EWEB Board of Commissioners — September 27, 2021

0:12 and welcome to this joint work session of the eugene city council on the eugene water electric board of commissioners i now call the september 27th 2021 city council work session to order and good evening everybody um i now call the september 27 2021 eweb board of commissioners work session to order thank you all for joining us in this remote meeting format we're using as our state and community recover from the covet 19 pandemic this format enables us to meet and take care of business while keeping everyone safe for work sessions like this one where there is no opportunity for public comment those wishing to access the meeting can do so by watching the live stream available on our website the broadcast on comcast channel 21 or by

0:57 calling into one of the phone numbers listed for this meeting on the public webcast and meeting materials webpage and as always other avenues of communication with me the city councillors and the commissioners are available including email and voicemail thank you so much for joining us and with that i am going to turn this over to city manager sarah dairy yeah thank you mayor venice thank you all i'm super excited to be here with you and another one of our joint meetings i wanted to just say a couple of comments before i kick it over to frank because he's actually doing presentations and that was really just about partnership and i wanted to share with all of you that frank was probably one of the first people that reached out to me when i was appointed pro 10 city manager and

1:43 has been a great resource partner through all the last couple of years through all the kind of the ups and downs has been a constant resource and somebody that i can really rely on so it's kind of like what you say on your trucks you can rely on so that that's been really amazing and i wanted to just give him that gratitude we also have regular meetings between the city of eugene city council and e-web board of commissioners leadership leadership so we we meet and we talk about topics and talk about things that we have an interest and and tonight's agenda really emerged from those conversations and i know not everybody gets to be a part of that but tonight you'll start to get a a glimpse of of how the work we're doing overlaps and

2:28 intersex and neither can really help each other so i just wanted to mention that and just say how much we're looking forward to hearing how you talk about this together and your conversations about how you hope to see us move work forward together and just um what's of interest to you hopes and concerns all of that so i know we have a number of good topics frank is kicking off the first presentation so i'm going to just introduce frank lawson yeah thank you sarah i would like to also echo my thanks to to you and city management and staff for the ongoing relationship you know we work on so many things together from climate to coordinating underground pipe and wire replacements with street resurfacing and all kinds of things and

3:14 it's really been a great partnership and i've really enjoyed the last couple years working with you and then echo my thanks to the mayor and city leadership for our quarterly meetings i think we get a lot of of good notes and opportunities to discuss pressing issues and so look forward to the discussion tonight as well i guess i'm kicking off the presentation is that um is that the schedule at this point so i guess if someone can pull up the presentation i'm not driving this but but doing the doing the talking so so great um mayor venice counselors president schlossberg and commissioners good evening

3:59 for the record i am frank lawson the general manager of eweb and it's a pleasure to be here with you this evening go ahead with the next slide please so our counselors and commissioners you were provided some background memos on the topic at hand but i want to acknowledge kind of up front that the presentation tonight might look and feel in essence like drinking from a fire hose there's there's a lot of content here and just wanted to acknowledge that up front go ahead with the next slide [Music] i also want to recognize that there's a number a lot of good work and cooperation that's going on with eweb and others including the city of eugene lane county and we have some great partners and i just wanted to say thank you to them as well a number of them listed here that

4:45 you recognize and then some that you may not because they're um basically trade organizations that we work with also i'll go ahead with slide four please so thank you i'd like to begin by establishing some benchmarks this evening and answering a few of the questions that have worked their way one way or another to me directly recently first of all we have built up debt to the climate and we need to work our way out the city of eugene recognizes through your climate action plan work and e-web through our strategic plan and values and climate change policy uh and many joint actions that we work with you that we recognize that getting out of debt won't be easy it will require us to work together i think that was a statement from one of

5:30 the counselors last week when referring to movements at the state and federal levels as well the next three items pertain to how energy systems work so for context e-web is reliant on a very large electric grid and indirectly on a on a gas grid in both cases we're small less than one percent of the electric grid that's all interconnected so from an absolute perspective we're a bit insignificant in all that next slide however that grid is becoming increasingly constrained hydro conditions and operating requirements are changing firm and dispatchable resources like coal are being retired for good reason with limited and not enough replacement

6:16 on your right is one indication of the sensitivity developing as uh more and more scarcity and volatility and volatility starts to occur if you look at the scale there that's electric pricing that occurred this last february during a cold weather event and normal prices which would be 40 a megawatt hour during that cold event went to over 300 and likely the carbon content shifted at the same time so next slide simultaneously we also know that carbon content of the grid does change seasonally and daily in essence the grid is more expensive and dirtier when at peak and almost all studies are pointing toward capacity

7:01 constraints which is how we describe reliability in the future without some significant changes and finally i would like to reiterate the importance of energy efficiency which is last item there and conservation the cheapest and most carbon free resources is the energy that's not used or not needed next slide please so speaking of our energy efficiency and conservation your packets included basically a full roster of e-web programs both water and electricity in addition to these programs i would like to mention that later this year we will be launching some new environmental products including giving customers the ability to buy bulk renewable energy credits and carbon offsets that we hope eventually

7:48 those offsets will be realized in our own watershed which will provide the community a double benefit as a result you know our goal has been to offset organic sort of community growth over the last 10 years and we've saved roughly 10 000 new megawatt hours per year so when you compound that over the 10-year period we've likely avoided over a hundred thousand metric tons of of carbon over that time next slide please um and go ahead and advance uh thank you as for the impact of electrification the study we published last year simply looked at the impacts of low medium and high rates of conversion or fuel switching of existing stock so this

8:34 we were not looking at new construction and we the studies showed that carbon savings especially in electric mobility and quantified the impacts of the eweb system over the likely the several decades predicted in that modeling the diagram on the right shows that even with electric heating carbon content still exists in the process because of how the electric grid functions much of the wasted energy showed is the inefficiency of converting from one fuel to another natural gas or coal to electricity what the study did not cover was the economics or the sensitivities to certain assumptions or changes in conditions so next slide

9:21 the present more enhanced study does evaluate the carbon and other economic impacts from three perspectives the participant or the person who would make a decision to electrify the customer owners of e-web and society the full report will be presented to commissioners in november the benefits and costs from each perspective is modeled over a 30-year time time period and in general participants are weighing higher appliance costs versus fuel costs while eweb experiences incremental or marginal revenue increases from from electrification and society gets the benefit of avoided carbon emissions valued in this in our study at the social cost of carbon

10:06 what's not included uh is eweb's long-term peaking or peak mitigation costs which could impact the marginal value from an e-web perspective so next slide please using the model we summarize the results showing the carbon benefit value which is the benefit or cost ratio for the three perspectives the peak impacts on e-web system and how easily those peaks can be mitigated it should be noted that some might feel looking at this that electrification is good all electrification is good given that sort of far left column there but as a utility we need to also consider the importance of reliability affordability and equity in those kinds

10:52 of decisions from this perspective smart and therefore likely electrification reduces carbon emissions both reliably and affordably so next slide please applying that definition to the results starts to highlight the best opportunities and also eliminate others and leads us to some high level conclusions so next next slide please so from our modeling anything and everything associated with the electrification of electric vehicles is good as long as eweb continues to mitigate the impacts of peak over time which which is achievable policies should continue to encourage off-peak convenience charging and

11:37 enhance equitable access and more access to electric mobility from a water heating perspective electrification will be poor without strong incentives from the utility so continued incentives are encouraged to facilitate further electrification of water heating and then from a space heating perspective we need to explore the options beyond the standard heat pump technology potentially leveraging dual fuel technology which is showing some interesting opportunities and some additional supporting policies and opportunities are also listed here um to be considered in a later discussion as you know relating to these conclusions next slide please

12:24 so finally i wanted to to answer ahead on what seems to be the question of the day for both eweb commissioners and council i'll give you my perspective on the impacts of gas infrastructure and some decisions related to that so please consider these perspectives are unweighted i'm not making a recommendation to prioritize one aspect over another um in general ewip as i mentioned earlier is insignificant when it comes to the grid and we also have an obligation to serve whatever load is electrified and i think that that is something that needs to be understood although you know utilities are not known for their speed we will also have time to respond to gradual electrification

13:09 however given that much natural gas load is aligned with electric grid's peak this would have detrimental impact on price carbon and the reliability of the grid that is already becoming more stressed from a broader perspective most electrification does provide carbon emission savings along with impacts on local housing local business economies and the bills of those who can probably least afford it electricity is more expensive than natural gas from a utility bill perspective and these bills are regressive and the cost increases will exagger exaggerate the inequities that already exist with energy burden customers

13:55 so rather than leave you though with a little kind of a doom and gloom uh approach to this i'd also like to offer up uh for e-web commissioners and counselors to consider and maybe discuss later uh an option um because so go ahead with the next slide this concept will be a mix of two opportunities um that could put eugene in in a leadership position i hope you recognize this as more of a carbon policy than a fuel policy and part of the concept has been done in canada with some immediate 70 reductions in natural gas use wherever it was applied uh granted there are some differences in climate between canada and eugene

14:40 while the other part creates a kind of you get what you measure carbon reduction method this approach is to focus on reducing the carbon intensity of energy delivered the first piece involves the exploration of a dual fuel agreement between northwest natural and eweb and the second piece and is to evolve building standards around energy and this part has some similarities i think what commissioner mccray and and josh scope proposed at least a couple of years ago so there's some elements of that included in this approach my specific ask tonight is for about six weeks i i have explored the rough idea with a few people including northwest natural

15:25 who are interested in the concept and if you liked the proposal at that time we could do a winter pilot and present the results next march either proving or disproving that we can find a path to decarbonize faster and more equitably while minimizing the impacts on reliability and cost and so next slide and so that was that was the electrification i was going to ask if you wanted me to do the water stuff right now or you want me to save that for later my intention was to have you we would have a discussion on the electrification and then do the water just because i think the question and answer might flow better and so if that i think

16:11 if that works for the rest of you and i will just say first of all thank you um and secondly just say to all of you that the plan is as we have done with other joint elected officials meetings uh we'll we'll uh take turns city council and e-web commissioners everybody gets two minutes um and uh in that first round and then a reminder that we actually have a second topic and so i will try to hold you to that hold the discussion so that we can get to the second topic as well and um president schlossberg and i will uh keep keep our respective cues so this is i think we were planning to have chelsea provide

16:56 the climate action update oh okay i'm sorry sorry i'm jumping on the script so i will turn that over to chelsea in that case thank you mayor this is this is matt i apologize to interject like this but uh i'm i've been receiving communication from constituents who echo rod's communication the chat there's no meeting being shown online that the there's a link that may there may be a technical issue that the public may not be able to fully engage or participate at this juncture so i just want to flag that for a staff on the back end please thank you counselor keating we are working on that okay thank you so now i will turn it over to chelsea

17:59 all right um let's see i can see counselor yay can you just nod your head if you can see my slides thank you all right good evening um thank you for having me here my name is chelsea clinton i'm the sustainability manager with the city of eugene and thank you frank for all that information it's a lot to consider and digest i really appreciated hearing all of it from you um today i'll give a quick overview of the city's climate recovery ordinance the climate action plan 2.0 and i'll wrap up by highlighting some of the collaborations happening between eweb and the city of eugene all right so first the cro or the climate recovery ordinance the cro includes four goals summarized on your screen so the first is carbon neutrality in city operations by 2020 the second reduced fossil fuel use in

18:45 city operations by 50 by 2030 compared to 2010 the third reduced fossil fuel use community wide by 50 by 2030 compared to 2010 and the last reduced community-wide greenhouse gas emissions by 7.6 annually or by about 64 annually by 2030. i won't talk more about the first two goals after this slide so i'll mention that the city purchased carbon offsets to cover emissions from 2020 to meet this goal you can read more about that in the eugene climate connection newsletter which is linked there on the slides and the remainder of our conversation will really focus on uh the on primarily on goal four which overlaps really heavily with goal three

19:32 this graph is one way to track our progress in meeting our community-wide cro emissions reduction goals the solid green line on the left shows our emissions from 2010 to 2017 and the car shows our 2019 emissions that's our last data point you'll notice that it's tracking fairly closely with our businesses usual forecast line the dashed orange line to the right and the bottom dash green line reflects our cro goal eugene's community climate action plan 2.0 or the cap 2.0 is the city's roadmap to reaching our community's cro goals city council adopted the cap 2.0 in the summer of 2020 after more than two years of process that included extensive data analysis and community engagement

20:18 it includes 115 actions contributed by the city of eugene and the eugene climate collaborative partners including eweb and i'll talk more about the eugene climate collaborative a little bit later but for now know that it's 12 community organizations that operate at a systems level and really have the ability to impact our community as we try and reach our climate goals at a systems level the cap 2.0 also includes 25 state and federal actions 41 equity panel recommendations 72 ideas for additional action from the community and six community engagement initiatives when you look through the cap 2.0 and talk about our when we talk about our local emissions the emissions that we emit in our geographic boundary we use

21:03 this framework the buckets to summarize their sources so the transportation bucket as you can see is about 53 of our emissions and most of those emissions come from gasoline and diesel fuel second the building energy bucket is about 32 percent of our emissions and most of those emissions come from electricity and natural gas and last fugitive emissions is about 15 of our emissions and those emissions come from waste and refrigerant linkage so today i'll provide an overview of the work where we're that's going on in our transportation and building energy buckets because that's where most of the overlap happens between our two organizations so first the transportation bucket if you look at the cap 2.0 most of the

21:49 actions in this bucket address either the trans eugene's transportation system plan envision eugene or long or land use planning and electric vehicles today i'll focus on the tsp as well as the electric vehicle strategy again because that's where our work aligns most closely so the tsp or the transportation system plan is the backbone of the cap 2.0 if implemented our modeling shows that it could lead to significant annual emissions reductions north of 200 000 metric tons carbon equivalent annually we plan to update the tsp in 2022 to better align it with the city's climate goals and to better understand what transportation projects and programs we need to implement in order to achieve the city's fossil fuel

22:35 reduction and emissions reduction goals and with this update we'll analyze potential potential emissions reduction from walking biking and transit infrastructure projects as well as potential reductions from programming and regulations that encourage people to drive less as part of that update process in evs the city has an electric vehicle strategy that we have posted online and is linked in this slide this strategy represents a multifaceted approach to increasing electric mobility in eugene including evs electric bikes and other forms of electric mobility as a few examples i'll share um we'll demonstrate this is an area of really high collaboration between our two organizations and we're really grateful

23:20 for this partnership so some of the things we've been working on at the city are hosting online workshops on buying evs and e-bikes developing comprehensive online resources for people interested in evs and e-bikes working with e-web and fourth mobility to bring forth electric car share vehicles to eugene including at affordable housing sites supporting ltd's efforts to transition its fleet to electric buses preparing for potential state federal grant funding for avia charging infrastructure and again working with eweb to investigate the potential to install uv charging in the right of way and last preparing for a shared e-scooter program program uh to be launched next spring

24:05 and then next building energy as i mentioned before emissions from building energy bucket come from natural gas and electricity the cap 2.0 specifically references uweb's electricity supply plan as a guiding policy for our communities climate action uweb's low-carbon electricity provides community members in eugene a climate-friendly energy source today something many communities do not have access to one way that the city and eugene the city and of eugene and eweb are collaborating to lower emissions is in our building stock is via cap action b2 we're developing a report to show how increased investments from the city could further leverage eweb's incentives to support energy efficiency and potential electrification in the community this will build on an existing

24:50 partnership between the city's affordable housing team and eweb which already worked together to find ways to leverage each organization's resources to improve energy efficiency and community projects another example of collaboration between our organizations is the score program for several years eweb the university of oregon and the city have supported the score program which trains students as energy specialists to conduct home energy score audits specifically in low income and rental units after conducting the audits property owners receive a report that provides estimated energy costs and a list of recommended improvements the report also provides households with low cost ways to lower their bills for property owners this home energy score is a great way to promote the energy updates they made to

25:35 their rental or to get a plan for future upgrades related to that the city will consider implementing a mandatory home energy score at the point of sale of a home this fall the program will use the same type of energy audit used by the score program and will offer potential home buyers information about energy use and options to improve the home to improve the home's energy performance city council will be receiving more information on this item in november including the next steps needed to move forward on a mandatory program and last just to switch gears a bit i did want to mention that the city has been negotiating uh a natural gas franchise renewal and climate agreement um with northwest natural that process began in late 2019 after um several extensions north was

26:20 naturals franchise with the city lapsed in may of 2021 but northwest natural and the city are still collaborating northwest natural is currently preparing to file a voluntary emissions reduction program under sb 844 with the oregon public utilities commission and the city is a key stakeholder in that process and at this time the hope is to complete that filing by the end of the calendar year i promised i would talk more about the eugene climate collaborative early in presentation or the ecc the ecc includes 12 organizations including the city and eweb that have significant oversight and impact on community-wide fossil fuel use and greenhouse gas emissions or have the ability to affect or alter systems that will enable the community to adapt and

27:06 prepare for climate change you can see each of the organization's logos on the screen we brought the ecc together to support the cap 2.0 planning process and we are still continuing to meet now as we work to implement climate solutions for our community we have staff groups currently meeting to discuss building electrification decarbonization energy efficiency as well as carbon offsets and we have plans to start an additional three staff groups this year one around transportation electrification and decarbonization one around sustainability and equity and the last around climate resiliency in addition the executives from all of these organizations are meeting periodically to affirm each organization's commitment to climate action and to continue to learn from each other

27:55 in this slide i give a couple more examples of our partnerships between our two organizations eweb has supported the city on a number of recent building upgrades and facilities projects on the left-hand side on the screen you can see a picture of the new electric heat bump being placed on the echo hollow community center as part of the pool renovation there you have provided an incentive of about 115 000 dollars for a variety of energy efficiency and electrification measures at that project our projections show that these features will lead to about a 64 reduction in energy use compared to the previous echo hollow facility or about a 300 metric ton carbon equivalent reduction annually and a similar project is currently underway at sheldon in the picture on the right the city's

28:40 public works team just finished installing new lamps in the down in the downtown globe lights the new lights are programmed to come on at sunset with a warm glow increase the brightness of 10 pm and again at 2 am enhancing security as well as taking into account energy efficiency the project included replacing more than 300 lights and is expected to reduce energy use by more than 40 percent you have contributed about 10 000 to this project through their incentives last year's an overview of the city's planned fall work sessions related to our climate and sustainability work as you can see climate will be a very common topic we're looking forward to robust conversations at the city council table and in our community over the next few months as we consider a variety of

29:26 strategies that will help us meet our climate goals okay thank you thank you all for that presentation i don't want to use too much time with comet so i have uh matt keating i had you with a q did you put your take your hand down okay i did mayor i'm formulating my questions it was mostly to just inform staff about the technical issue all right so i have uh mike up first and then we'll take an e-web commissioner thank you mayor i appreciate it uh i just had a few folks in and out of my house here sorry about that um

30:12 i appreciate all the presentations and frank and and questions i appreciate very much the work that eweb has done to try and answer some really difficult questions here um first off uh frank talk to me a little bit more about peak demand and reliability one of the things i noticed there in the presentation was i unless i got this really wrong you talking about high peak time having a 700 difference in cost can you talk more about that so um yes counselor i can so there's a number of things driving i'll call it the volatility and uncertainty in the grid so we're a little bit unusual in the

30:57 country we have a lot of hydro hydro is not as prolific in other parts of the country there are a number of different things affecting the future of hydro one is the climate itself which is starting to restrict water now the columbia basin is a lot better than the cascades but there's still some future predictions that that will diminish and the other one is just operating conditions so fish fish and wildlife restrictions are reducing the capacity of the system to respond and i would i would be really clear to say that we're talking about capacity um we're not talking about average altitude we're talking about the the ability to go over and fly over the mountains and that's that's the piece

31:43 that is of most most concern when you take out things that are dispatched by humans like coal for example and you replace it with intermittent resources like wind and solar and there's very good reasons to do that you create uh volatility in your ability to to um to work and manage those peaks so that scarcity will drive up prices um i suspect that uh capacity pricing will continue to to increase relative to average pricing and also at some point we are concerned that we're just not going to build enough resource or enough transmission to respond so there's a reliability and a pricing

32:28 concern and that was my next question with regard to reliability as demand increases from other parts of the grid and other locales and our capacity to serve it locally and or not be able to the transmission difficulties that happen from our increase in electrification can you talk about um reliability as it pertains to like california seeing blackouts as they do or manage brownouts or however you want to describe it right the um the best way to leverage the diversity of wind and solar and other resources is to geographically be diverse as well that's going to require additional transmission

33:13 and transmission is not easy or quickly built i would describe the old days that there was a complete surplus of energy in the northwest and when california needed it especially in the summer a lot of energy flowed to california and when we were colder in the northwest energy flowed the other way because it's now integrated we are starting to see more and more constraints we are very lucky that the heat dome that affect that in the at the end of june was not um we were not it was not simultaneous to a heat wave in california and the desert southwest or it could have caused some supply issues those will first manifest themselves as

34:00 pricing excursions which we're seeing i describe those as heart palpitations if you want to classify them that way and later if we don't build out transmission and further resource we will end up in a similar condition with california or texas or some of the other examples so we do need to increase our build out of resource and that's without electrification by the way so that's what i was just looking at um it i mean it could be managed i i don't want to make it sound like it can't be managed but the difficult one is the one that builds on peak and and space heating in particular is the one that builds on peak

34:45 so my question about the reliability will we see california blackouts in here at the pace we're on or at the pace of complete electrification if it doesn't match well with the scope of being able to increase capacity construction um that's a that's a big hypothetical question i guess i would i would say there's a number of things that are going to affect this over the next five to eight years one of them is you know we're part of part of the bonneville system bonneville would likely uh violate environmental laws to keep the grid on at some point if it starts as pricing they would probably violate some of

35:31 their fish and wildlife flow restrictions if they had to to keep the lights on i wouldn't necessarily expect in in the next five to eight years that that that happens starting to look beyond that if we don't build out resources we're put you know it's it's an issue of risk we're putting ourselves at greater and greater risk and the models that we're seeing kind of across the northwest uh reinforce that under low hydro conditions extreme temperatures uh and other sort of load excursions the probability of at least sort of rolling conditions like that where we would have to curtail load or increasing we already know about the pricing differential can you talk about the

36:17 carbon intensity differential of highest peak delivery yeah it's um and i'll use the grid numbers i think they were on one of the slides um they they tend to be multiple times higher during those peak periods you're you're generally turning on resources that are thermal resources and so when you when the wind isn't blowing and the sun's not shining and you're in a peak condition carbon resources are are used more during those times i don't remember the exact multiplier but it's several times dirtier during peak than it is sort of on average especially in the northwest with a with a good hydro base natural gas is used to produce electricity you know a very a small

37:04 amount during regular times but it wouldn't be fair to say that eight times it might even be close to 80 percent i you kind of broke up at the beginning of your question i didn't try here at all i said we know that it's a minor amount during normal time but at peak times would it be fair to say it approaches 80 i i would have to check on the exact number counselor um so the the way that the resource base space works is that um that natural gas will will peak during time it's really temperature driven um and so a majority of the natural gas use is going to be when you when you in the winter when you need to have peaking

37:49 conditions and a large amount of supply just energy in general is supplied by natural gas in the winter it's more peaky than than electricity for example from a base load perspective i don't know what the exact percentage would be and lastly did your studies talk about alternatives the general public might use in other words burning gas generate generators in times of of grid failure no it did not look at that thank you thank you all right i just want to alert everyone i've got a long list of folks needing to speak and so if we can keep it um a little tight that will be helpful so everyone gets a chance and i turn it over to mindy for the commissioners great all right so um commissioners i'm

38:36 going to assume that everybody has something to say but if you don't then when i call on you then you can just pass but the first round i'm going to start with uh commissioner mccray and then our next go through it'll be commissioner brown because those are the hands i see raised thanks president schlossberg first thanks for the presentation frank i do want to clarify that the solution that josh scobe and i proposed called for tapering out fossil fuel gas over 30 years it absolutely didn't suggest anyone invest in new fossil fuel infrastructure and though i haven't looked closely at the pilot project that frank just proposed i don't expect it will be something that i can get behind i also want to say that the argument that eugene is a tiny contributor to global greenhouse gas emissions is

39:22 accurate but in my opinion not relevant it's precisely the fact that every community can make the same argument that we are in the pickle we're in in my opinion is our responsibility to address our missions while others work on addressing theirs question for frank if there was a new policy that required all new buildings in eugene to run on electricity and we're talking about just new buildings not retrofitting all the existing buildings by dogs chiming in do you know how much additional load would result commissioner mccray we didn't look at that specifically um on our studies i know that we do about on average about 750 or so new connections every year so i would have to go back and run that

40:08 calculation okay given it's just an incremental increase each year isn't it a fairly minimal additional load yeah i would say in fact my my point about being sort of insignificant wasn't relative to to carbon as much as it was relative to the grid so um you know i i absolutely believe we all have to work together on the carbon side um from a grid perspective eweb and and eugene is pretty insignificant as far as its impact if you aggregate that though and you do say that talk about electrification or impacts on the grid the issue of contributing to peak even if it's small is detrimental to to that to the other side of that equation but i didn't mean

40:54 to imply that we're not significant in in the fight against uh climate change thanks for the clarification we have 30 years to make the transition to electrified buildings or buildings that don't run on fossil gas doesn't that give us sufficient time to plan and build sufficient resources to meet that new demand it it gives us a lot of time to work on that the the issue with me on on the whole relationship between i've been by the way false i don't look at fossil gas the same as i look at gas so gas in general i do believe that at some point we will we will continue to need both but the fossilness of that gas will be eliminated

41:40 i believe that it's going to take both yeah i um would love to see northwest national lean into that and provide renewable gas i don't see any um indication that they're going to go that way okay my last question and thanks for the time here even if we use high carbon electricity during peak as you and councillor clark were just discussing aren't the overall emissions lower if we you lose if we use electricity for a heating in our region and doesn't the carbon intense peak diminish as we build new renewable resources so i don't know that they would diminish as we build renewable resources um i do think that if you're talking about how you would most effectively meet peak

42:27 from a cost and carbon perspective a direct use fuel would be better than converting to electricity and losing the efficiency of the conversion the the whole concept behind sort of the the dual energy concept that i that i mentioned was that you're no longer the only time you're using natural gas is you're sipping natural gas during those times when you absolutely need it the rest of it the average use the average consumption drops significantly and so what you're doing is you're picking the most effective most efficient most carbon free way to meet that peak energy man demand under those conditions and so that's that's the concept and and

43:12 at the same time that you're decarbonizing the electric grid you're decarbonizing or de-fossilizing the uh the gas grid i hope that's how that works out thanks for the answers and i'll wrap up thanks very much thank you randy thank you mayor and thank you mr lawson and chelsea for your presentations um i think we're all concerned about being good stewards of our planet i think we're all concerned about climate change it's a matter of how we make our transitions and pace and timing uh for me that i'm interested in and i don't want to beat up on hydrocapacity i think councilor clark did a good job of of

43:57 trying to drill down into that issue however i will say that i i'm very interested if we can get any more detail before city council starts weighing in on some pretty significant issues of what the uh reduction from fish and wildlife the courts and our our drought conditions are going to have on hydroelectric generation at the same time um i also wanted to ask a question about solar uh it doesn't seem like we're we're putting a lot of energy into that and i've actually heard some people say well our climate isn't conducive to solar however i just got back from germany and switzerland and in germany the climate where i was at was very similar to our area in fact it looked like the

44:42 willamette valley and everywhere i looked there were solar panels i was absolutely blown away by the amount of solar generation capacity they have have we have we looked at that anymore mr lawson yes counselor so most of the studies that that i've seen have a few things in common one of them due indicate that there is a need even in the northwest and and you consider the northwest a fairly broad footprint to build out more renewables including solar so including wind including solar the need is there to build those out um all of those studies do also indicate that there's a capacity issue and there's there's another way that you're going to have to develop dispatchable

45:28 fuels i would say that um there's a number of things that eweb has to do to facilitate that um a number of those have have to relate to how we do our pricing of our product and how we capture fixed cost versus variable costs and other things but i do agree that more wind more solar is needed throughout the pacific northwest really the west coast that's where you leverage your diversity as well as one of the big missing pieces that right now is very expensive but also very important is storage um and that's something that um we need some um some innovation on and we need some some economics to to help that situation

46:15 thank you and uh just as you're planning out your new reservoirs i i had an opportunity to tour the uh hawkins and 25th avenue site and it it dawned on me there's such a large space that's buffered by trees are we giving any consideration to engineering the roof structures so that they could at least in the future hold solar panels because it would the footprint can't be really used for anything else i i don't know that that's been in our design criteria counselor i'd have to get back to you on that well i i would appreciate that and then my last question uh is around hydro hydrogen production and efforts i know eweb's been in some discussions with northwest natural could you touch on that briefly

47:00 yes i'd be happy to so um both northwest natural and eweb are interested in hydro production from from our perspective when you build out wind and solar you have to to achieve the same reliability you have to build out wind and solar somewhere between five and eight times greater than you uh do that what you take out or what you replace that naturally creates times of surplus and to make this whole effort more affordable so that the electric grid can can decarbonize we need to find a secondary market for the times when you have surplus as opposed to curtail it one of those potential opportunities is the production of hydrogen it's a stored

47:46 fuel it can be re-injected into the gas system to decarbonize it directly and it is one of the the pieces to moving from fossil fuel to synthetic fuel um with some other technologies at some point we could get rid of fossil fuels altogether use the surplus from wind and solar so that's our interest as well as storage as well as talking with people like ltd about fuel cell vehicles which are also carbon free and then also as a means of resiliency instead of having diesel generators as backup it'd be better to have fuel cells so we have multiple interests thank you and i'm out of time appreciate your

48:31 responses all right commissioner brown you're going to be next and at our next go around it'll be commissioner barofsky thank you and thank you council for this meeting i really think you're productive uh chelsea i just have a real quick question about your slide that talked about the carbon coming from electricity loss to the buildings could you elaborate on that what that particular um you said the carbon entering is second behind transportation from buildings and it's about 32 percent i thought what what is that about the electricity sector what amount of carbon is perceived to enter the environment through electricity loss in buildings what is that source carbon source in the

49:16 electricity grid um you know frank's is probably a better position to me to talk about the carbon sources within the electricity grid but uh we just know that um eweb's electricity like all electricity has some amount of a carbon footprint within it it's very small from eweb in particular for the city we look at uh ub's emission factor rather than that i know sometimes folks look at the northwest power pool but um uh frank feel free to chime in i know the eighty percent of your your electricity is carbon free and you could probably speak more about the particular elements that aren't yeah commissioner brown this is one of those questions where it's oftentimes you know will the real number please stand up um because there's there's a lot of different ways to look at this i i tend to look at this from a regional perspective so i tend to use either the

50:03 western interconnect or the northwest power pool for what i consider to be the most accurate way of carbon accounting in the grid itself there's a number of of sources we still have coal in the system we need to get that out and from eweb's perspective what's called unspecified market purchases get a carbon number assigned to them so there is still carbon in the grid uh some of the in fact i think one of the highest uses of natural gas in the northwest is electricity generation so um which is not very efficient so you know that's where the carbon comes from as far as northwest

50:48 okay thank you and then could you um to expand on that uh uh i i thought i heard 80 i thought we were more like 90 and that does not include the percentage of bonneville that's nuclear because it's carbon free but it's not renewable and so what is our true uh carbon uh where we're for 90 uh carbon free on our standard portfolio and then if we count the nuclear that is in bonneville's portfolio what is the true carbon uh free uh portfolio of of a hundred percent what is that percentage so i'll describe what i'll describe you webb's number as what we put into the grid it's not what we take out so just just to be clear we are 90 carbon free um that that does include nuclear as

51:34 being carbon free what is what is in that last 10 percent um there are are some thermal resources and i'll give one example and one one example is seneca seneca is considered renewable by oregon standards but is not necessarily carbon free and so it it's about i think it's about six percent and then the remain most of the remainder is what what are classified as those unspecified market purchases that's just assigned a number from the grid um depending on bonneville's numbers over the years and other over the year and other things so 90 carbon free is what what i would consider what we put into the grid and that varies year to year

52:19 mostly because of weather conditions and hydro levels so in a good hydro year we will have less carbon in the system in a bad hydro year we will have more carbon in the system so and kind of piggyback on council grows question about uh the hydro supply if um if the snake river dams are eliminated and or the chinook salmon are taken from threatened to endanger what does that do to our electric capacity our like our ability to have hydro because we're so hydro dependent on our ability to generate so um i'll i'll say and i'll strictly speak from the electricity perspective

53:04 um when you start removing um hydro and hydro storage in particular you reduce our capacity to respond to events and produce carbon-free resources that's independent of the fish examples as well so it puts pressure on the remaining part of the system i will say that it is going to get more complicated it is going to be regulated more and and there's no signs that um environmental regulations on uh dams and other things is going to get easier not harder you know the state of oregon is part of a lawsuit a federal lawsuit

53:49 which is challenging the spill regimes on the columbia that's that will have impacts if that goes through more water will be spilled and less will be used for generation and that's to protect um endangered fish so all of those have negative impacts on the system's ability relative to capacity okay and lastly um we're experiencing uh having to deal with the federal government on redoing the lieberg facility and they're making us plan and design and construct for a one in a million year event how if that is carried on to other hydro generation facilities how will that also affect um our ability to produce non-carbon electricity

54:34 the the decision for the various hydro producers i think commissioner would would not be one of um i think it would be a lot like i i think we're we're going to have to look at this which is how do we replace the profile of those resources which is the carbon content the dispatch ability and then what is the trade-off between cost of continuing to invest in a hydro facility versus investing in a combination of wind and solar and batteries and potentially other technologies so i have a feeling they would look at it the same way and and start to make investment choices based on some other criteria some of those standards are getting more difficult

55:21 which is making unfortunately making hydro less attractive as a generating resource and i think that another example of that is discussions about uh changing the lights the federal licenses on the on cougar reservoir and the cent and on the santiam as well thank you thank you uh jennifer thanks mayor um so also i will put in my thanks i appreciate everyone's time to be here tonight i think it's very important um councilor groves actually started touching on what i was interested in which was to talk a little bit about your your plans with solar um and so i want to make sure i entered

56:06 the way i understood what you were saying is that you have a storage there's there's storage issues i assume that means battery storage issues for for for storing the excess electricity when you when you're getting it so that you can then use it later and that's and that's the one of the reasons why you're interested in hydrogen is that correct that's part of it yes so i'm wondering if you can because i mean solar seems like a really good idea to me i and so i'm wondering if you can talk a little bit about the the battery issue very quickly and and it i guess the impression i'm getting is the e-web is not interested in in pushing the idea of solar but maybe

56:51 that's a maybe i'm not understanding so i i don't know that you're understanding that quite correctly um and they are they are interrelated but they're separate issues so um i think when you look at solar most of our incentives around solar have to do with installation incentives so we we provide installation incentives to put in solar part of the issue with solar is uh related to the the payback of solar uh relative to what the utility buys back the power for there's there's a cost of service and a pricing issue that we particularly will will probably have to address in the next couple of years if we want um more investment for customers to get a

57:38 return on that investment so so that's some that's sort of an administrative um structural issue that that e-web has from a storage perspective that's not unique to solar i think that if you look at intermittent resources in general they all have have their different profiles you know bend solar is different from eugene solar uh mckins or gorge wind is different than montana wind so looking at all those combinations we will need storage um in general and bulk storage is still very very expensive and kind of unpractical and and doesn't seem to be practical in the future so we we do need a different kind of storage and hydrogen is just one potential option for that but those are

58:24 that's a little bit of a separate issue okay um my second thing was it sounds like we have some very similar priorities uh you know you were talking about eevee conversion being um something you think is very worthwhile and the city has been talking about that energy efficiency um that's another thing we've been talking a lot about i i was very impressed with your residential and and your business um program that you have for folks and and looking at that and and i think there's got to be some great places in here that maybe we can collaborate on when we're doing our investments why you know we can do it together and i i'm sure chelsea is going to be bringing some of that back to us um because that's one of the things we were

59:09 interested in so i think that's great that we're kind of on the same page um so the last the last i remember was the last slide or close to the last slide oh i'm out of time i'm sorry never mind all right i think that it is our turn and um commissioner boroski thank you and thank you for the presentations um as eweb commissioners we we're pretty familiar with with our electrification study and you guys are more familiar with your studies so i'm gonna lean into some of yours um for me there's a couple of things that jump out as areas that i would like to

59:54 work on collaboration between the city and eweb one of them would be uh efficiencies you know frank talked about that that's the most bang for the buck is efficiencies and one of the major stumbling blocks to that is that 50 of our housing stock is rents now you know chelsea talked about that we can do an energy score and say yes it's cheaper to live in this apartment as opposed to that apartment but as matt can attest just finding an apartment right now is hard enough let less you know saying i'm not going to move into this one because it's going to cost me 20 a month more for electricity so figuring out a way to incentivize landlords to to weatherize and use efficiencies i think is one of a big thing that we

1:00:40 could work on together the other thing that i'm very hopeful that we can work together on is the carbon offsets and the ability for us to work together if the city of eugene is buying carbon offsets and we have an ability down the road of setting up carbon offsets in our watershed so that the money that the city is spending on carbon offsets is also helping to protect our watershed is something that i really hope we can pursue in the next few years um you know i looked at that slide that chelsea put up and showed how where we are and we're not going towards where we're going which means we're going to have to buy more and more carbon offsets if we're going to hit those numbers

1:01:25 and if that money is going to out of state i would like to really pursue trying to get it used in our neighborhood so that's some of the things i'd like to see us working on together thank you mayor uh thank you uh frank very much for the presentation and chelsea for the recap of our work i have some comments uh and questions so i agree your statement at the beginning frank that um the cheapest most environmentally friendly energy is the uh that which is never consumed um so i really appreciate commissioner borowski's comments and i love that framing um as we look at how we can move to

1:02:12 energy delivery that's less carbon intensive i believe we have to acknowledge that we've been pretty spoiled here in this region in terms of access to relatively cheap energy and we will likely need to make some adjustments in our expectations in terms of pricing and accessibility but if we take an informed and deliberate deliberate approach i don't think we have to head down the road that's going to result in rolling blackouts and the recent blackouts in california were to avoid starting fires not because they couldn't deliver the energy so let's not conflate those things and then frank you use the high peak time of an extreme weather event not just average peak demand so what is the

1:02:57 difference when we are not experiencing weather event between you know average demand and peak so uh councillor thanks for the the question so um we do our so just a little bit about how we do utility planning when it comes to peak events um we for planning purposes use a one in ten event as our as our planning criteria and that's primarily for reliability um the event that i showed was actually not that extreme that was last february i have lots of other examples that look very similar to that so that you know it's maybe not a one in two sort of a standard winter but we see pretty

1:03:45 clear alignment between peak pricing and scarcity and um and also the carbon that would be used to generate those and so those are pretty direct relationships i can actually pull pull the data and show you i would say in general it's pretty routine that you'll see a two times carbon content um even throughout the course of the day peak versus off peak and then weather events it is pretty nominal to see prices that range from twenty dollars to sixty dollars so a three-fold increase just in the course of a day or two all the time the 300 was definitely it wasn't an excursion per se wasn't unusual it was just one that i picked as an example but it was and how long did that peak

1:04:30 last that one was off and on for probably three or four days we also for example we saw some pretty interesting temperatures throughout sort of the middle latter half of august we saw something that looked very much like that only it was every day for about two weeks we also saw very similar effects at the heat dome so it's it really and and i actually would expect as a result of climate change that we see more variability in our weather patterns which doesn't really help that so it wasn't actually that unusual um and i can definitely pull more data if you if you want to get a feel for that thank you so i just you know we just

1:05:16 can't be using our worst case scenarios as our baseline um and then this new dual fuel proposal on your last slide is a total surprise out of left field it wasn't mentioned in our recent meetings with you to prepare for this joint meeting and it feels like a big sales pitch to assist northwest natural in avoiding action from the city council to start limiting their expansion and i have to say i'm left extremely skeptical of it given our history of trying to work in collaboration with northwest natural i have real reservations about the idea of our publicly owned and governed utility partnering with a non-profit not a private profit motive driven energy company and when that occurred with the seneca

1:06:03 biofuels plant did not go well for public rate payers so this is probably not a project i'm going to be able to buy into okay it's back to us uh commissioner carlson great thank you very much i really appreciate the meeting and and actually uh some of councillor serrett's uh questions uh partner well with the line of questioning that i have so i mean when we're talking about peak demand there are a few times of year when we have peaks i do recognize that we will have more of those kind of peak times but i don't want that to

1:06:49 delay the work that we need to do critically around energy efficiency in buildings around fuel switching you know the slide that frank uh presented that talks about electric vehicles um heat pumps and small office space heat are it seems like those are some of the options potentially i'm also skeptical um of some of the dual heat pump uh conversation i do want to see more data i'd also like to see more about what northwest natural is actually able to how they're able to decarbonize i mean are they are they truly decarbonizing by doing more methane capture on uh on

1:07:35 like landfills and so that's actually having a negative impact on the carbon um that's being released into the atmosphere how quickly can they and what what is the true amount of um availability of methane out there to capture to to make that switch i i do recognize that you know as a society we have a certain amount of energy resources and we need to you know figure out how we can use the the least carbon intensive during the times when we have those available and then potentially during those peak times use potentially those more carbon um intensive resources for reliability perspective i mean when we have times

1:08:22 where we have extreme freezing freezing conditions or extreme heat conditions that's going to result in loss of life i mean when we had 115 degrees weather here i mean people really do truly die during those sorts of situations so those are the times when i think as a society we we need to figure out how to ration those and i know the work that we're doing at eweb is around figuring out how to provide those resources to um and i'm already over i guess yeah all right i'm sorry about that um so i'll wrap it up but i do hope that we are able to get uh more of those resources together as a city and e-web um specifically thank you craig

1:09:14 thanks mayor and i want to thank the staff for all of this work um i asked i have a few quick questions the first one is ev stations we know we're behind in terms of installing ev stations but what is the plan for that and who is going to control it will it be the public or will it be a private entity that enters into this and takes control of it uh because you know they're going to want to make somebody's going to want to make money off of this so i think that's for frank i'll give you my perspective and that chelsea can weigh in as well i i think there's actually opportunity for both we we have funding to look at some direct e-web

1:09:59 charging um potentially and also providing incentives for third parties to also provide charging so i i don't think this is an either or i think it's probably a both in this case well how do we control price consumer prices in that in that area so if it could we we actually um i don't know that eweb can actually control that now they cannot market energy but they could market the connectivity to a charging station if they wanted to um i guess that that would not be within sort of eweb's ability to control other than our own stations uh this one might be a combined response

1:10:46 uh dark zones what i mean by dark zones is there are certain places in the city that do not have sufficient overhead light at night for people to travel if i'm traveling on highway 99 and somebody's dressed in black clothes i might hit him or if i don't see him come up that that quickly um there are several areas like that i'm not just talking about my area but several streets like that and you know i i thought we had gotten past the old south carolina dirt road uh deal years ago

1:11:34 is there other technology available i mean can we use the existing infrastructure that we have to create better lighting uh i don't have the answer for that but i think matt rodriguez is in the attendees i'm just kind of curious if he wants to jump in on on both your previous question or or this one we're able to pull him over well you could just eager to respond to me in the chat i have one last question because i know i'm running out of time um the grid how old is the grid and what is going to be needed to upgrade the grid so that we can uh have

1:12:19 some reliability in terms of our uh energy sources and uh what is the security to keep people hackers whether they're the russians the chinese or uh just some dude in his underwear uh breaking into the system and uh shutting it down and screwing us up bad for a long time so the the grid like a lot of an infrastructure counselor is in various states of of aging um there was a lot of infrastructure built out in the sort of mid 20th century late 20th century much of that is aging

1:13:04 there are all kinds of threats the the cyber threats is is one of them the grid needs significa the grid in general needs significant amount of investment i think that's that's part of sort of federal infrastructure plans and other things are recognizing that um and then it needs further investment to facilitate the build out of of renewable energy um in a reliable way so there's there's a lot of and i'm assuming you're talking about the grid in general um ewebs local grid much of that was built in the 50s and 60s and 70s and so it's at an age where all of that is kind of simultaneously aging and needs reinvestment and that's that's included in our most recent

1:13:49 capital plan to address that but there's there's a lot of investment still needed so does that mean higher rates or where are we going to get money for that capital i have a feeling that um any kind of energy system that you look at over the next few decades is going to increase in price significantly i i just think that there's a lot of investment to be made some of that will be uh sort of supplemented through federal actions and grants and other things but i i do believe i i think councilor said that we were blessed in the northwest i think we have historically been blessed with low prices um and i think it really across everywhere you're going to see

1:14:34 significant uh increases in the cost of energy in the infrastructure to support it one last thing real quick um what is the status of craig i'm out you're way over so if there's time for a second round i'll give it to you okay all right well i think it's my turn now um and my question is a joint question to frank and sarah sarah you haven't had much of a chance to respond and my question is more of like a policy or a procedural thing so we're all we've all been given information we can go kind of ad nauseam with questions how do we move forward

1:15:19 i i feel really strongly in my position at eweb is that i really want to figure out how to support the city in making sure that cat 2.0 happens and i guess we've had these quarterly meetings and we just talk about things a lot and no disrespect to staff or anything like that because i know there's a lot of issues and everyone's working really hard but how do we move forward what are the things that are like the low-hanging fruit that we can really put our heads together and just knock those out and then with some of these bigger issues how do we just not get caught up in asking question after question after question because at some point we're going to have to make some decisions and you know we can't conserve our way out of the climate crisis

1:16:04 uh we can't force people to suddenly buy electric cars like it needs to be something that's more directive policy wise uh thank you for that question i know that's something we've talked a lot about in some of our leadership meetings and i think it for me it kind of depends on the topic so in this case you know the the city council has had a lot of questions about the electrification study and have some conversations coming up around climate and building conservation that i think they're just eager to learn more and more and more so i think that on some of those bigger topics it feels like we need to have some kind of a forum like this in order

1:16:50 to to do that q a part before we can kind of move forward but even on those big ones i as we've been talking i've been thinking about how staff work really closely together but i don't know that we always that everybody always knows that but on on something like this you know where we're talking about how do we lower carbon in buildings it's something that would be good for us to actually more i would say more directly out of the gate uh make it really clear we're working together on on some of these discussions that are helping inform both sets of policies and then the smaller knock it out of the park things i think i do think some of those things are happening at a staff level and so it's maybe it's um a matter of communicating

1:17:37 that a little bit better or being really clear about what are those small knocking out of the park request that we want to move forward i hope i at least address your question yeah and i guess for frank on e-webside like um if there was a directive from the board that said that we want to align more closely or we want to work more closely with um council in meeting the city's climate goals like what what does the ewa board need to do to make sure that that kind of aggressively happens i think part part of that um president schlossberg this is sort of there's some

1:18:23 informal and formal aspects to that so e-web is part of the climate collaborative we work with the city pretty directly on on a number of different measures um i would have to probably be kind of get get more of a clear understanding is what the board wanted to to look at relative to the to the climate actions that are have sort of been rostered out uh from the city um the other the other thing is i know that we we sort of both entities sometimes evaluate um decisions or or make decisions or you know even consider those things that can affect the other one you know i think electrification is an example um it affects the climate and it affects the the energy grid and and developing

1:19:10 maybe some formality around how some of these questions get get answered um is you know we're we're actually pretty lucky there there's some cities that have a really combined very tricky governance relative to the utility system in the city and other other branches of the city and and we actually have something that i think could work pretty pretty cleanly but a lot of these questions there's there's not a really very good way of getting um sort of getting to the answer of either one entity or another so i think some formal process around that that if the city needed something evaluated or eweb needed something evaluated there would be a process to do that

1:19:55 great thank you that's all that i have hey matt thank you mayor and president shoshberg thank you for your comments you said quote we can't force people to buy electric but in this society in this community we can force people to have an account with a fossil fuel industry renters in particular have no choice i know from experience um as commissioner borowski alluded to my partner and i just rented a new place right here in south eugene and uh are forced to have uh forced to open an account with the fossil fuel industry i'm looking at the eweb residential

1:20:40 program summary and i applaud it but i see a dearth of of of um requirements uh in connection to renters and thank you commissioner brofsky for recognizing the 50 of our housing stock our renters with the exception of the energy efficiency excuse me the efficiency education program the home energy score are there other avenues you're exploring to reach out to renters in addition i see that income qualified customers receive a free kit with energy and water saving products basic emergency preparedness supplies what are what are you doing if anything to broaden that footprint so folks of

1:21:26 all economic backgrounds can have access to ways to reduce their monthly bill or improve their home comfort and lower their carbon footprint and in addition when it comes to rental properties that you're focused on in the home energy score tenants can choose to send those recommendations to the landlords and tenants can apply to receive an energy report with recommendations but what incentives do they have to do so counselor keating i i will fully admit that one of the biggest challenges that we have is um incentivizing um energy efficiency within rental properties there are there are certain rights that a renter has in a certain rates that that they do not

1:22:13 have based on the fact that they don't they don't actually don't own the property um we we would like to encourage uh whatever can create market pull for landlords to make those investments ultimately the land landlord has to make those investments and so we can have all kinds of incentives around behavior but the actual incentives to make a permanent change is something that we haven't found a way to effectively with without just supplementing a landlord found an effective way to do that in the rental market i think it's a big challenge i would like to see home energy scores for example by the way expanded not just from sales of homes but to rentals of homes

1:23:00 and rental agreements but i i also think it's a big challenge in the rental market thank you in my last eight seconds is it cheaper to reduce emissions by electrifying new buildings or by retrofitting old buildings with energy efficiency or electrification requirements i i would just say in general i think that there is an incredible amount of further potential with energy efficiency and conservation uh just in general i don't know the direct comparison but i i do believe that there's a lot of headroom that we could do more around efficiency if the conditions in the grid are what i say which i think they are the ability to manage peak through

1:23:45 efficiency measures is also there so i i think that it actually creates more incentive the conditions on the grid create more incentive to do more energy efficiency and conservation as well director lawson could eweb handle an outright ban on new gas hookups so the answer to that is is the key to that is handle like like i said we you know given time and that we i mean we expect adoption wouldn't wouldn't happen overnight but we could handle it as eweb that that isn't the issue thank you thank you mayor thank you i'm gonna let the last counselor speak because i think all the eweb commissioners had a chance and

1:24:31 that happens to be you alan well unless emily steps up as well thank you mayor um i did want to talk about drinking water resiliency wasn't looking good and get there i would point out that when i was in graduate school one of the projects i worked on was a project to improve the uh weatherization in multi-family housing in in eweb um so this has been a long-standing issue [Music] since i was in grad school we've been working on this so um i did appreciate in the report that you guys put together the distinction between the different tests for participant and rate payers and society

1:25:17 and but most of the impacts that i'm mostly concerned about fall on low-income folk and the and um and electrification poses some enormous equity concerns that we need to be very cognizant of and and uh not that we say we can't but we can mitigate for them but we need to know what they are and and the scale of what they are in order to deal with them forthrightly and as many people have said we're a city of mostly renters and and a lot of renters are low-income people and or energy-burdened people meaning you spend more than six percent of your income on energy um does the analysis that you guys take

1:26:02 that participant and break it down even further into uh impacts on low income parts of the participant class test or low-income rate payers and or on energy-burdened people for both the electricity side and the natural gas side and if not is that something that's possible to get out of this analysis we did not break down the participant class any further counselor if we did an analysis it would probably be to try to correlate with the other information that we have just on general participation in limited income programs would probably just do a secondary correlation it wouldn't

1:26:48 necessarily be part of of this analysis but but that could be done we i i think have quite a bit of data on that yeah because um average results don't necessarily indicate the impact on well young people they could be at a disadvantage or an advantage depending on how much energy they use they use less energy um then they could be an advantage over the over the general their average participant so be really good to see that kind of analysis because i think that's something we're going to have to deal with as we move forward with electrification yeah i agree i think the equity piece also has sort of two sides to that ledger there's obviously climate equity issues related to climate change and then there's

1:27:34 potential equity concerns with the electrification which is part of the solution to that so there's there's two sides to that ledger that need to be to consider not just the the equity of electrification but the inequity is created by climate change okay thank you i think we have two minutes left and so i think we probably won't go for a second round and i'm going to take my moment to just say a few things as we as we close up we did not get to water so i apologize for that but i i expected this to be a robust conversation i you know i just want to say that i think that uh i mean council has created a road in the climate action plan 2.0 and um and so we want to follow that roadmap and there are definitely is i think as

1:28:20 jennifer pointed out there are a lot of intersections with what eweb is currently doing and points at which we could make more investment and um and certainly on the energy efficiency and certainly on uh supporting low-income housing i you know will say also that as a council we have a lever and and one of that one of those big levers is that we are uh pushing hard to create more housing in this community and it is an opportunity to create more housing that is low carbon that is electric and so i think i would be looking for information to build on matt's questions earlier about you know what is that increased load with new housing that comes online

1:29:05 like as electric i would be interested in some data that would project that out because we know that we're trying to increase our housing stock steadily a lot of that is low income housing we want it to be efficient it should be electric if at all possible and um you know going forward i i i'm comfortable with the idea that there that it could be a little dirtier and messier in peak times because we're aiming for the future where that would be cleaner in the long term uh so i am interested in that i'm also very interested in some of the other uh renewables the wind and solar we've talked in the past about microgrids and whether we can create microgrids that have some resiliency and

1:29:51 so i am really interested in the way some of those things might also um fit into that uh constellation i think if we're going to look at pilot projects we really want to look at those pilot projects that take us um you know farther away from fossil fuels and um so uh i pre very much appreciate the data and uh acknowledging uh mindy's comment that for our council all that needs to happen for us to decide to move forward that we need more information is our counselor simply need to ask it a direct staff to do that work and come back with a motion and you have a series of meetings ahead of you that give you that opportunity to say please go to e-web and and request this information so i'll just leave you with that uh with that thought that um there are

1:30:37 many opportunities to act on this and have many meetings before you where you will be able to do that and so apologize for not getting to everyone for a second round but it is 701 and we have another meeting after this so thank you all very much and uh with that we are adjourned