 is as a bill before it that relates to a bill worn in schools back in Vermont in stage 462. And serendipitously, a couple weeks ago, I ran into a colleague of yours at Vermont Law School who said, oh, by the way, we actually have someone on our faculty now. We've been very involved in this in Massachusetts and made an introduction, but I'll meet you. So I really appreciate you taking time to be here today and giving us background on some of the work that you have done in Massachusetts and in particular with regard to a legal decision that, to some extent, launched the work that has been done in Massachusetts on global warming solutions and that. So we record all of our testimony here. So if you could introduce yourself to the record. And I also ask, to the extent, I'm happy for you to go through your entire presentation. If you want to field questions during that's fine too, whatever it is. OK. So take the weapon. OK, great. Thank you. So I'm Jennifer Rushlow. I'm the Associate Dean for Environmental Programs at Vermont Law School. I've been in that position for about six months. Prior to that, I was at Conservation Law Foundation based in Boston, where I was a senior attorney. And I also directed a farm and food program at CLF. And I'm planning to talk today about the Massachusetts Global Warming Solutions Act, and in particular, the litigation that flowed from that, where I was lead counsel on the case that ended up being called Kain VDEP, which is what ultimately led the administration in Massachusetts to promulgate regulations stemming from the GWSA statute in Massachusetts. So I have a presentation that talks about the litigation primarily. And I'm happy to go through that. But mostly, I want to be helpful to you. And so if you have questions about a statute or what's come after the statute implementation, I'm happy to talk about any of that. And I would welcome your questions at any point. OK? So I'll start with the presentation. And then we can work from there. I'm making sure about this right here. So the Global Warming Solutions Act was passed in 2008. And it took its inspiration from California, which had a global warming solutions act that was passed in, I believe, 2006, called AB32. That was the first. And Massachusetts, I believe, was the second. And at the time that it was passed in 2008, it was the most stringent climate law that's kind in the country. And what it required was for the secretary of the Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs, which is like A&R here, to determine a greenhouse gas emissions reduction requirement for 2020 between 20% and 25%. The secretary ultimately decided that it should be 25%. And so that's what it is, as well as an 80% reduction by 2050. The statute did that. It did a number of other things as well. You can see on this slide several of the provisions that it includes. Most of them have to do with accounting for greenhouse gas emissions from different sources, from different sectors, understanding what the baseline for emissions is as a starting point, and then figuring out how to keep track of everybody's emissions so that we can know whether we're getting close to these reduction requirements of 2020, 2050, and the interim decades between those. In addition to those inventory requirements, there's also a requirement that the administration issue a plan each decade, showing how they're going to get to the emissions limit requirement for that decade. So for instance, the administration issued a plan in 2010 that was then updated in 2015 to show how they were going to get to the 2020 reduction of 25% as required by the statute. So it sounds like twice a decade. That's what they've done. I don't think the statute is specific in how frequently those plans come out, just that they have to come out to show how you're going to get to that requirement each decade. There are required to do that periodically throughout. And the requirement that was most relevant to the litigation that I was a part of is section 3D of the statute, which I'll refer to as section 3D, which required the Department of Environmental Protection, which is within the auspices of the umbrella agency that I mentioned earlier, to promulgate regulations enforcing the statute. And so it was that section and that requirement that was at the heart of the litigation, and is primarily what I'm planning to talk about. So this is the language of section 3D. And I've read the bill that's before you, and I see that you have some version of this. This is what we have in Massachusetts, and it's important to really understand each of these words, because that was ultimately what CLF sued the state over, was the meaning of these words and what it required the agency to do, so DEP. So the language is, the department, meaning DEP, shall promulgate regulations establishing a desired level of declining annual aggregate emission limits for sources or categories of sources that emit greenhouse gas emissions. And I think the part of that that ended up having the most discussion was establishing a desired level first and declining annual aggregate emissions limits. Second, those are kind of the two pieces that I think there was the most discussion about. Yeah, is there a question? As we go along. Yeah, please. So this is entirely about emissions red. Well, I guess, slicing and dicing. So it's about emissions, which is different from how those emissions are treated like sequestration. That's right. Was there a discussion at this point on that? So the way that the statute is written is to give the agency broad discretion and flexibility in the method through which emissions reductions happen. What the statute did was just say, the reductions have to happen. We're telling the agency that they're in charge of making sure that they have been, but the methods that they use, like you mentioned, sequestration, or the particular sources or the categories of sources like the transportation sector or the electricity sector, that's up to the agency to determine. And they were intentionally very broad in allowing the agency that flexibility. So when all this was going on, you refer to the agency. Was there any public hearings or business input or anything on this as well? Rulemaking, I'm assuming, is what this was? Right, so DT did not conduct a rulemaking, which is what the litigation was about. The fact that they didn't issue the regulations required by this section on their own. So the litigation was to prompt them to issue those regulations. When they ultimately did, which was after the conclusion of the litigation, there were public hearings and all kinds of stakeholders and people who had an interest in it participated in that. Could an identified source be a negative source, as in the case of crime and sequestration? A source is anybody that emits greenhouse gas emissions. So I think the method of reducing greenhouse gas emissions is something that would be included in the regulations and is addressed in the ultimate regulations. But the source is something that is responsible for emitting greenhouse gas emissions. I'm hung up on the word desired. Desired by whom on what basis. That was ultimately a part of the discussion in the litigation. You're going to talk more about that. I can do that, yes. So just spending a little bit of time before we get to that, if it's helpful, on what happened before the litigation was filed. So as I mentioned, the Secretary of the Executive Office of Energy Environmental Affairs was responsible for issuing a plan for how they were going to get to 25% reductions by 2020. Issued that plan in 2010, they updated it in 2015. For those of us that were following what the state was planning to do to get to the required emissions reductions, this was the best information that was out there for seeing what the state intended to do, what its plans were. There was no mention in this plan of regulations that they had passed or that they planned to pass that flowed from this requirement right here. So there were discussions of programmatic changes. There were discussions of regional partnerships. There were even discussions of existing regulations. But there was no talk of promulgating regulations to satisfy this requirement, specifically. And so that's what we were looking for, is does the state have a plan, physically the agency, have a plan to ratchet down emissions and to put that in regulations so that it's enforceable? And had the goals actually been defined at that point? Yes. In 2015? Yes. So they were there? Yes. But no strategy to meet them? No regulatory strategy pursuant to this section. So yes. So at that point, a number of advocacy strategies were being used to try and tell TEP that they needed to promulgate regulations pursuant to this section. And there were a few different things that happened to try and move that forward. There was a petition in November 2012 submitted by hundreds of youth to TEP. There was a petition for a rulemaking saying you need to promulgate regulations pursuant to this section of 3D. I'll just leave that up for a minute. And in response to that, TEP said, we don't agree with that interpretation that we're required to promulgate regulations in the way that you say that we are. But even if we were, we've actually promulgated several sets of regulations that we believe comply with this requirement. And so that was their response. And that response continued to be true through, ultimately, the litigation. I can tell you what those three sets of regulations were that they relied on at the time. I'll just go to a further slide here. So these are the three sets of regulations that DEP relied on. The low-emission vehicle regulations are regulations that come from the Clean Air Act, which allows states to either follow federal requirements or California's requirements for reducing emissions from car fleets. So the key thing to know about these regulations is that they were adopted in, or ultimately adopted for the first time in 1990. They were updated in 2012. And we ultimately had quite a bit of debate over whether they satisfied section 3D. And we advocates and ultimately plaintiffs in the litigation felt that it didn't, but DEP argued that it did. And I can get into more detail on that if it's helpful. Another set of regulations they relied on are the sulfur hexafluoride regulations. Sulfur hexafluoride is a gas that's used to insulate switch gear equipment. Basically what that means is on power lines. If you want to de-energize a power line so that a maintenance crew can go in and work on it, that can be a pretty dangerous thing. So you insulate that equipment with this gas, sulfur hexafluoride, it makes it safer. It's responsible for a very, very, very small percentage of greenhouse gas emissions in the state. It is a powerful greenhouse gas emission. It's more potent than methane even, but it's very small. So they relied on that. And then they also relied on Reggie, the regional greenhouse gas issue. And that's a regional compact between states. And the argument from us was that that doesn't guarantee emissions reductions in any one particular state. It guarantees emissions reduction regionally. A DEP relied on that. So that was the response that they gave to the youth when they filed that petition for rulemaking. In addition to that youth strategy, which was a pretty formal strategy in that they submitted something formally to the agency, there were also more informal conversations happening between Conservation Law Foundation and other advocates and the state saying, this is how we interpret Section 3D. What's your plan? And the response to that was similar to what was said to the youth, which is we don't interpret it that way. And we've got these other regulations that we're relying on. And so CLF had those conversations in a way that was increasingly concerning to the organization. And after starting with a pretty gentle approach of talking to the agency and trying to find common ground, that then led to a notice of intent to the agency stating an intent to sue. And there was a good amount of time after that allowing some time to see if the agency would then respond to that and take action. And that didn't happen. And so ultimately, a lawsuit was filed. But I think it's important to know that that was years after the Section 3D regulations were required to be promulgated. And I can talk a little bit about that timeline. And so it didn't happen instantaneously. It was after many other strategies were tried. So before we get into the litigation, I'm really interested into the lead up that got you there. Was it clear prior to the keen litigation beginning that the state was actually not meeting the goals? Was there a measurement that was being undertaken by the state by DEP to attempt to demonstrate that the goals were being met or that at least Massachusetts was on track to meet the goals? There was some information available to the public that the administration thought they were on track to achieve those goals. I think there was some skepticism from others outside of the administration about whether the strategies that the state had in place would actually get to that goal. So I think there may have been some differences of opinion about that. There was no formal program to measure and document progress that had or hadn't been made? There are formal, so when I mentioned the statute and the accounting provisions, that does exist. I mean, the important thing to know is that I think some of the context here is that this was the first piece of implementation of this statute. So it was still kind of getting established how everything was going to work. There were a number of market factors, such as coal plants closing and the proliferation of natural gas that were kind of naturally leading to some emissions reductions. And so I think there was some thinking on behalf of some advocates that with time, those economic factors alone weren't going to be enough to get to eventually 80% reductions by 2050. And so when I say there is some skepticism about whether the plans and strategies that the state had in place would ultimately get us where we needed to go over the long term, that's why simply relying on the data still left some room for concern about whether this was a long term strategy and a marathon, not a sprint, and whether we were actually going to get where we needed to go over the long term, because that makes sense. Because what I'm trying to understand, just kind of rewinding to whatever the year was, 2013, 2014, is I think I understand what's in 3D and what wasn't happening in Massachusetts. What I'm also trying to understand is the argument that a Massachusetts doesn't have a strategy that is coherent and says, here is what we're doing as a commonwealth to address this issue in contrast to we had a bunch of things going on. And hey, this happens to be that we're making some progress based on what's going on in the market. It's different than a strategy. And a policy initiative that they get there, that's one thing. But then the other is actually making the case, which I think we can't do not, making the case that we've set these targets and we see that either we're not meeting them or we're not on track to meet them. And kind of pointing to those two things as issues. And as reasons why we need to step up, we need a strategy. And one of the reasons we need a strategy is we're not meeting the targets that we've met. And I'm wondering to the extent both of them. And I understand the second part. It doesn't sound like there was a strategy that the commonwealth had to actually move forward on this, unless clear on measurement. So I think that it just has a happy ending, so I know how it ends. But as a reminding of 2014. I think that it sounds like it may be the case that where Vermont is right now and where Massachusetts was in that moment or not, exactly the same. I think that in you say or not, we're not. And perhaps are not. I think that Massachusetts may have had more data on its side saying, we're getting where we need to go. Why isn't that enough? Ultimately, that wasn't what the litigation was about. It sounds like in Vermont you have even more reason to be concerned because you're not getting where you need to go. And I think had that been the case in Massachusetts, that would have been an additional factor. But as it was, that wasn't really the focus of the dispute. In Massachusetts, was there any real attempt to resolve the problem by amending or diluting section 3D? Or was their general agreement on yes, these goals are valid? It's a question of how and when we move there. Do you mean during the process of getting the law passed or after the fact? After the fact. After the fact? I'm not aware of any formal attempts to dilute the language of section 3D. I think at the point that the litigation was going on, it was still people were in a wait and see mode to see, are these advocates going to be successful in making the case that this is what this means? And so it wasn't until after the highest court in the state said, yes, this is what it means that people started to look at it that way within the administration. I think the legislature knew what it meant because they passed the law with that language. But since then, there have not been attempts to water that down to my knowledge. Should I continue to talk about the litigation? Yeah, very good, thank you. So after those softer strategies of working with the agency and seeing if they could be brought around to promulgate these regulations and that ultimately didn't happen, they do want to just mention the timeline of this. As I mentioned, the statute was passed in 2008. The agency, DEP, was required to promulgate regulations to comply with section 3D by January 1st, 2012. And the regulations were required to take effect a year later on January 1st, 2013. And there's a sunset provision, and I've noticed that this is addressed a little differently in the Vermont bill, there's a sunset provision in the Massachusetts GWSA that these regulations, the 3D regulations expire at the end of 2020, December 31st, 2020. So when the complaint was filed, and that happened, the complaint was filed in 2014, at that point, it had been six years since the law was passed and two years since the agency was required to have completed the process of promulgating these regulations. And so I think that timing is critical to understand. And at that point, there were only six years left for the regulations before they were set to sunset, according to the provisions of the statute. So things were getting pretty urgent at that point. The plaintiffs in the litigation were four teenagers who were part of the Youth Petition for Rolemaking to DEP, as well as Conservation Law Foundation on behalf of its members, and the nonprofit Mass Energy Consumers Alliance, which represents low income and middle income consumers with an interest in being able to secure clean energy. Can I ask why you deferred to them as four teenagers? Are they 18 and older, or are they under the age of 18? They were in high school at the time of the litigation. So under the age of 18. And why is that relevant in the sense of the overall process, or I mean, could it have been grade school kids? It could have. I'm just trying to give you a sense of who they were. Just for descriptive purposes. I think in the greater context of why this litigation is significant, and it is noteworthy that youth are involved in lawsuits and in advocacy on this issue. And I think that's a national trend. I don't think I know that's a national trend. This is one of those instances where youth are very concerned about what their states are doing about greenhouse gas emissions. The defending in this lawsuit was the Mass Department of Environmental Protection. And CLF and the other plaintiffs didn't name anyone individually, didn't name the governor. Really, this was a very targeted lawsuit about one particular requirement and one responsibility of this agency. And so it wasn't styled in kind of a flashy way. It was really very targeted and really trying to rely on the law and get to a particular result. And the two claims that were part of this lawsuit were a declaratory judgment and a written mandamus, which are two different ways of getting the court to say, DEP has to issue these regulations. So that was what the plaintiffs saw. I missed law school. Can you tell me what those two claims are? What does that actually mean? So a declaratory judgment is when you ask the judge to say, this is what the law means. To declare, this is what the law means and this is what it requires. A writ of mandamus is when a member of the public asks a court to compel an agency to do something or to compel the government to do something. So that's what I mean when I say it's two different ways of getting at the same thing, but there's some slight differences in the legal meaning. Thank you. Sure. So the arguments around whether the agency was required to promulgate these regulations really fell into two categories. One is, what does Section 3D mean and what does it require the agency to do if anything? And then the second is, well, regardless of what Section 3D means, DEP promulgated these three regulations. Is that enough? So it really fell into those two buckets. So focusing on the first one, which is the statutory interpretation, which is, OK, we've got this language of 3D, which is at the top of this slide. What does it mean? What the plaintiff said, you see at the bottom of the slide, which is, they need the argument that the language of this statute is very clean, it's very clear, and that it means that the regulations have to address multiple sources of emissions, impose a limit on those emissions that can be released from those sources, limit the aggregate emissions that can be released, the total emissions from those sets of sources, and set emissions limits for each year that decline. So in other words, the total emissions from these sources have to ratchet down year by year. The regulations have to accomplish that. What DEP said is that this phrase desired level means that DEP was only required to establish aspirational goals or unenforceable targets. And that's the language that they used in her briefs. And so they felt like the word desired essentially modified limit so that a limit in fact meant a goal, in this case. So desired limit equals goal according to DEP's interpretation. If I can again. So you've mentioned that you felt that the legislature felt that it wasn't achieving what it was intended to achieve, correct? The agency wasn't achieving what it intended. So why not let the legislature deal with this? Why did conservation law foundation and others have to jump in and let it get? Well, it had been six years since the statute was passed, and two years since the agency was required to do this. And the legislature hadn't taken action. So again, you feel that the CLF and others that litigated or presented the litigation were more informed and represented the people of Massachusetts and more in the legislature. That's not what I said. Well, that's what I'm saying. That's my interpretation of what happened. Well, I think that. Because to me, this could not only be just for this bill, but for any bill out there that I see, whether it's gun regulations or whatever. I mean, that's what the legislature's responsibility is. And I mean, last year in agriculture, we dealt with a citizen's right to sue regarding nutrient management plans, which saying goodness, we didn't go down that road. Because things like this are always changing. It's the same as the nutrient management plan in my mind, that you can't go into these specific purposes when industry's changing, technology's changing, whatever it is. And I think I just am upset with the process that's going on in states with Conservation Law Foundation and others that's going to make it difficult for citizens to live and work in their states. So to respond to that, I'm no longer a Conservation Law Foundation. I'm here today as a law professor and a dean at Vermont Law School. And from that perspective as a law professor, I would say that the responsibility of the legislature is to pass a law that is written in such a way that the rest of the world can interpret it and expect that the language of that law will be carried out. And the nature of the law is also such that that creates the ability for a number of avenues for litigation if that law is not met. And so that's the nature of the law, that that remedy is out there. Well, then that's what attorneys are going to interpret the law. What way are the other? That is what attorneys are for. And that's why we're going to court. That's right. I'll also mention in that regard that depending on the wording, you can have different interpretations of the same law. And therefore, if there's a disagreement, then you have to have some way of determining that which interpretation is correct. And that's where the litigation comes in. And the legislation may feel that it's obvious enough but if somebody interprets it differently, then you require a litigation. So are there any other questions about the statutory interpretation before I talk about the regulations? Just looking back at 3D, and again, this is 20-20 hindsight, we get pretty caught up on the word shall in this building and it's, you know, shall is pretty clear. And this was not a straightforward lawsuit. My sense is it took some turns and it wasn't clear what the outcome of this lawsuit was going to be at the end of the day. But the word shall in section 3D is pretty clear to me. So where was that? If you can put on the hat of the attorneys that represented DEP here, what was the case that they were making that makes it unclear that maybe the department may, as opposed to shall, promulgate regulation? I think that, so it was the attorney general's office representing DEP and I think the position of the attorney general was that not to write out shall promulgate regulations, not to argue that shall means may, as you said, but rather that the regulations could simply include aspirational goals as opposed to the limits of the plaintiffs. The regulations are desired. The regulations establish desired goals is what DEP would say. So I think they still agreed that they were required to do some kind of regulations. It's what those regulations did, how they were written, that the disagreement was about. But I'm curious, I'm sorry. I'm curious about the background of the word desired. Is there, there must be some history there about the intent of that word and the basis for determining what desired is? Can you talk about that? I can, sure. So we all, you know, everyone who was part of the litigation looked back at the legislative history, dug into the floor debates and the prior versions of the bills and there was no discussion among members of the legislature about what desired means. There were earlier versions of the bill. But they were not terribly illuminating as to what that word meant. And so that is a great example of how lawyers had to come in and sort of, you know, haggle it out. Was there to be what constitutes a greenhouse gas? That was very clearly established in the statute. And so I don't know, that wasn't part of the litigation. I think everyone felt like that was clear. With the benefit of hindsight, is there an alternate wording or phraseology that you would have recommended Massachusetts use in that, instead of that de-section that would have been far more precise and would have bypassed this whole process? Great question. I'm sure there is. I think the phrase that is the most confusing is desired level. I think you could take that out and it would be a lot clearer to most people reading this language. That being said, I fully appreciate the law making process as long and arduous. And they did their best and this represented a compromise in short. You know, yeah, just saying after those words, a desired level of, right, fair point. So I mentioned these three regulations. This is where it gets fairly technical and you can let me know how much of that you'd like to hear. Yes, you'd like to hear it? Well, I'll kind of jump right into the heart of it. The top two regulations did something that the plaintiffs were concerned about, which is rather than limiting the total or aggregate, is the word in section 3D, admissions from a group of sources. So in the law of the law of mission vehicle regulations, that was cars sold in Massachusetts, fleets of cars sold by manufacturers and the sulfur hexafluoride regulations. It was the total emitted sulfur hexafluoride from this switch gear equipment, as I mentioned. The regulations didn't limit those aggregate emissions for those groups of sources. What they did is establish an acceptable rate of emissions. The difference being that with a rate, if the total capacity from those sources increased, meaning if you had more switch gear equipment, if you had more cars, the aggregate emissions from those sources goes up. If you limit aggregate emissions, that's the limit. And everybody who's within that space has to figure out how to comply with it. Another question? So I have a question with regard to nuclear. Okay, and that limiting. And so in Vermont, we had a nuclear power plant that went offline, which likely contributed to slowing down at least of our trajectory auditions. In mass, you have a nuclear power plant that is going offline. I shouldn't say you're here in Vermont. So in mass, they have a nuclear power plant that is going offline. Do we have expected impact here with regard to the aggregate emission levels and that's what they're gonna be dealing with? I can't speak to how the state of Massachusetts is factoring in that into their total emissions projections. These three sets of regulations did not get to that sector. So that rate issue was something that the courts wrestled with. There were two different courts that looked at this issue. Ultimately, the Supreme Court agreed that regulations that were written to satisfy section 3D had to limit the aggregate emissions for the sources that they regulate and ratcheting down a rate does not accomplish that because if you add more cars, if you add more capacity, the aggregate emissions go up. I'm seeing nothing, so hopefully that makes sense. And then the regional greenhouse gas regulations, the Reggie Initiative, as I mentioned earlier, that's a regional initiative and the regulations that each state has to accomplish that require that the regional level emissions go down, but the nature of the program is such that regulated entities trade credits. And for instance, the Massachusetts regulated entities power plants over a certain size could buy credits from some other state and it's conceivable that the emissions reductions could happen in all of the other states and not Massachusetts. Is that likely? Perhaps not, but it's a possibility. And the question here was, were these regulations written in such a way that they guaranteed aggregate emissions reductions for those sources? So those were the three regulations that were put forward and that was the argument against whether they complied with this section 3D. I think the plaintiffs were very careful to make clear that they were not saying these were bad regulations. They were not saying they weren't great programs, but did they comply with section 3D? That very narrow question, they did not. So just to summarize this timeline here, the regulations were required to be promulgated while they were required to be issued in 2012, promulgated and put into effect by 2013. Complaint was filed in 2014. The complaint was filed in Superior Court, which is the trial court level in Massachusetts and the plaintiffs lost. DEP was successful at the Superior Court level. And what the court, what the judge said at the Superior Court was, we hear that you have two different interpretations of what section 3D means. We are finding that regardless of what it means, the three regulations put forward by DEP satisfy it. Whether it means what the plaintiffs say, whether it means what the defendants say it means, the regulations satisfy it either way. So that's it. The plaintiffs appealed that decision. That appeal would naturally go to the appellate court in Massachusetts, the Court of Appeals, which is the intermediate level. There's a provision that allows appellants to seek direct review by the highest court, the Supreme Judicial Court or the SJC. So the plaintiffs applied for that and the SJC granted that direct review. And that direct review is something that's reserved only for extraordinary cases. And so the SJC took this up thinking that it was a critical case of some kind. You know, it doesn't mean that they're gonna rule one way or the other, but they felt it was something that they needed to take up in a timely matter and that they wanted to weigh in on. And so they took it up. A decision was issued in May 17th, 2016. So now we're, we've got four years left before these regulations sunset. What's the sunset? A key factor in them deciding, and the SJC deciding to take? Probably. I can't speak to what went through their minds, but if I were to try and guess. They didn't say that. No, there's no, they don't tell you why they've taken it up. You just get to guess. Yeah. So this is some key language from the decision that ultimately came from the Supreme Judicial Court in Massachusetts. And K&B DEP's, the name of the decision that ultimately came out, Isabel Kane was one of the youth plaintiffs in the case. And the court said, the unambiguous language of section 3D requires the department to promulgate regulations that establish volumetric limits on multiple greenhouse gas emission sources expressed in carbon dioxide equivalents and that such limits must decline on an annual basis. So that was what they said about the statutory language. Then on the regulations itself, they said you further conclude that the sulfur hexafluoride, regi and low emission vehicle regulations fall short of complying with section 3D because they fail to ensure the type of mass-based reductions in greenhouse gases across the sources or categories of sources regulated under each program as intended by the legislature. And so they reversed the Superior Court. Yeah. So I just want to make sure I'm clear. The limits, the statutory limits must decline. Not, what's the result? The regulatory, the regulations must include declining annual limits. Is there an overall cost that this costs in the plaintiffs as well as the state? Do we know that? Don't know that. And I've got a question about kind of the first kind of this. Not being familiar with the law and maybe it's beyond section 3D, maybe there's a, but to what extent, and I'm looking at the fourth line of this and I'm just picking out a very specific thing that the court ruled and that such limits must decline on an annual basis. Was that something that was in the law? Or was that something that the court interpreted? That was on 3D. So 3D includes that the regulations establish a desired level of declining annual aggregate limits. So it is a law? Yeah. So in effect, the court of SJC is saying that the desired limit, that the DEP is responsible for saying what desired limits are by establishing volumetric limits or to their levels are by establishing volumetric limits. So they're saying that the desired must be defined by the DEP in volumetric limits. So you do get there, you know, it finds meaning. So the plaintiffs won, that was the finding of the Supreme Judicial Court. Following that decision, a couple of interesting things happened, Governor, Governor Baker, current governor, issued an executive order which is number 569, establishing an integrated climate change strategy for the Commonwealth. And that executive order does a number of things. One of the whereas clauses in the executive order is that the Supreme Judicial Court ruled that the steps mandated by the GWSA include promulgation of regulations by the Department of Environmental Protection. And that quotes the language that you just saw from McCain decision. And then section two of that executive order basically restates what's in the SJC decision that DEP shall promulgate regulations. And it sets out a timeline for the governor saying DEP needs to follow up on this SJC decision and this is what you need to do and by when. And so it required them to promulgate regulations by August 11th, 2017. And it did a couple other things indicating how they wanted DEP to go about this. But, yes. So it seems to me that they're not required, the DEP is not required to regulate all greenhouse gas emissions, but certain categories or aggregate categories to reach whatever these desired levels are, is that correct? That's correct. The legislature wanted apparently to give DEP that discretion to determine which sources they wanted to regulate. And how much greenhouse gas emissions reductions would be accomplished from those sources. See passenger vehicles, they don't see commercial vehicles. Right. So this is not a comprehensive. See energy generation, I don't see processing fuels. Right. So these are the six regulations that they came up with after, in order to comply with the SJC's decision, there was, if you're interested in understanding the process, there are documents online at DEP, such as this document is a background document that was issued when all the regulations were being considered. And there were public hearings and commenting procedures for each of these separate regulations. They ended up deciding to amend the sulfur hexafluoride regulations in such a way that they accomplished what the SJC said they would need to. They ended up going a different direction for passenger vehicles. But as you can see, there are a couple of regulations here which target the transportation sector, a couple that target the power sector. And that's what they target. In an aggregate DEP, and putting forth these regulations has said that these will meet the statutory goals of the Global Warring Solutions Act and Massachusetts. And future measurement will determine whether or not they should actually accomplish that. So these regulations alone are not intended by themselves to get to 25% reductions by 2020 or 80% by 2050. They're part of a suite of programs and strategies that the state is using to get to that overall reduction requirement. So this is one piece of that puzzle. And that's what the plan that accompanies each limit each decade, that's what that plan lays out is everything they're going to do. And the next plan would include these regulations as well as everything else that they hope to do, like building more solar arrays and other sorts of voluntary measures. Is there a time horizon associated with each day so that they can review the actual effects of the regulations in terms of their contribution to the aggregate limit? I'm not aware that there is. So they would come back and revisit and, as I say, tweak or adjust the particular regulations or limits in each regulation in order to meet that aggregate limit. Well, since section 3D required promulgations that are sorry, required the promulgation of regulations that sunset in 2020. Yeah, what does that mean? Yeah, that's something I wanted to go to as well. Why the sunset provision was put in the initial law and. I would love to know. Okay. But did the sunset, it's all over them. Did the sunset mean that after 2020, regulations would not have to be promulgated? Okay. I guess so. Okay. That's somebody's will. Huh. Okay. How many are there? My law professor itself says it's a strange provision and it doesn't seem as though it would be consistent with accomplishing the goals of the rest of the statute. Okay. I would not say that provision was well written. So, I don't know if you're prepared to do this and I don't want to take you off guard. And we can maybe talk about this in a future date if you're not ready to discuss this. As I mentioned at the beginning of our hearing, we have a bill before us, age of 462, which I think attempts to do some of the things that the original Massachusetts statute did, but maybe take some corrective action so that we don't wind up in litigation or that it's clearer. And I'm wondering if you're prepared to maybe discuss some of what's in age 462 or I would also say we'd be interested in your feedback on that. I don't have today. I think that I would prefer to talk about it at another time at more length, but I will say from an initial read, I think you've done a nice job of trying to correct some of the challenges of the Massachusetts GWCA and I would be happy to weigh in in more detail at a later date. So, not being an attorney, but being someone who's very interested in what this bill is trying to, or what Massachusetts was trying to accomplish. I actually share some of my concerns that the goal here is not to wind up in litigation. The goal is to pass a law that puts us on a track to address these issues and not wind in and in that context have a legislature be crystal clear, the end that we're trying to get to. And the legislature may debate that and may determine that we disagree in our legislative body on what those things are. But my goal would be that we are very clear on what we're trying to accomplish and setting out a path for the executive branch. We have a citizen legislator in Vermont that's in session for four months a year that is very limited in terms of its staff capacity. We have an executive branch that's quite powerful in relative terms to the legislative branch and that the legislative branch would be asking, actually mandating that our executive branch would in place a strategy with very specific gates to get through to meet certain targets, which I think are imperative. And again, the idea in my mind is that we're trying to be as clear as possible so that we don't wind up where Massachusetts did in 2013 or 2014. Litigation is not a foregone conclusion. A strong lawmaking process with stakeholder input would certainly be a good step toward avoiding that. It's very nice, I was like, but your last sentence is worse to live by anything. The pensioners get the most money. So one of my, I think a concern that the legislature has about moving forward is that this bill is not, what Massachusetts did is not proscript. Well, it doesn't, the legislation doesn't say how to achieve the goals that's left to the discretion of the administration and other entities. Right. This just says we need to set these goals and move toward them. It then takes one step further and says, and we're gonna require the agency to enforce, to make sure that we get there by promulgating regulations that accomplish X. So that is one step further than just saying we gotta get there. Right. But it doesn't tell the agency which sources to regulate, or exactly how much that mandates the style of regulation. Or how to regulate it. Just the style, just the design of the regulations. I think we do say how much, and maybe I'm not correct with that. We do have these goals and I guess I'm looking at that as the kind of quantitative aspect of what we're doing. I agree. But we don't, we're not prescripted in terms of how do we get to those goals that's left to the executive branch. Are you referring to the Massachusetts law or the proposed Vermont law? Actually both. Well, that existed. Yeah, that existing Vermont law is aspirational. Right. But those aspirations are quantitative, yes. Right, so the legislation establishes those reduction requirements, and that is a mandate, but without a foothold on how to get there, it's sort of left to chance. And so that is something that, what Massachusetts did in reference to that question is, instead of the legislature defining the exact pathway for how to get there, they allowed the DEP, which has more information as an agency with expertise about which sources emit how much, about the market mechanisms at play for each sector about the available technologies. And so in that way, the legislature was deferring to the expertise of the agency in saying, you're already very well educated about how best to implement this, and we defer to you on how exactly to go about that and to engage with the public in doing that, but you're the enforcer, and we're gonna make sure that you do that. That's essentially what the legislature was saying to the DEP. So you mentioned California and Massachusetts. Are there other states that have done this? Yes, there are other states that have the Warming Solutions Act laws now. I can't tell you whether they have provisions like section 3D, I'm not, I don't have that information today. Do you know roughly how many states? Oh, I wanna say six or more. If that is information that would be valuable to the committee, that's certainly something that BLS could provide an analysis of those other laws. Yeah, they're very helpful. Okay. So one thing I noticed is that there's nothing there about emissions from heating sources, residential heating. And in Vermont, that makes up about 24% of the greenhouse gas emissions. And was there a reason why, I'll ask the question, you may not know the answer. Is there a reason why that wasn't included in the regulations? I can't speak to that. I will say that some of my former colleagues at CLF in Massachusetts were more involved in this rulemaking process after the litigation than I was. And perhaps it would be useful just to hear from them. But I can't speak to that. I'm gonna jump in here with kind of a granular question that relates to how Massachusetts was or wasn't allowed to DEP was not allowed to point to Reggie as a strategy or as a regulatory path that they were taking to achieve these goals. Vermont's obviously involved in Reggie. I'm hopeful that we're gonna be involved in the Transportation Climate Initiative. Those are strategies that could ultimately affect people, certainly Reggie is, but TCI, I hope even more so, affect the amount of greenhouse gas emissions in Vermont. How, under this lawsuit and kind of where the law stands in Massachusetts right now, can the commonwealth of Massachusetts or potentially a state of Vermont in the future kind of reach toward or point to this as part of our strategy for being our greenhouse gas emissions statutory goals. Yes, so a couple of thoughts. One, the secretary in the plan that I mentioned that was amended in 2015 to show how the state would get to the 2020 emissions limit requirements did refer to Reggie as a strategy for accomplishing those emissions reductions. And that's a valid claim. Whether Reggie could comply with Section 3D specifically is another question. So can the administration say that they're relying on Reggie to help get to those emissions reductions? Sure. Can the administration say that Reggie complies with Section 3D and specifically is one of the regulations that accomplishes DEP's requirements under Section 3D? They couldn't, and that's what the court found. So Chris, why don't you wanna follow up and give me your interrupt? Sure, so just to continue answering your question, is it possible that a state like Vermont participating in Reggie and TCI could in some fashion rely on those? I mean, any regulatory strategy coming out of the TCI initiative is yet to be seen what that would look like. And so that's an open question. But for Reggie, my understanding is that there are some requirements as a participant in Reggie as to what a state's regulations look like in order to comply with Reggie. Could Massachusetts or Vermont legislate beyond the original requirements of Reggie to say, in addition to these regional emissions reductions, Massachusetts or Vermont's own emissions reductions must be X? Certainly, you could do that for the same regulated entity, but it would be going above and beyond what the regional program provides. And I assume the same would be true on the transportation side, but again, we don't know what those regulations would look like. So just to play this back to you, to make sure I understand, in terms of the statutory goals that Massachusetts has, Reggie may be pointed to as something that contributes to meeting those goals, but it does not fulfill the EP's obligation to promulgate policy and regulation that contributes to those goals. Right, so as the court determined, regulations that satisfy the section 3D requirement have to be of a certain kind, and they have to guarantee aggregate emissions reductions and in Massachusetts. And Reggie doesn't guarantee that. Can it hopefully contribute to where we end up? Certainly, but it's not a section 3D regulation because of how it's written. And this is gonna get even a little different because it leads my very superficial understanding of what's going on in Massachusetts is that with, actually I wouldn't even get into that now, it's too far back, I suppose, the session. Go, go, go. So we have to, we, Matt's had to have their own regulations to point to Reggie. Could their own regulation simply mimic the objective of Reggie? Or do they have to go above and beyond that? It would have to guarantee emissions, it would have to limit aggregate emissions from power plants over 25 megawatts, which is what Reggie applies to. It would have to limit those emissions and ratchet them down year by year in Massachusetts. Reggie doesn't do that. So it could cover the same sector, it could regulate power plants in a similar fashion, but the emissions limits in Reggie are regional and not state specific. Turning around in my head a little bit, what is incentivized here? Because with emissions reduction, you would see that to have a greater effect, we would want to connect more efforts. And this seems like we are incentivizing disconnection of efforts. Well, the regulations to satisfy section 3D don't have to regulate the same sources as Reggie. So it could have been that DEP used its discretion to say, you know what, for power plants of this size, Reggie's got it under control. So we're gonna regulate other sources because maybe they agreed with you, maybe they agreed with you that for the emissions from that sector, they were best left to a reading point. So what it seems to me that we would be talking about parallel regulations of the same sector, if there was gonna be a regulation around power plant emissions, it would be parallel to Reggie, not connected to Reggie. And to the extent that emissions reductions from power plants were achieved, that would actually benefit a state that's in Reggie because then it has credits to sell in Reggie, right? That's right. Yeah, as a matter of fact, the Vermont does benefit from Reggie because we generate dirty electricity here. We actually sell credits. You have to get, just like with renewable energy credits, you have to avoid something that is double counting. So you can't take credit for the reduction two separate ways for the same reduction. No, it's not that it would be credit, it's just that if a law is limiting aggregate emissions, within the state, then reducing emissions from electric generation would count towards the aggregate limit or reduction in a lower, lowering of the aggregate limit. And they would also benefit the state under Reggie. They seem separate to me, not the same. If I can weigh in on that, there's aggregate emissions, overall emissions from all sources versus aggregate emissions from a particular source. Yes. So we want to have out and like and we need to have aggregate emission limits from the transportation sector, aggregate emission limits from the thermal sector, and aggregate emissions from the electricity center. When we hear about the greenhouse gas emissions report from DEC today, we'll hear that the emissions from electricity have gone down, what transportation heating has gone on. Right, but what the Massachusetts law is doing and what seems like sound policy to me is it's leading it up to the DEP and Massachusetts to balance the emissions from the various sectors, nor do we need an aggregate limit. And because it's secondary, right, so the fact that informant electricity is on a downward trajectory is a good thing, but that would be the limits that the ANR might place on that sector here, might be there might be a stretch goal from the forward for electric generation that then adds to the meeting aggregate limit. So it can be discussed. A good example of why I think the legislature deferred to DEP to wrestle with these issues because they're so intricately involved in each of these, yes. But then we have time for expertise to deal with. If there aren't any more questions for Professor Rushlau, what I would like to humbly ask of you in DLS in terms of your help in looking at this. One, I'd be interested in your views on page 462 relative to what you found helpful and challenging with the law in Massachusetts. And secondly, I'd be interested in, not to say DLS, maybe it's you or, but an examination of some of the other global warming solutions acts that have different states. I know that Connecticut has one. I'm not familiar with what other states do. Sure, happy to do that. And what would be the most useful form for you to receive that information? Certainly written as the easiest to disseminate, not only for this committee, but other members of the legislature that are interested in examining this as well. And certainly, I'd be interested in inviting you back to share some of that information with us and take us through that. So happy to do that. I know you have a day job as well, but I think that would be very helpful to us. Okay, happy to do that. Any other questions for a moment? Well, you may not know this. The current status of the Massachusetts sunset language, do you know if that's being actively pursued? I believe there have been a legislative, proposed legislation to remove the sunset or extend it. I don't know that those have been successful, but I do know the position of many in Massachusetts is that there's nothing stopping DEP from extending regulations beyond 2020. Any final more question? Just to kind of order things in my mind. So would you add the ruling on the Supreme? Supreme Judicial Court. And then there was an executive order and also additional statutes. Regulations. Regulations. Yes. So they were done through a rulemaking process, not. That's right. So the six that you listed there were rules. So we had the executive order and the rules. That's right. And the executive order was on the governor's initiative. Can't speak to exactly what was going through his mind and why he compelled to do that, but that wasn't required by the court case. I think it was Governor Baker's way of acknowledging the court case and showing an effort to address those issues. But that was sort of above and beyond and separate from that. But the rulemaking that came out of it satisfied both, well, it satisfied the requirements of the GWSA. It followed from the ruling of the Supreme Judicial Court and also turned out to satisfy the executive order, which was restating what was already required on that front. The executive order was restating what was already required by the Supreme Judicial Court. And the executive order does some additional things related to climate. As far as these regulations, that's what the executive order did. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. All right. Good morning. Good morning. Thanks. So I saw Mark on stairs and I guess it's kind of all right. Why don't we get going? So I appreciate you joining us. One of the things that, is this committee kind of pokes around the world of the Warming Solutions Act. Legislation, one of the important parts of understanding how that would work in practice is understanding how measurement occurs of some of these things, namely Greenhouse gas emissions. And one thing that I think this committee is interested in is if we forward line and this state was operating under a regime where we have to have fairly timely recording and data on this. How would that in fact work? So I think what we're interested in is what do we do now? What might we have to do if we look forward to a time where we're tracking this on a, whether it's an annual basis or every couple of years. So that is an introduction. Welcome. Thank you for joining us. And if you could introduce yourself for the record that would be sure. Yes, thank you for having me. I have to testify on kind of the emissions inventory as you just mentioned. My name is Colin Smythe from the DEC Air Quality and Climate Division. Yeah, and I've kind of provided a couple of slides just to kind of walk through the basics, but please feel free to interrupt me if you have any questions or anything as we go. And you may, I wasn't sure exactly how in depth you wanted to get on some of these sectors. So I don't have real in-depth slides, but I'm happy to talk in-depth about the different sectors if you'd like to do that. So yeah, to kick it off, kind of, well, our little graph shows kind of our overall global trend, but kind of, yeah, just an introductory slide of the place we'd probably all love to be right now. And let me jump into the inventory here. Colin, what are the two lines on the graph? Sure, I believe that the black one is kind of the, and I'd have to go back, I'm sorry, to look at the total specifics, but it's the kind of the annual average and the red is kind of the annual fluctuations based on generally vegetation uptake versus winter months. So there's more sequestration during certain parts of the year than others. So I can say that annual. Yeah, yeah. And then just from this one particular monitoring station, there are certainly others. But this was, yeah, the one that popped up and it looked interesting. So to get into greenhouse gas emissions in Vermont, so the inventory is, it's an estimate of anthropogenic generated greenhouse gas emissions by sector. And so those are emissions that are human caused, essentially. And so what the inventory does is it attempts to provide kind of as comprehensive as possible and as accurate as possible a picture of our greenhouse gas emissions in the state. And I listed 2008 to 2015, just because those are the years the report has been produced, but the data itself goes from the 1990 baseline to currently 2015. And I'll get into a little bit more of why 2015 is the current year. The methodologies that we use, they are consistent with, I'm gonna have to read this because I'm always botched this name. Nevermind, greenhouse gas inventory and reference case projections 1990 to 2030 study that was part of the 2007 Governor's Commission on Climate Change Report, which was a pretty extensive report and was honestly before my time, but was something that was definitely used to kind of put this inventory together in the first place. We also follow the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC guidelines for inventory creation and kind of just a side note that we do coordinate with other agencies on specific data needs, Public Service Department, Forest Parks and Recreation and definitely VTrans data for certain aspects of this. So kind of an important note is this is not a measurement. I'm sorry. And I apologize. Can you help me just orient myself to this conversation? Sure. So what department do you work for? And you were here recording and like what is your job and like what are you working for? Sure. Being. Okay, I'm just, yeah, I'm sorry, I didn't cover that well enough. Department of Environmental Conservation and Air Quality and Climate section. I work in the planning section within that. So my job is essentially, well, one of my jobs is to put together this inventory to track greenhouse gas emissions in Vermont through time, essentially as they relate to the goals, which I'll touch on in a minute, but I'm sure you're all aware of them and familiar with them. Okay. Please walk us through this for me. Sure. And the, I think the goals are in a slide or two. Do you want, would you like me to get into them now? Or do you? I just want to make sure I'm with you. Yeah, no, I appreciate that. You're inventorying based on the goals that we have and you're going to interpret this. Yes. That's your- That's the reason that we're doing this inventory is kind of to track emissions by sector and kind of see the path that we're taking in terms of those goals. Is there any language that requires you to do that? Statutory language? Yes. And I believe that I have that in the next slide too. Okay, great. I'm happy to wait. I just want to make sure- Okay, sure. Yeah, if I don't cover enough, please let me know. Thank you. So yeah, just kind of another note. It's not an actual measurement of greenhouse gases that are emitted by any particular sector. It's an estimate that's based on generally some sort of, some sort of an input data like gallons of fuel used or kilowatts of electricity consumed depends on the sector. And then an emission factor is applied to that. So it gets a little complicated depending on the sector. For example, if you have a residential boiler that will have a certain kind of emissions profile. That generates a certain amount of carbon dioxide per gallon of fuel combusted in that appliance. And so the inventory uses, honestly, a lot of EPA generated tools that are made specifically to capture all of the specific pieces within each sector. And so yeah, that's where I can get into more detail if you want, but just important to note that it's not an actual measurement, it's an estimate based on the set generally fuel use. So does for your purposes is wood burning considered carbon neutral? In this inventory, yes. We do, because that is currently the EPA's stance and the IBCC stance. We do in the inventory report kind of give a scenario where we would account for the carbon dioxide release from wood burning through for the residential sector and for electricity generation. So we do have that in the report, but we do not currently subtract that out from our gross totals, if that makes sense. You don't subtract that out. I'm sorry, yeah, we don't include it. I'm sorry that, yeah, scratch that. We do not include that portion in there. I was thinking to the sequestration piece that kind of goes hand in hand with that. We also do not subtract out the sequestration because doing one without the other is problematic. Did that answer your question all right? Yes, and do you, just wondering how granular, you know, like in calculating kilowatts to you, is there a factor for transmission losses and things like that or? Not in the right answer to this. Sure, yeah, the electricity sector is probably the most convoluted of the sectors. We, in our calculations, do not account for electricity loss, but when we do the electricity sector, we use the kilowatt hours that are purchased by utilities. And so, I'm trying to work through this in my head, apologies for the time, but so we essentially apply a factor based on the generation source, how the electricity was generated, which is information the public service has, and public service also accounts for the renewable energy credits that are sold, and so that's kind of rolled into our calculations as well. And so, we end up calculating by utility, the kilowatt hours used, what their generation sources that they purchased from were, and are able to generate the emissions associated with those. And I will just note, sorry we're getting down the rabbit hole, for the electricity sector though, we do consumption-based emissions, not what we generate, because we feel that that's kind of a more fair representation of our emissions that we're responsible for. Sad. I didn't want to be real, you were. I appreciate the question. Thank you. Another quick question. You mentioned that the emissions are calculated generally on usage, on fuel usage, and can you say why it's generally, or is it a pretty direct calculation? Yeah, maybe generally it was the wrong term. It depends on the sector, I guess, was when I was trying to get out there. So, for example, the electricity sector, I guess on fuel usage is a little different for the waste sector, for example. It's not based on fuel usage. The waste sector. Yeah, sorry, like emissions from landfills, or waste, or water. It's based on kind of, landfill gas generation from landfills. So, in terms of the fuel usage itself, it's a very exact calculation, based on those rates that I talked about. Sure thing. Which one of them is something or something? Now, sorry, I probably wasn't able to really clear on it. Any other question before I kind of continue on? Just a clarification, that your estimates are based on consumption and dump factor in generation. Dump factor what? Generation. For electricity. So, they will include generation in the state, but it's not just the emissions from the generation. So, when we come up with these emission factors for the different electricity generation sources, say gas turbine, or whatever it may be, and we apply that to kind of all the kilowatt hours that are purchased by a utility. And so, I think it's probably four fifths of those are generated outside of Vermont, but if the utility bought from a generator in Vermont, that would also be included in the calculation. I guess the only point I was trying to make is if we only counted the emissions from the electricity we generated in the state, they'd be very small, because we don't generate very much electricity in Vermont. So, it's and? Yes. Yes. I guess I have a question as well. So, the formula that you use for all these purposes to find out, is that the same formula that's used across the country and the world? I would have to say it depends on the sector. We try to make it as consistent within kind of, especially the region as we can, because we realize how important it is to be able to kind of make comparisons possible between ourselves and say, Massachusetts. But that being said, I think it really depends on the situation, because some data Massachusetts might have that we don't have available or vice versa. And so, we try to balance it out and make it as kind of consistent as we can, but it's not always possible to have it exactly the same. But kind of as I mentioned, the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Guidelines, there's something that pretty much, I'm gonna say worldwide inventory creators try to use to maintain that consistency that you're talking about. Thank you. That's true. Is there any other questions before I? Okay. Oh, before I move on, actually, I will note that, and I think Jenny mentioned it in the last presentation, but the units of these emissions are in the report are a million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent. And so that is essentially saying, we count carbon dioxide, which is the vast majority of all these greenhouse gas emissions, but there are other gases that are included, like she mentioned, sulfur hexafluoride, and I'll get into the, I think there are six that are covered, and those are generally actually, they're all more potent than carbon dioxide. And so some of them are way more potent, like sulfur hexafluoride is 22,800 times more potent than carbon dioxide. And so it's, you end up, you end up essentially multiplying the emissions of the gases by that value, which is called the global warming potential, and I won't go into that, but it's essentially just a multiplier to make them all comparable and to carbon dioxide, so you can add them all together for your total. So carbon dioxide equivalent? Yes. All right, so I guess we're going backwards a little bit here, but kind of why do we, why do we put the cemetery together? I kind of mentioned it's really due to state statute. It was initiated under Act 209 and built on the Governor's Commission on Climate Change Report in 2007 that I mentioned, we used some of the methodologies for. And it's like I kind of mentioned to track our progress and kind of, it's a relatively high level just due to the data sources available, which I'll talk a little bit more about in a few minutes, but we try to maintain consistency and make it as useful and accurate as possible. And also we do it to kind of be a participant in kind of the regional efforts to reduce carbon dioxide and also the nationwide and the worldwide efforts to figure out a way to solve this problem. So this graph, which you may or may not have seen before, is one from the greenhouse gas emissions inventory report, the most recent one. And you'll notice on kind of the left hand access, those are the million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent per year. And on the bottom access is kind of all the years from the 1990 baseline of which our goals are based on. Their percent reduction goals to 2015, which is the most recent inventory year. And then kind of the points farther along out in time are the different statute and also the CEP goals and kind of the various trajectories that we would have to be on to reach those. And I realize in the global warming solutions build, sounds like those may be slightly adjusted and those are obviously not shown on here, but yeah, so they're kind of the current standing. Colin, can I take you back to that slide? Sure. And I'm new to this committee. Okay. And I'm also new to the legislature relative to what was going on here in 2008. So I'm not familiar with Acts 209. And maybe you're not the person to speak, but as you've got it on the slide, I'm gonna ask you. Fair enough. And I wanna go back and look at what Act 2009 prescribes, not only be measured, but also how Governor Douglas and then maybe subsequently Governor Shumlin and how this is working with the Scott administration now. So what we're here to talk about today is measurement. Measurement typically is part of a broader strategy. You don't just measure and put numbers in a drawer. You measure to actually use those numbers to take action or maybe develop a strategy. What, and maybe this is prescribed in this Act, what are these numbers to be used for? What is this data to be used for? We're tracking, but the work that you're doing, does it then move along to someone else, whether it's at DEC or ANR or the administration to then take these numbers and say, action needs to be taken, a strategy needs to be developed? Is there someone that you are working with in the administration that is taking action in our purpose-cribing policy based on these numbers? Is taking this data. Honestly, I can't really answer that. I can tell you that the administration is certainly aware of this report and they're aware of these values, but I can't really speak to what they do with the state after I give it to them. Okay. Just to follow up on that. Sure. So we have a climate change website, which I stumbled upon this weekend for the state. And I'm wondering, does this data get into this? What is that, how is this connected to the website? And maybe this is stating us a little further in the field, I see we have the deputy secretary here as well. Maybe you wanna hold on on this, but. It just kind of relates to this slide again, kind of what are we doing with this information? Sure, yeah. I guess I'm not exactly sure. The website where these reports are posted is up to date. I'm not sure. Which website is that? The. So I'm gonna ask your chair to manage them. Thank you. Sure. Peter walked deputy secretary, they didn't seem to have resources. The broader climate change website was a creation of a few years ago that had created ambition on what it was going to include all the sort of work that was happening around the state. It never had the resources assigned to it to actually be able to be maintained. And so it was a great snapshot in time that there simply is, we don't have enough time in the resource of the day to be able to keep updated to the, to the sufficiency that you clearly expect from going to that website and seeing how dynamic it appears to be, but it does not, it would require significant effort to keep that to the level that it's started. Okay. Laura, do you have a phone? The name of the report that you, yeah. So it does appear the greenhouse gas inventory reports from 2007 or present, which is what you're reporting to us on. Is that right? I'm sorry, the 2007 on the webpage you're looking at. Yeah, climate change down for Montego. 2007 should be the bottom one here, the greenhouse gas. Yeah, so that was the governor's report that was done. Sorry, the one, thank you, that governor Douglas kind of put into play and apologies, it was before my time. And that was the one I referenced where we use the methodologies from that report. It's a very comprehensively done report. And so I wasn't involved in that climatechange.gov website and so I'm not sure if they may link to our inventory reports, I'm not really sure. So it does look like the inventory reports are on there, but Mr. Chairman, I just asked the deputy secretary one more question on this. So is there, so the climatechange.vermont.gov is not where we are aggregating all of our activity and measurement of progress. Is there a website? So the website that Colin is referring you to is the division's website within the DEC website that provides the comprehensive information on all of the inventory work that has been done to date. So which the climatechange.vermont.gov website pulled from for that data. So just one more question, maybe hopefully it's just one more question. So the, why do we still have this other website up if it's getting out of date? So that is a question that I can't fully answer. Who could answer that? Well, I mean, we have, we inherited this website when we started, we didn't have the resources to maintain it. It does have some really interesting material on it that is still a value and I simply, I don't believe in taking climatechange websites down from governments. So I know that might come as a shock to everybody, but we, and I would love to have it be regularly updated to serve as purpose, but we simply don't have the resources to do it. Just to add a little bit though, but we are updating that in other places. We are updating a very small portion of that information through the work that Colin and his team are doing around the inventory pieces. There are lots of other pieces about that, about that website that would need to be updated on your continual basis on all the solutions work, which is really where the dynamism is happening. All the changes that you all work on, that we're working on in various these two seasons in the life, that just simply takes resources to build. And so, is that, so I'm trying, I'm kind of struggling to understand, so we have a website that is from our climate change website, and then we have DC compiling some information over here. I'm hearing you say it would be too hard to aggregate all of the information, which leads me to believe that there's a lot of work happening in this space. It's not too hard. We simply don't, we don't have anybody to do it. Based on the resources. Correct. Excuse me, not too hard. We don't have the resources. It would be not that challenging, but it would require a significant level of effort to keep it maintained, and to have it be useful as a resource. And we simply don't have the resources to build it. Did we have the resources at one time? Like what paid for the website? There was, to my understanding, there was never actually a plan in place on how it was going to be maintained. Can anybody tell us why it came to be? Not in this administration. Do we have less counsel on here? I don't think it, it wasn't a let, it wasn't a, it was a, it was an initiative of the previous administration who's not a legislative mandate. Okay, I promise this will be my last one because I know Colin has a little time. So is there, is there a person within the administration who is aware of all of these bits of information? Is that you? Is that Colin? Is there, you know, because presumably there's a lot of information relative to this across departments? I think I've probably come as close to that as possible, but not, we, all of the work is being done in various agencies. And so there is not a sort of coordinated, you know, there we have coordinated functions to look at all the work being done and make sure that we're collaborating, but to have one person being the warehouse of all that information and be able to then articulate it in a form we don't have. One department, one agency, one entity, I mean, is there, is there any central place where this information is coming together? No. Really? I mean, that's not dissimilar to any number of issues when you look at the way in which we work across agencies to tackle a topic like opioid addiction. There are lots of different agencies in departments that are involved in that discussion and no one single entity owns that whole thing. So, but we are contemplating legislation that would put our goals into statute that would really, I think, compel us and require us to have a good handle, not only on what we're doing, but what we need to do and where that work is happening and where it needs to happen. I don't, I don't, I'm not, I'm not just agreeing with you, I'm just, I'm saying current state is where this is working. We don't want the conservation law foundation to sue us, you know what I'm saying? So we don't want the conservation law foundation to sue us, so we've got to get this square in line. It's okay, proceed. All right. Thanks. Sure. All right, so yeah, we touched on the, just on the goals there, touched on kind of our graph here. Any questions on that before I move on from that? Kind of our trend, okay. Figured you probably had one. So I guess this will kind of give us a chance to dive a little bit deeper into these sections if you'd like, so that the sectors covered in the inventory include transportation sector, the residential, commercial and industrial, call it RCI to save the tongue, residential, commercial, industrial fuel use, agricultural sector, the electricity sector, industrial processes sector, of which we don't have a whole lot in Vermont, but we have a couple of major ones, the waste and wastewater and the landfills and wastewater and the fossil fuel industry, which sounds like a really big sector, but it's actually only includes kind of the transmission of really natural gas pipeline. And so it's actually a very small percentage of the total because it's Vermont gas is really the only one doing that and it's not an extensive system. Is that leakage or is that specifically leakage? That is leakage. The use of that natural gas will be covered in the residential, commercial, industrial sector. So it's kind of getting both kind of the transportation of that fuel by pipeline and the combustion of the fuel. So with the sectors included in the GHG emission totals, which are estimates, are you working with, what is it, six other agencies to aggregate that information? No, not six other agencies anyway. Would you like me to kind of get into a little, I feel like to answer your question and have to get into a little bit of the details. So transportation, for example, I don't work directly with V-trans, but I use reports produced by V-trans. And that data, I end up as part of a separate process that's actually called the National Emissions Inventory that I have to submit data to EPA for. I give them data related to our vehicle fleet, vehicle miles traveled, fuel use, age distributions for our fleet, a whole host of different inputs and EPA actually, and they do this for the majority of the states, models kind of the emissions for this national inventory. And so for transportation, we use that. And so I would be happy to work with V-trans, particular case, I just use one of their reports. For the residential commercial industrial, that's kind of more federal data and that kind of gets in the data source below as well. And so to my knowledge, we don't have great data on fuel use broken out the way it needs to be broken out for this inventory. And so what we end up using is the kind of, it's called EIA, the Energy Information Administration data set where regulated entity, I believe, have to report to EIA. And so it's a national level data set that gets incorporated into a lot of these different estimation tools. So that's what we use for that. Agriculture is kind of the same. I haven't really been able to connect with the Ag Department or find data from them. So it's really just the default USDA, sorry, U.S. I know what they are, but my question is, why haven't you been able to connect with them, I thought that was interesting. Not to. No, that's a fair question. I'm just not sure who to reach out to, honestly, and they're just a lot of different moving pieces. Yeah, absolutely. Electricity, we do work with PSD, so I do get the data directly from them. Industrial Balanceses is, I'm not sure even what agency I would reach out to on that. We generally use kind of the federal greenhouse gas reporting data for that. So it captures kind of only the very largest facilities. The big one is Global Foundries in Vermont. And then Waste, we do work with the Waste Sector on kind of methodologies and fossil fuels. Again, kind of a, it's a national data set to which we apply emission factors. I imagine one source of GHGs in the agricultural sector would be the use of the diesel or farm equipment? Yes. And I was just wondering about the emissions from like manure and things like that. Do you take that into consideration or not? Yes, it's actually, the diesel usage is not captured in the agricultural sector. It's captured in the transportation sector that is broken out into multiple sub-sectors. Sub-sectors in the non-road portion of the transportation. But in agriculture, yes, agricultural soils and tariff fermentation and manure management are the three sectors coming from that. And that would generate methane, right? Which then would have to be converted to carbon. Yes. That's the equivalent. Yeah, well, absolutely. I have some questions that I don't think in the time lab that we still have, you could probably answer, but I would like to follow up on how you're measuring electricity because to me, if you're just measuring it on the consumption and the number of kilowatt hours that are used in total, I just have a lot of questions that I like. How does, on which side is net metering measured? Is that show up as kilowatt hours used? And if so, are you counting the solar panels as in terms of how much power of the month gets from that source? Those are the kind of questions I would have. And also just in terms of waste, just I'm just curious whether how you count the emissions from the coventry landfill given that it's generating electricity in this place and some other source? Sure. The electricity, I will probably have to get back to you on and say it's a little bit complex and I'm gonna have to think about the net metering question a little bit. I'm not an electricity expert, but the waste, the waste I can answer for you. So in terms of coventry, we use our data that is reported to the air division for the point source registration. They submit every year the amount of landfill gas that is generated. And they also submit reports from the entities running the engines. And so we're able to kind of get at the, we make some assumptions on fugitive emission rates, which I think they actually estimate as well in their reporting, but we kind of, we essentially say that if it's combusted in the engine and we leave a 98% efficiency that we don't include that carbon dioxide because it's considered biogenic, which is kind of a whole nother issue with this inventory, but those are the guidelines. And so you generate methane, a lot of that, 85% of that is captured and burned in these engines, which have like a 98% efficiency. And so you end up with a very kind of a small percentage that you actually count that doesn't get combusted or it's fugitive. Hopefully that answered your question a little bit. That's what I was hoping to take care of. Okay. Any other questions before I continue? I do have one more question. You mentioned that you're not an electric electrician. Yes. So you did, you depend on the public service department to do the calculations for the electricity sector? No, but we depend on the public service department to give us the data kind of, as I mentioned before, by utility, by generation source. And they account for the wrecks taken out. That's the part that I don't have anything to do with and don't totally understand how they do that process. But what they end up giving us is then usable. And the general process is we take, we are able to derive emissions factors from the Iso-New England grid mix that they report and apply those emission factors, kind of the average and annual emission factor for a specific generation source and apply that to all the kilowatt hours. And so it's a relatively straightforward calculation at that point. And so, yeah, we have gone over that methodology with the public service department and they kind of helped us work on that. I would imagine that that's fairly accurate because any solar being generated through net metering is mostly behind the meter and that basically reduces demand. So if you're not consuming electricity from the grid, then it, which is, well, if you're not consuming electricity from the grid, then your solar is not in carbon producing, your... So that would kind of be accounted for as well. Yes, I think you're right. Great. I think that's kind of difficult. Any other questions on that? All right, I guess just, I think we're getting close to the end of these slides here, but just to touch briefly on the gases covered that I mentioned, there were, yeah, I think seven now, carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, hydrofluorocarbons, which actually encompass kind of a wide range of gas and same with perfluorocarbons. Sulphurhexafluoride, which I mentioned and nitrogen trifluoride was kind of a recent addition that has become more of a known issue. There are more emissions than people had realized and it's also got a very high multiplier. I think it's 17,200 or something like that. It's... What does that come from? What does that cause for that? Honestly, I'm not sure all the sources. I know that there's some of it, I believe, in semiconductor manufacturing process, but I don't believe that's the only source for that one. Sulphurhexafluoride, that is also kind of a product of semiconductor manufacturing, but also maybe not a product of, but incorporated into the process and necessary component, but also with the electricity distribution lines that were mentioned in the last presentation, kind of insulating purposes for that. But as I mentioned, all those other than carbon dioxide have multipliers and some are more than others. Two questions, so one is, realizing that you're working with a wide variety of sources, not doing actual measurement yourself, and knowing that I see things in the media like fugitive emissions from Boston's natural gas system initially estimated at 1.7%, now estimated somewhere near 5%, I think, or so we're talking about a 300% increase. Just wondering about the degree of confidence your numbers, your numbers. Sure, that's a fair question. I think a lot of times it really just depends on the sector in terms of the natural gas distribution. I don't have data specifically on the accuracy of it. And I guess as a related question. Sure. Is the overall emissions large enough and diverse enough that any errors in any one sector are sort of absorbed broadly, or is there something that would really skew the numbers? I think I would say that it's likely absorbed, at least to some degree. Our total emissions are not incredibly high even though we are kind of going in the wrong direction. But there's been a fair amount of kind of scrutiny of these methodologies and all these regional and even worldwide groups trying not to miss particular sectors or particular pieces that should be incorporated. In terms of the data quality, I honestly don't know. We kind of do the best we can and we try to make sure everything makes sense. But in terms of looking at a national data set on fuel consumption, I don't have any way to know whether or not that's correct or not. One more related question with addition of things like nitrogen tri-fluoride and recognition of sulfur hexafluoride, so changes in what you're measuring and the recognition of their impact. Does that, I'm trying to phrase this properly, how does that affect the 1990 baseline assumptions? Yeah, that's definitely a fair question. So that's sometimes a little bit difficult to handle. We try in those instances to, we hope that when that happens there's a good enough data source to kind of tell us what has been going on since 1990. We always try to update all the way back because if we didn't, like you suggest, it would skew kind of where we need to get to if we just adjusted the most recent emissions. So we always try to either project it back or hopefully have a good enough data source to go back that far and add it in. But we're definitely very aware of that. Yes, hopefully that's the answer to that. Sure. Other questions? Not too much. I guess I touched on some of these before so I won't go over them again, but the data sources, I touched on the National Issues Inventory and just kind of making the point that a lot of these are national level data sets that we don't have a whole lot of control over and can't always be entirely sure of the accuracy of. But we do the best we can to make sure they make sense and are consistent through time. Generally speaking, is the consensus that most of these are kind of accurate? Some are kind of high, some are kind of low, any particular corrections that the industry might use as a whole on a particular data set? Yeah, not really that I'm aware of. I'm trying to think if there's, yeah, I think it's kind of if they find something, some inconsistency and say they, if kind of one of these regional groups or a particular state finds something, they'll point it out to everybody and say, you should be aware of it. Just to take it into account to maintain the consistency. But I don't think there's any kind of red flag ones that are, that I know of anyway, sure. So the graph that you showed us of our total emissions, do you also graph by sector? Yes. So we can see if a particular sector is spiking. Yep, that is all in the reports that I link to in here but I'd be happy to send you the actual reports if you would like to see those too. Sure. Sure thing. And actually I'm going to insert a related question here. Do you also, I don't know if the answer is yes, but do you present the data by gas? Do we see that while we're tracking things per ton of carbon, really where our issue is, is in nothing. And it's so much more of a problematic gas emission relative to carbon dioxide that even though the volume may be smaller, the effect is significant. Yeah, that's a good point. We do not present it that way. I do have it that way. I just haven't kind of compiled it in that fashion and we've always kind of done it by sector, but we do occasionally get questions on kind of the total carbon dioxide. And so I essentially just have to go back in and tally up all the CO2 specific pieces. The reason I asked the question and then you've added to this this morning in our prior witness and spoken to it as well, I've never heard of sulfur or hexyl fluoride before, but was impressed by what a problematic gas it is. And you've also talked about some of these other gases that we measure and their relative harm to carbon dioxide and that's why I ask, even from a volume standpoint, they might be quite small from an actual effect. And I understand that's captured in the total amount, but you've answered my question. For sure, no, and that's definitely fair and I to kind of expand on that, I think methane is definitely second to carbon dioxide, but even methane is a relatively small portion. It's not tiny, but it's relatively small compared to carbon dioxide. These other gases are definitely, especially the sulfur and hexyl fluoride and nitrogen tri fluoride and some of the HFCs and VFCs. They're definitely very important because they are much more potent and they tend to last a long time in the atmosphere as well. So it's kind of a double whammy and so they may not have the kind of immediate threat that carbon dioxide has, but they're definitely important because of that fact allowing it to build up is definitely detrimental. So I'd like to go down two slides to the table. Sure. To this one. Look at the different sectors and what last column, I don't know, it's just the one that tells you whether it's increased or decreased over time. It's a bottom line. It's a total gross omission. Total, yeah. For each of the sectors, some of the sectors have actually decreased their omissions. Other sectors have increased and I think you can see the biggest increase in transportation in the... Yep, those are definitely two of the bigger ones. I don't see it. So by sector, talking about whether it's increased or decreased, for instance, electricity supply and demand has gone from 1.09 in 1990 down to 1.00. Yeah, sorry, let me find that one. Oh, yes. Residential commercial industrial fuel use has gone from 2.41 up to 2.78. That's the heating fuel, right? Right. Heating. Transportation went from 3.38 to 4.33. That's the biggest jump, I think. Yep. The fossil fuel industry, 0.0077 to 0.0050. So that's gone down. And industrial processes, 0.21 to 0.58. Significant increase, but not that much of an attribution. Right. Waste management, 0.27. Do you have a question? 0.07. No, I'm just going over these for the application of the committee. Thank you. Agriculture 1.22 down to 1.14, so that was a decrease. More up point, more up 16% over 99, total gross. Matthew spoke, we skipped over slide six, and I've got something for you. Sure, I can go back and touch on it. I think I've kind of touched on it already, just the data sources. And that's generally why it's, why only through 2015 is the current inventory. And because a lot of these large data sources take a long time for these agencies to compile and QA, make sure everything looks all right, it takes them a long time to get them out. And the same is kind of true a lot of times for some of the tools that EPA puts out for us to help us all calculate these emissions. And so that's why the lag time. And that being said, 2016 is probably, the data is probably there, just about there. So I'll be trying to put that together probably in the next couple of months here, but I'll have to kind of double check on, double check on all the sources and make sure they're all set. And what's the issue of report like this? Generally it's every year. Yeah, it gets a little bit complicated, especially with transportation because one, it's the biggest contributing sector. And since we base it on the national emissions inventory, which unfortunately is only every three years, we have to try to accurately project between years or going forward. Like right now they're working on the 2017 national emissions inventory. And so that's expected to be out in 2020 sometime, I think, and so we'll either have to wait to put that number in or give it our best estimate and either revisit it later or, yeah, kind of update it. But yeah, so there are a lot of moving pieces in there. Does the Energy Information Administration don't they compile fossil fuel usage, do they compile it on a monthly basis? You know, I'm not sure about that. It could be, I'm not sure, honestly. They definitely have a yearly, but it could certainly be more frequently. They can give you figures on how much is imported into a particular state, which you assume, I guess it's imported into a state that's consumed. Yeah. Or something. Yeah, I'm not, maybe, yeah, I think there's potential issues with people getting it and driving it out of state or filling up out of state and driving in in terms of the transportation stuff that's a little bit hard to account for. There's a lot of oil-supported people that's filled in. Tell us in the details, yeah, but. But eventually there's a steady state and then anything coming in is going to be consumed and so forth. Yeah. Great, any other questions on that? Okay, I'm going to go back to my answer. Who do you work with, primarily? Who do I work with on this inventory? Yeah. In terms of kind of other DC people or other agencies? In general. In general? I put this inventory together, essentially myself and my supervisor was doing it before me, but we collaborate with public service and Forest Parks and Recreation on the sequestration part of it and the waste sector if we should have any specific questions. So we definitely reach out when there's a need, but a lot of these methodologies have kind of, honestly, was before my time. I've only been here a few years, but my supervisor previously was doing this and he definitely reached out and kind of came up with these methodologies with these other agencies. And so I'm assuming they told him the appropriate data sets and everything like that. So just with regard to our bill 462 and how this information is coming in, I mean, estimated. And then what 462 really compels us to do, which is, you know, put the statutes requirements. I'm feeling like there's some disconnection here that might need to be addressed as part of that. Yes? Sorry, in terms of the accuracy. So it feels like you're measuring, so we're talking about putting into Vermont statute something that requires us to make progress on lowering our emissions. And the, right now we're measuring our emissions in and it's not completely connected to all of our emissions lowering programs. So I mean, it's more right now, it's connected to the data and not any efforts or programs or things that are happening. Do you understand what I'm saying? Am I messing this up? Yeah, I think they're two different, two separate things. Yes. You're measuring to the extent you can compile the data where we think Vermont's greenhouse gas emissions are. Full step. Right. I'm sorry, I think to get at your question a little bit is I think our hope is that the programs that are being implemented would reflect or would be reflected in these totals. So if you had a program to reduce residential fuel use by fuel switching or something like that, we would hope that that would be picked up in our data set. And so those emissions wouldn't be counted, but it depends on how granular you're gonna get. Right, and I think this legislation is us saying we probably need to stop over. Yeah, I'm not even, I'm not sure how to answer that one. Well, it's more of a, it's more just kind of trying to work through this. Yeah. So Colin, a question that I wanna ask you very specifically, Robin kind of asked it, it's okay, you can go ahead. Let's see if it's the same answer. Well, I want to use really small words so that I can understand it. When we look at your slide four, which shows that the trajectory of greenhouse gas emissions over time. Yep. And we consider some of the greenhouse gases that have been taken into account. For example, is the 2014 figure that you come up with, is that an apples to apples comparison with the measurement that was done in 1995, for example, because some of the players on the field with regard to gases have changed. It is as close as we can make it. I would say yes, without looking at the actual nitty gritty details out of hard time, kind of swearing to that, but we certainly, if there's a change that we have to implement in the current year, say they find a new gas, we always try to say, well, how much of that was emitted back in 1990? And what would that, like how much would we have to essentially add to each year to incorporate that new finding because it's a legitimate emission that was there up each year. We just never realized it was there before. So we certainly try, but sometimes the data's there and sometimes it's not, so some of those estimates are better. So we have lobby and lunch bell. Yeah. Oh, shit. Oh, shit. Thank you, Kyle. Thanks a lot for having me. I feel the five point on that. Oftentimes the science around a global warming potential, that emission factor for a time comes, changes. And so then we'll go back and adjust the inventory for previous years. So in 2015, if something changed, we show what changed and how that impacted. We're not gonna necessarily change the reports back from previous years. That's why the current version is so important because it reflects all the changes. Very graph may change. Absolutely, yeah, that's a good point, yeah. How many copies did you grab? Six. All the same, I hope. Zachary, can you join us? Thank you for having me. Yeah, thanks for joining us. Thanks for this work, you guys. I've never breathed this yet. Yeah, it's perfect. So I'm pleased that you can be here to take us through this. We've probably said in here a few times that you wouldn't mind introducing yourself to the record group for taking this. And then the floor is yours to take it to. I'm gonna pull this up when you've got it up there. Thanks, Dan. Yeah, so my name is Zach Hamelman for those of you who I haven't met. And I'm a student at the University of Vermont. I've been around the committee this semester. I've been working with representative Yom Tachka and my professor, Claire Ginger, who's teaching a course in public service. He's here with us today as well. And so the report that you have in front of you is focused on the idea of using the Clean Energy Development Fund as a vehicle for administering an electric vehicle incentive program. And I'd really like to update you on the status of the fund, because I'm not sure if that's something you've been briefed on at all recently, but the available money in the fund has dwindled over the years and there's been a focus on advancing the advanced with heating market. And so I'm gonna try and show how the Clean Energy Development Fund and electric vehicle incentive program can be similar to the advanced with heating schemes in rebate systems. So yeah, I'll jump in by walking you through the report and interrupt me if you guys have any questions. So for those of you who don't know, the CEDF is administered through the Department of Public Service. It contains an advisory committee, the Clean Energy Development Board, and members of the board are appointed by the legislature. The chair is Andrew Duvall, who we've heard testimony from, I think this session, and the co-chair, Sam Swanson, who works for PACE Law School, works remotely in Vermont, and I talked to him, had some conversations, so I draw from those in this report. There's a fund manager who is a full-time staffer from the Department of Public Service, and that fund manager is Andrew Perchlich, who is also now an active senator in the Vermont State Senate. So they have been conflicts with, he's not able to work full-time any longer on the CEDF because of his role in the Senate, which might be basically with an advent of a new program might be difficult and would need to be navigated with his part-time roles. So moving forward, the multi-year strategic plan published in 2018 for the CEDF says that, basically talks a lot about the funding, says that it may be powered down. I have the scrolling powers here, don't I? Yeah, you do. So I talk about the fund manager, it's all in the report. And here we have some quotes from the multi-year strategic plan. And then in my conversations with Sam Swanson, the co-chair, he basically told me that the Clean Energy Development Board is not, they're not advocating or searching for new sources of funding. That's not their job. Their job is to manage what funds come to them that are appropriated by the legislature. So I'm gonna step back for a second and say that the majority of money that was used to fund the CEDF in the past came from regular payments by Vermont Yankee and through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which some of those dollars are still available for deployment. But the Vermont Yankee funds, the last one came in, I think it was 2014, through a large sum from the legislature as well. And as I said, we looked through some of their funding models for the next fiscal year and over time and the money has dropped significantly. Most of the income comes from existing loan repayments from past projects. So this is why I've compiled this report on using the Volkswagen and other automobile settlement funds to help bring back the CEDF and add a new program for electric vehicles. Here we have some of the types of programs that the CEDF runs and we're gonna be looking mostly at the rebates and because a lot of existing electric vehicle incentives come in the form of rebates or tax credits. I really looked at how the CEDF has administered some of those heating incentive programs on a small scale and they could end, well, I'll get to this in a second, but at the Clean Energy Development Board meeting, which was held a few weeks ago, they talked about how their prior experience issuing rebates on a small scale, ask for a you get it policy, would work pretty well for electric vehicle program. Are there any questions? Is this something you're actively considering at this meeting? Yeah, so in this meeting they took a good chunk of time to talk about current legislation. They know they've heard rumors in the state house of using this money for the settlement dollars for electric vehicles, something the governor has expressed interest in bringing more EVs online and they're like different parties competing. I'm not sure what the current status is of the funds. It sounds like it's still in budget considerations. But they said that if they were given the money, they could start a program and the administrative costs to do so would probably be lower than if like say the agency of transportation were to start and hold a process because it's a complicated establishing and calculating costs for incentives like what works well economically is a complicated process, something I don't know a lot about, but they have experience doing that. And so is the issue that you're trying to anticipate what the uptake is and so you need a sufficient pool of funds to accommodate that or that if you don't sufficiently understand what the uptake is going to be, you're going to run out and send the dollars and maybe cause the opposite reaction which is kind of discouragement in purchasing the vehicle. Yeah, I think, well obviously you want the money in the pot so that you can ensure that you can promise that these incentives will work or be given out and also to cover some of those administrative costs like the hiring of staffer which they said would most likely be necessary, which would be necessary to administer the program. But basically the way they would do this is by probably consulting with like going to other groups in the state, other utilities and saying, here's this money, I'll bus set up a program and they would coordinate the communication and the work between the utilities. And their customers. And their customers, yeah, exactly. And that's how they've done it with the small scale renewable energy incentive program is they've gone through like Efficiency Vermont and other groups and made contracts for that. In the meeting, like Jared Duvall was the one who answered the two big questions. Is the CEDF eligible? Just like in the statutory requirements, is it eligible for an electric vehicle program? The answer is yes. And second are the American Recovering Reinvestment Act funds available for deployment. And he said yes as well. And then talking about how they would model it off of their past programs. And then here towards the end, I just added a section on existing incentive programs in the state and the federal government tax credit program just to show that these programs do exist. They have often come in the form of rebates around the country, a lot of municipalities, a lot of states are interested in bringing more electric vehicles online. So I just added in this section to show how it is, how these programs are feasible and like they do take money, what is that? And really the main points that I wanted to hit home in this report are the lack of funding for the CEDF and bring that to your attention. Like I said with my conversations with St. Swanson, they're not gonna actively come here and say we need money, but that people should be aware that these programs and the intent of the CEDF is being phased out over time. Currently there is a study in progress. The Cadmus Consulting Group is working on their 2020 budget that should be available in May or June depending on if they get it out in time and that should answer a lot more of these questions about the future for the CEDF. Scott, people are just gonna ask about how much money is left in your tweet for Cadmus to tell us, do you have any idea or... Yeah, they have enough money to continue their advanced wood heating program. The main small scale program. And then like I said, from the 2018 report, it's likely then the next year so they'll run out of money. I don't have a specific figure, sorry. Okay, so in our money in particular, you don't know how much of our money they have in our program, right, thanks. I can recommend that you might speak to someone at the public service department. Ed Delhagen works closely and is on the CEDF board and he does a lot of managing of the funds. So I just wanna say thank you for doing this, for doing our research and everything. I gotta say that Zach took this on his own, did a great job I think talking to, I appointed him two couple of people to talk to and he ran from there. So it's a tremendous part initially on his part to do this and I appreciate the ability to work with you. Yeah, thank you for coming out and showing me around the state of the semester. It's been a blast sitting in on your conversations and hopefully this sparks conversation. Obviously, well it's been ongoing about electric vehicles or just the electrification of the transportation sector. If we are to meet the, meet Vermont's energy and climate goals, so I hope this is one. Right, do you know, thank you for doing this. Do you know in this, in the budget that we just passed, so there's a million and a half for any incentives, but is that administered by the trans? I don't wanna stay for the record because I'm not entirely sure, but that would be my best guess. It's not in here. Right, and I'm sorry, but you said, you thought that CEDF could administer program more cheaply. Yes, that is. And then be trans getting something on that. Yeah, that's basically what I came to the conclusion of and at the discussion of the, in the CED board basically they all think that they could do this at a lesser cost than an agency that's never administered small incentives before. Yeah, I spoke with some members of V-Trans actually Michelle Blumauer and mentioned the possibility of using CEDF as a vehicle for the rebate program. I think they're, what I heard informally was that the agency of transportation made contract was an entity to administer rebate program and CEDF is one possibility that they might contract. Yeah, and I should add that one of their concerns was being micromanaged by another entity, such as V-Trans, but at the same time they are willing to work together. And are the members of the CEDF board, are they volunteer or they paid, you know? They're all volunteer with the exception of the fund manager and at Dill Hegan. We, as you know, spent a long time around this table wishing that lawsuit settlement money could be directed for specific causes. And discovering that mostly it can't. Do you have, I mean, so, you know, the co-signing sum of the 4.5 million makes perfect sense, that's not how it works. Same with the fiat and Bosch. Have you had discussions with anybody about other sources of funding or consistent sources of funding before this? Yeah, so one thing that Representative Young-Toshka and I have discussed a little bit this semester is in two cent increase gas tax to help bring in money. There's also, I mean, you can look at how other municipalities and how other states have generated revenue. There's another student actually in my class who's working on the best methods for implementing electric vehicles and one thing that she's looking into is the sources of funding. Just something I mentioned conversationally and as opinion, which is it's really hard to squeeze money out of the budget. Exactly, no. And I know one way to guarantee not to get money in the budget, which is to refuse to advocate for it. And, I mean, I question that as a strategy by the Clean Energy Development Board to say, just send us the money, we're not gonna advocate for it. It's, well, I think the numbers in that fund speak for themselves in terms of how much money's been placed there. When they had $30 million, they did a lot of great work. Unfortunately, they've had to slow down. Yeah, I get it. Is there in their charge or in their makeup a provision about if the amount of money reaches a certain level that they have to disband or, you know? I thought there was some time. Okay, thanks. Nothing to have, Fred. Here's your question if it gets to a low enough level. Right, if you're just funding the charges. Yeah. Any other questions for you? Great. I really appreciate you guys inviting me in here today. Thanks, guys. Thank you very much. Thanks for being here today. What's your major? I'm a environmental studies. Okay. So, what was not on our schedule this afternoon, but since we had earlier this week and last Friday, I was anticipating we were gonna be on the floor a long time today, so we didn't have a robust schedule. And I thought Heidi was gonna be still warding, so I wrote a fat bike. That's nice, nice. Kinda hard with these shoes, though. I asked Luke if he could join us to take us through H366, where we just go on our wall and, again, just do a walkthrough on this, and I appreciate you being able to adjust your schedule to do that, so. This is the last thing our schedule played, but I thought we'd use it. Go through another bill. Thanks for joining us. All our things go on that side already. Hold on. All right. Okay, no. Everything's back in the car. Thank you very much, Luke Marlann, from North State Council, and good afternoon, everybody. I've been asked to do a quick walkthrough of H366. I have it on the screen, but I'd like to step back for a moment and actually talk about law in 30 BSA 8005 Small A, which pertains to the standard law for program. That's not on your screen. This is existing law. 8005A pertains to the standard offer program, and there's language in a subdivision of that law concerning pilot projects. And it states that for one year commencing on January 1st, 2017, so the year has lapsed, the Public Utilities Commission would allocate one sixth of the increase in the standard offer program to new plants located in one or more preferred sites. So the keyword is preferred sites, key phrase, and that are not parking lots or canopies above parking lots, and an additional one sixth to parking projects on parking lots or on canopies above parking lots. Now you heard testimony about standard offer program, and when that testimony was given, the keyword was contract, if you remember, a couple weeks ago, and the whole idea of standard offer program was to incentivize developments of renewable energy and renewable plants. So what this bill does is it carries forward a similar idea and a similar term. So this pilot project has lapsed, is in the statute, but it's no longer in effect. And preferred location is defined in that old law, and it includes energy projects that fall within one of nine criteria, including Brownfield, a project on landfill, or on a gravel pit or quarry. Now what H366 does is four main things. First of all, it requires the Public Utilities Commission develop a simplified process to seek approval to build a plan at a, quote, priority site. And a priority site is largely defined in a way that's very similar to the old preferred location. It defines them in a very similar way. It also requires the PUC to establish a registration process for projects mounted on a roof or a parking canopy that are 15 kilowatts or less. And then last but not least, it sets time frames for the PUC to decide on metering projects. So those are the four main things that this bill does and giving you a little background about old law that's still in the books that has similar terms. And now I'll go through the language and statute. Sorry, but it's all solar and we're talking about that. No? For it is metering, 248 is more than solar. Yeah. Let me actually, as I go through, let me try to answer that question. I think some of it does and I think some of it may not. And that may be something you follow up on. But after your time, excuse me. Can you clarify for me, so the section that sunsetted? Yep. Which included reserving two sixths of the allocation? Yep. Does this, they'll continue to reserve those two sixths? No, so it is different. But it has a similar term of art that's defined in a very similar way, but it's different. So 8005, what I referred to, 8005A is a standard offer program. So that pertained only to standard offer contracts and required the PUC to reserve a certain proportion of any increase under the standard offer program for what was called sites on priority, preferred locations and then another six for canopies or parking lot sites. And then had a definition of that term. That's expired. That was for one year starting on January 1st, 2017. So it is done. This bill has a slightly different term that's defined in a very similar way, but it's broader in its impact. And then it does some other things that are different. The standard offer has divvies up the contracts. There's small hydro, there's a couple of sections where there were a couple sections of solar. What does that do to the pie and the slices that it's cut into? Or what is the status of that by now that those two one-sixths have- Can't really answer that question. That program's laps, what was approved under the program or not approved? I'm sorry, I don't really answer that question. But the PUC might be able to. I don't know, this is where you're going, but the reason you're bringing this up is because the definition from this lapsed program is relevant to how this bill was granted. Well, there's more background that there was a similar concept. Yeah. Similar term of art, defined in a very similar way. As a pilot project, I don't know how successful it was. That's lapsed and now there's a proposal in this bill to carry forward that concept, but it is different. So my question is a standard offer. I actually don't relate to this bill. I mean, is that correct that this bill doesn't relate to standard offer? It goes beyond standard offer, yes. So. Then I will stop distracting you. That's it. No, let's talk about the standard offer. Well, okay. To tell you the truth, I was wondering how standard offer fit into the standard offer. It's the concept and the definition of background. But if people talk about this, it's based on what was tried previously. Yeah. So let's begin with section one and I have the bill on the screen. So this is 30 VSA 248. So this is the overall statute that so-called section 248 that concerns with approving projects or granting of a certificate of public good. What it does is it adds a new subsection U, which reads as follows, for priority sites as defined in 8002. So that's the next thing we'll get to. The commission shell number one, establish a simplified processes that shall reduce the cost and time associated with an application. And to encourage the construction of plants on priority sites. So that's the first thing that the POC is ordered to do. And then second, establish a registration process for a plan of any size mounted on a roof or parking canopy and for a plant of 15 kilowatts or less. So it is a registration process for a plant of any size. It's on a roof or parking canopy and they plant to 15 kilowatts or less, wherever that may be. So there's two separate groups there. And under that registration process, the certificate of public good shall be deemed issued unless the interconnecting retail provider cements within a period to be prescribed by the commission a letter raising interconnection issues. Mr. Chair, should I call them or do you want to call them? Yeah, no, please go ahead. I'm busy with these. Is this a standard? So I think what I'm reading here is the CPG will be deemed to be issued unless there's a request by the utility not to have further, does that exist elsewhere? Do we know if that's common practice or impractice for other CPGs anywhere? There is actually, I'll get to it in a moment, but the rule of the POC for certain projects, some smaller projects for example, it's a process where it's deemed approved unless there's a letter from the interconnecting utility raising a concern. So this is once again, taking an existing concept and... And adding the priority projects to the existing practice. Correct, so it's sort of taking existing concepts and mixing them together in a slightly different way, perhaps slightly broader way. So if the only party that can raise a concern is the utility that it's connected to, that would rule out a neighbor that had a concern about the project. Under this language, you are correct. So under this language, unless there's something else that I'm not aware of, it seems that only on that basis could we inject and raise. Now this once again is for a project on a roof or parking canopy where a project of 15 kilowatts or less. So it's smaller size in theory. Question for kind of the solar heads. 15 kilowatts is about 100 by 100 foot square. Does that sound about right? Yeah, yeah, I can see a neighbor up there. Well, it's probably not 100 by 100. It's three trackers. I have two trackers and they're each five. Okay, how big is the tracker? I'm giving you a rough guess now, but it's probably 12 feet by 12 feet. Oh, but it's 12 feet, so maybe it's 15 feet by 12 feet or something like that. 12 by 16, maybe, so that's one. Okay. So we're about to move on to section two with just to recap section one new law that requires the PUC for priority sites to establish a simplified process. Okay, clear? Section two, this is really findings language. And usually this is not in the codified statutes in the so-called green books. In Title 30, a lot of it is. And so what I did is just amend that existing findings to include the new nine. And it really is a tent of the legislature type language that you would be putting law that mandatory time frames are positive thing. So this doesn't bind, this doesn't really do much, it's more expressions of legislative text. Section three, this is amending 30 VSA 8002. And what this basically does is give the definition of a priority site, which was the key term of art that was used in section one. Most of these criteria are either identical to or substantially the same as the preferred location definition used in that last law that I mentioned earlier. And includes if you just run down an A, a newer existing structure. So this would be, for example, the solar panel placed on a newer existing structure whose primary use is not the generational electricity. We're providing support for equipment that generates electricity, a canopy over a parking lot. There's language about tract previously developed for use other than siding or plant. Under D, land certified by the secondary natural resources to be a ground field, that's nearly identical to the language in the prior law. Sanitary landfill language in E, and the gravel pit and quarry language in F are very similar to the language in that other law that I mentioned earlier. G concerns a location that a municipality has determined is appropriate for a plant. So it's an area that they wish to put a plant on. In H.U. of language about the Environmental Response Compensation Liability Act and EPA, I'm not certain what that is. That's another chance to research before I came here today. I'm sure someone has been answered. I could look into it. So. Is that your question? Yeah. On H. Yeah, I think that's super fun. That's super fun? Gotcha. Are we still talking about the small under 15 AW? Well, this is a definition of priority site, but it's relevant because of section one, where you want this simplified process for a priority site and a registration process for certain projects on a priority site. So that's how it connects. I mean, this could be used in other contexts versus this bill. That's how it's relevant, right? So, I mean, in other words, so what you could have a very large brownfield site really it's only relevant if there's a a simplified process for a project on such a site and a registration process for smaller projects on that site. So this is just, this is for, we're very also the type of site this is for the smaller projects that are eligible for the registration process as opposed to a larger standard offer. So let's just back up for a moment. Remember under the first section, I'm sorry if I wasn't clear, it says that the PUC for priority sites that's what we're talking about the definition here shall establish a simplified process. That's for all potential projects on a priority site. Okay, and now general language about reducing costs. And then second, establish a registration process for a plant that's on a roof or parking canopy or 15 kilowatts of roof or less, okay? Okay. We continue with the, these are the criteria that would be under the definition of the term the two at the end, I and J, they were not in that prior law that I mentioned earlier the pilot project law. So these are new and different. These would be that on the same parcel or adjacent to, I'm sorry, on the same parcel as adjacent to or on the same electrical feeder of a customer who's been allocated at least 50% of the electrical output or under J, a plant where residential customers receive at least 50% of the systems electrical output. Any residential customers? I'm sorry, what did you say? Like any, so what is that plant where residential customers is that like, the people like directly like on the land that it's not? Or is that like community, community? I'm not, so according to the language here, the residential customers, home owners or people living in a home are receiving 50% of the systems electrical output in some way. It doesn't give any specifics beyond that. So I may not be understanding your question. So it doesn't say homeowner, it doesn't say renter, it doesn't differentiate. Those people are directly connected to the system. Well, it seems to be to the grid. Well, here it says we see at least 50% of the systems electrical output. So it doesn't say that we're connected. Now in I, adjacent to or on the same electrical feeder, of a customer, it's not really 50%. That's directly connected, sounds like. It does, J does not. The J does not. That J sounds like it's, it feeds this community somewhere, it feeds the grid. To clarify, those are horrors, right? I'm sorry, what? To clarify, those are horrors, right? Yeah, so under this definition, all you are one of, to fold in definition, you only need to be one of. You could be three of, but you only need to be one. So it's not and, they have to do all those things. It's one of those different things. And refresh me, I and J, are they modified by any size constraints, generation constraints? Well, can there be any size? Not under the definition of priority site, but that term is only relevant to what's in section one. So priority site is a defined term within that definition. It's not limited, but it's only relevant to what I, the language I run over in section one, about the commission developing a simple flood process and a registration process. Question me. Can you hold on one second? I'm not sure. Could you do a follow-up question? One more, which is, and maybe this may be a long answer or maybe not, what types of projects are not in this section? Sorry, not what? What types of projects are not in this section? Not permitted. Well, you have to be, fall within one of these categories. So gravel pit, brownfield, super fun, whatever it is. You have to fall within one of those. If you fall within none of these, you could not qualify as a priority site. Right. And so my question is, are there projects that would not qualify? It seems like there are a lot of projects that would qualify. I don't know the answer. You need someone to actually develop any of these projects. I don't know the answer to that. It is a long list of different options. And I'm not, this is not my specialty set out there. So I can't tell you the field if this includes all the most precious ones on it or not, but I don't know. So going back to J-I-N-J, I think it was. So I'm looking at I, and I'm just wondering if this is correct, that if I am a solar developer, Mike has a business and I build adjacent to his business and he's allocated 50% of the output, that's a contract between us, between me and Mike. So after building it the next year, I can, our contract's complete and I can change it. So I'm now selling power to Scott, but I got streamlined process. So according to the words, the statute, which is what we're going through today, is that possible? Yes. I don't know how long contracts normally are for, and I don't know if there'd be some process to look back if there was an allegation of back faith that you benefited from the streamlined process. I don't know. But this is focused on following the definition, being able then to avail yourself of the streamlined process or the registration process. After that, it's not right. Unless it's a net metering project, a group net metering project, the power cannot be sold directly to a customer. So if it's a merchant generator, then it's being sold to utilities either in Vermont or it could be outside of Vermont. So the only way you could know whether 50% of the customers were residential was that it was a net metering project because you'd know which electric customers have participating in it. Any more questions? Second? Not yet. Okay. So, are you still going ahead? As we go to section four, do you have a question about section three? I have a suggestion to think about in terms of the definition of the, what are we calling now priority site? Which is to maybe consider adding to that projects that are built on insights where there is a significant unused transmission and interconnection capacity, particularly thinking of the Vermont Yankee site that we know basically has this huge infrastructure that isn't being used now. So that's just a suggestion to think about just to add to this list because by putting projects there you are not putting pressures or demand on the system as opposed to potentially you could be if you're putting locating the site somewhere else. So, wouldn't that sort of use be greater than 15 kilowatts? Wouldn't that work? Wouldn't use there be greater than 15 kilowatts or a generation facility there? In order to take advantage of that infrastructure, it would be greater than 15 kilowatts, wouldn't it? But this is where I guess I'm confused. I feel like we're talking about the priority site is both for larger projects as well as under 15. It wouldn't make sense to go put 10 kilowatt on the Vermont Yankee site, but if someone was putting a 100 kilowatt site, this might make sense to encourage them to put it somewhere. Can I think of a suggestion? Let's get through the bill. I have the same issue and like to circle back and kind of get to our decision tree under what types of sites are actually affected by this. Sure. So, section four, this is modifying 30 BSA 8010, which concerns net metering. It is inserting new F and it states except for net metering systems to which the commission established a registration process. The commission shall issue a final determination on application filed pursuant to this section within 60 days of its filing or its original filing did not substantially comply with the commission's rules. Within 60 days of the date in which the commission notifies the applicant that the filing is complete. So, in other words, if it doesn't substantially comply, they need to fix it, provide new info, whatever it is. Within 60 days of that application being complete, they need to have a final determination. Or if the commission determines that the application raises a significant issue within 180 days, then there's similar language that if that application did not substantially comply within 180 days of it being complete. So, what this does is it has mandatory time limits. The default is 60 days for all net metering projects for approval. I do not believe that there's currently statutory time limits. There are time limits in PUC rules that are more narrow under the Public Utility Commission Rule 5.105C to get a certificate of public good for a hydro plant for ground mounted solar up to 15 kilowatts and for any type of roof mounted solar unless there's a letter from the utility about interconnection issues, which was what we talked about earlier, that the CPG would be deemed granted 11 days after filing for project is less than 15 kilowatts or if it's more than 15 kilowatts, 31 days after filing. That's pursuant to PUC rule. They put the time limits in their own rules. But that is only for that small universe of projects. These are different time limits for a larger universe of projects. It would be for all net metering projects, except for those that are in the registration process. So, it's a bigger universe of projects. So, I just want to be clear on the bigger. Am I correct in saying that what you're saying is this relates to bigger projects? A bigger, because a bigger universe, there's far more small projects that are deemed. I meant the universe of bigger projects. They could be bigger projects and the kilowatts is not what I meant. I meant all net metering projects would be subject to these time limits, whereas in the rules that I read to you, it was more limited. It was a ground mounted solar up to 15 kilowatts or roof mounted. So, it's more limited. That's what I meant by limited universe, not the kilowatt level. Is that clear? Well, that's what I'm going to play back to you. There are literally thousands of applications that go to or went to the PUC last year. And a vast majority of those were for small solar projects. And what I heard you say is that for those small projects, they are deemed to be approved unless the utility raises an issue. Well, for ground mounted solar up to 15 kilowatts. And for roof? Yes, within 11 days. Any roof mounted solar? Yes. So, yes, for those types of projects, there are time limits. Yeah, and I don't know the statistics about what we have, but for the many, many, many applications that go to PUC, what you just described is a big percentage of those projects, which is the homeowner who was putting solar. And so, now here in session four, we're dealing with something else. Correct. But under this language, it covers all net metering projects unless there's a registration process, which are the smaller projects. A standard fix potential one. And then for all other projects, there are these time limits in place, not based on the size of the project, but the kilowatts, but based on the complexity in essence of the applications. The under two, there's 180 days for a significant issue, which is not a defined term. Two questions, Luke. Sure. And one, I'm looking for definitions. And one, substantially comply, right? And then in, I think it's in two, significant issues for issue. So within this bill, there's no definition of either terms. Substantially comply is often used in statute or rule. I don't know if the PUC has a definition, but I think even if they did try to define it, it would sort of be common sense, which means. Different things to different people. Substantially comply to me as a lawyer is a term I can grab my head around pretty easily. Now maybe the PUC has other language to find it, I don't know. But I think it's, as a lawyer, that does not strike me as difficult to understand. Significant issue, I'm not aware if they define it or not. I'm not aware if they define it and that would be a good question. But it needs to be signed. What is so substantially compliant to you? It would be, well, this is an application. So there's a form, whether it's paper or online or whatever. You are putting down certain information. So to me, if I was looking at as an attorney, not an expert in this area, and not someone who's working for the PUC, did you fill out the form? Did you put all the information? Do we have all the information to make a decision on this? Have you checked all the boxes? Do we know everything we need to know? That's to me. And for many projects, I think the assumption is if you provide full and accurate information. That sounds like pretty easy. Substantially to me, when I think of substantially, it means not quite all the way. You're slicing that onion pretty fine. I think what you're saying is similar to what I'm saying. Whether you think it's substantial or not, we're getting to similar form. Okay. Well, that's my point, that's my point too. This may be a question more for the committee in a loop, but didn't we just pass a registration and fee structure for solar projects, 500KW, $100 fee for... See, it was in the fee. Yeah, so is it wouldn't that be, isn't that similar to the... It did not include language that... So when I presented our committee's recommendation to the Ways and Means Committee, I also talked to, I don't have a language in front of you, but our interest, if there's going to be a fee associated with this, which there is. That the PUC increases productivity in working on these. That is not in the fee. So that was not addressed in the bill that we passed the last week moving forward. Okay. I wanted to address Laura's question about what substantially comply in the application process for projects that sometimes they're required to get in and are approval of the site review, see if there are any wetlands there, the wetland boundaries, they're required to have a site plan and there are other requirements too. And so all those requirements for that size project have to be completed before that 60-day timeframe kicks in. So if I submit an application and it's not complete, that clock doesn't go off yet. That clock doesn't start. I have to complete the application before all the requirements of the application before that clock starts. Why wouldn't we say if it's not complete, that if the original filing is not complete, as opposed to substantially comply, I mean, it's sorry to be kind of picky you need about the sketch. So within 60 days of the date, how much the commission notifies the applicant that the filing is complete? That's if you did not substantially comply. So there's something. No, that's in one, with 60 days of its filing. Or if the original filing did not substantially comply within 60 days of the date, how much the commission notifies the date. If you're... That's complete. So that's when the clock starts. I think you're just reading it. So whoever you say substantially comply, comply or complete whatever word you use, you fill out the application correctly, you put down all the info, you've checked all the boxes. Defile it. 60 days have to approve. If there's something missing, I'm trying to use different words. Lacking, they go back and say, hey, we need this other info. After you submit it, then the 60 day clock starts taking. My point is, without it being defined, it feels like substantially complies, could be open to some interpretation. I mean, why not use clear word? It's like complete. Or complete, yeah. If you believe that makes it clear, I think it's early change. That's the difference is between whether there is a matter of substance missing the application, as opposed to just some eye that's not dotted or something like that. So do you think all people would agree about what a matter of substance is that might be helpful? I mean, I kind of trust Luke's take on it. A reasonable person, yeah, of course, of course. But just, you should never trust the lawyer, which you should do. I mean, this is a walkthrough of a bill that was proposed by Sponsor. You guys decide to take it up or not and modify it. If you are, I would have the PUC come in and talk about these terms. They're valid questions. But get their input on what those terms may mean, or if there's a better one, what your main well be. That's just not a big problem. Yeah, understood.