of what it takes to actually pull off complicated issues. And he's been really the force behind the consumer utility bill, LD 1646. And with that, I think all this, I really got to know him a lot in this past year and it's been a sheer pleasure. So, and take it away, Seth. Okay, I will do my best. Well, it's great to be with you all. Thank you, Sue and Matt and Jonathan for organizing this and for the invitation. Very glad to hear you have better than expected attendance and I hope this only grows from here. It's a great concept and obviously a very timely week to be embarking on these community conversations with Earth Day tomorrow. I would be remiss speaking of holidays to not acknowledge Yama Shoa tonight. I think it ends at 7.30 at night. Today was Holocaust Remembrance Day and a time to remember 11 million people who were slaughtered in Germany in the Holocaust. And it really kind of puts our current pandemic into perspective and I think obviously this is a challenging time as well. But if we could get through World War II and the Holocaust, I think we're gonna get through this as well.  I would count climate change among those things and it's a big motivator for me in my legislative work. I also work here. This is, I'm talking to you from my day job where I work at a lab involved in more sustainable food for the world and we specialize in aquatic animal health. But more importantly, we have good broadband here. So I'm here for that reason. And I brought my sign with me so that you could all be reminded of LD 1646. It's one of the topics I'll be talking about. And the first two that Sierra Club team asked me to speak on were the legislative accomplishments relating to clean energy from the 129th legislature which just wrapped up its work on March 17th. And also the work of the energy working group of the climate council. I am on the energy working group of the council. The climate council was created by this last legislature and it has a number of working groups. The energy working group obviously is going to be important to addressing our climate needs. So it's those three things, legislative accomplishments, energy working group and LD 1646, the consumer on utility effort. And I'll do them in that order. So as you know, the legislature works in two-year cycles. We have just completed our work for this past two-year cycle although a number of measures were left undone because we had to end early because of the pandemic. So we accomplished a lot but there are some things left on the table. We hope to maybe go back in July or August or September and finish those. If we don't, then those bills will die and they will have to sort of start the cycle over with a new two-year cycle and a new legislature because we're all up for re-election in November. And typically a third of the legislature turns over. So there is a big question mark as to those remaining bills. But what we did accomplish so far, and I'll just list a few of them, we reopened the term sheet for the main Aqua Ventus offshore wind project that the University of Maine has been working so hard on so that we can move forward with the university's very innovative floating platform technology. That's something that Paula Page, as you may recall, put the kibosh on and by intervening with the PUC, we reversed that and that process is now moving forward a little late, but it is moving forward. Likewise, we reversed the Paula Page PUC's decision on solar gross metering, which is just a great name. It kind of says it all. Gross metering was gross and it was not, it was very anti-solar and it didn't help anyone, either the solar owner or their neighbor who can benefit from a rooftop solar next door to them. We all benefit because it helps to drive down rates as long as it's done right. And so net metering was restored, the former policy. And we also went forward with a very substantial procurement bill around solar, larger grid scale and community scale solar. And so there's a lot of that in the pipeline. I think especially the larger grid scale work will continue even despite the pandemic. It is a little more challenging for some of the more intimate clean energy work.  It gets a little dicier with things like heat pumps and efficiency installation. So we are seeing, and you may have seen the Press Herald article. I think it was yesterday's Press Herald, maybe it was today by Tux-Turkel talking about the challenges there. But we are seeing a real renaissance around clean energy in general. And a lot of that is because of that work, those bills that we passed. And then one additional bill that really will help boost the larger grid scale renewable procurements here in Maine was the enactment of a bill to increase our renewable portfolio standard. And the renewable portfolio standard is where we require that a certain amount of the energy that is bought on our behalf as electricity ratepayers is renewable. And Maine's current requirement is 40% under the new bill. It will ramp up to 80% renewable by 2030 with a goal and not a statutory requirement but a long-term goal of 100% renewable by 2050. Now I need to clarify because it's easy to misunderstand. That does not mean that all of our energy is renewable. It means that all of our electricity is renewable. So it does nothing about cars and other forms of transportation that burn fossil fuels. It does nothing about oil furnaces. We're one of the most dependent states if not the most dependent on petroleum-based heating. And those are real challenges. So that's probably a pretty good segue to the climate council and the importance of that work. Another bill that we did enact was the climate council. They created a very large roughly 30-member panel which is to advise the governor on how we can attain our climate goals and climate goals were enacted which would get us to 80% fewer emissions than what we had as of 1990 by the year 2050. So that's economy-wide. That's the economy-wide goal that includes transportation and includes building, heating and cooling. And there's some debate about how we measure industrial emissions, those are important too. And I think we should absolutely include those. So now the real work begins, right? Because that larger challenge is much more substantial than electricity. Electricity, which my committee and the legislature overseas is only 9% of our overall emissions as a state. So the real challenge is transportation. That's over 50% of our emissions. And then building heating and cooling is next with over 30%. And then you have industrials and the rest again is electricity. So that is the larger challenge that the climate council is looking at. They're also looking at our agricultural practices, our land use, patterns of development, the whole kit and caboodle. But with respect to energy, my working group of the climate council, the subgroup that I'm on, is really where the rubber hits the road on how do we produce enough clean energy to power our transportation fleet, which is currently obviously not renewable at all. And also to heat and cool buildings and to power industrial processes. That's the real challenge. And it represents a massive, probably at least a five and a half fold increase over what we produce now with our overall generation. And so that's a whole lot more offshore wind turbines or solar panels or you name your favorite renewable that we need to bring online in order to get there. And we need to do that as quickly as possible. So very substantial investment needs to be made. And how we do that is something that the energy working group is working hard on. Now the energy working group includes people who have vested interests that includes the CEO of Summit Natural Gas, for example, who maybe has a perspective because he oversees a utility that does natural gas. It includes Eric Stineford, who's the vice president of central main power. And obviously he has a certain vested interest. But there are lots of people there who are more in the public interest as well. They're environmental folks and Dan Burgess, the governor's policy director on energy is co-chairing it with Ken Colburn who is from Bar Harbor and has a great background as a environmental regulator in state of New Hampshire and also interestingly been involved in energy co-ops. So it's a very mixed group but I think one that does hold some promise to make some good recommendations. I wouldn't expect a panacea from us but I'm hoping that we can really advance the conversation as part of the energy working group. And that work is unfolding. I'm hoping that we will be wrapping, I think we are hoping it will be wrapping up our recommendations to the larger climate council by the end of May. And then letting the climate council sift through those recommendations from the different working groups and produce their own larger recommendation for the next legislature in terms of short-term measures that we need to take to keep the ball moving. And it is a marathon and not a sprint but we have to keep moving. We have to maintain the strongest pace that we possibly can if we're going to do our part as a state to address the climate challenge because we have so much at stake ourselves in this challenge. And it's about our kids and our grandkids, yes. But even in our lifetime, we expect to see massive, massive, very consequential and very troubling changes if we don't change course now. I'll end there but happy to take questions on either of those two things. One more topic before we get to questions is I was asked to talk about the consumer and utility effort. And some of you I think are on the call because you're interested in replacing central main power and perhaps the main also with a consumer and utility. That is what LD 1646 would do. I put forward the bill last May. We had a great public hearing thanks to all of you who attended and testified and support consumer and utilities are a proven superior model and especially going into the very challenging future that we expect and addressing the climate challenge and also taking advantage of the opportunities that that challenge holds because every crisis also has opportunities hidden inside of it. A consumer utility would be a trend really transformative change for main to make. And it would really position us to be a leader in the clean energy future. Consumer utilities are not for profits. They are typically accountable to the people. They can be owned as a co-op or they can be quasi governmental kind of like your local water district maybe if you have one of those. There are five consumer owned utilities. Excuse me, there are eight consumer utilities here in Maine. Some of them are co-ops but Madison Electric for example, up in Madison attracted backyard farms because it has cheaper and more reliable electricity than neighboring CMP. Kenabunk light and power is a fantastic very popular consumer and utility down in Kenabunk obviously. We have Holton, we have Callis and Baileyville and actually that is a co-op which serves an area twice the size of Rhode Island. We have Van Buren, we have Vinyl Haven, we have Matinacus and Monhegan. So lots of consumer utilities here in Maine but they are still relatively small compared to Emera and CMP. Across the country, it's actually a little different. Out west, there are a lot more consumer utilities and all of one state, Nebraska, is entirely consumer owned and there are large, large portions. The majority in some cases of other states, Washington and Iowa and many others where public power really took hold in part because they were very rural and the investor owned utilities didn't want to go there so they never bothered. And in the 30s, they finally took the ball into their own hands and said we're gonna do this with a co-op. In other cases, it was because of a visionary like George Norris of Nebraska who worked with FDR and created the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Bonneville Power Authority and the law that made all of Nebraska publicly owned. So the advantage primarily is that they are locally controlled and that they have a lower cost capital. Consumer utilities are able to access capital at a much lower cost and we need to make, as I mentioned earlier, massive investments in the grid to improve reliability and to conduct all of the new clean electricity that we plan to generate. We also need to make massive investments in generation and so although LD 1646 does not propose it, we're also talking now about public investment, consumer owned investment in generation as well. So that some of that offshore wind, some of that solar, some of those other resources could be procured at a lower cost of capital and could not involve a massive profit center for far away investors, but rather could really be generating jobs here in Maine. We're going into a very challenging time economically. So we expect to need jobs. This is going to be a bit of a, certainly a massive recession, if not a depression and our state will need opportunities like these to generate, not just clean energy but also to generate jobs. And one last thing I can't resist mentioning because my committee also oversees telecommunications is when you own the polls, you also own the ability to bring fiber optic telecommunications infrastructure to the parts of Maine that don't have it. And we are seeing many people unable to access telehealth, unable to access digital learning, whether they're students or adults who are trying to improve their job skills right now, people involved in meetings like this, trying to work from home. And because roughly 15% of Maine does not have access to any kind of high speed internet. And as I mentioned, I had to come into my workplace today to speak to you because otherwise you wouldn't be seeing and you might, hopefully you'd be hearing me but that's it. We really need to do something about broadband as well. That's also a clean energy opportunity because if people can telecommute, if you can work from home or get your medicine, you're checking with your doctor from home or learn from home, you're cutting down on that transportation piece that I mentioned is over half of our overall emissions. Just quickly, the Maine state government employees are about 85% telecommuting right now. And that's an incredible statistic because in the space of about two weeks, we went from a negligible rate of telework to 85%. I actually put in a bill last year also on telecommuting and asked that Maine create a statutory goal of 30% telecommuting by 2030. And you know what, the human resources people and state government said, yeah, that's gonna be tough. I don't think we can really do that. You know, I think let's study this and we'll figure out what's possible. So, you know, we compromise, we agreed on a study and so this study is currently supposed to be taking place on whether we can get to 30% by 2030 and yet because of the pandemic, we saw in the space of two weeks an 85% telecommuting rate. But again, there are challenges involved with that. It is not perfect. A big part of that is our lack of fiber, optic infrastructure and the ability to work from home for people that don't have internet access. And for the wonderful main base providers of broadband such as GWI or Axiom or LCI or Pioneer, these wonderful small scrappy telecoms, they are looking at roughly 25 to 40% of the cost of getting fiber to you is attaching to the poles. Now guess who owns most of the poles? Well, CMP in Ameramine and yes, also Consolidated, which used to be Fairpoint, which used to be Verizon owns quite a few of the poles as well. But my point is, if we can go forward with a bold and visionary consumer owned utility that can not only invest in poles and wires, but can also invest in generation and can also make it possible for us to improve broadband infrastructure and access to the internet for the last mile for the folks who still don't have it. We can really transform our state and position Maine as a leader in the future, the very challenging future that we confront. I think Maine has real opportunities here if we play our cards, right? So I wanna wrap it up there. I think that's about all I wanted to share with you and make sure that we have time for questions. Thank you, Seth. And there's some questions coming in on the stack chat box, but before we get to those, I think I saw one hand up, Suzanne. Suzanne, do you wanna unmute yourself and ask a question? If you can't, then maybe just add it to the chat. I believe I've unmuted myself. Can you hear me? Yes. Thank you, Seth. Thank you, Seth, for doing this. This is a huge opportunity for us and great for me to hear, but now in the recap of the future. My big issue, I guess, in any of this is how we underestimate the power of energy efficiency. And in particular, I think the combination of energy efficiency in partnership with renewables because we tend to separate the two into two different camps when in fact I believe the real efficiency, if you will, and the real opportunity is the combination of both. And so would there be perhaps a consideration in the future of not only a renewable standard, but an efficiency standard that is a combined standard, efficiency renewable standard that we can begin to think about a combined effort within the idea of planning with the grid resource. Because again, I think as we go towards electrification, the real, again, synergy of forces here is the combination of all of the above. Yeah, I would just say amen to that. One reason I think that I don't talk about efficiency as much as I used to, Suzanne, when you and I were hanging out together more and you did some tremendous work on that and still are doing that, thank you for it. I've been, I've just been so pleased by the work of the efficiency main trust. And it's not that we can't do more there, but Maine is really fortunate to have the efficiency main trust and a very powerful maximum achievable cost effectiveness test where within the electricity sector at least we are really going out and getting as much efficiency as is determined to be cost effective. But can we do more? Absolutely. I think one of the opportunities there, for example, is around building codes and energy standards for new buildings as well as opportunities to retrofit our very, very old housing stock here. We do need to do more and part of the challenge has been funding that. It is hard in a utility model in a revenue bond model to finance that. I think it may be possible. I had a proposal back, I'm sure you remember Suzanne back in 2011 or so that would have used revenue bonds in addition to a small surcharge on heating oil and would have really been a massive engine to propel forward our efficiency work. But I think the other pieces is just around the smart grid and better uses of the energy that we do transmit over poles and wires. And we do have this advanced metering infrastructure, these smart meters which are supposed to help with that, but they have not helped. We have not seen savings from them. They've been nothing but a headache and a massive new profit center for the utilities. So if we can put all of this together, then I think we can really get somewhere. Thank you for mentioning efficiency. It is the cheapest and the cleanest source of power. And I appreciate that you mentioned it and appreciate what you're doing, Suzanne, to move that forward nationally. Well Seth, thank you very much. I'll be back in touch. Thank you so much. All right. Thank you. I'm happy to just kind of go down the chat box. We have a couple of questions here. One's more, maybe it was a comment, but is the legislature gonna be called back in a special session at some point this year? Do you know that yet or have you mentioned that? That is to be determined. Great question. And obviously a lot depends on the availability of testing. We are nowhere near where we need to be in terms of the availability of tests. And we're gonna let the public health experts determine when we are there. But what we know from them is that we're not there right now. And they're just not getting, I think the Abbott test, Dr. Shah, the CDC, had some comments about it today. Even that test is somewhat limited in terms of its ability to generate a false negative. And we don't have enough of them. The first order from the state, we ended up getting about 5% of what we ordered. So until we have massive new testing availability, preferably antibody testing, also we need a whole army of contact tracers to do it safely. We can't reopen the economy and expect anything but disaster. So I think it's safe to say that when the economy is safe to reopen, when you see businesses starting to reopen, we'll be in a better position to talk with the governor about bringing the legislature back into session. I certainly hope to come back. Actually, I saw. There are a lot of things I want to work on. But right now we do not have a date to come back. And it is the governor's call as to when and whether we come back. Okay, yeah. And actually, this is Eric. Just to let you know, that's not what I heard. I heard publicly she has said they are calling the legislature back in. Okay, thank you, Eric. I had not heard that yet. Yeah, she's already said it publicly because there's a judicial appointment that's come up with the departure of the Chief Justice of the State Supreme Court. And at that point, she said publicly, she will be calling you guys back in at some point later this year. I certainly hope that's the case. Did she give, I assume she didn't give a date because I would have heard about it. But I'm glad to hear that there was an indication that we would come back in. One thing I should mention though as a caveat to that is that even if the governor does call us back in, it could be for a limited purpose, such as the confirmation of a new Supreme Court justice. It does not need to be necessarily a blank check to vote on all of the legislation that remains before us. And for safety reasons, she may or may not want to encourage us to vote on every remaining bill. Even the ones that you and I might care about deeply such as LD 1646. So stay tuned is my best answer on that one. Thank you, Seth. And thank you, Eric. Dave asks, what's the climate of bipartisan support on all of the issues that you outlined?  And I think also the climate council bill. But, you know, we have not seen a lot of Republican support for more aggressive renewable portfolio standards or more transformative proposals like LD 1646, the concern-rend utility bill. You know, I will say that lots of Republicans who I talked to on the street or even folks that approach me unsolicited speak very highly of the idea that we should control our power locally. That decisions about something as important as our power should be made locally and not in a far away distant overseas boardroom, which is of course currently the case with both CMP and Amira Maine. So, I think Republicans in the state house are in a pretty unique bubble.  We tend to hear a lot from lobbyists and relatively little from the people. But that's one reason that we're also talking about the possibility of a referendum. If we need to go there, if we can't get all of the Democrats to support it or if maybe Republicans take over the state, one house, one branch of the state legislature next year, I think a valid question is certainly a possibility as well. And there are many, including in the Sierra Club who are discussing that as a real possibility. Great. Nolan Mike asks, what would be the benefits of buying out CMP rather than forming new smaller energy companies around the state? Yeah, it's a good question. So, a utility is a little bit different from a company. You know, just this may be a point that everyone's already familiar with, but I have to underscore that a utility is a monopoly. It is not a free market business in any way, shape, or form. So the idea of having a public utilities commission is to supposedly impose the discipline that the free market would otherwise impose. That's what's called the regulatory bargain. And so every utility, whether it's consumer owned or investor owned is given a certain service territory which is exclusive. So its customers are captive to that utility. And it is possible that we could create a lot of smaller consumer owned utilities around the state. But one real issue with that would be equity. The rural areas are much harder, much more expensive to serve. You need many, many more poles and many more miles of wire to serve an area like Piscataquist County than you do, say Cumberland County. So it would work very well for Cumberland County to have its own power utility. It would work less well for Piscataquist. It can be done. Now I mentioned Eastern Maine Electric Cooperative. They do a great job despite the challenging circumstances of serving a very rural area, twice the size of Rhode Island with only 12,500 customers in down East Maine. So it's not impossible, but it is more expensive. Their rates are higher than the rates of Madison or Kenabunk. And the reason is the rural nature. There are also efficiencies involved with a larger utility. You can move resources around more effectively if you have a storm that hits a particular part of the state very badly. You can move your crews from the areas that were less hard hit to the areas that are hard hit. And you can also keep your workers busy, make sure there is enough work for them by serving a larger area of the state and moving specialists around who might do a particular kind of work like installing tree wire. One very simple technology that we could use to improve our worst in the nation reliability if we could invest affordably is more coded wire, tree wire it's called, which when a tree branch touches it does not short the electricity supply. And it's also stronger. It can even hold the weight of an entire tree in many cases. So a larger utility would be better positioned to make those kinds of investments. It's not that you couldn't do it with a smaller utility, but one last efficiency is they could go to the bond houses in New York and sell revenue bonds at very attractive rates a little more easily because they'd be looking at a larger investment that the bond banks would be more interested in buying. And that's really one of the key. I mentioned access to low cost capital. That's one of the key factors. Investors like the tax exempt low interest, but predictable revenue that they can get from buying municipal bonds and tax exempt utility bonds, such as those issued by consumer and utilities. So that's what we're talking about when I talk about low cost capital. I hope I answered the question. I should probably let others ask their questions. Thanks, Seth. There was a comment just in support of broadband, especially after everything that's going on. And I'm glad you talked about that earlier. There's a question from Phillip. I understand that CMP does not own electric generating facilities. Does this make it easier to transition to sustainable generation? If this becomes consumer owned or are the commitments to purchase from current sources difficult to terminate? Yeah, so the commitments to purchase, we do have long-term contracts to purchase from for-profit investor owned clean energy generators. And those would not go away. We've made a commitment, we would honor that commitment. But as I mentioned, we need to at least quintuple the amount of clean energy that is currently on our grid if we're going to decarbonize our economy. And that's a pretty Herculean challenge. It will require an unprecedented level of clean energy investment. And it will require it now and at a sustained rate, probably an increasing rate of investment going forward to 2050, if that's our goal. So, you know, I think there's probably room for both publicly financed clean energy investments, such as a consumer owned utility could make as well as investment by the private sector. But again, you're going to be paying a lot more for that for-profit private sector investment. And I'm just not clear that our state will be able to afford it. We spend $6 billion a year already on energy. Our lower income individuals pay, some of them pay a fifth of their overall household budget on energy as it is. And it's a very high energy burden relative to other parts of the country. Our industrial sector is very sensitive to electricity costs. And we need to be careful in that respect as well. So, if we're going to do this as a relatively low income state, we need to be able to do it affordably. And if we do it right, we can generate that energy and generate those jobs. If we do it wrong, it could fall apart. You know, we may actually not get there at all. Great. Mal asked, do you have any thoughts on grid scale storage? Oh, that's a great question. Yes, I should have mentioned storage before. I think that the energy working group is going to make some additional recommendations around storage. We do need to have more thoughtful and strategic investment in storage. I think that's one of the great opportunities also for consumer-owned investment because it's still kind of coming online. Battery storage is not the only solution, but it might be the most sort of, off-the-shelf solution for the near-term investment. There's some really interesting stuff being done in storage around clean fuels where you're using molecules to store power rather than electrons to send power. The advantage of a molecule, of course, is once you've created it, it can be stored like gasoline. So I'm talking, obviously, about things like hydrogen or methane, which can be created by bacteria from hydrogen. Hydrogen is probably the most promising in the near-term, and it can be either stored for use in hydrogen vehicles, probably has some real potential around the larger transportation fleet for freight vehicles, for example. As well as it can be injected into our natural gas pipelines and used to supplement the natural gas supply, which is still, I think, in the near-term, going to be a significant portion of our overall energy use, hopefully decreasing over time, but that's to be determined. So yeah, storage is a great one. I really appreciate the question. Yeah, these are great. We have probably a handful more. Katie asks, what can we do right now to support LD 1646? Hey, great question, Katie. So I would suggest that if you already know about it, then you probably know that maybe you've done some of these things, but let me back up. So if you're just learning about it and you wanna learn more, educating yourself is definitely a great first step. Go to publicpower.org. That's the national association of the consumer and utilities around the country and check out their website, publicpower.org. We can follow up with these links. Go to bit.ly forward slash main power, capital M, capital P. That's a sort of a website that we created with links relating to LD 1646. And there are links there on how you can support it. You can contact your state legislators, you can contact your governor, you can donate all of those links from bit.ly forward slash main power, capital M, capital P. And again, we'll send that out after the call, if not put it on the chat. And we have bumper stickers. You may not be driving a lot right now, but hopefully you will be later with your very clean vehicle. And if you want a bumper sticker, you can contact me and or I'll send a, maybe if we can send out a link mat after this, an email after this with some of this information that might be the best way to get out there. A letter to the editor once you've kind of armed yourself with information would be tremendous. And they do get read, policymakers really do pay attention to letters to the editor. It's the second most read page in the newspaper after the front page. And I guess one last thing is donations. We definitely need funding. The Sierra Club has been terrific and we have had a couple of very generous donors step up and fund John Brodegam as a part-time sort of employee of this effort. He's done a tremendous job of organizing us and we wanna keep that going. So a donation, a generous donation at whatever level you can afford would be a terrific way to move us forward. We need probably in the six figures over the next few months to keep this effort going forward. So I would say you can try to donate at our new website and I'm gonna give you a link to our new website for donations but please keep in mind this website is still in the works. It is under construction but the, and I've personally had some problems with the donation link but you can try to donate there and that link is mainpowerformainpeople.org and the four is the number. Again, mainpowerformainpeople.org with the number four. So that's a good place to donate but again, we're still working on the website itself so some of those other resources may be more complete for your arming yourself with information. Thanks for that great question, Katie. That's great, thank you. And there's a couple more, yeah, still a handful. These kind of all relate to public buy-in for the consumer-owned utility and the cost but Steve says, one of the big opportunities for main is to move as quickly as possible toward an electric economy with electric vehicles and home heat pumps. We can move the economy to a low fossil fuel economy. Selling this idea would greatly help the public buy-in. And I'll just read the next one as well. Utility revenues are significantly threatened due to coronavirus epidemic and insecurity of payment in our rate base. This seems like a challenging time for the government to take over the utility system. How are you taking these changes in the landscape into consideration? And the third one that kind of relates to the buy-in is from Slef speaking to the costs of purchasing CMP in a meramine. So I hope I didn't do too many at once there but they seem related. Can you repeat the last question? Could you just speak to the cost of purchasing CMP in a mirror for mainers to consider? Yes, yes, okay. So I'm sorry, give me the first question again. I am sorry. Yeah, no, that's okay. I wasn't sure. First one's about electric vehicles and home heat pumps. Oh yeah, yeah, okay, right. Being helping the buy-in. Got it, got it. So let me, I'll start with that one. That is a great, great point. And I kind of alluded to it earlier but that is how we decarbonize. There is no question that the lion's share of decarbonization in Maine and everywhere will come from a shift to electric vehicles and to some extent, hydrogen vehicles. As you know, some automakers are moving more in that direction. But electrification is where we expect most of it to come from in transportation. And also, and likewise electrification of building heating and cooling. That is how we take the fossil fuels out of transportation and out of building heating and cooling and ultimately also out of the industrial sector. That's where the big emissions are in this state right now and in the global economy. And it's where we need to go with our electricity. But it's not enough to just plug in your electric vehicle. You also need to make sure that the electric vehicles being powered by clean electricity. And when we're increasing by a factor of five, the energy that's demanded of our grid, we are likewise increasing by a factor of five the amount of renewable generation that we need to bring online. So it's a both and question. We need to electrify the economy and we need to decarbonize generation as we do that. So it's a great point. And I hope that helped to sort of clarify the importance of public ownership of the grid and the access to low cost capital and local control because the grid really is the backbone, the foundation, if you will, of our clean energy future. So let me talk about the cost of purchase, CMP and Ameramean. It's a large number. It's in the billions. That will be the subject of litigation when we go forward with this and ultimately will probably be settled by the law court. But I would put the number somewhere around six or $7 billion. It's a big number. It's roughly what we spend on energy in a year in the state. But it's also a number that we can finance. And remember, we can do it at a much lower interest rate than what we're currently paying as part of our electricity bills every day that we turn on a light switch. Currently, when you turn on that light switch, your bill includes between a 10 and a 13% return on equity for the investors of CMP and Ameramean. They include oil-based sovereign wealth funds from the country of Qatar, the country of Norway, large investment banks from Spain, and many other investors around the world. BlackRock is another big investor in CMP and Iberdrola, which owns Avangreb, which owns CMP. So you're paying for that very high interest rate as part of your utility bill. They also have some taxable debt, which when you fold that in, the overall interest you're paying for every pole, every wire, every substation, every transformer, every investment in the grid that CMP has made, you're paying a total of all in about an 8% interest rate annualized. That's a very substantial cost to all of us. And we don't really think about it because it's just baked into our electricity rates and electricity is a relatively inexpensive form of energy, but Maine has one of the highest electricity costs in the nation in part because of the way that our New England ISO has prioritized reliability. You wouldn't know it here in Maine, but they say they have. And also because of the constitution of the United States, we allow this very high rate of return for investors. Notice that I mentioned the constitution of the United States. We don't have a choice. We can't just improve our public utilities commission and expect this whole problem to go away. It won't because there's a standard in federal case law, federal jurisprudence called the HOPE standard. And there's another one called the Bluefield standard. These are Supreme Court cases that were decided in the 1920s and the 1940s. And they require that we pay a very healthy market calibrated rate of return to the investors in investor owned utilities and bake it into the rates. We don't have a choice that has to happen. So when we talk about the acquisition cost of Sampia and Ameramein, the best way to think of it really is it's like you're purchasing a home that you are renting for a whole lot of money and your monthly mortgage payment is going to be a lot less expensive than your rent was. That's really the comparable here. You finance it out over time. And by the way, one of the great things about now is that the federal reserve rate is less than 1%. It's an incredibly good time to make these kinds of public investments because we can get such incredibly low cost capital. The new utility would be borrowing against the future revenue of the utility. There are no tax dollars involved. It's a very common misconception. Utilities try to stir that up. Opponents of the bill try to claim that it's gonna involve tax money. It's not, you're just borrowing against the future revenue. So the investors really like this investment because everybody pays their electricity bill. They know that they will get their money back. They get a tax exemption on that investment. And so it's attractive for investors as well in that respect. And Maine can take advantage of these historically low rates and the historically low difference between taxable and tax exempt debt in order to make this transaction possible. With respect to the challenges our utilities are facing right now, I think the problems that the economy has, the possibility that electricity consumption will go down is actually a good thing because it will help us to argue in court that the utilities are not worth as much as they claim they are. So it kind of cuts both ways. Ultimately, you have to look at what is the revenue generating potential of a utility? That's how you set the acquisition price. You factor in the net book value as well. But every argument that really looks at the unique moment that we're in, every serious argument that I've seen weighs in favor of acting on this and doing it now. Thanks, Seth. I know we're a little overrape, but if you have a couple more minutes, there's a few more questions here. Yeah. I just comments that David Gibson mentioned a link for Maine Youth for Climate Justice on divesting from the public employee retirement system that's on Thursday at one. And Jonathan mentioned the Green Bank talk that is this next community conversation in two weeks. Seth, the call asked my neighbor, Dana Dow, is opined that we are likely to need something like $150 million for broadband as opposed to the $15 million bond issue on the November ballot. As chief sponsor of the so-called Dow bill, doesn't this provide an opportunity to engage those on the other side of the aisle in moving both LD 1646 and DSG in general? DSG. I'm not sure what DSG. Well, I think generally the answer is yes. The need for high-speed internet in the parts of Maine that are currently unserved or underserved is better understood now than it ever has been before. The digital divide has always existed, but it's really come into stark relief and people are understanding it in a way that they never have before. We have some people on this call who we can't see and it may be because they don't have good internet at home and so they dialed in from a landline. They don't have access to these Zoom calls that we're enjoying right now. I don't have it in my house. I live halfway between Portland and Augusta and just off the highway and the top speed that I can access no matter how much I'm willing to pay is either satellite, which is awful, or DSL, which is three megabits per second down and one megabit per second up. That's a bonded DSL. It's actually better than what some DSL people can get. So Maine is one of the worst states in the name for rural broadband access. And as I said earlier, if you own the poles, if you can make pole attachment cheaper, it's over a quarter of the cost to bring fiber to homes right now. We can make that one-time investment. The ConnectMain Authority, if you haven't checked out the state broadband action plan, which is linked from the ConnectMain Authority website, I highly recommend it. We have a real opportunity to connect these dots. I think Seth is absolutely right. I'd like Dana Dow to be the next champion of this cause when I'm done. And I'm actually, thanks Seth. I'm just gonna unmute. I found Seth who asked about DSG and he had his hand up. Yeah. Go ahead, Seth. Yeah, I'm here. Can you hear me? Yeah. Hey Seth. Hey, hey, how are you doing? DSG is Distributed Solar Generation. Nothing radical. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, no, it's true. It's all literally connected. Yes. No, I mean, that's sort of the beauty of this. We're talking about poles and wires and everything is connected. And yes, Distributed Solar Generation also Distributed Efficiency, Distributed Storage. But all of those together, Distributed Energy Resources we call them are absolutely critical. And a consumer utility is going to be willing to invest in those things and support those things where an investor in utility is not. And the reason for that is very simply because of the guaranteed return on equity that an investor in utility has, their natural incentive is to overspend on infrastructure, to overspend on the big ticket items. For example, a very large new transmission line. And we've seen those built recently and more proposed, including the corridor project. Those are the big opportunities that they like to chase after. And the problem with Distributed Energy Renewables like solar and efficiency and in-home storage is that you actually decrease the need to add more poles and wires and more expensive new transmission corridors. And that's where they make the big money. So they don't like it. Yeah. One of the things, can I be heard? I'll let Matt decide. Just a quick follow up. There's a couple more questions. And I just want to respect that the time. But yeah. Go ahead, Seth. Yeah, you're on, Seth. Thanks. One of the very attractive opportunities I think we have is by virtue of the very low cost of investment capital right now, combining it not only with the socialization of CMP and Emeril and improving our broadband infrastructure, we potentially have the possibility to create a revolving fund through the same power authority for funding local relatively small three, five megabyte, a megawatt solar generation facilities as opposed, for example, to wind all over the state. And it can be done, we can use the public power authority to leverage that financial ability to make small towns like mine, Walderboro, able to put in a five megawatt, 10 megawatt power plant, solar power plant, for example. And in a way that's almost inconceivable until this point of low cost capital. Matt, that's a great point. Thank you, Seth. Yeah. Thank you, Seth. Grayson had a question in addition to green energy production, do you see the need to start building C level rise and other climate change related mitigation infrastructure now? Is that something on anyone's radar and legislature? So that's a great question, Grayson. Thank you so much. And yes, there is a huge need for adaptation. And I think the grid, one of the principal challenges to our hope of electrifying everything and providing all of our transportation and building heating and cooling and industrial energy needs through the electrical wires is that we do have the worst reliability in the nation at least as of 2017. And that means we have the longest and the most frequent outages. So think about that. We're a cold state. If it's the middle of January and you have a two week outage and you're depending on an electrical heat pump to heat your home, you're kind of up the creek, right? And likewise in the summer, if you need refrigeration for your medications, you're not gonna be depending on the electrical grid.  Some people can't afford that. There are all kinds of ways that reliability matters. If people are going to be confident enough to get an electric vehicle to charge every night at their home so they can get to work the next day, they also wanna have the power on. So reliability is critical. I think sea level rise is part of the challenge for the electrical grid. Certainly the rocky peninsulas of Maine are very, very prone to outages. A lot of that is just because of high winds and the soil conditions. We do have a lot of trees and they're shallow rooted on rocky soil. So you end up with a very significant challenge for any power utility. That will also be true of a consumer owned utility. But the nice thing about consumer owned utilities is they can make those investments at a lower cost and they pay attention to the lower voltage distribution system that goes out and serves the hinterland, the Willy Wax if you will, because they understand that's their job. They're not chasing after big new lucrative transmission corridors like the Hydro-Quebec proposal. They're focusing on how can we serve our customers better? And that's the reason that on a national basis, consumer owned utilities around the country have better than twice the reliability that the investor owned utilities have. That's also true in Maine. Just a quick example, in that last storm that we had a week and a half ago, I guess it was, the town of Madison, Maine, had a very stark contrast between the folks who are served by Madison Electric Works and the folks who are served by CMP. Roughly 1,650 customers in Madison have CMP, not by choice, believe me, they don't want it, but they're stuck and another half or so are served by Madison Electric Works. For the half that were served by Central Maine Power, 85% of them lost their power on Friday morning, and many of them did not get it back until Monday. For the folks next door across the street in some cases who are served by Madison Electric Works, with even more customers actually, Madison Electric Works had only 3% of their customers without power, again, that was 85% in Central Maine Power's part of the town, only 3% without power, and they had everybody back by lunchtime the same day, lunchtime on Friday. So instead of three or four days, it was three or four hours to get everybody back. And that is common, oh, in every storm I call around, I ask how the consumer and utilities are doing, their reliability statistics are not reported the same way, but here in Maine, they also have a much better track record. Part of that is investing in a distribution system with things like that insulated tree wire that I mentioned, but these are the kinds of adaptations that we need for the grid in order to confront a future that will have a lot more severe weather, and any electrical grid to be reliable in severe weather must be very, very robust and very well maintained. I'll stop there. Great, thanks. And I'm just gonna push, Jonathan, I'm gonna push your question down just in the interest of time. I have one quick one for you, Seth, and then one about rural part of the state. What is the present value of future CMP earnings? Maybe this isn't a quick one, from Mal. That's very debatable. It really depends on many, many factors. One of those is the extent to which we're successful in electrifying the economy. Obviously, the earnings will be greater if we electrify more. It's also very subject to the allowed rate of return, but generally speaking, those will be within a predictable range of roughly 9% to 13% depending on distribution or transmission. So, I mean, they make very good money. They make tens of millions of dollars every year, and some years they get an especially high rate of return because the regulators may have overlooked something or they were able to cut corners, maybe not trim as many trees and pocket that money for their investors. So, the answer is, unfortunately, not easy to put a number on. I think it's a substantial future profit, and that is what we would be removing by creating consumer on utility, keeping that money here in the state instead of sending it overseas. Great. Lynn had a question. Obviously, public transportation figures into reducing our fossil fuel usage. What new initiatives, if any, do you know of that addressed this particularly for public increasing transportation in rural Maine? So, I'm a huge fan of public transportation. I was fortunate in the 1990s to live and teach in New York City, and I was just a, I was so fortunate to not have to own a car. I moved back home to Maine when I was in my 30s. I think I bought my first car when I was 32 years old, and it was just incredible to be able to take the subway or the bus, the robust public transportation system. It is harder in the rural area, but we have, for example, in the Augusta region, the Kennebec Explorer buses, and I think if more of us use them, that will help that fleet can be transitioned to hydrogen, to electricity. That is a system that is generally not going to be governed by the utilities, whether that's telecommunications or electrical utilities, but it's an investment that I think communities and the state need to make, and no question rethinking our transportation systems is a very important part of the climate puzzle. I know the transportation working group of the Climate Council is working hard on some of those things. I'd also, as I mentioned earlier, like to see us not commute to begin with, but rather be able to work from home, study from home, visit our doctor from home, and I think that will help to cut down on vehicle miles traveled as well. But great question about public transportation. I'm a big supporter of it, and I appreciate your support as well. All right, and if you're up for it, two more, I probably said that a couple of times, but people are really engaged, this is great stuff. I didn't get the text yet that I'm supposed to go pick up dinner, so I'm good. Okay, how can we direct the wave of stimulus we hope is coming on some of these more green issues and broadband RT? How can we direct the stimulus? Yeah, I think that's the question. Yeah, I mean, obviously the stimulus in Washington right now, everybody's focused on the paycheck protection funds and really short-term measures to just stabilize people and prevent the pandemic from literally causing people to starve. I do hope that we get to a point where there's a big federal investment, and I think encouraging our, getting people like Sarah Gideon or Betsy Sweet, somebody other than Senator Collins into office in the US Senate would make a big difference. I think Angus King is very open to those kinds of suggestions and certainly Shelley and Jared, but forwarding creative ideas to them would be great. And then within the main sphere of influence where I do my work, I think that this conversation we're having today is absolutely about that. We will not have a lot of money sitting around to make tax-supported investments. We may be able to do some general fund bonding, the kinds of bonds that you vote on at the polls, but the real opportunity I think is revenue bonds. And with the bonds I'm talking about for taking over the power utilities and making investments in clean energy generation and storage and efficiency and broadband, these are not tax dollars we're talking about. You can do this outside of the tax system and that's important because in a depression or a recession, you have fewer tax dollars to spend. It is much, much harder. If you think about it, the entire state budget is dependent on basically two sources of revenue, sales taxes and income taxes. And when sales are down, sales taxes are down. When incomes are down, income taxes are down. And we have a balanced budget requirement in the state constitution. So every dollar that we spend, we have to say where we're gonna get it from. So these are going to be a very, very hard, I would say two, four, six years, hopefully not more than that, budgetarily in the state. And any stimulus coming from the state is gonna have to be outside of the tax system to really be as robust as we would like it to be to create jobs and re-energize the economy. But that's what we need. And that's what I'm gonna keep working on hopefully with your support. Great, and the last one that relates to that is what is the approximate difference between for-profit utilities, financial costs and consumer-owned utility capital costs? How much money is it estimated to cost to decarbonize Maine's economy? Yeah, so a good rule of thumb is that it costs about twice as much to make an investor-owned investment than a consumer-owned investment. Just historically, the difference is roughly between 3% annualized cost of capital and 8% annualized cost of capital. So if you amortize that out over 20 years, it ends up being roughly a two-fold difference. So just kind of ballpark back of the envelope. Dr. Richard Silkman has produced a book which I highly recommend to you. It's linked at that Maine power, Bitlylink. And he has really mapped out as an energy economist has mapped out what it would take to completely decarbonize Maine's economy by 2050. And he's not kind of going halfway. He's really looking at the deepest decarbonization. No kind of tricks like importing power from Hydro-Quebec and taking credit for that, even though Massachusetts already bought it or anything, any other tricks that people use sometimes to account for clean energy that they really shouldn't. So it's a very honest look at how we get there fully. Dr. Silkman says that we can, between now and 2050, completely decarbonize Maine's economy by electrifying everything, by making all the investment in the grid and in generation through a consumer-owned approach. That's at the 3% interest rate. So he says that that will be affordable. He literally budgets it, and by 2050, we would be making the same roughly $6 billion a year investment over time, but diverting some of what we spend on fossil fuels each year into new investment in the grid and in generation. If you were to do that with an investor-owned model, it would cost you twice as much. So instead of $6 billion a year, we'd be spending $12 billion a year and do that between now and 2050. And basically, we would break the bank within the first few years and we would not get to the destination. So I hope that helps with the rough ballpark of the cost differential. It really is the difference between success or failure. Great, wow. Well, this was very helpful. I'm really glad so many people have stayed on, even past our original time. Thank you very much, Seth, for your time. And I hope this went pretty well. This was my first time trying to facilitate the chat. So I hope I got everyone's questions and thank you for being patient. Yeah, and I will have another one of these in two weeks and we'll send out, as Seth said, some follow-up email with these resources as well, but I think a lot of them are in the chat. Very well, if I may, Matt. Thank you again. I just wanted to say thank you to all of you, to the Sierra Club, to everybody that joined tonight. If you're not already on my email list, there is a way to sign up for that as well, I believe, from the Bitly link and from that website that we're still working on. Please do stay tuned and also support the Sierra Club. Absolutely donate to the consumer utility effort, but also support the Sierra Club. You guys do tremendous work and I'm very, very honored to be one of your first community conversations. Happy Earth Day to everyone tomorrow and let's make 2020 a great year despite the initial challenges.


Felly mae'r cymdeithas. Thank you. Good morning, Members Officers, and any Members of the Public who are viewing this live stream of this meeting. Welcome to this meeting of the Grants Advisory Committee. My name is Councillor Dela Delfield and I'm the Vice-Chair of this Grants Advisory Committee. For information of Members of the Public, the role of this committee is to consider and make recommendations to the Lead Cabinet Officer for Finance, Councillor John Williams. The applications made under the Council's Grants themes, Councillor Williams then makes his decision taking into account our recommendations. This is one of the early virtual meetings that we've had. We've had a number now, but I would like everyone to be patient with us if we have any technical issues. If you're watching virtually online, please do be patient with us if we have connection problems. We are getting used to this way of working. Members, can you please remember to mute your microphones unless you're called on to speak, and you'll need to unmute in order to speak. I'll give you time to do that. Let's move on to the agenda. The first item is Apologies for Absence. Thank you, Chair. We've received two Apologies for Absence this morning from Councillor Joes Hales and Councillor Sue Ellington. For the rest of the members, I will read out your name. Could you please confirm that you're present remembering to unmute your microphones before you speak? Councillor Dawnton, please. Yes, I'm here. Councillor McDonald. Yes, good morning. And Councillor Delfield, clearly you're obviously present. And Councillor John Williams, lead Cabinet Member for Finance. Can you also confirm that you are in attendance today, please? Yes, good morning. I'm here. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you, Chair. Thank you. I can confirm then that this meeting is quarat. May I ask the officers in the meeting to unmute themselves and introduce themselves, please? I believe we've got a number of officers present, and I can see you, Siobhan, and please do introduce yourselves. So actually, we'll start with you, Aaron, as soon as you've spoken already. My name is Aaron Clarke. I'm the Democratic Services Officer for this meeting, and I will be Clarke in the proceedings. Thank you. Jonathan. I just unmuted myself. Is that working? Yes. Sorry, I just unmuted myself, but I'm Jonathan Moulton, a Cabinet Support Officer, and I am livestreaming this meeting. Thank you. Siobhan. Morning, I'm Siobhan Rowley. I'm the Development Officer for Climate Environment. Thank you. Emma. Hi, I'm Emma Dyer. I'm Project Officer for Climate Environment. Rebecca. Hi, I'm Rebecca Wainmouth-Woods. I'm a Technically Waste Policy Manager, but I also look after the two ladies, the Climate Environment Team. Thank you very much indeed. Have I missed anybody, or have we covered everybody that's on the call? I think we're covered. Thank you. Do any members have any interest to declare in relation to any of item business on the agenda today? And if an interest substance becomes apparent later, then of course please raise that, but any interest to declare? You know, I have everybody shaking their heads, so we'll proceed then. So that takes us on to item history, which is minutes of the previous meeting. I'm going to actually take these minutes kind of on block and check whether you're comfortable with assigning them off on block first. So please could I check with members of the committee if they are happy with them to be signed off as they are. I'm going to start with Councillor Dawnton. Yes, I'm happy with that. And I will go to Councillor, sorry, Councillor Donald. Yes, yes, I'm happy with those, Chair. And as am I, I'm happy with those too. So can we take that I can sign those off as a true record and arrange for that to happen, however these things happen electronically now. Thank you. That's item three. Text is to item four, which is to the main point of this agenda, which is the zero carbon grants new criteria and guidance, which is again the notes are at item four. And there's a number of a couple of the appendices which go with that. So, Siobhan, are you going to introduce this item? Yes. So, as you know, this item poses changes, we could say refinements to the zero carbon grant scheme, as we're always intended following the review of the scheme, the scheme's first year. So in a moment, I'll hand you over to Emma, who will run through the detail of the scheme as now proposed. But just to say that, as this scheme involves grants of over 5,000 pounds, Cabinet are the decision makers, the scheme criteria, and therefore the committee are asked to recommend approval of the new scheme to Cabinet with or without any changes you feel necessary. Cabinet will look at this on Monday, and so your recommendations will be published this afternoon as an addendum to the report, which has already gone to Cabinet. We also ask the recommend that authority to make minor changes to the scheme documents for the purpose of clarity is delegated to the head of shared waste and environment. And now I'll pass you over to Emma, if you're happy with that for her to run through the details of the proposal. Thank you. Can I just pause for a moment, because I've noticed that Councillor Bata-Taria has joined us morning. Councillor Bata-Taria, we've just moved on to item four, which is the main item for today. But just before we do that, can you confirm whether you have any interest in any of the items on the agenda today? There was one application submitted from my charity, which I am associated with the CAMCARE UK, so I will keep myself on here. Okay, thank you very much, because that has been noted. Yes, please do carry on then with the item, thank you Emma. Okay, thank you. So last year we allowed for a broad range of projects to be considered. We received 42 applications, which is fantastic. We managed to fund 19 projects, but this year we want to make some modifications. Why change the grant? We wanted to build on the success of the first round of the scheme. We wanted to share our thinking and listen to the members' comments and suggestions. We wanted to take into consideration the feedbacks from last year's applicants. We wanted to make it a little bit easier of the application process. We wanted to make it easier to compare and score projects and allow us to procure services and possible bulk discounts. So this year we're proposing three streams, cycling, community buildings and tree planting and other nature-based solutions. These three streams were the most popular with our applicants last year. Our members' workshop also allowed us to take into consideration suggestions, concerns and improvements for round two. So first of all we've got cycling. The first thing we are proposing is a cycling stream. Last year it was the most popular option with eight successfully funded projects covering a broad range from cycle racks, cycle repair cafes to e-bike share schemes and an app to make it easier to apply for infrastructure changes. We appreciate the needs of villages can vary due to different demographics. So this year we're proposing to make it easier to compare bike projects by allowing us to ask specific questions with the objectives of one, reducing the miles travelled in private vehicles. Two, increasing the take-up of cycling by people who would not otherwise cycle. Within our cycling stream we are proposing three categories. The first one is improvement to cycling infrastructure. So in this category applicants could bring forward a cycle lane, a cycle way, install a cycle stand or make some other improvement which promotes cycling. We recognise it's important that we know who owns the land and what value it brings to the community. And also that a small change can make a big difference which is what we are looking for in terms of value for money. Second category is the electric bike or electric cargo trikes category. It was evident last year that electric bikes and trikes were considered valuable assets to the villages of our district. We thought that this year we could offer applicants the chance to own their own e-bike for use in a local share scheme managed by themselves. By using our procurement power we can hopefully get better value for money with bulk buys. Applicants will be given the opportunity to tell us how they propose to manage their scheme and how they intend to ensure the bikes which I know has caused issues in the past. As we funded e-bike share schemes last year we can draw on their expertise and offer advice if needed. It might be that users would have to pay to help cover these costs. The third category would be one to kickstart a commercial electric share bike scheme in the area. By using a commercial operator applicants can also run an e-bike share scheme without the worry of taking on the booking, the maintenance replacement of any bikes with punctures or mechanical faults, insurance. There's a dedicated helpline and battery recharging as well as part of this all provided by the operator. All that is needed is a suitable clearly marked out location for the bikes to be stationed. The bonus here is that bike lockers are not needed due to the attached locking and tracking devices attached to each bike. We are proposing to fund four bikes per application and this would give the opportunity for families and friends to cycle together. It also means bikes are more likely to be available to hire. Users would need to pay a small rental fee of perhaps £4.50 for 12 hours through a mobile phone app or pre-paid smart card. Again we will procure the services of a commercial operator such as Cambridge Electric Transport and provide a 50% subsidy to a commercial operator for the first year to kickstart the scheme. Typically four e-bikes would be based in each village which would cost £2,400 for a year's subsidy. On to the next stream which is community buildings. The second stream we are proposing is a community building stream to help with improvements to those community buildings which are available for use. Last year, although very popular with 11 applications, only one community building project was funded which was Iculton Village Hall and that was a lighting upgrade, the rest fell down due to not enough in the way of community engagement. This year we have clearly stated in the objectives that along with a reduction of fossil fuel energy we would like proposals to include an increased awareness of energy improvements to the public. We believe that taking a whole building approach which takes into account the energy hierarchy is the most efficient approach as it ranks the stages on the way to using less energy in a building. So the energy hierarchy, I don't know if you've seen this, basically you'd have to do the energy conservation measures first then the energy efficiency and then go on to renewable energy. We believe leading by example is key and we hope that the projects we receive will raise awareness to the public on how improvements can benefit any building. For example, by holding an open event promotion via social media or newsletters. We are requesting that applicants have a free hold or lease hold interest in place and at least must have at least 21 years on it. So the first category within buildings is energy surveys. We recognise that it is wise to use the services of experts when making energy efficiency measures to make the best savings reductions in carbon emissions. For this reason we propose to invite applicants to apply for an energy efficiency survey. A bespoke reports and advice all procured by us. Reports are typically around 1250. Second category is energy and conservation or efficiency measures. This is where applicants have already had their energy survey and would like to improve the changes that we have been recommended. We are proposing to fund the insulation of walls, ceilings or floors of community buildings, replacement doors or windows and energy efficiency measures such as lighting upgrades. Although applicants with no energy survey can apply, we would prefer to see advice given from a professional. And the third category is solar PV and or battery storage system for solar PV. Solar PV and battery storage are a popular choice in this stream with five applications not funded last year due to lack of community engagement, inaccuracies and CO2 savings and lack of detail on or no energy conservation measures already undertaken. If our applicants satisfactorily answer our questions, we would want them to register with Cambridge Solar Together by their deadline of 5 October. Then if they are happy with their offer and are successful with our grant, we will then pay Cambridge Solar Together the price they are offered to undertake their project. And the prices are typically 20% less than the market rate, which is quite a good deal. Our final stream is the popular tree planting and other nature-based solutions. Last year we funded four out of the five applications we received for tree planting. We would like the tree planting to be a theme again this year as it was a great opportunity to involve communities no matter how small. We have therefore included an awareness of trees as an objective along with a reduction of CO2 in the atmosphere. Habitat creation or restoration has been added into as we see this as an important added benefit. We propose to keep the stream quite broad as we appreciate demographics and volunteer numbers can vary considerably. We would like funded projects to be sustained in the long term and have included privately owned land so long as applicants can show that the trees will be preserved in the future. We also recognise that tree planting can sometimes cause more damage than good, so we have included an option to fund a tree consultant and those projects which have already sought advice from a tree consultant will be looked upon favourably. Any questions? Thank you very much indeed. What I'll do first is actually just run through what it is that we're looking to be asked for recommendations on today and then we'll go to councillors for questions and clarifications. So just to be clear that the recommendation that we've been asked to look at today is for us to approve the changes to the zero carbon communities grant scheme as have just been outlined by Emma there on cycling community buildings and tree planting. And also the secondly to delegate to the head of shared waste services environment who I think I saw during the meeting but perhaps he just dipped in and dipped out again. Sorry, I'm here. Well, that's okay. Good to see you and to allow minor changes to be made to those scheme documents that are in the appendices. So they're the things that we're considering. But I'll open up to questions and comments from the councillors. So I will go in order if that's okay. So councillor, do you have any questions that you would like to ask or clarification on this recommendation? I'm okay. Okay. Thank you. Cattsford-Dawnton. Yes, please. I have a couple of questions. One is to do with dates. You mentioned, Emma, the solar, getting advice from solar energy. Can we show it together? Can we show it together? Thank you. Can we show it together? With a deadline of the 5th of October. The applications for this new round of grants doesn't close until the 30th of September and people do send things in at the last minute. So will there be enough time between the 1st of October, the 2nd of October, even by the time an application comes in, and the deadline of the 5th? Siobhan, I think you know more about the solar together than me, don't you? I need to unmute Siobhan, sorry. Yes, what we will be asking through the application form is for organisations with a community building where they're interested in solar PV to put in an application with a quote which is derived from another company. Now they could get this as an online quote. So they don't necessarily have to go to a lot of difficulty with this. But then they apply using that quote. And then they go through the solar together curvature process, which is very likely to produce a lower quote. So we would be asking you to decide the applications on the basis of the original quote, but then looking to actually fund them through kimchi solar together as a lower quote, if that makes sense. Yeah, thank you. I've got two other questions, Clare, if that's all right. So one is a general question and that is to do with the support that you will offer to applicants. I mean, we know that there were issues with the bikes this year. I won't go over all that. We're very familiar with that with television. So I just wanted to be sure that applicants in parish councils, particularly small parish councils, will you'll be able to provide them with enough support in the application process with dealing with the questions. The anxieties even feeling that, you know, they perhaps want to put in an application but don't have enough time or expertise locally. You feel able to deal with all of those questions. That's my first question. And my second one is very specific and that is to do with schools. I know, and it's very clear here on page 13 that schools can't apply for an entry in improvement, but could a school apply for an improvement to a garden, a school garden, which would then be open? That's a very specific question, which you might not want to take now, but take offline. But you're very definite here in the objectives under B on page 13 that schools can't apply because there is, quite rightly, there is the Refit Schools Programme in Cambridgeshire County Council Refit Schools Programme. But the question is about a school garden. So two questions. Thank you. I'd like to have them on those. So the first one was about support. What support can we offer to parishes, especially electric bikes? That's what I'm dealing with. Any queries? Sorry. Can you hear me? Yeah. So any kind of queries can be directed to me. If I don't know the answer, I can find the answer out for them. We're going to have a web page dedicated to this with FAQs and as they come in, we can add them to the web page. So obviously other parishes, if they want to apply, they can look at the FAQs as well. And as for schools, schools can apply in partnership if they have got some suitable land. That's right, Siobhan, isn't it? You're happy with... Yeah. So I think it's a good point that we should make it clear on the application information and it perhaps isn't clear enough at the moment. The situation so far as schools and the tree planting for parishes. I think when you say schools, not schools themselves, but say a PTA associated with a school because that's a non-profit organisation, I think that if you've got some parents that perhaps wanted to raise some money and it's a school in agreement, the PTA could then do the application for them. This may be something that we do need to take offline unless perhaps Councillor Williams has any. I know that you've spoken before on this aspect of school. Will the district council to fund improvements to school grounds? Is that something that we would want to do or not? Councillor Williams, you need to unmute. Okay. Yeah, this is something that's come up in the community chest fund. How much... What the criteria is for schools. I think the criteria is, is it open to the public? And if it's not open to the public and it's purely for educational purposes then it doesn't qualify. If it's open to the public, if it's a school garden for example, if the school allows the public access to that school garden outside of school hours, then clearly that's something that benefits the whole community. But if that school garden is simply there as part of the education of the students in that school, then that's clearly an education matter and should be dealt with through the county council, not through Southcams. So I think that's where I draw the line. Is it something that's open to the community and the whole community can benefit from? And it's got to be meaningful benefit. It's not, you know, will we open it twice a year or something like that? It's got to be accessible to the public. I think we can use, for example, the water fountains that we agreed last year because they were in the public areas of the village college which is used by the community. The sporting facilities are used by the community. And not in areas that are just for the sole use of the students that wouldn't qualify. So that's my definition. I don't know if other people have a different view of that, but that's the view I have at the moment. The thing that obviously with the tree planting, we're proposing that it could be for landowners as well. So obviously that would be on private land. So in some ways that might sort of apply to schools as well. So in that case if they couldn't, then would we consider private landowners as well? I think when it comes to schools, as I say, the school is the land owner is the county council. And one thing that we do not do is give money to other local authorities. I don't think we're, I'm not sure actually if we're legally able to do that anyway. So when it comes to ownership, if it's land that's owned by the parish council then we don't, that falls outside the criteria. Thank you. I can see that Trevor Nicholls has to come in here. I presume it's on this, but do go ahead. So I think we will just review and make some clarity over exactly where on each of those elements what can be funded and can't be. I think it's being very clear that this is community funding and that the benefit for communities and what we mean by that. So we can add, we'll add something to the application I think is important, but we'll add some really clear examples and the frequently asked questions because I think that's where we'll help. So I think we'll just look at those issues because I think there is a, there's a fine line between what's successful and what's not. So we'll pick that up before it goes live. The other issue about support. So one of the reasons this time that we really look to make it more streamlined on the applications rather than a real open application process was A to make it easier for parishes and community groups to apply because we've sort of done some of the thinking it's about choosing what you do and then how you move it forward. But also that will free up officer time to actually provide support at application stage and throughout to ensure that these projects get moved in your head. And also when you look at how we're looking to procure some of the schemes rather than leaving it up to parishes to have to do that work once they've got the funding on a number of these we're looking to do the procurement side. So that also ensures that our money is being, we're getting the most effective use out of our money and that's why we're the solar together and we're asking for quotes. We do get two quotes quite easily about that, but we're actually only asking the parishes or the groups to get one and we'll get the secondary quote and hopefully we'll get the increase in savings will come through that side so we can help more groups. So I think we've tried to take all of those points across, but it is about trying to make it easier across the board with groups that are now helping and enabling these projects to actually happen a lot faster than some of them this year. And I know some of those have been caught up in COVID, but I think a lot of them have been caught up in just the complications of having to do these where we can do a lot that for the parishes and move them on. Thank you very much. Siobhan, I see your hands up again. Did you want to just come in on that? A couple of points actually. One just on this support for parish councils in making their applications and we have provisionally scheduled a session on the 6th of July where we will go through what is involved in the scheme as it's now set up. We've also discussed Emma and I actually scheduling a session with appointment slots. A sort of surgery where specific proposals can be discussed with us. I mean, we're available at any time, but we thought that if we scheduled that for the end of July, it would really give that message very clearly that we're very happy to do. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Sorry. I had asked a few questions that you had. Yes, thank you. Thank you very much. I think that will all help enormously. I would just also add to the form. I would just sort of add an injunction or a suggestion that people read the form first before applying. Because an awful lot of mistakes or queries happen because some people simply didn't read the form. But that happens. It does happen. Thank you. Councillor Macdonald, do you have any questions or points? Yes, thank you. Once a general question. Well, I suppose two general questions. First one is for the projects that didn't succeed last year. Presumably they can resubmit that project with additional information and it will be considered against the criteria. That's my first question. Yes, I see nodding heads. Yes, I see nodding heads. Emma, I think you said 41 and 19 were approved. That's right. So they can resubmit? Yes, they will get an email as well. If they want to contact me, I did give them feedback last time as well. So they know where they fell down. The second one is a request stroke suggestion with my economic hat on. Could we say please in the applications that those that are sourcing from a South Cambridgeshire supplier, we can't exclude those outside South Cambridgeshire because you may have somebody who's got very good technology from London, Scotland, wherever it may be. But can we just say to help the economic recovery that where a project or where this capital involves expenditure, where it's sourced from a South Cambridgeshire supplier will be considered favourably kind of thing? So they wouldn't be disqualified if it's outside, but we might look at it more favourably if it's within South Cambridgeshire. I think we just need to be very careful about how we, that wording by some of the work we're looking to do to procure ourselves rather than handing money over and allowing parishes or groups to procure or it gives us greater flexibility to procure in that route or to add that as a weighting. What we don't really want to do is we're trying to make this streamline as possible. We don't want to add in another criteria to measure against. What we may want to do is just put that in the general wordings that as a community led funding it will be great to see that the any money is being spent within the local community. So I think we have to be a little bit lighter in that that rather than a criteria, it is a suggestion. However, for the funding that we are looking to to spend, if we're spending that grant money on solar together or other, that does allow us to be a bit more. We can put that into the purements to be a bit more forceful. So I don't think we want to add extra burdens in, but I think we should be saying that sticking with our sort of our mantra of buying local for whatever we spend, we can put that in just in the wordings. And again, in the frequently asked questions, but I would really suggest that we don't put that as a criteria in because I think that would leave us both up to challenge and it puts more burdens on through the groups. I was going to come to John next. So John, thoughts on that? Well, also, don't forget we have a value for money policy. And this also applies here. The value for money policy applies to this fund as it does to all our funds. So we will need to tie that into account as well. Thank you. I like the idea of there being some kind of sort of recommending looking at the local suppliers, but without it being a criteria that seems sensible and they rely on the value for money that we have to do. So that's comfortable without that sort of being added. Anything else? No, that's fine. And I agree with Travis recommendation. I don't want it to be a criteria. Just maybe some guidance. Yeah. OK, thank you. OK. Any more comments or questions before we move towards the recommendations of Sheffan? Yes. There is one aspect that is not clear at the moment in our information for applicants. And I think it would be helpful to have your steer on. And that is that it's not clear whether we invite organisations to apply for more than one project. Now this particularly comes up because some of the possibilities as we've now mapped them out are actually relatively low cost. In particular, a community building energy survey is selling so cost the electric bike or the kickstarting of the e-bike scene is a fairly small amount. It would be good to clarify that in our information for applicants. And it would be good to know how you feel about it since you will be looking at the propositions that come in and making your recommendations. Thank you. Comments from councillors on that? My view would be it would seem logical if you've got an organised local community who wanted to do an energy survey and an e-bike scheme. It would seem unfair to say that they could only apply for one would be my sort of view. How do other councillors feel about that? I'm torn. It's a very good question. I'm really torn. It might help the larger and better organised parish councils over the smaller and under-resourced parish councils and I'd be a bit wary of that. On the other hand, it might make for a really good set of applications where two matching or two partner grants could make a real substantial difference. I'm really torn. My view would be that we go back to what the purpose of the grants are and that is obviously pushing towards zero carbon communities and that that should be the focus when considering them. Cats the Williams. I assume that if you look back at last year's scheme, we had a criteria that we wanted to ensure that the villages, it was in even distribution across the district. I don't know if we managed to achieve that, but I would have thought that if that criteria is continuing, then if a village put in more than one application, we would make a decision as to whether we should grant more than one application on the basis that whether or not the £100,000, which is the limit of the scheme, has been distributed evenly across the district and if it hasn't, then we would take that into account into whether or not we award a particular parish council more than one application. I think that's probably covered in that criteria of wanting to ensure that this money is bred across the district and that they're not focused on maybe one or two parishes that happen to have the resources to deliver the applications. Is that right, Siobhan? Yes, I think one of the dilemmas that we'll face organisations seeking to apply will be whether to put in for a small thing or a large thing and I suppose I'm thinking that if they were to apply for what they're interested in, we wouldn't necessarily fund both of them, but it would actually give you a bit more flexibility as to how you do the funding. No, I'm happy with that. I think that was so long as at the end of the day we see this £100,000 invested. I fully appreciate we can't ensure that it's 100% across the district, but so long as we ensure that all parishes have an equal chance of the money and the money is being spent as far as we can in schemes across the district, then I don't have a problem with, say for example, a parish or an amenity group asking for money for two or more projects. Anything further on this that anyone would like to raise? Okay, in which case we'll go to the recommendations, which is item 0.2 of item agenda 4, a page 7 of the agenda. So are you quite comfortable, councillors, that we take these two recommendations, 0.1 and 2 together? Please nod. Yeah, thumbs up. Okay, thank you. In which case the proposal is the recommendation that we recommend to Cabinet, to councillor John Williams, the approval of the changes to 0 carbon community Scrant scheme as outlined in paragraph 11, which will result in a more focused scheme providing funding to projects under the three themes of cycling community buildings and tree planting at another nature-based solutions. And delegation to the head of shared waste services environment, the authority to make minor changes to the scheme documents in the pedicys A and B as necessary for clarity. So that is what we're recommending. So I will go through the councillors individually to ask if they're happy to accept that recommendation. So councillor Batticharia. Thank you. Thank you. Councillor Daunton. Yes, I'm happy. Thank you. Councillor Donald. Agree. And I can confirm that I'm in agreement with that as well. And the fact that we have asked delegation for the head of shared waste services to make those minor changes means the things that we've discussed today can be picked up in there. So councillor Williams. The point I was going to make, Claire, for those that this needs to be amended to the Cabinet, those changes can be picked up by Trevor. Thank you as part of that delegation. Lovely. Thank you very much indeed. Okay, that finishes item four, which was the substantive item on the agenda. So just to item five, which is the date of next meeting. The date of next meeting is Friday, the 31st of July at 10 am. Thank you very much. I'd like to thank all the officers for all their hard work on the Zero Carbon Communities Grant and for all of the members who've taken part in the workshop and also thanks to all of the community organisations who have applied for what I think is a fantastic scheme for us to move forward with Zero Carbon Communities in South Cambridge here. So thank you very much indeed for everybody this morning and I'll see you again on the 31st of July. Thank you. Thank you everyone. See you. Bye. Bye bye.