May 6, 2026 — Environmental Advisory Board Regular Meeting

Transcript

Captions from City of Boulder YouTube recording.

[0:05] Environmental Advisory Board: Good. Bring our goods? Alright, I call the meeting to order. [0:11] Environmental Advisory Board: And pass it over to Adam. All right, and we'll share our meeting protocols. One second, I have to do a little bit of… [0:17] Environmental Advisory Board: Screens switching around, because the last couple of times we've had some… [0:22] Environmental Advisory Board: issues with Zoom sharing the right screen. [0:29] Environmental Advisory Board: Agreed. [0:41] Environmental Advisory Board: And now freezing on me. Here we go. [0:45] Environmental Advisory Board: Carolyn, can you see my screen yet? [0:48] Carolyn Elam: Nope. [0:51] Carolyn Elam: Yes, it's starting now. [0:54] Environmental Advisory Board: Alright, perfect. Thank you. [0:56] Environmental Advisory Board: Alright, welcome everyone to the May Environmental Advisory Board Meeting. Excuse me. [1:03] Environmental Advisory Board: Let's take a minute to review our meeting protocols. [1:06] Environmental Advisory Board: The City has engaged with community members to co-create a vision for productive, meaningful, and inclusive civic conversations. This vision supports physical and emotional safety for community members, staff, and board members, as well as democracy for people of all ages, identities, lived experiences, and political perspectives. [1:28] Environmental Advisory Board: For more information about this vision and the community engagement process, please visit the website seen on your screen and the Boulder Revised Code Section 16B. [1:40] Environmental Advisory Board: The city will enforce the rules of decorum found in the Boulder Revised Code, Section 16B, including participants are required to sign up to speak using the name they are commonly known by, and individuals must display their whole name before being allowed to speak online. [1:55] Environmental Advisory Board: Currently, only audio testimony is permitted online. [2:00] Environmental Advisory Board: No attendee shall disrupt, disturb, or otherwise impede the orderly conduct. [2:05] Environmental Advisory Board: of any board meeting in a manner that obstructs business of the meeting. This also includes failing to obey any lawful order of the presiding officer to leave the physical or virtual meeting room or refrain from addressing the board. [2:20] Environmental Advisory Board: Slides catch up for just a second. There we go. Only one person at a time may speak during open comment unless an accommodation, like an interpreter, is required. All remarks and testimony shall be limited to matters related to city business. No participant shall make threats or use other forms of intimidation against any person. [2:39] Environmental Advisory Board: Obscenity, other episodes based on race, gender, or religion, and other speech and behavior that disrupts or otherwise impedes the meaning will not be tolerated. [2:49] Environmental Advisory Board: Because we do not have registration for open and public comment tonight, you can indicate you would like to participate by using the raise hand function. [2:56] Environmental Advisory Board: The raise hand button is in the participant box, which can be found in the menu by hovering over the top or the bottom of your screen, and then clicking on the participant icon. [3:06] Environmental Advisory Board: When the box opens, you will see the raise hand button at the bottom. By clicking that button, you can indicate you would like to participate in open or public comment. [3:13] Environmental Advisory Board: If you've joined us by phone, you can press star 9 to raise your hand. [3:22] Environmental Advisory Board: Oops. [3:23] Environmental Advisory Board: M… Approve the minutes, call to… motion to approve the minutes from April. [3:30] Environmental Advisory Board: Second. [3:32] Environmental Advisory Board: And then, do we have any guests? [3:36] Environmental Advisory Board: No, I have not. [3:42] Environmental Advisory Board: Ron, do you want to kick us off?

[3:49] Environmental Advisory Board: Sweet. [3:50] Carolyn Elam: Sarah, are you ready to move on to the presentation? [3:53] Environmental Advisory Board: Yes. [3:54] Carolyn Elam: Okay, just want to make sure. [3:56] Environmental Advisory Board: Thank you. [3:57] Carolyn Elam: Good evening, everybody. Apologies for not being there with you in person. I'm getting over a bug and decided not to share if I have a coughing fit, but also apologies, I may cough during the presentation, so please bear with me. For those I haven't met, I'm Carolyn Elam. I'm a Senior Manager in the Climate Initiatives Department for the City. [4:16] Carolyn Elam: I manage our energy systems work, as well as I'm the partnership manager for our partnership with Xcel Energy. So, happy to talk to you this evening about our Council Priority Project for this year, which is on power reliability and resilience. [4:34] Carolyn Elam: So I'm just gonna pull up my slides here, if you give me a second. [4:48] Carolyn Elam: And just verifying you can see the slide okay? Perfect, great. [4:52] Environmental Advisory Board: Yes. [4:53] Carolyn Elam: Thanks. So, I think everybody pretty well understands why we're here, and why Council took this important issue up. Obviously, our lived experiences over the last couple of years have really changed. [5:07] Carolyn Elam: With declining power reliability, proactive shutoff by our utility, and the impacts it has, and they're widespread. We've certainly, seen very significant disruption in city services, including, you know, [5:24] Carolyn Elam: Outages impacting our water treatment and our wastewater treatment plants, street lights, traffic signals, our city facilities. [5:33] Carolyn Elam: It's been tremendously disruptive to the businesses that have been impacted by the outages. We've had large outages impacting significant portions of the community, and then, of course, on our residents who have experienced the trauma of long outages, loss of food, loss of access to [5:51] Carolyn Elam: important medical equipment, right? So Council took this issue up at their retreat, noting that our work didn't start in January with Council adopting this. We've been, [6:01] Carolyn Elam: working on this issue for some time, in our work at the city and our work with Excel, and I'll talk a little bit more about that. [6:10] Carolyn Elam: So, just a quick, background on… [6:14] Carolyn Elam: where the concerns are, what they're stemming from, our work we're planning for this year, for 2026, as part of the Council priority. Talk a little bit about our community engagement approach that's part of that council process, share with you some progress so far, and then talk about the next steps. [6:33] Carolyn Elam: So I thought it's helpful. [6:35] Carolyn Elam: To really understand a little bit more about the electric system serving Boulder. It's a very complex spider web of different lines. The image on the right that you're seeing are, each color represents an individual power line starting out from one of our six substations. [6:53] Carolyn Elam: serving within the community, and then a subset of those you'll see, passed from inside the city to outside, or vice versa, from outside the city inside. And when we talk about some of the wildfire safety concerns in particular, those lines that serve both inside and outside of the city are really important, and, you know, I'll highlight them here with some of the [7:13] Carolyn Elam: Circles on the screen, just to draw a little bit more attention. [7:17] Carolyn Elam: There's over 30 individual lines that serve within the city, and as you can see where the colors come close together, you could have, individual, you know, blocks or neighbors served, from completely different power lines and having a very different lived experience in terms of power reliability, and this [7:34] Carolyn Elam: Leads to a lot of the confusion and some of the challenges the community has had, in understanding the outages and how they've been impacting them and why. [7:47] Carolyn Elam: There are multiple sources of declining reliability that we're seeing, especially over the last two years. They're certainly the most impactful, which is [7:55] Carolyn Elam: Excel's use of public safety power shutoffs or wildfire safety settings that I'll talk about in more detail. We've also seen more damage to lines during extreme weather, from extreme winds. [8:07] Carolyn Elam: We have aging equipment, so we have end-of-life failures that are occurring throughout the community, just based on… on when we built out the community. We also, have people that have experienced outages due to, like, cars running into power lines or construction. [8:24] Carolyn Elam: As well as work Excel's doing to upgrade the system, causing, known outages or planned construction. [8:30] Carolyn Elam: So, for example, the map on the right is just showing you, frequency of outages, so the more red you see in terms of those dots, the more frequent [8:41] Carolyn Elam: outages that area of town has experienced, and the one I've circled has actually had outages for all five of the reasons that I have, highlighted here. So, there's no single silver bullet. People are experiencing outages for different reasons, which is

[8:59] Carolyn Elam: Contributing to some of the challenges we face as we try and remedy it. [9:04] Carolyn Elam: A lot of folks ask us about [9:06] Carolyn Elam: you know, why now? Why is Excel shutting off power? What's changed? It's always been windy in Boulder. People who follow wind data will say, actually, wind speeds are declining. But… [9:19] Carolyn Elam: as you are our Environmental Advisory Board, you certainly understand that our climate has changed dramatically. Our windiest days are historically during winter, and historically, we used to have more moisture on the ground, so when a power pole came down, which they most certainly did. [9:36] Carolyn Elam: There is far less likely, [9:40] Carolyn Elam: opportunity for there to be ignition. The image on the right was taken in December. That's really what we're seeing in many of our winters and during some of our windiest months. [9:50] Carolyn Elam: And we've learned what can happen when a power line comes down in high-speed winds during drought conditions. And here are just some examples of some of the most impactful fires we've seen in the last decade. [10:02] Carolyn Elam: Across the country, from the campfire that, destroyed multiple communities in California, including Paradise, to, the 2024 Panhandle Fire, which was the most destructive in Texas history, to Lahaina. [10:19] Carolyn Elam: Which destroyed, you know, over 2,000 buildings, most of the downtown area, took over 100 lives, and most recently, the Eaton Fire, which was also caused by a power equipment and high winds. [10:34] Carolyn Elam: So, how's Excel approaching this wildfire risk and the learnings from some of those recent fires? As we all know, they're shutting off power proactively. [10:43] Carolyn Elam: I've listed the criteria here so we can understand when it's happening. It's during the top 1% of wind speeds, when there's also very low humidity and a large amount of fuel on the ground. [10:54] Carolyn Elam: So these are the 99th percentile events, but we are seeing more of these, historical wind events, not just speed, but some of the, sheer forces that we're seeing from, just the directional forces with the wind. [11:11] Carolyn Elam: They're also using enhanced power safety settings. They are not alone. All of our utilities are actually using these enhanced power safety settings, so on, red flag warning days, the system is set so that it doesn't just keep trying to restore power. It immediately shuts off until it can be expected. [11:29] Carolyn Elam: But in parallel, they're trying to fix the system, so these become… these tools become less necessary. [11:35] Carolyn Elam: hardening infrastructure, using better wildfire standards that didn't exist, 50, 70 years ago when these systems were originally constructed in our area. So this is stronger poles. [11:48] Carolyn Elam: more space between wires, better equipment that doesn't spark, they're undergrounding. They're working to reduce the number of outages by breaking the system up into more pieces. We saw some of the benefits of this in March, so if you recall the March 14th public safety power shutoff. [12:07] Carolyn Elam: There were actually far fewer, parts of town that were actually impacted, and this is because some of the work that Excel has been doing. They're also improving their situational awareness. [12:17] Carolyn Elam: I think it's helpful to understand, kind of, how this affects Boulder, and, like, what the intersection is around wildfire safety, wildfire risk, and the experience we're having as a community. So, I'm just going to walk through an example here in North Boulder. [12:32] Carolyn Elam: So the map here is showing, is the state's wildfire risk map, so obviously the darker the red, the higher the wildfire risk. You can see inside the urban boundary of North Boulder here that it's relatively low risk. [12:45] Carolyn Elam: Again, because we're in the urban core, so there's less combustible materials, there's fire response, there's urban irrigation. But… [12:54] Carolyn Elam: as I mentioned before, we have power lines that serve both inside and outside of the town, and so this area of town has been shut off in every one of the public safety power shutoff events, and I'll talk about why here in a second. So. [13:08] Carolyn Elam: 2024, the two in December, and the March event. [13:13] Carolyn Elam: And it's because of this power line, [13:16] Carolyn Elam: It starts out in central Boulder, in the downtown area, runs up 28th Street, and then along the North Foothills Highway, along Highway 36, up towards Lyons. You'll recognize this line if you ever drive that highway. You'll see it's… it sits right there along the Wildlands. [13:35] Carolyn Elam: you know, high… high vegetation along that is an older line, and that's a very high wind zone. So this is probably one of the highest risk lines we have in our area, which is where the concern stems from. [13:49] Carolyn Elam: And this is what it looks like from that map. The line actually forks off, part of it feeds North Boulder. [13:56] Carolyn Elam: Part of it runs up Highway 36 towards Never Road and feeds areas north of town, and then another part actually heads up, Lee Hill Drive and feeds the foothills. And so it's actually the Lee Hill Drive area. [14:10] Carolyn Elam: and the area north of town, that's the wildfire risk, but because it's all connected to the line that serves North Boulder, this is why North Boulder has been shut off. The solution for this is Excel's going to be undergrounding, that line roughly 5.5 miles, [14:25] Carolyn Elam: And that project should start this year, so that North Boulder would not have to be subjected to the public safety power shots anymore, and then they're hardening in the Foothill area. [14:39] Carolyn Elam: As I mentioned, we're seeing more weather-related damage. There's a few reasons for this. In part,

[14:48] Carolyn Elam: The way the wind patterns are… have been hitting our area, we're getting more, [14:53] Carolyn Elam: tornado-like forces, to the wind direction, so creating more shear that's causing more damage. We're having a lot more vegetation fail due to the extended droughts and disease, as well as the fact that we have a lot of mature and aging out vegetation in our area. [15:09] Carolyn Elam: and outages are lasting longer because of this, because there's, not just the proactive shutoff, but also, images like the one, in the lower corner here, which was taken during the December event. [15:22] Carolyn Elam: Both of these images were from December. [15:27] Carolyn Elam: We're also seeing failures on Blue Sky Days, which exacerbates the problem for the community. [15:32] Carolyn Elam: they're… they understand why power's getting shot, but they're attributing some of these other failures to the same thing, which is not true. We've actually seen equipment starting to fail in our substations, we've seen underground lines starting to fail, and this is just a function of the age. [15:49] Carolyn Elam: a lot of this equipment is put in at the time we grew. So Boulder had a large growth period in the 50s, and then extending through the 70s and 80s. That's when a lot of our power infrastructure was put in place. [16:03] Carolyn Elam: It's just now aging out in its natural life cycle, and we happen to have a lot of it, and it's, [16:09] Carolyn Elam: Just not been proactively replaced, but there are plans to do so. [16:14] Carolyn Elam: So this led us to the Council priority. Here's the work plan for this year. [16:18] Carolyn Elam: Again, this is a one-year priority, [16:21] Carolyn Elam: And the goal here is, to build out a comprehensive understanding of what Excel is planning to do to resolve these issues. So what investments are they planning to make? Where are the risks that are going to be remaining after they make those investments? Understanding what risks we face [16:40] Carolyn Elam: while they're making those investments, that will, you know, decline, but they're still present for many in our community. And then to use that to develop a set of prioritized policy opportunities that in future years, Council can take up and, [16:54] Carolyn Elam: build additional projects around. So this is the scope of the project for this year. [17:01] Carolyn Elam: We do have plans to measure progress. This is… An illustration of reliability metrics. [17:10] Carolyn Elam: just to calibrate you in case you, didn't get to read the memo in full, the one that's labeled SADI, this is, a measure of how many minutes per year lines are out, and these are based on regions. So a low number is good, a high number is bad. [17:28] Carolyn Elam: And you can see in this ranking, the Boulder Division, which includes Boulder County, is by far the worst, here on this, map. So when you see Boulder Division, that's not just within the city limits, it's inclusive areas like Nederland, Ward, some of our mountain areas that experience particularly poor reliability. [17:46] Carolyn Elam: They all… we also measure frequency, like, you know, even if you are experiencing log outages. [17:53] Carolyn Elam: you're experiencing repeated ones, that's a concern. The third one is… [17:59] Carolyn Elam: what, the average customer experience is, and we present this as both major event days and without major event days, where major event days is, like, the extreme events I showed you, or today's snowstorm would be an example of that. [18:16] Carolyn Elam: We also intend to measure progress in terms of investment, so how much Excel is invested in the system, how many miles have been underground or rebuilt, how they're catching up on vegetation management, removing threatening trees, as well as trimming back, so that there's more clearance on lines. [18:36] Carolyn Elam: So we have built-in community engagement into this project for this year. [18:42] Carolyn Elam: Again, to inform… [18:44] Carolyn Elam: our understanding of risk and consequence of these outages to the community, as well as to inform the policy actions that future councils can take and elevate. So we want to certainly, you know, build a shared understanding of how this is impacting the community and really learn [19:00] Carolyn Elam: from communities on how to navigate this. We certainly see that [19:05] Carolyn Elam: Many in our community are able to successfully navigate and even thrive still during these outages, while others really struggle. [19:13] Carolyn Elam: How can we learn from those who are more successful to build in better capacity and resilience for everybody? [19:20] Carolyn Elam: How do we can also prepare people for more outages? We're certainly seeing climate extremes grow. We… even as we harden the system, there's opportunity to help people, be more empowered and proactive. [19:35] Carolyn Elam: So how can we use this engagement to put more tools in the toolbox for all community members in the event that there are outages or disasters so that we as a community are more resilient? And then refining the policies that Council has cited as opportunities. [19:52] Carolyn Elam: We're particularly, planning… interested in planning to engage with, frontline communities, neighborhoods who are most impacted, by frequent extended outages. We, of course, know that from the data, as well as, from people we're hearing from.

[20:05] Carolyn Elam: Particular focus on those who are disproportionately impacted by outage, so these would be people very dependent on electricity for things like medical or mobility needs. [20:15] Carolyn Elam: seniors, who are, more impacted also by auditors, as well as our businesses and some of the losses they've experienced. So, many of these groups were, generally planning on, several types of engagement opportunities, from workshops to online surveys as our tools. [20:35] Carolyn Elam: We also see, building in information and helping empowerment, so we've stood up, some web content, so we have a new, project page, Power, Reliability, and Resilience. [20:47] Carolyn Elam: We did… [20:48] Carolyn Elam: the town hall in January, to try and get a little bit more of an explanation out there so community could better understand what they were experiencing during these outages. We have a FAQ page that's been put together, and then, more information about undergrounding, electrical lines. People are very interested in that. [21:07] Carolyn Elam: So, starting big with the window this summer, bringing that information down to a council community forum that will take place on October 8th. [21:19] Carolyn Elam: This is where we'll bring a select group of community members and council together in a study session format to really talk through, some of the opportunities and priorities. And then. [21:31] Carolyn Elam: the project doesn't end this year, we're just ending with kind of a roadmap of where future councils can go, and we would continue engagement around some of those policy actions into 2027 and beyond. [21:44] Carolyn Elam: Again, I said there's been progress, so I'll start, you know, again, we've been at this for quite a while, from an advocacy perspective, particularly after the 2024, public safety power shutoff. [21:56] Carolyn Elam: staff, were very active in Excel's, filing of their 2027 through 2027 wildfire mitigation plan at the Public Utilities Commission. We were able to get a lot accomplished there in terms of dedicated investment that will address many of the risks to the Boulder community and Boulder area. [22:16] Carolyn Elam: Similarly, we've been engaged on other plans outside of wildfires, such as rebuilding of our substations and expansion of power lines so that we can serve our growing needs in the community. [22:28] Carolyn Elam: Focusing on affordability and reliability in the rate case that's ongoing, we filed testimony last week. [22:36] Carolyn Elam: on that topic, and then we're very actively engaged at the legislature this year on the reauthorization of the Public Utilities Commission, including advancing amendments around quality of service, improving penalties and staffing to ensure that the Public Utilities Commission is providing proper oversight to our utility. [22:56] Carolyn Elam: Hmm We've also now developed a preliminary map that takes all those Spiderweb. [23:05] Carolyn Elam: power lines I showed you previously. [23:10] Carolyn Elam: And turns it into polygons of community areas, and so these different colors represent [23:16] Carolyn Elam: The subsets of the community that have the most similar experience in terms of reliability, and our plan is to basically create these as risk zones. [23:27] Carolyn Elam: So we can better study, you know, where there's disproportionate risk and disproportionate impact to really focus in some of our mitigations, in the future. Council passed an update to our tax ordinance earlier this year, and this allows us [23:42] Carolyn Elam: to also provide a rebate back on taxes paid on batteries. We've seen a high adoption rate of battery backup systems, and also allows us to stand up a grant program that we hope to launch later this year to provide battery backup in support of resilience centers. [24:02] Carolyn Elam: Excel is making progress, too. They recently completed the Chautauqua Undergrounding, the key phases that removed the power line from the open space areas and perimeter that were the greatest wildfire threat there. This [24:15] Carolyn Elam: not only reduces our wildfire risk, but also supports keeping power on in areas like University Hill, Upper Chautauqua. [24:23] Carolyn Elam: Lots of pulls and wires replacement, as I'm sure many of our community have been experiencing. [24:29] Carolyn Elam: about to break ground on the first wildfire undergrounding project out in the county. I mentioned the Highway 36 project. There's also a lot of other reconstruction projects. I won't read all of them here. I will highlight, though, and you'll be hearing from the city about this as well, we are expecting Excel to really ramp up tree management within the Boulder area. [24:50] Carolyn Elam: We do have a lot of, [24:54] Carolyn Elam: trees… it's been a while that they've trimmed certain areas, and so there will be a large presence of their tree crews here over the course of this year. They've been working closely with our forestry team to get proper standards and identify best practices and best forestry practices, so more to come from this, but I just want to highlight that because you may be hearing from community once [25:19] Carolyn Elam: That starts, because it'll be pretty substantial compared to what people are used to. [25:25] Carolyn Elam: The policy options that we reviewed with Council are, advanced additional grid hardening and infrastructure investment, so just really seeking to better understand how we can influence and accelerate Excel's efforts, through various strategies. [25:40] Carolyn Elam: Looking at the role of solar and storage locally, to grow our local resilience. [25:48] Carolyn Elam: Community preparedness, as I mentioned a lot, is about how we capacity build within our own community, so that we're ready for these outages, better able to respond. We've talked already about some of the regulatory and legislative pathways through our advocacy work at the state legislature and the Public Utilities Commission. [26:06] Carolyn Elam: There's potential for the city to increase our investment in our own infrastructure, to enhance community resilience, and then, obviously, everything needs to be, equity-centered, but really thinking about resiliency strategies that are particularly targeted at some of our most at risk for outage.

[26:24] Carolyn Elam: Finally, next steps, we'll provide Council an update this summer, with an information packet, generally towards, like, the end of June, as we're wrapping up that engagement window. We have the engagement window. [26:38] Carolyn Elam: Opening in June. [26:41] Carolyn Elam: Excel will be here to present to Council on August 27th for a study session, and then I mentioned the Community Council forum on October 8th. [26:52] Carolyn Elam: So with that, I will stop sharing and take questions. [26:58] Environmental Advisory Board: Thank you. [27:00] Environmental Advisory Board: We… I'll start off with just a quick one. You said, [27:05] Environmental Advisory Board: They're starting this year, that J Road 28th Street undergrounding, so how long would a project like that take? [27:14] Carolyn Elam: It'll probably take about a… [27:19] Carolyn Elam: I guess I was gonna answer a short version, and then… basically, these projects take about 2 years from… [27:25] Carolyn Elam: concept to construction completion. They are wrapping up the final design now, and hopefully start construction around the third quarter, late summer. And then once construction starts, we would expect it to wrap up in early 2027 with final, like. [27:44] Carolyn Elam: You know, for many, you know. [27:47] Carolyn Elam: Fixing landscaping and road repair, kind of in that 2020's time… 2027 timeframe. [27:54] Carolyn Elam: the project out on 75th Street, which is by our wastewater treatment plant, is shorter, so it's, [28:01] Carolyn Elam: Just going from where our plant is up to Lookout Road. [28:06] Carolyn Elam: that'll start, hopefully, this month, and would wrap up. It's kind of stage to work around the school session, because the school's up there. [28:17] Environmental Advisory Board: Hmm. [28:18] Carolyn Elam: But we would expect that one to be complete this year. [28:21] Environmental Advisory Board: Okay, great. [28:27] Environmental Advisory Board: Yeah, I have a question just about, like, the… how high a risk area is determined. I think I should have written down the, written down the earlier slide where you had the dots of the, frequency number of, like, outages, and, I was trying to compare that slide analysis versus, like, the later ones that showed the different substation grids. [28:46] Environmental Advisory Board: areas, and I think you highlighted the one that's, like, very intensely red, more central city, but I'm not sure if that… did that align with some of the, like, the example case? I think, because those are different areas, if I'm… if I'm not mistaken, correct? [29:03] Environmental Advisory Board: Oh, you're on mute. [29:04] Carolyn Elam: Let me share it again, hang on. [29:13] Environmental Advisory Board: Right, that's not… that's not the JAGO area we're looking at currently, correct? [29:17] Carolyn Elam: Yeah, so it's not. So this, I highlighted this one. This is basically, like, the Aurora neighborhood, [29:26] Carolyn Elam: So… Here, this, the thing about this community is… sorry, I don't know why my slides are moving. [29:37] Carolyn Elam: I'll stop touching them. [29:40] Carolyn Elam: The… this section of town is actually fed by one of those power lines that serves outside the city. You would never know it. [29:49] Carolyn Elam: Based on where it is, but it's actually served from a power line that starts up by NCAR. [29:55] Carolyn Elam: So it passes overhead near the federal laboratories, and so it's been shut off for public safety power shutoffs, it's been tripped off [30:04] Carolyn Elam: Because it's been enhanced power safety modes, they've… had a,

[30:12] Carolyn Elam: one of those, vehicle collisions ran into equipment there along South Boulder Road that took them out. And then there's also… they've also been, affected by [30:25] Carolyn Elam: some… Other failures of equipment. So, it's… it's the… where we've seen the highest number of outages. [30:34] Carolyn Elam: The area with the longest duration outages, is actually in North Boulder, right along Iris. [30:44] Carolyn Elam: Which is… near North Boulder Rec Center, kind of that area, [30:54] Carolyn Elam: right around, kind of, either side of Iris, kind of Hawthorne, Broadway, and that's in part because of, [31:03] Carolyn Elam: some substantial tree damage to power lines during the wind events, but, like, that ideal market area has been hard hit, so it kind of varies. North Boulder is reliable, except for the wildfire outages, as an example, right? So they've been shut off, every public safety power shut off. [31:22] Carolyn Elam: But otherwise, they haven't experienced outages, so that's kind of one of the… when I say there wasn't a silver bullet, each part of our community is being impacted for multiple reasons and different reasons, and so Excel undergrounding that power line along… [31:37] Carolyn Elam: Highway 36 there will give North Boulder probably very good reliability. [31:44] Carolyn Elam: Some of the solutions [31:47] Carolyn Elam: we have to dig deeper on, for areas like the one I highlighted, like the Aurora neighborhood, because there's underground cable failures, there's other things that are impacting that. Shanahan Ridge is another area, [32:00] Carolyn Elam: that… was actually wildlife, the most common outage. We had rodents getting into underground equipment there. [32:09] Carolyn Elam: Repeatedly, like, so they experienced, in 2024… 2023 and 2024, many outages, right? So it's… it's a combination of things. Hopefully that answered the question. [32:20] Environmental Advisory Board: Yeah, no, I appreciate you explaining that and all the different mechanisms of failure that are, you know, hard to, you know, address with one civil bill, as you said. I kind of asked a question leading to a second one, thinking about the… one of the, like, Section 6 of the equity-centered resilience Strategies focuses on [32:38] Environmental Advisory Board: Prioritizing investments in communities with higher outage risk and lower adaptive capacity, and trying to think through, like, as you're working through all these different failure modes and, like, metrics that you have, you know, it sounds like a sense of data on [32:49] Environmental Advisory Board: Like, what are some of the methodologies being used to, like, weight all those different metrics in order to identify highest priority, areas to service in terms of, you know, like, making sure we're meeting that goal of, like. [33:02] Environmental Advisory Board: higher outage risk, addressing higher outages first and lower adaptive capacity first. Like, is there a weighting function that's looking at, like, each substation, grouping, as you already highlighted in one of the other maps, towards also, like, weighting towards, [33:15] Environmental Advisory Board: say, lower AMI, area medium income for, like, those particular regions? Like, how… is that being prioritized in some of the, assessment or final, kind of, like, imagine heat map you might be producing towards identifying where to prioritize first? [33:28] Carolyn Elam: Yeah, and, so I think… [33:31] Carolyn Elam: sequencing. So the first thing is we're data gathering to have the information to understand where those disparate issues exist. So that's the… kind of the map I showed with the different polygons, because we want to overlay [33:48] Carolyn Elam: At-risk populations within those, as well as the outage data. [33:53] Carolyn Elam: Through the engagement process, I think we want to learn more about what some of the solutions are, and where they're most effective, before we assign a weighting. But by the end, that's the idea, is we would have a set of priorities that carry weight based on [34:12] Carolyn Elam: Community engagement, and the dialogue with Council at the end of the year. [34:18] Environmental Advisory Board: Thank you. I have one more question. Sure. So in the, on a different line of thought, you know, I'm thinking, like, the… what are, like, the revenue streams that go towards, like, funding some of these, adapt… adaptations and infrastructure repairs? [34:35] Environmental Advisory Board: I'm kind of thinking in the context of, like, you know, if those revenue streams are primarily coming from taxes, or if they're coming from, like, Excel, you know, are those… [34:43] Environmental Advisory Board: Are the ways in which that revenue is being generated priced in such that they're calculating the lifetime amortized cost and replacement of those [34:52] Environmental Advisory Board: you know, again, next future time index them, and thinking about, like, are we setting appropriate, like, taxation levels or Excel feed levels, or encouraging setting of those feeds such that, you know, we're thinking through, like. [35:04] Environmental Advisory Board: You know, when we do underground a power line, that's going to last longer than an above-ground line, and can we think through, like, that higher investment cost? [35:12] Environmental Advisory Board: And legitimizing towards a certain, you know, revenue generation structure that can, you know, make sense of and, like, legitimize that higher expenditure that we might need to, you know, convince the community of for maybe additional taxation or investment needed to form these types of repairs. Like, is that included in the budgetary analysis and how these [35:33] Environmental Advisory Board: Projects are priced out. [35:35] Carolyn Elam: Yeah, so…

[35:38] Carolyn Elam: the Excel investment is… is all through their public utilities process and approved plan, and it's paid for by… by all rate payers, all utility ratepayers. On that front. [35:52] Carolyn Elam: you know, I think we wanna… [35:54] Carolyn Elam: Make sure, to your point, that they're planning to recapitalize and replace, and so that we don't end up in the situation where we have a lot of aging-out infrastructure failing all around the same time, or presenting this risk. [36:07] Carolyn Elam: As far as where the city might lean in and provide additional investment, yeah, very much looking at… [36:16] Carolyn Elam: cost versus benefit, and understanding what the long-term need is going to be, will be a very deep part of the conversation. For example, a lot of folks cite undergrounding as kind of, you know, we'll hear from community a lot, we should underground everything, we should underground everything. [36:35] Carolyn Elam: Undergrounding solves for the wildfire risk. It definitely eliminates the wildfire risk. It's 4 to 10 times more expensive to construct underground. [36:45] Carolyn Elam: And as I mentioned. [36:47] Carolyn Elam: some of our largest and most impactful outages outside of public safety power shutoffs have actually been underground equipment failure. They're longer, they're harder to repair, they're harder to diagnose. So there are some trade-offs that we have to talk about. Similarly, in certain areas of town. [37:03] Carolyn Elam: Undergrounding has a substantial financial impact on individual households. [37:11] Carolyn Elam: Because to move the lines underground, it often triggers upgrades, so that's a deep conversation we need to have with the community. We should maybe focus where we get the most benefit, not… and manage those costs. We have not identified a revenue stream, nor do we expect to [37:28] Carolyn Elam: kind of, approve any of those strategies this year. The end is to be able to quantify [37:35] Carolyn Elam: what an estimated cost might look like, and what the considerations are, and that then creates the roadmap that future councils will want to have that very conversation around what's… [37:46] Carolyn Elam: What's the revenue source gonna be? [37:49] Carolyn Elam: How do we present this to the community, to deeper conversations. [37:54] Carolyn Elam: Does that… hopefully that answered it. [37:57] Environmental Advisory Board: Yeah, I appreciate the response there. [38:00] Environmental Advisory Board: I just have a question regarding environmental studies that are being conducted with the disturbed area, specifically wondering about any obstructions to groundwater flow, any heat that's generated from these electric lines, and how that could affect surrounding soils and vegetation, and then what, Excel is planning to do with regard to restoring disturbed vegetation to ensure that we're minimizing [38:25] Environmental Advisory Board: invasive species. [38:27] Carolyn Elam: Yes, [38:30] Carolyn Elam: That is a… that is an amazing question, so I appreciate you, and I'm just reflecting on… on the journey we've been on on a couple of projects. [38:39] Carolyn Elam: So, certainly whenever… [38:46] Carolyn Elam: They're, extensively engaged with our open space department, because there are some projects that traverse our open space lands. [38:54] Carolyn Elam: Right now there is a, repair going on that's, [39:00] Carolyn Elam: up Sunshine Canyon and on our open space, and so, you know, that went through review with… [39:07] Carolyn Elam: the Open Space Board, and complies with, our standards for [39:16] Carolyn Elam: you know, considerations around different vegetation, so we've definitely been heavily engaged in that. It's not my area of expertise, but we work closely with our open space team to review those. [39:30] Carolyn Elam: the… the larger projects that I talked about are all going to be within the roadway, so the right-of-way, roadway kind of areas where we mitigate some of those disturbances, but, you know, we have… like, there's, the 75th Street project hasn't started yet because we're monitoring, or Excel is monitoring. [39:48] Carolyn Elam: I wanna say, there's a couple of, [39:53] Carolyn Elam: Owl species that are concerned in that area. [39:56] Carolyn Elam: So it's certainly looking at that, and then they're required to, remediate to our standards, wherever it's our public right-of-way.

[40:05] Carolyn Elam: And that's where most of the work is taking place. [40:08] Carolyn Elam: It is certainly a concern, though, and certainly as they… they're going up into… but they aren't underground, so most of the undergrounding is happening [40:17] Carolyn Elam: Just proximate to town. They don't underground, like, up in the mountains. You asked about thermal. [40:24] Carolyn Elam: floating, and water plank disruption. That's certainly all evaluated. I mean, it goes through the permit process, [40:33] Carolyn Elam: they… [40:34] Carolyn Elam: they're, not necessarily generating a lot of heat, is my understanding, but they're, I'd have to double check and understand a little bit more of that. [40:45] Carolyn Elam: But certainly… Those are things that are looked at in the permit process. [40:51] Environmental Advisory Board: Okay, thank you. [40:53] Environmental Advisory Board: You made me think… Oh, go ahead. [40:56] Anie Roche: No, no, go ahead. [40:57] Environmental Advisory Board: Oh, okay. You made me think of an additional question. As you mentioned, like, you know, a lot of, projects we'd be considering along already right-of-ways and, like, roadways. [41:07] Environmental Advisory Board: You know, in that context, is there, like, a plan or policy already set, a sense to whenever a road is, dug up and replaced for, like, you know, asphalt or transportation reasons? [41:19] Environmental Advisory Board: Is there an intention or plan to, like, at that time, when it's cheaper, to, like, add an underground kind of, like, conduit line for, like, maybe future interconnection of, like, larger networks of, like, underground lines? [41:30] Environmental Advisory Board: I think, for example, on the upcoming, like, you know, Iris Avenue, improvement project, if that… that would be, like, a potential consideration to, like, you know, two birds with one stone, in a sense, attack that… that problem, and also upgrade some of the, potential undergoing utility infrastructure that could be added there. [41:48] Carolyn Elam: Yeah, no, that's a good… that's a good question. I think I'll take that as a recommendation. We've certainly looked at that. You know, we can direct [41:58] Carolyn Elam: some of Excel's undergrounding, so that was the very conversation we had on North Broadway, as an example, which was the first undergrounding project [42:09] Carolyn Elam: that was done once we went back under franchise with Excel, and for that very reason is… [42:14] Carolyn Elam: We're getting ready to redo that whole, you know, part of North Broadway. [42:20] Carolyn Elam: And concrete, and we don't want to come back and later disturb it, so we certainly look at that, but, I don't know that we've looked at the idea of [42:30] Carolyn Elam: extra conduit, and I'd have to have that conversation with our… [42:35] Carolyn Elam: transportation team to see if they've explored that with Excel, but I think it's a good recommendation. [42:45] Environmental Advisory Board: Annie? [42:46] Anie Roche: Yeah, thank you. I have, like, a couple of questions. So the first one, about how much will all this cost Excel? And do you know, [42:58] Anie Roche: What percentage of the revenues they get from their payers and [43:05] Anie Roche: Boulder account… City of Boulder, Boulder County, will that be? [43:10] Carolyn Elam: Yeah. [43:11] Carolyn Elam: So… Their wildfire mitigation plan, so the 2025 through 2027 plan, they were approved for roughly $1.9 billion. [43:23] Carolyn Elam: of investment. We don't know the exact number, of what that's going to represent in the Boulder area, but I would anticipate it's several hundred thousand… a million, sorry, several hundred million of that, because a lot of the work is in [43:38] Carolyn Elam: The areas surrounding Boulder. [43:41] Carolyn Elam: Hmm.

[43:42] Carolyn Elam: All of that is ratepayer funded. [43:45] Carolyn Elam: So, all rate payers is… Across all Colorado utility payers. [43:52] Anie Roche: Okay. [43:53] Anie Roche: And then, does the City of Boulder have any tools to hold Excel accountable? You know, you talked about the lived experience, you know, from lived experience, having been through a couple of PSPSs, it seems as, [44:13] Anie Roche: a lot of… Incompetence? [44:17] Anie Roche: on the part of Excel, not providing services to the ratepayers, right? What other tools does the city have to hold them accountable? [44:28] Carolyn Elam: Yeah, so as you… as you understand, we don't regulate Excel. [44:31] Anie Roche: Yeah. [44:32] Carolyn Elam: very limited authority. Like, this is why a lot of our advocacy at the Public Utilities Commission has been particularly important. So that's certainly a priority one, is, [44:44] Carolyn Elam: we raise those issues. We certainly work through our partnership to the extent that we can. And then we're, you know, having conversations with our legislators as well about solutions, but those are kind of the avenues that are available to us. [45:01] Anie Roche: Okay, and then, final question, I think you did mention backup options for batteries. I understand that the city does not give out permits anymore for generators, is that true? [45:16] Carolyn Elam: So… Slightly true. It's not in… not anymore. [45:23] Carolyn Elam: We've had in place, like most, urban communities, noise restrictions, In our residential zoned areas. [45:38] Carolyn Elam: generators are not made that meet those decibel thresholds within our residential areas. So technically, residential generators have not been allowed for decades. [45:53] Carolyn Elam: The added layer is that, with the energy code. [46:00] Carolyn Elam: that's an added enforcement mechanism to keep them from being installed, outside of the noise ordinance. They are still allowed for, in non-residential zones for, like, multi-family buildings, commercial buildings. [46:15] Carolyn Elam: Where we, you know, hospitals. [46:19] Carolyn Elam: Senior homes, just not for residential. [46:23] Anie Roche: So… [46:24] Carolyn Elam: And I also will take this moment just to say. [46:30] Carolyn Elam: I understand people have a very acute experience of late with unreliable power. This is not our future, and this is not an acceptable state. [46:43] Carolyn Elam: The solution is not having everybody who can afford to to go out and spend [46:49] Carolyn Elam: $15,000, $20,000 instilling a gas backup. [46:54] Anie Roche: Yeah. [46:54] Carolyn Elam: That, in most cases, like. [46:57] Carolyn Elam: people aren't maintaining them, they weren't reliable anyway. Like, that's not the solution, so we definitely don't want that. [47:04] Carolyn Elam: We support batteries because they provide benefits beyond backup that support our overall resilience of our grid. They save people money, because you use them to, you know, do arbitrage on your utility costs. Like, they provide value, so… [47:21] Carolyn Elam: are going to make an investment, we'd like to see it be one that they actually benefit from. So that's why we have it. [47:29] Carolyn Elam: taken up this topic of generators, and do we want to change noise thresholds in residential areas? Like, it just shouldn't be that way, and we're not unique, like, this is not unique to Boulder. [47:40] Carolyn Elam: But yeah, that's the solution. And then we're also… I think one of our goals is to provide more resources for people to understand what tools are available. Like, you can have a portable genera… or a temporary generator,

[47:53] Carolyn Elam: Like, if people are that concerned, that is allowable, it's a solution. [47:59] Carolyn Elam: there's solutions for, you know, smaller equipment, several people have gotten things like, I think one of the brands is, like, Jackery with a little solar panel, right? So there's… there's more accessible solutions, but… but from a city perspective, we just need to solve the problem. We should experience [48:17] Carolyn Elam: good reliability, few outages, and when there are outages, they should be relatively short in duration. They shouldn't be the kind of thing that [48:25] Carolyn Elam: Create such a threat on public health and well-being. [48:29] Anie Roche: The… the battery storage systems? They're exorbitantly expensive. [48:35] Anie Roche: Right? [48:38] Carolyn Elam: It turns out that, from what we're seeing in terms of quotes, they're no different than a backup generator, or potentially less, when you take into account incentives that you can get from [48:51] Carolyn Elam: Excel and, others, so… [48:57] Carolyn Elam: They're actually… the prices have been coming down. [49:01] Carolyn Elam: Especially for residential, they're, they actually have a payback, in terms of [49:08] Carolyn Elam: I mean, it's not… it's not like 3 years, but… [49:11] Anie Roche: Yeah. [49:12] Carolyn Elam: I'm not advocating people go out and get batteries, either, for all the reasons I just said. [49:15] Anie Roche: Yeah, makes sense. [49:16] Carolyn Elam: But, we'll certainly… Do our best to support those that want to take that step. [49:25] Carolyn Elam: But I think there has to be other solutions that are more accessible for more people. [49:31] Anie Roche: Thank you. [49:35] Environmental Advisory Board: I have a question, Carolyn. Thanks for the, overview. [49:41] Environmental Advisory Board: for a lot of these initiatives that, Excel is pursuing, I'm curious to know if those came from Excel themselves, do they come from the Utility Commission? Did they come from [49:55] Environmental Advisory Board: The city boulder, do they come from the community? Just curious to know where some of these [50:01] Environmental Advisory Board: Suggestions on what to do to address these problems, originate from. [50:10] Carolyn Elam: Yeah, that's a really great question. [50:13] Carolyn Elam: you know, our California utilities. [50:16] Carolyn Elam: You know, got there first about a decade ago, when they started, you know, when things like the campfire occurred. [50:24] Carolyn Elam: And so they've been trying to figure out, you know, how to do some of these solutions, like sectionalizing, rebuilding, wildfire standards. [50:31] Carolyn Elam: So a lot of this stems from Excel with lessons learned from the industry and best practices that have come out of utilities like PG&E and [50:40] Carolyn Elam: Southern Cali Edison, [50:44] Carolyn Elam: from some of their learnings and experiences. So a lot of, like, the wildfire hardening solutions and rebuilds are really coming from Excel. [50:52] Carolyn Elam: How it gets implemented in Boulder, though, is, [50:56] Carolyn Elam: benefiting from our internal expertise. So, you know, through years of pursuing municipalization, we developed a pretty deep understanding of the utility grid that serves us, so we're able to work hand-in-hand with the Excel engineers and say, you know, here's the problem here, and here's

[51:15] Carolyn Elam: how we can best solve for it based on what we know about the community. So there's some complementary design going on with our electrical engineer and theirs, so… [51:26] Carolyn Elam: That's helpful. As far as, like, the rest of the policy actions, I mean, these are things that I think we've been hearing from the community and others. [51:32] Carolyn Elam: At the Public Utilities Commission, there's also ideas and solutions that come from other, parties that may participate in that, but, you know, I want to credit Excel. A lot of this is their… [51:44] Carolyn Elam: initiative. I mean, they got us here in the first place, like, this is an under-maintained system, and it's aged, and… [51:51] Carolyn Elam: the risk is real, and it's there, but they're taking steps to correct it, and they're… they don't like shutting power off to a community. That's not their… that's not the thing they want to be doing, and they want to fix it really quickly. And I think we're going to be seeing, and we already have seen, some changes, pretty quickly. [52:10] Carolyn Elam: you know, I expect… [52:12] Carolyn Elam: most people inside the city limits will not be subjected to future PSPSs after maybe 2027, and I think maybe even this year. I mean, I think that they're going to decrease who they have to shut off, or how long they're going to have to shut off very quickly for that reason. So I do want to give them credit for [52:31] Carolyn Elam: For that. [52:33] Environmental Advisory Board: I think my next question was, are there certain requests or… [52:38] Environmental Advisory Board: interventions that Excel is resisting, and how would you overcome that? But it sounds like, from your response, that if Excel is kind of the originator of a lot of these ideas based on industry best practices. [52:52] Environmental Advisory Board: Sounds like they are willing to, you know, move forward with that. [52:58] Environmental Advisory Board: To address the problems and don't need… there doesn't need to be as much of a… [53:04] Environmental Advisory Board: an alternative argument to try and convince them that this really needs to be done to meet the needs of the community. [53:10] Carolyn Elam: Yeah, I think where I would put that category a little bit is, [53:16] Carolyn Elam: you know, I think there's a tension on the undergrounding solution. It's not their preference to underground as a standard practice. As I mentioned, it's more expensive, it's, [53:29] Carolyn Elam: Leads to longer outages when it fails. [53:32] Carolyn Elam: So… They're certainly undertaking undergrounding from the perspective of wildfire risk reduction. [53:44] Carolyn Elam: But it doesn't… but not necessarily to address the other sources of damage we're seeing. So, I think that's why I said, like, some of the weather-related damage. [53:54] Carolyn Elam: you know, I looked at the outage map today, large swaths of South Boulder were without power, parts of North and Northeast Boulder were without power, and that's… [54:03] Carolyn Elam: trees coming down on overhead power lines, Excel isn't going to want to underground those for all the reasons I said. So, I think if, as a community, if we want to pursue that, that's probably something we're going to have to push on. [54:20] Environmental Advisory Board: Excellent. [54:21] Anie Roche: Can I, from what I've read, it seems like the communities where there's significant undergrounding Have fewer outages. [54:31] Anie Roche: Which seems contrary to some of the things that you're saying, which I believe Excel is… is telling… saying, right? [54:40] Carolyn Elam: Yeah, fewer outages. It's definitely overall more reliable. It's more expensive, so I think everybody agrees it's more expensive. It's when… when an outage occurs, the impact can be larger. Now, there's ways to mitigate it. I showed you… [54:55] Carolyn Elam: the chart with the outage data, and the lowest numbers are Fort Collins and Longmont. And then, I don't think we have Loveland data, but Fort Collins and Longmont both report to the data source we had, and the majority of their system is underground. I think [55:12] Carolyn Elam: Fort Collins is almost 100%, not a full 100%, and Longmont's something, you know, above 80% underground. [55:21] Carolyn Elam: Boulder, Boulder's actually high. I mean, I think we're 71%. [55:28] Carolyn Elam: But, like I said, their preference, like, they… they prefer overhead construction. [55:35] Carolyn Elam: Because it's cheaper, and it's easier to make quick repairs and get power back on quickly. That's just their preference. [55:44] Carolyn Elam: But you don't have…

[55:47] Carolyn Elam: cars running into power lines, you don't have trees falling down, you don't have to keep after tree trimming. You know, so there are a lot of… there are things that lead to better reliability for underground systems overall. [55:59] Anie Roche: Yeah, so for our… for the community, we would prefer to have [56:03] Anie Roche: an underground system, right? Okay, fair. [56:10] Environmental Advisory Board: I had a follow-up question on the earlier point about the grants available for battery installations. I'm thinking about, like, you know, additional, kind of, like. [56:18] Environmental Advisory Board: you know, investments you said that, like, would also serve, like, other, like, long-term needs. I'm thinking to the, recent passing of the state bill for back, balcony solar, and how that could be also tied in, and also be an option to, like, enable, renters to be able to, like, have access to that sort of, like, grant funding. And I think even to the initial [56:37] Environmental Advisory Board: battery-led grant availability, is that only for, like, permanent battery installs, or does that also cover, like, portal Jackery-type ones you mentioned earlier? And would there be opportunity to even, like, expand, or at least, like, educate the public about that future offering where balcony installer options are also allowed? Because I recall in the last PSPSs. [56:56] Environmental Advisory Board: I actually used a, electric motorbike battery I had to pump my fridge during the outage. [57:01] Environmental Advisory Board: You know, and that lasted during that period of time, but, like, not everyone has that, like, extra battery lying around. There's lots of that being purchased, I think, for some folks, even though some of those bikes are, like, illegal, and there needs to be also education in that context as well. But… [57:15] Environmental Advisory Board: There's at least a multi-use there, and how can we be creative in thinking about [57:20] Environmental Advisory Board: those additional multi-uses, whether it's balcony solar, or maybe, like, e-bike batteries, or, like, vehicle-to-grid charging methodologies for electric vehicles, and how we can incentivize any or all three of those programs under that similar kind of, like, battery program we mentioned. Is that considered in future [57:38] Environmental Advisory Board: Expansions or additional considerations on that, on that program? [57:42] Carolyn Elam: Yeah, thank you. I'm admiring Annie's dog. [57:46] Carolyn Elam: Our extra… extra board member. So there's a lot to unpack there. Initially, I think we're looking at… [57:57] Carolyn Elam: kind of solutions that serve broader groups of… of… [58:04] Carolyn Elam: community members, so thinking about if there's, schools, or… [58:10] Carolyn Elam: shared spaces in high-density housing areas or something that can provide resources. We don't have a lot of money, just for clarity. We have a little bit of money. [58:22] Carolyn Elam: As far as the… [58:25] Carolyn Elam: like, balcony solar, kind of one of the nuances of the legislation is those won't provide you power… [58:35] Carolyn Elam: enough power to, like, power your home once the grid goes offline. The UL certification is going to require them to disconnect, just as systems do today. So, [58:49] Carolyn Elam: I think we're gonna have to learn a little bit more about where the opportunity is there. [58:54] Carolyn Elam: I think we're focusing on education around some of the other tools, like the smaller batteries, but not necessarily providing grants at this time to portable. I think we want to learn from community [59:04] Carolyn Elam: through the engagement process, what more solutions are necessary, but, we definitely do see at least an opportunity for some strategically located spaces where, [59:17] Carolyn Elam: we have, like, nonprofits who have put solar in and can add a battery relatively easily and become a center where people can go during an outage and charge, get internet access and those types of things. Understanding that that doesn't solve for a lot of people, like, not everybody's in a position to be able to go anywhere. [59:37] Carolyn Elam: We need to have a long game that looks at that broader topics, of how we help everybody be most successful. [59:44] Carolyn Elam: Certainly, vehicle-to-grid, batteries, educating about, like, if you have an electric vehicle, how you can use it. [59:53] Carolyn Elam: to, you know, back up your fridge. Teaching people, you know. [60:00] Carolyn Elam: about having coolers on hand, and being able to refresh ice or things like that. I mean, there's even low-dollar solutions that a lot [60:10] Carolyn Elam: folks don't even think about or aren't prepared. Like, a first step for us is just having everybody have an outage plan. Like, know what you do. [60:21] Carolyn Elam: when you make decisions on if you leave, you know, I think getting everybody prepared is the first step, but we have a very finite set of financial resources, so we can't solve, kind of, broad community at this point. I think that's the topic, though, for the [60:37] Carolyn Elam: one of the priorities I think I had on that list, more distributed resources. I think that's what we want to hear from the community and, talk with Council about through this process.

[60:49] Environmental Advisory Board: Thank you, yeah, and I think I want to highlight one idea, at least you've, [60:52] Environmental Advisory Board: brought to mind when you mentioned, like, kind of community centers, where people could go to and get support, and maybe think of, like, it would be a really cool, interesting idea for, like, you know, folks that would be in need of to be able to, like, lease out, like, a portable battery system to, like, just power their fridge. I think that's, like, one of the most critical things I think people can get by with during an outage. [61:12] Environmental Advisory Board: But, like, you know, obviously, like, heat and other kind of, like, those sort of systems are maybe more important, depending on the time of year an outage happens. But, like, yeah, like, you know, that would be an interesting idea to think about as well, in terms of, [61:27] Environmental Advisory Board: community centralized hubs where people can get resources and what could be made portable, even leased out during those PSPS periods. [61:37] Carolyn Elam: Thank you. [61:39] Environmental Advisory Board: You're gonna teach me the e-bike thing, though. Oh yeah, no, there's an inverter thing, it's really easy, actually, but yeah. Cool! Didn't know that. [61:50] Anie Roche: For me, the biggest issue is the heat. Like, when it happens in the winters, it's… [61:55] Anie Roche: Yeah. Get a Yeti cooler, put some ice, your food is fine, it's just eating up the house. [62:00] Anie Roche: Yeah. [62:01] Carolyn Elam: No, absolutely, and I think… [62:07] Carolyn Elam: Understanding, like, when you need to know how to shut off your water and go. [62:12] Anie Roche: somewhere. Yep, yep. [62:14] Carolyn Elam: And yeah, knowing when your threshold is of when you make that decision, you know, we've certainly talked to some folks after the December event. [62:24] Carolyn Elam: who… [62:26] Carolyn Elam: because of the very bad information, I think somebody mentioned this, right? You probably did, Annie, like, the… the, [62:34] Carolyn Elam: there wasn't clarity, like, how long the outage was, what the restoration status, like, there was a lot of issues with the communication. [62:41] Carolyn Elam: Which we've shared with the Commission a lot of recommendations around that. [62:46] Carolyn Elam: But they stayed in their home for a long time, and, like. [62:52] Carolyn Elam: suffer, you know, physical and mental distress, that could have… [62:59] Carolyn Elam: and ultimately had to, like, leave, but it, like, took a really long time to recover, and so information's power, and getting better resources, I think, is important, and yeah, Excel definitely needs to fix their communications. [63:13] Carolyn Elam: Hmm. [63:15] Environmental Advisory Board: think of, like, a creative solution to that space as, like, you know, like, trombay wall, like, passive heating systems that, like, you know, take advantage of, like, solar heating, and how do we encourage that as, like, a supplemental, you know, like. [63:26] Environmental Advisory Board: non-HVAC required kind of heating system that can also lower your generally heating bill outside of, like, [63:33] Environmental Advisory Board: power, shutoff periods or, you know, instability in the grid. And I'm not sure the ways in which, like, systems like that are even, like, permitted in, like, you know, permitting, design, and code of the city. What's it called? It's a trombay wall. It's a T-R-O-M-B… T-R-O-O-M-B-E. [63:51] Environmental Advisory Board: It just… it collects heat from the sun, and then, like, you know, there's a way… in the way in which it designs, it circulates that through the house. [63:57] Environmental Advisory Board: It can help reduce the energy load consumed by most buildings. But there's a… I think the tendency of most architectural design today is focusing on HVAC-type systems, but how can we think of, like, types of systems that can supplement that, but then also not rely on power to operate? [64:18] Carolyn Elam: Yeah, we tend to… incentivize and code, use of passive designs. [64:25] Carolyn Elam: so make it easier to comply with code if you incorporate those types of designs, or if you have, like, a passive home certification, it's easier to comply. But we don't require it. But I agree with you, we… we don't… we don't see a substantial uptake in it. There's definitely opportunity. [64:44] Carolyn Elam: And it definitely… Is the gift that keeps on giving, as you noted. [64:55] Environmental Advisory Board: Any more questions?

[64:58] Environmental Advisory Board: Thank you so much, that was really informative, and… [65:03] Carolyn Elam: Thank you. We'll definitely be back with more conversations as the year progresses, and… [65:08] Carolyn Elam: I'm happy to come back and… Good to see everybody. [65:14] Environmental Advisory Board: Thank you. [65:15] Environmental Advisory Board: Hope you feel better. [65:17] Carolyn Elam: Thank you. [65:18] Carolyn Elam: I'm gonna pass it back to you, Heather, so I can go… [65:21] Environmental Advisory Board: Sure, thanks. [65:22] Carolyn Elam: Thank you. [65:28] Environmental Advisory Board: Do we need to do anything? [65:31] Environmental Advisory Board: There aren't any public hearing items or old business updates. I know Jonathan usually likes to go through the Council calendar preview, so I'll just highlight on there that there is a July… on July 30th, there is a wildfire resilience study session. [65:48] Environmental Advisory Board: Where Council and staff will discuss home hardening… the… sorry, home hardening implementation hub and assessment of current programs, projects, and actions, so tune into that if you're interested. [66:00] Environmental Advisory Board: And then that full Council Agenda Committee summary is in your packet, so if you see anything that interests you and you want to learn more about, just reach out and let me know, and I'll see what I can find for you. [66:14] Environmental Advisory Board: And, our next meeting is scheduled… your next meeting is scheduled for June 3rd at 6pm. [66:20] Environmental Advisory Board: And that's the end of the agenda. [66:22] Environmental Advisory Board: Alright, motion to… Adjourn. [66:26] Environmental Advisory Board: Bye. [66:27] Environmental Advisory Board: Perfect. Something people say? That's perfect. Nailed it. [66:33] Environmental Advisory Board: Well, bye, Annie. [66:35] Anie Roche: Hi, thank you. [66:36] Environmental Advisory Board: You, Doug.