 So today, here at Davis Media Access in Davis, California, you know, Davis is a place that really likes its local control and its sustainability. There are a lot of different examples. The city right now, I serve on a task force that is currently exploring the feasibility of municipal broadband. That's one example. This very organization, Davis Media Access, actually grew out of an innovative experiment in consumer-owned cable co-op. So there's a lot of things that happen in Davis, but right now, the one that's on the table is Valley Clean Energy, and we're going to learn more about that today. And here to discuss it with me are Mitch Sears, who is the general manager of Valley Clean Energy, and Lucas Fraerichs, who, in addition to being on the Davis City Council, that role he is serving as the chair of the board. So welcome to you both. Thanks for coming in today. So I've actually been Valley Clean Energy launches in June, and it is going to be an alternative to what we currently have in our energy delivery systems for our homes, for our businesses. And I've been talking to a couple of people about it this week, and I keep hearing a couple of key questions come up, so I'm hoping we can get through those today. Let's start with what it is and a little bit of the backstory of how we got here. How long ago did this process start? For you hosting today and also for Davis Media Access producing this show, we really, really appreciate that. So Valley Clean Energy started actually as an official joint powers authority a few years ago with the city of Davis, the city of Woodland, and Yolo County joining together in a partnership and a collaboration. But it actually predates that even a little bit. A few years ago, the city of Davis was working on its sort of updating its climate action plan goals. And one of the major ways that we feel the ability for Davis to be sustainable over the long run is to have greater control over sort of how we generate energy and the types of energy we generate, including, you know, maybe protect like more renewable sources of energy, solar, wind, things like that. So we sort of an offshoot of that. So it started several years ago probably in the sort of 2010, 2012, 2014, made some iterative progress over those years, but we, excuse me, actually really formed as an organization about two years ago at this point, and we launched in June. It's going to be really great. So let's talk about what Valley Clean Energy is right now. Up until this point, we've had basically one option to get energy services in Davis, and that's been PG&E. Valley Clean Energy, what kind of options does this give us? And how is it different from what we have? Yeah, it's a really good question. I mean, at the fundamental kind of base of this is that the board of directors of Valley Clean Energy, which are made up of two members of the Davis City Council, two of the City of Woodland City Council, and also two board of supervisor members, formed this program to introduce competition into the electricity marketplace. Right, and I think we have a slide up right now too, so. Yeah, and so that explains, this is, we're going out into the public to try to get the word out about the program, which does launch in June. But the way that the state law set this up is to allow for local jurisdictions to aggregate all the electricity accounts within their jurisdictions, and then go out on the wholesale energy market to buy power on behalf of those customers. And so the way that the program was set up and the intent is, again, to introduce competition into the marketplace. And the results of that are that we are able to offer competitively priced electricity in comparison to PG&E. Also, we're able to offer a higher renewable energy content than PG&E, as well as provide customer choice, both in terms of participating in our program, or opting out for free to go back into PG&E. But even within our program, there are options to be able to opt up to what we call ultra green, which is 100% renewable energy. And then also, one of the other really important parts about this is the local control aspect. Decisions are made here at the local level by the board of directors, by Lucas and other board members at local meetings where the public can come and participate. Right. So I want to come back in a second to the choice about the various kinds of energy and renewable energy, because I was reading some comments online this week that said, well, it's only going to save us 2.5%. Why is that even worthwhile to change? And then someone else jumped in and talked about, well, it's about choice. So let's talk for a second about what consumer, okay, so a homeowner in Davis doesn't opt out of the program. They decide to go with Valley Clean Energy. What can they expect to see change in their bill over the course of the year and in the kinds of information coming at them? You want to start with the billing in such a way? Yeah, so the billing itself, actually PG&E is still providing billing services. They also provide transmission distribution services as well. So we all continue to be customers of PG&E. So the bill itself, though, will look virtually identical. The only difference will be on the front page rather than having PG&E's generation costs, it'll say Valley Clean Energy generation. So that'll really be the only difference. And one of the questions that we do encounter is, is that a double charge? Well, the answer to that is no, it's not a double charge. So anything that a customer, a Valley Clean Energy customer would be paying to PG&E otherwise is now replaced by that generation charge for Valley Clean Energy. And it's interesting, the Board of Directors that is made up of local elected officials in our county and our cities, we specifically set the discount rate beneath PG&E's rates at 2.5% for this first year of launch when we first are launching. And there was a reason for doing that, and it was to be a little bit more conservative financially. We wanted to make sure that the organization is launching and is successful as it launches and to make sure that we build up some of our reserves, cash reserves, so we have the ability to actually sort of start to implement different types of programs in our communities over time. Things like energy efficiency, upgrades for houses, potentially electric vehicle charging, that's another area we are interested in certainly. In the customers in Yolo County, there's a lot of agricultural customers, of course, and they may be interested in having a potentially different rate for agricultural use. So I mean, there's a lot of different types of incentives that I think over time, we will have the ability to work on offering our customers. We certainly would like to offer a deeper discount than just 2.5%, right? But for the first year, we set it at 2.5%. And we had a really robust discussion at our board of directors about whether or not that was the right percentage. Should we be 3%, should we be 4%, but we erred a little bit on the side of caution and a little bit less of a discount in the first year. But over the long term, we will be looking at that on an annual basis and making those adjustments. Right, and apart from the pricing, I really want to ask you this question, Lucas, because so much of what you have, your work, has really centered on localism and local control of various systems. So let's come back to that again. Why is that so important in the energy field? Oh yeah, I think it's important for a variety of reasons. One, I know it's important to me and I think a lot of my other colleagues in local government is that right now, when you have to, there's a couple of ways that you can participate with your energy provider, right, so PG&E provides electricity to us. They're headquartered in San Francisco. So if you have issues with them and you need to go to attend meetings, you literally have to go to San Francisco to attend a meeting. The California Public Utilities Commission, which oversees utilities in California, is also headquartered in San Francisco. So, and there are often many meetings, many public meetings that happen that where you would have to actually go to San Francisco in order to participate and have your voice heard as they are sort of making regulations and such around the state. You know, with Valley Clean Energy, we're doing that all here. The public meetings that are on a monthly, minimally at a monthly basis for our monthly board meetings and then we have a community advisory committee made up of members from all of our communities as well. Those meetings are held right here in Yolo County. They have been rotating between Davis City Hall, Woodland City Hall and then the Yolo County Board of Supervisors, Board Chambers. So, you know, people have access, citizens and the rate payers have access to the decision makers at a very, you know, local level. I'm guessing the board is not comprised of shareholders, either. That, yeah, that is also true. Yeah, so, I mean, this is a, you know, one of the reasons that we have the ability to do discounts and things like that in terms of rates, discount rate is that, you know, we are, this is for the benefit of our rate payers, you know, as opposed to, PG&E has a model, certainly where they're doing, you know, they have a, they have their shareholders to be responsive to, yeah, exactly. Yeah, I was just going to point out a couple of other things, too, to add on to the rate question. I mean, two and a half percent on an individual basis. That's maybe doesn't add up to a whole lot, but we did do a calculation and it saves Yolo County customers almost $2 million a year in aggregate. That is not small potatoes. It's not small potatoes. And that money, as we've, you know, as you probably understand, does circulate locally rather than leaving the community. So that's one aspect that I think is important. Another aspect that we think is important, too, on the local control side of things is that it, you know, the decisions are made at the local level and it goes to the point of even making rate decisions, which right now are out of our collective hands, and that happens at the local level where you have board members who are accountable to the local communities. So we think that that's a really important component of this. Right. So we all got a letter a few weeks ago that went out that let us know that this is launching and, you know, if we want it to opt out, there is that option. I'm curious to know what kind of opt-out rate you're experiencing or seeing. Yeah, so we're tracking that closely as you can imagine. I bet you are. Yes, exactly. And we're really, we actually have a real sort of benefit here, too. We're working under contract with SMUD, the Sacramento Municipal Utility District, and they're providing a lot of our sort of back office work. So they're helping us with energy procurement on the wholesale energy market. They are helping us with doing analysis and budgeting, but also what they're doing is they're actually running our call center. So it's a local call center, and those folks are available at any time to, there's hours and it's on our website to be able to call in, but that's one of the other sort of local aspects of this that we think is really quite important. In terms of the opt-out numbers, we're seeing it running at just over 1%. So we're going to be serving somewhere over 60,000 accounts if you add up the three jurisdictions that we're covering. And so right now, we're less than 1,000. Yeah, about a little over 700 accounts out of 60,000 have chosen to opt out as far as so. And as a comparison, too, so we talked to our other, so there's 17 of these programs that are being established around the state right now. The estimate is that 50% of the electricity in California is going to be served through one of these programs within the next five years. And so it's a big deal. And what we do is it allows us to, since we're all public agencies, all not-for-profit public agencies, returning values to the communities that we're serving, there's a real interest in sharing information amongst those 17 programs. So right now at this stage, the only way we can kind of gauge how we're doing is in comparison to how other programs who've already launched. And the 1% is actually performing quite well in comparison to how other programs have launched. Great. So we're down to our last couple of minutes. So, Lucas, yeah. Oh, just, yeah. I think it's also, I really want to emphasize that partnership with SMUD. It's something that, the Sacramento Municipality District's SMUD is known as one of the best utilities in the entire nation. And they know something about starting up a utility company. Precisely. And operating one really well, yes, absolutely. So it was not surprising that our values aligned, that we came to sort of an agreement with them. And while they are a contractor for Valley Clean Energy, we certainly are working very closely with them and regular reports and updates and with their key staff on this as we move forward. Which is somewhat of a difference compared to some of the other community choice energy programs around the state. This is the first one to partner with a utility such as SMUD. Right, I know they brought up a graphic right now too that kind of talks about the difference of, where the energy comes from and who runs it and all of that. I think we've touched on all of that. Any last things that you want people to know as they're making their decision this month, whether to go with Valley Clean Energy or remain with PG&E? So from my perspective, first of all, you don't have to do anything to enjoy the savings that we offer. The higher renewable energy content, we're at 42% renewable. The option to opt up to 100% renewable for a little bit of a premium and this local control aspect. So I think that those are the basic things that we're going out and talking to people. Just one real quick thing too. We've done close to 100 outreach meetings over the course of the past couple of years to try to get word out. We're on social media. We have a presence, we had a newspaper mail order that went out in the Davis Enterprise and the Daily Democrat, Sacramento Bee. So we know people are really busy, but we're trying to get word out through as many channels as possible. It has not gone unpublicized. I have good respect. That's great. We also, I would just one other quick point. We've also, you will be receiving, so you received your first notice a few weeks ago, but we have several other notices that are legally required by the state that will be coming in this subsequent week. So people will be continuing to hear more about the launch of Valley Clean Energy and the ability to be a customer of ours. And I just want to steer people to the website too, which is valleycleanenergy.org. You can go there. You can find out more about how this project came about, who's involved with it, and answers to frequently asked questions. So I want to thank both Lucas and Mitch for joining us here today. And I hope you'll come back down the road and let us know how it's going and maybe we can celebrate at the end of the first year of operation and touch base. But thanks for coming in today and thanks for the work you're doing. Thanks so much for having us. You have been watching in the studio here at Davis Media Access. And my thanks to Dianna Doshka for directing and to our wonderful volunteer crew today, Chris and William and Madeline. Thank you very much.