And in this session, we're going to try to explore really or focus more on the commercial industrial sector, really look at how the CCAs serve businesses, and then also expand that to explore how does a CCA serve direct access customers and provide a little bit of contrast between a traditional energy service provider and community choice aggregation. We have a great panel today in the brochure. You'll see that everybody in this session has 30 years of experience. It's ironic we all listed the same thing, but don't take that as we're old. We're just experienced. All of us got into the industry and our teams, and that's why we got so many years behind us. We do have a, yeah, if we could get people to settle down. And if you're in this session, please join us. Great, we have a great panel of speakers today. Jan Pepper is the CEO of Peninsula Clean Energy. She has worked previously as the president CEO of Silicon Valley Power and also founded several startup companies, I believe, AXS and Clean Power Exchange in the development of renewable energy credits and solar renewable energy credits. In addition to that, she's mayor of the city of Los Altos in her spare time. We also have Tom Habasi. He's the CEO of Silicon Valley Clean Energy, and Tom has an extensive career in municipal utility or electric utilities, having worked for the city of Burbank, city of Palo Alto, and I think prior to SVCE, Tom was running the city of Roseville's electrical utility.  Rand also has 30 years of electricity energy experience. She is the Northern California manager and senior originator for Shell North American Energy and also provides sales of natural gas, and Rand and I have known each other for an extensive amount of time way back when Direct Access had just begun to be opened up in the latter part of the 90s. With that, we'd kind of like to start off the session and allow each of the panelists some opening remarks, and then we'll go into a discussion, open it up to Q&A to the audience and then allow the panelists some closing remarks. But that will start with you, Jan, and I can advance your slides. Okay, thank you for the very nice introduction and thank you all for choosing this seminar to attend this afternoon. That's what we're all about, choice, community choice energy. So I'll tell a little bit, just to give a brief overview of what community choice energy is and how we fit into the marketplace. We have a little chart up here on the screen that shows basically how Peninsula Clean Energy works. You could substitute the same thing with Silicon Valley Clean Energy. But basically we aggregate the electrical load for all of the cities. For Peninsula Clean Energy, we aggregate all the load for all the cities and the unincorporated area of San Mateo County. It's a population of about three-quarters of a million people. And we provide the electricity for all of the residents and businesses in those communities. We are a joint powers authority of those communities. So all of the cities have a council member who serves on our board of directors. In San Mateo County, there's 20 cities who all unanimously voted to be a part of this joint powers authority. So we have actually a 22-member board with the 20 council members plus two of the county supervisors. So we're a public agency. We are basically a start-up public agency. And the main reason for doing community choice energy is to have the cities make huge progress in meeting their climate action goals. Each city passed a climate action plan as part of their effort to meet the state's carbon goals.  For Peninsula Clean Energy, so we source the electricity, PG&E still delivers it over their transmission and distribution lines. They still send the bills and they still do the metering. So we have a partnership with PG&E. But the, and the bill will show a line item for our portion of the bill which is the electric generation, which is shown on the first page of the bill. And then there's a generation credit, which is hidden on page three of the bill. For Peninsula Clean Energy, our default product is called EcoPlus. It's 50% renewable energy, 80% greenhouse gas free, which is cleaner and greener than PG&E. And we also price it at 5% below PG&E's generation rate, which results in about a $2 per month savings for residential customers and a greater savings than that for our commercial customers. Thank you for inviting me. I could just say replace the peninsula with Silicon Valley and you got pretty much the same story with probably a few caveats, but I do have five minutes, so I plan to talk. Silicon Valley is made up of nine cities, two towns and the county of Santa Clara. Pretty much all of the county of Santa Clara, with the exception of four cities, the city of Santa Clara and the city Palo Alto. Both of them have their own municipalities. The city of San Jose, which is about to start its own clean energy program. And the city of Milpitas, which still tried to make up its mind. We formed into existence in March of 2016 and I came on board in May. We started service in April and we're gonna finish and roll everybody in by the end of July. Our Silicon Valley clean energy is 100% carbon free. We're gonna emphasize that and we wanted to do that on day one. The product, the default product that we have is called Green Start and it is 100% carbon free, 50% of it is large hydro, the other 50% is renewable resources. And we have a second product, it's called Green Prime and that's 100% renewable resources. We pretty much go and steady for the last year and manage to go out without a glitch. I think we probably, hopefully by the end of July, we're gonna be 100% okay and manage to save some money actually in the first couple of months of operation. We are hopeful that by the end of the year, the first year of operation will have some money in reserves. Perhaps by the end of the second year of operation, we will save enough money that we'll be able to invest in building renewable resources. With that, I think that pretty much does my five minutes. Great, thank you Tom and Rand. All right, thanks Tom. Yeah, I'm Rand Havens with Shell Energy. I think the reason that we are here today is within the industry, you're probably fairly well known. Shell did sort of an experiment 22 years ago to get involved in the marketing of natural gas and electricity. And we have grown to where the last three years in the US, we've been the second largest seller of electricity by volume in the US. We also are a very large seller to CCAs and we wanna applaud their success. And they've brought additional choice into the market. And I congratulate them on that. And in the last year, Shell opened another new business called New Energies, which is an electric division for Shell, which is gonna be our new and largest division within Shell. Shell is going from what most people consider a large oil and gas company to a true energy company. And electricity is our big area of growth. And actually, for the US, we just opened our first big office for New Energies, it's located in downtown San Francisco. And actually one of our new employees is here today, Boris Schubert. And Boris is right over here. And he's running our solar programs. So go up and talk to Boris afterwards. And the one thing I wanted to comment on is, while we appreciate the growth in CCAs, they're very beneficial. We also want to say that we are very much in favor of getting rid of the cap on direct access, to have true retail choice in California, both CCAs and that we believe direct access are necessary. The reason we are arguing for direct access is that energy service providers like ourselves can customize to the individual direct access customer their needs, which I think CCAs may eventually do that for the large customers also, I don't think they're there yet. But in the meantime, we think we're the best and easiest program to develop our portfolios for large customers. And also on the environmental side, resource adequacy and RPS, we can customize that for the large customers. And we're getting involved partly through regulatory and partly just through choice to develop energy storage, especially batteries and work on that area. And so I think a lot of the new technologies and energy can be assisted by an open retail access program for all companies, as well as CCA members, and develop some of the new technologies to advance electricity. Great, thank you, Ran. I actually had the opportunity to serve on the land use and transportation element for the city of Sunnyvale, which also had the responsibility to put together their climate action plan. And as Jan mentioned, most municipalities in meeting AB 32 are required to execute a climate action plan. And our consultants really kind of gave us a pretty clear path that the CCA was really the most effective way to achieve AB 32 goals. As transportation becomes a much more difficult problem to address, cities most likely are going to move towards CCAs. In fact, there's a study out there that says by 2027 more than half of California will be served from some form of a CCA, whether it's aggregated municipalities or other forms. What I would like to explore with the panelists is really the renewable side of the equation. Every CCA is improving or exceeding renewable portfolio standards. The product offering, as Jan and Tom described, well above RPS and well above the 2030 goals. I think there's no debate that the cost of solar is coming down in terms of technology. It's a question about the market price of solar with sort of a mandated demand or at least demand that's created through meeting climate action plans. So we kind of just like the panelists to address what do you see from a market price signal for your portfolio with the aspect that more CCAs are going to be coming online, City of San Jose within this year. How does that affect your renewable procurement strategies and pricing? And we'll start with you, Jan. Okay. Well, we've been actively out in the market procuring supplies. So we initially started with an ESP. Shell was one of the bidders, but they weren't the one that was selected for us. But we have a master agreement with three different suppliers. And Direct Energy is supplying our phase one customer load, which means that they're supplying the energy, the renewables, and the GHG-free in one overall contract. And then for our phase two rollout which occurred in April and covered the rest of the county. We contracted with Constellation to provide a lot of that power for us as well. So as a startup agency with no credit rating, these ESPs were available to provide that power to us and set up certain financial structures so that they felt that they were protected that we would actually pay them, and we do pay them. And which we're happy to say. So now we're going out into the market. And we issued a solicitation last fall for long-term PPAs for renewable providers. And we had an overwhelming response to that RFP. We had, I think, 252 bids coming in from 52 different suppliers for a lot of solar projects and a lot of other types of renewable projects. And the prices are super competitive. And we're in the process of negotiating with those now. In fact, we have signed a contract with one of those suppliers for a new 200 megawatt solar project which will be built in Merced County. And it's supposed to start up towards the end of 2018. And we'll be signing some additional contracts in the next few months. So right now it's kind of a perfect storm for us in that with low natural gas prices and a lot of solar on the market. The investment tax credit, expiration, right in front of us. Companies are very aggressively going out there and bidding their projects. So it's a great time for CCAs to be in the market and line those up. And Tom, how are you finding the market? Yeah, I think that one of the major concern that we heard from some of our large customers specifically is when all of you are coming in and you're trying to get a lot more renewables than what you are required to do. Wouldn't that drive the renewable market, push the prices up and eventually push the price up on us? We found that not to be the case. And I think primarily because when we formed the CCA, we really didn't add any new load to the grid. What we did is we just procured it differently. And the response that we got from suppliers and from actually a lot of CCAs is to build new renewables. Figuring while some people is coming on the market, they would want more renewables into their portfolio. We're gonna build it and they eventually will be sold. And that happened and also they wanted to take advantage of the tax breaks and why not. Eventually that led to probably more supply than there were demand. And that helped bring the price down. The price down for renewables now is really I would say maybe about 70, 60% of what it was a year ago when I started working for Silicon Valley Clean Energy. And it's keep tumbling down. You can actually buy solar today at less than a dollar a kilowatt. You can install it at less than a dollar a kilowatt. That's really inexpensive. And that will continue to happen until we get to the point of realizing that we need to put storage in order to compensate for negative pricing for solar and why not. And eventually that will push the price up again to a point where people will be buying more storage and price of that will come down and it just the cycle keeps repeating. What I know is no matter what the generation type is, the prices almost never go up. It always comes down over the years with its fossil fuel generation or renewable generation, the more you use, the more likely the price to come down. Great, and Rand as both the developer and a marketer, what do you see in terms of pricing outlook for renewables? I agree that there's really two different markets for renewables. One is where you're actually developing a project and selling the actual solar wind. And I think those prices continue to come down, but within providing RPS to CCAs or to direct access customers. Those buying those rec separately from power that is going into the grid. That's a fairly flat market. It's not rising in price, it's really not falling. It's a pretty flat market. So we do both. At Shell Energy we've not been given a budget to build our own renewables. New energies that Boris is in can do that. Over time I think that will happen. We plan to work with them. We also work with Shell Wind, which provides a lot of wind energy in the West and in Texas, so we work with them. But much of our renewables that we're selling as solar or wind where we enter into a long-term PPA with the developer and then resell the renewables to the customer that wants them. And one of the things that we see in the direct access business is a lot of customers were required to provide 27% this year renewables, RPS. Growing to 29% next year on the way to 33% soon. But a number of direct access customers want to be greener than that. And so they'll come to us and say, okay, sell us the 27% at the market for the RPS and then sell us additional either directly renewables or RPS above that. Because we want to be 40%, 50% or whatever their own target is, your internal targets for their corporation. So we do some of that as well. Great, great. With sort of the types of contracts that you get into, in particular as you transition to being able to purchase directly from generators. And you buy out long, how do you continue to ensure your rate payers that you're actually less than the alternative being offered through traditional investor-owned utilities? We'll start with you on that one. I get to start again, I think Tom ought to start. Okay, Tom, why don't you field that one? Generally, I don't see the time when we are likely to be more expensive, if we do prudent planning, and that translates to me to diversity. Diversity of technology, suppliers, buy it over a number of years. And just constantly make sure that your eggs are spread all over those baskets, and that's how you keep your price much better than the competition. I think we can bring the price of renewables plus storage. And I'm seeing prices today that are for the combination of these two that are cheaper than natural gas. And I know that sometimes for some people that may sound a little off, but it is just how things are today. And that will help us begin to build on our own, build some of these supplies, and keep the prices down, and eventually eliminate the use of anything that's carbon. Help with the decarbonization of our neighborhood. I can have two. Yeah, please, Jay. So another advantage we have as a CCA is we're more like a municipal utility model than the IOU, so we're non-profits. We don't need to provide a return to our shareholders. And we're also very lean organizations right now at Peninsula Clean Energy. We have nine employees basically running a $250 million company. And we have a few here. Our director of marketing, Dan, is here. Our latest employee, Eric Weiner, who just graduated, or last year, graduated from Stanford with a master's. Siobhan, already our manager of contracts is here. We have a couple of our board members here, although maybe they went to Miller and other things, so we're all here. So like half of the staff of PCE is here today. The lights are still on in San Mateo County. So it's a slightly different model in that we're keeping our costs very low. And we're at a good time to be entering the market. Great, great. As an end user and energy manager for a corporation, there's many products that you're currently offering that sort of achieve some of our sustainability goals. And I suppose if I were to explore moving to a CCA to purchase one of the two products that you offer, there are some somewhere in between the cost premium for your 100% renewable product versus the discount for the base product, the 50%. How could I actually go beyond that? And it may be somewhere in between not paying a premium but not trying to realize a discount. Does your boards allow you some flexibility in terms of customizing products for your C&I type customers, which would be pretty good to acquire for your portfolio. So let's start with you, Jan, and then we'll kind of restructure that question to Rand. Yeah, we're just in the process of talking to our large customers about what kinds of products they're interested in. And some of them are putting solar on their roofs and if they were to go with our 100% renewable product, which is priced one cent per kilowatt hour more than our 50% product. It's way less expensive to get to 100% renewable by doing that than by actually making the investment to put solar on their facilities. So that's one way of doing it. But we're starting to have conversations with them about what we might be able to provide. And we're here to serve our communities. That's community choices about serving the local area and supporting the local businesses and local jobs. And so whatever we can do to help our business customers meet those requirements. We're interested in doing that, whether they're large or small. We're joining all of the chambers of commerce in San Mateo County to make sure that we're in touch with our small business customers as well. So we're really trying to have a lot of presence in the local area, which is the advantage of being a CCA. Great, great. And Tom, what does SVC allow you to do? I think we have a leeway, it's the beauty of being a small company and a startup company, you can do lots of different things. The products that we'd like to offer probably will differ, especially for me and I, to those who are already our customers, from those who are direct access and decide that for whatever the reason may be, to talk to us about having a different contract with them. Obviously, the contracts that will be offered or the deals that we can work out with and a current direct access customer will be different than what we're offering for the rest of our customers. If we offer something to the rest of our customers who are already there, that has to be consistent. If we offer it to one, we need to offer it to all. But for the DA customers to the extent that will preserve the DA status and their ability to switch supplies if they so choose and that it won't harm their vintage, we definitely can talk to them when and if they want to talk about a special contract. Great, great. And I'd like to pause on that for a second. But it appears that things are developing with respect to CCAs essentially being able to provide service to direct access customers. Right now as a direct access customer, I would get a contract with Rand and some period of time I have an obligation. And if I were to increase my renewable, Rand can offer me a variety of products at any scale I actually would request. The, I think the difference would be then the question if a DA customer remains in DA status and chooses a CCA to serve that load, do I have a contractual obligation to you as I do traditionally with an energy service provider? Yeah, yeah, I would say that we have to have a contract if you, if you remain a DA customer and you want to preserve that status, then we have to have a contract. I just want to add that if we do contract with DA customers, it will be only the DA customers that operate within our service territory. But yeah, certainly it would have to be a separate contract. It would have to be specific, it will have different pricing. Most likely the one thing that probably I would assume that the board would want to hold on to is to make sure that we're still sourcing 100% carbon free electricity, most likely still you'll get it cheaper than the alternative. Okay, and sort of exploring that in contrast to if we were to migrate and forgo our DA status and basically become a CNI customer with either CCA, how do you address departing load issues? If I were to choose in two years time to develop my own solar on my site and you think you're getting a 10 megawatt load and it becomes five megawatts over a couple of years, you may have procured resources to support our load, what mechanism do you have in current state with your product offering to recover from that or do you just sell it back into the market and just work it out through imbalanced charges? I'd go a little deeper into the weeds. I would presume that that likelihood will be acknowledged in the contract as step-up provision, ramp off or so you would have to acknowledge it in the contract. And whatever that is that you work on in the contract in Custom Taylor, the buy at our end in order to match this way if a couple of years later. If I were, let's just say, large CNI right now in part of load you guys are serving and that customer were to develop their own onsite solar, how do you manage that risk of the equivalent of a departing load on your portfolio? Well, I mean anyone can do that. So a lot of residential customers are putting solar in and actually we don't see that as a negative part of what our board is interested in is having more local renewables built in our county. So if someone's putting solar on their house, if they're putting it on their business, it may not be contributing to a profit motive but that's not really what we're about. We're about meeting the needs of our local communities and really trying to manage that. So when we procure our portfolio, we will always have a certain amount of open position to account for load coming in and load leaving. So that's just part of managing our portfolio. We have to have a diversity of supply, diversity of location, some in the market, some long term, some meeting term, some short term. Remember that our customers have the right to opt out whenever they choose. So we always have to keep that in mind as we go out and procure energy. Great, great. And I think just to contrast that, so as a DA customer, I've got to do some significant planning to determine if onsite generation made sense not to nominate and over procure through my DA contract and find myself in a position where I've got more power than I can actually consume. And then I'm subject to the risk of the market as the power sells back. The advantage perhaps then is as a CCA customer, not in a DA status, I really don't have to do that level of planning. I can pop in and give you my entire load and the development of onsite generation and it really has no effect on what you offer to us or as the end-use customer. Obviously you would have to balance out whatever load that the onsite generation would take off of what you're serving. Kind of exploring that one, it serves the interest of the climate action plan clearly, any onsite generation in terms of the municipal climate action plan interest, I think that gets met whether it's served through CCA or developed by the end-use customer. Would the CCA have the agility to offer that in a PPA or a virtual PPA so that we will develop the generation on our site but maybe the financing comes through CCA? Anything's possible. You're not our customer, so that would be Tom's. So Tom, that's great. Tom's saying, but I think one of the things advantage of the CCA is that we're small, we're flexible, we can act quickly, our boards meet monthly if it requires board discussion or advisement from our board members. So we're all about innovation and trying to move things forward in the energy industry and getting us toward a carbon-free energy supply. I think everything's possible to the extent that it's beneficial to you and you find it so and also that it is at a minimum neutral to the rest of our customers. Okay, yeah.  There's sort of a cost neutrality to all the rate payers. Which is to look at that from a DA standpoint, it's really more of a contract. And we have the option in a multitude of choices and we're procuring as much renewable as we choose and to hedge that out as far as we choose. I'd say if I were a DA customer being served through CCA, then I would retain that level of optionality. It would be a contract base. And if we wanted to hedge our portfolio out for five, ten years, that contract would potentially be available. Yeah, from our perspective, it would be no different than contracting with Shell, with all due difference to the difference in size, of course. It would be as if you're contracting with anybody to supply you with the energy needs. Okay, great. So I think what has evolved through community choice aggregation is really more options. And I think in general, customer choice is really what's been supported. Rand's opening statements is to allow, expand customer choice for retail energy consumers and reopen the direct access market. That discussion has been only in the context of reopening direct access to renewables. And if you can comment on that, Rand, is that really a conversation that's happening in the legislature to expand the market outside of just renewables? I'd say Senator Hertzberg, the last two years, put a bill in front of the state legislature to expand direct access. And he required above the current levels of RPS. Well, I thought it was 100%. 75 and 100% depends on the bill. And in May, there was an en banc hearing the PUC had in Sacramento, where they listened to all the different parties talking about whether direct access should be expanded or not. And the result of that en banc was that the PUC developed a number of questions to ask everyone who attended, was interested. And I know that we had to submit all of our answers to those questions in the last week, what the next step is for whether they will then expand direct access or not, we'll find out after the questions are looked at and see if they wish to do that. One thing I'll say about direct access is every customer is different. Renewables is an important part of it. But many of the large customers, they're very interested in getting the cheapest power price they can get also. One thing about direct access is you can pass through the wholesale price of energy. And to some of them, that's the most important thing, buying the power as cheap as they can. So every customer is different. So I think that what's been the advantage of direct access is tailoring your program to each individual customer as to what they want to do. Well, still meeting all the regulatory requirements by the state of California. Yeah, absolutely. And I concur with that because energy or electricity specifically is a very large component of almost any company operating in the Bay Area. And it's regarded within our own companies as an operating cost. And every company is interested in reducing or increasing operating margin. And so there is always that pressure of, are we willing to pay a premium to achieve sustainability goals? And what I think gets actually with sort of the advent of CCAs, the opportunity to explore other avenues to meet perhaps cost reduction as it's being currently offered and try to meet sustainability goals within each company. So this is a great sort of a change in the market where CCAs just give end-use customers another option. I think you could probably come up with a lot of other products that people here in the audience may want to explore because there seems to be now flexibility within the DA direct access customer status that may allow even those who were not even asked to opt out, maybe another opportunity or choice. So with that in mind, we'd like to open it up to questions in the audience. And if you have a mic to pass around, please do so. Hi, Sally from City of San Leandro. We just joined East Bay Community Energy and our focus for that CCA is local power generation. And San Leandro has an interest also in developing microgrid. So in either the Peninsula Clean Energy or Silicon Valley Energy, what do you think the future is for a really hyper-local generation? Rooftops, microgrid, how is that going to play into your future? As you mentioned, a contract in Merced County, that's not exactly local. So what are you looking for? What are your targets and your goals on that? Great question. Congratulations for joining East Bay Community Energy. Actually grew up in San Leandro, so I'm happy to see that San Leandro is joining in proud graduate of San Leandro High School. But our board has developed some overall goals. And one of our goals is to develop 20 megawatts of local resources within San Mateo County by 2025. So depending on what your locale is and how many roof tops are available, land or parking lots or whatever is available to build local renewables, that really kind of dictates what you might be able to do. But we're definitely looking at local projects. I know Merced County isn't really close, but it's just kind of over the hill. It's right at the intersection of Highway 5 and 152, and it's relatively close. So we have actually talked to labor in San Mateo County. We have a very good relationship with them. And we're very interested in making sure that we try to create local jobs as soon as we can as well. I can say that our focus at this point is finding ways to decarbonize. We want to be carbon free and sometimes focusing on just renewables. More specifically, solar roof tops may kind of deter us from the main goal. We are offering very generous rates for solar roof tops, but we don't have currently a program, per se, to develop local generation. And Marianne Grossman. And transportation is a really large part of the greenhouse gas emission profile in the Bay Area. And electrification of that transportation is a really important strategy for reducing those emissions. What are the CCEs going to do to expand electric vehicle charging, especially for the more than 50% of people who are renters in our area? That's a great question. And it's certainly something that we're very interested in. So for all the cities to meet their climate action plans, greening up the electricity is one thing. But transportation is probably 50% of the impact in the climate action goals as far as reducing GHGs. So we just started out, but we're actually starting discussions right now on what kind of energy programs we might be offering to our customers. Sonoma Clean Power, which is a few years ahead of us as a CCA, they have an electric vehicle program where they're incentivizing people in Sonoma County to purchase electric vehicles and offering incentives and helping to get the charging infrastructure there. So we're really interested in learning what they did and seeing if that's an appropriate program to replicate in San Mateo County. But electrification and electric vehicles is clearly the next step. One of the exciting things is that actually Caltrain, which runs on diesel trains right now and goes through our counties through Santa Clara County, San Mateo County, is going to electrify. The vote was taken, the money that the federal government is going to give to electrify Caltrain is happening. Caltrain voted to go 100% renewable. So for all the power that they use in San Mateo County, they're getting our Eco 100 product. For all the power they use in Santa Clara County, they'll be getting SVCEs, 100% products. So that's a great step in getting rid of that diesel transportation load and turning it into renewable electricity. I can repeat the same thing. It's just about everything that Jen said is what we are looking at at so to convey the clean energy. It's a reminder that we're still a month away from actually fully enrolling all of our customers. So we're still not completely out of the gate yet. But sometime around August or September, we're going to have a list of programs that we're going to be implementing for next year. Hi, Jim Sweeney. One of the, start with a little preamble then. We'll actually have a question at the end. I see one of the great advantages of the CCAs, there's a particular, is you can be really close to the customer. You're county based. I have evidence myself for Silicon Valley Clean Energy. Tom Supp and Pamela Leonard has been having many conversations with me representing homeowners on campus. That's a preamble. You have the ability to be close to your customers. One of the things that therefore seems that you could do that's really effective and close to your customers is help them work on energy efficiency programs for their homes, small businesses, big businesses maybe not, but the small businesses and homes. And you have a particular advantage that a big utility doesn't have doing that. Is that part of the plan? And if not, why not? I know you have all of six employees right now. But that's what's really nice because you don't have a socked in labor force. You can be flexible about working with the local organizations and start being very creative. So what are your thoughts about not just cleaning up by having clean power, but being effective as an agent of energy efficiency in the homes? Sure, I'll start. This is certainly one of the things that we would like to dabble into and do more of. As you probably know, the PG&E now, or generally the investor on utilities, the wire company collects for energy efficiency and public goods. And they are in charge of implementing, along with others, the energy efficiency programs that they currently have in place. We are pretty much planning to try to tap into some of that money so we can use it to start our own energy efficiency programs at Silicon Valley Clean Energy. That's coming soon. I can't tell you exactly when. But as soon as we're able to at least know that some of that money is going to be coming our way, then we'll be able to put some programs together. Ditto. Question, or a couple of them. I have a mic, so I'll speak. Hi, Kelly Morris, City of San Jose. I'm working on our CCA program that we're starting up there. I had a question about earlier when you said that the 100% renewable option is only one or two cents more expensive. Is there any concern that that will dissuade either residents or commercial customers from investing in their own renewable solar? By having it be so inexpensive. Right, I mean if they can upgrade to 100% renewable for one more cent, then why would they purchase their own solar array? You know, it really depends on the customers. Some people like the independence of having their own solar project. But we also incent net energy metering customers as well. So the program that we offer is if someone has a solar system and they generate excess solar during a particular month, we will actually pay them that one cent per kilowatt hour extra. So even if they're a default customer at EcoPlus, we'll reimburse them a cent per kilowatt hour for the extra power that they produce. And we chew that up on a monthly basis. And if someone generates over the course of the year more than $100 worth of credits by April, then we'll actually send them a check for that so that they have the money in their pocket. So we're trying to incent people to have their net metering programs as well. I hope you have a little bit of a different answer. I really hope that by offering inexpensive carbon-free electricity to our customers that that probably will convince them not to spend the money on solar rooftops, but instead spending on energy efficiency, on electrification, on other means by which they can help decarbonize. I think we have a question, several questions. We ever got the mic first? I got the mic. You guys are kind of both early adopters as far as the CCAs go, not as early as maybe Marin and some of the other ones, but way ahead of Southern California and a lot of other places in the state. So what I'm wondering is, as far as trying to get to 100% renewables, right now you guys are able to go out and get hydro or geothermal and have that as a backing for some of the renewables, the solar and the wind and so forth. As the rest of the state goes to CCAs, what's going to stop a shell game from happening where everybody will be trying to get those, that hydro and that geothermal, to get towards that 100% number? You're comment earlier about the storage and solar kind of in my mind, so maybe that's part of it, but just wondering, in the long run, how do all of the CCAs in California, how can they get to 100% with just solar, let's say, or with solar and wind? I think that really, given where the technology is at today, a combination of storage and what you can do on electrification of whether it's transportation modes or water heaters or a variety of other things, that could also serve as storage capacity. But the only thing that I know of today is storage of all kinds, whether it be a hydro storage or battery storage or your car in your garage, everywhere, that's really going to be the answer in order to be able to do 100% for the entire grid, hopefully, renewable resources. I think one of the other things that will need to happen, it'll probably take a long time, but there's a big discrepancy between the prices in the wholesale market and the retail prices that people are charged, because right now, the peak prices or peak times are in the afternoon for most customers, but as more and more solar gets on the grid, the wholesale prices during the afternoon are going to zero or even negative, so by putting more and more solar on the grid, it's exacerbating that problem, whether it's rooftop solar or utility scale. So we need to get the wholesale and the retail prices in line so that the right price signals are there and that people will shift their usage. Most people, if they have an electric car, they charge it starting at midnight. It's actually better right now if they charge it in the afternoon, charge it when the sun is out, because that's when we have excess electricity. So we need to get the price signals correct, and we can try to do that as CCAs when we set our rates to have to incent our customers to use power at the time, you know, to match our supply and demand curves. Great, I think we have another question. Chuck Wilhelm with Enline Energy, question for all the panelists, really. Yeah, we had a panel earlier on cybersecurity, and I was wondering what the CCAs and the ESPs also are doing to protect themselves structurally and maybe programmatically from potential impacts of cyber attacks. I actually missed that panel, but we don't have, you know, we don't have any, you know, the grid is really PG&E, the California ISO, so we don't own any of those resources, but I don't know if you, either of you were able to attend that panel and can quite certain shell public. Yeah, we work a lot on cybersecurity, yes. But I think, you know, the vulnerabilities for your billing systems. That was the only thing that I was going to comment on, that we have a fairly extensive information technology policies that protects the customer information, and that been looked at and deliberated and acted upon by our board. But beyond that, we don't own any facilities that we, at least at this point, that we need to worry about making sure that we protect. You mentioned that you provide direct access to some CCAs, or have the capability to do that, I believe. Have the capability, and we're just selling power to CCAs. Yeah, so with the issue of cybersecurity, end up being a contract issue discussion with CCAs? It shouldn't, because just as Jan was mentioning, and we're not going to be controlling those wires for delivering the power, we have to get our power into the wires, but at that point it's handed off to the wire company, the distribution company. And in many cases, by the way, Shell is also a buyer, so they just build a portfolio of resources. Some of it may be theirs, and the rest is just, they buy from other places, and they just move it. They're just a contractor in the middle. But that's probably a good question to ask Boris afterwards, because he's going to be the developer of actual generation, and how he's going to handle some of that. Thank you. I think we had a question over there. We'll field one more question, and then let the panelists provide some closing remarks. Ruth Marino, I just have a question. PG&E provides a $500 rebate when you buy an electric car. If somebody in the CCA buys an electric vehicle, does that rebate come, still come from PG&E, or does it come from the CCA? It still comes from PG&E, because PG&E is actually the money that they get for those rebates comes from them selling into the LCFS market. I can't remember what the low-carbon fuel standard market, and so they have the funds to provide those rebates. I'm Tom Cabot. I had a question for the CCAs. At the lunchtime debate, we heard all four debaters talking about the merits of decarbonizing and getting off of fossil fuel and converting to electrification, and then it appears the CCAs with their elected official boards may be in the unique position of being able to promulgate policies across wider territories that make it easier for electrification to happen within the building department, say, in the cities that are members. Have the CCAs started looking at how they will assist in that electrification, and of course all the real jobs will be local that happen in this electrification, because you don't do your electrification in Merced, you do it in your own counties where the loads are. So I'm curious, how are the CCA boards looking at their opportunities to create jobs and decarbonize with policy? We're actually looking at what kind of energy programs to institute, and Tom, you usually come to our board meetings. I don't think you were at our board meeting last night, but one of the things that we discussed was how would we go about selecting which energy programs we should go after. We're going to go out there and ask for a lot of input on what people would like to see, and I imagine you'll provide us some suggestions, and then we're trying to come up with some objective criteria on how to rank them and decide which is most appropriate for us to implement in San Mateo County, what would have the most benefit in reducing greenhouse gases, what would benefit the most number of residents or businesses, and then from that we would make a decision. Certainly once we come up with those programs, we'll be working closely with the cities. We do that already, reaching out to them in a number of ways to get their ideas and to try to help implement these programs through them. That is one of the great things with the CCAs is that we have the council members on our board and we can say, look, tell us what you need or tell us who we should speak to in your city so that we can try to get these programs out there, and they're very supportive of that. They're very engaged in making this all work. Great. Let's have Jeff, you with the last question. One, two. Jeff Byron, Jan, and Tom, I think what you're doing is extraordinary, and I think you're both doing a great job, and although it's Friday, what keeps you awake at night? What's the issue that's the most difficult for you in your roles? Go ahead. He's such a gentleman. He lets me go first all the time. One of the things that keeps me awake at night, we haven't talked about it at all here today, is kind of the regulatory risk and what's going on at the public utilities commission, which affects both direct access and CCAs, which is this thing called the power charge and difference adjustment, and it's the charge that keeps bundled customers of the utilities whole in that the utilities procured power on behalf of the customers who are now CCA customers, and how do we make sure that they aren't burdened with extra cost? And so we were pleased to have a victory this week at the PUC. The utilities had proposed a different way of, a new way of calculating that indifference charge, and we suggested as CalCCA, which is the trade association that the CCAs have formed, that that should be dismissed and that the PUC should open up a proceeding for everyone to provide input equally onto how they think this should be approached, and the PUC put out a proposed decision to dismiss the utilities proposal and to have this taken up in a new rule-making. So next week, the Public Utilities Commission on the 29th will vote on that. We're hopeful that at least three of the five commissioners will vote in favor of that, and that we'll have a level playing field to discuss that, and that will be a benefit to all of us up here. But I usually sleep okay, you know. What keeps you awake, Tom? Actually, I was going to say that nothing really keeps me awake at night, but there are a few things that do wake me up early in the morning, and definitely the regulatory risk that we face is one of them. And two, that happens more often than not, is are we one step ahead? Are we making sure that we're doing the things that will keep us one step ahead? Because I definitely don't want to see Silicon Valley clean energy ever be caught behind because they forgot to do something. So that's generally the things that wake me up early in the morning. Great. Well, we're coming down to the last couple of minutes. We'd like to have the panelists have an opportunity to just make some closing remarks. And I actually would want to frame it in a question. Does the state moving forward with reopening direct access create a concern to CCAs? As I think all end users would prefer to have the option of greater choice. Start with you, Rand, since you are a supplier to both categories. Yeah. Well, I think that obviously we're in favor of full open retail choice. Usually the question is, can California do it? And I think you can look at other states around the country that have got full open choice. And some of those states, they have actually direct access and CCAs and both seem to be thriving. And two questions that come up quite a bit about a full retail market is, you know, what ends up happening to the goals that right now the utilities are implementing for California. And I think the answer is all lords load serving entities, munis, all retailers have to meet those goals and do that. Right. One other one was, well, who becomes a provider of last resort? If you look at around the country, and I think ERCOT in Texas is a good example. The ERCOT grid actually goes out for bids on those who want to be the provider of last resort. And people bid to be that in case somebody defaults, they step in and sell power and they set a rate for that. And they let all those customers know they need to choose another supplier within like 60 days. I think all these things are solvable to have a fully open retail program. And I think the CCAs will thrive even if they do open direct access further. Another thing that works me up early in the morning, and that's to go back to a structure that will put us in a position that we were at back in 2001 when we saw a complete meltdown of the system here in California. I like community choice as much as I like municipalities or municipalization because it all about community. It's not about competition as much as it's about community and community doing the things that they know best for their own community. So open it up to anybody and everybody probably is not one of my favorite things. Okay, and Jen? Yeah, I think I mean you mentioned at the beginning that we've all been in this business for 30 years. Some of the people out here I know have been, some of the people weren't born 30 years ago. That's okay. But I think we do need to remember the lessons that we learned from the energy crisis and why did that happen and to make sure that we don't repeat those lessons. The law that allowed community choice energy was actually passed right after the energy crisis in 2002. And as community choice energy providers were based on the cities where government agencies were here to stay, we're not going to leave if the market changes. And that was one of the things that happened with the energy crisis is that these providers came in, they found they picked off the best customers, the most profitable customers, but then when the market turned they left. They left town and that was not good and it left a lot of people stranded. So I think we support full direct access, but full direct access means full direct access. You don't just pick off the top profitable companies. If you want to serve all customers, then you serve the residential customers. You serve the low income customers. You serve everyone. And that would really be what we would see as full retail access. So I think that there's a lot of discussion that needs to be done about this and to make sure that we remember the lessons from the past and don't go down that same path. Thank you. Please help me applaud the panelists. Thank you very much.


clearly it's been a rough stretch for this team. What can you guys do internally to try to jump start things and get back on track? I mean Just keep showing up every day and and keep competing. I think you know, there's adjustments that we need to make and whatnot, but You know, it's it's it's baseball. Sometimes things don't go your way. Like I said, and You know, I think guys are coming with the right attitude and positive attitude that we're gonna win every day It's just it's just not happening for us right now. So we have to we have to keep showing up and playing and things will swing for us Is it all perplexing to you with the talent you do have in the lineup that you guys aren't able to get it done on a more consistent basis? Not not not really to me I think it's just you know, the other teams are good as well You know in baseball just because you have a bunch of good hitters doesn't mean you're always gonna score a bunch of runs It's You know, it's a tough game. So I think There's there's gonna be stretches where you know, we're the best lineup in baseball and sometimes it's just not gonna go our way sometimes But that's how that's how it goes. But I know just from being in this clubhouse It's everybody works their butts off and they compete every day. So, you know, I don't I'm not too too worried about that You spent a lot of time working with Marcus Jim's yesterday. Did you feel any better any more comfortable at the plate this evening? Yeah, I mean, yeah, I felt good seeing the ball well. I felt like I've been seeing the ball well the whole time, you know, just maybe hits not going going going my way and whatnot, but You know, try to try to put the ball and play a little bit more But yeah, we worked on a few things looked at video and whatnot. So it's good to also to get a day and kind of Regroup and and get back out there the next day. So I felt good today I felt like I saw the ball well and had good at bats and that's that's really all you can do We go next to Tom Mariam Joey, how do you explain such an extended losing stretch at the such a long winning streak? Baseball, I mean, I don't know. I've been in thrift played my whole life. So I just that's just how it goes sometimes, you know sometimes things go your way and It seemed like we couldn't do anything wrong We're winning 13 straight, but right now it just seems like, you know, we just haven't got the big hit, you know myself included and You know, things just just kind of snowball on us and tough play ends up, you know Being a two base two bases and and things like that. So it's just it just it seems like Luck almost isn't on our side as well. So like I said, you just got to keep showing up every day and Put your head down and play the game and at some point things will turn


I suppose it goes without saying, but there will always be something to complain about no matter where you live. That being said, there certainly are places with significantly more things to complain about, areas with especially cold climates, for example. I grew up in one such place. While I in fact do miss the years I spent living there, there's one thing about living in a colder climate that I'll never miss. That thing being driving in the worst months of the year, weather-wise. It isn't exactly an uncommon complaint for sure, though for many people who live in such climates it's simply a fact of life that they've long grown used to and adapted to accordingly. I had done so as well, at least to the inherent danger of it. Something happened to me though that made driving in such weather difficult to stomach. Unnerving, really. While I wouldn't say it was my main reason for eventually moving away, I have to admit that it did come to mind when I made the decision. I was 17 at the time. It had been a year since I'd first gotten my license, and it was my second winter driving on my own. Some people might argue that brand new drivers are the most at risk of accidents, but I'd say they become even more potentially dangerous after about a year or two of driving. Most reasonable teens are especially cautious at first when it comes to driving. However, after a year or two of experience, they might allow themselves to relax a bit. Maybe even become a bit overconfident. I certainly did. To me, that accident for a year was irrefutable proof that I was a safe experienced and overall simply good driver, even though in actuality, a year was hardly any time at all, and certainly not enough time to be considered experienced. Looking back on it now, it was only a matter of time before I experienced some sort of lapse in judgment. The storm was not sudden, and it did not come on unexpectedly. It was by no one's fault, other than my own, that I found myself forced to drive through it, just as it was starting to get particularly bad. The storm came with an initial bout of freezing rain to coat the roads, followed by a raging blizzard to further blanket the world and obscure the site. Travel wasn't impossible when I set out, but it was most certainly risky. I didn't have much of a choice in the matter, though. Regardless of how I might feel about it, I had to manage a one to two hour drive home one way or another. That being said, I still felt confident that I'd be able to handle whatever the storm threw at me so long as I was careful. In a way, I suppose I was right, though it might be more accurate to say that I survived rather than handled what happened within the veil of the storm. I eventually made my way onto the highway at a snail's pace, though I was disheartened to find that the conditions there were hardly much better than the backcountry roads I just managed to traverse. There was evidence that a snow plow would come through at some point, and I was sure that there were quite a few more out there working through the storm. However, at the rate the snow was coming down, the cleaning crew's efforts were only able to keep a small section of the highway barely passable in regards to the snow and the salt and ash they'd spread had yet to make a discernible impact on the ice. The journey home was going to be a long, slow, and exceedingly tense struggle. My hands gripped the wheel so tightly that my fingers ached from the strain. Even so, I didn't dare loosen my grasp. I quickly lost any trace of the cockiness I'd felt. Left in its place was a lingering regret over having made the decision to go out in spite of all the warnings against doing so that had come from, frankly, just about everywhere. I could barely manage to keep the car going in a straight line. Even though I kept the vehicle speed at a slow crawl, every now and then I'd feel the car's tires begin to lose purchase and slip. With the almost complete lack of any reliable traction, it was almost more accurate to say that I was guiding the car through a controlled slide rather than driving. It wasn't long before I started to see vehicles that had gone off the road. I looked on, in silent pity at my unfortunate fellow travelers. With the weather like it was, emergency services were likely a long way away. They were stranded. I might have chosen to stop to check on them and see if they needed help. As it was, though, I wasn't confident that I wouldn't end up in a similar predicament myself if I attempted to pull over. They would have to fend for themselves. I quietly reassured myself that there was probably a residential area, a reasonable trek away where they could seek shelter if things got especially dire. I made the decision to favor my own well-being and averted my eyes from their plight. It wasn't long after that, though, that I noticed something odd and found my gaze drawn back to the side of the road. There was another car, a sedan, that had lost control and gone off the road. This vehicle was slightly closer to the road than the few others I'd seen at this point, having only veered off course just enough to find itself stuck in a snowbank at the edge of the highway. As such, I had a much clearer view of it through the veil of the snowstorm than I had of the others. Even so, I might have only offered it a cursory glance if it weren't for one thing. The car had been left idling with all of its doors wide open. My gaze snapped back towards the vehicle from where it had been slowly drifting towards the road ahead of me, and all the attention I could spare from driving focused on the stranded vehicle. There was no trace of the occupants anywhere, at least as far as I could see through the blizzard. Perhaps they had decided to try their luck at finding a nearby residence willing to shelter them. That much, I'd expected. However, I couldn't think of any reason why they would leave their car like that. It didn't make any sense to me. That being said, I didn't stop to investigate or even slow down. Neither was a safe option to choose anyway. I simply glanced once more into my rear view mirror as the sedan disappeared into the swirling snow behind me before refocusing my full attention on the road in front of me. I tried to put the odd vehicle out of my mind. I couldn't waste time worrying about the fate of some random strangers when my own was still very much so in question. I actually very nearly managed to put this odd occurrence out of my mind. That is, until I came upon another vehicle in a similar condition. This time, a semi truck. I might have missed the silhouette of the cab's open doors some distance away from the road and barely visible. If it weren't for the heavy wide open doors of the trailer swinging back and forth in the wild wind, it was too dark to tell what the trailer was filled with. But I could make out that it was very much so in disarray. These two were only the first of several more vehicles that I'd come across in the next half hour or so that were abandoned in the same strange way. A minivan, another sedan, a semi truck without a trailer, and a jeep that had somehow ended up on its side, its one free door standing straight up in the air in defiance of the wind. There were a couple of vehicles that had gone too far off the highway for me to be able to tell for sure, but the brief glimpses I'd managed to catch of red tail lights through the storm was enough to convince me that they were no different. My confusion was slowly giving way to a fear and dread that crept across my skin insidiously, like a lingering cold, dulling the feeling in my extremities and setting them to shaking. There had to be a reasonable explanation for this, right? My mind simply ran around in circles though, completely unable to find it.  There was movement ahead of me, something was in the road. I drew closer, slowly lowering my speed slightly. It was a person, a man, I think, waving me down. He looked like a traffic cone in his bright orange coat, I suppose that was the point though. I could see the lit tail lights of his car some distance away, his front end half buried in a snowdrift. I didn't feel entirely comfortable stopping. There was the question of the conditions as well as the fact that this was a complete stranger. However, I surprisingly found that my worries and growing fear of the strange abandoned cars took precedence in my mind over those more rational concerns. That being said, it wasn't like the man was just wanting to change his mind about needing my help though, and I wasn't so callous as to ignore somebody in need, who was literally right in front of me. He was blocking my way forward either way, so I slowly began easing my brake pedal down. So long as I was sufficiently careful, I figured I'd be able to come to a safe stop. At least I hoped. Before I could come close to doing so though, something changed suddenly and the demeanor of the man, his waving arms fell to his sides, not in a natural sort of manner and more like a puppet whose strings had been suddenly cut. He went rigid, completely, lifelessly, still some anane part of my mind conjured up Neville from the first Harry Potter movie, but I found no amusement in that thought. I was still some distance away, still slowly easing my car to stop in spite of my unease.  He began to take long, slow and measured strides off the road, not even bothering to give my car a glance. Where on earth was he going? There was nothing over there and his car was on the other side of the road. I was wrong. There was something there, or rather, someone. I could have sworn he wasn't there before. It was as if he'd materialized out of the snow in the space of a blink. That couldn't be true, right? They were some distance away now, partially obscured by the falling snow. Even so, it was hard to lose track of that bright orange coat that they were both wearing. In fact, it wasn't just the coat. It was hard to tell for sure, but it almost looked like they had the same pants, the same hat, the same build. The man who had been in the road reached the other man, halting and going still once more. They both just stood there for a few moments. It was impossible to tell from so far away if they were talking or doing anything other than simply staring at each other. I'd reached the point in the road where the man had been standing before, still inching forward slightly. Should I still stop? Did the man want my help or not? The whole thing had me completely weirded out. I wanted nothing more than to take off, but some measure of courteous obligation kept me from doing so. The second man pulled the first man into an embrace, if you could call it that. He was stiff, cold and rough, seemingly devoid of all the usual emotions that gesture held, any emotion really. I didn't dwell too much on that though, as it was then that I got my first full view of the second man's face, or more accurately, his eyes. All other thoughts fell free from my mind. His eyes, darker than eyes, should ever have any right to be, seemed to burn in a clearly contradictory manner, like twin solar eclipses or a pair of holes in the world itself leading into a luminescent dark void. He was looking at me. They were both yanked backwards as if by an invisible tether disappearing into the storm in an instant. I didn't think, didn't even try to process what I'd seen. I just drove, picking up speed, driving far faster than what was safe. I needed to get away, get home, get to safety. Out of the corners of my eyes, I saw far too many flickers of movement through the falling snow, shadows going the other way, rushing past, keeping pace with my vehicle. I didn't look, didn't care, if only it was so easy. A massive silhouette came out of nowhere, like a semi-truck emerging from the storm to t-bone me in a non-existent intersection. I couldn't help it. I looked. That singular shift in my gaze was all it took. There's a blank spot, an indeterminate amount of time scorched from my mind without a trace. Even now, looking back on my faded recollection of that day, I can feel it clearly, like a scar, the clear sensation of something missing, and the certainty that some amount of time had passed since I was last fully aware of it. I certainly didn't have the time to spend dwelling on the implications of that in the moment though, as my vehicle had already begun to fishtail before I was even fully aware of it. I wildly pumped my brakes, my mind racing to try and remember what way to turn my steering wheel. I came so very close to going off the road, mere inches from stranding myself in the middle of that storm along with whatever unnatural thing it was concealing.  Before I could even manage to catch hold of my panicked breaths, I reached the edge of the storm. The snowfall died off, and I broke free into a clear, cloudless night. I breathed a deep sigh of relief slowing my vehicle to a more reasonable speed. Any illusion of prowess that I'd had were long gone. I had no doubt that I'd simply been lucky. My gaze drifted up to my rear view mirror for a brief moment, more out of habit rather than any expectation that there would be anything to see in its reflection. There was something there though. Just for a brief moment before I blinked, and it was gone, a figure standing in the middle of the road. I didn't exactly get the time to spend examining this figure, but I still have clear, vivid nightmares about it all the same. It wore a coat, just like the one that still hangs untouched in my closet since that day.  But those eyes, oh, those eyes.