 I'm Steve Fitzhugh. I'm recently re-retired from Norwich University. I was a professor of electrical and computer engineering for 18 years. And I tried retiring for a year, and then they dragged me back to be the interim provost for a year. So I finally got out of that. So I'm back to being retired. So it's my pleasure to, if you will, co-moderate this panel with Alyssa. And Alyssa, why don't you? Hi, everyone again. I'm Alyssa Brink. I am an architecture major here at Norwich. And I am also a research fellow grant recipient. So this is actually a wonderful panel to be on, because it all works so nicely with my research and my major here. So I'm also very excited to be here to experience all of this. And so I think the first thing, if you would indulge me, if we could just go around the room, starting with you, and just say, give your name and who you're with. It's just, OK. I'm Laura Kapps, and today I'm a community member from Hinesburg. I'm Chris Clawing, I'm a retired IT questioner here. Hi, I'm Jolie Larson. I use SkiGam for an ad, so I'm a PhD student at the University of Vermont. My name's Caroline McKelvie. I work for the University of Vermont on a first college in Plain Sea Grant. I'm Zoe Niederland from B. Transplanting, an agency of education. I'm Jen, I'm with Eastburg School. Salem Center with Eastburg School. I'm Maven Bradshaw, a teacher and co-director of Eastburg School. OK. I'm Carl Martin, I'm an associate professor made this year at Norwich. Jeff Campbell, emergency manager and director for Town of Warren, also a law firm, aren't you? I'm Marta B. Divalenza, a climate energy planner for the Northwest region. I'm Jack Locker, a UDM undergraduate in primary studies. I'm from the Vermont State Archives and Records Administration and I'm a co-lead of the plant. Arts and culture disaster resilience number. OK. And Gene Krauss on the select board of the Bethel. OK. Well, thank you and welcome to all of you. We look forward to a very interesting panel this morning. Would you like to introduce them? Would you like me to introduce them? I can't, I wrote it all out, so I can't introduce you all. So just to welcome our guest speakers here today, we plan to discuss resilience and on the climate and energy track, I'm sure you all know. So today we have with us Michael Krauss, an assistant professor here at Norwich and electrical and computer engineering. Chad Farrell, the founder and CEO of Encore Renewable Energy. And Elizabeth Miller, the vice president in sustainable supply and resilience systems and the chief legal counsel at Green Mountain Power. Just to start off, really quick, we have a two-part question for you guys. Just to simply, how do you define resilience related to the energy sector? And what are some examples of the work you guys have done here to foster that resilience in Vermont's energy supply? Sure. You want me to start? Yeah, let's hear from you totally first. I feel like though, I mean, I know we're not going to actually do this, but I feel like we should all be sitting up with all of you because really just hearing everybody's affiliation, we might as well just have a conversation. So I will answer the question, but it would be really great to get to questions too. The idea is that we're going to, Back and forth? Unlike the other panel, we're going to go through, each of you have like five minutes. Okay. And we'll give you another question to get you started and then we're going to open it up and if we don't have enough questions, we'll feed the questions, but we want to have more of a conversation. Okay, good, that's great. Okay, so resilience in the energy system. You know, I'll get a little bit on the soapbox right away and just say, I sort of wish that we'd get beyond the distinction discussion about resiliency versus reliability in the electric sector because it's really all one in the same and it should be treated that way. For years, the electric sector's been really governed by needing to keep the lights on for customers, first and foremost, making sure power gets delivered safely and reliably. And that reliability is something that we're measured on and we take really seriously and at Green Mountain Power our storm response, if you ever have experienced an outage as one of our customers, I hope you've also experienced our just really tremendous focus on getting folks back on. And we also focus really strongly on the maintenance of the system, Mike runs our field operations and he's also a member of the Climate Council's Rural Resiliency Subcommittee. I can't quite remember the, there you go, Rural Resilience and Adaptation Subcommittee. And so he could speak if anyone wanted to know directly about how we manage the system. And what we talk about now most is keeping the system resilient, which really goes beyond sort of the way you think about reliability and the metrics of if there is an outage, how many hours was it and all that. Because what we want is a system that is always on for all of our customers. That's the ultimate goal, right? And the way we can achieve that now in 2022 and beyond is so different than it was even 10 years ago when you think about Irene. We have programs at Green Mountain Power and other utilities around the state and around the country are also starting to roll it out where we can work directly with our customer to create a two-way grid where the customer has solar, the customer has storage. We have our generation resources and the whole interconnected grid and we can work together. And it's not just about individual resilience at the home, it's about the community because if you have solar and storage and you're in a neighborhood and your neighborhood suffers an outage, we can rely on your resource with our grid to help keep folks on by micro-gridding. And then similarly, if there's a situation regionally, our grid can be helpful to the community and the individuals in Vermont. So it really should be more of a two-way system and the way I think of resiliency is that community connectedness, making sure people can stay on and stay healthy and strong when it's a natural disaster, if it's a cyber disaster, things that we need to respond to, we have the ability to do it quickly and as a community in Vermont. Great, I can pick up from there. So yeah, when we think about resiliency and I really like how you sort of like trying to break down that barrier between resiliency and reliability, we need it all, right? So I do think about things like what Mike has been working on at Green Mountain Power in terms of hardening the grid, making it more resilient to freak storms and reducing the number of outages from weather-based events, which are gonna be increasingly unpredictable, increasingly intense. So the hardening of the grid is really important, but I think as we're making this transition, I think of reliability and resiliency from the local standpoint, right? So it's basically how do we, and we're seeing this put in stark, just right in front of our faces with the war in Ukraine, right? We need to get away from being sort of subject to hostile governments that are propped up by fossil fuels. And so what we think about is sort of bringing all the generation and moving it to a true distributed network, right? Moving away from essentially produced gigawatt scale, nuclear plants and coal plants, and really sort of distributing that generation throughout the grid. And that's sort of both at the larger scale, all the way down to the residential scale. And that is all of these projects are actually helping to stabilize the grid, right? Every time we interconnect a project and we look at their vessel and the warming creates pressure, which spins a turbine also. And those technologies, that technology is, you can get up to a day or two. So, and it's large scale, utility scale stuff. So we're getting there. It's gonna be a really exciting decade, much like solar was last decade, because as I said, the price points just continue to improve. The technology continues to improve with scale. And adoption is really taking off right now as evidenced by what Green Mountain Power's been doing from the residential scale up to the utility scale. Hope that answered your question. Mike, Mike, everything you'd like to have? I just have a really cool problem for my first year engineering course. How long will Lake Champlain last if we take the water and split it into hydrogen and oxygen and run a fuel cell from Lake Champlain? Seriously, fuel cells are another option we haven't talked about yet, but green hydrogen technology and using solar to make hydrogen. We focus on larger scale, renewable energy projects, mostly solar and large energy storage projects. Every time we interconnect one of the larger projects into the grid, we are making improvements to that grid. We are making it more resilient. So the more projects we do, the more resilient the grid gets. And then when we have the power generated locally, we can do things like what Liz is talking about with islanding and micro grids. And down to the household level, these can be independent power plants that can be choreographed by the utility as they've done in their battery storage residential program. That can also happen at the larger scale as well. So really it's fostering an environment where we can build these projects locally to serve us locally and not have to rely on transmission lines that can get knocked out like I'm dating myself now, but back in the ice storm of 1998, if any folks were around, all those transmission lines coming down from Quebec were just completely frozen over with ice and collapsed. And we see similar instances recently in Texas last winter when they lost their grid. And then there was those iconic photos of like the one house on a block of McMansions that had solar panels on the roof and clearly a battery in the basement because the lights were on, everything else was blacked out. So I think, and one last thing I'd like to say, just another prop for Green Mountain Power here as really like we're fortunate to have Green Mountain Power in this state innovating and leading the way and showing other utilities what progressive utility management can look like and why it's so important. The concept of trying to move towards zero outages in the next 10 or 15 years, that's pretty incredible. And we're gonna do that by developing local sources of energy for our own consumption here in Vermont. So as we're going down the list here, you guys are taking all my keywords away. But I'll throw in a couple more. I teach the first year engineering course here at Norwich and we talk about energy and we talk about resiliency and we define it. And two of the key words that kind of stick in my mind is respond and adapt. So being able to respond to an event but being able to learn from that event and be able to adapt to it to changing times. And these ideas of flexible load management, utility controlled vehicle to grid, house to grid type resources, that's what we're gonna need to do in order to make the grid more resilient and be able to respond and be able to adapt to a changing environment. So that was short but they took all the good words from us. So, perfect. Thank you. Thank you very much. And in full disclosure, some people could say, hey, you stacked the deck here with your panel but I've been a professor at Norwich so Mike, I did not invite Mike on the panel. I didn't select the panel members but I have taught him in that group. Chad Farrell, Encore is working on a solar project with VEPSA, the Vermont Public Power Supply Authority of which Northfield Electric is a member and they're working on, I work with Northfield Electric Department and so we've been working on the solar project and Green Mountain Power has been doing a lot of contract line work and restoration for Northfield for over 20 years and so we have a good relationship with Green Mountain Power and their innovation as well. So, always a small world. Always a small world and so I did not invite them on the panel so it's not a conflict of interest. So, but so I wanna ask the first question and kind of pose it to the entire panel and then we'll open it up. So, I've written this out. Vermont has invested significantly in PV. I mean, we've got this big project coming in here now resulting in potentially less diversity in our power supply. Everybody wants to depend on the PV and we've moved away from a lot of other plants and so that's given us less diversity in the power supply mix and greater intermittency because there are resources, the solar, we only get it in the daytime and we don't get as much in the winter when the sun is down. So, how has this impacted grid stability and resilience? Happy to start. Happy to start. Happy to start. Well, I mean, you know, I appreciate the question because to me and to Green Mountain Power as we look at, I help lead power supply for Green Mountain Power so it's a, you know, it's a question we think about every day. When we think about it at Green Mountain Power it's really all sources. I mean, we think about the way our portfolio should deliver power to customer across resources and believe that solar has an incredibly important role to play now and in the future and it needs to grow in order to do that, especially as we all electrify, hopefully to get off fossil fuel in our transportation and heating and other aspects of our life. We are going to need more generation in state and that should be as I think Chad, you were the one who said, of all scales really, you know, the traditional centralized power plant that traditionally was fossil fuel-based or nuclear-based really needs to become smaller scale, more localized, even down to the house level and in Vermont it's true that PV solar is the leading resource that's been put out. We have some wind resource in the state of Vermont and there might be some ability to have wind in the future but solar is gonna be a continuing resource here and we think of the grid and the way that it operates as a 24-7, 365 system and so you're absolutely right that what we need to do is meet energy needs at all hours, all seasons, all year and we need diverse resources to do that. So a thing we would urge as people think about the system now and going forward is to support that diversity and to be open to solutions that are local as well as regional and of all types because all types play a role. We have at Green Mountain Power a diverse portfolio of local hydro that we own and operate that is about nine or 10% of our resource in a year it depends on how much rain falls and how the system operates. We also have regional hydro both from the Connecticut River system as well as from Quebec coming down that supports our system in really important ways particularly in the winter time and at night and that resource is something that Vermonters need to keep the lights on all the time and then we have other resources including PV solar in a growing proportion. GMP led the net metering policy what 15 years ago by putting a solar adder in place the state then adopted that policy statewide and net metering has been a really important resource and now we're heading into kind of almost 20 years and we need to and have been thinking about how to make that resource work for us going forward which is my last point and that's storage because solar paired with storage has the ability to keep solar generating for Vermonters in a sense even when the sun is down and so finding cost-effective ways to make that work for Vermonters as solar is deployed in the state will be increasingly important. Yeah, a lot of good stuff there. So first on the resource sort of allocation, yeah, I agree it's gotta be everything, right? And unfortunately right now there's essentially a de facto moratorium on wind projects in the state of Vermont. The Public Utility Commission passed a sound standard four, five, three, four, five years ago. That is really almost impossible to meet. So it's great to see so many young people here because I know a lot of young people look at wind turbines a lot differently than some of the older folks in our communities and I think that's what it's gonna take. If we wanna have wind in this state we've gotta advocate for it because it's a perfect complement to solar. Generation profile is much more focused on the winter months and at night. Obviously solar is the opposite of that. So I'd love to see us get back to being able to develop some wind projects here in the state of Vermont. I'll also pick up the concept of storage. One of the most exciting things in the energy space right now is the advent of energy storage. Energy storage is on a similar sort of cost decline curve that solar was the last decade and that's why solar is so prominent in the energy mix here in Vermont. It's just the economics are really, really favorable. But to Liz's point and everybody's understanding, the sun doesn't shine at night, doesn't shine on really cloudy days and it's tough to generate a meaningful amount of electricity from solar in the winter months in Vermont. It's just not a lot of sunlight. And so a couple of things. So storage is going to help us increase what's known as the capacity factor of solar. So basically you pair a battery with a solar project and instead of having a 15, 18% capacity factor, you've now more than doubled that. So it's basically extending, it's basically allowing us to dump electrons into the grid that were generated by renewable energy during the day, dumping those into the grid in the evening hours when we are now experiencing our peak demands because there's so much, there's decent amount of solar on the grid. So yeah, so storage is gonna play a really, really big role and again at all scales from residential up to utility scale. So it's really exciting sort of the advancements in technology and now we're starting to see not only shorter duration storage technologies make the market and there's always a difference between what's technically feasible and technically possible and what's financeable, what the banks will get behind. And the banks are firmly behind short duration storage in the form of lithium ion at this point but there are some longer duration storage technologies that are really starting to get a lot of attention in the capital markets and they're being proven out. And so it's exciting to see some longer duration, 12, 24, 36 hour kind of storage but that's still not gonna address the energy needs that we have in the winter time in a Northern state like Vermont. So there's a really awesome podcast that I got, I listened to last summer. It's called The Big Switch. If you guys, students have wanna check it out. It's this woman, Dr. Melissa Lott from Columbia Energy Center and she had, you know, it was like a five part podcast series that ran last summer and she basically sort of made the analogy of the energy system like a soccer team. And it was just, the metaphor is great, right? So you need, like on a soccer team you need the four words, right? To be fast moving, like scoring goals but really only on half the field, right? Then you've got your midfielders and that can be like nuclear and other forms of technology and storage. And then you've got your full backs and those could be the fossil fuel generators, right? We're still gonna need to have some natural gas in the mix to supply energy during these winter months when the renewable resources are not performing the way they do in the summer months, especially solar. So I thought, and then, you know, and then there's the goalie and I can't remember what the goalie was. The goalie might have been like, I don't know, maybe the goalie was nuclear but it was like, you know, we do need those base load technologies. We just wanna turn down the gas a little bit. And so the more renewables that we have that's paired with storage, the less we need those gas plants and that but we're still likely gonna need some element of base load generation and some of that is gonna be served by natural gas. I love that the utility person sitting next to you is probably like most likely to disagree with that. I mean, I'm really hoping that by 2035, 40, whatever, even quicker would be great. We have resources that don't require us to keep natural gas. I know that's something that we look forward to and how to plan for that. Anyway. I love hearing that. Yeah. All right. So I think the greatest opportunity for diversification is probably gonna be in storage. As you mentioned, there's lithium ion batteries, Tesla power walls, so you can store those locally. If we get to my presentation, I'll show you a picture of a vehicle that was powered by a grid scale battery technology so you can have non lithium grid scale size storage. You can spin a flywheel during the day and do a small scale local community based energy storage with excess solar, pump storage, not so much in Vermont, but that's an opportunity. But there's a lot of different opportunities for storage. And I think with renewable technologies, that's what you need. And we're gonna have to explore all the different types of storage technologies available to really be diversified and resilient to use the word. Can I say one more thing? Sure. Your question was about grid stability and the only thing none of us talked directly about was the control systems that are necessary. And so I just wanna like make sure that's a part of the conversation. Like even if you have the storage and the solar and the other resources that can balance out, you need to be able to, on a moment's notice, if the clouds come over, actually control those switching. And so that gets back to utility roles in the community and obviously the regional grid operator, but also the way everything has to coordinate and communications. And in a state like Vermont, I just don't want the conversation not to include communications and broadband connectivity, which will be so important. So part of the conversation. And that's an excellent point that you bring up. And unfortunately, Dan Nelson was not able to join us today from Velco, but Velco, the Vermont Electric Power Company, which is the electric transmission company in Vermont that's owned by all the utilities, has invested through ISO New England in a robust fiber network throughout the system, which the utilities all share in. So yes, and that helps with communications and the controls of the systems to be able to, minute by minute, virtually monitor the performance of the system, the flow of energy and where they're gonna be overloads if the clouds come over. So yes, so it's a good point, thank you, Liz. Okay, so let's open it up. Does anyone in the audience have a question? So I saw that hand first, so go ahead. Okay, hi, I'm Mark, so I'm really interested in long duration energy storage and also looking at what our grid infrastructure looks like once we are 100% renewable. So I've been really excited to talk to you all as a panel and my question has to do, it's two parts. The first part is what percent of the grid would you like to maintain for critical loads in service for how long during an emergency outage? And then if you do look forward into that future time span of when everything is 100% renewable and you're looking at long duration energy storage, how much do you think that we're gonna need to have in the state and have you started to looking into different technologies, Chad? I know you've been looking at different options and we've got a lot of slopes, so advanced rail, maybe? I don't know. So it's a lot, yeah. Yeah, well I'll take the first part. Okay, I'll take it. I think both of you would be probably better suited for the second part. When it comes to, think of all of our customers as critical, of course, and we work hard to keep all of them on and literally when a storm happens, if you were at a GMP office you would see any or all of us calling customers, trying to connect, let them know what the situation is. Having said that, we absolutely map the critical functions in the community and think about that when we're restoring. And we have a program right now called resiliency zones. I'll just talk about it super quickly because I think it gets to what you're asking. And that is where we look at communities based upon the types of reliability they have experienced. If there are communities that, frankly, over the years, because we're rural, we have had areas of the state where it's more challenging to keep the lights on. We probably all know that and have experienced it either ourselves or with our friends and family. So we know where those areas are and we overlay the communications infrastructure, what we know about that, and then what's called the social vulnerability index that the CDC uses to understand from an economic and social justice point of view and a health point of view where our customers are that might need the most help. And what we've done is create essentially a matrix of communities based on those metrics and identified where resiliency zones could be best suited. So so far we've started with three communities. We're working in Rochester, Grafton, and Brattleboro. And I'd be happy to talk about the individual projects, but the basic idea is to locate places and communities where more people could be served in a natural disaster or other disaster if there were a need and making sure you can microgrid, for example. We don't right now have the specific metric on your question of how many hours. Typically it's eight to 12 hours with management if you have the ability to microgrid or use direct solar that you can stretch that longer. But certainly as we create these resiliency zones, that's the sort of resiliency we're looking to provide. And it needs to get longer and better for those critical areas. We're talking hospitals, emergency management, transportation infrastructure so that trucks can come if roads need to be repaired and that sort of thing. But if you were thinking about it, what's the minimum percentage you would like to be able to maintain? It really depends on the community. Mike, I don't know if you have any better sense of that, but some communities with certain either customers or facilities, it might be a higher percentage than others. So it really takes a pretty granular look, is my sense. I don't think I could give you a statewide answer that would really help. I don't know what you think. If I would address that, I would say we started with the storage programs in the individual homes with one 5KW battery. And we quickly found out that that was harder for the customers to manage. And then we switched to a 10KW. So your answer on I know you'd like to serve the whole load would be what I would say for the storage too. We aren't, it's just hard for people to, people naturally say during a long duration heavy wet snow event, let's keep the furnace and the fridge on. But for 90% of the other storms, they don't really want the inconvenience. And in an emergency situation in a town, we want the government buildings to be able to run. So right now we're not putting that in and saying only run your load at 50%. So the goal is to, within reason, try to keep it as normal as we can. When you planned this winter for potential load shedding, which thank God we had decent weather this winter and everything was fine and we have resources to help cover that. But I know you planned for it. Two to three hours. Yeah, there you go. Okay, so right now when you think about the worst case situation and planning for it, that's how the planning was done. And I'll just add some of the resources that we now have in town and some of the planning that we're doing, we would look at just the downtown, part of the downtown area to create a microgrid because that's where the surface completes the fire. Unfortunately the ambulance is probably not close enough by, but services where people can get food and municipal access try to keep the lights on in that particular area. Because originally, back in 1897, when our field electric was created with the Dog River using it as hydro, that was the small community there had electricity and so I would like to get us back to, at the very least, we have a continued outage that we would be able to supply the downtown area. Yes, we're seeing more and more of this. I mean, again, GMP leading the way, the project that was focused in Time Magazine last year, regarding the Panton Project, which is an islanded circuit, technically not a microgrid because you basically just wall off the circuit. We're doing a project with Middlebury College right now that is a five megawatt solar generator, which is gonna generate renewable energy credits for the college's Energy 2028 decarbonization initiative. It's about a third of that, it's a solid pillar of it, but GMP was interested in also citing a battery on that same site because, A, we've got interconnection capacity there and B, the Porter Hospital also sits on that circuit. So in the event, so you'll still be able to run critical hospital functions, certainly not maybe the full hospital, but you'd be able to run critical care in the event of a massive transmission outage. And just, I guess, to get to your question about other types of storage technologies, yeah, it's fast moving right now, so lithium ion, as I've said, has kind of made the market to this point, but that taps out at about four hours of discharge at full capacity. So we're really excited about iron flow batteries and because iron is ubiquitous in the United States, we don't have to rely on hostile nations, as I was mentioning earlier. It's a lot more environmentally benign than lithium or worse cobalt, which is the, or vanadium, which are the other kind of electrochemistries that have sort of made the market. So really excited there's a company called ESS that just went public, iron flow, battery technology, got a massive valuation in the billions, if I'm not mistaken. So that's coming and that'll extend. It's still not technically really long duration though. So then you start talking about things like pumped hydro, which I think could be really helpful in a place like Vermont where we have such topographic differences. And there are these, I mean, I don't see this happening here, but out west, they're building these large like lattice structures that lift blocks up, like concrete blocks up when the energy is cheap. And then they drop them down when energy is expensive, spins a turbine and generates electricity that way. So, and then liquefied air is another technology that is in development. And that the process is basically super cooling air down to liquid form and then allowing it to war their vessel and the warming creates pressure, which spins a turbine also. So, and those technologies, that technology is, you can get up to a day or two. So, and it's large scale, utility scale stuff. So we're getting there. It's gonna be a really exciting decade, much like solar was last decade, because as I said, the price points just continue to improve. The technology continues to improve with scale and adoption is really taking off right now as evidenced by what Green Mountain Power's been doing from the residential scale up to the utility scale. Hope that answered your question. Mike, do you have anything you'd like to add? I just have a really cool problem for my first year engineering course. How long will Lake Champlain last if we take the water and split it into hydrogen and oxygen and run a fuel cell from Lake Champlain? No, seriously, fuel cell is another option we haven't talked about yet, but green hydrogen technology and using solar to make hydrogen and storage. Hydrogen storage is the issue there and now you're storing hydrogen, but it could be used as another alternative for storage to help supplement some of that, that demand. Yeah, that's gonna be a huge market. Yeah. It's making its comeback. It is. Yeah. Okay, from this side, in the back row, I saw your hand. Yeah, I'm just curious. I feel like I don't hear a lot about monthly digesters and as a really agricultural state and also looking for that consistency like year-round in 24 hours, it seems like a really good option. It helps with farm financials and improve water quality, takes that thing out of the air. It seems to have a lot of co-benefits. Only downside I really know is the big best initates, which I would assume with, you know, the focus and how much of it is important to renewable energy that should be relatively easy to overcome. Is there a reason it's not a bigger part of the discussion of the market? It doesn't really appear to be stable. That one's a count-out for a lot of us. I know, and we do have a number of digesters in our territory and with our customers. It's a good point in terms of the public conversation and the shift over time because you're right, cow power was something that probably had more currency in the conversation a decade or so ago. Many farms that could benefit from it because of the scale did look into it and some of them went forward and built in partnership either with their utility or with others. And we do have some larger scale projects around the state that aren't even farm-based and you're right. It's something that is still on the table and I know some have continued to look at and we're certainly still open to it. A few projects that Green Mountain Power pursued didn't go forward because there were actually ancillary concerns about some of the impacts that do have to be managed in terms of how the feedstock is stored or whether it comes from off-site and what impact it may have on water quality and so like with all energy choices, this is another thing I think we all know but I'm just gonna say it, there are benefits and drawbacks, right? And so that is true with methane digesters as well. There's also landfill methane in the state. There are a couple different sites as you probably are aware. So I think that makes a lot of sense, particularly as you point out because not only does it potentially bring income to the farmer or the landowner, but it also has a potential base load. There also is at least one project I think in the state that is feeding methane stock into the natural gas system in order to make the natural gas system less carbon-intensive. That one's down in Middlebury as well, yes. And there are others out of state like the Fitchburg Massachusetts, and we get electricity. That's right. Yeah, so my two cents here is not very well informed, two cents, but what we've understood is that that technology is really heavily operation and maintenance intensive, so you really have to have expertise kinda at the site at least once a week. So one of the concepts that gained traction a number of years ago, and I don't know sort of where it's gone since, was the concept of clustering a bunch of farms together to have shared sort of support from an operations standpoint because there's corrosivity. There's, yeah, it's just these machines get gummed up and they need a lot of maintenance, and that's been an impediment when you have kinda like a standalone project without a lot of others nearby. I don't know if you've studied or anything. Well, I'm actually working on a capstone project with our seniors looking at the Essex wastewater facility, so we also have methane from wastewater, and they're combined heat and power, so I'm wondering the scale of that facility versus farms, I don't know the numbers, but I'm wondering if a piece of that solution might be wastewater facilities as well. Like I'm not sure if Burlington does, do they do power? They looked at it, I don't think they implemented it, but they have looked at it, I know for sure, as a part of their district heating actually initiative. Okay. Yeah. And then the other piece rather than burning methane in a generator, because we can extract hydrogen out of natural gas, it's one of the ways you get your carbon and you get the hydrogen and then you can use the hydrogen to fuel so, can we modify the process so that you're actually extracting the hydrogen from the methane? So it's just another thought that crossed my mind. So, I saw a hand over here. One question about diversity, and then a comment, but there's not only solar, there's also geothermal, and if I understand correctly, especially with your comment about Northfield and I know Bethel also has a private generator that's running off of the White River, but anywhere there is a moving stream is a potential hydro generator that does not interfere with the ecology, like dams do, and does not encroach on indigenous lands like our dams do, and have historically done ever since the Tennessee Valley Authority. So, the, any encouragement, I happen to live in between two miles, I live in a valley. I have an open space, but I don't have enough time to put in solar. The, how do, how can we incentivize individuals like myself to find alternate sources of energy when we don't fit the mold? And the, well, yeah, and the other thing is I firmly believe in the decentralization of power production, and in my opinion, one of the most effective things we could do in the state of Vermont is by so put, is for the state to put solar power on every building in the state. And why we spend all the money for all these, now we need the grid, I'm not saying that. We need the grid and more if we did that in some ways. Well, but if we were to have every building in the state produce what they could, even if they can't meet their own individual needs, my guess is we could get a whole lot further, a whole lot faster. But that's, so, but other sources of energy, other than solar, all in my comment about wind, I used to live in Appalachian coal country. Please don't talk to me about saving mountain tops. Because in that country, they take the whole mountain down. Yeah, now we're putting solar projects on top. And for the solar projects, well, no, they use it for coal. And so they take the whole mountain, don't talk to me. Thank you. I think it should be more, I think it should be a federal level decision for solar for everybody, I don't run the numbers for the cost, but give everybody 20 solar panels and a couple of power walls and see what happens to the grid issues. I think there's a good solution there and I think it's easily financed. But yeah, I think, you mentioned geothermal, I'm wondering why, but then you went to the river. Are you talking about one of river generation or? Both, both. You've got hydro that can go through any year-round moving water that can be subsurface. And you've got geothermal at a 23rd, in the 80s. It was in Minnesota, had a farmer who went out and put with below, went about five feet down below the frost line and laid out in his cornfield a geothermal pipe. He heated his home in Minnesota that gets down to 50 below for $10 a year. That was the cost of his electricity to run the pump that pumped the geothermal into his house. He did not have to drill a well. And by the way, our fossil fuel companies are very good at drilling. So there's an option for the use of that tech. And I'm sure they're gonna discuss that. Next session, yes, front of river height, there's the Vermont-based climate tech incubator program from two or three years ago, had a company based out of Atlanta, I think, and the name's escaping me, but they had designed a run-of-river hydro system for exactly what you're talking about. And this would be, you know, would work in canals, would work in rivers, but open channel flow. So it's coming. The question is when is it like, when is it scalable? But we know that there's evidence out there in the marketplace of those kinds of technologies being developed and advanced. I also wanted to just pick up on the rooftop solar comment, which, look, we all agree, we should, I would love to see every rooftop in Vermont and elsewhere covered with solar panels, obviously. The issue is two-fold, it's the age of the roof and the structural capacity of the building. So if these are flat roofs, they got a 25-year life, we can't go on to a 10-year-old roof that's gonna need to be replaced in 15 years if we've got a 25-year contract to sell the power, which is typically what we need. And then structural capacity, right? A lot of these big warehouse buildings and the big box stores were designed to snow load and that's about it with no additional capacity for, you know, we need another five pounds per square foot, roughly, for a flat installation. So, yeah, I mean, the same thing with parking lots. Everybody says, we'll cover them, cover parking lots with solar. Well, they're twice as expensive because of all the steel. You know, you've got much more steel going up and therefore you have to have more foundational requirements on subterranean. So we're getting there, but they just, you know, in a world where it's all about the cheapest kilowatt hour generated, those projects are tough to compete. Yeah, nothing's easy, right? And I do just wanna not disagree with it all because I like the premise of your question. Like, if we all just could do what we best could do, wouldn't we be better off? And absolutely. But I do wanna just push back a little bit on the notion that we have to do it home by home or building by building in terms of what that building or home could generate because I do think it goes back to the concept that in Vermont, we could have and should have, we're developing right now, a two-way grid system where if you're in a valley and you don't have solar capacity and you're not near a run-of-river stream, you could drop a micro-turban into, you know, anytime soon with the technology, you can and are still connected to us. And we do have a clean and getting cleaner portfolio that we can deliver to you. We can prioritize making sure the lines to your home are hardened that you will withstand a storm if it comes in. We can put basement batteries or batteries in a shed near your house so that you can stay on. And then we can manage that through our load control so that at times when we need it, we could actually use the battery in your home to help your neighbors. So I do think there are approaches that could be more cost-effective now and possibly even more carbon impactful in the long run. If we keep that sort of interconnected system and don't necessarily expend the resources and the focus on an individual home-by-home solution. So I just wanna put that out there. feedback on this, what are some of the biggest challenges for the utilities in Vermont to expand their grid capacity to allow for more distributed generation? And it's, so I'll answer. I know Chad will have an answer as well. It's not just about expanding grid capacity for generation. We actually have places in the state with more generation than we have load. And those are areas where the generation is being constrained to operate and we're not using it essentially. So when we think of grid investment, we think first and foremost about serving Vermonters needs, meaning meeting the load requirements that they have in order for them to turn their lights on now and to use their heat pumps and electric vehicles and other systems in the future as again, hopefully electrification helps us bring fossil fuel use down. So just with that concept, it's not only about having a grid that has more capacity for generation but having a grid that's balanced. And so that the generation comes online, both here in the state as well as regionally that's available to meet the load that we have and that it happens again 24-7-365, which is the real challenge. So the short answer right now, like everything, it's cost and scale, but we are making really significant investments to improve the grid and the whole framework for the conference about looking back to look forward. If we think about what happened after Irene and the types of impacts we had there and what we've done to the grid since, I actually think it's a really hopeful story. It shows a lot of investment, a lot of new systems that are in the state now compared to then. And so if we future cast 10 or 15 years out, I do think we will see an even stronger grid that has the ability to host more generation as well as serve the load as Vermonters electrify. Right now we do that by spreading costs with all customers who share in the system. And when a generator comes on, if the generator has specific upgrades that are needed, the generator will pay those costs. One thing that we've looked at at Green Mountain Power is whether there are certain costs that can be shared either among generators because it shouldn't just be Chad with one system and then everybody else benefits behind Chad if they develop a project, or are there ways we can share certain costs between the generators and the customers because we recognize like Chad said that some improvements can help everybody. So specific investments keeping at it, I mean it is really about cost because we need to keep things affordable for customers and make sure that what we're aiming for is keeping the lights on for them 24-7-365 and that requires investments in a number of different areas. So I like everything, it's a balance. And I'd like to just add to that because just recently so many people all know that every utility has to do and integrate a resources plan every three or five years. And so Northfield is going through its IRP and we looked at the forecast for what is the electrification needs in 20 years relative to adding heat pumps and electric vehicles to the system. And then I had to take a look at kind of a rough back in the envelope sketch of, okay, given the system that we have built, what is the capacity? Is the system able to carry the capacity of the load and generation? And the answer was I have two or three times the capacity that I would need simply because when you build a system there are certain minimum sizes and certainly Northfield Electric is not a GMP. We only have, you have 90,000 customers, we have 1,800. So we have a much smaller system to deal with. 272,000. Not too sorry, 272,000, not too bad. Maybe I was thinking of, you know, back or something. So in many cases the system, the grid, as we talk about it, at the distribution level has the capacity. In many cases it's the transmission system where you have very large projects. There's a 20 megawatt solar farm down there, down there Coolidge, Southern Vermont, which is actually, and I don't remember how many acres or hundreds of acres that they had to clear. About 120 acres. About 120 acres of trees that they take down, like that's carbon sequestration right there, for a project that's actually selling electricity to out of state, I'll just say out of state. So the capacity, generally the distribution system, and then Mike you could speak to this as well, generally handles any load that we need in the distribution. It's more when you get to the transmission level, where you're trying to move a lot of energy out of an area where you have a big wind farm or a big solar farm from an area that's very rural, doesn't have much load, you're trying to move it to an area that has a lot of load. And it's really at the transmission level. The only thing I would add in diversity is a big thing with load A. And then B, we are putting in controls where we can actually control the load. And it never did get to a point where we're nervous about it, we could control it and shape the energy to meet it. The other thing on capacity I would say, and I know Chad has heard of this, we do have a climate plan at Green Mountain Power where we are looking at some of the most rural areas of our territory, which just based on when everyone was electrified, it's time for them to be upgraded and storm hardened. And whenever we do a storm hardened project, it does also increase the capacity of that line as well. So just by natural us trying to get better with resiliency, we're actually also creating capacity room at the same time. Just to close on Erica's question or comment, it really is about the cost. This is why we're really excited about the federal infrastructure funding coming to Vermont and the development community and the utilities got together and actually made an ask of the congressional delegation saying, look, this is what we really need and there were a number of different, a whole host of issues because what it comes down to is I call it the who pays conundrum, right? So if we try to propose a two megawatt solar project somewhere in GMP's grid and there's an interconnection cost that is assessed by the utility, either the project can support that cost or it can't. And so if it can't, no improvements get made, the project doesn't move forward. So a few years ago, and I think Liz was alluding to this, GMP created this really innovative program to socialize some of those costs. So it wouldn't be just the next developer in line to interconnect a project, it's tagged with millions of dollars of improvements that gets socialized around a number of different projects. And we've actually, we've become very active in Maine and New Hampshire and elsewhere and the state of Maine had this same problem. They stood up a pretty aggressive solar program a few years ago, got all these applications for interconnection and Central Maine Power and Versant over there, they didn't know what to do. So we said, hey, like do what Vermont did, like create this program to socialize those costs. So that really helped. But yeah, it's the who pays conundrum because either we pay it or the rate payers pay it. And neither is a good outcome. Hence the excitement around this infrastructure funding that can hopefully break down that conundrum. We started 25 minutes late. I'm not sure how much later we get to go. So let me just assume that we're going to have about another five minutes. And so two questions. There's people walking towards the door right now. Yeah. Okay, okay. So did you have a question? Did we have a question over here? I do, but I'm happy to ask it after. Okay, absolutely. I'm happy to stick around. Perhaps we should, if there are people milling around. You mean like back around the corner or something? Oh, okay. You might have a good amount of time for a little while. So let's, we'll have one more question. I saw your hand earlier, if you want to just shoot. Hi, it's Julian. And I'm really glad that this concept of cost has started to come up a little bit towards the end of this discussion because it started to jog within my own mind one of the other key tenants, principles of power supply, kind of the flip side of reliability, affordability. You know, that has kind of stuck his jargon within I think anyone that studies energy systems. And so one of the questions that I had was to ask the panel if y'all could reflect on one of the trends in the energy system of deregulation where we've purposefully disaggregated generation, wholesale and resale of power to different institutions. And I guess maybe to speed up some of what I wrote down, how might y'all anticipate this kind of simultaneous trend of deregulation in the energy system and how that affects reliability? Or as we're thinking about it, perhaps a little bit more broadly, resiliency. You know, this aggregation favors the big utility scale supplier often because it's cheapest. But as y'all have said, maybe that's not the best strategy for resilience in the long run. So how do we work with that trend? How do we interrupt that trend? Are there barriers or opportunities? Sorry, that's kind of just my question. I was gonna say the good news is we're Vermont, not Texas. Yeah, I was gonna say. So yeah, I know this is being recorded, so I'll say it respectfully. But yeah, thank God Vermont's not Texas, I guess, is one way to think of it. But no, in all seriousness, we could have a really long conversation about what you've brought up. It's incredibly important to think about the regulatory systems that overlay anything like this. And that's not just state level, obviously, that's regional when you talk about the system operator, federal, both the reliability standards as well as the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. But in Vermont, we have chosen a path to stay vertically integrated so that we at GMP do own generation transmission and distribution. The large-scale transmission is owned by Velco, as you alluded to earlier, but we have an integrated system and we have a very, very active regulatory oversight in Vermont that takes a look at everything we do. And that system has worked really well for Vermont. If you look at energy prices, electricity prices in New England, as a region, we're high, if you look at the nation, because we have fewer natural resources right here in New England. But within New England, Vermont's story is really good. And over the last 20 years or so, if you look at the bouncing chart of electricity prices, Vermont has been very steady, very stable, and lower than nearly all of the other New England states. Maine tends to be low as well. But we are doing a good job on affordability in Vermont, given our context. And we do that because we focus so strongly on it. I mean, everything we do at Green Mountain Power, I can tell you, we sat around the table there now after being at the state many, many years ago and seeing it from the other side. Everything we do starts with, how is this going to affect customers? And that gets back to, as we think about the power portfolio, how can we balance our resources to make sure that we have the most cost effective total portfolio? And when we look at storm hardening, Mike has spent a bunch of time looking at the cost effectiveness of putting in the tree wire to the place in the valley that doesn't have any other choice right now. You know, versus not doing that and looking at what that cost benefit can be over time and saying, yes, we need to make that investment. So short answer is, while we have to operate in a regionally deregulated environment, the vertical integration we have here is working and we think works going forward. And we support it very strongly for that reason. And I'd just like to reinforce it. Although Velco owns the transmission, the utilities own Velco. That's right. Which is also unique. Which is also unique. Yes. And it benefits customers. Okay, so we're ready to go? Okay. Well, thank you all for your participation. I appreciate it. Thank you.