 Okay, thank you for being part of this community conversation and welcome to a lot of folks who are friends and others who are tuning in for the first time. This is a great moment to be involved in this sector. There's a lot of potential and there was a lot of momentum for doing some big things. And as they say, sometimes big, big problems need big solutions. And we've never been shy about proposing bold measures in our work with the Sierra Club. So I'm going to just spend some time talking with you a little bit about the our proposal for consumer utility in Maine. And then as Matt said, we'll have an opportunity for folks to talk about this amongst themselves and then we'll come back together and have some Q&A after we finish that. As you probably know, this is a measure that goes back a couple years. It's had public hearing the legislature and it's been considered in various forms over the last 18 months or two years or so. And it has evolved and we've been refined somewhat. And it's now at the point where it is before or will soon be before the legislature again for further consideration and the Energy and Utilities Committee. And Seth Berry has been the main champion of this measure in the last session of the legislature. And we've also worked very closely with Nicole Grahowski and a large number of other legislators who are lending their support and helping to spread the word about this, this measure. Okay, so, excuse me for a second while I try to coordinate the PowerPoint here. Okay, so some of the little bit of a slide order in my PowerPoint is not what I thought it would be. Okay, well I'll just go with what we got. The goals for the state as everybody can anticipate are related to the climate council's goals that the work that's been done in the last couple years and the previous legislature and the Governor Mills approved some aggressive goals for the state of Maine. But we think that with our power in the consumer utility model it's realistically to talk about Maine being the first state to reach net zero. And to do it equitably and affordably, and in a way that stimulates the main the main economy and keeps more money within the borders of the state. At the same time, one of our major needs of the state is to expand access to broadband. And we think that this can also go hand in hand with expanding consumer owned utility model and with consumer control over more of the infrastructure that can facilitate expanded access to broadband around the state more quickly and more affordably. Considering that the infrastructure of the poles and wires is common to both both services and there are some potential economies there and and opportunities to facilitate and accelerate expansion. So this pathway obviously involves replacing the investor owned for profit central main power and version utilities with a lower cost alternative that would be controlled by folks here in Maine and with a focus on reliability economy and achieving those those other goals that we just mentioned. And in legislation that's going to be coming forward this will be called pine tree power company. And as as noted it will be a nonprofit corporation utility that will be operated just like other nonprofit utilities around the country, and in Maine. We see right here in this map, the service territories of CNP and blue and America and green. The rest of the state is actually already served by other consumer owned or municipal utilities. But pine tree power company would take over the service for the areas outlined in blue and green, which is over 90, 90, 95% of the state in terms of the numbers of customers. In this legend down below you can see the other about almost a dozen consumer owned utilities around the state, including some of the islands off the shore. Um, just what caused the evacuation of those hands correct sir. Sorry. And the Holton water district, and some others kind of bunk light and power Madison electric works, which some of you are probably familiar with. I don't know a whole lot about how the grid the grid is organized this slide is a sort of schematic of what part of the grid pine tree power company would own and operate on the left here is the generating assets, the wind power in this example. The right is the ultimate consumer your home or small business or even industrial consumer, and in between are the poles the wires the transformers the hardware that brings the power from generators to the home. That's the sector of the grid that the pine tree power company would own. As we refer to it it's the transmission and distribution sector that of the grid. Right now. There are a lot of examples and precedence for consumer owned electricity in the United States, one out of three American consumers gets their energy from consumer owned utilities. It surprises some people because, you know, in Maine it's predominantly an investor owned utility model, but in other states, like Nebraska is entirely owned by consumer owned utilities and other other states have large municipal utilities and other sectors of those of the states are owned and controlled by consumer, the consumer owned model, the rural electrification administration part of the New Deal in the 1930s helped to facilitate a lot of this. So what are the benefits of a consumer owned utility well we they come in three general categories, reduced cost, local control and enhanced reliability. In terms of cost. The empirical information shows that about 13% lower costs are paid for consumer owned utilities then for less invest drone utilities, particularly in Maine, even even with some of the more expensive locations such as on the islands where it's it's more expensive to deliver electric power than it is on the mainland, taking together the cost is still lower than it is for the investor owned utilities in the in the state. And this chart to the right shows the projected savings over the next 30 years of $9 billion from the consumer owned model over the investor owned approach that we are currently using. And this is a result of savings that are going to be leveraged during the investment that's going to take place in order to achieve beneficial electrification in other words to build out those poles wires, hardware transformers, etc. That will help us to move transportation and heating services to the grid, where they will be ultimately powered by cleaner sources of power. Local the local control aspect of consumer owned utilities. First of all, there will be an independent board within the state that will take control and run the operations of the utility. We'll replace the boards that are currently not really based in Maine for the incumbent investor owned utilities, and some in some cases not even based in the country. But a local consumer owned and control controlling board will make decisions that will determine you know the future and the rollout of this. The money that's that you pay as a rate pair will stay in Maine. I will not go to pay off an investor out of state, and by a leveraging lower cost financing. We think that the consumer owned utility creates the opportunity to achieve beneficial electrification more rapidly and more deeply than an investor owned model at the same cost and therefore it'll create more jobs will stimulate the economy, and bring with it the attendant multiplier effect that'll be good, it'll be good for all sectors in the state not just the utility sector. Reliability, you know Maine has currently some serious problems with reliability of our electric grid, and that affects you and me when we're working from our homes or we're just doing our day to day conducting our day to day business in a small business. It also impacts into industrial consumers and other large customers of the utilities and it hinders our economic development when an industry knows that it cannot get reliable power it may think twice about locating and we may suffer the economic consequences of those jobs that we're not brought here. So, we also think that investing in the polls and wires, rather than diverting profits to overseas investors will help to improve resilience of the grid and help to ensure that you know our frequent outages are reduced significantly, whether it's from an ice storm, or from some other unexplained occurrence. Okay, so how did we achieve this well there is as noted, there are. There are many precedents for consumer owned utilities around the country and there are even precedents for specific municipalities to transition from investor ownership to consumer ownership, but have a sort of rhetorical What do all of these six cities you see on your screen have in common from Alaska to Kansas, Texas, Colorado, Vermont, Missouri. What do they have in common, all six of these municipalities have two things in common. One is, they're all completely powered by 100% renewable energy. And the second is that they're all consumer owned. They all have consumer ownership of their electric utilities. And we just don't think it's a coincidence that the first municipalities to reach that 100% renewable benchmark are in the consumer ownership category, rather than the investor ownership category. A lot of you know, our energy grid is on the brink of a unprecedented transformation. It's been, you know, inadequate to meet the goals, the needs of our of our state today as we know from the many outages that have occurred. And it's going to be stressed and challenged even further as we move towards the beneficial electrification necessary to achieve our climate goals. We carry in three times as much power over the electric grid, and those wires you see overhead cannot carry an unlimited amount of power. They need to be upgraded and supplemented in order to achieve the grid of the future to in order to carry all of that power that's going to be needed for beneficial electrification. So we think that this is, this is the core that the secret and the only pathway to our energy future is to achieve beneficial electrification. And that necessitates some real careful thinking about the grid itself, how we manage it and how we pay for that expansion. And as we noted, we think make main can be the first state to net zero in our electric grid. And we think that in doing so we will stimulate the economy and also achieve our climate goals and keep more money within the state. You see here a residential solar panel installer. They have terrific jobs in the state. And obviously their jobs that that keep investments in the state and that keep money churning through the local economy. We can, you know, support local small businesses and not so small businesses that are emerging in the solar installation but not just in that area in other other sectors that are going to be contributing to this beneficial electrification trend. Not just the renewables themselves but the grid hardware that goes along with that, that's going to be needed to carry that power around the state. I could do a lot better in terms of broadband access 85,000 main homes do not have adequate broadband access and in the time of homeschooling and working from home this has been a serious setback as a serious problem for the state. And we are incorporating the goal of expanded broadband access into our power proposal into the legislation. And we think this is a common sense measure where the polls can be commonly owned between cost or own utility that can actually run the wires for power and run the wires for broadband on the same polls at a lower cost than the current pole attachment fees which make up a large part of the cost of expanding broadband around the state to all commercial and residential customers. Okay, here's a couple of examples of municipalities in the country that have made the transition winter park Florida in 2005 made the transition. There was a public vote that was strongly supportive of moving towards consumer ownership. This was resulted from something not unlike Maine where there were great problems in winter park with outages a lot of them related to their hurricanes rather of course rather ice storms but still the feeling that there was not enough investment in hardening and resiliency of the local grid. They were able to pay back the acquisition cost in under 10 years. And as a result statistics down in winter park show them they've had much greater rock reliability, even as storms have gotten larger and more intense over the years due to climate change. Jefferson County, Washington is another example of a an effort to take a utility to a consumer ownership model. They succeeded in reducing rates and bringing benefits to low income households in particular. So we're able to meet local job creation goals and to contribute to their climate goals by decarbonizing the energy sector as well. Pittsburgh is another model. This is a large city they they were notable because of their innovative community advisory councils that they rely on for direct input from the public. And they also have established a decision making of their utilities. And they also have have established a good track record of investment in green infrastructure. Using lower cost missful bonds to leverage the capital, rather than paying, you know, twice as much for investor owned equity through a stock market, kind of model. New York, Tennessee has done a terrific job, especially with broadband. They've now become a model for access to broadband around a municipality. This has been going on for about 10 years now, and they were able to leverage their existing polls and wires from the public utility company in order to increase improve access throughout the entire city. And they've had an affordable rate again with a special emphasis on reaching low income households and giving them the benefit of the economic opportunity that comes with expanded access to broadband. So there are certainly, there's no blueprint for how to do this. The acquisition process is not something that, you know, we can just, you know, turn a page and move into consumer consumer ownership, but it is certainly something that has been vetted and reviewed for legality by experts including people who testified at the Energy Utilities Committee last year that this can be done and there are no legal impediments to it. But the process needs to be done thoughtfully and needs to be done over a little bit of time to allow a new board to be put in place and to allow the assets of the outgoing utilities to be procured and a system of management of those assets to be to be put in place. So Pine Tree Power, which is not the state itself, under the legislation that's now in the works, Pine Tree Power would buy the assets of Versint and Central Main Power and would pay a fair price for them. And there would be a process where what is a fair price would be determined by, you know, looking deeply into the value of the assets and against the standards of what is fair in the industry, and then having that approved if necessary approved through a judicial process. One of the secrets of consumer owned, the benefits of consumer owned power is how it can access capital. The grid of the past 100 years and our whole electric system the past 100 years has largely been the cost of it has been driven by fuel costs. And to oversimplify somewhat in the future with all of the technology that's involved in renewable energy distributed generation, micro grids and the beneficial electrification we've been talking about. The cost driver for our electric system will be the cost of capital will be cost of making all of those physical investments so one time upfront cost that has to be paid in order to put batteries in place in order to put new substations in place in order to build build out our wire infrastructure, whatever it is the cost of capital will be the cost driver as we triple the size of what our electric grid can carry. So we really have to look closely and making sure we're getting the lowest cost capital in order to move forward as rapidly and as deeply as possible. Pine tree power will use low interest revenue bonds, which are added you know at a two to 3% charge for borrowing and a large amount of money needed to build this infrastructure. There will not be paying investors and investor premium for the stock that is sold to those equity investors, such as the current incumbent utilities have to do. It does not depend on state taxes. It does not depend on the state ownership or the state guarantee of these of these bonds. These are revenue bonds that are secured by the collection of bill bill payments from from customers. This is a stable and low cost way to fund this kind of infrastructure. It's important to value the workers who provide the physical labor and expertise to enable our grid infrastructure to serve us. The workers under the proposal that's before the legislature will be able to keep their jobs and their contracts and their seniority. We expect that the new utility will will prioritize highly qualified professionals and that to achieve that grid build out that we've been talking about will bring on new workers to support those goals. This is something that you know the people who are actually out there in the trucks and in the offices to deliver the services will be valued and will be appreciated by this locally owned nonprofit. That's my presentation and we hope you will connect with us and learn more about it. And certainly happy to have some conversation but I believe I'm not mistaken that the next step here is to do some breakout rooms and then come back for q amp a after that. Yeah, we'll. Yeah, we encourage you all to participate if you can and some small breakouts just for a few minutes. We do have a prompt I'll share my screen and then we can come back and answer as many questions as possible. The prompt is, what is the main benefit of a consumer utility and what are the main challenges of implementing john laid out. Most of those but it would be great just to foster some dialogue meet meet a neighbor and we'll circle back in a couple minutes and then we can answer all those questions so I'm just going to go for it and we'll we'll see you back here in five minutes. Everyone I'm going to continue recording. I hope that was, hope that was helpful I know, you know, sometimes it's hard to chat with others in a presentation like this but hopefully it was valuable, and at least kind of creating the questions to ask I know I was in a group and I bet you you all had some similar themed questions. We're going to try to try to keep him in the chat for the moment just because we do have a slightly larger group. But john yeah I mean I guess we could start with the one in the chat that I heard a few times, which was, I think about the citizen initiative and how that relates to this legislation, I also heard obviously question about that more about the question and how the board is made up so assume you've heard similar questions as well. Yeah, so those are good questions I guess I'll start out with the citizen initiative question. The folks know that you know we have a lot of different ways to move forward with a piece of policy like this. The legislature itself could enact a bill or it could be taken out to the voters after gathering signatures like just you know yesterday we learned that the folks opposing the court or have succeeded in gaining enough signatures to put their measure on the ballot. Each year there's a deadline in January for submitting your signatures. So the deadline for 2021 obviously is behind us and there'll be another deadline in 2022. And at that time, it's possible that you know if the legislature hasn't enacted a bill of this nature then a measure could be put before the legislature and then go out to the ballot in 2022 or even some later time. And it's also possible that the legislature itself could send a measure directly out to the voters without going through the signature collection process. So there are a couple of different pathways to, to move on. But let me just say that this is the kind of a question about a very important piece of our economy and a public good that serves us all. And that relates very much to the kind of state we want to be and who we want to be in the driver's seat. And these kinds of big questions are, are, you know, the kind of things that citizen initiatives are made for, for people to weigh in and and say, this is really, really important to us to achieve our climate goals to do it affordably and to be, you know, in the driver's seat have local control, and that's the kind of thing the voters should weigh in on there's many people who feel that way. So I can't say from where we are right now what's going to happen right now the most of the energy and the attention is on the legislative piece because we expect to be public hearings there before, before too long. In terms of the control of the board, I mean the legislation creates a board that would be an elected board with some members elected representing different geographic areas of the state. And some members would be non voting board members who'd be experts in the area, who would be appointed but not elected so it's a it's a blend of expertise from non voting members with the, you know, democratically chosen elected members. And that's a feature that is common with some municipal utilities around the around the country that have locally elected members controlling a municipal's electric and, you know, perhaps water supply system people in Portland are familiar with voting for the Portland Water District Board members for example. So what was the other question. My group, and I don't know about others feel free to put in the chat was just about how to require or the sale. The acquisition and the companies how that the mechanism might work or can you compel them to do that. And then I guess right before that there was a question of the appointments of the board by whom. Yeah. So the yes you can compel them to sell. There are different sort of legal pieces of that. But the short answer is that yes you can and as I as I noted, one of the experts who testified to the committee of jurisdiction last year was an attorney who was one of the national experts on this kind of thing and he gave in depth testimony to reviewing the whole question and reviewing the legislation that as it stood at that time. And he testified that there really is no legal impediment to doing this. The question comes down to the valuation of the utility and the assets that would be procured and what exactly is the price tag that's to be put on that. And that's not something that is, you know, easy to answer because there are a lot of market forces that affect what the real valuation of all of that, the polls and wires are and the, the package of it, all together, what is, what is how do you evaluate that and that's a fair question that is not, you know, easy to answer but would have to be answered in the course of making this kind of transit transition. That's a fair compensation to the utilities for those assets. I see a question here we wondered if we could also own the power generation to in Maine, the law currently says that a utility such as central main power verse and cannot own power generating assets. And that is a result of the deregulation of the generating side of the utility world. Around 20 years ago, where the utilities were required to divest from their assets their generating assets. And that is because the argument was made that the generating side is. You need to have, you know, a regulated monopoly that there can be competition and the competition would be good for prices and good for consumers as different generators tried to get a larger share of the of the market. So right now, basically there is no option for a utility to own the generating apps assets and that's not part of this plan, although I do believe there is legislation that is separately going forward. And I will be looking at that issue and looking at whether the advantages of low cost financing that I described earlier might also apply to financing the purchase and acquisition of generating assets. All right, good question yeah and there's another one in there john I don't know if you see that but well I see something about the utility changing ownership in eastern Maine. I would just note that kind of interestingly, some of the critics or opponents of consumer owned utilities, try to try to frame it as a question of a government ownership government control of a private sector industry. It just, you know, for the record interesting to point out that the versions utility is a wholly owned entity affiliated with the city of Calgary. So basically, the city of Calgary is the is currently a government of course and an owner of the version utility. The difference is that any profits or excess payments that are paid to versants instead of staying in Maine they go to provide a rebate to consumers are the taxpayers of Calgary. So I think once people start thinking about that and realize that it doesn't have to be that way, and that we could keep that money here in the state. They tend to look more favorably towards what we're trying to do here. And all right there's a few more pop in here but before we kind of stay on that. There's just a question about, you know tactics around combining this with fighting the corridor or not. It seems like they're separate. We're all kind of, or some of us are working on both of them at the same time but do you have any thoughts on that. I mean they're kind of on. I think they're both born out of out of a frustration that's, you know, feels very similar the frustration with people feel like they were not consulted and the process of creating the corridor, or feel like it just goes against the interests of Maine and benefits the interests of people outside the state. There's a lot of that that I sense from the corridor opponents. And there's, you know, sort of a sense of, you know, powerful interest abusing their power, frankly, and that kind of resonates with the people who are looking at the consumer ownership idea. There are certainly people who, you know, don't oppose the corridor who do support computer or consumer ownership and maybe vice versa. It's not complete overlap. Both, neither one is really very surprising in a state like Maine where people are very sensitive to issues like local control and the preservation of, you know, our, our values as a state and our mission for, you know, clean energy and so on. It's not a surprise that there would be a lot of overlap between the two efforts, but the timing is different the consumer ownership issue is going out. If it goes out to a ballot question, it would go out sometime in the future and the corridor question looks like it's headed for the ballot this year. Okay, great. And yeah, there's another question about the generation piece. I think it's more maybe related to upcoming legislation, or maybe even legislation we've had that needs to be implemented to cut down on the needs of larger electricity losing grids. Do you know of bills coming up or are we still in the implementation phase of last session of some of those bills. There are a lot of bills coming up, and I don't really profess to be an expert on all of the different proposals out there and it's been a lot of good work a lot of good thinking about the whole. You know the direction that we need to go in but let me just say two things. One is that grid planning is critically important. And it's important in a democratic sense that the public should be able to have a say in how we build out our grid it should not just be left to market forces. And the second thing I would say is that, no matter what happens, our grid is in is poised for enormous transformation, it's just not going to be, you know, like for years we had, you know, man Yankee pumping out power and and directing it, you know around the state through large power lines and distribution system. And then, you know, of course they're more than just main Yankee but in general the paradigm was, you know, a few large generators and spreading out the power across the state over wires to a lot of individual consumers. And that whole paradigm is going to be lost the new paradigm is distributed generation sources all around the state, batteries, solar, wind, other kinds of renewable green energy sources, distributed in different multiple different locations around the state, and that is a very different kind of an electric grid it still needs the wires and the poles to carry power but it's not all one direction from one central location, spreading all around the state it's more, you know, needs to be balanced that always you with the grid you you start to have the same amount of energy going into it as comes out of it, or else you start to have mechanical technical problems. So it has to always be kept balance and each part of it has to be kept balance which is a challenge a technical challenge. And that's that that's the challenge of the future grid. And that's, that's the new paradigm that we'll be dealing with instead of that old centralized paradigm of the past. That was very helpful. I see a question maybe priming us for action a little bit. Where is this bill in the legislature. And is it similar to the one introduced last session. We don't, we haven't seen the bill yet. So we expect it'll be coming out anytime now there's a, there's a backlog of the people who write the bills and create them and print them up so that they can be circulated and have a public hearing. There's a backlog and they just take some a while to turn through almost 2000 bill requests this year. So I expected it could be available anytime, certainly this month, and then a public hearing will be, you know, at least, you know, two weeks after that, maybe some time in March or April could be a public hearing, and then the work sessions in the in the committee. So that's kind of the in general that the timeline that we envision. So it will be likely be different from the bill the last session the LD 1646 it definitely has gone through some, some changes and improvements and some elaborations and clarifications and we've learned from some of the, you know, conversations that were held over over the course of the last 18 months. Yeah, and we'll, we'll definitely, I know our power, I'm sure will keep people up to date will also keep people up to date and I shared it in the beginning but I'll share our campaign to keep you informed and help help you take action. And over these weeks and months, bills can be introduced very quickly at this point and hearing pops up. So, I encourage you to log on there and you can help, you can stay informed. If I don't see any other final questions here. But feel free also to reach out to me or john. I have my email in the chat as well. Well, while we're, while we're here, I will just I see a comment in the in the chat about Texas. And the comment was the fossil fuel folks, blamed renewables for the tragedies down there that were from the devastating power outages and winter, winter conditions. And that is of course true. Another lesson to learn from that though is that resiliency is just so critically important, and a consumer own utility can we believe direct more resources into grid resiliency to protect us and to protect our, our access to electricity in the time of a crisis like that. Not, not shave off that extra money and send it out of the state to investors. Right, any other. I just encourage folks to stay, stay involved with the Sierra Club chapter and you can contact our power directly for more opportunities to learn about this and to, you know, help educate the public and help educate decision makers on this. Okay, thank you john very much for your time this is very informative. I'm glad to see such a big group, and I know I learned something so let me just quickly. Where did it go. We do have another upcoming community conversation we always appreciate you all coming to these. The next one is on a climate to thrive on March 2. And all these events are on our homepage, so your club that org slash main on the front calendar and we'll keep you updated we'll we'll send any links to you after this meeting as well and this will be up on our YouTube and our website.