 this is the most exciting thing I think that's come along in the electric power industry since sliced bread and and that may you may think that's overstating it but I've been in this industry all my entire career and yes autonomous vehicles are a wonderful prospect on the horizon and yes renewables and energy storage is just an incredible accomplishment on the part of so many different aspects of the industry but community choice aggregation affords us opportunities as consumers that we've not had before I'd like to give you a little bit of an introduction and then I'll introduce my panelists actually I'm going to say this right now as I said I think we're really fortunate to have them uh uh Jan Peppers on my immediate left is the CEO of Peninsula Clean Energy how many of you here are familiar with Peninsula Clean Energy how many of you in their service territory okay not too many but they all know about Peninsula Clean Energy I'm also proud to say that Jan is my council member in the city of Los Altos and mayor to be I think and thank you for voting for me you're welcome she's also I didn't realize this a member of the Bay Area Quality Management District I know she's been a successful entrepreneur she's taught an energy class here at Stanford uh Jan your uh accomplishments are astounding I'm really pleased to know you the Lori Mitchell the director of community energy from San Jose is relatively new I just met her today but I've been well aware of her accomplishments as well in San Francisco and now for about a year a year and a half yeah kicking off the San Jose um uh um what do we call it the the community energy department and we'll talk about that a little bit why that set up differently and then last but not least is Garish Balachandran Garish is the is the the CEO of the Silicon Valley Clean Energy let's see the hands for Santa Clara County well we have a few hands that are going to be covered by these two folks I've known Greece now for a couple of years he's also got a brilliant background in serving local power agencies in California and of course he runs the agency that serves my my little town of Los Altos and so I'm very interested in hearing what he has to say let's see I have a few questions just that I think will be helpful to my panelists how many of you live in these two counties we've already been through that um how many of you are here because they want to understand what a CCA is most of you all know you you no problem well because because you know we get into nomenclature and we assume we that everybody knows what we're talking about community choice aggregation I have a quick figure I'll show you that might help that um how many of you have questions you'd like to ask our panel ah a couple good so I want to make sure I leave time for that and we will um of course I think you've chosen the right panel to be at this afternoon these folks are offering programs to help each of you do something that will reduce greenhouse gases instead of the other panel you know that has a Nobel Prize winner over there and other brilliant directors and professors uh they're just talking about ways how to mitigate climate change in this panel there's things that you're going to learn that you can do about addressing climate change immediately I mean really litter quite literally from your chairs right now well um of course I in just in case there's any word that gets out about my ridiculing the other panel I was just kidding about that uh I'll give you a little background on CCAs and and and hopefully provide some information that will be helpful uh so that you don't have to answer all those those kind of questions uh I'm going to give each panelist an opportunity to give a brief overview of of their organization but really we want them to drill down on the program offerings that they have mapped out for their customers um and of course we're going to revisit some of those in detail time permitting we'll uh open it up to your questions um and then we'll give each panelist a couple of minutes at the end to provide some closing remarks um so like I said it's really easy to assume that everyone knows what uh community choice aggregation is and but and and I asked the question incorrectly uh it's okay to not understand what it is it's a relatively new idea it's been sticking or we we actually put it into the legislation after the electricity crisis back in about 2002 but it wasn't really exercised by anyone except marine county and it was and it was a long time for them to to kind of get the ball rolling there was a lot of opposition the investor owned utility uh was not very keen about it uh there's a few heads shake back there in fact we had to pass additional legislation I think in 2006 to stop the investor owned utilities from spending money to lobby against community choice aggregation well that didn't stop them they went ahead and ran a proposition spent almost 50 million dollars that proposition failed with very little money uh against the proposition but but just to give you a sense cca has been around for a while and in in the simplest terms if I may many of you have seen this figure before the the utility the investor owned utility is still delivering the electricity they still provide the wires but the procurement basically ends up in in the in the hands of the local agency in most cases a joint power authority that's created by the county or the cities involved in that county and silicon valley power I'm sorry silicon valley clean energy is is basically every city in the county of Santa Clara except san jose san jose set theirs up more recently and separately as a department within the city and then and then peninsula clean energy is the entire county of san mateo all 20 cities I believe so I'm not going to say much more about that except what we want to talk about today is how this is growing and we've been we've been discussing this at almost every one of these energy summits for the last four years I think and you can see from this map and I apologize it's very difficult to read but it gives you an idea that that this is this is a snowball that's gaining a lot more mass and velocity as it rolls downhill they provide look cca's provide local control they they uh they set community goals for the organization uh they they procure the renewable content that the that their boards determine their local boards and they also develop programs that serve consumers and as I said that's what we're going to try and concentrate on today let's see here's a list of all the cca's in california of course I don't expect you to read that there's been some some arguments against community choice aggregation early on that it wasn't it was going to do this it was going to do that but the and one of those negative comments had to do with the fact that it really wasn't going to be renewable energy they were going to they were going to primarily do renewable energy credits it wasn't going to create any demand for new renewables in the state they'd just be gobbling up what's there and make procurement for the iou is difficult a lot of different arguments or variations on those tunes but the reality is cca's are putting a lot of renewable energy on the map and you can see i've just taken some material from the the cca's trade group what do we call cal cca trade group um and and so you can see that a lot of new generation has been built as a result of cca's just in the last few years um and I guess I just wanted to emphasize a couple of numbers here um uh I can't even read these on the bottom of my screen the this is also put out by cal cca and you can see that the the number of customers and the total load estimated peak load I think we're getting close to about a third of the state now um is part of a cca and this momentum continues to build the there the you can always opt out of this anytime you want and you can see that they've retained on average 94 percent of their customers their renewable uh portfolio standard um minimum on average is 43 percent and most of these boards have goals to go to as much as a hundred percent I think that's all I have I'd like to to just go ahead and let's see I went through background format you know I think I'm missing some pages here okay no that's it so so what I'd like to do is ask each of you to give some introductory remarks I apologize if I spent too much time I hope that information was helpful um I'm not running a clock like I did at the debate hour this is your panel you'll hear very little from me for this point on but let's do that tell me a little bit about your organizations and the programs that you highlight some of the programs you don't have to do it all right now but go right ahead we'll have we'll start the veteran off first this pepper okay thank you Jeff and thank you all for choosing this this panel to uh listen to this afternoon so I'm jam pepper I'm the CEO of Peninsula Clean Energy we are a cca covering all of San Mateo County which is all of the 20 cities and towns in the county plus the unincorporated county we launched in 2016 and enrolled our customers in two phases the first phase in the fall of 2016 and the rest of the customers in the spring of 2017 so we've been serving all of our customers for two years now uh we offer two products our default product that everyone was automatically enrolled in is uh 50 renewable and 90 greenhouse gas free and our goal is to have that product be 100 greenhouse gas free by 2021 and we also have a 100 renewable product that our customers can opt up to can everyone hear me okay yeah okay good and we price our our default product eco plus at five percent below PG&E so we've done that from the very beginning I've always felt that people are interested in having cleaner and greener products are particularly interested in saving the green in their wallet and that if you have a better product but that's also less expensive then uh you'll have great participation and we have we've we have an opt out rate of 2.4 percent which means uh only two 2.4 percent of our customers have opted out and returned back to PG&E as their um generation provider um so with the five percent discount that our customers enjoy uh they save about 18 million dollars a year so that's 18 million dollars that can go back into the community rather than going into um PG&E's bank account we are very um interested in growing renewable energy we've contracted for two new solar projects one is a 200 megawatt solar project in merced county called the right solar project we broke ground on that last year and we expect the production from that to start at the end of this year and the second one is a 100 megawatt solar project in kings county where we'll be breaking ground on that later this fall and that will start delivering to us at the end of 2020 and we're in negotiations with a number of other renewable energy uh large renewable projects and we will probably also also be um contracting for some energy storage and we'll likely be announcing that in the next three to four months as we finish up our negotiations our overall mission for um pce is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and in san mateo county because we exist there the ghg emissions due to electricity are now down to about eight percent of the county the biggest emitter of uh or the biggest contributor of ghg emissions is transportation and so the energy programs that we have started up are um targeted a lot towards transportation and then building natural gas is the other big component and we started some programs on that too so um that's that's mainly what we're doing as far as the i don't know if you want me to get into all the programs right now i have a plenty of time give me plenty of time later on okay okay so we'll we'll stop there and then then i'll describe in more detail what our programs are so miss bischoff i'm gonna flip over you come to you as the as the rookie in the in the crowd she's not really a rookie she's just a new kid on the block exactly on the block yeah that's fine you go ahead so let's let's go to let's go to garish and and let him talk about santa claire and then we'll go do san jose last yeah i think jeff was going in order of when the cca's were formed and we went live so pc went live first and then we followed in 2017 and we did in two phases uh so you know though most of you seem to know about cca's i wanted to just start with uh why we got formed and i have one of my board members here rod sinks and i remember when i was looking for cca's and actually doesn't open here do i want to join a cca i went to youtube and i was looking at stuff and i saw the panel that i think you had that he was on i can't believe it rod sinks yes so this was you know i think like 2015 or 14 something like that where you're talking about this so all these cities had these climate action plans and they kind of realized oh in order to control our emissions going cleaning up electricity is you know an easy way to get it down fast and so uh we got formed uh sbc was formed 13 agencies we're the first cca to claim to be 100 carbon free and for those who uh are really into you know what's the definition of carbon free etc i'm gonna say we're essentially carbon neutral uh because where our industry is going is hourly balancing etc which we can get into later on but we are the first ones to get to 100 carbon free our product is 50 renewable 50 carbon free and over the last two years of operations we've returned 20 million dollars of savings through uh providing this electricity at six percent and one percent less than pjne's rates we love this can you we'll play can you top this later okay miss pepper but you know this is fantastic because we do 18 million a year so it's okay though i'm one of his customers so i i like the same there was a balance between spending a little bit more to be 100 carbon free which pc will be getting to in 2021 but we've been there from 2017 uh so yeah we love this because it's regularly as a former regulator and and you know we pass laws to try and require the state to do this and this is what i love about this now cca's are doing it because this is what your communities want right and there is you know lots of friendly competition even within the cities that we have on our board as to who's doing different programs uh first so from a program standpoint in terms of money our board decided to set aside two percent of revenues for program funding now all the customers in our territory still get access to pjne's public benefits so you know there's somewhere like four percent of their total bill four to five percent of their total bill is still available to them for program funding so that's quite a bit we've just added to the amount of funding available for programs so when we looked at decarbonization and we created what we call a decarbonization roadmap that our board approved last december that we are going out through 2050 and then we set a goal for 2030 how are we going to meet it and what sectors are we going to go after so obviously electricity is one and what we have today in terms of clean electricity is going to change as we invest in new power plants renewable plants so we've signed contracts for three long-term renewable uh ppas ones wind and two are solar storage and these are the one of the largest solar storage uh that has been contracted for in california till i'm sure san jose starts there contracting so we looked at the different areas this electric power cleaning that up and then there's the mobility or transportation side and then the built environment side which is buildings so we want to influence uh lowering emissions in each of those areas and right in the center of these three areas is an area we're calling grid innovation because when you think about mobility and buildings there's a certain interactivity between the buildings and the grid and so that's the other area we're looking at so i'll get into the programs under each one of these later on so miss michel i meant no offense by calling you a rookie to reset it much better than i did you're the newest and so i thought it would be best if you went last but please tell us about san jose yeah sure no thank you so much for including us so i'm laury michel and i'm the director of community energy at the city of san jose we're organized a little differently than some other cc's and that were a department within the city of san jose um san jose decided to do that because they're a fairly large city and they have a lot of scale just within uh the city of san jose if you're most of you probably are familiar with san jose but just a couple of key facts um so san jose is actually the 10th largest city in the united states so we're just about 1.3 million residents that live there in san jose so pretty large population very diverse um and san jose really uh was interested in informing a community energy department because they saw the success of many other cities launching cca's and because of a lot of advocacy um from many of our residents around really wanting to do something to reduce greenhouse gas emissions so ruth marino here was one of those residents that was at many of our city council meetings um so our council really took that on and in parallel they worked on what we call our climate smart san jose plan which is our sustainability plan that aligns with the paris agreement it has unanimous city council support it's a very ambitious plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the city of san jose um there are many different pillars in the plan but one of them is to get to 100 carbon free by 2021 and so that was very much one of the reasons they wanted to form san jose clean energy so um they unanimously approved uh forming the department in may of 2017 i came on board in november of 2017 um we launched service in three phases actually we first did a very small phase with just our city accounts last september so that included san jose international airport our wastewater treatment plan all of our police and fire stations and we did that just to make sure that um all of our operational practices were in place before we wanted to scale it um but then in february we enrolled all of the residents and our our large commercial customers so that was over 300 000 accounts in february in february also if you're here for the last panel pgd announced that they were going into bankruptcy so it was definitely an exciting time both for the community energy and in the energy space um definitely lots of interesting times in the energy industry but that was very successful we have a extremely low opt-out rate so we are just over just a little bit over one percent and so many of our residents have you know chosen to stay with us right now we are in the process of enrolling our small commercial customers that's also going very well we haven't had any actually opt out so that's that's great you have had none opt out none small commercial very good yeah we're right in the middle of it though so not gone with but we've done a lot of outreach to them um you know I would say overwhelmingly they're very supportive there's lots of small businesses within san jose that are excited about it and and to market with us so so that's been very successful um in terms of the products that we offer we also offer two products our default product is 45% renewable and 80% greenhouse gas free and we are basically competitive with PG&E so we are one percent lower on the rates and in san jose that means about two million dollars a year back to san jose we did that purposely to take a very conservative approach to make sure that the program works and that we can build up an operating reserve and provide financial stability for the city of san jose and once we get a pretty healthy operating reserve we're trying to build to 120 days of operating expenses we'll look at other rate discounts and programs to offer um and then we also offer 100 percent renewable program that's also one percent cheaper than PG&E is offering um on the program's front we're a little bit behind my colleagues here just because of our launch schedule but we do have a roadmap in place um and where we are focusing is really programs that align with our climate smart san jose plan and in that plan like uh jan mentioned in san jose we know that the majority of our emissions really come from transportation um if you're not familiar many people call san jose a mini LA there's lots of freeways and we have um we know that there's lots of emissions associated with that and and a lot of traffic and and transportation issues to work on so we are very focused there in the in the roadmap so very soon you'll see programs from us focused on vehicle electrification and and really improving public transportation options well thank you very much thank all of you so i could let you all go through your list but i'm that's what i'm trying to avoid because i'm just concerned that we may you know the the eyes will glaze over but let's go through them let's kind of see if this works okay it might not but uh let we'll go through the topics and uh you know we'll see who the opening bid is uh for what your program is and see what yours is and then maybe san jose and it doesn't have to be in that order but i'm just looking you know it's the it's the one opsmanship that we're going to be listening for here okay all right so for instance you've all mentioned you've mentioned some of these programs already let's talk about one uh electric vehicles you know we're trying cities are trying to reduce greenhouse gas use number one uh producer of greenhouse gases are as the transportation sector cities are going after this in a significant way there's all kinds of funds at the state level the resources board is making funds available the cca's are now also doing this so why don't you just you don't have to take too long but tell us about the programs that you're doing in your area and forgive me i'm going to be i'm going to provide some insight here this is your opportunity to talk to your customers and tell them what your programs are so let's let's let's get a little one-upsmanship going here miss pepper you can the opening bid here on electrical vehicle okay we actually cooperate on a lot of these things wait cooperation's allowed that's yeah it's the one really exciting part of being in the cca industry is that we actually are not competitors that we are collaborators and it's you know we have more force if we join together and more power if we join together so that's what that's what we're doing uh but for us at pce we're very heavily involved in transportation we put together an overall programs roadmap and transportation is one of the areas one of the things that we're doing is called riding drives where we want to introduce people to electric vehicles so we find a location in one of our 20 cities and we try to spread these out throughout the throughout the county to have dealers bring their electric vehicles there and people have the opportunity to test drive them for example i think in august facebook has a big festival at their campus and we did this last year we had a number of vehicles there teslas bolts uh leafs all these different vehicles you can drive the vehicles around and see what they're like and you're in a non-stress situation there isn't a salesman there trying to get you to buy the car but you can just see what they're like and and see if you like it so um we did six of those last year we're planning us to do 12 of those this year in 2019 and then we also have a new ev dealer promotion program so last year last fall we offered we put out an rfp to all of the car dealerships in the county and asked them to give us their best deal that they could for a plug-in hybrids and also for battery electric vehicles and then we threw in an additional thousand dollar incentive on top of that and we moved 120 cars with that deal and interestingly the we had just hired our programs director and he actually didn't realize when he joined us that he was actually going to be a car salesman so but we actually he does actually do a lot of other things but it was just kind of funny because we were just pushing these cars and we're doing that again this fall uh we're doing the same program we've also expanded that program for the low-income community so we've joined up with an organization called peninsula family services and for income qualified folks we're offering a four thousand dollar incentive for a used plug-in hybrid or a used battery electric vehicle and peninsula family services works with them to get loans and to uh to help them get into a car because we want to make sure that this isn't a program that's only for the wealthy but that everyone has the advantage of having an electric car and experiencing the the lower operation costs of that. We also have committed 16 million dollars for EV infrastructure because if you have these cars out there you need to be able to charge them and we are in the process of selecting a contractor to work with us to get the get these EV infrastructure out there and we're focusing mostly on multi-unit dwellings because about half of the housing stock in san mateo county is apartments or condos and if you've ever lived in one of those you know you don't necessarily have a plug right where you park your car so we're looking at that and also doing an innovation program to find a technology that might be inexpensive and uh and allow people to um to pay for plugging their car in if they're in that kind of situation and then we're focusing also on workplaces because if you're familiar with the energy industry the actual the coalsail cost of power is lowest in the afternoon now when the solar is generating so um we're hoping to encourage people to charge their cars during the daytime when it's least expensive and we'll be working on rate structures for that as well so i'll stop there that's great so i mean isn't this one of the advantages of of community choice aggregation that you can tailor these programs to your county is is is your i'm sorry i'm sorry in the case of san mateo county in your case uh 16 cities or so is yours the same program or do you have enhancements uh no it's uh i'll start with what jan said we actually cooperate quite a bit and we share quite a bit of information to make our programs better so um we're taking a little different approach in some areas and in some areas we actually uh going to do the same thing for example we're not going to provide rebates necessarily for folks because we live in a rather wealthy area so we don't think rebates are necessarily the way to go there let's say 40 of our program funding is set aside for mobility um and we're setting aside about eight million dollars so talk about some big picture pieces the county has this program called driving to net zero that they created a couple of years ago but it's kind of high level and there's still a gap between okay what that plan is and what individual cities can do so we've hired a consultant to help with closing that gap as to what each city can do so they've met with every one of these cities to say all right what do you need to take it to that next step so uh the final report on that should be presented to our board in august but the work's basically being completed in the next few weeks um additionally if you want to move the needle on some of these things uh you got to look at codes and uh so we have jointly with peninsular we have a reach code uh project and basically you know the cc has these codes that you have to you know title 24 and adopting it every three years and so every city can do something a little more and so peninsular and us have funded all the background information that an individual city would need so all the cost effectiveness calculations model ordinances etc to adopt these reach codes and so we have one for buildings and one for electric vehicles and so that is going to be uh now the cities have to act on that and actually adopt these reach codes so that's going to be planned we hope the cities will take action on that somewhere in the september through november time so how does that benefit your your constituents how does that benefit the people in your community well it's going to increase the amount of uh say for example charging infrastructure so today you have a certain number of uh chargers and the kind of chargers that you have uh that's a minimum requirement this in many cases will double the requirement because when you look at santa clara county we have the greatest penetration of evs in the state and so when the state does their codes they're kind of looking at an average with entire state right and we can't get to our reduction and emissions if we follow the state code we have to do something more and so we're focusing on low income multi-unit dwellings and fast charging um so those are the areas we're looking at uh if i may add one more we also have innovation is a big thing for us at svce and uh so we have an innovation program and we're looking at a virtual power plant initiative and so evs and providing real-time rates is going to be one of the options that we look at so um miss michael i mean both of these organizations that flank you are relatively new i mean they've only been in business for two years or has it been three and so there's a lot going on that they're trying to do you just got started um but i'm sure you can top them in terms of your roadmap for what you're going to do for your ev for evs in for the residents of san jose yeah i know i would just really echo what what jan stated um you're not working together with them too are we are we are yeah so it's a one i think really fantastic thing about cc's and i honestly think it's one of the keys of cca's success and why that they've grown so quickly is that there is a lot of collaboration not just on programs but a lot of operational um you know roadmaps if you will you know there there really is a a path that that leads to success and there's a lot of information sharing among all of the cca's and i think that makes us very strong um so yeah we are definitely plugged in with what they're doing on on programs and very supportive of it um but i will highlight just a couple of things that the city of san jose and and because we're a city department within the city of san jose were plugged into that you know is a little bit of a different approach just because of the city that we're in um you know in the we have a little bit of a different vision of where we would like to see transportation and electrification um we're actually working on an ev roadmap that's a collaborative effort from many departments within the city of san jose and in the short term we think vehicle electrification is really important in increasing charging but in the long term what we are really striving for is less vehicles on the road and more public transportation um more density in the downtown more public transportation options to get into downtown um if you're not aware the city is working on you know a pretty fantastic project at diradan station where calterine and amtrak currently come into the city as well as bta um bart is going to be extended into diradan station and we're also working with the high speed rail authority um to connect uh down into the central valley and la from there as well and so many people believe that that infrastructure will literally change san jose for 100 years so it's a really important project that the city of san jose is working on we think it's really key to achieving rghg emission reductions um from the transportation sector we really think that long term key is getting people out of their single driver vehicles and and using more public transportation options so where we're focused is um you know that last mile other transportation solutions um san jose is also unique at you know it's probably worth it to say that we're one of them you know probably one of the few cities across the nation that's really embraced scooters so at our last city council meeting we announced an agreement with you know a few different scooter providers to allow them access into the city and really embrace them and many residents embrace those scooters in san jose you know i work in city hall every day and san jose state university is right behind us we see a lot of college students who isn't around on the scooters and and have worked out um you know some rules of the road and safety measures to really make that um a viable way to get around in downtown san jose you know in addition to that the way deer down station is being configured we're trying to make it more walkable um you know connect more bus lines from the deer down station into the downtown you know bart obviously will be a huge help with that so you know at san jose clean energy we're really trying to plug it into that and um where our road mac will go is to really offer solutions that augment that vision that the city is trying to achieve all right i apologize it's not your fault but we're going to run out of time we're not going to get too many topics here so garish let me open this up to you it's a it's your your choice you want to talk about whole house electrification uh rooftop pvs or energy efficiency which pro what kind of programs this is what i this is what we're talking about can I talk with something else sir so your choice one of the things our board wanted us to do do something different right so and especially because we're community based we can prototype things so um we created this innovation on ramp program where we basically once a quarter we just tell people hey pitch ideas to us and we'll find prototyping it so we had the first one there were like 15 ideas we selected five but there was one entity that came up with an idea which is way beyond our budget so we took that separately to the board so that essentially i think it's pretty cool today if you if you're a solar contractor an eb contractor or storage and you want customer data you basically have to fill out a bunch of forms send it to pgne you get that data etc if you're a small company that's one man shop too much off it and you do a manual process it's going to cost you thousands of dollars if you're a rather large company you can set it up it's going to cost you twenty thousand dollars and then you can get the data in about ten minutes we're going to fund it where it'll be free for any contractor to do it so it's going to level the playing field um and there's going to essentially through an app uh if customer if a small contractor signs up with us they will get access to customer data of course they'll have to authenticate etc and if this works we just hope it can be copied another sound small but that's that's really a creative idea because oftentimes these are the kinds of things that hold up the innovative contractors and offerings correct and so that's that's something that we so let me turn lori same thing is there's something you'd like to highlight that san jose is going to be offering that's going to really get this this crowd excited you know besides scooters which i think is a big mistake yeah we like our scooters yeah lots of people are excited about that i would i would say just uh you know kind of going on a a little bit of a different topic um one issue that the city of san jose is really focused on is equity and in particular the city of san jose is leading with racial equity in the gear program which is a national program um where governments are really looking at institutional um equity issues and and you know what we can do to correct some of that and so as san jose clean energy you know what we think where we're going to focus on obviously we have to get up and running and build an operating reserve and and be stable but in terms of rates where we're really focused on our um you know probably not discounts to all of our customers although we'll probably keep the one percent to make sure we're still competitive and slightly less than pgne um but we will probably offer very targeted rate discounts um we just to give you a little flavor of our demographics we have actually 20 percent care customers um in san jose and and so that's that's quite a bit but we know that there are quite a bit of residents that don't qualify for care but are still qualified low income exactly sorry thank you for that if people don't understand what that is um so there's many residents that that don't qualify for those care programs but are still very much struggling um because of the cost of living um here in the bay area in particularly in silicon valley um so there there's a lot of work that we are focused on to try to reach um that population and and really provide more equitable access to energy for those residents jan anything you'd like to highlight what do you got coming up that would be of interest to uh to your customers well one of the things that that we're looking at is resilience and you're probably all aware that pgne is starting a new program the psps powers shut off i don't sure what all the p's and s's stand for but basically if it's very windy and there's a chance of a big fire they're going to shut off the power and so certain critical facilities need to continue to have power so we're actually working with another cca with east bay clean energy on a grant that we applied for with the um air quality district to set up resilience to look at all of the locations in the county that would be an important kind of resilient center like fire stations or libraries or community centers where um people can go to be safe or that need to have electricity that can't afford to be shut down and to figure out how we can uh economically put in systems like solar plus storage or other types of systems to make sure that they have power if they're going to be shut off we're also looking at some other innovative programs that i'm not going to share those ideas with you right now because they're still uh you just don't want the people next to you to know about them we're still we're still working on it so um but trying to but thinking of other customers say customers who are on medical baseline or who have you know medical equipment that needs to continue to have the power operating if the power is being shut off by the utility so what can we do for them that's going to be clean rather than them going out and buying a diesel generator which kind of defeats the whole purpose of trying to clean up our environment defeats a lot of purposes if you have questions go ahead and start lining up at the microphone okay because i think it'd be a good idea for us to make sure that we hear from them rather than just me but i've got a lot of other things i was hoping we'd get into whole house electrification rebates and incentives to build local renewables uh what what are we going to do about addressing more energy efficiency uh these are the kind of topics that i know cca's are addressing but let's hear from you what do you want to know do you want to know why uh why it is that peninsula clean energy is contracting for renewables outside of their service territory you know tough questions easy questions i'm just pausing to let folks consider what they want to ask please identify yourself and ask sure my name is richard rabbit i'm an energy attorney the law firm represent the developer clients who contract with cca's on our projects so my question is sort of related to that um i was curious to hear um before the pgb bankruptcy there's this issue about cca's being new relatively new organizations developing creditworthiness and their reserves and so forth and i wanted to hear sort of your perspective on how you moved in direction to be able to uh uh there was a kind of party in the waiters room you know what your challenges are in that area how we promise you they know that the mcd has got a credit rating so that's another thing because you're working on and then for lori specifically since your structure is differently uh different i'm curious to hear does that mean the city's endless days through through long the hook financially for the ppa's that you're into or is there some sort of structure i'm curious to hear so i know you're going to lori but i think jan has something to say on this as well right yes uh pce received our credit rating from moody's in may so we are b double a two we have a higher credit rating than p g&e of course that doesn't this is a competitive group here we have a higher credit rating than all of the iou's actually that's good that's good so so but we do have you know we do have a financial reserve policy so we do our policy is 120 days of operating reserves uh we're doing our budget right now i think we're actually at 225 days of uh operating reserves on hand and uh i was happy to hear lori say that you know one of the things that you're going to work on is make sure your reserves are there first before you implement programs and that's what we do that was the advice i got from another cca when we first started out they said make sure you're financially strong before you start implementing programs so have a lot of money in the bank and so that you can weather the storms because the energy markets can be volatile and we need to make sure that we can you know follow those prices and still be able to provide value to our customers lori did you want to did you want to respond to his question sure now i'm happy to and and yes um i think jan you told me that very early on when i came on board make sure you get your financial reserves so um i think that's great advice we are definitely taking it um and and i think we're on on track to build those fairly quickly but just to answer the question around how we're organized and how that's different or not than another cca um so yes we're a city department within uh the city of san jose but one thing that people i think sometimes aren't aware of or just don't understand is that um cities often operate what they call enterprise departments so departments essentially that operate off of the revenues that we receive so airports are a good example um both san jose international and san francisco international our departments within in san jose san jose and then in san francisco you know sfo is a department within the city of san francisco they operate on the revenues that they bring in another example is water and wastewater utilities so in san jose we operate um portions of the city we provide municipal water we also treat wastewater for all of the city and then offer garbage and recycling utility services those are all what the city designates as enterprise departments where um they are really stood up on on the revenues that they receive versus what cities call often general fund departments you think of those departments like your police fire library um so we are organized as an enterprise department so what that means for energy contracts is that they can look to our fund to fund um payment from that they cannot look to the general fund and then vice versa the general fund cannot look to our enterprise fund yeah so that's how that works you want to hold your powder powder we'll take another question please identify yourself yes my name is Doug Norton i work with uh of america we're an engineering and consulting firm in my way jeff i didn't come up from los angeles specifically for this session so thank you thank you so uh my question is it's not very often you get three these three executives together in one place so my question is more pertaining not to the specific programs but the journey and process you use to get there so i'm currently working with the clear power alliance in los angeles which will be the largest although for any new maybe even newer this is a competitive space is right so uh we're helping them to identify and select a series of programs so my question is can you explain a little bit of the trade-offs and i think there's discussion about a roadmap can you explain how you know we we're currently doing some outreach with a whole range of stakeholder groups from environmental and labor groups to um to board and community advisory committee we've got dozens probably a hundred different ideas for programs how do we sort through all of those to select the ones we want to implement and how do we phase those in so that's not exactly what this panel's about but it came from LA so by the way i'll give you my card be happy to share with you all the information we have and how we got there and essentially looking at what our objectives are so and what we want to emphasize right so emission reduction was a big thing for us then it was uh innovation so we had about five criteria that we decided all our programs are going to be a weight against that and that's essentially what we did and then you get a bunch of smart people um and look at a bunch of programs and we also went through another public process we had a customer program advisory group and we had individuals from every agency uh we serve uh be part of that and then we also had another group of city staff so we had sustainability officers from all our different cities also participate so there was input from the outside and pass it to the serve and we came up with these programs but the governance is challenging isn't it because you really need you need to have everybody at the table that's the point of being a cca right you can tailor it to what your community wants so we'll ask another question but after this gentleman behind you i'm happy to talk to you further afterwards there you go i i think that's going to be a very valuable connection both of those and and leave miss mitchell alone she's a she's a little too busy right now please identify yourself i'm with me and let me work in here um i have a few different questions first question is about the programs which you're talking about uh about that question okay you guys have a lot of you know what i i sit on okay go ahead can you hear you well so the program is um first the question is about the charging so you guys talk about that you have a lot of your budget towards you be charging and immobility but when you talk about super fast you're talking about 350 people what so that five charges that's it make a lot of work already and so you need a transformer and whoever's trying to build it if you're talking about office spaces then a lot of overhead expense are you guys planning to get into it as well are you providing any subsidy for taking the hardware set up for a positive charger and what's your yes for our program part of it is for fast charging and we're still in the process of developing that so i i don't have any details but i know that that is part of it particularly when we look at low low power charging for multi-unit dwellings so if you have only level one charger for example for your for your vehicle but then you need to go on a longer trip you may need to go to a fast charger to get fully charged up so it is part of our roadmap and i'd be happy to talk to you further and or connect you with the right person in our organization to talk further about your question let me just address that so actually the three agencies here plus the city of santa clara and the city of panel alto uh that covers the entire both counties exactly uh we're jointly applying to the cc for cali v ip funding and the bigger we are and the more we can show in matching funding uh chances of success increase so there's going to be a lot of there'll be money coming in over the next year to two on that uh some of the money that our board has set aside is for fast dc charging uh and this is part of our strategic plan where we've got this contractor to help us figure out where exactly we want us uh cite some of this dc fast charging and we are looking at how can we do things like uh lift and uber drivers how can we get them to get out of gasoline powered vehicles into this so the location for the fast dc charging for those kind of uh use cases are going to be different so that's something that we're looking at so that's our next step so i'm going to stop you there because i promised my my panelists and i apologize everyone that we couldn't do more but i'd like each of you to take a minute or two we're into bonus time now because we're cutting into people's breaks and i apologized to everybody but we're not starting up again until um 350 so we're we'll believe you plenty of time but if you will um please take a minute or two and just your concluding remarks that you'd like everybody to take away from this who would like to go first i do i have to call on someone uh lori would you mind going first sorry yeah i would just say you know thank you very much for you know joining on this panel i think um it's really important you know one of the the great benefits of cca's is that we can be very engaged with our community so you know thanks for being here and i would just encourage you to to get involved in your community um you know i know in san jose we love to hear from our customers we really want to be customer friendly and um develop not only rates but program offerings that are really responsive to what the community wants and and i guess you know one final thing um you know we're also resources um you know jan mentioned that the de-energization um issues and the public safety power shut off you know that's a a huge um effort that will go on this summer to make sure that our communities are aware of that and are prepared that our emergency response is prepared and i think one of the great benefits of cca's is that we can really be a resource for that um there's a lot of energy expertise i know i'm spending most of my time kind of focused on that just recently just to make sure the city of san jose is very prepared for that but i think that's one thing that um cca's really can be because we are such we do have such strong community connections and very local connections i think we can be a huge resource and really um helping people understand energy issues but also be prepared when we see these types of challenges like the public safety power shut off issue um let's go to george okay um you know i think cca's are not the answer to all our energy problems in our state but i think we play a part i think being an entity that is responsible to the community um is a big deal um you know and i think of pg&e they may be too big to succeed whereas our size is you know we're not too small we're we're pretty decent size where we can actually provide some programs and this whole power system and the grid is changing so much we don't know where it's going to be 20 and 30 years from now so i think you know having these 19 cca's right now and even more cca's um and everything we do is transparent we do it in public meetings the community actually gets to have feedback in where we go so i think um we're really adding value in terms of different kinds of ideas that can be brought to bear when it comes to reducing emissions whether it's transportation buildings or even clean power offerings or questions thank you uh the one thing i would like to to close with is that even though we are separate entities and we do focus on our own communities there is a lot of collaboration between the cca's and in fact uh we we talked about some of the programs that we're working on together here we're also collaborating on procurement and the three of us plus two other cca's have put together an agreement to purchase this one product called resource adequacy together and we're going to be looking at other opportunities to collaborate for other power procurement but it still allows us the whole idea of local control and i don't know if any of you were here for the previous panel when uh when one of the panelists said oh the the state ought to do all of that procurement on the PG&E bankruptcy yeah yeah we uh we totally disagree with that and um you know we i don't know how many years worth of procurement experience we have just sitting here at the table but cca's do uh do have people who have been in this field for a long time and we all know what we're doing and we work together and we try to do what's right for our community and we try to do what's right for um for each other so we're we're hoping that we can continue to have that local control be a part of what the future is and that as the utility industry uh is looked at in terms of restructuring which is going on at the legislature and at the public utilities commission that um there will be people like you joining with us to help to advocate that the local control is very important and the the procurement authority should remain with each of our organizations so thank you so much for your attention for being here today yes and i'd like to add my thanks i'll conclude with one remark i had told you at the beginning of the meeting there at the beginning of the panel there are things that you can do i mean we all know there's you can go buy an electric car you can change out your led light bulbs one of the things you can do with a cca right now is you can go on their websites and you you all live in these in the service territories of these three ccas and you can choose 100 renewable electricity at a small incremental amount i just don't understand it check the box it's an easy thing to do um and and that forces them to go out and contract for more renewables and essentially your all your electricity becomes renewables because you can go one step further and electrify your entire house and get rid of the gas meter and i think that's coming too and i know that programs are being thought about in that regard too i've already started down that path myself so please join me in thanking these three CEOs that have come to join us today thank you all