HomeMy WebLinkAboutMinutes - Energy Committee - 03/15/2012South Burlington Energy Committee
March 15, 2012 Meeting Notes
Laura Waters, chair, convened the meeting at 7 PM.
Attendees: Laura Waters, Marcy Murray, Sam Swanson, Marc Companion, Keith Epstein, Steve
Crowley, Anna Sommer, Randy Hall, Clary Franko from Suncommon
Keith volunteered to keep minutes.
Sam moved that Laura Waters be the committee chair for the next four months, Marcy
seconded, all were in favor. This vote was redundant with last month's vote, because we didn't
pay close attention to last month's minutes. Marcy moved that Marc Companion be the vice-
chair for the next four months. Laura seconded, all were in favor.
February 2012 minutes were approved.
Clary Franko introduced Suncommon. They are a new benefit corporation with the goal of
dramatically increasing solar electricity production in Vermont. They are a spinoff from the
VPIRG solar program. Focusing on residential solar only in Chittenden and Washington
counties for now, with a community organizing model. The two main obstacles they found for
people going solar is the large upfront cost and the difficult process. Their program attempts to
remove both those obstacles. They offer a 20 year fixed payment Sunpower lease with no
upfront cost. Peck Electric, who was trained by Sunpower, does the installations. They would
like us to come up with a solar goal for South Burlington and they will help us achieve that goal.
Sam and Marc will draft a document that expresses our goal.
Paul submitted written updates. City staff has been in touch with the EPA about the Energy Use
Assessment. City staff needs to provide some energy bills to the EPA then EPA can complete
the assessment tool. Route 7 Park and ride is part of the Shelburne Road Corridor Study, which
had a workshop on March 15th also. No status change on the Municipal Building Energy
Upgrade Grant. The city was awarded and extension and is awaiting results of a building
analysis. Sandy Miller posted a Front Porch Forum message about the March 19th city council
meeting where the Williston Road "road diet" will be discussed. Three proposals for the Condo
energy conservation project consultant were received, and they expect to select a consultant in
the near future.
Karen Alence recommends that we send a representative to the April Shelburne Road Corridor
Study meeting. Sam volunteered. It was discussed that we need to keep working on a short-
term Park and Ride effort while we are waiting for the Shelburne Road Corridor Study to
progress. Keith will contact Paul Conner about how to move forward.
Sam asked what items are remaining on the ARRA grant to make sure we use it all by the
September 30th deadline. Laura will ask Paul Conner.
Marc had no updates on streetlights.
Tim Perrin from Efficiency Vermont is working on getting someone to talk to us about residential
building energy codes.
Anna attended the CCRPC greenhouse gas emissions meeting last week. They have a goal of
completing the inventory by June 2012. They don't know whether they will be able to provide
town by town numbers for all the categories. They'll have meetings every 3-4 weeks, with each
meeting focusing on one categories, until the inventory is complete. Sam asked whether they
could recommend a method for inventorying transportation emmissions. Marcy said Larua
Nagle-Conant, one of the UVM students who did the South Burlington inventory, is now at
Efficiency Vermont and she might still have the original data. We are waiting for the payment to
ICLEI to be able to input data for Greenhouse Gas modeling.
Larua, Marc, and Anna attended the Chittenden County Regional Energy Forum. The Shelburne
Public Works director gave a presentation on their streetlight delamping and switch to LEDs. He
is willing to offer guidance to South Burlington. Shelburne created a lighting policy first, then did
delamping to meet the policy before switching to LEDs. March suggested that if we buy the
streelights we may want to do significant delamping before switching to LEDs to reduce project
cost.
Sam suggested we look at the recent Local Motion report on the economic benefits of
pedestrian and bicycle transportation. Marc pointed out that transportation studies for new
development almost always focus solely on vehicle performance (i.e. a "traffic" study), and
rarely place equal weight on the performance of bicycle and pedestrian facilities. That results in
skewed infrastructure improvements when a project is built, followed by years of attempting to
retrofit our communities to accommodate non-auto users. Sam suggested we ask Paul to teach
us about the development review process so we can know where in the system we can work to
improve.
Meeting adjourned at 8:30