 I'm Felicia Cilio, and we have Steve Cole with us. And we're going to be talking about the evolution and challenges of Alaska's rail belt electric grid. So first, I just wanted to do a brief overview of what is a rail belt? Why do we call it the rail belt? So in Alaska, we have the Alaska Railroad, which runs from Fairbanks down to Seward. And the transmission system approximately follows the railroad, which is why we call it the rail belt. So we're going to do a brief history of electrification in Alaska, go over remote microgrids and regional microgrids, do a little bit more about the rail belt, and then go over some significant studies and challenges, upcoming changes, both real and potential changes, and then a bit on ASAP, the Alaska Center for Energy and Power Research and Rail Belt Research. So first, this is a picture of some electrification data for Alaska. Alaska's history of electrification is similar in a lot of ways to the rest of the country. Around the 1940s, regional electric co-ops were formed in the major population centers of anchorage and fairbanks. That also includes just north of anchorage in the Palmer-Wissela area, where a lot of farmers immigrated to. And this was after the 1936 Federal Rural Electrification Act was passed. Similar patterns of electrification happened all across the country. It can see in the figure that the anchorage and Palmer area in the yellow lines were some of the first areas to be electrified. There are also about 200 remote microgrids that are scattered across the country. And there are also other regional grids within Alaska, other than the rail belt, which includes the southeast down in Juno, Ketchikan, farther south southeast. And then there's also a small regional grid in the Valdez to Glen Allen area, which is near anchorage just to the east of anchorage. But neither of those regional grids are connected to the rail belt grid. Going a little bit deeper into the rail belt electric grid, here's the overview of the rail belt electrical co-ops. There were five. Now there's four. And in addition to the rail belt, there's that regional grid just to the east called Copper Valley. This is in the Glen Allen and Valdez area, and serves about 35 megawatts of load. This system is not connected to the rail belt. There have been some studies to look at if it would be beneficial to connect the Copper Valley system to the rail belt. But currently, there are no plans to connect the two. As I just mentioned earlier, the rail belt electric co-ops were incorporated and electrified in the 1940s. And they're elicited here in order of when they were incorporated. The first incorporated was Matt Neusik Electric Association. First was MEA. We'll probably end up referring to these electric co-ops by their abbreviations later. But we should be able to share the slides with you later so you can look up these terms. MEA's co-op statutory is in the Armour-Wassil area. And then there is Golden Valley Electric, which we call GVA. And this is Fairbanks. And it goes all the way down to Peeley. It's kind of near Denali National Park. And all the way east over to Delta Junction. Other was Anchorage's Municipal Light and Power. And that was recently acquired by Chugach Electric, which is called CEA, which has the greater Anchorage area. And then last but not least, there is Homer Electric, HGA. And that's down all over the Kenai Peninsula. So if we look at the load, you'll see a comparison to California in a minute. But it's tiny by any standard other than our own. And furthermore, our load, I guess you could say it peaks at around 800 megawatts. But the purpose of this slide is to emphasize that we are in a flat or declining load situation, some of which relates to one or two large industrial loads. But we have very few of those mines. And so this decline is sort of an overall decline that's probably consistent with a lot of other places where we're getting more efficient. And in any event, it's kind of the backdrop for all the thinking and all the utility concerns that they're dealing with today. So I'll leave it at that other than maybe Felicia's going to come back to this or I will. But the links in this slide between the blue load centers show the transfer capacities of the transmission system. And as we'll talk about later, a couple of these links, these transfer capacities are so minuscule that it really makes this rail belt system just a, arguably, a poorly connected collection of regional micro goods. OK, let's go on. So it was building off of what Steve said, that the rail belt is tiny. For perspective, I wanted to get perspective into California and lower 48s. So on the right, that's a picture from California ISO, much as the transmission system in California, which I'm sure you all are familiar. And now I try to keep that picture to scale with the energy infrastructure map of Alaska in the middle there. And I've highlighted where the rail belt runs in orange. So the rail belt's peak load, I think is a little bit more than this, but is around 1,000 megawatts in perspective to California. So their peak load is around 45,000 megawatts. So California's load is 45 times larger. However, if you look at the geographic distance being spanned, it's somewhat comparable, maybe half, maybe a little bit more than half in terms of distances. So as you can imagine, when you're having really long lines of low loads, you're having weak grid issues and lots of other engineering challenges associated with that that we'll get into later. And as Steve mentioned, there's only a single transmission line between several of these load areas. That's between Anchorage and Fairbanks and down from Anchorage to Kenai. So in comparison to the California system, there's many pathways to get electricity from the north to the south in California. And different regions in between. But in the rail belt, we only have one single transmission path between Fairbanks and Anchorage and Anchorage and Kenai. So that causes significant, perhaps unnecessary congestion and issues related to renewable energy, power transfers that we'll get into in a bit. Steve, over to you. OK, so here's a little more history of how we got where we are. And basically, the build out of our generation capacity has everything to do with two or three circumstances. One of the first circumstance, I think, was the territorial days when people built some hydro and there were some attractive small hydro resources that worked in the 50s. And then Fairbanks had to do something in the 60s. So they built a 28 megawatt coal plant because a coal mine opened not just for electric power, but for general purpose sales. So I guess you could say they took advantage of the coal. Then we had a kind of serendipitous discovery of oil. And I'm not talking about nor-slope oil. I'm talking about the oil close to Anchorage in the Cook Inlet. And it had a huge amount of natural gas as essentially an economic byproduct. So people jumped up and said, all right, we can heat all our homes with gas. We can run all our generators with gas. Let's get cracking. And the folk wisdom, I think it's correct, is that natural gas in those days was less than $1 for 1,000 cubic feet, which if you know anything about your gas markets is a pretty good deal for natural gas. We built two by four framed homes in Alaska with wall-to-wall windows because we had endless cheap gas. And we ramped up the generation in the 70s. You can see the Luka gas, major buildout of gas generation. And it only it mirrored the discovery of north-slope oil, which made the whole state boom and caused the need. So we had the oil pipeline and we had oil. And then in the 80s, we had oil money. And the result of the oil money was actually not very much new generation built, but we flirted and we are still flirting now with a mega-hydro project. So the main result of the oil money was a massive hydro project done, as you sit in the river, that was not built, but we got awfully close. And the real outcome of the whole oil money era for the electric grid was one hydro project known as Bradley Lake, so it's 120 megawatts. So a kind of medium-size deal. Then we went rolling on through the 90s and the 2000s. And I'll just fill in any details there because they're not very exciting. And in the last decade, we've seen a lot of action on the generation build front, which includes two wind farms and really a huge build-up of additional natural gas generation, which if you look at it over on the right side of this picture, if you compare it to what's happening with the sales, a lot of people ended up scratching their heads and asking, why did we have this massive build-out, which I think it cost about $1 billion. I think some people are still scratching their heads and there are stories to be told. But in any event, that's where we are today, substantially by some people's viewpoints, substantially overbuilt with gas generation and facing flat loads as we look into the next decade. Next, another way of looking at the timeline is to think about some of the sort of political economy of electricity in Alaska. And the political economy story really is the story of five or six co-ops trying to collaborate and coordinate and maybe even merge as their service territory started to bump into each other through economic growth of all the load centers. So let's say in the 80s, when I first came to Alaska, Chugach Electric in Anchorage was more or less the generator for the entire southern part of the state. And that got to be kind of a sore point for the co-ops outside of Anchorage. And they finally said, enough, we're going to build our own generation. So Matt Nooska and Homer Electric stopped buying all their requirements from Chugach, built their own generation. And that's a big part of the story of the build out that we saw in the last slide. Then, or at the same time, I would say outside agitators, not agitators, but outside forces, outside the utilities themselves, were agitating for a little more collaboration and possibly mergers or some form of organized coordination of the system. Because it seemed apparent that it doesn't really make sense to have six utilities all doing their own thing when we should be sharing in some sense. But there was a lot of hullabaloo at the regulatory commission in the political sphere. And this went on, I just saw the chat. I'm about to expand on this point. So OK, since you asked me to expand, or someone asked me to expand, here I go. So my bio that was read, that was cooked up to satisfy some grant makers at the Office of Naval Research. But the real story of me is that I had the pleasure of working at the California Public Utilities Commission in 1984, looking at renewable power contracts under PERPA. I came straight to Alaska from my wonderful experience at the CPUC in San Francisco, 1984. And the very first thing that someone asked me when I got to Alaska, my boss followed me into his office. And I was just a computer programmer. And he said, I understand you know about electricity and you've been in California. Because I said, yeah. And he said, well, we're trying to merge all the Alaska Rail Belt Utilities. How should we do it? And I said, I don't know. And that was the end of that conversation. But the reason I bring it up is that the idea of consolidating all these little co-ops has been kicking around since at least 1980. And it reached a crescendo in the 2010s or yeah, 2010 through 15, when a lot of outside forces really put the screws on the, they got the regulators to take up the question of whether and how all these co-ops needed to merge. They had some big docket or maybe they had 10 dockets. But they were right in there. And the utilities themselves tried, I would say, in good faith. Others would question how much good faith there really was. Anyway, on paper, they tried to explore an ISO, an RTO, regional transmission organization, various forms of power pooling, and a transco. And all of these efforts, they sort of just blamed out around 2016. And the logo in the slide is one such effort. A lot of logos were generated during this period. And a lot of paper organizations were formed that looked good on paper, but they weren't really amount to anything. And the whole thing kind of flamed out sometime in the last four years. I think the very last failed effort was a transco potentially funded by an outside source of capital. I forget the name. Maybe Felicia remembers the name. One of some big American transco. And they finally said, forget it. We want nothing to do with you guys. And that was the end of that. So that's my expansion on our failed ISO transco RTO effort. And we'll probably have time if you have further questions about that. So another good question, is there a reason why the grids were not interconnected? Well, they are interconnected by these weak transmission lines. And, however, I'm speaking where in my economist hat here, it's not obvious that they would be interconnected, at least not the Fairbanks to Anchorage group. That transmission line was built by the state with oil money. And it's not obvious that the utilities would have financed it on their own. Had the state not just built it. So if you take away free oil money, I think there's an argument to be made that our loads have always been so small that it just doesn't pay to tie them together. Or it might pay some kind of net present value basis, but it's unfinancable. In other words, these co-ops could not, on their own, take on the requisite debt, even though it might look good. So what we have instead is we have a legacy of state-funded oil money financed stuff, which includes medium-sized hydro and some big transmission lines. And so it's not really even clear that the system that we see now makes economic sense in terms of what they would have built without the free money. I think we should go on. Oh, sorry, Alicia. You've got to go back one more. There was, however, one major step forward in this sort of consolidation timeline. And that is finally, in 2020, the two utilities that were serving Anchorage with a service-territory boundary that literally ran right through the center of the city, where you could see wires on both sides of the road. We finally got that merger accomplished. So we now have one utility serving the state's largest population center. And some people are absolutely exhausted from that one effort, because it really has taken 40 years. So now we can go on. So I want to touch on the major renewable energy projects that have been built in the last 10 or so years. The first one we'll talk about is not renewable energy, it's energy storage, but GVA built a 14-megawatt-hour battery in 2003. This is also around when the northern intertide of Fairbanks was built. And this battery was built to help with reliability within the region. And GVA claims that this battery has resulted in a 60% reduction in transmission power supply type outages. And at the time when it was installed, it was actually the largest grid-connected battery. So it was pretty innovative. And now that was in 2003. We are nearing the end of this 20 to 30-year lifespan. So GVA has a lot of decisions to make in terms of, is it going to upgrade it, revamp it, install a new type of battery? Yeah, lots of questions there. So then jumping over to 2012, Fire Island Wind was built. Fire Island is an island just off the coast of Anchorage in the Cook Inlet. This was actually built by the native corporation, the Cook Inlet Region Incorporation called Siri. And it was 17.6 megawatts. Now also in 2012 was the E.B. Creek Wind. So this is up in Healy area near Denali National Park. This was also built by GVA and GVA's territory and is 25 megawatts. And now both of these large wind farms, I do know the curtail. I don't know by how much, but I do know that they do a lot of curtailment. You can tell because it might seem small in terms of floor 48 megawatt size. But in terms of rail belts, Fire Island Wind, almost 20 megawatts, E.B. Creek Wind, over 20 megawatts. That's around 10% of the Fairbanks peak load. So now we're going to solar farms. There's two large solar farms also built around the same time. Once a willow solar farm, that's in the town of Willow, which is just north of Anchorage, which serves the Manuski Electric Association. And then GVA up in Fairbanks also built solar farm. These are much smaller, at 1.2 megawatts in Willow and 1.5 megawatt in GVA. So next I'm going to move on to some significant studies, which highlighted a bunch of challenges for the region. So in 2010, the state of Alaska commissioned Black and Beech to perform an integrated resource plan for the state. This is a really rare example of when the state has stepped in and paid for a regional study. All previous studies typically have been done by utility that we're really looking at benefits for that individual utility. So now as you're probably familiar, the objective function of an IRP is to, or at least this IRP was to minimize regional power supply costs and improve the reliability of the system. The system as a whole versus any individual electric core, which has been studied in the past. The results identified that there are several significant challenges. Those are associated with size and geography of this rail belt area. The limited number of connections, which results in limited redundancy. That's at least from a transmission perspective. So now there's these low loads and large distances. And this also contributes to limited economies of scale, also in addition to the great components. There is, and still is, a very large dependence on possible fuels. Now the transmission system is very limited. However, the amount of generation in these regions, you could say this over-built. An earlier slide noted when MEA and Homer broke off from two-catch in terms of they were no longer going to rely on two-catch electric for all their generation. And MEA and HDA started building their own generation. So a really small system. However, there's not a lot of load. Then you have regional entities within that very small system building of all their own generation to sort of their load and have reserves. If you want to consider the region as a whole system, now you're going to have a significantly over-built amount of generation. So, lots of challenges that are existing. Yeah. So then out of this hierarchy, Black and Beach identified several projects that would benefit the region as a whole. But several challenges exist with that. The major one being that there's really no cost sharing mechanisms in between the utilities to be able to pay and afford for these types of projects. Some of these projects have been done, but only some of the major projects that have been done are actually on this IRP list. Another significant study was one done by commissioned, or performed by electric power systems, which was commissioned by the Alaska Energy Authority, which is the state's equivalent of their energy, state energy department. This study looked more on the engineering side, looking at reliability standards. There actually are no universal or enforced reliability standards in Alaska. Like in lower 48, there's the NERC reliability standards because Alaska doesn't have any interstate commerce and electricity. We don't find it by any NERC reliability standards. There have been proposed Alaska reliability standards, which is what EPS used as guidelines for what to assess reliability by. But that's actually not universally accepted across all the utilities and it's definitely not enforced. So interesting challenges there. But anyway, so EPS used these, we'll call them temporary reliability standards to look at what needs to be done in the region to comply with these temporary reliability standards. And they identified several projects, many of which, these are the projects, many of which actually overlap with what had been identified in the R&P, such as increasing the capacity of the Northern intertide between Anchorage and Fairbanks or just building a second intertide which would increase redundancy and also removing, adding another intertide between Anchorage and Kenai to remove that redundancy. And several other projects related to reliability. So next we're gonna go into some of the upcoming changes. Some of these are happening and some of them might be happening. Steve, go to you to talk about the euro. Okay, there's a little too much on this slide. So I'll try to hit some of the high points. The final, well it's not final yet. The most current outcome of this long-standing sort of two steps forward and three steps backward attempt to integrate and consolidate is that I would say with significant prodding by outside forces in the nonprofit world, the Alaska legislature was prodded into or taking over the bell belt integration problem. And so we had a bill come through the legislature in 2020 which mandates that somebody form this thing. I don't know if it's an acronym outside of Alaska or if they just cooked it up. Electric Reliability Organization, fondly known as the ERO. And this ERO is supposed to do the reliability standards thing and do regional integrated resource planning from here on out. And it's supposed to be somewhat independent of the utilities. So that's that, oh, and finally to give it some teeth, there's an explicit clause in this statute which says that the regulatory commission will finally have some pre-approval, pre-build approval authority for large energy projects. Currently we just operate on the traditional regulatory model of the utility bills that comes in afterwards and says, hey, can we put this in our rates? And the commission either has to say yes or no and it's pretty hard to say no when a co-op has built a $200 million power plant. There's no shareholders to stick the cost on. So we have had post approval and this bill says here, henceforth you will have pre-approval but a lot of details to work out whether that'll actually happen. So we're on the path toward reliability standards, regional integrated resource planning and maybe some better oversight prior to construction now that we've overbuilt ourselves into the zone where we may not need any construction for the next 20 years, but I digress. This bill just to re-emphasize does not create an ISO and it does not itself create the reliability standards and it does not itself mandate what constitutes a balanced governance structure. That's all up in the air right now and what it does mandate is that our overworked regulatory commission has to adjudicate all of the details. And the other thing that happened which is probably significant to the whole, this whole drama is that when the anchorage utilities merged, which I talked about two slides ago which was a big deal, the regulatory commission said, one of the conditions of you guys merging anchorage is that you have to now form a tight pool with your neighbors to the north. So I think many utility engineers would say that all this stuff about the ERO and the regional this and all that is somewhat of a theatrics because we now have, they would say a functional tight power pool that's covering 80% of the customers in the rail belt. Go ahead Felicia, next slide. Now this is kind of a non sequitur jump. We're gonna jump around on some topics. So that was one topic. One thing that's playing out right now is the SB123 drama. Our electric reliability organization is going to be formed and what's gonna do. Another kind of fascinating little mini drama that's playing out because it ties right into climate change and carbon reduction is the very first and really the, not the very first. One of the major initial builds was this 28 megawatt coal power plant built near Fairbanks known as Healy One and it's due for either retirement or it needs to get a lot of new air pollution equipment to satisfy the EPA which has sort of been giving them a long leash for a long time. And the reason that this is fascinating to me is sort of a little vignette that shows the situation with the rail belt in relation to renewables. So Felicia mentioned previously that when we built a 25 megawatt wind farm in this Fairbanks region, first of all, you can see that's functionally equivalent to a quote unquote major coal generation plant. You know, we're not missing a zero here. It's only 28 megawatts, which is tiny for a coal plant. So the wind farm is the size of the coal plant and why that's interesting to me as an economist is that a lot of people would say or they did say or they might say, hey, we can't really pay new wind and solar resources. We can't pay you much more than six cents a kilowatt hour because that's our avoided fuel costs for coal. It's cheap and we're gonna use it. But what's interesting about this plant is that if they retired it, you'd get another four to five cents per kilowatt hour of avoided cost in a big lump of annual fixed O&M that would disappear. So this is actually an issue that I studied in California way back in 1984 when they were starting up the whole avoided cost contracting operation. Now there was a huge docket open that summer and I spent a lot of time enjoying myself in the hearing room listening to everybody argue about, well, what is avoided cost? What is it really? Is it short run, long run, medium run? How do we calculate it, blah, blah, blah. And this is to me as a good example of that debate or that conundrum carried into our situation. So just to tie it up, we have these lumps of generation and if we could eliminate lumps with renewables, then the economic benefit would probably be significantly higher than just eliminating some fuel burn, which is the way that we're now compensating new wind and new solar. And we don't have slides about it but there's been significant fighting, like fighting through the regulatory commission between IPPs wanting to sell more wind and utilities saying we can't take it. Hey. So talking about renewable energy, and IPPs and answering over the Sandy's question about wind energy. So there have been a couple of requests for proposals for renewable energy out there by the utilities, one by Chugach, one by Golden Valley. Both of these were published last year. I actually don't think Golden Valley accepted any of them, but they're still, they might still be in review. Not sure, Chugach is recent and they haven't awarded any yet. In addition to those requests from the proposals, Homer Electric is currently constructing a 90 megawatt hour Tesla battery and they do have a like carbon decarbonization goal and I forget what the exact number is, but I do know that their goals with this battery is to increase the renewable energy penetration on their system. And there's also hope by the utilities as a whole to potentially tap into some of this upcoming federal transmission investments through this Build a Better Grid initiative that was just released, I think a week or two ago. All right, next, I'm gonna go back to you, Steve. Maybe we can go through these real quickly. Yeah, before you do, I think I'm gonna ask you to go back to your, it's because we're used to these maps but I wanna emphasize that the key thing that we're hoping the feds or somebody will pay for is this weak link between the North and the South, which would really solve a lot of problems in terms of sharing generation and accommodating renewables. So that's what everybody's got their fingers crossed or they've got their lobbying hats on to try to accomplish. Okay, go ahead. In terms of, here's a sort of optimistic slide about distributed energy resources. We have a net metering is sort of a guideline really. I'm not even sure if it's a non-binding or part rule, part guideline in our regulatory structure, which says you have to accept up to 1.5% of your average demand in the form of net metered capacity owned by customers. But all the utilities so far have happily said, we'll accept more than 1.5%. And in fact, all the utilities, almost all of them are well above 1.5%. And if you wanna be really optimistic, you can do the math and say, we've had average annual growth of 51% in installed net metering capacity, which is almost all solar rooftop solar. And on the other hand, it's still a drop in the bucket, but the growth pattern is pretty encouraging for solar in the Arctic. Go ahead. So now let's talk about decarbonization, which hopefully will be the next big thing for the rail belt. This picture is very helpful in understanding that the decarbonization challenges and opportunities. And I think we are on track to get done in three minutes. I'm gonna speed up. So two things to note are really only, maybe one thing to note. Golden Valley has big emissions because they burned coal. So that's also a big opportunity. The other utilities are burning gas. And the thing to note is that they've already made significant improvements in carbon emissions just by building more efficient gas points. Go ahead. So a Golden Valley's board set a 26% reduction goal and it's not totally clear what they're actually gonna now do to achieve it, but we studied it and we'll leave the slides with you if you wanna look at the details. We found it was achievable. And the reason it's achievable because you got this coal target, it's a target of opportunity to just get rid of the coal bingo to go down 26%. Let's go ahead. We're gonna go all the way through this, just skip it. Skip, skip, skip, skip. And skip MEAs, decarbonization. And now you go ahead. I just wanted to give a little of a summary of some of the engineering and stability challenges that I've kind of touched on throughout the presentation because we have so little transmission and so much generation. The rail belt is very unique in the sense that it essentially functioned as large loosely connected microgrids. And it's very different structure whether or not you wanna see that's really behind or really ahead or for you, that's up to you. It's very kind of bizarre. And at least all sorts of other potential issues when you want to build up the amount of renewable energy on your grid. We also have, as we've mentioned, no current reliability standards. And even if the RRO enacts these, I actually don't know if they have any language in there for any enforcement. But then in addition to that, there's questions because of this very unique structure. You know, do the reliability standards that are used by NERC, do they actually, would those be the best for Alaska or their different standards? You know, there has to be a lot of development that goes into those to make sure that makes sense for the rail belt's unique structure. And now as we increase renewable energy for a common problem with increasing inverter-based resources that have faster responses, we need to shift how we do controls and reserves and that can also involve an increased need for better communication between devices, which Alaska also has unique challenges with because of the geographical expanse and not great connectivity across the state. And with the need for more reserves to handle greater renewables that leads into the need for more or higher capacity energize between the regions. And then these long lines and low load leads to big grids and that increases some interconnection costs associated with due to the need for reactive power compensation devices. And another interesting tip that going back to the way we see this, I can go with EVs and also DERs, all the previous studies, IRP and the EPSS transmission plan, they all assumed no change in load, whether that be from decrease from DERs or an increase from EVs or other benefit qualification. And it's a big question of whether or not that is a good assumption. All these technologies have, you know, cold climates challenges with uptake of these devices. But it would really benefit from a study looking at what would be realistic growth for these instead of just assuming that there won't be any. So, Stevie can talk about summary of economic and policy challenges. I've already covered it. Go ahead. So I just want to touch on the research that ASAP is doing for the rail belts and other research. So there's, I'm going to go from bottom up and pass it over to Steve. So there's the power systems integration group and that is the main group that I work with. We have a microgrid testbed that is supposed to replicate what the size and conditions of a real remote Alaskan microgrid. And then we're also doing and starting to do more projects working with our electric utilities on the rail belts particularly looking at wind and other studies. There's also the Alaska Hydrokinetic Energy Research Center which does a lot of like river and wave hydrokinetics. And that's a picture of at the Tanana River down in Inanna of the Waterhorse River Energy Converter. Steve will talk about the top four. Yeah, we really need to get to Q and A. So the top four are pretty much self-explanatory. BEE stands for Beneficial and Equitable Electrification. So we're looking at a lot of the same things that everyone else is looking at just on a tiny scale in a really cold place. So I think we should go ahead. So I'll briefly touch on, so working with ASAP and everyone who's interested in working in ASAP, the deadline for this is actually already closed but in partnership with Stanford, we were sponsoring a project through the Schulz Energy Fellowships to assist us with our rail belt decarbonization study. But unfortunately the application is closed but what has not happened closed yet for our undergraduate summer internship program the deadline for this for undergrads is February 14th. There's total projects from Energy Efficiency, Nuclear Energy, Renewable Energy and that would be this summer, which is paid including housing. And then as always, if there's any prospective graduate students who are interested in these topics, feel free to reach out to me. All right, now it's Q and A. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, I noticed that there are eight questions. Four of them have been answered by Felicia and the other four haven't. Now let me share my screen. Can you see the Q and A, the questions? I can see them. Yeah, so some of them have been, I think four of them have been answered by Felicia. Yeah, I think I propose that Felicia take the reactive power challenge. I think that's really interesting one to just flesh out a little bit. Which question is that? It's Sandy Lawrence's, I'm looking at the Q and A box. Sandy Lawrence says, please explain reactive power. Oh, reactive power, okay. Yeah, please. Oh. One sec. So reactive power and AC lines. So when you have long lines with low loads, when you have a low loaded AC line, you end up having to need a lot of reactive power to keep those lines stable because your voltage will have large swings and risk both to small changes in power on either end of the line. So what do you have are these reactive power compensation devices, facts or like stuff for compensators and devices like that, that inject reactive power where these long lines exist to help stabilize the voltage. Other questions, we're gonna hear. I have two more questions from Sandy Lawrence. Felicia, I could try the tidal power if you don't mind. Yeah, why don't you jump on so far? So Sandy, there is a good location. We have some of the highest hides comparable to the Bay of Fundy, I think around the Cook Inlet, which is the region close to Anchorage. And there have been studies to actually put in essentially a dam across part of Cook Inlet, I guess that's what you call it, to capture the tidal flux. It's still being studied. And my impression is that it's technically, seems to be technically feasible, but very expensive. And so I'm guessing that the focus of the study now, studies now is to try to identify ways to make it less expensive through some kind of technical innovation or better understanding of how to do it. But it's one of these things where you'd have a lot of megawatts, but it would take, it would be a significant disruption of the tidal ecosystem to capture. Fletcher, I love your question. So I'm gonna jump on that one unless, yeah, and Fletcher's question and Aviva's, they kind of blend together. So the major effective pressure to create the arrow came from the NGO sector within Alaska. We have a organization called Renewable Energy Alaska Project or REAP, and they have been working for years to try to consolidate the rail belt in a way that would admit more renewables onto the grid. So my REED, I'm not totally in the loop, but my REED is that it was in-state NGO action by the legislature to pass this bill for the ERO and also just exhaustion from everything else having failed. So then turning to Aviva's question, the co-ops are responsive to their boards. So my way of thinking the political economy revolves around how are the boards elected and how many members are actually involved in that part of the process? And I don't really have a good answer. It's never really been studied. But when the boards get their act, not their act together, when the boards decide to take action, the co-op boards, it really does have an effect. And it has more of an effect in the smaller co-ops. So in Golden Valley, the board is definitely leading, leading the charge toward decarbonization. And the management is, I would say, dutifully following along. They're not leading, but they're not really blocking it either, at least not so far. I want to quickly touch on the question earlier. Does a weak electricity and gas interconnection give rise to equity issues in the rail belt region? So there are definitely equity issues in the rail belt and our colleague Michelle Wilbur is leading the beneficial and equitable electrification group doing research on this. I don't know if the weak electricity and gas interconnection directly relates to the equity issues in the rail belt, but similar equity issues around like rooftop solar and hosting capacity that are found in lower 48 are also found here. And there is also significant equity issue due to the cost of electricity in the remote microgrids in Alaska versus the rail belt region and the amount of state funding and the portionedness of that state funding. But that's a little different than the rail belt. We're kind of on time, but we can go a little bit, find more minutes that you know, if people have more questions on you. Well, I wanted to chime in on the equity, the equity thing. Okay. Just too, too little. Question number three. Yeah. I just want to say that I'm not sure that the weak interconnections themselves are causing problems, but we do have significant equity and energy justice issues. And I think a lot of them really, we have a rate structure that's heavily tilted toward loading up the energy charge with our fixed costs. And so you can talk about whether that's inequitable because it means that it's good or bad for equity. And we've had, I would argue, we've had several programs and may still have several programs that basically reward people who don't need it because they've already got capital to invest. And we sometimes reward them for doing things with rebates or give backs. And those programs are completely off the, you know, they're out of reach for a lot of folks. And some of us are concerned that that's going to be the case with EV incentives as we move into EVs. So it's nothing new, but you know, the same kinds of issues that a lot of other people are facing. Okay. Do we have any more questions? From students in the classroom or people who join us online? Okay, let's thank those two speakers. This is a very interesting talk. Thank you for having us. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Bye-bye.