Climate Action Committee - Regular Meeting

Good morning. Welcome to the NAPA Climate Action Committee, our regular meeting for 06/27/2025. And good morning, everyone. May I have the roll call?

Member LaMatina? Here. Member Joseph?

Here.

Member Gift? Present. Member Painter?

Here.

Member Daisy? Here. Member Reeves? Here. Member Alessio? Chair Gallagher?

Here. Alright. We are going to now move and yep.

I don't think she called my name.

Did you call Member Eisenberg? Just go ahead and say here again.

I am here in fact.

Member Eisenberg.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Alright. I apologize. You are so here. Alright. We are going to move to the Pledge of Allegiance. Jim, would you? Thank you. Alright. We are going to move now to public comment. This is public comment for anything not on today's agenda.

Is there anyone in the room who would like to make public comment? Please come forward. Hello, Ms. Benz.

Hello. Chris Bens with the NAPA Climate Now. We're excited to share with you some news about a project that has been undertaken by NAPA Recycling under the community benefit agreement terms of a grant that they received from Cal Recycle. Specifically, this project is using updated climate accounting metrics that we've spoken to many of you about. These metrics provide a more comprehensive climate inventory and footprint than conventional methods and importantly shed new light on the actual heat reduction potential of each mitigation strategy under consideration.

In order to help the user prioritize their mitigation strategies in terms of true climate efficacy, the heat reduction benefits for each strategy are calculated for near term time horizons, like 2030, 2035, 2045. As this project wraps up, NAPA Climate Now respectfully requests that the CAC put NAPA recycling and the organization conducting the analysis, SCS Global Services, on the agenda. We believe that what you learn from such a presentation will directly inform the cities and county of NAPA as you prioritize actions under the RCAP. Thank you.

Thank you very much. Thank you for letting us know about that.

Hello, everybody. Marilyn Knight Mendelson, co chair of Napa Climate Now. So, a year ago, almost to the day, I came here and urged you to consider bringing about a total ban on new gas stations in Napa County. Here I am back again today, a year later, to encourage you to do the same thing. And what I'm urging you to do is to join with each city and town in the county and a growing number of other governments in our region, including, for example, Sonoma County, to firmly state a commitment to prohibiting the establishment of new gas stations and expanding existing ones.

I know you've heard all this before from me, from NAPA Climate Now, from our wonderful students involved in climate action. And so I don't need to tell you why. You all know why. This is just another call to action. As time passes, as you know, it's vital for our community to shift towards clean energy and away from dirty fossil fuel consumption.

So we urge you to be the necessary change, to be the body that really abides by what you've committed to do and make a very strong move towards achieving net zero emissions by 2030. So not much more to say. We realize and you realize that 2030 is fast approaching and that it's time for this ban to go into force. Thank you. Thank you, Ms. Mendelson.

Good morning. Kevin Miller, City of Napa Utilities Department. I come to you with good news today of some local action that directly is related to the climate action that we hope to see, you know, think globally, act locally. We have a lot of act locally here, I've got three things I wanted to share with you. One is Feeding It Forward, the nonprofit organization that does edible food recovery reported that from Bottle Rock and La Onda, they collected over 17,000 pounds of edible food.

So that's a new record. That's 8.5 tons, which in the world of of edible food, that's not much in my world, but in edible food that's a lot of edible food that would have otherwise gone probably gone to composting, but much higher ethic obviously to go to feed humans or animals before composting. So that was one success I wanted to share. Another is I went we just got the numbers for April 2025 and I went back and compared some of the numbers to April 2021, which was the year before SB thirteen eighty three, the organic recovery law took effect. And we had two eighty one accounts at that time on our food scrap collection program.

We now have five seventy three accounts. So we've more than doubled. We've added a truck in implementing 1383 and it's really showing and then the tonnage collected on our food routes compared with the calendar year of 2021, again, the year before 1383 was in effect, we've increased it 40%. So that's about 1,800 tons. So that's real progress that you can see and touch and feel and know that we are making local progress in implementing the steps that we need to.

And then the final kind of on the same theme, the biggest hole that we identified in complying with 1383 was our multifamily. There were quite a few that didn't have any type of organics collection. In fact, we a lot of them had yard trimmings, yard waste only, but nothing for food scraps. And we identified about 128, so multifamily is five units or more service commercially and 47 of them had no organic service at all. And we've been chipping away, we know it's going to take time, but we're down to 12.

And we promised the state that we would get all of them and not surprisingly, the ones that we're down to are the hardest to get on board, so we're working hard on them. So we will fulfill that by the end of this calendar year. We have committed to the state and we will do that. I have a great specialist that's bilingual and anecdotally about 80% of the people she's outreaching to are Spanish speakers. So not only are we getting the organics and the composting message out there, we're getting and communicating with a part of our community that maybe didn't get the attention that it deserved in the past. So those are the three things. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Miller. Great update. All right, thank you. Any more in the room?

Jim Wilson, nice to be here. Good to see you all, grandfather. A couple of items. In general, We talk about the science and we talk about it until we're blue in the face. We all understand it.

We may not understand what Chris Bens and Linda Brown are talking about, but I think I do and I think Steve does. And so it's very important, I think, that we all understand what's going on and then allow that to guide our policy and our policy implementation, especially when it comes to near term heat reduction impacts. I do want to give a shout out to Melissa and Mark and Brent Cooper, thanks for being here, and their staff for what they've done with their new general plan. And the student group, Schools for Climate Action, has been working with American Canyon since their hearing in October, the Planning Commission hearing. Ultimately, what American Canyon has done is they have strengthened their general plan to include their 2030 net zero goal as a general plan policy, as a climate policy now.

And they've also strengthened their OSATs work plan. That's their open space active transportation and sustainability commission work plan to include actual climate actions from their interim climate action plan, which pretty much overlay what they have in their updated general plan and certainly correspond to what this group is considering in terms of mitigation and adaptation actions. So I want to give a shout out to Mark especially for making sure that those motions to approve the general plan and the working and the work plan included that 2030 goal as, say, a commitment to view all planning and development through that climate emergency lens. And by climate emergency lens, what I mean is the carbon budget lens. If that project causes emissions, can they be mitigated such that they are recovered by or before 2030 to basically offset them?

If no, how do we compensate for that loss and who compensates for that loss? I think we know who does and so does the Scientific American. I'd like to ask that you all take a look at this one pager. They have a one pager at the end of every monthly issue and this says exposure to extreme events by age. Heat waves, for example, if you're born in 2020, my two grandchildren had not been born in 2020, but if you were born in 2020, you'd be looking at something like 25 times the frequency, severity and length of heat waves coming in your lifetime compared to our lifetimes.

Something to think about that 25 times. Thank you very much.

Thank you, Mr. Wilson.

Okay. Do we have any I don't think we have phones for this meeting. I can't remember.

We do have public comment on Great.

Go ahead and start.

Liliana, when you're ready, you'll have three minutes.

Good morning, Climate Action Committee members. My name is Liliana Kuresh. I'm a graduated senior from Napa High School now, and I'm also an incoming freshman at Stanford as a public policy major. For the past three years, I've had the privilege of leading an amazing climate organization called Napa Schools for Climate Action. Our motto is no school should be a silent witness to climate injustice, and we take that message incredibly seriously with every project that we initiate.

Similarly, I wanna ask you to take the issue of anthropogenic pollution, which continues to increase global warming with a sense of urgency, seriousness, and dedication. The National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration or NOAA, as well as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration or NASA have both confirmed 2024 to be the hottest year on record, exceeding the pre industrial average by 2.63 degrees Fahrenheit. That being said, it's now more critical than ever before that we, as a community, shift our dependence on fossil fuel on fossil fuels to clean energy. One way to do this is to implement a countywide prohibition on the building of new gas stations and the expansion of existing ones, which is a cornerstone of our project titled Fossil Free Future that champions the goals, the goal of reaching net zero greenhouse gas emissions by or before the critical year of 2030. That being said, it's now 2025, and we're counting down the years to make the critical changes we need to reach sustainability before that decisive year of 2030, which will unleash natural disasters as well as tipping points beyond our control.

As a result, we have to take action now and not wait until our community is engulfed in flames to make strides in climate policy focused decisions. So instead of allowing new permits for gas stations to be built, we urge you to initiate the countywide prohibition on new and expanding gas stations and to simultaneously create policy decisions that provide a smooth and equitable transition to zero emission vehicles in Napa County. Napa Schools for Climate Action has grown tremendously in the past year. And as a result of our advocacy, we are grateful to say that every city and town within the county has agreed to implement prohibit prohibition language. And most recently, as a result of our advocacy, the city of American Canyon made the 2,030 net zero goal an official policy in their general plan.

Also, I want to highlight that we were named the 2024 climate champions by congressman Mike Thompson, and also we recently have received the climate justice award by by three fifty Bay Area. Today, once again, we call on the county of Napa to issue a countywide ban on new and expanding gas stations, incorporating those jurisdictions not included in cities and towns, and to innovate policy solutions to make zero emission vehicles more accessible and affordable within our community. My team and I would like to express gratitude towards your climate leadership and also wanna highlight the support we received from vice mayor, Mark Joseph, in pushing for the 2,030 goal policy within the city of American Canyon. We hope you take our message seriously and implement this ban on new and expanding gas stations without further delay. This would demonstrate powerful climate action and also set a positive precedent for other government officials.

We hope our youth advocacy inspires you all to mirror our courage, bravery, and passion for fighting for our climate. Thank you so much.

Thank you, miss Garush.

No other public comment.

Okay. All right. Thank you so much to everyone for their public comment. Okay. We are going to then move on to our consent calendar. We have one item. Is there any public comment on our consent item A approval of minutes from April 25? Okay. Seeing none None. I'll bring it back. And if I could entertain a motion to approve the consent calendar.

Move approval of the consent calendar.

All right. I have a motion by Member Reeves.

Joseph, I'll second.

And second by Member Joseph. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed or abstentions? All right. Great. Thank you. We're going to go ahead and move to our administrative items. A is the discussion and possible action on the RCAP CEQUA review and next steps. And I will turn it over to, I think, Jesse or Ryan. I'm not sure which of you. Mr. Gutierrez, thank you, and good morning to you both. And please go ahead and present the item.

Thank you. Good morning. Good morning, Climate Action Committee. Good morning, everybody here today. My name is Jesse Gutierrez.

I am a principal planner with the it's such a long name Planning, Building and Environmental Sciences Services here with Napa County. And I'm here with Ryan Melendez, and we have Eric DeCock from Ascent also on the line to help us walk through our recommendation. So today, we're going to talk about two topics related to the RCAP sequel review, which is staffs and the all jurisdiction working groups recommendation. And the next steps in reviewing the RCAP and kind of passing the baton on to the Climate Action Committee members to initiate conversations within your jurisdictions with your leadership and staff about the RCAP. And we are requesting a vote, kind of affirming our recommendation at the end of the presentation.

I also want to acknowledge before moving on the fact that we had representatives from all six jurisdictions help out with the review of the administrative draft of the RCAP. We had about 42 people with access to those documents and we have over 150 comments on the documents themselves. And during our meetings with the All Jurisdiction Working Group, we had several comments about things like readability, making the content a little more relatable to people. So, a lot of great comments, a lot of different perspectives and I think that's what we really wanted and needed because, yeah, our staff group is limited in terms of understanding every jurisdiction's needs and goals. So getting this working group together has been a real big boost in terms of making sure that we have a solid R CAP.

Okay. So the R CAP sequel review, we've talked about it in the past and the All Jurisdiction Working Group has met several times over the last couple of months to both talk about the administrative draft but also talk about SEQA review and how the R CAP will impact the environment, right, and the measures within that the RCAP and how they kind of function and what we really need in terms of finding out, yeah, environmental impacts. City managers and kind of higher level staff have also had their conversations about the RCAP and about secret review. And on June 13, the working group was invited to a city manager's meeting to kind of have a larger conversation about that. And at that meeting, we kind of all agreed that an initial study of the R CAP was a reasonable first step in understanding how the measures in the R CAP impact the environment.

So that's our recommendation that we're putting forth today. We do have Eric DeCock from Ascent Environmental here to kind of give an overview of the initial studymitigated negative declaration, which is kind of what we're shooting for. And just for your information, this particular pathway, the ISMND, would cost about $130,000 which is within the budget that we had agreed upon in April. It's a much kind of smaller scale review than the full But I'll have Eric, who's on the line, kind of talk more about the initial study and what that means.

Eric, are you there? Yes. I

am. Can everybody hear me?

Yes. We

can. Thank you. Go

ahead. Great.

Awesome. Well, good morning, chair of members of the committee. Eric Decock, project manager for the Napa County Regional Climate Action and Adaptation Plan. Ascend is the lead consultant. I'm the project manager.

It's nice to see you all again. Just quickly about the initial study. You know, this was an approach that was identified in our CEQA approach memorandum that you all reviewed and discussed in your February meeting, and we're back here today to support staff's recommendation, on this first step in the environmental review process. We believe this is a reasonable approach, and it's a common first step, of course, in environmental review for proposed projects that do require some level of environmental review. We would, of course, prepare this initial study, you know, in accordance with the standard environmental check list in the CEQA guidelines, appendix g.

Some of you may be familiar, with those terms. But, of course, the initial study does provide for some level of analysis of potential environmental effects And if any proposed effects are determined to be potentially significant, through the initial study, you can identify potentially feasible mitigation to reduce those effects to a level that's less than significant. Now an initial study does give the lead agency, of course, some flexibility in the ultimate environmental determination that needs to be made and the type of final document that does need to prepare. So, you know, there's always three really typical pathways for what happens after you complete an initial study. The lead agency can choose to prepare what's called a negative declaration in which no potentially significant effects are found per the study findings.

In the event that potentially significant effects are identified and mitigation measures are identified that feasibly reduce those effects to less than significant, the lead agency can, of course, issue what's called a mitigated negative declaration or a mitigated NICDEC. The third pathway could be a focused EIR. Of course, this only really happens when mitigation is either not available, infeasible, or the effectiveness of that mitigation is uncertain or unclear, or the magnitude of potential effects is so large that further study is really needed through more of a formal environmental impact report or EIR process. This an initial study mitigated the negative declaration option is staff's recommendation today. And just quickly before I close, I'll just kinda go over some of the advantage and advantages and disadvantages of this option.

Clearly, as stated in your staff report, it is a quicker option. It's about a six to nine month total schedule versus an ER option, which takes quite a bit longer, about twelve or more months, for a focused EIR. Of course, the initial study is a lower cost option, and it is more of an incremental approach and gives the lead agencies some flexibility, excuse me, here on what sort of environmental determine you ultimately do decide to make, as the lead agency. A disadvantage, of course, with an initial study negative declaration is the potential legal risk. There is the fair argument standard legal context that does apply, and it sets a fairly low bar for legal challenges in the court directing a lead agency to go ahead and prepare an EIR if a legal challenge does prevail in court.

So that obviously is always a potential concern for any time a lead agency does prepare an initial study and decides to use a neg deck or a mitigated neg deck option. The other disadvantage that could end up being the most times intensive option overall if the ultimate conclusion following an initial study is that an EIR is ultimately required. So you've lost six to nine months of time, and then you have to do another nine to, you know, eighteen month process on top of that. So it can take more time and overall increase project management costs, but of course, we've discussed this with staff and they believe it's still prudent to proceed with the initial study option. So that really concludes my remarks today and happy to answer any questions. Thank you.

Thank you so much. I will check for public comment first.

Chair?

Yeah.

I still have a second portion of the That's fine.

We'll just go ahead and move on, and then we'll go ahead and do questions. Does anyone have any questions immediately for the presenter?

Yes. He'll be around at the end, too, so we can all

Great. Answer Then we'll wait to do questions. Thank you. Mr. Gutierrez, go

ahead. Thank you. And thank you, Eric. Yes, Eric will be around. He'll stick around so we can ask questions at the end.

But another important piece of our presentation and our discussions have been kind of bringing the RCAP and all the information that we've been discussing back down to the jurisdiction specific level. So what that would mean is that city and town management, municipal leadership, municipal department staff will work with CAC members to better understand how the RCAP will impact their jurisdiction, how the measures and actions in the RCAP line up with each jurisdiction's goals and priorities, and kind of understand the level of resources and commitments that will be required to move forward with implementation. We feel, as an all jurisdiction working group and then having talked to the city managers, that it's imperative to really understand how each jurisdiction plans to work within the jurisdiction but also regionally to move the RCAP forward and to implement the actions and measures that are found within that plan. So, the goal is to take a break from having these CAC meetings to kind of make sure that those discussions are taking place. And we're here to support if you need our help.

Eric and the center are also available. They were scheduled to have one meeting per jurisdiction during the adoption phase, but it seems like maybe some jurisdictions might need to have them available earlier for this first conversation to kind of help out in terms of getting everyone within the jurisdictions to understand what the RCAP and what the RCAP means for each jurisdiction. So, CAC members really are the champions of the RCAP. You've been through most of you have been from, you know, the beginning of the birth of what the RCAP is meant to be, and we hope that CAC members will be able to provide the history and the context of how the RCAP has been developed to municipal management staff and leadership. They might not have been as involved to date, so we're hoping that you can kind of share your background and your information with them to get everyone kind of on board or at least understand how we got to where we are today.

The subject matter experts would be your staff, but also your kind of subject matter experts yourself on the kind of process in terms of the RCAP and how we've gotten here today. If there is feedback and need for refinements to the measures or actions that come through come out from these conversations, we'd like to come back in September and have you all present those that feedback or those conversations or have staff come back and present some of those kind of takeaways from these conversations. So, yes, so July, hopefully, getting these conversations going. The public draft of the R CAP is expected to be available in August. So come August, everyone would be able to see the public draft of the RCAP.

We will have it on the website for people to comment. There will be a thirty day comment period that's open to the public. So anyone can comment on the RCAP itself, that document itself. And in August, we're also hoping that jurisdictions will themselves, you know, provide opportunities for public engagement. Since you know your constituents, you know who you need to talk to within your own jurisdiction, August is a good time to have the actual RCAP public draft there to share with people.

The county had planned and is planning on holding two events for anyone and everyone in the county is invited. They will be on Wednesday, August 20 at the Yountville Community Center from six to eight, and Thursday, August 21 in American Canyon Public Library from 05:30 to 07:30. So we still have those scheduled, but there is an opportunity for each jurisdiction, if they want to, to hold their own type of, you know, smaller community engagement type open house if they want to. So we will have materials. We will share those with everyone because that's what us sent and our sub consultant, NAPA RCD, is working on those as we speak so we can have ways to communicate with the public.

So as far as the CAC staff, what are we going to do in the meantime is we will be working with Ascent to continue to develop the public draft. We're going to review the screen check draft. The screen check draft is the next phase where we will be incorporating all the comments that we heard from the review of the admin draft. So, staff will be working to kind of get that one done, so we can get the public draft done by early August. We will also direct, obviously, a cent to get started on the initial study, obviously, a positive vote today from you all.

We'll post the public draft on the website. We'll monitor and promote having the thirty day public comment on there and then post those two open houses that I mentioned. And just as a reminder, the RCAP webpage currently does have supporting documents, which are the building blocks of the RCAP, including the GHE reduction measures, adaptation measures, the vulnerability assessment. They're all there. They're kind of in memo format or spreadsheet format, so they're, you know, a little denser and harder to read through, but they're there.

If you really wanted to engage and read through those measures and talk to them with your jurisdictional staff, they're there. And once the public draft is available in August, that draft will be up on the website as well. And I believe you can comment on the actual draft, like, when you're reading it, you can do comment bubbles on there. So everyone's gonna be able to do that. And, again, we're here to support any of these functions, so just let us know if you need our our help. And with that, I'll wrap it up.

Thank you. I'm going to go to public comment before questions from the members. Do you have any public comment on this item? Please come up.

Chris Benz, NAPA Climate Now, it's so exciting to see this move ahead. And actually, one of the measures in the RCAP is a ban on new and expanded fossil fuel stations. So, that should be coming everybody's way who doesn't have it already. One of the things that I would also like to offer is the support of NAPA Climate Now when you present to your councils. And people on the councils may be unaware, but so many of the measures in the RCAP are in process now. You're already doing it. So, we're happy to let people know, Yay, good job! And give support for that. Thank you.

Thank you, Chris.

Thank you, Chair, members, staff. One thing we didn't hear just now that I read in the staff report is the amount of time required for these options. For the ISMND, we're talking about nine months. So this puts us in next year. And that's why it's important, I think, to be doing what we need to be doing and can do right now. The EIR takes eighteen months. I think it will take longer. I think we spent something like $1,000,000 back in 2016, 2017, Brian can tell us, I think, for the county's EIR. And so these things take time and money. Recent experience in American Canyon.

We've had a couple of years' worth of climate actions on hold. I say on hold according to the youth commissioners who've gone before OSAT's commission and the city council talking about how to get those hold and into implementation. And so I like to think to Calistoga's Green Committee. We in Navajo Climate Now don't go to too many of those meetings, but we do watch in and we are in contact with a number of your members. And we remember that when you commissioned that or recommissioned the Green Committee back in 2021, it was to drive the awkward conversation around climate action.

And so it's been awkward and it's been hard, but you guys do a pretty good job of doing hard work. And we'd like to see that happen in American Canyon, drive the conversation, the awkward conversation and the hard decisions around actually making a difference now, not later. Bill McKibbin, founder of 350.org says, If it's wrong to wreck the climate, is it right to profit from the wreckage? Number one. And that is something that we remember as developers.

Is it right to profit from the wreckage? The other thing he says is winning slowly is the same as losing. And we know that. And so let's get up and like Chris says a minute ago, we know what to do, but we have to do it fast. Thank you.

Thank you, Jim. Anyone else in the room? Anyone on the phone?

We do have public comment on the phone. Okay, great.

Thank you.

Mr. Graves, when you're ready, you'll have three minutes.

David, are you there?

Mister Graves?

Hello? David? Are you there? Well, that's okay. We can come back. If you get him on the line, please let me know, and we'll come back. Okay. So we're gonna bring it back right now to the members and see if we have some discussion, questions. Anybody like to get started? Just raise your hand. Okay. Yes. Member painter. Please go ahead.

I guess I should get

there's is it gonna be mics? Sorry. Yeah. Please share mics.

I know it's tough. We're sharing.

I know you're stereo.

No. Oh, don't wanna be stereo. I think this, first of all, is a really solid approach. We had this conversation back in February where we talked about how do we make a decision to move ahead on a sequel review when we're not really sure what the actual project is. Now we have a plan and a path for what that actual project is.

We have a path for what the communication will be with each of jurisdictions. So I just think this makes all the sense in the world. Am very supportive. Couple of minor questions. The first is, and I am happy to try to support moving on the initial study now ASAP, but it seems to me that the real meat of the work or the bulk of the work doesn't happen until we get that draft of the R CAP. So just can you verify that, that if we move this forward, we're intending that the initial study would really be done once that draft is available in August?

I think we're hoping to have the initial study start right away and kind of work concurrently. There is no major changes to the RCAP plan. The public draft is really just the kind of fully shined up version. It's all done altogether, all packaged. This is what we've done.

Administrative draft that we reviewed with the jurisdiction working group and with the 42 people that we shared the draft with is basically the RCAP. These next two kind of iterations are just the final tweaks, changing pictures out or, you know, fixing specific language. But really, it's it's kind of it's already done. So by the time the public gets to see the RCAP, it's the same version that we have now, just better and shinier. So our hope is to kind of get going.

And I understand that, but I kind of respectfully a little bit disagree because you're asking us to go back to each of our jurisdictions and give everybody the opportunity to comment on the draft. So if that's in earnest what we're doing, I think we need to allow our fellow council members and supervisors to actually do that. Will they say much or do much? We don't know. We think maybe there could be some beneficial additions. But I just want to make sure that we follow that process so that the initial study will be tied to whatever the final draft is that comes out in August.

Yeah. See Brian coming up, and I think he might have Sorry, Brian. Some

Brian, you know, with Some insight. Gene's Friday, and he didn't plan on speaking, but

feeling old, tweaked my knee and pickleball. No business playing that. No business. All So, great comments. And, yeah, the intent is to run them concurrently. There is the possibility of there being some tweaks and additions. We're not anticipating them significant to have an impact from a CEQA perspective. If anything, there will likely be measures taken away or moreover maybe even added, in which case it would only serve to bolster the CEQA analysis and push us more closer to less than significant impacts if we are looking to strengthen it further.

Yeah, and I agree with that. I just want to make sure as we go back to our jurisdictions and say here is what we are asking you to do, that we're clear that we're asking for them to read and review and comment and that it's not this is what's completed and all you can do is sub out a picture here and there.

No, by all, the ink is not dry. Yeah. The idea is to provide an opportunity for each jurisdiction and their constituents to provide input, but also receive input from the elected We will combine all of those, take a look and see to what extent it modifies the substance of the RCAP, and then of course we'll make the corresponding changes to the sequel document.

Perfect.

And I think the intent is to bring that package We don't have a solid date on that because we did not get to the point of getting time commitments from all the respective jurisdictions as to when they would be bringing this back to their leadership. But we do anticipate that to occur between August and September, and the hope is that we come back in October.

Okay, great. And so that leads to my second question, which is when you come back, you'll have that recommendation of proceeding with an MND versus the programmatic EIR or anything else included in that package?

Yes. We will let the CAC know if the result of those outreach meetings caused a change in our CEQA path

for Perfect. Perfect.

Okay. No, I think I really think this is a great approach. I think that gives us the tools to go back to our jurisdictions and get review and education and buy in and all of that. But I think we also need to just that's why I wanted to ask about what we are presenting. I am not suggesting that we want to make big changes, but I just want if we are asking people to comment, then we honestly want to take their comment. Thank you.

Yes. Thank you. Really good point. Thanks, Brian. And Member Joseph?

Yes. I would also agree with the approach we are taking or proposing. But I'd like to ask some process questions. Number one, after we've gone through the exercise of final revisions to the draft document itself, we review the initial study, we vote at the CAC level to approve that? Or does each jurisdiction have to formally adopt the RCAP and environmental review?

My understanding of the action along those lines is that each jurisdiction would individually adopt the RCAP. They would all rely on the CEQA document that was prepared in support of that action.

Okay, good. That makes sense. Then for me, I think it's important that we commit these next two months to taking advantage of a sense offer to kind of show up at one of our meetings to kind of clarify what the R CAP is, just in case we don't get a chance to read the entire document. Sometimes it helps to have a presentation. So I think this approach is great.

I'm supportive and I'm assuming the costs in part reflect those that outreach that Ascent will be doing with each of the jurisdictions as well as the analysis and so forth? So have we kind of did any kind of critical review on the cost estimate?

I believe and Eric can speak to this to the extent that I fall short. This was already contemplated in the scope of work. It was just to occur later, more closer to adoption. So essentially, we're shifting those forward. In the event that we still feel additional support is needed from ASCENT, we may need to do some modifications to the scope to do it one more time. But the hope is that it's not necessary. But I guess we'll cross that bridge when we get there.

Perfect. Well, thank you very much.

Okay. Thank you. Member Reeves?

I also concur that this is a great approach. The initial study allows us to more customize what we actually get as a result. There's always that push me, pull you thing about timing because at one point we want to go fast and actually accomplish some actions. But it seems like once we get the draft, all of the jurisdictions have kind of had time to review what mitigations might be necessary, and we could start working on those anyway. So as staff is going to be working concurrently, maybe the jurisdictions could also be working concurrently.

And I hope, maybe this is a question actually, that the projected time frames of July and August for review and comments is actually doable in the summer vacation kind of mode. So that would be a concern about whether that's realistic.

Yeah, I had some similar thoughts when I heard Jesse mention the thirty day. I think it would make all the sense in the world to take a closer look at that thirty days and maybe have it more mirror what we're looking to be doing over the next couple of months. So maybe it's sixty days. There's no sense in closing it sooner as opposed to later, particularly if jurisdictions are having these and technically the comment period is closed, it wouldn't make any sense. So we'll take a closer look at that and maybe it's something more extensive, sixty days or so, give or take, but I think I can get in touch with all the city managers and see what makes sense to them.

Yeah. I know some cities are having a summer recess, and the board is sort of having that for the first time. I think we don't meet again until July 22. So we probably do need to check to see when people are actually having meetings. So it sounds like it might be more toward August.

Yeah. Like thirty days is the standard through the CEQA guidelines. There's no reason why we couldn't do it longer. And that's a good point. We're all sitting in neutral for most of July and that eats up half of the thirty days.

Exactly. It's going make much sense. Right.

So we'll take a look at that and make a good decision along those lines. Okay.

Great. Over here. Vice Chair Eisenberg.

Thank you. I still want some clarification on process. So it goes this draft will be prepared. It goes to the jurisdictions. The jurisdictions may have comment.

It'll come back. Then you would do there would be an additional draft that incorporates the comments or what do the comp what impact do the comments have on what finally is going to be adopted and will that final adoption be something that comes back to the CAC or is this just, no, here it is, your comments, you just adjust them as you wish.

Yeah. This may be a good question for Eric in terms of the different drafts.

Yeah. I can give you my thoughts.

Yeah. Sure. Thanks, Jesse. To the question, we are planning to release this public draft climate action plan for review by everybody, by staff, by the public, elected officials. Everyone gets a chance to do this review.

Once that comment period is closed and any hearings or input has been received from staff, from elected officials, from hearing bodies, we will take all of that input and begin preparing what's called an administrative final draft for staff review, and that'll probably happen later in the fall, early winter time frame. And once we have that final plan ready and staff has reviewed that, feel it's responsive to all the comments and direction, we will issue a final plan for adoption probably sometime in the 2026. And at that time, the initial study process will have played out and staff will have seen an administrative draft and initial study. Everything should be ready for public hearings and adoption.

Okay. And then one more question or maybe one and a half. So one, I totally appreciate the shout out to the Calistoga Green Committee, and relevant to that is many, many months ago, our Green Committee reviewed the draft, made a series of comments. It then went to our city council. Our city council then endorsed the comments made by our green committee, and then it came back here.

So was was any of that any of those comments included in the draft that's being prepared or is it just part of the collection of comments? And if and will our council then be reproducing the efforts we made to make it part of the public comments? And we would, of course, include more public comment from our our our residents.

I believe those the Green Committee from Calistoga comments were incorporated into this draft. But, yeah, as as mentioned, the public draft will be available for all to review including the Calistoga Committee again. So if they have additional comments, they can comment.

Okay. Thank you.

Member Alessio? Thank you.

I'm excited in the sense that we're making progress. It just feels like we've been doing reports since we started Climate Action. It's constant studies and reports, but we're getting closer to having something that'll be finalized, that can be implemented and be supported by all our jurisdictions in terms of knowing the due diligence through this report that we'll provide and hopefully provide clarity for jurisdictions, along with those who have projects and who want to bring these projects to our communities. I would like to ask, because sometimes between Climate Action Committee, CAC, and the actual councils or boards, there's a miss in terms of getting this information over. Can we ask staff to work with the jurisdictions to have this item agendized for each board or council?

So therefore, it's presented to everybody on the council and everybody on the board to get some leveling for everybody that needs to be involved in that outreach.

Yeah, I believe we can provide that support.

Absolutely. I think each jurisdiction, it's up to them as to how they want to do it, although at the same time, presenting something like this to a council or board is pretty straightforward in terms of the outreach. RCD, I believe, is gonna be helping out the city. We may also use RCD for support along those lines, but Ascent is on the ready, as is the county staff, to provide support to all the jurisdictions in their presentations to their respective leadership.

I just have you know, we've been at this for a while on here, and I have just seen that if the I I just I feel like there's been a gap there. And that's why I think it needs to be on the agendas to help support each of the representatives here for those councils and the board to have a presentation. Just a quick one, informational, so they can ask and they can be more well informed. It can be part of the it's it's just it's documented. It provides more public comment. And I just think it's gonna help with the outreach and getting everybody informed on this by jurisdiction. So I think it would be a helpful step of the process.

Yes. I fully anticipate that. And Ryan and Jesse, can you remind us when the two I believe there's two outreach meetings scheduled outside of councils and boards. Yeah,

the August 20 and August 21.

And one's in American Canyon and Okay. Others in Yalville,

Thank And I think, you know, we expect that everyone who is on the CAC will be having conversations with their city manager and relevant staff to make sure it does get agendized, but then we can have sort of the extra help from our staff to make sure that gets done. So that will just be dealing with timing in the summer and all of that. Is anyone yeah, Member Giff.

Thank you so much, and thank you very much to staff for all of your time on this and for working with our staff in our cities. We know we recently had a meeting with our city manager and and other people in our staff. I have two items here. One is as part of the allocation of funds, is the EIR part of those funds? Has that already been put into the budget?

The CAC budget was approved in April. We put a placeholder on the for $400,000 for the CEQUA environmental review.

Okay.

So we're not moving forward with the PEIR, but this ISMND and that that takes the place of the placeholder

Okay.

For that 130,000 instead of the 400,000 for Okay.

And so I guess my next item, and I'm kind of backing the truck up here a little bit, but I do have broader concerns for what mechanisms are in place to ensure genuine collaboration across our jurisdiction, rather than kind of defaulting to each individual jurisdiction and then the county taking the lead. You know, any of us could essentially drop out at any point. So I would like to continue to express something that supervisor Alessio had previously brought up is exploring whether we wanna transition from a joint powers of of agreement to a joint powers of authority to really better support the long term implementation and accountability of this R CAP. And I I I really feel that this would provide some sort of centralized governing structure and really make these binding decisions. You know, that said, again, not to put before the horse, I know that some JPAs, they have, like, a one jurisdiction, one vote, and others are are based on equal representation based on population.

So we would have to be thoughtful in that process if we took that step. But I think at a minimum, would like to possibly request maybe now is not the time for us to agendize this item as a future discussion to possibly move to a JPA.

Yeah. Thank you very much for that comment. I think that that's definitely a discussion we should have. We've talked about the fact that we need to have that discussion, but you're right. We should agendize that. Anybody else? I think I just want to make sure everyone understands that, no one is waiting to do anything until the RCAP is finalized. I think, as Ms. Benz pointed out, all of the jurisdictions are taking action and they will continue to take action. And I don't believe anybody is waiting to take action on climate issues and reducing GHGs and all of the other really important activities.

No one's waiting for the R CAP to be adopted. We are all moving forward, and we'll continue to do so, continue to talk about ways to do that across the county. So just so people understand that it's not like everything's at a halt until the R CAP is finalized. This is all a parallel process.

Yeah. And I believe both Ryan and Jesse have been maintaining a spot on the county's website that kinda outlines all the things that have been done both by this body and the county in case anybody's interested in that.

Thank you. Any other questions, comments? I believe we need to take a vote to proceed with the initial study. Is that basically the

Yeah, basically just accept

staff's Staff's recommendation recommendation to to Do I have anyone like to make a motion?

I'll move move staff's recommendation and proceed. I'll second.

Okay. Thank you. Motion by Alessio, second by Reeves. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed or abstentions? All right. Great. Thank you so much. And we look forward to moving forward as quickly as possible. All right. We're going to go ahead and move on to our next presentation, which is an introduction to the Calistoga Resiliency Center. Really excited to hear this. I believe we have someone queued up who's going to do a project overview for us. Is that going to be by Zoom?

Yeah. Craig Horn is supposed to do the presentation. I don't see him in the audience yet. I'm not sure if

Is someone on Zoom?

Repeat his name one more time.

Craig He's

not on Zoom.

He's not on Zoom.

Okay. Do we want staff or can I turn it over to Vice Chair Eisenberg? I think he was expecting Mr. Horn to present.

Yes. And Oh,

I think in your email you've got I'm just looking at it. It said 10:50 to 11:00.

Why don't we give Mr. Horn a call?

I I can do that.

Okay. Thank you. If you could do that, that would be great. So maybe we could just go ahead and go through the rest of the agenda if he's planning to be here in a few minutes. And maybe we can get him sooner if he's available, that would be great. And thank you, Member Gift, for doing that. Okay. Why don't we go ahead and go to reports and announcements? So do we have anything or comments from anyone? Mark, are you making a

No. No? I'm thinking of future agenda items.

Yes. I was thinking about that, too. Did you want to start with that?

I'll start.

That's the next item. Sorry. I forgot we had that. I thought it was combined into that. Well, me just see. It doesn't look like there's any comments. Okay. We're going to move to future agenda items. So Member Joseph, why don't you go ahead and start?

So in addition to considering a new structure for the CAC, I'd also, I think, probably repeat my call for having a presentation on the heat reduction efforts that Linda Brown and Chris Benz have been talking about. I was going to suggest something close to heresy by saying as long as we are skipping the next two meetings, maybe we have one of those that could be on that subject. But I think I will just advocate that we ought to have a presentation on it as soon as practical.

Okay, thank you. Yes, I also wanted to recommend that we have a presentation from Napa Recycling in concert with the now I can't remember Linda's name of her company. Brown. That we have that presentation and do that when we can. It looks like we're going to not we're not really sure with the archive if that's going to be a September or October presentation.

So when we know, let's try to go ahead and get maybe one of those on the agenda. We have an agenda planning session right after this, so we'll talk about that. Also, I do want to have a deeper dive possibly into the implementation of 1383. As Mr. Miller was describing, it sounds like they're making great progress.

But I also wanted to hear more about the part of the legislation that is to do food recovery at hospitals, restaurants and hotels that are of a certain size, certain threshold because in addition to the climate issues around this, we're facing some real need in terms of food security. And it's not looking great on the federal level in terms of funding for safety net and especially food. And so wanting to really we have to get creative about how we're going to feed people, frankly. And this legislation enables us to do more around making sure we feed our communities. So we'd like to know more about how that piece is being implemented or how that is going.

And then also, I do an update on the EV plan. I do agree that we should have the discussion on the JPA. And then I was wondering if, Mr. Melendez, you could give us an update or just make some comments about the gas station ban on the county side because we have been having those conversations. And I honestly can't recall where we are on those, but I know we need to have more conversation around the Lake Berryessa area and actually who has jurisdiction in terms of BLM versus whomever.

So I don't know if you can make a anyway, let me look to see if anybody else has any future agenda items, and then we'll come back to you. Yes, Member Painter. Yes. Thank

you. Yes, those are all great items. I have a couple to add to the list. The first is as a director on the board of MCE and Supervisor Alessio is also a director, there is a lot of work that's happening that I want all of our communities to really understand in terms of potential programs that could be brought to their communities, monies that are available, what's happening. Sometimes, know, we all get so busy, it's hard to know what's what.

So I'm hoping that MCE can come and give us more information about some of the tools and resources that are available in our communities. And then secondly, sort of on that front, just to let the CAC know, I have been working a little bit with MCE to talk about a green workforce training program. So if anyone is interested in that or wants to know more about sort of what framework is being said, don't hesitate to contact me. Nothing to necessarily share yet, but I think it's something that we really want to think about as you look at implementation of all this work that we are doing around the RCAP. We need to know that we have a trained workforce to carry out the efforts that we want to do starting, very quickly with or without the air cap with things like heat pump water heaters and then various other things that are maybe more residential related, also commercial.

And then lastly, maybe more of not so much on our agenda, bit of an announcement, so am backtracking, but we are doubling up on this item. To let the committee know, we are talking about the climate summit already for probably March 2026. And the focus area for that summit will be around resiliency and we are going to be talking we are in the process of creating an agenda and talking about what to discuss, but there is some really great work going on particularly with Firewise. And we may want to get up to speed with the work they are doing that is very much, you know, fire prevention related, but it also has a lot to do with climate resiliency. So stay tuned on that.

Great. Thank you so much. Amber Gibb?

I was just going to request a

short

recess. Doctor. Horn is just a few minutes away. He was just aiming there at 10:50.

Okay. Great. So do we have actually, Ryan, can you speak on the gas?

Sure. Yeah. I can speak both on the gas station ban update and on the a quick update on the EV plan, and we can agenda as a full presentation later. But, for the gas station ban, I have drafted language, but, we are, I I believe, potentially waiting on full direction from the board full board of supervisors to move forward forward with that as it was only discussed with not a quorum. So to fully move forward, I I've started drafting language and pulled a lot of that language from Sonoma County's ordinance. Okay. But, yeah, waiting. Okay. We'll direct it.

Think it sounds like, yeah, one of us needs to say, we want to agendize

it. Okay.

We're at that point. Okay. Good.

And still considering the exception, especially with the improvement district with Lake Berryessa to ensure an equitable development up at the at the lake in that area. So and then for the EV plan, we have utilized the tool that was developed by our consultant, Ari, with UC Berkeley's Center for Law, Energy, and Environment. And I have a list. We've developed a list of third or 12 sites, three in Calistoga, five or six in American Canyon, and two within the county county's jurisdiction for that are publicly owned that we are looking to move forward with an MCE free technical assistance program to help scope those out. And if, you know, we've we've chosen those sites specifically with kind of environmental justice, equity in mind, as well as ensuring that there's ample capacity to install several chargers.

And if, you know, if we move forward with with implementing those, it could be about a 120 level two chargers and about 20 level three. That said, don't know where funding for those is coming yet, but at least to scope them out, we are moving forward with a joint application for those sites.

Great. Thank you. Thanks for the update. Okay. What do you think in terms of a sit 10:50?

Like 10:45?

Okay. Well, let's go ahead and take a ten minute recess for comfort break, and we will come back at 10:50. All right. Thank you, everyone. Thank you for your patience.

Okay. Are

back from our recess. We're going to go ahead and get started again. And we're going to welcome Craig Horn, who is going to present for us on the Energy Vault on the Calistoga Resiliency Center. So we're super excited to hear from you, Mr. Horn, Doctor. Horn.

Yes.

And tell us a little bit about yourself and please go ahead with your presentation.

Well, thank you. I appreciate the committee inviting me here today to tell you about this exciting project. I know some of you have had an opportunity to see the project firsthand and I'd like to invite others who have not had a chance to come up and see it to let me know and be happy to give you a tour here at some point in the coming months. So yes, my name is Craig Horn. I'm the Senior Vice President of Advanced Energy Solutions at Energy Vault.

Energy Vault is a New York Stock Exchange listed company. We provide energy solutions to the power industry. And the project I'm here to talk to you about today is a project that we are in the last stages of building and commissioning. It's really the building part is over. We're in the commissioning phase right now. And we will own and operate this facility as a subsidiary entity and we're under contract Pacific Gas and Electric for resiliency services. So let's see if I get the clicker going here. Whoops. It's the the red button or oh, the red.

Okay. No. The one to the right.

There we go. Okay. So the background of this is something I'm sure everybody in this room is familiar with, the public safety power shutdowns. These are planned events where transmission lines are de energized to help mitigate the chances of wildfire during certain conditions which would be very dry vegetation, low humidity and high winds. They are quite intrusive to everyone's lifestyle and as you see in the chart here, some data from PG and E from their outages in the twenty nineteen fire season, they can persist for pretty extended periods of time.

So as a solution PG and E through the Calistoga and other places brought in diesel gensets or temporary generation to supply communities with power. This was part of a process that started in the late teens with the California Public Utility Commission. It's called the microgrids proceeding in that it authorized the public utilities to be able to bring temporary generation in to mitigate the impacts of PSPS events. And part of resolution was to try pilot projects. It was recognized that diesel gensets though having some unpopular characteristics were really the only viable solution for these extended period high power shutdowns.

But new technologies were on the horizon and so part of the mandate from the PUC was to have the utilities do pilot projects for that. I got to say no PG and E takes it on the chin up here for various reasons, but they have been pioneering. They are the only public utility that did have followed through with a clean microgrid procurement, which again they went through and got authorized by the PUC for the RFP that Energy Vault ultimately won, where we proposed a solution I'll talk to you about here in a second. But I do want to recognize that PG and E has tried to push forward. And for utilities, it's tough.

They're trying to innovate, but also keep the lights on, right? Nobody ever congratulates them at the end of the day for keeping your lights on, thank you. But as soon as the lights go off, they hear about it, right? So it's demanding industry and with a high degree of vulnerability because of some of the hazards evolve. But they tried their best with Calistoga was the target for this procurement with PG and E for a couple of different reasons.

Number one, they had a high frequency of outages with also a very long duration. The other thing, the community was very supportive of having alternate solutions available or trying those out. And also one of the more important aspects is the city had a parcel of land available for lease nearby where the project could interconnect and basically be a plug. And so if you're talking about a facility that's going to power an entire community, you're talking about a tremendous amount of power, right? So just plugging that into the grid really takes some consideration and planning.

You just can't necessarily do that at any spot within a location. So those are really the reasons where Calistoga was selected. And for the other thing was is the temporary generation occupied the city dog park for six months out of the year, so people didn't really like that. And you could see the video that played there was the diesel gensets running that was taken from a resident across the field from the gensets. So the solution that Energy Vault proposed in Wahgnat was a clean fuel cell battery hybrid generation station where the fuel cells will be powered by or energized by liquid hydrogen.

Liquid hydrogen is the reactant that feeds the fuel cells, so hydrogen then reacts with oxygen in the air to form water and electricity. So it's a zero point source emission facility and any of the carbon intensity comes from at the point of production for the hydrogen. Now we don't make hydrogen at the site, there's not enough land and from because the amount of hydrogen we actually use in a year is actually pretty small because this is a backup facility. We get it from third parties that produce it at other locations. That gives us also versatility.

We use liquid hydrogen. So the other form is of course gaseous hydrogen. Hydrogen is a gas at room temperature. But if you chill it down to 20 degrees above absolute zero or minus four twenty three degrees Fahrenheit, it becomes a liquid. So it's the second coldest substance on planet earth outside of liquid helium, which is four ks, four Kelvin.

So it's quite takes a there's specialty protocols and engineering processes and handling liquid hydrogen. These have been in use for decades in the aerospace and oil and gas industries and transportation industries. So we're really following on the backs of that and employing it here. So for the storage on the site, we're rated at 8.5 megawatt peak. So that's a projected peak demand for the city and the microgrid area at the end of the ten year contract.

So we're talking about 2032, 2033 or 2034, I guess, my math right there. And so we needed to have enough energy for that. So over a 48 period, the demand would be forecasted at two ninety three megawatt hours. So doing the math resulted in this very is red the pointer? Is there a pointer? Okay. So you could see the very long tank there with the green dot. So I think maybe folks had read about that last August came up through Napa here into Calistoga. So that's an 80,000 gallon liquid hydrogen tank supplied by Chart Industries. They've been making these cryogenic vessels since the 1960s.

NASA in fact has liquid hydrogen tanks that have been in use since the Launch Complex 39B since the mid 60s for the Apollo program and it's still in use today. So these are very durable, long lasting, well known technology. Chart Industries built that tank in their Minnesota facility and had it trucked out. For the fuel cell generation for using the hydrogen, we partnered with Plug Power and purchased six of their GS1540 units. So these are very high power units that are using kind of core technology that they've developed and used in their material handling business for over a decade and then integrated it into these very nice high power density units, which is very important because the size of the parcel is pretty small.

It's about two thirds of an acre. And so footprint is very important. So that was a very much an enabling product to be able to get eight megawatts of capacity in that site from fuel cells. And so there's the six purple dots show the fuel cell units. And then we have for the battery side, we have our B Vault battery units.

We have four of those. So each unit has an equivalent of about 30 electric pickup truck battery packs. So essentially you think of 120 Rivians or F-150s there at the site, that's the battery capacity there. And then controlling all these different elements and interacting with the grid is our proprietary Vault OS hybrid energy management systemmicrogrid controller. And so that is an EMS system that's been participating with another project in the California market for three years now as well as projects in Texas and forthcoming in Australia.

So it's a well proven unit that's really the brains of the overall facility here. So down at the bottom you kind of see a small functional diagram of the facility. So we have the liquid hydrogen goes into vaporizers, so those tall columns next to the tank. Those basically bring in heat from the ambient and convert liquid hydrogen into gaseous hydrogen. It doesn't take a lot of heat given the boiling point of hydrogen, but you're talking about a large volume flow.

So the gaseous hydrogen then goes into the fuel cells and so that provides basically the steady base power. What the batteries are therefore is to take any of the changes in load till where the load stabilizes to a new level and then hands back off to the fuel cells. That allows the fuel cells to run at maximum efficiency. So the batteries are also there at the beginning of an event, so they do what's called black starting the town. So the way that the handover will go for our facility is pretty much the same as it is with the diesel gensets.

To a pretty large degree, we get a call for event, the town gets taken down, goes dark, there's a switchover. They make sure that the all the switches that basically isolate the town is a microgrid are activated and everything is safe. And then they give us a signal and we start up. And then the batteries are there to provide that initial push from an electrical standpoint to get the lights back on. So if you've seen in movies where sections of a city from up top kind of go dark and then they come back up section by section, it's the same kind of process here.

And so the batteries will be doing that. It's a very short time span, only a few minutes. And as that power level then gets steadies, then the fuel cells are ramping up and then the batteries go down. So it doesn't really take a lot of duration from the batteries, they just need there for a lot of push. But we have that energy capacity behind it, like set of is that the pushing power of 120 electric pickup trucks in a way and then some of the duration aspect as well.

All right. And then each of those different elements of fuel cells and the batteries tie in to our switch gear, which is the gray cabinet in the the foreground there at the site, and that is the interconnection to the city. That's at the same voltage as the city. Need So to play it again. So just as we look at, you know, what this project represents is really a clean high value approach to resiliency.

There's a number of different attributes. I won't go through them all, but we feel that it's not just that the clean attributes here, there's a lot of economic advantages to this because we have no emissions from the site itself, right, the only emission is water when the fuel cells are running and we have all this battery capacity. We can be connected to the electrical grid where and basically participating in the energy market and earning revenues from that and that's outside our contract with PG and E. What that does is it gives us a value stream that we can use to offset the cost of the project, so we don't have to fully burden the cost of the project on the resiliency service. So that allows us to reduce the cost of this solution compared to diesel gensets, which when they're not being used have to be turned off because they're expensive and dirty and don't really provide any value to the grid.

As a grid connected resource, one of the benefits to the local power grid in Calistoga, the distribution grid there, is it will have a voltage and frequency. So basically that keeps the AC waves kind of marching at a consistent beat so to speak because electrical interference from turning on motors and other types of load can reduce power quality. So that should help with some of the overall power quality of the town just on blue sky days like today. And the other thing is with this facility compared to say just a big huge battery facility is that we can extend the durations. And so essentially we can bring in liquid hydrogen that comes in a tanker, 40 to 50 foot tanker, so really can't discern it from gasoline tanker that comes in town.

But it's the same construction basically as our tank, it's a tank inside a tank basically, double walled, thick steel construction, very durable and safe, but we can actually then put more liquid hydrogen into the tank while we're running. And so we can extend that duration if an event goes beyond the 48. So that's something with just a full battery facility, you need electricity to be able to extend the duration to recharge, right? And of course, you won't have it. And we've already proven that.

So that was really a unique attribute to our facility that we could run and power fuel cells, which run at high pressure hydrogen and then do pressure filling from a liquid hydrogen tank without interruption. So that was a great achievement that the team got last week. So, yeah, so outside of the technology itself, we've been trying to be very proactive in the community given that this is a new technology and, you know, people hear hydrogen and, you know, there's some concerns there. But, we feel went through a pretty rigorous safety assessment not only internally but also with PG and E before the contract was signed by them. So it was a couple of months of hazardous operations assessment and things like that with PG and E's gas team.

And then we have been very trying to be very proactive about outreach into the community. Here at the bottom is an open house we had for a couple nights before the planning for the use permit approval at the Planning Commission back in summer about two years ago now. In fact, we've had a tent there at the Vine Trail opening every other week at the Farmers Market. We have a local consultant. He's been in the community for thirty years.

He set up a table there at the Farmers Market to answer questions. And on the right is something we just started this year that we're particularly excited about. We worked with the local high school science teacher to give tours of the facility to her science classes. And then as part of their final project, they took some information we gave them on hydrogen safety and approach that we've taken and created public safety announcements for the community and educated themselves on hydrogen safety. So here you see on the right a one of the groups did as a work product.

It's really impressive about taking the information we gave them and creating a PSA pamphlet. They also did short videos as well. We're actually continuing this work over the summer with Pilot City and the Napa County Department of Education and sponsoring internships for some of the interested students to carry on. In addition to further developing some of this PSA material, they're also going out to the community and being more proactive in polling and basically trying to find the constituencies that we haven't been able to reach through the efforts we've done to date. And that will help us, number one, make more people more comfortable because we think that this is a very safe technology and the approach there.

And once we let people know about all that background work behind it, it makes everybody it calms their fears. And so we don't as members we think of ourselves as members of the community and we don't want to be worried about what we're doing. So we're pretty excited about that. So here's the overall project timeline. It's a bit of a dense slide, just kind of shows you the progression of things through the design phase, the construction commissioning.

One thing that's not a physical thing, but was very important achievement is last year, we worked with the National Renewable Energy Lab to do a validation of the technology where we took some of the individual components. So basically as you saw, the facility is several units of each element. We took one unit of each of the elements to NREL's Golden Colorado facility. There they have a very high-tech, high power grid simulator. It's one of the most advanced in the world.

And we basically did some trial runs and proved that the technology had the ability to power the town, but not only that, keep it going when there's different things, you get different perturbations with different loads coming on, big motors, big ovens, things like that, that can cause disruptions in the grid and in the microgrid mode during these PSPS events. Our facility will be the balancing to make sure that you don't get a nuisance trip, which is an unplanned event. So that really gave us ability to tune up Vault OS EMS parameters and now apply that. So we've been in commissioning here and that's been going along. We've proved out that the technology works on a functional level and now pretty much we're just in the last phase, which is not only now integrating that technology with PG and E system and going through some of the final acceptance testing with that as well as the working out the different procedures for when there's an event, how their call center, who they're to call, what phone number, what types of protocols will be in place when they answer and doing that.

So that process has been going on for the last year and now it's just a matter of finishing that up. So soon we will be open and ready for the call for PSPS events. And then about a year from now, the upgrades electrical upgrades in the town, are just some of the normal electrical work you'd see as you go down the street, but what that allows to do is to be connected 20 fourseven. So it's a process called distribution interconnection. So we started that two years ago, but that's when we're going to be able to be connected to the grid outside of those events.

PG and E calls that blue sky mode. And that's when we'll be participating in the market and then connected to the town and the town will be able to enjoy that power quality improvement that I talked about before. So this is a bit of an eye chart, but this just shows the different aspects not only on the hydrogen side, but also the battery energy storage side to make sure we had the most advanced technology going in. So there's a bunch of different codes that span batteries, fuel cells and hydrogen from the various different industries coming together in this project. And so this is part education of the community, the messaging that there's a large library of precedents there that we're building upon here in this design.

So the last thing is that we're really looking at the CRC to not be a singularity. So we've kind of productized this design in something we call H Vault. And so these different attributes I talked about would really be that as a product that we want to bring to other communities, and we're already engaged with several. But we see here not only in California and the Western U. S, but opportunities for these prolonged power scarcity events throughout the globe.

We already have a pretty good footprint in Australia, several different projects going on there in traditional or, I guess, regular battery energy storage. And so we hope to bring resiliency long term solution there. And also we have another energy storage project going on in Southern Europe. So we're already active in that region as well. And hopefully we'll be able to we think there is another right market for H Vault. And so and of course, to do another project here in Napa would also be wonderful too because we've had a great time here. So that's it. Happy to answer any questions and I thank you again for your time.

Thank you so much, Doctor. Horn. I'm going to go ahead and take questions from the members, go to public comment, and then we'll come back for comments from any of the members. So does anybody have any questions before public comment? Just Member Joseph? I

think from the presentation, I think I know the answer, but I just want to make sure. So this is actually designed not only to deal with the PSPS incident, but an ongoing basis. I mean, you could continue fueling the hydrogen tank and that you're a little power plant.

We could become our own municipality, yes.

Exactly. Okay. Perfect.

Thank you. Yes.

Okay. Yeah. Member Painter.

Thank you and good to see you. I actually had the opportunity to go on a tour. I would absolutely highly recommend it. This is phenomenal. And so thank you, first of all, for responding, coming to Napa County and serving Calistoga. Could you remind us the source, where does the green hydrogen come from?

Yes, so there's a number of different facilities around the country. Right now, you know, there's several in place already and more planned, you know, in coming years. So, know, everything from Las Vegas, Texas, Louisiana and Georgia are some of the ones that are active right now and Ontario, California

Great. As

Yes. I kind of knew that, but I wanted to just say is an opportunity for us to think about talking to our state electeds about how we can create green hydrogen in California?

Yes. Yes. And so California does have a hydrogen hub, which is part of a program, one of, I think, seven that the Department of Energy awarded. So that's one of the things that to have a supply base for hydrogen, but the other part is to have the consumption of hydrogen, right, and the offtake. And so that's where we come in with this facility. The way that I look at this is not so much where it is today, but how this spurs things over the next ten years. So and how all that folds out. So we really hope this is springboard to a larger consumption within the power sector, which to date has rather small fraction of the overall hydrogen market.

Thank you. Thank you. Member Alessio. This

is fascinating and truly wow. It's really cool. And you know, we've talked about hydrogen for some time, hearing that it's going to be the next main fuel source.

And

so we also know the instability and the fears of hydrogen too, but it looks like you've obviously gone through all the safety measures. You're going through your presentation, you're talking about, you know, fire alarms and those kind of things. If there was a catastrophic fire happened in that area, would your plant be self contained that it wouldn't be susceptible to high temperature from fire coming through that area? Is there a water source? Or how do you keep that from itself being an issue?

Yes. If you look I don't know if it's possible to get that back on. Just go to the last slide there. I think it's got a good view. Within the vicinity of the facility, there is nothing combustible. So if there was a fire that was going through Calistoga, and then hopefully there wouldn't be, that's one of the purposes of the facility, right, is the wildfire mitigation. But it is surrounded by the ring road is about a 25 foot perimeter and then inside too it's all gravel. So there's no ible material there. Now you could say what's the worst case if there's a fire next to that tank, right? It's got all this hydrogen in

it. Right. That's my

thought. And it was one of my original thoughts too when I kind of came on to this project because it was already awarded and where my team took over was shortly after the contract got approved. And the thing is, right, is this is tremendously cold material. It's 400 degrees below absolute zero. And also there's a lot of it, right?

There's tons of liquid hydrogen in there. So it has a huge amount of thermal mass and it's inside a very expensive, very high performance YETI cooler. So essentially what you'd be having is a fire outside this cooler. The only thing that'll happen is heat will you know, kind of, you know, transfer in and that will boil some of the hydrogen and it will go off, you know, through the vent stacks which are the you can kinda see the little tower things that are around the the containment area. Those are like almost 30 feet in the air.

And so when hydrogen is so light it goes straight up. So there's been instances where cars have crashed into a liquid hydrogen tank, right? They have the same construction. And some of these tanks, the tankers that come, the outer envelopes were built in the 60s. Like one of the trailers had actually filled the liquid hydrogen tank, carried liquid hydrogen that sent people to the moon.

So those outer steel vessels, right, they're welded, inspected, very, very durable. And some of the outer parts are the parts that get renewed over time in the transportation part. But anyway, so there's know, documented cases of cars running in, even the semi tractor catching fire just, you know, because that happens to cars at times, right, caught fire and, you know, basically burned down to the frame with a full load of liquid hydrogen behind it. There was no catastrophic incident, right? You just end up with a little bit more of the venting.

And if for some reason you did like ignite that vent, it basically becomes like a pilot light like you have at your home, right? You know, basically what comes out for your pilot light is a stream of natural gas that's connected to the big pipeline network, right? But there's always the flow of natural gas coming out so that's why the flame stays where it is and you don't have explosion from your pilot light at home. So it's the same type of thing. So in a fire situation, this facility is actually very safe and liquid hydrogen gives you a lot of that safety compared to gaseous hydrogen where you would have to store it in pressure vessels and pressure vessels need to be you know, they need to be inspected every year.

And they're much more expensive because each vessel, you know, the density of gaseous hydrogen compressed is like oneten that of liquid hydrogen. So you would need a lot more area, a lot more steel and everything else to enclose those. So liquid hydrogen is really a safe and cost effective way to have a facility like this.

I know, hotter balloons use hydrogen for their fuel source. And I don't recall if it's liquid or not liquid hydrogen.

Probably gaseous for,

yeah, a Okay.

I don't know, and not to alarm people, but years ago, Janesville had a big boom from a hydrogen tank. So that's why I ask. And our fires, what we've seen here, and you know, we've seen obviously in LA not that long ago, is that there's firestorms. It's not just a fire. It's a storm. It creates huge amount of winds. Almost like tornado kind of events with So I just wanted to make sure that that's all been addressed. And I'm very excited, and I do want to take a tour.

Yeah, no, please do.

Thank you. Congratulations to Calistoga. And

we're happy to answer questions like that because I think it's also just again, it just helps people understand and feel safer in their community. There was one thing they mentioned I wanted to touch on. Can't I think it was anyway.

Was it regarding the hydro balloons?

There's it one aspect of it, but yes, sorry.

Well, you again. Thank you for being here.

You're welcome. Thank you.

Thank you. We'll go to Member LaMontina and then also Member Reeves. I don't have any. Oh, you didn't? Okay. It was Reeves. Yeah. Okay. Go ahead.

Okay. I'm curious about the blue sky mode. So that's where you recoup your financial investment for this whole project?

No. I mean, we get revenues from our contract, the service we provide PG and E for the town, right? So PG and E collects money from rate payers to serve electricity and keep the lights on. So they then are under contract with a number of different power plants of various types, everything from solar to wind to nuclear to natural gas, geothermal around the state and even outside the state. So very similar type of arrangement with us.

We have what's called an off take agreement. So we get paid for providing the resiliency service. And it's actually kind of the same type of mechanism they had with the provider of the diesel gensets because the diesel genset array is not something that PG and E owns, they pay somebody to come in and provide that as a service. So it's the same kind of arrangement. So now we have to give them an offer price for the service.

So and that offer price needs to basically pay off for the you know, all the pieces and building it and then keeping it operating, right? So that is a certain cost. By having these other revenues when we're in the market, so this is an additional revenue stream, that means we're getting in money to help pay for the cost of this infrastructure that we don't need to get for the resiliency service. So that allows us then to reduce the cost of the resiliency service because we have this other revenue stream.

So when you're providing energy on a constant basis, how often do you have to refill your tanks?

So the what Let me figure out the best way to describe this. What we would be looking at doing when we're participating in the energy market is just using the batteries. And so the batteries would be operating more like a traditional battery energy storage facility. So it's relatively small, pretty small compared to the ones that are built today. But it's still a viable you can charge when prices are low or there's over generation on the grid and then discharge at high price signals or when the grid needs power.

But the other thing that batteries do is they're always there as a standby unit. So a lot of people don't understand this, but in traditional before there was battery storage, there know, there would be a number of different power plants that would just be sitting there idling because they need to be there for reserve in case a power plant went down, this new this other plant would come on, would lock in and come on and take the place of that so you don't have a blackout. But what that means is you would have a fleet of, you know, basically idling cars, burning fuel and everything getting paid just for being there. With battery energy storage, you basically can do that and you're not emitting anything, right? So that's what a lot of the battery plants out there are.

They're just they're there as a contingency reserve and getting paid for that service. And so that's what we'll be doing with these batteries and then depending on the time of day, we might charge and discharge into the energy grid. There's different kinds of ways that you can bid those in the power industry. Now if there's a very high scarcity event in the grid because it's a very hot day and power plants are offline, the prices may be such that we will want to go with the fuel cells. Now we have a seventy two hour response time for our liquid hydrogen and we can get roughly enough liquid hydrogen to run the town for twelve hours.

So there is some excess capacity in the tank. So during the fire season, we're getting, that's when we get paid from PG and E for this, it's called the priority period to be online. We always maintain that forty eight hour buffer, but we have a little bit above if we wanted to dispatch the fuel cells. We don't really that may be, you know, I don't know, couple hours once a year or something like that. So it's not projected to be, you know, a lot, but we would never compromise our ability to provide that main service. So we would get penalized if we did.

And just one more question about the green hydrogen. At the production point, what kind of greenhouse gases is it producing even though it's green, What is the consequence of using green hydrogen?

Yeah, well, you know, there's a lot of different aspects to it, so I'll just try to kind of summarize given the time, but basically, you have electrolyzers which split water, right, through a process that's, it's essentially a fuel cell running in reverse. A fuel cell takes hydrogen, oxygen and creates water, releases electricity. You take water and you bring in electricity and then you create hydrogen and oxygen. And then you know, the oxygen goes at the air or you capture that as liquid oxygen or you capture the hydrogen as a product. So there's plants that do that.

Then the so that's a very clean source, right, because you have water as a feedstock. So then it's a matter of where does that electricity come from. And so what typically to have that to be clean or green hydrogen, the contract with PPA with a solar or wind facility to energize that for the power. Then you have steam methane reformation. That's the current for industrial hydrogen.

So that's the largest production method for hydrogen. And that's taking methane, which natural gas or you can use renewable gas and basically with heat and water, you split it apart and you get H2 and then CO2. But if you're using renewable natural gas, then the CO2 is carbon neutral. So that's another way that you can do that. And then there's blue hydrogen, is steam methane reforming and storing the carbon. So there's a number of different approaches for that.

Okay, do we have any public comment? Anything on the phone?

We don't have

You want to come up? Jim? Come on up. Got to come with come up.

Jim Wilson, NAPA. Great questions. You answered most of my questions, you members of the committee. And I also want to talk about what constitutes green. We have an action item in RCAP that calls for 100% renewable energy.

MCE has that plan. It's called Deep Green. And I'm interested in knowing how this would compare with the carbon intensity of that electrical supply. And so bottom line is if we knew how long we would be, say, Blue Sky operating to provide electricity to, say, Calistoga residents, compare that to what it would require in terms of carbon with another source, such as MCE's deep green, I'd be very interested in knowing what the bottom line is. Increasingly, we know, especially with the 2030 deadline to achieve net zero climate pollutants or in the state of California, even with a 2045 deadline, it changes the way we look at green and, say, renewable energy.

We're dealing with a lot of plans right now for, say, generating or utilizing, say, waste biomass to produce electricity. Gold State Natural Resources is one. This is the plan to cut waste forest material in the Sierras, palletize that, put it on ships to Asia and Europe and burning it for energy, calling it green. So we've got to be careful about the 2045 or especially the 2030 deadlines, what we're calling green. So it takes one hundred years to, say, restore forest carbon when you cut it down or burn it and, say, utilize it as, say, an electrical supply.

You have to actually burn something. We no longer have one hundred years to regrow a forest, so we have to manage that forest carbon differently and other carbon sources, green sources, as we call them, other plant communities can provide that energy source. So I'd be very interested in knowing how this overall plan compares with MCE Deep Green, which takes into account, I think, direct and indirect sources of carbon that go into this life cycle analysis. Thank you, Doctor. Horn.

Thank you, Mr. Wilson. Anyone else in the public? Okay.

Can I ask a

couple of questions?

Yes, please.

Yeah. One, could you you mentioned the green hydrogen. Can you just remind me where the hydrogen is provided from? What company or

We've not publicly disclosed that. Okay.

And then have you considered adding solar to the facility as well that would pair with the batteries that could, A, make it more resilient and reduce operational cost if you did move to become maybe a municipal utility supplier or add resiliency to the PSPS events?

Yeah. Well, so the challenge with this facility with solar is you would need for the eight megawatt output, you would need roughly 30 acres or more of land for a solar farm. So the amount of footprint we have on the site is really only wouldn't give much solar generation at all. There

is a

field next to it, which is for wastewater. I can't remember the one of the council members from Calistoga, you know the term. Yes, I think people have mentioned possibly that solar could maybe be put there. That could help. One thing though, you go through and this is where things get really kind of nuanced and complicated.

I've been in the electrical power industry now for almost twenty years and it's taken a long time to kind of assimilate all the different concepts. But when you typically when a power plant is generating, right, you're putting electrons into the grid and those electrons are just part of the overall network, right, that get used at different points. So you have, you know, electrons coming on to the grid from all your different generating resources and then coming off the grid being used. And so, you know, having direct connection between a generation source and a consumption, whether that's a facility or a community, can get pretty complicated because it really comes down to the peak demand, right. Electrical demand typically is always, you know, it's you know, it ebbs and flows, right.

It rises and falls over the course of a day. And so you only really have very limited amount of time where you're using that peak amount. And then of course, over the course of the year, right, in the spring and fall, temperature is very mild, the days are pretty long, so you don't have a lot of consumption. When it's 95 degrees outside and you have very long summer days, you use a lot. But that might only be, you know, when you add it up, like five hundred, six hundred hours out of the year and there's, you know, over eight thousand hours of the year.

So you're not going to get a lot of use out of that, right? So that's the benefit of electricity grid is that you have all these different resources and you don't have this have to overbuild for your minute by minute supply. So those are some of the different things when when you think about how this would power the town. Would be the local source of electrons there and then of course when the facility you know when the town is isolated you know, we're able to provide it. But it is a backup system which inherently, you know, has a different value. There's different considerations in terms of the cost of generation versus something that would be 20 fourseven.

And of course, we've got our Calistoga Rats.

So just for a point of clarification, the replacement of this was to take over from our diesel generators, were providing really awful power during those PSPS events as we saw from that video. And I think us and on this committee and as a culture, the only thing that we can do is make that next best step. And for us, this was that next best step. We didn't have the room for wind turbines, possibly some solar panels, but for us, this really was a great solution for the zero on point emissions, and it does open a gateway for us down the road. Great.

Go ahead.

Just absolutely on a similar note, let's just say that Calistoga is looking long term and say current technology, current availability perhaps does not permit our own independent grid, but we are confident that there will become a time when we will be able to. And so we and as member Gibbs said, this is we're accomplishing what we set out to accomplish.

Mhmm.

And we're very happy about that. Mhmm. But we're always looking

Yeah.

Towards the future, towards if we don't know yet because that's the funny thing about the future. Yeah. So

Yeah. And I think on that note, probably in a community like Calistoga to have, it's really about having local generation, right? The electrons are kind of not traveling far. They're going in the wire on one block coming out on the next block, right? So really the way to I guess that vision, I would say the anchor of it wouldn't necessarily be one big field of solar, probably would be incentivizing the different build houses and commercial properties around town to put solar in and then have storage facilities around that could then take any excess daytime generation, store that and dispatch that at night.

Now, really just comes down to a question of cost, Like you know, if you think about it like like an analogy, if you, you know, if every once a month you went to the store and you bought something big, okay? So what are you gonna do? It's too big for your car. Well, would you go buy a pickup truck to use it for that one day out of the month? It's not really that cost effective. Right? You'd go rent one for $25 down the street. Right? So that's what being attached to the overall grid gives you, the fact that you don't have to buy that pickup truck. Because if you don't have it, what that means is when you have that high demand, the lights go out and everybody's gonna be dark.

So so you have to kind of figure out, you know, there there's a cost benefit thing with that and it's more of a it'll be an iterative type approach. I mean, the electricity grid is the biggest engineering accomplishment of the twentieth century, right? It took one hundred years to get to that point. And energy transformations happen, right, that happened before all throughout time since somebody took a heated rock and brought it in the cave and said, oh look, I can keep myself warm, right, back in the caveman days. So we've used, we've, you know, as a society we've evolved our harvesting of energy resources available to us through advances in technology.

But those transitions have taken, you know, from going from wood to to liquid fuels to solid fuels with coal to nuclear to to gas, you know, they take place over a couple decades. So, you know, this is just part of the process as we go forward. But, you know, going back to the point is, I think, you know, with, you know, in a community to have local solar, you know, solar on rooftops, that's probably the best bet because then you don't need this, you know, large parcel of land and then supplement. And then as the grid gets greener and greener, then you have that backup and then it becomes all one and the same.

This is remarkable. I haven't had a tour I'd like to do a tour to, so maybe we can get a bunch of us

Sure.

Yeah. Up and see it because it looks absolutely remarkable. And again, congratulations to Calistoga. Amazing.

We really appreciate the cooperation from the city. Councilmember Gift and Councilmember Eisenberg have been very big supporters and they've helped us move this along. And the city staff and the community as a whole has been very supportive.

Thank you.

And we're really appreciative of it.

And I think we did do a tour, right?

We organized a tour.

I couldn't go on that one, but

You can organize a second one? Don't mean

to say, like, we haven't already done it. We have. It's just some of us weren't able go.

Yeah. And we can organize a second, maybe a third tour if needed, but we can only have six members at a time maximum at each tour so that we don't have a quorum of CAC Okay.

Well, we'll see what we've got in terms of interest and do that. Great. Thank you so much, Doctor. Horn.

Thank you.

Very, very interesting and it's very inspiring.

Thank you.

Okay. I think we're at the end here. All right. We've done it all. Does anybody else have anything Just to note, we are most likely going to have the August meeting, so please keep that on your agenda.

We're going to be planning future agendas right after this meeting. And so if we decide we may need to have an August meeting, just kind of keep that on your radar. I think July is we're going to skip July. So please, everyone, go back to their city managers, colleagues, and start planning your meetings so that you can roll this out. And if you need a cent, please let us know right away so we can help you coordinate that. All right. Well, we are going to then adjourn, and we'll see you next time.