 This is our September meeting. We have not met for a long time. We had a wonderful social event in August that I can talk about in a moment. But just want to welcome you. We're going to do public forum. We are a bit behind on our agenda. And food has just arrived. So folks will be maybe getting up and getting food as we move through some of our items. So first, if we can, whenever we can get the slides, is awesome. And maybe while we're waiting for slides, I'll give a little recap of our social event in August. We were in Callahan Park on, was that August 11th? It was about a month ago. And we had a bunch of folks come through. I think 100 hamburgers and hot dogs were served. And Fareed provided a beautiful meal for everyone. Thank you, Fareed, for tonight and all other nights on which you feed the people. And one of the activities we did at our social event, in addition to hanging out and talking to each other and enjoying a beautiful day, was we had a little poster up where folks could say, this is what I'd like to see in the South End. And we heard a lot. I have a whole list here. And we'll post that on the NPA website when we're done here. So you can all take a nice, long look at what your neighbors want to see in our neighborhood. And maybe we can think about how to do some of that stuff. People want more green spaces, safer streets that are easier to walk and bike on, that people are not driving so fast on, that are better for buses. We want more affordable housing and mental health support. We want energy that is renewable and small scale. We want a lot of more people playing together. There was a pitch for a pickleball league, more free food, which we have some of tonight. And other questions about how we collectively decide how to spend our city's money and our city's resources. And people had a long list of social event suggestions like community dinners and clothing swaps and walking clubs. So if that excites you, thank you for continuing to participate in the NPA and keep talking to your neighbors about all of these things. And we'll put the list online. So is it helpful for you to promote me to presenter and then I can share the slides from here? OK, great. I'm just laying out over there. I think I'm the only one who's not a presenter. The audio was super fast. OK, all right. I see it back there. You see? Your slide, you have them on. It's not playing, you share it. Yeah. Do you want to talk a little bit about public forum while I figure this out? Sure. Yeah, so we're going to start public forum in about one minute. Usually we have a little visual aid for this section that we're just doing. So we're waiting to bring that up by having some trouble. We usually like to talk about what are our guiding principles. So we try to provide a safe space, try to make this meeting accessible to anyone who would be interested in joining and respect all the differences that we all have culturally, economically. And we just try to make it fun. A lot of that, for me, helps us make it more fun and interesting and satisfying by bringing food in. And the final thing was we don't endorse any political candidates in this group. So we're nonpartisan body. So OK, the public forum. Well, this kind of jump to the public forum. Eventually we'll put up the agenda to share as we're moving through the other items. We have a couple of other topics tonight. During this public forum part, if you have anything to bring up, we just ask that you give your first and last name, whether you live in Moor 5 or what street if you like. And if you're speaking on behalf of some kind of organization, just let us know so that we can make a note of it. And I don't know if anybody has anything long running, but we try to keep these two under four minutes. We'll let you know if it's going after three. So does anybody have any thing they wanted to bring up for the public forum? Yes, I do. We have something online to get to. Lucia, too. Cool. Let Lucia go first. Hey, you have the floor's menu, the two. Lucia. Awesome. But now I'm going to stay on because I want to hear what Andy has to say, too. Hi, everyone. My name is Lucia Campriolo. It's so nice to see you all. It's been a little while and I was not able to get to the socials and other fun activities this summer, so I have missed seeing you all. I live down in the south end on the corner of Pine and Lyman. And I am a parent to two young kiddos who attend Champlain Elementary School. And we are fully up and running in the back to school swing of things. And I am also your Ward 5 school commissioner representing you all on the school board in Burlington. And so it's with that hat on that I wanted to pop on and say hello and just mention that if you hadn't seen Superintendent Flanagan's most recent community update, which he typically shares within the school community and then more broadly via Front Porch Forum, it was issued to Front Porch Forum on Monday the 18th. And the conversation in that community update was to provide folks with a project update on BHSBTC and to let folks know that the school board would be voting on the guaranteed maximum price for the project on Tuesday, which we did. And the guaranteed map, the long short of it, and there's a lot more content online and on the BSD website, which is BSDVT.org. And I think I dropped that link in the Q&A as well for your minutes. But the long short is that while the price did increase over the last handful of months due to lots of expected circumstances that we've been preparing ourselves for, including supply and demand, shortage of workforce, materials, et cetera, we have been able to do some light value engineering to ensure that the quality of the building will be the high quality building that we have committed to the community while not changing any detail specific to the amount of the bond that was overwhelmingly supported by Berlin Tonians in March of 2022. So again, the punchline is there's a ton of information on the BSDVT.org website. I'd love for you to check that out. And the punchline is that we are within our budget and bond approval that folks approved last March. So if there are questions, I would encourage folks to please contact me directly, which you can do via email or phone. My email is a little bit long, but I will say it in case anyone goes to the videotape. And it's also on the BSD website, but it's L. And then my last name, Cambriello, cambriello.org. At BSDVT.org. I just want to welcome you. We are a bit behind on our agenda. And Ceboud has just arrived. So we're going to be getting on the get-go. I've got to be watching you. So we're still in the room having some technical. We did hear what you were saying, Lucia. We're having some technical trouble there. Are we watching the YouTube feed in another tab? We're not one of these people. I'll give a little recap of our social media. They said it's bad as the word, seven. There's a crime we know of. It rolls the crown, man. It's bad on you. Oh, there's another one down in the bottom. That's open. A bunch of folks down through. They're making burgers and hot dogs. And Cambriello's provided a beautiful meal for him. Thank you. Thank you. I'm sorry, but we're going to watch a movie now. It's not as bad as the word, four, seven in VA was the zoom bomb. We actually figured it out. I felt pretty good about this. Thanks. Work, everyone. All right. I know you don't know what we're talking about, but we're having a, the beginning of our meeting started to play in here a little bit to go over at the end of what you were saying, Lucia, so many lives. I thought y'all were giving me a bus up. We all would get off the stage and talk to each other. No, we started to not be able to hear you very well. It's us, not you, and we promise. And everyone online was probably totally fine, but. Oh my gosh. Yeah, we're having trouble. OK, other folks? Thank you for highlighting the high school project details. We did hear that. Other folks, Andy and then Jack? Yeah. Hello, my name is Andy Simon. I represent the Friends of the Barge Canal, a volunteer group, nonprofit that is focused on conserving and protecting and educating about Pine Street Barge Canal, which is just down the street from here. One of the things that we've done over the last two years is organize people to clean up the Barge Canal, mostly consisting of cleaning up old encampments from unhoused people who have moved on and found other places to live or, for one reason or another, have left and left a lot of things behind. We're doing another one of those cleanups in cooperation with the local synagogues. As part of the High Holiday Celebration, we're meeting on Sunday, this Sunday, September 24th, at 10 o'clock to have a brief ceremony to celebrate what is called normally Poshlich, which is a ceremony during the High Holidays. But what we're really doing there and what we did last year very effectively is clean up the Barge Canal for a couple of hours. Everybody is welcome to come. It's 10 o'clock on the 24th Sunday. We'll meet at 453 Pine Street, which is directly across from dealer.com and directly on the other side of this giant walk bike shared use path that they're currently digging up and paving. But we'll still be there at 10 o'clock in the morning or slightly before. And please come down. We're only going to work for a couple hours. Bring a long pant, wear a long pants, long sleeve shirt. It's not a totally friendly environment. There's poison ivy, and there's mosquitoes, and there's all sorts of sharp things and pokies and stuff. But it really responds to the love that people have been giving it over the last two years. So please come down Sunday, September 24th, 10 o'clock and help us clean up. My name is Jack Tiano. I live on St. Paul Street. There's mainly one big announcement. I have a little poster that I brought. But basically, what's on here? So tomorrow, actually, from 4 to 8 PM, a group called Vermonters for People-Oriented Places that I am involved with. Daisy is involved with too. A lot of people are involved with this. It's where we advocate for housing in transit and walkable and bikeable cities. And the point is there's a party tomorrow, block party downtown St. Paul Street next to City Hall Park, where we're going to be celebrating World Car Free Day. It's a day to celebrate alternative forms of transportation and thinking about a more human-scale city. So we're going to have vendors. There's going to be street performers. There's going to be street art. There's going to be food vendors. The whole street will be closed to cars and open to people. It's going to be a good time. And I hope that there's also, if you're interested, there's a car-free scavenger hunt that's live right now. You can come to our table and participate tomorrow. But if you're on Instagram, you can visit our Instagram page, which is VPOP802. And there's tasks and activities to do on the scavenger hunt. And the more you complete, the more entries you get in a raffle. We have prizes from the Lake Monsters, Vermont Green FC. We have Ski Rack, who's donated some prizes. So there's some cool and some house plans. There's some really cool prizes donated by local businesses, sports teams, residents. And we're really just trying to build up a block party vibe to celebrate World Car Free Day. So bring your friends, bring a chair, hang out with us, talk with us about alternative transportation and what if people are into Burlington and can look like in the future. And that's it. Hope to see you tomorrow. St. Paul Street, City Hall Park, 4 to 8 PM. Awesome. Other public fora? Yes, go ahead. My name is James Ballady. I'm new to the neighborhood. And I just want to say it's a lovely neighborhood. And you have an awesome park, Oatlich Park. And I noticed the city is doing some renovation there. And I just want to say that the people, the local people who use the park, they keep it nice and neat, trash in, bring it back, bring it home. And just a reminder to the people to take advantage of that lovely nature area. Thank you. Lovely neighborhood. Thank you. Welcome. Glad you're here and love the appreciation for our beautiful green spaces. All right. Given that we are astonishingly behind schedule, I'm going to say. I've been through this slide that you had up really fast, but you probably did introduce myself. I'm Toderi, ward 5 steering committee member. I'm on Ferguson Ave. I probably should have done that a half an hour ago. Thanks to everybody for joining tonight. And I'm Laina, they're the pronouns. I'm also a ward 5 steering committee member. And in absentia are Roger and Terry and Jason and Fareed. Fareed is here. Hi, I'm Fareed Monarcha. I live on Lejmere Street. It's not too late to come here and get some free food. We have vegan chowder with jackfruit and root veggies. It's really good. And some deep fried tapioca crackers. We also have two go containers so you can take some home. Thank you, Fareed. You're keeping things functioning even when the sound doesn't work and the table's falling apart. I'm sorry we didn't fix that table yet. It's only been three months. All manner of things are happening. And just I think folks know this, but we've got a website that's both the NPA website and the Burlington NPA website. We don't have Sam, but we have Scott today helping us with tech. And thank goodness for CCTV keeping us accountable for folks who are not in the room with us. I think we maybe still don't know how to use Zoom if today is any evidence, but you can raise your hand, you can mute and unmute. What else do we have in here? And here's our agenda. So we did a lengthy welcome and tech troubleshooting. We've gotten through a public forum. We're gonna get a quick update in a moment on community development. Community development block grants, that is a mouthful. We're gonna hear from some Ward 5 residents who have had bad experiences with fires. And then we're gonna talk about the proposed expansion of the McNeil Generating Station with time for questions at the end and discussion. So with that, I will hand it over to, I'm sorry, I don't know if your name is pronounced Ilona or Ilana, but feel free to unmute and give us your update. So you got one of the two, so great. Sorry, I'm not there to eat your food free. It sounds really great. I'm unfortunately getting over something, so not able to join you. I guess I'll try to keep this pretty short. I know there's been a lot going on tonight. So the CityBG or Community Development Block Grants are funding that the city receives from the federal government and is allocated to meet the city's economic development priorities that tend to be focused on the greatest needs of the community, especially in terms of those who need it most. So, especially focused on helping people to leave poverty or address needs that they may have while in poverty and other priorities that the city has identified that is within an action plan that is approved by HUD or Housing and Urban Development. So I was appointed to a term for two years to serve on a committee that advises the city on allocation and the actual allocation is, I think it's recommended by the mayor, made by the council, but then approved by HUD and generally the committee's recommendation and it's actually a fairly unique process has been respected year over year. So, and that was the case this year. I'm at the end of my term. So if anyone is interested in serving on the committee, I strongly recommend that you apply to the word five NPA to serve on the committee. It's a two-year term. It's a very, I would say it's a really important commitment that is very time-consuming for about three months, but then you don't need to meet for the rest of the year. So you meet about once a month and in the interim, you have a lot of applications to read and score. But you learn a lot about social service organizations that serve the Burlington community and also how little money there is to serve them so or to help them achieve their mission. So this year was no exception. We had a fairly limited funding less than last year because there was not also COVID funding to supplement the funds, but we and we received many very impressive applications. And so the committee ended up focusing on a few areas in terms of our funding recommendations. I would say probably the most significant one was housing and helping people to move out of homelessness and into semi-permanent or permanent housing situations. So two organizations that we funded with respect to that were Pathways Housing First Program and then COTS, which was renovation of permanent housing that they own and maintain. Another recommendation was to fund a new reentry recovery program. Unfortunately, I don't have the name in front of me, but that is a brand new program that has seen incredible success in helping people that are re-entering society after being incarcerated and assisting them in many, many needs that they have during that time period. There was also a recommendation to fund Save Tonight, which serves victims of domestic violence. Can't read my writing here. Oh, so this program may sound strange. It's actually assistance in filing income taxes and it actually helps people obtain their earned income credits and it has just an incredible return on the investment. Lund's early education children's program was funded again and then for the first time, the Winnieskee, or at least in recent history, the Winnieskee Valley Park District applied for funding and this was a bit of an anomaly. This was more focused on preserving the identity of Burlington and a community resource. So the Winnieskee Valley Park District obviously serves many, many different programs and many members of the community and they requested funding for renovation of one of their key buildings. And then the last group of organizations to be funded were all focused on workforce training and or micro-businesses. So CVOEO has a micro-business program and working and so they're working very much with very, very, very small businesses and have a lot of support, especially for those who have not had business experience at all and maybe new Americans. And then resource has a workforce training program that is tied to weatherization and then Mercy Connections also receive funding for a different micro-business training program which is a completely different model also working with many different very small businesses and an emphasis on new Americans. So those were the funding allocations that were made and passed along. It's a really educational process and I would recommend the experience to anyone who's interested. So thank you and thank you for the opportunity to serve you in this. Thank you. Any questions or thoughts about any of that? So when would the next session, we said that maybe a three month of a strong commitment and it's really two years. When are they kind of thinking of convening? Did you hear anything about that? I didn't hear anything about that but I feel like it starts in January and it runs through March. Yeah, okay, thank you. So and I would reach out to Christine and Cito. Okay. And I can also ask her to reach out to you. I will just make sure that we do a little election or whatever for in another month or so. Maybe next month, set that up. Intervention, how much money the grants allocate each year? I don't think it's that. Yeah, so there's actually two types of grants and one is called, they both, you can receive funding for public service in both of them, but one of them is called the public service one and I think the other one is called the capital one. And so just to give you a sense, Pathways received 35, 30,000, excuse me, which was the housing first services in Chittenden County. Hots renovation of St. John's Hall received 75,650. So the total allocation that we had for the non-capital was about 110,000. So the allocations that we recommended for that group range between 5,000 and 30,000. Thank you so, yeah. Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. All right, is Lenora here? So she was here, but she hasn't been feeling well. She just apologized that she couldn't stay and sounded like she just needed to go get rest and she just hasn't been feeling well. So she apologized and she told me I got the permission from her to just talk about her story and also the other neighbor that I was hoping would be able to join us tonight had to work, his name is Lamba. So if you know, I'm just gonna talk about why I think this is important for us to know about to become aware and also maybe possibly like come up with ways to help our neighbors address this. So my name is Fareed. I volunteer for the People's Kitchen. We do a weekly food distribution in the South Meadow neighborhood. And in around November, 2022, there was a fire in one of the building complexes. It was an eight unit building. So eight families were affected by the fire. They were displaced and usually we would like serve them like bring some fresh veggies and also other food stuff and groceries. So we kind of stayed in touch with a few of the families and so this was in November, 2022. And they were told to do the first month after the fire, everything was great. They were able to be placed in temporary housing and there was some assistance from the Red Cross and I think the insurance also covered some of the rent for them, but now it's almost November again and they're still not being housed back in a permanent housing. I think the first family is actually about to be moved back to where they were living before. And in the meantime, we've lost touch with at least two families and we are still in touch with another two families and they were deeply in debt like the whole incident just like put and these are folks who are like already struggling living in South Meadow and Baird neighborhood. So and last time I spoke to these families, they were thousands of dollars in debt trying to keep up after the fire. At least they had to be moved, some of them actually had to be moved to Colchester. So then transportation and to work and to school becomes a big burden. And so in the meantime, also in February, there was another incident of fire this time on the St. Paul. I think it's 567 St. Paul, the old observatory building where there's 11 units there and Lenora who was here earlier today, she was displaced along with her fellow tenants. And they put her in a hotel temporarily and for the first month because the city has an ordinance, then the landlord had to cover like the cost of the temporary housing but because she was placed in South Burlington pretty far away and she works at the road remark here so she had to and she doesn't drive so she had to like pay for Uber to get to and from work which adds up after a while. So even though the first month of her stay in the hotel was covered by the city by really by the landlord, the subsequent months were not. And so the ordinance that we have isn't really clear. They don't really say what happens after that first month if the landlord still hasn't been able to find the permanent housing for the displaced tenants. So Lenora has been paying thousands of dollars now in hotel fees in addition to transportation and she also has like some health issues as a result of the fire. So at this point like I have seen basically what I see is like a pattern of people who could least afford to be paying all this extra because they were displaced through no fault of their own and our neighbors who are struggling the most are not really getting like the help from like the authorities. The landlords, even though the ordinance has requires them to cover this cost, they're able to not to get away with basically to get away from doing the right thing which is either pregnant temporary or a pregnant permanent housing or cover the housing costs until the building is renovated. So Lenora's displacement was around February and now we are in September. So she's been paying out of pocket for since March, since the end of March and she really cannot afford that she's on fixed income and this is the similar stories with the families that we have from like the November fire. When I talk to them, they're drowning in that. Most of them work three, two, three jobs. So they don't really have the time to even like let people know. Lenora just happens to be very persistent. She doesn't give up. So that's how like I know of her story but the other tenants in her building they're to taken up with trying to survive to then talk to a reporter or something or even come to the NPA. So I think it's something that we should be aware of that we have neighbors who are struggling because of this disasters and they're not really getting the help that they need. And also I think as a community we need to hold the landlords accountable and also like the city departments who are supposed to be holding them accountable. The ordinance that we have actually to give the city the power to put a lien on property of these landlords. And but I keep checking the database that you can actually find a property has a lien placed on them. And that hasn't happened yet. So there is no like good way for the city to like to force the landlords to do the right thing. So and as far as like other neighbors who wants to help, like we are thinking of actually coming up with like some sort of fundraiser for both like landlords, like fellow tenants on the St. Paul and also the South Meadow fire like family. So if you're interested in helping out it would be great. And you can let me know if my email is for read at workerscenter.org and 802-272-8339 is my phone number. I think we could probably it would be really appreciated by the families. I don't think we could cover like all the how deep they are in debt. But you know, like winter is coming, we could get like some blankets and warm clothes for the kids. That would be great. And whatever money we could raise, we could help Lenora like pay off some of her debt and also the other families with their basic needs. So thank you very much. Thanks, Reed. Appreciate you're giving that update. Yeah, I was chatting with Lenora earlier and she was saying that it would be helpful for folks to like call the city and let them know that we're concerned. So we can put some tips for doing that, making that phone call in our notes. I believe unless other folks have thoughts or questions about this situation, okay, that we're gonna move to the discussion of the McNeil Generating Station. Someone from BED here, is it you? Yeah, Betsy and I are both here. Unfortunately, Darren, who's a general manager of BED is at the Ordnance Committee meeting, which he said is wrapping up soon. So if there's, if there are folks that wanna go first, I think Darren, he said he's on his way, but he told, for the record, I did send Jason and Joseph Darren's presentation, which I assume is, speak of the devil, which maybe we can get uploaded now. Do you wanna send it to me? Cause, oh, great, absolutely. Put it on our website if you want. So these things that have presentations, I tried to post them on our mda5.org website and you should be able to pretty quickly go to events and then get to the doc if you wanna review it yourself or just watch it when we present it here. Is that working? I'm just, oh, doc. Oh, you use the email version? Okay. Hi, welcome. Hi, how are you? I hear you're meeting hopping. I am, I was at Zoom meeting for the Ordnance Committee that just ended, about two and a half hours on Zoom, so. Wow. Got to just walk over through some of the construction and here we are. All right, hardcore. Well, glad you're here. I'm Lena. Hi, Darren. Ward 5 Steering Committee and I, we've had some exciting technical difficulties, so I'm gonna do the slides. Excellent. Thank you. Let's see. Okay, it doesn't quite look perfect. I can try to download it and open it the right way if you'd rather I have it in a different format. No, that seems good if folks can see. Okay, sounds good. I'll be able to run through them that way. Thanks so much for holding some time for us. Darren Springer, General Manager at Burlington Electric, joined by my colleagues, Jen Green, Sustainability Director, Betsy Lesnikowski, Chief Forester at the McNeil Station. And we're going around to the MPAs right now talking about the concept of district energy and how it might work for us in Burlington ahead of any work that we would try to bring on the project to the city council in the future. And so if we can go to the next slide, I think it's really just kind of a introduction for folks who may not be familiar and I know a lot of folks are, Burlington Electric. We're the public municipal utility for the city of Burlington. We provide electricity for the entire city and then also at the airport. We're the third largest municipal, third largest utility in the state of Vermont. 100% renewable since 2014. And I put a link here for our website, burlingtonelectric.com slash McNeil. We have a number of different resources, Q&A documents, webinar recordings, different things that you can check out there to learn more about this project and the McNeil plant just generally. So next slide, please. So really what is our focus? Why are we talking about this? What are we doing is really related to this net zero energy roadmap that we commissioned back in 2018, 2019 with the idea that if we're 100% renewable with our electricity, can we take that accomplishment into the thermal sectors for heating into the ground transportation sector and reduce and eventually eliminate fossil fuel use in those sectors. We've been tracking that annually. So we have data through 2022. And this is the natural gas use in Burlington, residential and commercial. And what you can see with the commercial sector in particular is we have a bit of a rebound in emissions. We were kind of trending down over the first couple of years. And in the transportation sector, we're actually lower than the dotted line, which is the pace of reduction that we need for the 2030 goal. As you can see with the commercial natural gas, to some extent residential as well, but really commercial, you're seeing a divergence there. And that's part of what's driving our focus on district heat. Next slide, please. This is the total emissions when you count both thermal and ground transportation. You see we kind of came down between 2018 and 2019 and into the pandemic. And then we kind of flatlined overall, but to the extent you're seeing that curve kind of going upward, a lot of that is really commercial sector natural gas use. Next slide, please. So the McNeil plant, there's a lot of conversation in the community about the McNeil plant. In the 1980s, McNeil was permitted with the idea that it could provide district energy, not just electricity, but also provide heating thermal energy to the university, to the medical center. At McNeil, Betsy and her team, we have four licensed professional foresters work to make sure that as we're procuring wood for the plant that it's being done in a sustainable way. What the chart there shows, and it's a little hard to see, so I'll just kind of state it. In 2022, 88.4% of our wood came from wood chips that are really residues, essentially leftover wood from harvesting for higher value wood products, things like saw logs or for furniture, timber. Somebody's going into the woods, they're gonna harvest, they're gonna have leftover residue. We're able to take that and have it as wood chips for energy use at McNeil. Another roughly 10% came from sawmill residue and other mill residue. So again, that's kind of a wood residue that's left over from processing at sawmills. 1.6% from our wastewood yard, if anybody's ever delivered untreated wood to our wastewood yard, we're able to take that and use it so it doesn't go into a landfill. And then 0.3% of our wood in 2022 comes from what's called round wood, which is a lower value wood that is harvested during those operations. If you ever see a picture of McNeil's wood yard and you see what looks like a log as opposed to chips, that's gonna be probably the round wood. We keep that on site for fuel security. In the month season, it's kind of hard to get out sometimes into the woods and get fuel. So we keep a very limited amount of round wood on site that can be used during those times of the year. But 0.3% of our wood in 2022 was round wood. From a climate standpoint, there's different ways you can look at the climate profile of a plant like McNeil. The kind of the language here on the slide is basically indicating from the IPCC that fossil fuels, coal, oil, and gas are the largest contributor by far to global climate change anthropogenic emissions, emissions caused by humans. In terms of the IPCC, they say you look at the emissions from wood when you harvest the tree. You look at it in the land use sector, not at the stack. But there's different ways to cut it. If you look at it that way, we did a third party analysis that says that in the areas where McNeil harvests in upstate New York and Vermont between 2007 and 2020, over 24 million tons of CO2 storage was added in live trees net. So we aren't losing carbon. We aren't even holding steady. We actually gained carbon storage in the areas where we're harvesting. So if you look at it with the lens that the IPCC takes, that's one of the ways you can look at it. You can also look at a life cycle basis. You can say, hey, let's look at from upstream when you harvest wood, you have to transport it to the plant, to the actual emissions at the stack, and then downstream when you're recapturing that carbon as trees regrow. How does that stack up against fossil fuels? So there's an analysis there from the National Renewable Energy Lab from the Department of Energy that shows biomass has a median life cycle emissions profile of 52 grams of CO2 per kilowatt hour, which is lower than natural gas at 486 grams, oil at 840 or coal at over 1,000. So just a couple of different ways you can look at the carbon profile. To be crystal clear, everything has a carbon footprint, right? Even solar and wind, which are great resources have a carbon footprint when they're created and installed. So we try to look at things on a life cycle basis. Let's try to do apples to apples comparison. And there's links at the bottom of the slide. So folks want to see the resources we were drawing on for these different data points. You can certainly do that. And that photo is just our foresters. You can see Betsy there in the white hat, blue jacket, and her colleagues from the forestry team. Next slide, please. So we were just talking about this, what is our fuel use? What you see there is our actual supply mix, and you see the variation in wood. In a given year, based on the electric market prices, the plant's gonna run in different ways to try to really be advantageous for the city of Burlington ratepayers. So you can see we may use tens of thousands of tons more or less wood in a given year. So some people, when they talk about district energy, they get focused on the idea that it might require additional wood, which actually you can run district energy without requiring any additional wood. But even if you were looking at any kind of incremental usage, at the point we want to make here is there's a lot of natural variability within how much wood we use. And it's really based on, is running the plant economic to protect Burlington customers from the ISO New England grid market. How do we dispatch the plant has changed over time? We really try to run it during the higher price times in the winter and the summer, where if we weren't running it, we would be exposing our customers to much higher costs and to fossil fuel volatility. So McNeil protects us from that. The other point on the left-hand side here is yet another way to cut it when we talk about emissions is something called the debt and dividend approach, which is favored in some cases by folks who may not necessarily support using wood energy. And there was a study in Massachusetts that looked at using that approach. And even that study found, if you're using the residues, the tops and whims that we were talking about earlier, that biomass electric has a favorable carbon payback relative to natural gas, relative to fossil fuels. So that study is referenced there and there's a link there as well. Next slide, please. So finally, what are we actually here talking about is district energy. Here's a map. You can see hopefully the kind of purple line there is the proposed route for the district energy system that would run from McNeil up to the UVM Medical Center, potentially connecting to other buildings at different points. You know, we're looking at whether it can connect to University of Vermont buildings, could it connect to other buildings, even down the road, the interval center or other buildings that are along that route. The proposed system, which has been designed and engineered over three phases of feasibility work that stemmed from late 2018 all the way through to current 2023, looks at a system that would provide 191,000 MMBTU of renewable steam that would come from McNeil and also from a supplemental electric boiler that would be a part of the system run on our 100% renewable electricity. And then you achieve about 34,000 MMBTU of additional efficiency savings by not having to use natural gas in boilers that are only 85% efficient, let's say. And so the total reduction of natural gas used is 225,000 MMBTU per year. That's equivalent to a 16% reduction in the commercial sector, natural gas use in Burlington. So we go back to that curve that we started with that's bending in the wrong direction. This is a project that can help bend that fossil fuel use curve back down in the direction that we want to see it. So that's, we view it as the single biggest step you could take in Burlington to affect our net zero energy roadmap goals. And then the last slide here, and then glad to talk here what's on your mind, take questions. This, and there's a lot of text here, so I apologize. This was a score, a carbon intensity score that was conducted about district energy at McNeil. So not like a generic study, not assumptions, but this was on the actual proposed district energy system at McNeil with the McNeil steam with the electric boiler and looked at it on a life cycle basis using accepted carbon accounting protocols using the model that was included in the state's clean heat standard that was passed this last legislative session. And it found that the McNeil system would reduce greenhouse gas emissions on a life cycle basis relative to natural gas by over 95%. So that's a link here to that report from first environment using the Greek model that was specified in the State Affordable Heat Act. Jen, Betsy and I are glad to answer questions or talk more about different topics, whatever's on everyone's mind, but thanks for letting us join the meeting and present, really appreciate it. Thank you. So we're gonna do one more presentation and then we're gonna have some time for questions. We are a bit behind schedule because of technical difficulties, but we will have lots of time to talk. So I'm gonna seed facilitation to you and switch over to the rest of the slides. You still have to use your computer to share the slides, though. I can do that. Okay, so I'm taking off my steering committee hat and I'm putting on my Burlington biomass hat. Thanks for joining us tonight, Lena. Thanks for having me, Joe. It's a real pleasure to be here with you. Can I remember how to do this multitasking? Still gonna work, there you go. So I'm Lena. I'm here now in my capacity as a member of Shop BTV biomass and I am here for the same reason that I serve on the steering committee, which is that I love Burlington and I know we can do better than what we have. So first thought on my mind is that it is no longer 1984. I know that mullets are back in but time has passed and in fact, it's 2023. This is the hottest year recorded in history and although it is terrifying to consider it, it is also the coldest and driest and most normal year of the rest of our lives and this is the McNeil generating station just in July 2023 when the interval was flooded at levels that exceeded Irene. The berm worked great. So the first thing that concerns me about McNeil and about using wood for heat is that Burlington Electric Department seems to be making this false distinction between how carbon works in the carbon cycle. So I have seen this slide in presentations that makes a distinction between what happens to carbon that comes from burned trees and what happens to carbon from fossil fuels. There's only one kind of carbon and the carbon cycle is not, cannot be split hairs to serve an idea of renewable energy and in fact, productivity and biomass, either if we leave the trees in the woods, they contribute to soil quality or they respire and become greenhouse gases or they burn and become greenhouse gases. So and not pictured here because there is nobody up there is a person in the sky saying, oh, this molecule of CO2 came from a tree or this molecule of CO2 came from fossil fuels. I appreciate the simplified diagram. I'm not a scientist. That last one is a little overwhelming to me, but here we can see that biogenic CO2 and non biogenic CO2, the words we use to describe carbon from things that were alive, things that were not alive in our current ecosystem. It all goes into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. Some of that comes back down in the terms in the spaces where forest is left unlogged and unhindered, but we also know that an older forest is a much more powerful forest than anyone that is replanted after logging or harvesting wood. So I wish that we still had time to wait 150 years for trees to grow back and sequester carbon. I know that BED is not slashing and burning 150 year old trees, but the scale at which trees exponentially sequester carbon is notable. We do not have time in 150 years. The entire world might look like this. That was last week in Libya, 20,000 people were washed away. This is not funny. It doesn't matter what you say about what happens with carbon emissions because the carbon emissions are still happening and the planet is still warming. So another thing that concerns me about wood heat, excuse me, is that when we actually count the emissions from burning the wood, that's a really different number. I didn't make this slide. I don't know how to do this kind of math or this kind of science, but there was a great presentation at City Hall just a few months ago. We heard from the folks at BED as well as some scientists who were invited by City Council to give us some more information. So when I saw this diagram, I was really concerned because it looks like we're not counting right and the emissions count even if we don't count them. We can also see that biomass is still generating CO2. It's not net zero. And to get to the point of exactly why we're chatting tonight, there's this idea that we're gonna build a steam pipe from the McNeil generating station up the hill to power the hospital. And while district heat will increase McNeil's efficiency, that is still only half as efficient as the accepted standard for biomass facilities across the U.S. So that makes me wonder why is this a responsible investment for Burlington if we are using an old plant? It's not still gonna meet efficiency standards and we need energy for the 21st century. That efficiency means that for four trees that are burned, just over one turns into energy that we use. And from my understanding about district heat, the waste heat that we get from McNeil is actually not enough heat to power the hospital. And we would need to increase the amount of wood burned and then we would make this commitment to a biomass facility that has served us tremendously well. I know that there's so much benefit to our community when electricity prices stay steady and we're not subject to the mercy of the fossil fuel industry, but we should really talk about another way to do this. And I'm not sure that investing in district energy is the right thing to do. I'm not here to say let's shut down McNeil tomorrow, I see its value, but I don't think that district energy is the right choice. And among many other things that we've already heard about because of the impact of burning wood for fuel, all of our neighbors are understanding that biomass is not renewable. This is not, we are not talking about 1984, we're not talking about 1994. Every state near us has started to restrict its funding, its approval, its support of biomass facilities and not counting them as renewable entirely. Bill McKibbin, our most famous environmentalist from Vermont, even says that burning wood for electricity is a bad idea. And again, I think our community deserves a conversation about how to get electricity and all the energy we need in a way that is respectful of people's bank accounts and of the planet. And I don't think shutting down McNeil tomorrow is the idea, but I do think that we deserve to really pause and reconsider if this very old proposal is still the right choice. And Madonna thinks so too. Sorry. All right. Thanks, Lena. Sure. Yes. Yeah. Sorry, Joe's facility. I want to weigh in on how I feel about this project because I have mixed feelings. Like I see the strengths and I see the harm and we're in a tough spot as humans right now. So we need to stay open to every possibility. But a question I have just for the BED folks is, like in this case, you know, like we're going to be harvesting wood within a certain radius and then transporting it using energy to then burn it to create energy. But right now we like transport a massive amount of biomass like out of Burlington to other places like landfills. And like, is the city looking at all about the idea of maybe strategic use of biodigesters to manage solid and liquid waste in Burlington? Because it may not produce enough electricity to heat a building, but it does produce electricity that could supplement the power supply as we move towards greater electrification. And then we would be saving our impact on fossil fuel because we wouldn't be shipping food waste across the state to a landfill. It could maybe be either like within the hospital, there could be a biodigester in UVM. There could be a biodigester at the intervail. There could be one, you know, et cetera. I'm just wondering if you've looked at it and what the pros or cons of that might be not to change the subject, but just in the grand scheme of the discussion of every possibility. I was thinking about like your critique and part of it is like the transportation of the fuel, but then we have this waste locally that we're sending very far away and so what could we do with that? So I'll take it. Brian, could you identify yourself too? I'm Brian Cina from the ward formerly, the part of ward two, formerly known as ward two that is now ward three, I think. Yes, so. Love that. Thank you. Thank you for looking to ask a question to your audience. Thanks for the question. Thank you for your presentation. I'd love to dig in on it more, but in terms of biodigesters, we had a conversation I think a few years back where there was some consideration of exactly what you were mentioning, Brian, and nothing has really come to fruition. I'm not a solid waste or a bio waste expert. Certainly the technology is demonstrated elsewhere. In Vermont, we have rural digesters, people call it cow power, different things. VGS is using digesters in some cases for methane, renewable methane or whatever you might want to call it. So I think, would we be open to it? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I've heard some different ideas like people have talked about, could we do solar on the landfill? Would we be interested? Yeah, we'd be interested. It's not our jurisdiction. We don't own the landfill, so we can't make that decision. But if there was a project that we could buy into, we would definitely be interested. Pretty much any, say this maybe without exception, for the most part, if there is an opportunity for somebody to develop a renewable energy project in the city of Burlington, that's gonna be really valuable to us because energy within the city is worth more to us than energy that we have to bring in from outside the city. We have to pay charges for that and everything. So that's why we love solar in the city. We would definitely be interested in that digester. I haven't heard a viable proposal. It'd be an interesting concept. We would definitely be interested to explore it. So one point I wanted to make too, that you were talking about the burning of methane and some people like that sounds bad. But my understanding is that methane is 30 times stronger of a greenhouse gas than carbon, you know, dioxide. So the small amount of carbon dioxide coming from burning any methane from a biodigester is harm reduction. It's big time harm reduction. So I just wanna put that out there to like, this is the mindset I'm coming from is how can we chip away at it? And so this is where I'm heading with this is you said that, and I have not heard anyone in propose a project in Burlington. I just had this idea for the first time now. So maybe I'll put it out there and it will inspire someone. We have a development being dreamed of over here. What if we like put it into the code for developments that like, or we maybe incentivize a developer to experiment with one. And you don't have to answer that, but it just came to mind when you said no one's done it. I'm like, well, we have all these developments. Like maybe it's too late for downtown, but downtown does the downtown development has all these other amazing things that have been built into the design. But like here we're gonna have this housing like development. What if there was like a south end biodigester? That's an interesting idea. I mean, just to your other point and kind of relates to this and to McNeil. You know, we get 75% of our wood at McNeil from rail which does certainly reduce some of the transportation burden doesn't eliminate it, but it reduces it from a mission standpoint and any project, whether it's digest or for this purpose or anything that's not solar or wind or hydro. If you're using fuel, you have to think about like what is the delivery mechanism, those types of things. But yeah, we'd be really interested. Renewable energy in the city of Burlington is speaking our language. We're interested. Yeah. We'll talk. I have so many thoughts about this. But thank you for that for indulging me everyone. Thank you. Appreciate it. Anybody else from the room? Yeah, sure. I have a few questions from your presentation. The first one was towards the end when you were talking about the impact I guess of the district heat, how it would replace, I guess it basically, it sounded like it would cut 16% of the commercial natural gas usage in the state and that would make a big impact in Burlington. And that would make a big impact in the short term. Thinking about like the capacity though of this project, like how does that, so there's still 84% remaining. How does this project continue? Does it? And it's kind of like, I guess that's kind of, I don't know, it seems like, yeah, it'll take a big chunk. It'll take a big step, but then there's like all this more to go. And it's like a short term win. And then like, how does that actually, even within the stated plan of like 2030, like how does that actually connect? No, it's a good question. And it kind of goes to one of the points, Lena, right? Lena. Lena, you had in your slide when you were talking about the waste heat, essentially the more we can connect customers along that route or within that route to the system and use what's called the condensate return, which is essentially if you're delivering steam and then you have essentially a hot water loop that's returning. And the more customers that we can connect to that, the more waste heat we can basically use for the project. So it's a variable there. But so it could connect multiple customers potentially and do even more potentially in the future, but it's a great point. It's a big chunk. It's the single biggest kind of chunk we can take. The meeting I was just at was the ordinance committee and they're looking at a carbon alternative compliance fee for new construction, large existing buildings that we voted on back on town meeting day. That's got to be part of the solution is if we're building new, let's not build with fossil fuels. As we're replacing systems in existing buildings that's have a policy that says let's not replace with fossil fuels. We have a rental weatherization ordinance that passed a few years ago and is in the process being implemented but hasn't fully impacted those numbers that we shared. I'm not gonna play a role. And then we offer incentives at double the level that essentially we're supposed to under state law. Through our revenue bond. So we're trying with heat pumps, geothermal, ground source heating, energy efficiency technologies to kind of make a dent in that way too. But what you're taking on is ambitious a goal as 2030 timeframe, 100%. You're trying to get to 100% net zero, 2030. You got to throw everything you have at the wall basically. And then some things we probably haven't even thought of to kind of to get on that trajectory. So yeah, this is one piece of the puzzle. It's not the whole puzzle. I wouldn't say it is. So I guess the other part of this that is kind of like the larger question is I've been like following this but not like super closely. Like how much is this going to cost? So in terms of the project cost, the capital cost, it's around 42 million. But the thing is we're not asking the taxpayers of Burlington to pay for it. We've created, there was a city council resolution last summer, created a 501c3 nonprofit that's run by Evergreen Energy, which is the entity we've been working with on the feasibility work. They run a system in St. Paul, a district heat system and they have expertise with this. The idea is McNeil would sell the steam to the nonprofit. The nonprofit would contract with the customers. It would issue bonds not backed by the city, not backed by the taxpayers. It would issue bonds backed by the sale of the thermal energy to the customers and the customers would pay for it. So our role would really be limited at Burlington Electric to incentives like we do with other projects. We would be financing it, we would be paying for it. Yeah, so I guess like what I'm thinking about is, so like even thinking about the first question that I asked you about like, how does this scale? Does it scale? What's the longer term impacts of pursuing this project? It sounds like you're physically limited by the steam pipe, right? You're not, it's not like the grid. It doesn't, in order to directly use the heat because it's not like electricity to direct the, right? You're actually doing thermal exchange, right? You are. So like you need to be along that route of that pipe to like benefit from this project. And so like there's also some, I would imagine, some capacity in terms of like, you're using waste heat from the plant. That's part of it, yeah. In a way, and there's also like the extra generating. Steaming, yeah. So like there's a limited geographical range of like what this can ultimately do. You're not spending taxpayer dollars but there's still like money going into this to build this out. And thinking about how if $40 million is going to be spent by someone, even if it's not you, even if it's not us, to pursue this like energy system, like is it not better spent on thinking about something that's more broadly applicable in terms of like distributed energy grids and like other types of neighborhood scale solar or other types of alternative energy systems that is not gonna be directly tied to, I mean, it also just, it increases our dependence on like meal, which again, like I'm not arguing like it's the worst thing and we need to decommission it tomorrow. But like it is like the central point of failure in our system, right? Like you look at what happened in the intervail. Do you like, who knows what types of weather events or types of issues we're gonna have. If McNeil has problems or whatever in the next 10, 20 years, even outside of this 2030 goal, where does that put us? And would we not have better spent this time now on more distributed energy systems? Great questions. So the first point is at some point, if we wanna get to net zero 2030, you have to deal with the large customers that can't electrify their heating systems. And believe me, like we're the electric utility. We provide incentives for that stuff. If I can electrify it, that's my first option. That's where we're gonna go always. But there are some loads in the city and you think about the customers we're talking about the hospital, potentially the university. These are large, for us at least, maybe not nationally, but for us, these are more industrial scale energy uses and you can electrify them. So at some point, we have to solve that problem. Solar won't do it, right? It's a thermal load, so solar's not gonna impact that. Solar generates electricity. We love solar. I have solar on my roof, like I believe in solar. So you have to get at that load. And the question that we've been asking for a long time in the community is, can we use McNeil more efficiently? Can we use it to do this? It's never gotten to this point before. It's never had a fully designed, engineered kind of viable project. McNeil itself, if you say yes to district energy, you don't necessarily commit to McNeil as it stands today for the next 20 or 30 years. What you're committing to is that we're gonna provide this renewable steam through this infrastructure. Now, safe energy technology comes on 5, 10 years from now. Like you could repower with something more efficient at McNeil. Nothing's stopping us from doing that. Nothing's stopping us from putting in or replacement technology as long as it's low carbon and renewable. So it doesn't lock you into the existing plant as it is. That said, I think we need the plant to the point that you both have made. I do foresee that we will eventually be able to move off of it. But I think for the next 20 years, it's really hard for me to see how you would move off of it. So I wanna make it as efficient and beneficial as possible. And this project does that. There are other things we can look at. Like you can capture additional waste heat to dry wood chips and make the plant even more efficient. To the point you had about the, how much energy were you getting out of the wood chips. A lot of that's moisture content, right? So if we can dry the wood chips using waste heat, you potentially get more energy out of each wood chip. That's another thing that we're interested in exploring at McNeil. So to some extent, the challenge we have is that when you're running McNeil, the hours that we run it, natural gas is the marginal fuel that's available on the New England grid, 92 to 98% of the time. And the other times it's mostly coal and oil. If 92 to 98% of the time we were running McNeil, solar was the alternative. I do with you right now, let's go down there. We don't need it. Go ahead, turn it off. Like we've got the grid that we need. We can run it on solar, run it on wind that has maybe a lower carbon footprint even than McNeil. I'm in, count me in. For the foreseeable future when solar and wind are single digit, low single digit percentages on that New England grid, the only alternative if you move away from McNeil is you're gonna use more fossil fuels. I mean, we don't wanna use nuclear as a community. People have said that repeatedly. People don't wanna use fossil fuels and wind and solar can't replace McNeil and we're not allowed to get new hydro really either in the state of Vermont or build wind. So when we look at the options, I see we're gonna need McNeil for that period of time. This project will make it more efficient. It doesn't necessarily require more wood use and it doesn't necessarily change the profile of the plant. That really changes year to year based on operations as I was mentioning earlier. So like I completely hear the critique and I just wanna share the way that I grapple with it personally. I guess I have a question. Dan. I'm proud of the fact that we have a municipal utility and have had since 1905. I've read the history that came out in 2005 and a pretty interesting one. There's been lots of good ideas and lots of bad ideas including a nuclear plant on the waterfront, which is one of the ideas that was proposed in the 60s. And I'm kind of interested. I went to the symposium in June and listened to Dr. Moomah and Dr. Rooney Vargas and listened to you and all the commenters. It doesn't seem like we're hearing each other. It seems like when people who have studied this as part of their career say, or their whole career say show a slide and you didn't show this one, Lena, but the one that Dr. Rooney Vargas showed with the need for dropping these emissions like that instead of keeping them on a straight line from 1984. And their argument is we can't do that with McNeil and we can't do that if we expand McNeil and we can't do that if we keep using biomass. And when I see a thousand climate scientists signing a letter that says biomass is not where we need to go, I'm not hearing from the BED side though. I do think that you are, some of your materials are responding to some of the arguments. I'm not hearing, it seems like two sides are talking but not necessarily listening to each other. So it's really a question to both of you is like how do we get this dialogue somewhere where it actually moves us toward a better planet and a better city? That's a good question. I've tried to digest the material that was presented by Dr. Rooney Vargas, Dr. Mumaan. I mean the positive thing, I think we see it in the room here. I think we see it at the TUC forum. I think we see it in any conversation as Burlington. We're all trying to do something that we view as positive on climate. We don't necessarily agree on every single step but I appreciate being in a community where people care and they want to move in that direction. I've spent my whole career working on these issues, different levels of government, different policies. The critique that Dr. Rooney Vargas offered, a couple things. So let me address it directly because that's kind of what you're saying is let's talk to each other, not past each other. One of the challenges I had with the presentation is it didn't actually analyze McNeil or our harvesting practices or our forestry practices. It was generic. I think she said this at one point during the presentation. The model wasn't specific to McNeil or this is what it looks like if you do a 95% harvest. I'm not saying that you do that at McNeil. She acknowledged that. The slide that was presented here shows the emissions at the stack. And this is where we're talking past each other I think to some extent. The emissions at the stack, if you only want to look at that and compare it to fossil fuels, you make the argument that Dr. Rooney Vargas and Dr. Muma made that we heard tonight. And I understand that. I understand if you look at the stack, that's the argument. I take a wider lens and it's not just me. This is the IPCC, the EPA, the State of Vermont and a number of other climate scientists who view it this way and say let's look at it on a life cycle basis. And when you do that, if the trees are regrowing you can argue that biomass emissions are offset and we had that kind of circular graph earlier. Now here's where I'll, let me give credit to the critique. There is a lag, right? We were talking about, I think Elena you said 150 years but there's different lags depending on what type of forest material you're using. And the one piece that I think maybe there's, I don't know if it's common ground but maybe there's some dynamic around this is we're using forest residues. And I think even Dr. Muma, Dr. Rooney Vargas acknowledged that has a quicker payback, much quicker payback than if you're harvesting trees for energy. If you're going out and cutting trees for energy. We don't go out and cut trees for energy. In fact, we don't go out and cut trees, period. We work with on private land primarily harvesters who are doing cuts and we say we're willing to take the lower value residue that's left over that would otherwise decompose and emit carbon over time. I think that all the science I've seen including science cited by Dr. Muma positively says if you're using those residues your carbon payback period is gonna be quicker. Some people say 10 years, some people say 15 years. It's gonna be quicker, certainly quicker than burning fossil fuels. The challenge at the tube forum was that I think Dr. Rooney Vargas, Dr. Muma said, well what if we were just using that residue for strand board or cellular insulation? Wouldn't that be even better? And maybe it would, but there's no market for that in Vermont. There's no reality for that in Vermont. And the foresters who were present, I think you might have heard them speak to that, that that's not an alternative that's actually viable. So my challenge is when we get to the perfect being the enemy of the good, if we're using residues that have a pretty good quick carbon payback and we're using that to avoid fossil fuel use that has a longer carbon payback, until we get to a point where we can rely more fully on wind, solar, and hydro, to me that's a positive from a climate standpoint. But I appreciate the frame where if you twist it in a different direction you can come at the exact same question and say no, it's a negative because I'm looking at the stack emissions only and I see that those would be different than fossil fuels. So I don't know if I grapple with it as directly as I think I can to try to give you a sense of how we're looking at the questions. I really be interested in your thoughts too though. Just because you don't count it at the stack doesn't mean it doesn't happen at the stack. So I'm struggling with this net zero idea generally and I know that that has been the frame with which Burlington Electric and Burlington has chosen to tackle climate change. I also know that net zero is a framework that was developed by the fossil fuel industry specifically to delay global climate policy. So I'm a little skeptical of that regardless of what we're doing here. I just don't think it's a useful frame. And I also like even if the carbon payback is 10 or 15 years we know that burning wood is not that efficient. So I'm maybe more than anything. I don't understand why BED and the city has maintained such a steadfast commitment to the idea of expanding McNeil when it's clear that we really need to study. You're absolutely right that the scientists at the TUC Forum did not actually look at McNeil and study McNeil. Why don't we do that? And not only why don't we really do that? I know that BED has put out a lot of research. I have found some of those sources pretty questionable. Regardless, we should also study alternatives. There's so much that I don't understand about energy and electricity but I do know that when we burn wood there's all this particulate matter that goes into the air. I know that I've heard in this blew my mind. I'm curious what you think about this that actually using natural gas is, burning wood is so inefficient that using natural gas is actually more efficient. So that was really troubling to me. And further, when we, this is different and feels very related to me, when we use the forest to have carbon credits and then the forest catches on fire, we're not netting zero anymore. I'm wondering about if we're actually considering the consequences of continuing to use wood heat and $40 million that the taxpayers don't have to pay. Great, I'm so glad the taxpayers don't have to pay it. Also, that's $40 million of work that maybe we should spend on figuring out if we can do a geothermal network under the hospital. I'm wanting to see more of a willingness to explore alternatives that are not this one 40 year old alternative and just looking for evidence to support the idea that we should do this thing that is 40 years old. Good questions or good thoughts. Let me try to dig in if it's helpful. So efficiency, let's start with efficiency. I think on the slide you said it's only 3% efficiency gain but it's actually a 10% efficiency gain because you can go from 25, 26% to 29%. It's more like a 10% improvement in the plant which is not nothing. That's a decent improvement for a solid fuel plant. If you look at solid fuel electric plants whether you're looking at biomass or coal, we're really kind of within the realm of normal around the country. If you use a combined cycle natural gas plant to generate electricity, it can be up to 60% efficient. I'm not aware of a lot of biomass electric plants that are that efficient but efficiency is not the only metric because if we're only worried about efficiency solar is not that efficient. Solars can be in the teens or maybe the 20s in terms of its ability to convert energy into useful electricity. Efficiency is an interesting metric. It's not the only metric, right? So let's kind of put aside that for a moment. We would have a decent improvement in efficiency. It's still within the realm of what a solid fuel plant is. It's not a liquid or a gaseous plant. If you use gas, you can get to a higher level of efficiency but you're burning a fossil fuel that's been extracted and ported for somewhere as opposed to a forest residue. In terms of some of the other points you made, the alternatives are things we're actually already working on and we're interested in. The Hula building right around the corner, we provided incentives for them to do geothermal. Like we love geothermal. We've worked with the new high school building to help drill geothermal test wells. We talked to the hospital, every other customer we can about geothermal. The challenge is if you're looking at a load like the hospitals, there is no geothermal or heat pump technology that works. And when we talk about spending that money, that capital money, it's not ours to really focus on necessarily but let's just play it out anyway because it's not taxpayer dollars but it's still an important investment. Like you said, the only two options that exist to decarbonize, if you'll grant me the term, the load at a building campus like the hospital with today's technology would be the district heating system or purchasing renewable gas, which you can do through VGS. Nobody has explained to me any other project and I've looked into this that would do what we're trying to do at the hospital at the scale we're doing it and potentially at the university and that's just unfortunate. Like that's the fact. If you could do a geothermal heating system that would meet the needs, the energy needs there, I'd be all over that. Like I love that technology. I have been a supporter of that for a long time. BED has been a supporter. We even have a person on staff who has particular expertise on geothermal and helped with the system that was put in at Champlain College. So we're all in on that. We helped us develop a new program for geothermal test wells and I think geothermal could be part of the mix too at campuses like the hospital or other campuses. It just can't do what the district heating system's gonna do. They could work in complement potentially to each other. So that right now is the question is if do you wanna keep using gas? Do you wanna use renewable gas? Do you wanna do district heating? If we wanna get that fossil fuel use off the table and that's why we're grappling with it the way we are. It's not a, when I became general manager in 2018 the question I got at the press conference was what are you guys doing about district energy? When are you gonna get it done? How do you guys get off your butts and go get it done? And it's interesting because now we're kind of on the cusp of bringing a project forward and we're hearing from people like why are you looking at this? And so the dynamic around that has changed a little bit but I still think for all the 80s stuff and I was born in the 80s so there's some good things in the 80s I'd like to think but for all the 80s stuff like this technology still works. Like it's working around the world we did a webinar with folks in Sweden, Canada, St. Paul, Minnesota that are using this as a climate solution in their communities and these are forward-looking communities that are trying to do some of the stuff we're doing. So I completely respect, you know people have a different opinion but that's just some insight of what we are thinking about. But we like geothermal, we like solar like we're all in on that stuff. So if geothermal could be part of the mix why is the choice not to install geothermal to be part of the mix and have that be the first step? I am quite sure that new technology is in development. Everyone in the world knows that we need to get off of fossil fuels except for a couple entities who will not be named in this room. I think we have a good chance of getting new, better technology in the time it might take us. I don't make the project timelines you do but I just don't understand why we wouldn't choose what I think is so obviously a better and more long-lasting option. I can't say that I understand why we aren't committing to McNeil if we commit to this project because if McNeil continues to have the technology that it does, like if we're bringing it up to speed and that's a huge amount of money for an upgrade then we've already got the steam pipe. It just doesn't add up to me and I would love to see more willingness to actually do that study before we push this through city council. So in terms of it kind of goes to your question too like the physical footprint of the system you're limited unless you wanna expand the footprint. The technologies you use within the system you're not necessarily limited. Now geothermal heating, as we know it in Vermont which is different than like producing electricity out west is it's a ground source heat pump and any heat pump is not producing energy. It's taking either colder particles of air and bringing them in or taking warmer particles and bringing them in depending on the season. And obviously with ground source geothermal we're benefiting from the Earth's constant temperature during colder seasons we can bring in warmer air. It does not produce steam like the hospital uses at their campus at the scale that the hospital uses. That's why it's not a primary option in this scenario neither is an air source heat pump. Now those technologies might develop, I hope they do and if there are options to integrate with the district energy system there's nothing preventing you from doing that. In fact that's the kind of neat thing is it's a network of infrastructure. It's not dependent on any particular type of technology. If McNeil was converted to some better renewable fuel 10 years from now they could still produce steam. You could run it on that. Geothermal has been mixed in with other district heating system applications and in St. Paul what we heard during the webinar was they kind of started with one thing then they were able to add stuff over time and continue to make better use of it. So I'm not unconvinced that 10 years from now if we had this system in place you couldn't add a geothermal component that would add a meaningful energy piece. I'm also not convinced that even if this doesn't even if geo doesn't provide the kind of mainline steam in this scenario that you can't have geo provide other heating and thermal needs on a campus like that to supplement, you know because not all the energy is necessary coming from steam. So I see geo as part of the mix in that kind of scenario and if there are improvements in technology you're well positioned to capture them there and potentially with that network as opposed to having to be locked into any particular kind of way of running it for a period of time. That's what I would say. So is the current design of the steam pipe and all of the other associated infrastructure created in the intention that it will receive other heat sources? Yeah, in fact it actually is starting off with another heat source. It's not just McNeil steam it's designed with an electric boiler as well. Now what we're talking about electric boiler this is like a resistance electric boilers the older technology but it produces steam and it runs off of our grid. So it'd be a 10 megawatt electric boiler the challenge there, because like people say why don't you just do that? Like why don't you just do an electric boiler? Because it's the resistance technology not the heat pump technology which can be like three X more efficient. You're not gonna be able to run that economically against natural gas more than maybe 10 to 20% of the time of the year. Folks may have seen in JP there was a project where they put in an electric boiler and they use propane for their energy. Propane's way more expensive. So they're able to run that boiler a little bit more of the time plus they're in a part of the regional grid where we have a lot of wind and it's not necessarily being used and we don't have the capacity to export it. It's called the Sheffield Highgate interface export interface. So they're able to use that boiler to soak up some of that wind energy that's available that's not being able to be utilized and to displace propane. Much better economic scenario than we have in Burlington where you're competing with natural gas. But so yes the initial design is you'd have the electric boiler as a supplemental source and the McNeil steam as a primary source and then you can integrate other sources as you go. Nothing preventing you from doing that. Thanks. So I have just have one more quick. I'll allow it. Thank you. I'm gonna hit my nine. So I know we're keeping the folks late. I know that the Interveal Center is no longer a potential customer of district energy because of the cost to hook up to the system. Does that not mean that other potential customers are also unable to do so because of the cost to hooking up to the system? I don't think we've actually made a proposal to the Interveal Center for a cost to hook up the system. The Interveal Center, if they develop some new buildings there'd be a potential to connect to that condensate line the return line, the hot water line but they're kind of a little further out so we don't actually have a proposal to them on what it would cost to hook up to the system. They'd be a potential partner down the road but they're not kind of an immediate customer. But let me state it clearly because this is a key point. It kind of goes to the questions we've been talking about. If this doesn't make some economic sense for the customers they're not gonna do it. And if they don't do it we're not gonna bring it to city council. We're not trying to move this through just to move it through. It only makes sense if it helps the customers who need the energy, who wanna move off of fossil fuels in a way that's economically competitive and beneficial. So if we don't have that agreement we're not gonna move the project forward. There's no reason to do that. Glad to hear it. It's been our position from day one. If there's no customer interest we won't move the project forward. And in previous iterations of District T that were designed and studied but never kind of engineered the customers weren't there. Either because the technology didn't match what they needed like it was a hot water system but they needed steam or the economics weren't there. So this is the version of the project that's gotten the furthest because it's been responsive to some of those concerns, I think. Customers with the hospital so far and possibly UPM. Correct. Okay. Correct. And what's the question? So basically those could be the first couple of customers. You could have the Interval Center or think about anybody along the line of that route that I showed on the map, the condensate return anybody could potentially hook up to it. You're gonna get more bank for your buck if it's a building that's using more energy because you could displace more. Any housing project out on would benefit from it. If you wanted to go downtown you'd have to build some more infrastructure to get there. Yeah, but any building that was along that route initially could benefit. And there's nothing saying you can't expand it in the future. It's just we're only trying to bite off what we can manage in one shot here. And the hospital is definitely gonna do it at UPM. Oh no, so we're still, we're having all those conversations with customers. So I think we will only bring it forward if there is an agreement that's beneficial for the customers but I don't wanna kind of make that announcement tonight because we're not at that point yet. Yeah. Thanks. Okay, one more question. It's not a question, but. Oh, a statement, okay. I mean, I just like listening to a lot of this, I do a lot of like housing and transportation advocacy and a lot of meetings with a lot of different people. And I'm seeing like a similar, no, just like happening of things here. Pointing, kind of getting into what Andy said about the talking past each other, like the missing each other. And I'm like in an interesting position where like I'm not an energy engineer, but I am an engineer and I did for a time work at an energy company. I understand a lot of what you're talking about. And just to kind of like throw this out there to the community and so like to not have this be a, to have this rooted in like the neighborhood, the neighborhood level, right, as an NPA. I think the conflict is coming from like what your job is to do is like kind of conflicting with kind of how we're looking at it. So like I was at a bridge meeting for the new, with a new ski bridge earlier this week. And I could see that there was like this like disconnect between how the project team from an engineering perspective was looking at what their job is to do with this bridge and how people were emotionally responding to it. And it's a complicated thing, right? So I can hear on both sides. Like, you know, I'm, you know, I would say that I'm, you know, generally more on the side of like stop biomass and like how do we get off of fossil fuels as quickly as possible, but I can also understand from an engineering perspective why that's not possible for mathematical and economic reasons. And so what I would like to kind of just propose to the community to think about is like the problem that it seems to me is that like a building like UVM or the hospital is just kind of like potentially not compatible with the future that we want to be going towards. And that's a really complicated and long-term problem to solve. And so it's like, in this case, like you can tell me and I believe you, right? That like the solutions that are out there right now to power a building of that size with the type of energy that it requires, there aren't better, better solutions. And so like that's frustrating to hear when we know what the carbon emissions are from wood and energy, but then that becomes a problem like what do we do with the hospital? What do we do with these things? So like to kind of again, put that out to the community to think about how do we move forward in the long term if we are living in certain ways and we are having certain buildings that are not currently compatible with the climate visions that we have for ourselves. And to kind of like, I don't know, give a little bit of something, kindness to the engineering perspective. There's, there, I don't know. It's very difficult to manage a lot of those expectations, but it is still important, right? To think about like, where are we trying to go? And so for both sides, I guess, to kind of think about the physical realities of what we can and can't do just mathematically, physically, chemically, and where we also want to be going as a society and as a culture, as a city. Anyway, that's just kind of me synthesizing a lot of different things that I'm hearing and trying to find a way to move forward between like a yes or a no thing and get into the more complicated and longer-term and messy, more difficult ways to think about how we move forward. Thanks. I mean, I might ask, you know, why would UVM be heating their building? Maybe if that's the primary thing to do the space heating with steam, why are they not using hot water? Why are they not using individual heat pump type systems? So maybe it's just that, well, we have this established structure that that's the way that it is and that's the kind of input that we need. So please provide that to us. And you know, maybe it was harder to receive that service than they would be thinking more along the lines of changing the way that those systems operate. Well, I think you want to remember, they have that service now through natural gas, right? Right, they can easily make 500 degree steam because they can burn. And the steam, I'm not an expert on the medical profession, but I understand that you need certain quality steam in a medical center like that, not only for energy use, but for process steam and things like that. So it may be that it's not really easy to replace that use in a medical facility that has to have reliable energy. And just to piggyback off of your comment for a moment, I don't support this project because of any engineering aspect. In fact, I'm not an engineer, I'm a lawyer. I don't support it for that reason. I don't support it because of any other reason other than, and I'll come at this sincerely and folks can disagree with me, I believe it's better for the climate than the alternative that exists. If I didn't think that, I wouldn't be here. I wouldn't come and I know folks are gonna disagree when we come with this. I wouldn't put myself through that if I didn't think it was actually a better project from a climate standpoint. I spent my entire career working on climate. I've worked on policy at the state of Vermont. I work for our Senator Bernie Sanders in DC on climate policy. If I thought that this was going to increase carbon emissions, I would not be here. And now I've presented information around that. Folks can easily, you know, come to their own conclusions and disagree and I respect that too. But we're not just trying to solve an engineering problem. Like we're actually trying to be part of the climate solution relative to the alternatives. And that's kind of where we come out from. Thanks. I really appreciate the discussion that we didn't have anybody comment online but I hope you appreciated it too. Thank you for hosting this. Of course. Thanks for coming to the NBA tonight. Don't forget to take some food home with you because I'm sure we have some. Good night. Thanks for coming next month. Thanks, Jill.