 This month, Longmont has begun replacing some of its electric meters with smart meters. And smart meters, for some reason, cause a lot of controversy. But they're really necessary given the changes that we're going through on this planet in this climate. And the reason we need smart meters is so that we can make the adjustment without hurting people so we can keep our energy system reliable and so that we can give you a level of service that you've never had before. The first thing that happens is that we transition to renewable energy and stop burning fossil fuels and nothing bad happens in the process. Your electric bills don't skyrocket although they're not going to fall for a while. Your service doesn't become less reliable. All kinds of things affect how much we can generate energy from the sun and wind that it's harder to control and harder to manage than generating energy from coal. But the trouble with generating energy from coal is that it's really expensive. It puts greenhouse gases and other noxious gases into the air as well as nasty particles. And because the planet is warming and we're having forest fires and stuff, there's already too many nasty particles. So we don't need to add to that by burning coal either way. I want everybody to know how important the energy transition is. I worked in this industry in the private sector for many years. I have patents and the techniques that the smart meters use now. I am telling you I've been living and breathing this transition for much longer than I've been on the city council. In the 1940s and 50s, when this was all designed or even earlier, electricity wasn't considered essential. It was considered a modern convenience. But today it's a necessity and that means that everybody is tremendously inconvenienced or even in danger if the electric grid doesn't work and doesn't deliver power to your house. Here in Longmont we are really blessed because our power almost never goes out. Or if it doesn't, you find out about it when you get up in the morning and your clocks are on your stove or something or flashing because it was off for 15 minutes in the middle of the night and you didn't even notice. But the grid was designed to operate until failure. It wasn't instrumented. It didn't have all these controls on it so that you would know when it was getting worn out. When the power goes out we'll fix it and that was the attitude for which it was designed. But now it's going to undergo a period of time when there are a lot more changes coming a lot closer together. Every electric vehicle that you plug in consumes as much energy as about half of a middle-sized house. But they move around so they're going to draw that power from all around town. And on Thanksgiving when everybody comes to your house and half of the people already are driving electric vehicles that could be a little bit of an overload if everybody needs to plug in in order to get home. We need to have a more adaptable grid and the first thing we have to do is to find out why and where the stress points are. Because when your electric grid fails, it fails just like a light bulb burning out. The electric current that flows through the filament in your light bulb, an old incandescent light bulb, you've all seen that happen, they burn out because that filament literally wears out. And the same thing can happen on the bigger components that are underground and we never think about them. But they can get overstressed when they are overloaded or when change happens too much when they have to adapt. And so we need these smart meters which are sensitive instruments on the grid that will tell us where those stress points are and let us upgrade them well before they fail. That's called distribution management. It's not invasive to you. It doesn't make any difference to you and it won't cause you to be charged for more electricity or anything like that. But what it will do is keep our electric grid up to date, reliable and sustainable, and make us able to do a good job, even in the face of rapid change in terms of what the grid has to do. The next big value that we get from those smart meters is demand management. A lot of things have to happen right on demand, like turning on the light. You'd be really inconvenienced if you put on the light switch and the switch and the light in come on because you need to see right down, right now. But there are a lot of other things like heating up the water in your hot water tank that can happen whenever there's plenty of energy because as long as the water in the tank doesn't go below a certain temperature, you're fine. It'll still be warm when you turn on the shower. It's the same with charging your electric car. If you plug it in when you go to bed, you don't care whether it's charging right then or whether it's going to charge between 2 o'clock and 4 o'clock in the morning. All you care about is that it's got at least a 70% charge by the time you wake up and head to work in the morning. And making sure that the demand, that all those devices, your devices on the electric grid are ready for you but also not overstressing the grid, not using too much electricity when there's not enough because the wind's not blowing hard enough or it's night and the sun isn't shining is called demand management. And having the meter be smart is one of the tools that we use to let your electric company do demand management both by predicting what the behavior is going to be based on past experience with your house and everybody else's house by exercising a certain amount of control in terms of playing around Robin with the different devices that are on the grid, for example. That's demand management. It keeps us from having to generate too much electricity. It keeps us from having to back up our renewable generation sources with generators that use natural gas or coal, bad. That in turn keeps our prices low. So that's demand management and it's really important. And by the way, it doesn't invade your privacy. All the detailed data that those smart meters gather is still strongly encrypted. And at a household level, nobody in the electric company or at the power company is ever even going to see that. All they do is see it lumped together by a neighborhood or a block or which transformer you're on, which is seven or eight houses. But they never know when you're running your dryer. They don't have to know that. Nobody is ever going to control the way you use your electricity. Nobody's ever going to say, no, you can't do this right now. But we can give you a discount if you say, yeah, this is my policy. I want you to make sure that at eight o'clock in the morning, if my EV is plugged in, I want to make sure it's at least at 60% charge. But what you do with my EV battery in the middle of the night, I don't care as long as you meet my policy. Then you can have a discount. You know, same thing if you say, I've got an air conditioner and it runs all day off and on because I've got a thermostat in my house, but I'm not going to get there until 5.30 because that's when I get off work. I want my house to be below 74 degrees Fahrenheit when I get home from work, but you can let it get hotter than that. As long as it's at a nice, you know, 72 to 75 when I walk in the door so I'm not miserable. Your air conditioner is spreading our demand for electricity around and saving everybody money because the power company that delivers the energy is charging us a surcharge if they have to burn coal to meet the demand. They'd rather use wind and solar because you know what? There's no fuel cost. There are a lot of other smaller consumer benefits than that. It can help you with your budget. You know, you can get three-quarters of the way through the month and get an alert on your phone that says, you know, you budgeted $75 for your electric bill this month and you're already at 60. Maybe you should, you know, change some of your thermostat settings or something to try to get to the end of the month inside budget. That's not control unless you want it to be. And there's nobody saying you have to subscribe to that service. The city is not going to control what you do. You can use the services from the city as much or as little as you like and you can pay more or less depending on how much you consume, but that's always been true. The meter is not going to make your bill higher. Yes, we are investing in all kinds of infrastructure to use renewable energy instead of using fossil fuels. There have always been capital costs affecting your bill. When the price of coal or natural gas goes up, your bill goes up as a consequence of that. And what's being predicted now from our power company, Platte River Power Authority, is that for the next 10 years, we're going to have about a 5% increase in energy costs each year because we're making an investment in renewable energy and it's a capital investment that has to be anortized. But the real news is that after that nine-year period is over, that rate of increase drops to almost zero because the capital investment is there and the fuel is free, which has never been true before. And so the only thing you're paying for is the maintenance of all of this infrastructure that it takes to use renewable energy. So it's not invading your privacy, it's not stealing money from you, and it's going to make your life better and you don't have to change anything unless you want to. Later, I'll be able to tell you about the new services, but that's another story because for right now, all we need to know is it's not going to change your life, it's not going to invade your privacy, and it's not going to cost you an arm and a leg. They're okay.