All right so Today, I'm going to try to teach you something that you won't believe I Am going to try to teach you or explain to you Why we're never going to run out of fossil fuels Now you have been told over and over again That the world is running out of fossil fuels and someday maybe someday soon We'll all be sitting In the coal in the dark freezing And we won't be able to drive our cars and society will collapse and so today I'm going to try to convince you this is untrue Now I must say there is a tenancy among humans For whatever reason to like these stories of the apocalypse That civilization is going to collapse Because we're going to run out of stuff we need for our society And I'm going to try to introduce you because for most of you I won't convince you To the concept that we're never running out skeptical Why you're skeptical Why do you say this you feel that we're going to run out eventually but you're of course not sure when Right So there's a limited supply. I Don't think so Really like there's a certain amount, but there's there's only so much that's accessible There's only so much that's accessible with modern technology That's good That's good. Who else doesn't believe me? Sure Getting more Okay, hydraulic fracking here in this part of the world, but that's different in different places Eventually, you know, I've been here in this eventually all my life and we never get there We never get closer There's a lot more energy now energy reserves fossil fuel reserves in the world and there were 40 years ago It keeps going up. Why?  I try to stay away from parties, but sometimes you can't avoid it, right? And Then someone comes up to me and they're trying to make small talk and they say hey, what do you do for a living? So I go to party and I say well, I'm an energy economist And the person says oh, when are we running out of energy? And then I say never and then they get mad at me and that kills the party Okay, I need a new proof. I need a new fake profession. I Don't know Ask me an Irish contractor. I Could be like I could work. Yeah, I could work for NC is You know something like that something like a spy and then when they ask question you go I'm very sorry, but I can't tell you That'd be good That'd be good, you know, I'm like Arnold in true lies. I Tell people my job is to be an energy economist, but in fact, I'm a secret agent Yeah, that's it. That's the ticket Anyhow, I can't teach class next week because I'm going well. I can't tell you See that's just a joke Okay So About every 30 years There have been predictions That we're going to run out of stuff And so, you know the US Geological Service has these estimates of reserves and they say well, you know At current levels of production. We only have 20 years left of something tungsten is my example and So You know makes you think well gee in 20 years. We'll have no tungsten Or anything else and then we'll all get success society will collapse And you know, I think I remember who this is. I think this is David Malthus Thomas Malthus from about 1800 This is a person who some people know Paul Ehrlich He's a very famous biologist at Stanford in the late 60s He wrote a book called the population bomb that said we're all going to overpopulate the world Then he wrote some other things saying we're all going to die. We're all going to be dead by the year 2000 And you know Professor Ehrlich keeps saying this And you know according to him we all should have been dead 15 years ago But he keeps on saying it and by the way just I should say that His son-in-law used to be my boss So I saw that was very nice And it was daughter too. She was very nice, but man. He seems to be a wacko to me, but anyhow Okay, so there's Thomas Malik Malthus. He's from 1800 You know, he said we're going to use up resources from a couple centuries ago. There's Paul Ehrlich He's I guess Paul is about 75 years old now. He's still with us Maybe he's 80 years old So, you know, this has been going on a long time and of course I don't take it seriously But you know don't make for good exam questions. I suppose All right, so Today we've run out of nothing Absolutely nothing Okay, we've had this industrialized society for 130 150 years. It's been using up all these materials fossil fuels the most obvious steel tungsten all these other things and we have run out of nothing even though during this time period All kinds of prominent people said we were going to run out Doesn't this make you suspicious So why is this spinning correct? Well, first of all You need to think about this term known reserves that our friends at the Geological Service use And we also have to think about economic incentives. One of the problems people have In economics, you know in economics, you may have noticed what I'm really trying to do is stretch your minds And now I'm trying to stretch it in a different direction. I'm trying to stretch it across time So people have trouble thinking about economic incentives over time So let's think about a world where We had just a little bit of oil left What would the price of oil be really really high? Right Now let's say you were a greedy company Which of course all are Wouldn't you want to save your oil For when the price is really really high Pardon me Yeah So then we wouldn't run out of oil because people would be saving their oil You see once you start to think about it in terms of trading off the present versus trading off future incomes The idea of running out of something actually becomes a contradiction in terms almost So geophysicists It turns out that geologists by the way Scott Hodges was I think he mentioned this in there Like the most optimistic people in the world It's like oh, yeah, we got a whole bunch of oil here or Natural gas, you know, maybe it's there. Maybe it's one. So Geologists divide the world into a nice table and So on one category is the knowledge of the earth Okay, now the problem with knowing about the earth's crust is what what's the challenge of knowing about the earth's crust Well, that's true, but what's the what's the real inherent problem? It's all the way underground So it's hard to figure out what's there and you know, this Marcelo shale stuff is 8,000 feet Below the ground and 8,000 feet it varies a little bit, but that's about it Okay, it's really far down and you don't know exactly what's there So you've got you know orchestrated reserves inferred hypothetical speculative All these different kinds of things. I'm not gonna ever too sure the difference in the definitions But there's all kinds of information, you know sets out there. We know there's natural gas We think there's natural gas. There might be natural gas. I got an idea. There's natural gas You know and I'll have lower levels of information Okay On the other axis which will show up in a minute is the economic feasibility now Two things go into the economic feasibility What are they? Right, how much it costs to get the stuff out of the ground from 8,000 feet and then how much you can sell it for? So here's a nice table so the Minerals that we can actually get out now are parts that are economic and Identified now this is just today square, you know Does anybody live near oil city? nobody oh Charlene do you live you have a family cabin? Okay, and why is it called oil city? Right there used to be lots of oil wells in oil city, but there aren't now how come Well part of the problem was is that they got into this common pool issue They drew them close together and stole each other's oil and all that And so they got a lot of oil up, but they got out too fast it turns out the other problem is that When Texas East the spindle top play in Texas came in in 1903 Texas oil was like, you know a third of the cost of Pennsylvania oil So the Pennsylvania oil You know went from here to here so You know, what have I seen lately I? Don't know what kind of new geophysics stuff do they have? The are you familiar with this? Well, what new methods do they have in geophysics? No, no, that's engineering. I'm sorry like to figure out what's below the earth Well, I don't really know but they have all kinds of new radar and sonar stuff that You know helps, you know in the early days what they used to do is just set off dynamite and record how the waves moved The sound waves moved around now. They have all kinds of more sophisticated things But one of the big differences is now they have much better idea of whether there's oil or natural gas there another thing that's happened is this hydraulic fracturing Which was kind of derived in a? Trial and error method, but here's how it works Anybody know what this means hydraulic fracturing and get somebody else to explain it. What do you think it means like? Okay, so that's a good part of it. What's another part of it, right? So so what happens is a combination they get a well site and they drill down 8,000 feet and then the pipe Turns horizontal and goes out all the way up to about 10,000 feet So almost two miles and then any well pad they'll have it depends But six or eight of these wells going out in all kinds of different directions kind of looks like a spider web Okay Now this is relatively new. Oh the other part the other thing that's new is basically what they do is they basically Explode water into the rock formation at different parts in the horizontal Horizontal well, so what they do is they push the water underground It's got a lot of water put under high pressure and then it breaks into the formation and Releases the natural gas or oil here natural gas in other places like North Dakota's oil and so Wow all the sudden This gas that was you know over here Got to be over here. Of course there was a countervailing factor Now that we have all this Marcella shale gas what happened to the price of gas? Went down so you know Now the price of gas went down now if you talk to Producing companies which I have to do I'm not gonna have to do it. I kind of like it You know they say they're always looking for the price to go up. I'm not so sure Why would the price go up? Pardon me said again Well, if the man if the price goes up the quantity demand will go down well in general scarcity increased demand Changes in technology, but I mean I could be wrong But because you never know what the EPA is going to do, but I think that the cost of drilling for this stuff will go down I Don't think the demand will increase although You know I keep waiting for people to drive natural gas cars So I don't think the price is going back up. Of course. I don't tell them that Natural gas Why would there I mean this is the question right? Why would there be a larger demand? Mm-hmm, right to find a new use right so maybe I'm sorry the person behind you Right, so now there's a lot of controversy about Shipping liquefied natural gas to Europe so liquefied natural gas being of course a gas is very hard to ship overseas So what you have to do is liquefy it in a liquefaction plant Then put it in a boat and ship it overseas and not only is that very expensive But to do that you have to get permission from the US government basically And so there's a whole bunch of people who've applied for permission and now a couple of plants have been approved But there's a fear feeling that if you approve all these plants and the price of natural gas will go up Although trying to figure out equilibrium is something I've been trying to do. It's not too clear to me what's going on But anyhow I'm not sure at least in the next couple of years that the price of natural gas here in Pennsylvania would go up But I'm not going to tell that to some of my industry friends Okay, so You know there's room for expansion Right, I mean our geologist friends can find new ways of finding the oil or natural gas our engineering friends can find new ways of getting it out and then Economically the price can go up if there's a scarcity Now of course, I don't think there's a scarcity here because the price is relatively low now there is a scarcity in Japan and Korea because they don't have any natural gas Local natural gas and it all has to come by ship Now the Korean South Koreans are very eager to build a natural gas pipeline from Russia Anybody know why this hasn't happened beside you Andy Pardon me would have to go through North Korea and The North Koreans aren't very friendly a friend of mine in South Korea had this idea He actually tried to get it done. He was where you'd have a pipeline that had no stops on it It would go south through North Korea into South Korea and then curl back up to North Korea And so that way the North Koreans couldn't cut it off without hurting themselves Which is ideas go was kind of clever but nowadays this North Koreans are so I can't words like use like crazy and demented because I'm a professor also a spy But you know So so let's think about something Gonna model just we had this two-period model because that's all the math we can handle And we're gonna talk about something called rent Which is price minus cost Okay, so you find a hundred thousand barrels of oil under your backyard Which if you I mean natural gas if you live in Lycoming County or the northern part of the state is actually Not that unreasonable Okay But I have to go back in the United States you own What's beneath your land in theory to the center of the earth so no one can extract that oil or natural gas Without your permission or some complicated legal things. I don't want to talk about almost everywhere else The government owns this land Which system is better? I'm sorry say it again Okay Well, it's true that I don't have the money to extract the oil But my friends at Exxon are happy to buy it that right from me Well, I don't know the government, you know the government can Lease out this can drill for this land or lease it out and get money and then use it to reduce taxes or pay for the next aircraft carrier or something right Not sure that's any different. What would be better government ownership or Private ownership well, it's true, but wouldn't you want to have the government in charge have the ownership then? Why not? Oh Interesting so what you're arguing is that the government might force this upon me Right Okay Okay, so the argument is that if the government was in charge Hey, they wouldn't care about pollution. They're just interested in the money in the short-sighted effect Just trying to put some some frame on this and so this is the only way this is a good way to protect ourselves from the government Is that a good argument? Okay, am I making a good argument I'm trying to phrase your argument interesting interesting Wait a second. This is this is like, you know Politician mostly Republican politicians just says the free market is the God we bow to Why is the free market better here in your argument? Well, but wait, isn't the government an agglomeration of the people I Mean of course if I happen to have the natural gas under my land, then I'm happier But it's really kind of random who gets this I want to ask Sarah This is bowing to another God Competition Why I want to know why No, why does it create more wealth? Now I think you're getting closer I think part of it is actually in Iraq The Iraqi government has hired a bunch of Russian companies to extract the oil and The reason is is because the Russians are actually better at doing relatively simple extraction and Not using technology advanced technology Okay, so part of it is the government isn't too clever about what it does. You don't like that are you? Okay, I Sarah snorted in it kind of hurt my feelings Actually people are coming close The argument for private ownership is basically if you think about the coast theorem You want to put the property rights in the hands of the people who have the lower transactions cost Well transactions cost for the government is really hard working things through the bureaucracy So the idea is if you put in the hand of landowners Hey, they just want money and So they'll get it out there a lot faster So you can take or leave it as you want Okay now You have a hundred thousand barrels of oil in your backyard It can be produced either today or next year at a cost of $30 per barrel The cost today is a hundred dollars, which means the rent is seventy dollars what time I have The rent is seventy dollars. Okay, so rent is price minus cost Assume that the price next year will be a hundred and four dollars and the interest rate is five percent Should you extract the oil this year or next year? This year. What do you say that Lily? Next year, it wouldn't be you'd be spending more money or interest Hmm, I think you might be seeing too much in my question, but Why do you say next year? Okay, so well, we don't have inflation by the way Okay, that makes life complicated and that's part of macroeconomics, which you know, I hate So how much money will you get this year if you extract it per barrel you get what? 70 and How much oil will you get next year? 74 assuming your cost stayed the same Okay What would you rather have? Oh, I'm sorry go ahead first Well, you don't have any cost right? It's all profit here. So so what would you rather have? $70 today or $74 a year from now Why? Well that presumably is embedded in the interest rate, but that's a good point a Dollar today is worth more than a dollar tomorrow But what's worth more? $70 today or $74 next year the same Why do you say that? Right, well, we don't have inflation. We don't have inflation. No, no, no bad bad bad How interesting question We're going to assume now that you are what we call liquid So you're not constrained today versus next year, but that's a very real question Really? So my guess is you view yourself as what we call liquidity constrained Well, you'd be happy to borrow money from the future to pay your bills today Right 7350 So if you get $70 today you could put it in the bank at 5% interest and have 7350 next year So it's a choice between having 7350 next year or 74 dollars next year Which would you choose if you invest? I'm sorry somebody said that but I don't know Oh, go ahead Well, if you don't invest, right? This against again to this assumption of liquidity constraints, which I'm not doing a good job of explaining but Assume you could borrow money at 5% To pay for your expenses today or you could put in the bank at 5% Which is really a stretch, right? So I'm going to argue that the way to think about at least this problem is to think about What you would have next year? Okay So You'd rather you know, so you'd get with a hundred thousand barrels You'd get seven point three five million next year versus seven point four million if you hold off for a year You could go to an Exxon which is in your minds is a gigantic oil producer, but in my mind it is an investment bank They have lots of money which they use to purchase properties like in your backyard Okay, and you know, you'd say hey, I need money now to pay off my college loans And all kinds of other things because I'm a college student and you know, I don't have any free cash Hey, maybe someday I will With this big degree in ebf so You'll go sell it to them for some price now Exxon Knows they'll get seven point four million next year So they'll depreciate this by five percent and they'd be willing to pay seven point oh four eight million and You'd be willing to take at least seven million dollars for this. So now there's a negotiation between the two okay But if you believe in this world of limited transaction cost Which I have asserted though not that strongly a hope that is lower when you own the rights than when the government owns the rights Then this property will get this property built not this year, but next year and So the idea is that when producing a property you're forever thinking about profits this year versus profits in the future By the way, who's this guy? Jed Clampett and how do you know mr. Clampett an old television show the Beverly hillbillies Very popular in the late 1960s I'm sure you can find it today on I don't know where the heck you find this stuff Nick at night seven or something Okay now assume the extractions cost For grading your oil out instead of thirty dollars is ten dollars So you could get a barrel out today and make nine dollars Or you get a barrel out you make ninety dollars, excuse me Or you can take a barrel out next year and make ninety four dollars Now What would you rather have? Ninety dollars today or 94 dollars a year from now Why do you say that? Well, I got to ask the question again. Would you rather have ninety dollars today or ninety four dollars a year from now? Well, it's just a question Why Four more what do you think same interest rate five percent Why do you say ninety today you get ninety four dollars and fifty cents So if you put the ninety dollars in the bank and wait a year, you'll have ninety four dollars and fifty cents Okay, so in general The lower cost sources of oil are extracted first because the rent Rises faster in time on the high cost oil Then on the low cost oil Now why do I refer to Jed clamp that oil as low cost oil? So as the song goes You know the song What will you could sing it? Listen here's a story about him. We can do it after class so as the song goes mr. Clamp it was out there with the rifle and shooting at a squirrel for food and He missed the squirrel and the bullet went into the land into the ground and oil spurred it out and then mr. Clamp it and his mother-in-law and His daughter and his nephew the family connections in the clutching climates were kind of unclear They took their money and moved to a mansion with a cement pond in Beverly Hills, California Okay, so the idea here is that You want to drill for the low cost oil first So there's no more oil left like they had in Texas in 1903 this huge gusher from spindle top That doesn't mean we're running out of oil and of course if you really have nothing to do You can go rent the Beverly Hill billies Although You know we could and then you could you could argue whether what was a better show Beverly Hill billies or Green Acres and Yeah, I would a success you not spend a lot of time doing that Okay So here's a problem. I like to ask on an exam So write it down You own a well with a hundred barrels of oil in it today the price is a hundred dollars Next year will be a hundred and two Your cost of extracting the oil is X For what levels of X? Will you extract? The oil today versus next year now what time do I have how would I do this problem by the way? Well, I would put my profits as a function of X today Which would be a hundred minus X And then I put it in future terms, so I'd multiplied out by 1.03 And I'd asked that to be less to be greater than excuse me the profits next year, which is a hundred and two minus X and then I'd solve for X So let's see what we have here Okay So if you produce today You make a hundred minus X per barrel Then you put in the bank at 3% You have a hundred and three minus one point oh three X next year This makes sense. I'm hoping it makes sense Okay, if you produce tomorrow you get a hundred and two minus X So the question is is producing today with a profit of a hundred and three minus one point a three X Pay off more than producing next year, which is a hundred and two minus X And when you solve that out You get that X is less than 33 and a third. I Hope That's one that's point on three. Yeah, so for low production cost You produce today For high production cost You wait till next year. All right. Does that make sense? Let's see what the next slide says so You know people have a lot of time thinking about this Thinking about over time But if you look at more agricultural products, you know So wheat is harvested in the fall But we don't run out of wheat in the market over the summertime That basically people hold wheat off the market Because I would expect the price of wheat is in general higher in the summer than in the winter Perhaps a clearer example is forest So they're private foresters all across this state. They grow trees You plant a tree You don't cut it down depending on the species for 20 to 50 years and So some of you if you like your ebf majors you can go take forestry economics, which some people like and and Talk about this which basically comes down to how long do you keep the trees off the market? Now if you didn't do this then no one would grow trees And we wouldn't have paper or other stuff Okay, and so for depletable resources sometimes the product can be held off the market for a long time Okay People then bring up ethical concerns. I mean if we use the energy now aren't we harming our ancestors? Shouldn't we care about future generations? Shouldn't we have a more whoo that word? What word am I talking about? sustainable Shouldn't we have a more sustainable economy? Sustainable is like the worst word in the galaxy We have to put it in all our reports like you know how we're gonna make a sustainable department Hey, we're the department getting started getting stuff out of the ground. What do you want out of us? But we're sustainable too Should we reduce our energy consumption now? So that people 50 years from now won't have high energy prices. What do you think? Interesting but just just because I'm running out of time. I will ask I will say no Shouldn't we care about future generations? Shouldn't we get rid of our addiction to energy to fossil fuels? I don't know who wants to bite on this, huh? All right What would you think if people if you read that people in 1910 had the same argument? Well, we shouldn't consume oil now because we have to worry about people in 2014 How would that strike you in reading back upon it? Pardon me Well, do you think they should have consumed less so we should be richer today? Do you think they should have consumed less so which could be richer today? Why not? Well, why is it dumb? Well, they're greedy, too Well, we're a lot wealthier than people in 1910 so the idea that we should we should wait now You know, I expect people in the future be wealthier than we are Now I have one more point to make so I'm gonna take you a couple minutes late. I know you're growing anxious Is the price of oil or natural gas going to go up or down in the future? Up, why do you say up? Sure, it goes up and down over time price of natural gas is plummeted Why do you say that? But what else happens? new technology Okay Theory doesn't tell us by the way that the price will go up in time Theory tells us that the rent The price minus the cost will go up over time But the cost keeps of getting stuff keeps declining Thanks to people. Oh, no, I got one more point to make. Oh, I'm done Next time we'll talk about the economics of owning your own oil property


This study investigated the characteristics of patients with severe coronavirus disease 2019, COVID-19, who were hospitalized for at least three months after discharge. It found that patients with low oxygen saturations upon admission had higher risks of having persistent radiographic abnormalities and poorer physical functioning. This article was authored by Pedro Maximín Késtevez-Villa, Paulo Roberto Orojo-Mendes, Tatiana Alves-Creator and others.


The very best quarterbacks in the NFL have mastered the art of moving to the next play. Why would I want my players focused on the next play? There's nothing they can do about the play that just happened. It's in the past. It's in the rear view mirror. It is now unchangeable. They acknowledged that no matter what just happened, that play is over. It's done. It's in the rear view mirror and it's unchangeable. So they quickly refocused their lens on the next play, the next snap. And any physical, mental or emotional currency, they waste on something that's in the past that is unchangeable, that is in the rear view mirror, means they don't have that emotional physical and mental currency to invest in the present moment where they can still make a difference. So no matter what happens, we have to have the wherewithal to quickly move to the next play.


Hello everyone and thank you for joining me for this webinar. I'm very happy to be here and I want to say big thanks to ProtoSchool for inviting me to do this talk. My topic for today is my favorite one, non-functional requirements. What are those? Why are they important for us as product managers and how we can manage them effectively? A little bit about the agenda today. We're going to start with a brief overview of the topic and then dive into specific non-functional requirements like availability, performance and scalability. Then I'll cover how do we balance such requirements and how to find the right level of investment. And finally we're going to wrap up this topic. Before getting into all of this, just a little bit about myself. My name is Emil, I'm coming from Sofia, Bulgaria and I'm the Senior Product Manager at Coursera. I'm responsible for one of the products focused on innovative hands-on learning experience and a big part of the product lies on the technical side of things. I have more than 8 years leading engineering teams doing all kinds of applications like software as a service, mobile technologies and various web applications. If you want to get in touch with me after the talk, I'm easily accessible on LinkedIn and would love to hear your questions or thoughts on what we are discussing today. So first, what are non-functional requirements? I'll give you the textbook definition by Wikipedia and then some examples to make it more clear. A non-functional requirement or NFR is a requirement that specifies criteria that can be used to judge the operation of a system rather than specific behaviors. Let's say our product is a car, a very simplistic and maybe silly example, but I think it can illustrate most of the concepts that we are going to go over today. Non-functional requirements can be identified by the verb be. A car can be fast, be safe or be cheap. On the other side, the functional requirements are those that a car does. It navigates, entertains and maybe does your caravan. Non-functional requirements are frequently referred as quality attributes and are usually manifested in the system architecture of your product. Let's see some examples of non-functional requirements. They can be broken down into groups. Execution qualities which are observed during the runtime of your product like safety, usability and performance. And evolution qualities which are embedded in the architecture or the beaut of your product like testability, portability or extensibility. There are more than 60 other examples that you can find out there and some of them would be relevant to your product. Some of them would not. Some would be more relevant than the others. So we need to find the right balance between all of them. But before that, why are NFR important at all? First, it's very easy to overlook them. They usually are not part of the conversations you're having with your customers until it's too late to be functioned. No customer will start a conversation with you with, I really need a product which is highly available. They would rather need a product that helps them with their jobs to be done. That's until your product is not working in the most important moment for them. Then it's also easy to over-engineer or over-invest in non-functional requirements. I have been part of products where a great amount of time, effort and resources were spent in making them robust, high-performing and secure to find out that no customer wants to use it. Finally, NFRs are hard to be observed in most cases, again until it's too late and you're observing on production. While developing the product, you cannot help open the homepage or start the application and check how secure it is or how many concurrent users it can handle. It requires deliberate attention and strategy in order to be able to assess the product's readiness to cover those requirements. This makes it easy to discover problems only when it's too late and at this stage the team might not be set up to address them successfully. Now let's go over a few non-functional requirements, which at least in my experience pop up most frequently in order to better understand what are NFRs and how to work with them. Starting with availability. The definition of availability is the probability that a system will operate successfully at a given point in time when used under given conditions and in an ideal support environment. If we get back to the car example, what are the chances of you being able to use your car when you need it? In your family of two adults with one family car, statistically there is a 50% chance that your car won't be there when you need it. That's the availability of your car and it's very simple with the availability of your web application as well. What are the chances of your website not behaving as expected? Availability is measured by dividing the total uptime by the sum of the uptime and the downtime or the whole period, usually excluding the maintenance. In most cases, it's a number pretty close to one and it's represented in percentages. For the standard web application, anywhere between 99.9% and 99.99% would be considered a greater availability, resulting in only several hours of downtime per year. Achieving higher availability than that usually is associated with higher cost and more complicated system architecture which needs to be justified by your business case in order to make sense. There are certainly cases in which 99.99% or even higher availability is a requirement, maybe if you're building a software for spaceships or autonomous cars, but in most cases the time and resources spent in achieving it would better be spent on other non-functional requirements or implementing functional requirements. Moving on to reliability. Reliability is tightly connected to availability. It is defined as the probability that the system will operate for a specified time interval. Getting back to the car analogy, how often your car will not be available due to flat tire, regular maintenance, or your partner using it. It can be measured in different ways, but probably the most straightforward one is dividing the total time in service by the number of failures. Think about this. Availability speaks about the total amount of downtime you have for a year, for example. Availability speaks about how this downtime is distributed throughout this year. It can be one big chunk of downtime or multiple dispersed smaller downtimes. Depending on what your product is, one might be more favorable than the others. Consider your users having to make long synchronous operation with your product and even the smallest downtime will reset the long operation. This would virtually make it impossible to complete it at all. In this case, one bigger downtime followed by a big save time span can be favorable. Jumping to the next non-functional requirement, which is performance. This time, this is the time it takes to perform a certain operation. In our car analogy, this is probably the most intuitive one. What is your car's top speed, acceleration from 0 to 100 km per hour, torque, etc. Similar to that, your product will have different aspects of performance you might be interested in and things to measure. For a website, it might be the world time of your homepage. Even that has different aspects to be measured. The time it takes to submit a purchase order might be another thing you are interested in or the time it takes to process a credit card. Usually, we are measuring whether a certain percentage of your users falls below or above a given threshold. This is because it's usually hard and impractical to try to meet a performance goal for 100% of your users. Some of them would have older hardware, shake internet connection or running another computational intensive software. The product I work on in Coursera is a hands-on learning product which provides a virtual workspace to practice for our learning. A key performance matrix is the latency of the workspace connection or the delay measured in milliseconds between the learner interacting and the workspace acknowledging their command and vice versa. Setting the baseline in our case comes from what is the minimal delay that the human brain can recognize which is usually around 150 and 200 milliseconds. Everything below that doesn't really matter as our brains cannot catch it. Everything above that will feel chunky, irritating and when close to this threshold may even fall into the uncanny valley making the user experience really irritating without knowing why. Performance is probably one of the most subjective non-functional requirements as it's primary based on the user's perception and expectations. There are famous experiments showing that you can effectively improve the perception of the performance of a slow operation by distracting the user in some way in this way achieving improvement in your perceived performance without improving the operation itself which might be expensive or even impossible. Just consider that specific performance and times for achieving some operations which were perfectly okay 10 years ago in appropriate or even unacceptable especially when we were talking about browsing the web application or waiting for processing a credit card. The last non-functional requirement we will cover today is scalability. It measures how quickly a system can adapt to a significant change in the processing demands both up and down scale. Here is where my car analogy breaks down a little bit but there will be. In this case scalability would be how fast you work and provide transportation for me if our family car is busy. Scalability is much easier and arguably cheaper to achieve nowadays than 10 years ago of course with the rise of the cloud providers. With one movement of the slider you can double, quadruple or multiply by 100 the resources powering your application to handle a search in the traffic and then down scale it when you no longer live it. This can even be an automated process based on some triggers in your environment. What really exciting times you are living in. But your system needs to be architected in a scalable manner. Early design decisions can be the difference between easily scalable product and nearly impossible to scale product. The magnitude of the scalability matters as well. Different managers will work a whole new set of challenges to solve. So we need to think deliberately about the realistic amount of load that we expect now and probably down the road. One example from the past year from Coursera the Covid pandemic forced many people to turn to online education to improve their current skills switch careers or simply learn something new while staying at home. This caused unprecedented surges in the traffic that was sustained for months and was unimaginable just a few months ago. Although our infrastructure team definitely had some sleepless nights architecting the system in a way that it can easily make use of additional resources that were spawned into the data center made it possible to serve all those learners who were in demand for education. We handled five times built in 2020 without major refactoring or changes in the system which wouldn't happen if we haven't started with this end goal in mind. Hopefully by now you're seeing a common pattern for working with non-functional requirements. First we need to understand how they are defined and especially in the context of our product because scalability for one product can be totally different from scalability for another one. While some products would gradually increase their needs for resources over time others might have certain spikes in the traffic that completely go away after a week or day or even minutes. Those two scenarios will go for different scalability strategies and probably for different system architecture decisions that we need to take. Then we define how to measure it and put in place measurement mechanisms. As we solve with the performance different products will focus on different aspects of their performance for product targeting carriers and for internet connection, smaller traffic volume would be very important. While for ours this might be not important at all. Third we need to set the right targets based on our users and business needs. The level of security needed for a blog would be completely different from the requirements for a system managing health records. And finally we take actions in order to achieve the targets we have set. Following this scheme, you can address most of the non-functional requirements you need to tackle. Sounds easy, but taking actions to achieve your goals at the right time is not always the most obvious thing to do. So, now I want to briefly talk about a concept called technical depth which often goes hand in hand with non-functional requirements. Technical depth happens when we deliberately cut corners and take shortcuts in the implementation which results in faster feature development. However, this process accumulates deficiencies in the product which at some point can slow down the feature development. It can also limit the capabilities of the product to self-users and result in product not meeting other non-functional requirements like security, accessibility and many others. Technical depth is a powerful way to progress fast when needed, but every team needs to have a deliberate strategy for paying back that technical depth on a regular basis, so the depth is manageable. In the context of non-functional requirements, technical depth is important because accumulating it usually results in shortcomings when meeting those requirements. So, how do we know when to invest in non-functional requirements and how to prioritize them? Let's take a look at this diagram which hopefully will give us some answers. On the vertical axis we have how mature our product is and on the horizontal axis we have the time. In green are how we are tracking with functional requirements and in yellow we have how we are tracking with non-functional requirements. In blue we have the user's expectations for our product. Where the functional requirements meet the expectations of the users, we would call this point the product market feedpoint. Generally, unless non-functional requirements are a key value proposition for your product most probably it won't make sense for you to invest in non-functional requirements before the product market feedpoint. This means we would better invest our effort in making sure that the product does the right things and later when you know that you have the right product you can start investing into addressing non-functional requirements. However, this doesn't mean that we can completely ignore NFRs doing that may mean that product should be completely rewritten at later stage. On the contrary we always start with the end go in mind, keep our future non-functional requirements aside and make sure that even though we are not investing in them right now we are laying the foundation for a scalable performant and highly available product. If we don't start our product with these goals in mind chances are we will have to really hard we will have really hard time addressing them at later stage. There are some notable exceptions to this rule of thumb. If NFRs will be a part of your main value proposition you want to make sure that those are addressed even as part of the MVP. For example if you are building the fastest search engine in the world like Google did this is the essence of your product so naturally performance should be your main focus. Another exception would be if you are legally binded to be compliant with the regulations. For example when managing and storing great cars you need to be PCI compliant which will come at a serious cost for your engineering team. You can't afford not to do it from day 0. If possible I'll try to outsource or defer search features at the least latest possible point in order to allow me to focus on working on my main value proposition. But if this is your main value prop obviously this might not be an option. So to sum up everything that we have talked so far there is no one size fits our approach. The right non-functional requirements to focus on and the right targets and goals to set will greatly vary on your product and the business needs your serving grade. The point here is to be conscious about those requirements and have a plan for how and when to address them. Second there is no free lunch and when it comes to non-functional requirements and in general. Higher targets always come at a higher cost be it time or money and most often both. Overinvesting will result in lost opportunity so make sure you understand how your targets are associated with business impact. Lowering the targets can be dangerous for your business as well. One example from a previous team that I was part of. We were owning the shopping cart of our website and our company and this was the mainstream of the mainstream of revenue for the company. We had a very precise our amount lost for every minute in which the shopping cart or the website itself is not working. This can easily quantify the amount of money the company uses on early basis and it can justify the investment in high availability and reliability of this component. Using a similar approach you can try to associate the effort and the investment that you need to do in non-functional requirements with the impact that this requirement will have on your business or your users. And to make sure you're approaching your non-functional requirements the right way the engineers are your best partners. Work with them in order to provide them with the product context about the business objectives and the impacts that non-functional requirements will have on your product. And don't miss the opportunity for them to inform you about what is possible from a technical point of view and what would be the cost. After all, a product being performant, secure and reliable engineering doing their job the right way. It needs nurturing time and focus at the right doses. With that I want to thank you for staying with me. I hope that this content has been useful and we'll help you in making the right trade-offs between functional and non-functional requirements. Having that understanding has been helping me throughout the years to have healthy and constructive conversations with engineers I work with and better what is going to be our future for the product. I wish you tons of success in building your amazing products. Goodbye!


This is Think Tech Hawaii, the Trinity Matters here. Bingo, four o'clock, rock, Think Tech Hawaii. Wow, this is our energy show, Hawaii the State of Clean Energy, which is supported by the Hawaii Energy Policy Forum. And today, we have two distinguished guests. One is my co-host, that's Veronica Rocha. She's renewable energy program manager at the Hawaii State Energy Office. She's from the government and she's here to help us. Thank you, thanks for having me. I'm really excited to be here today. Thank you, Veronica. Okay, and Rodney Chang, our distinguished guest, Renewable Acquisition Manager. Renewable Acquisition Manager, boy, that has huge prospects from Hawaii Electric Company. Welcome to the show, Rodney. Thank you, nice to be here. So, we have four questions. And we're gonna begin with those questions now to explore renewable, renewable. Because she's renewable, you're renewable, we're all renewable, it's a good thing and always has good connotations. So, why don't you ask the first question, Veronica? Wow, okay. So, this show is really focused on utility scale. So, larger renewable energy projects. So, my very first question is, we have this goal of achieving 100% renewable energy in the electricity sector by 2045. So, Rodney, where are we with regards to achieving that RPS? Yeah, thank you. So, you know, we're at about 26 and a half percent as a date, and so each year we keep getting closer and closer to the goal. So, the next milestone goal is in 2020 where we have to hit 30%. So, we think... That's according to the PSIP. Yeah, well, and it's according to statute too. Oh, statute, okay, okay. Yeah. So, the PSIP, you know, it has a plan for us to hopefully exceed that goal if we can. But the minimum is 30% by 2020. So, we feel that given where we are today in 2017, we're about 26% that we're on track for that. Oh, you'll have it easy, right? Yeah, hopefully. You heard it here on ThinkSec. Yeah, exactly. So... How are you gonna do it? So, you know, we're making steady progress and, you know, what you may have heard of recently is a recent approval by the commission for three projects for Oahu, fairly large project. Altogether, they're about 110 megawatts. So, some of you may remember about a year ago, Sun Edison had the three projects. They had some financial problems. Oh, yeah. The PPA got terminated. But NRG, they picked up the projects through the bankruptcy process and they approached us and we were able to negotiate a new PPA all at lower pricing. Lower pricing. Lower pricing. So, actually the consumer benefited on all that deal. Yeah, in the end it did. They did. Fortunately, we were able to get those signed and recently the commission approved those. So, those projects, you know, hopefully they'll be placed into service in the next few years and they'll add, I think, Altogether, about 3% to the RPS. Wow. So now you're at 29% of something. Yeah, yeah. So, we'll be at that. We justify those three projects alone. And the RPS does grow with other aspects such as, you know, rooftop key and other projects that are talked about in the PSIP as well. So, you know, we are looking to get more and, you know, we'll keep that number. What I hear you saying, you know, you can agree or you'll disagree, but is that big project is a big part of reaching these goals. And that's sort of a policy decision going forward. Maybe it's in the PSIP, but in any event, that's the fact. And we can expect to see more big projects to reach these goals going forward, right? That's true, that's true. But we cannot forget rooftop TV, although they're all small individually and aggregate, they make up a huge chunk of the RPS as well.  Of course, each project has a different profile.  And so some, you know, contribute more to the RPS than others, but we're looking, as stated in the PSIP, we're looking at all technologies. Ah, so it's all, it's all, it's not just solar and it's not just wind, it's anything that works. And you recognize that there might be a different pricing on different possibilities, but you want the diversity, is that it? Yes, we want diversity, you know, we want it to be as cost-effective as possible. So, you know, those have to be considered when evaluating this project. Do you have any, are there any wind projects that are either proposed or under development that are under Hawaiian Electric jurisdiction? So, the one that people know about publicly is one that the next wind project is going to be on the North Shore than the Puma County project. So- On Oahu. On Oahu, yes. And so, that's the one that most people know about. We did do a wind expression of interest for Oahu later, last, in the part of last year. So, we're still working through that. So, we'll see what comes out of that. What does that mean, a wind expression of interest? Tell us more. I've heard RAPs or requested proposals, but not quite that terminology. Yeah. So, you know, what the intention then is, and a lot of people know this, but, you know, the federal tax credit, they're expiring faster for wind as opposed to- Oh, too bad, yeah. Because when they expire these days, you have no assurance they're gonna be renewed these days. Exactly. In this special administration. That's right. Yeah, that's right. And so, this was something that we felt we had to look at and it's not a fool-blown RAP, but we recognize there's a need to try and see if there's some projects that are able to, you know, take advantage of tax credit. So, we did, you know, I'll put a request out there and say, hey, is anybody able to meet these, you know, take advantage of these tax credits and do a project there in Oahu? So, that's what we're working through and I can't speak too much more about that. No, but could you answer this question? Where an RFP needs to have the approval of the Public Utilities Commission, does a request for interest, does that require approval also? No, it does and any PPA requires approval from that team. Oh, but the question is, when you send out the request for expression of interest, does that require PUC approval? No, so the way we couch that was... Is that a good thing, Veronica? I actually have the same question, Jay, so... You see we're on the same wavelength there. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, absolutely. So, ultimately what the request will have to be if anything comes out of this is that it'll have to go to the commission. Oh, definitely. Yes, and say, you know, we like to ask for a waiver from the competitive bidding framework because this was something that was asked of outside of an RFP. And so we have to give all the reasons justifications why this should be a waiver. And it's almost, it's similar to what we did a few years ago with the Invitational Waiver Project as you recall. So again, that was one where, back in 2016, as you recall, or prior to 2016, the tax credit was going to expire in the 2016. So we felt that we need to... How to move to RFP? Exactly. And so we felt we didn't have time to do approval in RFP and so forth. So we did this Invitational Waiver Project. You know, technically it was a waiver that went through. We will go down the questions, but I just had one other thing, it just occurred to me that I wanted to ask you about. And that is, you know, from the beginning of the Clean Energy Initiative, I don't want to say 2008 or so, and you know, when Lingalingu, Ted Lu, made it happen, there was this whole notion that you would have third parties, that the utility would have third parties doing, you know, the design and construction and on contract, on PPA, right? Yes. But is there any change in that now? Do you see, for example, a future in which the utility itself, in its own name and its own ownership, will do these projects? Yeah, and a good example is the recent Westlock PD project that was approved by the Commission. And so that's the 20 May Watt PD project that's on Navy Land. And so that was one that was recently approved and you know, it's different structurally that it's a utility-owned project versus a third party. But my recollection is, you know, the equivalent PPA price, if it was a third party, it equates to about nine and a half. So that was a great price. Wow, yeah. And so you can do it. No, you can do it cheap, too, see? Yeah. So our view is that whatever is good for the customer. And so whether it's the third party or the utility-owned, it should be whatever makes you. All those possibilities are on the table. That's right. I have a follow-up question for you. So we talked about PSIP. And for the audience that maybe is not completely familiar with this alphabet soup and energy that we talk about, Power Supply Improvement Plan or PSIP. So this wind expression of interest, was that incorporated into the latest PSIP? Not verbatim, but the PSIP, incorporated some placeholder resources, future resources. So if you look at it, it contemplated, okay, we'll get about 30 megawatts of wind, 180 megawatts of PV, I'm thinking about Oahu. So that was the assumption that went into the analysis and the modeling that gave the results that people see in the PSIP. So the PSIP recognized and contemplated that there's gonna be solicitations thereafter to get these resources. It may be 180 megawatts of PV and 30 megawatts, so it may not be. And so it was based on purely an assumption at the time and the assumptions include what the pricing would be. So, they've said in many parts of the PSIP saying that, hey, this is just a plan and what really happens might be different. And it should be based on what the market dictates when we do a solicitation. If the prices come in way cheaper for this instead of this, then we should pick this if it makes better sense for the customer. So we just have to be scanning on new possibilities and better pricing and... A good example is if you look at the PSIP, there wasn't much discussion about, I call it hybrid projects, but PV coupled with storage. Sure. But that's kind of the hot thing right now. Just over the past six months plus, and you look at KIUC, they signed a PPA with... Tesla. Tesla and after that AES for hybrid projects. So what the trend seems to be is where developers are coupling batteries with PV so that you can apply the tax credits to the batteries as well. So in some cases, that makes sense. And I'm guessing, I'm anticipating when we do a solicitation, we'll get projects like that as well. So these projects that you talked about, like Westlock and the project, the wind project in Kahe, the waiver projects, NRG projects, do any of those utilize storage or are they pure just renewable generators? Right, so NRG, Westlock, I'll talk about those too. Those are pure PV projects currently. But the commission recently said in order saying, hey, we encourage you to consider storage. Storage, yes. Don't we agree to that? I mean, seems to me, how can you build a PV project without storage anymore? Because you have to have storage somewhere in the system for it to be useful. No, right. So what the PSIP said was, it did contemplate a lot of storage in the near future, but not immediately. But again, everything has to be looked at with fresh eyes. And if bids come in and it shows that, hey, having some PV with storage makes better sense then we'll have to justify it anyway. Do you foresee a time when you'll have all these non-storage facilities out there, non-storage PPAs, and one great big battery in the middle? Yeah, you know, I believe, and it's kind of talked about in the PSIP that there will be large batteries around the grid that will help to enable more integration renewables, right? Because as you know, storage helps you to shift energy during different times of the day. As you know, we have overabundance of PV during the middle of the day. So using batteries to take advantage of that, as well as provide some grid stability as well. So along those lines, Rodney, a few years ago, if my memory serves me right, there was a procurement that the companies issued to procure, how much was it, like 200 megawatts of storage? Was it, is that right? I forget the number. But what's the latest with that? Is that something that's being procured, or is the idea more to couple that with future procurements of large-scale utility projects? Yeah, I don't know the details on that, but I know that process is still in play. And I think that was still a plan. And the procurement for that was a, they call it a contingency battery, it's not necessarily load shift battery, but there was a solicitation for that. And I don't know the specifics on that, but I understand that's still going through the process. Well, we're getting better at this, aren't we? We're getting better at sizing up our needs and creating, you know, PPAs and facilities and working together on it. It seems like it's happening easier now with less fits and fewer fits and starts and all that. And you're doing a great job, by the way. Did I mention that? Yeah. Mr. Veronica Rocha. Thank you. Okay, and Roddy Chong, Hawaiian Electric Companies. We're gonna take a short break, we're gonna regroup, we're gonna come back in one minute, and we're gonna go on to more, more of the four questions. We've only got one so far, we'll be right back. Okay. This is Think Tech Hawaii, raising public awareness. Some say scuba divers are the poor man's astronaut. At DiveHeart, we believe that to be true. We say, forget the moon. DiveHeart can help children, adults, and veterans of all abilities escape gravity right here on Earth. Search DiveHeart.org and imagine the possibilities in your life. Dude. Okay, wow, we're back. You know, if you hadn't noticed, this is a hot show, honestly. Rodney Chong from Hawaiian Electric Company and Veronica Rocha, my co-host for the show. She's the Renewable Energy Program Manager for Hawaii State Energy Office. So this is like utility renewables meeting state energy office renewables. It's all about renewables. We're finding some very interesting things. So, let's look forward. You had a question about looking forward, Veronica. Yes, and you referenced four questions. We've actually covered two already. The second one is not a mystery question. It was really about recent procurements. Right, so this has been covered. Mystery question, that's a good idea, yeah. So the third question is, okay, Rodney, now that the Power Supply Improvement Plan, or PSIP, has been approved by the Public Utilities Commission, or PUC, what can we expect next in terms of procurements, future procurements from the utility? No, yeah, so, yes, the PUC recently accepted the PSIP, so that's great. And, you know, we were reading the order and it was clear that the next step is for them to open the dock. It's start the process to allow us to do the RFPs. So that's something that we anticipated.  So that's what we're waiting for and we're getting ready for that. And, you know, some of the things that we've been working on in preparation for it is, and it wasn't something maybe you wanted to bring up, but you know, we did a land RFI earlier this year. Yeah, please talk about that. Okay, and so, you know, over my years in this department, there were times where landowners called me or developers called me. How long have you been in the department? Seven years. Okay, just checking. Yeah. Okay, so landowners called you?  Or developer calls, hey, I need some land, who should I talk to? So, obviously, it's not something that we can just, you know, answer that question. No, I saw a press release on this very thing. No, exactly. We talked to Peter Rossick of Hawaiian Electric about this very- That's right, and he helped us get the information out. And so, it was a way to get landowners connected with developers. So, you know, we asked landowners who were interested, hey, if you want to offer your lands for future renewable projects, send us information. And we took that information, overlaid it with our system information, some transmission lines, so that we can provide that to developers. Very valuable. That's right. To facilitate or in exchange, that's right. It'll make it happen kind of person. I called it match.com. I liked it, match.com, there you go. But, you know, it was a way to help facilitate that process. And, you know, we'll see how that goes, hopefully it's useful. That's a good one. Yeah. And so, you know, that, because, you know, if you ask developers and landowners, it takes time for them to engage each other and talk about things before they can actually put a project together. So we're hopeful that, you know, this process is easier by us doing that. And we'll want to keep enhancing and maybe do that again. So we'll see.  So we want to make sure that, you know, unless told otherwise by the commission that we're following the steps required in that. Why don't you just go out there and make 57 RFPs and just wait and see what happens and then seek approval of the ones you like and get to 100% by 2018. Sorry. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's one way we're going about it, but then there's the PUC, I guess, way of doing things, right? So please clarify for me. Who opens this docket to allow for the RFP to take place? Is it the companies or is it the PUC? So we initiated by, we actually sent letters over the past year asking for, you know, requests to open the dockets to do the RFPs. So, you know, we sent that and, you know, we wait for the commission to open the docket. And so, you know, typically, if you follow a company framework, there might be an independent observer assigned to that to each RFP and so we'll meet with that person and go over what we think is the structure and the process of the RFP itself. Can you talk about the independent observer for a minute? What is that? Who is that? Can Veronica be one? Can I be one? I don't think so. I'm not like a studio staff here. Can they be one?  And so, they work with us to make sure that we're following, you know, whatever the commission might have stated when they open the docket or following the intent of the compid framework. So they, at some points, they'll issue reports on what they believe is their view of things. And so, you know, we've went through this before more recently with the geothermal RFP. Prior to that, there was one in 2008, I think, for Renewal RFP. So that's what's written in the compid framework. And so, you know, if an IO independent observer is assigned, that's how we work with them. And, you know, one of the reasons, too, if there's an RFP where the utility is also bidding, you know, obviously we have to have some firewalls. Possibility of conflict, yeah. Exactly, so they keep an eye out for that, make sure that everything is right, so. So let's see, PUC opens the docket. In response to approving the PCEP and in response to your letter asking for that docket to be opened, then you submit, is it your final RFP or is there a draft? It's a draft. And is there opportunity for public comment? Who gets to comment? Actually, is it the public or who gets to comment? Is it interveners, how does that work? Yeah, no, so good question is the process, you know, the docket gets opened, we have a draft RFP, so it's technically a draft. And we issue that. Of course, we'll have the IO look at it first and, you know, if it looks good, we'll issue the draft and it's a public document that people can see. And, you know, we solicit comments and, you know, more than likely we'll have a, it's called a technical conference by I view it as a bidder's conference where we talk about it, answer questions and we gotta run it a certain way so that everybody has access to the answers we give. You know, the public may participate in it, they'll see it anyway. And so they may issue comments as well. So we take all the comments in, review it, we try and incorporate it into our proposed final RFP. And once we've done that, we will issue that to the PUC. And if we don't hear anything, I think for 30 days then it's deemed final and we can go ahead and issue the RFP. You guys are so nice. I mean, you know, I doubt this happened when you were first building power plants in the early part of the 20th century. And you've gotten around to being transparent about everything, inviting everybody, total inclusivity. I remember in the RFP process, there were like 86, you know, stakeholders involved and that took years and it didn't work because so many voices, you know? I mean, so my question is, you know, doesn't some of this transparency type bureaucracy stand in the way of moving to goals that Veronica is asking about? Yeah, I mean, that's reality, it is. But, you know, there has to be a balance to, from transparency, letting people comment on things, but also us trying our best to meet the goals at our law. So we have to do that and... Our hearts go out to you. Yeah, thank you, I appreciate it. This actually takes me to the fourth question. Okay, the fourth question. Fourth question. So Rodney, how are the companies preparing the general community and also developers for these upcoming procurements? And so just to put some scale around the procurements, we're not talking about like 10 megawatts, right? How much are we talking about and how are you preparing general community and developers for the type of procurement scale that you're looking at? No, good question. This has been a hot topic because we do have this goal for the state, but people realize that there's gonna be a lot of big projects all over the island. And what we've heard loud and clear from communities is that they want more visibility because the way it's been done in the past is obviously for reasons of confidentiality, when we sign nondisclosure agreements with the developer we're negotiating with, we can't speak publicly about it unless they want to themselves. And so often the project's not made public until we actually have to file it to the commission for approval. That's when people hear about it. Some developers though, they may choose to do community outreach beforehand, but that's up to them. But what we're looking at is trying to integrate into the RFP process a way to get the developers out there earlier before we execute PPAs. So what we're looking to do is propose in the process a requirement that the developer does some community outreach prior to executing a PPA. And we gotta work out the details on that. Again, that would be our proposal. It's gonna be subject to comment by people who are stakeholders in the RFP process. It's gonna be subject to the PC approving our process. But that's the way we're looking at it. We're hearing loud and clear the community wants transparency and they don't wanna hear about it like we lead in the game. So that's what we're looking at doing. Strikes me though that earlier in the game, say going back to 2008 and a few years after that, actually it was after the blush. The blush was in 2000, everybody was on board, but maybe by 2010 or so there was little pushback. People said, oh, not in my backyard. You guys can do that but somewhere else, not here. My guess is, and I really like your thoughts on this, my guess is that that's so often that people are not so nimby today as they used to be, am I right? You can just say no. Yeah, it depends. And I think like certain communities feel like a lot of these types of project, they'll call it infrastructure projects seem to always be in their area. So obviously that doesn't sit well with some of those communities. So I don't wanna generalize saying that it's not an issue. So we're trying to address it, regardless what community, just wanna be consistent. And you can see that kind of playing out, there was recently an ordinance passed with the city council for future wind projects. So any wind projects proposed in ag or county lands, instead of a minor CUP now has to go through a major. So that requires more community engagement. So I think people are beginning to realize that they want to have more of a voice and more of a say in these projects and I see that happening. And so yeah, I don't think that's true for all parts of the state. Yeah, I wanna add to this part of the conversation. So in my experience, I agree with Ronnie, it does depend, but I feel that there is a thirst for not just being part of the decision-making process, but for seeing direct benefits to communities that are impacted in some way by these renewable energy projects. So to that end, I'm really happy to see that HECO's starting to take steps towards that direction of further really helping to engage the developers with the community and be part of the process. What is direct benefits, Veronica? For example, being able to purchase part of the power plant. Being able to have direct revenue derived for the community, for like the revenues that the developer would get. And to be honest, these are just examples because ultimately the types of benefits that matter are the benefits that the community is looking for and that they deem fair for whatever it is that they're giving up. The entitlements, you're talking about entitlements? I'm not sure you mean by entitlements. Well, build the gym for the kids. That could be it. Improve the high school, what have you. Spend some money in the local community. That could be part of it. And you know, so the last show of this series in September, so September 27th, I'm hoping if I can get a guest to talk about what they are doing with regards to this subject on a very local level. So this is something that folks are interested in. I highly recommend that they tune into that show. I wanna be there. Yeah, well, you know. Okay, Veronica, we're out of time. I am so sorry we're out of time, Rodney. There's much more to discuss here. I personally had my own four questions, but that's what the next time you're on the show. So it's time for you to summarize or at least make a point for takeaway and leave our viewers with some really profound thought. Ready, go. Shoot, so I don't know about the profound thoughts, but we have a very, we're the only state in the nation that has the goal of 100% renewal portfolio standard in the electricity sector by the year 2045. Towards that end, HECO has already procured quite a bit of utility-scale projects. We're currently at 26% RPAs. They continue to procure projects of energy, three projects are examples of that. Moving into the future, now that the Power Supply Improvement Plan has been approved by the Public Utilities Commission, we're gonna be looking to procure a lot more renewables and as part of that portfolio, of course, utility-scale renewables are gonna be a big part of that. So with that, I really thank Rodney for participating in this conversation today and also Jay for having me participate as the co-host. So thank you so much. We want you back. So Rodney, honestly, just one last thing. What do you think of Veronica's performance today? Awesome. Awesome. Awesome, Veronica. Very polished. Thank you, Rodney. Hello, how are you guys? Thank you, everybody. Appreciate it.