Transportation Board - Regular Meeting

Good evening. I call to order this September 16th, 2026 meeting of the Board of Public Utilities. Thank you all for attending this evening. Welcome to another evening of fun and frolic. Although the party seems to keep getting smaller, so maybe it's not so much fun for folks. Anyhow, welcome aboard. And we'll start, as we always do, by opening the floor to public comment. Do we have any public comment this evening? I do not see any in chambers. 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 nine to raise your hand. If you wish to make a public comment at this time, please raise your hand. Chair Gibson, I don't see any hands up.

Okay, thank you. That takes us to approval of the agenda.

Do we have, let's see, Eric? Thank you, Chair Gibson. I would like to pull item four, Foxtrot, off of the consent agenda and put it on the regular agenda, if I could, please.

You certainly may. Thank you. Let's see, let's put that. Let's see, we've only got two items on department business. That one, 4F, we have to do something with. So let's make that the first item of department business. Are there any other changes requested to the agenda? Seeing none, is there a motion to approve the agenda?

Chair Gibson, I'd like to move that we approve the agenda as amended. I'll second. Okay.

All in favor? Three to zero. Let's see, can we see, get a vote from Jennifer? Whoops. Yes. Yes, okay. Thank you. Ah, there she is again.

I don't want you to see me right now.

Pardon?

I don't want you to see me right now.

Okay, we'll ignore that. But we got your voice vote. Thank you. Agenda as amended is approved. That takes us to the consent agenda, which has also been amended. Would anyone like to make a motion on the consent agenda?

Yeah, I'd like to make a motion that we approve the items on the consent agenda as amended and that the motions and the staff reports be included in the minutes for the record. And I'll second that.

Okay. Moved and seconded to approve the consent agenda as amended. Is there any comment further on consent agenda? Seeing none, Kathy, would you please call the roll?

Member Hollingsworth? Yes. Member Stromberg?

Yes.

Member Hefner?

Yes.

And Member Gibson?

Yes.

Thank you.

Motion passes four to zero. Consent agenda is approved. That takes us to presentations. The first one, I think the only one we actually have tonight, is on EDAM, Energy Day Ahead Market. We're going to learn some more than we, what little we already know about that one, I hope. given how little I know, it should be hard to learn more. And we'll start with Philo on that one.

Yes, Chair and members of the board, I'd like to introduce Mason Baker and Matt Hastings. Mason's the general manager at UAMPS, and Matt is the assistant general manager. And UAMPS went online in April with EDAM and thought it would be timely to present to the board some of their findings and some recommendations they've given us as we move forward a year from now, moving into EDEM with PNM. So I think Mason and Matt, are you able to hear us and join in? And then we have the presentation online, so you can just ask for next slide I think would work best.

Great. Are you all able to hear me okay?

Yes.

Yes, we do. Great. Well, again, appreciate the introduction, Philo, Chair Gibson. Appreciate the opportunity to be with you all this evening. And the way that Matt and I talked about choreographing this, I'm going to take the lead and do the sort of executive flyover of the UAM's EDAM experience so far. And as we go about this, um, we're, we're totally good with, if you want to ask questions along the way, whatever the preferences of the group, um, are since the end, um, we're fine either way. And, um, so I don't know if there's a particular preference, but I might just go ahead and kind of get into it if that sounds good with everyone.

Sounds good. Usually, I mean, it's usually we go with the preference of the preventer, presenter, I'm sorry. And hopefully it's not a preventer. But if you're good either way, most commonly people ask questions as we go. And then there's usually some questions at the end also.

Yep. Great. Let's do that because my preference generally is to have more of a dialogue style presentation approach. And Matt, as the assistant general manager, has also been sort of the project director, if you will, for UAM's EDAM implementation. He knows more about EDAM than anyone should know about it. So we're in good hands. He'll be able to correct me when I run astray. And the way that we've approached this, and appreciate what you said a moment ago, Chair Gibson, on the level of undating of the EDAM. So we're gonna explain what this new market is, how we've experienced it. And as Los Alamos is considering how it's gonna become involved in EDAM through Public Service Company of New Mexico, things to look out for in the web's experience. So that's sort of overall what y'all are going to hear through the context of this presentation. With that, Philo, if you could go to the next slide, please. Okay. So as Philo mentioned, we did go live with EDAM in May of this year. May 1 was go live date. Prior to that, it was a very intensive, probably 24-month effort getting ready for that go live transition. And preceding go live in May of this year, there was a parallel operations period. And the intent behind that parallel operations period was to have us with an opportunity to sort of see how the market would work before it became binding with economic consequences. The parallel operations period was not satisfactory in my opinion. that leave breadcrumbs all along the way as far as lessons learned, but, you know, really need to have a robust parallel operations period. And that's something to look out for as PNM is looking to go into the market in October of 2027. So there was a huge amount of UAMP staff time dedicated to this effort. They did a tremendous job as staff, And, you know, that's just maybe another thing to put out there. It is a burden on the staff. So that's something to be thinking of as Los Alamos is preparing for P&M's entry into EDAM. And, you know, we'll talk about what we've learned so far through EDAM and what changes we're looking at doing. for our existing contracts that we have in place, operational changes given the portfolio that we have across the membership. These are all things that Los Alamos will need to look at. And we do have sort of three takeaways from our experience so far. The overall market goals are sound. They are. But the results that we're experiencing so far are mixed and we'll unpack that more But it really matters what, in our case, a member's portfolio of resources is comprised of and how they're experiencing EDAM and the economic consequences more pointedly that they're experiencing. So we'll get into that. And what's unfortunate with these markets is the market goes live and then it keeps going. And you're having to deal with the economic consequences in real time. And And that's the third takeaway that we'll get into more as we go. But it takes time to make changes to a portfolio and the economics and unfortunately negative economic consequences continue to be experienced while you're making those changes. So next slide, please. You know, From a very big picture standpoint, for the last 40 years in the West, we've been in a bilateral market and it served us pretty well. There's been talk of moving towards this more centralized market for the last 20, 26 year California energy crisis, Enron, and UAMPs are positioned really, for the last 25 years, we're not close to markets. We think that there can be more efficient economics with a market like EDAM, but it's critically important to have the design very well thought out and addressing the current circumstances of what the grid looks like in the West. And I'll get into that a bit more But the grid in the West, we're looking at a lot of low growth, a lot of need to put on new generation. And that is very, very challenging for a variety of reasons that I think some of which you're familiar with. So overall, the takeaway, this type of Merck you can be thing, but we're definitely not there yet in this EDAM journey that we're we've been on since May 1. Next slide. You know, a little more on the transition from a bilateral to EDAM. So before EDAM, it was pretty simple. You have a portfolio of resources can be composed of physical ownership and generation, can be contracts, You put all those together in a portfolio and you match your load. And that was what we've been doing historically. And as we move forward, we can go to the next slide. This new reality is more complex. You'll have your existing set of resources, but the key distinguishing feature of a centralized market is the centralized market is going to do an economic dispatch of all the generation assets that are in the footprint and determine what assets are most efficiently going to meet the load. And, you know, this is the key point. I mean, this is why we think and why EMS believes this sort of market can be more economic is it's looking across a bigger footprint and saying, What are the best assets to meet the load and do it at the most economic way? So what this means for Los Alamos, what it means for UAMS members, we can have portfolios and we can identify resources that get bid into the market. And sometimes they don't run because they're not in the money, so to speak. They don't meet the economic dispatch requirements. those resources still are very valuable in this new EDAM market for the reason that's called out here. A key component of this market is resource adequacy. The way it's described in this market, EDAM is resource efficiency evaluation. And what this really means is we're looking at all the load and looking at uh, the resources that can serve that load and making sure that we've got adequate resources to meet the load on a day ahead basis. So even if you don't have a resource that gets dispatched through the economic dispatch, there's still a lot of value economically to being able to point to that resource and say, I've got this resource here for resource sufficiency purposes. This is a key issue for us at UAMPS. Um, Our members overall do not have enough dispatchable resources to point to to meet this resource sufficiency evaluation test. And so what we end up doing is we go and do market purchases and that puts us at an economic disadvantage in the market. There is a premium on having your own dispatchable capacity in this EDM market that you can call on and say, I've got it there. and I can turn it on if needed. Let's see.

Mason, before you leave this slide, I've got two questions that I don't think are very much related here. But first, looking at the slide itself, am I correct that this upper curve here is the load curve? Looks like it is, but then it doesn't look like the resources down below come anywhere near close to matching the load. What am I missing? Yep.

Yeah, and Matt can correct me, but yep, so you've got your load and you've got resources that are making up your portfolio and there can be different resources coming from the market to actually serve that load. And I think what this one is more trying to reflect is a portfolio, not necessarily saying that the portfolio is fully meeting the load projections, Matt.

That's right. It's more for illustrative purposes just to show that we've got different resources Some resources run, some resources do not, but in a perfect world, you are correct, we would have resources exceeding that dark blue line to meet resource efficiency. So, I mean, you could use this as an example of a day when resource efficiency was not met, but ideally all of the resources plus those that are not running exceed that blue line for meeting resource efficiency.

Okay, thank you. That's helpful. My second question is you talk about the whole point of this is economic efficiency. The question is, for whom? I mean, is it for each utility within the CAISO or whatever? Or is it for somehow for all of them collectively? But then some are going to be winners and some are going to be losers, probably. Whose economics are we trying to optimize here?

That's a great question. I think it really gets at the heart of the issue. So the way this works, um, in our case, we're in the Pacific Corp balancing area, um, Pacific Corp East more specifically, and they came up with their own EDAM tariff that governs all the load serving entities in their balancing area, which includes UAMPs. And, um, My view is that the tariff design features that they put together did not really thoughtfully consider the economic impacts of all of the LSEs within the balancing area. Had it, then we wouldn't be running into many of the issues that we're experiencing now. And as we think about Los Alamos moving forward, you have to be laser focused on the tariff that PNM will be coming up with because they will be looking at their economic interest. And, you know, I don't think this is out of school to say that, you know, Los Alamos, other load serving entities, your economic interests are going to be very much secondary to theirs. Does that make sense? It sure does.

I don't, I mean, it's not a good, it's not an answer I'd like to hear, but it sounds like most likely a realistic one. Thank you. Certainly explains it. Yeah.

I mean, I just, you know, we've been, we've been at this and dealing with these issues very candidly. Yeah. Look forward to this conversation, but just be very direct with you and what I think you all need to be looking out for.

Sorry, I have a question. Probably a related question. So economic dispatch is determined at the level of individual resources. So that would be our level. But the tariff, as you called it, is being determined at a higher level, but we're not controlling that. Is that correct?

Yeah, let me unpack that, and Matt can correct me where I run astray. So resources will have their own economic bids that they put into the CAISO, California Independent System Operator. The CAISO will determine what resources are going to be economically dispatched. Then, in addition to that, P&M will have their tariff that also comes into play. And specifically, it comes into play on how the resource sufficiency evaluation test is passed by the load serving entities within the P&M balancing area. And there's economic costs tied to that resource sufficiency. So that is an area where Los Alamos needs to really hone in on how that resource sufficiency test is going to be applied to Los Alamos. It may not be the same way as what we're experiencing with Pacific. I hope not. But that's an area of focus. Does that help?

I think so. I'm just trying to decide who has the control. How do you mean we hone in on it? How do we...

Well, you've got to get involved in the comment process that will go on with PNM as they look at proposing their tariff and filing it at FERC. Okay, thank you. So you get your commercial team and your legal team geared up, and I've looked, and what I saw, and I've got this now monitored by my AI bot, Mason3000. to where he's going to tell me when P&M says anything about resource sufficiency and their tariffs. But I don't think that they have so far.

Wow. Okay. Thanks. Eric's got a question.

Thank you, Chair Gibson. Unless I'm getting something wrong here, this sounds to me exactly like what ERCOT does. Energy Reliability Council of Texas. And what they did was they're looking at the low-cost suppliers and they turn on and off the low-cost suppliers in a pecking order. Well, what happened a lot of times in the snowpocalypse is that the natural gas plants, if they wanted to winterize their system to protect the system, well, their costs went up per megawatt hour. And then they weren't dispatched because they cost too much. So it was in their best interest to not have the plants winterized. Then there's other issues to where – what they call renewables, I like to call them unreliables, but that's a different issue. Wind and solar, sometimes those, because of the economic contracts, those get moved higher in the pecking order. And if there's too much wind and solar and we don't have enough rotating masses, some people call it inertia, if we don't have enough rotating masses in the system, we don't have a stable frequency and we have an issue like Spain where the whole country went down. So you're talking about economic dispatch and I appreciate that, but who is minding the store in terms of the reliability of the plants and the balance of inverter based resources and rotating masses?

Yep. It's a great question. So there's, Built into this market, there are reliability considerations. That is the policy aim of this resource sufficiency evaluation test. And it's still early days in the market, but as the market matures, we are anticipating that the reliability value that certain types of generating assets have is probably also going to change as the market gets more mature. We refer to this as the effective load carrying capability. It's another way of thinking about how reliable a certain resource is. And it is an issue. It's going to be an issue that we're all going to struggle with as we're dealing with load growth across the Intermountain West. And we're trying to bring on more dispatchable capacity. And what I mean by that is capacity that you truly can call on and it can start generating. So, you know, that's going to be natural gas. It's going to be batteries. You know, wind and solar, they're not dispatchable capacity. So, you know, I think your parallel to ERCOT is fantastic. is an accurate parallel. They're not a one for one market. There's different market design features between ERCOT and what we're seeing here, but I do think that that's a reasonable parallel to draw.

Thank you.

Appreciate the questions. We'll go to the next slide, please. All right. Yeah, I guess that was probably a good segue for this slide. on renewables in EDAM. Um, what we've been experiencing so far and, you know, Matt, feel free to weigh in here. Um, in the early days of EDAM, the forecast has been changing a lot on the renewable side. Um, and that's created some issues, um, in our direct experience. But, you know, what we're seeing here on this slide is, um, is how it works in practice. Ideally, you've got a day ahead forecast saying solar is going to generate 20 megawatts. Then in real time, it shows up and only does 12. So then in real time, moving on to the third, you've got to cover that with flexible resources. And that's battery, flexible hydro, or other forms of dispatchable generation. You know, the forecasted amount does go to that resource efficiency test. And so we do see value for renewables. I wouldn't say it any other way. But we have realized some challenges in the forecasting variability. I think that's something that's going to get ironed out with more runtime and EDM. I don't know, Matt, if you have other things you want to add on this slide.

Yeah, I'll just add in that from a renewables perspective, you do receive a forecast and that goes to meet your resource efficiency in the case of UM's in a Pacific cork balancing area authority, I would expect it to be very similar for Los Alamos. But that forecast changes throughout each morning day ahead and And so we're buying resources to compensate for the changing forecast for our renewables throughout the morning. From a settlement perspective, we're paid, as Mason was saying, we're paid for that forecast day ahead, but then any change between that day ahead forecast at market close and what happens in real time is settled through different charges. And so you're paid for your forecast day ahead, but if that generation doesn't show up, then you're paying the market back for the generation that didn't materialize. And then from a reliability perspective, the balancing areas is covering that gap with other dispatchable resources. And what we have found is that renewables are tricky. to balance and to meet the resource efficiency evaluation because of that changing forecast each morning. The other concept to consider is that as you have batteries with solar, in the case of Foxtel Flats, you're able to decide, is that going to be modeled as a single resource that's dispatched as one? or do you want it to be dispatched as two resources, solar separate from the battery, and then dispatched with separate settlements for each one of those different resources? So several decisions to make along the way as the market ramps up for Los Alamos.

Can I just ask about that, Matt? That would be dependent on how the tariffs were set up by PNM, and so we'd need to model it based on what the tariff structure is that PNM implements. That question about if we do foxtail flats as one resource or two.

It's actually the KISO tariff that will apply there because your relationship will be directly with the KISO for those resources in the KISO full network model.

Okay, so the KISO rates are already in place, but They may evolve or are they pretty well set now?

Sorry, did you say the KISO rates?

The KISO tariff rates. Could we model that out now, I guess? Yes.

Okay.

Yeah, and I think that's the takeaway that we would urge is to start doing that modeling now as soon as you can, really. Let's see. Yep. Next slide, please. You know, I think we've covered this a bit. You know, what EDM was designed to do, balance supply and demand, make sure there's enough generation to serve forecasted load the next day, day ahead basis, as the name of the market would suggest. And, you know, key elements central tenant of the market is lowest cost dispatch through that centralized dispatch model and looking at a large footprint to find the most economic way to serve the load. And then, you know, the third box preparing for the operating day, the resource sufficiency evaluation, you know, that's really geared towards the consideration of making sure that we've got good reliability. You know, this is something that We as UNAMPS and other utilities, I think we all stand arm in arm. We want to make sure that we've got a reliable grid. We do have issues with how this resource efficiency evaluation is being applied through the Pacificorp tariff. We think there's better ways to do it that don't have the economic consequences that we've been experiencing. Again, this is something to look out for. And the other thing to be mindful of is it takes a long time, as we know, to change your power supply portfolio. So you may want to be looking at, as PNM is proposing something and you analyze it and you see how it negatively impacts your portfolio, I think it's completely reasonable to ask for a longer transition period before certain requirements get imposed. Because it's just, it's very challenging. Like these aren't things you do overnight or frankly, even within a year's time, make those portfolio changes. That being said, you know, we're, like I said a moment ago, you know, we're all for reliability. I mean, I think that's something we all stand behind. It's just, we have to be practical on, what the existing constraints look like in changing one's portfolio, bringing on new capacity onto the interconnected system. Next slide, please. I hinted at this at the outset, and what's interesting within the UAMS membership, since we're a project-based entity, meaning our members get to decide which resources which generation resources they subscribe to. We have very different portfolios amongst the members. And this is a bit of an over-generation, but not really. So far, what we've seen is members that have a lot of their load needs covered through dispatchable generation, coal or gas, and maybe some hydro generation. frankly, they've been fine in EDAM. The ones that have a much more challenging experience is where their portfolios are heavily reliant on market purchases and their loads aren't effectively covered by much dispatchable capacity. Those are the ones that have been very negatively impacted economically. I'm happy to answer any questions about that. Next slide, if not. Matt, did you want to say something on that last one?

Yeah, just on that last slide, I'll just add in that if you are self-scheduling your resource, you're just taking whatever the market price is from five-minute to five-minute period. And so you could have a resource that is completely out of the money, meaning, let's say, your resource... costs $70, but market rates are at $40, you wouldn't want to be using your $70 resource at that time. And so therein lies the value of dispatchability to cut generation when it's not in the money. And so just underscoring Mason's point that we've had different scenarios with different members, members that have a high degree of dispatchable resources, a high number of dispatchable resources really benefit, whereas those that are just buying firm energy from the market are not benefiting from the market.

Thanks for that, Matt. Next slide, please. you know, overall to kind of give a sense of what's transpired, um, you know, the UAMS internal team, frankly, did an incredible job getting ready for this market. And, you know, there's so many operational changes, so many, um, software changes that we've had to navigate. Um, that maybe not something that you immediately think of, but those are huge lifts. I don't know that Los Alamos would experience all of them, um, but it ripples through an organization and hits a lot more departments than you would maybe initially think. Um, you know, for example, the, your bills are going to look completely different from PNM and they're kind of monster bills. Um, completely different charge codes. Matt could tell us exactly how many, but it's a scary number. We had to add two more settlement accounting folks to deal with all those charge codes. And they've done a tremendous job. Everyone has internally. I think that's one thing that's frustrating and why I'm really harping on trying to take the lessons learned that we have and influence that tariff and not get in the situation that we're in, which is, you know, your team's done an incredible job, but then the experience is just a real negative one from an economic standpoint. And it's costing our members just a lot, a lot of money. So don't underestimate, you know, the, the burden that will happen on the Los Alamos staff. Um, we collaborated with the energy authority and utility cast and leaned on them heavily. Um, these are experts in the space of market transitions, um, leaned on them a lot, but it's still a huge, huge lift for staff. Um, you know, operationally it is, um, been just a paradigm shift to go from a bilateral market to this new market. You know, we're currently evaluating long-term purchases that we've done and trying to figure out, you know, is that really the best approach? Historically, You know, you do a long-term purchase in a bilateral market and you know what your cost is, right? You have pretty good certainty on what your cost exposure is for that portion of your portfolio that's being served by a market purchase. That is not the case in EDAM. You got to look hard at that. You know, we've been... doing a lot of education with marketers in the West. It's a bit of a frustrating, this fourth box. I think our team's done a really good job educating power marketers on certain nuances of EDAM. It's kind of odd, but a lot of the marketers just weren't really you know, they participate in other regulated markets, but they weren't really paying attention to EDAM evolution. And we've had to deal with a lot of issues there. I hope a lot of those issues, I know some of them will be ironed out by the time PNM comes in, but it's just, there's a lot of friction there. Um, Kaiso, um, you know, I will say Kaiso has been really good to work with. Um, They've been very responsive. A lot of the issues that I've brought up really tie back to the Pacific Corp tariff. So that's why I've been repeatedly saying pay close attention to the PNM tariff as it gets introduced and analyze how it's going to impact Los Alamos. You know, there's so, yeah, overall experience with CAISO actually has been really quite good. You know, the six box, I think I've more or less kind of colored this in a bit already. Experience with Pacific Corp hasn't been that good. You know, they, as I already indicated, probably in my view, designed the tariff in a way that worked for them, but gave little consideration towards how the LLCs within the balancing area were going to be affected. So, you know, don't expect any sort of consideration by your BA and how the tariff may impact you.

Next slide.

All right. So, you know, sort of switching gears towards P&M. As I best understand it, I think the current schedule has them joining EDAM 2027, so in October of 27, Los Alamos will have to be participating in this market. It is not a voluntary choice. So you're going to get dragged along into it. Second point, I've hammered this a bunch already. got to get involved in that tariff comment process and understand how it's impacting, um, Los Alamos. You know, I just being candid again, um, if you're not able to influence what they file, it's very hard to get changes made at the FERC level. So proactive engagement with them is our strong recommendation there with PNM. Um, FERC is, I'd say, predisposed to approving these tariffs. They like markets. All right. Third point, again, focus on the resource efficiency evaluation. I don't know Los Alamos' portfolio super well. You know, as I put these slides together, I think I would view the portfolio as capacity light. So there could be real negative

resource sufficiency evaluation consequences to Los Alamos.

That may or may not be right, but please look into that. And it will come down to how that resource sufficiency test is applied to Los Alamos.

Next slide.

You know, this is kind of the overall timeline of EDAM for PNM. You know, we're here in 2026. Pacific Corp went live with it in May. We've got Portland General going live with it in October of this year. They have a different approach to resource efficiency than Pacific Corp. So there's different ways to go about this. And, you know, this 2026 time period is the critical time period to get involved. in how PNM is developing their tariff and filing it at FERC. And then again, October it goes live, so you've got to be ready for that go live. And let's see, next slide. You know, I think if I was in y'all's shoes, I would be looking at a 30 day action plan of, um, how to get ready for this go live date. That's a little over a year away. And these are just some considerations, um, to keep in mind. I think working with a consultant is critical. Um, you know, there are a lot of consultants out there in this space. This is, you know, they've got years of experience during these market transitions. They can be extremely helpful. You kind of need to build that team of internal resources at Los Alamos as well as the external team. Get them going, operating as a team as quickly as possible. There's the scheduler coordinator decision. You need to figure out who's going to be the scheduler coordinator for Los Alamos. We haven't really touched a lot on that. during this conversation, but that's a key decision for UAMS. TEA acts as our scheduling coordinator, but that's something else that's got to be included. Tariff comments, I think we've touched on that already. The fourth part that works a little bit is doing that portfolio analysis, looking at your resources, looking at the CAISO tariff, understanding how the resources would be affected given the KISO tariff, and then you're going to have to analyze it again once you get more visibility to the PNM tariff once it's proposed. RSE readiness, looking at the Los Alamos portfolio, what capacity is dispatchable, what's not, understanding kind of the overall flexibility that you guys have in the existing resource. Um, this last one is sort of maybe a more focused one towards internally there at Los Alamos, you know, what, what departments are getting affected accounting operations, et cetera, and building, um, pieces of the game plan around that. See next slide. I'm happy to answer your questions on this one too. Um, You know, I'm sort of switching gears on this slide, what's going on at UAMS. And we're around to always share sort of the experience and lesson learned. There's just a sickening amount of work on EDAM that we're going to be doing over the next year. We've got near-term issues. We're working on different approaches to meet the resource sufficiency requirements. We're looking at how we do new market purchases. We're in a mode where we're going to have to do market purchases for the members while we're building new capacity. We need to be more thoughtful on how we do those market purchases based on our experience with EDAMP so far. Our settlements team is doing yeoman's work. dissecting data so we're able to understand you know really how certain operational decisions are impacting us that's a huge lift and the team's doing a great job there but just another thing that's ongoing we're looking in the medium term different types of ways to contract with third parties to kind of get in effect that dispatchable capacity that's what's meant by this tolling arrangement bullet here in the medium term. We're looking at restructuring long-term purchases if they're not economic, given how they flow through EDAM. We're going to be continuing to educate marketers about EDAM, and we are looking at EDAM tariff revisions that we think would be acceptable for the Pacific Corp tariff. In the long term, what are we doing?

Mason, before you leave that medium term thing, could you explain a little bit more about what you mean by tolling and what you mean by counterparty in this context?

Yeah. Yeah. So tolling is just a bit of a loose term that we use in the space to say you could have someone that owns a natural gas plant and you could enter into a tolling agreement with them where you could say, I want to have the ability to toll from that gas plant, you know, have its capacity available to me. And that is incredibly important for us in EDAM because it in effect kind of gives us the access that resource and we can point to it for resource efficiency purposes and in a way kind of use that as a bridge resource while we're building our own physical capacity. Does that answer your question, Chair Gibson?

I think so, yes. Thank you. On the tolling, I'm still looking for counterparty.

Counterparty, yeah. And this is the point that I was speaking to earlier. What we found is the market, the marketers that we historically have relied on to do market purchases in the bilateral market, they just haven't been as involved in the development of the EDM market. And so there's aspects both of the market design that they don't understand that we're having to educate them on. And also we're seeing some marketers just they're, they're seeing the market and they're kind of sitting out of the market. And because of that, what that means is we have less counterparties to trade with. And that's a real problem from a market liquidity standpoint. Matt, what else am I missing there on the,

In terms of counterparties, really just getting them on board with the different functions within the market. For example, the settlements from the market need to be passed from our counterparty marketers to us if we're purchasing that energy. that's important to have that understanding with your marketer well in advance. And I will say that the first four months of the market have been very rough in that regard, but we're making a lot of progress. And so I would hope and expect that by the time PNM joins, much more progress will have been made. But that's just definitely something that we continue to work on in the medium term to educate our marketer counterparties.

And Chair Gibson, this might be a bit of a gratuitous editorial, but I find it just very frustrating that UAMS is in the position of educating folks in this space where I think CAISO and Pacific Corp should have done more in interacting with them. You know, I mean, it's just, I don't know, it's a little frustrating. But something, it's a lesson learned, and I don't want Los Alamos to experience that. I would say I would press P&M. Like, what discussions are they having with marketers so there's good liquidity, you know? I think that would be the tangible, nice way to translate.

Thank you.

Next slide, please.

You still got long term to go here.

Oh, sorry. Thank you. I appreciate that. It's been a long day. So in the long term, what are we doing? This isn't really anything new. What we're doing is we're looking at securing physical capacity. What that means is we're developing new resources, all different shapes and sizes, natural gas resources. We do have an emphasis based on this market and how we're experiencing. We need dispatchable capacity. So we're spending a lot of time, for example, recently looking at utility scale batteries as well as smaller scale batteries to deploy in member host cities as quickly as possible. What we like about batteries, just so you know, is... they have much shorter lead times than doing gas generation, you know, as short as 12 to 18 months. So given our capacity needs, there's a strong push towards batteries. Happy to chat about that more separate time. You know, we're looking at different ways to move quicker with the members on developing new resources. We're in a situation now where the, old procurement methodology is we're recognizing it as being too slow. So we're looking at different organizational changes so where we can move quicker and account for changes that happen in the resource development space. You know, quick other point there, it is objectively harder to build new resources than it probably ever has been with supply chain issues. cost increases, et cetera. So we need to figure out different ways to go about this. Overall, what we're seeing, this has been a push for even EDAM. We need to rely less on the market, own more resources. And we're going to keep marching towards that goal. Next slide, please. Again, sort of the three takeaways that we started with. The goals were sound, but the results have been very mixed. I'll put that more bluntly. They've been very negative for pretty much the super majority of our members. The ones that haven't been negatively impacted are those that have the majority of their portfolio covered with dispatchable capacity. For the others, it has been hugely negative to put a fine point on it. Um, you know, we sent out July bills that had cost increases that range from, you know, on average, they were 36% higher. Um, and for a strong section of the members 40 to 70% higher. So this is a very big deal for us. Um, and. why I appreciate the opportunity to speak with y'all. So hopefully you guys can take some of these lessons learned and avoid some of this pain that we're experiencing. We're going to get through it, but it's not going to be pleasant. Let's see. Second takeaway, dispatchable, flexible capacity. It matters more now than ever. And unfortunately, it's one of the hardest things We're going to unlock batteries again, I think, are something to really look strongly at given the deployment timelines we see for them. As a third takeaway, you know, we do have a plan. We're going to deal with this. It's going to take time. We're looking at things both on the near, medium, and long term. The near term is going to be hard. We're not naive to that. We see those facts. We're going to get to them. I think that is my last. I really appreciate the opportunity to speak with you all. Yeah, I realize it probably wasn't maybe what you were expecting or wanting to hear, but I want to share our experience. So hopefully you do not have to experience it.

Well, thank you very, very much. We certainly would like to learn from your experiences. And so hopefully we don't make all of the same mistakes. We'll make some of our own. We'll make some new ones. And maybe there's some that we can't avoid, but they'll just happen. But we really appreciate your time. sharing your experience with us, and you're taking the time to do that this evening. I know it takes time to put together a good presentation. You can slap something together really fast, but something that really is oriented towards our situation, our needs, takes longer to think about. And I know you've got lots of other things to think about, so we're glad you took the time to do this for us. I guess I'll start with one question here. You said this has been a negative experience for you folks economically. And of course, the purpose of EDAM is to improve the economics. So if it's been negative for you, For whom has it been positive? Where's the money gone?

I'll jump in on the first part of that question. So the negative experience has been around the resource efficiency evaluation. The problem that we have found is that we've had to bring firm energy to the market. And in previous slides, we were showing how if you have firm energy, you're just a price taker. And so the problem that we have seen is ensuring that we obtain the appropriate dispatchability in our resources rather than just firm scheduled energy. A lot of that is dependent upon how the balancing area authority interprets and then assigns that resource sufficiency requirement to load serving entities within the balancing area. In the case of Pacific Corp, it directly assigns a pro rata basis I believe PGE has a slightly different approach. And I'm not sure how PNM is planning to do it. But where did the money go? Because we bring firm energy to the market, that means that another dispatchable resource was not running because we brought firm energy. And so The winners are those that have the dispatchability. The losers are those that bring the firm energy.

Okay. Other questions? Eric.

Thank you, Chair Gibson. In all your resources, do you have a minimum percentage of resources that have to be rotating masses? And then the rest can be inverter-based, but do you have a minimum that must be rotating masses?

We don't. Not from a UM's requirement perspective, nor from a balancing area perspective. The reliability role... stays with the balancing area authority, which in our case is Pacific Corp.

So, and then in the inverter-based, are you familiar with which resource is a reactive controlled inverter and which is a voltage controlled inverter? Because that makes a huge difference. And what I'm talking here is about the stability of the grid. Because if you don't have enough rotating masses, we're going to have an event like Spain and the whole country is going to go down. And people died, by the way. So who is handling the stability of the grid and all of the resource selection?

So FERC recently actually just became effective this year, dropped the megawatt level on inverter-based resources and the requirements, sorry, dropped the the capacity level for those resources for different reporting requirements. So, you know, who's responsible? FERC at the highest level is responsible. And then subordinate to that is WECC. And then subordinate to that is the Balancing Area Authority. So in our case, where UAMS is a load serving entity, we don't have that reliability responsibility, but it flows to Pacific Corp.

Okay, well, I encourage you to consider a percentage of rotating masses in all your analysis, but thank you very much. For sure.

Matt? Sure, first I'd like to echo Chair Gibson's thank you very much for helping us get started about this and showing us where some of the potential landmines are. This is really thought-provoking and question-provoking. I have lots of questions, but I think there's two main categories, and this may actually be for Philo. Everywhere in this presentation where it says Los Alamos County, is it Los Alamos County or is it the power pool? I don't want to reopen the ECA, but how does the ECA factor into our thinking about this?

It's the power pool. Okay. Yeah. For everything. And Sandia, Kirtland. And Sandia as well. That's another layer.

Okay. Yeah. So it's more complicated than just the county. It sure is. Okay. That's what I was afraid of and thought. My other question was I heard you guys say quite a bit, you know, additional capacity in terms of people in addition to resources. You said you had to hire two new people just to deal with the billing. And UAMPS is a different scale than we think about it. But I guess, Philo, do we have the capacity in terms of people to do this?

Board member? That's part of this 30-day action plan because we don't have the capacity to do all this. I think we are anticipating a blend of, you know, using resources like TEA that UAMS does. And so, yeah, there's going to be a lot of change.

And I guess a more detailed question as we think about this, since it is the power pool, Livermore is sitting in CAISO. I know the ECA is a unique beast, but how does Livermore play? Can we learn? Are we leveraging LANL's engagement in this?

We did have a meeting today with a larger DOE energy person that runs through different labs, and I was very surprised on the lack of knowledge about how this is going to work. Oh, well, nice try. Thanks a lot. Now, they do bring forward a consultant that has the experience. You know, as Mason said, there's a lot of good consultants out there that they're going to help us with some of the scoping of our RFP as well as, you know, we'll get some feedback from Mason's team.

Great, yeah.

Thanks.

I'll ask, since we've got... expertise here online. Ben, did you want to ask any questions or get involved in this discussion? Okay. We'll move on. And Jennifer, I haven't seen your hand up. I'm not sure if I would. Do you have any questions?

Yeah, I do have another question. So you've mentioned that wind and solar are not technically dispatchable capacity. So I'm just looking at the KISO's current day outlook, and they claim 65% of the demand is being served by renewables. I assume that means they're relying heavily on storage, on batteries. And do you know if that's the case? And does that suggest that they're viewing those resources as one? So the battery plus whatever generation, what I assume solar primarily?

Yes. They are relying heavily on batteries. There's been a big push to do a huge amount of batteries in CAISO. I don't have the exact number, but really over the last handful of years, somewhere probably in the neighborhood of 20,000 megawatts of batteries.

Okay, that is the current renewable output for the day is what they're saying. So, yeah, okay. And so they're, I assume, considered one of the winners in all of this. financially batteries well or kaiso i mean they're doing well this yeah their approach i'm cutting out here um yeah i mean i you know kaiso are they are they doing well um

I would look at it more on how the load-serving entities are doing that sit within KISO and what their rates are.

Yeah. Okay, so this is part of the up-and-down experience. Okay. All right, thanks.

Okay. Can one, can an LSE self-supply from some resources that we own or control and just say, okay, some part of our resources is going to go to supply some part of our load all the time and it's not included in And in the whole CAISO network thing, I'm thinking there's seems like there's a fair amount of risk involved here as we get started, especially in theory anyway, in the long term, this will be more economical. But I'm wondering if can we hold anything back? and not put everything at risk on day one? Or is that not the way it works? We have to put all of our resources into the pool here, into the KISO pool through PNM. Or can we hold any of those back and maybe reduce our risk on day one until we figure out how this really works?

That will be dependent upon the requirements that PNM has in their tariff. In the case of Pacific Corp, if a resource is greater than three megawatts in capacity, then it has to be in the full network model. I know that in the case of a resource that's behind the meter, there's a little bit more leeway For example, if one of our members has a five megawatt resource behind the meter, we have scenarios where it's grandfathered in and doesn't have to be a part of the full network model. And so I would say the largest determinant for that question would be the PNM tariff and what their requirement is. Thank you.

Can I follow up on that? Sure, go ahead. A specific one that comes to mind is the lab's combined gas turbine. Since we is the pool, is that behind the meter or not? That's behind the meter, I guess. Yeah.

But we don't quite know how that will play out, I guess. Yeah. You know, currently we've been operating the combustion turbine As a behind-the-meter resource, we don't take energy from it, but they operate that when the atomic accelerator is running. So they try to offset that load demand. That's a big question. It's always got to run, and that's a piece of equipment that doesn't always run. And it's been challenged even this month getting it to run. Okay, thanks.

Well, presumably, you wouldn't have to put it in the pool if it's not able to run.

But we have a variable load. So if it's not working, we lose 20 megawatts. Boom. And then we've got to find resources to fill it. So that is a big challenge.

OK. Other questions? This is a lot to absorb. I'm sure we don't understand it all, but it certainly is helpful. For those of us that are low on the learning curve, we're a little higher now. And there's a long ways to go yet. But this has been great. We thank you very much. Philo, you have anything else to add at this point?

No, I'll just let you know, I've been in a lot of these EDAM meetings. please just ask questions over time. We can have UAM's back or some other consultant that, you know, can report in. It takes a lot of time to kind of take this all in. And I think Mason can second that because a lot of members' discussions over the last year and a half, really, when they get into the detail of it. And, you know, the tariff... piece with pnm you know we're monitoring when that will get initiated but i do like mason's suggestion that you know we try to engage with pnm we're going to keep working them as best we can so that's it but thank you mason and matt i really appreciate your time and sharing your all your thoughts and experiences candidly thank you you're welcome thank you bye

Thank you, Chair Gibson. Appreciate the opportunity. Don't hesitate to reach out. We've unfortunately got the scars, wounds, probably not scars yet, unfortunately, open wounds. Happy to help however we can.

We appreciate that, too, and we may well take advantage of that. Thank you. Have a good rest of your evening, gentlemen.

You as well. Take care.

Okay. Now we'll let all that soak in for the next 20 seconds. Well, that's your homework assignment is to figure all this out. Meanwhile, we'll move on to the item that was removed from the consent agenda. That's item 4F, which is on page 56 of our agenda doc. And that's approval to execute power purchase agreements to get us through until next spring. And that's Ben.

Good evening, Chair, board members. So this is the next step in our Ongoing power purchase saga that started with the extensions of the ECA last March and Hopefully this is be the last one for a while now that we have 2026 ECA to operate under We do more than just a month or three months at a time. So what this one is asking for is approval to go from October to out through the end of March. So six-month period. And the reason for that is we want to have a little more certainty and clarity on where Foxtel Flats development actually is as we get closer to March. We're expecting come April that we should be getting at least some level of deliveries of energy from the PV portion of Foxtel Flats. And we want to be able to figure that into what sorts of power purchases we make, as well as refine our needs for the later period when the full capacity of the PV plus the full capacity of the battery come online in July and what we want to do in October when EDAM comes along, as you've heard. There may be challenges associated with particular sorts of resources, PPAs purchased through marketers who may or may not know how they work under EDAM. So building time here, getting time to figure those things out before we go and procure out further than that. So what I took was looked at the market prices that we've seen lately. Put a little cushion on that with some contingency so I don't have to come back to you. Check to make sure that's under the calculated value was underneath our budgeted amount that we have available and approved. under our fiscal year 27 budget. The amount that I ended up calculating for this PPA request is $18 million and something, $100,000. And the budget is $19 million something for that same six-month period. So it's within the budget that's been approved. With that, I'll stand for questions.

Thank you.

Eric. Thanks, Jerry Gibson. So am I right in saying that this represents about a third of the year? Okay, so Foxtail Flats, Foxville. I'm sorry about that. Man, paging Dr. Freud. Okay. Foxtail flats did not come online when we thought it was going to come online. And so we're buying power like this in the interim. So are we buying power for approximately a year? Is that about right?

Chair, Board Member Stromberg, yes. Okay.

So, and do you remember, because this last third is $18.5 million, do you remember what the first two-thirds of the year would have been? I don't recall. Was it about the same, maybe?

It was comparable. However, you have to figure in that our load changes seasonally. Yeah, of course. Yeah, you're right. Here we are looking at a different period, and the loads for this period are different than we had.

But in any event, it seems like it would be around $50 million annually. Maybe-ish. I believe that's what the total budget was for the facility. Okay, so does this, and you said 2027 budget. What I'm wondering is, does this put us in the whole, you know, we forecast all these budgets, you know, and we have reserves, and we're with Foxtail Flats. This is almost twice the cost per megawatt hour of what we would have been buying. What kind of position does that put us in in terms of our reserves or budget? Stuff like that. You know what I'm trying to ask?

Yes. It's not an impact to it. So when you're looking at Foxtel flats, if we had had Foxtel flats on its original schedule timeline, we would have been paying the $37.88 per megawatt hour for PV energy. But then we'd also have the battery fixed cost, which is almost the same total cost on a yearly annual basis as the cost of the PV energy from the entire facility. I think it's something like $12.5 million a year just to have the battery capacity. And then it's about $13 million or something, I think. I'm going off of memory here. For the full capacity of the PV energy out of the facility that we'll be using.

Okay. No, that's great. So it's not really putting us on a bind because of this. So I appreciate that. Thank you very much.

I missed something in your question, Eric. First of October to first of April or end of March is half a year. You were talking third of a year.

That's probably my bet. I'm thinking October, November, December, January, February, March. I guess that's five months. I think when I first counted it, I thought four months, which was a third. So it's between the two. It's between a third and a half.

I interpreted your question as going back to March when we started our PPA process.

Right, right. So I was just wondering how much more we were spending and if it was putting us in a hole. That was my only question. Thank you.

Other questions?

Ben?

Yeah, Jennifer.

Sorry if I missed it. Did you say something about EDAM and your justification or whatever for the timing for going out through March? When you were describing this, I think you mentioned EDAM.

Sure. Board Member Hollingsworth. Yes. So like I say, I'm not asking for anything beyond March, end of March, because I need more time to go and figure out what our strategy will be for future PPAs, particularly at night when the sun doesn't shine, and how we're going to address that under EDAM.

I see. Okay. It's not, yeah, it's not for the links until March. Okay. All right. Thanks.

Any other questions right now? Is there any public comment? None seen here.

Any members of the public wishing to make public comment, please raise your hand. There are no hands, Chair Gibson.

Thank you. Back to the board for more discussion or a motion.

I'll offer a motion. I move that the Board of Public Utilities recommend approval of one or more power purchase agreements with a yet-to-be-determined power supplier or power suppliers competitively selected in an amount not to exceed $18,509,400 plus applicable gross receipts tax for the purpose of supplying power and energy to serve the Los Alamos Power Pool's electric load for the period starting October 1, 2026 and running through March 31, 2027 and forward to Council for approval. Second.

Okay, moved and seconded the recommended motion. Any further discussion? If not, Kathy?

Member Hollingsworth? Yes. Member Stromberg?

Yes.

Member Hefner?

Yes.

And Member Gibson?

Yes.

Thank you.

Motion passes four to zero. Thank you. That takes us to item 7A, reliability discussion. This is not an action item. This is just a discussion. And that starts on page 73 of our agenda doc. And we've got Clay Mosley and Dennis Astley.

Chair, first I just wanted to mention, I wanted just to give the board a snapshot of August, one month, what we deal with as a department about reliability issues. And they come in different forms. And so I guess Dennis hopped up first in front of Clay. So that's good. They're ready.

You can target him first if you want.

Uh, but I thought it, it would help just, just get, uh, it varies from month. You know, you'll tone.

Okay. I bridges, which I don't have. We this past month that happened on took your Sadie up to 120. Uh, one of the things now set in the ground system that somehow clear the guys go patrol it, try to find the problem. they decide to put a fuse back in and it holds. That's not common on an underground system. It's very uncommon. So when I first heard about it last year, I thought, well, let's see if the fuses are undersized. No, the fuses are greatly above the actual load. And that made it a very mysterious problem. And in discussions with LANL, I found out that they have a power quality meter on the system that was triggered for fault current. And they actually saw two outages that happened in Camazón that lasted three to four cycles. And one cycle is 1 60th of a second. when they matched up with early morning outages like 4 a.m., I knew that that was caused by these camisole outages that had been bothering us. And three to four cycles to me is a very mysterious outage on an underground system because even if it was a mouse and a switch, I would expect it to go 30 cycles because they're not going to burn that fast. I don't think. Never measured it. It's not a lab experiment we did in college. But I would think it would last at least 30 cycles. So I'm guessing we either have a very thin vine growing somewhere in a switch. I compare it to honeysuckle that I grew up with that will just poof, disappear instantly. Or maybe ants. But we also have these live front switches that should have been replaced already. They were put in close to 20, 30 years ago. We have new switches on order with procurement that are ideal for these replacements. When they come in, we'll schedule to replace the live front switches. And I really think that when the guys pull them up with the digger truck, they're going to say there's the problem with one of them. They'll find an ant bed or something in there, This shouldn't be. Maybe not, but that's our goal is to eliminate those because there's something mysterious. And there's only a lift stemmer can't do it either. But N4 finds 1970 with a circuit because we just find it. It scares me because you want everybody. I don't think we could do without tearing up the sidewalks and laying all new wire around these neighborhoods. And I've seen what the contractors want to charge us to replace sidewalks. And it's not going to be easy to do. But I think it's something long term we need to look at. And so when Public Works is wanting to do a sidewalk job, I'm definitely wanting to get involved with them. Because we're going to need to do that in the long term. But I'll entertain questions.

Good. Questions? I've got a couple. I don't live in White Rock, so I didn't experience this outage. But the press release said there was an outage at 8.15 in the evening on the 13th of August that affected 1,300 customers. in White Rock, which I didn't see in the list anywhere. Is that one of them that you were talking about, or is there, was that not as extensive as was originally, as the press release said, or what's?

It's got to be the same one, but he told me that it only affected about 150 consumers when I talked with him today, and I recall it being on the 14th. But maybe I got the wrong date. I don't know. Everything was one blur in those weeks because I was watching the contractors at the substation trying to make sure they didn't kill themselves in our substation. And that's where I spent that whole week.

Well, if it was as large as 1,300 customers, that's something – That's a biggie that a lot of people are aware of, and we ought to be also.

It may have been that much at the beginning, and then they narrowed it down to 150. I can't be sure. The supervisor that was on call that went on that outage is on vacation this week, and I just can't get the details. That's what I count on those outage reports for.

Well, even if it was only a few minutes for that large number of customers, that makes a difference.

It does, yes.

Not only to our customers, which is the important part, but it also makes a difference in getting our city numbers right. Yes, it does. So I at least would appreciate at some point tracking that down and making sure we have the numbers, that we understand what really did happen there, impact on our customers and impact on our system. Okay. Second question is more general. We know we've got a problem with the old direct bury cable, and we've got a long-term plan that we're a few years into and several years to go to replace all that, which is good. What shape is the underground part of the distribution system in general that's in conduit? We'll put the... The DirectBerry stuff aside for the moment, we know that's an issue. But let's talk about the other that's in conduit. Age-wise, condition-wise, et cetera, what can you say about that?

I can't tell from our maps which are in conduit and which are not. I only have some maps showing the age of the conductor. And there's a lot of 1970s vintage. The one on Aragon and Grand Canyon, was 70s vintage cable, but it was in conduit. So it was the same age as most of the direct vary cable that's giving us trouble. And the concern I have with that is that cable is called concentric neutral. The neutral is around the insulator of the conductor as even the, Jacketed cable does, but it doesn't have a protective jacket around it. And so that copper is sitting there in the conduit getting wet and corroding and eventually eating away. And that's when the stuff has a serious tendency to fail. The cable we pulled out on both ends had been wet and was quite green and in some places a lot of the strands were gone. So it was nearing failure point on all of the phases already, and one of them did fail, and I'm not sure why, but probably something to do with the manufacturing. Concentric neutral has been a problem for me over the last 20 years in distribution. A lot of it was direct berry, but in this case it was in conduit, and it doesn't hold up a whole lot better in conduit than it does direct berry.

So with that in mind, thank you, if this PVC conduit has a tendency, if it's going to fail, it's going to weld or melt, and sometimes it's hard to pull the cable out, and sometimes it's harder to pull new stuff back in. Have you had issues with PVC conduit melting at that point?

Only on the one on Central Avenue here where we had 10,000 amps of fault current. The one in White Rock, it did not weld. It pulled it very easily. And I was surprised, but that seems to be the way it goes. If our fault current isn't that significant, apparently it's going to not weld to the conduit and force us to dig it up.

One of the things, and it's expensive, but RTRC conduit, otherwise known as fiberglass conduit, is really, really, well, first of all, it's got a coefficient of friction, half that of PVC, but there's not the melting or welding problems also. So it's something to consider if you're putting in conduit underground.

I like that conduit. I mentioned it to my peers in the office and it wasn't as well received as it was with you, but I'm going to work on it because I think we need to start looking at the fiberglass conduit. It's much more durable.

See, Jen, I still don't know that I see your hand. Do you have any questions?

No, I don't have a question.

Okay, thank you. I'm surprised that our maps don't show, don't distinguish between cable that's direct buried and cable that's in conduit. How can we plan...

Okay. Apparently there's a layer I'm not aware of. Clay is aware.

Oh, okay.

Jump in, Clay.

There are some areas where when the mapping was transferred from old paper drawings, There wasn't data on that. So there are some gaps, but there is a layer and a piece of information in the electric databases that show it's in conduit. And for a while we used to have a thing called conduit manager that you could draft in what the conduit cross sections were in every run. Because there's always, you know, sixes, fours, and twos in a duct bank. So we'll have to take a look at that.

Thanks, Clay. I was going to ask, well, how can we figure out the direct-bury cable replacement plan if we don't know which ones are direct-bury? But maybe that's not as much of an issue as I thought.

Okay. It hasn't been given to you on that. So we should look at that.

I'm looking at the linemen tell me where the problems are and that it's direct bury because they've dug it up in the last couple of years. That's where we're focusing our attention on cable replacement.

Okay. I'm glad you made the comment about the long secondary runs and that That's something that's probably, it sounds to me, is going to have to be replaced over time. So that's part of what needs to be rolled into the plan for distribution system 2.0. You know, we're not going to solve it all in the next year, but hopefully in the next few decades. So one more thing that I don't know that we were necessarily aware of, you probably were, but it's... More things to consider as we plan that.

That is actually a part of next summer's plan for Valle del Sol and Kimberly. We're going to shorten some secondary runs there that are going down the street, then across the street, and 400 or 500 feet, we're going to shorten them down to 200 or less.

Okay.

When we put in the new lines.

All right.

We went through a project. Um, I want to say it was in the late, just before maybe 2007 or so where we, we were opening up transformers and looking to see if there was conduit risers, you know, and so that's how we could tell if there was conduit or not. Um, it seems like there was a, a transition, um, in the early eighties that went from that when they were doing a lot of undergrounding and neighborhoods and stuff that they, uh, They started putting in conduit and stopped direct bearing cable. But we have a lot of areas that do have the direct bearing cable still in use. But sometime in the 80s, they stopped doing that. Okay.

Yeah. Okay. Any other questions for Dennis right now anyway? Okay. Clay.

All righty. My information is more complicated. qualitative than quantitative. It's always fun to dig into the, you know, the history of work orders. So for us, it's a little more difficult because we don't have, like, distinct outages and something that pops up on a map when there are service disruptions. So there's quite a data dive. MUNIS is more of a, it's a work order management system. And a lot of the data that gets put in gets put in by the service workers. So you can imagine there's a lot of colorful stuff to go through. And so then you end up in a lot of conversations with them about stuff. And then that leads to, you can't believe what people flush down the toilet conversation. And just all kinds of things like that. It's fun, but it takes a while. So in doing this, we had to go through and look at call out trouble calls and then off hours, what type of hours they were putting in. So it's kind of an interesting process to do that. Anyway, you have to filter through because sometimes like gas smell might get spelled out as gas snell or something like, you know, you have to read every single work order and then it prompts a bunch of other conversations. But the big story in August, and I think you've heard something about this, is what was going on with the gas system and related to the virtual pipeline. We estimated that the amount of mercaptan that was being put into it, the concentration is anywhere from 5 to 10 times stronger than it is when we normally get it. And we do, that's part of our O&Ms every year is to do the odorant checks. And the odorant that we're getting from New Mexico gas is normal. the way gas smells and gas leaks can occur, some of them will just dissipate in such a way that people don't detect them in small concentrations. But what did happen with the virtual pipeline was that much stronger odorant, people were getting like little whiffs of it here and there. And then once the news got out that more gas leaks were being detected because of the stronger smell any time people smelled it. So this is where having the public information process, a very robust public information process really helps because once word got out that we were detecting more gas leaks from people smelling it, people started calling in more and saying, you know what, I was kind of getting this little smell from time to time. Our guys would go there and there would be gas in a wall. that they were just getting it a little bit here and there. And so we'd go in there and there was a high concentration of gas. And most of them were on the customer side, but we did find quite a number of leaks on our side as well. And some were fairly significant, but those dissipate through the soil. Wind will carry, you know, WINDOW WILL CARRY IT AWAY AND SO THEY WEREN'T REALLY DETECTING IT AND IT WILL BE IN A PLACE WHERE IT WASN'T KILLING THE GRASS BECAUSE USUALLY WE CAN SEE A GAS LEAK UNDER PEOPLE'S LAWNS REALLY QUICKLY BECAUSE THERE'S A DEAD SPOT. WE DO A LOT OF LEAK DETECTIONS BUT THOSE ARE IN DISCRETE AREAS SO THIS WAS JUST, YOU KNOW, IT WAS INDISCRIMINATE SO THE SMELLS WERE HAPPENING ALL OVER THE COUNTY AND SO WE WERE getting all these calls and having to respond to them. But like I said, most of them were on the customer side, which resulted in a lot of appliance red tags. And then there were some red tags due to leaks on their line. And so there were times where we had to cut off the gas completely to a residence or a few businesses even. But most of them were red tags on appliances, and then a plumber had to deal with it. There are some issues where we had multiple appliances that got red-tagged within the same gas smell call. So the gas leaks, those were discrete calls for county side leaks that we dealt with. And most of them were just a leak out of fitting or the regulator began to vent. We did notice that we started to detect this very fine white dust getting into the some of the regulators and it actually we a lot of them were ruined by the dust and we think it came from the compressed natural gas because that we've never seen it before and we're going to kind of keep an eye on it now that we're back on the regular gas delivery but we went through a lot of regulators throughout july and august unfortunately um So we had to replace a lot of regulators and just go in and cinch everything up on our side when it was on our side. But sometimes we found gas leaks in the ground at the risers. And so there were a number of fairly large projects that our gas crew had to fix. had to undergo to mitigate some of these leaks. I want to give them a lot of credit. They did a wonderful job in managing this and actually we had people come in to our office and say thank you to them for the work that they did. In a way, this was sort of serendipitous that we had this thing happen because we found way more leaks this way, and some of them were critical leaks. We found one crawl space completely saturated with gas. We found And some people get very desensitized to it. Like they don't even smell it anymore because our guys would go in and instantly, oh, gosh, there's gas. And they asked the people to get out and work with the fire department. So there were some evacuations and people had lost their sensitivity to it. So this, what happened here was actually a good thing. We did see that it maybe started to kind of go down like we think that we got most of them. I'm going to kind of think about every once in a while, talk about seeing if we can put a higher concentration of the mercaptan in again, because we seem to find more leaks doing that than with the leak detection equipment that we have. So it was kind of an interesting experiment. So the gas mills, like I said, they resulted in a red tag on the customer side. Gas leaks were gas leaks that we had to fix on our side. We did have one fairly major third-party damage, which was one of the few actual disruptions of complete service to a residence, and that happened with atomic fiber microtrenching. They weren't potholing the gas service lines and they hit one that was not buried as deeply as the others had been. And we had to point out that they complained about that and I had to point out that there's actually no rule with steel gas lines. They can be above ground. They can be one inch deep. There's no rule on how deeply those have to be buried. Um, so, you know, that, that was a problem because, um, we had to dig back all the way to the main to, to shut that we're at the tap. You have to, it's not really a valve. It's like a stopper that you have to go in and, and, and push the, what we call the guts. You have to push it back down to stop the flow of gas, um, through the, through the service. And so then we had to like, uh, fix the line, because that trencher hit it, it bent the steel and we had to round it again and get a clamp. And now we have to, we're going to have to bring in a third party contractor to do, put in a, weld in a steel transition to repair the rest of it. So we're still working on that. So that's the story with gas. Water leaks and repairs. This is pretty normal that we have, you know, anywhere from four to 20 leaks repaired in a month, 20 would be very high. But in any given month, you know, we do it, we go around, we find areas where we see water that shouldn't be there. So drought times are easy to find leaks. During wet periods, of course, they kind of get blended in. But we found more leaks this summer It was so dry and so any time you see water that's still there. You know that that's from us But they were all on service lines and and were repairable We didn't have any water line breaks during the month of August. We're starting to see maybe a reduction knock on wood of Water main breaks, but winter season is coming up. So we'll see we've had quite an aggressive program of of Repairing and replacing PRVs which are kind of the the damping effect of the water You know the water forces of the water distribution system, so we're hoping That that that is going to make a difference. We've had a good relationship with the fire department doing a lot of Hydrant testing that's helped us to find weak spots in the in the water system and we've continued that program and with I think it's been successful because we haven't had as many water line breaks throughout the testing. So we'll see how the winter goes. It always takes a little while to see what your work has done, what the effect is down the road. And then sewer, same thing. I feel like I have to give big kudos to Justin Lujan, who's been the supervisor for the sewer system these past couple of years. He's really been aggressive with the program that he's managed, getting the crews to go out and do a lot of O&M work on sewer lines that we could not find you know, like a really definitive record as to when it had last been flushed and maintained. The way the records have always been kept is they would get an area and they would do flushing and inspection in a certain area so they wouldn't really talk about any specific line. So we would say, you know, it's probably time to get into this backyard area here. We know the mains and the roads are easier to get to. And, you know, that's always low-hanging fruit for crews to keep moving down the line. But we've really hit the hard-to-get-to areas and backyards, north community, western area, and some of the older areas with clay pipe. They'll be moving to White Rock as fall and winter starts up here. They were really aggressive this summer and found a lot of roots and collapsed or partially collapsed sections. So we did some dig ups and some repairs. But we had a, we did three service line repairs. One was in White Rock. This had been a repeat customer, and we'd been working with them and their plumber. And finally, we got, you know, we have a much better what we call a push camera, which allows us to get a much higher definition image of what's happening inside of the line. So we actually repaired two lines in White Rock. But one was a complete rebuild. We just had to do it. It was under a weeping willow, and the roots had just grown all into this line. And at some point the plumber had done some sort of work and like a clean out cap had caught into the roots. And so we just had to remove the whole thing and dig it up all the way from the property line to the main and fix it. It took a while. And then another customer, in Parrito Acres has a long pump line and it's a little bit flat. So we're working with them to come up with some solutions. They need to keep that line more pressurized because their pump discharges the water, but it doesn't quite make it all the way to the main. And so we're looking at having them put in a check valve farther in so that the main can stay pressurized a little bit better to discharge it. They upsize their pump, but the same thing happens. It just loses momentum and pressure down the line, so it'll sit there for too long. So that one's kind of a weird problem, but we're working with them on it. So these are just the types of things. Everything has this long story, and you end up in people's lives for quite a while until their problem gets fixed. And yeah, you learn a lot about people and meet them. It's pretty interesting. I should run for mayor if we had a mayor. My stock is really high right now. So that's about it. But we, oh, I will say the sewer, same thing. We are seeing a reduction in sewer line main blockages. They still occur. But, you know, we're able to respond to them because they're We haven't had nearly as many big backups that resulted in releases. Usually we're finding them through inspections. And it's just kind of a holding type thing. It's not a full blockage that resulted in this bad backup, but we'll find a slow draining line. And so we're able to get to those quickly. We did have an issue. We had a new lift station go online. Kathy Deanna was happy, except we had some startup issues with it, and it's always typical of something like that. But we were able to finally figure out what it was. There's a lot more technology going into them now, and so we kind of noted what it was that we need to be careful of with that type of lift station. But it's running well now. very stable. Yep.

Thank you. Questions, comments?

Well, thanks, Clay. And thanks for explaining that unintentional experiment that was done on the gas system. That was very interesting.

Yeah, it was interesting.

What is a typical number for gas leaks in a month?

Oh. They vary, but they're usually less than 10.

Yeah, yeah. Okay.

Yeah.

Very interesting. Well, thank you.

In the wintertime, we'll often get, as people fire up boilers, we'll see this slug of them in November. And it's usually, unfortunately, it results in a red tag. But we try to work with people and their plumber to see if we can get this done quickly. so that we can do relights and get them back up.

Thank you.

Okay. I've actually got a question for Dennis if nobody else has anything for Clay. Dennis, for a short period of time anyway, a few years, our SADI was down below our target. which was really nice, but now it's going back up again. And I'm not sure which is the normal state, whether we've had an unfortunate run of larger outages that has driven the number back up, or whether, in fact, the normal state is higher than our target. What is your sense about our overall electric distribution reliability? Are we likely to be able to get back down under 60 minutes and stay there much of the time with the current system? Or is a SETI that's higher than target Is that what our system is largely capable of doing now? And of course, we need to improve that, but over time.

I believe we are experiencing an unusual high safety due to unusual circumstances. The White Rock Transformer T1, that was a very unusual circumstance. The major outage in May by the aquatic center, There was no reason for that to fail. That was fairly new cable. Don't know what happened. It must have been a manufacturing or an installation problem that just reared its ugly head at us. But with all of the old cable that we have, I could see our Sadie staying right around 60 minutes, maybe a little above, until we can get ahead of some of these underground cable failures that we're experiencing on the old 70s vintage cable. When I first got into this industry as a co-op student in Texas in 1984, I was told the average lifespan of underground cable was 20 years. But that was in the wet environment of southeast Texas. Here it's dry. I think we've gotten a very good life out of that cable that's been out there 50 years. My fear is it's going to start failing on a more rapid basis. The loops that we have allow us to usually isolate it and then repair it during the business day afterward without people having to wait or having our linemen digging up the edge of the road at 2 in the morning. That helps. And that helps keep our standing figures down. There's a lot of loops that were built into the distribution system on the primary cable. But I think we're probably going to ride right around 60 until we can get some of this old cable replaced and in conduit. Because when they backfilled, I was told that they just backfilled all of the rock that came out of the hole back in the day, which we don't do anymore. And with the freezing and thawing in the environments when it gets cold, ground heaves and so now that cable is being pushed into those sharp edges of the rocks and that's why the cable has a tendency to fail then when moisture gets in it goes in those cracks and shorts it out and burns it up and I think that's going to continue to be an issue for us for a while I just hope we don't have any more of the major outages I am hoping that As we get further along here, maybe we can put more isolation in so that it doesn't trip all the way back to the substation main. That's where we're having the long outages is we don't isolate it well enough. Now we have to do what I call trial and error to find out where is the fault. We go open a switch, close at the substation, see if it holds. If it does, great. Now we start working down the line from that switch. But sometimes it's close in to the station and it takes a while to find it.

All things to think about with the design of distribution system 2.0. Yes. Okay. Thank you, Dennis. Thank you both, gentlemen. Okay, we have one more business item here, and it's already quarter of eight. Then we'll consider whether or not to take a break and probably in particular ask Jennifer how she's doing at that point. So I'll give you the heads up. We'll do one more item, and then we'll think about a break. So we move to... Item 7B, which is on page 76 of our agenda doc, and that's an amendment to services agreement for, this is for the hydro, I believe, yes, Abiquiu Hydro Plant draft tube.

That's James and maybe Ben James good chair and members of the board What we're bringing before you tonight is a recommendation for approval for an amendment and a number number one for our service agreement Specifically with Andretts hydro corporation This work it was a planned capital improvement project we were going to replace the draft tube for the low-flow turbine at Abiquiu. We had seen scouring in the inside of the turbine due to the oxygenation tube that went across horizontally on the inside of the tube. We had contracted with Andritz Hydro for them to do a rehab create a new draft tube with outer ring to inject the oxygen into for dissolved oxygen before it gets released out to the river. We moved along through the project. It got fabricated. In this work, the fabrication occurred down in Mexico. during the time when Trump's tariff fees and whatnot were approved, it was not anticipated that we were gonna see a tariff fee coming along to us. So that's what we're bringing before you tonight is a recommendation to pay for this tariff fee. The bill had originally come in over $100,000. Our procurement assisted us in negotiating that price down to about $82,000. But here with the tax, it's $87,000 and some change. And then with that, we're also asking for a budget revision.

For that because I was not an anticipated item that we were looking to expand on Questions Matt I Guess maybe this is to file over and anybody in the county has the county seen any refunds on tariffs after they've been decided illegal Do we have to apply for that, or does ANDITS? I'm just curious.

I think the status quo wasn't rescinded. Not all of them were rescinded.

Right. Yeah, I'm curious more in general if there are rescissions.

On this one, on this tariff, we did investigate, you know, was it rescinded? Because at that time, as you know, we've been assessed and then some return. No money has been returned. I can tell you that. And this one here, it took a little while to negotiate because we thought maybe some of it would be rescinded, but this was not in the case of steel work done in Mexico that didn't know when this order was made that this would occur. The elbow is in place and in use, so we can't send it back.

Okay. The original contract, did that have a contingency attached to it? It did.

We used about $30,000 of the contingency and that was specifically towards getting a laser survey of the existing draft tube just to make sure for the fitment of the new draft tube. being the, you know, the existing conditions, the temperature and such, the differential changes with the fitment, whether where was it going to be manufactured in another state or, and then mobilizing it here and making, we wanted to make sure that it fit properly. So that was what the $30,000 was surveying it, getting a laser and getting precise measurements We had a remainder of about 29,000 left of that contingency. However, we didn't carry that forward, so that was the reason why we're asking for the full 87,000 now.

I guess I don't understand kind of the accounting details here, why that contingency wasn't carried forward until the project was completed or until the bill was paid. I guess that went back into whichever fund this came out of. So we presumably didn't lose it. At least I hope we didn't. Okay. Eric. Thanks, Chair Gibson.

So oxygen injection system, how long has that been in there? Who installed that?

Originally, that went in around 2011 when the low-flow turbine was installed.

Okay, okay, because it was a little bit confusing in here. I was wondering if someone installed it, like if Andritz installed it a year ago, then it seems like it would be under warranty or something like that. And so, okay, so that's out of our hands. Thank you. Appreciate that.

So it really sounds like we don't have a choice here. Correct. Okay. Is there any public comment?

Thank you, Chair Gibson. Any members of the public online wishing to make comment, please raise your hand. There are no hands, Chair Gibson.

Thank you. All right, who would like to read this? I'll do it.

I move that the Board of Public Utilities recommend Amendment Number 1 to Services Agreement Number AGR25-925, with Andritz Hydro Corp. to incorporate tariff fees increasing the base contract by $81,771.75 plus New Mexico gross receipts tax of $5,417.38 for a revised total contract amount of $663,720.70 and recommend budget revision 2017-22 in the amount of $87,190, and that consisting of $81,771.75 base cost and $5,417.38 gross receipts tax with minor rounding to fund the remaining shortfall from the electric production fund reserves and forward to county council for final approval. Second. Okay. Okay.

Recommended motion has been moved and seconded one correction Joanne The budget revision you read is 2017 22, and it should be 20 27-22 I don't know if that makes a difference in the motion No, okay Thank you, John that sure looks like a friendly amendment to me I think so I

Okay. The maker of the motion and the seconder both approve changing it to budget, amending it to budget revision 2027-22. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, John. Any further discussion? Kathy.

Member Hollingsworth.

Yes.

Member Stromberg.

Yes.

Member Hefner. Yes. And Member Gibson.

Yes.

Thank you.

Motion passes four to zero. Okay, it is almost eight o'clock. We have reports to go through yet. Review of tickler, et cetera. Do we want to take a breather here or keep plowing through? And Jennifer, I'll ask you first, because you're the one probably most affected.

To be honest, I was considering going off at this point.

And that's entirely at your discretion. We greatly appreciate the effort that you make to participate at all.

Sorry, but yeah, I've had a little cold and I don't want to get worse. But yeah, and so I did send a question earlier regarding one of the reports. I think I was satisfied with the response I received on that. Okay.

All right. So we'll give you a permanent break. Enjoy the rest of your night off. Sorry.

Yeah, it's only three.

Thank you for hanging in here as long as you did this evening.

No, thank you. Sorry. See you guys soon. Bye.

Okay. What's the rest of the board's preference? Power on through. Keep going? Is everybody comfortable with that? Talk fast. Well, all right, folks. We'll see what we can do here. Unfortunately, the chair's report has a bunch of items on it, but I guess we'll talk fast. Okay. August 25th, there was the nuclear forum here in Los Alamos, up at Sala. I was hoping to learn more about potential nuclear projects, either in the state or nearby, that we might eventually get some power from. There doesn't seem to be any. I think the answer to the question is there aren't any on the horizon locally. By locally, I mean in the state or nearby. At least that seemed to be the answer coming out of that. The forum itself was, I'd say it was mostly New Mexico companies that are supporting the nuclear industry or want to support the nuclear industry telling us about what they do or could do. It's kind of a rah-rah for them. It didn't go into a lot of detail. They are planning, at least at the end of that meeting, they were planning to make this an annual event in Los Alamos, and they were thinking next year it ought to be maybe a day and a half or something longer than a day. It was a full day, and it was interesting, but I don't know that it had a lot of substance that I was looking for anyway. That evening, we had a council meeting where the gas rate increase was approved 6 to 1, and the ECA was approved 7 to 0. So finally, done. Moving on, we had the boards and commissions luncheon was on the 10th. I attended that for the board that time. You've got a copy in here of the report that I made or provided to the board or to the assembled chairs and then presented orally. Before I sent it to you folks, Philo added a couple things at the bottom of the page based on some discussion there. This wasn't part of my original report. But, of course, billing issues came up, as you might expect. And Councilor Neal Clinton, in particular, asked about the tie line to White Rock and whether or not we were planning to test, whether that had been tested or we were planning to test it. Of course, a true test would require shutting off White Rock. And whether that's worth it or not is... is a question. Anyway, she raised that issue, didn't try to resolve it there. That was probably the big feedback that we got from there. I raised the question at the last council scheduling meeting that they do every week about whether or not we ought to be looking at the approval authority levels. because prices of a lot of things have gone up. And Ann indicated she was comfortable with the approval authority level that the county manager has. which means the issues are utility manager and board. So the council chair asked us to make a recommendation on that. So that'll go on our agenda at some point. Obviously, no hurry. And if everybody hasn't noticed yet, this may be the last meeting we have in chambers this calendar year. Elections are next month, so they're always using this for elections. We are scheduled to be, I think we're scheduled to be in 3.30 next month. And then the first meeting in November is the day or the evening, the day after the election. The clerk never commits to being all cleared out by that night. But so far, several different times, they have been. So we might wind up back here, even though we're not scheduled for that. And then for various other reasons, we're scheduled elsewhere for the rest of the year. So pay attention to where we're scheduled for instead of just showing up here by force of habit. And the last item I have is that the board annual or annual monthly agenda review meeting is once again rescheduled. I'm not sure if we've ever had it at the time it was scheduled for, but we seem to do a pretty good job of moving it around, somewhere around there that works for everybody. And it is currently scheduled for 8 o'clock in the morning on Monday, the 28th of September. So if you have any inputs to the tickler file that we don't get tonight, please let us know by then. And that, I think, let me make sure, I think that's all I have for the chair's report Do we have any board member reports? Okay. That takes us to the utility manager's report.

Chair and members of the board, I'll just go over it briefly. We still are challenged with our utility billing transition. We did get our AMI portal back up and running, and we have figured out a fix for getting the NMGRT in place and applied to the time of use portion of the bill. And there will be some corrections in September's bill for the prior months where it didn't get assessed right. And then we have a temporary patch in place for the demand charge. And Tyler's got it in their development queue to fix that part of the program. Our August bills with the water, some Some customers crossed over into the tiered rates. Given the longer billing period, you know, if you're over 30 days, White Rock had the regular 30-day bill, but all the Los Alamos ones didn't. And so there will be an adjustment and proration done to correct those water used when they hit the tier. Also, solar customers, there was also an issue with the demand data. how it retrieved, it was incorrectly calculating the demand and combined it with kilowatt hours. And so that will be adjusted as well. And let's see, then the new gas rate went in effect September 1st. So there's a lot of changes in the bills and it's hard to, you really have to meet with each customer and review it with them to show all the changes. So it's been challenging with the staff and I want to thank them for sticking to it and working with customers just to explain all the changes. Then Elkridge, the closeout documents are in their hands. They have a lender that's reviewing them right now. That takes some time usually. And the White Rock substation, Dennis mentioned he's at the station a lot because a lot of construction was occurring. The actual slab is poured. delivering the delivery and crane to CISO. We're hoping by the end of September, first part of October, to have that transformer on that new pad. And New Mexico Gas, we talked about that, the virtual pipeline, it was completed, and we are back on the normal delivery pipeline on September 1st, and all the hydrotesting segments passed. The recruitment status, Jacob LAVA, he earned the promotion as a GWS supervisor. So congratulations to Jacob. And we made offers to utility locator, a water production operator, and a power system operator. We still have interviews going on for the power system operators. There's two vacancies remaining. Unfortunately, we received no applications for the electric distribution engineering manager with a Long one month in recruitment in different areas, nationally and nothing. And then we have other vacancies, an associate engineer and a management analyst. The Hemis Mountain Fire Protection Project, we got all the materials out to bid. We have a pre-bid meeting tomorrow, and the bids are due the end of the month. That follows all the FEMA grant requirements. The water element of construction, which is not part of FEMA, is just part of our construction budget shared with the ski area. We have foundations going in for the booster pump stations and the skids for those should be coming in middle of October. So we'll be getting all that hooked up to pump water, hopefully middle of November. UAMs, not really much to update there short of what you heard today on EDAM. There's lots of discussions on that, but the CFPP should be wrapping up between October and November. I'm still on the board, so I get to go to a board retreat. But it'll be interesting because we're going to look at some of the new electric generating technology on that trip. So San Ildefonso geothermal project, I did get an update that there's still two federal grants pending and a state one that are under consideration for doing feasibility test well work. We had a decommissioning. They do it by calendar year. It's a little over $5 million of site grading work. That remains 4%. based on the plant. So it's $123,524. And we're still working on a procurement to help expedite our overhead make readies for atomic fiber. And that will be paid by that project. And then this is kind of a new issue that I wanted to just bring to the board's attention that the New Mexico Environment Department's Surface Water Quality Bureau has done their water quality monitoring in the upper Rio Grande watershed, and they are proposing, they made some proposals for total maximum daily load, TMDLs, that will It's basically quality that impacts stream segments and excess areas that will impact us or aluminum. That's mostly from stormwater runoff, E. coli bacteria, obviously wastewater, gross alpha, PCBs, and temperature, high water temperature. So it will impact our discharge permit when we get a renewal and 27 it will have more monitoring and discharge requirements for sampling so I just wanted to bring that to the board's attention I've worked under these before in Colorado and they do sometimes vary by season like temperature also some nutrient loads can vary by season too depending on how algae grows, et cetera, and stream segments. So it can be a dynamic issue to monitor. So just wanted to bring that up because it will have some cost implications down the road. And that's my report for this month.

Eric.

Thank you, Chair Gibson. So a friend of mine sent me an interesting text message that just showed me his utility bill. There was no text, nothing, just a picture of the bill. The funny thing about it was that for the electric portion, the total did not match the on-peak and off-peak. So if you added up on-peak and off-peak, it was significantly different than the total. Do you have any idea how many bills like that you've had to reconcile?

I'm not sure it was a total, but Joanne, can you answer that a little more in detail? Without seeing the bill, it's hard. Right. It was just, obviously, I mean. It was a customer, a solar customer, too, because there's usually three lines in there. Yeah, he didn't have a solar anything.

Sorry, I'm trying to pull up the bill real quick so I can. Okay, so explain again.

Well, you know, we have on-peak and off-peak.

Right.

And if we had, say, 100 kilowatt hours on and 100 off, total would should be 200. Okay. But when the on-peak and the off-peak doesn't match the total. But I guess my general real question is how many bills, what percentage of bills has the county been having to correct because of the billing anomalies? Okay.

From what I understand, right now the bill adjustments is also one of the issues that we're having that we're not able to do the bill adjustments right now on the time of use. We do have several, but that is not one of the ones that I'm aware of that they're not totaling correctly. Let me pull up a bill real quick. Because I didn't think there was a total on the bill. I thought each line item was like the demand and then the peak and the off-peak and then if they were solar.

I'll have to look at the bill again. So you haven't had customers running to the customer service department with torches and pitchforks?

We've had a few that have called. I don't know of anybody that's come in, but we've had some that have had questions. And most of them was more of the timing issue or like because of the timing with when we sent them out originally and then trying to get back on to schedule some of their ACHs or their direct payments were coming out. different times and it wasn't reflecting on the bills we've had several calls on that but I'm looking at a bill a solar bill right now and there isn't a total there each line item is specific to if it's your demand you're off-peak on-peak or solar but it there isn't a total of any of them on the bill

Okay, I might have looked at it wrongly, but it was a lot higher than he was expecting. Okay, no, that's fine. I was just wondering. So in terms of bills, because of this strange period here, there's not a whole lot that you're having to correct or 10% or 5%?

I wish I had a better number for you. I know that we have... good stack but we've been correcting I know Philo had mentioned his manager report about the water and so we're able to correct those some of them are the most of the ones that I know about our solar that we've had the solar issue and then I think some of the first bills with solar kind of went out a little wonky. And then the first two cycles that we did, the demand was really kind of off, and we had to manually enter all the demands, so there might have been some issues there. But we're not, from what I understand, is that we're not having a lot of questions regarding the peak or off-peak. It's generally the demand And our solar customers that have had.

And the solar, it's unfortunate that the line item is labeled solar because it's really exported power. Okay. I mean, if they had a biomass generator, you know, it would be biomass. It wouldn't be solar.

Okay.

But so anyway, okay.

Okay, I appreciate it. That is something we could change. I mean, that's a simpler fix than pretty much anything else we've been doing with this.

Yeah, like exported KWH. Yeah, that covers everything.

Okay. I can discuss that with Philo and kind of go further with that and see what we want to do. That's what we set it up as, but that's probably one of the easier fixes if we want to change that.

Okay. Well, thank you.

And I can give you guys some more information on adjustments and issues. I can send an email out tomorrow and get a little bit more information to pass on to you guys and answer that question much better for you.

Okay. Thank you very much.

Appreciate your help.

Thank you, Mr. Strongberg.

Before you leave there, Joanne, it's not a question to follow up comment. From the customer's perspective, Solar might be simpler and easier to understand than exported KWH since we don't have too many biomass generators in town yet. So you might think about that when you think about the change. Look at it from the customer's perspective and what's clearest and simplest.

Right. I agree. I figured it could be a discussion. It's come up, so I'm happy to discuss it. Thank you.

Thank you. Uh, okay. Anything else on the utility manager's report? All right. We move on to the county manager. You're on. Thank you for staying awake this long.

Yeah. Thank you, chair and board members. Um, I'm actually going to do a two first since we don't have a council liaison. So, um, several things. Um, I'm definitely going to go to sleep tonight thinking and contemplating edam and board strong or board member Stromberg gave me my favorite, um, words to ponder rotating resources and for inverting masses. I have no idea what that means, but I'm going to be thinking about it, trying to figure it out as generators rotate. Okay. Okay. I don't know about the inverting part, but okay. I'd love for someone to explain that to me. Thank you. And let's see. So last, let's see. I've got our chair and vice chair of counselor in DC this week. they, um, went to the Energy Community Alliance, uh, cleanup workshop, but they also made a couple of trips to the Hill. We partnered, um, and, uh, and did, um, trips together with the Pueblo de San Ildefonso, uh, primarily focused on the one topic, which is the hexavalent chromium plume and, um, getting that interim measure started, back started. So I wanted to mention that. And what I'm hearing back is that all the conversations were well received and, um, there was ongoing conversations related to that rather, um, about needing a replacement well. And, um, and then also just the, uh, um, there's a, another paper that we've been working on and working on with ECA, which is, uh, An ESIP program, which is basically like the Department of Defense. They have kind of a grant program to help offset impacts they have on communities, a grant program. And we've been pitching for many years now to the National Association of Counties and others to get support for an energy community, similar type grant program, and that would be eligible for regional funding. projects and things like that. So anyway, just wanted to mention that because I think it's really interesting. Council will have a debrief on it at their upcoming meeting at the end of the month, I think. Let's see. Last, oh, I wanted to point out that fall activity guide came out. I don't know if you've seen it, but you should get one. They're great. But I wanted to highlight the back in the back cover. There's this ad in the back and there's a QR code. And you're going to see it. It's on our front doors here. You're going to see it advertised. We've given stickers and window decals to businesses. But it's a place where any business in town can register and promote. And you can easily search. If you're looking for ice cream, coffee, a consignment store, whatever it may be, a bookstore, you can search by categories. And then everyone who's registered will come up. It's all self-managed. The businesses can go in and register. But it's just a nice reminder for all of us to search here and see if what we need here is before we shop off the hill. So I just wanted to mention that because we're trying to promote it. And last weekend was very busy. We had the 911 Memorial Climb on Saturday at Pajarito. We also had a re-ribbon cutting, I guess, for the golf course just because the restaurants open. All of our punch list items for the construction are largely completed now. So we're really all systems ago and functioning out at the golf course. And then we also had a chamber and airport open house combined event, and that was wildly successful. It was last year and it was even more so this year. Skydivers were amazing and lots of people. And so it was a A lot of fun. We have an equally busy weekend this weekend with homecoming on Friday. Friday also, not so much an event, but draft or comments are due on our draft comprehensive plan this Friday. So if you have comments on that or know people who want to comment. And then we're going to have a P&Z initial discussion on September 23rd. And then they'll have a second conversation in October. Also this Saturday, we've got Clean Up Los Alamos Day. So there's going to be opportunities to help with that and participate in that. And then we have the Trans Rocky Mountain Bike event. So that's going on. And then Ruler Fest in the afternoon. So busy, busy Saturday. And then Chair Gibson, I think you mentioned election season and early voting starts October 6th. So it's right around the corner. Moving on, the September 8th council meeting had a couple big topics. One was a discussion about automatic license plate readers, and that discussion will come back on December 8th to council for consideration of either a local ordinance or some other, they've just asked a lot of questions and asked us to bring back more information. So that's December 8th. And then On that agenda, also there was approvals of the Fairway Drive project, which is a combined joint public works utilities project. And I think there's some ongoing conversations about coordinating the depth of utilities and some of the things with the paving. So we're working on that one. And then the property tax rate certification went to the September 9th meeting as well. And then lastly, for next week's council meeting, it's a work session. We are going to suspend the rules to introduce a couple of ordinances that will be heard on October 6th, but it's the MRA agreement for PIG and FIG for them to do some exterior improvements and also non-bay, or sorry, non-bay CB Fox is going to introduce and have their public hearing for their project that I think most of you have seen in the, in the media with the CB Fox rehab building is it's a retail food court, um, boutique hotel. And then also at that meeting, uh, Nam Bay is going to come in and just introduce, it's not an ordinance yet. There's no agreements drafted, but they're going to talk about their request for Alita, um, ask from the County and they're moving into new, um, area at the Central Park Square and they're expanding their services and staffing so you and we have a couple more coming so stay tuned we've been very busy trying to draft those agreements and partnerships on the towards some of our economic development and vitality goals and then lastly I'll just mention that our community national community survey is active right now we've already received almost 300 responses But if you received, I think it was a yellow or pink card or something in the mail, and then there's like a link to go in and take it. And then that's the statistically valid random sampling portion of it. And then at some point we will open up a link for anyone who's just dying to take it if they didn't get the random sampling. Last time we did that there, it wasn't dramatically different results between the statistically valid survey and the one we opened up to everybody. except for, I think, maybe one or two areas, but largely they were not too far off. And then we're trying to get that done in anticipation of Council's strategic planning session on November 19th. So with that, I'll stand for questions.

Are there any questions? You must have answered everybody's concerns. Thank you.

Thank you.

That takes us to the environmental... Environmental Sustainability Board Liaisons report. Carly.

Hello, can you hear me?

We sure can.

OK, great. OK, so the August meeting. Wasn't too much for that. The ESB created two working groups. To support the climate action plan implementation goals. One is supporting local food systems and the other is commuter trip reduction. We heard some brief updates about Bee City and then we had a presentation on biosolids composting operation update. And then for tomorrow's agenda, let's see. uh there will be a landfill feasibility study overview uh revision revise and approve the annual esb update to county council and an integrated pest management update um yeah that's all i have okay thank you do we have any questions for carly

You too must have answered all of our concerns for right now. Thank you. All right, thanks. Is there any general board business or board expenses for this evening consideration? Seeing none, we'll move to status reports. Questions, issues, concerns on status reports? I have a couple items. One As I mentioned earlier, I'm not sure that we have the Sadie correct because I'm not sure that I don't understand the different information about that white rock outage That shouldn't be too hard to resolve and then I had a question on the The incident reports under claims on page 105. There were four incidents involving GWS in August and a couple more in July. So my question is, Is this just a sort of a statistical fluke that we're seeing several of them from GWS in this short period of time? Or is there some more basic issue there that we need to be paying more attention to? And I don't know, Philo, whether you have an answer to that question. If not, it might be something to think about for next month.

Chair, I flagged this to Clay and him to speak to his crew about it as well. So not a surprise.

I'm glad you're ahead of us.

Yeah, it's hard to say with these things what it is. I mean, you know, I actually spoke to the employees and, you know, a lot of them were like little things where, you know, they smashed a finger, a guy dropped something on his foot. And, you know, we tried to look at the root cause and we really couldn't pinpoint one thing. But July and August were tough. You know, with all of the staff time, they were working a lot of call-out hours. We had to actually, so the standby crew would actually go in and attend a call, and we actually had to bring in our secondary crew because we were having these gas calls throughout July and August. And so, you know, we had multiple people on, overnight and stuff. We were dealing with, dealing with some of these and I, you know, we were looking at that as, as a maybe reason, but I mean, in the winter time, you know, we've had these, we've had these types of calls and, and didn't have quite the same, um, the same issue. A lot of these were actually happened at our shop, like in, at the end of the after responding to a call and they were cleaning things up or putting things away, that was when it happened. So maybe it was a little bit of fatigue after something like that happened. But they really didn't say that that was why. They were, I was like, what happened? And, you know, I just dropped that on my foot. And so it's just hard to say. I think it's maybe a little bit of a coincidence, but it could be from, you know, like what was going on in July and August as well. So, you know, we had to talk about that, like being careful when they're tired. But that's all I could find out.

Well, I'm glad you're already paying attention to that and talking to your crew about it.

Yeah. I mean, you know, like to them, you know, it's like, oh, well this happened. And we're like, well, you need to call it the, we have a, we have a program that where they call like a, uh, uh, like a company nurse is what we call it. Right. And, you know, they think, well, I did what I was needing. And I was like, so guys, these go into our statistics. So we need to figure it, you know, I'm, I'm worried one about you and hopefully, you know, this isn't something that, that, that was really a problem, but to, you know, like people look at that. And so, like, we wonder what's happening because, you know, safety is a big concern. And so they understand. And we had to have a talk about, you know, like, you need to double up your focus when you're at the end of a job. You know, you can't let your guard down when you're having to do that. And if you're really that tired, then we need to, like, call it right there. And so they understood.

Eric.

Thank you, Chair Gibson. So, Clay, while you're standing up there, you know, I'll ask this one first. Yeah, I'll just ask the same question I did last time. I read these things about the sewage backups in the homes, and the question I have is are they getting any better or they seem to have at the same rate? Where are we on that?

Yeah, so we – We feel like it has, I mean, I'm hopefully optimistic right now, and I don't want to jinx it. We're hoping that the program, like I said, you know, all of the things we did, it takes a while for us to recognize what the results are long term. We, I'm not saying that they're ever going to happen. I mean, these happen all over the world, and they're bound to happen. But we're trying to, you know, you're trying to lower the, instance rate of it but we are seeing it going down right now we haven't had um and and the root cause of them no pun intended i like what you did there yeah you know a lot of times are things like you know these backwater valves and the type of things that people need to be doing on their side i mean there are sometimes some things that the customer you know we find that that oh the here's a configuration that should not be that way. And so that was in looking, you know, really looking into those problems, we found a lot of problems that were definitely construction issues on the customer side. But, you know, with the aggressive public information campaign and, us getting out and taking closer looks at some of the older lines that are in the backyards and fixing a lot of the problems we found, we're hopefully optimistic that it's reducing it. The clay lines, you know, everybody has them. I mean, older towns have them, so maintenance is the, you know, that's the focus. When they get to a point where we're We're seeing collapses, too many routes, that's when it's time. But I mean, it doesn't mean that we need to go around and just start replacing them. That's not reasonable. So, you know, just having this aggressive maintenance and a supervisor that's staying on top of it, that really has helped a lot. And so I'm hoping to see the results over the next few years from what we've been doing.

Thank you. Thank you. My other question is for Joanne, actually. I'm looking at the accounts receivables, the overdue accounts receivables. Are those going up, or am I not looking at this right?

Let me check. I have it up here. I did it several weeks ago, so give me a second to look at it. The accounts receivable for the over 90 days, or is it the...

I guess I'm just generally delinquencies. Generally speaking, are delinquencies going up?

Not really. When I did this, I kind of noticed the accounts receivable for the inactive accounts looks like it's going up. But we did several refunds. So that kind of tends to make it look like there's more. Because I don't know if you noticed, we spread it out what's due and then what we owe people on credits. But as far as our active accounts, that doesn't seem to be going up.

Okay, okay, okay, good.

Yeah, it's staying pretty stable. Most of them are liens and disconnections for nonpayment. But those are just ones we can't collect right now. But that's not increasing at all.

Okay, thank you very much.

You're welcome.

Thank you. That takes us to upcoming agenda items. The tickler. anybody actually look through that? Do you have any additions or suggestions or whatever? Eric?

Yeah. Okay. This is kind of unpalatable at some point. I think we really ought to revisit the concept of rooftop solar connection charges. Um, I don't think we should do it anytime real soon because everyone's kind of burned out on the utility rates right now, but the rooftop solar people, um, You know, they're not paying for all the infrastructure charge that they need for their system to work. And so I brought this up a few times in the past, but the county wasn't willing to address it at that point. But I think we should address it at some point.

Okay, well.

As a rough estimate, what it would mean would be that rooftop, anyone with rooftop solar would pay a connection charge of $40 a month. That would have to be vetted through the department in terms of – but that's the figure that I heard about a year ago. It would be about $40 a month.

Well, we will put that on the agenda for some time. Some time. You're entitled to put anything on the agenda that you want. You can wear the flak jacket to talk to the solar people.

Yeah. The only other tickler file, you know, I could make a short presentation on rotating mass and inverter-based resources just as a, just if anyone's interested. But that's just something to think about.

Well, we know Anne is interested. We'll see what she thinks. All right, anything else for right now? If you think of anything before the 28th, let us know. I'm making a note here, and I don't write very fast. All right. All right. I think that takes us to the final opportunity for comment from our adoring public. Or not adoring public. Either one. We'll take it. Public comment. I don't see any in chambers.

Thank you, Chair Gibson. There are no members of public online.

Okay. Thank you. Thanks, everyone. We are adjourned.