If you're one of the three people who reads this blog regularly, you may be wondering where we've been lately. A big part of the answer is in today's paper, with Amanda Reavy's coverage of last night's utilities committee meeting. The five PURPA standards were up for consideration. Two weeks ago was the first time that CWLP's revisions to them, based on comments received, were released to the public and city council.
For the most part, we're pretty pleased. The things that we felt were the most egregious missteps--such as putting a hard limit on the size of generators for net metering, requiring ten people to start a net metering program, not actually doing anything to further increase fuel diversity--were taken care of, with one exception: smart metering.
We requested a meeting with CWLP, and Jay Bartlett and Eric Hobbe were kind enough to oblige earlier this week. We mostly made a second pitch for CWLP committing to a trial program for smart metering, which they declined for reasons that more or less make sense to us. They said that they'd be willing to extol the virtues of smart metering to city council, and state that they intended to keep working on the issue over the next several years, and could definitely revisit it in two years, all through their community meetings. We also asked for one minor change to the fuel diversity standard. CWLP included a statement that they would develop a plan to minimize reliance on one fuel source; we asked that energy efficiency be included as a route to that.
None of these changes were actually incorporated into the ordinances that city council will pass (or not pass, should something highly unexpected happen). In my comments, I asked that the committee consider incorporating those changes, and alderman Cahnman indicated that he would consider it.
So, where we're at now is: we're going to be giving alderman Cahnman some suggested language, and see it what he does with it. If he does put forward an amendment, we'll let everyone know. This is a little thing, but we feel it's important to keeping the conversation on sustainability in Springfield moving, so we're hoping people will contact their aldermen to let them know to support these amendments.
ALSO: On a personal note, I cringed pretty hard to see my quote about "deal-breakers" in Reavy's story. Not because I didn't say it, but because I said it while fumbling for words. All I meant was: we're mostly happy, and want just a couple of small changes to formalize stuff CWLP agrees to anyway.