Economic Development, Technology & City Light Committee 1/11/23

Recording.

Good morning, everybody, and Happy New Year.

Today is January 11th, and today's meeting of the Economic Development Technology and City Light Committee will come to order.

It is 9.32 a.m., and I am Sarah Nelson, chair of the committee.

Will the clerk please call the roll?

Council President Juarez?

Here.

Council Member Sawant?

Council Member Strauss.

Present.

Council Member Herbold.

Here.

Chair Nelson.

Present.

That's four present.

All right, hello.

There is one item on today's agenda, a briefing and discussion on Western energy markets presented by Seattle City Light.

And I understand that Council Member Strauss will need to leave the meeting early at about 10, but that you, Council Member Strauss, have been fully briefed on today's item.

Yes, thank you, Chair.

City Light has done a great job giving me a great briefing and I'm looking forward to more.

Okay, so that's our agenda for today.

Are there any objections?

Seeing none, the agenda is adopted.

Okay, with that, we'll move into our public comment on items listed on the agenda.

Please roll the video.

And while we're waiting for this, I do have to say that I've...

Yeah.

Pause.

Okay.

Um, I, I see that there are some, uh, commenters that, um, have, uh, come from far away from, um, uh, from the schedule, I believe.

And so, um, because, uh, uh, you are not familiar with the rule that we don't speak, um, on items that are not on the agenda.

I am making an exception because you are unfamiliar with this practice and different committees, uh, do.

public comment differently, so I will make that exception today.

Go on, please.

Hello, Seattle.

We are the Emerald City, the city of flowers and the city of goodwill, built on indigenous land, the traditional territory of the Coast Salish peoples.

The Seattle City Council welcomes remote public comment and is eager to hear from residents of our city.

If you would like to be a speaker and provide a verbal public comment, you may register two hours prior to the meeting via the Seattle City Council website.

Here's some information about the public comment proceedings.

Speakers are called upon in the order in which they registered on the council's website.

Each speaker must call in from the phone number provided when they registered online and used the meeting ID and passcode that was emailed upon confirmation.

If you did not receive an email confirmation, please check your spam or junk mail folders.

A reminder, the speaker meeting ID is different from the general listen line meeting ID provided on the agenda.

Once a speaker's name is called, the speaker's microphone will be unmuted and an automatic prompt will say, the host would like you to unmute your microphone.

That is your cue that it's your turn to speak.

At that time, you must press star six.

You will then hear a prompt of, you are unmuted.

Be sure your phone is unmuted on your end so that you will be heard.

As a speaker, you should begin by stating your name and the item that you are addressing.

A chime will sound when 10 seconds are left in your allotted time as a gentle reminder to wrap up your public comments.

At the end of the allotted time, your microphone will be muted and the next speaker registered will be called.

Once speakers have completed providing public comment, please disconnect from the public comment line and join us by following the meeting via Seattle Channel broadcast or through the listening line option listed on the agenda.

The council reserves the right to eliminate public comment if the system is being abused or if the process impedes the council's ability to conduct its business on behalf of residents of the city.

Any offensive language that is disruptive to these proceedings or that is not focused on an appropriate topic as specified in Council rules may lead to the speaker being muted by the presiding officer.

Our hope is to provide an opportunity for productive discussions that will assist our orderly consideration of issues before the Council.

The public comment period is now open.

and we will begin with the first speaker on the list.

Please remember to press star six after you hear the prompt of, you have been unmuted.

Thank you, Seattle.

All right, we will start with in-person commenters and everybody will have two minutes and we'll proceed in the order in which people registered to speak on the signup sheet.

So could you please call the first speaker?

The first speaker is Alan Rosema.

Can you speak up or can you, please hold one moment, please.

Need to make sure that your microphone is on.

It's on, okay, proceed.

My name is Alan Rosema.

I'm Executive Director of Skagit Tony's Observe Farmland located in Skagit County, Mount Vernon, Washington.

And we'd just like to take this opportunity to provide some comment about the FERC relicensing process that's occurring with Seattle City Light and Hydro Projects upriver from where the bulk of the farmland in Skagit County exists.

By way of background, Skagit Valley is home to one of only two fully functioning ag economies left in Puget Sound.

And it is home by all measure to one of the healthiest watersheds left in Puget Sound.

And this is not by accident.

There's been over half a century of local land use regulations are, and I'll speak to the agricultural side, landowners coming together, working with government, working with partners, to put in place some of the most restrictive protective agricultural and land use policies not only protect agricultural land but our natural resources to manage growth in a way that keeps our natural areas natural, recovers habitat and keeps our natural economy going.

We are disappointed that SPF has been directly involved for 34 years in a lot of this work directly and indirectly.

continues to marginalize and exclude the agricultural community from a lot of these conversations, particularly when there's discussions about using our agricultural lands.

So we would like to urge the Seattle City Council to continue to direct Seattle City Light to engage with our local stakeholders, engage with the local community, and to include flood control and include fish passage as part of the project.

This is very important to us in the Saskatchewan Valley, to the Saskatchewan watershed.

And we look forward to continuing to try and aid.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Who is the next speaker?

The next speaker is Matt Steinman.

Hello, City Council.

I want to thank you all for allowing myself and all of us from Skagit County to come up and talk to you, with you today.

Again, my name is Matt Steinman.

I run Foothills Farm.

We are in Cedar Woolly, Washington, right in the heart of Skagit County.

Our farm is a fourth-generation family farm.

We run about 100 acres of vegetables and berries, have 1,500 chickens that are all out on pasture.

We farm with regenerative, climate-friendly practices.

We have a fish stream, Hanson Creek, that runs through our property.

We engage heavily in creating natural buffers and habitat for the salmon, for the ecosystem around us.

We sell our products throughout the state from Bellingham along the I-5 corridor down to Olympia.

We're highly engaged here in the city of Seattle.

We go to four farmers markets, selling to many thousands of your constituents throughout this city.

And I've engaged in these conversations over the last year or two since I've become aware of the situations throughout regarding the dams, regarding the fish passage within within Skagit County and on the Skagit River.

And basically our tribal friends and neighbors are requesting that the City of Seattle and Seattle City Light put fish passage through the dams to Ross Lake.

This would open up 37% of the Skagit River main stem to fish habitat.

this is very important to us that we focus on fish passage on the Skagit River.

Thank you so much, councilmembers, for allowing us to be here and allowing me to present to you.

Have a great day.

Thank you.

And I just want to make sure that the volume is being heard by people outside of this room.

Seattle Channel, is that okay?

Audio sounds fine.

Thank you.

All right, please call the next speaker.

The next speaker is Jenna free bill or Jenna Friday.

Just so you know that chime is at 10 seconds remaining.

So in case you were wondering what that interruption was.

Go ahead.

Okay, thank you for letting us present today, I'm Jennifer evil executive director of this gadget drainage and irrigation district consortium represent 12 special purpose districts in the lower schedule river valley about 60,000 acres of sustainable farmland 30 plus miles of river levy.

20 miles of marine dikes.

We've been participating in the City Light relicensing process since it started four years ago.

We've had one message and it's been very clear.

We need increased flood storage at Russ and a shift from December 1st to November 1st in that timing to align better with flood season.

Throughout the process, we've made it clear that the infrastructure that we're protecting includes most of the major cities downstream of the Seattle light dams, major transportation quarters, hospitals, schools.

water treatment plants and sewer treatment plants.

This is really important to our community.

We've made multiple filings and the draft license doesn't request, doesn't reflect any of our requests for flood storage and flood risk reduction.

Even though we've been involved and clear with our ask, even though the purpose of ROS primarily is for flood storage when it was authorized in the 1940s, we've been excluded by and large from the process.

And I'm here today to ask the City Council to ensure that our voice is being heard and that we are included in the process.

We've heard multiple conflicting statements through City Light, relicensing staff and flood control and facility operators, and that's really why transparency and inclusion is important to us.

We have multiple cities that are signing on to our draft license comment letter, and many of them couldn't be here today, but this is the number one priority for flood control.

Thanks.

Thank you.

The next speaker is Andrew Miller.

Good morning, my name's Andrew Miller, and I am a Skagit County PUD Commissioner.

That's my part-time job.

I'm an elected official in Skagit County, a bit of a water commissioner, if you will.

And my day job is I grow tulips up in the Skagit Valleys, for which we're so known.

It's a bit of a homecoming for me.

I also studied law up at Seattle U, so it's fun to be back.

I'm here today to ask the council to exercise some curiosity.

And that's the, I have a lot of constituents that are coming to me asking, why is it that we're having, it feels like there's a disconnect between, in the partnership of maintaining the dams specifically for flood control and then access to water throughout the year.

And I want to assume positive intent.

And usually it's been my experience also as a PUD commissioner, that there's usually a deeper and more complex answer to this, to that question of what's going on.

Our concern from a utility district is really in flood control.

And I'm asking people to trust the process.

And the sense that we get, at least in Skagit County, is that the process, there's been important elements of that process that may have been either inadvertently or or specifically averted, and that's not an assertion that I bring lightly, but it's really important for us in Skagit County, because we really do want to be great partners.

We've got a phenomenal natural beauty and agricultural heritage and a future that we'd like to maintain, and it's going to require actions from our urban neighbors, such as the City of Seattle.

So we're excited to participate in that process.

We come here with the spirit of collaboration and we're grateful for the opportunity to share our thoughts.

Thank you.

The next speaker is Eiko Vojkovic.

Since I hate to talk to the empty chair, so I'm going to direct my comment to you.

My name is Eiko Vojkovic.

I own Skagit River Ranch.

I've been farming for 25 years now.

And we have like 250 heads of cattle, 800 chickens, some hogs.

Through Farmers Markets, Puget Sound Food Hub Network, PCC Markets, I serve over 20,000 customer here in Puget Sound area.

My farm have about 1,400 feet along the Skagit River, and I've been given up a lot through creps and substitute in the past to protect salmon runs.

I've done my share, and what I want to say today is simple.

We all know fish passage works, and it's proven that they will protect the salmon runs.

Skagit County has one of the most fertile land in the county and to provide local food and food security.

So let's cut the crap and leave the farmland alone and build a fish passage, please.

Thank you for your time.

Thank you.

The final in-person speaker is Will Honea.

Oh, thank you, good morning Council members, my name is will honey for the past 15 years of handled natural research legal matters schedule kind of government.

I grew up commercial fishing in this gadget around the northwest on a small farm a schedule county also spent a lot of years here in this beautiful city tending law school fishermen's terminal grown up commercial fishing.

We all have a lot of regional connections to each other.

You know, so it pains us to have to come here and talk about this, but I want to thank you on behalf of county government for hearing our concerns.

It's a privilege to live in an open society based on transparency, even if it seems a little messy and uncomfortable sometimes.

I've brought a letter reflecting Skagit County's views on some of these issues.

And we've dropped that off.

Um, I think, uh, commission county commissioner Browning is, uh, on remotely and would like to add, uh, some comments.

So I won't go too deeply into anything else.

Um, I just reflect or echo what my Skagit friends and neighbors said today.

And what I will say is this and leave you, you know, I'd ask you to please understand that we're trying really, really hard to keep farming and fishing as a part of our community and our culture over the longterm.

And that requires coming together with the three Skagit Treaty tribes that hold rights under the Treaty of Point Elliott.

So the ask here is for Seattle to afford our community the space to do that.

So thank you for hearing our concerns.

Thank you.

It looks like there are no other in-person commenters, so we will proceed with the folks signed up on the online sheet, starting with David Hawkins and please remember to press star six to unmute.

Can you hear me?

Yes.

Okay.

My name is David Hawkins.

I'm general counsel for the upper Skagit Indian tribe.

These comments are submitted on behalf of both policy and legal for upper Skagit.

Seattle City Lights Skagit Hydroelectric Project occupies the Upper Skagit Indian tribes adjudicated exclusive territory as established pursuant to the Indian Claims Commission order of March 25th, 1960. Land ceded to the United States pursuant to the 1855 Point Elliott Treaty.

Accordingly, from both a cultural perspective, as well as a treaty perspective, Upper Skagit is uniquely impacted by this project.

Unfortunately, Upper Skagit tribal members were not considered citizens of the United States with legal standing to protect their cultural and treaty rights until 1924, some three years after initial construction efforts of the project had begun.

Upper Skagit acknowledges the efforts to date of the Seattle City Council and Seattle City Light staff to bring to resolution issues we are currently addressing in the ongoing Scadgett FERC relicensing process, including fish passage for all three of the City Light dams on the Scadgett.

The Upper Scadgett have lived here for 10,000 years prior to the dams, and Upper Scadgett people are forever connected to the area referred today as the Project Area, along with Upper Scadgett Namesake River, Upper Scadgett Place of Origin and Creation, and numerous other sacred sites.

Upper Skagit ancestors look down today and watch Upper Skagit's efforts to give them the voice and choice they were once denied.

They drive Upper Skagit's continued efforts to dare to imagine what once was and could be.

It's time to answer their call to restore and reconnect the Skagit ecosystem function by providing fish passage.

Thank you.

Sorry, I just wanted our listeners to know that we have one, two, three, four, five, five more speakers.

The next step is Scott Schuyler.

Good morning, can you hear me?

Yes.

Yes, good morning, Council.

My name is Scott Schuyler, Tribal Elder and Policy Rep for the Upper Skagit Indian Tribe.

Again, I want to thank the Council, Deborah Smith, City Light staff for all of the efforts to date And I'm inviting, on behalf of the tribe, the city council to become a partner with the tribe on fish passage.

Again, to honor our ancestors by moving forward with providing fish passage for all three dams.

And our ask is pretty simple and straightforward at this point.

We're about to file some prescriptive asks on behalf of the tribe, the federal agencies will, that have 4E authority.

And we hope that the city light considers them and moves forward with their spirit and intent to provide passage and move forward again as a partner with the tribe.

Again, thank you for your time.

Thank you very much.

The next speaker is Dave Hallock followed by Peter Browning.

Good morning.

I'm Dave Hallock, a resident of Skagit County and a former resident of Seattle.

We strongly support and appreciate the leadership of the Skagit County Board of Commissioners and asking the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to require you to mitigate for your dam operations at your dam sites.

You should be investing in fish passage to enable salmon to access the 37% of the Skagit that lies above your dams.

You have an environmental ethical obligation to do this.

And I imagine the citizens of Seattle generally share this feeling.

Your obligation extends beyond the profits you generate and the utility rates you provide big corporate entities like Amazon, who should share our desire for you to do the right thing for salmon in the Skagit River.

We are one large community when it comes to protecting our environment and vital features of it like salmon.

And we should not let one-sided considerations like electric utility profit margins get in the way of caring for salmon.

This appears to be what you have been trying to do.

Why do you have to be forced by the federal government to do the right thing?

City of Seattle, do the right thing.

Build fish passage.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

I appreciate that.

Peter Browning.

Good morning, council members.

My name is Peter Browning, and I'm a Skagit County Commissioner.

I spent a significant part of my 69 years in Skagit County.

As you know, Seattle City Light is seeking a new federal license for Skagit dams, and we've spent a lot of time on the process the last three years.

It's our feeling that Seattle City Light has shut us out of any meaningful role in the relicensing process.

This is a problem.

And it's part of the reason the relicensing has been such a challenge.

We're all public entities and we feel like it would be best to just directly and openly explain our community's objectives.

First flood storage behind Ross is important.

All we ask is that Seattle City Light follow the U.S.

Army Corps of Engineers recommendations for safe flood storage at the Skagit project as Jenna pointed out.

Second Seattle City Light is looking to buy up Skagit farmland as mitigation for the project's impacts on salmon rather than installing fish passage.

Skagit City Light has already bought up more than 10,000 acres of farmland and forest land over the past couple of decades as mitigation removing these lands from our tax rolls which is tough for me and takes money away from our schools which is important for me fire departments and much else.

This also undermines our longstanding effort to keep farming viable in Skagit.

Worst of all, there's no evidence that buying up land in Skagit County has helped increase the number of salmon coming back to the Skagit at all.

Like Skagit tribes, we asked that Seattle City Light install fish passage instead.

It's really working on the Baker River dams that help provide our community's electricity, and all we seek here is equity.

We support Seattle City Light's mission to provide reasonably priced electricity for the city of Seattle, but we are having a problem meeting our primary objective, and we really need your help.

Thank you for listening to our concerns.

Thank you very much.

Our next speaker is Lisa Fenley, followed by Melissa Norris.

And I must note that Council Member Sawant has been present for the past, 15 or 20 minutes, and I neglected to mention that earlier, sorry.

Go ahead, Lisa.

Hello, my name is, okay, can you hear me okay?

Yes.

My name is Lisa Fanley, and I'm a fifth-generation property owner off of Mark Road in Rockport.

My husband and I have built our entire life around this 20-acre property that we've raised our children on and beef cattle.

We are very concerned about the future stability of our property and our community.

I would like to see a program that was implemented by Puget Sound Energy on the Baker River Dam to be considered for CLC light and salmon recovery instead of buying up private land and partnering with entities like Skagit River Systems Cooperative to do their homework.

I believe that such entities like Skagit River Systems Cooperative are a huge liability for state and city agencies due to the fact that their plans never include future maintenance once they have manipulated the flow of the Skagit River that has been federally classified as a wild and scenic river.

I would like to see people who are genuinely interested in stamina recovery always, and not just when grant money and relicensing are involved.

I think we should all be concerned about the longevity of salmon recovery while not forgetting about the safety of community and neighborhoods along the Seattle River.

I think the right thing for the city of Seattle is to provide safe and effective fish passage and be good stewards of the land that we live on.

Thank you for this opportunity.

Thank you very much.

And our last speaker, Melissa Norris, please.

Hey, my name is Melissa Norris and I also live on Martin road and Rockport and we raise grass fed beef.

We have a teaching farm where we do regenerative agriculture.

And our main concern, one is fish passage, but secondly is really the flood control and that Seattle City Light would take that into consideration and take it seriously.

As we saw from the last major flood event that happened last year, lives were in danger.

We were cut off and had the highest flooding here that we've ever had in history.

Not only does that damage our farmland, but it also puts lives at danger and they have a major opportunity here to help put measures in to fix that.

Okay, thank you very much.

Seeing no other in-person or online speakers, the public comment period will be closed.

I appreciate you coming all the way down here and speaking about this, as it was not an item on the agenda.

There's little context, but I really appreciate it, and at some point, we will be discussing relicensing going forward.

All right.

So somebody just walked in.

No other speakers?

Okay.

All right.

Public comment is officially closed now, and will the clerk please call read item one into the record.

Agenda item number one, Western Energy Markets briefing, briefing and discussion.

All right, this is technical and dense yet fascinating material.

So I will not venture an introduction or a synopsis of this topic and ask that the presenters come to the table and then just begin your presentation.

Are you ready to go?

Oh, you're probably waiting for some.

Hello.

Good morning.

Let's make sure the mics are on at the table.

Okay.

Good morning, Councilmember.

Thank you for having us here today.

We're excited to begin a conversation with you.

And this is a conversation that we expect to have multiple parts over the coming year.

So we're providing background information and we're providing some what I would call rather deep background information on the market expansion activities in the West.

And then at the same time, we're setting the stage for eventual hopeful participation in what's called the Western Resource Adequacy Program, or the WRAP.

and that's an item that we expect to bring you for action next month in February.

So again, deep background on markets, more immediate background on the WRAP, and we are very excited about this conversation, and it is complex.

So I just wanna let the council members know, feel free to interrupt us as we go if we're going too fast or, you need us to clarify something, because it's most important that we begin to get on the same page in terms of our general knowledge of the subject, and that's our goal today, so thank you very much.

Thank you, yes.

And I'll introduce my team.

Go ahead.

And you can introduce yourself and go down the row.

Actually, I'm going to start back up.

I want to introduce our new Power Management Director, Siobhan Doherty, and she comes to us from a resource adequate or resource acquisition place, which is exciting for City Light, because as we've discussed, it's been a very long time since we've been in a position looking forward with our load forecast and our integrated resource plan, which we brought you earlier.

It's been a long time since we've been in the position where we're actually acquiring resource.

And Siobhan has that as a particular skill set.

And so we're super excited to have her.

And then the others of you, just go ahead and introduce yourself.

Great.

I'm Jim Baggs.

I'm the regulation and market development officer.

And I'll be kicking off this presentation here in a few minutes.

Thank you.

And I'm Josh Walter.

I'm the power contracts and regional affairs manager.

Thank you for having us.

Thank you.

All right.

With that, I think we will just dive in.

I don't know.

We need to move to the next slide, please.

Thank you.

I thought I would start.

I must be getting old.

So just please make sure that you speak directly into the mic.

Thank you.

All right.

We'll start.

That better?

Okay, good.

This is just a slide that shows a little bit of what we hope to have as the flow of our presentation this morning.

We're going to I'm hearing something.

Is that me?

Let's make sure everybody who's in the tiles is on mute, please.

Okay.

Thank you.

There we go.

Now we're back.

Okay.

Thank you.

We're going to go start with a little bit of background, and as Councilmember Nelson mentioned, talk a little bit about the nature of the Western Interconnection, because I think that you will find throughout this conversation that some understanding of how that works is fundamental to any of the rest of the conversation about Western markets and resource adequacy.

We're going to talk a little bit about the interdependence among the various participants in this Western interconnection, a little bit about historical market efforts that have been going on since the mid-1990s.

Josh will talk some about our significant success in participating in the Western energy imbalance market.

We'll talk a little bit about our current market focus.

And then as was mentioned earlier, Siobhan will go over a little bit of background on the RAP program or the resource adequacy element, which is not a market program.

But on the other hand, it is a significant collaborative effort that should be beneficial to Seattle.

So next.

The I want to start here with this a picture of the Western interconnection what you see is. is what's referred to as the Western interconnection.

The lines that are shown on that are the high voltage transmission lines in the West.

And I will talk a little bit more about that in a minute.

But the notion that needs to be understood here is that this interconnection is one single large complex machine.

We tend to think about our role as Seattle City Light as a utility that's in the Puget Sound neighborhood, and we run that system.

That's all true, but we cannot escape the fact that we are one of the many elements of this larger Western interconnected transmission system.

Can we go to the next, please?

This is the same picture on the right-hand side.

Those are not transmission lines.

Those are actually paths where energy flows in a variety of directions over the literally hundreds of transmission lines throughout the Western interconnection.

But this single interconnection covers more than 1.8 million square miles.

It includes almost all of the West, 14 Western states, British Columbia, Alberta, Northern Baja.

It serves a population of 80 million people, over 80 million people.

And it integrates a large share of the generation in the West more so than in the East from hydroelectric facilities like the Skagit plants that we were just hearing about earlier, as well as variable resources, renewable variable resources like wind and solar.

And altogether in the West, there are about 136,000 miles of high voltage transmission lines holding this whole thing together.

The thing that is important to understand about this is that the operation of this large single machine is really controlled by physics.

The loads in this system have to match the generation in this system.

And it's influenced by individual operators, their reliability considerations, their economic considerations, but the physics really govern what actually occurs, whether we have outages, whether we have reliability, and those sorts of things are really the driving force behind the Western interconnection.

Let's move to the next, please.

As I said, the physics of the system requires that this interconnection be balanced at all times.

And by balanced, I mean that the loads that are taking energy off of the system exactly equal the energy that's being injected into the system.

And so there's two important considerations here to keep in mind.

One is the picture that's up on the screen here, and that is that there are 38 individual balancing areas in the Western Interconnection.

And we are one of them.

You can see SCL is up there in the upper left-hand corner.

We're one of the 38. But each one of those individual balancing areas undertakes balancing their loads and their resources independently but we all also are interconnected with one another and so we have transactions and relationships among all of the other balancing authority areas so that we try and after doing our individual work balance the loads and resources for the entire balancing authority area.

So that's the exercise that we and all utilities are engaged in in the West every day.

The other thing that's important about this is a time element.

We think about loads and resources from a planning perspective.

We do things like an integrated resource plan.

We worry about are we going to have enough resources in 20 years out?

And what might our loads be?

And are we going to have increased electrification?

Those kinds of questions we plan for.

And we, I say we, we all in the electric utility world.

land for these things, but we do them on a prospective basis.

And we do our best, but it's hard to project things accurately that are, say, 20 years from now.

So we do that look at our loads and resources.

And then as a time period shrinks and we get closer and closer to the real event or the real time that we're concerned about, We do it again, we do it better as we get closer because we have more knowledge about our loads, we know more about our resources and so forth.

Finally, getting down to a time frame where it's maybe less than a year or so and we begin engaging in economic activities where we maybe enter into contracts, we do things to actually try and true up our loads and resources as we get closer to real time.

Finally, the last two time elements I'll talk about here are the day ahead, So on a day before the actual consumption of energy, we try and project exactly what will happen for every hour of the next day and match up our loads and resources.

And then ultimately, when we get into real time and on the day of.

We actually have people in place that are on desks 24 hours a day, seven days a week that are actually physically matching those loads and resources in a real time basis.

And if any of that gets out of sync on a real time basis, that's when we have problems such as outages and and and and and the like.

So can I interrupt for a second?

Are you telling me that you will that utilities will actually buy or sell capacity?

The day before or we do it in advance and the day before and within the hour.

Right.

Yeah.

And ironically, which doesn't make sense intuitively, we may have sold our looking at a load forecast.

We may have assumed that we had excess power, sold it into the market on a.

pre-scheduled basis to someone, and then the temperature drops, it's colder than we thought, and this is in fact what has just happened.

And now we are also now out in the market on either the day-ahead market or the real-time market, and probably both, attempting to acquire sufficient resource to meet that load.

So when we talk about revenues, and this is even true for the rate stabilization account, the RSA, we talk about net wholesale revenues.

So those are net wholesale revenues, which are a sum total of all the buys and sells that we did for a given month, whether we did them two months in advance or 15 minutes in advance.

Thank you.

Yeah, that's right.

And I mean, that's a lot of just sort of utility gibberish that makes a lot of sense to us as utility geeks.

But it's really critical because as we move forward, we're going to spend time talking about day ahead markets and real-time markets.

And it's really critical to the understanding of those markets because what we're doing here is we're going to be talking about fundamentally changing the manner in which decisions are made and how the operations are carried out in the interconnection.

That's what the market efforts will be if we change how it's operated.

And that includes both the who and the when, and you'll hear more about that in a minute.

Anyway, I'll move real quickly into one slide I just wanted to put in front of everyone because it's a significant thing that we deal with all the time, partly because of the interconnected nature of all the West and the and the dependence that we all have on one another.

There's a substantial amount of regulatory oversight beyond what we experience here in Seattle and the normal regulatory, you know, the council regulation and the city's desires and so forth.

We have the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

We have the North American Electric Reliability Corporation and Western Electricity Coordinating Council, all of which have critical infrastructure protection requirements that govern operations and planning.

We have open access rules for transmission on our system and others.

We have market behavior and anti-market manipulation rules, transmission planning requirements, et cetera.

So there's this whole landscape that we have to operate within that goes along with the operation I just talked about.

Let's move to one more.

Most of what we have been doing and are still doing is bilateral trading.

The buying and selling like Debra just talked about a day ahead of time and so forth is between two different entities within this Western interconnection.

That was essentially the only thing we did prior to 2015. In 2014, the Western energy imbalance market was created, and we'll go over that here in a few minutes, but we joined it in 2020. And that has changed a little bit how we deal with our real-time operations.

We are now currently involved, and again, you're going to hear probably the bulk of our conversation here is about day-ahead market potential and possible participation.

And then ultimately, full market integration occurs with a regional transmission organization or an independent system operator.

Could be down the road someday.

Past attempts, as I said, started back in the mid-90s with an effort called Indigo.

A lot of the Western utilities participated in.

Then the California independent system operator was formed.

So the utilities in California do operate within a market, just within their own state boundaries.

There was an effort in the early 2000s to create an RTO, a regional transmission organization called RTO West or Grid West.

didn't come to fruition.

In the Southwest, there was an effort called West Connect, same story there.

In about 2014-15, we participated in an effort called the MC Initiative that also didn't actually come to fruition.

And then finally, the energy imbalance market, which we are now currently participants in, did did happen in 2014, we joined in 2020, and I will turn it over to Josh who will give us a little bit of background on both the energy and balance market as well as some of our current efforts on the day ahead.

Before Josh starts, I just want to throw something out there just in case folks remember or wonder.

Jim Banks, of course, has served in many roles at City Light, including two gigs as the interim general manager CEO.

And I guess it was probably about a year and a half ago or so, we started talking about how much market activity there was and how important it is for City Light as the largest utility in the Northwest, the largest public utility in the Northwest, for City Light to be involved and to help ensure that there are choices and that the market designs that are evolving would benefit us.

So about a year ago, we took Jim, and he's been pretty much full-time on market work for the last year.

We could have five people full-time on market work and still not cover everything, that's how much is happening.

But I just wanna note that we've been super, super fortunate.

Jim has worked for both investor-owned utilities and public power, and so he has the credibility and the relationships with folks that have really been important for us, and so I really, really appreciate.

I think it's a great opportunity for him to be willing to take that special assignment.

Other duties as assigned, how about that?

Thank you.

Thank you for that.

Well, thanks for the setup, Jim, and thanks for the opportunity to speak to market evolution and market participation.

Maybe a quick background So what it actually does is allows participants to buy and sell power close to the time electricity is consumed and gives system operators real-time visibility across neighboring grids.

The results improve balancing supply and demand at a lower cost.

and provides participants an additional revenue stream and time horizons that traditionally have not been available on a bilateral basis.

The Western Energy Imbalance Market started, as Jim mentioned, in 2014, when Pacificor became the first participant in the market.

After, again, as Jim showed earlier, one of the initiatives, the market coordination effort, collapsed.

So The energy imbalance market was born out of one of the efforts on a regional basis where we were attempting to coordinate and create our own market.

But, yeah, EIM kind of was what ultimately resulted in this market evolution back in 2014. Over 80 percent of the West participates in the market, and Seattle became a market participant in the spring of 2020. The market evolution at the region or in the region to a more organized market is, we like to, or I like to think of it similar to a cell phone analogy.

Next slide, please.

Thank you.

Who doesn't own a smartphone?

Right flip phones may were there to help move your voice short and short text.

But that's about it.

A smartphone smartphone shows you the real time data on grid conditions allows you to bank allows you to speak and FaceTime or video chat.

So this example is really used to show that what we're ultimately doing is evolving in technology from picking up the phone on a bilateral basis to trade with a partner into technology that is more It's modernized, right?

It's working towards meeting efficiencies.

Bilateral markets, again, where you pick up a landline or a flip phone to call a counterparty moves energy.

But that's it.

And it's only in an hourly time frame.

Right now with EIM, we're talking about optimizing on a five and 15 minute basis.

That traditionally has those time frames have not been available in trading windows.

And to take it a step further, an automated day ahead market does all of those things and all of these things, but at a much greater scale.

So we're talking in EIM, the number of trades at or around 5% of the transactions in a real time space where there's anecdotally approximately half or 50% of the trades that occur in the market are in the day ahead time space.

So I'm going to move on to the next item on the agenda.

Again, recounting or recapping some of the reasons why we elected to join the energy and balance market.

We projected three primary In the next slide with those projected benefits in our decision making, we are finding that they're they're becoming true.

And we are we are realizing the benefits that we were projecting and showcasing in the reasons for joining the market.

In quantifying our benefits, the market as a whole has reduced over 310,000 metric tons of CO2 emissions through greater integration of renewable resource deployment and has resulted in over $30 million in benefits to our customers.

So in recognizing and realizing, I think, how helpful and beneficial EIM has been.

As Jim had mentioned earlier, it has been wildly successful, not only for Seattle, but also for market participants as a whole.

Again, that 80% of the Western load or the West population is being served by EIM in real time.

Can you stay on this slide for a second?

I have to understand this better.

So are you basically saying that when you talk about integration of renewable energy, and these are short, these are day ahead or even shorter term interval transactions, are you basically saying that if energy from wind or solar is needed that the automation provides that it can pull from those resources and therefore maybe grow the market or something?

Is that kind of where you're going with that?

Yes, exactly.

So it's it's it's a place for it to go.

Right.

It's a it is a an opportunity where based on a resource owner, a you know, a wind plant or a solar producer has a place for the energy to flow.

There are some mechanics behind bid strategy and making sure that it actually is in, you know, in the bid stack for how it is deployed, but you're exactly right.

It is displacing I'm not sure if that's the right way to put it, but the idea that renewable resources are in how these CO2 savings are quantified is the idea that it's displacing other resources and other resources that historically are emitting resources.

So think coal or natural gas.

Remember also that wind and solar, while they're highly desirable from a cleanliness perspective, are also variable, which provides challenges for us in their operation.

What Josh is talking about here in the energy imbalance market is it provides, it helps provide a mechanism so that if in a given five minute period of time, the sun goes behind a cloud or the wind stops blowing or the wind picks up, that it allows the market to respond and react to those changes in those variable resources in a way that you can't do without the automated solution.

Thank you.

Great question, and thanks, Jim.

So moving to the next slide, I'm going to kind of transition away from the EIM market and into the day ahead and market evolution in general.

We're here today to mainly talk about how the time is right for the next step in market evolution.

With the success of EIM, we're now thinking and working on expanding regional markets to continue harnessing that we have been able to do in the last couple of years.

We've been able to do that through regional cooperation while also meeting individual utility interests such as further carbon reduction, improved reliability and cost reductions through market efficiencies.

You know, these are all elements associated with really trying to harness a level of So with that in mind, there are opportunities.

There's more than one.

We are working on and engaging in multiple potential opportunities in a day ahead market.

The California Independent System Operator, or CAISO, who's the market operator for EIM, is developing their extended day ahead market initiative that essentially is an extension of the EIM into the day ahead, right?

So making their current day ahead market available to entities outside of California.

So it's very similar in how it is kind of blossoming, if you will, similar to EIM, right?

There are options or the ability to join the market.

You can elect to join the market.

We can work through and are currently working through the market mechanics and the rules associated with participating in California's or CAISO's market.

So that is definitely on the table for an option for us to move forward with the day ahead, with the day ahead market.

Additionally, the Southwest Power Pool, a market operator based in Little Rock, Arkansas, is looking to expand their market into the West and is offering a similar product to CAISO's day ahead market.

So that's one of the things that we're working on.

what works best for the entities and our market options.

The Western Markets Exploratory Group is doing exactly what its name implies.

It is exploring alternatives in market operators, footprint size, and connectivity, and that connectivity is, you know, transmission, transfer, capability, speak.

in and amongst the various balancing authority areas.

If you remember Jim's earlier slide on the 38, and I actually forgot to correct that.

There's 39 now, but we're parsing, splitting hairs.

And how to maximize the benefits with various iterations of the market.

So we're ultimately looking at harnessing momentum while also working towards maximizing benefits and not just thinking about it from an individual basis, but from a regional basis.

Next slide.

So is this a revenue generation?

Is that one of the benefits here?

I mean, when you're talking about these markets and being able to participate, is it because one balancing area might have the potential of generating some revenue for its rate payers or for its own system by entering into these transactions that aren't immediately serving the rate payers?

Yes, there's a couple different aspects to that, right?

One of the important aspects of the market in and of itself is efficient dispatch, right?

So it's the idea of prices in the market being in a way that can can more accurately reflect system conditions and to the extent that there's an opportunity for one balancing authority or one market participant to to sell in the market at I think that's a good point.

I think that's a good point.

I think that's a good point.

the supply side for revenue.

It also, on the load side, is an opportunity for our customers to receive lower cost power in helping keep our rates low.

So it's a combination of both supply and demand and the efficiency associated with the market operator having full grid visibility in how the conditions of the market are.

So hopefully that made sense.

Yeah, and I only ask that because I'm imagining that some people are listening to this thinking, why don't we just run our own system?

And so I just wanted to make sure that it's understood that this is that you are keeping ultimately the interest of the rate payers in mind and also keeping in mind that supply is volatile from one day to the next.

Thanks.

Go on.

Okay.

Again, kind of carrying on or following on the why now, we again want to continue to to leverage the opportunity from EIM.

But again, the EIM really only operates in short timespans as we set things up earlier, right?

There's multiple trading windows that could use the efficiencies associated with a centrally dispatched, you know, energy market.

So due to, you know, the success of EIM where there has been over $2 billion in benefits across the footprint for and through market participation in EIM since 2014. Climate change is showcasing reliability challenges where further cooperation is necessary in light of drought, wildfires, and hydro uncertainty as a specific issue for us.

customers are demanding further integration of non-emitting resources, again, those opportunity for wind and solar non-emitting resources to have access to the market in order for their dispatch to help serve us and our customers.

I think that that's a wildly important aspect of market evolution and the opportunity for new resources to be deployed into the region.

Also, and this is especially hard on Seattle, is we want to maximize the value of our resources.

and our resource characteristics.

So this gets a little bit wonky, but I think it's really important that simple energy transactions do not fully appreciate the ability of hydro to meet the uncertainty and flexibility components of a changing grid.

If you were to put up kind of a value on what and why hydro is so important, its ability, as Jim was mentioning earlier about, let's say, cloud cover, on a five-minute basis makes multiple thousands of non-emitting resources unavailable because their solar is just not able to generate.

And it might be a very small window of time, but hydro is perfectly positioned to meet that uncertainty need where it can ramp incredibly quickly and respond almost instantaneously to a need.

But we need the market operators and the automation in order to achieve that, rather than wait for a call, pick up the phone and say, hey, can you dispatch that multiple, whatever that order might be.

So Hydro is uniquely situated to participate and drive new revenue streams, as mentioned earlier, through its participation.

Finally, and this has been mentioned a couple different times, we don't want to lose momentum.

As Jim showed earlier, market efforts in the West have come and gone with no results for decades.

So now is the time to harness momentum.

Next slide.

Okay, um, I don't this is essentially a reiteration of the last the last slide.

So we don't need to cover this too in depth, but one one highlight is the the idea of of the efficient usage of our transmission system is is imperative to keeping customer costs low.

I think that we can't lose sight of the transmission system and its importance in markets and market evolution.

Next slide.

And what we're ultimately looking for in a market is, through the evaluation, there's kind of a laundry list of what well-designed looks like to us.

It is something that reduces production costs.

Investment cost savings is an important aspect of evaluating a market.

we're going to be able to do a lot of work on that.

And also, reduction in overall customer costs.

And again, we don't want to lose sight of that last point.

If anything, that is the highlight of markets and market integration is working towards continuing to keep our customer costs low.

Next slide.

Again, the desirable outcomes are, you know, the idea that existing an additional ability, the ability to integrate renewables is hugely important in, for us in Washington State as well as in Seattle with our compliance requirements.

Additionally, focusing on the results of the market as a whole and the footprint as a whole is important in that in order to derive the most benefits, we need the largest number of market participants.

So being islanded is not a desired outcome and will likely kind of fracture the momentum I spoke of earlier.

This is, you know, maybe for the sake of time, let's move to the next slide, please, thank you.

Right, this is maybe another reiteration of what our interests are.

Again, customer benefits being the highlight.

Next slide.

And then reiterating our activities, CAISO and their extended day head market is a significant movement in market evolution.

And again, harnessing the, the benefits of EIM in the dayhead space is an important aspect of our deliberation of where and what we believe is the right choice for us.

The WMAG in exploring different market opportunities and that we have been working on for the last couple of years.

We have been working on the market footprints, the southwest power pool, and with that linkage to our resource adequacy work that Siobhan is going to cover in a couple of seconds.

I want to leave you with the in EDAM as well as in MarketsPlus in 2023 and 2024. 2025 is when the EDAM will most likely launch with CAISO.

SPP will most likely launch their market the following year in 26. And I just want to leave us with the idea that an RTO may or most likely will be on the horizon in 2030. with both Colorado and Nevada having a regulatory requirement to join an RTO by 2030. So with that, my portion is over.

Thank you.

Great.

Good morning.

Thank you for having us.

I am going to talk a little bit about the Western Resource Adequacy Program.

And this is just going to be a short overview and introduction to resource adequacy and WRAP.

You guys should have received a memo last week that goes into further details.

And as mentioned earlier, we'll be coming back to the council later this spring to talk in more detail about this and ask for the authority to join the program.

But to start out, I just wanted to provide a quick introduction to resource adequacy, and that is a regulatory construct to ensure that there's sufficient resources to meet our electricity load.

Normally, this would be part of a market design, but in the absence of a market in the Northwest, we're working with our counterparties across the region to develop a program specifically for us.

So first, let's talk about why this is happening right now.

There have been a number of studies that demonstrate the potential need for additional resources in the middle of this decade.

And this is being driven by a couple of things.

There's a lot of fossil fuel generation that's being retired across the West, and this is being replaced by solar and wind and other renewable resources that are intermittent.

And then this is being exasperated by load growth, including electrification.

And then some of the extreme weather events that we've seen, as well as drought conditions, are making this even more exasperated.

And this was clear also in our IRP that you guys reviewed last year.

So the Western Resource Adequacy Program, or WRAP, was developed to address these challenges and ensure that there are sufficient resources across the region.

Currently, each utility in the West is planning for its own resource needs.

They're not collaborating across the region and there is no standardization across the region.

This means that we could be either over-procuring or under-procuring because we don't know what is needed across the region and we're not coordinating.

The WRAP program, the WRAP is seeking to change this by coordinating across the region on what resources are actually available to meet needs.

This effort started in 2019, and Seattle City Light has been involved since the beginning.

And this was driven by industry participants, by the different utilities, and they're seeing that there was a potential shortfall coming up.

The effort is being led by a nonprofit organization based in Portland called the Western Power Pool, or WPP.

And it is a voluntary program that we can choose to join.

And once we join that, we will be bound by the requirements of that program.

And again, this is not an organized market, but would be in other regions where there are markets, this is an aspect of markets.

But since there is not a market in the West, this is being developed separate from that.

Next slide.

This is just a quick timeline.

As we mentioned, we're planning to come back to request the authority to execute a contract to join this program.

The program does start out as a non-binding phase as we learn how the program will operate.

It'll then transition to a binding.

And each participant has the option to choose at what point in the program they want to go binding up to a certain point.

And so our plan is to elect that latest binding phase in 2028 which gives us plenty of time to know how the program is working and how it would impact our operations and our plans.

That's my last slide, I believe.

Yeah, thank you.

Do you have any other comments that you'd like to make?

And I failed to point out that we do have Central Staff extraordinaire Eric McConaughey with us, so I will invite you to, Eric, to add anything or ask any questions as well.

Well, thanks for the introduction.

Yeah, good morning.

I'll just jump in.

I don't have anything to add.

I really appreciate the detail involved here, and I expect there'll be some more coming.

My understanding is that this is the sort of foundation for future discussions about resource adequacy, and I'll stay tuned.

Thank you very much.

And we will be having a transportation electrification briefing coming up soon, which is just to to sort of tee up the fact that we've got a lot of that are our demand for hydro is is is. growing at the same because of our transition from fossil fuels and at the same time with droughts and floods, et cetera, that you really do need to think about how can we best aim for stability, I think.

So I really appreciate this overview and it kind of makes me think, well, How could we have been operating without this level of coordination up to this point?

So I appreciate that.

Do my colleagues have any questions or comments?

Yes, Council Member Herbold.

Thank you.

I have a couple of questions.

And you may have covered this.

On slide 26 on resource adequacy, it says it is not an organized market.

Can you talk a little bit more about what that means to not be an organized market?

Yeah, sure.

So an organized market is similar to what Josh and Jim were speaking about, where there's an automated exchange of electricity.

This is a planning program, so about seven months ahead of when we would expect demand and electricity generation to occur.

We will look at how many resources do we have and what's our expected demand.

And then we plan a little bit above that demand.

This is a planning program.

We're not selling or buying resources through this program.

It's just a planning program to make sure there's enough resources available.

So an organized market would be one.

That was buying and selling resources that is that what got it market with councilmember and organized market would either be an independent system operator if it is a generally if it is one state, like think, Texas and or caught when they had that meltdown a couple years ago.

Okay, and then if it's a regional entity, it's called an RTO, a Regional Transmission Organization.

In both instances, they control the transmission within their footprint, and transmission owners actually turn the transmission, responsibility for operating that transmission, over to the system operator.

And then they operate it in the most efficient way, and they use efficient dispatch for the region.

That's helpful, thank you.

I just wanna say one quick thing, because I wasn't here when Council did the work to approve the EIM, but I know that some of you were, and that was a different deal.

I mean, that was almost like something where people went dragging and kicking because PAC was the first domino and it fell, and so there was a lot of choice, and most utilities, including City Light, didn't really start, it was when we noticed that there was less liquidity in the prior market and we were actually, we actually had fewer trading partners that caused us, that was one of the factors that caused us to move into the EIM.

This time with the EDAM, the extended day ahead market that Josh was talking about, there is general consensus within the region that this is going to happen.

It's just a question of there'll be two, probably two options, and utilities will make a decision about which option best serves their needs.

But it's not, it's a very different time.

There is an acknowledgement, and even FERC, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission had been very vocally supporting or encouraging the West to organize because we are the only part of the country that does not operate within an organized market.

Got it.

And then secondly, just sort of big picture, we've heard all about the benefits, but what are the risks of participating in this, either to the utility, to the rate payers, and are there steps to take to mitigate those risks?

built into this proposal.

Are you asking about in the wrap or in markets generally?

In the wrap.

When we become binding, there are financial penalties if you make commitments that you do not meet.

So the big benefit of this program is that we can do more efficient planning.

We won't have to over-procure.

But if we make a mistake or are not we are able to meet our customer load and not short on

Speaking of risk, I was going to ask that question, but are there any costs or fees or tariffs or any additional costs for participating once this becomes binding?

Yeah, in the rep program there are fees for participating and for running the program.

We have been under a MOU, a Memorandum of Understanding, with the program, with the Western Power Pool, as part of developing this program, where we have contributed money to help the development of it because we do see it as very important.

And there will be ongoing fees.

They're pretty minor compared to the benefits that we're getting from the program.

Thank you.

I might add also that that there is a tariff associated with the program that's not yet approved.

But the RAP program has a tariff that has been filed at FERC that's still under deliberation right now.

But ultimately, there will be a regulatory document that governs how the program will operate.

Thanks.

Okay, if there are no other, so I'm looking, scanning my colleagues, seeing if there are any other questions.

I'm not seeing any.

Do you want to, are there any comments from presenters or Eric to wrap up?

When will we interact with this topic next, please?

Thank you.

Eric, anything from your end?

No, just to say that I'm looking forward to what you're probably going to say, General Manager, that we anticipate some legislation, some decision-making in the future for Council.

And in my role, I always like to see when City Light comes in, and you do this often, early and often, to inform the Council so they can have a basis for the decision.

So we'll gear up for that, and Council, your staff will be meeting with City Light staff to prepare for that decision-making sequence, and I'll hand it over to the General Manager.

Thanks.

Thank you, Eric.

And so I guess what I would say is two things.

One, because we know these are really technical topics.

We did provide a pretty detailed memo to Council Member Nelson and I believe Council Member Strauss.

If others or if your staff are interested in it, we can certainly get that over to you so that you can dig a little deeper into just the wrap.

And yes, we expect to bring this back to you hopefully next month for actual action.

Thank you.

Madam Chair.

Yes, please.

May I ask a clarifying, thank you Madam Chair, a clarifying question for Director Smith.

So when you say you're going to come back, so are we looking at, and maybe you can answer this Madam Chair or Eric, are we looking at passing an ordinance or a resolution or an agreement to pass on the agreement?

What would that look like?

Eric?

Yeah, my understanding is that would be it would require an ordinance to authorize city like to enter into this agreement with wrap, because it's outside of the scope of what the code allows simulate general manager to enter into right now.

The city, the Seattle Municipal Code allows to be like to enter into lots of different kinds of agreements without Council of 40. well understood and sort of day in day out kinds of stuff.

But a decision of this level would require a council to approve it as the governing body.

So that's what we anticipate seeing.

And if I said anything wrong, city light folks, if I misrepresented things, please correct me.

So Madam Chair, we would be getting an agreement ahead of time to look at to vote on?

Absolutely.

And we will need to discuss internally when that happens because we've got a pretty full month coming up.

We'll get back with more specific timing.

Okay.

So if that is all on this topic, while I have you still at the table and before we adjourn, this is off topic, but the attacks on substations, speaking of infrastructure, nationally and more regionally have prompted some reporting and some questions that I'm receiving.

and nothing has impacted City Light infrastructure to my knowledge, but I just thought I'd ask, just assuming that your security folks and infrastructure people are on it.

Yeah, let me just give you just a little bit of information that hopefully will make everyone feel a bit better.

So, first of all, as part of the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, we call that NERC, substations are categorized as critical assets and must meet minimum security requirements.

And I think we've mentioned before, in fact, this is an audit year under SIP, correct?

And so we focus both on cyber protection, but also physical protection of assets that could interrupt the bulk electric system.

That's generally how things are defined.

We've spent about $2 million annually on substation security upgrades since 2007. So again, that's been a priority.

Important to note too, Jim actually runs that regulatory program as well.

City Light is, we're regularly in contact with local and federal law enforcement.

For instance, when things come down and the FBI's involved, we have access to those conversations.

We also participate in national information sharing sources that often provides to us information that isn't even available publicly.

It's information that is of top or fairly high security level.

OK, let me talk just a bit about the two incidents.

OK, so in North Carolina, the activity created physical damage to the substation equipment and the motive and the suspects have not been found.

So we don't know what they were what they were up to.

But at that point, and that was back in November of 2022, we increased our security patrols in and around our substations.

We alerted substation personnel performing routine work of the heightened risk.

We reinforced procedures for access and for escalating.

And then we also did reprioritize some upgrade work based on what we'd seen.

Fast forward into the more recent events with Tacoma and the Tacoma area involving both Tacoma Power and PSC.

I think you're all aware that what happened there was the activity damaged equipment by actually operating live equipment.

Suspects have been caught.

The motive was determined as local petty theft.

And I think even this morning, I saw a paper, an article in the paper that said their plans may have extended, but again, they were caught.

So we've been real fortunate.

We've worked closely with Tacoma Power, worked with industry peers to understand which equipment, what equipment was manipulated and how.

We then went and did an inventory of our substations and determined that we were in fact using that equipment in some locations.

And we have already started to integrate mechanisms to reduce the risk associated with it.

So we have inventoried and assessed our risk.

We have a plan in place to correct for it.

and we're working within the industry to understand any further guidance on substation minimum security requirements.

I think the most important thing to note is that because I was like, well, wow, why would you go after Tacoma and not City Light?

Thankfully, you know, I think the the thing here is this was not a cyber attack.

This was not a this was not an act of terrorism or espionage or anything.

It was local petty theft.

and so very different, certainly odd, to be honest with you, but on the other hand, reassuring for us when we learned what the motive was and then learned, actually, we got a good learning out of it in terms of equipment that we can modify to prevent any vulnerability in the future.

Thank you, Council Member, for the opportunity to share that.

Thank you very much for responding.

I appreciate it.

So did you have one more thing to say?

All right, so we're heading up into our adjournment unless I see any other hands, I do not.

So this concludes the January 11th meeting of the Economic Development Technology and City Light Committee.

Our next committee meeting is scheduled for Wednesday, January 25th at 9.30 a.m.

And this meeting is now adjourned.

It is 11.02.

Thank you.