 Welcome to the seminar this week. Our speaker today is Professor Sangyong Wang-mian from California Institute for Energy and Environment at UC Berkeley. Just quickly, I would like to remind everyone that our next seminar is in two weeks, on the fourth. Okay, we'll be on demand response and review in charge. And let's quickly give a brief introduction of our speaker. Professor Wang-mian is an adjourned professor in the DTS department at UC Berkeley. And she also directs the electric grid research program at California Institute for Energy and Environment. She's also a faculty scientist at the Berkeley International Lab. And her research focuses on power distribution systems including applications of mobile sensing, analytics and control strategies to facilitate the integration of ER. She has a book called Electric Power Systems a Contactual Introduction. I have read it before. So if you are looking for a book on Power Systems Introduction, I would recommend this one. Such a great receiver. That's a receiver, PhD in Energy and Resources from UC Berkeley. So without further delay, I would let us the slides. Thank you so much. It's a pleasure to be here with you. I'm going to talk about a labor of love that's called the Oakland EcoBlock. It's a very interdisciplinary project, a little bit less technical than some of our work in electric grid research, but very practical and applied. And I think ultimately it will be very rewarding because we're working with a real community within the city of Oakland to build a very novel type of microgrid. So I will tell you about that. I'm gonna spend a little time with the context and motivation and finish by telling you why all this is improbably difficult to actually pull off. Our motivation in the big picture is a set of three challenges that I think all of us here understand. Number one, climate mitigation. Number two, resilience in the face of climate impacts. And number three, equity amongst different communities that may be impacted very unequally. So in terms of climate mitigation, we understand that we have to decarbonize the energy sector. And there are essentially three pillars to that. One is energy efficiency. Everything starts with cutting the waste, right? Stop the bleeding first. Number two, renewables and carbon neutral energy, which at the local distribution level generally means solar PV, as well as small-scale energy storage for the most part batteries. Hopefully other technologies like flywheels may become practical and cost-effective as well very soon. But then the third pillar is electrification that is shifting end uses over from natural gas and gasoline or diesel to electricity because the electricity is easier to decarbonize than the liquid and gaseous fuels, generally speaking. On the resilience point, really we're talking about survivability and recovery from extreme events, right? This has always been an issue, but particularly with climate-related challenges to the electric grid and to other infrastructures, we need to give more thought to that. And finally, making new technology and clean, convenient, healthy solutions affordable for everyone. So that relates to the equity part. I noticed that in your, I think previous quarter, you had Ross Baldic talking about the Texas power outages and that obviously had a lot of lessons learned from that event. And also here in California, we had some rotating outages. We had some close calls with our California grid. In our case when the temperatures were hot and Texas when it was extremely cold. And from those close calls, but actually really deadly impact, certainly in Texas, the death toll that has been reported depending on whom you ask is in the hundreds from the power outages last February. The takeaways were that extreme weather, extreme climate scenarios are real. Also that there is an important interdependence between and among infrastructures. In Texas, we saw the interdependence between natural gas production and delivery and the electricity sector. Also the intersection of electricity and water being out of power as one thing, being out of drinking water, quite another. And the recognition that all of our efforts to make the macro electric grid reliable, we must not lose sight of the fact that sooner or later there will be a power outage that may be beyond the control of a utility or a system operator to prevent. It could be a malicious physical or cyber attack or it could be weather scenarios that are simply beyond anyone's capability to prepare for. And so that means we have to save lives, not if but when the power goes out. I thought that the main lesson learned from Texas was that we need to focus on how to make blackouts survivable for people. Yes, it would have been great to have all kinds of measures in place to prevent the power from going out. But the real tragedy was that people died from entirely preventable causes such as not being able to power their medical equipment or simply from hypothermia, that wasn't necessary. And as you probably also heard in the case of Texas, what happened is that the distribution utilities simply did not have the tools in place to do intelligent load shedding. Certainly at the system operator level, at the ERCOT level, all they could do was tell the distribution utilities, hey, we need you to shed this many more megawatts. But the only way that the utilities could accomplish that was by de-energizing entire distribution circuits, which is when you think about it, a really sort of gross and imprecise way to manage who gets electricity and who doesn't, because what you want to do is you want to discriminate between the important and the unimportant uses of electricity, right? Anyone probably would have been happy to volunteer even their refrigerator or their air conditioning for the sake of saving someone's life who depended on an oxygen machine. But there was not that ability to prioritize. And one really important strategic change, I believe in smarter kids is to be able to prioritize loads more thoughtfully on smaller scales, both temporally and spatially. So that means sectionalizing distribution circuits. It means being able to turn individual customer meters off so that you can serve some essential loads on a circuit without having to then serve everybody else on that circuit, even within the home. There are now technologies like smart circuit breaker panels that allow you to essentially limit the electric consumption within a house at the level of the breaker panel so that you can power a few essential circuits and dial it down to some specific level of the number of watts and be sure that you don't go over that. So this is technology that we understand how to do. We've been loath to implement it in the past, I believe not just for technical but also for cultural reasons because so much of our narrative about the electric grid has been that there is supposed to be ample supply for everyone whenever and wherever you need it. And what we're facing today is the reality that providing for those last few nines of reliability costs a lot more than most of us are willing to spend on it. And yet it doesn't have to impact people in a particularly painful way if they are able to prioritize. And it can even go down to the level of individual smart appliances. There is a huge opportunity of course with technologies that allow you to prioritize loads also to shape your demand at different levels of aggregation that can then be remunerated in markets whether that is at the distribution level where I think there's a lot of room for emerging new mechanisms run by for instance, distribution system operators. Right now it's mostly at the wholesale or transmission level but there are also now third party aggregators that will aggregate smaller amounts of kilowatt contributions to load shaping into a product that's actually sort of noticeable at the wholesale level. So I think this is an area where hopefully we will see a lot of growth. It's really, there is no reason not to take advantage of communication and information technology that we have today to just be a little bit more proactive in shaping the loads. I just wanted to include a visual here. This is in your neighborhood across the bay. This is from PG&E's interconnection maps of city of Palo Alto is not on there but just to visualize sort of the geography of distribution circuits where the pink line that is transmission the little red triangles are substations from which distribution circuits come and those are the dark blue ones are older four kilovolt, four KV circuits and then the light blue ones are 12 KV circuits. So the level of granularity that is available today for managing rotating outages for instance is sort of on the scale of these large clusters. And if there is a hospital or some other critical load somewhere on that circuit that means all of these customers are exempt from participating in the rotating blackouts. So what that meant for Texas was that that the rolling blackouts were limited to a very small number of customers who then had their power out for days on end. There wasn't the granularity in sharing that but having had this visual I wanna talk about what I think technically really is sort of the necessary next step and we have the technology to do this and that is to enable parts of the grid or sections of the grid to operate as power islands when that is apropos when the main grid is out or when it is not appropriate to try and send power for example during a PSPS event the public safety power shut off if for example a transmission line is impacted by wildfire hazards that it's still possible to energize certain pockets of distribution systems if you have enough local generation and load that you can balance and obviously the local storage is extremely helpful with that. So you could call it micro grids I like calling it balanced clusters without sort of being agnostic to the regulatory or institutional label like who owns this under what rules are they managing this just from a physical standpoint what you need is enough kilowatts or megawatts to be balanced in real time to manage frequency and voltage on the island and that can be operated independently or it can be reconnected to the grid when that is apropos. Now conventionally we know of micro grids today those are owned by essentially one party it would be one customer, one piece of property it may be a corporate campus, a university campus a large building, I'm thinking of hospitals there are places that have built micro grids that can be grid connected at some times and islanded at other times that may span multiple buildings but this has really been confined to a single parcel of property or a single owner and the innovation that we're trying to push with the Oakland ECO block is that the cluster of electrical demand and supply can extend across property lines it can be a community it can go across multiple residential properties and when you start to think about what that means to aggregate people together in a community like that you realize really this is a great opportunity to do a number of things so beyond just being an electric power island preparing to meet the criteria for that really is an opportunity to start with energy efficiency in particular if you're whether you're doing new construction or retrofitting existing buildings you want to start by reducing any unnecessary energy use it's the opportunity to electrify to switch over from natural gas to anticipate that there will be I mean in California with our EV mandate there will be a lot of new EVs that will require in many cases upgrading the distribution system so now is a really good time to think about future-proofing our distribution systems as we are thinking about adding these new capabilities accounting for the fact that we will have to have EV charging in addition to the existing electrical loads but this is also a great opportunity to improve indoor air quality efficiency, better insulation means better health and comfort coming back to the survivability I think many deaths would have been preventable in the case of the Texas blackout simply if homes had been better insulated and people wouldn't have to be shivering in the cold when there was no electric heating available because and conversely in the summer people during power outages die from heat stroke and having better thermally performing buildings is really a health and safety issue as much as it's a comfort issue then there's an opportunity here for community ownership of assets being able to make investments that an individual household might not be able to make it's easy for us to think about well, I can get solar on the roof and I can get a Tesla power wall and then my house can operate as its own power island not everyone can afford that not everyone can qualify for a loan to buy that but what the EcoBlock project is looking at is ways to facilitate that financing and providing access to those technologies and then to make the financial bottom line pencil out really what we would like to do is also for these balanced clusters or controllable micro grids to be able during blue sky conditions to support the grid and perhaps help the utility with problems related to integrating uncontrolled EV chargers uncontrolled solar generation to essentially be a good neighbor because with the micro grid control capability comes the ability to be of service but the vision here really is to think about the electric power and energy as one piece of a larger picture of greening our cities or making communities more resilient and sustainable and that may cut across many areas it may include water management, transportation as I mentioned, it could involve community gardens food growing, managing micro climates and a lot of it is about people working together. So the hypothesis we're testing in the EcoBlock project is that there is money to be saved by doing many of these things together. The other part of the hypothesis is really about scale and it's that doing retrofits in particular may be easiest to do not at the individual house level but at the level of tens of homes where a contractor can swoop in and basically do all the houses on the block where a section of a distribution circuit can be modified so that it can operate as an island where you have a number of people that still recognize and know each other and can work together in a community and you get some of that aggregation of the load diversity from among these neighbors to sort of make a meaningful contribution to shaping the net load on the grid something on the order of 100 kilowatts or hundreds of kilowatts. And the argument here is that at the individual person or home level, it's sort of too small to make a difference. There's some economies of scale but then when you scale up to the level of a city that gets to be more complicated and there's more people involved than can really work with each other individually. And I wanna anticipate sort of the question about how do you retrofit a block in a way that can actually pay for itself? And I'll say a little bit more about that but I wanna preempt the question of how can this be profitable to say we know that there are some public funds that have to be spent on climate resilience and equity. Who knows what will come out of the spending plans in Washington DC right now that are being negotiated? Who knows what's in and what's out of the package? But ultimately there will have to be some amount of public spending on reaching these goals. And really the question is not can these improvements in decarbonization and resilience and equity can these improvements be profitable or be immediately paying for themselves in strictly financial terms? The question really is where do you get the most bang for the buck? If you're going to be spending public funds where do you get the best return on that investment? How can you leverage investments to make communities healthier and safer and decarbonize them at the same time? So the hypothesis is that if you are going to be innovating infrastructure anyway and I believe that's not going to be a choice that will be an absolute necessity then maybe we can do all these things together most cost effectively that is to introduce islanding capability at a local level which then means being able to shed that load on any given day if we need to and have that corner of the distribution circuit be on their own. Innovating, beefing up the distribution system so that it can accommodate the solar PV and the EVs that will have to be installed to meet our targets to basically go beyond what now are the feeder hosting capacity limits for those new loads and that new generation and then ultimately retiring the natural gas infrastructure because to get to zero net carbon, we will have to do that. So again, we can't think of that as something that's going to be profitable. It is an investment that will need to be made in our collective future to really address the climate problem that we're confronted with inevitably but asking how can we make these adjustments together in a way that we get the most per dollar spent? So finally here I'm coming around to the title slide for the EcoBlock project. It's funded by the California Energy Commission as part of the electric program investment charge or EPIC program. We are in the middle of phase two which is to actually build it. Phase one was just to talk about how cool it would be and whether it might be feasible. So there were a number of projects in this advanced energy communities program with an EPIC of which four ended up getting funded to actually build their proposed microgrid solution. And the Oakland EcoBlock again is focused on doing retrofits using older housing stock with regular folks not particularly high income on a city block. And I can talk about how we identified the block that we ended up working with. They self-nominated and we looked for certain qualities in choosing the block that's in the Fruitvale neighborhood of Oakland. So we are building a 100% solar microgrid for roughly 30 some electric customers or individual units including some single family homes, some apartments. We're developing new legal and financial structures so that this community association which now actually is incorporated and they have a board of directors and they will own the assets which in this case the California Energy Commission funds are paying for the solar PV in the battery and the microgrid controller and all that. But ultimately the replication model is for that association to get a loan and hopefully a low interest loan that they can together finance and build this. And that is what we hope will bring these options and resilient power into the range where lower income electric customers in neighborhoods can afford it. And our goal eventually is to have a recipe for how the eco block can be replicated elsewhere. I wanna call out our two most important partners on this. One is the city of Oakland that has been amazing to work with and is actually putting up a lot of their own staff time and effort to work with us on how does a project like this get permitted? We have to do some work on the street, on the electrical infrastructure. How does one go about doing these things efficiently? PG&E has been working with us on the electrical infrastructure and our model approach for how to execute this microgrid in phase two is actually different from what was studied as an option in phase one, which I'll say a little bit more about, but PG&E has been working with us both on the technical side and on the tariff side because conventionally there was no such thing as a multi-customer microgrid. So there's a lot of different disciplines that go into this just, you know, the quick overview here, energy, community, urban planning, design and construction, business and finance, legal, water, mobility. And just a few pictures, one of the things we're doing on the block and I will say we're not doing as much on the water side as we had hoped to do, but it's a start, we're doing energy efficiency and some stormwater management on the block, mitigating runoff and essentially beautifying the street a little bit. This particular street is up against the creek and so there's sort of a nice integration that we hope to do. We have done energy and water audits in the participating homes and are planning to go in and do the actual physical construction work starting early next year. All of this was delayed a bit by COVID but were persevering and trucking along. So for the microgrid design, the original vision was to have DC coupled solar PV and batteries all interconnected with a DC infrastructure that was going to be separately owned by the association and separate from PG&E. And our regulatory argument, which we'll come back to is that this should qualify under the own use provision of California public utilities code section 218 that says, well, you can't sell power across a property line or if you do, you have to become a regulated utility and you'd be competing with PG&E here. So now our interpretation is that a homeowners association for example, should be able to do that because it's a nonprofit and it's for the shared use of the participants. However, that is a longer legal regulatory argument and which we haven't won yet. But meanwhile PG&E is actually very interested in exploring microgrid options because their thinking has evolved a lot since we've had these horrendous wildfire seasons. They've had to do their PSPS and they're also looking at areas where they're serving customers that they might prefer to serve in a standalone microgrid way than to have to keep lines energized that run through high hazard fire areas through the forest for many miles. So PG&E is actually very keen to experiment with different types of microgrids. And in this case, we are under their community microgrid enablement tariff that will be sort of the regulatory umbrella under which the eco block becomes legal to function as an entity to basically allow the eco block to operate as an island although PG&E distribution operators will have control over the connect disconnect switch. But the assets including generation and storage and microgrid controller will be operated and controlled by the association or that is a contractor. HALA technologies will be doing the actual physical operation of management of it but PG&E continues to own the distribution wires and transformers which means that PG&E still has the liability and the responsibility to come fix something if it gets damaged and so forth. And the insurance is actually a sticky point. Carrying liability insurance for power distribution equipment is a very expensive thing that could easily be prohibitive for a community like this. So here's a view of the block and we don't want to advertise the exact location really to protect the privacy of the participants for the time being. So I'm not advertising the name of the street it is in the Fruitvale neighborhood. And as you can sort of get the feel for it it's the older homes you don't see on this picture an apartment building and a small commercial corner store. So the microgrid physically will combine rooftop solar essentially as many kilowatts as will fit on every roof and those assets are shared and every solar array just contributes as much as it can into that distribution circuit there will be some smaller batteries at the home level and one larger community scale battery on the 100 kilowatt scale with a grid forming inverter that's sort of the main resource that will have the ability to black start that microgrid. I already mentioned we start with efficiency retrofits and the intelligent control is a huge part because in order to save some money on the sizing of these assets and to be confident in knowing that this microgrid could really operate indefinitely even in the winter we need the ability to prioritize loads and to shut stuff off that's not essential depending on how long we think we're gonna be out of power what's the state of charge of the batteries how much sun do we have right now? There needs to be an intelligent process for prioritizing that at the individual house level and at the block level. So the microgrid controller will be able to do that. Now electrical engineering is easy compared to the challenge of governance, right? Seven different languages are spoken on the block. There are a lot of different expectations and views of how people should work together how the community should be relating to the utility company how the participants should relate to each other their financial stakes and ultimately it's the property owners who are becoming part of the association who are putting a piece of their property value on the line with their commitment. And that's a big ask. There's a lot of trust that we're asking for and really the participants have to trust each other. There's obviously protections built into the bylaws of the association and into the contract that or the agreement that each participant ultimately signs that nobody can really get screwed over but there has to be really the bottom line of trust that people are doing this in good faith because it hasn't been done before like this. We're hoping that with the fifth or 10th or 100th eco block, it will be much easier to point to the previous examples and say, well, we're organizing ourselves like this other block has done and here's the blueprint for the governance process. But really a key goal in our research project has been to really cultivate transparency and make sure that everybody understands what's happening including the things that we as researchers don't know yet. I mentioned the PUC section 218, right? We believe that and Dan Kamen and I authored a white paper that was shared with the Public Utilities Commission. We believe that the own use exemption should apply to cases like this. It should be permissible for a neighbor to share power with their neighbor, for example, to cite a battery on one property that's being charged with PV from across the fence. There is a working group that is looking at these issues. Also, the tariff question, how do you design the rules and the rates to ensure that there isn't any unfair sort of cross-subsidization among different utility customer types or customer classes but to make this type of resilience accessible to all? So I think that another huge challenge here is really working with existing homes and an existing community of people that just happen to live on the same street as opposed to starting from scratch with some intentional community or new development where, yeah, we can build a new green sustainable neighborhood and attract the kinds of people who want to live there and work together as a community that would be an entirely different thing to do than to just grab these 33 households and say, okay, we're now going to work together and you'll get to know each other and we'll translate where we have to translate where people don't speak each other's language but we're going to make this effort because ultimately, and I do think this is ultimately in human nature to want to support each other, especially when there is a kind of physical emergency that we're all facing in the same way. I have this personal memory of really getting to know my neighbors in San Francisco after the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989 where it suddenly became very clear that, hey, we're here to help each other and make sure everyone is okay. I have also a personal experience with a group of neighbors in the high Sierra where we have shared water resources and lo and behold, people from different political parties and people with very different cultural backgrounds can come together and work together with the understanding that we all need drinking water and we all want each other to have that and to be safe. So I'm actually very optimistic that we can challenge everything that's good in human nature, that we can channel that to work cooperatively, to deal with extreme weather events and emergency kinds of scenarios but we have to facilitate that process and create an infrastructure that's set up for that that allows people to help each other. So right now we are, as I said, in the middle of phase two which is to build the project. We're designing everything to be specific to the site but also keeping notes, keeping close track of what decisions we made and why and how for a different block, for example, in a different climate zone with different building stock, with different solar resource on a different distribution circuit under different circumstances might have opted for different solutions at different points along the way. So that will be our eco block handbook and then we hope to scale this up to have a recipe book for how to adapt this to other blocks and be able ultimately to make a business case that's good enough for at least in a non-profit way and perhaps with some public funding to go into this hopefully ultimately to have a positive cash flow for projects like this to find a way to make this pencil out and we think there is absolutely the value proposition is absolutely there. There's some work that has to happen in the regulatory framework to facilitate this and things like the cost of insurance which reminds me of the analogy I think about is trying to get liability insurance for an indoor rock climbing gym which for the first climbing gym was really hard to do because the insurance companies thought, oh my goodness, indoor rock climbing that sounds terribly dangerous, people are gonna die, people are gonna get hurt, we're gonna charge you a huge premium and now of course there's an entire industry for this and it's a standard product, right? And there's standard safety procedures that are agreed upon in the field and I believe that multi-customer microgrids will evolve in that same way that clearly there are hazards, there's intrinsic hazards and risks that have to be managed but there will be standardized procedures and it will become a standard sort of insurance product like sure will ensure your community microgrid and there will be a standard financial product as a standard type of loan to take out for that. And the reason I've chosen this graphic here which illustrates blocks of buildings is because the block is really a unit that's replicated all across the country and all across the world. So if we have a cookie cutter solution that can work for a block it can be replicated very quickly in many places. Still, this is hard as I said, it requires trust, it requires cooperation amongst many parties including the technology developers, the electric utility, trust between the property owners and the renters and things as simple as, you know who saves money on their electric bill when the solar is producing and how does that get reflected in the dues payment for the community association? Will the landlord raise the rent for the tenant or should they be allowed to do that? How are the savings allocated amongst the participants? It requires really operating in good faith and with some ground rules in place. Requires cooperation with local government, with the city permitting and the regulatory agencies. So as I said in the beginning, it's a labor of love, it's a huge team working on this. And I think all of us are inspired by what this might be able to do really to accelerate our whole, our states, our countries and the world's movement in the direction toward climate mitigation, also unfortunately climate adaptation and resilience as well as equity. So I will stop here for Q and A. Any questions? Thank you first to share this whole project. And our question is, have we done projections on whether this pilot program would result in overall savings to PGE so bring benefits to other non-participating customers or is it gonna incur like more expenses? So there would be some cost shifting to other customers. A great question. So PG&E is very sensitive to the cost shifting issue. And I think I can say that there will absolutely not be any cost shifting to other customers to pay for all of this fund in particular because for this project, and we haven't penciled out the details of how much some of the upgrades, for instance, we need to do a transformer upgrade and a new transformer and how much that's gonna cost and some changes to what is now a single phase distribution lateral that for some stretch of it will have to be upgraded to three phase that will cost some money. And in this case, the project will pay for the bulk of that. In the long run and for scalability, I think those types of upgrades have to be rate-based in the sense that they're inevitable anyway, right? Because when there are upgrades for load growth those are generally speaking rate-based that is all the customers pay a share to allow for these upgrades. And what we're looking at in the big picture is that electricity may need to be more expensive than it already is, right? In order to reach our goals. Now, to reach our climate goals and our solar and EV integration goals there will have to be some upgrades done that cost money. At the societal level, I believe that investment is absolutely worth it because the alternative is much more expensive, right? We can't afford not to make those investments in our electric infrastructure, but how you allocate it sort of between micro grids and other customers, it stands to reason that those customers who benefit from increased reliability and resilience should have some burden to pay more for that privilege, right? And yet, on the other side, you can argue that, well, wait a minute, the utility has an obligation to serve. So if this is what it takes to serve reliably, some group of customers, for example, if because of the wildfire hazard conditions, if a micro grid is the most realistic way to serve that load, then the utility has to take that route and pay for it. So I think that's very fertile ground for detailed conversations. And I'm looking at what's on the shared screen. You've got two questions in the Q&A. Say again. Do you see the questions? I... Yes, so, you didn't tell the economics to have block-based rate making for electricity and gas to encourage the local solution. We currently have peanut buttered rate making, I love that. I don't know. And whenever I have the opportunity, focus on electrons rather than dollars, because I find the electrons a lot easier to understand. And I think that there are people much more qualified than me to talk about rate design and tariff design to find the best solution. I come at it really from the perspective of the societal level. And what is collectively the least cost way of making sure people are safe, period. And I think that... So my hunch is that there are actually some savings that can be had at the utility or system operator level, which I didn't mention previously. And that is that if we can guarantee that people will be safe and healthy when the macro grid goes out, that means potentially saving billions and billions of dollars that we now spend on the last lines of reliability. This is politically a very difficult point to discuss because nobody wants to be the person who sticks their neck out and goes on camera and says, yeah, the grid should become less reliable, right? Even though it makes sense, it might make sense from the societal point of view to say, as long as we make sure that the most vulnerable people are taken care of and that nobody will get hurt or will die when the macro grid goes out, wow, we can save a whole lot that we're now spending on generation reserves, for example. And or certain other system upgrades that we wouldn't need if we can actually depend on the local more granular management of load in both time and space. So I think there are savings there to be realized and people who are better steeped in the economics should take this up and discuss it. How will this affect existing utility companies facilities? How will the existing power plants be paid for? So the electric supply costs are really, I think a separate, quite separate bucket from the distribution charges, right? I mean, it's itemized on our bills. And but it's a great question because it actually reminds me to say something that I neglected to say earlier. That is, I think there are potential savings that is distribution system benefits that can be realized from controllable loads and controllable clusters or microgrids for which there is not presently a tariff. And we've talked about this with PG&E and they're very collegial in talking these things through with us, but the reality is there isn't really a mechanism to capture and both validate and remunerate things like voltage services at the distribution level or being able to alleviate local overloads, basically helping defer or avoid other distribution system investments. I'm convinced that that value is there somewhere. There's not a mechanism to capture it. Now, as far as on the generation side, a microgrid that can be intermittently connected clearly is taking advantage of the rest of the grid as a battery and as a reliability resource should pay for that, right? It shouldn't just pay zero if it has the benefit of connecting to the grid. And I see this is coming back to the other generation, to the electric supply costs, which of course are mostly owned not by the utilities but by other generating resources. You know, there will be a demand for those resources because by the kilowatt hour or by the megawatt hour, those will still be less expensive. That's where I really see a complimentary approach between having the local distributed renewables and having the larger scale centralized solar and wind farms that can really produce megawatt hours less expensively because you can cite them in the best, you know, the best regions, but which happens to be not where people live because it's either too hot and sunny or too damn windy to live there. So I think that this sort of approach to do local generation to meet essential needs and then do the less expensive bulk energy production in a centralized or more remote way, basically thinking of that as the, you know, the benefit of accessing cheap bulk resources but also using that in the sense as a luxury to supply the convenience loads, that's what we're sizing the system for but we may not want to have to count on the network to be there, you know, without fail. For us. I don't know if that answered the question but I'm gonna go on to the next one. How are drought problems such as inadequate water supply for water utilities farming and water reservoir maintenance? Water and electricity are resources should be included in the rates. How can they be separated? I'm not quite sure. I understand the question. I mean, there's a couple of different intersections between water and electricity, you know, on the one hand, we use hydropower to produce electricity. So, and that might be referred to here. That is, I mean, last year has been a terrible year for hydro resource, right? A lot of the reservoirs are at historic lows. And thank goodness it's raining right now. Fingers crossed for a better season. But so that impacts electricity scarcity. And on the other hand, we also need electricity to pump drinking water, also to pump sewage, by the way. So water inflow and outflow is, you know, absolutely dependent on having some amount of electricity. But the pricing, you know, in my mind, those are quite separate. And I'm not sure maybe somebody else wants to help discuss this question, just to hit the last point on this screen desalination. Is necessary to discuss. Certainly desalination is one type of electricity use that I think is easy to shape around the availability of solar wind power. So it's a kind of load that, you know, doesn't have to run uninterrupted at a certain power level, but could be helped to basically flatten the overall demand profile. How did we present this complicated info to the community? Ha, multiple outreach sessions. Yes, indeed. So we started with hiring a professional community outreach coordinator who is an Oakland native. And basically her job is to know everyone and talk to everyone, both in City Hall and on the blocks in the neighborhood. And then we've had a number of sessions, some, you know, outdoors masks during COVID, out on the street with posters and, yeah, little pieces at a time. I think this would have been easier if we as researchers could have gone in from the beginning and known exactly what we're doing. But we've had to go in and say to people, okay, we're gonna do this project together. That is, we hope you'll do this project with us. We can't force you to, even after you've signed a letter that says, you know, you're interested. We don't know yet exactly what we're doing, but we're figuring it out with you. And that gives the participants the opportunity to shape the process. Certainly the, you know, the Board of Directors for the Community Association, just a group of folks on the block has taken the lead in self-organizing. And as researchers, we now sort of sit and listen in, but we're not driving that process, right? And they're actually taking it to the next level of communicating with their neighbors. But we also, we have a monthly newsletter. So we have a website that's public facing ecoblock.berkeley.edu. And we have a part of that website that's accessible to the participants only. And so that involves a lot of technical explanation. And, you know, sometimes talking about stuff more than once. And sometimes going back and saying, oops, we're sorry, we said something wrong, here it is corrected because we just figured this out. So thank you. Can I elaborate further on the EV charging? Right. So the details of the pricing are not yet worked out. The basic approach is that there will be one or two vehicles that will be accessible to the participants to borrow and then come back and charge from the microgrid. The goal is that this will allow people to, some of the households to get rid of their second car. What we've learned, and these are things that you learn when you actually do a project on the ground is that the super hard currency on the block is parking spaces. And we, you will like incite a mini war amongst neighbors if you start to take away parking spaces. So actually the toughest issue on the EV front isn't the pricing, isn't the low shaping or the duck curve. It's the question of, well, do you dedicate a parking space to the EV? And how do you tell everybody else that there's now one less spot for parking any other car? We have looked at vehicle to grid two way charging, probably too complicated for what we're doing here. It's a possible resource. I think that would be the way to go if there were a larger number of EVs. And that's, I think, one of those topics that we're like, well, let's do it next time. Let's scroll down. I don't know if that was all. I think that's the last question. Great. Thank you so much. That was great. Thank you.