001sure councilmember here commissioner Lensky here commissioner mirskiy commissioner Appleyard here from commissioner Jameson and those are all in there okay great well second favor public input we have some public David de pais State Street yes one of the things I often hear about our mission is we need to do more education about what the programs and initiatives we are sponsoring and I'd like to suggest one way we can start doing that is in the agendas when on the legislature our system when you look at the agenda it's just a bunch of cryptic one-liners of a we're going to have a resolution we're going to support a House bill there's no additional information I think there should be you know a few centons this is a paragraph whatever it is if it's an infant item and
002I also would like to encourage you when it's a resolution that a text of that resolution should be in the agenda so if anybody sees that resolution the end says while I agree or I don't agree they can come down here and speak to it without just seeing a title that we don't know what it is so that's my comment for the evening that's a good comment and sometimes but not always if it's if it's in blue if you click on that you'll actually bring it up but a lot of times it they're not done in time but I appreciate that seeing no other public rising to the occasion we'll move on to the energy report yeah so I have some internal and external news per usual since last we met there has been 378
003mercury vapor lights that have been converted to LEDs that's basically all of our mercury vapor lights with a 1.6 year payback so I worked with DTE is to convert the remainder of those vapor lights some good news sure those these type of streetlights or the global it's not big enough it's mercury vapor usually there are some I should say there actually are some pictures that incorporate mercury vapor than our globe but the majority of them are going to be downward facing yeah the traditional streetlight yes going forward after the 1.6 years hey Beck the net savings yeah those funds so it'll be a thirty thousand dollar net savings per year after that on our street light bills okay and what will happen with that or allocated to that energy off that will go back to
004streetlights so the funds are allocated based off of for example streetlights has its own fund its own funds yes so I said it was all of our streetlights DTES not breathing but yeah so we own a portion of the streetlights the majority of them are still DTES so weakens a proportion of DTE lights so are there still yes yeah so I worked with DT to try to find probably the best payback it's just kind of a saving side of things I think kind of what percentage of them complexities I mean nickers yeah so so this is all the Murphy yeah and whatever we we also have some high pressure sodium so that's the next adventure this is just yeah so the majority of them are street lights so the ones you see other ISM cells
005but yeah as some of you were able to make the September 5th meeting for sustainability innovations we have our new manager she kind of gave the work plan for sustainability innovations they touched on a lot of topics that we've been talking about here at the Energy Commission including community facing programs for those who weren't able to make it there will actually be a joint meeting on September 27th with the environmental Commission at 7:00 p.m. so if there's any questions that you guys still have that would be that meeting for it as far as externally news so we did hold the house of worship open house we talked a little bit about their last Energy Commission meeting since then we've installed 20 kilowatts on a house of worship looking at possibly installing another 10 kilowatts which
006would actually we'd be the running basically for a $500,000 grant from the DOA the Department of Energy so we're looking forward to see if that that comes through do you know that those were installment yeah Jesu and there's a saint I believe st. Andrews is the one that we're looking at for the remainder of the 10th Lawrence as far as power hours we also had we talked a little bit about the power hours in the last meeting so the power hours are kind of community facing events that inform the public about energy efficiency opportunities renewable opportunities our chair Appleyard was able to speak of the events along with DTE and the county offering some of their programs as well it was well attended by 35 people turned out and Wayne was telling me that he
007heard two people were ready to get solar after the yes yeah well one I talked to at the meeting and another one actually contacted me later yeah with some questions and both were pretty sure so it's pretty successful those refer to Michigan says it's they were obviously aware of Michigan's saves I'm not sure that either of them was kind of financing so I think they were besides that it is national drive electric week and on September 16th from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. at the Whole Foods on Eisenhower would be an opportunity for those interested to try out an electric vehicle what a party there was always a fun of that try and get there you see the ones that are produced now and there's usually a few that show up their conversions and kind
008of fun and then finally John did you want to talk a little bit more about a pea sauce and the event that's coming up there's gonna be a staff presentation about pea faucet the I know there's gonna be my thinking in September 17 yep that's that's all I know I know questions have been essentially referred back to people and requested that they attend that meeting because there's going to be obviously a detailed presentation by staff and an opportunity for public questions and comments as per normal agenda one is only so city council 1717 yeah other energy news that people would like to share I'm so good I just saw a break for a few minutes enjoy some of you know this some of you don't dump the Soler's officially commercial all right just across the
009I'm not sure many electrons actually flow into Michigan they probably mostly flow to the East Coast but that one's been exciting and parallel to my Delta adventures so that's been crazy and then I have micro Griffith Jackson under construction finally so I'll have tour opportunities that are not interested in looking at any of these facilities very soon anyone else move right I had two questions about the status of resolutions ever passed in the last meeting and was wondering where they stood so we passed the resolution in support of the existing passenger car cafe standards and I was wondering on the Josh or Jack you could tell us where that stands and then just pick you back on that you can tell us on both we also passed a resolution on energy staff today I have
010never done anything in the cafe standards I did ask staff to prepare a resolution regard to the energy staff number and what I got back was just unusable and so I'm gonna have to work with our to come up with something that suits his hair precision yep mine too on her ours he's not offended by the fact that we're pushing for that and I think that at our work session we made it pretty clear that she's gonna see more than one as as to the status of that it's still pending because we're trying to work out some agreeable language if I can urge you to act on the cafe standard resolution because I think there is public comment period that runs out I don't recall the date so the Trump administration has proposed rolling the
011standards back and the resolution on its own is you could say not all that significant but what the resolution asks for is that the city contact a number of different parties that would have influence probably greater than the city of Ann Arbor alone the EPA's actions so there's a chain of activities that are sort of triggered by passage of the resolution and I understand that I want to apologize I had kind of a busy summer and so I was a bit distracted but I understood I could be there on another quick note so Honeywell was unable to join us for this meeting they will be joining us for our October meeting I haven't brought very large binders that gets it the work that they did as far as energy audits and when your review about
012so if anyone would like one big brass box at the end there okay and this is nothing big right the updated plan yeah so basically we had a few meetings with staff to see what they thought about the original energy audit they had some changes they want to see done so this is the update response right other energy news I have a couple of things I received something from a citizen about the Bermuda Triangle that exists in in are not related to the hurricane on the East Coast the shorts but basically they're they she was complaining about power outages that were frequent in between the stadium and seventh Street and is claiming that it has to do with tree problems but they citizens I'm sure that what's going on and there was some commenting here
013that one of the worker DTE workers had said that there's splices on splices and that's what the real problem is but so there's somebody that's unhappy this is some of you who have been around a while remember that it was a period of time went up in the northwest quadrant which i think is where chuck lives there were or not some sometimes these things take times and I know sometimes these things are hard to diagnose I had a problem in my little neighborhood it went on for six or eight months and they kept saying it was trees and it turned out to be bats in my transformer and when they finally technic the transformer out completely then they were able to find the bat so it's not always an easy thing to figure out so
014I can just briefly respond to that I am aware of the concerns in this neighborhood as well as I mean there's plenty of areas in Ann Arbor that do have more frequent outages than other and it's not unique to n Arbor although our propensity for love for big trees does make it worse than in some of the newer communities you know but there's a comprehensive there's a cup comprehensive programs that DTE has one around tree-trimming with you know a schedule of when the trees get trimmed and sometimes based on feedback like this you know GT will make changes to that but knowing that there's a certain amount of dollars invested in that every year to go on kind of a rotating schedule to get different neighborhoods so there's a balance between sticking to a planned
015schedule and you know adjusting where needed and then in addition to beyond just the tree trimming there's obviously infrastructure upgrades that are also on a schedule and get adjusted as necessary as we see things arise so I want people to know that there's work obviously being done on this and this one in particular I'm in contact with some folks I saw that email come through last night and so I will make sure that I also kind of pay attention to how that gets addressed these problems the amount of errors and things that happen in different neighborhoods vary occur you know just by chance and some areas that are gonna be worse than others just by the fact that there's a variation so anyway it's two other things one on the plus side and one on
016the negative side I there's a report that came out that said that we are rapidly losing the window to stop runaway climate change and they're saying that if we haven't made significant reductions by 2030 that that will be the case as it puts 150 and so that they feel that the next three to five years is really important to make significant changes that's from organization called the global Commission on the economy and complaint the other one is a little bit more humbie by the carbon tracker organization they have a 2020 vision which basically they think that peak fossil fuels are coming I think it's 19 or 2023 and that the change to electric vehicles and a change to renewables is going to happen fast enough to to really make a difference so it kind of
017shows two different scenarios and hopefully the better one will will win other things here that I wanted to mention about the replacement of Nate I had heard a rumor that we have a financial problem they're having problems having money to fill that position partially due to the fact that there's been lawsuits against the city that they have had to spend money on which is unfortunate on another interesting note if anybody's interested in volunteering this Saturday at nine o'clock at the sea fire station in Ypsilanti on Michigan Avenue if see solar is going to put more solar on the roof there's maybe on the roof now and it's producing 75% of their electricity than the fire chief said he wanted to do one hundred percent so there's another 50k nine o'clock 50 panels sorry and it
018was panels on the roof area so I hear so great I was there two years ago when we did the first group and it was finally learn some things and you get to meet some interesting people and stuff so we bring tools close the time yeah and I think that's it there's at the University and I think it's on the 24th or 25th there's a climate change adaptation conference going on unfortunately so you're charging given you got all the right is that the one he's got Bill McKibben no I don't think he no no no it's a there's somebody who September 25th and 26th it's ASA the Association had a patient society professionals adaptations science specialists the assistant yeah Wow Society of adaptation professional assistance I can't remember American some people I think that's it
019there's nothing else we'll move on to our resolutions mr. chair resolutions I just realized that um I don't I don't think this email was sent to everybody on the Commission here have you all received the number andum of about the hundred percent clean and renewable energy plan that's been distributed to council no forward this to Josh and no forward to tell everybody so the first resolution House bill in the house as well as in both resolutions first of all first of all I want to lot Larry Kerber who's in attendance today in the audience Larry approached me about these bills and asked if well first of all he said that uh he's concerned about not just talking but also taking action and this is one way that he felt that the Energy Commission could take
020action by supporting these bills they are I'll get into a little bit more detail in a second but both of these came at his initiative he drafted both resolutions with back and forth between Larry and me and others and what you see in front of you is the latest draft first of all let's maybe start with the first resolution 51 43 in 56 80 these two bills have already passed the Michigan House both by overwhelming margins roughly 100 votes for and single digits against like below 5 votes I think one bill received one more vote than the other but both both of these have passed 50 143 and 56 80 the first resolution and passed the House and our pending action in the Senate and it's important that we act on these quickly and hopefully
021if they then also go to Council that that would also be the same because my understanding is that the Senate may at least at these two bills in the month of September so we're a tight timetable from that perspective so yeah the meeting that was supposed to be a committee meeting on this last week in the Senate that meeting was cancelled and pushed off to this week's okay so it's either gonna tighten it up in September or it's gonna slap over a little that's good to hear so you have the the wording in front of you as I said as well as in the appendix a brief description we don't have here with us the entire text of the bill is obviously a lot longer but there's a good summary here that I think was
022taken actually Larry was it taken from an official website somewhere from I think the the state of Michigan correct so this is not something that Larry and I crafted in an attempt to skew things one way or the other this is a summary as provided by the state in both cases so how should we proceed read it really read it sure okay so the body of the resolution reads as follows whereas in December 2012 with the passage by the University Council of the climate action plan or cap the city of Ann Arbor committed to an ambitious multi-strategy vision to address climate change by reducing its community wide and greenhouse emissions and then in parentheses 8% by 2015 25% by 2025 and 90% by 2050 relative to a year 2000 baseline carbon dioxide equivalent emission levels
023close parentheses where as City Council unanimously reaffirmed the local commitment climate action in resolution are 17 to 38 and that's in parentheses resolution committing the city of Ann Arbor to adopt honor and uphold Paris climate agreement goals whereas Mayor Christopher Taylor has endorsed and signed on the Global Covenant of Mayors for climate and energy and u.s. climate mayor's initiatives whereas the energy Commission's capped derived solar goals 24 megawatts by 2025 were unanimously endorsed by the University Council in their June 2016 resolution authorizing and commitment making the city of Ann Arbor solar ready community we're asked to create a better energy future for all Ann Arbor and Michigan residents and Benes businesses we need a legislative agenda that eliminates barriers to solar energy and agenda that promotes aggressive adoption of next generation solar energy systems whereas
024residential solar initiatives in Ann Arbor and across Michigan have been discouraged by the financial burden of current property tax laws and confusion they have generated whereas the city of Ann Arbor also City Council supports distributed solar energy generation as vital to finding fighting global climate change and empowering local economies with local investment in clean energy jobs whereas the host burdens of each being fifty one forty three and fifty six eighty passed with overwhelming bipartisan support Anna versity Council can provide yet another strong message of support to the Senate and governor for adoption of these bills into law resolved and our Energy Commission urges the University Council to formally petition Michigan legislators representing and our residents to actively support property tax exemptions for residential solar systems and small scale business solar systems as provided by HB
0255143 and HB 56 80 and to direct the city's lobbying resources to assist their passage and then there's some additional supporters that are listed Michigan Environmental Council Alliance for solar of choice Michigan Farm Bureau Michigan energy innovation Business Council Michigan agribusiness Association and the Michigan Municipal League I would defer from reading the summary or should that I do that as well I think you can defer from that these are questions questions yeah so I'll take a motion to pass this resolution so moved and a second so okay now for discussion I don't have any specific questions about the resolution I think it's really well written I'm just curious this might be a question for for Josh one do you have a sense of how much energy the the lobbyist fist city has been putting into
026this already in whether that sudden impact so far into this is just more on curiosity I I was pleased and surprised that the Michigan Municipal League is supporting says I endure that was the main opposition to this before so I am again not really questions here I think the resolution is as written as well yeah I'm just curious folks have more information on that I don't I know that this is Detroit passed the resolution or the freedom package or this one to freedom pendant so the second package so I'm not not this one I'm sorry and one of the things that we were hoping is that if in our verb adopts a resolution like this that this would be able to serve as a model for other municipalities to basically take our resolution as a
027best practice or a template or whatever they might want to do either in favor of or slightly modified position relative to to the bills but we've been in touch but in the end to hurt your back from the Michigan Climate Action Network to see if we could use that network to also potentially garner support for these small-scale residential and commercial solar installations especially you know this as its mentioned here in the in the in the appendix really one of the main things as a death that dresses the the property tax issue which was obviously something that we talked about that great length over the course of the last year and we know that that has roughly in the case of an IRA or where property taxes are relatively high it has the effect of increasing
028the payback period for a small scale solar by maybe forty percent something like that in that range yes I think I agree with you that it's great having the mr. Municipal League on this and part of what happened in the last year and discussions about solar taxation Michigan Municipal League's position on solar taxation was made public numerous times and I I think that they decided to try and get on the right side of this thing so they've done that I guess and the second issue Jack I had similar questions about lobbying effort I assume that the council gets copies of the librarian report because the lobbyists work for the council right so would it be possible for us to to break out I've heard numerous times from city officials that while they can't do anything
029their hands are tied on solar taxation they're gonna have the lobbyists just like to know what percent of the lobbyist contracts is actually spent out of this issue or if there's some way to determine has it actually increased over the last year and if so you know the success of this effort moving to the Senate do they take credit for that so our lobbyist doesn't bill by the hour it's a broad contract same firm represents almost every local government wants to you know in everything and so they do work on these things but they they don't report to us how much time or effort they've given thing they do to the state because I have to file a librarian reports okay and so I could request that which may not necessarily be broken out questions
030show or this resolution asks that Council passed a resolution favoring this but do you also want to speak to having our lobbyists uh that's what the basically the last director I probably very less than I'm the result a question and and possible recommendation of a friendly amendment here is that the both of the House bills are talking about taxation for alternative energy systems of which solar is one but it says that there's thirteen of them included in there and this resolution is written is all about solar I wonder if it would be worthwhile to change the language in here where we talk about solar to talk about you know for example promotes aggressive adoption of next-generation alternative energy systems I think of geothermal having you know significant growth potential in Ann Arbor and so it
031just felt like a weird dichotomy to me great three suggestion from another comment briefly Josh you might be able to speak more accurately for the figures but we attract the Energy Commission had tracked the number of solar installations initially we just track the number and then we were able to go back and through Josh's efforts determine also the number of kilowatts that had been installed so josh has those figures and I'm just going to try to speak to memory but at least in terms of the number of systems installed they increased very gradually over the years and stalled out I think 25 or so a year and the stalling largely was in effect I think of two offsetting developments one was the price of solar was going down but knowledge within the community of the
032property tax assessment went way up and as a result of those and essentially offset and so we're currently installing solar I think in the range of maybe 100 kW or something like that per year and as mentioned in a year we had originally set a target of 24 megawatts per year now that would have been 2.3 2.4 10 into 10 you have 2.4 per year 24 over the 10 years right so we're way short of that that that 2.4 per year is somewhat questionable and you know anything from a residential solar to city solar the municipal buildings but in any case we're not anywhere close to what we had hoped we might be at because of this because of some of the issues around this by the way we should change I just noticed probably
033my mistake there's a couple of periods after we're a statement that uses semicolons everywhere so everywhere there's a period except at the very end should be a semicolon in addition to Shawna's okay they always seem to use alternative energy in there which is a term that I really don't like using I like to use renewable because it's really the imperative not the alternative and renewable more clearly defines the nature okay look for the 200 [Music] it's gotta be a dtu's tarasana recommended alternative the bills apparently use the terminology alternative you recommended already suggested possibly renewable instead but I think it doesn't stick with the line yeah I dig now we could put add in alternative energy systems in parenthesis particularly solar is it solar taxation pretty much I don't I don't remember from reading the
034bill exactly what all they include under alternative energy systems elsewhere here it says including photovoltaic and wind systems okay but thirteen energy systems yeah I'm not sure exactly where how you get 13 anyways I saw worse inclusion just so let me get into the language exactly looking for before we vote on this so in the second-to-last whereas statement on the first page there's a mention of solar which I understand will switch to alternative sure at the top of the flip side on the back there's also supports distributed alternative energy as opposed to solar and then the only another place for solar specifically mentioned is in the resolve and the question there is whether we change solar wear which is reference to times also to alternative systems I would say that we should just think yes
035oh there's one more change and the first page second up from the bottom where we changed generation solar energy systems we put next generation alternative energy systems yes and then insert in parentheses including solar photovoltaics and wind which comes directly from including solar photovoltaics and wind solar PV and wind yes right and wind energy systems it says quickly recognized theory yeah a few if you can read that to us you may want to step up to the microphone very learn step up to the my ulcer this is from Michigan he is BC and it says House bill 5143 would reinstate a tax exemption because if there is no exemption it's taxable for all quote alternative energy personal property in quote including solar PV fuel cell wind combined heat and power and storage systems which offset
036the hosts energy use 50 host House bill fifty six eighty would add alternative energy systems to the list of repairs and household upgrades that are not considered when determining the true cash value of a property for assessment purposes until the property is sold so this is specifically to a list of repairs and household upgrades not a list of all the possible alternative energy sources Commissioner Lansky sorry just also pointed out in the bottom where a statement there's also mention of solar that would be residential so the last two paragraphs on the first page also solar would be replaced by alternative as well as in the resulting any other questions alterations ask for a vote all in favor aye opposed we have another resolution in support freedom package as propose reads as follows so this borrows
037language from the first should I read even though the language is exactly the same I can avoid whereas in December 2012 with a passage by the University Council of the climate action plan the city of Ann Arbor committed to an ambitious multi-strategy peasant vision to address climate change by reducing its community-wide greenhouse gas emissions 80 percent by 2015 25% by 2025 and 90 percent by 2050 relative to year 2000 baseline carbon dioxide equivalent emissions levels whereas City Council unanimously reaffirmed the local commitment to climate action resolution our 17 to 38 resolution committing the city of Ann Arbor to adopt honor and puffle there's climate agreement goals whereas mayor Christopher Taylor has endorsed and signed on to the Global Covenant of Mayors for climate and energy and u.s. climate mayor's initiatives whereas the Energy Commission staff
038derives solar gold 24 megawatts by 2025 previously endorsed by the University Council in their June 2006 authorizing and commitment to making the city of Ann Arbor solar ready community where as to create a better energy future in our Michigan residents and businesses legislation is needed that eliminates barriers to solar generation and ownership and promotes an open to all market for adoption and interconnection of locally owned solar to the distribution grid whereas the Energy Commission supports community solar alternatives for all residents and businesses including those with limited access to solar due to constraints such as shading building orientation roof obstacles transitional living in parentheses rental potential move or financial whereas current community solar initiatives have largely encountered roadblocks from state laws and regulations the Michigan House of Representatives energy freedom package HB 58 61 through HB
0395865 henceforth equal energy freedom package which are intended to create first a healthy environment for locally owned community solar projects distributed generation solar tariffs that provide fair value to encourage solar adoption and local ownership of solar PV generation higher capacity caps on distribution distributed generation making it easier for businesses to maximize their energy savings by use of solar and elimination of restrictions and limits on the amount of customer own participation in meeting state electric load requirements whereas the energy freedom package has the potential to empower local communities and businesses to make their own community solar decisions enhancing local ownership control and economic prosperity whereas support for the energy freedom package is essential to secure fair value benefits for distributed generation and to eliminate restrictions on locally owned solar capacity thereby enabling Michigan to compete favorably
040with other states in promotion of ownership of solar generation resolved the anavar Energy Commission urges anniversa T Council to formally petition Michigan Legislature is represented representing and our residents to actively support the energy freedom package and to direct the city's lobbying resources to assist passage of the package so moved my support okay yes fire Larry you know where those bullets were lifted wrong that you saw that was inappropriate there yeah Larry I don't think that it's not inappropriate I just think there's a point of clarification particularly the last bullet where it says new state electric load requirements you know those are pretty difficult to put our arms around so I was going to just add that at the end if this is not objectionable and a friendly amendment to and the word subjects infrastructure and
041reliability constraints in a sense that if I have in my neighborhood let's say all my neighbors want to put up sword and we overload the distribution circuit that they all blow down to who pays for that distribution constraint that's an infrastructural constraint that's got the power of somebody the utility probably would fund it but only if the state provided reimbursement back through its process of improving infrastructure infrastructure so I'm just a little bit concerned that this may end up adding a rush of solar in a place where we're not yeah so I think this is the bullet item that relates to putting a cap on the overall amount of generation that can come from solar which I believe is 1% of the something like the last five years of peak power across the utilities which
042is nothing it's so it so small and this is the capacity limit that they ran into I think it's up cold work and it literally shut down the entire solar industry up there so I I think I understand that you might want to put something like that in but we are so far away from that this is a real limit that's coming up probably pretty quickly so and some people are asked well why do we even need a lit you're bringing up the point maybe we do I'm not sure what clarify I think Chuck was talking about localized areas where you might put in a system big enough you'd have some great connection issues you know I've got reliability problems maybe the next Rd run the same certain conditions it's just got to be done
043mindfully I don't I'm not proposing a limit I think as Larry is pointing out a hard-and-fast limit is done in a simple way to avoid a lot of extra work by utilities and owners of the distribution to reanalyze and reanalyze reanalyze more is set to keep it simple but simplicity oftentimes leads to tough rules and I agree concept if we put some words in here to make sense logically and how it could simplement and I think it works I would I would respectfully agree with the theory of wanting to you know ensure reliability but putting the language in here when what we're doing is supporting that energy freedom package doesn't change what's in the energy freedom package which currently doesn't include that so us supporting the energy freedom package is as it's written today which
044doesn't include that goes back to my original point if this were lifted out of the document if there I can only believe that there's some language in the region in the actual freedom package relative to this the summary and the appendix of House bill 58 sixty four addresses this specifically but it doesn't so it's at the bottom of the the pen dictate but it doesn't in this brief summary it doesn't get into the details I don't know if it's an exact language or not yeah let me say that when I did the summary it was a summary of a summary so everything that's in the state of Michigan summary is not in a summary I wanted to reduce it to more of the essence so people could really focus I don't understand that I'll withdraw
045my amendment because we're really voting on the freedom package as it stands and by the way it's this is not yet approved right I mean there's bills that have been drafted and they ever get to be these bills have not gone through the committee so concerns like you have can't be because I understand that still addressed through consideration we make sense I agree right with the trust of your point they should be maybe a friendly amendment if we just remove where f 7 & 8 we are essentially saying we support the energy freedom package and it doesn't lead to tracks anything from what we're saying here and it gets rid of some of that Dorney so the monitor the bottom to where as a bottom to and chairs over oh yes I'm saying take out
046remove six seven eight and basically everything else follows the preamble stuff is here we keep whereas a created better future breanne our Michigan residents legislation need to eliminate barriers to solar generation ownership you can change this to alternative energy we need to and promote open to all market for adoption interconnection locally owned solar to the distribution grid I could see how our utility friends might have some umbrage over that but then we pick up the last two and we're basically saying to the city we are a city to throw their support behind the energy freedom package to solve some of the things it takes out some of the details that maybe aren't really necessary and it just gets to the heart of the matter well which and some of the details I think are more
047commentary and what's coming out of the freedom package number five says why it's important why it's important to create a better future [Applause] anybody else I talked about these various paragraphs that are in or out but I do have some thoughts on the energy freedom package and general concerns with it in particular with the approach to net metering where the bill recommends that net metering be paid out at a retail rate for electricity which I think we've had this conversation many times as a group but the retail rate for electricity includes both the cost of generating the electricity as well as the delivery charge and the cost for distribution and which is by the way a very big piece of it so when you're avoiding when when a customer who is on that metering avoids
048paying that delivery charge they're essentially getting there they're kind of wires for free and in fact all our solar customers who remain attached to the grid which is virtually everybody do use the wires because their systems are not producing at exactly the moments that they're using it and in fact distributed generation customers tend to use the wires more than other customers because they're using it both to buy and to sell so it's you know going back and forth all the time and so I have a real concern with that I think you guys know I'm a solar customer myself and a beneficiary of net metering is it's written right now and and very much want to promote solar but I don't believe that that is a compensation mechanism that can be workable into the future
049you know today is very very small volumes of solar that are installed it doesn't have that big of an impact on other customers but as you start to see this pick up which is of course the goal of the resolution and of the Commission here you would start to see major subsidization in effect by non-solar customers for the solar customers use of the distribution portion of the grid so to me that's a fatal flaw in in this package of house bills the way they address that of course they would get the emissions reductions benefits for free too for free as would DTU stockholders I think it's it's a legitimate point in a good point I mean I wonder if someone can illuminate the the issue to a greater degree by saying they're telling us what
050other states have done much more that have different regulations regarding distributed energy and community solar and things like that I mean California just passed a bill where every new home has to have solar with so many exceptions so I do you know how they're in do they have a separate grid terms or does anybody know how how this is the dilemma that you've talked about how that's being addressed in other states there are basically as many different approaches to it as there are states that have any kind of rules around this variations on the theme as well as really different ways to approach it and some use net metering where the the compensation rate is just the generation portion of the retail rate and not the full retail rate others have minimum fixed charges either
051for solar customers exclusively or which essentially covers their grade costs or for all customers meaning that the variable portion of your rate pay you know maybe it's a I don't know a specific number but say you pay a $30 flat fee for a month instead of a $4 flat fee for a month and then the portion that you pay per kilowatt hour it's a lot lower it makes it it reduces the incentive for energy efficiency that's one of the concerns people have with that approach but there's there's a whole host of different approaches to this value of solar is one of the commonly used ones where essentially the Commission our state body comes up with a determination of what is the fair value of solar so we've gone through this discussion in Michigan but I'll
052tell you every single state comes up with a different way to determine what is the fair value of solar and what it you know what is that absolute number so there's not an answer to that you're interested in reading a lot of material that PLC rate case you 183 83 is where all this is housed this is nothing versus district so I wonder if we could solve that problem if we take the next-to-the-last whereas you can strip it down so we say where as support for fair values in promotion of ownership is it is fair value this is important for the promotion of ownership of solar generation I'll tell you my perspective is that you know we could pass a resolution supporting fair valley mechanism to compensate customers who have solar or other distributed generation
053but if this isn't if this is supporting these house bills irreconcilable difference so I have a question what you're objecting to is actually the content of the bills that were moving to support yes and those bills are in nowhere near final version at this point is that permit right correct and so I'm pretty sure that the utility lobbyists will be there lobbying that point at the same time that our lobbyists will be there lobbying the other point and there will be some mechanism to work those differences and so our expression of support for these bills because it's so uncertain at this point in time is going to go through all that mechanism of compromise anyways and so I think we can do this without getting into the weeds what's happening in this state is a
054takeover of DTE and consumers of our energy that's what's happening so we need to stand that's what these bills are doing this is a direct response to you two zero one six two if you go and read that what it says that's the first rate case that sets basically the compensation for older generation and basically it's two dollars and thirty one cents per kilowatt is what they're saying just for providing no value the statement that you made that this is going to somehow hurt everybody else is what the utilities say I think there's a lack of proof of that that's my view lack of proof you can cite the examples where that proof comes from it's all utility I'm happy to bring data that shows how that works if people are interested to see it
055yes because the utility has the data around how much customers pay and how much it costs to produce and distribute electricity I think we're getting if anyone has any other comments or questions or proposed changes to this resolution I'd like to hear their if not so that's so what were the changes that were proposed so picking up those six seven areas close yeah I'm fine with that I mean basically I think I'm just ready to clear oh yeah councilman Eaton is suggesting is that these bills are in draft form right now or even committee they're obviously gonna be additional input and compromise from multiple parties and what we're doing with this is signaling in general support for the size of legislation and therefore I mean in agreement and I don't know how other commissioners feel
056with taking out the two whereas things at the bottom which then carries over to the top and the next one and simplifying things and just saying were support for the package is essential to secure a fair event value benefits for distributed generation doesn't say whether it's what rain it is that will be obviously worked out and eliminating the restrictions on locally owned solar capacity and therefore we're recommending that Ann Arbor stand behind the legislation so I'm fine with eliminating it if anybody feels differently speak up or at least it's now it's your resume those changes your resolution you've got you've got the power so if there's no other changes or comments or questions all in favor I proposed right long resolution commending you recall and earlier part of last year when we had some difficulty
057with the Geo stellar program brought forth the idea of lenders to solar companies who were involved as oak electric and Michigan solar solutions made a commitment to work with all the companies all the people who have bought solar and to make them whole and in in some cases even the companies would absorb some of the down payment costs of those couldn't be clawed back from geo stellar and I put forth idea of a commendation to them for their outstanding efforts to make these customers whole at the time it was suggested that perhaps we would wait until they were finished with that job and then we would do that commendation and I withdrew the resolution at that time Nate then may was collecting data tracking that data and then he left and so we dropped the
058ball a little bit but we now have confirmation that they indeed did complete that task so what this is is a combination of those two companies as well as the Energy Office for stepping up and doing the right thing so that the citizens of Ann Arbor who trusted us and bought solar through this program were made whole and that the industry as a whole was not tainted by this and that we could do what we're doing now which has launched a new solar program to encourage people to adduce solar in Ann Arbor commensurate with the goals of the clam reduction plan so this is the new and revised motion that I'm going to re-enter now kind of motion for a commendation here honoring and our solar Club participants whereas in December of 2012 with the
059passage by the Ann Arbor City Council of the climate action plan or C ap the city of Ann Arbor committed to an ambitious multi strategy vision to address climate change by reducing his community-wide greenhouse emissions 8% by 2015 25% by 2025 and 90% by 2050 relative to year 2000 baseline carbon dioxide emissions levels whereas the energy Commission's cap solar goals 24 megawatts of new solar installations by 2025 at a rate of 2.4 megawatts a year were acknowledged by the Ann Arbor City Council in their June 2016 resolution authorizing a commitment to making the city of Ann Arbor a solar already community whereas City Council unanimously reaffirmed local commitments to climate action in resolution our 17 to 38 quote resolution committing the city of Ann Arbor to adopt honor and uphold Paris climate agreement goals and
060quote whereas in 2017 the city of Ann Arbor's contractor the Clean Energy Coalition CEC launched a solar Club in partnership with geo stellar a West Virginia based company to encourage local citizens to install solar energy commensurate with the cap solar goals whereas in the first year of operation geo style ran into significant problems launching the solar Club program and fulfilling their outstanding solar commitments to citizens that had purchased solar arrays under the program whereas geo geo cellars fulfillment problems has negatively impacted the refuge of local solar businesses the Ann Arbor Energy Office and CEC affected local citizens financially and slowed Ann Arbor's efforts to meet and climate action plan whereas the local solar companies that were directly involved and are indirectly affected by the geocell or fulfillment program an iris Energy Office and CEC were
061not in any way responsible and continued to do their jobs in spite of the geo stellar fulfilment problem whereas starting in December 2017 both oak electric and Michigan solar solutions went the extra mile at their own expense to fix this geo stellar fulfillment problem by assuming the responsibility of making sure Ann Arbor homeowners who paid for solar panels through geo stellar solar plug program Club programs received their promise to raise or were made otherwise whole whereas fostering trust and faith in our local solar small businesses the Energy Office and Ann Arbor's climate action plan related solar initiatives is paramount to the success of the city to honor and uphold Paris climate agreement goals resolved that the city of Ann Arbor Energy Commission wishes to acknowledge the Energy Office Oak electric and Michigan solar solutions for
062their outstanding efforts to maintain the integrity of the Ann Arbor solar Club in spite of geo stellar school member problems and their related efforts to ensure and our homeowners who paid for solar panels through a gos dollars program receive their promise to raise nor otherwise made home assuming that this motion gets passed I planned on attaching it to a nomination of both of these companies to receive the Business Award of the year a joint Business Award of the year from the Great Lakes Renewable Energy Association for outstanding solar businesses in Michigan 2017 thank so do I hear a motion pass this resolution so moved second Chang discussion you know forth whereas Klaus would you consider it different words other than partnership uh well what's part of it so there may be some legal relocation Center
063today I'd be more comfortable if I'm 70 cooperation and what courts sort out whether there was a yeah there may be some significance you have to be a little careful of wordage oh well we always do and we have an attorney it I said cooperation Act I don't care as long as it doesn't stick we always used that term partnership and I don't care you vote on your amendment yes no well the motion agree with this is off topic a little bit but on the same same paragraph there um Ann Arbor's contractor and it's solar Club so in effect did the contractor seek city approval to start the solar Club or was that done on their own volition so the city did authorize historic also they gave it the Clean Energy Coalition a grant to
064do this program okay and following down into the resolved site what does Clean Energy Coalition done relative to the GAF that was created by you they're no longer in operation I mean they were a city contractor and this program was repaired not by as by the two companies quite frankly in acting on their own the harbor Energy Commission certainly it was happy that they did they had some one point maybe in the picky but in the sea sixth whereas we're local citizens affected financially because all their contract you know I'm maybe similar concerns - councilman Eaton did we want to put out there because I understand all the contracts were fulfilled right so what's there funny well at the time that at the time that this fell apart before the companies fixed it they were
065financial negatively financially affected yes many of them were contacted the City Council members and and energy office energy office and energy commissioners saying well so I paid for something you can each other every relative figures CEC was tracking this and we were meeting regularly with them along with me I believe there were eleven contracts that were outstanding josh's thinking is that yes report when they had made down payments to varying degrees geo stellar was burning cash and basically they were taking money from as a lot of companies to do when they get into financial trouble they were taking money from prospective customers and using that to fulfill orders from other customers and they ran out in these eleven customers I checked when we were drafting this remark and I resurrected this resurrected and they still
066have an online presence it says they're in the process of they've ceased operations and they're in the process of restructuring something to that effect but there were indeed 11 customers split between the two where those companies basically fulfilled the jobs where money had flown to Geo stellar but not flown flowed from there to the local contractors subcontractors in a sense to fulfill and complete those jobs I've seen the range of 125,000 dollars speaking the point he's trying to make is that you're saying they were impacted and he's saying that at the end of the day they got what they paid for yes all right it's a technicality but it sir they were dead so yes you know what this should be geocells preferment program negatively impacted the reputation of local solar businesses and our Energy
067Office and CEC and local citizens period in slow climate action plans so whereas geocells fulfillment program negatively impacted the reputation of local solar businesses the citizens and citizens appreciate that this is one other maybe minor one but the motion for commendation that in the title honoring in our solar Club participants is it is it the participants that we're trying to honor here is that one because it's really it sounds like the contractors really saved the day here it's distractors right so is that what we're referring to as participants contractors myself yeah just just to be clear they know you're right story it's about actors because the director of our solar Club install I know I just want to make sure we're actually promised a solar contractor and can I just ask we know that each
068of those systems was ultimately installed but before we go honoring these do we know that the customers are essentially satisfied at this point there were no other major yes concerns yeah efforts to maintaining integrity of the an upper solar Club instead of in spite would be resulting from okay resulting from Joe sellers fulfillment problems and then the next part and their related efforts I don't know it I'm just trying to figure out how to connect that back to Oak electric in Michigan solar solutions because it seems like a nerd or a fan starts out so fulfilled problems and to ensure how's that so to maintain the integrity of an IRA solar Club resulting from geocells fulfillment problems and to ensure that they never home are some paper solar panels for GL cells for them to
069see their promise to race or otherwise mental yes hearing none all in favor on the next one here we have energy [Music] was trying to find the gateway you came in sorry for the technical difficulties people at home to the rescue the main power station it's on michigan avenue east of downtown so it's not a south side of the road it's a fairly good-sized one start building the bus pass the library yeah you're Washington's true all right so the title implies a liar 100% clean and renewable miscible operations we had a subcommittee that took a look at this bat probably about a month ago now they will over a month ago and this is kind of the final revised version worked with Missy as well as the city administrator to kind of turn all this
070together content energy efficiency upgrade current municipal operations on-site generation off-site generation fleet review some wild cards so some things that could be thrown in the mix and then next steps this is just a definition of what we mean by clean and renewable the next slide here yes this is an older version so basically energy that has little to no pollution and is generated from an unlimited source we came to as a result as you can see here municipal operations actually make up a very small percentage of total emissions in the community it's actually less than 2% that's actually rounding from the excel sheet and I went ahead and did a of emissions by type so we looked at natural gas fuel and electricity and by far electricity outweighed the rest if you can see there
071on the right hand side I went ahead and took away all the municipal facilities operations and I pulled out the top five so wastewater treatment plant water treatment plant wheeler Center City Hall and vets Park the other include fire stations some of the other park facilities but they're you know less than 2% so in totally make up 23% but I figured it'd be good to kind of focus on those first I can read read so municipal emissions by tonight yes Seoul is 38,000 metric tons yes that's right any electrical use that's 30,000 30,000 dear yeah yep so of the 30,000 MT co2 is $30,000 this is Ann Arbor's renewable electricity so we're generating currently you can see some fluctuations there but the average I wanted took the average for all the years we've been tracking
072it it's about eleven thousand five hundred three megawatt hours offset that includes landfill gas both the dams and you can't really see much of the solar but the solar is there keep going here so what does that mean so if we go ahead and look at pre offset so if we're not taking a consideration the actual renewable generation that's about 37,000 megawatt hours if we take into consideration the offset you're looking at about twenty-six thousand megawatt hours so that's what this graph is showing the basically kept natural gas and fuel the same they're kept constant this is really only showing that the change in electricity from looking at these renewable generation so how what's the plan as far as going 100 percent clean the first thing that we should do right at the gate is
073look at energy efficiency since you know the easiest way to get at going under percent clean is just not using the electricity in the first place this is actually comes from some of the Honeywell audit information the locations are on the left-hand side there they're about 14 different locations upgrades include LED conversions seals to building envelopes so we had a few for example areas where it can be improved adding insulation where possible using reprogrammable and smart thermostats and then replacing and optimizing basically HVAC systems water heaters boilers so most of your heating and cooling systems that's kind of what they they looked at those include the water in the wastewater treatment yes the big drivers yeah so the the Honeywell audit itself did not take a look at the waste water to plan the water
074treatment plant it also didn't take a look at City Hall so this is something that I think in our plans at least we want to probably do a follow-up energy audit that takes a look at our biggest users when I talk to made about why the focus on Honeywell was these buildings in particular he said that he just wanted kind of a swath so the different types of buildings but it wasn't really with the mindset of looking at the biggest energy users and the city so totally yearly use that's kind of the total use 4-wheeler center proposed offset a big number here percent offset so if we went ahead and implemented all these energy efficiency upgrades it cover about 15% or drop the energies by about 15 percent emissions offset so that's just converting proposed
075offset MT co2 ease what would be avoiding cost upgrades yearly electric cost so that's the yearly electric cost of the wheeler center and then yearly avoided cost so if we went ahead to do all of the energy efficiency upgrades that were suggested in Honeywell that's the yearly avoided cost the changes again I did lighting retrofits as well as motion sensors that was the main focus I think doing a deeper dive on some of these buildings with another energy audit that looks at for example the envelope specifically on wheeler would be really useful bedroom Memorial Park this is another one in the top five that I pointed at the beginning the same kind of thing looking at lighting retrofits sealing envelope leaks control retrofit sensors ice rink and pool so there's some things with programming of
076the ice rink temperatures of the actual ice itself you know a few degrees difference makes a big difference if you're looking throughout the whole year and that's all the way up to about 33 percent offset with white ring yeah politics it's not coming out as good as the ones that you think yeah so I'm totally early uses eight hundred and six thousand kilowatt hours proposed offset is two hundred and roughly seventy two hundred seventy thousand kilowatt hours that's about a thirty three percent offset that equates to about two hundred fifteen MTC T's avoided there's cost of upgrades themselves yearly electric cost so the cost is I think they price it around five hundred and fifty one thousand your electric cost is around eighty thousand and then they assumed about a twenty six but between 26
077and 27,000 yearly avoided costs with these energy efficiency upgrades Honeywell will be at the next meeting so if you guys have questions so what were they doing with the ice rink in the pool that must be where the pigs so I just had to do is upgrade pumps doing things for example again the ice rink the actual temperature of the ice lowering or well it was mostly lowering the temperature of the ice where it was still usable but at the same time it was saving a lot of money throughout the whole year there are binders over there if you guys want to get more into the details raising the temperature the ice no it said the more you have to actually lower the temperature yeah the lower the temperature the more energy it takes to
078lower it right so that you keep the ice in it slightly warmer temperature to save somebody yeah okay in the back until you were spending $50,000 to save twenty six thousand dollars yeah yep that's correct why was there paint Mack is roughly 20 years yep yeah this is just a screenshot of all the buildings they did all the usage I just use us to get rough estimates if you go down to percentage a saved so the estimates that last column they're kilowatt hours they're saying about 23% reduction roughly and electricity used from their analysis J kind of want to focus or some of these on it demand electric freight and that's why worse yeah so one of the real issues we have had the city some of these around 11 some of these open D
079threes different rates mean you know different paybacks because there are large energies are so for example with a water treatment plant wastewater treatment plant use a lot of electricity which means they have a much lower rate but gelada times means that these kind of energy efficiency upgrades don't always result the best return on investment where you do get a large emissions reduction you do yes yeah so regardless of the cost and it's the main goal is reductions that's still something that we should strive for again I just kind of focusing I think that we should look at we were and veterans just because again they're the top five as far as facilities so that's where we should probably start this took a look at basically all the electricity side of our municipal operations I went
080ahead and reduced it by 15% technically we could have reduced it by 23% but I just wanted to be a little conservative in the numbers just to show what kind of offset we could expect if we went ahead and did these energy efficiency upgrades to our facilities and then but the question still remains what do we do with boilers and other systems that rely on natural gas and I think the way forward is really electrifying everything that we can especially since we can use renewables to offset a lot of electrification it's a lot harder to look for clean alternatives for natural gas if you're not electrifying we're doable on-site generation potentials so that's kind of looking at the energy efficiency side of things now I'm going to be getting into the renewables on-site it's broken
081out into two categories one is on-site generation and then the other is on-site generation I wanted to start by looking at large solar arrays the potential for large solar arrays or large systems in general that could offset a large portion of our greenhouse gas emissions and I did that in part because a lot of times especially for example with solar when you're looking at larger arrays the cost per watt installed comes down significantly not only that but if it's back in the meter a lot of times you don't have to get into the issues of how do you get the generation off site so this was first these first slides here really look at pond sight back to the meter generation let's see and this just goes to show so it's 26,000 megawatt hours can
082be met with 20 megawatts of solar 13.6 megawatts of these wind turbines 18 megawatts of bio digester and 5 megawatts of hydroelectric and I did go ahead and take a look at all of these different categories so bio digester first one was a feasibility study done a while back on bio digester for the wastewater treatment plant the unfirm cost is quite significant so again I apologize for the came out better before but 22 million dollars for the bio digester a rough proposed generation of anywhere between let's say 8400 3000 132 5818 megawatt hours per year that roughly equates to about two thousand four hundred and ninety-six to 4639 mt co2 ease avoided the reason that there's such a range it really has to deal with the nutrition of the fuel so depending on the mix
083how many nitrates there are things of that nature one of the major hurdles for going forward on this so space constraints a bio digester takes up a large footprint wastewater treatment time might not necessarily have that kind of footprint but I haven't reached out to all of these different facility managers to talk about the possibility of it and if it's in this presentation they've given the okay to lease exploit the option water treatment plant and so it you see the red box there that's actually a reservoir there's really nothing going on on the top of the reservoir that's roughly about 1 megawatt system could fit on that reservoir and again it would offset 19 percent of of the total usage electrical usage about something about 780 MT co2 ease let's keep going this one's wheeler
084so this is actually on the south side of wheeler the one really nice thing I like about this solar system it actually offsets about a three hundred and eighty one percent of electricity used by wheeler so the question is what do you do with extra generation and I haven't taught them to staff about possibly using extra generation for electric vehicles so could you charge electric vehicles with the excess generation this is Veterans Park I went ahead and actually from our original attempt to we got some on the roof there and we got some in the back of the tennis courts there's also a really nice aspect of this particular solar array there's a fire station the lie is just I guess would be to the east of this and it would create for resilience for
085the fire station as well keep on going so that's kind of the on-site generation I would have been at the off-site generation potential so the big one one that we've been talking about a lot of Energy Commission is the landfill there was a feasibility study done it looks like there's about a 20 megawatt potential nearly generation would almost completely offset all municipal operations the 22,000 MT co2 we offset it is quite a hefty 40 million dollar price tag there but again I mean I think that it's it's worth when you're looking at either looking for these kind of back in the generation sites versus looking at these is just kind of silver bullets almost where it's just one system you're getting a lot of in a reduction in cost because it's such a large system
086and the actual installation and construction of it and I think this is kind of the way to go but we can talk about it more I also elected the to Dan so there was two feasibility studies done on the dams I think from these two of these Geddes is actually the more viable so it actually has a positive net flow cash flow and the other thing too so a lot of us is dependent on purple rates obviously burber rates right now are in flux and so depending on how perforates pan out those numbers that you see they're good change and this could be less or more viable so I went ahead and summarize all of these like I said before there are some on site locations I did an analysis back in 2015 with Nate
087looking at all of the potential for all of the city one of the issues about going site to site a lot of times you know roofs have fixtures on the top they might not be the most prime location with that being said though you know you do get these situations with wheeler where you could get 381 percent covered and then you can start looking at okay can we go ahead and charge EVs along with powering all of wheelers operations that's why in general I kind of tend to go more towards liking the landfill solar because it is one of these silver bullets were again if you're able to install something like that you're getting almost all of city operations in one shot and if you include things like the energy efficiency done to the buildings
088you know again the demand will go down as well so this is the payback and the Gettys hydro yeah so the ones that I highlighted here yeah they're the best paybacks this is kind of a cursory glance of all this there were feasibility studies done and I think as we go along this path it's really it's important to really take into consideration other costs outside of just energy use to kind of get a better sense yeah Gettys was actually out of our go and Gettys that was the most as the feasible one out of the dams those studies are a little bit archaic now and these older technology to replace what was in the hydro space was the eventual run over hydro not putting in some of the newer technologies so I think it should
089be revisited but maybe the cost comes down the net benefit might go up lesson you still have some infrastructure things but we looked at it at one time as the Commissioner yeah we got Oh have to look at it anymore Josh actually got the keys he got it okay it's a fleet I wanted broken all of our fleet as you can see a lot of the fleet doesn't really pertain to electric vehicles I can't read it it's not easy to to see it'll turn it for at this moment in the future that will probably change but I just took a look at the light vehicle so of the 720 rough number total fleet we have about 24% that are in light vehicles and as you can see they're mostly made up of sedans you know
090pickup trucks full-size vans mini vans SUVs motorcycles so we did an analysis looking at a Ford Focus vs. a Chevy Volt we have a provider in the state that we've got these numbers from the city actually usually purchases from the provider I took a look at the fuel costs per year one of the things a lot of times people overlook is the repair and maintenance per year so with electric vehicles it's a lot easier to maintain so the life you know we kind of did some really rough estimates as far as the life of the vehicle and what kind of savings could you see versus a conventional vehicle versus an electric vehicle I've been given the idea of being you know obviously the co2 emissions per year if you solar charge it it's not gonna
091have any emissions this is where if you we are able to actually get something done if we learn you're basically looking at zero emissions otherwise you would be looking at a certain level emissions currently we are talking to fleet it looks like we have three V's that already been secured for the fleet and we're looking at the potential with their departments to maybe have up to 23 so things are moving on that front notes it just kind of wild cards so these are things that might play in other considerations I've been talking to to the fire chief he said that he actually has two fire stations that he won Ciccone NetZero with so I'm working directly with him to see if that's something that we can do again when we're going through and doing a
092kind of deeper retrofit energy audit I think this would be great prime locations to see what kind of things could we actually get done again kind of offsets I'm not sure if we're at the point to talk about the actual fire stations but I'll let you do yeah Johnson I'm saying is is that those fire stations are looking at purchasing green credits to achieve Net Zero status yes deep retrofit snow it's a conversation we're looking at deep retrofit so what we could do actually on-site that says is that you know green credits don't improve emergency respond well great there's no it's green washing and battery storage okay the elephant in the room for all this battery storage would be great if we were able to use it everywhere basically fernandita resilience the fire station so
093we're waiting to see what comes of that we've been working with our colleagues over at the university of michigan could work directly in this field to see if they're willing to pilot some of these battery storage programs with us this is got a very complicated slide a lot of this was meant to be kind of read and I'll make sure that all of you get a copy of this but it's just kind of the the the plan so short term really focuses on energy efficiency upgrades continue to do energy audits again starting the electrification of our vehicles looking at let's say Net Zero for the fire stations a medium term we start really looking okay can we go ahead and put in some of these these renewable bit of solar generation things of that nature
094and then long-term it's kind of continuing that process let's see and then how is it going to be funded so we've been kind of talking about internal carbon tax something we've been bouncing around we've also looked at opportunities for grants partially we've been thinking about using part of the village fund to start things like for example the e V fleets but with the idea that eventually the departments are going to take up the cause and that and it really we step out at that point so it's really kind of seed almost like a seeding of money for some of these changes extended payback programs so you know a lot of times if we do some sort of energy retrofit can we go ahead and take a portion of the savings that the the building sees
095and can we reinvest it back into future upgrades future systems that's kind of where the energy fund comes in as well so we do have a revolving energy fund and I am currently looking at ways to spend the energy funds to make places more efficient and then recuperate some of those costs as well so departments are basically loan out money for efficiency they pay us back it's called an infrastructure bank so Jeff when you say that departments taking up the charge assume that that means that they would come up with projects and take them through the CIP process so in that did you know that return on investment energy savings is not factored into the evaluation process it's only the upfront cost and the merit of their project so that might be something you want
096to tackle sooner than later that that any you know improvement or savings etc should be part of the calculation and should see the least powerful mention if not actual bonus points in the CIP process if you really expect the department's take up the charge yeah otherwise no yeah yeah this is one thing where for example if you see the landfill solar it kind of gives you maybe sticker shock at $40 fine if you consider the fact that you know if we're able to get off site that it's basically all the electricity for the city all of a sudden you have to compare it to our electrical bills in the city and you know it starts making a lot more sense all right so this is where making sure that everyone has kind of this holistic
097perspective it's important it was kind of the timeline for it 50 percent reductions again being very conservative with the energy efficiency upgrades usually we see anywhere between 10 to 30 percent energy efficiency upgrades and buildings and you know I'm hoping we see more but 40 percent after 2025 when we start really looking at some of the larger renewable projects 75% at 2030 and then finally 100 percent by 2035 that's roughly the the idea goal because have any questions so who have you giving this presentation to besides us so City Council Jack even appreciate you guys got a version of this we received a version of this what's the path forward we'll continue the work that we're doing with a lot of receptivity to this presentation so we reached out to a lot of building managers
098especially the top five and I've been in conversations with them one of the big things obviously one of the big concerns is the financing of all this and how to make it work financially and I can totally understand that one of the things that I've been exploring so with the houses of worship in this PPA model we were able to bring a lot of benefits to nonprofits the investor wins because they're able to take advantage of the 30% tax credit but then a house of worship itself a lot of times sees reductions and it's and its costs for each watt spent I think it's something if we're looking at residential for example it's the difference between 10 cents and 14 cents so it's about four cents saved per watt so I think if we can
099take that PPA model and implement it in places you know throughout the city it might be something to at least look at community solarops buy into those arrays as well yeah I think there's no real definition on an investor necessarily and when working with the PPA models we were able to get whole congregations involved so we had a legal template that allowed multiple congregation members to invest in one one system you know if that's something that you know helps us to get investors got the community involved I think it'd be a great opportunity so maybe just some background I work for a large international company foundation [Music] the payback periods of investments that my employer made generally had a payback - and I would say in the worst case yep seven years yeah in seven
100years was something that was something that was a long-term investment simply I mean seven years didn't come up very often because there was a certain amount of money to make investments and most of that was used for projects with low paybacks hmm the paybacks that we're looking here at here which are 10 to 20 years so someone who's trying to be fiscally responsible would look at these and saying the only way that these maybe start to look of interest is taking the cue that you had on your like through the last light and an email that I sent you and Missy this morning suggesting that and I ever look at setting an internal cost of carbon so Yale University has done that lots of international companies have done that even royal companies have done that
101obviously the range in the price is something that the city would have to establish and that might be different than a business entity because we have a school that's something that council would have to debate but that would then be a levelizer for all of these projects yeah so it's not then something that people are looking at individually and trying to say well I like this about this one and I like that about that it's something that's objective it's set purposely it then gives a rule of thumb at least from a financial perspective what the pay back is and so that's one relative way of looking at the relative merits of these various projects in the other is to have another number that's also a relative number that can be used compare the various projects
102that would be for example what is the cost or what is the payback period per metric ton and save or something like that it seems to me there should be a review and maybe these can be combined into one another I don't know but I think the message is my message would be my recommendation is before we move forward on anything other than the efficiency side even there maybe we should even do it is really look at the internal price of carbon setting that number that may be something that goes up or changes over time as science and financial people are better able to define those numbers and then that we use that then so that council and the administrator and the CFO and everybody can look at these and say how which of these
103really makes sense because under normal financial considerations unfortunately these don't fly yeah you know we had a very similar issue in the houses of worship because we were looking for investors and obviously your average investor isn't gonna want a twenty year payback in some ways that's where congregation members really helped because obviously they're willing to invest in their congregation and it could be somewhere where any community members invest the other thing to we've been talking to the National Housing Trust and they do something like this PPA models for municipalities with investors who a lot of times are willing to absorb the longer-term cost of the investment I should also step back really quickly and say the PPA is come in all sorts and sizes I mean we were working with our lawyer and one of
104the reasons he was so key to moving the program forward he was able to make turns that lasted six years all the way up to twenty years now with the six year obviously you're not going to see the same return for the building manager who has to pay more but there are some very abilities in that so that's that's one of the you know one of the nice things with this National Housing Trust and seeing where that ends up but that's a I think you're totally right I mean I think I have to have a diverse number of funds that were actually grabbing money from again these aren't small numbers and something like a carbon tax could definitely and should be probably part of the mix as well and the audience should also realize that
105the payback rates for a lot of these projects is a lot for a lot worse than it is for a resident that's buying electricity because the city's rates electrical rates are a lot lower so it's not that every bio digester or project or every solar project is a 10 to 20 year payback for a resident because they're paying almost 15 cents a kilowatt hour during the city depends on the facility and things like that but they're typically playing a lot less than that and that's why the payback periods for a lot of these projects don't look as attractive as maybe what we have in our head from other projects that we've seen a opportunity to look at John's stuff and I couldn't agree more with his assessment on this with one small small variation I
106think on the renewable energy side there are some cases we're moving forward on renewables makes sense and I would make the suggestion that that is in the case of emergency responders that that to the extent that climate change risks can be localized to one city then we can rely on traditional you know methods utilities and portable generators both which by the way would be creating more climate change as they're solving this issue but putting solar on those buildings police fire emergency responders etc places where we have vehicles are would be charging fleets make a lot of sense from an emergency response point of view so perhaps looking at you know the value of health and safety it can be factored into this issue as well and I would say the priority would be given to
107those buildings for solar first base just on the fact that we are seeing the negative impacts of climate change hitting our coasts and hitting our country and hitting hitting all over the place and and we're kidding ourselves if we think that this isn't gonna get worse and cost the city more and that emergency response stress is going to go up because of climate change you're talking about doubling the cost or using vehicles as the batteries battery back up yet yeah this is where you of em is so key because if we can be kind of a guinea pig for them in any way I bet it from it benefit from it at the same time I think it's kind of a win-win on both sides yeah that's a good point it's definitely yeah mom I
108totally agree with I mean the great thing about the carbon taxes it's providing the funds to do this yeah right but it's important to realize that right now we basically are all always up against limited budgets it's kind of a zero-sum game so it gets a little difficult and I'm a little concerned about trying to go out into tax each thing individually because of the additional work involved in doing that and the fact that different parts of the city's budget are more constrained than others and may have different reasons or different importance as far as meaning obtaining certain things so the simple way to do it would be to basically say well okay it's a it's basically Council says we're gonna look at our annual emissions and we're gonna basically say we're gonna multiply that
109by five dollars a ton or whatever and that's the amount of money that we're gonna spend on reducing that every year and then you figure out where the best programs are and divide that money oh that way yeah definitely could be about it's putting the council behind it you know saying they want to do 100% yeah they should pass a carbon tax on themselves to get there yeah yeah that's something where I think currently we're doing the groundwork just see the feasibility of all of it but I think it's something that you know definitely keep in the back of the mind yes it's a way to go twice this so to follow up on one of the points mark is making about an emergency facility when our last fire chief left he submitted a fire
110department master plan proposal I'm not sure that anybody has accepted it but it points out the age of all of our facilities and the need to actually locate them better than they are now because of all of the development you know especially other than the north side of town and so if we're gonna build new facilities that you know that goes into your capital budget and then you you include that sort of consideration when you go through your facility much cheaper to do it from the beginning than references so I have a question on page 8 you've got the electric use but facility and there's the big category of other mm-hmm does that include of all all of our parking structures yes it does do we have an idea of how much energy parking structures
111consume it's some larger site I mean you could say below two percent of all of our actual electric use but with that being said it is it's on the larger side of that you know it's a low two percent so do you just talk to tap your heading I don't need to challenge you're better placing solar panels and parking structures can we really produce enough to offset the energy used to light a parking structure or you know the elevators not been yeah it's a great idea I been in touch with Dave Conkel there's been doing a lot of the work with DDA as far as solar panels on because it to be honest with you like you said they have a lot of use and it just makes sense because if you can do carports
112like that on the roof it's got a bowling with solar only net with batteries the batteries were too expensive I guess you can't you make money from recharging electric vehicles and uh solar solar panels in parking garages and stuff as well so there is a another offset right before this meeting I put up a version of that up on ledges star and I'll make sure if you guys want me to send it out individually as well what you sided - yeah for sure Josh how I just tell you I think this is outstanding work you've done a great job that's what I thank you so much okay moving right along here any updates the first one is dark skies lighting darkness okay go ahead so maybe in context this the origins of this trace back
113to the dark skies presentation that we had at the energy and environmental Commission is about a year ago by your professor Sally Olie in astronomy this was taken up by the Energy Commission and subcommittee the Berman subcommittee where we have one subcommittee at one time looking at basically all of our ordinances we didn't get a whole lot done other than we discovered through Wayne's Slough thing that Ann Arbor had actually developed a draft lighting ordinance in the year 2000 but the ball was dropped and nothing was ever done with it so in the meantime now we've developed a core team that's working on the lighting ordinance originally it had primarily three members with some also additional participation from Josh and Wayne on that is Professor Mary Adams who's affiliated with the International dark-sky Association and
114myself the three of us put together a presentation based on looking at the International dark-sky Association has a model lighting ordinance and that's been implemented to a large degree in Bloomington Minnesota which is a suburb of Minneapolis that by the way that's one of the I think the best place to live in the United States maybe four or five years ago but also tucson arizona has one Pennsylvania has a Pennsylvania lighting council and there's they have 50 ordinances municipalities in Pennsylvania with various forms of municipal ordinances we made a presentation to the Planning Commission about two months ago six weeks ago for that provided some goals for what we think why aligning ordinance makes sense laid out some approaches and a timetable leading to implementation that stretches out to July of next year we included
115two planning commissioners who joined the core team we and then had a meeting with Bret Leonard and his suggestion was keep it simple to kiss it so to speak to end to if we do differentiate between different zones to follow basically residential and commercial districts right now and not to make it overly complicated one of the models the model ad ordinance from IEA that's actually being reworked right now and that we're working with them to find five different lighting zones which adds layers of complexity that you know who wants to stay away from that so right now the core team is working on developing an ordinance what we've done so far is we've laid out side-by-side comparisons of the various ordinances and as I mentioned the MDA with their upgrade of their model lighting ordinance
116or template I guess is a better word to call it is working with them and also with the Pennsylvania subgroup to try to come up with something that works for Ann Arbor but then it would also work as a template for midsize cities like in our across the country I mean that's the whole idea is that something is developed that can be replicated easily by lots of other entities so that's where we stand in the timetable of implementation of July of next year still stands we basically like to have strapped language in place that people can actually start to look at by the end of the and that leads them with additional steps from stakeholder input and review with Council and Planning Commission and everything else would potentially lead to alert lighting ordinance integrated into
117all the other ordinances that UDC unified development code I think it's called and Biden by July of 2019 okay thank you Tommy Markin ordinance we should be having another meeting on that this month we over the summer with some members from the real estate community and they expressed some concern about costs and other things but I think we're gonna try and move ahead with something on this get it to Council by the end of the year I wanna explain in three sentences what it is okay so basically as a way of helping educate the public as to what their energy use is if they are looking at buying what it would cost them to heat and cooler and electrify their house that they're looking at when it's put on the market they would be required
118to have that information made available in possibly a couple of different ways either with simply passed energy bills but hopefully we're also looking at using the home energy score which is a nationally recognized scoring system that can be basically done in a home in about an hour and it both gives you a relative index as to how much energy uses in relationship to other homes in the community and also gives you potential ways to reduce the sumption of the home and by having it done at the time of marketing it would allow someone to build it into their mortgage and there are energy mortgages that allow that to happen and give you benefits for doing that it also would a lot potentially allows somebody who's looking at selling their home to do some of the
119energy efficiency program or issue developments on the home before they sell it so there is some cost involved we're looking at probably between 250 and 300 dollars and on it but since there's something like a couple of thousand houses that are sold each here in Ann Arbor we would overtime actually potentially bring a lot of these up to better energy efficiency so I think it's something to dry in an act it's been done in several other cities around the country so and we're working with a U of M researcher who's studied Austin extensively and has shown that actually homes that improve their scores actually command a higher price and this we paid back essentially them in for the for the upgrades made inside and studies have shown that that their souls more quicker yeah but
120when use it the term home underscore is that same as home energy rating the hearse radio that what you're talking about now this is this is a do you're an EPA actually developed a score and it's you have to be certified and in doing the audit but there's there's a nonprofit League on the western part of the state that is a partner for that that I've talked to and there certainly would like to work with us and getting trained auditors in the community so that we could enact this it would go in over somewhat of a period of time because a program like this you can't started overnight you have to have water trained I know that the Energy Star program and when I was working on the state the hers rating was to the
121state of the art and it made a big difference for financing so they're hers rating is much more about cost more and this is this is simple I'm easier and cheaper way of doing it and it gives you a little bit simpler so it's a 1 to 10 score as opposed to a 0 to 100 score it's a little less refined but you can do it in an hour so it's gonna cost less so I do have a really quick update as far as the next meeting last meeting we talked to earth advantage who's been running the system out of Portland and I have got in touch with Brett little the west side of the state who is offered to run or at least help us run parts of the program so I think that'll
122be you can set something up for the next meeting it might be worth checking the minutes days to see if they would honor this so moving right along evie readiness ordinance I've got all the background information from half a dozen cities across the country that have enacted various ordinances and in the process of putting a draft together and hopefully show that it's it's not a big deal to put this together I'd like to get it going it's somewhat limited because it's basically for the buildings major renovations so you know we're fairly built out so the changes occur over a longer period of time although it could be could potentially build into it then whenever a building is sold that EB EB ordinance kids so there might be a way of getting more done in a
123shorter period of time more to come on that I reach the schools so just just to remind folks of like how this started last year couple people join me in a small subcommittee Dave Conkel and Nick silver all and so we've been meeting over the past year looking at different ideas and then most of our activity so far has been coming from the students who are interested in pursuing projects so it's like definitely a push up from a grassroots level which is really what we want to encourage as a city and so far with the work that's in process is that I am working on a grant to pay for the writing of curriculum for solar power for the anniversary at Northside School which is a k-8 school and it's curriculum for kindergarten through eighth
124grade it's a have hands-on project-based curriculum so I'm working on that with the sixth grade science teacher Jeannie Wilson and then Dave Conkel is going to be doing the same thing with the Pioneer High School their environmental club there and Steve Armstrong the science teacher so hopefully we'll have some something complete fairly soon at least if the steam the steam grant we're looking at in the next month or so to have that completed and so that they can start piloting the curriculums this school year who's the grand cone it's gonna go to the school oh I'm sorry the sustainable annarbor neighborhood grant program that I learned about from anyway okay you might want to take a run at da foundation they were funding curriculum silver correctly awhile okay I don't know if they still are
125but it's worth the check all right okay thank you let's see yes a bit about it other than that something just to kind of with you in on another very large organization that's actively considering sustainability efforts looking at sustainability opportunities is the Anna Republic school system I'm a member of an advisory committee by environmental sustainability Advisory Committee and so they started meeting at the end of last school year and have been looking at what other schools throughout the country are doing from a number of different perspectives like indoor quality energy efficiency they you know what to do with the unused portion of school grounds things like that so it's really interesting some of the things that we're learning about what other areas of the country are doing and and then hopefully next spring there'll be
126a like a comprehensive like recommendation that will be provided to the superintendent for decisions to be made I looked at the utilities found a Dedes foundation or consumers Energy Foundation it might be worth something that great to them ok very good yeah community outreach solar and yo programs report from the environmental Commission focus almost exclusively in solid waste issues and the solid waste resource management the last meeting was dedicated entirely to that there was a presentation from the city together with the city's contractor actin on the plan for updating the resource plan which has a target date of completion of July of next year there's a roadmap of public engagement first of all there were 31 of 33 key stakeholder interviews that have been already conducted the first meeting of four with the Energy Commission
127was the one that I am referring to that was held they're planning on having a so called planning advisory committee that will be key stakeholders who really are knowledgeable about solid waste issues so maybe a few people from the environmental Commission but then drawing from city staff from some of the contractors like our AAA and West waste management and then from experts in the community for example like Jim Frey who's head of our RS and serves as the head of the Governor's Council on solid waste so he would be an excellent resource hopefully if he's willing and able to do that so the intention is to really focus on that and right now obviously this is a significant interest because the diversion rate is 29 percent it has an increase since 2013 so the 2013
1282017 solid waste plan set the target of 40 percent by 2017 and if you take into account non-recoverable x' from our recycling stream and things like that basically we've been flat at 29 percent since 2013 and has everybody I think knows I've mentioned it here the the city's Murph has been not an operational for two years we're shipping recycled materials to Ohio at higher cost revenues are also down because commodity prices have dropped substantially then there's also been some charges to the solid waste reserve fund related to pensions and so the solid waste fund because of higher expenses lower revenue and one-time charges has dropped significantly so there's lots of work to be done in the solid waste area to get that back on a solid footing and making progress to the goals that were
129set in the past and it's to be determined what those would be the future thank you now comes the time for public input seeing no one rising out of multitudes in the audience so only will would be coming and giving a presentation you guys have questions for them definitely broom again there are all those folders as well as a summary but I can be passed around if you guys want and then the other thing too commissioner Jamison said she was gonna do a have someone to a presentation on addy T's rate case an increase in rates so that should be Shoshana offered to come in and make a presentation on how to eat determines those rights in yeah perhaps those two would be timely to do together that's probably enough or that without knitting so
130I will call this meeting adjourned at 8:20 you