 Hi everybody, I'm Steve Hinchman. I am Chief Counsel and Director of Development for Revision Energy, which is the state's largest solar installation company, also do electric vehicles, LED lighting, and helping people convert space and water heating from oil to renewables through use of heat pumps, so air source heat pumps and water heat pumps. I moonlight as also as one of the partners in grid solar. And I'm really speaking to you about the grid solar project, but my background is in trying to find ways to overcome barriers to deployment of solar LEDs and heat pumps and electric vehicles, New England wide in our market. And actually we have a couple revision cohorts here, Jen and Jill from the Portland office. Revision is often engaged in a lot of these kinds of activities in our communities. Before I start, I just want to mention to everybody that this morning the Public Utilities Commission in deliberations once again changed the rules for net metering for solar, which were supposed to go into effect May 1st. They have now accelerated it to March 16th. So starting on March 16th, the new rules regarding gross net metering will come into effect, meaning that any customer that expected to have their project installed between March 16th and May 1st now suddenly has rules changed on them. This sort of whiplash is an economic regulator you're supposed to deliver economic stability and certainty and fairness and to have this sort of aggressive unprecedented attack on renewables. It's impossible to run a business when your customers have the rules changed out from underneath them. They've already put their deposits down, their projects are in the queue, we filed applications to build their projects and suddenly the rules are changed on them that changed their return. It's an unconscionable and bad faith regulatory move by an executive branch that we're seeing aggressively go after renewables. Just take the wind example that was in the papers this morning. It's a lawsuit where the several wind companies and a trade group are suing because the administration has arbitrarily put a moratorium on processing of permits and until they run it through a secret stakeholder process group that's closed to the public, you can't even know when they meet who's on it and what they say and they're going to rewrite the rules. That's how banana republics work. That is not democracy. That is not constitutional, it's not legal. You can't block people from getting their permits reviewed under existing rules arbitrarily just because you want to. You can't change the rules on solar customers midstream on projects that are already in process just because you want to. We are in a political administration that is attacking relentlessly renewables. Remember the attacks on the efficiency main budget, anything that would reduce your consumption of fossil fuels is being shut down by this administration in a thorough and programmatic way. There are going after everything we're doing trying to reverse our economy's addiction to fossil fuels. At a time when climate science says to us that in order to avoid the worst effects of climate change we have to completely disconnect our economy from carbon. Go to a zero carbon economy essentially within 10, 20 years by 2050 at the latest in order to avoid the worst effects of climate change. In fact we may also have to couple that with decarbonization where we're taking carbon out of the atmosphere in order to slow down the effects of climate change. I don't want to talk about the science of climate change or whether it's accepted or not other than to make the point that the task before us is immense and that the consequences of not acting we're seeing in the form of the kinds of weather events that are getting to be much more commonplace and the departures from the range of normal with regard to weather events that we set new records every year and these events have significant cost effects whether it's storms like we've seen in Texas and Florida and the Caribbean whether it's fires like we're seeing in California whether it's certain droughts whether it's the disruption of the winter snow-based economy in New England and how that affects snowmobiling and skiing and other aspects of our economy food production that goes on and on and on and on so it's extremely expensive for us as a society to not address climate change. If you put those two things together there's an urgency to act and the level that we have to go to to transform our economies that have been built on fossil fuels that task is is massive and we have you know the darkest hour before the dawn we have both in the state and the federal level administrations that are sort of bald faced efforts to block anything that would reduce the use of fossil fuels the EPA climate plan rejection by the current EPA administrator where he says we're going to get rid of the clean power plan and instead we're going to they asked for a subsidy for coal and nukes on the on the theory of grid reliability and so we're going to reverse the Obama era clean power plan and actually accelerate our use of coal and and and nukes and gas you know that's the direction our current political leaders are sort of taking us so that's to the context for those of us that are committed to sort of making this turning the cruise ship and I don't want to stay away from military metaphors turning this massive ship around you know that's the context of of how difficult the fight's going to be and and how much change we have to make and how urgent it is and so we have communities colleges and universities mayors for example that are making climate pledges to meet climate reduction goals within a set time frame both the cities of Portland and South Portland have done that and they're very aggressive climate goals and you know you see a lot of cities committed to meeting the climate the Paris climate accord goals for example is another one well how do we actually do that and what does it mean and where do we do it what parts of the economy where do we get the biggest bang for the buck and what is what is it going to how do we deploy capital to make that happen and what are the programs that we put in place and and so when you when you start asking yourself that question so now let's ignore the political maelstrom that we're in and the dire predictions and everything and let's just talk about mechanically how do we set about the task of meeting our climate goals and making the changes that we're talking about well the first and let's let's just look at the cities of Portland and South Portland because that's what our project first project involves the first task is to know what our current benchmark is and we don't know that so how much energy do the cities of Portland and South Portland use citywide not just the municipal load but everybody in the whole city we don't actually know that and if you don't know what you use where you use it how you use it when you use it and why you use it you can't possibly implement programs designed to cost effectively and aggressively reduce that energy use and switch carbon intensive energy uses over to carbon free energy uses so that the grid solar has proposed together with the Sierra Club of Maine a pilot project where we would map energy use in the in the two cities on a fine grain level so parcel tax map parcel level mapping of energy use so this building is is a single tax parcel on the city tax maps you go out into a neighborhood every house on the block is probably a different parcel um you if you if we knew sort of what office every office building and and so every parcel has a characteristic residential use retail office parking garages hospitals public facilities libraries town halls things like that so you know we we can if we're able to map parcel by parcel and you can assign parcels to their their sort of category um then you can start looking at programs that go uh incentivize residential improvements or that look at retail space or look at public facilities churches um you know you can really start to analyze by sector and activity potential solutions likewise we can look at the differences between electric electric use which we know is around 16 percent of our total energy use um compared to uh transportation which we know is around 50 percent of our total energy use and then in between is space and water heating and so we can if we were able to develop parcel by parcel level data we would we would be able to identify things like how much of our energy use actually matches those numbers that we think are true but we don't know are true um and within any category let's say space heating why is this building not what is it outside today 45 degrees 50 yeah so why isn't this ambient air temperature it's because it's heated what's it heated with I don't know do you anybody know what this building is heated with gas oil gas hot water yeah do we know how much this building uses no yeah so could we could we identify um a space heating solution writ large for all of downtown without knowing sort of where are the prime opportunities based on consumption per square footage for example you know does that mean we want to go into modernizing furnaces do we want to change out windows do we want to change out insulation do we want to you know what what sort of strategies would actually work and be cost effective we don't know that because we really don't know and we have no good way of comparing energy use so so the you can see how if we had partial level granular detail we could programmatically go about the business of identifying the most cost effective ways to decarbonize our economy quick question on on the context are you talking about the data that you're trying to build is this cumulative use or is this instantaneous load for usage I mean for heat loads going to be loads going to be hard to get for oil for instance because I've got a big I'm going to have a big tank out back and when it turns on it turns on but it's hard for you to track that as a as an observer right yeah I'm wondering what kind of data you're trying to collect is it yeah that's is it instantaneous or is it like across a year this building is so intensive with with respect to gas electric hey dot grab a chair um that's a great question let's talk about the quality of the data that we can get because um I think the answer to that is the practical reality is going to drive drive the answer so um we can get partial level detail by meter for electricity from the utilities so that we know we can get and we can get it in a format that can go into a database we can get if we're able to work with the oil and gas providers we can get partial level detail on deliveries we can get partial level data on square footage of buildings we think we can we don't know how good it is we can get partial level data on building type and use and we can we can get specific information from certain parcels based through intensive audits that we can then use to extrapolate in general for parcels that match the same characteristics so we would ground truth as much of it as we could to verify the data that we could as we could a transportation how in the world are we going to identify what transportation energy applies citywide parcel by parcel we can collect information say the number of vehicles number of miles driven can we get an mpg figure to apply to that for the the vehicles probably not we can use some averages we can get the city mass transit we can get public sector transit numbers possibly from some of the uh taxi and other companies but you can see right away that even as good a date as we can get it's going to have huge gaps in places and for instance let's say we had all of the oil and gas deliveries for building served by oil and gas for space heat for the year 2015 we could take a heating degree days and get a btu figure per square foot that would then be a metric that we could apply across future years in an apples to apples sort of way but what you know we are trying to what we want to get is the best level detail that we can multiple years if we can parcel by parcel if we can ground truth where we can and possibly taking some neighborhoods that might volunteer to actually have super intensively granular data that we can use as representative to cooperate the rest of the results we're getting and calibrate the results we're getting so that we can have higher quality level detail on the results that are coming in by importing information on a broad level just think you know return is that a familiar question what you're doing think at all about how we measure transportation it's not except for parking lots it's not really parcel by parcel but corridors and destinations you know the the issue with transportation and consumption of energy is congenital so it's the before and after that's a really good point and let me let me say that the idea behind this is to through learning through experience to try to figure out how to do this cost effectively and accurately because there are dozens and dozens and dozens of cities that have made the climate pledge that actually want granular detail on their energy use that they can then use to develop policy so what I've described is the first part which is the baseline data on energy use the the second thing that we're trying to do is to also map the energy delivery systems and in particular the electric grid and the reason why is is because the best and fastest way to decarbonize our economy is through beneficial electrification and what I mean by that is if you switch out a oil furnace for an air source heat pump and the air source heat pump powered by electricity is connected to say PV solar or PV solar with batteries or tidal or wind power or some other renewable source of energy you're effectively decarbonizing the space heating to the based on whatever your your marginal carbon level is per kilowatt hour of electricity because obviously it's going to be a blend it's not all going to be renewable so beneficial electrification represents taking somebody off of liquid fossil fuel and putting them putting them onto electricity that's increasingly renewably sourced and we know that we can decarbonize transportation through electric vehicles charged by renewables we know that we can decarbonize space heating and water heating through air source heat pumps or geothermal heat pumps powered by renewables combined with insulation and and you know weatherization and and those other things so we know that the electric grid is going to be the primary delivery mechanism of of a decarbonization strategy for electricity itself but also for transportation and space heating and think about that for a second right now if electricity uses only 16 percent of our total electric use and we want to go 100 percent decarbonized that means we basically have to increase our delivery of electricity sixfold do we have a strong enough grid to do that dot I struggled one getting the data and two wrapping my mind around what really makes more sense with the number of utilities like to talk about BTUs from their plug but obviously they had to make the electricity and they had to transport the electricity to the plug and do you have a data figure that you feel comfortable with what is the efficiency of getting that electricity to the plug you mean in terms of line losses and losses in manufacture I've heard it's you know 50 43 percent actually and I think that sometimes that's lost in the translation and actually utilities don't like to talk about what that number is sure okay so that's a that's a fair point that the the electric grid is in terms of efficiency of delivering energy has a lot of problems and some of that can be represented just in line losses and some of it's represented by the fact that you always have to have load and generation and balance and to do and you never you can't identify exactly what load's going to be so you actually have to have way more generation so that you can instantly match load and then generation that's not needed is terminated and lost one of the ways you would can account for that is just in time just in place delivery of electricity which is a distributed grid not a central grid where you have rooftop power on the roof delivering to the building you have you have storage if you admit to all those losses all of a sudden some of the distributed grid seems to make a lot more yeah right so there are solutions that you need to make the grid efficient in order to make the grid efficient you actually have to know what the grid's capacities are and if you're going to increase load by six-fold in a decade or two in order to achieve all these other benefits you're also going to have to beef up the grid and you want to do it in the most cost-effective way so that will result in higher capacity factor in the grid and address the problem you have you're talking about you're talking about a different issue than I'm talking about though in that what we're talking about is how do you decarbonize the economy and within a very short time frame you know a generation using the tools that we have so we may have a electric grid that's 60 percent efficient and we may improve that to 70 or 80 percent efficiency but we're not going to completely solve that problem but we don't have a way to decarbonize transportation other than electricity and maybe hydrogen fuel cell technologies but those are also very electric based although the distribution part of it's not so much and maybe that'll evolve and be a tool we can use but for right now if everybody started driving electric vehicles and what Volvo says in what two three years that's all they're going to sell what's that our grid in order to supply that electricity when are people charging those vehicles where are they charging those vehicles and what's the distribution to those points look like and what we learned through the booth based smart smart grid pilot project is the utilities currently monitor the existing electric grid essentially from the top down so the the grid is is comprised of remote generation stations primarily that are connected to high voltage power lines and in you know you guys see those driving around the state and then those high voltage power lines are the interstate corridors if you will the interstate highways of the electric grid so they're connected all the centralized power plants are connect connected directly to those hydro etc and then those go to substations where it's broken down to lower level power lines the wooden ones that are smaller not the big metal ones that are way in the but the smaller wooden ones and those go to nodes where there's substations that then serve the distribution grid that goes down the street so you know the power feeding this building for example is is probably a much higher level power than than a residential neighborhood on a residential neighborhood that's 1245 kv lines going down the street the utilities monitoring stops at the substation so they they're looking from the top down they're look at and at the substation they just know what's leaving the substation they don't know what's out at the end of the line and in the booth bay smart grid pilot project what we were doing is building a model that looked at the grid from the bottom up from every a single electric use up and you can do it by appliance by appliance but really most of the modeling work that's being developed and this is almost all coming out of california is looking meter by meter up where where they're deploying smart houses with smart appliances they're actually looking from appliance levels up and when you when you do that you're looking imagine a circuit let's just take the booth bay peninsula which is a a lot of grids are designed to be all looped together but in main we have a lot of our grid is is just a radial line out that terminates because it's a literal peninsula and so the utility knows what's happening here they don't know what's happening all the way down here but at the very end of the line that house has to get electricity within five percent plus or minus tolerance of the standard but every time the power is used going down the voltage drops so to get power down here to the level that you need you've got to increase it up here and this is the why dots point about efficiency this is where it happens on the distribution grid is is they're wasting a lot of power to get to the power quality standard you have to have at the end well in a in a distributed grid you would have along this line you'd have inverter based solar systems or battery systems that are monitoring that grid all the way down and you can adapt immediately in real time and change voltage levels so that your it's called conservation voltage where you're not wasting electricity is to keep the guy on the end at his has required standard and you've got a device maybe just up the street that can move it up and down improve power quality that supports the grid here and here and here and here instead of all the support coming from here that makes sense I'm wondering if you have any connection right now with the island institute and Brooks winter and some people who are kind of housekeeping islands because I moved from an island to where we live now mid coast main and now that we're with the Mara we're 35 persons on this island we're not exactly a priority so it seems like what you're talking about would be dramatically illustrated by you know going to the far reaches of a place like that sure um yes I am talking to island institute and yes these things would apply the utilities need to know this to have a smart grid um they they put in smart meters that we all paid for that were programmed to not collect this information central main power they it if you changed out the chip and you change out the programming you it could it would be expensive but you could do it right now the utilities aren't doing it I think that was a conscious choice um but in Booth Bay we happen to have a circuit where we had in the industrial park we had a backup electric generator we had a battery storage and just across the street we had a pv system so we have these lot these these radial lines where we could we were actually measuring voltage in real time and we could see what happens when up when the sun comes out when the sun goes down when motors turn on and off and it changes voltage and so you have all these distributed resources on that line that you can now then use to support and strengthen that line meaning that um a solar power with a smart inverter can push reactive power as well as real power out onto the grid reactive power will stabilize voltage so rather than pushing more power from up here down on a bigger and bigger conduit with bigger and bigger poles and higher off the ground with bigger insulators you know now you can have a grid reacting in real time two way between customers and the utility self-supporting and and able to use renewable resources to provide grid stability and reliability and at the same time enhance capacity um and so the the guys that have built this model are out in california it's called new power technologies and um they're as interested as we are in finding a way to remember the goal here is to deliver to the cities of portland south portland a menu of cost-effective solutions to meet their carbon reduction goals we know they're going to need the grid to effectively do that so we want to we want to build out that grid in the most cost-effective way uh and in the way that will support the most um renewable and sort of efficient solution so to so to use the electric grid is the primary vehicle to deliver carbon benefits it's got to be we know it's going to have to the capacity is going to have to be increased like we said six-fold so the capacity is a huge issue but also the efficiency of it and the um effectiveness of it at the least cost so we really are going to need a model of the grid that looks from the bottom up that's designed to put solar here and the whole rest of that system is strengthened and if you put solar here you actually cause additional problems until x y and z are done so now we have a work order for x y and z that's built into the the build out schedule if you will for that part of the grid go ahead it sounds like what you're describing is is that the the current system is is built under the assumption that every node is a consumer right every node is a is a is a net is a net uh load on the system right with the exception of those giant plants that that put the put the electrons in in the motion right um and so what we're trying to move to is a is a is a thing where where your node could be a net producer right so net producer of not just energy but voltage support frequency regulation all kinds of things that stabilize the grid right and right now right now the system itself isn't built to accommodate that kind of a we have we have a one-way grid right what you're describing is a two-way grid so so uh you know what you know next step would be and this this sounds like where you're where you're going is that that the the utilities themselves have knowledge about you know which which line segments are over our over capacity or nearing over subscription and and so there's immense value to them to have to have help on those on those on those points of the star right where where Booth Bay lives or where you know the end of Pemaquid or you know there's there's a lot of a lot of places where where the utility can't be can't be on the ground right um with its with its current uh its current design what what is it is it is it uh feasible to to add in these two-way grid segments or or do you have to do you have to adopt a whole new system architecture all at once you know i mean it sounds like the the utilities aren't terribly responsive to this kind of stuff so yeah okay so what's the so from a technical perspective working with cmp in the Booth Bay smart grid pilot project um and also in the camden rockland portion of the mid-coast and we're just starting in the portland loop area um if you were to talk to the technical staff that that is responsible for keeping the lights on they are thrilled by these ideas these are more tools in their toolbox and they're smarter tools um they're the technology is more advanced they're they're rapid fire um they're interesting challenging i mean they love it and they love to implement this stuff the being counters looking at it saying well wait a minute what you're essentially doing is you're taking our monopoly franchise which is delivering electricity and everything related to delivering electricity we completely control and we get a guaranteed return on investment of 9 to 13 percent so the bigger the more build out we do on that grid the more money we and you want me to open up that franchise and start paying this guy that puts solar with a smart inverter on the line start paying him to deliver benefits that i used to deliver only and so now i'm not i'm not building out poles and wires anymore i'm i'm i'm actually having the marketplace compete to provide the same resource and that marketplace is willing to do it at a because you want solar for other reasons so you just want a little additional revenue stream to make your project pencil for you so you're willing to do it at five percent so suddenly we have a competitive marketplace to provide electric delivery services that used to be a monopoly really really tough in our political economy to do go ahead lots of ammo on their side j o b s being one of them you know the people who climb the lines to maintain you know help maintain the power lines and also just we're such snobs we're such elitos sitting here talking about this stuff it's just you know what is the average person here they just want to turn on the lights they don't care where it comes from yeah right except for the other ones that are also paying the price in their insurance for the massive destruction in american south due to climate change and at what point are they going to say i can't afford these insurance costs we've got to do something so again i'm not talking about the the overall i'm recognizing there's a political challenge to deploying a smart grid that will be very effective in delivering beneficial electrification and how difficult it will be but i'm not really talking about that here that that's for the next stage let's let's come circle back to the pilot what i'm describing for taking that detour because those are the tough issues that people are wrestling with as you get your data and figure out okay that's right i mean those are questions we're going to have to confront and it's good to know they're coming but coming back to the pilot one the other side of that coin is to build a working functioning smart grid it is going to require substantial investment and there's and a smarter investment and there's plenty of room for the utility of the future to make a lot of money and be beloved by its ratepayers in helping deliver a carbon-free future that we want so that's about cultural change in in the in the utility sector which has to be part of this overall mission um but people have to understand how it would work and that it would work and that requires having a working model that begins to deploy smart functions into the grid in a way that don't cause brownouts and blackouts and in a way that the grid operators have trust in get experience in and in a way that ratepayers are saving money from and also in a way that makes for smarter overall investment we need this a robust distribution grid operated by the utilities and a neutral platform for this whole thing to succeed we need the utilities we want them to be powerhouse economic motivators in our communities yeah there's a great example of a investor-owned utility that's way out in front of this green mountain power will um sell you a remote pv system disconnected from the grid you can buy electricity from them without even hooking up to their grid because a lot of times it's cheaper for them to do that than it is for them to extend the line to your house out in the mountains um that's an example of a really smart utility that's begun that change it's really changed the way they think they deploy pv they deploy batteries the tesla battery walls the pv systems and their profits are going up and do they also they do heat pumps right so um and we've had them come to revisions annual meeting and talk to us about their their plan it's a really thrilling interesting example so um the goal of this pilot project is to have the the granular energy load um parcel by parcel and a type of activity and and energy sector so we have that kind of information and we also are getting out a living working model of the grid that can be continuously updated as we build solutions so if you have those two models in place you can start to then the whole point of this exercise is to produce a menu of act of solutions tony i don't get hung up on this we used an interesting term political economy but i guess my question is to your timing like for example i see that the city poland he was born in maybe both cities just launched a climate action solutions campaign of some sort and what's the what's the timing for this grid solar data collection and in our events going to move fast to you or sure that's a good point um we think it's a two-year project to get the the working baseline benchmark data and the working grid model and we haven't started because we don't have the money to start yet we're raising we're in the fundraising stage for those two things right now um so let me answer this by talking about what we anticipate producing you guys know what a wedge analysis is where you you have a problem and the solution can be broken out like a pie chart so you have 10 solutions and each solution in that pie chart becomes a wedge of different sizes so the idea of the two models is to develop a uh a menu of potential solutions and they may be things that are already ongoing or things that haven't started yet um and they may be that the the wedge analysis let's say that streetlights have all been swapped out already so you know that'll be added to the baseline data and won't be part of the wedge because it's already happened until we get some new streetlight technology and then it becomes a new wedge um so the the idea is to take the data and present it to the community saying here's how much energy you use here's how you use it where you use it when you use it what you're using it for in average in general among the whole community we're not going to be like policing you took too many showers today in you know that hot water you and your children are the problem that's not what we're talking about what we're talking about is uh uh very the data is all private but very general information about how where and when we use electricity and um and then to to come up with solutions that the community is deciding whether at once or not and i give you an example um the set of solutions might include weatherization programs subsidized um by the community through say the a pace program or some other mechanism um because that actually is cheaper than buying electric vehicles for um every vehicle in the city fleet so from a city's tax perspective budget perspective it says we can get the most bang for the buck here and we can we can get matching money from the private sector each homeowner has to put up three quarters of the cost and this is just a 25 subsidy and so the city might say you know that that's more efficient than all of our composting and recycling and all other programs we got going in the city that will do more carbon reduction than anything else and the city might choose to do that or they might say no we're not putting money into private homes we're only doing public things and we're going to encourage businesses to to meet these other needs working together with residential users um and we're going to do that by taxing um delivery of oil and gas in the city i mean who knows what they're going to come up with my only point is that we're trying to give the data and some and solution menu to work from and the idea would be the two models are not static that they're dynamic that they're really turned over the city's staffs to continue to operate so they can continue to generate solutions um and work with the utility and other um providers third party providers um that are trying to deliver carbon benefits and a key point of this of a collaboration with Sierra Club is Gritschiller views itself as the analyst um and we and and the idea of Sierra Club is Sierra Club is in the is in the education business and so Sierra is going to really be doing all the community outreach involved in sharing the data and the results and trying to drive solutions and to collaborate with other stakeholders as to the priorities and funding of various solutions um and the both cities have endorsed this idea wholeheartedly and are very very excited to participate and eager to get their hands on the on the data because they want to make immediate use of it in fact um there's a joint meeting of the sustainability committee's tomorrow um that i'm also doing this exact same discussion with although not as long thank goodness um that as a Gulf of Maine research institute and the first part of it is actually a presentation by gmri on their climate change module which i can't describe but you can look up online i'm looking forward to learning about that tomorrow well last point is that we are um you know we we've got committed money for about a quarter of the overall cost and revision is one of those that is committed um we are uh have grant applications in a number of places um but we're still trying to raise money so anybody with connections that might be willing to help us raise some money for this effort um would please talk to me and from the national sierra claus perspective um they're hoping that this project will produce a model that could be adopted elsewhere um so that's what we're doing and um i don't know any other questions thank you for your talk steve by my name is gregg um i'm curious what grid solar's perspective and um take is on transactive energy systems utilizing um sort of more peer-to-peer type transactions using blockchain technologies um in a micro grid or in a larger grid system that's something you guys are looking into a little bit um we definitely recognize that that's probably how energy settlement's going to happen in the future i don't know how far away it is so what he's describing is i've got surplus energy um this hour and you have load this hour um you can and so three other people have surplus energy using blockchain technology bitcoin essentially um all those transactions could happen instantaneously instantaneously and you'd be thinking you would be running along the wires it's my second question of course yeah yeah so utilities just being paid um the way brokers are being paid to deliver the benefits but it means that right now you buy electricity from a third party supplier that um has the obligation of delivering that power to to you but they don't really deliver it to you what they do is they they buy they have to own the power when it enters the grid matching when you take it off the grid um and that presupposes one supplier or 10 suppliers and one user what Greg's talking about is there's you know infinite number of users and suppliers all interacting in real time you know power just transactions moving constantly uh maybe like in Denmark it just makes so much sense i mean is there some place outside the country to live your farmers there's uh i don't know if there's one used a lot utilizing like a blockchain type of transaction system but there's a um brooklyn microcar is a sort of a pilot system implemented in brooklyn utilize i think 60 households maybe a quarter of which have pv on the rooftop and it's piloted by a company called elo 3 energy so there's companies trying this out in different places so the data collection for consumption is what you're looking at to parse by parse with that this would mean sourcing whereas the sources of power also like we would need that data collection that's not part of what we're looking at now we're that's a really fine filter so right now let's say if we were looking at energy load by parcel by parcel we'd get a net annual so if you had pv on your roof we would not be able to tell unless you gave us the data how much you generated locally versus how much you bought from the utility we'd only know what you bought from the utility because we we just can't get access to that data yet so you know it's going to require a much uh more information that is truly a to have a blockchain peer-to-peer transaction based grid you truly have a smart grid that's able to generate enough data so that you can have real-time two-way transactions right now we don't we don't have that if i have this data broker for lack of a better term i would know where i could be selling my access power with the data that you're coming up with we're headed that direction i know we're heading that way that's so we're getting the data for where the power is being used you're no but that's where you see we're we're moving that direction to getting that data interesting question the blue pay pilot project was funded by the puc is that correct or no it's funded by ratepayers by ratepayers but approved by the puc yeah and it was presented as a way to save money from preventing and build out of the grid that's right and this project for portland sounds like you're coming up with um potential solutions for reducing energy loads well potential solutions for reducing carbon intensity of our economy overall that um may result in higher electric loads but lower oil and gas use for example so would some of the projects qualify for rate payer funding absolutely because the lower overall cost of ratepayers for example let's use dots number that the grid has a capacity factor of 43 percent meaning that for every 100 units of energy that are put onto the grid 43 are actually used by an end-use consumer so the and the rest are wasted and um that we improve that through all these activities we improve that capacity factor to 80 percent that would be that's an efficiency that's why efficiency such a great thing yeah that would result in the net cost per unit of electricity for all ratepayers in dropping so would would that warrant rate payer investment it would and then that's the whole idea of the efficiency main trust is to improve that capacity factor and save everybody money um and you see what where we've been in the last eight years the puc and the efficiency main trust i i don't think in this admit emt it doesn't have any money to spare and in this administration i can't conceive of the commission being willing i mean they're attacking wind and solar today i can't conceive of them investing in long-term analysis to actually promote distributed solar i mean they're they're part of the problem i don't see how they're not going to be not we're going to go now for the solution but to give you guys an example the booth-based smart grid pilot project offset the need for construction of an 18 million dollar power line as as the price that was estimated about five six years ago from edge come down the booth bank over the life of that power line so its book depreciation term is 45 years so utility puts up 18 million and they're paid back over the life of that power line over those 45 years 75 million so the the net cost of rate payers of the line would have been 75 million over its useful life the booth bay pilot which implemented smart grid solutions offset the need to build the power line cost six million and over the um that six million is not eligible for um ongoing capital payments by rate payers to utility because it was not debt funded and it's not it didn't build up the poles and wires in the utility that they can continue to charge you for so the total cost of that six million is six million to rate payers so um that means the project saved almost 70 million to rate payers and what happened was um once the project showed itself to be successful cmp came back and said oh by the way we don't need it because electric load didn't grow as fast as we thought it was going to therefore the existing lines are sufficient we don't need to add a new line and we don't need to pay for this battery and backup generator and pv and efficiency anymore we can stop so they've ended the pilot project we've saved rate payers um because i would have built the line because they would have built the line otherwise now and they've said oh well we would have had to build the line because of old age in 20 years so um you know then you've saved rate payers uh you put off a need to build that line by 20 years so you've said what in this is actually fact and needed and what is it that's just part of the churn because the utility is trying to build new things because depreciated assets go away so that's what i want to do yeah you're right and and that's that's where the utility is thinking um how do you maximize value for shareholders and and for the management um and put it in your own pocket regardless of the impact to the economy to rate payers or to the environment or the climate and we're we're not going to survive climate change if everybody in the in the country continues to think that way we really have to think about being a smarter more efficient more productive economy not wasting in order to maximize personal profits and um that that cultural change has to happen