 I want to welcome everyone to this event. We are delighted to have you here. I'm Sharon Burke, and I am the Director of Resource Security at New America. We look at climate change, energy, critical minerals, water and what the interaction is with human security, with what makes you safe and well. Today, we're going to talk about winter storm, Yuri and electricity and security and the human impact of the recent storm. We are so grateful today to have a wonderful group of people to have this conversation with, and you're going to see a very lively group. We're going to start off with the amazing Paula Gold Williams, who I was lucky enough to first meet through our friends at ASU, the Tenacross program. Paula Gold Williams, a San Antonio native as we were discussing just a little bit ago, is the President and CEO of CPS Energy, which is the largest municipally-owned energy utility in the country, serving more than 840,000 customers, electricity customers, and more than 350,000 natural gas customers in the San Antonio area. And so for those of you don't know, San Antonio was right in the epicenter of what happened in Texas in February. So Paula has 30 years of leadership in San Antonio and she's been with CPS Energy since 2004, steadily rising through the executive ranks to be CEO and president today. So Paula, to have someone of your expertise when you're still right in the middle of this is a real gift and we appreciate your presence. So can you talk to us, take us through the days of the middle of February? And what did you think when you heard that forecast and on February 13th, when the storm started forming and moving, what were your, talk to us about what you thought and then what were your days like for you and for your team? Well, thank you Sharon and thanks for all of your participants in this session and giving me some time to talk and share that. I will say that I typically do a lot of speaking and I do a wide range of topics. I'm pretty much not talking about anything else but this. I do have some limitations, but I do think it's really is important. I think the conversation that we had before we started was there was a lot of misinformation out there and I definitely think that we need to think about this not just as a Texas event, but as an event that could have happened and can happen going forward anywhere in the world let alone the nation. So relative to the event, I mean our team does have a keen focus on the entire Texas market. ERCOT is the island that people have talked about from a connectivity standpoint and a grid. Texas typically has been big enough in a regional geographic way to handle large storms. Usually what we have is a weather pattern is either coming in the southern part of the state and we're more southern and then there's more clear weather up north and vice versa. And so usually the grid has been resilient. In this case, we saw the cold air like coming through a week before, but it again looked like they were gonna be parts of the state particularly San Antonio that wouldn't be as hard hit as the north. And then as we started entering into the week before the storm, we started seeing that the forecast was that it was gonna be extremely cold all the way through. And we were concerned and we'd seen we get cold temperatures, but usually they do not last long. They might last a day. We typically don't have a long-term weather pattern. And of course you can't always know, but what happened is the winter storm sat on the state of Texas and really covered the whole grid. And we started seeing also that the supply of natural gas, the cost was starting to escalate tremendously like the weekend before. And it really hit Sunday night into Monday morning and then Monday morning, and I say like one o'clock in the morning, we were getting warnings and alerts from ERCOT. And ERCOT basically as a system operator will send the messages of prepping for outage, mass outage, what is intended to be rolling outages across your state. I was basically just next to my phone. So I might try to nod off for a minute, but I was getting text messages. We have a group process and we're kind of watching it. It's getting more and more intense. And within about an hour, we had moved from morning to actual, we are now in a statewide outage process. So by the time that happened again, the challenge really was realizing that everybody's sleep. We're the ones up and we had been sending conservation messages within our community, but yet and still now we know that people are gonna wake up in the morning and their lights will potentially be off and how challenging that would be. I think the real issue that we had over time was we had a benchmark of 2011 and the storm in 2011 and the outage process lasted about 70, excuse me, seven hours, seven hours in duration. And that is what everybody had planned for. But as we lived through it, there was no relief. We saw single digit temperatures and in some cases below zero. And Texas, the way our plants are designed, they're designed to run and you don't put permanent structures around some of the exhaust systems and the water systems. And while we weatherized, again, it was just much more intense than what we had seen before. But by that time the real issue that we had was how do we manage the way the storm came in? So again, we're in the middle of the night, we're making the changes, people are waking up, but it didn't stop. And so the demand to shed load and create more outages moved five times, ultimately within that five day period moved five times bigger than we had ever seen before in decades. And that's what caused the real challenge because you break your system up and you have critical circuits, you have high frequency circuits and then you have the circuits that you can actually take down. And by about the second day, you had people who were permanently off and couldn't bring them back on again. So it was just a difficult, horrible experience for many, many of our customers and we were trying to communicate and take the instructions from ERCOT, try to manage and then try to manage through the issues of trying to fix things as fast as you can, but really realize you just couldn't bring people back on. So to this day, I continue to have situations where I'm talking to customers and they tell me their experiences and I will sit there and listen to them and whatever it takes and realize that that is something that they need to get off their chest and out of their minds and deal with it. So that's where we are now. And that seems, that's very, I know your personal philosophy, we had a chance to talk to you about this in the past was sort of people first. So I can see that that would be especially hard for you and the way that you've always approached the job. But as bad as it was, I think the reporting that's coming out now is that ERCOT, which of course is the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which is the grid operator. I don't know that Americans were all that aware that Texas was a separate grid, but I feel like everybody knows that now. So that's, you know, ERCOT is the big player there. And some of the reporting that's come out now is that as bad as it was, you were minutes away from a catastrophic shutdown that could have lasted for months. Is that true? And did you know it at the time as you were actually going through this? Yes, it is true. And at the time, yes. I mean, really and truly it's a complete balance of supply that in capacity that's always trying to run, but every single technology that we had, I know there were villainizations of different technologies, but every single one struggled. But, and then it was so cold, the demand was higher than what we've ever seen in a summer peak. So yes, we were constantly monitoring and we were aware by our communications from ERCOT. We can't see the entire grid. They can see the entire grid, but very much so the velocity of how it was happening and how high that peak got. We knew that we were moments away from the grid going down. Yeah, it's kind of, I mean, again, it kind of gives me the chills to realize that as bad as it was, and what the human cost was that it was so close to being worse. Could you help us understand a little bit about when you get a situation like this, how do you make decisions about critical customers? So military bases, first responders, fire stations, hospitals, water treatment plants, how do you decide who to help first, who to restore first, what's the decision that goes on with that? Well, the first thing to highlight, well before you have storms, every year we identify circuits as critical. And so we really do have hospitals that establish security operations, police and fire, military. So that's already pre-established, and you know, the challenges, the only way currently that we're able to do that is by broad circuit. And so that was one of the challenges. If you live on a circuit that's close to a hospital, you're gonna actually stay up because we gotta keep that hospital up. And then we also have what we call high-frequency circuits. And those are, think about that as a mini grid. You have to keep the velocity of the energy in your system proper for your section of the grid in balance. And so you really can't take off pieces of that. And that's why you end up with, and it's about a third, a third and a third. You end up about a third of customers that are not on critical and not on high frequency. And I will tell you though, one of the challenges that we had, again, we were talking to customers, our call center, I was talking to customers at night and so was our chief customer engagement officer. And we realized again, that keeping people off for days and days was problematic. So we did try to nudge around the high frequency. And in that case, I think we had one of the major water stations. And again, what we were just trying to do was get as many people and homes back up again. And it takes water to make energy and it takes energy to create a water and distribution system. So it was just extremely hard to keep in a balance and know that the customers that weren't on critical circuits or high frequency were carrying the brunt of the city based upon the way we had just, we didn't have, you don't have great control all the way down to the individual account. So there wasn't enough movement across the entire city. So, it was very tough. We knew though that if we took the hospitals down, that would be even more catastrophic. We did have an extra issue where we had centers that had huge inventories of vaccines. I mean, so again, as people were telling us about these high critical things that had to be readdressed, we made some on the fly adjustments and a lot of them worked out but there were others that were just, caused a lot of unintended consequence. So we're gonna redo our entire outage management system and try to find a system to help with that. So the work is like still just beginning on some level. So that's what happened. And I realized that talking about why it happened that you may have some restrictions here because CPS Energy filed a lawsuit last week against ERCOT. So, but could you talk to us a little bit about why this happened? And particularly, you did have a cold snap in 2011 where there were some lessons learned but it sounds like, you know, not enough. Like why did this happen? You know, why, without getting into pending litigation, why is, you know, who's responsible, who's fault? Why did this happen? Texas is a grid unto itself physically but it's also has its own structure. So we don't have a capacity market. There aren't normal incentives out there for these types of reliability measures but we have by design a energy market and in the market that we have structurally it creates this high threshold for scarcity. And it's intended to tell generators, oh, look, when there's problems in the market you're gonna get rewarded at that time with high prices. So the average price of power in Texas is typically somewhere around $25 to $35 a megawatt hour. Are the first level of threshold peak pricing is at $9,000 per megawatt hour. So that's like almost a 30,000% increase to create that signal. And we've never typically had a system that long with the system didn't stress test what happens when you push prices to the max over a long duration period. Our real issue in this case is actually about the after effects that again, we were highlighting to individuals in Austin this can't happen because right after reliability crisis which was hard on the state there will be this affordability tsunami. And so nobody again looked at the implications of quote unquote sitting signals not thinking that in the end the people who pay those bills are the average citizens. And so that's why you see these stories of people getting $7,000 bills, $10,000 bills, $15. I heard one somebody got a $20,000 bill from the event. That's unsustainable and outrageous in every way after that event. So that is our challenge. And then what is happening is this event financially is causing failure across the city of Texas. And again, it was because people automatically thought the only tool they had in the middle of a declared disaster was to raise rates. And that is why CPS Energy is fighting on behalf of customers. We don't think that is the right way when you take an essential service and you make it crazy. I'll give you one point. What happened to power was like if you went to the gas station to get a gallon of gas would it cost you about 350 bucks? And to fill up your tank would it cost you probably $6,000 to $7,000? That's crazy. And so we don't want this to be that way, but we are in terms of having to use litigation, we need to make sure that people think about this extensively and think about the implications of design and long-term fix it today and fix it going forward. So that's what we're trying to do. I can't hear you. That was my fault. I was just saying, I think affordability tsunami is gonna really stick with me as a comment from you about this. I'm gonna ask you one big last question, but before I do that, let me ask you one small superficial question. This was not the fault of wind turbines, right? This was not a clean energy crisis because that was the message that came out at first. I had a, somebody asked me about what happened, right? And then I said, well, look, there were problems with renewables. And I said, I said, I know people don't wanna hear that, but solar power didn't produce. And when produced, but it didn't produce at its peak. And then I was on the interview and somebody said, well, thank you very much, Paula. And then I got phone calls like, how could you say that about renewables? I said, well, they cut me off. They're not supposed to produce in the summer. That's not, excuse me, in the winter. We get them because they're non-emitting and they really do provide a good level of source of power over the summer, but we knew that renewables weren't supposed to save the day. But actually we had problems in every technology. We had problems with coal, gas, the problems in gas. Again, the price spikes in gas were incredible. It was challenging and even to keep the flow going. So we have both gas to generate power and gas and natural gas system. We had problems there, there was a eight foot line in one of our nuclear plants that we own a position in that froze, it was nothing wrong with the plant, but that froze, they weatherized everything, missed that one piece. And so there is no villain in terms of technology on this. And I just think we need to have a robust conversation that we do need all sources and we do need to support renewables because they are an effective way to solve other issues. And again, at the summertime, they are optimal and at night they're optimal based on, and then day on the coast. So if there's any villainization, it's because we're not having a long enough conversation about how we need to be thinking about our solutions more effectively. I do hope that everybody believes to solve this issue, you can't pick one, two or three types of technology. We're gonna have to do a lot of things again to keep it all balanced. Well, let's end there then. My last question for you is, if there is a villain here, it's weather and it's extreme weather. And with climate projections, it's clear that that's gonna become more of a problem. And so what should Texas walk away with? Like how should the state reimagine or adapt its energy system, because this was a systems failure to provide safe, reliable and resilient power and what's that gonna mean for customers? What would you like to see given that this is not gonna be an aberration as far as extreme weather? What would you like to see from the state? What do you think we need to do? You know, Sharon, what I would say is, I think the mother nature is mother nature and we know that climate science is real to your point and that's a given. And while we wanna do a lot of things to go all renewable or non-emitting to reach our decarbonization goals, which are real and effective, I think the real villain is inaction. I think the real villain is fighting over a lot of who's got the better solution when in fact we have things that we have to solve immediately and kicking the can down the road and assuming and hoping that this won't happen again. I think we need to embrace everything that we learned in a hard way during this event. And I think we have to be self-critical all across the state and I think the nation about let's have a mature transition to decarbonization that works. Let's put some more money on technology and innovation because that's how we make our technologies better and more resilient. And so, you know, the villainization is just getting caught up in an argument that really doesn't get us anywhere. That is a great last word because we know that you're an effective leader and you have to go out and get it done now. So we really appreciate your taking time from what is a especially busy time for you to talk to us and give us an overview of how things went and how they're going. And we wish you all the best luck and you should imagine lots of applause right now. Thank you very much. Thanks, very good, great conversation. I had to show up because it's important. I will listen to the replay. I must now go do a lot of other things but my pleasure to be with you today. Good luck, Paula. Take care. And at this point, I am going to turn things over to a panel discussion which you're in for a treat. Let me just start by introducing our panel moderator, Mr. Michael Wu, who is a former Air Force official, an Army officer, a lawyer, a gentleman. He is also the co-founder of Converged Strategies and is a non-resident fellow for New America all around as great an expert on energy security and all kinds of affiliated issues as you could want. And he's going to take over as our panel moderator. And Mike, I'm just delighted to now retreat and listen and heckle quietly from the back. Thank you so much, Sharon, and really appreciate that introduction. Certainly we very much welcome you to join the conversation if there's anything that you wanna chime in on. Noted. I just wanna thank Sharon and thank New America for hosting this conversation because I'm really excited to be joined by three friends, three people who I turned to when I'm looking for expertise on issues of this kind. And I just think that we're gonna have a great conversation specific to, I mean, I think Paula Gill Williams really set a great stage of what happened in Texas, of what it was like for her, managing a tremendous amount of customers, a tremendous number of challenges that she faced in one of the really remarkable events in the history of energy management. And so what I wanna do is try to accomplish a couple of things. One is really lay out what happened, why it happened, what levers are at play from a system design standpoint because as Sharon noted, this is a system wide failure. And then I wanna turn to what do we do about it? And not just talking about what do we do about Texas, but we have incredibly ambitious climate goals and needs. We have incredibly ambitious clean energy goals. And how are we gonna achieve those while if not just maintaining our current levels of reliability and resilience on the grid, but how can clean energy be one of the keys to unlocking and strengthening the infrastructure that we rely on. So with that, I wanna first start with John Munkin, my colleague at Cambridge Strategies. John has an incredible background, a unique background, I think he's the former director of Illinois Emergency Management. So he has a deep emergency management background where he was responsible in a lot of emergency operations centers for a lot of disasters, but he's also the former senior director for system resilience for PJM interconnection of a large grid operator, the world's second largest grid operator, I believe. And so he's got background in understanding system wide resilience of an electric grid similar in size to ERCOT. So John, I just wanna start with, you've been in the room when these kinds of events have happened. So can you just, and I know you've done a lot of research on what specifically happened in this case. So can you just give us an idea and an overview of what it was like, what happened, and then what does this mean for the future, both for Texas and more broadly? Yeah, but I think there's so many different variables that are at play here, getting a sense of really the way this particular event unfolded gives you a lot of insight into the gaps and seams that exist between the actual human impacts that are being managed from a consequence management standpoint by emergency management, public safety personnel, and all these other infrastructure sectors that depend on electricity, compared to how it's being managed in real time on a second by second basis by the grid operator itself. And so when you look at an event like this, the speed of onset for this event was very, very quick. It was not something that was a glacial pace of there's some imbalance in the system and a couple of things need to be taken to address it. The speed of onset was very rapid. And I think essentially what you have is a set of conditions where the forecasted load that they anticipated to see on the system was wildly different than what they ultimately saw. And one of the reasons for that is Texas is very unique as a region and as a state in that 75% of all the customers on the system actually get their heating from electricity. And in most places it serves by natural gas. And so they have these really unique winter peaks that other Northern Bay systems have seen in the past, but not to the severity or degree of what they ultimately saw here. They obliterated their previous all-time winter high by more than 10,000 megawatts, which is enormous when you consider the fact that that makes up more than really 15% of their entire installed capacity just in the difference for how much demand was on the system. And essentially the other issue that we ran into was the forced outage rate of generation. There were so many generators that were unavailable. It really didn't even matter that the infrastructure itself was intact. Transmission lines were not broadly damaged. Distribution infrastructure was in place. Essentially there just wasn't enough juice to go around but at a huge order of magnitude. We're talking 30 gigawatts of generation not available. And in that instance, when you're trying to maintain system balance, the only way to get there, if you still have control of the system is to just take as much of that customer load off the system as you can. And that's really what Paula was referring to before. And so they were doing load shed in these huge blocks, 3,000 megawatts at a time, which far exceeds any of the pre-planned factors that you typically get to work with with those distribution utilities. I'm saying we already know these feeders need to stay on because there's a hospital or a water plan or these can come off because they don't have those critical facilities. It exceeded that threshold by orders of magnitude. And that's why you saw these huge chunks coming off of the system with a wide variety of ultimately critical resources in the process. And really what Sharon referred to before, like how close were we? Really the cliff that was avoided by the narrowest of margins is that if the system was going to operate in an under frequency event, it's supposed to stay at 60 Hertz. But if it goes below 59.3 and stays there for 10 minutes, all of the generating assets on the system have pre-calibrated settings that if it's in an under frequency event for 10 minutes or longer, they have to come offline immediately or risk damaging themselves and the system. And they were less than five minutes away from that threshold. And if that happened, you'd have a circumstance where those generators could potentially not restart for weeks and not just be unavailable during this four day event, but be available for up to a month. And so just watching that timeline of events play out and seeing how all of this essentially happened in a period of 44 minutes with all the load shedding event and all the triggering things that happened immediately thereafter, that's how 44 minutes turns into four days. Yeah, thanks, John. I mean, I think that Sharon mentioned that as chilling and I think that's right. The idea that we could be, we saw how much of a struggle it was for folks in this community, to have hours or 48 hour long power outage events during this kind of time of stress, really scary to think about what that would mean in a weeks long event. I think that's a great opportunity to bring in a local elected leader, but also a deeply experienced renewable energy expert, Andrea Mar. Andrea is the mayor pro tem of Costa Mesa, California in Southern California. She's also a director at Will Dan and energy consulting firm. So Andrea, I guess I just wanna know as a local elected leader, when you were seeing this in real time, what were you thinking about your community and about how you would react? And you have substantial experience in California right now with the threat of wildfires causing the public safety power shut off. So, if you could also touch on how your community is challenged in thinking about the need for this critical lifeline infrastructure sector, given sort of the parallels between the challenges that you're facing in California and what we saw in Texas. Definitely, yeah. I mean, I think a few of us up here work on resilience planning in general and the first thing that comes to mind is what did we forget, right? This is like, what is the system that we may not have thought about? What fuel comes for our fire engines is not a source of backup power. And we, I love working on micrograds and solar battery storage, but man, sometimes it's like, what is on the emergency generator? Because that's a thing that needs to stay up. And when we're talking about a really extended blackout as well for any period of time, that just gets that laundry list of things to think about that we need to be resilient just gets longer and longer and longer. And so, and more complex, frankly. And so that was my, excuse me, my first thought is what are the things that, sorry about that. Welcome to Zoom, everyone. What are the things that we wouldn't have thought about as a city that would have really made the difference for our population? And then the second thing is it relates to public safety power shutoffs is really this idea of load shedding. And so Jonathan said it pretty well that to a huge extent, it was a blunt object. I mean, they were taking up huge quantities of power at a time. And load shedding is really like the thing you do before the really bad thing, right? It's the throwing things off the boat to keep it from sinking. And there are utilities and there are places where there is a lot of thought being given to great intelligence and how to do that surgically. So we heard a lot of stories from Texas where like the block with the hospital stayed up, right? Not the hospital, not specific circuits of the hospital, but like the general vicinity. And so this idea that you can look at it from both a facility perspective. And I done a lot of work on this in California working on specifically what is the circuit within the high school that's gonna keep the air conditioning on for emergency cooling in the summer when the fire might take out everything surrounding. Cause I got a tiny little battery and a tiny little solar panel. And I just need to keep the air conditioning on in this high school gym, right? To playing that out on a grid level where you could potentially do more surgical load shedding and say, I really do need to keep specific areas up. I think I started getting more and more concerned when I saw some of the tweets from water authorities issuing boil orders. Because, I mean, that there should be a big red axe over that as an emergency circuit that stays up. And to some extent, that's a question of having the technology and the resources and the grid intelligence to make those decisions. And part of it is the planning that goes into identifying them in the first place. And so, yeah, load shedding was the thing that it kept coming back to. Yeah, thank you. I mean, I think we can have a really interesting discussion not just about what kinds of resources are needed for the grid of the future. But as you described, where are those resources located? And how can they be a little bit closer to the loads that they serve so that we can manage the grid in a more granular way? Because, and I think that also prompts a conversation about, well, we need to understand fundamentally as a society, as a local government, as a state government, as a federal government, what are our requirements? So I think I do wanna have that discussion. And I think one way of thinking about it is, well, we know we need more types of specific resources. And I wanna turn to Kevin Johnson now. Kevin is a project developer, a project financier. He is the president of Clydepath Federal Solutions. Kevin, you've taught me a lot about how to think about project development and specifically renewable and energy storage projects. I mean, where do you think that kind of investment that seems to be a lot of momentum behind could have helped us in a situation like this? How will it help us confront some of the challenges that we are facing, whether it's wildfires, cold snaps, heat waves, that the grid is gonna be increasingly challenged within the future? Sure, Mike. Yeah, thanks for the opportunity to join here. And it's challenging, right? We all know that we have these risks out there. We all know that there's these coming requirements. The biggest challenge in the private markets is matching your development capital expense to actually being able to value that attribute and to provide a good rate of return to our investors to see that project through. So, Clydepath, we've primarily focused on battery storage development. And to say that we didn't see these potential events happening would not be true. We did. Clydepath was an early mover in Texas battery storage development, although not necessarily early enough to be fully online with all of our projects in the market. But part of that is around the revenue construct in the markets. So, Clydepath, we do have a 10 megawatt, one-hour battery that we put into operation last year in Texas. And we have about a 300 megawatt pipeline of battery storage behind that throughout Texas. Primarily, the reason we started that development is that we expected a summer peak events to start really impacting the reserve margin in Texas. We did not really fully expect a winter peak to be the really driving catalyst here to really wake the market up as to how close we can be at times to system-wide impacts and events. So, the key thing for us is the revenue construct, really valuing the attributes that things like battery storage can bring to the market to help ride through some of these events. And some of the issues that we see aren't isolated, of course, to Texas. And we see similar concerns or potential impacts in markets like PJM. So, I'd love to hear John's thoughts on, and these are long cycle regulatory challenges. PJM's been working through a Fortgate 41 order for years, right? So, a lot of these things are identified, but can take five years or so to actually work through the process. But sometimes it's things like we just saw in Texas that can really wake everyone up to see that we need to start really valuing the attributes of resilience and battery storage can really bring that to the market. So, with that I'll pause, but I'd love to talk more about how this is really applicable to other markets, not just in Texas. And for us to make those capital investments, it can take some risk, but we need to see a pathway to revenue recovery along the lifetime of the projects and it's not fully there yet in markets like Texas or the markets like PJM, as an example. Yeah, I think that's a perfect transition. And Kevin hit on something that is often talked about in our circles, which is like, how do you value resilience? I think a lot of us have struggled with and thought about giving a lot of thought to that conversation. And I guess one question I have is, well, who needs to do the valuing? So you were talking about PJM and its relationship to ERCOT and there's a relationship to regulators. And John, maybe you can speak to your experience in PJM or more broadly, but where does that kind of thinking need to happen? Because I think what we can say fairly assuredly is that customers don't wanna pay $20,000 for a day of power, but they do really need their power to be on because it's a critical lifeline infrastructure and because so much of our society is built around it. And so clearly there's some kind of mismatch between the way we've thought about and prioritized these long-term capital investments and the reality of the situation. And so where does that change need to start? So I mean, I think what you've got is a top-down versus bottom-up challenge right now in terms of figuring out what the ultimate value of resilience ultimately is. I think if we look at the last 25 years, I think priority was heavily placed on lease costs of delivery. Get those utility bills as low as you can possibly get them. And obviously there's a lot of reasons for that, not the least of which is, even when it's not $20,000 a day for your electricity bill, there are still large segments of customers on all systems nationally that still struggle to be able to afford what it costs to have electricity. We've also seen in the last 10 years that there's been an increased willingness to pay for attributes other than just reliability. And so carbon reduction is a great example of that. People have demonstrated a greater willingness and ability to pay because they recognize an attribute to their power delivery that's different than just the traditional model. And so the top-down component of it certainly comes in the form of market development. And so to the point that you made about the difference between a market like PJM and how ERCOT is structured, one of the biggest differences is the existence of the capacity performance market in PJM that specifically incentivizes generators to be available even during adverse operating conditions. And essentially what that does is it's a means of creating an economic stimulus for generators to make additional investments and their assets themselves when they're bringing them into the system. So whether it's winterizing them, whether it's paying for firm service of their fuel source, whether it's just taking additional steps to ensure the availability of that resource, there is demonstrated success of doing that. PJM had its own cold weather event in 2011 and that polar vortex and their forced outage rate of generation on the system was 24% at that time. After capacity performance had been implemented, there was another cold snap in 2018 and the forced outage rate which under almost identical circumstances, the forced outage rate was down to 11%. That's an amazing gain of generation availability that could really offset this type of event. The other thing to recognize though is it's not a panacea, right? It's not going to be the one thing that's going to make it happen. There are still going to be outages on the system. There are still circumstances where generators can't deliver and that's where we have to work from the bottom upside of things of saying from the community level where do they value resilience and what does that mean to the community? And so we listed off several examples of facility types and Andrea hit it really well saying like, look, community functions and community resilience depends on the availability of access to healthcare, access to clean water, access to public safety resources and the difficult circumstance we have right now is even in a system like ERCOT or PJM or really anywhere you are in the country, all of that is predicated the availability of capacity to meet that demand. And if that demand is not articulated in such a way that it's translatable from the distribution utility to the grid operator that moves the megawatts from point A to point B to make sure they can meet what those needs are, you get back into the situation that I described earlier where you have a load shedding event that far exceeds any of these plans and you start just kind of throwing that playbook out the window because you don't have enough visibility into the aggregated numbers associated with all of these smaller critical loads on the system that need to be supported in an event like this that you can really identify generation performance to meet it. And so I think there is a sweet spot there and when you look at the difference in cost the PJM capacity performance as an example over the period of 10 years cost a combined $14 billion to the 65 million customers in that system. The outages based on ERCOT's own calculations of the lost economic activity associated with a single megawatt hour of delivery following the 2011 cold weather event. This event cost an economic activity over $40 billion for four days. So if you look at well which is more costly which is more painful there are ways to implement these things in the long term that spread out cost to make sure that no one's paying $20,000 a day. Instead, you got an opportunity to and you also avoid the outage which is the most important thing. Yeah, absolutely and John you hit on something that I think is really important which is this question of community requirements. We have a question from the audience and I'd encourage folks to continue submitting their questions. But we have a question from the audience that hits on this from Chelsea Eakin who asks about, you know mentions that there's been reporting that these critical circuits that we're talking about are often wealthier or often wider than other circuits and other neighborhoods. And so Andrea, maybe this is a question for you as a local elected leader. You know, there are serious questions of equity. How can we ensure that marginalized communities have the opportunity to have those requirements and have them listen to more effectively so that they are not the ones who are hardest hit in this kind of crisis? Yeah, that's right. So generally cities unless they operate a municipal utility have also been able to say this isn't my problem, right? This isn't a thing that I have to care about. I don't have a department that worries about energy or water utilities. And so we've seen a couple of kind of interesting models spring up. One is to, in California there's a thought that we make it part of the hazard mitigation plan for each city, which kind of gets emergency management involved and sort of puts it in a public safety department. And so now you've got cities caring about energy from that specific perspective. But I think it just generally comes down to cities overall realizing that this is something that they can control, that they can have a say and that they can start planning for and that resilience really comes in all shapes and sizes. We're talking about power specifically. I don't think most people have made the connection between wildfires, climate and power in California until two years ago when it kind of hit us in the face. And so this idea of just sort of generally starting to plan about where our critical resources are and what matters and how we keep them alive is really important. And then just real quick to go back to Munkin's point here for a second too, this idea of incremental cost, right? Both from a grid operator perspective, but then also at the local level. I'm starting to work on projects where they've installed a solar system and now they wanna add the battery, right? And so we're not talking about like one giant project we're talking about incrementally adding to what exists already. And Kevin, I imagine you're seeing that too where this idea of you're tacking on and as renewables and as clean energy becomes sort of more ubiquitous that you can expand those projects, just add the control panel so that now you have an automatic transfer switch that like comes on when there's a grid outage. Like sometimes these are really incremental in terms of the technology required but can make all the difference on a resilience piece. And then last really the equity question just comes back to having it has nothing to do with technology or policy or resilience, right? But it has to do with who has the seat at the table? Who's involved in planning in the city in general? How are electives engaging the community at large and who those electives are and how they came to be there, right? So I think that is an overarching question about democracy largely and has broader implications certainly than just a resilience answer. This is, we need everybody to have a seat at the table when it comes to decision making for their city. Yeah, I just tack on that. I think one thing we've seen through this pandemic of the definition of critical infrastructure, critical personnel has been I think more clearly defined as who are the folks that are actually essential to keep our society moving. And I think that's been one of the bright spots of this past year for that to really demonstrate itself just so clearly on a day-to-day basis and to give those communities voices to put pressure on our elected leaders like Andrea and others across the country to have a voice to say, this is important to us and things like that happen in Texas could happen here or have been happening here. We've been impacted in our communities. Where are the opportunities to correct that? I'd say the environmental justice community has done a great job of ensuring that there's a seat at the table to have those voices heard. And like Andrea said, the solution set to technology, it's not a high tech solution. We're talking about solar battery storage in a lot of cases and especially to see the adoption of electric vehicle infrastructure. A lot of that infrastructure can be cited in communities that have otherwise been marginalized and can serve as critical resilience hubs going forward. One industry or market we didn't really talk about much is the defense industry and our defense communities are essential hubs of resilience and need to be. And a lot of times in situations of extreme events, the communities surrounding those bases are essential and a lot of times it might be otherwise marginalized but could serve as key hubs of resilience in the future. Yeah, just real quick, you made me think was the thing I was in Ames, Iowa after they experienced a pretty significant power disruption and one of the primary concern that they got from constituents was not having anyone to charge their phones, right? It was super hot outside at the time. And so the solution, the thing that they thought could be the most effective, which honestly just seems so simple, is like putting trucks out there that had a bunch of charging stations and like everyone could come from the community. These solutions don't need to be like these complex technical billion dollar micro grid sometimes the thing that you can do that relieves the most pressure at the moment really can kind of come from the community. What is the thing you need the most, right? At that time, so I think sometimes those of us who are in this field like always want to go for like the super sexy solution and we need to keep it sometimes. What is the thing that's actually needed that's gonna do the most good in this minute? Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, one of the things that is certainly resonating with me, Andrea is that, you know, we need to create those opportunities to communicate those requirements to not just, you know, local elected leaders, but also to public utility commissions to, you know, what is the sort of customer constituent user interface system to describe community and individual needs to policy makers and decision makers. And I think that's a critical question that is obviously gonna vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, but, you know, my sense is that there's not enough, there's not enough ways to do that. And I know, John, you spent a lot of time in thinking about questions of prioritization. And so can you give folks just a little bit of a rundown of how that prioritization comes about today and what it might look like in the future to be able to manage a little bit more, you know, granularly and clearly. Yeah, I mean, I think right now, one of the biggest challenges that we run into is it's, if you've seen one prioritization method, you've seen one prioritization method, right? It's generally a black box as to how these things are ultimately conducted because more often than not, they're at the discretion of the distribution operator. And that utility is going to make the difficult decisions about how they're going to prioritize different feeders on the system, different customers on the system. And certainly they also balance it out with economic implications. So fundamentally, grid operators prioritize the survival of their own system first, which I totally understand, right? If the grid collapses anyway, then it doesn't really matter if you were number one on the list and so understanding where those priorities are, I think is something that needs increased visibility, not as a gotcha. The idea here is trying to understand, imagine from a community standpoint, if they really had greater visibility into when they say, oh yeah, this feeder is a priority or this feeder is not, that's really informative to the consequence management functions and public safety functions of a local jurisdiction. I'm saying, okay, now I understand that we can generally expect that this area is going to be the last one to come off the system. Where do you tell people to go charge their phones? Like understanding where you can expect to have electricity. The other thing is, utilities are not necessarily going to be directly plugged into exactly the community-based impacts associated with outages in particular areas. And this kind of gets back to that equity discussion that we were having a little bit earlier is that, yes, do they inherently know that a hospital is important? Yes, of course, they get it. But even if you look at water systems as an example, which was a huge issue in Texas, not all water systems are exactly the same. Some of them are operating at absolute maximum output. There's no expandability of their system at all. Some of them, if they were built more recently, odds are they can serve more customers than the number that are currently connected to their system. And if you're going to choose two water treatment facilities in the same town because they're high demand facilities and you only have enough juice to supply one, the one that can scale up and then supply more potable water is something that could offset the overall community-based impacts of this particular event. And so the hard part is what we really need to do is open up the book a little bit more and just understand how do utilities come up with these priorities? Is it on the back of the napkin? Is it driven based on the topography of the distribution system in the area? Is it because they have this kind of open conversation with local elected officials and community leaders to try and help them understand how these priorities play out? Otherwise you find yourself in a situation like I found myself in Illinois when we would have power outages or we had an event and the governor says, we need to get that facility back up and running and I relay that message to the utility and they say, that's adorable but that's not how the grid works, right? I can't just skip five substations and jump over here and re-energize this building for you. It doesn't work that way but if I had better visibility into their strategy that's where we can really get to this joint planning effort and then it gets back to what we were really talking about of well, what is this strategy? It doesn't have to be this exquisite, hugely technical complex and crushingly expensive process. Instead, if we jointly prioritize where these things are that can have the greatest community impact, I think then we're really moving the needle on saying, it's not gold plating the system, we're actually supporting very clearly articulated needs. And then you add clean energy into that mix, right? And then you say, oh, hey, that's a station that we think may or may not be able to, that's where we put 500 KW batteries just to make sure it rides through. And then Kevin with a nine volt battery out there sticking into the building that needs power. Yeah, I mean, you start with like, okay, what are the areas we need? And then you add this clean energy solution in a truly intelligent integrated grid to be able to answer and solve some of those problems very hyper locally, individual sensation, individual nodes, individual circuits. And that for me is really the future of the grid is that we're not using the blood object, we're not throwing things overboard, we're able to surgically go in and say, hey, you got a little bit more power for another four hours right there. And I think further as an IPP independent power producer, same time, you don't necessarily have to wait for the utility to tell you what you can or cannot do. There are some markets where it's more efficient, easier, but Uber didn't ask the Taxi Association if it was okay if they started this ridesharing service, right? They drove the market, they created the position that was undeniable to stop their growth. And I see similar entrepreneurial opportunities growing more and more where there are certain markets where it's a better bet to put down investments like that. But a lot of times as developers, right? We work pretty much at odds with the utility to force them to do certain things and or try to find ways where you maybe go behind the meter or work directly with the CNI client or whatever the market may provide, but not necessarily wait for top-down planning rather create a position, market position and drive it to serve the customers better that might be more efficient. A lot of times we joke that if we waited for utilities to innovate in the analogy of phones, we'd also have these acute green phones attached to our walls, right? No, the Apple-innovated and drug market opportunity that is clearly abounded. We see some opportunities in the energy sector, especially in better storage. Yeah, I think that's a good, I mean, obviously a good platform to think about the future of the grid. Let's talk about Texas first. There was a question from the audience roughly saying, well, the real issue with Texas is its unique structure that was specifically developed to avoid federal regulation and federal interference with the way they were deregulating. And so I guess two questions. One is, is this event going to force changes to that structure? Do you, what's your prediction? And then two is, should it? And if so, what does that look like and how does that change? Yeah, I think there will be changes that come as a result of it. And I think ultimately it's very difficult to lie with the, to really contend with the numbers as to how this event played out without the ability to have regional interchange and have your neighbors support one another. That has really been the strength of both the Eastern and Western interconnections to be able to compensate for the differences in generation mixes across different service territories within a particular interchange or an interconnection and in events like this. During this event, during this exact same time, PJM set an all-time record for regional interchange. They were exporting more than 16,000 megawatts of energy to Miso and SPP. They were affected by the same cold snap that they could phone a friend, right? They already had the infrastructure in place to be able to call upon those resources for a region that was not experiencing the same severity of impacts related to the weather and they were able to deliver when they needed it the most. And they obliterated their previous export record by 60% because of that individual then, but they had the ability to do it. And so I think there's a point at which you have to recognize that when you're looking at a totally unbounded least cost of delivery model, you're going to have ramifications for that. You're going to have circumstances. And essentially what I think people realized in this particular event is they didn't know how much risk the actual asset owners themselves were willing to bear when they came onto the system, whether it's an individual generator owner or whether it's a utility operator and saying, oh yeah, by the way, we were hedging on this one. It just didn't work out this time. Sorry about that. And people just didn't realize how much risk the operators were willing to accept and how that really compares to the level of risk that consumers are willing to really bear. I take a little bit of a contrarian view like usual, John. I think that it should yield significant changes. However, I don't think it will quickly. I think the politics in the Texas, I think this will make it very challenging. I think they'll study it to death forever, which is usually kind of what happens here. However, I do think that there'll be changes on the margins that may create better incentives or disincentives for the operators that otherwise unbound, like you mentioned. I think that the topic about regulation in Texas I think will be the wedge issue. And I'd be surprised if re-regulating in Texas would move forward too, too quickly. However, I think some of the biggest impacts might be in other markets that the folks will really to study very closely, kind of what are the capacity margins, kind of what are the bounds on these tail events that could happen? But I'd be surprised if something happened quickly in Texas. I think that the pride of which, the ease of development, I would say that Texas is compared to like developing in California and New York is much, much easier. The permitting process is much more efficient. So I think I could see some incentivization to enhance development there, could move quickly, but I'd be surprised to see something happen in the regulations that. You guys are both still talking top down, right? What about this bottom up thing, right? Now that communities have experienced this, individual C&I customers have experienced this. That's what I'm excited about. Like that change is gonna happen from the bottom up and that is gonna be individual consumers, customers, businesses saying this isn't gonna work. We are not doing this again. I am not willing to bear this risk myself for my business. And so, yeah, I kind of agree with both of you. At least I'm ready to sort of change. There'll be a lot of stuff stuck in decision making for who knows how long, but the real change is gonna come from people saying this isn't okay. Yeah, and the switching costs in a consumer choice state like Texas for energy are so low that people say, I mean, it's not gonna take long, right? Before IPPs or power producers or utilities are saying, hey, it's gonna cost you incrementally more, just a little bit and we won't let that happen again, right? I could see it already, because before it was just like, here's the lowest rate I can possibly put in front of you right now. And then the individual consumer says, that's where I'm gonna buy my electricity from. I can see that part of the changing immediately. Yeah, I often think of the way in which folks design their information networks so that they are inherently resilient based on geography and because you could pay for a different quality of service. And I think that's something that we've talked about and thought about a lot. I'd encourage folks to continue submitting questions to the Q&A. We have one that I think really serves as a good transition for this conversation, which is really focused on, hey, the next big legislative fight or legislative opportunity on a federal level may be an infrastructure bill. And there's a lot of talk about what could be included and how many resources could be included, how much money could be included in that infrastructure bill. What would you like to see really specifically related to serious climate action, decarbonization and electric grid resilience? Well, my first thought is that right now, electric grid resilience has not been part of any infrastructure bill previously. But it just has not been something that's been codified in the vernacular around this discussion because essentially there is no federal regulatory standard around resilience explicitly. There is no NERC standard around resilience specifically. And I think that has been suffocating to really advancing this particular effort. It has wholly depended on either forward thinking and utilities that wanna tackle this or quite honestly, folks like Lidepath and Kevin that are saying like, hey, look, we realize that this is a place that we need to start driving the entire industry. It has to go there because I think it's fundamental to the discussion of what happens around climate into the future. Focusing on the decarbonization component of it is hugely important, but underestimating the climate-driven impacts that are actually creating these outages in the first place, which is the immediate need has to be something that's considered as part of an infrastructure bill. And there's potentially a lot of different ways to do it. And there are track records of success for federal grant programs that have been able to try and incentivize investment-specific areas and just trying to understand how that plays out. But it also just can't be disconnected from the bottom. Like we talked about before, there has to be a community-level program that really corresponds to how this infrastructure bill is ultimately rolled out. And at the end of the day, that's why infrastructure bills tend to be very popular is because people see the immediate effects of those bills locally. And right now, I think we're primed for that message to resonate. Yeah, on my side, not necessarily, I don't know if it'll necessarily go in the infrastructure bill, but we're very excited about the forward momentum on battery storage tax credit. That is, it seems to be getting some additional bipartisan and bicameral support, not to be too narrow on battery storage, but that's just our field. There's just a tremendous amount of pipeline of projects out there. A lot of projects that have already been done without any real incentive is pretty amazing, let alone with any type of incentive to really move that market forward that can really change the way that we operate the grid. Is battery storage energy? Yes, is it capacity? Yes, is it ancillary benefits? Yes, yes, yes, right? So there's so many ways in which with some additional incentives that battery storage could really leap forward over the next few years. So that's something we'd like to see, given the tax equity markets that have been a bit stale because of the recession of last year, we'd like to see a direct pay component included in that. It's very nuanced, wonky type of thing, but that's already seeing some pretty good support and something that we hope gets done actually outside of the infrastructure bill here over the next few months. I don't have anything further to add. I think these two kind of covered it. We need to do both of those things. We need to talk about resilience and then the best way we can start adding it locally that the grid is using batteries. So thank you, my friends. I wanted to sneak in with a question. If I could, Mike, do you mind? Of course, no, absolutely. One thing that the audience may not be aware of is that of course you're all military veterans and some still in the reserves. And what happened in Texas, what really hit me was there's a lot of bases in Texas. And I know some of you have actually worked very actively on how you improve the resilience of those bases because they are all on the commercial grid. So I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about that and especially if you know anything about how some of these bases fared and is their resilience separate from the community around them? I think Kevin said specifically that they have the potential to be resilience hubs. So just I'd be really interested if you would all comment on that. Yeah, I mean, I think there's a growing appreciation and awareness just within the Department of Defense in general that they have a total dependence on private sector infrastructure just to maintain mission assurance. It's fundamental now, right? The bases just don't operate independently. They get their clean water and their communications and their electricity and transportation networks. All this stuff is privately owned. And so recognition of that, I think this is the first step in solving the problem, right? Submitting that you have a problem. The challenge right now is that the way that it's been fixed so far is we'll just slap another diesel generator on it and then another one and then another one and then another one and another one and then we'll just update the fuel service contract or reflect 72 hours, now seven days, now 14 days. That's not the same thing as energy resilience. Not to mention the fact, it does nothing to support the community that they're entirely codependent on. I mean, on average about 60% of all of the military personnel that are needed to conduct these missions live off post, right? Like, if you don't have power at the gate, you can't even get them in the door to actually start their mission. If there's no lights in the motor pool, they're not moving anything to get anything started. And so there is recognition of the issue. In Texas specifically, there are 14 federal military installations that are present, only three of which had no electricity impacts at all. So essentially 11 out of 14 had some level of electricity impact. And unfortunately, 13 out of 14 had a water-based impact because of frozen pipes, boil orders, water availability and all that kind of stuff. That's terrifying. That's terrifying for somebody in the military that's like all about readiness and making sure that you're ready to roll out the gate. That is a shocking statistic, not to mention the fact that for the communities, the vast majority of those bases were closed to non-essential personnel. And there's a lot of folks that live in the community. That's where they put gas in their car. That's where they go and buy groceries. That's where they have access to these fundamental things that they need because they assume that it's always going to be open. And so that in and of itself, I think, is a lesson that we absolutely have to take from this event. Yeah, John, you summarized it well with the stats of what the impacts were. But ironically, in the past life, I supplied the solar panels to the project at Fort Hood. So I've been wondering how that project fared in light of this certain situation. Sharon, as you mentioned, that's kind of what binds us all here together, what's helped us stay connected in the industry over the past few years in various capacities and roles and capacities. But as John noted, what a clear wake-up signal, wake-up call to our mission assurance and how something like one bad weather could potentially affect the mission across the world. And I'm very hopeful that this new administration incorporates that into our requirements. I know folks like Mike and John and others in yourself are very involved with ensuring that that is the case. And I'm hopeful that there is a true value of resilience applied so that the market can meet the demand because the demand is clearly there. We just need to be able to value it so that the respective utilities and developers can provide the attributes to deliver it. I also think we're just at this perfect moment right now. So we've done experimental project after demonstration project, after demonstration project on military installations and we're there, right? It makes sense, it's economically feasible, it's well-proven at this point. And so embracing some of these ideas about making an entire base of microgrid, just making critical infrastructure on a base of microgrid, just the area around the flight line, if that's what it takes, we're there. And then also because there actually has been a lot of solar built on military bases, again, back to not sound like a broken record, but some of that's incremental cost, right? Like we've already put in the big asset. So how do we modify it to make it resilient and not just a power saving instrument? So I think it's gonna be really exciting to see what happens over the next couple of years because we're still close on so many facilities to like really, really being pretty darn resilient. Yeah, I would just add, I think that this is a huge opportunity for us to understand how that model of sort of all input defense community planning can translate to more broadly. We spend a lot of time at Converged Strategies thinking about ways in which we've processes and ways in which we've created for understanding and translating military mission requirements to energy requirements to energy projects. And I think that's the same conversation that needs to be had at a community level. The community has critical energy requirements just like the military does. And so how do we start generating those kinds of processes and those kinds of, again, like interface opportunities between communities, whether it's defense communities or marginalized communities, those are the opportunities that I really see as one of the fundamental opportunities for the Biden administration to really generate action towards. Yeah, I like how you phrased that, Mike. And I think that's the call to action that we have to take here is that it cannot, first off, it's not gonna be a silver bullet fix, right? It's a silver buckshot approach where you got multiple aspects that need to be addressed at the same time. I know how much you love that one, Mike. But I also think that it's, when we get into the process that's in front of us right now, whether it's the infrastructure bill or some of the local based impacts, we have to be the ones that structure the narrative here that focus the dialogue in a productive way instead of just the circular firing squad of finger pointing that says like, no, no, no, it's this, but we've gotta be able to just cut through that and focus on the things that are really going to have a measurable lasting impact. And there's so much that local communities could learn from the military planning exercises, too. And you know, it's wearing my former Navy hat. Here's some, like ultimately identifying criticality and length of time we need assets to be available and prioritizing sort of which mission comes first. And all of those things that planning process itself is really directly translatable to so much in the civilian world that we should capitalize on the work that's already been done by people like you guys that converge. I realized during this conversation that I'm the only member of this panel that did not graduate from a service academy. So I do wanna just leave it. So we only have time for just one more question, but I'd really just be curious and Sharon, please I'd love to include you in this as well. What's the one thing you'd like to see in the next year that would be a meaningful change to the way we think about this problem, this challenge of grid resilience in an increasingly difficult strategic environment? I guess I'll go first, no takers. In the next year, I think that I think we're gonna come up on it pretty soon. I think clear communication to the American public about why this is important, I think it's really important. I think someone like the secretary of Buddha judge and transportation I think does a tremendous job of cutting through all the noise and just explaining to why this is important, why we need to make the investments and really rallying that support at the local level. And I think department of transportation will be a unique one that touches down to the governors and states and local communities to really communicate the issues at hand. I think the less the theory that we can make it, the less the philosophical, the better. And just to talk about why it's important to someone in their community is essential here. And I'm looking forward to seeing that hopefully break through over the next few months as the infrastructure bill begins to move forward. Yeah, likewise, I think as I always said, working in emergency management never waste a good disaster. And I think what we have right now is that there have been major events within the last four years when we talk about the 2017 hurricane season, we talk about two years of wildfires in California, we talk about the circumstances in Texas that have each taught us very, very specific and very, very important lessons about these types of impacts on critical infrastructure systems. And so we have to heed those warnings. And unfortunately, it would be better to learn it in advance of the horrible thing happening, but they have happened now and we will have more events coming in the future. And it is incumbent upon us right now to make sure that like Kevin said before, well, it should change, it could change, it probably won't, he's not wrong, right? I mean, you gotta take a realist approach here. And so essentially the number one reason why I think change won't happen is if there isn't a clearly defined path for progress. And that's, I think that's what's incumbent upon us of saying like, it's not just about saying and articulating how bad the issue is, it's about trying to look at these actionable, incremental, economically feasible and technically feasible steps that can be taken to get there. I'm gonna give a really specific answer and then let the panelists give the last bigger answer, which is based on a DM I got during this conversation from a colleague who's at FEMA, who's a really great guy. What I would really like to see is a statutory definition for resilience, that we have a common definition and way of valuing resilience going forward and not something that's a presidential decision that could change all the time. So I thought that was a great comment and I hope that that's something we'll see in the near future. So I feel really boring saying this because I feel like the five of us have talked about this before, probably for the last five or six years, but back to this, like, what is the cost of resilience? I think some of these problems aren't gonna get solved unless we can put a dollar value on them. And maybe that starts from a statutory definition and then sort of opens the door to other things to come. But I think to Kevin's point, like more is going to happen if we can put an ROI on it and we can say here is the financial impact. And some of the studies coming out of the previous storm in Texas were pretty interesting about we actually lived at what the billions of dollars lost to cities were in. We need to be able to extrapolate that for every disaster so that things have a more tangible meaning after those things happen. Yeah, I completely agree. I mean, we're entering a time where if we're just reacting to disasters and crises like this in Texas, it will never be enough and there won't be enough money. So, defining and putting a cost on resilience also means getting ahead of the problem and building in that resilience. I think that's an extremely important point because we ran the numbers and it does make sense right now. So making sure using that information, using that analysis and ensuring that that's attached to money and that money is, you know, equitably and reasonably distributed. And I think that's the ball game. So with that, I wanna conclude a really wonderful discussion and thank all the panelists and thank New America, Sharon and the Resource Security Program for putting this on. Just briefly, this recording, we have been recording this conversation, this recording will be posted on the New America site and everybody who has attended will receive communication to that. But with that, I just wanna thank everybody for attending and thank you all for a wonderful conversation.