board on issues related to you know life and distribution of power in general and i let them introduce themselves as the landscape around ralph jones move but i i really funny that people are going to be repetitive just say you agree or have one person speak for the group and as opposed to taking up everybody's time saying the same thing the person ahead of you said if you could just in the interest of time to move forward would we want to get through everybody wants to speak the other thing is that i want to be clear i think the big just lightning rod in this whole discussion has really don't see that there's an ever going to be a need for however in my in the future sometimes becomes something we talk about again but right now i think it was a premature discussion and we are intending on implementing it so we're taking it off the table for now so i thought that that was a smart thing to do right up front and you're so you're all aware of it and that you know your inquiries and comments  eleven the tariff sets up compensation for distributing and emission free renewable energy and basically it sets out the rules for how we pay owners of such systems for any excess energy that they produce and put back out onto our onto our wires net metering is a commonly used approach and it really was our only option at the time back in two thousand and eleven arge lee because of the metering technology that we had phase was supposed to be in place for one year it was always supposed to be a transitory thing and as a side note i like to point out that the tariff also does have some stipulations in it about the ruble energy certificates associated with that excess generation any understanding was that those were to be retired know in the case of least systems i understand that typically those wrecks actually stay with the leasing companies or they don't actually transferred to the lessee but we have not actually enforced that provision so we you know kind of let that one go to phase two under phase two we would pay the wholesale rate well but in conversations with sustainable belmont we were urged to remove that phase two and we did actually agree to do that when we first started talking about phase two which was quite a while ago and we had discussion tonight though we're not considering that right now it has been suggested that these two pricing is out of step with what other municipals are doing in massachusetts but actually it  isn't just a quick explanation of the pricing just to make sure that everybody's understanding what the what retail versus wholesale is both retail and wholesale includes the value of energy and they also include the value of transporting that energy across the high voltage transmission system to belmont also imbedded in the energy price though is an implied price on carbon a market price on carbon emissions because massachusetts is part of the  regional greenhouse gas initiative now the difference between the retail and the wholesale price is that the retail price also includes the cost of belmont's delivery system and the services that  almost like provides to the customers and we did a web survey and you can see the high level results here on what other muni's do and we found that phase two actually would be in the majority of other municipal xylo levon of the mob her full doesn't buy back any of the power at all so we were we would not be out of step i see so why implement phase two now phase one was always intended to be temporary when you are actually two years late  we have a metering technology in place now to do phase two and we do actually expect that we will start to see a lot more p v installations and it is still expensive we acknowledged but the costs for solar panel come down quite a bit in the last few years and we expect that trend could continue and we would see a lot more of it in town and we just need to be ready with a policy that considers all people in town not just solar panel as i'm sure most of you are aware of onshore wind from a couple of projects that are one that's in construction one that's operating and we pay roughly half of what we pay and would be paying at retail or services that it does not provide so we're compensating is that what it does but it really doesn't i'm a nash is going to talk about this guy in a moment but you know it has also been suggested that we're not  v right now because it's expensive it really is that technology can to be adopted by more affluent people and there have been a number of studies that have pointed out the regressive nature of subsidizing that type of power i personally think it's important to also look at the magnitude of the cross subsidy and compare it with another delivery deliberate subsidy that we have a place in belmont and that's for low income  instituted a low income rate back in two thousand and five in consultation with an expert on the way the low income rate works is that those customers don't pay the ten dollars sixty cents a month history charge and they also get about a thirty percent duct on the part held our rate that they pay and you'd be surprised at the number of families that fall a fine but as you can see on the slide the subsidy that we give to p v right now through the retail is about sixty percent higher than what we get flowing and you know i'm personally very i attend i cannot personalize these things but i'm personally very bothered by that i just it just doesn't feel right  addition to the subsidy p v does still get a pretty generous tax credit as well for the government so with that i'll hand it over if you but then i'm going to do is go through the solar and this is large scale solar which is more efficient than small scale software and for that out here is an analysis friend that lives are which is a wall street financial firm which looked at this it concluded that rooftop solar is the most and from an economic standpoint an extremely expensive form of energy now that we've gone through in that analysis we've seen some literature from the pick of solar advocates to talk about the long term criteria one has to look at it so we tried to do that and walk through that one is what's the effect on distribution as patty indicated one of the effects is the solar p v providers do not pay their fair share of the distribution system that's where the part of where the subsidy that you talked about comes from the cross subsidy and of good job or detail on that in a minute and also it's not at all certain what the impact on line losses in the distribution system has and i've seen arguments going both ways i think it's a factual question it could be helpful it could be detrimental it's really a it's a fact specific question you can't assume any value associated with that it may be there may not be there transmission we've looked at because of the way transmission is planned because of its bill because of the kind of the scale there's almost nothing to be saved in and from transmission capacity standpoint in regard to juice to distribute it so it's small scale it doesn't get close to the scale th solar has little or no capacity value has absolutely no value was a hedge and has some value and energy but it depends on when it's produced why does it have little or no capacity value of it when we buy capacity in the market two things happen the capacity that we buy that is somebody standing there for a company actually a generator standing there ready to produce when we need it if they don't produce when we need it when we call in to produce they have to compe they have to buy at the marginal cost of energy and sell it and provided to us and our contract price so they take that risk that's good and they guarantee the availability that energy in solar there's no estate there that we know for sure it's intermittent nobody can guarantee its availability when we need it all talk a little more detail about that a second and nobody nobody in the solar p v verse is going to compensate us if they're not available instead what happens we have to go and buy replacement cost energy at the marginal price and then socialize it across everybody not on the people who feel they deliver on that so there is no capacity value and value is an interesting question we do generate differently often by we made by hedges because we're concerned about a hi against a ten cent risk nobody would do that and secondly look suppose we pay the eighteen cents and it's a hedge and what happens is the price goes to twenty five cents or the solar p v people going to pay seven cents to make that value if the hedge callable it has no value so there is no hedge value associated with it there is an energy value it may be high and maybe low entirely depends on what i'm about to show you which is when is the energy produced electricity prices are quite if you can see this is it this is for january peak demand in new england in january is around six o'clock at night where a solar production that's the lower there isn't any so when prices are the highest  plants in the system get dispatched which means that what's being displaced by the solar not the dirtiest plants but the more efficient cleaner plants on the system so we're not displacing them of the dirtiest units were displacing cleaner guinness let me go to the su jet here it's now become a by the way the it's because always in the evening this is new england i don't know what happens as you can see is that solar hits it's big around noon at two o'clock it starts dropping off and then disappears towards the end of the afternoon peak in demand in new england starts around two o'clock and doesn't really go down substantially until six or two after six o'clock which means for almost t we know it for three very clear reasons number one the transfer the distribution cost of the system part fixed when somebody is not using a lot of drawing electricity from the system we can't retract the wires we don't we can't really take away the money we started because somebody has to pay for that if the people that are getting the benefit from it aren't paying for it those costs get shifted to somebody else namely to the non solar customers so we if they're not paying their fair share of the fixed cost and that means somebody else a product that's basically generation only when it is so clearly if we're paying that and another thirty some percent of that cost is actually retail services they don't provide that's a problem it's across subsidy and the other cook aspect of the cross  ranging from the koch brothers on the far right that enry love and says the energy efficiency guru they all agree completely the least possible least the fish it way possible to reduce carbon he's using solar is using distributed solar energy there's a broad consensus is that a lot of controversy about that to deliver their illustrate the point we do now we analyze with the green choice program in belmont currently provides if you buy that we can buy and that's all new england specific which is not very but we could buy six times the carbon reduction pradelle are spent by new england wrecks then you can buy subsidising distributed solar if you move to a cold intensive region like my native state of ohio what you get is fifteen times the reduction that look at germany germany's got thirty percent renewable and immerse thirty percent penetration of solar energy that's true unfortunately it's not the whole truth this is the headline from made two thousand  gone up five and a half but the back between five and six percent and interestingly be a man of brown whole generated electricity and brand coal is super dirty super carbon intensive call that has actually had now reached its highest level in twenty years so the problem gets to the issue is just putting on distributed solar and just do it which is expensive may not get i'm not saying we're germany but if you think by massive distribution massive market penetration by intermittent solar intermittent of resources you're going to reduce carbon germany as a monument for why that may not be correct next page how do i get there there it is i have ten seconds you can read ok thank you everyone who took the time to come down here tonight i appreciate it very much my name is alex band deal i'm a belmont resident and town meeting member from precinct seven i am also a homeowner with some panels on my house and i appreciate the opportunity to speak on behalf of sustainable bellman here tonight but a matter that is very important to me and is very important to a lot of the folks who are sitting in this room and also folks i know who wanted to come tonight but couldn't for various conflict reasons my time tonight is very limited so i'm going to go to a fast pace and i'm going to make reference to some of the written comments that the state energy working group has already submitted for further information i hope that everybody here particularly the light board has had the chance to read those comments i realize they're very long and i appreciate your time in that we certainly put a lot of effort to generating them that being said i'm going to cut to the chase we have four recommendations for the light board tonight the first one is fantastic news that we have already that this should include both supply and demand side components it should include targets for renewal energy reliance in belmont and dates for achieving those targets and it should include a cost benefit analysis and other appropriate analysis for formulating recommendations about how to achieve those targets that's our second recommendation in the context thank you thanks in the context of such a plan it may be appropriate to consider moving a phase two of some sort away from the current phase one of retail net metering we have recommended i made some english recommendations in our collective comments and i know that individuals have also provided additional ideas and their own comments on this matter i'm not going to go into those today but again refer you to those other documents and sustainable belmont is more than willing to engage with all my might on discussing some of these other kinds of options face to as it currently stands is not acceptable to us and we recommend further more that we should keep phase one retail net metering until something that is mutually agreeable can be identified and approved by the white board why do we care so much we care a lot about distributed solar and the future distributed solar in our town first of all because of global warming it's a huge problem and this is one of many pieces that need to be in place to try to do something about it distributed generation does in fact displace fossil fuel generation and will reduce the town's carbon footprint it's consistent with the town's climate action plan of two thousand and nine that was passed by town meeting and is consistent we believe with the town's values and also does reduce the need for peak price price power the overlap is not perfect nevertheless in general prices during the day are higher than at night and that is when solar is producing so reduces the need for buying some of the more expensive power maybe not always the most expensive at any given moment it's also a complement to wind it's not a competitor solar and wind have different generation profiles solar during the day and it's more during the summer in the winter wind you tend to get more in the winter for some passivity you tend to get more of night i don't think they should be viewed as competitors we need solar we need wind and we need conservation finally  distributed solar especially rooftop solar does not require loss of habitat or devotion of large areas of land to either commercial arrays or solar farms it's built on top of existing infrastructure and has that environmental benefit as well also earlier this year some of you may be aware the e p a has new requirements through the clean power plant that are going to be coming down to massachusetts i don't know how those are going to affect our state and how they might flow through but given that and also given the expected retirement of a number of power generating plants in new england it would seem to be foolish to try to cut off more options for local generation at this point in time which is about both phase two and phase three would do we don't think it's appropriate to try to discard tools from the tool box at this point now you heard about some cross subsidies that have been alleged to exist we question whether those cross of these in fact exist there have been a lot of studies on this exact issue in different jurisdictions around the country this document here referenced here i s a review article by the rocky mountains too that pulled together fourteen or fifteen or so of these studies and summarized them in this rather complicated slide that i'm not going to go through in detail there's two points from this slide and the first of these points w summarized in a quote from carl rob ago one of the leading experts in this field who looked at this diagram and said the following this slide shows that the calculated benefits of in this case of the distributed solar often exceed residential is that all the studies looked at multiple different cost categories in detail and that in our opinion in order to conclude whether or not there is a cross subsidy and the direction of the cross subsidy you need to do an actual formal study an objective study by experts in appeal to actually seriously look at all these things that has not been done the analysis that we have seen from belmont light and the documents that have been provided to us looked at the energy savings from distributed solar they did not look at any of these other benefits of solar that are provided to the energy system and to society in general in a two thousand and thirteen a white paper called the regulators guidebook calculating the benefits and costs of distributed  generation ten different benefits of recommended a stand to as part of a standardized approach for estimating the bet net benefits and costs of distributed solar if you really read a look at the issue of cross subsidy follow the general literature do a thorough analysis and then come forward with an answer about whether or not this cross subsidies ists why is net metering important solar panel costs fractionally have been going down and they have probably will continue to go down but in the meantime they're still pretty expensive and there's ten take a lot of labor and so forth which is also expensive to get them installed if you want solar then those high costs need to be offset by one or more compensating financial measures some of those measures have been supported at the federal and at the state level with policies that you have heard about such as the federal tax credit thirty percent of installation costs there's a much smaller state tax credit there's also some financial benefits that belmont residents can presently enjoy which i want to detail as rex at the state level and other form of support for solar storms may or may not actually continue in belmont and the last budget house legislative session there was legislation pending that was actually going to eliminate the ability of municipal like department and municipal districts to take advantage of asterix program because the program was supposed to be phased out for future insulations so in the future i don't know what happens when the house in belmont light has not chosen to join in so we don't get that as a belmont red didn't the last piece here is electric bill savings and that's what net metering comes in if you change the net metering terms you take a big bite out of your electric bill savings and that affects the overall picture of whether or not it makes sense financially for someone to go solar let's look at the numbers there most of these numbers are from belmont light except for phase two the annual bill of a typical residential customer in the in belmont is going to be about thirteen for one thousand three hundred forty five dollars without solar given a typical annual energy use and the current price of electricity right now under phase fun phase one if a resident installs a typically sized solar array of five kilowatts they save they generate eighty five percent of their energy and their poll goes down by about eighty five percent which kind of makes sense under phase two and phase three those savings drop and they drop substantially the way it's been calculated here isn't on the second line you can see that a solar customer will bill increase the way it's been calculated here is it would go up by almost six hundred dollars a year interface to and by almost seven hundred dollars a year under phase three those are not small numbers especially when you think about them over twenty years now i'm going to skip to stride about why phase three is a bad policy because my time is limited and we don't have to worry about facer any more  he fails to is also a bad policy financially it will disincentive by solar and belmont strongly because of the financial terms that which i just mentioned it's also has nearly netting is in the bill of your of your energy use and your energy consumption this is different than what just about everybody else does which and that's your energy use on a monthly basis under phase two they're proposing adding on an hour by hour basis this is highly problematic first of all it's really complicated added if you actually read the terms of it going to a lay person is going to have a very hard time even understanding them and if you don't understand it and if the solar folks r understand it they're not going to be willing to move forward with it and in fact we've already had residence on talking with some surrogate installers who are refusing to work at belmont because of phase two and i don't think that's really what we want to have businesses not want to work with them on residence also to him understand the financial implications of phase two for your family that means you need to know your hourly energy use by day and go over the course of a year not  inconsistent with belmont might own twenty thirteen energy resource policy which said that it was going to include environmental benefits and estimates of among other things net metering and i denounce this has has not been has not done that on their website and it says all of the provisions of this terror subject the limitations in this provision and that goes on to time about the host customer she'll accept the f r facility production limit i'm so sorry anyway ok very sorry so if in fact i'm reading this policy correctly and i think i am there still is the sixty six percent generation limit here if i'm wrong about that yea but if i'm right this is a big problem because anything over sixty six percent of your own power generated belmont light has proposed to take from you without any compensation and then to charge you f freight for all the power you use above that at full retail rates even if it's your own panels your own power panels in your own house that's not reasonable again we have issues with the path next to where the rates paid for the power  out on the grid and those being under compensation see are more detailed comments and again inconsistent with that but with with energy now what have other whatever other public utility commissions decided this is not an issue that this is not an issue that is unique to belmont this fight against net metering has reached the national stage and is playing out in jurisdiction around the country utilities across the country have been coming to their public utility commissions and asking for more money from solar panel owners either in the form of increased fees or in terms of changes to net metering this is not just belmont light and so i thought i would take a quick look at what some public utility commissions have decided on this in the past year or two keeping in mind that these public utility commissions are charged with protecting rate player interest in general and also with making sure that utilities have enough revenue to cover their costs very briefly with the one that's closest to home geographically is ramadhan public service department  in january twenty thirty they issued a did a very comprehensive study and that study concluded that net metered systems do not impose a significant net costs to ratepayers who are not that metering participants in other words they did not find even just last month utah public service commission rejected a fee as low as four dollars sixty five cents a month on solar panel owners because they can grow that the utility failed to prove that this modest fee relatively speaking was justified ok so what are other nasty messages municipal utilities managed to get the net metering policies of all of them in the in massachusetts every single one a lot of effort was that went into that and of those fourteen of them pay retail price for all solar generation an additional twenty one pay retail price for all a generation up to one hundred percent of the homeowners consumption for do pay wholesale for on the other hand offer actual rebates for installation of solar panels and importantly thirty eight and thirty nine calculate generation and consumption they net year metering on a monthly billing period basis not on an hourly two falls the other small number of commune he said in the lower in the medium well category you have virtually no solar the ones that fell into the medium high are high categories have varying amounts of solar penetration probably reflecting a variety of factors some of the very high ones are kind of special cases that we can talk about if we have more time point is if we add up base to our face three practically speaking i think we are going to see a virtual halt of more distributed center in our town is that what this town wants is that what is good for this town in summary abandon phase three develop a comprehensive objective integrated resource plan of their new level energy targets and goals and dates and recommendations for how to get there engage with step sustainable belmont productively to find some alternative that it can be acceptable to everybody what we have at the present is not and finally keep phase one until such a mutually acceptable  say a couple of things first of all i'm very grateful to everybody who's come out of this evening this is a very important discussion and one of the things i'm most proud of is that generally when your decisions about then the issue of national importance most of the experts are usually in this room so we should have a very productive discussion secondly though i do want to also player by something just to go over the summary recommendations that were just presented we have abandoned phase three and we certainly until we have phase two we're going to be keeping phase one so i think of three of those recommendations are things we can work with and i as i hold elected politician at least always like to find a middle way or as roger call those headlines in the paper today was is there a way we can find some way to agree on how to do this and i think we may be able to thank you to engage more often than we have which is stated in the film on some of these issues and tried to work more collaboratively on some of the feedback you provided tonight alex and so that's what it just came to light for me at least in my mind talking about first of all there's hundreds of people who get that amount of money for the poor but only twenty solar panel holders so the volume is very different but the delta in what they need give it to receives is just the co pay for a single as tax so as climate gets worse the poverty the chronic diseases associated with low income will mean that nobody will benefit greatly to a great extent that low income people a so frankly i'm saying is that if you look at it from an annual basis i'm generating while i'm using you what you're saying is that i should pay that now during the winter and i get peak in the summertime is far more valuable to us at the everybody we give you can produce today but the predator but the but the pay you see me to pay you for a summer value at winter when it has less value doesn't make a lot of economic sense i understand your point about grandfather in the promise that some way to think about but it turns of the actual value added there really are very substantial seasonal him of the differences if you get rid of that a month if you go to a yearly you lose all make a decision that but whatever is decided on phase two collectively not metering there's no guarantee that that's forever i mean the they are the entire field the entire landscape of p v generation is changing right before our eyes nationally so to moonlight has a climate action plan based on the climate actually guidelines approved by the town meeting our fossil fuel plants that power a year's worth of belmont electricity produce about thirty thousand tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions causing about one and a half million dollars worth of damage due to climate change depending on what your social cost of carbon but using a number that is commonly used who pays our grandchildren who should pay the fossil fuel industry that's the cross subsidy we should be paying attention to and i absolutely dispute that the regional greenhouse gas initiative captures even a small portion of the damages of carbon dioxide emissions i'd like to see your numbers on that one what to do about it serve energy efficiency nobody's going to dispute that what else most of the world agrees on this one you subsidize wind and solar subsidies are part of the game here we should want to subsidize wind and solar because our energy is damaging our grandchildren's world how much to spend on subsidies the german spend about two hundred sixty eight dollars per family per year and a large majority still support their energy transition in spite of the same claim that are being made by i am glad you know this very obviously there fossil fuel industry in their utilities are going through a transition the politics of transitions are difficult and there that the that this is a real people's movement and the people in germany in spite of spending a lot of money on subsidies still support their transition in arlington i used to live there the r p s rex system we used to spend fifty dollars per family per year that's the nature of rex you subsidize new clean generation and belmont a doubtful one to two dollars up to be perfectly person subsidy per family per year subsidy to our own solar energy don't have a plan to deal with our contribution to that right now and a possible one dollar per family per year subsidy is not what we should be talking about by the way in california there are they have fifty times more solar than we do they're taking two years hundreds of thousands of dollars of studies to decide what if any change they want to make to net metering this is not easy to do and i really think it's unfair in the necessary for our board of selectmen to try to decide this issue right now it's just not necessary and we have bigger issues to talk about about climate change an action plan for our utility thank you thank you i'm jenny meridia and i'm up here to emphasize i'm not here to emphasize the tremendous you're told or do or hello i'm up here to emphasize the tremendous amount of support that solar has in this town i think the light board received a hundred and seventy five comments ninety nine percent of which were against the proposed policies and for looking for a better solution i myself am a renter i do not solar and neither do the vast majority of the people who supported the letter that you were talking about the form letter which i'm going to read but i promise i'll be the only one emissions reduction by twenty fifty i do not support belmont lights changes to its net metering by back agreement this includes phase two which would make solar installations an economic i support policies that fairly charge develops a net metering buyback agreement that is fair and balanced and that supports going development of solar in our town this is a matter of public concern that deserves a full process public before any new you know it's just the acoustics in town auditorium are really bad yes i want to see a reduction in the use of not renewable fuels but i've run some figures that do not look to encourage residential solar as a means to do this so i'd like to ask if anyone has done this analysis i've run some figures that to now look to encourage residential solar as a means to reduce it as a means to reduce the use of not undoable fuels so i'd like to ask if anyone has already done a professional analysis like i'm about to describe or and if you take the electrical energy that could be created by one residential solar installation and multiplied by the number of applicable one and two family houses in massachusetts you get a number of that is only four percent of the total electricity consumed in massachusetts last year hitting that four percent is not likely we could not get half the people in belmont to vote for an override to repair the roads at a cost of something like less than one hundred dollars per residence we  sure you do the percentage of people who will spend having twenty thousand dollars or even ten thousand if we can bring the cost down or even thousands it's probably going to be pretty small in the four percent number will get much smaller i know we like to think the trap in the bucket adds but i'm starting to wonder if there are enough drops to what the bottom of the bucket one wad of residential solar costs five dollars to install someone said that earlier that large scale winter and cost less than two dollars now i know there are many other considerations to any sort of alternative energy but looking at the broad brush figures i'm starting to wonder if there are better ways than presidential solar insolation the use of not renewable fuels i want to emphasize i'm talking about residential solar and not necessarily large scale solar or putting in an apartment buildings and things like that  albuquerque new mexico so i know a little bit about sort of what i think two aspects i'd like to bring to the attention here one is the bigger picture of where the energy is going to come from in this future and if you look at on so i i don't know why we want to make all live so much hotter in belmont i mean everyone else and i mean i would be really very much for adopting the same rules and regulations that certainly shouldn't be supposed changes that on the table right now really critical and i will also want to say that i am pleased to hear that the openness that i hear from the selectmen with regard to this issue and the willingness to reconsider the of the whole issue of what the long term policy is with regard to renewable energy and belmont i do want to express a i have a matter of concern and that is bill it is really privileged to have its own community electric company that doesn't happen a lot of places and i think it's really important that we have leadership from that public electric company that is supportive of the kind of policies that you hear here and i must say we've never met before but i don't hear that support which i think is really critical for us to move forward so i think we need an openness and i would like to ask you sir if in fact you are willing to support the kind of expressions of the kind of policies that you've heard today provided that the june meeting and the the cross subsidy of for each belmont resident for the soul for the nineteen solar panels that we have solar arrays that we have in town is two dollars and twelve cents which comes out to eighteen cents per month or two dollars or twelve a year two dollars and cents a year or eighteen cents a month so i asked in my companies that i sent and why why why are we doing this way we spending our time on this there are a lot more important things than something and the answer that i got was that we need to get ahead of the curve so i multiply the number of  raise in belmont by ten and i said well what happens if we have one hundred ninety rays of the same general kilowatt hours and the subsidy then comes to a dollar seventy six month so even if even in the most brightest scenario the problem is minuscule compared to other costs to the town and i just don't get it in that eighteen cents is a subsidy calculation for the energy that i produce on my roof that goes into my house and i use in my house that's equivalent to saying that if i turn off my lights because i want to save energy i'm being subsidized by my neighbors and that doesn't make any sense phase three is objectionable because it forces people who generate their own electricity and use it in their own houses to not send it out into the grid to sell that electricity at the wholesale price and then to be charged for it at the retail price set top repayment off that they're ok but that aspect of it shouldn't just be taken off the table for now that aspect of it should be taken off the table forever for energy generated and used within the home and they charge less than retail price for the service but none of those metering by the hour all of those me to read by the month and  the power he gets from the grid that is mostly generation and transmission if we use the average big years from the monthly bill it comes to about twelve cents a kilowatt hour the smart meters are capable of doing the weighted integration of the power of the liberty back into the grid by solar panel people we might get a more accurate figure so that it might be lower and might be might be instead of pope cents ten cents might be thirteen cents i don't know somebody could do the calculation and they've got the energy and the basic numbers there is some things that might you be used to adjust just twelve cents or whatever if you don't want to wants to give a premium for really green energy like solar panels i think that's a matter for the town meeting up and decide whether we want to do that if the quality of the power generated by solar panels is not as good as what we can get from the grid and harmonic content the fact that it's somewhat temperamental opts going on you know it's no more than your hot water heater you have an electric hot water heater and on that subject people have solar panels and have no battery can heat or their hot water with their excess energy  to find a rate that would actually balance the needs of those wanting to do solar and wanting to do things for the environment and also to keep the whole for the life plan and make sure they received all the overhead that they  needed in the end the rate that we came up with basically charged customers the overhead they would have been charging the retail rate for everything they generate and that comes out as what we call a distribution fee that's a flat rate each month and for that flat rate what the solar owner gets is the ability to bank over the month at the end of the month if they haven't used all their electricity they sell it at the day ahead rate which is a spot market rate the was a real time a locational price so if they don't generate enough to meet their needs then they purchase at the retail rate and one additional comment i want to say i did see a slide up there about the capacity hour and i think this is important i've had an array i have five tracked it's in its production on the hour  i know what it's doing i've pushed for kilowatts for four years during the capacity peak theeye so it does lower that for capacity market obligation so you do have to pay less and those costs and we have a total of about think it's for megawatts of solar one point seven for utility one point three or four for residential and up and some commercial as well ok thank you think about on for less than the the solar panels are approximately the same but the decrease solar counts as a novel technology and some version of moore's law should apply so what we're actually doing here is where investing in the future and i think somebody who runs a utility should have the long view and the long view here is that by paying for so long now be a net metering you drive the volume of the panels the volume goes up the price comes down to just over the past per month i kind of wonder how we even got to be here it's really when you look at the amount of time that we're putting into it it's it seems like the delta is so tiny i don't understand why it just doesn't get taken off the state with what we've they all given two or three megawatt hours per year extra to the the system to soak up those cars you just need a very tiny number of electric cars like ten so you have if they drive thirty thousand so there is another way of looking at looking at the business and supporting you know the the infrastructure and that is to drive demand that's the green way of doing that is by moving people from using carbohydrates and there's a fuel to doing it electric i don't get it well my name's steve sloan i live on golden street and i do want to echo many of those cell sentiments i feel like the board i feel it's important to honor the work that any board does for the town i think that's part of what makes our governance  massachusetts so special so i do want to thank everyone for their effort however i feel like in this particular case they've come up with the wrong answer to the wrong question or possibly the right policy for another town i'm not sure which town that is i think  rather than as people said focus on this question will marginal cross subsidy i think it would be preferable to ask the question of what are the values of this community and what do we want to promote and how can we do that in every way and for light board what that means is how can we encourage a sustainable future for ourselves and our children and i would request that the light board give the advisory board a request to come up with a solution that further promotes not marginalizes solar generation in this town down but it's are filled with subsidies we subsidize schools when we don't have children because we value our children we value our education some of us pay for elder services before we're elderly because we value that that's part of what makes this a great governance structure is that we decide what values we have and we put money where we think there is impact so rather than focusing on this marginal cross subsidy which may or may not exist in some quantity i really think we need to step back turn the ship around and start going in the right direction go towards burlington's action not towards i don't even know what counterpoint to that we were headed towards before phase three was taken off the table you know when i was in college member the professor of science saying there's more oil under north america in all of the arabian peninsula but we're never going to use it because it's just too expensive to get well look where we are today and what they're extracting now and to echo the gentleman who was before me we can't take the short view on solar we can't say well it's not the best horse right now let's get rid of it we are so far from a solution with respect to climate change and solutions that we need to keep all the forces in this game i have a final panel here was that germany took a lot of nuclear plants off line after the catastrophe in japan the increase in coral was related in large part due to the fact that those nukes were taken offline not because we're people putting solar rooftop the germans planned to take the nukes offline that's true but it has not yet occurred entirely and in fact actually they're continuing to buy nuclear power from the czech republic and from france ok yeah i'm  solar panels but those who do not install solar panels for whatever reason economic or just whatever do are not made to unduly subsidize solar panel generation of would be power thank you thank you b transmission costs in your capacity charges no will power pool in april has up provided all the communities whether they participate in surveys or not at the i s o results of analysis of solar throughout new england and its contribution on peak and forecast of the benefits to roll lowering total capacity requirements so i have couple pages from there able report so i can leave with you there  and in fact the discussion over the last few months has certainly got me thinking much more about this as a good thing someone however i think that i have to agree with the sentiment that we seem to be talking about fairly small person costs generate their own power i think the biggest problem right now is the cost of the installation people stay away from this because the number of years it takes to get your money back is ten to twenty years right i have a house i still have a house here in belmont which has a solar domestic hot water system since one thousand nine hundred three i'm not replacing my third tank but it has performed very well over the years the roof is dead south i want to put  need the incentive to do it and i want to give my tenants half of the savings to do a shared savings program that i want for also designed associates out of harvard mass we designed and commissioned the system at the belmont hill sports facility recently and with the i o c roofing took more time to negotiate with the municipal like department on the net metering compensation they did to install the whole system what we did in harvard where our offices was established the first community shared solar program in the state with his community shared solar what it is is where residents who are renters residents who have slate roof facing north people who want to participate in solar but don't have the accessibility of rooftop so what they've done is in an aggregation built a two hundred ninety four kilowatt system that consists of forty one residences and seven commercial businesses and by doing something on your land by the incinerator the old town dump which is useless land at this point is at twenty one he has at his site you could do up to a megawatts of power on five acres that would provide enough for probably three or four hundred homeowners or renter's the ability to get virtually net metered power to their homes credited on their bills so i would hope that you would expand the program to virtual net metering which is what we can do a national grid and in and start  western mass electric company the ious we have a new program called the master the solar policy council and if you'd like to join it mark zandi you take your name here and you can read about what's going on nationally i think bellman has the opportunity to be a shining light in the muni sector and i hope that you make the right decisions tonight thank you i man man i sell out of real estate and sell mine and i always talk about mass saves and how we can save on energy costs and reduce the carbon footprint with my clients there has been a lot of about twenty five percent of people ask me about solar and i have learned that we aren't getting leases anymore from these companies because of the way they were set up but i went belmont savings bank i talked to bob mahoney who's the president there and he said that he could do home equity lines people could buy the solar outright then we would get the credit for the record here in belmont which would be important and that actually the cost savings could be quite a bit more because i don't know if you realize how much these leasing companies take from you so that's one point the the other point is there's a group called mothers out find that we've just been introduced to mothers outfront dot com check it out you can elect to have all of your electric be renewable energy source and more of us that used to do it would force more of the power that comes into belmont to be renewable energy it costs a little bit more but it's worth it the i think is the subsidy now the people that have that bought solar specifically for the subsidy should probably be able to maintain that because they cannot have but i do know personally that there are people interested in solar that aren't in it as much for the subsidy as for the cultural change in reducing the carbon footprint but what scares me ashley is that you said in germany they have all these solar powered roofs but that the carbon footprint has grown as opposed to be reduced now here's the thing if it's not going to reduce the carbon footprint the way that we all hope and believe it is and we've all read about it and we all believe it right all of us do but we better make sure it does because all of this is going to be for nothing if we don't know that all of this that's being done is really going to do what we want to do which is preserve this planet for our kids so i'm hoping that we can get a lot more research on that to figure this out before we get too ahead of ourselves thanks for having us for thanks man can i ask you a question since you are in the real estate business i have heard that adding solar do your house adds about twenty five thousand dollars to its resale value do you have any sense of whether that's correct and i have people they will pay more for a house that already has solar on it and i have people they ask me if they should put solar on before they sell because there's no progressive folks that are coming to this part of new england and they they want to reduce their carbon footprint really regardless of other things and they're willing to pay more in order to do it so that should board of selectmen is a is having a public form and one of the options that we're having engineers look at is whether in fact works as a large scale solar facility  and we're looking at many options that's just want to and we'll be able to compare options give the pros and cons and hopefully down the line be able to make a cogent decision right thank you that they're all king precinct one i do have a solar panel ran my roof we've had it for two years and to answer the question that one of you raised leasing is permitted in in belmont and leasing is a very excellent program for certain persons one of the bullets that was up there earlier was that only the wealthy people can afford solar panels but leasing actually makes the option available to anyone because you can actually get a zero down lease for no money up front have everything installed yes the solar company gets all the racks in the tax breaks but then you pay a monthly lease amount that is less than what you paid for your electric before it's figured out that way so it actually it turns out that most solar panels are put on by middle class folks not by the rich so that's those are two questions the third thing is yesterday the city of boston enhanced their website they put a new tool on their website and the tool shows everyone in the city of boston how the potential for solar on their individual house they can look at all the houses in town  shows where all the solar installations are what the sizes what the production is what the savings is it's a tool to promote solar in the city of boston and i think town apartment should look at something like that i think it's a wonderful thing thank you all for me t low that closer thank you i like to speak as one of the about one hundred households in belmont who take advantage of the green choice program i did a quick calculation the other day and it's nice i can tell those that i pay for a hotel what it's about the same as a forty five dollars tax per ton of c o two which is the number being bandied around as you'll hear about this so i look at what we're doing one hundred families and  i was we're doing voluntary taxation so to speak now you think i'd like to bring out and i'd like this panel and this meeting and the public to know that i looked at it in the course of my research in this other thing that came out of that research was very interesting set of numbers most of the websites told you what their portfolio was and you can see from that what percentage of their electric output came from non greenhouse gas was and it turns out that polio was one hundred percent wrong greenhouse gas strolling was about sixty five seventy five percent concerned about in the green trees program is the multiple you're talking about we could do better if we expanded it to include by rex from other states that are far more coal intensive the new england you were in the process of actively looking at it so people are looking at a green choice options we can give advisory board to aggressively market green choice i mean i wonder how many folks in our community know about it and you know when i'm signing up i'm not and i haven't signed up and i'm going to because frankly i didn't really know about until you just  little bit with what this gentleman was just saying which is looking at where the overall generation from belmont is coming from and when you look at the dome of light numbers forty five percent of the electricity generated belmont right now is coming from natural gas and and if you read the statements about what the dependence on natural gas has meant in belmont there's just been a rate increase which i believe was largely tributed to the price volatility of natural gas excuse me so when you when you multiply these numbers out what you see is that the right it increased due to dependence on natural gas has worked out to about one hundred eighty five dollars a year per resident just in this latest rate increase and we know that natural gas prices are likely and electricity prices spot prices are likely to peak again and this winter to make up for the polar vortex so we can expect war home on the lines and so my question would be what is you know we have talking a lot about subsidies at a dollar per person and what we're really looking at what i would suggest one of the things that needs to be looked at  is rate increases that are on the order of one hundred eighty five dollars a year and maybe as mine here has as much more than that coming down the line so i would ask to look at what we're what you would be doing to diversify when you have a dependence on one  other sources and actually kind of timely because lives are just announce the latest numbers today at about ten o'clock today so if you look here so perhaps the gentleman hadn't seen the latest numbers  v is the least effective way so that's clear so that the the overall comment though is when when we're talking about a dollar a year or we're talking about two hundred dollars a year it seems like the focus ought to be on the two hundred dollars here and what the plans would be to diversify excuse me what did you say your name was my name is mark seen dean i'm the chair of sustainable lexington thank you thank you mark germany's solar production comes from residential installations it's really all large scale installations this goes back to my point earlier that i think we need to take a really good look at his residential solar the way to achieve our goals thank you thank you the small hydro there are some purchases i think at belmont makes from the class one sources generation sources are we purchasing belmont the wrecks  jim is reminding me of is the the the this is the supplier the when company in this case actually put into the our contract with them that all the price information and all that information is is confidential because they don't want anybody else knowing what it is i mean every wish that wasn't the case but that was the only condition that they would sell it to us on so they're just reminding me that that is part of our contract with them that both price information and the wreckage information is held confidential by terms of the purchase renewable energy and rex just like the ious do i mean in some way we don't have to follow in r p s but we do have to follow our conscience and i think our state has a conscience and that's part of the whole system and i think we have to find our conscience as well which in having this unclear sort of secret contract around the racks is not a good way to follow our conscience off like a public tariff it's a private contract right it's a competitive market and they insist to be confidential if we didn't agree to that we wouldn't be buying it we think what would you know i would you can't conversation tonight and i hope that everybody has a good feel now of how sincere and how well how deep some of these feelings run in terms of moving belmont in a more stable direction i guess my question is really you know what are the next steps and how can you know what was our time frame we talking about today obama definitely love to get engaged we've had conversations with national experts they're happy to come here from out of state to offer their viewpoints and i've been very amazing even just the number of people in surrounding communities that have a good deal expertise on this already and you ah well where obviously i think mark and others have said you know we're willing to engage with cystitis sustainable boma to discuss particularly the phase two men metering policy and what we can do if if there are any tweaks to it that make sense and that a reasonable for everyone i think will thoughtfully about this process i would also like to say that i've been in the energy and solar industry for about fifteen years and my specialty is actually negotiating and providing  energy credit contracts and i've never heard of any of those being confidential they've all been part of the public record in my experience not be glad to point to any resources and as a r belmont i feel that any contracts that the town or the light board engages in on behalf of the residents and its customers should be in the public domain th this will be the last comma but it's yours thank you i'm jennifer page town meeting member from precinct three and i rise in part to say that  formerly the department has in fact accumulated a very strong record of supporting environmental activity here in belmont and i think it's important to recognize that that the  and of course the light department was the first town department to acquire a car that was very fuel efficient so those are just three examples of things that the like department has done in the past and i am hopeful based on what i've heard tonight that we will ultimately find our way to a resolution of this problem that has been so painful for so many people but i think that tonight's openness and exchanges have sat us on a good and i i just want to say that i thank everybody regardless of one's point of view on this would have to agree and numbers clearly showing that belmont is the term to make better environmental stresses going forward and we're determined to increase our renewable capacity we're determined to increase our green quotient of energy we're absolutely determined to do this how we get there and you know sustainable bamma but the entire community will engage with us and we thank you for coming out tonight and people ask why you know it's such a small dollar amount why are we doing this look around the room there's huge interest in this it's important for the future people pointed out that even though they may not you know be really the economic model right now that we really have to look beyond that i think everybody in this room is trying to look beyond and calling the people up here so thank you very much please us stay on it with us if anybody lately sammy yeah i've been the most silent of the three but i do want to say you know thank you to the advisory board and thank you to the residents here who spoke up i found this to be very helpful very productive and it will no doubt the comments we heard today i think will weigh into our decision making process thank you thank you on a very i thank you very much