Good evening, and thank you for joining us for this work session of January 13th, 2026.

If we could all rise for the Pledge of Allegiance, I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America.

And to the Republic for its hands, one nation, under God, indivisible liberty liberty, and justice are all.

If you could remain standing for a moment of silence as we uh pray for all of those defending our country, uh keeping us safe, uh those in the military, our law enforcement, our firefighters, our EMS first responders, uh, and pray that they all get home safe.

We also remember Renee Nicole Hood in Minneapolis.

We also remember her.

Thank you.

Okay, before we jump into the uh the meeting itself, uh uh quick proclamation, uh honoring Dr.

Martin Luther King Day.

Uh whereas Dr.

Martin Luther Luther King Jr.

was a visionary leader who dedicated his life to advancing the cause of civil rights through nonviolent action, courage, and an unwavering commitment to justice, equality, and human dignity.

And whereas Dr.

King's leadership helped dismantle legalized segregation and discrimination and inspire transformative social change throughout the world, and whereas Dr.

King's teachings emphasize service, unity, compassion, and the belief that all people are created equal, and whereas Dr.

King called upon all individuals and communities to stand up against injustice and hatred in all forms and urged each generation to continue the work of building a more just and inclusive society, and whereas Dr.

King reminded us that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

And whereas the observance of Dr.

Martin Luther King Day provided an opportunity to reflect on his enduring legacy and the and to recommit ourselves to the values of equality, service, and respect for all people.

Now, therefore, I Edward Lacterman, supervisor, along with the town board of the town of Yorktown, to hereby proclaim January 19th, 2026 as Dr.

Martin Luther King Jr.

Day in the town of Yorktown, and encourage all residents to honor his legacy through acts of service, community engagement, and renewed commitment to justice and equality.

I do have a proclamation up, Sarah.

There you are.

That if you want to come grab that, Sarah, Sarah is going to be hosting a Martin Luther King Day celebration at uh Grace Lutheran Church.

Uh what was the time on that, Sarah?

Between one and nine on Monday.

One and nine PM on the 19th.

Thank you, Sarah.

Okay.

To start off, um, we we had a town building solar RFQ.

Uh Leo Wegman was uh running that for us through the uh through the um sustainable Westchester.

Leo, if you could come up and give us where we're at.

Good evening, Supervisor Lacherman and town board.

Uh so we did uh we received the New York State electric gas bills for quite a number of accounts from uh the for the period ending May 2025 to use that as a baseline for judging how much electricity these accounts use to figure out how much solar would needed to be needed to offset that electricity use.

Um that totaled about a thousand pages of PDF information uh for those 16 accounts.

We do know the town has probably about 40 total accounts with New York State Electric and Gas, and we judge these to be the larger accounts.

So we did a deeper dive on about eight or nine of those um accounts that we did get.

Um and the bottom line is relative to the uh cost and the uh effect of putting solar on the roof, for example, of the highway garage or the roof of the community and cultural center, that the paybacks there are are quite long.

Uh on the order of 65 or 70 years at this moment in time.

And the reason for that is that the portion of the electric bills that are the kilowatt hours of continuous energy use for most of your larger buildings like the cultural center and the highway garage are only 20% of the dollars that you're paying for those electric bills.

80% of the dollars that you're paying for those electric bills are due to instantaneous demand of the kilowatt for turning everything on all at once or any at any given 15 minute period throughout the month.

And so the utility has to be prepared to provide you with all that power when all the AC turns on all at once or all the arc wells just turn on all at once.

And that from doing a deeper dive is where 80% of your dollars on most of those accounts are going.

So the solar is only able to offset the continuous flow of energy through the system because if the solar is not shining when you're turning everything on there's no impact on that peak demand.

The peak stays high and the only way to offset that peak is to use a battery system to buffer the peak so the battery will provide that instantaneous demand for turning all the equipment on in any given period of time.

We didn't have hourly data so I wasn't able to analyze when that when those peaks occur we could do you know good set that up.

How big would the battery need to be pretty pretty enormous.

No not necessarily it could be a it could be a 50 kilowatt hour battery because you're just shaving a peak from 25 below to 10 to 10.

So it doesn't have to be as it's not a shipping container size battery.

It could be smaller.

And we don't know the exact size that it would be required but for every suffice it to say that the buildings that we were looking at for housing solar have eighty percent of their dollars for utility for electricity going toward that peak demand and only 20% for the continuous flow through of kilowatt hours.

So that means and you're spending the other piece of it is you are a nice customer for most of your accounts or all the accounts that we saw and your kilowatt hour charge there is two cents a kilowatt hour very low.

But your conversely what you're paying for instantaneous spikes in any consecutive 15 minute period throughout the month is is quite high.

It's 25 or more dollars per per peak per per kilowatt.

If you have 25 kilowatts and you exceed times 25 dollars is 625 dollars for that month alone for that one spike.

So I'm sorry.

Leo is there a system that we could do that that could manually control this through the overnight hours that it could sort of and I see I see an electrician in the back nodding his head with Bill.

So is there any type of computerized systems we could try to hook up to the first thing to do would be to get better data about your historical usage up to this point and that would be to get the interval data what the utilities call interval data which means every 15 minutes of charges for kilowatt hours and for kilowatt which is which is a um a data file that the utility sh should have or should be able to make available I know they're available uh quite readily through con Edison in in NYSEC territory you may have to work with the community liaison or you can set up an actual scatter device with contact transformers on your actual service panels for those buildings and measure it yourself typically for a month or two to see whether what the pattern is of which hours have those spikes and how high those spikes go and then you can figure out what size energy storage buffer you would need to lower those to a more manageable level.

And I I'd be happy to can have the our the electrician uh inform you uh uh you know of more details on that well he just happens to be an electric electrician but uh he's not not our not our town electricity okay but but but so the use the use of a uh uh of measuring your own device either either the utility has the data and they can share it with you if they don't have the data it's a very simple matter to to use uh uh uh a contact transformer device to read your actual ongoing usage you might do it for I typically recommend doing it for at least two months these two buildings I think from looking at the monthly usage pattern have a regular have a sort of year-round season they they're not seasonal buildings they don't just turn on in the summer and turn off in the winter they sort of run all year so these these buildings if we got two or three months worth of data we would know by by April the the size of the opportunity for lowering your the 80% of your bill that that is you know the the big piece of it for the instantaneous demand.