Jan 23, 2016 City Council on 2016-01-23 9:30 AM

Good morning everyone. No good morning back. Good morning, come on. Good morning everyone. Welcome to the Renewable Denton Q&A session. My name is Ken Banks. I'm the Director of Environmental Services for the City of Denton. I'll be serving today as your moderator. I'm also pulling a bit of double duty and serving as a panelist on a few topics. So you may see me shuffling back and forth a little bit. I appreciate everyone coming out today. We have a large number of folks here and so in the interest of time I'll just very quickly go through some of the specifics. I do want to point out to everyone, just in case you're unaware, this is being televised on DTV and is also being recorded so that it can be viewed later. So I just wanted to make everyone aware of that. We've got a rough timeline that we're looking at and the agenda is available by the door if you haven't had a chance to pick one up. Basically we're going to go through some brief presentations by the panelists that are going to address what we feel are some of the more frequent of the frequently asked questions. And then we'll move right into the session where everyone can ask their own questions from the audience. So some procedural issues just very quickly. I would like to, of course, welcome everyone and to clear up a little bit of what might be some confusion. I've seen this posted as a public hearing and in some areas it's actually a question and answer session so I want to make everyone aware of that. Basically the panelists will discuss the top questions as I had stated that we've had. After this discussion the staff will, our panelists will take questions from the audience. If you do have a question for the panelists, we've set up a central microphone here for your use. When you go to that microphone and when we get to that section of the meeting, please state your name and your address. And we've got a lot of people here today and I'm sure a lot of folks have questions. So in the interest of time, please ask a single question at a time to be respective of the other ones that are in the room that might have questions. Please listen to the questions as they're asked. If someone asks a question that you intended to ask, please don't ask that question again. We're going to have a bit of a challenge trying to get through everyone today in the allocated time I imagine. So please be respective of those folks in the audience that have questions. What I do is the best that we can to get everyone's questions answered during this session. And to do that we're going to have to be efficient. Any additional questions, if you didn't get an opportunity to ask a question, if you think of a question later that you'd like answered, you can send that question to renewabledenton@cityofdenton. com and you will receive a response to that question. A few housekeeping issues. The closest restrooms to this facility are actually out the door to your right and down the stairs. There's a women's restroom as you're facing the wall to the left and a men's restroom to the right. There's another set of restrooms that are down the hall. You will leave this area, go left down the hall, and they're kind of around the next corner that you'll come to. So just want to make everyone aware of those. There are water fountains to your right as you exit. There are also vending machines downstairs if you need them. So just if you have to step out of the meeting, use the facilities, of course feel free. Want to recognize a couple of elected and appointed officials in the audience, and I apologize because it's a little difficult to pick everyone out. Just real briefly, Mayor Watts is in the back, slowly crouching down. And I saw Mayor Pro Tem Dalton Gregory here. And he is Mayor Pro Tem at large place five. I believe I saw Keely Briggs in the audience. Is Keely here ? Oh, there she is right there. Wave to the audience. Keely is District 2. And Kathleen Wasney was here earlier. She is with District 3. I also, oh, I'm sorry, I miss Kevin. Kevin Roden is here as well. Kevin is with District 1. He's there in the back. I also wanted to recognize a few of our appointed officials from our Public Utility Board. Brendan Carroll is in the back. And Susan Parker is in the back as well. Did I miss any council or PUB members? Who would that? Okay. Koby Weinell. Thank you. Oh, is Barbara here? I'm sorry, Barbara. I didn't see you. Thank you. Again, I want to remind everyone, especially in light of having elected and appointed officials here, this is not a public hearing. This is a Q&A session. So when you ask your questions, please do direct those questions to the panelists. I believe that's all the housekeeping issues. I'm going to hand this over now to Brian Dascombe, who is with Dinton Municipal Electric, for an introduction. Thank you, Ken. Welcome, everyone, and thanks for being here. We put out the invitation to come ask us questions, and thank you for all for participating in that. This is a good opportunity, I think, to decide as a city where we want our power to come from. Well, I wanted to ask the question, why is DME proposing this plan? We've heard a lot of feedback, and some of that has been positive, but as we look around the room, we see a lot of stickers, and we anticipate a lot of objection to this plan. Why, in the face of that objection, are we still proposing it? I mean, do we not understand? Do we not see what the tenor of the room is? Are we unable to gauge what you feel about this? So why are we proposing this, even in the face of some criticism? Well, the answer to that is that we're responding to council direction. We're a community-owned electric utility, and so we answer to the city council, and they gave us this direction. They wanted us to increase renewable energy. We currently have 40 percent wind power, and that's a nation-leading statistic, but they said, "Let's not rest on our laurels. Let's push further and have more renewable energy." They said, "While you do that, we want to make sure that we protect rates. Don't let rates get out of control, and we also want to maintain reliability." I'll briefly mention that reliability, when you're talking about power supply, refers not to the lights going out, not to power outages or blackouts, but rather to the volatility of the electric market and our exposure to that volatility. So as council gave us this direction, I think you'd agree it would be inappropriate of us to say, "We don't want to follow that direction," or, "We like two pieces of this direction, but we don't like the third piece, and so we're not going to pay attention to that." No, it's only appropriate for us to respond to the direction that council has given us. And the response to that direction is the renewable DIN plan, in its most simple form, and of course there's much more to it, but in its simplest form it says we're going from 40 percent renewable to 70 percent renewable. So we're increasing our renewables. We're shrinking our market portion, and that's the purchases we make off of the ERCOT market, from 30 percent to 17 percent. And keep in mind that that's the dirtiest, most emitting portion of our portfolio, is the market purchases, and that 's being cut almost in half. And then we're going from 29 percent coal that we have partial ownership in, divesting ourselves of that interest and going to 13 percent natural gas power. So in real summary form, that's the content of the plan. Now that meets these three criteria. It certainly increases renewable energy. It certainly protects rates. In fact, it has rate decreases beginning in 2020. It's the only scenario we've run that shows rate decreases. And it maintains reliability by reducing our exposure to the Texas market. So I don't want to go on any more than that. I'm sure you 'll have specific questions about that. So now I'll turn it over to Galen Gillum to answer questions about safety. Galen Gillum is our executive manager of administration. He has 32 years of utility experience, and 28 of those are in power generation. He has degrees in law and in business management. Thank you, Brian. One of the questions we've been asked about safety is aren 't these plants at risk of fire and explosion? So I'm going to address that question. First, let me talk. I'm going to talk a little bit about our safety record and the programs we put in place and realize that these plants will be within our safety program . And I think when you see the chart, you'll see that it's been an effective program. It's produced some good results. There's some inherent risk in all forms of power generation . The key is how you deal with that risk. You can't always eliminate it, but sometimes you can. But when you can't, how do you deal with that risk? We'll talk a little bit about some of the safety features, again, trying to be brief to keep things moving, and then show some maps that show the proximity of the plants to structures in the area. Okay, so a little bit about our safety record. What this chart shows is that over the years, the programs that we've implemented for safety at Denton Municipal Electric have had a tremendous effect. This is a chart that shows the incident rate, the employee incident rate per 100 employees that work. And as you can see, it's got a very good trend. It's got a positive that we want to point out. The programs we put in place per 100 employees have caused us to have less than one incident per year for those 100 employees. In fact, we're at .62 in the latest year that we have measurements for. Keep in mind that these plants, if approved, will be put into a program that has these elements that allows us to have this safety performance. This has occurred despite the fact over the last couple of years that we're doing a tremendous amount of additions to our system to meet the growing needs of the city of Denton to replace some aging infrastructure in the city. So we've got a good safety record and we're very proud of it. It takes all folks from Phil Williams down to put this program into place and have these kind of results. Okay, so I want to talk just very briefly about these internal combustion engines at these gas start units. They have some inherent safety features and they also have some installed safety features. Some of the installed safety features include leak detection, should the fuel leak, they have isolation valves that if there is a leak, those valves will shut to stop that leak, ventilation systems, fire detection systems, fire suppression systems, and then the very nature of natural gas. If you drove here, you drove with an internal combustion engine unless you have an electric car, if that fuel leaks, you may have it puddle up and create a problem. If natural gas leaks, it tends to disperse a little bit and provide a little bit less of a problem. So these safety features are added to the plant and inherent in the style of the plant. Proximity to homes. The white outline near the center of the drawing shows the plant footprint. The red drawing around that shows a 500 foot distance around the plant. There's a lighter blue line that shows the actual property boundary. It's a little bit hard to see with some of the greens and browns in the background. But the drawing on the left shows the plant that's to the west of the Denton Airport. The drawing on the right shows the plant that's in the Green Valley area north of the city. And as you can see, there are not a lot of structures nearby to those facilities. I'm going to turn it over to Phil Williams, the general manager. Phil has more than 38 years of experience working for municipal cooperative and investor-owned utilities. He has a degree in accounting. He's a certified public accountant, serves on the boards for ERCOT and Texas Public Power Association and American Public Power Association. Phil? Thank you, Galen. So as I go to cover a question that we frequently got that pertains to rates, one of the questions that we've had is why do we go into more debt for another plant before paying off TMPA? And it's a very good question. We have TMPA debt was structured so that pays off in the last years of that plant. Fortunately, all that debt within TMPA, the generation debt , we paid off by 2018. The remaining debt, which would be about $40 million, a little bit more than that, we paid off by 2025. So those debts are scheduled to be paid off when retired. We look forward to what different power supply do we want in the future. No matter what power supply we choose, debt will be issued to build whatever that power supply is, whether it's a solar farm or a wind farm or these reciproc ating engines, debt will be issued to build those. And we back it up, the rate payers in Denton will be paying that debt regardless of how it's structured. Whether we buy a purchase power agreement from a solar farm or a purchase power agreement for a wind farm, we're backing up and paying that amount, or whether we issue that debt ourselves for our own generation on site here. So no matter what form of generation we go forward with, there will be debt associated with that, and it will be spread out, and usually that debt is paid by the people who are using the power. So no matter which type of generation we go forward with, there will be some debt issued to go forward with that. So as we look at the different types of generation, what we propose is a plan that is 70 percent solar and wind with the backup of quick-fired gas generation. As we looked at different alternatives, and the community and community meetings we've had asked to look at different alternatives, as we looked at different alternatives of 100 percent, 83 percent, different percentages of renewable, we came back to that green line on the bottom is a renewable Denton plan that has the lowest cost. And with that lowest cost comes lower rates. And so this chart shows the rates going forward. As we get to 2019, we can separate from our business as usual, which is the blue line, and have lower rates for citizens going forward. It also protects us because we have such a large percentage of our power under contract of wind and solar power contracts that insulates us from the gas market, gas prices going higher because we'd have so much of our generation locked in at a locked in price. So next question we'll get to is going to be answered by Mary Hounder Davis. Mary is with Burns & MacDonald, Burns & MacDonald Engineering Company. She has 18 years of experience that specializes in air quality permitting, air dispersion modeling, and noise analysis. She serves both industrial and utility clients throughout the United States, specializing in air construction permitting for coal and natural gas power projects. Mary? Thank you, Phil. As Phil stated, I assisted Denton with applying for and receiving the air permits for the two sites. So I'm going to tell you a little bit about the air permits that both the sites received. Both sites received the standard permit for electrical generating units. The emissions were authorized by the TCEQ under the standard permit. These are both minor sources for prevention of significant deterioration and nonattainment new source review. And as minor sources, the TCEQ has determined that there is no measurable effect on air quality or public health, public health including the sensitive populations such as asthmatics and the elderly. They are within the National Ambient Air Quality Standards. The standard permit includes requirements such as a NOX limit. It also includes record keeping and reporting that will have to be reported to the TCEQ for compliance. Originally, there were two air permit registrations that were submitted to the state. The first one was for 12 engines at one site, and this was done because at that time the renewable energy, the renewable Denton plan, the second site, the due diligence hadn't been done, but the applications needed to go in. So we did 12 engines at one site, seven engines at the second site. But now that the renewable Denton plan is finalized, there will be six engines at each site. There are limits on annual emissions to remain minor sources of air pollution at each site. And as I stated before, there will only be a total of 12 engines, not 19, which was included in both of the air permit applications. The TCEQ reviewed all of the emissions and authorized the emissions under the standard permit for each site. Next up, Dr. Banks is going to tell you a little bit about the emissions from the site. The question that I chose to take a look at is, won't the proposed plans further damage Denton's poor air quality? As you know, Denton does have some pretty poor air quality, and air quality in Denton is predominantly rated to be poor because of ozone concentrations. So I wanted to talk a little bit about that in the context of this plan. And it's a complicated subject, and I'm trying to condense it down, so please bear with me for all the text on the screen. So air quality in this area is influenced, or in general, is influenced by emissions, transport, and reaction times. Ozone is formed by the interaction of what are referred to as ozone precursors, which are predominantly nitrogen ox ides, or NOx, and volatile organic carbons, or VOCs. And basically they react with themselves and with sunlight energy over time as they're transported by wind. Denton's air quality with regards to ozone is mainly bad due to the sources that are to the south and to the east of us, and quite a bit of our pollutants actually come from sources outside of the state. So it is a transport issue, and these are transport pollut ants. The proposed plant emissions, as stated by Mary, are actually very low. They fall below a threshold that's referred to as the prevention of significant deterioration, which is why they are allowed to obtain just a standard permit. It's because the emissions are overall very low compared to other sources. I did want to qualify this and kind of try to put it in context to give you a little bit of a sense of what relatively low means. There was a recent study that was done by the University of North Texas that modeled the effects of reducing nitrogen oxides by about 90 percent from five large coal-fired power plants that are located to the south and to the east of the city of Denton. These coal-fired power plants collectively emit quite a large amount of nitrogen oxides, and I'll go through that in just a second. But the change in the amount of emissions by reducing it by 90 percent actually reduced the design value of the ozone monitor at the Denton South Airport Station, which is the monitor that we have in this area that the TCE Q uses for ozone, only by about one part per billion or about a 1.3 percent change. These coal plants, as modeled, emitted 181.72 tons of nitrogen oxides a day. A 90 percent reduction takes that down to about 18.72 tons per day, which is a difference of about 163 tons per day. The proposed Denton plants together emit 0.067 tons per day , and that's about 0.04 percent of the reduced value of 163 tons per day that moved our ozone by about one part per billion. So essentially what that means is that the amount coming out is very, very low compared to other sources, and that is one of the reasons it falls below that threshold of what's known as prevention of significant deterioration that the state uses. So bottom line on that, based on the amount of emissions, it's unlikely that the emissions from these plants are going to have an effect on local ozone due to the concentration of contaminants that are coming out, the lack of reaction time, and the prevailing wind directions that generally move when we have our high ozone days from the south to the north. These plants are also unlikely to influence ozone outside of Denton simply due to the low concentrations. They're a very minor component of a much larger mass of ozone precursors that move through this area and then continue heading northwards. So at this point, I'm going to turn it over to Jim Maynard. Jim Maynard is going to talk about some of the alternative technologies that were considered or thought as possibilities. Just real briefly for Jim's bio, which I had a second ago when I lost. Here it is. Jim Maynard is the Energy Project Development Manager for the Denton Municipal Electric. He is the project manager for the Renewable Denton Plan and has over 10 years of experience in the electric power industry and over 20 years of project management experience . Jim has a degree in geographical sciences as well as an MBA with a specialization in finance. He's an expert in the area of electricity market analysis, including renewable energy. Thanks, Dr. Banks. So a question I chose to answer is why has DME chosen this specific technology to support the Renewable Denton Plan? DME continuously monitors the electric market, including emerging technologies. And a few of the technologies we continue to monitor and investigate are listed here, including reciprocating engines, various forms of storage, and other technologies. So this graphic shows some of these alternative solutions. And the horizontal axis is the power rating solution in meg awatts, and the vertical axis is the discharge time at that rated power. And Denton's area of need, as you can see in the top right corner, is in bulk power management. We need hundreds of megawatts over 12 to 16 hours per day in the summer. Most of the battery technology is in the bottom left corner , and we usually refer to that short duration power as an cillary services. Here's some of these alternative solutions and their costs per megawatt hour. You can see the reciprocating engines have the lowest cost of the dispatchable options on this list. A comparable solution that will perhaps be ready in the future are flow batteries. But their cost right now is around four times as high. So with that being said, here's some of the advantages of the reciprocating engines. They are the best technology for backing renewables that are currently available. I think we're going to move now into the open Q&A session. Before we do that, I wanted to introduce Stephen Johnson. He's one of our panelists that hasn't given a presentation, but I wanted you to know who he is. He's our market operations supervisor. He has 31 years in global commodity markets, and 22 of those are energy focused. He's been materially involved in developing and executing transactions for renewable components and placing them in existing portfolios, including wind, solar, landfill gas, pump storage, and other renewable energy sources. Thanks, Brian. At this point, we'd be glad to take any questions from the audience. I would simply ask again to single question per person to allow folks to have the opportunity to ask a question. If you could, queue up as you feel comfortable for doing. I don't want to prevent people from standing as long as they, you know, as much as we can, so you may want to keep an eye on the line. The microphone's here in the center, and please ask your questions. If you believe the question is directed to a particular panelist, you could certainly ask that panelist or we'll choose to respond. Hello. My name is Jennifer Lane. I'm a resident of Denton, and my question is as follows. DME has stated multiple times at City Council work sessions , and again this morning, that this proposal was created in response to direction by City Council. Yet, you have also stated that you began working in 2012 with dozens of consultants on this renewable plan. And in fact, the renewable plan is both that and a response to a three-part charge, renewable, reliable rates, but then another charge came along that includes 100 percent renewable by 2030. Yet, the plan remains the same. When exactly did you begin working on this renewable plan, and why has the population, especially our neighbors closest to the proposed plans in Aubrey and in Crum, become made aware of it only now? Great expense was used on mailers that were sent out that did not mention this. I'll be happy to answer that. That second question first, so it sounded like there were two questions there. One, when exactly did we get this direction from City Council? And then the second one was what about the notification to the neighbors near the sites? Is that a fair summation? Okay, sure. Sure. So that second part about notification, well, there's really two answers to that. One is there's a question of what are our legal and procedural requirements for notification? So, of course, we would have to meet those. And as we've heard so far this morning, because there's no anticipated deterioration of air quality, because there's no noise or safety concerns, then there's no notification that's required. Now, our procedures say that whenever we build new infrastructure, we notify everyone within a 500-foot buffer . Now, if you're wondering where we got that number, we talked to planning, and that's the furthest they go out. We also talked to power engineers, an engineering consulting firm, and asked them for various projects that you do, what's the furthest out that anyone ever goes for notification? And they said 500 feet. And we said, okay, well, there's no one within 500 feet of these proposed plans. Now, those are our legal and procedural requirements. In addition to those legal and procedural requirements, we 've also had on October 6th a press conference. And as a result of that press conference, partly, we had stories show up in the local paper, the Dinn Record Chron icle. We had stories in the NT Daily, our college paper. We had stories in the Fort Worth Star Telegram. We had some in the Texas Tribune. KERA covered the story. Channel 5 covered the story. There have been dozens of media outlets covering this story . We also had a website launch on the same day that gave full explanation, certainly including the plans at that time. That's seen thousands of visitors. We've had an open house meeting, two open house meetings, in fact. And in anticipation of those open house meetings, we thought together, we thought, how do we notify the people who are going to be most affected by this plan, the Dinn citizens whose rates and power portfolio are going to be affected by it? And we said the best way to notify them is to send a mailer to every single person that's a customer of ours. And so we sent out 45,000 mailers for those open house meetings. We held those two open house meetings. We've held a public hearing with the city council and a public hearing with the public utilities board. Individual council members have held meetings. And so all that to say, if we're trying to keep this plan a secret, we've done a very poor job of it. In fact, there's been a lot of attention on this plan. And so we're glad about that. And we're glad that we have the opportunity today to talk to you about it before the city council votes on this. That's one of the advantages of public power is we get to make these we get to make these decisions. The city council gets to make these decisions as a result of a conversation with the community. Now, the first question was about when exactly did we start working on this plan or when did we get the direction from city council? Now, I remember that the first council meeting of 2015 and I don't remember the exact date of that, but it was the first council meeting of 2015. We had explicit direction from the council to pursue this. And then when Georgetown went 100 announced 100 percent, that really increased some of the request and expectations that be any form of plan. But keep in mind that we have a power supply department and their job day in and day out every time they come to work is to make plans for Denton's energy future. So it's natural and expected that they would be working on this plan day in and day out as they come to work. Hi, my name is Rita Beving. I work for Public Citizen and I'm from Dallas. And I have a question that I've already posed at one time to Mr. Williams or perhaps the ear modeler. According to the FAA, the Federal Aviation Administration, peaker plants can cause turbulence, which can interfere with pilot takeoff and landing as many some peaker plants have been denied permits for such. And they can also interfere with communications between the tower and with pilots. I want to know what specific modeling has been done regarding turbulence and communications interference. And if someone could enlighten us on airport discussions with their management. Thank you. I can talk a little bit about who's who has reviewed the plan. The Federal Aviation Administration has reviewed the plan. The plan details have been shared with Denton Airport Management. They've also been shared. There's a contractor that performs air traffic controller duties for the airport. They've reviewed the plan. And there's a consultant that's an environmental engineering firm and they've reviewed the plan as well. I don't know what exact models they use. We provide them the information about the plan, about the size of the plant, the location of the plant. And they use that in their determination that it's not an impact. I can perhaps add a little bit more to that. We specifically shared the information with the director of aviation at the Denton Airport. As was stated, the air traffic control component of the Denton Airport is a contracted agency. The director of aviation met with the contractor for air traffic control. They have a recording or they keep logs of every takeoff and landing that occurs at that airport. Based on the distance from the airport of this plant, the prevailing wind directions, the way the ramp is or the landing strip is oriented, and their recordings of flight, takeoff and landings, they provided a memo to us that stated that they do not see any problems with the location of the plant. And that's based on their expectations of how planes will land and basically their analysis of where the plant is located, as well as all the plant specifics. My name is Gary Steele and I live in Denton. I'm also president of the Green Valley School Historical Society, which looking at the map, it appears that that plant is going to be built across the street from where our school is at. There's three historical units out there. The Vietnam Vets, we spent four years and 15,000 hours restoring that schoolhouse. It's headquarters for not only the Vietnam Vets, but all era veterans. It's a community center of modern day for the community. My question is, what about the noise level? Because we feel that if it's there, the noise level may det ract from people using the facility. And we depend on the facility for part of our income. So I haven't heard anything yet about the noise level of the power plant. Your school, Green Valley? Do you need the document viewer for this, Mary? Yes. We have performed pretty extensive noise modeling to determine what the noise levels would be from each of the sites. And I'm going to present some contours that will show you what the noise levels will be so you can see what those are . Let's see. So I have a document to be viewed. We'll see. I don't know how well you can see this, but these are cont ours in five dB increments. So you can see what the noise levels are at the various areas around the site. So is there a dot where your school is that I can talk about? I can't see that from here. 45. It looks like it's approximately 45 dB. And that's very close to the existing background level. So there will be a very slight increase, if no increase at all. We went out there and took existing noise measurements at four different time periods, including the nighttime hours when it's very quiet. And 45 is the maximum noise level that it would be during any time period. And the existing background levels are very close to 45. A loud air conditioner is 65 to 75 decibel, if that helps. It will be barely noticeable. So a 3 to 5 dB increase is considered barely noticeable. And that's the increase that will be observed at any of the nearby residences. Does that help explain? It does. Now, how far will that set back off of Shepherd or 2153? Can you answer that question? So the setback off of Shepherd, if I remember correctly, is about 600 feet. Shepherd? You're talking about the property line of the facility? Yes, the property line. It parallels like this. You've got Shepherd and 2153. How far does it set back off in that corner there? It's not on the direct corner. If you see the white outline , that's the actual site property line. Okay, so the north side would be the 2153 then? I'm sorry, what was your question again? Okay, so 2153, it looks like the site is going to set back quite off of 2153. Yeah, it's about, the facility itself is about 1200 feet away. Okay. That's my only question was the noise level there. Okay, thank you. Hello, my name is Gina Felker. I live here in Denton. I have a brief statement on behalf of Jaron and Jason Lee. Their property line borders where one of these plants is going to be erected potentially. Gina Felker has been given permission to read this on our behalf. We recently purchased a million dollar home and made that investment in Texas. We uprooted our family and spent six months personally renovating a home intending to its 54 acres, the very 54 acres that border your proposed plant. We have only been in our home since September of 2015 and have finally settled our children into a nearby school only now to have something threaten our home and lifestyle completely. My husband and I wanted to leave California and its chaotic hustle, the pollution and lower quality of life for something peaceful where we could raise our children on the organic fruits and vegetables we plan to harvest from our land, eat grass-fed beef where we raise and live life where our family's health and welfare is paramount, something we didn't feel Los Angeles could offer. Now with this proposed plant, not only is our home value going to diminish, but considerably, but more importantly, the air quality will be greatly affected around our home, putting the welfare of our children at risk. Our running plant will create excessive construction, light and noise pollution with trucks in and out of our neighborhood, which is meant to be rural. Our children's safety will be at risk. This is why we moved so far out of town. This proposed plant jeopardizes our investment in Denton. We have invested in this community and if this plant is erected, we will most definitely need to sell up and leave. We are partners in four large businesses in Denton and those two will be at great risk with us needing to move out of the area. We have only been here but six months, but we have finally made a home and plan on starting a community farm. The pollution from the plant will devastate any plans we have to operate an organic farm. Please consider the families in the area and stop this plant from being erected in the small rural community. Thank you for your time and my deepest hopes are that you take this letter to heart. We would be sad to leave, but that is what will need to happen, Jaron and Jason Lee. A question to follow that up would be, they didn't know about this until I told them and showed them on the map that this is your property line and this is where they want to place this. They didn't even know what fracking was and they didn't know about the natural gas plant. They didn't know about any of these things. My question is, someone that lives directly across the street from where this is going to be potentially erected, why did they not have any knowledge? They had no idea. They haven't had a mailer, they haven't had anything. So your question is why didn't they know about it? Why don't more people know about it? I only know about it because I worked so hard in Frack Free Denton for so long. The majority, like none of my neighbors know about it. It's a great question and it's one I'm sensitive to because it is difficult to communicate with everyone. I went through a list and it wasn't even an exhaustive list of all the things we've done to engage with the community. Think about how much the Frack Free Denton group has done to engage the community. There was a real grassroots campaign and you mentioned that they didn't even know what fracking was. It just underlines the difficulty of communicating with an entire population about detailed matters like this. That's not really answering my question. My question though is when you're proposing putting it on a piece of land and you're like, oh, there's a house right there and right there and right there, oh, and a fishing tank, oh, and there's an airport, why do the people that live, I mean, their land, it's like, it's right there. It borders it. Why did they not know? Why did someone not personally come to them and say, we're thinking of doing this here? Yeah. We realize you just spent a ton of money on this property and invested a lot of money and time into Denton because they want to make it a better place. It's a good question. It's worth mentioning that the property on the west side of town is in an industrial district, so it's zoned industrial . That's the area that it's in. But you raise a good question. Could we have done more? And the answer is there's always something more that you could have done. But I guess I would question, does that make the project illegitimate because it's conceivable to think of something that we didn't do. But in fact, whenever I go through what we did that was legally required, procedurally required, and the great amount of activity that we did above and beyond that, I think-- I just feel like it's a minimum because as active as I was --and I have cancer and I haven't been as active in Fract Freedom in the last year. But as active as I was in the access that I have and the friends that I have involved in it, this is something I just have only learned about in the last couple of months. And if this is something that--what did I say? That it was proposed--I heard you say it was proposed at the beginning of the session. October 6. October? October 6. And so what they moved here just a couple months before that, that doesn't give the people like--the people in that area, they all need flyers on their doors. Like, people need to know and not just have it slip in on technicalities and legal stuff like that. Okay, so your comment is you--in addition to the postcards, you wish we'd do flyers. I wish you would do flyers. I wish you would door knock. I wish you would really get the word out because people don 't know. I live on Parkside. I live in the middle of Denton. I didn't know about this. Okay. Thank you for your comment. Yeah. Thank you. And again, there's a lot of folks that are wanting to ask questions. So please, if we could stick to questions and responses just in the interest of time to make sure everyone has a chance. Thank you. Yeah. My name is Deborah Armatara. And I first wanted to say that even if everybody who lived near the plants had received one of those flyers that DME sent out, they would have no idea that there was going to be a gas plant. And consequently, they would have no idea where those gas plants were going to be because those flyers didn't mention gas plants. I wanted to ask just a quick question first to the audience . Raise your hand if you live near either of the proposed gas plant's locations. Okay. Now, raise your hand if you received notification from DME that a gas plant was going to be built possibly near your home. Nobody? Okay. So that was my question for the audience. My question for you is does the following surprise you? I'm going to communicate something to you and I just want to know if this surprises you. I'm one of the people who has been going around notifying residents who live near both proposed gas plant's locations , notifying them that a gas plant has been proposed, it's going to be voted on soon, et cetera. And recently, I wrote an email to the mayor of Crum, Mayor Ron Harris, and I told him I'm writing to let you know that Denton City Council will soon be voting yes or no on DME's plan to build a natural gas plant right around the Denton- Crum border, et cetera. Have you been notified of this by DME or is this email the first you're hearing of their plans? Now, up until this point, everybody I talked to said no, including people on Aubrey City Council and the mayor of Aubrey. We never heard of this before. We were never notified. These are people who have neighborhoods right across the street from where these plants are going to be. He responded, "Debra, your information is erroneous and your assumption is misleading regarding any possible plans related to a project such as this. Your data is false regarding environmental impacts and it appears your intent is only to mislead and misinform. A project of this magnitude similar to the one like it near Austin would supply needed power and provide options for people in Denton County and surrounding areas, blah, blah, blah. I in no way support your position related to this and I would be a full supporter of this type of project, which would have so many benefits for this area and communities around us, Mayor Harris." So I wrote back to him. I said, "I take it from your message that DME has not alert ed you to their plans." He writes back, "I'm not sure what you're fishing for. I'm fully aware of what DME had planned for the future." So now he's saying he does know. As I said before, I fully support those plans as outlined previously, et cetera, et cetera. Nothing further to address with you regarding this issue." And then I wrote back and I just said, "Thanks for answering that question. I just wanted to confirm you knew where the gas plants were going to be. Please consider informing your constituents as well." I then went on to forward that message to Crumb City Council because I had a feeling from the hostile tone of his message that he had not gone and informed them. One of them wrote back to me, Sandin Doherty, who she can't be here today because she has pneumonia. She sends her regrets. She was looking forward to coming. And she told me that the mayor of Crumb, Ron Harris, is actually employed by DME. Now, that sounded crazy to me and I had never met Sandin before. So I said, "I'm going to have to look this up." And I looked it up and sure enough, unless this is a different Ronald Harris on the city payroll, Ronald Harris, employee ID 2294815, system operations, system operator one . He makes $25.68 hourly, et cetera, et cetera. You know, this is public record, the city salaries. So I don't think I'm disclosing anything confidential here. Anyway, I just take that. Well, I'm just wondering if you knew that, that one of your employees is the mayor of Crumb, or if that surprised you? I knew Ron was mayor of Crumb. We also have some of our employees there on the school districts and active in their community. And that kind of depicts the nature of some of our employees to serve in their community. In no way, to my knowledge, anybody had consulted with Ron as far as what he wrote back to you, he did that in his position as mayor. Yeah, so you didn't hurt him. Yes, he's mayor there and aware that we also have other employees who are on school districts and active in their communities and other roles. Well, thank you. I just wanted to share that with you and to let you know, in fact, not only had he not informed his constituents, I learned he also had not informed his own city council. They had not heard about it until they heard it from me. So thank you very much. Just real briefly, I'm sorry to cut you off. Again, there will be a public hearing on this item. So let's, if we can, stick to the questions. We've got a lot of people here and we want to try to get through everyone. So I appreciate your cooperation there. Ken, from my understanding, I know we've already had a public hearing with the public utilities board and with the city councils. Well, I don't know if they're considering any more public hearings just to... There will be further council action on this item. Hi, Topher Jones. Thanks for having us. I live on Fulton Street in Kathleen Wasney's district. My question is about the future of these plants. Considering the DME has already invested in obsolete technology, as in Gibbons Creek, we still owe millions on that. We're about to invest millions upon millions of dollars in a soon to be obsolete technology and the future of these plants are in my question based on this. In one of the last council sessions, Phil, you stated that these power plants will continue to run even after Denton becomes 100% renewable. You talked about how they're not only power Denton, but they're going to power at the mercy of ERCOT, even after we 're 100% renewable in however many years. That's going to be 25 years. So you said they're going to continue to run after we become 100% renewable. However, in contradiction to that, what council member Rod en put on his blog was that we could just essentially sell these plants to China after we become 100% renewable. So considering this plan is, in my opinion, quite short- sighted and soon to be obsolete technology, what is the future of these plants? Will they continue to run and pollute our air alongside the plants like Gibbons Creek, or will we just sell them to China? Thanks very much for your question. I apologize in advance and welcome everybody turning up on a Saturday, but I apologize for my lack of particular experience in practicing public speaking, but I'll do my level best to try and answer your questions succinctly. You can't? Any better? Okay, I'll chew the microphone. Your question is a good one, and I appreciate it, and we've given it plenty of thought. So if I can paraphrase your question and make sure that I'm answering it correctly, you're A, asking why use obsolete technology, and you're B, asking if we do employ that technology, is it not going to become redundant later on as the city moves to a stated objective of 100% renewable? And what are we going to do with those plants? So the first question, why use obsolete technology? This is not obsolete technology. I meant soon to be obsolete. Soon in utility terms is potentially decades. Sure. Decades. Solutions to do things better do not happen from one day to the next that you stop one type of technology and switch immediately to 100% of another. There is a period of time in which something may change. The same is exactly true of a wonderful and important step to increase the nation's renewable energy. We have more wind power today. We have more solar power today. Those are great things. All of us would like to see more of that. DME is no different from everybody else. We breathe and sleep the same air that everybody in this room eats. Don't for one minute think that we are any different in our objectives to see things like that happen. But the technology is modern, and the technology is required. It's the latest plants with the category lowest levels of emissions of plants in North America, potentially the world . The plants are specifically designed to support the use of renewable energy. No one can deny that renewable energy is intermittent in the nature of when it comes to you. You do not get to choose when the sun shines. You do not get to choose when the wind blows. That's a greater power. Because you don't get to choose that, and because you don't know when to predict that will happen, you need something else so that we can sit here today and use a microphone, have lights on, have a room that's warm and not 20 degrees. This technology responds very quickly to very quick changes . It's low emitting. It is the type of technology that will be needed as we increase our use of wind and solar. Denton is proposing to go from 40 to 70 percent. The nation does not have anywhere near 40 percent in renewable technology today. Denton's need to have something to support the intermittent renewable energy is greater than the rest of the nation. We recognize that. We looked at all the alternatives and we came to a conclusion. This is what we need to provide the certainty, the rate control and reliability that's necessary. In the second part of your question, we installed units that several people here today go, "Why? What do you do with them in 10 years if other things are available and they're obsolete?" They won't be. There is a period of time over which these units will continue to run. Undeniable. The electric grid operator says that. Action groups that don't want these things state that. Not us. We're not saying this. This is other people. In the time that other alternatives come to the fore, these units are exactly what's required to support renewables. The units that aren't like that are the ones that will go away first. These units will continue to operate after 2030. Why? Because that will still be needed. I think there may be a misconception here that going to 100 percent renewable energy means that every minute of every day all your electricity is continuing to come from renewable sources. Let me dispel that rumor. It's false. Categoric. Look at the way electricity can be provided, whether it's from a fossil plant or whether it's from a renewable plant. I don't change physics and I don't change facts. You're going to have to be able to provide electricity when those sources are not available. The technologies that some people here would have you believe need to happen today are not possible today. They're not possible and they're still not economic. They're not economic in an order of magnitude that is multiples. Does that help answer your question or not? Yes. You're saying they'll continue to run after 2030. Absolutely they will. Thank you. Thank you. I just want to make sure there's no TARDIS in this room. There are no Time Lords among us. We cannot travel back in time, correct? All right. So it seems to me that going with, in the future , a fossil fuel plant is going backwards in time to take technology that is old and not the future. But more important to me has to do with when you release, when you give us those charts of what the emissions are, the numbers you are not putting on that screen are the numbers that come from getting that natural gas out of the ground. And in addition to, you know, transmitting it and getting it out of the ground, you have the emissions there. But then you have the use of water. When we are running short of water on this planet, it is a tremendous waste of water that we use getting natural grass out of the ground. And we can't afford it. We simply cannot afford to waste water. I'll pass on to Phil Williams in a second, but I think I feel the need to clarify something else. The first thing I want to clarify is the last statement about water. When I talked about the fact that this technology is some of the most modern that you can find and directly supports the endeavor to increase the use of renewables, one thing that also may not be apparent to people, because again, people provide false information, and our desire is not to do that. And I'd like to clarify, these plants use in the single digits of gallons of water per day. Okay, so let me just finish my point. These units use a very small amount of water. Traditional plants use a large amount of water. One of the reasons we are choosing our technology is because we are environmentally conscious as to what we can do to help limit the depletion of resources. One of the questions we got there was about gas production and what it does with water. Our proposal to use this gas plant to support the renew ables does not change the amount of energy that all of you are using every day. That's going to happen whether these plants are there or not. But one thing I can say is that if these plants are not used and we rely on what's currently available, that will use more gas. We are not increasing the consumption of gas with these plants. We are reducing it. Now, it may not be desirable to everybody that we use gas, but the net effect of this is a reduction in gas. The net effect is a reduction in emissions. The phrase that we use is displacement. We're doing this rather than that, which is deemed to be a lot worse. And I think that is also something that people are not responding to us that they necessarily understand completely. But there's a lot of displacement involved here. What we're going to do is better, not worse. It's going to improve. Again, I come back down to you can't wave a wand and suddenly stop doing one thing and do another, because the answer is we're not prepared to sit here in a freezing cold room with no lights. Phil, I'm sorry if I took any of you under there. I apologize. Hi, my name is Ed Sofe. I live in Denton, and thank you for holding this. First of all, with all due respect to the gentlewoman from the company that acted as consultant on the air permit, to entrust protection of our air quality to the TCEQ is laughable. And we know that. We know that. And I say that because I think it's imperative that we have a health impact study on what these plants will do to the air. Displacement or not, there's still going to be stuff being put into the air. And especially as the points been made, depending upon the height of the stack, that we'll be dumping this on our neighbors. We don't have to worry about it falling on us. It's going to go upstream, just as we are upstream from Dallas for it worse. So we are simply continuing the great river of pollution. So we need a health impact study. Maybe from somebody at North Texas. I know you've been in contact with Dr. John. So I think that's absolutely imperative. Phil spoke earlier about debt. The total outstanding debt obligation, including TMPA contractual obligations as a fiscal year ended September 30th, 2015 for Denton Municipal Electric is $547, 713,053. Now, that's a lot of money. How much more are these gas plants going to cost us? And I 'm putting this simply in a very layman perspective. One looks at Gibbons Creek, incidentally permitted by the same company that worked on the permit for these gas plants . We look at Gibbons Creek and we see what's happening there. The debt, the expense of operating that plant because of new environmental regulations, the updates that had to be done. Well, looking at these gas plants, what's coming down the road? They're not going to loosen regulations on greenhouse gases . They're not going to loosen regulations on air quality, especially if the EPA takes over the TCEQ's incompetence and puts in a real plan. There are going to be some costs coming down the road. Have these been thought about? Have these been factored in? These plants have a life of 30 to 40 years. So let's just say we look to 2049. I haven't seen one graph yet for anything that goes through 2049. Nothing about prices, nothing. So we really haven't looked at the big picture. And I don't say that in an accusatory way. I say that in a partnership with you. We need to look at the big picture. What are these plants really going to cost us? Are we going to be stuck with another Gibbons Creek? Are these plants the e-cigarettes of the fossil fuel industry? Thank you. Ed, thanks for that question. I'm going to struggle here because I'm going to try to condense a lot of information into a very short period of time in respect of all those folks that are standing up there. I had had people ask me about the health study issue. It is not required by the state of Texas, but it is required by the state of California. I did some searching around and I've actually found a health study that was done for a plant that is almost identical, a proposed plant that was almost identical to this plant. There are some nuanced differences about comparing California to Texas, which I had evaluated by an independent reviewer at the University of North Texas to make sure I'm making good decisions here. The plants are approximately the same size. Their emissions are actually higher than the plants that we're proposing. These were proposed in 2008. The plants that we're proposing have better technology. These plants were proposed to run longer than the plants that we're proposing, so not only do they have more emissions per hour of operation, they will operate more hours. Basically, the size of the property that these plants was, this plant in California was designed to be on was 6.22 acres. The size of the properties of these plants, one is 160 acres, one is approximately 110. So I just want you to give you an idea of kind of how comparable they are. The stack heights are approximately the same. The engine technology is the same technology. The air quality between the two regions is about as comparable as we can get. I do have information that goes into detail on that, and it was reviewed by someone else. Basically, they perform a health assessment as a part of California regulations. California Energy Commission requires that. It's also rerun by the independent air quality management district in which this plant was proposed. Basically, they have a screening level assessment that they do that incorporates assumptions that are intentionally biased towards the protection of public health, and I'm reading this directly out of the study, by using the highest level of pollutants that could be emitted from the plant, assuming weather conditions that would result in the maximum ambient concentration of pollutants, using the air quality modeling program that predicts the greatest possible impacts, evaluating health risks by choosing the location where pollutant concentrations are calculated to be the highest, using health-based standards designed to protect the most sensitive members of the population, the young, the elderly , and individuals with respiratory illness, include exposures to substances that could affect non-inhal ation pathways such as soil ingestion, dermal exposure, and mother's milk, and assuming an individual's exposure to cancer-causing agents occurs for a lifetime of 70 years. Using the assumptions listed above, the risk assessment consists of the following steps. Identify the types and amounts of hazardous substances that the project could emit into the environment. Estimate the worst-case concentration of project emissions in the environment using dispersion modeling. Estimate the amount of pollutants to which people could be exposed through inhalation, ingestion, or dermal contact. And characterize the potential health risks by comparing worst-case exposures to safe standards based on known health effects. This health risk assessment addressed three categories, acute, which is short-term exposure, chronic, which is long -term exposure, and carcinogenic health effects. I'll just skip to the finding and conclusions. During the project construction, exposure to emissions during construction and to fugitive dust could potentially result in adverse health effects. However, the temporary nature of construction and implementation of an air quality construction mitigation plan ensures that construction-related emissions will not result in adverse public health effects. During the project operation, the energy center will emit criteria and non-criteria pollutants that could potentially result in adverse public health effects. Best available control technology used to control emissions of criteria pollutants effectively controls emissions of toxic air contaminants from the source. A health risk assessment was completed using well-estab lished scientific protocol to analyze potential adverse health effects of toxic air contaminants emitted by the energy center within a six-mile radius of the project site. There are sensitive receptors within a three-mile radius of the site. However, the health risk assessment assumed any receptor within the analyzed area was a sensitive receptor. The health risk assessment was based on worst-case assumptions using the highest emission factors, assuming the worst weather conditions, and calculating the effects of maximum impacts so that actual risks are expected to be much lower at any other location. The health risk assessment determined the point of maximum cancer and non-chronic cancer impact is 50 yards to the east of the project site. Again, this is a site that's six acres in a parking lot. The maximum acute health impact is located near the north end of the site fence line, again on a six-acre site. Here are their findings. The maximum incremental lifetime cancer risk is below the significance threshold. The total chronic hazard index is below the significance level. The maximum acute non-cancer hazard index is below the significant thresholds. District staff performed an independent analysis using the same data. The district staff's calculations for cancer risk, chronic non-cancer, and acute risk show the results below the significance threshold for chronic non-cancer and acute hazards. Results of this health risk assessment indicate that public health risk from exposure to emissions of toxic air contaminants during the project operation will be insignificant. There is no evidence of cumulative health impacts from project emissions. There is no evidence of project-related disproportionate public health impacts on the environmental justice community. The commission concluded that project emissions of non-cr iteria pollutants do not pose a significant direct, indirect , or cumulative adverse public health risk. So this study is available online. I'll be glad to provide that link to anyone who would like to take a look at it. Thank you. Please. And I'm very sorry that I took your time . I'm Jim Moffitt. I live in Louisville. Just in respect to that situation, that information you were talking about was the report of the situation in California? That was a report of a plant that was similar in size and emission, actually was greater emission, same type, but emitted more. So it was an example of a plant that is very similar to this one. Yes. There's an interesting question that I have. Is that in a similar area of what's known as the stagnation index report by NOAA about the conditions surrounding the area, I mean most of the area that North Texas is in, as far as the dispersion? I notice they say dispersion was taken into consideration to the maximum. Is that the maximum for their area or the maximum for our area? Yeah, that was one of the reasons that I was very concerned about the comparison between the two. My person that I used at the University of North Texas direct statement was that it was, I'm on very strong grounds to compare the two. This one was in the San Jose Bay Area, topographically very similar to this, existing air quality at the time that the permit was issued, very similar. Okay. The point that I wanted to make was as far as what is your confidence? Well, I'll ask the question later. Two days ago I was at a hearing for the CEQ with the EPA president where about the air quality in the North Texas region, Dent on being the worst of all of them that's reported. There was potentially 80 to 100 people who testified to the problems that they have personally as far as asthma and everything else. There was a Dr. Haley from UT Southwestern who represented two different doctors groups, as many as thousands of people who say that they have to do something about this. And the tension was called to the fact that the TCEQ has had their recent state implementation plan rejected by the EPA and that the massive amount of the testimony given was to take away the TCEQ's ability to cite, to issue permits and have the EPA take it over. There was a question about whether that will happen, but there was a strong, other strong sentiment expressed to have them implement standards that are sufficient to protect us that haven't been in compliance since 1991. And that's four SIPs that have not met the criteria and one that's been rejected. So have you taken this into account, my question then is have you taken into account the impact this might have, and especially added to the impact that we recently signed an agreement with 190 other nations to do something about the impact on all emissions? Yes. We have taken basically several issues there. I'll try to be succinct. What we've done is we compared the emissions of our current power portfolio against the emissions of the proposed power portfolio with the renewable dentin plan. In all cases, emissions of criteria pollutants significantly reduce. Gas usage in the renewable dentin plan goes down by 37 percent compared to where we are right now, where, and keeping in mind that we're 40 percent wind right now. So we're already relatively low. We'll decrease it that much further because of the amount of the renewable component that's being added to the overall power mix. In terms of CO2 equivalents, with respect to your question about the recent Paris climate talks and some of the issues associated with minimizing CO2 equivalents, that's why I'm involved in this project. I am part of the sustainability group here at the city of Denton, and our charge is to reduce our carbon footprint as a municipality. Looking at the amount of CO2 equivalents for our business as usual, which is what we're doing right now with 40 percent wind compared to CO2 equivalents under the renewable dentin plan, is a 74 percent decrease. So it massively decreases the amount of CO2 equivalents that we're currently putting out into the atmosphere. Did that get all elements? I can't really speak on the EPA TCQ issue. Well, I do not have a lot of confidence that that will do anything to help reduce the emissions overall and the impact of methane, which is far more significant than CO2. I understand that, and that thing was included in this analysis for the plant itself. And then with regards to the source of the fuel, all I can say is that we're reducing the amount of gas we're currently using by 37 percent. Phil, would it be worth mentioning the Clean Power Plan and how that affects this plan? That's a federal standard, isn't it? I don't know if that pertains. I admit to not being so familiar with it, but I don't know if that's worth mentioning. The Clean Power Plan is issued and is being considered. Certainly this puts us ahead of the game of other utilities as far as being compliant and giving us a plan forward to be compliant with that plan, even though it's shaped up to be under litigation for some period of time. This will put us on the road to being compliant with it ahead of other utilities. Okay, I'm Leanne Todd. I live on Rose Lawn and I'm surrounded by eight frac sites that have been underutilized for extracting the gas. All the people on Rose Lawn for some reason are on well water and not city water. I know as a result of the frac sites that my water was destroyed. It became salty and oily, and the more you drink , the thirstier you got. This proposed gas, 30 percent, will require more frac gas, will require more fracking, and a majority of the people in Denton have voted a band against fracking, even though short-lived. It was a band. Now the people are asking again for 100 percent renewable, and we feel like that our needs are not being responded to by our Mayor Chris Watts and our city council, and that we are not looking into alternative sources and outside agencies to do analysis of what can be done in relation to investment in the future. We're saying by TCEQ standards that there's going to be some pollution. There's still going to be pollution. There 's still going to be air pollution. There will still be pollution to the water by the process of getting that. So what I am asking is why is our Mayor and our city council not responding to the needs and the requirements requested by a majority of the people here? And why have we not utilized an outside external source to do analysis on using wind and solar? Because I know there is advanced technologies in wind and solar. Even our President Obama and the State of Union address talked about getting away from gas and coal and going to alternative energies, and now is the time for 100 percent. If we want to be 100 percent renewable in 2030, that's 14 years away. So to me it seems like we're going in the wrong direction, but not being 100 percent renewable. So this plan calls for a significant decrease in the amount of use of gas, only using gas when needed to back up wind and solar power. It's taking as far as we feel like we can go to use as much wind and solar power as possible, and certainly ahead of any country that was at Paris. It puts us down the road. We can look at what Germany has done. We can learn from those things. And what we've seen from the actions that we're taking in Germany, which the rest of the crowd doesn't know, Germany made significant commitment to have 100 percent of the capacity they need in solar and wind. But even with that installed capacity, if they have enough solar and wind installed, they could meet 100 percent of the loaded requirements if the wind blows and if the sun shines. And so even with that installed, they still have to have fossil-based generation that already had installed to back that up. And so even going forward with 100 percent going, and certainly the Council said it would go for us not to be satisfied even at 70, but to go towards 100 percent. And we'll certainly strive to keep doing that, to meet those requirements, to balance the needs of going more renewable, but maintaining competitive rates and maintain reliability not only operationally, but financially as far as subject ing ourselves to ERCOP market risk. So battery technology shows great promise. I'm going to make an exception here and follow up on that. But battery technology shows great promise, and I think it will be something in the future. But as Joe Maynard showed up before by the Sierra Club's chart, that chart was from the Sierra Club. By that own chart, they showed that battery technology can 't meet the needs of what we're needing, which is on a hot August day, you've got to have something that's supplying power 12 to 16 hours a day, and battery technology isn't there. Its first chance for it to make an impact is providing a very short-term burst of energy for meeting the ancillary services market, and they're going towards that, but they're not there to meet the needs that these engines would. If I may just answer that. You challenged some questions of technology and what's possible, and I don't want this to be DME's opinion of what is and is not possible. Wherever we've made statements, it's supported through evidence from the broader market and the broader available set of experts. But just speaking to battery storage as a technology, Elon Musk, who I'm sure most people in the room are familiar with, but he's the pioneer for Tesla, so we might point to him as being an industry leader in batteries and how battery may power things. Even he, with his desire to grow his corporation and with his desire to grow his goals and objectives, to see a country and a globe that goes to greater renew ables, even he says optimistically by 2030, he might expect optimistically for a 10% penetration of battery storage to support electric grid usage. That's the pioneer. That's the guy who has the ideas. So when you say that the president says that we're going to do this, he's not an electrical person, but Elon Musk is. And Elon Musk is not saying it's happening today and it can be done today. He's not even saying it can be done tomorrow or in four or five or ten years' time. He's saying there will be 10% penetration of batteries by 2030. Let me follow that up by saying that today batteries are considerably more expensive than other alternatives, as Jim pointed out to you. Batteries have to be charged. The energy that goes into those batteries needs to be paid for. Batteries do not put out 100% of what they take in. There's a conversion. That's not that efficient. Batteries deplete over time, so each time you charge and recharge them, they do not produce the same each time it de grades. They need replacing. So when you install a battery, you have to pay for energy to put into it, and you have to account for the fact that within a number of years significantly less than other means of providing energy, you're going to have to pay to replace them multiple times over before you meet the equivalent of the proposed plants involved in RDP. So there's a significant economic detriment to trying to go down that route. We're open to it. We're looking at it. We continue to monitor it. As and when that becomes available in an economic, reliable , good fashion that makes sense for Denton, we'll be only too happy to raise the flag and say this is another opportunity here. But until that happens, it doesn't behoove us to follow the instruction of council to follow the directives, because it doesn't meet them and it doesn't do good things for Denton. And we want good things for Denton. Trust me, we want very good things for Denton. So you are seeking an outside analysis for alternate. Unfortunately, I'm going to have to defer to the next question. Hello, my name is Rachel Bunch. I'm sorry. I live in Denton , and this is my queue. How is the cost the same to build? I know that it's less a cost for the client for the electricity, but there's more damage to our eco. Because in the end, what is the cause for unreversible damage? Can we pay that price? So you're asking not only about the dollar cost, but the cost as far as the environmental cost? So I'm going to use this as an opportunity to follow up on that question, but also to follow up on a question that Mr. Sofa asked earlier about the cost of the plants. As far as the environmental cost, it's an integral part of going 70%. It's an integral part of trying to sign purchase power agreements that will fund and provide two or three wind farms and two or three solar farms. And those, I think we could all agree, would be better for the environment and would help the environment. And so these plants use less gas and enable us to improve the environment in a very positive way by reducing the amount of gas and emissions that are used in this community to power this community. As far as the cost of the plants, $225 million is a lot of money. And the amount of debt we have is a lot of money. But if you look at 20 years in the chart I had up earlier, 20-year time frame, $2 billion. If we don't change from what we're doing now, the cost to save business as usual now and not go to a different change, and this is the most economical change, $2 billion. We can invest in this plant, $225 million, enable us to go buy renewable energy in the most economical format we can. That we can go buy wind power from different sectors of the state and solar farms from different sectors of the state and buy it in the most economical fashion so that we can balance the needs of meeting requirements. And by doing that, we will save $500 million. So three numbers, $225 million investment now, $2 billion investment if we don't, $2 million that we'll spend over 20 years if we don't, $1.5 billion if we make that investment, plus paying back that investment. So both from an environmental standpoint and from a cost standpoint, we believe this is a positive way forward to help the environment but also maintain competitive rates. Hi, I'm Brandy Price. I'm actually from McKinney in Yesa, just 30 miles from McKinney because this is my former college town. I also used to work here and actually I live Denton and I'm with the Crosstumber Sierra Club group that represents Dent on County and other counties. I have a question. I'm not going to go off on a statement, so you'll like that. I hear that City Council may vote on a resolution regarding the plants on February 2nd. Why would the City Council vote on these plants when you clearly have so much pelvic frustration going on? That's all I have. So in order for an item to be discussed with the council, it has to be posted on the agenda and to allow flexibility for whatever they want to do, it's usually posted as an item for them to take action on. Just because it's posted on the agenda before they take action, as we've seen before, doesn't mean they'll take action at that time. It means it's posted so they can have that discussion. If they desire they will take action, they can. If they desire to postpone it to a meeting or ask staff to gather further information, that's done also. So that's why it's posted that way. What is the timeline though? What's the timeline? Is this a timeline of when it's posted? Of when this whole thing is moving forward? I mean, y'all are back there. What's the timeline? When are y'all going to vote on this? What should we expect? People are concerned, lots of people are here. So let's direct the question to the panel, please. And so the time frame is it is posted for council discussion on February 2nd. It's posted at that time in a way that they could take action, but we'll take further direction and see what their actions are at that meeting when it's posted. Okay. I am really happy to see so many people here. It's really nice. And I just bring that up because I know some of y'all are in maybe the hot seat, but that so many people are here and they're coming from a place that they're concerned about their own homes and they 're concerned about their health. And if it's uncomfortable, I don't know if it is, but if it is, just know that that's the place that it's coming from. If we can just acknowledge that and all of us have better places we could be on a Saturday, I'm sure. So I have a couple of questions, but they're real quick. One was about the time frame. What are the other questions? Okay. At the beginning of the meeting, Mr. Dascom, I appreciate you kind of pointing out, like, I see all the stickers. We get it. There's a lot of opposition. I get it. So I guess my question is, what would it take to get another plan on the table or what does it take to change this? Because you were saying we are doing this, we're doing our jobs and we're doing this under the direction of city council. So what would it take for us to get something else on the table? Does it take a direct action from city council or what do we need to consider something else? Yeah, that's a good question and important. I think your main concern is to provide a different plan for how it then gets its energy. That's certainly an important question. I'd say a couple things. One is it's true that we're responding to direction from city council. And until we hear of something that better meets that direction we've been given, then this is the plan that we 're recommending. Certainly city council could at any time redirect DME in any way they wanted to. So that would be a decision by the council. I'd also mention when it comes to this community discussion , there's a couple points that keep coming to my mind. One is that when we've done the open houses and we had a comment form online as well, it's still available. There's a very mixed reaction. In fact, the most common statement that we heard back from those comment forms was positive of people saying they like the direction that it saves money, it's good for the environment, and they were positive about that. But certainly some people have been against it for legitimate reasons. I would add that I wonder how many people this morning, we 've gone through some technical information this morning, I wonder how many people came in against the plan that have now changed and said, you know what, they're right, I'm for the plan. Maybe just raise a hand? Raise a hand? That's right, yeah. So I say that to indicate that more time and more answers doesn't seem to be changing a lot of minds. People have their opinion and they're certainly welcome to it. But in that instance, more time doesn't seem to be making much difference on how people feel. I have a couple other, they're just like quick questions. How often is ERCOT going to run this thing or ask us to? What should we expect from ERCOT? It's just like a one word answer. How often? Quick answer, I think we've modeled between 35 and 40 percent. 35 to 40 percent of what? The year, the day? The total time it could run. So it's 8,700? You have what appears to you to be an extremely simple question. And unfortunately, with all respect, it's a very complicated answer. It takes a lot of time to understand how an electrical grid operates. The set of rules that goes by is a set of papers that goes that tall. So I'll try and endeavor to make it a little more simple if I can, but I apologize if I either confuse anybody. And I don't want anybody to misunderstand any of my words because I may slip up because I'm trying to make it simple. Everybody who participates in the consumption of electricity in Texas, that which is governed by ERCOT, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, all operate under the same rules to both consume and to produce electricity. The proposed plant and our existing plant is no different. The plant of everybody else is no different. We have a proposal to increase renewable energy consumption to 70 percent. I've already told you that that means that there will be a greater requirement to provide certain backup supply when those things are not available. In order to take advantage of the opportunities that the low prices in the market that will from time to time appear , we want to be able to buy that and save citizens money. At the same time, we have a collective responsibility to that being available both to us and to everybody else. We operate under the rules. We don't get to choose that. It 's not a Denton choice. It's governed by the rules. ERCOT stands there as an independent body that sits there and says, "I will make sure that the lights stay on. Lights don't flicker. Your electronic equipment doesn't ruin." In order to do that, they ask everybody to make available their generation. Not a choice. You don't get to say, "I get to use this little piece for Denton and I get to give that little piece to ERCOT." They get 100% of everything. They get 100% of your consumption and they get 100% of whatever you can generate. They then look at all that generation and say the cheapest possible way to provide enough electricity at this moment in time to meet the needs of the entire electric grid needs these plants. It needs these plants to keep the lights from flickering and it needs them to meet the total. Will they run continually? So it's going to say economically, every four seconds a signal goes out and every five minutes they assess what needs to happen. That's continually changing. Based on our analysis of what we know the proposed plants are capable of, Phil is quite right in saying that they will operate 35% of the time. 30% of the time. The maximum amount of time is they'll operate 35% of the year. I don't understand. There's 8,760 hours in a year. Based upon the forecast of consumption and the forecast of supply, these plants have a certain capability of producing electricity. All electricity is not produced equally. It doesn't cost the same for every single production source to produce electricity. They're all different. ERCOT will continually look at the cheapest that's available at that time to dispatch it and say this is what we need to meet everybody's load and keep the lights on. So is there a possibility it could run 24/7? No. Categorically, no. There is a maximum. We have a maximum limit from air permits. But we have an analysis limit that says, look, this is what 's happened before. This is our future analysis of what will happen and we estimate these plants will operate in the mid 30s percent of available time. 30% of the year. There's a greater maximum on the permit, but the permit is a standardized process that says I'm asking for these units , each one has a certain capability, and it sets a limit. That limit is much higher than our reasonable expectation of how they will run. Can we run over our permit? No, you cannot. What are the consequences? TCU doesn't seem to regulate stuff really hard, so what are the consequences? TCU does regulate, but we have to move on to other questions, unfortunately. But the short answer is there's a punishment and we can't do it. Hello. I'd like to thank you for being here. My name is Heather Davis. I'm with the League of Independent Voters. Today you've said that there is, and it's true, there is a difference in the cost of gas-fired peaker plants compared to battery storage, just as there is a difference in the cost of a Ford Focus compared to a Maserati. You don't judge a person for driving a Maserati because it 's their choice. It's reflective of where they choose to assign value. This is the people of Ditten's choice. Health, safety without the need of a safety valve, that's the benefit. And really, that's the cost of a democracy. My question for you, Mr. Johnson, is who owns Denton Municipal Electric? Thank you for your question. The ownership of Denton Municipal Electric is the citizens of Denton. Great. So with that, I'd like to encourage you to take the time to listen to what the people are communicating to you instead of trying to minimize it at every turn. I don't wish to belabor the point, but D&E is responding to the directive of council in what it's looking to do, and we 're doing our best to respond to council's instructions to us. D&E wants good things for Denton, and we are listening to you, and we highly appreciate having feedback and understanding what the citizenry want, both the people here and the people at large. I want to make a very brief announcement. It's 1110 right now. We've got quite a few people queued up in line. The intention, the original ending of the meeting was scheduled for 1130. What we'd like to do is get to 1130. It appears that there will be additional questions. So if we can take about a 10-minute break at 1130 and come back, and we'll continue to try to answer those questions. But for those of you that are in line, we're going to have about 20 minutes before that time. Sorry for taking your time. >> Hey, so my first question here, I guess it's rhetorical. I don't really want an answer, but, like, do you guys understand why you've kind of lost credibility? Like, I mean, have you even noticed that you've lost credibility when you mailed out these flyers about the renewable Denton plan? It showed a farm field, and it looked scenic and pleasant. It didn't mention power plants. And then when you did your little community things, I've talked to a lot of people in this room, and I've talked to a lot of people that aren't in this room. And I've pretty much got a timeline of the way that at first you said, you know, I don't think the plants are really going to run on ERCOT. And then, well, they might run sometimes, and then they might run frequently. And I mean, city council asked you questions about this, and you kind of avoided on the emissions figures. They had to pull it out of you very grudgingly. I know three people that sit up there, three people who have told me that they've asked you guys questions and you haven't given them answers. And people know this. You're losing credibility. Here I have your projected annual energy expenses, little flyer. You know, I know I said before your plan wouldn't pass an engineering course. In fact, it wouldn't pass a freshman English composition class. There's nothing here. There's no real sources. You're quoting projected 20-year cost of $1.5 billion, and you're calculating it to the very last dollar. That's not believable that you could be that accurate. And I'd just like to point out to people here that assuming these numbers are accurate, the cost of going 100% renewable for everybody in Denton, it averages about 30 cents a day. That's what you're actually, it says on here, it's only 30 cents a day. Maybe we should look at that a little closer. So I just think you guys should maybe think about the fact that you haven't been entirely honest. You didn't even tell the people across the road that you're building a power plant across the road from them. But forget all that. I actually have a question. These generators, who manufactures them? There are several different companies that manufacture these engines. The ones that you're buying? We haven't made a decision on an engine manufacturer yet. Okay. Well, is there like a model name for the engine? Like I know it's not just called a generic quick start generator. Like what are you actually planning on buying? Some of the manufacturers are Mann, Rolls Royce, GE, Wart zilla, several others. You haven't decided on who you're buying it from. But then how can you know the price? Because every one of them is going to be a little different . Exactly, just a little different. There's going to be some negotiations. So maybe it could go up or it could go down and maybe this chart's not accurate at all. I mean, do you have a picture of what one of these generators looks like? We did show a picture at the second open house. A citizen requested that we show it. I asked that we show a picture and we did bring it to the open house. That's good. I've never seen one of these. I keep hearing how many years of experience you guys have. How many years of experience do you have with this specific type of generator? As I said, this is the absolute latest technology that's available. How much experience does anybody have? So it's zero, right? I think that's disingenuous to the electric industry and people involved in electric utility, frankly, I'm sorry . Okay, well, it's zero. That's my answer, thanks. [applause] Hey guys, my name is Hale Baskin and I'm a Denton person, live here. I just had a couple of questions. How do you guys kind of like justify the cognitive disson ance that arises when our community votes unequivocally to ban the fracking industry and the natural gas industry from within our town limits because of feeling exploited and abused by this industry? And then you turn around a year later and try to sell our energy dependence to the very industry that we have tried to essentially run out of town that the state won't allow us to kind of protect our own land. Do you see irony at all in that? It's a legitimate question. [applause] So obviously the Frack Free campaign has been a huge part of Denton, especially its most recent history of understanding how the people of Denton feel and where our priorities are. I think it surprised a lot of people. I watched it and certainly we were paying attention to that . And you may notice it's the first question on our FAQs online. It was the first one we had to encounter was we think that this plan most closely fulfills the council direction to increase renewable energy while maintaining competitive rates and reliability. You know, an important part of this plan, I think, especially when we're talking about if there's a dislike of fracking, is that it reduces the use of natural gas. We will use less natural gas under this plan than we would otherwise. And so it seems to reduce the very commodity that the citizens voted against. Okay, and then my next question is, has anyone read or heard of the Cornell study that was done on the methane emissions from fracking? They released a study in 2011 and they updated it in 2014 to include data from all over the country that they had gathered. And I would just like to read you their conclusion about whether or not natural gas -- is anyone in here an Ivy League-educated ecologist? No, okay. So I just wanted to read what Cornell concluded about the natural gas and how good for our climate natural gas power is. [inaudible] Okay, using these new best available data and a 20-year time period for comparing the warming potential of methane to carbon dioxide, the conclusion stands that both shale gas and conventional natural gas have a larger GHG -- greenhouse gas emission rating -- than do coal or oil for any possible use of natural gas and particularly for the primary uses of residential and commercial heating. The 20-year time period, which is greater than our plan of 14 years to be 100% renewable, is appropriate because of the urgent need to reduce methane emissions over the coming 15 to 35 years. And then you combine that with the huge problem California is having with methane emissions. You can't see it. It's under-reported. It's been found to have been under-reported by like 100%. And so we can't really trust numbers we get from California . Do you guys respect highly educated people's opinion on whether or not natural gas is truly good for the environment, and is it really good for the environment? And I think that's a good question. I think that's a good question. I think that's a good question. I think that's a good question. I think that's a good question. I think that's a good question. I think that's a good question. I think that's a good question. I think that's a good question. I think that's a good question. I think that's a good question. I think that's a good question. I think that's a good question. I think that's a good question. I think that's a good question. I think that's a good question. I think that's a good question. I think that's a good question. I think that's a good question. I think that's a good question. I think that's a good question. I think that's a good question. I think that's a good question. I think that's a good question. I think that's a good question. I think that's a good question. I think that's a good question. I think that's a good question. I think that's a good question. I think that's a good question. I think that's a good question. I think that's a good question. I think that's a good question. I think that's a good question. I think that's a good question. I think that's a good question. I think that's a good question. I think that's a good question. I think that's a good question. I think that's a good question. I think that's a good question. I think that's a good question. I will also read you something from that same article, if I may. I will also read you something from that same article, if I may. This is for, this is Howarth's article. This is for, this is Howarth's article. He states, "Am I recommending that we continue to use coal and oil rather than replace these with natural gas? Not at all. Society needs to wean itself from the addiction to fossil fuels as quickly as possible, but to replace some fossil fuels with others will not suffice as an approach to take on global warming. Whether we should embrace the technologies of the 21st century and convert our energy systems to ones that rely on wind, solar, and water power. In Jacobson et al., we lay out a plan of doing this for the state of New York, making it largely free of fossil fuels by 2030 and completely free by 2050." The plan that we're talking about here is a step in that direction. The state of New York City Council has already taken a look at, establishes renewable energy at 100% of our goal at 2030. The same timeline that is quoted in the article that you just stated. So if these plants have a 30, 40 year lifespan, how is it possible that we would be 100% renewable if we have these plants in our backyard? There is no 100% renewable community that I'm aware of right now that does not have some form of backup. And if someone knows of one, I'd be glad to hear it. There are several that have touted themselves as being 100% renewable, and that's true on paper, but they do have backup with natural gas or with coal. The response to your question is that we would be taking a similar pathway. We would be going to a 2030 with some backup and hopefully at a later time, a 2050 with no backup. Do I think the rest of the world is going to do that? The rest of the United States? The rest of the ERCOT market in Texas? I don't see that happening. So there will still be natural gas used in the ERCOT market and there will still be supply of energy to that market. But I think you're kind of substituting purchasing power with creating our own dirty power, which natural gas is objectively dirty. And there's a difference between buying it and making it ourselves in our backyard. You're right. We have complete control of it if we make it. We don't have complete control of it if we buy it. You can't control the methane leaks across the wall. All right, we've got about 10 minutes. My name is Sam Alexander and I live in Sanger, but I live just north of this proposed power plant out in the 2153 area. First of all, I've got a couple of things. You know, I've heard these things about the cancer thing wasn't significant, blah, blah, blah. Well, you know what? I've got cancer and it's pretty damn significant to me. And, you know, I worry about anything else being put out that's going to blow over in my backyard. I mean, you know, that's just my own personal opinion, but, you know, that's it. You know, and I think you have to follow history to see where you're going in the future. I'm a believer in that. And I have to look at the things that I've dealt with DME over the years. And I've been doing this for a long time. You know, and I can bring up so many different items where, you know, DME has done some weird things to, you know, that people can't explain why or how much it costs. They built the Spencer Administration Building. It was told by council to be no more than $450,000. That project wound up being, at last time I did the open record, was $816,000. That's how much overrun that project was for one building for DME. And then came this debacle about this transmission line substation, 138 upgrade we're doing now. This project started at $302 million. You can check all the newspapers you want, all the open records you want, but it started out around $302 million. Now, according to Phil at a couple of meetings ago, this project now is $403 million. And it seems like every council meeting I hear, we're building another substation. Last council meeting, it was out on May Hill. This council meeting is going to be another one out here on the Shady Oaks, Shady Shores, whatever street that is. It's a new substation every week, it seems like. And so you've got $225 million or $220 million, whatever number that you want to pick, that they've said this project is going to cost. Phil, at a workshop session just a couple of weeks ago, said this project is now $240 million. So now, Phil, it's in the workshop, so we can go back and check the files. >> Mr. Alexander, do you have a question? >> Okay, please, please. Thank you. >> I would like to know, first of all, has DME ever completed a major project without cost overruns? And is DME willing to promise that the proposed project will not have cost overruns? Will they pick a number like $225 million, and it's going to be no more than $225 million? And a follow-up to that would be, is DME willing to publish a list of the amount of each of its cost overruns for the past 10 years? Thank you. >> Yes. >> Well, I have one other question, too. >> No, that's it. >> This is a real easy question, Phil. Y'all project this stuff for 30 years out and stuff, and so I'd really like to know the Powerball numbers in the next 30 years. >> I'm really anxious to know that. >> I wouldn't be here, nor would you, right? Okay. So I'm trying to remember all the questions you had. Have we built a project and not gone over? Yes. Have we? Am I willing to guarantee a number? No. We put together estimates, and they're just that. They're estimates, but now we're trying to back up those estimates by going forward with request for proposals so that we'll have hard contracts before -- that we bring before council of what each component of building these would cost. We've done it with addictive pricing from manufacturers of what they build other plants like this for, but as far as knowing exactly what the land costs are going to be, what the manufacturer engine costs are going to be, what the design bill costs are going to be. We put together estimates based on projections that have been provided from other plants looking at what they cost, and we'll do request for proposals and have hard numbers from contractors and for different components before we proceed forward. >> I think we have time for one more question. I'm sorry to cut you off, but we'll take a short break after this question and re- convene here at -- I want to do 1140, 1145, 1140. Okay, 1140. We'll start back up again. Yes, sir. >> Good morning. My name is Gary Stewart. I am the local chapter -- I mean, the local chair of the local chapter of systems change, not climate change. A question I have is that you all have, I guess, proposed to forego your partnership with the Gibbons Creek coal plant, and I have looked at information that seems to indicate that you are basing your emissions rates on the assumption that that will be closing. But there are other cities that are still partnering with them, Bryan, Greenville, and New Orleans, and they have not indicated that they're disconnecting with them. Have you based your emissions evaluations on your assumption that the coal plant is going to be shut down? >> Emission calculations were based on the fact that we were no longer owners of the emissions from the coal plant. What happens with the coal plant, and Phil would be much better qualified to address this, is out of control of Benton if we divest ourselves of that plant. I don't know if you want to add any? >> Yeah, I'm chairman of the operating committee, that's the advisory committee to the TMPA board, and that operating committee is made up of the fellow general managers of each of the utilities of Bryan, Garland, and Greenville. As far as the future of that plant, we've been certainly in discussions and considering our different options going forward of what that plant, what it will do. What this plan does is gives us the option of, we need to have some option going forward if we don't want to participate in that plant in the future , gives us the option of what we need to do to have that option to get out of that plant if we want to. >> But wouldn't your emissions calculations be way off if that coal plant still is operating, even if y'all have disconnected from partnership with it? When you trade in your less efficient car and buy a more efficient car, are you still responsible for the emissions of the car you turned in? >> Well then, but the fact is the emissions are still happening, regardless, and so it seems to me like you're presenting something disingenuous when you're assuming that somehow even, you know they're still going to be operating, why are you deducting the emissions? Because our plan would be for it not to operate for us. When we turn it, when that plant turns over to someone else , to think it would be someone else down the line, it would probably be replacing something even less efficient, even more emissions. As a coal power plant goes, Gibbons Creek is one of the cleanest power plants of that era that was built in the 80s. If you look at the NOx levels of different plant sites around Texas, it is far below any emissions of any coal plant. So it would make sense to other people who have coal plants would displace those other coal plants for a displace it. >> Well, I still find that somewhat disingenuous in your presenting of your emissions accounts, but I do want to leave with a comment. The fact is this planet is dying. The ecospheres are collapsing. We cannot put any more CO2, methane in the atmosphere. I get it that you're saying that it's less. But the fact is you're still emitting it. And we cannot be going in that direction. We cannot. And another thing for you all to think about is what's good for Denton. Well, you seem to have the notion that unlimited economic growth, which benefits only a few if you really look at it given the increasing disparity in economics, I mean, and income in this country, you're still thinking, oh, we need to have energy for unlimited growth. That is insanity. That is cancer. And this city and all cities need to begin to think growth is cancerous. Unlimited growth is illusion. I may my question and let me talk. I am a citizen. You're -- no, I am not. So you all need to -- I suggest you all have an independent group to come up with another plan that really takes it from the citizens instead of vested interests. Thank you. [ Applause ] It's a little after 1130. We were saying we would take a 10-minute break. We went a little bit over there. So let's come back at 1142 and we'll continue some questions. Sorry to cut you off, Mr. Zoldmer. [ Silence ] We're convening our question and answer session. It's about 1145. Again, if you would like to pose a question, please queue up behind the microphone and ask the question of the panelists. And again, remind everyone to please be succinct. We're close to noon already. And I'd like to have an opportunity for everybody to ask a question if they want to. I believe Dr. Zoldmer is next. So please go ahead. Yes, thank you. Good morning or afternoon. My name is David Zoldmer. I live in Denton. And I have what I hope is a fairly short process or housekeeping question to answer. On October 6th, when we first found out really what was actually inside this renewable Denton plan, there were some folks that really were wondering whether or not there was a greater purpose in all these gas plants than just backing up renewables. In other words, might have there possibly been something going on here between ERCOT and DME to get back into the generation business of some plan to maybe co-market power? Now, that's not an accusation. That's just an open question. But if that is on the table, that immediately brings me back to Section 12 of the utility portion of our city charter, which explicitly states that the rates and charges for services to consumers outside the corporate limits may be greater, but shall not be less than the rates and charges for similar service to consumers within the corporate limits of our city. Now, I'm certainly not here today to debate what our charter will or will not allow. But at the time our charter was adopted, we were in the generation business. And frankly, ERCOT is just another name for consumers. So the only question I have to ask right now is, has DME bothered to ask either our city attorney, the attorney general, the judge, or whoever, whether or not this may possibly, this entire plan may possibly violate our charter, and do we need to amend our charter possibly before moving forward ? We have our city attorney here this morning. So if Anita or -- So this is Anita Burgess. She's the city attorney for the city of Denton. Good morning. How are you? Would you repeat the question? I just walked back in the room when you were stating it. The question, yeah, the question is, according to the language of Section 12 on the utility part of our charter, and I won't read it again, but the idea here is that marketing power or services, however you define services outside of our market area, would not be allowed under Section 12 of the utility part of the charter. So the question is, if ERCOT or DME have some agreement here to market power, and it's going to be at ERCOT's price, not DME's, is this going to wash with our charter? So that's the question. Okay. Thank you for your question and for your concern with regard to our staying within the parameters of our charter and within the parameters of the law. I don't believe that there's going to be a charter issue. I am of the opinion that there is not a charter issue with the project, as I understand it, on the table. The city would be providing electricity and services to its citizens within the corporate boundary and then also complying with law and rule as it concerns the ERCOT protocols. So I don't see that that is an inconsistent reading with our city charter. There are limited circumstances under which matters must go to vote, pursuant to the terms of our charter. We've looked closely at those. I do not believe that this is one of them at this time. Okay. I'm not arguing for a citizen vote on any of this, but I'm just asking whether or not, are you willing to put that opinion in writing for the council and the citizens that you feel like this does not violate? Well, I think as the council, I work for the city council, so certainly whatever my client desires, I'm certainly willing to do that. My comments here, I'm sure, are a matter of public record, and this is being recorded. I think our citizens are watching it right now. That is certainly some information out to the public as it concerns my thinking on this matter. Thank you very much. Now, my question was – go ahead, Will. Well, I just want to follow up on that as far as to clarify that. Interchanging energy with ERCOT is something we do today. It's something that's been done our whole time in ERCOT. We can't exactly predict our load at any certain point in time, and so there are certainly times where we have overbought energy from others and we're selling that back into ERCOT markets. So that's not a new concept. Now, that's what we've gotten the opportunity for, certainly a greater volume of that, but selling energy and buying energy from the ERCOT market is not a new thing. I'm not suggesting this is new. It's maybe just a base that's never been – something that's never been addressed or cleared up. So I guess I'm good for now. Thank you. Thank you, Dr. Zolot. I might make a procedural suggestion. I know people are queuing up. The room is thinned out enough so that with a little bit of rearrangement, folks could actually sit down and not have to stand up to wait for the questions. So if you all wouldn't mind, it looks like the amount of space on my right would be easier to thin out. Would you all mind scooting over a couple of chairs so that these folks have an opportunity to sit down instead of stand? And we'll just consider those outside chairs to be there for people to ask questions. If you want to stand, please stand. I know we've been sitting a long time. Please go ahead. Hi. My name is Jody Ismert and I just wanted to say that – I definitely have a question, but I also wanted to say something first, just that we are all neighbors here. I feel like we should be working together with the city and the public, and it just doesn't really feel like that's happening right now. And it kind of makes me a little sad, to be honest, because I think we have a lot of opportunities where we can work together and really truly make Denton great, where the public feels it's wonderful and a wonderful place to live, as well as the city, as well as DME. Another thing, Brian Dascombe – and I apologize if I mispr onounce your name – I read those comments, too, because they were public from the open house, and I think a good majority of them were pretty negative. But, however, the ones that were positive, I did notice, were calling the people who were writing negative comments climate deniers. A couple of them did that, so I don't even think they were aware that there were gas plants involved. I'll let you respond to that, but I want to finish. Anyhow, my question really is this, is that – and Phil and I have already spoken about this – Texas is going through a huge population boom right now. Mutual insurance is moving here. They're moving their headquarters here, as well as Toyota. There are so many people moving into Texas right now. There simply isn't even enough housing for all of the people who are planning to move here in the next couple of years. And energy needs are on the rise, not necessarily typical energy needs from BAU and what we might project into the future, but exponentially. And so one thing that I had mentioned to Phil a while ago in one of our meetings is that that means that most of these plants that are in operation right now will be running on top of what we place and what we build if we choose to go forward with that. And so truly, even though Denton – and I understand what Mr . Johnson was saying about how Denton is not accountable for it on the books, necessarily, if we choose to run these generators nonstop during the summer, like 30 percent of the time, you know, four months straight, we are not necessarily accountable for all of that, if AirCut buys it from us. But we are still getting those emissions on top of all of the emissions from every other gas plant and coal plant that is continuing to run. And so really, net emissions are increasing because we are not shutting down any. And population is increasing. Businesses are increasing demand. Everything is increasing. And so I understand what you are saying on the books. On the books, we can show a decrease. But as far as total, it is a net increase because none of these other plants are being shuttered. And we are adding gas plants. And so my question is how do we justify that? I mean, how -- when can we see the numbers to show the exact net increase with all of these plants running all simultaneously? And I will let you answer. Okay, great. So there is a couple of important concepts here. And thank you for bringing them up. The first one was regarding the comments that we have received on our website. And I gave some kind of portrayal of those as being majority positive. And this is a tricky thing to do when you are talking about qualitative feedback that people are giving. They are writing comments. And I am trying to shoehorn those really into categories. Were they for this plan? Were they for 100% renewables? What did they prefer? And you can do it somewhat. But as I looked at those, I would say that people who were largely positive, who had largely positive comments, who didn't recommend that we do something different, I said , okay, well, I am going to go with that. I am going to group them into the positive category and so on. But it is a very fair statement to question that. Because really what I am doing is trying to make qualitative information quantitative. It is just tricky, right? And so the second concept you brought up there was the state of Texas is growing. What does that mean for emissions and for these additional plants? And one concept here, maybe you will mostly be familiar with it. And so I am sorry if I am boring you with something you already understand. But the supply of energy in Texas and in any grid is driven by demand rather than supply. So when we turn on air conditioners, when we turn on lights , the generators react. It is not as though when we put new -- if we were to put new plants here in Denton, it is not as though we are increasing the use of energy, right? Because we all use the energy that we decide to use without first checking to see if there is enough generation on the state grid. That is what ERCOT is for. They make sure there is. So as you are right, as new people move to Texas, as new businesses move to Texas, their electrical use may increase. But the reason that we can consider the emissions strictly for our plants is because we know that the demand that isn 't being increased because we are putting in these new plants. And so when these plants run, they are ipso facto taking the place of other generation that would be running. And since these are some of the cleanest plants in the state, if not the nation, then we know that it is cleaner energy than otherwise would have been produced. So that energy is going to be produced. The question is what kind of generating facility is appropriate for it. And these are very efficient. Well, I don't think you are answering the question. I mean, I respect what you are -- I can kind of see what you are saying. But like for -- and I may have not been clear, so I apologize. But when the plants are running and ERCOT is buying our energy for the grid, essentially, because there is all of this extra demand, because so many people have moved to the area, and we need the energy when it is 110 degrees in the summertime. What you are putting, you know, what is being emitted into Denton and our neighboring cities is not going on our books . Okay. Sorry. I think I understand now. But it is the net emissions if every single plant is running to meet the demand. It is a net increase because we are all contributing to it. Okay. So if these plants are running, I guess there is the question, do we take credit, if you will, for the emissions that are coming out of these plants? And if we do, I think it would only be fair to say, well, then, we shouldn't take credit for the emissions coming from plants that we don't own, right? Whoever owns those should be taking those emissions. Otherwise, we are double counting the emissions. Right. But we are still getting the emissions in town, is what I am saying. Right. So there is a question -- I guess there are two questions. Overall emissions statewide and then local emissions. Overall net emissions are increasing as a result of building these gas plants, because everything else is running as well because of the population boom. Okay. That is a specific question. I guess I would defer to Kenny on are these increasing net emissions. I can partially address that. The unfortunate reality is that those that are running in other areas of the state are ending up in our town. They are being transported here with enough reaction time to create ground-level ozone and other issues. So Brian is correct in the sense that if you look at -- we did do analyses to look at the ERCOT gas market. We didn't want to look at the whole market because it is clearly superior to the whole market. We wanted to look at the gas component only and contrast that in terms of pollution compared to what we were generating versus what would have been generated on the ERC OT market. And the fact of the matter is that because of the effic iencies of these plants, the plants would produce the same amount of electricity but use 27 percent less gas. And all of the parameters with regards to the pollutants have decreased. So it's -- you know, air quality issues are an issue of transport. And it's really a question of how that material -- where it 's generated, how much time that it has to get here. And unfortunately, just because of the prevailing wind direction of what's south of us and a little bit to the east of us, we get the brunt of all of that. Okay. So that makes sense to me then. So what you're saying is, in fact, if everything is running plus these gas plants, there is going to be a net increase total, like because of the demands? I guess that the way I would characterize it is if the gas plants here were not running, the amount of energy being produced to the south and to the east of us would be the same. And so the contaminants that are associated with that energy would be liberated into the air and move in our direction because of the prevailing wind directions. So if the plants are running, by definition, they're displ acing some electricity generation that would occur to the south. Now, is that -- you know, you're right. We are going to see increased electricity generation in this state because of growth. And the question is going to be, where is that capacity coming from? In the absence of these plants, even though they're a tiny portion of the energy that would be produced, that energy is going to come from the south by plants that are currently in operation or it's going to come from a new plant that's put online. Or it could come from renewable, which I think is what people want to do, like solar panels on roofs and things like that. Yeah, that's correct, but the peaker plants, by definition, only run when the renewable has been completely occupied. Remember earlier when we said that the fuel source that's the cheapest is the one that gets triggered first. Renewables are the first thing that goes, and then the next cheapest option is what is demanded on by ERCOT. So can we -- kind of like what I was mentioning before, like us working together in all neighbors, can't we look at doing something different? Because this is the only plan that has been looked at at all. So can't we all work together and try and find something that works for everyone? We have looked at the different ones, and that's the graphs that we show of what would it take to be 100%, 83%, going 70% without building these plants. We have looked at all those options, and we've shown the graph and numbers to do that, and the emissions. I mean, like with an independent consultant, and truly, I mean, really working with the community to do this. But I have asked so many questions, and I apologize. I think I've overdone myself here. Right. Go on, Ed. Okay. Thank you. Yeah, thank you. Yes, sir. Hi. My name is Ben Hutash. I live here in Denton. In the '70s, my parents started messing around with going off-grid, and by the time I was born in '85, we had six 45- watt solar panels and three golf cart batteries and an ONAN generator. And so we'd fire on the generator whenever we needed, you know, like backup like we're talking about. So when we talk about this plan being state-of-the-art, I kind of feel like it's a 40-year-old off-grid solution being applied to an on-grid situation. It doesn't seem that miraculous to me. But my question is more of a functional one to do with the market, because I was trying to understand -- oh, my gosh. Excuse me one second. I just had a major brain fart. It's so terrible. Yeah. Oh, God. Oh, yes. Yes. Here we go. So we were talking about when I met with you, Phil, we were saying that we could get off of the day-ahead market and actually get on to purchasing power day-to-day and meeting the goals in the 15-minute. Increments of pricing changes. And Stephen seemed to say that the prices are analyzed on a five-minute basis. And so with our five-minute start with these plans, we'd be able to capture pretty successfully the price changes. And if this is such a successful solution to this problem, how come more people aren't doing it? And if us in the South Texas energy co-op build these plans and prove that they work, what's going to prevent other people from diluting the market and the functionality of this as more people adopt this technology? Will we have a competitive edge forever or just a short period of time? I'll let Stephen answer that last question. But as far as other people building these, if I remember correctly, there are about 2.7 gigawatts of these reciproc ating engines installed in America. Engine manufacturers expect that number to dramatically increase as renewables increase going forward. So there are quite a bit, quite a few other people that are doing this, other entities that are doing this. Thanks for your question. Much appreciated. I have curiosity. Can you tell me how many cities or cont iguous areas have 70% renewable generation today in North America? Any idea? Oh, I'm not sure. I've got an idea. That's a zero. The reason why more people are not articulating this as a proposal in response is because more people are not trying to go 70% renewable at this point in time. Of those that you're hearing, and I'll use Georgetown as an example, they're choosing to outsource effectively the proposal that we're bringing to council. They're passing that burden onto a third party, and a third party is turning it around. That's really what's not being shown in all of this. We're articulating it to hear why, because we want to take control. But unless you have 70% renewable, the solution that Phil put back to you as to going more and being able to respond quickly becomes more not a new point at all, but less of an extreme unpredictable factor. When you have usage and consumption that we all know can change dramatically because as the day gets cold like this morning or a day gets hot, your consumption changes, and it changes quite rapidly. You might be surprised, but it does hour on hour. If the same thing is happening in an opposite direction in renewables, it's the difference between if I walked along the back of the dais and asked people to throw a sponge ball at me, they have some probability of hitting me. But if I walked along the back of the dais and was continually going up and down at the same time as going across, I guarantee you have a much lower probability of hitting me. It's the same thing in going to increased renewables. You have to have something that is more appropriate to make sure that you hit the target as frequently as you can. Does that give you some greater analysis to the level of complexity involved here? Yeah, may I ask one more question? We sort of touched on this a lot, but it seems like there are more efficient technologies out there like the combined cycle. What I've read about those is they can fluctuate like 50% power load up and down and still maintain the steam generation. If we were in a partnership with other communities that were trying to advance their solar portfolio, couldn't we do better by having an underlying base load that we all use for part of our and then the 50% that is adjustable? So if your only concern was people's consumption and not where all your power sources were coming from, the short answer would be kind of, but not really. One of the reasons I say that is because a traditional combined cycle plant has constraints around it as to how it operates, including the number of times that it can start and stop and how long it has to run for in order to heat up and then cool down afterwards before it starts back up again. The intimate nature of sun and wind and other renewable sources dictates that you have to have a capability of greater frequency of switching on and off and going from the bottom of your capability to the top. A little bit like driving your car to work. If you drive your car and you live next to the highway and your office is at the other end of the highway and there's nobody on it , you can drive 56 miles an hour and you might get the fuel consumption that the manufacturer told you you could get. But if you don't live close to the freeway, you live off freeway and you live in very congested and you have a lot of school zones and you have to stop and start all your way and you go up and downhill and you have different road conditions, your fuel consumption is going to be a lot different. Same thing here. It's a suitable for purpose exercise and what we're proposing is the most suitable purpose to meet the demands of where consumption and debt is going to go. In going from 40% to 70% again, that's something nobody else is doing and achieving. And when I think Denton needs to be thoroughly applauded, it was before my time, decision to go to 40%. It's pione ering. It really is and I think people need to really appreciate that and remind themselves of that. If there's a person who's for this proposal or a person who has a little cynicism towards it, at the end of the day Denton is doing great things and going to 70% is an awesome thing. It really truly is. We're merely saying to do that, you want to have this because for the greater benefit of everybody else, we need to protect citizens from exposure to risks and we need to have appropriate sources that we have some control of to make it happen. Does that answer your question, sir? Yeah, I just want to end with saying that even if we did the 100% renewable and we had the power purchase agreements for our backup, it would be worth it to me to spend the extra penny a kilowatt for the first five years and then whatever follows. I think some of the math is a little wonky out there, but the cost impact of people might be quite more significant than that and I think we have to bear in mind all the citizens in Denton, including those on fixed income and those on low incomes. The average per capita income in Denton is not the greatest in the state of Texas at all by a long way. I think the impact of spending anything extra on a utility bill has to be taken into account. So whether this is. All right, can we move on to the next question, please? Thank you. Hi there, I'm Todd King. I live in Denton. My question is around the use of frequency of the use of the quick start plants, and I get the need for them when it 's cloudy and not windy. But somewhere between that frequency and 30% 35%. But is there an opportunity to have to generate surplus from these units and that would be sold onto the market? And then if that happens, is there an opportunity for DME or the city of Denton to actually profit from selling this product out on the market? Thanks for the question. Good question. I think we've attempted to answer that in a number of different ways previously, and I apologize if that hasn't been something you've seen. But the attempt to be briefed to your answer is that the proposed plants will function in an economic dispatch. They will be operating at times when they are the cheapest units to operate given everything that's available. Our analysis is that's going to be a 30-ish percent amount of the time. That doesn't mean that they run 100% of the time during summer, which I've heard a couple of comments made. It means they're going to be there when the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine, and that's going to take up an awful lot of their capability. There will be times when the units are capable of operating , they make economic sense to operate, yet Denton may not need them to serve the load. But they're economic and ERCOT will dispatch them. That in essence is generating electricity that is economically beneficial to Denton, but the greater good to the market. I would add that DME is a non-profit organization, and so any financial reward that's realized from selling power onto the market has a beneficial impact on rates. There's no sense of DME profiting. It's that we pass that savings along to the rate payer. So we look at how much we spend on all electric consumption to meet the needs of the city. So if there are some revenues in there, then it just makes the overall expenditure lesser than it would have been. So that's how we would get our rates to be either flat or down, is we'd be able to subsidize our citizens' rates by having these plants. It is certainly something that contributed into the analysis, sir. Yeah. I wonder, like we've heard a couple times, if people wouldn't mind tiered rates or paying a little bit more, if it would mean not having these plants. Or if there's another way to reduce the rates for citizens of Denton besides buying into natural gas. So we have a green sense rate available for anybody that wants to be 100% renewable today. And so that option is available to citizens today. As far as meeting the needs of those who can't pay their bill, don't have the funds, we provide funding to a community organization that helps deal with them. Which usually if they don't have the funds for that, they have other social needs that need to be met also. And so we refer them to that agency and provide funds for that agency to meet their needs. Thank you. Hello, gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for the, you know, it's been a very informative meeting. Lots of good backgrounds, so I appreciate it. My name is Lucas Hall. I'm a resident of Denton. Okay. Just a, I think it was really jarring for a lot of people to see that the renewable Denton plan involved constructing two gas plants. And then specifically, in my opinion, the gas plant proposal in the Green Valley, North Sherman area is just in the middle of nowhere, not in an established industrial area. So I guess as a general question, I was wondering why site it there of all possible places? Why not, I don't know, for example, further west of town? Why not really far out of town? And then I have a follow-up question. So when you look for the siting of where you're going to site it, I mean, first of all, the presentation of renewable Denton plan emphasized the majority of what renewable Denton plan was about. 70% renewable. And the percentage of it that's funded, that is supported by the gas plants is a minority amount. Yes. Okay. So the second part of that is as far as determining the siting of the plants, when you're going to site a plant , you're looking for a crossroads of where's the transmission lines to get the power out and where are the gas lines to bring the gas in. And so that eliminates a lot of area around Denton and it puts you at that crossroads of where we're talking about out by the airport where there's two major transmission lines, gas transmission lines, and there's also electric transmission lines. Same thing for the Green Valley site. You'll notice there's an electric transmission line going across there and there 's a major gas supply lines also. That's what determines the size. Okay. And you'll use that same analysis to eliminate possible sites for further out of town, I guess. Well, you know what, I trust that that's a very understandable, that's a reasonable response. Here's my actual question is what right now that entire area, North Sherman area, is zoned agricultural or native pasture land? Can any of you tell me 10 years from now, what will the zoning be in the immediate areas surrounding the industrial, the new gas plant? I don't think any of us know what it will be 10 years from now. Okay. Do you see my point? My point is that this will serve conceivably as an anchor to a broader industrial area. Once you put the gas plant there, it's my belief that it will immediately make, it will incentivize surrounding land owners to either sell to the developers or what have you, who will then apply for rezoning to create a new industrial district. That's not foreseen in anything, any sort of Denton plants. I realize this is out of the scope of what you've done, but this is just one piece of a greater independent analysis, not just looking at air and water quality, but also broader social, environmental planning and zoning implications of installing gas plants in a pristine, undeveloped area. And that's something that really concerns me. I don't think Denton really needs a new industrial area north of town, but you'd have a tough time convincing me that that's not what's going to eventually happen. So that's not really a question, but that's my concern. Thank you. It's a concern, and it's a good concern. We appreciate it. I worked for Houston Lying and Power a good time ago, and we had this same situation out near Galveston Bay, near Clear Lake area, and we had a gas plant out there that had been built in the 60s or 70s. And it, what came next to the plant was housing developments. Housing developments, the land was valuable for housing developments. That's where developers wanted to put that. We don't have control of that. City Council has some control of how they zone the property, and folks come before them and say, "Hey, we want it zoned this way for this purpose." And so that happens. There's a fair and open process that lets that happen. But history has shown that different kinds of development can happen around these facilities. It 's not just going to be all one way. It may be the way you're concerned about, and it may not. You know, we can't really answer how it's going to be for sure. I think an independent analysis of those sorts of dynamics would be important and valuable to the people of Denton. Thank you. Galen, to add on to your response, it is helpful to look at the existing power plant that we have in Denton, the Spencer Gas Generating Plant. And we're very familiar with the location of that because it's just a few feet from our office. We're right next door to it. And if you look around, you see apartment homes, you see retail development and that sort of thing. So it's certainly maintained its character. My name is John Rath. I came from Gravevine. I've spent about the last two years in Buffalo, New York, learning about geothermal energy as a way to reduce peak loads and as a way to help reduce the demand and therefore reduce the supply. And I realize it's two different climates, but geothermal energy is such a huge secret. And I don't understand why it hasn't been discussed here as a means to drop demand, particularly at peak times. Peak times here are probably during the summer. I've lived here 30 years and came back. So having a massive effort to increase geothermal would drop the peak demand for electricity during the times that you need it. Now, there also are other ways that I'm aware of, mostly happening in industrial and commercial areas where people, companies make a conscious decision to voluntarily drop their demand, therefore not needing as much in payment for maybe reduced rates at certain times. I haven't heard anything like that talked about. The money that you would propose to build plants might be better spent in terms of reducing your demand here. And I guess from what I hear from the citizens, they might be willing to make those tradeoffs now that they understand the health aspects versus some cost aspects. So have you considered any of those things, and can you at this time? Well, I can answer briefly, and any of these guys may have more to add to it. I'll say that conservation and efficiency, thank you for bringing it up. It's something that we really care about a lot. In fact, demonstrably so. You can see in all the programs that we have, we have an energy audit program where anyone can for free have their home looked at with a thermal imaging camera and that sort of thing to find out where they can make the most efficiency upgrades. And then once they find out what they need to repair in their home, we have considerable rebates available for people to add energy efficiency to their home. So windows, air conditioners, we give up to $30,000 for someone who wants to install solar panels. So that's the most generous rebate in the state. And all of that goes towards exactly what you're saying of reducing the demand. And also there's the industrial demand side management. Those are all very important parts of the job that we do. Now, this particular plan that we're talking about is a question of once we've been as efficient as we can, once we 've implemented those programs to the extent that we can, we know that we can't be 100% efficient. That is, we can't be so efficient that we don't use any energy. So since we still have some energy to use, the question remains, where should that energy come from? And so this plan offers a way to get the energy that we know we're still going to need in the way that's renewable, that's cost effective, and that maintains our reliability. I would encourage you to look at just perhaps super efforts at that efficiency, but congratulations on what you're doing. Hello, I'm John Seidman. I live in the South Ridge area of the beautiful and growing city of Denton. I have a very little short question, but first I'd like to comment that I'm very impressed with the quality of answers that the DME and the city staff have given to the many questions that have come up. It's obvious that this group has done their homework, and I 'll think that you ought to be congratulated for it. The same thing really applies to our city council while I'm on that subject. We have a wonderful city council, and you know, we as citizens elected that group, and we need to let them do their job. I guess what I'm suggesting there is that that's where the final decision should be made. Back to my question, I'm an old man, and I've done a lot of different things right now. I'm a retired engineer. In an earlier life, I was manager of ESSO's Zelton Field in Libya, and in Libya, we had to generate our own power. And what we ended up doing, I think we got the plant from a company in Scandinavian country. I forget which one it was now. Actually, it was Switzerland , that's what it was. My question, though, is that we built a turbine gas plant, and I know from the petroleum industry, which I'm not connected with for a long time now, but all the power, to my knowledge, of LNG plants, which was considerable power, was all powered by gas turbines. And I'm just curious of why the group is considering reciprocating gas engines rather than gas turbines. So the new reciprocating engine technology is quite a bit more fuel efficient than your gas turbines that have been used in the past. I think the efficiency for these engines is about 48.5 percent, whereas a simple cycle turbine is going to be closer to the high 30s, low 40s range in fuel efficiency. Also, a turbine loses considerable capacity when the temperatures get really hot. These engines are just like your car engine. They don't lose any capacity in the summer when it gets above 100 degrees here in Texas. So those are two of the main reasons. They're also much more flexible as far as ramp rates and up and down time, minimum down time, and those kind of things. Okay, thank you. I was sure that you had evaluated that. Actually, one quick comment. You know, in the Libyan desert , the temperatures were pretty high, but I gather that at that time, we weren't really that concerned about efficiency. We had the gas there, and we had to need the power, and that was the way we went. Thank you very much. Hi, my name is Sarah Baggierri. I live in Denton. Can everybody hear me? Okay. All right. Two questions. The first one has to do with the permit, which I think would be best for Dr. Banks, and the other one has to do with the debt. The permit question, as you know, Denton's in a non-attain ment area, and because we're in a non-attainment area, anything over 50 tons of VOCs per year is considered a major source, correct? Right. That's correct. Okay. We'll verify with Mary, but -- So we're at that -- 50 tons is what constitutes a major source in North Texas. For each of our applications, it's stated that there would be 48.9 tons of VOCs. So my question for you, and it's really just a true/false question, if this were one application for one plant instead of two applications for two plants, wouldn't that make this a major source polluter? Do you want to address that? Well, there's a lot that goes into the air emission calculations. We talked a little bit before the break. It depends on the number of starts and the number of operating hours. We did submit the original application for 12 engines at one site, and it was still going to be minor. So I think in Denton's case, you can correct me if I'm wrong, it was very important for them to remain minor, to be a minor source of emissions to fit in with the renewable Denton plan. So even if there were 12 engines, they would reduce the hours, the starts, whatever they could to remain minor and be within that 48.6 tons. Okay. So that exactly wasn't my question. My question was, if this were one application, would it have been a major source? I think the answer is still going to be. So it's important to remember that those air permits were for 19 total engines to allow for flexibility. The renewable Denton plan calls for 12 engines only, either at one site or two sites. So if we put 12 engines at one site, that would still be a minor source. I'm going to take that as a yes. Okay. The next question is regarding the amount of debt that DME has. Currently, it's $547 million. This plan would add perhaps an additional $250 million. That's a total of $797 million of debt. According to the Comptroller, we also have tax-supported debt of $462.5 million. So that puts us at approximately $1.24 billion of debt for our city of 128,000 people. That's $7,800 of debt per capita. This is Comptroller numbers. So my question for you is, is it DME's position that having $797 million of outstanding debt will somehow reduce the rate of electricity for rate payers ? Yes. Would you please explain? I thought I'd fish for that. Help me learn your math. Yes. So it is counterintuitive. There's counterintuitive things about this plan, right? You're going to lower gas emissions, but you're going to build gas units? Yes, because we're going to displace dirtier gas units that would be used instead. It's counterintuitive. You're going to spend $225 million, but you're going to save money? How does that work? Well, it works because, as I stated at the beginning of this presentation, whatever fuel source we go forward with, someone's going to issue debt to fund the building of a solar farm, a wind farm, these gas plants. We're going to -- whether we obligate ourselves through a purchase power agreement with those sources to pay that or whether we have that down in our books by itself, we're going to have that obligation going forward to pay that debt by simply procuring the power to do that. So the reason we believe this is the lowest cost plan is because it allows us to buy the wind power and the solar energy at the lowest cost by having these plants to back up those resources and that this is the lowest cost, most efficient resource we can have to provide that backup. So are you willing to guarantee the ratepayers that their rates will actually go down going forward with this plan? No. Because I don't know what future gas prices are going to be . I don't know what future regulations are going to be. We certainly have our best estimate. And we -- choosing not to do anything is a choice. And so choosing to go forward as business as usual and keep operating a coal plant in South Texas and maintain it 40 percent while still puts us as a leader in the nation of renewables is not the direction we've received that we want to go. The direction we've received is to maximize the amount of renewables, mitigate exposure to rent to rate increases in the future, and to maintain financial and operational reliability. And so this is the best plan we've got to put forward to that. So I'm sorry, I don't mean to pester you, but this 6.5 cents per kilowatt hour, I believe, is what the ratepayers are paying. Correct me if I'm wrong at this time on average. It depends on -- no, it's not. And it depends on what rate class you're talking about. I was talking about residential off-peak. Well, I mean, we have a residential rate. We have, I think, just authorized time of use rates. So we don't have a residential off-peak rate at this point. So let's use the 6.5 cents as a baseline. What is the cent amount of the debt service on this $747 million? How much is that factored into this rate that debt and rate payers are paying? Is it going to -- where is the number in that 6.5 cent example? So within the cost structure of our rate structure, there's the debt that's at TMPA that we're paying through a bill to TMPA. There's the debt we have in our books, and there's the operation and the fuel cost we have or the purchase power cost we have. As far as what parts of that make up which components, I don't have that. Why not? I'd be certainly glad to meet with you. I don't have that right now with me to answer to you right here. I'll certainly be glad to meet with you at any point and provide those details. So what I would just request is that you make that public. I don't personally need it, but I'd like for people to know when they're paying a rate what part of that is a debt payment. That's what I'm asking for, and I appreciate your time. Thank you. So part of that is presented annually in our budget to the City Council, and it is a public document as far as what can be made public. There are certainly parts of our cost structure that is electric competitive information that because we have purchase power contracts and those contracts have confidentiality clauses in them, aren't made public. They are available to our City Council and Public Utility Board and discussed with them in a closed session. I'm Sharon Wilson, and I have two questions and something else to say. But my first question, it seems that because the city is refusing to grant the citizens many of the things that we've asked for to be comfortable with this, including an outside independent renewable energy expert to analyze this, so all we get comes from you. So I'd like to know if each of you would make available online, publicly, your CVs, including your work history, all of the companies you have consulted for, including the ones that have the words "gas," "oil," and "L NG." I would like for you to make your CV and work history public. You mean our resumes? Yes, because your CVs and your work history, because this plan has been created under your paradigm. It seems that that's all we're going to get, so we deserve to know what paradigm this was created under. Certainly any of our applications for employment would have resumes and that information be available to an open record request ? We would like to have that. I'm asking if you would make that information publicly available so that we know the paradigm under which this plan has been created. So as we introduced ourselves, we introduced our backgrounds, and those backgrounds I think were pretty inclusive. We can certainly go into more detail. But certainly I think another point you could make is -- So I'll take that as if you're not willing to do that? I'm trying to answer your question. The second part of your question was, as far as renewable energy experience, on a per capita basis, this team is responsible for purchasing more renewable energy than just about anybody in the nation . And so I think as far as experience with renewable energy, you've got executive manager and team here that's responsible for more renewable energy per capita than most any place in the nation. So I think there is some experience there. There's some experience, but there's not any 100 percent renewable energy experience of that kind. And there's also a lot of experience that's heavily steeped in the fossil fuel industry. So that's the paradigm I'm getting at. But anyway, also because it doesn't seem that the citizens are going to be allowed, a renewable energy expert, I wanted to make sure I passed out some flyers. I wanted to make sure everyone knows that at the Thinline Film Festival, Josh Fox will be screening his new movie that is focused on climate change. And he'll have a renewable energy expert with him who has already stated that Denton does not have to have the power plants. And that renewable energy expert will be there to answer questions. Unfortunately, it seems that the council is intent on rushing this through, the vote. So you may only hear what would have been, could have been, but still there will be that person there. I was in Paris and I spoke with some very highly regarded climate scientists, sat in on some of their presentations, and they said that there is no way that we will meet the 2 degrees centigrade goal by building more natural gas power plants. Yes ma'am, in the absence of additional renewable energy, you're absolutely correct. They said that... Could you please get to your question? I'm going to get to my question, but I'm going to get to my question in my time frame. Okay. The thing is that the earth has lung cancer. The earth is a two-pack-a-day smoker for decades. And people in the council, certain council members, and I heard it from Mr. Johnson, has said that, you know, we're doing more than some other cities, but what you're doing essentially is cutting down to one pack a day, and that's not going to... If you have lung cancer, that's still going to be a death sentence. 71% of the people in America want renewable energy, but we 're trapped. We're trapped in this system where we can't get out of fossil fuels. That's why people are here trying to get out of that system . It's called democracy. And so, Mr. Johnson, you're scolding of citizens who are trapped in that system for participating in that system seemed rather inappropriate. And then also, part of this question was just answered about the TCEQ permit, but the minor source permits are rubber stamp permit, and according to what you said is that these plants will only... According to the permit, they will only operate 37% of the time. But we have to supply energy to ERCOT, and ERCOT can ask us to turn these plants on if there's an emergency. So say we have a really hot summer, which we're going to have a lot of those, and the plants have to run a lot, and we exceed that 37% by say October. Then what happens November and December? Do those plants, if you exceed the 37%, do those plants sit idle, or can ERCOT demand that you run those plants in violation of the permit? And so that's it. So under an emergency situation, ERCOT could demand that. But an emergency situation is not a typical summer day in Texas. An emergency situation is when the grid is in danger of brown out or black out. [inaudible] Hey there. I'm Sharon Spies, and I'm a resident of Denton, and I did not know what Sharon Wilson was going to ask, so I apologize, but there is a little bit of an overlap of this. And then I have my question, and then I'm also going to ask a question for another citizen of Denton that is seated here. Okay, to put my question in context, a brief look at DME's cost estimates on three things show more than $100 million overage in installing the extra substations around town. We still owe over $150 million on the Gibbons Creek plant that we bought decades ago. And the cost estimate to just build this plant keeps going up. And at the work session, you did give the amount fill of $2 40 million and said it may increase even more because of interest rates and other, as you get your estimates in. So that was stated in the work session. Okay, we keep hearing 70% renewable. I'm sorry, but natural gas is not a renewable. So I get offended when I keep hearing you guys state this as a renewable Denton plan, and I believe a lot of the citizens do as well. We've heard today that the technology of wind and solar is not a viable option for the city at this time. The renewable industry has made great strides in just the past few years. So my question, and please understand that I say this with a heavy heart because I am truly wanting to be 100% solar and wind, true renewable, not dependent on fossil fuels at all. But since Gibbons Creek is going to continue to run, whether we divest right now, today, or not, why not get better use of our money and the citizens of Denton's money, get better use of that money and continue to use that energy for right now and get an independent study from a true renewables consulting firm, as well as allow in that, doing that, you will also allow the battery storage technology to advance, the wind and solar development technology to advance to make it a more viable option. You guys are experienced in fossil fuels. That's what you were hired for when you came into DMA. I understand that. But you're not renewables, truly 100% renewables experts, experienced. So to truly get both sides of this story to understand, you have to have both sides pros and cons of this issue. We're, as the citizens, we're asking for that independent study from a truly renewable consultant firm. Not you guys calling them, but them being tasked with that. And I know you guys may want to defer and say the city council has tasked you with this, but I believe as a citizen here in Denton, that should have been an option that should have been done in the first place. We shouldn't have to be asking for that because we have to see the whole picture. We're only seeing your perspective of that whole picture. So that's my question. If I could, I'd like to respond to one thing you said early on, and it's a point that can be confusing. I hope that this concept will be helpful to clear up a little bit. We talked about our CIP budget, the budget for transmission lines and substations, and how that seems to be going up every year. Last year we said maybe it was going to be $300 million, and the next year we say it's going to be $350 million. Were we not telling the truth then, or are we lying? Now what's going on? Why are we giving different numbers? And that's simply that we're in a growing city. So as we anticipate out five years ahead, how much money we need to spend on capital investment to invest in the capital infrastructure here in Denton, that changes because it's a growing city. So it's kind of like if I told you last year that my son was three feet tall, but this year I'm saying he's three feet tall and two inches, was I lying last year or am I lying now? No, I'm sorry. People grow and our city's growing. I accept that. I see what you're saying, but you guys are in the business of trying to forecast. You cannot forecast one year out. You have got to forecast five, 10, 15, 20 years out. That was having to do with our five-year CIP. You've already gone up on that. You estimated… And we will every year, unless the city of Denton stops growing. And then maybe we'll go down. But you should have that in your assessment in the first place. We are going to keep growing. We're looking out five years. So each new year comes, there 's another year that's added to that site, the CIP. And there's another one. This doesn't completely address this question. I've heard a lot about renewable energy experts. And again, I'm going to make a statement that doesn't completely satisfy that, but I did want you to know I think you can be proud of your city. When the city of Boulder, Colorado, which is a pretty progressive city, when they started thinking, you know, we could have more control of our energy if we created our own municipal electric company, they wanted someone to come in to tell them about renew ables. And the two people that they had come were Mike Grimm, our executive manager of power supply, and Phil Williams, our general manager. They said, here's to renewable energy experts. Demonstrably they are renewable energy experts because of the 40 percent renewable that they brought to their city. We want to hear more about how they did that. And so just to give you some comfort about the level of expertise you have here in Denton. And there's more to say on that, but I wanted to make those two points. Again, I'm sorry. And no disrespect to you, Phil. You are a fossil fuel person. This technology is advancing. It has advanced so much in just the last two to three years. It wouldn't be – I won't sit here and say that I expect you guys to be the experts in renewables because it is such a new industry that keeps – it keeps growing and it keeps advancing by leaps and bounds. Okay. So given that, now for another citizen, Denton citizen here, Christy Wood, she asked regarding the 2008 health impact study that you gave information about when we asked about a health impact study, why are we using an eight-year-old study when air quality testing methods have also improved to include additional greenhouse gases and VOCs that we now know is in fact very harmful to our health? Those – that study eight years ago, well, in 2008, it doesn 't include the things that we now know are harmful to our health. Can you tell me what it doesn't include? Me specifically? No. I cannot. My statement to you is that included all emissions off of that plant. In 2008? That's correct. The same emissions that come off of this plant because it's the same technology that's being used. They did not evaluate a CO2 as a health impact because CO2 is not an air contaminant from a health standpoint. It is an air contaminant from the standpoint of global warming potential. But the health aspects, human health aspects that were evaluated in that study are based on the same criteria and non-criteria pollutants that are coming off of this plant as proposed. The reason that I chose a 2008 study was – and I'll point out that the methodology, to my knowledge, has not changed in the way the CEC evaluates this type of study. The reason that I chose that was that was the closest one that I could find to the type of engine and type of emissions that came off of these proposed plants. Okay, but why not now – you cannot expect that that industry, that technology to test air quality has not also improved. It wasn't a test of – I'm sorry to interrupt you, but it wasn't a test of air quality. It was an assessment of emissions compared to health screening effects. Okay, well those emissions are killing us. And it is – every day there are new studies that come out. The EPA is saying that the levels that they were thinking about, just methane levels, now are actually – there are more of those methane levels being emitted into the air from plants, and they're more harmful to us. Are you talking about the gas industry or these plants? Everything, all of it. I don't think you guys have thought about – or had somebody that is new in the industry now, that has better technology to do these air quality or this modeling now. You say that the report was done for air quality and now health impact. No, I said that the report in the section that I wrote – or section that I reviewed was done for the purposes of health impact assessment. Specifically, human health impact assessment. Okay, are we reading every day that those values that they held true, that they felt were adequate or not harmful in 2008, are now in fact in 2016 harmful? For that particular type of assessment, I don't know the answer to that. That's a problem. Really? Yeah, it's a problem. Ma'am, we're getting into a debate on this issue. We need to progress. As a citizen, I think that we need to have a true renewable consulting firm do an independent study and provide it to DME and the city council. Is that not a misnomer? I mean, when you say an independent study, but then you throw in a renewable consultant into that, is that independent then? Would that truly be independent if it was a renewable consultant doing the study? Right. How independent are you guys coming from fossil fuels? We analyze the wind effects and the solar effects on the Er cot market hourly every single day. But you're looking at it. Your experience comes from a fossil fuel site. No, I have nothing to do with fossil fuels. Ma'am, again, we're getting into a debate. We have others that are asking – Okay. –wanting to ask questions. Thank you for your time. Hello. My name is Steven Harris. I'm a student at University of Texas. And I have a couple of questions. How come this issue isn't being voted on by the ballot or on the ballot for the citizens here in the city of Denton, first of all? I can address that quickly. We have a democratically elected city council, and they have appointees on a public utilities board. And so we presented this plan to them. And there's certainly no charter – what we've heard from our city attorney is that there's certainly no requirement for that to go to a vote. And so it would be at the city council discretion. But perhaps they would say – and they can speak for themselves, certainly – but perhaps they would say that a complex issue about power supply for an entire city – and you can see those three pieces of the puzzle that interact with one another heavily – that's a complex issue. And it can be difficult to put on a ballot. You get kind of a one-senates thing on a ballot that says, "Do you want the renewable? Didn't plan or not?" It would be difficult to vote on, perhaps. But there's more to be said on that, but that's a brief statement. Okay. And then also, have you all considered about teaming up with other municipalities in the area, maybe with a nuclear power option or a hydroelectric option? I know hydroelectric has a higher ecological impact versus nuclear has a lesser impact, even less CO2 emissions life cycle than a wind turbine. Just saying. So in the 1980s, the direction from federal government at that time was to build – to the electric industry – was to not build another gas plant after 1990, and that you were directed to find some other power source. And so Denton, with three other cities of Bryan, Garland, and Greenville, went together in helping form the Texas Municipal Power Agency. That power agency was a way for us to gain the economy of scale to build some – to approach the only alternatives we had at that time to build a Lignite unit in South Texas, it was identified, and also to participate as a minority owner in the Comanche Peak Nuclear Power Plant. So we were involved in a nuclear power plant at one time. At that time, the cost increases became so much that the cities negotiated to pull out of the nuclear power plant at that time. And so modular nukes are out there now. We happen to have a nuclear engineer on staff. And so that is one of the other technologies to look at. It 's just a problem of economies of scale. But also that was back in 1990, not 2016 now. Also, if we have looked at the current options, we can definitely apply smaller scale reactor if needed, and it's a lower cost at that point. Tough construction, the Department of Energy is willing to lower the cost simply because you're building an offsetting carbon technology versus a nuclear – I'm sorry, a gas power plant or a coal power plant. Could you repeat the first part of your question, please? I 'm sorry. Yeah. So how come we haven't considered building a smaller nuclear reactor, something that is more economy of scale versus what we currently have? Well, that's the problem is that a smaller nuclear reactor would not have economies of scale. It would be fairly expensive to do so. We've looked at nuclear technology. Like we said, we've had a nuclear engineer on staff who follows that. I guess I don't have to tell you how difficult it's been to build a nuclear plant in the United States in the last few decades. Oh, no. One hasn't been built until Tennessee recently came on site. But what I'm saying is that we can definitely build an economy of scale nuclear power plant by upgrading our next reactor. If we build one reactor that's smaller, it can accommodate what we currently have. We can easily build another on-site local reactor that is equivalent to the one we have there, and that way we can actually grow as an economy of scale. So I don't get where you're saying it's not an economy of scale when it actually is. Two factors that I immediately think of when you ask that question. Number one, how suitable is a nuclear plant to what we're trying to do to support increased renewables? And the second one, I think you're highly underestimating the operational cost of any form of nuclear facility from a regulatory standpoint and a compliance standpoint. The onerous nature of having any nuclear facility, just because it's a smaller scale, would not reduce the actual amount of regulation that has to occur, whether you've got 12 zeros or two zeros in your numbers. Same regulation, same processes have to be followed. It's enormous, absolutely enormous. You would double the cost of the employment staff at DME to do that. So on an ongoing operational basis, absolutely categor ically uneconomic. From a suitability, if you follow the nuclear industry at all, and it's one of the few things which is actually very publicly available because of the nature of nuclear energy in the United States, you'll notice that nuclear plants do two things. They operate at 100 percent and they operate at zero percent. That's all they do because that's what they're designed to do. They're designed to be on or off. There is no physics that allows them to ramp and support renewable energy. Does that help give you some information? Yeah, that does help give me some information. But I understand that there's tons of regulations that are required of the nuclear entire projects. But how come you can't provide a municipality that teams up with other municipalities in entering this project with a nuclear power plant? There's plenty of sites available in North Texas. They've done tons of research on it. You can go on somebody's website, Nuclear Matters, and you can go find tons of research on it. So I don't agree with you, technically speaking. I don't want to get into a debate with you. The plans you'll find are actually very different. It's extremely difficult to put a nuclear plant in place today in North America. Extremely. And it's very onerous on resources. I don't want to start a debate here, but I don't agree with what's going on here because that is not a renewable plan that you all are providing. You are not giving the citizens the right to vote on what they want inside their city, even though it's a democr atically elected council. The citizens here are voicing their opinion and obviously have a statement and you all aren't listening. I refrain. It's about five till one. We've been at this now for about another hour and 15 minutes. Do you all want to take a 10 minute break just to stretch around a little bit? We've got one more question here. Yeah, go ahead, please. Are you all okay with taking a 10 minute break after this question and then coming back? I don't know that. Hi. I have a question about the Green Sense renewable rate and how it relates to this plan. So if we sign up for Green Sense, we understand that there 's not a new windmill built that connects directly to our house. We understand that you're buying that renewable energy from the grid. Is that correct? So renewable energy credits are created by someone with a renewable energy source. So that funding goes to that entity that's created that renewable source. So it's going to a wind farm owner or a solar farm owner. Fantastic. So with more people signing up for Green Sense, which we have seen an increase in the last since actually this plan was put into play proposed. We've seen an increase in the number of people signing up for Green Sense, which is great. But theoretically, could we end up in a situation where so many people have signed up for Green Sense that say theoretically the whole city signs up for Green Sense, right? All the businesses, everyone. That's not going to happen. But theoretically, could we be in a situation where we are still breathing the emissions from the coal plants and we 're still breathing the emissions from these new gas plants, but we're actually buying our energy from green sources afar? Is that a potential? So I think where you could go if we had a significant amount of, let's say, you know, everybody signed up and it 's 100% Green Sense. They're still going to need to provide physical power 100% of the time. And renewable energy sources available today don't provide that. And so, yes, there'll still be some fossil fuel base today, generation capacity to back up and provide the physical power at times that the citizens demand. Okay. So how, okay, I guess more my question is more as we as we build that demand in the Green Sense, could we actually create so much of a demand that we would require there to be more wind and energy, wind and solar built like infrastructure actually invested in? Directly at some point. Okay, okay, that's good. Okay, so related to that, then it would take the Green Sense rate is point four of one cent more per kilowatt is what the White House website says. So, I know Ben was up here earlier and he suggested you know what if we went to 100% and people are people are saying I'm willing to pay a little bit more to go to aim more for 100% if it means, you know, we can, we can not build these gas plants. And, and I know that y'all are really considering not raising the rates for some of the more vulnerable of our population the lower income people. I super appreciate that you are considering that alarms go off in my head though, when, when we basically are trying to push gas plants in the name of lower income people. And the reason, the reason that I'm concerned about that is , I'm not a high income person myself, and my respiratory cost per year, my asthma cost are so sky high, y'all, that I think alarms go off for me because without a health cost analysis or health impact study. You know, the burden of asthma is not equally distributed throughout our population, lower income, the lower the average income of a population, the more frequent the need for hospitalization and for severe asthma attacks. And one of the reasons that I've seen in my life is that preventative medicine, a preventative inhaler for example is $300 for me, an emergency inhaler is $50. So there's this huge, there's this huge increase in costs when you look at trying to manage asthma. And there's emissions being put in there and I understand your displacement idea here. But what I'm seeing is that cleaner, cleaner air in the long run is going to save people more money. When you when you look at the cost impacts. So I again, you know 300 letters were turned into city council calling for an independent analyst right. And I would also I would also encourage you all to consider a citizens task force, the health cost analysis, the health impact study. And really when you when you start toting, but we got to build these gas plants because we're really afraid it's going to raise the rates, you have to balance that with asthma costs respiratory costs hospitalization emergency room visits. Those are real things to be considered that that really play into people's actual daily lives so so I would just ask you what is what is the hesitation to to do a health cost analysis, we would like to see a recent one. You know when you when you look at the I appreciate that you brought that study it's good to look at what's out there right. But that area I mean when we look at the geography they've got an ocean on the left they've got mountains on the right. It's it's not as compatible I think as as it may be. Maybe you're perceiving. And I thought the same thing which is why I asked the other person that is qualified to make that assessment to analyze it. So that you know that the the way that model works is it might move slightly the the area of maximum concentration. And since they assume the maximum concentration for the entire area doesn't really matter where it moves. And so that was the explanation and I did, I did say, you know, during that that study that that, you know, those areas are different and that's one of the reasons why I wanted to have someone take a look at it. The more important part to me was what was the air quality there compared to here because I didn't want to compare health study on a on a power generation facility that was in great air compared to a study. Yeah, I try to make it analogous to a study that was that was here that in air that's not so great due to those sources from the South. So, okay, well, my last thought just is, you know, when you say that the Gibbons that you're not factoring in the Gib bons Creek because we don't own that, but I really I really want to push for this health cost analysis and I really want to hear what the, what the restrictions and in doing that before a vote would be. Just because for us on the ground who are struggling to breathe every day. It doesn't matter whether we own Gibbons or not. We're breathing in it. Right. And so I really, I really want to push for that health impact study. I'd like to hear your thoughts on why we, we don't deserve our own impact study for this area currently. So, it's my last. Okay, we're, we're at five minutes after want to take a maybe a 10 minute break. Let everybody get up and stretch around. We can reconvene at 1 15 and we'll start back up again in case anybody else came in late rest rooms are to the right and downstairs water fountains are over there. There's some additional restrooms down the hall to your left. Okay. Okay. We're reconvening our renewable dent in Q and a it's about 1 16. Just a couple of things here. Like to wrap this up in the next 30 minutes if possible. All right. So if if folks have with that timeline in mind. If you need to get up and ask a question, please do so. Keep in mind, and we've, we've put the address up here. If you have a question that you didn't get answered, you can certainly submit it to renewable dent in at city of dent in dot com and we'll get you an answer. So, if we want to start back up again, I guess we're ready to go. So, thank you. My name is Rhonda love and I live in district for dent and have a question about health issues. So, Dr banks, I really appreciate you bring that study forward and I look forward to reading it. But if I heard and read everything correctly, we're being told that there's no appreciable increase in ozone. So there'd be no appreciable impact on the health of vulnerable populations, including asthmatics, etc. And we're also being told that the plants would be a minor source of emissions. Okay, let's accept that there was no statistical significant increase in cases. I think they were mostly talking about cancer, but at the break, you said they also including other diseases. Yes, just to clarify, they looked at acute. They looked at chronic and they looked at cancer lifetime. Okay, good. What I am curious about though is that if it can be not statistically significant, but it can still be clinically significant and it can certainly be as a few people have said individually very significant because it costs a lot of money, which in our kind of system falls mostly on the individual, not on a collectivized group. I'm curious if we have any idea what we could anticipate truly indented in terms of an increase in cases. All I can tell you is that that study had a as with and you 're familiar with these as with the way toxicology studies are done and risk assessment studies are done. They have a they have what's referred to as an incident rate and it's based on a exposure of the maximum contamin ant under the pre under the specified time to the sensitive population. And that is used to to determine or to calculate the incident rate. They have what is defined to be through that risk assessment and all risk assessment methodologies are like this will have a rate above which they consider to be significant or not significant. And I appreciate your comments. I mean, and Mr. Alexander's comments to you know, if you've got cancer, it's not insignificant. I understand that the term of insignificant is just simply a way that toxicologist determine whether the impact meets the criteria of the incident level compared to the exposure and the time of exposure and the status of that individual. So those numbers are in that study. I don't have them off the top of my head there, but they are in that study if you if you want to review them. So we should be able to determine though how many actual cases there were using looking at their total population and the incident rate. Correct. Can we do that? I think I believe with the numbers that they have, you could do that calculation. So theoretically we could figure out what how many more cases of the serious diseases we could expect in Denton and then we could compare that to other costs and other economic factors. I believe that would be I believe you could do that mathematically with the results of the study. Well, I don't know that I could, but somebody could. It's doable. I think so. I think so too. Thank you very much. Good afternoon. My name is Tom Smith. I'm better known as Smitty and I don't live in Denton and I'm really proud of the people in Denton who are here and who have come to express their opinion and to the City Council people who have stayed. It seems to me that there are three big questions that this community needs to answer and one of them I think really falls on DME. The first is a moral question and that is, is it appropriate knowing we know about climate change to add any more fossil fuel generators? The second is one having to do with whether or not the technology you are proposing will quickly be outdated. And the third is why not really go out and do a thorough examination of non-fossil fuel alternatives before you commit to these choices. Let me begin by saying something really nice about DME and the City of Denton. Y'all deserve a lot of credit as a community for doing 40% renewables and for having the leadership and vision of saying we want to get to 70% renewables and 100% renewables . And that really puts you at the forefront of the utility community, not just here in Texas, but nationally. And I want to acknowledge that, that we nationally and those of us in the state who advocate for these things are really aware of that and grateful to your leadership and vision. However, there are some issues that I see with the problem you have and the solution. And you have a real problem, we all do. How do you back up those renewables? How do you keep the lights on for those periods of time when renewables don't generate? And that's the problem that you're trying to resolve and I think that I would question the solution you're coming up to for two reasons. And I'll get to the actual question is second here. One is will this be technologically outdated? And the proposal you're making to build these gas reciproc ating engines may be the best technology available today, but the big question is for how long? And when you look at what ERCOT has had to say about the ranking of various kinds of combustion turbines, often within five years they're no longer the best technology. They're not the first dispatched and the revenue curve drops off and the amount of money that the first owners make is insufficient. And that's where the alarms that they are suggesting is that typically gas engines don't make enough money to pay for themselves. The second issue I want to bring to your attention is that there have been a number of studies shared with city council and with you questioning about whether it makes any sense to invest in turbine technologies these days. And other kinds of fossil fuel engines because of the new technologies primarily being battery storage and other storage technologies. Recently a permit in California for a gas turbine, I acknowledge there's a difference and you know I'm sophisticated enough to acknowledge that. That is inappropriate because of the increasing availability and rapidly declining costs of storage and other technologies. And as a proud owner of a Chevrolet Volt that's now five years old, that technology is now way outdated. We have Teslas, we have Bolts, we have cars that are now 40 % more efficient on the same kilowatts of electricity. And that's in a five year period of time. And when you all quote Tesla saying we're not going to be able to hit 10% of the electric market with batteries before 2030, it's not the 10% problem you're trying to resolve. It's a tiny fraction of that. It's a 2 to 3% period of time or maybe a 5%. I don't have your modeling. That you are having problems with the reliability and predictability of renewables. That's the problem you're really trying to resolve. So the question is what are other technologies that can meet your needs and why isn't it appropriate for this as a community to go out and ask for bids on other technologies? And ask for bids not on today's technology but on the technology as the time goes on when Gibbons Creek is retired or your hole for generation and capacity needs gets bigger. Look at the 2020 and 2025 increments and figure out what you can do to make those things happen. Alternatives that don't seem to be fully analyzed and we don't have bids on are what can happen in terms of demand side management. Battery storage, chilled water storage for large institutions. And as the gentleman here just recently said, geothermal. Austin Energy now has 194 megawatts of energy that they, of capacity they can drop in an instant by pushing off a button using demand side management. That's a number very equivalent to what the hole is that you're looking at building, filling with these generating plants. They're looking at as much as 700 megawatts by 2025 of that kind of technology. And the reason they've gotten to that number is by doing an analysis of what's potentially available out there. Target, one of your largest customers, has reduced their energy demand by 14% in the city of Seattle under an agreement with that municipality. And summertime, now again it's not nearly as hot and I'll take that critique right before you make it Phil. But it is a model that people in your community can look to and say this is a deal that one of our largest customers have done. And without that analysis, I don't think this council is in a position to be fully informed to make a decision. And so that's the question I'm asking. What's the downside of doing an all source analysis and b ids before you take this fully to council and ask them to make a decision on the RFP for these gas plants? Thank you. If I could respond to that first question. If I could respond to that first question, tell me if I got it wrong, but it sounded like you were saying how can we morally justify putting in new gas power plants knowing what we know about climate change? Is that a fair way to put it? [inaudible] Right, right, yeah. [inaudible] Well, I would disagree with that last one. But to the question of how do we morally justify it, it's a great question. And in some ways a more appropriate question for a Saturday afternoon like this to answer those more philosophical questions. So we have on the one side a moral question regarding emissions. And on the other side we have a moral question regarding rates. There's a difference of value between those two. And in fact those values are in tension at some point. Now one of the reasons we're proposing this plan is because those values are well aligned. We get reduction in emissions, reduction in gas use, and reduction in rates. But if we push it further to the renewable side, for instance, we see an increase in rates. And we see some decrease in emissions as well. Not 100%, but some decrease in emissions. So those values are in tension. And how do we resolve that tension? And I think what we see as our direction as the community- owned electric utility is that we don't get to decide. We don't get to impose our values on you. Instead, we respond to the direction of the city council. And they can have those discussion of values and where exactly they place that. To what extent should we burden people with extra rates? To what extent should we burden people with extra emissions ? And so the answer is that those aren't for us to determine, rather to respond to that direction we've been given by council. But I know that was only one of your questions. One of the answers I know and things you put forward many times as far as you need to do more in demand and response. You need to do more in getting control of other people's, of your customers' consumption and make a deal to cut it. I mean, and one of the things that comes to mind with me, I don't mean to make light of it, but it just comes to my mind all the time. I can't get my wife to give me control of the thermostat, much less get my customers to give me control of the therm ostat. I mean, that's, I think that's reaching pretty far. It is a philosophy. It is something that's out there. We do have a program for our, not only for our residential customers, as Brian talked about earlier, offering free energy audits, a rebate program that tries to help them accomplish those things, but to help them conserve. We also talk to our large customers as far as things we can do in their shop, putting solar panels in, lighting retro fits, those type one-off projects. We look at each one and evaluate the reduction and provide rebate programs to them to assist them doing that. We've also been in discussion with them about demand reduction as far as, hey, at some point, would it, you know , the true cost of that peak energy is so much, we can give you a credit for going off. And ERCOT has a load acting as a resource program out there. And we've looked at trying to coordinate that with customers. So far, the large commercial industrial customers have not indicated, they've been, I won't say they haven't indicated interest. They haven't indicated interest, but they haven't indicated coming back of, yes, I want to pursue that. We'll continue to pursue that, continue to look at those programs and continue to try to evaluate that with those customers. Just to follow up on that, Phil, I hear you made these efforts, but I think the lesson I would like to share is it wasn't until Austin got some folks in to actually do the potential study on what you could do in terms of demand side management and presented the models, who got people in to take a look at how much we could do in terms of chilled storage or community storage as a way of reducing peak, that they were able to share the vision and the charts that basically said to the big industrial customers, big commercial customers, you could save a bunch of money, and that's what got those people to the table. It wasn't knocking on their door and saying, would you like to buy this red tomato? It was, this is a way of dramatically saving you money and having enough data to them to show how as a community, Austin could avoid having to get into a $250 million plant. And that's the sort of question I'm asking, is it more risky, isn't it more risky to build a, to get into a contract for a $225 million plant, and it's less risky, I would think, to do the analysis that there are no other alternatives available to you. And do that work to see if the industrial and commercial customers would help you not get into that debt. And as we all know, as you know certainly, efficiency and demand side management are typically a fraction, often a third or less, of the cost of having to build new generation. And this last study for the PUC said we could save 23% of the energy consumed on peak for less than the cost of operating a gas plant. You know, those numbers may have changed with the declining cost of gas, but without those potential studies, doesn't the risk of building a gas plant that's going to be significantly challenged by technology and likely outmoded, isn't that higher than taking the time to look and do whatever else you can to avoid having to build that plant? That's the fundamental question that faces you, and I don't envy you this choice, but fundamentally is going to have to come back to the council and ultimately to the citizenry. As balancing those two risks, that's the question you as a manager need to face is, can I make a decision to recommend to this council to build this plant before I've done those other studies? And you've done the studies on the gas plants. You've gone out for the RFP. Why not go out for the RFP on the other things too? Okay. So the -- many things you've said I agreed with, as you know. Certainly the cleanest kilowatt hour and the cheapest kilow att hour, but more importantly the cleanest one is the one I don't have to generate. And so certainly we meet with our customers to see what we can do. We've talked about what we've done for residential, and in doing it with commercial customers, we've done it more than just with our staff. We've worked with them to bring in other consultants, Schne ider Engineering, TD Industries, name brand groups for those large customers, and they have evaluated and have come up with programs of the type we're talking about. More installation, tighten up their air vent system, and lighting retrofits, chiller change-outs, those kind of projects. And for five years of my career, that's what I was involved in with a business that did exactly that, was go into businesses and put the structure of the deals to provide them the capital to fund those kind of projects that would pay back in savings. And so we've brought that here. We've done that same thing here as far as partnering with those other outside agencies to do that. As far as looking at other technologies, and if Jim wants to weigh in on this, he can, but we have certainly -- like I said, in 2009, Earth Day, when we announced ourselves as 40% renewable, we put our dentin on the map, and we started having anybody that had renewable type projects calling us say, hey, if you're interested in renew ables, I've got a deal for you. I want to talk to you about our pump storage program. I want to talk to you about our compressed air storage, you know, pump storage program. And so we've had a number of those vendors contact us, provide us the information, and provide us the initial information for each one of those, and have analyzed those to look at. And the ones that -- where the numbers made sense, we've pursued those more vigorously and have gone back and looked at those. And so we have analyzed those different technologies and analyzed those different ones, and the ones that show promise -- I mean, many of those vendors, we say, hey, when you get your price down to this or get your statistics of what you can produce at this point, come back and talk to us, and sometimes they do. And, you know, to go forward with this is not an exclusion of other technologies in the future. To go forward with this doesn't mean we're not -- or that we're going to stop looking at battery storage or that we 're not going to look at those things -- those technologies have a place and will have a place in the future. And we continue to have growth and demand, and that's part of what this plan allows for, which that percentage we have left to the market that we've got to buy, that leaves us room to go forward to continue to factor in those other technologies and bring those into play. So, you got anything to add to that? I was just going to make one statement to you there, Smitty , is that it's a little interesting that you're advocating that we go along the line of Austin Energy. You're just advocating us to acquire 2,000 megawatts of generation, because Austin does that. So you're selectively choosing the pieces of a very integrated puzzle to try and suggest that we should do the same, and I don't think that analysis is accurate equally. You suggested to us that Austin's demand response is exactly what we're looking for. That, in fact, is untrue. We're talking about a 70% renewable portfolio. Austin isn't even at our 40%, and won't be for a number of years, and it's the backup to a 70% renewable portfolio that we're advocating here. The demand response is a fraction of what is required. We require significantly more than that, and we need something greater than that. So, in elements, would I like to see people conserve more energy and be more efficient in what they do? Absolutely, 100% categorically agree. Do I believe realistically that the citizens of Denton, and indeed the citizens of Texas or America, want their utility dictating to them where they set their thermostats when they have their equipment turned on and off? Absolutely not. The citizens want Denton to have control, but they also want themselves to have control. They don't want DMA telling them what to do. So, unless we can be fairly certain that that would be the case, it's not going to happen. It can't do. So, I would encourage you to reassess your analysis and make it more accurate and more appropriate for proposals on that. The only thing I'd like to add is that everybody continues to suggest the independent consultant when Austin just got a study from an independent consultant for the very same reason. They actually recommended that Austin build the gas plant that they were talking about building. And then they also suggested that Austin look at reciproc ating engines as a better solution. So, I don't know what an independent study for us is going to discover that the independent study for Austin did not. Yes, Mr. Smith, we've got other folks that are wanting to ask questions. I want to answer that one question. That independent study didn't look at demand side management and didn't look at energy efficiency. The Navigant Program wasn't capable of it. And it also had a number of other flaws which I've shared with your management and with the city council. So, I'm not going to allow that to go unanswered and I appreciate that other people need to answer. Thank you. The only thing I'll say to that is that it doesn't matter who the consultant would be. If it didn't come back in someone's favor, they're going to find flaws with it. And again, demand side management is a fraction of what we need. Do we have any other questions? Well, I think Theron had a question and I don't believe Th eron has talked yet. Did you have a question? I guess my comments are is that the global economy has gladly bought into the fossil fuel industry and we have what we have today because of it. But I think it's recognizable by everybody in the room that the externalities have caught up with this in terms of health consequences, climate change, massive restructuring of society over the coming years to take care of sea level rise, any number of things that are going to be very, very expensive. I don't think that there are many people in the room that will not be active in these types of activities until the last nail in the coffin of the fossil fuel industry has been driven. And I think most of you will retire having discussions like the one we're having today over where the city is going as far as its energy needs. Now, one of the main criticisms that came from the citizens , of course, was the fact that it looked like a very quick time frame that we went from the director of the council for the RDP to it was presented in October. And that's where a lot of the mistrust in the citizenry arose. So what I'm hoping that we can do today is start the conversation right now with DME taking the lead voluntarily or at council's direction if necessary about talking about how we're getting to 100% by 2030. We're going to have, we're going to be saddled with these power plants, depending on council vote. But when I have an old clunker car, which the power plants will be at some point, I just junk the car. And that might be the cost we have to pay on these plants at some point, 10 years down the road, 15 years down the road. But that doesn't obviate the necessity of getting to 100% renewable by 2030. I get really tired of hearing council members say we're at 70% where the best there is. It's just a bad argument. It's a fallacious argument. The argument should be this 70% is a milestone in our way to 100%. And I want to see at least something on the order of what San Diego's doing about announcing how it's going to go to 100% renewable in the way of public outreach, in the way of outlining what plans are available at this date and time to get us to that goal. Any ideas about how we're going to get there? Can you give us a rough sketch at this time about how we're getting there? So certainly, I mean, we've heard the charge from, or we interpret the charge from council is they want to be the most renewable they can be while maintaining competitive rates and liability. And so we didn't stop at 40%. I don't see a stop at 70%. I think we'll continue to pursue other avenues to maximize the amount of renewable energy we can procure to services and to do. And so, you know, like I said, we certainly our name is out there now for renewable projects. And we're looking at each one comes to us and then looking for ones that are out there. And we'll continue to do that and pursue those. I guess what we need is a systematic way of getting that information out there and providing citizen input as we go. Rather than rather than load it all at the back end. Just just real quickly, is there is there anyone in the audience who has not asked a question who wishes to ask a question? Look at that edge. You're up. Just a clarification. It's something that Mr. Smith talked about. When he had addressed you about requests for proposals, the answer that he basically got was sort of an anecdote, anecd otal narrative about you folks being approached by green vendors or renewable power vendors after the city declared that they had 40% wind power. Is that correct? You said that you were contacted by a bunch of people? I wouldn't characterize my discussion as anecdotal, but yes . Well, my question is for clarification. Have there been formal requests for proposals made to any other renewable energy providers in the way of geothermal, solar, et cetera? We've certainly put out an RFP for other solar projects before we put out this last one. I think this may be the third time we put out for solar. And we put out one for wind that's out on the street now and we've gotten requests back. We haven't analyzed all those yet. And so as far as solar and wind, we've certainly had RFPs out there for that. As far as, you know, I guess the balancing act is if you keep putting out RFPs, indeed you don't act on them. At some point, it's a lot of work to respond to RFPs. And so at some point, the vendors would stop responding. And so to me, you don't want to put an RFP out until you've seen indication from the vendors that, hey, this is real and it really would be cost effective. It is really something we'd want to consider. And so the preliminary information we've gotten from all these other types of energy resources have not indicated a good fit or cost to be seriously considered at this point. I mean, I won't say we are seriously considering them. But as far as going to the point of, hey, we think battery technology really is there now. We do see where it will fit. So now we want to put an RFP out for battery technology. Austin Energy, I applaud them, got a grant to test battery storage. And so them being another modestly owned utility, they'll be very open about sharing with us the results of that. And we'll look at the results of that, look how that fits in with our infrastructure, and be able to go forward and see where we go in the future with that. Well, that's about one forty five. Do a last call. Does anyone have one more question that they'd like to ask? Keeping in mind, we do have the you can certainly submit if online and get a response to your question if you prefer to do that. I appreciate you let me come in back down again. And one of the answers that I think Keely Briggs had asked you guys would be the outstanding debt in 20 years. And it was said that in 2030, there would still be a 98 million dollar outstanding debt on these two plants, given that that's with the 225 million dollar amount. I haven't heard any estimates on what it's going to cost to operate these facilities. Can can you give me some information about that? Or did I miss that? I don't think it was stated anywhere here today. So the operational cost is electric competitive matter. The reason that's electric competitive matter is because as Stephen's talking before about your bidding these plants in into a competitive wholesale generation market within our con. And so recognize that 85 percent of utilities in our con are not necessarily owned and their their operating costs, their construction costs, all those costs are not open to the public. I mean, we're much more open to the public as far as where our costs are than anybody. Then the rest of the market is. But as far as the operating cost, I guess the staffing required is minimal. I mean, you're talking about less than 20 people. And so it just creates a plant that can be operated with minimal staff and minimal moving parts as far as going forward. Then am I safe to assume that this is going to be additional amount of money that's going to be expended by D .M.E. over top of what you're doing now with your current employees? You're adding 20 more people to operate these plants? No, that would not be correct. You're using existing employees? No. Finish answering the question here. We're paying if we pay for purchase power, we're paying for somebody else's plant and somebody else's employees. So if we don't have these plants, we're going to pay that same cost. In fact, we're going to pay more than that cost for somebody else's plant and somebody else's employees to operate to furnish that power. So it's not additional cost to D.M.E. In fact, it's less cost. OK, thanks, everybody, for being here. I appreciate everyone's time. Like I said, if you do have additional questions, please submit them and hope everyone has a great day and safe trip back to their homes. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.