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PUBLIC POWER AGENCY MEETING MINUTES
May 17, 2007
Members Present: John Montone, Chairperson, Timothy C. Lattimore, Luke Rybarczyk, William Graney, Mike Luksa, and Dennis Zach
Members Absent: Vijay Mital and Krste Biljanoski
Staff Present: Andy Fusco, City Attorney, Michael Long, Anthony DeCaro
One vacant position
Meeting of the Public Power Agency of May 17, 2007 was called to order by Chairperson John Montone at 4:00 p.m. Motion to approve the minutes from the March 14, 2007 and April 18, 2007 meetings made by Tim Lattimore and seconded by Dennis Zach and all in favor.
Chair introduced Mike Mathis. Mike is an engineer with 30 years of experience in the power industry, a year ago when Syracuse Common Council expressed an interest in public power I decided to volunteer a little bit of that interest to the cause and it finally bore through about a week or two ago when the Common Council approved some money in the City budget for a feasibility study on public power. Mike said that for 20 years he worked for Niagara Mohawk and 4 with Betel Power Corporation and left Niagara Mohawk worked with Navagant Consulting and the last few years have just been working here and there on his own.
Bob Mount from Power Innovations sent a proposal and is going to present the proposal to City Council. Has some idea about managing the public power utility for the City of Auburn. He is here is to answer any questions that the agency may have regarding the proposal. Proposal is basic, retainer portion in the proposal and Power Innovations become the consulting engineers. You have projects going on now with the digester and the hydro, we talked about distribution being critical, the feasibilities of distribution, the implementation of distribution which will be very critical once these generation points are up and running. Also part of the retainer is the marketing and publicizing what the agency is doing. Very important that the actual citizens in the City know what the objectives are,
what the changes are so that they can talk about it, can be proud about and monitor it and feel that real progress is being made. This is something that everyone talks about, who actually is doing it. What we have been involved in has been Olympics, the 2002 Winter Olympics, we were in Salt Lake City, the 2004 Olympics that were in Athens, Greece and the 2006 Olympics that were in Torino, Italy and if anyone is aware of the Olympics it is a major production. Basically the world comes into a City and over taxes that City as far as power requirements, security requirements, everything and it is basically in a fish bowl for the world to look at for 2 or 3 weeks, 24/7 so there is a tremendous power infrastructure that is the part that we have been involved the power infrastructure so that the show does go on. We are involved in Home Land Security, National Security, exploration, and medical. We produce two products one is Power Hawk, which is
an emergency mobile power unit. Designed as a first responder to go in and do all the issues of a paramedic and rescue as well as provide long-term power. It has been a project we have been working on with Ford and Cummings for about 3 ½ to 4 years and right now with the Army alone they have outlined 8 billion dollars for vehicles. Two things most important to them are power and communications in that vehicle. Another piece of equipment that we have done is called AMPS. Most of you are familiar with generators. Basically you have a motor turning a generator of some sort and set idle and that set idle regulates the power and frequency. We have been able to take this system and over a wide range of rotational rpm we have been able to maintain a constant load and a constant frequency, what does that mean? You put this in your car, your RV, as soon as you turn the key you have full load perfect power so whether it is
idle, full throttle it doesn’t matter. Currently right now we have a crew up in Newfoundland that are putting these on life boats with the Coast Guard going out for trials on these units, but basically it provides the ships with all the power that they need.
Chair commented that the products are one aspect of this proposal, but the real issue at hand is the management of the Public Power Agency of some point. Bob said if you look at the proposal for a company like ours, it really doesn’t make sense to do this unless we are able to develop those causes and of course we know the resources to do that would be very hard to find here so basically what is in that proposal is going out there and lobbying and putting together the grants in order to basically put together these projects to the dollars that are going to be required and manage those project as they come in. Window of opportunity for federal funding is near closing. The urgency is to get grants as soon as we can and we only have in essence weeks left as far as this year’s budgets.
We need to meet and talk about what projects we need to focus on first. Tim asked how we over come us being the City and taking the County into account with Niagara Mohawk, RG&E, the three utility companies. Bob said when we first started talking we focused the City and of course for various reasons the County became interested and the County has a lot of resources out there. The City is where the greater population and need is, I think at this point the focus should be the City and to get that infrastructure in and if we can do that the County can duck tail on, they can be an added benefit for resource. When I say resource I am talking about areas to implement generation sites of various kinds and add them into that distribution network too. Chair stated we have a Local Law in place with the County so when we negotiate with them we will be talking about the City.
Tim asked Bob to explain marketing and Bob stated as far as his company is concerned is basically getting enthusiasm and education out to the City, the citizens, every one is worried about the referendum, biggest questions – where are we, what is happening, what is the committee doing. It would really be good to actually go out and get them involved get them excited in way that they understand they are behind it. The objective is when you are talking about any citizen in the City first question is what is in it for me, what does that mean for me? Any type of marketing campaign we try to educate the citizens, the whole focus will be how they are better off with what the City is doing and how they will be better off in the future and energy is a very critical subject. If you are able to
break it down and show them how they are going to be better off and they are better off, then there is a lot more excitement and a lot more support. Chair asks say we are operating with a feasible study that we have done for the alternative energy projects, we can operate them and interface them parallel with along a time line of negotiating with NYSEG the distribution systems, either owned, leased or whatever. How do you see interfacing with our digester project that would be part of the generation market? You would manage that end of it? Bob stated yes. Once this master plan is done is that a very well model is put together, something that people from all around could come and look at.
Chair said if we put this proposal in place say within the first year do we see something dramatic right away or get into the feasible study system? Bob said they would address immediately would be feasibility, negotiations and marketing. Negotiations on distributions, feasibility for distribution as well as the marketing and again there are projects that are going on right now. Other thing of course is again this is something that I am mentioning right now but of course it will all be something that would discussed but my intent is to go out there and find every grant that is still available that ties into what you may want to do and file for it. After we get those out we would go onto your feasibility and your negotiations and then of course your long-term strategy and that will definitely come
into line. We want to get this in front of City Council and we will get back to you how we want to go about this.
Next on agenda is RFQ. We get some qualifications from other firms and look at them. Bill Cetti and Kamyar are here and they have been negotiating with Constellation over this digester situation. Did an over view of Constellation Proposal. Bill Cetti worked on this and is strictly the landfill methane project that would come from the shutting down the sludge burning process, capturing off the landfill. Real question is why does Constellation want to do this? Bill said they can do these kinds of projects, the way they are structured with subsidiaries, they can make enough money to make it work. They do this type of work across the U.S. They work on small projects under 2 megawatts, not many that can do this, so that puts them in a unique category.
Focusing on landfill project with Stearns and Wheler and they are moving forward rapidly trying to get information necessary on engineering side, primarily stabilization and sludge, first big win for City and at the same time looking at landfill generating plants.
Discussion of Bonds for this project and digester project. Sell bonds with 0% interest and pay no interest but pay back principle over 12 to 15 years. Person that buys the bond gets a tax break. Put together a few packages one for the landfill and one for the digester and we are asking funding for both projects.
Motion to adjourn by Mike Long, seconded by Tim Lattimore.
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