Energy Advisory Committee

MEAC Minutes 5-20-14 Senior Center Resource Room Members present: Becky Wigg, Andrew Stein, Geoff Fitzgerald, Tim Shea, Anne Watson, Scott Muller, Bill Neuberger, Dan Costin, Keil Corey, Barry McPhee, Dan Jones Others present: Paul Markowitz, Bill Maclay, Jessie Baker, Hannah Reckhow, Alex Prolman 1. Call to order, approve minutes Meeting called to order at 7:08. Minutes were approved. 2. Approve proposed bylaws and subsequent elections Bylaws (see Attachment 1) were approved without discussion. Elections: Alison nominated Tim Shea for chair. Bill Neuberger seconded. Barry nominated Dan Jones for chair. Dan declined, and Tim was voted in as chair. Barry nominated Dan Jones for vice chair. Andrew Stein seconded. Andrew Stein nominated Becky Wigg for vice chair. The committee took an anonymous vote, and Becky was voted in as vice chair. 3. Report on Solar RFP Becky: The Solar RFP Subcommittee decided to re-issue the RFP, mainly because the initial RFP didn't have sufficient specificity to get the City what it wanted. We finished re-writing it before today. There are a few remaining questions for Matt Rubin to clarify for us, given his expertise. Hopefully we can get this out again within the next week. Goal: get responses back by June 15th. Major changes: 1. The new RFP specifies that the City wants a total of 1000KW installed at the stump dump and/or private locations. 2. Additional specific questions are needed from the bidders before making a decision. 3. Whether the City retains or sells the RECs is no longer an option. We are going to retire the RECs. Anne: The Council would like to see the RFP before it goes out, but doesn't need to give formal review and approval again. Ken: The schools are interested, but have been left out. Can they be included again? Anne: I would encourage the schools to do it in parallel with the City. Ken: Sure. We will learn from your experience, and work it out on our own. We don't want to get in the way. Jessie: Please loop in DPW a few days before you release this RFP, as they haven't been a part of the process since the fall. 4. Presentation by Bill Maclay Bill's firm has been able to design net-zero energy buildings that generate a positive cash-flow from day one, for both residential and commercial buildings. Short history of creating net-zero energy buildings. Given the conditions today, there's not much of a reason why anyone shouldn't be doing net-zero development. At this point though, there's a need to start looking beyond buildings and think about a net-zero planet. For example, we looked at the Mad River Valley and discovered our energy use was  extremely intensive. Even with dramatic wind, solar, and/or biomass initiatives, it'll take a lot to achieve net zero for MRV. Conclusion: we need very aggressive conservation measures. We've also done work with in Putney creating a similar net-zero energy plan for the school there. Dan J: Given the large number of older buildings in Montpelier, we don't have the ability to have a centralized administration to make the kinds of decisions we need. Bill: Obviously a tough nut to crack. Ideal is to look for a model project; find a landowner that's interested, work with EVT//VEIC and take a cluster of buildings in Montpelier and look at them really closely, then show them as a demonstration for how other people can work with their buildings. Another thing we were discussing with the State was looking at different building types and creating net-zero standards for different construction and building types for people to begin to hit those targets. Tim: The EAN portal too, there was discussion of how to plug in details of your home into the back end and have it tell you what it'll take to get your home to Net Zero. Alison: Regarding the dashboard, we have all the templates that are needed and gave them to EAN; this will be shared. It can model the different scenarios from a top-down view, and we'll also be able to do the bottom-up, “what does your home need to get there,” type information. Scott: I want to say something about what Bill said: What he's talking about is transformation of communities—not just changing energy. Some of its most fundamental parts are economic development, changing economic distribution, quality of life, all these things. Having this buy- in is important before making major investments. Ken: Bill, you're referring to the technology side of the equation, but what I'm interested in is the ownership models. Ways to include the homeowners, Energy Service Companies and others, so the financing model can be distributed. Where do you see possibilities for the financing and management piece to help homeowners move forward? Bill: Not the expert on that. In the past, the ESCos have gone for the low-hanging fruit. When you are putting the money into deep energy retrofits, it just represents an enormous opportunity lost if you don't go for it all then. The message needs to be about integrated design early on. Huge potential opportunity for community investment here—people don't want to put their money in the stock market. We can agree that energy costs are going to go up, so this is going to be a safe investment. Major focus on holistic building design is needed. Dan: How would you see the City facilitating that? Bill: One possibility is handing out information on net zero design when people come in for building permits, etc. Anne: I don't mean to say I believe in this kind of government, but I think if we're really going to get there, it's not going to work if we just let people opt-in. We may need to force people into it. Scott: I have a lot of data on cities, and can provide a list of carrot approaches, tambourine approaches and stick approaches. Anne: Council is currently very gung-ho on moving on this, and if there's any policy change we can make I think Council will be supportive. Bill: One possibility is to require building-owners to report their energy use. NYC did it. Geoff: What kind of cost is included by making building-owners perform this analysis? Bill: Large for current homeowners, easiest for new construction. Alison: The EAN dashboard will do this, in some capacity, and over time it'll have features that an individual can plug into and it'll provide you a menu of options with how to get there, for free. Anne: The difference is between requiring people to report and opting in. This may be too much in the weeds, but it'd be nice to have those two be able to talk to each other. Either requiring people to use the EAN dashboard or exporting the info to EAN. Bill: For electric, you can just sign a release form to make the info available very easily. Geoff: Has the city done this analysis for its buildings? Alison: Yes, it's worked with EVT and an ESCo a few years ago, so there's a ton of data. Bill: That's different, though, from coming up with an actual plan to get to net zero. The city's done some work through the solar RFP and the district heat project, but nothing on transportation. Dan: Do we have a mandate to report our energy data? Jessie: No, we don't report it; we have the data but haven't organized it and made it public, because so far we haven't had anything to do with it. We also have no resources to analyze this. I can share our bills with EVT if you are interested. Paul: The EPA does have the energy star benchamarking system. A great first step would be to benchmark all City buildings. The City did use an ESCo to do efficiency improvements a few years ago and I can get some data on that. The wastewater plant is also going through efficiency upgrades and can save a significant amount of energy through that. We have this huge list of options to use, and fifteen years to get there. I think our job should be to prioritize those tools. Andrew: You have the public realm (City and State), then private (nonprofits, small businesses and corporate entities), then residential. How do you propose splitting this up along those prongs? Paul: Bill's got immense knowledge of this. There's a lot of knowledge and expertise that can contribute to help develop your plan of action. The challenge is corralling all this expertise into an effective way of participating in the creation of this NZM plan. Alison: That's what we need. Some kind of structure. We spent our winter adopting the NZM model and now everyone's on board and now we need to organize everyone for this task. 5. Outline critical project goals for NZM Overview of Attachment 2, “NZM Goals and Objectives 2014-2030” Ken: I see this as being a real jumping off point for discussions—not just among committee members but going out and engaging with people about concerete ideas of what NZM is. Alison: We had talked about a series of public engagement events, perhaps we can get Bill back, but just to get the community to understand what we're talking about. Perhaps having the businesses, city, state to contribute. We should get some of our bigger partners to come; GMP, EVT, some solar providers to explain what this means. Dan C: I think it's also important to make a space for public input early on, for example with transportation, we can have a community-wide conversation about whether we want to go in the direction of more public transit or electric cars. We certainly have an opportunity to make Montpelier a more walkable city, but there should be public input around this. Dan J: This (document) is something to help you all think about the long-term project. 6. Reorganizing MEAC Dan J: At the last meeting there were some opinions that NZM was too big a challenge and needed an alternative structure than MEAC. So we came up with a multi-prong approach of working groups with specific focuses: 1) Public info/engagement group 2) Project management group 3) Goals & Public Policy group 4) Stakeholder integration group This is just a proposal based on the things heard from members of this committee. Idea is that each member would be on one of these groups, meaning at least one extra meeting per month per person; hopefully this will make our full MEAC meetings more productive. Dan C: Another way of dividing things would be by type of energy use—by transportation, by home heating, by electric use, etc. So each of these working groups that you've proposed would tackle each of those. Tim: These groups can certainly be changed; my thought was that let's just get started somewhere. These groups don't necessarily have to meet, even, as long as the work is happening along these lines, great. If you're interested in working in transportation, stay working in that area; go for it. We're volunteers that wear many hats. My thought is that since this project is so long term, let's just start to move this in the right direction without burning ourselves out. Paul: You have people that are officially appointed to this committee, but a whole list of people and organizations in town that can help lend their expertise to this work. Need to find a way to leverage all that knowledge into your process. Tim: I think that's the place I'd like to see us get to—not anytime soon, but that seems to be the end- goal. Being mindful of the resources that can do the heavy lifting outside of this group is essential. Andrew: Before we have those meetings to gather public input, what do you think about generating potential projects that the public can respond to? Alison: We need to bring people on board with specific things to organize around. Going to be a continuous process. I agree though, whatever we put together for the fall should be a clear process that explains to people what the opportunities are right now. Andrew: Other than that VEIC document, I haven't seen those ideas packaged. Scott: New subcommittee to establish a baseline to identify total energy use for the City before the next meeting. Ken: On the lines of outreach, we put an article in the TA this week and plan on doing one next month about heat pumps. Anne: The thought is that the four subgroups would be made up of all the members of this committee and each subcommittee tackles the different sectors? I can easily see it going the other way— break it up by sector first, then by subgroup category. Becky: I completely disagree. Especially with stakeholders, you need a person whose job it is to maintain that point of contact, rather than a bunch of different people reaching out to outside entities over different topics at different times. Need one group to be doing consistent outreach at the same time. Ken: Piggybacking off what Paul said, what I have in my mind is a two dimensional grid, that shows what people are interested in regarding each sector and each category to make sure we have all our bases covered. Tim: MEAC members will send him the sectors and categories they are interested in. 7. Outreach to Planning Commission Dan J: The PC is currently updating the zoning. Given the importance the zoning policies have over development, it seems to me we should do some outreach to the PC at this time. I know Barbara was interested, perhaps Ken can help. Andrew: Perhaps we can bring in some developers to talk about this—good opportunity to convene some stakeholders. Jessie: One area you could start in is by reviewing the Zoning Technical Review and weighing in on the energy section of that review. Furthermore, the town Master Plan will be updated next year. Ken: That's an opportunity for the public policy group. Zoning has to do with new construction, for the most part. And in our case, new construction is essential—as it'll decrease the transportation needs in town. So that's a discussion—how do we want to position Net Zero with regard to the housing issue. Certainly a discussion I'm interested in having. Meeting adjourned at 9:12