 Good afternoon. On behalf of the Ford School of Public Policy and in particular the International Policy Center, it's my pleasure to welcome you to our fifth webinar event for the North American Colloquium on Climate Change Policy Series. The North American Colloquium is an ongoing collaboration between the Ford School, the University of Toronto's Monk School, and the Centro de Investigaciones sobre América del Norte at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. I would also like to acknowledge the generous support of the Meany Family Foundation for making this year's programming possible. Today's event focuses on the topic of energy and electricity governance. First we'll hear from Commissioner Emeritus of the California Public Utility Commission, Diane Brunich. Then we'll hear from Monica Gattinger, a leading Canadian academic voice on energy and electricity governance. This will be followed by a Q&A session which will be moderated by James Van Steele, one of our outstanding MPP students here at the Ford School. As audience members, you may ask a question in writing using the Q&A feature on your Zoom control panel. During the Q&A session following the both presentations, we'll get to as many of your questions as possible, but my apologies in advance if we can't get to all of them. We will go about 10 minutes beyond the scheduled end time of 1pm local time to accommodate as many questions as possible. It's now my pleasure to introduce Diane Brunich. Diane Brunich is an internationally recognized energy and regulatory policy expert. She served as a commissioner on the California Public Utilities Commission from 2005 to 2010, where she led the commission's work on energy efficiency, transmission planning and permitting, western energy, smart grid, and the implementation of California's famous climate change law. Diane is currently affiliated with Stanford University's Precourt Institute for Energy, the Schultz-Stevensson Energy Policy Task Force, and the Bill Lane Center for the American West. She has received numerous awards for her work, including the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners Clean Energy Award, and E-Global Forum's Visionary Award for Leadership in Developing California's Long Term Energy Efficiency Strategic Plan. So, Commissioner Brunich, welcome. I'm just going to pull up your slides. And then we can get the show on the road. Okay. Great. Thank you very much. I'm delighted to be here today. I'm just going to control the slides so I can focus on the content. So next slide, please. I'm going to be addressing two topics today. One is just U.S. electricity regulation and specifically what state utility commissioners do, and then a real world example of a transmission line. Next slide. So most of you, I'm sure, probably know this, but in the United States, we have three levels of government, federal, state, and local, and we have three branches, legislative, executive, and judicial. And I'm talking about state executive agencies and actions today. So next slide, please. So what I'm going to focus on is the agency where I was a commissioner, the California Public Utility Commission. It's the largest state utility regulator regulated agency in the United States. It was established 110 years ago under the California State Constitution. There's five commissioners nominated by the governor and confirmed by the California Senate, and you serve six year staggered terms. It's very powerful to be very direct. It among what it does, primarily it regulates what are called privately owned utilities, known as investor owned utilities, electric natural gas water, as well as here in California some regulation of transportation and communication companies. And each everywhere what a commission does is it sets the rates that utilities can charge, and the profits they can make, and the rates here in California set by the PUC fund most of California's clean energy programs in the IOU service areas. There's efficiency, demand response, solar PV, storage rebates, electric vehicle and fuel cell charging infrastructure, as well as low income programs. So you have this hand in hand relationship between, again in California what's going on in the clean energy climate with what these state regulators do. And under law again here in California, the CPC sets the rules for energy utility procurement, including renewables, distributed energy resources, and they review the power purchase agreements of the IOUs. And again specific to California, not true everywhere, but the CPC oversees planning and permitting of any new proposed IOU transmission lines. As a quick side note in California, we have a legal structure that allows our local cities to buy electricity on behalf of their residents and businesses. It's known as community choice aggregation and the PUC does what's called a light touch of regulation in this area. Just for reference here in California, our major utilities, electric utilities are PG&E, Pacific Gas and Electric, Southern California Edison, and the utility I'll talk about today, San Diego Gas and Electric or SDG&E. Collectively they cover about 80% of California electric load. The remainder is by municipal utilities like Los Angeles Department and Water and Power. Next slide. So what do you do when you're a commissioner? First here in California, the number of decisions you make and the money involved is enormous. California spend more than 50 billion annually for CPC regulated services and that money flows by decisions made by the commissioners. Again, perhaps not quite unique to California, but true is that our culture here is the PUC is very proactive. Because it's a constitutional agency, it can act even if there is not a specific law if it comes within its constitutional powers. So here's a quick example. I was appointed as a commissioner by Governor Schwarzenegger and he wanted California to launch what was then called the Million Solar Rousse Program to basically install million solar PVs in California over 10 years. He couldn't get that bill through the legislature. So he asked the PUC to consider it and we did and we passed a program that mandated the California IOUs to undertake this huge program. And the next year, the legislature passed a law codifying it and putting in some more specifics about it. But this again is an example of just how proactive with how much money you can be doing as a commissioner. I was also Governor Schwarzenegger's first appointment to the CPUC. It was right after our energy crisis. So what he looked for was somebody who had a lot of experience in this area, which I did that I had done decades of work, not only with the PUC but also with the other California agencies, with many agencies at the federal level, utilities, local governments, environmentalists, businesses. And so I did come in with a lot of experience, but being a commissioner in just about any state is actually quite a political job. It's common that commissioners may get appointed who literally don't have a background in this area, but there's sort of a whole extensive effort to make sure you get trained once you are appointed. And I'll just say I had the good fortune as Joshua said at the beginning to be able to be the lead in many, many areas they were fascinating complex, and often first of their kind. And as everybody asked me, would you, you know, should I ever consider being a commissioner, I say it's a it's a great job. I really did enjoy it. Next slide. So now I'm going to turn to my second topic, which is transmission and when I was appointed Governor Schwarzenegger asked me to focus on this area in particular because he felt California had not built enough transmission, and he also realized that we would need more transmission for development of renewables because renewables are often located in places that don't necessarily have transmission. In California, any investor on utility that wants to build a major transmission line has to receive from the CPU see what's called a certificate of public convenience and necessity or CPCN. That's a very broad review, you look at the need for the line you look at alternatives line, you look at what a reasonable cost for the line, though now, most of that cost issue is addressed at first that I'll talk about in a moment. And importantly, you also do the environmental review where you're looking at alternate routes, as well as mitigation measures. And so as I said, there's federal involvement that first can set the tariffs that actually reimburse the developer of the line profit as well. But there's federal environmental permits. The two primary agencies are the Department of Interior, and the Department of Agriculture and they get involved if lines go through federal lands under their jurisdiction, like national force so you can see just looking at this slide just the complexity of issues that we have when we think about transmission. Next slide please. So my example today is a real world one called the sunrise. Yeah, that's the one called the sunrise transmission line but I'm going to give you some background to know that the electric grid in the western in western North America if you don't already know is interconnected and it's called the Western interconnection. It's the grid for not just the 14 Western states in the United States, but the two most Western Canadian provinces, Alberta, and British Columbia, and then northern Baja, which on the slide is very low down at the bottom. So in other words, unlike Texas and ERCOT which I'm sure you've all been hearing about California is physically linked to the entire West, northern Baja Mexico and other parts of Mexico through parts of lines, and Canada vehicle the whole electric transmission system. The western interconnection has over 135,000 miles of transmission lines, and because of the unique supply and demand patterns in the west utilities in the west rely heavily on electricity transported over long distances than in the east. So this is just a snapshot to keep in mind. Next slide please. So let me go to some of the specifics on the sunrise transmission line. It was aligned at SDG NEE San Diego gas electric proposed in 2005. A very long line 120 miles, both 500 and 230 kV that would bring power basically from the eastern part of San Diego County the Imperial Valley into San Diego. And as I noted by law, San Diego had to file a request before the CPUC for the CPCN to build and operate sunrise. And the project was ultimately approved and the line became operational in 2012. I was the assigned commissioner guiding the regulatory review of this project. It was enormously controversial. It was not uncommon when we had public hearings down in San Diego's area for me to be accompanied by police to the hearing rooms, because of the concern over the public opposition to the line. And this was not just because nobody likes having transmission lines built near them, but because the need for the line was questioned by many and because of the project's environmental impacts. So let me start with environmental, no, stay there, start with environmental impacts. California take seriously environmental review and I was committed to that effort as well. The choice of the route was particularly controversial. SDG NEE had proposed to build the line in wilderness across what was called the crown jewel of the California State Park System, the ANSA Borrego Desert State Park, which had endangered species and just a lot of environmental issues. So I ordered alternate routes to be explored and after pushback, it was ultimately approved a new line to the south that avoided the desert state park. So you can actually think about having transmission lines having fewer environmental impacts than originally proposed. And it taught me that serious environmental review by a government agency at any level of a major infrastructure project takes money, resources, and a great determination, not just at the leadership level of the agency, but also at the staff level and I have a big shout out to the staff commission and the consultants that they use of just hunkering down literally for years to try to avoid or mitigate environmental impacts, and they did a lot. So out of this experience, I actually didn't revamp the CPU sees permitting process for transmission lines to be much more proactive and identify issues and agencies that would be involved before the CPCM was filed because I found you could actually resolve a lot of issues in that pre filing and that's one example I think that everywhere we can think about improving. So real quickly, the second issue for sunrise centered on need. And I'll talk a minute about costs and profits but let me just show you this map next slide. That I dug out of my files preparing for this. Why, why was it needed, it wasn't because it was reliability or the lower cost but SDGV said it would carry renewables from the Imperial Valley, as I said in the East to the San Diego load and the Imperial Valley is rich with wind and solar and geothermal which I love and biomass so there was a lot to do there and the justification was not controversial, but rather whether the line would truly carry renewable power or not. SDGV claimed that the sunrise line would carry almost 2000 megawatts renewable power from California's Imperial Valley into San Diego. But at the time that it filed for the line approval, it only had contracts for about 20% of the energy that would be carried over the line. So the justification for this line would only hold true. If you had extensive development of renewables in the Imperial Valley, and if SDGV or other California IO use because they could also use power that flowed over the line into California. If they signed power purchase agreements for renewables. But there was another way that the grid could be used and that's what the slide is about in developing the record we discovered that sunrise because of the extensive interconnected grid in the West. And its proximity to Mexican transmission lines and power could carry not just renewable power from California, but fossil fired power from both new and both existing and new power plants from Mexico or out of state but Mexico became an area of grave concern. And this was because the parent company of SDG, G&E had extensive fossil fired resources in Mexico, including two existing gas fire power plants. And so they stood to profit if this did occur. So what, what did I end up doing? Well, as a state agency, the PUC cannot regulate Mexican energy operations. And because sunrise didn't entail building new cross border transmission facilities, there were no federal permits for cross border issues either. So instead what I did after great consultation was propose linking the authorization for sunrise to renewable developments as that was the rationale for the line and it was pretty unprecedented what I proposed that I proposed the CPC would approve sunrise but with specific requirements on developing Imperial Valley renewables so that we made sure that there was development in that area. And I will say that is a very, very economically depressed area of California. So it was also going to bring needed jobs as well. So I proposed a specific procurement requirement on SDG, G&E and report and proposed also that the PUC would monitor development of PPAs by the other California, Iowa is unfortunately my proposal was not accepted, but an alternate pass that was based upon oral promises that it would use the line for renewables because we did highlight a great deal this issue. So real quickly, I'm getting to the end of my time on the cost of line because this is sometimes I opening to thinking about it. In 2008 the line was estimated for both construction and operation at about 5.5 billion over its estimated 58 year useful life so this again transmission lines are really expensive this was one line almost five and a half billion dollars. And FERC who regulates it allows a generous rate of return for transmission line developers. And one estimate I have is that Semper Energy, the parent of SDG&E who made the initial investment would earn about 2.9 billion of the 5.4 billion in after tax profits as an after tax profits, which meant that a bit 50% of the cost of the line was going to profits. I did ask one person in preparation for today to look at FERC filings and they were able to find 2016. And in that line the about 40% of the cost paid by rate payers was profits with the remainder to O&M and then bond related capital costs and taxes. And so there is always this juxtaposition of thinking about transmission lines and believe me we do need more transmission lines but how the whole issues interconnect, so to speak. So let me just end we've got to wrap this up the next slide. I'm just going to mention real briefly a project I've been involved with at Stanford called the Western Interconnection Data Analytics Project or WIDAP. You can Google WIDAP and on the pre-court energy website get all sorts of information. But it relies on this massive database hourly data going back to the 1980s of every fossil fired power plant unit in the western United States. So for our project we took 75 million data points, looked at 15 years of changing electricity generation in the west. And here's a map. Here this shows just an example of some of our findings on the left is the coal fired generation. That was occurring with both the darkness and the side of the dot showing different parameters. And then by 2016 you can see that very significantly we did have decreases in coal generation, but real quickly look at the bottom most dot. It's labeled CODAD Juarez and it's in Mexico, but you can see exactly this interconnection into the west. And this is from coal fired. So here's the last one. I don't have time to go into it. But this is again we plotted out the difference in CO2 emissions by year and by fuel. And you can see a significant decrease in the coal. But because the gas fired UC showed this period ramped up by about 150%, there were still significant NOx emission is still significant CO2 emissions. And interestingly, the CO2 emissions decreased less than what we saw for NOx and SO2, because those emissions are actually directly regulated at a significant level. And as everyone knows we don't do CO2 emissions at power plants. So that's it I'm sorry I had to go so quickly but I just wanted to give you a sense of the wonderful range of issues that can be addressed. When you're commissioner. Thanks. Thanks so much Diane that was extremely informative I'm glad that you took all the time you did because I think we learned a lot. So I'm going to introduce our next speaker. Dr. Monica Gattinger. And I'm just going to ready her slides because actually Josh if I could let you ask you to wait until I have you pull them up. Some introductory remarks before showing you. Oh sounds good so then we go so then I stopped sharing my screen and so now I'm going to introduce you and then I will pull them up on command. So Dr. Monica Gattinger is director of the Institute for Science, Society and Policy, Professor of Political Studies and the founder and chair of the Positive Energy Institute at the University of Ottawa. She's an award winning researcher whose research program convenes business government indigenous civil society and academic leaders to address complex policy regulatory and governance challenges. Dr. Gattinger is a fellow at the Canadian Global Affairs Institute, a board member of the clean resource innovation network, and she serves on advisory boards for the Institute on governance, the National Research Council of Canada, the nuclear waste management organization pollution probe and the University of Calgary. She received the 2020 clean 50 award for her thought leadership in the energy sector. So, Monica. Thank you so much, Josh. And thank you very much to you and to Barry for the kind invitation to come and speak with everyone here today. It's been a while Barry so lovely to lovely to participate. So if I had to give a title to my talk for today it would be great news, good news, forgotten news and I'm going to go through each of those topics in turn. So in terms of the great news piece, the great news is that Canada US collaboration on climate and energy is back. Hooray. So you know bilateral government relations on energy and climate to really withered over the last number of decades and particularly in recent years this is I really cut my teeth and the energy space on Canada US energy relations and, and we went from you know pretty robust and resourced continental relations of North American wide under President Bush through the North American energy working group the continent wide security and prosperity partnership you know there was some really robust work taking place around energy to to somewhat narrower and more robust relations focus predominantly on electricity under the Obama administration the Canada US clean energy dialogue clean energy ministerials, and the like. And then over the last number of years to virtually, you know, no relations or at least ad hoc relations under the Trump administration so it's, you know, again it's so nice to to see attention to Canada US and brought in North American energy and climate issues popping up in my inbox and speaking engagements and invitations so that that's the great news. So what about the good news. Well the good news and this was probably discussed at the last session. The good news is that we now have a roadmap for renewed US Canada partnership so President Biden and Prime Minister Trudeau in their first meeting, laid out a very ambitious and detailed roadmap to renew the US Canada partnership. One of the key planks of that partnership is accelerating climate ambitions, and I'm not going to go through. You know the commitments there in detail but I'll just give you a few of the highlights for folks who haven't had a chance to dive into them. I mean the overall commitment from the Prime Minister and the President is is to strengthen implementation of the Paris agreement, including by working together and with others to increase the scale and speed of action to address the crisis and to better protect nature I mean this is you know it's like night and day from what we have seen over the last few years. So there are quite a few commitments that are made in the in the road the renewed roadmap. Working in tandem and encouraging others to achieve net zero emissions no later than 2050, working together on cooperative action ahead of the US hosted leaders climate summit. Both countries to include increase their climate ambitions so we're likely to see some interesting announcements made at that upcoming summit. They agreed to launch a high level ministerial dialogue on climate ambition that has already met I mean it met in the day or two following the Prime Ministerial presidential meeting that's intended to coordinate cooperation between the US and Canada to increase ambition aligned to the Paris agreement and net zero objectives. You know they are they're working towards a zero emissions vehicle future climate related financial risk disclosure, many many more commitments that I won't go into here, but one of the things that I would point to is that there's a specific commitment to doing this work with indigenous peoples with subnational governments with workers stakeholders including civil society youth business and industry. And I think that's a really important signal because a number of the initiatives in the past bilateral and trilateral have been critiqued at rightly critiqued for being somewhat insular and not involving that civil society participation. So that's the good news you know, hooray. So what about the forgotten news. Well, you know, leaving aside the fact that I'm not going to get into it today, but although I'd be happy to in the discussion section so leaving aside the fact that oil and gas is kind of barely mentioned if at all in this statement so everyone wonders kind of what's going on there I have my ideas but leaving aside that forgotten piece of the North American landscape. There are three, you know, elements aspects that deal with regulation that I think our gaps and sort of missed opportunities when it comes to the road to 2050. So Josh, this is where I want you to pull up the first image. So the first piece of what I'm referring to here is forgotten news can be summed up by this image. So people who know my Twitter account know that this is like the background to my Twitter, to my Twitter account. Give me just one moment I want to get the slides to appear the way that they should. Sure. You can tell me when they look good to you. There we go that's the one. So this is the backdrop to my Twitter and it's sort of like an inside joke so to speak for folks who know the energy space. So this map have a look at this map. Have you seen yet what's a bit bizarre about this map. Well this is, you know, of course, a satellite image of North America at night. This was August 14, 2003. And Josh, if you could you know kind of roll your cursor around that very big blank spot beside the Great Lakes. All right, so come right there you go the very big blank what's going on there. Where's Ottawa, where's New York, where's a whole host of cities that we would normally see lighting up that space. Well by now obviously people know this is a satellite image taken during the great electricity blackout of 2003 that left some 50 million people without power, a number of which for up to a week. It was affected by that it was really quite quite astounding. And of course we've seen, you know, the importance of electricity reliability with the very deadly and devastating and heart wrenching blackout in Texas. And this is, you know, to my mind there's there's a piece of news that's a bit forgotten on this road to 2050, which is that electricity reliability is likely to be challenged as never before in the years ahead. And a big piece of this has to do with electrification. Because the energy systems for lions on electricity grows so too does its vulnerability to power outages. The challenges here are multiple. They include climate change itself in the form of more frequent and extreme weather events knocking power systems offline. I think Texas is an unfortunate illustration of that. And of course the more we rely on electricity for transportation for heating for industry, the more devastating the economic and social impacts will be. This is going to be about far more than the lights going out so electricity reliability becomes increasingly important. Another challenge to reliability, you know, is the ability to integrate intermittent sources of power like wind and solar into the grid courses is going to, you know, shape availability of power. We need to have that access to firm base low power or large scale storage to supply power when intermittent sources cannot. And they underpin reliability. I'm not suggesting by any stretch of the imagination not to go forward with integrating intermittent sources but of course it's part of one of the challenges is how to ensure reliability in that context. Another big challenge. And if you ask any, you know, power system player but particularly the utilities and the generators and transmission operators guarding against cyber attacks you ask them what keeps you up at night. Whether it's you know hostile foreign powers terrorists ransom seekers or even disgruntled employees guarding against cyber attacks and and all of this, you know, in turn depends on the ability to finance and construct a mind boggling amount of electricity infrastructure for Canada just as a small example electrification means doubling or even tripling the country's generation capacity. That's a lot of new renewables nuclear transmission lines and more. And of course electricity has this wonderful characteristic which is that supply and demand need to be balanced at all times on the grid. You know the North American grid has been referred to as the largest machine in the world. I'm often, you know, sort of awestruck it's phenomenal to me that the whole thing works at all but it does and it's remarkably reliable. One of the biggest reasons that it's so reliable is owed to the North American Electric Reliability Corporation. This is an organization that's a fascinating organization I've written about NERC. It's often think of it as kind of an unsung hero of North American relations. It's the closest thing and from my perspective that we come to super national policymaking in North America, where you have a number of the key players in the electricity sector coming together to develop electricity reliability standards for the bulk power system. And they do so in a way that really puts North America, particularly Canada United States at the forefront. In the wake of the blackout that you're looking at here on your screen. One of the things that that blackout really did was to get on to policy agendas something that many electricity players and wanted on agendas for quite some time which was the need to have in place reliability standards that were mandatory with penalties for failure to comply. Prior to the blackout here in 2003 reliability standards were voluntary. Putting in place mandatory standards has made, you know, certainly a big difference to the way things are governed. It's meant that the corporation interfaces with regulators, both in Canada and in the United States in terms of that backstop the regulatory backstop for reliability standards. So these relationships NERC, the regulators of reliability this is all going to be essential going forward not only for economic security and human health and safety, but also when it comes to public support for emissions you know and I hope that one of the lasting impacts of Texas will be to help us not to forget the importance of reliability and again what I'm not what I'm not saying here is that what happened in Texas was related to emissions reductions. And that is absolutely not the case but as we know this has been spun in such a way politically to you know in some instances try to place the blame on emissions reductions and efforts to reduce the emissions intensity of electricity supply sources. And that you know is really important to make sure that we've got that public support going forward. So this brings me to my second image so this is to my mind the second piece of forgotten news. And I think we just heard a great illustration of this with Diane's presentation, and it relates to you know citing and public confidence in energy infrastructure decision making processes. And I think you know we are accustomed to pipelines and oil and gas projects being the poster children, you know for social opposition to energy projects. But you know renewable electricity infrastructure electricity transmission infrastructure, even infrastructure in this case it's going to be carrying renewable power. And for those who don't know the Northern Pass project. This was a project to carry hydro power from Quebec through New Hampshire into New England, very turned out to be a very controversial, a very controversial project within a lot of research on this issue at the University of Ottawa and the positive energy program, really trying to get a better handle on what drives community confidence and energy project decision making. And I'm not going to have time to go, you know through all of our findings here I'd be happy to get into that in the discussion session, but I think one of the things that's come forward that's really important to bear in mind is that at the local level climate is not always the top environmental priority. The environmental priorities can actually be local environmental impacts. And you know information in terms of informing people about projects and what the rationale is for a project, all the information that I'm sure Diana the proponent proponent in the project that she mentioned was providing to people you know it's a necessary condition, but it's an insufficient condition you know people have a variety of concerns and legitimate interest and in many instances providing additional information does not necessarily change, change minds process is really important. When it comes to decision making on these issues, the need for regulators and I'm sure you know Diane live this in California to be genuinely engaging with stakeholders with stakeholders, giving communities the time that they need for reflection, making it clear that that you know not having a project go forward is a genuine option the fix is not in on projects, and regulators are you know in many ways in sort of the crosshairs on a lot of these issues because they are quite front and center. Clearly when it comes to energy infrastructure citing, citing processes and regulators, you know in the Canadian context I suspect it's the same in the US as well, are really in what I think of as an unprecedented period of experimentation. It's a public engagement and public confidence in their decision making arrangements I think we've still got a really long way to go. When it comes to identifying how to build confidence and decision making, and it's not just about public confidence but it's also about investor confidence at the end of the day, projects require investors and that's, regardless of what kind of project it is, and also government confidence as well that policymakers have confidence in regulate in regulators to be taking decisions. So I'll move now because I know time is short to my final slide here the final piece of forgotten news. And this is another area where I think we're entering a period of unprecedented experimentation. So this is an area that's coming forward increasingly in the Canadian context we're starting to do some work in this space. And it's, you know, what are some of the obstacles and what is the role of energy regulators on the road to 2030 on on the road to net zero by 2050. So in the context of utility regulation you see the, the sort of traditional regulatory compact summed up here, you know, where is environment and climate in that compact. And so how do we transform utility regulation to take the value of emissions reductions into into and how do we do so in a way that supports innovation that supports competition that supports consumers notably vulnerable consumers that you know that keeps prices affordable that keeps the power on and all of this is you know it's hugely important. And talk all we want about reducing emissions and making commitments to do so but if we don't have the regulatory frameworks to support that and enable that will be you know running into obstacles on on an ongoing basis. So, Josh, you can stop sharing the screen now and I'll just conclude here because I know we want to get into Q amp a one of the things that that I was really interested to see. And the roadmap for a renewed partnership is the Prime Minister and the President acknowledging the impact of international regulatory cooperation on enhancing economic competitiveness. And the wellbeing of citizens and maintaining high standards of public health, safety environmental protection, and the like. And I think you know some of these issues, they sort of go under the radar, but I would like to think that that there's an opportunity here for far more collaboration to try to ensure that regulation in North America is up to the energy and climate challenges on the road ahead. So thanks very much I'll stop there and look forward to the Q amp a. Thank you very much. It was such a nice, the two presentations I think complemented each other in a really nice way and I really appreciate that. So, in a moment. So, I'm going to introduce James van steel who's going to moderate the discussion. I just want to remind the audience that you can use the Q amp a feature in your zoom control panel to ask a question in writing. And if you would like to direct your question to a particular presenter please state whom otherwise both presenters will answer or which whoever feels so inclined. Professor Gattinger does have to leave a little bit early so if you do have any questions specifically for her please state so. And at this time it is my pleasure to introduce James van steel who will moderate the Q amp a for us. And before I do please Monica and Diane please unmute your microphones if they're not already so that you can fully participate in the discussion. James is a third year graduate student pursuing a dual degree master's program from the Ford School and urban and regional planning from Taubman College. He graduated from Michigan State University in 2015 and worked for three years at the Michigan Public Service Commission which is Michigan's analog to a public utility commission. He's an energy market analyst at that was his role at the Michigan PSC, and he plans to pursue a career focused on the intersections of urban policy environmental sustainability and social equity. So James take it away. Thanks so much, Josh, and thank you Diana Monica for fascinating presentations and certainly triggered a lot of things that I remember working with here in the state of Michigan, and certainly challenges that we were trying to anticipate about, especially the integration of renewable energy that challenges of citing transmission lines and certainly public confidence always at the base of all of this. So I'll begin with a question, and then I can move on to public questions from the audience. I didn't know if Professor rave also wanted to ask a question. But I'll start with this one. And, and perhaps Diane has more of an insight in the US context and Monica will be able to answer this from the Canadian federal context. In terms of climate change action at the state and provincial level state policymakers and regulators have taken a lot of steps such as supporting renewable portfolio standards promoting energy efficiency for appliances and buildings, promoting a more resilient and reliable grid and supporting more distributed or localized electric grids and resilience through things like community solar and battery battery storage. So totally independent of federal policymaking. The Biden Harris administration begins to craft a climate and energy agenda in earnest, have they been reaching out to work with state governments as partners in this effort. Are there signs that the administration is planning to leverage a more federalist policy approach paying attention to state and federal jurisdictional issues. Or are they going to rely on a more divergent or separated approach in their comprehensive climate strategy. Thanks. I'll take it and I'll just key off of what Monica said, when she was observing what's starting to come out with the Biden administration on the international front relationships with Canada where she said, it really is looking at an inclusive approach of not just federal to federal, but also a wide range of stakeholders and involving them. And that certainly is what we're seeing at the state level, the expertise that the new administration has gathered is phenomenal. I've never seen anything like that. And they're not only people who have been in the former President Obama's administration and sometimes the Clinton administration so they work together before. But they have a wide range of expertise at the state level. I mean Gina McCarthy was, I think she ran the Mexican Massachusetts Energy Department. I could go through a whole host of others, one of our commissioners from our energy commission is now a top level at Department of Interior. So these are people who understand the complexity of energy and climate at the state and even the local level Everything that I know is that there is no way of feeling that we're the feds, you know, we're here to help you but instead that it will be a partnership. And oftentimes what states most need are resources. I was involved in a huge transmission planning effort under President Obama's administration and what they did was they funneled millions of dollars to allow stakeholders literally to come to meetings to allow hiring of experts and use of the national labs and that's what states and local governments need are a lot of the resources that the federal government can provide. And I think that's what the Biden Harris administration understands. I think that they also realize if they're going to come in and just say no no no to states that's going to be, you know, really difficult to then move ahead. So I'm a lot of work has already been going on behind the scenes. And I think it's going to continue but at the end of the day we still have huge problems of to really put in place a solid federal approach we're going to need some new resources lost from Congress and right now on climate and energy. You know, that's not happening this year. It may happen next year. And so we're still going to have the state laws as a driver, but ultimately to get to our climate goals we've got to have that federal framework, and I think it will then set out a great role for the states. James did you want me to comment a bit on sort of the response of that question in the Canadian context. I do feel that it differs, but certainly just any thoughts you have on the relationship. I would say that it differs in some way and aligns in other ways. I think it's important to bear in mind that the current federal government has been in power, first and majority and now in minority since 2015. Over the course of that six years they have done some pretty phenomenal things on the climate front. When they first came into power very quickly, they, you know, turned the page from the previous administration that did not work closely with the provinces, you know, not on climate not on on anything really they were very much kind of hands off in terms of connecting with with the provinces. So very rapidly at that time in 2015, they convened a meeting of federal provincial and territorial leaders and they put in place a really ambitious initiative called the Pan-Canadian or agreement, called the Pan-Canadian framework on clean growth and climate change. That put in place a carbon tax in Canada, which again is generally not terribly well understood. We've actually had a carbon tax since 2015, or at least an agreement on one and then implemented subsequent to that. What enabled that to happen to the point of what's going on sub nationally was a very, you know, for the most part, provinces in the same song sheet as the federal government was even in the province of Alberta at that time and NDP government and power that was, you know, had put in place its own climate leadership plan, prior to the Pan-Canadian framework, which then paved the way for the agreement around carbon pricing. A number of other jurisdictions to the question about, you know, what are sub national governments doing, a variety of other jurisdictions, British Columbia and Quebec notably already had carbon taxes or some form of carbon pricing. So that, you know, that was, I think, a nice illustration of the government's coming, the government's coming together. Once, you know, following the, that agreement, there were a number of provincial elections that brought to power conservative premiers that were very, you know, against opposed to a carbon tax taking the federal government to court, we're still waiting on a Supreme Court case around, around the carbon tax. And that's when the tone, I think really, you know, shifted quite a bit in the country and we went from a lot of provincial alignment to a lot of acrimony over energy and climate issues in the country. There's a lot that goes on at the sub national level that the provinces, you know, are able to do on their own. Canada has one of the most divided and decentralized set of constitutional agreements around energy in, in the world. So the provinces are able to do a good deal without needing to have federal, federal power. What we've seen over the last couple of years now at the federal level is bringing into play some pretty, you know, substantial comprehensive climate planning notably last fall. So net zero legislation, a climate plan that lays out, you know, carbon pricing ramping up the carbon price to have $170 between now and 2030. So you do see that federal leadership there, public opinion polling shows Canadians want that federal leadership, but you know they can't get too far out ahead of where the provinces are at, because national unity on many of these issues is extremely ambiguous, which sometimes means that you know the progress can be you make gains when there are windows of opportunity, and then in between it can be you know incrementalism and a good deal of acrimony. Thank you that's very valuable context, especially for those of us who sort of live in the US media bubble, even on energy reporting. So I have our first question from the audience. This is from Alacia, and I apologize Alacia if I distil your question in a way that doesn't represent it correctly but hopefully this makes sense. So Alacia asks, what policies or strategies are needed to facilitate or enable North American renewable energy resources. For example, innovative tools for reducing or accounting for long term cost uncertainty or risk when investing in infrastructure and industrial investments to promote a more environmentally sustainable grid in the future. I can talk about the US I won't try to talk about Canada. There's been very extensive and excellent work I think done by the US national labs on where are renewable large scale renewable resources are the wind the solar the geothermal and the quality of those resources so we're in good shape of understanding where the renewables are. There is as I said obviously this issue of how much of our existing transmission line is sufficient. Part of it is, you know, how soon will we be seeing our coal and natural gas plants no longer using those lines and so that's a whole another evaluation to think about that it's not like as I said in my presentation we don't have hundreds of thousands of miles of transmission line in in North America. So understanding that and thinking it through and then, you know what I touched upon is nobody likes lines, because in my mind, the very high incentives that first gives to developers. There's a tendency to in fact, overpropose lines, because they are among the most profitable infrastructure you can build and how we thread to the ones we need versus the ones we don't because again as Monica showed, you know, the public can get up in arms about these projects very quickly. And it's very hard to recover once the public says we don't like some of this infrastructure. So it's not an easy issue. I mean, that's, that's why we have this whole regulatory network. But I would say, you know, just resources is what we need for people to learn from experience to talk to one another. And I'll end with there still is this real diverging issue. Well, an issue of our is our future for the 100% emission free world in North America, United States is going to be everybody has solar on their rooftops and batteries and wherever they can fit them. As we are increasingly thinking about environmental justice and equity, we are understanding that is a solution for a certain number of frankly white middle class people, at least here in California, and a lot of lower income people live in apartment buildings or don't own houses and so that's a solution that is picking a certain segment of the population versus are we going to really have full development of this rich abundance of renewable resources throughout the United States. So how are we going to deal with the intermittent see how are we going to deal with the transmission line so both of those are also somewhat clashing of what direction we're going in. Yeah. So, I think it, I mean that's really the $64,000 question and that's putting a pretty small price tag on it. I think we know the answer to it just yet one of the things that would point it from the Canadian context for for folks who aren't familiar with the Canadian energy system. So our electricity grid is remarkably clean. So we're 80% non emitting 80% like 80, 80% not emitting with federal government commitments. And I think it's very realistic to bring that up to 90 by 2030. And that's thanks to you know historic investments in hydro in nuclear. We really have a different electricity mix profile than the United States does doesn't mean that we don't have some of the same issues, but I think it does put a bit of a slightly different spin on it so on the infrastructure question. You know one of the things here that I think is interesting is there's a lot of discussion around well how can we better use existing infrastructure. So think about for example our natural gas transmission infrastructure which is used very substantially in the, you know in the home heating sector. Do we have the regulatory frameworks that will support innovation to do things like begin to, you know, retool that infrastructure whether it's for hydrogen for you know lowering emissions and other and other ways using the infrastructure and different for different purposes. Do we have regulatory systems that support, you know, finding the best technology lowest cost technology in a level playing field for decisions and it goes back to that image of the regulatory compact that I showed in my presentation, and how do you find some, you know, innovative ways of pricing environmental benefits notably climate benefits into into regulation. I don't think we have the answers to that yet and I think this is you know very much where I think the, to Diane's point about each other, developing the resources trying to identify and I've started asking around you know, is there who's looking at all of these experiments and starting to evaluate them because I call them experiments maybe that's not the right terminology. But I think that you know regulators are experimenting in unprecedented ways with how to, you know, how to address these issues, but it goes beyond regulators frankly in many instances that requires policymakers as well Diane you mentioned about, you know, Governor Schwarzenegger going with an executive order as opposed to going through the legislature because of challenges with the legislative route. But policymakers need to be engaged on these issues here as well whether it comes to reforming regulators mandates or utility legislation, providing greater policy certainty, you know, having a path for carbon pricing in Canada to 2030. That's huge. You know, assuming that that can be maintained which I guess is an assumption, it really does start to bring the risk, bring the risk down for for investors. So there's you know it's the $64,000 question it probably has 64,000 different elements to to an answer it's how do you bring all of these issues together. Thank you. I'll move on to another attendee question from RT, and this one is focusing on the recent news and situation down in Texas. Could the commissioners office in Texas have regulated the spike in energy prices during the winter storm. Does FERC hold energy companies responsible for the lack of infrastructure adapting to climate change risks, or provide guidelines on how to do so. I guess those are two distinct but related questions. I'll take it real quickly and I'll just say for years as a Californian where we've had our blackouts. I've been at dozens of meetings where our friends from Cal from Texas come and be moaned California and say we haven't have it figured out but Texas the problems in my mind were both planning, and then the physical problems of the Texas grid which I don't think you know Monica explained clearly had nothing to do with the renewables, but the fact that decisions have been made to not connect the Texas grid with either the Western interconnection or the Eastern interconnection except for these like straws of power. And until that problem is fixed. Texas is going to be vulnerable and they're going to have the same problems again, and they are not subject to FERC jurisdiction because they're within their own. They don't cross over into other states. They're looking at it and NERC is looking at it seeing what can be done, but it's going to have to take a change in political leadership the state level in Texas to say we want to get interconnected, and nothing I'm reading about says that that's the case. And so they set up their own market and frankly you know we, we knew that they could allow these price spikes to happen. We knew that they were mostly electric they don't really have gas distribution in their buildings. We knew that they didn't have the ability to pull in power from outside Texas because of decisions they made. And so this wasn't like oh my God, I mean it's certainly the weather was unprecedented but anyone who knows how transmission works and knows the structure of the Texas market. Monica said they were just in my mind fooling around with reliability and we saw the consequences, whether that's going to cause them to reshape their rules. So far it doesn't seem to be the case that it's more, let's all you know, mass resignations or firings and pointing the finger, but it may it may settle out I mean they're, you know it's going to put their entire state economy at risk if this is the way they continue. Monica a non US perspective. I was pretty harsh but I believe in markets but I know markets have to have some rules of regulation. I wouldn't add to, you know, too much to that I don't think I think the one the one thing I would know from a Canadian perspective is that, you know, electricity in Canada again I think this is in contrast to the US in Canada in most provinces it's a it's a corporation so a publicly owned entity that is you know historically a vertically integrated monopoly monopoly we've begun to see IPPs come you know come in come into the marketplace. But because of that history, when there are issues with power with electricity. They point their fingers directly and immediately at political leaders, and in many instances with great effect in terms of response so again I live in a jurisdiction where the you know the restructuring of the electricity market in Ontario was a bit of a gong show, you know, in hindsight, maybe in the actual fact of the time as well. And you know what ended up happening was the government sort of let you know decisions were made that kind of let the restructuring horse out of the barn, and then when prices did what prices were are supposed to do which is respond to the market. And when to a place people didn't like, what ended up happening the government issued rebates and you know kind of. Then you've got this hybrid situation that's more of a mess than perhaps what you had had started with and so we've got this unfortunate situation again it relates back to electrification, perhaps it is less of an issue in the US and in Canada. And the more we electrify the more I think we're at risk of politicizing our decision making around energy. And I worry about what that might mean for, you know, reliance on on market forces to and. I'll say, I'm speaking from a resident of a state that lost our governor over our attempt over that sooner or later the politics come home, but the port from what I know the portions of Texas that resided within the western interconnection. Even when the ERCOT went down, they were able to pull in power from the western interconnection and keep the lights on and keep the water on. So, um, this is not an insolvable problem. It's a political problem in my mind, coupled with, it's a foretaste of really thinking about the planning we're going to have to do if we are moving towards electrification, which I think we are. Yeah, no, agreed. Folks, I am so sorry, I wish I could stay but I will have to hop off. So I wish you the best for for the remainder and if anybody has any specific questions, feel free to reach out directly I would be delighted to to connect with you. And thank you very much for the opportunity. Thank you Monica. Thank you everyone. Okay, so we have time for one more question I guess Diane you're the primary answer here, but certainly can have a conversation if there's time for it. So, this question is prompted by one of our attendees Martin but it aligns pretty well with something that I was going to ask about anyways so I'll give a little bit of context. We've been talking a little bit about some of the shortcomings of transmission and distribution reliability, the IOU regulatory model investor on utility regulatory model. And certainly California is not the only place that's seen problems with extreme weather affecting reliability here in the state of Michigan DTE and consumers have had problems during deep freezes and wind storms on a pretty regular basis. So, looking perhaps out beyond the unique ERCOT example, looking at ISOs like MISO or PJM. We also see issues with reliability with the failure to procure the best reserve margins or capacity to handle frequent disturbances on the grid. What might the role of a more distributed or localized energy grid, like what we call micro grids, or even just a smaller scale than this very large continental wide distribution and transmission system play in increasing resilience to these kind of climate related issues. Thanks. Well, you've hit upon another fascinating topic that we could all talk about for a long time here in California we've had a little bit of taste of that because as we have as what I mentioned, community choice aggregation where a local city can buy electricity on behalf of its residents and businesses. And in general, sort of a solution that we embark upon for addressing reliability is what we call resource adequacy that if you are a utility supplying power to businesses and residents, you should plan to have power in reserve. You don't necessarily need to keep a power plant just, you know, that you own there but you have bilateral contracts or you're a participant in a market so that when it's called upon, because of extreme weather, you can get the power, and then trans and you have transmission rights to then feed it into your service area. So what we've discovered in California with these CCAs they because they don't have a long history they don't necessarily they're not necessarily have the credit to be able to secure the type of contracts that are really needed or arrangements for this resource adequacy. And because a lot of their premises green power that is less expensive than the competing utility. This is a cost that they're not necessarily wanting to do and it requires sophistication which at the local government. They have been learning, and there's certainly many of them are very sophisticated, but it is in my mind a bit of a taste. If we have all these disaggregated micro grids supplying power. They still have to have some rules of the game. You know, they still have to have resources when you have extreme events that go beyond their micro grid. If people are going to be, you know, having heating way beyond what they otherwise would do. How are they going to get the electricity that's needed. And so there's great pushback about having sort of the same traditional standards, or as Monica said with the Eastern interconnection blackout we got mandatory rules. How are they going to apply and that again is yet an unresolved issue but I like reliability. I'm a former regulator so I definitely err on the side of whatever those rules are they need to apply to everybody, or we're going to have problems and you can have your micro grid burned down in the wildfire, believe me, just as much as the power plant and in fact then getting your house rebuilt to put those pvs back on is a lot longer time period than getting the power plant which isn't to say we can't have multiple solutions, but it's not a panacea I think. I'm going to take it back. That was really, really so interesting. I learned so much, and I already knew a fair amount but even I learned so much. And I as as Diane said if any of you in the audience ever have the opportunity to serve in some sort of role. Please take it because as you can see these issues are endlessly interesting. Thank you very much, Diane and thank you James for moderating and on behalf of me and Barry, the coordinator other coordinator of this I want to thank everyone for joining, and please join us for our next NAC webinar event on March 23 at noon. We'll be looking at public opinion in terms of climate policy in all three North American countries. Thank you and have a good afternoon. Thank you.