23 ATTACHMENT 2 - Laserfiche WebLink

impacts for more reliable power, the cities role with its facilities and equipment, the types of cars and trucks we use, and local control of our energy resources. How we plan our city has a big impact on the energy of the city. Transportation is a big user of energy. Scott Baker, Assistant Director of Public Works, informed the committee that he has been working on the energy element for 6 years. The city wanted to try and to get a plan together in case of an energy crisis in the future, therefore, council created the Energy Advisory Group. Enron had proposed a peaker station to be built in Pleasanton and the council was concerned that the city did not have any sort of land use rules. The peaker plant was not approved but it would be nice to have some set rules. The city does have the generator-citing ordinance. The goal of the group is to create the energy plan. It is currently on the city website for viewing. It starts out with guiding principles to improve local controls and power supplies. A generic view as to how the energy future should look. In the early 90's the state deregulated. The rules of energy dramatically changed. PG&E provides most of the power in Pleasanton and is regulated by the PUC. The city at this time is trying to move forward. In Community Choice Aggregation there are 3 components, generation, transmission and distribution. In community choice, the cities and counties can become the retailers of electrons. One of the benefits provides for better local control of energy. Currently the ABl 17 states that we can purchase electrons but it does not tell us how to do it. If the city were to purchase electrons, it would no longer depend on fuel related costs. Mr. Baker hopes that the energy element will be completed by July. He is asking for suggestions and comments from the EVC to take to council and asked for input. Matt Sullivan, Council member, asked for the committee's feedback. Mr. Sullivan has been on the Energy Advisory Group since 2001 and feels the city needs to have a strategy. There have been laws that have passed that give the city a lot of flexibility and how much participation do we want to take advantage of. If the city was to collect the money for energy than we could set up our own programs, things that would lower the citizen's energy bill. At this time, we could become an aggregator on our own, or we could join with other local cities in a JPA. There are risks associated with this, when the price goes up you would have to pass that increase to the ratepayers. One strategy is to join the JPA and have a broader portfolio that gives us more power to buy, plus we could share the risks. We would still have local control, which is more than we have right now with PG8,E. Mr. Sullivan said that we would be buying power, and not owning it. We should not own all of our sources. Arne Olson read the energy element and there are a lot of great ideas, but one thing that struck him is that he wouldn't want the city to issue bonds for a facility that provides natural gas. To develop capital facilities in the renewable area would make sense. Getting a wider participation, this is a business of scale, it's highly capital intensive and you need a lot of ratepayers in time to repay that cost. The JPA would make more sense than trying to go it alone. Mr. Olson asked if we knew how much of our current power is hydro electric.