 Stanford University. Now the next session we are very delighted to have three panelists really devote their career for public service to discuss with us regarding the clean and equitable energy transition. So let's welcome Dean Aruma Jinda to moderate the session. This session is about clean and equitable energy transition. I can't find a more important topic in terms of this, the attributes of a transition that we like to see happen. And we have a terrific panel. We have Eddie Ahn, the executive director of Brightline Defense. We have Alice Reynolds, president of the California Public Utility Commission. And Leanne Randolph, chair of the California Air Resources Board. Let me take this option to welcome all of them. Let's have a seat. First of all, it's terrific to have you here. Thank you for taking the time, all of you, to come and spend some time with us. You heard some of the discussions in the morning. Let me first offer you some time to offer you remarks of how you're thinking about your job and your California. Leanne, you want to get started? Yeah, thank you so much for having me. Looking forward to this discussion. I'm Leanne Randolph, chair of the California Air Resources Board. Of course, we are focused both on meeting our Clean Air Act obligations and trying to reach attainment with Clean Air Act standards in the state of California. And we are working on cleaning up mobile sources of pollution and tackling climate change in our role as the agency responsible for developing the AB 32 climate change scoping plan, which we recently updated at the end of 2022. So in terms of thinking about our challenges, I think we are at this sort of intersection of wanting to move fast, tackle both the causes of climate change and the impacts of climate change, but at the same time recognizing that we are an expensive state, it is imperative that we recognize that the, as with society writ large, the benefits and burdens are not distributed equitably. So how as policymakers can we implement these policies that we have set forth in a way that helps bring communities along and addresses localized impacts, but also recognizes that we need to achieve change at a global scale. One of the things I enjoy in my role at CARB is working with other states and other countries. And a lot of what we think about as CARB is how do we build strategies and policies that are scalable and that can be beneficial to other jurisdictions. So that's sort of like the hard part and the fun part of my job at CARB. Alice? Great. Alice Reynolds, I'm the president of the California Public Utilities Commission, and I want to start by just thanking CEC and Stanford for convening this group today. Really a fantastic group of folks and agenda. I will say I'm a Stanford graduate, so I'm always happy to be back here. We heard from one of the senators today about the number of Stanford graduates in the Senate. I don't know if I'm the only Stanford graduate who's been the president of PUC, but I'm glad to be there and I'm thankful for having been to Stanford and just what I brought throughout my career from starting at Stanford. So a couple of things about the PUC. PUC is the utility regulator for privately-owned utilities, and that includes energy, so electricity and gas, water, transportation, telecommunications, and we do some regulatory work in the rail sector. So what that means is we focus on safety and reliability of utility services, and for the energy sector, we're also intensely focused on clean energy, fighting climate change, and then we think about affordability and equity. And so for all of those things, and even more now, we're focusing on equity, centering on equity, and thinking about the impacts of our decisions. Here now, and I think you heard this morning, we're now at this point where in California we have many goals, including for the electrical sector, but we're at the point where we're really working hard to implement those goals. And so when you think about electricity, we have the goal for 100% clean electricity. All of our, so we're thinking about cleaning up that fuel. How do we make the electricity that is delivered to every single Californian clean electricity? And then we think about how do we electrify the transportation sector and the building sector, and for the utilities that we regulate, that means how is the grid ready to support the changes that we need to see for transportation and building. So how is the grid not an impediment? We need to make sure the grid is anticipating and is ready for the new technologies that are developed and the new grid needs that transportation electrification and building electrification bring to us. And this of course creates a challenge for affordability. We know that energy bills are a disproportionate amount of income for low income customers goes to energy compared to higher income customers. So every time we increase energy costs, it hits low income customers harder. And we are also needing to think about rates in different ways. And we've talked about that a little bit this morning. So I think as Leanne said, it's both the hardest part and the funnest part of my job. The questions we have to think about involve many, you know, predictions about the future, impacts on different people in the state and lots of different industries. So I guess I'll stop there, but a lot to talk about. Eddie? Good afternoon everybody. Eddie, I'm the executive director of Brightline. In case you don't know Brightline, we're an environmental justice organization based in San Francisco. And we essentially have two buckets of work that I like to describe. One is direct services to frontline communities in the form of say an air quality monitoring program, AB 617 with the California Air Resources Board. We do a job training program. We do also significant amount of youth leadership and community organizing to keep our work connected to environmental justice communities that we've always cared about. And the second big book of work is essentially our policy work that is probably the reason why I'm here before you today, which has come from a long history of organizing to shut down originally power plants, fossil fuel power plants in Baby Hunter's Point that Chair Hope Shield earlier mentioned, as well as low income household incentives around rooftop solar or EV rebates. And more recently, we've been getting very heavily into the offshore wind space. And every time we approach a clean energy piece, policy piece, it's with the lens of equity, making sure that we're trying to ensure not only community benefits for local communities as these offshore wind projects, for instance, get set up, but also looking at the longer term picture, and this is where the CPUC becomes so important, is looking at what is the overall energy mix and how does it help us hopefully in the long term retire peak or power plants across the state, which are, as we heard earlier, primarily sighted in low income communities. So these environmental justice issues are not going away. A lot of what Brightline also thinks about is just generally community storytelling, how to make these offshore wind turbines are fantastical looking and having utility scale solar installation before you is really a stunning sight. But at the end of the day, what does it mean to communities? Especially, let's say, if you have a huge solar installation, a dirt road, and then a rural community without broadband access to even understand the meaning of it, the impact of what's being placed there. I think that's what leads to the populism that you see today and ultimately resentment against environmental policy. So a lot of my non-profit is trying to bridge those worlds. Let me start by asking Leanne and Alice the same question that I asked the policy makers. That is, we want to go as fast as possible in addressing climate and cleaning and having a clean energy system. We have some goals. California has some targets. But if you go too fast, we could have, you know, the prices could go up or some other bad things could happen. So how do you, as a regulator, as an execution, as part of the executive branch, how are you thinking about what's the right pace and what are the things in a framework of dares that I talked about? Decarbonization, affordability, reliability, equity and security. How do you make decisions? So that's a lot of what we did in our 2022 Scoping Plan in terms of rolling up our sleeves, doing a lot of detailed modeling and trying to understand sort of what are the costs and benefits of various strategies and how do you, you know, structure it all. We started with four different scenarios. At the time, we did not have a statutory carbon neutrality goal when we first did the modeling, when we first started. But the legislature subsequently did adopt, did codify Governor Brown's executive order for carbon neutrality by 2045. So we looked at what are the most cost-effective ways to decarbonize? What are the strategies that we as a state need to support? What are the market-based programs like cap-and-trade and low-carbon fuel standard that we need to keep in place and what ambition do those programs need to have? But also what are some of the other strategies? For instance, as is frequently mentioned, our last Scoping Plan did not have a big role for energy storage, for battery storage. So, you know, as we update that plan every five years, it allows us to calibrate and kind of say, okay, here are some new things on the horizon. This time around, the plan really talks a lot about offshore wind, carbon capture, utilization in storage, direct carbon removal. It talks about the role of natural and working lands. Are there strategies we can deploy in that sector? And those strategies take a long time to bear fruit. So we need to start as soon as possible. So using kind of enough analysis that helps us understand at an economy-wide scale, what are the things we need to lean into and what are some of the benefits and trade-offs in those different strategies? That's sort of the approach we took in the Scoping Plan. And so now, as Alice said, we are in implementation mode. We are doing the regulatory work and the implementation work and the interagency coordination work that's necessary to bring the vision that was laid out in the Scoping Plan to life. Alice, you're right in the trenches of execution on these plans. So how do you manage the extension? What keeps you awake at night? Sure. And to get to your question about whether we need to slow down or whether there are trade-offs on going fast, I think it's not so much about slowing down as it is about thinking about the strategies we're using, making sure that they're cost-effective and that they're geared towards addressing the problems that we need to address. Eddie mentioned the gas plants. And so for the investor-owned utilities, the focus really is on reducing reliance on gas plants, so reducing the time that they run and then eventually getting away from the gas plants so that we don't need to rely on them. So what are the things that really make a difference in transitioning our portfolio of resources that supplies electricity to the state? And resources all include energy efficiency, which is very important, demand response is very important. How do those tools really get to the result that we want to see? So I do regulate the investor-owned utilities and their infrastructure, but when we think about the choices about our energy portfolio, it's not just PG&E, SDG&E, and SE. We're also talking about the community choice aggregators. We haven't mentioned them yet today. I hope there's somebody here from the community choice aggregator. Maybe not, but they play a very important role in deciding what energy resources we need in our portfolio to make sure that we are relying less on our gas plants so that we can eventually get away from them. Some of the public energy utilities are also dealing with getting away from coal, but for us the focus is on the gas plants. And so we have a process that tees off of Leanne's, the scoping plan that she talked about that CARB creates and looks at the reductions that we need to see as a state from the energy sector and then requires all of the entities that provide retail services to customers to look at their load and that includes their entire load shapes, summer, winter, morning, night, and figure out what they need to do to cover that load with clean resources. And so they come to us, to the PUC with plans, how are we going to transition our systems over time? We're now planning, we have a short-term planning system that we pair with requirements for purchasing clean energy and then we also look out further into the future. So what do you see that you need in your portfolio into the future? And we use modeling to figure out what the most cost-effective tools are to get there because, of course, it's repairs. It's people in communities that have to pay their electricity bills to manage this transition, to take us to the transition and take us where we need to go. So really it's about figuring out what are those gas plants providing now that we need to get away from and how can we replace it? We talked some about the incident on September 6th and I think of last year where we saw a record load, we also had some good demand response performance through the text that we talked about this morning, but I also wanted to mention that on September 6th of this year, the load was about 20,000 megawatts smaller than it was the previous year. So basically we have to have a portfolio of resources ready to serve a 52 gigawatt load one year and a 32, 34 gigawatt load the next year, which means some resources will sit around and maybe not be used for the entire year, but they need to be there. And more and more, we're thinking about electricity as something that has to be there when you need it and there's a payment for that. Do we have resources that are available so that we can demand can be met at all times, all days of every year? And so we're looking at ways to make sure we can guarantee reliability, but also control costs. So Eddie, let me ask you, I mean you're representing communities, you worry about equity in this transition. When we look at new technology, we need new innovations. When you look at new technologies, initially they're more expensive, like take EVs for the time, right? And so initially they may not be equitable, but eventually we want equity later on. And there are lessons learned from the past where there have been inequities. And I was wondering if you could tell us, educate us on how you're thinking about this because the underserved communities are probably going to get more affected by climate extremes and climate issues than the higher income households, et cetera. So how are you thinking about this and listening to the California plans? Where do you think we could add some value in addressing the equity issue? I'll start with maybe a hyper-local story in San Francisco. I'm just curious, a show of hands. Does anybody here know of SRO buildings, single room occupancy buildings? Not bad, actually. Yeah, it's maybe 5%, if you had to guess. So single room occupancy buildings are a form of housing stock that still exists in San Francisco. They actually existed in most major American cities in the 1900s, but have been mostly taken over and made way for whatever, condominiums, multi-family affordable housing that we know today. SRO buildings have been maintained in San Francisco as a form of very low-income housing. And unfortunately these buildings are aging. They don't have modern HVAC infrastructure. They don't have essentially insulation that we would expect out of a typical CPC energy efficiency program. And in other words, they're not well maintained. They're serving a low-income population, usually racially diverse in San Francisco. But it shows when something like wildfires happens in San Francisco, it's a population that's disproportionately impacted. They don't have an air filtration unit or even a housing unit that they can retreat to. And because their own buildings themselves are so leaky where the wildfire smoke will seep in. So it's an example of the overall impacts that are happening from climate change but a disproportionately burdened community that we work with. The one thing I do want to caution, though, the way Brightline thinks about it is we don't go out and claim to represent every community. Environmental justice, that's often hard because the sense of place that's demanded in the work and the accountability that comes from that. I think when we talk about new technologies, that's one of the challenges is that, as I mentioned earlier, offshore wind, floating offshore wind turbines are almost fantastical. You could describe them as turbines the size of the Eiffel Tower that float on the water and then power up to 25% of the state's power. But that description probably means nothing to a local community resident in the North Coast who's never been to Paris, for instance, or even on the Central Coast where they're being primarily proposed. The Eiffel Tower itself is just like a generic, in other words, a romantic description of the technology that may not be applicable at the end of the day. So part, again, of thinking through what's in it for the communities where renewable energy projects are being cited is a lot of what we do, whether it's in the form of, say, workforce benefits through community benefits agreements. It could be as simple as providing broadband access that I describe as lacking in certain communities. But ultimately, our perspective is going to the community, going through that process first and asking them what they would like to see out of the projects too. Alice, maybe I could follow up on the question of the electricity system. The grid was never designed for solar and wind. We are integrating solar and wind to a grid that was designed for turbo machinery. There will be fluctuations. You need storage solutions. And in this process, if you look at the pricing on the wholesale market, it's actually stable or maybe going down because the marginal cost of electricity from solar and wind is much lower than gas and other units. So the price, the wholesale price is going down or flat, whereas the retail price seems to be going up. So there's this gap that is increasing and that's the business model of the utilities and return on investment. That's the way it is structured. And I was wondering if that's a source of inequity that may be coming because of the pricing of the retail side. And are there innovations in the business models that are required for the utility sector to make sure that the prices don't go up and hopefully go down and follow the wholesale market? I'm just curious how you're thinking about that. Sure. So you write the wholesale market. I mean, is it a good tool to keep the cost of generation down? And even we're looking at west-wide markets that provide resilience against weather events and so ensuring resilience of the system in the face of extreme heat served by the wholesale market, but that's not the only thing that goes into retail rates. And I mentioned capacity payments for one. So the wholesale real-time price of energy doesn't reflect everything that we pay to energy generators. We also pay them to capacity payments, meaning they need to be there when we need them. And part of those payments help compensate renewable energy generators to get their projects built. We also support low-income customers through electricity bills. So the retail rates include subsidies for low-income ratepayers. About a third of our customers of the investor-owned utilities use the CARE or FERA discount that we give. And that's a big proportion of Californians. But California is an expensive place to live, and we have a large number of people who struggle to pay their energy bills. So retail rates also include that subsidy and thankfully people that can have some disposable income pay that through retail rates and we're fortunate to have that. Retail rates also include the cost of the distribution system and the cost of the transmission system. And even if, you know, customers have their own sources of generation, have storage, they're still using the distribution system, there are still technicians that come to serve them, and there are upgrades that are needed. We are, and will in the future, fund the transportation sector through electrification, through rates, retail rates. So grid upgrades will be needed to accommodate vehicle charging. That's already starting to happen and we're seeing that in rates. We're also seeing wildfire mitigation hit rates so that utilities are hurting their systems to prevent wildfires. Wildfire is something that also has an equity component because smoke impacts health. We know it impacts the entire state and so we need to make sure that our system is ready to be resilient against the hot, windy days when the conditions are still dry and to invest in a system that isn't ready in the face of climate change. So all of these things have cost. Again, we need to look at the most cost effective way to do this and so if the investments don't need to be made, we don't want them to be made because they hit rates. There are a lot of really difficult questions to look at. We just finished PG&E's GRC, their general rate case. It was a thousand page decision. Anyone who's interested can look at our docket and see the... Or if you need something to read to fall asleep at night. But no, it's actually a very interesting case and we get information from all the utilities on what do you need to pay for, what do you plan to do and we have participants in our proceedings that give us information about what they don't need to do or a cheaper way to do things and so that's something that we look at the PUC to try to keep costs down as much as possible. It's all very available for parties to look at and we also have individual rate pairs are represented by rate pair advocates. So it's not on individuals to come in and read the thousand page decision. We do have advocates who represent rate pairs from the residential side. At the same time, we want to encourage innovation and a lot of innovation has fallen on rate pairs. So when you talk about investment, the investment in innovative technologies, a lot of the repayment for that investment comes from rate pairs. So we need to be careful about that as well, although it's certainly a great way to keep California at the forefront of all of the technologies that can help us into the future. Maybe you could use the AI to read the thousand page and make a summary. That is a good idea so much to do that with ChatGP2. Yeah, let me ask you. The Air Resources Board has the responsibility to take some of the legislative mandates and goals and develop plans. And how we plan in California affects not only California but frankly many other states in our neighborhood as well as people are watching from around the world. California is a role model in many ways. So as you look at the planning, I mean there are a huge amount of renewables, injection that we want in the grid. There are transmission lines that need to be built and ask this question to the senators as well. Let me ask you, give us a view of the coordination between the Energy Commission, between the PUC, between Cal ISO, between the Air Resources Board in trying to streamline the regulatory process and actually build infrastructure. Where is the bottleneck out here? Yeah, so as you note and as the senators discussed earlier, we need a huge amount of renewable energy deployment. Those projects need to move faster. They need to get approved. We need the transmission upgrades and distribution upgrades. I think there's a really important legislative conversation going on around some of sort of the permitting challenges, some of the more specific permitting challenges and the laws governing those challenges like CEQA. I think it's really critical to have those conversations. But to your point, there is a lot we can do at the administrative agency level to try to make things smoother. I'll give you an example I was just talking about earlier, which is the charging needs for heavy duty transportation. The light duty sector, I think we're feeling like there's capacity there. We can see a path. In the heavy duty sector, it's going to take a lot of work in certain areas of the state. There's certain areas of the state where there's plenty of capacity, but it is more challenging in other places. It's also a big question. For instance, in the very large vehicles, like the Class 8 vehicles, it's unclear where the market is going in terms of how much of those vehicles are going to be hydrogen and how much of those vehicles are going to be battery electric. It makes it a little challenging to do that kind of forward planning. The coordination we have with the PUC and the Energy Commission is kind of a critical piece of that. The PUC is working on more forward planning strategies specifically on heavy duty transportation. It's really important for us to be talking to them and CEC staff about this is how the regulation works. I will tell you our advanced clean fleet regulation is very complicated because there's a lot of different timelines for deployment. Helping them figure out what those timelines are, how we anticipate it playing out, how do we prioritize in the energy sector the same things that are prioritized in the rule? For instance, the advanced clean fleets rule, the first deadline is around draged truck deployment from ports to warehouses. We need to be in constant communication with the Energy Commission, with the PUC, and with the ports themselves about how we see that rule playing out and where we see those registries happening in the draged registry. That's just kind of one small example. Another example of a success story, I think, is we have closer coordination in our incentive programs between the incentives that CARB distributes through the HVIP program to purchase the vehicles and then the Energize program, which the CEC administers for the infrastructure. So we are trying to stay as closely coordinated as possible, but sometimes it's not up to us because, for instance, we do sometimes have disconnect where an applicant in the HVIP program will sign up for vouchers to get incentives for their vehicles, but then the charging infrastructure lags behind. And so they're like, oh wait, we want to have these vehicles delivered in six months and I'm hearing from the utility that they're not going to be ready for another 12 months. So these are the kind of individual problems that we have to work to smooth out in communication with our sister agencies and with the utilities themselves. And I will say the utilities have been much more open to being creative in how to solve some of those problems. And I think that's really a positive result of the understanding that no one agency or private entity can do it by themselves. We all have to be coordinating together. Eddie, let me switch to you. Take an example of undergrounding to reduce the wildfire risk. And this is the low-income communities have wildfire risk, but the policy framework for undergrounding is not quite what is followed based on equity. So how would you, this is just one example. There could be many others. When you look at this transition from an equity point of view and you look at some of the plans, how would you overlay equity in this transition and say that if you're going to do this, we've got to look at it with this lens. Is that happening? And if not, should more of this be happening? What's your thought? I think there are two different levels and perhaps President Reynolds can even speak more to the rate structure and the way it potentially protects moderate to low-income homeowners or ratepayers generally. But that would be one level I'd look at when talking about undergrounding and just essentially the cost of a resiliency we had not anticipated even five years ago that we're now rushing toward. The other second thing, again, to return to the idea of community benefits is perhaps the workforce development. I do know one narrative that's often pushed around undergrounding is the idea of creating jobs that this creates a lot of potential long-term jobs around building futuristic transmission structure. And then when you create those jobs, it's not just about union jobs, but a concept called local hiring. So if you have a certain project who's getting hired within that radius of a project is the basic concept of local hiring and how does it tie into local job training systems that can ultimately feed into this vision that everybody knows the term green new deal but ideally inequitable in just economy where everybody can share the economic benefits. It's a hard vision. Union politics itself, labor politics is something that Brightline's very familiar with having done mandatory local hire in San Francisco, but it is possible. It's not just local ordinances, even state law can potentially require it. We're even seeing federal projects at the DOT level that require local hiring, but through even direct benefit agreements, community benefit agreements from the developer with the community. It's all an act of negotiation at the end of the day to determine what's best for the community. We're going to open it up for a question, but let me ask you since you mentioned workforce, we think we are in some of the workforce development business ourselves. What would you tell the young Leanne, the young Alice and the young Eddie who are there in a UC system out here or a Cal State system, or maybe at Stanford, what would you tell them in terms of your lessons learned from your own life and the future ahead that you see? Leanne? I guess I would start by saying don't set yourself on too rigid of a path no matter what you do, right? As you build your career, you want to think about experiences and building blocks, but always be open to where those experiences and building blocks are going to take you. So have a vision for your career. If your vision is, I want to make the world better. I appreciated the senator's points about public service being really important. Speaking of someone who came out of school with a heavy debt load, I can understand that that's not an option for everyone. So being creative about looking for jobs that include potentially a debt forgiveness component to them, being able to take advantage of some of those federal programs. But also recognizing that if you have a vision for your career to make change and make good, be open to the possibilities and where those might take you and don't get too set on a specific path because there are industries that didn't exist five years ago, 10 years ago, 20 years ago. So having that flexibility I think is so important. Alice? Just to tee off of something, Lance, I also came out of school with a lot of debt and so public service was not an option for me at the beginning and a lot of people said, if you go into the private sector, you'll never go back because you'll get used to it and it's really hard to transition into the public sector. It's not necessarily true. You can go into the private sector, get a lot of good training, maybe you stay in the private sector and you might include shifting into the public sector. The PUC is hiring. We have... We are too. I'm hiring too. See? Options. We have a lot of dedicated staff members who are doing the work that they do because they care about it and a lot of them come from a place where they worked really hard in school, they focused on learning and getting an education that would support them with a technical knowledge to come to a place like this at CPUC and so I would encourage students, if you're thinking about energy, there are lots of opportunities for you and just try to explore the full range of opportunities. We did fortunately have a shot school fellowship this summer, so Stanford came from Stanford. She was fantastic. A graduate student at Stanford, she worked in my office and so there are opportunities like that to explore different agencies throughout state government and so I would say just keep an open mind, as Leanne said, and be open to different paths. Maybe? I'll share something about myself that I normally do not do at conferences. I actually haven't done this before besides a class at Brown which were relatively small convenings. So I do illustration work. I've been doing it more seriously since the pandemic and the Instagram account I have has grown and grown and nowadays I'm going to have an upcoming graphic memoir about my career development, the work that I've done published by Penguin Random House in April 2024. So it's been an extraordinary trajectory to even get to that point but part of the reason why I wanted to create that story was what's not talked a lot about is the sacrifice needed to make environmental policy work and happen and I get personally nervous as a gentle argument, counter argument to what President Reynolds was saying. I get sometimes nervous when people go into the private sector, think they'll make, and this is not what I'm saying here, is the ideal pathway, but make a ton of money and then come back with a plan to save the world. That makes me nervous because in my mind that's what a James Bond villain does sometimes and I just worry sometimes that we don't think a lot about the trade-offs that we make in our life and in some ways I think the graphic memoir that I've created will indicate in some ways I've made too severe of a trade-off. I think about like have I been a dummy that honestly for working in the nonprofit sector as long as I have. I've always believed in the mission. I think it's a result of my own family background that I'm still doing what I do but when we talk about environmental policy, environmental careers, I also want to make sure that we set our sights on a social mission not just about making a quick buck, hopefully. Let me ask you, Leon. What was the... I don't know if you had plans, right, when you were college to become the head of the Air Resources Board. So what was the most pleasant surprise you have had as the president of Air Resources Board? Oh, that's a great question. Well, you know, when I was in high school I wanted to be Secretary of State, so I don't know. That was a... I clearly moved away from foreign policy. So I guess I would say that has been the thing that I have... The biggest surprise I think I enjoy most is the international engagement. Last year I visited seven different countries. You know, spoke with people from... in Japan, in Mexico, I had an opportunity to go to the European Union and advocate for strong heavy-duty standards. And it's really a great opportunity to learn from other countries what they're doing. You know, when I went to China and saw their electric vehicle deployment and their offshore wind deployment, it was just... it was great to see. And so I... And I think it's, as I mentioned earlier, you know, it's so important. California is... We're 1% of worldwide greenhouse gas emissions, but because we have been able to, through our strong economy, we've been able to... and our strong policies, we've been able to, you know, be a thought leader, drive innovation, show how deployment can work, and the opportunity to share that experience and hear from others and figure out how we can make our policies and deployment better I think is the thing that's been most enjoyable about my job. Alice, when you were in Stanford, I don't know if you had plans to become the president of the California Public Utility Commission. So if you had, what was the... Has it lived up to your expectations? And if not, what was the most pleasant surprise that you have encountered? Well, I'll start by saying that I think Leigh-Anne would make a fantastic secretary of state. So... But no, I never thought I would be the president of the PC. I'm a lawyer by training, so I graduated from Stanford with a philosophy degree, didn't quite know what I wanted to do, and ended up going to law school, and really enjoyed the practice of law, but also kind of wanted to do things that felt more interesting to me. I had always cared about environmental work and tried to do as much of it as I could, and so got into state government. And then just really enjoyed state government and just feel like we have a lot of tools, we have more tools than what a litigator brings to the table, being as a part, being an administrative branch of state government. We work with the legislature, and then we implement laws, and we work with our litigators, and so we kind of have the full range of tools to build a government that works for the people. So I've enjoyed doing that, and I guess, you know, as far as a surprise at the PC, I think, you know, I learned, I was in the governor's office before, so I knew a little bit about what the PC did. It was a, not necessarily a surprise, but we're very welcome to me to see the quality of the staff and the dedication of the staff and work more closely with the staff at the CPUC. And so to see a full agency, we have 1,500 people who are, you know, really believe in what they're doing was important to me. The other thing they'll add is that I've really enjoyed working with commissioners throughout the country. So Public Utilities Commission, through our national organization, and then especially the Western commissioners who are working together with California on reliability and cleaner energy and cost-effectiveness. And so that has been just a real pleasure, and I've enjoyed learning from them and hopefully spreading some of what we're doing too throughout the West and throughout the country. Fantastic. We're going to open it up for questions now. I just encourage people to ask short questions so that we can have many more. So let's start with this side and then we'll sort of go back and go back and forth. Anyone from this side, questions? Yes. You can barely see the headlights. Okay. Go ahead. Hi. Thanks so much for your time. I'm Kailash Raman. I'm from FormEnergy. I work on a strategy and market development team. I wanted to ask about California's fleet of gas generators and disadvantaged communities. I believe the state has roughly 15 gigawatts of gas in disadvantaged communities or adjacent to them. And out of that 15, about 10 are in local reliability areas where they're being kept online due to kind of transmission constraints. So I wanted to ask what the state's vision is for ultimately transitioning away from these resources. Sure. I mean, I think it's through our planning process. We're looking at reliability needs both on a system level and a local level. Most of the gas plants are continued to be needed for system reliability in extreme conditions. One thing that we did recently was start a strategic reliability reserve. And so kind of the concept that I mentioned before is that we're having these wide variations in demand on, at this point, it's hot summer days. And we have to plan for that. And we're trying to look at new ways to do that. So on a small number of days in the summer, we need a large number of resources. And because, of course, reliability events affect low-income communities disproportionately, too. If the power is going out, there are some people that are hit harder than others. And so in planning for reliability, we created a reserve that would be controlled by the state where the state could make decisions about holding those resources out of the market so the state doesn't need to necessarily be compensated in order to have a viable business plan. And we shifted some of our gas resources recently into the reliability reserve so that they were there when we needed them, but we're not running them just because the private owner needs to continue to support the financial model. And with that transfer, those resources were taken out of the wholesale market. So they no longer bid in to the market. Some resources bid in, they don't get taken if we don't need them, but they're not even bid in at all. And so I think it's a really great model on how we can ensure that we have enough reliability but also be ready for those extreme events. I mean, look, you're from FormEnergy so I'll say also that we are looking very closely in evaluating long-duration energy storage. We know that some of the gas plants also provide the long-term, those days when the sun isn't shining and the batteries aren't able to charge up. So looking forward in the future as we model what we're going to need for the system, we're showing that in the future we are absolutely going to need long-duration energy storage. And so the question of how we do that, how we encourage it, how we get it at the right time, at the right cost is something we're really thinking a lot about. All right, let's move to that side. The lady in red. Hi, thanks. I'm Mindy Craig, Blue Point Planning. Thank you for this really thoughtful panel. So one of the things that seems to be a common baseline for everybody is that we're just doing like for like. We aren't asking anybody to make any compromises or to change what we're doing in terms of our energy use. And I'm curious, you know, to what end should we, as a society, as a state be looking at actually reducing our energy use overall and not planning for the highest worst case, but actually looking and say, we need to be more equitable, we need to be more affordable, and therefore we actually do have to make some compromises and can't have 100% or 120% of where we are. Eddie, you want to take it? I don't have the answer to this, but I also wanted to add like two more sentences to layer onto that is what happens when the power demand goes up, right? And when we're talking about charging EVs and, you know, electrifying homes, like in other words, the demand curve, how was that met the other day? And maybe I'll kick it to the regulators to answer this. I'm going to say something and I'll pass it over to Alice, but I guess I would quibble a little bit with the premise because I actually think it's not true what we're just doing like for like, I think we are really thinking much, much more deeper and systematically. And, you know, like the conversation around reliability is a great example. And you mentioned that earlier today that, you know, the grid was built to do a certain thing in a certain way with certain types of resources. And so what Alice has to do is sort of rethink that whole thing and figure out, you know, how you bring the right resources. What are the right policies and programs? What are the right market signals? What's the right market structure that needs to happen to shift? Kind of the form energy example is a good example. Like, you know, how do you think about the market structure for demand response? How do you think about the market structure for long duration storage? How do you think about those planning things? How do you continue to make progress on energy efficiency, which is always as Alice mentioned, sort of your first thing you're trying to do. And I think all of those things are happening. And one of the reasons they are happening is because if the lights go out then the support for these policies is affected, right? So we have to have a solid grid. If we are going to get people to move away from their natural gas appliances and towards energy, move their electricity towards transportation, towards electricity, they have to be confident that it's going to be there. And we are on a trajectory where we want to, for the first time in many decades of state policy, we do want demand to go up, but we want it to go up in a clean, efficient way. So I don't think we're trying to do like for like, Alice? Yeah, so I was going to start at the same place you did, Leanne, is that I don't think that that's true. We are asking people, individual California to think about the way they do things differently. Businesses to think about the way they do things differently. We do have an existing grid, and so we have to take that into account. And we have to take into account what the grid needs to accommodate all of these new changes. But the idea of saying to people, look, if you're going to charge your car, you need to think about when you charge it. If you're going to use electricity, it's not all about using less necessarily. It's about using it at the right time. Because, you know, so if we had, and you'll start hearing more and more about the coincidental peak, if you had every person charge in, plug in their electric vehicle in 2035, what is that, including heavy duty trucks, and you know, so if everyone's charging at the same time, what do you need to plan? The system that you need to plan to meet that demand is different than what we're planning for. We don't want that to happen. We are going to be using responsive technologies, both in rate design and other types of incentives to make sure that the grid is managed and used efficiently and that demand is managed and used. We're doing a lot of thinking about flexible rates and flexible demand at the PUC. But we also need to make sure that we're not just envisioning a customer who lives in Los Altos Hills and has an electric vehicle and, you know, can run their dishwasher at night or do all of the things that they need to do on a managed schedule. We're also thinking about people who live in SROs and people who live in inner cities, people who live in West Oakland and have jobs that don't allow them to charge their vehicles at the time when the PUC is telling them would be a good time to charge them. And so there are a lot of complicated questions that we're thinking about, but we very much are encouraging people to not think about business as usual. One quick thing to add. I did want to appreciate the CPC for your recent IRP decision that really takes into account the idea of on-lotting new sources of power generation, whether it's geothermal, offshore wind. There's a lot to like in the way our agencies are moving toward hopefully what's going to be a cleaner, more resilient grid. But it's also dependent on our ability to build to something we do. Let's move over here to the next question. Hi, my name is Shen Wang from the Green Development Institute. I have a question about climate finance. What financial instruments or tools do you think we should use most frequently or most, you know, like to support the energy transition? Thanks. That's a very broad question. Financial instruments. Actually, maybe I could put a little finer touch to this. There are lots of now federal incentives that are coming in into this. How are you planning from the state side to leverage the financial instruments into the project finance or other kind of investments for all the renewables and the infrastructure that needs to be built? How are you thinking about it? I think the most important thing is to make sure that we do not have policy decisions at the federal and the state level that are conflicting. Right? They need to be consistent. And so, you know, our staff spends a lot of time watching what's happening at the federal level, commenting on proposals, and making sure that we are not moving in opposite directions. I think that the federal, what the federal government is doing at this time is extremely important, extremely helpful for California since we are at this breaking point in rates and just our affordability crisis that we have here. Lance Ray, we need to make sure that our policies are consistent and that the programs work for us. We're trying to do so much, and we're ahead of other states in many ways. And so, some programs that are designed for West Virginia might not be great for California. But we need to try to fit into the federal programs to the greatest extent we can. I think it's important to recognize that the tax credits that the federal government has offered and extended have been very, very important and played a huge role. Great. Any questions from this side? Yes, ma'am? Claire Broom, 350 Bay Area. Thank you for a really engaging panel and important information. President Reynolds, you and both Senator Stern and Becker mentioned the importance of keeping the lights on. But as Lumen has demonstrated, over 95% of the power outages for customers are on the distribution grid. So I'd like to ask when the CPUC will put a value on resilience when they do their cost-effectiveness studies, particularly for distributed energy resources? So I think we have an open proceeding that relates to that question. I think 350 is a party. I don't think I should comment on that, but maybe others want to. I think if it's an active case, I guess you cannot talk about it. We'll shelve that for the time being. But let me ask you this issue about reliability and about the system and the resilience. I mean, there is an inherent tension out here. One is that you want as little risk as possible so that the things are reliable. On the other hand, we know there's a transition that we need to make that involves risk. So that is the inherent tension that we're dealing with out here, right? And how do you manage to navigate this in terms of risk? And I was going to ask you, there are lots of new technologies that are being developed. Is there a process in California to be able to de-risk it so that you integrate it into the system as rapidly as possible, but as little risk? Are you thinking about this in the Air Resources Board, for example? Yeah, I mean, I think all of the, you know, CEC, PUC, and CARB are all thinking about that in sort of our own ways. I think, you know, one way to... It is the tension, right? And I'll kind of restate the tension. You know, one way to reduce risk is to create redundancy, but redundancy increased costs. And so how can you de-risk without creating those additional costs? And I think there's being very clear about what you're trying to achieve and what are the ways you can achieve it without deploying new resources. You know, being creative around a lot of the work that the PUC is doing around demand response and other market opportunities to create those redundancies without building new resources. And, you know, also thinking about ways that you can achieve as much benefit from each of your programs, right? Circling back to our Advanced Clean Fleets rule. I mean, we really spent a lot of time thinking about how do you get the most air quality and climate benefits in structuring the program, but at the same time, really pushing innovation so that that innovation in the sector is as effective as possible. I think one thing that we do is we create pilot programs so to test new technologies, new rate designs, and we challenge our regulated utilities and also work together with the community choice aggregators to come forward with innovative pilot programs. So we have many. One of them that we recently approved is to take another step in creative rate reform and to have very dynamic rates and appliances and ag pumps also that respond to rate changes. And then we do what was talked about earlier is we have a shadow bill, and so the program doesn't cost the customer money, and in fact they only benefit if they're able to modify their rates in a way that matches this new structure that we're developing. And so it's a way to test a rate structure with a limited number of customers because there is a cost, of course. And then we study the results and we see how we can build and improve. Let me ask the last question. And Leanne, I think you triggered this. I was not planning to go there, but you mentioned about the international, all your visits internationally, et cetera. And the way I look at it is that every country, every region has a different initial condition, has a different constraints of boundary conditions. And when you go around, help us think about how you place California in the world. What are the lessons learned from California that can be used worldwide and what are the lessons worldwide that can be used out here? What are the best practices? Well, that's a big question. I guess I'll highlight a couple things. As Alice mentioned, sort of trying things out in a smaller scale and then deploying them in a larger scale, I think that's one way to think about it. As you think about decarbonizing different sectors of the economy, if you pick strategies that might create technologies that can then be deployed to other sectors, that's a really effective way of kind of expanding your... Cool benefits. Right. So we started with battery technology for vehicles and that battery technology is now scaling to be used in different ways. I think there's an opportunity to think about that with hydrogen, right? People are like, okay, you can start with hydrogen in fuel cells or in industrial processes and how can you take that technology and scale it up? In India, they're doing an amazing job of getting rid of two-stroke engines and they're deploying a lot of sort of battery swapping and there's some battery swapping going on in China. We don't do that in the United States. So is that something we need to think about? So I guess sort of using technology, incentivizing technology and then trying to use that technology in other ways and in other sectors. This is a fantastic discussion. This could have gone on for much longer. Let's give a big round of applause for the panelists out here. Thank you so much for your service. Thank you.