Minutes of the January 11, 2018 Meeting of The Medfield Energy Committee

Attendees:

Lee Alinsky

Fred Davis

Jerry McCarty

Osler L. Peterson

Marie Nolan

Paul Fechtelkotter

Cynthia Greene

Mike Sullivan

Sophie Gustafson (Student, Medfield HS)

Meeting minutes taken by Paul Fechtelkotter

General

• Adjusted and corrected minutes of the 2 November meeting. Committee approved as amended. Lee will submit to the town.
• Marie is still trying to reach Andrew to get permissions to allow the broader committee to edit Google drive documents.

Green Communities Grant status – Jerry

• The state gave us tentative approval for items relative to retro–commissioning and software upgrade at Blake Middle School. The state turned down our request for funding projects at the high school. Jerry is closing issues with Rise Engineering (in conjunction with Trane) to finalize a proposal with a specific dollar value for the Blake project to get the funding approved and released. If approved this project would consume ~$102K of the $146K grant available.
• Funding for retro-commissioning at the high school will likely come from the town budget.
• There was a 6 month delay in the DOER approval of the retro commission request.
• State approved funding request for exterior lighting at both Blake and Memorial. Gerry is looking at lighting projects for additional schools to help consume the remaining funding available from the original grant. Approval should be quick for these projects (~3 weeks).
• We cannot apply for grants for fiscal 2018 until we have spent this year’s grant funds.
• The committee agreed to work to start submitting fiscal 2019 projects for review and “pre-approval” to the degree possible.

DPW Solar– Gerry

• We are rebidding the project to consume the ~$267K in remaining funding (~$220K available for construction costs and balance in soft costs). Gerry reached out to Solar Design to define the scope of services necessary to create a phased design to fit within the ~$220K construction budget in a base bid with incrementally phased add-ons.

• The Permanent Building Committee will need to review design documents once they become available.
• There is the potential of securing additional funds through a warrant at the town meeting if that becomes necessary.
• Pete said we collected ~$68K through SREC credit and generated ~40% energy savings at the waste water treatment plant, making the project cash positive for the year. The savings helped reduce the planned increase in town water/sewer rates from the anticipated 4% to an actual 2%. We need to highlight these successes in the committee report for town meeting.

Street Lighting

• Mike expressed a desire to understand exactly what is in the Eversource contract and be very clear on what the town is buying and what its responsibilities will be once the town has assumed ownership of the lighting assets.
• Mike would also like to get a better understanding of the exact cost savings and associated risks. The committee agreed on the need to get a final report from our consultant and then arrange to have him present the findings to the committee.

Ne Zero Communities – Fred

• Fred presented slides from an MAPC Webinar held in late 2017.
• Multiple towns in MA have already committed to significant carbon and energy reductions.
• Fred is planning to attend MMA and will report on what happened to the committee.