 It's a pleasure to do, I think this may be our 13th or 14th session of Wires University, so if people aren't quite getting the total transmission thing, it's not our fault. We're delighted that you're here. Actually, the word of the day is infrastructure, and interestingly enough, if you look through the President's proposals and a lot of things in the recent funding legislation, you'll find not a great deal about electric transmission. We think it's a critical network that not enough attention is being paid to. We've heard a lot, and the commentators are all over the fact that American infrastructure is rated a D plus by the American Society of Civil Engineers, while among those qualifying for a D plus is electric transmission. Despite the fact that we've invested $80 or $90 billion in the last decade, primarily to make up for underinvestment in the grid since the late 70s. So we're getting back in the saddle in terms of investing in the grid, but there's something happening that's probably pretty obvious to all of us. Society's becoming more animated by electric power. Not just iPhones, but electric heating, and there is a large transportation fleet out there that before too long is going to be electric powered. Is the grid ready for that? I submit that it probably isn't, and if you're depending on low-cost renewable energy that comes from very remote locations very often in the middle of the country, you are going to need a more robust transmission grid. It's the only way you can move that power in any great quantities to markets. So we are here to talk today about a couple of very important topics. It's clear to those of us in the business that the grid is not as robust as it needs to be to meet the demands, the coming demands of the electrified economy. So how do we persuade policymakers, regulators, and the public that this is a place where we can invest with very, very positive results in the long run? Remember, these are assets. Once you build them, put them in the ground, they're going to be there for a half century, and they're going to be serving not just your children, but your grandchildren and beyond probably. Today we are still leaning on transmission that was built in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. So planning ahead is not something that we've done a whole lot of in this country, and I'm personally delighted that the President has put a shining light on infrastructure and the need to plan ahead and invest. We can talk more about that later. This morning, we bring you, the Wires Group, brings you two experts in the area. Julia Freyer is a director, I think is that, or a managing director at London Economics International. She's out of the Boston area and has done two or three studies for the Wires Organization. We're going to talk about two of those today. One that deals with the myths associated with transmission. A lot of people think we can't invest or shouldn't invest in that area for a variety of reasons. I think you'll be very interested in what she has to say about those myths, conceptions. She's here with her colleague, Eva Wang, and together they and other colleagues at London Economics come up with the study of myths. And a second study, this is the, how does electric transmission benefit you? And this is the short version. She also has a methodological treatise that goes with this if you're really into this stuff and it does something that I think is fairly rare and that is she's looked at transmission, these long-term, long-lived assets and calculated, projected, what the benefits will be over the life of those assets and she'll talk about what those benefits are. There are lots of different ones that change over time, but the benefits are real. Problem is planners don't typically focus on anything beyond electrical liability. So that'll be interesting. So we're going to take, I think, the first study, the myth study, then the benefit study. With Julie this morning is my friend and my new boss because she's president of Wires this year, Nina Plauchin. She is the vice president, the title is a long one, vice president of regulatory federal affairs and communications and at ITC holdings. And she'll tell you a little bit about that company, but it was my pleasure when I was on the FERC to begin to work on independent transmission companies and some of the transmission only companies that emerged in Michigan I had the pleasure of working on and that they became part of ITC holdings. Nina is one of, I guess what I would call one of the big brains in the business and I think she and Julie are going to kind of toss things back and forth about these studies, about the myths, about the benefits of transmission. And we invite you to think about some good, very tough questions about the benefits, the challenges that transmission developers face in this changing environment, changing not just politically but changing in terms of the economy, in terms of technology and transmission is going to play a very major role in all those changes. So do you want to add anything to that? Do you want to say a little something about ITC? Yeah, I can do that. ITC is obviously, as Jim mentioned, an independent transmission company that means we own no generation and we own no distribution. We are headquartered in Michigan but we also have assets in Iowa, in Kansas, Minnesota, a small part of Illinois, and Oklahoma. We are part of a larger organization. We are one of a Fordist company which is a Canadian based company that also owns generation and transmission assets in New York and in Arizona. Jim has sort of outed me a little bit and I think this is probably the story for Wires. ITC and Wires go back a long way and we were talking about transmission when transmission wasn't cool and there was a time when we were facing three decades of under-investment in the grid and there was a strong need for more transmission and so the independent transmission model sort of came out of that, Wires came out of that and now we've gone through something of a build cycle and it's interesting because now that we're through that build cycle, I think one of the myths we're going to talk about is so what does that mean for the grid? We've had a big investment spur over the last 10 years. What happens now? And I think that it'll be very interesting to talk about how the environment that the grid is operating in has changed too because it's not a stagnant equation. When we first started talking about investment in transmission, we were talking about vertically integrated utilities who were servicing their load and basically generation relatively close to where it was being used. We have a totally new environment which is much different. So I would just say that I'm very pleased to be here. I am glad that some of you still care about transmission. I know there's a lot of other issues competing for interest these days but I guess I would just preface this by saying one of the reasons WIRE exists is because we want to educate people on the issues. We are here to make sure people actually understand some pretty complex matters but we're also here because when we talk about infrastructure, when we're talking about growth of the economy, a big piece of that is the cost of power and part of that solution in keeping power prices low is transmission. You can't get away from that. And so with that I guess I'll turn it over to Julie. And good morning to everyone. Thank you Jim for the introduction and Nina. And thank you WIREs and the Environmental and Energy Study Institute for hosting us here today. And last but not least, thank you to my colleagues who have worked with me for the past year. I think we started about a year ago on the two studies that I'm going to talk about today. Generally speaking, transmission investment is a very important issue to me because I'm engaged. I work as a consultant in the electricity sector and transmission is what really connects and completes what we call a power system. You can't deliver electricity without the transmission. But I think transmission investment should actually be important to all of us, not just those that work in the sector directly, because of the cost of electricity. The fact is we're all consumers and we all are impacted by decisions made with respect to transmission investment. So with that introduction, I think the first goal today is to provide some basic facts about transmission investment and in so doing hopefully dispel some of what I call the myths that we've heard about the need or the lack thereof for investment. The second paper, which we'll take some questions after the first few slides, the second paper is then to really accomplish our second goal of the day. And I hope I can at least provide a basic explanation of how transmission investment can benefit everyone here in the room, consumers, households, owners of businesses, and generally the economy here in the U.S. So I know I've set two very large goals for myself, but I'm hoping that I get some good marks after the day is done. So as Jim said, we have two papers out there. There's copies in the front for those who'd like to take a copy back home with them. They're also available electronically off the wire's website. And there's fact sheets on your chairs, if you haven't found them already, that provide the website link. I won't spend much time around talking about the myths because we're going to step into it and I want it to be a little bit of a surprise. But really the purpose was to, I think, debunk what I personally hear quite often when I go see regulators, policy makers, decision makers, investors, private equity firms, banks about why are you here supporting this? We don't need new transmission. They just had a billion dollars last year. They made a bunch of investments. We're good for now. And I think we want to take apart that statement and make sure we understand why people think that way and then correct their thinking. The second paper, as Jim suggested, is a little bit more of a next step. So once we correct people's thinking or make sure we understand what the true needs of transmission are, how do we get transmission investment evaluated and approved and one of the missing links in my opinion is the fact that we sometimes have a hard time understanding how transmission benefits us. It's large infrastructure. We understand the cost because engineers are all over that. They have a good handle on how much it takes to put up new transmission towers and conduct a new line and so forth. But benefits tend to be more of an enigma to many of us and in part because I don't think historically transmission planners, system planners were required to establish the economic value, proposition or the benefits of investment. But I think in this day and age, it's really important to bring that all down. And I'm hoping that with a second study, I can help explain some of the benefits over time and we can examine them together in terms of dollars and cents because I think the more conventional rubric used in the transmission planning world of loss of load expectations, second contingencies, N minus 1 minus 1 events, that sounds like super science to many of us. And it's very hard to explain it. I always try to use my 11-year-old as my test case. He does not know what N minus 1 minus 1 is, but he knows a billion dollars. It's a lot of benefit. So hopefully, we can get there today. So on with the myths. And I apologize, I talk fast, but I'm happy to also take questions. So don't hesitate to wait till the end. I might talk past the point, so feel free to stop me at any point in time. So we've identified 16 common myths in our first paper. And all the myths basically revolved around the basic question of why we don't need transmission or why we don't need more transmission. And we've categorized those 16 myths into five broad categories so that we're covering all aspects of the arguments we've heard. There's arguments about demand side. There's arguments about we don't need transmission because other supply side considerations will meet the needs of electricity consumers. There's arguments about other new technologies, alternatives to transmission. There's also arguments about the cost. And finally, I think also about the certainty of the benefits that transmission provides. I'd like to take you through a few examples today. We won't have time to go through 16 myths, but I'd like to at least cover a few and try to explain why I think those myths arise. In my mind, legends, myths, they all have some factual foundation. There's a seed of truth there. The problem really happens when that seed of truth gets overwhelmed with, in many cases, misunderstandings of the value of transmission. The fact is that we're not just building for today. We're building for today, tomorrow, the day after, and for the longer term. And that type of perspective is sometimes lost in the context of what we are more certain about, which is really about today and tomorrow. So let me, without much embellishment, unless Nina wants to jump in, I'll start with the first example we came up with. And maybe Nina has some firsthand experience to comment after I describe it a bit. So I often hear people talk about the fact that demand is forecast to not increase demand for electricity and maybe even decline. If you're familiar with perhaps your own utility or your local RTO system operator, they put out demand forecast for electricity. Across many parts of the U.S., demand growth has really come down into low single digits. 20 years ago, when I started in the industry, we were having demand growth projections that are 2% to 3% per year in line with 2% to 3% per year GDP growth estimates at the time. And now they've come down quite a bit. So there is a seed of truth in that I recognize that our near term demand forecasts are fairly stable. They have plateaued, so we're not seeing electric growth. But that doesn't mean that we won't see the need for transmission. And the issue is that transmission, as Jim pointed out, is an investment that has a very long-term planning horizon. Not only does it take a long time to develop and construct, but more importantly, it will provide value, provide benefits for a very long time frame. Usually we talk about 50 plus years, maybe even into the 80 plus years horizon. So when we talk about do we have demand that necessitates transmission investment, we should really be talking or asking ourselves the question of will we have demand over the next 50 years that will need new transmission investment. And there's a multitude of forecasts out there that suggest that is definitely the case, despite what the near term prognosis is for electricity demand. We are expecting a major electrification of our economies. Electrification in the transportation sector won't happen in the next year or the next five years, maybe not even the next 10 years in the levels to really make an impact, but in the next 30 to 50 years we're expecting as that graphic suggests a significant push in the transportation sector. It's the gray bar and I think by the 2050 horizon, we're expecting that it's responsible for 2,000 terawatt hours of additional load across the US. But another element is also electrification of the heating sector. That too is expected and that's the red bar to increase significantly over time. We're also expecting in addition to just growth in new activities or load patterns just even a transition to where people put their businesses and where electricity is needed. Two examples are discussed in the paper and that relates to the new information technology sector and the fact that we need a lot of electricity to support servers and server farms are coming up in very strange places that weren't anticipated and also we're seeing a boom in our domestic natural gas production and that also requires a lot of electricity. Nina, do you want to jump in? I'm the color commentary for this program. So I would say one thing that just is an interesting story from the ITC perspective is of course this issue where we have seen greater efficiency so we've seen some drop in demand. But we've also seen a switch away from some traditional manufacturing jobs. But what is now coming up are the Amazons, the big data centers. And they're not necessarily locating in places where we would traditionally have a large amount of transmission or generation. We have a very large data center going in in Iowa for example. Well, Iowa is a pretty rural area by and large. We have a lot of transmission there but it's lower voltage because people are farther apart. And so when you say I'm going to put a huge amount of load in Iowa now for a data center, that's great for the state, good tax base, maybe some jobs. But it also means, oh no, I have to hurry up and build a bunch of stuff to serve this need. And so and you probably have seen on the news that Amazon's got like three or four locations where they might put their next big facility, their big warehouse. So there are very large customers who are coming into play now that we haven't seen in the past. And we also represent, we have transmission in the Detroit area. Well, Detroit obviously has gone through a huge economic downturn. But what's happening now? Well, businesses are starting to come back. We are getting more businesses and manufacturing even in the state. And so one of the things we're going to talk about later but to keep in mind when we talk about a long planning horizon, generally we plan for at least ten years. But we need to be looking even farther out frequently to figure out what's going to happen is, okay, well, we know some of these things are coming. We're trying to address them but at the same time, does that match up with how we look at planning and how we actually do these things? And so you have to be ready to accept the fact that the future is uncertain and you have to look at multiple scenarios because none of us knew exactly what 20 years from now is going to look like. And so what you don't want to have is a situation where someone wants to locate in the upper peninsula of Michigan just as an example. We don't have the facilities up there to accommodate them. So we tell them, that's great. In seven years, you can put your business there. Well, that's not good for the state of Michigan. That's not good for the customers. That's not good for anybody. But that's how long it sometimes takes to build these facilities. And so when we talk about new demand, you need to think of it too as, well, how ready are we for this potential influx? Not just, well, we can build it once we need it because that could be a very long lag. Another argument that I've commonly heard from decision makers is that transmission isn't really needed anymore because of new technologies, kind of new ideas that appear to be less costly, smaller scale. So they don't require as much of a commitment from regulators and decision makers. But I think that story is actually something that we've spent quite a long time trying to unravel. That story is a misconception about how the actual power system works. The power system doesn't work because we can replace transmission with energy efficiency and demand side management. And it won't work if we replace all transmission with new conventional generation. And that's just two examples. Really, the power system is a portfolio, a combination of many different technologies. We need the transmission just as much as we need the generation and the energy efficiency programs and demand response and distributed generation and frankly, new technologies down the road. More importantly too, the need for various pieces of the system have their kind of unique fit. One of our prior studies from a few years back, we evaluated the services that transmission can provide relative to the services of other alternatives. We call them market resource alternatives, but I'm sure some of you have also heard of them referred to as non-transmission alternatives, but essentially looking at other pieces of the grid. Like in this particular chart, we've got energy efficiency as a column, demand response as a column, distributed generation, and energy storage. And this is just an excerpt. We have actually a larger chart that contains many other technologies across the landscape of the electricity sector. And what you can see from these moon charts is transmission really from the ability to deliver a variety of products over large geographical areas for long durations tends to kind of win out in terms of its ability to provide those, that's the black colored moon charts. Other technologies, alternatives can do the same in certain segments, in certain characteristics, but not across the board, and not in the same way that transmission can. I have to comment on this issue, because I'm absolutely certain all of you have heard about this, which is of course solar panels. People putting solar panels on their homes. There's sort of this mythology out there now that all utilities hate solar panels and there's some big conflict. From a transmission company point of view, and I think also from a wires point of view, no one is trying to prevent people from making choices in terms of customer choices, in terms of what makes sense for them. There are some issues around cost, around who's paying and who's benefiting. There are issues around economies of scale, but putting all of that aside. When we go to interconnect a customer, if it's a bunch of aggregated solar panels, it looks the same to me as any other type of demand response or any other type of generation. But what's interesting about it is the value proposition for solar panels. There's a value for you as an individual customer because you can use it and presumably be off the grid. But the real value proposition comes in selling back into the grid. Aggregating all the energy that's not being used at any given time in these facilities, in these homes, wherever they may be, and then selling them back. And we're seeing that in New York. We're seeing that in California. We're seeing it anywhere where there's large penetration of solar panels or other types of distributed resources. What we also see are those aggregators pairing that type of resource with storage. And the reason they're doing that is because it has to be deliverable. It has to be what we call firm in the business. Nobody wants to buy anything that you may not be able to deliver. Okay? So once you start having that conversation, you start saying, okay, well we've got aggregators who are putting neighborhoods together and then we're gonna have storage, which is gonna be another cost component. And then we're gonna sell it back into the grid. Well, you better have a grid to sell it back into. And that's really the point of this, which is somewhat being missed. The other point that's being missed, as with any demand responses, let's say cities are better able in certain regions where there's a lot of sun to do this type of technology, just like wind is better in certain places. Well, you wanna be able to move it around in the grid. You don't want it all just getting dumped in one place. And in fact, that's the California experience, right? That there are times when they're actually dumping power off of the grid because they can't use it all. Well, how wasteful is that, right? I mean, we're talking about being efficient and being conservative in terms of environmental reasons for generation. Well, part of making this all work is having a grid that can deliver it and move it. And so I don't see it as an either or proposition. And I think that that's what our study shows. There are rules for all these different things. But one doesn't just say, well, because a bunch of people put on solar panels, now we don't need a transmission grid anymore. Will it long term have an impact? I know in California there were a couple of projects that were canceled because of projections around solar implementation. And my feeling is, well, we have projects that are canceled all the time because of changes. A power plant gets built one place, and then we have to what we call reconfigure, which means we have to restudy all the power flows, I'm sorry, but to restudy all the power flows to figure out, well, do we still need that facility? So that's not necessarily a change from how we currently do things. Will it maybe impact things long term? Maybe, but then we might actually have to build transmission for other reasons like ancillary services and other things that are identified in that little chart that some of those technologies don't provide. So I think it's just an important point to remember. We're not here to say that we oppose any one type of resource. What we are trying to say is we need to really look at the system as an integrated system because it is. The generation is tied directly through distribution in or directly into the grid. And what happens on one piece of the system impacts every other piece of the system. I try to tell people, don't think of it like pipelines. This isn't like an oil pipeline or a gas pipeline. It's like a spider web. And that really helps you better understand how a one little movement one place causes ripple effects everywhere else. A well balanced machine that is better than the individual parts when we sum it all together. So another common myth, if we can move on, relates to the cost side of any transmission investments. If you pick up and undo like an industry search of transmission investment projects that have been announced in the last 10 years, I will make a bet that 95% of the articles will have the name of the project and within two sentences it's costs. Costs and projects seem to go hand in hand because generally these are large amounts of dollars being spent on big infrastructure projects. But that I think actually raises the problems we've seen around the myth that I commonly hear that transmission investment is just too costly. The price tags are generally large because the infrastructure scale is large. And that statement just again has a very negative connotation to many decision makers. I think what they overlook is the fact that the cost, the price tag actually is the driver for local economic benefits. A billion dollar project typically is going to infuse anywhere from 500 million to 700 million worth of dollars back into the local economy where that project is being constructed and installed. So I think it's the use of the word cost that's quite deceiving because the next paragraph down and even the paragraph below that won't talk about the benefits. And one of the things that's commonly overlooked in the system planning world these days is that RTOs, ISOs go through extensive vetting of transmission investments to ensure that the benefit to cost relationship is positive. In other words that benefits exceed costs. But I think those studies tend to be very technical and in some ways may be far outside of the typical rubric that is covered in the press or in the more basic descriptions of projects. So we need to discipline ourselves I think to make sure when we're looking at investments we're not just thinking costs. We have costs and benefits side by side. Yes, please. Great point. In fact this whole segment of category of myths has different subcategories, separate myths around it. So one of the myths is the fear of the billion dollar price tag and I'm just using a billion dollars. There's many transmission projects that are much lower cost than a billion dollars. But a billion dollar transmission project being too expensive but rather the way that we actually allocate those costs is over so many years to so many different consumers that it's typically a drop of the bucket. Transmission still today is the is a much smaller portion of typical customers utility bill that they receive many years. Yeah, and I think that it, yeah, and I think also just to do one of our favorite stats, you know, transmission comprises somewhere between 7 to 10 percent of the overall cost to deliver power as a national average in some places it's lower in some places it's higher. So what you're looking at is if you increase that by one percentage point you can leverage and reduce what is a much bigger portion of the cost of delivered power from the generation side or even the distribution side sometimes. And so, you know, it is one of those things where it's fascinating to me that transmission has gotten so much scrutiny because of the cost. Whereas, you know, and I can say this I guess because I'm not a generator technically. But, you know, whereas you know on the generation side we're kind of trusting that the markets are disciplining price and that we've got the best price we can get. And maybe that's true and maybe it isn't. But it does seem to me that, you know, they're which we're going to go into a lot more depth on so I don't want to take too long but it does seem that one of the things to keep in mind is, you know, we do see in some of the generation prices they're going down because fuel costs are going down wind doesn't cost anything, right. And so customers are seeing, you know, cheaper fuel and so they're now seeing a reduction in their generation. So that's great. But guess what, to get that wind you've got to move it and there's got to be some transmission. And so it's a mixed bag but I guess I would just remind everyone that, you know, when we talk about transmission we're starting from the premise that it's already a very small part of what you're paying for in terms of getting your power. And then if you are able to leverage it to reduce the other portions which are much more expensive it's a great value proposition. And in fact, again kind of going back to what is already being done by system planners we have a picture on this slide of the economic benefits that were evaluated for a particular, well it was part of the mid-MISOs, I'm going to get the acronym correct, MISOs 2016 Transmission Expansion Plan. And as you can see there are a lot of different types of benefits that essentially add up to the largest green bar on the screen and that's then compared to the total costs which is the second bar from the right and yields a net benefit metric. So what we need to do, I think in my opinion to take it one step further, one step beyond what system operators and transmission decision makers regulators are already looking at is to expand the categories of benefits and expand the time frame over which we're evaluating those benefits because it's not just the next 10 years, it's a much longer time frame. And I have to jump in one more time and just say you know we're not the only ones who have looked at these types of calculations. The Southwest Power Pool did their own analysis of the investment they made under their so-called highway byway plan and they looked at $3.4 billion of transmission investment from 2012 to 2014. That was a total of 348 projects and when they looked at a variety of benefits they had benefits to customers that exceeded $16.6 billion. Now we could eliminate looking at some of those benefits which is what a lot of regions do and even if you just did that the benefits would be about $660,000 a day, $240 million a year. So calculate that over 40 years for the life of the project. So it's good to know that there are other entities out there who are doing the same thing. We are, SPP actually is one of the more robust regions in terms of looking at benefits. So one more example if you guys hopefully aren't too, too bored talking about myths. I think another one that we have received and this kind of segues really nicely to our discussions here. It's about the variety of benefits. One of the things we're seeing in our economy is that transmission investments, some of the big economic transmission investments projects tend to be covering a very large footprint. Sometimes they're going across multiple state boundaries because they are trying to capture the opportunity to gather electricity from natural producing areas where we have either cheap gas like the shale gas plays or where we have abundance of wind or maybe even abundance of solar PV production capability. They're trying to take that electricity and then move it to consumers and our consumers are pretty distributed around the coastlines, if you will, and the urban centers. So there is a natural physical need for transmission that serves as the highway for electricity. But the argument then is well, it's only those consumers on the coasts, those consumers that are receiving the power that are benefiting. And that's, again, a misimpression I think about the benefits of transmission. Transmission investment is not like a power cord. So that's another thing I learned from my 11-year-old. He thinks the transmission lines are like power cords. We're not living in a world of power cords. And the reason that's a wrong analogy is because electric systems are much more integrated and our economies are much more integrated than what meets the eye. So the benefits that we can think about accrue to people outside of the person at the end of the power cord that's receiving the power. And if we take this particular slide through its conclusion, there's what I call the source region where the power cords, or the transmission investment, I should stop calling them power cords, where the transmission investment really begins. And there are benefits there for suppliers, for generators, because they're going to be able to expand their market opportunities and sell into more markets, make additional profits and revenues, expand their businesses, expand, we've seen many cases where generators were able to make investments and expand their power plants because transmission allowed them to, we call it wheel, or sell their power to other markets. Then we look at what I call transit regions, which is basically the areas that transmission, you'll see the transmission towers and the transmission lines, areas that are kind of in the middle between the source and the sink. Again, there's, I think, a misunderstanding about the potential for transmission to benefit those regions as well. Transmission projects typically pay for use of land, make property tax payments, and during construction, the local economies in those geographies get the benefit of the boost because of construction that's happening within their perimeter. We also have the sink, finally, location. That's where the consumers are getting access to lower cost, more economic, more efficient, more environmentally friendly, hopefully electric power. But there's also a number of additional benefits that we'll talk to as we go through the second paper that accrue to that geography or location of transmission investment. Yeah, I would just make a comment, too. There's been some press about a couple projects which are what we call direct current projects, merchant projects. They take power from one place to another, and they do operate kind of like a power cord. And so there's been complaints from what we call the flyover states that they don't get any benefit. Those are not the norm. Those are not most of the projects that are built in the U.S. There are more out west because there's a lot of terrain and reasons for that. But what we're talking about are integrated projects at this point, you know, part of the AC network. And one of the comments I like to make to people when I talk to them is that, you know, you go in and you build a 345 or a high-voltage line through a region, okay? What happens in that region? Even if you're not delivering power there, which I would argue you probably are in some ways because the electrons go where they want to go, but we'll talk about that later. So you're going through that region in an AC network. Well, what happens is power flows up to the highest voltage you can reach because there's less resistance and you have fewer losses. So what happens is that frees up all this capacity at the lower voltages that now the local communities can take advantage of and, in fact, may divert other needed investment that they otherwise would have made. So it's not a zero-sum game. It's not like, oh, a 345... I'm really getting it out of control. It's not like a 345 line just basically ends up benefiting only people at the end because it has impacts on the system as a whole that are beneficial. So now that we've talked a little bit about the myths and how there are combinations of factual elements and maybe some false notions or misunderstandings, I think the big question that remains is how do we avoid the trap of going down the path of repeating those myths around transmission investment? And in that first paper, towards the back, if you make it your way through, you'll see that we've laid out what I consider to be six kind of rules, and that's why I called it a playbook, kind of an ode to my husband who loves sports. And I'm hoping that these six rules can help decision makers really think through a proper analysis where they can avoid being convinced by myths that aren't wholly correct and think through the full realities of the power system. So the first rule is that I think costs and benefits need to be evaluated together as a package. Second rule is transmission alternatives need to be examined comprehensively. And the reason we think this is important is not simply because we want to prove out that transmission is better. I think it's really to prove out that this is an integrated system, that transmission is a complement to other types of investments. And in fact, the need for other types of investments to some degree drives the need for transmission investment. So if we don't look at alternatives on a comprehensive basis, we're probably going to get an improperly planned system in the long run. The third rule is to recognize the fact that uncertainty is not an obstacle to investment. Most people will think that they're very certain about the cost of something, but they're uncertain about the benefits in the future. I would argue that costs are uncertain, too, to some degree. But more importantly, the fact that we have uncertainty shouldn't stop us from doing the analysis. And there are tools out there. Nina mentioned scenario analysis, among others, that can help us grapple with uncertainty and still make a robust decision on long-term investment. Fourth point is to plan for the future. In the future, should probably come with a number of years, but I think at the minimum, we need to be talking 20 years or longer out for transmission investment or any, frankly, large infrastructure project. We don't build these projects to meet the needs of tomorrow. It's the many years of tomorrow, many generations of consumers that we need to consider in the analysis. I also think in this fifth point, it actually goes hand-in-hand with the fourth point, I do think, and this is a problem. I have this problem at home. My kids were bad five minutes ago. I'm still mad at them. I don't forget or I don't remember as much all the good things they've done weeks before and good things they're going to do in the future. I think we also have a natural tendency to over-reli on just very recent experience and have that color or understanding. I recall meeting with many local politicians and regulators in the Northeast after the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy and having everybody very concerned about investments. And then as the months went by and they turned into seasons and then years, I think many of the, I think, very thoughtful ideas and initiatives sort of waned in their interest. And that's just one kind of colloquial example I personally had with it. But I think we need to look very objectively at all future conditions and not just worry about what just happened in the past. And finally, I think it's very important to plan for the unexpected. And this, I think, pairs well with uncertainty aspects because that's really the goal here, is to build a transmission system that is flexible and resilient to changes in conditions so that we're not caught off guard. And the way I like to think about it, to be unprepared has a big cost or price tag for us too. So when we think of investment planning, part of the purpose is to avoid those costs of not being prepared as much as it is to take advantage of the benefits of having that investment in place. Nina, comment. Now, I'm going to pass on that one, but I think we should take a break here, right? Yeah, I think this is a good point to ask you all for questions. We've gone through the missed study. I think what you've clearly heard is that transmission is a network, a spider web, not a pipeline or an extension cord. It can be very flexible. It can deliver a lower cost energy. It is inherently very interstate in nature. And I think most important, it's an enabler. That is, it's a new technology that we're all experiencing every day and that people frequently think of as alternatives to transmission are actually going to benefit from a more robust grid that can aggregate and dispatch those resources in a way that's very economic. So the benefits of transmission, because it's such a complicated machine, are not necessarily intuitive. Let's put it that way. This is not easy stuff. The lights are on, so what's the problem? The fact is that we are in the midst of a transformational period that we need to prepare for the future. And to the extent policymakers are able to digest the lessons that Julia has outlined here, to that extent we're going to see better infrastructure, more of it in the future, that's going to enable all those benefits. There are lots of big transmission projects that are dying on the vine because people are kind of scratching their heads about the price tag compared to the benefits next week or next year when they should be thinking quite differently about these big infrastructure projects. I should say, for those of you who came in late, these studies are available here, but we also have them on our website. And one study that we don't, we aren't really talking a whole lot about today, is the one that Julia referenced. It's a study that was done in 2014 that talks about new technology and transmission as an enabler, and that too is on our website. I think it's, I still think it's the best thing in the whole discussion about distributed generation versus transmission. Questions? Great question. Yeah. Yeah, I would say that we're having meetings this week, and that is one of our topics. I'm moderating a panel on resiliency. We're very interested in this issue. Obviously, FERC has been looking at it. NERC, which is our regulator, our industry regulator is looking at this issue. And what it really comes down to is how do you define reliability? You know, Puerto Rico, there's some thought that, at least in Puerto Rico, one of the reasons why a lot of their stuff came down wasn't just because it was a horrible storm, because it was, but it was also because it wasn't well maintained. And you know, in Florida, they've started building new facilities that can withstand category three hurricanes, as an example. And they got buy-in from their state regulators to do that, because otherwise, every time there's a hurricane, one or two or three hurricanes, you got to go put everything back up again, right? And so, you know, it costs more up front, but over time, it pays for itself. And so, the resiliency issue is fascinating to us. We are beginning to look at it and try to figure out how to talk about transmission in that context, because it's about a lot of different things. It's not just about hurricanes and storms. It's about security breaches and terrorist attacks. If we lose a couple big pieces of equipment, transformers, which, by the way, take at least a year to get placed, and they're from out of this country. What do we do? How do we deal with that? We have a spare transformer program in the industry, but there's also a transmission component to this. How could you reconfigure the system through transmission to get people up quicker and get power restored? There's also just questions around the markets. And I was just going to make a comment about this enabling issue, because it's not just when people think about, well, the lights are on, what's the problem? It's also about, are we doing this the most cost-effective way? And when you are not able to facilitate the markets and enable generation to move freely, people pay more. That's basically just supply and demand economics, right? And she's the economist here. I'm the color for commentary. But I would say that we do need to look at that, too. And so lots of states have different policy objectives. Some people want solar panels. Some people want to do wind exports. Some people have a lot of natural gas. Some people have coal. Some people have electricity. Some people have power. Some people have power to do it. Some people have power to do it. And they're not just one country, they're not just one state. They all want to be able to do different things with those resources. Well, guess what makes all that possible? It's all transmission. It's not just one or the other. We're not just building it for wind. And so resiliency, though, I think is one of those things where people mean different things when they talk about it. And I think it's a very beneficial way, but we don't want to get ahead of our members either. I will tell you that ITC has a lot to say, so we can talk later. Okay. Great. Julia, I'm going to go on to the next. Any other questions? We can go on to the next study. And I might touch upon the question of reliability benefits and how to measure them. And it will encompass resiliency as part of this. So hopefully we'll come back to it. But since we're in DC, therefore this graphic, and we're moving on to the second paper. So I think much of the materials we're going to talk for the rest of our session is really covered in the second paper. And the purpose of the second paper was to move us down the road. So in the myths we discovered that there's a lot of consternation among decision makers and stakeholders in the industry about how do you go measuring uncertain benefits. And what we wanted to demonstrate in this paper is that it is possible to quantify future benefits of transmission comprehensively. And the best way to organize yourself in thinking about it is to make sure you're addressing all the important questions. And for us, these are the four important questions. Who gets the benefits of transmission? That's in the upper left-hand corner. Not surprisingly, transmission affects many different entities. Although I think in some instances, system planners tend to only focus on one or the other. Transmission affects households. It affects retail and commercial businesses, industrials. It affects generators. It affects small and large industrial complexes. And it affects governments and how successful they are in implementing their policies. What are those benefits? Well, very much linked to the beneficiaries. We have a diversity of benefits. We can affect consumers' utility bills because we reduce the cost of producing electricity by allowing for more efficient trading of electricity on the network. Transmission investment can increase reliability and flexibility of the grid. That basically avoids costly outcomes. It avoids the fact that consumers don't have electricity and therefore can't do their business, can't support economic activity. There are also benefits from achieving policy goals, environmental policy goals. There's benefits to the local economy. It's well known that local economies benefit from an economic boost during construction of large infrastructure, but there's also and this is much rarer in discussion, but there's also a lot of local economic benefits because consumers do see a reduced electricity cost after the projects put into service. And that actually has a much more profound effect than even the temporary boost due to construction of projects. Where do we see transmission benefits? It's the geographical question and I would just re-emphasize what Nina said in that in the integrated nature of transmission it's not just the point of interconnection or 100 km or 100 mile radius. Really what we're seeing in our analyses because we can simulate how electrons will flow physically is that the cost consequences of major transmission benefits could cross state boundaries very easily, but travel thousands of miles and newer transmission technologies are actually facilitating that because they're reducing the transmission losses that we've seen historically on older assets. And then when do these benefits arise speaking to the question of timing, those benefits sometimes don't arise immediately. It takes time for transmission investment in some instances to really get to like their full maximum spectrum of benefits. For example, reliability benefits and I'll show you some numbers overwhelming in their magnitude in dollar terms, but you're not going to have those benefits show up year after year. Those benefits from a consumer perspective might happen unexpectedly at some point but what we do know is that they will happen at least once over 40 years or longer. So it's not the question of when as much as knowing that we are likely to expect them at some point in time. I just wanted to make one comment about outages. I know everyone thinks outages are storms or power outages, but we actually have what we call planned outages as well. All power plants have to be taken out of service at some point, usually at least once a year, if not more, for maintenance. That's a planned outage. Transmission lines need to be taken out of service so certain elements can be worked on, things can be fixed, poles can be swapped out. And so the amount of excess capacity for lack of a better word for the amount of transmission and how robust your grid is influences how able you are to do that kind of planned outages and how long people have to wait for those to happen. And so those can be quite expensive and difficult to get if you have a system that's really running on the edge. I will, before I get into the number crunching portion of this presentation, I did want to bring up an analogy and in the paper we talk, I think, about this. In part I think people don't appreciate the electric wires because sometimes they're not even visible to some of us. But we all appreciate the roads and we all have suffered through congested highways and congested local roads. I heard traffic wasn't very pretty this morning here in DC. Think of the transmission investments that we're talking about as additional roads, additional bridges, additional highways. It's infrastructure with a big eye but more importantly I think it does the same thing that roads do which is it basically gets people, goods and services that's what roads do from one location to another. Transmission basically does that with electrons, with electricity. It gets electricity from the point of production to the point where consumers are demanding it where consumers are located. And I think because of that in economic terms and I promise not to bombard you with a bunch of economic theory here, transmission by definition is going to create benefits because it's of the trade opportunities and the increased competition it provides to markets for electricity. And I think that's important because sometimes when I approach investors or regulators about transmission, the assumption is really zero benefits and we have to convince them that they're there. Whereas I think if they think about the economics they should recognize that there will be benefits. It's just a question of magnitude but they won't be zero. Yeah I would mention one thing about congestion too just so those of you who are from regions where they're organized markets every year you'll see published information about how much customers are paid for congestion in that region. That's because the way the wholesale markets work there's a valuation put to congestion to send a price signal to encourage investment. We're not here to argue whether the market structure makes sense or not but the point is we actually measure how much people are spending on congestion every year and so right off the top if you're doing a project that's going to eliminate congestion you already know that not only going to eliminate that congestion for one year you're going to do it for 40 years so that's why it's never zero in addition to being able to move things more efficiently to the market there's also just the transmission congestion pricing component. Congestion costs can be enormous and billions and billions of dollars annually you don't see it on your bill but believe me it's there somewhere the I want to clarify that by organized markets what we're talking about is regional transmission organizations it's something created by FERC your public utilities and that means that for an entire region there is one organization in charge of administering the power market but also planning transmission and overseeing it from one central point and we're in PJM right now the PJM interconnection I believe is still the world's largest organized organized power market sorry just and it's actually PJM is one of the focuses of the second study so going back our goal was to demonstrate to readers that it is possible to quantify benefits and we thought the best way to do that was to actually document in a report how you go about quantifying those benefits and in order to do that we picked two transmission projects one on the west coast western interconnect and one on the I would say Midwest part of the country but located in what we call the eastern interconnect part of the national transmission system and we wanted to model projects that are hypothetical in nature because we didn't want to put any transmission developer on the hot seat but at the same time these are real projects and we model them in the context of real these are realistic projects and we wanted to model them in the context of real world dynamics so we simulated the power systems as they are today and as they are expected to be in the next 20 years and longer so taking into account very detailed information that we have on location of project existing generation location of new projects future conditions for fuel natural gas prices various state and regional policies related to carbon renewable investment and so forth these hypothetical projects I think represent very common drivers for transmission investment so for the myso pgm transmission expansion project we looked at what we call a trade enhancing project where the transmission investment would lead to additional transactions between these two rto those are two organized two separate organized markets and what we noticed as part of our modeling and we were able to quantify is that they also help these two rto's achieve decarbonization goals at a lower cost because they are leveraging the ability to tap into spare generation capacity in one market or the other from time to time the second hypothetical project we studied was a simulation of a transmission line that would start out in the Rocky mountain area tap into the abundance of wind potential in that part of the U.S. and essentially deliver that power into southern California where we have a lot of interested electric consumers but also policymakers that are looking to purchase renewable based energy the project has an interesting dynamic it shows how transmission could actually be an enabler to new generation investment because we're actually interconnecting in a part of the world that doesn't currently have working wind power plants but would if there was transmission to take that power and deliver it to consumers so it I think epitomizes that mutually beneficial relationship between transmission and other technologies on the power system so what are the benefits let me start off and take you through what we use I do want to describe and it's described I think in exhaustive detail in the paper the type of analysis we did the type of models we used but essentially because we're talking about the future these projects don't exist today we have to look to the future and we have to be able to model it so we use production cost based network simulation models that really represent how the electricity systems work we also use simulation models of the economies the local economies I'm going to use a really fancy term here not to scare anybody but essentially there's what we call computable general equilibrium models of the economies that actually tell us what happens if one particular sector has a change in how it affects other sectors of the economy so for example if we see lower electricity costs for consumers in a particular region what does that mean to various businesses in that economy to state level GDPs employment labor markets so it's essentially I would say an integrated approach where we first start with electricity markets where the transmission has a direct impact and then we look at the larger economy and that's important because we're getting that relationship between electricity and input to almost every industry out there almost every product or service we consume as consumers requires some level of electricity so in the short term we really are focused on the economic impacts of construction and what we see is that there will be essentially an effect where transmission investment requires local spending to install the new transmission infrastructure construction activities and that construction effective a set of activities really starts to benefit through the larger economy construction workers are attracted to are employed by the transmission company to build infrastructure they receive money they earn money working on the project and that slowly ripples throughout the economy and affects other businesses individuals construction workers need to eat food they need to purchase goods and services they need a place to stay overnight they need a number of various services they pay for those services they also to the extent their construction workers that have been relocated to the construction site also send money home and so those payments affect even economies that aren't physically located next to the construction site so moving on what do we see in the medium term I think of the medium term as when the project actually starts operating because it does take anywhere from I would say two years to maybe five years depending on location to develop and actually fully build construction projects maybe a little bit too long maybe four years and it depends on the location and complexity of the project but once the project is complete and begins operating within the electric system it creates immediate impacts on the electricity markets that Nina and Jim have talked about it allows for additional trading or transactions of electricity and that reduces the cost of power the cost of energy and that basically ripples down to the bottom line for the utility bills that we all receive as repayers or consumers of electricity and it also boils down and also means additional profits for some generators as they're able to sell their power to new markets it also creates benefits for policy makers because they can show that their policies to reduce emissions are successful and there's that added indirect effect on the local economies because frankly more money in our pockets even if it's five dollars a month is more money that we can spend on other goods and services other activities and that ripple effect it's well known very empirically robust and well established we rely on information from national data sources like the Bureau of Economic Analysis and the Bureau of Labor Statistics they have information that's useful in thinking through what a dollar of cost savings to consumers or to different industries means in terms of their ability then to expand production and expand their economic activity to benefit GDP so what about the longer term well I think in the longer term and this is where scenario analysis is extremely valuable what we see is that the presence of transmission creates what I typically call reliability benefits but I think through some lens that could be seen as resiliency where the existence of transmission can help consumers and the markets avoid very costly outcomes where we don't have sufficient generation supply or the mother nature intercedes and creates problems with our chain of electric supply those reliability benefits are quite significant and we won't know when they will happen exactly but I think we are pretty confident that they will happen given the long life of transmission investments at some point and scenario analysis helps us establish that because we can look at what if cases what if there's problems with generation facilities of what if we start to see a lot of retirements of generation facilities as we are reaching their 40, 60 year life cycle what if governments pass laws that basically require changes in the generation mix and we can't keep up with the pace of demand what if demand happens in areas that we didn't anticipate all those essentially create what I consider to be supply shortages or problems that transmission by its existence solves so maybe I can go through some numbers and I know we are going to be reaching our time limits I might just cover off one of our hypothetical projects and then I'm happy and available to answer any questions even outside this forum so as you take a skim through the reports if there's other questions that arise please reach out to us but let me take you through the myso PGM Trate Enhancing Transmission Project it is an example this is a project hypothetically was one of the smaller scale transmission projects that could be built it had a price tag I believe in our analysis of approximately 200 million because it wasn't a very big project in terms of distance in terms of the area covered but it had a profound impact so even that level of spending created a measurable impact on the local economy so what we call the host state would see a boost in GDP and a boost in the number of jobs created to construct the project over a three year period and that's why that bar and the number of 22 million is colored in orange we then move on to the medium term that's when the project goes live and it becomes part of the integrated transmission network and at that point we have lots of different categories of benefits that's probably the best way to describe it we have the electricity cost savings to consumers we have increases in net revenues or profits to generators who are able to take advantage of the additional trading opportunities created by additional transmission we also see savings to the system from more efficient production this is the fuel cost savings because we're not we're able to avoid operating more expensive generation on the system because the transmission creates a pathway to allow the system operator to make more efficient choices in terms of which generation to dispatch we also see carbon emissions reductions and finally we see what I call local economic benefits that's that multiplier effect because consumers are going to be paying less for electricity and they have more money in their pockets they can spend that money on other goods and services and that really kicks off that indirect and induced benefits for other industries and expands GDP this these numbers are all large numbers so you could just imagine if you multiplied by the number of years and extended out to over the lifetime of transmission projects even from a project that costs 200 million you can get to billions of dollars of benefits if we go at longer term which is the last two columns we start to see also the value of reliability benefits as an example if you look at the last two columns what we see is savings for consumers from avoided supply shortages or even supply interruptions basically having black blackouts if we take the two bars from ISO that amounts to 740 million plus 480 million if we take the PGM numbers that's 1.3 billion plus 550 million we don't know when those savings will specifically happen but I think we're confident to say from our scenario analysis that at some point over the life of the project they will happen and those are important opportunities to help us think through the benefits because again this project had a price tag of 200 million the annual cost to consumers approximately 32 million so if we look at just the electricity cost savings to consumers that alone is multiples of the cost in myso that's 110 million dollars on average relative to an annualized cost of 32 million in PGM that's 400 million dollars on average relative to an annualized levelized cost of 32 million however I think one of the issues we have and this is probably where I might almost wrap up is that it's sometimes difficult for different organized markets to settle on these numbers because myso may identify certain benefits for certain timeframes but may not be willing to commit to paying for the entirety of the cost of the project and PGM might do the same on its end or may use a different subset of metrics but I don't think either PGM or myso frankly any system planner right now or organized markets RTO decision maker currently uses this full suite of benefits and by just focusing maybe on one category and one bar they have a they won't get a full appreciation for the spectrum of benefits and may overlook or decide not for the investment opportunities because of the narrow perspective we have also a graph similar to this for the California project but I think I'll skip over that the story is very similar just the magnitude of the numbers are different because it was a project with a much larger cost and a different set of characteristics with that I thought I would kind of end with a couple of key messages for us from this paper the first one being that it is possible to measure benefits of transmission and those benefits are significant and actually probably that combines both one and two messages here the third message being that transmission investments will deliver benefits to many different beneficiaries and it's important for us to identify those because if you don't identify all the beneficiaries you may overlook some of them and that may lead to I think suboptimal transmission investment decisions and finally the benefits of transmission investment are long lasting and occur over a long time frame so by focusing on a very short time frame we will overlook projects that if we build them today will be considered in the future very significant benefits to consumers and our local economies I guess I would just make a comment about different regions and how they look at benefits it is a mixed bag and I'm talking about regions that have regional transmission organizations wholesale markets I'm not talking about outside of those regions and you know projects which really was looking at a multitude of benefits for all the projects they put together and they did a portfolio of projects and they were in the process of now completing the last one of those but generally speaking what the Midwest ISO does is have project categories so they have reliability projects where you basically build those because you're going to violate a reliability criteria standard under NERC rules and then they have economic projects and economic projects you have to meet a certain economic threshold to get them built but you aren't allowed to commingle the benefits so even though we know that reliability projects have economic benefits and economic projects have reliability benefits if you're stuck in this sort of compartmentalization and so very frequently economic projects don't get built because we aren't looking at the broad spectrum of the benefits they provide so it's a little strange and so did do it sort of the way we're talking about but they don't do it like that all the time and SPP has a pretty broad set of benefits that they look at which is good as probably one of the better regions really and then you've got New York and California and there's just so many every region has a different way they characterize their projects a different way that they define them and a different way they measure benefits and so it shouldn't be a big surprise different regions have different levels of build-out in terms of transmission and then in addition building between regions is highly complex and pretty much almost impossible to do because you're measuring different benefits and trying to say that the benefits are completely equal between two separate regions and it almost never works out that way well let's turn to you for some good questions how about that well I guess I would just say that that proposal is not new it comes up time and time again in budgets because it is a large revenue razor and yet I see they've never been sold and so I guess politically I think that's a pretty big amount in decline those organizations give preference power which is generally lower cost power produced by federal dams and other types of low cost generation and the people who have that power output are guaranteed to don't want that to go away so I don't want to be jaundiced and say it's all just a political calculation but part of the reason it goes in there is because it does raise money so you can offset other spending in the bill I don't think that ITC or WIRES has a specific position on privatization of the power marketing administrations I would just say that you know we didn't even begin to talk about public power and the PMAs and how they fit into sort of the grid and how that all works but there's another big complication because we have multiple different types of ownership structures and different agendas if you're looking at a small public power entity they just want to provide for their little city or their municipality and they don't really have any interest in what anybody else gets or does even though in this day and age they're probably selling into the market or buying power out of the market it's still a very narrow view so when you look at something like BPA Bonneville or TVA it's a much bigger organization and it's very challenging but I would say that there's been talk about trying to promote transmission expansion along federal corridors which I think is a constructive conversation to have to the extent that we can use some federal lands to get needed facilities built and not have to infringe on private property I think that probably makes some sense well other questions well I want to thank you all for being here Dan and I think you might ask why the focus on benefits we've done multiple studies on this and frankly if you read them you'll come away with the conclusion that transmission is a no brainer if you want your utility to be able to access lower cost power or lower emitting power or resources that will help support reliability or bulk power markets that are more efficient transmissions the key to all that and the problem is and it's something that we haven't really gotten into much today is that building the kinds of projects that Julia was alluding to hypothetically is a major undertaking it's a 10 to 15 year odyssey trying to get multiple approvals at federal and state agencies and it is it is relatively tortuous let's put it that way the federal power act and regulation of utilities comes from an era when we thought of power generation distribution in terms of one utilities service territory and then it was the state and maybe the interconnection of one utility with another for emergency service or economy power and now we're thinking that the power markets really operate regionally and inter regionally potentially because bigger is better bigger is more efficient bigger gives us more options bigger gives us the ability to adapt to that that electric future that we keep talking about and so can we get the benefits that we've talked about this morning under the current regulatory regime that we have that's a big question but I can tell you that and I'm sure that Nina would tell you this and her colleagues in the wires business the transmission is not for sissies you've got to be able to tie up a lot of capital for a long period of time and talk to regulators I love regulators but you get to talk to them not over a long period of time about why this is in the public interest and that is that is a reason to keep this dialogue going so you'll be hearing more from us I'm sure in the future you have any benediction I just have one closing comment and I'll be quick because I know we're at time which is generally speaking the way that we do planning in the regions is very much incremental right now people come in and they need transmission service and we build to provide them transmission service based on their service request they want to connect to power plant we build to connect their power plant we recognize a reliability problem because we do a load flow analysis or a power flow analysis and we fix that we don't do very well big picture hey what's going on everywhere and let's put that all together and optimize we're going to do a lot of projects MISO did do that with their MVPs but we're having a hard time doing that again and so what we end up having is what we like to call just in time transmission you kind of yeah you're going to get interconnected and in fact there's a big argument right now about interconnection queues and how they're too big and nobody's able to interconnect well part of the reason is because if you don't build big regional infrastructure they have to pay for every little increment and every single one we build is not only about the benefits of transmission it's about how we do planning and how we think about planning because the benefits directly tie to that question if you think the only benefit to transmission is the avoided cost of power production you're not going to get out of an incremental cycle but if you think about it in resilience terms or in terms of long term benefits like we illustrated here you're going to start thinking bigger picture and planning bitter picture now we do plan a long planning horizon we're not saying that but the data inputs that go into it the assumptions that go into the models tend to be short-sighted well thank you all visit our website www.wiresgroup.com we're happy to take your questions anytime and thanks for being here thank you