Town Council Work Session

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Leesburg Town Council 2h 8m 6 speakers 8 agenda items transcribed 1 day ago official recording ↗

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What is the Energy Efficiency Conservation Strategy and why is federal funding tied to it?

Kelly Burk 3:55

Tonight's um Town hall town council work session of March eleventh. two thousand twenty four. Our first item for discussion tonight is the energy efficiency conservation strategy. Hello.

Dan (No last name provided) 4:13

And I am the sustainability for manager for the town. Haven't seen you all since October, so just want you to forget who I was. Um today we're gonna be talking about our energy efficiency conservation strategy. I'm really quickly gonna go over kind of why we're here and why we're talking about this now, uh, what the goals are as drafted by the sustainability committee. and then really what they actually mean, uh and then we'll go forward with recommendations and have time for questions. Um so the energy efficiency conservation strategy establishes goals and targets to reduce energy use in town operations. It directly aligns with uh chapter five of the town plan. Um and I do wanna note that setting these goals doesn't mean that we're gonna be in any trouble if we don't hit them.

Dan (No last name provided) 4:55

So that's what we mean by non binding. Um and the reason we're talking about the energy efficiency conservation strategy and associated goals now is it's because it is a requirement to receive federal grant funding. Uh, the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 established what they're referring to as the Energy Efficiency Conservation Block Grant Fund, which is formula funding that allocates $76,000 for the town of Leesburg to use for energy efficiency and alternative fuel initiatives. But again, in order to receive that funding, we have to have goals established. The benefit is that while we're establishing these goals specifically for this Um, funding, having goals tends to be a requirement for most grant applications anyway, so it puts us in a good spot.

Dan (No last name provided) 5:40

Um, so here are the draft goals, and I'm gonna highlight some key phrases and then we'll get a little bit deeper into what they mean. So we established uh we identified the goals and we put them in two different categories. You may recall from our presentation in October that wastewater and water treatment operations or our utilities team, they use the biggest chunk of energy, and they are the hardest to get energy reduction initiatives done for. So we wanted to separate those. that amount of energy from the rest of town operations so that we wouldn't lose the good stories and the good benefits from all the other work that we're doing, getting them swallowed up in that big number. Um so for town operations our goal is a fifty percent reduction in purchased energy.

Dan (No last name provided) 6:21

And I wanna stop and highlight purchased energy refers to anything that we're getting from the utility. So if we were to generate our own renewable energy, it would count towards that reduction. Um so a fifty percent reduction in purchased energy from government operations From the business as usual projections. And I think this is where we might lose some people. Um, so the business as usual projection uh is making the assumption. that we did absolutely nothing to be more energy efficient, but we still have more people to serve and more things to do in that nature. And we got through that to that through a standard calculation. And we'll talk a little bit about that when we get to that particular slide.

Dan (No last name provided) 6:55

So it's a fifty percent reduction in purchased energy for government operations from a business as usual projection by twenty fifty. Our second goal for town government operations. Um is a forty forty percent alternative fuel vehicle adoption for our non emergency response vehicles. And we define I'm gonna read this one so I don't mess it up, emergency response vehicles as those needed to function for a continuous twenty-four hour period in prevention or response to emergency situations. So this is gonna talk about our police vehicles, our on-call maintenance vehicles, things we use uh in emergency operations. Um then our wastewater and water treatment operations goals include a ten percent reduction in purchased energy, again going back to purchased energy um for our utilities operations from that business as usual projection by twenty fifty.