 We are we are delighted to see you all here this morning and so on behalf of Boyers I want to welcome you to the first kind of day-long session like this that we've had. We've briefed policy makers and Hill staff and agency staff on the realities of the electric transmission system for a long time but we've never done a survey course and looked at all the many issues that are that are challenging investment in the electric transmission grid. So let me let me acknowledge some of our friends who are here and helped us put this on the National Electric Manufacturers Association, the Midwest Governors Association, the Environment and Energy Studies Institute and in a new group you'll hear from one of their founders this morning the House of Representatives Grid Innovation Caucus. We're going to hear from Representative Matt Nerney at lunchtime. So we are we are we are of course especially indebted to the Reserve Officers Association for doing a terrific job with this setup. Their facilities are wonderful and we had them draw the curtains because we were afraid you're going to start looking out the window at this beautiful day. So a few housekeeping matters. Those of you who have laptops and want Wi-Fi the the code is wires in all caps and group in lowercase. We also point out that although we're not charging for this session today we would welcome any contributions you would want to make to Salvation Army Washington area fuels fund for for for underprivileged and challenged energy users. So that that would be downstairs you can you can give that some thought. We will be offering lunch. Many I say most of you have signed up for that and we we are delighted to to have you all stick around for this whole day of excellent panels. If you haven't signed up with this is the honor system. So you'll just have to bite your wrist I guess. But the our speakers in most instances are going to be happy to talk to you offline maybe out in the hall. We have so many subject matters so many good speakers today that the time for this is going to be relatively compressed. So what are we trying to accomplish? First of all I think we're surveying how high voltage transmission systems work how they how they operate who regulates them and and and some discussion of the basics the fundamentals you need to know as a policymaker as an industry person as agency staff in order to appreciate exactly how this enormous machine works. Is is our presentation going to answer every conceivable technical question you have today? Probably not. But you will have access on a continuing basis to these excellent panelists and I urge you to engage in an ongoing conversation with them about about the about the grid. Second we we have highlighted several important developments that are affected by the network the transmission network or or that affecting network and we want to talk about you know why you invest in transmission who pays for it what benefits do they get and what and this is very interesting I'm looking for the the last panelist afternoon when some really seasoned industry experts are going to tell us what they see coming down the road in 10 20 years as far as the wholesale or bulk power market and the electric transmission system that supports it. We have of course some preeminent energy policy advocates from Congress and and some most knowledgeable industry experts to talk to you. So to the extent we possibly can we're going to provide opportunities for you to ask them questions and since this is being videotaped we will post this all on our website for you to refresh your recollections and that that is something and the materials we posted there as well that is something you can refer back to in the future. The electric transmission system as I alluded to is a large complicated machine and there is a rage for infrastructure among policymakers in this country everybody's talking about it but it's all it all seems to be dominated conversation dominated by the roads and bridges guys and I would say that the electric transmission system is one of the three most important networks that ties our economy and our culture in a way together and it's something that we that we dare not ignore which we have done from time to time in the past. It is I submit the most important thing that you never think about and of course people don't don't particularly aren't particularly aware of its benefits and that's why we are here today. Transmission is an enabler of new technology it's a platform for competitive energy markets that will lower prices for consumers. It's provides an access road to diverse energy resources including this new evolving generation mix that we see in various parts of the country. But it can also be congested. It can be outdated in terms of its technology in places. It is regulated and I somewhat peculiar way as you'll find out and and we are we are we think it's very important to understand the realities of the system both good and bad. The the first panelist morning if you call a panel it's two fabulous industry people that I've known for a long time are going to start us off with what we call transmission 101 and Don Morrow comes to us from Quanta Technologies in in Houston and Don has over three decades of experience in this business and in all aspects of the utility and utility consulting business. He is an expert in transmission planning which is really at the core of what we're talking about today. Don a senior vice president corporate strategy at Quanta Technologies and he has he has been at Quanta for since 2006. Yeah. And American transmission company and we we are delighted to have Don here. He is a an electrical engineer and an MBA from the University of Wisconsin my alma mater. So I'm delighted to introduce Don. His his panel made on this first panel is Adrienne McCoy. She hails from from Kansas City from Burns and McDonald. Adrienne is also an electrical engineer and has the title of market strategy manager. It's a new title right. Yeah. She she focuses on the transmission distribution part of the business at Burns and Mac and is a graduate of Kansas State University. So I welcome them to come up and we can get the the show on the road. We will be perhaps a little bit arbitrary about time this morning so that we can get a sense of every speaker's topic. So with that are you first. All right. I'm out of here. Thank you. All right. Welcome everybody. So just to set the stage here I want to again introduce myself. My name is Adrienne McCoy. Like you said I'm from Kansas City. I'm electrical engineer by degree. Somebody asked me earlier this morning how I got a condom to getting in the TND industry and I'll tell you it was a long path. But mostly I became attracted to it because it's ever changing at least this day and age and I love keeping up with all the events that are happening. So today we're hoping to kind of walk you through some of those things. All right. So here's our agenda. We're going to go through the basic definitions and components of the grid. We're going to talk about how the grid is operated how it's planned how it's developed who pays for projects how funding gets together and then go through some of the emerging technologies and answer any questions you guys may have. Ultimately the objective like Jim said the grid is a large complicated machine. So we want to take all of the interweavings of the technology the operations the planning and try to unwind a bit of that for you guys today in 60 minutes or less which will be difficult. So anyway stick with us. I will say that we're trying to just give a high level overview of all this. There's going to be people throughout the day that are going to do the deep dive into some of these topics. So I'd say hold all difficult questions for them in the afternoon. All right. So starting with the grid the most basic definition here. So what is the grid. The grid is the networks that make up our electric distribution or transmission distribution system. So that's all the wires all the transformers all the switches includes the generators the power plants the substation the step up and down those voltages and again the lines that bring that energy to your doorstep. Couple other basic definitions here for those that maybe don't have the electrical background or a bit out of touch voltage. So I always like to do electricity under the analogy of the water system. This is probably the most popular way. My husband is a mechanical engineer for him. He can talk about water and pressure and the movement of those things much easier than he can electrons but really it's all the same. So voltage is kind of like the electrical pressure and it's measured in voltage or in volts. Current is the movement of that charge that would be like the water flow if we're going with that analogy. Power then actually start with energy energy then is the amount of work that can be done by electricity. So that's measured in watts and then power would be the rate at which that electricity is transferred. And so another example of kind of the difference between energy and power here. So a lot of my friends who are non technical ask us so when I order by a light bulb and it's 15 watt light bulb what's the difference in getting that one or one with lower wattage. So here's if you're wanting to know how your power is kind of calculated from your light usage. If you take one 15 watt light bulb you're in it for five hours a day for 30 days. That's going to total up a power of 2.25 kilowatt hours and kilowatt just means a thousand watt hours. So that's how your bill would be calculated at the end of the month. So what can you hour with one megawatt hour or what can you power with one megawatt hour. So here's a one megawatt hour it's quite a bit of energy you can power a number of things you can cool a refrigerator for three months that's 150 kilowatt hours download 130 or over 133 thousand songs 50 kilowatt hours so on and so forth and we'll talk about this a little more in a second but this is a rather general statement again how much you can get out of one megawatt hour is going to vary in one part of the country to another part of the country we'll get to that. So now talking a little bit about the industry and the overview so utility ownership. There are kind of three basic forms of ownership in our industry. One would be the private or investor owned model they're commonly referred to as IOU's. So these are supported by private funds of the shareholders. So this is actually the prevailing form of ownership even though there's only around 200 investor owned utilities in the country. They power over 75% of the power users in the country. So this is the prevailing form. Many of these are then owned by holding companies that maybe own one or two. So I have a California examples over here on the right. So the example of an IOU in California would be PG&E Pacific Gas and Electric who we have some lovely people here today from PG&E. So investor owned utilities are regulated by the are more heavily regulated than the public and cooperative forms. That's because the public and cooperative forms are government owned or member owned. So we'll talk a minute about kind of the natural monopoly of our industry and why the IOU's might be more heavily regulated than than those that are not. But public government owned an example that would be LADWP. That's one of the largest I think actually the largest publicly owned utility in the country. Most publicly owned in co-ops are smaller more rural but there are many many more as you can see there's over 2000 government owned utilities across the country. And then the co-op is another form of public owned. This is member owned meaning that the actual members that that that that utility is serving actually are part owners in the utility. So they're providing an at cost service. So it's kind of understood that the public and the co-ops are already operating with the customer's best interest in mind. So that's why slightly less regulated IOU's are as well. But again because of the natural monopoly of the way they're formed a little bit different. So again I went through that also to make the point that public utility does not mean it's publicly owned. So again when you hear public utility don't don't think that that means that they're all government regulated or government owned. So the utility industry is special for a number of reasons not just because I love it but it is a capital intensive industry. So it is not it is not cheap to build a transmission line or build a substation or build a power plant. These are very capital intensive efforts and so there are efficiencies and economies of scale in and having one utility owned and build all of that. They can buy multiple transformers multiple pieces of equipment and get better pricing so on and so forth as well. Their their equipment depreciates over 30 to 40 years. So again because it is capital intensive and natural monopoly it kind of spurs the regulated side of the market. Also there's an obligation to serve and I'll point out that means that utilities have an obligation to serve anybody that wants to be connected to the grid. So no matter how far away you live from the closest line there is an obligation to get power to you. I'll also point out not only is an obligation to serve everyone anywhere but also as much power as they want. So then the components of the grid the utility industry is traditionally a vertically integrated industry meaning that the people that own the generation also owns the lines also own the retail traditionally. Then there was a bit of a restructuring in the 90s kind of between 95 and 2002. There were some efforts to restructure. So a number of a number of utilities sold off or spun off their generation. So now you'll see in different parts of the state or of the country there's some that are completely restructured already. There's some that did not go all the way through. Part of that there was the California electricity crisis in 2002. Some of you may remember that kind of put a halt on a lot of the restructuring efforts that were going on. So you'll find different utilities and different power companies in different phases of the restructuring. But the main point here is that is again when we talk about who owns what who's regulated by what later as we get into who I think Pauline here is going to talk about who regulates. So keep in mind that the transmission side is regulated. The wholesale prices are regulated by FERC versus on the distribution side the retail prices are usually regulated by their state PUCs. All right. So then going back to again the basics of that vertically integrated system there generation. I think most people probably are familiar generation traditionally is your coal power plants or nuclear. Nowadays you're seeing a lot more of your renewables your solar and wind and hydro and biomass. So these are just a few examples of generation. And then load. So the load is the consumer of that electric energy. Loads can be anywhere from a watt to again a megawatt. It all varies. As you all see you have our national lampoon Christmas here. So that would be quite the load. As I mentioned before the loads can vary. So for example the I saw a stat while back. Let's see if I wrote it down here that loads in the northeast is have half the load consumption of the south each southeast such as Georgia. So if you think about it in that way one megawatt generator could serve twice the amount of people in the northeast as it could in the southeast. So again when we talk about load and earlier when I mentioned what can one megawatt hour power. Keep that in mind that it's going to vary depending on where you're at. I will also mention on this slide that the grid is designed to service the peak load. So typically reserve margins are anywhere from 15 to 20% range. And so a lot of times we we plan and build the grid in order to be able to manage whatever the loads are the peak loads are in the situation that one or two of the largest power plants in the area are down for maintenance or have failed for whatever reason. So when we talk about some of the technologies later and some of the efficiencies that we're trying to find in the industry and where transmission comes into play. Transmission plays a big piece and making sure that that the load is able to be served. Distribution then again this is this is your serving to the home. So these range anywhere from 4 kV to 12 kV something we'll call 34 and a half kV that's kilovolts or thousand volts. I always like to give when I do really really entry level. So at your outlet you get 120 volts, 110, 120 volts right. So even though this is the low voltage it's still as little as 4,000 volts. So it's still a lot of voltage but in the scheme of how we move power and the numbers this is a this is your lower voltage. Transmission then is the high voltage. So this is anywhere from 115 kilovolts to 565 kilovolts. In some parts of the world they're doing a megavolts now. This is essentially your interstate system and I think I have a picture somewhere in here. If you see a picture of the grid you'll see it is a web of interwoven transmission lines. And so the purpose of transmission lines is that when you start at the generator you want to step up oftentimes your power plants and things are far away from where your load is right. You don't want a power plant sitting in your neighbor's backyard. So we'll put them out away from the load system usually and then you have to get that power to the load center. And so the best way to do that without to minimize the amount of electrical losses there are is to step that up to a high voltage. You have less loss at a high voltage. So then you'll move it at the high voltage to another substation closer to your load center. You'll step it back down to the distribution level and then that's where it'll move on into your distribution network into your neighborhoods and hit another transformer and meter at your house. So transmission is important because again and enable us to build generation in areas that are removed from the loads like I mentioned. This is more desirable from an environmental standpoint and again like I said nobody wants to have something in their backyard. It also allows us to build larger and more efficient generators so the larger the capacity of the power plant the more the higher capacity of the line we need to bring it in. So we can again do economies of scale on both the plant and on the transmission lines to bring that to the load center. And again getting power out to remote areas with lower losses. So in our country we have around six percent electric loss on our lines. So again by by increasing to the higher voltage we're minimizing that amount. And again creating robust interconnected networks. So obviously that the basis of everything we do in this industry is around reliability resiliency safety all of that. So transmission enable us enables us to increase our reliability decrease our costs. And it also and Donald talk here in a second a bit more about markets and power pools and whatnot. But it also enables us to operate under that kind of a format. Ended up and done. Nice job Adrian. And I have a great excuse as of yesterday I had no voice and when I woke up this morning I have a voice so kind of I hope it holds up throughout this little talk. Who here is brand new to this industry. Raise your hand. I mean if you're here for wires university raise your hand. Okay. Who's been in this industry for a very long time and could be teaching this thing. Honest I know could raise his hand. All right. And so there's a whole group of people in the middle. For those that are here who's an attorney. Raise your hand. Okay who's an economist. Any economist in the room. And then engineers. And then anybody who I didn't mention anybody else that would not be of those three really that's interesting. So so you may be my primary audience and Adrian's primary audience here today. Now how do I do just tap this. Was that. Oh here. Got it. All right. So if you are an attorney or an economist. One of your perspectives on the industry when you're dealing with buying and selling electricity. We started when I started in the industry and still to this day most of the energy was transacted through bilateral transactions two parties sitting together and going hey I got some excess energy you want to buy it. And someone else going yeah I might be interested. It's expensive for me to generate what's your price. You cut a deal and you make a sale. Those would be in this example. A and B. So you might have utility A. With some excess energy utility B. Needing it because they're running some expensive internal generation maybe in a downtown area. Now this looks real simple right. You know you just utility A cranks up their generator utility B lowers their generator power moves they do some accounting cut a deal and pay for it at the back end. This seems simple. Here's the reality. What happens is the utilities are part of an interconnected network. And that's what electricity is like here in this industry. So if you're at utility A in the middle and you just want to move it to utility B on the side in the lower left hand corner. Some of that does flow directly. But the physics of the system means that actually the rest of it moves around the grid. And so what you'll see here in this example is some of it moves from A to E. So it actually moves away. And then that'll flow back through D or F. And then through C into B. And this is a realistic example of how electricity moves throughout the grid today. When you think about some of the issues on the electric system and you think about the markets that I'll talk a little bit more about and what many of the people here are going to be talking about later in the day. This is a dynamic that has to be taken into account every single moment that the lights are staying on and every single process that gets into planning and gets into cost allocation. So this is a very fundamental dynamic. That's an important takeaway from our introductory session this morning. Now I'll give a little bit of a background on grid operations and markets. Now grid operation as Adrian pointed out there's an analogy on the water system. But if you remember my previous slide about how that all flows it's not quite the same. So there's an analogy on the components like voltage, current, amperage and wattage but it flows through what's called the path of least resistance and it's a heavily interconnected grid. So it requires an awful lot of monitoring to really keep track of how electricity is flowing on the grid. There's a few operators in the room. I know Greg's an operator. Raise your hand if you're a system operator. Okay, we only got one. So if you have any questions after this talk to Greg, okay? Yeah, you got that. I'm there for you. All right. So but it requires a heavy amount of operations and I'm going to show you some control center stuff here in a minute. The but it's really it's a critical difference and it's a critical part of how the utilities operate. The map that we've chosen is kind of interesting to ignore the gold lines on that for a minute. You can see a lot of what I would say are pre existing or existing transmission lines in the country. And the country's split up into three different sections. You have the eastern interconnect. That's the I guess that would be a pink type color. You have the Western interconnect, which is the light green color. And then you have Texas or Urcott. And that would be the light yellow color. And what you have is in each of those regions that really tight interconnected network. So when you have transactions occurring within each of those interconnections, you get that sort of pattern with how electricity flows throughout those grids. Now what you see with the gold lines is a vision for where the electricity industry may go with this. This would be a conceptual overlay that tries to link all of the grids together and allows for heavy movement back and forth across the country. It's a vision. And it's something we put in here just to kind of give you a sense of what the system looks like now and where it may be going in the future. Now grid operation. This is a picture, I believe of the CalSO, correct? And I've got a bigger picture of that here in a minute. The control centers that are at the independent system operators, the utilities and a few other organizations that we may talk about if we got time, their staff 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. And their focus is on safety, reliability and availability of the electric system. They do a lot of stuff in here. But one of the most basic things that they do is they balance the generation with the load. And that's a critical thing. There's a lot of automated systems that are in place. You may consider it part of smart grid in some ways because I'm an old transmission guy, as Jim pointed out, been in the industry for a very long time. We've been doing a lot of smart grid stuff from the very beginning in operations. So we have a lot of telemetry, a lot of data that gets brought into control centers. And you monitor the electric use every second of the day. And then you balance through automated control systems, the generation with it. Those operators sit there and make sure that that's working correctly. Now, by the way, Jim, how do I get rid of that banner on top here? Do you know? Somehow I put that thing on the top. Just go quit preview, I think. Right there. Got it. Thank you. There we go. We're back. All right. So there is an awful lot going on inside a control center. And this is an expanded picture of the Cal ISO. Really what's happening in these big operations is there are transmission operators that are looking at the transmission system, looking at the flows on it. What that means is the electricity usage on each and every element on the on the electric grid. They're monitoring voltage, they're monitoring the amount of flow. If there's an overload, their position to take corrective action. If there's an automatic outage, their position to react to that. There are market operators. And we'll talk more about energy markets. But these people sit there and keep the energy markets going today to efficiently move electricity throughout the U.S. electric grid. There are what are called balancing authority operators. These are the people that balance the generation with the load. And they do a lot of interaction between the transmission operator and the market operators to make sure that everybody's playing their role correctly and satisfying the North American Electrical Reliability Corp standards and a reliability criteria. Now, supporting the operators, there are a couple of positions inside these things as well. There's what I would call an operational assessment engineer. And these people are sitting running studies almost continuously throughout the day that are looking at what if scenarios they're looking at if a contingency happens, if the generator trips off, if I lose the whole substation what's going to happen to me? If there's a maintenance occurring, how does that affect the electric system? And they're there to run studies and provide technical support for the operators so that they can make sometimes instantaneous decisions. There are also people in there called maintenance schedulers. And they work together with the operations planners, the field crews, the folks that actually hang the wire and send out the trucks and so on. They also interact with the PJMs or the California ISOs to look at when is the appropriate time to take out a transmission line where it will not ideally cause maybe a price spike or some issues and reliability for a certain part of the grid. So they're sitting there again around the clock working year round scheduling outages and making sure that it's being done in an appropriate way. And then finally there's supervision. As you can imagine the bigger operations like Cal ISO or PJM who's going to speak with us shortly. These are very complex operations. And so the supervision is there to kind of kind of make sure things are working correctly. So that's a control center. Now you've heard a lot about smart grid. And as I pointed out, I think on the control center side, there's been a lot of smart grid capability all along. Operations needs to take immediate actions. We talked about that smart grid in this case refers to an upgraded system which offers the grid operators even more visibility and control. So I've got an example here. I've got two sets of pictures. Anybody recognize that guy standing above the console? That would be me. So you can see what this industry does to you after a while. So that is a control center from about the mid 90s. And so you can see there's actually a fair amount of advanced capability even at that time. The graphics were primitive. Randy and I used to work together. Randy Sederfield was going to talk. That's an old style map board behind. They just got rid of that type of a map board and have gone to a video wall. But generally the information that the system operator uses today has been available to them at least since the 80s and generally actually in many cases back into the 70s or 60s. So a lot of that data is there. There's two way communications that are in the control center. There's the ability to operate remotely or open up a breaker or take out a transmission line. There's the ability to change generation, bring them on, take them off. So that's there. The smart grid enhancements in the control center really are about enhancing or increasing situational awareness. Situational awareness is a phrase that's in our industry right now. It's kind of a buzz phrase. But what it means is if something bad's happening, the operator has the ability to rapidly figure out what that bad thing's going to do to the electric grid and give them a pathway to restore the system back to normal and prevent either a blackout or restore service as quickly as possible. That's the purpose of smart grid in the control center. Now there's some emerging smart grid capabilities coming. I won't go through this in detail to save some time. But real quick distributed generation is going to become a big deal. Even at some of these large control centers, the amount of distributed generation is showing up in big ways. And it's starting to have some big impacts on the system. Smart appliances may be part of the controls that are implemented to help address that. Remote control applications, plug-in hybrids, as you can imagine, can be a big deal and kind of bring in storage in a way that's really not formally storage, but can be used that way. Got a lot of the locally generated power, wireless chips, which is communications enhanced between the control centers to maybe intermediate operations points out into the homes and web and mobile phone interfaces and then obviously energy storage. So a lot of this is coming. If I had more time, I'd go into it, but just be aware that this will be impacting how operators will approach their job today. Now electricity markets, we talked a little bit about that at the beginning. Megawatt of energy like any other commodity is frequently bought or sold. In some cases and especially in places like PJM, where they have a market called the Locational Marginal Price or LMP Market, you don't even know who you're buying and selling your electricity from or to. So it's all goes through a kind of a market and whatever that price clearing is, you're going to get that electricity. Market participants in this include generators. There's obviously end users and then there are resellers as well as utilities and so on. Now the price for our wholesale electricity is, as we talked about, there's still some of this bilateral transactions going on. Generally in the case of that, it's just negotiated price, whatever makes sense. There are FERC regulated wholesale tariffs. In some cases those are cost plus, but generally now since about the mid 90s or maybe the early 90s, those have been converted to market price. So there really are no caps. And if you've been around the industry long enough, you know the price spikes that occurred in the late 90s, a lot of those tariffs had changed just before that to to market price prices. In an LMP type market, generally what happens there is you have a clearing price. So everybody puts in their electricity needs. The market operator aligns all of that and determines a certain amount of energy to buy. Then they'll pair that up with suppliers that'll put in a price point and they'll go from the lowest to highest. And when those two intersect with a certain amount of reserves and so on, that's when they'll cut the deal and that's where the price points are set. Now wholesale electricity markets are not universal and they are not throughout the United States. But they do cover a significant portion of it. In the United States, the shaded areas represent two things. One is an ISO, Independent System Operator which oversees the grid and works with the utilities to operate it. But generally they also operate an electricity market or a clearing market. So there are seven of these in the United States. And they're in New England, New York ISO, PJM, going from east to west. Then we have the Midwest ISO in the middle, Southwest Power Pool, ERCOT, and then California ISO. Also there are two ISOs that are set up in energy markets in Canada. There's the Alberta Electric System Operator, AESO, and then the Independent Electricity System Operator, IESO, in Quebec. Now there is a lot of action and many of these have been in the news recently, especially the Cal ISO and PJM. We'll talk about those two in a minute when we get into the planning. Now as we talked about, there's not a standard market across the country and even within the ISOs, the way they implement their market has some subtle differences. Not every product, for example in PJM, is available to you if you want to plan the SPP market. So there are some differences. But all of them provide a central clearing house for transactions. All of them allow for if desired negotiated bilateral agreements. And all of them make efficient grid management. It's all about really making sure that the most economically priced electricity is available for the users of the grid and in a way that supports the reliability of the electric grid. Right now, participation is voluntary, but I do think for keeps moving more and more toward a mandatory participation in markets. They're not there yet. We'll see if they ever get there. This is a little price chart on prices. I'm going to skip this one because I think this one's more interesting. Now if you were going to be playing the markets today, you would, unfortunately, it's not showing up too well. You would be staring at a screen right now that looks just like this. And this is from the Midwest ISO. This is the northern half of the Midwest ISO. I took this last week at 10.15 AM. And it was showing the electricity prices throughout the Midwest ISO at that point in time. The color shading shows different ranges of the price. And the bluest is the lowest price all the way up to the red. In this case, it would be yellow. It would be the highest price. And what you can see here is that prices are not uniform across an energy market. You would think maybe they would be, but there's a reason for this. And that's because sometimes there are what are called transmission constraints that prevent the lowest priced energy from getting into the pockets of biggest demand. And so even on this relatively normal day with very, very standard temperatures, we were seeing some price spiking right around the intersection of Iowa, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. So I wanted to put this in here to not just show you high energy markets work, but also to give you a feel, especially if you're new to the industry, how markets can help target potentially transmission investment to help lower cost for pockets of high-cost energy. I'm not sure this may be a case, but it does illustrate that these pockets do exist. And planners and utility folks are able to use this data to make informed decision on transmission investment. All right, let's talk a little bit about grid planning. As you can imagine, this all doesn't happen just by itself. It doesn't automatically, five minutes, all right, does not come together just by itself. It requires some knowledge and some planning. In the transmission space, FERC regulates transmission. When you get into distribution or generation, that also starts to bring into the states. We'll skip forward. When you look at the, when the planners look at the grid, they focus on a variety of things. Is it adequate? Is there good size and strength to the system? Is it balanced? Can you handle the maintenance? Are you dealing with safety and protection? And then recovery and restoration. So the primary purpose of transmission planning, determine the transmission and substation additions, which render the transmission network to be able to supply the loads and facilitate wholesale power marketing. With a given criteria, the lowest possible cost in managing the risk to the system. And that's the essence of planning. Now here are the factors real quick. If you're going to sit down and really try and figure out how to plan, you're going to go, well, how far into the future do I plan? Do I plan for next year? Or do I plan for 20? And the answer is it's kind of a combination of both. You do need to look at that five-year window to build a major transmission line takes about five years. I know people are trying to push that faster, but you need to look out at least five years to give you enough time to be able to execute. And generally, utilities in the United States and ISOs deal with a 10-year planning horizon. You got to do a load forecast. So when you look 10 years out, well, what's that electricity demand going to be? What's driving it? So you got to figure that out. Got to look at your generation resources. Today, could that be in the form of rooftop solar? Could it be a part of a wind farm? What generator is going to be retiring? Maybe through emissions requirements. So you take that into account. And you factor all of these things in here. I'll just highlight a couple of them right away limitations, because that's existing right-of-ways or opportunities for expansion. So that becomes a big part of it. And then new and emerging technology. Real quick on regional planning, FERC has been trying to help out the regional planners quite a bit by issuing orders. And one of the orders they've focused on is order 1,000, where they are introducing for certain transmission lines throughout the country the possibility of not just the incumbent building it, the incumbent meaning the utility that owns or serves the geographic territory of its footprint. But allowing other people to come in and actually bid on it. Is there usually very large regional type projects? Or they could be public policy projects. FERC has come up with two models on it, a competitive bid model and a sponsorship model. And for the details you can look at it. And I do think we have some other talk on this, right, Jim? So I can skip it. One of the biggest issues, and you're going to hear more about this, is cost allocation. Who's going to pay? And it's extremely challenging. If you go back to that first slide, or actually second slide I showed you with that dynamic of the power flowing all over the place, that dynamic makes cost allocation extremely complicated. Now there are three ways that currently exist to look at funding projects. There's a rate based project which goes, it's an approved project, goes through the planning process, gets into the rate base. There's something called a participant funded project where you have someone who's agreed to pay for the transmission line. Maybe it's a generation source. And so they will go ahead with a contract and deal with that. And then you may also have merchant projects that are being built on spec, but looking at price differentials like we had on that one LMP slide from the Midwest ISO. And they look at that delta in price to help fund it. And with that I'm going to turn it real quick back over to her to cover emerging. We'll make it fast. All right. So quickly we'll go through a couple of the emerging technologies just for those that are interested in some of the things that are up and coming in the industry. So storage you guys will hear about storage quite a bit probably for no short term here. So as Dawn mentioned, there's a rule with balancing load sometimes. And so if you think about when your peak loads are going on, if you can use storage to hold over maybe wind energy from the night before, that kind of thing and then use it to serve your load during the daytime this helps a lot with balancing your load. Skip through quickly here. Syncrophasers and PMUs are phasor measurement units. When we talk about smart grid this is one of the technologies that's coming out of the grid very quickly in support of smart grid efforts. So a syncrophaser is again a sophisticated monitoring device that can measure the voltage, current, and frequency at specific locations. Those three things are kind of like the heartbeat or health of the system. So it allows the operator to monitor those, excuse me, monitor those. And then they can make real time decisions based off of the data that they get in both online decisions such as being able to accelerate the re-closing of an important tie line or offline decisions such as going back and doing any kind of analysis on that data to help them with system planning for the future or any forensic analysis of any events that happen on the grid. Again, syncrophasers and they're measured by PMUs. These are 100 times faster than the existing SCADA technology. So that's what you see out on the grid mostly right now. So you'll be seeing these day overall. Can improve your reliability, cost efficiency, and help operators again in real time. Superconductors are another emerging technology. These are pretty cool. They're made out of alloys or compounds that allow electricity to be conducted with less loss as long as they're maintained below a certain level. These are still expensive. Again, I think as more and more of these get deployed, you'll see the cost effectiveness of these go down and you'll probably see more and more. But like I mentioned before, in the United States, about 6% of the electricity that's transmitted each year is lost. That's if you do the math on what we were talking about before. That's quite a bit of cost that we lose right out the gate. So being able to, A, transfer electricity with less loss. And B, this would also enable you to transfer power over long distances at lower voltages. Like I said before, normally you have to transform your voltage up to a high voltage just to transmit it across a long distance. Now you could do that at residential voltages and eliminate the cost of a large transformer or a substation so on and so forth. And then I think this is the last one I'm going to hit on real quick. And then we'll go to questions if we have time. But smart wires. So these are, there's actually a company. Smart wires is based out of Oakland. I have kind of a shout out here to them. But they have this technology that's basically a flow controller built into the conductor. And so again, when we talk about real time monitoring, this conductor itself can adjust the impedance of the line to meet the needs of the power on the grid. And so again, it's just a real time way to be able to affect the change in the line necessary to improve the reliability. And so in summary, again, there's the power system is a key element of the infrastructure here in the United States. We use transmission to kind of support the backbone of our energy markets. And there's a lot of challenges to investment. You're going to hear a lot more about that as you go through the afternoon. It'll probably be somewhat of a theme. But we're all here in this industry to try to address those needs, address those challenges, and come out on the other end. Are there one or two really important questions you'd like to add? Do we have a portable mic? I can repeat it. I'll repeat it. Let's go ahead. We talked about balancing. OK, the question was, we talked about balancing the load. What happens if the load's not balanced? Well, that's a bad thing. We don't like that to happen at all. Generally, what happens in the system operations time frame is the frequency drops. And so frequency dropping seems like it's not that big of a deal. But it's an extremely dangerous thing to happen if it goes too far. The generation that runs on the system, especially the large coal, nuclear, and more traditional generators have to be synchronized at 60 hertz or very close to it. If the system drops too far, they'll start tripping offline. And if you're too far out of whack on your load, you're going to have a system collapse. So it's a very bad thing. Yes, sir. One more. One more question. You, sir. You, sir. He's waiting for the mic. Yeah, he's waiting for the mic. We'll repeat the question. That's OK. Something about the cost. Yeah, so again, superconductors just as an example, it's fairly early stages. They've all been deployed in a few places. And so the costs are still rather high. I feel like I mentioned before, a few as they start deploying more and more, you're going to see that come down. Superconductors again, in particular, in order for them to maintain the low temperatures that are required for that conductor to achieve low loss, they have to be insulated, gas insulated in most cases. And so that represents a rather high cost as well. So I think as that technology develops more, you'll see more and more of that as they, they'll become more popular in underground as it's easier to insulate there. But I think you'll see those costs coming down. Sure. I know of a couple that have been installed in Texas. OK, thank you very much. That was great. I want to bring to your attention that we are doing a live stream of this, of these presentations this morning. And I do have a press report here that says, after watching the first hour of Wires University, Vice President Joe Biden and Energy Secretary Ernie Moniz today will call on Congress to approve millions of dollars in new spending to repair the rickety electric grid. The pair will appear in Philadelphia touting today's release of the Quadrennial Energy Review. So see, this is, we're making a basic big impact already. So by this afternoon, we should have all the answers, I think. I hate to rush through this. I know you all have questions and our presenters are going to be available throughout the day if you can collar them. But we need to move on, I'm afraid. Our next presenters, we have four of them and I guess I would invite them to come up to the table. And I will give you brief introductions. And I think you will see from what they have to say the method in our madness. We've talked about the operational realities of the bulk power system and high voltage grid. And now we're going to talk a little bit about regulation, including things like siting, how RTOs, the regional transmission organizations work. First up, and I don't know, are we doing this in the order that's in the program? Do you care? OK. OK. I think you're, yeah. OK. First up is Professor Amy Stein. Amy is an old friend and an associate professor of law at the University of Florida, Levin School of Law. She used to teach at Tulane. And I've heard your lecture on a number of occasions. She teaches energy law and policy, environmental law, climate change, grid governance, distributed energy, environmental law, federalism. It's quite a full plate. She's got a forthcoming article coming out at the Colorado Law Review called Distributed Reliability. And she's done one called Making a Case for Energy Storage. Today she's going to talk a little bit about some of the basic legal and jurisdictional concepts that are confronted when we talk about getting transmission projects authorized. Our next presenter and also a good friend and somebody who's been very helpful to me personally, David Morinoff is the general counsel of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and has a long history in that organization, having been a legal advisor to the commission, special counsel in the office of general counsel. You were acting general counsel. You were deputy general counsel and senior counsel to the chairman, I think. And he's been in private practice. The Harvard Law graduate, I'm telling you, there's nothing you can't ask this guy that he doesn't already know. So I hope you find an occasion to ask him a tough question about page 18 of South Carolina versus FERC or something like that. I'm very glad you're enjoying yourself a bit. Randy Satterfield is executive vice president for strategic planning and project development of American Transmission Company in Waukesha, Wisconsin. Randy has been a longtime supporter of Wires and has given us briefings on transmission siting. But his responsibilities range all over the map as his title suggests. He's been head of communications, regulatory and government relations, and has done a lot of work in plan old project development. Randy is a graduate of Market University, and I'm delighted he's here today. And finally, Pauline Foley is with us. She works at the PJM interconnection, which is the RTO we have to find ourselves in right now. The regional transmission organizations play a very important role since FERC helped them to emerge in the late 20th century. They reflect the regional realities of energy or electricity markets. And I look forward to hearing what Pauline has to say. She's primarily responsible for legal issues regarding transmission planning, generator and merchant interconnections. And she's been extensively involved in a lot of cases. Some of mine, as a matter of fact, didn't come out so well, but we love her anyway. And the job of legal counsel for RTOs is an exceptionally difficult one. It's essential to understand the breadth of the authority of the RTO and what FERC wants, as well as what competing utilities within the RTO want from that organization. So I look forward to hearing what she has to say. I'm going to turn it over to Amy Stein. I'm trying to see if we're going to keep going here. Does it just keep going all the way down to? Oh, there we go. How's that? That look great? Wonderful. Well, welcome. Good morning and thank you all for being here. And thank you to Chairman Hecker, of course, for organizing and all of the Wires folks for putting together such a fabulous panel that there are so many wonderful speakers here, I think, that we were each given 10 minutes. So unlike your morning panel, we get to do the entire world of our different areas in only 10 minutes. And I wasn't aware of how fabulous Don and Adrian's presentation was going to be. So if you have already flipped ahead to mine, you'll see there's a few repeat slides. So mine will be even less than 10 minutes because I am not going to bore you by covering slides we already handled. I had the pleasure of kicking off our panel, and so my job was supposed to be laying the fundamental groundwork for some of these issues, and then touching upon jurisdiction. And happily, I don't really need to do the fundamental groundwork anymore. So transmission basics, we could skip. But I will then talk about transmission jurisdiction and then give a nice, hopefully segue into transmission management. And the idea being that David will be able to dive deeper into what FERC is doing with FERC's authority and jurisdiction. And Pauline will be digging deeper into sort of regional issues in terms of management. And I believe Randy will be digging into siting issues. So I'll touch upon the basics of jurisdiction upon each of those three areas for our panel. So transmission basics, the one slide you have not seen yet, which is our sources of electricity generation in our country. And even though this is a transmission panel, I took the liberty of branching out a little bit to be thinking just about generation first. As Don explained, our industry is generally broken up into three segments. Generation, transmission, and distribution. That's how we have historically viewed the entire industry. And we are seeing now a lot of technologies which are sort of crossing over. Things that can perform multiple functions, like energy storage, for instance, which Adrian briefly mentioned. It's causing lots of interesting jurisdictional quandaries for all of us, because what do we do? We sort of used to have these nice lawyers like to partition. We like clarity. We like categories. And now all of a sudden, we have these things that cross over. But I think it's important to just have some sense, particularly with my students. I am assuming all of you know this, but that things like, one, what's striking? Petroleum is not an issue when we're talking about electricity. So just really remembering that energy as a whole, we often think about it in terms of electricity and transportation. But then once you're in the electricity world, coal is still king. Natural gas is giving it a run for its money. As many of you, I'm sure, have been following the fracking boom. Over the years, this chart from EIA, the Energy Information Administration, which if you have never frequented their websites, have some of the best data out there in terms of more than you could ever imagine on any single thing. And they have all these cool new Excel formats that I was just on a panel with the administrator of EIA. And so thinking, though, about if you look historically how this has changed a little bit, nuclear has remained relatively constant. It's always been around 1920%. And renewables being 13%. And then this little box is the further breakdown of that. And based on what you see in the news, you would think renewables is all wind and solar. But if you see, look, solar is actually 2% of the 13%. And wind, 32% of the 13%. Our number one source is hydro, actually. And so biomass is a big source. This is important when we get to thinking about reasons why transmission lines are important. This is from New York ISO, does this great graphic, which then tries to break down, I think, the segments for you in a step-by-step process. I think Don showed you something similar. So I won't show a lot of time. I won't spend a lot of time. But just know that the generator, and then we have sort of our transmission. It includes the transformers that Adrian mentioned, our substation, and then the distribution at the end. But what I will draw your attention to is underneath that. That can be a value added for those of you. You see how the blue boxes say wholesale, and the reddish boxes say retail? And this is very important from a jurisdictional standpoint. Because although you'll see my slides focus on FERC's jurisdiction over transmission, FERC, of course, also has jurisdiction over interstate wholesale sales of electricity. Now, that's a mouthful if you don't deal with this. But really, the way that I think about it, and David can correct me, but is often sales to a middleman. When you're not selling to the end user, those are the wholesale sales. And so then, from the middleman to you, the customer, that's the retail side of it. And in the Congress in its wisdom has decided that we have split jurisdiction here, and that FERC, we have federal jurisdiction over those wholesale sales. But we leave it to the state public utility commissions and public service commissions on the retail side. So that is probably fundamental takeaway point number one. All right, then Don also used this great chart that I showed you now. The only interesting thing that I did, I think, was that I'm showing you, this was the map of, this is a few years old now, but this is the existing transmission lines. And then I think Don, you were using this one, right? Which was including the proposed lines as well. So just to kind of show you the difference, and in terms of how massive this is, this only includes the lines that are 345 kilovolts and up. So there's a whole mess if you go even lower than that, that the map gets even more complicated. He had also mentioned to you the point about how the grid is not just one grid. So I would say that's probably take away number two for me, that it's really important to remember that we're really talking about three separate grids here in our country. So we have the Eastern interconnect, the Western interconnect, and the Texas interconnect. And why is this important? Because of a whole history of legal cases that have decided that if electrons get onto the transmission lines, they are on the grid, and that is in some way connected to another state, even within your own state, because those lines connect to other states, that qualifies as interstate, which triggers the Commerce Clause, which triggers the interstate provisions of the Federal Power Act, and hence FERC is able to grab jurisdiction over those sales. So this has been a long time coming, and what that also means is can anyone guess what happens to Dural, Texas down there? They are not connected to any other state, officially the interstate, and so they are able to largely avoid FERC jurisdiction through this process. So it's very interesting, I think two times they've needed to have a special request to interconnect, to be able in an emergency, and the second time I believe they went to Mexico instead of going up, so right, but the idea that they can kind of go it alone. Whereas I think that as you'll hear, definitely throughout the day, some benefits in trying to connect on a broader regional scale to have lots of benefits there. So the big drivers of new transmission, I think you've heard most of them already. I'll just touch upon them briefly, one being enhanced reliability of the grid. I do a lot of work on reliability, and so to me that means both adequacy of resources to make sure we have sufficient resources there when we need them to get this perfect balance between supply and demand, but also security, the ability to withstand disturbances. And so this includes things, I think that the agenda for today is fabulous because it touches upon all these cyber security I would include in there, right? But the ability to withstand the physical attacks as well, like the Metcalf incident. And so all that goes into trying to enhance the reliability of the grid, which is a big goal of everybody involved. But to relieve congestion is also a really important one. We can have equipment that restricts flows, but we can also have operational constraints. One of the case studies we do with my students is actually we look at Bonneville Power Association where they had an incident where they had so much hydro power and so much wind that they couldn't get it all on the lines. And so they had to curtail the wind farm and say, sorry, we gotta let the water go. And you know why they had to let the water flow because of my other favorite topic, which is the interconnection of all of these different laws. It's not like we're acting in a vacuum under the Federal Power Act. We have the Endangered Species Act lurking in the background and the Clean Air Act lurking in the background, which we'll talk about later this afternoon with the power plan. And so what happened is we needed to maintain minimum stream flows for endangered species. And so the water had to run so they had to curtail the wind. And of course it led to a fun lawsuit that's beyond the scope of here today. But these are the sorts of issues if we had had more transmission capacity then maybe we wouldn't have had such congestion. Also to facilitate the wholesale markets, I think that's already been talked about, but the idea being that historically you were sort of limited to buying from generators who were local. And that the broader you get in terms of interconnecting the more options you have, less ability for someone to maintain a monopoly in a narrow area because you don't have choice. And then of course to support the Diverse and Changing portfolio, mention briefly, but remember that first chart with the generation sources as that changes, for instance as fracking and natural gas is becoming a primary source for so many states, states are able to make their own decisions about what they want their resource mix to look like. And so that chart was just nationally but there's another great chart that shows breaks it down regionally how if you look at our United States by region and you see drastic differences in terms of what's the primary source. As we have so much more natural gas that means a real need for more natural gas infrastructure both pipelines and transmission lines to then move that around. Same with wind, wind is being, there's a great map that if I had known that I would have time for it, I would have showed you but it shows sort of our strength of our wind resources across the country and they're all where we do not have large population centers. It's sort of that middle swath of our country sort of Western but not quite all the way West to be close enough to LA and our big population centers. And so that means we need the transmission lines. I mean the most fundamental reason for these is to connect our sources of generation to the people who need them. And so then lastly just a more flexible and resilient grid. I think of resilience as being different from reliability to the extent that it's really about reducing the magnitude or duration of disruptive events. So kind of how are we going to recover from these? The learning process being adaptable to be able to come back on. Okay, so what I said I would really talk about in my four minutes remaining, right? Is jurisdiction. So if you only remember one law, governing energy and you come out of here today, remember the Federal Power Act. So this is the big one for our purposes. It is about 80 years old. It has been enduring since 1935 with some very interesting language. The first important section, I don't want all your eyes glazing over just because I put some legal citations up there. Okay, so the first provision is section 201. And this is the one that gives FERC, right? Big first point, of course, FERC implements the Federal Power Act. Two, it gives FERC exclusive jurisdiction over the transmission of electric energy in interstate commerce, you see? There's that lovely frame. So we have the exact same language for jurisdiction over wholesale sales, but I just focused on transmission for our purposes. Now, it also requires FERC to ensure that all rates, charges, terms, and conditions of transmission service are, and here's your second big takeaway, just unreasonable and not unduly discriminatory and or preferential. And so this is massive because it applies to so much of what FERC does. Sections 205 and 206 are their provisions that basically have FERC review all public utility filings of rates. They respond to complaints. They can bring independent actions to review of rates. And in all senses, they are judging everything based on these standards. Now, if you have never seen this language before, you may be thinking, wow, like my students, that's really vague, Professor Stein is what they tell me. How what does just unreasonable mean? And then we get to dive deep. Well, let's see how the courts have interpreted it. And so as much as it is vague, I think that this is the reason it has survived 80 years is that we have been able to sort of use this term to suit what the current needs and situations are. And so I don't see them going away anytime soon. The other important piece would be citing of transmission lines. Now, so far we were talking about rates and terms and conditions, but it's not as easy as saying, FERC has jurisdiction over transmission. That would be wrong, okay? Because the other really important piece is, well, who exactly is gonna build these things and who decides which lines get built and where they're going to get built. And in the wisdom of Congress, this is part of the jurisdictional divide that goes to the states. So it reserves power exclusively to the states over transmission citing. For those of you who follow this there, you all know, of course know about the backstop authority, but for those of you who are new to this, this was causing some concern that states were totally in charge over whether a transmission line could get cited. Just think about that for a minute and you can imagine all this talk about lines getting longer, lines crossing over multiple states. And all of a sudden you have three states and there's that middle state who says, no, I'm not getting anything out of this. I'm not gonna be your extension cord. And so the one holdout state could basically trash an entire project. So folks started getting very upset, right? Because well, what are we gonna do? It's not cost effective to, we'll go all the way around a state. This is really important to connect two different states. And so Congress tried and they amended. We had a little piece here where it decided to give FERC authority over citing in certain limited circumstances. They put all these conditions that they had to work with Department of Energy and Department of Energy first had to do a study, a congestion study, and they would have to designate certain areas as being so highly congested that it justified FERC making a decision about this. Now, everyone sort of thought, wow, is this gonna be massive and make big changes? And what actually happened is that our lovely balance of powers in our country that the judicial system sort of came in and took away all that power with a big important case that basically said that FERC, they limited FERC's authority even more to say it's only in situations where the state withholds approval of a line, which basically meant that any smart state that didn't want it could just say no. And then there you go, all of a sudden FERC didn't have this authority. And then sort of the second big hit to this federal extension of citing authority happened with another Ninth Circuit case where they basically vacated those two congestion areas that Department of Energy had actually designated. They happened to have been in the Northeast and in LA. And so now we're in a state of limbo where the next congestion study is coming out right now, I think, aren't they? I think they're in their DOE should be coming out with their every couple of years they have to do these congestion studies. So suffice it to say in the world we live in right now, even though this is on the books, the states are still fully in charge of the siting of transmission lines. The only other point I will make on this would be sort of thinking about jurisdictional entities under the Federal Power Act and just noting as well that FERC has a jurisdiction over public utilities. And this is any person who owns or operates facilities subject to the jurisdiction of the commission. This includes most of the investor-owned utilities that you had been referred to earlier, a few electric cooperatives, but that also means you should think about who is a non-public utility and whose FERC jurisdiction does not extend to. And this would include state and municipal utilities, most electric cooperatives, federal utilities, and also of course you have to think about dear old Alaska, Hawaii and Texas, which are two that we can't get under interstate just geographically and Texas who now you all have learned because they're sort of on their lonesome. So managing the grid, you have all seen this before so I will not say much else. I think that everything I was going to say has been covered and I think even David's gonna speak to it so we will let that happen. I will save my last minute to just tell you that the other entity you should be aware of and all this that I haven't heard discussed is NERC. NERC, just more acronyms in the energy world, but NERC is the North American Electric Reliability Council and it is a non-profit regulatory authority that it's job is to assure reliability of the grid along with 10,000 other entities that as you hear here I have a reliability talk I give and I basically say well these folks are in charge of reliability and so are these and so are these and so are these. So it has really become a group or deal here and everyone is in charge but just know that NERC is there because you see all these different ways we can cut our country apart so they actually still see the three interconnections there but now these colorations are giving you the eight reliability planning areas that our country has been divided into and NERC adopts reliability standards and subject to FERC oversight. And so this of course is another important component to all of the mix trying to make sure that our transmission lines are doing it. This was just another added detail to show you that even those reliability regions are further divided into assessment areas and NERC if you're interested comes out with all sorts of projections, reports, short and long term assessments about reliability in all these regions and this is becoming so important as you all know reliability is being strained right now both by the increase in extreme weather disturbances and events per Katrina and Hurricane Sandy and the rest. The environmental regulations which you will hear about this afternoon EPA's proposal to regulate carbon dioxide from stationary sources is the latest that is causing a whole lot of concerns because it is arguably going to push out and more coal closures. And as you saw on that generation slide if the coal plants start closing down to try to comply with EPA rule makings because of course it's not just the carbon rule there's a whole host of historical rules in the pipeline that are all sort of coming to be effective at the same time. What does that mean? Does that mean natural gas is gonna step up to fill that void? We of course still see demand for electricity increasing although it's increasing by smaller amounts it is still increasing for the near future. And then of course the move to renewables and distributed resources is also putting pressure on reliability. Renewables have so many benefits but it is no doubt that solar is only good when we have sun and wind is only good when the wind is blowing. And that means they make for very difficult base load sources. Is there not quite fungible with all of our base load coal and natural gas? By base load I mean the plants that can kind of run 24 seven. And so energy storage is very interesting because if we can find a way to firm up those renewables they can help with the reliability issues. There's a lot going on there and sort of the aging infrastructure that chairman Hecker has referenced. We have a D plus I believe for the energy industry per the engineers have sort of taken all of our infrastructure and we are dealing with a D plus there. So a whole lot of reliability pressures that we have a lot of entities to kind of focus on. So I will skip next steps and hand it off to David. So thank you. Thank you. So thanks everyone for being here. Chairman Hecker, thank you so much for the invitation. I'm honored to be following up on the presentations that Adrian, Don and Amy have made. I have a couple of kind of picking up on some of their key points. And then we're talking specifically about a few FERC initiatives that are particularly important to the way that the grid is currently operated and is developed going forward. So as Amy had noted, the key statute and source of FERC authority with respect to these topics is the Federal Power Act first enacted in 1935 and with particularly notable amendments in 1992 and then again in 2005. And also as Amy had noted, the most important I think for present purposes in this discussion for responsibility is to ensure that the rates, terms and conditions of transmission service by public utilities in the interstate commerce. I do apologize, I know that is a mouthful with each of those clauses for transmission service and the practices affecting those rates must be just and reasonable and not unduly discriminatory or preferential. Those are very broad terms. I agree with Amy that that's an important part of why the Federal Power Act has been enduring, particularly in contrast to PERPA, another statute that FERC implements which remains important, but it's enacted in 1978. It is very, very specific and it hasn't aged as well as the Federal Power Act. I think in some ways that's because the broad terms have allowed FERC and given FERC a responsibility to interpret those terms in light of the many changes that have happened in geography, in the economy and importantly in technology over the 80 years since then. There are many important FERC responsibilities related to transmission that I'm not going to try to cover today. One good example of not to be talking about is the mandatory reliability standards authority. It's something that FERC was given in 2005 by Congress. That is the relationship between FERC and NERC and the electric industry. That's a relatively new responsibility, it's evolving. I think there's been important progress there, but that would be a whole story of its own. What I am going to focus on today is probably the three most important FERC generic rule makings that have currently effect the operation and development of the transmission grid. The first of those, really a landmark for FERC as noted here is order number 888, which FERC issued in 1996, is order 888 because just at that time, FERC was moving into a new building which is 888 First Street, Northeast and the old building on North Capital Street was widely regarded as a dump, so people were very excited to move into the new building. And the key principle of order number 888 is open access of transmission. The premise there is to say in the traditional vertically integrated utility world, you have one entity that owned the generation, owned the transmission and owned the distribution. In that world, FERC had a concern that there would be the prospect for undue discrimination by the owner of transmission systems in favor of its own generation. At a time when Congress in 1992 was trying to promote the development of more competitive generation, that prospect could be really a problem. And so FERC said that there can't be that discrimination in favor of your own generation. Rather, there has to be what's called an open access transmission tariff by which everyone can have access to the grid on an equal basis. That also helped us set the stage for further development of competitive or called merchant generation. And that is upheld by the Supreme Court on the issues of the extent of FERC's jurisdiction in the case of New York versus FERC in 2002. Order number 2000, another major step. And did Chairman Hecker leave the room? Well, Chairman Hecker is very modest in saying that FERC led the development of encouraging RTOs. He is the chairman who was driving the driving force behind the development of order number 2000. And the premise here is to promote voluntary membership in regional transmission organizations. Picking up on something that Don said right to a slightly different perspective, FERC has always emphasized that participation in regional transmission organizations or RTOs is voluntary. The voluntary nature of RTOs was a core principle by which the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit upheld order number 2000. FERC certainly continues to try to promote the development and expansion of the RTOs with the belief that doing things on the regional basis provides a lot of benefits. We've seen membership continue to grow over the past decade as I think increasingly people are realizing for the operation of their system. There are indeed benefits to that participation. I think for the foreseeable future, FERC is not moving to mandatory RTOs. FERC made a push in that direction in 2002, 2003 and a lot of considerations, particularly concerns about lack of respect for regional differences. FERC pulled back from that and I think anything's possible. I think for the foreseeable future, voluntary participation in RTOs remains the key principle. And the RTOs work, it's not transfer of ownership of the transmission facilities to the RTO, but it's transferring operational control. So you still have the utility owned the transmission lines, but it's allowing this independent entity, the RTO, or in a single state in California, New York, the same entity is known as the independent system operator. It's responsible for how the transmission system will be operated. That premise again builds on the undue discrimination point I was describing for order 888 and saying, it's a further benefit if you have an independent entity that is operating the grid rather than having the vertically integrated utility that has its own generation that would also be benefited through the operation. I think as we've now seen this slide two or three times, but this is a helpful contrast to what I'll show you later. This is again the operation, the location of the RTOs, ISOs in the United States. As people have noted, FERC has jurisdiction with respect to six, not with respect to ERCOT, the Texas ISO RTO, with the exception of reliability issues, which I mentioned briefly earlier. And then talking a bit about order number 1000, that is, so as I said, it's order 888 is 1996, order 2000, which gets that number because it's heading into the new millennium. It was issued in 1999. In 2011, FERC issued another major rulemaking with respect to transmission, planning and cost allocation. That is called order number 1000, and that is just, it's an easily remembered round number. But the core premise of order 1000 is that taking a broader look at transmission needs rather than only having planning done by each individual utility is more likely to identify more efficient or more cost effective solutions to those needs. So what at the slide I have up here now shows the transmission planning regions that have developed in response to order 1000. FERC required public utilities to participate in a regional transmission planning process that meets certain criteria, but FERC did not take out the crayons and draw on the map and say, this is who has to go where. Every utility gets to decide what planning region it wants to join in to with the caveat that you can't be your own transmission planning region because that's, even though there are some utilities that carry have very broad geographic scope, if you're planning only with yourself, FERC has said that doesn't get the benefits of broader regional looks that order 1000 is intended to promote. So some of the core requirements of order 1000 building on that regional transmission planning is that every regional transmission planning process must develop a transmission plan. Importantly in this respect order 1000 is about process that plan needs to be developed but that plan is not required to be submitted to FERC. FERC does not do a thumbs up or thumbs down on what the transmission plan is. That transmission planning process must account for three different types of transmission needs. The one we've talked the most about this morning is transmission needs driven by reliability. When you are getting to the point where one of the reliability standards is going to be violated in the near future, utilities know you need to do something to fix that. Building transmission is one of the solutions. Other types of transmission tend to be looking a little bit farther out in time. That can be transmission that is not needed only for reliability but can have economic benefits such as reducing congestion on the transmission system. Or for the first time in order 1000, FERC specifically identified a category of transmission needs driven by public policy requirements. FERC did not say there are any specific public policy requirements that need to be considered but was anticipating a situation where not only at the state level but possibly at the federal level, you would have other laws or regulations being adopted which transmission could be part of the solution to how those needs would be met. A good example is I think 35, 36 states have adopted various forms of renewable portfolio standards saying that utilities within their states need to buy a certain percentage of their electricity from qualifying renewable resources. As a general matter, you need transmission to get the power from those resources. So one of the things FERC said there has to be a home in the planning process. If someone wanted to come in and say my state has a 20% renewable portfolio standard, I think we should be getting it from wind in this general area. You need to look at how transmission could address that need. People have also briefly touched upon cost allocation requirements. Cost allocation is a core part of how transmission rates are formed. That goes to the just and reasonable aspect of that statutory authority for FERC. FERC set out six principles in order 1,000 that cost allocation methods need to meet. The cost allocation method, FERC said, has to be presented in advance with the thought being if there's uncertainty about how a developer is ever going to get its money back, people won't want to make the often billions of dollars of investment that we're talking about for a transmission line. And then the cost allocation method has to be tied to who will benefit from that transmission line. That's an exercise in planning, determining what are the relevant types of benefits and doing a lot of modeling to see what that would be. FERC also said that the key phrase comes from a Seventh Circuit Court decision in 2008 or 2009. The phrase is that the cost must be allocated at least roughly commensurate with the benefits. Roughly commensurate is acknowledging this is an art, not a science. You're not going to get precision, but you at least have to be looking for who are the beneficiaries of the transmission line and they should be making a contribution to covering those costs. The flip side, which FERC said explicitly is if you're not benefiting, then you don't pay. If you wind up using the line later, then you'll pay for that service, but you won't be part of the cost allocation method. Two other brief areas in order 1000 I wanted to touch upon is the requirement that there has to be a place in the planning process for people who are not currently the transmission owners of the region to provide proposals. The thought was this is an area in which people may have new ideas that the incumbent transmission developers for a variety of reasons may not want to propose. If you can create a place for people to present those other ideas, hopefully you can wind up with benefits driving down rates if you have those innovative solutions. And then FERC also required that every transmission planning region must coordinate with its neighboring transmission regions on a paired basis in the West. It's not even, they've gone above and beyond that and are coordinating throughout the Western interconnection. And pretty much every segment of the industry challenged at least one part of order 1000. Last year in August, order 1000 was upheld in its entirety by the DC Circuit Court of Appeals and there were no requests for the Supreme Court to take it up. So order 1000 is the law. The process of implementing all these requirements has been a major FERC project for the intervening four years. Still going on though at this point much of the compliance work is done in regions are beginning now to do the planning processes that reflect those requirements. The last thing I want to say before I hand it off to Randy is that picking up on something Amy said, FERC has very broad authority with respect to transmission service and interstate commerce, but it would be wrong to say that FERC has jurisdiction over everything that is transmission. Particularly with respect to siting, FERC has the backstop siting authority. It has never been used in large part because of the court cases that Amy noted. Given FERC's goal of wanting to develop, promote the development through regional planning of more efficient and cost effective transmission facilities. If you promote that on paper and they're never built then there's no benefit for customers. So the relationship between the important platform FERC is developing and then the siting processes which actually get the transmission built is very fundamental. And with that I'll hand it off to Randy. Good morning. Thank you all for being here. So what we've learned so far is how the grid operates, how it's regulated and how we go about planning transmission. Let me talk a little bit about siting but first just a little bit about American Transmission Company. We're a little bit unique. We're not a vertically integrated utility. We're a transmission-only utility. The first of its kind we began operation 1101 with about $500 million of assets. Those assets were the divested assets of our owners. Our owners are the utilities that gave up their transmission assets for the formation of our company. Over the last 13, 14 years we've invested about $3.5 billion in the transmission system for which we are responsible which is most of Wisconsin. The UP of Michigan with little pieces in Illinois and Minnesota. We have been very successful in routing, siting, planning, building, operating transmission. When it's the only thing you do you better be good at it. Otherwise you won't be doing it long. Transmission can be cited and built. Requires time and effort. It's not rocket science but it's a lot of hard work. I'm gonna share with you some of our perspectives from having done this for the past 12 or 13 years. When we go about citing a new project and here I'm talking about large projects for our system that's 345,000 volts. We go out and engage the public very early in the process and very exhaustively. And so one of the first things that we do as part of that process is we share with them what we're gonna walk them through over the course of four phases of routing and siting. So you see those four phases here. The first phase we go out to the public and we say we gotta get from point A to point B so here's a study quarter, an area that we're looking at. Give us some thoughts and ideas, what we should avoid, maybe where we should site it, et cetera. We then come back to them some time later with some preliminary quarters where we narrow that study area down and then we'll come back yet a third time with some proposed routes. Now, in the state of Wisconsin, as we learned earlier, the FERC regulates for our tariff and the states regulate for routing and siting. In the state of Wisconsin, when we propose a project, we have to give them two routes to choose from. So we come back in that third phase with a number of proposed routes based on the feedback that we've gotten from the public. We get more feedback, go back, study more, do more environmental analysis, more design work with our engineers, and then finally come back to the public with some final routes and give the public yet another opportunity to provide some input. This process, again, on major projects, takes typically anywhere from two to three years and this is all leading up to the submitting of an application to our regulator. So when Don mentioned earlier, it requires at a minimum of five years for major projects, he's absolutely right. I mean, five years is probably on the quick end for projects of significant voltage, probably been more in the seven to eight year timeframe. Clearly there are a number of challenges when siting, I would say intrastate and interstate projects. We're working on a project right now with ITC and Dario and Power, a 345 KV project from the Madison, Wisconsin area to Dubuque. It's a very challenging project for a number of obvious reasons. We have to get certificates in the state of Wisconsin, certificates from the state of Iowa, as well as local jurisdictions in Iowa. Two separate state regulatory processes that have different time frames add into that the permits that we need to get from Fish and Wildlife for the crossing in the Mississippi River and you have a very challenging project because none of those processes sync up from a timing perspective. Critical path certainly is crossing the Mississippi River. We know that's gonna take a lot of time. What we don't know is how much time because there are no federal rules around the amount of time that Fish and Wildlife get to evaluate a project and to make a decision. In Wisconsin and Iowa, we know that once we give our application to the regulators, they have a set amount of time to make a decision for us. We don't have that with federal permitting. And I'll give you just one example. About 10, 12 years ago, we built a project, large project, from Central Wisconsin to Duluth, Minnesota. We had to cross the Nama Coggan River in Northwestern Wisconsin. It's a federally designated wild and scenic river. It's a beautiful river. It's actually a large creek. But we had to cross at a place where the river's about 30 feet wide. And at that location, there was an existing lower voltage transmission line crossing. There was a railroad crossing and a gas pipeline crossing. It took us 60 months to get the permit to cross the Nama Coggan River. 60 months and about $8 million worth of payments to beautify the riverway. So that's a challenge, right? I mean, when you're trying to sync up your construction teams and sync up regulatory processes, it's a challenge when you don't have the timing certainty from the federal permitting standpoint. And then stakeholder engagement, of course, is always a challenge. And what I mean by that is, you know, when you talk to the public, you rarely meet members of the public who raise their hand and say, put a transmission line in my backyard. So we engage in a very involved public involvement process where we have a collection of processes that we use when we reach out to the variety of stakeholders to involve them in the decision-making process of where a transmission line gets placed. Here's what we know, and we know this from more than a decade of public opinion surveying, which is one of the tools that we use. We know that stakeholders can, if not accept a project, certainly understand why it's needed. If you can convince them of that very point that the project is needed, if you can convince them of the benefits that the project brings, if not to them, to kind of the greater society in general, and if you give them an opportunity to participate in the process. If you give them the opportunity to have a say in where the transmission line is placed or where it is not placed. Now with that said, you're not always going to bring everybody along. Again, we know from public opinion survey that you're gonna have about a third of the people in a quarter in the area where you're gonna build a line, about a third of the people that are gonna be opposed to the project no matter what you do. But if you give folks enough information on a consistent basis, most folks will come to accept the necessity of the project. Again, if you make sure they understand the needs and the benefits, and you give them the opportunity to participate. With that said, it takes time. You're gonna have nimbyism. I mean, there's no way around that. Who here has chosen to move near a power line? Probably not many of us, right? As a matter of fact, in my 12 or 13 years of doing routing and siting work for ATC, I've met one person who actually asked if we could move the line onto his property, and it was the sheriff of Washburn County, Wisconsin. And he had a ranch, and he needed to build a new fence on his ranch. And that project I mentioned earlier was going through his county. And he wanted the real estate payments that we would provide so that he could buy a new fence. But we were too far in the process to move the line. But he's the only guy thus far that's offered to host a power line. So again, on the challenges, when you're engaging the public, of course, the news media gets involved to a late love controversy, right? And so you have to continuing constantly fight all the myths that are out there about power lines. And again, if you engage in this process with the stakeholders, you can get it done. So at the end of the day, if you have an involved public involvement process, you get the opportunity to build and strengthen your relationship with stakeholders, help the public understand the need and benefits for a line, help the regulators, and this maybe is as important as anything, help the regulators understand that you engaged in a process whereby the public got to be heard. And when you do that, and you put the regulators in a position of being able to make a decision on where to put your power line, make a decision based on the merits and not about the politics and heat and light of the controversy around a transmission line project. And then at the end of the day, you get your project built, you get it built on time and on budget. With that, I'll turn it over to Pauline. Good morning. My name is Pauline Foley. I'm an attorney with PJM Interconnection. I appreciate having the opportunity to come here and speak to you today about why RTOs such as PJM are a really good idea. That's not right. Let's see. Here we go. I'm doing pretty good. Okay, PJM was founded in 1927 to ensure the reliability of the high voltage electric transmission system. PJM serves approximately 61 million people in all or parts of 13 states plus the District of Columbia. PJM coordinates and directs the operation of the regional transmission grid, which includes 62,556 miles of transmission lines. PJM operates its transmission system as though it were a single system. Corporate and state boundaries are not considered when taking operational action or making planning decisions. PJM also administers a competitive wholesale electricity market. So these are some of the stats that might be helpful. They have been updated for this presentation. I wanted to show you PJM wasn't made in a day. It started out in 1927 with what they call classic PJM, the dark blue area. And it has evolved as recently as I believe 2013 when Eastern Kentucky Power Cooperative asked to join PJM. And in addition, as you can see, we have the PJM region, but we also have neighboring regions which are significant and they would, we have actually have three. We have the mid-continent ISO. We have the New York ISO. And we have a planning region that was recently formed under Order 1000 that is known as the Southeastern Regional Transmission Planning Region, or SERTP. PJM has interregional coordination agreements with these regions as well as with ISO New England. Let's move on. As others have stated, there are three primary focuses of transmission planning. One is PJM is charged, manages the reliability, the real-time operation of the power grid. In terms of regional planning, PJM plans functions, I'm sorry, the planning function assesses the grid 15 years out into the future and directs enhancements which are otherwise known as either transmission upgrades or new transmission investment to enhance grid reliability. PJM is also responsible for administering a wholesale market which includes day ahead and real-time energy markets. It includes an RPM auction, a financial transmission rights auction, as well as ancillary service markets, such as regulation, spinning, reserve, black start and reactive supply. In order to maintain independence as an RTO, PJM is governed by an independent board of managers. The board of managers is made up of a president as well as nine voting members who are elected by the members committee. The board supervises and oversees all matters pertaining to the PJM region as well as to PJM itself. The members committee is a senior standing committee and it's made up of five sectors. They are listed here. We have the generation owners, transmission owners, other suppliers, electric distributors and end-use customers. Each member has one vote and the members committee meets regularly pretty much once a month. PJM's authority to carry out its responsibilities is established by FERC's approval of its governing documents and NERC reliability standards as well as PJM's designated roles with regard to those standards. There are a number of benefits being an RTO and maintaining the reliability of a grid on a regional level as opposed to utility by utility or state by state. And some of those are listed here. So for example, there's information from price transparency in terms of PJM. Within the PJM region, there's elimination of seams across utilities. There's reduced prices as a result of efficiencies. There's also operational efficiencies in operating the grid. There's market liquidity, increased system reliability by being able to use each other's systems on a large regional scale. There's also regional transmission planning in transmission investment as well as generation investment. There's increased demand response and innovation and renewable energy developments on a regional basis. The impact of specific elements of PJM's role as an RTO is estimated to produce as much as $2.3 billion per year in benefits and economic value for the region. I've separated out some of the market benefits. So for example, through reliability, PJM is able to direct changes in output of generation resources rather than curtail power sales transactions to deal with transmission congestion. And it enables PJM to deal with transmission constraints and to rapidly address market emergencies. PJM is also able to plan for future reliability needs region-wide through bypassing utility by-butility solutions or state-by-state solutions. PJM is able to focus on transmission upgrades that meet reliability criteria and increase economic efficiency. In terms of generation investment, the large size of the PJM market combined with its diversity of demand and resources reduces overall capacity needs to ensure adequate reserve of electricity to meet peak demands and emergency situations. The capacity buffer known as the reserve margin avoids costs of additional generation or transmission to meet higher levels of reserve. With regard to generation, PJM does not have the ability to direct the building of generation. It only has the ability to direct the building of transmission. So having the larger region for generation and having the diversity that the PJM region has enables us to have a better mix of fuels. The commitment of demand resources to reduce load during system peak also for stalls cost of building additional facilities. Through the RPM auction demand response competes in an equal footing with generation and transmission in the capacity market. Through RPM, the quantity of demand response that is providing capacity has increased reducing the need for further generation and transmission capacity. We're also finding a shift in demand response from limited summer availability to extended and annual availability which improves the usefulness of demand response. In terms of energy production, PJM centralized dispatch of numerous resources over the PJM region produces significant efficiencies in cost savings compared with previous operation of independent control areas that were operated by states across the region. The increased effectiveness of PJM's dispatch operation has also reduced operating reserve costs. In terms of grid services, by operating markets with grid services such as ancillary services across the region, PJM achieves economics in providing services that are essential to the reliability of the system. For example, synchronized reserve sources supplies electricity if the grid has an unexpected need for more power in short notice. Also regulation helps match generation and load by correcting short term changes in electricity use that might affect system stability. Nonetheless, we have certain challenges ahead of us. In terms of order 1000, we have implemented a number of new initiatives not implemented before or tried before. So for example, we have a new competitive solicitation process for planning transmission and for cost allocation purposes. What does that mean? It means that in the past PJM would designate the construction of transmission, PJM would plan, identify solutions for transmission and designate the construction of transmission to its incumbent transmission owners and they were required to build. Now PJM has a competitive solicitation process where anyone who pre-qualifies may submit a proposal to build and be the designated entity to own and maintain that facility. It's been a new effort, but one of the things that we have found is and what FERC had hoped for is that we would get more innovative solutions to transmission and we have found that to at least be something that comes out of order 1000. Also consideration of public policy was an initiative out of order 1000. PJM believed that while we would consider public policy initiatives, in order for public policy to be built, we needed the states to agree to it, especially in a region like PJM where we have 13 states plus the District of Columbia with different public policy programs or statutes. And therefore we have what's called a state agreement approach. If the state approaches us or the states approach us together and ask us to build a project that is needed for public policy, then PJM will work with the states to get it built. Additionally, as stated by other panel members, regional cost allocation has been a huge issue for PJM because of the fact, because of the diversity of its region. And we've had a number of challenges both to our prior cost allocation methodology and we still have some challenges to our current price methodology that the commission has recently approved. In terms of markets, the recent EPSA ruling by the DC circuit is creating challenges for PJM. This ruling could affect how demand response resources are able to participate in PJM's market in the future. And as I had pointed out to you previously, demand response has become a very key element of our planning process. And we're working with FERC and seeing how we will address the possibility that demand response will not be able to be used as a wholesale product. In terms of the EPA clean power plan, PJM is assessed with tasking potential impacts of the proposal on the PJM states. The states are required under the plan, 111D you might have heard of, to come up with a plan. But PJM is the entity who has been tasked with doing the analysis to see the impact on the plan. Jim has been giving me the circle. So I think that I'll cut it short and allow for time for questions. Thank you. Thank you, Pauline. We'll take a few questions. I see on the agenda it says break. I think we were only kidding. We'll take a very short one, but it will be short. I wanted to ask David a question leading off about isn't it true that wholesale markets are deregulated? Thank you. It's a thought I wanted to do picking up also on Pauline's presentation. I think the word that I would use for the organized wholesale markets that FERC regulates could be either competitive or restructured rather than deregulated. That while it's true that rather than the price of power simply being done purely on cost, when bids are put into the system, there's a fairly elaborate regulatory structure by which those bids are observed by an independent market monitor and then can be mitigated. So this is not a situation where even if a generator has market power, that means the prices can rise to an infinite level. I think FERC has felt it's very important to ensure that in order to produce just and reasonable outcomes, there has to be that mitigation side to ensure that customers are benefiting from competition rather than potentially being subject to market power. Thank you. Thank you. That was a setup in case you did. Yes, sir. Who wants to take it? Yeah, awesome. Can you give him the microphone? I don't think we've heard it, but I'll make it clear. Yeah, so I was trying to ask what about Puerto Rico, American or American Indian areas where there's certain federal laws or state laws. What does FERC do with them? How do they regulate that? So I think two different answers. As to American Samoa or traditionally Puerto Rico, the answer would have been FERC does not have a role because the transactions are not in interstate commerce. There is an interesting proposal. Trying to think it is, it may be Puerto Rico or it may be connecting some of the Virgin Islands, but the way the statute is written if a transmission line is built between a couple of the islands, that could actually create interstate commerce. So FERC may begin to have a role in that area and then it would be the same standards that we've discussed would apply there. FERC at various times has had a tribal liaison specifically to work with Native American tribes to discuss the specific issues and the roles that those tribes may have under their distinct relationships with the US government. I think it is the case that there are some tribes that have seen development of generation resources as a potential vehicle for economic development and in order to make that work, then the need for transmission becomes important there as well. Sir. Wait a minute, wait for the microphone. We'd like to capture this on the phone. Yeah, I'm John Wattmore at pedestrians.org. The issue of building new transmission lines and getting public acceptance nearby in Maryland with the PEPCO X-Lon merger had still in process. One of the side agreements was to have a pilot trail project along one of the PEPCO transmission corridors. Public amenities like bike paths and transmission corridors made them more acceptable to the public in people's experience. In our experience, yes. As a matter of fact, in the state of Wisconsin, the law dictates that we first have to use, look at using existing corridors. Transmission line corridor, pipeline corridor, railroad corridor, and our statute even gets down to bike paths and state trails. Now, that may seem a little bit odd that you didn't look at a bike path or a state trail, but if you have a line that needs to go through, say a forested area, it's better to use a corridor that's already been affected than to cut a new corridor. So, absolutely. Public polling also shows us routinely that the public much prefers line-sided on public lands versus private lands. So, I think that does make sense. Other questions? Yes? Yes, you mentioned earlier a project where you're crossing the Mississippi River. Have you considered undergrounding in general or in specific instances in a sensitive river system like that? We have looked at it on the specific project that I referenced, the cost associated with undergrounding would make the project uneconomic. So, if you had to spend the money to put the line under the river, the total cost of the project would render the project effectively moved. Its value wouldn't be there. We have undergrounded in certain situations and circumstances elsewhere in our system, typically at voltages like 345 kV and higher, you're looking at an undergrounding cost of anywhere from six to 10 times the cost of overhead. So, they're very limited circumstances because it's very cost prohibitive. Okay, I wanna mention one thing before we break. Number one is we're gonna break very briefly, but number two is obviously all our panelists have a lot more material in their heads and even on their PowerPoints than we could conceivably get to. We will post all this on our website, including the video, but you may be more interested in some of the written materials they've developed and we'll do that within a day or two after we conclude. So, if we could start up again in five minutes, that would be perfect and thank you.