EWEB Board of Commissioners — February 1, 2022

0:08 the first agenda item is an agenda check is there any conditions changes to the incentive yes good evening commissioner president brown i just wanted to make note that item 11 this evening which is the integrated resource plan is listed as tentative staff is prepared and ready for this item if we get to it today but we left a little bit of flexibility in the schedule not knowing how late this meeting was going to go but i just wanted uh you all to know that staff is ready uh to go either way and it uh you know pushing it off does not impact the schedule with irp at all so it's totally at our discretions thank you okay and i'll do my best to keep it on agenda but i don't want to cut things short too so if we run out of

0:54 time i'm going to take a lot of time i'll ask for an extension so that said anything else from anybody else if not i just board members of the general manager i'll start with you frank you think um yes commissioners i have one thing um i did want to let commissioners know that the executive director of the northwest public power association reached out to me and asked me to put in an application to be on their board of trustees this is similar to what former commissioner helgeson

1:39 that same organization this is slightly different in the sense that this is allotted to an executive of a utility and not a board member unless anybody in particular objects to that i look forward to representing the utility with the northwest public power association next i don't know how long the term goes up i think it's two or three years but if you do have an objection please let me know and can i get back out but represent us unless you're here otherwise thank you would that preclude a commissioner from also being on it or is there only one decision for utility typically there's one per utility in those last several years

2:24 if there was an opening for another commissioner level and they also divided up by state so there was another opening for a commissioner in the state of oregon i will let this group know and if the board wishes to change the representation that i'm perfectly fine thank you okay mindy anything for the video um just we had a really nice retreat um i think it was just last week i really appreciated getting together with all of you um and also i formally and submitted all of my paperwork for my to run against my seat so everything's in so um i will be on the ballot in

3:10 may congratulations nothing for me thank you nothing for me um had our meeting with the mckenzie watershed council that i finally is on went well staff is well represented there so they they do more of the heavy lifting and i just kind of go along for the ride but it's a very uh rewarding position good i've got several items number one build chambers again they don't stop the tribal farms and things and he have a colonies that came from from his parents parents in 1901 to 1950

3:55 he said he didn't have any use for it he sent it to me and i'm going to pass it down um the other thing is i don't know if anybody saw today's news about forest service model during the south sister and the bulge is getting bigger and if you know the south sister that uh the mechanical event there would be catastrophic to mckinley or just you may want to read

4:43 security and about being proactive rather than reactive about how we deal with that uh because individuals in our actions on what is going on a presentation on what are our options what is the probability and things such as that so we can address that before we have to be reactive i think it's a good suggestion without objection to other board members i'd like the staff to bring us back some information on that and how we may

5:28 better feel more secure in this position absolutely president brown on behalf of staff i can tell you it's an issue that we contemplated and considered and we'll be prepared to have that discussion okay well good because i know we have security people here and uh they're well trained they're good for what they do and we want to make them better okay thank you we really appreciate your presence thank you next item is a public input all right well then i don't have to open that we'll move right along the next agenda item number four the approval of consent calendar

6:15 and move to approve it said calendar second second segment any question and any other comments or questions on this i just would make one comment that again i feel like these are super helpful i start to read and have questions and they're answered in as a part of the brief the vast majority of the time so i really appreciate the effort staff puts into putting these together i think it makes things transparent and easier for all of us so appreciation there

7:00 yeah my questions uh you know i don't like no bid when we don't have competition and everything so i reached out to a couple other architecture firms they had no knowledge of this although we did say in the background there was and they questioned we're not designing a building for this service it's a half a million dollars design a full yard of growing why wouldn't an engineering firm do

7:45 good question that i was going to defer to the price for karen kelly on that one syllabus era you would you like me to take that question thank you sarah thanks sarah sure um so when we um were looking at the potential options for the use of this property it did include some buildings and potentially multiple buildings and so the way that we formed the request for proposals was based on a phased approach and so it would potentially have building design but also there's significant wetlands and alternatives analysis involved and so we um

8:32 we have the option of how we pursue um the design work and that's why it's a significant dollar amount so this is for buildings and not engineering or because we lock 400 grand off the price for wetlands mitigation i'm just wondering what are we getting for a half a million dollars that you know i'm just wondering why an architectural firm is doing it not in engineering so the um partnership for the team that's involved is a combination of engineering and architects um it was originally proposed by pivot and so they are the um primary contractor but there are engineering

9:17 firms um you know there's a landscape structural wetland mitigation [Music] pieces and so i could provide a breakdown with more information about who's involved in the project and the nature of the work that they're doing if that would be helpful my concern is i see these contracts come in and nobody else does it and then we get contract amendments in the future because we only have one player at that place and i just i just want to make sure that you know some of us are watching or all of us are watching it not that i question the integrity of this process it's just we've got an architectural contract for half a million dollars and it's the first i've heard of the new building so

10:04 i'm just wondering you know you can see my where i'm coming from but with that i will i will prove this but i'm going to watch it so i guess i'm curious about what we're doing there for

10:49 enhancing privacy questions in the watershed all right good evening president brown commissioners uh for the record carl morgenstern ewebs watershed restoration program manager i'm here with uh lucas silva who's going to talk to us about some of the carbon sequestration work he's doing with us lucas is an associate professor of environmental studies at u of o he is the director of uofo's plant soil or soil plant atmosphere research laboratory which focuses on nature-based solutions or climate change and so um he has an extensive uh uh background and essentially looking at climate driven studies and changes in the carbon water use

11:34 and he's from originally from brazil and studied in uh the rain forest tropical forests and savannahs and then he started doing uh uh his phd in canada he got his phd in canada in 2011 and studied more of the temperate and boreal forests and now he's with ufo and looking at his research focus on the pacific northwest is kind of the model for the nation when it comes to looking at uh perfecting and scaling up climate solutions so eweb's been working with dr silva to really start trying to get the science right on some of the carbon sequestration network that we're looking at as part of watershed restoration efforts and so without any further ado pass it off to lucas

12:24 everybody so you know i tried to put a few slides together to give a first uh an introduction to what we do in our laboratory we'll begin by showing a series of photos here it's just our core team of graduate students of six graduate six uh phd candidates two master's students one lab manager at the moment working on what we call enhanced natural requirement solutions you may be familiar with the acronym ncs for natural climate solutions i think we can accelerate that we'll give a couple examples we received most of our funding from nsf and the usda we also connected with the ltr network we work with hd andrews for example with osu partners we are locally based focused on the region and uh we are fortunate to partner with the web in

13:10 a variety of activities and i'll be focusing on one of them today the concept behind this idea of ncs plus or enhanced natural game solutions begun for us in 2019 this is when i began working with carl and others here the web nsf convergence accelerator pilot that's how they call this they funded us to bring together hundreds of leaders in carbon capture from the whole region we brought everybody together you can see by the photo there it's pre-covered world so nobody's wearing masks all in a room for three days trying to figure out a plan uh discuss the literature and devise a plan for the northwest as a model for the nation that resulted in 37 different partnerships across nine different

13:55 states 10 universities three tribal governments participate in this a number of federal uh state and local agencies as well as ngos and english departments and national laboratories so it is it is a regional to national scale effort and we are getting ideas to be tested in specific systems and with hopes of coordinating research and implementation so if i were to boil down our main mission what what do we do and why do we do it have one scientific goal which is to better understand mechanisms that control carbon and water cycles as you know carbon water cycles are inherently connected from the level of the leaf the level of the landscape the story of carbon is the story of water and our applied contribution in relation

14:41 to that has to do with accelerating climate change mitigation adaptation through ecosystem management restoration and crucially here workforce development we're training the next generation of folks to be able to quantify and improve carbon budgets and and trade-offs related to that that's our mission at uwo and our lab now the the uf uh uo partnership uh is testing as carl said uh you know uh first first staff is testing some scalable solutions for the whole region right so i'll make a case in a second for why you can't look at a single sector so we're looking at some photos here of urban systems wetlands forests and agricultural systems to make a dent on the carbon sequestration

15:26 issue we need to work across the sectors and integrate research and development across all these sectors and and here's why that is the case so let's take a classic approach here for a second the standard approach today is plant trees everywhere right that's a quote here that the simplification of the approach but that's what it is so if you look at a nature paper science paper that came out in 2018 titled natural climate solutions for the united states this was altered by several of my colleagues at uo but you're looking at here is the main figure from that paper looking at the top this is the climate mitigation potential in terms of paragrams of carbon or co2 equivalents can be sequestered by different sectors so the size of the bar

16:11 here is the amount of mitigation potential for each sector and here you have the main place we have forests on the top agricultural grasslands systems right here wetlands at the bottom there's no sequestration potential that would rival reforestation at the very top of this chart uh even the the most uh beneficial agricultural and grassland management practice in this type of analysis would fall short uh you know 25 to 30 percent of the mitigation potential of of uh of when you climb in reforestation i will uh so wetlands let me just talk about this for a second even though wetlands hold the largest potential for sequestration per area of land their footprint is so narrow so small compared

16:57 to the rest of the other sectors that in fact when you add that up the potential for mitigation for wetlands is much smaller than that of other ecosystems second thing i'll point out in this in this figure here's an economic and economic projection the current cargo markers of 10 bucks a ton of carbon you have these light green bars before a station gets a very small mitigation potential in the light green by horizon let's say that something happened and uh the price of carbon market now goes to fifty dollars a ton of carbon question that changes by orders of magnitude the sequestration the mitigation potential of forests that is because people will begin to allocate land that otherwise would have been allocated weapons like culture and other activity to now do

17:43 reforestation so the message coming from the forestry industry and for the policy makers is plan trees everywhere and with some help for the cargo market we can make an economic problem the issue is nobody is talking about the trade-offs between the different sectors and competition for resources and land between the different sectors we have to look at that for example i simplify here in two key problems first is the problem of accumulation and permanence not all carbon and accumulative force remains right so that much emphasis on tree planting and two liter potential soils where is the largest repository of carbon we'll talk about that in a second second problem is the trade-off and risk management plant trees they cost space they cost time the cost of water

18:28 and they increase fire risk for example as one of the outcomes of dense tree plantations that's a matter of fact and a scientific fact we can measure that right so to deal with these two problems uh we need more than a single sector and i'm not the only one saying this okay so here's a series of papers from colleagues of mine this came out in science uh two years ago comment on the three global restoration potential what do we take in terms of land to take all the emissions globally and bring that back to zero our carbon emissions calculation uh indicated by these authors here they need about three times the atlanta area of the united states planted with new forests assuming that they all grow to be mature forests that's what you would take to

19:15 bring emissions to hell by printing trees the authors consider this an unrealistic target and i agree with that but beyond being an unrealistic target on the land area uh scenario there is the idea against force planted for carbon gain reduce stream flow and increase fire risk the three papers from colleagues of mine and lsu first one general hydrology here long-term effects of forest harvesting on summer low flow deficient coastal range another one summer uh stream flow death is from regina rating local spur forest the northwest regional assessment another one severe fire weather and intensive forest management increased fire severity in multi-ownership landscapes these are well known

20:00 challenges that come with the the status quo business as usual that's planned trees everywhere so we're trying to change that by first of all looking where is the carbon now so here we have a diagram a simplified version where i will begin by showing you this bar graph at the bottom this is globally the total carbon stored on land vast majority so in general the soils contain about two times as much as carbon as the atmosphere and all living flora and animals combine soil is really the big player here if you were to break this down by ecosystem you look a system like a boreal forest and these numbers here are in tons of carbon distort uh in the above terminal and in the soil

20:45 below here the dark green when you see a system like boreal forest the game here is to mitigate the destruction of those carbon sinks and prevent emission conservation in a system like pepper and forest where you have an almost even breakdown or twice as much in soil compared to what an involved ground has there is room for for for growing those carbon stocks especially below ground take a look at tempered grasslands for example you have orders of magnitude more uh carbon sequestered in the soil in the tempered grassland compared to to contemporary forest and compared to the above ground diamonds if you go to the tropics where i'm from you see almost a great even often the most productive ecosystems on earth high sequestration biomass and not so high

21:31 sequestration and soil my point is there's an opportunity here to learn from nature about combination of species and combination of plant and soil microbial organisms that can lead to higher sequestration rates in human design systems another way to look at this let's take a global stat here looking at a figure for global carbon stocks paper came out in size 2019 global carbon stocks on the y-axis latitude absolute latitude on the on the x-axis here is uh equator so tropical forces will be right here the green is carbon sequester in the biomass of vegetation the brown is carbon sequestering the soil the shades of ground give you soil depths from top soil to two meters down the profile

22:16 again you see the boreal forest here holding the vast majority that cause integration land the idea here is that you have to prevent this from coming out of the atmosphere that's the main thing to be done same for the tropical forest the sweet spot here in the temperate latitudes where we may use human design and engineer solutions then reverse plan degradation increase this this carbon stocks which are well below saturation threshold there's a way to increase this and we after testing those ways using sound science now the high banks project is precisely uh designed to do that is an experimental uh management uh for soil carbon sequestration i'm sorry the ladder didn't come off right here my flight were slightly different than that

23:01 but uh bear with me this is a 140 acres by springfield and this is the division of the site we have three phases of planting where uh phase one right here in orange phase two right here in green phase three uh to be planted uh next year and each of these uh spots of land here dedicated to uniquely designed combination of tree species and uh we hope that will lead to different kinds of microbial networks in the soil which will accelerate carbon sequestration so it's about managing and designing uh unique combinations of species to elevate carbon gain and mitigate water use

23:46 so for example this is whatever uh is what we had already been planted in february 2021 phase one of the planting each of the colors on this pixels here show the kind of treatment we applied everything from pure conifer treatments to pure hardwoods to combinations of shrubs conifers and hardwood species you're looking at monetary survival rates and you just the basics the very basics of the introduction of these species and monitoring and watching how the microbial community and the soil carbon respond to them at the same time phase two that's planning as planned for now february 2022 uh we have 20 about 22 acres of that land uh being allocated gonna have thousands of trees and shrubs again we are emulating the

24:32 treatments from from uh from phase one combining different species that will uh their expect to have different effects on soil carbon accumulation and what i use uh just to give you a sense i made a you know cartoonish representation of our hypothesis here this is based on robust science but this is just to illustrate the point uh three conceptual hypothesis for you the first one is species diversity increases the productivity of of the overall above ground vegetation as well the solar carbon accumulation below ground show some preliminary data on that in a second the second hypothesis is that a structural diversity and that is the the the structure of the canopies the structure of a community

25:17 uh can be designed to increase water efficiency and decrease fire risk so in this case we're looking at representation what might be the water used by tall tree versus water used by grasses so there's a way to design a system that would be structurally diverse use less water and perhaps sequester the same amount of carbon combination of those two hypotheses leading to our third one that species and structural diversity increase both carbon sequestration with co-benefits such as drought stress mitigation and fire risk mitigation that's the kind of thing you offer after increasing carbon as well as conserving water and biodiversity so evidence of feasibility right that

26:02 there aren't enough uh experiments like this around the world this is the longest one uh the so-called yenna experiment nine years of data you're looking at here response of plant diverse species soil carbon accumulation on the on the y-axis plant species uh diversity on the x-axis the different colors indicate whether or not you had legumes in those plots of legumes and natural fixers and that they considered the possibility of nitrogen fixes changing the game it did not a paper in nature 2015 this increasing carbon accumulation is attributable attributed by the alters to to change the microbial community in slow carbon stabilization so they were able to identify certain combinations of species that would increase carbon uh sequestration and uh increase

26:48 water deficiency which is what we are after one thing that is unique about our project that nobody has in the world of cargo markets and monitoring is that what are the conditions before the project begun what is the baseline how do you know how much you gain no but it does know that right now so right now you get the tnc's of the world they go there they measure dbh the size of the trees they relate the carbon gain and above ground biomass with the previous vegetation but that's it there is no assessment or long-term storage of long-term gain so you're doing a detailed mapping of the site so this is a diagram showing a 175 sample that we took across the site looking at a variety of of different factors you know

27:33 so ph so carbon bulk density pyrogenic carbon which is another name for charcoal which can be stored for a long time and so texture just as a first step and a mat like this is you know generated using combination field sampling some lab work and some sophisticated data science uh looking spatial data science and here's one example of a result of such an analysis if you look at the high banks now without the contours you look at each of these points the source uh soil profile sampling spot and what you look at here with the shaded concentrations of baseline fibrin concentration in the cell as you can tell it's a distribution of baseline carbon accumulation at this site

28:19 if you were to do a carbon gain project you would need to consider this to see how much you're actually gaining relative to what existed before and this kind of fine-grained analysis with spatially explicit quantifications of gain is what will allow us to say okay so in such a system i will approach this with certain plant communities here i'm approaching this is a different combination it is all designed to elevate that baseline and fine-tune uh carbon gain and water use at the landscape scale we call this landscape prioritization based on data science and artificial intelligence and algorithms can apply to this and this this will be automated at some point right now we're doing the research to to inform those algorithms and

29:05 computer models we also look at uh so look at the ph distribution some of you may find this curious it ranges everywhere from five to nine uh creates a soil ph if you you know try to grow anything in such a range in such a small area is is insane right and and and for the lack of better words not a very scientific term here but ph really shapes how the microbial community deals with the carbon that's why you're looking at this the ratios between fungi and bacteria for example are selected at a great extent by the soil ph so how much of that carbon would remain in the soil how much of the micro mycorrhizal networks would be formed and share nutrients and make the system resilience to climate it's dependent on that so we're looking at abiotic factors

29:51 as well and finally just to close out you know this is a beginning of a partnership that i hope will last for a long time i'm going to give you a taste of two future directions we will begin to explore this year first one is this idea of applying basalt dust to landscapes to increase carbon sequestration to the inorganic carbon cycle so we're talking about formation of carbonates from basalt dust applications so there's a paper in nature 2020 just to say they're not insane okay uh remove our concert co2 by rock weathering its promise for crunch mitigation is an unexplored uh type of technology in our system um this is being applied in many places in the midwest now we think we can do better in the northwest for a variety of reasons

30:37 not the least of which is that basalt dust is a byproduct of mining operations you can get it really inexpensively here private landscapes that would correct ph improve economic sustainability of agriculture in our case you're not growing food but you're testing uh the possibility of increasing um sequestration to that inorganic part of the carbon cycle forming carbonates that will against sequester carbon and then lift through the streams and go back into the deep carbon cycle to the oceans without any harm of course to to the flora and fauna of the of the land and and stream themselves and rewrite themselves in the second direction we are actively pursuing right now so here's a photo of uh one of our investor working rally students aj corrad and she is a karuk

31:23 tribes part of the career tribes workforce internship coordinator uh one of the things we do we partner with tribes to to learn more about the indigenous fire management how that might be used to mitigate catastrophic wildfire one of the experiments we were interested in doing right now is surveying the holiday farm fire up and down the whole region to look at how much prescribed fire actually protected the cargo pools and how much of that was lost in the areas that he did not have that the prescribed fire that you know i had the time so doing a survey comparing that and we intend to do uh we consider doing experiments in parts creek um uh area we recently acquired by e-web one side of this uh to understand correctly it's privately owned and

32:08 managed the other side is federally owned and managed and there may be an opportunity here to test the idea of prescribed fire to create uh stable carbon pools in soil for example uh you know if we if we can mitigate fuel uh strategically place prescribed fire to increase sequestration of charcoal and forming biochar in the landscape that carbon pool could last for thousands of years and with many other benefits so just a taste of two future directions here and i thank you again for your time a pleasure to be here uh you can learn more about what you do at southlandatmosphere.com or us on twitter check us out and i'm looking forward to your questions if i have time for that thank you very much for your presentation very enlightening i think some of you may recognize some of that

32:53 land on my bank's road thank you very much for your presentation for the fascinating work that you have going on um i had a quick question about the the two um parts that you had on the soil that was orange and the blue one if you could pull those back question there um there we go thank you um does it mean that there's a correlation between how acidic the soil is and how much carbon that it can hold that's an excellent question that shouldn't be necessarily that we wouldn't expect to

33:38 see that necessarily so it's not implying that there's a mechanism of carbon accumulation related to ph but ph does indicate uh how much organic acids are being put by the rhizosphere ph shapes the microbial community but there's an indirect in this case appears to be a correlation there it's not it's a correlation not causation but it indicates it's not related to that relate that lack of the potential relationship is not why they're putting results to salt no no it's not it's more in this case we think it's more a legacy of previous land management and whatever was dumped there the way that the soil was managed to push but it's an interesting thing that you know it certainly shapes what kinds of plants grow and how they grow and their uh

34:23 microbial partners below ground as well so we you know they could be causally connected but right now we are not prepared to infer that from this kind of data okay thank you very much for your questions um yeah thank you the presentation just i'm going to go back to a layman thing so you you talked about karen's sequestration in the soils and you refer to microbials and those types of things so i mean i know when a tree grows it goes to woody pulp and that is where the carbon is is done what is how is it getting into the soil it's a that's a phenomenal question so first of all it's estimated about 60 percent of the large douglas fir tree

35:09 daily carbon production in terms of soluble sugars that they makes in the canopy and shuttles it down about sixty percent of that on a daily basis leaks out through the ride sphere and go to feed uh microbial fungi and microbial networks you know most of it uh goes outside of that tree so the small amount ends up in the gulf and then the actual wood that is harvested okay great and then the other question that i had was on time frames is the carbon sequestration into the soil faster than what you would get from a you know a 40 year old or an eight-year-old tree yeah it's there not necessarily it's a good question too

35:54 right so it could be as fast because the pump we've talked to carl about this before and one analogy that i like you know that the trees provide a pump soil provide the bucket uh as the bucket size varies depending on where you are in the landscape and some in some conditions you may want a big tree and that in the bucket will be able to to get all the carbon be pumped down and maybe eventually the whole body of the tree will stay there the reality is that those buckets are not all the same so choosing where to to print what to kind of equalize that and maximize the banks for the buck you could have sequestration rates as fast as those of vegetation growing because that is the source that is the pump right so to answer a question could be faster but if you were to date carbon in

36:40 the soil it's thousands of years of history there but but that sequestration rates that adding to it could be as fast as the growth rate of a plan right thank you if i may uh so i know this research that you just shared with us is a riparian habitat closer in the valley here yeah but if we look upstream in the area of the holiday farm fire where ego is currently active um assuming that's part of your expertise as well what and assuming our goal was to increase carbon sequestration to the maximum amount in in areas of river what does your research suggest and there's a very good question so uh uh so first we are working that our reference sites are aj energy we have mapped in a similar way the old growth forest at asia andrews they are a reference point

37:26 how much carbon can accumulate and then we compare the impact of clear cutting and versus that so that let's put a pin on this the question that i think gets closer to answering yours first thing we're measuring is is there a benefit of prescribed burn prescribed fire in terms of preserving carbon uh you know in the footprint of the holiday farm fire we know that when you know the high severity impacts that almost all carbon for the biomass as a definition of high severity fire right most of the biomass will be gone that carbon for the planted forests are now gone is now gone uh and through erosion and many other processes that soil that very hot fire lost a lot of carbon as well we have some preliminaries that show

38:12 that if you plan your plant communities if you plant uh your prescribed burn you actually maintain most of the carbon uh in within that fire affected area so you do two things at once you mitigate the catastrophic risk and you conserve your soil you make sure that that 10 bucks or 50 bucks a ton that one is getting for a carbon project that remains as a persistent sink as opposed to upping flames in a catastrophic file so it's a win-win type of situation great thanks because i

39:07 yeah it's a terrific question right so right now we're trying to build the capacity to do it it's my dream to scale things up and test things that would make sense to be scaled to the region we have a couple panthenoceph proposals that would allow us to create this new center uh or enhance natural climate solutions that that goes through we got really close to getting one of the largest intersections last year tentatively recommended it not landed competition with china was uh presumably the thing that shifted the focus for nsf and they funded that i got a little kind of but about a more global state of oregon and oregon department forestry and correctly wrong i heard that planting to basically what their standards are when you cut trees you have to reform all that you know everybody puts in the same type the same

39:53 size everything else that doesn't sound like a good product that's a bad idea and even though the state mandate that sounds like it's counterproductive for carbons and questions you're trying to get by mandating that on millions i fully agree with you that is a bad idea and the communities appear to know it the managers appear to know it it feels like you have has a good grip on this being a bad idea so yeah i just learned that

40:42 [Music] thank you very much and i wish you the best i'm proud that you all invited me and feel free to reach out at any point thank you thank you so much all right the next time one final thought i thought that um commissioner mccray i believe asked a really relevant question in the pre-board meeting questions and that was you know why is he webb interested in this you know as a utility and i and i think that you know from our perspective um especially related to the watershed there's a recognition that what we do above the ground matters from a carbon sequestration that goes on below the ground and by by trying to link those two together

41:27 ultimately we want to be able to stack the benefits of our work up there to the point where even customers and potentially investors and others recognize that there's a carbon benefit to the work we're doing in watershed over the long term and by doing that hopefully and eventually developing a more sustainable finance way to finance continued work in the watershed so it's a long term play it certainly relies on research like this to kind of quantify and qualify what we're doing but there is there is a reason to do that and and hopefully we'll be able to continue uh this work and be able to to recognize that you know in this case our watershed

42:13 work our carbon sequestration our complementary types of work thank you very much any other questions or comments we'll move on all right gen 9's number eight environmental products line it's going to be yes we're here thank you so good evening commissioners i'm julie mcgahee and joining me is anna wade and tonight anna will be introducing you to eweb's proposed environmental product line after the presentation we'd love to hear your questions and your feedback and then our plan is to come back to you next month for approval on the associated product pricing so anna if you're ready i'm going to

42:59 turn it over to you yeah thank you julie i appreciate that um before i get started i just want to share that um for me this is a product line that i've been eager to put my energy towards for some time so i really am happy to be here tonight and and do uh welcome any questions and comments you have at the end um um has a long history of environmental stewardship our resource portfolio provides low carbon electricity to the community our conservation programs are long-standing and they're robust and our leadership as you just saw in the mckenzie watershed has been a highlight over the course of a couple really really challenging years in the past customer communication on these fronts has focused on lowering customer bills

43:45 on reliability and on source protection which of course are all super important and central to eweb's strategic plan as you all know but our customers are voicing a growing call for climate solutions and we have an opportunity at this time to rebrand and showcase eweb's long-standing commitment to the environment in concert with the rollout of new customer options can i get the next slide holly okay so while our focus tonight will be on the lead green product line i think it's really helpful to provide you all with with that in context under jen connor's leadership we are developing a cohesive framework that focuses on the carbon benefits of new

44:31 and existing programs this is absolutely a work in progress i'd say we're about 80 of the way there in terms of uh our naming conventions and our branding strategies the uh aesthetic if you will and imagery um but we did want to share a preview with you all tonight of the key concepts that have gone that we focused on in this effort customer choice is perhaps the most dominant we want our customers to understand that they will have expanding choices of the products and services that eweb can offer them in the future among others our partnership this isn't just about the things that we're selling our customers but about actions that we can take together innovation

45:17 also action as you can see uh the call to action is evident even in our naming conventions and also it's about transition um decarbonizing the electric grid certainly won't happen overnight we all know that but there are meaningful steps that we can take immediately you will see these concepts permeate throughout this presentation but also in the marketing activities in the months to come and throughout the next year so a couple of things that i ask you to keep in mind as we get on to the lead green uh this framework is built for expansion with time of use demand response electrification and others on the horizon we want to really create a space and some context for our customers to

46:02 explore and weigh their options as they come available uh secondly to me this product line is a much as much about education as it is the actual transaction the information that we provide and the story we tell can benefit participants and non-participants alike also these are first generation program offerings so enhancements will be forthcoming as will broader eligibility and program capacity in fact when we think about program rollouts we consider that to really be the next phase of market research in this effort and then the last thing i want to call out is that this suite of programs is entirely voluntary the lead green product lines allow

46:47 customers to start or stop service at any time as they so choose and they're designed to be self-funding with no impact to the standard cost of service can i get the next slide please okay so i want to make a quick stop at green power because it is part of the growing family it is our legacy program offering and it meets our state of oregon requirements under the oregon renewable energy act so as far as product and pricing is concerned green power will remain unchanged um participant surveys uh have indicated that customers are largely satisfied with green power and the investments that we make on their behalf but what you can expect is that green

47:32 power will be rebranded to conform to that broader suite of options and we're also going to employ a much heavier focus on community investments particularly solar as this is something that's unique to makes green power unique among its peers and what i mean by that is that although green power includes rex and therefore addresses home energy carbon for the participant the lion's share of revenues are actually used to support eweb's pv incentive program and the green power grant with some funding for k-12 education events so in that green power is something of a crowdfunding model helping to socialize the cost of renewable investment within our community next slide

48:21 please okay uh i interviewed a handful of general service customers and many of whom expressed that rex really are the value center of green power so eweb will answer that demand with clean power this product will allow subscribers to meet sustainability goals and demonstrate responsiveness to growing investor and consumer focus on environmental social and governance policies esg we'll provide marketing and promotional packages so that they can display their commitment to operational sustainability and will also provide an annual statement for reporting and record-keeping purposes in terms of pricing uh clean power is a bulk purchase option which means that there's a minimum buy-in of 5000 kwh or

49:06 greater per month so customers who consume less than that would still qualify but they'd have to um subscribe under block pricing participants may over subscribe to account for non-eweb load but not by over two times their average consumption this will allow customers with operations inside and am i frozen oh you're still good okay i'm just making sure i got a text and i figured maybe somebody was giving me a shout out sorry about that apologies um as i was saying so that that double down will allow customers with options operations that are both inside and outside the eweb service territory to

49:53 meet their needs at a one-stop shop we did some probabilistic modeling i'm getting a little feedback i'm going to just continue on but if you can't hear me uh please just kind of wave a little bit and i'll pause great well then i'll ignore the second me that i hear so we did some probabilistic modeling of this structure which indicated that potential demand uh would be around 80 000 recs per year for perspective eweb's current rec rec bank stands at a little over a million the proposed tariff rates that you see on the slide were developed using 12 month rolling average of wholesale pricing plus a 28 percent adder to cover

50:39 transaction and administrative costs that are borne by the utility the tariff will be calibrated annually in partnership with finance and power planning and will be submitted to the board for approval under existing protocols so uh this is something that i want to kind of highlight especially given the volatility that we have seen in wholesale markets for example in 2021 wreck prices rose from around about 50 in january to 450 in november that's a that's a 200 increase so i will be collaborating closely with general accounting and power planning on a monthly basis so that we can prudently manage um customer demand relative to financial exposure

51:24 i'd also add that uh board policy sda assigns the risk management committee to oversee market price volatility and so they the rmc convenes monthly to monitor ewebs commodity portfolios let me get the next slide please okay because eweb has invested in low carbon resources home energy consumption is not necessarily the primary driver of household carbon it may actually be a better choice for some to move green and take advantage of eweb's electric mobility options some customers may have a bigger impact if they live green and install a heat pump hot water heater for example but when you've done all you can do to

52:10 reduce your reduce your carbon footprint we offer in the clear so this is eweb's new carbon offset product while there's strong interest throughout the community in addressing carbon emissions customer surveys indicate uh somewhat tepid demand for carbon offsets as they're not really well understood at this time so i really view this as an opportunity to improve awareness of cost-effective alternatives to address emissions and also to help functionalize some of the upriver activities that you've heard about program offsets are verified and validated by the american carbon registry under voluntary offset protocols um initially we're finalizing an offset purchase with the climate trust

52:55 for a carbon forestry project that is in a located in alaska it includes auxiliary benefits such as wildlife habitat water quality as well as funding for the local indigenous community pricing so in order to right-size the customer blocks we analyzed household emissions from three primary sources uh those are home energy use transportation and waste so for home energy use that was calculated using the deq value for carbon intensity of eweb's portfolio transportation assumptions come from ewebs electrification study and we include waste emissions as calculated in the city of eugene cap 2.0 study

53:40 so to be clear these are local emissions which don't include say the production and delivery of consumer goods so your wardrobe your toaster oven those aren't part of the profile or part of the part of this calculation unless of course you throw them in the local landfill so using these data points as a baseline annual household admissions are estimated at approximately five metric tons co2 equivalent per year customers of course will be free to evaluate their personal carbon profile using resources provided at eweb.org so if they want to take a more expansive view of carbon they're free to do so with that customers can subscribe in a combination of blocks that meet their

54:25 individual needs with a cap set at 16 metric tons as you can see on this slide initially only residential accounts will be eligible while i'm very eager to extend in the clear to general service customers more analysis and supply uh supply line development is needed to make sure that we can adequately forecast and meet potential demand as with clean power tariff pricing was developed collaboratively with finance and power planning and will be approved by the board annually it's based on actual transaction costs as well as a review of the 12-month ruling average of wholesale pricing plus again a 28 patter adder to account for

55:10 transactional and administrative costs can i get the next slide please so uh really excited to have had lucas silva's silver here tonight because he really you know did the job of science for me and i i certainly appreciate that um ewok customers consistently voiced support for protecting the mackenzie river and while the new watershed recovery fee will provide substantial funding for a variety of initiatives there there are other impactful work going on outside the scope of that funding namely the high banks project which he presented on this evening it is a very cool project it's innovative it's forward thinking and it has the potential to make a huge impact

55:57 on climate change and you know as a community we should be a pro we should be proud of that and we are inviting our customers to be a part of it voluntary funding will help ensure long-term viability of that project and make room for expansion throughout the watershed as was noted by several of the commissioners so product pricing is modeled after the actual high banks expenses for plant materials plant and other materials and the carbon research activities through the operating agreements we have with lucas and the graduate team so program revenues will be used for upcoming plantings at the high bank site but also potential project expansion as we've talked about um in the aftermath of the holiday farm

56:43 fire additional opportunities are definitely coming available our focus for customer messaging as was talked about earlier will be on immediate contributions for source protection while developing innovative solutions for carbon drawdown in the future we'll also highlight the the idea of stacked benefits carbon offsets drinking water resiliency and human capital last slide please okay so in closing i just want to remind you all that we will be asking for your approval of pricing tariffs in march by a consent calendar following that we plan to initiate a teaser campaign uh in the lead up to

57:28 formal product launch which is scheduled for earth day on april 22nd of this year and then throughout the next year we're going to run targeted marketing campaigns for each of eweb's various carbon product lines so those are my prepared remarks and with that i i welcome your questions and your feedback your feedback thank you very much that's a very uh informative presentation i kind of lot of people have a lot of questions and so we've got 15 minutes left and that's about the first extent so um questions to comments uh commissioner um um i have to say i really appreciate the kind of the branding and marketing

58:13 of it and the way that you can broken it down um so my question is so these programs tell me if i have this right are entirely based on people opting into it so um it's like something compelling but basically you're showing yup that's absolutely correct so we will put to use any any revenues that are generated but as i said um customers are welcome to subscribe or unsubscribe unsubscribe as they so choose oh my question is are we replicating things that have been

58:59 done before are we fairly certain that people will but i'm just curious like are these based on other utilities programs uh yeah just just so you all know the audio is a little bit challenging for those that are in person so if i miss uh part of your question please just go ahead and repeat repeat that back to me um but yeah part of our initial research was to look at what what is being offered by our peers um what are the units that they're being offered what are the price points all of those things

59:45 i can say that um uh as for uh clear power that's that's pretty common actually um a lot of our um uh regional peers offer you know offer green power of course but also target larger customers selling in in bulk blocks so that's not terribly uncommon um as far as carbon offsets i will say that's a little less common of a utility typically it's only natural gas utilities that will offer that um but one of the primary goals as i mentioned during the presentation is that you know customers can account for their home energy use through rats and through green power if they want to get beyond that you know there are other sources out there

1:00:31 but as a utility we can provide that you know in a way that is seamless to the customer um and helps me you know shared in mutual goals so i see that as an opportunity to get beyond just ewebs portfolio and the electricity we provide to again expand what what our customer choices are thank you um great yeah i really appreciate the presentation and it was very clear i liked the breakdown of the different buckets and the names of them i'm curious um how are the rates determined and um is this something that you know like the the city oversees our rates is

1:01:16 this something that they would oversee because it's technically in the bill or is it just something because people are opting in yeah so first off i would say uh you know we're we're lucky to have a board of commissioners that has you know rate making authorities so they're approved by you all um as for how those the pricing was constructed um as i mentioned during the presentation uh clean power and and in the clear in particular are very much tied to wholesale markets because really that's what the customers are purchasing they are purchasing those commodities that

1:02:01 give them access to the renewable attributes of renewable energy or conversely the carbon offsets that are verified validated and generated by projects that that can um reliably document the drawdown and the additionality of those projects to carbon sequestration so uh pricing for those two is very commodity driven um like i said we do want to account for any of all eweb costs or associated with that because as these are voluntary we want to ensure that our standard cost of service is not impacted by these voluntary programs and then again the carbon forest lab obviously we want to expand opportunities as they come available but

1:02:46 i did model the pricing after actual uh project costs of the high banks uh project okay so if it's tied to those commodities we know those commodity prices change and fluctuate how are these set in relation to the potential fluctuations of those markets yeah no it's it's a great question and and it's one that we'll have to be very active in managing so just as we do with power when when you're setting rates there's there's a power price that's associated with those rates and those power prices fluctuate all the time like within the hour every hour um throughout the year so uh that's something as i said that the risk management committee is very active

1:03:32 in overseeing um and and why we have a hedging program into the future to secure that rate with that quantity that yeah correct so um in working with the power planning group and with finance that's why we looked at not just a spot price what are those commodities uh marked at today but we looked at that 12-month rolling average we looked at transactional costs and and different options that we had available to us we looked at the trends of those pricing of those prices so there was definitely some analysis that went into that it wasn't simply a spot price but it is something that you know when you are engaged in commodities

1:04:17 you do have to manage those either with price ta price hedging or other tools that are available to us i think my time is out if there was another round i had one more quick question any other questions or comments from mcrae yeah i have a couple questions hey thanks for the presentation and for all the work missions um i do have a handful of questions for you um and i hope this isn't involved with leads um on a clean power fund you said that you estimate 80 000 wrecks a year would be sold to you translate that into there's a pretty good sense of scale of how much

1:05:10 uh yeah so um on that front like and it really depends on demand so when i said 80 000 recs uh like i said we did some probability analysis like so a couple data points i want you to keep in mind one our current participation rate with green power is only two percent uh not a lot of uptake there but there is evidence to suggest that there's uh there's greater capacity and greater interest in the community as for example northwest natural boasts a participation rate around 20 so what i looked at was a potential for increasing participation in that particular product line to 10 percent and when we did probabilistic modeling of the customers that are sized right to really you know have the greatest interest that's where i came up with

1:05:56 with the 80 000 recs um so based on that you know we're looking around 300k thanks and those wrecks are generated by e-web operations is that accurate yeah that's correct i mean it's we won't be limited necessarily to racks that uh are generated from eweb's portfolio that it though at this time we do have a significant surplus and so we have a source on the shelf uh to provide for a much much higher level of customer demand however should we need to or should we want to we could certainly procure in the market at a price point there is relative liquidity to do so

1:06:41 um so definitely it's our intention to utilize that robust wreck bank but we do have market access and the infrastructure available should we need to procure outside um outside our our own resource space okay thank you and then um going into the carbon f or offset program um you know what the current rate for carbon offsets is this seems wild is less effective than the standard market price yeah excuse me uh commissioner it's i'm sorry about that it it really is kind of all over the map and uh part of that is because it is a sort of a

1:07:26 burgeoning marketplace right now and carbon offsets have not really been commodified in that you know with a lot of products it is a very single and well understood brand whereas carbon offsets can be generated in a variety of ways there are industrial projects there's carbon forestry projects you know digesters things like that and the market basically prices them not just on the commodity but also what some of those auxiliary benefits are so we received in doing the market research for carbon offsets we got pricing from a you know commercial broker for example and we sell prices as low as four dollars we saw prices as high as twenty

1:08:11 dollars um you know depending on where you shop for offsets that the price can be you know pretty volatile um and it's really based on those auxiliary benefits uh so again that's why we didn't just take into account the purchase price for the carbon offsets that that we're getting ready to execute on but we looked at a broad set of different types of projects that e-wood would have market access to any any questions or comments thanks john um thank you for the presentation a couple quick questions um so on the racks would that be something that the city of eugene could use to

1:08:56 if they were one of our customers they could use to get some of their climate action goals and you know i know they're buying offsets on other markets that's something that we could market to the city of eugene as a large user yeah absolutely um and i will say we've been very collaborative with our local partner agencies and there's a lot of interest in clear power because it is a more affordable avenue to achieving carbon neutral operations several of those agencies have indicated interest in participating in this program jenny and parise and i will be attending the uh it's a collaborative group next month that includes you know all the usual suspects we'll provide this

1:09:43 presentation to them but i know that already several of them have indicated that they're interested and are eager to participate right um two other things one is i heard you talk one of your things about 28 overhead and recovery charge i would really like to make sure that we track that and and that's not just a stab in the dark that we're doing 28 if if it comes in less i would like that to be reflected i don't want to be overcharging for overhead i would like to see that hopefully be a base you know i'm getting it rolling and it's 28 but 28 seems high to me for overhead and management and then the last thing is

1:10:28 um mark as far as marketing the carbon forest lab i would really hope when we do our up river meeting that we have some sort of a presentation of that for the upriver people because i think that they'll see that the benefits that they've gotten from e-web and they may be a very willing partner to buy into that that program so i hope we cannot shoot that marketing up there when we go thank you um actually thanks for bringing that up commissioner borowski uh one of the things that i've uh started to communicate with my peers about is the potential for extending that particular program beyond ewebs customer base because i think you're right there

1:11:13 is potentially a lot of interest upriver and for others who are interested in that sort of innovative research type of project uh and i think the benefits have the potential to extend well beyond e-web service territory so i asked the question why wouldn't we want to allow others to participate um who are not simply e-web traditional customers um so i think it's a great idea and and yeah we for this product line in particular um we will be taking a a pretty aggressive marketing campaign um i'm grateful to be partnering with jen connors she's phenomenal i think she might be on the line if there are any questions for her by the way but um yeah absolutely

1:12:00 thank you i'll go last thank you um just a couple of quick questions will we be able to see who's participating and by what amounts because like i'd like to see how the university buys into this they're you know they eat all their buildings with gas and things like that and i'd like to see just how much check they're going to write or if they're going to participate in this program at all i i don't know how i didn't feel about that but city of eugene lane county the big the big users of the public agencies that can make this decision to participate and uh lead by example are we going to be able to see who the participants are and how much distributing or their offsets so certainly you will have uh quarterly reports on program participation rates and and revenues generated and all of

1:12:46 that and then we'll we'll have an annual update on you know program achievements uh every year as for providing a specific list of who's in and who's out i'd probably look to sarah crichton in enterprise risk to make sure that you know the best way to share that information with the board um given that you know customer customer accounts are you know right um so i'd probably look to sarah to figure out how we would how we would provide that kind of information to the board i don't know frank do you have any comments on that maybe please stand in the air thank you yeah i was just gonna say from perspective but i think we'd be happy to share it we'll have to follow up on the

1:13:32 legalities of disclosing customer information it was with our appropriate people on that but i don't think it would be our intent not to share details with the board at least as a minimum yeah i don't know if we've only got it but in my other question i gotta find this is that we've got only a two percent participation rate in green power right now and this is a bigger variety of products and you know i think a much it's gonna be fun to see how this transpired but how do i sell this to the lay person when i say that 96 of all the electricity you consume right now is carbon free um so we're doing this for four percent and uh how do i tell them to justify this expense i mean what marketing program do you have or message

1:14:19 do you have to tell the people why this is a good buy-in besides i mean what we obviously know but to the lay people that don't understand this as detailed as we do how do we get over that that hurdle of educating people to uh spend this extra money for what i think is it's a small percentage of our portfolio would offset yeah no it's a great question and honestly i i spoke with some customers uh general service customers who actually uh calculate green power block purchases based on that 90 so they look to cover the remaining 10 percent so it's not a concept that is you know unknown to some of our customer base um i would also say that it's our intention to approach

1:15:06 marketing in iterative fashion so right out of the gates we know we're looking for those sort of climate innovators early adopters that are going to see these products and services and say this is an opportunity for me to do more um i know that you we have very low carbon electricity here in the pacific northwest and at eweb in specific but i have an opportunity to do more and you're right it will be a tougher nut to crack as we kind of move along that curve and try to get to those who are you know less inclined less interested but i think one of the things that this suite of programs has going for it is that there is something for everybody um and and i think it's great that we'll have an offering that really focuses on

1:15:52 the water utility and the infrastructure that we're working up there so if a customer is satisfied with the web's portfolio more power to you pun intended but there are other things that you know we can provide for them that get beyond their home energy use as i said with carbon offsets they can address their transportation their waste and other things um and they can also participate in in you know the watershed project so that's really the point is that we're hoping to offer something for everyone um and expand customer choice through this product line okay thank you yeah president brown i was just gonna say that there's from a strategic perspective probably two by-products does this work one is

1:16:37 an enhancement of our ability both develop and market products and customer choices that's an internal thing i mean we have to at some point understand the trade-off price and volume for example the second from a customer perspective it won't be too many years in the future when being a passive consumer of energy will not be to your benefit as a consumer and so recognizing that customers at some point have to start dipping their toes into some more active relationship with their utility is another byproduct of this develops over time so those are very long-term strategic reasons for both an internal

1:17:22 one and external one why this work is important now even if there's pretty low participation thank you great explanation thank you before i close this agenda item and ask for a check um don't you win the second round yeah we got that okay a few more quick questions in a comment um when you were going through talking to different customers that are already purchasing or offsetting you know very savvy these early adopters are they buying offsets elsewhere right now i'm sorry commissioner carlson i missed that last part are they buying what are they buying offsets are they buying offsets right now urban offsets um that's a mixed bag uh like i said there there are

1:18:07 a variety of views about offsets because historically it it has been sort of a wild west of of a of a market i would say um with folks having questions about the the viability and and the additionality of those projects so um carbon offsets is a mixed bag as you know the city of eugene has purchased carbon offsets um so i know that for certain and we also know that at least as it relates to natural gas customers they recognize the benefit of carbon offsets against their home energy consumption so mixed bag some of the it was interesting too because for me a priority has been focusing on you know

1:18:53 purchasing local offsets and developing strategies to begin generating local offsets um and and again there were a variety of opinions there some just wanted to ensure that so long as it's a project that i i feel confident is making a difference then location doesn't matter others are are very very interested in location some of those local agencies are particularly interested in what you will have to offer in the future relating to our upriver activities uh so really there was a wide variety with carbon offsets yeah i mean thinking about the participation rate i mean turnpost natural they have a much dirtier product so you know more guilt more

1:19:38 participation so i don't know that we'll ever get to that level but i would like to see it increase and then final question the the cap there was a cap of 16 metric tons of co2 equivalents why is there a cap on that experience um you know like like i said at the beginning it is our intent to enhance these programs expand program capacity and eligibility um as soon as we're able uh but right out of the gates since uh carbon offsets are not a commodity that eweb has transacted on in the past uh we really want to make sure that we shore up our supply lines that we don't have a

1:20:23 a single source for procurement and that we have good market liquidity to ensure that we can meet whatever demand uh is asked by our customers so it's really a matter of of developing that and and ensuring that we can prudently manage uh the price exposure okay i guess i would just recommend that as we go into this process and you say you know there's a cap it might be good to have an option for them to say you know if you were if it was available to purchase more would you and how much so we can get a sense of that market okay thank you okay i just have one more question um the the carbon and the forced carbon research

1:21:09 program i'm all for that kind of research i am wondering if we're funded like our are our research partners having a hard time getting carbon sequestration research funded it feels like a slightly peculiar area um you broke up for part of it so i'll answer the part that i did hear and then maybe follow up for for what i missed with that so uh during his presentation uh mr silva

1:21:56 talked about the nsf grant that they applied for last year they narrowly missed that and uh there was a period of time when they they were sure that they were gonna get and that was substantial funding i don't recall the actual dollar figure um but this is certainly something that not just eweb uh and some of the smaller local players are looking at for example uh i read a couple months ago that the um the senate was looking at a bill that would assign oversight of carbon forestry and carbon agriculture practices under the department of agriculture and really start to create standardized ways of not just developing protocols but they would

1:22:41 actually oversee those markets um because there's a lot of potential there so i don't think that this is something that is so far out on the bleeding edge that we should not be participating because these markets really are growing um there's a ton of demand right now for voluntary offset markets and that demand is coming from unfamiliar sources so i mentioned briefly a lot of corporates are starting to take interest in purchasing offsets in these things so the interest is increasing not just uh from the federal government but also market participants um and this is just a really unique opportunity to kind of be on the forefront of actually looking at the science a lot of the carbon forest projects they

1:23:28 use estimates um they're standardized estimates and they're approved you know by new california air resources board etc but the data that is being collected by lucas and his team is you know it's pretty phenomenal and again it's taking a look at not just above ground plant materials but below ground so yes we're on the forefront but there's a lot of energy right now uh to look at carbon forestration and uh carbon agriculture and those types of things so that we have natural solutions to climate change thank you i know carl morgenstern came to the podium real quick to answer your question uh commissioner craig um in addition to what what anna provided is you know given the

1:24:14 positioning of this research and the fact that there's very little of this happening around the country we feel like there's there's two nsf grants out right now so we'll hear about those but basically princeton set up a carbon research center back east and there is nothing out west so we're really on the forefront of trying to make the ufo that research center would really solidify if we got like nike or somebody to build a carbon research building in the university of oregon so i mean maybe we could help them that way um no but i do think that this this is going to start kind of funding itself in a way as the research starts showing results

1:24:59 we started scaling up but great question thanks all right thank you any other questions or comments well thank you very much it's a great presentation and i think we all learned a lot and uh um that sound kind of wraps it up and we'll look forward to more reports from you and uh we'll get a greater level of participation throughout our customer base so thank you really appreciate it okay uh comments from the board now uh we're ahead of schedule by about 25 minutes uh we're scheduled for a break at 7 40. that's the next agenda item but i think number 10 based upon just a fleeting thought may go quickly and we could knock that out maybe take a break and then uh bring megan on for at number 11.

1:25:46 yep we're getting a lot of reports that folks that are um do that really quickly okay well then i'll just we'll just adjourn we'll take a five minute break and convene in five minutes okay thank you i'll have to speak into our microphone speak into the mic

1:34:53 yes can you hear me yes you're coming through nice and clear and ben are you there thank you yes i'm here and i can hear it clearly too excellent we're good to go all right we're about ready to reconvene okay i'm going to reconvene the regular meeting of the g1 electric board to february 1st 2022 next gen item is number 10 resolution 2207 authorizing general manager to negotiate an extra profit set up general manager yes president bureau commissioners good evening i just have a quick introduction um what go ahead with the next slide please what we have before you is a potential resolution for your consideration this

1:35:39 evening is resolution number 220 and it has to do with a a lot which is included in headquarters property very far southeast corner of the first property as also referred to this evening as the triangle locks next slide please what resolution 2207 states is that the board would direct the general manager to take the appropriate land use actions uh and convey the triangle loss separately from the headquarters lot and negotiate any terms and conditions of a transfer of that sale and execute any property transactions associated with that separate sale

1:36:27 property there are some advantages and disadvantages to this as shown on the slide and as was presented in your background material so i won't necessarily go through those at this time but the board is up for deliberation as to whether you would like to consider resolution 2207 um or passage or for denial or for postponement president brown next slide please i'll pass it back to you thank you very much okay well we're all familiar with this topic and uh to take a lot of speed on it so i'll just open it for a discussion to the board anybody have any questions or comments or want to make any statements

1:37:12 john v um yeah i think it would be appropriate at this point to possibly postpone action on this resolution what with the fact that we are formulating an rfp for the sale of the whole headquarters as a whole um i think it would be prudent for us to go through that process and see where that takes us not taking this off the table so that if in the future this wouldn't be appropriate for us to sell i think that we can come back and visit it so it would be my intention to put a motion forward to postpone this uh not to a time certain just uh to keep it on consideration on our calendar

1:38:02 so okay so for the minutes minutes keeper we have we had a motion by uh john borowski and segregated by clinton carlson to postpone this agenda item until a future date any other discussion let's function promotion yeah i i don't have super strong feelings however given that the opportunity for this lot to be sold by whoever buys it in the future to sell it to the same potential buyer it just it feels like a lot of work that we're potentially putting ourselves if we were to go through the process of trying to separate this triangle a lot i'm not sure it makes a bunch of sense from from my perspective i i guess at

1:38:48 what i'm saying my inclination would be not to uh approve the resolution however if we're gonna close the opponent i i guess there's not a lot of harm there but it feels like we have such a top agenda over the next year that kind of leading us off in the wings where we have to pick it up later i'm not sure if that serves us okay frank do you have a comment yeah i think the the timing and resource question is certainly a relevant one based on the agenda we'll talk about later um i would actually lump this in with any future discussions that are already planned around the disposition of the headquarters property itself i think the intent would be that this could still be up for consideration

1:39:33 in the context of the proposals we get for headquarters and the future intended uses of headquarters so i i don't see that this would be additive to our agenda i think it would be inclusive of work and discussions that we have about of course mr schlesberg any comments or questions on the agenda or the motion on just comment too i i support the motion i think this is going to be the right move to make and in the future if we do it we won't be a time consuming thing if i have anything to do with it say we negotiate it you can hear the sideboards just so you know that uh commercial cars myself and with the help of dan doing a wonderful job we're meeting weekly i'm trying to get the rfp criteria set up we're fast tracking it we're doing the best we can

1:40:18 and so uh hopefully this will come back and we'll get this resolved and make everybody happy great i just had one comment i think it is important that we are very transparent in the headquarters process that this that the master plan was amended to include housing along this property and that the proposers take that into consideration um in their future uses obviously it's not an obligation but i think to your point um president brown i think that communication should be transparent and clear another question to comments i'll call the question although in favor of the motion on the floor to table this till some point in the future saying bye bye saying aye lady graham

1:41:04 all right passes unanimously and so will be a future date thank you very much thank you next attend the item megan kapper timeline irp find the principal's 2022 roadmap good evening um so i'm megan capper yes energy resources manager and i'm really happy that we're able to present to you tonight i'm going to kick us off this evening and then hand it over to ben ulrich our long-term planner to talk us through our roadmap and recommended principles to the 2022 integrated resource plan the objective tonight is to walk through the steps we will be taking to develop our preliminary public draft and to highlight our the conversations we'll have with you through that process and how we intend to use our communication

1:41:50 tools to keep everyone informed at the end of the presentation there will be an opportunity to ask some clarified questions and discuss a set of proposed principles to guide the integrated resource planning process slide one please the irp work we're discussing today will meet our organizational goal number five to provide a public draft by the end of the year last year we completed the electrification study those results directly feed into the irp providing a deeper understanding of our customer usage the irp is an important step as we continue to move down the path of meeting our long-term strategic objectives it's a tool that allows us to look at what resources we may need

1:42:35 when and under what circumstances we can then identify the next steps in preparation for the decisions we know are coming in the future as you can see by the diagram in 2025 and 2026 we'll have decisions around seneca and bpa power purchases so now i'll hand it over to all right ben slide please so a brief agenda for tonight um tonight we'd like to spend some time covering why we're doing an irp and the type of questions that we're trying to answer then we'll go over the key elements of the irp and explain how we plan to keep the board and community engaged on these topics lastly we'll end the meeting with our draft guiding principles which will guide our work for the coming year and

1:43:20 we hope that the board can provide feedback on these on these draft principles to make sure that the staff and the board are aligned on high level expectations next slide please let's start by talking about why we are doing an irp an integrated resource plan serves as a roadmap to guide decisions for how the utility will meet the energy needs of our customers over the next two decades and identify specific actions to take within the next few years eweb's last irp was in 2011 after e-web renewed its contract with bpa through 2028 and our portfolio has not changed substantially since that time however our strategic plan emphasizes that prior to 2028 our utility will need

1:44:05 to reassemble an electric supply portfolio as our existing power contracts come to an end the irp will be a key tool for preparing this and future boards to make strategic decisions about the portfolio of the future to meet the strategic priority our irp process is changing to become more frequent and iterative we view the 2022 irp as foundational developing our modeling tools and analysis to begin answering the questions answering questions for the board and our community the decisions ahead will involve trade-offs and we hope that this and future irps will begin putting a framework around these electricity supply decisions next slide please

1:44:51 we provided a list of questions that we are trying to answer in the ir in this irp cycle in the board memo we know that not all questions can be answered in a single irp so we spent some time narrowing our questions recognizing that this irp is foundational that's why you'll see that these questions start with an emphasis on exploring eweb's energy and capacity needs in the future with the existing contracts expiring before 2028 we need to know how big these gaps will be and what resources could be used to fill those gaps we want to better understand what best fit can really mean for those resources we know that there is not some perfect low-cost low-carbon highly reliable resource out there and the challenge

1:45:37 will come from exploring trade-offs between our resource choices and understanding the risks and rewards that come with those choices we think these questions will provide a great foundation to begin asking more complex questions and future irps next slide please so let's dive into the key elements of the irp an integrated resource plan is both a technical study and an action plan staff is currently developing models to analyze how different resource portfolios will perform in an uncertain future in the board memo we try to highlight some base case assumptions and variables which will serve as inputs into our modeling work but all of these assumptions and input

1:46:22 inputs have impacts on the results we want to be sure to have more in-depth conversations about the key elements of our irp throughout this year on the left hand side you can see four key elements of the irp that we want to highlight for the board tonight the first is customer load characteristics next please thank you understanding how and when our customers consume electricity will be key to understanding what our needs will be in the future the electrification provided useful inputs into our forecasted loads in the future but that's just one part of the overall load forecast we want to make sure that the board is informed about the timing and seasonality of our energy consumption and how it may impact what resources fit eweb best next please

1:47:07 the next key element we want to look into is resource characteristics we want to discuss the attributes of resources that could be used to meet this customer load this represents an integrated approach to power planning because it includes both demand side options like conservation demand response programs and distributed generation like rooftop solar as well as traditional supply-side electricity generating resources like hydro wind and solar as well as battery storage and the ability to purchase from the market our future portfolio will be a collection of these resources combined each of these resources has unique trade-offs between costs reliability carbon and other attributes we want to

1:47:52 take some time to explore those attributes throughout this modeling process i can go back one please throughout the modeling process if you can get the balancing act i want to show the constraints there at the bottom so throughout the modeling process we'll also be balancing constraints identified by the board and state law a great example of one of these constraints is the board's recent revision of the climate change policy which targets over 95 percent of annual energy coming from carbon free resources by 2030. next please a key output of our modeling work will be a list of portfolio alternatives for the board to consider each portfolio will represent a unique mix of resources that meet the

1:48:38 established constraints and will allow the board to consider the trade-offs between the different portfolios this is also an opportunity for the board to highlight the metrics that are important to our community to ensure that the power portfolio reflects our values we want to spend more time discussing these metrics in future board meetings next please the final key element of the irp is will be the action plan approved by the board at the end of this process after reviewing the modeling results and discussing the trade-offs among the alternative portfolios the board will be asked to identify next steps for management to take before the next irp cycle going forward both the irp roadmap and the action plan will be flexible and

1:49:23 iterative and iterative to adapt to a changing utility landscape next please these key elements have much more detail than we can cover in a single board meeting so how will the board be engaged in this process as you can see we plan to bring each of the key elements we discussed tonight before the board during this year we plan to start this with a discussion around customer load characteristics in april and then have a conversation about resource characteristics in august the goal of these sessions will be to inform and engage the board as we get model as we get modeling results later in the year we plan to discuss the trade-offs of the alternate portfolios with the board in august and finally in december we plan to come

1:50:09 to the board with the preliminary draft of the irp with results recommendations and a draft action plan for board discussion and guidance this will kick off a formal public engagement process in december where we will begin working to engage the public in 2023 next slide please but these board meetings won't be the only form of communication about the irp before december our communications team will begin we'll work on building public awareness about what the irp is and how it works how it works and the types of questions it seeks to answer during this comprehensive education effort we'll use a variety of channels including a project website email updates social media and newsroom stories the initial project website has

1:50:55 already been published and will serve as a clearinghouse for information and updates throughout this irp process during this initial public awareness period the public will have the opportunity to act and interact with the board in the usual ways including by contacting commissioners and attending these public meetings the communications team will also make sure that commissioners are equipped with key messages and communications collateral for any neighborhood meetings or similar events if you choose to do if you choose to do those after the preliminary results have been released in december we'll kick off a more formal public engagement process the exact form that this will take is still to be determined but options include work sessions and presentations to neighborhood groups or other community organizations

1:51:41 customers will have the opportunity to formally comment on the preliminary draft at that time next slide please now that we've highlighted the key elements of the irp and our plans to engage the board in public we thought it would be good to propose some debt draft guiding principles these can serve as guideposts to the work that power planning will be doing over the next year and help set baseline expectations the first two principles are straightforward and and affirm that all of the portfolio alternatives that we analyze should align with the strategic plan and also comply with laws and regulations next please the third principle begins to put some boundaries around what best fit might

1:52:27 mean we want to take an integrated approach to to meeting our future loads integrated meaning looking at both supply side and demand side resources and why do we say meet our load with least cost solutions within the established constraints for our modeling work we will use constraints to make sure that the portfolio alternatives meet our minimum criteria for example all portfolios should comply with oregon's renewable portfolio standards because that's the law but then our model will work to solve for least cost portfolios that meet those criteria so that the board can also consider affordability this pr this approach would provide a list of portfolio alternatives that meet

1:53:12 baseline expectations and would allow the board to discuss more nuanced trade-offs between the lease cost portfolios next please the last draft principle speaks to a theme that we've consistently seen over the last decade which is the need for flexibility we know that customer preferences are changing our customers are more engaged with the utility about electrification and decarbonization of the electric grid and these changes are not just local but regional and national as well this principle highlights the need for e-web to maintain flexibility and adaptability in a rapidly changing utility environment the new iterative and more frequent irp process itself is a great example

1:53:57 of how this principle is being applied to our work today next please so our question tonight for the board is do these principles reflect the right strategic direction for the irp and with that we can open up for board discussion and feedback okay thank you very much i have commissioner carlson to the cube thank you i know we've been talking about the irp for a while i actually remember two years ago after we had a similar presentation and i kind of raised my hand and said i don't get it what are we doing this to me is a different ball game this actually feels like there's a plan i understand where we're going i know what the end goal is and why we're doing it so thank you i i i love that that windy

1:54:45 road uh picture there i think kind of felt like we've gotten there but i feel like this actually feels like we have a good plan and process so i really appreciate all the work that you've done to get us to a place where i understand what we're doing and why we're doing it so that's my comment thank you commissioner well i want to echo what sony just said because that was at the top of my list um kudos to this presentation it was very very clear and i totally understand the process and i remember two years ago being really confused so um great job on the presentation and kind of clarifying what it is that we're doing um i have one question about public engagement and what what does that

1:55:32 look like like in terms of the um i lost the slide but um the when we take it out to the public not just going to neighborhood association meetings but are we asking for feedback from the public and how how do we meaningfully do that um since we're the ones up here that are going to be you know finalizing a plan and you know we have different constraints how do we do it so it's not just performative or is it do we just present it to the public i'm just curious what you have in mind for that public engagement part let me start to take a crack at that and then um maybe somebody from our um

1:56:17 communications team can and can't add onto that um the reason that you have it to be determined is uh we will be providing you with um you know what we see is the objective we'll we'll be providing you with some um some guidance and some recommendations on how we want to do that we just haven't gotten there yet uh the intent is to collect uh comments from customers after we've done some kind of a roll out of of the actual public draft and then to act to uh put assimilate the comments um and put it back into a draft and then make sure in our final document that we have a section that really represents the um and and and shows that the view the board what the um themes were in the

1:57:04 comments that we received does anyone want to add on to that from communications uh no megan i think i think you covered that quite well commissioner schlossberg that's a an excellent point and um you know we'll want to make sure that we meet those criteria as we develop that plan in the in the coming months thank you yeah i i just wanted to add a little bit to that i think there there are a couple of different phases to this the awareness piece is to kind of walk the public through the process like we're walking commissioners through the process we're not going to do that uniquely but they're certainly welcome to contribute as we go once you know that the difficult challenging piece to this is it's hard

1:57:49 to really garner good feedback without something to provide that feedback without a mechanism so the reason we're calling it a public draft is for that exact reason at that point we really want to solicit feedback and genuinely genuinely listen to the public as to the content now that we have provided and so it may lead us to sort of reinforce what we thought or it might lead us to looking at some some different sensitivities or some other things that we would want to run into with a scenario in the future um the exact mechanisms there's probably going to be a lot of them there's probably going to be some very formal presentations there could be videos there could be

1:58:35 public outreach events that's still redetermined the exact mechanisms but the intent will be to provide enough material that the public can really provide some good input for us questions or comments from other board members john yeah um this kind of doesn't go to guiding draft principles i think those are pretty much laid out there between our strategic plan and some of our other goals one of the things that i'm going to need to know and get learn get educated on is some of the the resources so the bottom i don't know how the bonneville power

1:59:20 contract works i i didn't need to learn how that works i mean i know that we generate electricity and carbon and there's possibility that we're going to be generating electricity at leiber and walter bill so i know where that stuff comes from but i need to learn how the the power that we're going to need i would get that and and what you know because that's coming up in 25 both seneca and and bonneville so that is something that whether it's me meeting one-on-one with staff to get brought up to speed on that so i can balance that against okay it's gonna cost us this much buy power from bonneville but i can if i do conservation i can it cost me this much and then i'll be able to make

2:00:07 those trade-offs so that's what i'm gonna need to have for me to help put a slide that had all the different colors on there saying okay it's carbons cost you this much and it's going to price you more this way so those are the things that i'm going to need live feed on and learn about so that i can make a informed decision because at this point i'm not sure what that is yeah commissioner i think when you the way that this was laid out in a series of events the the first part being looking at the consumption side and really really diving in and understanding the nuances of consumption seasonality and the dynamics associated with that

2:00:52 between now and august so august is really when we want the board to understand the the characteristics the performance characteristics of all the different resources it could be ones that we have now it could be ones that we don't have what are the characteristics that we operate under uh with bonneville hydro versus our own hydro montana wind versus columbia gorge wind it's all of those have different operating characteristics and the goal of that august session between now and august to really pull that all together so that when we put those into models you know actually what's going in you know what columbia hydro looks like

2:01:38 and then the cost filter out that solves for various costs how does it handle peaking is it dispatchable or not is it base load is it variable all of those things will go into between now and august if we do need to schedule some one-on-one sessions i'm sure we'd be happy to do that between now and then um we're packing your schedule pretty tight between now and then so a lot to learn great thank you thank you another questions and comments i i have i can jump into two questions and i'm not so sure how good questions they are matt i think you said uh and you had that chart and uh the one the thing that could get things over the uh variable you go back a bunch of several charts where you said

2:02:23 uh um you know we're supposed to hit a 2025 goal back please yeah the constraints and you said one of the constraints would be not meeting our 95 goal if we're already at 96 percent why would that be a constraint is there something in our portfolio that will go backwards so actually in in reality commissioner we're probably we probably averaged about 90 percent um sometimes it's a little higher sometimes it's lower we did not achieve 90 in 2019 when we took carmen smith offline and liebert went online because of the hydro characteristics so if you look at where we are on an average basis we're not as high as 95. but okay because i'm just looking at the

2:03:08 information the index card you gave us yeah and it says 96 remove and if that's not true please correct it yeah when i've been operating on false information that i've been provided because i got the pie chart right here it says 96 i need to know what number an example carbon free and renewable are different and so for example seneca is considered renewable right it is not necessarily carbon free so our constraint in sd15 was around carbon and so we'll we'll need to clarify that that would help me and then the other one is about the key assumptions just need to understand historical oil growth

2:03:53 continues at the same because we've seen a huge change in peaking i mean we went from winter peak i think now we're getting closer to summer peak because of the heat and uh that coupled with some of the unknowns that you know the salmon are listed as endangered if the snake river dams go if uh that you know that lawsuit that oregon filed against bonneville and on the spill things such as that are all those being considered as variables yeah in our supply i mean yes they are then in what you just mentioned in two different sides to this sorry ben i didn't beat it and it interrupted we're we're talking here so there's some on the consumption side there's a certain base load that you can look at history and understand

2:04:39 but you also have to be careful that the future and history might be different yeah so you might you you we will and we are seeing our summer peaks grow at a faster rate than our winter peaks it's we're still winter peaking but we have to look forward and say is that going to continue so we have to look forward on the consumption site from a resource perspective all of those are considered constraints so are we going to continue to see operational constraints on columbia river hydro for example some of that could be through further spill you know operational regulations some of it could be through climate change just the fact that over time hydro conditions will be will be

2:05:24 changing so we those are when when ben mentions constraints there's constraints and forecasts on the on the side of consumption there's also such as exactly what you mentioned constraints on how our resources perform forward so we have to look at both of those thank you another question yeah question just about um how the board is involved in you know providing our thoughts about you know what the resource mix looks like in the future um there's the matrix that i understand we're gonna take a look at in august that will help us understand the qualities of all the different operations in front of us i wonder however if it would be useful

2:06:09 for the board to also provide some thoughts about other things that we collectively might want to see as just kind of baked in constraints i don't know if there's more appetite for that but things like uh you know if there's some percentage of our power that is controlled directly by e-web for example um if there are other things variables like that that we might want to say you know at the outset are you know across the board important to us if we valuable to establish those on the front end rather than um looking at it at that as a part of a whole mix of several different variables that we're talking about in august

2:06:54 um i actually i'll consult on on that mat i think there's there's a roster of considerations for example that you it was fairly small print but you made it maybe didn't notice localness was one of the calls for example because we knew that the board was interested in a certain local flavor i guess i'll say there could be other constraints that we would need to understand a little bit further and maybe that can be part of the april discussion before we go to august because we'll we will talk a lot about consumption but maybe there would be an opportunity to extend that conversation a little bit and talk about that um i'm not sure about low whether control so within our sliced product at bonneville

2:07:40 for example we have we have a certain degree of control over when that is generated when it isn't even though it's a federal resources we control the flow of water in essence there we'd have to understand that further but probably the best time to do that would be that april versus august and i guess we would ask the lord to give that some thought there are other things that you will we can send you kind of what we're thinking and then maybe you could we can even do that correspondence to get started and then when we get in april

2:08:27 so if i could just piggyback on that um i mean we could go into we could sell off carpet we could we could just go to a totally buying our power type of a utility a lot of utilities around here do that you know but the majority of them around here don't generate their own power and so that i guess again there's there's the local control yes we dispatch it and we can sell it if we we do it but how much more does that cost us is the is the is the equation does it and that will hopefully be on that chart that has the different colors in

2:09:14 there that yes we have carbon we've invested a ton of money into common so we're going to keep carbon and that kilowatt hour gamma times cost us this much money it's not just bad i guess that so that's that's the other part of the consideration yes it's local if there's some sort of a disaster we have dispatchable power that we might be able to get it get to us but that that kilowatt might cost us three times what we it actually is worth so those are the trade-offs that this type of thing is going to help us decide i think the the table that was shown there with the green things was somewhat simplified for this

2:10:00 discussion there could be just a whole series of columns there cost and affordability localness a degree of sort of eweb independence there's an independence factor we could be a full requirements customer from bonneville and be like springfield utility board for example there are risks with that as well it's like having a single supplier so you know i think those columns will not just be there won't just be three columns there will probably be several columns um there that deal with the sort of i'll say the best

2:10:45 just one quick comment on the kind of the e key elements i mean when i think about this i think about our our value center and you know what what items we have on there and the other one that i don't see on there is like we have this we have safety and i do think that some resources have you know more inherent risks like you know dance they break that has more of an inherent risk to the community nuclear you know some of those so that one's stood out to me as one that maybe doesn't fall in there but otherwise i would think about the values that we've already said are our priorities how do they align with these games could i jump in the queue uh or comment i think this this conversation is really helpful and it

2:11:31 provides a great example of how infinitely complex these decisions can feel especially as we zoom in and get and we mentioned specific resources by name carmen smith lieberg when we zoom into that you have all these elements like local um but in our irp work it's really hypothetical we're in this land of modeling and a bunch of hypotheticals and it's a strategic kind of level modeling exercise where it might help us identify future portfolios that show us that maybe eweb is a little bit less interested in wind and a little bit more interested in solar and hydro and using those strategic themes it might help us focus our future efforts to say okay now that we know broadly that we're interested in these

2:12:17 types of resources let's get more specific what are the attributes of those types of resources that we really care about do we want local solar do we want solar somewhere else that we wheel home so i as we um as we start this modeling work i'm hopeful that the irp can give us some of that strategic insight where we identify um types of resources and i and i view that resource conversation where we start to discuss attributes of resources that the utility is interested in at a strategic level which then can guide future work and you can get more specific about attributes of individual resources so we're really starting very high level long-term vision and then could eventually work our way

2:13:02 down to more specifics we'll say the attribute discussion as ben points out would include for example hydro there's built into the cost there are official wildlife costs there are also dam safety costs built in built into those those are those are attributes that lie within that family of resources so a lot more to come i guess i would say um i do want to say i think that the communications team megan and ben have done a really good job of peeling this back to where it lays out a road map for where we're going i didn't feel like we had that two years ago

2:13:47 now i feel like there's there's certain steps and there's a purpose and a basis for where we're headed and this is really important work considering in the next eight years sorry six years starting 2022 we have over two billion dollars worth of decisions today as a utility of these contracts are 10 15 year contracts minimum you think about you know the fact that almost half of our electric utility costs are in resources so it's massively important exercise in modeling in values and ultimately in action plans and

2:14:32 decisions yeah i just wanted to add um that just reminded this is the first um irp we've done in a long time so we're really developing a framework and while it is a 20-year look we're going to as soon as we're done and we have an action plan from you we're going to start doing we're going to start answering some of your follow-up questions and uh we don't have the information today like what our products from bonneville will look like or what those costs will be so this framework we can start asking we can build upon in our subsequent irps and ask ourselves um some of those questions uh so we're going to be prepared for those questions in the future so it's a 20-year look but because the assumptions and the

2:15:18 our industry is changing so quickly we're going to want to refresh our assumptions um you know every you know two years like we were saying so while it looks like it's a long um uh 20 years and it looks like there's a ton of uncertainty we're going to make sure we have the best and most current assumptions in there to be making these decisions and simultaneously we are working with industry partners in bonneville and trade organizations to to try to move forward what 2028 contracts look like bonneville because it's not a decision you can you can wait until 2026 or 2027 to figure out so we're working that resource end through the public power council our own

2:16:05 a number of other the number of other utilities on that side thank you so i just have one last kind of commenter question because i um so i you know it's my understanding that thirty percent of the electricity consumed in the state of marine comes from coal and if they retire all that coal in this window that we're looking at what is that you know we reduce the supply increases demand are we factoring things like that because i'm assuming that the goal is going to be retired within this window we're looking at are we making that assumption that that we're going to have to find just to stay even with no increase in load we're going to have to find a 30 increase in electric production to serve people of oregon

2:16:50 uh is that coming into you know the competitive range of where we are in this analysis so the analysis itself mr ground will not um deal with that specifically what what it will deal with or the byproducts of trends like that so an understanding that the importance of mitigating peaking and peaking pricing for example will become more important in the future than it has been in the past so there are trends some of those are actually known because there are regulatory constructs driving that this isn't just a market trend there are there are forecasts and therefore utilities are planning on these retirements they're replacing them with uh they're doing the same thing they're replacing

2:17:36 them with a mix of resources some of those are more variable and so those will have impacts on prices peaking otherwise so those are the byproducts that will go into future forecasts as well as the importance of characteristics of different resources is it is a resource able to handle peaking or not that's or is it a mix of resources so not directly but indirectly thank you and when you do have these one on ones or one or two i'm looks like you've got some potential invitations for some

2:18:23 private sessions i need another meeting any other questions or comments for staff or a good manager on this topic i just would add an appreciation to the staff i i agree with the all board members the presentation here and the materials are super helpful thank you thank you very much so well thank you megan matt and the rest of the team that's worked on this uh you have made a very complex topic understandable to lay people so thank you very much i truly really appreciate it because i was just last time or you know a couple years ago so thank you i appreciate that it's hard to sit up here and pretend you understand and you know and so i partially understand but thank you very

2:19:08 much all right the next agenda item is sport uh agendas and uh correspondence yes president brown thank you um i wanted to point out to the board and i think i actually mentioned this in a separate email to you um you should notice if you haven't that the board agenda report is more robust than in the past um i have to give a lot of kudos to the executive team managers and others who we challenged with how do we try to map out the entire year we we have a lot of work to do with you this year if you'll notice that there are certain characteristics of things on the board

2:19:53 of chen to report some of them we call recurring those are things that we bring back you know budgets and certain operational reports and these types of things they are important they are in some cases required we also try to identify where we're working on certain goals in one example that you just heard about you'll see an agenda item in april and august and a work session in november on goal number five which is the integrated resource plan that's mapped into the year i think we added six work sessions and one additional executive session to the list so we tried not to over pack the the board in any one particular

2:20:41 meeting but trying to space this out and coordinate it in a way that that made sense to us if you had additional feedback on it we'd appreciate that some of the goals are covered in the operational reporting so you'll see a quarterly report where it's operational strategic goals report that's some of the goals are covered in there but quite a few of the others lieberg and others are identified and honestly i think maybe august part of july august and september are the only meetings that have any time left in them um we've pretty heavily booked you there the rest of the of the time and i do want to

2:21:27 point out it's not cast in stone there we may have to slide a few things around here and there as as we go through the year and sometimes you get emerging issues and others but i wanted to know if the board had any comments on it we really tried to map out the year as best we could any questions or comments about the gen event uh just one comment is super helpful and super overwhelming at the same time thank you i'm glad to share the pain you're welcome yeah no it's definitely i think i knew that was coming that if you mapped out all the decisions you made by the sport it's a thick agenda but it's really helpful to have it laid out so we can get a sense of what that's going to feel like

2:22:12 thank you commissioner um i think in some ways it's less overwhelming to have it all laid out like this because at least for me sometimes it's hard to follow the thread of like when are we talking about this again because we skipped several meetings um and so i think it's super helpful and i really appreciate it all right any other comments on the board of and things after that correspondence there's just a few um items of correspondence that were for your information some of them one was a follow-up roster of active resolutions i think across that we we did actually go going through those found a couple that were inactive that were originally on the list that we closed out

2:22:58 and then two pieces of information one is a historical account of the past communications associated with the second source which included some customer interactions some surveys some direct committees and the communications team went back and did that research um and then the communications plan associated with the riverfront and headquarters building so this was really information for your digestion if you had any questions staff here could answer those but it was really the things that we thought you had asked for and so all right other questions or comments if not and we're just going to move the

2:23:45 last agenda item against the board wrap up anybody have anything to say or comment on commissioner um this is really small but i just want to say this is my board beginning my fourth year on the board and um i really noticed that the quality of the presentations to us have increased greatly um i don't know if there's been like some kind of design standard across the utility or something or how staff have really been working together but i appreciate it i feel like the presentations um have really been elevated over the past several years thank you for that and great job stop that anything for the good of the order hopefully thanks mr carlos actually had similar thoughts especially

2:24:31 tonight's reasons yeah they were just absolutely stellar nothing brought me all right i'm good i was just gonna say you know that that is noticed internally as well and i think staff has really recognized the importance of how they communicate with this board first of all a lot of assistance from the communications team and then managers and others taking a step back and saying if i need to zero base how i think about these issues how would i want this presented and what kind of feedback can we give those presenters so really appreciate that feedback always opportunity to continue to improve but really thank staff and then managers for for their work on that

2:25:18 and i'd just like to thank everybody before and the staff and everybody else for keeping you know we we thought we were going to be here to 9 30 tonight and we were worried about it but thank you very much for your concise and consent questions and responses and you know the good thing is we didn't have to say any extensions i really appreciate that i think everybody appreciates that i'm glad we could get to making that presentation this evening nothing worse than having to sit there and say once again and uh just a final on the update but it's sony and i and ann and a whole group of staff are meeting very regularly working on the uh the rfp protocols and content things like that and get another meeting thursday and we're meeting once a week so we hope

2:26:04 to get that back to you so you guys can see what a good job is it sounds like leading in one day seriously thank you very much i think we're doing good so with that thank you