tga approved

>> good afternoon everyone and welcome to the november 30, 2012 -- i'm sorry december 7, 2012 meeting of the local agency formation commission. my name is david campos and i am the chair of the commission. we are joined by the clerk linda wong and i want to thank the san francisco gtv staff for the

coverage of this meeting. madam clerk, if you can please call item number two, roll call. >> supervisor avalos, absent. supervisor olague. >> here. >> supervisor -- i'm sorry, commissioner schmeltzer. >> here. >> commissioner mar. >> commissioner pimentel absent. chairperson campos. >> present. >> mr. chair, there is a quorum. item two approval from the minutes from the regular meeting and november 30 joint meeting with the san francisco public utilities commission. >> great. before we take action on this item i would like to open it up for public comment. if there is any member of the public that would like to speak on item number two please come forward. seeing none public comment is closed. colleagues

this is an action item. can we have a motion to approve the minutes? we have a motion for commissioner schmeltzer. second by commissioner olague. if we can take that without objection. madam clerk you can call item three. >> item three is review of the renewable energy task force. >> we will have fried. >> i'm going to turn it over to danielle and give a presentation of the report and we are available for questions after that. >> great. thank you. >> thanks jason. i will return through this fairly quickly, especially the background which you are all familiar with, but if you questions please stop me. awz know san francisco has a long history of climate action

and a lot of the work that we have done over the last couple years is guided by our climate change ordinances and our plan to be updated and the sf puc plan and the city set forth aggressive greenhouse gas reduction targets. san francisco emissions come from a variety of sources, but electricity is about 25% of that, so it's one of the largest areas for reduction in the city. san francisco's electricity supply is actually quite clean to the national average. we are 41% renewable if you include hydro electric power and hetch hetchy and pg&e hydro generation, but the goal as set out by mayor newsom is to become 100% renewable and we have a

task force comprised of leaders and community and stakeholders, environmental ngo's and the local utilities and relevant city departments. the task force met for 18 months monthly to discuss issues with renewable energy development for the city and the was to do this goal within 10 years so we looked at barriers and technical opportunities, financial aspects and of course public education and awareness, and ultimately outlined recommendations around three areas, energy efficiency and utility generation and the course identified five prong strategy to help achieve this goal and the first is shrink the pay. of course by reducing the

amount of lktd the city demands it's easier to get to the 100% so there are a number of recommendations want a few of them are highlighted here and strengthening the retrofit rules, promoting energy audits, and through the real estate which we did a couple we go with the lead ratings and the assessors data basis and data for local governments and property owners so it's hard for the city to do smart energy and policy if we don't know where we're starting from so we need to benchmark as a city and need property owners to know what their energy use and patterns are within their own property. the second one is to encourage local renewable energy and dg distributed generation and don't need to build new transition

needs and local security and keep the dollars in the local economy and to help with us there are a number of recommendations and they're tinkering around the edge of our regulatory process and rules but ultimately we want to work together to drive comprehensive energy policy to support renewables and continue to take the lead on streamlining the processes and working with neighboring jurisdictions to do that as well so we have a standard system bay area wide and include this for local renewals and work with pg&e and we have a robust electric grid downtown and precludes installing renewable energy there and work with the homeowners so they know the options and how to finance it -- >> chair campos. >> commissioner mab. >> can i ask danielle? can you say more about explore and fee

and tariff for local renewables. >> sure. we will talk about that in a second, but this is one of the opportunities that we have for community choice aggregation. it's a toil that has been used in other countries and japan and germany and basically assure the renewable energy community there is a guaranteed off taker and price paid for electricity generated from a renewable energy project. it's normally 10 or 20 years and set higher than the going rate for gas or electricity generation so it provides a sole developer to say i have this contract for this off taker whether the caa or whoever toy bathe power and. >> >> and guaranteed to buy it from me and i can go to the bank i have this stream of income if you give me a loan. >> please continue.

>> thanks, so one of the areas -- also that is applicable to efficiency is addressing barriers for 10 -- tenants and may be are tenants in their spaces and critical to reduce this for efficiency and new due to incentives or they don't have access to physical resources like their roof so expanding energy to renewable energy is one opportunity that would help the renewable energy space. right now all ratepayers pay into -- for example the state fund that goes towards the solar incentive but across the state only a quarter of houses can take advantage of on their roof and we're looking to expand that to others so there are fixes under the rent control rules. there is a list of passthroughs that haven't been adopted by

the board of supervisors that we would like to see clarification on the rules and for the tenants and expanding metering and enable customers in multi-families or tenant buildings credited for the portion from the roof top system -- this has been recently expanding but doing it more so at the state regulation level so more customers can take advantage and supporting renewable energy legislation and we have been pushing for this at the state level and invest in a system not located on their house or multi-property or in the community or the state even and own a portion of that state and get the generation of the system to their own utility bill like they would if it's on their own roof, and next and one of the more important ones in

terms of reaching this 100% goal is providing a renewable energy option. we have limited resources in the city in terms of roof top space or open space for wind turbines and we need to have some option to import to get to the 100% target so one is to implement community choice aggregation and the 100% renewable as planned by at sf puc and the more people that take in part of we will get to the goal and working with pg&e on programs if they choose to roll out a similar program and expand local delivery of clean power and when sf puc has power to the wholesale market we would love that sold to customers in san francisco rather than outside of here and we have

cleaner power coming to san francisco and reduce our climate footprint in the city. so that could include different areas in the city and bart and cal train and help reduce the emissions on the transportation side this way and not just our environment and lastly we looked how can we encourage private sector investment and new and the city can't do this on its own. we need to work with the private sector and leverage this and that could be look at programs to reduce the cost of and expand clean energy financing and with pace and other mechanisms, pursuing third party ownerships and partnerships to develop more renewable energy. levering caa and and to the fee and tariff

and having this set of customers under cca and guaranteed off takers the renewable power for years to come you can assure to the developers there is the market to sell into and thereby help them to get financing and get projects on the ground and supporting clean investments. for example by working with the pension and retirement funds to use some portion of the portfolios to go towards these programs and demonstrations on public property and that's been started already on clean power sf. we have almost 40 members in total and it's a fantastic group and we're lucky to have knowledgeable folks and universities in the area and active community members so a very big thank you to all those that worked on this for a year and a half and that's it. >> thank you very much for the presentation. why don't we

open it up to comments or questions from the commission. commissioner olague. >> i was wondering how much time was given specifically to your conversations to the clean power sf? >> we -- basically we had a different topic each month. one month puc came in and one month others came in and talked about hetch hetchy and cca and in most meetings it touched on various topics and we were talking about investments or renewables locally so it came up frequently. >> i thought it was going to be emphasized more. >> that was sort of my question. can you talk a little bit about how -- what's the role of clean power sf in achieving these

objectives? do you have a number of goals and recommendations here and how critical is community choice aggregation in helping us to get to where we need to be? >> it could play a significant role and if it's rolled out as 100% any power provided will help us meet the goal and there are a couple opportunities to leverage that in the program to result in private investment and here in the city and those are really important to get the large scale renewable energy generation and additionally we might be able to use the program to efficient these programs and similar programs and it could be an important piece of

getting to that 100% goal. >> in terms of the renewable energy study what's the next step. >> so we presented this to the mayor last week and he is very interested in moving forward and particular on some of the legislative pieces, and starting to -- for example, the example of pace into the federal legislative agenda and looking at supporting whether it's community or other pieces at the state level so we're talking about that as that legislative agenda comes up. we have the task force there. they're happy to continue their work. they really enjoyed being part of this work and so close in step with the city so they are available and willing to move forward. we at the department are moving forward on a number of these recommendations which are in the full task force and our u.s. department of energy grant and looking at permitting and financing in particular and

we have a grant from the frank foundation to continue implementation and planning around some of the recommendations so we have the recommendations for the task force and we're looking to bring it in house and look at measures that are implementable in the future and low cost and move forward quickly and identify funding for. >> does this study have to be adopted by anyone? >> it doesn't have to be. if the board of supervisors wanted to we're of course open to that, but from my perspective it's a great tool for us to look at in guidance how we move forward with the energy policy and planning and with the electricity plan that we have from the sf puc that has been adopted by resolution i believe and it's a support document moving forward and provides background on the energy sector so it's a nice document to go back to for fact checking and

data. >> i appreciate the thoroughness of the report. i do think it would be helpful to see a greater emphasis on clean power sf and i don't know how exactly we go about making that point, but i would certainly like to see more emphasis given to that because i just don't see how you can achieve all the objectives without fully implemented and robust community aggregation piece so i would like to see some of that. i don't know if you mr. freed have any idea bs that. >> yes. jason fried i was a member and they determined i was staff and should be on the advisory side and not the committee side and to address what commissioner olague said at every meeting -- at some point during the meeting i said "we

could achieve that if we had a cca program in the city" and in earlier drafts were it was connecting to the goals in there. when it came to the final draft instead of referencing cca in the recommendation sections it says sf puc. i am taking that to code they could do it in multiple ways, one which is a cca format, and one of the other things i will point out i brought up more than once the fact we're looking altdoing 100% renewable in the city and the bay guard an pointed it out this week and no mention much public hour. >> >> and that's how you get to 100% and if that's the true goal there is only one way and have a public power system that is 100% renewable and that is never mentioned in this report.

>> thank you very much. is there a response as to -- a couple of things. first, was there a decision to sort of deemphasize or -- or not emphasize as much community choice aggregation. i am wondering if you could comment on that. >> yeah, we tried to -- maybe not equal weight because there is different controls in the area but we wanted to do that throughout utility, through pg&e and through the city, and cca as you know was still going through the process of being approved in its newest form. this fall when this is finalized so there were discussions with the mayor's office to make sure that it was more even between what we're able to do and what we have already on the books and what pg&e is offering to do, so i wouldn't say that it was

strongly deemphasized but a lot of meat was in one recommendation about cca, and it really has far reaching implications and certainly it's discussed within other recommendations even if it doesn't get top billing in that recommendation. >> you said that came from the mayor's office? >> it was -- in conversation with the mayor's office as well as other task force members. >> okay. so maybe you could sort of shed more light on that, so was there a directive from the mayor's office to not emphasize as much community choice aggregation? >> no. there is not a directive from him. they reviewed the draft and in our discussions with them they had concern -- as you know the mayor had concern with cca, and what they did

request from us that we only make sure that the wording when we discuss cca was this a possibility and not a done deal at this point to have this program which was the case back at that point in early september. >> has there been a follow up since approved by the board of supervisors eight-three and highlight it more and it's not just a possibility but a reality? >> it hasn't since the text was finalized in september before that was passed. obviously moving into forward of the recommendations and the implementation of the department or the city that will be very significant in what we can do going forward. >> thank you. did you want to add something. >> yeah i think on these reports timing is everything so i appreciate the fact that the report was done prior to the vote but i think in terms of recommendations that is also a

ity riff process and you could adopt a res diewgz. also the board could adopt a res diewgz and they're consistent with the program and should be updated to show the progress that has been achieved since the report was finalized and what has happened during that time. >> i certainly will be interested in that. commissioner avalos. >> i would be interested in that as well and also the resolution have a way to prioritize the recommendations and there are so many and we need a road map how they could be implemented and that seems like a big process too to come up with that and that way you could put the expansion of clean power sf at the very top of it because it's now what we approved as a city