Light Board - Regular Meeting

Good morning, everyone. I'm going to call this June 18th meeting of the Concord Light Board to order. I think the first thing we need to do is it's somewhat of a new process is have a formal roll call. So I'll identify each of the board members and ask them if they're here to indicate present. Chris Schaffner. Here. Warren Leon. Present. Nicole Grosner.

Present.

Tyson Kuczynski.

Present.

And myself, John Dalton. Present. With that, I think we have two sets of minutes to approve. The first is, I believe, from our last meeting on May 3rd. Can I have a motion from someone for approval of those minutes?

I move to approve the May meeting minutes. I'll second.

We'll now move to a vote. Nicole? Yes. Warren?

Yes.

Chris? Yes. And Tyson was not a board member there, so we'll hold off on asking him to vote, and I vote yes as well. So with that, the May 13th board meeting minutes have been approved. There's also some amendments which were shared to our April 8th meeting. Can I have a motion for approval of those minutes?

I move to approve the amendments to the previous minutes. I'll second.

Nicole?

I was not.

You were not a member of that. Yeah. Yes, yeah, yeah. Chris? Yes. Warren?

Yes.

And I vote yes as well. And with that, the April 8th minutes have been, as modified, have been approved. I guess in terms of the next agenda item is the chair's update. And I think that the first thing is, I'd like to welcome Tyson Kupczynski. Tyson, probably the first matter here is to make sure that, could you please pronounce your name for me? And I'm probably going to require some help on this.

That's fine. I usually just go by Tyson. But yeah, my last name is Kupczynski. Kupczynski.

Well, Tyson has a strong background in terms of the IT sector, as well as cybersecurity. Obviously, capabilities that the board really can utilize. Tyson, if you could provide a more formal introduction for the other board members and everyone present, that would be great.

Yeah. Uh, so again, my name is Tyson. I just failed by Tyson. You don't, you don't need to worry about my last name. Um, nice to meet you all and excited to obviously join the board. Um, I have a very long history, um, in the technology space, um, well over 20 years, I grew up in, uh, heavily in the infrastructure space. Um, I'm a former, uh, two times CISO. Um, I'm actually now a venture capitalist, uh, in the cyber. security arena. And I've done everything under the sun from consulting work to working for very small, scrappy startups to large Fortune 500s across many, many different industries, everything from financial services to healthcare to semiconductor, et cetera, et cetera. So very excited to join the board.

Well, thrilled to have you here, Tyson. Welcome.

Thank you.

This is my first meeting as serving as chair of the board. I guess one thing I just ask the other members is please, you know, feel free to kind of reach out to me in terms of, you know, collectively, you know, working together to kind of set the agenda, look for your input on various issues. Obviously, we have to kind of operate within the constraints of the open meeting law. So that prevents three of us from formally getting together. But welcome the opportunity for discussions with each of you as we kind of sort through issues. And Jason and others expect you to kind of keep me on the rails in terms of meeting procedure. And with that, I'm going to turn it over to Jason for the director's update.

Thank you, John. Some updates from this past month. I wanted to mention that the new level three chargers at the bus depot have been installed. I want to thank Joe and the engineering and line crew for all of their work getting these chargers installed. We had to run primaries from an existing tie point over there down to a new connection point and then add a transformer and pad and a handhold so that we could share this new service with the state's vendor who was installing it. The school had gotten a grant for these Level 3 chargers worth quite a bit of money. It'll allow them to do up to 60 kW of Level 3 charging, and there are two ports on this. The school does have one newer bus that's capable of charging quite fast and discharging. And they're looking at expanding their fleet, potentially getting two more electric buses and one additional charger. We're going to be talking a little bit later about the new vehicle to grid rate, which is definitely a prerequisite for this to become fully operational. But it's been a lot of coordination between the licensed site professional who's been working with us, the CMLP staff, the school department staff, the state, and then all of the vendors that have been selected by the state to do the make ready work and the installation of the actual charger. So the school has a couple applications in, one for interconnection and one for the new meter. And so we're moving that process along and it should be done soon. I know that there's a little bit of conditioning that needs to happen. There are communications in the charger that will go back to the state's vendor, the mobility house, which is the entity who will actually be discharging and looking for peaks for this particular device. So just really happy that we have got here on this aggressive timeline, considering the delays and getting the equipment and then doing this on an EPA Superfund site, which is always a challenge in terms of digging and putting in underground infrastructure. So thanks to all involved there. And then I hope that once rate is voted and in place, then we can actually, you know, turn this on and aim for some of the summer peaks, which will both help the school and help rate payers. So time of day work continues. We're now kind of starting the next wave of cycle bill cycles under time of day. And I'd say that we're not getting a huge amount of customer concerns about time of day. Some people haven't really noticed. They just pay their bills as they always have. Some people continue to ask questions and come up with, you know, scenarios that aren't addressed in our massive frequently asked questions list on the website. And so staff continue to kind of look into and address those customer questions and concerns. But it's definitely not an onslaught or a wave. I hope I'm not jinxing us. But it's going well. And as I said, we're in the second month now. I want to thank Jesse and Jennifer for kind of proactively identifying some issues that we had had. There was a problem with the service order process when we added a new meter under time of day, which is something that hadn't been extensively tested. And so they found this and were able to kind of correct it. before it had any real impact on the handful of customers that had been changed over and then messaged those people who were impacted. So, you know, there's still kind of like learning curve items that we have, but I'd say things are kind of settling down. We do expect people for the next few months might continue to call and ask about this. And we're also trying to understand, you know, the current wave or the current customers have gone through these waves of communication, but new customers who come into the light plant territory may not know and seen all those things. So we're trying to understand like what we need to do for new customers in particular to make them aware of this rate structure. And then in coming months, hopefully at our next meeting, but to be determined because we want to make sure we get this right, but we'll start talking about the analysis that we have based on the meter data and the usage that we're seeing in terms of our people shifting and how much and what is that impact. And, you know, I will say as complicated as the rate structure is with having a super off peak, having that is a pretty good indicator because it's a good data point to see if people are lowering their peak, we don't know why, but if they lower their peak and they increase their super off peak, it's a pretty good indication that they're actually trying to shift load. So we've been trying to collect as many ideas as we can about how we can prove the numbers that we're going to report. And we also have had, if I don't know if the board remembers, give Metcalf who presented to the board maybe a year and a half ago on, um, our efforts to reduce peaks through a Google Groups email. Gibb is an economist and mathematician and statistician who's kind of acclaimed and Professor Emeritus from MIT and works at Tufts. And he's a Concord resident and he's really fascinated with studying the effects of certain things and changes. And so he has offered his services to help us brainstorm and prove out some of this as well. So It'd be great to start talking about to see what has actually happened. That first month in April usage for May billing, some people might not have been aware because they didn't see their bill. Then they got their May bill and then they said, oh, okay now. It'll be interesting to see which month has a bigger swing, the month that was announced as the start or the month that was after people got their bills and might have responded to what they saw in their actual usage. Staff in the finance department and others continue to work on the annual audit. The auditors are busy at work and they have a target completion for the financial statements for a few weeks, maybe two to four weeks. It depends on how quickly we get them all the information and how quickly they address it. And we also have some outstanding items that the townhouse needs to provide to sign off on certain things. This would be a lot sooner than last year and gets us back on track with a timely audit And I want to say, you know, one of our hopes that by going to an auditor that has extensive municipal light plant experience, that there would be some benefit to us to understand industry-wide best practices that maybe another auditor doesn't. And I'm happy to say I've already seen several examples of that happen. One of them, I mentioned this to John, but we had a kind of a long discussion last year during the financial – process to determine whether we should be using the net plant or gross plant numbers to calculate the DPU's rate of return. And, you know, the auditors read those minutes from when we had that discussion and they were able to add a lot of value to that discussion and provide examples from other communities that they audit of where they've interacted with the DPU and had those specific questions. And the DPU has issued formal guidance on how to handle those things. And That's exactly what we were hoping would happen and it has been happening, so that's great. Work continues on the landfill solar and storage project. This, if you'll remember, is gonna move us from about 1.5 megawatts AC at the landfill to four megawatts AC and add energy storage. So we are still waiting on some filings with the state and then the special permit from the planning board has been continued while they collect more feedback and information Keir Sarge has provided the light plant with some additional drawings and information, and we continue to coordinate among engineering staff and Laura, myself, and others to make sure that we move this project along and understand kind of the timeframe that we're looking at. We had a great meeting with the town's assessor and the town CFO and assistant CFO and council to discuss pilot and how that might change to the town and then understand kind of the demarcation and what any other departments might need. There was a question about mowing around the fence to make sure that the town didn't incur additional costs as they mow, which it sounds like a very simple thing, but the goal here is to not put any additional burden on the town. So those were good discussions and we were able to get a lot of good feedback from other town departments. We did have a couple power outages last month, which it's been a little while, knock on wood, since we've kind of had a larger outage, but I did just want to mention these. You know, it's always a lot of work and effort by staff, and it's kind of unseen by most people, but these were both caused by Mother Nature, but one of them was basically a squirrel that got where they shouldn't, and then the other was a branch that fell across two phases of a primary, and So those did trip our power protection device at a switch point and kind of cut power off to make sure that something didn't burn up or blow up and everything worked as expected. But, you know, crews do need to go make sure that they inspect everything and that everything is safe to re-energize. And kind of in the broadband portion, I'll mention too that there was an effect of that was felt in broadband because of the the change that broadband has been doing in their new move to XGS PON and the double equipment that they've had at the substation 479. So that equipment was impacted by that power outage, but they've found a way to mitigate that issue so that if the power goes out there, you know, they obviously have battery backups, but it wasn't enough to sustain all of their equipment because they kind of have twice the amount of equipment today as they had before. So they've been able to switch that and address that so that it returned to the full length of battery backup. I wanted to mention this. The municipal light plants were granted another waiver by MassDOER for their regulation on large building energy reporting. The Municipal Electric Association of Massachusetts has been talking to DOR about this as a lot of light plants have concerns about privacy of customer data and have offered to extensively support customers who are reporting this. but are concerned about having to do it on their behalf when there are, you know, potentially proprietary information that can be gleaned from power usage for some companies. I want to say that, like, we also understand that, you know, establishing greenhouse goal emission, you know, emission goals is dependent upon having data. So we're trying to be good partners with DOER and get information on the books and just find a way that, you know, is appropriate for all customers who have a say in their own personal and private data. But I do want to mention it just because I feel like it's something the board might discuss in the future, and I just want to make people aware of it. DOER and Meme are actually in discussions and plan to, DOER says that they're going to be looking at their regulations to kind of clarify or maybe even alter some of that as it pertains to municipal light plants. So we'll see what comes with that conversation. Then last thing I want to mention that we are actively recruiting several positions at the light plant. We've got two people in the metering division and then three people in the line underground crew, including a master mechanic or senior master mechanic that we're trying to fill in anticipation of a potential future retirement. So we do have a lot of recruitment going on and this is a really difficult industry to recruit for because we really need specialized people with a lot of experience. And some of the skills from other investor-owned utilities are not necessarily transferable to a municipal utility where people are asked to kind of do everything. So it is a challenge to hire. We're trying to get a leg up on a couple of these positions and then fill some vacancies due to retirements and resignations. So I think I'll stop there and see if there's any questions from the board.

Thank you, Jason. Very comprehensive review and very helpful. Are there any questions or comments from the board?

Chris? Yeah, just a quick one. You had mentioned the auditors and I was at the Financial Audit Advisory Committee meeting last night representing the Light Board and the auditor who had finished the town audit was there and one of the questions I asked him was, what he thought of as having different auditors for different segments, specifically a separate auditor for the light plant. And they were supportive of that and very complimentary of our current auditor. So I thought that was good information. And the current charge to that group is that the town should have one auditor for the whole thing. But I think that there's broad agreement across the committee that that's going to change. So the charge is being redrafted. Yeah. So I think they're eager to see the results of this audit and see how that all fits together. That was a good comment, I thought.

Yeah. Tyson?

Yeah, just a quick question going back to the data points you're collecting about the load shift as people kind of adjust to kind of the new time of day rates. Are you going to publicly post that to folks so that they can consume it?

Um, well, so here's what I will say. Like we'll definitely publish the findings as well as the methodology and the data. Like we're not going to put the 12 gigabyte file of, you know, I'm talking about like an analysis. There'll be a presentation to the board if the chair allows and we'll have discussions about the methodology. And then also people might have other suggestions or things that they want to see too. So yeah, absolutely. We'll have, um, yeah, that's, it's really important because we anticipated a phase two, um, So I think that data is going to be vital to understand what impact it's had on people, you know, and because we had assumptions about what bills would do, and now we can actually look at those to see, like, you know, did that bear out? We thought this person would be flat, were they? We thought this person would be higher, were they? You know, so absolutely. Okay, awesome.

Quick question. Is there a way for individuals to access their AMI data?

You can see a certain amount on Smart Hub. Jennifer, can you weigh in on if Smart Hub has 100% of their hourly data or if it is limited in some capacity?

Um, there is a lot of the data there. There may still be some points that may not be available. Um, but I think it's a good place to start and then, you know, people will call in and they can download different pieces of data from two people call in and ask us questions and we can always fill in any additional information that they may need to have.

Yeah. We're happy to provide you more information. Um, if, if we have more, we're, we're happy to give it to customers. It's their, their usage. Thanks.

Jason, can you remind me in terms of where we are with respect to any commercial negotiations with Kearsarge for the landfill solar expansion? We did agree with the board that a shared savings made sense for the battery energy storage, but is that something that's been resolved? Is that a power purchase agreement that you'll be asking the board to weigh in on at some point?

Yes. So at this point, we have a letter of intent with Kearsarge, signed by the town manager, to move forward with negotiations and discussions, which allows them to commit resources to the project. And then we would be drafting a purchase power agreement and a battery energy storage services agreement for the site. And those would go through the normal PPA process. So yes. So we're not there yet, but Those are being discussed and we're having council look at those and work with us on making refinements to those. And it will be different because we don't have a battery energy storage services agreement yet. So this will be definitely a new function. Now the actual solar will be probably very similar to the solar agreements that we have in other places. I think one thing that we never really addressed in the past with our previous two or three solar PPAs in town is If there's an emergency, we know that we can kind of eliminate that source of power. But emergency is usually defined as like the wires are on fire or life safety is in jeopardy. But what happens when solar is creeping to a point where it's going to trip out both circuits in town and we're going to lose power, which is an emergency to us who need to provide electricity 24-7, but might not be an emergency as it's legally written in the contract where You know, life safety is threatened, even though obviously a power outage could threaten life safety. But anyway, so we want to make sure that that curtailment, sort of emergent curtailment that is meant to protect from a bad outcome is kind of weaved into that contract because it's not really addressed directly in other contracts that we have.

Is there likely to be any value in terms of a provision where we were able to curtail them for convenience? You know, we'd be in a situation where there might be back feeding when we're not in a position to back feed.

Yep, absolutely. And then also for the battery, I think we've also conceived that at our cost, we might be able to use the battery. So we do have the ISO will issue warnings or orders to lower voltage or cut load when there's a significant issue. And we will have the option to discharge the battery to sort of offset that. The hard part is if that order is a long-term thing, that's not going to help us. But if it's to get through a two-hour while a generator needs to make emergency repairs to start up something, that might help. And having more and more of those resources on our system might help us mitigate those for a longer period of time.

Great. Thank you. Any other questions, comments from the board? And Jason, will you be providing the broadband update?

I'll give that update. So I wanted to mention that Ahmed Belyazid, our senior network engineer, is leaving at the end of next week. Ahmed has been here for a year and a half, and he was really instrumental in getting a lot of big projects off the ground. He came with a lot of experience, and he is a Concord resident as well. And so he kind of looked at Concord Broadband from both sides and we're going to miss him and we wish him the absolute best. The good news is that, you know, several years ago, we recognized that having a single point of failure in network engineering is not a good thing. And so we do have two network engineers today to make sure that we can address gaps like this. So we are in good hands. We have another network engineer, Daniel Chen, who's been here for several months now, maybe nearly a year. And so that's good. And we've already started recruiting actually with HR. So some additional network changes have been happening as we continue to move forward on that project for XGS PON, the latest generation of broadband equipment. Our last phase was to replace the core routers that we use. These are used for all town internet traffic to basically find a path to the internet. And the existing routers had 10 gig ports that were connected. And so the max throughput that they had was like 20 gigs. And so the new routers have 100 gig max. We are seeing bandwidth increase at a faster pace than we had in the past. It was steadily increasing, but pretty slowly. In the last, I'd say, six to nine months, we've seen it increase more dramatically. We do have a 100 gig circuit for internet with one provider, and we have two 10 gig circuits with other providers. And we are actually able to increase one of the other 10 gigs to 100 gigs at very little additional cost, which is great news. And so that'll allow us to continue to have a very high level of redundancy. And the new routers are configured so that they can really load balance much better than the old routers. The old routers really picked a preference. And once they found that preference, they kind of stuck to it. and they didn't kind of load balance as nicely as we wanted to. The new routers are configured and support that, which would allow us to address an issue. Like, say, for example, today we had traffic at 12 gigabits per second, and we have two ISPs that provide 10, and our other ISP that has 100 is not working. So the new routers will be able to intelligently segment that traffic and say, let's put a pool of people on this path and a pool of people on that path, Before, after 10 gig, it would have just kind of slowed down and people would have experienced bottlenecks. So we have kind of a mixed environment where we have old and new routers participating as backups for each other. And we're in the process of switching over the new routers to become the primary on both incoming and outgoing traffic. And then once that is established and tested and is working well, we will then replace the secondary backup router as well. And I think that with vacations and transitions, we want to make sure we document everything we can before our med leaves. So I expect that that work will probably happen in mid to late July. Again, we still have full resilience now with all the equipment there, and we do have plenty of time with our existing bandwidth profile of kind of where we are. One of Dale's goals for the fiscal year 26 was to work on a more concrete plan for getting Concord Broadband into multi-dwelling units and create a few pilot programs that we can start doing. We've talked to many different locations over the years to try to understand what the barriers for adoption were, whether it's not having fiber that last mile or having coax in their entire building and not ethernet or conduit where we can install things easily. And so we've kind of already identified many of the issues, the specific issues of the MDUs. And so what we're hoping we'll have out of this is a framework and a priority list of, you know, for dollars spent, customers achieved in these underserved areas where we have, you know, we have buildings that were built before they envisioned another provider. And so that'll be exciting. That was one of the goals of the Fiber Broadband Completion Task Force was to try to understand, you know, what these barriers were and make sure that we could find solutions to them. And we've probably earned discussions with either associations or owners of several MDUs to understand, you know, like what upgrades they're making and how can we get access to those buildings. And so at a future meeting, Dale will kind of give an update on that and talk about where we might look to start first. The network team, just remember the network team here in broadband supports the town's network as well. They've been spending a lot of time adding additional Wi-Fi access points to provide better coverage in town buildings. One particular issue we've had perennially is at the Beattie Center. They have a lot of swim meets there. We've got a lot of parents, and every parent would like to both film and livestream their student or child as they do their swim meet. And when you have a couple hundred people trying to livestream HD video, you can obviously have a bottleneck. So they've taken steps to address some of those issues. to make dramatic improvements. And then I'll just mention, Tyson knows this, but he had a meeting with Dale and I where we reviewed some of the broadband infrastructure and network. And our hope is that we'll continue to have conversations with him to get him up to speed and see if there's any experience or perspective that he can help leverage to improve the security and reliability of our network. So I'll pause there.

Excellent. Thank you for that. Any questions or comments from Warren?

Yeah. Back in the olden days when I was still board chair, I was copied on an email correspondence with Warren. a resident asking about broadband coverage and our services versus Comcast. And there are very good answers in there. And I wonder whether there's a way to beef up the marketing material on the website about broadband to explain more clearly the advantages of broadband the service and especially in comparison to Comcast.

Yeah, that's a great suggestion and we can absolutely do that. I will work with Dale on getting some of that information up and I'll just say the customer service team has been phenomenal and they have a lot of skill in creating new marketing materials. We've been planning our public power week for October, and I'm just blown away at the capability and professionalism of the kind of the graphics and flyers and handouts that they've been making. So, yeah, we can definitely work with the teams to make sure that we get that information out. And you're right, like we don't want to wait until people are express their concerns. We want to make sure we're proactive and providing that information up front.

Any other questions or comments from the board? I see none. We'll move on to the next agenda item. And this is essentially a rate hearing. This is the vehicle to grid rate that we discussed in our last meeting. I need a motion from someone to suspend the regular meeting and to go into a rate hearing.

So I'll move that we suspend the meeting in progress and enter into a rate hearing for the purpose of discussing the rates listed in the posted agenda.

Tyson?

Yes. Yeah. Yes.

Nicole? Yes. Warren? Yes. Chris? Yes. And I'm also yes. So are we going to have a presentation here from Laura? Yes.

Do you want to share your screen, Laura, or do you want me to pull up the tariff?

Yeah, I will go ahead and share my screen if I'm able to. Let's see. Okay, so... I'm gonna back up just one step before I move forward because not all of our current board members were here at the April meeting when we last discussed this. I just wanna kind of bring them up to speed a little bit before we move forward. Back in April, we had proposed the basic outline of a new vehicle to grid pilot. This is a rate that not only specifies what CMLP will charge a customer for charging a battery. So when they pull energy, electricity from CMLP, what do they pay CMLP for that electricity? But it also specifies what CMLP is going to compensate them for. when they push energy back from the battery to the grid. So that's essentially what this rate schedule is designed to do. When we presented this to you in April and got broad agreement that this was a rate structure Profile that the board was in agreement with we had proposed no meter charge a dollar 83 demand fee based on non coincident peak the phase 2 time of day energy rates that were that resulted from the cost of service study. And then in terms of the compensation to the customers, we talked about compensating them for administrative ease at a flat energy rate of five and a half cents, $168 per KW year for electricity. All annual ISO regional coincident capacity peak hours, which are assessed after the fact, and then $56 per KW for all metered KW delivered during the annual ISO system-wide peak, which is assessed about five months after the end of the year. And so fast forward to today, and we have an actual tariff for you to approve, or we're hoping that you'll approve. And I'm just going to point out where the actual tariff that we're proposing to you today differs from the outline presented at the April meeting. we've decided we should charge a meter charge. Since this is a pilot rate and it's designed specifically to be for an electric bus charger that has the capacity of around 66 kilowatts, we would like to propose applying the medium general service meter charge, which all commercial customers pay. at $90 a month. Medium general service covers commercial customers who have demands that are greater than 20 kilowatts, but less than 200. So the 66 kilowatts would fall in that range. And so we think a $90 per month meter charge is appropriate. The 183 is the same. The delivery charge is the same as before. It's the phase two time of day cost of service study prices that came out. The credits we had proposed to you to be five and a half cents, which was based on an average of the number of hours that fall. During each of our defined time period. So, in other words, there's four hours, you know, of peaks of peak hours per day. There's four hours of super off peak. All the other hours are off peak. And so when the consultant prepared the price, they simply took sort of the weighted average of all the number of hours in the month times the corresponding prices. Jason and I talked about that a little bit further and we thought, you know, that doesn't really make a lot of sense because the bus is not going to be pushing energy back in the middle of the super off-peak, right? They're going to be targeting the peak. And in fact, most of their money is going to be made by hitting those ISO peaks. And so instead... What we did is we said, okay, we're going to take, and this might be more information than you want to see, but these are the actual peak dates, days of the week and hours over the last 12 months. And we said, if the bus had been operating during these months and they had been doing a good job of targeting the peaks, they would have tried to discharge the battery on either side of the peak hour to make sure they hit the peak. In other words, if the peak's estimated to be hour ending 17 or 5 p.m., they're gonna start discharging the battery at 3 p.m. and go all the way to 6 p.m. to make sure that they hit the peak. So we're estimating that they would be pushing energy back during these three hours. Those happen to be, since it's June, and a weekday, those are the standard peak hours, which are color coded in this like orange. Similarly, in other months that are not peak months, for example, the shoulder months of October and November, the peaks happen later. They would have been discharging during these hours. These are This falls within the peak rate. These are in the off-peak rate. So basically, we just said if they use the strategy, they would have been pushing back during peak, off-peak hours in the standard and summer months this many times. And this is what the corresponding energy rate would have been. And using that methodology, we come up with a slightly higher compensation for the customer instead of five and a half cents. It's six and a half cents. As you would expect, because before they were including super off peak hours as part of the calculation. And now they're not. Tyson, is that a raised hand?

No, I was a champion. Sorry. Okay.

Sorry. So what we're, we are proposing now instead of five and a half cents, we're proposing six and a half cents. So other than the meter charge, and the energy rate, all the other terms are the same. We had told you that we proposed crediting $56 per kW for the capacity. The tariff is $55.68. And we told you that we were going to credit $14 per kilowatt month for the transmission. And that's what's in this rate. So hopefully, you've had a chance to look. Most of the other terms in here are pretty standard. This is the draft tariff sheet that we'd like you to consider and vote on today.

Any comments or questions from board members?

Wow, I either did a really great job or nobody has any idea what's going on.

Well, we did discuss that last meeting, so that certainly helped. Laura, can I just ask, so the rates that you have in terms of the transmission and then the rate that's based on the forward capacity market, those rates seem to align with the specific charges, as well as the energy rate that the the customer will receive. So is there any value that non-participating customers get? I mean, is the light plant better off from people, from a customer participating in this rate?

You know, we've tried to be very fair about the value of the energy being returned. There is a slight haircut in it to offset the administrative cost because we're going to have to do these credits kind of by hand after the fact, right? But for the most part, they're aligned with market prices. So I would answer affirmatively to your question. I would say, you know, given that they're aligned with market prices, then yes, it should be favorable for other customers. both from the light plant's perspective and from the customer's perspective.

Thank you.

Did I answer that correctly, John?

Yeah, I mean, I guess I'm really just trying to understand, you know, is there value to a non-participant customer, right? If you share with the participating customer all the value they create, then the life plan and customers are kind of indifferent. But I'm just trying to understand the question. It all makes sense. Chris?

I think Nicole was ahead of me.

Sorry, I didn't notice. Nicole.

Yeah, I just had some sort of contextual questions about the pilot. So it looks like this is a rate that would apply year round and is not just focused on the summer. So I guess first question is kind of my understanding is that this is a requirement of the grant that was received for the charger, the charging infrastructure. But given that, can you speak a little bit to like what the goals of the pilot are? Like what are we hoping to see through this pilot? What are we hoping? to achieve with these rates. A question being, are we trying to see what's needed to reimburse the bus operator for the cost of electricity to regularly charge and recharge the bus during, for example, during the summer when it wouldn't normally be charged or not as frequently, maybe plus some extra to cover wear on the battery. Or are we wanting to also see what would be required to make the economics favorable for installing more of these chargers that are capable of doing this discharge back to the grid?

So I think in general, we're trying to find a compensation methodology that provides a return on investment for the bus. In other words, the bus is providing value to the light plant. We don't currently have any tariffs or any rate schedules that recognize the value that the bus or any other charger, any other battery is putting back onto the grid. And so this is our first attempt to compensate customers for the value they're providing to the light plant. And we've tried to make that value as close to what it truly is worth to us from a market perspective as possible to make it so that there's no value being shifted from one party to the other. In other words, we're paying the bus exactly what the market says what they're providing to us is worth.

Yeah, I guess my question is like, So during the summer, the bus, if we're talking about one bus, it might not charge as much as would be useful to the Concord Light plant in our town. Is this pilot sort of encouraging the more regular charging of the bus in order to serve as that battery resource for the grid? So we're sort of encouraging more electricity demand from the bus in order to utilize the battery resource.

I mean, only if it makes economic sense for them. Like they're making the decision whether they want to charge it or not. And we are providing the value mechanism that says here's what it's worth if you decide to charge it and discharge it in the summer. Okay. Okay. That makes sense.

And I think from a big picture, the town wants a green fleet. Stakeholders want clean buses. And this could be a mechanism to help sustain the added cost of both charging a bus and the infrastructure associated with it, because electric buses are much more expensive than diesel buses. And so I think the thought process was that if the bus has this ancillary use that could help generate revenue, that it might help sustain building the fleet. Like that was the original intention for a structure like this. And that's why MassCEC is dedicating dollars to study this, which is to see like, Could this model work? How much peak avoidance can these buses use, knowing that they have to be used first and foremost as buses?

Yeah. Okay.

Chris? I know this is really aimed at the school buses in particular, but is there any concern that other customers might take this up?

Well, the pilot is pretty narrowly defined as being, you know, it's CMLP has to approve of someone joining this tariff. And it's crafted to be solely applicable to energy delivered to and discharged from electric vehicle bus battery systems.

I'm just imagining that, you know, the buses that run from Crosby's decide they want to they want to do something, I guess we'd look at that.

Yeah. I mean, it's not meant to be really applicable to our residential base in part, because as you know, or as, as the new members may not know, but we'll soon know that residential batteries are not allowed to push back to the CMLP system for system protection reasons at this time, you know, we'd like to change that, but that's where we are currently. And so this wouldn't apply to say residential batteries.

I guess Laura, I would just, I would comment that the design of the rate is such that if others were to participate, there's not necessarily a disadvantage to the lake. Correct. Yes. Any other questions or comments from the board? If not, I'll open it up to kind of liaison Dean Banfield.

Hi. I have a very basic question, and that is in the pilot that the schools are running, they have these chargers which are managed by a third party, and the third party, I assume, is looking for that peak, Laura. They're managing in such a way that they're going to find that peak and do it. If the schools continue to build out that infrastructure, is the expectation that the light plant would help them understand where and when to discharge their battery to find the peak or are we going to continue to rely on third parties who manage these chargers and have an have an awareness of grid peaks that's just my question is You're making an assumption that they're going to do a discharge somewhere in a three-hour window each month because they know they're aware of when the peak's going to occur. I'm just wondering what the practical effect of sort of building out this infrastructure is going to be and where the monitoring is going to occur that identifies that three-hour window. That's all.

Yeah, I think that's a great question, Dean. This pilot was crafted specifically in response to the grant program and the way it is structured. And the way it is structured is the government has selected, you know, a party who is an expert at finding these peaks to help the schools. And so, you know, Right now, they're part of the picture because they're part of the grant program. But you have a good question, which is down the line, when we're not under a grant program, assuming the economics work out here and we figure out a good way to structure this, is it reasonable to assume that a customer is going to have that expertise to be able to do this effectively and get the most value out of this? And I think John Dalton asked this question back in April, which is that Gosh, aren't we putting way too much of the risk here on the customer? And so I do think, you know, Dean, if in the future MassCEC ends the program and just says, OK, you know, go forth and be fruitful and get more buses. Right. You know, how is that going to work? You know, I don't think it's reasonable to ask anybody at the school or the buildings and grounds department, you know, to be figuring out when to discharge the battery. So, yeah, it's a point well taken.

Thank you.

Laura, one final question from me. Given that it is a pilot, is there a defined period when we're going to reassess it?

So the term of this is written as the customer can terminate it whenever they want with 60 days written notice. And we haven't put an end to this, you know, specifically in the tariff. But I think, you know, we probably want to give it at least a full year because the capacity peaks, you know, are only determined once a year, way after the fact, five months after the end of the year. So we're talking about at least 18 months, right, to see how the billing's going, to see if they're actually... being able to capture the peaks and getting the value. We'll have to reevaluate, but I think we'd want at least a full year under our belt before we made any type of decision about it.

And with respect to that question of term of the contract, is there a risk that a customer could terminate the contract before the peak is reached and would be compensated for the months prior to that? But with respect to the

seeing that because it does happen in arrears um the customer will definitely be entitled to any monies that were uh incurred or or uh what's the opposite for incurred, you know, that we're owing to them basically for their time under participation of the agreement. So if they, you know, quit in December, but we don't issue the credit until May of the next year, even though they're not currently under the tariff in May, it would be retroactive and we'd find a compensation, you know, method if it wasn't, you know, if they weren't currently continuing to get bills, we would find another way to send the money back to them. So it's our full intent that, money's owing, you know, will be delivered based on when they're caused, not based on the term of the actual tariff that the customer's on.

Got it. Thank you. Now I'll open it up to the public. Pamela Dritt, I see that your hand's raised. We welcome your comments.

Hi. I'm sorry, there's an echo. Let me change this. Is there an echo now? Turn it off.

OK, sorry.

This is wonderful that we're getting this kind of thing. several questions. The town benefits as a whole from this because the more systems like this we have, the cheaper our cost of electricity for the remaining customers is, right?

I don't know if that's a question for me, but as I said, this tariff's been modeled, Pamela, to be as close to the actual market value. So CMLP's not like making a bunch of money off of this, and neither is the customer. They're exchanging value of goods at the market rate.

But the value to peak shaving is far higher than the, quote, market rate, is it not? No. I mean... we save massive amounts of money the more we shave the peak for the coming year's cost of electricity generated, don't we?

But that's what we're giving back to the customer in these very big payments here. The $56 per KW year and the $14 per KW month is basically what our costs are, Pamela, and we're giving it back to the customer because they're saving us that money.

Yay. Do... Could we do a similar thing with the energy storage people whose special rate we ended by giving rebates when you use... That doesn't go back on... You can't... CMLP only has control over charging those devices, not discharging them. They don't discharge back onto the grid, do they?

I'm not sure which devices you're talking about.

The ETS units, maybe?

Yes. Yes. The ETS units.

Right. They do not discharge on the grid. They discharge heat into the people's homes.

Mm-hmm. You said that people who have batteries aren't currently allowed to discharge onto the grid, but that you'd like to change it. I think that's an excellent idea because we want to end up with a virtual power plant. And can you accelerate the ability for that program to go? And also... incentivize it. We need to increase the economic incentives for the kind of behavior we want our customers to do so that they will do it and make it pay enough to encourage people to install batteries. that we can make up for. Can you put that on?

on the front burner. Definitely something that we will be considering in the future, Pamela. Thank you for your comments. Yeah, no, I think the board, a number of members of the board have just become aware of the fact that there is not an ability or any framework to push power back. And it's definitely something that we're interested in and will consider. Thank you for your comments. Brian.

Hi, I just wanted to thank the board for creating this rate and to review it in a year after we have some user data. And if any other customer finds this rate attractive and wants to do something similar, just partner with them and make sure that they know that they shouldn't be investing, that this is going to be the rate forever, that it will change in the future based on what we learn. And I hope it also does inform stationary energy storage and any efforts there in the forward. So thank you. That's all I really wanted to say.

Thank you for your comments, Brian. Any other comments from the public? If not, can I have a motion from a board member to exit the rate hearing?

I move that we close the rate hearing.

Second. Tyson? Proof. Nicole? Yes. Chris. Yes. Warren. Yes. And I'm also yes. So with that, I think the next step is a vote on the proposed rate.

Can I move to approve the proposed rate as presented?

A second.

Seconded.

Warren.

Yes.

Nicole. Yes. Tyson. Yes. Chris. Yes. Yes. And I'm also yes. Great. With that, the rate as drafted is approved, the vehicle to grid rate. I think we're now going to open up any comments from liaison or from the public. Any comments from anyone?

I just thought I'd just introduce myself and welcome Tyson. I'm your new liaison, and I had a productive meeting in the interim with John, so we can kind of cover what's up ahead. I know Jason well, I know Laura well, and I look forward to working with the board. This is going to be a good year ahead. Thank you.

Well, Dean, we're thrilled to have you as our liaison because you're someone who obviously knows these issues and we look forward to working with you.

Thank you.

Fran. Fran Cummings.

Hi, thank you. I'm Fran Cummings and I'm speaking for myself, although I am a member of the Climate Action Committee. And I wanted to touch on the large building reporting issues that came up. Jason spoke about them. I'm familiar with some of them because I've tried to use the available data. just in developing my own thinking about suggestions for the Climate Action Committee, which is doing an update on the 2020 climate plan. In the 2020 plan, there was a series of actions about trying to get more data on the large, the energy use of large customers in town. sort of by developing our own in Concord system. But the state has actually developed this system, which meets the needs that we had identified in that 2020 plan. I understand the value of coordinating through Meme with other municipal departments. And I understand that there are privacy concerns on the part of some customers. However, I think that CMLP is not prohibited by DOER or the arrangements that have been discussed with Meme from voluntarily complying with the reporting that other utilities are required to do under this state, I guess it's a regulation. So I think the presumption should be that we as a town should provide this data for its various public values. And so I think if we were to not provide it, the board should make a policy decision about that, not just assume that sort of Meeam has kind of spoken for us necessarily. I think if particular customers have privacy concerns, they could request some sort of special privacy treatment. If they do, CMLP could report the data in steps or categories or high, medium, low or something. We could list customers who together account for a lot of usage. We could report the total usage of all buildings that would otherwise be required to comply with this. Buildings over 20,000 square feet. There are a couple dozen of them in Concord. So this would not be difficult to total up their electricity usage and report that as a total. So I think this requires a little more attention or research on how we could meet the needs of the climate plan and respect customers' legitimate privacy concerns. And I'd be happy to help coordinate between our two committees in discussing this in the future.

Thank you for that comment, Fran. And yeah, I agree. I think that this is definitely an issue that warrants consideration in a future board meeting. And some of the actions that you've outlined make plenty sense. There are certainly ways to address any confidentiality concerns if large customers have those. Gail Heyer, I see your hand is raised.

Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, so I actually have a few comments, but I wanted to start off with thanks to Jason for the shout out. The shout out to the Fiber Broadband Committee. I was the petitioner on that, citizens petitioner, so it's just really gratifying to see that the the leg plant was able to take our recommendations and is really moving forward. I was really excited about the MDU research. That was a big kind of confusion point for us, you know, how to get in there. And also I see that there's some expansion to the Concord Housing Authority sites for fiber. So thank you for that. I have a slightly different, view from Mr. Cummings about the privacy concerns. I am very concerned that anyone can call into the lay plan and get detailed data about usage. How do you know that the person is actually the customer? Maybe it's a neighbor trying to get information on what people are doing next door. And so I think that privacy should really be the default and then people should consent if they want to share more data. And I understand data can be very useful for planning and things like that. One of the comments I saw from a recent minutes was someone had asked if the AMI data could be used to identify specific appliance loads within households. And that was really disturbing to me. Like, you know, why does the town need that? You know, I think if you want to offer it, that's great. They should know that the town has access to this and it should not be just default. You know, the pipeline can look at this and find out when people go on vacation and what they're doing inside their homes. So that that's a big concern for me. The other thing I had was a question I've seen in the national news about the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has told the major utilities that they need to rebate their customers to the tune of like a billion plus dollars for overcharging. And I couldn't figure out if that applies to MLPs. So could someone speak to that?

Yeah, we'll have more information in the future. They did appeal this, but they basically, a ruling was issued to say that the rate of equity or rate of return that was planned for large transmission projects was unfairly too high. And so they lowered that rate and it is in the billions of dollars that would come back and it would be spread out and Concord would be a beneficiary of that. But they had so long to kind of, file an appeal and they did, it was denied. And so we don't have data yet on exactly like what our share will be, but we are tracking that carefully with council and others in the power sector. So we will talk about that when we have more information.

Thank you. So one more question, if I may. I've seen in the broadband updates, kind of separate the broadband conduit from the electric conduit for safety reasons. And I think that's great. And while I think everyone should be a comfort broadband customer, I do like competition. Like on Monday, I had to switch plans and go into the city because I lost my broadband connection and I had some Zoom calls. So my question is, have extra space for other fiber, or at least for expansion for concrete in the future. And just wanted to say, expansion, there should always be room for that, especially when you're digging and undergrounding is so expensive. We need to be thoughtful about possible future uses. There could be telecom uses. So I just wanted to say that I'd like the conduit to have room for expansion and maybe other fiber providers, if that is possible.

That's great feedback. Thank you.

Jason, Gail had made some comments in terms of confidentiality of customer information. I thought that the program that Fran was talking about was really focused in terms of large customers, and we're not talking about individual residential customers, are we?

No, we're talking about large, the large building energy reporting refers to, I think, 10 or 20,000 square feet minimum.

Yeah, 25,000.

25,000.

But the, I mean, I think the comment, and Gail can certainly remind us what her comment was, but she was talking about people being able to get their own information about their time of day. And so the question is, if I call up and I say, I'm my neighbor, what's keeping me you from giving me my neighbor's electric data.

Right? Yeah, we have widespread existing practices to make sure that we confirm the identity of our customers. Because as you can imagine, they call in for about for everything, not just asking for their data, but to make changes on their account. And we do have industry wide accepted practices for verification for things like that.

Thank you. Pamela, we're running late. If you have a comment, if you could keep it short.

I wanted to know what the status is on the MCI infrastructure, because I'm not confident that they will do the right thing without pressure from us. And I want to know, is there any possibility for getting the Concord broadband in Concord Green?

I can speak very briefly to that. Yes, Concord Green, we are working with them. That's one of the MDUs that I was referring to. And we are hopeful to be able to provide that service to customers. And at MCI Concord, I mean, right now, The biggest effort is to create separate service for the wastewater treatment plant, which will continue on after the prison itself is fully decommissioned. And the line crew and engineering team have been doing a great job setting new poles to get new infrastructure and transformers over there. And then really it's a town and state process to determine what's going to happen in that land. There still is no hard plan yet for what's being constructed, but once there is a plan, We'd be happy to work with the board or anybody else on what infrastructure is going in there.

I'm worried about the infrastructure for the heating. It must be electric heat pump and encouraging solar and battery build-out for that whole community so that it can actually generate power rather than be a consumer of it.

Thank you, Pamela. Any other comments from the public? With that, do I have a motion so that we can move into executive session to discuss some power supply contracts?

Yeah, I'd like to move that we adjourn the regular session light board meeting and enter executive session to not return to regular session pursuant to Massachusetts open meeting law exemption number 10 for the purpose of discussing trade secrets or confidential information competitively sensitive or other proprietary information related to a power supply contract.

Second. Tyson? Yes. Nicole? Yes. Warren? Yes. Chris?

Yes.

And Ami, yes. So with that, we'll move into