 Thank you all for being here, and I'd like to start out with just a few questions for the sake of our panelists to get a sense of the audience. Who here is because Community Choice is new to them and they want to learn more about it? Community Choice aggregation. It's okay, hands up. Okay, so a few newbies. Who's already familiar with Community Choice aggregation? Everyone else. And how many of you are involved in a local CCA in some way or another? Okay, so I hope that's helpful to you. Also, if it's all right, I'm going to go through just a few slides that I think would help a little background on all of this. Because this audience is pretty well informed and they have a good sense of what Community Choice is, I'll just speak briefly to those who are here to learn about it. It was created by legislation in 2002 following the California energy crisis. And the purpose was to allow communities to become their own electric providers. Primarily, cities and counties have been doing this to reduce greenhouse gases. I think I'm going to pick this up. Maybe not. Primarily, they've been doing it to reduce greenhouse gases. But a number of communities have been doing it to increase the number of renewables in their local community and also to gain local control. Number in County was the first to take this up. And at the time I was a California Energy Commissioner and I and others also supported their efforts. And there was some additional legislation needed to protect against the abuse of practices of investor owned utilities. There was also a proposition in 2010, which essentially would have put a stop to Community Choice aggregation. There was also some legislation that was put forward in 2014, which would have changed the opt in opt out provisions for consumers. And that seemed to have really, at least through my experience, have galvanized the cities and communities. That's when they really all throughout California woke up and said, why would they provide legislation to change something that we don't know much about? There must be something there. And I think cities began to investigate it at that time. As of today, there's about 20 CCAs and I'm sure I'll be corrected by some of our panelists. And I think I'll just kind of stop there with regard to some background. I do have some slides I want to show you that I think will also be helpful. Although existing CCAs are thus far pretty successful, there continues to be some risks and some concerns. There are financial credit worthiness, who will be the provider of last resort if one of these agencies were to fail. And a number of other concerns have been raised, namely reliability of the grid, the market disruptions that are threatening the achievement of California's greenhouse gas and other energy goals, cost shifting, regulatory ambiguity. There's a few others and I think our panelists will be getting into those a little bit. I don't mean to go into any detail there. And we've been doing panels on this here at the Silicon Valley Energy Summit for the last three years. I believe this is our fourth year of addressing the subject. But it's a bit of an avalanche that has begun to take place. What seemed like a snowball has now really gained momentum. I'd like to just go through a couple of slides that I think will be helpful. Moody's investor service report just came out last week on having done a rating on Marin Clean Energy. And although it says it's all confidential and not to be duplicated, I'm going to take my chances because all the information they pulled was from public domain anyhow. The reason I'm using their stuff is because I think it's a pretty independent evaluation of the credit worthiness of Marin Clean Energy. This was a figure that they had that depicts how widespread it indicates that there's 17 today with four mortal launch in 2018. This particular, and you can see there's a lot of interest in terms of those that are exploring community choice aggregation. This is a table of operational CCAs. And I'll just go quickly through these. I think I'm up to slide four. This one is again from the Moody's investor report. It's a percentage of the investor owned utility that's served percent of IOU served load for PG&E. And you can see it's greater than 20%. And Southern California Edison is much smaller, but it's also growing. And PUC concludes that by the end of the year, about 25% of the investor owned utility load will have migrated to CCAs. Of course, all this migration that's taking place is not just CCAs, but there's another phenomenon called direct access that we may talk about a little bit here today, and rooftop solar. And also the President of the Public Utilities Commission, President Picker, has recently said that more than 80% of utility load could switch to alternative suppliers. Again, that would also be direct access and rooftop solar by the early to mid 2020s. I think this was just a helpful slide because of my panelists, if they want to speak to what California's clean energy goals are. I've just taken this again from the Moody's report and it lists some of them. You can see to reduce greenhouse gases, increase renewables, movement towards local renewable energy on new homes, large scale renewable energy, and the last bullet is also important about transparency and equitableness. And finally, the percentage of renewable energy and the power supply of the CCAs and the IOUs in California. Although the investor owned utilities have done an excellent job, it's taken a long time. And the CCAs, as you can see, are at a starting point above where the IOUs have gotten to today. All right. The format for the panel is I'm going to ask, after some short introductions of each of them, I'm going to ask to make a brief opening statement. Then we'll get into it with some of the key topics and questions that I have. I'll certainly leave time for the audience to ask questions. We do have a microphone up here and I think what I'll do is I'll ask you to raise your hand if we get to that point and come forward and quickly and ask your question. We'll certainly give each panelist a chance to make some final concluding remarks at the end. In the event we didn't cover a topic that you want to make sure we do, or the final point that you'd like to leave everyone with. So I'd like to just add my personal note to the biographies of the individuals that you've seen here today. For instance, Jan Pepper on the end here, I've known I think for more than 20 years. She's taught energy classes here at Stanford and I know she started at least one company, probably more. She was at four or three. All right, so she's quite entrepreneurial. She's also my council member and my former mayor. That'll probably happen again, I suspect. And she's also confided in me that she now has her dream job as the CEO of a community choice aggregation that encompasses all of San Mateo County. This is Jan Pepper. Now I've known John V. White for a long time. I'm sorry, I said that wrong. V. John White, who I'll just refer to as Mr. White. He's been a fixture in Sacramento on energy and environmental policy for over 35 years and has devoted his career to clean energy policy, clean environmental policy. I've found, John, I've met with him a number of times when I was in Sacramento to be a very reasoned and well-informed voice in Sacramento who has the ear of many people, including the governor's office. Now, John, you may correct me, but I think I read a number of years ago that either you or your family have a long association with the Rose Parade. Is that correct? That's correct. My father was the president of the parade in 1972 and we rode down the whole parade as a family. So I had that right then. I couldn't find anything on it, but I remembered seeing that years ago and it seems to me putting two and two together here that ever since that parade was first broadcast in living color back in the mid-50s and every year since, the population of California has tripled. And I think it has a lot to do with that Rose Ball Parade and maybe a lot to do with why John has been working his entire career to reduce the environmental impact of the nearly 40 million people that live in California. Correct? Yes. Okay. All right. And if I may, I'd like to say just something briefly about Beth. I've also known Beth for a number of years. Initially as an expert on cogeneration and combined heat and power before renewable energy really gained the foothold it has in the past decade or so. She's also an environmental policy expert. And most recently in our new role, she is the California Community Choice Aggregates Trade Organization Executive Director since last October. And Beth was so kind to connect me with my family and I went to New Zealand a number of years ago with the Minister of Lands and the founding chairman of the New Zealand National Parks and Conservation Foundation. Wonderful gentleman, her former boss. But I've seen the best part was he's now winemaker and I bought a number of cases of his wine while we were there. Excellent. All right. So thank you all for being here today. Let's do this. Let's take a minute for each of you to introduce yourselves and say why you really elected to be on this panel here today. If you wouldn't mind, Jan, going first. Is this on? Okay. Give it a try. Can everyone hear me okay? Yeah. Okay. Great. Thank you, Jeff, for such a lovely introduction. Jeff's a great guy and it's always fun to be at this conference and have Jeff moderating the panels. This is a terrific job. And thank you all for coming to this panel. I know you had a choice and that's what we're all about, community choice. So thank you for making this excellent choice today and hopefully we'll have a good panel discussion and make it worth your while. I am in my dream job which is running Peninsula Clean Energy. I've been there for two years now as the first employee and basically we're a public agency startup. And so actually that makes it five companies that have started up. The advantage of this one is that it was a little bit easier in that each city in San Mateo County, which is where Peninsula Clean Energy operates, each city council voted whether to be a member of Peninsula Clean Energy and every city voted unanimously to be a part of Peninsula Clean Energy. So there's huge support from all of the communities and from our board members. We have a 22 member board consisting of a council member from each city and two county supervisors and I work closely with them. We launched in October of 2016 and finished our enrollment in April of 2017. So we've been operating now with our full load for over a year. We're running in about $250 million of revenue per year. We have about 300,000 accounts and we're doing that with 15 people right now, although we do have three job openings. So if any of you are people looking for a job, go to our website PeninsulaCleanEnergy.com. I think we have three positions we're hiring for right now. Our default product is called EcoPlus. It's 50% renewable energy and right now 85% greenhouse gas free and our opt-up product is Eco100 which is 100% renewable energy. We have about 5,000 customers who have opted up to Eco100 including 15 of our cities for their municipal accounts and actually the town of Portola Valley. All of their council voted to have all of their residents be on Eco100 from the get-go. We also have a couple of companies you may have heard of that have opted up to Eco100. One is Facebook which is in Menlo Park and Visa who has their headquarters in Foster City. So we're very excited about that. Only 2.4% of our customers have opted out so everyone is automatically enrolled in the program and if they don't want to be with us they can opt out to be with PG&E. We wonder why they want to do that when we provide a cleaner and greener product at 5% below PG&E's rates. Ms. Pepper, that's quite an introduction. I think you did just fine. Save some for later. That's all for now. Mr. White, go ahead. As Jeff said, thank you all for inviting me, including me. It's nice to be out of Sacramento given the kind of wicked that I've had. We have discussed everything from wildfire liability to regional grid expansion with a little bit of solar and like the transportation on the side. So I'm glad to come here and talk about one thing. I've been working in this field. Excuse me, John. Can everybody hear him okay? Will you pull a little closer, John? I've been working in this field, as Jeff said, for some time. I came to the issue of energy through the lens of air pollution. I grew up in Pasadena and went to university at Riverside, was involved with the atmospheric chemistry research that was done there. Even though I'm a political hack mostly, I have spent and have great regard for the scientific community and the partnership that we have made in California. One of the reasons we have been successful is because of the quality of the scientific work that has gone on and has informed us about our problems, particularly our air pollution problems. So I got to air pollution and then to energy and then back to air pollution, although this time it was called climate. And I think the thing that I want to talk about here and the reason I wanted to be part of this was a couple of things. My observation is that this is an experiment that has now turned into a hurricane. I think it directly results from the ineptitude and the arrogance of PG&E that we even have this law in the first place. This all came from a result of what they did in San Francisco to suppress public power and deny their constituents the voice that they wanted. I don't think anybody expected this to take off in this fashion. And so we now have, I think, the triumph of enthusiasm over experience that we are living with. So we have an enormous amount of energy and goodwill and talent that has been assembled. What I'm starting to think about though is what about the intersection of the laws of finance and the laws of physics? Because with electricity, as we discovered in the early 2000s, it is not so simple as simply turning on the switch or somebody sending their power to the grid. There needs to be a balance and it occurs. And one of the things that our organization has been working on and we are a coalition of renewable developer, technology, clean companies, and NGOs is how do we begin to turn the success of renewables not just into more renewables but into running the grid with less greenhouse gas. And that means choosing the renewables for more than their price and more than their location. And to me, this is the conversation as we go forward that we're going to have to rethink everything and have. Thank you very much, Mr. White. Now, could you all hear him? Do we need to pull closer? Okay, volume up, please. Pull those microphones in. John, I expect you to be louder the next time we go around. Ms. Vaughn, please introduce yourself. Put my Ralph Cabana voice on. All right. Can everyone hear me in the back? Yeah. Okay. As Jeff said, my name is Beth Vaughn. I'm the executive director of the California Community Choice Association. And I guess I'm here because you bought my former boss's wine from the sounds of things. I owe you. I would have brought you a bottle, but he's gone. So, and just a little background on that. I'm Canadian Kiwi. I spent second part of my life, I guess, and I'm on my third part here in New Zealand for 13 years and five years in the parliament there. So the minister he's referring to is a conservation minister, which I often reflect upon how I got involved in community choice is I recently had a trip back. I'm involved in the New Zealand conservation foundation and national parks foundation. And, and I went back and saw after 20 years, what was actually happening on the ground because of the policies we put in place 25 years ago. And it and the reason why it was impactful and making a difference was because of the communities. The communities were engaged. And so that's why I'm super excited to now be involved in California community choice because I think that's where the difference can be made. And picking up on John's point, I agree with you. It's it's beyond kind of a number counting game on renewables. It's how do we actually harness this innovation? And I think they're that people are more engaged now than they ever were. And it could be because of technology or ability to have information and data. Anyways, I'm very excited about it, as you can tell, but a little bit about the association. It was formed actually initially a couple of years ago, but it was housed without any staff at MCE, Marine Clean Energy. And a year ago I came on board to kind of have a look at what it would take to be a standalone association. Jan is one of my directors on the board here, one of my bosses. And the first thing I told her is it's going to take a lot more time, a lot more money, a lot more resources, and we have to get serious. Because the mission for the trade association is to advocate on behalf of the CCAs specifically in the regulatory and legislative forums. And as most of you know, and I'm sure we're going to get into it, there is a heavy lift when you decide to engage in those places, particularly at the Public Utilities Commission. So we have a lot of major cases that we're very involved in, and we have a lot of experts with experience that we've brought on board, John, to help us with that. At the moment, just to correct one of your figures, it's actually 17 CCAs serving load, but you are correct. By September, there will be 20. In September, the city of San Jose, which is the third largest city in California, 10th largest city in the nation, is going to be launching their program. And I understand that they are an affiliate partner with the governor's Global Climate Summit initiative that second week in September. So watch for excitement there. I think they're going to have a big event. So the association, just to say quickly, it contains the operational and affiliate members. So operational in terms of those that are serving load, but also those that have filed implementation plans and identified CEOs, and we're there to help them and help them on board. Affiliates are those that are exploring the local government agencies, looking at the feasibility and considering the CCAs as an option. And then we also have partners. And our partners will be focusing on that with a partners program coming up this next year because our partners come in different shapes and sizes. And again, because we're community-based, there's a lot of partners out there. So watch this space. All right. Thank you all very much for those brief introductions. So you have a sense. We have the CEO of a local, rather large community choice aggregation. We have a gentleman, an expert on policy from Sacramento who's got some concerns. And we've got the director of the trade organization for all of California's CCAs. And it's growing faster than she can keep up with at this point. I think we've got a good sense of the status of CCAs in California. We want to get into risk and benefits, roles and responsibilities. Are they living up to their expectations? But let's get right into it. I'm going to start with you, Ms. Pepper. The president of the PUC, President Picker, has, as I would put it, raised alarm bells recently when he said, quote, if California policymakers are not careful, we could drift slowly back into another predicament like the energy crisis of 2001. Now he's making the comparison that we may be facing an electric crisis because we, quote, we do not have a plan to deal with CCAs. So are you and your fellow CCAs underplaying the risks to your customers, the grid, and California's energy environmental policies? Pick any one. No, we're not underplaying the risks. And I think we, in fact, are very much aware of the risks and very much addressing those risks. So first of all, we are subject to all of the laws of the state of California. So as far as the renewable portfolio standard goes, we all follow that. In fact, we all exceed that. We are all responsible for procuring capacity, which the term of art we use is resource adequacy. We are all doing that. We're all obeying the law to do that. And so those are examples of two things that we follow. So we're subject to all those laws. And we're government agencies. You know, we're not private companies that are going to try to skirt the law. We're government agencies. We obey the law because, in fact, our member cities make laws for themselves. So we're very much engaged and feel that we're doing a great job. In fact, we're looking at working together to procure capacity. We're looking at, we work very closely at the public utilities commission, both with the staff and commissioners and within our trade association to try to come up with creative ways of solving some of California's problems in the energy industry. So we don't believe that we're going to be falling into a crisis again. The way that the electricity industry is structured now is completely different than the way it was back when we first restructured 20 years ago. So we feel that we're very positive, positively moving forward. Also, we're very transparent. As government agencies, as public agencies, we follow what's called the Brown Act. All of our meetings are public. Everyone is welcome to come to any CCA board meeting and speak up and listen to what we're doing. We look on our websites. Our procurement plans are all public. The board meetings, the minutes, everything is public. And having that kind of transparency and the closeness to our customers makes it clear that there's plenty of oversight and that we're going to do what the people want. So that's really what our plan is and that's what we're doing. Thank you. Everything's rosy. Everything's good. The CCAs have failed or are failing at this point? Mr. White, what's your primary concern or biggest concern? Well, I want to... First of all, I think President Picker's message about crisis should prompt a look in the mirror because I think the problem that we have at the moment has a lot to do with the agency he leads. Part of that is because of the lack of innovation and the degree to which the organization is structured along parochial lines without enough networking and internal dialogue, much less with the outside world. They have an attitude that has always been present that we're like the fifth branch of government because we are mentioned in the Constitution. May I suggest why don't you go ahead and turn the microphone off the stand and that way you'll keep it right in front of you no matter which way you face because I'm just concerned people aren't getting all of your arguments. Anyway, I'll leave the insult for the moment but there's a big meeting tomorrow in San Francisco to discuss this green book that they put out and it covers a lot of ground. And I think part of the concern that I have frankly isn't the willingness or desire of the CCAs to do the things that they're charted with doing. The level of enthusiasm, the level of competence so far that I've seen is excellent. These are good jobs for people to have. There's a lot of sense of mission. There's a lot of sense of teamwork. Marin and Sonoma are the two senior leaders and they are helping their fellows work together and I think that's all good. What I worry about is the depth of the financial ability to be a counterparty and to finance new projects as opposed to by existing. I think that's a concern. It's good that Marin got raided by Moody's but it didn't happen overnight. So I think the other problem isn't so much what's wrong with CCAs is that the phenomenon has caused everything to stop. So we have not had significant new renewable investment in this state in the last three years. We're building out the stuff we already have. CCAs are the only ones now even thinking about buying anything so on the one hand they are the market for the most part. The municipal utilities are a separate faction and they are more stable and slow than everybody else but they're steady. The munis and in case of Palo Alto and other places you've got really good municipal utility. That's good of you to say. So it's the effect that this is all having in terms of the near term investment. The second thing that I worry about and that's not something that I think the PUC can solve is that we've got to find a way to coordinate the planning of the CCAs, the IOUs, the PRUs if we're going to get to where we need to go in terms of greenhouse gas. Because we're at a level of renewable penetration where simply adding more kilowatt hours isn't necessarily the strategy. And the RPS is very restrictive. It's an instrument that we develop to mandate procurement by utilities of products that cost more money and they didn't want to buy. So the architecture of the RPS is a regulatory mandate with an emphasis on cost containment and an emphasis on compliance. Penalties and so on. And as a result the utilities in the last five years especially they just basically check the box and bought the cheapest stuff they could find and that has turned out to be all solar almost entirely solar and solar is now cheaper than anything else in the market. We also limit the ability to balance the market with resources from out of state because of our fondness for our labor unions. And so what I worry about is the system that we're developing is disaggregating at the bottom even as we need to think about how to lead it from the top. So the other thing is because the CCAs are municipally charted the fit with the PUC is awkward. There is a little bit of an attitude of you're not the boss of me I'm a locally charted official and I'm not going to let you micromanage me the way you think you need to micromanage the utilities. And I get that. But I also think that there's got to be some way for this all to be looked at as a whole and I think we may need a new institution but not at the PUC that has buy-in from the CCAs that they will live with and be part of and agree to work with and I don't think that's currently the case. Not that they're unfriendly to the PUC but the fact that the PUC is somebody described it as world federation wrestling and full opera dress. This is being broadcast Mr. White. That's enough then. So there's a few things in there Miss Vaughn. There's a lot there. I know you're ready but I'd like you to address first the notion that no new renewables are getting built. Well and John and I have had discussions about this. I'd like to jump in on that too after you're done. I was going to say Jan, there were so many things on John's list. Which ones do you want to take? Which ones should I take? You can take turns then. But I'll just really quickly on the I hear what he's saying and can I just back up in order to answer that question. I think John hit upon something here in terms of the role of the commission and we look at this concern. I'm in agreement. I don't think we're drifting towards an energy crisis. I think what it is is that this rapid evolution of this retail sector and what's going on now has shone a light on the fact that the way the regulatory framework doesn't work. And there were things wrong that a bunch of us saw quite a while ago. For instance and let's pick on these contracts as Jeff mentioned, I was the Executive Director of the California Code Generation Council. So natural gas is my background. And we saw 10 years ago where the utilities were no longer entering into long-term contracts. We did have a CHP settlement and Todd from PG&E is out there. We worked long and hard on that. But as what they do is a 10-year planning process through the long-term procurement planning process. LTPP it's called. And they stopped. You're exactly right. They stopped procuring news, stopped the all source and we moved into integrated resource planning. And it's taken a long time to get heads around what does that mean? How is it going to operate? How do we fit all the pieces together? And so there has been this cooling off period. I would say though that the CCAs that have come on board and remember that at the end of 2016, there were five CCAs serving load end of 2017, nine serving load at the end of 2017 over 1300 megawatts of new construction had been contracted for by the CCAs and since then in just the last one are we all six months five months of 2018 another 800 megawatts have been contracted for which include you'll be happy to know not just solar but also wind and battery storage. So as well as micro grids and I mean there's a lot going on when you start to break it down and we'll be able to make some of that information public shortly. But so the CCAs are doing it however I will point out that we have to be a little careful with our procurement strategy because we do have a big issue at the Regulatory at the commission to do with exit fees and in terms of the different proposals out there the proposal by the joint IOUs at the moment would mandatory require that the CCAs take certain products that could in some instances like for MCEs and NOMA for others double triple you know it put them way over the top in terms of procurement. It gets complicated gets deep but I am acknowledging that there is an issue now where the CCAs have to say do we go out and procure some of this new construction do we hold back when we wait for a final decision and determine you know are we going to be forced to take some contracts some existing energy or can we go out and build what our communities want and are asking us for so I'll stop there and I know Jan though can speak directly to some new contracts. Right ahead Miss Pepper. So John you mentioned that basically it caused everything to stop in the near term and I think part of that also is that the utilities the IOUs had contracted for sufficient amount of renewables to meet the RPS requirements so they're required to meet. If you count the bank contracts they get to count. And that's all that they're going to contract for because for them the RPS is the ceiling that they need to meet for us the RPS which is the renewable portfolio standard is the floor and that's the minimum we're going to do we're going to go beyond that. So I think that's part of what is happening. But we have been for Peninsula Clean Energy we've been operating for a year we've contracted for 300 megawatts of new solar projects we're having a groundbreaking for a new 200 megawatt solar project that's going to be built in Merced County in October and that'll be ready that'll start delivering to us at the end of 2019 and there's another 100 megawatts of new solar we've contracted for in Kings County that will be delivering to us shortly after that. But as Beth mentioned we do need to see how the result of this of this proceeding of the public utilities commission is going to end up because there may be the opportunity to purchase contracts from the IOUs that we like. Hopefully we have the option to do that or they may be forced on us and they may be contracts that don't fit our load so we have to kind of wait and see how that works. So and I also thank you for John for complimenting the CCAs for level of enthusiasm and competence because we do have excellent people and you know we're government agencies but the people that we have working for us are not the stereotypical government employee. We're all people who've worked in this industry for a long time and we have decades and decades of experience in our business and we're all mission driven. We want to make the world a better place and we're doing that. Excuse me. Mr. White, was there something that Ms. Pepper said there that concerned you? I thought I saw your... No, no, I'm thinking as I listen. So I wanted to respond to your comment about the financial ability of CCAs to contract. So before we even started we were able for the initial power deliveries to our customers and so we've come up with innovative ways of being able to do that and our suppliers we came up with a lock box structure in that as people paid their bills and you get billed through the IOU there's a line item there for each CCA and the everyday the IOU sends that money to us. Well we put that money aside and we pay our suppliers first before any of that money comes to us. So as long as people pay their bills most people do pay their bills if they don't their power gets shut off by the IOU then they're assured of getting paid. So these kind of innovative financing structures came up for initial for these initial contracts and now for our contracts for these new projects we're able to demonstrate that we have retained our customers there are provisions in the contracts that protect them if our customer base was to decrease there's also provisions in those contracts that protect us because we want to make sure that those projects are actually going to be built because we're relying on those so it goes both ways and so far we have been able to show that we're credit worthy and Marin has shown that we can get credit ratings and a number of us are also working on that and I think you'll see announcements in the next year or two of a number of other CCAs getting credit ratings from the Wall Street rating agencies. So if I may I'm going to direct a question to Mr. White we haven't talked for a long time and I know your work and as I've begun to learn about community choice aggregation and what we've just heard this afternoon here about these 50% 100% in the long run it was seen to me that stuff's going to get built is it a control issue I mean what's not to like about community choice aggregation, higher renewables lower GHG, lower cost so tell me what's the real issue? First of all one of the assumptions that has been made by almost everybody is that the act of producing a kilowatt hour of renewables automatically reduces greenhouse gas emissions and that has been the case I think in general except that when you now start to get to deeper penetrations of renewables the fit begins to matter a lot and so one of my concerns one of my concerns about everything being localized is that we're not going to make choices for the good of all but for the good and desires of the people in these communities now I don't think that's harmful inherently or wrong particularly given the motivation Northern California especially this is the bluest of the blue part of California and that people want these products to be the greenest cleanest there's also a very not so subtle anti-utility narrative that creeps into this and in case of PG&E it's richly deserved in some respects I'm not going to defend that but we have invested $50 billion approximately in California's renewable portfolio and that's why the costs have come down not only ours but that's a very significant thing it's a little bit like the feed in tariffs in Germany where they spent a fairly significant amount of money to force the costs down and now the incremental costs of new additions are low but there is this mortgage to pay of the money that you spent to build the portfolio that you have so to me this is where the exit feed discussion is going to be complicated and I'm not a party to it and have not taken a position on it other than to know that it's where the action is because it's going to determine what the marginal difference in prices between the CCAs and utilities so that's where that proceeding is important and that's where that proceeding and I want to make clear I'm not blaming the CCAs for there being no new investment what I'm saying is that the atmosphere that we're in has caused the PUC to back off doing any new procurements and letting utilities not do any new procurements and so it's not anybody's fault and the CCA will because they're out trying to put it together and buy stuff I do think that there is much that is being learned and this quality of this experience is going to grow and that we should be hopeful about this on the other hand I think that there is a lot of work that isn't being done and this isn't just a CCA issue about how these pieces all fit together and how we're actually because right now if you look into that integrated resource plan document there's one fact that struck me the other day because I'm working on another bill that even if we meet the greenhouse gas targets and the RPS targets in 2030 air pollution emissions are still going to be higher and so one of the things I think the CCAs can play a role and this is already being done I think in Alameda we've got an old jet engine peaker sitting right at Jacqueline and Square and it's a NOx generator extraordinary and it's only there for certain conditions and the trick is can we meet that local capacity requirement with a combination of these resources that everybody loves which includes local solar battery storage, demand response maybe some creative other kinds of generation and because a lot of what we're going to end up needing to do in the system is to move the load closer to where the generation is because solar and wind are cheap but they're not always available and what we're going to need to try to do if we're going to minimize what we have to turn on at night then we're going to have to as was said earlier about the electric vehicle charging we're going to need to use power in the middle of the day and shut stuff down at the end if we can and the CCA is because you're talking to your customers not just selling on power but you theoretically involving them I think could be a really important influence in terms of that behavioral conversation partly because they're trusted and liked better than their counterparts that trust is going to have to be earned and sustained it's not automatic but you start with a good reputation and the fact that you have this innovation ethic that is present I think there is much to be gained and learned but I also think this is where the energy crisis stuff is not impossible I just don't think that CCAs are necessarily causing an energy crisis I think our lack of planning and foresight is contributing to the fact what happened in the last energy crisis as we imagined deregulation we stopped investing in new things and we also misjudged the locational value of generation because it's not just a matter of buying kilowatt hours that you get off the grid you have to have local capacity that matches what the physics are and that's something where the ISO is the menu but all the things we're talking about whether it's disaggregated storage or demand response getting these things to contribute to reliability isn't automatic it's not like you just plug stuff in and everything is good there has to be some ability to fit this stuff together and that's why I think we're all going to have to get smarter and think about how to work together I'm going to go to you next but I just wanted to add thank you John you reminded me that ten years ago when I joined the California Energy Commission we did not foresee the renewable energy projects that came in the multi-hundred megawatt projects these were just unfathomable only a few years earlier and we weren't ready for that the government really didn't anticipate and have a process ready for that so much as we enjoyed seeing it happen we really had to scramble and I think there's an analogous issue going on here right now with community choice aggregation Miss Vaughn I think you'd like to respond to some of that and let me just tell you before you speak I'm going to open up to questions here momentarily I think I'd like to pull you all a little bit get a sense of what you want if there's anything else you want to talk about but we may need to just do that based upon questions from others and I'm looking back there at Garish I'd like a CEO from another CCA is here and I'd like to invite him to ask a question as well so please Miss Vaughn go ahead just again Don great comments and you traversed a lot of different topics there and just one thing I want to come back to that you spoke of and also Jeff in some of your introductory or your introductory question to us and that was this issue around planning and coordination that is I think an important point and one thing that I don't know if everyone knows in the room but I mentioned the integrated resource planning that was SB 350 that required that and it's taken some time to get organized and figure out how to do that all of the load serving entities must submit their IRPs their integrated resource plans by August 1st and I think that's when we're going to have some insight into procurement strategies where and I think it's a really good exercise to sit down and again think of a CCA you've got to sit down with your community with your board talk about some of those issues of is it local does that make the most sense does it not, what are the combinations what are the goals that we're trying to achieve so there's that and then also just on this green book I also think of that because they've highlighted planning as being an issue and it takes me back to after the energy crisis when the energy action plan was pulled together and one thing I remember working in the energy sector for so long is that that was actually a really helpful document it created a loading order it was a touch point it was something in the integrated energy report that the the IPER we called it that the Energy Commission still does it was again something that you went back to and said okay are we achieving the goals do we need to modify this how do we implement it and I in our comments on the green book Cal CCA talked about next steps and suggested that that's something we should look at distributed energy resource action plan I know the commissioner in his comments last week to the power association in California talked about an environmental justice action plan so the idea where you have this overview this umbrella document creates a roadmap and it can then point to all of these other venues where the different issues are being debated so for instance we've talked a little bit about reliability which to me when I read the green book and I you know there are the themes and the objectives for affordability and reliability but reliability seems to be the one that is of most concern it's kind of you know and again I would say we're almost victims of our own success in terms of driving towards those renewable targets and as you say unanticipated that it would be embraced and that's fabulous it's just to your point how do we we have to then also think about how do we keep the grid going at 3 a.m. in the morning if we don't have the solar and we don't have the wind and what have you and I think that's where folks down here and the innovators are looking at what are those options how do we replace our natural gas or fossil fuel so a number of different issues there but I like this idea of an umbrella document and we go back and we kind of revise our interjection plan and the interjection plan agency was more transparent and accessible than the PC in terms they had an interagency focus and but this was this was what happened in the aftermath of the collapse of the first experiment okay and so we don't want to have to necessarily have a crisis again to get us back to thinking about how these pieces fit together the one thing about natural gas I'd also point out is that the influx of renewables has had a huge effect on the wholesale natural gas market and caused prices to fall to the point that we're losing gas plants faster than we thought we were which is and we've also got the baked in costs of San Bruno and Lisa Canyon still to come and that's going to cause more costs on the gas sector with less generators to pay for it and likely to affect residential customers on the gas side so that's the other issue to think about here that's not really RPS or climate driven is what's happening in the wholesale market and what effects might that have on reliability or other things so we've got 20 minutes to go and I want to make sure we turn over to the audience but I'm going to ask one more question Miss Pepper if I may the green books come up a couple of times what's your take on this can you briefly describe to our audience what the green book is and and and my question really ultimately is the PUC getting out of its lane here are they trying to take responsibility that's not theirs with the with this this plan on how to address community choice aggregation and energy procurement planning would you talk to the green book a little bit please yeah I don't have a copy of it with me it's in my car it's green it has a green cover actually we call it a draft white paper but it's been called the green book because the PUC put out a yellow book and a blue book in the 90s and so this year they put out a green book which they haven't found and put up on the website yeah because when you when you mix yellow and when you mix yellow and blue you get green yeah so that's what the green book is but basically the green book it gives an overview of the energy landscape in California over the last 20 30 40 years it provides some examples of what other states are doing I'd say there's about five pages in there that are the meat of the of the discussion where they raise some questions and it's just it's a document that I think just raises questions about where are we going there may be a little bit of hyperbole at the beginning saying oh there was a crisis are we going into another crisis and I think hopefully all of you after hearing our comments today feel like there is no crisis coming and are they getting out of out of their line I mean I think some of the issues the main issues they're bringing up are decarbonization reliability and affordability and as Beth mentioned reliability being the key concern and I actually think that reliability is the responsibility of the California independent system operator they're charged with the operation of the grid and they're the ones who will decide if a plant needs to operate they will give them a contract to make sure that they continue to be available on the grid so as John mentioned there's probably some changes that need to be made in the regulatory landscape as to who has responsibility for what and determining you know what the PUC's future is so I really think that's what the green book is about it's really what's the role of the PUC in the future let's do this let's open it up to the audience because we want to make sure we cover their topics and I'm just going to take prerogative and see if Grish yes please so if you don't mind I will go right to you next I just thought this gentleman is a relatively new CEO of another CCA please introduce yourself yeah hi I'm Grish Balachandran new CEO of Silicon Valley Clean Energy spent my entire career in municipal utility so that kind of brings I want to make a couple of points and then a question for you John and the panel as a whole but you know we know in California that our future is about decarbonization and our future is going to be about electrification of the entire economy and I think the role of CCAs is one of accelerating that change and tailoring solutions that reflect our local communities values so you mentioned during one of your statements there are all these entities and we need more coordination and that's going to be a that's potentially a problem when it comes to reliability I'm going to say we had a hundred year old experiment in California on disaggregation which has worked out wonderfully and that's public power we have 40 electric municipal utilities whose rates are lower than the private utilities and their reliability is twice as better so we have an experiment that's worked so CCAs actually have the right structure that we can have tailored solutions I think the problem that gets to Jan's last statement is the PUC doesn't seem ready to adapt to the change of how we can harness all these new entities and we're just talking about 20 entities coming in to basically get this decarbonization future successful so what should the CPUC change to achieve that well thank you first of all I don't think I said that this was a threat to reliability the threat that I worry more about on coordination is achieving the greenhouse gas targets okay I think reliability is in fact being done I think there's some issues with the way it's being done and with what gets to count and how clean that is but I think the issue in terms of procurement planning is how do we be sure that the things that everybody's doing collectively gets us to the goal and I don't think that the CCAs are a threat to that necessarily I just think there's an absence of that kind of coordinated planning I think in terms of the PUC's role I think they have too much on their plate and that we ought to rethink their role in procurement and planning and think about a body that can be a single place to do planning procurement oversight coordination with the buy-in of its constituents which means not the PUC for either the publicly owned utilities or the CCAs but something else something where they feel that there will be more involvement and more engagement I just don't see the PUC's institution able to do that successfully given their history and given some of their tenancies but I also think there's a big difference between the CCAs role as basically a power buying middleman and a publicly owned municipal utility and I do think that the municipal utilities I live in the smud territory I've done a lot of work at LADDP over the years and they are long what's valuable about those guys is that they think long term and they think about what their system needs are but they were slow on the RPS and played some games in terms of what they counted and stuff and they still have 40% coal in LA because of the deal that they did in Utah so we are done making improvements in that sector but I also think that you're correct that the publicly owned utilities have been a successful resolution to the problem so I'm not without hope I just think there's some things we got to talk about and that's what we're doing today okay let's take another question thank you sir please identify yourself where do I have any more questions okay so we'll take John next go right ahead identify yourself please hi my name is Andy Robin I'm just a Palo Alto resident my question is regarding Cal ISO so I know that when I was out there last year those guys are pulling their hair out with all the renewable power and the fluctuations of it at different times a day and now here are a bunch of new CCAs who are all really focused on getting to more of that renewable power sooner and I'm wondering how Cal ISO sees the CCAs please thank you who can speak for the Cal ISO I don't think we can you must interact with them yes and I'll just say that we had a great gathering with them I think was it March Jan where quite a number of the CCAs some of the board members came up to Cal ISO where we spent a day together where we presented to them they presented to us got some tours of the control room or the oversight of the control room but and some of us have dealt with them and their stakeholder processes over the years kind of to John's point I do want to make the point that CCAs it's yes we have some young innovative folks we also have a lot of experienced people coming over from the IOUs from generators who were the counterparties to the IOUs we do have some physicists we do have investment bankers we do have some economists I've been actually some of the folks in the backgrounds but we do have some that have experience at the ISO and when I talked about the PCIA case we're also very involved in track 2 of the resource adequacy proceeding and we have a former Cal ISO employee as one of our consultants helping advise us in that proceeding so I think that there is integration and there's an onboarding process that Cal ISO has for new CCAs as they become expertise and engage and I don't want to point out one thing as all the CCAs form there's not like an additional load that's coming on in California it's just shifting it's shifting from the IOUs to the CCAs so the overall electrical load in the state is saying staying the same it's just who's sourcing the power for those customers so from the ISO's perspective I don't think they're really seeing anything different other than the fact that we may be eventually accelerating the addition of renewables into the grid and you know we're working on that together we're trying to figure out how to solve that so California does have some goals it's just that with the CCAs some of us are accelerating those goals faster so let's go ahead and take a couple more questions you'll be my next question please with CalSTART our organization works to promote clean transportation and grow the industry relative to electric transportation can you tell me about the role of the CCAs and just two anecdotal pieces of information I live in Marin County and I don't see MC coming forward with any kind of incentive for me for owning an electric vehicle and then secondly I'm very surprised by the IOU's and their applications to get a lot of new funding to support the growth of electric transportation so I'm not saying pro or con but I just want to learn more about this role of CCAs and promoting electric transportation okay any quick answers please so I can get one more question in I can't speak to what MCE is doing at Peninsula Clean Energy we're just rolling out our programs and we are actually rolling out an electric transportation program we're being very aggressive about that we're going to be having six ride and drive events this summer we're working with our with the dealers in San Mateo County to offer incentives to get people into electric vehicles both into new vehicles and a program to get people into used vehicles and a particular emphasis on low income and disadvantaged communities we're also looking at multi-unit dwellings and how do you get I mean you have to get the infrastructure out there so we're looking closely at apartments because 50% of people actually live in multi-unit dwellings so you need to be able to charge it in those homes so we're moving that quickly I'll just add very quickly that this is an area of focus for a lot of the CCAs in terms of their customer programs that they're developing and we at Cal CCAs are tracking these so it's great to write down everything Jan just said but a lot of that is leveraging off of other programs right so you learn from someone like Sonoma Clean Power that's done in their Evergreen, Drive Evergreen program and then someone else takes it, customizes it for their area because they do share and the one I will just touch on is electric vehicle bus program that Lancaster Choice Energy has and that they have the largest manufacturing of EV buses in the state as down in Lancaster City. So I apologize but I just I feel very responsible to the entire audience to make sure we end on time because the next panel will begin in about 12 minutes and I also promised my panelists for an opportunity for their final remarks so if you would just please take a minute or so Jan and John and Beth and and we'll finish this off. You want me to go first? Okay I'll finish. So I think for us as a CCA and kind of my philosophy is to think globally and act locally. I'm sure you've all heard of that before and so if we can demonstrate in our communities here that we can move the needle with innovation and one of our goals is by 2025 to be 100% renewable and to me matching that on an hourly basis that our supply and our load will be matching on an hourly basis with 100% renewables so we will be getting rid of natural gas in that stream that we can that we can change the world and we can if we can demonstrate that we're doing this here that will provide an example for other communities to do the same and we'll do that with local generation, we'll do it with micro grids, we'll do it with EVs, we'll do it with vehicle to grid programs, storage doing lots of pilot programs that we can quickly get going to test out how we can make that happen so that's one of the things we're very excited about is the ability to really innovate and move the needle in the energy field. Thank you Ms. Pepper and Mr. White. Thank you and thanks everyone for your attention and I'm sorry we ran out of time for questions I'm happy if somebody wants to harass me further and give me some ideas. Actually if I may interrupt you for just a moment there will be another panel following this called Conversation for Action will be in the main conference room and many of the panels that took place today will have an opportunity for additional discussion. Jan's going to be moderating that panel I believe, it's not really a panel it's just a round table discussion and I hope if you're able that you'll stay. Okay so go right ahead. Just a couple things, I think we all have to do our best to innovate and be creative and learn as we go and we're now dealing with the consequences of our success in California and we have to I think adapt and innovate in our institutions and I think the PUC is a good place to start and it's not got a history of innovation but we can always hope. The other thing I would just say is that we have to keep our eye on the fairness and the equity issues it is in fact the case that there are parts of the state that are left behind and in Central Valley is part of PG&E service territory and so we have to be mindful that the cost shifts that could occur are going to affect people in those communities and we need to have that in our minds. Also I think there's opportunities maybe to share and show some of the innovative things that are being done on the ground with communities in Central Valley. Friend of mine is the mayor of Huron and he's trying to be as green as y'all are and so I hope that we can be sure that we can extend some of this vision into the places that need it the most. Lastly I would just say that in addition to the local accountability and local responsibility that the CCAs have to think of themselves as stewards of the grit as good citizens of the grit and this is true for all of the vendors and all the technologies and increasingly I think the challenge is just adding more renewables because we won that argument they're now cheaper than new gas but we have to be sure that everybody is doing what they need to do to make it all work and that doesn't mean just more for me whether I'm a solar developer or wind developer it's like we all need to collectively be doing and I think community choice aggregation can be a very significant source of innovation. It can also be a source of distraction so I'm looking to sort of figure out how we can make it be more of the former. Thank you Mr. White. Thank you for coming all the way here from Sacramento. Ms. Vaughn the last word. I'll be brief. I think back to last week I was at a symposium where commissioner Martha Guzman Esseves said at the end of the day at some point we're going to be green we're all going to be green but what the CCAs have to offer and the strength of the CCAs is their ability to innovate to be agile with their enthusiasm and their programs in the communities and we didn't get a lot of opportunity here to talk about those and I'm happy to chat further just as John afterwards but I think that that is part that excites me the most and these best practices and the sharing of these ideas and this innovation I'll just say that I see my role and I see the role of Cal CCA is to assist in the orderly transition to this new world I think it's a great vision but I do agree with John and Jan that we do need to be coordinated we do need to make this smooth as smooth as possible just like how CCA is here and I welcome the partnerships working with people like John thank you very much to my audience thank you for your attendance just a couple of closing remarks I'm sorry that we couldn't get the more questions but like I said I really want to make sure you all get to the next session on time there is going to be a session called conversation for action and there will be a round table discussion hopefully all three of these panel members will be there so you've got to let them make their way that direction and I hope you will join in if you can there and I think that's it except to extend my thanks I hope you'll join me and our panelists for being here today