Alright everyone, welcome to Sustainability Framework Advisory Committee.
It is June 7th at 1 o'clock.
We are in the City Council Work Session Room and we do have a quorum today.
Just a couple of things, we will be moving item C, Reissued Report, Hold a Discussion
and Give Staff Direction regarding the value of solar study under item A and then B will
come after that and then we will have a couple of speakers before that item.
So we will first continue with items for individual consideration.
Consider approval of the February 23, 2024 minutes.
Does anyone have any comments or questions about those?
Okay and so we have a first and a second, all in favor of approval of the minutes?
Aye.
Alright so we will move on to the next item which will be C and we do have a couple of
speakers requesting to speak.
Catherine, do you know, do they get two or three minutes?
Is it normally, what is normally, I think we're done for in the past, up in the past.
So we will give them three minutes and you can come up and speak and we are using the
mics from the ceiling and as soon as your time is up, your time is up.
Alright so the first speaker, we will receive a report, hold a discussion and give staff
direction regarding the value of solar study and the speakers are speaking directly to
this item.
Alright.
Who's first Catherine?
Bill Maness.
Bill.
I just decided five minutes ago to speak, I want to thank the committee for allowing
me to speak.
I'm speaking regarding to item C which is now item A, I think, DME's proposal which
I haven't heard but I just, over the last two years DME has taken several actions regarding
solar panels.
I'm a solar panel owner but my interest is more in the city as a whole and I've heard
a lot of, I've even gone on video and listened to some meetings here and from my view, when
DME speaks, they speak for DME.
I don't think they speak that much for the city as a whole and when they're arguing,
making an argument, they don't get both sides.
They're going to give you all the items, all the facts that support their view and their
change and that's all they do.
And I was just amazed where the committee doesn't hear the other side.
So don't expect an unbiased view from these guys.
That's all I have.
I'll leave.
I'm out.
Thank you.
And I do have one more speaker signed up.
Thank you for considering this item.
Environment Texas, I'm with Environment Texas, I'm the North Texas City Hall advocate for
Environment Texas.
We are not in favor of moving away from net metering policies.
If anything, we are for advancing net metering policies across the state.
Net metering policies dramatically increase the benefits of solar for homeowners.
You are much more likely to install solar on your home if you have net metering in your
district.
Our reports across Texas and across California have shown this.
Meanwhile, in California, as is seen in the report, has moved to the net energy metering
3.0, which is somewhat similar to this point.
And what we've seen is 17,000 solar industry layoffs, mass bankruptcies across the solar
in California, and a complete flatlining of rooftop solar across the state.
What we don't want to see is that here in Texas.
Specifically here in Denton, the report says that there is not really any real pollution
or greenhouse gas benefits from keeping the net energy metering policy because Denton
Municipal Electric already has power purchase agreements.
That is not true because every time somebody brings on more solar energy on their rooftop,
they are adding renewable energy to the grid.
The net total of renewable energy across the state does increase.
By stopping that increase here in Denton, we are, in effect, preventing future growth
of renewables in the county.
So for these reasons, environment taxes is opposed to a change from the metering.
Thank you.
Great.
So we will continue with a presentation on the item, and we have some out of town guests
today doing that presentation for us.
Yes ma'am.
Good afternoon, Madam Chair, committee members.
I'm Bill Shepard with DME.
And before I introduce who's going to be doing the presentation, I just wanted to remind
everybody about the conversations that we've had about a year ago.
We came through and talked about the solar program, as well as the green sense program,
and made a couple of recommendations back then, and with feedback from you all, feedback
from the PUB, and feedback from some council members, we sort of backed up, backed up and
regrouped a little bit, and we did hear a lot about the value of solar.
We want to see what the value of solar is here at Denton.
So with that, we commissioned the same company that did the value of solar study for Austin
Energy, and Ms. Jill Schupbach is here with that company, NUGEN, to go over those results.
You've already got the report, as well, that was a conclusion of the study.
And at the end, we'll have our staff recommendations, and I'll come up and talk about those.
And what we're hoping for is to get your support moving forward with that.
And also, if I could ask to hold questions until the end, that way we'll get through
the presentation.
It's not a terribly long presentation, but that way we can sort of have a good two-way
conversation.
All right, Jill.
Thank you.
Thank you for having me.
Okay, so today we'll cover the value of solar methodology, the components that we looked
at.
We'll review the findings of our research and our analysis.
We'll look at some bill impacts and then staff recommendations.
So the value of solar represents the energy purchased from a customer that's valued above
the avoided cost, based on utilities policies.
The value of solar methodology has three components.
The avoided cost, which is your left column, the middle column, which is societal benefits,
and the last column, which is policy-driven incentives.
The avoided cost column, this is the cost, the actual instant cost that Denton receive,
or the avoided cost that Denton has, the savings that they have, by not having to buy any of
the additional power, because the customer is now generating their own power.
Avoided costs over the years have been calculated many ways.
This has been around since the '70s from some federal legislation.
So of the many ways you can look at it, we've calculated it two ways.
We've looked at the ERCOT market, because Denton is in the ERCOT market, and we also
looked at Denton's existing solar purchase power agreements.
The second piece of that is societal benefits.
This is the benefit of not emitting more greenhouse gases or more carbon, and in societal benefits,
there's not a federal market for greenhouse gases or a state market, but there are other
ways to measure it.
There's multiple groups that have measured it, including the federal government.
There is a market in the Northeast for greenhouse gases also, and depending on the study, the
benefit of not emitting another ton of carbon varies from one cent to eight cents per kilowatt
hour.
The policy-driven incentives part, there are state and federal policies that support rooftop
solar and renewables and solar generation, but this part is more driven on local policy
and what Denton's local policies and city council policies are.
So for example, Denton's already 100% renewable, and that's based on city council policy and
decisions that city council has made.
Denton has also, for over a decade, been incentivizing rooftop solar through their rebates and their
net billing programs.
So first, we'll talk about avoided costs.
Just for our visual understanding, if you look at the graph first, the green line is
how solar generates throughout the 24 hours of the day.
You can see it peaks during lunch when the sun is the strongest.
The blue line represents the ERCAT market, and when it peaks, it tends to peak late afternoon
and into the early evening.
As I said, we looked at the avoided costs, we did it two different ways.
The first way we looked at the ERCAT market was an hourly analysis.
We looked at when solar was generating.
We used NREL's PVWatts calculator for their load sheet, and we looked at ERCAT hourly
pricing and compared the two to come up with an avoided cost.
And that avoided cost is seven cents per kilowatt hour.
Next, we also looked at Denton's existing purchased power contracts for solar, because
that's what Denton's already paying for solar power.
And when you look at the average of those contracts, it averages about four cents.
For societal benefits, again, remember, this is the cost of not emitting another ton of
carbon or greenhouse gases.
As I said, there's a variety of studies depending on who you look at.
The market in the northeast, it's called Reggie, they estimated about $15 a ton.
The EPA recently estimated $190 per ton, if you convert that into dollars per kilowatt
hour.
It varies from about one cents to eight cents a kilowatt hour.
Denton already mitigates their emissions for the utility as a whole.
So they already have 100% renewable energy.
Therefore, if we're looking at a value of solar rate, we've assigned this zero because
they've already mitigated their emissions.
Now, all of that said, city council can make a policy decision to change this and they
can include, you know, really anything from one cents to eight cents if they want to add
that to the value of solar.
We're going to take a moment and have a question.
So I'm just wondering which one is accurate.
Oh, there's, yeah, one of them I put in the rounding from one cent to eight cent.
This one says 0.006 to 0.0770, on slide five, the one you were just on, there for the second.
Yeah, and I just ran with it from one cent to eight cents.
Oh, okay.
That's all.
I thought it was easier to understand one cent to eight cents than a lot of decimals.
Let's see.
Okay.
As far as policy-driven incentives, there are federal policies and state policies that
support renewables.
As far as Denton policy, we reviewed multiple policies and right now none of them support
the need for local renewables.
They do support the need for 100% renewables to balance out Denton's load.
So with that said, the incentive we'd add to value of solar is zero because there's
not a policy supporting that at the time, but again, this is city council's choice.
City council can make a policy to set that however they want to set it, however much
they want to incentivize solar.
It's also important to note that there are ways to incentivize rooftop solar and local
solar beyond just adding it into your value of solar rate.
You can streamline installation processes, permits, inspections, waive some of the fees
that customers have to pay to connect to the system, provide grants or rebates, or sometimes
utilities can offer low-cost loans for installation because one of the hardest things about getting
to be a solar customer is just that huge installation cost, that upfront cost.
So in summary, the value of solar has three components, the avoided costs, societal benefits,
policy-driven incentives.
For the avoided cost rate, anything from that four cent to seven cent range is reasonable
to use for avoided costs as far as societal benefits and policy-driven incentives.
We've set those at zero, but again, this is a city council decision on how much they want
to incentivize solar.
So if they want to add anything for societal benefits or if any policies come about, that
can be adjusted.
This is an example of what bills would look like.
This bill is for somebody that uses more energy than they produce.
So you can see in the top row, the usage is 1,365 kilowatt hours a month.
This first column is just for a standard residential customer that does not have solar installed.
Their bill is about $181 if you look at the bottom row.
The next column is the current net billing customer under dense current rates with the
RCA.
Their bill is about $140.
If we switch and use an avoided cost rate, this is still net billing, but we're using
an avoided cost rate from the PPAs of four cents.
Their bill is about $167.
If we use the ERCAP market rate, it's $154.
Now if we switch to one of these columns with the Purchased Power Agreement or the ERCAP
market, the net effect is in that bottom row is that if you use the debt and PPA for the
avoided cost, debt is going to have about $463 more thousand dollars that they can use
for other programs, which Bill will talk about shortly.
And if you choose the ERCAP market avoided cost, it's about $236,000.
So these are annual numbers.
Thank you Jill.
And so staff's recommendation would be to go ahead and implement the avoided cost based
on DME's, PPA's.
So that would be the 3.79 cents and that would go into effect October 1st.
What we'd also recommend is similar to how we transitioned out of the rebate, the solar
rebates, is we would take that savings from that change and apply that to the Green Sense
Incentive Programs and make that budget $463,000 more.
So that is staff's recommendation.
Do I have any questions, comments, members?
Oh, I do.
Just some general comments about the report here with me here.
The DEX emissions, as you saw in the presentation, are discounted as are fuel costs and other
externalities as well as air quality impacts of the DEC.
The DEC is an integral part of Denton's energy portfolio and will become even more so given
hotter days and more severe storms.
I would hope that all components of DME's energy generation be evaluated within this
report.
I have some figures between 2018 and 2023 and I don't know if the folks who wrote the
Value of Solar report were given these, but for the public record, between 2018 and 2023,
CO2 emissions from the DEC amounted to 767,536 tons which translates into 1,535,072,000 pounds.
As of matter 10 and 2.5 for those years, 2018 to 2023, 298,870 pounds, NOx 2,019,654 pounds
and VOCs 181,799 pounds.
I quote from the study, "Despite DME's achievement of 100% renewable energy, ongoing initiatives
like the city's cap underscore the importance of furthering sustainable energy goals including
specific targets for installed solar, distributed generation.
However, the study does not estimate the cost of those incentives and their impact on the
value of solar."
There's no mention of grandfathering existing installations and as you'll recall, this was
a matter of great concern in previous discussions.
The study praises distributed generation and battery storage and variable pricing structures
during the course of the day, however, none of these aspects were included in the study.
I did not find any data showing the amount of reduction in energy consumption per dollar
of Green Sense initiatives such as $1,000 in incentives equals what kind of reduction
in energy use.
So those are my concerns and as a question, just in a simple nutshell, if this program
is adopted, what will become of net metering in DME?
Just, you know, as plainly as answers as possible, thanks to whomever, I mean that's...
Is that the only question you had or was there some questions on the front part?
No, no, so far that's it.
Okay, so DME is a net billing program, so it's very similar to the net metering other than
the fact that instead of netting the usage, we net the dollars.
So we have the amount of energy that comes to the house is charged with the retail rate
is for that energy, the amount of energy that comes out of that house is credited currently
a retail plus the RCA rate going out, and then the differential is what shows up on
the bottom line of the bill.
That is still going to be the same way as far as the net billing piece, so we're going
to charge a retail rate for the energy coming into the house, the energy coming out of the
house instead of doing what we're doing now, which is retail plus RCA, we're just going
to pay the value of solar for that energy going out of the house.
You're still going to get 100% of the benefit for the kilowatt hours that you use inside
your walls.
All right.
And is the $60 facility fee that was discussed last year, which was going to be put on solar,
is that dead?
Yes.
All right.
So in this discussion, what we did was we sort of shifted courses and looked at it from
a value of solar standpoint versus trying to recover our loss in those fixed costs and
elsewhere.
Okay.
Well, I guess my biggest concern in regard to the study and the reason why I would wish
further review and study of what's going on is the dismissal of the DEX emissions and
its possible impacts.
So this study was just looking at the value of solar and how it impacts our programs now.
There's currently a study going on which is the Dent Renewable Resource Plan 2.0 and that's
being worked on and that's going to be brought forth probably within the next four, six months.
I'd still like to see something.
I have a problem with just the flat dismissal under societal benefits of the DEX emissions.
They're just too big and the future is too precarious to just put that under the rug.
Thank you.
Brian, Adam?
Yeah.
I'm still trying to catch up to this.
Okay.
You want to go?
Go ahead, Brian.
So I'm aware of a lot of emerald studies that go into distributed generation, especially
at the local level being one of the most cost-based ways to get energy into a grid and I understand
that and I hear our consultants saying that a lot of this does come down to a purely policy
discussion about what our values are as a community and I've read through the report.
I see your math there.
I am echoing Ed's concerns about the debt is mentioned in this report as an integral
part of our grid and I wish at the end of the day we were looking at an apples to apples
comparison in our cost savings here because I understand that you do pay this one way
or another and this is a policy discussion about what we are willing to pay, but my issue
with funneling money from essentially DMA into the Greensense program, which is return
to residents as rebates, is we're not examining a carbon to carbon value and this is really
coming down to a carbon question about what type of behaviors are we looking to incentivize
in our city.
I think we're still very much reeling from winter storm Uri a couple years ago and the
very clear need for reliable, consistent, and localized generation to support residents
in crisis just from a reliability standpoint.
This to me, I'm not seeing where we can make that fair comparison about what that distributed
generation does even though distributed generation is called for in this report including battery
storage and among other things I'm not seeing this in the proposal either and I understand
this is the second time you're coming to us for a recommendation and we don't make the
final decision here.
It's just our recommendation.
I know that you're looking for ways to recoup some of those costs from this very cost expensive
energy generation.
It's just that for us to be able to make a decision it's we really need to see what it
is we're comparing.
So having some sort of data about what our carbon reduction just from our Greensense
program looks like based on what we're getting from the reliability costs and societal benefits
from having distributed generation across the city that would help me make a better
decision.
We've got into net metering and had quite a lengthy discussion in this committee about
what our values were there and to me this also discounts the grandfathering that we
supported from that initiative and I'm not seeing anything that talks about how we spent
a long time supporting those early adopters when there was a real clear need to build
in renewable energy into our portfolio again this is another way that we're looking at
effectively taxing the people who we spend more than a decade trying to incentivize that
adoption.
I'm just not seeing where we recognize that they supported our program then and here's
a bait and switch on them once again and so if those components were included I think
that's a much easier way for us to look at this from a holistic sense.
I just disagree fundamentally that this is a truly representative value of the policy
direction we choose to go as a city.
So if I could just address one of the comments that he makes I think Mr. Soap made it as
well and that's as far as the dollar value of these dollars shifting from solar to the
greensense program.
So on our previous presentation we did clearly list that out as far as the dollar savings
and the carbon offset for dollars spent on those programs because quite honestly the best
way to save carbon is to not have the energy use at all and that's what those rebate programs
incentivize is production and use.
So it was a pretty clear difference between the two I don't have the slide in front of
me now but if you go back you can see that and I apologize that it wasn't part of this
slide deck but it is a clear difference between the value of those dollars going to solar
and the value of those dollars going to greensense.
Yeah can you just talk a little bit about the concerns that have been expressed around
the equity dimensions of this that in other words we've had you've incentivized to buy
into this program and now the cost is going up.
Can you or remind us of the way you think about fairness when it comes to distribution
of costs for energy distribution around the city.
Sure so right now and this is really what started this conversation over a year actually
even prior to my arrival at DME was the fact that the amount of money that we're spending
both in rebates and in the net metering credits that were going to customers was being borne
by the rest of our customers.
It was being borne by the 64,000 customers that don't have solar and in order to try
to make that equitable we were looking more at valuing that solar coming out of those
customers that have the rooftop and valuing it properly so it doesn't impact the rest
of the rate base that we have.
And remind us how does it impact how are the others shouldering the extra cost is it from
the fixed infrastructure?
For the yes so fixed infrastructure is one of the big ones so those customers that have
net zero or you know get a $10 credit at the end of the month or a $20 electric bill at
the end of the month they're not paying their share of the fixed cost for the distribution
system for the administrative in general for the all the trucks we have on the road they're
not paying that fair share because that right now through a cost of service study takes
all those costs and distribute them amongst the customers that we have so we have 65,000
customers when 1,100 of those customers and it was continuing to grow and it does continue
still continue to grow when that number goes down the rest of those customers are having
to make up that difference.
Another way to think about it also is again the presentation didn't find solar power around
four cents and if you look at what you're paying the customers we go back to that billing
slide on here that column that says net billing customer what you're paying them now is you're
paying them seven cents plus that RCA so whereas them could buy a solar contract for four cents
you're paying customers you know 10 plus cents and so who makes up that difference well your
other customers make up that difference so it's a fair to them to pay 10 cents for this
power when you can get it for four cents you know and if the utility as a whole or a city
council as a whole says yes we think it's that valuable we should do it you know then that's
fine that's what you do but there's also some utilities that say no it's cost-based everybody's
going to pay you know what the power is worth and so that's another place you see the difference.
I see so if I'm understanding what you're saying under the proposed plan staff's recommendation
we're going to pay out the energy that's created put back on the grid from the house we're going
to pay out at four cents because that's what we could buy solar for in our PPAs.
Right and so and so when you have somebody like like Austin Energy and they have a little bit
different program you know that it's buy all sell all the customer buys 100% of the utilities if
they didn't have solar and then they sell the solar back to the utility a certain amount and so
Austin has a value of solar rate and they have an avoided cost which they used or caught which was
around six or seven cents and then they did add on some societal benefit because they weren't 100%
renewable and so they ended up closer to nine cents so so they put a they chose to put a higher
value on that at the same time they're also netting that's not net metering it's not net billing
it's buy all sell all so it's also a different metering setup does anybody have a you know put
it back on the direction page. Yeah and some of the some of you already mentioned the grandfathering
too so we had had long discussions about that we had discussions in this body we had discussions
in PBB about it we did consult our legal staff about that and there are some equity challenges
with that as well because now we have one solar customer being treated different than another
solar customer i.e. the existing one versus anybody that comes on so we chose to not make that part of
our recommendation. When you're ready I was going to clarify a little bit on the deck if you want
to. We have one more question from Brandon. So if this is your full slate of recommendations
on slide six of this slide deck we did talk about application fees, the installation process,
grants or rebates. I know that we've removed our solar installation rebates previously is there
any discussion about adding possibly to the green sense program some sort of rebate that incentivizes
solar installation at the local level? Yeah I will leave that up to to Mr. Gagne and his plans moving
forward. I know batteries were discussed in the past but as far as DME is concerned we're sort
of taking that packaging those dollars that would otherwise been spent on solar and the green sense
program and having them do what what is asked of them. Did that answer your question? Yes.
Do you want to come on up and talk about the deck for just a minute?
And I will confirm with our legal team it's okay that some did his mission in our report
that we can talk about them. Great I'm Terry Holt the assistant general manager of DME and I just
want to make sure in the context of the discussion you're having about the deck that we you know
we're as transparent as we can be about why the deck is there and what role it plays.
You know we we are very transparent about the emissions from the deck. We publish a every month
a report what our carbon emissions are NOx emissions and our particular emissions are.
How many hours we run the deck and while while we don't back away from the fact that it does
contribute to atmospheric emissions of carbon and other pollutants the reality is is that
the deck was originally part of the program the renewable end program in order to provide
a price hedge against the intermittency of renewables and the physics of the transmission
system is such that if we did not provide that ourselves we would be relying on some other
entity to provide that backup energy that that replacement energy during those intermittent
periods. Because as a utility we not only have a responsibility for adhering with the
Denton renewable resource plan but to maintain the reliability of our system and to meet ERCOT
protocols with respect to that reliability of the overall credit. You know leaving it up to others
would probably result in even higher emissions for that intermittency backup because the Denton
energy center is one of the cleanest if not the cleanest resource in the ERCOT market
as a gas fire generator. So again I think as Jill Bill pointed out you know these are policy
decisions that the council will ultimately make and certainly with with your role as an advisory
committee we'll take into account your wishes your guidance but the energy center again is a
necessary evil so to speak in order to maintain the reliability that we're obligated to to provide
to the ERCOT grid and it's done in a way that is as clean as possible because of the nature of the
technology that we've employed. So just want to make sure that that was on the record and then
you all understand that while there is emissions we do it as as responsible a manner as we possibly
can. I want a question um because I don't think anyone was questioning the deck we were just
yeah explaining the emissions since this is the environmental and sustainability committee that's
kind of like our our niche so it was worth mentioning. So if the if more people so like
as of today no one else installs rooftop solar like we were just left with whatever is out there
what does that mean for like our PPAs or the deck does that mean more the deck is turned on more
does that mean that we're using that more frequently to put energy into the grid to make
up for that absence of because as our city grows the need for more energy grows so when people add
rooftop solar that kind of helps I mean it doesn't make up for the energy we need with the growth but
it helps right it balances that out a little bit so if if we basically as our first commenter said
kill solar and didn't what does that mean for us relying on these other um these other things to
use that create more emissions and carbon in our local atmosphere. Yeah so the question you're
asking is a very good one and we are facing significant low growth which means our electrical
supply has to increase. You probably saw we recently signed another 100 megawatt solar contract
a 15-year contract for 100 megawatts of additional solar and we will continue to add to that portfolio
of renewable resources to ensure that on an annual basis we're 100 percent renewable. Now will that
meet the reliability requirements that we are mandated to follow from ERCOT? No it won't and
there was legislation that was passed last session for renewable resources intermittent renewable
resources that are started up post-2027 with respect to farming of that energy because of
the intermittency and so when we bring the dental renewable resource plan to the council for the new
dental renewable resource plan or version 2.0 that will be at one of the major issues that will have
to be debated publicly about how we want to move forward to meet the growth requirements of our
of our community as well as the reliability requirements of the community and of ERCOT.
So not giving a direct answer but we do continue to always scale in additional renewable resources.
There is also you know we have a responsibility to provide the lowest rates possible to the
65,000 customers we serve and so as Jill has pointed out you know we can buy utility scale
solar much cheaper than we can buy energy from rooftop solar and so that has to be taken into
account as well. What we want to incentivize and encourage people to put rooftop solar on their
on their homes it's for the benefit of the homeowner because it offsets their utility bill
and that value still will exist. I have one more question for you while you're here or maybe for
for anyone really because we're we're talking about the what you can buy solar for right and then so
and you may have mentioned this our transmission cost included in that because I know they are
significant and so what is the difference say so when we have our our PPA solar that we're paying
for four cents right and then a homeowner we're paying six cents or eight cents I can't remember
but is that a transmission I mean do we pay transmission costs on that as well
because it goes directly into the grid so I mean I feel like there's like this amount of money
in transmission cost and distribution that isn't accounted for or it may be I'm just
so we did we looked at the two avoided costs right we looked at one which is the purchase
agreements which comes into the market that's four cents when we looked at the one that's
based on the ERCAT market where we did an hourly analysis let's say we had to buy all this from the
ERCAT market we didn't have these purchase power agreements that one that's the one that was seven
cents and that one has energy costs in it has ancillary costs in it and it has the transmission
or CP cost included in it and then everything's adjusted for losses also because if you generated
a kilowatt hour at your house and use it it's if you if you're generating that at the grid it might
be 1.1 kilowatt hours and because you're generating where you're using it you're avoiding losses so
there's a credit for that in there also so it does have a credit for losses across the system in
transmission. I don't know maybe I missed it in the report but do you know what impact this would
have on the overall DME users rate this $463,000 savings that would go to the green sense program?
Are you talking about for example I know we're also going to be raising our DME rates right
does this have any direct impact on those rates through these savings?
So we are not pocketing those savings so to speak we're transferring into another program so it's
still going to be a cost but it's going to be a cost that's going to go towards a program that
we feel is a little bit more better bang for the buck. Yeah and if I can speak to the killing of
the solar nothing here is suggesting that we kill solar we still allow so systems to connect they
may be more incentivized to now couple their solar with a battery so instead of sending that energy
to us for that cost they're now sending it to their battery and they're using it at different
times of the day so that will still continue to happen we still see systems coming online we
still see systems coming online on other utilities that that don't have as lucrative a program as
DME has had. Okay members do you have a recommendation? It does say it does ask us
if we have any direction regarding the value of solar so so there are these recommendations
one and two. Does anybody for one or two or have a third option maybe you would like to send a council?
Adam you go first. Well I'm in favor of both.
I do think that the
value that we're talking about Michael's yelling at me to yell um I do think that we might be
undervaluing again our societal costs here and I don't believe that the 3.7 cents necessarily
captures all of that I would be more comfortable with a number closer to six or seven personally.
I again I want to read back again to make sure that I understand our carbon to carbon savings
that we're talking about in transferring these savings from DME's costs to the green sense program
we have more discussions on that later today as well and I recognize how valuable that program
has been and what an injection of funds would do for it it just hurts me again to see that
14 years we told people this is our policy this is direction we'd like you to go this is how we'd
like you to support your community in your own home to bait and switch like that and pull the
rug away just as we were recommending for the net metering program it feels really it just doesn't
feel great it doesn't feel great to me and I don't even own somewhere on my roof I'm more than
comfortable paying for people like Ed who do I really am and to me I think that it is valuable
to have that in our local grid regardless of what it does cost seven cents to me doesn't feel
egregious at all and I know that that impacts our savings to other programs but I feel that the
reliability of having our own ability to generate energy and you know maybe this is a discussion
where we if we go with this recommendation we're talking more about local batteries and
local energy savings but this just doesn't get me there I would like to see a higher number
so just uh so you would like on the recommendation okay so a rate of six cents
again we we're not setting the policy right now I'm purely advisory and so I don't want to
give you a number without looking at your math and I know you've done a lot of math on this
and I don't want to suggest a number without my own data right I would like to see something that
puts our our societal and policy value of solar higher than what you put it here at you know zero
three seventy nine dollars so I know that today's the day that we are doing recommendations for city
council but as far as this group is it something that DME could come back and talk about the
what that would look like for the say six nights I thought the question was going to come up okay
so uh what we did so so uh we added one alternative that just fell in the middle
between the four cents and seven cents and that's this last column that's a blended rate
and so you can see that
I'm not sure you guys see the mouse oh yeah okay so the seven cents that's the
the ERCOT remember I said that you would recommend between this four cents and seven cents based on
the avoided cost that's the ERCOT and then this four cents that's the PPA rate and you average
them it's about five and a half cents so we just did a simple average of the of the bookends of
the avoided cost and that's more in the middle if that's something you're more comfortable with
and this might be a question for you I apologize um the way that we're able to acquire PPAs versus
how that's weighted against the general ERCOT grid why is there discrepancy in those numbers
just as a financial um well the the PPAs and Terry may have to help me but
PPAs for solar usually are around two three four cents is what we've seen they're huge installations
they don't have any ongoing you know fuel costs there's very little maintenance and things like
that so on an energy basis they are much more affordable um in in the market in ERCOT's market
when you're buying power it's a mix of you've got coal and gas and renewables and who knows what
but in the market you know the part of this too is you know solar's generating in the middle of the
day and when we need when we need power and power cost of the highest is at the end of the day
so it's just a mix of like the hourly profiles of them and of what units are feeding into it
so this PPA cost reflects DME's specific average solar PPA exactly because I know we have a number
of them and your ERCOT cost there represents an average of the market rate per kilowatt hour if
we had to go to ERCOT and buy that power instead of the customer generating it it's that seven
cents but because previous policies that has purchased power agreements for all of their
energy and that's the four cents but that's very helpful thank you I have one other question just
because you did mention in the presentation that the Denton renewable resource plan is being
looked at again and is coming back and I know the old one I do believe some of that solar was
included and my question is are we making this decision a little ahead of the game so like what
happens if they come back and they're like you need this solar and you need so much more solar
localized because it benefits and you know directly our renewable resource plan so like
and then we have to like backtrack so I'm just I'm just trying to understand why you want a
decision today when that plan is still being discussed and that may not be for this I don't
I think it's a good question but but I think I think the answer is real simple
that even if we had a huge incentive to incentivize rooftop solar it's not going to move the needle on
the big picture of the community's needs for energy and renewable energy so I don't think
it's premature for you to make this decision a recommendation it really will have great impact
on what we do the plan as we're developing it will include the value proposition from rooftop
solar in terms of the total inventory of renewable energy that's used to serve the city and the
benefit of energy efficiency programs and the avoided emissions avoided energy that would have
been would have been needed to serve the load so again it's just it's not it's just not big enough
okay and last question then we're kind of going to wrap this up if you covered this I apologize
it's pretty simple but you mentioned the fact that non-solar customers subsidize the people who had
solar that's been a discussion before how is that being dealt with now it will be less of amount
of dollars that we're paying to those customers for the rooftop solar and those dollars will be
channeled to the uh the greensense program but we may we'll be paying more of an appropriate rate
for that solar energy coming back versus a retail plus rate that's the bigger difference is that the
same rate that is that like it's what point tip point one zero six five yes so right now
to blend it it's about ten and a half cents right that we paid for every kilowatt hour that so
is that going to change yes that'll change to the to the value of solar rate so it'd be the three
point three point seven nine in the recommendation
yeah so all these rates have been presented are just what is then going to pay the customer
when the customer sells them power so that will be the that the point zero three seven nine is
what a solar owner of what will be the return for for what they send to us yes again every
kilowatt hour they displace on their side of the meter is a full retail offset
and just want to say because i said i'm in favor both i didn't say why so what's going on in my mind
here is folks we haven't mentioned because i do remember our previous conversations about the
greater bang for the buck other ways of avoiding energy use in the city this would be a significant
influx of money to that so i'm thinking about people in low-income communities in the city of
dinn who could benefit from this this extra money to insulate their homes or whatever
and as things get hotter you know they're the ones who are going to maybe beat this
come up so i do think there's equity issues to be considered that are built into this i know i i
really wish we could grandfather too it sounds like we can't but that's why i in favor of this maybe we
could move the number up a little bit or something that makes trades interesting i didn't know we
could do that something like that i mean i just want to recall we had decided we could as a
community have a lot greater impact for the goals and values that we have by putting that money into
this program times have changed we've got all these big ppas going on that right so i think we've been
paying too high of a rate we're still doing that billing with those trades so you're still buying
that energy back so that's just me that's why i was in favor of it okay do you have recommendation
are you good with the limited rate that was shown or are are you not wanting to make a
recommend for either one of these so you're not in favor of either of those okay you're in favor of
both of them yeah right again we are purely an advisory body yeah you take this to puv and you
take this to council and ultimately this is council's decision but i personally would not
feel comfortable without some recognition of the people who we've led on effectively for more than
a decade to say this is what we wanted you to do and these are the financial choices into you know
2030 financial plans that you're going to invest yourself into this feels like we're doing those
people wrong who said you know we see the need for local generation we see the need for renewable
energy and we want to support the city in this way i know that it costs us as a community but
if this is a conversation about how much do we value that i just don't think that does them justice
so i would like to see closer to the blended rate from our recommendation
and you're okay with the blended rate as well well that's not on our slide could you go back
to the blended rate because i don't think that included what was nice about the recommendation
that showed us the impact on green sense budget yeah what would that so it would be in between the
236 000 and 463 000 it's in the bio right here okay 350 350 000 that would go to green sense
i mean that's a decent compromise for me i could get on board with that okay so maybe when you go
back to council we pretty much are kind of undecided but moving more towards the the blended rate if
there was something to be discussed grandfathering is still a big issue for this body i know you said
that you know legal had some issues with the equality of it i would like i have some more
legal questions for those who bought the solar and thought they were getting something they may have
something else to say about it legally so i don't i don't really i feel like it's still a big issue
for this body like grandfathering so if when you bring the recommendations from this body to council
please explain that to them i'm sure the conversation will continue on grandfathering
so if i can if i can just make sure
thank you so uh the blended rate is the
0.054 so are you comfortable making our recommendation 0.054 with that differential going to
the greensense program and that's what we can modify moving forward with your support
um i don't think we need to vote i think it's just
i don't i don't suppose that's a direction yeah my recommendation would be is just each member
provide their direction and they'll capture that and move forward yeah i think we pretty much have
done that i i'm a little uncomfortable with this going forward one because of the um
the dip renewable plan coming forward and also the the grandfathering being left out and i'm afraid
that if we say okay i'm in favor of these recommendations that conversation is going
to get thrown by the wayside and we'll just be you know moving forward so
that that's me personally i think adam said he's okay
brand but blended rate feels more comfortable to me and it does still benefit the greensense program
which we've had for long conversations about the larger community benefit of that program and so i
i personally feel like that would be my suggestion okay all right so i mean if if a race going forward
i would prefer the blended right up there likewise and too so i think that you have a pretty okay
and then i'll mention the the the conference uh the conversation that we had on the grandfather
and again i i would be very surprised if it didn't come up in both bodies coming up okay
all right well thank you thank you for your presentation and time thank you we appreciate it
and we will um go ahead and move on to what was the receipt report and home discussion about
commercial organics pilot program thank you all so much for for waiting we appreciate your time
in there is it brandy are you giving it yes it's a brady meal
all right well we'll get started good afternoon madam chair and
my name is brady neal i'm the administration manager for solid waste recycling and i'm here
today just to give you an update on our commercial organics pilot so starting just with some background
in 2021 solid waste adopted a conference of solid waste management strategy that helped plan out the
next 75 plus years for us giving us some diversion goals you may have heard these goals but it's 30
diversion by 2030 40 by 40 and 75 by 75 as a part of that comprehensive solid waste management
strategy our consultants conducted a waste characterization study this waste characterization
study took samples from residential homes multi-family properties and commercial properties
and the results told us that of that waste stream about 32 percent of it was considered
food waste so that's pre-consumer and post-consumer that is a huge number
so just to give a quick background some of the things that we're doing prior to the pilot that
we just put into place we offer a commercial organics program to our commercial businesses
it is a front-load service just like this picture here we have several customers it is mostly big
box stores like walmart sams morrison millings those types of places we do only collect pre-consumer
food waste which is just their raw fruits and vegetables there is some bread that goes into
those dumpsters as well that gets delivered straight over to beneficial reuse it goes into
their windrows like a compost and gets put right there so in last year fiscal year 22 23 we were
able to deliver 792 tons of food waste to them and then moving on to residential and most of
you are probably aware but we have a curbside yard waste cart so outside of just putting grass
clippings and small branches you can also put your pre-consumer food waste items in there as well
we at that level of residential it's mostly you know most people preparing fruits and vegetables
it just goes in those things like that so nothing that has been cooked no graces no fats we do
introduce some eggshells from time to time some coffee grounds and we have about a 26
percent participation rate for our residents using that bin for that purpose
so it brings us to our commercial organics pilot so knowing we again we have about 32
percent of food waste that is missing being diverted from the landfill so that's kind of
where we want to introduce post-consumer so we already had a couple of programs in place
for our pre-consumer we know that this is probably where we're missing the mark a lot of people are
cooking their foods and they have those leftovers that they're not able to use and they're just
scraping the plate so that's the material that we wanted to capture i just wanted to point out that
none of this would be possible without our partnership with wastewater and environmental
services of course and some important information to talk about is our existing infrastructure so
we're really lucky that we own and operate our own landfill and our collections and wastewater
has their own treatment plan as well so they have a digester they have all of the underground
piping that they need and they have the placement so all of it kind of starts us at a net zero
starting out you know not needing a lot of funding to get this pilot off the ground
there is some grant funding so the north central texas council governments
awarded us a grant to help us pay for some items that we'll talk about in a little bit
so i want to introduce you to our customers so our customers are going to be the downtown
fry street area you may have seen this before we're back in 2019 we removed all the dumpsters from
the streets and we gave them all carts so just like residential they're all provided a trash
and a residential cart this is a premium service they're collected multiple times a day depending
on their level of tier that they are signed up to pay for up to five times some are three times so
we do go out there multiple times there's about 150 customers that are on valet services and through
this implementation of switching them over from dumpsters to carts we're able to build a really
good relationship with them as well so we knew that we already had and and with the main street
association they actually wrote us a letter of recommendation as we applied for our grant so
thinking about those 150 customers you know who is going to be having the most food waste was kind of
the question that we had to ask ourselves about 50 of them were bars and restaurants and then taking
it even just a step further you know there are some bars that serve bar food but mostly we knew
restaurants were probably the main one producing them the biggest amount of post-consumer food
waste is what we were trying to capture so the restaurants became our focus in this area and
there is about 30 of those between both areas so I want to introduce you to our equipment so some of
the new equipment that was purchased with grant funding so again this is actually wastewater you
probably recognize in the background so they had the space for us but we had to buy a couple things
to get the program going so these post-consumer food waste is going to end up in the digester
and it needed to be grinded up because now we're going to introduce bones and raw meat and any
table scraps pizza all those things they can't just be entered into the windmill without going
through this process first so we had to purchase a grinder you can see it's right on top it's the
final piece and so it's really simple you open up the lid drop the food in I have a video for y'all
and then it's going to hit several blades with 24 teeth on each blade and it will break it down
to about a quarter inch and so breaks it down to a little bit of pieces and then it will push it
through so actually goes down to the bottom piece which is the pump the pump will feed it right to
the digester um brandy we have a question yes you said windrow is that is that the facility where
they make the diamond dirt yes okay thank you thank you and please stop me you have a question
i'm a fast talker all right so looking at the supply so this is for our customers we wanted
to set them up for success give them everything that they needed so the first thing that you're
looking at here is their kitchen bin so this bin was meant to be used inside of the restaurant
really for them just to store material throughout the day so as they're prepping in the kitchen or
cleaning off tables they can put them in those buckets so it's a five gallon bucket and there
are some educational material on it that we'll talk about next and so that's meant to be inside
it does have a lid there is best practices that's listed on there where they should store it to
reduce odor and those kind of things as well and then the second one is the outside bin so that's
going to go right beside the trash bin and beside the recycling bin what you can't see here is this
lock or this car is locked so there is a lock on it that's just going to prevent any scavenging or
if it accidentally gets knocked over or whether somebody just walking by on a bad day none of
those things would get spilled out onto the ground so each business would be provided with
the indoor cart or the indoor bin and then keys or the outdoor cart
so some of the education and outreach that was performed so outreach we went out door to door had
conversations with each of the 30 restaurants really wanted to outline them with exactly what to expect
you know what is the program items are acceptable how long the pilot is going to run for so we gave
them all flyer with all of that information was able to talk to each of them and give the material
everybody was presented with a poster which is on this far side the poster is large it's 24 by 16
so it's really big we didn't know how they would handle that but some people wanted multiple posters
so it's good that they wanted to see it and then some of the educational material as you can see
everything is very consistent and all saves the same message it tells them exactly what they can
put in the car and what they shouldn't put in the car so those prohibited items obviously is styrofoam
plastic bags those kind of things you don't want but really anything that is food it can go inside
that cart and again giving them those best practices and you know how to wash their container how to
manage it to to prevent any rodents or whatnot on the inside and then we saw the waste and recycling
cleaning organics bins weekly i think we do it weekly all of any of those messes
so looking at the collection piece of it so again you know with our existing infrastructure
we already have valet staff they're already in the area they're down there multiple times a day
so we have the equipment to handle it we have the trucks this is harvey he's our crew leader kind
of ran that show and we did have to do a practice run because we want to make sure it worked before
we started which is the video that i have for you so i'm going to try to see if it will play
i'm gonna mute it so you don't hear me scream
so
so that was our practice round so as you can see it's it's type of a process so because we had to
get the grinder and the pump that thing is about eight feet in the air so it's not easy to get the
material up in the air so you can't see here but you can tell that there's a forklift involved
in that as well so there's a lot of aftermarket things that had to be added on so luckily we have
a great group of welders in solid waste they were able to build a catwalk and retrofit everything
that we needed to safely get up there and manage that material so just talking about contamination
a little bit so in the very beginning as we started we went out introduced everybody to the
program everybody got started in july we initially seen a lot of pre-consumer food waste but i think
it's where people are putting their buckets mostly in their kitchen as they're preparing food
they weren't really using it as like a table scraps yet and so you can see in the pictures
here we have lots of bread in this one container and then below it lots of fruits and vegetables
we did have slight contamination maybe like a paper around a piece of bread here and there
or plastic bag the nice part about valet is we touch every single container so unlike residential
they're not collected with the you know automatic side load where they're just grabbing them going
we actually have staff touching the container opening the container so we're able to find any
contamination before it enters the truck and then also we know exactly where it's coming from
because the cart's right behind the business and so we can immediately go around have a
conversation with them and let them know so once we found out we were getting a lot of pre-consumer
we wanted to encourage that post-consumer so we went back out had conversations with them again
let them know this is the things that can go in there make sure we're very clear that you know
they can put table scraps we want all of those items which introduced a new contamination to us
which was silverware so we quickly ran into an issue issue with it luckily the grinder is
set up for success and they have a lot of safety features that shuts everything down so as soon as
they need that silverware makes it to the blade it stops it so we're able to back it out but working
with environmental services we made a really quick flag to go out and put it on every single
container went back out had conversations with businesses that we believe might have been the
corporate of the butter knife we could figure it out by seeing other butter knives and then we also
changed our practices to incorporate some magnets into the collection so that we can grab those items
before they make it into that grinder so all pilots you got to see what's going on so some
of our key performance indicators are here so the first graph you're seeing is the participation rate
and so again we delivered buckets to about 30 businesses downtown we started in july and we
ran it for about six months you can see the first is 31 so we need about 31 of the businesses were
actually putting items in their cart so valet was able to track that this doesn't show how full is
their cart some of them were quarter full some were half full we have one customer who builds two
full carts every single week so hurrah for them but as you can see as we went along the more
communication we have with them as we started the program we went out every other week in the
beginning and then we were able to stretch it out to monthly or as needed but in september we had a
huge jump of 85 which is exactly what we would love to see you can see we have 73 69 so really
just in between 50 and 60 which is it's a great turnout for us and then the second graph shows
you your collection by waste type now this does include all of valet so it's not just the 30
businesses the first part of the line is your trash so you can see in july about 70 tons of
trash was collected and then right below that is the recycling which was 6.3 tons and then the
organics which was 4.1 tons and as you watch it grow you can see in august we kind of had a dip
they're probably still trying to figure it out but september we moved it to 5.7 october we collected
nine tons so we're seeing that grow on the bottom and the really cool thing to look at is the trash
so you start to see it go down which is exactly what we want to see so we were collecting 70 tons
and then you see these peaks are these lows down here in november of 43 tons of trash this
organics number on the side there is that including this pilot program as well as the
yard waste bin or no this is just the pilot okay that's fascinating it's crazy to see that
ranked up with right there with recycling and it's heavy yard or food waste is heavy too so we expect
it to be a lot heavier but it is a great graph to visualize exactly what's happening
all right then wrapping up the pilot program we went out and we gave them a participant survey
wanted to get their feedback we made it super easy just five simple questions scan this qr code
please we want your feedback overall we got an average rating of 4.88 it's not a five but we will
take a 4.88 most respondents said it was extremely easy which is great so they understood the program
it wasn't hard most reported problem problem was staffing issues so this was something we quickly
realized that there was a high turnover turnover in restaurants so every time we would go back and
have a conversation it was always a new manager it was always a new staff but they were always very
open to hear our story we would tell them the same message they were always very eager we had a lot
of people who are excited about it but getting their staff to take one additional step was the
most most challenge that we would hear from them and then some of the improvements this is just a
fun one and said make it mandatory so everybody wants to see it and then just next steps for us
is making it a permanent service for ballet step one we are currently still running it in our ballet
program downtown we are pending the tceq approval we have received verbal approval to move forward
but we're just pending they're written so right now we are still moving along we're still doing
ballet and then after that our plan is to do some multi-stage phases we're planning to work with
environmental services and getting into dentin isd we'll keep it very micro pilot so probably just
one school and working with them getting with the university's multifamily we really want to try it
out with different types of businesses to see how it works ultimately the goal is to spread it across
all of the commercial businesses that's a couple years out from there and then at the end of the
day having some sort of residential drop off for post-consumer so that thing that is it any questions
adam go ahead yeah first of all this is great thank you very educational and i'm glad to see
you're having success with this um it different of questions so you're educating with these
categories they've got pre-consumer and then even the post-consumer is there a category for
food that's still edible like you know i don't know a grocery store or donut shop or something
and do you all track that and is there a way to actually get that food not just to a composting
program but to hungry people is that in the conversation at all and currently no um but
yeah right now we're just tracking you know what is going into the carts that is getting collected
by us and but not a current conversation but for future okay friend only praise for you guys about
every time you come because it's always just so exhilarating to hear of all the good ideas
that you guys have um loved this i worked at a restaurant downtown ran into you several times
actually and in our space there in those old buildings space was always the biggest challenge
i love that you guys thought of storage and it sounds like you really communicated well
with nsa and and your vendors there that this looks like it's going to be a really cool program
everyone there always talked about like gosh how could we do something better in this space and
there was just never any structural option for us to get rid of or divert food from just going into
the dumpster so this is a really great idea i would love to start seeing it rolled out especially at
the university level it's a conversation that we have every single time we meet on our sustainability
council there um so really really excited to see how this program scales thank you yeah this is
great it's great to see the progress a lot of thought a lot of effort gone into it it's paying
off it's great uh i was just wondering that the 26 participation rate residential
are there any plans to try to increase that i think so i think we have been adding more
social media posts about the pre-consumer food waste i think a lot of people just aren't familiar
with this i think the hard part is not everybody follows social and so those are some of the
challenges that you know we run into but citizen connection like all of those things have been
getting added so absolutely good and also just mirroring what adam said i've seen other programs
where the the edible edibles are given to places like our daily bread and so i hope at some point
that that becomes a consideration to it i also had a question on that metric um the 26 participation
is that for using the yard waste bin period or using pre-consumer foods within the yard waste bin
i believe it's a yard waste bin so roughly a quarter of solid waste users have a yard waste
bin that they use yes i also had a question on that too because i know that it's fantastic by
the way and i use mine all the time but i know that when that program originally came out it was
a a fee like an extra fee and i wonder if that prevented a lot of people originally from doing
that and i know it has since been um i don't think there is a separate fee for that anymore
maybe for the bin but not monthly that's correct and so i wonder if that originally you know extra
added monthly cost prevented people from joining and then it just kind of like flew by the way like
they just forgot about it so i don't know if maybe that's why it's low it hasn't increased or
maybe that's no i agree i think that's possible i know that one of the things we've been working on
is getting um brian's coming up too but getting more information out about the bin and it is a
one-time fee of 20 but that's it one time but getting more information out to our residents so
that they know that they can buy it and no environmental services just sent out a postcard
to a very heavily treated area just kind of promoting that and helping them um recognize
you know the craft bags how many go into a car and trying to promote that and then
brian what you want to end i'll just say i love what it is it's fantastic well good afternoon i'm
brian burner i'm solid waste director here in the city and to answer your question or to add on to
the response here you know we didn't see a market improvement in the number of folks that jumped on
once we we brought the fee we've considered to we've continued to see people log log into the
program and in fact we've gotten a fairly substantial slug of people asking for carts
following our storm here in the past couple of weeks you know so you know sometimes you know
the adverse is really a positive for us but at the end of the day we've got to remember that in the
city of denton we're not uniformly treated you look up on the north side north of 380 south of 380
very heavily very densely treated you get to go towards the south of the community it's very
likely treated so at the end of the day you know i think the maximum amount we'd probably see is
about 50 60 percent only because that's really where the peak is of the two lines crossing and
people that that have enough uh brush to fulfill a yard part on a week or bi-weekly basis versus
those that may just have a handful of stuff that they have to you know either compost on site just
on the radio trash can whatever brand you have a question for him it builds off of this so when
we're kind of talking about scaling out and understanding that roughly a quarter of the
community has these bins to begin with just for yard waste pre-consumer when you're thinking
about residential level if we're thinking about residential level post-consumer waste are we
thinking about different bin types or sizes given the what volume we get to clarify we will never go
house to house to house compost consumer waste so that carp will not exist okay we're going to be
promoting either one self-composting compost bin in your yard or potentially setting up some sort
of system where you bring it to a centralized location and we take it from there and right now
between the pre-consumer waste you eat everything that you have and wash plates off that is really
designed optimally i mean we don't want to have just massive amount of waste so part of our
education you see in the future is sort of menu planning right planning you know eat what you make
make what you going back to what our grandmother's told us clean your plate you know that's what you
gotta do so you would see this program specifically mainly targeting those large commercial vendors
and then our denser valley services correct so i have some questions about the presentation so
maybe friends that's right so one i'm just super excited about this i can't thank you enough like
this is fantastic so that that's that oh i i'm wondering on the version so like you had the
792 tons of impact reduction so like have we or can we as we're bringing those to council or
coming back here or putting out the public kid because people like numbers is there a way to say
okay well that is so much space in our landfill which you know we'll say okay so the more food
waste we keep out the longer this our our landfill will we can keep using it right so like that that's
pretty important for us as we're talking about reduction in our landfill so like do we have those
numbers so say you know we get 100 participation from the larger people that were asking to do this
what does that look like like does that saves us a lot of landfill space in in the future or
i mean it's pretty significant amount yeah the tonnage up front is significant the thing you
gotta remember about food waste it's a majority water once the water evaporates it exits about
leachate it shrinks okay and then all of a sudden it decays you take the molecules of gas out so at
the end of the day you know food waste is really one of those things we really want the landfill
because again over the 30 years it really compacts it really doesn't take up much space of life
landfill if we're looking at extending life landfill we've got to focus on on like construction
demolition those things that do not rot that do not break down that take up a lot of space
you know mattresses mattresses are the bane of landfills because again they're very light they
take up a lot of space so we gotta figure out a way to manage those but again going back to food
waste you know when you look when you're looking at the long sum of this the amount of space that
it actually takes up is in the long term is is fairly minimal okay so then what is the is the
one i know the benefit to me but i'm saying like for you to support this program to fund it to keep
going right what is that is that benefit for the city well part of it is you know it it is part of
the waste stream coming in so again if we can break it out and not have to manage it on the front end
it's less material that we have to to manage here immediately uh secondarily we are very heavily
regulated by both the state and federal governments so we you know this this decay that happens is
you know forms into landfill gas which is methane oxygen sulfur dioxide you know things of that
nature so if we can move this out of the landfill it actually benefits us from a cost standpoint of
managing that type of waste that comes out of the landfill so there are net benefits to us from a
cost standpoint if it's not the long fund of moving losing landfill to pex so it also for our purposes
in the sustainability committee reduces those emissions and may reduce flaring from the gases
that that it puts off correct okay thank you you're welcome and i'm excited about um disd i know they
have a like their food waste is probably equal to the city of titan residents i mean it's a lot i've
seen just so kids get their whole trays i'll just dump them um so i'm excited about maybe that
uh partnership and also unt and twu and um so my question is for the the restaurants people that
do participate is it a is it a cost of it no no currently because they're not generating more
waste they're just moving it from one bin to the next oh okay um so we were able to keep it cost
neutral um now as a commercial business as they implement a new program there will be a fee that
we don't know what that fee is yet but there will be but for ballet it's not because we're already
down there they're just moving it around basically okay and then um can you just run through the cycle
of it for us so um there's the food waste they get put in the bin the bin gets picked and kind of had
a little yeah yeah yeah no it's a process so um the first you know the businesses put it in their
kitchen bin inside and then they carry it out into the day or how many times they need to they put it
into the outdoor bin our ballet staff collects it every morning so they go by in a morning shift it
goes every single day saturday and sunday and they'll collect it they actually put it on a trailer
we don't even put it in a truck right now we just it works out better that way for us so they'll take
it in a trailer drive it across town go across the scales of a way in and then we go over to
wastewater so we work with wastewater we call them and tell them they're on the way because
they manage all of the equipment on site in case something's down they need to be to tell be able
to tell us no once we get there we actually install the ramp in just like a i don't know what it is
like a low spot at wastewater and so we will work at that point to move all of the material from the
carts into the white thing that you see dropper dropping is the hopper and so go into that hopper
and then that hopper is then carried over by the forklift to the equipment site and then it just
goes straight up in the air that's right and there's a clean off station and everything so we'll clean
off the material clean out the bucket make sure there's nothing on the ground and then it cycles
back into what what is it so to the digester so it goes the grinding process goes straight to the
pump the pump shoots it back and then it ultimately they we tied into an unused or retired system
piping system i don't know how you call it and then it shoots back up straight to the digester
and then from there does it come to the sledge yep and from there the the bio solids are dumped
and put into the windrows of the downer dirt process so again you know we're using existing
infrastructures existing staff to actually enhance the program now again this is a pilot
you know long term what we want to be able to do as part of the wastewater treatment plant redesign
which is currently about to kick off is we actually want to create a system that instead of having to
manage this material eight feet in the air it's at ground level so you pour it in it grinds and it
goes automatically and it's safer easier to be able to manage much larger volume we talked about
needing approval from the tcq because we're actually putting another component in the in the
wastewater process that required basically a permanent amendment and that's part of what
that approval is to ensure that the way this is designed is that does not impact the flow
or the operation of the facility we received you know ripped approval on the solid waste side
we've received verbal approval we're just waiting for the written approval on the waste water side
that's fantastic i just see it like as a cycle it is it just it just goes back well and at the end
of the day you know part of part of what we have to recognize is in this digester not only are we
breaking down the organics to go into the sludge of the biosod there's also natural gas that comes
off the top part of that natural gas is used to actually keep the digesters towards the process
so what we want to be able to do is create excess natural gas that will be sold back
to a renewable natural gas company who will make that into pipeline very quality gas dropping into
an atmost line that we have on the north side of the facility and actually what we do is what we
will be doing is supplanting existing demand that currently exists so we don't have to take it you
know from from a wellhead it's that renewable natural gas that the landfill and the wastewater
plant already so then we get rid of the flares on both sides and we're actually putting this
beneficial reuse back into the community well i appreciate y'all's presentation today and for
waiting patiently for the first presentation thank you so much i think we're good everybody
good yeah thank you brandy thank you all right so we will move on to our next item receive a
report hold the discussion and give staff direction regarding this employment action plan
chair committee members michael garnier director of environmental service sustainability i have
catherine here as well another staff that have been part of the overall plan it's been a while
since we've been in front of y'all with the climate action plan you may notice the word adaptation is
not there we've been focused more on the actual actions they know that adaptation goes beyond
what was really in there initially so just to put a little bit of perspective this is more of a
reminder we have some new members of council as well we had one new member here she's not present
this started back in april 2022 when council took action to establish science-based targets
and established a need for the actual formal climate action plan that's what's actually being
discussed today the graphic on the right hand side of the slide is the emission sources as broken
down by our 2019 greenhouse gas inventory which of course the elephant in the room always is
transportation 53 percent the bear for how we move buildings is 35 percent and the other is roughly
12 other is fugitive emissions and some landfill emissions that you just heard about from several
places sorry michael i'm trying to check with you is your presentation in our backup no it is not
i'm sorry to clarify we did a dry run on late on tuesday i couldn't make it back in time so i
apologize so this is just a quick timeline this is also for new members and all of y'all were here
for this but it does talk to a little bit of for council to make sure they know we started back in
april 2022 got a contract in place by july had a draft in front of them in october of last year
we had come before this committee three different times as well during that planning process to
talk about outreach different things the actions the goals and the targets
if you got the chance to watch it this is kind of a summary of feedback from council
during the october 24 2023 work session some of the things we heard was i got confusion over what
do we directly control who's actually affected by the plan what are we asking people to do is
this going to be mandatory it's going to be voluntary how did we calculate savings how do
the evie forecast align with market conditions some you know another one the big one was is it
going to be voluntary mandatory and then the overall overarching need for an awareness or
outreach to make sure the community is aware of all the different resources and the needs to move
this plan forward so as we move through to answer one of the first questions just as a clarity this
climate action plan covers all of that everything in green on the graphic everything in green is
covered by the plan what does the city of denton directly control as y'all are aware we control
our fleet for sure our facilities our infrastructure and then we get down into where we can do
ordinances codes zoning requirements or rates similar to what you heard from dne earlier
there's different things we do control that can drive the actions to move the climate action plan
forward one thing that wasn't discussed really as clearly during the initial briefings on some of
the climate action plan was the regulatory context just as a reminder in the state of texas the state
legislature said we as a city can't directly or indirectly affect what utilities the way to put
that layman's term is i can't say only use electric or only use natural gas it's an open market so as
the buildings and how things get built we can't limit we can't influence how those utility
development can't speed up permits we can't slow down permits can't charge more fees it's pretty
simple in that regard as a reminder the state energy conservation officer cico sets the state
wide energy code and all already there is reminded that they're currently at 2015 we here in denton
have already adopted 2021 international energy conservation code and we're currently reviewing
2024 the right hand side hud recently updated their speakers so hud's going from 2009 to 2021
what they have estimated is by moving from 2009 to upgrade to the 2021 code overall there's a 40
percent efficiency gain also the icc updates on a three-year cycle and each one of those cycles
effectively brings or gains eight percent efficiency the other thing hud says is one of
their supports of making this change is their proposed they're predicting that moving from 2009
to 2021 a individual single-family house could realize one thousand dollars per year for energy
savings and multi-family households can save four one thing we've spent a whole lot of time on over
the last six months is trying to look across everything the city's already working we heard
some things just a little while ago on the comprehensive solid waste management strategy
we as a city have a lot of plans this is just five examples if you don't know which ones they are
just in case it starts on the left hand side is simply sustainable framework which all are
clearly aware of and been intimately involved with then there's the mobility plan the parks and
trails master plan the one where the title is hard to see is the denton 2040 comprehensive plan
that's the blue document and on the far right is the comprehensive solid waste management strategy
so we spent a lot of time in here trying to show how the actions being proposed to move our climate
credentials tie into plans that are already adopted so to jump right into it we've adjusted
the planning or the discussions that were presented to council to come back with an overarching one
first goal is how people move how the community moves or gets around or delivers goods within the
city today so it's focused on movement or transportation within that we have five key actions
which you've seen before it goes down with instead of having fleet sources broken out separately we
roll them all together the cpa the city of denton public businesses are all in action 1.1
then we pulled out to improve the active transportation infrastructure
to actually make sure we're building that structure that infrastructure make sure it's
accessible and available we also want to encourage people to walk and bike or use no emission modes
how do we get that out of vehicles the next one is how do we decrease the total number of vehicle
trips and vehicles how do we get people out of cars and actually walking or biking or doing other
means the last one we want to make sure we're positioned in case the heavy duty fleet goes
towards the hydrogen market that we're not missing that so still want to be closely involved with
facilitating the installation of a green hydrogen facility here in denton if that's the way that
market goes we want to make sure we're not losing perspective on that the far right hand column says
resident action what that means is we have some questions over what are we actually asking the
community to do these are the actions when it says yes we're going to ask them to change behavior
or invest their own dollars in making the change so when it comes to the fleet it could be making
a change in how you use your fleet or making the change in buying an ev or some other vehicle has
composed to a gas engine but that's what the yes there means because generally speaking the public
is not going to directly invest in the infrastructure for active transportation
the next goal we're focused on which is the the bearing room which is buildings the goal would be
to improve the efficiency resiliency and reduce the long-term impact of how we use those buildings
so we've walked through all the actions here there's eight actions they start out with
efficient energy efficiency upgrades in existing buildings helping people encouraging people and
showing the value and changing how a building operates the second one is probably one of our
critical ones it actually gets to how do we actually consume energy how do we change our
energy set points do we need the air conditioner 73 could we do 75 those kind of things how do we
actually operate and use how do we reduce our overall energy consumption also start the city
facilities then we get into the very high efficiency energy standard that was one that was debated a
lot some people call it the passive house standard they're trying to look at that for new buildings
how do we actually make that happen then we get into zero emission systems which really ties into
the heat pump discussion primarily but it's heating and cooling and natural in your hot water heating
and how do we get those to be zero emissions then we start moving into what you just heard a little
bit on was organics so we get into we want to reduce the amount of waste produced per capita
we want to increase waste diversion obviously as you just heard we want to maximize organic
diversion for renewable natural gas and the last one which we just recently you remember the date
council just adopted the new drought and conservation plan for water department
i believe it was last month or might have been the month before but overall we want to reduce
water consumption the last goal is to really look at how we as a city can plan and use the land we
have available so it's more of a land use how are we using that land so we want to make sure people
have access to necessities how they can minimize their energy needs and ensure connectivity across
them so none of these are new except for maybe the wording on 3.1 which is enhance access to
necessities or create walkable communities by doing that we're looking at how do you get the
density to where people can walk and live how do we get to shared wall space how do we get all those
things that are of value of having connections or course produce natural renewable natural gas from
landfill that's just a direct day-to-day operation of land of the actual landfill above and beyond
what you heard about with organics diversion are there how do we actually make sure that gas being
produced by the natural process of the landfill can be used for rng and of course we're going to
increase local renewable energy generation capacity across that is that solar that's anything that's
renewable yes and solar wind and we'll get to that that one's not what i'll go over but i there in
your backup on the measures that we'll be looking at any type of solar that's installed how many are
installed what's the capacity how does that compare to our peak services wind generation how is that
done we'd want to track measures such as how city facilities we don't have any solar or wind at a
city facility at this point but how do we get that installed how do we make use of that as we can
invest those dollars so that would be tied into that as well so that would go a little deeper dive
to walk you through what's in the plan i'm going to go through two of the actions in a little more
detail so decarbonizing the fleet was a tough discussion over hey is are evs even available
can you charge on those things so this ties into the comprehensive plan on the local side we do
have ev and e-biking centers under the greensense program on a federal level there's a tax credit
both for individuals and businesses on the state level there's a grant program as well that helps
support move that needle to make this happen the market assessment as of march of last year
it's a little over a year ago there were 40 evs and 33 plug-in hybrids but by the end of this
calendar year it's projected we'll have over 100 models available and gm is actually one of the
first manufacturers to step out and say they want to cease production of gas-powered light duty
vehicles by 2035 so that just helps put in perspective that this is where we're going so
within the decarbonization of the fleet we want to we're proposing some of the measures the measures
can be fluid can be added to the leading enhance but we think it's important to look at how many ev
registrations we have also how many non are we actually making progress it's not good enough just
to know how many evs how does that compare to the overall population then the next three focus in on
the city we want to make sure we're very clear on what our light duty fleets do what our medium and
heavy duty fleets do and our non-road or just extra electric equipment so when you see grounds
maintenance around city hall how are we doing on that to decarbonize that and the last one is the
availability of basically getting fuel are there enough ev charging facilities if we go to hydrogen
it's hydrogen available how does all that come together so we want to go track that and show that
the right hand side is part dimension lizard is three things we're currently doing we provide ev
charging at five city facilities solid wasted pilot an ev trash truck recently we did sit back
and wait for research we tried it ourselves and the fire department is actually looking to acquire
and should be here probably in october our first ev fire truck so we're moving the moving the needle
then we get that mouthful of walkable communities it can mean so many things so this slide the
intent of this is it's really deeply committed a piece of our comprehensive plan it's what the
public was involved with the comprehensive planning as well as the climate action plan and spoke to
they wanted more density the right hand side some key quotes that came out one of the reasons i call
it the compact scenario receiving of those votes the compact scenario called for roughly 80 multi
unit construction going forward so that was a big diversion from what we were doing historically
but all this ties together this is not an existent not exhaustive list there's other ones in the plan
and in your backup measures how do you measure success to make a walkable community so it's
kind of tough but one of the things we want to look at is the number of infill housing permits
how are we making good use of already developed areas to revitalize those and make use of those
the walkability could be a chance this is key there's things that come to council that are not
allowed by right so anytime that's not allowed by right how do we make sure that we as an entity
are driving people to encourage and add those walkability finishes so how are we doing so that'll
be something we have to manually track right now but if we think it's important if we as staff are
making a recommendation to plan your zoning permission or city council we want to make sure
we're identifying have we actually asked for and addressed walkability within those things that are
not allowed by right sorry i'm looking back and forth between the draft plan in the backup and
this presentation and you have a couple items in this measure that's not included in that summary
table at the very end is there concurrency between these slides and what we're looking at here in the
backup usually yes this one what i you beat me to what i was about to say bottom three on this slide
the bottom three are actually more tied to action 1.2 which is active active transportation
infrastructure but they're also key to making a walkable community so i'm showing them here
but we will be tracking those under 1.2 and the key thing on the bottom four here is the bottom four
are all direct measures or metrics out of two other plans the 10 minute walk to park and the
miles of trails are both the parts of trail master plan the miles of sidewalks and miles of bike lanes
are both called for in the mobility plan so even though they're part of this plan they're also part
of another plan that everyone's actively working on on our uh so like when you say it's our
opportunities so some of these things aren't all right the economic development board like um or
economic development for the city i'm sorry are these things that they're going to start thinking
about before they bring or when they bring someone to our city are they going to start
going through um these things in our plan and say okay can you do this this this and this will
in turn allow us to give you an incentive like that is our goal to tie those to tie those together
and so if i back up to this slide there's a lot of different things here that are called for in
the content that we're working towards and all those things have to come together how do we
maximize those new developments to ensure we have that connectivity i don't think it's on this one
but there is one walk basically public gathering and connections i think i truncated on here but
there is a requirement for new development to ensure we have public walkways to allow through
new development so existing development can connect so we don't want to have those islands where we
either don't have a sidewalk or don't have a means to move within at all
so that was a deep dive into two of the actions i'm willing to go through all the actions
i know it's been a long day for y'all already um just as a reminder the original the ssg plan
had 15 actions broken over four sectors or major shifts in those 15 actions three of those 15 were
on fleet because they had dcta the city of denton and not and everything else we combine those into
one we also went in if there was actions where there was two parts to an action instead of two
parts to an action may not be individual actions so this these actions align with what ssg had done
their modeling on how they recommended that since we've slightly modified them i can't directly say
100 the savings are the same the overall emission reduction if you recall they were saying we could
reach 87 reduction by 2050 that should stay because we haven't moved on anything else
we're going to be doing analysis on how any years and how we traffic each year to make sure we make
the progress necessary again right now my recommendation would be to go voluntary before
we have to go make this whereas ssg has some hard numbers they wanted us to do certain things
starting in 2025 maybe 2028 we're looking at all those all those targets will still be in there
and part of this says we're going to report back to council which should also include this body
we're proposing in june of every year that'll give us sufficient time to wrap up anything if
we're doing emission cycles different things to ensure the data is complete for the prior year
so the next step we're scheduled to be in front of council at this point and we're scheduled to
be on june 18th to walk through this and then of course we have to implement that which is the
next biggest barrier is how do we actually get everything done so with that i'll stand for any
questions okay go ahead i'm if you could clarify for me that the economic information in the
original plan which showed the savings that's not going to be presented with this i can't directly
tie at this point within the six month period we had to be working on this i can't stand with those
same numbers because the proposed actions don't directly align but they are similar so that document
that you're looking at from ssg so on the record council has it from their travel work session
it'll be there we're referencing it it's in this plan to say we did present it we did talk through
it and we as staff will be coming back with updated metrics on that when we update it a year
good we just didn't have the time to realign everything in that window good yeah because
that's so impressive it is yeah and the only other thing i thought was uh is it going to be
just as public has been educated about recycling will there be any sort of program educational
program regarding the climate action plan not only for the public you know bill stuffers and
that sort of thing but also using entrance into the schools as well since we already have recycling
programs there is introducing that here's here's the next step to make a better world sort of thing
yes the goal here as i started out with i went back to the side one of the things we heard is
outreach and awareness and education has to be a critical component to everything so all 16 actions
will have that embedded within it to be successful do i have dedicated staff right now to do that not
necessarily we'll work through that and figure out how to best align some of the actions directly
relate to staff we already have whether it be on waste reduction or organics diversion some of those
we have win-wins some mobility things we have win-wins there's other ones that we'll have to
figure out how we're going to do all that but yes 100 our push is going to be on awareness we're
going to work on everything we can on a website basis which limits us if it does reach certain
individuals it's a good place to start and then go out and go through whether it be to the chamber
of commerce whether it go through business entities all different outlets to reach the
business community to reach all the residents to bridge the gap to hopefully also reach out and
talk to people who are coming in our community because we do have a certain amount of transients
we want to make sure they're aware of what all resources are working towards so they can be a
part of it as well because they impact us on a daily basis and one of the one other question is
there any way at all to establish a relationship with the county in regard to what we're doing
here i know they don't have a dedicated sustainability man or lady but there is a
person over there whose name just went right out of my head that i've had some discussions with
about the county's take on doing something like this go on my class second or third flower it says
it covers everything in the green so the county is part of that okay we will be working with them
to make sure we can maximize the team together and make that happen terrific just like the dentin isd
dcta we met with both dentin isd and dcta to discuss two things good regarding our fleets great
yeah thank you for this i'm so happy that it's back on our agenda it's been a long time behind
the scenes and we've been doing this as you said for a long time one suggestion and then maybe two
questions i remember so for the outreach and education i remember when we were first talking
about this we would deputize people as like you can do a climate action in a box presentation
or something that was part of our outreach effort initially to make sure we could receive that
input back from the public it was a meeting in a box i wonder if we could as you said we'd maybe
have the staff to to do all the outreach and education maybe we could get volunteers to
train them up then they can do a lot of that work i would say back to that is nothing's off the table
we're going to look at every option we can to move this because we can't continue to wait you know
that and we're trying to engage the whole community as the community not just anyone's sector okay good
um so my question maybe two questions you talked on this a couple times but how do you because the
big took takeaway i took from council too was the mandatory or voluntary question i guess my take on
that was well like any plan this is a plan like you said the city has a lot of plans it'll come
down to the implementation decisions on the ground with all the decisions we make as a city all the
time um but can you just say a bit more about how you think of this plan along that line of the
mandatory voluntary dimension everything right now we're going to try to do with encouragement
on centers primarily however on energy efficiency as i pointed out going from 2009 to 2021 hud
estimates that's a 40 efficiency deck what i would say to that is there's about 80 percent of the
housing stock in denton that was built before 2010 so we have a huge opportunity to go in like you
had mentioned earlier with the green sense incentive to help those buildings help those
residences to improve their efficiency so one way we have mandatory there is that they do a
certain amount of upgrade they have to meet the 2021 standard so we get that win that's more
mandatory how do we incentivize how do we make sure our green sense program is getting money
in the hands of the right people to make the right changes and hopefully an equitable manner
so we'll be back in front of you coming up with some other change on the green sense program but
i see it as instead of trying to say hey if you're going to build a dent you got to build this way
we're aware of builders in dent that are building close to the net zero or the high efficiency
standard they got small little pocket communities let's see how they sell how their price compares
and how their utility consumption compares to others and that might start moving the target
i think one of the changes is going to happen to all of us as a community is we may have to spend
a little more on the house but we're going to be spending less on the utility bill so instead of
spending the $200 to the electric bill we might be spending 100 and our house may be $40 more
which means if you stay in the home long enough you'd have a better return on investment but
since i can't predict that we would have changes there okay good thank you my other question was
about the bear uh like the elephant the bear that's really nice the distraction squirrel
a squirrel um it seems like the elephant within the bear to me is like new and maybe that's not
true but new building i think about was a coal a hunter ranch and we did mention the limitations
that the state legislature has put on on cities in terms of utilities um can you speak a little bit
more to the challenge maybe that that presents any ideas about how to overcome that challenge
when we're looking at perhaps building out natural gas infrastructure to all these builds and the
kind of built-in emissions that come with that are there strategies it's always a tough one to
address there are certain areas of dentin that are being built that don't currently have natural gas
services some of those areas are being built full metric other ones are going to have a high enough
density that the gas providers are looking to add that infrastructure to provide that to those
customers what i would say is just because the infrastructure gets installed doesn't necessarily
mean it'll be fully utilized either it'll kind of depend on the market as the building mechanics
change over the years it may drive it towards a certain direction so as for example if electric
heat pump becomes almost the price of an HVAC but is truly three or four hundred times more efficient
someone may actually choose to go that direction regardless of the fuel source but
most of those the higher efficiencies are on the electric there's still some natural gas back in
there just like it's efficient so i can't i can't say we'll be moving away from any fuel source
i think the biggest thing is we're going to gain a whole lot of efficiency gains
in a lot of those new constructions i've been a part of various meetings and people being very
creative to do efficient build there's a billion alignment some are even looking at which way
streets should run to minimize waste west facing versus east and north and south different alignments
how do we maximize areas where you might have less tree cover or you might know to be more rooftop
solar whereas when you have the tree cover you want to use that to shield the building to then
offset the energy bill they're looking at all those things they're also looking at how to enhance
which is a part of this enhanced reduced space which is a key aspect of walkable because people
like to walk but there's something pretty different okay thank you um might kind of take away from
watching the council deliberations back in october this how do we package this as a win for
residents how do you sell it so i just wondered like generally what do you see is your bigger
taglines off of this modified draft it's kind of a revision from what ssg had given us biggest tag
lines um well one of the ones would be is with the efficiency that we're going for if you're
going to keep more money in your pocket your records because of not spending on a utility bill
then if we can also build that into um reducing vehicle miles traveled we're actually moved up
to a more serious attainment level for ground level loads on climate which has a negative impact
on local health so we can actually show them by changing how they move within denton they're
having a direct public health impact by reducing those emissions so i think if you try to tie it
into a public health initiative over the healthy side of things as well as trying to get the
understanding that the overall goal here is to minimize our consumption which has the ultimate
benefit of reducing emissions it also reduces our costs overall day-to-day so i know obviously the
bulk of what we're looking at is emissions reductions and the bulk of our emissions are
transportation related i know a lot of that is fixed based on the infrastructure we already have
and i know a lot of our transportation measures do look at how do we mitigate that down versus the
more of the land use planning measures what overlap have we had or conversations or
overlap that we're looking at with say planning and development and how going forward with the
non-infield space that we have and our growth potential in these new areas around town
building environments that fit with this vision of more connected communities more closer access
to amenities less reliance on a single combustible automobile i think that directly ties into the
dentin 2040 comp plan as well if you actually read through it and look at it and look at the key
actions like there's 278 key actions 280 key actions if you get into that plan there's a lot of things
that mainly focus back on building that compact that density making things accessible so it's a
key route of how we're trying to build that plan within the comp 340 plan the goal of this plan is
to draw awareness to by doing all those actions we're actually having a climate impact as well
so it's a double win so the hopeful goal there is we already have that built into a lot of things
are working on and how do we continue to maximize that and grow that i know that some of the other
concerns were the mandatory behavioral changes that some people felt a little bit anxious about
i liked the way that you packaged some of your measures up there where was it that a resident
might have individual control over versus what does the city have operative control over i wonder if
that would be helpful in that summary table there as well under those measures when we're looking at
you know number of ev registrations that's going to be an individual's uptake right but versus our
miles of trails built if it was labeled there that that's something that the city is capable of doing
and that way it's very clearly distinguished about what is it that we're asking the residents you know
what cost are we incentivize or inducing versus what is the city capable of changing whether it's
already in a plan or whether this is a new proposal outside of say the comp plan or mobility
and that might help visualize what exactly we're expecting okay so make sure i heard you clearly
on the measures table you're thinking within that by each measure we propose kind of have an action
i have of it directly impacts like a behavior change or the cost of a resident correct or the
community okay how would that be difficult just normally yes kind of we did it on the slides i
didn't do it there because the measures are kind of uh it was to see how those would work how they
would grow this is just our preliminary they grow out a lot of the areas are actually a summary
statement ahead of other plans there may be six metrics in track but for this to be able to model
i simplify it instead of tracking six different things like bike lanes or bike paths so i care
about the side path a dedicated road a side path you know all those things i wonder how many bike
lanes yeah so i try to simplify it here because that's how i can plug it into the model
i think i stopped coughing but yes we can we'll definitely take that into consideration thank you
i have a common question if i can there's water can you some water you've got your cell phone
okay so might have peppermints we started this in 2022 we yes it's right on top yes
it's been a while so i'm really glad this has come to us although it's an altered version
my question is and this may not be something that that you can answer but are you how
how confident are you that council will approve this without any metrics or costs added to it
like if that if that's a big concern for them say so like in the first plan we had you had all of
that out there which showed the people the the residents like this is gonna put this much money
back into our pockets or your pockets which is fantastic it was a large amount and that's not
yet hasn't been trimmed it hasn't been added to this one yet
so i'm just i'm just curious like do you think that's going to be
that's going to be prevent them from going forward with this is it that big of a deal or
i support the plan as we're proposing it yeah to be able to go forward i think a lot of the costs
got stuck and i think there was about a split of different people having different
challenges of how it was calculated or what it meant okay so i think by not having it now
it outlines all the actions to make sure we're committing to it while we then build that back
in so part of that's why i was trying to quote those HUD standards is that they're estimated
that a household will save a thousand dollars a year in utilities that's quite a bit that's
eighty dollars a month and then for multi-payments four hundred dollars per year that's still not
you know tiny enough that's 330 to 40 dollars a month so we're just not going hard on the savings
we tried to work through that some i don't think it'll distract for council i think there'll be at
least two members that i'll ask about it pretty heavily yeah um i don't think it'll keep it from
being moved forward i hope okay does it mean they will ask for it we have to put it in before we
bring it forward yeah i just i don't have a good answer on how long that would take to break that
back down and match these actions okay and then just um another thing so ssg like just bring me
back like 2022 originally our conversations here on this body were about a carbon reduction goal
right and that goal was or is net zero net zero by 2050 that's still in here and it was 46.3 percent
of your from your baseline by 2030 which even out of their low carbons here we were going to
miss quite a bit by 2030 because of the timing where we're starting we made up a lot of headway
later in like between 2030 and 2050 okay so that um i'm so sorry so that is still still in here and
the the purpose that this body addressed for the reason for the carbon action plan so i i think this
is great i just wanted to tie this plan back to our original goal that's all i wanted to do here
and it does clearly the one thing i think i said this in front of council too
by keeping it simple here people don't get lost in what's in there i think it's right in front of
them they can see that their actions that we all can take we all can accomplish and while they're
big lifts they're still attainable so part of the feedback from council was how do we make it
realistic not make it be perfection how do we make it realistic this presentation i feel makes it
be realistic and attainable for the bulk of the community to understand and get behind it i think
so too i think you did a great job you worked quite hard to do yeah okay all right um it says
give staff direction regarding this plan so is everybody okay with this plan do we have any
feedback for council or just i i'll just echo what you said i thought this was brilliant it shows how
this is in alignment with so many of our other plans and our goals and our values as a city
and it helps people see well if that's the case then it has all of these co-benefits that come
along with our already agreed to value of getting to net zero by 2050 so i just think it's it's great
i agree i mean you have a unanimous consent to move forward with our previous draft this was just a
little bit more concise and i think the way that you build the bridges between our already adopted
plans really really helps tie in why what we're doing is just a continuous and not something
it's like a radical pivot that just clearly aligns us all under an umbrella that we can
get behind i think that's a really nice way to distinctly do it so i recommend approval
i recommend approval good thank you so much the only thing i would say is it allows us to take
all those other measures and put them into a carbon reduction yeah who wants the carbon reduction
yeah so you're just kind of pulling things for we're making it put it in perspective for the
person we're talking to yeah that's great thank you very much all right we have got item e
receiver report and hold a discussion about greensense incentive program expenditures
and um i did phone a friend text a friend jp says that i can trust the state of the h reduction
number that's in our power bi it's just for the h back and insulation but it's a 360
thousand kilowatt hour reduction so i'll have to get you a number of rebates that that
includes so they're going to try to get to the cost curve i know jp's done that before i was
trying to find out the best of hearsay so just a little update today on where we are for instance
for this year um i can't move um so we'll talk a little bit about the revisions that were made for
this year where we are on the budget what we have upcoming and then our next steps
so just the background y'all heard this before we began in 2009 um prior to the 24 update that
incentive levels have been in place since fiscal year 18 so a significant amount of time without
addressing the inflation program is administered by our department and funding through dme and only
available to dme customers energy focused on heating and cooling and then we have a million
dollars for this year just a little bit of an update on how they were increased so the rebates
for h5 were significantly increased the attic insulation as well we did the e-bike rebate
this year and we increased the electric vehicle rebate as well
that was done away there we go um so for h5 we spent um this was as a
531 65 000 that was 366 so we have about nine percent remaining of what we've marked for that
for this year i think i've seen that where we kind of set up that budget it may actually be in your
backup but it's not legible um that very small chart um we spent the presentation as well okay
um we have about 62 remaining on insulation and then smart furnace that we've got a little bit
of money there's two on the ev and the e-bike we adjusted both of those rebates in december
and pulled a little bit of money from multifamily to to increase those because the demand was so
high for them both of those are on hold again now they've gone through the adjusted amount
so with us having less than 30 percent left we were focusing strictly on energy efficiency
the bank giveaway is funded however incense i don't want to let you all know we have some giveaway
events coming up for those we'll be at senior we'll be at mlk
those are kind of ad hoc we try to
and then if you have any questions about where we are so far
okay i have i'm sorry everybody i have a question at what point um can we
talk about adding something to our uh our rebates so like we can do the next meeting
we can bring back funding recommendations in the manual just want to give you kind of an update
on where we are and as we start moving through the modifications to the manual for next year
we have some lessons learned um it's a lot more money and a lot more to the process
but it's working we've got some things worked out we're working with um our procurement and
our accounts payable folks to try to streamline it a little bit more so those are new again at
end of the school right yes october 1 to clarify that that's part of the recommended budget council
has to take action to adopt yes but it is being recommended to be included so if we were to do
an amendment to the items or categories included in the program you would want to see that adopted
for fy 25 yes the manual will have to be adopted all right so those discussions will come with a
different presentation not this this was just the update okay all right thank you can we get
suggestions here shouldn't you put them on the matrix we'll just wait till the matrix so that
which brings us everybody to the matrix
so um ed do you want to go ahead and sit down for a minute yeah i'd like to uh
second what akili just mentioned about expansion of the incentive program
with a particular focus on battery storage residential uh also i was curious as
if there are any green sense incentives for low income households i know in looking over the
the schedule of what's available it seems that the person has to make an expenditure for whatever
they want to do before they can get the incentive and um i would like to talk about some policies
where the rebates might be a bit easier for folks uh low income housing uh and
maybe uh if there could be an audit of prior greenhouse disbursements and analyzing how the
funds have been utilized by low income households uh i guess you could use the appraisal district
for assessing home values i don't know but at any rate i i would like to open a discussion of
making our green sense incentives uh easier to
or yeah easier to to obtain by folks who may not have the money put down out front
anyone else
you want to have anything to add i would like to put it on the matrix to discuss additional
categories or items or maybe we just call it an adjustment to the greensense program
specifically in consideration of battery and top solar incentives
and then also and this is a little bit out there and maybe it builds into the greensense program
possibly too um in the space that i work in which is mostly ecological restoration there's been a
number of municipalities moving towards managing green spaces in the sense of carbon sequestration
or looking at it as a community that is very public health sense frisco lewisville grand prairie
corinth for example are all racing ahead and looking at enhancing green spaces with
pollinator habitat call it carbon sequestration areas that it does kind of feel that it's kind
of slipping a little bit behind some of our peers and this might be something that we look at a
partnership parks for so call it a matrix title consideration of green space enhancements
and i would like to add a presentation for this body to discuss
speakers and like the process for if we want to have that on the agenda or to add a little spot
on our agenda that says if you want to speak you have to pull out of the car just so it's consistent
for everyone and we can decide as a body if we want to have them or not and in the process for that
and i don't that that may not be up to us it may be up to somebody else but
um we'll kind of go that route just so we can look into that okay bring it back okay thank you
okay um was there anything on staff reports you wanted to go over kathryn or
don't we just have the matrix okay okay all right um anybody have any concluding items or
hope you feel better i was just so excited about stuff just kidding all right well i appreciate
everybody's time today and we will close the meeting at 3 18 thank you so oh i have a question
we can't can't do that we just close oh really
you