 Hi, everyone. Welcome to the SmartPrix Seminar. Our speaker today is Dr. Anita Perkins. She's from the city of Palauco Utility. She's talked to Palauco about decarbonisation today. Let me remind you that these are the presentations of this course. We recorded all the presentations, so if you need to review any of them, you can send us an email and we'll send you the link. Dr. Anita Perkins is a sample graduate person. As you receive her PhD in mechanical engineering, I believe it's 2015 or 14 years. She has worked on microgrid projects in Alaska and American Samoa before joining the city of Palauco Utility. She's currently the manager of the program for emerging technologies at the city of Palauco Utility. She also manages and optimises the largest electric contract on the utility. This is a hydroelectric contract which provides about 45% of the electricity to the city of Palauco. Okay, let's welcome our speaker. Yeah, it's a pleasure to be here. You know, I understand there's a variety of backgrounds and levels of expertise here and those participating remotely. So it'll probably flow a little better if you jot down questions as you go because all my interesting slides are at the end. So the first step is just kind of intro and background. But so anything that you don't know the acronym for or you're confused, all the slides should be numbered, should be here. And so I'll just jump into it. And can you remind me about how long you want me to talk versus Q&A? Most of the time I'll talk about 45. Okay, so I get 35 now and this should end by around 23. Okay, yeah, so I'll try to reserve most of it for Q&A because I think that's more interesting. Welcome. So city of Palauco Utilities is a municipal utility. There are six utilities. Six utilities, water, wastewater, electric, gas, storm drain and fiber. I work predominantly with the electric utility. It's really interesting to be at a municipal utility that's with electric and gas, given that the big push nationally, globally, and certainly in California is to transition essentially all natural gas end uses to electric. So the idea is to wind down all of the natural gas infrastructure and essentially have no natural gas utility anymore. So that is, it's a really interesting time from that perspective and the electricity markets, as you might have noticed with the rolling brownouts the last couple of years, I guess, August 2020 was when we really had one, but we came really close this last summer. And that speaks to a lot of structural changes going on. We can get into that. Interesting things are not always fun when they happen on your spouse's birthday or other things like that. This is from Bloomberg 2020. And what it represents is that out of 850 cities around the world of various sizes, Palo Alto, the city of Palo Alto is leading in the actual achievement of its sustainability goal, which is an 80% reduction in carbon emissions from 1990 levels by 2030. So not what the goal was set at, but the actual progress towards the goal, which is great, which is really cool in it. And I can speak more about that. But it also speaks to how a lot of the low-hanging fruit is the easiest step to get to and to make bigger emissions reductions. We have to do still a lot more work. So this, this is from 1990 to today, 2018, but pretty close to this in 2021. Essentially, the way the progress to date for emissions reduction has been to only have long-term contracts for zero carbon electricity and then to purchase offsets for the natural gas. And, you know, some work on, we had, there's, there's some other things around the edges, but, but that's basically where the progress has come from to date. And as you can see, the red bar is the one thing I want to draw your attention to. You can't read the typeings, not so important, but the green was power emissions. We took those away. The blue is natural gas emissions. If you believe in offsets, then we have taken those out of the picture. And then the red is transportation and transportation is, it's coming. It's, it's tricky, but it's coming. So utilities have many levers to try to help lower CO2 emissions. And of course, staff isn't out there deciding what Palo Alto is going to do. The community of Palo Alto has to do that. And they're doing it via their elected officials. So the city council of Palo Alto is actually our board of directors. And so you have laymen, smart laymen, making really transformative energy decisions. That's really, it's interesting. But at the same time, they're very connected to that constituency. It's really different than PG&E, you know, which has moderate connection to the community. So you have rates, how those are structured, incentive programs, city mandates, where we source our, our energy and water, and then some pilots. We have 100% carbon free electricity with 30% lower rates than within PG&E. 100% carbon neutral natural gas. That's the offsets. That's it. Carbon neutral, you could say carbon offset natural gas. All electric mandate for new residences. So you must design a new home with only electric and natural gas. Efficiency programs. Palo Alto is not a high growth city. So every year, the efficiency programs run by our utility have the equivalent of removing 800 homes from the city in terms of efficiency games. It's really aggressive for a low growth city. Highest EV adoption in the nation, 30% of new vehicles, 2.5% of electricity from N city, solar. And we're swapping gas and water space, gas space heaters and water and gas water heaters for new electric heat pumps, space and water heaters. So heat pumps are like refrigerators but you care about the heat side of it instead of the cooling side of it. So you just basically run a refrigerator backwards. This is all great. And it's only gotten us half of the way to this, you know, a little more than half of the way to our 80% reduction by 2030, which, you know, if you've been watching the news, it's actually not enough, even if what we're accomplished on a global scale to kind of alleviate where we're going with global warming. So what are we going to do with this more? There's a 2020 action, climate action plan, you know, all of these things. These are all different areas. And so we have stuff there and now I'm getting to the interesting part, you know, of course, we want to marginal carbon curve. And that's just basically, where does your money go the farthest if you care about chipping away and carbon, you know, get the low hanging fruit first. But the problem with some of those curves is that they misunderstand people's resistance or, or legal matters or other things like that. So these are really interesting. But, you know, and it takes a lot of work, you know, I think the key research questions are really rate structures. There's a ton of, you know, rate structures are sending the signal to customers of what you want them to do. And everything about our supply and our transmission and our demand is different now. So these legacy rate structures that are, you know, litigated things that are very tightly constrained and what you can do and what you can't do, you know, these have to be adjusted. So and I'll talk more about it later. This is kind of an overview of what we're going to get into interesting stuff. How to wind down a natural gas utility equitably. So you could do things like pruning, where you prune back from kind of the least, least profitable areas, piecemeal, where you electrify one appliance at a time, natural gas bands, you can have renewable natural gas. This is a really interesting area. And I'm hoping that somebody here wants to do is in another class or wants to do an independent study on some of these areas, because it's a really data rich dynamic time. And we don't have time to do even 10% of the analysis that I think is out there. So smart panels basically have smart circuit breakers in them, and you can connect different appliances, and you can do some interesting things, like throttle them or use them for shaping demand for reliability purposes, which is very valuable these days. And also if we're going all electric, we as a community, we would be removing one of the energy services from people's homes. And people have a natural aversion that I understand, I'm an engineer, we have infrastructure there, I have two sources of energy, why would I give up one of them? But natural gas is a very, very hard thing to decarbonize like as in that thing, molecule. So that's, you know, electrifying everything really is the cheapest path. So this is on rate structures, everything about supply, transmission and demand has changed. What that means is that often the marginal marginal resource that's the last electricity resource to be picked up is free, because it's curtailed renewables that we have surplus because they're inflexible. And the whole rate structure was designed for that to be a really, really expensive gas peager plant. What do you do with that, you know, like that legacy rate structure? So that's where like, tiered rate structures come from. Okay, you know, and it's very, it's a jumpy signal, you know, it's free and then it's expensive, it's free and then it's expensive. What that means, you know, in combination with having to harden transmission because of wildfires and extreme wind events and extreme dry wind events, along with solar and other things is that if you actually pass through the true cost of the system right now, you're going to end up gouging the poorest, least sophisticated customers. And while that's physical, is it fair? Is it equitable? The people that can't shape their demands and don't have a smart control panel and don't have solar and don't have a smart EV that can basically gain the grid, you know, should they be paying a really high fixed cost because that's the true cost of the system. It's all in the wires. It's not in the generation anymore, right? That's a really hard thing to grapple with and we basically need really cheap smart devices to like it would be one way to fix it because right now the whole rate structure is upside down. It doesn't represent reality and it's a very careful stepwise thing to try to try to answer these questions, you know, and then if we electrify everything but have our tiered rate structure, we're penalizing the people who are decarbonizing their homes right now, right? You know, so we have to, this is the media thing out there, but what is solar worth on your home, right? If it's making your neighbor's fixed costs go up more, you know, and then you purchase the solar system thinking you're going to make money or you know, recoup your costs over 20 years and the utility can up your fixed fee next year and they can up it again another year. So it never pans out for you. You have no financial certainty. So very unpopular questions because there's no easy good answers but really powerful. You know, if you get it right and you do some smart things that save everybody money and there are some things out there, you know, these are some of the really interesting questions and so smart control panels are actually a really good answer to this what and we can talk talk more about that. So this is smart control panels. Essentially the reason that we are having reliability problems in the summer in California is because we are an energy only market and so they just they don't the dispatchability of that energy is not priced in to the wholesale market. It's in this other course market called resource adequacy and it's never been an issue before because all the energy was flexible before where they just had gas speakers and they turned a lot off and now we're faced with some big problems because essentially our market was not designed for the resources that are serving a lot of the load. So rather than you know traditionally you turn on your electric kettle or you know hot water heater or whatever and then and then the generation follows you right. There's a big there's a small morning peak and a big evening peak and now one of the most promising things is to have through various devices a smart circuit breaker and smart electrical panels being some of them to shape your demand around when their surplus wind when their surplus solar there's always surplus solar from 10 to 4 you know always surplus solar. So if you can have an electric heat pump water heater three heat that you have a tightly sealed house can preheat your house or the heat pump space heater charge your review of your home on the weekends you know anything you can do there you can shape your home loads to match you know match the generation when it's available that is going to be the cheapest way to decarbonize the grid otherwise we have to build three times as many renewables in places people don't always want to build them like protected areas like farmland you know like things like that because if they're not flexible you need a lot more because you need to just play the odds with some things going and then you have climate change on top of it which is bad for hydroelectric in the west. So and this also smart circuit panels also have the benefit of if you are actually going to electrify everybody's home you're going to double or triple the electrical load on the system so then you have to have bigger wires and you have to have bigger transformers and you have to have you to upgrade the whole system but it turns out most of the system is not used most of the time it's it's tremendously oversized if you can be smart and flatten out your demand so these so basically that's what a smart panel does is it flattens your demand you pre-designate which devices you want to make sure don't put you over your sort of current limit like your EV charger and then it saves everybody money we can talk more about it span.io is a good example there are cheaper smart circuit breakers themselves and then how should a natural gas utility be when I'm down I know you know this is smart bits and watts here but atoms matter too and methane is just a very hard molecule to manufacture it takes a lot of energy to get those four carbon bonds with hydrogen so you know you can make I think methane in a lab or or with green electricity it's super super super super energy intensive so that's why we're electrifying everything right you know people have been trying there's a little bit of renewable natural gas out there sure but you're going to pay a big energetic price so it's more efficient and cheaper to electrify everything but if only the wealthiest people can afford to electrify their homes the people that are left on the system will pay higher and higher costs to carry the fixed costs and so again you don't want to be in the situation of climate versus equity you want to think about it it's hardly if you if you prune a lot of the lines going out to single family homes which are the least dense and kind of the least profitable from a utility perspective prune those back saves everybody money but do it you know a coldest act at a time a line at a time especially places are um especially of lines are you know due to be due to be replaced and PGD and others are actually doing this so yeah this is what I'm excited about I've worked on a number of collaborations with RPE and PowerNet and AutoGrid and I just have to say after working in Alaska in American Smova we are so lucky here we have a super mild climate and we're not on an island so this is really surmountable problems here but it's more about being smart and figuring out how to share the money not that there isn't enough money to go around you know so anyway that's that's kind of my talk in a nutshell and I'll go to I guess the Q&A go back and I'm going to go the slide I want to hang out on this year because these are what I think are the most interesting things I was looking forward to talking about Huntington Beach it's going to be great all right oh Craig hi um one of the biggest opportunities to be able to get solar dormitory microids um you know I think the biggest opportunities for Palo Alto to get solar dormitory microgrids um I think starting within a premise so all what that means is behind the meter so you're not wheeling power along utility lines that you don't own as customers right so start at the premise I would work with organizations that want emergency resiliency like especially multifamily is very vulnerable and emergencies are disasters um or um shelters you know places that in say a big earthquake you would want additional resiliency which kind of ballot um makes the cost for a while um why not simply having said for the special solar that pays time that delivery rates are hard yes did we don't have to you rates in Palo Alto because we don't have smart readers yet because it didn't make sense um financially sorry oh I was at Craig Lewis 150 um it can you read the question oh sorry yeah some folks online sorry about that yeah okay so yeah so I'll just finish I'll keep going with the Craig Lewis 150 why not simply having synapse for dispatchable solar that pays time of delivery rates with higher rewards when energy is most valuable to CPIU dispatchable solar is easily enabled with energy storage and TOD stratified rewards um by the straightforward matching principle um yes so the answer is yes I think that will happen with the time of you know we could do it now with smart solar and storage systems but we would have to we'd have to have an API with every single house or premise that had one of these systems and then we would have to compensate them at a agreed upon rate for every window of time and that is a lot of overhead on the utility side so by the time we price that in for our time to like make sure all the APIs are working with every single different brand of solar and storage um there isn't very much profit left to give these solar and storage people a better better return on their investment and there's not much profit in the first place because solar and storage is still much much more expensive than utility scale solar and storage because just the economies of scale so it's it's like doing a lot of work for pennies that kind of everyone would have to pay for because it's utility staff time so you know it's it's physically it's not a bad thing at all it's just um you know and there there's some interesting ways to slice that if you have larger installations in city like something down at the airport parking lot at the research parking lot where you just have to have one api and validate when it's delivering okay suppose i'm less of a labor and methane offset what is the timeline approach yes i'm so glad someone asked the offset question um i don't believe in methane offsets i think they're fine but i think palo Alto can do better especially because we're a natural gas utility i think methane offsets are better used for something you do not exercise direct control over palo Alto exercises direct control over having a natural gas utility so it's methane offsets are not counted in the 2020 update of the of the s cap and it means that we have to do a lot more work before 2030 um and turn off gas from entire streets you know the CEC just hosted PG and so called so called gas um yesterday and said it's really hard to get a whole bunch of neighbors to agree to cut off the gas lines they said you know on a single street maybe half the people will cut off their gasoline you know you actually remove it cap it you don't want it leaking um and then it'll be sort of that then they'll start talking to their neighbors and then maybe the dominoes will start falling so it's still going to be piecemeal in that respect which is tough because the the last it's a game of musical chairs and the last one standing ends up paying the whole cost of the system so you kind of you need to do it you know it's your work we're basically planning if we go ahead with the goals we're planning to kind of create almost our own death spiral on the natural gas utility where there's fewer and fewer customers to support the natural gas utility and then it becomes more and more expensive over time for residential not on commercial commercials on the on the trunks and so it's less it's less expensive anyway yeah so i have it on that vein as you draw down the natural gas utility there's a budget that the city of california has for that right is there a way to subsidize that as you go a little bit with that budget knowing that eventually it's going to go away that cost disappears yeah there are a lot of it has to be done very carefully because there are so many constraints actually in the constitution of california via the proposition uh mechanism in california and i will just say everyone should read propositions really really carefully because they are then once passed they become part of the constitution of california and they're basically impossible to get rid of they're not normal laws and they like no other state system and it's very very dangerous and so one of the things there is that proposition i think prop 26 um designates that we can only charge cost-based rates and so if we're trying to look into the future we have to be very careful that we're not overcharging right now you know that we're you know that we can defend that in court because it is litigated annually so uh by you know rate payer advocates like it's not a bad thing but yeah so the language is really strict so you know wind down yes and the other thing is that different different customer classes cost a different amount to serve that's why commercial rates are cheaper than residential rates because it takes less pipe to get more gas there right so like single family the the natural if we pruned all of the single family um from the current natural gas system in Palo Alto the utility would actually become more profitable because those are you know we're obligated to serve those or worse had been obligated to serve those and so because we're not a monopoly and so we have to serve everyone not just the profit you know more profitable ones so so you know things to think about and there's just the single family solutions for electrification are just further along than you know industrial furnaces and like commercial cooking operations are just harder to electrify not impossible but harder um okay how about combined financing for total upgrade property by property yes financing is a great answer to this you know it's it is hard I don't know if anyone's aware but um housing's expensive in this area and so so when you talk about doing anything you're adding cost and that like becomes an equity thing in itself but financing is definitely one way to think about it and it makes it makes a lot more tractable I think the analysis is that it's about you know to accomplish every to basically accomplish the 80 by 30 goal in Palo Alto it's $750 million and so that can be financed by individuals and by the utility but it's big number and so you know and it's utility has certain lovers and and not and yeah not every you know people need to step up and make their own decisions as well electricity for all of the lowest income there is electricity rates of major concerns yeah I mean subsidy yeah so I mean this this is true the one thing is that for oh sorry I'm supposed to read it for all but the lowest income earners are electricity rates really a major concern for customers unlike manufacturers and commercial establishments who pass on the overhead to cost consumers isn't a few pennies on the way one way or another per kilowatt hour generally insignificant for most people subsidies can help the lowest income earners so you know this this is a hard one so we'll start with the subsidies bit public utilities have private utilities like PG&E are are mandated by the CPUC to have a low income lower rate public utilities have a code that they follow to do the same thing and income qualified lower rate but it's unclear if it's actually in conflict with the you can only charge your costs of prop 26 so it's you know and actually on the water side we used to have a low income rate and it was challenged and it had to go away because it wasn't cost-based like if just because you make less money than that guy doesn't mean it costs less to serve you so like that's the way that these this fairness ends up being very regressive and so so that's a tough one it's there right now but it might not survive a legal challenge and you know I think it's really tricky because for the lowest income earners electricity you know energy maybe not in our climate but energy can be like 30 percent of their their take home you know so it that's the problem with energy in general is it has to be cheap just like food has to be cheap because you can't live without it so it's it's not biotech you can't make a million dollars every 15 minutes because it needs to be accessible um so yeah it's tough one um but you know I see your point certainly in Palo Alto um you know although there's you know there's a lot of renters in Palo Alto okay okay for yeah yeah about so should I read this one yes okay about smart trigger breaker panel turn off turn on off only provide discreet that continuous control the loads as hard for me as customer in a one utility to turn off my home loads frequently did I not understand correctly what you meant by shaping loads my smart breakers can you explain challenges for utility to promote the smart breakers so customers like me yes so glad you asked this question so something that's really interesting Tom Kavitz here too man um something that is really interesting about smart about smart circuit breakers is um that first of all there's a number of really great use cases one is that a lot of homes have a hundred amp panel and the way an engineer goes in and sizes the panel they take all of the loads at once and assume they're all going to be on it once and then they basically double it to make sure that you've never you know and that they never trips there and so when you put an EV and an induction stove and the heat pump water heater and heat pump space heater on that sucker all the sudden you need 400 amps especially be up to EV and so so that's not true you don't have to run all those at once you wouldn't need to and you wouldn't want to size the system for that anyway so one of the really cool applications for a smart control panel is actually to go in as a sub panel downstream on the customer side so the utility panel is still in place and the sub panel will trip before your utility panel so you do not have to pay to up size your service or both which can get into the $30,000 so up size your service because if you trigger a knock on we're like now we need to hire transform and everything else that that falls back on you for the cost so so and then you can prioritize which ones you want to trip first your EV charger is a great example of like something that is not going to be bust if you if you you know have that as the first to kick off your hot water heater actually like can maintain 48 hours of hot water then it needs to be up for a couple hours great things like that and if you just give it a little bit of playing your thermostat for your heat pump space heater central or mini split those are great too so that's a really cool application the other thing is that in the event of an emergency if you gave the utility permission to throttle your whole panel what you would be left to say you have a hundred amp panel and there's a major emergency and I say okay now you have a 75 amp panel because I need to know exactly what I'm dealing with um you would have complete discretion within that 75 amp it wouldn't be me going in and turning down your hot water heater or your Tesla or whatever else so I think that's a pretty cool application as well um yeah it is it is discreet not continuous um but you know it's you know I'm unfamiliar with weed grid and some other you know things for kind of it could be yeah it could be exactly and I mean it's it's because there's so because these things are sized so conservatively you're really only dealing with this less than 10 percent of the time you know so it's really just a so yeah do you mind if I add one yes but this month meter yeah that was a big debate 10 or a dozen years ago yeah and after 10 years or dozen years what did you see this perspective was not everything yeah yeah 10 years ago the solar and weighing has not this kind of opportunity or issues yeah yeah no it's not it wasn't actually well I mean I wasn't at the city 10 years ago but I in the report um it just didn't pencil out for Palo Alto because we have meter readers that go to each premise and read the electricity natural gas and water so our meter readers were effectively one third the cost of you know as like Alameda has only power utility right so the cost savings like it had to be one third the price that the smart readers need to be one third the price to pencil out for us and so it just didn't pencil out plus water water meters are under ground so you need like really good radios to to actually otherwise you still have a meter reader that save any of the cost basically um so um yeah and so you know it's happening and the rule that's like 2024 and luckily the price of smart readers has come way down and the back end and everything there is I think so you know um especially you mean from a privacy perspective it's also a big cost of the smart meter is communication the network kind of thing yeah but the city also managed the fiber network yeah it's a big ladder yeah to reduce the cost yeah yeah I mean and you know it doesn't go to all the right places and it's limited there's a dark fiber loop and a not dark fiber loop but but yeah I mean it's it's definitely coming it just didn't pencil out when we looked at it and and now the prices are lower and and people installed solar and got EVs anyway right you know so it's it's disappointing as a researcher to not have that data but you can also query the devices themselves right if we wanted to you know have go to the trouble of setting up the apis with tesla and sunrun then we can have most of the data we want anyway um and like yeah I mean there we have had we did have a pilot with you know watching people's uh you know what 150 or 300 halls had smart meters in them so you know dealing with the different communications issues in the gateways so now also you know the smart panel can also do the same function as me I know and it can do it by circuit breaker so it can be super granular I know I really want them I want them in everywhere right now but it's it's basically like 24 times the data so I'm not like so yeah exactly but I know I mean it's so you know you can leave it up to the next yeah we could we could except you know uh one one thing at a time but but yeah I mean I think you know generally the smart control panels are going in with solar and storage because the application is hey you know when the big 9.0 earthquake comes and I have my solar and storage system set up I don't want to accidentally drain my tesla power wall with my tesla ap and there goes all my power to like you know power my house assuming that they don't get a vehicle to grid so they're rolling out with solar and storage but if you're right on all the all points um and I'm not sure I mean my head hurts to think what we would do with that amount of data but but I mean one really clear application is the low carbon fuel standard credits they're trading at $200 a metric ton um and if we can prove that our customers are charging with our clean energy um then you know then we can get through to recoup more of that money so it's just again it's just you have to have scale to make it worth my time so yeah but all right and then yeah tom tom's good question uh there is you know according to professor michael wara there is legal precedent for providing services not fuels so as long as we're providing energy we can make the case that we don't it doesn't have to be in the form of natural gas it can be in the form of electricity but the bigger thing according to michael wara oh sorry I didn't read the question about um okay so tom says can follow up to provide examples to the cpuc on how to define the obligation to serve to be the obligation to meet the end use needs not to provide chemical energy yes but tom you know we are not governed by the cpuc we're we're a public entity unlike pg me so we know we're not strictly governed by them but there is legal precedent and when michael wara professor michael wara states is you know everybody used to have fairies going across the bay and then they figured out the buses were cheaper and people were really mad that they didn't get their fairies anymore but at the end of the day the obligation was transportation not a ferry right I think it's a pretty good analogy and I'm going to put all of that legal interpretation on my quora not on myself at city of Palo Alto um it's you know yet to be tested but my my quora's other point is that community buy-in is actually so much more important neighborhood and community buy-in because if people are really angry about what you're doing it doesn't matter they will still tie you up in the courts um right demigodals it seems to me that we need to set a public goal for the city of Palo Alto utilities that we will work with all residents and businesses provide them an appropriate level of financial assistance to make the switch to electricity for their building okay we need to treat this change as part of our community effort we require that every house has a sewer require every building be part of the water system requires farm grains okay even street trees are part of the city's responsibility we need to frame the switch as being the city's responsibility we all collectively pay for the work on how to do that in an equitable way with taxes or fees okay um switch for like so this is all about electrifying natural gas appliances and I think that it's not a bad mat bad idea and I think on the resident single family residential side and possibly multi-family residential side you could probably make it financially work today where it's still going to take money so where the money it's going to come from is hard and I think on the commercial side things are less less game ready but not impossible does anyone does everyone understand that question I feel like I'm talking to myself up here a lot anyone you know you know they get what they're saying like provide it provide a subsidy to to make this happen um and I think I think that the where that money is coming from would probably require the community to vote um and pass you know a bond basically the same way you pass like a school bond um yeah there's probably some confusion of how exactly that would work in reality so if I went home in Palo Alto and all of a sudden you say you're shutting my gas off that's it and I'm like okay great so now I gotta hire an electrician and come in put another circuit in for you know 240 to 240 yeah yeah like that's all on me just because you decided to shut the gas off I think that's yeah yeah I mean and like I didn't decide it you were elected officials decided so you know but then maybe the whole council gets thrown out right I mean I think that's that's like that's the core point is that we get ahead of the community on this it's a big deal and there's real costs associated and so I mean certainly and when the and I will just say another really really interesting thing is that I believe Mike Mora I won't I won't put him out of the bus again but I did see some studies that there are that voluntary versus mandatory means so like incentives and getting the early adopters are actually just as fast you know for basically the first five years because it takes just as fast for getting to a climate goal and like just as cost effective because it takes a while yeah I don't know how's our time okay so yeah I mean I think that's the nightmare scenario right where you just you just show up and somebody's ripping out your gas like that's not going to happen right it's coming in stages first we've had voluntary piecemeal incentives which are hey we'll give you $1,500 to install a heat pump water heater and you know kind of comparable coming on the space heater side and then there's they already passed an electric only new construction so you know keep it out of the new construction but very cost effective you know and then maybe a gas ban so right now you can have a line to your house but just as long as you don't have any natural gas appliances when the inspector comes through then it'll be it'll pass inspection and then people could do other things and so then having an actual gas ban where you don't get a line to your house like that you know new lines because that's what costs us money honestly right you know in terms of you know if we're trying to save some costs by not spreading the system like new lines are you know one thing that's not helping that equation and then and then I think really like the way PGD has done it is they found they found cities in the central in the San Joaquin Valley that say hey we want to go all electric you know a lot of these cities are on propane and they don't have natural gas and so PGD could have an obligation to serve them you know depending on how dense and like out of the agreements there and so instead they get buy in from the whole community and say you know we're gonna we're gonna help people all electric um and then they become electric customers you know think about it they're PG from PGD's perspective that's low growth because they're not making any money from the propane sales right and then they don't have to extend this infrastructure that they're worried about winding down in the same way we're worried about winding our infrastructure down so you know I think I think it's not I think they you know point will take in um yeah and this um and then you know but for full context Tom Cowen used to be in my job at City of Palo Alto five years ago and now he's on like the sustainability I'm gonna get the title wrong Tom but he is on like the board of advisors for Menlo Park City Council on their like sustainability team and so really really smart guy um and and what he's also familiar with is PGD is actually sharing their highly sensitive infrastructure gas line maps with you know cities who want it who can actually look at pruning the system back as they want you know they have the the city has the relationship city can go to different neighborhoods and say hey want to be all electric you know maybe it's better for all these reasons um and so Tom has actually seen some of these maps and is actually like at that level so um jump ahead by Palo Alto can jump ahead of PGD by looking at 15 minutes smart meter usage day to provide each customer with a monthly line item notice on their bill of how much remaining panel capacity the customer used to electrify everything we don't have 15 minutes our meter data but yes I think that's true you know we could you know because we're not you know if the if if um if the city and the community being the voting residents decide they want to go all electric you know we are not we are governed by them unlike PGD which is governed by their shareholders right so we don't have a natural a natural adversity to going to winding down our our natural gas utility the way that PGD does um yeah so let me ask another question regarding the secondary transformer do you see any issues even now because if I imagine you know a lot of rich people in Palo Alto if they park in their electrical vehicle you know you got a lot of people even you don't have the dynamic rate but other people like to plug the EV after go home usually at night time right so they can get the car have enough juice to drive in the morning yeah you see any issue in at night time the secondary transformer may see because most of secondary transformer like 600 amps right that's kind of yeah but if you have 10 cars charging simultaneously yeah we're not seeing that but we might be seeing um faster wear and tear on the transformers which is harder to find right because and the reason we're not seeing that is because our system is very conservatively built very oversized already because we want a higher level of reliability and we and because we don't want it we're so small we don't want to be rolling people all the time and I mean yeah and yeah PGD is much less conservative on how many they support you know what's harder to see is if we're getting half the lifetime out of them that we expected which would kind of speak to that if they're overloaded for a shorter period of time and everything else the other thing that helps us is the climate and being so cool in the evenings right you know if anybody wondered why a lot of southern California was out with outages during like the rolling outages it wasn't the rolling outages most of it was transformers exploding from the high heat when it didn't cool down at night and like a lot you know anyway LADWP isn't even in the cow lives that went a lot of LA went out just from the transformers exploding those warm nights day on day heat no bueno um yeah any yeah um so you talked a bit about the difference between uh the public utility and PGD you like to find some of the differences between a CCA and yeah I mean a CCA is is just the um supply and generation and then sort of finance side of a public utility so they deal with the electricity purchases out outside of the um outside of the entity outside of the geographical entity and then and that's it and so they don't have to maintain the distribution wires um and yeah and they don't have you know yeah so that they're sort of they're the most profitable part of the public utility um so and I know that there are some there's a lot of good work being done at CCA and I think they've put a lot of more renewables in ground than would be there otherwise and now they're doing solicitations for long duration storage which is really critical to increasing the amount of renewable generation on the system so those are all really good things there is there is some concern and if they're sort of they're sort of um um the costs that PGD you know uh the cost and debt that PGD incurred in order to serve everyone are going to have to be repaid by someone and so by taking sort of the wealthiest groups up and taking the most profitable part of the business off there could be some some problems with equity um caused by the CCA model and that's that's kind of the CPUC's problem because they allowed the creation of CCAs but I think I think they've done a lot of good things and so I'm just but that's what they are they're just the procurement side and like playing in the energy and financial markets side they're none of the dealing with the the wires side and transformers blowing up and everything else so it's interesting is my job basically that's okay so I have a lot of friends weren't there considered it been offered but um yeah but why give up on the hardest time? What do you think about like utility scale battery storage? Yeah um it's coming you know I mean it's here there's a lot coming in the pipeline um I think the prices are you know can be pretty good um um I personally have some reservations on like what do you do with the batteries when they go dead and I I want to see better recycling or regeneration on that side but um it solves a lot of the reliability problems um in California in particular because we have sort of narrow peaks um if batteries are not going to get you to 100% renewable or even yeah um and I think the other thing that battery folks would say is that the market structure requires them to discharge their battery for four hours and all the cost of battery is in the size is in the energy not in the not in the rate and so if all your need is an hour let me discharge for an hour and I can have a smaller battery and make more money and help the grid more so please please revise the market um so that's why actually some of the some of the CCAs and some others are actually you know using in-city or behind-the-meter batteries to use them in a more dynamic way that's like more cost effective for everybody because the only way they'll be recognized in the the energy system is an RA RA resource RA eligible energy resource they can fit in as if they you know if they kind of derate their ability to discharge by by 75% so that they may and then you know with the reliability issues they've also been told how to dispatch the last summer and that was not in their best financial interest so that's that's a hard place to be all right well I can answer other questions I guess offline I think we're pretty close to time or yeah I think we're on time thank you thank you thanks for the good question