Austin Energy Utility Oversight Committee Meeting Transcript – 05/23/2018 Title: ATXN 24/7 Recording Channel: 6 - ATXN Recorded On: 5/23/2018 6:00:00 AM Original Air Date: 5/23/2018 Transcript Generated by SnapStream ================================== [1:35:25 PM] >> Pool: I hear the Aetna the radio -- I hear the quiet in the room. So we are -- we need dous mas. We need two more here. When they get here we'll get started and we should be done within the two hours allotted. So we'll be back. [1:39:20 PM] >> Pool: Jackie, why don't you go ahead and come on up. I think our sixth is on her way down. We won't start until councilmember alter gets here, but get ready. We do, yes. So you guys could come up if you would like, Ms. Tracera and Mr. Pena, if you would like to come up to the table, when you get started -- is Mr. Pena here? Okay. Oh good. All right. Very good. Yeah. All right: I'm Leslie pool, chair of the Austin energy utility oversight committee and I call this meeting to order Wednesday, may 23rd, 2018. It is 1:40 P.M. We are at city hall, 301 west second street, Austin, Texas. And present are councilmember Houston, councilmember Casar, councilmember Renteria, councilmember Flannigan, and mayor Adler. Absent from this meeting is councilmember Garza, who is out ill, the mayor pro tem, her child is ill. Of course we know that councilmember troxclair is still on maternity leave. And councilmember kitchen advised that she would not be here. All right. I called the meeting to order, and our first item is approval of the minutes of April 25. Do I have -- thank you. Councilmember Houston moves approval of the committee meeting minutes from April 25. Are there any corrections or changes or comments? Great. Is there a second on this one? Councilmember alter. And all those in favor, please? It looks unanimous on the dais. Citizens communication, we have two people signed up. [1:41:23 PM] It looks like Gus Pena may not be here. And Bobby chicara is here. You have three minutes to -- >> I doubt I'll need that. And you have three minutes to talk about anything not on the agenda. >> Thank you for providing me this opportunity to speak with y'all. I appreciate that. Who am I? Bobby sucuhara and I am representing 350 Austin, the president of 350 Austin and also a co-founder, so I'm speaking to you in that capacity. A few weeks ago euc commissioner Stephan ray had drafted a project plan for the steps or at least the information that would need to be provided for communication regarding the studies that Austin energy has been directed to do as part of the resource generation plant that the council approved last August. So the reason that I am here today is to request that this project plan, although it is quite skeletal in nature, it does provide several of the key items that it would be helpful for both those who are planning the studies and also those, the communication back and forth between the community and Austin energy regarding those studies. So our request at 350 Austin is that Austin energy would actually utilize either Mr. Ray's suggested plan or something similar to that so that it can facilitate getting the studies going. There are multiple studies, not just one, as you may know. And so if they would use that or something similar to both get it going and also to provide that means of [1:43:25 PM] communicating with the public. So that's my essential request. I had intended to print out and provide all of you copies of it, but I had a major printer fail this morning, and so I have sent it to all councilmembers as an email attachment. I apologize that I can't give you a hard copy. But that's my request. Thank you very much. >> Pool: Thanks. And thanks for emailing it and it saves you printing on paper too. That works out really well. All right. Thank you so much. And is Mr. Pena here? One last time, Mr. Pena? Mr. Pena? All right. We'll move on to the general manager's report. Ms. Sargent, welcome. >> Good afternoon, madam chair, councilmembers. I am Jackie Sargent, Austin energy's general manager. In addition to my report today, you will receive presentations on Austin shines project, information security at Austin energy, an update on the ercot market and summer readiness, and a report on customer service. So today my report will include a review of some items that are going to be coming forward for council approval. A reminder of our regulations regarding moratoriums on disconnecting residential utility service during extreme weather events. I'll also provide an update on an innovative project Austin energy has been working on. And I'll highlight a couple of awards we've received. And I want to recognize some of our outstanding employees. As you know, we have some extra people in the audience today, some very important people, and I want to welcome my staff that's joining us today. And of course, I'll take any questions that you may have. So to begin with I'm going to start with highlighting a [1:45:26 PM] few of the upcoming items for. Council approval. The first two items that appeared on your agenda, a district cooling project that was to be located at the convention center and engineering services for electric service delivery, have been withdrawn by staff. And that happened after today's committee agenda was posted two weeks ago. And I will come back to this group and provide updates prior to either of these items coming forward for council approval. Next I'll give you a brief update on a couple of procurement contracts that will provide us parts and equipment that we use on a daily basis. On June 14th, you'll have an rca to provide transmission of station hardware for up to five years for a total amount of $4.6 million, divided among the following contractors, tech line, kbs electrical distributors, Texas electric co-op actives and Stewart C Erby companies. These provide clamps, connectors in order for crews to make timely repairs and also to facilitate the new installation of equipment. The second is a contract with control panels U.S.A. To provide relay panel design and manufacturing for up to five years for a total amount not to exceed five and a half million dollars. The contract will provide customized relay panels on an as-needed basis to support Austin energy operations and capital improvement projects that we have in the pipeline. We lie panels are used to protect high voltage transmission lines, substation equipment and the distribution system. Their essential to maintaining the safety and efficiency of the electric system by protecting personnel working around the equipment and critical assets that are located within substations. The next item is a contract with open systems international to provide software support for our supervisory control and data [1:47:27 PM] acquisition energy management system, also known as scata ems, for up to 10 years for a total contract amount not to exceed $8.4 million. This software allows Austin energy to analyze and process information in the realtime to optimize the operation of our transmission system. The current scata software requires an autopsy grade of technology in order to safely and relibrarily operate the system and remain in compliance with the northern American reliability system requirements. Then finally finally, on June 14th you will have a construction contract in the amount of approximately $490,000 to build a security wall viewing area and educational signage for the energy storage system at the Mueller neighborhood. The underlying goal of the project is to provide security for the site, but we also want to turn the shines energy storage system into a learning opportunity for the community. As we head into the hot summer months, I would liked to remind you that city of Austin utilities observes moratoriums with regard to disconnection of utility services for nonpayment of residential customers during extreme weather conditions in both the summer and the winter months. Although city utility regulations state specific weather conditions for moratoriums, city of Austin utilities will err on the side of caution if there's any uncertainty in the forecast or the actual heat indices rise above expectations. And we want you to know that these regulations are more responsive to our customers than statewide rules that are set and established by the public utility commission. Now I'd like to update you on an innovative electric vehicle program. At the beginning of the month Austin energy was notified that we were [1:49:29 PM] awarded $1.6 million in state funding to bring more fast electric vehicle charging to Austin. This is part of a new initiative by the state of Texas alternative fueling facilities program to bring fast charging to Texas highways. And Austin energy was awarded the largest share of this grant. The grant expands Austin energy's current plans to bring nine new fast chargers online during the next fiscal year as called for in the 2017 resource plan. This funding allows us to increase the number of charges by 15 for a total amount of 24 to be installed through 2020. We continue to work on expanding our charging network through our service territory and we are currently working with city fleet services to bring forward an item next month to construct additional charging stations. Next I want to highlight a couple of awards that we recently received. The first is the thought leader award from peak load management alliance. The award acknowledges the role Austin energy green building takes in advising the city on local amendments to energy codes. It also recognizes collaboration with energy efficiency services in the smart power partner thermostat program. In recent years we've expanded our reach working with local multiple retail outlets to offer instant discounts and advertising to promote our thermostat program. Due to these efforts or program now has 40,000 partnering customers. In 2017 we estimate that the program saved us roughly $1.2 million and avoided transmission costs by shifting consumption. Austin energy was also named one of a select group of utilities that connected the most solar to the grid in 2017, earning it a spot on the annual top 10 list compiled by smart electric power alliance, also known as scpa. Austin energy ranked number four on the utility solar list with 286 megawatts installed in 2017. The survey collected figures from over 400 utilities [1:51:32 PM] across the country on solar, energy storage and demand response connected to the grid this past year. Cpa sighted Austin energy's strong model for innovation and leadership when they released their top 10 list. We have provided you multiple updates on the Austin shines project over the last couple of years. I'm using the employee recognition section of my report today to acknowledge several of our staff members who are making this nationally recognized project happen. A number of the shines' project members are in the audience today and they are listed on this slide. I am proud of the work that -- their work because it cuts across many department lines and touches basically every area of Austin energy. This project puts us on the leading edge of determining how distributed energy technologies like battery storage and smart inventors can most effectively be deployed into the electric grid. The project will benefit Austin energy, our community and the entire electric utility industry. Now I would like all of our staff members associated with the shines project who are here to stand and be recognized. [Applause]. That concludes my portion of the report. And we can start the presentations unless you have any questions for me. >> Pool: Well, I think we are really, really proud, again, of our Austin energy employees. Thank you all for the extra work that you're doing. The shines project is pretty cool. Great to see you all here today. Councilmember alter. >> Alter: I just also wanted to applaud 311. My house was among the group in my district that lost power this weekend with the storm, and it was back up and running very quickly, and I used my little app and it was very helpful since I couldn't use my regular phone. And I just wanted to say that it seemed to work very [1:53:34 PM] well. >> That's great. Thank you. >> Pool: Anybody else? All right. Great. >> I'll welcome Dan Smith to come up and talk about the shines project. >> Pool: Thanks. Welcome, Mr. Smith. Good to see you. >> Good afternoon, mayor, council. [Inaudible]. I'm on, good. I can hear the echo. Good afternoon, mayor, councilmembers. Yeah, my privilege to just build on what Jackie was just sharing about this has been a really great project. We've gotten a lot of national interest in the project. A lot of national acclaim. I'll tail at the very end and talk about some of the things that we received there. And by the way, there's even stuff fresh in the news from even when I last put this presentation together. Just to let you know where this kind of fits in too with our strategic goals, you're well aware that Austin energy has six strategic goals of which one of those is grid modernization. And we have four major strategies that build our grid modernization program. It's our ama, or advanced metering infrastructure, our grid automation, our distribute active energy resource integration and asset management. And it's that distributive resource innovation that Austin shines project falls under. Just to remind you, this was a grant project that we received from the doe sun shop program. The purpose of shines, and it's an acronym for sanable, holistic -- it's so promote the increased pentation and use of solar energy, at the same time driving it down -- [1:55:36 PM] the cost down to is becomes in pair active with other energy sources. That's really its main objectives. And this shows how it touches the scales and it's that combination of both solar with energy storage. So this is a graphic that tells you really the scope of Austin shines. So I do credit our team. They took what the doe called the shines grant and said this makes sense to call it Austin shines as how we are shining in the industry in this area. And this is an overview of it. I'll explain the first part of it is the utility scale battery storage that we're putting into the system. And we're actually locating those in two specific different areas of town. One in the Kingsbury area and that's in conjunction with the la Loma community solar farm, which is a 2.3-megawatt system. So we've got a utility scale battery that's going into the substation adjacent to that installation. And then we also have a battery storage, another utility scale going in in the pecan street, Mueller area. And it works with the Mueller substation in that area. So that's what is shown here. The next thing is just to highlight what we're doing on a commercial side. And by the way, this is just very illustrative so it's not meant to be full scale, but we have a number of installations going in. These involve the use of solar in conjunction with commercial installed batteries. And we're also doing things where we're using aggregation to be a part of this as well. The third major elements, the residential side of this, same type of concept. And in this area we're doing a number of things, in [1:57:36 PM] addition to aggregation, there are some areas where the utility has direct control of some of these installations as well. I would add, it's not -- I guess it's somewhat highlighted there, but we just got approval to add a vehicle to grid into this program as well, so that just recently got approved by the doe and will be a part of the Austin shines thing as well. Just to let you know what that is, that's taking an ev, electric vehicle, and seeing how that can be used as a storage device on the system. And then a very key part, and one of the things that probably makes us one of the differentiators and it's really got a lot of highlight, is how we're really controlling these assets and it's an optimization. And it's something that I'll talk a little bit more about, but it's how we're able to take multiple use cases and values, stack those things to really try to bring, as the doe is directing or trying, is to drive that cost down. Just another highlight about the project I think and that's the fact that it's got a diverse group of partners. And this just gives you a lot of those logos are showing you all the different companies. This isn't everybody, but it's a good representation of the different partners that we've had and are working with on this particular project. It's also got diversity in its application. So I mentioned to you the two utility scale batteries. The one-- there's one installed in the substation, but the other one is installed in the community and I'll highlight that in a little bit. This gives you an overall project timeline in funding. I've shared this with you before. Not quite half the project is being taken care of by grant money. 4.3 million from the doe grant, which similar to the ev grant, was the largest of all the grant recipients. There were six grant recipients and we were the largest of that six. There is also a-million-dollar tceq grant on top of that and also a [1:59:37 PM] little bit of manufacturer contribution as well in that. All that to be stated is -- equates for about a 5.3- million-dollar funding from external sources. So you can see we're really overhalfway through. There's three major phases of the project. The contract design phase, the deployment phase and the demonstration phase. They're roughly year long phases and we're well into the deployment side, the utility scale battery. Actually, I'll wait and share with you some of the pictures so you can see what some of that looks like. By October we'll be in the full demonstration phase which means all of these assets will be operational at that point and we'll be demonstrating it and doing a lot of analytics and studies on that. So here's that Kingsbury battery and that's that substation wall and you can see adjacent to it is a portion of the la Loma community solar farm. And in that system we're installing it at the Kingsbury installation is currently -- it is energized and currently going through its final commissioning phases and will soon be totally operational. This is a little closeup of what it looks like. That's actually the container that houses the batteries. And then if you look out to the left in the background there that's the inverter that is used to take the DC and invert it up to ac and put it up on the grid. This is another picture of what's going on, current status. Once again -- in fact, that middle picture I think I'll hate another technology we're using. That happens to be a uav, sometimes called a drone, and that actually shows infrared imaging. So we've got a uav that's got an infrared camera. That's just showing the imaging of the community solar panels. And so it's a nice way to just look and not only in the initial start-up phase, [2:01:38 PM] but also in the maintenance phase in the future. We are utilizing those. Hopefully in the future I'll have an opportunity to actually share a little bit about what we're doing with the uavs. And you can see some of the installed and residential battery installations below. To that right, I'm not going to talk a lot about what that is, other than that's some of what's in the -- what we call a distributive energy resource management %-úsystem or what's actually doing the optimization of these assets. This is showing you once again a little bit more about some of the installations going on. That's a duplicate picture there, isn't it? Yeah. All right. This is what's going on at Mueller. So right now Mueller is in the construction phase, so a lot of civil works being done at this point. And it's getting prepared for those utility scale battery modules to go in. This is what Mueller will somewhat look like through the renderings. And as general manager Sargent stated, we'll be putting the -- the contract that's going in right now that will be before you next month is the signage as viewing and security wall that will be going around those energy storage units. Those energy storage units are self contained so they're already in an enclosure, but this is just to give it something that we made sure met with the Mueller neighborhood design guidelines and also along with the developer in the area. One of the things we really did want to make sure we highlighted is making this also an educational opportunity. So it is noteworthy. We know we'll get a lot of outside visitors, but we also want to educate the community in what we're doing in the area. And this is just a good -- I guess you can call did a graphic on what I was talking about as far as stacking the values. So there's -- we've identified really 18 possible use cases of which we've focused on six. And they really fall into three major buckets. The customer value, the [2:03:39 PM] reliability or grid value, and then the market value. And I won't go into details of what those things are, but this is really important. We do believe, and it does coincide with where the doe believes as well, that you can really as you utilize this for multiple purposes, you're able to really drive the cost down. And so no doubt at this particular point in time batteries are still an expensive technology. The costs are appearing to drop. We believe when it's used for multiple use cases, you can actually obtain what really hope to be that parity with other energy sources. And just to highlight the award side of this, so we received the 2017 utility of the year award from smart cities dive. Green tech media just awarded us the 2018 grid edge innovation award. Smart cities connect awarded us one of the smart 50 award. This is our own Lisa martin who stood up. She's the project manager for Austin energy over this, doing a phenomenal job. And this was at distributech where we spoke about the project and she was highlighted there as one of the spotlights. And we've had a local NPR piece. And then we just recently are short listed as one of the three potential recipients of the Cepas award. So that's just a rundown of shines. I can certainly field any questions that relate to this. It is a real highlight for us. And I will say what helps to differentiate us again is there are other battery storage projects happening around the country, but there's really none that are cross-cutting all the different use cases between utility, commercial and residential and it's that optimization and as I [2:05:39 PM] mentioned that value stacking that's really a significant part of the innovation we're doing here. >> Pool: Thanks. Anybody have any questions for Mr. Smith? Councilmember alter. >> Alter: Thank you. This is great and I think it's a good example of some of the things that we can do as a municipal utility. I was just wondering if you could speak to the next steps, kind of now that you're seeing some success with this and as these get built out what are the next steps? >> Thank you. Actually, I meant to bring that up. That's a great question. Be do believe for us this is a real foundational and formative because we do expect during that demonstration phase to really get really good results to be able to understand which use cases we need to leverage, which ones we need to consider and then really set in a roadmap. As you know, our resource generation plan has set forth a 10-megawatt goal. This will get this roughly a third of the way there so we certainly have more to go, but the optimal part is to determine how we can best leverage especially the use of solar in our service territory. So the long story short there is that we will use this to form our future roadmap. There are certainly things we're looking at at the point, but this year in the October to October time frame will tell us the most. >> Alter: Okay, thank you. >> Pool: Councilmember Houston. >> Houston: Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Smith. On slide 11, where is the prep site for the Mueller battedry? R, where is that located? On the 51st street side or on the manor roadside? >> I would defer that question to Robbie. >> Which one of you would like to help [indiscernible]. >> Good afternoon, I'm Kirk S -- it's right next to [2:07:43 PM] wrathgaber village. >> Houston: On the manor roadside? >> Yes. >> Houston: You talked about educational opportunities. So students could or people could go and look at the battery? >> Yes are that's the plan is to develop curriculum to go with that. >> Houston: Wonderful, wonderful. I couldn't picture where it would be. I know where that is. And then on slide 14, people have just been fascinated with those blue solar. Do those actually work? Because we've had questions -- we've had questions in the neighborhood about is it pretty or what do they do? >> So they are functional. They were -- they're applied materials' sunflower design so when applied materials was in the solar business locally, they used that as a showcase for theirs. So they used that as an opportunity to showcase their product locally. >> Houston: But it is functioning. >> They do produce, yes. >> Houston: Some energy. >> Yes. [Laughter]. I can't tell you how much, but yes. >> Houston: I'm not going to ask you. >> I guess I have to watch what pictures I put up. [Laughter]. >> Houston: That's just interesting. Thank you so much. This was very helpful. And I think, Mr. Smith, you made a new all time goal for acronyms. I just didn't stop you. >> I hope I wrote them all out. I tried to do that, ma'am. I understand. Well, I thought of you today as I was in a meeting where there's like a 10 or 20 page document of acronyms that I was in today. So just so you know it gets worse. [Laughter]. It gets worse. >> Houston: Thank you. You did a great job. I appreciate it. >> Pool: So I just have one question. You said earlier in your presentation, and maybe I didn't hear it completely. The department of energy contract or the grant for battery storage and vehicles, is that personal cars or can you tell us a little bit more about that department of energy -- >> I can certainly allow them to talk to the recent [2:09:45 PM] charging one that came up, but in this case we had an opportunity to do a bit of a substitution and we've been very interested to really test out this aspect of a vehicle to grid part. Admittedly it's a small portion, but we were thankful that the doe did approve our change on that because in the future -- there's been a lot of talk about this and different manufacturers in the past had not allowed you to be at point of discharge, but now more of them are now opening the door and saying yes, you can. So I think there's some opportunities that happen as small as the home, but also on larger scales, especially when you start talking about some of the fleet electrification and all that. >> Pool: So you turn your car into a generator. >> That's correct. >> Pool: But I'm sure it would not impede the battery power that's needed to run the car. So that you don't actually run down the battery so you can't drive your car. >> That's a great point. I think that's part of the deal is there's probably ways to set state of charge. I want to make sure I have my 20-mile range to get back to work or whatever I have to do. That's an excellent point and I think that's part of the challenge. And it's also the reality that these are mobile so how they -- they could potentially be an asset if you needed them to move them in places that you needed energy for a short bit of time or so. >> Pool: Great. Are there any other questions on this item? All right, great. Thank you so much. And thank you to all the staff who are working on the shines project one more time. We really appreciate your excellent efforts. Okay. Let's see. Where are we? Here we go. We are up to item 5, which is information security. Who do we have for that? Hello, Mr. Shalabi. [2:11:48 PM] Welcome. Gentlemen, thanks for being here. >> Good afternoon, council, Khalil shalabi, strategy and markets. With me is Kevin Williams, the chief information security officer for the city. Since we are talking about information security, we do this very much in conjunction with the city, and so I invited Kevin up in case there's questions or if he wanted to elaborate on anything that we talked about. I'd also like to acknowledge that our enterprise security, we don't like to call them cyber security. Surprise security staff works very hard to keep our system safe. Some of them are here in the audience so I want to acknowledge their hard work on behalf of Austin energy and the city as well. So first I just want to put some of what's been going on in context. Very early on, you know, when the computer systems were coming into being, people figured out that this data needed to be protected. So the first data encryption standards actually started back in 1976. And then very quickly after that some people figured out that this information is valuable, and the first actually personal computer virus was created in 85 and it was called brain and originated in Pakistan. In 1988 I think that was the first time there was somebody convicted for a crime for hacking. And they launched an internet worm that spread -- maybe some people even remember this -- to about 6,000 computers and back then it was only one-10th of the computers were connected to the internet. >> His father was also the highest ranking officer investigating cyber crime in the federal government at the time. >> That's some irony for [2:13:49 PM] you. [Laughter]. >> Which we always need. >> So when it comes to hacking the timeline is really compressed so I kind of looked up what's happened so far in 2018. We've had 25 major incidents really compromising billions of individual person's confidential data around the world so far. And I picked out some kind of interesting ones. Schneider electric, which we use their equipment as well, was forced to shut down some powerpoints in -- power plants in the Middle East because some of their industrial control systems were infected by a virus that controlled thousands of power plants. There was a data breach so this is what they call iot devices, but these are not really computers, but there was a data breach of under armor and maybe some of you used this app, myfitnesspal, so all that data was breached and is out there somewhere. So if you have your running data or your heart rates or whatever out there, somebody else has those as well now. And then I think most recently, and a lot of you have heard, the city of Atlanta itself got breached and near and dear to us, billing, they were not able to bill for water for about six weeks. So just -- this thing is really starting to accelerate. The purpose of my presentation really is to high level show what an information security program is all about. And we have to adhere to a lot of laws, local, state and federal. So there's just a ton of -- there hasn't been a lack of will to pass legislation or laws in order to protect us. You know, that really doesn't seem to have translated to reducing the amount of incidents out there. So what compromises an enterprise security program? I think first and foremost you need a process. Most people think of cyber [2:15:50 PM] security or enterprise security as we have a lot of really good fire walls or we patch our computers really well, but that's all really important, but what's most important is that you have a process, you have a governance. And you start with risk management frameworks and there are frameworks that are out there that the industry uses, and we at Austin energy and the city we follow those forecasts. We don't reinvent the wheel. We look towards industry standards and we try to put those frameworks into our organizations. It's really important, at the end of the day putting aside equipment that can be hacked, at the end of the day this is really about protecting data, right? And a lot of times the WRAY this data gets out is how we manage the data. It's not just the computer information. It's who emailed who what, right? So having data governance, having your employees and stakeholders know what data is important, what's confidential and how to treat that, that's also -- that's one of the first line defenses for protecting our data. Vendors. A lot of our vendors now, we have a lot of cloud programs. They have our data. So it's really important to manage. And a lot of our vendors have really good security. As a matter of fact, maybe better security than we do. But you have to actually have the contractual requirements when you sign a contract with them so that they can adhere to all the requirements that you want to protect your own data. Internal controls and vulnerability management, that's where you get down to the equipment, the fire walls, the patching, all that kind of stuff. And this really extends all the way to an edge device, a computer that you're using right now, for example. If you get a notice that you should be patching your computer, don't wait. There's a reason that you have an update. Most of the time it's for security and a lot of the breaches happen sort of at those edge devices. Because we're good at controlling our servers and our data centers, but it's [2:17:52 PM] much hard to control what other people are doing on their devices and their phones. You need to do continuous threat assessment. So those are kind of even maybe contracting people to look at how you protect your data, how you can do some what we call penetration testing. So some people try to actually penetrate your systems. And also we have like I said a coordinated approach with the city. So the framework that we follow is called national institute of standards and testing. So this is the primary framework that we use at Austin energy. Most of the frameworks are sort of similar, but essentially you have a life cycle management of how you protect your data. You need to consider the effectiveness and efficiency and the constraints. First of all, due to applicable laws, and also your own policies and standards. And a lot of times security and usability are in conflict, right? So the more security you have the harder it is to use your system and the easier toss to use your system the less secure it has to be. So there has to be some sort of compromise and when you have that sort of risk management framework it makes it easier to make those decisions. And also at Austin energy, for example, we have an executive level committee as part of this framework that meets quarterly and looks into all the specific issues, policies, guidelines, incidents that we have at Austin energy. >> We formally adopted the Nist framework as the city level frameworks, so that way any city agency that has to -- is beholden to federal laws, regulations, be it on the energy side, criminal justice, health care, they're all going to be aligned with this same framework. >> Data governance. So at Austin energy we handle a lot of confidential information. I mean, what stands out is we have all the billing, our customer data, for example. That is some of the most [2:19:52 PM] confidential information that we carry. So it becomes extremely important to figure out how do you govern that data. And having good governance internally so that our employees know exactly how to use that data is critical. So we've been working very hard at that. We have a data council, for example, that meets monthly and looks at data issues to figure out rules and governance for data. Some of the things around data, for example, is people think they own data. And that's not what we want. What we want is rules and procedure for people to figure out how to share that data and it keeps basically everybody out of trouble. Vendor and partner data security, this is just getting more and more important. Even our billing data, for example, is a cloud system, right? It's housed with the company called Oracle. So we now have in all of our contract what we call can data controls document. It spells out all the requirements. It's actually a fairly long and detailed document. So some of the things we'll tell our vendors, if the data has to travel, it has to be encrypted. When data is at rest it has to be encrypted. You can only store the data after the contract has expired for a certain amount of time before you have to destroy it. So these are just some of the examples of all the rules and requirements that we've put into our data handling controls document. Internal controls and vulnerability management, that's becoming more and more complex as we have more and more people with phones that can be compromised, as we have edge devices that can be compromised. And our business systems are just growing. So the amount of sort of the target is actually keeps growing. So we have strengthened our vulnerability practices, how we patch our computers. For example, for most people, patching a computer you get an update on your [2:21:53 PM] laptop. And you run it, right? For us, for example, in the data center, for a server, if we get a patch, we have to test it first because we don't know what's going to happen once we update it to our system. So it's -- it becomes a fairly complex process for us to patch all our systems. Continuous assessment. So we've leveraged actually quite a few industry available assessments out there. The department of defense came in and looked at our program, our systems. The national renewable energy lab also did an assessment and for the most part they said our posture is good. We have some areas for improvement. Most of it has to do with sort of knowing or having a good inventory of where our assets and data lies. But otherwise we were contract comforted to see that we led the industry when it came to our practices. And last, and maybe I'll let Kevin say a couple of words, but we work very, very closely with Kevin and his folks. As a matter of fact, we're dotted line reporting up to Kevin's folks. >> Yes. I was hired two and a half years ago. Prior to that I didn't have a predecessor so all the security teams and the departments were kind of doing their own thing. So I was kind of brought on board to standardize that, formalize it and create that through-put between all the different teams and so we've got a security governance council here at the city where I chair that and it's got the membership from each department that has dedicated security staff on it as well as functional leads for specific security disciplines that don't have a formal office or team behind it, say like risk management, something like that. So we've taken the risk manager from Austin energy, appointed him the chair of that subcommittee, so he's [2:23:54 PM] working with other groups to make sure we're talking the same language when we talk about risk management, similarly with physical security, we have the building services that handles that across the city, so we just try to empower them and make sure whatever they're doing fits into the larger security framework across the city. As well as the other city department security teams, we have a couple at airport, a couple at health, ctec, the emergency 911 call center has a position posted and so does water. So altogether there's two dozen to 30 people in the city that have formal security titles and we work very closely with state and federal governments. I just came here from a security conference that dir is putting on at the convention center today and tomorrow. And we just had homeland security in two weeks ago now where they conducted a tabletop exercise with all the aforementioned folks across the city. >> That concludes my presentation. >> Pool: Great. Thank you, both. Any questions, folks? Yes, Ms. Houston. >> Houston: Thank you, chair pool. I actually don't know what dir is. >> I'm sorry, that's the department of information resources. That's the state's I.T. Department. They're the ctm for the state. >> Pool: Anybody else? Councilmember Renteria? >> Renteria: There was a -- >> It was in Saudi Arabia actually. >> So they had to pay the ransom to get this thing recovered or was it just a backup where they could reload the system. >> I don't think it was ransomware. That's what happened in Atlanta where they sort of lock up your files and you can't access them and you have to pay ransom typically through a Bitcoin type of [2:25:56 PM] arrangement. This is where they just took over the system. You have probably heard this acronym nerc. We throw it around a little bit. It has to do with hacking into all our systems. >> Great. Councilmember pool councilmember Flannigan. >> Flannigan: I wanted to thank you for all the hard work you're doing. This is one of the things in the background when you're doing your job well. So just a reminder to staff and to the public that all the technology and security things you do in the world doesn't protect against an insecure password. The biggest challenge we have is making sure that every member of our staff, all 16,000 of them, are thinking about the security of the jobs that they perform. So thank you all for doing all the heavy lifting on the infrastructure side and I hope everyone keeps that in mind. We hopefully will never have to use or hear about the things that you've done. So thank you. >> Thank you. Councilmember pool microphone -- >> Pool: Ms. Houston, did you have anything else? All right, thank you. Thank you, John. Appreciate it. All right. So item 6 is the ercot market update and summer readiness. >> So I switch hats here. Back to what you're really used to me talking about. So again, Khalil shalabi, strategy and markets. This is a quick presentation to update you on where the markets is headed this summer. We did this update for you back in November. So as you know, as time moves on, things change in the market and we wanted to update you just so that you keep this in the front of your mind as the summer approaches. [2:27:58 PM] So going back to what's really going on in the market, we've had sustained low prices. And what this graph shows is the average what we call peak and off peak prices in the market for the past three years. And they have been unusually low. So when prices are low, generators in the market, so that includes, for example, Austin energy, our generators, both renewable and thermal, have a hard time recovering revenue in the market because prices are so low. Not only are prices low, that doesn't show the whole picture. The way the market works recently in ercot is most hours of the day prices are extremely low and then you get some really high price spikes for -- say, for example, for 15 minutes. So that type of pricing behavior doesn't lend itself for very big units that really just like steady price in the market so that they can take revenue. To make a long story short, because of this kind of. Sustained low pricing on market behavior we've had a lot of retirements that have happened announced in the ercot market. Just in the last few months. Because of those retirements, what we've seen is what we call the reserve margin sort of tighten up. And what the reserve margin is the difference between how much generation capacity of them in the market and how much demand you have in the market. So the top line, that's the amount of capacity that you have. So that squiggly line on top. And those bars is what we call the installed -- other way around, I'm sorry. The installed capacity is the squiggly line and then the peak load is those bars that you see. And the difference between those is a reserve margin and as you can see, the next two Summers that difference is a lot smaller than it has been in the past. And just from basic economics, supply and [2:30:00 PM] for supply and demand, when that happens, you splices -- you see prices starting to rise. I can't see this, I'm going to have to read it off my chart. Okay. >> Pool: Do you want this? I know, it is hard to read on this screen. Do you want it there? >> So on October 6 was the first retirement announcement, so we had a Monticello, which is a unit east of Dallas, announced its retirement. And as you can see, market prices started to rise from that yellow line which was the former forward. These are all forward market prices. If I wanted to buy energy now for the summer, this is what the price would be. Then after that, another retirement got announced. These are two big units, Sandau and big brown announced their retirement so now market prices started to rise again. On December 18th, what we call the cdr, this is a report by ercot was released, and basically it's an inventory report that says here's how much capacity we expect to be on the market for generation, and here's what we expect the peak load to be. When they released that report they found the reserve margin was going to be very tight so market prices just jumped at that point and people started to get a little bit nervous. On March 1st, we had the Sara report released which tightened prices even further. And I think, yeah, I'm losing -- yeah. Then on April 16th, what happened -- because market prices were so high, Barney [2:32:00 PM] Davis and Spencer, these were moth ball gas units, looked a lot like decker units, they came back from being moth balled. So people said these prices are high enough for us to make money, and when they came back, prices actually -- because we had more installed generation in the market, prices actually ameliorated a little bit, but the market highs are still back from what we were. So what does that mean to Austin energy? We've got an increased cost in energy that could be reflected in the psa during the next budget cycle. So our customers aren't going to see these high prices reflected in their bills right away, this surges because we set the psa based on prices retroactively, so it wasn't like -- so our customers may see those higher prices if we do see them in the market, they'll see them in their bills next year when we set the psa in October, the next fiscal cycle. In extreme cases if we do see a lot of shortages and ercot sees a lot of shortages, we'll have some ruling outages. We saw that back in 2011. We doubt this is going to happen but there may be some ruling outages in extreme cases. And we'll be monitoring this very closely. What does it mean to Austin energy? We're going to be proactive when it comes to customer engagement. We go through a summer readiness program when it comes to all our generations so each of our power plants prepares for the summer season. We perform extensive preventative maintenance to ensure reliability so they're going to be on when we call them on. Our conventional and renewable errorses are prepared for the summer ahead. When you have high prices, you have to watch your cash because we have to pay our bill the next day back to [2:34:03 PM] ercot and if they might be short on cash. These are things we have to watch out for when we see prices that we haven't been used to seeing for the past three years. So that's just really a quick update for ercot. And I apologize for that graph. It didn't quite follow what I had expected it to follow. >> Pool: That's all right. That's all right. Yes, councilmember alter. >> Alter: Thank you. Excuse me if I get a little confused into the details of the ercot market. So we just had a presentation about the solar that was coming online, the magnitude is obviously not going to impact completely our usage in August, and we've made some purchases recently, some of which may or may not be online, so when we generate that energy, it goes into the ercot market and we don't necessarily use that specific energy, but then if the prices are high, we get money for that. >> Correct yeah,. >> Alter: At the higher prices. >> We do. >> Alter: So this was the futures, where are we kind of relative, what we're expecting to produce out of Austin energy versus our projected needs in terms of like if we're at a peak and we -- unlike some cities, we actually do produce energy, so that should be offsetting, that's probably the whole point -- >> Correct. >> Alter: Of doing that. So there should be a companion chart to understand where we're at in terms of our production. Can you speak to that? >> So at these peak prices, all our resources would be making money, regardless of where they're located in the market, if we see those prices. Is that your question? >> Alter: But how much of a gap between our production levels and our usage would we see where we'd be paying the higher prices? >> Oh, okay. That really gigs -- that's a tough question to answer because -- so we have a lot of wind, for example, recently, most of that comes [2:36:04 PM] on at night, so we don't see those prices typically at night, those on-peak prices. So when we're -- when we typically see a lot of these high prices, we will try and have our thermal resources that are here in Austin and around Austin to be online to garner that revenue. We see a lot of that revenue as well during these high peak prices. >> Alter: I'm trying to understand the impact on us since we do have the reduction of when we would be paying the higher -- I understand we'd be taking that in for our resources but how much of a projected gap do we have between what we're producing and what we're using? >> We're typically about 15% short when that happens. >> Alter: Okay. >> Between our production and our buy in the markettal -- in themarket. >> Alter: There's about 15% of our usage that we wouldn't be paying, that's the cost that gets transferred over? >> That's what our customers would see in the bill, the net impact, the 15% typically. So when prices go up, typically our bills go up. Not as fast as the market because we see revenue from our generation, and when prices go down, our bills go down, but again, not as fast as everybody else's bills, you know, because we have sort of some of those embedded costs already in there. >> Alter: But if we didn't own our own resource generation and run our own utility, we'd have higher costs potentially passed on to our consumers. >> We would, yeah. So when our market prices really go up, we really depend on our local generation to generate revenue for us. So not only do they generate revenue, they also impact the pricing in Austin. So when they come on, when you see these kind of big spikes, some of our quick acting generation, example, decker and sand hill, these [2:38:06 PM] are are bolted onto the ground so they come on quickly. When these come on, they take high revenue but they also bring down pricing because now you put supply into the market. That's a big advantage of being a municipality and also being able to own your own generation. In the future, when battery prices sort of come down, you can see sort of that quick acting generation when market prices go up, we could likely use batteries in the future in order to do that as well. >> Alter: Great. Thank you. >> Pool: Anybody else? Councilmember Houston. >> Houston: You always do a great job of explaining this very complicated relationship we have with the energy reliability council of Texas, but on slide -- >> Thank you. >> Houston: -- 4 -- so in may, the price was less than $50. That's what that says? >> So this is may 18th, so this is -- yeah. So when this chart was generated, may was in the future. >> Houston: Oh, may was in the future. >> When we put this chart together. So, yeah, forward prices, they start to go up in the summer, right the prices start to go up in the summer. So we're showing in the future, those prices are going to increase higher and higher. >> Houston: So in August, looks like just a little south of 250 -- >> Right. >> Houston: $50? >> You can buy energy what we call forward, so you can buy energy in August, today, and lock that price in right? That's called hedging. So if we wanted to do that now and just go out in the market, that's what the price would go, as of whenever this chart was generated recently. >> Houston: Okay. Thank you. >> Pool: Okay. Mayor Adler. >> Mayor Adler: The 15% gap, [2:40:07 PM] does that remain fairly constant historically over time? >> That's what it's been lately, but I'd have to go back at look, mayor. >> Mayor Adler: Okay. >> I just add -- Jackie Sargent, general manager. I just add that we have a number of resources that we own independently or jointly with others, and when you look at our system usage and peak usage on a regular basis, those assets meet that requirement, and then in the summer when we get to those extreme peak events, if you don't count any of our renewable assets, there may be times when we're short, but on average, on typical, we are actually long resources to cover our load. But our generation is not used to serve load in the ercot market. Our generation is dispatched into the market and we receive revenue from that that offsets the costs that we incur to serve our load, like buying from the ercot market. >> Mayor Adler: But we fall short in that period of time by that 15%, and that's the gap that we have to pay the -- because we can generate -- >> Well, there are other things we can do, there's financial instruments we can use and we put into place to help us manage that, so we're always looking out to the future and we're taking that into consideration daily. We're looking at the forward strip. We're looking at the instruments that are available to us, and we're managing that risk. But overall, I would not say that we have a standing 15% gap. >> Mayor Adler: I was just wondering, as we change our generation and our dispatchability, whether that number has been changing over time. >> As we change that, because of the capacity and when it's available, it will, in fact, impact that, because we can't control the wind and we can't control the solar. And that's why the project that Dan was talking about, although it's just a small fraction of the need, if that can be transformed into being commercially viable and available, that is going [2:42:08 PM] to be something that's going to be really impactful going forward, and seeing that locally in our system is going to be very helpful. So getting that project to fruition is going to be a great asset for us and hopefully we can drive those costs down. >> Mayor Adler: And I understand -- I just want to confirm that over time, as we've been changing our generation portfolio of making choices, that we haven't been changing that percentage. >> We will, as we have retirements, we've been directed to implement with our generation resources, as those come offline, that is significantly going to impact that because it's not a one to one translation when you take a renewable intermittent resource such as wind and solar, it's not a direct correlation in number of megawatts to replace those assets that are going to be retiring from our portfolio. >> Mayor Adler: So understanding what that financial exposure would be, would be helpful. >> That's correct. >> Mayor Adler: I was looking back saying has that changed over time so has our exposure changed over that period of time? >> We've actually added so we haven't yet retired assets. >> Mayor Adler: Correct. We have changed the generation portfolio. >> That's correct. >> Mayor Adler: So I understand, looking forward to make decisions, I was also just asking the question, given what we've already done, if we have been making choices, would we be at 25% now or 5% now or is that unrelated to all the choices we've made? >> The times we're talking about being short is typically -- we don't have wind. We have so much wind, like Jackie said, if you count the megawatt hours, we're long. But that doesn't come in at the most peak hours. Has it changed? Yes, it changes over time depending on the market and demand in pricing. So it's a hard question to answer. It does change every year. And it's not only because our capacity mix or amounts of capacity has changed, [2:44:08 PM] it's also the way the market has changed as well and the pricing in the market. >> Mayor Adler: I understand. Okay. Thank you. >> There's not one answer to that question. >> Mayor Adler: Thank you. >> Pool: And just one little question about the proactive -- being proactive, knowing that summertime things are more expensive and we have more of a demand, what do we do in order to ramp up our demand response like this time of year in order to mitigate maybe some of these spikes? >> Yeah, so there's several efforts that we do on an ongoing basis every year of preparing for summer and also for this particular summer, but we have a summer savings campaign that, you know, is for both water and electric, so that includes bill inserts, it includes social media posts, press releases, all sort of talking to our customers about saving energy over the summer. We've actually encumbered already all of our weatherization funds for the year, so our weatherization program has really been successful this year. We have the web app that gives tier alerts to our customers so as they change tiers, the pricing changes so it'll warn them ahead of time that they should manage their energy because they're going to a higher- priced tier. Let's see, we have a very large led lighting and low flow fixture program that's going in right now, so we have quite -- and I can site some more, but we have quite a few programs that are -- we're going to be using to engage our customers going forward. >> Pool: Okay. Thank you. Anybody else have anything on ercot? Great! Thank you. I think we are to our last item from staff customer service report, and this will be Mr. Overton, and I think Mr. Galvan -- is he also here? Great. Welcome, gentlemen. Thanks for being here. [2:46:12 PM] And how is our customer service? >> It's going well. >> Pool: Great. >> End of presentation. [Laughter]. Again, thank you. My name is Kerry Overton. I am the chief customer and compliance officer. >> Jerry Galvan, vice president customer care services. >> The presentation we have for you today is intended to be a short presentation. Periodically at this oversight committee, we take a glimpse into each of the areas of the entire program, and this particular portion is focused on customer service. I will give you a little background that -- and remind -- remind you as part of this presentation, when we talk about the customer care operations within Austin energy, we provide functions and services for a host of departments across the city. You'll see each of them logod at the top of that logo -- logo'd, whether it's affordability, all the services our customers receive, both on account management associated with industrial, commercial, and residential customers. This gives you a little bit of an outline of the way we are organized. There is both a front office and a back office. We manage two call centers, Austin 311, which provides direct services to all citizens of Austin and beyond, for any information on the services that the city provides. The utility contact center, which provides all of the billing assistance and account information associated to those services, water, wastewater, code, Austin resource recovery, and -- did I forget one? And watershed, and public works. [2:48:12 PM] So those are the departments that we serve. I'm going to -- within that group, we have a customer service management group that handles all of our customer escalations associated with those activities, and we have a customer assistance program, and that's the area I'm going to focus on today. And then we have a back office where we also are responsible for all of the billing, collections, payments, and the quality management associate -- associated with awful those all of those accounts. As a broad overview, the total work efforts of our employees, if you roll those up, there's some high-level key performance indicators that gives you a measure of the success or work that they have on a day-to-day basis. Between the two centers, we receive about -- and handle about 2.9 million calls on an annual basis, so, in other words, we have agents that are highly specialized that we value greatly that are in contact with about 10,000 customers every single day, whether it's on utility issues or departmental issues across the city associated with 311. We use them also as part of our disaster recovery as a backup to each other, and that's why, when you hear us bring this presentation, we often talk about the citizens who call 311 or customers who call for utility services. The total bill production is about $2.2 billion on an annual basis for all those city activities, and a measure of our success is that we are able to, from a financial perspective, recover the costs associated with our services, but we also provide flexible means in which our customers can pay us back over time, and so this measure of 14.8% of the outstanding debt includes payment arrangements where we have very flexible terms to allow customers to not always just [2:50:13 PM] pay within the 30 days but they can pay that over a period of time, and we keep that measure in front of us, both from a financial perspective but also from affordability and a flexibility standpoint. And with that said, the customer assistance program with that background, we're going to focus more on what we refer to as caps. Cap is really a portfolio of programs, although one of the most popular aspects of when we refer to caps as the acronym, councilmember Houston, we're mostly referring to those that are in our discount programs, but we also within those cap, customers are also eligible for other services throughout the city other than just a discount, and we'll talk about that as well. This is one of the highlights of our customer assistance program. And as we travel across the country, we're finding more and more that Austin, we are on the leading edge in terms of the kind of services that we provide to our customers in the residential area, particularly in those that are eligible for the caps program. And right now, probably over the last five years, we spend more of our time across the country where most utilities are benchmarking our programs to develop theirs in their utility. The hallmark of how we're able to do this, we have built a wonderful relationship with over 55 agencies, our partners. We don't provide the direct social service, services, we rely on the community to non-profits and other organizations to do that, but we network them very closely on all of the services that we provide, so we can connect between referrals, they provide those direct services, we provide, you know, the funding and additional assistance that we'll talk about over on the benefit side, but we develop a great relationship where all of [2:52:16 PM] our employees know this entire community, the partner network that we basically talk with them on a regular basis, not just in formal meetings, but we call them across the county and the city on a day-to- day basis. We also utilize the community and all of the programs that we shape, the discount steering committee, the committee advocacy groups, and all of those that participate in -- I think we don't just try to reinvent the wheel. We work closely with others that have successful programs, as we bring forward to you, policy changes and reg changes, we spend time, prior to council seeing it, we work with advocacy groups to make sure that we're getting a whole rounded view of what the community is looking for, and we try to shape the policies designed with that feedback. The customer eligibilities are listed there in terms of the way in which customers are included into the program. It includes income, medical, but also their veteran status, and also other social services programs that they participate in, and so we have a wide, expanded view of the kind of individuals that are eligible for the programs. And the kind of benefits range from the discount programs, the weatherization. We also have the management program on the plus one, where on emergency basis, customers can receive additional funding beyond the regular discount to give them another opportunity to guess the finances and the revenue associated with paying the bill back over a period of time, and we all -- we do everything we can to avoid a disconnect. And that's what that program is about. What I wanted to -- and we also have the medical vulnerable registry, and that is customers who need specialized assistance, if we have a power outage, for an example, or we have an [2:54:17 PM] emergency in the area this group of individuals, we have direct information on the location, household, and telephone numbers, and even we have several family members that are backup to when there's any condition that will require that house to be without power, we will go through a series of contacts with these individuals to make sure that we can get them to a safe place and weather the storm or whatever service that we would need to provide. We provide them direct one-on-one services. What at this particular time to speak a little bit about today is also the case management and the education outreach. Part of this case management program, for those that are in caps, we actually make direct home visits to our customers, and in that home visit, again, we may make referrals that are beyond what we can handle in terms of our expertise, and our scope in terms of social service agencies, about the what we do is visit and sit down with our customers in those home visits. We help them because our goal is to make sure that we can get them to a place of understanding the affordable affordabilityof all of their utility services. We do budget planning with them, we help them doe calculations on how they can, you know, better -- we take an entire portfolio, a notebook, and walk through worksheets that could help them calculate how they can pay not only services to the utility, but how they can begin to budget for all household items. As we stated earlier, we provide specialized payment arrangements for these customers. One of the things we do in our analysis is just make sure that they are enrolled in any of the programs based on whether they're eligible, where their finances take them, we make sure they have the best optimized program [2:56:17 PM] for their needs. As I mentioned, we do the budget consultation. We also -- in that, we also save them not just simply ways to pay -- make payments, but we also make sure that they're conserving energy in the first place. And so we make sure that between our weatherization program and other referral programs, to make sure that the overall household is using the energy the least amount as possible. We make sure that they have access to the products that they could use, whether it's energy efficiency, light bulbs, but also connect them with the community where they might have to have some level of retrofits, and we bring in those referrals as well. And obviously, as we stated, when those services go beyond what we can handle, we also do the social service engagement. And so with that being said, that's a real look that we have case managers that have a direct contact with our customers to make sure that they can make their payments, we make sure that they're eligible, and you may have -- in our other presentations, have known we've had well over maybe 35 to maybe 40,000 customers that -- thousand customers that benefit directly from our discount programs. At some years, we had a wait list, you know, for those customers, through working with council and the directives that you have provided and working with the other agencies, we no longer have a wait list. We have all of our customers who are eligible for these programs receiving the benefits. With that being said, there are two major events coming up. On July 25th, we have our affordability energy summit. This is a really large summit. Although it is limited to the invited partner agencies, in this summit, we bring in all of the non-profits for local and state agencies, and we spend time to talk about their [2:58:17 PM] programs and the specific program of the city's, the way we design any changes that we've had for that year. We make sure that they're educated because they have a different kind of contact with their clients, and we want to make sure that when they're doing the referrals, they know which program they can connect their clients to. But the one on October 20th is the seventh annual community connections fair, resource fair that's coming up, and this one is open to the public, and you don't have to be a cat recipient to take part or learn about our programs. We have all of the city agencies represented at that forum, and it goes beyond the city. We have county and other specialized services. So if anyone wants to know of any service that can be provided throughout the city of Austin, even if the city of Austin is not the only provider, this is the place to come. And as you can see, each year we took a look at income levels, we took a look at some of our escalations, where we had customers inquiring more about our programs. We do a sophisticated analysis around zip codes. We try to look at all ten of the councilmember districts and as you can see, it moved around from all the places in the past. This year it will be at Travis high school. We were going to some of the middle schools but we've outgrown it. We needed a larger place. This is a place we can answer all of the questions. We also have some fun and games and some snacks and food for the kids to come out because it also allows us to build a good relationship with the community. That's the conclusion of our presentation. We will take any questions, and again, just wanted to give you the assurance that we have a case management group and we have an entire organization that their whole job is to dedicate those services to the customers who need the help the most. >> Pool: Thank you, Mr. Overton, I appreciate that and thanks, Mr. Galvan, for being here too. [3:00:23 PM] Any questions? Yes, Mr. Flannigan. >> Flannigan: The locations of those, I'm not necessarily familiar with where all those schools are can you roughly tell me where these events are being held? >> We were just giving you an example of where they were in the past. When the connection fair opens up, it's only one location for that date, so it's going to be Travis high school. And we can send the actual address. The ones we listed in the past was just to give an idea of kind of our journey, of where we started in the different locations around the city of Austin. So we will not have satellite programs at those locations. The entire program will take place at Travis high school this year. >> Flannigan: Is there a reason we shouldn't have satellite -- >> Well, we can, but one of the things we're going to do just a little bit different, it's a pretty expensive endeavor in terms of the staffing and the resources, and also we coordinate with other agencies to -- so that they can plan their resources and services to be there beyond us. But what we are going to do this year, we're going to have more outreach, working with all of the city utility departments. We're going to -- going into this next summer, we're going to be looking at about five or six outreach programs for water, Austin resource recovery, code, Austin energy, we will have six or seven programs within the districts as satellite programs to help people with their utility services. And that would be a program we will expand to this year. >> Flannigan: I'm sure you already will, but I encourage to you work with council members on that anytime there's outreach, I think we all, as district councilmembers, have reach into certain parts of the community that is not effective as much for staff. >> Absolutely. We agree. >> Pool: Great. Anybody else? Thank you so much. >> Okay. Thank you. >> Pool: Yeah. Oh -- >> Houston: I'm sorry. [3:02:23 PM] >> Pool: Councilmember Houston. >> Houston: I have a quick one. On slide 4 -- >> Yes, ma'am. >> Houston: Accounts receivable, outstanding debt, is that decreasing or increasing? >> It is decreasing. And, again, as I said, we have some very flexible payment arrangement policies, so if you take outside of the 30 days outstanding, that number, if you remove the payment arrangements, it's right at about 8%. So it's right at what we want it to be in terms of the market and industry. We just -- when we include that, we wanted to talk about at least the broadest perspective of it and work back from there. >> Houston: Okay. And I also appreciate the work that you do with people going into their homes because some of our seniors can't get to you, and that's always been very helpful. But the question is, do you have conversations or are you in communication with Austin public health that also have case managers there? >> We do and I'll let -- >> We do take a holistic approach, when we visit the customer at their home and sit down at the kitchen table or in their living room, we ask a set of questions related to their budget, their income, the needs that they have. And they'll tell us -- we also visit customers that have medical needs, so we do inquire if they start telling us, sharing information with us about a respirator or about medical equipment that they have at the house, we take that approach, and we also, if we identify that there's other needs beyond the utility piece, we will refer them to social agencies, non-for- profits and churches, and certainly the health and human services organization, if there's a need that they require that we do not offer. But we work in partnership with those non-profits and Travis county health organizations and city of Austin as well health department to ensure that they get the services they need. >> Pool: Great. Thank you so much, gentlemen. >> Thank you very much. >> Pool: That's the last of our planned agenda items. If anybody has any items they want to discuss at [3:04:24 PM] future meetings, just let -- you know something right now? Sure. >> Houston: No, I just saw Mr. Peña walk in so... >> Pool: Mr. Pena, you had signed up for citizens communication. You're welcome to take three minutes and talk to us if -- >> [Off mic] >> Pool: I understand completely but we're happy to hear from you now if you'd like to. >> Thank you very much. >> Pool: Mr. Pena, welcome. You have three minutes, sir. >> Thank you. I won't take three minutes. I want to commend Austin energy -- >> Sorry to interrupt. >> Yeah. Old man forgets. Gus peña, native east austinite, president of veterans for progress, and I just want to let you know that the -- because my nephew -- you know my nephew, and so does the general manager. I'm glad that the city of Austin works with people that have outstanding debt and that cuts their utilities, this man had his utilities cut without any notification, and that's not appropriate. When I ran for city council '96, '97, Bruce Todd, actually in '91, Bruce Todd and I had spoken when he was running for mayor, we would do everything we could to help out the poor. Electricity, you might say it's achievement it's expensive for a lot of people because apartments are not energy efficient, et cetera. So anyway, I want to thank the city of Austin, and of course this young man knows me very well, his family, and also the city manager cronk, Jason, has been outstanding in helping do outreach for the people to make sure utilities are not cut off, and if they are, expeditiously turn them back on because they have babies. I just want to say, job well done, it has improved. Customer relations has improved and I'm here -- the injuring manager is smiling over there. I told her when she first came aboard, you have some big shoes to fill. Thank you very much, because [3:06:25 PM] even with the heat, it's going to be more needful for the electricity. Through very much for all the work you do. I know you're having a lot of committees but thank you for allowing me to speak at the tail end. >> Pool: You bet, Mr. Peña. We're happy you are here. Okay. I'll take any -- if anybody has any agenda items, just let me or Jackie Sargent now. And I just want to remind everybody, we have one more meeting June 27th, and then we have a bit of a hiatus, no meeting in July or August. We'll be taking up budget, of course, in August, and then just three more meetings for the rest of the year, and that's September 26, October 24, and November 28. All of them are at 1:30 in this room. Okay? That's all we have, and there being nothing else, I will adjourn this meeting of the Austin energy utility oversight committee. Thanks, everybody, for being here today.