Sustainability and Energy Action Plan

IMPLEMENTATION GRANTS PASS SUSTAINABILITY AND ENERGY ACTION PLAN The City could report improvements in energy efficiency and reductions in MTCO2e through a dashboard on the City website. A dynamic, user -friendly dashboard will help to engage the public in important conversations about energy and sustainability. This dashboard may require purchase of a report publishing license, e.g., Microsoft Power BI or Tableau . Some open -source options may be available, such as R Studio , Shiny , or Apache Super Set, but they may also have steeper learning curves. Specific targets to be tracked on the dashboard include number (percentage) of electric vehicles in the City fleet, square footage of solar panels operated by the City, MTCO2e from electricity, MTCO2e from diesel, MTCO2e from gasoline, MTCO2e from natural gas, MTCO2e from wastewater, and MTCO2e from solid waste, annual energy savings, number of employees participating in alternative commute programs, and the amount of time essential services could be provided for without grid power. Emissions reporting could also be expresse d through equivalencies instead of just MTCO2e, using the EPA equivalencies calculator .119 ReportingMonitoring The City could continue to use the equations from the EPA GHG Calculator tool to monitor and report the City’s greenhouse gas emissions in terms of metric tons of CO2 equivalents (MTCO2e). The equations are based on the Local Government Operations (LGO ) protocol from the California Air Resources Board, California Climate Actions Registry, ICLEI – Local Governments for Sustainability, and TheClimate Registry.115 One of the Taskforce members wrote code using R, an open -source programming language for data analysis and visualization, to provide more flexibility in howresults can be sorted and presented.116 The code uses the same equations from the LGO protocol to allow for categorizing energy usage by building, forexample, or by vehicle types.117Data from 2021 were runthrough both the GHG calculator and the Taskforce’s code, for quality assurance. Categories include stationary combustion, mobile combustion, solid waste, wastewater treatment, electricity, employee commute, water, ag and land management, and waste generation. Offsets from urban forestry are included .118 Facilitating Good Data In order to support decision making and monitor progress associated with the City of Grants Pass Sustainable Energy Action Plan, it is essential that basic data be available from the various public utilities and service providers that serve the City. In the process of obtaining and preparing data from service providers there were a number of difficulties and delays encountered. These frequently involved inconsistent processes for service providers in requesting data, differences in format across data requests, and confusion in the scope of service across requests (for example, electrical meters being left off of requested data extracts). Since monitoring and accountability are a crucial part of the Plan, working out a simple, timely, and repeatable process for requesting and processing data is important. The data needed is simple and limited to what appears on an ordinary billing statement: Unique Meter Number or Vehicle ID (as applicable) Service Address Date of Bill, Meter Reading Period, or Fueling Event Units (kilowatt hours for electricity, therms for natural gas, gallons for fuel, cubic yards for waste) Amount Billed 94