Press enter after choosing selection

Sustainable Ann Arbor Forums 2012: Climate and Energy

When: March 8, 2012 at the Downtown Library: Multi-Purpose Room

This third in a series of four monthly discussions co-sponsored by the City of Ann Arbor focuses on a community Climate Action Plan to address greenhouse gas emissions. The forum is an opportunity to learn and contribute towards the developing Climate Action Plan, and discuss solutions that can reduce emissions in the community. The presentations will look at past successes and challenges, discuss possible future priorities and feature a think tank of local stakeholders. The ensuing discussions will help guide the city's sustainability planning efforts.The City has long been recognized for forward reaching energy initiatives like LED lighting, solar power, and energy efficiency improvements at its facilities, and Mayor John Hieftje's Energy Challenge sets ambitious goals for green energy and reduced emissions. See how the community at large plays a role in Ann Arbor's response to a warming climate, and help articulate a vision for a prosperous, cleaner energy future.Panelists for this event include, from the City: John Hieftje, Mayor; Matt Naud, Environmental Coordinator; and Nathan Geisler, Energy Programs Associate, Energy Office. The panel also includes Larissa Larsen, UM Associate Professor of Urban and Regional Planning; Monica Patel of the Ecology Center; Jenny Oorbeck, Communities Division Manager, Clean Energy Coalition; Wayne Appleyard, Chair of the Ann Arbor Energy Commission and Terry Alexander, Executive Director of the Office of Campus Sustainability at University of Michigan. Please note that on March 29th from 6pm to 8pm in the 4th floor meeting room of the Downtown Library, the City of Ann Arbor will hold a public meeting to discuss a set of draft overarching sustainability goals developed from existing plans and goals by commissioners from each of the key sustainability commissions and a team of city staff. The public meeting will build on the Sustainable Ann Arbor Forums sponsored by the Ann Arbor District Library and the City of Ann Arbor and provide an opportunity for attendees to share comments on the draft set of sustainability goals.Details of this series are posted online at www.a2gov.org/sustainability. For Ann Arbor's current environmental goals, check out the State of Our Environment Report at www.a2gov.org/soe.

Transcript

  • [00:00:26.84] TIM GRIMES: Good evening, everyone. Welcome to the Ann Arbor District Library. My name is Tim Grimes, I'm the manager of community relations and marketing for the library, and thank you so much for coming tonight. This really means a lot for us to see all of you here. This is just one of many events that we have here at the library. You can read about more events coming in March in this brochure.
  • [00:00:47.61] Tomorrow night we have a very important event at 7:00. It's the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. A representative from the museum will be here discussing the exhibit that's at the Taubman Science Library, Deadly Medicine. We hope to see you back for that. It's a very important subject. Find out more in this brochure or also aadl.org is our website, and you can read about our many events.
  • [00:01:13.70] Tonight's event is one in a series that we've been doing. This is the third in the sustainability series we've been doing with the city. I'm very pleased to introduce Matthew Naud, Environmental Coordinator for the city of Ann Arbor, that will tell us more.
  • [00:01:34.06] MATTHEW NAUD: you so much for coming out tonight. Mike Garfield and I had a conversation about six months ago wondering whether people would come out to a public meeting on climate change without any controversy. And you've proved him wrong. So thanks. Mike has a board meeting tonight, which is why Monica Patel is here with the Ecology Center. I am your emcee for the evening. Thank you so much. We have a big panel of folks that are going to give you a lot of information in very tight five minute talks. So we're going to hold them to that.
  • [00:02:11.35] I'm going to give you a little introduction to our sustainability framework, what we're doing here at the city, and then introduce John Hieftje, the mayor, who's going to talk a little bit before kicking off the show. So again, thank you for being here. Really, thank the Ann Arbor District Library. They have been an amazing partner. It's a great space, they have a great website to put these events up. This is funded in part by the Home Depot Foundation because we have a grant to work on our sustainability framework. That pays for Jamie Kidwell's time, who really does all the work and a few of us take a little extra credit for it.
  • [00:02:48.46] Wendy Rampson, my colleague at the city, the head planner, she and I and Jamie have been trying to kind of coordinate this. I'd also like to thank our presenters. Members of the University faculty, local nonprofits, city staff. It's really a great organization of folks here in town. We're lucky to live in a town like this where we can bring this kind of expertise together for free.
  • [00:03:16.36] So we have divided what we're doing here into four sustainability themes. Resource management, that forum happened in January. Land use and access in February. Tonight is climate and energy. And then in April, we'll have a forum on community dealing with things like recreation, public safety, housing, equity issues.
  • [00:03:39.11] Here's the agenda for tonight. We have the mayor, Larissa Larsen from the University of Michigan, Nate Geisler, who works with us in the Energy Office; Terry Alexander from the University of Michigan Office of Campus Sustainability; Jenny Oorbeck from the Clean Energy Coalition, a local nonprofit in town who's working to help the city in a number of ways. Tonight it's about the climate action plan we're working on. Monica Patel from the Ecology Center, and then Wayne Appleyard, the chair of our Energy Commission.
  • [00:04:12.71] So as part of the sustainability framework, one of the things Jamie's worked on is finding all of the various plans we have active in the city. 27 so far. We think Jamie may be the only person who has read them all. We laugh, but it's really about an opportunity for us at the city to step back, look at 20-plus years of good planning, and figure out, how do we bring it together under a sustainability framework?
  • [00:04:38.63] So in all those plans, we found over 120 goals. This is kind of a word cloud of the most frequent words. From that, we brought together members of the commissions at the city that make recommendations to council on a variety of sustainability issues. So we have an Energy Commission, Environmental Commission, Housing, Housing and Human Services Advisory Board, Park Advisory Commission, and a Planning Commission.
  • [00:05:15.01] So tonight, we're talking about climate and energy. We have a set of 15 draft goals that have been created. These are the three that we're listing under climate and energy. So sustainable energy. Improve access to and support use of renewable energy by all members of our community. Energy conservation, reduce energy consumption and eliminate net greenhouse gas emissions in our community. And then high performance buildings. Increase efficiency in new and existing buildings.
  • [00:05:47.96] Those are our draft goals in this area that we're working on. I'm not going to spend a lot of time on this, but I would like you to check out a2energy.org, a new website that we've created as we find ways to reach out and help out with community energy efficiency. But tonight, again, it's a little different than the previous forums.
  • [00:06:12.13] We have a climate action plan that's underway right now, and a lot of the focus tonight is going to be the foundation for this. Where do we think our climate emissions are coming from? And what are some of those actions we think this community can take to reach some pretty stretch climate goals that we're going to set for ourselves?
  • [00:06:33.75] This effort, the climate action plan was funded by the state of Michigan. It's actually funded off the interest from the bottle, the dimes you all give at the grocery store that's never collected. It turns out it's at least $250,000 a year. So in August, 2011, the Energy Commission created a subcommittee to create this climate action plan. Here's the committee's charge.
  • [00:06:59.95] The main tasks that you're going to hear about tonight are looking at, what is our inventory of greenhouse gas emissions? What are those actions and steps we can take in the community? And what's an implementation plan we can use to guide us as we try and reach those? So with that, here's our emails.
  • [00:07:20.51] But I'd like to introduce the mayor of the City of Ann Arbor, John Hieftje. John's been the mayor since 2000. He's an active member of the Energy Commission. There's typically a council member on each of these commissions. John has been a part of the Energy Commission for a long time. He's also been a winner of several major environmental awards. And I'd like to thank him for being here tonight, and his words about energy and climate.
  • [00:07:52.84] JOHN HIEFTJE: Thank you, Matt. Thanks everybody, for coming. This is a great series and it's just very gratifying to see so many people out here. The Energy Commission-- and I want to introduce somebody who's with us tonight, and that's David Konkle, who we used to call our energy czar, and who helped us get a whole lot done over a couple of decades. We appreciate him showing up tonight, and I'm glad he's still around. I don't just mean on the planet. He's still around town. So Dave, it's good to have you here.
  • [00:08:23.84] The Energy Commission started back in 1981. It's interesting. Back then, the mission was more about getting the best price for energy, as you can imagine. And it's morphed a lot. I don't know that there's any other cities in Michigan, and certainly very few in the nation, that even have an Energy Commission and have an energy czar. And that's not his real title. But Dave retired, and Andrew took over and we're a little bit in between right now. But the Energy Commission continues to forge on.
  • [00:08:51.88] But the mission has changed. It's become more about certainly getting a good price for energy, but it's more about getting clean energy. It's more about dealing with the greenhouse condition. It's more about sustainability than it ever was when it started. And that's natural because the world's changed quite a bit since then. But we'd had a number of important initiatives that have really put the CEO in a leadership role.
  • [00:09:15.87] It's hard to believe, but we were named Solar America's City. Are we up to 25 now in the nation? We were in the first batch of that, and we continue to work with the federal government on that. But that was a recognition of the work that the city had done, that the staff had done over the years, over the decades, to put the city in a position where we are. Where we're one of the nation's leaders in energy conservation. Certainly one of the top leaders in LED street light technology, and a whole host of different things they were done over the years.
  • [00:09:47.10] One of the interesting parts for taxpayers and residents is that things we do in the energy field save us money. We can add up millions of dollars that the city has saved through its energy conservation efforts. We're fortunate that we're able to move ahead with things like the LEDs and a lot of the work that we do with grant programs. So we've been very successful in bringing in grant dollars to fund things like that.
  • [00:10:12.49] We've even worked with the AATA. I know I worked a lot with some others in city staff, with Congressman Dingle to get the funding that pays the difference between a regular bus and a hybrid bus. Those make a big difference around our city, and the whole fleet is being filled out over time with hybrids.
  • [00:10:28.27] Back when I was elected, the Energy Commission was already there and was up and running, and Dave was there. I was very happy to become a member of it and to keep working on these issues. A whole lot has happened since then. Back in 2005, I was working with the energy commissioners and said, let's reset the bar. In 2005, I issued something called the Mayor's Green Energy Challenge. The Mayor's Green Energy Challenge set a number for the city of 20% renewable energy for all city operations by 2010 and 15%, if I recall right, for the whole city by 2015 is what we're shooting for.
  • [00:11:05.32] And then we sent it off to the Energy Commission, and the Energy Commission worked over for a while and came back and said, John, we think we can hit 30% by 2010. I said, you guys sure of that? And they said, yeah, we can do it. At the time, we were very hopeful about the big wind energy field that was being developed up in Michigan's thumb. That was really picking up momentum. We wanted to buy that wind energy, bring it to Ann Arbor.
  • [00:11:27.92] I put out in a statement at the time, an offer that still stands, we would like to buy renewable energy produced in Michigan-- could be solar, probably more likely going to be wind-- that we will use here in Ann Arbor. And we'll even pay more than the current market price for it. We'll sign a 20-year contract for that energy. We know that as time goes on, we're going to get paid back on the end of that contract. But we wanted somebody to be able to go to the bank and say, listen, I've got a contract with Ann Arbor. Give me a loan to put in this new wind field. And that would spur that industry to keep it moving, to get things going.
  • [00:12:03.22] Nobody's taken us up on that yet. There's a lot of reasons for that. The wind field up in Michigan's thumb has never really taken off. There's some windmills up there now, I think they're up to about 60. If you look across the lake, though, if you were to take a look at northern Ontario-- and a frustrating part for me is when you're up in Sault Ste. Marie, you can look across to a location there called Gros Cap, where there's 160 300-meter, 300-feet-tall industrial windmills that are powering Sault Ste. Marie, which is actually becoming one of the most renewable energy-friendly places in North America. So they're also going big into solar.
  • [00:12:40.86] And if you take a look at what's happening on the other side of Lake Huron, they have something similar to a feed-in tariff like they do in Europe. So they're taking off. But in the meantime, back here the Energy Commission said, hey, we can hit 30%. So that was the goal that we set back in 2006. And we didn't hit it, we didn't hit the 30. But we did at the 20. So Ann Arbor is one of the very few cities that you will find anywhere that's hit the 20% renewable energy for city operations. Now the big thing now is to roll that out into the public. And that's a big part of our effort.
  • [00:13:14.02] We have a resident here who I've been emailing the last couple days. She's pretty frustrated, and I think rightly so, that we don't have the ability at this time to say we aren't going to tax you on your new solar panels, for instance. But our representative, Jeff Erwin, is working on that in Lansing. We're happy to work with him on that and get that changed. As far as I've been able to figure out, that is something that we cannot affect locally because there just isn't a way to do it through the state statute.
  • [00:13:43.59] A large part of the effort is to roll this stuff out to our residents. And people are really picking up the ball and running with it. We have solar panels going up at houses, up at businesses. We've got the pace program online, something we worked very hard to get in place. We worked with now Senator Warren, back when she was in the House. And we'd love to extend that to residential, but we can't quite yet because the federal government is holding us up on that.
  • [00:14:06.28] But that allows somebody to go out and get loans actually from the city at a very low interest rate, and it becomes attached to their property bill. The city knows they're going to get paid back. But you can pay for these new investments in your home's energy efficiency over a long time. And should you move, then it just becomes part of the new owner and it's an asset for them on their house. Tremendous program. Businesses are taking advantage of it because we can offer it to them. And we've got more work to do with that and it's very nice that people are signing up for it. We'd love to be able to roll it out residentially, but it's going to require a change in Washington.
  • [00:14:40.23] I wanted to give you a little flavor of where it is we're trying to go and what it is we're trying to do. But I think our goal is pretty clear. Matt talked about all 200 some goals. But the basic one is Ann Arbor wants to be one of the most energy efficient cities anywhere. And we're on that path. And we also want to be able to roll that out to our residents. So I hope you'll enjoy the evening, and we'll get on with our presentations and be happy to take your questions afterwards. Thank you.
  • [00:15:13.44] MATTHEW NAUD: Thank you, John. To keep us on track, I'm going to give a very short introduction to Professor Larissa Larsen, Associate Professor of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Michigan. When she left for a little bit, they let me teach environmental planning one term, and you'll notice I wasn't asked back. So we'd like to thank her for coming tonight, and she's going to share an overview of the context of climate change in energy tonight. So thank you.
  • [00:15:48.39] LARISSA LARSEN: Thanks very much. I'm proud to live in a place that I can talk about this openly. And I'm really proud you let me go early tonight so that my little children could come and see me. They never know what Mommy does all the time, so they'll probably never come back now. But I'd like to give you a little overview. I teach environmental planning, mostly to graduate students in the planning school. So I want to solve problems and do things a little bit better. Let's see if I can make this work. We won't stay too long on this slide.
  • [00:16:20.61] But as we know, if we didn't have this insulating blanket around our earth, which is out about seven miles out, just past the troposphere, we would have a situation where our earth would be about minus 60 degrees Fahrenheit. That's what climatologists, geologists tell me. Not a very inhabitable space. But as a result of this blanket that we have, which is really made up of heat-trapping gases, we're able to have this comfortable environment that we know. Well, the problem is we have too many gases lately and the blanket is getting a little too thick and it's getting a little too hot in here.
  • [00:16:57.91] So what's the relationship between climate and energy? When the Industrial Revolution started, we had about-- they say-- 270 parts per million in our atmosphere, in that blanket. And as a result of using fossil fuel, it really has increased over time. If you look at this graph, 87% of the US greenhouse gas emissions come from energy production. So there's no denying that the way we have fueled our economy, our growth, has resulted in this. One of the things is, as many of you know, there's multiple gases in that blanket. Why do we talk so much about carbon dioxide? The reason we talk about it is it constitutes 85% of the changes that have been happening.
  • [00:17:45.58] So let's talk about what it means in this place. So about two years ago, I started working with climate scientists. I think my biggest skill in life, I learned early, is to just keep asking questions and saying, why, and what does it mean? And so when they keep saying things to me that I have no idea, I just keep asking. And so I'm going to tell you in the way that I understand it.
  • [00:18:04.25] So what's going to happen here? Well, we know that we're going to have some rising temperatures in this area. And if you look at the literature, right now it says it's going to increase in temperatures, on average, three to 17 degrees Fahrenheit. That's a little bit higher. If we look at the global averages, they're two to 11 degrees Fahrenheit.
  • [00:18:23.37] Well what does that mean for us? One of the things it means is an extension of the growing season. Many of you have probably noticed, in the last 30 years, spring comes 10 to 14 days earlier here. As a Canadian, I'm a little bit excited about that. But you know what? There's some downsides. We see some shifting plant zones, and we see more of those darn invasive plants which I spend a lot of my summer energy on trying to get rid of. Another thing we're going to be noticing, decreased lake ice, decreased snow cover, increased ice storms. Not so good. More extreme heat events, and increased cooling demand from electricity.
  • [00:18:59.71] Let's just talk about that last one. So I've told you, it's going to get a little bit warmer here in the winter. But what's going to happen is it's going to get a little harder here in the summer, and unfortunately there isn't an equal relationship with the sources of energy that we use for those two things.
  • [00:19:15.86] This graph shows you in the United States what is the source of electricity in this country. And it's actually higher here. But you can see half of it in the United States is coal based. So one of the challenges we're going to have is that as we try to mitigate the heat, we're going to probably use HVAC, Heating Ventilation Air Conditioning systems. And that's going to demand more electricity. So that's not so good, if we remember what contributes to that blanket.
  • [00:19:45.83] What else is going to happen here? This is the one that really I think we're more concerned about, the changes in precipitation. So we're going to see increased storm intensities, increased flooding, stormwater volumes are going to be up. We're going to have faster rains, flashier floods, stream flow patterns are going to change slightly. We're going to see increases in water pollution.
  • [00:20:07.63] And in our part of the country, that's important because we have a lot of combined stormwater sewer systems. And so that means when we get a lot of rain, often because the facilities are over-flooded and we actually have direct release of that fluid into the receiving waters. Not a desirable thing. Next, we're also going to see decreased summer rainfall. There's infrastructure implications.
  • [00:20:31.03] So those are the general things. Now I'm going to tell you more specifically. Again, asking all these questions, myself and some students in this room, and a climate scientist decided that we wanted to understand exactly what was going to happen here or what best we could know. So we selected three places. Marquette, Michigan-- who are some of the nicest people God's planet, almost as nice as Ann Arbor-- and Detroit, Michigan and Buffalo.
  • [00:20:57.12] And we strategically selected those based on where they were with the prevailing winds and the relationship to the lakes and a few other characteristics. And we ran some different models. Again, I know people find models very confusing. And when I would talk to my friends, the climate scientists, they'd tell me, it depends on which model you use. And I said, I want to use all the models. Just show me all of them. OK. Well, geez, nobody's ever asked for that before. I guess we could do that. And the university computing system was slowed for several months. You don't this, but that's true. You couldn't get your email as quickly because my student Evan was running all these models.
  • [00:21:32.71] But what these show is this is what's supposed to happen between 2041 and 2070 for temperatures. On the left side are winter temperatures, average, and on the right side are summer temperatures. Notice that these are in Celsius, I'm sorry. So remember, Celsius is like almost twice as much as in Fahrenheit. As you can see, at the bottom there's these different kinds of models. There are global circulation models, there's statistically downscaled models, and there's dynamically downscaled models.
  • [00:22:02.13] I'm sure all of you pray that I will not explain the differences between all those. They do mean very specific things, and they produce slightly different outcomes. But the critical thing to know is if you look at this, you can see Marquette, Detroit, Buffalo, and then the Great Lakes region. And if you look in the winter, if you just look across the models to get a sense of what are all the different models saying, they're saying that in winter our temperature should be around 2 to 2 and 1/2 degrees Celsius-- 5, 6 degrees Fahrenheit-- warmer.
  • [00:22:34.30] What does that mean in summer? So when we look on the other side, we see again, Detroit is a surrogate for Ann Arbor there. We're seeing again a little bit warmer. There we're ranging from almost 3 and 1/2 to about 2 and 1/4. So somewhere in between there, we think summer average temperatures are going to increase. Some of you might have seen these maps. They kind of frighten me a little bit because I worry about those darn invasive plants.
  • [00:23:00.73] But alas, some of the challenges are the scenarios. In this case, there's a lower emission scenario, which means that our conditions will be maybe like the southern part of Illinois. And then there's a higher emissions scenario, which means we're like the North of Texas. Now, that's at the end of the century, but it's a little bit frightening. Let's come back and look at precipitation, the one I told you that I think really matters in our part of the world.
  • [00:23:29.96] So in this case, on the left we've got winter precipitation. Some of us call it snow sometimes. And on the right is summer. And if you look at our models here again, this is different than the degrees. This is the percent of change. We're going to see, if we look at Detroit, that the percent of change there across these different models, we're looking at between 8% and 16% increase in winter precipitation. But one of the challenges is going to be we're going to have warmer temperatures. So there's going to be a lot more freezing and thawing that go on. So a little bit more there.
  • [00:24:06.82] But let's go over to the other side, which is a little bit more discouraging. If you look at Detroit, we're actually seeing a decrease between 2.5% and about 5% in summer. We're going to have some very dry summer circumstances. So again, we are so fortunate not to be in the Southwest right now talking about this. But we are going to have situations where things get really brown and really dry in our summers.
  • [00:24:31.32] So Larissa, you're so smart-- well actually, I'd never say that-- but Larissa, what would you do? These are the things I think we need to do. And I think I'm really happy. When I came to the rehearsal the other day, all these other people who are pretty smart about this said all the same sort of things, so I think we're getting somewhere.
  • [00:24:45.88] So first of all, one thing we have to do is absolutely prioritize energy efficiency. We've got to use the energy we have right now very well. Another thing is we've got to stop building in the flood plain. I'm really happy Ann Arbor right now is taking a look at its flood plain. It's asked FEMA to remap it. And so we've got to really be watchful of that. We're going to have more flooding conditions. So this is of increasing concern for us.
  • [00:25:09.88] Infrastructure planning. We've got to think about long-term resilience in these situations. What we build today will be in place in those 100 years ahead, hopefully, when those maps are different. And one of the biggest things-- I don't know if Janis Bobrin is here, but this is a little plug for Janice-- we need to have more pervious surfaces everywhere. So handling stormwater on site is key.
  • [00:25:29.92] Another is we need to revise our building codes. The way that building codes are set up right now is this TMY, Typical Meteorological Year. And that is usually based on information from the 1970s that says what they think the climate will be. And we use it to size systems and to estimate things. And so we have to go back and take a look at those expectations with the new information that we have.
  • [00:25:55.95] We really need to stress passive strategies. Some of my dear friends in public health think our answer is to install air conditioning everywhere. We can't do that because we'll blow the grid. We don't want to. We really want to be very thoughtful about incorporating passive strategies. We need to think about energy diversification and renewables. How do we increase those, as the mayor talked about. Our interest is there. Where is the source?
  • [00:26:22.05] And then finally, it comes back to this. We need to reduce vehicle miles, and that means more of these difficult conversations about density. So I'll just end there. And I just worked with some students for the US Green Building Council, and they're going to look at how they incorporate lead climate adaptation strategies into green building practices. If you'd like this, it's available on the web and we would delighted if anyone would read it. So thanks.
  • [00:26:55.49] MATTHEW NAUD: Thank you. I'd now like to introduce our current interim energy czar, Nate Geisler, the City of Ann Arbor Energy Programs Associate. Thank you, Nate.
  • [00:27:14.43] NATHAN GEISLER: Thank you. A couple years ago, I was fortunate to have an environmental planning course with Larissa. And I recall one of the assignments was investigating these new things called climate action plans, and looking at a couple of them, comparing and contrasting, and finding some of the issues they raised. And little did I know, a few years later we would be kicking them off here and getting one going for our own city. So I'm glad to have her as a part of this form.
  • [00:27:40.45] So in order to first delve into the issue of figuring out what strategies and actions are needed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the obvious first step is in inventorying where we are both today and hopefully in the past. And fortunately, in 2003, a student project for the School of Natural Resources and Environment conducted a strategy that helped inventory calendar year 2000 emissions for Ann Arbor, which helped us establish a baseline, a base year of emissions, so that any of the planning that we do in the future or targets that we set can be measured against that baseline year. That project helped establish that for 2000.
  • [00:28:24.98] Something that the mayor touched on is the Green Energy Challenge, which set goals for the municipality and the community at large. We've long been involved in other climate protection efforts, including being assigned for the US Mayors Climate Protection Agreement.
  • [00:28:44.24] Stable climate is among the 10 city council-approved environmental goals that were set in 2007. So we have our own background of being proactive, but additionally, new EPA rules and things are coming forward that are more seriously regulating greenhouse gases. So inventorying emissions and planning for climate change is a way to be proactive about some of these emerging regulations.
  • [00:29:08.80] So these are some of the sectors that we're able to get data on. They include the residential, commercial, and industrial. We've pulled out the University of Michigan, who is tracking their own data-- we'll hear from them in just a moment-- the transportation sector and the waste sector. And not surprisingly residential, commercial, industrial, we're talking mostly about electricity and natural gas use. There are a variety of sources, but namely these two things for the University.
  • [00:29:40.07] And we have a model that looks at transportation vehicle miles traveled. One of the last things Dr. Larsen mentioned was reducing VMT, as it's called. And every five years, the Washtenaw Area Transportation Study models a VMT number that's helpful to apply a emissions amount to our transportation sector. Finally, we have methane that is part of our waste collection system, as well as our wastewater treatment processing. We also have a closed landfill that we capture a lot of gas from, fortunately, but that also emits a trace amount of methane gas. Which is, as we see on the bottom here, a greenhouse gas that's 21 times stronger than carbon dioxide. So this is just to show some of the different heat trapping potential of the primary greenhouse gases we looked at in our inventory.
  • [00:30:34.79] At the very bottom, if you can see, is the basic calculation that goes into figuring out what the emissions are, which is the activity data or consumption, if you will, of electricity in kilowatts. Then you apply that to a certain factor per kilowatt hour, in that instance, that results in an emission.
  • [00:30:53.72] A few final terms and things to keep in mind. Greenhouse gases, internationally, the standard is metric tons. So there are 2200-plus pounds per metric ton. So all the data I'm going to show you in a second are in metric tons of CO2 equivalent, equalizing both methane, nitrous oxide, and carbon dioxide into one common unit.
  • [00:31:15.36] We have a protocol, the International Local Government Emissions Analysis Protocol that helps set some of the guidelines for attempting to do these emissions inventories. I should say, dozens and dozens of cities are on their way with doing climate action plans. And even more have done greenhouse gas inventories. So we're certainly not alone in this effort. I mentioned the 2000 baseline year being established by the SNRE report.
  • [00:31:43.42] Really quickly here, unfortunately I know I'm running out of time and in order to get everybody up here, I'm going to try and go through this kind of quickly. We've seen a pretty constant level from the year 2000 to 2010, which was our last of inventory year in the residential sector. This coincides with an ever so slight decrease in population over that time between 2000 and 2010. The commercial industrial sector, contrasting to that, dropped quite a bit. We think this probably has a lot to do with economic factors. The loss of the Pfizer facility, things of that sort.
  • [00:32:17.98] Transportation, based on that the watts numbers that we have, has remained fairly constant. We're actually seeing a slight decrease in that, largely due to the improvements in vehicle efficiency. The University of Michigan has grown substantially. And fortunately, Terry Alexander is going to talk right after me about some of the great things that the University is going to be doing to address their own emissions as, as we see at the very bottom, across this whole time frame, based on what data we can get, it's been a less than 1% change in the emissions from the data. The drop in industrial and commercial emissions, paired with the growth at the University, has sort of leveled that out.
  • [00:33:00.13] This just shows that same information in a graphic form here, 2000 and 2010, left to right on those two common-colored bars. And I want to point out at the very bottom, the municipal footprint only makes up 1.2% of the community inventory. And that's why the mayor stressed that we've done a lot of great work in trying to strive to improve what we've done at the city government level, but it's only less than 2% of the overall picture.
  • [00:33:29.46] So it really underscores the need for a community-focused climate action plan. And quickly, this is another way, we have a few different ways to slice and dice emissions, including fuel source and scopes and all these other fun things that we'll have in the plan. But unfortunately, I don't have enough time to go into right now. But it just helps to explore this a little more detailed.
  • [00:33:52.01] Finally, this is my last slide, Jamie will be happy. This shows our per-capita emissions here in Ann Arbor in the blue. We've got the American pie for the US average over there. We are doing better than the US average on a per-capita basis. And we're still at about 19.4 metric tons per person, which is about the equivalent of each person driving four cars for an entire year, rather than just a single vehicle.
  • [00:34:18.08] We've done a lot. Some places are a little lower but have different factors involved. This just sort of shows where we are with things. As I mentioned, I want to now hand it over to Terry, and he'll be able to discuss a little bit of what the University is doing. Contact information. Find me afterwards to contact me.
  • [00:34:45.49] MATTHEW NAUD: So thank you, Nate. I would like to welcome Terry Alexander from the University, the Office of Campus Sustainability. They've been a great partner in our climate action planning and also set a bunch of significant stretch goals themselves this year, but he can tell you more about that. Thank you.
  • [00:35:03.80] TERRY ALEXANDER: Thanks, Matt. Good evening. Two years ago, we started into a collaborative process across campus among faculty, staff, and students to attempt to come up with some long-term stretch goals for the University. We had Town Hall meetings like this so we could get ideas from the community, we had online systems to collect data. Again, it was a two-year process. And out of that, we came up with five goals for the campus.
  • [00:35:31.33] These goals are set for 2025. We consider them kind of interim goals. We have a five-year review process on the goals, so every five years we're going to look at them, see if we need to stretch them out further. The goals span across several areas. Two of them deal with climate and I'm going to talk about those tonight. Two of them deal with healthy communities, protecting the Huron River Watershed, and finding sustainable food sources for our on-campus food systems. And then the final one is waste reduction.
  • [00:36:03.33] So our climate goal, basically our guiding principle is to work toward a long-term goal of becoming climate neutral. Carbon neutrality really is not an achievable goal at this point in time. Technically it's just not there, there's not enough renewable out there to make it happen. But that's of our long-term stretch of where we'd like to get to.
  • [00:36:25.99] So our 2025 goals touch on two areas. The first one deals with our buildings. Basically, we want to reduce our scope one and scope two greenhouse gases by 25% below 2006 levels. For those of you who don't understand, scope one emissions are those that are produced on campus through our central power plant, our boilers, and our transportation vehicles. And scope two emissions are what we purchase through our electricity that we buy from DTE. So we account for the emissions from those coal power plants out there in our scope two.
  • [00:37:03.98] Our second goal is to try to increase the amount of ridership and clean up our transportation fleet so that we can reduce the carbon per person that rides our vehicles. Last year, we were up to about 6 and 1/2 million riders on our bus system, Another several million on the Ann Arbor transportation system. The more riders we can get on the buses, the less reliance we have on people driving to the campus. It's a win-win, and we want to try to get 30% below our 2006 levels on the per-person carbon.
  • [00:37:39.91] So where are we at right now? The top graph deals with our overall campus greenhouse gas emissions. The gold bars show the total amount of emissions that we produce in a year. That includes what we do on campus and what we buy from DTE. And then the black line on that top one is a per-person, per million square foot normalized number so that we can see, are we making progress on what we're doing across our buildings?
  • [00:38:08.75] You can see our greenhouse gas emissions in total are up about 28% since 2004. Our building square foot is also up 22% and our campus population has grown 12%. When you normalize it, our per-person, per-square foot greenhouse gas emissions are actually down 5.8%. What that's telling us is the energy efficient things that we're doing in our buildings are actually working. We're making them more efficient, we're bringing that number down. Obviously, we need to bring down that gold bar by 25% to meet our goal, so that's going to be a challenge.
  • [00:38:45.52] The bottom graph deals with our transportation systems, basically our campus buses. You can see the black line there are carbon per-person that rides our bus is on its way down. Down about 24% since 2004. So we're doing great there. What we need to do there is to increase our ridership, which gets tough because our bus system runs pretty capacity right now, and to make our buses more efficient.
  • [00:39:13.64] So in the short term, we've got a couple things happening. On our energy efficiency in buildings, we have basically been doing energy programs in our buildings since the 1980s. We've gone through the EPA Green Lights Program, the EPA Energy Star Program, we've done re-commissioning. And then over the last four years, we started a program we call our Planet Blue Program. And basically, that is a re-commissioning of buildings and educating our campus community on how to operate the building the most efficient way possible. And over 70 buildings we've completed so far, we're seeing about an 8.6% drop in energy use across those buildings. And that's on average. Some buildings are hitting 30% to 40%. Some buildings a little bit less, but on average, 8.6%.
  • [00:40:00.39] For new buildings, we have two goals in place. The first one is lead silver on our buildings. The second one is to take the national energy standard and go 30% beyond that standard. So we're really pushing the envelope on trying to make our buildings as efficient as possible. On the bus system, you've seen some of our new buses across campus. And Jamie's giving me the big zero minutes sign here.
  • [00:40:25.28] So what we've got is more energy efficient buses, four of them on line already, three more on order, and over the next five to six years we're going to be replacing our fleet with more energy efficient buses. We also are looking at alternative energy sources. We have a program with DTE that we're working over the next six to 12 months, where we're going to try to get about 600 kilowatts of solar energy on North Campus. And we've already purchased the energy from two of the wind mills that the mayor mentioned, accounts for about 2% of our energy purchase.
  • [00:41:00.74] Long-term challenge. This is a tough one. I apologize for taking an extra minute on this, but it's kind of important. What you see here is our total overall energy use last year, about 720,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide was produced from this total energy bubble. The little sliver you see down on the bottom here, that's our transportation piece. It's only about 1% of our overall role energy use across campus. It's not huge, but it's very visible, so a lot of people want us to do a lot with that, and that's where we're working toward. The blue side of it is what we produce from our power plant. Natural gas burning, co-generation plant, about 80% efficient.
  • [00:41:44.22] The purple section is what's produced in what we buy from DTE. Coal-fired primarily. Not very energy efficient because it's not co-generation. It's running 45% to 50% efficiency. What we need to do in the long term is to reduce that purple side. And that's where the challenge is. It's looking for renewables which, as we've already mentioned, aren't that available in this area, or find different ways to produce energy on campus that's done in a more energy efficient method. So that's our big challenge. That's a longer term and a very expensive challenge. But it's on our radar, trying to look for ideas on how to accomplish that. So with that, back to Matt.
  • [00:42:30.76] MATTHEW NAUD: All right, thank you Terry. I'm going to move on to Jenny Oorbeck, who's the community's division manager with the Clean Energy Coalition, who's going to talk about some of the climate action strategies we have. So Jenny, thank you.
  • [00:42:51.46] JENNY OOERBECK: It's great to see so many of you here tonight, and some familiar faces in the crowd. I'm going to be talking to you about some of the climate action plan strategies the City of Ann Arbor has come up with. And the process for doing this, the city has assigned a task force to work on this. So the Clean Energy Coalition is a partner to the City of Ann Arbor on this project, and the task force is helping us determine what are the actions we need to take to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and how can we actually achieve our greenhouse gas reduction goals in the interim and long term?
  • [00:43:26.95] I wanted to mention that there are a couple of goals that appear to be coming out of this task force. One is a mid-term goal of 25% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2025. So that's 25% below 2000 level emissions. And a very aggressive target of reaching 80% to 90% below 2000 level emissions by 2050. These are very aggressive targets, and we need to figure out how to get there. I'm going to tell you some of the ideas we've come up with so far.
  • [00:43:58.79] If we take all of the actions that the task force has pulled together at this time, and we tally up all of the emissions we expected that could be achieved-- and this is at the peak of all the programs. So you implement a program, it might take 10 years to actually achieve the peak reduction. But if we're taking the peak reduction for every strategy, every action, we're looking at a reduction of nearly 700,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent. That comes up to 40% of our 2000 level emissions. So even though we've had a task force working on this for months, we haven't identified all the strategies to get to that 80% or 90% reduction we really absolutely need to get to.
  • [00:44:45.62] So I'm going to show you where we are able to get to based on the strategies we've identified. These are our 2000 baseline levels. If we do nothing, if we continue status quo today, business as usual, and we have a 2% growth in emissions each year, This is what our missions will look like by 2050. There will be a substantial growth, more than doubling. If there were a little bit less aggressive growth during that time period, say half a percent, the economy doesn't perk up-- hopefully it'll perk up by 2050-- but if it's not immediately perking up but if we have lower growth during this time period, we're still by 2050 surpassing our 2000 level emissions.
  • [00:45:39.95] If we take all of the actions we've identified with the task force and we tally them all up-- again, this is assuming we actually implement every single one that we've identified-- we are able to achieve a 28% reduction in emissions by 2025. So that helps us achieve our 2025 goal. We can get there with these. But that means implementing every single one, finding the resources in the staff, and everything we need to make that happen.
  • [00:46:09.18] But something interesting happens around this time frame. If we don't do any more beyond that, we start to see an uptake in the emissions at that point. And that basically, we've assumed a 1% growth in that line. It's sort of a midpoint between those two scenarios. And what we really need to do is figure out how to get from that 2025 level that we've identified all the way to the reduction goal that we have for 2050. That's the huge task at hand.
  • [00:46:42.56] How do we get there? I'm throwing it out to this group. You all are interested in this subject to have come here tonight, so I don't think we have, as a task force, identified all of the actions that are possible. So if any of you want to see the action list, feel free to come up and talk to me or sign a comment card while you're here tonight, and we can distribute that.
  • [00:47:04.27] There'll be more public engagement on this process as we move forward, but we are open to ideas. We want the community to be involved and engaged. But we have a huge task ahead of us. How do we get here? A lot of that may be technologies we don't even know exist, emerging technologies that can help us get there. I think there's definitely hope. There's optimism, but we need to figure out how to do that, and we need to do it collaboratively. All of us, we can't do it alone.
  • [00:47:32.63] So I'm going to give you a really quick snapshot of some of the actions we've identified. This is in now way meant to be exhaustive or give you a false sense of what we've identified, but to just give you a quick snapshot of what some of them are, what are the expected reductions we would assume to achieve from the program at its peak.
  • [00:47:51.94] One of the examples we have for energy in buildings is to establish a renewable energy portfolio standard of 25%. We're looking at a reduction of around 40,000 metric tons per year. We could update our existing housing stock through weatherization programs that reach a good portion of the housing stock. And we're looking at a 14,000 ton reduction.
  • [00:48:18.71] If you look at some of the actions we've identified and put under community and health, we have create green teams or sweeps around elementary schools to promote climate mitigation strategies. We're looking at around an 18,000 metric ton reduction. We have some actions related to adaptation are preparing for flooding and dramatic whether that we are expecting, severe weather events. So we have one that's protecting and restoring our wetlands, so that we can respond to these severe weather events.
  • [00:48:53.50] Right now we don't have the ability to quantify exactly what that would mean as far as a metric ton reduction in carbon dioxide equivalents, but it's an important thing to do and for us to prepare. Land use and access is another category we're looking at. Increasing density through supporting re-development downtown. We're expecting that this could have a pretty dramatic impact over time, and at its peak could achieve more than 70,000 tons reduction. We have created a traffic demand management program to encourage folks to bike, walk, ride the bus more to their destinations, around 10,000 metric tons. I'm just giving these so you can see the spectrum of what might be a big action and a small action, but really we actually have to do them all together to get there.
  • [00:49:41.83] So in the resource management, we have a couple samples. Implement a single-use bag ban or fees. That would be when you go to the grocery store and get your bags, you'd have to bring a reusable bag or you would have to pay a fee to get a bag from the grocery store. So we modeled this. It looked like about a 3,000 ton reduction.
  • [00:50:06.94] The other example we have here is require city-sponsored events to be zero waste. And that has minimal impact, but it doesn't mean that we necessarily don't want to do that. This is just a snapshot, if you look at all of the actions we've identified, the spectrum. We have some that we think will have a big impact, some of them that we think will have a small impact, and some that we may not be able to model, that's difficult to ascertain.
  • [00:50:40.11] But it's complicated, because some of these that might have a big impact may be difficult to implement, it might take a long time, may have resistance in the community. Some of them that might have a little impact, might be really easy to do, we could do immediately. So these are all the things we need to be thinking about. How do we approach this? How do we solve this problem? What's the best way to do it?
  • [00:51:01.94] As I mentioned, there's going to be more opportunity for the public to be engaged. Tonight is really the first night that the city is talking about the climate action plan it's engaged in. But we will have some other events. These are events where we'll be speaking at commissions or City Council. The public is obviously invited to that, but we will likely be holding one other large public engagement event to get people out and discussing this.
  • [00:51:27.82] One thing I wanted to leave you all with, Matt already mentioned it. The Clean Energy Coalition and the City of Ann Arbor have been working together on a community energy program, and one of the things we've pulled together is a2energy. Right now, it's started as a website. We've launched a website at the beginning of this year. There are some magnets on the back table that hopefully you saw when you came in. Feel free to take them with you, take them home, put them in your fridge.
  • [00:51:56.44] The reason we're promoting this is we want folks to know what they can do. We want homeowners to know what they can do, we want business owners to know what they can do, we want renters to know what they can do, we want landlords to know what they can do to help with this problem. So this is just the beginning of this project. We're launching a website, we're going to be out, engaged in the community. This is long term on this problem. I wanted you all to know that if you want to know immediately, what's something I can do, this is a place to go and find out some of that information. And the city is also a resource to you, and also the Clean Energy Coalition. That'll do it.
  • [00:52:45.64] MATTHEW NAUD: We're almost there. Thank you, Jenny. Monica Patel, a policy specialist for the Ecology Center.
  • [00:52:58.14] MONICA PATEL: Hi, I'm Monica. I work at the Ecology Center. Mike Garfield, our director, was on the task force that Jenny just mentioned, and I worked on our Ann Arbor 350 project. So it's Ann Arbor 350. And I just want to get a sense of how many people know what 350 is. A lot of people call us Ann Arbor 360. I'll just tell you what 350.
  • [00:53:23.23] 350 parts per million is the number of parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that scientists have decided is the upper limit for what's appropriate for human habitation. Right now, that second blue arrow is pointing at 350. And right now, we're actually above that top blue arrow at 392. Before industrialization, we were not even on this graph. We were down below around 70 or 280 parts per million. So right now, 390, goal 350, before 280. So this is a huge gap that we have to cross over.
  • [00:54:11.08] And while we like almost everything that was on that bottom row of that huge chart that Jenny showed, we just don't think it's enough. We think that as a community, we have to do a lot more to reach our 350 goal. And 28% by 2025 is great, but it would require us to do every single thing there, and that just doesn't really seem feasible.
  • [00:54:37.37] So given the fact that we're speeding down this incredibly unsustainable path, and at the same time we think Ann Arbor should be a leader in this movement. We think that, at least in the Midwest, we're stewards of this incredible water resource, we have the Great Lakes here, and we've traditionally been a leader in things, and we should keep being a leader. So we really think that we need to get a move on.
  • [00:55:01.23] This is a slide from 350.org national group, which was founded by Bill McKibben, who came here in 2009 and was one of the reasons that we started coordinating this Ann Arbor 350 project. And it's from a 2009 day of action where he had everyone from all over the globe send in photos numbering out the numbers 350 and then sending them into him. And it really showed that there's this amazing growing global climate movement that Ann Arbor just needs to get onboard with and join. So the Ann Arbor 350 project is about local action that helps us get onboard and do this.
  • [00:55:49.91] These are some photos from some of our events. In the upper left is 10/10 Day of Action 350 Garden Build that David, who's in the audience, helped install a front yard garden here. And now this house has passive solar. And we're going to be doing a tour next month to show people in the community about passive solar.
  • [00:56:12.19] The house on the right, as many of you might recognize, is Matt Grocoff's house. It's a 1900 farmhouse. It's a 1908 farmhouse that's Net-Zero in terms of its energy use. And those solar panels, those black panels that you see on the roof are actually allowing the Grocoffs to get paid by DTE for the energy they generate. They generate more than they use. So we did a tour of that house last year, and we had 300 people go through and learn a little bit more about household energy efficiency and other things that they could do to their own homes.
  • [00:56:52.93] In the bottom left, we also organize yearly for 350.org global events. And Moving Planet we did over at Liberty Plaza. Some of the people who are there are also here. And we talked about, what's our vision? What do we think our community needs to do on a bunch of different levels-- energy, water, housing, food-- to get us to a more sustainable place, to get us to 350.
  • [00:57:20.96] So it's a growing movement, and we just need more people to join this movement. We need to show the city and the University and all of the major actors that there really is a movement of people who care about this, and that will help empower their decision making to make those right 350 decisions. So we're inviting you to go to aa350.org and join our movement. And there's also climate pledges outside on the information table as sort of an entry point into joining the movement. And so I encourage you to join us. Thanks.
  • [00:58:00.58] MATTHEW NAUD: Thank you, Monica. And finally, we have Wayne Appleyard, chair of the Ann Arbor Energy Commission, a long time renewable architect here in town. Wayne, thank you so much.
  • [00:58:16.53] WAYNE APPLEYARD: Thank you, Matt. Excuse me, I've got a bit of cold. I'm supposed to be telling you the big vision as to how we're supposed to get there, and it's really important to know that we're moving into a time when predicting the future is getting more and more difficult. But I think from what you've heard tonight, we all realize we really have to do as much as we can.
  • [00:58:42.92] It's important to know that we have made changes in our energy usage before in rather rapid times. There wasn't quite the infrastructure for oil lamps as there is today for electricity, but we did move in 10 years from whale oil to kerosene. So what we really need to do is increase our energy efficiency and move to renewables.
  • [00:59:09.41] The average American user. Doctor Chu said that we have the equivalent of 100 servants. We have to reduce that by 70% to 90%, down to a reasonable number of people. Those people couldn't fit in my house anyways.
  • [00:59:26.74] Is there enough energy? Sure there is. One hour of sunlight falling on the earth produces more energy than all of what we use in the entire year. So there's plenty of energy available, coming into us every day from our friend, the sun. We just need to figure out how to use it and store it.
  • [00:59:49.16] Locally is there enough? You can see here on the right, you've got the amount of energy used by residences and commercial spaces, and this is the amount of sunlight that falls on the vertical and horizontal surfaces of those developments in various parts of the country. There is enough energy on average.
  • [01:00:13.14] You've seen what's happened in the last few years. Natural gas prices went up, went down, went up, went down. They're going to be down for a while, they're going to go up again eventually. Gasoline. Who would've thought that it would be where it is today, but it's going all over the place. Here's the US Energy Information Administration. Their predictions have changed from 2005 2011 for what's going to happen up to 2030. Which one's right? Who knows.
  • [01:00:56.78] Renewables are really a source of risk management, and that's one of the reasons that we really need to move in that direction. They have a fixed installation cost, they have a predicted energy output on an average day, and the energy is free. So you can conceivably contract for 20 years of energy at a fixed price from solar or wind. Try asking DTE for a fixed price for the next 20 years. I don't think you'll get it.
  • [01:01:25.93] There have been many studies around eliminating our use of fossil fuels by 2050. This is one by the World Wildlife Fund. The European Union has one that they just came out with for them. This is one I'm going to take a quick look that Amory Lovins and the Rocky Mountain Institute came out with. This is what we do today. We use 30% oil, 26% natural gas, 22% coal, 9% nuclear, any the other renewables are down there at almost nothing.
  • [01:02:05.69] His plan says that by 2050, without any major technical innovation, just by a lot of efficiency, moving to lighter vehicles, vehicles that use electricity instead of gasoline, increasingly the energy efficiency of our buildings so they reduce the amount of energy they use by 1/2 to 2/3, and increasing the efficiency of our industry and moving our electrical grid to renewables and making it more cost effective, and he says basically by 2050 we won't use any coal. We'll use a very small amount of natural gas, and no fossil fuel. And he maintains that would actually save money doing it.
  • [01:02:59.59] The former head of DTE said this. The sun doesn't shine all the time, wind doesn't blow all the time. What are we going to do? There's a plan to use those as baseload. And basically, the way you do it is by hooking them all together and having some control systems to level everything out. So you get solar from a lot of different places, you get wind from a lot of different places, and then you have a bio gas plant that you can turn on and off to even things out. And then a reservoir, like we have up in Luddington, that we can store electrical energy as water raised up and then regenerate electricity when we need it.
  • [01:03:42.10] They did this study in Germany and showed that it was possible to do. So it's totally a myth. They got wind systems and solar equipment from various places, and this is what it looks like and how it all equalizes out, and don't look at that too fast. Luddington Pump Station, we got this already. 8% of the energy that we use on a state level has gone through this plant. It's really quite significant.
  • [01:04:13.36] We can also use compressed air to store energy and run it back through a turbine. And we have a lot of underground natural gas caverns that allow us to do that here in the states. So that's another possibility. I just took a quick guess as to how many of those things that we would need of each one, just sizing up the study that you saw there was done in Europe. 1900 wind systems, 9,000 acres of solar array, a bunch of bio gas, and some pump storage. And this is without reducing by becoming more efficient.
  • [01:04:49.33] But the future is now. The wind systems are there. I've got a twelve-year-old car that gets 60 miles per gallon, and we're doing it for our kids. One last thing. Make sure you vote for this, make sure you sign the petitions for this. This gets us to 25% electricity from renewables by 2025. It's going to be a Constitutional amendment that they're trying to put on the ballot for this fall. If you see somebody with a petition, sign it. Various sources of information, and my connection. Thank you.
  • [01:05:31.24] MATTHEW NAUD: Thank you very much. So we have a large group of panelists that we're going to switch over, raise the screen, and they're going to come up. And I'll be fielding questions, so think of them. Just to put this in scale, we've heard a lot about environmental issues associated with climate change. It's the most important thing we could be working on. We spend $140 million a year in Ann Arbor on natural gas and electricity. And that's just residents and businesses, that's not the University.
  • [01:06:06.16] All the people in town that I talk to say we could say we could save 10% with caulk. So if we all just caulked our houses, a little bit of insulation, there'd be $14 million in the local economy. And all that money gets spent on local contractors who have mortgages in local banks, and those dollars spend in our local economy. So while I think the science and the health issues with climate change are really important, I don't think we can forget that doing all of these things is an incredible economic development for this community. So I will stop and invite you to ask questions of our panel. Sir.
  • [01:06:45.06] AUDIENCE: Thank you. Two quick questions. Is this working?
  • [01:06:49.40] MATTHEW NAUD: A little bit.
  • [01:06:50.75] [INTERPOSING VOICES]
  • [01:06:54.71] AUDIENCE: Regarding climate change, specifically precipitation regarding the data that showed winter precipitation increasing and summer precipitation decreasing. Any prognoses on cloud cover?
  • [01:07:08.45] MATTHEW NAUD: Larissa?
  • [01:07:13.02] LARISSA LARSEN: That's a good question. It goes along with the lake levels. We're not so good on understanding those things. One thing I didn't say in my presentation, we're much better at modeling temperature than we are precipitation. And then from there, we decrease in our effectiveness.
  • [01:07:26.38] [SIDE CONVERSATION]
  • [01:07:33.51] LARISSA LARSEN: Actually, I just spoke with a state climatologist a couple of weeks ago, and actually the models are coming in at slightly less, about 10% more cloud cover. So maybe don't tell that to people that are moving here, that it's going to be a little bit dimmer in the winter. But it indeed may be.
  • [01:07:55.72] AUDIENCE: Second question about the University and the carbon emission. I guess some of the units are carbon per-person and all that. You mentioned scope one and scope two, stationary and vehicular sources and stuff like that. Does the University measure carbon per person emitted by employees with their own personal vehicles within the city limits? Something that might be reduced if the employees parked on the outskirts and took mass transit into the campus. Does the University currently include that segment of carbon?
  • [01:08:32.43] TERRY ALEXANDER: We don't. Those would actually be considered scope three emissions. And the reason we don't is we haven't figured out how to measure them accurately at this point. We have a couple of different student groups that are looking into this trying to figure out a method for it. And as these things evolve over the next year or so, it may become another goal for us. At this point, it's hard to set a goal for something that's not measurable.
  • [01:09:00.58] AUDIENCE: You couldn't set a qualitative goal? You couldn't officially recognize that it is an actual category of sources and something that you could effect?
  • [01:09:10.57] TERRY ALEXANDER: We also have-- in addition to the five quantitative goals, we have a fifth area that we're looking at on community outreach and education. Part of that is the education of our campus community for bicycles, buses, alternative transportation methods. We promote a lot of things like van pooling, ride-sharing programs and that type of thing. So it is an education effort we have under way already. I wouldn't call it a true goal, but it is something that we have in our goal statement as an aspirational thing that we're looking at.
  • [01:09:50.43] MATTHEW NAUD: Thank you. Go ahead, sir.
  • [01:09:52.20] AUDIENCE: I would just like to thank you all for really inspirational talks. It really helps me appreciate the amount of work and progress that's being made by institutions in our government, and I know that that's really important. And I also know, deep down, that it's up to me instead of you guys in the institutions. And I would just love to have another session where people talk about what they get to do, and can do, and have done that has been successful as individuals.
  • [01:10:26.08] We all have their own stories and we all have our ways of finding solutions outside of the box. We still rely on the institutionally. Personally, I ride a bike to work almost all the time. I used to ride all the time. I'm a little bit smarter now, I don't ride in the snow and rain so much anymore. So now I use the bus, which happens to be a block away. If you don't live a block away from the bus, it's a lot harder.
  • [01:10:49.68] So encouraging increased frequency and increased coverage of bus systems in this city can make a big difference in individual persons' versus decisions, I suspect, to make it more feasible for them to do simple things like use a bicycle. How feasible is all of this? Our family used to use about 18 kilowatt hours a day. We did the standard things. We got CFLs. We started turning off our lights. We unplugged the vampire boxes when we stopped the TV.
  • [01:11:21.54] We didn't just save 10%. We didn't just save 20%. We went from about 18 down to about 10 kilowatt hours, just by doing standard stuff. It works. We need to talk to each other about what works and find ways to make it happen. In fact, we put a solar installation on our house. Very modest. It gives all the electricity we use on the electric grid. It doesn't take care of our heat, of course. But we can all do it. Thank you.
  • [01:11:47.48] MATTHEW NAUD: Thank you. I would say to all of you, including you, the a2energy.org website, we're trying to highlight people in the community. It's called ePeeps. There are a lot of stories there, but we know there's a lot more stories in the community. So please, go to the site, tell us about it, contact us, and we'll try and highlight those. But I think the idea of getting people together in the future to do that one on one would be a good idea. Vince?
  • [01:12:13.41] VINCE: Thanks for coming out tonight and speaking to the community, I appreciate that. One comment was there was an editorial not too long ago that talked about if we had taken the $3 trillion we're spending on the oil wars in the last couple years, we could be totally energy independent if we had invested that money in alternative energy. The possibilities out there are really there. If we just make the decisions, it could be a real advantage for our country.
  • [01:12:46.15] MATTHEW NAUD: Vince, you've got to ask a question.
  • [01:12:48.86] VINCE: I'm getting to it. I would like to see the city and the University step up, and I'd like to hear if they would do that to reduce the flood hazard, especially on the west side and the Owl's Creek Watershed Group. We need a watershed study, we need to look at porous pavement in the city. We've got one street now that's been paved and porous. We have some parking lots that are porous.
  • [01:13:10.47] It has a lot of potential to reduce flood hazard, which we think in the Owl's Creek Watershed Group is much higher than what the current floodplain maps show. I'd like to see the city and the University work together on that. The University contributes a tremendous amount of storm water into the city system and into the river. They have a lot of imperviousness. They're working on changing that, but I'd like to see them move faster. Thank you.
  • [01:13:36.21] MATTHEW NAUD: Thanks, Vince. Anybody want to respond to those stormwater questions?
  • [01:13:40.11] JOHN HIEFTJE: Sure. I think that that's something that we all share. Matt could probably tell you as much as anybody about what's going on as far as bringing something like that back to the city. And we've got the new floodplain maps now, which gives us a little better picture about what's going on. And that's been something we've been hoping for. Ann Arbor is very, very aggressive about stormwater, probably more aggressive than certainly any other city in Michigan. And there aren't very many that are as aggressive. And we continue to pursue those goals.
  • [01:14:05.20] But hearing about the additional precipitation, I think that's going to be something that helps spur us all along. And we have a very good water resources director in Janis Bobrin, who used to be called the Drain Commissioner, and they've changed the title. But there's a lot of work and study that's going in there. But Vince is exactly right. Those are some issues as far as flooding. I don't know if it's going to help us with reducing our greenhouse gases, but it's something we need to take care of.
  • [01:14:28.97] AUDIENCE: Good afternoon and thanks for bringing everyone out here. I have three areas I would really love to hear if you can comment. And if you can't touch all of them, I can totally understand. But the first one would be, when it comes down to pace-- and thankfully commercial we can still go forward through that, despite the obstacles that residential faced. Has there been any look at how you might be resolving the split incentive landlord-tenant issues? Where it's not the case an owner-occupied.
  • [01:14:58.81] MATTHEW NAUD: I will be able to speak to that one.
  • [01:15:03.19] AUDIENCE: That would be great, especially in the student housing here. The second one is building codes have been mentioned, that holding back Ann Arbor's ability to go as far as they could.
  • [01:15:12.17] JOHN HIEFTJE: I'll handle that one, Matt.
  • [01:15:13.74] AUDIENCE: Oh, this is great. And then the last one would be, I was around town when the first inception of the green belt initiative went through. And I was just wondering, since so many relationships have already been gathered with land owners and more people understanding the process, has there been any consideration of maybe doing some sort of a larger scale renewable energy project like Chicago did where they have a solar farm just a couple miles outside of the city which is bigger than any of us would have imagined it? And just thoughts on that, if anyone can take that up.
  • [01:15:49.27] MATTHEW NAUD: Sure. I'm going to let John start.
  • [01:15:52.48] JOHN HIEFTJE: On building codes, I was appointed by the previous governor to serve on the climate action task force at the state level, and I wanted to be, and was put on, the building subcommittee. And we made some very, very strong recommendations about building codes. Unfortunately, in the state of Michigan, no city, no municipality can have a building code that is any stronger than the state code. Because we would do it tomorrow if we could.
  • [01:16:14.16] I do not understand why buildings are not being constructed state-wide to the highest efficiency standard, why LED lights aren't put into every new building, when they build a new whatever department store. The parking lot, inside the store, it should all be the most efficient lighting possible. But in the state of Michigan, local governments don't have the ability to do that on their own.
  • [01:16:34.89] TERRY ALEXANDER: If I could just add to that real quickly. The University does self-regulate when it comes to building codes, and we're at least two, maybe three versions ahead of where the state is on adopting building codes. And that's where we're able to adopt this 30% better than what the building codes require for energy efficiency and that type of thing. So we've actually moved much further than what the building codes require.
  • [01:17:02.84] MATTHEW NAUD: Does anyone else want to take anything on the split incentives or Green Belt?
  • [01:17:10.65] JOHN HIEFTJE: I can help with the Green Belt. Green Belt continues to grow, and it's actually going through a great phase right now because agricultural prices, land prices are down, and the Green Belt is doing very well. And we may hit our original goal, which was to preserve 7,000 acres. And the growing food movement in Ann Arbor, it is very secure in the knowledge that we're going to continue to have locally-produced food. And hoop houses are going up in the Green Belt, so there's a really bright future there.
  • [01:17:36.35] Devoting it to solar would mean an all-out land purchase for the most part. Most of our work in the Green Belt is a development right purchase to keep it as agricultural land and make it agricultural. We could do that. It's going to come down to resources.
  • [01:17:49.10] DTE is partnering, as you heard, with the University. That's just a great plan. All you have to do is to take a look at what they're doing in Sarnia, Ontario to understand that this can work here because the Canadians are doing it right over there on a very large scale. So it's a great suggestion. It's going to come down to resources to be able to find that. But we could certainly use our program, perhaps, to buy some of that land if we needed it.
  • [01:18:13.55] TERRY ALEXANDER: Certainly, the sun and the wind should be considered as crops.
  • [01:18:17.81] JOHN HIEFTJE: Exactly. We can harvest them.
  • [01:18:21.32] TERRY ALEXANDER: Yeah, so they should be part of that.
  • [01:18:24.19] MATTHEW NAUD: In terms of the split incentives, I'll touch that real quick. We're fortunate. The county just won a $3 million sustainable communities grant from HUD, Housing and Urban Development. Part of that is a grant that we pitched once before to the Home Depot Foundation and weren't successful. But we were successful through the HUD Grant. So we've got a project that we're going to spend the next three years in a partnership with the City of Ann Arbor, city of Ypsilanti, EMU, University of Michigan, and the county to really look at those very things.
  • [01:18:57.17] How do we solve the split incentives where tenants are paying utilities, landlords don't have a good incentive to invest. How do we create the right voluntary programs? Are there regulatory approaches? Is it just disclosure? Because it's hard to find out when you're renting what your energy bill is going to be. So please look forward to that in the next couple months as that gets going. Feel free to contact us if you have good thoughts on it.
  • [01:19:26.40] AUDIENCE: So I've got an idea. And this is just the panel to test it, because a number of the comments tonight just got me thinking about this again. It seems to me that Ann Arbor is really prime to move beyond this type of forum. Terrific panelists, lots of questions, and kind of go the next step in engagement, which is to have sustainability conferences. Literally. Use the school system, use some existing infrastructure to kind of get the word out. Set up tracks, food, transportation, energy, various tracks. Figure out effective means of gathering folks together.
  • [01:20:13.51] The reason I want to test that idea and be really curious to do the feasibility look at it, is one of the gentlemen earlier said there are so many success stories. It's like we're beyond the early adopters, and we're kind of putting our toe in the water of moving to scale. The business community is going to do lots to get products out there that make much of this easier. I find myself thinking about what's a different model for engaging the community.
  • [01:20:42.00] And Monica, just thinking about the good work 350 is trying to do, what do you think about that? And Here's the one other thing I'll add, is just success to date. I joined a board recently, it's called Michigan Interfaith Power and Light, and we teamed up with Aquinas. And we did a sustainability conference, and oh my gosh, a bunch of people came. And lots of good things happened. I just find myself really thinking, how do you do something like that in a community, broader setting. I'd really appreciate your thoughts about that.
  • [01:21:13.82] MONICA PATEL: I think that's an awesome idea, I love that idea. So the Mission Zero Fest that I mentioned earlier was a tour of one house, and then we tacked on a couple of like new house tours. This year, we're doing a neighborhood, and we're doing Water Hill neighborhood. Many of you may have known, there's that music festival, and everybody wants to recreate the magic that it created. And so we thought, magic, energy efficiency, and weatherization. Maybe that could make it exciting.
  • [01:21:48.99] So after the Green Fair, which is June 8th, we're going to get a bunch of the homeowners in that neighborhood to open up their houses and literally show people what they're doing. And then we're going to try to tag along to the heels of the food movement and the music movement and try to make it more fun for people. So that's like a mini conference that we hope goes from neighborhood to neighborhood. Because it's not just Water Hill and the other neighborhoods that are cool and have names like that, it's a lot of neighborhoods in Ann Arbor.
  • [01:22:24.21] And I think the people who have done things like that to their homes have really taken initiative and can really inspire the rest of us like me, who is a new homeowner, and who dreads doing anything to my home, to really just take that action. And just by doing that small step and reaching out to neighbors, we can really do our part as community members to take initiative on our own homes. I don't if the conference that you were talking about was kind of more than just the community. Is it the region? Which would be awesome, because Ann Arbor would be a leader, I think.
  • [01:23:03.85] AUDIENCE: That is the question. What's the organizing principle? Is it neighborhood? Is it school district? Is it whatever, whatever? There's got to be some organizing principle that gets it down to bite size pieces. But that sense of sitting around the table, hearing the successes, beginning to put together someone's own plan, tying in with the resources.
  • [01:23:25.38] MONICA PATEL: Absolutely.
  • [01:23:26.52] JOHN HIEFTJE: I'll just add in, that conversation has been going on at the Energy Commission, too. About how to better engage the citizenry and get everybody. All these examples, what Monica is talking about is just right up that alley. There's a lot of people doing a lot, both in their homes and in their businesses. Some of the stuff that local business is doing is just great.
  • [01:23:42.96] And so to showcase that and to let other people learn about how to do it, and it's a great idea. We had some large level conferences several years ago. We hosted the ICLEI Conference, the international studies for local and environmental initiatives that led to the big Rio conference. We were the North American center. The University has had some good transportation forums that are fairly national. But that would be a great step, I think, to engage not only our residents but people from around the region as well.
  • [01:24:11.28] MATTHEW NAUD: Other thoughts?
  • [01:24:11.89] MARK LEVY: Evening. My name is Mark Levy and I'm a resident, but I'm also the manager of renewable energy with the Michigan Energy Office. My question is for Wayne. When you referred to Amory Lovin's work, Reinventing Fire-- and I share your enthusiasm for that work-- you also mentioned that someone in your position as the manager of the Energy Commission was going to be looking at it more. I guess my question is, is it possible to use that as a template to actually look at how we get to reducing quads of energy? Because it is such a detailed work.
  • [01:24:44.11] The methodology is there, it's broken up into each sector, and it seems like that would be a reasonable template to use to evaluate how we get to the kind of breakthroughs we're trying to get through. Especially things that looks like all our best thinking to date is only going to get us part of the way. And we need to get all the way. It seems that that's probably the best thinking I've seen, Amory Lovin's work on how we would do that. So I was curious as to what your thoughts were when you said we're looking at that. How much are you looking at that?
  • [01:25:16.05] WAYNE APPLEYARD: Yes, it is a good template. I think it's really important to realize that a lot of those things that are discussed in there are beyond the community level, so a lot of things have to be done on the state level. And right now, we have some problems with the state. For instance, there actually was a bill that was introduced to repeal the current RPS standard of 10% renewables by 2015, even though basically all the utilities have signed most of the contracts for that energy.
  • [01:25:55.58] They're trying to repeal the ban and putting yard waste in the landfills. So right now, unfortunately on a state level, we have some people who are working in the wrong direction, and that makes it lot more difficult. Certainly, some of the stuff with transportation, on a community level we don't have enough leverage to get the car companies to do really super-light cars. But certainly, some of those things can be done.
  • [01:26:32.00] As the mayor mentioned, there's currently a state law that says that you can't have a more stringent energy code than the state code. So our hands are a little bit tied in that regard. We can do some things voluntarily and we certainly will continue to do a lot of education and everything to try and move in that direction. But like I say, there's a lot of things in the book that are really good ideas but are not a community level solution.
  • [01:27:03.83] MATTHEW NAUD: Any more questions? One more.
  • [01:27:07.57] AUDIENCE: Thanks very much. Monica and Wayne especially were very inspiring. You told us that the decisions individuals make can allow us to achieve this goal of moving back to 350 parts per million. Wayne, you showed us a graphic that showed that instead of using whatever huge percent it is coal that we use today, in the future if we take these actions, if we put solar panels on our roof, if we put windmills where there's wind, if we built facilities to store the energy so that they can be used all night long and all that, that we can achieve a huge increase. I forget your exact figure. It was way up there, like 50% or more. And you actually showed that all of our energy can come from the sun.
  • [01:27:51.63] This is absolutely true. We need to make those changes. And we need to use less energy. That's part of Monica's idea. We have to weatherize, we have to get people to understand that you've got to put in that insulation. Years ago, all our houses were built with no installation or very little, single-pane windows, all kind of leaky stuff. That was what was normal, we built our houses that way. It's considered normal maintenance and repair of your house to add insulation. If you add insulation today, you will save a lot of energy.
  • [01:28:27.49] MATTHEW NAUD: We need to go to a question because we probably have a minute.
  • [01:28:30.07] AUDIENCE: The furnace is putting out heat, it's going out the roof. You put in insulation, the heat that your furnace puts out will stay in your house, and you'll reduce your energy use. No increase in taxable value is added to a house when a person adds insulation. It's an improvement of the house, but it's considered normal repair and maintenance. Just a minute, I'm coming to it. The same is true if you replace your furnace with an energy efficient one. The same is true if you put storm windows on your house. Normal maintenance.
  • [01:29:04.10] SPEAKER 1: We're running out of time, please ask your question.
  • [01:29:06.67] AUDIENCE: Every house has solar energy falling on the roof. Ann Arbor has produced on their website, and publishes for every address in Ann Arbor, the amount of solar electricity that could--
  • [01:29:22.12] MATTHEW NAUD: OK, ma'am, let me finish your story for you.
  • [01:29:25.79] AUDIENCE: Then if a person puts the solar panels on the roof, that should be also considered a normal repair and maintenance of the house. Instead, this year, with no warning, Ann Arbor has started increasing the taxable value of such houses by $7,000. Why is it reasonable to tax a house with solar panels by-- add the taxable value of $7,000, $315 per year-- per year-- for making the normal maintenance and repair of adding solar panels to collect the solar energy that's already following on your house? Why is that not the same as insulation?
  • [01:30:16.16] JOHN HIEFTJE: I've been working on this question for a few days, and I appreciate it. As you know, we've had several emails. And I've done some research already in just the last couple days. The Energy Commission has looked into this, but it's quite a few years ago. The assessor, who has to follow the rules set for assessing by the state-- and we're still researching that, and in fact I'm meeting with one of the attorneys about it next week-- has to follow those rules. And the state considers solar panels an addition to the value of the house because a window for instance, you're replacing a window that existed. Insulation, you're adding more to something that was already there. But the state--
  • [01:30:49.01] AUDIENCE: No, it wasn't there.
  • [01:30:51.12] JOHN HIEFTJE: I'm sorry, ma'am. I'm just trying to tell you what the state requirements are for our assessor. As you can imagine, we probably don't want the elected officials messing around with the assessor when he's doing assessments of homes for taxable purpose. If it's within our ability to pass something that says that we won't assess, that we can give non-tax solar panels, we will do that.
  • [01:31:13.07] And so what we're doing is researching it, if we even have the ability. So far, it's showing that we don't. But if there's anything that we can do, and as I mentioned earlier, our state representative whom we work with very closely, Jeff Erwin, has a bill in Lansing that would make it so that solar panels would not be taxable. So we're working very hard on that, and we all share the same goal in this one.
  • [01:31:33.79] MATTHEW NAUD: So we do have to exit quickly. Please give our panelists another round of applause. I really appreciate their time tonight. And thanks again to you. It's sustainability@a2gov.org if you have additional comments or questions for us. Thanks again for coming out tonight.
Graphic for audio posts

Media

March 8, 2012 at the Downtown Library: Multi-Purpose Room

Length: 1:32:00

Copyright: Creative Commons (Attribution, Non-Commercial, Share-alike)

Rights Held by: Ann Arbor District Library

Downloads


Subjects
Environment
Local Issues
Sustainable Ann Arbor