ORDER-2015-110 : Authorization to enter into an Agreement with Siemens to perform an Investment Grade Audit of City-owned Streetlights

Transcript (~32 min @ 1:33:15)

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▶ 1:32:40 Peter D. Mortimer: that the business is conducted in the committee meetings and then the votes The votes are taken at the full board. So we want to thank you very much for coming, and we want to thank you for allowing the residents to have an opportunity to save money. And I just say for the people out there, be careful because there are some scam artists on the telephone. You call up, they'll give you a good rate for three months, and then they'll jack it through the ceiling. So people at home, please watch yourself. There can be some bad characters out there as we know. Thank you once again for coming.

▶ 1:33:16 Speaker 11: Thank you for coming. Thank you.

▶ 1:33:22 Speaker 7: Thank you.

▶ 1:33:23 Peter D. Mortimer: The next order we have before the Appropriations Committee is order 2015-110. It is authorization to enter into an agreement with Siemens to perform an investment grade audit of city owned street lights. We are under suspension, so I would ask the Mayor, Ms. Grover, Ms. Timmerman, and any other interested parties on the city team to come forward and address the board, please.

▶ 1:34:08 Speaker 4: Hi, again, Martha Grover, Energy Efficiency Manager for the City of Melrose, thank you very much. This is act two, we'll go through this hopefully as quickly as possible.

▶ 1:34:21 Speaker 4: tonight what we have before you is a request to authorize mayor to enter into an agreement with Siemens for an audit of our streetlights we're going to quickly go through what this is about we've been talking about it for quite a while streetlights as you know represent 8% of our energy usage as a green community an opportunity to reduce that by up to 66 70 percent is a fantastic opportunity November of communities around the state have already done this store Winchester Chelsea Boston will provide a list and we we hadn't yet done this because the tariff structure with National Grid did not make it financially feasible but this is as soon as that tariff changed we immediately started working with mapc participated in a group procurement with nine communities representing 18 000 plus street lights this is the third round of procurement for led street lights with mapc it but this is the first national grid project procurement we got lots of

▶ 1:35:33 Speaker 4: interest from a lot of vendors and through a fantastic once again selection process selected Siemens I have with me Clint Shuckle our account business account manager with Siemens this is a project that is chapter 25 a just like the ESCO project, so it's the same concept where we first do an audit and then we'll go back and we'll come back to you with the scope of work for the energy services agreement. The other piece of this is that the project pays for itself. We would borrow the money or get a tax exempt lease and make those payments from the guaranteed savings from this project. a list of the participating communities I was on the selection committee along with some others my counterparts from other communities Melrose is as you can see one of the larger communities in terms of our inventory and good evening

▶ 1:36:43 Speaker 12: everyone thank you for the opportunity to speak with you tonight my name is Clint chuckle I'm Siemens account manager for the mobility division in New england and our core business is maintaining and installing traffic signals and street lights so this is exactly what we do i will try to be very brief to leave time for your questions the previous slide which you don't have to go back to my team members who do a lot of the heavy lifting on this project the audit which i'll speak of briefly in a couple slides the design piece which is working with your city staff to determine what's the appropriate level of lighting on various streets obviously looking to strike that balance between public safety and energy savings and the last piece on the previous slide is our construction phase those people that will manage the actual swap out of the streetlights our firm has been fortunate enough to have several major projects under our belt now here in in Massachusetts we about two years ago did a project through MAPC their first procurement which involved four communities in massachusetts arlington chelsea natick and woburn that project involved about 8 000 streetlights we've also worked for the cape light compact the same organization that you talked about in your previous item they are also the energy efficiency organization for cape cod they funded a streetlight retrofit so if you're fortunate enough to go out on the cape or martha's vineyard sometime soon you'll get to enjoy all those lovely led street lights because the entire cape has been converted we've also recently completed a project in the city of new bedford included about 10 000 fixtures in total we are as you might expect been a little bit hampered by the snow but we're about to finish up that project the next couple of months next please as Martha mentioned this is a performance contract or procured through Mass General Law 25a so the process that that procurement sets up is the audit which is before you tonight which allows for the city to carefully examine the opportunity for energy savings the cost and then to weigh those two so we will with the city's input try to find every single light some of which you may pay for and don't exist so we will be doing a reconciling of your billing and trying to find every single light that you might want to consider for this project we are utilizing a GIS application and making everything web-based so that the status of the project can be made available at whatever level you decide so that residents or city staff can see the progress of the project as points appearing on a map the design piece as i mentioned before is a collaborative process with the city because certain parts of the city certain types of streets you may decide need a little more light than others the the next phase under our step under November three will be the the financing piece of the project and the ems or the energy management service that's the actual installation phase once you've taken in this audit information and decided that this is a wise investment for the city the construction phase is is managed by two folks in our office both by the name of david so it says dave and dave after construction there is a warranty phase of this project and this we're focusing on the audit tonight but i'm just kind of walking you through all the steps and happy to take your questions on any of these the there is a guarantee that siemens is making to the city as part of this project that you will save a certain November of kilowatt hours per year and that's measured in units of energy so it's not a function of what energy costs you it it's a guarantee that you will save so much energy by doing this project so the measurement and verification piece of that is an annual process for us to document that those guaranteed savings were met and it's as simple as reviewing your utility bill on an annual basis the the maintenance is an option for the city to decide at a later date all of our work will have a one-year workmanship warranty so about a year post completion probably late summer of 2016 the the city will need to make a decision as to how you want to maintain the streetlights long term next please this is a some rough dates obviously that first date is probably pretty optimistic but i think in the this is a very doable uh six month schedule for the project upon uh signing of this audit agreement we'll need about 30 days to go street by street to the city and and map in gis each one of your streetlight poles about two weeks later we will submit a design report to the city and there will be some back and forth as i mentioned in terms of determining what the appropriate lighting level is at various city streets and areas about mid-may we would order the fixtures there's about a six week lead time for those and we believe with four to six crews good weather that will be in our favor based on the timing that we would complete the project in about 60 days the next phase is to submit the billing adjustments to national grid because these are not by and large metered lights so we have to give national grid the new information about the light that's been changed and that finally the city would receive those savings on your electric bills right about october 1st included in that process is us siemens applying for a national grid incentive on behalf of the city and then taking that amount to offset the cost of the project our audit process is web-based as i mentioned we have audit crews going around the city collecting all the polls we then use that as part of our installation so that initially if if you have access to the web you can see the dots appearing on the map and then when we do the conversion you see the dots changing color so it's very easy to track which neighborhoods are done and which ones are coming ultimately this becomes a management tool for the city to manage outages and complaints we give National Grid the GIS point location of all your polls to help reconcile if there's ever any question about which poll is which or where it is sometimes now in the spreadsheet the street is spelled wrong or the street is actually wrong so this will help hopefully over time reconcile that probably your largest electric bill in the city next I'll go quickly through these are our audit tool that the auditors are using on the street is an iPad basically and it's it's pushing information to the cloud and we provide access to Martha to DPW to a public site however you'd like to share that information next we also create what we call an operations dashboard and this is an example from our new Bedford project it showed in the yellow the total November of streetlights the green was at this point in time there were 1551 converted and then we found 26 issues as we went through and you may have experienced this as an elected official with a resident that can't get the light back on because it doesn't have a power connection either underground or overhead so we do find those types of items as we go around the city we through the audit often locate tree trimming locations double poles those types of things we can collect if the city finds those metrics useful next and then lastly as i mentioned the there is a web map that these this is a screenshot of city of new bedford and and all of their street lights are shown there in the the yellow dots next our design philosophy as i mentioned is to we're obviously trying to maximize your energy savings but also acknowledge the public safety and and level of security that street lights provide to your constituents it's not going to be a successful project if your phone rings off the hook after this because everybody thinks their street is too bright or too dark so we will attempt to again strike that balance between putting the appropriate light in the appropriate places we through mapc have provided three different fixture options and the pricing for each so the the city has some choices to make as to which vendor is best fit we have proposed to include a photo cell that would allow you to do some wireless controls at some point in the future if if the city determines the price is right we try to take advantage of the ability of white light to help you see better because you can see true colors at night so if you walk out as i was noticing just outside city hall the color of the the street will be markedly different, and I think you'll all find that it really is more aesthetically pleasing than the sodium lights that you have now. And as I mentioned, we do try to make lighting level consistent from street to street, area to area, because your eye and my eye can't adapt quickly as we drive at night. So we're better off, we're helping the driver regardless of their age by giving them a consistent level of light that your eyes can adapt to and try to stay at that light. Next. As Martha mentioned, I think we've got about 17 communities on this list. These are not all our customers. These are projects that have the largest ones that have happened so far. I would guess there's nine more communities to be added to this list as part of this project and probably at least another dozen that are at the stage that you are that are looking at the project. The three in green are the National Grid communities. As Martha mentioned, this National Grid has kind of been slow to get to the table and make things accessible for communities to convert. So this is by far the largest, you're part of the largest conversion to happen so far in NGrid territory. Every one of those other communities is in the territory now referred to as Eversource. Most of those jobs have gone quicker. That concludes my presentation.

▶ 1:47:24 Speaker 4: I just wanted to say one point, the cost for the audit is $14.60 per street light. We would only incur that cost if we don't move ahead with the actual LED upgrade, just like with the ESCO project, the audit is included in the project cost.

▶ 1:47:41 Speaker 3: I'd just like to add, just to give a brief history, in 2005 we analyzed whether or not we should be purchasing our street lights that were owned by National Grid. estimated a savings of $100,000 during a very difficult time in the finances of the city we did reach that consistently more so 2006 we purchased the street lights by vote of this Board of Aldermen over from 2011 to 2012 after a study of whether or not we should go to LED and have Victorian lights throughout the city we completed that project to much success so in 2015 we will conduct the audit if it's allowed by this board make a decision installation and 15 and then hopefully aggregation savings in 60 so there's a plan here to to to control our own destiny and be proactive over costs that are that are going up thank you

▶ 1:48:35 Peter D. Mortimer: lady and gentlemen first in queue we have Alderman Medeiros please are we

▶ 1:48:43 Speaker 8: talking replacing the poles the structures just the how much are we

▶ 1:48:51 Speaker 12: replacing here not sure if I had a picture in my presentation but every light has a metal bracket arm they're usually about six feet long coming off the pole whether it's a wood pole or a dedicated streetlight pole we're only changing the light that's on the fixture that's on the end of that pole or on the end of that bracket arm the pole itself stays just as is okay there's there's a

▶ 1:49:15 Speaker 12: picture on the screen now just so just that fixture you can see the bracket arm in the lower right so just what's on the end of that metal arm I'm gonna talk a

▶ 1:49:24 Speaker 8: little bit about streetlights that are out it's probably one of my biggest pet peeves as we go along and and right now I think we have quite a few street and I'm wondering you score from your perspective and in the Energy Commission are we losing more money when the streetlight is out is energy is is energy still going into that no and I know I've heard lots of talk over the

▶ 1:50:00 Speaker 8: years about LED lighting lasting longer is that's true yes that was one of the

▶ 1:50:09 Speaker 12: specifications that the MAPC came up with and one that we typically limit in terms of which vendors we're willing to install is a 10-year product warranty. So any failures from year one to 10 will be covered by the manufacturer.

▶ 1:50:25 Speaker 8: But typically how long do those bulbs last before they go out?

▶ 1:50:31 Speaker 12: We're seeing a very low percentage rate of failures. As shown on the screen, pretty much every project we've done is in the last two years. we don't there isn't you know a lot of data to go along with that but we've had failure rates of under one percent in all of our projects that's just the

▶ 1:50:49 Monica C. Medeiros: first couple years but and right now in the city from you know talking with mr. Shana about this if there's no effort by our DPW or anybody to go out and you know kind of take an assessment of what street lights are on and what street lights are off it's they're working during the day and they're not seeing the lighting out and so it's up to community members to report these so i guess kind of what i'm getting at is that you know they're not getting fixed on a regular basis uh and you know aside from the energy savings that we can see from this if we can you know have more of our street lights staying on and working it would probably be a benefit to us in the city my only hesitation with this is unfortunately Siemens had been our contractor to service our lights and they were all supposed to be fixed within seven days of reporting them and I could tell you as an alderman

▶ 1:51:48 Speaker 8: that didn't happen quite so often within the seven days so I'm a little bit reluctant to

▶ 1:51:59 Speaker 8: to support this a little bit because of Siemens but I think this is a wise you know use that we

▶ 1:52:07 Speaker 4: could that you can address that but I'll also address that that was those are some of the questions that we actually had of Siemens during the selection process and based on my conversations with New Bedford and the Cape and some of the other communities is that they've really they've hired this crack project management team and they've really revamped their entire maintenance crew and team so a lot of the people that they had inherited through a merger or acquisition of another company there's been a lot of turnover and I think that they've really responded very well by responding to those concerns and we haven't had we don't contract with Siemens Republic it's with now we have a

▶ 1:52:57 Speaker 12: different company now yes yeah just briefly thank you Martha for I think highlighting that that we have made some improvements and some of the folks that I think were directly responsible for some of our past failures are no longer with the company so we have had to make some personnel changes to I think perform better to our customers expectations I think the fact that we are providing a one-year workmanship warranty really gives us the opportunity to show and earn the trust of the city otherwise I can't imagine why you would go any beyond that one year so I think it is it is an audition for us to hopefully reestablish your trust and if so have the opportunity to to be your maintenance contractor for a longer period but I think you have that leverage for sure that we have no chance of anything beyond a year if we can't show you we can respond to a simple outage is there anything in terms of you

▶ 1:53:50 Monica C. Medeiros: know potentially putting a chipper as an option to be able to tell when a light goes out so that you know because we don't have DPW staff that's working at night to check this stuff out so if there's something that can report back and report that there's an outage to us you know that would help us and I don't know what the cost of that is obviously but it certainly will as it stands I

▶ 1:54:15 Speaker 12: believe you're specifying what's called control ready fixtures which means that if at any point you wanted to incorporate a wireless system in into street lights that these products exist today it would just be a matter of changing the the hockey puck device on top of it which is its photo cell tells the light to turn on and off when when the sun comes up and down so you will have that capability without having to change the fixtures someday to remote control them if you include a dimmable what's called a dimmable driver you can then decide as some cities are talking about to dim certain hours um that's again a very much a personal and and uh financial yeah financial decision that that you can consider but the those systems do give you that those kinds of options and and i think that's the intent of the city is

▶ 1:55:10 Speaker 8: to have a control ready fixture and they can send back a message that there's something wrong with

▶ 1:55:13 Speaker 4: the yeah our idea is that we we would make it right now that that technology is too expensive so we're going to i think we're going to have the control ready components the receptacles and then when the prices come down that would be something we look into it's switching it up yep

▶ 1:55:27 Peter D. Mortimer: thank you very much thank you alderman medeiros next we'll hear from president khan please yeah

▶ 1:55:31 Speaker 4: um mr chairman what we're voting on here tonight is to whether to go forward with the audit yep i can't imagine why anybody would not vote to go forward with the audit it's a good order it's a good idea uh i'm hoping that uh if this order passes uh that the audit will lead us to energy savings down the line and i am moving to recommend this order to the full board mr chairman okay we

▶ 1:55:56 Peter D. Mortimer: have a motion which is in order um to recommend this order to the full board i did have a second over here who was the trump uh second by alderman inferna um and we do have some further discussion so the motion is on the floor at this point but the discussion will continue

▶ 1:56:20 Peter D. Mortimer: the colloquy will next be will next be prosecuted by Alderman McAteer my goal

▶ 1:56:26 Mary Beth McAteer-Margolis: is gee I hope it's not that bad I have two quick questions I heard you say something about when you were doing the audit you could identify like lights that maybe we were paying for but we didn't really have or lights that were properly connected and something about double poles which used to be like like the bane of our existence in this city I don't really know where we're at with that we've kind of let that go lately that's that's a different night but we

▶ 1:56:52 Speaker 3: last week we spent a full day and have made very substantial progress with double poles although you there it's still an issue that is a piece of data

▶ 1:57:02 Speaker 7: we can collect we can get so that's what I wanted can it be an inventory of double pole during the audit yes okay that's all I want to have that is I

▶ 1:57:09 Mary Beth McAteer-Margolis: I don't need to know anymore that we can get that information and we can maybe leverage it in some positive way.

▶ 1:57:18 Speaker 12: Just one caveat. You probably have lights on about half of your poles. We're typically only auditing just the poles with lights. So if we come up with 200 double poles, could be there are many more because we've only really surveyed about half the poles, only those with lights on them.

▶ 1:57:38 Mary Beth McAteer-Margolis: if there's a pole with a light on it and another pole next with it doesn't have the light on it you're not gonna count that other pole we have more counted you have more counted okay fine okay and my other question is um we have a state road the Linfels Parkway that goes through Melrose is are the lights on

▶ 1:57:57 Speaker 7: that included the lights on the Fellsway or not I believe those are owned by the

▶ 1:57:59 Speaker 12: DCR so those would not be part of the project would not be included because

▶ 1:58:04 Mary Beth McAteer-Margolis: those are big offenders in my mind in terms of what's frequently out and not

▶ 1:58:12 Peter D. Mortimer: addressed so thank you Thank You alderman McAteer my goal is next we'll

▶ 1:58:17 Robert A. Boisselle: hear from alderman Boyce L please thank you for coming this evening question concerning you talked about the brightness of the light and so forth is the new lights considered light pollution or a second question would be does the emergency services find the yellow lights or the white lights better for them in their activities what's your experience in other communities with that especially with the light pollution and the emergency groups and so forth

▶ 1:58:50 Speaker 12: pretty much industry standard now is is what's called a full cutoff fixture so it means there's no light above the horizontal if you do a horizontal line from 20 feet in the air where the fixture is everything goes down and with the led type fixture the light is actually a lot more focused on the street and the sidewalk and some of our projects we have had complaints from residents who used to enjoy the benefit if you want to call it that of the street light lighting their private property and you're going to see a lot more focus on the street and the sidewalk because of the the optics of the fixture allow a lot more control as to where the light goes very good in terms of public safety we've we've had a in our experience a very positive reaction from police and fire because of the ability to see true colors so if there is a suspicious suspicious vehicle of some sort can tell if the vehicle is black or blue the standard color of the lights these days is, to use the technical term, is 4,000 Kelvin. Moonlight is about 4,100, so they're very similar in terms of the whiteness to moonlight. If you went to Home Depot and were looking for an LED for your kitchen, you'd probably want something a lot warmer, and I think those are about 2,700 Kelvin, the bulbs on the aisle there. So we've had, I think, very positive feedback, and in a couple of the communities, we are doing some pilot installations so that we make sure we have buy-in from interested parties. We could do that here, if you like.

▶ 2:00:36 Robert A. Boisselle: Okay, good. You talked about the control cells on top of the light and so forth. So they're basically sort of a plug that you can take out and put a new plug that will be more electronic sensitive and so forth? Correct. Yeah. in the future we could have these electronic sensors that would sort of a Wi-Fi or whatever hookup that you want that if there's no signal or no light that comes on you'll send this red dot to the map that you have that you're showing here that this light is out in the neighborhood and DPW would response

▶ 2:01:13 Speaker 12: to respond to that or who would respond if it's in the first year post installation will be us after that time that'll be a city decision if you want to have an in-house crew do that or to outsource outsourcing okay and the any

▶ 2:01:24 Robert A. Boisselle: fixtures that you find that have a problem and you replace them that's

▶ 2:01:34 Speaker 12: charged back to the city is that correct not in the first year so there's there's

▶ 2:01:37 Robert A. Boisselle: a no when you go out to do the audit and you find that there's two or three of these that are out of service period right would they replace would you guys

▶ 2:01:49 Speaker 12: replace that we would do that as part of the systematic install so we would go street to street one thing to note we're not going to identify outages in the audit because that is done during the day so the crews are walking either on foot or in a personal car so they have no idea if the light is functioning at that stage we do know if the light works when the electrician goes up in the bucket truck to install it because there is a there's a very quick test that's done when the light goes in when the photo cell is twisted on the light turns on for about 10 seconds or so so they verify that there is power from the the end grid line out to the street light pole when we find ones that don't have power national grid has given us some leeway to make those repairs as we find them if it's a repair that's somewhere underground or there's a conduit broken somewhere you know those are not going to be a fix it as we go but anything that's overhead which is probably most of your street lights we are going to address those as we go through the project and part of our audit tool the intent is to map and track the locations that don't have power or have some issue with us getting the light back on so we will provide that in map format so that the city can track

▶ 2:03:20 Robert A. Boisselle: where needed and grid's response now within the past years i know especially in ward 4 and in ward 2 new power lines have been coming through have been upgrading the city's power system and the utilities have come in and put in bigger poles almost 15 feet taller above the standard poles is that going to cause a problem in the audits no typically if if the utility company puts in

▶ 2:03:44 Speaker 12: a new pole the the city now that you own your street lights for about the last nine years you have the responsibility of having that street light moved from the old pole to the new one but usually it stays at its height if it's 20 24 feet off the ground it just moves over horizontally but that's currently something the city is responsible for and something you would continue to be responsible for regardless of what type of light you have well i mean i got comments from some of

▶ 2:04:13 Robert A. Boisselle: the residents that it seems to cover more light because it's raised it went up higher on the pole in comparison to the previous light and it just sheds more light it almost covers two poles areas and so forth instead of just that one area so just wondering that's something different that's going

▶ 2:04:35 Speaker 12: to occur we anticipate a few calls there will be some too dark or too bright all of the fixtures that we've priced have a shield option so if the city determines that the light on someone's house or property is really excessive we can put a shield on it to block the light that's going off the right-of-way okay if it's determined to be too dark have some options to either change out the fixture again these will be city decisions we can advise but ultimately it's your electric bill and and your determination as to what what the if if a resident has a legitimate issue or if really the light is as it should be thank you very much thank you mr chairman thank you

▶ 2:05:24 Peter D. Mortimer: Thank you, Alderman Boycelle. We have a motion on the floor that has been duly seconded. All in favor of a motion to recommend this order for passage at our next full board meeting, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Hearing none, this order will be recommended for passage at our next full board meeting. Thank you all for coming, and I would welcome a motion to adjourn the appropriations committee. Alderman Lavender Byrd has made a motion to adjourn the appropriations committee, duly seconded by Alderman Forbes. All in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Hearing none, the Committee on Appropriations is adjourned. Thank you, one and all.