 Good evening. It's 5.30 on the second Wednesday of the month. This is the May meeting of the Burlington Board of Electric Commissioners. We meet every second Wednesday of the month here at 5.30 at 5.85 pine. And as always, the public is welcome to join us. Joining the conversation, your thoughts, questions, concerns, they all mean a lot to us. Come on down and join the conversation. All right. We'll start the meeting with the agenda. Are there any changes to the agenda? I think I see one. We're adding a discussion of the general obligation bond. Discussion and vote on that. And we're all good with that. I don't think we need to vote on that. So there's one change that'll be right after the proposed rate case. So we'll go into minutes of the April 12, 2023 meeting. If there are any changes that are substantial, that are not simply typos or something, please bring that forward. If you have any changes that should be noted. If not, I will take a motion. Motion's been made to have a second. Motion made and seconded. Any discussion on the motion? Hearing none, all in favor say aye. Aye. I'll oppose nay. Ayes have it. The moment of the minutes for April 12 pass. Third item on the agenda is public forum. This is a chance for the public to come and speak before the board. With, again, questions, concerns, praise, whatever. Always here at 525, second Wednesday of the month. Do we have any people? We have one member of the public here. Awesome. Do we have any members of the public online? Cool, we have a member. Come on up. Yes, have a seat. So for everybody, this is my next door neighbor, Jody Woos. Do I need to do anything with it? No, no, you're fine. Great. So I bought a 1,600 square foot duplex in the, oh, sorry, Jody Woos. I live in the old Northland. We bought our duplex in November 2019. And we're fortunate, very fortunate, to live next to Scott and Tammy. And since we've lived in the house, we've undertaken a lot of upgrades in terms of being able to use electricity more intensely. And over that time, I've had lots of conversations with Scott, and he said, why don't you come and share your experience and your thoughts. So I'm delighted to be here. The house was in good shape when we bought it, and it was very much natural gas focused. Domestic hot water, gas stoes in the upstairs apartment where our sun lives and downstairs where we live, baseboard hot water systems fueled by natural gas. Each unit has its own electric panel and each has 100 amp Burlington Electric Service. Annually, our total electric consumption between the, for the two units is about 12,000 kilowatt hours. Is that the right unit? That's right, okay. So since we purchased it, we've done a number of upgrades. We installed a level two electric car charger. We're now on our third Nissan Leaf. We've installed an electric stove in the downstairs apartment. We installed heat pumps upstairs and downstairs. We worked with energy co-op of Vermont to weatherize the house. We built window inserts for all the windows using the window dresser's template. I don't know if you all are familiar with that. And we've insulated the basement ceiling using one inch insulation board. We're currently working with sun comment and solar solar canopy in the backyard which will provide three quarters of our total electric service needs. We're committed to transitioning to electric for all our energy needs and we've benefited enormously from the Burlington Electric incentives, Vermont gas for weatherization incentives and various state and government level incentives. Over the past three years through this process we've learned a lot in talking with people and researching and in experiencing all of these activities. First, both units in our building are right at the edge of our 100 amp service. Right now we would not be able to add an electric clothes dryer for example as there's no room in the panel and we've maxed out on our service. As we understand it, the cost of upgrading the service rests entirely on us and we suspect that most of the homes in the old North End are in the same boat in terms of having a 100 amp service. That may not be certainly for us but that may not be up to the needs of people in our neighborhood. I think that Burlington Electric's admirable and necessary focus on helping people transition to electric and away from fossil fuels needs to take the situation into account in the whole city but in particular in the old North End where the houses are older and smaller. For most homes in our neighborhood it is not possible to generate sufficient electricity from a roof only installed solar system. The houses are small and the electric needs are what they are. The small square footage of the roof combined with the current level of efficiency of the solar panels prevents this. For example, a roof insulation at our house would only generate a third of our annual electric consumption. Because there are no community solar options for Burlington Electric customers as far as I know, our project to go solar entirely depends on the square footage of our lot, on our finances and on our ability to navigate the complexities of the project which as I'm sure you know are significant. Another point I'd like to make is that we, my husband Dennis and I are very concerned about the electric grid in the state and in New England on which Burlington Electric depends. Projects to increase electricity generation in Vermont using solar and wind power have been installed or canceled for a number of reasons including the lack of capacity of the grid to take additional power. For many projects, the developer or the homeowner who or ever it is who's putting in small commercial, large or commercial have to pay the entire cost of upgrading the grid access. And that makes in many cases the projects economically unfeasible. Final point I'd like to make is that we're concerned that the grid just doesn't have enough power to accommodate the increased demand for electricity that Burlington Electric has been very responsible in pushing at this time. We know from national experience that when demand exceeds supply for electricity that the least efficient power plants must be spun up to accommodate it. These plants are the worst of the worst in terms of efficiency and greenhouse gas emissions. We all know that we're facing climate catastrophe. Organizations like Burlington Electric are addressing this responsibly through promoting increased use of electricity. And we'd like to thank you all very much for everything you've done to incentivize the use of electricity in our city. I know that the points I've made are things you're painfully aware of. I'm sure you talk about these all the time. But I did want to emphasize, we wanted to emphasize the roadblocks that we foresee in widespread adoption of electricity for home heating and cooling and for transportation in the future. Thank you. Thank you for your time. Don't go away. Yeah, okay. I'm the resident nerd. So I have a couple of questions about actual numbers. Yeah. You have two circuits each, 100 amp, right? And the total energy used per year, adding both of them together is 12,000 kilowatt hours. Correct. Okay. That is correct. The electrician we've been working with has said you are right at the edge. If we turned on everything all at the same time, wouldn't be a good thing. Yeah. The average you use is something like one and a half kilowatts, which is like 10 amps or 15 amps total. So it's those everything on at once issues that sound to be the problems. I'm sorry, I couldn't hear. It sounds as though the all on one, all on at one time is the issue. Oh yeah, for sure. Okay. And we don't. I mean, you know, I don't know anybody who does that. Thanks. Yeah. And you know, if I could just take another moment, I think that the potential is huge. I mean, electric car batteries, for example, which people are researching, our lease has the ability to take power and give power, but our charger doesn't have that ability yet. California has just indicated that they're going to, they're saying by 2035 have all electric cars have the ability to do that. It's an enormous resource, mostly for evening out the flow. I mean, the electricity is the whole country in some places. The other thing I wanted to just to mention that I didn't is that we don't want to be burning anything. I mean, this is why we're going to solar. I think burning anything at all is bad for all of us and for the environment. And so, you know, this is why I am concerned about the roadblocks that have been put up in terms of solar and wind generation in the state is a real concern to me. Do you have a, I don't know if I asked you this, if we know what the ballpark price is or what it would be to cost to upgrade your service to whatever the next, it would be 150 or whatever the next tier would be that the engineers would feel comfortable with. We were talking about going up to 200. The solar folks are, I think we may have to upgrade, but they're not sure. It depends on if you get a smart panel, which for response to my cell phone, which I'm not that interested in, but I think we're talking about between $2,000 and $3,000 on that order, is that the sound of that right? And we don't have to, our service is right at the pole, right at the house. So, you know, we're not in a situation where we have to dig underneath four houses to get to the pole. So, in that sense, we're in a good situation. I think as are most of the houses in the North Island, right? We're all just at our poles right there. We can see them right at the road. One of the parts of management from our end is to time demand. And so, there are incentives, say, for charging EVs and so on, that encourage asking for power at off peak times. So, again, the all-on-at-one-time problem doesn't happen. So, there are costs of doing what you're suggesting and there are also costs of managing the demand. And we are looking at those specifically. I mean, I could make the joke. If everybody flushed the toilet at the same time. Right. Yeah. Okay. Great, but I think the point being is that I think what you're struggling with is the engineers or whoever the powers that be, designed for that scenario and anything that it becomes potentially a safety issue and sort of forces you down that road. And that being the part that, I guess, to paraphrase, I think what Jody says is for us to look at, perhaps that upgrade being somehow incentivized or... I share a couple of thoughts. First, thank you for your comments. Absolutely. Thanks for coming to the public forum. We don't get a lot of members of public, so it's nice. And thank you for everything you're doing at your house. So, just a couple of things. The electric panel issue is really, it's not a BED issue. It's a Department of Permitting and Inspection issue. What I understand is if you have 100 amps, they're gonna want you to be filling no more than 80. And Jim knows this better than I do. 80% of your panel. Right. For the purpose of what we just discussed, that you would never overload it by having everything all on at once and then having a real issue. So the move from 100 amp to 200 amp very much, as you said, unless you go with, there are some smart panel technologies that can ensure that you're not using all of the things at once. And that may be a way to avoid the upgrade. The good news there, while we don't have specific incentives for that, because we're not able to, on our regulatory structure, the incentives we offer have to reduce fossil fuel use. And this is sort of adjacent to that, it's important. The state has a program, it's an income qualified program using federal funds that's gonna be available this year to help with exactly this issue, which is upgrading panels and service. And then the Federal Inflation Reduction Act has both tax credits and rebates. The rebates income qualified, the tax credit available generally to support this as well. So I think for the first time this year that we've ever had, we're gonna have some resources available to help when customers need to upgrade. So that's really important, totally agree. I think we're running into the same issue at my house, not on the amperage but on the panel. Because we've done all the things that you're talking about. Right, there's no room left in the panel. And you run out of room. Yeah, I totally understand. And we'd love to do an electric dryer and electric induction as well. The point on renewables and the grid, for Burlington at least, we have a unique situation because we're a compact geographic service territory. And our grid was really built to manage more load than what we have today. In fact, it's part of the budget presentation but you'll see if you go to sales back in 2004, 2005, we were selling 360 some odd thousand megawatt hours a year. And now we're only using about 315 to 320,000. So we're actually using less partly through efficiency, partly because of other issues. So our grid can actually manage quite a bit more. And we are with the revenue bond that we got voter approval for investing in additional capacity to be able to manage these new loads that are coming on. And we are actually more than 100% renewable when it comes to our power supply. So we actually have more renewable energy than what we need currently for our sales. But your point, I think primarily about wind in particular is a really good one. There's still a lot of solar being developed. The state has over 400 megawatts and the state grids about a thousand. So on a sunny summer day where all of that's on, you could see a really significant portion of the state's energy coming from solar, but solar ramps up and down. And that means New England grids ramping up and down different resources to match that, which is a challenge. Wind has a different profile, is running more in the winter in the evenings, has a nice balancing effect. And you can't build wind in the state of Vermont right now. So we would agree with you that that's a significant issue because we purchase energy from Georgia Mountain Wind in Vermont and from Sheffield. And we would be open to looking if there were new wind projects in Vermont, we would be open to talking about that for future needs. So that's, I think, a real issue. It's a state permitting issue and regulatory issue that we don't have control over, but we've certainly advocated for making wind a part of the resource mix again in Vermont. So that's, I couldn't agree more on that point. And then the last point I would say on the solar front, first thanks for doing that. I know I've seen those solar canopies, they're beautiful. So I'm sure you're gonna enjoy that. We definitely appreciate that there's limited geography in Burlington for people to do solar. The only good news there is because we're public power utility and because we represent essentially all of our customers equally with power, when we do add solar to the mix, it's benefiting all our customers. So we always try to think of the panels on the roof here or anything else that we're doing in the airport becomes part of essentially the community mix, although it's not as visible as the panels on the roof or in a field. So appreciate what you're doing there and we know not everyone can access that, but at least they can know all of our customers that we're 100% renewable and that when they do electrify they're doing so in the state that has the cleanest grid in the country, which is good overall for Vermont. Just a few points to share. Really appreciate your comments. I can add to, I know this might be helpful just to know that there's lots of people working on this issue, be doing amazing things and the DOE, Pacific National Labs, Lawrence Berkeley Labs are all looking at panel capacity and looking at how to either find new ways that doesn't require panel upgrades or looking at what it looks like in terms of the value stream of how to encourage that and Darren talked about the money available in the state. So I think hopefully there's lots of awareness of this being a core issue to benefit like electrification and beneficial electrification. So hopefully there's money flowing towards it now but then hopefully even more is coming and more diverse solutions too. Anyone else? That was a good discussion. Thank you, Jody for coming in. I really appreciate it. I think everyone here needed to hear from someone like yourself that's doing all the right things and all the things that we encourage and hearing some real-time actual benefits and struggles through that. So thank you, I really appreciate it. If I could just say, if you're interested, I don't know if you are, Mike over here runs our communications work and we have a podcast and we have like customer videos that we do. So if you would be interested to share some of the things you're doing with us, we would love to highlight that for the rest of the community. It was a big step for me to come here. All right, I only offer no pressure. Yeah, I had to pull teeth together here. Thanks for what you're doing. Thank you, Jody, I really appreciate it. All right, on to agenda item number four, commissioners corner. This is a part where commissioners have an opportunity to bring up anything that they wanted to bring up for thoughts, things that have happened over the next month, whatever, open forum. We have a rather long meeting, so I have nothing to say. Okay, we're gonna try to keep it short because a couple of us have to get to a spring band concert, so. All right, gentlemen, it's your update. Very good, thank you. I will skip over the budget because we're gonna cover that as an agenda item. I will mention just briefly that we had one of our major IT systems, that's part of this IT forward project we've been talking about forever. Go live, the meter data management system, so Erica's online, Emily's here in the room. I don't know who else was here. We had a number of folks who worked on this, IT, finance, customer care, billing team in particular, Mike Leach, Jennifer Bouchard, so really great accomplishment. This is one of the major go lives that we had in the IT forward kind of list. It's so far knock on wood, been a success, and customers are gonna see benefits from it in terms of an improved outage map that's already up and running a new customer energy data use portal that's coming soon, so instead of energy engage, which folks may remember, we're gonna have a more updated customer data portal where you'll be able to go in and look at your energy use. And obviously, by upgrading, we're gonna avoid some of the challenges we've had in the past where we had outdated systems that weren't well integrated and weren't able to update together as easily, so a big effort there and a much appreciation to the team that worked on it. Legislature could adjourn any day, hasn't happened yet, but we had some good news, S137, which is the efficiency bill that we've been tracking has passed the House and the Senate, it's heading to the governor, gives BED the ability to pull on our thermal energy process fuel funds to enhance our incentives further in the areas that we're all talking about, and this is somewhat unique, and it's only for BED, we're the only entity in the state that's gonna get to do this, but we get to design programs through this that would specifically target customers who have a significant energy burden in terms of using a lot of gasoline for commuting, for example. We worked on this provision with VPURG, among others, and my understanding is, if we're able to utilize this authority, talking to one of the national groups that's working on it, we might be the first utility in the country to come up with a program aimed at helping these customers specifically, so we're excited to work on that. I know that's back with James about it, Chris Burns and others. The RES issue is not yet resolved, there's both a study and a workgroup lingering in the House and the Senate. We're not sure which or both may move forward. The DPS is doing its own study, so there's gonna be a look at this, it's definitely gonna be an issue going forward, but we'll be monitoring really to avoid adverse impacts for BED customers. We wanna make sure that our customers are not penalized for having been early adopters of renewables. On the McNeil and Wood Energy front, the Climate Council held a meeting and ended up rejecting by a pretty significant margin, I think there was only maybe one vote in favor, a set of recommendations that would have been adverse for McNeil and for district heat. They've kind of taken those back to the drawing board to come up with hopefully a better set of recommendations that would be a little more nuanced in terms of their application, but that was something that, we wanna play a constructive role there, so we're not looking for something not to move forward, but we're hoping that what moves forward is supportive of things like district heat that actually improves the efficiency of plants like McNeil because we feel McNeil has an important purpose going forward. There will be on, I believe, June 13th in the evening at Contoy's Auditorium, a forum by the Transportation Energy Utilities Committee of the City Council, where we will be a part of it. We're gonna bring in some outside experts from various viewpoints that the committee's gonna invite, some of them will invite. There will be a public comment, there will be a facilitated Q and A, and this is an effort by the committee to gather more information about McNeil and carbon accounting and district heat ahead of, are potentially being able to bring a vote to the City Council sometime this summer on district heat. So we'll send more information, but if you'd like, mark your calendars for June 13th, 6.30, we'd welcome one or more commissioners either joining or calling in for public comment. I know that a number of others engaged in this discussion will be a part of that. I'll skip one item for a moment and just mention any excuse to throw in a nice photo to the report I always take. So here I did wanna mention, we have these nice new signs, one that you've seen hopefully coming into the building, nice bright red BED logo, and then the net zero logo on the side of the building facing Pine Street. We had a great visit from second graders to Champlain Elementary who were here learning about different careers. So they learned about forestry, they learned about energy efficiency, being a line worker, our GIS CAD technician, Raquel, talked to them about making the diagrams of the grid for the city. We had a really nice time kind of working with them, talking with them and demonstrating the power town setup as well as the line crew trucks and Robin Miller ran the forklift for them, showed them how that works. So it was a great day and that photo is from that day. And then lastly, I'll share a kind of a brief verbal update and then I think we can go into more detail with slides if you'd like next meeting on the net zero data from Synapse, which I do now have, but we're still kind of putting together into presentation format. So I don't have it to present via slides tonight. And I don't think this is any different than what I've shared previously. I just have more confirmation of it, which is in 2022, emissions overall in the sectors we track, ground transportation and buildings thermal were down about 11.2% relative to 2018. But that represents a mild rebound from the lows of the pandemic when we were down at one point, about 15%. The state came out with new data on their emissions inventory of the tracks through 2020, very much the result we were seeing with the pandemic where everything dropped off and then they expect to see a similar rebound in emissions. Well, they track data for 21 and 22. The good news is that, you know, it didn't rebound all the way back up to zero. It's still down 11.2%. And it's a bit of a mixed bag in the commercial building sector. We saw natural gas use up significantly between 21 and 22. Part of it could be that we had, it's not whether normalized. So part of it could be that the winner in early 22 was cooler and people were using more gas for heating. Some of it could be new construction. This is not a per capita number. So as we add square footage, inevitably see some additional fuel use, we hope that our buildings policies that are being implemented will eventually tackle that issue because people will be building with renewable. But those policies weren't implemented fully in 2022. And also obviously the rental weatherization policies are just rolling out now. So some of the policy work we've done will impact these numbers going forward, but hasn't yet. And it also just happens to be the sector where district would make the impact that it would make, where we know that it would cut between 11 and a half and 15% right off of that figure because you'd be really reducing fossil fuel use significantly at the hospital, UVM. So that to me is another argument for why we're doing the work we're doing on district heat. On the more positive side, on transportation, we actually are on pace relative to gas and diesel use with the roadmaps ambitious pace, not purely because we've gotten everyone to adopt EVs, certainly we've made some progress, but we're not at the pace we would need to be, but because with that combined with the reduced vehicle miles traveled that seems to have been sustained coming out of the pandemic, there's been some rebound, but not that much. And overall just a lower number of vehicles in Burlington, we are seeing transportation fuel usage that is remaining below the pace of the net zero road map. So that's a positive and we hope to build on that. In particular, we're thinking that there may be a great opportunity with Green Mountain Transit to add a number of new electric transit buses over the next coming few years. So that'll make a dent there as well. So it's a bit of a mixed result. There's some positive, there's some challenge, but we'll get slides together with more granular detail that we'll share. I know we're planning to share with the city council on the fifth as part of the commission update. And then also we'll do a public briefing that day on the fifth and then share the detailed slides with the commission at the next meeting as well. And I will stop there. Questions? I know this is down the road, but this can't help myself. As you spec out the buses or any other new school bus additions, are you thinking about the storage capacity and vehicle to grid and that kind of? We haven't gotten to vehicle to grid with those, but we're definitely always thinking about time of use with those chargers. So James and his team have worked with the current two buses in the charging to make sure that we can charge off peak at the lower rates. And as that capability becomes available, it would certainly be something, those would be the size of vehicles where if you were able to tap them, it would be significant. Yeah. Yeah, great. I'm not thinking primarily that being grid connected is key times where we're going to need battery discharge right off the bat. Either we're trying to avoid them being connected for charging during those times and charging at night where we don't really need battery discharge either. So again, it's not our first thought range. It's our first thought. Sure. We're trying to make sure that they're not doing charging during the day. Absolutely. I have one other quick question. I noticed in the rest of your notes that you had a mention of geothermal in the airport. If I forget that you'd already talked about those apologies, but can you mention just a sentence more about what that project is if that's possible? Let me just scroll to the, that's probably in the energy services section. I'll just hang on one second. There we go. Sorry. No, no, it's okay. Yeah, so we have not an R section of the airport, but there is geothermal that the National Guard has in one of their buildings at the airport. And so we've, and this is kind of goes back to that S137 because that gives us the funding to do geothermal test wells, which has been very popular. So this is I think one of a number, maybe seven projects in the city where we're looking at this, including the high school and a few other buildings as well. So I don't have anything more kind of to add than what was here from Chris, but I know that the ability for us to kind of help with the financial aspects of drilling the test well is a bit of a game changer because customers never know if you're gonna hit, you know, a good geologic spot to use for heating and cooling or not. And we can kind of de-risk that a little bit. So I think we see a lot of potential here with geothermal both for the commercial buildings that are new and in some cases renovations as well. So yeah, this would be exciting. There's a lot going on at the airport. I was out there recently with some of our team to visit beta and see their kind of expansion efforts there. They're on our side and the GMP side both and they're gonna be doing manufacturing. They've got battery storage. So adding geothermal there would be great, but yeah, I don't have anything other to add here. We can always follow up though. No, that's okay. I did peak mentors just because of the diversification of adding to the mix for net zero. So that's great. Definitely. So beta isn't, they're installing geophone. Yeah. They're there, yeah. On our side of the airport? No one. On the GMP side, yeah. Yeah, I wish we had the whole thing. Yeah, it's quite proud to have you. But we're glad to be working with them on our part. Yeah, well, it's good. Yeah, they had a very nice visit for the first lady there just recently. Yeah. On our side of the airport. Yes. Yeah, I know. I was on the other side. I know, I know. Any other questions for the general manager? Cool. Hearing none. Thank you, Darren. Thank you. We're going to do item number six, March FY23 financials with Emily. You can see that now. I am on the tail end of a cold. So I may start coughing at any point. I have a cough drop. I've got my T, my tissues, but just fair warning. So March, 2023 financials. We, oh, that bar. Is there a way to move the bar off of that, or move it in a different spot? If not, I can scroll up. It's just kind of covering the bottom. Do you know if you see what I mean? I can scroll up a bit. That one. Whoops. That would help. Scrolling. That's better. Thank you. All right, so in March, we recorded a net loss of 1.264 million compared to a budgeted net loss of 336,000, a negative variance of $928,000 compared to budget. Looking at the elements of that, first of all, sales to customers were down very modestly, only $26,000 compared to budget. Other revenues were a favorable to budget by $205,000. Most of that, EEU reimbursements, reimbursements. Moving to expense, you see what makes up the biggest delta, the net power supply expense. A purchased power expenses, net, sorry, yeah. Net purchase power was 950,000 over budget, combination of low energy prices. We received $591,000 less in revenue from excess sales compared to what we had budgeted for, combination of lower energy prices and reduced McNeil and wind production. We also saw a mystic capacity charge of $284,000 in February, so those two combined resulted in most of the $950,000 variance. Fuel was slightly over budget for the month, combination of production under budget offset by a wood price per ton higher than budget. Transmission fees were modestly favorable by $65,000. So energy markets, energy prices for excess energy sales and mystic continue to be the headlines once again this month. Looking at other operating expense, that was worse than budget by $356,000. A good portion of that was expenses related to repair of the gas turbine. Those will be or have been capitalized. We did an entry in April. So not all of that expense overage will stay on the books as expense this fiscal year. Other income and deductions now moving below the line was favorable by $191,000 better. Most of that due to higher than budgeted interest income and unrealized gain on investment. So year to date, we have a net loss of $637,000 at this point in the year, almost a $4 million variance compared to where we had budgeted to be. Questions on that before I move to capital and... So capital spending for March year to date is $5.53 million. We had budgeted to be at about $7 million. At this point in the year, it's about 61% of the full year budget. This doesn't reflect the production expenses for the McNeil outage, which occurred in April. So that will be mostly in the April results. And then moving on to our credit rating factors. For the current month, 2.36 on the, sorry, for the current 12 months ended in March, 2.36 on the debt service coverage, adjusted debt of 0.67 and 93 days cash on hand. Questions? Thank you. Hopefully we've seen the worst of it. Yeah. Onto the next one, next subject matter, which is still you, which is the fiscal year 2024 updated draft budget. Well, Emily's pulling it up. I'll just give a quick intro. So actually, this will be the final budget, assuming you approve it. And there's been a lot of work that took place just between the last meeting and this meeting to bring the budget where it is. And 23 and 24 interlinked in a variety of ways. As you just saw, we have a number of challenges to overcome this year. I am concerned about the days cash on hand metric for 24 or for 23, excuse me. I think it is, you know, challenged because of that variance and we have very limited tools to affect that. We're using all the tools we can and our forecast for cash has improved since we started seeing some of that variance in the, you know, December, January timeframe. So we're gonna try to get that as close to 90 days as we can. We don't know exactly where to land until we're done. The adjusted debt service coverage ratio for 23, I'm a little less concerned about because of some of the things we'll talk about in the budget presentation, including the accounting order that we're looking to file that would amortize that negative variance that we experienced from the power markets over a period of years, which would then affect our net income and our income statement for FY23. And allow us to recover in rates, some of that loss over the subsequent years. For 24, this gotta be the toughest budget we've had to do and we've had some tough ones. And I think the, you know, having talked, having been at a department, had meeting today and learning kind of where the city is. I don't think we're experiencing, you know, unique things here. I think it's tough budgeting kind of all around. Inflation remains challenging. There's, because of inflation, we have a higher than typical labor colas that have been implemented last, or this current fiscal year and then, you know, coming up in 24, those are affecting the budget, the power market volatility certainly affecting the budget. And so, you know, we have, and we're continuing with the 5.5% rate change that we talked about last meeting, but to get the budget to line up with that rate change as opposed to a higher one took quite a bit of work. And I do wanna recognize not only Emily, but Cheryl Mitchell who's here with us who did a ton of work on the budget to help get it where it needs to be, sitting through a number of meetings with a number of us and documenting more changes than maybe any year prior. And I wanna as well thank the entire executive team and thank the near and particular for his work trying to help us identify cuts and operating expenses that we could reduce and thank James as well. That policy planning's always integral to the budget process here, so I'll add a comment or two as we go through, but kick it back over to Emily now that we're, ready to go. Thanks, Darren, and I'll just echo my appreciation for Cheryl and James and my colleagues on the executive team, it was certainly a team effort this year. And the McNeil folks chipped in a little bit. Yeah, I think they certainly did. Don't worry about Rod. I'm sorry, I do. Chipped in, no love, no love. So just before we get into the budget, most of this you're familiar with, as you know, we're heading into this budget with a week starting cash position, driven by those low winter energy prices which reduce the value of our excess winter energy that we sold. It continues to be a high inflation environment everywhere in the economy. We're happy to sign a new contract with the IBEW for the next four years. That contract was negotiated in a high inflation environment. So over the four years, there's a cumulative of 18% COLA for FY24, it's a 5%. As you also know, I think sales to customers are generally not growing right now. We are seeing some uptick in the residential consumption, but on the commercial side, we've lost some square footage over the past seven to eight years and things are becoming more efficient, which is wonderful and great, but we're not seeing the sales of residential heat pumps and residential EVs kind of make up for those losses, right? Not yet anyway. There's continued uncertainty looking at the prices for next winter, for what we'll receive for our excess energy. The net zero revenue bond is a critical source of capital funding this year. You'll see a very robust capital budget and mostly because we have the revenue bond available to finance that. We're now assuming yourselves and the commission in the city council approve our rate increase will be for the third year in the row asking for less than our cost of service indicates that we need. We're asking for five and a half this year. We're not completely done with the analysis, but right now it's penciling in around 14% for what we can demonstrably need. And then we've left at least around 3% on the table in the past two rate requests. Sorry, could you explain that? We're gonna ask for five and a half, but we should ask for 14, is that what that means? That's what that means. Well, it means that we could demonstrate a need for a rate increase of 14% in order to generate enough net income that's twice our interest payment. That's the metric that a rule of thumb for how much net income should you be allowed to have set by the Department of Public Service. So you essentially take your interest payment, multiply it by two, and that's your allowable, reasonable net income. It's called the two-tier, times interest earned. Okay, and that's sort of an automatic. So if interest rates go up, then immediately you can justify. It's the payment on our fixed interest debt. So we're lucky to have fixed interest debt. So the budget this year, it really wasn't about, unfortunately, improving our Moody's metrics. It was really about keeping them stable while minimizing the rate increase that we asked of the community. Just a picture of the sales. So you can see kind of what we're talking about. This is where they've been since, you know, it's in the 2000s. You can see some dips here and here for recessions. This is when the hospital did a big expansion. You can see the impact of that. Somewhere around 2010, you couldn't buy incandescent light bulbs anymore per the federal efficiency standards. So that we think has had an impact kind of overall. Blodgett ovens closed in 2017 or didn't close. They relocated their facilities from Burlington in 2017. And in 2019, the town center came down and hasn't been rebuilt yet. And of course, we know what happened in 2020. So kind of when you combine the efficiency gains with the loss of commercial square footage, which makes up most of our sales, you kind of see where we are. And we've certainly rebounded out of the pandemic, but, you know, we've rebounded to almost 2019, which historically was sort of much lower than we'd been, you know, any of the 18 previous years to that. To me, this is maybe one of the most important slides in the whole presentation. And we just put it together. So thanks, Emily, for helping. Mike Leach put it together. Thanks, Mike Leach and Emily for helping to make this happen. Mike Leach has the greatest data on sales and going back to like the 1950s practically. But, you know, we have a system with inflation, particularly that the costs of the system have not gotten cheaper. The costs of the system have gotten more expensive, but the units being sold have gone down. And partly for good reason, partly because of efficiency, we're for that. We want that. Partly for less desirable reasons like, you know, changes in economic activity, closures that haven't reopened yet. Those are not things we're looking for. And what we really need is for this to start rebounding back up because of either economic activity or electrification that's reducing fossil fuel use. So we can get more units, because the more units you have without exacerbating the system costs, the cheaper the per unit price would be. All things equal. And so to really long-term reduce our rate pressure, our upward rate pressure, we need this to change and we need electrification to kick in in a meaningful way. You know, I was just wondering why, how I could reconcile that with this graph. And I realized the y-axis is different here. The separation between the lines is like 3%. But that's enough to do it. When you really look from like 370,000 almost back in 2005 down to, you know, 320,000 today. Or even when I became GM, we were selling around 340, 335,000. I have slides from, you know, back in 2017, when I started, when we used to go to legislature, we said we use about 350,000 megawatt hours a year. And I've had to change it to 330 and then 320. And then during the pandemic, 310. And now it's coming back up a little. But the Delta over time, combined with the fact that the system cost, all things equal is more expensive, not less is part of the challenge. So we're not changing the per unit rate quickly enough to make up for some of these other challenges, or we haven't at least over the last, you know, couple decade and a half. Right. So with our operating, you know, with the chief source of our operating revenue, you know, essentially flat, you know, you have to turn to the expense side to make a budget balance. The red line at the top of that graph shows the trend line for what expenses would be if we had continued on the pace of expense increase. That is the sort of the average growth between 2007 and 2016. So expenses grew in that period by 5.84%. The red line shows where they'd be today if they continued on that trajectory. Looking from 2016 to now, they've actually grown only 3.7% on average. We, the team cut over about $6.4 million of expense during the course of this budget development. And our controllable non-power supply operating and maintenance expenses are actually 2.3% lower than last year's budget. So the department has made some painful sacrifices in order to keep the rate request as low as possible. So kind of with all of that context, and then wanted to talk about the budget itself in your packet are many pages of detail, which I'm happy to take questions about. Cheryl can tell me where I go astray. But just kind of high level, we're assuming operating revenues of 65.1 million. That includes the rate increase of 5.5% effective on bills rendered September 1st. Operating revenues in total are 2.5% higher than last year's budget. Underlying kilowatt hour sales, as you just saw, are relatively flat compared to FY23. And our rec sales revenue is, you know, mod at very minorly decreased, less than 2%. So it's, you know, I would call that roughly where it was last year. Operating expenses are 67.2 million. That's overall 4% higher than last year's budget. Differences from last year's budget most significantly are reduced assumptions around the sales of excess winter energy, which is an offset to purchase power expense. That line on them in the budget is reduced by one and a half million dollars, or about 25%. And that's due to lower assumptions about the price of winter energy. We're assuming on average for the winter, $124 per megawatt hour last year, we budgeted for $188 on average. And so to flag, this is a risk point in the budget, just like it was last year, but it's not as big of a risk point because we're budgeting more conservatively based on the current forwards being lower than what they were at this time last year. So if we have another winter that's identical to the one we just had, we will have a negative variance in this line item, but it won't be as severe as what we experienced during the prior year. But I want to flag it that it continued risk while we have that excess winter energy to sell. And I would add to that, if there's less upside as well too, like it would be a winter we've never seen before if those prices, well, we've seen a winter like that only once before, right? And to be comparable to last winter is kind of what we've budgeted for FY24. So yeah, this is a line that broke against us against us completely this past year. We're hoping it doesn't break against us completely again this year. If it came in in line with expectations or even a little below expectations, but just not dramatically below, we would probably do okay with this budget. But this is something we will look at and we will obviously consider as we did last year options to lock in a portion of that ahead of time if the prices are good to reduce the risk further. We didn't end up doing that last year. There wasn't the right option on the table to do so. Okay, I'll then talk about, we have budgeted for continued mystic capacity charges this year now that we know about them and that agreement is gonna continue at least through May of 2024. So that's additional $759,000 of expense that we didn't have in the FY23 budget at all. Quick question, is this an indefinite, like how long is this mystic boat gonna, or whatever the tanker that it was? The current contract that ISO New England has with the mystic plant is through May of 2024. I can make no predictions on what will happen after that. I don't think James can do that. There's no upside to this, I mean. No, there's not. The problem is that it shares the same risk profile as the energy problem. At times of very low energy prices, the mystic gets more expensive and our actual power becomes less valuable itself. So it's directionally the same. So that's the problem. If mystic is supposed to come out of the factory market to May of 2024, so that contract ends, it doesn't necessarily mean any more in place of something different, worse. That plant's supposed to shut down too. Correct, yeah. And then, but the question that becomes for the gas, liquid gas facility to stay open, it doesn't shift from what it's now to, right? I mean, if that gas facility is basically there for a mystic. So again, it's not like you can look at this thing. Thank God, at May 30th, the first of 2024, this problem all goes away. It changes. Yeah, I just, I guess I can't understand what the upside of it at all is for any... Well, the intent is for insurance liability. To make sure the plant remained there for a period of time, while other units came online and things like that, whether it solves that problem or not, it's hard to set. But if you have that plant online, it doesn't do any good, it doesn't have fuel. So they had to pre-position tankers of natural liquid, natural gas off the upper report. And then if the prices weren't there, they had to burn it at a loss. That's why I say if the energy prices are low, you get hit twice. If you're brolling from electric, if you hit somebody else, it might be only one hit. We had the excess energy from our sales being 355,000 megawatt hours on the contract. Okay, the next bullet I wanna call your attention to is that there is an additional amortization expense assumed in this budget. We will be in the next three weeks or so filing an accounting order with the Public Utility Commission to request the ability to amortize our roughly $4 million loss of sales from the excess energy over a period of eight years. So that will reduce our expense in FY23. Won't help our cash at all, of course, but it will help our net income and therefore our adjusted debt service coverage ratio. What that also means though. Is that what the accounting order is? Just a definition of accounting. Yes, it's the ability to do essentially non-gap accounting or the ability to account for something in a different way than normal accounting rules would allow you to do so. So basically you're taking that expense instead of taking it all in one year, you're spreading it out over eight years. So it improves our, it would, if approved, improve our results, our reported results for FY23, but you're spreading it out over eight years. So then you're kind of adding that expense to the next seven budgets, right? And recording that $529,000 over the next seven years. So we, you know, we weighed the pros and cons of that. I think the, we know that we most likely will have less cash than we would wish for on June 30 and so that that will be a flag for Moody's, right? But if we take this approach and are successful with the accounting order, we then don't have two metrics that kind of went in a negative direction, right? We're able to preserve a decent, adjusted debt service coverage ratio. So that was the, that was the thinking. And if approved for that, our auditors in the end would be okay. Yes, we just consulted with the auditors today. They're, if the regulators are okay with it, they're okay with it. So they're, yeah, they're fine, assuming we get the approval from the PUC. And that reduces the pressure for a rate hike a little bit, maybe? It, I mean, it adds actually a little pressure to the cost of service because that $529,000 is included as additional expense. But it does allow us to, if we chose to, collect or, you know, kind of make up for those lost revenues through rates, if we were to ask for the full amount that we could justify. So it kind of preserves our ability to build some of that lost cash back in future rate increases if we chose to file for the full amount. It's also maybe like somebody came in at the last minute and said, you've got a problem, I'll loan you some money. Do we pay interest on it? Uh, no, no, okay, all right. No, it would really, like if we were Green Mountain Power or Vermont Gas and we had a fuel adjuster and this had happened, we would have had an automatic increase in our rates for our commodity costs for a three or four month period while this was going on. And we would have recovered it all right then. And we don't have that. So this is our much clunkier version of that where we don't recover any of the money in the year that it impacted us. But we preserve our ability to potentially recover it in rates in the future if we go in and ask for the maximum that we're allowed to ask for. So it preserves some optionality at a minimum. And it does, as Emily mentioned, kind of benefit our adjusted debt metric to make sure that it reflects what our budget would have looked like had this not happened to us, which is, you know, is helpful as well. But there's no carrying costs to it, essentially. It's just an option on the books essentially to, you know, to use it for rates if we need to. Is there precedent for approval of this type of thing? We've had accounting orders in the past for things that are kind of an unexpected expense during a certain period of time. For example, we had a, you know, we've had them with McNeil in the past when we've had some specific, you know, maintenance costs that were, you know, either during a certain duration of time or unexpected things like that. We got one for the labor costs that we weren't able to capitalize due to COVID. Oh, yeah. For example. So, yeah. They could be around if we cover anything, but there are criteria they have to meet and it doesn't care that they want to eat stuff. Okay, so additionally, I just wanted to call to your attention that when you take out the excess energy sales and you take out Mystic, net power supply expense is only up 2% compared to FY23. So, when you look at the numbers side by side in the income statement comparison, there's a really big delta, but the volatility of the energy forwards and the additional expense for the Mystic capacity payments are driving a lot of the difference, right, from the year to year comparison. We have also budgeted this year for a new cash outlay related to our repayment of the Moran Environmental Liability MOU with the city. And we're also seeing a big increase again this year in the city indirect allocation that we pay for city attorney and HR and racial equity inclusion and belonging. Positively, interest income is budgeted a lot higher because interest rates are better on the money that we have in the bank. And then all told, we have a net income budget of $142,000, which is $1.1 million less than the budget that you approved last year in FY23. 70% since last year. Move on to capital unless there's questions, okay. So as I said, this is our biggest capital budget in a number of years, $10.9 million overall. It's using funding from the general obligation bond and $9.2 million from the 2022 revenue bond. You can see the pie chart there on the right shows you that most of that is going to the distribution plant. About $2 million to our generation facilities. $1.34 million to general, which is things like IT and fleet and buildings. And then other, I know, includes some safety equipment. And I can't remember if the EV chargers are in other or in general, are there in other too? Yes, thank you, Cheryl. So that's where EV charging infrastructure falls as well. And so our final kind of projected credit rating factors, assuming this budget came into the penny, we would end the year with a 3.64 debt service coverage ratio well above the 1.25 we need. We would have an adjusted debt service coverage ratio of 1.09 and we would have exactly 90 days cash on hand. Taking the three year average of where we're projecting to end this year, that's what you can see for comparison in the column to the right. That's FY21 actual, FY22 actual, and then FY23 forecasted end position in the average of those three. And then final slide is just to preview some things on the horizon, many of which we've already discussed with you first, the accounting order that we're gonna request as I just discussed. Darren mentioned the fuel adjuster clause that that VGS and GMP have, this energy market volatility is really hard to deal with. To have a fuel adjuster clause for us as a municipal utility would mean a charter change, which requires voter approval, so it would be a fairly big deal, but we wanted to just kind of put that on the table for your awareness and for the council's awareness of this is our current situation, and that kind of provision would give us some tools that we don't have to manage our cash position and our expenses relative to our income. And then that will be the next steps if you're gonna start to continue to assess and pursue that, is that a? That to me of the items up here would probably be the third in priority. I think the other two I'm gonna mention are more likely near term. Right. So the second item, as you know, we have a $5 million line of credit. I did some detective work with various attorneys and our best guess is that was set around 1999. That is part of the city charter, our ability to borrow to that level because it's indebtedness, which either has to be voter approved or in the charter. Since 1999 our operating expenses have essentially doubled and so that $5 million is providing us a lot less days of cash when your operating expenses are twice what they were at the time. So it's I think quite a certainty that at the 2024 town meeting day we'll be asking to include on the ballot an item for voter approval to increase that line. I would say we'd ask at least to double it, but probably more than that to allow some headroom or maybe it can adjust with inflation or something like that to allow that line to sort of keep up in relation to our operating expenses. And then finally you've seen what a critical part of the capital financing puzzle the revenue bond is. We're anticipating that we will be asking for a second revenue bond as part of the FY25 budget in order to be, oh maybe I should have said the FY26 budget, I think that should be FY26. Because it kicks out in the middle of 25. Right, so we would most likely have that be November 2024 ballot item. We would issue in February, March of 2025 and then we'd have that available for the latter half of FY25 and then all of 26 and 27. And really we'd always envision the revenue bond as a $40 million need but we broke it up thinking that we didn't wanna ask for and have to spend the entirety of it in a three year period. So we asked for the first 20 million as part of the vote that happened December of 2021 with the idea that assuming the need was still there which we anticipate it will be that we'd come back and ask for the second part of it. Oh I should also mention, I forgot to put this on the slide but we are also considering coupling this bond issuance with a taxable bond issuance to finance our Velco equity investment. Velco is over the next three or four years issuing calls for a total of $100 million in equity sort of spread among its owners. And for us that's a significant addition to the capital budget that can't be financed by non-taxable bonds but we've done this before in the past where if you kinda bundle a few of them together and you couple it with a non-taxable bond issuance you can put an offering out there that would be competitive in the bond market and then save on issuance costs by bundling it with a bigger non-taxable bond. And is the reason we'd like to do that that it pays 12%? Yes. And we'll continue? Yes. That's why, yes. And that's, oh sorry, you wanna cover this one, Darren? Yeah, just obviously we're gonna continue to make the investments in all the key items related to net zero. As you can see, you know, roughly a little over three million between tier three and the efficiency programs in investments for rebates and incentives. And then above and beyond that, the revenue bond investments that are taking place in infrastructure, charging stations, you know, electric vehicles for the fleet, the electric bucket truck that's coming in 2024. You know, level two and level three chargers. We're working to try to get level twos in a number of the parks around the community. And we're also working, and I think this is a key point, we have through the revenue bond potential matching funds well-timed for a number of different federal grants, both for EV charging, for battery storage. So the fact that we have that capital available is gonna benefit us if we're successful with one or more of these applications for federal or state funding. So we're gonna continue with all of that. We've got some other exciting things like the heat pump rate pilot that I've talked about a little bit. And really, you all know this, so this is in part for the Board of Finance and City Council, since we're using the same set of slides so that we can share with them how we're continuing to invest in all of these different areas. Let me just ask, since a big part of that capital pie is distribution. A lot of this, of course, is distribution. But how much of that segment is NCE versus just depreciation and equipment replacement, that sort of stuff? Well, the original revenue bond, the original 20 million, we had roughly specced out that a little over seven million of it was for traditional reliability investments in the distribution system. And around five some odd million was for electrification upgrades. And then the remainder was for IT infrastructure, for renewable plant maintenance, and for EV charging and other kind of electrification investments. I'm playing my usual devil's advocate position here. We're talking about a second rate hike. I think the two add up to 17% or something like that. No, that's wrong. It's up to about 9%. Which depresses to some tiny degree demand. And folks are always bridling under rate hikes. So then we talk about all these programs, including another bond issue and all that. And we justify it by referring predominantly to NCE. Okay, it works for me. I think, you know, our cost increases are not zero. Our competitors cost increases are not zero, right? So we know that, obviously, we don't want to raise rates all things equal because we don't want to burden the community and we want to keep the cost of electrification as low as possible. And use rates will help with that too. So, you know, you can charge your EV a lot cheaper than you can turn on your lights if you go off peak with the EV. We're hoping to do the same in a way for the heat pumps and other technologies. But I think even if we were to turn off the spigot entirely with the incentives and the programs, this wave is coming. The federal government set it in motion. The state has set it in motion. So I view our job, even if we were to not do incentives, which we very much want to do for all the reasons you mentioned, our job is to be ahead of the wave by at least enough that no customer ends up in a situation where we heard earlier, not because they couldn't upgrade their panel, but what if the grid couldn't accommodate what they were trying to do? Like what if our system couldn't accommodate? I don't want to be in that position. Their infrastructure at their home is kind of an interesting and separate challenge that we also want to help with. But our goal is to keep our system robust enough that as the new uses come on, we can manage it. And not to invest too soon, because we don't want customers paying for a system that they're not using yet. So we're trying to pace it appropriately. So those were all of the budget slides that we had prepared. I'm happy to answer questions on anything or go into any more detail. Questions? Hearing no questions. There is a suggested motion. I'll make motion to approve the requirements for this year 2024 capital and operating budget as presented. Do I have a second? Second. Motion made in second. Can we discuss? That was good. This is somewhat contingent on the vote about the rate hike? Yes. Okay, just so we know. Very much. So motion made in seconded. Discussion. Just so we know that. All in favor? Aye. Aye. All opposed? All ayes have it, budget passes. Next item on the agenda is the 2023 rate case. Also, Emily. And really this slides that we would present, which we're happy to go through again, if it's helpful are identical to the slides we presented last time. Pretty much as can be. We haven't changed a thing because we kept the number exactly where it was. So it's still exactly the five and a half percent. All of the kind of impacts that we discussed during the last meeting are all the same impacts. So if there was any information within that that you wanted to go into more detail on, we're happy to, but I didn't want to repeat the same presentation given that, you know, happily in some sense, we didn't have to go to a higher number. And obviously we weren't able to lower it any further either. Do it. Okay. Then there's a suggested motion. Commissioner Herrington. I move that we approve the rate hike as per. There's a suggested, do you have the language? Okay. I make a motion to recommend to the Board of Finance and City Council the authorization to pursue a rate case to pursue a rate case in the amount of 5.5 percent beginning September 1, 2023. Do I have a second? Second. Motion made and seconded. There is a discussion on the motion. Hearing none. All in favor signify by saying aye. Aye. Aye. All in opposed say nay. Ayes have it the rate case motion passes. On to number nine on our agenda fiscal year 2024 GEO bond discussion and vote is the Emily Stevens Wheelock show. Thank you. So as part of our budget we've assumed again annual general obligation bond financing in the amount of $3 million. This is general obligation debt backed by the full faith and credit of the city issued by the city as part of their annual GEO bond issuance with 3 million of that allocated to BED for our use in capital investments and I think it says anything we need to make the electric plant work well, something like this very, very broad usage authority. And for Lara, especially this is something that we do every year. Yes, thank you. It is a commissioner mode. Very calm and standard annual thing. Nothing new. You'll see it again and again. Any questions about that? There is a suggested motion. I think you're the only one that hasn't made a motion yet, Lara. You're right. Pardon me. I'm happy to. I make a motion to recommend to the board of finance and the city council to authorize and direct the chief financial officer to pledge the credit of the city by issuing a bond anticipation note or bonds in the amount of 3 million. Motion made is there a second? Okay. Motion made and seconded. Discussion on the motion. Hearing none. All in favor of the motion signify by saying aye. Aye. Aye. Those opposed say nay. All in favor of the motion passes. Item number 10 on our agenda, the IRP forecast. Mr. James Gibbons. I'd just like to say thank you, Emily, and all the staff. Yes, thank you for all your work and all of your whole team. Really good job. Thank you. I didn't go through the whole budget, looked at it. Thank you so much. Nice job, so. Thank you. Agreed. Some hard work, difficult work. So, Darren, did you want me to go through the 18th slide presentation? I think very brief is helpful. So I believe I've been asked to postpone the 18th slide presentation until next meeting. The IRP forecast, so that PowerPoints you want me to go through is about 18 slides long. So I'll give a quick update and just say that work continues in the IRP. Casey is generating what we call mini models. They are evaluations of the customer utility and societal economics of various measures that are going into the IRP. My understanding is he's delivered to Tom. The portions he needs for what we call the energy services chapter, which is really the tier three measures. The energy efficiency is kind of done on its own. For an integrated plan, a lot of it's done in different places and different times. You have to admire that. He's now will be working on the actual resource chapter of the IRP. The economics study from McNeil and the carbon study from McNeil are almost finished. There are some last edits. Essentially, we expect to have those ready by the next electric commission meeting. Pardon me, and to provide those concurrently to the DPS for review. And I think those are the big updates at this point. I don't think I'm, I don't think I missed anything, no. Anything you want to say about the numerical trends up, down, or sideways? In the forecast? Yeah. Not without the PowerPoint in front of me, but I mean, the load is growing. It depends on which scenario you're looking at, right? If you look at the conservative scenarios, they're growing little or known. We look at the optimistic scenarios where electrification is aggressive. They're growing fairly aggressively, but they're not growing as well as, we talked about this, not growing as fast as the net zero roadmap showed because there are measures that are not included in the forecast at this time. Yeah, I mean, last few meetings, you've been and said, remember that number I said was 160, 120, it's really a hundred. Well, so again, the TND work is being done at a couple of stages at this point. So we know 80 megawatts approximately is the system capability today with what I would call benevolent load growth, which is load growth that happily occurs equally on all circuits, you know, based on their capability to hold load growth. We've done the analysis at just over 100 megawatts for the last IRP that has been updated with new costing to reflect the increases in inflation and things like that. Engineering has done 120 megawatt case, which will be included in this IRP, which shows the work necessary to go from the 102.8 to 120 megawatts. We are probably not going to do the 140 megawatt case in this IRP and it may not actually be necessary at all if load control is sufficient to keep it from occurring. That's essentially was, I think the way they did it in that model was controlled EV charging, uncontrolled heating. So, and it was a winter peak. So the heating is the big driver. So we're trying to get to where we can load control heating meaningfully and hopefully not hit the 140 at all. Is that what you're referring to? No, but it's just as good. Oh, well, excellent. In fact, it's better. If I can't do what you've asked, I can at least do something cool. I'm happy, I'm happy. If there's, I'm happy to answer the other question. I just didn't understand it, I guess. No, you're close enough. Okay. Thank you. Other questions for James? Thank you. We'll look forward to your more in-depth discussion next month. Okay. Awesome. Last but not least, anything else from commissioners? I wanted to make a comment following up from the public comment. I was a little bit promotion-ly, and I thank you for being more complete and conciliatory, Darren. But I still am a little freaked in that we are making a long-term effort in demand management. And the idea of spikes that blow the system and demand a quick response is a little anesthetical to that. So I just hope that we continue with that plan. When I hear something like was presented tonight, I think about when you build a bridge, what period of time during the year do you want it to be packed to capacity? And the answer is, never. Then you've overbuilt. So likewise here. And about that, we talked about a buildout of IT and so on that just was accomplished. And I keep coming back to time of day rates. We have some time of day rates now for EV charging and all that's great. But what James just mentioned, which was basically managing winter thermal with some kind of time management, sounds great. And I hope we don't. I know we're not going to lose track of it, but the discussion didn't come down as hard as I were to come down saying, look, we're going to manage demand. Well, it's a couple of different things, right? At the home level, they will not let you build what you need for capacity to overbuild. It's the electricians and the code and the permitting, really, they require you to overbuild your panel relative to the amperage that you could max out. So we know that's going to be an issue. And we know people are going to need upgraded service. And there are some smart technologies that can manage it. And we'll certainly investigate those. And then I view that as somewhat separate from the, OK, now with what you've got, how are you using it? And can we manage the usage, which we are very much interested in. And we are with the heat pump pilot, we are hopeful to be able to do load. I wouldn't say load control, but I would say peak reduction impacts with heat pumps where we can moderate the temperature a little bit during the winter time and during the summer time. Yeah, maybe I understand it. It's essentially pre-cooling and preheating to be able to displace that time of charging, isn't it? Yeah, and storing heat and storing cooling. Well, using the building envelope as a storage device, essentially. OK, but maybe I misunderstood. I thought the public person's comment was to the effect that we envision a peak time when we're going to basically overload our panel. So we want a bigger panel. Well, yeah, no, I think this is not so much a peak usage issue. This is a design issue based on the permitting code requirements, not a peak usage issue that they're going to have. So their issue is not really with us. It's with the permitting and electrical code. As I understand it, I just thought it was dumb. Sorry to push it, but it seems to me the question is, you know, the physics here, I mean, do they want more than 100 amps? The answer seemed to be yes. And one answer might be, you don't need it if you manage to demand. Well, the code doesn't allow for that yet. Right, right. That's going to recognize breakers. Breaker amperage installed in a panel is all it looks at. OK, so but if they walk around your house and they add up the maximum wattages of all the devices and it's greater than 100 amps, then you have to have a bigger panel. They actually count the amperage. I just had this done at my house. They count the amperage of breakers installed in the panel. And I had a really futile argument with them, which I said, you have a 200 amp panel. And I said, well, if I can only put 160 amps, isn't it 160 amp panel? And we went around and around for that a little bit. But that's new. I could have put 200 amps in my panel up until this recent change in the national electric safety code. Now they're going to require 20% open amperage. So they're not doing any house assessment. They're counting the amps of breakers. I'll ask one more then, quick, because my questions are also dumb. Why is it a problem? Don't they want to use more wattage than their panel will allow? Isn't that the issue? Again, I'm not an electrician. I would think that the purpose of the individual breakers is to protect that very problem, but I don't understand why they did it. It's the chance of the capacities there for them to go over. So if they're putting in EV chargers, battery banks, solar, if they only have 100 amp panel, then you're right. They're probably only going to use not all together, probably maybe 15 amps, 20 amps, when they're running. But the capability to them to go over that peak is what the national electric code looks at. So if you have the capability that if everything came on, you would peak out and trip your main breaker. We can't have, they can't have that. So it's a safety issue of them being, having that capability to do that. I think she's frustrated with the fact that they're trying to do all these things the right way. And now, all of a sudden, they come into this roadblock of, oh yeah, we're doing all of this and we're stuck with this historic size of breaker here because it's an old house. And now there's this other expense that needs to be heard. You can tell your grandkids about this conversation. Aren't they saying, we want more watts than we're supposed to have? And that's the end of it. I understand. And why would you assume that everything's turned on at once? That's what they say. The engineers. That's what they say. Because the possibility is there. You have that possibility that you can override and overload your building. Physically, that's correct. Well, that's how they're looking at it. All right, so they should be building roads that are never crowded, ever. That's exactly her complaint. The house is built, it's an older house that only has so much capacity. And now there's this, because they're trying to do all these things the right way, there's this other roadblock called having to upgrade their thing that's not actually the problem. By the way, for me, panels are $1,200, $1,800. I have an underground service, and that's a 200 amp underground service. Now I don't even know what the cost to replace. So I can't put anything at my house. Even though I've got open breaker spaces, I'm limited. So it's when did that change? Just like in this cold cycle, 220? Yeah. Yeah. I'm sorry, but I can't believe this. You get a new gadget, which kicks up your maximum wattage if everything is on. And one answer is, OK, we'll give you a new circuit that'll handle that. And the other is, you'll have to do some management and don't turn them all on at once. We haven't gotten to that point where the second one maybe we will, but we're not there. When I plugged in all those Christmas tree lights, I blew the fuse. Yeah. All right, thank you. I deferred it, Jim. He's the expert. Well, I was like you, Pa. I was just like, I couldn't believe it. Yeah, wait until again, you're a smart pants. We should build autobahns for 175 miles an hour because one car can go that fast. So moved. OK. I'm glad that I'm glad that she came and this was a discussion that we're having a robust thought about because this will come up again. I'm sure I will. Absolutely. Thank you. Anything else on the commissioner's check-in? Hearing none, I will entertain a motion. Second? Seconded? All in favor? Aye. We stand adjourned. Thank you.