com and we have as a city been talking about the world of energy quite intensely for quite a few years now yes and we've been so into energy that it's been on the front pages paper in the form community groups leave running international expert to help us with the finding how we need to approach the whole question of how to do energy in this twenty first century we even got the environmental award just last night and this is being taped in september so we got that word from the american i'm bloom organization and i know in the judges were here there were pretty wowed by all the things that are happening in the business world in the b p w world in the education growth thinking towards how do we do energy better so it's really nice when somebody crosses state lines and appreciates us on a national level  without all the hard work that has been going on and we appreciate all that hard work so right now we have this community energy plan that was developed mostly by peter gar ford and committee right did you want to talk about that dan a little bit you know to help your there's studies that show that fine particulates to raise the cost of health care and shorten life so all those things were taken into account and that study was completed this bring early summer and we've been presenting that information to the public  for the last month or so and we will have a q and a session you know this monday this coming monday september twenty fourth yeah so the whole question of how to do energy the council realize this is going to be something that's going to get bigger and bigger and need deeper and deeper study and that's why that sustainability committee was formed out of the community and they did a great job of really wrestling with these questions and trying to figure out how do we best approach this and how of other places done it and what would be the you know i love the way howland doesn't just look at its peers it tries to go above that with how can we do this the best way possible and to bring in someone of the stature of peter gar forth as an international consultant i think he said he was workin in something in russia something in belgium and i mean he's been everywhere he compares  g i s system the only one place in the world that he thinks even comes close to a system which was a place in mongolia some chinese university it's just amazing the breadth of his experience in the world of energy and i do really appreciate too at that meeting we had monday where we brought all different community members were welcome to come and find a spot a committee of what really interests them in tackling energy questions that he made a real point to say this is not a peter ghar fourth plan this is a community energy plan and it's comes from the community and and what everybody has come together to decide what's best for us and  that's great and i really appreciate his attitude that way and is willing to work with us and he's pretty good about the things that have come out of that strategy didn't he say that he was where was he where in belgium where they said man we wish you guys really have a better plan here in holland that your strategy looks so good maybe we should go back and redo r's something to that effect which is very heartwarming and encouraging as you know all of you have been working so hard so long in trying to get the facts to go with the principles and to not just approach this as an economic question that is  also an environmental and social question and the b p w s not just for engineers anymore it's just it's a holistic world over there right now not being an engineer i agree yeah i know my dad is an engineer i'm not an engineer i'm not a scientist but i understand that energy is is bigger than just the numbers of money and so we really want to think of all of that now ryan you kind of came in here just last year right and everybody said ok now we're doing community energy plans on top of everything else had you had experience in this kind of love all of twice now there's a lot in there you learn acronyms but there's quite a bit of good information and what i get from that is our whole system is of course driven by energy and we can use it wisely or we can waste it and the cheapest kilowatt is a kilowatt you don't need to produce so from an economic standpoint we can do a lot for our our community and our residents and businesses by making energy cheaply and also conserving it so we have to have more going forward and going forward who knows what kinds of regulations what kinds of limitations on natural gas and other sources might come into play so the idea of renewables is to provide more diversification flexibility at least this is what i get from the plan and this is what i get from the conversations that b p that he's having in the community so the portion involving the citizenry  know it's you can reduce energy in operative ways well in our homes we can that's one that's one fifth of all the energy consumes in our homes the extent that homes are energy efficient that you can make your homes at least twice as efficient depending on the resources you bring to bear so that's one element to our task force there's four task force forces another one is building energy labeling the idea is if we if  we make sure that we kind of document those businesses industries homes that are using energy wisely that that then that becomes a resource for others to learn from in an asset in our community that will only increase in value  the concept of community education outreach being sustained long term it involves conversations with some of our educational leaders in some of our fantastic educational institutions so we hope to  institutionalize that kind of energy knowledge long term going forward and last this district heating which dan knows quite a bit more about and of course peter garrett ford has numerous worldwide examples of and that w package and hoeing can really ensure a bright future not only that but how will become recognized worldwide for our comprehensive holistic approach to this problem that others are yeah it's exciting to see those that kind of potential this and that and to have a small enough group that is committed enough to work hard enough to make something happen and maybe not get their own little piece of the pie exactly but realize the value of the hall and to come together and make decisions and make it happen that can some bigger places can do exactly and i want to add another thing that's kind of a new thing we're doing two is create a model that is that is community based we have these task forces and all their meetings are on the website and all their subcommittee meetings are on the website and anyone who comes is even mediately a member of that task force there's no application process their voice will be heard because we want to have the most information and the best information we can bring to bear on these questions so we're only becoming stronger and better community long term however ally report this is saying about return on investment is not just about money as you said it thinks about the all the people and the breathing and the diseases and everything else that we need to think about besides good power and the values of highland i remember one of those sessions where they're thinking about just throwing out snow melt and we had a little bit of an uprising from from people that live in holland saying you know we love snow melt and we love how it puts us on the map is recycling of energy and creative way to tackle a problem and what it does to winter  holland and that was new information for the organization and that they took that back and they listened and so it is great to have community people come forward and be willing to put their time and energy to studying this and thinking it through and making wise decision and we're thinking that to them tomorrow we think you know four years out with this right now the s r y plan looked out twenty five years because that was the length of time that we had good data for when you look at modeling power prices and such getting out past twenty five years it's just too speculative so even though the guard force community energy plan a community energy plan is a forty year look at how and we were able to model the first twenty five years of that fairly well and it was very interesting in looking at the results as to what value the various aspects of what we have for energy use in our community provides like snowmelt from an economic development standpoint from just a quality of life standpoint healthy walking it was  very interesting to have concrete values assigned to some of those things how you look at costs related to health care and try and quantify the numbers are very very large  knew they were big but i didn't know they were that big yeah kind of helps to appreciate what you can easily take for granted in your community yeah that's great and they came up with that the community energy plan has several choices of ways to go as scenarios scenarios that look at a variety of approaches to reducing our energy consumption the community energy plan heads a base case scenario which looked at building a seventy eight megawatt circulating fluid ice bed plant and that was chosen as base case just because we had an air permit in waste and we have to make an assumption as to what are we going to compare things against so that's what we chose and then we laid in some additional scenarios from the community energy plan that involved gas combined cycle gas powered  combined heat and power renewables when we looked at two scenarios that said we won't build anything i will buy everything from the market because we did have citizens comment that well geez don't build anything there so much out there just buy it from the markets we looked at two scenarios that did just that and also looked at one at a different sized gas combined cycle power plant more from us setting of scale than a standalone so that's what we have to narrow it down to eventually down taking one of those choices and the original plan had a through eight through   combined with other renewables as we roll those into our portfolio because all of the things that the board does it's really a portfolio approach you don't put all your eggs in one basket you have at fuel diversity we want to have natural gas coal we want to have renewables a variety of renewables so that we're not dependent upon any one one source so whatever we do it will be looking at a whole portfolio not just one approach yeah and this community energy plan is kind of a framework it doesn't define every single step and every single thing we do it just gives us an overall principles to work from in order to go a direction of good stewards of our resources and diversifying where we get power exactly exactly it was as peter says it is a framework it's a fifty thousand foot view of holland and the approaches that we should take has some very specific things that it points out but then the report is very clear to state which you start getting into this you need to do investment grade analysis so you understand the economics and the impact of each of those quite frankly that's what the sri process was is that economic grade financial analysis  with some others yeah well there's a cost to whatever we choose and we need to be willing to pay the cost or be able to pay the cost and realizing that we don't really know the future but the best thing to do is to figure out how to have a variety of ways to approach it and getting energy and we appreciate the steering committee and your work in organizing all this well we kind of picked up based on council direction in july so  we appreciate that direction and we just want to add that as dad commented briefly on their recommendation will have a lot to do with waterfront like mecca tower and what the existing plant will look like long term coming together as i can tell and with the community input along the way it'll only get better and speaking of that community input once again i want to make sure people know that if they're interested in home energy retrofit as but amy i'll drink is our leader on that or a spokesperson district heating it's jim into being or trent bore either one and we also have a citizen leader on the building energy labeling and the energy education outreach i don't want announce those on air right now that people will be able to see that on our web page city of holland come yeah great in the meetings will be there and they can tune in if they'd like to and we i know there's huge dedication behind every thing that's just a debatable and we don't do any of this weapon only or casually it is really thought through well with the best of minds that we can bring together in order to serve this community in the best way possible so we appreciate all those hours that people see in the ones they don't see that really make this the community we love to live in so thank you so much and we thank all of you for joining us this month and i hope that you can come back to the help you've enjoyed this roundtable discussion that we have provided for you and hope you can get the needed information you'd like if you'd like to be a part of our community energy conversation please visit our website city of holland slash sustainability or you can go to p twenty one decision that comment and you can also find this episode as well as well along with the previous episodes of city connections and that is on the city of holland website it's a video page you go to w w w dat dat or does that word that come in and you can find out slash video of holland and you can find out about what's going on with all our city connection pieces that you'd like to watch so thanks for being here today autumn the city conducts their fall leaf pick up program where for several weeks in october and november you are permitted to place your fallen leaves at the curbside for pick up we have an abundance of trees which translates into an abundance of leaves obviously a month's worth of leaves on any given street in the city is surely enough to create havoc for traffic as well as for city services to facilitate leaf pick up please be sure your leaves are piled at the right of way rather than in the street if they must be in the street then please be sure that you have an area cleared for access by garbage trucks mail service etc also try to be sure the piles of leaves are not blocking traffic this video will  calender the date when you may begin place nearly as out as well as the end date right before the cruise begin pick up are both included if you have any questions about this process or if you believe you were missed for some reason please call nine two eight two four zero zero with questions regarding