Aug 22, 2025 Sustainability Framework Advisory Committee on 2025-08-22 1:00 PM

Good afternoon. I'm calling to order the Friday, August 22nd, 2025 meeting of the Sustainability Framework Advisory Committee here in the work session room of Stanton City Hall. Our first item on the agenda is considered the approval of July 25th, 2025 minutes. Is there any discussion or any motion? I move to approve. I second. Motion made to approve and seconded. So done. Minutes passed. Okay, next item is to receive a report and hold a discussion regarding updates to the Dent Renewable Resource Plan and the potential acquisition of additional... Sorry, I apologize for interrupting. You need to take a vote. Oh, I'm sorry. We have a vote on the minutes. All in favor? All opposed? Thank you. Are you ready now? Yeah. Tony Puente will make the presentation. Mr. Chair, members of the committee, thank you for having me this afternoon. My name is Tony Puente. I'm the general manager for DME. With me, I also brought Chris Nutrick, who's our executive manager of operations, and Chris has been with DME for a while, and he kind of helped with the construction of the Dent Energy Center, so if there's questions that I can't answer, Chris will help me out. We have Jose Gaitan and Tony Roybal that manage all our power supply processes, all our energy trading, and so if there's questions that come up that I can't answer, they're here as resources as well. So just really quickly, today's presentation is on a recap of what's called the Dent Renewable Resource Plan that was adopted back in 2018. There's a couple of other things that we'll cover here as well. Part two is, we'll talk a little bit about the integrated resource plan, and then part three is acquisition of the special generation. This entire presentation, although I kind of culled some of the slides from what I presented to the council and the PV, but it's still about 15 slides in total, so bear with me as I try to go through all of these. And certainly if there's questions, Mr. Chair, in between, just let me know and happy to pause and try to address those. Thank you. So Dent Renewable Resource Plan, as I mentioned, was adopted back in 2018. That plan called for 100% renewable energy for the city, and when I say the city, that's for just the service territory that's served by Dent Municipal Electric. There are citizens in Dent that are served by Coastal Electric and Encore as well, or TXU. This plan does not apply to those utilities. There was a goal of 100% renewable by 2020 or 2024. There was a variety of strategies within why those dates are there. There was five objectives, the leading being that we would pursue lease cost alternatives or lease cost supplies, and so over the years we've brought forward a number of RFPs and proposals to councils that have not moved forward, primarily because of the cost of those resources. Dent Energy Center, within that plan, was certainly recognized as a cost hedge. I know that certainly since Winter's Farm period there's been a lot of questions about that facility. I will mention to you that facility does not provide power directly to our residents. That is interconnected into ERCOT just like any other facility. All the PPAs that we have with renewable resources are all interconnected into the ERCOT grid as well, and so this facility is no different than any other facility out there that's producing power. Certainly there are some facilities out there that might be interconnected into a distribution system like a community solar or even our rooftop solar stuff, and there's other smaller kind of generators out there, combined heating power plants and various universities that are interconnected kind of behind the meter, and so but here certainly I wanted to just be clear that this facility is interconnected into the grid, and certainly acknowledge that there are some challenges in balancing that portfolio with 100% renewable energy, and certainly that's part of our conversation today. Just as an inventory for you, this is currently what we have by way of resources. Power purchase agreements. The latest one that we executed was Yellow Viking. We executed that last year. That was a solar project at 100 megawatts. That project is still not online. As a matter of fact, and we'll talk a little bit about some of the challenges that we're seeing with some of these PPAs and just the overall market, but you know at this point we're uncertain whether or not that 100 megawatts of capacity will come online. We're kind of working through that process now, and what's that accounted for here is that we currently have an RFP. We issue an RFP for up to 300 megawatts of additional solar, wind, and/or battery storage. I will tell you that we're close to bringing that forward to the council for consideration here in the next couple of weeks for a wind resource and potential battery resource as well, all through a power purchase agreement. But anyway, so that's kind of the inventory of what we have. Just for some context, generally when we look at these resources on the wind side, when you look at that total capacity of 150 megawatts, we're really counting at about 30 percent of that capacity that will actually show up. On the solar side, it's about 40 percent, right? And so while we have here, where we listed 455 megawatts of capacity, actual production is only going to be about 167, right? And so you know, much of the recommendations back in 2018 was that you needed basically twice as much renewable resources to get to the amount of your peak load that you needed, right? And I will tell you Georgetown is an example, or TheExample, that's exactly what they did. And I'll tell you that that became a challenge for them, and they're still unwinding some of those agreements because they ended up in a very long position, right? For D&E, I think as we've been kind of moderately kind of heading in that direction, we're certainly not in that kind of position where we're long on renewables, right? And so certainly if that was the case, we probably wouldn't be issuing another request for proposals. So just the timeline, kind of going back to 2009, you know, D&E had a goal of 40 percent and moved it to 70 percent in 2016. 2018 certainly was 100 percent, and certainly we believe that in 2021 we achieved that 100 percent renewable goal based on the parameters established within their renewable resource plan. So in 2021, we served 1.5, almost 1.6 million megawatt hours of load. So we, this is the energy that we buy from the market, and then that amount at the end of the year that we account for it, we look and see, well, how much power was generated from the renewables, right? And so that particular year, we had one point three million megawatt hours of actual power that was produced by these PPAs sold into the market. And so when we accounted for those, we were short, right, roughly 30 megawatts, and so what is equivalent of the 262,000 megawatt hours. We had a conversation with the council leading into this discussion. We had a contract called the Whitetail contract that included 30 megawatts of energy and included 30 megawatts of renewable energy credits without the energy, and so we advocated or we proposed to the council that we count those 30 megawatts of RECs towards this goal, and that's what represented here, right? And so that particular contract expired in December of 2023, and so in 2022, those 30 megawatts were included in that 353, same thing in 2023, and in 2024, we went out and we actually purchased 400 megawatt hours of renewable energy credits, right, to round out that 100 percent renewable goal. The conversation we had with the council at the time was that in order for us to buy those three years worth of energy equivalent to the 30 megawatts of RECs would have cost D&E an additional five million, almost five and a half million dollars, and so the council's direction was go ahead and count the RECs, do not buy the energy. We recognize that the RECs count towards that goal, and so since that time, yes sir. I'm sorry, I'm just confused. I need to be enlightened here. You've got the renewable energy column and then you've got RECs without energy. What the RECs meaning no direct, that's the energy that goes into the grid, correct? So all the energy goes into the grid. Then what is the renewable energy represent, the specific category before that? So the renewable energy, that is the energy that's produced from contracts that we have with wind and solar producers. For every megawatt of power that they generate through our contract, the city gets one REC, right, and so it's one REC for every one megawatt hour of power that's generated. This additional RECs that we purchased, right, well we had already purchased them through the Whiteside contract. We already owned those, and so that particular company would also deposit into our account an additional 30 megawatts of RECs. The 400,000 were RECs that we went out into the market and we purchased, but again I think it's important to understand that for a REC to be awarded, right, that power has to be generated, right? So for every one megawatt hour of renewable energy, it's awarded one REC, and so even though we didn't own the energy for these RECs, there was energy produced that's validated through those RECs that we purchased. Tell me again what renewable energy represents? This renewable energy is the actual energy that was generated by the contracts that we have, that the city owns, and that's evidence through the RECs that are deposited into the DME's account along with the compensation that we receive for the energy that we purchase. Okay, so that's still RECs energy. There's still RECs. Okay, that's what it is. Anything that's on here, there are RECs associated with it. That's the evidence that the power was produced and that we own it, and that we can designate it towards our goal of a 100% goal. Gotcha. Thank you. Yes sir? That's a good question. My question is how the renewable energy column matches the previous slide because those numbers are a lot bigger than the PPAs. Yes, so this is just in capacity, right, and so what's produced here, right, you know, and you convert it to megawatt hours right in total because the units come up close to, you know, about a million megawatt hours. Gotcha. Gotcha. Thanks. Okay. The other thing that I'll just point out just really quick here, and a couple things that we'll talk about, so when DME gets these RECs, currently we do not retire them. We let them expire, and so each, every REC has a three-year life, right, and so from the year that it's produced, it has two additional years, right, so you can go out in the market and buy a REC that's two years old or three years old, right, and so these RECs currently, we do not retire them. We also don't roll them over to the next year, right. That's why in this particular year, 2021, it shows 101% renewable because that's how the accounting kind of works for us. And we'll talk a little about that, kind of the basis for some of the recommendations that we're making in this particular policy that we have, that we took to the council. So, just to kind of get into that, so, you know, certainly a lot of additional detail. I did reference and I asked that there are additional slides that we presented to the council that I did not include in here, but the recommendation that we made to the council is to create or develop a city renewable energy policy that is very clear about how that goal is calculated, what resources are actually acceptable. Those are all tied to what's called the Texas Renewable Portfolio Standard that identifies only specific types of facilities, solar, wind, geothermal, hydro, wave, tidal, biomass are actually the ones that are considered renewable because through the Texas Portfolio Standard, those are the only types of facilities that are actually awarded renewable energy credits. And so, what is an allowable resource to account towards that? Certainly, we would like to tie that to that standard. And also, how are we going to treat recs, right? And there's also this other kind of nebulous thing called compliance premiums that are awarded in addition to recs to certain types of solar facilities. Now, we'll tell you that those are starting to wind down. And so, within this policy, we would also stipulate how those recs are going to be counted towards that goal and that they must be retired, right? And so, and why are we recommending that? So, you could count a rec today towards your goal, monetize it, and then somebody else counts it towards their goal, and there could be that potential double counting, right? And so, we think that certainly, based on an audit that our internal audit made as well, kind of came to the same conclusions that this policy would require that DME retire those recs if we're going to count towards our goal. And also, that DME be allowed to sell any excess recs. So, if I end up in a situation where I have 101%, 105%, that excess, I can go ahead and monetize it and sell it since I'm going to count towards our goal. We didn't think that recommending that those be rolled over, now you're crossing years. You know, I come from the finance side, you know, where you buy, you can go out to the Fed window and buy a brand new treasury that hasn't been traded before. Kind of looking at it this way is we're going to buy recs that are produced in the same year in which we're going to count them, and therefore, we're not going to roll them over to next year, because I think you kind of get away from kind of what the true nature of those are, plus not only that, if the power is generated in 2024, but you're counting in 2025, now you've got some time difference there. And frankly, the impact that those have. And then also, when needed to meet the 100% goal, so if we are short, that we would go out and we would actually do what we've been doing, and that's to go out and buy these renewable energy credits. Recs on the open market range, and there's certainly a range of costs anywhere from roughly $1.50 to $2.25. And so, when you're talking about buying a rec, right, and the cost of that rec versus the energy, there's a substantial amount of cost difference if you haven't already pre-negotiated that contract to a PPA. And so, now you're basically exposed yourself to a real-time market or, you know, just the normal market conditions. And then there's also this other concept of large loads. As you can imagine, you know, large loads are big in the news, certainly here in Denton, but across the state. Across the state, it's projecting, you know, certainly over 80, excuse me, over 80 gigawatts of data center load to come in the DFW area alone. I recently read an article that Encore has over 200 gigawatts of interconnection requests for data center loads across their entire service territory. If you think about that data center load that's coming alive in the total generation capacity of all types, you know, now you're talking about renewable, coal, wind, I mean, natural gas, everything, it just, there's just not enough generation, right. And so, certainly that becomes a need. So, I think addressing how we're going to treat these loads from a risk profile standpoint is important. You know, the other thing too that I'll mention, you know, these renewable PPAs that we do, they're 15 and 20 years long, right. And so, if I have a large load that comes into our system, that's 200 megawatts, that could be gone tomorrow, but yet I've entered into a PPA for 15 or 20 years, and then the load's not there, now I'm in a potential Georgetown long type of position, right. So, and all these, and these loads, they're not all created equal, right. You know, in the oil and gas industry, they call them wall catters, right. So, we're seeing a lot of speculators, speculative developers that are saying, hey, let us interconnect into your system at 300 megawatts, and we're going to build it and they will come. Well, entering into a very long-term contract for something that's speculative, I think puts a lot of risk on our ratepayers. And so, evaluating them, you know, who are the counterparties, who are the financial backings, making sure that we're monitoring them, you know, maybe the strategy, if it is a solid company that has good financials, is maybe we do a short-term type of agreement for a five-year kind of short position on renewable energy. We kind of take a, you know, on the finance side, we call it the prudent investor rule, right. And so, that would be the approach that we would recommend. But certainly, addressing these large loads is something that we would envision putting into this policy. Yes, sir. So, you're saying you could, and I imagine this is competitive with other cities, but you could stipulate in a contract with these large loads that you're paying us for five years of electricity. Is that what you're saying? So that they can't just up and leave a year later. Can that be stipulated in the contract? Yeah, certainly. I mean, it's a negotiation. You know, we can and have asked for the moon in some of these cases. Whether or not there's any takers or not is certainly something that we evaluate as we're negotiating. I was just, I've read where some of the larger data companies are actually building their own on-site generation. Has there been any consideration of making, bringing that into play, assuming that we get more than one center here? So, certainly, SB6 that passed by the legislature and the legislature this year does mandate and require a co-location of backup generation for this facility. I can tell you just purely on a business practice, the data center that we have had already made that decision is already installing backup generation. So, I just think it's a good business practice anyways. I think most of these developers, certainly the AI type of developers that are going to be operational 24/7, you know, they have a lot of counterparty risk with their own customers that they have to have the power. So, if there's outages, particularly for interruption, they're going to have on-site generation. But now through this legislation, it's going to be required. So, do you know what type of generation they're going to have? Is it wind or solar? No, the backup generation that they have is natural gas or diesel. They have generators. They also are looking to do some battery storage as well. I have one more question. Could you clarify, again, in the weeds on this, what is meant by addressing the environmental or offset goal of matching the annual load served with renewable energy and not the resource mix, et cetera? What is the offset goal? Yeah. So, the conversation we have with the council is that there is a renewable kind of environmental impact aspect of the generation that DNE has. And then there's the generation mix in managing our portfolio and ensuring that we have safe, reliable, and affordable power to our customers. And so, this particular policy is only going to address that environmental kind of renewable aspect of our load and how we manage that. The generation mix is what the integrated resource plan will end up eventually vetting out and then coming back and making recommendations to the council on what that generation mix should be for the city long term. If you remember, this 2018 goal mandated that DNE be 100% renewable with just renewable energy. And so, certainly we think that some of the challenges that we'll talk about on the regulatory and market side, that that's continuing to be more and more difficult, right? To say we're going to have nothing but wind and solar generation to meet the needs of our customers and to be able to keep rates affordable and power reliable across the market. As a grid participant, we are as responsible as any other interconnected member of ERCOT to ensure that there's reliability of the grid. Because as you know, during winter storm year eight, there was outages, and so those outages impacted us as well, right? So, that's what I mean by keeping these two things separate. Just to clarify, this policy statement that's presented here, this is our current 2018 policy, this is where you're thinking of taking this renewed, the direction that you received from the June council meeting. Yeah, so what that policy statement eventually is may not necessarily be this. This was just to stipulate to the council that having a policy statement, and certainly we think that something along these lines may be workable, but certainly I think as we continue to go through the process, that may eventually be tweaked a little bit, or a little bit different. So, this is your draft policy statement? Yes, yes. So, I guess I'm just trying to clarify what our function in this discussion is, because you received the direction to begin this planning phase with your renewable energy policy, your integrated resource plan. We have it on our agenda to receive your report and hold your discussion, and you stipulate in your backup that this is going to be a six to nine month process for you guys. Is this the point at which we're providing or you're hearing input from us on that policy statement, or you're just giving us a point in time with where you're at in your thinking? Well, I think it's a dual process, and so certainly you're the first set of community members that we're presenting this to. So, certainly we would welcome your feedback, we'll collect that, eventually we'll incorporate it, or make recommendations to the council, and then outline to the council what that feedback was. Mr. Chair, I would like to come back to this policy statement at the end of the presentation if we could. I have one more question, please. Yes, sir. So, when you say the goal of matching the annual load served with renewable energy, meaning the renewable energy we get with recs through the purchase of recs? So, certainly I think this draft is based on, we will count the recs from the PPAs that we own, and to make up the difference, we will buy recs out of the market. And what will those recs offset? Are they part of that environmental offset goal? Correct, and the load as well. So, whatever amount of load that we serve, I've served 1.6 million megawatt hours of load, I'm going to look at how much did the PPAs produce, and then the difference will be renewable energy credits. So, I'm trying to get my mind around, is this load served with renewable energy also put towards offsetting, say, the emissions of the deck? No. Okay. They're tied directly to the amount of load that we serve. Okay, thank you for the clarification. Yes, sir. In addition to this policy, we would envision that we would have an actual calculation of how we would calculate on an annual basis what that goal is. That was something that was absent from the plan and determined that the internal auditor has advocated for as well, and that there'd be an annual reporting. After the audit, we began to provide a report to the council annually. We do what's called an "interformal staff report," basically an accounting of how much load did we serve, how much power came from these PPAs, and then how much did we buy in renewable energy credits. And then, of course, there would be a glossary of the assortment of acronyms that are out there in the ERCOT market, just the electric industry as a whole. Tony, if I may, we are only posted to receive a report and hold a discussion on this item. And so, as far as like providing direction, we would have to do that under a different posting. I just wanted to put that out there before you're earning your money today. So part two is this concept of an integrated resource plan. I will tell you that DME has not ever had an integrated resource plan. In 2017, the city conducted a management study that's required of all the utilities in 18 years. That was part of the recommendation. Certainly, it's taken us some time to get there. Certainly, we think that the dead renewable resource plan had aspects of an integrated resource plan. But the plan in general is a strategy to meet the kind of future electric demand, both on the supply side, that's on the generation side, and also on the demand side. And so looking at all those within the context of what it's going to take to serve DME's load over 15 to 20 years. I'll tell you, the P&B is thinking that 15 to 20 years is probably not long enough. And so part of their feedback is you really should be looking at at least a 30-year type of plan. What I communicate to them, what I communicate to you, is that whether it's a 15, 20, or 30-year plan, every five years, we need to refresh that. Technology changes, the regulatory environment changes, the market changes, and so making sure that we're staying on top of things. As an example, currently at the federal level, there's movement to streamline the process for nuclear, right? And so that was something that was not there. So if there's types of developments that come forward, if there's additional pipeline networks on hydrogen, you know, an assortment of a variety of things, every five years you want to stay on top of it, but at least you have a plan where you're headed. As an example for nuclear, the permitting process, you're looking at probably at least a decade, the construction process, another decade. So now you're talking 20 years on any type of nuclear development. Certainly the current federal administration is looking at trying to streamline some of those processes. There's the advent of what's called small module nuclear reactors that I think are being very attractive, and that's certainly something that they're trying to pinpoint. One major aspect of this IRP development is that there be a stakeholder involvement. Some of the feedback that we got on the policy is that, well we need to have stakeholder involvement as well on the policy. We're working through that, certainly coming here is part of that aspect as well. But how do we get additional feedback from the community on that policy, just like we're going to do right here with this integrated resource plan. And to be clear, we would anticipate that we would hire an outside firm to do this. We don't think this is something that we can do internally. We just don't have the bandwidth, and so we're going to go out and do a solicitation and look at hiring a firm, or firms, both CPS Energy in San Antonio and Austin Energy, who we're kind of modeling some of these processes to as kind of what they've done. So just kind of going down to a little bit of kind of where our load is, and where we think it's going, and some of the challenges that we have. So today, you know, DME has one dispatchable generation facility. That's the deck, that's about 225 megawatts of power that we can generate. Our peak load, which was set back in the summer of '23, was 408 megawatts. And so the shortage that we're seeing here is about 183 megawatts in dispatchable generation. And we'll talk a little bit further along these slides, and how kind of DME works, and how we manage that. But just to be clear, the reason why we've addressed it this way is that in this last legislative session, there was a number of bills that would have required all load-serving entities that include DME, and THU, and all these other facilities, providers out there, to firm their loads, right? To guarantee and back up their load with dispatchable generation. They were very clear that dispatchable generation did not include wind and solar, did not include battery storage, right? Now, that particular bill, as we were drafting this presentation, eventually did not pass, right? Now, we suspect that in the next two years, when the legislature gets back together, there'll probably be an additional effort to do that, right? And all of that is behind, or the reason behind that is to ensure that there's reliability of the grid, right? Renewable resources, you know, you don't really know when they're going to show up. I mean, we have very smart folks in our EMO that have a lot of probabilistic forecasting of when wind's going to show up, when the sun's going to show up. But unlike the deck, where we can push a button and it starts producing power on demand, it's very difficult in managing a grid where there's requirements for reliability through all renewable generation. And so, again, I'm giving you the context of kind of the regulatory legislative environment. So currently, like I said, we're at 408. We anticipate that by 2028, our load will be somewhere in the 800 range. By 2036, certainly we'll be almost at 900. And we think by 2044, we will be 900, if not a little bit north of 900. So twice the peak load that we have today. Those forecasts, while they aren't somewhat dated and they've been somewhat impacted, we've had a very mild summer this year. But those forecasts do not assume any additional large loads coming onto the DME's network or system. I'll tell you, we have no less than two to three prospects now that are wanting to locate in our service territory, and they're as big or bigger than the current facility that we've already entered into a deal with. But again, we're refreshing what the forecast would be, and ultimately wherever we'll be within the context of that 15-, 20-, or 30-year horizon is something that we'll be working with with whoever the consultant is on that particular project. May I just interject something? Yes, sir. I'm sure you're aware of this, but for everybody else here, the U.S. Energy Information Administration just earlier this week released a report on new electric generating capacity, and just from a Texas standpoint, it's pretty amazing. About 27%, 3.2 gigawatts of the solar capacity added so far in 2025 is in Texas, and developers plan to bring another 9.7 gigawatts of solar online in Texas in the second half of this year. In the last year, Texas surpassed California as the state with the most utility solar capacity. As for battery storage, it accounted for the second largest share of capacity additions in the first half of the year at 26%, about half of which was in Arizona or California. Developers in Texas are expecting to bring 7 gigawatts of battery storage capacity online this year, with much of that capacity coming online in the second half of the year. So it's really exploding. So certainly Texas leads the nation in both wind and solar production and in small capacity. One thing that's important to also just kind of keep in mind is that in the 88th legislature, the legislature mandated that all renewable energy facilities after January 1st of 2027 install backup generation. And so it's for that firming requirement. If you say you're going to produce a megawatt hour and it doesn't produce because the sun wasn't there, you've got to be able to produce it either yourself or through some kind of contract. And that's already state law. That's already mandated. The 89th legislature actually wanted to expand that and take away basically the grandfathering of existing facilities. Something that we were looking at was our current PPAs. If in fact those PPAs would have been required to install backup generation, then likelihood the price would have escalated in those PPAs and certainly taking them out of the money. They're in the money today, but they'd likely would take them out of the money because the generator is going to pass that cost of that backup generation back to their customers. In this case, it was going to be in need. But that grandfathering is still in place. It was not taken away. But again, any installation after 2027 of January has to have backup generation. And so that's why you're seeing some of this kind of rush to install. In addition, the federal government is doing away with a lot of the tax credits and subsidies that both went to solar and battery storage containers. So there there is a rush to try to get those so they can preserve those tax credits because otherwise the economics changes for those types of facilities. Thank you. So within this, so the recommendation that we make to the council was to create this integrated resource plan. Certainly from our position within 20 years, is that certainly we've gotten feedback on 15 to as much as 30 years. This particular plan would or the process would evaluate the various types of resources that may be out there. And so for example, if nuclear is something that the city might be interested in that can be justified within the forecasted load, then we need to start that process now. But remember, that's likely a 20 year process that many of our ratepayers today that will have to foot a lot of that bill will never see that right. And so so those are some of the challenges, you know, prioritizing and looking at, you know, nuclear, hydrogen, geothermal, battery storage, all different technologies that are out there are certainly something that we think needs to be vetted through through this process, including natural gas. And then consider short term needs to reduce the risk. And so as we continue to serve our load in in the current state that we have in the short position, that certainly poses a lot of risks to our ratepayers and not being able to manage that. We'll talk a little bit about about what happened in August of 2023, where we did not have enough generations to meet that, and when we're exposed to real time prices, and, and then incorporated the local demand side management. That's certainly something that we hear a lot of from our customers. We're certainly interested we're need to assess where our system can and can do to do something like installing the trouble thermostats in people's homes, right, and managing our virtual power plants when it comes to battery storage to somebody may have in the garage or, or their Tesla or whatever the case may be. There's a lot of system improvements that we believe we may have to make it. And we need to get started on that. And having that plan, I think is important. Same thing with community solar. Now we'll mention to you that we we have identified currently two properties that DME already owns, and we're in the process of looking at a potential community solar installation within those, but you're talking about one megawatt each, right. When we're short 183 megawatts, it doesn't make a big splash, but at least it gets us moving in that direction, right. And so while some of these resources may not be economical, they may still make sense from just the diversification standpoint, right. You know, when I look at this plan, I look at almost like a retirement plan, right. You know, you don't put your entire life savings in McDonald's stock, right. You have to have a good diversified mix, right, to be able to give you that kind of long-term protection. And so that's how these integrated resource plans are looked at. And certainly that plan as we develop it in concert with, you know, Catherine and Michael and cognizant of this climate action plan and the goals, is certainly something that needs to be incorporated into the consideration for these various type of resources. And then we would anticipate that that process would likely take us 18 to 24 months to complete, and then be able to come back and make those recommendations from that plan to the city council. So with that, I have any questions on the integrated resource plan? Anybody? Okay, so got a couple graphs here for you. You know, just trying to explain here how DME works. This is probably not necessarily a typical day, but certainly was a day in August, August 25th of 2023. And just kind of walk you through kind of what some of these bars are. So this is, the solid line is our load. This is generally how our load is. It kind of picks up, you know, starts to drop off during the day hours, and it picks up in the afternoon hours. Usually our peak is around the four to five o'clock range, if you're familiar on the transmission side. They talk about this four coincident peaks, right, and that normally happens between four or five o'clock. But really the scarcity periods are in the afternoons, during the summer, roughly between seven o'clock and ten o'clock at night. And so as we go, and we're managing our position, certainly we're looking at, okay, what can we produce? Where are prices? How are we locking in things? Can we expose ourselves, and frankly our ratepayers, to real-time prices? Right now, in many cases during the day, real-time prices, when there's a lot of solar, are down in the five dollar range in some cases, there's been some days that we've seen prices go negative, right? And so if I have a PPA, as an example, and I'm paying forty dollars a megawatt hour, that's when I'm paying the developer, when he sells that into ERCOT, I get back the five dollars, or in some cases, I'm going to pay an additional ten dollars for people to take that power. So now that power hasn't cost me forty dollars, that power is now costing fifty dollars, right? And so those are some of the things that we're managing, right, through these positions. We also use these positions on our renewables, these green bars, in the late afternoon hours. We're looking at, okay, are we certain that they're going to produce? Are we going to have a hedge there to protect us from those price spikes? That's exactly what we do with the deck, right? We use the deck as that hedge, right? We're buying power, so they're buying power two or three days in advance, or some cases even months in advance. I'm using the deck to protect us, right, that if the power, if power that day all of a sudden goes above the thirty-five dollar strike price of the deck, the deck also produces and gives us that protection. It's the same thing that we do with renewable energies, with the renewable energy PPAs as well. Part of the difference here is that we have far more control of the deck, right? Now it is a machine, and there could be mechanical issues, and certainly there could be fuel issues, so we recognize that. But by and large, the deck, we push a button, it starts producing power, we have a lot more certainty. My AMO guys call it doing the average of the average when it comes to how they're forecasting these renewable energy, the renewable energy, and how we're managing our position, right? But anytime that the deck or the renewables do not meet our forecasted load, actually our actual load, then we are then at that point buying power that same day, right? So we are now exposed to real-time prices. And so that's what happened to us in the summer of '23. We incurred, you know, 31 million dollars of cost over a couple of week period, where the temperatures were so high that the demand for power in our community stayed much higher than what we forecasted. And then wind didn't show up until prices spiked up, and I did not have enough dispatchable generation to cover that position, right? And so we ended up with all of these hours, three to four hours, where we were buying power, right, in the market to serve the load, right? Very similar to the challenge that we had during winter storm Uri. Certainly the option could have been just don't buy the power, right? And then we're doing localized outages. We certainly don't think when the temperature is down minus six, or the temperature is up 110, right, that our customers are really going to look at this very favorably, that we didn't go out there and buy the power to serve them. So. Yes, sir? Of course I want to apologize because I have to go, I have to run to another meeting. But before I go, one question. This is really fascinating. I'm hearing two reasons why you want to go out looking for more dispatchable power. The one was that the legislature might require amended that. The other is what you're showing us here, that we get exposed to the retail market sometimes, and we don't have enough with the deck to cover that. Am I understanding this? Yes, sir. Okay. All right, thanks for your presentation. Sorry, I have to go. Could you discuss the role of time arbitrage in this graph scenario? The what? Of energy time arbitrage or time shifting for load. Yeah, so, you know, demand side management, I think, is kind of, you know, kind of what you're addressing. And certainly we try to let our customers know when we anticipate these types of shortages, right, as, you know, we'll issue, you know, conservation notices. Now we don't have the type of programs currently that ERCOT has where we can dial up, you know, a major industrial customer and say, hey, can you shut down and then we'll do some cost sharing with you on that. And so we try to do that. You know, I think battery storage can also kind of provide some of that protection. It's certainly something we're looking at. We have been looking at it. The economics just haven't been there. What I will tell you is that in many cases we're looking at what other partner utilities, other MOUs are doing. No other MOUs currently are buying and building their own wind and solar. They're not investing in their own battery storage. They're capturing those through purchase power agreements. It's kind of what we're moving to as well. So the generation need, as I mentioned earlier, you know, in one of the graphs that I had, today we have a short position of about 183 megawatts. We anticipate that that will continue to grow with our peak load to over 600 megawatts. You know, native load, which is the non-data center load, is what we refer to that. We think that that's going to probably grow about 100 megawatts. That's just normal development, multifamily, you know, commercial, residential. Certainly that 100 megawatts is an estimate. There is a lot of growth happening in Denton that certainly the 100 megawatts by 2036 may be a very conservative number. I will mention to you that as a share of the ERCOT market, we comprise about half a percent, and that continues to decrease. Because believe it or not, as much growth as there is in Denton, there's actually even more growth in other parts of the state, right? That our share of the ERCOT grid continues to actually come down a little bit. The scarcity period, I kind of mentioned the summer, you know, that's usually, you know, six, seven to ten o'clock at night. In the winter, it's actually a two-event situation. During the winter, we actually see scarcity periods in the morning, about seven o'clock to nine o'clock in the morning. As wind starts to die out or sun doesn't show up, you start seeing scarcity there in the winter, and of course then also in the afternoon as well. Power price is something to be aware of, is that the current scarcity cap is $5,000 a megawatt hour. During winter storm year eight, that was $9,000. There's some legislation that was reduced. What I will tell you is that there are folks in the market today that are advocating that that scarcity cap be moved back to $9,000 in order to be able to spur the economic incentive to build additional generation, and there are folks out there that believe that that cap should be completely removed, right? And so if you think about the cost that we incurred during winter storm year eight, you know, $200 million at $9,000 a megawatt hour, right? If there was no cap of that, you know, it would be a pretty devastating situation. But not just, frankly, not just the immediate with the entire market. And so I mentioned already the cost that we had for year eight, summer '23. And so our primary needs as we see them today is that we certainly believe that dispatchable generation is kind of the immediate, you know, thing that would help address some of the challenges that we're seeing from a price risk standpoint. And we're not alone in that. Brownsville, Greenville, even Austin Energy, certainly CPS Energy, all our counterpart MOUs have already kicked off the process to build additional generation. And that generation is quick start generation, very similar to the facility that we own today. Maybe not necessarily a combustion engine, but certainly they're looking at turbines. What I will tell you is that in the market today, delivery of both combustion engines and turbines, if you put the if you put the order today, right, you're probably not going to see those to 2030, 2031 at best, right? And so we're already kind of behind the curve. If ultimately that's where we need to go. Certainly, if you're going to add an additional two years of having to go through the process of creating an IRP. And if in fact, that's what we decide to do, now you have to add an additional two years, if not longer, right? And so, you know, we'll talk a little bit about how we might be able to kind of jump to the front of the line. If that's something that ultimately we get the direction to do. We sort of believe that currently the most viable alternative is a natural gas facility. We think that there's ample fuel out there in supply to meet that. Surely, as we look at where we might acquire a facility or replace a new facility, Denton is certainly not something that we would look at for a number of reasons. One, currently, and I'll mention to you why, but currently Denton is in a non-attainment area. So a facility would be limited in run hours, very similar to the facility that we have today. It's limited through an EPA permit on how many hours it could run, although that facility's never exceeded those requirements. And then also, we really don't need another competing resource right next to our facility. You know, one of the challenges that Wind and Solar has primarily in west Texas is the station of congestion, right? There's just too much power going through very limited transmission lines, and so you see a lot of curtailment. And so we think that certainly the economics of placing something in Denton is certainly problematic. In addition to the fact that I think we've hurt our community, right? I think the community doesn't want another facility in Denton, right? And so I think that would be a mistake to do that. Acquiring an existing facility is certainly something that, at the time that I presented this to the council, might have been viable. It may still be viable. A couple of things that have happened at the federal level, and that's why I mentioned the non-attainment area, is that there's changes happening at the federal level, both at the Department of Energy and also at the EPA, right? And rewriting, right? And recopulating many of the greenhouse gas provisions that have been in place. And so there could be the potential that that non-attainment area designation in the DFW area may just completely go away. And at that point, there wouldn't be any limitations on running hours of our facility or any of the facility within this area. In addition to that, a number of programs have been eliminated. The last one that I read was $3.7 billion, $3.7 billion federal incentives for carbon capture and decarbonization through grants have been eliminated, right? There's also been a lot of previously held Clean Air Act provisions that are now being eliminated that would have, if they had stayed in place, right? Shuttered some coal plants and older gas generation facilities. That may go away. And so then those facilities, the economics of those facilities have now changed. So the possibility of doing something like CPS Energy did, where they acquired two coal plants, right? With the idea that they were going to convert them to natural gas, is likely at this point might be somewhat of a challenge. We have not recommended to the council to go out there and buy a coal plant to convert it, but certainly that's something that may be possible. It certainly has been done, not just here in the state of Texas, but across the country as well. Yes, sir. Did you have a question? Go ahead. On your generation, earlier in the presentation, you were discussing a current RFP for 300 megawatts of solar wind and battery. How does that relate to this slide here? Yeah, so our current mandate is still that we have 100% renewable, right? And so we continue to be good stewards of the mandate that we have. And so certainly we're going to be bringing that forward to council. Ultimately, it's going to be council's decision whether or not to move forward with that. That's no different than how we're managing our power plant today, right? That's owned by the citizens. And so we operate and we manage that facility just like we do anything else at the city level. We have a fiduciary and steward responsibility. And so that's what we do. That's what we're doing here is we're still taking those forward for consideration to the council. Now, within the context of all these discussions, we'll certainly see where the council lands on moving forward with those agreements or not. Yeah, the fact that so many federal regulations are being axed concerns me, and I know it concerns you, especially you, because all those, well, we still have to think about being carbon neutral by 2050, correct? That's still the goal. Yeah. And despite what happens in Washington, I would hope that you will still find ways to keep rates low, et cetera, et cetera, without further endangering the future of climate change. Because it's, it's, from my standpoint, when I, when I get a place, a paper like this, a very succinct and great presentation, but in no, no place is climate change mentioned. And I think the more that we bring that into the equation, the better it's going to be for everybody, business-wise and everything. Because the more we can get ahead of the curve now, the better shape will be in when everybody else has decided to jump on the wagon down the road. So I just, I just hope that we keep our goal of 2050 in mind and that the specter of climate change is always there. Because, as you know, as we all know, it is happening and things aren't getting any better. So that's all. Yes, sir. What I'll say is that certainly as a public utility, you know, we want to listen to our customers and certainly many of them have my cell phone number and call me directly. And we're certainly happy to take those calls. What I will tell you, and certainly don't have any documented data to show you, I can just tell you anecdotally, I've gotten more phone calls from more customers about the price increases that we have than about how we're dealing with our renewable goal, right? And so certainly addressing that and making sure that we're doing the best we can. You know, Jose and Tony and their folks are in the market every day and they're working hard to try to make sure that we're doing the best for our customer from a rate standpoint. But at some point, if they don't have the resources that they need to be able to continue doing that, it becomes a very challenging position, right? And so the last thing that we want to do is to have to come back to the council and ask them for another $31 million to finance over five years. Yes, sir. Not to jump ahead too far, but on the mention of keeping prices in focus, I see that even in slide 13, you have discussion about a price increase from 14.2 to 14.3 in the anticipation of bringing on additional generation capacity. I'm just curious how we're framing this discussion around what seems to be a pretty prescriptive need for a, what I'm reading as a peaker gas plant, but I'm also hearing discussion of taking on base load. It's confusing to me why we're taking that as the assumption without direction. And I understand this is just a discussion on our agenda, but a future discussion point for council. I guess I've just not seen some of those economics you're discussing about why these alternatives aren't being explored to the degree we seem so certain about acquisitions of existing facilities. I guess that's just a concern of mine that I look forward to hearing more from you about. Yeah, I think principally because of what we're seeing in the market, you know, and what's actually being constructed in the market and what the plans are by, you know, other utilities, very similar to us, right? And so that's certainly grounded in that. Ultimately, that's a decision for the community and a decision for the council on what direction we're going to head, right? As an example, Austin Energy is building a five megawatt hydro, geothermal facility out in Nacogdoches, right? And that's great, right? And certainly we think geothermal might have a place for DME as well. I think it was important to understand that five megawatts for Austin Energy, when they have a peak load of 2,700 megawatts, it's really just a drop, right, in the bucket. And not only that, but, you know, conversations I've had with folks in Austin Energy is that folks in Nacogdoches are concerned that that facility is going to cause earthquakes in Nacogdoches. And so they've not been very supportive of that facility, right? And so again, I think each resource has its challenges, but I think that if we're looking at a diversified portfolio, looking at all of those resources and how they ultimately interplay and how we're managing our energy needs for our community is something that we'll continue to have conversations about. But also kind of based on the availability and what others are doing, I think Quick Start Generation today is likely the best alternative, the most immediate alternative. And we'll talk a little bit about the Texas Energy Fund as well that contains many of those. But a base load unit, you know, kind of the best practice is once you get at about 1,200 megawatts, you know, that's when a base load unit really makes sense, right? Again, 2024 will be at 900 megawatts. I don't think a base load unit makes sense, but things can change between now and then, right? And so now if you're talking about nuclear, whether it's a traditional nuclear facility or an SMR, those are base load units, right? And so again, a lot of different numbers here that we're still going to have to go through. And we'll see ultimately where the community stands on this integrated resource plan. Does DME have any concern about the availability of natural gas for power generation? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think, you know, Winter Storm URI is kind of one big example. I read an article the other day that some of the winterization that that the oil and gas industry was supposed to do, you know, they may not have completely done, right? And so certainly it's something that's on our mind constantly as we're managing that facility. What I can tell you is that since URI, we've not seen any drop in that fuel to that facility. Now we're still exposed that we have one gas pipeline. We only have one source. We don't have gas storage on site. And so there's still some level of risk. But what I'll tell you is that natural gas currently is the leading fuel mix out in the market. And those that are looking to build additional generation, which only dispatchable, is natural gas. So this is just some of the power trends, kind of what we see. Again, this is just a data that I picked, just to give you some context of where we are. So in the morning hours, you know, certainly at seven o'clock, you have very little wind that's kind of depicted here in this graph. There's very little solar. There's no solar that starts to pick up around seven o'clock, right? You know, wind at that time is pretty good, and it starts to die down. Solar starts to pick up during the day, right? And then it dies out in the afternoon. You know, and in the afternoon, wind picks up, right? And it's in these periods here, in the morning and in the afternoon, when the sun's coming down and the wind starts to pick up, that if one or the other fails, then all of a sudden you start to see scarcity prices. Same thing during the day, right? If there is issues that happen on the transmission side, or certainly if solar doesn't begin, isn't producing, or there's an issue that happens, then you can have some scarcity during the day. And in this particular slide, you have, you know, some hydro, just to give you some context of how much hydro is out there. You know, also power storage. These are batteries, right? Now that continues to grow, and we anticipate that there will continue to be additional resources, a battery storage, excuse me. But the natural gas continues to certainly still make up kind of the lion's share of the power that's there. And then you have, you know, some coal. I'll show you another graph with coal that has actually started to come down. Again, we'll see what happens with some of the plants that had been scheduled to be shuttered kind of in this new environment. And then you have your two nuclear facilities here in the state of Texas. And so generally this is kind of a day in the life of kind of what we see. And, I mean, these charts and this information you can find on the ERCOT website that's there, and it's updated every five minutes. And then for the prices standpoint, you know, these are also directly from the ERCOT grid, right, after the ERCOT website. This dotted line that you can see here, this is kind of the forecast of where prices ERCOT believes will be in the next day, right? Same thing in this slide here. It's a dotted line. And then the solid line is actually what happened, right? And so many cases, you know, ERCOT's actually pretty good, right? And so the actual real-time prices match up pretty well to their forecast. But if there's some type of interruption, if there's some type of issue, if there's more demand, all of a sudden you start seeing those prices go up. In this particular case, prices, we're going to forecast it to be a little bit over $100. Before a very short period of time, they actually spiked up to over $150. It's during those spikes, right, that many of these resources that are out there that are sitting on the sidelines that aren't producing like the deck, right, once they get those price signals, right, that's when they start producing. For the deck, it's about $35. So at $35, when prices go above $35, the deck's producing power at whatever time of day or night that may happen. And so this is kind of the normal type of picture that we see during the summer. This particular day, you know, we don't know what happened other than there was some type of interruption. There was either a downage or at some facility or there was some type of transmission issue that during that early morning hours, all of a sudden prices peaked, right, or increased from where they were projected to be. And these are the types of data and types of things that our energy management organization is constantly looking at and monitoring to make sure that we're staying on top of what the ultimate cost to our rents is. So this is Mr. Richter, the slide that you were referring to. So currently, our summer price, so D&E has a winter and summer rate structure for residential. So this is the summer schedule. So at 1,000 kilowatt hours, which is what in the market is an average residential customer, you know, they're paying about $122 per month. That's about, you know, that's 14.2 cents per kilowatt hour. We certainly think that that rate's still very competitive. Certainly, you know, when we compare ourselves to the deregulating market, we're still below what is being offered at 12 in the 24-month contract. Certainly, we believe that without the deck, if the deck wasn't there, that cost to our ratepayers would increase by $96. Again, these are estimates, right? They are a little bit dated from when I put this presentation together. With additional generation, if we were to build additional generation or acquire additional generation today, we certainly think that that would help us continue to moderate and keep those rates pretty stable over the next several years. Without additional generation, and certainly we're seeing that now, is we continue to see the price of power increasing as we're buying power. Whether we're buying power to the foreign market or we're buying it the next day or real time, we continue to see the cost of power continue to increase, right? And now for next year, you may have seen in our budget presentation, we are recommending no base rate increase to our customers for the next fiscal year. We are already ready to come to the PUB and the Council, and our recommendation on the ECA, which is how we pass through our cost to our customers, is to maintain it at where we are. So we're not projecting an increase to the ECA either. So this power to choose, these are the, at the time when I looked at this, on a 12-month contract, if you were in an unregulated area, you could pick your own provider. You'd be looking at a little bit over 15 cents a kilowatt hour compared to our 14 cents. A 24-month contract would be a little bit more expensive at 15.8. And something that many of our customers just don't know, right, is when you're in a deregulated market, if your provider goes out of business, or if you are outside of your contract, you go to their highest tiered rate, right? In this particular case, it's called the polymer rate, the provider of last resort. That rate at the time when I looked at it was almost 20 cents, right? And so if you're a customer and you're not constantly managing your contract and you're on a contract, you're going to go to their most expensive rate, right? So for many customers in those situations, they may go a couple of months not realizing until they get that bill, right? Oh, I should have renewed that contract, right? So with DME, there is no contract, right? With DME, everybody gets the same rate across all the rate classes. And then for our commercial customers, this is what they would actually pay with, without the additional generation and with additional generation. So certainly, we have two types, three types of customers, currently small, and they use about a thousand, a little bit over a thousand kilowatt hours on average, general service medium. You know, once you get to the medium and large, you're not only playing a usage rate, you're also playing a demand rate, right? So, but for them, again, you see here kind of what the cost would be for a large average customer without generation, you're looking at over $46,000 additional cost. So we have four total rate tiers, if we're including residential and the three commercial? Yes. Do you see a role at all for, I guess, broadening the amount of buckets that we have in rate tiers? I'm thinking of water, for example, having over six tiers for different uses, right? Do you see a function there for kind of helping even out what people are paying? So we're working on what's called a cost of service study now, and we're planning to bring that forward to the PV and the council towards the end of this year to talk about where our rate structure is, our design, and then we've hired a consultant to do that, and we'll be making some recommendations based on what's out there in the market and what may be right for this community. And then certainly, if council wants us to look at a different type of rate structure, they also want to be their prerogative, and we'll be looking for that direction to do that. So the PV's rate structure has been in place for many, many years, and it's probably more along the traditional lines of what a utility rate structure is, but you find differences throughout the country and certainly across the state of Texas as well. Like a data center is paying the same rate as any other commercial customer? No. So we have two data centers. Both data centers are covered under a power purchase agreement, and so their rates on what we call the base rate side are confidential, so they don't pay a tariff rate. Part of this process of doing a rate study is ultimately we're going to recommend a actual tariff rate that will be a separate, so instead of having three general service commercial rates, we'll have a fourth one that'll be for all data centers. Now the data centers will also pay an ECA, and we've now created what's called large load ECA. So we have a native ECA, so all our other customers pay a 462 is what they're paying per kilowatt hour on ECA. The data center currently is paying a little bit over five cents, and so we're managing those separately, but those are published rates. And then there's also this other rate called the transmission cost recovery factor that does apply to the data centers as well, and all our customers. And that's how we pass through cost for transmission across our system. Thank you. So the conversations we have with the council and in the possibility of acquiring an existing facility, again I already mentioned to you based on some of the federal initiatives, some of the economics on that may have changed. I will tell you that I've had probably no less than five or seven phone calls from folks that are willing to enter into conversations about us acquiring their facility. I think we've lost a little bit of our initiative, right, and because now I'm getting solicited instead of me calling out there and looking for a deal. But certainly keeping, looking at facility within ERCOT, right, there's actually areas in the state of Texas that are not in the ERCOT region, so we would not be looking at that. Certainly we wouldn't be looking for something out of the state. So certainly in the ERCOT grid within the North Load Zone, so so ERCOT is broken out of the various load zones. We think that certainly keeping it within our load zone would be preferable, but certainly not, we wouldn't necessarily limit ourselves to a deal if there is a deal to be made outside of that zone. And then I already mentioned that we would not be looking at something within the City of Dent. Nuclear, I mentioned from a generation type, very unlikely, right, that those two facilities would be sold. I think they'll be certainly cost prohibitive. Coal and lignite, well I think, you know, I mentioned CPS Energy did that. You know, there might be some attraction to saying we're going to buy a coal plant and then we're going to convert it to natural gas, right, and so now you take a very dirty type of facility and you're going to convert it to something that's not, and you kind of take that credit, right, but certainly we understand, I mean, D&E through TNPA shut down Givens Creek, right, so I think going and purchasing another coal plant is, you know, probably unlikely. Again, maybe now uneconomical based on some of the provisions in the federal level. And in natural gas there are existing about 100 generators out there today that are already in existence. I'll talk a little bit about the Texas Energy Fund and some potential projects there as well that might be acquired, right. And then from a design standpoint, surely some of these facilities might be baseloads, some may be quick start generation. You can still take a baseload unit and convert it to, you know, to a quick start generation if that, if the investment to keep it at a baseload level might be too expensive, be cost prohibitive. There is another facility in Denton that I office right next to on Spencer that's owned by Garland. That is a baseload unit, but again that's certainly well, D&E, the city used to own that, right. We likely wouldn't be looking to acquire that type of facility. I think from a capacity standpoint, in light of the fact that we believe we need 600 megawatts, I think anything less than 100 megawatts is probably not something we're going to look at. So I think kind of setting that threshold. But then at that point you're looking at multiple type of facilities to get you that 600. And then, or if it's a single hundred that you can expand, that might be something that might be attractive as well. And so this is just kind of what the generation mix has been, you know, over the last, you know, 24, 25 years. And you can see here on the straight line, you know, this is coal, right. So coal has steadily decreased over the years. We'll see what the next few years kind of has in store for that. Then you have your nuclear nuclear bomb. There's been two for a very long time. You have now natural gas that kind of has wavered. If you start looking here in these outer years, or the more current years, the spikes here are starting to come down as renewables start to come into the market, right. And so as we're looking for opportunities to acquire what makes sense, certainly natural gas continues to be the lion's share of what's out there, certainly as coal continues to come down. And it's just a recap of what's out there again. In megawatts, two nuclear facilities over 400 megawatts, leg-mounted coal still over 16,000 megawatts, natural gas over 65,000 megawatts that comprise that hundred generators of which the deck is one. I have a question. Yes, sir. Just a matter of diminishing, is battery storage considered dispatchable? No, it's not. Why is that? Because the regulators decided that it's not dispatchable. Even though you can get it like that. Huh. Thanks. So in November of '23, there was a statewide election. There was a proposition to adopt what's called the Texan Energy Fund. That was approved. I would say overwhelmingly across the state, in the city of Denton, it was approved by over 60 percent of voters that voted in the election. So about 15,000 voters that that particular proposition, over 60 percent of them voted in favor. What that proposition did is added $10 billion over two biennium. Of that $10 billion, $7 billion was to build additional dispatchable generation up to 10,000 megawatts of additional dispatchable generation. And so the application process opened. There have been a number of facilities that are proposals that have been made. This is kind of where things stand today of what's being considered. There's been a number of facilities that were proposed that have now dropped out. Two provisions or two requirements in applying for this particular funding was that you had to have land and or control of land and that you have to have a facility that was designed. And so DME did not have land. We didn't have a design and we didn't have a direction to apply for this funding. So DME did not provide for this funding. But in looking at what may be out there from an opportunity standpoint to acquire, these are some facilities that we might look at to acquire. Right? There's already land that they've acquired or have rights to and there's already a design. Right? So, and likelihood, they've already placed orders for their types of engines or turbines or combined cycle, whatever that may be. And so these will also be some potential facilities that we could look at to try to acquire. In this particular case, in order to do that, it would likely come with some of that Texas Energy Fund funding as well. So, but again, just trying to give the council and certainly, you know, here at the committee kind of what the breadth of all the possibilities might be. Again, there's not anything out there that we have in the works or that we've talked to. Just kind of what is the realm of possibilities that exist today. So with that, that concludes my presentation. Certainly, if you have any additional questions, happy to try to address them. Anyone? Well, I have a question. In the future, you're interested in storage batteries, as you said, at one point. So my comment is, thank you very much for a very well-documented and thorough presentation. And I really appreciate that you look at a diversified acquisition portfolio. Thank you, sir. Yeah, thanks very much. And I know we all look forward to getting the presentation on the renewable resource or the integrated resource plan. Yes, sir. When it's ready. This was good luck with that. Thank you. Thank you very much. Appreciate it. Thank you for me, too. You guys have a difficult job and we appreciate everything you do for the community. It's actually a lot of fun. So thank you. All right. Are we still in session? We are. Our next report is CIVA report. Hold discussion and give staff direction on the new public facing city of Denton air quality dashboard. Good afternoon, community. Caitlin Davis, I'm one of the conservation program coordinators in the environmental services and sustainability department. And today I'm just going to talk to you guys about our new city of Denton public facing air quality dashboard. So I'm going to outline what I'm going to be speaking to you all about today. First, I'm going to give a brief background over the city of Denton air quality monitoring in the area. And I'm going to give an overview of the dashboard as it resides on our sustainable Denton website. Throughout the presentation, I'm going to give time for questions and feedback from the committee. And then I'll talk about some next steps for the dashboard. All right. So a bit of a background as Mr. Fuente stated in his presentation that the Denton is in DFW and DFW is a non-attainment for ground level ozone. This means an area is considered non-attainment when it has ozone levels that exceed limits set by the national ambient air quality standards or NAQS. It's looking like we may be a non-attainment for particulate matter as well. And the Clear Air Act establishes NAQS for criteria pollutants or common air quality pollutants that can be harmful to the environment. This includes ground level ozone, particulate matter, carbon monoxide, lead, sulfur dioxide, and nitrogen dioxide. And the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality or TCEQ has 46 regulatory monitors in DFW alone. And there is one TCEQ air quality site in Northwest Denton near the airport. This site measures ambient weather, so wind data, so wind speed and wind direction, precipitation, solar radiation. It also measures nitric oxide, nitrogen dioxide, oxides and nitrogen, and particulate matter, specifically PM2.5. So this is particulate matter that is 2.5 microns or less in diameter, so very small particles. It also measures total volatile organic compounds or TBOC. However, this air quality monitor does not provide a wider look or even a closer look at the neighborhood level throughout the city. So in 2023, City of Denton Environmental Services and Sustainability began the process of acquiring and installing several AQ mesh sensors throughout the city. These sensors were chosen because they are small and they are easy to install. They are a little bit cheaper to install and acquire. They are customizable, so you can pick and choose which sensors you want to include and which pollutants to measure. They are extremely accurate, and data is provided in near real time. So these sensors, they collect air quality data every 15 minutes, and at the top of every hour, it'll average that data and then record that average every hour. So in collaboration with Denton Municipal Electric, staff installed these sensors, 12 sensors, in two different phases. Phase two was completed in February 2023, and we installed six different sensors at electric substations. These were a little bit more difficult to install, just the connections were difficult and a little bit more difficult to access by staff. We have to coordinate with DME when we come out and do any sort of maintenance on these. So in phase two, we decided to install an additional six sensors at these light poles, which are a little bit easier to access. They're right off of the roads, and site locations for the sensors were chosen based on several criteria, including sufficient spatial distribution throughout the city, as well as DC power availability, minimal tree canopy cover, which can impact the readings here, and distance from roadways. So keeping them out of access by the public, but still easy to access by staff. So like I said, these sensors were chosen because they're extremely accurate, and they have a low detection limit, which means they can pick up relatively low levels of different pollutants. And these are configured to measure ozone particulate matter, PM2.5 and PM10 specifically, nitrogen dioxide, total volatile organic compounds, or TVOC, and sulfur dioxide. And ozone and particulate matter are especially a primary concern in North Texas. That is the AQI, or air quality index. That's ozone and PM. Particulate matter is included in that AQI, NCTCOG. They report on ozone particulate matter through AQI. However, we also included these other pollutants because they also present health concerns of their own, and they lead to ozone formation. So here is an overview of what the air quality dashboard currently looks like on our Sustainable Denton website. Residents, they can go to www.cityofdenton.com/airquality, and they can view this dashboard. And this dashboard is comprised of five different maps. Our GIS team was great, and they helped build out this map for us. And whenever they first log on to the dashboard, they will come to this homepage, or this landing page, which will show the distribution of all of the different air quality sensors throughout the City of Denton. The green circles and the red squares denote the City of Denton monitors. So the four red squares are sensors that also include wind and wind data, so wind speed and wind direction. Only four of them are configured with that currently. And we also have that Navy triangle is the TCEQ site, and residents can toggle and they can click between these different sites. And if they click on any of the City of Denton locations, that it will provide an average reading of ozone PM2.5, PM10, and wind data for the sensors that record them. And these are weekly averages. Currently, this data is not automated, so we have to do a manual upload of the data. So due to staff time, we are currently reporting weekly averages. I will talk about it in the next few slides, but we will eventually move towards an automated data poll, where it'll be reporting every hour. But that's where we're at right now. And so anyone can click on the City of Denton monitor. They can look at the weekly averages of the previous week. They can also click on the sites for the TCEQ monitor, and that will direct them away from the City of Denton dashboard into the TCEQ website. And they can delve into the data there, and they can compare between TCEQ and Denton if they wish. And then at the top from there, they can look, if they wanted to delve into that data even further, if they wanted to look at the hourly readings for any of our pollutants, they can go along the top and click on any of the tabs. For instance, if they click on ozone, it'll take them to another map where, again, it shows the distribution of the City of Denton monitors, and it'll show a list of our active monitors, including the pod name. Again, that weekly average reading for ozone, in this case, in parts per billion. It'll also show an hourly log of those readings. And this is historical data. Currently, this is displaying data all the way from October, whenever we had all 12 sensors online, just so it could be a bit more comparable when there's gaps in the data. Additionally, we have configured some functionality where at each of the sites along the map, we have included that air quality index color. And this is based on the weekly average again. So what that was is the air quality index or the AQI. This is just a way to communicate to the public based on colors, the level of concern to public health based on the air quality in that area. So this is an index, but it's based on EPA breakpoints. So this is based on a range of different concentrations of different pollutants. So as you can see on our dashboard, we are reporting the data as is, as it's pulled. So it's based on concentrations, so in ozone, parts per billion, et cetera. So we just provided these charts here on each of the maps so that our residents, whenever they're looking at these green colors and they see, all right, that color is green, what does that mean? And they can look at the data and get some more information there. All right. And so the next steps, like I said earlier, currently, this is a manual data pull. So I'm pulling this data. Every Monday, I'm pulling the previous week's data and uploading it into the dashboard. We are currently working on migrating to an application programming interface, which is an API, not to be confused with AQI, which I've done. And this will automatically pull that data from the sensors into the dashboard. And it will report a rolling 24 average of the air quality data as well, so that whenever residents are looking and if they've signed up for air quality alerts, they're seeing, okay, so today the forecast, their air quality, the AQI is yellow. What does it look like at city of Denton? Okay, all right. And then you can compare from there. And with that 24 hour average, it's a little more informative and comparable. We're also working towards a, we're not currently working, but we're wanting to also include a mobile configuration of the air quality dashboard. Currently, you can only view this dashboard on the desktop. If you try to look at it on your cell phone, iPad, it doesn't work. So there was interest in moving towards a mobile configuration as well. And we're hearing the same concerns with other cities. They're wanting to move towards a mobile configuration as well. And then finally, we really want to work towards analyzing this air quality data. We have a ton of data. You know, it's only about a year or more, but that's good data. So there's interest in analyzing that from there to where is this meeting. And with that, I'll take any questions. Questions? So you mentioned that you go into analyzing the data. Do you envision making graphs, annual graphs of all these pollutants that you monitor and look into the, maybe the cause of why they are above EPA standards and advise the public or come back and report to us? Absolutely. Absolutely. That's one way you can analyze that data. I, currently, I don't know if that will be us or if we'll partner or collaborate with anyone, but there is interest there. That's something that we could absolutely do. Yeah, because you have, as you said, lots of data and that, you know, all this analysis will be very informative for the public. So I saw that our sensors can sense additional material than the PMs and the ozone. Are we storing that information anywhere? Absolutely. Yeah. So we have, we have access to that data on the back end. Okay. And if anyone is interested in looking at that data, because as you saw our dashboard currently, it only, we're only publicly presenting ozone and particulate matter. So that when residents, this is informational only, these sensors are non-regulatory. So these, if anyone wants to look into that data further, they can reach out to me. My contact information is there, and if they want that data, they can. I know that there is student researchers at local universities, UNT, TWU, if they want that data and they want to use that for research, they can reach out to us. To Camilla's point, I think that information, if it's not like accessible on this dashboard, would be really great to hear. I just was making sure we didn't over-buy sensors. It's doing information that we're not going to be looking at. So that's really helpful to know that it's still going to be around. The weekly averages. So this is just, it's a, we're casting back a little bit, right? Whenever I open up this dashboard, I can see what was, I don't really have the ability to see what's happening right now. Is that correct? Yes, correct. Okay. And within the dashboard's functionality, I can only see that average of the weekly and then see the logs specifically. Yes. Okay. And I guess to reflect what you just said, if I wanted additional information or I wanted to maybe understand a little bit more about my local context and what I may or may not be being exposed to, I could request that information from you. Yes, for now, yes. Maybe a little in the weeds, but is there any kind of regular calibration or sanity checks that have to be done with those sensors? That's a great question. I'm not sure about calibration. That is something that I can reach out to for our technicians or not our technicians, but I don't know. They are calibrated before they're installed. Yeah. I think I'm on the screen right here. No, and they reference with the TCEQ monitors, so they do a calibration that way as well. Yeah. I had a couple of questions. First of all, this is a great asset. I appreciate all your work in developing it. Do you have any way to ascertain how many people have accessed the site and information? Is there a counter on there where you can see how many folks are getting the message? I believe so. Yes. Do you have any numbers on that now? Not currently, no. Yes, you can get that. Okay. Also, you're probably already doing it, but is there a way to obviously, let me put it this way, if I go on this website and I see the error numbers, is there a button? Can I push a button and go to a part that tells me what Denton is doing to combat this? In other words, what are the clean air initiatives that sustainability offers? I don't know if you've done that yet, but it would be neat if you could unify the whole thing so that people start to understand how it's all interrelated, just like an ecosystem. Currently, we don't have anything on the dashboard. However, the dashboard is located on the Sustainable Denton, that air quality greenhouse gas page, so we have a list of the different initiatives that we're doing, the partnerships, and then when they scroll down, they can find that dashboard. But currently, it's not in the dashboard. Okay. It's something that we could add. Okay. I might go one more. Yeah, I just hope that you will, as soon as is possible, get it so that I can find this on my phone. As fast as our GIS. To this previous question, if I wanted to know, I don't know what ozone is, I don't know what PM2.5 is, I can find that still on the greenhouse gas website on sustainability, right? It was. We can add that to that greenhouse gas page. It is on the dashboard, so if they wanted to go and they wanted to see... Like a descriptor, or maybe sources that this could be coming, like VOCs, for example. I know that's not a part of the dashboard, but it's something that they do record, like even trees, for example, can release VOCs, right? Or sulfur dioxide or whatever. Where just it's a little bit more interpretive or intuitive for a user to see, "Oh, gosh, last week I was exposed to red levels of eggs. Now I'm curious, where was that coming from? What's contributing to that?" And at this point, maybe I'm thinking, "Oh, gosh, this city should be doing something about that." I think it leads to a lot of interesting jumping off questions as an educational tool. That it'd be nice to try to consolidate some of those information that way. If there are concerns or there's just curiosity about what's happening and why it may be happening, and it's all kind of localized in one spot for people to quickly understand what is ozone, where does it come from, what does the city do about it, and here's what your neighborhood looked like the week prior. I think that's really informative for people. No, that's a great point. And currently, right now, we do have on each of the pollutant pages, again, it's only ozone in particular matter, but if they wanted to learn more about this pollutant, they can click on this language that says, "For more information about this pollutant, click here," and it does take them to the EPA page specifically on that pollutant. So that gives the resident the opportunity to research that on their own. Awesome. Any other comments, questions? All right. Now we shall receive a report, hold a discussion, and give staff direction on Sustainability Framework Fund 2024-2025, those programs and the prioritization of programs in 2025-2026. Pardon me? I'm going to take that one, we're all good for a few more minutes? Yeah, sure. Okay. Catherine Barnett, Sustainability Manager. I'm just going to talk a little bit about the 2024-2025 Sustainability Framework Fund programs, and then a little bit about what we are looking for for next year. So we'll do some project updates, talk about the expenditures, have a discussion about prioritization for 2025-2026, and then out to look at our next steps. So just a reminder, for 2024-2025, we have about $600,000 planned in programs and projects, I've listed the funding that we have earmarked for those, and our expenditures. A few of them, the water conservation specifically, we ended up not funding out of the Framework Fund because Denton Water Utilities chose to go ahead and fund those incentives through their budget. We postponed a little bit on the ecosystem protection and enhancement. We had a little bit of a rebound with the privet at a couple of our sites this summer. Potentially the heavy rains that we had in the spring helped out a lot. We have the EV rebates, the E-5 rebates, and I'll go ahead and talk about the lawn equipment pilot here too. All three of those programs are doing really well. Those amounts, the $72,000 expended, the almost $38,000 and about $35,000. Those were as of the eighth, whenever we had to have the backup finalized, but we are at about $44,000 on e-bikes now, $79,000 on EV, and about $45,000 on lawn equipment as of today. So really well received. The lawn equipment project program just really took off. We've had 287 applicants. Some of those are duplicates. They're buying it one piece at a time, but they're getting them. So yeah, really happy with how that program took off. We funded the electric bikes for PD. That was a $31,000 expenditure. Worked on that charging management for the city as a whole, which are the chargers that are at our facilities. Parks mowers, we have here marked 52,500 that should be coming to council for approval soon, and those will be the electric robotic mowers. See, we didn't have to spend any money on the electric vehicle for the city fleet support. We talked about that during the climate action plan update, the vehicles that we purchased. The department's purchased that within their own funding and didn't need that support from the sustainability fund, so that was great. We have a little bit of O&M costs with the monitor program. We'll see a little bit of that continuing in the next year. Catherine, could you remind us, so the funding column 600k, that was our budgeted or that was our actual fund total for FY24? That was the project total for 24. That was what we were programming to spend for 24. Whenever we set that amount, we had, I think we had an $800,000 budget, 750, sorry, 750 for 24/25, so we went at that 600 because we hadn't hit those revenue projections before. So yeah, so that's where we are. That was just our program budget. My question, outside of the budgeting for how much we anticipate receiving, I understand the fund is franchise E funded, our actual FY24 total that was within the fund. We expended 280, how much was left in the pot? I'll have to get that together. I know every year we go through this and we're like, did we ballpark right? Did we ballpark right? And we kind of get a little bit of a reflection back to see, we know what our programs did during the year, and then we look at the next year and say, here's what we are thinking we're going to be around. And I know there's always a fine-tuning process. I didn't know if there's additional details we could be thinking about in regards to, it looks like well underestimated or perhaps some of the programs uptake, wasn't it? What we may have thought. I'm just trying to think about those balances. We'll get that information. We don't get finalized numbers until later in the year, so we do have enough funding available for what we're proposing. Cool, thank you. I think that's it. I'll clean this way on that. So just some specifics about the different programs. We launched that electric line up in the program May 29th. Like I said, we're right at 45,000 spent now, and then we are in regular inclusion of that project for 25-26 as a continuity program. EV and EVITE incentives. Again, we're at 79,000 now and 44,000 or 5,000. We have funded those at a higher level, so we haven't reached the entire spend from what we have programmed for 25-26. I think that those are established programs and can continue forward if that's what the committee desires. And then kind of moving into the 25-26 proposed programs, looking at that transportation travel movement that this area kind of ties back to our climate action plan goals. We have the EV, rebank the EVITE, the lot equipment. We have a three-year program planned with parks for the mowers. So that would be about $52,500 per year to get them up to six mowers working in our ball fields. So including that again for next year for expense and then the O&M for their quality sensors. And then one thing that we've had this in the plan since our original big $4 million proposal to work on the bike lane and sidewalk connections just to improve walkability and bikeability in town. So really work with transportation on that and if there's anywhere we can help close some of those gaps. And then we've heard a lot this year about some of the school areas and some white line gaps and sidewalk gaps. Anything that we can do to help facilitate. On the building focus area, we're talking with community development about partnering with them with their minor improvement program where we could go in and if they're working on a home we could go in and we can work on energy efficiency. We would work on the building envelope insulation kind of do all of that upgrade at that one point in time so they only have one construction disturbance and try to try to get them up to a better energy efficient home, more comfortable home. They work between 30 and 50 homes a year and so we would partner with them for up to 50 and we're looking at an average of 7,000 and that would help increase this year of their HVAC heat pump units. I was curious on this like because that is a proposed program. Do they have a team that goes in and does the installation for these types of projects or they contract that out to somebody here? They contract. Okay, so we would just be adding some of those additional efficiencies and weatherization programs? Exactly and providing an energy outlet up front. Prior to work? Yes, so we identify the goal of the whole project. Yeah, we're excited about this one. It helps us against that gap that we have from the green sense program that able to go in and help witness things on the front. And you'll see it matches with the green sense that we would bring up to the green sense standard. For land use focus area we're proposing 200,000. That'd be the carryover from 24, 25 as well. Talking with parks about some low water use median projects, the safe routes to schools, anything that we can do to help with that, shade, tree planting by parking canopies, and then the ecosystem protection and enhancement that we're continuing that into the park. Yes? Does ecosystem protection and enhancement, does that encompass say if somebody wanted to zero escape the law? No, no, no. There is a turf buyback program through water utilities that would work for that. Okay. Yeah, but not through this. This would be in our parks. Thank you. So how many previous areas do we have? Do you have a? How many are we working on in Denton? You worked on three of them? I think we've done, I think we're up to about half a dozen now, just off the top of my head. Not all of them are scheduled for the enhancement, but we are monitoring up to about half a dozen sites. Okay, and I know that in your report you're signing 100,000 dollars for them. Do you think that's enough? I think I raised an issue before. Yes, and I think as we look at outer years, we may need more. Some of it's being accomplished through existing projects right now, so I think we have adequate funding for the next year, especially rolling over the current year into next year. I think we're good with that. A big project is kicked off just recently down on the south side of town. It's a village with a new permel project, and they've been working through that site. I'm really excited to see this slide. The Safe Cross to School Initiative projects was particularly of interest. I've learned recently that KDB's tree or block program is not that active anymore, and so I think this fills the gap that we have some flexibility to dedicate funds to, and honestly it's a really great way to have some cost-effective programs that people can tell there's a difference, and so this is a really interesting idea, and I think we can see some progress here. Yeah, and I mean it fits in with the bike lane blocking pedestrian connections. Just trying to make it more palatable for folks to walk to school in 100 degrees. So just talking about the prioritization. From our side, we would look at that minor home repair energy efficiency upgrade project kind of as our number one priority, the 350,000 for that, and then move into the bike lane cycle connections and the ecosystem connections. We have a little over a million dollars proposed for next year's budget, and so that's the first 590,000. We would want to focus on those three, and then we'll keep an eye on revenue as it comes to them and expand that as we can. I know we just talked about this, but the relationship with the prioritization specifically. When you talked about community development's program, we're describing this as a pilot, and you mentioned something about 30 homes and then thinking of 50 homes. Is there an existing program that they have that we're building into and then increasing their scope of? It's increasing the scope. They work on 30 to 50 homes a year through their minor home repair program, so we would come in and partner with them, or they may be replacing an air conditioner now, but they're not replacing it up to a 15.2 sear, so we would help them bridge that cost difference, and then they may not be touching insulation, so we would say, okay, we could go in and we can do the insulation piece. The average cost that we're seeing for insulation and then the difference on the HVACs, we feel like 70,000 is a great average cost for that, even if we had to get into some weatherization and maybe a little bit more. And that would be our individual home-by-home investment? Yes. If possible, it would be helpful to see some additional information, and maybe I can find this independently. What community developments process for applicants or how they develop that list for what they can actually get to in a year? I think that'd be interesting information as we think about it. We can get their application process for you. I think I'll send them. So the continuing existing programs, that's about 410,000, so that gets us up to a million, but 410 of that would be continuing existing programs, and those are just proposed by the levels for each. So what we'll do next steps, we'll close out the 24-25 year and then come back and report back on how all those projects closed out for the year, and we'll prepare a framework by work plan for consideration at our next meeting and present that. If we want to go back and talk about the different programs and where your interests lie for prioritization, that would be great. Any feedback that you can offer today? I'm pretty partial to the energy efficiency upgrades. I think they are very crucial given the situation. And also, I know it's perhaps not germane to this now, but at some point, as it's already on the matrix, is to look about reinstating some sort of solar incentive, residential solar incentive, and a battery incentive as well. So we are currently looking at zeroing out the fleet support upgrades? We have that money earmarked in the project right now, so we would not be adding additional funding to that next year. Okay, so keeping it at the 175 for the next work plan? Yes. That's true. We are pausing our participating goals with budget next year. I would be, I would love to see at that future work plan presentation, if we know that's going to be a policy on the books, it makes sense to me to go ahead and just zero that line on account, and we can just hold it in our minds that maybe a year or two from now, and that's a door that's open again, we can support those efforts. But if they needed no support in this previous fiscal or anticipating no additional procurement next fiscal, I think it just might make sense to clean it up a little bit and just say we're going to focus on some other issues as my input. Anything else? Thank you. Under staff reports, does anyone have anything they want to add to the matrix? So I think I would like for us to get more information on the styrofoam recycling. I know that's something new that we do, and I'm not sure we know a lot about it and also then tonight, so. Yes, we do. Any other matrix items? I would like for it to go in our matrix during D&E's IOP and R&P development process that we do from then again in an item where we can provide direct feedback to staff regarding our position on some of their policy development as we move through those programs. Zero timeline on this, but at some point I would really love to see that maybe annual or semi-annual analysis of the air quality data that we do capture especially ones that aren't presented or available on the publicly viewable dashboard and that would be really fascinating to kind of understand what are we capturing on that localized basis if we could get that one. Anybody else? I have one thing. A while back we were told about a landfill that was being closed here in Denton and it's out near Crossroads 74 acres. It's adjacent to Mosley Road about four and a half miles east of Denton. Its record ID, which I assume is the state registration with the state, is 239 and its facility ID is 13. And what I would like an update on what plans there are, what they're going to do with this landfill because I know when Brian presented it way back when there was some talk of thinking about turning it into a park, but I'm just curious to see if there's been any development with that. Not to my knowledge, but I'll get an update. Thank you. Anything else? Do we have a motion to adjourn? So moved. So moved. All in favor? Thank you. We are adjourned. Thank you.