Finance — 05/18/16 Page 6
Alderman Dowd
My follow up question would be: is there a difference in electricity from 3,000 to 4,000? How do we calculate
that savings?
Mayor Donchess
| think the answer to that is the tariff says what the bill is going to be. There would be no difference in billing
between a 3,000 and 4,000. The smart meter would enable the city to get into that maybe in the future but
without the smart meter, the tariff brings the bill down.
Alderman McCarthy
The problem with the tariff is the lights have to be at constant wattage. You can probably put variable
luminosity bulbs in but you are not going to save any money because the tariff says we bill you by the number
of hours of darkness times the wattage you told us was in the light bulbs. If we put 40 watt lights in and run
them at 20, we're still going to pay for 40. | think Alderman Dowd’s question is: Is the wattage different
depending on what temperature you run the lights at, which would set the initial value that the tariff is based
on.
Mayor Donchess
Maybe Ms. Walker knows that. My understanding is if we were to put different bulbs in the neighborhoods with
3000 that is what would be there. We wouldn’t be able to change that.
Ms. Walker
It does not change the billing rate. It is a set billing rate regardless whether it’s 3,000 or 4,000. The ability to
dim ties back into the smart meters. If we were allowed to install the smart meters, we would be able to dim
the lights to turn them on gradually as the sun goes down and the opposite when the sun is coming back up.
You would reduce the amount of energy that you were expending but because we couldn't do that that’s not
part of the equation.
Alderman Siegel
There’s probably a more immediate concern which is the 4K fixtures are more widely available through multiple
sources than the 3K fixtures. There’s a reason that we probably want to standardize on something that is more
widely available. You don’t want to find 25 years down the road that we bought the Beta version.
Alderman McCarthy
VHS isn’t worth much at the moment either.
Alderman Siegel
No it’s not, but at the time...
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