 Stanford University. My name's David Victor. I'm from UC San Diego. I was here at Stanford many years ago at Stanford Law School and Freeman's Bogley Institute. It's terrific to be back here. And I wanted to say one thing about the theme here, which is about electricity and regulation. I'm an academic. Academics are completely disagreeable people. We make progress by disagreeing with each other. That's how we advance. There is one thing that essentially every academic study that's looked at deep decarbonization agrees on, and that is decarbonization means electrification. We don't agree on exactly how much, but electricity is the center of it. Electricity is a highly regulated industry, and so it's hard to imagine a better panel to talk about that than the panel we have here today. We're going to have a few minutes of opening remarks about the decarbonization challenges, what's proving easy, what's proving hard. I have a fireside chat here. We're the last panel between now and lunch, so we're actually in a very powerful position. We can cause a lot of anguish and hunger. I'm going to ask you folks to ask some questions along the way, bring in the audience a little bit earlier than in the previous panels. But let me just first introduce the panelists to my immediate right, Alice Bushing Reynolds, who is the president of the California Public Utilities Commission, previously worked on energy and climate issues for Governor Newsom, Governor Brown, was a Cal EPA before that at the Attorney General's Office, very distinguished career between public sector and private sector around law and regulation. And then next to Alice is Joshua Burns, who is a member of the Iowa Utilities Board. That's the regulatory commission of Iowa. He is also a key person, vice president of the organization of MISO states. MISO is a regional transmission organization in a huge section of the Midwest, and so I have a chance to learn from Josh about the role of regionalization, what's working, what's not working there. Is a senior official at an organization dear to my heart, an organization called Naeruk, which is the club of utility regulators in this country, and it's the institution that many of you have never heard of, but is vitally important because it's the place where best practices and lessons that learned are moved around. So a terrific panel for you today. I want to start with you, Alice. Maybe you could give us a few minutes of opening remarks on the decarbonization goals, what you're sitting in the Utilities Commission, what's looking like it's easy to do, what's hard. Yeah, great, thank you. And I just wanted to start by saying how happy I am to be here. Really pleased to be a part of this event today. I think this consortium is exciting. As you heard from the last panel, what we're taking on is huge. And I think that one thing that Stanford is doing is encouraging an underappreciated skill, which is listening. I think really listening broadly and bringing in lots of voices as we take on this challenge. So just really pleased to be here. And so I am the president of the Public Utilities Commission at the CPUC. We regulate energy, water, transportation, telecommunications, and we have some work on rail as well. In the energy sector, our regulated entities are the investor-owned utilities. It's about 75% of the load here in California. And when we think about all of the utilities, we're prioritizing safety, reliability, and resilience. In the energy sector, we're very, very focused on clean energy, meeting our clean energy targets. And then of course, primary concern is cost and affordability. So we take all of those things and we're trying to move as fast as we can on solutions for the huge challenges we have in front of us. So for electricity, we have a goal of 100% clean retail sales of electricity by 2045. We also have a statewide carbon neutrality goal of 2045. And so at the PUC, we're doing the work to make sure that the energy sector it meets or is ahead of its portion of meeting those goals. And when we think about the energy sector, it's not just on the energy itself. So part of this is cleaning up the fuel, right? So making sure that all of the energy electricity that's provided to all customers in California comes from clean sources. But it's also about electrifying the transportation sector, electrifying the building sector. And from our perspective, making sure that the utilities we regulate are prepared for that transition. So is our distribution system ready? Is the transmission system ready? Are we supporting what's happening and encouraging and facilitating what's happening on the transportation side and the clean building side? So we take our part of the climate change transition very seriously and we're really trying to do as much as we can to support it and encourage it. It brings a lot of challenges. And I think that's part of what we're here to talk about today. The other thing I really wanna focus on and it has been the subject of this event as well is the equity piece. So it's not just affordability, but it's also equitable solutions. We're doing in that space a lot to talk about. Some of it is just high level, making sure that to the extent we're subsidizing. So all of our funding comes through, not our funding, but funding to do this transition in the energy sector comes through utility bills. And so if we're subsidizing, we're using rate payer money. We wanna make sure that that money is targeted to low income and disadvantaged communities to the greatest extent possible to get through this transition. And then we're also making sure that services and programs are all prioritizing disadvantaged and low income communities. And we're prioritizing hearing from those communities in our proceedings and in the work that we do. So it's a hard job to move quickly and also try to learn from past mistakes and constantly try to challenge ourselves to do better. Just quick follow up before we got to Josh. In terms of what's proving really difficult, is the carbon part of the story cleaning up the fuels and so on, is that proving because of technological advance, maybe easier than people expected, but are the equity questions proving harder because you're ultimately using rate payer money and you're creating subsidy schemes and cross subsidy schemes and there's all kinds of adverse effects. Does it help us understand kind of where, what's the state of play right now in terms of what's really challenging? I think that's well stated. It's kind of pulling it all together and realizing that we might wanna do everything everywhere but there are also consequences of that in trade-offs. And so when we think about clean energy, we're very focused on getting a path to reducing reliance and then eliminating reliance on our gas plants. So in California, at least for the investor and utilities, we're not really relying on coal. So we've been very successful in moving away from coal resources but we still have gas plants. And so our path is focused on replacing the function of those gas plants and figuring out how we can get to a reduced reliance and then elimination of that part of our resource mix. And we've done a lot on, California has been a leader on solar development. We've made a lot of early investments in that have brought down the costs of many of these resources, wind development. But we're at a point where rates are unsustainable for people. We have about 30% of the customers within the territories of the utilities that we regulate who are on low-income programs. So they receive subsidies for their energy bills. So we need to think about providing services for everyone, every single Californian in an affordable way. On the gas question, there's a guy here who wants to convert cardboard boxes into methane so he'll probably find you at the break and solve the gas problem. So I'm curious, Josh, you've heard about some of the challenges we face here in California. You're in Iowa. You're interconnected with the entire Midwest or a solar-dominated grid system as we move to renewables. You're a wind-dominated grid system as you move to renewables. What's proving easy and hard for you in Iowa? Sure. Well, first and foremost, I'd just like to take the opportunity to thank everyone for having me come to this panel. I would also like to say that Brock Purdy is an Iowa State grad and George Kittle is an Iowa native and went to the University of Iowa. So Iowa right now is probably in second place in terms of 49ers fans since we don't have a professional football team. I'm gonna rule out of order all questions about football and so on, just we're gonna stay focused on the grid. So, but yeah, this is an honor to be here. So I appreciate that. And ironically, yes, I was the OMS vice president, but because of politics, our president of OMS, he was from Wisconsin. He hadn't been confirmed yet by his Senate and his Senate a couple of weeks ago voted to not confirm him. And so I am now the president of OMS. And so my advice is be careful when you sign up for leadership positions because things may happen and come true. But I think to your point that some of the challenges and things that maybe we're seeing, and I think OMS or the MISO system is a good example of that. You know, we have MISO North, MISO South. So basically we're going all the way from Canada down to New Orleans. And sometimes within MISO, we don't agree on policies. You know, and MISO South sometimes has a hard time supporting things that we're doing up in MISO North. And I think, too, the other thing to point out, I think this is a good panel because you have an individual, President Reynolds with California, and then you have me and Iowa. We are vastly different from each other when it comes to our energy resources. We really don't have any decarbonization goals in Iowa and yet we're second or third, I don't know, we go back and forth between us and Oklahoma and the amount of wind energy we produce. But yet we have no goals or mandates on us to do those things. And I think right now as a regulator, I would say some of my biggest challenges that we're facing is just, you know, making sure policy isn't just a one-size-fits-all. Each one of us are different estates and it becomes a challenge sometimes when the policy is maybe just a blanket policy. We have different weather patterns in Iowa and so we have different energy needs. I mean we can have a day in which it's 50 degrees out and the next day it might be negative 20. And so our energy resources and our energy mix needs to be different than maybe what it is in California to meet those needs. So sometimes I think policy gets to be tough to navigate especially if it's coming from a federal level. I think the other thing and I'm excited about Ernest in the sense that we have a small team at our utility board. And so in Iowa we're called a utilities board. We're not a commission. I don't know why. There's only two states that use the word board. It's us in New Jersey. But so at our Iowa Utilities Board we have a very small bench of employees. I don't have a lot of people in reg analysis or people that can crunch the data if you will. And so for me Ernest is going to be a good resource, a good resource or a tool for us to make our bench a little bit deeper. So I look forward to the fact that Iowa State University is a partner in this and that Professor McCalley at Iowa State is engaged on this because we're gonna need those resources as a regulatory board because we just don't have, we just don't have the bodies. And the other thing is it's really hard for us to find that workforce. The minute that we land a really good employee that really understands this utility world, we lose them. They go to the investor owns, they get paid more, they leave us. And as most of you know, this is not an easy world to understand. It takes time. There is a long onboarding process to understand the utility sector. And so you lose somebody that's been there for three to five years, they have all that knowledge, you built it up and then they're gone and then you gotta replace that void. And that's really, really hard on some of us as regulatory bodies is to keep that workforce pipeline filled. And I think Ernest is gonna do a really good job of helping us out as regulatory bodies to keep filling that pipeline. My notes here say WSED, what should Ernest do? Alice's remarks suggest that one of the things we might do is really maybe quantify this interactions between these different nods. You're worried about carbon, you're worried about cost, you're worried about reliability, you're worried about equity, justice and so on. And look at the trade offs and see how they're connected. I wanna ask you Josh, from the Midwest point of view, you mentioned there's disagreements in MISO, but nonetheless you all seem to get along. We don't have that experience in the West and yet there's a lot of value in regionalization. Almost all the models are showing tremendous value being able to move more power, especially renewable power over longer distances. So help us understand what's the secret sauce that allows 14 different states with different ideas, different regions, different preferences, that allows them nonetheless to cooperate? Are they're paying each other off? Are they, is one guy there holding a lead pipe, looking at the other guy's kneecaps? What do you do to hold it together? I would say relationships and communication. So we may have disagreements within MISO and MISO North and MISO South, but at the end of the day we have really good communication and I think that was talked about on the previous panel is sometimes you have to have those difficult conversations. And I think the other thing is just pointing out that, there are times we can look at Winter Storm, Elliot and situations like that where MISO South really needed MISO North to keep the lights on and to keep the system from catastrophic failure. So I guess you need to have that communication, build those relationships and maybe remind them from time to time with the benefits that they receive by being part of the greater grid. Okay, sounds a little bit like a lead pipe, but it was kind of a friendly lead pipe. Friendly pipe, yeah. Let's take Elliot as an example. So this is a storm, this is December 24th, 2022. One of these cold bombs or whatever bombsite, bomb cyclone I guess is the term of art, where the jet stream wanders south, you have huge areas that are interconnected and also very cold and not able to draw on natural gas for reliability. Help us understand from Ernest's point of view, do we need to be doing more work on these kinds of tail events to understand their probability, how the probability may change in the future and what that means for folks ultimately who are responsible for keeping the lights on? I think so. I think there'd be strong benefits in taking a look at some of these extremes. I mean, that's what we hear, we're gonna have more frequent extreme weather events, so I think absolutely we need to take a look at those extreme situations that we're encountering. I mean, I think Iowa State's actually gonna do some research or is talking about doing some research just in terms of a few years ago we got hit with a deratio. I mean, we basically had an inland hurricane that was absolutely devastating in the state of Iowa. So taking a look at that system and what went right, what went wrong, and preparing for those future events, I think that is absolutely should be within the scope of it. Do you, I wanna go to ask the same question to Alice, not about bomb cyclones, but about other events we have here in California, but just before I do that, do you have a sense as a utility regulator that there are more of these tail events that we don't really understand? Is that one of the things in keeping you up at night? Um, what keeps me up at night is just the reliability side of things. Take a look at what happened at ERCOT. I mean, you know- ERCOT is the Texas- The Texas balancing employee, yeah. And, you know, that event happened and then the knee-jerk reaction was we're just gonna clean house on ERCOT, all their commissioners are gone, we're gonna start over. So I think as a regulator, that is somewhat nerve wracking to think that, you know, you could be blamed for any sort of failure, shortfall in the grid. So it's that reliability that keeps me up is making sure that, you know, that the lights do stay on. And, you know, I just- So for an A-Rook, we just got done doing a book club and it's a book called A Question of Power. Very good book, if you haven't read it, take a look at that. But it's, we have people in this world that are definitely the have-nots with electricity. And then we have us, we are the haves. And sometimes I worry about us going from the haves to the have-nots and making sure we're doing a good job of keeping this grid resilient and reliable and making sure that we're making good decisions that have those end results. Let me ask the same question to you, Alice, that Ernest is getting going. He's gonna be working on all different aspects of grid operations and planning and things like that. How much emphasis should we be giving on the reliability and resilience part of this? California's been through hell of a lot with, with, you know, the wildfires. I think I saw a guy building an arc on the way in here because we're getting ready for another flooding event. Is that, are those same concerns really keeping you up at night? That's an easy question for me and I would say absolutely. Everything that we're talking about here is done at the same time that the impacts of climate change are already hitting us. And the past is no longer a predictor of the future. And so when you think about what we're trying to do in the energy sector, a lot of it is planning. So we're getting ready for what we expect in the future so that we can provide a reliable grid so that power can be provided at all times of the day as much as people need when they need it. And in California, in the past, we've gone for about 40 years without seeing an increase in our load. Our load has been very stable despite population growth, economic development growth. But we had made early investments in energy efficiency and they really paid off. And now we anticipate load growing and not just load growth, but load growing with extreme spikes at certain times with heat events. So we're getting needle peaks and we're getting load at different times a day. We're getting load that is less easy to predict. But we also have a lot of opportunity there to do load management. And we're talking a lot about that here which is part of our planning efforts. And the incredible power of load management is also something that we look forward to. And we also welcome some load growth because that can help put downward pressure on rates as we start spreading load across more megawatts and use electricity for more of the energy wallet of consumers. So you're gonna be fueling your cars. You're not gonna be buying gas at the gas station. You're gonna be powering your homes. You're not gonna be paying your gas bill or so less and less. But we also have to be able to manage that load and a lot of the solutions we're talking about have a cost. So if we wanna automate, there's a cost to that. Those investments have to be made somehow and usually they're put on the backs of ratepayers. We have been talking a lot about federal funding which is also incredibly helpful. And in California, we are working hard to take advantage of federal funding including tax credits to have that help us through our transition. But we're also planning in terms of what is a load that we're forecasting for the future? What does it look like in light of climate change and do we have the resources in place to meet that load? Are we planning for those resources and making sure that they're available? We're doing that in a lot of ways of course including emphasizing battery storage. We've seen a huge increase in battery storage. About three or four years ago, we had about 200 megawatts of battery storage and now we have over 7,000. And so we've been able to see if we're really focused on solutions, we can make them happen. And that's not to say that it's not challenging. It takes a lot of people. One thing before, I know you have more questions. I did want to. I got a long list here. I'm gonna show everybody the list. Check that box. I did want to note just for background in California, we also have 43 load serving entities. What we call load serving entity, those are the retail providers. And so when probably most of this office, most of this audience is not relying on utilities to make choices about their portfolio of resources in the future. It's likely it's a community choice aggregator. So smaller entities, local governments that make choices about portfolios. What we do at the PUC is we do system wide modeling to make sure that all of those portfolios come together for a reliable system. A quick follow up on this. Now I'm gonna go to Josh and talk about siting. Seems like there's an arms race underway right now, which is on the one hand, the grid is becoming more decentralized, more DERs, more LSEs, community choice aggregators and so on, it's becoming a lot more complex and also giving people more choice and voice and so on, all of which should be good. That's happening. In that all loss equal, that makes it much harder to predict how the system's gonna behave. And the other hand, we have all these advances, AI and so on that seem to be improving the quality of our modeling techniques and so on. And so from the point of view of the regulator, where do you think that arms race is leaning? Are we actually improving our ability to understand this and get load forecasts right? Is it actually getting harder and we need to develop regulatory systems that much more deeply embrace kind of like unknowable uncertainties? Help us understand that. That's gonna be very important thing for the Uranus project to grapple with. Well, I think it's a little bit of both. So we're getting better, getting better at predicting. We're trying new things. We tend to do a lot of pilot programs and so if there's uncertainty, then we test. And then we try to leave open uncertainty to be filled within the future. So to the extent that we can, we see how things play out. We welcome the private sector to come in with solutions too. We encourage competitive competition because of course I don't regulate, we don't regulate the generators. We don't regulate the private companies that control the sources of power, but we have competition there. And so we encourage that to try to keep costs down. So I think there's just a lot going on and it's what we're trying to do in California is pull it all together. And then also looking at regional solutions. We have power sources that depend on weather as we've been talking about today. And there is a lot of benefit to having a grid, a sharing of resources that's bigger than individual weather events. So in California, the time that we are most reliant on all of our resources are during West wide heat events when the entire West is hot. There are certain times when it's only hot in certain areas in California or the wind is only blowing in certain areas and the wind blows in Iowa, it's a good thing for the West. But so if we have a grid that is not brought down by individual weather events, because we're all connected, we're sharing clean resources with each other and our Western states, we can get to carbon reduction throughout the West. There may be questions about that and how we actually put that into practice here. But first I wanna go back to you, Josh, and ask you about siting. The last couple of panels I've been talking about what is now the Kofok wisdom, which is we gotta build a lot of stuff. Alice is talking about load growth, a bunch of models suggesting doubling, potentially doubling load. Not just small changes, big changes, the value of regionalization, which means more transmission. So from your point of view, how well are we doing in actually taking the lesson that we need to engage more communities and that makes it easier to build things? Is that one of those things that we just kinda talk about and then it doesn't really happen or it happens but it doesn't change the way we're siting? Cause it seems like the whole country is kinda stuck on this siting problem and we need to find a way forward. That's a great question and that's a big topic in Iowa right now. I mean, we've got over 6,000 wind turbines in Iowa and we got more projects that are in the pipeline to be constructed. We are now moving into an era of large scale solar projects as well. And one of the things, challenges that we have in Iowa is that we have farmland that, we may have three foot of good solid black dirt and these landowners don't wanna disturb that soil. They wanna protect that farmland. So I've been calling it landowner fatigue. We have landowner fatigue in Iowa right now and it's at an all time high and it's gonna make it really, really challenging to continue to build some of these resources whether it's wind or solar. So right now in Iowa one of the things that we have going on is we have a carbon pipeline being proposed. And so in Iowa for every county that you go through you have to have a public information meeting. So I've probably done, I don't know, 50, 60 of these public information meetings and I sit there and listen to people and they're not happy. And they are not happy about this carbon pipeline and we as a utility board, we actually grant the eminent domain for those landowners in which you don't secure a voluntary easement. That's a difficult decision for us. But this carbon pipeline is actually being built to sequester carbon off of our ethanol plants. And one of the reasons that they wanna do this is because of carbon index scores in other states and the ability to sell ethanol in those markets. So between a carbon pipeline, solar, wind, all those different things that we have going on in Iowa right now, the landowner fatigue is an all time high. And it's really making it difficult to cite things. And it's difficult now to the point where we're seeing a lot of our county supervisors, they're creating citing ordinances that are nearly impossible to put up renewables. And it's becoming a challenge. And I don't know what the solution is to overcome that other than just communicating the message with these landowners. I can tell you that there's definitely mistakes that have been made by some of these companies. They bring in these land agents. They need to understand Iowans. They need to understand the environment, their audience in which they're in. And all it does is it takes a couple of bad actors and it spreads like wildfire at the local coffee shops and it's a big problem. Well, we don't use the wildfire analogies here. Well, that's just a tendency to take off. Let me just, I'm gonna go to you and bring in a couple of questions from the audience. And so get your questions ready, put your hand up if you're ready, you'll get the microphone first. But I wanna just quick follow up. You served for six years in the Iowa House of Representatives. So you know a lot about politics. You're in a very political position here. Are these citing problems just kind of political problems and people who know politics need to work on them? Or is there something that we in the analyst community, like the earnest community could be doing to help understand what's working, what's not working? Dan Riker in the previous panel talked about these dialogues, bringing people together, come up with ideas, that's fantastic. But presumably we also need to compliment that with some empirical research on what's actually working. Yes, unfortunately energy has become political. I mean, there's just no doubt. Dan Riker's gonna have a quick follow up on this, I suspect, but we need to give you a microphone. Who's the Vice President in charge of microphones? Oh, here we go, here comes the microphone. Right up here. And then after Dan, first, Dan? Yeah, very, very quickly this question about follow up research. The energy department, literally today, people have been filing proposals for how to do this related research to really get to the bottom of what's working and what's not on these very, very tricky citing issues. As I said, solar and wind are tough, transmission's even harder, and we do have to have a much better sense than this sort of qualitative go in, say some good words and get out. Okay, thank you. I'm gonna declare that to be a comment, but a very helpful comment indeed. The next one is right in the back there, there's a hand there, and just as the microphone's going over there, I just wanna mention, I think one of the things we have to do in the research community is pay attention to not just studying the things that everyone's talking about as the solutions. Community engagement clearly is part of this, but there's a lot of other, there's side payments, there's legal reforms, there's a lot, the playbook is big. We ought to be studying the whole playbook. Please, tell us who you are and what your question is. Hi, thank you so much for your time. I'm Madalsa, I'm a PhD student at Stanford. An early thread I was picking up in the conversation was the need for place-based decarbonization solutions. What works for Iowa doesn't work for California, but even within Iowa, what works for North Miso is not working for South Miso or what works for Central Valley doesn't work for San Francisco Bay. So I had a question and sort of a request. My question is how do you, as decision makers, not just navigate the political economy of that place-based challenges, but what sort of decision tools do you use to do that? And the sort of request is just as researchers, I guess, better access to spatially resolved data would be very helpful. Like we're thinking about it, it's just we don't have good granular data to tease those things out. And I know there's a privacy concern. You can figure out which person is driving or which person is using how much electricity, but some solutions would be welcome, but also how you think through those challenges. Thank you. Alice, you wanna talk about what tools for these different place-based solutions? Sure. We look at, certainly it's true that there's no one solution, no one size fits all solution. There's an emphasis on place-based solutions. Absolutely. I talked a little bit about the local community choice aggregators and even the utilities and our direct access providers who are thinking about their set of, their own set of local customers. But we're also looking at, because of course the grid is all connected, right? And so we're looking at planning for the distribution system, that the local grid, as well as the transmission system and thinking about how all of the resources work together. And in looking at the distribution system, you do have to get pretty granular about what's happening at in individual areas. Our distribution system was not built for what we're trying to do. And I think that that's an area that's maybe has been overlooked and we'll get a lot of attention. We're trying to put together studies to work on ways to learn more about the distribution system and how it can better meet our needs, the needs of the future in California. There's of course a cost to this. And so there are also cost considerations and the need to look at cost effectiveness for capacity upgrades, for grid improvements, distribution system, grid improvements for local communities. But then also the same goes for the transmission system. And so we're thinking about things like offshore wind, which actually communities, even if they're not located near areas where our wind resources is, we can make best use of it. Some local communities would like offshore wind to be part of their portfolio. And so really getting, and we have a local community effort around the areas where the development will happen, also participating. So sometimes it's about linking different communities and thinking about solutions comprehensively. Before we go to our next question, I wanna ask the same question but a different way, Josh, which is it seems like these place-based conversations are all the same conversation happens when it comes to turning equity or justice into reality. And the language even matters. Some people are more comfortable calling it fairness. Some people are more comfortable calling it justice. And it just is a reminder that we're under tremendous pressure to deliver solutions that are seen as just, but the context really varies enormously. And so I'm just curious as to how your organization is dealing with that. Are there some things that always work? Are there, is there research that we need to do to look at how justice becomes reality in different contexts? Help us think through that problem. So I think for us anyway, and again, I go back to the fact that we don't have the biggest team of staff. I think that we moving forward probably haven't done that much work in that arena. And so even like being here today and listening to our two panels ago and listening to some of that conversation, they are now gonna become resources for me as we move forward on collecting information since I don't feel like maybe we're quite there yet. So I think through the earnest program, that can help some states like Iowa where maybe we don't have some of those resources to get into some of those avenues. Yeah, I think one of the challenges is that this is an important moral issue. It's also an important political issue, but it's proving very challenging to take the big picture vision and then turn it into real projects and know what should be in and out, how much you should pay for it and so on. I wanted to see if they're right in here. Oh, I'm sorry. Let's start there. And then we're gonna have one more question here and we have an incentive for brevity. Please tell us who you are and what your question is. Thank you. My name is Toda Voodoo. I work for the city of Watsonville. And if you don't know where Watsonville is, it is about an hour, hour and a half traffic dependence south of here. My question is primarily for Alice, so. And I just wanted to preface it with an understanding that I know you get it in terms of what I've heard you say yesterday, today for rate payers and the way you're working with PUC to integrate equity and environmental justice into the way of working. But I would feel remiss today if I didn't ask this question on the topic of how state agencies can address some barriers when we apply that equity lens because one of the largest barriers that we got as feedback in the city of Watsonville for making that shift transitioning away from gas into electricity, especially when it comes to EV uptake and equitable deployment of EVs for communities who largely don't speak English, do not own a home, those types of things is rates. And I understand the benefits of a lot of these dynamic rates, but it's making it very difficult for people to understand what they're paying for. So you might not be going to the pump, but people understand that they receive so many gallons for so many dollars. And one of the largest barriers is people can't compare prices because the apples aren't apples. So I'm wondering what you can do from a state perspective when you are setting rates with those dynamic rates to make them more transparent and accessible for people who might not be here today. Thank you. You want to talk briefly about this kind of tension between what the economists all tell us to do, which is dynamic rates and what people sometimes feel comfortable with, which is not dynamic rates? Sure, it's a great question. And rate pressure is a huge issue in California. We're trying to do a lot and there's a lot of, in order to make this work, there's a cost. There's a cost of dealing with climate change, there's a cost of responding to climate change, and there's a cost to preventing climate change. And unfortunately the rate payers have had to bear a lot of it. We try to be as transparent as possible about what we're doing and the decisions that we're making, but I know that last year we made over 500 decisions. And so it's complicated. It's hard for individuals who are trying to make the right decisions to really understand why rates are going up the way they are and the decisions that are made and the trade-offs that are made. We also try to make programs available to help low-income customers. I talked a little bit about our care program. We have incentive programs for low-income customers. And it's broader than just the PUC. It's on acquiring electric vehicles, we're trying to focus charging stations into low-income communities. But it's still difficult in California. The cost of living in general is very high. And so I hear the question and I think that we do need to do better on transparency. We've tried to put together reporting that is more accessible to individuals and not just people like researchers and people in the energy space who spend 24-7 thinking about energy issues. And so we're also trying to work with community partners, community-based organizations, and also our community choice aggregators, local governments, to make sure that we're not the only ones speaking on these issues and that we're all talking together and understanding where we're going and why. So just mine for the time very quickly, Josh. Is it, from Iowa's perspective, do you face similar or see similar challenges around this tension of a rate design and maybe this is an area where Ernest could make some applications? Yeah, absolutely. We just had, last year, in the legislative session, mandate to do a report and we brought in London Economics to do a study on rate design. And so we're taking a look at that right now. So we're kind of on the front end of that conversation and early on. Yeah, I mean the rate levels are so much higher in California that certainly it's much more acute. Well, I think I have two jobs. One job first is to get your help in thanking Alice and Josh for this terrific conversation.