As a City-owned building in San Francisco, the California Academy of Sciences (CAS) used to enjoy heavily subsidized electricity rates offered through a Public Utility Commission. However, the current building is now being demolished. The new building will be built on the same site. We are not sure if the Academy will be offered subsidized rates in 2008, when the new building is scheduled to open. We do know that for gas, the Academy will be paying market rates for service from Pacific Gas and Electric (the local utility provider). When completing our energy modeling, the results are quite skewed when we apply the subsidized rates for electricity and the market rates for gas. Therefore, we are proposing using the market rates for both gas and electricity (published by the local utility company, PG&E) in order to complete the energy modeling and determine the appropriate strategies to employ in the design of the building to obtain the energy efficiency credits. We propose to use this same energy cost budget (using market rates or both gas and electric) to calculate the PV contribution for the renewable energy credit. Please indicate if it is appropriate for us to use market rates from the local utility company for both gas and electric to calculate the energy cost budget.
The design team seeks to use the market rate for the local utility provider for the energy cost budget calculations even if there may be subsidies that apply. This is acceptable as long as they can demonstrate that the energy rates they are assuming for the building are in fact unsubsidized rates offered by the local utility company (in this case, Pacific Gas and Electric). Please note that the same rate structure needs to be applied for both the budget building and the proposed building.