EWEB Board of Commissioners — September 6, 2022

0:01 is there anybody that has any questions or comments about the agenda if not and then second agenda item is either for the board members feedback i noticed we have some people from public hearing so i just want to give you a brief overview of facility safety awareness and meeting logistics i want to thank you for attending the meeting um we and we have ebay management and subject matter experts here in the room and virtually and tonight's presentation remote presentation presenter will appear on the screen you're invited to sign up at the table the back of the room if you want to provide public testimony testimony but visitor access is limited to the board meeting restrooms restrooms are located on the first floor through the exit door in case of an emergency such as a firearm arm exit through the glass door at the back of the room unless it's like

0:46 unsafe to do so emerging evacuation is needed exit from the front of the building if possible across the bridge and assemble out the parking lot have a greater distance so the building is needed for safety assemble with the flagpole at the parking lot of the east interest or if absolutely necessary exit the rear of the building just behind the restroom to take immediate ride and assemble the bar to the building uh tonight's meeting will be recorded the recording will start when the meeting is called to order and we'll continue until in german the meeting will be muted during the break aside from that period virtual participants on the screen will be able to hear conversations in the room until the meeting is disconnected thank you so the next agenda item is item for board members and general manager so i'll start with commissioner schleichman only thing i have is that i was able to purchase my very first e-bike and

1:33 got my rebate already from e-web and that was a really smooth and easy process and i'm super grateful for that 300 towards my bike yeah john nothing for me right thank you i got a couple things i purchased a electric car and i'm having a lot of fun i'm going to get in trouble with it they're way too fast but it's a lot of fun i do have a question from frank i know i had a little issue with international paper and the use of the riverbanks above our water intake and you had a meeting with them if you could report back to me on what the results of that meeting are and whether or not they're going to clean up that mess and whether or not we may be able to acquire that real estate i really appreciate that thank you very much and then this

2:19 saturday i'm going to be a dedication for another one of our emergency water systems at sheldon uh we're going to dedicate that i think saturday at 11 and uh another emergency water station going so good for your staff thank you very much the next thing is the public mackenzie watershed council is having a potluck this thursday it's at their new offices just right near diana park so that if any commissioners wanted to go they would be more than welcome they do great work okay thank you okay the next agenda item is public input so i'm going to open the public input and i'm going to say when your name is called please come to the podium clearly state your name and obviously your address award each speaker will be offered three

3:04 minutes to present their testimony please keep track of time by watching the timer at the front of the room or removing an audio notification when three minutes has elapsed we are participating by telephone remember i mute your call do we have anybody on the phone okay i'm going to skip that after all testimony is heard each commissioner will have an opportunity to speak if they choose although by policy we do not engage in a background please note that the commissioner to speak shall not be construed or support or opposition to any speaker's testimony the question is presented by the speaker not quite an answer any web staff member will contact the speaker so the question can be addressed at the later time so the first person signed up to speak is jerry ester please

3:53 good evening thank you for allowing me to speak once again it was a privilege to speak to you last month and i'm here to speak on the same issue and that is the issue of leeburg lake after i gave my testimony last month people in the community were greatly interested in what i had to say and so several people not i developed some petitions and started circulating them and they're still in circulation i currently tonight have 50 signed petitions for you of people who hold the same position that i expressed last month and that was that whatever option you decide to choose

4:38 for that project that you consider an option that preserves the lake uh for the community for all the reasons i missed in her testimony last month so i'm not quite sure who to present well you can give them to our general manager right here that's the type of start right there all right now you can either you don't they'll never get lost and trust me well thank you very much thank you we really appreciate it is there anybody else in the audience that would like to address the board on any topic that may be relevant if not then i will close the public input from commissioners

5:29 uh thanks for testimony and thanks to those who gathered signatures and uh we certainly have a decision to make in front of us for sure that yeah yeah i think we're all we're all wrestling with that so i appreciate the input and taking the time other questions or comments i'd like to thank you jerry for uh for reaching out to us and jerry thank you for reaching out to us but i also like to make you aware that we have a lot more public input and public sessions up the river if we have scheduled uh more uh listening sessions and things such as that and and if you check our agendas this thing is going to be really getting after it here shortly it's on the agenda this evening but also it's on every agenda we have between now and december

6:14 and so it's a it's a big decision and uh it's going to require a lot of a lot of thought so thank you very much for your input and stay engaged thank you thank you okay that will do that thank you very much next agenda item is going to be the set counter approver of consent calendar a does anybody have anyone to leave anything out of that with consent calendar b do you want to discuss anything if not that would entertain a motion to approve movement by carlson secretary mcrae any discussion all those in favor signify by

7:00 saying nothing was removed so item seven riverfront property rfp and next steps frank lawson general manager president brown thank you good evening commissioners um just a couple of quick updates uh and the recommendation this evening so um first of all the rfp closed in mid-august and we received uh four different proposals go ahead next slide gene science center ob companies olympus academia three muses and then one of the original intended proposers with the group in the process each of these proposals

7:46 uh covered different aspects of their intended interest some of them were more visionary some had different uses of which we were interested in the rfp process however called for a series of evaluations based on a scoring matrix and each of the proposals lacked a certain degree of specifics around some aspect or another whether that be pricing or terms and conditions and really created a situation where a scoring matrix was no longer applicable our recommendation based on that and so each and without going through each one

8:32 of them and the specifics what we're going to recommend to the board and open for discussion with the board is that we cancel the rfp it's something where none of the proposals fulfill the entire vision economically or uh the combination of economics and terms and conditions and and then therefore by canceling the rfp you could direct the general manager to continue to explore and pursue the sale of the riverfront property under guidance that you would provide to me in executive session and that would

9:17 more than likely get scheduled in october with the disposition potentially being also approved by the board or not depending on the parameters that that you provide so our recommendation this evening based on the rfp proposals that we received was that we cancelled the art painting brown can you also outline um for for any of the folks i see a number of faces in the crowd that i don't recognize so i'm wondering if some of the people here might be for this particular topic could you spot a little bit if we did cancel tonight um some of the outreach that you might have with the people who did absolutely commissioner carlson so so

10:02 first of all what we would do in a cancelled rfp and this is this goes for any rfp we would officially respond to all of those proposers that the rfp is cancelled and also we would be in a position to to talk to them about their particular rfp and their proposal as well um you know and and whatever potential issues or risks that we saw with thank you just wanted to make sure that the feedback so they would know right they'll get direct feedback i think given what we've seen i'm

10:48 supportive of the out the outline that staff has provided and um thank you um well i'm just i'm just sad that mindy and i don't get into going on this more meetings in the scoring committee i was really looking forward to those extra meetings um so that that being said um yeah i think it's important to to point out that this isn't uh no to any of these proposals this is just that the the proposals that were put forward didn't meet the criteria that we had set out to go through an evaluation

11:34 process on um it just wouldn't have worked you know we could this one we couldn't compare this one to this one because they were coming at it from different directions it wasn't that this one was not applicable and this one was it because they just didn't meet the criteria that we were asking for so it wouldn't be fair to judge them using that criteria and so i any of these people are free to if we if we move forward with this we'd be free to go into negotiations with the general manager or whoever it is and we would set some parameters that we're looking for and hopefully people could meet those parameters and move forward

12:20 we talked about we don't want to be in the real estate business that's not our mission our mission is providing light and water and that's what we need to put our energy into so hopefully this will lead us to a conclusion of getting this property disposed of in a responsible manner but i just didn't want to let anybody know that the door was closed to them just because we are closing the rfp process the other thing uh commercial barofsky is that in going through the process and looking at the different proposals i think i think you're absolutely correct in the sense that

13:05 when you when you have sort of a mixed degree of proposals you can't do a cross-comparison some proposals outlined a very clear vision but then the financials were very insecure and unspecified others had more specific specificity around some of the terms but the financial offer was not clear or the vision wasn't cleared so each of the different proposals had some ambiguity in some of the key areas that that we wanted to hear and when we didn't get more than you know two or more that you could you could actually make a comparison with and the commissioners you saw the

13:50 proposal so just so people in the public know you've actually seen all the proposals this is the reason for the recommendation to continue in a different way good comments by other men uh just briefly just want to say thanks to the commissioners who have already put in extra work to um um i mean we all spent some time trying to think about what a criteria but you know i know the circle will be put in more time than others um so thank you for the effort you put in and i think it helps us lead towards you know some criteria for the next phase i also want to say thanks to the folks who put together uh proposals that were very in-depth um yes

14:37 maybe missing some criteria that we had spelled out or another but clearly a lot of effort went into those and and and thought and resources so um that is appreciated yeah um i also agree with the recommendation i think that we tried to come up with a um rfp that would kind of encapsulate everything that we wanted to do and clearly it didn't work and so um i think that the best thing to do is to lean forward as quickly as we can and i think by going ahead with this recommendation it will allow us to do that and i guess i'm last so um i i don't disagree with that recommendation i just

15:22 hope that uh i think i've been through the rfp process the civic stadium and eugene civic alliance how they amassed that group of people very short notice they got the money together and they were able to write the check and then they were doing additional fundraising to achieve their goal i don't know if that you know that's this by doing this that allows us more flexibility with it and and or any proposer the flexibility because we still have a for sale sign on it but now they can just go to the general manager or designees and negotiate and then we have the sideboard set and say this is a minimum price well these are some of our preferred uses and users these are some of our criteria and we can go from there because you're absolutely right and some of us have some more time in it but we have some

16:07 things on the agenda coming up that are uh huge and uh we have to stay focused on running the electricity and the water systems here and so i think to allow the staff to do this more than us will be in the uk so i'm going to be supportive of the recommendation as well so that said it's a it's a action item there's a proposal here [Music] so if we move forward with this frank what what type of direction does this give

16:53 you and what other areas for checking are we going to have in your in your mind so the first check-in will be to establish the boundary criteria with board that would be an executive session in october that would be the very next step at that and as part of the october meeting we would bring forth a resolution that would specify the parameters and process and just in general for the public to be aware of such as does the general manager have permission to not just negotiate but also execute any kind of sale if within the parameters or not those are those are

17:39 things that we will be working on between now and then and that's that's the question that i want to know is where the board feels on giving him giving you that much authority and i want to have a robust discussion about that i think there's so in the past and some of this would depend on how specific the criteria is developed um and i'll say how tight that criteria is you have in the past has generally given the general manager the authority to both negotiate and execute however you know given the particular public visibility of the site

18:26 the board may wish to draw the line and say you can negotiate within these parameters but ultimately the board has the final say and that that would certainly be acceptable in this kind of case at all and so you have a few weeks to think about how you position that from from an individual perspective but either of those i think in this case would be appropriate i'm not sure whether to to thank you or you should offer me my condolences to go through this process but um you know i i do think that it opens up some opportunities for people and you know we will [Music] try to move forward in the best way for the utility

19:14 any other comments before we take a roll call on the boat i just have one other quick comment if i may so when we set the sideboards i know we had one proposal called flat position and i think that's whether or not we're going to all right any other comments under the motion [Music] thank you very much okay the next general uh business item agenda item 8 2022 legislative and regional costly update and legislative information json someplace

20:00 okay i'm here give me a second to catch up you moving very quick tonight that's great all right okay uh i can you all see me and hear me yeah okay great all right good evening commissioners uh see you all i hope you had a great summer um it's uh opportune time to update you all on policy matters in both washington dc as well as salem um there's been some significant news out of washington d.c on federal policy that will address climate change and reduce our nation's greenhouse gas emissions and also uh this kind of perfect timing a few months ahead of the 2023

20:45 legislative session preview preview to give you um at least a hazy snapshot of what that session might look like and what issues could very well be on the final adopted eweb agenda for the next state legislative session so we're hitting a good sweet spot here next slide please first off i wanted to talk a little bit about washington dc it's been almost a year since the federal infrastructure bill was passed um you'll probably recall at a previous meeting i i noted the difference between a stimulus bill and a true infrastructure package the first one really is a sprint

21:33 a search for shovel ready projects to stimulate the economy and create jobs as quickly as possible in contrast to that a true infrastructure package is more of an intermediate race and as such is a multi-year spending effort and strives to identify shovel-worthy projects not merely ready projects uh so to that end um uh i would say there there is progress um there have not been a ton of actual funding opportunity announcements that have gone not gone out yet um in some cases there have been those were probably where there was an existing program existing federal staff to run it and it

22:19 was plug and play there are many elements of a sweeping infrastructure bill that actually created completely new programs whole cloth that necessitated all sorts of hr staffing and rule making and a process to stand programs up so not surprisingly those programs are are still in progress although you certainly can see uh 2023 shaping up to be potentially a busy year for uh our eweb grant writer and other e-web staff um we've been participating in all sorts of webinars and trainings on what to expect uh for funding opportunity announcements some of those have been through our professional trade associations others of those have

23:05 actually been conducted by state and federal agencies eweb has formerly responded to at least two federal or state agency requests for information this is simply a process where the agency solicits input from potential applicants about what will work best for them uh so this is a so these these funds are put to great use and are not overly difficult to access um two rfis we've responded to were on hydroelectric incentives that's not just hydroelectric production there are some potential funding opportunities that could also address and check boxes related to our ferc license

23:51 mandated activities at carmen things like recreation ecosystem improvements so we responded to that rfi and are watching that closely also there we've responded to an rfi from the state of washington relating to their potential uh proposal to our application to be designated a national hydrogen hub which comes with all sorts of um federal funding um to that end uh e-web actually had an informational meeting um with the staff that are leading the effort to prepare the northwest hydrogen hub regional application uh it started off uh as a washington oriented uh effort but

24:38 it's been extended expanded to oregon and idaho and i think the folks at washington state uh uh it's not an official washington state you know run thing but uh a lot of the staff uh preparing the application are based out of washington state they were really thrilled to meet us um so we had a really really productive discussion with them we're on their radar and vice versa there's kind of an effort to do matchmaking in a hub proposal you want some kind of synchronization between potential production and demand um so it was great that we're on their radar and obviously geographical diversity will be a strength in a competitive application process so i think uh

25:24 being uh to my knowledge we might we're probably the most southern located um person or entity to respond to the rfi so um i'm glad we're doing that uh moving on the oregon department of energy has uh applied or is in the process of applying to usdoe for a formula application grant for grid resiliency formula basically means the the original bill actually allocated so much money for every state by a formula they don't just write you a check though the state has to go through a process to apply for it um you basically do their due diligence to show that the money will be spent in accordance with

26:10 the goals and the criteria set forth in the iiga but i wouldn't call it a rubber stamp but if you get the work done any state is going to get the money that was allocated to them and the formula odo had a public hearing on august 31st that was preceded by some listening sessions uh our general manager frank lawson uh rod price janine parisi and myself were all very involved in all those meetings and i think we gave some pretty good input uh to usd that will strengthen their application which is due by the end of september which means uh it's possible uh there could be funding opportunity announcements within the state of oregon to sub grantees in oregon as maybe maybe q4 i think it's

26:56 probably more likely 2023 that would probably sync up uh with also the national program so i talked about the formula money that every state is guaranteed to get um there's also a nationally competitive program and anyone in the country can can go for that money there there is a carve out in the national program so much of the money has to be allocated to utilities with retail sales of less than 4 million megawatt hours per year and eweb just sneaks barely under that threshold so that's good there was a worry that uh large utilities with regionally significant uh projects uh might give most of that money at the national level

27:42 um we we have a shot to compete well in that small utility category next slide please okay more stuff in washington dc uh it's really great to report that things are happening at the national level the inflation reduction act uh was passed a few weeks ago and it was surprising the bill had languished for a very long time i think a lot of people were ready to give up and move on uh miraculously they found the votes to pass the bill and it is a really really big accomplishment and i think any american that cares about climate change and reducing greenhouse gas emissions should be very very excited about the passage of this

28:27 bill the bill addresses multiple parts of the american economy uh but the there's no doubt the climate provisions are the centerpiece of this legislation and uh it's been estimated that the claimant provisions will reduce u.s greenhouse gas emissions 40 by 2030 and that is an amazing number um you know i think a lot of people worried to get the votes this bill would be watered down and yes compared to the original climate bill it is but uh 40 is a very significant number uh it gives the united states credibility again on the international stage um when they arrive at you know global climate meetings um the us is doing something

29:13 we're back in the game so very exciting a couple of key elements here you'll see in the bullet points uh it is a investment oriented vehicle um at eweb we love carbon pricing we still do we still think it's the least cost approach uh but at the national level they had to get the votes and uh the proponents of addressing climate pivoted away from carbon pricing or other market approaches more to a standards and investment approach they didn't have the votes for the standards you need 60 votes to break a filibuster however in the federal budget you just need 51 votes in the u.s senate to pass a budget and so essentially using budget reconciliation

29:59 they they passed a massive spending package and you can see here a 10-year authorization of production tax credits that's a long period in the past congress that has reauthorized these sometimes on a cycle as short as a year or two which gave no certainty to developers so 10 years is a very extensive period there's a direct pay option for the first time for tax-exempt entities like eweb we don't have a tax liability so tax credits were um i won't say completely difficult we we went to some very elaborate lengths to create third party entities um with other util other publicly owned utilities but this is so much better it's almost like a grant like a real true grant option uh there's also transferability for

30:44 friends that may have a tax liability but it's not very large and they can't use the full balance of the tax credit they'll be able to transfer that tax credit to another party in in offline transactions and hydrogen's been added um you know hydrogen uh we know the value proposition there is very exciting so it's it's great to see hydrogen take its place alongside the other methods of producing energy in receiving tax credits it's not just a investment on the production side um to address both residential energy production as well as addressing demand uh energy demand and reducing people's bills and helping out their

31:30 bottom line there's all sorts of consumer facing incentives nine billion for home energy rebate programs 10 years of tax credits for heat pumps heat pump water heaters and rooftop solar 4 000 dollars in in tax credits for used electric vehicles up to 7 500 for new um as you know uh some of the the ev tax credits had actually ended for certain automakers because they'd hit the cap that had been created so this is uh just extending everything and increasing it it's great um i also wanted to mention in many of these tax credits they've also converted them into i guess what you would call cash on the hood or point-of-sale uh they're they're the government's

32:16 basically fronting the money as opposed to people having to you know pay up front and then um you know be compensated on the back end when they tac file their taxes so that's also very very pro-consumer to to uh convert these to these point-of-sale type um even it's tax rebate but you get it up front it's a tax credit rather so that's that's great and finally a billion dollars to make affordable housing more energy efficient i can't think of a better way to invest money in affordable housing that's comfortable energy efficient so it's a it's a big deal lots more to come on this this just happened and uh you know i mentioned the iiga and all the work that's being done

33:02 two-way communication between potential future applicants uh beneficiaries with the the agencies they're going to have to start doing that for this bill as well so i probably can tell you a lot more about this bill in a few weeks or months but it's something to definitely be excited about it's a major investment in addressing climate in this country next next slide please uh pivoting to our state capital um you know as it's several months away it's always hard to know exactly what we're going to be doing i think the first one is the easiest one because uh it's an absolute imperative it's something eweb will be playing offense on we will be working with other stakeholders other

33:49 utilities that own hydroelectric facilities but eweb's leading leading the charge on this we're playing some offense there was a court case in december of last year water watch versus warm springs hydro that effectively created a major problem for e-web anytime a hydroelectric project has not been generating for a long time you begin a clock basically on potential forfeiture of your water rights that were issued for for hydroelectric generation um the work work around on this has been uh you could put the water to beneficial use and told the statute by leasing it to a third party say an irrigator the supreme court decision said that's actually not enough you you

34:36 have to use the water for the purpose for which it was intended which essentially puts a five-year shot clock on any hydroelectric facility uh that's not generating so the implications for lieberg um are very big i think our five-year clock uh runs through the end of 2023. we need a legislative fix on this that there is a potential administrative remedy and workaround however it's totally untested we're not even sure that that might not be litigated by the same plaintiff that litigated the the warm springs case so we need the legislature to clear this up right at this point in time it seems like the clearest way to do this would be to create a exemption

35:22 from the water rights forfeiture statute for any uh hydroelectric project that has an active ferc license perk license comes all sorts of oversight for issues like safety and it is a it's a very regular periodic process if you have a dam that has a safety issue there's a lot of reporting at least on a quarterly maybe even a monthly basis to ferc so it's a it'd be very solid ground for us to ask the legislature to exempt a project with an active ferc license and i think it would still be compatible with the spirit of the supreme court decision in which the plaintiff was basically asking for zombie projects that have not generated

36:09 in a long time where someone might be holding the water rights for a speculative purpose really really different than the library situation i i think we can uh i think we can get this done and still uphold um the spirit of uh of the legal decision and what the plaintiffs were trying to accomplish um moving on i i won't explain a lot about this second one i think it's a repeat from our last legislative agenda um we're going to be back again um talking to the legislature about an investment of state matching funds towards eweb water infrastructure including second source we did get a small amount of money last year from the legislature thank you senator manning for carrying that water

36:54 for us no pun intended obviously and we'll be back again there are some funding sources that have a shelf life on them including arpa funds the american rescue plan the stimulus bill that was passed during the heights of covid uh and the economic crisis in america one of the eligible uses of arpa funds is water infrastructure so if the legislature finds itself with unspent arpa funds and that's definitely a possibility we would be sitting there um close to the uh that the time they have to spend or lose that money so that's uh that's a funding source in addition to general fund or lottery fund uh that we can apply for and and lastly this this third one is really just a placeholder

37:40 there was a task force uh directed by the legislature to examine how to make buildings in oregon more resilient energy efficient have a lower carbon footprint be more resistant to wildfire smoke that community has been meeting for several months i i wouldn't even hazard to try to summarize the the topics they've been tackling it has been an exhaustive list of measures they are considering recommending to the legislature and uh they're gonna have to narrow that down so i expect to hear a report back though as that committee uh begins to bring its work into focus and uh make make recommendations we will uh we'll update

38:27 you on the work of that group and what could come out of that so i'll i'll wrap it up there and i i'd be happy to take questions thank you jason um technically we got a minute and 39 seconds left but since we're ahead of schedule i'll take executive privilege a couple questions uh jason well first thanks for holding down everything in salem and monitoring dc on our behalf and reporting back a quick question about that last bullet item the resilient efficient buildings task force are the recommendations they're geared towards building code or are they geared towards legislative incentives i highly highly geared towards building code but there are incentives that have

39:12 been discussed and are you involved in that task force in any way uh we were not appointed to the task force i had been monitoring the meetings though uh and uh eugene is pretty well served uh uh with uh uh eugene mayor lucy venice uh is the i believe the co-chair of the task force along with representative pam marsh from ashland great thanks questions comments john b um thank you jason and thank you sonia for bumping us up to earlier on in in the agenda i think that's very appropriate especially on the state level ones um jason i was wondering if at some point you could uh send out a memo with some talking points

39:59 especially on the hydroelectric and the second source so that if we commissioners are have meetings with state legislatures we can advocate them and with from a place of knowledge you know not just saying oh i want can you give me money for the hydroelectric or rv for the second source or can you help move this bill along if you can send us some talking points because i know that i'll be meeting with some state legislators over the next few months and it would be nice to be able to have an educated conversation with that sounds fantastic on the hydro liquid water rights we actually are very close to finalizing talking points i

40:44 think we're just letting the uh the attorney that represented the the defendant in the former springs case was going to take a look at it as he's as knowledgeable as anyone about the legislative remedy that's necessary also on the second source i think it would be fantastic for us to have what i call a leave behind something you either electronic or paper document you leave behind with with someone you've just uh you know advocated to and uh i'd like to have some good graphics in it for once uh i i tend to be a written word guy and uh i'll need some help from the visual team at eweb to spruce it up but i would love to have that for you as a lead behind i think our leave behind should be a straw

41:39 thank you so much jason yes i did ask for this to be a little bit earlier just in case there's things that we wanted to get ahead of so i really appreciate you jumping in here sooner than you would have otherwise um great information and i echo what uh john barofsky was saying i'm definitely meeting with different legislators in the uh next few months and two weeks okay i have a question jason i know that the the money that they the ira act was is designed about you know a lot of carbon uh reducing a lot of carbon i would hope that we could look to get some help on libre because you know we're struggling trying

42:25 to get a carbon-free permitted resource back running and it's a huge financial lift for us and if there's any way we could get uh if we could get that on the list of projects i couldn't think of a better project i could promote and then help you know get that gap back to where we could you know at least make a little bit more financially feasible to the ratepayers to uh to re-energize that system if it's at all possible because right now it's a long stretch for us to get there is there any opportunity you think for us to get money to to make that uh facility safe well i i mentioned the rfi that we uh responded to on uh hydro hydroelectric incentives in the

43:12 iiga act those those are probably a little better fit for uh measures at carmen but uh we're going to be watching that closely that was an rfi they still gotta write the rules um i think i i think we may have hinted at that in our in our comments in the rfi but uh we'll be watching that rule making more very very closely because potentially again i think it's probably a better fit for carmen but potentially um that could be an area where we could seek some assistance in those funding opportunities now thank you any other comments or questions for frank yeah president brown one things i was going to mention around the timing of this is that we do have a follow-up

43:59 correspondence scheduled for november so that when the board reviews the legislative agenda for 2023 in december which is what that usually is you'll have some current updates from from jason so this is going to be an ongoing september november december kind of sequence thanks to the feedback from the board thank you another questions or comments jason thank you very much good to see you welcome back thank you hydrogen plan appreciate it thank you the next gen item is number nine the goal number four your rfp for eweb enterprise solutions ess information assistant provider hi good evening

44:45 get the present in person so i'm going to try to move my own slides here and talk at the same time um so but if i get off i'll throw something at me and i'll hit the arrow because i'll probably keep talking um so the last time i presented uh on the ees program was several months ago so i thought i would just start with a quick recap of where we were and how we've gotten to where we are right now so back in early 2021 2021 i did say that here right we talked about our a lot about it but really talked about our legacy applications and and how we were struggling to do things because of the legacy applications that we had with an average of 20 years old with those systems and so brought forth the recommendation to

45:30 modernize those with an erp which is that integrated suite of business tools with the board's approval we moved forward to an assessment had a third party company come in by the name of sure power came in and did an assessment spoke with our managers supervisors executive teams subject matter experts to really you know understanding where we were and where our ideas moving forward were and then also not wanting to forget a question because we've there's a theme of this back to your question commissioner carlson what's different this time and we talked about top-down sponsorship and some of the things that we're doing differently this time and then we've anchored this all on our guiding principles as we select the product a very utility specific commercial off the shelf

46:16 enterprise class and supportable so over the last nine nine months five years uh we've we've transitioned this has turned into the ees program with the software selection being really a track of that overall program and ees standing for eweb enterprise solutions and today we'll talk about where we are with the governance plan or readiness we'll talk about our software selection and then really what's next from a program governance perspective um we've got an executive steering committee um that we've set up that consists of the entire et and so really on the previous slide we saw top-down sponsorship but really what this is is top-down [Music] i'm not like i lost my word um

47:01 what's another word for smile sponsor help me out frank uh commitment that's the word i'm looking for talk down commitment from the executive team we've also developed a program team and we've hired a consultant from sure power to be our program manager who's gone through these transformation efforts before to help guide us we've also hired a another consultant from sure power for business readiness and change management to help us help guide the change because that's a big piece of this transformation we've also got the framework for our workstream teams who will partner with our solutions implementer to to do the work right to actually transition from old software legacy software into the new system and then we've also built a framework around operations team and that's to really help ensure the integrity of this system long

47:47 term and so mr mcrae you asked last meeting how long before we have to do this forklift project again and really the answer that is we don't ever want to do it again we want to maintain the system and keep it up to date so we don't have to do that ever again so legacy being a bad word in the software world so as we look at our organizational readiness we'll kind of go around this counterclockwise lots of communication we've got an updated sharepoint site sending out weekly news articles change leader training and change agents it's really that conduit so the program team can be feeding information through leaders and then change agents which are e-web employees that are embedded in the divisions to make sure they're getting accurate information about the program we did an internal survey to kind of

48:32 find out where people were and how to address those things we've done some lessons learned um sessions to make sure that we sidestep minds and hopefully take on the good things that we did last time and do them again the other portions of goal 4 was to do business process mapping and data governance to build that data governance framework and both of those are really important pieces and were well on track and started down that those two as well now for the fun slide those are the journey and it was it was a really long journey but it was really um it was a good one and so for our software selection we we released an outcome-based rfp in q1 of 2022 and at that time the executive team appointed a 17-member scoring team so

49:17 from across the utility the entire all the divisions were represented and then in q2 we had responses and we reviewed those responses we had on-site vendor demonstrations you can see we had an average of 35 staff in each of those sessions of them over 1800 hours of seat time 80 pages of notes that we got to go through q3 was a vendor follow-up q a virtual site visits so we had an opportunity to reach out to other utilities and ask well with their implementation what would they change did the vendors really say do what they said they could do during the demonstrations and have an opportunity to do just kind of back check and we received

50:02 the initial pricing bundle and through all those three there's three phases there through those three phases sap was issued the intent to award this is a really exciting time right i mean this is this was a huge endeavor um the the team went through and it was a really robust process and so it's really exciting time and so now we're in the contract negotiations to finalize those contracts and hopefully we have we'll hope to have that done at the end of september so what's next i know it's a puzzling slide i'll piece it together for you um the software costs came in uh from sap at about seven million dollars over six and a half years and to just put that into a comparison we're currently

50:48 paying about 1.2 million a year in our legacy applications with about a four to five percent um annual increase to those so the seven million was within the range that we were expecting from our budget um we're also going to kick off a solution to implement our phoenix which that'll be the partner that we use to help us implement this software and we do it we're doing this in a very intentional order we want to make sure that we got an expert in the vendor that we selected in our case sap as part of that selection process and then 2023 to 2028 herculean effort right out of my house just to say it it's just going to be a massive effort effort lots of dedication from staff and and to make this all happen

51:33 um this is a huge piece for our strategic plan and you know we're in the mid game and we talk about all the pieces that have to be in place to do this this is a major one that we just have to have in place for mid game in order to get to the to do the next thing right we talk about earning the right to do the next thing well this is one of those that's really critical so i'm really excited that the board gets to be involved in this process so what do we have to do the journey starts with one step right so what the program team needs is is once we get through the contract negotiations um we want to we need to place this first puzzle so the the software costs my intent to die and the previous presentations that i've given was to be able to give you all enough

52:18 information and answer any questions that i can that you'll feel comfortable signing that contract when it comes in on consent in either october november so that is the end of my presentation i would hand it back to you president thank you very much i appreciate it so looking forward to some questions or comments not i've met a couple i'll start out if i may so i've been through just buying a lot of software and things that sometimes we actually the past had to litigate to because we didn't have the outcomes as expected what assurance do we have that three years into this process if this company becomes involved that the the proprietary nature of the software is passed on to us so we don't have an investment yeah i think one of the the

53:03 things that we did this time around was with our guiding principles was we wanted to select a product that was enterprise class and so you look at sap as a company they've been around for a long time and you know it's i suppose they could go out of business in three years um i think it's really unlikely what we are doing this time around is we've purchased a sas model so we're essentially releasing our software from them so if they went out of business and went to put in three years and nobody bought them then we've been upgraded okay we will have the coast upgraded i mean it's not isn't proprietary in the software to where we're if they do somehow transition to another company or something else and you know because i know the maintenance costs are quite

53:48 expensive too is there a way that we can be assured that we're not they're having to start this process all over again you know i'm not sure how to answer that so we're not purchasing licenses this time around we're leasing space from sap and this is the world that all software vendors are going to or most of them is to the cloud-hosted environments and so um yeah i'll definitely take that and come back but i think we have some history here at eweb with some software challenges that we've had in the past so yeah yeah all right well thank you very much john b um [Music] i'll just going on that a little bit

54:34 i'm not so worried about sap going away i would be more worried about it being acquired and then not not keeping up with the with the requirements you know i had that happen with the point of sale i mean very much smaller you know oracle bought the company and said okay we're just not gonna we're not gonna continue to service that product anymore but that i'm not real worried about that with sap the quote one of the questions i had is he said we're spending about 1.1 million dollars a year on our on our software now how much of that will go away and at what time frame and you know we're spending we're spending seven million dollars over six and a half years so

55:19 a little over a million a year when do you see the us being able to not pay that software licensing fee of 1.1 million dollars yeah so some of that roadmap will be developed with the solutions implementer but we definitely do see a phase in and a phase out right so we won't have to purchase software that we're not going to implement in year one right so this the full that full seven million was if we signed a check tomorrow and bought it for six and a half years so there'll be a phase in as the new software comes online and it phase out as old software goes away so we'll double pay during the transition throughout the whole for the for the entirety of the project and then do you anticipate it being

56:04 similar to a million dollars a year to to pay them to keep keep it running basically yeah and licensing fee or yeah yeah and there's definitely things that will work out in the contracts that as far as escalation goes and all of that type of thing it also depends on what additional features that are added down the road too great thank you any questions or comments good for you thank you very much you have what you need from us i do yeah i mean like i said what i was hoping for today was you know when we bring this in on consent that you got the the world [Music]

56:55 travis one of the things that just a quick take away from me is the board is asking questions about how are we going to mitigate the risk of obsolescence i think that's that's a valid point when you're talking about you know a different way of licensing the software package at this point how do we mitigate that how do we make sure that we we own certain data i mean i know that's that's all in what you're working on but i think that's going to be maybe something that when we get to the contract portion of this would be good follow up you know we're talking about thinking funds on some of our capital projects do we need to budget a sinking fund for

57:42 our i.t projects you know say you know keep that in mind say okay we know that this technology turns over every five years is there i mean rather than having to bite the bullet every five years do we build that into our budget as a as a sinking fund for i mean it's not capital but it's it's really similar to capital yeah we've definitely built that into our long-term financial plans and it and it actually is capital now um they've changed the accounting practices i don't want to speak for deborah hart but or her team but they have changed the gatsby accounting standards to where sas applications are capital and so this is a capital investment

58:28 and so that makes it depreciable as well right it's obviously a different useful life than you would have with a you know decades-old transformer but travis initially mentioned that sort of legacy is something we're trying to avoid we are you know trying to avoid sort of the big bang approach to this and actually look at these as modules that continue to upgrade over time so that we are not in this position 10 20 years from now when you look across your systems and you go wow everything is obsolete here we want to be able to do this in a way that you know to travis's point we're feeding this as it goes so you never reach the point of having a legacy system you're continually working on your systems and that's why we would

59:14 budget it much differently than we have in the past okay well thank you very much so before we move on i know we're way ahead of schedule i would like you to indulge me to acknowledge a couple people in the audience that have shown up i'm pretty sure i know why they're here and what the schedule is for but we ran if you may i'm going to just take executive privilege and do this i want to let you know that we ran through the rfp process we were way ahead of schedule we ran through that again and to kind of summarize that what we did is cancel the rfp we gave the general manager direction we're going to give him sideboards on the parameters of to negotiate with people and basically just try and sell it subject to our parameters and so uh i'm just trying

1:00:00 to respect your time and i think i know why you're here it's not because you love watching these meetings it's about one topic and that's a headquarters and uh and so that said we are scheduled to take a break here shortly if if they want to or we can move ahead but either way if you have questions we have staff here that can maybe elaborate more on what we've done the bottom line is we canceled the rfp we kicked it back to the general manager he's going to come back to us about some questions and he's going to be able to negotiate with anybody or anything about this this building does that answer any questions you may have had yeah yeah thank you very much for coming in welcome you're welcome to stay i'm not asking you to leave you're welcome to

1:00:45 stay but uh i just wanted to be respectful of why i thought you were here thank you okay thank you so that's that aside uh we are scheduled for a break the break's scheduled for 7 40. um we're about close to an hour ahead we've got two more agenda items 30 minutes each we can take one of them we take both of them we can take a break it's up to you okay we're going to keep going right the customer satisfaction survey results can you drive from up there

1:01:34 it's not a self-driving car but you can drive it's tesla you drive a stick shift oh actually can will this work from anywhere the heated seat yeah it's all ready for me president bureau commissioners good evening this is frank lawson for the record i wanted to start off um by acknowledging the work of rachel chilton in our customer survey really tremendous job sorting through developing working with canada and a number of other people on our communications team to develop the survey itself try to make it consistent with some of the past surveys but also

1:02:20 not get locked into that because there was some new information we wanted to receive and learn about so and then analyze it so rachel really did a phenomenal job with that i'm pretty sure she's online virtually so if there's something that comes up that requires the next level of analysis she'd be able to assist with that i wanted to just briefly run through some of the highlights here i'm not going to spend a lot of time on all the different slides but i wanted to talk a little bit about the methodology some of the general performance feedback that we got we asked a lot of questions about competing priorities

1:03:05 uh in different areas of work some of our strategic initiatives and and then some specific we saw some specific feedback around some customer preferences and and i really just opened it up for dialogue from commissioners at that point a little bit about just the methodology it's fair to acknowledge and something that we do need to acknowledge this was a an online survey so this use used digital method so one of the things that you'll notice later on is as if you are getting feedback of preference around digital techniques for example and this was a digital survey you need to actually go back and do probably another analysis to

1:03:50 see whether your general preferences around the digital formats and digital methods would still be the same so we'll we'll talk about that in a little a little bit later this was done um kind of late spring before the summer you can just see here a little over a thousand people responded to the survey and there were a total of 44 questions with various trade-offs between those those responses there we we did a lot of we created the ability to do a lot of segmentation so we can look at how the responses may vary based on things like age based on income based on whether you rent or own your property

1:04:35 whether it's a building apartment house we can sort of mix and match all of those things uh fuel type so whether you are have an electric fuel source or a gas fuel source so we can slice and dice this data significantly to see what kind of variances we can get in the response and so the findings in many cases where you saw a page that had sort of some high level conclusions and then you saw this comment called deeper dive that's what we were looking at we were saying what what's this kind of the story behind uh some of the data and does it does the segmentation matter from a general performance perspective we did find that

1:05:20 on the whole people do trust eweb and have confidence in eweb this was um in in all fairness the 2019 results were asked a little bit differently this was this was a scored ranking and in 2019 we we actually asked do you have you know high medium or low kind of confidence in us so we had to do a little bit of just assumptions around what what high medium and low was that'll be consistent going forward we did find in the deeper dive that there was some some variants i think you mentioned mckinsey valley residents you know 97 their zip code i can't remember off the top of my head

1:06:06 was uh lower uh was in the area of confidence they also had some other variances relative to what they prioritized so we'll talk about that and so we we really you know mckenzie valley residents renters and younger customers tended to have a lower confidence while those 55 and older homeowners had more confidence on average than the other than the other groups the we also gathered just some some very you know open-ended feedback and as you can see those that had low confidence were very clear to express what was driving that confidence

1:06:53 cost and rates do matter with these groups as well as some of some things around customer programs we got six you know of the thousand people that we surveyed we got over 600 comments so open-ended comments and you know those who were in that lowest confidence category you know 37 percent of them mention cost and rates as as the reason for their lack of competence our ability to control and manage those the um you know relative to decision making we try to try to understand where people rank our our value set reliable affordable environmental

1:07:38 safety community some of some of these types of priorities so we asked questions around how people would allocate points to these areas really reliability and affordability tended to on average be the the two areas that people attended or the respondents attended to rank the highest although you can see that income matters in in in the area of the relationship between reliability and affordability and that was a pretty a pretty common theme and it is not unexpected that people with lower in lower income categories would be more sensitive to cost and price and so that was was reflected in

1:08:26 in their feedback as well as renters and as well as people under the age of 55. so they tended to prioritize cost and price over the other values that were listed there and how we make decisions so this was a question about use you know use these general areas and the decisions that we made the in our core services this is where we ask people to to rank different types of activities so in this this one you know we and with all of these whether it be core services environmental community work we included not just the trade-offs between the different priorities such as enhancing electric reliability versus water

1:09:13 quality we also had controlling costs as kind of a control measure throughout these just to understand the trade-offs there and you know you can see that coarser in the core service area controlling cost was was the highest followed by just electric reliability and then enhancing water quality you kind of see the the categories that paid off there the controlling cost was the highest priority again mckenzie valley respondents put a much higher emphasis on enhancing electric reliability which was nearly sort of double the

1:09:58 overall average for for that particular category so this this did you know when you got into the deeper dives you could see how people were prioritizing this from an environmental perspective again cost so this is this is where we started to see um some real tension between the financial and the environmental or the financial and the services so we we actually saw this in a in a number of different situations so this was for you know there's a graphic later that all that i'll show you that that points out that those who put intended to emphasize controlling costs

1:10:44 first would put other things last and almost the opposite any of the other people who put that last would put cost but that first would cost less so this real dichotomy between the financial priority and whatever particular program or feeling or cause that people have and it was it was really pretty interesting to see in a number of these different areas but again controlling costs but we also in this case uh you know some of the it kind of saw really sort of split between some of the geographic locations in many cases 97401 403 405. um placed a real higher value on protecting the watershed whereas 402 408

1:11:34 478 placed a higher emphasis on controlling cost over protecting the watershed so we this this one had tended to have a geographic feel to it as well as you know really looking at about a third prioritizing cost cost still still matters and there was another third that placed costs in the lower third so this is this is where we really start to see the battle between cost and different values and i don't think that's the surprising to do anybody here and we'll highlight that a little bit more i think it does really show itself here um when we started to look at community and so you

1:12:20 start to look at the choices here you have cost you have addressing helping the the community address climate change limited income programs emergency preparation and community presence just just overall and the the stat on the left is pretty interesting 64 of those who placed controlling costs as their top priority um place addressing climate change is there as the lowest two priorities and then it's just the opposite 64 who put climate change as their top priority put controlling costs at the bottom so you really started we really started to see that the tension between between costs and and some of the

1:13:05 community values that people have and this is a really good example this is this actually uh graphically shows that if you look at the the left wheel there that's those who put we should environmental impact is the most important things and this was in the electricity supply criteria right now what do we actually consider part of our electric supply choices there was the group that said if you if you look at that 31 of that group put the environmental impact is number one but if you go down to their fourth priority there the largest one is the blue line which is controlling cost or overall cost

1:13:50 so and then right next to it the 29 percent those those people put the overall cost is number one and you go down to the their fourth choice is the environmental impact so this is addressing the electricity supply and you again see this well we have the sort of the cost camp and then we have the environmental camp and they they're putting placing things at the total opposite end of their priority list were there any geographic differences between the environmental oh you saw that with the different zip codes too were there age ranges for that as well

1:14:35 yeah we we have age age ranges and and it was it was interesting when we started looking at some of the lowest age categories i think the first one was 18 to 24 years old somewhere in there the lower age groups tend to put a really high high importance on cost even of you know it's even above some of the other values that we've talked about when we when we put excluded everybody else and looked at that that's what tended to happen from uh emergency water alternative water um it's pretty pretty nice to see that almost half of our respondents are aware that that eweb has emergency distribution sites i think that's pretty

1:15:21 encouraging since we haven't those started a few years ago now the other way to look at that as well half of them don't so there's still there's still more work to do there you know that that's up significantly though from really just sort of barely pre-coded and you know more more work to come there it's also unfair to say that there's not a lot of awareness around the second treatment plant there's there's some but when we ask people their tolerance to support that project financially you can you can see that um you know anywhere you know between five ten dollars on their bill there was quite a bit of support for that so we wanted to get a little bit of a gauge to

1:16:06 how much financial support even without knowing what it is so there's not a lot of awareness of it but there seems to be support for the concept and then some of the interactive customer interaction preferences this is this is one of those those areas where if you look at there were kind of the two pie charts here the one on the left is represents us sending them and providing information the one on the right is is really customers contacting us to to do some kind of a business uh interaction and so there's a little bit of a difference there people at least who were surveyed digitally uh do like digital methods so

1:16:52 that's that's not a surprise there was a a slight bias especially towards some of the younger categories which were even more so that way it does show in person there in person really is in this sort of depending on people who want to conduct business as really small as three percent who prefer that and then receiving information i think that's even that's about the same about three percent those are some of the things that were we have some follow-up actions on to to look beyond the digital survey to go to some other methods and actually qualify this slide a little bit more since this was potentially biased by the method that we were using

1:17:37 and then this is this is really kind of to highlight just some of the overall conclusions and this was was one of those where eweb's role in community priorities you can see the the chart on the left those were respondents that put controlling costs as their top priority and then addressing climate change is their fifth or bottom priority so and then on the on the far other side those who put addressing climate changes their top priority uh put controlling costs as is by far their bottom so it's this is where we really um start to see the tension between it's almost like it's it's caught there's a cost camp and then everything

1:18:22 else and then there's this oh we like everything else doesn't matter how much it costs so you know you kind of get the two camps and this is where we just really saw a divine attention between those and i think that we've you know those are things that we wrestle with uh in this room as well um and then really i think you know overall conclusions if you know people do in general have a high regard for uweb trust and confidence there's i think it's really important to recognize the importance of reliability and affordability both of those tend to become important and then really looking at so mckenzie valley residents younger lower income renters

1:19:07 are less satisfied and place a higher degree of importance on controlling costs and rates so that that matters to them and so those are just some of the high level thoughts i appreciate the opportunity to share and i know that if there's things that we want to dig into we probably can't but that's back to you president brown thank you very much questions comments mindy yeah okay um is our return rate typical or what we expected a thousand out of forty thousand um i guess rachel are you out there i i was i was gonna answer that but i'll see if rachel's

1:19:54 yes i'm here good evening commissioners uh yeah it um hit the target that we were aiming for to get that uh confidence level and margin of error great and um is this something that we regularly do every three years or hasn't institutionalized that yet we have done a customer survey it wasn't quite like this one we think this one's a lot better it was a lot more informative but we for a number of years it was every other year i think we probably have data that now goes back at least 10 or 12 years and so certain things you know rank the different programs that eweb has and importance and then satisfaction so you

1:20:39 saw some of that data that's been pretty consistent but the questions that were different this time is asking people saying oh all these things are important but if you had to prioritize them how would you rank the priorities those uh those are new and i think we got a lot of value out of really sort of testing people's priorities was anything is there anything unexpected i i think what was what was fascinating to me and i don't know that it's more it's so much unexpected but maybe enlightening is that when you look

1:21:24 it's the averages are too easy to look at you can you can do a survey and you can say oh here's the average response well when you start to dive into the segmentation and the demographics a little bit further the the enlightening part comes from oh how do renters feel about us versus how do homeowners feel about us because then you can start to normalize that across so we had more homeowners respond to this survey than we did renters but we also know that half of the housing stock in eugene is renters so we need to actually pay attention to that particular segmentation in order to craft what we want to do so the enlightening part to me was to see the difference between

1:22:11 how younger respondents versus older renters versus owners higher versus lower income mackenzie val valley for example their really emphasis on the reliability piece even above cost although um you know and the satisfaction and the trust being lower there even though you know we we have a meeting out there and we try very hard to work with that so i mean the enlightening part was that the i i think the um the part that i kind of said wow this is this is probably more than i would have expected was the real dichotomy in that

1:22:57 tension between cost program and how really extreme that um i don't know if i'm surprised when i look around a society that we're more divisive and in general satisfactions were kind of down a little bit i think kind of look around at the world that sort of feels that way but you have this cost and an economic camp and then you have this sort of programs and services and and values camp and those are those are very much diametrically opposed so that was that was enlightening and one last question so there's i i think we're sort of

1:23:43 digesting it at the moment we also asked some questions about headquarters and other things and strategy i think this is very useful in some of the strategic areas where we ask about customer awareness around do you do you know the differences that electricity has different carbon values and different prices at different times and to to be able to start to formulate what the knowledge base is for potential new programs and services looking at looking at budgets understanding the sensitivity around cost and what things we might be able to work with the board that would be investments that the community would would be in favor of or a part of the

1:24:28 community would be in favor of and understanding where not to so and then you know looking in and seeing if there's a difference in response between those that have a heat pump versus an electric um you know um i like to keep them versus a gap gas furnace or you know do you plan on adding air conditioning there's some things that really have a lot of value but we're kind of digesting it now and depending on the area i think there's going to be a lot of interesting uses for it [Music] so a number of years ago when we were setting our strategic plan

1:25:14 just for that and was to boost customer satisfaction and e-way when you look at that versus the results you get in here and you kind of mentioned a little bit do you attribute that to just the general employment or do you think that there are things that we're still not yeah so the the ranking of confidence in e-web still went up a little bit sort of on average now that's where we changed the methodology a little bit so it's probably um not fair to say what that specific increase would be but it seems like the confidence that customers have in e-web is is pretty strong one of the questions i think um

1:25:59 was if you could you know recommended something for you have to change what it would be and somewhere between 35 and 40 said nothing it wouldn't change anything i mean that's that was actually the highest response which is pretty good for a utility uh to get that kind of response the individual when you looked at sort of all the individual satisfaction versus importance those were all just skewed down just a little bit it was almost that's why we kind of got this just general feel that feels like it's not so specific to us but it just feels like kind of a more global feeling but satisfaction and or the trust and confidence in e-web is still still high

1:26:46 and higher than it was a number i just want to say thanks for the effort that went into this having something that we can rely on to look back at i there's so much information in there and it's so dense but also really um really nicely relating this this packet that we got there's a lot to glean and i know i'm going to go back to it these kinds of surveys are incredibly valuable especially when we start to bump up against really hard decisions you know what people are asking for is really helpful so i really hope we'll continue to do them on some kind of frequency every three years seems like right you know something

1:27:31 reasonable thanks for the work uh yeah yeah yeah rachel and her team did a phenomenal job of not not just i'll say the database but the next tier down the deeper dive and how you present that in the graphics there's also knowing the segmentation that's there the demographics we also and it can come up potentially in some of our conversations but what do renters think about that person versus that yeah the goal is to do a general customer survey probably every couple of years we also want to do some more intermediate surveys on things that are a little more strategic along the way we actually took the opportunity to dive

1:28:17 into how customers would prioritize uses of the headquarters building for example that wasn't in the report because we wanted to actually use it in the evaluation criteria the trade-offs between education and the arts and housing and so we we got feedback on that but that that was something specific but we want to do some some other ones also but i think probably at least every couple years would be good to do this one there's uh one question for rachel or maybe for you with a thousand something respondents i can't imagine there's enough uh revolution to be able to look at like specific awards um is there enough resolution that we could look at like the sentiment among people that we're

1:29:03 working to represent and whether that's different than customers as a whole we did actually ask a hidden question which is how do you feel about your commissioner that we didn't publish that one so no we didn't that's that's rachel can i don't know what kind of i think zip code was the granularity but yeah yeah we have zip code and you'll notice in the findings report there is a map that overlays zip code and ward and so you have to do a little bit of a guesstimate there um because we didn't ask respondents about their ward thinking many might not they might not know right and we don't have their addresses as a part of the survey no they were anonymous okay great thank you so much [Music] yeah that that kind of

1:29:48 touches on one of the things that i was going to look at you know you know my time sitting in here this was the first time that i really started thinking about myself as a ward 2 and 3 commissioner as opposed to as opposed to utility wide and that's where i can hopefully go in and dig deep into this and see what the people who elected who voted to put me in here are looking for from from the utility and so that was one of my questions is will we have the opportunity to to dig in with staff and say you know what does 97403 405

1:30:35 can't feel about this type of issue that would be something that i would hope to be able to do on on a couple of issues not on everything um so that's one question is is is it okay for us to reach out to rachel or whoever and and ask specific questions about yeah i i think it would be a great opportunity to do that if if you're so inclined there's there's a couple of different tools we um to do that but um they do require a subscription to those those two tools but it may be better just to sit down with with rachel or someone on the on staff and just say here's some of the things i'm interested in and let's dive into

1:31:21 97401 or yeah yeah i mean i could i think i could i could at least my award i could get out with a couple of zip codes and just sit and and you know it's really easy to do in the tool that the i'll give rachel credit for i can go in and click any number of zip codes and see that all the charts and graphs change around on the fly which is actually pretty cool yeah and that's what the other comment i was going to make it seems like something that you would be geeking out over for hours on hours so in our one-on-one i might dig in a little bit more with you on this um and then i guess the other question that i would have is how does

1:32:06 the university play into this um you know where you know university as far as students that are on campus and some of these large rental apartments you know we have a way to touch in to feel what that segment of our community feels about the services that we're offering because i think that that would have a different view i mean i know somebody that's living in the dorm and not paying a utility bill is going to have a different feel about you know climate change as as opposed to price i don't know was was there a way to to tap into the university population

1:32:51 rachel what do you what are your thoughts on yeah yeah so respondents um are only account holders and so it's a different view of you know customer versus i think what you're talking about commissioner barofsky and you know for me one of the things that the survey really highlights or maybe some areas of additional exploration um so you know some more informal uh research um initiatives that we could we could kick off you know in in 2023 that maybe aren't quite as robust as this full customer survey but and then lastly was there did we reach out to some of our large users

1:33:36 and and see what their response was or did we get any responses from our big industrial commercial type of of accounts and and get any kind of input and feedback from them not on this particular survey this was a residential account holder survey we have done that at a number of points in the past the last one was a couple years ago where we actually hired a firm to sit down and interview some of our key accounts and so we've done that periodically not quite the same schedule but we do have some history with with that and we'll probably do that again as well so it would be sort of large accounts commercial accounts and it's more conversational it still has questions but it's

1:34:22 you know instead of being a thousand people it's you know 20 30 50 people so it's just a different type of survey but we do we do that kind as well and to me that would be something that would be helpful because i mean if we have a thousand households that are looking at climate change but we've got one one industrial user that uses the same as a thousand households i would like to know what their view is on on some of these issues because again a large lever can be pulled if if we know which way the community is leading more questions comments thank you have the questions from us

1:35:07 are you good i'm great i hope it was informative okay thank you rachel thank you i'll pull the board one more time we got one more agenda item and does anybody want to break a roll roll okay next agenda item debt metering program and store policies agenda item number good evening commissioners my name is rod price for the record i'm

1:35:52 here with two of you have solar program experts greg kelleher and juan sir so renewable energy solar generation and its related programs are a vast topic tonight further requests from earlier this year from the board we want to give a little background on uweb solar programs specifically related to public building projects and be available to support any discussions you may want to have on this topic i would like to start with the note that numbers and calculations used in the background and in tonight's presentation are mainly for illustration and are based on averages and general

1:36:37 data that uf has collected we realize there are a wide degree of variability in costs and specific applications for solar projects we are mainly trying to illustrate some relative magnitudes and general principles so let's start with uh probably the most common application of solar generation systems and uf service area and i realized this drawing probably made me feel better as an engineer but i hope you can kind of see that the customer's pv system for the net meter situation is tied directly into their own electrical system and the net meter then tracks the power being used by the customer or exported to the utility maximum size of this application um allows for net metering is 25 kw

1:37:24 which is the minimum set by the state of oregon i wanted to review two cases uh related to to kind of illustrate how map metering works so case one if the residential customer consumes more than the solar system is generating over the period of a month the effective generation rate is offset residential rate of nine and a half or nine point four eight cents kilowatt hour which includes an energy charge and a delivery charge the second situation if the total generation over the billing bunk is more than the customer's load difference between the consumption and the generation will be exported to the utility and credited at the net metering renewable energy rate of 6.93 cents per kilowatt hour

1:38:09 the renewable generation rate is a fixed average rate meant to reflect yearly energy and our marketing costs the less common application is the direct generation connection in this case the entire amount of generation is exported to eweb and is metered and credited to the customer at the direct generation renewal rate of 7.24 cents per kilowatt hour customer's load is metered separately as you can see and the direct generation application is available to all customers for systems up to 200 kw as you can probably guess for residential solar systems under 25 kw it makes more sense to select the net metered application as it provides a

1:38:55 higher rate of value by offsetting the residential rate of 19.48 per kilowatt hour i will point out too that systems over 200kw require coordination with monumental power and therefore typically contract kind of situations i just want to give a little context of how e-web system is populated as of the end of this august you have just over a thousand solar systems installed and this is since 2001. of those installed approximately 100 over 800 our net meter applications and 45 are direct generation applications

1:39:41 and just to give a little context for a dollar figure and again this is very hypothetical but uh if we credit 100 percent of the solar generation at residential rate worst case best case defense look at it to a theoretical year in consumption number total revenue would be about 835 000 per year so customers who wish to install a solar system will consider many factors the main economic factors are the generation size of the system with its associated initial cost and the rate at which their solar generation will be credited for the website of the meter the renewable generation rates we offer are based on our expected market power supply

1:40:26 and transmission costs our power supply portfolio also provides for a relatively low residential and commercial retail rate by charter uf provides services on a cost only basis which means our renewable generation rates are also relatively low our low wage can make it challenging to getting positive economic return on projects that are fixed in size and larger than 25 kw for instance if we consider a new building project that is required by state law to spend 1.5 percent of the construction costs on green energy technology such as solar the builder is likely to need to obtain a system larger than 25 kw

1:41:11 in this example we look at a 50 kw system that is connected for direct generation again this is a hypothetical system with simple economic supply but i think it illustrates some of the challenges public building developers face from the state requirements so case one shows that even with upfront credits and rebates applied under the current direct generation rates the simple payback is estimated in over 30 years we have a clear case too where the project does not necessarily receive any credits or rebates but a hypothetical direct generation rate of 25 cents per kilowatt hour is applied the simple payback is reduced to about 18 years this is the historical note 25 cents per kilowatt hour rules if you go into the wayback machine when

1:41:56 that first started that was the incentives that were being offered back in that time with our current power supply portfolio and financial systems the case two hypothetical rate that is over three times higher than our current renewable generation rate really does not make any sense to our overall customer rate base in fact the overall customer rate base would be subsidizing these hypothetical kind of rates for solar projects so in summary uf renewable generation policies meet state laws and e-web board policies our renewable generation rates match our other rate structures to meet our energy costs however as part of our strategic plan you will be working on programs to

1:42:43 determine the value of renewable generation beyond just cost recovery of energy in addition to e-web programs like ami travis talked about eds tonight and you've heard a lot about the irp project lately um it seems already in progress other emerging items of interest our energy storage technologies and of course we've got some pending bpa contracts coming up so short over the next several years will likely be very impactful to our municipal policies and with that president i'll hold it for questions and discussion thank you very much you can name right at these guys got it okay questions comments matt i know you got some i have a couple yeah go ahead uh

1:43:30 thank you for putting this together uh i know there's a couple things that are in the mix here right one of one of the pieces is the calculator you put together to help us think about residential costs for solar and then we're also talking about whatever incentives or policies we have for public buildings in particular which really was kind of the spark of a conversation maybe a year ago when bethel school district was looking at a project they're scratching their heads trying to figure out how to make use of the 1.5 percent that's required by the state for investments in renewable energy right so when when the school is building a new school building or any public building is being constructed

1:44:16 with with taxpayer funds they have to we have to spend one and a half percent for renewables there is one this school district that i'm aware is is not actually doing that at this point because they're like this just doesn't make any financial sense for us um because of you know the very dynamics you just described and so the question was are there ways that i that i have anyway are there ways in which we could adjust the policies just for public projects so that a school district that's having to spend one and a half percent on solar or energy efficiency or whatever they're choosing to spend it on cancels out it makes sense given that the you know the district we have the eweb service territory and the school districts

1:45:01 overlap so much that they're you know more or less the same group of residents you know yes one is being taxed for schools and the other is paying a utility bill but it's all kind of the same pool of dollars are there some things that we could do to try and make those dollars being required by the state make more sense like to me that's the question that i'm interested in a conversation about um and at the same time that some of the things in here um are you know you you said a big disclaimer at the front like there's all kinds of different numbers that we could use for this this is for illustrative purposes uh but there are a handful of things that that don't match my understanding in terms of um

1:45:46 both like the average cost per watt you have that four and a half cents for a residential project and some of the references i'm looking at suggest more like three dollars so by just the kind of order of magnitude is wildly different and i'm not saying what i'm looking at is right and yours is wrong i'm just saying there are some things in here that i think we want to get a little more refined on before we make policy decisions about them the other one is just the lifespan of the solar installation many of them now being warranted for 25 years i mean they last even longer but are warranted for 25 years so a 20-year life ban may or may not be the right you know the reference point i would encourage us to um to just socialize this a little bit you know take it out to some of the solar

1:46:32 installers who are doing these calculations right for homeowners and see you know do our numbers jive with theirs and and if not what might we do to adjust and then the last thing i would say is that this calculator is at least the one where we have some details at the end is about a red residential net metering system and really i think we're talking about larger scale systems for schools for example that wouldn't be 20 panels it'd be 200 panels and i think that economics there are different so i'm hoping i'm hoping we can continue this conversation with a little more socializing in between um of the results just to see you know how we can refine it a little bit before we talk about policies as a as a board i'm also

1:47:18 interested in your thoughts about what policy levers might return i mean a 25 kilowatt limitation is one that feels a little bit arbitrary and and i think relaxing that might create some more opportunities but again here's your thoughts on that i'm sorry i threw in some questions behind a whole bunch yeah so one point you touched on i think pretty well is the um there's an enormous amount of variables in this and there's actually we've got several tools uh available and they do allow for adjustments that you're talking about um and and i think kind of so there's to get the question of what levers there's kind of there's the front cost right so how do you apply

1:48:04 incentives for that and then there's the the rate question and so those are two of the levers what i would say is we cover our costs at this point so there would be a very selective uh with the way we're set up and structured with our metering and all the things that we have to believe provide more incentives or more um economic incentives i guess you will with either of those levers you know we need more study i think that's one thing that that's very clear and we would also have to have some more input

1:48:51 do you want to say something yeah yeah well i was i was just going to say that part of this was you know i think the board was requesting to have a conversation around public buildings what becomes pretty obvious pretty quickly is that there are a lot of components that come together when you start to talk about programs and pricing and and how in our case we recapture our [Music] recapture our cost there's when we looked for example one of the policy levers that's been asked about was well what if we moved from 25kw to 50kw now on a on a commercial type of system

1:49:38 it makes no difference because what we're paying for a distributed generation rate versus what you're offsetting in an energy charge are basically the same it's a little different on the residential side where because we are capturing fixed cost in a variable component which is actually not where we want to be long term we get a difference between nine and a half cents and six and a half cents so it it would make a difference there but for the wrong reason the we did run some calculations where we looked at you know different installation values the the reality of it is it's a super long payback it just our rates are incredibly low and so if the only mechanism you're

1:50:23 offsetting is kilowatt hours with the low rate and there's no value yet that we've captured with for example carbon or peak shaving or any of the other things that i think we really want to look at i think the policy opportunity is to look beyond kilowatt hours and recognize that at some point in the next few years capacity is going to have a value for example if someone adds capacity and we can help them pay for that value we would we would offset that but right now the only mechanism we have is kilowatt hours and it's it's just you you put difference you put three dollars instead of four and a half it doesn't it changes up from 28 years to 26 years i mean it's just it's it's such a there's such a delta there

1:51:10 because of the environment that we're working in the only way around that is for them to have customers subsidizing and that's that's really a bored discussion as to whether you want to have and subsidize something um which is you know it has its pros and cons and that's that's something for the board to debate but the mechanisms until we get some of these other components in place is really limited to kilowatt hour offset yeah and i guess that was my thinking is that we collectively are subsidizing the schools one way or another by you know sinking money into a project that doesn't really make sense or you know we provide some subsidy on the eweb side and make that have more overall value

1:51:55 to the community as a whole um i think there's an opportunity there i don't know for sure i'm actually i know that we do have a team of staff that work directly with schools when they're building a school to talk about what might work and i'm curious kind of what comes out of those conversations in terms of opportunities for policy adjustments like to me maybe that's the the most direct way to get at it is next time we have a public building being worked on can we get those policy changes thrown to us for contemplation real time so that they can design that into their project i don't know that that's realistic i'm kind of thinking out loud which is dangerous and trying to avoid doing it but um i do wonder you know how we can circle this in a way that's not causing us to

1:52:40 you know make a whole bunch of machinations of studies but it gives right to resolve some of these problems for the whole sorry sonia one of the reasons that i was interested in looking at the net metering program again is just that the technology has changed it doesn't seem like for us i think the low rate has really kind of hurt the issue which is great i mean we have the rates so that still makes it a really long payback period i am curious if uh what jason huser was talking about if some of the subsidies of the federal level are changing that calculation to cut that down from 18 to something that's more in line with the lifespan of the solar panels you know down to a reasonable lifespan

1:53:27 have you looked at any of that or is that just still too undefined to really see how that impacts our metering and our customers ability to really get value from it my knowledge we have a look at that specific route most of those things are money is pointing towards resiliency there are currently some tax credits available to businesses 26 to 32 something like that um it's declining over this year the new mail that jason talked about earlier is going

1:54:13 to introduce some more that we don't have all the detail on yet we haven't explored um the challenge for public business is that they cannot necessarily take advantage of the tax credit um i was just going to say we did build into the calculator any sort of known tax credits or incentives and so as those change um we can you know include those in the present day calculation i think there was only one and that had to do with rate of depreciation of assets or assets that kind of thing but if if there's new laws that come out that have different incentives or tax credits we'll update the model and see what impact that has on them

1:54:59 on the payback um to the point about the 1.5 percent that they have to the public entities have to spend can that be spent on things like electric charging charging stations or does it have to be dependent on the actual generation of renewable energy there was an amendment in hb 2496 2019 um that allows additional items to be considered for that 1.5 um and correct me here verify using some of those which would be battery storage energy efficiency and

1:55:46 geothermal was included there i'm not sure what else and that's something that i was going to mention earlier to your question commissioner mcrae was that one of the options there is for new construction and public building to improve go 20 better than energy code and that's something we certainly have robust incentives for and we have subject matter experts on staff to assist with energy programs that we've been doing so for 30 30 years i haven't been doing it for 30 years but 20 something so we have those available there was a time when when bonneville had some support for for pv and we could have really high incentives 15 20 years ago some people are lobbying bonneville to

1:56:32 bring those back where we have a reimbursement um that is really essentially funded from our wholesale rates um that we can use for conservation there's some lobbying to do that for keeping projects okay thank you i appreciate that last comment um i would this still tells me that our highest and best use of funds to go to production of carbon and best use of energy dollars is still not here that's what it says to me and i would still advocate for moving those dollars towards highest and best years

1:57:22 so just to be clear matt your your initial question was or thought that school districts for example have to spend 1.5 of their new construction costs on renewable energy and how can you how can we make sure that uweb is the best partner in like effectively using that money like where's the most bang for their buck and i'm curious apart from like energy efficiencies we've talked about so solar doesn't seem to be it so do we know what it is one of the opportunities is the energy storage piece uh greg mentioned that part of that money can be spent on on energy storage now so we're talking with lcc and i'm not sure

1:58:09 where bethel's ended up yet but we are talking about a couple of projects that are very large when you think of a 40 million dollar elementary school that's entire amount 600 000 right that they have to spend so i think that's where a lot of the opportunities exploration as you mentioned also i was also going to add that some of the work that we're doing in the irp is helping us establish values for different degrees of energy efficiency for example for solar

1:58:55 and for storage so the irp will help us with how we want to compensate customers for the value that i'll say a solar battery combination would bring which is which is way way beyond just how many kilowatt hours you're generating but when and how we could use it and the cost there so the irp will look at helping to answer your question which is where is the biggest bang for the buck um relative to sort of green technologies and solar and some of these other questions that and the rate design work that you you're doing we are doing will will help with that as well to make sure that those those

1:59:40 compensations are are appropriate um and one more question is how does it currently work so say a school district is building a new building do they come and consult with architects come and consult with eweb like how does that process work that was the um commissioner mcgregor mentioned we had a meeting with with bethel and their architects and their builders and school district people and that's the the questions they were asking hey how can we make this work what's the best thing and can we can we make some changes i think that's the route we're taking is ford i'm sorry okay so there's no

2:00:25 standard protocol like 4j just builds a new school they're building another school there's no like part of their process initially is we sit down with eweb and we look at how we can use spend that one point yeah and so you know every utility approach is just a little different so different like a developer reporting i think was involved in the bethel one for instance and so they they had some experience with the utility there and they so they brought it to the table here um but i would say that by and large any big project like that is

2:01:12 [Music] every solar project has to go through 11 and a contract in an application to get the metering right so we're aware of every project that's coming through the public projects are eligible for up to twelve thousand five hundred dollars in incentives which you know for a six figure project it doesn't sound like a lot i know um that's 50 cents a watt up to 25kw so at that point we're aware of you know project and we can assist with you know making sure that it's it's installed according to our standards um we can also at that point make customers aware of energy efficiency opportunities so we usually

2:01:58 get involved in some developer artifacts and whatnot prior to somewhere in the midst of their design that process for energy efficiency is used very heavily by university and by fortunate and bethel school districts so there's quite a bit more i wouldn't say there's a standard blueprint for exactly every thank you project questions john b um yeah so somebody who has built a six-figure solar panel on a

2:02:43 commercial building back when incentives were different 2008 you could do it on a commercial building you could there was enough incentives that it was a it was a wash between the incentives from the feds the states and the depreciation they allowed i was able to put 120 000 array on a commercial building and have it pay for itself not using a single kilowatt of energy to offset that so incentives flow back and forth depending on what the uh political climate is either in washington or or salem uh you know what they want to incentivize

2:03:28 so i think that there's opportunities there getting to matt's if i were sitting here in one exchange policy for public buildings one that i would want to know what who are the big players in that obviously it's going to be the university the school districts lcc the city and the county right those are those are the big ones and using hot water and electric board right uh and then find out what kind of implications that would have if if they decided to go solar you know what what would our other rate payers have to subsidize them if we wanted to make the one and a half percent pencil out for a

2:04:15 school to use solar as their as their model i i think i would be more interested in having us develop answers to these entities that make the most sense both for economics and carbon reduction that that work and having that as a toolbox for uh public entities that are going to be developing projects going forward say you know yeah you can do solar but it's gonna cost you this and i don't know if eweb is really in the position to help subsidize that but if you did geothermal or you did battery or you did this or you did that and give them kind of have a toolbox for them to look

2:05:00 at i think would be the first level that i would like to go to rather than having our our ratepayers subsidize the public things at this point that may be something down the road that we could look at as a as a community-wide you know asset building but right now i think using our expertise to help guide these people would be the most highest and best use of our resources at this point so that's just kind of where i'm at so one may jump in um i kind of look at this as an unfunded mandate from the state because when they adopted this one and a half percent we had betsy an acronym for business energy tax credits

2:05:45 i mean i bought them for 4j it made economic sense to do this but then the state took that away and it makes no more economic sense because they can't they don't they're not their tax exempt and they're non-tax paying entity and so they can't appreciate it so i'm for me my solution would be to go back on the legislature and say look you guys you guys said this is really a good idea and what will help you get there it's still not there it's so far apart it didn't i mean these statistics don't lie i mean my question was why you have a payback on something that's you know for 30 years or something's got a 20-year life you've got to actually factor in the cost in this and make it even worse because if the payback is 30 years on something that's kind of 25 to 20-year life you're gonna have to renew that short-lived component after 20 years it makes a payback more like 40 years and

2:06:31 so um i'd push back on the legislature we're all going to save them anyhow to hammer on them and say give us our business energy tax credits back and uh make it work so i worked for the chair of the revenue committee when we were dealing with them say that part of the reason that it was paired back is that that funding i mean as most funding does you take that and you give it to businesses and it doesn't have a payback you're taking it right out of the pool that goes into funding education and that's why it was i mean that's a very large portion of why it was paid back i also couldn't guarantee that the betsy was actually making any better decisions

2:07:16 in terms of getting more investment it was a lot of groups that were getting it and they would have funded it anyway granted that was also when the feds had bigger incentives so that was quite a bad change but i looked look at the state's economic situation right now they're talking about a kicker that's off the charts i mean they're talking about giving us so much money back in 2024 and 2025 on our tax returns because they're collecting so much more money than they need and uh well it's more money than their economic that their economists forecasted they would bring in not free sorry well i mean you'll never get enough money that they need but they've got the money they just don't have the priority in my opinion they want this to work uh they're gonna have to buy it down but it still doesn't work

2:08:02 and i agree with john b about subsidizing you know having all the rate payers at death by a thousand cuts we keep raising rates for small projects um we've got some pretty big projects i think we have to raise rates to take care of the problem with the river yeah and respectfully i'm not even suggesting we necessarily need to subsidize things anything my question is are there some policy adjustments that we can make that make this stuff work without it costing you a bunch or anything and and again respectfully one year payback i don't like i think we should ground truth our numbers a little more before we start making assumptions about what doesn't doesn't pay off i have a bigger question then so this came to us with three head nods

2:08:48 and are we or is this something that we want to go down and put more staff time and resources in knowing what our workload is and our schedule is right now for the rest of the year because i think that's a question matt that we we got to be fair to to staff and everything so if we say well let's go and do this and change policy and find out how this works i what i heard was that when you change policy you're going to break data subsidizing a couple things but i know commissioner carlson's in the queue

2:09:34 looking at the mechanism so it's not interesting both of you looking at the mechanisms that customers have today to pay off a solar investment is basically offsetting kilowatt hours and whatever incentives that we presently have there and the fact that we're cost based and the fact that we're low priced and also there's no other mechanism to capture carbon value and things like that there there's there's nothing we could do right now that i can see from a policy perspective that would avoid a subsidy of this now that's that is i don't want that to come across that oh we're giving up on

2:10:20 it but the mechanisms we have today it would be subsidized one way or the other when you have an economic investment that doesn't pay off somebody is paying for it some of our customers i do think to answer the other piece around staff work there's a few things that are in the works that support this just already one of them is the model that i think has a lot of value when people come to us as a service agency and say i want to understand solar and battery and some of these other investments and we want to be able to to roll in new incentives from the state understand some of the ira potential and all these other things and we also

2:11:06 really want to develop as part of the irp and the rate case and other thing solar batteries storage they will all have their place in in the mix and some at some point it's just at this point the mechanism we have isn't there so that work will continue as well getting and understanding the value of solar not just from kilowatt hours but when you add a battery to it and you can offset peak what is that worth to us that will have value so that work is part of what rod mentioned we said this is one of the puzzle pieces there are several things over the next year or two that will develop products and services that just we just don't have today that

2:11:52 will be in there either way but i don't know i i think i answered your question it will require a subsidy when you look at just the basis of the economics today that just the numbers just aren't close i'll leave it alone we got somebody at the yeah i wasn't sure when to interject something absolutely thank you at some point your comment about the cost and coming closer to what it may be so we work with a solar contractor first we use enroll pb watts calculator but then to make it so that we're closer to what it would be in eugene in the common installation we're with a solar contractor to narrow that down the cost is more reflective of what we're seeing

2:12:38 for net meter installations in our program but i use random numbers for four dollars to cost we see more like four thirty four and with the 25-year life on the system and it ends up being like a 38-year pay-back so even if we were to change it the number doesn't quite change dramatically thank you i think one of the things i hear um is concerned you know we have laws that have put some of our customers in mind and i think that's important for for staff to do with our customers and so in the course of our work with lcc and

2:13:23 some of these other uh similar kind of projects we'll look for those opportunities maybe develop tools and to look for those opportunities and leverage things and so in that that'll take place again along with our irp work and some of these things it's killing me we don't have ami it's killing me but that's a that's another problem right so because that would be a great enabler to have some of these conversations to get more data other questions or comments thank you for the effort it's not done the good the good thing is

2:14:08 the point's been made in in you know and i think that they hear us and it's a it's a good thing but it's an eye-opener about uh sometimes unintended consequences of when people think they're doing the right thing and then they turn around they force you to spend a dollar for 50 cents especially education dollars so president i do think there's a lot of opportunity i think one of the things that rob and i talked about the other day was this this started as a very simple question about um you know specifically around solar with public buildings but this touches so many different pieces of the utility that it has it has started

2:14:54 to get us thinking about how customers who make these investments can recoup those investments i mean we that's where we really started looking at the value of storage where the irp where ami where earlier your travis talk about ees and customer systems and how we price things all of these are puzzle pieces that have to come together and there is so much opportunity here but like everything else we're facing it's not simple and i mean it would be it would be really easy if we if our electric rates were 35 cents a kilowatt hour or 42 or 52 like they are in southern california instead of all in at six or nine i mean that's

2:15:39 just i don't want to give us an excuse to raise rates that much but i do think there is opportunity here and i don't want us to lose sight of the fact that there is and it's going to come in lots of different forms and i think public buildings unfortunately right now are put in a really bad position you have to make this investment of which there's no payback for you that's that's kind of unfortunate john b and and just for staff to know and i know and i know you know this but as as one of the faces of the utility customers come to us and say how come i can't i can't afford to put solar on my roof you know how come you're only paying six cents a six cents a kilowatt hour you know and you charge me not

2:16:24 that's the question i get all the time how come you get i sell it to you and i say well you know those polls cost money and those wires cost money and those transformers cost money and we have to recoup that but but that is a question that's out there that that we get as commissioners at least i know i do and and so having the answers to that is helpful um you know being able to articulate to them the reason why and and i think one of the a good comeback for that i just got from frank was well if you're living in southern california and paying five times the amount for a kilowatt hour you would be affordable but luckily for us the kilowatt hours here are lower so

2:17:10 yeah this again there's so many rabbit holes to go down and one of them really is that this was highlighted i think even in this memo the difference between commercial and residential is that how we recover our fixed cost versus our variable cost is is an issue we on the residential side where he mentioned it's nine and a half cents some of that nine and a half cents is to recover fixed cost so no matter if you use nothing those costs still exist the the poles pipes or the pipes the poles and transformers and wires whether you're netting out to zero they still are there and there still have to be the investment so recovering the fixed cost is a piece of that and so

2:17:58 some of that weighs into the why we charge nine or why we charge you nine and a half versus you paying six as some of those fixed costs even if you don't use any net electrons is included in that nine and a half cents okay you got what we need thank you very much next agenda items correspondence backward agendas correspondence items i won't really touch on all of them i did i didn't want to touch on one that was a follow-up item from earlier in the year

2:18:43 and that was updates to the strategic plan i believe it was in may that we had a conversation there was some feedback from the board um there's both a red line markup as well as um a clean version of that we tried to incorporate a few things so try to get a a little bit of consistency within the specific actions of the uh both the midterm or mid the the mid game as we're calling next couple years and then the outer years relative to the eweb enterprise system or ees also incorporated some feedback in that came out of the discussion with the board around a specific

2:19:29 target item relative to bonneville and the bonneville contract which understanding the impacts and benefits of cost relative to the london contract in the next couple of years in order to be able to decide which product options and electives we want to negotiate into the long term so that was we tried to capture that in both the near term and the and the outer years and then there was some work around the values we did i think to commissioner's suggestion as well support in the conversation differentiated safety from physical and psychological wellness we specifically picked the word wellness because we already have a wellness program that's pretty well established

2:20:15 and so seemed like a value that was that was consistent in differentiating the you know wellness versus safety but also in a way that that we can point to progress being made on that in the reliable one we um also highlighted the fact that we have on an ongoing continuous on-demand delivery requirement and what really we tried to capture there was we can't just worry about reliability today we have to make investments that continue that reliability over the long term that's that's a because we're so asset based we people will look at them why are you spending money on that when you know it's it doesn't seem like it's immediate it's because our 24 7 365

2:21:03 continuous service doesn't end in 2025 or 2028 or 2030 we wanted to make sure we capture the fact that we're dealing with some long-term as well as near-term reliability requirements and then we expanded the community value significantly to try to capture what we think are some of our cultural youth in some ways our cultural uniqueness but also reflects some of the things that we're starting to to see emerge from a cultural perspective one of the interesting things um so we added you know we value a culture of of intentional actions and outcomes and what's kind of i think unique about eweb

2:21:49 and i do some comparison contrast we like to do things um we don't yeah we plan uh we we understand long term but we we actually like to to do things and so intentional actions and outcomes seems to reflect kind of who we are as as an organization continuous improvement the same way uh diverse perspectives we want to be trustworthy respectful equitable and inclusive to employees and community members again this is an expansion of what we had before which really talked about our governance and being transparent and then we also wanted to recognize that that we are dedicated to our public service to our professions

2:22:34 there are so many different professions that are with the expertise within eweb whether that be financial or analysis or working in various construction fields or electric fields water fields that that those professions we we feel like are part of what we're dedicated to uh we're all dedicated to our local governance which is which is in this room and our commitment to serve our communities honestly and with integrity and so you really there's there may be a little bit of wordsmithing to that as well to recognize the some of the uniqueness of the workforce or other things but our intent would be if and to check in i think unless there's feedback

2:23:20 directly at this point president brown i can also check in with individual commissioners but our our goal based on your feedback in may and then any other feedback would try to we try to bring this back in october for for your approval so that's the one i wanted to touch on specifically there's any other comments on on the other correspondence you can either do it tonight or through our individual follow-ups thank you president comments from anybody if not then are we good for agendas i think the agendas are in pretty good shape there's going to be some shift because of the change in the

2:24:05 headquarters approach so that will provide some degree of relief with some of the meeting agenda time we did not specifically remove that from this agenda until the board took action today and then the the last part of this year we've got a lot of work to do around lieberg and around finances budgets goal setting for for next year's as well and then just making sure that all the nine goals um come together and if there's any gaps we'll try to fill those in to make sure we're getting our

2:24:50 annual organizational goals done okay it looks like we're getting ready for the beginning of the end the board wrap-up i think for me uh no chance uh there may be a chance i won't be at the november first but i will be out of the country but if my wife lets me dial in i might but i don't know about that just one one word we talked a fair amount about leeberg tonight and i know where to talk about it more and i just want to commend the staff team that's working on that crazy authority issue and especially the work they're doing to expand the amount of outreach um

2:25:35 and to learn the information for us as a decision-making body it's um and also the the um you know the videos that have been made as i've heard from a number of people that really helps them understand the situation in a way they couldn't otherwise so i just want to acknowledge all the effort that goes into helping us all as a community working with that decision [Music] i've got one last this evening i apologize for the texting but i've been getting text messages from people up the river because we got potentially red flag warnings coming this weekend high winds 100 degree weather and they're worried about our protocols and so i told them i would ask i'm in a meeting and i said well i'm

2:26:20 just bring it up about what our protocols are to shut the power up i've been having i'm also texting too so yeah we're talking about the options and so we know that that's common and it's not going to be a fun weekend the protocols would be we would shut it down it did it take a red flag warning or does it just take amounts of caution or what does it take to shut things down so to actually shut things down we don't we don't have a protocol for it would be a decision that we'd have to make so one of the things we're looking at is the weather patterns and they're not quite sure i'd say up north it's they're probably going to be in shutdowns probably down here maybe not so anyway i've been going through a bunch of options with people and it's the same

2:27:05 thing with the south hills and i mean all our areas that are at risk it's similar yeah i'm going to the higher protocols where the trip has to be inspected right we're already in that protocol right now so the question the next step would be actually shutting somebody off or for people who are listening to your response can you explain that what that is that higher protocol and the sensitivity in the shutoffs right so right now our protective schemes are in a much faster tripping mode so the there's less energy that if something does happen there's less energy that goes into the ignition arc and then normally we have a reclosed set so that

2:27:51 automatically recloses so those are cut out as well and these are for the high risk circuits that are identified on our website but it's mostly up river and a few circuits in town here so and then there's some a lot more stricter patrols so if you have a trip out and you have a patrol before you re-energize make sure there's not a dry material or something sitting on the on or you know whatever problem there is thank you very much appreciate that i will relay that information to the people that have texted me so anything else you can go to the order frankly ron are we potentially going to work with i was just going to maybe suggest we work on a response for that topic in general

2:28:36 because i have a feeling if one commissioner is going to get that multiple mic and then just work with the communications team to provide a response we'll do that thanks i just had one thing president brown and that is something i'm kind of excited about working with kelly hale who you all know on putting together an e-web climate guidebook which is something that i've been kind of excited about i know she's excited about it it'll address our sd15 and i know that some commissioners more than others like to see specific goals along the way it'll start to identify goals it'll have um

2:29:23 it'll be our point of record where we report our operational uh footprint carbon footprint which we do on an annual basis it'll it'll also provide some technical references for things like on an annual basis we will calculate our carbon intensity and methodology for both what we're supplying and what consumers can assume is the electricity they're consuming and those are probably different numbers but we'll establish the methodology it's just it'll be a clearinghouse of information that hopefully people can use as a reference book for things related to questions that come up about electricity and carbon and the climate impact and where we are with sd15 and where cap 2.0

2:30:10 is and all this stuff so it's it's pretty exciting we'll have sort of a first edition around the end of the year and then we'll try to iterate from there but working on the sort of the outline and certain content right now but looks excited about that so it's just something to look forward to thank you anything else for the good of the order not