 Good afternoon and welcome to today's energy seminar. I'm delighted to introduce our speakers today to talk about a really big project they're working on. So our two speakers today are Margaret Cedarup, who is the head of planning and sustainability for the California High Speed Rail Authority and Aldi Chisreza, who is a CEO of Tara Verdi Energy that specializes in managing big projects from what I've read, and this is a really big one. And they're here to talk today about the whole project, but really to drill down on the where all the power is gonna come from. I did read on their website that this project, when completed, will be the biggest single consumer of electricity in California, which is pretty big. That's what it says. So their topic today is resilient and renewable power for California High Speed Rail. So Margaret and Aldi, thank you very much for coming. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks. Well, thank you for that gracious introduction and we are really pleased to be here today because we are certainly amongst a cohort of people who are poised to be taking fullest advantage of the High Speed Rail system when it's in operation. And we love making sure there's good information out there around the project, what's happening on the project. And Ali and I specifically love talking to an informed audience of people about the topic of energy and energy systems and the renewable energy system we have planned to allow the system to operate entirely on renewable energy, which is, I think, a hallmark of being a mega project in California. So with that, I would love to give you a bit of background, just a quick overview of the project because I can't tell you the number of times I talk about California High Speed Rail and say, yes, I'm the director of planning and sustainability and then the next thing that happens is people look at me and say, well, that project's dead, isn't it? There's nothing happening. So I want to give you a little overview then we'll dig into some of the sustainability goals for the project and then, of course, have a deep dive in renewable energy. So the mission of the California High Speed Rail Authority is to deliver a fully functional, truly high speed rail system to California. And when we say fully high speed, that means of speeds greater than 220 miles per hour. I think you all are very familiar with traveling around California. We are a large state. We are the fourth or fifth largest economy depending upon what metric you're using on any given day. And we are one of the few major economies in the world without high speed rail amongst our transportation network. And it is a pretty crucial tool for making some crucial distance trips. Kind of that 100 mile to 600 mile trip is most efficiently handled on something like high speed rail. You've certainly seen those types of, you've certainly seen this borne out in many countries around the world. So it's been a germ of an idea for a long time in California and we have been actively planning and delivering it since a bond measure in 2008 which identified kind of $9 billion of seed funding to get moving on delivering the system, finish up design work and environmental clearance work. And that money was actually incredibly attractive and valuable and helped us to attract federal funding as well. So we've been putting those funds into practice in the Central Valley in construction but not just focusing on that test track which runs roughly between Madera and, oh, let's see if this works. Oh, it does, between Madera and sort of the Kern County border here at Poplar Avenue. I'm very curious of folks in the room who are from the Central Valley. Okay, two, fantastic. Can I just ask where are you from? Sacramento. Oh, Sacramento, okay, excellent. And Fresno area, oh my gosh, the epicenter of High Speed Rail, okay. So I'm a transplant, you can tell from my accent I'm from Chicago, Illinois, but it's been my privilege to work on this project for the past 12 years and I've learned a lot about California and one thing that strikes me is how many people there are in the Central Valley, about six million people and how much it will change California to connect, spatially connect the economy of the Central Valley to the economies in the Bay Area and the Indian Empire and LA Basin. So this project is intended to do that. Again, 220 miles per hour, we're connecting San Francisco and Los Angeles with trip times of under three hours which is embedded into our enabling legislation and we are of course running this system on electricity and our board committed us to running the system on renewable electricity. So if you take nothing else away from this presentation today, you know that we are in construction in High Speed Rail and we're focused on getting passenger service up and running by 2030 which is seven short years and we have a lot to do, but it's all in progress. So we have environmentally cleared more than 422 miles of the entire system which is critical. The environmental clearance phase answers incredibly important questions about the alignment, where things will go and we do enough engineering to understand the broad range of impacts but then we take a deeper dive into much more detailed engineering work on other segments including construction work on the Madera to popular avenue section which you can see in yellow on this. But we are not waiting just or only doing that investment in the Central Valley. Here on the Caltrain Corridor we've also provided about $720 million to help the overall, we'll double check that fact. We've actually provided a significant amount of funding for the Caltrain electrification project and that allows High Speed Rail trains to use the Caltrain Corridor once we get to San Jose. So we're doing investments in Northern California as well as Southern California in order to use that section as well in what we call kind of a blended service and this is something that is done in many different types of High Speed Rail segments around the world and this building out in phases starting with kind of a core trunk section where we can do testing and certification of the system and then building out from there is also very common for High Speed Rail globally. We, one of our crucial goals is focused this summer around completing our first construction package which then allows us to get that segment ready for trackway and systems which means then we can start on testing and commissioning trains. So I'm the director of planning as well as the director of sustainability so that means I have a very specific focus on delivering our stations which is incredibly important because that's where the people get on the train and are kind of a crucial element in terms of sustainability writ large for the system. The system when we received the bond when the bond act passed in 2008 you can see embedded in it is the philosophy that is very much a hallmark of California which is to deliver a transportation service that enables the economic development and quality of life and growth and continuance of the economy but without sacrificing environmental quality which is also a hallmark of California. It's a beautiful state with amazing natural resources which if done well with High Speed Rail we can continue to protect but then having that travel time that connectivity that you get through the speeds of High Speed Rail also means continued economic development and the diversification of the economy in the Central Valley but without sacrificing the environment. So running entirely on electricity was one of the first focuses electricity, zero emissions but then we've also as you'll hear today taken a deep dive into how to run the system on renewable energy as well which does again just continue to enhance the environmental quality of the project and operation but as the director of sustainability we've understood that we don't wanna wait for that future great outcome and objective of sustainable development. We actually wanna look at how we can deliver this mega project and materially change or move the needle on construction practices so that in operation, in construction we are delivering truly sustainable infrastructure. Our board has adopted this sustainable sustainability policy statement. You can see that we focus across environmental, social and governance topics as well as across all of the aspects of delivery from planning to design to siting the stations construction practices and then operations and maintenance as well. These are a summary of some of the long-term objectives we want to achieve reducing greenhouse gas emissions by mode shift from automobile travel including zero emissions vehicle, automobile travel and air travel to high speed rail but then we don't wanna focus on just that long-term outcome. As I noted, we've made a number of critical requirements in construction so that we are looking at and have already achieved some pretty notable aspects already including reducing the amount of criteria air pollutants produced in construction by requiring cleaner equipment and furthermore engaging in offset activity kind of direct sequestration activity either through conservation easements or tree planting in urban areas as well as urban areas so that we have a net zero construction emissions and criteria air pollutant emissions construction projects writ large and we're one of the only US based mega projects any project to have that as a goal which thankfully we have a really good bank balance at the moment. We've done a lot of really good work in terms of delivering those offsets and that sequestration activity and then we're continuing to drive down the overall emissions we produced by making some pretty strict requirements for how construction happens. And I think one of the elements that isn't quite on this slide is maybe that social aspect or the focus we have on making sure that the benefits are accruing to disadvantaged communities in California. We have a very strong focus on making sure that this is providing jobs to targeted workers as well as some of the economic investment going to small businesses which are engines sometimes of job creation in disadvantaged communities. This is quite a large graph. I don't think I've ever seen it this large before but it's exciting to see. Everybody can spot that yellow trend line which is the ever diminishing use of the types of equipment that have engines that are of tier two or lower or worse is really how you wanna think about that. This refers to the tier of off-road engine. So off-road equipment, it's a large construction site, we're a mega project and we want to make sure that we are phasing out the use of these older pieces of equipment. I'm sure you're familiar with seeing a construction site and seeing the equipment belching sort of black smoke and that is not what happens on high-speed rail. We've been very focused on using the cleanest available equipment which is tier four or better. And you can see that that overall this shows you the usage of vehicles. We also focus a lot on what that means in terms of the air basin in which we're constructing and it means our site is about 67, between 50 and 70% cleaner than an average construction site. And that's pretty crucial for the people who are working on the site and for the communities adjacent to it. We don't want to stop there. And luckily we're in California which means if we wanna focus on zero emissions of vehicle usage, we can because there's a number of policy moves the state has made to focus on the usage and the uptake of heavier duty construction equipment as well in the zero emission space. So we've identified that I think about 50% of the existing carbon footprint of construction comes from people just traveling on the site which makes sense because the site is 119 miles long. So somebody just doing a quick visit to double check what's happening with stormwater management or even just going out to the sites driving a pretty heavy duty truck right now. But luckily we have quite a range of electric vehicles that are coming onto the market. One thing we've noted and one thing that is incredibly important when you have the sort of market difference maker that a mega project is, we've set the expectation with the industry that we would have 100% on-road fleets be zero emissions by the time of our next construction package which is probably going to be in the next year or two when we release that package and then go to construction. This helps reduce the carbon footprint of the project. This means we don't have to do offset activity. It means we're just reducing the actual emissions produced but it's also critically important for the surrounding community and as well as having a much more quality quieter construction site. That is our focus and then we've also focused on that larger scale of on-road hauling type activity as well as offered equipment as it becomes available. I think one of our key things is to look for an all electric construction site as soon as possible. So that's a little bit about what's happening now. I'm going to turn to Ali who is going to give you a very deep dive into what we've been exploring in terms of powering the train and operation because we have made some strides in terms of using solar batteries. Thank you Meg. First round of applause for Meg. Thank you. Okay. Just so you all know, how many years have we been working on this project? 12. 12 years. This is a labor of love many years in the making and many more years to go and this is a very important job that Ms. Siddharth here has appointed by the governor himself to be in this job. This is a ever-challenging project. It's a multi-decade long project and I could not be even more proud to be part of this project with Meg and the team to do the small portion of the job which is helping figuring out how to power these trains with renewable energy and that's what we're going to talk about. So this sentence up here is capturing one of the goals, one of the objectives of this project which is to power these trains with 100% renewable energy. This is not a greenwashing campaign of buying carbon offset credits somewhere. This is not about going to buy power from another state or another location off the tracks and deliver the power and assume it got mixed in the wash and you are green. This is actually about physically talking about the word power as we studied in physics books and propelling these trains forward utilizing renewable energy primarily using solar which is what we're going to talk about. A lot of contests on this slide but it's important to go through this. So you see in the map of the track this is the central value portion as we call it. What you see on this map are four or five dots labeled TPSS. These are the traction power substations which is where the nodes of the electric grid connect to where the trains collect their power. That is also the location where we're going to have the solar and battery storage systems connect so that we can meet the grid, meet the train, have this tri-connection to make sure these trains can actually physically receive the power that's generated by solar on site to help move these trains forward. These stations are about 30 miles apart. A lot of work has gone into figuring out where to position these things, how does it make the most sense, a lot of collaboration with the utilities because we're working with them to bring the transmission line to connect to us here. The goal that we want to accomplish at these locations is to be able to supply sufficient amount of solar so the trains can operate so we can provide backup power and also start to change the relationship between the utilities and yourself. Traditionally, utilities provide power, we're all consumers of power. Now we're entering an age that you can actually generate your own power with battery storage, you can do load shifting, you can do demand response, a lot of exciting programs that you can actually become a prosumer. You can send power back to the grid. You can actually support the grid when they are constrained to be able to take power from you when they need it. So what we're trying to figure out with this project is not just how to make sure the trains operate but also how can we be a good provider of energy to the grid when they most need it. Here's a block diagram of what those locations look like. So at each of those dots in a block level view, what you see here are generally those three components that come together. The utility power coming in in the purple, the switching and the power system equipment needed to generate the power, connect to solar, meet the utility there and then the overhead collection system which is powering the trains and taking power from that what's called a switchboard. So all of these power lines come together. We have to make sure that there's sufficient amount of electricity being generated by solar or by batteries. If needed through the grid, make sure the exchange is happening, deploy micro grid controllers to balance the load so that those trains can come and go, pick up the right amount of power, especially as they come to a hard stop and start. Because when you stop with these electric trains, you have power that gets regenerated back that you have to capture. And when you get going, there's a big power spike. So this is the level at which we have to do the engineering to sort out the right sizing, the right optimization, right controls, make sure these trains are getting the right power they need. At a high level picture as to how much electricity we're talking about and how much solar and battery storage, this is about a annual consumption at these four stations only, which is just the Central Valley segment of the rail. We're talking about using 90 gigawatt hours of electricity per year. To meet that, we are producing just about 100% solar electricity at each of these locations, paired with the right amount of battery storage to be able to absorb the excess solar when the trains are in use of them. So we can have the battery powered ready to go and provide power over nighttime operation or in the evenings, or when there's a cloudy operation or have the batteries ready to go for when there's a grid demand response requirement. But in general, at the moment, what we're looking at is 62 megawatt of battery capacity. We're looking at two hour battery durations. This could actually extend longer as technology is evolving, we're finding new solutions as we go and paired with 43 megawatts of solar. And as it was mentioned earlier on at the beginning of the talk, this will be high speed rail when it's all fully operational with all segments, the single biggest user of electricity in the state of California, which is huge. California next to Texas is one of the biggest electric users or electricity consumers in the nation. So being a single customer that draws that much power is a big deal. All right, how do we get to figure out the energy supply? So there are three objectives we wanted to solve for. Cost optimization because the cost of ridership is very much correlated to the cost of power. We want to be 100% renewable and this is 100% renewable with our power generated and we're aiming for an hourly matching supply and demand and energy resiliency because why we are having outages, brownouts, public safety, power shutoffs. We want to make sure these trains actually meet their destination when they go in motion. But to start the process, we have to go through a modeling assumption because when we start doing this work, well there are no electric trains running in California of this capacity. There aren't even that many of them in the US. There are some electric trains in Europe but they're all operated in a very unique way. Nothing is really that replicable or that applicable to what we wanted to use a model. So we had to make the very hard decision of we gotta go figure this stuff out and to do that, we started with physics. This is the basic principles of motion. Newton's second law of motion was our best friend here. We built a model utilizing Python and Excel to go through and start to simulate what does moving a mass of this size take to go from point A to point B. And at that point A and at point B has some wind resistance, has some traction resistance, there's turns, there's uphills, there's downhills, there's speed. All of that, if you are an engineering or a mechanical engineering program, this is the stuff that we had to use in order to build up this model and model every minute of the operation of this train across the track the whole way. So we could figure out as this train moves how much electricity does it draw so we can figure out the amount of load it's going to put on the grid. Doing models, programs, code is pretty easy when you're not testing it against anything or we all know if you want to test your model to figure out does it actually work is you apply it against the test case. So what we did was we grabbed the power curves from similar type trains like from their engines. We spoke to some of our peers and our contacts over in Europe that had electric trains in operation. We picked up graphs of performance of these trains, how much power they draw depending on the resistance, slope of the road, and corrected our models against these curves to make sure we could match each of these lines of power and power draw so that we could make sure that what we were simulating in models actually would represent some of the real world test cases so we knew we were in the right sizing angle for these projects. Once that was all done, then we could actually go ahead and figure out given how much power we need, how much we're using it, when we're using it, the volume and value and location becomes very important. Then we could go ahead and lay that over with the transmission with the attraction power substations so we could see at which locations how much power do we need and then how much solar to go build so we can go ahead and offset that demand and make sure we have enough built to operate those trains. Once we had all these scenarios figured out and we knew how much solar and battery was needed to actually operate these trains, then we had to have the conversation about how do we go get it? This is where the hard conversation started to happen with the stakeholders involved around do we go buy it and build it ourselves? Do we go get third-party contractors? Do we assess figuring out how to supply our own power elsewhere? This is where the hard decisions are made and the authority through a lot of great work that MEC has done, has decided that they want to go and own and operate these systems themselves. As they're not only are they building the trains, the attraction power, working with PG&E to build the transmission lines, but they're actually going to be building and owning and operating the solar and battery storage facilities as well. So this is a very much a vertically integrated operation where you are being self-reliant and supplying your own power needs. The general picture of these systems looks something along these lines. Big utility scale solar farms along the central valley locations will be pointed out earlier. We're going to be needing a lot of battery storage systems to be able to supply the or store the surplus solar power that gets generated to be able to do a time matching of demand and supply. But most importantly, figuring out how to utilize these batteries beyond just a storage and load shifting opportunity to provide the back of power that we need knowing that what we're heading into is a lot of more frequent power outages and brownouts. We've all experienced some of the fires that we've had, the power shutoffs that we've had over the past few years. This was top of mind and we know this is coming. This is part of the climate mitigation efforts that everybody is working towards. So we wanted to make sure we had the same solutions here for the high speed rail. This is where things get a bit more technical but it's actually very simple in a high level summary. When you are connected to a power supply, what you want to plan for is contingency, knowing what would, if something goes wrong, do I have enough power to be able to sustain myself? This is like homes right now getting a battery backup power. When you do, if you go through the calculations, you realize you might have enough power to only operate your fridge or maybe your critical loads. You're not going to be running your whole house, dishwasher on, dryer on, TV on, if there's a power outage. You're going to conserve it, you're going to make sure how much power do I have to ride through this outage. Those similar scenarios very much apply in the power systems world. When you are connected to the grid or you have a solar system that's powering your systems, your operations. And we go through these scenarios called N minus one and minus two. And that's basically how many things go wrong, how many fees get lost for you to still be able to operate. So you test out your systems through each of these connection points that we have along the way. We went through all the series and permutations of what would happen if one transmission point got disconnected. Do we have enough power with solar and batteries to still operate all of the trains? What would happen if two of them go down? What would happen if two of them go down in summertime when we have peak solar production? What would happen if it was in wintertime? So all that math had to go through for us to come down to a summary result which is very impressive given that everything we simulated tells us that we can power these trains 24-7 with these systems. And even if we have the worst case scenario of a failure of all grids N minus two event in the winter months when we have the lowest production, we can still safely operate these trains because why? It's electric. We can throttle the speed down to half, draw much less power. For those of you who've driven electric cars, the slower you go, the longer range you get, the faster you go, the more power you need. It's a bit of an exponential. Same thing here. If you have passengers on trains and it has to operate, we'll just have to go slower. There'll have to be operational schedule changes until the grid comes back on. But given the fact that we have solar and battery storage paired at these sites and we are vertically integrated, we can actually continue to operate these trains through the worst of the events. And I pass it now back to Meg for procurement. I think I'm gonna, again, the people who have lived in the Central Valley, I think you understand exactly how hot it gets there. So the last thing we want is for a train to, is for PG&E to throw off the grid or have a brownout in the middle of July or August and have a train full of 400 people sitting in King's County because that would get hot very quickly. So what we wanted to make sure could happen was that we could get everybody into a station safely and efficiently. And then as we started analyzing what those battery resources did for us, we realized it could actually keep the trains running at full speed for multiple hours, if not more than a day in the summer. And then in winter, when we have winters like this, which was a little bit cloudy and a lot rainy, we still see that these are resources we can draw on for a good six hours if we run the full system at speed. But what Ali has talked about is you wouldn't necessarily run a 220 mile an hour train because these are types of pretty severe events. So I think at that point, we would look at a scenario where we would just run the trains at slightly lower speeds. All of these are resources that our operator who will come online once we have the infrastructure completed, the operator can really use these resources to be as efficient as possible and do that calculus of ridership, cost of electricity, cost of operating the system and making sure we have a reliable system because everybody knows you love it when the trains run on time. I took Cal train today and it was in fact very much on time. So just to close out a little bit on the topic of sustainable procurement, you know, we, as Ali said, we recognize that we, it's probably more cost effective for us. You know, we have a large procurement team, we have a large set of capital we can go do procurement of these things at scale, but as we go do that procurement, we want to be considering the full life cycle and supply chain of what we're purchasing. So the authority has a sustainable procurement policy that asks us to focus across that life cycle and understand what are the sort of major elements that we're buying and what are some of the either environmentally, environmental harm or social harm that might come from some of these materials that we will be using and to also look at ways of using the power of that procurement to improve that supply chain and to improve the recycled content and recyclability of what we're looking at. So this is just a quick summary of what the objective is and then of course we'll be putting it into practice once we get through the final design of the system and move toward procurement in the next 18 months or a year. So I am excited to hear questions today. I think it's kind of nice when you get to talk with somebody who can dig deep into the physics of the system that we're thinking about. We're more than happy to take a range of questions across any of the things we've talked about today, but we did want to emphasize that this is, I don't know, this is very much a part of I think being a California high-speed rail system really thinking about how to use all of the tools of the industry and the innovation and the policy instruments that California has to deliver a system that is truly going to run on renewable energy and run for the next 100 years and be of service to our economies and our communities. So that's what we have in summary and I think we're eager to answer any questions you all have. Thanks, very exciting. I have a lot of questions myself but we usually start with audience questions and particularly with students. So please raise your hand if you have a question. I love it. We've been that informative, no questions. Okay, nice to meet you. All right, there you go. Well, that works. I can remember that. That was a good trigger, huh? Hello, thank you for your time. Okay, I have a question. Do you guys have any metric that you measure? Like how costly it is to abate carbon emissions? Because I think like changing technologies to more cleaner infrastructure and stuff is probably more costly. So there's probably an abatement cost there, right? That is a good question. I would say we've, in doing the cost benefit analysis or sort of the, yeah, total cost of these elements, we've actually done it on just a financial basis. We haven't added in a carbon component of it but for other projects my team undertakes, we actually do measure the zero emissions vehicle goal, for example, for our construction. We realized we were probably paying between $10 and like $500 for an offset for just a ton of carbon to be offset. So it's far more cost effective to have a vehicle that is a zero emissions vehicle and doesn't emit anything rather than pay for that offset. So we do actually use kind of that total cost of carbon in some of our cost benefit analysis for policies. Yeah. One of the components that we put into the studies was the value of the low carbon fuel standards. Oh, yes. Which is essentially a credit towards those that operate or buy vehicles that are zero emission. That's largely how, for example, Tesla makes a lot of their revenues because they are essentially allowing other companies to buy their LCFS, low carbon fuel standard credits that they get which is like carbon credits, similar type model. The interesting thing about that is when you project into the future, if you're right, if you do all of our works right, the value of those credits should go down to zero because our goal is to decarbonize the grid. We want energy abundance with renewables. And so at some point in the future, call it next decade or so, we want those credits to go to zero. And that's our goal. We don't want to be relying on those credits. We want to be operating in a world where the standard is what high speed rail is doing. 100% clean energy supply for your operations. So while those will come into effect and I'm sure it will be the right thing to do to be able to generate those credits, but over the long run, we want to make sure we're just operating on what we have. And the benefits will be coming from, I would say sources that are not really that easy to calculate, like noise abatement, right? For those of you who've operated or been on Caltrain, it's a lousy machine. It's loud, right? Like it's not quiet, it vibrates and imagine riding that for 300 miles. But doing that in electric, it's like going in an electric car versus a diesel truck. That rattling actually tires you out. It has health effects. The noise that it brings to community. If you've, I used to live on Forth and King, I was just telling the story. Those trains, they hum all night. They're loud. But when they're electric, they don't. Those benefits are stuff that you can't calculate. There's no credit for it, but we're gonna bring it. Hi. Thank you for being here. I really enjoyed the presentation. It was really informative and engaging. I had two questions. One of them was, did you guys investigate the application of regenerative raking technology on the high-speed rail? And then also, you've discussed a lot about renewable energy and how that contributes to carbon reduction. But I was curious, because this was such a heavy concrete project, if there was also a lot of innovation in how to reduce the embodied carbon of the concrete that you laid down. Right. Oh my gosh, my favorite question of all times is always about embodied carbon, just because you can't deny the fact that, like, A, concrete is great when you want something to be very durable and long-lasting, but cement has a really nasty footprint relative to carbon. So we have investigated that. We have actually been looking at ways of kind of creating a ceiling for the global warming potential for the concrete and mixed designs that we use so that we're holding, the contractor is really the actor in that. So we want very durable concrete with as low a carbon footprint as it can get. And it's a very hard problem to tackle. And we are actually looking across a range of different techniques to try to keep driving that down and reducing it overall. I would say, though, that, you know, even with the uptake of zero emissions vehicles, operating high-speed rail, you know, in a couple of weeks, eliminates the footprint we created in production. And I recognize there's a lot more we could talk about with that, but we'll leave it at that for the moment, but always happy to dive into that topic in detail. And we're also looking concrete, the copper wire, across a number of the different materials that we're using to deliver the system overall. The first question was about... Regenbreaking? Regenbreaking. And the answer is yes. That's built into the model and that's why we can optimize the size of the storage and solar knowing that the trains actually give power back. It's not all lost. Really, I know Ali's really excited when we start modeling the system once we leave the Central Valley because then we start climbing into the mountains and then climbing out of the mountains. And so that's gonna be a very different equation. The train itself is a battery storage. It's like you push it up the hill with electricity and it gives you electricity back on the breakdown. Hi, thank you so much. My understanding is that the two key indicators, like objectives of this mega project is to help the economy and then also help the state decarbonize. Is that correct? Correct, yes. So I was just... I mean, just on basic intuition, this seems like a great thing to do for those two objectives. But I was just wondering if there's any analysis done to see the use of the dollar because it's gonna be a mega project. So a lot of money's gonna go into it. So I was just wondering if there was any analysis done to see if the best use of the dollar, the amount of money that's going in, is through something like this or there are other ways to get better economic returns and decarbonization impact through the kind of investment that's being made. Was it like, let's say making a lot more of renewable capacity and just adding that to the grid or other infrastructure projects that could have done that? So was there any comparative analysis done for that? We've done over the course of the past few, several years, a couple of different types of analysis. The one that comes to mind that addresses your question most directly is a capacity analysis where we understood how, what are the vehicle miles traveled that are going to be coming to see it? How do you provide the type of capacity or equivalent capacity of what high-speed rail can deliver through other means? And the other means are, 10 lanes of 600-mile roadways, which is ridiculous, like the state of California would never be able to get that environmentally cleared or the equivalent of like three new runways at each airport. And again, our airports are really difficult to expand. And so when you look at the need to fulfill that transportation objective, high-speed rail is incredibly cost-objective or cost-effective. I think that we've also analyzed, you know, this state looks at its carbon footprint, 40% of it is transportation. And so this is one of many instruments that the state wants to use in terms of decarbonizing the transportation sector at large. And then of course there's other elements like we need to focus on the grid, we also need to focus on our industrial sector as well. So in terms of looking at transportation, it's an incredibly powerful tool. And much more cost-effective than other means. It's a good question. Oh, okay. I don't know if this one's live, is this live? Yeah. Okay, my question has to do with kind of, you might think of the reliability or robustness of the distributed storage and generation in the sense that this is a very big system. It spans many hundreds of miles. You could imagine a credible thing like an earthquake occurring. So in a case like this, how do you envision you can basically load shed or, you know, if you lose one of the storage facilities or whatever, what kind of control and configurability do you envision and design? And how would you wanna handle something like an earthquake that occurred near Palmdale or an earthquake on the Hayward Fault or something in terms of the operation of the system? Yeah, great question. So this is the crux of the world we're stepping into. Historically, the power grid, which is a great invention, it is about a hundred years old. It's a very much, as I mentioned, a one-dimensional relationship. Like we had big power plants, nuclear gas coal, tried to operate them as steady as possible, respond to loads that consumers had. As we're stepping into a world where we get to actually, as consumers produce our own power, we need to figure out how to interplay that power that we generate, the load that we have, with the grid that we are connected to, which is part of the economy that's built upon the state, and operate in a smart way to make sure we can load balance the right way. Because if we don't, then you'll have problems like curtailments, like shutoffs, like nuclear plants tripping off, which is disastrous. So how we go about solving for this problem is when a trigger event happens, whether it's an earthquake or a flood or a power shutoff due to some heat event, that sends a signal to the microgrid controller that you would have at your solar and storage facilities. Based off of that, you will know the amount of load profile that you're trying to supply. And if there's a mismatch, the microgrid controller responds by either self curtailing or discharging the batteries, whatever is needed, to make sure we supply the right amount of power if, for example, the grid connection is not available. So that smart connection managing your generation to smart load is how we're going to navigate this next phase of the power grid and the world we're going in towards. Thank you very much for the presentation. So I have two questions actually regarding renewable energy. And the first one is, since the bulk, if not all of the energy generation is from solar, and you have an edict for recycling equipment, what is the useful life you're using for your calculations for the PV panels? And then the second question is, what sort of considerations or analysis was done regarding the use of wind energy? Good. So for the solar panels, useful life, you do typically warranty for about 30 years. So that's historically what you model and the degradation curves for those are very much available and proven. So the amount of power generally solar panels produce every year degrades by about 0.25, half a percent. So those are all modeled into the overall life cycle of them. Typically though, what ends up happening is 10, 15 years down the road, we expect technology to improve, things to get better, and the cost of new installation for retrofit. If things break, you replace them with newer panels and off you go. And that's a very much a typical process in the industry, even today. You recycle broken old stuff, put new ones in, you end up getting a lot more power per square footage because efficiency of these technologies go up. As far as wind energy goes, that was not part of the modeling for generation. At least I wasn't involved in that. No, and I can say why, which is we, one of the things that maybe we glossed over in the presentation. So I think everybody's familiar with kind of how we divide land in the United States in these nice 160 acre parcels. And I think you're also very up on physics. And so when we're moving something at 220 miles an hour, we go in a very straight line or a very wide curves. And so what has ended up happening is the purchase of these large parcels and these kind of well configured square parcels that are approximate to our traction power substation. So first we had land. So we were like, this is a great asset that we can use for energy generation. The problem is our safety and security team has highly discouraged us from having wind turbines anywhere near the high speed rail line because they are worried about, there's some like artful phrase for when a wind turbine degrades or shreds a blade. And so that was one of those, it's interesting when you are trying to implement some of these goals because you think, oh, well, what a great idea. That's an incredibly efficient form of energy production and our safety and security team say, yes, but we don't want a wind turbine hitting, they can't narrow lines or running into the train or following the tracks. Exactly, exactly. Yeah, I have two questions. One is, have you modeled the participation of solar and storage in the electricity markets and how that kind of impacts the cost benefit of those resources? And then the second question is, what is the status of your work with KAISO on interconnection? Because we know that's a big issue in terms of timeline of getting a project done. Absolutely. So yes to the first question, did we study the interplay with the grid? Absolutely. There are multiple threads. I briefly touched on that on the procurement side of should we go be a retail consumer and generate power behind the meter or other approaches or you can become a wholesale provider of power yourself. That was a whole study, whole assessment and it made more sense to partner with the utilities and be a retail consumer that you get to self-generate, take advantage of net energy metering, for example. And with that, we get to the interconnection side. The interconnection application for the solar projects will be going in with the procurement cycle that's coming up in a few months. The load connection to the grid where we want to get basically notify the utilities, hey, this much load is about to come online. Let's start studying that. That cluster study is in the way right now. So we will be within the study period for about six to 12 months. But the PG&E has so far signed up and wants to be a partner and build a transmission line to bring it to the sites and meet us with the solar generation. KAISO understands what we're doing. And KAISO is very much in the loop, yeah. Hello, and thank you for the presentation. So two questions. One is actually partly already responded to by Ali. So the first question is that what were the specific issues? Maybe I'm ignorant, pardon my ignorance. What were the specific issues why this project has been delaying for so many years and how those issues you see unfolding in future? So how does the future look like? And the second that Ali pointed out, procurement of the electricity, I just wanted to understand the, if we can get some more details on how that decision was made, that you become a retail consumer of the energy or you, because you have a stable source of electricity demand and then probably it makes sense to set up your own units also. So it might have been, as you have pointed out, considerable debate on that decision. And if we can get some material on that, how that decision was made, thank you. Absolutely. Can we take part one? Yeah, please. Okay, so great question. And our CEO has been incredibly transparent with sort of our legislative oversight body as well as generally the state of California that we received these federal funds back in 2008, actually 2009 and then another large grant in 2010, which is fantastic. It is fantastic to get a federal partner to help us deliver high-speed rail in California and not just have it be all about the state of California providing the funding. But with those funds came a spending timeline and a requirement to get to construction as soon as possible. And in our grant application for those funds, we actually identified four different corridors where we could get started. The federal government said, you know what, focus on the central valley. At the time it was kind of lagging behind the rest of the economies in terms of recovering from the global economic meltdown that happened in 2008. So we were asked to focus on the central valley. We were asked to get those funds going as soon as possible. And our strategy at the time was to use a design build delivery method. Unfortunately, the procurement of the right-of-way took much longer than one would have wanted or planned. And with that, if you don't make the land available to a contractor to move through construction, quickly the contractor cannot move A quickly and then of course is subject to claim. So that is probably described in a nutshell one of the reasons why we've seen some of the delay relative to the system. And we, you know, with good intention it was trying to move forward as quickly as possible but we've along the way also been learning important lessons about the level of design we need to execute as the public sector in order for those bids to be much more secure and certain. And so now having learned that lesson the team is much more focused on, we're right now engaged in final design work of the two segments that will get us from that 119 then up into Merced and down into Bakersfield. So that adds another 60 miles to the overall construction. So those we will have all of the right-of-way in hand. We will have design documents done before we go to construction. And that ironically though, you know those steps all add time to project delivery. They also add a lot more cost certainty. And for us I think a lot more time certainty as well. And I'll just add to that. Building big projects is hard. It's an ultra marathon. You gotta enjoy the during because in a like democratic process to actually build a public project like this you have to go through a lot of hurdles. Like clearing it right away. That just sounds like a few wars but it actually means like lawsuits you have to fight against endangered species. Clearing utilities. Clearing utilities. I guess there is you would be surprised as to how much work you have to go through to want to do good things here. And there's a good book I recommend reading about the history of BART, Bay Area Rapid Transit which talks about what it took to actually build that system and how much opposition to God and how many times it was pronounced dead before it actually got built. I think the high-speed rail would be another one of those stories. What was your second question? It was about power. Talk about your ag ground the other day. Yeah, so that there's a lot of these details we can take that one in. So the considerations there are building the rail operating trains is big enough. Building solar and powering is another big thing. Becoming either a just a retail customer or versus a wholesale provider is a whole other thing and there's agency related to that. In California, we live in a regulated, re-regulated power markets and there are a lot of considerations around if you want to become a load-serving entity as in producing your own power, selling power to yourself. That there are cost benefits, pros and cons to that that we're studied versus can we be a retail customer of power from one of the regulated utilities. So we went through this whole process. There is political, there is legal, there's commercial applications of it or considerations that have to be made and we decided on the retail side. One last question, Green Hat. Oh yeah, I guess I was just gonna ask if in terms of this being a big economic driver, would there be like the transportation of different goods via the train, like I know it's going through a lot of big agricultural zones as well as briefly if there's any migratory species or other environmental concerns due to wildlife in these areas. Okay, so two great questions. One of the interesting elements of our sort of enabling legislation and rights and authorities is that the mission is passenger rail. You know, I think our focus is to make sure we get dedicated, grade separated, focused alignment, passenger rail, because I think, I mean, a show of hands. How many people have taken a train in California and it's been delayed because you're waiting for a freight train? Oh, feel our pain, the rest of the room. It's painful how long we have to wait for freight because of goods movement. And so the focus has been on, okay, then let's stand up a dedicated passenger rail service. I think when you look at long-term operation and the opportunity for sort of smaller packages and goods movement, I think that opportunity is there, but we don't wanna be carrying bulk freight on something designed for high street rail passenger service just because of the way we've designed the infrastructure and the way infrastructure degrades if you put really heavy loads on it more than just passengers. And yes, in terms of environmental review and the analysis of migratory, we do have a lot of wildlife crossings and culverts on other aspects to make sure that the line is permeable for those species that we've identified in the corridor, so. That said, we're unfortunately out of time for the public part of the seminar, so I'd like to thank Meg, as I know that you were called, and Ali for this incredible vision with great tangibility. So it's a vision for inter-regional transportation in California with enough detail to believe that it just might work. It's gonna work. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.