Skip to main content

tv   Government Access Programming  SFGTV  November 19, 2018 4:00pm-5:01pm PST

4:00 pm
available for prepping transfers fl interest r from grandparents to grandchildren. if you're interested in learning more visit our website or
4:01 pm
4:02 pm
4:03 pm
4:04 pm
4:05 pm
4:06 pm
4:07 pm
4:08 pm
4:09 pm
4:10 pm
4:11 pm
4:12 pm
4:13 pm
4:14 pm
4:15 pm
4:16 pm
4:17 pm
4:18 pm
4:19 pm
4:20 pm
4:21 pm
4:22 pm
4:23 pm
4:24 pm
4:25 pm
4:26 pm
>> my passion for civil service is inspired by a tradition.
4:27 pm
scda stands for supervisorory control and data acquisition. we can respond to an alarm, store history, so we can look at previous events and see what went wrong and if we can improve it. operations came to scda and said, can you write a program that would run the pumps at crystal springs pump station to eliminate peak power usage during daytimes, and we performed that function. i love the puzzle. every time there's a problem that comes up, it's a puzzle that has to be solved, and we do it. >> travis writes all the code for the original water system. he is super passionate. he knows every little detail about everything. he's a great troubleshooter.
4:28 pm
he can walk into the plant, we can tell hem an issue, and he'll nail down what the problem is, whether it be electrical, mechanical or computer. he works very well with others, he knows how to teach, very easygoing, great guy to work with. >> my passion for civil service is inspired by a tradition. i'm performing a task that has been done for thousands of years. the aztec had their aqueducts and water supply for the city. we bring water from the hetch hetchy reservoir, and we don't pump it. the romans would have been proud. my name is travis ong. i'm a senior i.s. engineer
4:29 pm
in this san francisco office, there are about 1400 employees. and they're working in roughly 400,000 square feet. we were especially pleased that cleanpowersf offers the super green 100% clean energy, not only for commercial entities like ours, but also for residents of the city of san francisco. we were pleased with the package of services they offered and we're now encouraging our employees who have residence in san francisco to sign on as well. we didn't have any interruption of service or any problems with the switch over to cleanpowersf. this clean power opportunity reflects that. i would encourage any large business in san francisco to seriously consider converting and upgrading to the
4:30 pm
cleanpowersf service. it's good for the environment, it's good for business and it's good for the community. >> this meeting will come to order. this is october 19th, 2018, special meeting of the san francisco local agency formation i am sandra lee fewer, chair of the commission. i am joined by commissioner
4:31 pm
cynthia pollock. we are expecting another commissioner in a little while. the clerk of the commission his elisa samara. i would also like to thank the staff at san francisco government television for recording today's meeting. do you have any announcements? >> yes. make sure to silence all cell phones and electronic devices. speaker cards and copies of any documents should be submitted to the clerk. >> thank you very much. can you please call item number 2. >> item number 2 his approval of the last minutes of the september 21st, 2018 regular meeting. >> commissioners, do you have any changes of the minutes of the september 21st meeting? seeing no changes, i will open this up to public comment. are there any members of the public who wish to comment on item number 2? seeing none, public comment is
4:32 pm
now closed. is there a motion to approve the minutes? the next so moved. >> yes. moved and seconded. without objection, these minutes are approved. can you please call item number 3. >> it is a community chai joe's choice aggregation activities report. outreach and communication and regular as regulatory activities >> thank you very much. i believe we have a presentation from my clients at the san francisco public utilities commission. >> good morning, commissioners. pardon me while i load the slide deck. good morning, again. happy friday. i am the director of clean power s.f. for the san francisco public utilities commission.
4:33 pm
for our clean power s.f. program update today, we are going to cover a few things. our enrolment activities and service to customers will also judge we will also review the clean power s.f. outreach and communications program for the enrolments that was conducted in july. and then finally we will provide an update on the recent cpuc decision. >> do you have copies of your powerpoint? >> i do. i will also deliver them to the clerk here. >> and we are also joined by commissioner singh. good to see you.
4:34 pm
>> i have also put additional copies for the public in the box >> ok. our ongoing clean power s.f. enrolment and service to customers continues to move along successfully. this month, clean power s.f. is conducting one of our regular quarterly enrolments. bringing on an additional 1600 customers that signed up for the program during the month of april through august of this year or have solar on the rooftops and participate in net energy metering. with october's enrolment, we are actively serving about 109,000 accounts within the city with a cumulative opt out percentage of 3.1%. that is pretty consistent with what we reported the last meeting. our super green upgrade rate
4:35 pm
continues to exceed that rate and it is 3.6% of active customers. that means that more than 3800 businesses and households in san francisco have chosen to receive 100% eligible renewable and greenhouse gas free electricity from clean power s.f. the next section of our update is on outreach and communications. for this portion of the update i will turn things over to tyler gamble. the acting director of communications and i will rejoin for the regulatory update. >> thank you. >> thank you. good morning, commissioners. i will go through a presentation first. i will reintroduce myself. i am tyler gamble. and the acting communications
4:36 pm
director. i have been here about a year and a half almost. i started out as deputy communication director for power so is very focused on putting together the bones and implementation of the enrolment strategy for the summer. i was here back in may telling you about the plan that we had and i promised to come back and talk about the results. here i am. first, i wanted to reintroduce what the team looks like so you all get a handle on what we are doing on a day-to-day basis and how mate staff and resources that we have. we have a communications team at the p.u.c. dedicated to the power vertical specifically and to talk about public outreach for our clean energy programs. our team handles earned media, owned media, paid media, engaging with partners and then we also do a life direct customer engagement. as well as commercial dust commercially and residentially.
4:37 pm
so this past july,, we had our enrolment campaign, enrolling 25,000 commercial customers. our main message was that clean power s.f. gives you the power to choose cleaner energy options for your business at a competitive price. the word -- these are just commercial customers. our messages were focused around that type of customer. some of the strategies we took on, we took advantage of the required mailings. we leverage local and regional media outlets and use existing p.u.c. and city communication channels. greetings enlisted clean energy movement influencers targeted customers ahead of time. we engaged business organizations and we also put together a paid digital media campaign. going through each of those, we did new enrolment notices. we are already required to send these out so we wanted to make sure we could tailor them to make them attractive and educational for the people who got them. we sent for waves in a may
4:38 pm
through august and mailed a total of almost 93,000 of these out to customers. we had a goal of next of getting coverage to educate businesses and residents about the program and encourage upgrades to super green at the same time. a lot of businesses have sustainability goals so it was a good opportunity to jump in and say you will be clean -- you will be clean though she will be enrolled in clean power s.f. and we have a hundred% renewable ready for you as well. a big announcement that came through was that the new salesforce tower signed on for 100% renewable energy through super green. they were already a customer with others. that was exciting to be able to leverage that moment that was popular around the city and state for media coverage to say they are also a customer with the city of san francisco. that was helpful. that got picked up in salesforce they did their own blogging about it, including the c.e.o. as well. we also use existing city communications channels. a shout out to supervisor fewer.
4:39 pm
we put that in your newsletter earlier this summer. we ended up hunting --dash contacting 55 stakeholder organizations and gave them enrolment information, digital media kit they could use to put in their own newsletter. we printed some inserts in our p.u.c. customers since we are to have that platform available and we did that digitally. we leverage mayor farrell at the time and other board of supervisors and newsletters and made sure we got all the information to them to communicate to their stakeholders. we partnered with some of the clean energy movement influencers locally. the sierra club, and others. we have had really great success during phone banking opportunities with those folks. so we shared information and attended events and did some phone banking. we sponsored some events and panels as well to get the word out. than we did a lot of meeting customers face-to-face. merchant association meetings,
4:40 pm
film screenings, panel presentations, we attended nearly 30 events in 2018 total and interacted with about 4300 people. we also wanted to engage business organizations. we partnered with the mayor's office of workforce development and got a list of all the folks they engage with on a regular basis. we narrow that down to about 100 small and medium and large businesses that would be focused , that was business focused and energy focused organizations. a lot of the folks just wanted to get the details and they would present it to their constituents as they wanted to. others wanted us to come in so we did in person presentations and scent them digital press kits that they asked for as well the most exciting thing for me, we launched a new clean power s.f. website that is clearly reaching more customers. we have always owned the url clean power s.f..org but it takes us back to the p.u.c. website and with the size of
4:41 pm
this program and the attention we need around it to get people to understand it, it made sense to separate it to a separate website for the time being. we made sure the website let match the rest of the classical just collateral. the results were great. we did a lot of outreach but also paid for additional -- additional outreach campaign. we saw over 50,000 unique visitors during the three-month period. we have seen over 74,000 year to date. that sounds good to, but what do you right that too. i looked at a comparison from the same time frame for a full year from june 17th until june 18th and we only saw 12,000 hits to that website. clearly this was the way to go and a better way to directly engage with customers as well. i was excited about that and we have seen that continue to grow over time. and then some commercial outreach and education that we did. we met with beaumont twice in july and august and presented to
4:42 pm
the san francisco hotel council meeting. a lot of the hotels, especially on the larger side do you have sustainability goals and are interested in being part of this i wanted to make sure they knew it was available in san francisco and through the city as well. and then we ran a digital ad campaign. we wanted to be a little fun with it and make sure that we got the word out. we focused a lot on new sites that people might show up on so they would look like in advertising that they were reading. so we didn't want to have a lot of imagery. we wanted to get right to the point. these are two examples of the ones that we did. it was a multilingual campaign that we ran into digital print and we did other targeted byes. again with a redesign clean power s.f. website where people were sent to. around september through october , sorry, it ran may through august and then september through october we wanted to take advantage of the fact that even though enrolment
4:43 pm
is over, let's push people to learn and sign up for super green during the climate summit activities that were happening. there's a lot of attention around that as well. and then the next slide shows the multilingual advertising that we did. obviously as you think through this, not everything that may be considered funny or sarcastic or anything that might be different by the languages. so we stuck to innovation power san francisco. our clean energy powers you. that was a really high collect ad of using that. at really hammered to the point home across all languages. we were excited to see that. i know this is a question that came up at the last meeting so i wanted to make sure we talked about communities being part of our plan and not separate from the work that we do. i wanted to do a quick run down of some of the activities we have done over the last year and again, is part of this campaign. we conducted a research project
4:44 pm
-- project with s.f. fellows to understand diverse needs in the city. they pulled together interesting research -- research that can guide some of the decisions we made in the future. we have done bilingual presentations with chinatown partners and a lot of face-to-face outreach with individual business owners. we are fortunate to have chinese , english and filipino speaking representatives at the san francisco public utilities commission that we use for clean power s.f. and across the board with water and wastewater as well. always translating our materials how to read your bill, terms and conditions, not only do we want to do that because it's the best way, but a lot of it is just part of the rules that we have to do anyway. we ran in language print adds and other spanish-language publications within san francisco. we are currently updating our ivr which is when you call a hotline and you have a recorded
4:45 pm
message there, we are making sure it will be in spanish and cantonese and mandarin and filipino. we are developing in language micro- sites with more extensive web content that we believe will be most helpful for these communities as we continue to educate about that particular program. we want to keep customers engaged that we already have as well as educate new ones as we look ahead to upcoming enrolment and things like that. so over the next few months, we will be focusing on operational communications, super green upgrade campaigns, annual disclosures and mailings that we have to do. customer inquiries, we will be doing a series of super green spotlight videos that have chosen to do go -- goat super green. we have done another round with some good partnerships. there is a group, there is a business that runs out camping
4:46 pm
gear. i can't remember the name of it. but we did a really fun thing with them where we shot a video of them promoting the program and they said any customers who would bring in their clean power s.f. newsletter when you get ten % off a rental for their camping gear that they would get good partnerships that allow for both ends to get benefit out of their. we are looking at enrolment communications again as we look at the next final and residential enrolments. some awareness building about the s.f. p.u.c. power enterprise brand. some outdoor and digital advertising. we will look at what we have done and see what makes the most sense to invest our resources in in the future. some open house style informational sessions and some more engagement through other partners that we see as well. we really want to get into -- past the traditional public meetings type space and be more innovative about the things we are doing. one of the great examples, if you are able to see the pop up
4:47 pm
that we did with the global climate summit to, around the 100 years of the power. we gave away snow cones to people and popped up in areas of the climate summit and also in residential areas as well. it was a fun way to educate people about where the power has come from over the last 100 years and where we are moving forward as well. looking into more of it was innovative things keep educating customers. that is a basic wrap up that i wanted to give on that but i'm happy to take any questions you may have around the communications efforts that we have done. >> colleagues. any questions? none. ok. >> ok. thank you. i appreciate it. >> thank you, tyler. if we could have the slides back thank you.
4:48 pm
ok. i imagine some of you have seen the news lately about the proceeding at the cpuc. so i will share a bit about that with you. on october 11th, we voted unanimously to approve the alternate proposal in the power charge indifference adjustment proceeding. as a reminder, the power charge indifference adjustment is a fee that appears on c.c.a. customer 's bills to recover the above market cost of power supply commitments that they made on behalf of those customers prior to their switch to a c.c.a. program for electricity supply. this is the power plants that they own and to the contracts that they entered into before the c.c.a. formed. historically, the generation rants have been said to absorb
4:49 pm
the impact of the pci a on our customers. the community vigourously opposed the alternate proposal on the grounds that among other things, it underestimates the market value of the generation resources. resulting in more of the cost being recovered through the exit fee and c.c.a. customers. and that it unlawfully allows the above market cost of generation assets owned by pg nd to be recovered. with this decision we expect they will have an ink -- have an increase of more than 200% since san francisco committed to beginning service in 2015. ultimately, it is expected the decision will increase the cost to c.c.a. customers must pay to pg&e verse above market power supply starting in january of next year.
4:50 pm
so what specifically are we expecting to happen as a result of the decision? as i noted, we are anticipating that as early as january 1 of next year the rate will increase for all clean power s.f. customers. we are also expecting pg&e it generation right to decrease relative to current levels. based on the best information we have available now, we estimate that existing clean power s.f. customers could pay 40- $50 million more per year as a result if no action is taken by clean power s.f. to absorb the change. i want to be clear about that. that is if nothing is done. but significantly, that is equivalent to about 25 -- it is a big, big chunk. these figures are based on the
4:51 pm
most recent rate forecast which is scheduled to be updated in early november. the decision itself did not publish rates. and adopted a methodological change. those rates will be set in another proceeding and a the schedule for that proceeding has an update to the rates happening in early november. so we actually are anticipating the outlook with those rates will improve. because wholesale electricity markets have been -- prices have been up since pg&e initially forecasted. that is an influencer in the calculation. we will be waiting to see what those figures are before submitting any proposals for next steps. on those next steps, first of all, i think that as the rates picture becomes clearer for 2019
4:52 pm
, i want to emphasize that we will continue to provide clean and reliable and affordable service to our customers. they continue to operate and offer generational service today that is about two% lower cost than pg&e so customers are receiving their -- those savings we are also evaluating next steps for 2019 and asking questions like how can we reduce program cost to absorb increases we and the pg&e generation decreases. should we make changes to our power supply portfolio? should we adjust our april enrolment plan? there are other questions but those are some of the key things that we are considering. at this point, all options are on the table. in partnership with our colleagues back we will also be examining our options for recourse at the cpuc. the worse case scenario is that we postpone our april enrolments
4:53 pm
and we operate at a higher cost for some amount of time. we definitely hope not to need to delay the enrolment as it will set back our efforts to procure new renewable resources and begin programming to support local buildout and affordability objectives. so that concludes our reports but of course, i'm happy to take any questions you may have. >> commissioner ronen? >> thank you. this is very upsetting. i don't know if you could talk a little bit more about what possible appeal recourse we have i don't know the process at the cpuc and i don't know if you can appeal directly or the legislators can intervene in some way. whatever you can talk about publicly, if you could educate us. >> yeah. what i can say is there is a rehearing process at the cpuc
4:54 pm
that would go before the cpuc initially. an application for rehearing could be filed by parties. we are looking at that with our partners. typically that is done on legal grounds. and that is due 30 calendar days after the final decision. so early to mid november is one that would be due. soon. that would go through a cpuc process which could take several months. and depending on the outcome, that the cpuc finds are the decision that the cpuc makes, the next deck would be the ticket to the courts. there certainly could be legislation that addresses things that may not have been clear enough in the law and the statute.
4:55 pm
so that is certainly another route. probably a slightly longer term route, as i said, all options are on the table. we are looking at all those options and we will definitely continue to keep you informed. >> while litigation is ongoing, do the changes go into effect? i guess that is the judge's decision on whether or not there is an injunction of the rate change. >> i believe that they do. but i will double, -- double check and confirm as to whether the changes will go into effect on schedule. one other thing i wanted to mention, i'm not sure if it was clear in the presentation, the timeline for implementing by january 1st is really quite tight. in fact, the cpuc wasn't even dealing with these methodological changes this last year and the rates were delayed three months. which isn't very common. normally there is a rubber
4:56 pm
rubberstamp process for these rates. so they were delayed for implementation in 2018 and now for implementation of the rates for 2019, they have some changes to make which will require that all parties that have an interest feel comfortable that it is being done correctly. so we will be participating in that process and advocating for enough time to make sure that the rates are reflective of the decision. so i mentioned before the 1st week of november, that is when we would typically be updating the rates. it is just a few weeks from now. so we will have to see if they will be able to make that schedule. so we could see the timeline slipped a little bit in terms of when the rates would go into effect. >> and then you said -- should we change our supply portfolio?
4:57 pm
what would that look like? >> so the city and the clean powers program through the city 's direction has focused on certain types of renewable resources that are the most costly in the market. they are really the premium product types. >> and those are what? >> for the renewable portfolio standard programming in california there are three categories of renewable energy products. there are is category one which is a bundled renewable energy product, you purchased it ahead of time with the electricity and all of the attributes associated and that has to be delivered into the california grid. there is a category to resource which comes from out-of-state that also has to be delivered into the california grid. but it is not a state product
4:58 pm
and then there is a category three resources which can be unbundled in time and they can be in-state or out-of-state. they don't need to be purchased ahead of time and bundled. they can be purchased after the energy is generated. it they tend to be the lowest cost renewable resources. there are a number of options. i want to be clear. that is one set of options is to incorporate more category to renewable resources then we have another option would be to pause on the increasing of our renewable energy content so that we are not incurring those additional costs. that would be one way to avoid some amount of cost that we have budgeted for when we have not yet contracted for certain amounts. we might also look to purchase
4:59 pm
other lower-cost clean energy products like hydro. more hydroelectric power. this could be a short-term approach to bring the cost down for some amount of time. so the changing of the portfolio is a cost mitigation, cost reduction strategy. >> and excuse my lack of knowledge in this area, but is it paid -- how long is that fee per customer paid? >> for the most part, it is for the life of the commitments. so the cpuc has approved a lot of long-term contracts for pg&e and the other utilities for renewable energy. and many of those are 25 years in duration. so projects that are just coming online, and in some cases, we
5:00 pm
have that situation, those will be operating for another 25 years. and the utilities will be able to recover those above market costs for that period of time. it is a long-lived cost recovery measure. i do want to mention that there are a couple pluses, positives that came out of the decision, which unfortunately, they are for the next phase. the proceeding is not over. there will be a phase two. one of the things that the cpuc will be looking at, which was advocated for by the c.c.a. community was securitizing these costs. essentially, fixing the cost over a longer period of time and refinancing some of the deals to help bring costs down for all repairs, not just to help with the p.c. i.a. issue but also to help all of pg&e customers, for example. and