Transportation Board - workshop

Good evening. I call to order this August 5th, 2026 meeting of the Board of Public Utilities. And I welcome everyone who's here and online. Much appreciated. We do have Jen Hollingsworth on Zoom and we expect to have Charlie Dockley on Zoom soon once he escapes the traffic jam. So We should have a full membership this evening at some point fairly soon, we hope. First order of business is public comment. Is there any public comment on any item that's not otherwise on our agenda this evening? Any in chambers? I don't see any. Do we have any online?

Thank you, Chair Gibson. For members of the public who are joining us tonight on Zoom, when Chair Gibson calls for public comment, please use the raise hand function. If you are participating by phone, press star 9 to raise your hand. If you wish to make a public comment at this time, please raise your hand on Zoom. No, Chair Gibson, there are no public comment.

Okay, thank you very much. That takes us to approval of the agenda. Are there any requested changes to the agenda? Seeing none, could we have a motion to approve it?

Sure. I move we approve the agenda as presented. I'll second. Okay.

All in favor? Jennifer, I see a thumbs up. That passes four to zero. Thank you. That takes us to first presentation, UNM and New Mexico State, Pathways to Zero Natural Gas Usage. And we'll start with Philo.

Yes, Chair, I'll introduce Yuting Yang and Jamal, but I will ask them to introduce the students online. I don't know if all of them got admitted as presenters, so I don't know. Can you see who's online from your team, Yuting and Jamal?

Yes, we have Ahmed here, and then Jiaxin is still connecting. She's in China, so there's a bit of internet issue.

Okay. Did you say she was in China? Yes. She was back for the summer. Okay. Well, we appreciate the effort that it takes to make a connection like that work, and God knows what hour it is over there. So, okay.

So, Chair, I think we have your presentation, the latest one. We'll load that up. And then when you're ready, we'll have you present.

Is it okay if I share the screen or is it better on your end?

I don't know on Zoom what's best for you. Okay, you can do that.

If that works, I can share. Thank you. Professor Yang, would you prefer to make your whole presentation and then we'll ask questions, or would you prefer that we ask questions as you go through it?

I don't know how much time I have, but maybe it's best that I go through it so we leave the question at the end so we don't go over in terms of, you know, the script.

Well, we don't have a fixed time limit. We try to keep things moving, but we will certainly let you do your presentation completely, and then we'll see what things we would like to clarify. Okay.

If there are short, clarifying questions, I'm happy to take them as I go.

Okay.

Thank you. Let me share this. Thank you for coming. That's my pleasure. And then if I share this, let's see, how do I make it? This is my computer. I should know, but there, can you see this side?

Yes, we can.

for some reason it's not full screen for me, but I think it works. All right, thank you so much for this chance to present to the board and the general public of Los Alamos County. And then this is the project that we started a year and a half ago in early 2025 in collaboration with the utility. So we have finally finished the entire study and this is to give you a summary of our main findings. And I have also submitted the full report to the public utility and it's accessible through the agenda link. So the goal of the project is to study the pathway to natural gas. And then we have a team, a set of team members that contributed to the project. My colleague from New Mexico State University, Dr. Jamal Nankosiri, he's online. And our PhD student, Ahmed Johari, he's now interning at the state government as well. And my other PhD student, Jiaqing Zhao, and she's online. still yet to be connected. And Benjamin Cornelius was another PhD student at UNM. So this is a joint work and they will help me step in when there's questions to be answered. So the goal of this project is really to understand what's the implications of the county's goal to eliminate natural gas services by 2070. So for residential homes, this means to replace natural gas furnaces, water heaters installed with their electric alternatives. And mostly these would be through voluntary decisions and made over decades. And there's a couple of questions we need to be understood in order to understand fully the implications of this goal. First, we need to understand, are households willing to switch? And how willing are consumers to move away from gas? What would help change their minds? And what would it take in terms of what are the barriers and costs to consumers if they they want to go electrify their house. And mainly for the utility, what you care about is what would happen to grid planning? How much new electricity load would this switch add for utility that you need to plan ahead of time? So we answer these questions with evidence from Los Alamos. So our main data sources to answer these questions are three components. One is the residential survey that we conducted from July to September in 2025 jointly with the utility. And we received 912 responses from the consumers, which is about... 12% of the existing consumer base. So we asked consumers about their current appliance stock, how they're using their appliances, what's their billing situation, and what's their preferences and attitude towards electrifying. And along with the survey, we also conducted a choice experiment where we received a full 400 answers from household who answered six choice questions regarding different electrification scenarios. So what this choice experiment allows us to do is to quantify or monetize their wellness for different attributes of electrification. And I will go into detail about that in a bit. And the third data set is what we got from the utility, which are the metered data of their electricity and natural gas consumption readings from January 2022 to June 2025. And additionally, we also received solar installation records for all the households within the the county. We also complemented these datasets with the public data sources, including census data and also weather data that help us with the statistical analysis. So our main findings are these. So given the time limit, I won't go through all of the detailed findings in the report, but you can access the full report in the agenda link. So here I want to highlight these five main findings. So first, we found that households are open to switching away from natural gas, but they are cost-incentive institutions. in the sense that if they face high increases in their energy bills, they would face certain hardship. And currently, given the responses I've received, three quarters of the households still have no active plan to make switches. And what we found is that household value efficiency gains and bill savings over emission gains when they think about switching or electrifying. And currently the electrical panel upgrade is the single largest barriers for household to make switching decisions. And we also looked into whether rooftop solar adoption can help with switching decisions as well as reducing the impact on the grid electricity consumption. And we found that it does cut grid purchases, but installing solar would also lead to higher total energy use within the household. And this rebound effect would reduce some of the solar carbon benefits that we think about. And we also find, combining the survey with the metered consumption data, that natural gas usage is driven by building characteristics, and electricity usage is driven mostly by household characteristics, including how much appliances you have, what's the occupancy of the household, et cetera. So what this implies is that different fuel types would need different type of policies to help with its reduction. And then looking forward at reaching the 2070 goal, it would imply around 61% of the more electricity demand compared to what the current load is. And it will be leading to a much sharper winter peak in terms of electricity demand. So I will go through each of these findings in detail in the following presentations. And also, if there's any questions, please let me know. So first part is the residential survey findings. Given that we have reported to the board the main survey findings a couple months ago, I won't go into detail here, but here we will highlight some of the key takeaways in terms of the willingness and also the barriers to switching. So what we found from the survey is that currently about 96% of households still use natural gas and 88% are satisfied with their gas appliances, which also potentially leads to the reason that people are not planning to switch, which is about three quarters of the current respondents, because they see electric appliances as less reliable than their natural gas counterparts. And we also show from the survey responses that people are sensitive to energy cost increase. With a moderate bill increase of $25 to $50 per month, a lot of households are stating that they will face some level of hardship. So that cost component is also one factor of why households are reluctant to switch. And then in terms of the barriers that the household face, the upfront cost of installing or electrifying and also the electrical panel upgrade costs are the key switching barriers. And when people think about why they potentially want to switch, the cost savings and efficiency gains from the electric appliance would value more than environmental benefits potentially deliver electrifying, which is reducing the carbon footprint from natural gas use. And given that a third of the GDs currently are more than 20 years old, we can anticipate a wave of replace or switch decisions to be made. So right now, thinking about what type of policies or information outreach can be designed to reach these households is definitely important. So this graph shows, again, what are the key barriers for households to think about when they think about switching. So up-ground installation costs is definitely the key barrier, about three-quarters of them cite this. And then they think there might be potentially higher energy bills. So that's also one of the key barriers to switching. both from the survey and also from focus group discussions, we found that some of the respondents are, you know, they think the electric grid is less reliable than the natural gas pipelines for them. So that's also one reason. And then whether they have enough space in their current electric panels is another half of them cite this as a key barrier. So these are the rankings of the barriers that people think about when they consider switching. So along with the survey, we did the discreet choice experiment in order to elicit the willingness to pay for different attributes of electrification. So we asked the household to make six choice questions about different electrification packages that varied in these attributes, which the first one is the upfront rebate. frame as a financial incentive in terms of rebates or subsidies to the household. And the second one is appliance efficiency, whether there can be increased energy efficiency compared to natural gas appliances. The third one is the carbon footprint reduction with the electrification. And the fourth one is the net monthly cost. So household respondents will be seeing this as a choice and then they can choose between option A or B or neither, which they can maintain business as usual for them. And when they're making these decisions, they're implicitly making trade-offs across the four different attributes. So then we use these trade-off that they made to then conduct statistical analysis that can tell us how much value they put into each of the attribute related to electrification. So what we found is that households value mostly their appliance efficiency. So with one percentage point of increasing appliance efficiency compared to the natural gas appliance, they would be willing to pay $2 per month. on that. So what this means is consider a scenario where your electric appliance would increase 10%. It would be 10% more efficient than they're willing to pay $20 more per month for that. And the second attribute that the highest attribute they ranked would be for carbon reduction. So for one percentage point of reduction, they're willing to pay $1.5 more per month. So you're rethinking that switching electrifying would reduce carbon emissions of the household by say 50%. So that will be multiplying 50% to this number to calculate how much they're willing to pay per month. and for upfront rebate per percentage point of cost covered would imply a willingness to pay of one dollar so what this is telling us is that the household value electrification mainly for its private benefit that is the efficiency gains and not its climate benefits and um For households that have higher environmental values, which is expressed through, we had a set of new ecological paradigm questions. If a household scored higher in those questions, they will be considered as more environmentally minded. So those environmentally minded households value carbon cuts significantly. several times more than other households, so they have a higher willingness to pay for carbon reduction. But what we do find is that this ranking across all the different attributes are still robust, that even they value more carbon reduction, they also have a higher value for the appliance efficiency as well. So this environmental value matters for who have a higher willingness to pay. And we find that, so what we want to take away from this is the ordering of these attributes, not necessarily the actual dollar amounts, because for all stated preference studies like this, there might be some overstatement compared to how they will really pay in real world values. So what the takeaway is mostly how the ordering of these attribute matters for household decisions when they're making switches. And given that the housing stock in Los Alamos dates back to the 1940s to 1970s, and they're mostly built with 100 or 150 amp panels, about three out of four homes in Los Alamos would be needing a 200 amp panel upgrade to go all electric. And this implies an added upgrade cost of 50%. from $2,000 to $5,000 plus any permitting frictions or any waiting times to get electricians to make these upgrades. So if household are facing a panel upgrade, we found that they would be needing about $800 per year in extra savings or incentives before they would choose to electrify. So this panel upgrade is the single largest barrier for household to make those electrification decisions. So this would imply that making these panel upgrade easier, maybe providing financing options for these and streamlining the permitting process would help address this largest barrier and that can be affected in terms of leading household towards electrification. When we were doing this survey, we also randomly assigned some respondents who read us a short paragraph about the climate and indoor health benefit of reducing natural gas use. And what we found is that this kind of message had no measurable effect on the willingness to pay. once we account for their environmental attitudes. So this message is already resonating with people who care and it does not create additional willingness to pay. So implication from this would be if we're thinking about different type of information outreach leading with potential bill savings, comfort and performance, which is the efficiency gains of their electricity, the electric appliance might be more effective than using climate and health benefit as the headline reason for switching. So that's the discrete choice experiment findings. And then we also looked into whether rooftop solar can be a potential avenue towards leading to more electrification as well as reducing the impact on the grid when people go electrified. What we did here is that we compared the household that adopted solar panels within our study period, which is 2022 to 2025, and compared those households with a matched control group who did not adopt solar. And what we wanted to identify is the causal impact of solar adoption on their electricity and natural gas consumption. So what we found is that, interestingly, after installing solar, people do reduce their purchase directly from the grid. That's a 21% reduction. But overall, their total electricity consumption increased. increased by about also 20%, 19%. And then there's no statistically significant effect on natural gas use. So overall, their total energy use with solar adoption increased by about 7%. What this means is that the household are not simply just replacing their grid electricity with solar panels, they're actually adding more to their electricity consumption profile. And this is what we in the literature we call a rebound effect. And then we decompose this rebound effect by season to give us some idea of why are people using more electricity in general. So what we found is that that effect is very large in winter and second largest in spring and basically no effect in summer and fall. So winter electricity use raises by about 65% across the whole day, including the evening hours where it's still not producing. So this is more consistent with the story that there is extra use of electricity for heating and comfort. And then in spring, we found that the electricity use also raised by about 30%, but then at the same time, the gas use reduced by 14%. So in springtime, it's more consistent with the story where you're using electric heating, for example, to replace some of your within household natural gas heating. But in winter, you're adding to that natural gas heating and some additional space heating, for example, having a small electric heater or installing additional mini splits to provide additional comfort. now that you have solar. And then in summer and fall, there's little change in total use and the solar is basically just replacing grid electricity use. So this not only have an implication in how the electricity load would change for the grid, it also have implication in terms of how much carbon reduction we can expect to see with solar adoption. Because with solar adoption, on average, the Los Alamos household would install a 4.3 kilowatt system. And then if we're only looking at the engineering estimate that your solar generated power is replacing the grid electricity power, we can anticipate a 3.9 ton of CO2 reduction per year. But if we consider this rebound effect, then the realized emission reduction is only one ton. So you read So 75% of the potential carbon reduction gain is offset by the solar rebound effect. So what the takeaway message here is that the solar does help reduce electricity load for the grid, but then it is far less than what the solar generation would suggest. And there is also no reduction in winter times because people are adding a lot to their electricity consumption. So finally, we want to understand how would electrification change the electricity demand on the utility. So here we combined the survey responses to the meter consumption data for about 580 homes of the Los Alamos customers to then separate what are the driving factors that affect each fuel persistence used within the household. So what we found here is that the natural gas use is determined more by building and weather characteristics. So weather itself, the temperature within Los Alamos day-to-day would already explain 60% of the day-to-day natural gas use. And the remaining is then determined by household size, age, and structure. So basically what you do within the household doesn't affect much of your natural gas use. But on the other side, electricity use is more determined by the household themselves. So weather only explains about 9%. Electricity use mostly reflects what type of appliances they have, whether they have electrical appliances or not, what's the occupancy, so how many people reside in the household, and the household characteristics on top of the building envelope. So this also includes whether you're a renter, whether the education level, income level, all that. So the implication from this is that to mitigate the use of gas or electricity, that would call for different types of policies. Because gas use falls through the building measures, then weatherizing the household would then deliver a lower natural gas use in the interim before we get to zero natural gas. And to reduce electricity use, then we need to think about increasing appliance efficiency or the different household characteristics can help change the electricity use pattern. To project how much load it would add to the grid when household go all electrified, we use our measuring meter data and control for all the different other household characteristics to get to these numbers. So what we found is that if household... If an average Los Alamos household go electric on water heating, it would add to their current electricity profile by 4.3 kilowatt hour per day. So currently, on average, households consume about 20 kilowatt hour a day. That would reflect a 20% increase. And if they go electric on cooking, that would add 1.5 kilowatt hours. And if they go electric on clothes drying, it will add to 1.4 kilowatt hours. So these would be 7% of additional electricity consumption. And for space heating, that definitely is the largest addition. The reason that we don't have a... hour here is that because space heating is very weather driven. So there would be a very high addition concentrated in winter and basically no effect in summer times. But these water heating, cooking and clothes drying are consistent growth for all seasons. So the implication here is that when we think about grid planning, we have to take into account mostly the space heating and the winter heating, how much load that is adding to plan around those. And cooking and drying are a minor increase for the grid. And in addition to these appliances switching, also when we're thinking about grid planning in the long run, the different characteristics of the home would also matter, especially for heating. So the larger homes use both more natural gas and electric heating. And each additional 1,000 square feet would add additional 5 kilowatt hour a day of electricity. So we're thinking in the long run, there's more housing to be built in Los Alamos County. And then those kind of growth should also be taken into account. So then to think about what should we anticipate by 2070, we did several different scenarios to project what the load profile would look like. And the scenarios that we look at are one, achieving the 2070 goal. So by 2070, if there's zero natural gas, so we assume all household are full electric, then we work backward in terms of what are the interim goals we achieve in different decades? So by 2030, if it's 30% of households achieving fully electric and the remaining households still have their current appliance stock, what could be the low profile that we're looking at? So that's the first scenario, the top-down scenario that we look at. And the second and third scenario are related to the survey responses. So with the survey, we saw that three quarters of the households still have no plan to switch. So if we only look at the household that stays there, they are very likely to switch within one, three, five years. what are the load projections that we anticipate to see. And the third one is adding to the stated intention if all other households would only go electric when their current gas appliance fails, then what are the load that we're anticipating to see. We run all the different scenarios to produce the different projections. And then we also made all these projections into an interactive online tool with this link. I will come back to that in a bit because I want to show you how that works. So the interactive tool will look something like this. So you can change out the different scenarios. That's your assumptions. And then that would change how the load projection would look like. So to meet the goal, which is the 2070 goal. So the current business as usual, the household just do what they're currently doing, the current share of appliances. And the dash line is showing the baseline case. And this growth of electricity is only from housing growth. So we're assuming a 0.4% increase annually of the number of households in Los Alamos County. And this blue line is showing the 2070 goal. So if we achieve zero natural gas by 2070, what is the projected load growth? The orange line is the stated intention scenario, and the green line is the stated intention plus replacement at burnout. So here we see that if we reach the 2070 goal, we can anticipate a 60% of load growth compared to the current 2025 level. So the total electricity demand for the grid would increase from 62 gigawatt hours to 100 gigawatt hours by 2070. And a third of this growth is from the new housing and the rest is from electrification. And if we look at the stated intentions only, the load would only reach about 88 gigawatt hour. And this would not allow us to achieve zero natural gas because the rest of the household are still using some natural gas appliances. And if we decompose it into months, we can see there's a much higher winter peak than what we are having now. So the current load would have the highest electricity consumption in the summer month and also the winter month. But if we electrify, especially with space heating, that will lead to a much higher winter peak. And, but for all month, there will be a high growth in electricity load compared to the current projected profile. And these are from, the base raises from the electrification of water heaters or cooking and drying. And this graph is showing what the natural gas usage would look like with the different projected scenarios. So if we achieve the zero natural gas goal, then by assumption, this is going to reach a zero natural gas consumption by 2070, and we'll see a gradual reduction across. If we look at the stated intention of switching to electric appliances, then we will see a gradual reduction. But then since the remaining household have no intention to switch, then they will continue to be using natural gas, but about half of what we're using right now. And then if all the houses are replacing their appliances at the end of the lifetime, then we can approach this zero natural gas goal, but maybe not reaching it 100%. So the goal is reachable on a natural replacement timeline, but not on stated intentions. So considering solar, even if solar reaches 40% of the homes, it will trim the grid load by about 4 gigawatt hour, which is only 5%. So that will reduce some of the burden on the grid, but not fully. And two reasons is that solar will only... reach a minority of homes. And then the rebound effect that we talked about earlier would then also convert to higher electricity consumption overall within the household. So that would have a limited effect on how much they're still drawing from the grid. And then even with solar adoption, there will be higher electric load peaks in winter evenings. And that's also the time when panel is not producing. So the grid might also be seeing a much higher peak in winter evenings compared to if people don't adopt solar. So in terms of policy implication from our project, we grouped it into a near-term, medium-term, and long-term planning to think about. So in the near-term, helping households to make switching decisions would mean to first addressing the highest barrier, which is the electric panel upgrade. And also the information outreach needs to be leading with the savings they can potentially get from electrifying and the performance of electrical appliances and not just the climate angle. And in terms of helping the homes to make the switching decisions, making information available about what kind of rebate subsidies at the state or federal level are available to the household and helping them maybe apply for these rebates can be helpful. helpful although currently at the federal level there's very limited incentives but at the state level there's sufficient levels of there's still a package of different incentives for electrification and solar adoption as well as EVs or weatherization of the homes so those information made available can also be helpful and given that a third of the household already have heating systems that are above 20 years old. So reaching these households at the time of the equipment failures would be the cheapest way of making them to switch because they have to make some switching decision. At that point, if their options are readily available, then that could be a potential way of streamlining or accelerating the switching process. And in the medium term, to reduce natural gas consumption without having the household all go fully electric would be helping weatherizing the large homes. And given the metered record, we can easily identify which household use more natural gas and what's the building characteristics of those households. And if we want to concentrate resources and target those households to help them weatherize give them a streamlined financing or permitting process that could reduce the highest users first in the medium term. And then for household, we do find that they're willing to electrify their space and water heating first. And cooking is amongst the lowest willingness to electrify because people do have a preference for natural gas heating. So those can come last. And then the targeting, the concentration can target space and water heating first. And in terms of solar base structure design, currently LATPU is already using that billing, which incentivize self-consumption over exports. Maybe adding to that time of use credits or seasonal credit to reduce and incentives for battery storage can reduce the winter peak that we can anticipate to see with the solar rebound effect that we identified. And in the long run, the utility would have to plan for a much higher winter peak and also a much higher overall electricity load with an increase of about 60% of electricity load increase. Then it's planning not only for procurement, but also for the electricity, the grid infrastructures in terms of delivering that load reliably, especially at peak hours. And then when doing the planning, taking into account those rebound effects that we identified would also be relatively important, as we see that had different implications in different seasons. And given that households do cite that they might be facing hardship if energy bills increase by $50 to $100 per month, then thinking about how to make sure that these electrification process is not going to impact people who remain on natural gas pipeline paying more higher fixed costs will be very important when thinking about the race structure designs. So to conclude, I'm not going to repeat these in detail. It's basically that it's reasonable to achieve the natural gas goal, zero natural gas goal by 2070 on a natural replacement pipeline. We also have to take into account what are the highest barriers, how we can reach people the most effectively, and what type of load that we are going to anticipate. So last, before I wrap up, I do want to show you this interactive tool, which I find very interesting to use. So basically, this tool wraps up all the key takeaways from our report. And then these are... things that you can play around as a utility and also as homeowners to think about your electrification options. So the first tool is for the county to think about what are the different projection load profiles that we can project under different scenarios. So you can drag it along these bars to change the assumptions that underline these projections. You can change out the scenarios that you're looking at with or without solar adoption, how much housing growth you anticipate to see, what are the interim goals you anticipate to meet by the different decades. and how much percentage of homes have solar, et cetera. And with that, you're able to see what are the electricity low profile and the natural gas profile and how that profile would be decomposed by month. That's one. And the second one is the willingness to pay. This is from the discrete choice experiment. So if you... You can play around with these numbers to look at if carbon reduction reduced by 50%, energy efficiency improved by 50%. There's also rebates for the upfront cost, how much are people willing to pay for these kind of measures. And then the third one is to look at how, if we have more households adopting solar, so currently there's 6% of Los Alamos households have solar, and if we have more households adopting solar, how would that change the electricity load, natural gas use, and then how much carbon are we avoiding from the grid, the electricity delivered from the grid? And then for homeowners, this is a tool for them to think about how much energy or bill savings they can get if they electrify. So if you have these different options, And the household have these appliances and they decided to switch to electrify their space heating. And this number is telling on average, they can lower their energy bill a year by $300. And then how much more electricity they're using more. and then how much natural gas they're going to reduce. And this energy bill is reflecting both combined because Los Alamos also have one energy bill for all their energy uses. And if they adopt solar, then what is their anticipated bill reduction per year? So this is the tool that could potentially be helpful for information, how outreach or grid planning at the utility level. So that's all I have. And then if there's any questions, our team is happy to respond.

Well, thank you very much, Professor Yang and all your colleagues. Before I go to the board, I'd like to welcome Charlie. I'd like to ask if or provide opportunity for any of your colleagues that wish to say anything before we go to the board. Do you? I'm not enforcing it to, but if you want to say anything, here's your chance.

Thank you for having us. I think that's what I'm going to add. Okay.

I would like to thank you for this opportunity for providing us with the data and everything to work on. It was a great project to work on. I personally learned a lot. So thank you.

Well, thank you. We learn too, so we're all in this together. OK, with that, I will open to the board for questions. I'd prefer we hold comments and discussions a little later, but let's start with questions. OK, Eric.

Thank you. Good presentation. I'm a little confused when you use the word efficiency because you're saying that people prize efficiency. But I think I heard you say that efficiency of electric versus efficiency of gas. Well, if you look at a water heater, the typical efficiency of a gas water heater is 57%. The typical efficiency of an electric immersion heater is 93%. But the gas water heater costs less, and it's got a lower carbon footprint. Now, back when I did this presentation maybe five years ago, if I replace my gas water heater with electric with the power coming off, you know, average of the U.S., then by going electric, my carbon footprint goes up 60%. If at the time we were buying our power from a coal-fired station, if I replaced my gas with electric, my carbon footprint became 2.9 times what it did. So it doesn't really have to do with the efficiency of appliances as much now. Granted, if you're comparing gas with gas, you can talk about efficiency. If you're comparing electric to electric, you can talk about efficiency. But I guess in your presentation, I'm really, really confused at how you're using the word efficiency because I don't think you're using it in the scientific term of output divided by input. Can you tell me how you're using the word efficiency?

I think you already... answered when you're stating your comparison. So efficiency is definitely just, that's the design, the engineering aspect of electric versus natural gas water heater, how much you're In heat terms, how much you're using the energy equivalent to heat up your water to the same temperature. I think we're using it in the same engineering terms. And when you're giving me the example, you're already implicitly doing the trade-offs that we're doing. We're giving the respondents the options to choose from. You're comparing the carbon footprint with the cost of... the appliance itself with the efficiency. So that's precisely what we're asking the respondents to do when they're making those discrete choice questions.

Okay, I think I'm getting it because maybe I was too focused. I was looking at efficiency of the appliance itself.

And that really has no bearing on anything of your presentation.

Yes, that is the term that we're using. What you're talking about is the overall efficiency from cradle to grave, if I'm hearing you correctly.

Yes. Yes, the engineering aspect of that, yes.

Okay. Thank you.

Matt? I had one question that's sort of in the details of your report and a lot of questions and discussion for later. But the specific one, I don't know if it's easy to pull up the report for anybody. It's page 115 of our packet or page 110 on your report. And it's figure C.4 and then C.5 also. Is that easy to pull up for anybody?

Yes, I will be looking at that. Let me share screen.

And I read this late last night. So make sure I'm making sense when I ask this question. But to me, this looks like the results And some of the output from the models. Yeah, I think it was page 110. So back up a little bit.

Thank you for getting all the way to the appendix table.

There's a lot of good stuff in there. It was worth it. Sometimes the appendix is the most interesting part. Especially in the lower right and the lower two plots. And I think this is looking at natural gas and total energy after adoption or after change. And my concern is that it looks fairly linear out until month 35 or so, and then it goes – the error increases quite a bit, and if I extrapolate, which is always bad, it goes exponential. And so to me, this looks like there's instability in the model in the three years out potentially. And the reason I was bringing this up is my concern is if there's less reliability in the model in the out years – what impact would that have in some of the tools that you've developed? Like what is there need for a concern there? And I think if you scroll down to the, to the two, the plots on the, just on the next page, um, it shows similar behavior in the bottom two plots where it's linear and the errors are fairly tight. And then it just, you know, the last three months, it really blows up. So am I interpreting that as an issue in out months in the model? And if so, What are the potential impacts on some of the conclusions? Or if we're playing around with that modeling, are there any caveats that we should be aware of?

Thanks. It's a great question. I can't have my student answer it, but I can also give you an overview of how to interpret these plots. So one thing that's important to note is that these are not models in the sense that these are empirical estimates. These are based on the true numbers that we receive with the meter readings. And then how to read these models. These are event study plots. So time zero is when you adopt solar. And then here we want to show that three, zero, so the negative time period is prior to your adoption solar. This flat line is trying to show you that there's no difference across the treated or control groups to the household that adopted or not adopted solar. So this is what we call a parallel time assumption. So this needs to be held for us to interpret any of these results. That's the first thing. And these are after the different month of adopting solar, how much electricity consumption that you use compared to the control group. So these are the effects by month. So what this is showing is more like... the household as they adopt solar, they first increase their electricity consumption by a lot and gradually there might be some learning that they gradually reverted back to a reduction to their pre-consumption, pre-solar consumption. A great point that you made is that there is some change over time. And then there is a larger error bar as we approach the end of our graph. It's because there is a smaller sample. So the error bars would be much larger. So here, what this graph can tell us is there's some dynamics across how people respond after they adopt solar, if that makes sense.

It does. Can you talk about that lower plot where it's fairly linear until month 35, and so the less samples and larger error bar makes good sense, but it seems like something weird is going on month 35, 36, 37. Why does it get so large all of a sudden? And I guess that's empirical, but that seems...

Yes, so these are mostly from the lack of household that... That's a smaller sample size that have a household that have 40 months into adopting solar within our sample period, basically. So that's why there's a larger area bar. So basically, when we're reading these graphs, the central, the focus or the more reliable estimates would be within like... negative 20 to 20 basically. So because our total subject sample period is from January 22nd to June 2025. So that gives us a 40-month sample period. So then you can imagine that for the household that's installed solar in the beginning of that sample, since we don't have a pre-period for that household electricity consumption, so that's a difference that we're capturing would be a more noisy result.

Yeah, that makes good sense. My big concern is Should we have just truncated this at 35 months in or especially on that plot C, are there any conclusions from this data that are then feeding into your modeling or any of your tools? Is there any impact to that increase at the end that would then feed into like our goals for 2070? That's the concern.

I see. That's a great point. So what we feed into the model is the average treatment effect. So we take the monthly average and then for natural gas, it's a non-significant effect on average. So that's what we feed into the model. And we can definitely revisit this result in like two years and then rerun the model with more data. And that can definitely give us more precise estimates on that.

That sounds good. I love more data is always the answer. But yeah, thanks so much for jumping into the weeds with me.

Thank you so much for reading it. And we're happy to discuss more questions if you have that offline.

Okay. Thank you.

Since we're here, can I just ask a naive question? Sorry. So the rebound effect you're referring to is just in these zero through one 22 months or so? Is that this hump?

That will be the driving factor. So we're looking at the average treatment effect. So that will be taking all these months on average. That gives one number to talk about the rebound effect. But then across time, we see a dynamic for sure. Yes.

Okay. I had a question about the rebound effect. I think on the slide where you discussed the rebound effect, you implied that it was largest in the winter period, implying that there was a use of electricity for heat. Is that for heating? Yes. But then on the use determinant slide, which I follow that, there was the implication that the electricity by household, the weather has a very minor impact on use of electricity. So I was a little confused. Those two observations didn't seem to mesh.

Well, you want to jump in on that? So I... So these two, that's a great observation. So here. Yeah, so these are, yeah, go ahead.

Okay, so for electricity, our models found that weather only explains a small fraction simply because electricity can be used for a wide range variety of things for your appliances, electronics, anything. But for gas, however, it's mainly used for heating. So when it's hot, your gas consumption goes up very quickly. And so our model will naturally find more and explain more variation in gas consumption because gas is mainly used for heating. And when it's cold, you're going to use more.

Right, so alone, this slide makes sense. I was just contrasting it with the previous slide or two where you were discussing the rebound effect and saw what appears to be a rather significant aberration in winter where solar adopters magically all of a sudden are using a heck of a lot more in winter, which would imply a heating, weather-related source. I mean, being a solar adopter and knowing that I timed my solar adoption with buying two EVs, that would be where I would look to say that, yeah, your energy consumption can go up. But the fact that you're suggesting that this is a real effect, that really what you're seeing is a loss. a winter effect for this rebound. I'm just confusing because that seems to correlate with weather and that contradicts the next two, that slide 13. Yeah.

I totally get that. And I would argue there's no contradiction in the sense that this is for solar adopters. So the behaviors of solar adopters. And then there's only 6% of solar adopters in the entire Los Alamos County. And the other graph is reflecting a general public. So that's one argument. And another, we did consider the EV angle of rebound effect. But with that, we would argue that you would see a consistent increase for all seasons and not just winter. So the fact that that is not showing up, one could be that not all solar adopters are also EV owners or they didn't time it in the way that you did, which I myself did. I bought my EV because I had solar. But this is not showing up because we think... That can be the case, or also there's additional things within the household that you're changing your usage of feeding as well. Given that we don't have EV registration data, that has been something we want to look into, yes.

Right, right, right. Okay, okay.

I think I understand.

But yeah, it just struck me as a little bit funky there. But it could also be a sampling issue or no? Do you have enough data?

For this part, this is purely solar households, right? So within the solar household, what changed for them when season to season? And then the other one, this is explaining what's for the general, not the general population, but the matched samples, which is 180 households, out of which about still 6% have solar. So they might not be driving this result. So if we only focus on the solar household, this might be a larger effect, I agree.

Yeah, okay. And then I have a question about the question of reliability. I thought on one slide you mentioned that there's a lot of folks see electric appliances as less reliable. But then later, I think the term was the electric grid was less reliable in their view. Is it the grid they're questioning or the appliances themselves? Do you know? Yes. And also, what might be the origin of that concern?

That's a great question.

So definitely for the grid reliability, that's an issue. So that didn't only come from the survey responses, but also our discussions within focus groups that people refer to that often. But then for reliability of the

Yes, I think you have appliance reliability.

Appliance reliability, so that's not the leading factor for why they want to switch. So people don't really, even if it's more reliable, people don't, that's not why they want to switch away from natural gas use. So I think in this slide, I should be emphasizing on the great reliability as a source. I agree.

I mean, yes, you know, in terms of communication to the public, you know, we need to understand, right, you know, what their concerns are, especially if they're not necessarily grounded in reality, right? Education would be a component to moving this forward. So understanding their concerns and their fears and being able to

I do have that. Sorry about that. I just saw this. So there is a perceived reliability of natural gas to electric ones. They don't see it as much better. And then they see it as somewhat worse than natural gas.

Is that related to what's powering the appliance or the appliance itself, I guess?

So here we're asking for the appliance itself, but whether they do take into account the reliability of the grid when they're answering this question, we cannot really disentangle that.

Okay, that's interesting. I think that's what I have for now.

Okay, thank you, Jennifer. We seem to have lost Charlie for the moment anyway. No, I'm here.

I'm just listening.

Oh, okay. I don't see you on the screen here, but do you have any questions at this point, Charlie? No, none from me. Thank you. Okay. I've got, I think, three questions. One is you make the point that natural gas use is largely determined by building characteristics. yet we know a significant part of natural gas use is the secondary uses, water heating, cooking, clothes drying, et cetera. Did you in this study do anything that would indicate how much of the gas use is for those secondary uses? I couldn't find it explicitly, but I kind of got lost in Appendix D trying to see if there was enough information there to pull it out. I couldn't find it. But it's significant, and I'm wondering if you figured out what it was or if you estimated what it was at all on any basis.

So you're asking taking out the space heating part, how much are the other appliances accounting for natural gas use?

Yes. That's one way of looking at it. Some percentage of gas use goes to heating and some percentage goes to secondary uses. And we know from summer use that when there's no heating, it's at least 25%. but it's probably more in the colder weather. And that's what I would like to get a handle on if possible. But I don't think you did that. But if you did, I didn't find it.

It's a great question. Ahmed, can you take that?

Yes. Let me look at the table again.

Shall I go to another question while you're doing that? That would be nice.

Real quick. Is to some extent your answer in one of the slides they showed towards the end about the electric use added for each appliance conversion. I mean, it's not related to specifically the gas, but it separated out space heating versus cooking, clothes, water heating. It might at least give you the right ratio.

That's kind of what the additional electric use would be for a conversion, but we don't know where we're starting. At least I don't think we do.

That's what I'm trying to find out. Well, I thought it might show you at least the ratio of the energy use.

I will let him find it. It's definitely there because that's what we needed to do the projection for natural gas reduction as home switch. Then we need to know how much reduction in the natural gas total we're seeing. So it's definitely some number there, but I will let him pinpoint the actual spot for you.

Okay, I'd appreciate it, because that, to me, is a really important consideration. You know, people are... We recognize that changing how space heating is done, you know, from gas to electric, that's probably the single biggest issue, and that's likely to take the longest. But there's incremental improvements in our carbon footprint that can be done if people are converting other appliances before they convert... So it gives us an incremental way to approach it, to approach improvement. That doesn't get to our goal, ultimate goal, but it improves the carbon footprint along the way. We've got poor Ahmed on the spot here.

But if you have other questions, I'm happy to take them while he's looking.

If that's your preference, I can do that. This is really just a clarifying question. I didn't see any mention of gas fireplaces or pilot lights in here. Did you include those in your survey?

We did. Yes, because I think in the initial discussion with the board when we were proposing this, you mentioned that. So I'm pretty sure we added in. But whether that's a significant share within our response sample, I need to go back to our raw data to check.

I don't have any idea how much, you know. energy over the course of a year, gas fireplaces, the gas fireplaces account for. But if you do a back of the envelope calculation, pilot lights could easily be of order 10% of the gas use. I mean, they're, uh, depending on how many there are. That's the, that's the problem is we don't, we don't know how many there are. And I was hoping that maybe your survey would give us, would shed some light on that because a lot of people probably don't even know how many pilot lights they have, but it's, uh, uh, it's a potential significant use altogether. They don't burn much at a time, but they're sitting there 24-7, usually 365.

Hello, can you see my screen?

Yes, we can.

Okay, so I think you're talking about this part being the effect of switching your appliance to being electric and its effect on electricity and gas consumption. But the table, we have concerns of primary appliances.

Excuse me, what page is that on? It'll make it easier for me to find it.

Of course, that would be page 54. Thank you.

Okay, go ahead, got it.

Okay, so as I said, our model only incorporates the primary appliances used for either cooking, water heating, or drying. So we don't include the secondary appliances, if I understood your question right. And please correct me if I'm wrong.

Okay, so... For those of us that are a bit dense, can you explain this table a little bit more? What's the coefficient? What's the percent of mean in both electricity and gas actually mean?

Of course. So this table is basically us going to those who have an electric, for example, cooking appliance. And then we compare them for those who don't. And then we see what's the effect of using an electric appliance as your primary cooking one on your electricity consumption per day. So, for example, those who use electric for their primary cooking, they consume about 1.4 kilowatt hour per day more than those who don't.

Okay. Than those without.

And considering an average consumption of household being 20 kilowatt hour per day, this increase implies a 7% increase in consumption compared to the mean.

Your previous comment said somebody who was using cooking would be 1.47 kilowatt hours per day, but isn't the kilowatt hours per day in the parentheses, meaning 0.89?

No, these are just standard errors.

Oh, OK. All right. Good. Thank you. All right.

I remember your comment. You mentioned secondary appliances. Can you please repeat that so I try to understand the question better?

Well, does your survey give any indication of what of how it goes to secondary uses as opposed to the primary use, which is space heating. So lump, you know, putting all three of these or any others that you might have together, you know, if they're broken down, that's great. But is it 30%? Is it 35%? Is it 40%? That's what I'm trying to get a handle on. I see.

I see what you mean. We look at a household's consumption and see how much they're allocating, how much electricity is going for, for gas, how much, I mean, for heating, how much is going for cooking, et cetera.

Okay.

I don't think our data allows to answer that kind of question. So we, we observe how much they consume, but we do not observe how much they consume for each type of use.

Hmm. And this is per household? Yes. Okay. And so one would have to multiply that by the number of households that use the different types of the different energy sources for cooking, heating, etc. ?

Exactly. And that is why Professor Yuting presented you with the dashboard. So that dashboard simplifies all this math, considers how many households are under the utility and how much their coefficients to come up.

Okay. Mr. Gibson. The bills from Everson's almost exactly every unit is used for 25%.

So that it's higher than 25%. Any further information on the pilot light or gas fireplace issues? You cite panel installation costs or panel costs at $2,000 to $5,000, but you say that plus permit fees, plus electrician, and I'm wondering if that is just the panel cost or if that also looks at any typical wiring changes that might be required, such as to get... 240 to a kitchen that is not wired for an electric range of any kind? Or is that just the panel itself or the rest of the wiring too? Because I've heard higher numbers than this, and I'm trying to get a handle for what this number includes.

Do you want to take that or?

Yeah, I'm looking at the way that we explain it to folks. I'm just going to read the description of that attribute, electrical panel upgrade needed. And for a typical home in Los Alamos County, the cost of an electrical panel upgrade ranges from $2,000 to $8,000, depending on the home's existing system and energy needs. These upgrades can add to the overall cost of transitioning from natural gas to electric appliances and may be consideration for some households. To help offset these costs, the state offers income eligible rebates of up to $4,000 for electrical panel upgrades and up to $2,500 for electric wiring available through authorized contractors. So, um, obviously I think we, I remember we were talking about this attribute in, we did three or four focus groups. Um, and also we were talking to Philo that I remember he was saying that he had upgraded his own house. So these numbers come from not only the internet and, but, but also, uh, from the focus group as well. There's a lot of uncertainty surrounding those numbers, hence the white confidence intervals.

Well, yeah, I'm sure there is. It varies. I'm sure every house is different. Um, the, uh, um, and, you know, electrician fees are significant also. So, uh, yeah. So you just read me what the question was, but I'm looking for the answer. Did this wind up being just the panel or include the wiring upgrades?

My understanding of this is that it includes a total cost. Okay. This is the cost for an electrical panel to be installed at one's house.

With the wiring to it or from it. Right. Okay, thank you.

And there's an online question.

Okay, Charlie?

Yeah, thanks. Let me lower the hand. First of all, really nice work, really great study, very clear presentation. So thank you for that. Um, and I never, I want to ask a question. I think that's a little bit off the beaten path. So, or a little bit, you know, outside of the, the, the remit of the, all the work you did, but I don't want to waste the opportunity of having a team of great economists in front of me. So I want to ask you guys a question. So it seems to me like one of the problem we had last winter, right. Was it was very warm winter. All of our winters are getting very warm. The summers are getting pretty darn hot too. And we didn't sell nearly as much gas as we were budgeting. So we had a big shortfall. So now we have to raise rates to get rid of the red ink because the system still needs to be maintained. And so that's observation one. That's just a practical problem we have. And then observation number two, I think personally, and this could be wrong, but I think your research is in line with it, that people are going to move to electric as soon as the electric appliances just get better or better performing or cheaper or easier to put in. That's what's going to move them. I think that was your number one thing, right? Like lead with savings and lead with efficiency and so on. And I think that's the way people work. And I think that's going to happen in a town like ours, too, which did not have a lot of air conditioning in a lot of the older houses because it was a lot cooler. Now people have put in mini splits, right? And they're just going to, in less cold winters, might as well just turn them on. So I think the usage is probably going to go that way anyway, generally speaking, away from gas. And that's going to compound our problem of how do we price, you know, gas in a reasonably fair way that still maintains the system. So it's a long background, but why is by way of saying it seems to me one thing that I think we kind of need and I'm wondering if you know of any research in this area is sort of modeling of the integrated gas electric system, right? That shows how all of those tradeoffs work and maybe runs some different pricing strategies on the two utilities in a combined way to try to get everybody to the goal. Because in the limit, we'll have a full gas system for one customer and that's impossible to pay and to maintain. And so how do you, I mean, I think one of our big challenges is gonna be managing that transition, which I think is inevitable regardless, right, of what one thinks. I just think cost and efficiency and ease of use is likely to drive all of that. So do you know of any research along those lines? I mean, it's far outside the bounds of the study you did, but I think it's a very important question for us practically.

We really appreciate it. So along with that, I do want to mention one caveat in terms of the project projection is that we're not taking the climate change aspect into account, as in like the temperature pattern change that we're seeing going forward. So that could be in our future projects. in terms of adding that into the projection scenario so that as winter gets warmer and summer gets warmer, how would that also change? So that's one thing I would put in my to-do. And for your question, I think that's a very great question. know direction of research because when we're doing this research there is very limited literature out there that two is among the same household to do the analysis that we think we're making this project to the literature is that data where they have the data because they're not by one so there is hard for them to do any direct comparison for the same household these kind of comparisons So we can definitely take that one step further to answer your questions and extend our project so we can work on this. And another thing to answer your question, very importantly, is to have price variance across households so we can do elasticity analysis so that we can know that for these households, if they increase their price by 10 cents, how their consumption pattern would change. That's one thing we couldn't do within just Los Alamos because there's no price variation. All households face the same price, so we're not able to disentangle that. But now I do understand that the utility is switching to time of use pricing, so I might be able to get some additional variation in that to answer the elasticity of demand kind of questions. But these are really great options. ideas for us as well, the questions that you post. And then if we see anything in the literature, we'll definitely send it your way to think about how the right structure can be designed.

Great. Thank you.

I think California and Massachusetts have done some work on this. I don't have a citation at the top of my head to give you, but I also know I'll just echo what Yuting said. The literature on this is very thin. I've seen real world application of it. And speaking of price elasticity, I'm on a case here for one of the IOUs in New Mexico. The company itself does not have a price elasticity figure. So it's not just you, LADPU. And one of the big fish in New Mexico with probably the most number of customers, I didn't name names, but price elasticity. So I'll just leave it with that.

So yeah, definitely more data is always the answer.

That's what Matt said, right? Exactly.

Exactly.

Absolutely. All right. Again, really great stuff. Thank you very much.

Thank you. Thank you. Before we go back to, or go to board discussion, I'll ask if we have any public input or comment or questions to be raised here. The I2C1. Dave, you know the drill. We need your name for the record, and please limit your comments to three minutes.

My name is David Powell, and I live at 1732 Ponderosa Street. And I was a member of this board from 2011 to 2016. Mr. Chair and members of the board, I'm glad I came tonight because this was a very timely topic for me. Uh, we live in a house that was built in the mid sixties. Our furnace gas furnace is 30 years old. So, and it's getting hotter without air conditioning. We're suffering. And so we have a real incentive to make this kind of a change. Uh, The disincentives are the initial cost. My back of the envelope estimate is somewhere in the $20,000 to $25,000 range to actually go all electric and eliminate the gas entirely. And then there's also a kind of a question in the back of my mind about the reliability of the electric grid to support us in the winter. With gas, if you lose the gas service, you still probably have the electricity that you could use to heat your house for a while. But if you're all electric and you lose the grid, what do you do? That's a tough question. So in my mind, the reliability of the electric grid is a big consideration in addition to the initial cost. I don't know what we're going to do, but we're going to have to make a decision in the next year or so. So I'll be interested to hear how your discussion goes. Thank you very much.

Thank you. We have any other public comment in chambers or online?

Anyone wishing to make public comment, please raise your hand. No hands, Chair Gibson.

Okay, thank you. All right, we'll bring it back to the board for discussion, comments. Take advantage of the experts that we have here to engage. Matt.

Sure, I've got a couple of comments and a few more questions. First, again, thanks so much for all the work. This was really fantastic to read through, and the tools look really great to play with, so thank you again for all the work and your time tonight. All right. As I was thinking about this, I had to remind myself that the scope of this is really natural gas and how that plays with the electrical system. But I think we can go beyond that because the natural gas is part of the county's LRES efforts, and it ties into a lot of things. But I think Jen had a couple of questions about the rebound already, and that was a lot of effort. To me, the rebound effect was kind of a secondary effect or secondary impact to this bigger question of how can the county go to natural gas. I think it's an important consideration, but it really intrigued me. So I'm going to ask or say a couple of questions about that. I think maybe – I don't know if you can pull up slide 12. That will be my specific question. But with the rebound, I think several people have already talked about as you buy – As you think about electrifying or putting rooftop solar on, that's the same time you buy an EV. Or for our family, that's even when we got mini splits, switched to electric cooking and switched to electric water heater. And so this rebound is hard to think about, even from just a natural gas and electric perspective. And so my question here was this bullet. Making this a bulleted conclusion of the average solar home would avoid 3.9 tons if they didn't do anything else, But with this rebound, the realized emission deduction is only one ton. And I think that doesn't include reductions from switching from a gas car to an electric car. So that's a caveat that I think should be put onto that bullet. And that's more of a comment that I'd be happy to discuss. But I think the bigger question I had about the rebound, in addition to bringing in EV, and I know you looked at a little bit of EV data, there wasn't as much discussion around storage. And one of your comments at the end was perhaps the county should consider incentivizing storage. And so another aspect I wanted the board or the folks that did all the hard work to consider is I looked at your references and there were a lot of references on the rebound, but is there a specific literature that looks at what is the storage impact around the rebound effect? And I think for the county, it's both. distributed storage, so household batteries, but also utility scale batteries. Because I think as we look at Foxtail and we think about Foxtail resources in the winter, if we're storing more, how does that play in offsetting the rebound effect? So I think there's a couple of questions around the rebound and then reminding myself that this is really looking at natural gas. So how important is this rebound effect to thinking about the transition to natural gas anyway? So I'd open that up with those thoughts around rebound. And I guess maybe the question I'd give to the folks that presented on this bullet, should there be a caveat that if part of the rebound is due to electric vehicles, maybe this change in CO2 reduction needs an asterisk with it at least?

Thank you for those very enlightening comments. So for... This rebound effect part, we totally agree with what you... So basically, with the approach that we're taking, we want to identify the possible impact of solar adoption on that. But what we cannot disentangle for certain is what you mentioned, is that if you... would have adopt EVs and electrify your house, other house appliances, regardless of your solar adoption. And we did it at the same time. We cannot really disentangle that. So the question for you, just from my own understanding would be, would you have electrified your cooking and adopted an EV if you didn't have solar?

I think personally, if we for some reason couldn't have gotten solar, we still would have electrified. So yes.

Okay. Yes.

So our usage still would have gone up without the PV system.

Yeah, so that's definitely what is making this rebound estimate an upper bound in terms of you would have done it regardless of solar. But if you're like me, I adopted EV because I decided I wanted solar. I wouldn't have gotten an EV if I didn't have the solar. then this rebound effect does apply to me because my behavioral change is conditional on solar adoption. So yes, we would caveat on that. And then your point regarding this Fuel switching between gasoline and electric for driving, that's one thing we cannot capture without the vehicle registration data, but we are approaching that. We're trying to get that, to disentangle that. So here we can only look at the switching between natural gas use and electricity use. within the household. So that EV aspect definitely is an important part of your energy consumption portfolio, but that's not what we can capture within our data availabilities. But I agree on your point that we can caveat this rebound effect by saying that if we cannot rule out that you would have electrified regardless, then this would be an upper bound estimate.

Great, thanks. And can you comment anything about how storage might impact this rebound effect? I don't know if there's a better term.

Yes, they're growing to be more and more literature in the past couple of years. So there has been, because storage is becoming more prevalent and some, there are more and more available data sources on that. So there is a growing literature on that. We do not have, and then how the utility, we cannot, as that data becomes.

We can theoretic capacities per day, for example.

Is level storage and community level storage, are there? studies of both of those and how they might impact rebound and some of this thinking about carbon benefits around switching from natural gas to electrification.

So the literature that I'm looking at is more on the residential side. So co-adoption of solar and battery storage. I know a couple of papers on that because that's more within the household decision-making realm. And then they can decide whether, you know, how their rebound would shift if they do both at the same time. At the utility level, we typically would think that if it's outside of the house, that doesn't really have an impact. rebound effect. There is a paper looking at utility solar versus household solar, and then it's claiming that with utility solar, you get all the proper benefit, but then you don't trigger any rebound effect for the households, given what the paper showed. For battery storage, I have to look into whether there's a comparison on rebound effect from different types of battery storage, but that's a really good point.

Okay. I guess my thought or the reason for that question is This bullet again that we're looking at, and there's an assumption based on the current carbon footprint of the DPU balance. And so as we go to Foxtail, if we think about more storage in Foxtail, that could also impact those CO2 numbers. So that's where the utility scale storage could come into how we think about your report.

Mm-hmm.

I think that was all my comments on the rebound thing. I had one other short comment. Go for it. Continue? Okay. Thank you for letting me take all this time. This was just a quick observation. Your bullet on your conclusion that the panel upgrade was one of the biggest challenges, and the county is considering on-bill financing options to facilitate energy transition. And I just can't remember if panel upgrades was part of that. But based on this report, it definitely should be.

I thought this report helped us guide where we should put our efforts in non-bill financing. Perfect. Including the panel. That's the comment. Many splits, yeah.

Thank you. Thanks. That's everything for me. Okay. Let's see. Jen, you've got your hand up.

Well, okay, just another follow-up on the rebound question. So I had a comment in my notes that you had said that even if solar reaches 40% of the homes by 2050, it would trim the 2070 grid load by only about 5%. So I had a comment here. This is assuming no storage because the emphasis was on peaks in the winter evenings. And so again, we're back to that, you know, what is the source of the rebound and is it primarily heating effects in the winter? So, and the reason it's relevant, I think, you know, is to guide our actions going forward. Do we encourage folks who are considering to adopt solar to simultaneously consider adopting, you know, battery storage options? So that seems relevant. And then I really enjoyed your comment about, you know, a third of the households, their heating systems are 20 plus years old. So again, as far as where do we put our efforts, you know, we'd probably be trying to communicate with the folks that are on the verge of having to convert, or I mean, having to adopt a new technology, a different technology, or the same technology or a different technology. So that's very helpful. And I would concur with my colleagues. Thank you for an excellent report and presentation today.

Absolutely.

Thank you.

Thank you, Jen.

Eric? Thank you, Chair Gibson. I encourage you that when you do your analysis on storage, that's not a real simple subject because when a house uses power from a battery, it has to disconnect itself from the grid. And so you can take your $2,000 to $8,000 panel change and maybe make it a $20,000 panel change. I've heard that figure before. For example, there was a product, you know, Ford made a Ford Lightning. And in order for the truck to power the house, they had to, of course, change the entire electrical panel, put in a transfer switch, you know, special inverter. Whether it disconnects itself from a grid from a transfer switch or a shunt trip breaker, it disconnects itself. And it has to because you can't export power out to the line like that. And so that would be extremely, extremely expensive. And if you get something like that, there basically is no ROI for energy shifting because those systems are extremely expensive. So just When you perform your analysis on storage, please take into account the heart surgery that has to occur on the electrical panels to make that happen. Thank you.

Okay. Several comments here. on your peak power demands, if there's conversion takes place, you pointed out correctly that, you know, you do an annual calculation, you do a monthly calculation, how much more power would be needed. The reality is the peak power needed is instantaneous. What is needed in the coldest winter morning? And we already have a couple of ballpark estimates for that number, which is substantially higher than the number that you have because you're averaging over at least a month. The LARES report estimated between 20 and 40 megawatts additional load, and the Burns-McDonald report estimated between 7.5 and 24 megawatts for the for the peak load, which we have to meet, you know, maybe only once every year or maybe even once every few years, but still we have to meet that. So that's different, I think, than the way you calculated it based on annual or monthly averages. The comment about the reliability being a major concern, reliability of the electric system being a major concern about switching is consistent with other surveys that we've taken. And it's wrong because with the exception of a gas stove, which can be lit with a match, everything, all the gas appliances require, have an electric control system. and some also have electric ignition. And space heaters need some way to move the heat around, so that's either electric blowers or electric pumps. Closed dryers have electric drums. So for all of those gas appliances to work, they also have to have electricity. So you have to have two supply sources. So that, I think, is an area where we need to maybe work on educating people a little bit more so that that's not... I mean, there are real impediments, but that shouldn't be one of them. That's an educational issue. your observation quantified about additional resistance mounts, as one might expect, when the perceived operating costs are higher, even above the additional capital costs, that's also consistent with both what one would think and what other surveys have indicated also. but we should be careful in the future, because we'll keep doing surveys like this for forever, that the survey itself does not perpetuate the belief that costs necessarily have to be higher. Yes, we all know, because it's always been true, that electric heat costs more than gas heat. Well, that may not be so true anymore. But we need to be careful in the way surveys are done to make sure the survey itself doesn't perpetuate that. Then when we get to attitudes, I think 76% have no intention of switching. Well, that's not going to be true in 10 years, 20 years, 30 years, 40 years. It might be true today, but today's intentions are largely based on today's or really yesterday's technology, product availability, economics. regulatory environment, and for some people, political dogma also. There's a lot of factors that are going to change over time. And I was actually quite encouraged by the data plot, page 18, that has intended time frame to switch. It shows 20% intended to switch, either within one year, within two to three, or within three to five. Now, there's 20 percent within five years. Everybody looks at our goal of zeroing out natural gas by 2070, but there's another part of that goal that's a 10 percent reduction by 2030. It's the start of the whole thing. You've got to start someplace. And that's an interim milestone that we set that people don't pay too much attention to. Well, if, big if, 20% intend to switch within five years, that looks good for our 2030 goal. Now, will 20% actually do it? I don't know. But if half of them do it, hey, we're still there. And frankly, I think that's where we need to concentrate right now. It's not so much what's going to happen in 30 or 40 years down the road. It's what's going to happen, how are we going to get started, get that first 10%. And the available appliances will keep improving. The economics will keep changing. All things are going to change. And word of mouth spreads. Look what's happening with induction cooking. You know, people have tried that. Virtually everyone loves it. They pass that word around, more people try it. That'll happen with other things too. It just, it'll take some time. So I would encourage us to focus not so much right now on the 2070 goal, but on the nearer term goal, getting the early adopters going and supporting them as best we can. And others will come along as time goes on. When we have with our successors, which may still be some, maybe Matt here, have this discussion in five or 10 years, things will be different. And hopefully we have that first 10% or 20% maybe if there's really that intent to switch. Like everybody else, I really appreciate all the work that went into this. It was a very informative report. I won't say that I absorbed everything the first time through. particularly Appendix D I'm still struggling with, but there's a lot here, a lot of meat here. We're all data mongers here, so it's good to have some data to crunch. So does anyone else have any comments or questions at this point? Okay, I don't see any. Thank you very much. We do appreciate the work you did and your being here this evening to talk with us about it. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you so much for this opportunity and then to have this discussion with us. I really appreciate it. All your comment also brings us new research idea that we can take forward. And then with all projections, we hope to revisit this maybe five years, 10 years down the line to see how well we projected and how things can change in the direction that we want to see. So thank you so much for this. And then we do hope that we will have future opportunity to collaborate on additional projects. Thank you.

Okay. Thank you very much. Do appreciate it.

I'll just say one thing that came out of your last comment. This was just a cross section. We only looked at a cross section of the customers. It would be great if we would have a panel data. over the years, and then that will address your comment about whether that distribution change next year or two years from now or five years from now. And then the projections will also obviously change.

Okay.

Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you.

All right. Take care. Okay. Have a good rest of your evening, folks.

You too. Thank you.

All right. We've got quite a few things to do tonight, but let's do the public hearing on the water rate ordinance and then maybe take a breather after that. How does that sound, everyone? I think I saw Charlie's thumb go up quickly before it Things disappeared here. So, okay.

That sounds great. Yep.

Okay. Thanks, Charlie. And Jennifer, I hope you can hang with us here. All right. Let's move on to the, let's see, page 214 in our agenda doc, which is the water rate ordinance. Third time's the charm on this one. And this would be Joanne. This is an introduction, so hopefully we don't need to get into extensive discussion tonight. But Joanne, you want to introduce the ordinance?

Yes. Good evening, Chair. Good evening, members of the board. So I'm bringing forward Water Right Quote Ordinance 02387 tonight. So if we go to the next slide. So back in April, I brought forward to you in Council Water Rate Ordinance 02380. So what happened was on the 15th of April, the correct ordinance was attached to your agenda docs. But all the following meetings, there was an incorrect ordinance attached. And so this ordinance that we're bringing tonight is a corrected ordinance with the correct dates. And we've got to go through the whole process, introducing it to you guys tonight, bringing it back in a couple of weeks, and then taking it to council again for approval. They did approve it on June 30. But unfortunately, the incorrect version was attached. So we have to start over again. So it was an administrative error. So this ordinance replaces that incorrect ordinance that was approved back in June. My presentation is pretty short. It's just kind of going over the changes we made with the dates in this new ordinance to become effective in October after the tiered water rates no longer exist, and we go into the new rates starting in October for residential customers. So if you want to go to the next slide, Abby. So the recommendations is we just revised where we changed the dates. So it's just a bullet point of all the date changes that were made in the ordinance. None of the actual rates of the 8% were changed. If you guys remember back in April and probably early May, I'm thinking, we did introduce new rates for our bulk water rate sales to Los Alamos National Lab irrigation. We also brought the potty, the mountain service area cost of water, and then some non-potable water rates as well. So none of that changed. None of those rates changed. Just specifically the dates on the ordinance changed to fall into line with this going back to you guys for approval and to council as well. So I'm open to any questions that you might have.

Okay. Are there questions? We've had the full-blown presentation on the ordinance. As she said, the numbers didn't change. We just got the... In fact, what was introduced to us back last April is the same thing that we're seeing here, essentially.

Yes, that is correct.

If there are no questions right now, I don't think Well, we'll give the public opportunity to comment, even though it's only an introduction. Is there any public comment? I see none in chambers. Any online?

Chair Gibson, there are no members of the public online.

Okay, thank you. Coming back to board, the suggested motion here has a little extra information in it that we don't need so that ending clause that says with revisions to the effective dates, blah, blah, blah. That's actually already in the ordinance, so it doesn't have to be in the motion here. So the motion to introduce the ordinance can end with just to the Incorporated County of Los Alamos code. Is there any further discussion or a motion? Actually, it's not a motion. It's an introduction. I'm sorry.

I was wondering about the motion thing because this is a work meeting. You're right. I appreciate your clearing that up.

Thank you.

Well, I catch on eventually.

Sure. I will introduce without prejudice Incorporated County of Los Alamos Code Ordinance Number 02-387, an ordinance amending the Department of Public Utilities water service rate schedules, Chapter 40, Article 3. sections 40-171, 40-173, and 40-175, and adding new sections 40-176, 40-177, and 40-178 to the incorporated county of Los Alamos code.

Okay. That ordinance is now introduced again. And I really like to thank Joanne and Christella and others, but principally you two for your persistence in trying to get this untangled and to us in the correct form.

Thank you.

Okay. Let's take a 10-minute break here, and then we'll come back to business.

Recording stopped.

Thanks, everyone. And our next item is a discussion on the electric coordination agreement. Ben.

Chair Gibson, board members, thank you very much. For the record, I'm Ben Ulbrich, Deputy Utility Manager for Power Supply. This is a follow-up to a prior presentation I made providing an overview of what we're talking about with plug-in solar, what the systems are, what they do, why people might want to use them. So next slide, please. There we go. So this one's got one purpose, to provide a status. Oh, sorry. I'm out of order here. Thanks. I was wondering why you were smiling at me. All right. This is, again, another follow-up on a prior presentation just two weeks ago when we had an in-depth discussion on the ECA, the new ECA, the 2026 ECA, where we were at with that, trying to get it. We were looking for approval. Then we had some last-minute things come up. So now we're working through a one month extension period and here's some status on where we are with that So just one purpose to give you the status So there were a number of issues raised during the meet last meeting I'm going to step through the the ones that I'm aware of feel free to Speak up with any other additional ones you have that I either I'm not aware of or missed The biggest one here is the termination of your convenience The first bullet here is a quote of the language that's in the terms and conditions of the contract award document that was provided by the DOE and NSA. I'm not going to read it, but I will point out the key part of it is that it limits the amount of termination payment from the DOE, from the government, to the dollar amount allotted to the contract. That's where we take issue with that because, as we know, the starting allotment to the contract is $6 million, just a small fraction of the total, $424 million for the total contract value, and it doesn't even come close to making consideration of the long-term investments that the county has committed to in order to supply the power pool. The DOE and the county attorneys have been working as well as outside counsel have been discussing options for how to address this, what we find is considered a shortcoming, a big shortcoming in the current proposed language. And they worked on that. They had some options that were discussed. They're going to continue to work through a number of different options that may work to the DOE's satisfaction. That's going to happen this week, and I'll have an update on that as time progresses here. All of these things, again, we're working under a one-month extension, which means we basically have one more week to get through all these points and settle on some agreed-upon language between the two parties. Next slide, please. And by the way, please feel free to speak up if you have any questions or comments along the way. Second issue of not insignificant but less significance than the first one is the short extension notification period that is allowed for in the contract. It's 30 days. I have highlighted in red 30 days and 60 days. And I believe it's the 60 that's changing to 90. I could be a little mixed up on that, but I believe that is the number. I'm getting clarity on that. Rather short period for a contract of this magnitude. For the follow-on 10-year option period, we're talking a total contract value, I believe, in the neighborhood estimated of Five hundred and eighty million dollars, so that's a lot of money And for us to take action on that with 30 days notice is going to be difficult As I said in the last meeting in practice, we're not going to do that We will actually as a body the operating committee will consider this as a far in advance. And so what we've done is the DOE is not amenable to changing these numbers. These are beyond just their allowable amounts of up to 90 days. So what we're doing is to give us some comfort that we'll be looking at this well in advance. The operating procedures are being adjusted and adding specific language to address this concern. When I put in here what the language proposed is, it could change into its final form from this. But this gives you the idea of where it is. And what it says is that the operating committee will start looking at at least three years in advance, which is what we had originally proposed for the timeline for considering the DOE's decision to go with the option, exercise the option for the extension. It also coincides, three-year period also coincides with the timeline for Sandia National Lab, currently therefore based, to make a decision on whether they want to extend their participation in Foxdale Flats for an additional 10 years. So the timing we're there is aligned. And what we're going to do is, I've got two bullets here. One is we'll plan for DOE and NSA exercising the option. There may be changes associated with that. That will take time to roll into modification of the contract language in the ECA. Things could change in the next seven years. They're likely to change with resources. where markets are language will probably need provisions we'll make revisions as needed along the way through modification process but if there are any outstanding ones that we know are coming along that will drive the language for the option period we'll get those put into the into the ECA prior to the extension the X otherwise the end date of the contract and roll into the new extension the other option is which we also plan for simultaneously, is what if the DOA chooses not to exercise the extension? They probably won't have a decision three years out, but we can still plan for it and what we need to do if that's the situation. So I believe that covers both scenarios of planning for this extension. Any questions? Okay, not seeing any.

That's the extent of your presentation?

Nope. There's more.

Oh, okay.

All right. I just wanted to hit this one in particular. Okay. The next one is about the combustion gas turbine generator fixed cost. There was a question about the cost for fixed fee for the operation of that unit, that generator. and the date that it was coming from 2023 that really we I concluded that the date there is really immaterial we do look at that periodically to evaluate whether that cost structure needs to change it hasn't changed since 2023 has it needed to gas prices were pretty stable their maintenance costs are fixed under their contract with Siemens so there was no need to change that that's why it's sticking with the 2023 I think it's just sufficient to remove that as the language already includes the The concept that will review and update that number as needed Next slide please Lionel exhibit G physical security lab wide this is this got a specific question about the burden that this could potentially place on staff how much time that would take the money that would take to PERFORM REPORTING REQUIREMENTS UNDER THIS EXHIBIT SO THAT YOU CAN SEE THAT THERE. I DO WANT TO SAY THAT WE ARE CURRENTLY OPERATING UNDER THIS BECAUSE WE DO WORK ON LABORATORY PREMISES PROPERTY NOW. SO THIS IS NOT A NEW REQUIREMENT FOR US. WE'VE BEEN DOING IT WITH MINIMAL EFFORT. WE REALLY BASICALLY DON'T DO MUCH FOR IT BECAUSE OF THE NATURE OF OUR WORK. WE'RE NOT WORKING IN HIGHLY SECURED AREAS. WE'RE NOT DOING ANY RADIOACTIVE work, we're simply sitting in an office space monitoring computer systems. So minimal tie-in with the actual work that's required under Exhibit G. And I expect that to continue under the new ECA. No change there. The next question was, how is the cost of that effort, if there is any cost directly related to this reporting, how is that allocated between the DOE and NSA in the county? There is language, and I neglected to mention this at the prior meeting when this question came up, that there are no costs to allocate currently. I will say that. And if we do have costs specific to this, to the requirements of this Exhibit G, we have language in the new ECA that specifically addresses costs associated with this reporting and that the operating committee will decide how to allocate those costs. Clearly, if the costs are entirely to the benefit of the DOE and NSA and to the burden of the county, 100% of those costs are expected to be passed to the DOE. Next slide, please. We got a question about EDAM and other market costs and how those are addressed. We have language repeated here in the italicized second bullet about how we – there's costs that we know about and there's costs that we just don't know how they're going to pan out when we join EDAM, or other market changes that may happen in the next 10 years. So we wanted to cover that base, and we put in language that specifically addresses market changes, market forces, costs associated with them, and states that the operating committee has the flexibility to determine how those costs are allocated between the two parties. At this point, we don't know how they'll need to be allocated, but this does give us the flexibility to address concerns where if one party uses a resource to the detriment of the other party, we can address that financially. Next slide, please. Miscellaneous. I think this is the last real slide here of the issues that were raised. This is just a catch-all for some relatively minor things that need to be changed in the document. Update all the dates to reflect the new term start date coming from the extension of one month. Fix whatever typographical errors we find. Believe there's a will shall duplication in there. We'll clean that up There was a comment and I don't really recall what it is off my head So I brought put it in here in case anybody and remind me what it was about operating committee alternates Don't know what that question really was and what the action requested was so If anyone has any thoughts on what that was, let me know. Otherwise, I'll have to go back and watch the to our transcript. I which is not my first choice. So if that was your comment, please speak up. Next slide, please. Staff recommendations. I just whipped this up, and I say that we request concurrence or direction on what actions we're taking to resolve these issues. Next slide, please. Summary. Work is continuing with urgency, as I mentioned. We've got about a week to get this done. And whether it gets done to everyone's satisfaction or not, We're coming back for another decision for approval on the next meeting, which I believe is the 18th. I think that's the next regular session. I do want to point out the DOE and NSA and county utilities are both committed to getting this done in a form that's satisfactory to the governing bodies. Next slide. Next steps. Pretty straightforward. Works continue with, I say, urgency to get this done. We get the revised ECA to BPU on August 19th. I got it a day off. For consideration of a recommendation for approval to council. On the 25th, that's scheduled to go to council for approval. Next step would be to sign and execute before the end of the month. And we would transition power pool operations to the new 2026 ECA starting September 1st 2026 and then go through the big process of closing out the now 41 plus year I Think that's the end of this. Thank you any questions Thanks, Ben

Eric.

Thank you, Chair Gibson. So, okay, they mentioned the termination for convenience. That kind of surprises me because that's a federal acquisition regulation, 52.249-2. And when you look at the FAR clause, it's all about work. It's all about termination of work. It's all about work performed. It's all about compensation for work performed. But this is not a work contract. This is a commodity contract. So I guess I'm not legal, but it seems like I were legal. I would be pushing back on that FAR clause because it doesn't seem like it would apply to this. That's my only comment.

That's a good comment.

I appreciate that, Member Stromberg.

I will say that if you look in there, the part that really puts the hitch in it besides the limit is Termination for convenience arrested references the government termination for king's clause fixed price notwithstanding which means this Supersedes that right, but the text of the far clause is all about work and work performed right and I'm familiar with do we?

This is what I deal with all the time is do we documentation and directives and a lot of times It is not written very well and in this case if they want to apply this that's that's their prerogative, but It just seems like a mismatch.

Agreed. And that's why we've got our council working through this with DOE council to come to a mutual agreement on it.

Is that all, Eric? That's it. OK, Charlie?

Yeah, so Ben, just to double check, the termination for convenience is really the only thing aside from the typos and a few date updates, right, that you're working through right now. Is that right?

Remember, Dr. Lee, that's the big one. Chair Gibson has also expressed his desire to see that a formal statement that we are going to be looking at and preparing for the extension.

option so that's the second main issue i see that's that text down the italicized text down yeah okay all right and so now you've added that into the document that you're now discussing okay correct okay that's proposed language at this point okay thank you okay uh other questions or comments at this point

Ben, do you think the lawyers are actually going to agree on something that is acceptable to us? Yes. You talked about acceptable to DOE, but it's got to be acceptable to us.

Yes. Well, the way I see it is, either we come to a mutual agreement that provides some comfort to the board, council, and the community as a whole, or we don't. In which case, either case, we're coming back on the 19th for a decision. It may be an easier decision or a harder decision, but the same two decision points are still there, to proceed or not.

Which puts us back where we were last month. We have one meeting to decide and I hope that they don't throw whatever the resolution is at us at the 11th hour like they did last month, but it wouldn't surprise me. So good luck on working that one out.

I will say that the DOE contracting office has expressed repeatedly their willingness to continue this discussion and implement modifications to the contract language after it's approved, which doesn't give the same level of comfort that we would want to have, but that's something more than nothing. Take that for what it's worth.

Yeah. Well, let's hope it doesn't come to that. We take contracts at what they say, not what certain people promise or suggest might be possible. Okay. Well, it looks like we're making progress, but we're not there yet. Agreed. Eric, this sounds like another example of trying to pound square pegs into round holes in this whole bloody thing. Okay. There's nothing else. Thank you, Ben, on this one. We appreciate the update and all the hard work that goes into trying to make this work. Glad to be here. Okay. Well, we were wishing you're not here on this topic tonight. We wanted it wrapped up two years ago, but we'll still... We appreciate you continuing to bird dog it. Let's move on. Preparing for plug-in solar. Now you can start with what you started to speak to the last time.

Chair, members of the board, again, Ben Olbrich, Deputy Utilities Manager for Power Supply. Everything I said earlier with my mistaken introduction still applies. We did talk about this, I believe it was in April, I came to you and introduced the topic and all the significant information relating to plug-in solar. Next slide, please. The purpose of this presentation is a follow-up to April 1, explaining why we need to prepare for plug-in solar. I'm going to call it hereafter plug-in photovoltaic because that's what one of the UL 3700 documents refer to it as. And I realize that's because plug-in solar is an unfortunate sounding acronym when you pronounce it. So that's probably why they went with PIPV. So I'm going to evaluate safety distribution system impacts and what I'm calling rogue PIPV systems. It describes what the choices are available to DPU. It considers the ways for DPU to help inform customers and identifies our recommended choices. Next slide, please. First question, why do we need to prepare for this? And the bottom line answer is because people are going to be doing this. No matter what we do, whether we have some kind of statewide statutes on it, whether we have official county utility policy on it, people are going to be doing this. Whether they're going to be doing it under the guidance of actual rules or just, like I say, building their own systems and plugging them in, we have minimal control or authority to enforce that. And the reason why they're going to be doing this is because they're inexpensive. Their best estimate is 30% to 50% lower cost per watt installed cost than a rooftop solar system. It could be more, depending on what kind of a system you get. They're easy to install by a customer in concept, based upon the European concept. We'll get into some details about why in practice in the US that could be more difficult than being simple. You just tick. Theoretically, you could just find a sunny spot to put a panel down, have some kind of ground mount array mounted to something sturdy so it doesn't blow away, and plug it into an outlet, and you're good to go. Portable. You can unplug them, take your panel, and move it somewhere else. Take it with you camping, wherever you want it. I don't care. They could do it. And it's already popular in Europe, 4 million plus systems in use across Germany and other countries. And people are getting aware of it in the United States. And DPU's decisions now will support, hopefully, the safe adoption of plug-in photovoltaics and formalize any associated DPU rules that we may put in place. Next slide. Next one we really need to do is evaluate what are the safety concerns. So there's a lot of safety concerns. I touched upon them in the prior presentation. Those safety concerns are all still there. What we do know is that there's attempts to address those safety concerns, primarily through underwriters laboratory certification testing, 1741 concerns inverters, UL 3700 concerns whole system certification for plug-in solar systems specifically. And there's also, we also as a utility, and other utilities do, we have line worker engineering controls to help provide some safety from backfeeding. UL1741, as I mentioned, covers automatic shutdown of grid-tied inverters so that once you lose the grid power, they automatically shut off in a matter of milliseconds. Some are faster. Most systems are much faster than the required specification for that. Here's the rub, though, with photo PIPV systems is, as far as I know, there are currently no UL3700 certified systems available for sale in the U.S. There, I did become aware after I put the, uploaded this, finished this presentation and uploaded, like a day after I did that, one microinverter got UL3700 certified, but that's just the microinverter piece of it. That's not the entire system. which requires UL3700 certification from PAL all the way to receptacle. As far as I'm aware, there's nothing like that yet. There's obstacles that are being overcome. State and local regulations and policies are changing. And the safety issues are being mitigated, like I said, largely through UL3700. If that becomes what everybody does, again, we can't control what kind of systems people get and whether they are, in fact, UL3700 certified. Right now, I want to be clear, it's a buyer beware market. And it likely will be for a while more, meaning that the buyers, not the DPU, are going to have to assume the risk of these PIV systems in whatever form they choose to get and install. Next slide, OK. And I will point out, the more I read into, I haven't read the whole thing. I don't have access to it. You've got to go buy it. And I didn't see the value of buying it just yet. You know 3700 as far as I can tell from the internet reading they got some tough requirements Some people would say they're justified some people might argue. They're not what the reality is that safety is a primary concern of this certification and There are several approaches to providing the safety that they want one of which is A requirement, an optional requirement, there's other ways of dealing with it, but one way of mitigating the safety issues is by having a specialized plug and receptacle combo, which will be proprietary. There is no NEMA plug receptacle standard in the U.S. for systems that do this. But that concept is that you're all familiar with the standard plug, a NEMA 515 or whatever plug it is, I think. It has two or three pins on it. and they're exposed. You've got the little nubbin made out of plastic that's insulated, but when you plug it in, those pins go into the receptacle. When you pull it out, those pins are potentially exposed and energized for a brief period of time as you're pulling it out. So one of the approaches to mitigate the potential shock hazard, if you jammed a finger or something in there, that little gap, while you're unplugging it or plugging it in, one of the approaches is to have a special plug that has a Shroud around it the blocks access to the pins from finger touching It doesn't exist except and I'm aware as far as I'm aware except in some industrial connectors So this is a be a new thing. It would be require someone to install a new plug and new receptacle into their home which My understanding is requires a licensed electrician to pull a permit and get it inspected at that point. I So that implies that you're going to have to go through that electrician process, and it's no longer just take it and plug it into any old receptacle on the outside of your house. You could have these giddy or rogue installs of non-compliant systems, and I expect people are going to do that. They probably will be mostly safe. We unplug lots of things today that are energized from the house power supply. This is no less safe than that if people do this with a regular plug, but it's not super safe. And I think that's what UL 3700 is going for. They're going for super safe, not just safe. And again, buyer beware on that. If you get one of these, know what you're doing. Know what you're getting yourself into. I think DPU can stay out of this issue if we don't require interconnection agreements for plug-in solar systems, or we could decide that the safety issues are significant enough to merit an interconnection agreement. So that's what we're going to discuss in the following slides about choices. Next slide, please. Evaluate distribution system impacts. That's a big question. We've had discussions previously about distributed solar and distributed generation resources, particularly rooftop solar, and about what impacts they may have on the stability of our distribution system. That's why we've implemented a six megawatt cap on the total number of PV systems to be revised and updated as needed in the future. I expect that the impact from plug-in PV systems is going to be fairly minor. The average ones that I'm seeing Being developed are only with the 1200 Watts. I figured 900 sports are to be exposing that much power item in their house up to the distribution system. Customers don't currently don't have internet set up to monitor X, register and record. Don't have an interconnection area. Even we won't have any. Does it matter? Maybe not. There are thousands of these systems. Its amount, I'll point out right now, we had our discussion about plug-in or rooftop solar and the contribution, you know, in that analysis that was done by Yuting and her colleagues. I will point out we have something like 500 something rooftop systems currently registered in the county. And on a monthly basis, they produce maybe a fraction of a percent of the total load or generation needed for the county in a month.

Can I just add load for the pool, not the county?

Yes, for the pool and for the county. It's still pretty small, even for the county. But then it goes up to maybe 2%. It could be a potential issue, maybe, if we don't have an interconnection study and these things get popular like hotcakes. Next slide, please. So I mentioned rogue PIPV systems. I made that by the term. So if you disagree with it, you can come up with another term. Doesn't exist in the in the literature that I've seen But but it's a real possible thing The potential is for customers either putting multiple of these systems on a on a premises or putting Extraordinarily large ones. I've discussed this with at least one of the board members about a What if someone puts a 5-kilowatt system and plugs it into a big 240-volt outlet? Could happen. We're not really prepared to address that in this presentation, but just want people to be aware. People do things. And we're aware of it, and we're mindful of it. We're trying to look for all the potential gotchas here, even if we miss some. There's a potential for customers who have an existing rooftop system and an existing interconnection agreement to get a plug-in solar system, one more, and plug them in. And then we kind of had these phantom plug-in systems. They have an interconnection agreement, so they are configured for and signed up to get compensation for their exported energy. This would add to that exported energy and allow them to make more... generate more offsetting credits from their bill. The question is, Can we detect that, one? And two, is there a way of, should we be doing anything about that? Introducing that concept so that it's in everybody's mind that this is a possibility. There are, the only way that we could come up with maybe on detecting that is if they either exceeded their interconnection agreement through the exported power levels, or if we maybe looked at some historical data and said, hey, you were exporting this much before, and now you've suddenly jumped up by an average of 600 watts during the day. What's going on? I don't necessarily propose that we go and look at that. That seems a little bit big brotherish, but maybe it'll become necessary. Don't know. Next slide, please. I do want to point out a little background on the, what we call our interconnection agreement, but it's formally called the customer-owned generation process. It doesn't apply only to solar. It could apply to if someone had, nobody has them, but it's generic enough to cover that. So we have an application for operation and a standard process for customer generation. Grid-tied PV systems are allowed to export energy, sending power from the PV system, that's what they have, to the distribution system. And we have a rule, E5.05, which describes what the compensation and credit will be for exported energy. It's there. I won't bother reading it. There's some other... Nuances, maybe they go into it and it changes on a monthly basis based upon what our actual cost of power for the power pool is next slide, please Now we get to the choices so Here's here's my slide for you get to pick a PV PIPV interconnection approach. So there are four approaches for PIPV interconnection We could require all PIPV systems to use a customer-owned generation interconnector from process and just the same as for rooftop solar and everything that comes along with it, including a meter hookup, which I believe is a meter configuration setup, which I believe is a $500 fee for that, which really cuts into the payback on a small PIPV system if you're doing it for that. We could require only PIPV systems or multiple systems that exceed a power threshold, made up a number, 800, 200 watts, whatever you want it to be, to use the interconnection process. And then for these two options, we have some choices in there. Actually, I mentioned the $500 net meter installation fee. That would apply for these interconnection agreements. We could allow for an energy export credit, the same as for rooftop solar. Or we could apply a different method for that and say, this is the price you get paid for a plug-in PV system. It's different from the rooftop solar system. Could do that. The benefit of having an interconnection approach is that we can communicate guidance directly to people who are interested in doing this as they're going through the process, and we can have indemnification and liability clauses in the interconnection agreement already. We don't assume any liability regardless, but this makes it clear and they're signing up that they understand that when they get our interconnection agreement. We can choose whether DPU would internally enforce requirements under UL 3700 and maybe partially address rogue systems. It could provide metrics to us. Now we have some data from the export values, and we can look at that and see. And we also have registration information, like how many people are actually using this? Where are they located? What are the potential impacts on that distribution secondary in that particular neighborhood or area? How many people are doing it off of a single transformer? That kind of stuff. We could do that in the future. I'm not saying we have any plans to do that. But as we develop a more robust GIS mapping of our system, we could include that in our analysis. And it would require PIPV modifications to the associated process documents in order to address PIPV systems. Next slide covers the other two options. So this is option three. We could create a whole new PIPV registration process It'd be similar to option one and two, but it would be separate from these large rooftop systems and other customer-owned generation facilities. It could make it easier for customers to understand and easier for staff to manage. It would require the creation of entirely new process documents. The fourth option is to have no interconnection agreement required at all. No registration, no interconnection agreement. Essentially, we... wash our hands of any involvement in people actually implementing these systems. It has no burden, benefit of no burden on staff and no burden on the customers to go through our process. But on the other hand, flip side, we're giving up any potential for control or knowledge of these installations and monitoring of them. There'd be no net meter or installation fee, no metrics collected, no export energy credit, no enforcement or review of DPU by any requirements under UL 3700. And it would require us in good faith to go and communicate to the community what this is and what these PIPV systems are. We'd want to do that regardless, but this puts extra incentive there because we don't have some kind of registration or interconnection process where we'd go and have this discussion with a potential customer. Next slide, please. So the next choice to pick from, and these two choices are independent, is three approaches for how we give credit for power exports. We could provide credit for exported energy under Rule E5.05. We could provide credit for export energy under a new PIPV-specific registration rule or interconnection rule. Or we could provide no credit at all for PIPV exports with the understanding that these are intended to be small systems. solely dedicated to offsetting customers load and if you export any energy you're just giving it a gift as a gift to the county because in theory you should be using these for your own native load within your premises so these choices like I say last point there is they're completely separate you could pick whichever all the four interconnection approaches you want and you could pick a different export approach for any one of them next slide please This is what I mentioned. We want to share information with customers regardless of what choices we make. It behooves us as a utility that's invested in the safety of our staff and our customers to get this information out as best we can about pros and cons, safety, where they can find information about PIPV systems to get them to be informed users, and the fact that we're not taking any of the risk off of them. they put a whole bunch of these and they put them in an unsafe fashion and there's something bad happens at their premises, that's on the user, not on the county. We're not going to be reviewing or approving the safety of PIBV systems unless we elect to do so. And the customers take all the risks. Next slide, please. So I got some recommendations. We'll see where they go. I think we should respond to rogue PIPV systems if it becomes an issue. If we become aware of it and it's causing some kind of notable issue, I think then we should do something about it. But maybe just kind of hands off until that happens. I recommend... No PIPV interconnection agreement because it lowers the barrier to entry for distributed solar. It's already going to be high enough, I think, under UL 3700 if people want to get certified systems. And I don't think it's really worth our, from a community support standpoint, to go and add to that burden. I recommend, as I mentioned, no credit for exported energy because I think The intent behind and the whole spirit of PIPV systems is for them to be a small little boost to offset some of the customer's actual native load for their premise and not become a power provider to the utility. And the last thing is I think we should, regardless of what choices we make, get as much information as we can out to the community. Next slide, please. So to summarize, it's an emerging technology, and that we can do something now to prevent some of the future potential issues. Any one of those paths is reasonable, those choices. I provided what I think I would personally recommend with Philo's support, I believe, of no PIPV interconnection agreement or registration, no compensation for PIPV energy, and getting that information out to our customers. Next steps are, that's where BPU, you get to give us your input on, we're asking for your input on what you would like to see. And we'll draft plans, documents, and customer resources accordingly and get it back to you for review. I stand for questions.

Thank you. Let's start with questions and then we'll go to discussion and feedback to Ben. later. So are there questions to start with?

Yeah. Hi. Yeah, thanks, Ben. So in the four options, number three, it would have a new PIPV registration process. Would the meter and the installation fee be as high as it is for, or the same as it is for the standard rooftop solar in that case?

So that $500 fee is associated with the task and effort of reconfiguring the meter. So it requires configuring a new meter, pulling it, doing a service on it, getting it upgraded, or having another meter there, and then reestablishing and re-registering that meter for that account. that process would be the same as under an interconnection agreement. So while I don't anticipate that cost being any different, we can change things as we see fit.

Okay, but basically it's the same physical process, so you'd probably be the same. Okay. All right. And then the, I'm sorry, I lost my train of thought here.

It is almost 3 a.m. here.

Okay. You made the comment that all risk would be assumed by the customers. That's also the case for standard rooftop solar's

Yes, that's correct. And those, what I say, when we go through the interconnection process, we have those liability and indemnification clauses built into the agreement, and they have to read that and acknowledge that when they sign on for the interconnection agreement. So that's one of the little fuzzy areas. I don't believe we just take responsibility for someone plugging in an appliance to their home anyway. So I think it's more a reassertion of the fact that we don't take any responsibility for what people do with the electricity in their homes now.

Would there be any benefit to allowing multiple approaches to exist simultaneously? For the person who wants to attempt to take advantage of getting credit for energy that goes into the system, they might want to participate as a normal rooftop solar type engagement. Whereas somebody else might just want to not have that hassle and just do it on their own. Would it make sense at all for the county to have both options available for this level of a system or no? That's too complicated.

It would have at a level of complication. It'd be similar to having mandating an interconnection agreement in that we would need to update all our documents to reflect that optionality. Or it could be entirely, as I mentioned in the other option, entirely standalone process specific to these types of systems. That's really what that other option there covered.

Well, and some people can opt in or some people not, right? Is that a potential? No.

There is that potential. That's what I mentioned. That's why I say rogue systems. People could do this without... Not rogue.

Rogue sounds like... Yeah, well...

People could do this without even telling us, and I expect that people will do this without telling us, even if we say you need to tell us. Because I'm not aware of, and I'm not a county attorney, I'm not fully aware of all the rules associated with it, but I don't see any enforcement authority that the utility has, even if we found out about somebody had one of these plugged in in their backyard.

Okay. All right. Thanks.

Is that all, Jen?

Yes, thanks.

Matt? Yeah, can I just follow up on Jen's question about options for the customer? And I guess what I'm thinking is if the customer just wanted to plug it in, your recommendations would make sense. And if the customer said, no, I want to get credits, could they go under the existing interconnect agreement? I mean, there wouldn't need to be a separate one for these PIPVs necessarily. That could be the county's line is if you want to get paid, you've got to do the regular interconnect.

That is true. The concern there would be that the current customer-owned generation process doesn't consider these systems in it. They consider rooftop systems. So they have all the rules, the process and permitting rules and inspection and CID, construction industry division inspections of that system, getting a license to permitted installation, all that is baked into it right now, as well as where we go and evaluate the sizing of their system versus what we expect their load to be.

Okay. So it would need modification at the minimum. I believe so. Yeah. Okay. Thanks.

Eric?

Thank you, Chair Gibson. Yeah, I'm against allowing interconnected communities. I think the whole thing, plug-in PV is, you know, they're doing it because it's cheap. And like you said in your presentation, you said if you're going to pay $500 for a meter, that really bites into your cost, you know, your return on investment. Just to point out, UL 3700 is not a standard yet. It is what is called an outline of investigation. And so I think there's going to be a lot of flux in that one because... If they require a separate kind of receptacle, well, then it's no longer plug-in solar. And so you can't call it plug-in solar if you can't plug it in. So I'm a fan. I like your suggestions. Can we go back to that slide? I guess the one about the staff recommendations. Yeah, you know, I don't think we need to respond to rogue systems because I think that's the fire department's job. Yeah. I do have a question. Do you have any idea what insurance companies are doing in terms of if an insurance company, if a house burns down because of plug-in solar, you're not in your head yes?

I'm not in my head yes with what you're saying about you're far more familiar with the UL process than I am, so I accept and appreciate what you're saying there at the current state of UL, $3,700. The second part about Refresh me on the second part insurance company.

Yes. Is that a have they gotten a hold of this yet?

I'm not aware of that I don't see anything really associated with that in the public available information I Also, I didn't mention it here, but that is also a concern. That's part of the public education is is Your insurance needs to be on it. If you're not the homeowner, you need to be aware that unless the state does something statutorily to force a landlord to allow these things, you're going to have to work through your landlord, if you're renting, about putting one of these in. Because they're now assuming the risk of you burning down their complex. There are those factors, and those are still unknown about how they would fit in with people's widespread adoption of these systems.

It'll be interesting to watch. I'll follow the UL, because UL standards, the very last part of the UL standard are instructions the manufacturer puts in an owner's manual. They could put instructions in the manual to replace the receptacle and cord cap and all that kind of stuff. But like I said, they're not going to do that. The whole purpose of plug-in balcony, that's a great description because you put it on the balcony and you plug it in the receptacle outside. And if UL starts putting all these standards in here, like I said, it's no longer plug-in solar anyway.

I will point out that my brief understanding of UL3700 is the proprietary physical protection plug receptacle combo is one of at least four approaches for mitigating the safety risks. There are others such as systems that have intelligent processing and use a current transformer at the main feeder into the panel, which requires you to hook that up and then establish a communication to some kind of processing device that goes and monitors so you have no exports, so you don't energize the line, and that if you sense certain conditions that it'll shut the system off.

Right. That's the microinverter. But then there's also GFCI. And I don't know if we figured out the one about individual branch circuit. But all those requirements point to the fact that it's no longer PIPV. Anyway, and I don't think we should ever. And I think that, yes, I think we should cap export credits to, like you said, the baseline rate. If someone has rooftop solar and has interconnection agreement, if they exceed the amount of export that is in the interconnection agreement, yeah, we're not going to pay them for it. So I agree with that. Thank you.

Okay. Ben, following up on that question, what do we do now? with somebody who has an approved rooftop solar system if the amount of power that they export exceeds what their interconnection agreement says.

So the answer to that question is somewhat nuanced. We have limits on the overall system sizing based upon a hard cap. It's just no system cell will be bigger than I think it's 10 kilowatts of capacity without getting special exemption from that. But there's a separate piece of that that looks at their historical yearly total energy consumption and evaluates the projected production of their rooftop solar system to that historical load and consumption. And the evaluation is intended to say that we don't expect you to generate more energy across a total year than you're using. Granted, in the summer, The panels are more sunlight, longer duration. Panels put on more energy, so it's possible and likely that a larger system during the summer, depending on how people are using that energy, could exceed the system, could exceed their required load, the amount they have natively, and be exporting. They could be exporting a lot at that point. In the winter, we'd expect them to export less. But we don't look at those actual power exports. We only look at total energy compared to historical energy consumption across an entire year.

And if they exceed that baseline, what do you do about it? Anything?

Currently, we have nothing in the rule that addresses that situation.

Okay. Well, that answers my question. Okay. These have been a lot more popular. They got popular in Europe before they're starting to get popular now in the U.S. There's certainly when one looks at it from an engineering standpoint, you say, hey, there's a number of safety issues here. But I believe the comment was made back in the 1st of April meeting that the actual experience in Europe was that these were not You didn't frequently run into the safety issues that are theoretically possible. What do we know about the European experience? Because that's our main consideration here. Our first consideration is the safety not only of our crews, which is, you know, that can be dealt with with inverters that don't feed power back into the line. but the safety of the property owner, the occupant. What do we know about the experience in Europe with these things? And how big an issue is it? How many times do they run into problems?

Excellent question. I haven't been able to find any specific numbers. Everything I've seen says very small number of issues. What does that mean numerically? I don't have a, quantitative value for you. I haven't seen anything. I've looked. All I get is qualitative assessments. Four million plus systems and a small number of issues. I do want to point out that In general, European utility electric systems to structures are significantly different than in the U.S. A lot of 240-volt single-phase systems as opposed to the U.S. standard of 120-volt. Even in the U.S., when we have a 240-volt system, it's different. It's a split-phase system, not a single-phase. So everything's different. The wiring's different. The receptacles are different. The plugs are different. A lot of plugs have integrated Touch protection. They have, you've probably seen them, like round pins, and most of the pin is plastic and only the very tip is metal. So as you pull out the plug from the receptacle, it automatically loses contact, breaks contact with the receptacle before the metal pins are exposed. So you get built-in touch protection with some of those plug receptacle combos, and we don't have that in the U.S. So it's difficult to draw exact parallels between their systems and ours. So that's why UL3700 is taking this new look and approach to make sure that the systems in there address the safety concerns that they're aware of.

And a lot of the homes are 400 slash 233 phase. So 230 is aligned to neutral voltage. 400 is aligned to line. Homes are that way, too? Homes are 400, 230. I wasn't aware of them. A lot of them. Okay. Depends where you are and what country. Depending on how old it is and everything else.

The staff recommendation is that we don't try to impose regulation on this and tell the homeowner, you know, buyer beware, it's your risk. How is, how would this be different than saying the same thing to a property owner with respect to building codes or existing electrical codes or whatever, which are, again, something that is, you know, they could say, or we could say, you know, We, the government, at any level, could say, it's your risk. Build it however you want to and wire it however you want to. It's your risk. How does this differ?

I believe the fundamental difference is we are not an authority having jurisdiction over the electrical systems in these structures. That's a state responsibility for permitting and inspecting. We don't get into that. I don't believe we have any authority to go into someone's home and start inspecting their systems and saying this is insufficient, we're going to tag you. Maybe we have, I think we have some limited authority to do that for gas systems. I don't know if that would be extensible to electric systems. The way I view this is this is no different than someone plugging in an appliance to their home unsafely. There is, because these are generators, they're not taking power. They could potentially put power out. To the distribution system, there is a safety aspect for the county utility workers, but I do believe that's largely addressed through the inverter requirements for automatic shutoff when you sense a loss of grid tie. And two, that whenever we're doing work on a system, we use engineering controls to ground out that circuit so that our line workers aren't exposed to a live circuit, regardless of whether we know there's a generator at the residence or not. It's the practice we do.

Are you aware of any movement in this state to impose any regulation or statute at the state level on these things?

Good question. Yes, I do believe in the last session that was introduced in some committee. I don't recall the details, but I don't think it went anywhere.

That may be only a start in the process.

SB 157 was introduced in January of 26.

Oh, okay. SB 157, you said?

Yeah, correct.

Oh, thank you. That can be looked up.

So I just Eight states currently have legislation. New York is about to put one forward, and 30 states have had some form introduced in their state legislatures. So definitely happening. New Mexico is one of those 30.

Okay. Well, thank you for that research. Appreciate it. Okay. I'll ask if there is any public comment on the subject. See none in chambers. We have any online? Chair Gibson, there are no members of the public. Thank you. Okay, thoughts, comments? What do we want Ben to do? This is not necessarily a formal action. This is provide feedback, which we may not all agree on, but let's see what people think.

I like his staff recommendations. The only thing I would add, and maybe it's not, the only thing I would add is the thing about the base load to try to figure that one out. If they do have an agreement, they have a maximum amount they can export, and after that maximum amount, cut them off.

Matt?

I like Ben's recommendations. That looks good.

Okay.

Charlie? Charlie?

Yeah, I agree also with Ben's recommendations.

Okay. Jennifer, any comment?

Yeah, I would agree as well with keeping an eye on what the state's doing, though, as well.

Okay. And I would go along, make that more or less unanimous. I would suggest in any information that we put out, that we mention the potential that we may change in the future, that so people don't come back when we do have to change and say, hey, we invested because you said you weren't going to regulate this in any way, and now you're changing. We ought to say that up front that we still, as we did with the rooftop solar, although it didn't do a lot of good, but we ought to try anyway to let people know that as the technology evolves, as the regulatory environment evolves, and as we and others get more operational experience, we may need to change our policy sometime in the future, so. You can't take this one to the bank for forever. It may work that way, but we don't know yet. That should be made clear. Otherwise, I think you've got a fairly clear answer, I hope, from the board to not regulate it for the time being, at least. Thank you. Any other comments at this point from the board?

Well, this is a question. So if New Mexico does ultimately pass the bill that was previously introduced, which is regulatory, it looks like. Sorry, I'm just reading it here. They limit power output to 1920 watts, and they have specific safety and certification requirements and so forth and so on. So if we say there's no requirements or we're not going to do anything, does that contradict the state position if they adopt something like this?

Well, I would think, this is off the top of my head, if the state adopts something, you know, that is applicable to all utilities, including municipal utilities, then I don't know that we have a choice.

Yeah. Okay. Just wondering.

Which is something that can be put in the little disclaimer that says things may change.

Things may change, and we can add later. Yeah.

Okay.

Sounds good.

Okay. Thank you, Ben. Thank you very much. We move on to the annual update on wastewater systems. Clay.

I just keep taking the wind out of my sails with these long presentations. See if I can do this in less than five minutes like last year.

Hey, let's set the timer. See if Clay can do it in less than five minutes. Yeah, put the timer on him like you do for public comment. I speak really fast.

Does anyone ever call you vitrified Clay Mosley?

Yeah, I know. My kids have now heard me talking about it. All right, we'll go to the next slide. Okay, so the purpose of the presentation is just basically to provide an overview of both the wastewater collections and the wastewater treatment. talk about our challenges and maintaining the systems. We'll talk about the physical condition and then our operational needs and capital project plans. So our wastewaters collect, this is our waste, I'm going to talk about wastewater collections first and then wastewater treatment. The wastewater collection system, you know, it's primarily For the larger part of town and White Rock, it was all built kind of in the same era, so we end up with a lot of vitrified clay pipe. They're about 32,000 lineal feet between town site and White Rock. And then, of course, the newer parts of town are built out of more modern materials, which are types of polyethylene and PVC. We own and maintain 25 lift stations, which... Most of them have been upgraded. Almost all of them have been upgraded by now at least once. They're already in cycles of being upgraded again. But we've spent a lot of time and resources upgrading them because those are big failure points. So we had to do that essentially. Like I said, the newer parts of town, PVC and PE pipe, They really give us no problems whatsoever. We rarely ever see a backup or anything in those. So, obviously, when we start finding problem areas with clay pipe and it becomes a recurring problem, that becomes a priority for replacement or rehabilitation. We are seeing a big shift in the technology coming into the system. into the designs for the lift stations. We now are able to bring data points back to a type of SCADA that was kind of an, it's kind of our first attempt at doing it. That is going to evolve, too, as time goes on. But we're able to receive warning before we get backups overflows. We've even implemented the same technology in a couple of really high-risk manholes, and that's worked out pretty well for us. O&M or the wastewater collection system, it's just, it's a matter of experience and learning the process, and you kind of, there's not, there's kind of a playbook, but from there, you got to take it, learn it, and understand the pattern. So it's kind of a heuristic approach. All right, next. The older infrastructure, which we still have a lot of, presents a lot of O&M challenges. And you can see that we have all of these MESA drop lines. And those are just a really big logistical and engineering problem. Like how we don't want to go back and replace it the way it was. So you got to, you know, find these other ways to do that. And a lot of them, we've actually replaced quite a number of them, well, a few of them. And basically we essentially just drilled through the entire mesa. And so there's some of them that are just bored right through the middle of the mesa and we found a way to get it to come out where we want it to. And then you can see in the middle photo the types of root, you just get these stringy roots. And, you know, roots, They're prevalent in all sewer systems around the world. And wastewater runs through roots. And a lot of times we'll find a set of roots that have been there quite a while and there was never a blockage because, you know, wastewater is a matter of consumer habits. So it's like what people are putting down the system. And the more we educate people about what not to put into the sewer systems, the better. I mean, eventually we're going to find the roots, but they can be that way for quite a long time before they present a problem. So the education component is very important. And then we obviously have a lot of, like, poor craftsmanship when it comes to how some plumbers, contractors put in service line connections to our mains. You can see that shifted offset joint. We really ask, I mean, although that's kind of a building code situation, we do ask that when people need to put in a new tap that they let us come and inspect it and provide advice. All right, next. O&M challenges. You know, the wastewater collection system is very unpredictable. We do our best to just find the problem areas, hit those as frequently as we can, but then keep moving on to areas that we haven't touched. in the past. So we keep basically a tabular map and we color code it so we know where we've been. And so the crews go in, color code, kind of color code what the conditions were. We keep that data so that we can report it to our asset management team. But, you know, it's just a matter of trying to get coverage in the older parts of the system. And it's just hard to predict where it's going to occur. And like I said, bad consumer habits are really our biggest problem. And then we have a lot of miles of pipe. You know, for the size of community that we are, the number of connections we have, it's a lot of pipe per capita. So that's kind of one of our big issues too. We do get a lot of grade problems where we have older areas of town and the pipes, I think I've talked about this before, the pipes are running, you know, transverse to the slope. That pressure, that lateral pressure on the pipes cause shifting joints and cracks in the vitrified clay pipes. We don't see that really with newer installations because they bed it in sand and things like that. So it relieves the pressure. Um, we've had this issue where sewer mains running underneath homes present problems. Um, you know, in the past that was, they allowed people to do that and even the Zia company would do it. And so some of those, you get settling and some of those original clay pipelines are now showing that settling and the pressure on them. Sometimes it won't. present the problem we video it looks great but then suddenly it'll look good one year and then the next year we'll have a some sort of change in weather like a wet spell and that lateral pressure gets underneath the house and the house just pushes a tiny bit and it'll break that pipe and then that and all of a sudden we'll get a report of it and we go back and we look at it wasn't like that last year but it just is it happens it's stress and strain it gives all at once. And so the sewer mains under homes have become a priority for us because you never know when they're going to fail. And then like I said, the above ground steel cliff drop sewer lines, those eventually have to be replaced. All right, next. So this is kind of a visual of how much of the town site we have in clay pipe. It's the blue, the light blue. You can see the burn area project replaced a lot of that clay pipe that was, you know, it was basically designed like a drainage system. It went along with the grade through drainages and stuff like that. So that presents a problem for us because access, a huge it's a big undertaking to get into backyards through drainages through steep you know just gullies and cuts through the mesa that's where they ran the sewer line it was easy to put it there back then because there were no homes but now there are homes in the way of us actually accessing a lot of it so you know we have to Leave a note with a homeowner, hey, by the way, we're going to be in your backyard for the next three days because we've got to get down this way and we run a lot of hoses and connect to the fire hydrant to get water, you know, to do all this flushing. So it's an involved process. It takes a lot of time and energy. But 17,200 feet for town site. Next slide. And believe it or not, White Rock still has a lot of clay pipe You know, it was basically built in the late 60s, early 70s, and they were still using clay pipe. A lot of it was built actually mostly in the late 60s. So 14,800 feet. We typically have fewer problems with the clay pipe in White Rock unless somebody has like a really big cottonwood tree and it found its way into it. Then we start having this problem and So we do a lot of root cutting and some, we've had to do a few dig ups where we replaced a section so that that tree didn't get there. But it's amazing what a cottonwood tree can do. We've seen cottonwood trees 500 feet away from a clay pipeline and we see that it's cottonwood roots from this tree way over there found the sewer line somehow. It is the most amazing thing. All right, next. So this is, I'm just going to go through real quickly. You can see that we've spent a lot of time and energy upgrading, replacing lift stations because, like I said, they're failure points. But as we move through the years, you're going to see that we start putting a lot more focus on now rehabilitating and replacing problem sections of the clay pipe areas of town. So this is going on next year. This is this year. So, you know, we had the Denver Seals and then several of these projects are planned to be, we're going to start these projects to work on Fairway, Sycamore, and North Community really soon. We have a project for the wastewater treatment. I'm going to go through, I'm skipping ahead, but we have to use wash water at the wastewater treatment. And so instead of using our potable water, we use, we reuse the non-potable system because it's really non-potable water through the wash water system because it's water that's right there. We don't have to use pump treated water. But we have to use pumps. And so we now, now that we have built a gravity line And we no longer have a lift station pushing water from the bio canyon, all the north side of town site. We used to have a lift station because of where the old plant was. And we had to pump water up to the wastewater plant. We put a gravity line in. And now we can repurpose all of that to get gravity fed non-potable water to the plant. So that'll save us a lot of money and pumping costs. I did want to talk about that. Again, moving through. I'll leave it to you guys to look at these, but you'll see how we're starting to transition from lift station projects to pipe projects. And we know where the problem areas are. There's no... It's really easy to put together where we have the issues. Basically... It starts at the lower ends, elevation-wise, of those older areas of town. The lower pipes typically are seeing the most degradation. And then as you move up to A, where there are fewer homes on the line, and B, where there's less lateral pressure and flow through them, the pipes at the upper ends of the systems are not in as bad a shape. So it's usually the lower ends. So we'll move from the low end to the high end over time. All right, going through. Again, you just start looking at hardly any lift stations become any of the projects anymore. It becomes almost all pipes. And we'll be able to maintain the lift stations now that we have them all upgraded to modern controls and pumps. And wastewater treatment, we have a sort of a, a collection of projects that we're doing currently. And once that package of projects is kind of done because it's upgrading what's kind of wearing out at the LA wastewater treatment plant, it's going to be maintenance from there on out. All right. Moving through. You can see we know where the pipes are. So those just become, you know, every year a new set of projects. Focus points for the future, you know, the aggressive capital project plan shifting from lift stations to pipes, replacing VCP with PVC and PE. We're going to keep analyzing and responding to operational needs. Really it's a matter of looking at all the processes, seeing how much you can do with what you have. So streamlining the whole operation. And a big part of that is making sure that the staff you have are trained, they know what the expectations are, they know they need to make O and M progress, and you keep them motivated. Have a lot of burger cookouts and stuff like that. All right, next. All right, wastewater collections, staff recommendations is, you know, like I said, it's a workforce thing. And then having the right operational tools, like last year we were able to do that budget adjustment, get that factor on order. That's a big, important piece of equipment, and that'll help us to streamline the operation. I don't know if you guys have seen, but we've, We move the crews to nighttime operations. So they're actually out flushing all the areas that we cannot hit during the day. So they've gone to nighttime. So they're out there working right now, flushing. So you look at that and you find a way to make that happen without, you know, traffic control and stuff like that. Continuous analyze what's going on and report it and communicate it. We have a lot of communications with engineering and Philo about what we need. and prioritize all of the asset management team needs and get it on the plan. Being very flexible, we've kind of shifted a few things around to prioritize, you know, emerging needs and stuff like that. And then a big part of it, and I really appreciate working with Abby. She's done a great job, you know, helping us out with public engagement. And we have noticed an improvement. with the education. We're seeing a lot fewer, I mean, almost every blockage that we do end up with, it is a wipe-caused issue. So we'll go and put out door hangers, and then we won't see it as much. So it does help a lot. Next. All right. Treatment reclamation. So you know we own two wastewater treatment plants. Both plants produce very good effluent, very clean 1A effluent. And let's see, Los Alamos plant was put in place and was put online in 2007. It currently, on average, it's about .8 MGD. Both plants are what we call BNR, biological nutrient removal processes. Basically it's like the, you know, the facultative bacteria digesting and then sort of off gassing a lot of the mass in the reactor. The Los Alamos plant, works on an aeration process. So we have these big blowers that infuse air into the process. And so you have all these dissolved oxygen monitors to put in oxygen or take the oxygen out, depending on what stage of the process of metabolizing the nutrients the bacteria are in. White rock's a little bit different. It uses big mixers. And you've seen that lazy river sort of train. They call that an oxidation ditch. But essentially, they're both doing exactly the same thing. And in that biological reactor in the oxidation ditch, there are areas where there's more oxygen than others. You feed all these bacteria all this oxygen. They start the metabolism process. Then you kind of starve them from oxygen, and they start stripping oxygen off of molecules and respirating it out. So it's kind of a really cool process. And, you know, after you get really into it, you can geek out on all of the numbers and messing around with all of the controls to get it exactly where you want it. And, you know, the operators, I'm so proud of them because they really, taken it upon themselves to educate and continue their education, and they're always improving all of it. And this is across the board. They are all doing a good job of that. I would have to say I've been to a lot of wastewater plants around New Mexico, and I think that we have two of the best wastewater plants I've ever seen. We have, we are experiencing some new facility startup issues at White Rock. We have this weird corrosion problem in the mixing pumps where we, in our solids holding tanks. It's an interesting problem and it's interesting to work on, but we would like to get it figured out. We have some sort of very aggressive corrosion occurring and it's like a stray current coming in. It's just, it's like, you know, this very strong, it's causing the pump impellers and the pump volute to be this anode, so we're sort of like, you know, it's like some sort of galvanic corrosion. We don't know where the metal's going. It's got to be plating something somewhere, but we have not found that yet. And so we're doing this big corrosion research project, and we hope to figure this out. All right, next. Los Alamos wastewater plant. Originally constructed in 2007, we're starting to see several of the processes needing either replacement or rehabilitation. We're currently working on all of that right now, and so far it's going pretty well. If you look here under the list, these are all the things that have been done as of 2026. Originally, we had these very overpowered Hoffman blowers, and they would just suck a lot of electricity and kind of overdo the oxygen in the aeration basin. And we replaced those with BFD blowers that can adjust exactly according to what the oxygen levels are. So that's how those are set. We've replaced all of the SCADA from the original. And it looked like an Atari 2600 after, I mean, it got installed and no one ever upgraded it. And so we had to replace it. when we were doing a couple of other projects. So that's worked out pretty well. And now the guys can really adjust all of their numbers and fine tune the processes really well. We got rid of the dewatering, the belt press, which was a huge pain in the rear to maintain. And so we just finished that project this spring with the screw press, much more efficient. We've replaced the original reuse water system pumps with much better efficient pumps. The VFDs on the reuse water system, 50% of the RASWAS pumps, those eventually wear out. We're in-house rebuilding what we call the MCC buckets, which are the motor control, the motor starters. You have this whole panel of motor starters. And our electric staff, they're doing that in-house. So they've really learned how to do this. And so we found a huge cost savings in having our guys learn it and do it in-house. We've fabricated and installed a lot of this grit chamber decking because we would get all of this moisture getting sucked into the HVAC system and corrode the whole thing. So we put all this diamond decking over it, and now we don't have that problem. And here coming up, the latest project we did in-house was the complete overhaul and rebuild of the Headworks fine screen. We'll go ahead and change. Oh, yeah. And so this is part of the project. that we have coming up. We're just about to start the UV disinfection system replacement. We have this heat problem in the blower room and the blowers end up, the electronics and the oil in them overheats and they'll shut down. So we're looking at kind of dividing the room off and providing better ventilation to keep that from happening and hopefully extend the life of the blowers. We're working on repairing and waterproofing the aeration basin walls. Some of them are starting to, you get a little bit of water seeping through. We're going to eliminate the onsite reuse water pumping system like I explained before. We just recently replaced all the sodium and mercury ballast lighting with LEDs. We did that in-house. Saved us a lot of time and money doing it with a contractor. We're going to continue doing the MCC bucket rebuilds. So this is the in-house overhaul of the fine screen. I was just asking James here exactly what our engineer's cost estimate is project, and it was actually up to about $500,000. But we did it for about $55,000, I think. We were fortunate that Lakeside, the manufacturer of this unit, still, had the parts for this particular unit because if we were going to buy a new one, we would have had to go in there. You can see that channel, that deep channel. That's where the influent water comes in from the collection system. We were going to have to redo all of that if we got a full new unit. So we all looked at it, and it was kind of taking a leap of faith. But one day we did the bypass, and we just started taking it apart and replacing it bit by bit. And, you know, it has a motor that runs this auger, and you can see eventually everything kind of got worn out and was getting out of alignment. And so we were starting to have problems with it. All right, go ahead. And you can see the wear on the shaft and with the bearings. And so we took all of that apart, and we had to actually – It got a little aggressive. We had to cut some pieces apart, and then we ended up having to put all that back together. They didn't tell us about that, but we figured it out. But you can see how worn out it was. I mean, this thing runs 24-7, and it had been running since 2007, and the main shaft was heavily scored there. All right, moving forward. Yeah, so this is them starting to put it back together. And new screen, new bearings, new auger, everything. And it runs great, way better than they had even expected. White Rock, it's a new facility. It's great for public tours. Everybody likes it. The operators love working there now. And like I said, it does have a few little issues. And some of the issues that we had with it originally that we've kind of fixed And I got to say the team of Bohannon Houston and RMCI, they were great. We really are happy with the outcome. But the grit chamber vortex system, that removes like all of the sand and rocks and coffee grounds and eggshells because you don't want that stuff going through pumps or other processes. So it wasn't working quite right. And they mess around with it. What was it they eventually found? Yeah, that's right, the solenoid. So it's amazing. It just wasn't producing the right vortex, so we weren't getting the removal. And so eventually we just adjusted that, and suddenly, you know, you have this big trash bag, and suddenly you started to see all of the grit being pulled out of the wastewater stream. We had some issues with the RAS-WAS. This is return activated sludge and waste activated sludge. So you manage the level of bacteria in the process. So you want to return some of it to keep the bacteria process at a certain level. And then eventually it gets to a point that you need to waste some of it. So that's what that is. We had an issue with the chlorinator in the sensors and several minor SCADA and controls issues that our team worked with the contractor team to resolve. We're still working on the sludge basin mixing pump situation. I just put an example of our White Rock effluent discharge permit because once we put the two new plants online and we actually apply, we have to renew these discharge permits. the state has put us on a very strict sort of regime of producing this very high-quality water. So that's the new permit that we're under. And you can see what we used to deal with under the old permit. You would, at the end of an irrigation season, the White Rock Pond would just be full of all of this sludge. Eventually, now that we've produced all of this great class 1A effluent, now we want to start protecting it because we're putting it back out into an open environment, tumbleweeds and birds and all kinds of sand and stuff gets into it and it decreases its water quality. So we're looking at putting a cover over the storage pond and reusing some of the basins in the old plant. All right, go ahead, Abby. So focus points for the future is maintain current level and mix of CIP and what we can do in-house. I encourage the guys to, you know, sometimes it is a little bit of a leap of faith, but when you have such high quality staff, you know, they're willing to take on projects as their confidence grows and they're starting to find out that they're actually quite capable of running and managing these projects themselves. You know, you're constantly analyzing, meeting with the group what the needs are and see where we can improve efficiency, what projects we could do to make things better. And again, you know, a lot of this, I say that the most important part of all of this is the staff we have. And right now Los Alamos County is very lucky to have, you know, kind of across the board, but since we're talking about the wastewater treatment operators, they are, fantastic. So with the operations, we're fully staffed, and so we're doing really well right now. And that's it.

Okay. Thank you, Clay. A little over five minutes.

Well, I didn't want to... There was a lot to talk about.

Anyhow, Matt...

Sure. Thanks, Clay. Really appreciate the update and your staff for sure. So thanks. This was great. One quick question was both the water treatment plants seem to be working at about half the design capacity. And I was just curious, are there any efficiency issues if you're running below design or other things we might think about, or is it just, we have excess capacity in the town?

Yeah. So in, you know, it's, it's customary for, you know, engineering designs to, to over build one for, anticipating growth, and we are going to start seeing some growth with new developments coming in. People are conserving water, but the water that goes into the wastewater system is kind of the same right now. The amount of of water that makes it from residential and commercial use is still making it. So we don't really see a drop in what makes it. Most of the water conservation is happening in irrigation. So essentially almost always there's a certain per capita use that goes into the wastewater system. And so it's going to increase. Another thing that you have to anticipate, and it does happen here, is we get infiltration during storms. And so you end up with stormwater that it's inevitable. And so you want to have that receiving capacity in a wastewater system. I mean, we try to separate them and keep them, but it just makes it into the manholes and through roof vents and stuff. And so having that ability to go from like 800,000 gallons a day to suddenly almost 2 million, which does happen sometimes.

Okay. Thanks. Yeah. I guess what I was thinking is like, I know the trans Alaskan pipeline is operating about half its design capacity or less, and that's bringing in resonances and other unintended things. And so, yeah.

And there's a kind of safety factor there too. You know, you don't want to design it at capacity right away and have everything having to have all this stress on it.

Yeah. But then it doesn't, it's not operating at reduced efficiency.

No, no. Um, we actually had to evaluate, um, whether or not we were going to put two oxidation ditch trains. And that was originally part of the original plan, but it was going to cost another, it was like another six million, I think, to put another oxidation ditch train. And we looked at how much White Rock was producing, and it just didn't seem necessary. So if White Rock ever does expand more, DOE lets go more land, White Rock does have the ability to have another oxidation ditch built.

Okay, thanks.

Eric?

So where do – I think you answered about a quarter of my question already. And my question is simply where does the stormwater go? Because in your presentation, you talk about sewer, but I think that's in the past what I've called sanitary sewer. Sanitary sewer, right. So, okay. So I'm not like living in the past.

Well, I am, but. Yeah. Okay. Well, old systems like back East and in the Midwest, they would, they would. combine them together.

And then, but the storm water was traditionally went into the sewer and then where you flush the toilets went into the sanitary sewer. Right. But you're using the term sewer.

Yeah.

What do you use storm sewer? Yeah. So this using sewer for sanitary sewer. So what are you using for sewer?

Yeah. So I'm saying sewer just because I'm talking about sanitary sewer. The storm sewer is, you know, that's public. You see the culverts and the storm drains and that gets discharged into canyons. Sometimes, uh, There's a certain volume of it that makes it into the sanitary sewer as well. Sure.

But what do you call it? Do you just call it stormwater?

Yeah, that's stormwater. Right. Stormwater. But in engineering terms, you do see SAS sanitary sewer versus stormwater sewer. Okay, thank you. And there are places that have to do some treatment. They'll have to collect stormwater, do some treatment to it before it gets discharged. So there are places that have stormwater processing plants as well.

And that was my main question. So generally speaking, our stormwater just stays out of the sanitary sewer except for the intrusion. Right. And so, and it just runs off the mesas and wherever else. Yeah. Okay. All right. Thank you.

Okay. Clay, you talked about wanting good apprenticeship and training programs, but you also said you're adequately staffed for now. Are you thinking of apprentice training programs in the sense of new people being added to that or when you do hire somebody new going through an apprentice program?

Yeah, that's a good question, Chair Gibson. So when I, when Jack retired and I came on board, we had, we essentially had a whole new, there was like half of the gas water sewer crew, half of them were new. And they were all learning about any of this in utilities. So we had to sit down. You know, I sat down with Sammy Maestas, the superintendent. Same with Dave Gomez in the water production. They were new. And Josh Silva in the wastewater treatment. It seemed like every division had a large number of brand new people that didn't have any of their operator certifications and were coming from other, industries and so we had to find a way to how are we going to get them up to speed and so you know we put together a plan to both have them studying for their operator certifications and work with whoever we had you know that had the experience to sort of apprentice so we would pair them with people And then we would talk about how their day needed to go, like how they needed to learn it, practice it in the shop. We would have, like, training sessions at the shop, how to use the vector, how to work on the controls, how to use the flushing equipment. Because a lot of that, the wastewater collections equipment, it's dangerous. And so we had to have a lot of safety talks, a lot of – you know, sequence of operations practice before they were kind of cut loose on doing it. So, and then what happened in certain situations, we would like say, okay, you're going to have a blockage like this, or you've see this huge grease ball in the, in the, in the lift stations. What do you do? And so we, yeah, we all just sat there and went through it. And we had like classroom kind of outside training in the shop. And then we would go and do a practice, we'd find a lift station that we knew had grease in it and we'd all work on it. So it was just kind of like, you know, taking extra time out of our day and having the senior guys be more patient and help teach the younger ones or the newer ones how to do this stuff.

Okay. Summary, your staffing level you think is sufficient so we're not anticipating increases in staffing for the foreseeable future.

Is that correct? I always want wastewater, wastewater collections is labor intensive. And on any given day, we may have four guys working on it. Two of them are usually working on the lift station. Sometimes you'll have all four doing flushing work together. So it's my preference and I'm just going to put it out there. It could use a couple more guys to get more coverage because we have a lot of, a lot of clay pipe. And a lot of times what we'll find is, oh, we have a clay pipe that collapsed. And suddenly progress on the flushing and the other O&M stops because they have to deal with this line break or a collapse. And so that suddenly that becomes anywhere from three to eight days of work. And so all of the schedule gets pushed back. So I feel like the wastewater collection system could use a little more staff. But we get by with what we have and, you know, let's see what happens with the new vector. Having two highly functional vectors may actually solve a lot of problems. But we're finding other methods, too. You know, they're doing pipe inspections in a much more efficient way. They used to get the whole robot camera, and they would take all this time to video all of the lines. We don't need to do that anymore. We have that sonic detector. It introduces a tone. You have a receiver, a tone generator, and a receiver, and they can find out whether or not that pipe needs attention or not. If it comes out excellent, they just move on. They don't bother with it. And it'll find a bad pipe. So if it scores poorly, then they'll get the push camera real quick, go see what the problem is, and then either they can just clean it or it needs like a construction project. Okay. So we move, we try to move a little faster with more modern tools.

Chair, I just want to also add, you know, Clay showed that we're doing an aggressive pipe refurbishment program. You could put as many people as you want, but you still get overflows. Yeah. And it's better we solve the issue of the vitrified clay pipe so we don't get clogged roots and grease and whatever, rags, et cetera.

Okay. Thank you. Any other questions?

Yeah, I have a question, Clay. Thanks, Clay. I'm just curious about the corrosion issue you're having in the sludge basin. Sorry if I missed it. Did you say that your primary suspect is sort of galvanic reactions happening?

Yeah, there's some sort of stray current that's not being connected to the grounding system. That original, so it's those old anaerobic digester basins in the original building because we didn't tear that building down. And we repurposed the anaerobic digester basins. Somehow those were never ground. And of course, they didn't have any electrical equipment in them before. And now we've introduced piping and electrical equipment. Of course, there's grounding on the on the motor cases and stuff, but somehow the mixers that are inside of the media, we're not dissipating that current. We're not giving that stray current somewhere to go. And we've done resistance tests on either side. We have to drop leads down into the media, and we've turned the pumps on, and all of a sudden you'll see sort of this stray current, and we don't know Exactly why it's why there's current being induced into the media like that How it so we put jumpers Because there are gaskets and things in that assembly we put we drilled in and put grounding jumpers and We're evaluating that process right now seeing if that is what did it, but we need to have sort of a corrosion assessment done to make sure because it In a very short amount of time, the entire innards of these pumps were just eaten, gone. They were just gone.

Yeah, I was wondering if it could be potentially biogenic in origin. You know, you're producing a lot of hydrogen sulfide, I assume.

Yeah, we thought that too, but that's what this company does. These were like stainless steel, and they were liquid. Like, no, we put these pumps in all of these applications. This doesn't happen. And so there's something more aggressive than just like, you know, slow over time chemical corrosion. There is actually a current that's like anodizing the material.

Interesting. Okay, cool. Thanks.

you can come out and help us. That's what we kind of need is somebody, cause we're all just scratching our heads. Anybody go get a chemistry book on this.

And I mean, yeah, I mean just, I was just thinking sulfuric acid, but you generate an invest, not going to be inside and not the way you're describing it. So it's interesting.

Yeah. Yeah. We've thrown every theory out there and had a lot of people on it, but, but yeah, so we, we have a, uh, a consultant that's going to be coming out and helping us. They're going to put, you know, test leads and, yeah, we'll get better data because it's really sort of a data collection thing now, finding out where it's happening, from what source.

Very cool. Thanks. Okay. Thank you. During my first term on Board of Public Utilities, which is 20-plus years ago, One of our big projects was designing bidding starting construction of the Los Alamos Wastewater Treatment Plant. And now you're saying a lot of it's worn out and it's end of life and has to be replaced. I keep wondering, what does that say about me?

Oh, I remember working on that project, too. I was like, man, it feels like we just did that, and it's already stuff's worn out. Yeah. But, you know, it's been on 24-7 since 2006, so it makes sense. The nice thing is it is easy... to perform the projects because it's not that old of a plant. You know, it's ready for the stuff that we need. We have easier path forward on improving it than like the old White Rock plant just needed to go.

Understood. Okay. Thank you. Much appreciated.

My pleasure.

Folks, it is almost 9.30. We still have three items on the agenda tonight. I think all of those who actually were in our scheduling were postponed from last month, mostly due to ECA. So my question is, what is the board's pleasure? Do we want to do any of those tonight or kick them down the road another meeting?

Actually, I'm going to step off either way.

Okay. You're going to go greet the sunrise, huh?

Pretty much.

Well, thank you very much for hanging in there with us tonight. We know it's tough for you.

Yeah, no worries. Thank you very much. See you guys. Good night.

Good night. Okay. Charlie?

I would vote for putting it off and doing it the next time.

Okay. Cristela, two of these items are yours. Does that bother you at all to put them off?

No, Mr. Chair. I think, though, just one point on the review of the BPU procedural rules is that it will have to be, there will have to be a vote. And so if there's going to be discussion and then it will be pushed off to two more meetings before a vote will be taken on the

I understand that. Thank you. Okay. I've got one solid vote and one head nod in favor of calling it at this point.

How long is the transactional survey report? Can we do that? How long do you think that'll be?

I can make it really short. You mean five minutes? Yes. Yes.

I saw your name and I thought, you know?

Yeah, but that's up to you guys.

Well... I'm inclined just to postpone it all here. Okay. At four hours? Okay. We will regroup and put these items on the later meeting agendas. I thank everyone for your attention. I think almost everybody's still awake. Much appreciated. We do have to have public comment, opportunity for public comment. Is there any public comment? I don't see any in chambers.

Chair Gibson, there is no public online.

Okay. Thank you. With that, we are adjourned. Thanks, everyone. Thanks.

Good night.

Good night. Recording stopped.