It's one o'clock, so I'll get started. My name is James Pepper, I'm the chair of the Remind Cannabis Control Board. Today is September 14th, 2022, and I call this meeting to order. First thing, the staff has recommended a social equity status denial. So we'll need to enter into executive session later in this meeting to discuss the specifics of that case. Additionally, another prospective licensee has a presumptively disqualifying conviction on their criminal history record, but based on the facts and circumstances surrounding the conviction, the staff has recommended that they have overcome the presumptive disqualification and should be allowed to receive a license. So we need to talk about each of these issues and recommendations in executive session. We've invited Susanna Davis, the executive director of the Office of Racial Equity, and Jake Green, who's a research and policy analyst for the Office of Racial Equity to that executive session, which we will do after Brynne has reviewed the applications that are up for approval and before we take a vote on them. I just wanted to respond to a question from last week about what we're doing in these executive sessions. So the vast majority of recommended social equity denials are in that category of applicants claiming to be from a community that was disproportionately impacted by cannabis prohibition. What we're trying to determine in executive session is whether the community that's being claimed is sufficiently defined, whether that community has been disproportionately harmed by cannabis prohibition in a way that's more than just the general threat of suspicion or prosecution that anyone who's even tangentially associated with cannabis experiences. And then finally, whether the individual applicant has been personally harmed because of their association with that community. These are the issues that we discuss in executive session with respect to the staff recommendations on social equity status. And then we come out and we describe kind of where we landed on the staff recommendation. A licensing update, today's list contains a number of cultivators, indoor, outdoor, and mixed, as well as an integrated license and two retail licenses. I've said it before, but I'm happy to say it again. The fact that we were able to stand this program up with a skeleton crew, a part-time legislature, is nothing short of miraculous. Bryn, the team you've put together is one of the most nimble, dynamic, tireless teams I've ever seen. It's in the private sector, the public sector, or a local state or federal government. It's hard for an outsider to really understand how complicated life at the CCB can get day to day. And there really is no playbook. Every state has a unique set of laws and priorities. Every state has a different political climate, a different actual climate, and a different access to resources. This team comes in with a positive attitude and really gets down to the hard work of problem solving. And these are seemingly impossible problems. We have a lot to get through today and in the coming weeks and months, so I'm not gonna dwell on this, but I wanted to take a brief pause to give everyone here my deepest gratitude for the endless dedication and determination you've shown to get us to this truly historic moment in Vermont's history. I also wanted to thank our partners at the Agency of Digital Services. You all built a highly complicated and yet highly functional platform in a matter of months, whereas other similar state projects have taken years. I know you all have called in favors, worked overtime, worked on your personal time, translated tech talk into plain English so that we could actually follow along with what was happening. And you didn't do it because of some love of cannabis. You really did it because you saw an agency that needed your help and you stepped up to the plate. Just wanted to mention quickly about these retail licenses and this integrated license. We always get the question here, why these businesses and not those. So I wanted to say just a quick few words about our licensing priority. First, with respect to the integrated license, I know that the very idea of these integrated licenses has been polarizing since the passage of Act 164. It's not our job to wait into the politics of this issue. Our job is to follow the law as it was written. The legislature directed the cannabis board to give certain priorities in the issuance of licenses. First, to social equity applicants. Second, applications from minority or women-owned businesses. And third, applicants that have an existing medical cannabis dispensary license in good standing. We have the ability to move people around when the needs of the market demand. We've used this overarching authority to focus on outdoor cultivators and now indoor wholesalers and product manufacturers. But as we moved into the review of retail applications, we had to start with the applicants that are either social equity owned or have a medical license in good standing. This integrated application had all the boxes checked so there's no reason for us not to proceed with approving it. With respect to the other retailers, one is a social equity applicant and the other is a standard applicant. Of the 25 or so retail applications we have in the queue currently, two are social equity and the rest are standard. We prioritize the two social equity applications. One is up for approval today and the other is still incomplete. We've sent the incomplete letter and we've conducted a site visit and then we moved on to the other applications based on the order that they came in. Of course, if we get more social equity or economic empowerment applications, we will prioritize those. One thing I wanna mention about retail is that our approval does not mean that the doors will open immediately. As any outdoor cultivator knows all too well, the legislature probably did not consult the Farmer's Almanac when it created the timelines in Act 164. The cannabis supply shortage that we have seen in the initial rollout of every adult use marketplace is gonna be exacerbated by, A, the time it is taking us to get through our backlog and B, our prioritization of outdoor cultivators. Are gonna harvest when the time is right and then they need to test and cure and dry and process and package. These things don't magically coincide with an October 1st deadline. Approved retailers will have to make their own business decisions about when to hire their staff, who their suppliers are and when to open their doors. We'll do whatever we can to increase testing capacity and manufacturing capacity, but we can't force entrepreneurial interest in these license types. They have some of the biggest barriers to entry in an industry that is already inaccessible to most. Another reason not to expect retail immediately is that retailers also have a few additional hoops they need to jump through, even after they're approved for licensure. There are potential local issues that they need to resolve. There are permits from the tax department that they need to get. And there's things like employee trainings that have to happen before a retailer can open their doors to the public. On the employee training, the board will maintain a list of approved vendors who have developed specific employee trainings for the requirements that we have in 2.2.5 of rules. We should have at least one of these vendors listed on our website by the end of the day and a few more by the end of the week. One final administrative point that our licensing team wanted me to mention, if you are listed as an owner, a principal, a finance or a financier on your application, you do not need to apply separately for a cannabis establishment identification card or pay the $50 fee for that card. You're listed as an owner, principal or financier on your application and went through that CSI check. You will be issued a cannabis establishment identification card as part of your license. So Kyle, I just wanted to turn things over to you just for a quick update on kind of packaging. Sure, thanks James. I appreciate it and agree with everything that you said thus far, especially as it relates to gratitude towards our staff. I wanted to take one moment and talk about packaging. I think that there's a lot of confusion out there as it relates to requirements for packaging in the state of Vermont. We do have guidance on our website with a list of definitions that should help you make good decisions as it relates to standards that we wanna see in the packaging world. Primarily that relates to the need for child resistance, which in the state of Vermont, you do not need child resistant packaging for flower or for pre-rolls. For cannabis products other than pre-rolls, edibles, concentrates, et cetera, those do need to be child resistant. We've made a couple decisions as it relates to packaging waivers. One is a lid from a company that I've done an extensive amount of research on. We put those lids out there to help folks in the concentrate or edibles side of the equation because we understand that plastic plays a heavy hand in meeting certain child resistant requirements. However, that's not the end all be all. There are many different options that meet child resistance from other sources, whether it's tin, aluminum, flip open cans. There's also a bunch of different cardboard options, believe it or not, that do satisfy child resistance for those products, especially vape carts. But I just wanna stress that the need for that in the flower portion of what we're trying to do here is not necessary. There's a lot of alternatives out there that you can really look to employ and just meet that child deterrent definition, which can be satisfied with a tamper proof sticker over the top of a metal lid or if that metal lid has a tamper ring, open a ring that you may see. Opaqueness can be satisfied with putting your label over the clear glass jar and on the bottom of the jar. It doesn't need to be completely blacked out opaque. We're trying to meet people as far as we can there. I think, again, we're focused on glass. There's gonna be a couple alternatives. There is a compostable bag that's up on our website that does not meet the child resistant packaging standard and we'll get more clear about that. We're gonna put forward some more information, I think on our website that really we think can help people make smart decisions, but your edibles don't belong in that compostable bag. There will be some other decisions that we're gonna make as it relates to packaging waivers. I'm getting some ducks in a row before we actually start to list a couple of things on our website. I would not expect any bioplastic jars to be at the center of how we're gonna move forward, at least right now. I really wanna see the market roll out with glass and alternatives to plastic, not plastic alternatives, as it relates to where we are at this moment in time. And I think we can all do that. I think all of us heard over the last 18 months how sustainable this industry already is without regulation, but that doesn't stop at the inputs that you put into your plants, in your growing operations. We need to look at this industry as a whole. And I'm confident that if everybody can work together to really try and weed out plastic in our industry, there's other states that are looking at what we're doing. There's plastic companies that are looking at what we're doing and asking us questions about the direction that we feel the packaging needs to go in the cannabis industry. But all the credit will be given to the folks like yourselves watching, who are looking to meet the spirit of what we're trying to accomplish here, not credit to us for requiring you to do certain things. So all that being said, no CR requirement for flower and for pre-roll tubes. There's glass cork top alternatives, bamboo top alternatives. There's a host of different ways. I've talked to a number of you that have found alternatives that are smart from a business decision. And yeah, I mean, I just wanted to kind of go over that one more time and we're gonna try and figure out more ways to make that as clear as we possibly can, but please take time to read the guidance that's on our website. There are a number of companies out there that will supply you with packaging, whether it's child deterrent or child resistant that meet what we're trying to accomplish here. There's a definition of child deterrent in statute. There is. People can go there to look for that. It's an Act 158 is literally the first four lines of that entire act. And the point of that really is because child resistance needs to be certified and there's a list, federally maintained lists and having a different definition for that removes it from that certification process. It's gotta be difficult for a person under five to open whereas easy for another person to open, relatively easy. You don't need a waiver if you're not using plastic in that area. And also the child deterrent packaging also removed the requirement for opaque opacity, past opaqueness. And so flower does not need to be in an opaque package. So you might decide you want to because it helps with your quality control, your shelf life stability, whatever the case may be but a clear jar with your label over it and a metal top. That is the direction that we want to go because once we can all get our ducks in a row I really want to push reuse programs into a lot of our retail operations and we're willing to help folks figure that out. I got a lot of things that I'm working on in the background to kind of help incentivize retailers to really move in that direction and consumers to move in that direction. So right now we're focused on glass. There will be a couple of compostable pouches that are gonna be available to folks as well but I wouldn't expect any bioplastic jars to be to meet our waiver criteria at the outside of the market. We want to see how things roll out. Thanks for that Kyle. Well, Julie, if you don't have any comments I don't know if you do. I don't have anything else to say. Great, then why don't we approve the minutes from our last meeting on September 7th? Have you guys had a chance to review those? Yes. Is there a motion to approve? So moved. Seconded. All in favor? Aye. Okay, inventory tracking requirements. I know a lot of people have a lot of questions about how to comply with inventory tracking. Our director of compliance has developed specific data points that each licensee will need to track. These are very similar to the data points that you would track with any inventory tracking platform. And you need to report these back to the board. Eventually we will have a system in place where you can log into your CCB account and report them through an extension there. In the meantime, we're going to ask that you report them through an electronic form that's available on our website. And today, Carrie, I don't know if you're one of those guests in the lobby, but if you are, Carrie is going to walk us through this form and the data tracking requirements for cultivators only. We're going to do similar walkthroughs for our other license types, but today we are focused exclusively on data tracking for cultivators. All right, I'm going to try and take over the screen. Thanks, Pepper. Can you guys see that? Yep. Yep. All right, so as far as the seed-to-sale tracking, we're in process of really building it and standing it up. And we've taken a lot of what other platforms, data points that they track and tried to make it a little bit more efficient. So what are we tracking? Basically seed-to-sale, it's all license types. And it's cannabis production, product production transfers and sales. And it makes sense to track by date of transaction, but we'd like to have this pushed out every two weeks. Let me see if I can. Did that change slides for you? It did. All right, excellent. In the interim, working with folks at ADS, we've built nine forms. One is a loss of inventory form. So any loss of inventory, whether that's from theft or you have a molar mildew problem or your product is out of compliance and you had to remanufacture or dispose of it. So we've built a form for tracking your losses. There are two forms for cultivators because they really largely had different questions associated with them. So there's an indoor and an outdoor.  And then transfers, we're tracking transfers. So there's three different reporting forms for transfers. One for the seller, one for transferring flour and one for transferring products. And then manufacturers, there's a form for manufacturers and there's a form for tracking retail records and retail transactions as well. There's another form, but it isn't really part of seed to sale tracking, and that's for product registration. And so for cultivators that are filling out the record for us, there aren't a lot of questions, but this is basically a summary of the data we want. And harvest lot, I know in the regulations, it says harvest lot is one specific variety, but what we're seeing out in the field is some of the small growers are growing multiple varieties in that field, but they're treating it all the same. So it's getting the same inputs as far as fertilizers, as far as crop protectants and will likely be harvested all at the same time and dried in the same room. So harvest lot is going to be important for you to help us with records tracking. And at this point in time, you're going to assign your harvest lot a number. And I would suggest using your license number and either the date of harvest or something or just sequentially number your harvest. But harvest lot is going to be important for us when you fill out this form, so we don't get duplicate records and you'll see what I mean, we'll walk through the form here in a second. But basically the data we're collecting from you on that harvest lot is the data was planted, the data was harvested, the number of plants that are in that harvest lot, the final dry weight of flower, the final dry weight of the usable trims so stuff that you may be selling to an extractor, the weight of the waste and the inputs used in the production of that profit. And I'm going to start walking through the questions that we have on the form. I wasn't brave enough to try and link you live to a web form for this presentation. So these are basically the questions, but I can't show you the dropdown menu. And also, okay. So this is for outdoor growers. These are the questions on the web form. Provide the name of the registered cannabis. So your name goes in the first line, that's required. The license type, this is a dropdown menu of all the different tiers of cultivation that we have registered indoor outdoor and mixed and integrated. And then your license number, so we can tag this record to you. And then this is where we'll be asking for the harvest lot number. Oops, sorry about that. Great. And then continuing with the form, if that slide is up. Yep. No, yep. The data planting, we already went through this and this is a calendar. So if you hit the button, it pops up and open a calendar. And the same is true for the date of harvest. And I know harvest may be over a couple of days, but the date that your harvest is final will be a good date to give us. So this is first strictly indoor, indicate the date of initiation of flower. And then select the growing style, because as we analyze the data that you provide us, the growing style is important, whether that's in the ground, outdoors, hydroponic, or containerized media, will allow a different set of analytics to be applied to your volume, weights and volumes. And there it is, the harvest date also is a calendar dropdown. I didn't realize how hard these were going to be to see on my screen, in this mode. The other thing I wanted to mention is, so the number of plants here, but some of the other measuring platforms ask for wet weight once you've harvested. And we decided that we didn't really want to track by wet weight. We can get all the information we need with a dry weight and there's no point in folks going out there and buying bigger scales to measure or weigh crop coming off the field. So we are asking for dry weight and you'll see we're asking for it in grams. I know you may be keeping track in pounds, but we can, if you could convert that to grams for us when you're filling out the form, that would be great. And here you're reporting us dry weight of flour, dry weight of trim and weight of the waste on that particular grow. And if you had a second strain or variety in that lot and you wanted to let us know, this pops open another series just for a separate variety and you can continue to do that for all the varieties in your particular harvest lot. So what to report and when to report. Anytime cannabis changes form, so if you're going from wet flour or from the field to the drying room, we want to know that all the plants that you were growing in the field made it or you're reporting a loss on number of plants that didn't make it. So anytime it changes form, so if it goes from flour or trim to extract, we want to know if it goes from extract to product we want to know and anytime cannabis changes hands. So it goes from a grower to a processor or a grower to a retailer, we do want to know. Growers are tracking based on harvest lot. The mixed tier will report on separate forms for indoor and outdoor grows, processes and manufacturers, how much material in, how much extract was produced, what was that extract used in the production of and how many products did that extract make? Wholesalers are going to ask what to track. It's more complicated than two bullets, but they're going to be able to have to track what came in and what went out to their wholesale facility and retailers are going to have to track what was purchased and what was sold. And we're looking at a two week reporting timeline. So some folks might want to modify that for their business procedures, but at a minimum, we're going to want to see that every two weeks. And this interim solution that ADS has built for us in forms, we should be able to finalize that in the next couple of weeks. But we're also in the process of doing discovery for the final solution that happens through your login directly in our Salesforce database. So the internal form should be up in the next few weeks and in the next few months, we should see the final solution up and running for folks to use. And Pepper, that's all I have. Thanks, Carrie. So really, this is a self-reporting system just like any inventory tracking. It's much less time intensive from a human capital perspective than some of the other companies that are out there. And yet I think the data is just as reliable as those and we are going to finalize a contract with our data analytics firm very soon. They're going to be taking this data and looking for irregularities and suspicious activity. We can always pivot and go for a much more extreme version of inventory tracking if we feel like we need it, but I think it's much better to start with this and to really analyze the data that we're seeing because I think this is the direction that most states want to move in. And if everyone could start over again, they probably would start with something like this. But a few things, there's a few questions that I've heard are can I use my own independent inventory tracking software in order to kind of help facilitate and automate some of this? The kind of final solution, when we move away from the form and into an extension of our licensing portal that we have the contract in place to build that, it will be ready later in the fall and that is a Salesforce-based platform. So if your inventory tracking system, third-party inventory tracking system can interface with Salesforce through an API, then the answer is yes, that can automate a lot of this for your business. And then you just have to make sure that your inventory tracking is tracking the specific data points that we need at the board. And then as far as this kind of initial rollout of this, Carrie walked through it for cultivators, I think the goal at the board would be to send an email out to all of our licensees with kind of instructions on how to input your first set of inventory records. But you should be tracking them now and it's just when you enter them is kind of the variable point. So anyway, any questions about that? I had one question, Carrie, when you were talking about when, what and when to report was like destruction and waste, was that on that list? Yes, yep. Okay. So everybody will, there's a separate form for reporting destruction and waste, but it's also captured on the grower's form though, the grower will report from any harvest lot, pounds of cannabis being sold as flour, pounds being sold as trim, and then the weight of the stems, as waste, yep. Yeah, I don't really have any questions, just driving home a point that you made, this is the direction that a lot of states, I think if they could do it over, what would go in? It certainly puts, it's at a low or no cost to everybody listening, depending on how much automation you want to really plug in here. But it also, it's a high degree of trust between the board and all of our licensees. And our compliance team is, some praises to everybody that they've inspected there, everybody's really trying to go above and beyond the cough or compliance here, and that's really exciting. But, as Pepper mentioned, if we're seeing too many irregularities, we can always make this a little bit more difficult. So please work with us at the beginning, so we don't have to move in that direction. Brent, I know we're on a little bit of a tight timeline for our executive session. Can we transition to reviewing the recommendations? Yep. So your adult use in medical cannabis register for this week, starting with the medical program, medical program received just under a hundred new patient applications, renewal applications from caregivers and patients, and has processed about 39 patient cards and approved for caregiver applications We're currently processing applications we're seeing on and after August 10th. Our license applications list this week. So we have 12 applications that are up for the organization this week. As the chair mentioned in the outset, we've got two retailers on the list and one integrated license. So that is very exciting. One thing to point out is that the numbers down here at the bottom are total numbers in each of these status categories up to the point where the application is pending the board review are remaining pretty static week by week. So it looks like though we've gotten about 53 applications in the door this last week, these numbers are remaining relatively static. So our staff are really processing applications at a steady clip and managing to keep our statuses around the same numbers despite the influx of new applications. We're gonna move on our recommendations for licensure this week. As I mentioned, we have 12. So we've got Pine Hill Organics being recommended for a mixed cultivator tier one. OGW cannabis is recommended for an indoor tier one cultivator. Pinnacle Valley Organics is being recommended for an indoor tier three cultivation license. Champlain Valley Dispensory is being recommended for an integrated license. Ernst Flowers is being recommended for an indoor tier one cultivation license. Birds Eye Botanicals is being recommended for an outdoor tier two cultivation license. District 802 is recommended for an indoor tier one cultivation license. YBNRML is being recommended for a mixed tier two cultivation license. Turkey Hollow Cannabis is recommended for an indoor tier one cultivation license. Trichome Ranch is being recommended for a mixed tier one cultivation license. Laura Cannabis is being recommended for a retail license and Mountain Girl Cannabis is being recommended for a retail license. And as always, this list of applicants have demonstrated compliance with all of the requirements for a cannabis establishment license that's contained in our rules and in statute. We've got this data here about our license amendments. I think this data is really just showing right now other work that is being done by our staff and it may get a little more interesting as time goes on, but we're gonna keep reporting it. And then we have three recommendations from staff for Social Equity Status Denial this week. We've got submission 637 and 913, and then we have one of those pending Board Review for a license this week. And then we have three recommendations from staff for Social Equity Status Denial this week. We've got submission 637 and 913, both of which staff are recommending denial of Social Equity Status because the applicant doesn't need the criteria for a Social Equity Business Applicant as defined in Board Rule. And we also have submission 845 and staff are recommending denial for this applicant as they don't meet the criteria for Social Equity Individual Applicant as defined in Board Rule. And before we move into executive session, I just thought I would put a finer point on one of the things that the chair, one of the remarks that the chair made at the outset about our Social Equity Status Denials, which is that the majority of our denials are actually for applicants that are applying under the criteria for Social Equity that's based on incarceration as a result of the cannabis-related defense. But because that's really an objective criteria that staff are able to determine without discussion among the board, we're able to kind of make those determinations without going into executive session. So the majority of our executive sessions are for applicants that are applying under that criteria of being from a community that has been historically disproportionately impacted. And that is what I'm suggesting. We go into executive session now to review because one of these recommended denials is for an applicant that applied under that status. Great. Any sense of how long this executive session might last? I've read the reports, I would say 10 or 15 minutes. I think that's right. We've got the one Social Equity Status Denial and the recommendation for a license, as you mentioned, for an applicant that has presumptively disqualifying offenses, both we have a memo for each. Yes, the board has a motion. All right, is there a motion? I move that the CCB go into executive session to consider confidential attorney-client communications made for the purpose of providing professional legal services to the body and that executive session is required because premature general public knowledge regarding such communications would clearly place the board at a substantial disadvantage. And I further move that the board invites Donna Davis, Director of Racial Equity and Jay Green, Racial Equity Research and Policy Analysts from the same department into executive session. I'll second. I need discussion. David? Hi. Okay, so why don't we say 10 minutes just so that we don't go short and then miss people? So we'll be back at 150, 150. Nellie, if you wouldn't mind just putting up the OA message indicating that.  I am indeed. We are still recording, I think. We are indeed. Okay, I'll resume the meeting. It's 1.49 PM, September 14th. We are out of executive session. Again, the purpose of that executive session was to review two separate staff recommendations. One was a social equity status denial. And it was a person claiming to be from a community that had been disproportionately historically impacted by cannabis prohibition. And then another applicant that was presumptively disqualified because of events in their criminal history record and the staff had recommended that the person has overcome that presumptive disqualification and is able to be licensed. We had the discussion about that. I think we're now ready to vote on the entire staff recommendations for today. I move that the board accept each of the recommendations for social equity status and licensing approval as presented to us by staff in this meeting. Second. All in favor. Aye. Aye. Well, that's great. It's, you know, some retail applications on September 14th. That's huge. Not too bad. There should be snaps to the staff. Last thing we have to do today is do public comment. So we'll handle it the same way we always do. If you have joined via the link and would like to make a public comment, please raise your virtual hands. We'll call on you in the order that those hands go up. If you will move then to people that joined via the phone and we can start with our first one, Rose. Hello, I'm a 21 year old medical patient. Thank you for letting me speak today. My comment is regarding medical testing for just testing in general for the medical program. I'm speaking to the mandated education part of it as well. As a medical patient, it worries me that the medical dispensaries are not subject to the same education mandates, though they have much more money to do so and are using, and their outreach is to a lot more vulnerable patients who need that extra support and that protection. This is in line with the reality that medical dispensaries are not actually up to par in some cases and it's something that I feel it does need to be addressed. There gives no protection to me and other patients while adult use mandates that there's just no testing for medical dispensaries. And again, as a medical patient, canvass is expensive and my medicine is expensive and I can definitely vouch for others and say that canvass is expensive. And if we want access to clean tested medicine, we have to go to dispensaries and either pay a huge tax or not know what we're really getting. And I wanted to speak up as a young medical patient and reiterate how concerning this part is as well as many of you know, this information is all public. And yes, thank you very much. Yeah, thanks. Thank you for sharing. Any other people that joined via the link, please, if you'd like to make a public comment, raise your virtual hands. And if you joined via the phone, you can make a public comment. You hit star six on your phone to unmute yourself. I'm seriously concerned with the tracking system and I understand that you are trying to do what's best and from my experience and my knowledge, 23 states use metric and it is sufficient and well used. And I also want to know is Carrie Garnier and you guys going to give a training session how to implement all this information or is this just about free for all to retailers and everybody else put it in. How in God's name are you going to track every single sale, every single retail dispensary in the state without a proper track and trace system? That system dice all today on there, it might be good, it's from NCS Analytics and but it does not meet the standard of what is going on in the United States for track and trace systems nationally. And I've spoken to three other companies, Biotrack, Metric and Leafwire Tracing System. They all have decided to turn over to, most states have turned over to using Metric. And that's the best system out there. And I've sent you guys that emails a dozen times. I've sent emails for the last 18 months and not ever got a response from anybody at the CCB. I am a medical patient. I am just as concerned with that as I am for the retail market and the consumers out there because that system has no training, has no 24 hour support, has no way of doing anything to help anybody if they have a problem. Where's the support network in your track and trace system? There's no training for whatsoever. There's no 24 hour technical team to answer questions. It is a individual website put on your page that you put the data entry in freely with no backup of any sort. And there's no licensing to get in there. With Metric, you can go into the system. It has a 101% renewal rate. 23 states in the country of Guam use Metric. They provide news bulletins on contamination. They provide the hardware and software at a very low cost to the commissioners of the regulated cannabis industry. They use RFD tags to monitor everything that is being done. This seed to sale tracking thing is kind of behind the eyeball in my opinion because it says seed to sale means when those seeds got planted in the ground in this year, they should have been tracked all the way through to harvest.  God only knows what they've done with it. I personally will not buy any products in the state of Vermont from the retail sales market this year just for that reason alone. And I feel really disappointed that you guys did not investigate the market and went with NC analytics. And I know the guy that just was down in DC recently had a nice meeting down there as well. The holder for NC analytics held a nice meeting down there and I read his article recently. But anybody that's listening to this comment section today, please go and look at metric.com m-e-t-r-c.com and see in real time currently today 300 million sales in Massachusetts and 900,000 that have been given out easily. They track every single data point then in Massachusetts, metric opened a data catalog for police, schools, law enforcement and parents to know what the good products are and what the bad products are. I do not see anything like that in Keri Garnier's tracking entry system. That is, I could do that myself and though that's something I don't trust it and I feel bad for the consumers of Vermont and that's all I have to say to you for my comments. Thank you. Yep, thanks Keith. Dan. I just picked up the end of that last comment but just wanted to commend the board and thank you guys for your efforts. Just would like to comment about metric, metric is used in every single state except for the state of Washington is it's an incredibly flawed system. I have experience using it. It makes it incredibly burdening and difficult for farmers, especially small businesses. It's a really horrible, horrible tracking trade system and I just wanted to applaud Vermont and the CCB for trying to come up with something that can work for everybody. Thank you. Thanks Dan. Any other public comments either via the folks that joined by video or by phone and again, for phone it's star six to unmute yourself. I only have one comment really quick just to throw in about metric. Metric also does non-reusable plastic tags. So if you guys are trying to alleviate the plastic tag thing then I don't think that that really goes along with everything that you guys are trying to do in Vermont. Just my two cents about metric. Yep, thank you. How do we navigate to the seat-to-sale inventory tracking system? So we will be communicating out to our licensees about how to do that when it's fully up and operational. So right now every licensee should be tracking their inventory and getting ready for that first initial inventory input. I see. Rose, I see your hand up. We don't generally take repeat comments during these types of public comment sessions. But if you do have a comment, I really appreciate your comment from earlier. Please email the board, ccb.info at vermont.gov. We have a public input button that you can hit on our home page, ccb. vermont.gov. And that goes to all of our inboxes here. So we'll see it. If I don't see any other comments, Todd? Thanks, I appreciate the time. This is Todd Bailey from Trace. We're a Vermont-based seat-to-sale tracking company. And I'm just curious to know whether or not under the temporary system, our customers using our solution will be able to upload their data to the temporary system or will they have to do that manually? So again, we don't generally answer questions. I know I just broke that cardinal rule a minute ago, but we generally don't answer questions. If you want to send that question to Carey, I think he'll be able to get you an answer. Great, I appreciate it. Sorry, I didn't mean to break the rule. No, no, it's fine. I would know. We appreciate getting the questions. They're very helpful for us and kind of... knowing where we need to kind of provide the public more information. So I don't mind getting the questions. We just don't turn these public comment sessions into kind of question and answer sessions. All right, well, I will close the public comment window and just once again, thank just the tremendous effort of everyone here. It looked almost impossible to meet some of the deadlines that were in Act 164. And yet here we are today. So thank you all and I will adjourn the meeting. Okay, buddy. Thank you.


sponsor this annual program of our first writing forms and our governmental affairs and advocacy work. So we're very grateful to Bermuda Health for that. And today, we are going to welcome Eric Sandvik, who is the director. And I'm going to, this is a lot, so I'm going to read it. Director WPL, Generation Operations, plant manager, Edgewater Columbia Generating Station. So they get all that correct? All right, perfect. So he has been the plant manager at Edgewater since 2010. But you have worked in the industry since the early 90s. That's correct. Perfect. Originally from La Crosse, but he now lives here, right here in the city of Sheboygan, with his lovely wife. And we are glad he's here. So with that, Eric, it's all you. Well, thank you for the opportunity to talk about not only what's happening at Edgewater, but just aligned energy and the industry as a whole. I'll kind of get into some introductions here. And thanks for the introduction. Yeah, I've been, I started with Wisconsin Power and Light, the predecessor company to aligned energy back in 1990. And I started, actually, as a summer intern. I graduated from UW-Platteville, degree in mechanical engineering. And I went, or I had a job offer from aligned energy, Wisconsin Power and Light, before going back for my final semester. And I remember telling one of my professors, hey, I got this job offer from Wisconsin Power and Light. And I was all excited. And he said, oh, yeah, congratulations, Eric. It's going to be a good job. It'll be kind of boring. But it'll be a good job. He couldn't have been more wrong. I kept thinking that you turn on your light.  It's pretty simple. And it's just amazing that the pace of change has just been continually increasing year after year after year. And there's really no end in sight it appears. And just even the last couple of months maybe bear that out, all of the announcements we've made and the changes in the industry. And we're going to talk about all that today. We always start our meetings at aligned energy with a safety share. Safety is one of our core values. It's our most important core value. Our employees operate around a lot of hazardous energy. So we want to make sure that safety's on the forefront of their mind. And this example really comes from one of our employees' experiences. He was driving to work one morning. I think he was up in Howard's Grove. And he almost hit a neighbor who was out walking in the morning. The neighbor was dressed in black. And he was going to work in his darkout still. And so he remembered that in the back of his car he had this reflective vest. Every time we do a large project at the power plant, we make sure all of our employees were reflective vest because of all the increased vehicle traffic. And our projects were kind of behind us. So he went to the neighbor that night when he got home and said, here, next time you're out walking, wear this vest. And sure enough, every day after that, in the morning, he was going to work in the dark. And the neighbor was wearing a vest. So I think it says a lot about our employees. We're looking out for each other. We're looking out for the community. We're very proud to be part of the community here. And so I'm encouraging you as well. If you're out walking in the morning, it's starting to get dark again. It's that time of day or time of year. So just make sure you're wearing bright reflective clothing. I'm driving to work in the dark now. So you have to watch out for me. So we're going to talk a lot about transitions. And Aligned Energy, you may have heard, is transitioning our generation fleet from large central coal-fired units to more distributed renewable resources. And the reality is that that's where Wisconsin Power and Light started. We started as a company that was founded on distributed renewable resources. Our first power plants were located in communities throughout kind of southwestern or Wisconsin, maybe up south central Wisconsin. Wherever there was like a dam and someone decided to put in a lumber mill, they thought, well, maybe while the lumber mill's not running at night when the employees go home, I'll put a generator there. Maybe I'll sell the electricity to the local community so they can run their street lights. Or maybe like here in Sheboygan, we can run the electric trolleys. And those were the first power plants. And they were all over the place. There were dozens of them. And over time, the technology began to improve. They became more efficient. These little micro grids started getting interconnected together. And that's really where Wisconsin Power and Light was founded back in 1924. All these small utilities joined up into one big utility that's all interconnected into the first grids. So here's an example of the scale that we're talking about. Like Janesville was a great example. There's a dam downtown. There was a lumber mill next to it and someone put a generator in there and it was capable of about a half a megawatt of production. Riverside, which was right across the street at the time, was a huge technological improvement built in the early 1900s. That was five megawatts. And then it kind of continued that way for maybe 20 years. And technology improved so much that it really made sense for our customers to shut down a lot of these smaller, less efficient power plants and build the first greenfield large central station. And that was Edgewater. Edgewater Unit 1 was built in 1931. That's when it came online. And that really just set the trend for the industry going forward. So this is just a Wisconsin Power and Lights expansion of our coal fleet starting back with this large central station, Edgewater Unit 1. And you can see the pace of the construction and the size of these new power plants just kept increasing and increasing and increasing every year. You know, ultimately culminating when we added a very large unit, double the size of Edgewater back in 1953. That was Edgewater Unit 3. Added some units down in Beloit and out in Cassville, the Rock River and Nelson Dewey Plants. Added Edgewater Unit 4, which was just this whole step up in technology and size in 1969. And then built our Columbia plant in the mid-70s. And then ultimately our last coal-fired unit built was Edgewater Unit 5 here in Sheboygan. We'll talk about Edgewater 5 a little more in a bit. The next phase of this was again, realizing that technology was changing. There was this new technology out there. It's becoming more economic, lower cost, and that's renewable energy, wind and solar. And it was becoming very clear in like about 2010 that our smaller, less efficient coal units just could not compete with renewables. And it definitely didn't make sense to add a like a half a billion dollar scrubber to some of these small units. So we then began the process of retiring those older units. And now to this day really, it's just those bottom three units on this list that are still in place, Edgewater 5 and Columbia 1 and 2. Everything else above that has been retired. So most of the plants I've worked at in my career are now gone. We also, we've made some significant large investments in natural gas units lately. Natural gas is just a perfect complement to the increasing amount of renewables that are out there on the grid. Renewables like wind and solar can change pretty quickly, they're output. When the wind's not blowing and the sun's not shining, you need something to fill in that gap. And the recent construction of our West Riverside plant, it was just a perfect complement. That's a unit that can start up very quickly, ramp to full load very quickly and respond to those instantaneous changes in wind and sunshine. But we've been doing natural gas power plants for a long time as this slide shows. Our first unit was built back in the late 60s. And they've always been a good complement for coal units as well because you can start them up fast and they can respond quickly to changes in demand. And now again, we've been retiring some of those older units. So rock three, four, sheepskin, five and six, those have all been retired and removed. You're probably familiar with the remaining units. You drive past the Sheboygan Falls every day if you're coming back from Fond du Lac. And even if you're going around the cell side of Fond du Lac, you'll see the four Sheboygan or cell Fond du Lac units, which is that top picture there. We own two of those units and WPPI owns the other two. And feel free to ask questions anytime through the moment. So now back to Edgewater. Right in the midst of shutting down our smaller, less efficient units, like Edgewater Unit 3 and Unit 4 are now retired. The building is still there but the units don't run. We've also made a step of adding emission controls to our large coal-fired units. So this would be an SCR, which is a selective catalytic reduction. It's a big catalytic converter really that eliminates NOx emissions. And then also a, we call it an AQCS. It's a scrubber in a bag house that eliminates sulfur dioxide, particulate and mercury emissions. That's really the state of the art for coal-fired power plants. At the time these projects were installed and approved by the PSCW, really even as late as 2016, solar and wind, it was still uncertain about what role they were gonna play in the future. And the amazing thing is that the economics of solar and wind have just changed so radically in the last five years. It made sense for us to, in spite of these investments, to shut down our coal-fired plants. What caused that to change the economics of those, which I agree, I'd go to meetings less than 10 years ago and they'd say, well, it's not cost effective. And all of a sudden it's changed. Right. I don't wanna say it changed overnight, but it changed over quickly in my opinion. Yeah, there were definitely trends over the last decade that they were getting cheaper and cheaper, but in the case of solar and batteries, it accelerated in like the last five years. And it's just a research into better materials, better manufacturing methods. There's definitely an economy of scale aspect to it, more manufacturers. That's all just adding up to really to the point where it made sense for our customers to take this investment that, it was a very large investment at Columbia Edgewater and to shut that down and stop operating these large coal units and replace that with solar. In the case of wind, the big change has been just gaming operating experience. We, our first wind turbines were installed in, well about 14 years ago, 12 years ago, out at just East of Fond du Lac, it's our Cedar Ridge wind farm. And back then there was a thought that wind was fairly new and we might have to replace main gearboxes and bearings in every turbine every couple of years, which is a major investment. And at the time it was thought that maybe you could get the cost of electricity from a wind turbine would might be $50 per megawatt hour, just because of all the maintenance needed. We're now operating Cedar Ridge wind farm at about $10 per megawatt hour, just through improved maintenance practices. We now know how to avoid gearbox replacements and bearing replacements. So maintenance experience has been a huge part of wind. Women's fore are doing so well now. When can we expect that they can go on their own with our own subsidies? I think it's, I'm probably the wrong person to talk about subsidies. I think we'll probably see, if we look back at the experience with wind, maybe we can draw some comparisons. Wind definitely benefited from economies of scale, from additional operating experience, and the production tax credits for our Cedar Ridge wind farm, those expired about three years ago. I think maybe we'll see something similar with solar.  So it's probably gonna take some time. Sorry, you're still getting subsidies for wind energy? Yeah, they're based on, these are production tax credits for wind. So they're based on how much power you get out of a wind farm. And then they expire after a period of time. For solar, we get an investment tax credit. So you get a tax credit for making that initial investment. So if you wanted to match the current output of our people, I'd make a lot. How big of a solar field would that take? Or how big of a wind department would that take? Sure, we'll talk about Onion River near the end of the presentation. But just to, from a high level, Edgewater Unit 5, and I think we have a slide about this, is about 425 megawatts. The new Onion River solar farm is 150 megawatts. That's over a thousand acres. So it's a lot of acreage to replace Edgewater. And the other thing about Edgewater is, or any coal-fired plant, the power is always there, whether the wind's blowing or sun's shining. So it can have a very high capacity factor, that's what we call it. It can run around the clock and utilize that full 420 megawatts any time of the day. You can't do that with solar. And so you get less kilowatt hours out of a solar farm than you would from a coal plant. You'll talk more about how the solar is developed, where you store that, like that, or if you get through this. Sure, yeah. Right now, there is no real storage for electricity. There are some small-scale battery installations that are being done by Alliant Energy and across the country. But overall, the way the grid operates is, there's no real storage. So when you turn on your light switch, some power plant somewhere in the grid has to pick up a little bit of output to make up for that. You can't really absorb it anywhere. Based on that, wouldn't it be more accurate to say that wind and solar complements call or gas fire as opposed to the other way around? Yeah, I think that's a good way to say it. And I think that's, we'll talk about the recent announcement of extending the retirement dates for Columbia and Edgewater, our two remaining coal plants. And it's because that complementary relationship really still needs to be worked out. We still need something to replace the base load wind or coal in order to help complement wind and solar. Batteries ultimately could do that, but it'd be a lot of batteries. I also noticed that you have not yet mentioned anything about nuclear capability. Why not? Alliant Energy made the decision to exit that part of the industry, I can't remember how many years ago that was, when we had a share of the Kiwani power plant. We also owned the Dwayne Arnold plant, just throughout the Cedar Rapids, Iowa. And it wasn't our core competency. And I don't think we're having any discussions about re-entering. Number of utilities are though. Daryl and Power, Excel Energy, have talked about studies that are underway to site some small modular nuclear units. The Genoa site, South of La Crosse is one of those. But I don't think we're looking at that yet. I could be wrong. Certainly you're familiar with the investment that Bill Gates is making in the Wyoming. No. Seriously? He's taking a little coal-fired plant, him and Warren Buffett are converting it to me. Which is their core competency. I would think it's there, but I don't know. It's just like Windows, you reboot once in a while and you'll be fine. I hope not. Yeah, you know, you're really talking about, you're reinforcing the point I made earlier. This is an exciting time to be involved with the utility and to follow utilities. So being that we're right on the lake, was there any consideration given to using Wave? Power to generate anything? I'm not aware of any studies that Alliant Energy has done for Wave utilization. You know, even like offshore wind, it just, I think the type of scale that we're looking for doesn't apply to Lake Michigan, at least for us. I'm not sure about other utilities, so. So what's we're looking at? Is these, the coal plant just kind of being shut down or are we looking at utilizing some of that clean air technology and sharing it with countries that aren't as far along as the US? Or does that kind of just get scrapped and thrown in? The, yeah, it's a, that's a great question. And again, that's been a part of the industry that's been changing so much. We've, we shut down our first coal plant back in, I think it was 2009. That was in downtown Cedar Rapids. And at the time, people were scrambling to get parts out of that power plant. Because there's all these, you know, coal-fired power plants around the country. And with every plant shut down we've been doing, and there's been a lot of them.  So our anticipation was that most of what's now standing at Edgewater will get recycled. There's just not much of a market for it anymore. We do have some real critical assets that are part of the scrubber that have already, we've gotten requests. There's a very, there's almost a sister unit of the scrubber down in Oklahoma. Those pumps will be going to that power plant when we shut down. Actually, I don't know if we've even told them we're staying open longer. But I think I can do that. So just a small scale can be reused. Most of it will be recycled. So with the emission controls that were installed at Edgewater, there was a real huge reduction in emissions from that power plant. Again, the scrubber, baghouse and SCR really are the state of the art for a coal-fired power plant. And you can see back to a baseline of 2005, there's just been a gradual or continual increase down. Even before the scrubber and baghouse and SCR, we were implementing multiple projects at Edgewater to reduce emissions. These were things like a different burner technology, something called overfire air to stage combustion, all meant to drive emissions lower, trying to avoid a real significant investment that could impact rates for customers. It's really based on minimizing the impact on customers while trying to maximize the emission reductions. And ultimately, just with the outlook for emission regulation, it made sense in 2016 to install the scrubber. And that's where you saw that huge reduction. The one kind of difference here, and it's notable is CO2. There really isn't an economically viable way of reducing CO2 from a coal-fired power plant. There've been lots of experiments done, lots of pilot studies, but in the end, it's still not a commercially available technology. And it still doesn't make sense to install carbon capture on a coal-fired plant. So the increase you see there in last year, in 2021 in CO2, is really because the plant ran a lot more in 2021 than it had in its previous years. And we'll talk about that in a second here also. Yeah, so that's Edgewater as it stands today. That small little 30 megawatt part of the power plant that we saw in the early pictures is way on the left side of the, or the right side of the picture. I don't know if I have a pointer on this or not. That's on the south end of the plant, that little brick building. Unit three is where the building kind of steps up a little bit.  Unit five is like right smack dab in the middle. That's the 425 megawatt unit. The SCR is kind of hanging off the north end of the building. And then the scrubber is there on the far north side. There are, even though there were three units operating, there was two stacks, three and four share a common stack. The north stack is Edge five. And I think I'll talk about that in a second too. And then just for comparison, you can't really have too many power plant pictures. This is the other power plant that I managed, the Columbia power plant, just south of Portage. You can see it from the interstate if you're driving north of Madison. Just for scale, this power plant produces about 1,200 megawatts. So it's about three times the size of Edgewater. It has its own lake. We don't have the benefit of having this nice heat sink like we do here in Sheboygan. So that's a manmade or an artificially constructed 480 acre lake that is used to cool the steam down and it's continually recycled. And its scrubber is over there on the right hand side of the picture. It kind of about doubled the footprint of the power plant. These scrubbers are massive pieces of equipment. How many people here have been inside Edgewater? Just curious. Hasn't changed, yeah. So this is a picture of the Turban Hall. This is where, this is unit five generator. Unit four retired is behind that. And then the old, we call it the old side of the plant or one, two, and three were, is even further than that. And so this is two football fields long. It's about 80 feet wide. So it's just this massive indoor space. And we'll talk about the site redevelopment efforts that we're working on with the city. Some potential utilization of this massive space would be nice in the future. Then this is the south end of the power plant. This is what we call the old side. That's unit three Turban installed in 1953. That's an Alice Chalmers Turban. It was manufactured in Milwaukee. And then one and two had been removed. They were moved in the 80s. So we use that for some equipment storage. There's a water tank to support unit five. Oh, I think I've covered a lot of these. About 420 megawatts. That's depending on what rule of thumb you use. It's about 400,000 homes. The boiler is a lot of heat transfer pipes in there when you burn the coal. And it boils water to make steam, which turns the steam turbine. There's about 100 miles of piping to do that inside the boiler itself. We have about 280 acres of property. That might seem like a lot for a power plant. It's not. It's a very constrained site. Our Columbia site is 3,000 acres. Maybe the number one question I get asked are how tall are the stacks? So 550 feet is the Washington Monument. That's maybe a way to think of it.  Unit five was designed to burn that. Which was one of the first units to really kind of perfect the burning of low sulfur coal. Our trains have a 220 hour round trip between Sheboygan and Wyoming. And we burn, depending on the year, an average of about 2 million tons of coal a year. So I said, depending on the year, so what does that mean? We, aligned energy does not control how hard edge water runs, how much output it produces. The Mid-Continent Independent System Operator, MISO, is responsible for determining how hard edge water runs. How hard every power plant in the MISO footprint runs. The market, we call it a market, but the business of generating electricity is a competitive market. Every power plant in MISO competes with every other power plant to be a low cost producer. And if you're not a low cost producer, then you won't run as much. And there are units in the MISO footprint that because of maybe fuel cost or efficiency or high O and M cost run hardly at all. It's the most efficient, the lowest cost, just the cheapest units that run the most. And MISO dispatches units based on something they call vocational marginal price, LMP. LMP is really the way to reflect how our supply and demand of electricity balanced locally. So in a location where there's a high demand or maybe a low supply, the price of electricity will go up locally. And what that will do then is call on more expensive or less efficient power plants to run. So that will get more electricity onto the grid, which should help drive the price down. So it's like a self-balancing market. And I just, I took a snapshot. This is something that's fun to watch. You can see this on the internet. I would encourage anyone to go to Mid-Continent Independent System Operator, just Google it. And you can watch this in real time, what's happening with the grid. This is a typical day, well, maybe not typical, but it's not uncommon to see Minnesota, the Dakotas with low prices. So that dark color is, the price is very low. And that means that there's an excess of generation in that part of the footprint. And that's really because that's where a lot of the wind turbines are at. It's a really windy day in Bismarck, you know, on this day. And so that's driving, and there's not much demand up there either. So that's driving the local price down. If the transmission system were 100% perfect and 100% efficient, then it would be all of that plentiful, low-cost wind energy would just flow through the grid and bring down the prices overall for all of my so. But the transmission system has constraints. And that's what's the bottleneck between Minnesota and Wisconsin and Minnesota and Iowa in this case. The transmission system doesn't have the capability to get that much power out into the grid. That brings up the question. So the transmission of electricity, obviously there's losses per distance. And is that factored into the cost when they're buying power? And if so, is there a number, you know, what is the efficiency in terms of transmission per mile or per distance? Is there, are there any numbers? Cause it's gonna depend on what is there to transmit the electricity. But obviously the further away from the demand you are with the source, you're going to lose something. And as we go more remote and more remote and more remote with some of these generation sites, we're getting less efficient. So I'm just curious how those calculations are done. Yeah, the cost of, Mycel calls it congestion. It's a congestion adder. Having to transmit electricity a long distance because there isn't a local resource has losses associated with it. And that just means it's more expensive to get the power there. And that's baked into Mycel's calculation for LNP. As we're transitioning from coal to renewable, we're actually, we think that's gonna improve because right now we have a lot of eggs in one basket, kind of not near where the load is. 400 megawatts here, 1,000 megawatts in portage. In the future, all of these solar resources and ultimately batteries are going to be distributed through our footprint. And we have a map of where our one gigawatt of solar is gonna be located. So it should be more balanced. It's gonna be proliferated throughout the distribution system. But is there, I guess, is there any kind of efficiency, transmission efficiency number? Or could I get something like that? I'm just curious. The Mycel website would be a great place to go. They have a lot of background information about how their calculations work. And really, it would be, you'd be looking for the congestion adder. That will talk about how, it's a locational calculation, depending on, because there are transmission lines that have a lot more capability than other ones based on their voltage. I think that'd be the best place to look. Okay, thank you. What is the legend for the colors that are up there? There's, that's all based on price. And so you can see up in Minnesota there, maybe you can't see if you're in the back. That's a negative LNP right now. There is so much power being produced there. They are probably shutting down wind turbines because there's no place to put the power. The transmission system isn't capable of getting it out into the rest of the grid.  On the other hand, in like the Michigan hub there, $110 per megawatt hour, that's a really high price. Typically, we would see, again, depending on the year, maybe $20 per megawatt hour being an average. And here in Michigan, Mycel is saying, okay, peaking power plants, some smaller and more efficient ones, get online, start producing electricity because the price is above what you're offering to produce. As you say, is that a direct comparison to your wind hour, $20 per megawatt hour before we, so we were originally $50 per megawatt hour? Yeah, that's how we're offering the Cedar Ridge wind farm into the Mycel market. Yeah, so on this day, you can kind of see like a red spot around Sheboygan. Price is gonna be about $100 per megawatt hour. So if there's enough wind, the Cedar Ridge would be running at full load. A power plant like Edgewater in Columbia dispatches for around $25 per megawatt hour that's driven by coal cost primarily. And a natural gas fired unit like Sheboygan Falls that's just heavily driven by natural gas price. Right now, natural gas is running about $8 per million BTU. So that puts those units around $80 per megawatt hour. In 2019 and 2020, those units were producing power around $20 per megawatt hour. Our combined cycle plants, the West Riverside, Riverside, Marshalltown, and Emory, those would in 2019 were producing for around $12 per megawatt hour because natural gas was so cheap. Now they're producing for around 50. So our current coal unit is around $25. Yes.  I mean, they end up at some point to have a negative payback. And do they ever calculate that or do they just forget about it? It is calculated in. Once a unit shuts down, there's a cost to get it back online. And the MISO forecast models have to take into account that unit, the market price is better be strong enough for that unit to recover its high startup costs. So that is all facted into the dispatch model MISO uses. And then depending on the source, say the plant down here, your Edgewater plant, it's got some maximum capacity when everything's running correctly. If you throttle it back, is it scalable? And if so, what happens to the efficiency curve? Because I would imagine it's designed for 100% of its capacity and that's going to be where it's most efficient. And how does that then compare to some of these other sources in terms of their efficiency as they are scaled up and down? Yes. The efficiency of a coal-fired power plant is a function of load. I think it's less efficient, lower load for exactly the reason you described. They were typically designed to run at full load. That's what justified them being built. And that's a real good way to describe our Columbia Power Plant. In when it was designed and built in the 70s, it was meant to be, this thing's never going to come offline. And at that time, we realized we need more resources that are intermittent. Something that can be more flexible and in following the customer demand. Something that's more efficient across the load range. And that was built into Edgewater Unit 5. Edgewater Unit 5 was designed to be an intermediate load unit. It has a design feature called sliding pressure that makes it more efficient at low load. It can take off unnecessary equipment as it's backing down to help save auxiliary power. So it's incorporated a lot of features that we still use to stay. It's still less efficient at low load, but it's not as bad as if you were to drop a load on Columbia. And our coal units, almost all units in white, so our variable units, they follow the demand. So Edgewater and Columbia will back down to low load over the course of the day, depending on market price, and definitely seasonally. And then we have, I think, one of the next graphs will talk about that also. I noticed that there's kind of like a light out of the mysochunk around Chicago. Is that obviously not in that network? That's correct. The entire United States is, well, there's really three grids in the United States that are interconnected. There's one that's east of the Mississippi, there's one west of the Mississippi, and then there's Texas. And I didn't mean to say it that way. I know there's a tone there. So east of the Mississippi, well, the entire country then with these three different grids is divided up into organizations that are really responsible for reliability and for managing the dispatch. Myso is one of them. Commonwealth Edison, which is that footprint there, its parent company belongs to a different grid out east. PJM is the name of that grid. So that's why they don't participate in Myso. But there is a lot of interchange between the neighboring grids, the neighboring transmission operators. So Myso routinely imports about 1,000 megawatts a day from the east and from the west. This is a graph that's available on the internet again. This was a report that came out in April of this year that I wanted to share because I think it says a lot about what's happening in the industry. And it was exciting for me to find it because there's just so much encapsulated in here. The first thing to look at is, one of Myso's mandates is reliability. That's why they do what they do, is to ensure that we all have electricity. It's not a luxury anymore. It's a life essential service. So that's why they're there. And that black line that's toward the bottom of those graphs is Myso's estimate for how much capacity is needed in the footprint to ensure that we're not gonna have blackout somewhere. Make sure power's gonna be available all the time. And you can see over the years, that number's been kind of flat and there's always been enough accredited capacity, that's the, I think that's a green bar on the bottom, that to cover that estimated need. But that number's been going down. You can see that trend. And that reflects the retirement of baseload nuclear plants and coal-fired power plants. These were plants that you can count on when the wind's not blowing and the sun's not shining. And so that's why that number's been dropping closer to the kind of the target. Those plants have been retired. But overall, the amount of capacity installed in Myso has been going up every year, even though these nuclear and coal plants have been retired. And that reflects the addition of wind and solar. So there's a lot more capacity available in Myso, but it's not, it cannot all be accounted on to be there exactly when you need it. So is there a line on here that says, what is reliable and what is not? The reliable line is the one that's decreasing. That's the one that Myso counts on. There is some margin built into that black line there. There's about a 15% planning margin. So, but you don't want to get close to it. And the capacity auction, because Myso's a competitive market for a generation, they do an auction to see whose capacity will be into the market. That showed that we're getting really close. So it's time for the member utilities to rethink their plans for their power plants. The other thing I want to point out real quick is the amount of wind and solar has been gradually, it's been increasing. And even though you can't count on that for reliable capacity that have it there all the time when you need it, it produces a lot of energy. Wind blows a lot in Iowa. There's a solar actually has a pretty good capacity factor in Wisconsin. So over the years, with this more wind and solar being installed, that's been driving down utilization of coal-fired units. It's been making them less economically viable. And that's been reflected in how much Edgewater has been running. And it really prompted the decision to retire the plant and our other coal unit. The general trend for Edgewater utilization has been going down year after year. And we got to the point in 2018 and 2019 with so much solar and so much wind coming onto the market. It just looked like maybe Edgewater wouldn't be running at all in the future. And so in 2019, that's where we made the decision. It makes more sense for our customers to shut that plant down and invest in solar. So is this a result of the legislative action probably eight years ago where our state government said by whatever date out in the future, a certain percentage of energy must be produced by wind and solar. When we had 100% of what we needed being made, then they said, okay, we're going to have to give back. If you have to get to a percentage calculation of the future, that means you have to double the capacity and throttle back the stuff that's reliable and add all kinds of variable, not reliable stuff. And that's gonna drive this kind of stuff to where we may not have according to that graph you just showed me. The decision to transition our fleet away from coal into renewables is really based on customer costs. At least it was when we made the decision back in 2019. Our economic analysis showed that it just doesn't make sense to continually cycle 135 railcars from Wyoming to Chevegan and back because that's very expensive and produce power at $25 per megawatt hour at Edgewater when we can really get free fuel from the wind and from the sign. And the economic analysis indicated that for our customers, the best decision is to stop maintaining and investing in our coal plants and build solar. At the time, it was an economic decision to avoid additional costs for customers. Was there a reliability factor? Yes, there was. All of these plans to shut down Edgewater, shut down Columbia, invest in solar, that all goes through MISO analysis and approval. One of the things that MISO does is when we put in a request to retire a coal unit is they run a reliability study. It's called an attachment-wise study. They look at, okay, this power plant is now plucked from the grid. What happens to the transmission system? And they say, okay, it looks good. So what happens if you now lose a transmission line or another transmission line? And they run thousands of scenarios to see, is there any way that this power plant going away could impact local reliability? The outcome of the study for Edgewater was the recently approved Howard's Grove to Erdman line that ATC will be building shortly. That was the one little piece of transmission infrastructure addition they thought would ensure reliability in the Sheboygan area. For Columbia, there was no impact. You could remove a gigawatt of coal-fired capacity from the center of the state and the transmission is so robust that they said, go ahead, it has no reliability impact. It's a kind of a, but it's a different part of the equation than this. This is, is there enough capacity in the entire MISO footprint to meet the native demand? And that's MISO's responsibility to balance. And that's why they did the capacity auction and that's why we announced plans to keep the plant open. Did they ever show you a graph? I do it back to the last one, blue and the green. They ever show you one of those? What I would look like if you remove the tax incentives for wind and solar, so it'd be on the same plane field as coal or nuclear or, because I mean, that's a huge factor. We talked about the rail cars going back and forth. Yeah, that's an expense, but that tax incentive is an expense too. It is, yeah. And we would expect that tax incentive, like it has for wind, it has driven innovation and really driven those economies of scale that have made well, our Cedar Ridge wind farm, now one of the cheapest power plants in our portfolio. Without that initial production tax credit, maybe that initial investment never would have been made. But now our customers are definitely benefiting from having that 80 megawatt wind power plant. So a lot of those types of sources need tax incentives throughout their whole life? Well, a lot of these haven't reached their full life yet, so I guess that remains to be seen. It's really amazing that technology is changing so fast for wind and solar. I agree with you if you see people going out and investing their own money in this stuff without any incentives, but we don't see that. People don't invest in it, while there's tax incentives or governments throwing money at it. Like a lot of technology. I don't know about a lot, but certainly green technology's better for them. So one other thing to note here, so in 2021 we saw a huge increase in the utilization of Edgewater in Columbia. A lot of this was post COVID economic bump. Just the demand for electricity has skyrocketed in the last two years. 2022 is going to look very similar to 2021 for Edgewater in Columbia. The real limiting factor right now is, like a lot of industries, it's supply chain. The railroads have not been able to ramp up their staffing and their infrastructure to deliver the coal we need to meet, to be able to allow these units to run unimpeded. So there were times where limiting the output on Edgewater in Columbia just because there isn't enough coal available to run the plants. That's gradually changing. Like a lot of supply change issues that a number of industries are facing, that it's getting better, but that's kind of hampered the utilization of those plants in 2020. So solar and wind is not really free. You still have the amortization costs and the construction and all of that has to be factored into the pricing of solar and wind. Right, yeah, it's a different cost profile than typical with the cost of wind and solar is all up front, getting it installed. And then the fuel cost is nothing afterwards. With coal, in case it costs a lot to build a coal plant, you know that, but it also costs a lot to keep it running and to maintain it going forward. And that's what really factored into our decision to shut down our coal units. It's that ongoing cost. In spite of that, that big sunk cost of having that asset there, getting the fuel and maintaining the plant, continuing the investment into it is just so expensive it just makes more sense to shut it down and get the power from elsewhere. At least it did in 2019. And that's really the next slide here. Really, it's amazing. It's never boring in the utility industry. The picture has changed. And we went through the analysis again and we wanted to check our assumptions because we were literally four months away from shutting down Edgewater. It was gonna shut down in November of this year. Columbia One was going to be end of the year in 2023 and Columbia Two was gonna be in 2024. And looking at what's happening with natural gas price, what's happening with the LMPs that you saw on that one MISO map, what's happening with supply chain around solar and batteries. And then the reliability concerns that have come up because of that line that's gradually decreasing, we decided that we need to take another look at this and we announced that we were gonna change the retirement dates for the coal fired units. And you may have seen headlines. There's some of those over on the right hand side there. MISO talking about power outages, talking about this impending disaster coming up. And it really seemed imprudent and the economics backed it up to kind of put on blinders and continue to move forward with a plan developed in 2019 when the conditions have changed radically since that decision was made. So some of the stuff we talked about, almost every utility around us is doing what aligned energy is doing. We're shutting down our coal plants, we're planting on it, building solar and they're all facing supply change challenges, uncertainty associated with that. And given the concerns that MISO raised about capacity, we decided it's time to take another look at it and that's where we made the announcement to change the retirement dates. It's really gonna give aligned energy the ability to be very flexible with responding to these concerns in the market. If there are supply change issues impacting our solar farms, so far it's looking that we're gonna be okay, we'll be able to react to it. The nice thing is that Colombian Edgewater are very well performing power plants. They're efficient, they're low cost, they're very reliable and they're really primed to be good reliable assets for the customers for these next couple of years. Is there a plant including these two nuclear plants at Point Beach? That's a thousand megawatts. And does that factor into aliens or into the group, they go into the MISO grid, right? They do, yes. I'm not sure what the strategic plan is for Point Beach, you know that we're not owners of that or partners in that, but yeah, having Point Beach there definitely helps the market prices in this area, helps the stability of the transmission system. But even with Point Beach there, the MISO capacity studies were showing that MISO needed more capacity to get through the next couple of years. So that's really what made us decide that we better keep our coal units around for a while longer. What is the, if you looked at the plants that are slated for shutdown, when they were built, what was the estimated lifespan and where are we in that curve and what is currently considered the remaining lifespan of these that are slated to be shut down? When the engineers designed like Edgewater Unit 3, and we had the documents that still reflected that, they planned for a 40 year life for the assets. Edgewater 3 ended up being about 63 years old I think when we retired it. So there's some margin in there. The original shutdown date that we were planning on for Edgewater Unit 5 was I think 2042, 2040s. And we had a plan of ongoing investment to ensure it was in environmental compliance, that it was safe to operate, efficient to operate, replacing key pieces of equipment that were out over time, you know when you're burning coal things were out. But our plan was about 2040-ish. Same for Columbia, they were similar. So you're gonna cut them out 15 or 20 years early and is there a plan to remove that possibility of recommissioning and if so why? Yeah, the, really the economics of renewables was going to, was driving the decision to retire these plants early. Even having that asset there, it's still costs a lot to maintain them and operate them relative to renewables. So we were prepared to retire them early. Our plans now, and for Edgewater, I just, for Columbia I think it was maybe like a 30 degree adjustment. For Edgewater it was a total 180 because we were going to shut down in four months. So now we're gonna have to run for three years and there will be some targeted additional investment needed in that plan to keep it running. Just some small projects. But is there, and the second part of the question though was are these considered to be decommissioned fully in those target, on those target dates, knowing that they would still have 15 years of usable life, presumably. You're gonna remove the capacity, bulldoze it all down and now we don't have a backup that's reliable. The, what we've been doing up until now is when we retire a coal-fired power plant, we fully decommission it. It's removed. I'm getting the sign that we have like five minutes left and I have a lot of material here. So I'll, I don't need to cut the discussion off because these are fantastic questions. Let's see. Question maybe about the recent Supreme Court decision.  Again, that's, it's, for us it's being driven by economics for customers. It's the right thing to do for our customers to reduce rates. Staffing, we had, at one point, shortly after I started Edgewater, 136 employees onsite there when we were operating three units. We now have, at the time of the Clean Energy Blueprint announcement 2019, we had 81 employees there. We now have 45. And also we have six special temporary employees who, it's a special agreement. They're members of the union, but they know that when the plant shuts down that their employment ends. We've been very lucky in being able to find opportunities for employees within the line of energy. I think between the two coal-fired plants, about 50 employees have found other opportunities within the rest of the line of energy. I anticipate that by the end of the year we're gonna lose about a third of the workforce at Edgewater because the plant was going to shut down and they had made retirement plans and it was, you know, Florida was starting to sound pretty good to some of them who weren't thinking about it before. And so that's, that's one of the main things I'm working on now is making sure that we can operate the plant safely and reliably until June 1st of 2025. We've been meeting with employees on a continual basis. I have ongoing one-on-one meetings with every employee at Columbia and Edgewater. We're meeting with the union quarterly at both plants to make sure that all employee concerns are being addressed. We're making progress. I'm out with each crew making sure that if they have safety concerns or operating concerns they're getting addressed. And then we put in place a lot of programs to help them with this transition. I think the big one, the one I'm most proud of that we did as an organization is this Future Fill Position Program. What we're doing now is we took a look out maybe four or five years to see what retirements were gonna happen within aligned energy. And we are interviewing employees and selecting employees and awarding those positions now. So the employee has no more uncertainty about the future. They know that if they stay to the end of Edgewater there's a line tech position for them to move into. It's their job. So that's been helping a lot. And that's really satisfied a lot of employees that okay, I'm good, I can keep helping operate this plant until shutdown. Future site reuse. So a lot of questions about what's gonna happen to the site. And this is kind of an exciting part. I don't really mean to blast through it. We're working with Vandal Wall Associates. They work with the city on their last comprehensive plan. So they're a known partner here in Sheboygan. And they view Edgewater as having like potentially this central role. It's kind of like midpoint to a lot of exciting things that are happening in Sheboygan County. And here's an overall view of the site. You can see this area right here is was ash treatment ponds, but that's all, that's all an all grassy, big grassy field. Both the only thing you can really do on a closed landfill is install solar panels on it. So that kind of factors into maybe some of the future plans. So we have about 280 acres, but really only about 120 acres is readily developable between wetlands and closed landfill and the big substation we have on site there. There's just some things you just can't move. So Vandal Wall is kind of working on plans, proposals to kind of develop what is developable. They've done a really thorough analysis of all the infrastructure. The site just has a lot of things going forward, especially that mile of lakeshore. And so they've just been factoring a lot of things into the reuse alternatives. Alliant will have an ongoing presence there. ATC is that big substation. We have a landfill. It'd be a good site for maybe batteries or solar panels someday, but not all of it. We definitely wanna work with the city on potential reuse that helps the city and the county meet their goals. Housing keeps coming up over and over again as a potential possible use for the site. They wanna pull in that lake into the site. It's such a great site for halfway between the state park and downtown. Maybe tying that together with bike trails or something like that. So that's all being worked on. Little more about what's going on with Alliant. We're continuing on with our plans to transition our fleet. We are now the third largest operator of wind energy in the country. We have 1,800 megawatts. We've announced plans for over a gigawatt of solar in the state. Some of that currently coming online. Back in 2005, you know, almost half of our energy was coming from coal. In 2030, we're still on path to having just one coal unit left. And that's our Tamil power plant out in southeastern Iowa. Edgewater and Columbia will be shut down by then. Those are our plans. These are our announced solar projects that I've all been approved by the Public Utility Commission. Spread throughout our footprint. Again, distributing that energy out to where the demand is. We have a project in Phonlet called Community Solar that our customers can subscribe to. If you don't want to put solar panels on your roof or in your backyard, you don't want to maintain that or pay the cost in installing it. You can buy a portion of a Community Solar project and get the benefit of renewable energy, but don't have to worry about it breaking. Alliant Energy will take care of that. That's just off of 1.51. Just kind of next door to our combustion turbines. We just had groundbreaking last week. What was it, Laura? At Kohler and in Sheboygan for our customer hosted solar. That's where we're paying rent to the city and to Kohler to allow us to put our solar panels on their property. And those are now commercial and producing energy. Pictures from the ribbon cutting. Onion River is now under construction and that's 150 megawatts of solar farm, over 1,000 acres in the town of Holland.  And Onion River is far from that and most of our solar projects in the state are that way. Really, we're just partnering up with farmers who want to participate and who want that steady income and that's why you kind of see the patchwork. This is farmers that have elected or property owners that have elected to participate. With Wisconsin having about 177 days of sunshine out of the 365, how reliable can this be? It's remarkable. And it's just how the capacity is changing. We're getting, we've been doing solar at a length of about 10 years on a small scale. And with our newest installations, we're seeing about a 35% capacity factor close to wind. One of the technology advancements is bifacial solar panels where you have collecting surface on the top and on the bottom.  A bifacial panel will collect sunlight from the backside, reflected sunlight that will produce enough current in the panel to warm it up and melt the snow on the top and then it gets back to full output again. But if you have, so you said, what is this, the capacity here? This is 150 megawatts. 150 megawatts, when it's sunny, right? We expect about a 35, a 30 to 35% capacity factor from that. So on average, it'll be producing about 50 megawatts of energy like around the clock. But if it's not sunny for a month, then I mean, I'm trying to understand the average concept. If it's 35% of that. On an annual average. On an annual average. If it's not sunny for two months, which we had in March and April of this year, what would the output of that be during that, those two months? Yeah, it'll be in the, it'll be a significant fraction of that. You know, it'll be definitely be less than 150. And that's really the, that's the mysograph that we were talking about. That's why it's not suspected. That's why I wanna try to really understand that. And that's why battery technology is important. I will ask that we hold all questions and comments so we can allow Eric an opportunity to finish his presentation. Thank you. I think we're getting close. So batteries, batteries are gonna be a key in the future with more renewables. You know, we need a, since there is no storage really right now, we need a place to put electricity when the sun's not shining, when the wind's not blowing. And we have two, well, this is our, we now have three of battery projects that are in operation. One, kind of in rural Iowa. One in Portage that just started up last month and then another one in Cedar Rapids that's almost identical to this one. Small scale, it's just a 10 megawatt hour, it's like five megawatts for two hours is kind of how that's, how the calculation works. And it's just us getting a sense for how does, how does batteries fit into the myso market? How will this kind of play a role in this renewable grid of the future? We've also made an announcement that we're going to electrify our, our heat of trucks. You know, you see our trucks running around everywhere. We're going to do our part to, you know, to reduce greenhouse gas emissions through vehicles. You know, we're, we're just going to continue to be members of the community, even though the power plant will be shutting down our, where we, we have a line crews here and distribution system that we're going to continue to maintain. Our employees have, have always been, you know, proud to be parts of the community. Retirees are active volunteers and that's not going to change. So really allowing energy's purpose, you know, is to, it's to serve our customers, but it's to also build stronger communities. And, and we really just want to make sure people understand we're not going anywhere. We still want to, you know, help support Shiboy Inc. And that, that's just going to continue. Bye.