EWEB Board of Commissioners — April 20, 2021

0:15 so we're going to start with an agenda check does anybody have any i'm going to do my best to remember that you're on my screen here but if i don't call anybody all right um so nothing to the agenda um we have a 20 minute presentation and then an hour discussion and i know that probably many of us are going to have a lot of questions but it seems like it's better to go through his whole presentation so um just make sure that you write down your questions because we have a whole hour for them and there's a lot of information to go through so we'll get started on our urban and

1:01 the energy sector frank great uh presidential hospital commissioners good evening thank you appreciate the opportunity i'm going to go ahead and share my screen so you can see that i appreciate the opportunity to have a work session a couple of thank yous first of all this is a rather unique forum for us having some in person some remote and so we appreciate that i think is the is staff did a great job setting up the room um for us and and hopefully the sound is good for those who are remote as well and then ann and hawley in the back room as well producing what the public is seeing so thanks to them

1:46 i'll get right into this this is a work session and so what i'm presenting to kick this off has really meant to stimulate some conversation uh develop some understandings of what is uh and can be a pretty complex issue which is energy and carbon and how those systems work together and so the the goal is to eventually let the board have discussions ask questions understand where there might be further interest or gaps and those types of things where i posed at least three questions for you to ponder as we go through this one is you know should we change anything in the strategic plan based on climate or energy driven conditions

2:31 and if so how so you know not just yes or no but what areas might you like to look at further what future board policy opportunities might the board be interested in pursuing or having management look into or explore or assess we'd be curious to learn that and then also some of the control measures that you have as a board things around budgeting and allocations are we allocating and pursuing the priorities and investments and programs correctly and so kind of keep those things in mind as we go through it i won't go through this slide in detail this is just a reminder that we do have a strategic plan an important piece of the strategic plan is that

3:16 we have some strategic priorities which includes the reassembly of our generation portfolio in the context of a changing climate new technology developing markets and customer expectations and those types of things we also have to keep in mind that we really need to do that in the context of our core values which safety reliability affordability and environmental stewardship all those things are important when we look to to understand these issues and then we also have a climate change policy and probably the most important thing there relative to this conversation is understanding our electric power portfolio

4:01 utilizing low-carbon resources without impacting safety liability i think those those two come back into play as a reminder on timing with some of these decisions this is a timeline based on you can see that the size of the circles have to do with the size of the resource that we're making a decision on and there's different colors represent you know green is wind thermal are the sort of orange colors you see seneca out here 2026. um back in 2020 we had a re-licensing and carmen smith decision and then singing way out here off the scale is the end of the license with lieberg although we may have some decisions relative uh coming to kind of set up an earlier decision on that

4:47 um the one thing that is missing here is of course bpa bpa sort of in the in the big context of the decision at the end of 2028 there's a lot of steps that go into getting there we'll likely have to start making these decisions in the 2025 to 2028 kind of time frame there's lots of different you know this is building up the brick wall uh of different things that we have to do to really get ready for that you know you'll you'll notice that some in here that we've talked a little bit about you know here's ami it's an important piece of technology but also rate reform how do we align rates to offer new types of products and services maybe a clean portfolio version

5:33 maybe things related to time of use or different kinds of products and services irp as well which stands for integrated resource plan that's that's how we match up our load with with our generating resources i'll back up just a little bit and then come in rather quickly i wanted to talk about just the grid in general this is this is really how energy flows uh across the united states this is these are huge numbers and really not you know don't talk about the numbers so much here we are the electricity sector electricity is generated still across the country from three main big sources coal natural gas and nuclear those those are the big three across the country hydro is about six percent

6:19 although in the northwest we're very fortunate because uh in eweb's case it's probably about 70 percent uh very much more prominent in the northwest than it is across the country there's a couple of other things to note here and this on the far right you notice this lighter gray that's wasted energy there is a tremendous amount of energy that is wasted through inefficiencies you know it's the big two that contribute to that here's transportation and basically this is this this section right here is the heat coming out your tailpipe um internal combustion engines are are very inefficient and a lot of that just is wasted out the back end of the car and then same with the thermal resources

7:04 here there's a lot of wasted energy that comes out of when we convert a thermal process into electricity those tend to be 40 50 sometimes a little more percentage efficient so you'll notice this is a pretty wide band here about the same size as the coal and natural gas and nuclear sections here so 50 efficiency is is one of the big reasons direct use the natural gas coming down here the the obviously we need to keep an eye on when we electrify are we simply moving from direct use up to here which then creates additional inefficiencies so it's just worth keeping in mind and then of course the the desire to build out

7:51 wind and solar and we'll talk a little bit more about the implications and opportunities with that state of oregon flow is is somewhat similar this is presented slightly differently it's imported energy versus energy produced in the state you'll notice hydro much bigger percentage here from an electricity generation perspective but then coal is really still present in the energy that is consumed so you have to keep in mind this is consumed energy not generated energy this is imported from places like wyoming and utah and montana and goes into the electricity sector along with natural gas and then you still see some of the big waste streams that you did

8:36 at a national level coming out of transportation and coming out of a thermal generation of electricity those are the largest waste streams so pretty similar some noticeable differences especially the presence of hydroelectric in the northwest which is something that mother nature blessed us with here in this part of the country and it contributes very very a lot to the cleanliness of our electricity supply here relative to other parts of the country this is uh this is the grid you know the darker lines are are higher degrees of transmission capability here we are out in the west you see some lines down to california you see some

9:22 heading out to the east into wyoming and utah that's because there's a lot of generation out there but you do notice there's a there's kind of a gap right down through the middle of the country and there's not a lot of transfer capability or generation transmission between the western part of the united states and then all of this out out to the east when we refer to that we call it the western interconnect so um when we refer to our grid that we are part of it's the western interconnect so it's basically colorado and the western part of canada that is our grid there's not a lot of

10:08 interconnectivity beyond that to the rest of the country that is something where there's more and more opportunity to look at there's a lot of wind and solar potential down through these states right in the middle of the country with very little transfer capability to the west and so when we refer to the grid generally when we talk about it we're referring to the western interconnect which is the western part of the united states so how do we contribute how do we play into the grid um eweb contributes 0.12 as far as generating and put elect putting electrons into the grid that does not include bonneville bonneville

10:54 allocates us uh some here about 245 average megawatts we generate on our own as eweb another 116 120 or so these these numbers vary a little bit with hydro conditions with wind conditions and other things but those are typical numbers we should feel good about what we do contribute hydro wind solar not a lot of solar some thermal those thermal by the way and are in our cogen and in many cases they're considered renewables by the state of oregon and i'll get to some of those definitions in a minute but what eweb has done here i think is a pretty good job of saying the resources that we're responsible for we've tried to to consider

11:40 a number of different factors and carbon is one of those and so even though it's a very small percentage what we've put in what we put into the grid if we had a pool in the backyard the water we'd be dumping in there the few buckets would be clean water now it does all mix together it all mixes together and we pull out a little more than that 0.28 again this is a huge grid that's and so if we dumped a few gallons of clean water into the pool what we dr what we're drinking from the pool is not going to be the same quality that we dumped into it and so just because it's such a big interconnected system so talk a little bit about carbon as well carbon and decarbonization

12:27 and one of the things that is an important reminder is that a number of different areas and studies have shown that there's really four main categories to deep decarbonization across the us you see some of them here that you recognize energy efficiency and conservation electrifications part of this low carbon supplies and different kinds of fuels and then a number of different other things related to gases and new technology where e-web tends to play the most is in you know some of these categories of energy efficiency and conservation and also where we have at least going

13:12 forward over the next decade or so because of those resource decisions ensuring that we're still contributing a low-carbon electricity to the grid as far as what's our responsibility we also have some secondary things that we're working on here's one the renewable hydrogen project i'll talk a little bit about that electrification of passenger vehicles that's one where e-web thus has a number of different forms of incentives um and then the hybrid heat pump gas technology is one that we're starting to look at more and more which is what's the most efficient delivery of energy to to a building and it could be a combination of using a heat pump which is very

13:58 efficient under electric conditions but there are some conditions under peaking or very cold weather where it might be more efficient to use a gas furnace and there's a combination technology opportunity there then there's some some additional areas electrificate further electrification we do talk about kind of smart electrification what that means we also look at replacing some sort of potential gases some of you know this already some of you don't one of the insulating gases we use in switchgear is sf6 which is a very potent greenhouse gas it's used as an insulator a spark suppressant suppressant it's 23 000 times

14:45 more potent than co2 and so we actually are part of an epa program to monitor that but those are things that were we look for opportunities to replace that kind of usage and application when it becomes available right now it's it's not readily available so we play in a number of these categories some more than others and some have more potential than others going forward as well one thing about carbon is is when matters in in carbon there's a number and it's kind of interesting when people start talking about carbon intensity because part of this is will the real number please stand up there's so many different carbon intensities depending on how you're looking at this when you're looking at this

15:31 we have peak versus average numbers here for eweb the northwest power pool region is one that is for the most part the northwest with a couple provinces in canada a little bit into utah and montana idaho so it's a little smaller than the western interconnect a little more concentrated in the northwest but you can see the ratio between peak and average you know in our portfolio if we go out to the grid to deal with a peaking issue that is 17 to 19 times dirtier electricity than our average carbon intensity so these all have some kind of multiplying factors in fact in the future if you look at projections and

16:16 decarbonizing the grid further which is which is great news there's still a pretty significant difference between average and peak from a carbon intensity perspective and these are what our curves look like they're seasonal month by month and then you know this is maybe a typical day where we peak in the morning and then we peak in the evening and have two peaks throughout the day it depends a little bit winter and summer those those do and whether that's spring break or not or whether people are in school or not there's a number of variables to that i wanted to explain something that sometimes you hear about which is the net position um again this is part of the will the real number please stand up uh here's our here's our portfolio

17:01 if you looked at this is eweb's average across the year we have total generation and then we have average consumption and this is e-web we do generate more than we consume on average over the course of a year you start to break that down a little bit you go oh look we've got lots of hydro we do have some nuclear that comes through our bonneville contract we have some wind as you saw some thermal and then we go out to the market to get to do balancing throughout the throughout the year and so hey look at this based on this number look at all this hydro nuclear that's carbon free so wow we're 90 carbon free according to this average net view of it but there's a little more

17:47 to the story sometimes we're in a surplus condition which is wow this is even better our consumption's dropped hydro conditions are really good maybe this is the spring um still have nuclear and wind and now wow we're 100 no no actually we're 120 percent um of carbon-free this this time so let's bank this let's let's just bank it we don't need it now let's let's bank it because here's a different condition here's a peak condition where maybe hydro is not performing as well consumption is high this might be a winter evening what we have to do we have to go to market and so we've we've banked all this really good clean uh carbon free so that we don't have to

18:34 address this sort of ugly dirty market uh here and hey we averaged out our net position is 90 carbon free so which of those numbers do you really go on and it's it's going to depend on whether you call yourself net neutral or net clean or whether you want to look at this hour by hour month by month day by day all the time so there's some definitions to to work through and some of those definitions are pretty interesting and they all get interchanged oftentimes so renewable energy and in fact we have people that that encourage us rightfully so to make a

19:20 just transition to to renewable energy i don't think when they show up and say that they are telling us to go buy more senecas i just i don't get the impression that that's what they mean although the state of oregon includes cogen and in fact seneca generates renewable energy credits for uf it's a it's considered renewable by the state of oregon but i don't think people when they show up they tend to say oh when they say go go more renewable that's actually what they mean for the most part i think they mean wind and solar probably the two big ones and sometimes hydro sometimes not hydro is is one that's not considered renewable by the state

20:06 of oregon at least what's called legacy hydro which is hydra that was built before 1995 and there's some there's some good reasons for that when the state did that but it is in essence carbon free and then you have these 100 percent clean you know here's here's this net again that hundred percent clean where your your annual energy generated by carbon free resources is equal to or greater than the energy you consumed so that means you can over produce at times and buy or use carbon based fossil based energy at other times so this this netting is something that we we need to pay

20:52 attention to we need to be intentional with it carbon neutral again this is kind of looking at the same kind of thing over a period of time and then carbon free you know wind solar hydro nuclear nuclear is is in essence carbon free by some of those definitions and so the key question that all of this raises and it raises it not just when you're talking in an open setting but when you're talking with legislators and about rulemaking in in laws when they say 100 clean does that mean on average over a year or does that mean every hour that you produce this you need to be 100 clean there's a huge difference in in those particular cases so over what time

21:38 period really does matter in these definitions a couple of this is really small i don't expect you to read this and memorize it um there's there's a couple of points in here um i find it interesting that a number of utilities and are are starting to develop programs that are are specific you know here's a puget sound energy they have a program called beyond net zero we just talked about net so this is beyond net zero so that's 120 percent clean i'm not quite sure what that that means and here's smud sacramento municipal utility district absolute zero by 23. so that's i'll talk about that one a little bit more here's portland general electric oregon's clean energy future

22:23 what is interesting about all of these cases and in fact most of the cases that i have found not all of them but a lot of them where you see we're going to be this amount by this date follow a starting point that is really not that good the starting point you know look look at puget sound energy coal is 35 natural gas 31 that's a huge part of their portfolio already approximately 50 of smuds is fossil based remember e-webs what we're contributing is about 90 carbon-free already so some of these are talking about getting to 90 by 2030 they're getting into neutral in some fashion by 2045.

23:10 what i found interesting about smud was with this absolute zero by 2030 they very specifically highlighted how they were going to do that to get to 90 then they self admittedly said we don't know how we're going to get from 90 to 100 which to me that's that's important because he webs at 90 so they've they've identified how to get to where we are which is how i looked at it and some of this you'll see even very specifically they're talking about repurposing that their natural gas fleet to use biofuels to use other kinds of fuels so

23:55 and in some cases move more to peaking all of these scenarios also do involve more investment i in wind and solar which is incredible which is a really important part of the equation so if you look at the economics of going to 100 percent um you'll look at this these reduction numbers by the way 80 reduction that's 80 below 1990 levels those are the original targets from the kyoto accords and a lot of the standards that you hear about is we want to reduce to some significant level below 1990. you can see this is the starting

24:40 point for the northwest region some of the other regions are even worse you know and even you if you looked at smud's example they're probably not even to this point yet the good news is this is pretty affordable as a region as an industry to get to this 80 percent even 90 percent levels of 90 reduction means that it's 95 percent off carbon free worried about 90 these are very affordable when you start to get past that the costs become incredibly high and most of that cost is because you're building out wind and solar so much and then you're curtailing their use

25:25 because you have to build them out for reliability purposes the the good news is also what's facilitating this and this is this is um there's two lines here the the yellow line and then you kind of see a blue line here those are those are the prices that utilities are paying when they go out and and get either wind contracts or solar contracts so the price is coming down per kilowatt hour per megawatt hour of those produced depends on the purpose though and the timing of those and what's called capacity and i'll talk a little bit more about that when i talk about reliability

26:11 there are we are starting to see some land use challenges so there's good news there's there's lots of technology advances there's lots of opportunity costs improvements wind and so are there still and will continue to be increased land use challenges they're starting to see that in the desert south southwest already where various protected habitats in the desert as well so a lot of land use if if you were to go to that net zero level that i just showed the cost curve uh the footprint for that would be 8 to 37 times the land area of seattle and portland combined it starts to take up a lot of land use for wind in particular solar

26:57 arrays not not counting distributed solar on on rooftops but just you look at utility scale projects it takes a lot of land use and it also takes a lot of transmission these circles here on this one are where you see the highest concentration of wind generation in the northwest the challenge with that is is that's not where it's used um it's it's used typically along the i-5 cord or all the way up and down and so transmission the getting of and the connecting of where it's generated to where it's consumed is an ongoing challenge and transmission lines don't just get built very quickly it takes in some cases decades to get

27:42 those built and so again i'm not sure whether that's a land use issue or not but there's a lot of issues associated with transmission so there's some really good news on the wind and solar front there's also some challenges with land use and and with transmission so reliability reliability is incredibly important we've we've seen what happens when there's reliability issues like in texas also last summer in california they had rolling blackouts in california i'm often asked if could that happen here absolutely it could happen here what we're seeing across the west is a

28:27 retirement of coal plants and that's that's really great news from a carbon perspective when you take out a coal plant let's just say you take out 100 megawatt coal plant you don't replace it with 100 megawatts of wind and solar a coal plant is for what's called firm reason the firm resources it's count on you dispatch it you have to replace it with more wind and solar to get the same amount of reliability depending on where and what time of day and the rest of the resource that could be five six eight times more than what you took out so you have to over build those to get the same amount of resource we are taking out you know over this time

29:12 frame you know now through 2030 4 000 megawatts of coal out of the northwest region again you have about an average 300 that's many times more and that has to be replaced this this information comes from the pacific northwest utility coordinating council and their regional forecasts they do every year they go they talk to a number of different utilities and they add up all these numbers and they present them to the power conservation council and you can see the deficits now starting to form pretty this is the winter this is the summer 2022-23 this this is a concern for the northwest this is called a

29:58 resource adequacy concern um what that basically means you take all these different conditions some of them not great conditions for generation low hydro for example the wind doesn't blow for a week you look at a lot of different iterations of a model and then it comes up with percentages of which you could have issues you just wouldn't be able to supply load and those percentages are getting higher especially in this this 20 22 to 2025 kind of time frame so there's there is concern we eweb is working with a number of other utilities on a resource adequacy program which would allow utilities to work each other work with each other across the region

30:45 to figure out and secure resources at certain times to make sure that with certain capacity so that's something we are actively involved in and this is kind of an example of what happens i won't go through all this but black line is load you can see pretty high load over a few days this is kind of a typical maybe winter day your hydro conditions and your wind conditions are such that a lot in fact what happens a lot of times in the northwest is you get a high pressure system move over and stay and it gets cold it'll get cold across the region and because it sits there the wind doesn't blow much and so it's not uncommon that it gets really cold and the wind doesn't blow and hydra if hydro conditions

31:31 are not good you get this deficit here you need to have some kind of dispatchable energy to be able to fill that opposite i'll just answer this question a little bit i've been asked a number of times what are you doing with hydrogen why does that matter why is he web interested in that and i'll i'll try to keep it pretty simple and high level but everybody you remember this chart from the very beginning and this is a simpler version of it and what i talked about before was kind of cold going away natural gas still in the picture here supplying part of the supply for electricity but

32:16 we're building out wind and solar and for carbon and climate change reason we should be building that for wind and solar but that means because of reliability there's times that it's going to be curtailed you're going to have to build out so much that there will be times you'll have surplus unless you unless you create a use for it so this is a different form of wasted energy from my perspective i just try to represent those here with these two i have lines coming out of solar and wind the idea from an economic perspective and also from a decarbonization perspective is to find a use for that and one of the uses is to elect you run it through an electrolyzer and create renewable

33:02 hydrogen basically you're using wind and solar and and its surpluses to create a different form of energy which is which is hydrogen it's a way of storing that energy for either direct generation infusion into the gas line of which you see this is not natural gas it's just gas you can there's some direct blending that you can use and then also down here in transportation for large vehicles particularly buses and large semis where you have a fuel cell that can go a lot further refuel a lot faster it's a lot lighter batteries for these big vehicles are incredibly heavy

33:47 and then also mix that back with some kind of carbon capture to then truly create a synthetic gas instead of natural gas the whole the whole point here would be to take the fossil out of the out of natural gas take the fossilness out make it no longer a natural gas that's that's the intent the reason we're interested from an electric perspective is we still probably need gas in our fleet for reliability purposes for peaking purposes it would be that much better if it wasn't a fossil fuel and then also if we really want to build out wind and solar affordably we need to find a secondary

34:33 market for the surplus that's created when you're not using it when you're not needing it so in both sectors the gas sector and the electricity sector need each other in order to decarbonize that's the reason that we're interested in it some of this technology exists some of it exists but is not scaled yet and some of it needs needs some work especially some of the carbon capture stuff so this is i only mentioned it because people asked why are you doing this why are you interested in it it's to create a secondary market so that we can build out more wind and solar and do it affordably and reliably so that that's the reason so i want to end

35:18 um with a little bit i'm not going to go through all these i i think you know you had the presentation ahead of time hopefully you got a chance to look at some of these there are some pretty exciting opportunities related to climate and energy that we're participating in that we see in the future some of these continued energy efficiency and conservation the most carbon free energy is the energy you don't use if you can be more efficient and do it at the right times and avoid using it that's that's actually the best of all worlds it doesn't look like energy consumption is going to go down in the next several decades is the way economies work the way including our economy around digital devices

36:05 telecommunications server farms digital the digital world is driving a lot of energy consumption great design expanding some of our programs carbon sequestration programs green power programs looking for secondary markets and then there's a lot of things with federal regulations that we continue to push and technology we continue to push the goal is to help our community and also do it in a way that we can align our resources in a way that we can be have carbon free as carbon-free reliable affordable resources as possible going forward as we get into some of these

36:51 decisions in 2025 to 2028 range this is this just a reminder where we started the plan and the questions and probably talked long enough i went that went over a little bit so i apologize maybe gave you enough to to talk about and and some ideas to to spread around president schlossberg with that i'll turn it back to you and report and dive in is possible thank you thank you for that very thorough presentation i'm sure that we have a lot of questions and so um i might start the queue

37:37 with matt or sonia just so that i can keep i could view on my screen um so i don't know if one of you wants to annoy raise your hand so again i did raise my hand but if matt wants to go right he can go first you go for it okay all right um so a couple of quick comments and questions one um on the transmission side i was curious why and the the map that you showed i can't remember what slide it was on but there was a map nevada is like completely blank seems like they're a bit closer to us

38:22 than connecting with some of the others and probably have a broad wealth of ability to do solar um but it doesn't seem to be connected to anything is there a a reason behind that and part of what i ask is that if we are looking at regionally and supporting the utility to work regionally or even looking at expanding our own um you know capabilities i know at times we have owned various resources in other states but anyway just what's something about it what's up with the vet but i don't i don't have the map right right in front of me i guess i could pull up again there's

39:07 there it could be that some of the lines there sonya were lower voltage lines there's there is increasing solar in in nevada most of that goes into california directly it doesn't come to the northwest california has some different challenges solar is very prevalent in the desert southwest in california probably more than most places in the country their challenge happens to be in the evening when it's hot in the summer and the sun goes down it's still hot your solar goes away the batteries haven't come into play yet this is this is an area where batteries can make a significant

39:53 difference in that few hours after the sun goes down but i'd like to look at specifically nevada um commissioner carlson to answer your question directly and i can do that that's fine um my other other questions um real quick and then and then i'll make a couple of comments so i didn't touch on wave energy at all during the presentation um i know it also asked a little bit about solar pricing and i was hoping that we could get a little bit of an update on solar pricing i didn't see any of that in here though i understand that that it seems like the the goal of the presentation is really to say

40:38 hey look at we we want to go to more renewable resources i mean that is a goal we've outlined it in our strategic plan how do we get there i mean building new resources is expensive even if you're looking at kind of nearby regions because the transmission is expensive there isn't anything in that region already so we're a tiny little drop in the bucket what can we do from a strategic perspective to help impact that and it seems like you know a lot of it was really focused on the the hydrogen capability to make a battery to store any of this other renewable energy that we might make

41:23 um so i what i what i took away a little bit too is like there are other resources out there that we also haven't discussed maybe in future maybe they're just not as viable but i know wave energy is something that's out there we have the ocean that's closer i don't know how viable you know that is and connecting to that um and also we have um from the the kind of fuel switching of sorts if we're looking at you know either creating hydrogen or another another opportunity in maybe cleaning the natural gas system up to turn that into more of a battery is uh capturing the

42:10 the gas that comes off of waste and i'm curious what the capacity of the region is and how much is kind of like low hanging fruit to capture that as a region to to get another resource that reduces the carbon but also gives us another opportunity to get that that resource that is more carbon neutral so those are some of the things that i've thought of through through the presentation um i'll leave it there and i'll come back to the questions after we get to it yeah i think i think there's there's a couple of really important points i i believe that as we go forward that we're going to need a a mix of resources with different characteristics and what what i mean by

42:56 that is i there's nothing that says that wave energy is off the table it's still evolving solar and wind are are viable choices you you have to have a mix though that meets your climate goals but also meets your reliability and affordability goal i think we're in a pretty good position to do that and i don't want to get too hung up on the hydrogen piece of it there's a lot of work to do in energy efficiency and conservation there's a lot to do in what i would call demand response which is to address the issue of timing given that the the grid is dirtier at some times as opposed to others i think that's ami technology and

43:42 different products and services to encourage people to use energy when not only is it cheapest but it's also the cleanest so these are direct things that e-web can do the the cleaning up of the gas system is not necessarily our responsibility i do think that electric utilities and gas utilities ultimately can help each other to decarbonize that's that's the answer to the question when people ask why we're doing this there is some mutual benefit in that but there's also a role for the electric utility and then there's a role for the gas utility the renewable piece of natural gas in the state of oregon is somewhere between 7 and 18 of the um i'll say natural gas

44:29 consumption in the state of oregon could be what's called renewable natural gas is um now part of when you renew it you're you're capturing methane as opposed to co2 so there's some additional benefit there uh but it's it's certainly not going to renewable natural gas is not going to replace the natural gas consumption in the state of oregon given the percentages that that i just mentioned that was an inventory study done by the oregon department of energy by the way okay is i i didn't see that wasn't something that was provided in our materials no i i did not mention that there have been comments about renewable natural gas and there is

45:14 an inventory this potential is something between like i said seven and eighteen percent or some somewhere in that range maybe twenty percent at the most if it's capturing methane there's additional benefit to that because of methane's potency versus co2 but it depends what you're capturing but but it's not going to replace the entire state of oregon natural gas consumption okay those are my questions um i'll come back to the the questions to ponder after i hear others respond thanks

46:10 you hear me okay great uh thanks commissioner salsberg for running this meeting hurting the cats as it were um thank you to frank for the presentation there's a lot here and we probably won't have enough time for all the questions and discussion um so i hope we can find some ways to ensure that uh we can all get on the same page i know it's gonna take uh probably a few iterations to so we have a shared understanding of all the um the trade-offs and the issues that are being surfaced um i also want to say thanks to the technical staff who put this hybrid meeting together it's really nicely done and from where i sit it's it feels really really smooth and thanks to the staff who are running

46:56 the production for the um of this meeting for the public um a few uh points just to completely agree with you frank um from everything i understand we're gonna need renewable hydrogen for storage uh it just and i think there's a big role for eweb to play we're already stepping out in that direction working with northwest natural to do some pilot work on generating renewable hydrogen so i'm grateful that we're doing that and i feel like we should continue in that direction because that's going to be important technology for us to develop to make the rest of the renewable systems work yes we're gonna need um synthetic gas and or renewable gas

47:42 and um we're gonna need to save those energy sources for those sectors that are hard to electrify like heavy industry and freight and my only point here is that from my perspective and again my understanding of what's required to get us to a more renewable energy future we we need to electrify everything that can be electrified and which includes in our climate includes electrifying home heating and home water heat the things that frequently are using natural gas right now so that we can save any renewable natural gas or synthetic natural gas for those sectors that are hard to electrify yes there's a ton of opportunity with

48:28 energy efficiency and i look forward to um continuing to lead on that front and i'm going to save my policy questions for later actually so i'll leave that a couple of questions or clarifying points for you frank you mentioned land use for renewable energy uh which is certainly an issue and and you pointed out a few of them that there are some areas of land we just can't use for renewable energy generation um so there's gonna be some work there as we expand renewable generation but it's also worth noting that there is a tremendous footprint of our current fossil fuel powered system right when we look at coal for example

49:13 it's not just the coal-fired power plant but the huge coal mines in all over the country the the flat mountain tops in west virginia etc that have an enormous footprint that goes beyond um just the the generating facility and i'm um then i'll just make ask one question and then i'll i'll turn it over to somebody else to pick up from there um electricity versus all energy if you could just say a few things frank about the difference of going to like a 90 renewable electric um sector versus a 90 renewable energy sector what we're looking at both transportation and housing and how those work because my understanding is that when we look at

49:58 all energy increasing um and especially electrifying houses and other buildings and and the transportation sector it increases our flexibility and provides opportunities can you speak to that um i i think so and i'll i'm not exactly sure about the inner relationship that you're asking about i i will say that i i've always felt and i think e-web in the past has been supportive of looking at clean energy policies that were economy-wide and and some of that is because when you look at some of those big areas of waste and inefficiency those are

50:44 the the interactions between the different sectors and i ultimately think matt that this is going to come down to eventually an issue of efficiency there's going to be a limited amount of energy and and then there's going to be all this use that these different uses that society wants to have and you know we're we're only dealing with the electricity sector but i also think that when you look at this you have to say okay what are we doing this that's the most efficient that we can do when we have interactions with other sectors what's the efficiency choice is it you know i think eventually all those systems will work together uh

51:32 there's i think you and i have had this conversation the issue of timing with this transition is important also because we don't want to do a couple things we don't want to lose the portability and the reliability of the electric grid that would shut down electrification probably faster than anything and so i don't know exactly about flexibility maybe we can look at that a little bit further but i think ultimately we're going to want to look at this from an efficiency perspective and and make sure that we are being flexible environmental affordable reliable and there may be areas that we want to push harder than others to make that happen

52:18 but i do think all of these systems eventually work together and it'll come down to i think the most efficient system will be the way that society ultimately should go what are we using the most efficiently and when i say that from an environmental from a triple bottom line perspective what's the most efficient from a triple bottom line perspective i can elaborate at some point my teacher more on that just to make sure i understand what you're asking no i think you you hit on most of it yeah thanks frank all right so john john brown okay thank you couple um so one of the questions i had was

53:03 one of the slides said we're going to lose 4 000 megawatts of coal over the next few years and in our community we have values certain values but other communities that are producing energy may have different values so my question is in the areas that are taking off the coal are they just replacing that with a gas plant and at what point is it not going to be economical or are the lines going converge so that it's not it doesn't pay to build a gas plant to replace it that's the first point yeah well it's a so i'll come in on your first your first

53:50 question around do other communities have different values absolutely we're dealing with in some cases the wild west there's there's a big difference between and you see it in regulations there's a big difference in the clean standards in wyoming for example versus oregon wyoming they have no rps it's it's zero there's there's no energy cleanliness standard in the state of wyoming now what utilities are finding and this is this is really i think this is a really important point if you have an energy source that does not have a fuel cost and you can run it you're going to run it before you have another plant like a gas plant that has a fuel cost if you have both and you have the choice

54:36 you're going to go with the free one a lot of utilities in their planning are looking and saying if we take out this coal what do we need to replace it with for reliability and also for cost some other reason that coal is coming out isn't just because utilities are going oh it's great for the environment it's expensive now compared to gas gas has an advantage over coal from from a carbon perspective you still need gas in the system for reliability but most utilities are starting to look at this and they go we're going to build out these renewables we're going to deal with demand response we're going to look at storage so they're planning this knowing that

55:22 even if they build gas they're going to run it less they're only going to run it when they need it so that's that's what we're starting to see happen is they're not just taking out one and putting in another they're taking out coal and they're looking at a mix we are concerned because they're taking up coal faster than they're putting in other stuff across the region i say us as as an industry that's why you see some of those deficits that we're concerned about but ultimately they'll build out renewables they'll build up gas and the whole point is gas will be used less only for when you need it and that makes sense to build a gas plant not run no not really that's that's part of the

56:07 challenge building out capacity and then curtailing it is very expensive it's part of the reason some of the opportunities that we talk about are looking at more organized markets that can price let's say gas or some kind of fast ramping resource based on its availability and not just how many megawatt hours you get out of it right now most of the markets charge like we charge our customers kilowatt hours they and if you don't run it you don't make money and so that's an issue that the industry needs to work on and that's part of when we talk about market development some of these things resource adequacy paying into the system

56:53 to have some of those available when we need them that's part of that development but right now it's it's like you described okay thank you so a couple of things that i see are there's long range medium range and short range you know i think that the hydrogen is a longer range thing but it's something that i'm very excited about you know wind and solar i would say is medium range and then for e-web has where we have control i think conservation is going to be our low-hanging fruit and our quickest area to get to the one problem that i see with that is trying to incentivize the rental

57:41 market because in the city of eugene 50 of the homes are rentals and there is no incent incentive right now for a landlord to go through and do winterizing when they're not paying the bill and so i think if we can figure out that challenge and some way to figure that to incentivize landlords and property owners to weatherize and get conservation on the rental properties that's where an area that i would like to look into and see what are the opportunities for us to do that it's hard to do when you're not paying the bills to you know say put

58:28 especially in some of these older multi-family units that have windows from the 70s put windows in a multi-family unit is going to be tens and tens of thousands of dollars for something that they're not going to reap the benefit of so that's that's an area that i'm looking for any sort of solutions obviously with that yeah i think that's i liked how you characterize the immediate the mid-range in the long range i would classify certain things in the immediate energy efficiency conservation demand response is another one because of the timing issues we have to size infrastructure we have to buy

59:13 resources based on peak if we can lower that peak shift it around we get a carbon benefit we get an infrastructure benefit we get a resource and an advantage there so i think that's in the kind of the immediate to mid midterm range and then resource decisions it is a challenge given the housing stock that we have and the status with you know 50 it is more than 50 percent is rentals how do you create pull in the market is is part of the answer to that how do you create competition for including those energy bills over the power utility bills in general water electricity or gas whatever in the price

59:59 that that creates competition that's that's a that's a big challenge i don't have the answers to that um we'll go find them thank you great presentation thank you very educational all right as to comment john uh at smud we looked into that at an nwppa conference a few years ago about smut has an excellent program for uh conservation on their rental program so we'll have that discussion because there's there's some opportunity there i agree a couple quick questions frank um when's the last time a transmission line was approved how long did it take and it was and knowing how i like

1:00:45 keystone and jordan cove and things that if what the the opposition wasn't you know was is because of the product they were carrying but those were you know surface transmission facilities and all this new capacity has to be above ground and probably to me much more impactful on the environment what is the probability of permitting a new transmission line from these new sources in the timing the the timeliness the one that that i'm most familiar with is the one that was that's still in process in eastern oregon out in the remote part of eastern oregon and i believe that started 15 years ago 15 years and they haven't broken ground yet and they haven't gotten all their permits yet it's there there is definitely a knot in my backyard piece of that as there is wind even you

1:01:32 know offshore wind is another one we didn't talk about but you know getting people don't necessarily want to see wind turbines off the coast um even though you know there's a potential there and then your slide on nicole uh the you know the retirement whole capacities and things and you showed a deficit on you know like 2024 i think it was that we're going to have some roundouts and things you're really concerned about were those statistics created with electrification of the transportation sector are those deficits assuming that we've electrified the transportation sector in the next two to four years or those deficits have no change in how we live and act so the the numbers i showed there was from a survey

1:02:17 of utilities and their planning process it does not include very much if any electrification okay and then my comment is is that uh you know as far as you know we've got the big three questions i'll get to those later but i think uh besides what john the other john we talked about the rental pool i think electrification of the transportation sector is huge and it's something that we can do i i don't know how we're going to get that you know i don't understand the logic of we're trying to get people to shift to electricity but if we make it unreliable less reliable than it is now and much more expensive that's a hard sell and that device for me defies logic and so that steep curve in that last five to ten percent is uh it's like the reliability we can get 95 percent reliability we get 100 percent

1:03:02 cost of 50 times more so that's going to be a challenge for me to to go into a mode to where we make something much more expensive and much less reliable but we're trying to say but please believe us you know we're going to have to find that balance and that that's going to be a challenge for us so yeah and i think our electrification study showed that the electrification of transportation is definitely something that as from a system we can handle from a resource perspective we can handle it surprisingly doesn't use a lot of energy if everybody charges at the same time that's that can be a capacity problem but that's where demand responds and time of use comes in if we can work with people to charge off peak times that's definitely a help but

1:03:49 you know we've been looking at a number of different incentive programs and infrastructure programs specifically around transportation because also because some of the clean fuel laws in oregon are changing and we will have to allocate some of the funds we get for that program specifically to transportation electrification so um it aligns and supports what you said that that's a big opportunity it's manageable for us and it has a big impact on the community so yeah the slide that you showed how we can really get a real bang for the buck by doing that and then like you say if we can get people to charge their evs at night when we have a surplus during their surplus times and

1:04:34 having participated in that time of youth study it's it's really kind of fascinating how much energy you save when you're consciously aware of saying i i really don't want to run my dishwasher six o'clock in the evening or on my clothes dryer at seven a.m um it's just a conscious effort and hopefully we can get through all that yes it saves money and i think what what i tried to point out today was it it saves carbon yeah if if you can get consumers to consume electricity when there's lots of sun and wind that's a great thing uh we need to align those those two the challenge california has is basically they've got a lot of solar now and when the sun goes down they have a problem because it's still

1:05:19 hot still in the summer that is where batteries a three or four hour battery makes a big difference in california the three or four hour battery in oregon won't help it's we're looking at days where the wind doesn't blow and the sun is sort of intermittent especially in the winter when we pee so but transportation big opportunity i think and one last pool i got 30 seconds it looks like proliferation of these on and streaming and server farms is that an impact i mean because it's all peak and everybody streams and everybody looks at videos and things like that on their phones and they think it's endless but is that really a thing that uh really does affect the peaking and things such as that because certain forms i wouldn't say it's necessarily peaking per se

1:06:04 what's the proliferation of technology including cell phones streaming services social media the one of the largest areas of growth for load or or energy in the northwest has been server farms and you know it's interesting because part of me wants to say if you really want to help the environment don't do this good luck with that though because we all are sort of addicted to this um and and also you know you have to look at a lot of other external things you know you john rode your bike here um you know that's that's important where you get your products for you know the the largest generator of carbon in the world is china and look at how much we consume from

1:06:50 china it's more than double the us so all of those things are going to matter what we have to come back to is as a utility what can we do to really help facilitate take ownership in what we're doing and then how can we help our community in a way that keeps us affordable keeps us reliable and all those things that you pointed out thank you okay well one of the great things about being in charge is i get to listen to everybody's questions first but then one of the bad things is that most of my questions get answered along the way so um i'm just gonna maybe jump right into those questions that you put up because i have some thoughts about that um

1:07:35 i'm really curious about you know what we can control right we can talk about the grid and the interconnectedness and all that stuff but we're a small utility in a pretty small city like where would we what areas do you see that we're going to get the most bang for our buck realistically and how can we leverage other partners to get that i think you might say you already said efficiency demand response and rates are things that we can really control and to address what john brofsky said about efficiency with the rental housing market we're trying to work with the city to partner on that because we can't do that all by ourselves

1:08:21 we haven't gotten very far so anybody from the city into this work session we really want to work on that goal and figure out how to how to make that happen anyway i'm starting to ramble now but i guess my question is given what we can control what will give us the most bang for our buck um in the short short term i would say so are you asking me okay so i i really the the focus on energy efficiency and conservation is probably the highest impact the soonest even with the rental situation there's still a lot of potential across the community

1:09:08 to me that's that's first and foremost finishing our ami infrastructure and the data management of that so that we can get into products and services that create demand response programs that's i would say that's in the near term also um depending on who you talk to it might be near term or midterm but that that is something that facilitates a lot of discussion even around time of use you know we're talking about rate design fixed costs variable costs you know all these kinds of things you have to have the programs and the products in place to facilitate that so i think that's a really big near-term opportunity i i think

1:09:56 looking at expanding some of our green power programs to include carbon sequestration which aligns with the watershed work also that's like a double win across the utility i think expanding those giving people like pac tech the opportunity to buy renewable energy credits from their local electricity supplier is something we're talking to them about but we don't have a program yet for it those i think our customers would really appreciate again that starts to expand into regional influence we actually have a lot of influence on the region um let's do things that help the region also um and so those are kind of things that

1:10:41 i actually had the list of all these for a sec you know with the secondary market that's mid long term you're probably right john you know the other thing cross would you know we are looking at hybrid gas electric potential infrastructure it gets back to your point from a consumer's position if you put in a combination furnace heat pump where you have heat pump most of the time and you only have gas when you need it you have the same issue how do you recover from you know how did the economics work on that that's a that's a study but i think transportation electrification also probably water heating is what i

1:11:26 would call smart electrification i do have a definition for smart electrification includes a number of characteristics some of them include the economics the building on peaks and some of these other things but i probably gave you too much already the challenge is we can't do everything so we're going to have to figure out which of those are really the priorities but energy efficiency conservation is high up there getting setting ourselves up for demand response is another one expanding our green power programs and our sequestration those are things i think we can do so what i would love to see and obviously it's not up to me it's a typical board but something that i would love to see is like taking those top three things and coming up with some measurable

1:12:13 goals that we can really i don't know what we can do in the in the short term because i think that um some of the stuff we're just we're tipping away and we're getting there but i think it'd be really awesome to to have some short-term things that we can target and you know at the end of i don't know what short-term is three to five years or whatever i consider it three to five years midterm okay so short term is like one to two years midterm is three to five and then stuff beyond that is it starts to get a little bit fuzzier i also think that we we need to do we started to do electrification analysis we did some we did some look on the system we're

1:12:58 looking at some of the economics now really the most important next step is to look at consumption across our entire customer base and when i i mean in detail look at peaking forecast economic and and climate differences because if we do get to a point where we're shopping for energy so we're going outward maybe bonneville is part of it maybe they're not with at some point we're going to have to shop for a supplier and we're going to want to go down the list and say it's urban free it's reliable you know all our things right but they're going to want to know what do you need what do you want we need to have a very detailed look that's the integrated

1:13:44 resource planning process and the consumption piece is really important part of that we're going to have to be able to say here's our specification we're going to go out to the world and we need this kind of energy and so that's really important it's it's near term because midterm is coming pretty quickly so that's that's something that we're it actually is in the goals already and some of this is hidden in the operational goals yeah i'm sure i'm sure it is somewhere or it's in your head or it's with the executive leadership team but um that's the direction that we had some i

1:14:31 think that would be important also because at some point you want to take this sort of massive list and go you know you have to prioritize somewhere if you don't prioritize you end up ruining your affordability piece and also you don't do anything very well right so i'd rather see us and if you probably agree do a few things really well and check those boxes and move on than to fragment ourselves too much okay so we've got 15 minutes left in our meeting but i know that everybody wants everybody still wants to address the policy piece so um i'm not sure if we can do it all in three three minutes each or um if we should add a little bit of time

1:15:16 um maybe just see how it goes but everyone okay with that and i was thinking that we would go backwards around the um circle to ask the next question to be fair if that's okay with everybody we'll start with john brown go to john borowski matt and then sonia can you put those questions back up on the screen i can

1:16:03 so number one i don't think we need to change our strategic plan uh to accommodate the uh conditions now i think when we look at it the more policy opportunities the board be interested in having management before the policies i think the policies that john b mentioned about you know about the energy efficiency and uh electrification should continue than we have and uh and the priorities um i think we ought to reallocate our priorities and make uh because it's a triple win i mean the people in the rental pool tend to you know a lot of them tend to have some different financial capacities than others and i think that we should reallocate

1:16:49 our priorities to put a lot more money in the weatherization and the energy efficiency element there and also programs on making evs much more you know acceptable and so we can incentivize chargers at home so we can encourage people to charge at night rather than during the day when they're working things such as that so um and things like that and then the time of use i think i think the time of use that you know if you want to run your dishwasher at six o'clock at night it's going to cost you 12 cents a minute you know kilowatt versus six it's just a it's a choice that you make and i think that we ought to go into time and use and things such as

1:17:37 do you think that as a utility we should own charging stations available to the public i think the logistics of that are going to be uh very challenging i mean public charging stations yes in places like where we can incentivize it you know like you know like i've said places like the oakway mall the fifth street market places like that where we could take out a sector and you know bring people in and rapid charge and things like that but as far as owning you know individual stations i just leave that up to the consumer yeah it wouldn't prevent any commercial organization from doing that you know the tesla charge is 30 38 cents or 40 cents a kilo a kilowatt to charge and the pain is sex you know so there's a

1:18:22 there's a huge incentive there but i i personally don't think we should the logistics of getting into that i mean look at the challenges we've had with implementing ami and if we start putting charging stations in and the security and the liability and things such as that i think at the beginning let's see how the private sector can handle it would be my initial reaction but i haven't really studied that but if somebody wants to get this presentation i'll change my mind yeah it just starts to work we tend to be very infrastructure oriented and if we can provide infrastructure that the general public can leverage to facilitate further electrification of vehicles it's just is it a means to something that's at the end even if at some point we start to roll that into time of use and other things

1:19:08 with those in public charging stations as well it's just just a follow-up question i didn't have a specific answer we've kind of looked at both there's opportunities potentially for both but it wouldn't prevent private commercial i'd probably like to do a couple pilots to see how it works because i mean our job is to provide water to the people and then how they use it and you know and the same thing with electricity we bring it to the point of service and then how they use it and what appliances they use and how they use that is up to the consumer and if we change that philosophy we're kind of starting in there okay now do we provide you know we put financial incentives for them but do we actually provide the

1:19:53 physical thing we provide a dryer and hot water heater no we don't we just give them financial incentives to do it so i'd probably want to draw that and facilitate the investment of someone else in those yeah oh yeah absolutely you should incentivize it financially and pay back your credits i'm all for that anything we can get to make this a much more um consumable you know the transition from going from fuel uh to electricity is a huge huge climb it's not so much for younger generations but for old people like me you know my hands are gonna be i'm gonna hang on to that gas car as long as i can i may be facetious but seriously it's going to be a challenge to take millions and millions of vehicles and say there you've got a finite

1:20:39 remaining economic life yeah sorry i just took up all your time go i'm done thank you um yeah for me the number one should we change our strategic plan um i don't know if we should change it i think we can look at it and see if there's areas that might dumb tail and supplement it i'm not real i'm not familiar enough with it to to go in and do wholesale changes to it i think that they're from what you showed up on the the slides there's opportunities for us to to slide in there in the existing strategic plan future board policies and opportunities you know when you ask that question of john about should we put in charging stations

1:21:25 let's think about the areas that eweb owns right we have a bunch of substations if you put a if you put a fast charge station at some of our substations outside the fence you know it might be something that could be could be doable um and then the third one should eweb reallocate priorities investments or programs for me if we're looking long term at hydrogen as a as a fuel that we're going to want to change water to oxygen and hydrogen you need fuel for that and for me i think one of our areas that we're going to be coming up with in the next few few well in the next year or so is

1:22:11 leeburg walterville and i see leiber and walterville as flow through power that could be used at nighttime and when the demand is not there to have that clean hydrogen stuff so that might be an area that i would look at to maybe reallocate some priorities and say hey we we may spend a little bit up front but we've got 20 more years of license on these facilities and in 15 years we could we could make a lot of hydrogen out of those on those plants so that would be something i would say i'm number three

1:23:06 sorry um can you hear me okay cool all right um thanks for the conversation so far uh yeah i'm just gonna try to jump in here so i'm trying to pull up my notes i was taking notes there they are um all right a few quick comments and probably not a whole bunch of time for discussion because i know we have two more commissioners or that at least commissioner carlson has a comment time here too uh it won't be a surprise to anyone that i think addressing community-wide carbon emissions swiftly has to be a top priority uh whether or not it's reflected in this strategic plan uh i don't know i yeah i think we could update the strategic plan so it's reflected

1:23:51 more prominently um and and in my opinion not just electricity but all energy sources we already do influence energy use but beyond just current electricity use for example by incentivizing hybrid water heaters that can replace natural gas water heaters and by hybrid i mean enter heat pump water heaters that can replace natural gas water heaters and by incentivizing heat pumps for heating homes that can replace natural gas or and by by installing charging stations for evs we already influenced those other part portions of the energy sector i think we should continue to do so we of course have to do it affordably but everything i've seen suggest that

1:24:36 making a transition off of fossil fuels uh can be done very affordably and doesn't break the budget i want to say quickly thanks to the planning team who conducted electrification study i would like to see another phase of that electrification study that extends to include both industrial and freight energy use in our area because i think that's an important piece of the picture that we probably need to understand over the coming several years i also feel and when we talk about policy altogether i feel like we can and should establish a transition equity goal so that as we look at decarbonizing our community we're not only not disproportionately affecting

1:25:22 marginalized communities but we also help those communities um get into a better place over the course of decarbonizing our community um i know there's more to talk about on on this um and then also not only the carbonization goal i feel like we can and should establish a goal for what our how much carbon comes along with our electricity over different increments of time so by 2025 and 2030 and 2035 where how much carbon char electricity be producing i think the board should weigh on it in on a target like that not only carbon but also i think we should have an electrification goal or target

1:26:08 and also in addition to decarbonization i think we should have a resilience target of some kind so perhaps we could identify the portion of electricity that is generated locally perhaps within a certain radius from our immediate area or that we have immediate control over so that as we look at disruptions to the energy system we know that we have control over enough electricity to to supply our basic needs um and the last thing and this is a question for firing if we are thinking about setting targets like this for e-web and energy purchases electricity purchases in the future what's the timeline what's the right timeline to have targets in place to both inform staff planning efforts um

1:26:55 but also negotiations with potential generate generating sources or other entities that we're purchasing electricity from that's all my comments in my last question great uh well thank you all i really appreciated the conversation i agreed with much of what was said i've been uh as we've kind of gone through this i've been thinking about bucketing each category into you know what we own um which is where i think you know when we we talk about that goal uh we're at a place where we have ninety

1:27:40 percent of our electricity is clean and that other ten percent is much of what we don't own it's the market purchases so then that made me start thinking about okay so is it realistic to make a goal that the electricity that we offer is 100 renewable um because we don't influence that other ten percent um and we talk about you know generation that's very expensive transmission through other states um like you know various pointed out it seems in the the time frame is impossible so for me um it's i i think it's it's actually saying we are not

1:28:25 going to claim to be 100 renewable what we're instead going to focus on is that that outer layer of influence and i heard that throughout the conversation but it's not it's not something i think it has to be an intentional marketing strategy from the utility to say we're not going after this and here's why we have a bigger responsibility responsibility in the community and i think we've we've under we've done this throughout some of the policies we've implemented for years you know looking at electrification of evs um fuel switching things of that nature but because we don't have that goal and i really loved what matt was talking about about having the different targets for different timelines um and even

1:29:11 probably different buckets you know targets for different buckets like here's what we own here's what we think we can go after here's what we influence and that influence piece is maybe um you know uh the the rental sector efficiency which i've been banging the table about for years and years and i think there are some rental efficiency programs that have been uh in place a bit but that's still uh we still have a long way to go there so what's what's our potential for impact the cars um you know when we said natural gas and our responsibility versus our potential to influence i mean if we're saying that our our area of influence is more the goal

1:29:56 and here's the different sectors and there are that little pie chart of what we can influence and here's the cost for each of those i think that's where we start being able to say these are the targets but we need to know the size and the cost and the time frame for that area so i mean i i don't know how others feel about saying okay we're just going to wipe our hands of that 10 percent but i think in some respects based on the the affordability and the transmission aspect it's pretty hard to say that we could go after that but our real responsibility is to reduce the other part to offset that 10 percent maybe that's something that we could look at um

1:30:41 so when i think about the the first question i don't and i can't see the time frame for some if there's a timer up it's gone i don't know where that went um but the the um the the first point i don't think we need to change the strategic plan per se but the policies that are underlying and supporting that i absolutely would support um i think it would be very helpful in another meeting to go through these near-term opportunities and really flesh those out in those buckets that um that we've talked about with targets and then um i i guess i'm also curious for a later time my my assumption is that we don't really have

1:31:26 a lot of impact on the market um because that's where that 10 percent is but do we have do we have some opportunity there through the regional coordination um it just seems like regional coordination sounds like it's very that's a very long process and so that you know the the timing on that um granted people seem motivated given that there is a re resiliency um short or a reliability shortage there so i absolutely think we should be involved in those conversations um from a resiliency standpoint and need to look at that you know in near term how we're going to support

1:32:11 that from e-web but that our our power to influence that is also you know much smaller because we're a small utility well we're a bigger utility but in the realm of all of the utilities that are involved in that regional planning that's still a you know a piece of the influence it's not something that at the board level you just say okay yeah great fix that and make it happen you know that that creates a lot of coordination we need to figure out how much time and effort we can put into that and what we would expect to get from it okay i think i'm out of time i don't think anybody is from from a

1:32:56 staff perspective or a regional influence perspective saying that we're giving up on the 10 um i i think there is a difference in the influence of what and the difference between what we produce and what we buy off of the market but there's also a number of standards that are developing i just saw one today a renewable energy export standard from another large utility in canada the worry that a lot of times happens is that you're going to buy a clean energy product from another utility and then they will backfill that with something dirtier which doesn't help the end game you might feel good about what you bought but then there's a fallout from that and so there's

1:33:41 some attempts to look at things like that but i i think that if we're balancing reliability with affordability there's there's no reason why we can't continue to make progress on getting cleaner and cleaner the the challenge will be if we get what i would say dumb electrification that starts to push up against the the the fuel switching at the worst times but everything that we've talked about here hasn't been in that category really so yeah i don't i think there's opportunity there okay i mean it's it's really hard to have these discussions and have no costs for any of the items i mean

1:34:29 i guess that's part of why we're having this conversation do we want to have staff look into those costs or not and if so which ones i mean the top one on the near term opportunity is advanced metering infrastructure which i think we've done but it's probably the next step of how do we send price signals into the you know into the into the market and will people respond to them maybe i'm wrong on that but it's hard for me to figure out like on these near-term opportunities what those really mean without fleshing out a little bit more of how what that means specifically for eweb this was a very you know broad conversation about the regional and the nationwide market and the the the focus on you know the need to to do

1:35:14 uh carbon carbon uh reduction but it feels to me like we really really really need to focus on what e-web specifically can do where we can influence it and what we might be able to i mean i think you know what i've heard tonight we all are in support of going down this is just how do we go about making these decisions and choosing the right path and we're going to need some information that's really targeted at eweb specifically to move those forward at least that's my perspective and i think uh commissioner carlson this this has to evolve a little bit so when i think about tonight's discussion i was really trying to think about if there are policy or high level

1:35:59 directional changes that would need to take place there's obviously lots of programs that start to fall in under under policies if the board said something to the effect that um we don't care about something on that list then oh then okay you start to look at trade-offs or you know one of the things we're going to have to look at is if there's further incentives and energy efficiency what do we give up you know what what are the things that we have to de-prioritize in order to make that happen and that's something that's that management staff's going to have to come back and take a look at but um yeah i was just some of this is just to get get a feel for if there's something

1:36:45 major that we're missing or that's unexpected from a direction or a policy perspective to start with and then there's lots of follow-on conversations after this one okay um so real quick my answers to these three questions that i haven't already given is um i'm a little bit on the fence if we need to change our strategic plan i think that um you know this the strategic plan has been worked on for a while and and well thought out and i don't really want to waste time necessarily concurring with it too much when there's a lot of work that can be done um but i

1:37:31 do want to make sure that this work kind of rises to the top and if it's not the lending and the strategic plan i'm afraid that it's it doesn't it doesn't have the same importance so i guess i am i am supportive of changing the strategic plan or adding something to it or fleshing something out a little bit more just to make sure that it stays at that level because i think this is really important and in terms of future board policy opportunities i mean i think that it seems like everybody is pretty much on the same page in that the types of policies that what i'm hearing is that people are interested in are um things that are

1:38:22 can do also i'm hearing things about like setting specific goals towards things and like i said you probably all have those goals or it is somewhere but at least at the board level i'm not sure that it's that we've seen goals we've talked about these things in generalities um and then in terms of reallocating priorities investments or programs i don't know if it's necessarily reallocating but it seems like maybe shifting some of the focus towards answering these questions and i liked what matt said about making sure that there was an equity equity goal in this i think that's really important so yeah does anybody have anything else that they want to add or

1:39:07 maybe we can talk about like what next steps are like where do we go from here have you gotten frank's information that you that you were hoping to get i've gotten some some good feedback i think the the interesting thing about policy is that policy generally doesn't get into uh an annual goal it's a little bit higher level which but that's that's fine that's that's a nuance to me um i i think i have enough to to come back to the board with a little bit different conversation around how this fits into this the strategic discussions

1:39:54 and part of the reason i say how does it fit in there there are areas where i'll say climate work renewable energy work resiliency work all aligned very nicely there's other places where you could distract from one thing or another and so i want to have a discussion with the board and probably the best way to do it would be to come back with some very specific strategic things and say this is something to consider as opposed to just opening it up saying what do you want why don't you know i come back with here's some things to consider um from a policy and a strategic

1:40:39 perspective that brings some of these issues to likes and probably some trade-offs in there too because this the important thing about a strategy is it also tells you maybe what you're not gonna do and so all these things are very attractive there's lots of things we can be doing there's there's also a lot of other things we're already doing so which are which are really valuable as well so i think i have enough to come back to the board with some ideas and then you can shoot them down or you can twist them around and and uh correct and tweak and guide i mean that's really what this board is is for so i think i have enough to do that and create some interesting healthy

1:41:25 debates and discussions i think one more thing that i think would be helpful as a board as far as policy-wise is figuring out which term we want to use you know is it net neutral is it you know he gave us those four or five different ways of looking at things if we're setting goals we have to as a board come to a conclusion as to what our benchmark is and is it this term this term or this term so that then they can shoot towards that because if you're just saying renewables that doesn't help him so i think that's the type of policy thing that you're hoping to get from

1:42:10 us at some point so that he can build those metrics and build the things that we can go against am i wrong or no you're absolutely right i think when when you start getting into policy words matter because there's a history and a meaning to those words and those who develop it i'm looking i'm sorry looking at the screen but looking here too um those who develop it are the ones who understand its meaning the most right so um that's why i think going through some of the strategic pieces is going to be valuable but you know for for president schlossberg for you you weren't involved in the last one um i think all those matter i think the words matter i think the meaning behind the words

1:42:56 matter i think how that you know whether we're looking at this as local versus regional matters you know we we could make a decision that locally helps from a region hers how do you how do you reconcile that which one's more important i'll give you an example we sold a wind farm two years ago people didn't like we sold the wind farm we sold it to somebody who real retooled it and made it larger and more productive it helped the region it made us look worse so what's you know those are the kinds of things that we'll have to talk about we we could shop around away from bpa

1:43:43 potentially i'm not saying we will i'm not saying we won't there's a big decision coming up on that that could make us look better or worse but help the region so though you're absolutely right those are the things we need to get into and i don't know which net will stand up the most i don't i don't know which one whether it's net carbon free net neutral net 100 percent clean that i don't know we'll have that discussion all right unless anybody has anything else thank you frank for that presentation and thank you commissioners for the discussion i look forward to seeing what comes next and i've been so prompted every meeting and this is the first one we've gone

1:44:28 over so i apologize for that but we are 15 minutes late but that's right the discussion was definitely worth it so if that meeting is a journey thank you mindy