Austin Energy Utility Oversight Committee (AEUOC) meeting Transcript – 7/16/2024 Title: ATXN-1 (24hr) Channel: 1 - ATXN-1 Recorded On: 7/16/2024 6:00:00 AM Original Air Date: 7/16/2024 Transcript Generated by SnapStream ================================== Please note that the following transcript is for reference purposes and does not constitute the official record of actions taken during the meeting. For the official record of actions of the meeting, please refer to the Approved Minutes. [9:03:52 AM] we will recess the work session of the Austin city council, and I will convene the Austin energy utility oversight committee. And we are still at city hall, and it is 9:04 A.M. Leslie pool, chair of the committee. And we have a quorum present. Let me shift over to that agenda. We are called to order, and I [9:04:53 AM] are called to order, and I understand from the city clerk that we have no speakers for today. Is that correct, or do we have speakers for Austin energy oversight? Do we have anybody signed up to speak for? I can't tell what you're saying. >> We do not have any speakers. >> Thank you so much. No speakers today. So we will move to the approval of minutes, which is item one. Approve the minutes of April 30th, 2024 meeting of the Austin energy utility pool. >> Sorry, we do have one speaker who? >> Mr. Suddaby are you registered to speak? >> He emailed me. Did not sign up through the system. >> Okay. Do you have that sign up? >> Yes. >> Okay, I'll forward it to your staff. Okay. Mr. Suddaby, you have three minutes for public communication. [9:05:54 AM] communication. >> I won't take the full three minutes, good morning, I wanted to, come down here and let you all know that you're about to see some really good presentations on items four and five, I saw these slides last night over in Mueller. And these are the types of, efforts and energy that I love to see our city focusing on looking for opportunities to build resiliency into our communities, focusing on resiliency hubs, focusing on finding grants that allow us to build microgrids and solar, finding all the opportunities to make us more resilient. I know that our community is, our hearts are going out to, all the folks out in Houston and, you know, on, you know, I forgot to mention, I'm here speaking as, as a resident of d4. Personal capacity, not on behalf of, of my union, which I'm a proud [9:06:55 AM] my union, which I'm a proud member of or my employer. I'm proud to serve the public, but I am. I am glad to see items even, like, for where we're putting out, rfp that have really good, returns on, really good response rates. Where there are lots of ideas coming to the table, and, and the city having a good strategy and Austin energy having a good method for sorting through them. And making short lists of which are the best ideas. This is the type of thing that we should be focusing on building our capacity as a community, and, and I might add, also, I'm glad to see that other ideas that are out there, were pulled, that would reduce our, our, our own capacity, our own strategies, to address our energy needs and the climate, the, the idea of load shaping and demand response technologies that allow us to turn on a dime is exactly the direction we need to go. You know, these climate you know, precipitated energy [9:07:56 AM] you know, precipitated energy crises are not going away. It's only going to get worse. So now is the time for us to be preparing. And I'm so glad that Austin energy is doing that. And in your capacity of oversight, I want to encourage you all to keep pushing that way. So pay attention to him. >> Thanks, Mr. Cha' keeta B. >> All right. We'll move to the first item, which is approval of minutes. Do I have a motion to approve the minutes of April 30th, 2024? Thank you, council member harper-madison. And a second. Thank you, council member qadri. Are there any corrections or changes to the minutes? If not, they are adopted, briefings item two general manager's report. General manager con welcome for an operational update. Awards and recognitions. Good morning. Good morning. >> Good morning. Good morning, chair pool. Vice chair Vella, I guess mayor Watson's not here right now. And committee members, I'm Bob Kohn, general [9:08:57 AM] members, I'm Bob Kohn, general manager of Austin energy. So I'd like to start today by talking about our neighbors in the Houston area who are affected by the aftermath of hurricane beryl. More than 2 million people lost power and some still have not been restored. One week ago today, Austin energy sent line workers and support staff with bucket trucks to help with restoration efforts. Our crews have replaced multiple broken poles, miles of overhead wires and many damaged transformers to help get the power back for the people of Houston, providing mutual aid and natural disasters is something our line workers take great pride in, and we're especially thankful to the 20 employees who have taken time away from their own families to help their fellow Texans in need. Next thing I want to talk about is ercot. So ercot, the statewide grid operator, says the summer weather outlook will likely be above normal [9:09:58 AM] likely be above normal temperatures across Texas for the rest of the summer. They're expecting 2024 to be in the top ten hottest Summers on record, but not as hot as last summer. Ercot projects sufficient resources to meet summer demand. Ercot is talking more about something called the solar ramp down and let me let me talk about that for a second. So solar power as we know, is clean, renewable energy. And it's helped the ercot grid meet increasing demand for energy as our state's population grows. But the sun goes down faster than the energy demand to continue cooling homes and businesses. And that's called the solar ramp down. And it can lead to tighter conditions around sunset, especially in the hottest part of the summer and especially in August. This is due to a loss of solar generation. While energy demand is still high and wind is low, and that usually happens between 8 and 10:00 at night. You you may remember all the [9:10:59 AM] may remember all the conservation alerts we had last summer, and usually that's around when that happened, and again, like I said in August, that's when we can look forward to probably seeing some of those conservation alerts, because when it's not blowing as much as we need it, when the solar is ramping down. So at Austin energy, we are using messaging to help empower our customers to continue to save energy and money with conservation tips into the solar ramp down hours as solar ramps down in the hottest part of the year, we're ramping up our education and conservation tips across our multiple communication channels and partners, so together as a community, we can make a difference for a more reliable and sustainable grid. I want to talk a little bit on the next subject. Talk about our light up navajo effort. I don't know how many of you have heard about that, but for the past few years, thanks to a partnership between Austin energy, the American power association, and the navajo tribal utility authority, many navajo families [9:12:00 AM] authority, many navajo families can turn on lights, ovens, and air conditioners in their homes for the first time. Recently, 16 Austin energy crews made a 2000 mile round trip to Arizona. They installed ten miles of overhead electrical lines and 78 electrical poles. Now, nine navajo families have working electricity in their homes for the first time. That's an incredibly rewarding experience for our crew members, along with education and training opportunities that a project like this allows, especially for our newer line workers. For one of our line workers, Edward Jodi, it was a homecoming, so I brought a short one minute snippet of video so you can hear from Edward himself. And I think, Josh, I'm an enrolled member of the navajo nation. >> Like taking a trip down memory lane because I haven't been home here. I'd say 15, 20 years. I was recognizing every local spot that I used to go, [9:13:00 AM] local spot that I used to go, you know, visit with my grandma and my grandpa. So it's a fun experience. And the guys gave me the honor of stabbing the first meter to energize the customers house, over on sawmill. So they were very thankful for it. Turns out the family there are no my extended family here in, pinion, Arizona. So I was glad to help. It feels humbling. I feel like almost like a superhero. Like giving them power. And they're really grateful for it. >> It's always a blessing to give back when you have a 90 year old woman crying, and she makes the statement, I can go to the grocery store and buy more than three days worth of food because she now has a refrigerator instead of a cooler. I mean, not one of my crew members have came back without feeling just a blessed to be a part of bringing that to somebody's life. In this day and age, the tribe always tells us we're now part of a tribe, and I always tell them, you're part of our tribe also, as much as you are humbled by us coming in, we are more humbled by providing [9:14:01 AM] are more humbled by providing this this service to you. >> So I'd like to publicly thank Edward and all 16 members of our Austin energy team who took the time away from their families to do this. And I will say that this is a nationwide effort. We aren't the only utility that does this. That's a large area of Arizona and New Mexico that just has no power. So we feel good about doing that and giving back to the community, so that concludes my report. I know we have a busy agenda today with updates on the resource generation plan, renewable rp's battery storage, and our customer assistance program. So I'd be glad to answer any questions if you have any questions. >> You know, I just wanted to be reminded how many years now have we been sending our linemen to help the navajo nation? >> Three years. >> Very good. That's really, really does my heart good. Any other questions for the general manager? Yes. Council member Ryan alter a question related to the solar ramp down issue that [9:15:02 AM] the solar ramp down issue that obviously affects us, affects the state. >> We had a conversation a while back, in terms of our demand response program, about when we utilize the call and how we when we put our call out to customers, and you know, that the financial incentive component of that I'm curious in that conversation, the discussion was that we would do it when there was a and I forget the exact term, but the emergency constraint from ercot or conservation, it just depends on how serious it is. Right. And there was also discussion about the possibility of just looking at the sheer monetary elements. Right. Like if prices go above $500 or $1000, you know, there's no conservation call, but it is in our financial interest to have users. Use less energy because then, you know, we're [9:16:03 AM] because then, you know, we're making more money. Is that something that we're exploring for demand response program that to go beyond the conservation calls? >> Yeah, absolutely. In fact, I think today you might hear from Michael anger when he talks about our rfp responses and what we're looking at as far as battery storage and how those can be used in homes to help that effort. >> Okay. Great. Thank you. >> Thank you, Mr. Khan. Okay. Item number three, we have Lisa martin, deputy general manager and coo. Linda rife, president of rife line. And I believe we will hear from doctor Michael weber of the university of Texas at Austin. And he will be remote. Hello, miss martin, good morning, >> Good morning, chair pool, vice chair vela and committee members. I'm Lisa martin, Austin energy's chief operating officer. My goal today is to provide you a brief status update on the recessed resource generation plan efforts. And then I'll share the floor with most and most of my time today with some subject matter experts, next slide please. The last uac update was in April, and at that [9:17:05 AM] update was in April, and at that time I emphasized that we were no longer doing a 2030 update to the resource generation plan. Instead, we're leveraging the necessary resources to propose a full resource generation plan to 2035. This involves staying true to our goal of carbon free by 2035, but also ensuring that we establish other objectives to align with community values. We are committed to leveraging the work of the 2030 update, including the auc, working group recommendations, and we had a productive technical discussion last month when we met to discuss their work and it will continue to bear fruit as we proceed along this path. Ultimately, the resource generation plan to 2035 will be an objective based plan rooted in community values and priorities. We're going to have to recognize the tradeoffs of different options, and we'll walk you through that as we go. Across the globe, there are dynamic factors driving a change to how all utilities are approaching resource planning. And as a result of these drivers, resource plans are being structured to allow flexibility to respond to [9:18:06 AM] flexibility to respond to changing market and dynamic circumstances, said another way, the 2035 plan will be structured to hold up to uncertainty, and we're on the right path. Next slide please. This slide highlights the six main workstreams that we have running in parallel on this effort. With our longer term planning horizon, we've engaged with several external parties to help throughout the process. You're familiar with the first two rifling and energy research community facilitation by reefline and energy research by doctor Michael weber and UT. In addition to presenting here today, doctor weber will be a main speaker at the second reefline workshop. Rounding out the top row. You recently approved a contract with nv energy insights to conduct a market study of demand side management and local solar for Austin energy. As we discussed previously, the scope of work was informed by the auc working group recommendations. This work will feed into the modeling as well as the options presented to you at the end of this process. Moving to the bottom row, we have portfolio modeling and [9:19:07 AM] have portfolio modeling and item, which we kicked off last night with the electric utility commission meeting. We also extended a contract with ascend, which is a third party analytics company, to provide additional insight into the modeling work associated with the resource generation plan. Next is request for proposals, and after this agenda item, Mikel anger will present an update on the latest renewable and storage rfp. And finally, we're tapping into our industry contacts at source and ipri, both of which have deep knowledge on subjects relevant to the resource generation plan, such as energy efficiency, demand response and decarbonization methods. Next slide. As I just mentioned last night, we kicked off the deeper level modeling work with the electric utility commission. We're starting our collaboration by sharing information on the modeling framework and the inputs. We've solicited feedback. It's the inputs and assumptions this month and the portfolios next month. And then after the models are run, we'll work with the auc to review the outputs, which will ultimately lead to solutions and [9:20:07 AM] lead to solutions and recommendations. Next slide. Above all, the work that we're doing across all these areas and with all the stakeholders follows a common pattern. We're working through phase by phase. And as we do so, these are the questions we're asking of and about our community. We started with a discussion about what values are important to the community and what each value means. Linda's presentation today will close out the values and definitions phase of work. And next we're exploring what's the current and future state and what problems we're trying to solve and what risks we're facing. Doctor weber's presentation today will initiate that phase of work, and ultimately we're looking to understand risk tolerances and community priorities. After that, we'll engage in discussions to identify objectives and how we should put our collective values into action. This is about defining metrics for success and exploring the tradeoffs and finally, we'll arrive at solutions echo plans to present a set of solutions with associated risks and tradeoffs [9:21:08 AM] associated risks and tradeoffs for your consideration. These will include details describing the degree to which each portfolio aligns with community risks and values, and community risk tolerances, values and priorities, and the trade offs that each option proposal poses. The results will go into the gen plan. Next slide please. My final slide shows those four phases in a graphic way with key dates all along the way. The key takeaway here is that there are many touch points actually, even more than we've shown here, and we're leading to a completion before the end of the calendar year. So now I'll pass the floor to Linda Rief for an update on workshop one. After that, doctor Michael weber will share his insights on some key items for all of us to consider and I'll return for questions at the conclusion of the presentation. Thank you. >> Thanks, miss martin. Welcome, miss Rief. >> Thank you. Good morning. Linda rife with reefline, our job is process and facilitation [9:22:08 AM] job is process and facilitation of the workshops. Next slide please. Austin energy hosted. It's going to be hosted four, workshops, the first one was held on Friday, June 7th for about two hours over lunch. And that information you just heard from Lisa was to gather initial feedback from a very diverse set of people, which I'm hoping will show up here in a second. And the stakeholders are going to identify community values, priorities, priorities, and then some criteria that we can look at, the different solutions that come up and see how they they fit into all of that. The agenda included introductory presentation of the basics of Texas and Austin area energy markets. And then we broke out into small groups. So there were 35 participants that showed up at this first meeting. It seemed to be very popular, and I appreciate everybody's input into that process. Next slide please. So these are the organizations that are on that workshop. It's pretty, diverse. We had someone representing aarp [9:23:08 AM] We had someone representing aarp and a student that just graduated from aisd. We had, the diversity chambers. We had, someone from assisted living. So it's very, very diverse as well as people that know a lot about this, like public citizen and Sierra club. Next slide please. So overall we learned that there's agreement with the mission pillars of sustainability reliability and affordability. All of those are important. But the group also talked about equity transparency and communication. We want to make sure that we think about those things as we move forward for sustainability. And innovation. They wanted a holistic view. We heard a lot about, cradle to grave or life cycle assessments as methods, methods of measuring sustainability. When we talked about equity, that was an interesting one for me. They defined it as making sure that Austin energy considers the population that needs energy [9:24:09 AM] population that needs energy most, especially those who are medically vulnerable, low income or on fixed income, in everything it does. And that includes returning reliability to the grid. That includes affordability for sure, in and making sure their environment around if we're building something close to them was clean. Lastly, they recognized that 100% reliability is likely not attainable. Probably not attainable. However, transparency and communication were noted here as well, and they encouraged Austin energy to be more predictable and more, with this specific information. After that workshop, we reported out and you all should have gotten the whole report from all of that, from the different groups. If you haven't, make sure you let us know and make sure you get it. But we talked to the auc and we had gathered a couple of additional informations. A big takeaway was they emphasized the importance of keeping Austin energy public, and to ensure that it remains financially viable because it's a dividend [9:25:10 AM] viable because it's a dividend to the community, the commissioners agreed that equity should be top of mind and incorporated and developed in the generation resource plan, they also mirrored the feedback we heard from the group about the balance between responsibly addressing our current and future energy challenges, while prioritizing community values, and they felt like Austin energy could do more to provide transparency and better communication. I know they've taken a major step forward on that. Next slide please. What you're we're seeing next is we have an upcoming workshop on Friday, July 26th, 1115 to 130. That is shown, you can watch it on on channel six I think. But at least on on site. Or you can watch the video later, this is mostly going to be a presentation and some questions and answers. It really is kind of a table setting for the next steps, but we will also provide a report out for that. The next workshop after that would be Thursday, August 22nd. And then finally Friday, September 13th [9:26:10 AM] finally Friday, September 13th to meet your needs to get this done by the end of the year. So we'll ensure and we'll keep talking to the utility commission and also to all to you in this process. But I thank you for, again all your good ideas. We've got a great, diverse group of people, and they've given us some really good feedback to date. And I'm excited about the next upcoming meetings. Thanks so much. >> Thanks so much, miss rife. I think we have doctor weber joining us remotely. Let's see if we can bring his image up. >> Yes, here I am. Hi doctor. We can hear me. >> We can hear you. Are we able to see you, if briefly before you start? There you are. Look at that. That's amazing. >> Good. Good to see you. And thank you for inviting me to be part of this conversation and this analysis. And sorry, I could not be there in person. I'm actually on holiday in new York, so I'm glad the virtual connection will work. This is a collection of some analysis [9:27:10 AM] collection of some analysis thoughts pulled together by Emily Arnold. She's a graduate student at UT and doctor Yael glazer, research associate at UT. So I'm mostly presenting their work and they're on the call. So if I get any questions that I can't answer, they'll help me out. Or if I say anything that's wrong, hopefully they will correct me. I have about 30 slides and a lot of information. If you've ever seen me present, you know I'm a fast talker, so I should get through them. But there is a lot of different concepts and so I would encourage you to interrupt me with questions. If you need me to clarify something or explain it again, or just repeat it because I spoke too quickly. These are preliminary results we just started a little while ago. We're just digging in, but we think there are already some insights worth sharing, next slide please. Next slide starting with Austin energy basics. I apologize for telling you a bunch of things you already know, but I think it's good to return to the basics every once in a while. What is Austin energy? Well, it's a part of the local community. And just so you know, my background, I was once a member of the electric utility commission from 2008 to 2013. So I, I have known this energy and been a customer since I was born in 1971, but [9:28:11 AM] since I was born in 1971, but also have known him as a member of the commission and a research partner for a long time. Austin energy has over half a million customers. That means households. Essentially, there's roughly 2 to 3 people per household, so you can think of that as substantial number of people. That earns a lot of revenue and has a couple thousand employees, and then two numbers at the bottom left that are worth paying attention to is the peak demand record, which was set last year during the heat dome in 2023, is a little over 3000mw. That's the same as saying a little over three gigawatts. So you'll hear me talk about megawatts and gigawatts. That's basically the size of the power plants. You need to provide the electricity to Austin. Then there's this other number, 14,000, a little over 14,000 gigawatt hours. That's how much electricity generated in the 3000mw is the ability to generate electricity in real time. So it's a pretty substantial utility. It's one of the largest municipal utilities in the United States. Next slide please. The resource mix is diverse Austin energy is a leader. So it's got a very clean fuel mix. Over 75% is carbon free which is way above industry average, which is really fantastic. That color coded donut shows the different forms. [9:29:11 AM] donut shows the different forms. There's wind and solar and biomass and nuclear. Those are the carbon free sources. And then you have, a little bit of coal and natural gas. So you have the clean ones and then the natural gas and coal. And over time the mix gets cleaner, which is really great. The map on the left shows the locations of the power plants. The natural gas power plants tend to be really close to Austin coal, not so far away at fayette, and then nuclear on the coast, and then wind is in the panhandle or the south, and solar is kind of west and also near Austin. And then the biomass plant is in nacogdoches in east Texas. So we have a pretty good mix, which is great. It's sensible from a resilience perspective to have a diverse mix in the mix. It's particularly clean, which I think is great. Next slide please. The challenge before us right now that Austin energy is experienced. But really this is a universal challenge. Is that the grid needs to grow because demand for electricity is expanding. Increasing. This is a good news story. But we also need to decarbonize the grid and need to replace things that will retire. And the world is warming. So we need to design the grid to work in a warming world in a cleaner way, while [9:30:12 AM] world in a cleaner way, while also expanding. So we have to do a lot of things at once. And that's the challenge before us. Next slide please. And that all what I'm saying, like in a warming world expanding decarbonize is really the energy transition. Next slide, on my view we're about 10 to 15 years into a 30 to 40 year transition, the reason I say we're 10 to 15 years into the transition already is that in the united States, CO2 emissions peaked about 15 years ago and have been dropping despite population growth and economic growth, which is really good news story. That's primarily because of a decline in coal use nationally, but also because of efficiency standards like fuel economy standards for cars and light bulb efficiency standards. We gotten there through fuel substitution and efficiency. So we actually use less energy per person and less energy per unit of economic activity today than we used to. So that's good news. The United States is actually one of the leaders on this. Despite everything in Austin, energy is a part of that story. A lot of people who have looked at how to get to a net zero world, or a zero carbon world, who looked at the future and how [9:31:13 AM] who looked at the future and how to decarbonize, have done a variety of analyzes. My group has done some analysis, but so has the white house international groups, the us department of energy, princeton, you name it. There are a lot of these decarbonization studies. And the goal here, if you want to decarbonize the economy, is to reduce the CO2 emissions to the atmosphere and or remove CO2 from the atmosphere to keep the concentration of CO2 levels from growing. In fact, even potentially someday, to reduce them back to where they were at pre-industrial levels, which could be great. And there are a lot of similar and overlapping conclusions. There's only so many ways you can decarbonize, and we tend to converge on the same sets of solutions, which I'll talk about in along the way. There are some distinct things to keep in mind. The concepts of carbon neutral, versus or net zero versus carbon free. So carbon free means you do not emit CO2 into the atmosphere, but net zero means you might have emissions in one location, say, a smokestack on one part of Texas. But then you have a removal on another location, say, from direct air capture or some sort of carbon scrubbing or something like that. In all these studies conclude that net zero is cheaper, faster and more equitable than having zero [9:32:14 AM] equitable than having zero carbon, which is a pretty important conclusion. And we tend to argue around the edges of all how much carbon or this and that. But we all agree that if you want to get to net, if you want to get to decarbonize economy faster and cheaper in a way that's more reliable and equitable, it's okay to have some emissions in some places as long as you clean them up. And that's the question how you might clean it up with direct air capture or soil carbon sequestration or planting trees. There's a lot of ways to do it. So that's a very important point I want to make, because that will be relevant to Austin's future as well. Next slide. The priority order for decarbonization generally has four steps. This is kind of my tagline. Say do your best and clean up the rest and do your best means. Avoid as much mess as you can. The first and most important step is efficiency. Efficiency saves you a lot of cost in trouble, and thankfully Austin energy has already done a lot as a leader on this. That's great news. I'll send you been at it for decades. That also means there's a little less obvious efficiency remaining. So if you are in other parts of the state or other parts of the nation, you can start with efficiency because you haven't [9:33:14 AM] efficiency because you haven't done it yet. So the good news is we've already done it. The bad news is it gets a little harder for the next step. However, that efficiency has saved us a lot of heartache and money that we can now use to invest in sort of the next round of equipment we need. So anyway, efficiency remains an option, but might not be as obvious an option as it was a couple of decades ago. Electrification is the next step in decarbonization, especially electrifying light duty vehicles. That's cars getting cars off gasoline onto electricity is really good for the economy and the environment and all sorts of things. So we can talk about that more if you want. But also switching from natural gas for home heating and cooking to electric home heating and cooking is really good environmentally, etc, but we'll probably need to expand the grid to accommodate both of those. The electric vehicles and electric cooking and heating. But electrification comes with a lot of efficiencies. It comes with a lot of air quality benefits, and it also comes with revenue benefits for the city of Austin. And it also has these other things that we'll talk about where it improves the overall economics and performance of the system. If we do it the right way, however, it will drive up the demand for how [9:34:15 AM] will drive up the demand for how much capacity we need to generate electricity and how much overall electricity will need to be made. But electrification is a good news story, especially as we decarbonize the power sector. So you get like a double benefit there. The third step is clean molecules. Basically for whatever parts of the economy that are hard to electrify, it's hard to electrify planes or ships across the ocean or, high temperature industrial heat or chemicals fabrication sometimes maybe heavy duty trucking. We can see. So there are certain parts of the economy that are difficult to electrify, and molecules make a good fit for that. And there are a variety of molecules we might consider that are cleaner than coal, biomethane or hydrogen or hydrogen carriers like ammonia. And we might use those molecules for power generation. When we don't have electricity directly available, say, from wind and solar. And then the fourth step is kind of picking up the rest. So do your best two steps one, two and three and then clean up the rest of step four which is carbon management. Using point source capture to keep the CO2 from going into the atmosphere or direct air capture to remove it or other methods. Planting seagrass meadows in the coast to take CO2 out of the ocean, which [9:35:15 AM] take CO2 out of the ocean, which takes CO2 out of the atmosphere. There are a lot of ways to remove CO2, but that tends to be pretty expensive, so it's best to first do your best to reduce the mess. And then you can use carbon management to clean it up. Next slide please. One of the trends that's important for us to be aware of is what's happening in ercot. I think there's already been some talk about what's happening, and all synergy is going to be feeling some of the same trends, which is significant growth in demand for power. That's gigawatts as well as overall consumption and gigawatt hours. Another key trend in ercot is transmission congestion. The wires are full at peak times, and it's easier to build power plants and easier to buy electric vehicles than it is to build the transmission. So we're entering or really have already entered a transmission scarce environment. So that means transmission, which is the ability to move power from, say, a west Texas wind farm to Austin or a solar farm, stuff like that. If it's far away, it's getting more expensive, more volatile, more difficult, and so this will be important because the location of where the energy is generated will become something that Austin is very [9:36:16 AM] something that Austin is very sensitive to. Next slide. If you look at the growth, it's really incredible, and there's a lot of agreement that ercot and governor Abbott and Elon Musk and environmental advocates agree that electricity demand is going up and should go up. That's good environmentally. It's also good for the economy. So we have two charts show here, peak demand on the right and ten megawatts peak demand is going to maybe 90,000mw or 90gw in, say, six years or eight years or so, and then gigawatt hours on the left also increasing. So ercot is expecting a lot more power requirements and a lot more energy generation and consumption to meet the loads for oil and gas electrification, data centers, electric vehicles, more people, more economic activity and hotter Summers. So that's the fundamental trend of the region. And also energy is caught up in that as well. Next slide. Low growth is on the way for a few reasons. I just mentioned some electrification of transportation is really important. Electric vehicles are on the rise. There are already 50,000 or so in Austin energy's [9:37:18 AM] 50,000 or so in Austin energy's area and that will grow by an order of magnitude in the coming decade or so. There's also electrification of industrial loads. Oil and gas is electrifying for extracting the oil and gas from the ground, but also for the refineries. You also have more steel smelters and mills and also data centers. So data centers are really a new source of industrial load. But also we might electrify home heating and cooking as we talked about. And there's just more of us and we're getting active. And then repeating what I said earlier, the transmission congestion will be particularly acute for Austin energy. It's already kind of acute, but it will get worse. Next slide please. Let's take a specific view of low growth in Austin energy. Next slide please. And this chart shows in blue the historical growth looking backwards from 2023. And before in growth the load has grown just because there's been more people in Austin and we have more electric loads for zoom and virtual meetings like this. So we see a pretty reliable growth over the years and decades. But looking forward from 2024 and beyond, we have projections, continued population economic growth, which is the dark blue, but also a few other things, [9:38:19 AM] but also a few other things, some growth from home. Home electrification, which might be heating and, and cooking and that kind of thing. Data centers in blue and then look at electric vehicle generation or electric vehicle charging. Excuse me in green. And this is a scenario where everyone comes home and plugs in their vehicle at the same time, which is kind of preposterous. So don't get too attached to these numbers. But if everybody plugs in their electric vehicles at the same time, the peak demand will go up by a factor of two and a half or so, from three gigawatts to almost eight gigawatts. So significant growth in peak demand just from more of us, but then electrifying more loads at home. Data center growth and electric vehicles. Electric vehicles are the biggest part of this story, and this is the scenario where there's no charging management, where we all plug in at the same time. Something else on this chart is this magenta line that shows the generation capacity, frost energy, us all energy already does not have enough generating capacity to meet peak demand. And so has to go to the markets through a variety of means to buy power from ercot. That generally works fine if prices are low, but prices can be [9:39:19 AM] are low, but prices can be volatile and be very expensive sometimes, and you have transmission congestion, other things. So there's already a shortfall, so to speak. And that magenta line predicting the future will drop. I'll come back to that in just a couple slides as our different power plants retire or as our different power plant agreements for these power purchase agreements for wind and solar, for example. And we'll have a shortfall. And the difference between the peak demand at the top of the colors and the magenta supply, that is the shortfall that needs to be filled. There are a variety of ways we can do that, which I'll come to shortly. So this is a scenario with electric vehicles that are not managed for the charging, which is a stupid way to do it. And I don't think this will happen, but it's a risk we need to be wary of. Next slide please. Another scenario is you take those electric vehicles instead of everyone plugging them in at 6 P.M, you charge them around the clock. Let's say we could do perfectly smooth round the clock charging. We know how many miles people drive. We know it's about a third of a kilowatt or a kilowatt hour per mile driven. We can figure out how many kilowatt hours per year we need. We sort of generate it around [9:40:21 AM] We sort of generate it around the clock. Then the peak demand growth is not so significant or not as significant, I say, but still growing from about three gigawatts to over four gigawatts. So still significant growth in power demand with electric vehicles. If we had perfect round the clock management and then the data centers start to look a little more important there. Let's talk about the data centers for a second. There's 125mw of data centers in Austin already. And this is anticipating a quadrupling of that like another 500mw of data centers. That's a wild card, there are tens of gigawatts or tens of thousands of megawatts of data centers coming to Texas. And how many of them come in to the Austin energy service area is unknown. Sometimes they built outside of Austin because they can get a cheaper rate. However, if for the data center world, they're in a race to get utility hookups faster and they can get more reliable in service and a faster hookup in Austin energy. So we might see some of them coming into Austin service area. The university of Texas on Thursday was awarded a billion dollar supercomputer from the national science foundation. This is a huge thing. UT will have the fastest open science academic research computer in the world, which is really cool. It will be [9:41:22 AM] which is really cool. It will be 30mw, that one computer, that one research computer. So just one data center, one computer, just a UT will be 30mw. And we're thinking there'll be more than just the research computer. UT let's look at the next slide. This scenario three. This is where you expect 10% of your electric vehicles to charge at peak times, which is actually what ercot expects ercot doesn't expect. Everybody plugs in at the same time. It also does not expect round the clock smooth charging. It expects about 10% of evs to charge at peak times based on historical data, and this gives us a result that's more like 4.5gw or so, so that means our peak demand and us energy service area will grow by 50% or so in the coming 16 years. So this is probably where we'll end up. But the risks that will be lower are much higher. With an unmanaged situation raises the importance of criticality, of having smart management for the ev charging. So that the evs are good for the grid, as opposed to bad for the grid. Next slide please. And here's a question like, well, we all really act at the same time with our evs. Is it possible for people across a wide geographic [9:42:22 AM] people across a wide geographic area to really have synchronous behavior? And the answer is yes for weather, for sure. We turn on our air conditioners at the same time, or we turn on our furnaces for heating at the same time. But we also do it for non-weather things. And I'll give you a couple examples. Next slide. These are kind of ridiculous, but they do reveal some human behavior. There's a popular soap opera in England on bbc called eastenders. And a lot of millions of people watch it. And when it ends, 1.75 million electric tea kettles are turned on almost simultaneously, and each one a couple kilowatts. And so there's a surge of three gigawatts, three nuclear power plants worth of power for 3 to 5 minutes. This happens reliably. So the grid operator knows and they have nuclear power plants on standby in France, as well as like some hydroelectric power plants in the uk and Wales just to do this. So this is not a weather thing, but this is a lot of people across the water area doing the exact same thing, the exact same moment. Next slide please. In America it's not tea, it's the super bowl flush. This is a known phenomenon in the wastewater world where we all flush our toilets at the same time at commercial break, and this creates a wave of wastewater that also then [9:43:24 AM] wastewater that also then triggers a surge in demand for water from the water reservoir. So this is not weather related. This is a cultural activity related. It's kind of a funny human thing. And next slide, we also do it for traffic. We all hit the roads at the same time for Thanksgiving. So this is the risk for us in energy is that electric vehicle owners. And there'll be half 1 million or 1 million electric vehicles in Austin will all do the same thing at the same time, next slide please. This is a known risk. This is a paper from 2008 about electric vehicles showing two different ways to charge. This is in California. For a different number of electric vehicles, in this case, phevs, plug in hybrid electric vehicles. And on the right, it shows what happens if everyone charges at the same time. It creates huge surges in demand, which are those red, blue and sort of pink or magenta curves, causing a requirement to build a lot more power plants just to manage the charging. But on the left is if you have managed charging with charging off peak, and then you do what's called valley filling, you have this excess capacity at night, you charge up at night. Well, all of a sudden that doesn't strain the grid. It actually saves costs because the cost of the grid is [9:44:24 AM] because the cost of the grid is amortized over more kilowatt hours. So I often say that whether electric vehicles break or save the grid depends on what time of day you charge them, and if you charge them at the peak time, it's really hard on the grid. But if it's managed, you can spread it around the clock, then it's actually quite good for the grid and lowers costs for everybody, which is really a unique opportunity. Next slide. The forecasted shortfall in generating capacity is really significant. So that's what I was talking about earlier. Next slide and I want to talk a little bit more about it here. This shows that generating capacity not energy today 2500mw or 2.5gw. And you can start to roll off different power plants. Fayette shown there in blue and Orange for different times. It rolls off. Regardless of what happens with fayette power plant, a lot of these power purchase agreements for wind and solar that were signed in the ten like or the 2020 tens, like a, you know, a decade or so ago will roll off. And if we allow them to roll off, then we'll have even greater shortfall in generating capacity, even beyond fayette. And fayette could shut down in 2029, which is like a [9:45:25 AM] down in 2029, which is like a local preference. But even if we don't have a local preference to shut down the coal plant, the EPA has sent rules and the Biden administration, and we'll see how sticky those rules are. There are a variety of lawsuits, but they say, basically, if you want to continue your coal plant after 2032, you have to add scrubbers so you can anticipate that fayette shuts down like in 2029 or 2032, or you pick your date. But if you add in the retirement of fayette and the ending date of these solar and wind ppas that are significant shortfall in supply and so we have to fill in that difference to get resource adequacy, to have enough supply to match demand without having to buy it all from ercot, because that can get really pricey. And that decline sets up some of the that need, next slide please. We have some options to meet our resource adequacy needs. Meaning to have enough power generation capacity next slide. We have some options that are not power plants like energy efficiency I already talked about that before. That is the cheapest best thing to do. We should do more of that. That reduces the need for power generation and consumption. But it also has this, equity and safety aspect, which is if the power goes out during a cold snap or a heat [9:46:27 AM] during a cold snap or a heat wave, your home will stay at a safer and more comfortable temperature for longer. And so efficiency has other benefits beyond just reducing the need for more electricity demand. It's important, council member already asked Bob Kahn about that. That's that's a big opportunity because for grid balancing, turning a load off is just as useful as turning power plants on. And there are a variety of non-essential loads, such as hot water heaters or pool pumps. You can turn off here and there to spare some power demand. And then there are also essentialloads, heating and cooling. You wouldn't want to turn off for good, but maybe you can rotate in. All energy has done that with the power partners program for quite some time. With tens of megawatts of demand response capability. Really one of the leaders on that, I think this is a big opportunity to expand, require some new devices and some smart communications and other things, but that might be cheaper than building new power plant. And then we'll have batteries and other storage systems. And you heard Bob Kahn mentioned that as well. And batteries are really helpful for that solar wind gap that that Bob talked about where solar is declining, when has it picked up yet? So there's like a 2 to 4 hour period in the evenings where it's still hot, [9:47:28 AM] evenings where it's still hot, but you don't have renewables available necessarily. Batteries are great for that, but batteries are not great for a five or 7 or 12 day period where it's neither windy nor sunny. So batteries are really great for certain purposes, but for longer duration storage you need a different kind of battery or different kind of storage technique or a different generator. Next slide please. There are also renewable options to meet our resource adequacy needs. I think the first priority and we're not really done with our recommendations. So it's so preliminary. But this is where we're leaning. I think it makes sense to renew the existing ppas as ppas for solar and wind are outside of the service area, and it would be good to either renew or extend those. And it might be possible, as those are renewed, to repower the wind turbines for example, or replace the solar panels. So at the same site, you actually get more power out. And I don't know what that boost might be 10 or 20, but it might be good to renew those and get more power out. One thing I'll point out, though, is a reason why ppas were so attractive in the 2020 tens is because municipal utilities weren't able to access the tax credits, the investment tax credits, or production tax credits that supported solar and wind. But with the inflation [9:48:30 AM] wind. But with the inflation reduction act that passed in 2022, there is tax transferability. So this energy now can collect those tax credits, which might make them want to build their own wind and solar farms rather than do ppas. The other challenge of ppa is even though you can repower the sites already there, and we already know those customers or those providers, it does not alleviate the concerns about transmission congestion. Those transmission lines are getting more congested. And we could also add new solar in the energy service area. There is not a good opportunity for wind in Austin, but there is a good opportunity for solar, and I would recommend prioritizing commercial locations, parking lots, warehouses, things like that. As opposed to residential rooftop. Residential rooftop is good. I've got a residential rooftop array. I love residential solar, but it's the most expensive kind. But there are a lot of commercial locations. I think especially every parking lot should have solar, and that's what we can do in the service area. And maybe we can expand solar out of the service area. But try to find locations that don't have as much transmission congestion. Next slide please. And then there are the dispatchable sources. So wind and solar you do not dispatch so easily. You take them when weather provides [9:49:31 AM] take them when weather provides them to you. But there are things you can turn on and off. But we want them to be low carbon. So we need carbon free, dispatchable sources in whatever we have of that in the fuel mix. Probably will have low capacity factor, meaning it will not be used much. It would be used when wind and solar aren't available, for example, because wind and solar are the cheapest and cleanest if you have them. But if you don't have them, you might need something else. There are some near-term options, and if you want to keep it clean, it could be gas, but you would either need to remove the carbon at nacogdoches, at the bomass plant, or somewhere else, or you could do gas with carbon capture on site, or you could do gas with flexible fuel, which includes like blending with hydrogen or biomethane or things like that. And biomethane is clean. We have some of our own biomethane from the landfills and from wastewater treatment and then there are future fuels. I don't know if they really call them future fuels or not, but hydrogen is becoming more popular. There are hydrogen turbines available, ammonia, which is a hydrogen carrier that does not meet Escott CO2. So there are cleaner options. Also fayette power plant, but with wood pellets or things like [9:50:32 AM] wood pellets or things like that, like they did in the uk where they quit using coal, but they used wood instead, or add carbon capture or do both. And if you have wood with carbon capture, it's actually carbon negative, which is pretty interesting. Longer term, we could do geothermal awesome energy service areas. Not the best geothermal resource site. There are other places in Texas where it makes more sense. Most geothermal tends to be in the mountain west or Hawaii or Iceland or Indonesia, where you have volcanoes nearby, so we can get there eventually. But that doesn't seem near at hand. Nuclear fission is just expensive and slow to build and hard to do in Austin, but maybe there could be some plus up at the south Texas nuclear project site on the coast, either with the traditional large fission reactors, either generation three or generation four, or small modular reactors. And nuclear fusion is very exciting, but very technically immature and hard to estimate the cost. So those are some of the options we can choose from. Next slide please. Just some special considerations for us energy I think I have two slides left. Next slide. Building dispatchable power within the service zone reduces exposure to significant financial risk from [9:51:32 AM] significant financial risk from just price volatility in the grid as a whole. Transmission congestion pricing and improves local reliability, which is important, this is more of a technical issue. Happy to talk about a more if you have questions. But rotating machines like the thermal power plants, they can be dirty, but they're really valuable for grid reliability and voltage and frequency control. And so that's something to keep in mind. The power purchase agreements still have a part to play, but might be less desirable because of the new tax rules. And municipal utilities are uniquely positioned to address low growth because of their ability to build different things on their own. So there are a couple of things that are pretty interesting for us. Energy. Next slide please. And then there are of course equity considerations we need to keep in mind. Traditionally equity considerations have been around fence line pollution. People living near the power plant. But there are other things around site pollution or light pollution or noise. Other equity considerations is who gets the jobs, what populations get to work in the new clean stuff. But also keeping costs low and keeping electricity reliable? Are very important for equity considerations, because if you [9:52:32 AM] considerations, because if you have an outage event, it's the poor or marginalized populations that suffer the most historically. And if the costs are too high, then people get priced out of the market. Next slide. One other subtle nuance but important environmental point is based on some research we did about 15 years ago out of my group at UT. And, this confuses people sometimes. So happy to come back to it if you want. But using electricity to displace gasoline or diesel vehicles, or using electricity to displace natural gas for home heating, cooking has very good environmental benefits. Even if you have coal fired electricity, a coal fired electric car is cleaner than a gasoline car. And this is relevant to fayette. Because fayette to charge electric vehicles actually is an environmentally beneficial beneficial compared to gasoline or diesel engines. The internal combustion engines are dirty and that pollution is during the day in a populated urban area at ground level, which means a lot of people are breathing in that pollution. But electric vehicles, if they're charged at [9:53:33 AM] vehicles, if they're charged at night in rural areas, that pollution is emitted out of a smokestack that's hundreds of feet tall and that becomes important because if it's really high up, it really spreads out in the atmosphere. People aren't breathing it in. It's in a rural area. So fewer people breathe it in. It's at night. So there are not sunlight around. And sunlight is an important ingredient for photochemical smog. So if you emit your pollution up high at night in a rural area rather than down low in the daytime in an urban area, then you get really good environmental benefits going from the tailpipe to the smokestack. And that that's something to keep in mind. And if you go to cleaner power plants like natural gas or wind solar, you get even more environmental benefit. Next slide. And then this is my last slide I believe. Summary. Utilities and including or maybe especially los energy need to prepare for an era of unprecedented growth in electricity. We have had not growth. We have not had growth like this in the power sector for at least like 90 years. But it might be ever it might be the fastest rate of growth that we all have ever seen. And so all energy should expedite the deployment of a variety of supply and demand options to [9:54:33 AM] supply and demand options to ensure resource adequacy, while reducing exposure to out of service area price volatility and transmission congestion. And there are a variety of options for how you might generate power or avoid power use or do demand response. And if we do it, the right way with an updated diversified fuel mix plus electrification, we will reduce air pollution in Austin while improving equity and improving financial health of the city and the utility. Because instead of sending money out of the Austin energy service area to buy gasoline, we'll be buying electricity here at home. So I think it's really great. And then my final comment is the key lens through which energy options should be viewed is with the lens of trade offs. There's no option that's all bad or all good. They all have some benefit or disbenefit and we need to optimize that complex mix. And thank you for letting me speak so long. That is, I'll be happy to take any questions or provide clarifications. >> Doctor weber, thank you so much. Let's see if we can get his visual up on the screen when we remove the. There you are. Thank you. This has been really informative. I just want to note that the mayor has joined us for [9:55:33 AM] that the mayor has joined us for the oversight committee meeting here, doctor weber had a couple of questions for you, and then we'll see what other questions are on the dias. Could you talk a little bit more about, it's your slide 25. You mentioned repowering and then also rotating machines. I'm really interested in efficiencies and the ways technology has changed and improved that helps us push down the cost of technology, providing the service down, or at least holding the line on the cost. So slide 25. >> Yeah. >> So if you think of like, repowering. So if you have a wind farm, it's got the tower and then the turbine is at the top and you might not need to replace the tower because the tower is structurally sound, but there are new wind turbine. They're called nacelles and generators up there. You can replace the top, the blades, everything else. And with the same footprint of that tower, you can get more power out of that tower. So those wind turbines last 20 or 25 years or so. But the tower lasts longer. So sometimes you can just add [9:56:33 AM] So sometimes you can just add new or better equipment and get a little more, power out of the same wind farm, same number of turbines, that kind of thing. And I'm hearing discussion. I think your energy staff will know a lot more than I will on this, but I'm hearing that if you replace solar panels with the same size and footprint, you're getting more power out. There's a little more efficient now than, say, ten years ago. And there's a recent example of a hailstorm that damaged a lot of solar panels in west Texas, west of Austin, and the damage panels were replaced with new panels. They're kind of off the shelf parts now, so you can quickly replace the damaged panels. And the new panels had more performance and more output. So maybe this is an opportunity because the early wind and solar farms built in the 2000 or 20 tens, there's just newer technology. So that's exciting to me that you don't have to necessarily build a bigger wind farm or solar farm or a new wind farm, solar farm. Use the existing footprint to get more power out. That's one thing that maybe before I go on rotating machines. Did that answer your question about repowering? >> Yeah, it does. And I especially like the fact that you are upgrading or replacing with newer, more efficient parts [9:57:34 AM] with newer, more efficient parts so that you're not replacing the entirety, for example, of the tower as you point out. >> Right. >> And you already have suffered the environmental footprint of the tower. You don't have to have new footprint Wright new environment. And also energy's experts will know more about how much more power you can get out of that. So that's really something I think is worth looking into as those roll off with rotating machines, because we have alternating current and the power system, we have these sine waves of power that go over the lines. You have to maintain the frequency of the electricity at 60hz, so that the sine wave is moving at 60 times per second. And if the frequency gets too high or too low, it creates problems for the grid. This happened during winter storm uri in February 2021. You need to maintain the frequency, and if you have too few power plants online, then the frequency can sag and it starts to blow up equipment or damage equipment, or just create this cascading outage. So frequency maintenance is very important. And one way you can do that is with rotational inertia. You have these rotating machines that help you generate the frequencies you need to maintain [9:58:35 AM] frequencies you need to maintain the voltage. This is all deep in the world of electrical engineering. So I'm already over my skis on what I know. But if you have rotating machines like turbines and shafts and generators and spinning magnets, you can help prop up the frequency as a way to think about it. And one of the advantages of coal plants or nuclear power plants or natural gas power plants is they have these rotating thermal thermal systems, these rotating masses of turbines and generators and things like that that help maintain the frequency. And so it'd be great if we could get that frequency benefit from, say, the gas power plant without the emissions. And you can do that with something called synchronous condensers, where it's really there just to spin the mass flywheels and other things as well. And that's something that they already have a market for in the uk. Ireland has installed some synchronous condensers. The things you can do to rotate, get rotating machines to help prop up the frequency and then maybe if you had a natural gas power plant, you could also get power out of it if you want. If wind and solar are not available and the reason why this is becoming more important, because the solar panels do not rotate, they don't [9:59:35 AM] panels do not rotate, they don't generate rotational inertia. They can give some what's called synthetic inertia, but it's not nearly as much as, say, a rotating turbine might give. And wind turbines, though they rotate, are called asynchronous. They're not connected to the grid in that way, where they prop up the inertia. So rotating machines are pretty useful. And we built up our grid based on the assumption that they would always be there. And so as we shut off the rotating machines from coal plants for example, we need to make sure we don't undermine the ability of the grid to stay stable. >> So let me ask a question. So I think I understand this concept. If we were to have had rotating machines during uri for example, when we had to shut down the circuits across the state because there was a concern about cratering, the system is that an instance where that might have been useful or would that not have applied at all? >> It would have applied. >> It would have been useful to have things giving us more [10:00:35 AM] have things giving us more inertia, it would not have solved the fundamental problem that two power plants were working. Right. So it doesn't doesn't give you more power, but it does maintain the frequency. So what it would have done is reduce the risk of a total system wide blackout. And we got within 4.5 minutes where we would have been on the edge, and that would have made those risks a little bit less. So it just gives the operators a few more tools to help manage the risk and rotate things around, rather than just turning off loads. The way they did is just turn off a neighborhood, turn off a city, just keep turning off load. And if you have those synchronous condensers, maybe you don't have to shed quite as much load. So it just gives you a little more operational flexibility and precision. But it would not have solved the fundamental problem of not having that power plants, but it would have been helpful. >> And then that would also help us if we are looking at the prospect, for example, of brownouts in the summertime. >> And I think we're we're I really think it would be helpful. And, and I'm not sure I'm good on my words. Right if we have a lot of solar in Austin, which would be great because it's clean, a lot of rooftop solar or warehouses, [10:01:36 AM] rooftop solar or warehouses, that kind of thing. Then we have to worry about frequency control within the Austin energy service area might help with that. And there are other experts at Austin energy that can answer those questions more precisely than I can, but it's just one more tool in our toolbox. The way I think about it, along with batteries and rooftop solar and demand response and that kind of thing. >> You mentioned that it's really the gasoline powered vehicles on the road during the day that are creating the load or, or the emissions that are so dangerous and in fact, that those emissions are more toxic and more dangerous than the emissions that are coming out of, for example, fayette, can you talk about that just a little bit more, please? >> Correct. And I'm an Austin native, so I've seen the air quality change over my decades in Austin and the brown cloud of the haze in Austin is primarily automobile driven event. So it's either the gasoline emissions from the tailpipes of cars or the diesel emissions from trucks. Say it also can be if everyone turns on their gas furnace. At same time, the gas [10:02:37 AM] furnace. At same time, the gas furnaces contribute, and it could be the gas power plants. But the gas power plants are on the eastern edge of town. And so the, the, the pollution is not in the heart of the town. The way the cars are. So the power in fayette especially, is far away from Austin. The tailpipes are in the middle of Austin, and so they're the biggest source of our air quality concerns in Austin right now. Many, many decades ago, when we did have a power plant right in the heart of the city that was operating, that would have been a bigger source. But tailpipes are our biggest air quality problem in Austin, and going from tailpipes to smokestacks for those electric vehicles would have distinct air quality benefits in the city. And I think you would have ozone benefits as well. We have these ozone action days and that kind of thing. So getting the tailpipes out would be really good, right? >> So that really puts the emphasis on our on the cars, on the gas powered cars. I'm not at all just in case anybody's worried, I'm not at all suggesting that we should not continue to proceed with closing down fayette. And I know that the feds are requiring them to have scrubbers by 2032. This is [10:03:38 AM] have scrubbers by 2032. This is simply to magnify the concern about shifting from gas powered vehicles to, hopefully, electric powered ones, I have two more questions. What would managing ev charging across the city or county look like? And like, what sort of a program or recommendation might you have? And then I just wanted to note, I guess this isn't a question. It was good information on the possibilities of geothermal. I had wondered about whether the Austin area would be a good candidate for that, and it sounds like it might be a heavier lift or involve more cost than if we were, say, located in a different part of the country or the state even. >> That's right. So let me talk about geothermal first and I'll come to let you vehicles. Geothermal is available everywhere in the world. Everyone has a heat. It's just a matter of how deep you have to drill for it. And in Austin we'd [10:04:39 AM] drill for it. And in Austin we'd have to drill pretty deep through a lot of rock, so it would just be more expensive and so probably we should let the geothermal developers figure out the technology a little bit better in Nevada and California, and then as it gets cheaper, becomes a better option for us. So it's not an impossible option. It's just pretty expensive right now. But 10 or 20 years from now, it might be very affordable. Actually because drilling costs will go down and the ability to know exactly where the heat is will improve. So it is an option for us, just not immediately, I would say, or just looks too expensive to my eye compared to say, solar or other things we could do in terms of smart charging management of electric vehicles. I think there are a variety of ways to do it in England. They don't manage things like that in a smart way. They just say, if you want to charge your electric vehicle for 10:00 pm, it's going to be super expensive and if you charge it after 10 P.M, it'll be cheaper and people figure out pretty quickly, okay, I won't plug it in until 10 P.M. And so we could just use prices or things like that, there could be smart circuits where you plug it in right when you get home, but your charger or your circuit is connected in a program, maybe with Austin energy or someone [10:05:41 AM] with Austin energy or someone else where it just doesn't start the charging until 10 P.M. Or midnight, or whenever the excess electricity is available, even though you might plug it in because it might be. I plug in. I don't want to go back out in my slippers at 10 P.M. To plug in my car or something, so it could be it's done by me, the charging. I just wait to plug it in or there's a smart control that will do that for me. And I think that will be really important as time goes on. And there are smart charging capabilities. The charges sometimes have that capacity. There are remote control capacity capabilities, maybe like the power partners program, where Austin energy can remotely dial air conditioning up and down, say, maybe we give them the same kind of control for our electric vehicles in exchange for a better rate or something like that, or in exchange for the charger itself. But then if you get to smart charging, there's this other benefit. Not only will you reduce the strain on the peak demand, but if we wire our systems the right way, if there is an outage, which we don't want, those cars can then back up the houses or businesses. Maybe the power flows the other way. So it might not be just smart charging, it might be smart discharging. And I don't think we have all the tools in hand in a really easy [10:06:42 AM] tools in hand in a really easy way today. But I think they're coming and I see more and more of that happening on Ford with their Ford F-150 lightning truck already kind of advertised. Use our truck to back up your house's smart charging. So I think there's a lot of ways to get there and we're not done. We don't final sort of recommendation about that, but I think it's going to be necessary to spare a lot of heartache and cost. >> Great. Council member harper-madison you had a question, I did. >> I actually have two and, I their your last question was a really great segue. So, you guys might remember there's a community directly adjacent to district one called whisper valley that's tapped into a lot of really cool sustainability, innovation, geothermal being one. And, you know, it's a question that I've posed to echo and a couple other folks along the way, and just for context, with so much of district one kind of being the wild, wild east, so to speak, there's so much that's coming that is going to require, I mean, all of the basics in terms of infrastructure. So just kind of [10:07:42 AM] infrastructure. So just kind of thinking through, excuse me, just kind of thinking through preemptively what sort of infrastructure can we install on the front end, especially as it pertains to sustainability measures? I mean, everything from you know, greywater capture to geothermal to like, what are all the possibilities that we could consider from a like, perpetually sustainable perspective on the front end with us, you know, just really starting from scratch. And so that was a question I had. But I appreciate, mayor pro tem pool's question because that you answered my question, like in terms of feasibility, in terms of feasibility, like where along our trajectory are we looking? And I think about that from the perspective of like for succession planning is it my successor or my successor? Successor like where in the queue are we starting to pull the levers around? Geothermal type thought processes? >> Yeah. May I comment on that real quick because you bring up [10:08:42 AM] real quick because you bring up please. Sure. Please do that. >> So whisper valley is a great example, so there's two different ways to use geothermal. One is in a shallow way where you trench down or dig down tens of feet or hundreds of feet. You use that heating or cooling of the Earth to heat or cool your homes. Of whisper valley is a great example of that. The other way to use geothermal is drill down thousands of feet to get power generation. So I was talking about geothermal for power generation, geothermal for heating, and cooling is already in place, as you mentioned whisper valley and is a great opportunity to ramp up. That's really an efficiency play. Is the way I think of it. And I would say every subdivision that's built should have those heating or cooling districts. And also energy has cooling districts that at Miller and domain and downtown. And having more heating and cooling districts is a very important infrastructure play. It's much easier to build it when you're building anyway, rather than try to add it after the fact. In geothermal, as a way to achieve some of the heating. Cooling is really clean and efficient. That's great. It saves a lot of money for the whisper valley residents. Everything else that gets easier as you go east because the soils get softer, so [10:09:43 AM] because the soils get softer, so softer clay soils instead of the harder limestone, so harder to do in the western part of Austin, but easier to do in the eastern part. We should do more of that. And as you build new subdivision, I would say building the underground infrastructure will be really key. So I'm glad you brought that up because that is a very important efficiency play. And for the residents, their their bills 50 bucks a month. It doesn't spike to $500 a month unexpectedly in a hot summer. So there's a lot of economic benefits. >> I really appreciate that. And you know, as we are on the precipice of approaching execution on the northeast planning district with, you know, the first ever interlocal agreement with the county, there's so much there. And my mind's eye, especially that etj area, we're starting to think more regionally. So I'm going to have John Lawler, you know, really just get with, echo folks and just help us to figure out how to, articulate our questions and concerns. So thank you for that, the other thing that you said that really piqued my interest, given that I'm a farmer at heart, you said something along the lines of vegetative. I don't think you called it this. I did. You said [10:10:44 AM] called it this. I did. You said seagrass meadows. I called it vegetative carbon management. If I trademarked that thing, y'all put a T in a circle, and so, vegetative carbon management. You really got me curious there. You said something about sea moss in which case, I don't know what the economics around that are, but I know that we do have sort of like marsh land, native vegetative bog plants that we could easily deploy on floodplain again in the northeast planning district. So much of that we can't do residential or commercial, but we could do vegetative buffers, we could do some floodplain management with vegetation. So I'm curious that you don't actually have to expand here, but I'm curious to expand on that conversation. Also. >> Yeah, I'm happy to meet with you and your team and talk about that. So there are mechanical or machine based ways to remove CO2 from the atmosphere, like large vacuum cleaners for the sky that are being deployed around the world. But there are also natural ways to do it with reforestation, afforestation, soil carbon sequestration, planting grasses and meadows. And then I mentioned seagrass [10:11:44 AM] And then I mentioned seagrass meadows. We have a couple million dollars just awarded to us. But my group is a part of this from arpa-e. Arpa-e is the advanced research projects agency for energy for the us government to plant seagrass meadows along the gulf coast near Corpus Christi. And those seagrasses take CO2 out of the ocean and into the sea into, like the, the sediment and the seabed. And as it takes it out of the ocean, the ocean takes more CO2 out of the atmosphere. So offshore seagrass meadows is what I particularly mentioned, because I'm part of that project. But there are a variety of nature based solutions in addition to the mechanical solutions. And it doesn't have to be offshore. It could be in a floodplain or whatever, and there might be a way to measure how much vegetative growth there is and therefore how much CO2 is taken out of the atmosphere and get Austin credit for that, the markets are all very immature, but using those grasses and the floodplains to take CO2 out of the atmosphere can help offset some emissions somewhere else. And I think that's something worth considering and happy to talk more about that. I'm not an expert on that, but I know some people who are smart on it. [10:12:45 AM] people who are smart on it. >> Well, you just said a lot of things that I'm very curious. And so I don't know if it's you that's my new best friend or those people, but, I'm very interested in continuing that conversation. I think it's important, especially like as we, you know, make adjacent the conversation around urban agriculture and all the other resource management tools, making them more integrated and comprehensive, I think is in all of our best interest. So thank you for answering my questions. >> That's great. Thank you so much. Do we have any other questions? Yes. Council member Ryan alder, thank you very much. >> Good to see you, professor weber, I wanted to ask you a little bit about the demand side issues or ideas. You talked about. I'm wondering first and foremost, kind of at a global level, have you or anyone you know, looked at what how far could we get just on the demand side piece of things? >> That's a great question. >> I don't have the final results. And still trying to figure that out for the Austin energy situation, but I can't remember exactly. I think all energy is 50 to 85mw or so demand response. And don't put too much stock in those numbers. [10:13:46 AM] too much stock in those numbers. I just said from cycling air conditioners and that kind of thing. And it's a good program, and I'm a participant in that program, and I would just expect that the total potential is in the hundreds of megawatts, you can't get gigawatts of demand response. So we can't get, even half our demand from response or half our supply manage that way. But maybe it's larger than where we are now, so that's something to explore. It requires smarter controls, like you might need a new switch or control on your water heater if it's electric or switch or control on, non-essential devices. Maybe your electric clothes dryer or something like that. So it takes smart controls so it doesn't happen for free. But generally speaking, those controls cost less than a new power plant. So I think it's a way to get more availability resources for a lower cost. And then the cost is not emissions directly associated with it. So I find that very appealing. The practical operational implementation barriers are significant. So I don't want to sort of undermine or belittle how hard it would be to actually get these things wired up. But one thing it feels easier to me to install a bunch of chips and controls and smart [10:14:48 AM] controls and smart communication. Maybe that takes a few years, as opposed to building a power plant, which might be 4 to 6 years or something like that. So I'm pretty excited about it. There's a lot of different ways to do it. There are some leaders that that do this in different places in France, they do a demand response, but in a very blunt analog 1970s way. They just limit how much capacity you have at your panel, and it's up to you to figure out on your side of the panel what you're going to do. And you figure out in France that you can't plug in your electric iron, your electric cooktop, and your electric clothes dryer all at the same time, like you will just kind of just turn on 2 or 3. It's very clunky, but they've done it for a long time, and they also have some analog signals. They send down the wires to turn off hot water heaters and turn them back on. So it can be done with old technology as well, or just say, hey, figure it out on your side. But in Texas, we have more of an attitude that we shouldn't have to manage on our side. We'd rather have smart controls. And so I think that will be more culturally aligned with how Austin energy consumers will be. I think there's an opportunity there, and I've already spoken with Bob and Lisa and others [10:15:48 AM] with Bob and Lisa and others about energy, so they know what I think about that. And I think it's something they're looking into, and I think we'll hear about it more later. >> Excellent. I was also curious on your slide seven, you talked a little bit about the carbon neutral versus carbon free. The equity element of that. And I was curious if you could expand a little bit more. Yes. On that conclusion that so the carbon free sources are wind and solar, nuclear and geothermal and usually biomass is also considered carbon free because it takes CO2 out of the atmosphere to grow your biomass and then you emit it. >> So those are considered carbon free. And then your carbon emitting are gas, coal and petroleum. If you have like a diesel generator or something like that. And generally speaking, you want to use the carbon free sources as much as possible nuclear, geothermal, wind and solar. If you have hydroelectric use, hydroelectric as well, we don't have much in Austin. And so you you use the carbon free sources. But if you only use carbon free sources and you cannot build nuclear and geothermal, well, then it's especially wind and solar because of the variability of wind and solar, you have to overbuild the capacity so substantially it becomes pretty [10:16:49 AM] substantially it becomes pretty expensive. And we don't know if the limit is 70 or 80 or 90% or whatever it is of the grid being wind and solar. But a some limit, it becomes exponential and cost to build enough to make it for the times we have low wind or low sun. And so it ends up being cheaper to have some emitting sources for a natural gas, power plant or whatever it is with carbon capture or gas with carbon removal somewhere else, because then you don't have to overbuild your wind and solar so much. So the equity benefit of that is it lowers the cost for everyone. In most, cost optimization analyzes, which is what we did at UT or princeton did or others. If you optimize around cost, you'll end up having some emissions somewhere that you then pay to remove somewhere else. And I don't mean an offset like you avoid refrigeration emissions in Indonesia. I mean like an actual removal of CO2. It just ends up being cheaper and therefore more equitable. It also becomes more reliable, which is also equitable because if you have an unreliable system that really highlights a lot of the inequities and who can respond to an outage and that kind of thing. So that's what happens if you have a least cost analysis [10:17:49 AM] you have a least cost analysis or, you know, an equitable thing in that way. So that requires us to have some carbon removals or carbon technologies in the mix somewhere. As a consequence. And one thing, this is kind of my own personal interest. So I'm not speaking on behalf of house energy or anything, but I look at nacogdoches and the biomass power plant that is a carbon free fuel, and then if carbon capture becomes carbon negative, that that could offset a lot of other emissions elsewhere. >> Okay, okay, >> Thank you so much. I appreciate that. And I it's helpful to know that it's from a reliability economic standpoint. You know, I think we think about here in Austin, you know, the equity concern of whether it's decker or sand hill. Right. The geographic element being traditionally locating these source emitters in east Austin. And that's a that's a different part of the conversation, than what you're doing. So I appreciate just that context there. I know we've got a lot on our agenda. So I appreciate your time. Good to see you as always. And I'm sure we'll continue the conversation. >> Colleagues, thanks so much. I do have a request for us to be [10:18:51 AM] do have a request for us to be able to move into executive session by about 1030, which means kind of moving through the rest of this agenda more quickly. Council member Allison alter, did you have a question, yeah, I have some questions. Burning question okay, yes. I will say that I would like to ensure that doctor weber can come back and talk to us at a future meeting so that we can have, because clearly, this is of really deep interest to everybody. We don't have to get it all out here today. Council member Alison alter. >> Thank you. So first I just want to state that, you know, I believe it is officially council policy that the FAA, power plant should already be closed, not a date of 2029, and I would like to see it moved sooner, for closure than 2029, I know that you were just putting an assumption up there, but I just wanted to put that out there, so, professor weber, thank you for the presentation. It was very thorough. And I think it covered, you know, some really [10:19:52 AM] covered, you know, some really important elements of what we need to pay attention to, you mentioned, time sensitive pricing, and this is one of the things, you know, we're talking about the generation plan, but there is this question of what do we need to do to improve our billing structure, to support, you know, the demand response elements of it, so can you talk about you know, where this is in place in terms of the time sensitive pricing and, and how we think about that? >> There's not as much of it in the United States. >> It tends to be in Europe or other places where the time of day or, sort of the price is changed by our that happens more typically elsewhere, although we all might be familiar with it from our cell phone plans 20 years ago. So I don't know if you remember how cell phones used to have like free nights and weekends, but they're more expensive cost during the day until they built enough capacity. Now it's just kind of the same price all the time. But that could be the same kind of concept of electric vehicles. Charging would be free on nights and weekends, but more expensive [10:20:52 AM] and weekends, but more expensive during the day, maybe especially expensive at peak times. That requires a rate making process. That's easier said than done, but it also requires the ability to communicate with the consumers about what the prices are in a clear way. So no one's caught by surprise. And it's a very expensive bill, and that make it easier for them to interpret. And that can be hard for consumers, frankly. So that's why, like cell phone companies have moved away from it just got too confusing for consumers. So they said, well, we won't do that. And they manage capacity in other way. So I think it's a part of the rate making process and just making sure that if you don't need to plug it in 6 P.M, you don't. But if you need to, you can. You just have to pay a different price. >> Yeah. I would like us to really be exploring that. Thank you, the second question that I have has to do with model assumptions. So one of the things that we're hearing a lot from folks who are involved in the working group is sort of questioning the assumptions that Austin energy is making in their models, whether it's the cost of solar or renewable or whether it is the level of emissions that are coming out, from particular choices for generation, how in [10:21:54 AM] choices for generation, how in your mind, how should we be thinking about those modeling assumptions? And, and, you know, at some level you just have to pick a number. But but it seems like we keep coming to this debate over who what the assumptions are. And the assumptions can really lead you to different conclusions. >> Yeah. And the great question I haven't looked I have not looked in detail Austin energy's model. >> So I don't know about their assumptions and we don't have costs in our model. We're just looking at low forecast. We have not put any pricing on it, but on our big study we released two years ago from UT, where we did a cost optimization model. We did have to put a price on wind and solar and coal and that kind of thing. And those costs, especially for solar and batteries, drop with time, wind drops with time, but not as much. Nuclear has gone up with time. So. But whether you believe nuclear goes up or down, these assumptions become very important for how the model results will come out. The one thing that I would recommend is putting a price on pollution. And if you put a price on the criteria, air pollutant pollutants or the greenhouse gas emissions, you'll get a different result than if you don't. And so that's one thing [10:22:55 AM] don't. And so that's one thing modelers often do. Now, if you want to do a full economic study to include the cost of pollution, the cost of reliability, and the for the benefits of cleanliness of wind, solar. But the reliability benefits of others. So it's there's just so many assumptions. There's so many things go into it. And the biggest wild card, frankly, is what the price of natural gas will be, which no one knows. And gas is cheap today, but might be expensive in the future because cheap gas will affect what looks cheapest in the markets. But. So I can't really comment on the details of energy models, but the assumptions become very, very important for sure, because we're propagating them out 20 years. >> Thank you. I'll continue this conversation with you offline, professor weber and enjoy your vacation. And I just do want to say that, you know, in my conversations with Austin energy, I have communicated the desire to have that cost of pollution. In those models. And hopefully the new models will, will have those. Thank you. >> Thanks so much. And doctor weber, thanks so much for joining us from New York, colleagues, I am going to ask, Mr. Overton to come up and do [10:23:57 AM] Mr. Overton to come up and do his presentation. He says he can do a quick summary of that. We will push item five to September, and item four was presented last night to the PUC. You can look at that presentation and I will be talking with our staff to see if that is also something to put on to the September agenda, and thank you to Austin energy staff for your flexibility. There's so much to talk about, Mr. Overton. >> Thank you. Chair, I will try to, take this presentation down to about two minutes. Great. Unless you have any additional questions, I probably can't go at the speed of doctor weber, he did a wonderful job, I am the deputy general manager. Chief customer officer, I handle all of the customer facing, programs at Austin energy. We provide our services to a combined group of utilities for all services to go out. Austin water, the [10:24:58 AM] out. Austin water, the transportation and public works department, and watershed protection. Those are all of the departments that provide some level of discounts to the customers that I'm going to speak to, and we just have the fortune of managing the overall operations, of doing the bill and bill productions and the payments and distributing those discounts, we have an extensive program in caps and December of 2022. Council, you asked that we expand, the enrollment in that program over a three year period, our team has been very successful in working hard in the community with those departments that I just mentioned, and each of those provide discounts, as those services are those employees, let me back up as those households are enrolled and as you can see, in the first year of that goal, we exceeded that at 53,000. And our goal was at 42. We continue that this year at the time of the print, we're at 63,000, but we always wait until we get our June data. I just received that yesterday [10:25:59 AM] just received that yesterday evening and we're at about 67,000. So we are, at on track for what we're achieving. The challenge is going to be, we've exhausted a lot of our efforts in terms of what we've done in automatic enrollment for the programs, where households ought to automatically qualify for federal and state programs. We're enrolling them, automatically and while we also are doing self enrollment throughout the community, what that means is our efforts over this next year are going to have to substantially change. We will continue those programs, but we're going to expand, the data analysis that we do with the Texas health and human services. Part of those files we receive justice40 data and basically justice40 data is an overlay in our community where you have, disadvantaged communities measured by, hardships or burdens and housing, transportation. There's a various level of overlay. We've [10:27:00 AM] various level of overlay. We've looked at that and we think it matches up phenomenally with our data. And so we'll be able to enroll, households using those methods. The summary here is that, individually, we've done a lot of marketing to only appeal to the individuals, to go out. We're having our case managers work out there, in the households doing case management, one on one wraparound services, those are, very effective. But it's a very slow process, we're often there, having households keep those commitments and meet us there. Many of these, individuals who live there have 3 or 4 jobs and that they're working, so we have to use a combination of that, but also, opt out strategies. And when we use justice40 overlays, we're going to pull in and we're going to continue quality controls to weed out those that don't, deserve to be on that program. But this is [10:28:01 AM] on that program. But this is basically instead of going one by one, we're going to bring in the data pool do the overlay match, and then our q&a will continue to work to, have a 4% tolerance threshold to take out anybody who doesn't meet those qualifications. So with that being said, this is one example. If you look at, seven, eight, 702 and it's right on the border of, 787 21, where, for an example, we'll concentrate here is 2800 households, in that population, we're going to do a justice40 overlay. We'll clean that through our data as well. And we believe that we'll get a good a good target. Result of achieving that. And we're going to go around the entire city of Austin zip code by zip code overlay by those using that tactics, my summary would be, is that we're going to continue to maximize our current trategies of what we've done. We're going to continue to make operational [10:29:01 AM] to continue to make operational improvements. We're going to continue to do property screening safeguards. We're going to continue to do opening, ongoing marketing and outreach. But we're also have learned a lot throughout this process, and we're going to continue to advance in the future using the to adopt the justice40 data overlay, we're going to expand our auto enrollment, and we are going to move more toward an opt out, process and use all of those in conjunction. So at this point, we are on target. You will get a letter from us at the end of this month, and it will actually update that chart that I gave you. We're at about 67,000. Customers enrolled. That's my time. >> That's great. Thank you so much. Any questions for mister Everton? Yes, council member harper-madison not actually a question, >> Chair. Just a really brief comment. I on Friday received a phone call from Austin energy notifying me that I was eligible for weatherization considerations, and she walked me through the process and how to work with my landlord. I'm a [10:30:03 AM] to work with my landlord. I'm a renter, it was thorough and brief, and I really appreciated them taking the initiative to reach out to me. So I just wanted to give you all a nice shout out on your customer service programs and them taking the initiative to reach out preemptively. I hadn't even inquired, but I'm eligible and my landlord didn't is into it, so I just wanted to give y'all that shout out. >> Thank you. I had a section in here where I was going to really brag on the team. There is. We have a wonderful group of employees who do this work every day. And I also want to highlight that, Austin energy, along with Austin water, provides a lot of discounts. And right now we were at Ann last year, fy 23. We were receiving some of the discounts about one point, I'm sorry, $11 million in discounts. And when you add that together already, we still have another quarter to go in this year. We've increased that over another $2.8 million. And that's in addition to what Austin water is doing as well. So we've been very successful. >> That's great. Thank you so much, as we conclude and here, I would like to make sure, hang on [10:31:04 AM] would like to make sure, hang on one second that we get a copy of doctor Webber's presentation. I think that's the one that we didn't yet have yet, >> You guys have the final in your email, but we will have it posted today to the to the backup to agenda. >> Yes. All right. Council member Alison alter. >> Thank you. Chair pool. I'm just wondering, why we can't go to executive session and come back and hear the other reports, if we are going to get the generation plan done by the end of the year, we have a council need to be doing this work. And these are really, really important, presentations. They have gone out and done these rfps and I think we need to have a sense and the community needs to have a sense of what the options are for. This gets to the heart of some of the questions that the working group is getting at and trying to ask for more local solar, etc. And I'm concerned about pushing this off for another two months that I understand. >> I think we can time that we can recess so that we can get to executive session. I did note [10:32:06 AM] executive session. I did note that PUC had heard the presentation last night, so the information is out there, but is that a general feel on the dais that you would rather us recess and then come back for that item, that just that one briefing and we'll hold. So there are two that are related. I think that that then mayor, is what we will do. I will recess the oversight committee meeting. Then at 1032 and turn it over to you. [11:29:55 AM] Thanks, mayor. And at 1130, we are reconvening Austin energy utility oversight committee meeting so we can get the two additional items. If that is the, willingness of the dais. Are you all okay with also talking about the solar battery piece? We'll get that knocked out then today. So, thank you for your flexibility, staff. And we will move to item number [11:30:57 AM] we will move to item number four, Mikel anger talking a staff briefing on requests for proposals for renewable energy and storage technologies. And Mr. Inger is our vice president for energy market operations and resource planning. Good morning. >> Good morning. Council members, Mike Langer vice president, energy market operations and resource planning. I'm going to talk a little bit about the most recent request for proposals for renewable and carbon free generation that we are in the process of analyzing, I would like to start with just the overall rfp process and what we do. The first thing we do is we maintain ongoing contact with renewable developers and marketers within the ercot market. We are we maintain that that communication with them. We want to understand what they're working on, what challenges they're seeing, where the price, where they're seeing pricing challenges, for example. And then what, what they're really looking to develop. So by the time we go out for an rfp, it's not really a surprise. We kind [11:31:57 AM] not really a surprise. We kind of have a good idea of what we might see and levels of pricing. We may see. In addition to that, there are some new exchanges such as renewal fee where they actually have live bids and offers for different types of renewable ppas. And so we're able to also get pricing points that way as well, so then we go out and solicit proposals, through our request for proposal process. We try to do this at least once a year. That way we can also keep a good pulse on where the market is and where those live offers are. And when we receive back those proposals, we are then going to analyze those proposals and find out what delivers the most value for our customers. We will then take and make recommendations to our electric utility commission, and ultimately, we will come back to city council to seek a strike authority to negotiate and execute a ppa agreement. So for this particular request for proposals, we were looking for carbon free generation, as well as renewables. We put it out looking for, projects that were between 50mw and 500mw. I will say that we'll put that in our rfp, but we'll get many different proposals of all [11:32:59 AM] different proposals of all different kinds of sizes as well, we issued this rfp April 19th. We then allow developers to ask questions, that deadline was that was may 3rd. We take all those questions and we post those answers to all the developers so everybody knows what those answers are to keep an even and level playing field. And then those responses were due back to us June 7th. We were asking for, like I mentioned, renewable and carbon free generation. So we included wind, solar, battery storage. And then for carbon free projects, we, listed a couple of examples such as fuel cells and geothermal, we got back a pretty robust response. We had bids from over from 42 different companies. So quite a few people interested in in and are giving us proposals for our request, we saw approximately 100 different projects. I will tell you that most of those are more than half of those were battery storage projects. We did see solar as well. We saw less lot less wind than we had been seeing in previous rfps. And I think largely that's because wind has been more saturated in ercot, and a lot of the really good [11:34:00 AM] and a lot of the really good locations have already been developed. So we only saw eight projects there, and I've listed other, we actually did get a proposal for a natural gas generator with carbon capture and sequestration that was out in west Texas. Of those 100 projects we had over 350 different proposals. So I just want to explain that for a moment. How can we have 100 projects and 350 different proposals, or maybe closer to 400, some of those projects will vary in term length. They might offer it to us for a ten year term or a 30 year term, and they will have different pricing, their, settlement locations. So as we've talked about in the past about being in a nodal market, every power plant settles with ercot at its resource node. You can also look at settling that at a generation hub or a trading hub. And so that's where you put some of that congestion risk more on the developer. And that will impact pricing as well. So you may have a project that is either at its node or at a trading hub where it's going to settle with ercot. And when we get to batteries, we're really looking at at different prices and different proposals around duration, two hour, four hour or even longer duration. We did see a 12 hour [11:35:00 AM] duration. We did see a 12 hour battery as well as the newer emerging hundred hour battery as well. So just to give you kind of a high level, pricing overview of nominal pricing, for solar, we saw pricing in the low 30s to upper 70s per megawatt hour. For wind, we saw it in the low 30s to upper 50s per megawatt hour. And then for battery storage, we saw it in the low $6 to upper $30 per kilowatt month. And I know that's a little bit of a different term than wind and solar, so if I want to convert that to megawatt hours, if I had a battery that had 300 cycles per year, typically we'll see proposals for 200 or 300 cycles, but at 300 cycles per year, kind of near that lower end. That's about 140 to $150 per megawatt hour before you charge that battery. You will notice there's quite a wide range on pricing and that will get to kind of the next slide, which is analyzing which proposal delivers the most value. The nominal pricing is great, but we're not buying something off of a shelf. We're buying a project that's located. So location really matters. I [11:36:00 AM] So location really matters. I think, just kind of an anecdote or a story I could tell you is probably back in the 2016, 2017 time frame when we did a request for proposals. We actually had a win proposal that was less than $10 a megawatt hour. So based on the nominal pricing, you might think that is the deal that we should be going after. That's the project, when we looked at the terms of the contract the developer had proposed, they wanted to offer that in at a negative price so they could capture as much of the production tax credit as possible. And they wanted Austin energy to take all the market risk, which means if it was a negative price, we're paying ercot to take the power and then we're paying the developer for the power. As well. So when we asked them to reprice that with a zero offer curve so that it curtailed when ercot did not want the power and prices were negative, it more than tripled. Or it almost tripled the cost of that ppa. So that's just to say that the nominal pricing is great, but we really do some deep analysis to see where that net value is for our customers. And so we kind of look at, four major areas here. The first is economic analysis. So we look at the contract costs as well as the terms in the contract terms [11:37:00 AM] the terms in the contract terms really make a big difference on renewables. And the net value to our customers. We will run it through a couple of different models. One is a fundamental model that has all of ercot modeled inside of all the transmission lines, as well as power plants and offer curves. We'll also use a stochastic model, which is a little bit better job at approximating risk around that asset. As things may change, we'll we'll also look at power flow modeling. So if we build something at this location or have a project built this location, if other things get built there, how does that look? Does it overload that particular substation? Maybe we have congestion risk. And then since we are doing a lot of additionality in the projects that we work on, a lot of there is not a historical note for it yet. So we'll look at historical what we call proxy nodes. So, so other nodes near or in that region or on similar transmission to see how those have performed as well. We also look at project viability is there adequate infrastructure in and around the area to support that project, or do we or are we going to need more transmission upgrades? What else is getting built around there? We look at portfolio fit and so we are not looking at just an individual [11:38:01 AM] looking at just an individual project project, but we're looking at how we build a renewable portfolio. And so the way I would describe that is different renewable generation sources in different areas of Texas will have different generation output curves. And so we like to put those together in combination to create renewable output curve that more closely matches our load, so that we're generating and producing revenue at the same time that we're consuming load and incurring cost. We also want to look at regulatory risks. There's a lot of talk around affirming requirements in the future, for example. So we want to see how that project may insulate us or mitigate us from potential future regulatory changes and risk as well. Voltage ride through things of that nature. We're also going to look at the developer and the developer's experience. We would like to see a developer with a proven track record with this technology. We're not necessarily as keen to do something with someone who has never developed a wind project before, for example. We also want to see that they have project experience in the ercot region. There are lots of different isos throughout the United States, and each one has kind of different [11:39:02 AM] kind of different interconnection rules and different ways the market works. So we want to make sure they've worked here in ercot as well. And then finally we're going to look at financial viability. So how likely is the project to be able to receive financing and get built, does the developer have the ability to balance sheet finance it? Are we looking at the bank financing it? And then we might have some concerns around the terms of whether or not that will make it financeable, this is just a little map that I like to look at as well, kind of more of a qualitative look. But what we've done here is, is you've probably seen this map before with our assets, maybe a little bit nicer picture before, but here we've mapped our assets throughout Texas. And then we've mapped where we saw the proposals. So the green stars are wind. The yellow stars are solar, the Orange stars are storage. And when I'm talking a little bit about portfolio fit, for example, if you look down in the south part of Texas near los Vientos, three and four and los Vientos two, we have a lot of wind down in that region already, and so we might be less attracted to a wind asset down there because we don't want to put too much of our supply in any one area in [11:40:02 AM] our supply in any one area in Texas. We like geographic diversity as another way to mitigate our risk. So we will be looking at that as well. And it also gives us the ability to see where things are moving towards. So you're seeing a lot of batteries now near load centers, where in the past we saw those batteries developed, out west near some of the renewables that are having issues with congestion. So next steps is we are looking to complete our fundamental and stochastic modeling. We already kicked that off about a week and a half ago. We're hoping to have that done within the next few weeks. We will then shortlist those proposals to get kind of the handful or the top ten proposals. We'll run through those through that power flow modeling that I mentioned earlier to see how different projects being built may impact the output or the net value to our customers, should that occur. So we can understand that risk as well, then we'll discuss internally on which recommendations we would like to make. We'll take that to the electric utility commission and then ultimately bring it to the city council to negotiate and execute an agreement. So that's all the slides I have prepared, but I'm happy to answer any questions you all may have. [11:41:04 AM] questions you all may have. Great. >> Thank you so much. What kind of questions do we have? Yes. Council member Alison alter. >> Thank you, can you help me? I know you have the chart that had sort of the stars of where they were, that had didn't have a whole lot of proposals that were in our, our load zone. Area, can you speak to, you know, the ones that were in our area and what you saw there, you know. Right. So looks like they're mostly storage, just storage batteries at this point, you know, we look for utility scale renewables in our rfp. >> So typically you're not going to see a wind or solar, farm proposed that's in the Austin area, part of that is the amount of land required for some of these larger solar farms or wind farms, they're also looking for the areas where the best irradiance and best wind speeds, because the capital cost is the same for that wind turbine, what what brings down the price is how many megawatts that wind turbine produces. So typically we do not see wind and solar proposals in the Austin area unless we do something very specific for smaller scale. But we will see battery assets in [11:42:06 AM] we will see battery assets in this area. >> Okay. And then at this point in time, you haven't evaluated all the proposals. >> So if yeah, we're still in the evaluation phase, I will say that we are seeing prices a little bit higher. I've been doing battery storage rfp since about 2016. We saw the low that price per kilowatt month back in about 2020. And we've seen it steadily tick up since then. And this time around is a little bit higher than the one we did in 2022. >> Okay. So one of the things that that I'm hearing about is, you know, questions that, you know, some of the proposals are coming in with, you know, low costs for solar. And your assumptions in the model are much higher, so as we move forward, I know you haven't evaluated those proposals yet. >> We use the information from the rfp to influence those assumptions. I think what I mentioned last night is, is we're not going to take the very, very lowest one to make that our assumption and that gets back that less than $10 wind project. I was telling you about earlier is the terms really matter. So we look in [11:43:06 AM] really matter. So we look in that lower quartile, not necessarily right at the, the median or the mean, but something there where we think is a little bit more viable. So typically the cheapest project will not have favorable terms. And so that's not the price we're going to look at. We're going to look at something a little bit higher than that. That seems a bit more what we would do and more viable for our customers. Okay. >> So that's, so as we move forward, it sounds like you did it at auc and are doing it here. It's helpful if you can clarify how you got to your assumptions as you. Yeah. So for example, if we have 50 so the projects are in different regions. >> So the projects, the wind projects down in the, the gulf coast for example, is a more expensive. I gave you a wide range. Different regions will have different prices. So we'll have a different price for gulf coast wind than we'll have for west Texas wind or panhandle wind. Solar in the Houston area, for example, is much more expensive than solar out in west Texas or down in south Texas. And so we have different prices for the regions and we look at all those proposals and we look at kind of like I said, not the very cheapest proposal, but if [11:44:06 AM] very cheapest proposal, but if we have a cluster of a few proposals all in a similar price area, that seems a lot more likely to get built, and probably better terms and conditions for our customers. And so we will utilize that price because it seems, something that we'll be able to act upon as opposed to something that's, more academic. >> Okay. And do you have any sense at this point of what's going to be more useful in terms of like, solar alone or co-located with storage or. >> So I think some of the regulatory risks are looking at firming requirements in the future, maybe as early as 2027, 2028. So recommendations will likely involve something that has some component of storage that would help firm or as we look into those rules, if we felt we had that firming elsewhere. But we do want to do projects that mitigate us against future regulatory risk. >> Okay. Thank you. >> Any other questions? Yes. Council member Ryan, where are we on the solar standard offer? >> I believe Tim will maybe be speaking a little bit later to that, but I know that's moving forward, and I believe that they [11:45:07 AM] forward, and I believe that they are looking to, bring that back in maybe October. >> I'm just curious if, as part of this analysis and when we are comparing options, if the that pricing is also worth us thinking about, just in terms of I know we can't just do that instead of these other things, but just in terms of how we think about what kind of behavior we want to motivate, you know, if the standard offer allows for us to have a lot of local generation, while there's certain hard costs associated with that, there are other to your point, kind of benefits of being in the load zone. And what is the transmission and the reduced risk cost of that. And so I'm just curious if you could help us. You know, professor weber talked about the difference in cost. When we think about just home, home, home to home rooftops. But you know, we do have the parking lot, the commercial element. And so if, if it is economically, it makes more sense for us to maybe [11:46:09 AM] makes more sense for us to maybe make that offer richer and still is cheaper and lower risk than, let's say, a solar farm out in west Texas. I'm just would like to be able to compare all those things together. Sure. >> And I think you need a combination of all of those things you're not going to get. Maybe the economies of scale or something here local and something smaller and, you know, he showed those slides that showed as pass decline. We're not going be able to replace it all with with local generation. There's not enough room. And so we'll need to do both for sure. >> And I'm actually I had a question right about our ppas do typically when they're near the end of their life, is it customary that they offer to the market just they go back and see who wants it? Or do they come to us and say, hey, you're our customer. Do you want to renew for another ten years? >> So in my experience, they they always come back to us first. They'd like to extend we're a great credit entity and we have a lot of experience in [11:47:10 AM] we have a lot of experience in this market and a long history in doing renewables and renewable ppas without many issues, and so we typically will look at renegotiating to extend those, maybe at a lower price, like we have done with the hackberry project. Or we may look to let those assets just roll off, depending on the location. You know, congestion patterns change in ercot. What might have been great in 2015 might not be great in 2024. So we'll look at that. And then we also look at potentially repowering those assets as well. You know we never talked about that a little bit earlier. The production tax credit is only good for the first ten years that a wind farm is in, in production or a solar farm. It's what we see a lot of times after year 11 or after our ppa has expired. Or getting near the end is many developers want to repower that to get the production tax credits. >> Again, that makes sense. That makes sense. Well, that was my last question. So you answered it, I appreciate it. >> Great. Thank you so much. >> Thank you. >> And now we are moving to our last item, which is the staff [11:48:11 AM] last item, which is the staff briefing on solar battery storage, microgrids and load shaping technology. This is Tim Harvey, customer, renewable solutions manager. Now there he is behind you okay. Yes. >> Good morning. Chair and council members, city manager and deputy city manager. I'm not Tim Harvey. I'm Richard genesi, I'm the vice president of customer energy solutions. I'm just going to give a little background and context before Tim Harvey delivers the briefing. So in December of 2022, council approved the resolution on storage load shaping, and microgrids. And we delivered, multiple updates to that in 2023. This is the first of the updates in 2024. And so this is obviously a very multiple year effort. And, you know, you'll hear some of the success that we've talked about. But very happy to share the briefing with you. And to answer [11:49:13 AM] briefing with you. And to answer your question, council member alter, we are on track. Tim can get into more of the details in the briefing, but we are on track to launch the solar standard offer in October, per the plan. So with that, I'll turn it over to Tim Harvey. Thank you. I'll come back for questions. Great. >> Thank you, Mr. Genesi. Mr. Harvey, welcome. >> Hello, I'm Tim Harvey. I'm the customer renewable solutions manager. I'm going to be talking about battery storage, microgrids and load shifting technology, next. Oh, I got this clicker. Okay, first I want to let you all know that. And you've probably heard, but, we were successful at getting the solar for all. Grant, this is a $7 billion grant effort from the EPA. They gave 60 awards, we applied through a coalition in Texas, the coalition was awarded $250 million, and we anticipate receiving 31 plus million [11:50:13 AM] receiving 31 plus million dollars, of that money, and the specific purpose of that is to, reach into low income communities, provide high value and access to solar and batteries, the way we'll do that is we will go out to rfp to enter into agreements for power purchase agreements, as well as performance contracts for the batteries, then we will approach, customers that are in disadvantaged communities, focusing on low income and the medically vulnerable, and provide them an upfront incentive for hosting a system. The system would be solar and batteries, and the event of a power failure, the host customer would have access to those to the solar and batteries to power to keep their lights on. And then the, the solar energy that's produced on those systems [11:51:15 AM] that's produced on those systems will go to the community solar program through which low income customers can participate and receive 20% bill savings, and the batteries will be operated as a virtual power plant. So we'll aggregate those batteries, we'll control them. We'll we'll use them for demand reduction, all of this will be installed utilizing workforce development programs. So we're reaching deeper into the community, and providing long lasting value there. Then, you know, of course, there are the environmental benefits of the renewable energy, and, generating in our load zone with a controllable asset as, as well as us starting to, really put into place and, and experiment with virtual power plants. So this is, this is a great opportunity for us. We're super [11:52:16 AM] opportunity for us. We're super excited. We'll begin by engaging community benefit organizations, to get informed on what the low income communities really need out of this. Before we start to really you know, button up the structure of the program. So we want to make sure that we're doing as much, positive things in the community as we can. So the virtual power plant, through, solar for all will kind of be separate, but we intend to also do a virtual power plant for those that, have their own batteries. Currently, we have about ten megawatts of customer owned batteries, and what we intend to do is to create an avenue by which they would allow us to have control of their battery, then we would signal a derm operator, which would be an edge derms at first at least, which means that the, [11:53:18 AM] which means that the, distributed energy management system is owned and is owned by a third party that's contracting with us, not by us, and so we would send a signal to them to deploy those batteries during demand response events, they would then discharge the batteries. We avoid costs on the market, and then we pass some of those benefits through to the participating customers. So, those those benefits come back as incentives to the customers to participate, and, and adopt batteries, we may couple that with an upfront incentive. We'll have to see what that incentive looks like. For overtime. But, if needed, we'll couple we'll couple that with an upfront incentive, and then this would allow us another fleet to operate in a very similar or maybe even the exact same fashion as the vpi from solar for all, but this would be [11:54:19 AM] for all, but this would be another fleet of vpps that we would have to manage separately for grant purposes. So. So to date, we've made quite a bit of progress in terms of battery adoption. The shines, project has, you know, created a lot of lessons learned for us. We developed residential and commercial interconnection guidelines and standards in coordination with our first responders to make sure that they're safe. As well as, you know, make sure that safety is throughout, and that it's meeting all of our, expectations and standards, we have upgraded the billing system to enable more configurations of batteries and, and solar, we've integrated a vehicle to home project, and we have more in the queue, and we have about ten megawatts of residential batteries installed, so current efforts that will further battery adoption, are [11:55:19 AM] further battery adoption, are the resilience hubs. I have a slide on that in a minute, we're working on a microgrid with camp Mabry, which is a pretty substantial one. That's not it goes beyond just a single building. They have multiple buildings there, we have a we're working on a battery, recycling information program so that when we go out to inspect a residential, battery system, we'll put a sticker with a qr code on the side of that battery so that, in the future, customers can just go to that qr code website, which will be maintained and updated frequently so that they can get the latest and greatest information about how to recycle their battery. When it comes time for that. So we are also in the process of, trying to procure a, a edge derm systems. So that would be working with a third party. Who, who owns and manages the derms to meet our [11:56:19 AM] manages the derms to meet our needs. And then of course, the solar for all, will also use derms. And then in terms of planning, we are working with EPA to identify and build requirements for a central derms that would be a derm system that's owned by Austin energy, and that will integrate with all of our systems better to more accurately, allow us to model all of the events, on our system and, integrate with all of our software. And then finally, and the fy 25 budget, we have included money to procure those terms. So a little bit about microgrids. So this is a typical microgrid that you would see at the home level or small business level, in this scenario, you'll notice that just behind the [11:57:20 AM] notice that just behind the meter is the isolation device. So when the grid goes down, the system will sense that the grid is down. It will automatically open that that isolation device which keeps any energy from flowing back onto the lines. And that will, you know, ensure the safety of our line workers. And then the, the system kicks on the house might, may see a second or two where there's a power lapse, but it's, pretty seamless. Then, you know, the, the system will, power the home until the grid comes back on. It will sense that and then it'll switch back over to grid power. At that time. So an example of that is something that we're planning. We're working on four different resilience hub pilots at montopolis Gus Garcia, dove springs and givens. These were, rec centers that were identified [11:58:22 AM] rec centers that were identified by the community as some of their top choices, and what we plan to do is to put enough solar out there or really as much solar out there as the site will handle. And an appropriately sized battery that will provide three days of autonomy, to the site at at normal loads, as well as an on site natural gas generator for the belt and suspenders approach. So with that type of a system, you can have days, weeks and even months of autonomy from the grid if needed. So these would be important and extreme events or even mild events. It's also important to note that we would operate that battery in the same fashion as our other batteries for demand response, as well as, the solar would be part of the community solar program and add [11:59:24 AM] community solar program and add to the benefits of that program. The next level, microgrid would be to sexualize a feeder. So this is something we haven't done yet, but we're ready to explore, this is the idea that you could potentially have a neighborhood that is on a micro grid, so there have been different examples of this, there's one in Florida where they had a major event in Florida that the practically the whole state went down, but this community stayed up and didn't even have to reset their clocks, so, you know, it's possible it's more likely with new construction. We're just kind of waiting for a developer to bring that to us. We think that this would be, you know, a multi-year project to get something like this put in place. And we are excited to learn more about it and enable that. And finally, we have low load shaping and demand [12:00:28 PM] have low load shaping and demand response technologies. We offer programs to residential and commercial customers to enroll their devices into demand response, which allows us to throttle them back or turn them off, during demand response events, the commercial demand response is for medium to large commercial customers, so we would reduce their hvac, lighting and process loads, power partner thermostat, is also for evs now, so we can help them manage their charging to make sure they're not charging their vehicles during, demand response events, as well as cycling thermostats and water heater timers, as well. Then we have thermal energy storage with with chilled water and ice storage systems that allow [12:01:28 PM] storage systems that allow commercial customers to shift, cooling loads and a couple demonstration projects. The power saver program, where residential customers volunteer to receive alerts to conserve energy on peak days, as well as a multifamily smart home rewards program, which utilizes $1 million grant, to provide incentives to both the tenants and the apartment complexes, to make sure that they're, connected and we're able to control their devices. It also features leak detection and would control their water heater timers as well as thermostats. And that's all the slides I have prepared today. I'm happy to take any questions. >> That's great. What kind of questions do we have? Yes. Council member Vanessa Fuentes, thank you for the solar for all. >> Grant, I know you mentioned that you'd be reaching out to [12:02:28 PM] that you'd be reaching out to organizations to work to identify, eligible households. What is the timeline in developing that program and having it available for our neighborhoods? >> Yeah. So right now we're we're waiting for funding, to come through. We're going to have to enter into an interlocal agreement with Houston, who was the lead on that, so once that happens and we're able to we'll go out to rfp, will, I'm not exactly sure how all of that is going to work yet. We're still kind of ironing out the details, but the intent is to work with community benefit organizations who will help us connect with low income communities so that we can have a good stakeholder group to inform our approach. So through the grant, we're allowed a year to kind of settle in on what our approach is. And before we have to start spending money on that, and when you say we intend to do that up front as close as possible, when you say community benefit organizations, can you is that a defined type of organization? [12:03:28 PM] of organization? >> What does that mean? >> Yeah. >> We haven't really dug down into the definition of that, but we're looking for organizations that are involved with low income communities so that we can, you know, get them together and stakeholder groups and really, you know, reach down into the community to get that information. >> I, I would offer, community organizations with which we already have relationships elsewhere throughout the portfolio, like in our cap program, we have relationships established with lots and lots of community organizations. So they would be typically of, indicative of the ones that we would reach out for this program as well. So, but you imagine a process where, where there is an open solicitation, where non-profits and other types of organizations can apply for funding to help with identifying households. I don't know about identifying, I'm talking about really input and partnership in terms of communication of the [12:04:29 PM] terms of communication of the program and eligibility and things like that. It's primarily a residential focused program, so it would be, as you saw in the slide up to 3000 households for batteries and solar. So we'd be engaging the community in terms of how do we get the word out, how do we identify the because we already know, like for the grant purposes, the areas have to be aligned with justice40, as you heard. So it would be working with the community to identify households in the justice40 areas and communication of the program. >> Sure. >> Well, I know y'all have had some really great success with increasing our enrollees in the cap program, which is great to hear. I would just, you know, think through what are some innovative ways that we can get families signed up quickly to participate, mostly because I know with our other programs that we have available with the city, including our home repair program, it is challenging to find individuals who know about the program and to get them [12:05:29 PM] the program and to get them signed up to, to participate. So thank you. >> Any other questions? Yes. Council member Alison alter, thank you. >> So, when will Austin energy have a tariff to support, deployment of customer sited batteries, that they can utilize? >> I'd say, you know, we're working through, specific timeline. I don't know that we have a specific timeline right now that we can quote, but I would say we're making really good progress on ironing out all those details. As recently as yesterday, we were in an internal meeting, ironing out, you know, the approach that we're taking for, tariff on, on that. So I don't have a specific. >> But is it like within a year. >> Oh yeah. You know, certainly certainly within a year, I'd say frankly shorter time frame than that, I feel confident. I mean, I think the timing is commensurate, with solar for all and, solar standard offer. So solar standard offer. We're [12:06:30 PM] solar standard offer. We're launching in October. Solar for all, as you heard, will launch within a year of when the funding is awarded. >> Okay, in for the solar standard offer. Can you just remind me of. There's a lot of solar things I want to make sure I'm not. >> Yeah. So solar standard offer is, the ability for Austin energy to provide a benefit to a third party who owns and operates a solar array in this in the, on the distribution grid and in front of the customer's meter. >> Okay. >> And then, right now, with our demand response program, we just get an upfront incentive if you do the thermostat or I think now with the evs, when would we be able to pay our customers for, being able to adjust their demand? Because right now it's just like, yeah, right. Connection. But you don't get it if you actually do it. >> Well, just right now, we do [12:07:31 PM] >> Well, just right now, we do pay an upfront and annually for retention in the program. We don't have the component that you're you're addressing yet. But I would say, just so you know, across the whole portfolio, if someone signed up for every single thing that we have, either in a program offering or in pilot, it would be $350 and $175, $350 up front and $175 on an annual basis for everything. Like because we have thermostats, we have evs, we have, you know, multiple devices in the home. >> Okay. Thank you. >> All right. I think I think that's it for questions. And I appreciate staff's flexibility with, how we ran our meeting today. Our next meeting will be in September, I think it's September 24. Let me double check that. Yep. September 24th, 9 A.M. Thank you, staff and I will adjourn the July meeting of [12:08:31 PM] will adjourn the July meeting of the Austin energy utility oversight committee