EWEB Board of Commissioners — July 11, 2023

0:02 service all right great excellent so I'm gonna call the board meeting to order a couple of options here so facility and safety awareness so thank you for attending this evening's board meeting eweb management subject matter experts are here with us in the room and virtually during tonight's presentations remote speakers will appear on the screen please click here to speak loudly and clearly so everyone can hear you guests are invited to signs at the table at the back of the room if they wish to provide public testimony visitor access is limited to the board meeting room and the restrooms restrooms are located in the first floor through the exit on the right hand door across the hallway in case of an emergency such as a fire alarm exit through the garage door at the back of the room unless it is not safe to do so the alternate

0:47 emergency exit is located at the rear of the building just beyond the restroom so through the store during an evacuation follow status instructions and stay together for safety tonight's meeting will be recorded the reporting will start from the meeting is called the order and will continue until adjournment meeting room will be muted during the break besides from that period virtual participants on the screen and public audience will be able to hear conversations in the room until the meeting is disconnected all right uh first up we have an abundant check ing no changes we will jump into items from board members and general manager how'd you start nothing from me two items I just wanted for the record to ask if you could get back to me and

1:33 tell me if and when we have any plans to extend water lines out please let's go to the ugb expansion area for industrial lands I had that question today and then I'd like to thank and commend uip staff for donating uh the old used office equipment the furniture that we could use to some of the non-profit specially bags of love but people that make uh things worth in the foster care system I think that was really good that you did that and I really appreciate that support I would just like to congratulate staff on closing on the headquarters building congratulations I know it's time to work for everybody

2:19 um extra work in sorting out options I wanted to say thank you for the open house before opportunity to say goodbye to that chapter thanks president Carlson Commissioners good evening just a couple of things um I I wanted to thank the Commissioners for their involvement with the headquarters uh sale to the city and particularly wanted to thank UF staff and also Sarah maderi and City staff the the process with the city was was really productive and I think it

3:06 strengthened the relationship between eweb and the city and so that comes back to the people involved and so I wanted to thank staff and and City step for that uh the other thing to cover this evening is the a couple of different correspondence items um just just for review um there were there were four items in particular uh one is an annual update on our Enterprise risk and the various areas that we're continuing to look at as far as mitigation uh risk is all around us and part of continuing our products and services is an ongoing assessment of that risk the other one was an update on some federal legislation that was driven into the

3:52 state of Oregon relative to the lead copper rule revisions this really extends to both the e-webside and the customer side of the meter and the fact that we have to have an inventory of that which were in process pretty lengthy State Legislative updates after the largest or sorry the longest walkout in history there was a flurry of activity um and Jason is actually on vacation if there's further questions relative to some of the passage of bills in the last same number of hours but the last few days in Salem we're continuing to digest what that means for our organization in

4:38 particular with some of the combined climate resiliency packages that uh that were passed and then finally um as a follow-up to last month's meeting there was a couple of revisions to the Strategic plan that the Commissioners voted on I just wanted to reiterate that back to Commissioners based on the interpretation of the two changes that were involved in that so that was the correspondence and be happy to address anything further but that was that was my update anybody have anything on correspondence yeah I just wanted to uh thanks staff for the risk the risk memo that we got I think it was it was well put together at effort

5:24 people in the audience it's all available online it showed what our risks are what we're doing to mitigate it in a whole different whole bunch of areas and and that was very helpful and then the other thing that I was really it was very timely was to let them copper rule uh memo that we got uh you know last last week in the news it was like 50 of the water in the United States is Tainted and we're lucky to have a robust program here to make sure that our water is is not painted and if there is some form of lead piping between the meter and and the house we're doing the best that we can to try and identify those and rather be those wherever they happen you know a

6:10 lot of thousand stock was built a long time ago so we're not exactly sure what's in there but we're doing our very best to make sure that the water we have is safe and the best water we have around and so I think that that member was very timely considering that what was in the news last week because I just wanted to reiterate that to Seth thank you so uh when your name is well open the public testimony period your name is called please come forward and clearly state your name and optionally your address reward each maker will be offered three minutes to present their testimony please keep track of time by watching the timer at

6:56 the front of the room or by listening for an audio notification when three minutes is a last if you are participating by telephone remember to unmute your call press star six of calling from a landline or simply use the unmute button if calling from your cell phone after all testimony is heard each printer will have an opportunity to speak if they choose although guys engage in a back and forth dialogue please note that failure of a commissioner to speak shall not be construed as supportive or opposition to any speaker's testimony the question is presented by a speaker and the board does not provide an answer anyone staff member will contact the speakers so the question can be addressed at a later time so here's the you know I have four people that are signed up to provide testimony via the phone I think

7:43 I'll go through those first and then I'll go through the the pile from the room is there any Tech issues we can work those out while others are served justifying so what's the so I have Catherine chutty and then Kathy gang followed by Daniel Noonan and Craig Patterson and please forgive me if I've mispronounced any names or mispronounce any names following this okay so uh Catherine chutty are you there yes I am okay can you hear me we can hear you okay great my name is Catherine chutty and I'm testifying on behalf of Oregon Conservancy Foundation ocf opposes inclusion of smnr's in eweb's IRP for

8:30 the following key reasons that are further addressed in our written testimony submitted today due to eweb's three-minute time limit on oral testimony in 1980 Oregon voters adopted a ballot measure law requiring that before a nuclear power plant can be built and operated in our state there must first be a permanent federal license repository for the storage of its high-level nuclear waste followed by a Statewide Board of the people this law was adopted after PGE and eweb's Trojan nuclear plant had already been built and operating in Oregon 43 years later highly radioactive spent fuel still sits and dry casks that Trojan's nuclear plant site near Rainier Oregon there is still no permanent federally licensed

9:15 high-level waste repository cape of safely storing this nuclear waste eweb's promotion of proposed fmnrs ignores the fact that if these unproven Advanced reactors do operate they will add still more high-level nuclear waste in need of permanent repository storage e-web informs rate payers that it can legally obtain power from Advanced nuclear reactors operated out of state eweb fails to tell its ratepayers that it is also actively seeking to repeal organs 1980 ballot measure law in March 2023 eweb testified in support of House Bill 2215 which if enacted would have cleared the way for smnrs to be built and operated in Oregon by supporting this

10:02 legislation eweb is promoting creation of more high-level nuclear waste without a permanent radioactive waste repository nor a Statewide vote of the people this does not meet eweb's IRP priority of environmental responsibility ocf urges eweb's board and staff to perform a more diligent and thorough analysis of available renewable energy conservation and Energy Efficiency Alternatives as well as the veracity of the nuclear industry's claims regarding smnrs please review ocf's written testimony submitted for the record as IT addresses agenda items number eight and number nine thank you so much for the opportunity to provide input

10:50 thank you Catherine next up we have Kathy gain okay I'm not hearing Kathy so we're going to move on and if we can back later Daniel Noonan I'm hearing you a few minutes star six unmute if you're calling from the landline okay we will come back next up Craig Patterson we have not joined okay all right we're gonna move to the room we'll come back to the phone uh so first up I have Vincent McClellan

11:36 followed by um Palmer and then Eva Edelman Vincent McClellan thank you hi thanks for allowing me to speak thanks for the board meeting on this particular subject I would like to speak out against uh nuclear power being a part of the IRP it's being proposed the levelized cost of electricity for nuclear power is some of the most expensive that is currently available and will raise rates for the entirety web grid that's been proven over and over again in any place I mean

12:23 um facility that just went online in Georgia kind of proved that there was cost overruns it took an extra several years to build the facility I don't believe that nuclear power is in the best interest of the citizens of Eugene and I kind of got a loss to why it's even being considered um you don't want to be too redundant but I also have an issue with the storage like it was already mentioned that the Trojan nuclear power plant which has now been dismantled still has all of its uh spent nuclear fuel rods still in place close to the Columbia River in Oregon with no permanent storage since the

13:10 federal government reneged on their their promise to provide permanent nuclear nuclear waste storage you don't have anywhere to put this type of material and we currently live in a very highly seismic area we've already learned from the um Japanese disaster all right even a really well thought out nuclear reactor well engineered to be damaged by seismic activity I don't believe that a nuclear reactor

13:55 even a small one even the current versions of nuclear reactors should be cited into organ at all and I'd also like to bring up again I'm a solar contractor many of you know me here I'd like to bring up that eweb is still currently telling us solar contractors that you don't need power coming from solar electric systems in our area um and so they're still limiting the commercial clients ability to put up more than 25 kilowatts per meter the net metered system and you have the generation program which is great but that adds a lot of

14:42 cost and expense to my clients and doesn't make the financial uh scenario a solar electric system work out very well so I'm confused in here and one of the ones that hand you're limiting power going into the grid and saying you don't need it on the other hand you're looking at bringing in a various dangerous form of electricity generation thank you sorry Vincent start your time is up okay thanks for future listening to me better we'll go back to her at the end thing

15:27 uh Dane Palmer my name is Dane Palmer I live on Lieber Dam Road in Liebert Oregon I'm here tonight to address this board regarding the decommissioning of Lieber Dam this board's decision to decommission the dam in the estimation of the McKenzie residence is careless and irresponsible you've made the decision to remove the dam which creates a very important Recreation Area attracting and used by hundreds of people every week

16:16 you are devastating the recreational assets and business the areas of desperately needs at this point your decisions are well known by the up River residents obviously but almost unknown to the rest of the customers in your service area some of my concerns as I'm sure it would be the rest of your customers are the assets that you will be abandoning you recently did work on The Damp roll gates with an estimated cost of 5.2 million dollars which here rate payers have been paying for and will continue to pay for in future years and you now want to remove

17:01 the dam you within the last couple of years invested 7.6 million dollars that the Holden Creek substation which has not been used to capacity since its completion and you now want to abandon that investment the 13 million dollars you were abandoning pale in comparison to the cost of tearing out the dam which is estimated to cost 225 million dollars let's wonder if you've let your rate payers throughout your entire service area so what impact your decisions are having

17:47 on everybody how much will your customers electricity bill go up as a percentage in order to pay the 225 million dollars plus interest have you considered the environmental impact your work will have on the beautiful McKenzie Valley what is the impact of the fish hatchery when the dam is gone what is the toll on the covered bridge going to be with all of the additional car truck and semi truck traffic what is the impact of the falling real estate values and property tax revenues your project will have

18:34 and the last thing I'll mention is that you are destroying an important piece of green energy which has become extremely important no matter how large how small that percentage might be your decisions regarding the dam removal are flawed very very flawed my name is Eva Edelman I live at 3003 West 11 that's in 97402 yeah

19:21 so um I'd like to say that the previous two speakers talking about the difficulty getting solar and the this man proposed dismantlement of the lieburn dam or water power like this is incomprehensible to me like instead of having Alternatives we're going like the proposal to study nuclear as a possibility that is like nuclear nuclear waste leaks into the environment it's been leaking a Trojan it leaks at Hanford where the proposed taffet is

20:06 like a multiplex of nuclear waste it's like amazingly contaminated um nuclear waste like it's in the water in the Columbia right and like you add a little nuclear modulus small nuclear power plant that supposedly um will prevent uh meltdown like we've heard this before that it automatically well we've heard things this all these safeguards but that doesn't mean that really will exist in every single case that hasn't happened Fukushima you know it just doesn't happen and meanwhile children our children are people like

20:52 how much thyroid disease is there in America and the world how much cancer like skyrocketing rates of cancer we had a mini nuclear war in Nevada the amount of Dukes that were tested that leaked into the environment and now we have the children's iQ going right in low thyroid thyroid radioactive iodine affects you know the children it gets all over America that I grew up in New York and there was radioactive iodine in New York from those little tests like if this little mini reactor had a problem and exploded the waste at Hanford

21:40 you know it's inconceivable that's like worse than Fukushima to explode all the ways to it again so um we shouldn't even be considering the funding a study of something that the voters reject we said we don't want nukes in this in this um State and this County also unless there's something to do with the way so that isn't on the horizon and meanwhile it's like totally going against the voters what are you guys thinking thank you Eva next up we have Victor please

22:26 Andy Sanders yes I am Victor oblivac um at the top of the rain Highway Ward three and I just want to piggyback on what everyone else is saying I mean vehicular is very very bad Germany 2024 they shut down everything all the nuclear power plants Germans are not stupid right so why don't we want to go there the solar here is really good the wind is really good when I was pedaling here I went down bertelsen and I saw a hookup for the solar photovoltaic and old windmill looked like the 1920s Jacobson windmill or a modern version of it was going great I

23:13 mean if you look at the cost of electricity solar and wind where the wind farms it's so easy to do why in the world would we want to do nuclear Hanford is the most toxic place on the planet that's no exaggeration you add up all the waste water and all the stuff there and all the waste from children I mean we just don't want to touch it this is the fourth time the people the entire state of Oregon are you Eugene are saying no nukes you want to know put it on the bill yes no never

23:59 that's what you need to do because we don't want it we've had enough we've had enough sickness cancer Etc and there's no place you can put it the half-life of plutonium is 27 000 years the half-life of the uranium is 4.5 so you've got between 27 000 and 4.5 billion years and he got cesium 137 and iodine and all the other things thrown in where on Earth can you put it that you can guarantee it could be safe for four and a half billion years for 27 000 years remember there was an ice age 12 000 years ago so

24:44 no you don't want it thank you for your time thank you for listening my name is Stephen fullerrell I live in a ward seven I first like to thank the IRP team for the early briefings on the IOP I'm active with several groups that identify false solutions to The Climate crisis two of these four Solutions appear in

25:29 the IRP nuclear power and biomass energy is not just false Solutions but they also distract from the increasingly urgent need to identify and act on real climate solutions they should therefore not be including the IRP or receive rate payer funding for p-web first off smrs they seem to be no more than an opportunistic rebranding of all big nuclear small appears to be the new sales pitch for the same failed technology beside poor cost per kilowatt hour dubious safety and poor carbon life cycle of smrs and fuel there's also the elephant in the room nuclear waste as others have said there's no realistic solution for what to do with the waste

26:14 from Trojan the hot mess lives on in Trojan in a pit the suggests a conclusion for those considering an investment nuclear when you find yourself in a hole stop digging on this Supply alternative should be prioritized to fill the need for flexible energy Supply and then biomass this was categorized as renewable energy resource by the ipcc and the renewable Oregon renewable portfolio it would have the major use of otherwise unused biowaste biomass waste now the tail is wagging the dog forests in the Southeast are being clear-cut for pellets we're being exported to Europe as a replacement for coal in Plants operated by tracks the

26:59 Drax is coming to Longview the time scales of renewability do not match a forest can be clear-cut in days it takes decades for forests to regrow to the stage when it's sequestering significant amounts of carbon biomass is not a clean fuel it burns worse it carbon emissions are worse than from Carnival biomass emits and it emits carbon at every stage from the forest to the burner carbon capture from biomass burning beccs is turning out to be less than feasible other emissions other pollutants are also significant for those of us living downwind from the former Seneca kojo and Cogen plant the new owners of Sierra

27:44 Pacific the new owner Sierra Pacific plans to double production and this will make things worse Timber industry biomass needs to stay in the forest to maintain soil fertility in conclusion nuclear energy and bioin nuclear energy and bioenergy are both false climate Solutions the divert attention investment from real climate Solutions please instruct staff to take them out of the IRP thank you all right next up we have Community Sanders followed by Deborah Higby followed by Sid well uh Sandy Sanders and I live on 800 Maxwell Road and I'm a customer people we pay 250 a

28:30 month about for all of our utilities and that we're talking about nuclear now after coming through the 80s and eliminating this I thought here we are again talking about a destructive ecocidal technology that is just should be buried deep but never touched again the bombs the radiation the plants it's all a travesty of reality five years ago new scale tried to come with their little mini nukes and get them through the legislature uh my wife and I made this postcard and we're with a group of people that nixed it in the Senate and we don't want to see this anymore that people in Oregon have voted against it before time we don't want it it's our right to say no let us vote on it if we have to

29:21 sun is free why aren't we doing putting all of our money in finding out how how to turn solar energy into easy free electricity distributed on every rooftop everyone would be generating electricity we could share with one another and then the problem is that centralized uh control of energy would not make money for corporations now why this is a public entity why would you guys worry about such a thing it's really strange to me that we're not going all solar this is a doable thing let's do it yesterday yesterday I saw this article it was published on the fourth by PBS about dumping a Fuji uh is nuclear waste material into the Pacific Ocean

30:06 China is not going to buy fish from that area in the ocean why are they doing that because it's poison why are we talking about putting poison in the state next to us are we going to put it in the Willamette River are we going to put it in the Columbia this is all insane I'm an artist and my friend Ralph and I had a show at new Zone Gallery in Maine called the war on Humanity and for us this is part of this corporate one percent rich person or on Humanity to extract as much profit and Destroy as much in the process as they can possibly get away with you all are working for the public this is not forth the rich and stupid corporate ideas like new scale

30:53 please stop this is insanity hello my name is Deborah Higby and I live at 1281 Dalton um I'm Incorporated Eugene and um you're faced with the decision whether to include nuclear energy in the IRP or biomass and I'm here to speak about nuclear energy but I urge you to not waste our money on either one of these they do not well illegal energy does not pass the test of affordability of the

31:38 reliability or environmental responsibility any rate pay or money used for speculative small reactors represent an opportunity cost for the things we care about such as Renewables conservation storage and etc etc in is nuclear power going to help the United States decarbonize its energy Supply and flight climate change probably not that's the conclusion of a remarkable news study published in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in early July it's remarkable because it's not written by opponents of nuclear power as one might expect given the conclusion authors are in fact extremely supportive of nuclear and view its loss

32:23 as a matter of profound concern they explained that as costs for smrs go up Renewable Energy Technologies seem to be on a trajectory toward subsidy Independence they are falling in costs at ridiculous rates not just wind and solar but storage EVs and other grid Edge Technologies as well policy can accelerate their progress or repeat it but at this point it cannot stop them they have a momentum of their own purely on economics nucular is in a different situation its current trajectory is decline it needs lots and lots of new policy and public money to reverse that trajectory

33:09 that is a much more difficult political lift you better feel worse renewable energy is the name of the game for the next few decades this new report explains small modular reactors are not environmentally responsible the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences also explained that new reactor waste is higher in volume and radioactivity per unit energy produced the large nuclear power reactors small reactors will not make less waste the most recent inter-governmental panel on climate change report that came out in March 2023 shows that the most effective way is to limit climate change are to use solar and wind power to enhance Energy Efficiency

33:54 to stop the afforestation and to reduce methane emissions the report reveals that the least effective ways to limit climate change are nuclear power and carbon capture and storage their figures show that in terms of cutting emissions nuclear power and carbon capture and storage each have only 10 whoops thank you very much thank you for anybody who if you had more to submit and didn't get to read it please feel free to email us um is next then Peter draganovich dragovich and Mark rabbinowitz

34:55 area resident since 1982. although I've lived in the Eugene area for over 40 years I grew up in Portland in the 1960s and early 70s during that time I observed the building of the Trojan nuclear power plant along the Columbia River Northwest of Portland construction began in July of 1968 the summer before I started High School on a clear day we could look East and see mouth Hood or look Northwest and see the Trojan Tower Rising above the river finally after years of construction delays and cost overrun in May of 1976. Trojan began generating commercial power Portland General Electric was a two-thirds owner of the plant and eweb was a 30 percent owner you may know the rest of the Trojan

35:41 story citizen protest starting in 1977 increasing in 1978 after the plant was found to be on a major geological fault line and when public awareness of the problem of nuclear waste disposal was growing a combination of Citizen activism and Trojan's ongoing expensive maintenance and repair issues and leaks led to its permanent closure in 1993. since uweb is now considering returning to the use of nuclear power something has changed in how you view the nuclear industry you see the new small modular nuclear reactors is somehow very different from Trojan or Hanford

36:26 how different are they the towers are 75 feet tall rather than the 500 foot height of Trojan smaller is easier to move and build but our smnr is safer don't they still generate the same kind of high level reactive nuclear waste as Trojan and Oregon law wisely approved by voters in 1980 would have to be repealed or altered in order to allow a new nuclear power plant to be cited and built new scale the oregon-based smnr company was behind bills in the Oregon legislature that would have done away with the requirement to find an adequate repository for the disposal of nuclear reactive waste produced by their plants in the 40 years plus since the statue

37:12 was passed the nuclear waste disposal problem has not been solved the climate crisis we live in doesn't offer an excuse to create new Public Safety risks to solve the problems of rising global temperatures questions um commissioner's employees should be asking yourselves are is nuclear power solution to the issues of variable renewable energy by you wind and solar will the nuclear industry operate its plants safely and cost effectively and solve its waste problem or will the solar industry producer of real clean energy develop Battery Systems capable of storing power generated during daylight to be available at night taking a look at the battery storage systems for solar energy currently being developed May answer

37:58 these questions thank you for your time okay Peter panovic robinowitz then Jim good evening Commissioners Peter dragovich the web customer award five I have a couple comments about the IRP earlier versions of your IRP a few months ago had basically no reference to geothermal the word occurred twice uh once in a dismissive sentence and the other time uh in the glossary in the back of the IRP since that time geothermal has been repeated that word has been repeated more in the document but it's in response to public comments that have been made encouraging that you

38:43 look closer at geothermal uh there have been some and I'm sure you're aware of this and I encourage you to look into this further and if not in this IRP put into future irps that drilling technology has made very significant gains to the point where drilling down six miles is feasible under commercially uh under 69 a megawatt commercially feasible to drill down six miles what does that get in most areas of the world you can get down to uh enough heat under the surface of the Earth you know three miles to make geothermal feasible so no longer is geothermal tied

39:28 to geologic formations where heat is near the surface and what that opens up a lot of possibilities including citing geothermal at for example shuttered or scheduled to be shattered coal plants or your transmission lines are already there so I would urge you strongly to look more closely at geothermal in the future and then my only other comment on the IRP is to take smnrs out completely that's I think that's off the table in my opinion I think the public opinion realize that I'm aware of support set view also thank you for the opportunity to comment

40:23 Stan Thompson was a physicist who lived in Eugene and he said the most intolerable reactor maybe one which comes successfully to the end of its planned life having produced mountains of radioactive waste for which there is no disposal safe from earthquake damage or sabotage a half century ago eweb sought a reactor north of Eugene and then planned a location in the tsunami Zone north of Florence after our citizens managed to defeat this plan eweb's leaders admitted that the defeat was good for the utility and absolutely nothing has changed about boiling water with fission since then there is no way to turn off radioactive waste except time lots of it

41:10 new scale and all the other small modular nuclear reactor designs create the same array of fission products that their larger cousins create we should have learned from whoops in 1980s that reactors are a recipe for bankruptcy when I first learned to use solar panels a third of a century ago the first lesson was use less electricity this applies to the society not just the household level in 2006 eweb paid for Richard heinberg to speak in Eugene who was with post-carbon Institute some of you may remember that um since then world population has increased by a billion and a half more than the 1.2

41:55 billion the world had in 1859 and the first oil well was dug in Pennsylvania uranium is also in Decline uranium mining peaked in the U.S in 1980 and almost all of it is imported from places like Russia and central Africa mining is not renewable it's why gold mining ended in Cottage Grove the war is gone it's a joke pretending that a reactor can solve the problem of boiling water with fission is psychological bargaining we need acceptance that we live on a finite planet and need to adapt to constraints Dr John Goffman was a veteran of the Manhattan Project in first biomedical director at Lawrence Livermore and he

42:42 said quote licensing a nuclear power reactor is licensing random premeditated murder because radiation produces cancer and the evidence is good all the way down to the lowest doses I recently learned about brandolini's law to quote the amount of energy needed to refute is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it so you're going to get a half hour song and dance on how wonderful new reactors would be to create the old waste but you need to give a lot more Credence to the eight Decades of reactor construction that has raised a background level of radiation on Earth

43:27 foreign Commissioners general manager and staff small modular modular reactors appear to be giving a new Renaissance to the nuclear industry branding them durable reliable prefab and below ground although they would provide consistent base load power the new scale design is the same as the Manhattan Project reactor creating an endless life cycle of waste the larger the reactor the less costs are involved according to Lazard study smrs are more expensive than megawatt generated 350 per dollars per

44:15 megawatt hour there's also the threat of nuclear proliferation and accidents such as three mile Fukushima and Chernobyl all those sites are still contaminated and again the waste issue where smrs create more waste than larger reactors according to the doe existing conventional reactors create greater than 2 000 metric tons of radioactive waste per year with on-site storage because states do not want to come National depositories New Mexico just passed legislation Banning nuclear waste storage locally controlled power and storage should be the direction of eweb and the IRP future plan we need to establish 15 to 20 percent locally controlled power through green hydrogen and battery and through solar and Battery utilizing residential and Commercial rooftop as

45:02 well as parking lot Systems Green hydrogen and storage is an alternative to nuclear provided that there is a sufficient water source and fossil fuels are not involved in the process another less expensive and shovel ready alternative to smrs would be virtual power plants that could be funded by IRA and state funding power plants are a network of Battery Systems that work in tandem generated by rooftop and Community solar that can add megawatts of capacity to the grid when demand is the greatest this is a continual source of power according to an RM RMI forecast U.S potential for virtual power plant capacity by 2030 would be 62 gigawatts 20 gigawatts or 32 percent from

45:47 residential 10 gigawatts or 16 from small battery storage 17 gigawatts or 28 from EVs and 15 gigawatts or 24 for commercial sourcing there are currently thousands of virtual power plant Community participants in California Utah and Vermont in California PG e and Sunrun are producing 30 megawatts Via 7 500 customers and Sonnen and Baker Electric home energy on 2025 will produce two 20 megawatts through 5 000 customers in Vermont a similar latitude is Eugene Green Mountain Power is 4 000 battery customers and in Hawaii in coordination with swell electric as an 80 megawatt VPP virtual power plant that

46:32 serves three islands there are working alternatives to expensive and forever nuclear waste of smrs please consider Renewables and locally controlled power sourcing well thank you for this opportunity to speak and your attention Baker then I I missed sorry Elliott Gray will be after mark

47:17 uh I'm strongly opposed to eweb investing in potential nuclear energy projects for that for a number of reasons people needs to invest in more renewable energy projects Germany currently generates more than 50 percent of his electricity from renewable energy sources when it's over and is easily able to manage the grid finally in Denmark generates 55 percent of its electricity from the removable energy mostly wind and management degree renewable electricity generated from solar to Wind by P11 BPA is much much smaller share of electric generation than these countries produce now so there's ample ability to add more renewable energy and still properly manage the grids

48:02 and meet consumption requirements furthermore Pub and DBA have hydroelectric projects that can be used when needed to meet intermittent issues with electricity demands when needed web needs to increase their investment in solar and wind projects there are a number of promising Technologies for stationary storage of electricity that are being developed tested and implemented these storage systems allow electricity from solar and wind to be safe for later use to mitigate potential problems with the internet in nature of solar with that was demonstrated by Germany and Denmark through storage Technologies are only needed when eweb and EPA start

48:48 to generate a much larger share of their electricity from wind and solar so they aren't needed should be tracking these electric storage developments consider participating in some trials finally the U.S still does not have an approval or operational nuclear waste facility Oregon law prohibits new nuclear facilities unless a suitable waste facility has been built otherwise UF staff in its board are skirting state law by investing in nuclear facilities in Washington board members making new investments in nuclear energy adjust passing on these problems to their children and

49:34 grandchildren we live in an unstable world considering all the existing pools of spent nuclear Fuel and power stations and how inviting these potential terrorist heart you don't need to create more pictures thank you again I just might add I was a energy animals at the urban Department of energy for many years and I've worked out and he went into buildings uh in fact we have a nature just because of them but also like sometimes if you're interested I could explain why the energy use of your building was twice what it should have been because of some mistakes made by the contractor and some Visions made at the time during

50:20 construction definitely afraid then we'll turn back to the phone I have Kathy ging Daniel Noonan and Craig Patterson I'll be a gray I live in Ward one I own commercial property in board seven and Ward five I'm going to go off script a little bit because of all the eloquent people that have been talking about in ways I'm going to say that I find it ironic that eweb is talking about investing or in a feasibility study in a technology that is completely untested at this point um and uh is unwilling to update its

51:07 Billing System so that it can take advantage of Distributing solar it's only because it's I.T system and its customer service system unwilling to other system um I've been in Eugene since before Trojan started and saw the promises that chief chief Energy power and I saw the boondoggle that taxpayers are still funding and I saw that Westinghouse is still making problems for that Oregon boaters banned nuclear power and giant corporations are now trying to sell us clean safe there's only three small small

51:56 modular reactors in the world that are in China Russia and India the other ones there are nuns of the power that they're talking about selling us is the technology is just the same technology only modified a little bit um and they're trying to set tell us that again and have not changed and updated safety is all things nuclear waste test not been filtered down let's talk about right now Hanford is leaking leaking into the groundwater they don't know how to fix it I've got papers right now to

52:41 show you that 45 feet under the ground high level waste it's going to last for 250 000 years 250 000 years there weren't Neanderthals get that 250 000 years ago neanderthals weren't walking through that's a long time ago low-level nuclear waste is Chernobyl 24 000 years 24 000 years 12 times longer than the Romans same fact before Mesopotamia that's low-level nuclear waste we're talking about mentioning nuclear reactors and creating waste we don't even know how to deal

53:27 with you guys are going to buy nuclear plants create nuclear waste you don't know how to deal with it we're going to put it there and our kids kids kids kids kids about 12 000 years how to deal with it Kathy ging is now on yes I'm here thank you um Kathy again long time Eugene resident and energy a concerned person thanks for your volunteer public stewardship are you best serving rate payer owners by omitting an ierp volunteer citizen

54:13 committee I've watched citizen input attrition the last Erp had no public form this one no citizen committee the last Erp committee I discovered via public records requests and staff deliberately did not select any citizen in the solar energy academic or business Fields ignoring 250 years of local experience due to a possible conflict of interest your PR person told me how ludicrous solar radiation increased in this area 10 to 15 percent the 10 to 15 years before 2008 per uo solar energy

54:59 radiation monitoring lab which you helped fund by the way yet solar incentives and myopic policies were so a thief That Mountain Rose would not install more solar electric cells some time ago a discussion of nuclear energy in eweb's future energy is egregious in this community it should not be on the agenda e-web rate payer owners have not been specifically informed about this issue in mainstream or social media or a survey conservation is still our major new hemp Source I mean I think major new energy source and hemp batteries not fire prone or in Development David Midland m-i-t-l-i-n has a patent a

55:44 recent documentary stated the sabotage of only nine U.S power stations could dismantle the Electoral threads another issue of which we need to be cognizant is devastate devastating earthquakes possibly here in the next 50 years you may be aware that most health and Hazard insurance companies exclude damage not only from earthquake injury but also Insurance Riders added to policy but also exclude damage from nuclear disasters nuclear plants including smaller units could devastate tax bases and communities in which they are cited if accident occurred in addition to leaving long-term brownfields dead zones burst of plants

56:29 and Wildlife and adverse health issues some of which we packed on to Future Generations besides the vulnerability of the grid you know some of these people are saying that the batteries decentralized energy storage including Innovative Battery Technology rapidly evolving because of our electric vehicles can help with demand reduction reducing Reliance on Need for firm power and capital intents and Central Power generating plants that can be attacked manually Etc finally I want to say that the Green State reported that there are new plant-based batteries which may be the solution to the problems generated by conventional batteries

57:14 plant-based batteries are contains products of implants Etc okay I think that's all I have time for but Reed small is profitable by Rocky Mountain Institute 207 reasons why micro energy plants are Optical for our energy future thank you Daniel Noonan and then Craig Anderson can you hear me yes okay I think you can hear me now um Lord president Carson and e-web Commissioners thank you for the opportunity to give testimony this evening and apologies for the technical difficulties uh for the record my name is Daniel Noonan and I am a renter and resident of Ward 7. I'm also a climate

57:59 and energy strategist for the local 501c3 non-profit organization breach Collective I wish I could be testifying this evening simply to congratulate uh aweb on its 2023 IRP however there are major shortcomings uh contained within the IRP that I think are worth towards attention first the IR Peak gives very little consideration to demand side Investments specifically uh weatherization upgrades and retrofitting of existing electric space and water heating with much more efficient heat pump appliances would significantly mitigate the load increase from electrification that is forecasted to come from a widespread electric vehicle adoption

58:44 on a personal note I am a renter currently residing in a poorly insulated dwelling to accommodate for this lack of insulation and the resulting lack of passive Heating and Cooling I've had to run my electric resistance heater nearly constantly through the coldest parts of the winter and run a portable AC unit that I purchased out of pocket nearly constantly throughout the summer insulation upgrades and a heat pump system would resolve these problems for me and greatly reduce my own Demand on the grid and I'm convinced it would do the same for a number of houses as I've been a renter in Eugene for some time it would also significantly lower my utility bill yet the IRP contains essentially no concrete plans to increase investment in these kinds of solutions beyond what

59:30 currently exists for homeowners uh despite the significant state and federal funding being made available for these Investments under the inflation reduction act in other programs second the IRP suggests that emissions the emissions reductions benefits of building electrification are primarily contingent on the composition of the electric grid in fact Studies have shown that electrification with heat pumps provides immediate advantages over sticking with gas at virtually any utility Energy Mix in the country today and this is due to the massive efficiency advantages that heat pump appliances are enjoy even over the most efficient gas appliances and this was demonstrated in the good company the good company's electrification analysis that was prepared for the City of Eugene last year

1:00:16 third are the IRP seems to overemphasize the need to explore and invest in particular dispatchable energy sources specifically small modular nuclear reactors and biomass uh I am concerned about both of these for particularly uh small modular reactors which I think is the testimonial shown tonight have a number of uh concerns associated with them to say the least uh Portland General Electric's IRP is illustrative in this area despite serving approximately 10 times as many customers of e-web there are RP places minimal emphasis on this technology relative to renewable energy storage and demand side measures discussed earlier finally most governments and private interests promoting SMR to date have been aligned

1:01:01 with the fossil fuel and nuclear Industries please take these comments into consideration uh thank you thank you Craig perfect sorry Daniel okay and next up we have Craig is Craig on the line and join yes thank you for this opportunity can you hear me okay thank you uh thank you for this opportunity to speak in regards to the integrated resource planning effort however I believe there are some very substantial flaws in this effort and the document first I see very little real integration in this document

1:01:46 regarding in particular conservation its Effectiveness its costs its Trends and the need for far more reliable analysis as the number one Regional priority conservation must take precedent questionable conservation accounting and huge disparities between BPA and the power planning Council offer little support that we can rely on what the numbers say BPA has said that we have saved 2 000 or 2357 megawatts historically and the

1:02:31 power planning Council says it's over seven thousand and there's no vetting for this substantial difference so what have we learned from history the energy shortfalls projected in the 60s and 70s led to whoops the nuclear Fiasco where cost overrun stopped four of the five plants when costs soared from 325 million to 3.2 billion for the one completed plant number two in the 70s BPA raised its rates twice 28 in 74. these are the wholesale rates and 88 and 79. and by 82 Peter Johnson the

1:03:19 the head of BPA was declaring that the deficit the energy deficit was over and that we now have a surplus so much for modeling and projecting today at the Northwest power planning council's regular meeting a presentation by Elizabeth owner husner a page of Puget Sound Energy stated that nuclear energy was considered and eliminated from their projections going forward based only mostly on the high costs their planning projections showed zero energy through 2040. the power planning Council applauded this meanwhile the Columbia Generating

1:04:05 Station previous whoops has said that the life of number two Newt plant was 20 to 30 years initially however given that the indebtedness for whoops will continue until 2044. they extended the life to reflect that time frame too never mind the leaking radiation from compromised tanks beginning to reach the Columbia and no permanent site for the waste a power source too comprehensive to come to comprehend integrated resource planning must understand history if we are to take climate change seriously

1:04:51 we must understand all the costs and liabilities which affect today and tomorrow and thus nuclear and biomass pardon you're three minutes are up oh and then we're closing the public testimony for this evening okay well thank you then all right thank you very much all right thank you all to have participated we will now have some comments from Commissioners should they choose to which they're not required to um I did want to just thank everybody for coming and participating and uh you know this is part of the progress we put

1:05:38 the information out there we want to hear all sides and this is exactly why we didn't limit uh conversation this evening because we want to hear everything that you have to say so thank you for taking time out of your busy evening sir and coming down and sharing your thoughts and Views with us if you listen to us all and appreciate it I do have some questions there were so many different things there I'll raise them with staff based on some of the comments this evening but I'll take that up with Frank and our questions later so anything else have anything to share oh sorry I'd like to thank everybody too um like commissioner Carlson said we're a late group that's elected here and it's input like this that we're not going to ignore

1:06:24 we're not going to just say thank you and go our own way we're going to discuss this we're going to get more educated on it and I thank you we've done we've been through processes like this with smart meters and other things such as that so when we get challenged by the public we will listen to the public and whether or not whatever we come up with I know that they're illegal in Oregon I've brought it up a long time ago but we'll we'll discuss this I would hope that staff could contact I think it was um Walmart from upriver it sounds like he needs some more information on the decision of why we have to tear that Dam out who's making us tear it down and what our options are and so hopefully he can uh be contacted and we can educate him a little or given the facts that we're working with thank you

1:07:11 just take a moment and also say thank you to folks for coming out um I had the same thought about Mr Palmer and if we have an ability to move off with them I think that'd be helpful um as reitering uh commissioner Brown's comment we haven't made decisions we're at the very start of evaluating options to address um the Gap in generation that's a decade or more away I think it's important to note that the Peak demand that we're looking to address is in the winter when solar generation is just not as as productive and the peak that we're trying to manage is a multi-week cold snap not just the the time between daylight so it's um not to say that solar isn't a part of the solution but the point we are in planning I think it doesn't it doesn't fit the need that we're trying to solve for

1:07:57 um in my opinion all forms of electric I'm not saying that I'm uh maybe all forms of electric generation have a downside so before we purchase new power of any kind from my perspective it's imperative that we take every opportunity to reduce energy first and um I think that is Central in this plan if you look at our plan we are looking to do a conservation assessment to understand how much conservation is cost effective and we will do all of that so I I think that's an important step and I heard that voice from a few folks today um and then lastly that given the costs of nuclear and the associated risks I would like to see us evaluate every alternative before going down the road of adding more nuclear to our portfolio

1:08:42 and again thank you all for taking the time to share your thoughts with us because on the point of I mean in the plan nuclear doesn't even pop up as an option until 2042. so I know that we're talking about it tonight it's it's not even modeled which will get other information but it's not in there until 2042 which I mean I would hope by that point we have lots of other technology options uh committee um thank you everybody for for coming tonight I think we know how to get people out to our public comments um thanks for that um I just wanted to point out piggybacking on what Matt said about Energy Efficiency and things like that we have scheduled at our next board

1:09:28 meeting that we're going to have a presentation on Energy Efficiency programs for renters so if that's something that we've been talking about a lot the board has been asking about and um just to add to our repertoire of things that we can do but we're going to have a presentation next month on that topic Frank yeah thanks I I I'm the one to blame I guess for uh that we're causing so much attention and part of it um but I'll really say you know a number of people have asked us to take nuclear off the table and part of the reason it's in is that we're looking at a portfolio which is a mix of resources uh and to keep all options on the table in order to make decisions as things evolve

1:10:13 uh this doesn't mean that we're going to build a plant in Coburg next month but in order to evaluate all the choices you have to leave them on the table and then evaluate their social their economic and and their environmental impacts and that's the reason it's in the plan was because I could look at every single resource and start pulling them out because we have Advocates show up and say get get rid of the Snake River dams get rid of other other Technologies as well so it's in there but I would also point out that the reason we have an IRP is to look at a long-term view but to pull that back to near term actions and the first three actions listed are the Bonneville contract conservation and Energy Efficiency and demand response of which this is not an ore situation these

1:10:59 are ants and so a lot of the things that people have asked for are in there um the fact that we mentioned future technologies that we want to keep an eye on and understand as we go forward I I don't think diminishes the fact that the near-term actions focus on those on those two things um and so that that would be and we'll get to that we'll hear more information uh about the technology we'll hear more information about the integrated resource plan and and where we're taking that later staff will present that so anyway I appreciate the feedback as well the the quit hearing and we will move on to the next action items we have a portal

1:11:45 of consent calendar a depending if you want to pull anything from consent calendar a we would not consent calendar in all in favor of the adopting all in favor of the motion uh say aye motion passes unanimously consent calendar B does anybody like to pull item seven there's an emotion for the remainder step adopt consent calendar B absolutely number seven thank you all right all those in favor uh minus seven you say I think John um item number seven is 1.6 billion dollars

1:12:30 over seven years for environmental permitting and services related to the second Second Source treatment and this is this is just for for my being a newer person on the boards I I'm still pulling that card out as a newer person on the board I know that later on in the in the evening we're going to be going over the capital Improvement uh plan and the long-term financial plan I'm just wondering has this board committed or or a previous board committed to Second Source plan it's a hundred million dollar commitment and I'm just I don't recall doing that

1:13:18 this consent calendar is 1.6 billion dollars towards that it's obviously in the early stage of planning and permitting but I don't know I'm just looking to staff to find out is like we had with Lieber is there a uh time frame where we do that or is it when we approve the capital Improvement plan later on and if that's the case you know there were there were several different uh scenarios put forward there as far as the long-term financial plan there's ones with with the second source and ones without the second source and by putting this in a consent calendar that's kind of to me putting the cart in front of the horse a little bit I just need a little input from staff on this yeah I think certainly through the

1:14:04 last few years in particular I'm going to say probably a year or two before you joined the board when we brought forth the timeline and the the scope of the Second Source uh the board at that time the last the uh the approach to a second source Point um we started including it we are doing preliminary work to understand scope and design and the reason it's presented with Alternatives it isn't so much for the alternative but to understand the impact of that it's such a large project to segregate out that particular impact on customer owner rates okay

1:14:49 um that's helpful and I guess the only concern that I would have is again I I respect previous boards that that gave that direction forward that previous board gave directions and forwarded a 70 million dollar price tag and we're looking at almost 100 million dollar price tag now so again it might be something that this board would like to at least talk about and I think we can later on in the in the Apple but that was one of the reasons I just wanted to be clear where we were as far as the decision-making process so with that I would move to approve consent calendar bees item seven second

1:15:36 any more discussion all those in favor say I'm I'm actually passed you honestly thank you okay we will move now to we have advanced nuclear presentation all right good evening you guys hear me okay yes all right uh well hey uh happy to be here tonight my name is Greg Cullen I'm the vice president of Energy Services and development for energy Northwest um I've been with energy Northwest just over 29 years now and in a variety of different roles right now I lead the organization it really does uh uh everything everything but operate

1:16:22 Columbia Generating Station for the most part so if you can go to the next slide a little bit about energy Northwest uh maybe uh everyone's very familiar but I know some might not be so energy Northwest is a not-for-profit municipal Corporation we are Public Power just like you are we are a joint operating agency in the state of Washington uh our membership is is made up of public utility districts and municipalities in the state of Washington uh by Statute um however if you go to the next slide uh participants in our projects are not limited to our members so we have uh 93 participants in six different states in our generating projects go to the next slide

1:17:08 uh this is the look at our uh generating portfolio um we are proud that it's a hundred percent clean um and I like to kind of talk through this slide real quickly to kind of point out the White Bluff solar station the lower left 38 KW these days is pretty darn small but back when we put that online in the year 2000 that was sort of early first of its kind utility scale solar demonstration um the nine Canyon wind project at the top the first phase went online in 2002 and subsequent phases again early development of wind in the state in fact I'd like to kind of point out that we actually were so early in Wind development that we had a wind project shut down by the state of Washington so

1:17:54 um at the very bottom you'll see the horn rapid solar storage and training project that's one that we put online about two and a half years ago in conjunction with uh Grant from the Washington State Department of Commerce for megawatts of solar one megawatt four megawatt hours of battery with that again sort of a first of its kind and size in the state so we do have a history of helping develop newer Technologies especially Clean Energy Technologies to be leaders in that area we're obviously best known for operating Columbia generic station um and we do have a Packwood Hydro we have other hydros that we operate and maintain uh for other utilities including Stone Creek Hydro that we don't maintain for your organization uh we are developing a solar project right now that's about 127.5 megawatts uh the

1:18:40 Ruby flat solar project and so we're in process on that project expect that up and running uh hopefully in 2024. next slide so why are we studying nuclear energy we first had utilities approach Us in 2010 uh requesting that we perform a study a feasibility study the time that really led us to uh partnering with uamps on their project with the new scale technology we spent a better part of the decade uh helping new scale develop their technology as well as um's developed their project but in 2019 uh we commissioned a study next slide please a study using energy environmental economics or E3 you're

1:19:25 probably familiar with them they do a lot of some of the most respected studies in the region around looking at things like resource adequacy and and how a system works we commissioned this study to kind of follow on some of the other work that had been performed in the region if you go to the next slide when uh when we looked at the final results if you're if you're talking about it we were able to the clean energy transformation act had been passed in Washington state by this time so we were able to incorporate those requirements and you look at trying to be 100 clean by 2045 uh which is the Washington State requirement um we uh went through different series of Opera options for the models to look at and I will have to talk you through a lot of this I know your integrated resource plan does similar analysis but simple simple answer is what we saw when

1:20:11 you look at things from a system perspective um that that the uh a system costs were much much lower when you had clean firm resources such as small modular reactors in the mix and it's quite a bit cheaper in this case by providing those options to the models that saved almost eight billion dollars per year relative to just doing it with Renewables and energy storage alone next slide so that really led us to kind of conclude that this was the right mix for the region going forward um that we know wind and solar and storage and as we said we've been heavily involved in developing that um do have a place uh we do believe we need to keep the existing Hydro in the region uh we think Columbia generic station uh could operate another 20 years so we just we did renew its

1:20:57 license for 20 years and um that program is built to make sure the plant is reliable and safe and we believe there's plenty in place to show that we can do that another 20 years and then uh we do believe new nuclear will be needed in the mix next slide so I was asked to kind of talk a little bit about the state of nuclear right now um and I'm going to talk a little bit about some of the activities as far as Federal support uh next slide in uh in 20 January 2020 Congress directed uh doe to form the advanced reactor demonstration program and they provided initial Appropriations for that program uh and that was really to build two new reactors in this country by the end of the decade but the federal government paying half of the cost uh so

1:21:44 that process was put in place in May a quick quick turnaround by Doe um and they went through the application process and by October had selected the two technologies that would be eligible for that the two technologies chosen were x-energy and Terra power Terra power of course is Bill Gates technology that is based in in Bellevue Washington and I'll talk a little bit more about those Technologies in a minute um in same week that those awards are handed out the federal government did provide an award to um for their new scale project so the three uh technologies that were sort of chosen by the federal government to be able to provide the most significant funding to are the new scale technology the X energy and Terra power Technologies uh later in 2021 November 2021 the

1:22:31 infrastructure investment and jobs act um did front fund the ardp for the first five years of that uh that's a very rare occurrence to see things unlike that but it did um the in January 22 is part of the uh as directed by the infrastructure act uh the doe formed the office of clean energy demonstration to manage the advanced reaction demonstration project and other early technology deployments and in August 2022 the inflation reduction Act was signed into law to go to the next slide many are familiar with a lot of things out of the inflation reduction act but you may not be familiar that the production tax credits the investment tax credit options in in that word now for the first time nuclear was eligible for those

1:23:17 uh you can get a 30 megawatt hour for the first 10 years production tax credit or a 30 investment tax credit uh there's also an increaser of 10 for each of those related to sufficient domestic content which we believe right now that uh the X energy technology the the three basically chosen for federal Awards would likely meet this because those Awards also basically require a lot of that already um also for the first time I'm sure you're aware the IRA included the ability for public uh non-federal tax liability entities to receive direct pay options for those tax credit and get access to that so we have the opportunity to do that for the first time as do you and it also included an

1:24:04 increase in the Loan program office funding uh include an increase in the authorization for Lending but also funding for a loan and loan fees and closing costs and and that provides that they have a whole program around nuclear as it provides a significant low cost and money opportunity for nuclear responsible next slide in March of this year the department of energy issued this report um and I encourage you to go look for that if you've not seen this uh you know the the report basically concluded that if we're going to be successful as a country with our decarbonization efforts we're really going to probably need about 200 gigawatts of new nuclear in the system um just to give you some uh you know

1:24:49 point of reference there the current fleets in the U.S makes up about 100 gigawatts right now so you're talking about tripling the nuclear capacity in the U.S uh and that's really again based on the the federal government's analysis of meeting decarbonization goals another aspect has come out and touched on a little bit in this report but has come out even more since then is you know that as as was talked about by one of the commenters you know China and Russia are developing new nuclear technologies and selling them around the world and and there's real concerns about allowing about us abdicating our leadership role in nuclear nuclear operation and regulation as well as as the influence that that gives them in those countries and so the federal government has also recognized that that

1:25:34 needing to have advanced nuclear technologies to compete around the world is actually a national security issue as well so this has led to a lot of of intense Focus just over the last few months in Washington DC about what additional support is needed to uh to to get this liftoff going all right next slide we talked a little bit about the Technologies obviously this is going to be a very quick flyover with the limited time I have and happy to come back and talk in more depth that if you're interested but I will focus initially on the three technologies that were funded by the federal government so the first one if you go to the next slide is the Terra power technology it's a sodium fast reactor sodium called Fast reactor uh it's basically the design is

1:26:19 a single reactor that can put out at 100 power puts out about 345 megawatts but it has between the reactor and the turbine generator and steam generator and then the turbine generators it has a molten salt energy storage system and so the energy that's used to create the Steam and the steam generators is is actually from the energy storage system and so the the intent at this point is to have the generator basically rated at 500 megawatts or it could be more than that but and so you have the ability to basically ramp up and down using the energy storage system to create your actual output while you leave the reactor basically at 100 power many of you familiar with it Pacific core has included this in their integrated

1:27:04 resource plan and in their most recent plan actually went from one of these deploying one of these to deploying three of these and and really the next 10 to 15 years and their first one is planned for a former pool site in in Cameroon Wyoming next slide just another close-up of that you know basically the reactor Island nuclear island has the reactor and then the molten salt is heated up inside the reactor building so only the molten salts is what leaves and goes over to the steam generator and storage system um and again while we talk about a lot of these being Advanced or new new nuclear uh the uh this design is based on the fast flux test facility a doe demonstration reactor that operated for decades just north of Richland

1:27:49 Washington here in Tri-Cities next slide the x-energy technology is a high temperature gas cooled reactor and it uses helium as it's not really a coolant it's really more of a heat transfer mechanism and it uses trisofuel and I'll talk a little bit more about trisofuel on the next slide this is a very modular approach each module is about 80 megawatts electric and you can put anywhere from 1 to 12 modules on the common control room and other infrastructure they're designed for 60-year life but quite frankly these are these are going to be 100 Year assets because it's very simple and and relatively cheap to replace any components in this system uh they're they're made in factories and brought to the site many of the components including the turbine generator you know

1:28:35 basically the secondary sides are off the shelf just like what you'd put into combine cycle natural gas plant uh one thing that's unique about this technology compared to others is that it's a continuous online refueling and uh you'll maybe understand that a little more when I talk about the fuel the next slide but that from a utility standpoint what's nice about that is it moves the fuel in from you know a fixed cost to a variable cost so if at some point we decide to operate a reactor like this as a flexible resource to to pair with Renewables and and uh and just firm up the system uh when you're not operating you're saving on fuel unlike most other reactor designs uh like all of these there it's considered walk away safe meaning that there's nothing for operators to have to do to keep us safe

1:29:21 within shutting down safely uh they're based on passive Safety Systems but one that X energy really has and adds is the is the claim of meltdown proof as well and again I'll talk about that on the next slide um the the main advantage of the smaller ones and with particularly the X energy and new scale Technologies is the more modulized approach that I've already talked about the ability to ship those on rail or Road next slide so again what's unique about the x-energy is the fuel it's it's trisofuel try structural isotropic is what that's short for basically what this is is uranium kernels are encased in five layers of different forms of carbon graphite uh and there's about 18 000 of those

1:30:07 kernels in a single Pebble uh the pebble is also encased in layers of carbon graphite and those those those shell layers cannot melt at any temperature the reactor could reach or create and therefore basically again you cannot melt the fuel the the concern with with nuclear is always if you overheat the fuel you could melt the outside and release the radio opiates or fission products to the environment in this case you basically eliminated that possibility next slide the new scale technology is probably one you're a little more familiar with again it's uh really a still a light water cooled reactor uh really sort of a modernized shrunken version of the pressurized water reactors that operated the existing Fleet and very similar

1:30:52 really to what's operated safely in the U.S submarine and aircraft carrier Fleet for decades um it basically you can build you have to build this reactor building for how many modules you want to be able to add they're offering anywhere four six or twelve module building size um right now the the upgraded their reactors to put out 77 megawatts electric per module so very similar in output to the uh X energy size again a 60 year design life these do require refueling outages and right now they'd be at 18 month refueling outage and cycle um like a lot of these what we're seeing with the more passive systems and simplified systems and approaches it

1:31:37 needs far fewer control operators to manage the units safely again walk away safe because all the cooling systems and loose scale system are passive and again modulized components can be built off-site and transported to be available one quick item for uh for this technology that I do want to highlight is you know they if you go to the next slide while while they have uh basically achieved some some licensing progress you know what was what was approved by the nuclear Regulatory Commission was a 12 module reactor building with 50 megawatt modules and um and now what they intend to build for uamps and design and build for um says a six module building uh with 77 megawatt modules and so that will require some

1:32:23 additional approvals by the NRC to look at both the upgraded modules as well as the six module buildings and that combination so that they still have still has some work to do on from a license standpoint to get those combinations approved so that's kind of a quick flyover there's a there are some other Technologies out there including General Electric has um a Boiling Water Reactor uh 300 megawatt version uh it's it's basically a smaller version of Columbia's airing station but with modernized and simplified and passive Safety Systems Ontario power generation and can in Canada has chosen this technology to build for power uh electricity purposes and tends to have their reactor online by the end of the decade Tennessee Valley Authority has picked this

1:33:09 technology as well as well and it's working down the path of Licensing uh some sites in Tennessee there for this technology a Westinghouse the ap1000 is what was built down in Georgia those are just coming online now but they also have recently announced an ap300 a smaller obviously 300 megawatt version of that design again these are being built very successfully and and on schedule on budget in China and there's a lot that can be learned from that as well as well as the recent experience but we do see obviously a lot more focus on the smaller sizes these days uh whole Tech is a company you may not have heard of they have another pressurized water reactor and simplified design of 160 megawatts uh Kairos power has a unique design it's sort of a little bit of a

1:33:55 mix between the X energy and the terror power in a way it uses a fluoride salt coolant um but then uses the try soil Pebble fuel latex energy um and uh the one unique thing about both the the X energy the terror power and the Kairos Powers they've used produce higher temperature steam than the water cooled reactors um which has uh potential advantages of Ontario power generation while they chose the GE technology for for electricity generation did choose the x-energy technology for processed heat applications in their Providence partly because of that and then there are microreactors as well right now we don't see that micro reactors would probably ever be economical for standard utility

1:34:41 use without a lot more progress but they right now are likely to be very attractive for remote remote Villages remote industrial operations or even like remote military bases say in Alaska or or Northern Canada or other areas like that next slide um what are we seeing around the in the region as far as interest and discussions on nuclear you know the investor and utilities our region have a serious challenge in front of them right uh 80 clean by 2030 in both Oregon and Washington you talk to the investor-owned utilities and most of them when you ask them where are they today they'll give you numbers in the around 30 or lower 30 percent clean range uh with you know six and a half

1:35:27 years left to go so a lot of work to do so we are we have had some very serious interests from industrial utilities about this we talked already about Pacific Corps and what they're doing with the Terra power project but we are seeing it appearing in their integrated resource plans in many of them as they start to realize that they're going to need something like this in the system to be successful uh the Bonneville power Administration customers that are are even look are looking ahead to the new contracts and are expecting to be at or over their high water Mark um are very seriously exploring something like this we have uh somewhere around 11 utilities that have sent us levels of interest and to be able to provided some funding of our feasibility study uh because of their concerns about where they're going to find power that's

1:36:12 going to be both compliant with the clean energy requirements as well as uh us firm and reliable so we have quite a bit of interest from that portion of the vpa customers and of course I know I don't need to tell you that you know BPA power cannot be used for new large single loads so we've had conversations with several industrial companies that uh that are looking to bring new large single loans to the region um and uh you know I think to quote one of the uh one of these industrial companies uh uh said you know your state lied to us they told us come here there's all this great clean uh affordable hydropower they didn't tell us that it was all spoken for and I think that's you know kind of a really good summary of the state of the

1:36:57 industry right now for uh for Industrial Development in our states um is right now there's you know we're talking a lot about how do we replace the the fossil fire generation for the loads that we have already but if we want any form of Industrial Development uh we're seeing a lot of interest from those uh areas because there's really no other option that's going to provide the 24 7 365 power they need I think let's see next slide um so yeah just for for what we're exploring right now we are looking the possibility of putting a an X energy reactor on our one of our sites that has an unfinished reactor right next to Columbia's airing station uh so far we've received about 247 megawatts of letters of interest for that project

1:37:42 um we have another 480 megawatts that have been indicated to us from an investor owned utility as far as interest um that they're talking to us about and performing a pretty deep dive on uh there's another 95 megawatts of interest from a public utility that has been indicated in one form to us but not in a formal letter of interest at this point and then there's another utility working with one of their industrial customers that has put out a request for information and request a proposal for 150 megawatts that that that it has to be very clean very firm very very 24 7 reliable so just a just a sense of what we've what we've had as far as Outreach to us there's there's numbers far beyond this as far as the conversations we've had but this is what we've had as far as as what I would call some form of

1:38:28 structured uh indication of exact need and interest so that's a very quick flyover I think that's the last slide I had but happy to take any questions if there's any time remaining I thank you for that presentation so I don't know very much at all about easier and yeah um far off are we of the industry from having a plant like this up and running or is it are they already up and running the UAMS project and the uh X energy projects or expect still right now

1:39:14 projected to be online in 2029 or by 2030 uh Tara Powers uh uh and Pacific Corps are talking similar numbers right in that range um you know again whether we can actually achieve that or not is yet to be seen but right now those projects are considered to be on track for around around 2029 um the uh the the GE bwr project in Ontario uh they're talking 2028 is kind of their Target right now um and and moving pretty heavily down that path as well so again whether we'll actually achieve those is yet to be seen but uh those are the targets right now when we expect so right around 2030 is kind of what we're expecting to see um there there are none of these Technologies are up and operating right

1:39:59 now as I said they're all based on previous design so they're not they're not something that we worry about we don't don't know how they're going to work or if they're going to work uh China has started up some high temperature gas reactors recently that are very similar to The X Energy Design um and uh and so that that's you know something that we have seen operated around the world recently so I actually have some slides if you can keep going for a minute here there's some slides sort of at the end of the presentation here um that might help with this discussion if you'll just keep going and I'll tell you when to stop

1:40:48 all right stop right there if you go back one so um right now I'm sorry go forward one more so this these are spent fuel casts at Columbia daring station uh this is what they look like one thing I do want to be very clear from some of the conversations um there are a lot of a lot of things that weren't accurate but one in particular you know this is what the waste of storage for fuel looks like um the the Columbia generic station has nothing to do with what happened and what's at Hanford that's all uh waste production or excuse me weapons production waste and cleanup efforts from you know the early days of weapons production uh so this is what storage of spent fuel looks like it's solid it's never in a liquid form it doesn't leak

1:41:33 because it's all solid and it sits in these casts these casts are designed to withstand earthquakes or 747 impacts um and they're designed that if they did follow over an earthquake nothing happens anyway um they just basically sit on a concrete pad um I tell people that uh you know number one I've I've lived I've been for almost 30 years in the Tri-Cities I've raised two children who were born here and let their entire lives here I would have my children stand next to and even hug these casks because there's just no uh radiation coming out of them uh if you go to the next slide if you look at all of the waste for the commercial industry in the U.S that's been created over its entire life it would fit on a football field and 20 feet high and that's kind

1:42:19 of what this blue large Blue Box represents local if you look over in the corner you'll see kind of what what has resulted from Colony Generating Station so we know how to store this safely we know you know there's been a lot of conversation we absolutely absolutely do need a permanent repository for this but we know how to store it safely I I will tell you that you know as was mentioned earlier every technology has its downsides as I mentioned we operate wind and solar and batteries and our solar project the panels are failing they have mercury in them they have other chemicals in them and we don't have a we don't know where we're supposed to store those right now that's safe as well um so in the next slide too if you look you know the other thing that we do need

1:43:05 to talk more about in this country is is the possibility for recycling used fuel there's a lot of value and energy left in the fuel we've been working recently with a company called curio that is using some lab proven Technologies to uh to uh to try to develop a commercial Venture they believe it's commercially viable to recycle the fuel and if you go to the next slide uh when they're when they're done you have four percent remaining volume left the rest is all reused um and you've that four percent remaining has a 300 years to background level of radiation instead of the longer periods that we're talking about earlier so this is something else that we need to be talking about in this country this is a proliferation resistant that's not a concern and so this is something else we need to talk about there's better

1:43:50 things we can do than just store it in a permanent Repository so on the the storage of the fuel um and the costs what's the time frame that's put into your cost metrics like if you do an MPV analysis on the cost of one of these plants do you include the way the cost of the waste storage and over what time frame so the work we've done I'll just focus on the X energy technology because that's the one we've spent the most detailed analysis on um the plant design includes uh on-site

1:44:35 storage it's it's kind of below grade storage system that's all built into the site for how you would store that um and so it's designed to have that storage built for all the fuel you would create in a 60-year life and can store there for really an unlimited period of time until a repository is built um the uh the nuclear uh licensing process it is required if your Opera nuclear implant that you'll be funding nuclear waste storage eventually and so that's factored into the cost estimates as well as the cost of decommissioning it's another thing that's kind of unique to nuclear compared to a lot of Technologies is that they are required by a lot of fund for decommissioning as part of the the project as part of your annual costs

1:45:20 so there's there's no time frame necessarily that's built into it it's just until there might be an additional facility built right I mean there'd be no additional cost basically because that storage is all built in so it can be stored on site safely and that all is factored into the costs um so over time anything deteriorates how do you deal with the deterioration of the material that's around that waste well I said these are kind of below grade uh kind of built in so they're it's not the same as even what I showed you with the above ground casks um I think it's a good question I don't have the numbers on exactly how long those intend to be qualified for I agree with you it's probably in 100 years not

1:46:06 thousands um but it is built in the ability to move those out there it's designed such that if that when there is a permanent repository you're able to move those out and into Transportation casts to move them to the permit repository so you'd have the same ability to use that capability to move into Newcastle storage cast if you need to at some point you'd have to just uh you know move them into newer casks you know maybe about again above ground system like at Columbia or something else but uh again it's not really it's just more of a Time issue down the road probably hundreds of years down the road or one or two hundred years down the road before you'd have to really deal with something like that

1:46:51 in a waste that's already been enclosed in these casts be recycled as you're talking about yeah the ways the waste for the existing Fleet that's exactly what Curie was targeting is is recycling that way so it absolutely can be right and in terms of the material needed that's mined how do you where do you get the new line the material from and how much is needed versus how much we actually have on the component available yeah so the uranium is really very plentiful uh the reason it was some conversation or comment earlier about you know reduction in uranium Mining and that's really really because in the U.S there was so much plentiful uranium

1:47:36 around the world that that it just was too expensive to mine in the US so most of the U.S mining has been sort of uh scaled back just because of competitiveness again there's an opportunity here to uh to to to gain uranium out of the used fuel as well and and reuse that what I will tell you is from our analysis again as we look at all different Technologies from our analysis we're far more concerned about the mining issues around lithium and some of the the metals needed or the materials needed for solar and batteries than we are uranium as far as as far as availability and our environmental impact from the mining process

1:48:23 hey thanks uh so much for the presentation this is uh super helpful for me um I have a question about the the anticipated costs you were talking about the savings compared to other sources of generation and my question is around uh our assumed cost per megawatt hour um given that there aren't any uh small scale reactors functioning in the US yet um I'm curious how you come to the cost estimate and what your current cost assumption is so we were ex-energy uh does has done most of the cost analysis around the specific technology and they hired two different constructing Partnerships last year and have worked with them pretty extensively to to leverage their

1:49:09 experience around estimating what it's going to take to to build and construct these um and so we use they just provided an update and updated their estimates based on that work as well as bringing it into 2023 dollars uh we have built a cost model that allows us then to take other aspects and pull it into that uh around that to sort of come up with a final lcoe what we're seeing right now is uh um you know somewhere on the order of around eighty dollars a megawatt hour for our project is our estimate we are however like I mentioned earlier working with the federal government on opportunities for additional support from the federal government both in terms of trying to reduce that number some as well as um as as providing some sort of a wrist

1:49:56 cap if you will you know it's interesting to think about the subsidies that that when solar and batteries have received over the last 30 years um and um and and so we're looking to kind of get some some subsidies as well for the nuclear to bring those early project costs down so we can get the cost current reduced and continue forward with getting this launched so we don't think the story's yet written on what these final costs are going to look like um but all said and done but that's our current estimate is around the 80 a megawatt hour um I should mention again our solar project that we're developing um over the last year or so as we brought in it into 2023 dollars has gone from being estimated at just under 40 a megawatt hour to now be an estimated

1:50:41 over 62 dollars a megawatt hour and we're also not done with those costs as well and have some supply chain concerns around um timing on getting the panels as well so we're seeing that you know in all technologies that their costs are going up uh over the last couple years in particular thank you that's helpful another question around water use these are thermal systems right so they they're they're consuming water or they're they're using water and heating water in the process right these the smaller scale systems are do they use water at the same rate that a conventional large reactor does so you know the I guess for the most

1:51:26 part I'm going to tell you the answer is yes uh because most reactors the water usage is really limited to the secondary side so it you know depends on your cooling mechanism on the secondary side so it really has nothing to do with the reactor itself um for example Columbia's entering station you know the the does not have to really use water as far as the reactor coolant systems it's only the water that that's taken out of the river is really to use for the coolings tower system so you know megawatt hour to megawatt hour you're talking about similar water usage for wet cooling however we do have the opportunity here and what we've been studying quite heavily with our project would be using dry cooling systems those who use about

1:52:11 100 1 100th one percent of the water that um that it would use for wet cooling system and even if you set it up as sort of a hybrid system where there can be some supplemental living Cooling with water during the um during the hottest months of the year it's still very very small fraction of what's used there so that's something we've studied very significantly with a higher temperature scheme you don't really take as much of a efficiency hit there's a little bit additional cost up front for that equipment but we think that's that's worth it to avoid the water usage and also with using the dry cooling you're not putting any heat in the river as well yeah thanks that's the question I had was around the thermal pollution in in waterways and what the contribution was but it sounds like if there if there is

1:52:58 dry cooling options that it reduces the thermal pollution load yeah for the river in particular yep thanks John bro yeah thank you for the presentation um most of my questions have been answered but what about distribution given the limitations on the transmission capacity do you have to locate these new facilities going to have to be located in close proximity to existing facilities or repurposed facilities or you have some magical way to get through the limitations on the distribution well I guess what I would tell you is I think this technology is the best fit for our transmission and distribution challenges um you know the the problem we have right now of course is as we try to

1:53:43 which I'm trying to develop the Renewables obviously they can't be located in metropolitan areas and and they're best located in areas like ours over here in the Tri-Cities where we have more sun and more wind and so that's generally what we're looking at but then as we spread them out um you know then you have to have significant transmission to try to gather all that together you know I like to point out that if if if we if we multiply the number of turbines in the in the Columbia River Gorge by a hundred um you know that doesn't help us one bit if the wind's not blowing in The Gorge so you do require geographical diversity uh for wind and solar as well to make sure that somewhere you're you're getting that generation when you need it um but it's it's and and and that

1:54:28 requires it of course a significant transmission here we have the opportunity it's much more energy dense you have the opportunity to put it where you need it um Bonneville power Administration gave us a presentation at one of our board meetings recently and talked about their transmission challenges um they gave a slide at the end unsolicited but but through in a slide that said you know where the top locations in their mind would be for small mods of reactors based on transmission needs and our site next to Columbia daring station was one of the top ones on their list obviously you think about like the retiring coal plant in Centralia Washington where you you know you're taking 1400 plus megawatts of firm capacity offline uh you know obviously that's a prime location from a

1:55:14 transmission standpoint where you can use Outland existing land existing resources to uh to cite a dense project like this and so there are others like that that they've identified that would be great places to to put energy dense stuff like this and and and solve really eliminate the need for a lot of transmission build out and so that's another cost consideration that that goes into the overall analysis thank you um thanks most of my questions have been answered except for I think I'm going to go back to one of the ones that Matt mentioned about the cost per megawatt hours as you said we were 80. that include the sub the federal subsidies

1:56:00 that you mentioned with uh uh the place from ducks and act and some of these other ones is that factored into that or is would that drive that down yeah no our analysis does include and that one particularly was used in the investment tax credit although I will tell you that um we had some early information that the investment the the tax credits for the direct pay option that you would only get 85 percent of the value and now as we've dug into that further we don't see we don't see that being true so we have not updated it yet to show the full value of the tax credit um so that'll bring it down some when we put in the full value of the tax credit um but again we're right now we're we're also expecting that at some point

1:56:45 there'll be additional opportunities to bring that down for with further support and I guess the question that I would have is do those tax credits have a time limit I mean are they is there a certain amount a certain bucket that is drawing from you know it's six billion dollars and when that's gone it's gone or is it uh is it an ongoing type of a Funding Company well I mean you know the interesting again I I'm probably going to get quickly outside of my pure expertise but the interesting thing about a tax credit is it's a you know it doesn't really have to be appropriated even though they've got the direct pay option it's it's really sort of something run more out of the Department of Treasury say it in like the department of energy so

1:57:31 um right now the limitation in the inflation reduction act for any of these tax credits is uh 2032 or uh 75 reduction in greenhouse gas emissions as a country uh whichever is later uh so I mean there are current estimates right now are that we're not going to be anywhere near 75 reduction by 2032 so we expect that right now we don't really expect a time limit uh for a dollar limit uh on either one of us thank you maybe three other questions I think it'd be quick if other Commissioners were willing to but yeah uh real quick uh so do the small scale gen uh actually

1:58:17 generate more waste per kilowatt hour than the other typical power plants nuclear power plants it's it's really comparable uh the only the only one that you know is the X energy technology or the ones that use that triso fuel um because of the significant amount of graphites and and uh and carbon in in making up all the the shells if you will um that does increase the volume not of the actual high level waste but just the volume of what it takes to store because of all that graphite but but on the flip side it's also far more resilient so you know there's there's really no way that

1:59:02 earthquakes or water in leakage or anything could ever cause those those Pebbles to break open and release anything so it's a much more robust form for long-term storage but the volume is is higher because of its but it's more it's more graphite volume if you will than it is uh used you know a nuclear High level nuclear waste volume proof I was getting nervous when somebody said that it's it's proof it's like saying the Titanic is Unsinkable but what what about this design makes it less dangerous than the others is it because of this kind of graphite piece in there or is it something else the fuel is the main thing now all of

1:59:48 these all of these reactor designs have you know are set up now that they have passive safety fix systems so like what you saw in Fukushima was when you lost the ability to drive water into the core uh because you lost power to pumps and motors in these designs they don't require any off-site they don't require any on-site or off-site electricity to shut down safely they don't have any pumps or Motors required to shut down safely the x-energy design it's the fuel but it's also designed such that if you lost all your helium for example the the the heating that occurs there causes their nuclear reactions to just shut down um and so it's just designed in that that that they set themselves down that's really the the way it works in

2:00:35 the U.S that Chernobyl design is not possible in the US the Chernobyl design had what's called a positive reactivity coefficient none of that stuff that's not legal in the U.S so these reactors cannot run away when they when they start to heat up they self limit and shut down the power and so X energies fuel uh the doe has declared this the most robust fuel on Earth and tends to use it for space travel as well as as other applications because of how robust it is and their belief that it's meltdown proof what what we've been told is that you know again well this this fuel has been lab National Lab tested and analyzed forever it's been around for a long time this isn't a new idea so there's a lot of analysis out there around this fuel

2:01:20 and what we've been told is you could throw this in a volcano and it can't melt so I can't melt at any temperature that these reactors could create um and so you know yes I agree with you it's not meltdown proof under you know any conditions but any conditions these reactors can create and even like I said throwing them in a volcano allowance and then finally your organizations that they've studied you know all kinds of different technology I'm just curious about green hydrogen and what your thoughts are on that it's done something that you've looked up we have looked at that um I will tell you what we've concluded is is that um right now we don't see a viable way for hydrogen to be a an energy storage

2:02:06 or energy generation uh resource at least not cost competitive I believe hydrogen is a very viable option for a transportation Fuel and particularly when you're talking about medium and long haul or Heavy Haul equipment you know that where you know basically by the time you put enough batteries in an 18-wheeler you don't have much room left to you know for it to be able to go anywhere in distance you don't have um any much room for free hauling and of course I don't have to tell the utility the challenges of of you know trying to charge an 18-wheeler in any appreciable time in order to get back on the road and what that does from a power spiking standpoint so I think I think batteries from a from a heavy medium and heavy all

2:02:51 trucking kind of aspect or a real challenge I think that's where hydrogen fuel cells and probably the better option and I think hydrogen is a great viable uh Transportation fuel source for that and I think that's where we should be focusing the challenges with hydrogen are you can't put it in the existing natural gas system more than about 20 percent or it starts doing brittle the pipes it's a high leakage because it's a very small molecule so and you're talking about having to create uh invest in resources that that that make the hydrogen then you have to invest in significant resources to store it and then you have to convert your natural gas plants or create other uh resources near where you're making it to to convert it back into electricity it's just a significant capital investment to make that all work but we have been

2:03:36 involved we are involved in the Northwest uh hydrogen Hub application process we are looking at what opportunities are out there for that like I said our personal our analysis has said that it's better as a transportation fuel than an energy storage or generation resource so we're at 7 50 and that was quite a bit over this is our part I think we will take the break and then

2:04:21 we'll go to the IRP after the break so we'll come back at 8 o'clock

2:13:54 who starts with anything good evening everyone I'm Brian Booth energy resource officer here at eweb uh joining me up here we have Maine camper uh in this department let's go ahead and jump to it so I will help everybody out by reading a lot of the agenda but then add a little bit of color commentary uh we're going to look at the Strategic importance of the Erp process Ary reports or action plan which is the midnight here and also we're hoping for some wildly Evolution although I'm sorry

2:14:39 to say that much more likely this yes uh so what you'll notice is not the agenda original bond is a full review of the IRP report at the former Florida Authority and available right uh the Strategic importance of the IRP um we expect to be reassembling our power portfolio and trade a new BPA contract to be participating in the western resource adequacy program we expect to be in a semi-automated pricing market and we're also looking at

2:15:27 the expiration of multiple power purchase agreements they currently Supply our power here at 15. well that is a lot uh the IRP is a tool that we use to forecast our needs and the least cost options to fill those needs it is strictly a financial model to go out and do this it is also an iterative process we'll be renewing this every two years and we fully intend to get better at it uh this is the muscle that you would have not used for 10 years prior to this round it is one that's going to get stronger over time see I did want to mention that in addition to being that financial model

2:16:12 we also have to live within the constraints of policy that are set by the board so we intend to reduce our carbon footprint or carbon intensity roughly half uh dropping excuse me increasing our carbon free content to 95 by 2030. I want to add also that this is an industry standard approach where I can find some homes Beauty we've been doing these iterative processes for many many years we're doing it the right way I've seen nothing but good things out of this team lastly I want to say the therapy it informed this strategy it is not a rigid handbook on how to go out and do this it is more like a compass we want to go north the compass Points North but

2:16:58 between now and then we have all kinds of terrain that we can navigate and that's how we're going to look at this as we get into our action plans taking on these two to three year action plans months that we can manage as that train you know enters our look at that thank you um so I am really fortunate to have the opportunity to talk about um where we've been and how we've gotten to where we are today you can see here uh the IRP timeline this shows from December 2022 when we first published our public draft of the IRP uh there are a few things I want to draw your attention to uh the first is that you have all seen the briefings that were

2:17:45 published in response to board and stakeholder feedback and most of these were sent to you in the um to the board in June and you'll also find them in your board packet and on the internet uh the goal of the briefings was to explore areas of community and just by doing a deeper dive into areas of zero carbon resource zero no carbon resources solar utility skill batteries diversity equity and inclusion as well as resource acquisition um the resource acquisition process secondly staff has been added a risk analysis to the sensitivity analysis to show how poor water conditions and high gas prices could impact our feature portfolios finally staff and management work to

2:18:30 prepare a recommended action plan that Brian's already mentioned that I identify key areas of focus for the next two to three years and that is where we're going to spend most of our time today however before passing this on to Ben um this is the end of an 18-month process and so um I know tomorrow we will start our 2025 IRP but before I'm doing that I just want to take a moment and really you know first of all acknowledge the board um you've been engaged you've asked questions you've sat down with us um on your own time and you know provided us with Direction in really um helped us land on what I consider a great Foundation from which we can continue to build and I also want to recognize the customers and their

2:19:16 engagement uh wow we've had some great showings for our briefings and we've taken uh time uh value your valuable time to provide us with feedback I also want to acknowledge our court IRP team which is Ben Ulrich at the lead and then we have um in the back of the room we have John Kreider who is our modeler and Aaron Bush here and go Aaron Bush who as really our researcher and our drafter and then Aaron olowski back there from the communications uh team that ran a really impressive stakeholder process and helped us make our work accessible and understandable to um to really the majority of people so finally this is a cross-functional effort it took people from all over the organization

2:20:03 um from uh customer Solutions and I.T I mean we do we really needed I.T support and um uh Finance as well as well as the broader public planning team so I just think it's important that we say uh thank you to everyone for for getting us where we are today and now I'm going to pass it off to Ben to walk us through our recommended actions to help us go from our 2023 IRP learnings to our 2025 art great okay thanks Megan at work okay so before we dive into the recommended action plan I wanted to go through a list of some of the key insights from this IRP uh so one of the first things that we

2:20:49 want to highlight is that when we forecasted our demand for electricity in the future we're anticipating that electrification is going to be a driver of our growth in the future as we anticipate that our customers start to adopt electric vehicles we also found that our winter Peaks are expected to be our highest periods of demand even as our sour Peaks continue to rise and based on those needs our modeling results showed that UF could need new resources as soon as 2026. using our analytical tools we looked at some potential portfolios and the ideal mix of resources that could be used to meet those needs in the future under we did that under a reference case scenario as well as three different sensitivity portfolios we also did some risk analysis to show

2:21:34 how poor Hydro conditions and high gas prices would impact those portfolios and we included that risk analysis in this final IRP document found that large hydropower from BPA can provide low-cost low carbon energy and could be foundational to our least cost portfolio in the future we also found that our risk analysis showed us that this concentration in Hydro can create Financial uncertainty caused by the water conditions which change annually however over time as eweb diversifies our mix and supplement that Hydro portfolio we can see the impacts of those poor water conditions be less impactful to the total portfolio

2:22:19 eweb looks to supplement our Hydro portfolio we found that wind and batteries are promising options we also found that customer Partnerships will be vital and that customer facing programs like conservation and demand response can play a role in our portfolio as well and lastly we found that low or zero carbon dispatchable resources like geothermal or small modular nuclear or some resource that's still yet to be developed will be needed as part of that least cost fully decarbonized strategy so with those key insights in mind we want to step through the recommended action plan the full text of the recommended action plan can be found in appendix a of the IRP document

2:23:04 this is what we'll be seeking board approval of at the August board meeting management staff sat down to develop a recommended action plan considered our strategic plan organization of organizational values and board policies we started much with a much larger list but managed to narrow it down into eight areas of focus where we can take action in the next two to three years and those actions which are listed on the right hand side of the slide here are what we're going to cover in more detail tonight so the first area of focus is the BPA contract the most impactful resource decision that you will 2028 is the BPA contract today ebub gets about 80 percent of our power from BPA

2:23:49 and the existing contract is expected to is going to expire in September of 2028. we are actively engaged in the post-2028 contract negotiations so that we can understand how much energy and capacity we could get from BPA in the future we want to influence the development of potential products from BPA through active participation in the regional negotiation process in addition we want to analyze those new products to understand how it could change our future portfolio therefore staff is recommending that you have continued to actively engage in the 2028 contract negotiation process and then we analyze those new product infra new products options from BPA as soon as information becomes important next area of focus is conservation and

2:24:36 Energy Efficiency conservation is often a least cost local resource option and euf is already familiar with the program cost-effective Energy Efficiency was selected in our IRP modeling but we aren't certain on exactly how much conservation exists in our community today or how much it would cost to implement those programs purchased conservation can play a role in our in our portfolio but we need to have a better sense of the program Administration costs and the financial incentives that would be required to achieve those savings for this reason staff is recommending a study to look at the cost and potential for conservation in our service territory the results of this conservation potential assessment could be used as an input to our future IRP

2:25:24 the next area focus is demand response demand response is Shifting or shedding of electricity demand in response to the needs of the grid technology advances for both eweb and our customers are creating more opportunities for cost-effective demand response programs some portion of electricity use is discretionary and there are opportunities to partner with our customers to shift their payment demands to other parts of the day in our IRP modeling we found the off-peak electric vehicle charging and shifting our customer demand away from our existing system Peaks presenting a meaningful savings opportunity for the portfolio we also um so because of this staff is recommending that we look at a study to look at the value cost and potential for

2:26:09 demand response in our service territory it can be used as a future input to our irps and help us understand how Dr programs could be used to create value for all e-web customers we also recommend that you have develop a product plan to understand what Dr programs we should roll out to our customers first the next area of focus is around existing resource contracts we know that several of our local resource contracts are set to expire in the next five years and that will create new resource needs you have already has relationships with Sierra Pacific International Paper and the University of Oregon and we recommend engaging with our local resource owner operators to understand their future plans and identify areas

2:26:54 where eweb and the local generators may have mutual interests next area of focus is around future resource contracts our IRP analysis showed that it's likely evil Ewa will need to buy new resources in the future therefore staff are recommending that we develop a resource acquisition strategy and a decision framework that can guide our future investment decisions this decision framework can be an expanded triple bottom line approach and will consider our strategic priorities board policies and our values this new strategy and decision framework could be used to translate our IRP strategy into a procurement strategy the next area of focus is the market and a market impact analysis there are two

2:27:41 impactful Western Market initiatives that will influence eweb's future resource decisions the first is the Western resource adequacy program more commonly called The Wrap which is focused on reliability this program will likely impose a planning Reserve margin onto e-web meaning eweb and other utilities will be required to carry reserved capacity in the future to ensure grid reliability second Market initiative is the formation of a day ahead organized Market in the Northwest this would be a significant change in the way energy is traded it would mean shifting from a system of bilateral trades today to one where market prices are formed through bidding into a centralized Market

2:28:26 formation of a day ahead Market will be very impactful for energy trading in the Northwest and could come as soon as 2026. is recommending that you AB track and identify the opportunities and impacts that these Market initiatives could have on our wholesale operations we also need to consider the impacts that these could that these markets could have to eweb's business model to prepare eweb will need to identify the Investments required in people and processes in order to participate in these new market constructs this analysis can help us get there the next area focuses ongoing IRP refinements as an industry electric utilities are constantly changing our assumptions and adapting to new conditions we've done a

2:29:12 lot of work to establish and establish an initial set of tools and assumptions for this IRP and like all other utilities we've learned a lot along the way we see opportunities to use continuous Improvement to enhance our input assumptions and our modeling approach as a result staff is recommending that we take the time to update our modeling assumptions to incorporate supply chain cost increases new tax incentives and information from developers like what we just heard from energy Northwest uh we also see the need to improve and expand our new resource options in the model for example including things like geothermal

2:29:58 and lastly uh the next area of focus is preparation for the next IRP uh Brian tease me says this is this fun the fun thing about irps is that you kick off the next one as soon as you finish this one and that was a good question because I said oh it's kind of fun uh but but it really it's it's really kicking off a brand new work stream where you get to build on what we've done so far and so our next IRP is going to align with the vpa contract decision and we hope it will include more information about your command response and conservation and so staff is looking that uh is recommending that we look at those key inputs now get started on that right away we want to have a specific focus on incorporating those new potential BPA products and we want to ensure that the conservation potential assessment and the demand

2:30:45 response study are completed in a timely fashion in order to be used as an input into our next IRP so in addition to the eight areas of focus we're recommending uh the recommended action plan includes some recommended strategy updates for the next few years the first strategy update is for conservation we recommend adjusting from our previous strategy of meeting all load growth with conservation to meeting most of our load growth with conservation this will allow us to keep our existing conservation targets stable and sustainable while we take the time to do a deeper dive with con the conservation potential assessment for our resource acquisition strategy we recommend meeting our near-term resource gaps with Market purchases under our

2:31:31 existing risk management policies this will allow us to meet our near term near-term needs while working to develop a more formal resource acquisition strategy to help us make long-term resource decisions we also recommend continuing our stakeholder stakeholder engagement strategy focusing on building trust and confidence with our customers while educating and soliciting feedback and we also want to work to incorporate diversity equity and inclusion principles into our IRP work we know that other utilities are doing similar work and we want to adapt our processes as we learn more about Dei so with that we can open up for more discussion and feedback on the recommended action plan

2:32:16 it's our plan to bring the recommended action plan back for board approval at the August board meeting and no break and we can open up the discussion thank you three minutes um I have um a couple of questions for you so one is about the BPA contract there seems to be like a lot of mystery around it because we don't know what they're going to offer or what they're gonna do um and when will we have more on that uh Bonneville is coming out with a draft policy broad record of decision uh at

2:33:02 the end of this month and what that will do is we'll it will give us some indication of the policy that um that they're looking at and then we'll have an ability to influence that as a you know as a region as we work with all the other utilities and then indeed I think it's December January they'll be putting out a final draft policy and then after that we move into um talking about products we translate the policy into products so in early 2024 we'll be looking at products products and contract language and that will take us down into about the end of 2025 and then people will start redoing their analysis the beginning of 25 and sign by October of 2025. that is the plan

2:33:47 um my other question is about the resource acquisition strategy so there's a lot of exciting new developments that are happening right in the energy sector with the IRA there's all this money but um how would we plan for it when there's a lot of possibilities out there but there's nothing that's really like online yet and even if the technology is possible there's so much with like permitting and Licensing and that kind of stuff gets in the way so how do we actually plan for that some thoughts on that but I ended up with Brian if you had any thoughts on the strategy side of it initial thought editing the exact Gap that we see right now too we shared our modeling results

2:34:33 with everyone and said this is just a just as a forecast to potential options and so the first thing we want to do is refine our assumptions now so we want to talk to developers we want to see incorporate supply chain but we're seeing this resource acquisition strategy and procurement strategy as being something we need to sit down and think about more and communicate with the board about and I think that's why we're recommending it as an action plan to better articulate how we're going to translate modeling results into an actual acquisition strategy so I don't have a concrete answer yet but I think we're seeing that need and that's why we're recommending it as an action right but I do want to just follow up in that we have been here before we've been you know we we have staff that have gone through this and that that we we look

2:35:19 and we we talk to you we look at our values and we say what do we want to do more research on and then we do actually that we we could do an RFI or a request for information we can do an RFP and then we look at what we get I mean this is this is there are some standards um I guess processes around that um and so it's not like we're coming in cold but what I think is this um uh this strategy will provide help us do is all be on the same page with where we are and how how we how we all see this occurring I just want a really quick comment is that um doing tonight is we're not we're not voting to approve or recommend specific resources we are just looking

2:36:04 at this Strat this these actions to explore what our possibilities are so I just want to be clear about that because I don't want people to think that because we had a presentation tonight on nuclear what we're doing is we're voting to say yes we're going to go nuclear or we heard it's been on green hydrogen but we're just exploring what our options are that's really what yeah that's really what as Brian said earlier that's really what an IRP is it's it's giving us that Compass of where we have all these things that are happening where are our priorities where do we need to start looking into the future and that's um that that's exactly what exactly what we're doing and you know we are lucky because we keep saying we have time right no 26 cells you know along but but we do have we're in we're going in the

2:36:49 right direction um thank you thank you for the presentation and uh what do you think that actions I like them thank you but clarify on you said that water volatility uh will have an impact on that you know so this year there is 70 percent there are so how's that affecting us financially or Supply wise if I mean if a 30 deviation from the norm doesn't affect this then why is it a concern but if another fact of how has it affected us this year it doesn't affect us and you'll see it in the budget monitoring results that we're getting this year that it does hurt our portfolio and so we did the risk analysis and it showed that today we can see a 10 cost change in our

2:37:35 portfolio just because of water conditions alone and so it does impact impact us today and in the risk analysis we kind of found that um as our portfolio we start adding more resources that are not Hydro it diminish diminishes our concentration it's like stocks and bonds are diversifying your portfolio so in a way as we add other resources other than Hydro it makes the impact of that water condition less impactful to the total event that makes sense and then the next day at that thing about my hand moves like that the next day pricing or whatever that was so at one time we used to do the trading for other utilities because of our trades were we still doing that and schedule we do yes we schedule Friday we

2:38:20 schedule for us it's okay between is that the same concept you're talking about here is doing that I mean explain that to me because I can't follow it so let me let me get the 30-second overview on on what this means yeah uh scheduling would still exists um a lot of change in automated Market would be the pricing so instead of the Traders picking up the phone and negotiating price over the phone and all in our resources into a centralized market and decide the price okay and if you're a bid it's below the clearing price it's a UE web turn on your resources above the clear price we don't okay so our physical operations still

2:39:07 look very much the same it's the pricing it's just the way you could operate within it but okay thank you very much I would just so if you own stocks today if you don't start calling up people saying do you want to buy my stock or you go on E-Trade and you put conditions in there and the market operator which is E-Trade manages that for you it's a similar sort of rough analogy moving from a bilateral Market to an organized Market there's a market operator that manages when you may or may not turn on resources or may or may not sell resources depending on the price thank you

2:39:56 I like the idea that we are moving right from one hierarchy into the next so I I have a couple of questions first is if we were to drop biological or nuclear from the mile here when it's supposed to hit in 2042 in this iteration in this through your window how much of an effect did that have on on yeah I can't speak to that off the top of my head I guess uh but it would not be very material on the reference case because it was only 10 megawatts so really small so like one percent of your portfolio it would have a small impact under the reference

2:40:42 but community-wise it would have a large impact just from what we saw here today and and I think maybe you know we good look at it in the Next Generation what it did show was when we looked at sensitivities the more we turn up growth the more nuclear was pulled in and the more and the nearerment was pulled in so there was a sensitivity there that the more growth we are forecasting the more nuclear becomes applicable uh that's because we look at the two-year action plan there is nothing up there that says

2:41:27 we're going to go build a nuclear plant so it has really it and I would actually you know since this meeting also we're having the long-term financial plan discussion an IRP is basically a long-term financial plan but the board actually ends up doing is approving the next year's budget and in this case you're approving the action plan I understand that and I'm just looking at it politically and yeah and the the perception that we have we put out a we put out a thing and we got 30 people showing up thinking that we're building a nuclear plant on our on rose on our space in Roseville and I'm just

2:42:19 and in our next iteration of it we hope to be able to button iterations so we could give you a with and without nuclear right that would give you a dollar number I want to figure out it means some number of additional dollars we'd have to spend on a replacement resource and that's a decision that we would it's some minimum amount I would imagine that we all prefer not to and whether we come back and say it only cost a billion dollars to not build an interest then we need to have a serious conversation about it um the next question I have is other utilities are doing irps as well I was Bill 2021 said that investors in all utilities

2:43:04 need to be 100 percent free by a Time specific how are they what are they doing in their irps to reach that last five percent and is that something that we can look at in future irps going forward because if we can if other Utilities in the state are doing it by mandate they have to do it it would be interesting to know in the next iteration what that is costing them and are we in a position to be able to do some of the same things that's a really good I think that's a really good point I think I also want to point out what Brian said earlier is that the the approach we're taking is very standard and it's very

2:43:51 standard to a way sure I go can it finish here I thought it was the Android um so the approach is pretty standard it's real very standard and and so just to as you heard Greg Collins talk about how Pacific core is investing in in the smrs they do they are including you know smrs and all of the available technology in the next 10 years that's pretty standard um in their irps and then they get their results and then they have you know they have the puc but then they have boards that look at it and say okay now now what are we going to do with that information um and and so but yeah sorry go ahead yeah so I was just going to add on I mean it is not there is not currently an identified solution involved

2:44:38 so P Portland General Electric there are IRP specifically says we can meet the 2030 goals which are I think right so it's they're moving from not particularly those apartments with lower carbon by 2030 they can meet that with existing Technologies and then their IRP says we do not yet have the technology identified to meet the 2040 goal we have put in SMR as kind of a proxy it gets a potentially viable technology right there's a lot of uncertainty around all these things people are making bets on different things Portland General said for this iteration we don't have the answer yet and that's what I was discovering from is that you know the people who have the sharp stick

2:45:25 pointed at their back we might be able to learn from them I was going to say commissioner barovsky in September uh the executive director of the Pacific Northwest utility conference movie is going to present to this group for public regional forecast and that is the accumulation of all of the irfps in the region so there'll be a few things like the mystery resource that was identified there's also they have to do carbon reduction plans along with their irps and there are some costs off ramps for that as well so it's a little bit of a different environment thank you that'll be September

2:46:15 yeah thanks um thank you as always for the presentation um and the the packet we provided it is super helpful um I have one question about the sensitivity analyzes that we did um the high electrification scenario which I mean certainly I don't think is a good movie um there were a couple of stressors that came with that that I have questions about so one is that as I read it and tell me if I have this right that the the most of the increase of peak in that scenario or in that sensitivity comes from unmanaged charging is that right yes and that's true with the reference case as well do we we think that will happen that we'll have a scenario where there's an unmanaged to be charity don't we have a huge influence on whether or

2:47:00 not your Contracting is managed or at home yeah when when Brian first started at UF he kind of referred to it as a problem statement so when we think about our Peaks if we do nothing to intervene what what would our portfolio look like and that's why we did the managed EV charging scenario as well to show how that one assumption is very meaningful but you're right I think UF does plan to influence on customers Behavior yeah right yeah so as I think about the that combined with like the low transmission scenario those combined bring the the need for the mystery generation in this case SMR that we end up talking about brings that kind of forward in time as you said right and I just think it feels like that we have a lot of influence

2:47:45 over at least that piece and then the other piece of the high electrification scenario is um is 50 right of residential units that are heated with natural gas get electrified uh and I don't I haven't done all the math exactly but I think it's about there's like 20 000 units residential units right that's not right um so we're looking at 10 000 residential units that would have to be electrified over the next 17 years which is 600 units a year and we're currently doing the issue like it's a that would be amazing I hope we can do that and also it's hard for me to I'm not sure maybe the IRP incentives get us there you will know better than

2:48:32 than we do okay that's a huge bump right something dangerous and look into my crystal ball yeah you have one I'm an economist significantly cheaper than central air conditioning yeah so the extent the people Central Energy and occasionally needs to be replaced is they're a little bit less expensive incentives to a selling which now means that they'll have a dual something like 80 percent of their heater that is a considerable amount of life

2:49:18 uses the systems typically switch over to gas when it gets below 30 35 degrees right or peaking gets pushed onto Northwest Natural right um I could definitely see the 600 a year just imagining the rate at which air conditioners fail that's super helpful thank you all right well optimism application uh two other questions and and then I'll then here um we've talked a little bit last month about um just the local locally controlled power um like what keyword has control over especially if there's like a regional power outage you know what are we able to manage ourselves um and I'm curious do we know what the percentage of locally controlled assets

2:50:04 or generation definitely looks like my head is what percentage is local yeah and maybe it's on an average I don't know and I would just put forward that as we're thinking about the future energy Supply resources that number five there um that maybe that's something we think about is you know what's our current amount of local generation and I would propose that we try and keep it there over time at least not backstep on what we have controlled locally another interesting comparison would be what um what kind of generation is required to meet just fundamental needs so running hospitals and fire stations and police stations and e-web facilities and and

2:50:49 water you know the skeletal water system like if we could have that in mind as we're thinking about how much Global generation do we want I think this would be valuable to bake into number five and then lastly I think this action plan is is spot on in terms of all the things we need to do so thanks for viewing them McRae I think that also applies to number four up there which is the existing contract sure so both four and five yeah there's a resiliency component to that and I think that's kind of what we've been talking about incorporating that policy into this process you know yeah agreed

2:51:39 okay um I agree with the recommended actions I know that we're just providing Direction we'll come back and vote on it next month um but is it possible to provide a scenario plug it in pops out really quick where nuclear is not on the table yes for informational purposes and if we give that does it influence any of these decisions on here or is that it's so far in the future that it really doesn't hacked the direction of any of these I would certainly you know by looking at what what action items we have and all that we need to do I would certainly recommend that we start getting to work on the future and then we have a

2:52:24 conversation around the 2025 hierarchy so the decision that we're making it doesn't touch that what we do so there's time to touch that later but I I do also appreciate what John barowski was saying because I know that we got a lot of feedback today because we would put out a hey we're we're going to have nuclear in our portfolio as a news item which none of us knew about until it was already in the media and I know that that definitely ruffled many feathers so it just I would maybe like to put out a show of like Hey we're actually not doing this or publicly yes it's a consideration down the road but that's not we're

2:53:09 making a decision on this tonight we had 16 people that came and gave us a lot of feedback and we don't get a lot of people that come down even for very big decisions so if I want to also kind of clarify is that the the model is it doesn't say we're considering it it's it's it's we're running a model you know that's based on that's not what the people see I mean if you are a lay person in the community this is a an option this is a portfolio that they think that we are voting on it's not you can tell me that all day long but that's not what the public sees so we have a public perception challenge that is very different than what the process is here so to whatever extent we can disconnect those two and make that message a lot clearer for the public I

2:53:54 would appreciate that that's I'll take on some of that commissioner Carlson um I also think people read too much into it I I read the releases I approved the releases and they didn't say anything about us going out and buying nuclear what they said was we need to consider this kind of resource and here's a couple of examples of those kinds of resources and so there is nothing in here that says Fine Line it says that we have to consider these things and I believe we should keep it in the modeling we should keep natural gas in the modeling because how else are we going to know what the best choices are whether it picks that or not and so we

2:54:41 have people saying take it out of the modeling don't consider it it's an evil word and that's wrong we are taking so many resources off the table what's left on the table because this is this is gonna this is headed a bad direction from a regional from an industry perspective if we start taking things off the table because people show up and don't like it and I'm not saying that it's anywhere in here that we're going to go build a nuclear station but we need to keep it in our consideration okay Mom fine with things these are the costs I mean from an economics background here are the costs and benefits of each of these things that's how I feel like

2:55:26 we need to approach it hey we throw everything in the mix so we can look at the costs and benefits of each of these things and we can be clear with the community about okay we looked at all of these different options and we decided hey maybe these are not the best option because the costs are really terrible or it's going to cost three billion dollars to do this or whatever that is um but that needs to be very clear that our methodology is include everything from a neutral perspective but not we are going out and we're doing this because when you put out a singular press release in the media that says we're considering nuclear that that to me sends a totally different message but but all from there anyway

2:56:13 you've got to counter that a little bit but I saw that information the presentation this evening that the current administration's Department have introduced spending people by billion dollars just so people can research and tell give me a message too that the current the current Administration the house the Senate everybody else Department of energy is wants to look at it and I don't see anything different from that than what we're doing there's no way in hell you're going to pass a nuclear uh thing and the special this town level of the state it's against the law it's not going to change the law but I agree with Frank that it's it's important that we consider it in there just like we consider gas and you know and I've been through the Seneca thing and uh how bad that was perceived and turned out to be in my opinion not not

2:56:58 as bad as everybody thought so I keep it on the table keep it considered but then at the end it's it's our decision and we listen to the people that put us here and so be it but I I agree we probably should have it in the model along with everything else just to see how you know because there's not just the economics of it there's the social you know it's like the triple bottom line we've got all a lot more than just money and resource adequacy and and he's right you know if 40 of our electricity in Oregon is generated by gas and coal what are we going to do because gas is no longer legal and coal is going away and that's a big chunk so I'm gonna be the dead person all right anything else

2:57:43 all right do you have what you need okay thank you okay now I'm going to bring up the next item with Dr Rob we could potentially move this to the next month well Wildfire mitigation plan are there any objections to moving that to the next month yeah I haven't I have a problem with that I mean we just had an urban Wildfire last week suspended the news that it's an important it's an important topic to talk about again a staff person sitting in the back of the room for five hours now don't you worry about little old meme that's just my feeling I mean I was I

2:58:30 was I saw that I saw that hail burning last Friday and it was disheartening you know I've had meetings till 11 just like we don't get invested yes when the person who's giving me you know what liquor right and you know I tried to provide options this is what I get for it okay all right well then we'll continue on that's what I'm hearing thank you yes oh I threw temp slides very quickly and just gives you as much time as possible okay uh I think Tyler next is going to join me so

2:59:25 so we're here to discuss some potentially for a wildfire mitigation plan for the calendar year 23 24. if you are like me when we talked about this last July that feels like a decade ago so I'm just gonna like super high level just recap you did your initial plan and the goals for that initial plan award let's meet the PC compliance which is still forthcoming we didn't even know what the rules were when you approve the plan and adopt best practices were practical so our Focus areas were identify which parts of our service Terrier are at highest risk for Wildfire focus on preventative maintenance including like bench management safety Patrols in those areas improve our situational awareness we put the weather station in at Hayden Bridge we have a new alert Wildfire camera and really

3:00:10 engage our partners in helping us develop this plan and I really want to put a shout out to our Communications team because they did a fantastic job last year a portfolio of great news media coverage to bring awareness and we needed that because in September we called our PSPs event if we hadn't already had that like people paying attention I don't think we would have been as successful in alerting those customers that they're going to be without power for 36 hours so that it really did pay off and I thanked them a lot for that um part of your adopting that plan was including plan metrics and as well as this annual Cadence so you can see all the metrics in the back of the plan but you know last year we were able to run through a number of different projects everything from Fields mitigation work

3:00:55 to what I think is our biggest project was removal of about 31 miles of transmission line and why that's important is we also were able to use that project to reconfigure the distribution under build remove some seven dozen or so power cross arms which basically removes a point of failure from our system for better reliability but also increases clearance around the trees so that's a great kind of two for one project that we were able to accomplish last year good news here is that if you look at this list you can see that we are doing the work we're meeting your targets and I think exceeding them on the not so great news you just alluded to this commissioner Broski is would we talk about the 2023 Wildfire

3:01:41 season you know we went into it pretty good this spring we had lots of rain lots of snow drought conditions were favorable looking better in Oregon and then um with still some drought conditions but then we moved into may work up very hot and they forecast an El Nino pattern for the rest of this year starting in August and what that means not a meteorologist but it means hotter drier especially for the northern half of Oregon and we saw that come to fruition because and on July 4th 5th we had our first Wildfire right in our backyard 35 acres cost still undetermined and preceding that a Red Flag Warning on July 3rd so these always happen on the weekends when everybody's trying to go out on vacation Tyler and I work list

3:02:28 communication so that was fun um so um as we think about this next year's plan we're really focusing on operational Readiness but also honing and on some of our um some of our research and development so a couple things we're doing this year that are new just to bring to your attention we'll do our first PSPs tabletop exercise and that's really to test our decision making criteria test some tools in the field and work on the notification process because we really want to keep communication is like the most important part of PSPs so we want to keep practicing that we're procuring local weather forecasting for fire weather so that will start off Friday we'll start getting daily forecasts using our local

3:03:13 weather station but some other weather stations and that will help us make those really hard decisions if we need to call a PSPs should we do it when do we do it and when do we get people's power back on so just Gathering better information and data and we've also started tracking ignition events from from bird related outages and I'm sorry data so we're trying we're tracking both ignition and bird related outage data so these are new data points and the purpose of that is to help us figure out where there could be parts of our system where we want to do future finishing thick I'm turning this over to you Tyler thank you so you're going to run through so Tyler nice lecture division manager thanks for the time on this important

3:03:59 topic as you noted so in timely so for this year our operational Readiness that we do every year is kind of a layered approach so Janine mentioned some of them every year we go out and we inspect our components of our system in these circuits we take a look at clearances for vegetation and we make that number one priority to trim so the the component Replacements that were identified those are in progress and we're getting close to the end of that the vegetation side of things did get done things the week before last week of June so we kind of beat that that rise in fire level so that's the goal every year next thing we do is we partner with the Oregon Department of Forestry they came and they trained all our crews and the new protocols or anything changed fire safety and they go out and inspect all of our trucks and tooling and pump trailers make sure we have the right

3:04:45 flows because we need those in place so do work throughout the year and respond so check check and then the the third thing we look at is Improvement on last year's operational protocols one of them that we're noting that that Janine uh hinted on was our protective settings our power line protective settings that that we've enacted and it's a benchmark thing around utilities so last year original plan if you remember going into it was anytime we have a red flag we're going to go out and make those settings more sensitive when the red flag leaves we're gonna went back to quote-unquote normal what we learned pretty quickly is those red flags can come without warning basically really quick and they can be short-lived and it became pretty burdensome to be able to respond to that quickly with the work needed so what we migrated to was

3:05:32 keeping it on for all of Fire season another thing that we've seen other utilities do after we benchmarked this iteration of the plan sticks with that so learning more and getting uh tuned in on the notifications tighter for odf and National Weather Service those settings go into effect when it goes to level two or moderate which happened July 1st June 30th and then they'll stay in until it goes back down to low which you know you don't know but it could be September or the October kind of time frame uh if we're on the shoulder kind of times of that where it's where it's low but there's still possibilities of fire danger and red flag we will do the on and off there that that decision came from we reflected on the outages and the reliability impacts from that decision last year which was you know more on the

3:06:18 conservative side and it was really unanimous impact so we kept that decision so those are kind of three operational Readiness points and we can go to the next one oh yeah so because when we're insensitive and it can take longer to restore so we changed our outage speed so if you go out and you look up an outage you'll see where the highest fire zones are and that will help alert people that if you have an outage and you're in the orange section you might experience a longer restoration time because we are going to go out and Patrol those lines so is another piece of you know public awareness on the research and development we're calling it another layered approach here um you know one piece that we're looking

3:07:05 at is posted here yes sir well this is your show and tell Mom sir I got something to build up I got to build up I gotta build up to it modeling and investment so uh one of the things we're doing another tail on from last year is continue on with our modeling of fire Behavior fire risk and that's going to focus our investments on certain areas in these circuits second layer of that is relying more on boots on the ground experience so we're we're putting resources to doing lots of ride-alongs lots of anal analysis of outages with the crews that respond to it because they have some really specific pinpointed improvements we could do the third one which is the props an example of new technology uh is

3:07:50 uh non-explosion infuses so this is a normal fuse and this one is a non-expulsion fuse you can see they're different sizes they act differently electrically the non-expulsion fuse is another Benchmark thing that we're looking into actually signed a study this week with a consultant to study applicability in our system and impact reliability and it really in decreases the possibility of ignition so that's something you can see it's a different form factor take some construction standard changes some are hoping to get to the bottom of this here and then do a pilot on so if you have any juice left in you at the end of the night you want to mess with these and taking Parts see how they work I can show you uh but that's that's the three examples of research and development along with and out of those

3:08:36 first two projects will be spawned is the idea and then lastly I just want to talk about the another news initiative as a PSPs support program so when we learned last year and a lot of other utilities are looking at this that they're a segment of customers who are especially vulnerable during an outage so these are folks with have a medical need for power because they have equipment or they have Mobility constraints so we are doing a trying to create an opt-in program where these folks can let us know that they have special needs and if they sign up for the program we'll do personalized notifications in advance of a PSPs make sure they know that this is happening make sure they have a safety plan and then they can also request additional services like I need to be able to get

3:09:21 transportation to a hotel or Community Service Center or I need help evacuating or I would like a welfare check because I'm not leaving my house but come make sure I'm okay or Uncle Bob's okay we wouldn't do those kinds of services but we partner with our interagency partners help us make sure that folks are safe during a prolonged out end and I'm going to wrap up so um you know the pace of change on the ground is really fast we're seeing that in fact climate change right around us the technology Investments are changing and we are positioning ourselves to advance our mitigation work and our response capabilities to effectively buy down the risks that our equipment's involved in a fire so how we're doing in that is we're monitoring best practices we're bringing in outside expertise well

3:10:07 where do we feel stuff to Bubble Up those projects and start building that pipeline of projects and I'd expect to see our investments accelerating over time that could even go faster if the couple of Grant applications that we are part of a Consortium are successful we should know in August or September we have two federal grants and then there's a couple of state grants that we're also looking at so we can't do this alone we're working with our customers to build that risk awareness and and continue to move forward we've been to the season so I'm going to stop there note that the draft is in your packet had a couple of typos that some Eagle Eye stuff figured out thank you very much so those are but we'll go to the PDC we'll have those Corrections plus delivered coupons

3:11:13 last year when we moved and bumped it up we have a ballpark of how many times it got tripped and how many times we had to go out and do it and and how much more that is going to be if we're running it from July to October for the for the whole season there was about six trips that that we would say was due to those settings you know our full feeder trips uh I think there's two of them that we we would call um did we want those to happen you know you'll never know the right answer for that but uh that's about the scale it was you know it's field work extra field work but it was well worth it and you know like I said we kept the decision to do that so but but that was six in for all of Fire season so from about June when we enabled it to the first couple things of October here

3:12:04 through the end of October okay so theoretically this year could be instead of three months to four months but I think but it wasn't a huge number yeah the two on the end were if you remember it started raining very quickly it felt like uh and I went from dry to dry to wet and those those ones were right on the end when when it was pouring outside and we had tripped and had to ask ourselves should we keep this in okay um and that on the last slide something that just kind of came up to me was and this isn't immediate but I think that if we're going to have red flags and total shutoffs electrical vehicle charging it's going to be something that we're going to need to to think about because if you're down for 36 hours and fire starts and you don't have any

3:12:50 battery this is as we get more and more electrified I think that that's another thing yeah where you know each year we're learning I think that that's one other thing no question on your map that showed the area especially up the river um doesn't Lane electric have a big part of that because of the key says electric service area and it surrounds the entire McKenzie Valley doesn't that isn't all our our series that this map ends up Tunnel right there but that is the end of our service territory and then on both electric picks up and so that we have two other room equipment that we provide Power and safety and substation

3:13:35 that serves the other electric utility in the area are we going to shut those substations off and quit providing power to other utilities Holden Creek for example like you're talking about that without feed Blue River so that's a partnership like the one last year for example that was a shared discussion with vpa Lane electric and us we wouldn't unless there's an emergency situation we wouldn't do that unilaterally and then liability I know that you look at our torque claims or all our claimsy stuff and every time we have a power outage somebody's ice cream melts and we get the suit for it um if we do a voluntary shut off because of a Red Flag Warning do we still have liability for when we re-energize their you know all the TVs go out and then the computers blow up and we get claims for those are we still liable for that if

3:14:20 it's about or we'll get claims but the determination of them are very divert to our claims department answer the process to go through that but and that's that's fine no guarantee of service right so um yeah I think the what makes a PSPs a little different is that we strive to give at least 24 hours notice so people can make decisions about surge protectors or unplugging their equipment or plugging in their electric vehicles so it's fully charged or going to the gas station and getting gas because Gas Stations don't work where there's no power like these kinds of things the purpose of of trying to get as much advanced warning and predicting mother nature which is really really challenging is to in invite people to be ready for power

3:15:07 interruptions because they're going to happen more frequently whether it's because of summer or winter storms we just are seeing more extreme weather and this is It's kind of runs you know opposite of how we've acted as a utility for a hundred years we've talked about reliability reliability reliably now we're saying actually you have to be prepared for outages thank you I really like the plan um any questions based on this map so the fire that sprung up is actually outside of our territory right so are we looking at but I mean obviously a fire can spread very easily do we is there anything that we do or think about on those edges where it's still high risk I mean it's surprising to me that that is the only

3:15:53 area that is truly high risk where you know some of those other areas around there are still again I can't tell exactly so they're still fairly heavily forced in that whole Southern section caution that these are the preliminary High fire visones that we had to pull together to get the plan in time right so the analysis that we were talking about is to contract for a phase two risk analysis and this will be way more in depth and I think we're going to get better quality information so these boundaries can't change okay uh thank you that's it for me by the same token though I'll say there might be some things in there that are not high risk fire zones so we don't have to shut off as many people are in order to

3:16:39 have that consideration so it should be a win-win to get the more detailed study if there's another discussion I think we need a motion very quickly just um say thank you for the presentation thank you for the work on this uh it's super unsettling to me that we're in this position in this place super proud to be part of utility it's taking it so seriously and being so adaptive Forward Thinking so thank you I really appreciate it appreciate the attention you're making to um so we're dealing with medical equipment consistential um so that's all thank you again super supportive of everything thank you

3:17:28 uh move to adopt to approve second hey we are moving on financial plan president Carlson Commissioners good evening we have a team effort here to

3:18:15 talk about a number of different things relative to combination of the long-term financial plan of the capital Improvement plans as well as the impact and projected impact on the revenue requirement which ultimately results in rates kick things off and then I'll pass it to Rod to go through some of the assumptions Karen will talk about the capital pieces of it and capital priorities and then Deborah will bring it all together with the outcome when it comes to to the impact on our finances uh just a little bit of a this is really the the bottom line up front is kind of a summary of everything I'll just touch

3:19:00 on a few things first of all on the electric side we have included um in the plan to include the pre-funding for the lieberge name that has resulted about an 8.2 percent uh rough impact on the rates over the tension View and water or the electric side has over the the course of the the plan which is a 10-year long-term financial plan the average annual yearly increases a little over what we had originally targeted in that two to four percent range it's pushed that up to a little over four percent on the water side

3:19:45 um we do have um we did move in about 15 million dollars of spending into the the near-term years the water side does include the investment in a second Source um and over the 10-year view the average is about six and a quarter percent uh on the average annual rate increases uh over the life of of the plan again that's that's a little bit outside of what we wanted to do um from our original benchmarking to inflation uh some of that is because of the Investments we're making some of it is also because as as you can imagine and even Commissioners have asked for us to make some slightly different assumptions around inflationary impacts we are seeing some some rate pressures that are pretty specific to our industry

3:20:32 but not to eweb including some of the labor market pressures that we're we're building supply chain pressures and expenses we're also on the Waterside seeing some declining in the consumption going forward that's a pretty typical pattern it's not just e-web I think that's we're seeing that across the uh probably the United States uh the per capita water consumption and number that which is consumer behavior is is decreasing and that puts a little more pressure on the the fixed cost uh Henley into the remaining consumption that we're we're forecasting and and we're also in incorporating a little bit of the inflation that we're seeing this year into the long-term financial plan going forward so we've

3:21:18 already experienced some of this inflation that we're now forecasting into the future but on the water side we're still in good position um relative to our comparators and the electric rates on the electric side will be mid-tier on the water side where the second lowest in the region well probably after even with the Second Source investment be in the in the lower third would be it would be my estimate after investing in a second source so pretty quite a bit of Headroom on the water side from a market perspective there's a little bit of context as far as where we are the board has the opportunity uh through this process on the left there to provide input and guidance relative to economic assumptions and also strategic

3:22:04 assumptions this is really an ongoing cycle where we look at our our strategic plan our priorities we look at our economic assumptions assumptions those who feed into the the green box there which is when we're looking at our long-term financial plan Capital plans which are fed by a number of different Master plans that ultimately results that we come back to the board for our annual budget approvals at the end of the year as well as our specific rate development process so ultimately concludes in some public hearings as well as final approval of the budgets and the rates this is kind of where this is a

3:22:49 reiteration of that we're in in June July and we'll have a number of different events between on the end of the year including and to public hearings on on the rates down I'm going to pass it to Rod who's going to run through some of the priorities on the Strategic and the economic side democology uh thanks Frank um uh I think he covered the the it was kind of like even sort of listening to this conversation and thinking about the IRP so the IRP is a model so uh Deb don't don't hurt me here but I kind of see the the financial system as a model you know I know there's dollars and cents and all that but remember we've talked about turning those dials and everything and so um Frank highlighted the input that the

3:23:36 board gets to have this process right so what we did was of course this is all in your background or so I don't want to go through each piece specifically detail but uh these are the particular strategic and operational guidance points that the importance to weigh in on I think Nebraska you asked about the second source for instance so part of our strategic goals from our strategic plan is to become more resilient by adding a second source for instance so this is a an input here where say hey this is very important due to our strategic plan we have a second Source in here to create some resilience and so much like last year

3:24:21 um focusing on those same strategic areas reliability and compliance and then investing in programs and projects that increase resiliency the one exception the one difference from last year is and this will be covered a couple of places but the the addition of the the leepburg refunding decommissioning to the electric plan um otherwise pretty much everything else is the same one piece of feedback we did take it's around the customer care we got some feedback from the board about how how that gets funded and how it's calculated and the amounts that go into that so we've taken a preliminary look at modeling or creating a different

3:25:07 model around how that's been created foreign um the other area of interest is the cost escalation so as you look at the the economic forecast assumptions

3:25:54 um Frank talked about this a little bit um due to feedback last year about making sure we're accounting for in the last year or two and even here in the economic index we've got the escalators uh higher than the the forecasted Federal and cost escalation amounts um those in the long-term Financial return back to the quote unquote normal three percent three percent money is fascinating I know and it's been um the uh

3:26:40 again the assumptions are pretty similar to what we had last year to put in the model and after it's all said and done all our financial targets are being bad which Karen's going to talk about projects I wanted to pause right here before I turn it over uh and see if there's any questions about those assumptions of that um

3:27:30 chief operations officer and I get to talk about the Investments that we'd like to make um here and the coming 10 years so just a reminder that in order to continue to safely execute our strategic plan we have to continue to invest in the systems through our Capital Improvement planning process this year's 10-year plan continues that progress on projects that we put forth over the last couple of years and it meets our strategic plan goals of completing all compulsory work maintaining reliability including the delivery and and quality and safety of our products as well as increasing resiliency and really targeting projects that can't do that for us to increase that and just want to remind folks too that that we're talking about these projects from source to Tab and source

3:28:16 to switch so from every aspect of our systems so starting out with the water utility our plan components are essentially the same in this coming 10-year period as we provided to you in the last 10-year period so we're continuing to invest in the systems and ramp up towards Second Source construction which is beginning in 2025 our type 1 work includes compulsory service and pipeline work immersion and planned minor facility work as well as information systems and Fleet equipment replacement our type 2 work continues-based level Reservoir Replacements transmission system upgrades as well as shared service projects including eweb Enterprise Solutions and the bertelson property expansion

3:29:02 type 3 is primarily the second water treatment plant on the Willamette River and you can find a really good summary of kind of the board process in the background or from October 2021 meeting so that would be a good one to go back and take a look at if you you know need a refresher on where we were and where we've gone to this slide I just want to say up front this is just highlights of the plan from 2023 to 2024 in other words what has changed in that amount of time these numbers aren't going to add up so um I'm looking at the finance people don't look at that just take in the the big chunks out and and highlighting some of those things so um the overall plan

3:29:47 is 342 million and it's down 3 million or approximately 0.9 percent from last year's 10-year plan as Frank and Rod mentioned earlier the water utility is experiencing higher rate pressure to to cost escalation including inflation labor ongoing supply chain disruptions and movement of some of the shared service project costs to earlier in the 10-year plan which can contribute to earlier compounding rate increases our base level work for storage is going down because of a slow ramp up on College Hill and we also have a planned Gap year between College Hill and what will be the next base level Reservoir project which is either Hawkins or Santa Clara that we are continuing throughout this plan to work on our upper level

3:30:33 reservoirs as well I don't want them to get lost in the shuffle as we're talking about the main storage but as transmission projects have progressed in planning costs have gone up and estimates have been revised so you can see that on this chart Ami costs are going down because we anticipate project completion in 2024 and then the cost of our Willamette River Water Filtration plant has gone up as the project schedule has moved up by six months and it's now when you look at it this year the the entire Project's in the next five years so that that five-year window also can affect that compounded cost of the increases so those are the highlights again there's a lot of detail on this in your backyard

3:31:18 moving to the electric side of the house the plan components again are the same as we have shown in last year's 10-year plan to this year's 10-year plan we continue to invest in the system and make progress on the Carmen Smith relicensing requirements our type 1 work focuses on ramping up asset replacement and moving from reactive to proactive replacement along with stabilizing equipment and resources and includes our Communications equipment fiber downtown network fleet Information Services and much more our type 2 focuses on enhancing resiliency of our highest impact loads risk-based rebuilds and renewals including the 10 substations in 10 years efforts that we have planned it's managing emergency emerging risks to the

3:32:05 system including Dam safety Wildfire load growth with electrification and other transmission and distribution needs as well as earthquakes and also accounting for strategic initiatives such as the eweb Enterprise Solutions and Ami uh our type 3 work again is uh focused on the re-licensing requirements of Carmen Smith both with the plant and with the risk mitigation projects and you have seen quite a bit of that in our consent items as of late so taking that same view again these numbers won't add up um but it gives you the highlights of what's changed in that 10-year plan from 2023 to 2024 so the overall 2024 10-year plan is 613 million dollars uh 24

3:32:52 million or 4.2 percent is higher than the 2023 plan as Rod discussed the rate trajectory is not as impactful over the 10-year span as in water but it's still affected by cost escalation including inflation labor ongoing supply chain disruption and the addition of some shared service projects electric infrastructure went down due to new and better estimates for projects completion of work such as the current project which is expected to end next year and some of the Transformer changeouts that are also ending earlier in the plan and as well as affected by a more stable supply cost projections Ami is going down due to initial deployment completion again in 2024 we're hopeful and the movement of that

3:33:37 next round of deployment you know it's going to come back around again but we've moved that out of the 10-year window so that's another reason why you see that cost coming down like with water the Enterprise solution costs and capitalization of software and updated project estimates have resulted in an increase in this area for Information Services and for Generation more information on the Liebert near-term risk reduction measure costs plus estimates for real property acquisition is uh resulting in a significant increase in the costs for the 10-year plan in the generation side of things I wanted to mention that the real property estimates in the past have been assuming that we might be able to do partial acquisition or obtain

3:34:24 easements and we've decided that we wanted to budget for full-cost acquisition in case we can negotiate some of those other so that's why that number looks higher the risk reduction measures are going to help with eventual decommissioning work that is coming so I did want to mention that and then I think it's important to know because I got hung up on this earlier that most of the decommissioning work is going to be o m so you're not going to see it in the capital plan it's really just some of this real property work and the near-term risk reduction measures and then some minor work that we'll have to do on water rights that will be capitalized so with that I'm gonna

3:35:10 have a slight pause again remind you that there this was just a brief overview there is a lot more information in your background but I'll pause there and see if there's questions good evening Deborah Hart CFO I feel like my colleagues have said most of what I have to say today so thank you uh uh but here are the numbers starting with the water utility uh this plan is drafted does remain within board targeted metrics and the yellow that you see up there though is stress on debt service in the latter half of the plan

3:35:56 and that is a result of the utility taking on substantial debt for the planned 340 million dollars in Investments um the 10-year rate trajectory is at 83 and approximately 25 percent of that is due to Second Source this plan does assume conventional borrowing for um the Second Source however we are actively pursuing uh other opportunities be it with you certainly if uh we'll pursue any potential Grant funds but for now this is our conventional borrowing

3:36:42 moving on to electric again it does remain within uh board targeted metrics as drafted albeit with stress in the Years highlighted in yellow so a little stress on cash and Reserve staying above Target however and then Debt Service at the end of the plan rate increases compounded are approaching 50 percent that is inclusive of the of decommissioning of the Liebert project uh the plan is supporting 615 million dollars in investments in infrastructure and the rate increase is dedicated to Lieber are sufficient to fund the decommissioning as projected

3:37:31 so what does that do to rates right now as you can see uh as of June these rates were pulled and this is everybody's rights in June so hours today and our comparators uh eweb is right there in the middle for electric uh the rate projections that were included in this presentation would bump up the average single-family all-electric to 193 dollars a month and then on the water side we're second from the bottom and the plan is projected is about a three uh three dollar rate increase for the average single family home we ran some numbers on general service there are usage does

3:38:16 vary a lot more but the average small general service would see a 36 dollar increase on their electric bill and uh 14 on the water but opportunity for questions sorry to get into the minutia but I'm not going to let this go so we're I look at the second highest priority on water on the Watershed restoration on the McKenzie and we managed to maintain all the spill response trailers why not why have we not reached out to Springfield Utility Board saying since they're going to be drawn water from the Mackenzie why aren't they participating in these costs

3:39:06 I I just say I don't believe that we haven't our T our teams talk regularly why we haven't so so the source protection teams talk regularly why we haven't I guess as a board or as leadership gone to their leadership I think possibility I mean to me it only seems bigger I mean we're footing the entire bill for the protection the restoration they're building their own independent plan right now to suck water out of the McKenzie and the same thing we're protecting and uh why are we footing the entire bill for it we haven't even asked them that's something that we could do I'm sorry it's a little off topic but I certainly asked commissioner

3:39:53 ask thank you so on the on the water side thank allude into it earlier on that operation is just down it said 95 percent of what we're targeting is that 95 percent over the 10 year or is that 95 or is it dropping five percent a year um you can answer it uh so the 95 percent is a 95 of the five-year average is what we use to budget to as it close to the 100 and that gives us the contribution

3:40:38 margin for this tolerance uh what we did was go back over a seven year look back period to see what um looks like from projections so as we move Beyond the budget here uh were not had not been realized over the last seven years so we really ratcheted that back it's not actually a decline but it's just a very subtle Road dances and it has that would be convinced that it was I just grabbing Nationwide and use symptoms down does that mean that we need to fail back

3:41:23 the the size of our second treatment plan and the capacity that we're doing on that we projected it five years ago but yeah I don't believe we we should I think when you look at what was driving the size of the second treatment plant it was for our our base minimum winter load where you're seeing a lot of sort of per capita reductions is coming with things like landscaping and things like that that are probably more summer oriented but having the the size that we would size the backup I think is the minimum size actually right um and then on the summaries of the long-term financial plan do you have if you could back up with

3:42:08 just a couple slides edit you can go to either one that yeah that's fine you only have raid stabilization listed in 24 and 25 is that and it was the same on water as that uh something that is just that's funding coming out as out of the rate stabilization for those years so that's taking money out of restabilizing out of brain stabilization um I guess just for me going forward it would be interesting you know we have we have Reserve policies on Monday and we have this on another night now we're up here do I see Reserves

3:42:56 so so other than other than the targets I guess total cancer oh no I'm talking they're there total cash Reserves so our rate stabilization fund is at 5 billion is that what our Target is for all electricity and what is it on water okay and so you're using that nine million and eight million because we were about 15 right now we're over we're over the Target and when the money went in there the uh it was done and so that's that's probably the most two years to seven seven five and seven two five if we didn't use rate stabilization those would be a point or so higher Maybe the

3:43:42 the rate increases now you're asking me to do higher level math in my head but yes that is helping mitigate the rate increase in those years but the the long-term effect that those rate increases and that's about one time interactive drawing output yeah okay and and why is there just sets the big drop off into 26 here going from seven and a half seven two five from seven three seven five probably helps if I would look at

3:44:28 the same one as you were if so um yeah it's the pre-funding primarily we have a very um Progressive Progressive pre-funding the last question is on finding um you know right now if you have to go out the bus let's go behind because interest rates are are we are we thinking those are going to come down and we're going to pull the money as we need it later on in the forecast so historically Bond rates uh we were making a little bit spoiled in 2020 when rates were amazingly low and we actually in the history of the last 30 years or so the

3:45:15 rates were still fairly favorable but that was a consideration and why we didn't think about borrowing more money for electric now volatile markets and not an immediate need and if staying out of the market might a little bit lower rates we're still forecasting rates that are a percentage going a full percentage Point higher than we paid then we will pay on months that we just borrowed for

3:46:15 welcome I guess just in summary I guess the only thing it includes that the other thing that will be important is our message that you hear because we've had low to no rate increases for quite some time and now we're going to be looking at significant rate increases over a significant period of time and being able to tell the story

3:47:01 correctly yeah this is something that I'm asking from you guys is maybe even just an FAQ to give to us so that whatever so that when our constituents come to us and say what the hell's seven and a half percent that I can say you know hey this is what we're doing and why we're doing it more succinctly that he said well there's Lieber again there's Second Source and there's this and that if there's a good communication plan that would help me when I'm talking to constituents at this type of significant radiators Matt I just say thanks for the packet you continue to provide financial

3:47:47 information in ways that are simple enough that I understand them at least I think I understand um and and with that I appreciate the highlighting of you know where the board policies are said that when we're in person that those kind of bounds um highlight is super helpful and I I suspect we all feel a little uncomfortable by where this is going but I also don't I don't see that there's a lot of options for us to change course on any of these like all these projects that we have in the pipeline are long-term expensive and inflation providing us and but it's staying the course seems like the right thing to do from everything that I'm seeing I would appreciate the conference

3:48:33 comprehensive information um I guess that will be an invitation if there's an out here that we don't know about please make that thank you okay I was gonna I was gonna say that I think that when you look at the assumptions you look at the Investments you get a certain outcome and whatever has to do with them and balance that with the policies that we have in place to keep us financially sound and when we do that it drives rates a certain direction and trajectory and we we don't like that anymore that anybody else does but it's driven by our strategic Investments we have a very Capital intensive type of of

3:49:18 organization and we're operating in an environment that is not very conducive to to Investments uh because of some of the the items that you listed all that said we're going to continue to look for opportunities to mitigate the financial impacts on our customers and I think that's that work is never done and I know that this team and and the rest of the organization is viewing it like this is our customers money it affects them and we're going to continue to look for opportunities to approve that so you know this is where we are but it's it's it's something that we're going to continue to pursue yeah and I see that I see the organizational dedication to trying to control our costs to the extent possible

3:50:04 um so the only one other question I have is have we budgeted for the party that we're going to have when am I is done that's my question because it's going to be big bring your own that's a good question um the sale proceeds from headquarters that I could go in to offset any of these costs because I know we had discussions of how much of that money goes to water and how much it goes to electricity where does that come in or does that even come into this conversation so we could soften it I mean 12 million bucks is a lot of money and the sale proceeds are in those cash

3:50:49 balances so it's already facts again they're already factored in I know thank you I had the same question the first time I saw them together it does all right we're done thank you

3:51:47 is it back to me it is Commissioners uh just a few new items to point out on the board of gender report um one thing that's that I think is important is that next month you'll get a correspondence item describing the communications plan and Outreach plan for the College Hill project and then where we have some agenda time the meeting after that to actually walk through and understand if there's any questions or comments or guidance that you'd like to get provided the next few months have a number of items that you know we have several guest speakers coming on on different subjects from Energy Efficiency and conservation to

3:52:33 forecasts for the for the region and also an update on some of the the hydro challenges and that we have um from Northwest River Partners on the Columbia and so just those are just a few things to point out we also have a work session coming up in August as well on on the to discuss the Dei proposed Dei policy so I'll just open it up if there's any questions or suggestions but those are just some of the new highlights one thing that I noted it said on here that our next quarterly

3:53:22 schedules right I don't I don't believe that is scheduled at this point um and that needs to be updated just as our next references in July and I don't think we've had any conversations at all about it when we're setting that actually that was okay should probably get going on that because it took around two months to find the dates for the last one it's College and they're on their break here please pretty soon yeah Focus together you get a break what is the date of the Dei meeting in August it's oh this sinks

3:54:09 it's awesome August 15th 15th 14th will be surrounded him there it is I see it on the 15th Tuesday okay great just a heads up on agendas the next two meetings the next one I will probably be doing virtually and then the following one after that I don't know if I'm gonna do virtually or that because I'll be in Europe and this will be 2 30 is supporting and so I don't know if I've been able to the September first one I'm starting to slip give me an excuse to absence how's that rated Jesus just giving against heads up

3:54:54 my son okay first of all I apologize tonight was a super long meeting and what we had at the end was really important and so I just wonder if we've done this before but in future meetings like even if we had just had this portion as like a virtual meeting anyway it's just about like it's not it'll end up being close to five hour meeting well if I don't advertise nuclear energy next time

3:55:49 I wonder if here is on September 5th is there an opportunity for us to bump that meeting to something where you're available I don't want to turn everything upside down but I I'm gonna be gone the first I don't think I get back to like the 12th of September so I guess September I think I leave the 12. I guess what you have is still on the week I think you guys got four strong voices here I mean I'll read the packet and I can send in questions and that type of stuff and I may attend it

3:56:34 drink enough espresso September 5th looks like most of its updates but it's not perfect I mean right now I'll say there's nothing controversial but I that may change yeah do something really controversial rate changes