 Welcome everyone to the 2020 Santa Fe Community College Distributed Energy Workforce Summit. We've got about 35 people in on the call right now and I do know that we have close to 100 registrants. So I'm actually talking somewhat slow intentionally as I see the number climb. We went from 33 to 36 just since I clicked go. But I do want to welcome everyone who is able to be with us today. You've all been invited because it's part of your opportunity and our opportunity to ensure that we are working together to develop the workforce in distributed energy systems. So we're incredibly grateful to the EPSCORE smart grid grant, the Economic Development Association, who've provided funding for us to be able to get started on those efforts. Each and every one of you for the role that we'll play statewide in developing workforce so that we can actually fill these jobs through local and state means. So we're incredibly grateful for your presence here today and tomorrow morning. As part of the EPSCORE smart grid center Santa Fe Community College is absolutely committed to being a conduit in developing this workforce. I can't say that enough. I think in the last day and a half we had a power outage all of you have experienced it in Santa Fe County that lasted a number of hours or what we're looking at. Excuse me our ways to ensure that we have resilient energy systems. All of us want to be a part of that. We've all known what it's like to have our, our energy down to have to work with generators. This is the start of being on a path to a more resilient, sustainable energy system that will allow us to be more autonomous and less reliant on external sources for our energy. So let's look now at our housekeeping. They will have we'll have session logins you will be in on the login that you logged in with this morning until 10 o'clock when we take a break. You will return promptly after a 10 minute break, and you will have a new zoom meeting links link at your agenda. So you will link on again at 1010 to a new zoom meeting link. You will have ample opportunity for questions and participation. You will have cues throughout the programming for when we will work in groups and when we will talk to our speakers and be able to ask questions after our interviews and portions of our seminars. Next slide. So today we have with us. Some presentations first George Ayala from the regional the regional director of the US Economic Development Administration. Department of Commerce isn't able to join us today but he sent a video welcoming you all and sharing his thoughts on the work that we're doing. Good morning and welcome. Thank you for joining the Distributed Energy Workforce Summit today. My name is George Ayala and I serve as a regional director for the Economic Development Administration covering five states, Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and of course the great state of New Mexico. We're part of the US Department of Commerce. Back in 2017, my team had the honor of working with the Santa Fe Community College and the North Central New Mexico Economic Development District to develop the Building Energy Automation and Microgrid Training Center. This center is an excellent example of how partnerships with educational institutions can spur innovative approaches to workforce development. With this grant, not only were jobs immediately made available on campus but also jobs of the future, ones working with breakthrough technologies that are highly skilled and well compensated. Santa Fe Community College is meeting the new age of energy self-sufficiency and developing an ecosystem of innovation at its campus and we are proud to be a partner in these efforts. EDA is focused on helping communities, educational institutions, regional governments and nonprofits bring plans for economic development into reality. We work with communities recovering from disasters, from economic loss, and those looking to revitalize their workforce. The Santa Fe Community College had a vision for this training center that excited my team. The plan to pair new technology with eager minds was a clear formula for success. Now on the surface, the EDA grant provided new equipment for the Microgrid Training Center and expanded access to this new program. But in reality, the EDA investment in partnership with the Santa Fe Community College is in the people. Those people who have the dream and the dedication and know how to grow the center and most importantly to invest in the bright new minds that will power it into the future. I want to thank Dr. Becky Rowley and Dr. Camilla Bustamante, the North Central New Mexico Economic Development District, and all those who continue to invest in the development of the Microgrid Training Center. At EDA, we see a lot of success stories, a lot of projects that we fund, and some in particular show us how a great idea can become a beacon of positive change in the community. I want to congratulate the Santa Fe Community College Micro Training Center for being one of those great projects. Thank you for inviting me to speak with you today. I hope you enjoy an informative and exciting summit. Thank you, George. What George has said is absolutely true about the vision and the forward thinking of the people who've come through Santa Fe Community College and the Trades and Advanced Technology Center. It really is about a vision that was held better than a decade ago in moving forward and making sure that we're addressing sustainability through advanced technologies. Next, we have Secretary Cotrell-Propst. Sarah Cotrell-Propst is the Secretary of New Mexico Energy Minerals and Natural Resources for the State of New Mexico. Secretary Cotrell-Propst, thank you for being with us today. Hi, good morning, everyone. Thank you so much for having me here today. I need to join George in saying, I can't say enough good things about Santa Fe Community College and the role that you play. The curriculum and the faculty are always on the cutting edge of clean energy and where this state and this nation should be. And so, you know, events like this are just one more piece of that. So thank you for having me. I wanted to tell you a little bit about what's happening in the policy space in New Mexico on clean energy, microgrids, and the like. Last year you may be aware we passed a monumental piece of legislation in New Mexico called the Energy Transition Act, or the ETA. And the ETA does a number of things, but one of them is set New Mexico on a track to 100% clean energy, zero carbon energy by 2045. PNM, our largest utility, has already said that they can meet that target five years early. Building up to that are a series of renewable portfolio standards, getting us toward that zero carbon goal, 80% by 2040 is the highest one in the Act. The Act also provides a lot of transition funding for retiring coal community workers and for community projects. And Secretary McCamely might talk a little bit about that, but setting a huge policy like that in a direction for the electric sector isn't enough. We know that we need to do more. And so this year we followed up that legislation with several more bills that continue to move us down that path. One is the solar market development income tax credit. So this is a tax credit for New Mexico, small businesses and homeowners who want to put solar at their home or their business. And this is really important because it's helping and it's helping more than we thought. We didn't realize a pandemic was right around the corner, but that really helps make the economics work for rooftop solar. And so I hope that many of you are going to leave Santa Fe Community Colleges programs and go into that industry and we hope that this policy will help make sure that that's a very viable industry going into the future. Another really important bill this year that passed in Representative Akeel was one of the lead sponsors was the Energy Grid Modernization Act. And that bill is really, really important because we know that we want to get to this 100% zero carbon electric future. But we're not 100% sure how we're going to get there. And so we know that we need to make improvements to the electric grid. We don't have any number of strategies. And so one of the important things that the Grid Modernization Act did was direct our department, the Energy Minerals and Natural Resources Department to develop a roadmap for grid modernization in the state of New Mexico. We have convened a number of the best and the brightest from all corners of New Mexico to help us put together that roadmap and to develop a series of technical and policy white papers with recommendations on what we need to do next. And those will be public documents. I hope that you will all review them and give us comments on them when that when that is available later this fall. But we are very aggressively moving forward on grid modernization and that includes micro grids as well. I also want to point out that the state has a renewable energy transmission authority, and they are currently studying micro grids as well they've been directed by the legislature to do so. And then finally, I just want to note this is something that you know has all of our attention on a daily basis, including the governor. Yesterday she appeared at a renewable energy finance forum with Wall Street and private sector executives from around the country, really touting New Mexico and talking about our clean energy resources policy landscape that we've been able to develop over the last few years, and all the opportunities and inviting them to come here and hopefully hire all of you to work for their for their companies. So, this is really important this summit is really timely. And I want to thank you for inviting me to participate. Thank you Madam Secretary, we're so grateful that you're here with us today and it's always a pleasure to see you. A smile that just lights up the room even when it's a virtual room so I'm so grateful and I'm so grateful for the good work that you've been doing and the leadership in the vision that you've carried with our state. It's always always good to see you it's always visionary. The next person that we have with us today is Secretary Bill McCamley, who is the Secretary of the New Mexico workforce solutions and even when he was serving in our legislature has long been a leader and an advocate for how we can actually address workforce in the state. So we're absolutely grateful to hear from the Secretary today, Secretary McCamley, it's always a pleasure to see you. So glad that you're here. Thank you. Good morning. Good morning to everybody. As was said my name is Bill McCamley I'm the Secretary of the New Mexico workforce solutions department. We do a couple of things you know we actually run the unemployment program for the state and as everyone might imagine we've been fairly busy the last six months. And as of yesterday, we had 124,163 new Mexicans that were certifying so receiving benefits for unemployment. And that number has come down a little bit from its highs back in May and June, that is still over double what the maximum number of people on unemployment were during the Great Recession, which is about 60,000 in March of 2009. So, we are at an unprecedented level with new Mexicans that are out of work and so it is extremely critical. Now more than ever that we find new ways of getting folks back into not only jobs, but careers where people stay in for a while, make a decent salary and provide for themselves their families and their communities. That's even more important when we talk about clean energy, which is what we're talking about here today. And we've seen the effects of climate change you know we have almost had a one to punch in terms of hurricanes that hit the Louisiana coast that that's unprecedented and we've had more named storms in the Atlantic and Caribbean than we've had, I think ever. And we see the devastating absolutely devastating effects of fires in the western United States and in our own backyard you know I work in Albuquerque but I live in Santa Fe, and I saw those fires up and there were a couple days where you could barely breathe. And so we are seeing it. It is real it is here and we need to do what we can to decrease our carbon footprint and making sure we have more clean energy available. It's huge. So this is big deal because of the jobs, and it's a huge deal because of the way we need to shift our energy. I'd like to talk about three specific things in my introduction here. The first is, I'm so glad you all are having a round table with employers. We need to talk about workforce. We absolutely critically have to work with our employers to find out what their needs are so that when we're designing programs, they can be done with the skills needed to get those jobs. Sometimes there's disconnect, and sometimes educators get real excited about something and then they design a program and then students get out and aren't able to get those jobs so thank you for having them here please continue to engage them. We are encouraging very strongly the use of the apprenticeship model for these types of programs going forward. We actually just started a registered apprenticeship program with affordable solar. It is the first solar apprenticeship program in the state we're excited about it we want to see how we can expand that, but it's really critical for the people that are participating in these programs because they can't go into debt they can't go and spend X amount of money without making some money to begin with so finding ways of getting the education paid for as well as making some money while you're in the program so you can live and eat and get childcare and all those important things is absolutely critical. The last thing I would really encourage y'all to look at is gender in the distributed energy workforce so I don't know how many y'all know this but I actually used to sell solar panels I worked for Sunspot solar energy in Las Cruces, New Mexico for a year and while our sales and leadership team were pretty diversified in terms of gender. Every single person who were in our in our installer teams was a dude and we find that actually with a lot of our trades we have 90, I think 97% of the apprentices and the registered trades here in New Mexico are gentlemen. And there's nothing stopping women from getting into these jobs and making good money so how we make sure that we address in our employment in our training programs this real lack of gender diversity is going to be a big deal. Lastly everybody please please wear your masks we're never going to get our economy back on track until we get this virus under control. So please not only for yourselves let everybody know keep up social distancing, keep wearing the mask keep not going parties and we'll get through this Thank you all very much for the time I really appreciate it I hope you all have a great conference. Thank you so much Secretary McKamaly. I want to just sort of dovetail on a little bit of what the Secretary has shared with us with regard to working with industry and working with the research that's coming out. It's incredibly important and that's why we're so grateful for those of you from the industry who are able to join us as well as those researchers who are doing the cutting edge work in smart grid technologies. How do we actually close this gap. The research is coming out we have the EPSCORE teams from NMSU UNM New Mexico Tech, doing some deep dive research, developing new processes new procedures that need to be implemented into our infrastructure. And that's where we at Santa Fe Community College serve in the role of closing that gap between the the research and what needs to be implemented and how we actually deploy those new and improved technologies from the research sector into the workforce. So we're super grateful for that opportunity and to speak a little bit to that and bring it home with Santa Fe Community College. I'd like to introduce Dr. Becky Rowley, the president of Santa Fe Community College Dr. Rowley. Thank you for being with us this morning. Thank you very much Camilla. I I really appreciate the opportunity to be here with everyone this morning, and I really appreciate what you all are doing with this conference I think it's vitally important and this is one of the truly stellar projects on the Santa Fe Community College campus. I haven't been at the college all that long, but it's really really impressive to watch the progress that we've made in this area and the excitement of our students to in being part of something so important. I'd like to thank the EPSCORE team for their partnership and for the opportunity to align with the emerging technologies coming from the smart grid research institutions. This alignment assures that with our campus microgrid structure, we are able to meet growing workforce needs, which as Secretary McKamley said is so vitally important. I'd like to thank the Economic Development Administration Region 6 for the financial support to develop the microgrid training center. And I'd also like to acknowledge Mr. David Breaker from Microgrid Systems Laboratory for working with Santa Fe Community College. Excuse me to assure continued development and alignment of our distributed energy infrastructure with existing cutting edge technologies. We have a history of research and innovation at Santa Fe Community College, and we want to work with all undergraduate institutions to help develop the workforce statewide. I'd like to thank all of you for being here today and I hope that you get a great deal out of the next couple of days and we learn a lot and go forward. Thank you for your time. Thank you Dr. Raleigh sincerely thank you for being here. And thank you all. The next person that I want to introduce is Frank Curry. And Frank Curry is brought to us from the EPSCOR grant. We were able to hire Frank because of our participation in this program. Frank came from Sandia National Laboratory. You all have his bio available to you. Frank is going to introduce us to our keynote speaker this morning. Frank is the lead faculty for the smart microgrid training center at Santa Fe Community College. Let's welcome Frank Curry. Thank you Frank. Thank you Camilla. I'm really just going to not talk about me and what I'm doing right now where that's going to come later. Right now, I have the pleasure of introducing our keynote speaker. You heard a little bit earlier about legislation that has passed in the past year in New Mexico from Secretary Probst. And one of the driving forces behind sustainability legislation, grid modernization in New Mexico is Abbas Akhil. Abbas brought two years ago Abbas was elected to the New State House. He's the representative for district 20. And he comes with more than 20 years of time at Sandia National Laboratories and their energy storage program. He now is the principal of renewable energy ventures. And he has a vast wealth of information and experience and insight when it comes to energy and sustainability and how we can move this forward. So I guess with that I would like to say thank you Abbas Akhil for coming and speaking with us today. Thank you Frank. Good morning everybody. It's a real pleasure to be here. And I really want to congratulate also the Sandia Community College for taking the lead in this exciting field and giving me the opportunity to share some thoughts with you today. This is a major area in our renewable energy future and their leadership is outstanding and truly cutting edge. It was early on that they took a lead in this and they have continued to work. And of course developing the workforce that we need as Secretary McKamley said is really important. It's an integral part of that. Without that all our hardware that we will install in the future of course needs to be serviced, installed and maintained. I also want to recognize that we have tremendous talent in our state. We have three national labs. We have excellent academic institutions and we have an amazing innovation spirit. You know and the that that will definitely propel us forward. And the fact that we have such a diverse rich cultural heritage we need to recognize and honor that because each one brings a different perspective to this field. So again it's an honor for me to serve the state and let me share some thoughts about distributed generation and in the electric grid and all. So next slide please. There you go. So this slide shows that you know, despite the fact that some people think that we have one large electric grid that's connected from coast to coast. That is not really the case for a variety of reasons we have divided the country into several regions. And as you can see from this map, New Mexico sits at the extreme southeast corner of this, the western region. The reason for doing this was just so that we could share energy between our partners and our neighbors. Whenever there's a shortage we lean on them and when they have a shortage they lean on us so it's a good way to manage our resources and make them more efficient and and this is served as well for many, many years. Now what happens here is between the regions. There's a discrepancy and I'll go into that in the next slide. Let's go to the next slide. There you go. This is basically the depiction of the western region that I showed you just now, but it also shows the major transmission corridors that exists that interconnect us to our neighbors. And this entire network extends from British Columbia down into Mexico. But the fact is that we are an island, a large island unto ourselves. And the reason this happens is that's how when we created this grid, our neighbors created their grid. In very simple terms, our electrons do not march in step with their electrons. So which is why it is very hard to interconnect these disparate regions. We have to literally change at the point of interconnection if we have one, change the way the electric system electrons march and make sure that they are in step with the electrons of the neighboring region. And that happens only in what I think there's seven places in the country where it happens. So if you look at New Mexico on the eastern border, there are two red boxes with an X mark in them. That is two locations where we do have the capability to change our electrons, put them in phase with the neighboring region, and then we can transfer electricity back and forth. So this is important to recognize because we really don't have a large interconnected coast to coast national grid. Let's go to the next slide. This drilling down. This is the map of our own state. And the reason I'm showing this is to show you that the existing network of transmission corridors and paths that we have is very limited. And it's mostly best of the Rio Grande. So if you look at the red lines starting from the northwest corner, which is where we built San Juan Generating Station, which was our largest coal producing generating station. The two red lines that come down to Albuquerque. And those were the two major transmission, original major transmission pathways that we had. Later on we built some other lines, but still you can see that pretty much all our transmission backbone is to the west. There's really one major line going to the east and a few other smaller transmission lines. Now the red lines are the high voltage lines that 345 kilowatts. There are smaller lines of 115 and 230 KV, which you might not be able to see on this map, but they do interconnect us from the larger urban areas like Albuquerque and Santa Fe Las Cruces into the smaller rural communities. The shaded areas that you see and I borrowed this map from PNM that those are areas which are served by Public Service of New Mexico. And then what we need to see from this slide is that all our renewable energy resources, especially our large wind resource is all in the eastern part of the state. And then solar is pretty much all over the state, but most of it is more available in the southern part of the state and the lower belt, which goes across from Las Cruces, Deming and all. So, given the fact that we have these resources in the east, we really don't have the transmission corridors to bring that power to the load centers and export it to other neighboring states as we do. At present, it doesn't exist in the great capacity. So let's go to the next slide please. That kind of lays down the bigger picture. Now let's drill down to what happened in legislative actions that we took last year and this year. Of course, you know, Secretary Probst has mentioned the Energy Transition Act. That was Senate Bill 489 passed into 2019. And then the energy grid modernization roadmap, which was HP 233 in 2020. And then the two or three others, the more important one also is community solar. This was a bill that was really intended to bring solar resources and energy to people who would not normally be, you know, able to utilize it because they were living in apartments or condominiums and it is there, you know, they do not have a rooftop where they can install the solar. So this was, this is a bill that has been adopted in other states as well. We want to use it here as to but unfortunately, last year it died. So the notation there API means action postponed indefinitely, which means basically they make it out to the House or the Senate. The next bill was study of smart hybrid micro grids for new energy. This was a memorial and HM 71 in 2019 and I'll cover that also later on. And then the last one. There's just a, you know, a small selection of the bills that were passed. I just want to highlight those that are relevant to our discussion today. The renewable energy transmission Authority Rita. The next bill was House bill 426, which also died, but we and represent the hot when we help were able to give money directly to Rita to conduct a study. And the reason for this identify what transmission pathways we have now, what is the capacity, and what additional changes we need in the future to, in order to serve all the renewable energy that we will develop as we move into this future. That study has just been completed. And it, it identified that we have a potential of up to 11 and a half gigawatts of radio capacity, we will need about 1300 miles of new transmission lines. All of this will require about nine to 11 billion dollars of developer investment through 2030. But what's important for today's discussion is all this activity will also generate 3700 temporary and permanent jobs out of which after the construction is over. There will still be six to 800 permanent jobs to serve this, this industry basically. So that that is something that we need to keep in mind, because as our oil and gas revenues decline and our production declines. This is how we want to create new jobs, new opportunities for our workforce and the renewable energy field. Let's go to the next slide. So in these slides, I want to take those five or six legislative actions and cover each one in detail. So the energy transition act is what I call the mother act. Basically, this is the umbrella under which we need to have more pieces. The act itself laid out three major goals. The first one was we'll be at 50% clean energy by 2030. The second one was 80% by 2040. And finally, in 2045, we should be at 100% carbon free. That was the goal that was laid out by the energy transition act. And then, you know, being a goal, we still need the pieces to fill in. But in any case, the other important piece that was really a key piece of this legislation was to allow PNM to refinance the loan to pay off San Juan generating production because we are asking them to shut it down prematurely and quickly. So this allows them to recover the investment and pay it off. And, and going into the financial details actually that was a really good arrangement, which favors our us as citizens, and it does save us some quite a bit of money. In addition to that, since the economy in Farmington and San Juan is going to shift from cold to renewable energy, we've provided funds to San Juan for developing the workforce and retraining and their own economic development. As I said, this is these are just goals. And what is needed is more legislation to backfill and provide a pathway of how we achieve those goals. So next slide please. The next one was the energy grid modernization roadmap which Secretary Props referred to. Now, as we know, our state is served by three major investor owned utilities and then their work is supplemented by 16 almost 20 cooperatives that operate in the rural areas of our state. Now, one important difference that we need to recognize is the investor owned utilities serve a more dense population center. They by statistics wise, they serve 35 customers for every mile of distribution wire that they have. Whereas the coops that serve a very sparse population rural areas, their statistics are that they serve only seven customers per mile. So there's a big disconnect between the density of customers that each entity serves. So what is grid modernization and why is it necessary and who will benefit from it. These are the, you know, questions we need to ask. Now, grid modernization is nothing but making sure that the grid becomes more interactive. It provides more information to you as a consumer of energy in a very timely and if possible even in real time manner. And it allows the up the utilities as operators of the network to see exactly what is happening all the way to your home. Something we need to recognize now is the ability of, let's say public service of New Mexico to see what is happening in that part of the grid, which is what we call the grid edge is very limited. Right now, the control only extends to a substation. Beyond that, like, you know, for example, the outages that happened yesterday. Of course, when a large outage happens, they can see it, but individually in a neighborhood level. They do not know whether you have lost power or not until you and your neighbors start calling PNM to save you lost power. So in a modern grid that we open up that visibility and they can see all the way to the edge of the grid exactly what is happening, who's generating power who's consuming the power. It is not one technology that does this grid modernization is a whole suite of technologies. They don't need to be implemented at the same time they can be done sequentially and they can include things like smart meters, energy storage, electric vehicle chargers, you know demand response strategies and things like that. So as Secretary Prop said, HB 233 this bill, it tasks the energy minerals and natural resources department to complete to assemble and complete a roadmap of how we do this grid modernization. Next slide please. The next one is the Community Solar Act. Now this as I said earlier is it really dispels the notion that solar is for the rich people that you can install solar only if you have a home and a rooftop on which you can put the panels. This breaks down that myth and makes solar accessible to pretty much everybody whether they own a home or not. It can be people who live in apartments, condominiums. It also allows more solar to be used in tribal lands. That's one thing that we would like to see. And then the way it works is a developer builds a system. Let's say normally it's five megawatts and that developer then sell subscriptions just like a subscription to a magazine. They sell subscriptions to a group of people who say, yes, we want to participate in and we want to take part and buy solar from this developer. So that don't say I lost my slide. So that is the intent of this bill, you know, and several other states have adopted it. It could literally add significantly more solar and storage capacity to our grid. And more than that, it really has a pretty high potential for jobs because we need a trade workforce to install and maintain these systems as they proliferate in within the grid. This bill unfortunately did not pass in the last legislative session, but right now there's a new effort. It's being led by Senator Stefanix and represented Roy Bolcobarro, and I'm pretty sure they'll present a very credible bill in the 2021 session. And, you know, I'm very hopeful that it will pass. Next slide please. What I'm showing here for digressing for a minute is just to give you an idea of the major components of the electric grid. So if you look to the left. That is a portion where the electricity is actually generated. And that's like the San Juan coal plant. And then in the middle section, you have the transmission corridors. It's all the transmission poles all the transmission wires substations that take the energy from the generating station and bring it closer to you. But before that reaches you, there's one more step where the voltage is stepped down, because these the transmission lines are all at a high voltage anywhere from, you know, 700 kilowatts down to 150 kilowatts. There's a step down transformer closer to your home, which reduces that voltage to a much more safer level, normally about 120 to 240, 440 volts. And that is then distributed to the customers that I illustrate on the right hand side of the slide. These are large customers, industrial customers, commercial customers and finally your home at the lowest voltage level. So this is important because what we are talking about today is distributed energy systems. And the distributed energy systems fit on the right hand side of the system where the voltage is lower and it's closer to the point of use, which is your home or your business. Okay, let me see if I've covered everything here. So that kind of frames where distributed energy phase, it's not in the left hand side, it's all on the right hand side. Next slide please. So when we talk about distributed energy resources, what do we need by that? And again, as I said, this is a suite of technologies. It can be made up of microgrids, all the rooftop solar that you use is part of a distributed energy system. Community solar is a distributed energy system as well. And any storage, energy storage that you install in a home at a substation or in a small commercial building, that is also a distributed energy system. And then at some point, it is quite possible that we will have electric vehicles who also have storage on board, which is the battery that drives the car. It's very possible that they will be able to backfeed to the grid. And that's what we call vehicle to grid. That is a work, it's a technology that's still evolving. There's a lot of considerations that go into that safety, you know, warranty of the battery, things like that. So, but at some point in the future, you want to be able to utilize that because as we have a growing population of electric vehicles, it is, you know, obviously to our advantage to use that storage to support the grid and vice versa. Next slide please. So let me focus on the workforce needs. This is, I think I'm the right one. Yeah. The workforce that we need goes back to the technologies that I just talked about. You've got distributed residential solar plus storage. You've got also workforce for the large central station solar power plants. You've got the large wind turbines that needs a workforce. The train workforce that is necessary for the transmission line construction and maintenance. That's not nothing new. Most all the utility companies have that kind of a trained workforce at this time, but we need to expand it because we are network is going to grow something new is battery energy storage. This is again training that will be needed for the workforce and a place like scientific community colleges and excellent. And that is the mission that they have for themselves is to train this kind of workforce that is needed. And then of course electric vehicles and charging stations, micro grids, both the installation and maintenance and the operations, you've got the electrical distribution system. And let's not forget the fact that all this hardware, the backbone and the background is software. What software drives this hardware. We need to perform the analysis to see how it is working, what it is doing, and of course the cyber security to keep it safe. Not only to protect your information, but also to make sure that it is operated as it should. And nobody else takes control of it and makes it do things that we don't want it to do. So cyber security is an equally important part of this workforce training. So we need people, not only hardware, but also for the software. And of course, you know, renewable and distributed systems manufacturing. Unfortunately, within our state, we don't do much of the manufacturing. We do some. Actually, we have a couple of industries that are working worldwide in providing the racks that support the solar panels that we use. Those they are doing very well. But there's a whole host of other technologies that that are in required for renewable energy that we do not have any manufacturing in the state at this time. And it could be something simple, you know, like making the steel towers for the wind turbines or making the blades that go on these wind turbines. So we need to look at that too. We need to make sure that we have a manufacturing infrastructure to support our renewable future. At this time, most of this technology and hardware is imported from other states. We can change that and we need to change that. So manufacturing is an important component of our future. So with that, I think I've used up pretty much all my time for my presentation into the next slide. You know, any questions. I don't know if you want to have questions now or wait till later. But certainly I am open to questions on anything that we have discussed so far. And again, thank you very much for your time. And please stay safe in this pandemic. We will get through this and look forward to a bright future for our state. Thank you. So a boss this is Frank. Yeah, we've got about 10 minutes for questions if you have questions. If you could please put them into the zoom Q&A feature that you're you'll see down at the bottom of your screen and then I will take those questions and field them for a boss. And about we've got one already from Ann Jekyll. And it says, what's the primary source of opposition to community solar? So what are the and what are the reasons for this opposition? So I would say, yes, opposition in the sense there was pushback when we discussed the bill and presented it last year. Mostly it was operational considerations. And by that I mean, for example, the proponents of the bill wanted the size of the community solar systems to be up to 10 megawatts. Operationally, that's a difficult thing to do because when you tie in 10 megawatts into a substation, that's pretty much a third of its capacity. And most substations do not have the wherewithal to accept that much solar other generation into its network. So the requirement that was asked for by the stakeholders who were concerned with this was to reduce that to maybe five megawatts. And if you look at the other states that have done community solar, most of them have kept it at five. So there was really no justifiable technical reason for us to push up the limit to 10 megawatts. That was one of the pushbacks. And the other things were just normal things like, all right, if you have 10 megawatts in New Mexico, you need about five or six acres per megawatt, which means you really need about 50 or 60 acres of land available close to a substation to be able to build a community solar if it is up to 10 megawatts. So there are technical issues like that there was pushback. And the way we are doing it now is to resolve those issues before we get to the committees and make sure that everybody's on the same page. And I hope that answers your question. I think I think one thing that I would point out just to put it more at a layperson level is that slide that you put up of the electric system of our electricity system. The generating station the transmission lines going into the customers are just some like green lines and they show customers, but one of the things that people may not really understand is that that transmission system and that that energy system has been built over more than 100 years. It was built from that central perspective. So those generation stations taking the energy into the end use customers is the way things are put together. So when we talk about distributed energy and getting done to that green part of of a boss's slide, that requires that there's a lot of equipment that needs to go in there. We need a lot more information about our systems that's where the workforce training comes in a lot of workforce training to, to create new workers who understand new new problems because we've got to basically when we talk about grid distribution, we've got to add a lot of equipment we've got to start with what we have and then we've got to figure out how to push back and make it what we want it to be. And so, and so the system just isn't really designed so far for all the energy resources to be on that distribution side. So there has been for decades and will continue to be, but I think less and less pushback as we get more and more people who go into the PNMs of the world understanding how these things work and and how to make it all function smoothly. Do we have any other questions. We do. There's one in the chat. Okay, is this is there a resource. All right. So there's a question. So resource that. Yeah, you see it on us. Yeah, the resource that identifies all the education workforce, education training options for each workforce area that I've identified on a slide. Yes. Are you referring to the educational institutions like the Santa Fe Community College or the Mesa lands Community College. Is that the intent of your question. Yes. Okay, good. So yes, we actually very fortunate. Very early on, Santa Fe Community College took on this mission of saying, All right, what are the workplace force needs of the future. Visualize that but they build the hardware to train that workforce and educate them. And the same thing happened on the east side of our state and the Mesa lands Community College. They were fortunate enough to install large wind turbines. And that's a wonderful pictures if you go to the website, because these wind turbine towers are high, they are heavy equipment, very specialized training. So they are able to offer hands on training to their students, how to work and maintain these large machines. And that's really very cutting edge to so we are very fortunate and the other side there's also Community College in Farmington, which is doing the same thing. They're more focused on oil and gas right now, but they are changing their mission to include renewable energy so we are fortunate to have the statewide network. And of course, the universities are doing their part in higher education so there's cutting edge research. There's, you know, research going on at New Mexico State University which is an excellent power engineering program. And all this together really positions us in a good safe place where we can handle all the needs of our future. Boss I see two more questions there's one in the Q&A and there's one in the chat and the first one that came up was from Gary Appendall and says how can we get regulators to allow for integrative, excuse me, innovative, innovative pilot programs to move us forward rapidly. That's a good question. Given the fact that we have a pandemic, there's going to be a great shortage of money going forward because we need to focus on our economic recovery as well. The conversations that have been going on with the speaker, the speaker of the house, represent Brian Egov is very good. So what he's doing is he's actually reserving some slots to make sure that the focus is not entirely on economic recovery, but we have openings and slots for bills such as bills related to energy. So I think that is, that's important. And the legislators do recognize that some incentives are needed to push this forward. So that is definitely there. I'm pretty confident that there are good legislators like Representative Nathan Small, Representative Melanie Stansbury, and in the Senate, it's Senator Mimi Stewart, Senator Talman, so many other, you know, Jerry Ortiz Pino, there are legislators who recognize the need to also move forward in the energy space. So I'm very confident that this work will go on. And then we've got a question from David Breaker, who would like to know. Yes, good morning. The outage of yesterday and the last couple of days and everything that's happening in California is an excellent example. What we did, as Frank explained and I should have pointed it out in my slide, the traditional wisdom was to build large power plants far away from the urban center. So you don't see the smoke, you don't smell the, you know, order or anything. It's not in your backyard, somewhere 200 miles away. That was fine, but it required large transmission lines spanning 500 miles, 700 miles coming to the urban center. Well, what happens if there's a fire and you lose that transmission line, you lose your load and the communities that are going through the fires in California now are feeling the brunt of that, because they are isolated from these power generation centers. So what a microgrid does is it moves the generating capacity right close to your urban and load center locations. That is what a microgrid does. It basically collapses the entire large grid into a micro scale and moves it close to you. So that when there's an emergency and you do need to recover from a natural disaster or man made disaster, then it is possible for you to do that or go to that recovery quickly, because now you don't have to rely on repairing 200 miles of transmission lines. Your energy sources are right next to you. They are under your control and more accessible to you than there's a power plant, you know, 300 miles away. So that is what a microgrid does. It replicates a larger grid in a very small geographic area close to you so that you can have a quicker recovery, which is what your resiliency is. How quickly you can recover from a disaster. It makes it much more quicker and more feasible for you to do that. That's what microgrids do. Yeah, the boss before I came to Santa Fe Community College when I was working for Sandia National Labs, we were working specifically in Puerto Rico and one of the projects that I was working on had to do with using existing hydro in the urban region, putting in some solar and some energy storage and getting communities that in some cases went as long as a year without power because of the transmission lines that have been blown apart. We were looking at ways that we could get communities up and running in, you know, it's still a long time for the mainland maybe but you know maybe weeks instead of instead of a year in some cases so that's it's it's a kind of an extreme example but that's exactly what they do. We put the the energy resources near where they're needed, then we've got the opportunity to keep things running. I see two more questions and then we're kind of running out of time. First Steve Gomez would like to know that when you're finished with the legislature will be looking for an adjunct faculty position so yes I could absolutely use use somebody teaching in the distributed energy program. So Steve Frank I'd be honored to do that and I really I enjoy interacting with our young generation because this is our future. And we need to bring you know, not only the current knowledge to them but but some historical perspective it's always good to see why we got to where and to learn from that and how can we change our future pathways to perhaps improve the situation that we have right now. So yes, it would be my honor to teach if I can or do a few seminars I'd love to do that. Alright, and I think we've got our final question up here from John usery to these plans address the possibilities for combined heat and power systems that generate energy especially at night and then the winter when solar is least available. You know, Europe was actually much more advanced in heat and combined heat and power. Unfortunately, because of the fact that we moved our generation plants away from urban centers, like in San Juan generating station, you know, the efficiency is only about 30% at best, which means two thirds of the energy that is present in the fuel source goes up the stack. And that can change. In fact, micro grids is a really good opportunity to do that because now your generation, which also is a source of heat, because all that heat is used to generate the energy but most of it is exhausted to the atmosphere. So we can capture that and use it in an industrial process or even home heating, you know, regional heating at the campuses are a good example. University of New Mexico utilizes pretty much all the heat that is coming out of the generators to heat the campus, the same thing can be done in other, you know, smaller communities, but Europe is much more advanced in using that the technology is much more efficient. There's no, you know, it's not rocket science. It is just the co-location of the users that we need, which at this point is not there. All right, thank you, Abbas. I think that wraps up our time for now. I appreciate all the questions and very much we all appreciate your coming to speak with us today. It's been very insightful. And thank you, everybody, for giving me the time and hopefully we'll see you in the future and we'll have a great energy future for our state. Thank you. Hey, all, this is Selena. I just want to let you know we're wrapping up this session and we will be starting at 10-15 in the next session and I'll paste that link in the chat if you need it, but you can also check in with your e-agenda and the link will be there. So good session, everybody, and we'll see you all at 10-15. We'll start promptly at 10-15, so make sure you're in the session by 10-10 or so.