 Good morning and welcome to the 2020 Congressional Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Expo. I'm Dan Bersett, the Executive Director of the Environmental and Energy Study Institute. We will soon begin our second panel of the day, Macro Benefits of Microgrids in just one moment. Over the course of the rest of the day, we will feature welcome messages from the members of Congress who lead the House and Senate Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Caucuses. We would not be here today without their support and without the support of their excellent staff. And to help introduce this panel is my privilege to introduce United States Senator Susan Collins from the great state of Maine. Hello, I'm Senator Susan Collins. I'm pleased to welcome you to EESI's 7th Annual Congressional Expo and the first ever virtual expo. As a co-chair of the Senate's Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Caucus, it is my pleasure to introduce the next panel, the Macro Benefits of Microgrids. This distinguished panel, which includes experts from the National Association of Energy Service Companies, New Jersey's Clean Energy Program, and the Electric Power Research Institute, will explore the benefits of this exciting technology. Microgrids are relevant to the many islands located along the more than 3,000 miles of Maine coastlines. Maine's island communities have long had to be creative to obtain electricity, but the power is often costly. Several islands, including Isla Ho, are now looking to microgrids as a way to cut costs and rely less on outside sources for power. Thank you again for joining this expo, and please help me give a warm welcome to the next panel, the Macro Benefits of Microgrids. Great, thank you so much, Senator Collins, for joining us, and thanks to your wonderful staff for everything they have done to make today possible. They really couldn't be a nicer group of people to work with. EESI was founded in 1984 to provide nonpartisan information on environmental energy and climate issues to policy makers on Capitol Hill and to the public. We do this in different ways, including by holding briefings, which are all archived online, and writing fact sheets and articles. I encourage everyone to visit us online at www.esi.org and sign up for our bi-weekly newsletter, Climate Change Solutions. That is really the best way to keep up with all of our work. This next panel is Macro Benefits of Microgrids. These facilities deliver considerable reliability and resilience benefits, not just for the off-takers of their energy output, but also the rest of the grid. Resilience in particular is a top priority of EESIs, and has implications for everything from national security to the ability to recover from severe weather events. You will hear about the value proposition of microgrids, which is a lot more complicated than you might guess, as well as how new technologies are making these applications better than ever. Even though we're online, we will still take your questions. Please follow EESI on Twitter at EESI online and send in your questions that way. You can also send an email to EESI at EESI.org. We will draw from your questions submissions after we hear from our panelists. Our four panelists today are Joy Ditto of the American Public Power Association, Timothy Unruh of the National Association of Energy Service Companies, Harash Kamath with the Electric Power Research Institute, and Doug Vine of the Center for Climate and Clean Energy Solutions. For full biographies of our panels, visit www.esi.org. Joy, we're going to kick it off with you. Welcome to the Expo, and I'm really looking forward to your presentation. Thank you so much, Dan. Thank you to you and EESI and also to Becky Blood, a longtime friend of mine who works with you on putting this Expo on for helping to include me in this panel. It's an esteemed panel, and I appreciate being included. So before I get started, I know we have a few minutes for remarks about kind of level setting who we are. I am the president and CEO of APPA. I came back in January after having been president and CEO of a related organization, the Utilities Technology Council, and I'll bring some of that experience to bear here today from the technology side. Prior to that, I was at APPA for 15 years and then prior to that on Capitol Hill. So I've been working on energy and electricity related matters for about 20 years now, but I am not an engineer. We are joined on this esteemed panel by many engineers who can give you some of the details on really the nitty-gritty of how this operates. But I see things through sort of a different lens, and we'll also bring the perspective of smaller electric utilities and how we manage microgrids and how we've managed them for many years and will into the future. So what is APPA? What's public power? APPA is the national organization representing the interests of the approximately 2,000 public power utilities that operate across our nation and in a few territories. We're in 49 states, all but Hawaii. And the vast majority of our members are in communities of 10,000 people or less. We do have some larger cities that you'll hear about, but for the most part, we're very small utilities. So in some ways, our members were kind of the original microgrids, meaning back 100 years ago and even more recently than that, before the bulk power system really became the most economic way of generating and producing and distributing power. We were really on our own in many cases and providing power to our small community on our own and kind of as a microgrid is envisioned. So that's who we are. We also are just to be clear. We're not for profit electric utilities. We provide our electricity at cost. We're typically affiliated with municipal governments. We employ about 93,000 people across the country and provide electricity to about 2.6 million businesses. So I am a big fan of definitions. And so I'm going to start off and you may have heard this already if you were participating in the previous panel, but what is a microgrid? How is it defined? And the Department of Energy defines a microgrid as a group of interconnected loads, so demand, and distributed energy resources within clearly defined electrical boundaries that acts as a single controllable entity with respect to the grid. A microgrid can connect and disconnect from the grid to enable it to operate in both grid connected and island mode. So this also, even though this seems like a simple definition, I think there needs to also be a brief understanding of how electricity works. Electricity is produced and consumed instantaneously. While we've made strides in energy storage and especially in recent years, it's still not ubiquitous. It's still expensive. And it's still maybe not quite as reliable as we'd like it to be for 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365. So we need to keep the lights on continuously at every second of every day. So I just want to be clear that that's the case in a microgrid situation or outside of a microgrid situation. So on those main islands that Senator Collins was talking about, they're challenged with keeping the lights on in their communities all the time, no matter what they're doing with their generation portfolios. So I just will say that the ability to sort of island and use microgrids is typically the defining feature of such a grid. You want it to operate on its own and it's also a system that can manage load or demand and distributed energy resources such as wind, small wind, solar and other types of combined heat and power resources. And it may be able to optimize energy efficiency and operations, reliability and grid services. Looking ahead, I think these systems will likely become more complex. Because we're increasing the usage of sources that are intermittent, like wind and solar, again, electricity needs to be produced and consumed instantaneously. So if the wind isn't blowing or the sun isn't shining, you have to do something else. So if we can integrate those dynamics in a microgrid, that will be really interesting and I think will be very helpful. But it requires frankly a lot of technology to do that integration. So there's a lot of promise with those types of technologies as we move forward, especially in microgrids. But you still need to balance and manage those intermittencies and also adding storage and perhaps adding electric vehicles, other technologies. There's a lot of balancing that needs to occur. And how you balance that is related to frankly telecommunications technology. You have to have a network that you're able to see those grids and turn things off and on instantaneously. And that is enabled by telecommunications technology, which allows sensors to go on certain generation sources so that you can know quickly what's going on and bring on other generation sources so that you don't get a blip in your system. So the technology piece is really important in the telecommunications piece that underpins it. So when we're talking about being able to island, you also have to contemplate that there's a communications component that needs to be also be reliable. And so whoever's operating that communications component is important. Is it the utility? Is it a third party provider like a telecommunications carrier? Also, telecommunications technology has to be energized with electricity. So if the electricity is down, the telecommunications doesn't work. So it's this kind of integrated system. So you have to have backup power for the telecommunication system. So there are some complexities here. I think we're up to the challenge of meeting those complexities. And in public power, in addition to kind of being the original micro grids, as we have moved forward, where we see the need is really related to resiliency, which is something Dan mentioned already. So particularly when we serve military facilities, we've long worked with them to make sure that they can continue to function if our grid is down from a storm or some other reason. So we work with them. That's kind of a resilience piece. And there are other of our customers who really care tremendously about that resilience piece, not just the military but others. So we've long worked with them on micro gritting their systems. We also are again looking forward and really kind of testing some of these other newer technologies and renewable technologies to see if those can work as an integrated system. And much of that that we're doing is almost a research and development and demonstration, kind of that practical application of this technology. And we're often doing that in conjunction with universities, with our research arm, which is the demonstration of energy and efficiency development or DEED. We also work with EPRI who you'll hear from. So there's a research and development kind of component to this, a testing, a test bed component, especially with some of these new technologies. And many of our members are again partnering from a funding standpoint with other groups and also with research and development grant entities like DEED and EPRI to deploy these newer technologies in a microgrit setting. So with that, I will give some examples later during the Q&A of some specific places where we are seeing some of these interesting and exciting microgrid research and development and sort of testing occurring. But with that, I will end and turn it back to you, Dan, and hopefully looking forward to the Q&A. Thanks. Great. Thank you so much. Tim, we're over to you. Thanks, Dan. And Joy, I know that you said you weren't an engineer, but I think that I've got an extra, I'm an engineer, pin somewhere. I'm going to send to you because that was a great set of definitions for an engineer. I'm Timothy Unruh, the executive director of the National Association of Energy Service Companies. I am an electrical engineer and I've worked in the efficiency installation business for about 20 years and also served at the US Department of Energy for eight years serving as the director of the Federal Energy Management Program, also known as FEMP, and as the deputy assistant secretary of renewable power. I'm also involved in the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers in various standards-making processes. So today, we're here to talk about microgrids. And I think it's wise to state my definition for microgrid before going too far. It will not be as good as Joy's definition. She obviously did her homework better than I did. It wasn't even until recently that my spell checking program even recognized the word microgrid. I always had to put a hyphen in it or override the spell checker to let it have the word microgrid. But to me, a microgrid, like Joy said, is nothing new. I love the phrase about the original microgrid from American Public Power Association. As an electrical engineer, I know that small independent grids have been around since the beginning of electrical power. Even before we had integrated utilities, basically, all the power was delivered through what you might call a microgrid. So today, when we talk about microgrids, I think of a grid or a subset of a grid that has implemented controls that allow the grid to function or perform some additional functionality related to resiliency or efficiency. Note that I didn't say reliability, as I think probably all grids are always built for a reliability component. They probably have some resiliency components as well, but I think we're trying to enhance resiliency in a lot of times when we're thinking about microgrids. Again, reliability is the ability to keep power flowing. Efficiency is the ability to use the power more effectively, and resiliency is the ability to restore power upon its loss. My organization is called the National Association of Energy Service Companies, or simply NASCO. My member companies install energy efficiency retrofits in buildings. And these installations cause substantial savings to occur in what otherwise would have been wasted energy. The monetary amount of those savings, along with operational savings, provide the cash flow stream that can fund the repayment of the investment into energy efficiency in those buildings. Advanced controls on the electrical power system have always been a part of these projects, but there's been a change over the last few years to increase size and sophistication of these microgrids. While early on, controls might have implemented such simple things as demand reduction, today the implementation is often coupled with renewable energy and storage to accomplish a resiliency measure. Most of our projects are done with public sector buildings, federal buildings, state, city, county, K-12 schools, universities, and hospitals. These buildings, especially today, are being asked to do functions beyond their original intent, from shelters to public meeting spaces, even today, hospital facilities. Our public buildings are being stretched beyond their original intent. And we have begun calling them mission critical facilities as their use has become critical components of fulfilling the mission of our government. A challenge we face with the need for resiliency is funding, where we can implement most efficiency measures to paid for by savings efforts resiliency, which is closely tied to efficiency, often lacks the expense history to justify a future saving stream. In other words, the changing paradigm of today means we are asking more from our public buildings than we've ever asked in the past. Our buildings are focused on keeping the lights on and keeping the occupants safe. Electrical power is critical for both and microgrids offer the functionality to enhance the systems supplied by the utility. As an example, let's consider the microgrid installed at a Marine Corp site in South Carolina. That system has a natural gas fuel combined heat and power plant of about three and a half megawatts, solar foldable take of one and a half megawatts that's distributed in four megawatts at a single location. The system also has substantial battery energy storage system. The microgrid in this case allows for high speed controls that can load shed, dispatch generation, batteries, and solar to optimize operation, both quick and connected to the grid and when isolated. This type of system highlights the integration of the efficiency and resiliency needs of the site. Efficiency is supplied by the combined heat and power plant coupled with solar foldable take to provide low cost electricity, as well as the source of heat for the site. However, resiliency is supplied by having independent generation and the control of that generation. Coupled with the battery storage, the microgrid allows the site to reduce its operating costs at the same time, improve resiliency. As we look at most projects, we learn that efficiency and resiliency are tied in their implementation. From the simplest look at window replacements to save energy, but then upgrading those same windows to be storm resistant, making the building efficient and resilient at the same time. Microgrids are uniquely positioned to provide the same coupling between efficiency and resiliency. Advanced controls at the microgrid and in the building can coordinate internal loads, onsite supply, and your external utility availability to result in a location that can withstand power loss and operate efficiently. The future operation of our grid with the inclusion of renewable energy, a variable type of power source will inevitably lead to the need for additional load control and onsite generation control to allow our use of the electrical power to match its availability. Thanks, Tim. Harash, welcome to our panel today, really looking forward. Your organization's name has already been taken in vain. Looking forward to what you have to add to our conversation today. Great, thanks, Dan. We really appreciate having an opportunity to be on this panel along with these very distinguished speakers. I'm Harash Kamath as Dan said earlier. I lead the research area for DER integration and energy storage at EPRI. EPRI, if you're familiar with us, we're the Electric Power Research Institute. We do public interest research in energy and the environment. We are primarily a technical organization. However, today I'm not going to go deep into the technology. In fact, I think that Joy and Tim have defined the microgrid very well. So I'm going to focus my discussion here a little bit on why microgrids make sense right now and why things are changing. Microgrids are not new. They've been around for quite some time, actually. But most of the microgrids that we've seen in the past have been based on distributed generation that's based on, for example, natural gas or gasoline or other types of liquid fuels or gas fields. Now what we're seeing is the possibility of creating microgrids from solar and storage and other new technologies that are much cleaner than what we've seen in the past, and which make much more sense from a economic perspective. So to start out, we have to say, why are we seeing so much deployment of distributed solar and storage? Most of it is driven by a number of different drivers, bill reduction, of course. There's tremendous interest in lowering bills from the customer side. Response to, and a lot of that is response to renewable incentives as well as a commitment to renewable generation. We have people who are very interested these days in controlling their own generation primarily because of their commitment. And that's not just on the personal side. That's also on the corporate side. Many companies are seeking to reduce their carbon footprint or become net zero carbon in a way that they see of doing that is install their own solar resources and even using storage on site to increase the amount of energy that they get from their solar that they can use locally. All of this has been made possible through Better Technology, which has lowered costs substantially over the last decade. And as you know, it's been a lot about solar, but more recently, it's been a lot about storage. And that raises some very interesting possibilities for micro grids. So a lot of people don't know that just because you have solar doesn't mean that you can maintain your power in an outage. A lot of solar systems are designed to operate only when the grid is online. And so if you don't have a grid, then your solar system may not be able to give you your power during an outage. You can fix by having storage on site. And so the solar plus the storage system can create something that gives you a local power. And that's what many people call a micro grid. If we have some capabilities to link up neighboring buildings and installations, then you can expand the boundaries of that micro grid to incorporate more than one customer, a number of customers. So what we're really seeing is the capability of maintaining resiliency, being able to get back on the grid, get back on power a lot sooner than you would normally be able to do because of the existence of solar plus storage. In addition to that, having micro grids and actually creating, having systems to control these micro grids can actually improve the integration of these renewable resources by allowing us to control them better and orchestrate the way they deliver energy and ultimately help us make better use of the energy that is being delivered from a distributed solar. And finally, we can even think of using these solar and storage systems to operate even during those times when the grid is not, is still up 99.999% of the times that the grid is still out there delivering power. These systems can actually deliver services back to the grid. And that's a very powerful potential for the future. That said, we have to remember that adopting micro grids, there are some technical challenges to it. It is more than just simply installing solar plus storage. It involves installing controllers that let us orchestrate all of this equipment out there and be able to control it in a way that maintains the level of reliability that we've come to expect from the grid. We've done a lot of feasibility studies to look at this, to see what's required out there and to see if it makes economic sense. And I'll point out that even today, even with all the cost reduction that we've seen, a lot of these micro grids are not immediately evident as a economic option. They don't necessarily make sense when you look at the numbers. That's today, the cost continues to fall. And as the cost falls, we will see increased adoption of micro grids for resiliency purposes. And I wanna point out that resilience is a very hard number, it's very hard thing to put a value on. There are many people out there who value resilience very, very greatly. So it doesn't have to make economic sense on the basis of energy. A lot of people are gonna install micro grids anyway. And as we see those, that installation, just as we saw a lot of installation of solar, long before it made sense to put solar on just from a purely economic perspective. So don't be fooled by a lot of the folks out there will say, well, this stuff doesn't really make sense. The grid's out there and it's very reliable. All of that is true. But the fact of the matter is that there are many customers who are willing to pay substantially more than the price of energy that they've got right now to make these micro grids possible. And these micro grids are not always going to be more expensive than our conventional energy choices. This is a really important thing to consider when we're looking at adoption. This is especially true in a world where we have an increased incidence of natural disasters that can take out the grid and an increased reliance simultaneously on electricity. So there's incredible interest in actually deploying micro grids for these purposes and we will have to work to accommodate these micro grids into the existing planning and operation pathways of the grid. There's still a lot of work to make this happen. There are still a lot of technical challenges that are out there that we have to try to address. There's a substantial amount of work that we're doing at equity and in collaboration with our partners of the APPA, as Joyce said earlier, with organizations like DOE, which is funding a great deal of research in micro grids and in micro grid related technologies through the national labs. There's also a lot of work happening at the utilities in America who are always trying to maintain a high level of reliability for their repairs and for the customers of electricity here in the US. In short, it's a very exciting time for micro grids and for resilience. This is a technology with a lot of potential for the future, something that we're going to see increased adoption of as time goes by and we're very excited to be a part of this mission. That's great. Thanks so much. And Doug, really looking forward to your presentation. Thanks for joining us this morning. Thanks Dan and thanks to ESI for hosting this event and for the opportunity to speak here. Quickly for those of you that are not familiar with the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions or just C2ES, we are an independent, non-partisan, non-profit organization that's been around for about 22 years now. So our mission is to forge practical solutions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, expand clean energy, and strengthen resilience to climate impacts. And I think that's a pretty good segue into this topic of micro grids because just as C2ES is looking to mitigate carbon emissions and strengthen resilience, as the other panelists have noted, micro grids can do both. So we've been seeing power sector emissions in the US, they've been falling over the past 10 or 15 years, generally, as the trend, we're on a downward trend and we continue to look for strategies to build on that momentum. Scientists tell us that we're going to need to make even deeper reductions in emissions in the coming decades in order to avoid the worst impacts of climate change. And at the same time, we also know that climate change is here and now. We're already seeing the effects of a changing climate in terms of things like sea level rise, more frequent downpour events and intense storms. So C2ES is interested in both the mitigation and the adaptation attributes of micro grids and other forms of distributed generation. So as several of the panelists, I believe all of the panelists have already mentioned, micro grids have been around for a long time. But I think in presently, or micro grids sort of, they had their aha moment about eight years ago in October, 2012, when Hurricane Sandy cut off power for many days to millions of homes and businesses in the Northeast and a few areas, mostly parts of universities, a few other micro grids kept the lights on using their own islanded power generation systems. And this ability to sustain electricity during widespread natural disasters is probably the primary reason for the growing interest in micro grids today. So historically, micro grids, they have, in the past, they've used combined heat and power and reciprocating engine generators, which rely primarily on fossil fuels. But as some of the other panelists have pointed out, as micro grids are, new micro grids are becoming greener and they're able to incorporate more solar power, energy storage, and other clean energies, clean energy technologies. So specifically, micro grids, they can reduce greenhouse gas emissions in two ways, at least two ways. They offer the opportunity to deploy more zero emission electricity sources within the micro grid itself. So we had a good definition of a micro grid from Joy. So I don't need to reiterate that, but a micro grid can balance generation from the intermittent renewable power sources, small wind or solar with its dispatchable, say natural gas fire generation. And additionally, as the price of storage has come down, they can also use energy storage to balance production and usage within the micro grid. The amount of renewables that can be deployed into micro grid will be highly dependent on the setting. So whether it's an urban, suburban, or rural micro grid, the particular geography and the climate of the micro grid. The second way that micro grids reduce greenhouse gases is by making use of energy that would otherwise be lost. So since micro grid electricity is generated adjacent or very close to where it will be used, line losses are minimized. So not as much electric power loss and less power is required to meet an equivalent level of demand. So when the electricity is generated from certain centralized power sources, a large centralized natural gas or coal plant or a large nuclear power plant, they generate a lot of heat, but typically that heat is wasted. It goes unused up the smokestack. But when you generate the power close to end users, then it becomes economically feasible to use this heat energy productively. So we need to take advantage of all of the potential attributes that micro grids have in order to improve the value proposition. So we can use this heat productively for heating water or space in nearby homes and businesses. Therefore we need less fuel to be combusted overall. So we achieve lower greenhouse gas emissions. So in addition to the mitigation of emissions, micro grids also have their grid resilience attributes. So I mentioned earlier that micro grids can continue to power and can continue to provide electric service during and soon after extreme weather events like hurricanes. They also can, Haresh mentioned this as well. They can also help the macro grid recover from a system outage either indirectly by sustaining services needed by restoration crews or directly by helping to reenergize the macro grid. Great example of micro grid is the one that's located about a dozen miles from the US Capitol in White Oak, Maryland. It's one of the larger micro grids, the Food and Drug Administration Federal Research Center micro grid. It has an inherent resilience and reliability value to the FDA. So there is a tangible monetary loss to the organization. If it's scientific experiments are ruined due to a loss of power and climate control. So there have been several instances where the surrounding macro grid went dark. There we had a famously, we had a 2011 earthquake in the DC area. There was a 2012 derecho event. I mentioned Hurricane Sandy. There have been other hurricanes and other storms and the FDA's micro grid has been remarkably reliable and resilient and it's remained online through all of those events. The micro grid does incorporate some solar power as well and it's projected that it prevents about 72,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide, equivalent emissions per year. And it does help the supporting surrounding macro grid. It provides ancillary services, which is another way that micro grids can find value and get an additional revenue stream for themselves. So utilities have found that micro grids can be helpful for them particularly in instances of where there are remote power locations. A very famous example is in Borrego Springs, California. It's kind of the end of the line town on the edge of the metropolitan area and they have a mixed ownership micro grid there that provides clean, reliable and resilient backup power, not backup power, cost effectively and that hard to serve isolated community. So I wanna draw your attention to three papers that C2ES has done on micro grids. So the easiest way to find them is just Google C2ES and micro grids and I think you'll see all three of them. We also have a video that is very good of an event that we had in conjunction with George Washington University and you can also listen to a webinar that we had a couple of years ago on micro grids. So I wanna talk just a little bit quickly about a couple of the challenges facing micro grids and this is from one of those three papers. Yeah, I've mentioned all of the micro grids that they currently provide just a tiny fraction of US electricity but their capacity is expected to grow significantly. I mentioned that the interest in micro grids is their ability to improve resilience and reliability, increase efficiency, better manage electricity, supply and demand and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. As an aside, there was just a recent Wood McKenzie report that came out that noted that 546 micro grids projects were completed in 2019 and that's a record number. 86% of those micro grids were fossil fuel-based but they do project in their five-year forecast that solar, wind, hydropower and energy storage will grow to account for 35% of annually installed capacity by 2025. So in the near term, we're gonna start to see a lot more renewables incorporated in planned micro grids. So micro grids, they are unique. They're a unique combination of a power source. They have unique customers, geography and they each have a unique market that they're serving as well. So it does make financing these projects a challenge. So doing financial feasibility studies and simulation modeling, having public-private partnerships, they could all play a growing role in overcoming some of these financial hurdles. States can play a key role in facilitating micro grid developments. Some states have created funding opportunities for micro grids and these can be extremely helpful and for planning feasibility studies, for example. But there are challenges that states lack a legal definition of micro grid and there are regulatory and legal challenges that can differ between and within states. So states can assist projects by providing funding grants or low-cost loans to perform these feasibility studies that I mentioned or to aid in demonstration and commercialization. So we need a clear legal framework on how to define a micro grid and set forth the rights and obligations of a micro grid owner. So it's easier say for utility to put a micro grid in place as they're sort of the franchise owner, but it might be more challenging for another entity that wants to employ a micro grid. So we need to address some of these issues, including rules and costs for connecting to the macro grid and micro grid developers access to reasonably priced backup. Backup power also known as standby service and to wholesale power markets to sell access electricity or other services. So there are programming models that can help project developers in all phases of development as well. So we need to develop supportive frameworks and policies. It's gonna be vital to promote greater dialogue among the finance community, service providers and implementers, government officials at all levels, regulatory agencies and other stakeholders. So I think I've probably gone a bit over my time and I'll just say thanks at this point and I'm looking forward to the discussion. Great, thanks Doug and thanks to the other panelists. We are going to transition now to questions and answers and have a discussion for the next 15 or so minutes. So really looking forward to that. The first and just a quick reminder, if you have questions and there are many, many of you online watching, thank you for that. If you have questions, there are two great ways that you can send them to us. One is by following us online, Twitter at ESI online. We could also send us an email, ESI at ESI.org if you'd like to ask a question of our panelists. Our first question, I was gonna ask about the definition but Joy took care of that and we wanna find a way to get like, maybe we'll get up like embroidered microgrid pillows where we can have the definition emblazoned on it or something. But my first question, and this is something that Doug talked about is this value proposition idea. At various points in your presentations, you talked about how microgrids are not necessarily or easily evaluated in terms of cost-effectiveness. And to me, as someone who's worked in financing for a while, that means that there must be other co-benefits. And Joy, I'd like to start with you and ask for some additional commentary and maybe some examples from the field about where applications were able to be installed, maybe where these co-benefits added up to a degree where it made the value proposition for the microgrid. I'd love to hear a little bit more about what goes into that decision. Absolutely, thank you. Can you guys hear me? We good? Okay. So thanks for that question. And affordability actually, if I didn't make it clear earlier, is a huge component of what we do as public power. We are not for profit. So we're really, our mantra is affordable, reliable, safe and then environmentally sustainable power. So we do have to make that argument to our communities if we're investing in potentially more expensive technology. I also wanna make it clear that by 2024, we've estimated that about 320 megawatts of energy are gonna be deployed only by public power in microgrid technology and microgrids. So that's significant given we're only 15% of the electricity mix in the country. So we're certainly doing this and nothing I'm about to say is a reason not to deploy microgrids, but you definitely have to bring those value power positions forward. You heard from Doug about and Horesh about the clean energy component. And so if you're looking at microgrids that incorporate solar and storage and other energy sources, I think that could be a component that could be looked at to be viewed as a sort of a balance to potentially more expensive investment. Also in the city of Cleveland, our Cleveland member there has been extremely focused on kind of the resilience component. And we talked about that already a lot, but it can't be really overstated. And so they've issued a request for proposal about a microgrid in downtown Cleveland. And there's also, you remember too, this does require infrastructure. So there's this sort of potential for pushback on kind of the NIMBY side, right? So it's not just the affordability, but it's also what does that infrastructure look like? So if we're looking at a microgrid in downtown Cleveland, you really have to justify it. And they have really been looking at kind of valuing power resiliency. So cost savings coming from reduced capacity, demand and transmission fees, to lower business interruption and insurance premiums, right? So those are a few of the areas where on the resilience side you can justify. And I think there's some well-known areas that maybe the rest of the panel can talk about in terms of quantifying the reduction in greenhouse gases and other environmental benefits that could come from microgrids. So with that, I'll turn it back. Thanks Tim. And Tim, as your member companies, their business is dependent in some ways about helping to find this value proposition and making the numbers add up. What are some of the key co-benefits that when your members are working, say with a public facility, how do they make the economics work out for their customers? Well, the challenge we have with microgrids today is adding any of the resiliency components, not just a microgrid, means that we're asking our facility to do something that we probably did not expect it to do in the past. And so we have a paradigm shift in that we're asking something in the future to happen that in many ways we don't have a savings or a cost history in the past to justify the expense. And so what that means is it's a new expense. It requires investment. It requires something to be put forth in addition to whatever cost you plan to make that happen. You know, the costification, of course, of the resiliency is we often don't understand the true cost of that. And so we're still challenged today with defining those costs. We can talk about power losses, but the reality is that most of our utility systems have been pretty reliable. And so it really comes into the ability to do things like demand shifting and integration of renewable assets. When you integrate those renewable assets as the several speakers have talked about, the variable nature of that load needs some sort of a support structure. Fortunately, I see the future that we have a whole integrated load source system and the microgrids will play a central role in negotiating the fact that our loads have been variable for years. Our sources are now becoming variable. Now we have to start matching those two up. And I think the micro will play a key role in that. Thanks. Harash, I'd like to hear your thoughts on that, but we just got a question in from our online audience asking us if we could talk a little bit about what the economic benefits of a demand response capacity or capability at a micro grid. And I think that's something that you and perhaps also Doug would have something nice to say about. Sure, yeah. You know, demand response I think is going to be an important part of what we do with even micro gridding approaches. Having some ability to control the loads can ensure us that we have enough power on a given micro grid to power all the critical loads. And that's really where we're starting with a lot of these resiliency efforts. We'd like to start with those critical loads, manage other loads as much as we can so that people all get a chance to get their power. And then gradually as time goes by, we expect that distributed generation will get stronger enough that it will sustain all loads. And increasingly we're already talking about micro grids that are basically a whole power resources. Nevertheless, I think having a certain amount of load control gives you substantially more reliability on a micro grid when you're actually operating it. Because one of the reasons that the grid itself is so stable is because it's so massive. And there's so much simply aggregated loads and aggregated supply that small fluctuations don't actually matter. When you have a smaller grid, it really helps to have some ability on both the supply side and the demand side so that you can maintain a very high degree of reliability in the grid. So load control is going to be an essential part of how we implement micro grids in the future. Thanks. Doug, I think I'm really interested in how you give us a little bit more information about the proposition. Also, if you have any thoughts about how that value proposition might continue to evolve over time and maybe there are some applications today that maybe won't quite pencil out, but maybe five to 10 years into the future we'll start to see the more of these installations pop up. Yeah, so on the question of the demand response, I think that's a really interesting one and that's something where modeling tools can really, really help. And the sophistication of micro grid managers that are basically balancing the supply and demand within the micro grid are important. So a micro grid might not make sense at some points for the micro grid to even be generating its own power. If it's interconnected, its common point of coupling, it may have more than one. It may even make much more sense for it to be getting power from the grid at certain points in time. So I think the level of sophistication, that's one of the things about micro grids that's really has been evolving in recent times. It's getting a lot more sophisticated in how these micro grids are managed. So that's going to optimize the amount of admissions. It's going to give consumers the lowest costs that are under the umbrella of this particular micro grid. I think, but every micro, one of the things that we heard when we were doing research back a couple of years ago on this topic is if you've seen one micro grid, you've seen one micro grid. So they are all different and they all have a unique set of generation sources. They have a unique market that they are having to adapt to. So it's up to the developers, the micro grid owner, to look for all of the various value propositions. And I mentioned being one that's very important scale is another that's quite important. I think the trend last year at least had been toward much smaller micro grids, larger micro grids probably make a bit more sense in terms of penciling out economically. We know that some renewables have come down a lot in our particularly solar panels is what I have in mind. So it's at a maximum that you can incorporate solar. If you're in a city location, you might be a little hamstrung in terms of doing that solar that you can feasibly incorporate. If you're in a urban or a more rural setting, you can incorporate more solar and reduce your cost, your system costs and the cleaner grid. So it's each situation requires a lot of forethought. Okay, thanks. We have a few minutes left and I'm gonna make this one sort of a free for all. So please speak up if you have a reply to it. One thing we haven't talked much, we've talked about renewables, we've talked about storage, but we haven't talked quite as much about electric vehicles. And I'm wondering if you have any thoughts about how micro grid deployments, how that will be affected by the deployment of electric vehicles, which are forms of energy storage and which will I assume continue and increase in number and variety. I'll jump in on that. Go ahead, Dwight. Okay, I just wanted to say, just to kind of keep quickly key up of what Doug was talking about in terms of each micro grid being sort of an individual entity. And I think that really mirrors how we are and public power, we're locally controlled and so we make decisions based on those local circumstances. And one example of your question, Dan, about electric vehicles is we have, especially in Washington State, with a member of the Homish County Public Utility District, which is right outside of Seattle, kind of like a Fairfax had its own electric utility. And they are using a $3.5 million grant from the Washington Clean Energy Fund to invest a total of $12 million in their Arlington micro grid and Clean Energy Center project. It's gonna include a 500 kilowatt solar array with smart inverters, a 1000 kilowatt lithium ion battery storage system and several vehicle to grid charging stations for use with their electric fleet vehicles. So I think you could have seen all these sort of happen individually and not be integrated, but the idea of integrating this into one campus, I think is really exciting. And I think that's something I can definitely see in the future being even more important with micro grids. So it certainly is something that we support and look forward to exploring more. Good, thanks. Harish, it sounded like you might have another, you might actually have our last comment of the day given the time. So let's hear what you think about this. I'll make a brief. We think electric vehicles are a huge opportunity for resiliency and particularly for micro grid and as a component of the micro grids. And we actually talk about four components. You know, when we talk about micro grids, we say solar and storage and then electric vehicles and load management. So electric vehicles are kind of an in-between there because the primary function is not to power the grid. The primary function is to take you from one place to another, but when they're connected to the grid, they are a formidable resource because they tend to be fairly large in terms of their, both their power, potentially their load, but also the capability of putting power back on the grid. As a result, I mean, you can't ignore that when you look at opportunities for trying to reduce your total resource in being able to provide resilience to customers. Great, thanks. We got another online question. We're not gonna have time to answer it, unfortunately, but Doug mentioned this and I think this is responsive to our question. If you are looking for more research and analysis of these, I would Google micro grids and APPA and NASCO and EPRI and C2ES. All of these organizations have put a lot of time and thought into this story. We're not able to get to your question, but thank you, Joy, Tim, Harak, and Doug. This was a great panel and learned a lot about sort of this exciting technology that's sometimes what's old is new again and I think maybe this is one good example. Thank you so much for joining us. That is going to conclude the second panel of the day. If you have a few moments, we would love it if you helped us out by taking our survey and providing us some feedback and comments about what you thought about this panel and the Expo overall. We really do read that feedback and we do try to take it to heart and find new ways to improve, but also the kinds of information that we want to deliver to our policy-making and public audience. We are going to start up the next panel in five minutes at noon, just so that everyone knows the platform that we're using today. If you would like to stay on and watch the next panel, you'll have to refresh your browser and hopefully that's not a problem for anyone. The next panel is a special panel about environmental justice and advancing climate solutions through environmental justice. But if you would like to, just staying on this feed isn't going to let you do that. You're going to need to refresh your browser. We'll go ahead and end it there and I just wanted to say thanks again to our panelists, Joy, Tim, Harisha, Doug and hope to see everyone back in about five minutes for advancing climate solutions through environmental justice. Thank you so much.