001at 12 minutes after approval of the agenda add anything to the agenda associations so I'll call for a motion to approve the minutes are the agenda so moved second favour high post approval of the minutes everybody had a chance to look at the minutes from last meeting a October meeting they're not in front of us right I think we all saw them yeah I moved to approve the minutes okay here a second second all in favor aye opposed now we come to the top portion of our meeting where we have room for public input there's anyone in the audience who would like to talk to us for up to three minutes about something related to energy they can approach the podium and give us their name seeing no one moving will close the public input
002and move on to energy report as far as the greenhouse gas inventory goes we've been waiting some time for DT to give us some of that data bad news we might have to wait a little bit longer until January they said they'd have it ready for us the good news is that we'll be getting 2016-17 in 18 so I went ahead and talked to him about wrapping them all together I figured if it was a tedious process if they can get us all the information or the last couple of years that would help we also have a new staff person a temp who's helping me out say a girl in ER so she might be coming actually to one of the future Commission meetings as well so that means we would be able to update
003the inventory and update the dashboard another thing as far as the dashboard and I know there was a question John that you had about the dashboard and so Missy Stoltz is currently looking at redoing basically our web presence so trying to figure out how best to get our message across and updating it on a number of different fronts as far as external news have we yet or will we with the updates take into account the U of M Ann Arbor whatever was there was an adjustment that we need to make based on the splitting out of those two entities and the transfer of the Pfizer property yeah so we'll probably be doing a presentation of the Anarchy Energy Commission similar to what we did with the 2015 numbers and with that we'll be taking an
004account some of the I guess information that we've gained since doing the original right so that that update then in early 2019 will encompass all of that when we compass all of it including so 16 17 and 18 numbers for the community okay okay external news Jail reas annual meeting is December 8th 2018 at the freight house and epsilon E Michigan it occurs from 9:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. and it looks like a pretty packed schedule with some good keynote speakers if anyone make that I think it's about $20 is that correct to register well that being said I know that is our speaker today Trent's keys could be doing a workshop at that meeting about how to organize volunteer solar projects and communities and it's part of the morning session so all right and
005mark I know you also had other news as far as the LRA oh we do it here yeah so grea gives out a series of awards and they're giving out a number of awards this year but I wanted to highlight one here because the Energy Commission endorsed this one so the I'll just read this this is the write up for the award 2018 Great Lakes Renewable Energy Association Business Leadership Award GL Rea business leadership award is awarded to businesses that have significantly further d'marco transformation for renewable energy in Michigan at their annual meeting in December GL Rea will make two such awards first is to mark Haggerty president Michigan Solar Solutions second is to Jeremy's n project manager manager oak electric incorporated starting in December 2017 both local electric and Michigan solar solutions at their
006own expense assumed the responsibility for making sure Ann Arbor's home owners who had paid for solar panels through geo stellar solar Club program received their promise of raise or were otherwise made whole after jiho's tellers untimely and costly demise oak electric and michigan solar solutions outstanding leadership efforts restored traced trust and faith in in arbors local solar small businesses the solar industry the Energy Office and Ann Arbor's climate action plan related solar initiatives all of which are paramount to the success of the city to an honor and uphold Paris climate agreement goals Michigan solar solutions in Oak electrics demonstrated outstanding entrepreneurialism outstanding business leadership and most importantly honor and integrity in this effort they are credit to the solar energy industry in Michigan and to the Great Lakes Renewable Energy Association in outside of that
007the only other thing I had John I know that there was an article from the New York Times that you wanted me to did you hi I have a - you can read it as well or I can't either way okay I'm taking chairman fo Yards place of youth announcing reports and things like that so I think this is a general interest to commissioners as well as everybody in the audience so this is an article in The New York Times today and it's reporting on a report that the International Energy Agency issued on Monday it issues a World Energy Outlook 661 pages long I won't read 661 pages but I will read the the end of the article it says climate goals out of reach even with the impressive recent gains for renewable energy the
008world is star far from solving global warming global carbon carbon dioxide emissions rose 1.6 percent last year and our on track to climb again this year the report projects that emissions will keep rising slowly until 2040 one reason carbon free sources like wind solar and nuclear power aren't yet growing fast enough to keep up with rising global energy demand particularly in places like India and Southeast Asia that means fossil fuel use keeps growing to fill the gap for this to change nations will have to enact sweeping new policies like investing in energy efficiency to slow demand growth curbing methane leaks from oil and gas operations and developing carbon capture technology for existing fossil fuel power plants and cement factories governments will pay a key role the report notes that the world invests 2 trillion annually
009to its energy infrastructure and 70% of that is directed by state-owned companies or regulators that tells me our energy destiny destiny will rely heavily on government decisions the next two decades and I think that applies certainly here in the United States at the federal state and even at the local level so something for us to keep in mind as we go forward we have our work cut out any other energy news okay moving right along next on the agenda we are honored to have a presentation on the epsilon e fire station solar system taking my day for really a presentation that was going to explain what we did they made you should introduce yourself because you're also on closed-circuit TV and there's other people in the room that I hate so I'm uh I'm Dave
010Donsky I started solar MC back in 2005 and we basically went from zero to about a megawatt actually just atom at 1.15 megawatts of power in the last 13 years and so one one of the and then and kind of my philosophy has been and you guys know who's been up on the roof with me is no meetings just just doing and so uh you know my philosophy is is the the barrier to entry is the cost and so how can I get the cost down and there's several different ways money one way is to use volunteer labor and that's kind of kind of in my model I'm a engineer by trade I play with computers that work for a company called crank and so on my hobby I I've been designing systems finding friends
011and just kind of making it happen for people in my neighborhood and right at the beginning we were able to put two and a half kilowatts on our City Hall using volunteer labor and and getting is that what that was with a gram so I'm gonna assume everybody here knows solder power 22 uh a quick refresher on solar power everybody knows how it works all righty so I forget what did we do this 2016 2016 first page in fact max is our fire chief from the planning and we talked for maybe about a year about you know whether or not this was an acceptable idea to think about and it wasn't and then the idea was how do you how do you make it work right and so if you we think we picked the
012number we looked at his electric bills and we picked the number of just 50 kilowatts what would it take to put 50 kilowatts on this roof right and that's less than what they would need to be on a percent solar power and if you and I'm just gonna run through the numbers real quickly here and this is this is a way to kind of I kind of visualize it if I called up one of these contractors it's about three dollars a watt to put 50 kilowatts on a roof that's $150,000 right so you can go I'll try and find $150,000 and make that project happen if you could get volunteer labor and you know help on permits and things like that you could probably get that down to near $2 a watt okay so now
013and now your dad $100,000 and then the real clever thing we figured out how to do by luck actually is monetizing the tax credit so there's a 30% federal tax credit out there that homeowners can take advantage of so if I put solar on my house cost me $15,000 and do my taxes I get five thousand dollars back so I save 30% on this municipalities nonprofits can't take advantage it so there's a company there's many companies but we use Chart House energy in Muskegon and so instead of buying the material in this case from McNulty McKay for for like $100,000 I would we're gonna we're gonna be $2 a watt so we're a hundred thousand dollars so instead of buying that material for McNulty McKay for $100,000 we leased it from chart house energy so
014chart house was able to buy the same material and instead of selling it to us he leases it to us and he does what's called a pre buyout lease and so we pay him seventy thousand dollars we have the panels on our roof we get full value we get all the electricity we don't own them he owns them for six years and at the end of the six years than we owned them and the reason he holds title to the panel's is because then he writes him off his taxes he collects the 30% federal tax credit and then passes that on through us so we got one from a hundred fifty to a hundred now we're down in a neighborhood of seventy and then we got lucky we had a person give a donation of
015twenty five thousand dollars and in the end I think the city kicked in like thirty thirty five something like that so that so thirty-five was the end number so he started a hundred fifty we're down to thirty five so that that that's how we were able to do and we put on 50 kilowatts it took us one day to do it we had the volunteers they'd there's a I don't know how much time do I have I don't know I don't want to blow your budget here I know if everybody's seen this I think I'm just going to go through this two-minute video because this kind of explains it all I also have friends with drones so this video was made for free so this is the fire station it's two levels a hopper level
016and a lower level it also has a tower so we put a time-lapse camera in the tower these are some of our volunteers I want you to notice that we have a not a guardrail but we have cones around the edge with yellow flagging to alert people the edge of the roof the installation is done with these this is called a you know rack ballasted mounting system so there's there's no penetrations and the roof is a new roof you have these little baskets and you basically put in a number of concrete blocks into there to hold the panels onto the roof which is wait it was kind of fun I mean it was it was kind of crazy we had about a dozen volunteers and I think we finished it in 8 hours or something
017like that and what was nice was I was there all the volunteers didn't show up at one this is the original project so I would show two three Cabala do it and it's very repetitive and so once once you show a couple people how to do it boom they're off I said you know start here go that way and then I grabbed another group of people train them start here go there so it was it was very easy to to train and there's no there's no electrical work here this is all just nuts and bolts and mostly a lot of lifting the material was fought from mcnulty mckay through chart house and they delivered it on ballots and we were lucky that the fires the firemen and our Department of Public Services was able to
018use their equipment to push it all up on the roof so between fire trucks and front-end loaders they got it all up on the roof and then once it was all done there is an electrical box called an optimizer that goes I don't eat some of the panels so I was able to hang or another volunteer and I were able to hang these electrical boxes but we didn't know why or anything together and then as part of the deal we hired John Weidman who's actually in Ann Arbor here who officially took the the power from the panels and ran it into the building and connected it to their electrical system so that's how it was and then we did that for two years and then he says well we're saving so much money let's buy
019some more so about a month ago we bought another 52 panels had some more volunteers show up and and that was two hours maybe guys were trained experts $6,000 first year for the first year so up to three years we'll get $18,000 and we bought the extra 52 panels so you took the savings to buy the second round you know council agreed with that and they are very very very supportive I think anyone faster they went faster well cause of the $25,000 yeah so chart house you didn't use them for the second round we did I hope you thought your match came from the cities we didn't have a donation for the second did you have a someone do a structural analysis of the roof to make sure we really putting on that extra ballasted
020load I know her we work with I've worked with truck kokum and he's he's an inspiration for me before I believe he looked at this roofing it's a big concrete for us it's not but you're right you do put a couple of tons up there what was the biggest berry I mean it's fantastic yeah I mean from kind of a little sight to appears when I did the first one at City Hall and I went to the mayor and today you know in mind if I do this he says knock yourself out now if you can do it do it so so that's how this is all kind of a snowball you actually that's been it's been very nice so so I kind we kind of warmed up with with Ipsy slowly we've had some
021small ones and then we did their dps we on their truck port we did both of the community centers and in all these cases I'm either monetizing something or I'm getting a donation or something and so by at that time this project comes along they're all like what do I sign so there's really no barriers to do this they do have pictures I mean it's a flat roof this is what the inverters look like so initially there were three inverters so there's a the initial installation was 176 panels which is a lot of panels and I don't know how many blocks a couple hundred concrete blocks so there is a lot of movement of material and then the the end the expansion was 52 panels so the original system all that power got wired in
022Khandwa and I actually volunteered my own time and helped John with the with the conduit runs and running the wires and then all of it goes into the building and then these are the inverters that convert the DC to AC and it was and that's their electrical service there's the panel's so you mean you could see there was a quite a bit of work again a lot of credit card surrounding right hmm okay that's the rack that's the balance yeah the record so how much wind can one of those panels take before it it's scoots across the roof so company does all this for you so you know rain you tell you in Iraq what you want to do they know what the zoning laws for this area so we designed for a hundred mile
023an hour winds and a 25 mile an hour snow load and we tell them what kind of panels and they do what they do a pattern actually we iterated about three or four times because there's a lot of obstacle stuff here and the lower roof and then they would say okay what the panels out like this and but it's kind of funny they give me a little map is two panels here one two blocks here one block here three blocks here and it makes a little bit sense basically there's more blocks on the perimeter and fewer in the center but you follow the map in theory right it's their problem blows off the roof it's our problem it's but it's underneath them this is a 15 degree angle 10 degrees huh you skipped up the
024important picture dang cough right there there is our Chairman Apple Yahoo chairman up living instead of being up on the roof we're all eating in the same time so the firemen get a lot of there are these middle clips that that go on the corner of all the baskets and so there's a lot of it sembly work and this was all done on the floor the second time we did it on the ground but you know those guys right there probably did that for a couple hours I think do you have to clean off snow in the winter no we we don't worry about it because Michigan gets what's called four hours of peak Sun and that includes snow snow cover so this is basically zero maintenance although I will say that yeah I will
025say that I was a little not impressed with solar edge which is the company we use for the app for the inverters and the optimizers because we've had six of them fail now yeah and we had to we had to fail actually we had three fail right when we started and then when I went to fix those three but they're real good I mean I got replacements within a week so there's not it's just a hassle yeah so three failed right at the beginning and then it was kind of ironic cuz I went and got him fixed and I read pared the system and then two more fell out but then after that they were good for a couple years and then there was one more that I just fixed actually two days ago but
026luckily on this roof it's a piece of cake to swap them because it's not you know underneath because you can see this is this comes from you know axle when you order your system they designed this and they give you all the facts on the wind load and everything else and then this is the map that we would follow to say how many blocks going in each basket or does the energy I'll go into the building this is all that meter so all the energy does go into the building consume what they do what they what they need and then any excess right and it does chart house handle that no Charles in this particular case they're out of the picture they're basically just leasing us the majority okay I have worked on other projects
027if you want to talk about those is uh where he actually did the whole installation without any volunteer labor and it costs more but then he was able to structure it this is for the the truck pork I can show you pictures of it so instead of so we bought everything from chart house we gave him a down payment and then he structured payments for six years so in our case with the firehouse there were no payments we made the one payment upfront and then there's no paintings we don't own him but we don't make any payments and then after six years beyond for the the truck port we put down a down payment and then we're gonna make payments for six years and he structures the payment such that the the payment is ninety
028percent of the value of the electricity that I would have bought from from the Power Company so if I would have if I'm spending a hundred dollars every month with DTE he structures the payment so that I pay nineteen ninety dollars to to chart house for six years and then so that that was that way there was no volunteer labor than he did everything and in that case then he's monitoring the system and he's he's actually guaranteeing that we're making the power and and he does his billing based on what the inverter is is producing calculation $9,000 a year savings 25 years I thought was it six oh now with the additional take me less to lose nine so that's $225,000 over twenty five years and you're paying roughly four hundred forty five thousand two
029chart house because that's $9,000 year times five years which is a net savings or net income to you guys somewhere in between a hundred and fifty and one hundred and eighty thousand is that near the numbers you would work with there are two sons we make no payments we we paid him was in over fifty thousand sixty thousand dollars up front okay and that's it one-time payment and then we were then we're saving this six thousand every year okay in the in DPS truck port project but after five years you don't pay right we calculated it after County years we because I'm paying electricity anyways so I can't I had to come up with this sixty thousand dollars they actually of that sixty now twenty five is a donation okay so that then ours is
030like 35 yes over the life of the system how much money cash do you so how how would the city of epsilon D come up with a hundred thousand dollars to hand you over you know if you went to them said I want a hundred thousand dollars or something else how could you what's your prospect of you be able to get that this is one way to generate that hundred thousand dollars yourself yeah let's I know so I guess the Fifth Avenue energy right so I remember when we did the the second Ray Wayne myself and and Chuck was there I had talked to you a bit about this and and you said something to the effect that you couldn't understand how any city could not do this and I I assume that's based in
031part on the fact that this makes money for you and you wouldn't be able to get that any other way I'm gonna answer your question in a different way so if this is such a gray of this is you know money falling from the sky why isn't everybody doing right and the reason is is because it's it's a return on investment on a typical home it's seven years to get your money back you have to come up with an upfront payment which is like the a used car you know and then and then you have to wait seven years I've gone to many businesses inside epsilon E and say why don't you do this it's a positive return on investment and the guy at Michigan ladder says Dave you know I can buy a new
032milling machine it'll pay for itself in a year you know why am I even gonna think about this I even went to st. Joe's I actually got a meeting with the head of facilities at st. Joe's hospital and he pulls out of the binder he says you know one year pay back to your baby back so that's why people don't just jump at that because it's a seven year payback we got it shortened not by the techmount accent detector you need to have that already but by having a donation in there that's shortened it to five so to check that's the sweet spot for a city five years high I don't know anything about finances of cities by the way that for the residential systems the payback in Ann Arbor is even higher because because
033we this the City Assessor assesses taxes which is a back another roughly 50% me so that's actually another motivator for your fire station is because that doesn't affect your correct profits so this would be one way or a cheap way to get more solar inside of Ann Arbor because instead of forcing people to the stacks just tax this property tax you sidestep that whole issue if you could put it on all your nonprofits and yeah um has this bottle been discussed at all with epsilon E public schools we have a lot of public school high school students here and in the audience and using volunteer labor I would seem to me that this would be a model that would be great for public schools doing the same thing they could also go to chart house
034they have students that could help out with the labor with a little bit of supervision [Laughter] no that's very good so we have Adam school has a small array I was actually actually in the ecology Center had a program a couple years ago they put solar on schools and Adams was one of those we got another donation that helped us put it on why high school in that case we still didn't have the students help students gets a little more tricky because they're the younger more inexperienced and prone to accidents but I know chart house just did a project at Bloomfield Hills High School and there is a video of of the kids literally you know building the array so if it's if it's a ground mount and I'm and I would recommend a ground
035mount for school because then they can interact with it but if it's a ground mount then the kids aren't climbing ladders and it's it's so much easier for them to just put it up if I can ask question did you do anything liability why is this the city require waivers from volunteers or what did you guess I was kind of surprised there I've worked on past projects for the city and they do have a standard indemnification form that you can sign I don't know why we didn't use him on this one mostly it was firemen and public works people and so David and I guess chief as well how how have other fire departments around the country looked at this project what kind of feedback have you gotten from other people who've looked at this
036and we're curious about it in I know you did an article I think a fire magazine firehouse magazine that that's another reason to do this is to and that's kind of my my a planning model I'm gonna talk about that a meeting is you know you do something and then you talk about it then you get money and you do something again you talk about itself so we were able to get published in a national magazine to kind of show off its Lanie's fire department as you know being cool so that's another motivating so is that for another fire departments to think that you guys are cool or do they think you're nuts no no Charlie uh Tardos has done two other fires yeah and then didn't you say Augusta Township culture do you consider
037this a resiliency project where if you know there would be a supply issue from DTE that it I'm sure know so you don't you don't have any battery backup Bernie oh they have a generator set and a transfer switch so okay they lose power they're going to switch over the generator in there okay solar panels will be dead you could I'm not sold on batteries yet there's a flavor of that around some fire station our emergency centers for community sorry Bo there some fire station are designed emergency centers for some communities and mostly small community so to get our tornado coming out and there's no more power they designed as fire station with solar panel or some other type of power system but they have batteries with it so that's that would be a good
038application for for this fire station and I think they start to to have grants designed for that if it's the design Emergency Center for the city not an electric vehicle charging have you looked at their does it have a capability to do that are you that one doesn't but I actually just finished the project where the inverter comes with an l2 charging plug on it so you can charge things with that uh you reminded me of another point was they just got a new roof and we kind of were unfortunate that they did the roof before we did the solar because I learned that chart house will also include a new roof in a solar project so there's this tax credit out there which from what I understand can be interpreted loosely or in different
039ways and char house has done several projects where they've put a new roof on the building and put solar on at the same time and then called the new roof part of the solar installation and and III would I would sleep at night with no problem because you would never put solar on up on a crappy roof right you'd want to replace the roof and so you could definitely see the motivation for replacing the roof it's part of the solar project what that does is that now gives you a 30% discount on a new roof and what that basically does is gives you free solder and chart house has done this on another project of mine where the guy was going to replace his roof he had a quote from a roofing contractor he gave
040at the Chart House and chart house says I'll do the same thing with solar basically took the 30% off on the on the rear off and was able to apply the solar you know fit the solar system within the cost the savings of the 30% so if you're doing any missed' municipal buildings that we have a new don't need a new roof you'd be dumb not that put solar on at the same time because it'll just save you money I actually talked to a tax consultant about that and he said to be sure about doing that and not getting any negative repercussions from the IRS what you should do is include something with the roof that for example increases the r-value where you add some insulation or something like that and then you're safe for
041sure yeah yep so I think Josh if we looked into something like that I mean it certainly doesn't hurt also to increase the insulation to a lot of these roofs on these buildings are poorly insulated and then if you can wrap that all up together and get the the tax write-off on both the roof and the solar then and solar faithful would be the same way too if we did it on a house of worth it they should look at their roofs potentially too so that makes Dave's point on batteries a little less attractive yeah they're not fully DC and a few DC charge them your array just got a lot bigger because you're doing two things at once but here in our expansion we were going to John Weidman was gonna bring he an
042elevator to move all the material to the roof and I had so many people that that's what I think is funded so push everything aside this was fun I mean we had the mayor we had the chief up there we had city council people up there we had teenagers we had one guy I think it was like 7 years old some other guy and we had a real good sense of community Wayne did you have a good time did you have a good time I mean so building community right all of that you know good stuff and so before John could show up with this elevator you know actually that's my neighbor there he says well let's just carry him up you know and boom there we go before we could get the elevator there
043we already had all the material up on the roof just by people handing it over and then this is a U of M student is this she was kind of funny she came at like noon and we're done and I was like well we can I'm done screwing around with these optimizers I started doing some wiring and so I helped her or she helped me you know do some wiring so I mean from a student perspective there there's a good view of kind of the crowd that we drew and I'll say half of them are probably from Ann Arbor we had people from EMU wits and EMU professors their neighbors and with a turkey if you ever look at this you look like you got here's another one and we're working on us on a
044SunShot challenge I think you guys are too and this is chart house again it's cool so here's a building in a low-income is like the meeting house a community center for a local income housing project and they built this building from scratch and so not only did he include the roof but he included some of the structure he says you know some of these two by fours are part of the solar installation and then he used a little bit of his own money and we put solar we put 20 kilowatts up on this roof and it was it was beautiful because we hired four people from the housing project and trained them how to do solar and then brought them up on the roof which we trained them this is Leah we're a little better
045here we have we had ropes we did fall training you know these are these guys and they were they were doing it so we trained local people we hired them we paid them a living wage and then we were able to put the solar on on a low-income housing building and save that money so that it's all good and then and then it's always good to have friends with drums and then like a month later we did it again we went back to our dPW's truck port we had five kilowatts on there from before we ripped it off added 20 kilowatts and here's here's we trained another four people on how to install solar and they're up on that roof installing so that'd be another aspect you know if you don't want to use volunteers
046maybe you can make a jobs program out of this the Train people land and hire them to put it up on your roof and if you work with char now so you can we can fire fire house versus some other city building if we had to if we better if we have in a numbering of five buildings we're looking at put solar on I mean look at the one with how we prioritize the one with the worst ruff the one with the worst roof because you want to monetize the tax credit and the on the roof okay and then look at solar exposure on the list which is nice is looking at public exposure so one problem I have with the fire house is uh nobody can see it unless you look at it so
047this is why I like I love this project that we just finished coming in 105 panels it's a it was a church it got bought by a friend of mine you turning it into a performance space but that's a that's a 1012 pitch makes it a little more exciting I wouldn't put volunteers on no on that roof but that's that's beautiful because everybody coming in on Washington Avenue now on cross street or whatever tries right by you all right so I know it's also you you've talked about the training you do training for other fire departments or others on charter house did all that tournament yeah they they they that's his model is he wants to find local people train them how to do this and iron and what about training for inspectors and things
048like that absolutely inspectors so what this is a way to figure out how to look at John's house next time better and some like I've seen some inspectors that I will say some inspectors don't know what they're doing for our Sol Sol smart Gold Award I actually held a training session for the building department to educate them in solar so you have any advice for us just do it okay all right guys let's go you know just get a quote that's that's where you start get a quote if you if you're gonna attack a building with a bad roof get a quote for off get two or three quotes for the roof get two or three quotes for the solar figure out what your budget is talk I keep saying chart house but I think
049Nova consultants can monetize this tax credit too and I'm sure there's other companies that can do this and get monetize the tax rate find out what the bottom dollar is and put out a notice then you know to the city it did a resident to say let's do this and you could help get up on the roof did you do any education for the community about this project this project we did a bunch of projects where I was doing ribbon cuttings at the end of each project and that's good and I over the 12 years I've done 250 solar presentations and I've reached like five thousand people face to face and that's so that's that's the maybe that's why we're so good nipsey is because I just keep talking yeah every Rotary Club Kiwanis Club
050live right then several in the library just trying to just keep getting that message out there talk about reading one thing we did as far as firefighters because we get all of those and firefighters all know to fight fire when there's those type of things you know I mean things happens so one of our captain took us training and training other fire department as far as the safety concern that there is you know where to shut up the power before you put some water on those things okay excellent well thank you that was a very wonderful presentation you're doing fabulous work be careful on those roofs putting in everything 2019 introduce this resolution for so we can follow on to this presentation a proposed resolution that we all have to have and look at for
051a month or so according to our bylaws so I'm introducing this tonight and it's essentially it's - I can everybody should have a copy of this [Music] so let me just run through this quickly then I'm proposing a resolution that would require Ann Arbor emergency management and renewable energy plans give priority to solar installations on emergency responder buildings whereas climate change risks are regional in nature and pose special challenges to local communities such as drought deluge and rain bombs and related toxic substances overflow release heat and cold extremes and related social unrest and whereas in December 2012 with the passage by the Ann Arbor City Council of the climate action plan the city of Ann Arbor committed to an ambitious multi strategy vision to address climate change by reducing its community-wide greenhouse emissions 8% by
0522015 25% by 225 and 90% by 2050 relative to the year 2000 baseline carbon dioxide equivalent emission levels and we're a City Council unanimously reaffirmed local commitment to climate action in resolution are seventeen to 38 resolution committing the city of Ann Arbor to adopt honor and uphold the Paris climate agreement goals and whereas an IRS hazardous mitigation plan recognizes that climate change poses special risks to local emergency planning and response noting that quote all of Ann Arbor including current and future buildings populations infrastructure and other assets is vulnerable to severe winter hazards and quote all of Ann Arbor is vulnerable to extreme heat including all current and future buildings infrastructure and populations and whereas emergency planners typically rely on three approaches to emergency power utility generated power from fossil fuels in accordance with a Michigan
053emergency management plan to Michigan public service Commission's energy related emergency planning preparedness response and recovery responsibilities and three on-site backup emergency generators and whereas because of their regional Nature climate emergencies often involve a disruption to utility power and large-scale regional regional emergencies pose competing recovery demands on utility systems the Michigan Public Service Commission and backup local generator capabilities and whereas many communities are adding on-site solar generation as an emergency power option to augment utility power and portable generators and climate emergencies and whereas emergency responders such as police fire and ambulance ideal candidates for solar installations on building roofs carports and adjacent grounds where solar power can be stored in battery packs used to directly charge electric vehicles power communications and medical equipment provided emergency street lighting and power from mobile emergency power stations resolved because
054of the special emergency response duties emergency responder buildings should be given priority for solar installations in Ann Arbor renewable energy and emergency management plans as a way to address both climate change risks and to augment traditional power approaches during climate change-related emergencies that disrupt the power so I'm proposing that we consider this and address deal with it at the January meeting because the December meeting is a planning meeting thank you or you said you'd send it out already so you'll finish it'll be attached then to the minutes or something okay great thank you as far as housekeeping if you guys see the meeting basically we're just going to be similar to say I've been asked to make sure to keep record of attendance for next year keeping two missing three different meetings commissioners are supposed
055to not miss more than three so something starting in 2019 will definitely be keeping record up so do you want a thing that might change is if we have joint meetings yeah some discussion going on about having one in January or February because the administrator would like to talk with both Commission's and I'm not sure whether we'll have separate force them to come to two meanings yeah sure sure okay so do you guys sure I'll entertain a motion to pass the energy Commission's planned meetings for calendar year 2019 so moved second second from mr. McCumber on favor aye opposed yeah passes great this is gonna come a little bit further into the committee updates but I did also want to talk a little bit about the way that we structure the committee the subcommittee meetings
056I know that there's been some confusion as far as doodle polls and when everyone gets the the kind of doodle pulls back to us and timing as far as when the subcommittee's actually meet so one thing that I was thinking about doing was having set schedules for the subcommittee's probably on so every other every Tuesday there would be a different subcommittee that would meet so for example the second Tuesday that would be when Energy Commission meets the third Tuesday we might have an Eevee meeting fourth so on and so forth so that way it's just easy to kind of remember it's easy for people to come to if they're interested in it and with a set schedule we can also post that so that way it's known for the rest of the year so those
057be at six o'clock as well or yeah I'm thinking somewhere between 5:30 and six o'clock just to give enough people time to get to City Hall but also that it doesn't run so late but you know we're going and burning the midnight oil so it was kind of my my preference as long as everyone on the Commission thinks it's a good idea okay I have a question related to meetings sure commissioner hokum and I met on Sunday and one of the things that we talked about and actually the environmental commission is going through this process right now is sort of identifying not only the meeting schedule but what might be specific topics for those and input was requested from commissioner not necessarily what topic would be a bit one particular meeting but what are the
058topics that should be covered and then laying those out in the calendar year and I think maybe that's something that we should consider doing I don't know that we want to do that through the whole year but at least X months out and I think one of the things that Chuck mentioned at the time that the environmental Commission hasn't done but it seems to me makes sense for both Commission's or frankly for any Commission is not only what commissioners would like to cover in that but what in particular the city and staff want of the Commission and where can we help where can we advise where can we advance a topic so that we're not necessarily pushing the agenda at least from our side but also that there's a real balance back and forth between
059the city and its goals and the work plan for the new office of sustainability and innovation and what can we do to advance those topics so maybe we think about that maybe you sent an email out saying what would we like to cover but also what would you like from us yeah no I think that's a that's a great idea I did see in some ways the subcommittee's that we're putting together is kind of embodying some of us so some of the major pushes that we have break down into smaller groups would that said it would be interesting to see how we can may feed that back into the larger group with the Energy Commission so maybe in December we can have this as part of the discussion as well but along with this that
060were charged with with all or part of the smart framework within our recommendation no one's you know we're asked to come up with the idea or we're asked to come up with metrics or were asked to come up something but we use the discipline of the smart framework in this committee structure and that the challenge or that when the committee is given a task to do it's broken out here is that we want you to this part of this smart framework so we get some specificity so we know when we had passed this on what still has to be done I think thanks for bringing that up actually that was my recommendation or part of my recommendation for the environmental Commission and that was that we take all of the metrics that are related to
061the environmental Commission and break them up into let's say four and cover one quarter of them in one meeting where the next two meetings could then deal with ad hoc topics or whatever is coming up and then the next quarter we deal with the next set of four and the next source to me next set of goals and the next set of goals or metrics I should say and what are the related action plans to your point to make progress against those and what are what's the progress on those actions what are obstacles what could the Commission do to advance achieving the targets that are assets associated with each one of those sustainability framework dashboard metrics that we have and we could potentially do the same thing with the Energy Commission I don't think we
062have that many we might have something like six or eight six metrics maybe so we could do that you know in three meetings where we take two metrics and then look at those in particular and then talk about action plans associated with those we could have reports from outside groups that relate to those particular metrics for example I'll use one from the environmental Commission one of the metrics is the health of the watershed we developed a new metric that's now on a 1 to 100 scale it's very easy to trend the urine River watershed council has a big role to play they might have a report associated with that in that meeting so the the metric the action plans and reports would all align in that one meeting and I think that's sort of what
063you're getting at Marc so Jack I wonder if you could weigh in on this you've been pointed in your advice to us that we need to tighten up our recommendations apply metrics to them I wonder if you think the discussion we're having here is that going in the direction you think we need to go and if not what would you suggest we do differently I think this is the right direction if you turn on my microphone first I think this is the right direction I think we need to set a goal we have to have a baseline we have to have measurable goal lines along the way and and then we have to have a budget for accomplishing that so yeah we we often express good intentions which go to council and they ratify those
064good intentions and then nothing comes of those good intentions and so to the extent that we can identify what we believe should be done and how it should be done and how much it will cost to do it and what the outcome of that is I think that that helps push our agenda so you know back in the day when this Energy Commission started it was a City Council that sparked it and there was almost the whole the whole Energy Commission was City Council's so they basically embodied some issues topics critical topics of interest to the city to push forward on and if you read those back in the 80s you'd say wow these guys are pretty forward-thinking great stuff let's move on with these things let's make them happen so in some instances they
065did take place there's a lot of movement and energy efficiency back in the eighties forward-thinking not a good things happen what I've noticed and maybe again my history buffs I to me I see a lot of effort from our Commission to promote espouse ideas we we pass a lot of resolutions other than maybe some feedback we get from commissioner Eaton I don't think we get any feedback from Council on whether we're off-base are we going the right direction I think that I'm on a I'm on a national energy journal I'm one of the associate editors if we're not accountable and we're not doing the right thing we get feedback directly from our readers from our editor from everybody that says hey you guys need to be focused on something else and so we get that
066feedback very quickly and that keeps us on point it keeps us productive it keeps us moving the bar for the public forward I'm I'm sensing we need some of that and that's maybe my own opinion but I think we would really benefit as a body to make the next step with our council telling us hey this makes sense or doesn't that feedback is incredibly valuable because we only have so much you know volunteer time and I think if we had better alignment that way it would be great Josh same thing with staff I mean you know you've got a lot of people here who have a lot of skill sets have been in the marketplace for in some cases forty years I don't know about Wayne but I'm I'm 40-plus been doing this a long
067time we now have a little bit more time on our hands a lot of times to help you guys and help staff and help Commission and help the sustainability group that's now out there John's done a wonderful job promoting that and I think his he's a exemplary of some of the things we can do to work better as a team and move the city along and we don't we see evidence of like climate change you know starting to impact us quite a bit we there's may be disagreements scientifically about what's going on but the main message is we don't have a lot of time here on our hands so some of us are getting older and want to make a difference we got a we got to start making some stepwise definite changes here well
068we're not going to get anywhere so the message is how do we better work together Commission to staff Commission to Council are we right go into the right direction or aren't we and just tell us point-blank you're maybe maybe one of the messages is you're too big or maybe the message is focus on climate change or climate action plan only forget about solar or forget about this or forget about that focus only your about your efforts on this topic and then our group can have a better critical mass fragment wise our subcommittees probably don't get as much done as maybe we could if we had that direction so I'm just pointing this out my opinion only I didn't canvass anyone else I just throw it out there for free talk it is a problem and
069I can remember I don't remember the year but it was probably 2006 or 2008 we gave the 40-minute presentation slide has a whole lot of energy is only one very small portion and they rely on us I mean it's it's sort of chicken an egg on some respects because they rely on us we're the experts supposedly or at least I hope they think we are and so they're relying on us to suggest things and but certainly more input from Council would be very welcome and because of our limited the limited amount of time that we can spend on projects we want to work on stuff that has some possibility of actually happening so if we're not gonna get support from councils and it'd be better if we knew it early on so now one of
070the things maybe we should do is I think in our bylaws were supposed to have some kind of a report annually and I'm not one that likes to spend a whole lot of time doing reports or changing bylaws or any of that stuff I'd rather do something that's meaningful but one of the things that we could do is send something up to Council saying these are the things that we expect to work on and we'd love your feedback on whether or not these are things that you want us to work pretty easy we might not get much back but we might get some good information if we propose something that proposes a tangible result and how to do it little good support so at the meeting on November 19th which is next Monday I'm bringing
071forward a budget amendment that will pare down Missy's dr. Stoltz proposal to the two items that actually will have an impact on energy consumption that'll be the net-zero housing project which is not a small ticket item that was the vast majority of her abs and the the other thing is the electric vehicle charging stations because those meet both of our criteria for a budget amendment which is that they're time-sensitive you know to start the net-zero housing project we have to approve it now so that they're ready to go at the beginning of the next building season they can't wait for the you know the next fiscal year you know the electric vehicle chargers are time sensitive because in fact we've purchased those beautiful so you know there were a variety of things in there that
072don't quite likely come up in the next budget year and are really topics for your normal budget deliberations because we have to weigh a lot of things against each other you know so it's not that I don't want energy staff or I mean sustainability staff to be well paid but it has to be part of our broader non-union salary study and part of our normal budget process there were a variety of other things in there like travel to other cities for conferences and things that I don't think are really good steps for people who are trying to address sustainability jumping on a jet is not energy efficient sending a soon to retire employee to a conference doesn't make sense in a variety of different levels so um I don't want you to believe that you
073don't have the support of counsel when you get to counsel most often the resolutions that you send are unanimously passed have support but I'm here to warn you when when we send stuff difficulty you know and I think there was a fair amount of forewarning on the budget amendment issue it's not a lack of support for taking tangible action it's there was a lot of money that some of it was debatable you know so I want you to be adventuresome I want you to identify the building that you want to do the audit do the whole process on and how much that would cost so that we can take that forward but to generally state that we want to be Net Zero by X year doesn't do that yeah you know so again I really
074do want you to understand that I'm here because I want this process to work and I think that it doesn't hurt us to be pushy here as long as you understand the parameters of the process that when I get to have council table you know we have a hundred and eight million dollar general fund budget and and we have to balance that between a variety of needs you know we have ten million dollars worth of needs in our fire department I can't tell you what our sewer and our water infrastructure needs it's just off the charts there are so many needs in so many different ways that when we go we need to be able to compete by showing what it's going to accomplish and especially if we are going to reduce our carbon output
075or reduce our energy consumption because energy consumption has a built in savings over the long haul that's an argument that we can make and that's that's an argument that we can succeed in well it's important for us to be specific about what we want to do on the other end of things one of the things that I neglected to put forth in the energy report is that Portland just passed a clean-energy ordinance and what they're doing is they are taxing any corporation that does business within their community that has a gross annual budget of a billion dollars and they're going to have 30 million dollars a year to do climate work and that's what they think they need now there's six times bigger than Ann Arbor so that works out to five million dollars a
076year is what we probably should be spending if we could figure out a way of generating that money the I mean that's the report that John read earlier from the New York Times just shows how big the issue is and how much money we really need to be putting at it and it's it's not throwing money away it's investing in in future of people who are a lot younger than we are so so two items in there first Michigan restricts oh I know that our ability to raise new revenues in secondly I'm not sure how many billion dollar corporations we have well and that's another discussion just briefly I think we've had several meetings I think Jack some of them may have been before you joined the Energy Commission where the environmental Commission and Energy
077Commission looked at the sustainability framework and the goals and the dashboard indicators with the metrics and in line with what Mark mentioned earlier having smart goals specific measurable attainable realistic and time-bound each one of we've we've identified goals and metrics for both energy and environmental metrics and I think what Mark and Chuck and what you are saying is that our responsibility as let's say the city and Commission these are the residents is that we should be delivering positive outcomes for the residents of Ann Arbor you know there should be an improvement in water quality there should be improvement in greenhouse gas reductions and everything that we do should be focused around that either where it delivers directly a positive outcome and we see an improvement in a metric or it's a it's an enabler and
078I agree with everything that you said jack especially when it relates to things that the city does for municipal operations but we have to remember that municipal operations are 1.3 percent of Ann Arbor's total greenhouse gas reductions so if we do a project for the city then yes we can say if we put solar on the wheeler Center it's gonna cost this amount of money and it's gonna deliver this many metric tons and there's a good payback on it and there's a real clear line between doing this and getting a positive outcome that we can see in our metric but the cap is addressed to all of Ann Arbor's greenhouse gas reductions all 100% from the whole community from transportation from residential industrial and commercial in the only way we're going to really help drive
079that is through enabling programs well we won't be able to necessarily necessarily say if we have this energy efficiency program then we know for sure 100 people will do X and they will save so many metric tons of co2 and that will impact our goal so that's gonna be I think the difficulty that we're going to have visa vie council and also for the residents of Ann Arbor spending their money is to be able to come up with programs that address what is going on in the community in reducing those greenhouse gas reductions and having a clear line which we all want to have in terms of accountability if we do X it will deliver Y that's that's going to be more difficult innovations plan if you guys have looked at the cap there are
080a lot of suggestions in there as to how best to reach our goals and our targets some of them are less or more feasible some of them you know you have to throw invest more money into others and so I think when creating the sustainability and innovation plan in our office we are really looking for programs that could in some ways go further than than any other one individual action could do so when we looked at for example time of marketing we're looking at how the market could really pick up the economic forces of the market could pick up incentivizing energy audits in ways that if the city were to incentivize rebates there just wouldn't be enough funding to be able to reach all the houses so I think in some ways you know the
081sustainability innovation plan the one that we presented really is in a way cohesive and tries to get at all of these different sectors by looking at the best way to do it for the less the the for not as much money time and effort that it would take if we were actually to go through and look at all of the the different recommendations for the cap so that was something that went into our planning as well if not let's move along to update City Council has a policy committee and we had made recommendations if you see a city council of page labeled City Council has Energy Commission a very mental commission these are basically some recommendations that we gave to City Council in the previous year as far as things to look at and kind
082of focus on I just wanted to go through these and see if we if we want to add to them if there's anything we want to change again just kind of with house housekeeping and making sure that we're ready for for 2019 since this is the last meeting that we'll be having outside of a work session in December so that the first bullet point here pursue remedies that incent the installation of sustainable and renewable energy resources including but not limited to residential and community solar and wind systems yeah I'm not sure where that came from next one pursue legislative remedies that remove disincentives yes space the city's reserve there's no property to put something in that way okay so it's incredibly used because we're not disrupting the rest of the land so what's not strike
083okay high school was was going to deploy we had a professor from the University of Michigan come to us and say you shouldn't waste your time cuz Ann Arbor is is not a good spot for attempting to capture the wind you know the it's just not consistent or you know can you have a high quality wind however you say it in that terminology this is not the place to seek it's not the best place for sure using to the higher you can put something the better the winds gonna be so putting a small wind system out next to the bleachers in Pioneer high school really didn't make much sense and small wind systems are notorious for ripping themselves apart actually first-hand knowledge what killed it eventually was that it was too tall for its proximity
084to the airport and that's certainly another so consideration I I went out to the wheeler Center one day with with mr. bricks and helium balloon and and took pictures showing how far up we could actually put one and not have it be in the airspace so ya know or we do have to be concerned about that purely better I mean there's a ridge line out there that's great yeah but there are some viability zit doesn't have to be a massive wind turbine that we build on the utility scale it could be something vertical or unique but it's probably not a focus let's just leave it there yeah it'll probably screen itself out there there was also a period of time when they were redoing the line from the water treatment plant up to the liming
085lime pit next as a school where we tried to get them to put a piece of conduit in to put a fairly good-sized wind system up there but no they didn't want to spend the money on the conduit so but that's another story but it's yeah it's it's a minor thing it's yeah we'll leave it you know and it doesn't preclude the city buying into and wind farm someplace else in the in the state high school down in paulding oh hi oh I'd love to show you pictures it's a 90 meter hub height winter and this is not unfeasible 300 and some feet tall the kids that play football love to see it you know it's part of the school environment now I think they may have renamed their football team but there's part of
086it that's it's there's always potential let's not screen out something yeah yeah and it's all depends on what you're what you're trying to do you know if you get 30% instead of 40% it may be fine if you're not looking for a profit you know which is what most wind farms are set up for the next one pursue legislative remedies remove disincentives for installation of sustainable and renewable energy resources including but not limited to seeking statewide property tax exemptions for residential solar systems indeed we could do I still think pursue legislative remedies or move disincentives make sense yeah yeah maybe we can get rid of that second after the comma so that way it's not as specific to but we can continue to because there's a number of issues and one of the things yeah
087one of the things that I was thinking about even looking at for example purple law I mean it really does go wide yeah the things that we okay let's see a pursue legislative remedies to support appropriate local government access to household utility data on gas and electricity used to support the upcoming city investment and community facing energy programs so this is mostly about data access and suit legislature enemies probably just say raise an army and support and advocate for the incorporation of high performance building efficiency systems into the Uniform Building Code I need to replace it with Michigan and then we can leave building there but we also need to add residential and energy codes all three of them work together yeah and the barrier frankly is energy code the others are kind of paralleling
088but there's advocacy going on this one already from a lot of fronts to move our energy code out of prehistoric times to the next level you know another another exercise that might be worthwhile is going through these and thinking about what kind of recommendations to our earlier conversation we could give to it to City Council as to how best to pursue some of these things so if we know certain avenues that could overcome some of these things well certainly on this one I don't do but short of getting a lot of reports but perhaps asking them to work on this specific thing that's the function of the policy Commission I guess for pulling a committee and City Council as is they are directing our lobbyists as to what is important to us and they report
089back to them and it really depends on the opportunities in Lansing you know we saw some legislation moving on on the alternative energy taxation and and they were active on that we just have the wrong but it's not that they're not working on our behalf it's that you know they're yelling into a deep well yes we're changing it slowly I I would suggest that this this election cycle has made some positive changes in this Indiana's fashion that our new governor may in fact be more impressed with this subject than our previous one sometimes there is something we said for term limits some of the people yeah are leaving not that I'm an advocate for that and then this last one here advocate for a carbon fee and dividend plan consistent with a resolution r17 314
090appendix B so that's again about the carbon fee and dividend plan the other the other kind of sector that I identified that we might want to add to this list are Evy related especially since we do have an Eevee ordinance so so I think there is currently a lot happening on the state level there's a Volkswagen settlement that's going through right now I'm trying to find out how that's going to be spent at the state level that's that's one way that we can get involved so if they get the legislative in general legislative level making sure that we have a finger on the pulse and that we're making recommendations is best to kind of promote v's that's language that we could craft now or I could put something together and share with you guys to
091edit either way for expediency sake another potential topic and I'm not frankly qualified to talk about it but your boss would be in that is is there anything that should be done from a climate adaptation perspective yeah I think Missy's got a lot of experience in that area it's this is all sort of mitigation sort of focused right but I think from the adaptation side there may be legislation or things that we should be pushing at the state level and I think miss Eve would be able to craft a statement or doctors Stolz would be able to craft a statement to that effect and include that on the list so maybe you could you have her do that so there are there's an environmental Commission portion as well and I think some of the things
092she had made some recommendations out at the bottom here but if we can think of anything that's more kind of energy related that we would be doing on a daily basis you know I kind of went through and thought about her subcommittees and it kind of covers I think what we have now outside of the Evy component but okay well if you guys can think of anything else email me and when we're looking at new development in town we can't push them to you know incorporate energy efficiency or green roofs or variety of those things unless they're in certain very narrow zoning districts and certainly to the extent that I think this comes up in your first one but um we really want the building codes to to really recognize that some of some communities
093want to be more adventuresome you know we really want to push on these issues and we're in a boom cycle right now building wise and we can't you can't require six inch studs in new houses we can't require more insulation than you know the state code does we can't we can't encourage solar all right anything else in a house and certainly to the extent that we can get the legislature in Lansing done give us more discretion that would be it exists in other places mm-hm need to get closer sorry Massachusetts is one there's for several states that have pushed this to the local jurisdictions so what did it also provide some and set it to builders that they could do higher floors and buildings if they met certain energy standards I know it wasn't successful
094but there was yes we have some credence news certainly in certain zoning districts so like the downtown area is either d1 or d2 and there are limits on height and if you want to exceed that you have to provide some benefit like affordable housing or energy efficiency or something yeah and they've almost always chosen something other than energy efficiency mm-hmm but that's that's something that were quite likely to revisit this year because at one point in time just including any kind of residential space in your Downtown Development got you a greater height it didn't even have to be affordable housing and so we're trying to narrow the the benefits that they can another zoning district before we get to exercise some discretion is with the Planned Unit development or PUD is fed and they have
095to provide us public benefits and affordability to use one of those and so is energy efficiency and so we can push harder on those if we if we use those zoning districts more more effectively than we have so for instance the Lowertown development where Kroger's used to be at the base of Broadway Hill we released them from that zoning district and gave them a very permissive zoning of c1 AR and so they don't have to provide us anything we have to be less permissive in our in our exercise of rezoning and more demanding and our desire for public benefits like energy efficiency towards that and is there anything that the Energy Commission could do that would make it easier for you to be stronger on those issues [Music] towards that end is there anything the
096Energy Commission can do that make it easier for your to strengthen your hands so you could do those kinds of things going forward I mean you're saying we think this is a good idea you should do more of it or already know that so yeah so let me ponder that and I'll come back with a ask if I can think of an answer if you want to do something to help us that council you can recognize that one of the easiest things we can do to address climate change plant trees and we are reckless with our current trees and one of the things that we are doing to address our tree population is our deer call which is wildly controversial and and if if we were to express the opinion that this is a good
097outlet you know by by reducing deer over brazing we're encouraging reforestation in our natural areas you may turn the public against you but it's one of the easiest things that we can do is just the not have deer eat all the oak sapling or seedlings you know and it it has a real immeasurable impact over time December is a work session but besides that I think our purview is more energy focus I wrote it down for them okay because the environmental Commission does have you're right it's exactly in in our will in that wheelhouse and one of the sustainability dashboard metrics is the tree canopy as Josh knows and so I think that doesn't mean that we couldn't have that resolution also endorsed by Energy Commission but a price probably starts best in environmental commitment
098and I made an oh yeah okay so that being said okay so I'll go ahead and craft the evie related one we'll go ahead and I'll pass that around finalize the list so yeah I just realized that what we printed probably went back to the template because it's an old one so I'm just going to read off the committees that we have and we can go and do updates one by one so 100% clean municipal operations we met we discussed proposition we've decided to move beyond Honeywell and our next meeting we'll be talking about next steps we did have a little bit of a conversation as far as what's next steps with v but I think that'll really be the focus of our next meeting in general I've created templates for all of these meetings
099I put them up on ledges star there's also reading material on those templates so if people want to join you can go ahead and actually read it just download it there are links that are right into the agenda that they're basically built into the agenda you could take a reading and join us the next one is dark skies ordinance John did you want to do very briefly we haven't met I don't think since the last committee meeting but we meet next week we have a draft ordinance that's been it's sort of like a straw man I guess you'd say everybody is in the process of putting comments into a Google Docs framework and we're gonna meet and review all those comments and then hopefully come up with the next iteration our target date for having
100essentially a fine semi final draft that we could then show to the Energy Commission as well as the Planning Commission I believe is in the beginning of February so we we still have a chance for an iteration or two between this meeting next week and then when we would then present a final draft but we're making good progress I know that you've told me this before so I apologize but have we included the City Attorney's Office and in the drafting of this yeah so one of the steps in the timeline that we have is going to not only the city attorney but with the Planning Commission and others we identified all the key stakeholder groups and are also going to meet with all stakeholder groups as well so yeah and it's we also fortunately the
101Planning Commission at the same time was looking at a sign ordinance and we looked at that sign ordinance because there's a lot of signs that are lit and so we provide in put in that that'll be separate that'll be a part of the sign ordinance but we were able to address the lighting aspects of that at the same time all right next we have time of marketing ordinance and I can also lump in a little bit of the Evie Reddy ordinance as well so for both of our red notes already ordinance subcommittees we went ahead and took a look at a timeline so with John's help we took a look at what dark skies was doing we I've begun to basically put a timeline together for each of those committees for our next meeting we
102also identified some of the stakeholders that we want to bring to the table in the process I shared with everyone some kind of overview material so that way we can all look at the same stuff and be be on the same page so both of those again will be meeting this month and will be looking at some of those the timeline stakeholders things of that nature Josh before you go into the next one I think yes for um clarity sake for not so much necessarily as committee because we keep on talking about it but for residents why don't we rename the dark skies ordinance it's really going to be a lighting ordinance and I think that is more meaningful to anybody looking from the outside in or listening on TV or whatever we're looking at
103minutes or genders and maybe for time of marketing we could do something along the lines of energy audit disclosure so that way it's a bit more at time of market really clear okay solar access check did you myrrh to add to the Commission sometimes we need this so I my son happens to live in this little town and in Colorado that thinks it's more advanced than we are called Boulder so I I reached out to him a little bit to find out work I just helped them build a new house and new houses in Boulder there's a pretty strong solar access easement ordinance requirement there and actually the it's it's batted about as being the revolution of solar access easements so I've adopted the boulder concept a little bit and I've actually written something so
104this one-man ordinance activities has moved to the next step I need to piggyback on some of the other ordinance work that's going on to get the stakeholders planning commission and director planning involved in the city but I think we're at a state where before I do that I want to make sure this body is comfortable with what we're proposing there are already you know too much going on in the city that needs to have this move forward because I have a at least one solar system when you may have others that are now shaded because we allowed construction to go beyond where that should have so I'll bring that to the body and I think we have a work session next next time I'll have that for the for the body mix next so a
105little Ricky one it is tricky and it's it's trickier here there doesn't folder because Boulder has a height limitation because they want you to be able to see the mountains that is correct and so they're limited to I think six storeys it's something like that so interestingly Boulder because of settlements with the utility in Colorado give the solar panels to the residents so my son has a free array on his house you didn't have to pay a cent for the the array really wasn't that wonderful sure so wonder if we could pass the rest you know something in there any new residents never gets free solar panels will taxi Thanks Oh keep it moving yeah great thank you for working on that okay I reach to schools not here I do have a little bit
106of an update I reached out to Jason Bing about Power Purchase Agreements we're looking at National Housing Trust as well as Michigan saves as possible P P a power purchase agreement a model and we are interested to see if the schools we're looking into it thankfully so those conversations will be ongoing um U of M is also working on a PPA with DTE are you in touch at all with the office of campus inability or I don't know is this as the wind yeah yeah yeah we okay community outreach there wasn't much on this front I do know that there's an idea kind of put forth as far as getting out into the community and and having some conversations I don't know where things live with that mark would you know anyway this new tour
107the listening tour is aware yep oh yes yeah there's a discussion about that dr. sells is looking at the information that was collected but from from various people on inputs and December well hopefully that will change John I report from the environmental Commission so you guys had the joint meeting everybody knows about that and since then the main focus has been still on solid waste and maybe just to elaborate on that a little bit we're in the process the city is with heavy involvement from environmental Commission in the solid waste resource management plan update together with the city's consultants Acton and tomorrow afternoon will be the first meeting with the so called advisory group which in foods people that are sort of experts in the field as well as key stakeholder groups downtown businesses residents
108that are involved and I'll be attending that as a substitute for Allison Skinner but that process is a multi-step process that goes through July so there's still many many steps beyond that but that's been basically the focus of the environmental Commission in addition to the other topic that I mentioned earlier was the future meetings and what we're gonna be handling in those meetings so that's main thing for I think you're okay we still have some public out there would anybody like to say or say anything about energy three minutes come on up state your name and let's hear it looking for specific projects and they can kind of latch on to I just quickly googled to find the most recent info about the Veridian that counting farms which is from M live in September 24th
109of 2018 so it seems like it's getting getting quite close it's the I know it's the county's land but it's inside the city so it seems like it should be a really good opportunity for the Energy Commission the environmental Commission the whole city you to really make sure we're partnering with this whole project and we can offer input on lighting or EBU readiness or whatever and I'm sure even if they've thought of everything already that we could learn a lot from it and hopefully now go towards some future projects but it seems like it'd be a shame if the whole thing got done and we couldn't say we as a city we're partnering strongly with this thing a major showcase for clean energy in the future and it did say they should have given their
110final vote on October 3rd for the purchase and that the next steps continue advocacy through the city's approval process so it sounds like it's maybe in the city's Court right now and hopefully we as a Energy Commission and the rest of the Commission's and the council and everything can think that the project we could jump on board with and partner with numerous times with metro talk about this budget and it kind of it couldn't really move until it got through the county one of the things we've discussed is getting that area designated as the solar micro grid and so carving it out as a micro grid that requires DTES participation we've had some preliminary meetings with DTE on this subject and and the boss is kind of in Matt's Court right now just to decide
111whether or not you know there's various ways to pursue that but I mean one way is having there's nothing that precludes every individual home in that area putting solar on the house and doing in that meter with the with the utilities assuming they don't all that by the time this gets done but doing it as a solar micro grid adds a lot of benefits to the community as a whole and it provides the city with some emergency response benefits and some other things so we won't get a solar micro grid unless the city is actively engaged with DTE and Matt knows that and and preliminary discussions have happened we've offered to have him come to the Energy Commission and request our endorsement of the solar micro girl idea and we're waiting for him okay for
112example resolution we shouldn't initiate until we get a signal from that till we get some that I've given that a draft resolution several months ago and we're just we're literally waiting I sent him an email here when the county did the thing and said you know when do you want him he wants to do this now and he said get back with yourself we're waiting but I think it would I agree with you it would be an outstanding project and as of solo micro-grid it would really be a good project and Chuck knows a lot about solar micro grid and they're actually consumers is testing micro grid battery hybrids which would be ideal for this as well I'm trying to encourage consumers to buy DTE and make it easier but then the short one will
113probably have to deal with DTE on this just the feet planning process is going to be less of an obstacle than the micro-grid process yeah but when it enters the planning process there are opportunities for public hearing and the planning commission and so if you or anybody in the committee in the community has ideas as to what they'd like to see it be part of that community yeah I think that's good they've got exciting ideas but nobody can think of everything they would certainly entertain those I don't there's plenty of public opportunity to discuss this before it gets to City Council I don't there's any way we can have the Energy Commission can have some kind of formal partnership with Matt's gotta it's in his court he's gonna come forward to us maddis met with
114me too on several occasions so I think he knows where to come to Matt Schmitt with everybody thank you thank you thanks we're spending a lot of money and the best technology that we have available which is some kind of activated charcoal filters and it's proven to be somewhat effective you know you don't get to zero you just don't I mean one of the reasons why he passes is just an emerging issue is because over the last 10 years they've just been developing the technology to measure down to parts per billion and Piazza's is dangerous at parts per billion whereas like dioxane is parts per million and so when you're down at parts per million if you can cut it from 37 down to 10 or something like that that's that's a dramatic decrease but
115you know it's I think it's pretty hard to keep all of them we've authorized the expenditure to install the filter maybe we should be working on facilitating individual households to use rainwater catchment systems posed to me that we should be encouraging the collection of water to use for you know Gardens parks trees enough water runs off from your yard to take care of a considerable portion of the greenery around you that you want which matt has done with his home his personal no matter if everybody knows that yeah everything except for portable water from Green rain water certainly from an environmental standpoint and this is not energy related just our fundamental infrastructure is so important to our role as environmentalist you know because just periodically you're reading my of about us is dumping 100,000 gallons
116of raw sewage into the river yeah which is not a good thing you'll read about keifa's foam in the river that you shouldn't touch or eat you know the dioxin is is headed towards the river it's just a matter of whether it hits the river not far enough north to tank our water supply so again and again our our infrastructure issues are really environmental issues and and so when I talk about the competing interests in our in our city budget when we're you know deciding how to spend that hundred eight million dollars these are you know some of the more pressing issues that we have you know tens of millions of dollars worth of needs since that you're talking about water out pass up the gun maybe we can get an answer at some point
117because I gave it to Matt a while back and never got any answer back from the water department there was a study that came out to Matt naught yes okay about a year ago now where they looked at 40 or 50 cities worldwide their water supply and they tested for microplastics and they discovered that most of them had some in it and so I asked a question do we have that in our water system in Ann Arbor so I think the important question is do we test for that you know but now we're dealing with micro biological issues and and you know there's lots of stuff in the water from decades and centuries of irresponsibility you know the micro plastic ones it's an interesting one because it's we use so much plastics and we we
118let so much of it go out into the environment and then they added micro plastics to facial creams and everything and it's just everywhere and it's coming off of our synthetic clothes and everything else and yet they don't know what the safe levels of ingestion are you know you eat fish and you eat that because it's definitely in fish send me an email to remind me to ask you I will because I'm going from this meeting to another meeting and don't forget before I came hoping alright I will do that I appreciate it but doesn't microplastics the other problems carryover drugs and some of these things hyperlapse some of them just go away because they react with other things in our some of the carryover drugs are not and so there's some elements of that
119that we have to rely on so the Jax point there's more than what you think in the water yeah lots of pharmaceuticals yeah okay that's why I drink okay okay after a slight digression here items for the next agenda it's a working session ongoing conversation about commission relationship I also have update energy fund so I would be yes yeah so I have met with Dave Conkel and we're thinking about how best to kind of reboot energy fund and then finally mark for January's meeting we have your resolution so I can bring for at least a report on the listening tour stuff because I'll have a chance to talked about that that's great so I can report on that okay so I have a quick question sure last council meeting we passed bylaws for a commission
120that's yet to be formed and I'm wondering what's the status of our bylaws did we passed those all right they got tabled when there was a move afoot to combine us with the environmental Commission which now seems to be dead so it is something yeah so we should bring that forward in the near future please oversight to to other to other possibilities in the rest a solar faithful update I think would be interesting and then potentially especially in light of what Dave talked about because I know chart house was also a possibility and what's the carryover from that to the city or a noir public schools etc eventually that sort of carries over into community solar kinds of things but right now we don't have I haven't had a subcommittee meeting on that because there's
121really nothing to do especially also with the freedom package going through the house and waiting on solar faithful so an update at some point Josh you can maybe tell us when I mean it could be December it could be in January or past then and the other one is something that I would present we had a contingent from our sister city Tubingen that was here we hosted a couple of my wife and I did and attended several of events and one of them was an event with Mayor Taylor and council members from both Tubingen and Ann Arbor talking about three sort of common issues between the cities and one was energy and climate action and there was a presentation that was given by a tubing in a member of their City Council and I have
122a copy of that that I had him leave with me and I could go over that briefly I'm not gonna be able to get into real detail but it'd be interesting for us to see what they're tracking what metrics they're using some of the strategies that they've employed some of which are know to low cost kinds of things some of which actually tie in with what Dave's doing about job programs so I could present that at whatever meeting is appropriate tubing in Germany - Germany yeah it's a university town I can Arbor about the same size in one of our sister cities we also send a few recommendations as far as topics for you next that's something that I'll I'll be working with her to see when the best timing would be okay great wonderful
123well if there's nothing else we'll call this meeting adjourned at 8:10 environmental regulations hurt income so is there any like incentives short-term for people working looking for like solar panels and other environmental friendly stuff yeah but like short term because a lot of the things for talking about it everybody yeah that's an excellent question I think equity our office is really good taking equity ones and the things we've been doing one of the things that I know we've been looking at as far as rental housing and energy efficiency audits one of the problems that we often find is when we require energy efficiency upgrades to be done in rental units it can just fortunately affect those that have the most burden so that's something that I know we've been working with Boulder and others to
124try to see if there are market forces that we can use to help on that front the other side affordable housing so everything we've been doing I recently completed a Net Zero analysis of some affordable housing where the idea would be the energy costs are usually a large burden for those that obviously are hard pressed economically and so we've been finding ways to possibly bring down their energy burden through energy efficiency upgrades a lot of energy efficiency your upgrades specifically things like LED lights can bring down the cost of electrical use and the upfront cost can be much less than for example major upgrades on top of that were so helping to I guess proposing to help subsidize some of those energy efficiency upgrades as well as renewables so I think those are a few
125things we're looking at maybe you could exchange contact information we can we'll continue yeah I don't know if you picked up earlier one of the things that councilman Eaton mentioned earlier is that there is a resolution in front of Council to provide funding and as he mentioned a major portion of that is for two hundred thousand dollars that would essentially make affordable housing units that are on Broadway Net Zero and so the idea is that both energy efficiency as well as solar measures would be taken so that people that are living in those would essentially not have utility costs anymore other than water and gas from the electrical side would be it's the gas side is not being addressed in the NetZero right so my recommendations were to turn all the natural gas appliances to
126hide to electric okay okay so it would be truly Net Zero yes other than the water and then more generally our housing director is looking at our affordable housing units as we retrofit them to be more durable and more energy efficient so not necessarily Net Zero but just changing out the appliances so that they don't consume as much electricity or just adequately insulating a housing unit saves on heating and cooling costs so we're trying to address people of modest incomes at one of those levels that that pounds them harder than the rest of us you know I mean air conditioning isn't a luxury to me but you know heating and cooling costs are a major expense for someone who is on a limited income and so just making our housing units for subsidized house housing
127more affordable and in all respects have you any contact with Habitat for Humanity so um you know they obviously they're sort of low income people and you should talk to them they have all of their homes are built energy or other or the retrofits as well our Energy Star related which is a threshold from the Department of Energy and they also provide incentive programs for things like replacing old refrigerators and things like that that's sort of linked in with DTE but you should contact there's habitat of humanity of Washington County and you should contact them some of that the things that they do might be of interest for your report yeah that's true that's a good point I think library is available on the web and you can look at it where we had somebody
128from DTE and somebody from the county and somebody from Habitat all talking about different things that we're assistance programs for energy efficiency that was recorded just like this meeting I think yeah you should be able to access it I think maybe through the city or the district line yeah I'll give you my contact information we can talk it's hard to find on the library's website but I want to applaud your attention to that issue because certainly energy and environmental issues are minorities and people of low income more than the rest it's true they're living through it in ways that we don't all the power plants are in their neighborhoods and everything else okay well with that we're adjourned you