 Thank you everyone for joining us for our last energy seminar of the quarter and of the academic year. We're thrilled and delighted to have Cliff here with us, but to introduce him properly I'm going to hand off to Jill Ferguson so Jill take it away. Thanks Sarah so I'm Jill Ferguson I did the Schultz fellowship fellowship last year and I worked in Commissioner Rick Shoffin's office, and it was the best experience. And Cliff's the best boss I'll go into some transferable skills I think we can all practice from him but I also want to throw out there before I introduce Commissioner Rick Shoffin that the Schultz fellowship program is really amazing and it's changed my career trajectory in terms of what kind of public service I want to practice. So I'll share my contact information in the chat, just in case anyone's interested in this program wants to hear about it wants to hear about placement I had the things I worked on. Can't say enough good things about the program. Now as far as our guests of honor today, you can see in his bio he went to Princeton then Yale law worked in the California Attorney General's office. And environmental law for a long time in fact, everybody that we would run into either at the Commission or out and about at a conference was like, Professor Rick Shoffin Professor Rick Shoffin so I think he's taught just about everybody in California. And then he was senior advisor to Governor Jerry Brown, and when Governor Jerry Brown asked him to be Commissioner, so something I really thought spoke a lot about his character he said, do I know enough. And he asked himself that before saying yes to regulating just about every business and the state of California which is one of the largest, you know economies in the world right from energy to transportation telecom everything so I thought it was interesting that he made the position not really about himself but about did he know enough to really do it. And then when he was Commissioner he worked on everything as you can see in his bio from IRPs building decarbon transportation electrification, the long term gas proceeding equity, so many things but to get back to the the reason why I really am honored to be here today is he really was the best boss I've ever worked for and I think two things before we let him take over and unleash him. I think we can all do a little bit of what cliff does which is one is treat everybody the same same kind of level of importance as an intern in the office I felt like I really did matter, just as much as his advisors and that is not something about about other working environments, he was really interested in what I was thinking, what I was writing, gave me feedback, positive and constructive. And just make sure I was invited to every meeting, big ones, little ones, planning ones, you know, external ones, just it's really it really is something to be treated equally as an intern. Second piece of advice I think that I observed from Commissioner Rex often is normalizing asking questions, until you really understand something is when you're regulating so many different industries. It's almost impossible. It is impossible to know everything you have to rely on your advisors, you have to rely on people but he made sure that in every decision that he's making. He understands it, he can communicate it which meant being bold enough to say, I don't get this and making sure you ask that question until he got it. And so that he could explain it to someone else or be didactic with someone else. And so I would say he showed me that questions are not a weakness. I think that questions should be more welcome in the work environment and for that I'll always be thankful for those two lessons. I'll always try to be more like you. So, with that, I'm going to pass it along to Commissioner Rex often to tell us more. Thank you that for that incredibly generous introduction and I think anything I'm going to say is going to be downhill after all those plots is incredibly generous and gracious of you Joe and it. I'll give you who are interested the Schultz Fellowship is wonderful and I had the pleasure when I was a commissioner at the PUC to have three different fellows who are all magnificent so I really encourage people to to look for that I mean there's opportunities throughout California state government. The state energy agencies rather. Well, I'm going to talk about. I'm not a commissioner anymore so nobody has to call me commissioner Joe you don't have to call me commissioner anymore. I'm going to talk about a set of policies that I worked on when I was at the public commission dealing with promoting environmental justice. I just want to start by level setting. I wanted to tell you a little bit about what the California public utilities commission as many of you may know this some of you may not. It is one of the most important state regulatory agencies in California. It regulates all of the private utilities in the state and that's most of the energy, most of the electricity and gas utilities, about 20% of the state's water utilities, as well as ride sharing companies. So it also has some regulatory control over communication services, although much less since the telecom industry was deregulated in the 1990s, it also regulates rail safety. So it's a very broad mandate. It was, it was a body created in the early 1900s, along with a lot of other utilities commissions at the time, originally created to regulate the railroad industry. Most of the state agencies in the San Francisco Bay area at the time reformists wanted to keep the PUC out of the, the grip of the railroad lobbyists who were circling in Sacramento so that's why the PUCs and mostly in San Francisco although the PUC is in Sacramento in Los Angeles, and it's a constitutional body which means it's somewhat different than most state agencies who report directly through the executive branch to the governor. The PUC has five members who are appointed by the governor for fixed six, six year fixed terms confirmed by the Senate, but constitutionally it has independent authority and very, very broad authority. Now, public utilities commissions are not always well known. I came across this quote recently that I think is interesting as we have our discussion. It's from a public interest group called the Chisholm Legacy Project, and it asks, how many of us fully understand who are the entities responsible for ensuring the air we breathe is clean and whether the energy we use is safe. We're maintaining affordable electric bills for providing access to resources to help us conserve energy for ensuring that customers are not cut off from our heat, our water, and our electricity supply. Each state has a little known entity that holds a significant level of responsibility for all these aspects of our daily lives. Some states call these bodies of public service commission. Others call it a public utilities commission in California is a public utilities commission. And I, I show that to you to make the point that public utilities commissions are not always super well known, but they are extraordinarily powerful. At this moment, they play, and the PUC in California is certainly in this position. They play a critical role in our clean energy efforts in our decarbonization efforts, more so than ever with the spate of federal and state legislation so the public utilities commission is a very important body, even if it's not well known to the public, by the way, and I'm happy to talk about this in question and answer a wonderful place for clean energy professionals and lawyers and other others who want to work in this field. Okay, so I'm going to start by give you some context about environmental justice in California, some of this may be from quite familiar to people. In many other states in California, policymakers have known for years, decades in fact that environmental harms are not equitably distributed that there are certain communities, low income communities and communities of color in particular that bear disproportionate towards higher air pollution, poor water quality, more exposure to pesticides, more exposure to extreme heat, closer to power plants and refineries, and so forth. California was has been one of the first states in the country to try to deal with these problems. It was the first state to define environmental justice and statute and to direct state agencies to make achieving environmental justice part of its mission. And then about 10 years ago, California rolled out an analytic tool known as Cal in virus screen. I don't know how many people are familiar with this but it's a very powerful tool created by the California environmental protection agency, and what it does is it takes a whole lot of information about a community's vulnerability to environmental hazards, whether that's linguistic isolation, rates of education income level employment, and so forth, and combines that with actual environmental exposure data, air pollution, water pollution toxic waste, pesticide exposure and so forth to come up with a score by census track of which areas of the state are the most environmentally burdened or the most environmentally disadvantaged. This tool has now been emulated by other states it's it's been emulated by the federal government, the Biden administration in something called it's justice 40 initiative has followed this. But this tool is one way that the state is really embraced trying to get a handle on where environmental injustice occurs, and how to address it so for example, the state has passed legislation saying that the proceeds of our carbon pricing policy or cap and trade policy, some portion about a third of those the proceeds of the sale of of of cap and trade allowances have to be spent to benefit the most disadvantaged communities as determined by this policy. So that's one very, very important tool. In addition to that in the clean energy space, the states over the years has adopted a number of measures, directing the PUC and other agencies to incorporate environmental justice into various programs. One of the most important statutes was one passed in 2015, known as SB 350, which established at that point, a very aggressive 50% renewable portfolio standard, and that required the PUC in its integrated resource planning process to prioritize pollution reduction in disadvantaged communities. And it also directed the PUC and the Energy Commission to try to address barriers faced by low income communities who who are having trouble participating in energy efficiency, and other clean energy programs. And it established an advisory group to provide input to the agencies doing that. I mean, let's fast forward to 2017. When I joined the public utilities commission I had worked in the governor's office I had also, as Jill said I had taught environmental justice and it actually helped start an environmental law justice clinic. When I was joined, when I when I was appointed, along with me and other new commissioner was Commissioner Martha Guzman Asseves, who had a strong background in working on social justice issues as well she had worked the United Workers. She had also worked for the California Rural Legal Assistance Association Foundation. She had worked in Governor Brown's office as a legislative advocate and among many things she worked on in 2012 she helped get past a bill establishing a human right to water in California one of the first states to do that. I joined in 2017 and we decided that it would be important to establish an environmental and social justice action plan. And we then developed that over the next couple of years and the bulk of what I'll be talking about now is what's in the plan and how it was adopted. Over the next couple of years to do it there was a process for doing that. And the first question is why, you know, why did we want to do this what was, what was the reason for needing a plan or policy like this. And there were, there were a few, there were a few things that motivated us. And while the Public Utilities Commission was working on environmental justice issues in part, the activities were scattered they were in different places. They were different program areas this was wasn't a lot of coordination among them. That's number one. And secondly, we thought that a plan would be important to try to integrate environmental justice considerations and all the things that the Public Utilities Commission does. So the Public Utilities Commission sets rates, it adopts policies, it does audits of utilities, it takes enforcement action, it administers grants, it issues permits. There are lots of context in which it acts, and a plan, an overarching comprehensive plan could provide guidance for all those different activities. So they're those two issues. And then there's just some more, I would say, pedestrian, if you will, but important considerations. Like any other agency or big organization, the Public Utilities Commission, the PUC is bureaucratic and people behave bureaucratically it's just the nature of how people work. The PUC had previously had some high level strategic directors on environmental justice. And the nature of things staff when they're faced with on the one hand a very clear directive or clear imperative to do something versus a generalized or amorphous commitment to environmental justice. On the other hand, staff can be reluctant to weigh in and lean in to promote environmental justice or to to act boldly and expansively on the other hand. I think the way to sum the gist of that is policy matters, establishing a firm policy matters as a way to guide staff and agency behavior, not just staff, but what the work of the commissioners as well. It's also important to convey a message to stakeholders that this is what the agency thinks is very important. So there are all those issues that we were trying to work on. And then the reality is that despite the state's best efforts, any of our clean energy programs still have not been equitably shared. And I'll go through a couple quickly. So this is a little bit of a dated slide, but the basic facts are the same right now. We lead the nation in electric vehicle adoption, but the rates of adoption are much higher among higher income groups than in lower income groups. There are studies that show in the most disadvantaged communities in Los Angeles County and elsewhere there is near zero rates of electric vehicle adoption the most disadvantaged being the most impoverished. And it unfortunately race also matters there. A study earlier this year that I read from Cal matters which is an investigative reporting unit found out that there's a quite significant racial disparity that zip codes when the residents are three quarters wide up much higher rates of adoption than where they are three quarters Latino or African American. The same thing is true with rooftop solar California leads the nation and rooftop solar adoption over 1.5 million businesses, schools, homes, but it's disproportionately benefited wealthier households and if you look at this chart and other studies from Lawrence that I'll show you that three to four to five times the rates, the adoption rates are three to four or five times higher in the highest income quartile than the lowest quartile and again in the most disadvantaged communities disparities are even greater. Now this is changing this is starting to change it's improving. So we have solar adoptions more widespread among middle and lower income households but there's still a fairly stark disparity and by the way, the disparities is worse in California than any other state in the country. And there's also racial disparities. Similar what I talked about. disparate benefits being experienced and then the dis amenities the impacts are disproportionately experienced in disadvantaged communities, half of the state's gas plants are in communities with the highest environmental burdens double the rate of the population in those areas. Low income people people of color experience much more pollution from other from refineries and other major greenhouse gas pollutants air pollution. We have the worst air pollution the state. Six of the 10 worst air cities. The biggest source by far of that is transportation of that. The lion shares from medium and heavy duty vehicles, especially near ports. That level of pollution from diesel trucks, gas trucks is heavily concentrated in disadvantaged communities. And then we have energy burden. In California, low income households pay a higher share of their household income and energy. Even though they have smaller houses, even though they have fewer energy consuming products like dishwashers dryers and so forth in the central valley and Southern California these burns are the greatest. A chart from AC triple E, the leading energy efficiency advocacy group in the country showing the same things true nationally that lower income people you see on the left and middle. People of color and as you move to the right elderly people. So all these reasons are their income on energy. They're also more likely to have be disconnected have the utilities be disconnected. So, all these reasons led us to think it was really important that we have a plan. We, we, we went through a process of about two years where we had workshops we we convene staff to develop ideas. We consulted extensively with this advisory group that I mentioned the disadvantaged communities advisory group, which is about 11 environmental justice advocates, they were extremely helpful they actually developed their own environmental equity framework framework that was useful for us in adopting a plan and then the plan was finally adopted in early 2019. Now, one of the key issues is how we defined environmental justice. This, can you, can you guys see this is this cut off the slide. I can see it just. Okay, great. Well, I'm not going to get it. There's lots of definitions these days about environmental justice, energy justice climate justice, just transition. We didn't obsess over these issues. This is the more. This is the traditional definition from the United States Environmental Protection Agency. That was established in the 1990s and it's been its formal definition for some time and it says that environmental justice is the fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people, regardless of race color national origin or income. With respect to the development implementation and enforcement of environmental laws regulations and policies. So, we started with this definition but we wanted to add to it because this definitions really. First of all, it's, it's focused on environmental issues, not a broader set of issues which I'll talk about in a second. And it talks about fair process, the ability to access the development of policy and to some degree, fair treatment, how environmental harms or benefits are distributed. We consciously chose to call our policy and environmental and social justice policy to capture a broader and a broader effort and a broader set of of communities of concern. And we defined what we were doing more broadly so I'm going to show you two slides that have quite a bit of words on it but they. They arrive at help us arrive at the same conclusion so this was in the first version of the plan and it's, it says environmental and social justice seeks to come to terms with in remedy a history of unfair treatment of communities, predominantly of people of color and low end or low income residents. These communities have been subject to disproportionate impacts from one or more environmental hazards. socioeconomic burns or both residents have been excluded in policy setting or decision making processes, and have lacked protections and benefits afforded to other communities by the implementation of environmental and other regulations, such as those enacted to control polluting activities. So what we were trying to do here first, you know, our regulatory ambit at the PC extends to utility services beyond just energy includes telecommunications right sharing communities and so forth. This is one thing but we, we really wanted to go beyond the traditional definitions of procedural or distributed equity and to use a broader frame a broad frame to capture structural inequities. So to include communities as this says where there have been historic under representation and exclusion from policy, where the communities were underserved. And our vision was to help address these historic and structural inequities, and to proactively advance economic benefits and economic opportunities and most ambitiously most idealistically to help create a more just society. So we, this, this slide again with with quite a bit of words. The first paragraph just reflects what I just said that when we defined in the policy which communities we wanted to benefit. We were looking at communities will who face the structural structural barriers the structural problems he's historic exclusion. We wanted to get at those, but we also wanted to be expansive. And so the next tranche below it also includes the communities, the worst, the most environmentally burned communities as identified by the tool I mentioned calen virus screen tribal lands. The tribes have been ravaged by pollution and have participated very, very little in the clean and clean energy benefits, low income households, and low income census track so you can see these prior our priorities were identified in in these different in these definitions. The reason that we, we, we, we spent about 18 months to two years adopting a plan. Interestingly, the utilities who we regulate didn't have really vociferous objections to the plan. And I can say they were standing up cheering but they understood it and actually over time they've come to embrace it. Even the telecommunications industry question how much authority we had over some of these issues, even though the, the, the PC has very, very broad authority to regulate as an economic regulator the PC has very, very broad authority to regulate utilities. The PC's authority over telecommunications entities is a little more complex than over energy entities because of deregulation but over, over the energy entities the PC has under the under the Constitution and under statutory law, very broad authority to regulate and to literally put anything quote necessary and convenient in the exercise of its jurisdiction. So, there were some concerns some staff had concerns about additional workload houses going to work but we, you know, it was a relatively smooth process with a lot of public input. Okay, I'm going to talk now about. I go through all of these don't worry, but this is the list of the, of the nine goals. What I think is really as important as the goals is that when the PC adopted this plan. It adopted action items for every goal and there's sub goals and sub action items. There's 95 action items. The plan is updated every two years, and there's a public process to evaluate how well. So I'll come back to this these goals in a second but there's a public process to evaluate how well. The process is working the way it's implemented and this I think is has been helpful for its success is there are about seven or eight different divisions at the public utilities Commission, one that regulates water. Electricity safety, railroad safety, consumer protection, so forth. So they each have a liaison that comes to regular meetings and is the person responsible for tracking. How the policies being implemented within that division. And then there's also this, there's oversight provided by this disadvantaged advisory community group that I mentioned, which was established by statute. So here's the nine goals. I'm going to pull out a few to talk about but you can see there's an attempt to be comprehensive in part to be to make the process more accessible to direct investment to communities. Goal three, I'm not going to talk about outside the purview of the energy seminar but to try to address high quality water communications and transportation services those are essential services. If anything we learned in covert is that having high speed internet is critical to your health and well being an economic welfare. There's about resiliency goal five I'm going to spend some time about talking about how you enhance public participation at the PUC goal six, as I mentioned the PUC takes enforcement actions that those. There's a goal to make sure that those protect all communities. Goal seven is about economic opportunity which I will also talk about and goal eight and nine are about internal policing of how it's done goal eight is training and staff development don't underestimate that if you don't train people about this, it's not going to get done so both internally and externally that's really critical and goal nine to monitor how it's being done. That's really, really important. Okay, so here's the implementation. So I'm going to start by talking about a few things that the piece is actually done to do this goal one was to integrate equity and access throughout PUC proceedings. I mentioned that one of the critical motivating factors behind this policy was to make sure that environmental justice is addressed in all the different contexts at the PUC acts. And to do that, the staff developed standard language that are used in scoping memos that are issued at the start of PUC proceedings. So what that is is when there's a formal proceeding at the PUC, the judge in charge of hearing it will say here's the things we're going to be addressing. Here's what I want evidence about here's what the this, what this proceedings going to consider. And there's now a question about, does this impact the Commission's environmental justice action plan. And if it does then you take certain actions, and one of which is just, you asked the question, should we change the way we're doing outreach for this proceeding in order because of the special impacts that it that it might have. So that's just good bread and butter administrative work, you make sure that you're asking the questions. Jill said I like to ask questions to ask questions to make sure you're not overlooking things and by the way you come up with some unexpected outcomes For example, the PUC among the many things it does is it grants permission to create at level at grade railroad crossings throughout the state. And there's a proceeding and a process for doing that. And when people ask the question in those proceedings it turned out that in some areas they were homeless people who were affected by where the railroad crossings will take us people are living in railroad tracks so the PUC spend some time trying to figure out how particular railroad crossing applications were needed to be addressed so you can find, you can find these considerations in unusual places. The second goal, and a very important goal is to increase investment in clean energy resources to benefit environmental social justice communities, especially to improve air quality. The PUC has been pretty good in this regard it has targeted its investments in quite a number of areas to disadvantaged communities. So for example, the PUC is authorized about $2 billion in spending on electric vehicle charges over the past four or five years. Increasingly it said, significant portions of that 40 to 50% have to be in disadvantaged communities have to be serving low income multifamily units things like that. And in battery storage the PUC two or three years ago created a program, a several hundred million dollar program designed to provide backup that batteries for cousin for residences that could be used in the event of power outages, whether through the wildfires or proactive public safety power shutoffs. There have been programs directing money for rooftop solar just to low income areas and so forth so those have been very important and one point I want to emphasize to you that it. We really learned through this process and it may be very obvious to others and sometimes overlook but there are multiple benefits when you increase investment in these in these communities. The air pollution benefits may be obvious if there's an electric vehicle rather than a diesel truck or if there's a solar facility rather than a gas burning facility but they're very important economic and social benefits to having a battery in your in your community or a clean microgrid their job benefits. There may be supplier benefits their visibility benefits to showing the community that this is important. There may be the ability to enhance your reliability if low income communities suffer the most electricity outages. So there's a whole slew of their important social and economic benefits as well as the straight environmental benefits that come from these investments. By the way we're very much in line with in doing this with what the Biden administration is doing it's justice 40 initiative and the state as a whole has been moving in this direction. Last year in the state budget, the legislature directed about $900 million for the installation of heat pumps electric heat pumps in the homes and said about three quarters of that has to be in low income communities. And it said about 900 million allocated about $900 million for battery solar plus batteries and said two thirds of that has to be in low income communities. Some of that might have gone next in this budget but I don't know but anyway, it's very much in line with what the state's doing. It's in line with the additional incentives that have been provided in the inflation reduction act. I want to talk about it. This is a sub goal we had, which is to address impacts and environmental justice communities. I don't have time to talk too much about this. But I think it's important it's really interesting. California adopted the first in the country, affordability proceeding in 2018 and we came up with these metrics a couple of years later. And the goal here was to get a better handle on the cumulative impact on rate payers of all the services that the CPC regulates gas electricity, water telecommunications and to spotlight which communities were facing the greatest burdens. There's three different metrics here. The I'll just focus on one for example, the affordability ratio which which basically says, Okay, how much money do you have to spend what portion of your disposable income. You're spending on utilities. So the denominator is, I mean the numerator is your utilities, the denominator is your household income minus your non discretionary expenses, such as housing and other utilities. And we're, we're people facing the greatest burdens. There's two other metrics that the PC developed to try to get a handle on this as well. The California already has programs that subsidize people's energy bills but they don't guarantee affordability, especially in a period of time when, when, when rates are rising. So, this was a very important effort to try to say, we need to get a handle on where rates are going. The first report in 2020 showed that in different parts of the state. The, if you using any of the metrics but especially the affordability ratio people are spending way too much of their disposable income on utility services could be up to 30% in some cases but the trend was very disturbing and this proceeding also highlighted that forecasting for the future for especially for electricity rates. It's going to get worse, it's predicted to get worse. And this is an enormous challenge for the state right now because one of our key tenants of decarbonizing is to electrify everything. And we can't elect, we can't afford to electrify everything if we're imposing unreasonable burdens on people who lower income people are spending high portions of their income on utilities. And for the moment, the PC has been using this as an informational tool and hasn't been using it as a tool to force any decision that's just been something to be aware of as the, as the agency decides whether or not to move forward with the decision or not it hasn't said this is absolutely a burden you can't go beyond but it's a very, very important. Rate tool, very important tool to protecting consumers. And also in this sub goal addressing impacts in environmental and social justice communities. The PC really leaned in the past few years on trying to protect the most vulnerable from energy burdens. Two or three years ago the PC established a declining cap on the rate of disconnections by utilities. Even before COVID the rates were up to 8% among some among some utilities six to 8% really really shockingly high too high. I mean not everyone was permanently disconnected but just, you know, very worrisome. The PC also told the utilities to come up with plans by which people could gradually repay the debt that they owed a rearage management plans and in some cases. If you were current on your repayment for a period of a year at the PC said utility had to forgive some of that. This was for very low income consumers. And then, most recently the PC said we're going to experiment in some very low income communities, which face high rates of disconnection. We're going to cap the amount of money, the percentage of your income that a customer has to pay for energy for electricity services, some other states have started this it's a very small pilot. By the way, these debt forgiveness and payment as percentage of income pilots. These are these programs are the costs are subsidized by other rate payers so it's not, you know, the utility is not paying for the other rate payers are paying for it but it's a conscious effort to try to protect low income customers from rate impacts. The goal for is to increase climate resiliency in low income and disadvantaged communities. And here the PC did something interesting. The PC has a proceeding dealing with adaptation trying to get the utilities ready to adapt for a world in which climate change impacts will be visited on us. In this proceeding, the PC established a definition of disadvantage vulnerable communities that reflects the relative at adaptive capacities of different communities so it said disadvantages not just the function of physical risk not just proximity to C level rise or and so forth but it also includes sensitivity to climate change for your, how much medical care you have who has fewer resources your ability to adapt the climate change and then it directed the utilities to engage in additional targeted outreach to these vulnerable communities as part of their preparation of climate vulnerability assessments. So again, vulnerability not just physical risk also the ability of the community to adapt to the impacts of climate change. This is a really important goal. This is an outreach and public participation opportunities to meaningfully participate in the PCs decision making. It's really important because the PC is probably one of the probably the hardest state agency to participate in it's very technocratic. A lot of the PC proceedings are done through formal quasi adjudicatory proceedings with a judge and parties, you have to know the evidence, they're complicated exparte rules. It's really hard for people just to participate in it. It's not like many agencies which have noticed and comment rulemaking the agency issues and notice you just show up at a hearing or workshop and you file in formal written comments. So there's been a lot of efforts to try to make that process easier. And these are just a few of a few of them. One is literally to have a place where on a docket sheet, you could submit a public comment in any kind of informal way. The PC tried has been trying to do different kinds of outreach, not the usual outreach proactively seeking outreach with groups who are not usually parties to PC proceedings and trying new approaches to community engagement. So zoom helped a lot depend and being able to do things remotely helped a lot. But for example, in the long term gas proceeding that Joe mentioned, the, the PUC did a gas one on one webinar to address particularly technical concepts that because the PUC community groups the language to try to participate in a what otherwise can be a very obtuse and technical, technical challenge process. Last year, the legislature granted the PUC $30 million to try to enhance the capacity of community groups to engage in the PUC processes so that's a really interesting new development the PUC is in the process of implementing that. One of the really things I'm the most proud of is this, this particular effort on the part of the PUC. And this is part of a sub goal of the outreach and access which is to engage with particular environmental and social justice communities. And this has resulted in the PUC is tribal land transfer policy. In my view, this is a far reaching land reparations policy. So basically, what, what it means is that for tribal lands that are owned by utilities. The PUC, by the way, has, whenever utility sells property, including land, the PUC has to approve it. So this establishes a preference that the, the land should be transferred to the tribes, if it's within their ancestral territory and specifically the utility should offer the tribe the rights and a right of first refusal before putting the property on the market. So I think it's a really far reaching interesting plan. This picture, this was, this was a transfer from PG&E before the plan went into effect, but the my due tribe in Northern California got land that back in 2018 remarkably and so jubilant process that hopefully will be repeated. Goal seven deals with promoting economic opportunity. And this is another area where there was some controversy when the plan was was adopted because some people said, well, you know, that shouldn't necessarily be the focus of the PUC, but I don't, I don't, that wasn't the sentiment that carried the day and I don't think that's, I don't think that's right. We, we, the PUC directs billions of dollars in rate payer investments in various programs it has an economic impact on things that happen in the state. And actually, for about 30 years, the PUC has had a supplier diversity program, which has been modeled in many other states, which requires the utilities to set goals for procurement with diverse suppliers women minority disabled veterans now LGBTQ businesses. The overall targets about 21% of total procurement. And as a result of this voluntary program over last the last year that was reported about $12 billion was spent with diverse suppliers, half of which by the way, half of all the procurement was in environmental and social justice communities. So it's been an engine to provide economic opportunity to traditionally underrepresented communities. The LGBT goal the Commission set last year is now one and a half percent that's the most ambitious goal in the country. This goal also talks about promoting high road employment and career paths for residents of environmental social justice justice communities. The thought here is, we need conscious efforts to promote job quality and job access for disadvantaged residents. It's not going to happen just by itself and again, the PUC is directing the investment of billions of dollars to help the PUC with recommendations about how to do this. The PUC entered has entered into a memorandum of understanding with the workforce investment board. The first areas are looking at transportation electrification energy efficiency and also vegetation management which a lot of utilities have to do to deal with wildfire risk. I'm pretty much done going through our goals. I want to save some time for questions. I do want to point out this is very, very important. The need to monitor efforts to ensure they're achieving their objectives in the update to the plan last year. The PUC said it's going to establish accountability metrics to develop a regular reporting schedule of the Commission's progress on various items. I want to say a couple of things, one general thing and then one specific set specific conclusion about California. The PUC started in 2017 adopted in 2019. The good news. It's very, very good news is that environmental justice is now a central tenant of many state and federal climate and clean energy plans. It's an environmental justice guide administration justice 40 initiative, but you can see it in many other states there. There are about two dozen states that are part of something called the US Climate Alliance which California is part of and environmental justice concerns environmental justice requirements, guidance efforts investment directives are part of many of those, if not all some. If not all of them have multiple requirements to achieve environmental justice so the trend is very much in that direction some very far some farther than California in part. And they're also now if you do some research you can see that they're some states like Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts, Washington, which now have laws, telling their public utilities commissions to varying degrees to incorporate equity in their decision processes these are relatively new but they're happening. Michigan's opened a docket to do that, do that and so on so the trend is is very very good so the lesson to leave you with policy matters policy matters a great deal implementation matters a great deal accountability matters accountability measures matter having public input matters making this a living document matters. As long as remain there's still bureaucratic inertia, there's still technocratic bias expert bias procedural barriers and overcoming a legacy of environmental justice doesn't happen immediately, but pros policy matters, you know, putting your, your mark down say what your priorities are, and then having a comprehensive plan with a lot of boring sounding action items makes a really difference. Can you talk a little bit about your advice on, I guess public service in general, you know, when's the the right time, what kind of experience do you need, you know, for, for example I know like your, your impact on decarbonization policy goes back many decades like your fingerprints are all over a lot of our decarbonization policy, even before you were commissioner, and then as commissioner you're, you know, pretty much directly responsible for helping us get to like one and a half million EVs on the road two years ahead of schedule so it's like big impact. But for all the, the people I hear who are students. How do we kind of sort of connect the dots from where we are now to policy impacts. Thank you for giving me glorifying what I did even more but there's no one path and the, you know, you shouldn't worry about having the perfect path. I, it's the good news, I mean we have enormous problems to address but there's never been a better time to work in the clean energy and climate space because there's so much to do technology as advanced so quickly. We have federal money we have money we have federal and state policies and alignment so I think you, you throw yourself in if you can be doing internship for summer or a year or take a year. If you can go to someplace that's not Washington DC or San Francisco and get your hands dirty, doing direct work, that's great. But if not, if you spend five years working for a financing company or venture capital firm or, or, you know, three years for those are lawyers or whatever that's great you can always turn your expertise into the policy arena. When you're ready California between this, all the various state age, energy agencies the California Resources Board, very progressive and advanced and sophisticated state local governments. There are hundreds of jobs that are being filled and they're going to be continued to be needed over the next year so it's a great time to dive in. And by the way, you know, sometimes as little sink or swim on the other 10 and my experience of public service is you got more experience sooner, because there's not a lot of not a million people staffing you have to figure out how to do it you get more responsibility earlier on. Okay. So the audience, what changes would you make to Cal and viral screen, if you could, you know, are there factors that you feel that it doesn't take into account that are relevant for the priorities at the CPUC. I'm not the best person to answer because I haven't kept up with the, there's the latest version 4.0 that I think it's pretty sophisticated and has more, I think it has 20 indicators now. There's some glitches because there's some rural areas that were never really can that weren't adequately considered because they don't have enough, you know, enough sources of exposure so they don't get into the highest most burned areas. And I think that's the stage try to tweak that, but I'm not an expert I do know it's stated the art, all the stuff that it does is peer reviewed. The PUC like a lot of other agencies doesn't use it as a talisman I mean it uses it in part but it also uses, as you can see from the definition of environmental justice uses other metrics because it may not capture like it doesn't necessarily capture tribal communities but or, you know, they're, even though they're very disadvantaged. Thank you. See you mentioned that the PUC was directed to include EJ or Cal and viral screen in the IRP modeling process. And so how did the PUC actually integrate the data from Cal and viral screen into the modeling or the decision making to inform this, the resource investments. So that's a really good question. And I don't know that we, I don't know that the PUC has done as much as it, it could or should in that although it's still very much a work in progress. It wasn't directed to consider Cal and viral screen that the statute just said that the PUC should should the integrated resource plan should should prioritize reduction and pollutants with an early emphasis on disadvantage so it's part of the mix of factors that goes into the modeling and resource procurement plans that are developed by utilities and approved by the public utilities commission but it's not a rule of decision that says you absolutely must do this. And it's been attention has been some frustration in the part of environmental groups that the PUC hasn't done more to put the thumb on the scale of say, phasing out gas plants but the PUCs has to balance reliability issues and other issues so it's not a hard and fast rule, but that's what happens when you have language that says you have to consider this or you have to give a priority to it it's not an absolute rule of decision. And, you know, you can necessarily trace it from from here to there. So that's a very good question actually. We can find some follow up contacts for these questions I'll write this down. Another quick round hot topic right now, the income base fixed rates. You know could be good for, you know, the ESJ kind of lens but for maybe rooftop solar or battery leases this question is saying maybe not so much so the trade off there. How's the CPC balancing those equity goals with general decarbonization goals. I thought you like me Jill. This is a big, I mean this is a very live issue that this was a similar issue arose in the this, the very contentious and controversial issue that the PC dealt with last year the year before over over subsidies the right policy for for rooftop solar. And this, the big problem, and then I'll answer the question the big problem is that we can't make electricity rates go so high that people can't afford to use them and the burden does fall disproportionately on lower income consumers, and in California traditionally not had fixed fixed rates that pay for the cost of the, you know, the fixed cost of the system that exists no matter how much you use it, you know, billing and pipes, polls and wires. So, because people have been paying for those costs by volumetric energy charges the amount of energy that they use. The result has been that poor people who use that they, they are paying. It's a regressive. It's a regressive system poor people are using more, more energy paying a higher share their income on on on on energy bills and people who exit the system who use rooftop solar or avoiding some of those charges. So, we do need to have some reconciling of these competing policies but we also don't want to send signals to people that you can't benefit by adopting efficiency measures or conserving or reducing your load. So it's a tough balance to try to figure out. Yeah. Well, since there are a lot more questions the good thing we have that little discussion section after this to keep it going. So for anybody who wants to ask the questions that we didn't get to, or you want to follow up on the ones that that we did discuss. Join in that link that Tully just put in the webinar chat. It's another little zoom room and commissioner Rex often will keep it going. Thank you so much to Jill and to Tully and of course to Cliff for sharing your expertise and you know capping off the the year with such a interesting and timely topic and many thanks to one and all, and have a wonderful rest of your week everyone. Thank you.