Hi everyone. Welcome back to our second meeting. It's really exciting to see you all here. Just a reminder that we are recording the meeting so it will be available on YouTube. If at any point you want to go back and watch some information, feel free to go to YouTube and just all you have to do is type in the search ECAC Renewable Task Group and you'll actually see all the task groups will probably show up. And so you can watch the others as well if you're interested in what they've been doing as well. So I just wanted to very quickly start with the land acknowledgement, but a couple of things I want to remind everyone to please just start with your pronouns again. So I'm Stephanie Chigrello. Again, I'm she, her and if for any reason at some point this meeting does get zoom bombed. Remember that you can just close yourself out of the meeting or we'll shut down the meeting if we can't remove the person will tell you what to do. So just be aware that that a zoom bombing will be inappropriate language or images. And you can just immediately close yourself out of the meeting and leave the meeting. So I want to start with the land acknowledgement. So this is a statement of the indigenous heritage of the land. We humbly acknowledge that we stand on non attack land. Acknowledging also our neighboring indigenous nations, the network and the Wampanoag to the east, the Mohegan and Pequot to the south, the Mohegan to the west, and the apanaki to the north. And with that, I would like to turn it over to Gazi Haya. Thanks, Stephanie. So I'm Gazi Haya, two first names, my pronouns are they them. And I just want to remind us of our agreements that we talked about last time to put people and relationships first to stay aware of our language to avoid jargon or technical terms to really pace ourselves and give ourselves the opportunity to have a slow and thoughtful pace. To share more if you're typically a quiet person and think about stepping back. If you're one who tends to talk a lot to do our best to keep everything that's shared here, confidential, and to be thinking about learning about personal and cultural values of everyone in in the group remembering that what's good for you might not be good for everyone. So I just want to take a quick moment and make sure that those agreements still feel okay for everyone and if there's anything that anyone has thought of that they'd like to add to our list. No pressure if there's not something that comes up for you. Okay, and if someone has something that they'd rather share in an email or one on one conversation you can always reach out to myself or Stephanie. Thank you. This is Jim Newman. I use he him, his pronouns. We at the last meeting. asked if the members of the committee might ask a few questions of some of their friends, your friends. And around some specific topics. Do you want to sort of talk a little bit about sort of what we learned out of that. Yes, so not everybody had a chance to respond but I really appreciate those who did. Jen, did you want to say something. I didn't share what I had what I gleaned and I can do that. Yeah, I was just going to say anybody who didn't get a chance yet, just feel free to email me those and we'll add it to the mix. I just wanted to share briefly some of the themes that came up from the responses that I did receive. The major theme was the idea of that the people who were responding felt that it is important for renters to have access to renewables. But that landlords really need to be given very concrete incentives to do so there were a few ideas around how to motivate landlords. One person shared that, well, they're asking what can be done to reduce the risk for landlords in making an investment that will pay dividends in the long term. So like making sure that the investment is something that will turn out to be positive for the landlords, and they offered some ideas that perhaps and I don't understand all of these but that someone could contract for excess power back to the grid. There was also a question of is collateral provided and to me that seems like are we are we there's another person who talked about subsidizing the landlords so offering landlord some chunk of money to be able to make these investments. And pretty much everyone talked about making the incentive or the motivation be financially related. And one person brought up an idea of having an incentive of some sort of designation as a green building and having a maybe a resource guide for renters to be able to look specifically to what property managers or complexes are considered green buildings or offer renewables. And another response talked about how the impact of the renters themselves and the community around prioritizing and being excited about access to renewables would be helpful in influencing landlords. So, did anyone want to clarify anything that I said, or add a little something. We will have time for everyone to share but maybe, you know, if there was anything that I said that you wanted to add to.  There's just more question around because I just want to clarify, you're speaking of solar. I mean, I think. Yeah.  You know, there are different ways to go about it. So, like the will and I guess this this person I spoke to said that, you know, laws and rules can can change is just that it would just take, you know, the time and energy invested by somebody who's like willing to do that I guess and, you know, I don't I don't know if that's true or not with classic management and specifically, but, you know, you know, I don't know has anyone like tried, I guess that's the thing because it's like incentive. So incentive stuff is important, obviously, but what about just like, there has to be some like will on their part right to like make you know like a like permit it. Yeah. So that's kind of like where I was in the conversation with someone. Yeah, thanks. That's a great, great comment. And thanks. Both Jen is he for go talking about those things and going through it. Thank everybody who participated and, you know, this whole idea of sort of, okay, let's take something out of this meeting. Let's go back. See what it means to other people who are we sort of know about, I think is is really valuable for this process. And you know it. It's great and if we can do it that's great and if it turns out that it's tricky, then that's fine. So we had a moment. We had some time in between our meeting and Andre and put together a little, a little homework around the community choice aggregation and that process and what that means. I'm hoping everybody got a chance to sort of check out that video. And Andre and Dwayne will do a quick sort of update recap on that information. Then we have an opportunity to ask questions if there are things you thought were interesting or things that were confusing. This is a chance to ask questions before we sort of dive into the meat of the conversation for today, which is really kind of about that as a, as a, there are a couple of particular strategies around that. Andre, you want to jump in? Yeah, I think I'll just go through the slides and people can ask questions as, as I go. That's all right. How much did people get to see the, the video. Is that something that people got a chance to check out. Yeah. Okay, great. Awesome. So it's a pretty basic introduction to the idea of community choice aggregation. And it's buying the electricity in bulk choice means choosing the source, according to our preferences. And community means that we're in control of the money we decide the rate we collect, we get the money. From, from all the customers that are in our group. And it's going to include Northampton, Amherst, and Pellum. This is something in process that's being worked on. Yeah, I can see Taya asked, is there an analogy and the, you know, this, this is an idea of a fundraiser. You buy food in bulk, you choose to support a local grocery and everybody buys the food at the rate you choose. The funds go to, in this case, our own choices for electricity. So this is how the whole idea got started with residents and then the town officials and we've been working for two years. I'll just say again, clearly, this a CCA does not mean you're becoming an electric utility. We don't take over the lines. The ever source still does all of that line work and provides the electricity to the homes. There's the supply that we're able to purchase and sell. So, and just by the way, community choice energy is the same thing as community choice aggregation. If you pay an electric bill, this is something might look a little familiar. There's a supply charge and a delivery charge. And again, the CCA sets the rate for the supply and gets the money from everybody in our area. And then the utility still gets the delivery charges. And there's different levels of green in CCAs. And the one that we are aiming for is CCA 3.0. These are made up really, but the ideas that, you know, the more you localize, the more democratic it can be. And one of the ways it's going to be democratic is that community members will serve on an advisory committee and be represented by one or more members on the board, which is built broad. And then also the other idea is that you don't have to go out and buy your own renewable energy that you will get more renewable energy in your electricity because we're all collectively purchasing more. And it's been a long process, but right now we're writing a plan, an agreement for the three towns, and we'll, once we have the plan written that will go to public review, and we hope that you'll all be part of that. So I didn't let me say anything during that whole time. Tell me if you want me to go back to any slides or just ask questions. Thanks, Andrea. In this. So in there, there's sort of a very quick outline, similar to the outline that was in the video with a little bit more depth. So if you've got a chance to see the video, it's a mildly complex sort of structure that's aimed at doing some kind of cool things. And so there's a question here about, are any of the things that you heard in there, do they really resonate with you when you look at them you say, oh man, I love that part. Are there any of those in there, you look at that and you say, whoa, that part makes me really nervous. I'm not sure how to think about that. And that'll give us then we'll sort of come back to this in a sec, how we jump into a deeper conversation about a couple of particular topics around there. So anybody want any questions or comments on on that description. Yeah, Jen.  One of the things about communities that have done CCA's and like half of practically half of the communities in Massachusetts have done just their own town is that you have you want to keep people. So you keep the rates as comparable as possible. And in studying it, we've seen that, you know, the rates fluctuate with the utility. And so sometimes the communities are above. Sometimes they're below. Little bit more time. They're, they're above. So Duane's students, people who work with Duane did that study and the answer is it will be competitive. It'll be very similar. Most people won't notice a difference. Maybe I can add a little bit to that and I try to be as simple as I can. And that is I want to just clarify a little bit when Andres suggested that we would set our own rates. To some extent, we do have discretion of what would, how we could set, could set the rates for all the members of the of the aggregation. Obviously, we, the aggregation, the CCA needs to cover its cost of paying for the electricity that we buy in bulk from the electric suppliers that serve, that provide electric supply to, to, to master's its customers. So we would, we'd obviously have to set a rate that at least, at least covers the cost of buying that electricity from the wholesale market through a retailer that would we, we as the community choice aggregation would negotiate a contract with a retail electric supplier supplier for a specific rate to buy that energy in bulk. The idea is that buying the energy in bulk provides us a bulk purchase and would expect to get a good rate. What Andres is referring to particularly with regard to discretionary how we can sort of set the rates ourselves. And this would be a result of a lot of discussion and with with the advisory board and representation and so forth. I think that what municipal aggregations or community choice aggregation generally do is, is take that cost of the electricity that they obviously need to at least set the rate at that level but then provide a bit of an adder, add a little bit to that, to that rate that everybody pays a little bit more and we're talking about portions of a cent, a kilowatt hour. The more money that the CCA would have discretion over the higher we set that additional amount the more money the CCA would have to invest in local renewable energy generation. But obviously we can set it too high because the rates need to stay competitive with what you would otherwise be be be paying the utility whether you're on basic service or your own competitive supplier. And importantly also, we, the CCA would not want to set it too high just to quote unquote quote unquote scare people away out of the program. It is an opt opt opt out program so basically all ratepayers residential ratepayers particularly would be a part of the of the aggregation, but they would need to be informed by regulation that they're becoming a part of this aggregation, and an easy step, an easy process for them to opt out at any point, if they want to. Thank you. So as you can see Jen and everybody. Even just talking about the cost is a complex, complex thing. So there are a couple of key things about this. This process as, as Andrew was saying, it's like they've been working on it for a couple years but it's just at the beginning it's still really like the ideas are forming the structures are beginning to form. Now is a really good time to talk about it and to understand how does it what does it have to be to serve you what does it have to be to serve you. Because now is the time when those ideas can really be start to make it into what this thing looks like. It is kind of a big deal it, you know it's electricity for three towns. It's not necessarily everybody but it's it's a lot of everybody. And that's not a that's not an insignificant thing. It's this is kind of a big deal. But before we jump into this will go Jen you have something else you want to say. Yeah, I just, I mean I saw because he has enough though so I don't. Did you want to say. Okay, sorry miss you. That's okay. I was just going to clarify that opt out means everybody who currently gets ever source will be switched to the community choice aggregation unless they take a step to say no thank you I don't want to be involved. So that's something that will be really important for landlords to communicate to their renters and for the CCA to be aware of making sure how to, you know, make that information available in accessible formats so that people because it's not necessarily going to be cheaper. Right. And so we'll come back to this in a sec. Thank you for that clarification that's awesome.  Definitely put your hand up let's get it clarified. This is going to be tons of stuff in this that is maybe things you're not sure about or I'm not sure about it's like what's that. But I didn't have a question. And then I'll be quiet. I'm sorry. I'm just, and I might have missed this because I, but within the, is there any like, sort of income based like scale for like that people, you know, would rates that we get any like different rates. Is that something that is being, you know, considered in this process in this planning process. You understand. Yeah. What will be able to do is funnel the money to projects that we choose. And so we can funnel it to in ways that will benefit. If we have lower income, if we want to do that if we, if we, you know, have enough money to go around at the beginning, it's going to be a little bit tight because we'll, you know, we'll just be getting started. We won't have a crude, you know, built up a lot but whether we can actually change is that different like not everybody having to pay into the adder I'm not sure it's very legalistic but there's certainly ways that we can spend the money in ways to advantage people would benefit from not being paying so much. And part of this discussion is what's going to be important. You know what what things make it work for people what things get in the way. A couple of notes on one of them is, you know, a couple of questions came up in our conversation last time around assistance and the other built in systems of fuel support. And those follow you through the utility. So those don't change. Yeah, that's what I was just going to make sure we clarify is that there are income based programs through ever source, and there's separately fuel assistance, and both of those programs it sounds like from what Andrew and Drain understand would continue, even the ACA versus something like next amp where they don't go well together this apparently wouldn't negatively impact your access to fuel assistance or the income based rates. Stephanie you have something. So I just wanted to add to that. There would be an extensive information campaign so people would get information about all of this. And it would be very clearly spelled out. You know, we want to make sure that people have the information that they need. So, and we're required to do that. We're legally required to do that. Yeah, there's a whole the requirements around the information when it actually happens, which is a ways off. The requirements around how it gets communicated are huge. Yeah. If someone wants to sort of opt out and wait and see where that will there be like an annual time when you could reconsider and join in. Probably it'll be anytime you want. Yeah, yep, yep, you can you can opt in when when you want. And you can opt out when you want. Yeah, but you start out opted in. Yeah. Um, so I'm just going to remind everybody of sort of some of the principles that we did that we kind of that surfaced at the last meeting as a way to sort of think about, right, what do we do, what do we think about this as a particular thing are there particular actions that we think are valuable to to sort of prioritize. So first, with the principles out of this group from last time, one of them was the first one was to really to reduce our carbon emissions in an equitable and inclusive way to create systems that enable all members of the community to participate in climate action meaningfully. And that's, that's big and that's part of what we're talking about today. The second one is to design solutions in ways that don't advantage landowners or people with means as opposed to advantaging people without means and renters. That is important and that's part of what we were just discussing. And third is to emphasize working with landowners and property managers, particularly around multifamily housing, and that landowners and property managers are part of the process and part of the action as well. And the fourth is to create policies and systems that align business owner and property manager incentives with ecological and human health and wellness. So that we're not working at cross purposes with our incentives and our policies seem pretty good. Anybody have any questions about that. I just wanted to say a quick welcome to Cedric Cedric has joined us. Awesome. Welcome. And thanks for the way. The principles in mind, which is just exactly what we've been talking about. We, there, the ourselves and the committee co chairs under and Dwayne have suggested there are a couple of big what we're calling big moves or big actions. We're going to do the CCA and to renew renewable energy, mostly solar, but renewable energy in general. That are what we call strong candidates for including in the plan, the overall climate action plan. One of those is developing community owned solar. There's a lot of different meanings in that term. And it would be great to have a conversation about what do we mean by communities what what would be like to see as what community owned solar means. And then the second is the idea of buying renewable energy from outside of the town of Amherst or outside of the three town area versus developing it locally. And the question is sort of what are principles and how we think about this, tell us about those two actions. So I'd like to start with the idea of community owned solar and say that, you know, one version of what's called community owned solar is that the town develops solar projects, which they've already done, but develops new solar projects. And so the, the solar project is owned by the town like energy is owned by the town, and it feeds our, you know, potentially our process or it feeds the grid in general. So that's a version of a community owned solar project. Another version of a community owned solar project is one in which I think Jake was talking about this a little last time. In which a group of people get together with somebody who is a person who does this kind of thing. And then a developer says, okay, we're going to develop this, and we're going to own the electricity we're going to own the use of it we're going to own where to get sold that. And that's something that is that it's also sort of falls into the category of community owned solar, but it's not a publicly owned process. Another version of this and is actually way more than three. In which a solar developer works with a community group, or a couple of community groups to develop a solar project that then people can residents can kind of buy into his owners. And then those people who buy in, they are can use the energy and can and participate in the growth and the value of that solar project over time. Those are three very different versions of this, although they're all kind of the same in different ways. So I'd like to sort of think about from our first principle of sort of reducing carbon emissions in an equitable and inclusive way. Which of those activities really, really makes sense to you, which of them do you look at and say well that's nice but it doesn't really matter to me. And are there things in there that you think well if we're going to do this we really need to do this too. Those are those are sort of the big questions that I have for now to start this conversation. Can you explain the third one again. Sure, let's see I'll use an example. There is a project in that I know of in Codman Square in Boston Dorchester in Boston. There are two community groups that banded together to sort of initiate this development of solar power on a, I think it's on a site that's owned by Mastio T because of the tracks that go through there. I think there's a couple of Mastio T sites.  And over a certain amount of time then that amount goes down and you get your you having bought in you get your electricity for cheaper and cheaper over time. It's not a bad model. It's also the kind of thing that the CCA process could do and instead of you buying you're participating in the CCA. But instead of your rate going down over time, the CCA is making more money over time, and that money can then be put back into activities that might, you know that might suit you in some way might be you know renewable insulation or new equipment or something in places that you were living in or other you know incentives that can go to to members. Jake, do you want to talk about our Andre and Dwayne do you want to sort of talking about any of that. Yep. I don't have as many specifics about the CCA, but I'm very, it's really happy and encouraged to watch the video and know that this process is underway. I love the idea of local ownership and eventually then the projects as well. Ultimately ever source is a publicly traded stock exchange company that's paying probably a lot of, you know, high salaries and such which is ultimately coming from the rate payer so I really encouraged to know that this is where the local community is heading and I think back to back up my preferred pronouns are key in his. My question about which of those scenarios is more equitable I think it's certainly the third one. Second scenario that I was explaining last, last session we had. So I, I think Dwayne and Andre will have specifics about the CCA offer that input. And I also had a question the same question as Jen so that was a good question earlier about the different levels of adders or off takers based on perhaps consumption. Maybe if they say, for example, a business as a high consumption, perhaps they have a reduced rate or maybe even a higher rate because they're ultimately taking or using resources. Jake just so you know we're having a little bit of trouble with your audio I'm not sure why it. So it's a little bit muffled sometimes so I think we got most of what you said but just so you're aware. Jen, you want to say something. I didn't live two things. I don't think I'm not sure that I understand the difference between two and three. I think I do but if somebody can clarify that and then Jake because of the muffling I missed you were talking about one being more equitable equitable than the other and I just kind of miss that because there's a lot of crunching and I'm sorry about that can you hear me. The third one is more equitable because that is. I'm having trouble. I guess I would just offer that I think the question of equity is is nuanced, both in terms of what the definition of equity is, but also with regard to I think each of these models can express equity or not, depending on sort of how you define that but more so in the nuances once we get into that in terms of in each of these cases it's really a question of where is the money coming from to pay for the capital cost of the solar and that can be a combination of individuals or the town or the CCA taking ownership roles through equity investment in these projects and a role of loans or debt financing for these projects and then where do the benefits go in terms of the the not only the benefits in terms of potentially good prices on electricity that would come from these projects, but also in terms of where does the rates of return, if you will, or the profits of the of these investments go. In each of these cases, depending on how who the players are and how that's organized with regard to who these who these owners are, what, what, what members of our community are are investing, or in the case of municipal ownership to some extent, that's ownership by everybody, in an ideal sense at least. So I think, I think in each of these cases there's the, the, the issue of equity and the distribution of those costs and benefits really gets into more details of of of the specifics of in each of these cases. Can I just clarify. So, right now we're talking about different ways to have local solar panels. Right. And we're talking about that because we want to think about with the CCA where we buy the solar from, whether it be some solar field or I don't know what they're somewhere else or if we want to try and have our own source of solar right here and how and now, now we're talking about different versions of how to go about that. Is that correct. Mm hmm. Yeah, and kind of the reason to do that. Yeah, go ahead, Don. You need to unmute yourself. You're still not unmuted. Try again. Nope. I'm watching I can see. There you go. Hey. I forgot I was muted by whoever muted me way back. But in any event, it seems to me we're talking about two different things we're talking about a company, if you will, a CCA that basically is a supplier distributor of of electricity, which it's buying from someplace else, and the ownership of a generator of electricity, which is this whole idea of participating in an ownership way with solar panels to make this thing easy. I don't, I mean, I'm not really well versed in this. And maybe you all can help me. My understanding is we're buying electricity through the grid. Um, can you buy electricity from your own generating source or does it go through the grid and come to the CCA? I mean, is there really a distinction between saying we're, we're buying our own generated electricity as opposed to we're generating electricity, putting a pile of other electricity and buying back green generated electricity from the grid. And maybe you can help me understand that. Does that make sense. Hmm. Okay. Do you want to talk about that. Yep. And, and it gets complicated, I guess, but it will try to very simple version. Absolutely. You know, unless you have solar on your roof and you're using it right in your house, and it never escapes your house. Then only in that case can you say I am consuming solar electricity that's coming from that solar panel. In the case where you have a solar project in a field, say it's in Amherst it's in a field it's co owned by some combination of either the town or Amherst residents or the CCA. The electricity physically and electronically that electricity goes into the grid, and it follows the laws of physics. It goes down the wires, the way, and don't ask me to explain this part, but it goes down the wires the way physics prescribes how electricity flows and whether those electrons are often called green electrons get to your house in the house of the owners is anybody's guess and I can assure you that you can trace that those electrons. That being said, you know, Massachusetts and many other states have organized sort of contractual paths by which a owner of a project that might be far away, or a CCA that has a contract to purchase the, the, the power that comes from that solar farm or an array, then they can, and they contractually agree to purchase all the electricity that comes from that array that can be helpful to the array, and then the CCA can also take claim to providing their customers with power coming from that array. It's not, it's not, it's not the exact electrons that were spun off by that array for sure. But it's contractually can be traced to those to that, that project. So, I'm sorry, but so then what we're really talking about is incentivizing the production of green electricity, because you're not really buying the electricity that gets generated from a particular place. The more we want to, whether by contract or otherwise, Dwayne, the more we want to buy green electricity, the more that gets produced to a certain extent. I might take that a little further, huh, Dwayne? Yeah, please. That, that, well, yes, it's not the exact electrons. We're actually contracting with those producers for that electricity. And that's what, that's what happens now, right? Yeah, but your, every source contracts with specific producers, and to some extent they just buy from the grid because they can do that. And the ISO managed. So there's another group outside that managed it. Right. But the idea of the CCA is the CCA would actually pick particular producers and pay those producers for the energy they were generating. So it's pretty direct. Okay. And I'm sorry to kind of dominate this. I don't usually talk that. But what you're, what you're basically saying is, yeah, we have a contract with this producer of solar electricity. We have that contract. And we pay them for that. I take it. The electricity itself goes through the grid and whether we get that electricity actually, or some other electricity, because a lot of it, as you were saying, Dwayne depends upon peak times and what plants are running and what plants aren't running. And, and I happen to do an investigation into a power plant and Aguam. I mean, I understand ISO and I understand the whole piece and I don't mean to confuse things. So maybe I should just shop. That's the easiest thing. Yeah, so there, there's ways to help green the grid. And that's the, and then there's saving up money and actually putting solar on the roofs of buildings that will use the solar because there's lots of people during the day using electricity there. By little by little over time, ideally, we do that more and more, and we draw less of the electrons from the grid. So, in a way that is creating a community resource, because collectively we're, we're taking less, we're having to purchase less from some other provider elsewhere. And the more we can do that, you know, eventually, perhaps we can have little micro grids where a few buildings can share the electricity that one building that has a good roof for solar actually produces. Those are the kinds of creative ideas that that excite those of us who've been working on this for a while. Yeah, and, and you know, as, as it's become clear again. This is a complicated little world, and it's very regulatory driven. But what we're trying to try and do is get to the parts of this process, which it's very tricky to do, get to the parts of this process that are that actually affect us as people. And what do we care about in terms of the parts that affect us as people because you guys you have something you want to say. No, yeah. Yeah, go ahead. Yeah, I was just going to try and clarify again to Jim's point I'm feeling a little lost in the weeds here. But is, am I understanding it correctly that there's sort of two driving forces. One is to use cleaner energy, which is better for our health and planet and all that. And then another is to try to move away from dependence on outside. Like, like, almost like local food, like if we can grow our own, then we're not so dependent on someone far away to grow our food and so we could take care of ourselves better. Is it a little bit like that in terms of energy like if we were able to be in charge of our energy here, then if something happened in the rest of the world we could a little bit better take care of ourselves here. I think those are important attributes and values that clean energy and distributed energy can help to address. But what I what I think the other perspective I wanted to bring to this and to get to sort of Don's point but I think also a gazikaya point. The other way sort of to frame this or look at this is that there is expectation that the Commonwealth through all of its program with programs and policies will be moving to 80 100% renewable electricity generation by 2050 is sort of the time frame they're talking about in Amherst we want to sort of be a leader and do that quicker. So to some extent, you know, we could just sit back and say, Okay, well, the Commonwealth is going to take care of it and will be will be green by 2050 and we don't really have to do anything. The issue that I think this ownership issue really gets at is that obviously, and we'll talk about solar just as an example of renewables. The solar project in a field owned by a third party is wonderful with regard to reducing our greenhouse gas emissions and addressing climate that we all are critical and is that we care about. But it's not really that different than a power plant economically. And in terms of the welfare and the economic value to the community.  It sells electricity at the rate it can get and all the profit rates of returns and so forth accrue to the owners out of out of out of community and probably out of state even owners of many of these solar projects are being developed now, typically as opposed to being financed by Wall Street capital. And so the idea of local ownership is not only to address and contribute and protect even accelerate the contributions to reducing carbon to addressing the climate issue, but also to recognize that this clean energy and distributed energy being sort of small, small energy, as opposed to centralized power plants really opens up for the first time really in the in in our electricity opportunities for what we've referred to a sort of energy democracy where individuals and local organizations can take more control and decision making with regard and ownership of their power production, because it doesn't take what it takes to a centralized power plant, which you know, citizens of the community aren't going to take that on. And so it's really, I think a lot of this is really about how does Amherst and the CCA in this for Northampton Pelham and Amherst really want to look at this with regard to how can we not only capitalize on the greenhouse gas mitigation that solar and renewables will provide, but also an opportunity to keep the not only keep those keep that economic value local, but also in a way that would distribute that value equitably across the community. Dwayne, that was lovely. Oh, thank you.  We are we're trying. It's awesome. Thanks, that was great. If I were talking to other like community members who maybe identify as low income or BIPOC folks, what would be ways that like questions that I would want them to know to ask as this process is going and what would I want to tell them are ways that that we could get involved in making sure that we're a part of the conversation about where those, you know, rate levels are set that they're not too high that it's going to put people in jeopardy. And, you know, what are what are the questions that we need to be thinking about what are the ways that we can get involved to ask those questions. Great question. I'm gonna hand it back to you guys. Yeah. One of the things that will probably be offered is up options. Those will be more expensive. Those will be ways for people to purchase more. You know, the greenness of the supply. And, you know, that's something that people will need to be very well educated about so that no one pops up without understanding, you know, what it's going to cost them. We might have, you know, everybody will be at, you know, 25% of their electricity coming from renewables based on what we contract with the supplier. So that would be the basic and then pales, you know, a couple of cents more. And per unit of electricity, and you can get 50%. Or all the way to 100%. So I think that's something for people to be really aware of, you know, sort of consumer awareness around energy. So I would think as well that there's a couple of things here within the structure of this company, as Don described it, is the community choice aggregation thing that are probably good questions to ask. And I would be interested in whether these questions make sense to everybody on the call. You know, one of them is probably, is there some kind of community board that I could be involved in, or I could get somebody involved in, and is that something that is likely to happen. It will happen. We're writing the, you know, legal plan right now, and putting in very strong community advisory committee. So that's great. Are there any thoughts about from from the group about what, you know, what that needs to be or, or how, like any questions about well, how would you be involved in it or things like that does anybody have questions about that. I'm just wondering any of the community leaders, what would make it possible for you to be involved in something like that. Like what kind of needs would need to be met for you to be able to set aside time to go to a, I don't know, monthly, I don't know how often they would be at the board meeting. I think specified time, just, you know, say it's two hours, semi monthly, or something like that one night a week. So specified time. Great, Jen. Oops, wrong button. Yeah, I was going to say the same thing. I mean, you know, just with concerns of family responsibilities and work, etc.  I think that's a great comment and the comment of recognizing that, look, this is a community board, we're going to have to think about community members and what community members actually need in order to really be effective in this role. I think that that's a great, great comment. That's huge. You got some. Yeah, I'm just, I'm sorry, I just want to kind of honing is this is the idea of a community board in reducing to its essence. Are we talking about, you know, in comparison with a more capitalist model of ownership of a generator of electricity. Are we really talking about, you know, how to distribute or redistribute what in a capitalist system would be the profits of this. You generate electricity, you, you buy electricity and because it's community owned and because it's kind of cooperatively owned. But isn't the, you know, profits don't go to as somebody said earlier, high salaries or whatever else. This board would be kind of putting together a plan of what to do with this, these excess funds or or what what is the board trying to do. So I want to clarify, we're talking about a community advisory board, as opposed to the organization that is, is a different name, right? Remind me, Dwayne, what's the, there's three entities, right? The advisory committee would be the, the one that people from the three towns, you know, who are just really interested, you know, a couple of people I should have some expertise that we can all draw on. And then the aggregation board would be representatives from the different towns. And that'll be much smaller. And they will be the ones who make the decision but the community advisory committee would have representatives, non voting representatives. That's how we're thinking about it right now. And then there's staff. There'll be staff who actually run this, you know, pseudo business, it's sort of a public business. And they take care of day to day stuff. The direct board of directors takes care of the major policy with community members at the table and, you know, ideally after things have been run through discussions at the community advisory committee. Yeah. Great. Okay, go ahead. Yeah, Jen. A quick question. I just, when you were mentioning that it's sort of like a business, like what, what is the legal structure of this entity? Good question. It's called a joint powers entity. And entity is actually the legal word. That's why we want to agree on a name soon, because that's awful. The valley green energy is is the name that we have thought of so far. It would be the name of this thing that runs the aggregation. And also other programs that even municipalities that aren't a part of the aggregation could join in. We like to compare it to the bike share. You know, we already have that but if we wanted that that could be something that this organization started. And other municipalities could join in just for that. But don really to answer your question. Yes, the, the municipal, municipally appointed board makes the decisions about how to spend the money that comes through. Yeah, what would be the profits if you were talking about this in a more traditional as Dwayne said earlier, you know, some hedge fund owned power plant. Okay. Basically, yeah. Dwayne, you want to talk a little bit to to Jen's question about what the structure, the legal structure is. Is there anything to say about that. Not. I didn't have anything to say, particularly about that. I think this is all really important, I think to some extent. The legal work and structure and details and bylaws and principal documents and so forth that still need to be written and and and that's going to be a process that will require and look for a lot of community engagement. So we're talking I think we're talking a lot of detail that doesn't exist quite yet. So we're sort of more at the structure structure and building the structure in the community engagement part of it. Great. I can answer Jen's question in a certain way. Any town can do and municipal aggregation for their own residents and businesses. But it's just theirs. So the fact that we have three municipalities working together means we have to create a different entity, and, and, and there are different legal ways to do that, and towns do joint projects, all the time they share, you know, trash, waste management, whatever. So the one that we're doing really does set it up as kind of a public business. And maybe I can add a little bit more to that. Let's see where the conversation's flowing. There are legal constraints municipal community, any, any community can develop a municipal aggregation but it needs to abide by the rules and regulations of the Commonwealth that define how to do a municipal aggregation. And so, for example, we would not have a discretion to arbitrarily set these adder values in above and beyond the the electricity price those are need to be reviewed and approved and limits are put on to those by by by the Commonwealth and in this case the Department of Public Utilities. Similarly, there needs to be clear directions for citizens to opt out of the program and information distributed about the program. We're also constrained by legal issues with regard to and this really comes up very much in solar ownership. We're better for worse. And it's not so much of a state thing but part of solar part of investing in solar is really take being able to take take advantage of the federal tax credits that are available for solar, which in my mind very unfortunately are accessible to non tax paying entities. So low income that are below tax paying ranges and municipalities and nonprofits have a really hard time owning outright solar because they leave a substantial incentive and important incentive from the from the federal government on the table. That's that's a rule that can change over time. And so I we sort of that's a moving always sort of a moving target. But yeah, there are legal, legal limits and boundaries and constraints on how this can move this this will be able to move forward. Yeah, and yeah, yeah, that's it. Yeah, thanks. I think that's I think that makes sense you know it's it is a it's a sort of we got a bunch of regulations like everything right we got a bunch of regulations that we have to live in. And this happens to be a pretty complicated world. And so the regulations are relatively complicated. And that's why, you know, this was a staff that does it that's why putting together the documents is such a rattle. And it takes so much time. Because you got to navigate all of that in a reasonable way that gets to the things we actually care about, as opposed to sort of the general way things are done. I do think that one of the things that because he kind of brought up about. So the first question was about sort of how do you get involved what is it what if you care about this how do you get involved how do you get involved with which you answered beautifully. And the second was around sort of understanding the value that it brings. And, and the value that you need it to bring, I think. So I, because you have a different way of asking that you had you did a much better job than I did that. I'm not sure about the, the value piece, but I guess I was just trying to wrap my head around like, you know, sometimes the main goal is to make something more affordable or sometimes the main goal is to make something more accessible. And so I was thinking in this case it's not affordability, there maybe is an accessibility piece, because I think I'm hearing Dwayne saying for folks who might not have been able to tap into a renewable energy source. So I think I'm a different option, if they don't have access to those federal grants or whatever incentives, and I could see how from my perspective as a renter, if I never foreseen being able to put up my own solar panels, then if the town does this it would be a way to participate in renewable energy, which I would like to be able to. So I was trying to identify like what's the, why are we reaching towards this. And then one question I had about the getting involved piece. I think I heard you, Andrew, saying that there's going to be an advisory board, and then there's going to be a board that makes the decisions, and that the advisory board will not have a vote in the board's decisions. I'm wondering, is there any system of accountability that's going to be set up between those two. You know, I think about like our town council the accountability is that we can decide whether to vote for them or not next time. Is there going to be a system, or like something in place where the community advisory board is actually going to have some sort of checks and balances about this decision decision making board. This is exactly what we're talking about in meetings twice a week right now, trying to hammer out, you know, how much power can we get into the hands of community members. And it's, it's an interesting problem, but in some ways, being at the table is maybe more important than being the one who votes, because you can steer things that way. And we might be able to agree that there's three or four members from the community advisory committee on the board of directors as non voting, but participants so that the issues can come up and really be worked out. So it's because of the legal structure, the municipalities have to be the ones who the board is accountable to. But I'm glad to hear encouragement to go in that direction as much as we can. Yeah, I just wanted to say that I think, you know, the success of the CCA is going to be based on the number of people that are involved, and it needs to reflect the needs and desires of the community. Why would people really want to participate so I think there's a real incentive, not just to be dictated by the board specifically I mean the board is going to need people to join and be part of this and actively involved in this. And I think the whole mission of this specifically to meet the needs of the community members. So, there's a lot of incentive to really be responsive to the community advisory board and the community members. There's no direct election of the people, it will be appointed appointments by whoever makes the appointments in the different municipalities and we have three different government systems. And what would be the qualifying criteria for the people who are getting those appointments. I don't think we know that yet. Right. So we have some I mean we've identified some things but none of this is finalized. Yeah, we're talking about it right now. Stephanie. She tried to mute, I bet. I'm curious, Cedric Alini or Jaden or done just what, like, thoughts you have about the concept of being at the table but being a non voting member and how that, how that could work or not work. I think it's a great opportunity to share thoughts and just be involved in the process because I think it's, regardless of our voting power, right, I think it's important for us to be aware of what's happening in our community and to voice it. I don't want to play with the balloon in the back. But to voice our concerns, our ideas and recognize that others are listening to what we have to say and then taking our input and implementing into their decision so I think regardless who will be a great opportunity. Thanks Alini. Yeah, Jaden. Yeah, I definitely agree with what she just said just like being a part of it and being here just like even not having the voting is definitely like enough for that. Thanks Jaden. Awesome. Yeah, Jen. I think, you know, if that is if like the structure dictates that it has to be like that but I think it's interesting. I think the question of like what is the qualifying criteria for people that get appointments. You know, it's like interesting to me and like why couldn't community members vote like I understand that there probably need to be a certain level of expertise. And maybe, you know, but it's not to say that community members wouldn't and or couldn't have that expertise. So, you know, that's where I'm thinking. So, one of my hopes is that people who with an interest would start out with, you know, joining the community advisory committee and learn and become an expert you know I didn't start out as an expert at all. And it's just a resident who thought this was a cool idea and spent the last three years kind of over my head and trying to understand it all. And so, you know, partly because of that. The manager appointed me to the PCAC and the manager would be the one to appoint the directors as well. So, there's absolutely no reason that, you know, someone without professional expertise can be on the actual board of directors. And I hope that, you know, there's sort of stepping stones and that we do a really good job of educating people and bring more and more people on. Represent a lot of different parts of our town than usually get represented. No, I was just going to say, you know, thank you. I like, I like that vision. And I think that feels to me more than just saying I think that makes a lot of sense, Jen, that a pathway. Yeah, go ahead, Lauren. Sorry. She her hers pronouns. I just wanted to also sort of close the loop on something that gives me highest that earlier around sort of the accountability. And if the CCA is ultimately accountable to the towns, and the towns are ultimately still accountable to their residents and citizens. That's, that's also something to keep in mind. In terms of the influence that the community can have over how the, how the CCA is held accountable. Can you expand on that just a touch in, in what way I mean. Well, I think in, in the way that the CCA is upholding the values of the residents that it's intended to serve. If residents, well, we have the Community Advisory Committee and that's intended to give residents a voice. And if that, if that structure ends up feeling still limiting. Then there's an opportunity there to turn to town governance and to say as residents, we want the way that the CCA is held accountable to be changed because we're not seeing our values reflected in the decisions that the CCA is making. Ideally the Community Advisory Committee will serve that role and that's, that's not, you know, going to be necessary. But always something to keep in mind the relationship there between the towns and the CCA and the residents. I will tell you something that we have been talking a lot about on the, in the little subcommittee that's working on the agreement among the, and the governance questions. And that's, you know, it's core part of the idea is to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions from our communities. And if we, you know, we imagine other communities are going to want to join us. And how do we keep that commitment to both to equity and to the greenhouse gas reductions so that it, you know, it in most places it's not a green option. It's, you know, it's, that's not what they're trying to do at all. They're using it as a tool to be able to kind of pay for itself and raise money to be able to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. So we don't want that to change in the future. And so the citizens, the residents are going to be really key to helping make sure that continues. Their values are reflected. I just wanted to share real quick. Stephanie somehow got bumped out and is trying to get back in, but is unable to so I don't know. Lauren Delapara, you are host. Yeah, I don't see her attendee list go to attendees. There's panelists and attendees. Yeah, she's not in there. She's not in there. Yeah. Okay. Because he has also a co-host. Yeah, she said that. Can't do it. Okay. Yeah, she said that it should not affect the recording and that we should be okay for the remainder of the meeting. So her apologies. Thank you. Great. Shout out to Darcy's attendees. Hi Darcy. Oh good. Awesome. I haven't been looking at the list. Fantastic. Dwayne, you had something you were going to say. I'm sorry. I'm actually under just beat me to it. I was just going to also indicate and disclose basically that you know one thing that the agreement amongst Amherst Northampton and Pelham is working on drafting is really, really important really to articulate not just the mechanics of the CCA but also the vision and the priorities and the principles associated with the CCA. And as Andre mentioned, really you know, two primary things in addition to, you know, maintaining reasonable rates for everybody is greenhouse gas reductions and equity. And those are important as Andre, and I was going to say, but under beat me to it is really important because it is important for people to recognize that there is a vision for this CCA to expand to neighboring communities and we've had or at least other communities and we've had discussions about what would be acceptable in terms of other communities joining us. What would be acceptable for them to join us without diluting the vision and the priorities and the principles that we have. So that document is going to be really important in my mind. And I don't know exactly the process of which that agreement is going to be hashed out and drafted and whether that agreement itself might be open for public input. We can certainly run some ideas by this group. We're really trying to get it completed in the next month that that would be I think our goal. Don, you were trying to say things a few times and did not. Nope, you're good. No, I'm good. Okay. So this is, this is, this is a great conversation. The, the sort of really understanding, you know, the questions of like, exactly what this is and what that is our, we're not really that the group is not really there yet. What we really are at is what's important. What matters in this process that we put together. And I think we've started to answer some of those questions from this group as to participation matters, potentially pathways to being in the decision making matters. Maybe Andra has suggested that how sort of what criteria might towns need to, or, you know, what values might towns need to sign up to, in order to join the participation if it starts to get wildly successful. Those are I think are great questions. Does anybody have any other sort of thoughts about what those sort of kinds of things that are founding issues might be 70s back. Hi, sorry about that I our network just dropped my husband and I were both on meetings and it just completely dropped us. There's a lot of storms going on around us so I apologize. As the host, it really wouldn't let me and it wanted me to end the whole meeting so the trials of zoom so I'm sorry I missed probably a whole lot of great conversations so apologies. I'm glad you're back, it was all recorded. Exactly. I'll watch it later. I'll sort of ask that question again which is, we've identified a number of really great values and and ways in which we'd like to see those values. What are the values that might be upheld. Are there other things that might be important as well within sort of for us. Other values that might be valuable, or maybe useful, or things that like, does this really cover this. I think people would like to like to bring forward at this point. This is really great. A great conversation. Yeah, Andrea, Andrea and more and both are available with under you are muted. I have a specific question in, if you imagine yourselves, you know, knowing just, you know, this much about CCA, but trying to explain it to somebody else. There, like, one of the pictures in the slides that was particularly useful, you know, if we are going to start spreading the word about it, we want to be able to provide some, you know, visual. And I wondered if we have created anything so far that you saw that was particularly important to your understanding of it. I think that's a great question. Would you mind just doing a quick like click through and we could refresh our memories and then maybe we could say like, Oh, that one. Starting at the tail end. Andrea, you are muted again in case you I know too many buttons. That's about it. Community leaders, do you have any thoughts. I think that the hands holding up the solar is a strong image and and the one. And I mean you're, you're talking about and and this one I think it's going. I was the slide after this one after the utility bill. Yes, this slide that sort of some of the things. Often what the vision is in the long term vision of the community or committee effort. That's great. And I think Dwayne was was so articulate about energy democracy and kind of what that meant about both community participation in the process. And, you know, in sort of at least advising that decision making process as well as, you know, the money staying within the money flow staying within the community and supporting activities that the community gets to decide what should be supported. I think those are, those are pretty compelling and that energy democracy slide I found to be pretty, pretty great. Lauren found that. Did she. Oh, no wonder I liked it. I just want to throw out there that it I've now been in like, I don't know, maybe five beatings with Andrea and Dwayne and Stephanie and Jim and Lauren trying to wrap my head around this and making that video and trying to understand that video and I still feel like I'm having a really hard time understanding this. And I've heard both Andrea and Stephanie say that that's common that this is a very dense and complicated topic. So I just wanted to throw out there that like, the expectation is not that we totally understand this walking away from today's the expectation is that we would just get a little taste of it and from my understanding, the idea of why we want to get a little taste of it is because the town is going to be working on over the next chunk of time, getting the community connected with this idea and supportive of it. Because they feel that it's a good thing for our community. So this is a start just so that we have something to ring a bell, you know, when we start getting some of this education and information that's going to be sent out. And that, that we definitely, you know, everyone in this room can continue discussing and talking about and asking questions about this outside of this meeting in whatever way feels right to you. And, and there's a piece to that like the more questions we ask, even if we feel a little stupid when we're asking them the more questions we ask the better. Andra and Stephanie and Dwayne are going to know what needs to be communicated to the community. So like, part of our job is to like, make ourselves uncomfortable and ask the questions, so that they understand what gaps need to be filled and how best to communicate with the community so that people can really make their own decision about if they want to be a part of it or not. That's based on them really feeling sure about their decision and not just feeling like scared by the enormity of trying to understand something new. And now I would say that this is not a topic for anyone to feel stupid about asking more questions because it's not, it's not obvious to anybody, nobody. I mean, even the people who work in the industry, it takes a while. There's a lot of layers to it. It, you know, it sort of starts out with kind of a simple concept, but the more we're trying to do the more complicated it seems to get so you know, please don't, don't feel stupid asking questions and please do ask questions and there will have to be a lot of information and outreach to the community but you all are sort of at the forefront of knowing that this is something the town wants to do. And so for you, when we start getting the information out you'll have already had some introduction so it will be just that much more familiar to you then it will be to most other people. So you'll actually be ahead of the curve. And we can be ambassadors, you know, sharing with folks as it comes up what we've already learned. Absolutely. Oh, we hope you will be. Yeah. So, Andrew you were saying that you're hoping to have sort of all this sort of fleshed out a little more in the next month. Like what's the timeline. You know, approximately. When is this going to be sort of, you know, really unusual case the state agency that has to review it and okay it has never seen anything quite like it. The things that we want to do have been done in pieces by different ones but not all together. So it's probably going to take them a year to decide. And I just want to add to that Jen that we were in a meeting today with a legal firm that helps communities get this through the entity that approves it. And one example that they used of a community just doing it on their own with something very simple recently took a year and a half. And really, we can't really predict how long it will take even if we have everything all together. If there are questions. It has to go before the Department of Public Utilities and if they have a lot of questions that could take a while, especially because this is more complicated and unique. I mean, it could be a year and a half. It could be two years. We hope it won't be, but, you know, but it, you know, well, we hope it won't be, but it could be. We just have to be realistic that we will try to do as much as we can to make everything as clear to them as possible, but we can't predict. That's a great question though, Jen. And I'm sure it's a question is on everybody's mind who is involved in the committee right now. How long is this going to take? How many more committee meetings do I have to go to? We do hope to get it to the State Department of Public Utilities by the end of the year. That should be doable right Stephanie. I don't know if we can. Yes, I don't. I would think that we'll certainly have something probably by then that's that's the hope is to submit something by then but again, because this is a little more complicated and apparently some of the requirements from the DPU are changing a lot. That's at least what the legal firm has told us. So, you know, we're trying to keep up with the changes and then trying to get our information. So we, we hope to get it submitted by the end of the year. But again, it's the process that, you know, for their approval that we can't predict that's the piece that we can't predict, but, you know, good to what will be important is that we have to get this before the community or the communities, I should say, community is involved. And so the more we have community support for it, the better, you know, and that response is articulated to the DPU that's important to know that this is something the communities really want. And in the form that we're talking that you're talking about in the form that you've constructed. Yeah. That's like everything right it's like, Oh, this is a simple question how long is this going to take. It's like, I'm sorry. That's a very complicated answer. It's amazing. We're, we've got about 10 minutes. And what I think. So we, you know, we asked you to go ask a bunch of questions after the end of the last meeting. And then we asked you questions that provided a bunch of information and it was pretty, pretty valuable. And if there are things that you haven't said about those conversations, definitely send them as an email to Gazikaya, so that we can start to compile those and and respond to them within this group. And it's like, okay, what do we do this time and and it seems in a way kind of obvious. What kind of thing we might do this time as something that we can go out and ask our friends and acquaintances about. And that would be, and I must admit this was Andrews idea. That that I'm going to say this three different ways that go ahead, go out and try to explain this to some of your friends or some people who haven't been in this conversation and record what questions they ask. Because those questions are really going to start to help get going to start to identify both what needs to be communicated better, but also what things are important. And so those are both important parts of the answers we get back out of this. So go to your friends, go to the folks you see on a regular basis. Say, hey, I just was in a meeting we just were talking about this community choice aggregation thing. A couple towns, what they're trying to do. Feel free to bone up and use the video to to try and refresh your memory. And then when you finish explaining so does this make any sense to you what would you want to know. Record those questions. And let's send them back to Kazikaya so that we can collect all that stuff up and have a conversation about this at our next meeting. Any questions about that any thoughts. I just wanted to say not only can you rewatch the video you could actually share it with someone. Absolutely. And you know you could text them the video link and then you could say hey do you do you have any questions, shoot me back the question, you know you can have a conversations but you could also use the video it's publicly available. Yeah, that's a great point. Really, you could even just imagine telling somebody and write down your own questions like because just trying to articulate it might bring up the most important questions. Those questions you know I'm thinking, I need to, you know, write a draft of frequently asked questions that should be like something we do really soon. That's a great idea and you can also just ask your own questions that you have right now. Because in the next day or two you're probably going to think oh wait what about this and oh wait what about this, and you can share those questions to you can ask them. Meanwhile, to just email one of us. We'll try to make it short. Jen, what were you going to say. Yeah, it's not exactly a question of others but I am thinking sort of about the marketing of it and like, you know how the information, you know, will be, you know, shared and just because from talking to neighbors I think there's so little understanding of how I mean like we're, finding it, it's a steep learning curve for everyone, but I just especially, yeah, I don't I think that people just throw out like they pay their electricity bill like throughout the rest and like a lot of times. So even like talking to people about the option to have a renewable supplier for instance like people don't even know that that's available I mean, whether or not they were dropped in, you know, is irrelevant because you know, could be too expensive but the point being that, yeah, I think that this is just there's like a steep learning curve and how this gets marketed is is I'm sure you're thinking about it but it's just on my mind. But the other thing is that there are people including my own self family that you know we've had like solicitors come around in earlier years when we lived here and like, we got really like, we got into something that we didn't realize that we were getting rates increased and you know, and then we had to get out and I mean, it's like it was just really much uglier than we realized on. And so that also complicates things people are just are probably confused and leery. I think that's one of the reasons why that you know we want to make people understand that this is something the towns are behind.  And there are requirements in terms of getting those information out one of the things you were told today is now we're communities are being required to provide information in multiple languages. So that's our requirement now it didn't used to be it is now which is great I think we would have done that anyway, you know, but you know, there's going to be really strict ways we have to get the information to people to make sure that people are very clear what it is that we're offering them. And that's probably going to be more so than those people that just come to your door. You know, so I think it's sort of the way I'm thinking of it is like the Solaris campaign that the town did. There was something specifically that Amherst got behind. It was a town project, and it was different than just having someone knock on your door there were companies that were trying to sort of piggyback on what we did and that's something we'd have to be careful of is to make sure that people are clear what is a town offering versus some other company and we'd have to be clear about that. I'll just add to that as well because I think it's really important differentiation between people that knock on your door or or or send you unsolicited stuff in the mail or give you a call quite frankly, even on your cell phone it seems like you're offering you these you know competitive retail electric suppliers and and the municipal aggregation. And I do know that even at the at the level of the Attorney General, Martha Coakley she's been really concerned about less than scrupulous marketing by read competitive retail suppliers with to directly to homeowners because it creates a really unbalanced power position where they have all the information and you're a consumer that doesn't know too much information. And so she's been really outspoken with regard to trying to rein in the behavior of the retail electric suppliers in soliciting customers directly from the directly residential customers directly. She's very also on the record of very much supporting municipal aggregation because in some way they're they're very similar municipal aggregations also work with as opposed to getting your electricity supply from the utility company you're getting your electricity supply through these retail electric suppliers that compete with each other, but the big difference is really that you have you're in a much better negotiating position, and you have a quote unquote sort of sophisticated, well informed knowledgeable party negotiating and bringing into these agreements with the with these retail suppliers, then, then in the form of the CCA, then, then individual residential customers. I think it sounds also though like that is that is a key item to to man what you are aware of a key item to be aware of when communicating with with community members and sort of understanding that yeah, like I drew a kind of a skivvy situation and and why is this different. And so that's a key communication point. I think that's great. Don yeah. Yeah, my new. No, you're good. Yeah. That's what happens when you're as old as I am you can't quite figure these things out. For me if you all had come to me and I wasn't in this group. What what I would really, what I think is the biggest thing here. I mean, obviously the green energy is the biggest thing, but from my perspective if I was going to sell this it's what vision does this group not not this group but does Andrea's group and Duane's group have in terms of using the revenue what good things are are going to come from keeping this revenue within the community and using it within the community what what's the vision for that. Maybe you can share that in the next meeting. Or we could talk about it in the next meeting I just want to be aware of our time but that's no but that's as a as a question that's a great question to ask. And, and I think that that's, that's part of what we've been getting to, but we're starting to develop some answers right then you guys are developing answers and hopefully this conversation has helped to bring you know, some more clarity and, and, and depth to those answers as well, which is ideal. So, because you guys are anything we're missing here. No, okay. I was just, I think I'd really love for Don's question to be something that we really do talk about. I think that's a great question. So it's time for us to call this quits. I'd like to just thank everybody for your participation. I realized that some of these things, Cedric we haven't heard from you much. Anything you want to jump in on. I'm good. I'm good. I'm really just listening. And I do, you know, just think about what how part of this morning. Well, it's just, you know, that's as I can so I can teach this to kids, you know, so we can learn this and if it's, you know, the way I can just learn this just to get to be able to teach this to a greater than I think we were golden. Well, now this is a biology class or something. So it's awesome. I like it. I'm just learning. Fantastic. Thanks. What a great, what a great way to close out this meeting, man. You nailed it. So, thank you everybody. We do take a chance to, to try and talk to some folks about this community choice aggregation idea and to think up some questions. And we will send it will probably meet again in another three or four weeks, four weeks, something like that. And we'll see you all soon. Thank you so much. Any final thoughts. Stay well everyone. Thanks everyone so much so nice to see you all. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Bye everyone. Thank you. Bye bye.


Okay, thanks for coming this is today my speech is my speech topic is all you need to know to build your own GPU machine learning clouds and this is about me I am the DevOps engineer from TUNAR and I'm mainly responsible for the private-clouds building operation and the maintenance including the container as a service and machine learning cloud platform and the private open-stack clouds. This is today's agenda I would talk about the rise of deep learning and I would talk about some applications of deep learning in TUNAR and then I would talk about the GPU cloud solutions and then some tips of building your own clouds from my practice. Firstly, I want to introduce them I want to talk about some solutions we face now. The rising of deep learning. This year the hot news in the deep learning maybe the AlphaGo has beat Ke Jie in 023. Ke Jie is the world-class Go player and at the last contest he cried and said I couldn't I couldn't find any chance to win because the AlphaGo is too perfect. Another news is that AlphaGo 0 has perfectly beat AlphaGo through self-learning and without human intervention. AlphaGo 0 has started from a blank state and it figures out how to play for itself and it without any human data, any knowledge and all examples or anything. It discovered how to play the game from the first principle and yesterday I heard that there are another version of Alpha, it's called AlphaZero I think and it can play any chess, it's go far beyond the Go game and it can beat the previous versions easily. So this is Husbis. He's the founder of DeepMind as well as known as the father of AlphaGo and AlphaGo 0 and AlphaZero. So his confident smile we can tell that the deep learning would have a great and brighter future and deep learning has go far from the games and it actually have more practical applications. This is the Google drive less car. It has run for very long distance like I think is 200,000 miles and without no accident and nobody heard or injured in in the test and it can't be reached without the technology, without the technology in deep learning. So all those big companies are start fighting for the AI era and among all the resources the talents and the scientists may be the one, maybe in the first place. As maybe some people know that Lee Fei-Fei from Stanford has joined Google and Amazon, the Ren Xiaofei from Amazon has joined Alibaba as the vice president and he's best known project from Amazon is the Amazon Go. Amazon Go is expected to subvert the traditional retail model and also Google has changed its goal from mobile first to AI first. Okay, let's talk about some history. On the top of the picture is the LNET. LNET is maybe the first successful application in the multi-layer neural network and it was used for the handwriting recognition, mostly for the numbers and the zip codes and another huge project is Minist. It's a huge handwritten digital dataset that was started in the 1980s. Here is another big names in deep learning. It's Hinton and Yang. Actually, deep learning is very hot now, but its history is not that easy. Back to the 1960s, you submit a paper related to deep learning, your submission would be rejected. In 2006, Hinton and Yang proposed the idea and the subject of deep learning. It's just another name of the previous research. From those histories, we know that deep learning is already put up for decades, but why it comes to the people's vision again at this moment? I have at least three reasons why. The first one is big data. The data volume and the way we can get the data easily and the data volume is much bigger than the past. The second one is the cost of the computer resources is reduced a lot, such as the GPU and more TPU invented by Google. The popularity of the open source tools such as TensorFlow and some like Keras or Pedalpedal. GPUs are deep learning accelerators because we used to take experiments for several months or several days. We finally find out that our models and our parameters may just default, and we need to change it. Maybe another month passed, the process is quite pain. You can tell from the image on the right, the GPU takes much less time than the CPU to build the same number of the Hinton layers. Here is the NVIDIA stock is catching in the stock market. 20 times in two years it started from, I think it's from 20 to 180 and more. I think they would go higher. This indicated that the high level of hardware through the development of deep learning. Next I would turn into the applications in Kuna. Using the deep learning technology we can turn the computer to smart. The computers can distinguish the good or bad and help to control the risks and to meet the preference, such as we have the following applications in Kuna, like the hotel recommendation based on your order or browse history, and we can calculate the different hotel room type price factor, and we have the smart customer service. The smart customer support service can react much quicker than the human. When you dial a supported number you may wait for quite a long time, but with the robust they can respond in seconds. Here is the interesting application. It's called Little Point. How it works, you can look at, you can just upload a picture and it can write a point, sorry, it was very probably in last year's spring festival, and it was played by millions of people in a few days. After you upload the picture, you can choose the machine can identify the objects in it, and the users can choose the subject or the mind or the spirits that they want to express in this point. They can generate a point from a quite large knowledge base, and from me I couldn't wrote a point like this. I think the point is quite beautiful and it's great even for university students or adults. Before we jump into the topic of how to build a platform, we already knew that deep learning is as popular and we need to leverage the power of GPU. Let's learn something about in the old days in our company in China, and the risk of how we use the GPU, we used to share the GPU resources, and the risk of sharing GPU resources is maybe one day, one of my colleagues stand out and say, who killed my task that I have run for three days? Your hard work may be interrupted by someone easily. Maybe the one didn't know what your program is running and maybe it's important, but they don't know it because it's not his. Another reason is that the purchase cycle could be quite long. It could be days or months in some enterprise. It's a practical problem, and I think that a brilliant idea shouldn't be that long. Or you can buy your own GPU and make your own devices, then you still face the challenge of the machine broken or the data loss. I have tried to build a computer like this, and it could be very loud if you run some applications on it. And another practical problem is the low issues utilization. As you can see from the monitor, at some point the GPU utilization could be very high, maybe up to 100%, but at most of the time it's zero, so on average the utilization is low. To sum up, there are some problems of the old ways to using GPU resources. First one is no isolation between the different environments that people can easily care someone's application. Second one is the long purchase cycle and then the low resource utilization. And if you change your machines or devices, you need to rebuild all your workstation and all the dependence. It's quite time consuming. So what should we do? This is the general goals of our platform. We need to remove all the obstacles of accessing resources and the second one is to improve the resource utilization. Let's get from the very beginning. These are the first stage goals. The first one is to cloudify the GPU resources. So after cloudify, you can easily control the resources. You can build the applications in seconds and you can disable it. You can release it in just one click and we need to control the permissions and OS management. In QNAR, we do it by integrated to our unified application control center, we call it portal. I believe that in every company maybe we have something like that. And the third one is the environment isolation and then we need to ensure the data availability in distributed environments. The last one is not sure you've seen this. The last one is to support the TensorFlow 4.2 chain like the TensorFlow board or the TensorFlow serving. These are the very beginning stage goals. So next I would talk about some choices on the components. The first one is why TensorFlow, why we support TensorFlow. Here is the comparison between TensorFlow community and others. You can see that the star, the number of star, fork and issues and the PR is much larger than other community. And also we can see from this, this is a sample code for minutes. It's just 149 lines and it has defined two hidden lines and it's defined the softmax regression model. And it's quite clear and so people can maintain it easily. So this is the screenshot for the TensorFlow board. One of the first thing I like TensorFlow is TensorFlow because it can show how your model works and the main graph automatically generated. It can show the connections between all the neurons. It's quite convenient and obvious. After we pick up the deep learning framework, we need to think about clouding our GPU resources. We have two choices then, back then. So one is methods and another is Kubernetes. So why we don't choose methods? Actually, methods is good at in job scheduling but back to then Kubernetes is much better to handle the GPU resources and it's have multiple persistent data integration plug-in. So this is our final combination is Docker and Kubernetes. Using Docker because it's immutable so we can keep our environments unique and people don't need to reinstall their dependence and the leaves again and again. Okay. So why the Kubernetes? Here is the details. Kubernetes is not only for the container or creation and it also can detect the GPU resources. It has ability to being aware of the different hardware. You can detail, detect how many GPUs you have on the machine and the models of your hardware. It can tell it's K80 or P100. So it has multiple storage backend to integrate which is very important to the deep learning or machine learning. Okay. After pick up the main framework to cloudify our GPU resources we need to think about where is our data stored. As we know data could be very important while we doing the training. Stateful application is important because the GPU resources is precious and it can be disabled in some time but when you came back, you came back with the GPU resources you gained and you want all your contacts like the training data and the checking points. Data is important. This is what we do. We provide the image maybe a little bit. I can explain. We provide two ways to access your data and this is based on SAF. The first way is actually we are not using the S3 from AWS. We are using it from SAF and the two ways we provide the first one is to provide the data volume access and the second one is to provide the S3 standard API. As you can see from this picture of the SAF monitoring, it's bigger than any single machine's capacity and for one advantage from SAF is that it can easily resize it. No need to stop your application and no need to transfer your data while you change your devices. It can be done just with one click and then your space expanded. Okay. Here is our choice to complete this. We choose Minio to have us to turn SAF data volume to have the ability to provide S3 standard API. Minio is quite lightweight so we deploy it with our application and we didn't even use the multi-tenant feature here. This one you can, if you want to use this, you can just maybe one command line from the helm. Next components we choose is Jupyter. Jupyter notebook provides a web version of code writing and is supported by the Python I kernel. You can choose different versions of Python or you can use different languages like the language R and the advantage of it is that team members can collaborate to write codes and to debug it. Also it has massive extensions which can improve your efficiency. Okay. After you're choosing all the components, let's take a look at the architecture. Here is the glimpse of how the application is deployed in our cloud. The first application is a single machine TensorFlow. Another one is the distributed TensorFlow across two servers with three GPUs and it has one parameter server and three workers. So how can we do this? How can we build an application like this? First, I didn't have the screenshot of our user interface. I can just say about it. First, a wizard would lead the users to choose what they want for their application such as you can choose the framework you want to work on. Then you can choose how many GPUs and the storage size you want to use. Then we generate the resource defined YAML. Then the command is read YAML and then deploy it according to the fire. The resource type we choose is the deployment back to then because we started the project like a year ago and back to then the stateful applications may not work that well so we choose the deployment. And nowadays I am considering to upgrade it and change the resource type. Okay. It's sample workflow of a developer or data science or machine learning scientist daily work. Maybe one developer came up with some idea of some model then he want to have a playground to test it and then you finally figure out how to build your models and the parameters and all the arguments is that you can distribute it to the real servers and our platform can help to do with it. And finally your well-tuned and well-trained model you want to put it online. We have the TensorFlow serving and it can easily put your models online. Okay. Here is some add-ons. If you want to build a complete machine learning platform you need to take this into consideration. The first one is you need to provide the customization of the workstations because you may want the developers one maybe want to choose the different versions of the machine learning framework and at last if they want to put their models online you need to provide the HA model registry and the serving service and then the Jupyter plug-in system integration is always wanted. And last one is the resource billing based on the events. And as we know that GPU resources is relatively limited so if you don't have billing or something like that they may don't want to disable it. They always want it. Okay. Here is the architecture of TensorFlow model serving service. We have the self-apps has a storage backend and the it's just been online for like two months and there are still issues to fix such as the TensorFlow serving demon is always need to restart if you want to add some new models, if you want to add new list of models. Okay. Here is some tips. If you want to build your own platform. The first one is the network solution. Why we choose the host network? Because between the perimeter servers and the workers there are so many data transfer and the volume of data transfer is huge. So we can consider about the software defined network before, but we can consider about the network before, but it could not support it. And it may crash the components. And the service discovery we use the core DNS. We don't use the original, the Kubernetes because we can easily come by it and it has so many APIs. And we also can use the core DNS together with the traditional KVM DNS services. And another thing you need to consider is the upstream and downstream data pipeline. You may want the data from the HDFS and maybe you want to, you want the AI ops from the metrics data from any other systems. Here are more tips about if you want to build your own GPU clouds. You can choose one main framework, but you can't limit it to it because people always want the freedom to customize it. They may want the curious, they may want another framework. And about staff, because staff is quite important in this system, we are all based on it. If the staff is broken, then the whole system is down, I think. So one main issue we run into is the stop using the kernel IBD with the low version of kernel because it can run into very serious problems. It can cause the kernel dialogue. If the data volume is, data transfer volume is huge. And you need to test it and benchmark it before you put it online because it's important. Okay. To sum up, here is some comparison of the before and after. As you can see, the before we need to coordinate the GPU resources on our self. And it's hard and time consuming and it's annoying. And second one is you need to set up the environments every time. You need to install the dependencies and the leaves. And another problem of sharing the resources is the environment solution. Someone may install the different versions of leaves on your workstation. It can cause crashes in your apps. And the data sharing problems while you are using the distributed frameworks. And also the data size is limited to the local disk size. And after we have this cloud, we have solved the environment isolation problem. And we can set up the environment and disable it in seconds. And also we have the multiple access to our data. You can have access to it through the S3 API or you can access it just like your own disk. And another one is you can have all the add-ons from our cloud platform. So that's all. So that's all for my sharing. So if you have any questions and details, okay. No. We run it in separate. Because machine learning is quite memory consuming, I think. Yeah. It may take lots of memory. So we separate it. Yeah. CepFS is just for the model registry. Yeah. Okay. I don't think I understand the word of... Oh, building. Okay. Sorry. Actually, it's based on... It was written by ourselves and we used the MQ to collect all the events. And then we... This part was written by ourselves. Yeah. Sorry. Okay. We used to use the Jackims to build the dock images. We have the Ripple to store the Docker fires. And in our unified application control center and every people have app code. And they can only submit to the dock file to the... To the dock file modification, I think. And then the Jackims can build it automatically. Yeah. Yeah. We always have that problem because we handle that by the billing system. Yeah. Because billing is important. If we don't charge them, they can... They may want the resource all the time. Yeah. Because maybe in my experience, because we cannot only monitor the GPU utilization because people may pre-train their data like the CPU resources and we can't kill it. And yeah. Yeah. I think... Okay. So many questions. Give a chance to... Yeah. We use RBD to just ask the backend of the persistence volume. And we also use the Minion, the application of Minion to provide the S3 standard API. Yeah. I have just mentioned the issue. That's if you use the low version of kernels, it can bring into some serious problems and other... Many other problems. So you need to test it and benchmark it before you put it on the production environments, I think. I didn't hear it. We use the... How to pronounce it? The pro...  It's very hard for me. Okay. Serverless, I haven't ticket in practice. Okay. Any more questions? Okay. Uh-huh. Because for our application, the rados is not... You can't use the can't use the data, I'm not sure about using the same data source as the RBD, they are different, they are separate data storage. If you use it as RBD, you can't use the the same data parts. We choose because, let me think, because in why you are doing a training job, you may have read the data from the disk and you may have, the program enable you to use the S3 API directly, so we provide both. Yeah, like directly from the disk. Okay, I think time is up. Okay, thank you.