 Thank you everybody, 1003 AM on Tuesday, February 2nd, and I'm going to go ahead and call the meeting of the Environment and Infrastructure Committee to order. Thank you guys for being here. Ms. Hammond, will you call the roll? Good morning. Councilwoman Devine. Here. Councilman Brennan. Present. Councilman Rickerman. Thank you. Thank you, Ms. Hammond. And as Ms. Hammond indicated earlier, Councilman Rickerman is delayed shortly, but he will join us momentarily. So if we can go ahead, we've got, first on our agenda is an update from our CPAC committee. And I'm excited. I've met with a few of them earlier last week and Dr. Z and I've been emailing all through 2020 pandemic. Did not stop us from email each other and having ideas, but I'm excited to have CPAC here to give us a progress report on where they are. And I also asked them if they would bring forward just some some plans or goals for 2021 that we could look at and keep in the forefront. So Dr. Z, I'm going to kick it over to you and Mary Pat, and if you would start with just introducing your committee members. I know I see at least two of them on here. Hi, thank you very much for having us. It's a, it's quite an honor and we've been trying really hard to do great things. And so my co-chair was, yeah, so my co-chair is here Gretchen Lambert. She's a belief. She's, yes. And yes, there she is waving. And then we have Tamara Warren, who's here, and Penny Cotherin, and then Jane, I'm sorry, Jane, I should be able to say your last name because I have a complicated last name too. But Jane is not an officially committee member but comes to all our meetings and participates a lot. And so she's been a valued contributor to all of this too. Hopefully I didn't miss anyone later. And then of course, Robert and Mary Pat have been helping us through this transition of trying to figure out new times. Well, thank you all for being here and thank you all for your service. I don't think that it can be said enough on behalf of all the members of city council and our mayor that we appreciate all of our citizens who give of their time and their talent and their expertise to serve on these committees. And I know that CPAC and BPAC are particularly difficult ones sometimes because, you know, you have ideas and plans and the implementation of those sometimes don't happen as quickly as you want. But I want to tell you guys, Mr. Brent and I really appreciate your service and we're looking forward to your presentation. So from that, Dr. Z, I'm going to let you go ahead and have your presentation. All right. So I believe you should be able to see my screen now. All right, cool. So thank you very much for having us today. I just wanted to give you a brief overview in terms of our progress report looking forward. And so to that end, we're going to be talking about a few brief updates to our bylaws and hopefully our revised bylaws will be going through the decision process and approval process. We also are going to do just a tiny bit of a climate change primer so we make sure that we all have the same goals as it relates to climate change, some city specific data which will help target some actions going forward and then CPACs ongoing and longer term goals. So just highlighting two very brief changes that we made to the bylaws. The old bylaws had eight seats, and then all of those eight members were voting and each of those vote members were tied to a specific district. We have altered that now to have seven seats, partially so there's an uneven number for voting, but we've also added up to eight seats for non voting members. And so that we could add area of subject matter expertise or other people because as you'll see, we have started expanding our efforts and we need to have more people in order to be able to be a workforce to this. We decided not to tie it to specific district in terms of where the people are located partially due to expertise. And we also provided clarity on the length of term. And so we're trying to get more regular about having us cycling off at specific times of the year. So the changes happened essentially odd numbers for the no tie votes, more members to get more things done. And so we could recruit subject matter experts, because hopefully you'll see as we go through this today, that we're going to need more expertise, especially in certain areas as we move forward. The other thing I'd like to highlight is essentially these changes and how we change the mission statement. And so the mission statement is now reads that it's to mitigate green house gas emissions. To adapt to climate change. Well also conserving natural resources to protect the environment. But this is to also foster the quality of life and have an improved quality of life for the citizens. So we've been trying to focus on things that have importance for equity and improve quality of life for the citizens so greenhouse gas emissions and adapting to climate change. And this quality of life are going to be central themes to what we're talking about today in terms of our mission going forward. I'm not familiar that it's getting a little warmer. And so that this is essentially what you're looking at here is over time how temperature is increasing. Why is this important, because it is expected that by 2040 Columbia will experience a full two months of the year above 95 degrees. I'm from the north and I am not a fond of our summers, and that is only going to become more intense with climate change. And so why is that happening. If you look at this thick black line so we're on the horizontal axis we have time vertical axis we have temperature. And this thick black line is the observed temperature. The only way we can recreate this temperature. One of the reasons of what's observed is when we put the human impacts or the human effects on to what we're doing and this is essentially temperatures are rising due to our emissions of greenhouse gases, and you can't get this just by natural factors alone. Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. It's going up essentially this is from 1960 to today, you can see there's this steady increase. Just in case you're curious that little squiggle is just due to photosynthesis and respiration that's the growing cycle. The steep increase is essentially what's happening through our fossil fuel emissions. Globally, this is what things look like in terms of on your vertical axis you're seeing billions of tons of CO two being emitted every year. And our CO two in the atmosphere will continue to go up until we get zero on these emissions we have a steep task ahead of us. And until we stop emitting these gases, things are only going to increase so it's going to continue to warm for the next while until we figure out what these emissions. So how does that look like for Columbia. Now you're going to say hey definitely you're missing things on the slide here that's on purpose you'll see what they are. And so what I'm showing you here in the red, our greenhouse gas emissions from the city. I've purposely plotted them in a way that makes them look tiny, because I'm going to contrast them with community wide emissions. And so you can see that we've had greenhouse gas audits done for the city in 2016 and then for 2019 and there was a decrease between those two years. But when you look at the community wide emissions you see a shocking difference. And that is the community wide emissions are much larger. What you're seeing here is the extent of the current greenhouse gas audit data that we have for the city. And this is something that we need to start doing much more regularly, so that we can track progress because we won't know for making progress, unless we have the data to show that. But what you can take away from this is that the community wide emissions are 36 times that of the city government. There was a 21% decrease in the city government emissions between 2006 and 2019. Most of that was due to improvements in the water delivery systems and lighting upgrades. And it was noted in the report though that cities of similar sizes typically have 30% decreases over that same time period. So we can do better. The community strongly feels that we should be focusing on community wide emissions, not just city government because that will have the largest impact. So where are these emissions coming from what sectors. So if we look at the city government on the left, you can see that most of it is water delivery systems. And then transportation through vehicle fleet and employee commute and then there's also the house street and buildings and facilities run into that. So for the city government itself, it's about figuring out how can we pump more efficient efficiently. And how do you use how do you have cleaner electricity essentially and then start working on your vehicle transport. Dr. Z. Have you as Clint shared with you some of the plans that they have going future on capturing the methane gas and the solar energy project out there the wastewater help reduce the footprint. I know that the solar and that was going to help with the morning load but we haven't talked about the gases. I do at some point want to pick your brain because I heard that you at one point had also been trying to work on bio gas projects to actually doing two of them right now and working on a landfill gas project so I'd be glad to share some info with you. Okay cool. All right, but it's so that's so on the left hand side we have the city government but then if we look contrast that with the community wide emissions. You'll notice that there's a big contrast in terms of what the sources of these emissions are. And for the community wide, it's mostly buildings with a chunk of it being transport. This gas and things like that is where you're going to have that 7% in terms of the community wide. So we're going to target trying to figure out how to decrease these greenhouse gas emissions how you go about it will be different for the city, then it will be for the community. And that's something we need to one size does not fit all for this. So for the city government it's about reducing emissions from transport and water systems and obviously I need to talk to Clint more. And for community wide it's about figuring how to reduce emissions from buildings, and then going for transport. So if we then take the community wide emissions and sort of dig down to into them slightly more that we're starting to see that for the buildings and most of it is from electricity with a little bit from natural gas was still significant but some from natural gas, a longer term goal will be to start figuring out ways to remove natural gas, and we'll come to that later not today but it'll be later problem. And then you can see that gasoline transport is the biggest sector that's causing the emissions from transport, not so much from diesel. It's worth noting that trains, buses, and Owens field were minimal, and they didn't even show up on this axis because that was included in the same assessment. So the biggest source of emissions community wide are electrical usage from buildings, and then gas powered vehicles. So thinking about how to foster an improved quality of quality of life for the citizens of Columbia how do we do that. So it's about reducing the greenhouse gas emissions and then adapting to climate change. And so these are the two sort of foci of the committee at the moment. So digging into the reducing greenhouse gas emissions. This is about how to reduce energy usage, change how we generate electricity, and in the future it will be about electrifying transport. It is worth noting that if we electrify transport, we are going to dramatically increase our electricity usage. And so we have to figure out how to have clean electricity generation before we fully put the gas on to electrifying the transport. And that will also change the city's load in terms of electricity. So I'm going just to put the electrified transport a little bit later because we're trying to focus on the electricity aspect at the moment. So from the reducing energy usage, the committee is currently working on two initiatives, and one is an outreach program on incentives and loan programs. And so on March 18, we're holding an event that will be interacting with the public. And it's basically going to talk about heating bill assistance and weatherization and how Dominion can help out with energy audits. This is in coordination with the South Carolina Energy Office. And what we're looking for is actually some help from the city in terms of promos, because we're trying to we see this is also an equity issue, and I'll get into why it's an equity issue, as we talk about the energy labeling. We've also helped CPAC see how we need to do a better job in terms of having a comprehensive communication plan, because we can really help educate the public about how they can reduce things in terms of their own costs. The energy labeling for real estate and rentals is a policy that we're trying to or two separate policies that we're trying to develop at the committee levels right now we're in the investigation stage about this. So South Carolina, so let's just focus on the rentals for a second. South Carolina has one of the highest eviction rates in the country. And I think Richland County's sixth in South Carolina for evictions. Most of these happen to be because of unexpected high utility bills. And that's actually one of the biggest reasons people go for payday loans is actually utility bills. Buildings in South Carolina also use more energy on average than any other bill at any other state, and our energy costs are fourth highest in the nation. And so this puts a big burden on people and because and we don't have a way to basically incentivizing improving older housing stock. So we are hoping that we can use the models from other cities and states that have been trying to implement improvements in building stock by having a labeling program for rentals this might mean disclosures of like utility bills ahead of lease signing. So that way people aren't getting in over their head for rentals this means having real estate agents disclosing this. What about work with the utilities. I mean, you know, if I remember the post incurrier did a huge article and dominion which at that time was scanner was the most expensive electricity on the whole east of the Mississippi. So, I mean, I think we need to really be lobbying dominion as well about in the end, you know, if there's not a rate reduction for certain housing stocks maybe there's some type of program where they can do improvement weatherization improvements and this and that to help out, because you can't put it can't be all on the tenants and the landlords I mean the people who are generating the energy need to need to have a role in this. Yes, I haven't figured out how to put the pressure and rates on the power company yet. I have other ideas about the power company but I don't have great ideas just yet but I'll still on that a bit. Alright, so these are some programs that we're working on and I expect you'll have a policy recommendation from us about the energy labeling before the years out. We're just trying to work our way around how it could be incentivized and how it could be enforced before we bring it to you. Then we get to the sort of the nuts and bolts and where I've quickly learned that I'm outside of any area of expertise and the city is quickly going to need my expertise when it comes to this, and that's about changing how we generate electricity. So the first item that we're investigating and we have some recommendations for the committee in the city about is working with dominion and perhaps the PSC on how to source renewables. We also have an energy consultant who we're working with that was funded by the Sierra Club to advise on ready for 100. And so I'll give a brief comment about that. First on the dominion and PSC issue. So a few years ago the energy freedom act was passed and what this allowed was for third parties to generate renewables. Why is this important. We are not in Duke territory but I'm going to talk about Duke for a second because this is something that happened in South Carolina. Duke, after the energy freedom act was proposed or surpassed Duke proposed a program called the green source advantage. This allowed for third party renewable generation. When they proposed it to the PSC, it had 150 megawatt generation capacity. And later, once it was approved and amended, it ended up having a 250 megawatt generation capacity that had carve outs for cities and universities. And so what happened in between the proposed and the amended, and it was the city of Greenville intervened at the PSC. And the CPAC equivalent in Greenville basically was like, this is wrong, because Duke had had a different model in South Carolina that had a carve out for cities and universities. And so they essentially got involved at the PSC level and said we want to have what North Carolina had without saying it exactly like that. And they were able to get it. But what this means is that now that Dominion has such an offering at the PSC, which has 135 megawatt generation capacity proposed with no carve outs for cities or university, it is still under consideration at the PSC at this moment. Nobody has intervened from a city or university in Dominion territory to ask for having carve out. And so, essentially, what we're asking here is that the city ask. And so if the city of Columbia wants renewable power, this is an avenue to help make this happen. And so there are two ways that you could go about this. One is to directly ask Dominion, can we have a carve out. If that doesn't work, you intervene at the PSC. And there's still time from what I understand that there that one could intervene at the PSC about this. This helps city government, but this doesn't not necessarily help the community wide. But this is within the laws set by the state, this is going to be your best avenue. And this is not necessarily about the city building like paying the money to build the infrastructure themselves. This is where a third party, not the city, can get the tax credits to build this infrastructure, and then sell and then they're selling it back to Dominion, but they're, but the city is basically having that power as being their green power. Dr. Z, I think, you know, Georgia has been very advanced. I'm doing two projects down there and their PSC really, well, they're elected by the public one, which it changes the way they operate. But they put a great deal of pressure on Georgia power and the meags and the other folks to do lots of different renewables and spread it out so that they can make sure it just wasn't sold or driven and so forth. But one of the things that's popping up a lot and may be beneficial to help get this is the offsets. And in Alabama, they, Alabama power did a deal with the private developer who then helped offset power for 150 Walmart, Super Walmart. And what they did is kind of interesting is, is they worked out a better rate than avoided costs, which is what, you know, they always, but not super aggressive, but allowed the entity to keep the racks, and then they were able to sell the racks to back to Walmart. And so that's where the gap got fixed, but it allowed the private sector really to step in and create opportunities to offset by investing in these larger solar biomass. I think they, they're working on one AD plant and some other stuff. But, you know, I think that's the kind of stuff that I think you're right, we need to intervene, but we also need to push them to be creative because we have not been creative. Just wait, I got a creative proposal for you after this. But one thing about this is I don't, I really, really, really would like the city to get involved in having this carve out. This is and to be able to have that generation capacity because if you leave this up to just the private sector, you have no control over rates. You have no control over where the infrastructure is being built. And I really strongly think that we need to be part of this discussion from the bottom up, not just from the top tip. Well, the goals we have is when the canal gets fixed is we're going to reenergize the canal plant. And one of the thoughts was that we would actually, since we own the land between there, we can directly feed it back to the water treatment. I mean, the water plant there and offset that and then use that money from the savings from the purchase of energy to invest in other renewable projects around the city to kind of push our goal that, you know, the mayor's committed to and, you know, I'd love to be like aspen and be 100% But we have a lot of challenges here, but we also have some opportunities. So the city of Greenville and I do not understand all the math because this is out of my subject area expertise but in terms of what I've been gleaning and what Greenville is doing. They expect they'll have a $50,000 cost savings in the first year of implementing this, and then that will be continued through time so it's worth the while to try pursuing this because it will decrease your costs, but it might also make you less susceptible to rate increases and the longer term because this will not cause increases in the generation costs, like the 7.7% rate increase from Dominion would cost I believe the city $700,000 based on looking at the energy bills for the state for the city. So it's significant what these proposed increases can do and so it's worthwhile just thinking about like how can we extract more out of this. Yeah, and, you know, we're going to have to do some lobbying to because the other way that that comes back is then that becomes that demand charge so that if you have intermittency like solar or so forth, then you're paying a pretty high demand charge for that stand by power, which then creates a whole another issue so we got to attack it in multiple ways but this is very exciting thank y'all. So the city of Greenville, the lawyer who represented the city for this PSC case. I've spoken with him and he'd be happy of course to represent the city but in terms he'd be interested because it's something that he's very passionate about and he has experience of how it worked on the Duke case because so I can connect you all that is of any interest to you. That'd be great. So you want a bigger bolder part of the proposal in terms of what to do in terms of energy. After talking with the energy consultant yesterday, we were telling him about what we were talking about with you all. And he thought that this might be a really bold statement to talk to Dominion about. So if you all have gotten your notifications that you're having a new smart meter installed at your house. And this is where Dominion is essentially putting a new meter onto your house kind of like the water meters, where it's a way that the utility can talk to your meter without always having someone come out and read it. A benefit of what's happening is that Columbia is in the first phase of the smart meters. Smart meters are basically how we're going to be able to do better when we start having new forms of energy generation. So one thing that we basically are asking you to think about is approaching Dominion and asking if you can be a model modern city for this and be figure out a way in which we can be the smart the South city that builds technology around the smart meters and how we can use that to be powered by renewables because you're going to need these special meters to be able to do the demand in terms of when you're having solar. We also need are going to have to start thinking about rate structures with time of use. And that's when this will also help with these smart meters. And in the future, we're going to have to think about technology of the vehicle to grid transfer and how our reason cars will be important. And so this might be a way that Columbia could get on the map as an innovator is partnering with Dominion about this. This might seem fantastical, but Dominion needs to do better right now because their IRP or their long term planning was recently denied at PSC level. And so they have to get more aggressive with how they're approaching renewables, and this might be a way that Dominion might be able to solve that problem. Do you want a big and bold idea? Try this. Dr. Z, I see you to build the vehicle grid. One of the concerns I have about pushing so much in electric vehicles is one is the generation of the energy, how that's going to be generated. The second is the batteries are so dominated by titanium. And the mining of titanium does far more worse to the earth than, you know, carbon emissions at this point. So finding the balance. You know, this is where natural gas or bio gas would be a much better resource from a power standpoint, or depending on battery technology at this point the technology is not in favor in the environment but maybe down the road it will be but the trade off doesn't seem to work. I teach a class where I talk about deep sea mining because we can't just have the mining of the rare earth elements just all being in Africa and it's a, it's a, it's a problem. That's a dirty little secret we never talk about in battery tech, but in terms of we're going to have to do a little bit of it nonetheless because not all of it can be just by gases. So there's, there's ways we need to think about this in the future but this might be a good way in which the university can partner with the city, and also strengthen some and basically help create a better workforce for the future in terms of what South Carolina needs. So this is just a big bold idea to think about in terms of how to approach this. And we still I think we still have a hydrogen station here somewhere to that's not in use that would be great to try to integrate somehow some way. There is also believe a biogas situation on campus it's I think it's also dormant at the moment but I've been pushed to work on trying to see if we can renew that. So with the energy consultant, his report is expected in late this spring, but it will basically be pulling things together and having big picture strategy about what we can do. A likely outcome of this will be that the city needs to hire someone to work on energy policy and economics full time, because I have gotten to the point where I can talk about it at this level because I've been spending the last couple of months researching this, but there doesn't seem to be enough expertise currently to be able to guide us on this. And so that might be a way that the city could help with them strategizing how to do better. So that is what the committee is working on this moment in terms of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and then we're also working on adapting to climate change. And so we're working on how to prepare for more extreme heat because as I told you at the beginning we're expected to have 60 days of extreme over extreme heat. We also know flooding is likely to be a future problem. We have not been working a lot on integrating flooding and adapting to more rainfall as part of what we're working on right now because so much was already going on. A flood water commission, or sorry, not the flood water commission with the stormwater bond, etc. And so we'd like to work with that more in the future but we decided we wanted to go where there was an efforts at the moment. So when it comes to more extreme heat, we would like to work on figuring out how to keep more citizens cool, and then also how to use heat vulnerability to guide to tree planting. So first on the help keep more citizens cool. Currently, there's only one program for helping people keep cool in the summer, and that's run by the Columbia Police Department, and it's called fan the heat they have a list of 100 seniors that they call and check on. That doesn't help everybody can we do better. And so we're just trying to figure out ways to do better and so we wrote a grant to the National League of Cities to hire a consultant we haven't heard back in terms of trying to figure out ways that we can integrate more community partners, do more education, perhaps have more community centers open just have more available to the citizens as it gets warmer. So from health perspective it's most seniors and children who are most impacted by extreme heat. And so this becomes a public health issue. And so it's an important aspect that we need to work on. When the heat vulnerability to guide tree planting. There was a paper. So I'm an academic so I found an academic paper that was published essentially where Boston had used this thing called heat vulnerability index which is kind of like a remote sense but like a census data level map that integrated health economy and a bunch of other factors, and then they overlaid it on top of where trees are planted in the city. And they were able to see that the people who needed the most help economically and health wise were also where the trees needed to be planted. And so I have found some community volunteers who are willing to start this project, but we really need help in crunching some of the data so possibly if an intern could help. Over the summer you're doing some GIS work this would really help because this will give us a way that it can help us target tree planting. Part of the flood commission and outcome of that is the governor wanted to plant a million trees over the next 10 years so there's likely to be more trees available and this would help help more citizens of the of the community. So just to pull these different ideas together that I gave you, we're working on outreach we're working on policy for energy labeling, thinking big about how to try to partner with dominion and going forward for ready for 100 keeping citizens cool and working on planting efforts. And longer term, what does this look like, we would like to take the actions that we're currently work on and develop a community action plan as it relates to climate. If you look at the climate plan that is on the CPAC website at the moment that is primarily focused on the city itself and not the community and it's not in the most accessible means for the public to be able to consume. So it's a developed community plan to engage with the public more and get their buy in. We also need to have better framework about ready for 100 and so we'd like to make more progress on that we'd like to be able to track more emissions and so having more regular greenhouse gas emissions will help. We may also need to adjust our targets on that so in terms of how we've defined the scope of ready for 100 but we'll cross that bridge on another day. And that's all I have for you. Do you have any questions for me. Thanks that to see will any questions. I guess my question is for staff, the proposed new structure for the board CPAC. Is that something that council would vote on those recommendations to move forward. And that can be answered at a later date. But I do do like the thought of bringing on particular experts to be a part of growing the board. Thank you. I think it does require a council action but we'll double check that between now and our two o'clock meeting and see. Daniel you got any additional questions. Now I just appreciate all the hard work everybody's been doing this is fantastic and you know if there's, I have a lot of resources out there so if there's anything I can connect you with with people for background or equipment or anything let me know be glad to share that. One of the other things that they said before you jumped on when we talked about the structure is, and this is thinking of subject matter experts because you do have so many connections and folks that they're looking at expanding the board and and not having it where it's district specific but you know, opening up at large membership so that we can have some subject matter experts if you know some folks who might want to, you know participate with CPAC I think that would be impactful. It sounds like you know kind of like we do with with DDRC or other committees really have a specific specific industry or or subject matter that you want to tag those new members to and we can find some folks to participate but there's a lot of talent here in South Carolina. Unfortunately they're doing a lot of business outside of South Carolina because we don't have the conditions yet but hopefully we'll get there. I think you guys one of the things that I mentioned to Dr. Z and Ms. Warren and Mayor Pat last week when we taught was having the 2021 kind of plans and goals and then that long term so I like the way that that's presented. And I think how we how we tackle those 2021, especially Clinton Robert as we are working with Ralph and others. I am hearing that there's just going to be so many opportunities with things coming down through block grants and other resources from the federal government to move forward this new administration's climate protection plans and so we need to be positioned to take advantage of that and so if we can take the goals of CPAC and of course some of the things that we already are doing internally and align those and make sure that that Ralph and Deborah can help us be in position to take advantage of any resources I think it's important. Madam Chair can we you know I would add that we thought Ralph and Deborah that we asked them if it makes sense for us to create a energy finance authority Georgia has it in the state they get a lot of money from the feds. And what they do is they go back then to, if you have an authority that is a city, you can per se borrow the money at like 1% to pursue these projects and partner with the private sector. And I mean they're doing grants up to 25 million I looked at a project in Lamar County where they were having an issue with with their landfill and they were able to put in a technology, were they able to process all their landfill and get they got back 50 years worth of life, which helped them be able not only to recycle but limit what they're putting in so you know I think we ought to utilize them and I think you're right there's going to be some opportunities we just need to make sure we're set to get that money. The South Carolina Energy Office is also pursuing a green bank and so they're working on trying to figure out what are the different opportunities within the state but they're pretty far along in terms of this investigatory process, and they see it as an avenue to fund things that wouldn't work through traditional financing as it relates to aspects like this. So I need to pick your brain more and what type of opportunities that you see, so that I can also help inform them in terms of what possibilities are there. Great. And, and the, I just lost it. It was something else. I think I was going to say. Oh, I was gonna and not I know this is for our next presentation and not necessarily put them on the spot, but john if do you have any thoughts of some of the things that Dr. Z mentioned about partnering or possibilities and exploring things with dominion. Good morning. Yeah, you know if there is an opportunity to to sit down with, I guess representatives from the committee. Absolutely we'd be willing to sit down and talk about that there's a lot of information and pricing programs that people aren't aware of that we'd be willing to share so absolutely. Awesome. Thank you. Okay, so thank you guys I don't know if any other many members want to say anything. Or Mary Pat, but feel free to say anything before we move on to the next issue. Now, going once going twice. Tamara, you want to say something. No, Dr. Z. She laid it out clearly. Okay. All right. Well, again, thank you guys. I will honestly I was suspect and I don't know what will and Daniel think we would love to do more regular updates and discussions so if we could work Erica, this is February so maybe you know every quarter. We have a full day and that keeps us, you know, holds our accountability from the council side and it really keeps us informed as to what y'all are working on and how we're progressing towards these goals. And then there may be, I would imagine, we may need a presentation to the full council we're not doing a whole lot of presentations because we're still virtual, but I do think that there's some information here that probably be that, you know, really need to have a full conversation in addition to the committee. And that PSC matter in terms of the proposal that's at the PSC right now that is fairly timely from what I can understand where it will be resolved likely in the next six months or so, if not sooner. So we need to prepare and ask to dominion sooner rather than later on having a carve out in terms of that voluntary renewable offering. All right, we'll have some conversations with John and maybe early goal to talk about kind of some of those things and best route. Okay, Chairman one last note, I had a wonderful conversation with Dr Z. I said, please share case studies, as you see them come through of what nationally, regionally or internationally so please feel free to share that with the council members. Another thing I know Dr Z we talked about you were talking about the energy office and I know that when we talked about that they were offering audits and I think Mary Pat's going to work on that when they get back to doing those things but that's one thing that we do need to look at sooner rather than later is getting partnering with them and getting an audit for us. We also we need to do audits but we also we need to do regular assessments to see how efficiency improvements are working to. And so there's a kind of like a both sort of sides to that. All right. Thank you so much. Thank you very much we appreciate you guys. You know have a great day. Right. Well, I've got three other and thank you for having us. I've got three other people with me, a gentleman named Robbie Garvin, who's out of our Charleston office. Kimberly Benton who's in the Midlands, and Mike likely or believe you believe he's also in the Midlands. They're going to take it from here but just real quickly. This is something the LED lighting is something that that city staff has asked about for many years. Our companies come up with a program that we really think will help with LED conversion. And so that's the reason we're here. So with that I'll go ahead and shoot it over to Robbie Garvin. And again thank you so much for your time. Hello. This is Robbie Garvin can y'all hear me and start off with good. Okay. I just wanted to briefly introduce myself on manager lighting services. Our department handles the entire service territory, Columbia's Charleston, Aiken area, Somerville and also Buford. So they say our department again covers all those areas. And we do have a strong presence in the Columbia with our resources there. We have Kim that works out of our contracts and have Palomar is which works the maintenance and also the new installation side. So the underlying we got also Mike Locklear and he may have had to cut out but he is a integral part of this proposal. I'm going to talk to you about as far as deployment. So he had another meeting he attend to at the last minute but I just wanted to mention that he is going to be someone that if y'all decide to do this. He will be involved with y'all a lot. I'm going to go ahead and share my screen. Excuse me if I can. I'm going to try it to you anyway. Yeah, excuse me. I don't use zoom a lot. But can y'all see the presentation. I think y'all may have a copy of it also. Yeah, we can see it. Well, until John. Thank you very much. All right. I'm going to hide this. So this is a concept that we wanted to approach you on. It is a LED to LED conversion and just want to set back to start off with to make sure that we on the same page. I might be throwing some of these acronyms around. Each ID is what we is to older technology bulbs that we use in our street lights. They may comprise of high pressure sodium metal halide mercury vapor and depends on what bulb it is what tinted you may have on that street. The LED is going to be white light and it is again the newest type of technology for the lighting and just two examples here. The bulb again is the older technology solid state LED. Just this is a bottom of a picture we have is the newer that is what we're trying to go to. Just a couple of pictures to show you the difference. Each ID is on the left hand side. LED is on the right. One thing to notice here is the shadowing. Each LED can do much better job of bending light to where you want it. Just a difference there. Also the color difference that you may see. Each ID is on the left hand side. LED is on the right. The color clarity and of course the color makes a big difference. Again LED is not a very new technology but it is starting to be more adopted. The point to introduce the concept of what we are talking about. We have heard from municipalities we have heard from a number of different customers about converting to LED. We want to move to LED also. The issue is our pricing on LED is still more expensive than the HID counterparts. Our rates based on the cost of the fixtures and also labor and anything else that is associated with that fixture to hang it. The solution that we want to present to you is to try to convert these HID to LED. The rate again is higher but we are wanting to throw in some incentives that will then take you in your case below the cost of HID. I will show you that here in just a second. Again that is the concept. Try to move you to LED without any cost to you. Just a little bit more background. The lights that we are talking about here are rate 17 municipal street lighting fixtures. The two pictures on the left and the middle are examples of that. These are what we call cobra heads. They could be on a wooden pole. They could be on a more decorative pole that is fed on the ground. But as long as it is like this and it is on rate 17 then it would fall under this concept in the center package. The ones that we are not doing is any decorative fixtures. Excuse me, any decorative fixtures we may offer to you. Those may be coming to the end of this year if need be. One other thing to mention on this is it is for existing and new lights. So if you want again all existing rate 17 lights or if you wanted to add new ones we can also add the incentives to it. I am going to throw the numbers at you here. This is everything that we know of. We are billing you for that is under rate 17. So you have 8,000 approximately 8,100 fixtures on our system that you have on the rate 17. This price of a number of different fixtures anywhere from 100 watt high pressure sodium open light. And I will show you a picture of it on up to a 400 watt high pressure sodium cobra. What we are doing is we are taking these fixtures and applying a comfortable fixture to it in the LED version. If you look at your current cost, excuse me, 99 grand that is per month. If we went to the LED based on our rates you would be at about 120. What we are offering is an incentive of 28 grand per month. So essentially your cost would be $8,000 less per month to install the new technology LED lights. With that I am going to stop just for a second to see if anybody has any questions on the spreadsheet or anything else before I move forward. Any questions guys? Could you explain what the incentive is driven from? The incentive is driven from our DSM program. That is a comfortable program where it is some funds that we collect and are able to put towards programs for energy savings and other factors. So by switching over we would have about $100,000 a year in savings. If I did quick math and that could be used to invest in new lighting. That is correct. You could use this to funnel those funds to someplace else if it can be done within your organization. Or you can use this to install new lights or if there is other technologies you want to explore on your system then you could do that. $8,300 is really just the cost savings going from the LED to the HID to the LED within the incentive. So have those funds get dispersed. How long is that incentive? Is it the life of the light or is it a one year? Good segue. I am going to go to that on the next page but if I could also I wanted to just mention this. These are the kilowatt hour savings based on the HID version, the wattage they have compared to the LED version. If you can look at annual savings here close to $4.8 million they are in kilowatt hours. So just wanted to mention that since I know you all are looking at some other factors to save energy and also climate effects. Before you move on to that slide sir, that $8,072 units street lights, what percentage is that of the total street lights in our municipality? In your municipality including yours or just ours? The Columbia, what we can affect. Let me ask it another way. So y'all have lights that y'all maintain that are not on this, that are not in rate 17 and other rates. And you do have other lights on us with, excuse me, I do not have that figure right at, excuse me, right with me. But I can get that to you and email it, that figure to you. Thank you. Okay, let me jot that down real quick here if I could. Yeah, and just to make sure that we understand that again you do have lights that y'all maintain and that those would not be in that figure. Excuse me. So as far as the incentive plan, this is to install the lights it does come with a 10 year contract. So you would be sawing and seeing your contract for the LED lights, similar to what you have already with other, with other lights in some other areas. I know there are some concerns on that, but we will work out the details if as far as it can concept is okay. The five year incentive is what we are looking at. And the reason why we are offering a five year incentive is the price of HID is going up. This past year we got hit with a 15% increase in fixture price and also our labor price is going up. And here that HID price is going up. I expect it to be about the same next year when we get those costs. Excuse me. This year last year we got hit with 15%. I'm still talking 2020. This year we expect to get about the same. And based on if we have a great hearing, those will most probably be introduced. With the HID cost rising, LED lights stand steady or coming down. But eventually that price is going to be, well it is getting closer together, but will be equal. And given that we think in five years and industry thinks at least in five years we will meet the break even point for both of those. And so an incentive to go to LED will be needed. Also given that the HID and LED are getting closer together in price. Incentives over the coming years will be lowered until they go away. I would like to mention that if you decide to pursue this contract, then the incentive amounts that we are offering here today would be in effect. And if you wanted to wait, then those incentives at the time of the contract would be in effect at that time. So any questions on that? Okay. So just some of the advantages of going to the LED. Of course the quality of light, the monthly costs, you will be saving money. There are no upfront costs to do this. It is added to a monthly cost just as we do currently. One of the biggest advantages though, when we are installing these LED lights, we are going to add what we call a communicating node to the top of that fixture. That communicating node is similar to what we have currently. A photo cell that cuts the light on and off. But this device will give us a number of other advantages for installing it. The communicating node, if the fixture starts to fail and we see less power being used than it should, or if it fails totally, it will communicate to us via a wireless transmission that the light has failed. So no longer would people have to ride out there searching for lights. Public wouldn't have to call them in. Whatever mechanism is being used currently to find lights that are not working. This device will communicate to us and we can go ahead and roll the truck. We are setting up software packages back ends at this. When it comes into the software that controls this node, it will actually pass it through right into our billing and truck rule system. So we really don't even have to touch it. The other advantage to it, if you wanted to dim or cut off that fixture in the future, we will be able to do that. We have some hurdles to get over with that, but it will be capable of doing so. Do you have a map prepared for where all these would go in? We do have a map and we have been trying to work on the spacing of the lights because it is a large area and because there are so many lights that we are trying to get it to where it is on one page, but that is difficult. But we may have to break it up into individual maps to put together. But yes, we can get you a map. Just understanding, are we talking major corridors throughout the city would be very helpful. One other quick question, Mr. Garvin. For residents that pay for rate 17 lights, like say in their backyard, is there an option for them to upgrade to this LED technology? There is an option for them to upgrade to LED, but it would not be under this scenario. This is for rate 17, which is a municipal light. They are billed under another rate and so incentives are not available to them as it is currently. But some of the fixtures that we have, they can take advantage of cost savings based on the fixture that they want. But we do have fixtures available on our rates that they can use and also other mechanisms to get LED in if they like. So customers have a choice as to what light they could put on their Cobra as a private resident and a private payer. I just want to make sure we understand the Cobra lights normally are not used on residents. They are used on street lights, but we do have what we call a backyard light, which sometimes is used on street, but it's mainly made for residents, backyards, rural areas, things like that. And we do have options for them and we have some new options coming later in this year to expand that offering. Great, thank you. So while we're talking about fixtures, good segue again. This is just an example of what we have. The upper fixture is what we call a Cobra head and that is a street light fixture, normally street light. People can use them in parking lots and so forth, but it's normally used on street light. The bottom fixture is the same fixture, just an LED fixture. If you notice the lumens are less for the LED, that is industry wide. Because of the way it can bend light and the clarity of the light, you use about 50 to 60% of the light output of a normal HID fixture. One thing to also notice is this is a roadway pattern, which is what this light produces. So this roadway pattern, again, the pole would be in the middle and the light is spread out to the road and down the road. One of the other things that y'all have, go ahead, I'm sorry. I was just going to ask, you know, one of the things that we had several areas throughout the years where we've upgraded the light at the request of neighborhoods to create more lighting, you know, brighter, not having to replace and add more lights, but just replace the bulb for a higher watt bulb. Is there capability with the LED to have it in areas that need a wider and brighter illumination? That is correct. And again, you can use, you can put up new lights or you can go to a different wattage. So what we have currently, we have the 72 watt, 108 and a 216. So if you wanted to go from a 72 watt to 108, that can be done or you can step it all the way up. We do have one of a fixture that has a, that is a lot of lumens. We try not to use it unless the customer really feels that it is necessary because it is a lot of light. What we recommend though is that you look at what a comparable fixture is and then if it needs to be changed over, we can do so. And we can do so after the fact and make adjustments to the incentives. Thank you. So one of the other things that we mentioned is the backyard light. This is a backyard private light NEMA. There's a number of different terminology for it, but this is normally what that light looks like. This is our LED equivalent light here. This, these lights do say pattern similar to this sort of poles in the middle circular pattern. So you get a lot of for roadways, you get a lot of pollution into a private property. And also you are using, losing, excuse me, some of the light on the roadway. What we are recommending is go from this, these open lights to an LED roadway light and use the pattern that you see here. So it throws it to the road where you, where you're paying for it. The other advantage to that is if you notice the refractor on these lights, this does have some dark sky issues, let's say. There is some up light to it. These are all a cut off fixture. So the light is thrown to the road. So it's thrown all the way down. The other disadvantage of using these on roads is, especially when it's raining and especially when you start getting old and like I am, these refractors are somewhat blinding because of the way they are made and what they are made for. Again, they were made for back yard normally, but we have been using them for roads. This would solve that issue. Again, the light goes down so it does not have that effect on you. Just a couple of things of why we use this light. It was a, it was a light that was always in our storeroom. People were comfortable with it. They knew what it did and it was installed. Most of the time by recommendations of our technical staff. Whereas we would have normally gone to this where we didn't have a fixture that may have suited the need. With the LED, we do have those pictures now and we can suit y'all's needs almost every case. Mr. Garvin, can I ask a few questions real quick? What are the misspals you are using this LED light? Are you using it currently? Currently using it and enjoying it. Well, let me say that we don't have a lot of municipalities that are using it widely right now. But mainly because we have tried to hold them off because we knew this was coming and we had to get it approved by the PSC. The outside of our service territory though is it is used in a lot of, with a lot of utilities. The neighboring utility here, Berkeley uses it a lot. If you go through Georgetown, they have done a major conversion. Myrtle Beach has done a major conversion. Different types of, different manufacturers, let's say, but all of them are used in this type of what they call an Audubon series light that throws the light down. Gotcha, you mentioned manufacturers. Are they manufactured in America? There are some pictures that are manufactured in America and some that are manufactured in Mexico. It depends on where we get that version from. So it is a spectrum of them. Councilman Burnett, this is Robert. I also want to say that we're using LED lights in the Inavista area as part of our private lighting that we own. Is that decorative lighting or is that the Cobra? That is decorative lighting. So where we now, we are getting contracts now. As I stated, we don't have, we've been trying to get these contracts after the PSC approved our proposal. We started getting contracts and we have a number of utilities, excuse me, a number of cities that have taken advantage of this. We are starting full deployment. Hopefully the end first of this, end of this month, first of March. And, but we do have a, because we do have a number of municipalities have taken up, taken this up on this. It may take some time to get to you. We are trying to deploy all our crews accordingly and trying to spread them out as much as possible. But also take, try to do it smartly to where we not jumping around from, you know, driving from one city to another. And also try to keep the materials where they are needed. So if you were to sign today, it still may be a number of months to get to you. We have crews coming online. We are going to be hiring new crews to do this as a, as a, just a proposal type contract. Not our normal, but they are normal contractors that we use on our system. So they are familiar with us, but they're going to have new crews set up. So we're not going to be taking resources from our normal work. So again, we're going to start hopefully here in the near future, but it may take some time to get to you. So what we think is the next step is we can get you a contract. If you want to look at it, see if there are any comments on it, or if you want to move forward. If you want to start identifying any streets or lights that you know you want to add or change, then we can do that. Again, we recommend to go ahead and do a one-to-one change out. And then if it needs to be increased or new added, then we do it at that time. We did, we have done a few pilots and we've tried a different scenarios. And the latter, what we're recommending was definitely the best choice because in a number of situations where they thought they needed extra light, they did not. Because of the way that LED bends the light, they were pleased after we went ahead and put them up. But again, if you want to make changes, we welcome that. And Mike again would be the man on the ground. He would be communicating with you as far as where we are, how many we've installed. If you want to look at them at night, then you can communicate back to Mike and let him know your wishes. So with that, I just want to close and see if you have any more comments, any more questions. And I'll be glad to try to field them. I do just on the decorative lighting that you kept mentioning be available later this year. When later this year. Are you thinking and if that is, if there are areas that decorative lighting makes more sense. Would that be part of the original contract if we went forward. So the decorative lighting, I'm going to go back to that slide if I could please. There's a number of different fixtures that we have as far as decorative lighting. And again, this would be the ones that you have where you are paying for our lighting service. This is one type of traditional that's a number of other types that we have that may we may have throughout your city or you can move to. So we are trying to one of the things that we do not have currently for those decades is a published rate. And the reason for that is the LED version of the decorative fixtures has been has been changing a lot over the years and also within a month. So I have a meeting tomorrow to go with our vendor and they have different pricing for those decorative fixtures. The cobra heads go ahead. I'm sorry, Mr. Vine. If I can also weigh in on that. A lot of the decorative lights are on main thoroughfares are actually owned by us. I'm not taking any with me away from Dominion. But years ago we actually found out their decorative light lease rate was fairly expensive. So we actually found it better and more cost efficient for the city to own those lights. I think from a staff perspective that we would like to see maybe the savings from if if council was to go with this program. We would like to see the savings of the monthly bill be put into account for us to turn and switch our main thoroughfares over to the LED lightings where we have decorative lights such as main street to not road. We can name several lighting projects that we have that we truly and I think we own about 2700 Decorate lights are so perfect. Robert that was my question because I was just thinking I know that a lot of the thoroughfares especially where we've done streetscaping. We've got decorative lighting out. I was just wondering so probably the vast majority that we own those not Dominion owns any of the ones that we'd be interested in replacing. Correct. Unless they would come up with a very very good rate. I know John's hearing me something. Well and that's you know as I said the LED version of our decorative lights are coming down and that's why we have not had published rates with this meeting tomorrow. We may decide to go and push those out and that's why it's sort of conditional if we will do it or not. We don't want to introduce rates and then the rates and I've talked to other utilities that have set rates for their fixtures. And then they didn't want to go back to the PSC or their governing body and change them because of just you know the process. But the LED they had they were not able to take advantages in newer technologies and wattages because they were stuck with the rate. So that's why we did not do that with the decoratives. The Cobra heads they leveled off fairly quickly. I think because of the number of fixtures that the manufacturers were were were manufacturing that the price came down fairly quickly and leveled off. So that's why I felt comfortable in setting those. But again if we set the rates for the LED it will be hopefully at a very good price. I will say this fixture right here that we have this traditional it is it is the same or a little bit lower than the HID version. And I know that we are working with some large subdivisions in y'all's areas now to convert them over. And I believe that y'all have some of some of these lights in that y'all are paying for in those subdivisions. So that's something that we can offer to y'all hopefully here in the near future to convert over. Mr. Garvin. Yes. This is Teresa. I'm sorry I had to join late today and Robert may know the answer to this because I'm always bothering him about it. The interstate entrance and exit ramps particularly coming into Columbia onto Elmwood and then access in 26. What type lights are those our responsibility if we want to do this program or how and you I may have already answered this. But they tend to it to me it's a little darker than I would like. And sometimes they're out a lot. Robert do you know what I'm talking about? Yes ma'am and their DOT lights and I think it was a conversion program through Dominion. And I think what's interesting about this is the lights go out as the whole circuit goes out generally not just one light. So I've seen DOT out there I believe they're their lights correct me if I'm wrong John but I think they're their lights. And I've seen them working on the wires on them about a couple months ago. So I wondered if they didn't have a squirrel getting in their lighting system somewhere. What happens pretty often so I was just curious if that was something we if we decide those routes but it's not really our responsibility it sounds like. Yeah that's not I would like to point out that from and I think Robbie you mentioned this early on the node that sits on top the light. That is going to notify you in the lights out currently we either get that through a council sending me a text or something that there's a light out. Somebody writing around it calls me Mr Brandon I need to get a kick into that somebody calling or driving around. Or the police department actually drives around at night and gets the poll numbers and sends a big long spreadsheet. I do think the node on these will allow for these lights to be replaced a little bit quicker would I be correct Robbie. That would be what our goal is is we try to replace every light within three we were we tried to replace at least 85% of all lights within three days and 99% 100% within 10. Sometimes because of the issues whether it may be manpower or other situations that does not happen. But that is our goal the with this that's going to cut out hopefully a day or two from getting delight that is turned on. What we went through some training on the software yesterday and it will if it it pulls that that node about every four hours. So if it starts acting up whether it be that it automatically cuts on during the day and it burns all the time to it would store the data from night and report it doing when we come in in the morning. And we can go ahead and get that in the system or find out the reason why it is in the system because again we are working on back office to automatically get that to the truck but us even touching it. So yes we hope to take a day two days out of the process of people turning those lights in and then get the lights back on as quickly as possible. Here I want to have one last question. Sure. That's all right. Mr. Garvin. If you go back to those numbers. Thank you so much for pulling that those numbers together. The proposal for to take it ahead to counsel and staff to present just that. Do those numbers stay consistent. Depending if we still if we use American made fixtures if they respect those numbers going to stay the same. The if it is an American made fixture then I would have to resource it. Again it depends on what picture there is being produced that comes from and from my understanding that fixture could come from let's say that 72 watt fixture it could come from Mexico it could come from Georgia. So it depends on where the stock is at that time. But if it's if it's one that is made just in Mexico I'd have to resource it and numbers would change because of the costs. The pricing that we get from this manufacturer that we've been with with over 20 years that we are not we are going to we would lose that pricing advantage. And the fixtures are going to go up higher. So the number here would go up because it has to introduce a new rate. And again it would take a while to do that. And the incentive it depends on what incentive we could offer with that. So as far as the American made incentive right. You can trade that. I don't. I don't know the spectrum of where fixtures are made by all of the man. Yeah, we get ours from American Electric. And they are based out of Georgia. And he also have offices there in Columbia. You also have. Okay. Is there any more questions. No ma'am thank you very much. I think probably miss divine. I would say they probably make sense for them to send us a copy of the contract to have legal review before we present the council with a recommendation. Council and recommend it's already been vetted by council are vetted by legal review. We've had that done for about a month or so. So we already have the contract vetted and need to go council proceeds, which is to proceed. So miss Wilson, what, what would be your pleasure is this for addition to executive sessions so that council can have a discussion on it and then potentially come back out. What, what, what do you want to do. Well, we would have to it wouldn't come to council miss divine until you know your next meeting potentially, but we can. I guess it needs to come out of committee though, I guess you all could report it out of committee today, just as far as what you discussed and what we learned and just say that staff has an under advisement and legal, you know, any further legal review. And, you know, if you all feel good about it, I don't know that it needs to come to the full council again before you what we would put it on the agenda. But you put it on as a discussion and action item I guess is what I'm saying and at our next council meeting and you can report it out today if you like. Hi. All right. Yeah, I was taking that I was planning to make the report out today and then we'll see if council has any additional questions, but it would need, you know, count staff input. Right. If they do today and, you know, we need to give it a, you know, two more council meetings did that through the process or answer any questions the full council has we can. But I think between, you know, me talking through it a little bit more with Robert, we should be in good shape. All right, thank you. All right, well, thank you guys. We appreciate the presentation. Great information and we will be in touch. And in the next week or next two weeks or so, we, we meet every two weeks. So if it's next council meeting, you'll hear from us, or the following one. Great. Thank you for your time. Thank you very much. All right, that's all we had on our agenda. Mr. Rickman, Mr. Brennan, is there anything additional that you guys have for today? No, ma'am. All right, well, then I think our meeting is adjourned. We will report report out this afternoon to the full council. And then if there's any other items that we need will will get those referred to the committee but if nothing else, you guys have a great day and we'll see you at a full council meeting at two o'clock. Sounds good. Thank you.