Light Board - Regular Meeting

Okay, let's call this meeting to order. This is the meeting of the Light Board on May 13th. I'm Warren Leon. I'm chair. If Nicole Grosner is here under an assumed name, raise your hand. But let's start with approving some minutes. We have minutes from the last meeting, both minutes from the regular session and minutes from the executive session, which we need to vote to approve, but not make public. And does somebody want to make a motion to approve the minutes? I will move to approve both sets of minutes. And is there a second?

I'll give a second.

Great. And let's go. Brian, do you approve? Yes. And John?

I was not at this meeting, so I'm going to abstain.

Okay. And Chris? Yes. Okay. And I approve as well. very good um let's go on to the chair's update and the first thing i'm pleased to report is we have a new board member nicole grosner we very much welcome her here the board has seen her bio, but Nicole, if you could let other folks here know a little bit about yourself so they will understand the experience and perspective you're bringing to the board.

Sure. Good morning, everyone. Yeah, I'm really excited to be part of this board. I've been working, I would say almost exclusively with utilities, many of the utilities in Massachusetts and other parts of the country as a third party consultant conducting evaluations of their demand side management programs. A lot of my work in recent years has been focused on demand response programs and EV managed charging programs, but also done a lot of work in the area of kind of more traditional energy efficiency programs and more recently, a lot of focus on understanding how heat pumps are going for people. So yeah, I worked for a company called GuideHouse doing that work. That was a kind of spinoff from Navigant, some of you may be familiar with. And when I started at Navigant, I was conducting work for the U.S. Department of Energy to try to assess kind of the manufacturer impacts, financial impacts of having to comply with different standard levels associated with their appliance and commercial equipment standards program. So, yeah, that's kind of the most recent professional experience. I am taking a career break at the moment, just very recently, about a month ago, left my job to be a fully stay-at-home parent with my three children. Yeah, I have twin girls who are 18 months and a boy who's four years old. So yeah, it's quite a busy household around here.

Hey, Nicole, thanks very much. And let me get the answer to the most important question. Do you pronounce your last name Groszner or do I have it wrong?

It's, yeah. I mean, it doesn't really matter how you pronounce it. Different members of my husband's family pronounce it differently. So, but I say Grosner. That's fine. Okay.

Thank you. Thanks. Well, welcome to the board. I think you'll find it an interesting experience and you'll have useful perspectives to share. Let's go to the chair's update. And the first thing I want to... talk about is the fact that this is Brian Fold's last meeting on the board. He's been on the board for six years and he's cycling off because his two terms are up. During that period, Brian has been the most active and engaged board member and has had a real impact on the operations of the Light Plant. It's fair to say that Brian likes to get into the weeds on things. And in fact, he doesn't just get into the weeds. He looks at the differences between the roots of the weeds, the stems and the leaves. But the thing that's really good about Brian is at the same time he gets into the weeds, he's able to focus and think about the big picture. And he's a big picture thinker as well. And that balance has been really good for us. And Brian, I want to thank you for your service. And I'm sure everybody here joins me in thanking you for all you've done for the Light Board and the Light Plant. Well, thank you.

Thank you.

I also am pleased to report that this is my last meeting as board chair. I will be rolling off of that role. I'll be staying on the board. This is assuming we vote on a new board chair a little later in the meeting. I want to say it's been a real... interesting and satisfying learning experience for me. I've learned a lot from being the chair and engaging with the board. And the thing I've learned more than anything else is that the staff of the Light Plant is really dedicated, engaged, and skilled. That was really great to have an opportunity to see people a little more closely than I had before. I especially want to thank the staff and especially Jason and Laura for All their preparation they put into the light board meetings and to helping the light board chair and made my job easy. So thank you. With that, let's go on to the director's report.

Warren, I just think your time as chair should be acknowledged in terms of you really have done.

I just acknowledged it.

Well, I think someone else should acknowledge it. you've done a great job in terms of, you know, finding the middle ground among, you know, diverse interests. You know, you've been very respectful, thoughtful, and, you know, really done a superb job. And thank you for your time and effort. And as well, Brian, Warren appropriately acknowledged your great work. And I imagine and I'm hoping sincerely that you will continue to be engaged because your voice is helpful.

Thank you. Yeah, I started watching this board back in 2011. I don't think I'm going to stop. So you can't get rid of me. I'll be in the audience.

Great.

Okay. I hate to pile on, but I did just want to say that I started working for the town of Concord just a month after Brian came on the board, and I know he'd been to many, many board meetings, but he was always a fixture at the light board meetings from my time here and when I became director. Brian, you were incredibly supportive and helpful and spent a lot of your time coming in here, meeting with me, giving me background and helping me because you wanted me and the Light Plant to be successful. So I genuinely thank you for that time, Brian. And welcome, Nicole. And also, I want to just acknowledge that Tyson is here as well. Hello, Tyson. Tyson is due to be appointed or has been appointed to start in June of this year and will replace Brian on the board. So, yes.

So Tyson folks will give you an opportunity to introduce yourself next month when you're officials. Yes.

Yes. I'm here to listen as part of the, the audience today.

So I did just want to acknowledge time of day rollout in my director's update, but we have a dedicated topic on it, so I'll save my comments for then. I wanted to mention the middle school solar and battery project and the progress on that. We are expected to hear very soon on whether we got the, or the schools got the $1.4 million grant from MassCEC Green School Works program. I am slated to go to the school committee meeting next week, a week from today, to give them an update as well. We expect that we will have heard by then. And we also think we'll have a little bit more information on pricing for ourselves to understand that the PPA avenue is going to look favorable. We have met with another company. I kind of need to catch Laura up on this, but while she was gone, I met with a company to discuss this and they gave us some really promising leads and good information. And we have some solid information from another developer that we can use to kind of evaluate the options. And we would expect to bring something to the board in June for discussion at kind of a more detailed level to see which of these paths look most favorable. And, you know, it also we need to coordinate closely with the school department and administration to discuss those options and make sure that whatever path makes sense, you know, financially and from a project viability perspective is also going to be looked upon favorably by the school administration. We continue to support the bus electrification efforts at the school. They are slated to start work tomorrow on the installation of the transformer and the trenching that's required to bring the primary power down to that area where the school bus chargers are. They are putting one new level three bus charger in as part of the grant that they got. And then they are actually working with Highland to add up to three more chargers and potentially five more buses that would be coming in through a grant from the EPA. So, you know, there's a little bit of unknown on that second phase of the project, but we're trying to do our work in such a way that it wouldn't have to be repeated were they to get more buses and chargers. And in conjunction with that, we're going to be talking about later today in this meeting, how we are going to create a tariff or a compensation mechanism for the expected pushback for that system. But just know that the staff have been doing a lot of work on that and that the actual shovel work starts tomorrow. We know there's a lot of rain coming, but we're hoping to get some excavation work done. And then they'll probably do the pouring the pads and the installation of the actual chargers starting on Monday. And the good news is that the soil came back clean in that we do not need to send that off for offsite removal. It is not contaminated. It was probably fill that was placed when they did the bus depot work. And so that's good news.

And so do we need the EPA supervision?

We still need the licensed site professional because it is a managed site. And so what they will do is they will call, they're calling MassDEP today to let them know that the work starts. they will be monitoring and then preparing a site report that they have to file with both the EPA and MassDEP to let them know what was done and the depths and what was excavated, how much was removed, how much was brought in, things like that. And so that's required. But going forward, I think that it would probably be an easier ask in terms of just that monitoring report that's done. But unfortunately, that is kind of a part of every bit of work that has to happen at this site.

Well, let's hope it doesn't rain and we can stay on schedule because we've got lots of parties that have to show up.

It's definitely raining, but we think the work we're doing can happen in the rain tomorrow. And then on Monday, we're looking pretty good.

Jason, can I also ask something about the work at the schools? You said you're preparing in case additional funding comes in for additional buses, right? But if there isn't more funding for additional buses, is any of this work superfluous and extra expense?

No, nope. I mean, first of all, the good news is that Brian years ago asked town meeting to set aside some money for this exact project. Not knowing when it would come, but knowing that it would come someday. And so the good news is there's a small pile of money for that installation work. So it's not costing ratepayers or taxpayers anything more than what was already appropriated at the time. And then the work that we're doing now is to support the grant that they did already receive. We're just designing it in such a way that were they to come back for three or four more chargers, we wouldn't need to go dig up all that work and do something different. So we just shifted our approach a little bit so that it would be in more support of future project expansion. But it's not putting extra infrastructure in that's not needed. The transformer that we're using is sized for one charger, but it'll easily be swappable were they to add more.

Thank you. Yeah, and it's just dropping more pipes, the conduit, into the ground in the existing hole that's going to be made. And so we don't have to go back and re-dig the hole.

Yeah, the schools are doing kind of a change order with the contractor that's paid for by the grant to add a little bit of extra infrastructure to prevent having to dig up this area in the future. The financial audit is set to begin the site work in late May and early June. They're coming on for a couple days on site. And our team is working on preparing items and doing the closes and the reconciliation work that needs to happen. We did have a financial audit advisory committee meeting that Chris was at yesterday and I attended remotely. And it sounds like that committee is dedicated to having a more regular meeting schedule and be more involved in the process, which is great to hear. And one of the conversations that were had at that meeting was, In their charge, it says that they are in charge of deciding who the auditors are and that also there's a recommendation to have a single auditor across all entities. There's the school, the town, and the light plant. And I personally don't have any concern about who picks the auditor as long as they try to take into consideration the various needs of different departments. But I'm a little concerned that they would say that it has to be the same auditor because In fact, the state recommends that the towns do not use the same auditor for the different entities to kind of have a stronger firewall between those and have more assurances that if there is a concern, it will be addressed as opposed to just kind of dealt with when they do another audit later. And Chris, do you want to make a comment?

You beat me to the state recommendation for separate auditors. And I think we talked a little bit about that at the end of the meeting. And my sense is the committee is he wants to change the charge as opposed to get one auditor for everybody. Right.

Yeah. I think that's good news. And again, like I said, we have no skin in the game as to who is selected as an auditor, as long as they're competent and ideally have experience doing like plan audits. And so sorry, I lost my notes here. Okay. I want to mention the AP automation project is moving along. That's a project that Nan and her team are working on and, This will help us streamline the processing of vendor bills, which we get a lot here at the light plant. This will basically allow them to create a template for the vendor bills, and then it will automatically ingest those and then appropriately put everything into the system to save a lot of manual entry that happens today. We still have the issue of the double entry, which I think will come up as a part of the conversation of governance, as well as just the efficiencies and or inefficiencies that happen when we have two financial systems that we need to enter data into the towns and the light plants. We did complete the 2025 rec purchases marking I think now the third full year of 100% non-carbon emitting power supply. So thank you, Laura and Nan for your help on figuring that out and for Laura getting the purchases made. I think Brian's got a question.

Oh, on the purchases, the, the state report came out, the greenhouse gas retail sellers inventory, and there's a discrepancy between what we thought we'd hit and what we actually did as a percentage. So I just want to ask that it come up as a future topic. And I'll send you an email, John and Jason, about all the details of kind of what I want to ask about. I think we were 97% non-emitting instead of the 100.

In 2025?

In 2023, because they're two years in the rear. And I'm sure Laura has a thought on this.

Yeah, just a quick question. Brian, are you looking at percent of purchases or percent of sales?

That's what we need to talk about because the state, what we said is we would do according to the greenhouse gas and the retail sellers report. And the retail sellers report came up 97% because we did sales and they do purchases. So that's what the board needs to talk about.

Brian, you said you're going to submit something that is a good thing to do. And let's have further discussion on this after you submit something and the staff has had a chance to review it.

Perfect. We continue to support the Novo 40B project that's happening on Baker Ave. There are a few projects coming up in town involving adding a lot of residences. And this one in particular is going to require a pretty big redesign of the electric service that provides electricity to those buildings. And so Joe and his team have been working quite extensively with them trying to understand what the timeline is and how they're going to get electricity to the various areas. And it's going to result in us needing to do some temporary, take some temporary measures because their infrastructure is in a place that's slated to kind of be torn down and moved around. And so They've been working quite extensively with them. The SCADA project is coming along. Again, we've taken delivery at substation 223 of a lot of equipment and the substation 219 equipment was delayed slightly due to a relay being unavailable, but we're hoping to receive that soon as well. And then we're just going to probably flip the order of expected installation so that we can keep this project moving, hopefully install some later this summer and then some more in the fall. Uh, so Joe and his team have been really busy with the SCADA system there. Uh, we found that the roof here at CMLP needs to be replaced. It was, it received the lowest marks in the roofers assessment. Uh, we've known this it's, it's kind of of the age it just needs to be replaced. We've repaired it many times and it's just really in a failed state. So we'll be working on identifying a contractor who can help us wade through that because while chapter 164 makes procurement easy for some things for the light plants, when it comes to municipal buildings, of which this is considered one. We do have to follow more stringent procurement laws and that requires a lot more work. So we will be starting that process soon. The Climate Action Resilience Plant update has been moving along. Laura has been monitoring that very closely and attending meetings with the Climate Action Committee to understand what's needed. We, the light plant, were involved last time, but it was more of a direct, connection between the director and the sustainability director. And we're hoping that the process this time can be more open and include more stakeholders, especially because we feel that the light board is the one kind of setting the light plant's priorities. We would love for a board member to be involved in that process a little bit more so that it's kind of a unified voice and not just staff kind of saying like that number sounds reasonable to us. Um, so, uh, in support of that, there's actually a meeting tomorrow, um, on, on site with West and Samson, the vendor that's been chosen. And we are eager for any life board members who might have an hour to spare that might want to come and kind of observe that meeting. I don't know that it's hybrid, but if that's the only way somebody can attend, we're happy to try to see if we can hook up the OWL so that somebody can join. So if anybody is available, if you could shoot me an email or I'll send an email to the board members and just ask who might be available.

What was the time again?

Well, it's really any time. We can give them the times, Chris. So if you have even an hour to spare, let me know and I can let them know that that's a time that would work. Do you have time? I think so.

I also just wanted to mention I'm planning on joining that. I had been coordinating with Brad on it. Oh, great. So I'm going to be there.

Oh, awesome. Okay. Yeah. So we could have two members without hitting a court issue. So, Chris, if you want to come, you're welcome to still let me know what time you're available.

I'll drop you an email with the availability. And then if that doesn't work out, then Nicole will be there. That's great.

In terms of staffing, I just wanted to say we did part ways with a couple of line workers. One was an apprentice and one was a first class line worker. They did both go to National Grid, just kind of underscoring the process. staffing pressures that we face competing with these large multinational corporations and the different opportunities that they have that we just can't compete with in terms of probably more access to mutual aid and training and then kind of more specialization. Here we really do ask our line workers to do everything. You need to know underground, overhead, switching, safety, substation work, and Whereas when you go to a much bigger outfit, you do get to specialize and figure out which area you're interested in. And, you know, I'd say we offer a lot of benefits that they don't offer in terms of stability and knowing where you're going every day. And like I said, that level of expertise in more areas, which, you know, our staff who stick around generally really appreciate. But it is hard to find those people who are interested in that and really stick to it for a career. We are going to be advertising those two positions very soon, as well as a couple other positions, knowing that we have some retirements coming up, trying to get those filled. And then we do still have some vacancies in the metering division. And Jennifer, Joe, and I have been working on brainstorming how to get, you know, the right candidates in. We've had a lot of applicants, just none of them are kind of in the right space. So those are the, the, the, staffing updates, and I think I'll stop there and see if there's any other board questions.

Thank you, Doug. Jason, seeing none, is that the end of your?

Yes.

Well, let's move on to the broadband report then. Yeah, I'll give that today.

Yeah, I'll give that today. So I wanted to just commend the broadband team for their extensive effort for the XGS PON migration. It is complete. It did complete on April 30th. What that means is that all of the broadband customers are now running through the new hardware and the new protocols and the new software as well. What that means is that we can now offer much faster speeds to customers. We're planning on, as we had talked about a few months ago at the board meeting, increasing residential speeds at no extra cost for people to remain competitive with Comcast and other ISPs. And it now allows us to offer businesses much faster speeds, which was kind of one of the reasons why we didn't get as many business customers online. in the past is because, you know, we could offer speeds of up to a gig, but a lot of businesses needed five or even 10 gigs that we can now offer with this new hardware. So it was really several years in the making for this project. And it required a lot of after hours work in coordination with people. And so I thank everybody who was involved in that project. And there's a few other phases, one to remove the old equipment, and take some of the power supplies that were connected to the old equipment and move it to the new equipment. And then also the last piece of this upgrade is the routers. The current routers offer speeds up to 10 gig per port. The new routers offer speeds up to 100 gig. And so that will allow us to better balance our ISPs that we have. We have three ISPs that provide service to Concord Broadband that we then resell. And so this would really allow us to kind of load balance more in real time. And also if we cross that 10 gig threshold, then we'll be able to not have an issue with that. We're currently, our max is about eight and a half gig at the evening peak, which it was about four when I started. So it has crept up. And then A couple other projects that they're working on. One is with the Concord Housing Authority. They were awarded a grant to get fiber there. Concord Broadband was not awarded the grant because we had to also provide service outside of Concord for this grant, and we were not eligible to do that. However, we are supporting it, and it will result in the added infrastructure coming into Concord Broadband, which is good news, paid for by the state. And so we are working on that project, getting fiber to four different locations, and that's been Dale working a lot with the technicians and with the engineering and line division here to figure out the best path to get to these places. And then also, as the board may or may not know, we have a lot of broadband infrastructure inside of our electric infrastructure, which is not an ideal situation to have. One of the Downsides of that is that whenever work needs to happen in there, we need electrically qualified people to do that work, which takes them away from other work that they're doing. Another issue is just the safety in the underground system and the manhole systems. If you have fiber in there, it's just one more area to get kind of tangled in. And so that can add a layer of danger when people need to enter the manhole system. And then just when equipment needs to be replaced, whether it's a pole or whether it's a hand hole or manhole or conduit, having that fiber in there definitely complicates things. So one of our efforts, and it will be a long process, but is to try to identify those areas where we do have fiber in the electric system and find a way to add infrastructure that would allow us to separate it. And so one of the areas that we already have the broadband distribution infrastructure in place is in Gifford lane. Uh, but unfortunately it's not tied into the other broadband infrastructure. So we're actually going to be doing a project to extend that a couple hundred feet so that we can actually pull all the fiber out and put it where it belongs. And, um, and so this is just one small project that will hopefully chip away at the kind of the decisions that were made in the past to kind of get things done quickly, but that have kind of over time complicated and, um, reduce the safety of our electric system. So the other thing I'll mention is just that sometimes when the electric system goes in, there's a primary conduit and a backup. And that backup is intended that when the service is failed or is failing or needs to be upgraded, we can pull new conductor in that second conduit, and then we can easily transfer service over and quickly. When we have fiber in that second conduit and we can't pull through, we then have a problem. So if there's a failure, we need to kind of rip that out quickly and restore service. It just adds time. So we always want to have a primary and a backup for those situations, and projects like this will help in support of that. And that's all I've got for broadband.

Great. Thank you. Let me ask a question. Maybe others have other questions as well. In terms of that issue of co-location of broadband cables and electric lines, is that in five places or 55 places?

Definitely closer to 55, maybe 555.

It's a big deal that will take a long time to resolve.

It is. Yeah. I mean, I think first of all, it's a philosophy, you know, going forward that we don't do it. And second of all, it's when we find an opportunity that is a good candidate, we take steps at that time to remedy it. You know, I think that over time, when there are roads projects, when we need to add other infrastructure, we'll definitely start, you know, and we have for a while, like, you know, remember, the electric underground system went in long before broadband was a thing. And so decisions were made decade ago, you know, before most of the staff on this meeting were even here to say, well, hey, in this area, why don't we just pull the fiber through this extra conduit we have over here, you know, and it was It was not with any malice. It was just trying to achieve an objective and, you know, do it at a reasonable cost, but it did create some complexities and some unintended issues. And so, uh, yes, it is, it is a slow burn, but we're, we're trying to commit resources to it steadily so that it doesn't become like one big project, but that all the staff know that we're trying to move in the right direction.

Thank you. Any other questions or comments from Jason from the board? Thank you. We have to vote on appointments here. Chris Schaffner has been very graciously serving on the audit committee, but he hasn't been official.

No, I have been for one meeting. I was official last night.

Oh, okay. Well, we have to vote to appoint you to the position here.

I was right. I was filling in on, um, uh, Bianca who had her, her unexpired term. Okay. And so now you're appointing me for a full year. Okay. You understand better than I do.

Can we have a motion to appoint Chris to the audit committee for a full year term? So moved a second.

I'll give you a second.

Thank you. And John, do you approve? Yes. Brian?

Yes. Thank you, Chris.

Nicole?

Yes.

Chris? Am I allowed to vote? I'll say yes. And I'll just point out that actually I get appointed by the select committee, not us. We're just recommending.

Oh, we're recommending. Okay. Thank you. And I approve as well. Thank you. Now the next thing is we will vote to appoint a new chair and a new secretary to take effect um after this meeting and the um in the scheme of things we have two very well qualified candidates to move into those roles john as chair and chris as clerk can i see a motion to that effect uh so moved and a second second And is there any discussion?

I'm told that the secondary position is a light lift, so I'm counting on that.

Oh, we tricked him. Wait till the vote, Brian.

Oh, sorry. Okay, so Nicole, do you approve? I approve. Chris. Yes. Brian.

Yes.

John. Yes. And I approve as well. Good. We're now going to go into an update on how things are going with time of day rates. Before I turn it over to Jason, I want to say, you know, we on the Light Board by setting this policy have given the staff a really heavy lift to make this transition to this new system, which is much, much better. for the Light Plant and for the people of Concord. But even though it's much better, there's a lot of work and the customer service staff, Jennifer and others, have been really working really hard to make this all possible. And I want to thank them. And so let me turn it over to Jason.

Great. Thank you. I'm going to share my screen. Got a short presentation. I don't know if you guys can see this.

And Jason, when you're done, you can share these presentations with the board?

Yes, they'll be in the packet. Yeah, sorry, we were working on them late last night. So here's where the late plan budget went to the blimp that we flew over Boston. So yeah, so as Warren mentioned, on May 8th, the actual first bills went out for the new time of day billing. What that meant was that on April 1st, the new rates went into effect, but we obviously bill a month in arrears. So we know what people actually used. And so that's when the bills went out, uh, the first bills went out on May 8th. We do have three billing cycles. And so one, uh, is usually around the 10th. Uh, this one was the 10th was a Sunday, so it went out on Friday, but the 10th, the 20th, and then the last day of the month. And so, uh, the first bills in that first batch went out there. Um, and, uh, really that's it. Any questions? No, I'm just kidding. Um, so I did want to echo Warren's comments to say that this was a Herculean effort, um, I think Laura was the only one of us here at the time when we used our old billing system, Harris, but the prerequisites for this migration were deep and included a new financial ERP, and it required new meters on every customer home, and it required all new software and new meter data management system structures that didn't exist, rates that didn't exist. So The board, you know, for I'd say two years was meeting monthly and sometimes twice a month to discuss these issues to try to get this as right as we possibly could. And I thank the board for the leadership and I thank the staff for their implementation because it was a tremendous amount of work. I'd like to thank Carol and Donna and Annie, too, who have left before this completed, but who have been watching and have been checking in and

have been sending their thoughts and prayers to us for Go Live.

And then also, Jennifer, Jesse, Laura, Nan, and all the staff, the customer service staff, especially, who have spent a lot of time trying to get this as right as we possibly could with the information we had and the limitations we had in the system. It was probably around 4,000, but definitely over 3,500 customer bills that went out on May 8th. And this did require a lot of changes. And if you'll recall, there were also changes that were not time of day changes as well. So even in a normal year, there's a lot of work that goes into building the new rates and testing and validating them. And so That was kind of almost an aside, but it was a really important piece as well. We have a lot of general service customers, and these people tend to have very large bills. And so a hundredth of a decimal point error can result in a huge difference in their bill change. So we had to kind of keep our eyes on time of day, but also make sure that we were paying attention to all these other rates. And then there's also... board actions that result in rates needing to be created behind the scenes that people will never see. For example, we had to create an ETS time of day rate, which was not voted by the board, but not because it's a different rate, but because that's the only way we could get an ETS sub-meter to build properly with a primary time of day meter was to sort of replicate the same time periods so that it could bill under the flat ETS rate. So there was a lot of work behind the scenes that we had to kind of reinvent the wheel in some cases because of the complexity of the rate structure and also due to the limitations that were put upon us by our ERP company, NISC, and the product that we use, iView. So there were a lot of limitations there of what we could do in terms of the bill print and in terms of the configuration. So definitely learned a lot. And I think Jennifer, Jesse, and I are now kind of, level 10 experts on how this system works. And I'm very grateful for their help in getting this to where it needed to be to be able to flip that switch. And, you know, on a fundamental level, what needed to happen was we needed to migrate several thousand customers who were on different rate structures over the time of day and keep track of that. And luckily, a lot of that was automated, but some of it was not. So we had to go through by hand and actually move buckets of customers and in some cases use kind of automated scripts to move people And we needed to work with NISC on the bill print. And also I'll mention that our meter data management system doesn't connect with our test databases. It only integrates with live. So while we were able to test a lot of this before we went live, we really weren't able to test much until we went live. And the good news was we have the G4 rate, which we're going to talk a little bit about later today, which is what we use for our general service EV charging, and that's a time of day rate. So luckily, that used the meter data management system and was taking data in from UConn, our meter system, and bringing it into iView. So that allowed us to make sure that the process was working before we flipped the switch. So we had a pretty high confidence level that it was going to work when we actually moved the residential customers over, and it did. The other thing I'll say is that we were historically we've been concerned about the amount of an accuracy of the meter data that was coming in. And that's something that Jesse tracks as the AMI analyst very closely and something that we've been working to improve, especially over the last several months, you know, Previous to this, we cared very much about the month end read, but now we care about the hourly interval data. And we also don't want to bill customers for time of day rates if we don't really feel like we know what their time of day usage was. So after the data comes in, it does get cleaned up and goes through some VEE rules that are the logic that says, okay, we're going to take the raw meter data and put it into the billing system. And where we miss one hour, we can easily bin that and say, this is likely the usage that happened in that one hour. But I'm pleased to say we're at 99.7% of all the interval data reporting for the residential meters that are under time of day, which is great news. Our vendor is required to have 99.5%. And so we're seeing that number tick up as we make some small changes, replace a few meters that seem to be faulty. And so that's great news. In terms of the reaction so far, and I'll ask Jennifer to chime in if anything's changed, but initially, you know, over the weekend, just a couple of emails and then on Monday, definitely a few calls. But, you know, most people were reporting some graph issues with the colors and then A couple inquiries on solar specifically. And then, as we'll point out, a couple of the rates, in particular the second meter EV charging, had charges that were, we'll call them unbundled. They're normally kind of collected into a few lines and they were spread out. And so there were some inquiries about that. Those are all easily fixable items and ones that we anticipate fixing soon. by the next bill cycle. So that means that it's really just going to affect that first tranche of customers and that the other customers will hopefully not see that. And then we'll continue to make refinements as things go on. Jennifer, did I miss anything? I don't know if you're

Sure. We've had a few customers actually call us with questions around Smart Hub and some of the changes to the data and the information that they've seen in there as well, which we've been able to actually make some more adjustments and modifications to it to realign it back to some of the data that they were used to or used to seeing prior to the changes. And as we said, I think we'll see a few more questions this week as the paper bills actually hit and people actually have them in front of them and they're able to look at them. But so far, consistent with what Jason has said so far.

Thank you. In terms of some of the punch list of to-do items that we have, so as I mentioned, the solar bills in particular have incorrect graph periods, so the colors are wrong on the graph, and we believe that's been fixed now already, so that's great news. The EV second meter rate in particular is I think there's one other, but there's only like two or a small handful of customers on that rate. They have rates that are kind of unbundled. So in other words, They're seeing a line for capacity and transmission three times, one for each time of day period, a line for energy three times, a line for distribution three times. So that can easily be collapsed and put in the right bucket. So that will be done. And then this was actually an error. We knew that the board had voted to handle second meters in the way that they did, which was any second meter that's not ETS, or covered by some other specific mention in the tariff of what it was, that it should be this flat $650 per month. And so we did that. But then we realized that we had some hundred and something customers who have another meter that's on a totally separate account, but it's at the same location. And we felt like the intention of the board was to make that second meter a $650 charge. And we're not really sure the history as to why it's on a second account, but we did go through cleaning that up. As I mentioned, there were a hundred something, but most of them were actually not on the bill cycle that went out. So I think there were 40 something. And so those customers will be getting a credit on the next month's bill. And we are communicating to all the customers about these issues. We have three emails drafted that the team is reviewing right now. And we'll go out today just so that we can let them know like, Hey, just, you know, so you don't need to report it. We know your graph is wrong or Hey, And the meter charges is changing. So we don't anticipate too many people will have even noticed that it should have been 650 unless they were really plugged in, but we did notice. And so we are gonna make that change and make sure that they get a credit for the 1350. And as it says here, the changes should be done by the next cycle. I'll get into this later, but we are doing a full bill redesign later this year, which will give us a lot more flexibility on how we make changes. In terms of communications, we have had a lot of direct messages to customers. And then we will be sending out those emails to those three groups in particular later today. Questline did start their campaign yesterday of these weekly emails. That was part of our marketing team's recommendation was these kind of welcoming people at the time of day, reminding them of a few tips. And rather than the broad program, some specific things that they can do or that they should be aware of. And there's four of those. And, you know, there was some thought as to potentially new customers who come into Concord and, you know, acclimating them in some way. So we're going to think about that. We do have a welcome program. kit that we kind of send to people. And so we're going to be thinking about how we integrate some of these materials into that as well. And then internal staff communications, especially where things have changed in either a complicated way or a way that people are still not entirely aware of. Examples include the load control programs, things like connected homes and the relays that we have where we control customers' water heaters or ETS units. So there's some nuance there, and so we want to make sure that everybody, especially on the internal staff, are aware of how that works. We have extensive frequently asked questions, and they are appreciated by customers who go there to look for answers to their questions, and it seems to satisfy many of them. But we do want to make sure that the staff here are all on the same page. And I mentioned second meters as well. That's another area where there's some question because we have Second meters that are sub meters. We have second meters that are separate service and we have second meters that are tied into the same service. And so there's different categories of meters and lots of questions about what's happening with different types of meters. In terms of the internal items, as I mentioned, that welcome packet and how we onboard new customers, because some customers, when they move to Concord, they have never worked with a light plant before. And they're walking through the door kind of confused as to why we have an electric utility here. And so they're going to be equally confused that we have a totally different rate structure and that they're going to be on. And so we want to make sure that they are aware of the process since they wouldn't have gone through all those series of customer outreaches that we did previously. And then we're looking at the monthly processes that we go through and making sure that, you know, we have redundancy. As I mentioned, there's been this core team working on it. We want to make sure that other people are aware of how to do those different things and how they've been changed from before time of day. And then we are looking at consolidating our bill cycles. If you can imagine that bill cycles are created to kind of distribute work. They distribute when money arrives, they distribute the number of bills that need to go out, they distribute the number of issues that you have when you make a change or when something goes wrong. So, you know, we're kind of in the area where it might make sense to have more than one, but we don't need to have three. And having three definitely complicates a lot of different things from a financial perspective and from a timing and process perspective. So, We're looking at consolidating, and we might consolidate it into two or look at the benefits of even consolidating to one. Other utilities our size have one. Other utilities our size have more than three. So it really just depends on the software and how people are using it. And then the really exciting thing for me that I can't wait to do is the analysis on what's actually happening with customer load. So we know it's changing. I've been slapped on the wrist to tell you how I think it's changing yet until we have more data, but we're excited to start looking at that and how it might actually be changing our peaks. As I mentioned, there is a bill redesign coming. And, you know, when the board had enough information about time of day, we reached out to our billing provider and said, hey, we'd like to redesign our bill for time of day. And they said, okay, keep in mind that a full bill redesign requires an 18 month lead time. And we said, well, that's a long time. And they said, well, we'll put you on the schedule and we'll do whatever we can to support your time of day rollout. So that's what we've been doing is working within their model to date. But because we did let them know a year and a half ago that we wanted a full redesign, it's coming up pretty soon in December of this year. And what that will mean is that not just the colors, the look, the feel, but also the pagination, how different providers appear in the bill, the order of pages. I mean, the entire bill redesign is up for Discussion. And so we'll want to work with public works to discuss, you know, all of their billing elements water stormwater sewer curbside and, you know, figure out how they may want to make some changes as well. And so that's really exciting. And then In terms of all the visualizations that we talked about at board meetings, looking at other providers, we can put those back on the table. And then we also have a great blue that we've used for our customer outreach and kind of satisfaction data. They do this exact work where they can create focus groups and they've done bill redesign focus groups specifically around projects like this. So we can also, we'll have six months of data basically on how people are interacting with their bills and what they might find confusing or what has always been a question for people that customer service gets a lot and take all that data and roll it into what we hope will be a really good streamlined bill. Concord's bill is still one of the templates that they use for setting up new customers. And so we can hopefully, again, be at the forefront of a bill redesign. And then, as I mentioned, just this future analysis, The data that we have, I've looked at the March to April data. I've compared it with the March to April data a year ago. And I think that as time goes on, we'll have obviously even more data. The program was announced to start in April, but we do know that people, once they get their May bills, they will then really see what the impact is and may make further changes. So it'll be really interesting to see once we adjust for temperature and seasonal changes and ambient light and all these other factors, just exactly what those changes are in the peak. So I'll stop there and see if there's questions on the board.

Hey, thanks for that thorough report. Any questions or comments from the board?

I had a couple questions. The 99.7% of interval data reporting, was that before any interpolation? Yes. Okay. Any other? There's one other question about the use of AMI and kind of the analysis of it, whether there's been any discussion about kind of how to use that data beyond kind of, you know, verifying whether load has been shifted off-peak. So, for instance, kind of trying to assess the types of loads in homes throughout the town, that sort of thing.

Yeah. So, I mean, there are some signatures we can detect, like usually things like EV charging or HVAC uses, heat pumps and things like that. that can be detected. And so one of the things we're looking at too is not just did the peak reduce, but did the super off-peak increase? Because that would be a clearer signal that people were taking direct action to move their charging, say electric vehicle charging, or some of their usage to that more favorable time for them economically. But other than that, no. I mean, I think that because of the rebates we give, we have a lot of strong data on where heat pumps are, where solar panels are, where people are using these devices. But we'd be thrilled to have any ideas of how we could also use this data.

Okay. Yeah, I saw something in the notes, the packet about wanting to market heat pumps to people who don't have central ACs. I was wondering how you were identifying people who have central AC versus don't.

The assessor keeps that data when they go through your home to assess the value. They know your heating type and whether you have a central HVAC system. It's not perfect, and they do only do inspections every three or five years. And so, you know, the permits come through usually, but it is possible for people to do some kind of unknown work or have it not leak in there. But it's pretty accurate. It's in the high 90s.

Okay.

Great. Thanks.

John?

Yeah, thanks, Jason. And obviously, it's too early to declare success, but it seems like kind of initial signs are really promising in terms of that the transition's been really smooth, and that's great news. Yeah, I kind of share your enthusiasm in terms of the more analysis of kind of the shifts in load based on the changes in rates. in terms of using that information going forward and helping us in terms of our rate design process, recognizing that we are talking about moving to new rates in about 12 months. And then in terms of the bill redesign process, is that something where we can expect that the board will be um will weigh in at some point and if so it seems like uh there was really some useful information that you shared in terms of alternative uh bill designs um and that would be something that would be worth looking at again to kind of refresh our memories and figure out you know what really is the uh um not necessarily the ideal but uh a very um an improved bill design based on um the degrees of freedom we have to work with.

Absolutely. I would hope that we would get some board input because you guys all live here and are going to get these bills as well and have seen them and probably read them more than most and would have some good experience and perspective. we don't want to waste the board's time with conversations we've already had. So we certainly have a design that we thought the board wanted and we gave that to the company and they said, oh yeah, we can't do all of that. So we can start there and say, well, this is what we had. Now that we see how it works and now that we know what people are really looking for, does this make sense? Or maybe now that the limits are off, maybe there are other things that we can think of. And so, yeah, I'm, I'm happy to bring that back to the board and work with you to figure out how we're going to have those conversations. I think the hardest part was not having the rates built before we started talking about the bill print because the two were worked hand in hand and the software company needs all of the information before they can really start building it. And that really limited us to when we could even ask them to put us on the list because they said, well, we give us the tariffs and then that's, that's their normal starting place. And so, um, saying like, well, the board will vote that in another 12 months. They were like, well, come back in 12 months, you know? And so I think we're in a much better position to have those conversations now and have the true possibilities be open to us.

Any other questions or comments from the board?

I think that this rollout is so far going well. I think it's going to have teething issues, as everything does. I think it's, I was kind of surprised, I didn't put together in my head the impact on solar customers from the transition to TOD. So we tried to dull the transition not to shock customers, but we adjusted for the EV customers, and I think we didn't adjust for the credits to the solar customers. But that will resolve next year when we go to full time of day rates. But otherwise, I'm kind of surprised at the low volume of complaining customers. Also, I think it's great we're going through the teething problems of build layout and display, the sandbox versus the go live and meter data. And I think once we get a handle on that in a few months, we should be in a very good place. I'm pleased.

Good. Two things. One, Sven Weber, I want to say we're going to hold off on public comments till the end of the meeting. We'll be very interested in hearing whatever you have to say there. The second thing I would say, with a lot of people using automatic payments, I think we shouldn't fool ourselves into thinking that there's a high percentage of people who look at their bills. I think a lot of folks who It's only after they get their bank statement that they actually know what they paid on their electric bill. So we'll have to see how it plays out. John, were you going to say anything?

I guess I'm just interested in Jason Lord's perspective in terms of, I feel like we're We're fortunate that we made the change in April and that, you know, I'm assuming that, you know, whether this time of year probably really covers up any, you know, major problems and mitigates kind of potential rate shock.

Also, the shoulder month TOD rates, I mean, it's a five cent difference between the on and off peak. So it really hasn't shown up in that usage.

Yes. Yeah, I think that's true. Well, look, let's move on to the next topic, which Laura is going to explain to us why we're even talking about this topic, which is a vehicle to grid rate.

Thank you and good to see everybody today. So Jason has been talking to you and he mentioned in his director's update that the school got a grant to install specifically what we call V to G or vehicle to grid charging capability. This means that the electric vehicle bus that they're gonna be buying has the capacity to not only charge, to then run the bus on its routes, But it also has the capability of pushing kilowatts back to the utility like any other battery, except this is a pretty big battery. We're talking about a 66 kilowatt installation compared to an electric vehicle normally in the range of 6 to 20 kilowatts. So it's not a 300 kilowatt, you know, level three, phase three charger, but it's still fairly large. And we were asked to come up with a compensation method for how we were going to pay the school for energy that they push back to us. Now, my understanding of how this is going to work is that a third party provider on behalf of the schools is going to be managing the charging and discharging of the bus battery. So they will be, you know, one of their goals is going to be to make sure the vehicles are charged up before they go on their routes so they can complete their route successfully without running out. But a secondary consideration, because the school wants to help pay for the cost of the school bus, The second consideration is providing the utility with kilowatts when it's most beneficial to the utility. So think of it this way. They charge the bus up, let's say, early in the morning or overnight. So it's available to go on its routes. It comes back. And it charges again, probably midday. And then it goes on its afternoon route. It comes back and potentially they try to charge again so that they can provide the utility with capacity and energy during the evening peak. But it's going to be up to this third party provider to strategize exactly when to discharge that battery. It's not going to be up to CMLP to do it. So we wanna provide them with a good incentive to give us energy when it's gonna be most valuable to us. So if Jason, you could bring up the, we have a very short, just a couple of slide presentation to show you what we're talking about. So this is a school bus vehicle to grid tariff that we're gonna propose. And the major components of the tariff would be that the deliveries made by CMLP to the bus charger, so energy going to the bus, would be charged the same rates as would be the G4 commercial EV charging rate. And if you skip ahead a couple slides, Jason, down here on the left, is what that rate looks like. That's an existing rate that we have a few customers on that's available specifically for electric vehicle charging for commercial customers. And it consists of no meter charge, a very reduced demand rate of $1.83 per kW. And then the energy rates that are listed below there are the phase two TOD rates. So you can see it's a much higher standard on peak of 48 cents, and then the off peak and super off peak are lower than what they are in phase one. You know, phase one, they're about 20, and here they're 18 to 17, and then the shoulder is 33, 17, and 15.9. So go back up a couple of slides. Sorry to make you jump around. So they would pay the G4 rate for deliveries to the bus. And then for deliveries made by the customer to CMLP, we would specify the compensation rate for that in a new pilot rate. The customer would receive credit for energy. And what we're going to propose is a fixed amount rather than a time of day rate. We did ask our cost of service utility consultants, utility financial solutions, excuse me, to help us design this rate and give us their advice on what's the current landscape for V2G tariffs. And they came up with some energy rates that range between four and a half and six and a half cents. And just to simplify, because the differential was not that big, they proposed just making it a flat five and a half cents. And then the customer would also receive two other capacity-based payments. One would be equal to a total of $168 per kilowatt year, which is about $14 per kilowatt month, for all the KW that they deliver to CMLP during the monthly regional ISO coincident peak. We don't find out what that hour is until a couple of months after the fact. So this credit would be a miscellaneous credit applied manually. After we find out what the hour was, we would look to see how much they pushed back during that hour and we would pay them $14 per kilowatt for that month. And we would do that for every single month. So the total value, if they hit all the peaks would be $168 per kilowatt year. And then for capacity, for the annual capacity, we would pay them the equivalent of $56 per KW year for all the KW delivered during the annual ISO system-wide coincident peak, which happens during one hour of the year. And that hour is not known until about five months after the year ends. So again, a miscellaneous credit applied manually once we find out what that hour was. If you go to the next slide and we look at our local utility offerings with regard to V to G. And they are for really residential scale. Eligible systems for this program have to be less than 50 kilowatts. But they do offer a $275 per kilowatt credit for the system's average performance during utility called peaks. So the utility, much like CMLPs,

And sorry, Laura, these are annual numbers?

Yeah, I'll explain that a little bit more in a minute. But I'm just trying to think of our Google, the Google group, where we ask volunteers to voluntarily cut back demand during the summer. And we call a limited number of peaks. We try to call no more than eight peaks per summer. In this program offered by the IOUs under the MassSave umbrella, the utility calls a lot more peaks. They do a maximum of 60 from June 1st through September 30th. So rather than taking the one hour of the year, they simply look at what a customer's average pushback was from their battery during the called peaks. And then they apply that $275 to that amount. And they say that the typical pushback that they get is about 4.4 kilowatts. And so at $275, a customer is getting about $1,200 a year. So if we go to the next slide, I just want to point out specifically down on the right here, The value of capacity in ISO New England is based on these two costs, transmission and capacity. And the cost is allocated in different ways. For transmission, every single month, the ISO looks at what CMLP's load was during the one hour that Northeastern Massachusetts system peaks. And then they multiply what we were using during that hour times a transmission cost, which is roughly, right now if you see up in the red box, it's the equivalent of $184 a year or whatever 184 divided by 12 is. It's a monthly assessment. So if you look at what we're proposing, we're proposing to provide someone with $14 per KW every single month. In contrast, the capacity payment is assessed once per year, it's one hour. We don't know when it's going to occur. I just stuck it in July. It's usually during a summer month. It can be June, July, August, September. And it's the one hour that the, not just Northeastern Massachusetts, but all of ISO New England from Maine down to Connecticut. When that system peaks, we get assessed the capacity costs for that one hour. And so the total value to the customer from providing energy during both of these peaks in the proposed tariff is $224. And so it is less than what the mass save offers. And it is slightly less than what our actual savings are from the wholesale market. And that is because we want to be able to account for other costs that CMLP will experience in administering this program. One is losses. We will have to move energy that's received from the battery to other customers. And we're also going to have some administration overhead in applying this pilot tariff due to the manual calculations and payments. So We will have a tariff sheet for you to look at, but it's going to consist of going back to the slide before Jason. It's going to consist of the flat energy payment of five and a half cents. multiplied by a cost factor of 85%. And the cost factor is, again, to account for the costs we're going to have administering the program. So 85% of roughly 5.5 cents is going to consist of the $14 per KW month for transmission and $56 per KW year for capacity. So that is our proposal. We wanted to create a system where CMLP did not have a lot of the risk. The risk is mostly on that third party provider who has to guess when these when these peaks are going to occur. And CMLP is simply going to pay for all the energy that's delivered during those peaks at the rates that we've identified here.

Any questions or comments from the board? And we're not taking a vote today. No. We're just getting reactions to this, and it will come up at next month's board meeting as something to actually consider and decide about. Brian, Chris, and John.

Um, do you mind going back to the first slide? Yeah. So, so you're proposing this delivery made by customer, um, way of, of, um, of crediting them and the fixed energy credit also with these two incentives to hit our peaks. Um, that's. very wholesale market thinking. It's a good thing. If they're using a third party like stationary batteries used to try to hit our demand, then this is the right thing. I think of Highland, this is the right thing. But if they're not using a third party. So the pilot is just for their Bluebird bus. So they're never going to hit the 66 kilowatt with just the one bus. They're going to have to get another one. But for the, whatever we do, it's a pilot rate for a year because we're going to have to come back as a board and reassess how things went, because this is a first time thing. I don't, If you were to ask me before this meeting, what would be a good rate for this customer, you know, to get this started, I would have said a solar, just like we treat a solar customer in TOD, just for simplicity, because we're going to need a year of experience before we actually make a really good rate structure for these mobile batteries. And we don't... Do we have a program for residential home energy storage? Was that the part on the second, next slide?

The only thing we have right now with respect to batteries is the connected homes. But remember, we have the added complexity with the batteries that we do not allow batteries to push back to CMLP. They can only reduce their load. So that's a complicating factor with residential batteries.

Can I just mention one quick thing before next comments? I think Brian was curious about this third party Just so you know, it's part of the grant that the school got for this charger that they had to have this third party manage the charging, discharging, and monitor the data. They're looking at how to integrate the same connected solutions like program that happens in the investor-owned utility areas inside of light plant territories. And so this was a test bed for them. And they are the ones who are telling us that this is the rate structure that they and the state expect because they see that most of the value for the battery is actually hitting the peaks, not just raw KWH coming out. So just to give that context.

Thank you. That is a good context.

Yeah, I just, this is my question. This is, you talk about the customer, but this is just for the school buses. So are we anticipating another, somebody else in town wants to do this, or is this really just for the school?

Miniman Arc could do it.

Okay. But we don't think like somebody at Baker Abb decides they're going to start plugging their fleet in.

Well, remember, we don't allow pushback from customers. This is an exception. The school bus, and I'm not sure, Jason or Joe, maybe you know how this is an exception to our usual rule that we don't allow pushback to the system.

And actually the pushback rule is the first I'm hearing of it.

But doesn't my solar push back?

Yeah.

Solar is allowed to push back, but batteries are not allowed to push back.

Got it. Okay. So I won't go buy a battery next week then. Okay. So, but technically, I mean, it's written so that if somebody else could meet the requirements of this, they could, they could qualify.

Yeah. It needs to be greater than 50 kilowatts is going to be the proposal.

Okay, so that's a giant system pilot. Yeah, we're trying to make sure that we see how this goes before it's something that we use as a model elsewhere.

Great. John?

Yeah, I think Jason's comment was really interesting. fundamental concern with this was all the risk that we are putting on the participant. And it really, as Brian was indicating, or his question was suggesting, it comes down to their level of sophistication. Because they have to look at, if they're only gonna be paid five and a half cents per kilowatt hour for the energy that they put into the system, unless they hit one of these peaks, They kind of have to weigh that in terms of what are the impacts in terms of battery degradation, something I know nothing about, but have to think that there's some cost there. So, I mean, I feel like the way this putting a lot of risk on the proponent. And I understand why we're doing that. But I think that at the end of the day, our objective should be more of kind of promoting this type of behavior, recognizing that, you know, why don't we give them a signal in terms of this is the period when we want it? You know, why don't we pay them if you deliver during these periods or if we can call upon you And I realize we don't want to be in a position where we're going to call on them today because the resources associated with doing that for one battery don't make sense. But I just feel like there's the risk allocation here is somewhat surprising. And I feel like it really is going to discourage participation. But, you know, Jason has suggested if that's what the providing this service recommended, then that caused me to kind of temper those comments. But I do think it's something that we want to think about because I think that the framework we're talking about here really is a critical one for the future in terms of vehicle to grid having an important role to play in terms of addressing kind of system requirements and more efficiently operating the grid.

Warren, if it makes sense. They're trying to get this charger spun up very quickly. If we create this pilot rate or some pilot rate like this, in the short term, and then between now and the next six months, we can try to bring in some additional resources from the state or from MassCEC or, you know, Mobility House or any of these other places to talk about it, you know, to kind of go over that, because I think it's a fair question, but it's a model they're familiar with and a that's how their business has been set up. And so I think that they do like it, but what happens if they don't? And I don't know also the term that the mobility house is required to dispatch for the battery, Laura. Do you remember in the grant, like, is it three years? Is it five years? Is it forever? Or is it one?

I don't know.

We can find that out. But to your point, like what happens if it's a two-year deal? And then after two years, the school's like, well, what do we do now? Right? Like, They might not have the sophistication or want to spend the money to have a third party kind of manage that. So it's a fair question for the long term. But maybe there is kind of a different model out there that we can bring that expertise in.

It does seem like the key word in this rate is pilot.

Yeah.

This is something we're going to try, and I think John's point is a good one, that if the third-party provider is comfortable with this, this seems good to go with for the short term, but we shouldn't necessarily delude ourselves in thinking that this is going to work for other providers. ratepayers at other times and we may need to revive something else. Nicole, you put down your hand. I assume that's the case. Let me go to Brian.

Yeah, I think The most important thing for the board to do is to get a rate in place. I think Laura's proposal is a good one. I think it complies with the state. I think it's too soon for the board to think about other customers and whether or not this incentivizes, disincentivizes, you know, this kind of investment by the customer. I think we get something, some rate established at the next meeting. And then in a year after the pilot's been running for a while, we have some real information. Then we can reassess and blue sky thinking is available with real information to make good decisions.

Yeah. I think that's probably as far as we need to take it here. I mean, I think, Laura, you're hearing from the board a general sense that we're going to likely be willing to support the type of pilot rate that you want to propose next time. And to defer as long as it's something you and the third party provider are comfortable with it. It seems like it's a good starting point and this will require further discussion in the future. Okay. Well, let's go to liaison and public comment. And before going to public comments, I want to acknowledge that we have a new liaison from the Finance Committee because our previous liaison has moved on to become town moderator. So Colin Reed won't be liaison anymore. Gerard Janssen is going to be our new liaison, and I'm happy that he attended today's meeting. Are there any folks who want to make a public comment? Raise your hand. People should be able to unmute and turn on the radio now. Yeah, so Sven Weber, please.

Yeah, thank you. So Just want to provide a little bit of customer feedback here. I'm one of your solo customers. I got my first bill, had a few questions. And definitely before I go into my observations, I want to thank the staff of CMLP to really be responsive. I called on Monday morning, talked with someone, got a response very quickly after that. um that i i know you probably get a lot of calls so i have to give the staff of cmlp a lot of credit to be on top of it so a couple of observations here so my bill went significantly up um And that caused me to look at my own usage data. So I have this little device where I have all my data hour by hour over the last six years. So I just look at last years, simulated the new tariff with the solar pricing and everything, and figured out that the new pricing for me as a solar customer will, based on 2025 numbers, increase my build by 27%. or roughly about $280 a year. And that is mainly driven, as you're probably well aware of, that most of the solar is produced in off-peak until about 3 p.m., for which when I put into the grid, I get roughly 11 cents And if I take it back in off-peak or super off-peak, when I charge my car, I pay 20 cents. So there's a nine cent differential between that. And I'm not even touching... peak because I barely use peak anyway. So it's really driven by this differential in the off peak. And then I said, okay, fine. It's all on the web pages. If I'm not happy, I can switch back to the old system. And then I learned that's not possible. And I had AI looking through all of your web pages, all of your disclosures, And to be honest, the restriction on solar customers that we cannot switch back to the old system is not disclosed in plain language in any of the customer-facing time of day pages, neither the landing page, neither the FAQ, even not on the opt-out form itself. It doesn't state that this is not available for solar customers. You can only find it deep buried in the net billing tariff PDF, but only implicit, not explicit. You really have to read the legal language three or four times to understand that solar customers cannot switch back to the old credit system. So two kinds of feedbacks. A, what Brian said earlier, this impact to solar customers, you really have to look at that, specifically when you move to phase two. is probably higher than people expect. I would say you will get more calls once people start actually looking at their bill. I talked with a few and barely anyone looked yet at their bill. You have to work on a disclosure. This needs to be understood because when this was set up, I always thought I can switch back if I'm not happy and I'm fine. It's not disclosed properly. And then you really, before you go in phase two, You really have to think through what this means for solar customers. I think existing solar customers made their investment decision based on a certain pricing model. It's 27% difference, $270, $280 a year in my case, makes a big difference in amortization calculations and return of invest calculations on the solar. So existing customers, from my perspective, should have a grandfathering rules or whatever that should be considered. Thank you.

Thank you. Let me make one comment. See, maybe Jason or Laura want to say something as well. I want to make one comment, but I first want to ask you a question. When you were calculating the $27,000 percent increase from last year. You were comparing it to the

2026 time of day rates not the ones that will go into effect in january 2020 current time of day rates okay thank you just just i have hour by hour um data on my system the solar every device in my house i monitor i'm a little data freak so i'm i'm not your usual client it would be interesting to see you

You know, if you might be willing to, since you have all that data, calculate it based on the rates that will go effect in January to see whether that makes the situation better or worse for you and share. the analysis with folks. The other thing I would say is before we established the rates, some analysis was done on what the impact of the new time of day rates would be for solar customers. And the conclusion from the analysis that was done ahead of time was that most solar customers would actually see a rate reduction, that there would be a share of solar customers who would see rate increases. I mean, sort of bill increases, but most solar customers would see bill decreases. We will have to monitor to see if that's the way it plays out. You know, it seems like it may be the case that you're one of the sole customers who may be in the minority of seeing bill increases.

So, I looked into that because I saw it on your FAQ. And again, sorry, I'm a data guy here. So, math-wise, it only works if you're heavily overproducing solder and putting a lot of solder into the grid. Because in the new pricing system, you're getting much more per kilowatt for putting into your overreach. So you have a net overage over what you're doing and the net overage is priced now better. But if you're a customer like me where the system is somehow designed around my usage, where you have things in the day where you put in and then take, let's say, off peak at, let's say, when you charge the car at midnight or whenever, I take it out again. then you don't have that behavior. So you have to get to the number you have. You have to have this high overproduction and not taking it back. And that's the thing in how you design a system.

Great. Thank you. Laura. Oh, you're muted, Laura.

You're muted.

I just want to mention that in addition to whether or not you're net sending to CMLP, as Sven's pointing out, the other considerations that affect whether you will pay more or less under the new rate are what you were paying for that fixed net metering distribution charge before. Sven was paying a very low amount. It was only $4.18 a month. And so he's saving about... whatever that is, $60 a year by not having to pay that. But someone who had a $15 per month net medium distribution charge is saving $180. So that was a factor as well in that overall analysis that we did ahead of time. And then the final thing is, Remember, these solar customers are not just experiencing the change from net metering to net billing, but we also, when we went to time of day, remember we collapsed the tiers. And Sven is a very low volume user. And we knew that when we collapse the tiers, it's going to tend to make low volume users pay a higher rate and high volume users pay a lower rate. So he has a number of factors compounding. I agree with all his numbers and I agree that he is paying more now. But he he sort of got the worst end of all those sticks.

Sven, do you also have your array pointed southeast instead of southwest?

The array is exactly south.

Okay.

Yeah, but I see the peak is between 1130 and 230, what I produce. and then ramps down, but even math, just most of the sort of production is an off-peak.

Yeah. Okay. So look, Sven, thanks for bringing this to our attention. We're going to need to keep monitoring this. And, you know, if necessary, there will be adjustments made to the, rates appropriately going forward, but it's a little soon to consider any changes when we're just rolling things out now. We'll see how things work for a range of customers. Chris?

Yes, I mentioned some load shifting. Do you have a battery as part of the system?

Well, I just learned on the other comment, which was another surprise, is that batteries cannot push back.

Yeah.

So my first reaction was, I buy a battery, bank all the stuff in off-peak, and push it in on-peak into the grid. That was my thought as well. But it just was a side comment. Batteries cannot push back.

Yeah, well. But so you don't have a battery currently.

Sorry? don't have a battery currently no because the moment the grid was the battery right yes yes what that nine senses yeah and i stand in that i'm not disputing the nine cents difference i'm more kind of they what is represented on the web pages leaves a different opinion uh impression so just be careful and also that the the representation people can roll switch back to the old system is not true for solar customers. So there are a lot of things that came together. I just ask you to just look, improve, make things better, be careful on the next step, have solar customers in mind, that someone like me with low electricity usage, which I think is what Concord wants, someone like me with solar is getting kind of, as pointed out, several overlay sticks here. I think it's not what we all want from customers. I hope I was somehow an ideal customer, but I get a big stick here.

Hey, thanks for this input. And I'm sure we're going to, in the coming months, have other discussions about how time of day rates are affecting various folks. And we certainly are going to be having more discussions about battery storage as well, because that is something we do want to incentivize in the future. Having said that, can I hear from a board member a motion to adjourn?

I move that we adjourn.

A second. Second. And Chris? Yes. Nicole?

Yes.

John. Yes. Brian. Yes. And I'm a yes as well. So that's the end of the meeting. We will see you next month. But a very important thing. The date of the meeting has changed next month. It's not the usual Wednesday. And it's on the board agenda for today listed next week's meeting. Next month's meeting. June 18th. June 18th. So see you then. Thank you, folks. Okay. Bye now.