Randy Manion: Good morning, or good afternoon, wherever you may be, and welcome to the fifth webinar of the 2017 DOE Tribal Energy Webinar Series, "What Energy Project Is Right for My Tribe?" I'm Randy Manion, today's webinar chair and manager of Western Area Power Administration's Renewable Resource Program. Let's go over some event details. Today's webinar is being recorded and will be made available on DOE's Office of Indian Energy Policy and Programs website, along with copies of today's PowerPoint presentations in about one week. Everyone will receive a post-webinar e-mail with the link to the page where the slides and recording are located. Because we are recording this webinar, all phones have been muted for this purpose, and we'll answer all your questions at the end of all the presentations. However, you can submit a question at any time by clicking on the Question button located in the webinar control box on your screen and typing your question in.We'll try to keep the webinar to no more than two hours, so let's get started with opening remarks from Lizana Pierce. Ms. Pierce is a senior engineer and deployment supervisor in the Office of Indian Energy Policy and Programs duty-stationed in Golden, Colorado. Lizana is responsible for managing technical assistance services, implementing national funding and financing programs, and administering the resultant tribal energy project grants and agreements. She has more than 20 years of experience in project development and management, and has been assisting tribes in developing their energy resources for the last 18 years. She holds a bachelor's of science degree in mechanical engineering from Colorado State University, and has pursued a master's in business administration through the University of Northern Colorado. Lizana, the virtual floor is now yours.
Lizana Pierce: Thank you Randy, and hello, everyone. I join Randy in welcoming you to the fifth webinar of the 2017 series. This webinar series is sponsored by two US Department of Energy organizations: the Office of Indian Energy Policy and Programs, and the Western Area Power Administration. The Office of Indian Energy directs, fosters, coordinates and implements energy planning, education, management, and programs that assist tribes with energy development, capacity-building, energy infrastructure, energy cost and electrification of Indian lands and homes. To provide this assistance, our deployment program works within the Department of Energy across government agencies and with Indian tribes and organizations to help those Indian tribes and Alaska Native villages overcome the barriers to energy development.Our deployment program is composed of a three-pronged approach consisting of financial assistance, technical assistance, and education and capacity-building. As an example of our funding opportunity, we have recently announced 32 new tribal energy grants, 19 of those for the initial steps towards energy development, and just last week, I believe it was, 13 hardware deployment grants. For more on those, you can see the main page on the Office of Indian Energy's website. I would also like to offer tribes and Alaska Native villages, tribal entities and intertribal entities listening to consider requesting technical assistance from DOE to help them reach their energy visions. This free technical assistance, you can request that on our website, as well, and for more information, please see the website.This tribal energy webinar series is an example of the education and capacity-building efforts that we offer. The webinar series is part of the Office of Indian Energy's efforts to support fiscally-responsible energy, business, and economic development decision-making and information-sharing amongst tribes. It is intended to provide attendees with information on tools and resources to develop and implement the tribal energy plans, programs, and projects, to highlight tribal energy case studies, as you will hear John Hendrix speak later, and identify business strategies tribes can use to expand their energy options and develop sustainable local economies. Today's webinar, "What Energy Project Is Right for My Tribe?" will provide guidance on how to identify an appropriate energy project, whether it's small renewable energy or a single tribal residence or building, or tribal community project or utility scale requiring transmission, interconnection and off-take through a power purchase agreement.The speakers will also share information on tools and resources available to help tribes evaluate options and move forward. In fact, one such resource was recently announced by DOI's Office of Indian Energy and Economic Development yesterday. I'm sure Steve is going to speak about it, but there is the funding opportunity that was issued for a grant program to assist, evaluate, and promote the development of tribal energy and mineral resources. I urge you to look on grants.gov for information on that if you're interested. We hope the webinar series is useful but welcome your feedback, so please let us know if there are ways we could make the series better. With that, I'll now turn it back over to Randy. Thank you.
Randy Manion: Thank you, Lizana. Thanks. We have three additional speakers today: Jimmy Salasovich, Stephen Manydeeds, and John Hendrix, and I'll introduce them all now. Jimmy Salasovich is an engineer at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and he has 17 years of experience in energy efficiency and renewable energy analysis. He has been the technical leader for over 100 energy efficiency and renewable energy assessments, including 12 tribal projects.Following Jimmy is Stephen Manydeeds. Mr. Manydeeds is an enrolled member of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe and chief for the Division of Energy and Mineral Development, which is responsible for all energy, both traditional and renewable, and mineral activity on tribal Indian trust lands nationwide. He has over 40 years' experience in performing geologic and economic studies on both energy and mineral resources on nearly all United States tribal reservations. Since taking over the division chief position, he has redefined its mission to include not just assessments, but the development of vast resources contained on Indian land.Closing out our speaking today will be John Hendrix. Mr. Hendrix is the director of economic development for the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians, with over 20 years of experience in tribal economic development. His primary focus at the Mississippi Choctaw is to create new job opportunities for tribal members and new sources of business revenue for the tribal government. His responsibilities include investment analysis, industrial recruitment, retail and commercial development, energy development, and small business development. John also manages the tribe's 800,000-square-foot commercial real estate portfolio, as well as the tribally-owned organic vegetable farming business.John is currently working on several energy-related projects, including natural gas service, biomass energy generation, and energy efficiency initiatives. He also represents the Mississippi Choctaw as a delegate to the Department of Energy _____ committee on Energy Infrastructure Working Group, also known as ICEIWG. During his 23-year tenure with the tribe, John has participated in the development and startup of many tribally-owned companies representing investments of more than $500 million. John received his bachelor's degree in business administration from Millsaps College and his MBA from Duke University. So, with that ‒
Lizana Pierce: Randy ‒
Randy Manion: ‒ Jimmy, just give me a moment ‒ yes?
Lizana Pierce: Randy, this is Lizana. The audience is not hearing the webinar, so can you check ‒
Randy Manion: Oh, they're not?
Lizana Pierce: No. Can you check to make sure that everything is open. I think ‒
Randy Manion: Okay ‒
Lizana Pierce: I don't think anything was ‒
Randy Manion: ‒ let me try this one more time. Okay. Well, let me go back. We're going to do this all over again.[Side Conversation]We had some audio problems but we're good to go, and good morning, good afternoon, wherever you may be, and welcome to the fifth webinar of the 2017 DOE Tribal Energy Webinar Series, "What Energy Project Is Right for My Tribe?" I'm Randy Manion, today's webinar chair and manager of Western Area Power Administration's Renewable Resource Program. Let's go over some event details. Today's webinar is being recorded and will be made available on DOE's Office of Indian Energy Policy and Programs website, along with copies of today's PowerPoint presentations in about one week. Everyone will receive a post-webinar e-mail with the link to the page where the slides and recording will be located.Because we are recording this webinar, all phones have been muted for this purpose. We'll answer your questions at the end of all presentations. However, you can submit a question at any time by clicking on the Question button located in the webinar control box on your screen and typing your question. We'll keep the webinar to no more than two hours, so let's get started with opening remarks from Lizana Pierce. Ms. Pierce is the senior engineer and deployment supervisor in the Office of Indian Energy Policy and Programs duty-stationed in Golden, Colorado. Lizana is responsible for managing technical assistance services, implementing national funding and financing programs, and administering the resultant tribal energy project grants and agreements. With that, Lizana, the virtual floor is now yours.
Lizana Pierce: Thank you Randy, and hello, everyone. I join Randy in welcoming you to the fifth webinar of the 2017 series. This webinar series is sponsored by two US Department of Energy organizations: the Office of Indian Energy Policy and Programs ‒ Office of Indian Energy, for short ‒ and the Western Area Power Administration. The Office of Indian Energy directs, fosters, coordinates and implements energy planning, education, management, and programs that assist tribes with energy development, capacity-building, energy infrastructure, energy cost and electrification of Indian lands and homes. To provide this assistance, our deployment program works within the Department of Energy across government agencies and with Indian tribes and organizations to help those Indian tribes and Alaska Native villages overcome the barriers to energy development.Our deployment program is composed of a three-pronged approach consisting of financial assistance, technical assistance, and education and capacity-building. As a recent example of our financial assistance, we just announced recently 32 new tribal energy project grant funds. The first 19 of those were for the initial steps towards energy development, and just last week, I think it was just last week, 13 new hardware deployment grants. For more on those, you can see the main page of our website. I would also like those listening, tribes, villages, and tribal entities to consider requesting technical assistance from DOE. That assistance is intended to help address any barriers you may have. It's free of charge, and you can request that online through our website.This tribal energy webinar series is an example of our education and capacity-building efforts. This webinar series is part of the office's efforts to support fiscally-responsible energy, business, and economic development decision-making and information-sharing amongst tribes. It is intended to provide attendees with information on tools and resources to develop and implement tribal energy plans, programs, and projects; also to highlight tribal energy case studies, as you will hear later from John Hendrix, and identify business strategies tribes can use to expand their energy options and develop sustainable local economies. Today's webinar, "What Energy Project Is Right for My Tribe?" will provide guidance on how to identify an appropriate energy project, whether it's a small renewable energy project for a single tribal residence or building, a tribal community project, or utility scale project requiring transmission, interconnection, and off-take through a power purchase agreement.Speakers will also share information on tools and resources available to help tribes evaluate options and move forward. In fact, one such resource, which I'm sure Steve will speak about, is the recently announced Indian Energy and Economic Development funding opportunity announcement for the assessment, evaluation, and promotion of the development of tribal energy and mineral resources. That, again, is through Interior's IEED office, and I would urge you to look on grants.gov and the requirements for that funding opportunity announcement. We hope the webinar series is useful but we welcome your feedback, so please let us know if there are ways we could make the series better. With that, I'll now turn it back over to Randy. Thank you.
Randy Manion: Thank you, Lizana. Thank you. We have three additional speakers today: Jimmy Salasovich, Stephen Manydeeds, and John Hendrix, and I'll introduce them all now, and then we'll get started with Jimmy. Jimmy Salasovich is an engineer at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and he has 17 years of experience in energy efficiency and renewable energy analysis. He has been the technical leader for over 100 energy efficiency and renewable energy assessments, including 12 tribal projects.Following Jimmy is Stephen Manydeeds. Mr. Manydeeds is an enrolled member of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe and chief for the Division of Energy and Mineral Development, which is responsible for all energy, both traditional and renewable, and mineral activity on Indian trust lands nationwide. He has over 40 years' experience in performing geologic and economic studies on both energy and mineral resources on nearly all United States tribal reservations. Since taking over the division chief position, he has redefined its mission to include not just assessments, but the development of the vast resources contained on Indian land.Then, closing out will be John Hendrix. Mr. Hendrix is the director of economic development for the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians, with over 20 years of experience in tribal economic development. His primary focus at Mississippi Choctaw is to create new job opportunities for tribal members and new sources of business revenue for tribal government. His responsibilities include investment analysis, industrial recruitment, retail and commercial development, energy development, and small business development. John also manages the tribe's 800,000-square-foot commercial real estate portfolio, as well as tribally-owned organic vegetable farming business. John is currently working on several energy-related projects, including natural gas, biomass energy generation, and energy efficiency initiatives.He has also represented the Mississippi Choctaw as a delegate to the Department of Energy Indian committee on Energy Infrastructure Working Group, also known as ICEIWG. During his 23-year tenure with the tribe, John has participated in the development and start-up of many tribally-owned companies representing an investment of more than $500 million. John received his bachelor's degree in business administration from Millsaps College and his MBA from Duke University. So, with that, Jimmy, let me pull up your slide deck and we'll get started. Okay, Jimmy, it's all yours.
Jimmy Salasovich: All right. Thanks, Randy. Hi, everyone. I'm going to talk today about energy system sizing. This could relate to any energy system. Renewable energy is kind of the focus, but _____ _____ taught here can be applied to pretty much any energy system, so the process can be used for any energy system. So here are the major components when you're sizing an energy system. The first step is to determine the energy baseline, what buildings are using how much energy, what the site is using, so we'll go into a little more detail for each of these topics. The first step is defining the baseline. The next step is minimizing the energy use through energy efficiency. One of the mantras here at the lab is to do energy efficiency first. It's almost always more cost-effective, and then, once you reduce the load, you look at renewable energy sources, and I'll go into more detail there.The next step would be doing some resource mapping. After that, you could determine the type and scope of the project, and then, from there, you analyze the feasibility of the energy project. With that step, I'll go into some of the tools that we typically use. Most of them are free, so I'll cover those tools. Then, once all those steps are completed, you could work towards implementing the energy project. So, along the bottom are just some examples of a large hydro project, biomass boilers, photovoltaics, and wind turbines.So here is just the workflow for all those different components when you're sizing an energy system. So, again, the first step is determine the baseline, the energy baseline, so how many kilowatt hours a year are you using, how many therms of natural gas, that kind of thing. The next step would be to minimize energy use through, again, energy efficiency, and so these two steps are kind of iterative. If you reduce the energy use, you would want to go back and create a new baseline to figure out how much your energy use has gone down after you implement that. Once you implement all the energy efficiency measures, you can go on to the resource mapping and determining the scope of the project. Again, similar to the previous step, this is kind of an iterative process, determining your type and scope of the project might change once you look at the resource mapping.From there, you would want to analyze the feasibility of the project, so that would be using the tools that we'll cover in detail to figure out whether or not the project is feasible. From there, you ask yourself, "Is the project viable?" If no, you start the process all over again. If yes, you work towards implementing the project. So here's just a slide on energy baselines. This goes into a little bit of detail with the difference between power and energy, so when you're looking at electricity, a lot of times you'll hear, or on your utility bill, there might be a peak kW charge. So, in the chart shown here, the peak would be 85 kilowatts, and that's the peak demand for that day. So this is just a single day of electricity use for an example building. The energy use, the units are kilowatt hours, and that's simply the area under the curve, so that would be 1,200 kilowatt hours per day.So, for houses and smaller buildings, typically the electricity rate is just an energy charge, so you would be paying a dollar-per-kilowatt-hour charge for that. For larger buildings, you could be charged for the peak kW, and that would be _____ per kW charge. So it's important, when you're developing the baseline, to look at your utility bill to figure out all the details of how you're being charged and ways you can reduce that. So going along the same lines with the energy baseline, the next step would be to collect energy data. You should consider all energy usage, so electricity, natural gas, propane, diesel, whatever is used at the site, look into each one of those components and see how you're using it, see if the usage is going up over time, if it's seasonal, things like that.So you would want to collect not only the energy use, but you would also want to look at the cost data. So the data can be for individual buildings or for an entire site, depending on how big of a project you want to look at. Typically, you would like to collect monthly data for multiple years. The reason for doing this is your energy use could go down or up over time, so seeing if there are trends there, so that's a good reason to do that, and also collecting three years of data lets you look at any month that might be anomalous. For example, a piece of equipment might fail and so your electricity use might go down for just a single month, and so it's not really a good representative of value for that month.Then, the final bullet is analyze the utility rate structure. So, again, are you being charged for dollars-per-kilowatt-hour? If it's natural gas, dollars-per-therm, et cetera. So the two charts on the bottom are just typical energy use profiles for a group of buildings. This data was taken, it's just example data, but it's 2014 to 2016, so we have three years of data. It's for electricity use on the left and electricity cost on the right. You can see the general trend is that the electricity use seems to be going down. It's higher in 2014 than it is in 2016. On the ‒
Randy Manion: Jimmy, you cut out. Lizana, can you hear me?
Lizana Pierce: Yes, I can hear you. We've lost ‒
Randy Manion: Jimmy cut out.
Lizana Pierce: Yeah.[Side Conversation]
Jimmy Salasovich: We can go on to the next slide. Okay, so some more information on the energy baseline. A key component is to develop an energy use intensity. So a lot of times, you'll hear EUI, and that stands for the energy use intensity of a building, and it's simply the energy use divided by the square footage of the building, and, typically, it's on an annual basis. What this does is it allows you to look at many different buildings and normalize the buildings based on the square footage. So a large building wouldn't get penalized for being a large building because its energy use obviously most likely would be higher simply because of the size of it. _____ _____ look at what are the big energy-using buildings on a per-square-foot-basis for your whole portfolio of buildings. So the chart on the bottom is just an example of different energy use intensities for tribal buildings.Here, one of the things you might look at is the health clinic has the highest energy use intensity. Here, we're measuring it in kBtu per square foot per year. It could be kilowatt hours per square foot per year. It just depends on what you're looking at. So, with the health clinic being at 120 kBtu per square foot per year, that might be an indicator that it could be a building where you could maybe consider reducing the energy use. But then, another thing to consider is health clinics typically do use more energy than office buildings and other types of buildings, so this just allows you to just look at what are your buildings using, and, again, on a per-square-foot-basis, and kind of focus on the buildings that are using the most energy. Another thing you could do with this is compare it to different data for a standard office building, and things like that, to see how you're doing against national averages.So the next step, again, is minimizing energy use. Again, it's one of the mantras here at the lab, is reduce your energy use through energy efficiency first, and then consider renewable energy projects. Again, the reason behind that is energy efficiency is typically more cost-effective than renewable energy technologies, and the other big impact is implementing ECMs reduces the energy use, which, in turn, impacts the sizing of renewable energy systems. So, if you reduce your energy use in a building, you wouldn't have to put in as big of a wind farm or as big of a PV system to meet the load of the building, so it has a dual benefit there.So some typical energy conservation measures, a lot of times you'll hear them just using the acronym ECM, so here are some typical energy conservation measures. They include measures on heating, ventilation, and air conditioning systems. A lot of times, you'll hear that just named HVAC. You can do measures on lighting and plug loads, so things like LED lighting or ENERGY STAR refrigerators, and then you can do things on the building envelope, so putting in better windows or more insulation and doing air sealing, things like that. Just a note: conducting building energy audits is a good way to identify the energy conservation measures in a building or a group of buildings on a site. The photos below are just some of the technologies that we see in energy-efficient buildings, so LED lighting, ENERGY STAR refrigerators, appliances, condensing boilers, high-efficiency pumps, things like that.So resource mapping would be the next step. So it's a good first step in determining what technologies might be most feasible at a given site. So, at this point, you know what your energy use is at the site, you've tried to reduce all of your energy use doing energy efficiency measures, and the next step would be to go into these resource maps. You can find resource maps on the Internet, so there are resource maps at the NREL site. They're listed below. There are maps for wind, solar, biomass, and geothermal. Then, if those maps don't provide enough detail, you could go into more refined resource maps for a specific location using GIS _____, or geographic information systems. The two images below, the one on the left is from the NREL site, so that's just a resource map for the entire US, including Alaska and Hawaii. That's for the photovoltaic solar resource.So you can see in the southwest, they have the best solar resource in the continental US. But, when you're looking at energy systems, it's not just the resource; you also want to consider the cost of electricity, how much it costs to install, but this is a good first step to just kind of pinpoint what technologies might make the most sense for your site. On the right is a more detailed map that was created by a GIS team, and this is a biomass map for a specific location. It gives how much biomass is for that specific location. Given they needed more detail, so they created this more detailed map for biomass.So the next step would be determining the type and scope of the energy project, so once you've looked at all the resource maps, you would want to use all the information you've gathered so far in this next step, so you would use all the information from the energy baseline to determine the range of sizes for a potential project given your energy use at the site. You will also want to use this data to determine what buildings, or a group of buildings is suited for a particular technology. Again, minimize the energy use through energy efficiency, and then tracking that after the measures have been implemented, and then using the resource mapping. So choosing the appropriate energy technology by location based on the resources available.Google Earth is a very useful tool in this scoping phase. It's a free tool, a free download, and it's very helpful at just determining what areas are available for different technologies. It also is helpful in determining the distance to the nearest substation, if you're building a bigger system and need to tie back into the substation. It's important to note we use it here in the scoping phase; it can also be used in the analysis phase. So the image shown here is just a Google Earth image for a site that looked at the different potential areas for photovoltaics. So the blue area is the rooftop area on the building, the purple/pink area is kind of a carport PV system, the area being considered for that, and then the big green area is the potential area for a ground-mounted PV system. So, once we know the area, we can figure out how close the substation ‒ you know, it's a good step in determining the size and scale of this energy project.So just some general guidelines when you're determining the scope and type of project. You want to choose the technologies that match the way energy is being used. An example of this is a biomass boiler might work really well for a cold climate in a housing complex that uses a lot of heat, but it might not work so well in a warm climate office building, for example. So choosing the appropriate technology is a very important consideration. On the next bullet, size the energy system to meet the energy load. You wouldn't want to size the system way over what a building might be using or a group of buildings might be using, because you would be selling that electricity back to the utility maybe at a much lower rate, so you would want to size the system appropriately.The size can be based on the current load, based on your energy baseline step that you do, but the size of the system can also meet future loads. If you're building a housing sub-development and you know there are 50 houses going in and you want them to be powered by a certain technology, you can base the sizing on that future load. So start with the US resource maps, and then consider using more refined resource maps, if needed, is another general guideline. It's a good first step to start with the Internet search using the US maps, and then more refined.So the next step would be to analyze the feasibility of a project, so when you think about this, the first thing to think about is what constitutes a viable project. Typically, a viable project is based on the financial parameters. It has a low, simple payback, a positive net present value, et cetera. But the viability can also be based on a site's specific goal, so an example of that would be carbon reduction. So determining what constitutes a viable project is an important step in determining what type of project you should consider. You should choose the proper tools to analyze the project, and we'll, again, go into some of these tools in the upcoming slides. So, with the tools, you want to be able to analyze the technical aspects of a project, but you also want to analyze the financial aspects of a project, so considering tools that do both is important.Then, you want to report the findings, so it's important to write a report that presents data that shows projects that are feasible, but then also projects that aren't feasible so that you know why they aren't feasible, and people maybe wouldn't have to look at them in the future. So the reports also can be written in a way, or you can do the analysis so that you could determine, maybe it's not feasible now, but at what point would it be feasible. An example of that would be at what electric rate would a photovoltaic system become feasible? Maybe at .05 cents it doesn't make sense but, at .10 cents per kilowatt hour, it does.So here are just some of the tools for the different types of energy projects you could do. So, for solar PV, PV Watts is a good tool. The System Advisor Model is another good tool, and then HOMER Energy. I have a link, I should note, on the last slide. I have links for all of these, and it says whether or not they're free or pay tools. For wind, you could use HOMER, and then SAM again. So, for thermal resource assessments for solar hot water, you could use SAM and RETscreen. For concentrating solar, you can use SAM, and then for solar vent pre-heat, you could use RETscreen. So, again, all of the tools listed here are free, so just tools you can use to do the different thermal resource assessments. So, for biomass, again, you could use SAM and RETscreen, and then there's also some biomass resource maps, so there's the link for those. So, if you have a use for that heat, these maps are a good tool for you to use.So, with all the different software tools available, I felt like giving the example for SAM would be a good process to go through, since SAM does both the technical and financial aspects of a project. SAM is a free Web download. Here's the link where you can download it. There is a tutorial available, so it's a good step-by-step process in using SAM. SAM uses TMY hourly weather data, so it does an hourly calculation for the whole year ______ determine the technical and financial feasibility of a project. SAM models many different energy systems, so on the right, you can see all the different projects it models. So PV, wind, concentrating solar, biomass, geothermal, solar hot water. It does all these systems, so it's a very versatile tool from that aspect. So it does both detailed performance modeling, detailed financial modeling, and then it also has detailed results. I'll go into examples of each of those.So, for the detailed performance modeling, here on the right, it's just a layout of the SAM tool. So you can see along the left is kind of the different tabs you could go to, so you can put in the location and the resource, the system, you could design the system, and then go into the cost, and things like that. The tool is set up with inputting into text boxes, or there are also dropdown menus that you could choose from, and the format of SAM, the input is in black font, and then a calculated value is in blue font. It's just a formatted site. Then, with the detailed performance modeling within SAM, you could put in any location in the US and it puts in the weather data for that site, and then you put in all the system details. For this example on the right, it's just a PV system, so you could put in the size, what the tilt is, what the _____ is, what the different shading factors are, so just a lot of detail you can put into the model.As I mentioned before, SAM does detailed financial modeling. So you can see all the different financial parameters there on the left ‒ the system cost, the system lifetime ‒ and then here's the _____ for financial parameters, so you could put in what the debt percent is. If you're taking a loan out on 100 percent of the system, you could put those kinds of things in, the loan terms. Just a lot of different financial parameters you could put into this model to make it as accurate as possible. You could also put in the incentives, the electricity rate, and then the actual loads of the building or the site, and it models all of that in the tool.So some of the results, so SAM does output very detailed results. This is just a summary slide, but across the top, you could see there's also data tables, graphs, cashflow charts you could output from SAM. This is just the summary. So it gives you the annual energy product there on the top right, and then the bottom gives you cashflows and the energy production by year. Then, the table in the upper-left corner gives you the production, net present value, _____ cost of electricity, simple payback, all the things you would want to look at in determining whether or not a project is viable.So just a summary. You want to track the energy use when you're looking at these sizing and energy projects. So track the energy use and create an energy baseline, and, again, implement energy efficiency first and then consider renewable energy, and then use the tools available. So the resource mapping, Google Earth, all the different software tools, so PV Watts, SAM, HOMER, RETscreen, and then keep in mind that the overall goal is to reduce energy use and implement renewable energy projects.This is the final slide. This is a link to all the different tools, and you can see in parentheses, I have whether or not the tool is free. So pretty much all the tools I mentioned are free, with the exception of HOMER, and that is a pay tool. Yeah, I have links for cost data, too, so for PV system costs, if you want to look into that. So that's all I have for the sizing energy systems. Thanks.
Randy Manion: Thank you, Jimmy. Excellent. Stephen, give me a moment to get your deck pulled up.
Stephen Manydeeds: Okay.
Randy Manion: You are good to go.
Stephen Manydeeds: Excellent. Thank you. Hello. I'm Steve Manydeeds, Division of Energy and Minerals. So you can get an idea of who we are, we're not actually the Bureau of Indian Affairs. We're underneath the assistant secretary for Indian Affairs. The reason why we bring this up is that normally, under the Bureau of Indian Affairs, they run different kinds of programs. Our office is specifically designed for economic development, and we're very much looking at tribes saying, "Okay, how can they develop a resource? If they do want to develop a resource, how is the best way to do it?" So that's all we do, and we're a small office, but that's what we're aiming for. You can see underneath there, there's the Division of Economic Development and Division of Capital Investment, and that's actually the Guaranteed Loan Program.The reason why we're all grouped together is that what we're looking at, and we're very much about the whole tribe, a holistic view of what the tribe wants to accomplish. So, if we say, for instance, develop a biomass project, can the tribe get into the trucking business? If they get into the trucking business, is there capital available that they can get loans for to take out loans for the trucking business, as well as the biomass _____. So it's sort of looking at the overall project all the way around.Yeah, this is our mission to talk about. As you can see there, our job is to really help give you the best technical and economic advice, and really looking at a sustainable economies through that. But we kind of look at anytime you develop anything, it shouldn't be the end-all to develop, say, _____ biomass or wind or whatever, but how it fits into the overall tribal economy, and also to do it environmentally sound so that we're not coming up here and we're suggesting something that would be detrimental to the environment. So, when you talk with us, here's all the things that are underneath our purview. So let's just say for the sake of discussion, a tribe has decided to develop a wind farm, which is great. They're also going to need aggregate to build roads to all those wind farms, and so we look at that, also, as an overall practice.We also look at it from the standpoint of how does the tribe structure its business? Are they structuring it properly? Do they have the right kinds of laws, codes, regulations so that they can develop LLCs? How can the tribe really maximize this resource, as well as good tribal practices? If the tribe is concerned about air emissions, do they or should they have laws, regulations the tribe enacts to make sure that their environment is held to uphold to what they do. So, again, you're looking at really a holistic approach to how we develop energy _____ resources on it. We're made up primarily of geologists, geophysicists, mineral economists, the marketers, engineers, business development, analysts, and policy. I think we only have two admin people associated with our office, and there's about 26 of us here in the office, as well, we have contractors to over 30. So small as offices go, but actually, if you take a look at Indian energy and the Bureau of Indian Affairs and us, it turns out we're the only people that actually do Indian energy and minerals.Lizana ‒ oops, next slide. I apologize. I thought I took this out. Yeah, there you go. Lizana pointed out that we do have a couple programs out there. Energy and Mineral Development Program, the EMDP. This just got announced yesterday, in that we're asking for proposals. It's 90 days for the proposals to come in. It's designed to assess and evaluate and promote tribal energy resources and minerals. It can't be used for buying equipment; it's assessment only. Right now, we gave out about $7 million last year in loans. I'll tell you that this is extremely competitive. We usually get about 60 to 70 proposals every year, and they usually total about $28 million, so it's a really competitive program. The nice thing about this is that if you have any questions, you can call up anybody in this office and we can help you with this whole process and talk with you about what you're trying to do _____ _____. So that we're really after you trying to make the best proposal you possibly can.The next proposal that will probably be coming out in the next week or so is the Tribal Energy Development Capacity Program. Again, it's helping the tribe at the governmental level organize itself so they can take full advantage: if they want to develop energy, how is the best way to do this? How can the tribe take advantage of it, making sure that if the tribe wants to start up its own company, how is the best way to do this? What's the most economic? What's the most legal way to do these things? This is an opportunity for the tribe to really sit down and really look at the laws and codes and statutes that regulate their life. This really does fall under self-determination, that we really support this whole process.Finally, technical assistance. You can call us up anytime, and e‑mail us, whatever, and ask for assistance and we'll help you; it's basically that easy. So, if a tribal member, if a tribe calls up or a tribal chairman calls up, or somebody says, "Hey, my tribe needs help, XYZ," we generally have guys going out there really to sit down and talk with you about what should be done, what could be done, and how we can really help you, you know, provide assistance. The goal is that each tribe doesn't necessarily have to have its own engineer, electrical engineer, or mechanical or civil engineer on staff. The goal is for us to become your engineer, your on-staff engineer so that we're really part of the overall process, so we're not showing up one day and you never see us again for the next three or four years. We're there as many times and as often as you want us to be there, and a lot of our tribes really take a tremendous advantage on this whole thing.So, if you want to sit down and talk about, "Well, who's the best company out there?" and you'll find out, in any industry, there are some really outstanding companies out there, and, likewise, there are some really terrible companies out there. How do you sit down and differentiate what's a good company and what's a bad company? Do they have a history of performing as they say? Do they have a history of performing and working well with indigenous people? These are the things that we can help you out with and just be a part of as much as you would like us to be.This sort of gives you an overview of where we're all located, the projects we're working on. The reason why we sort of flash that up there and show you all the renewable energy, oil and gas, mineral and PV programs is that what we've developed is a great corporate knowledge. So, if a tribe in, say, Arizona wants to develop a biomass project and is thinking about it, we have access to all the other ‒ sort of a corporate knowledge of what was tried in all the other different places. We can usually tag them up and say, "Hey, you might want to talk with these guys up here in, say, northern Minnesota who have done a similar project and they're looking at similar things," to get two tribes talking together so they can exchange lessons learned on the whole thing.We don't want a tribe to sit down and just basically learn the same life-of-hard-knocks over and over again. So, if we can help out by doing that, that's just what we're after on the whole thing. So, as you can see, there are tribes around, and, if you have any tribes in that area ‒ often, a lot of people are sort of shocked that, yeah, we do have a project in their area and they just have to go talk with the tribal chairman who has assigned it to somebody to talk about.The reason, again, why I put this up is when we talk about energy and minerals, how important it is to the Indian community, and this was developed by the US Department of Interior. It's an economic report, and the slide is listed exactly as it is on it, and the energy and minerals have an economic impact of $14.6 billion. This is far and away more than any other resources out there at all, and is only second to gaming, which is probably about $24 billion. This is as of 2015. There's a website there where you can download it and get the whole thing as it stands right now. But it does talk about how many jobs are supported and what the economic contribution is on the reservation. Interesting that this number does not include sand and gravel or renewable energy, and so they have since re-looked at it and added on an economic impact of sand and gravel of $186 million in support of 834 jobs.Renewable energy has a similar impact on Indian country, and here's kind of what we know about, and there's certainly a lot more tribes out there that have a lot more _____ energy. So we sit down and talk about why would you want to do any kind of energy, mineral energy and mineral development. The economic impact that it has on your reservation is significant. It by far exceeds almost everything else that is out there, and I think renewable energy is only second to ‒ I think if you were to lump it all together and have it separate, it's right behind irrigation, so it's a fairly important thing. So, when you talk about this, when you talk about energy development, it has an impact on your reservation, and it is significant, with jobs and everything else.So let's talk about tribe, and, again, this really is oriented toward the leadership of the tribe and talking about why you want to do something, why would you want to develop energy at all? When we get together with a tribe, the first thing question is, "Why do you want to do this?" What inevitably happens is somebody shows up on their doorstep ‒ it could be a solar panel salesman, it could be a wind person, it could be a biomass person ‒ and says, "Have I got a deal for you," in which case you go, "Oh my gosh, this is a great deal. We should jump into it." You're basically fitting into that person's business plan and business model. The goal here that we're trying to get our tribes, and the successful tribes that are really good at this, is developing their own business plan: What do they want out of it? What's their model?So we want to have our tribes really sort of look at it and say, "What do we want to accomplish with developing …" whatever the resource they want to develop. So sort of the step-by-step thing is, "What's the opportunity?" You can call us up and we can sit down and talk with you and say, "Well, you have Resource A, B, C." You'll look at it and say, "Well, really, we don't like A and B but we like C. What can we do with C?" and we can start a discussion from there and then do feasibility studies based on that. So it really does go down, and, again, what do you want to accomplish? Some of our tribes will look at it and say, "You know what? Unemployment is a big deal here. What can we do that will generate jobs?" or, "We really want to establish a second line of income. We want to broaden our portfolio. We want to figure out some way to develop savings to our individual tribal members. What can we do?"This really has to occur I like to say in the cool of the day when nobody jumping on you saying, "Oh my god, you need to develop …" whatever resource there is, to sit down and talk about the planning of that resource. If you develop let's say, again, biomass, if the problem within your ‒ I guess I should back up. Everything we talk about is a solution. The problem is for the tribe to define, "What exactly is the problem we're trying to solve?" Some of our tribes have come back and said, "The price of electricity is really cheap here, but we want to look at something else." When we go in there, we find out that a lot of times their homes are heated by propane, which is a very expensive fuel to use to heat your home. Some of our tribes have looked at that and said, "You know, why don't we get into _____ biomass?"We've talked with some of our tribes just saying, "Okay, you know what we can do is interact with the _____ service, a formal stewardship contract in which you'll go out and _____ land and do fire mitigation, which lessens the possibility of fire," which is occurring really sort of timely right now. "Instead of taking that material away and burning it, a control burn, chip it, bring it home, and use it for your members to heat their homes." This is working on several different reservations around. Again, what kind of resources do you have? What are your options? Start doing the economics, start doing the feasibility studies with the tribe so that you start looking at that. The whole time you're looking at developing your resource, you should be looking at business development.Again, I talked about, again, using biomass as an example, the tribe may not want to _____ _____ tribe might have several businesses. One may be a trucking company that distributes the chipped up material. Another company for the tribal company may be starting up a business that does fire mitigation. So they're two different animals, they're running two different projects. The reason for that is it really does protect the tribe. In case, God forbid, there's a lawsuit, it protects the tribe's assets. So there's a real legal reason why you would want to do all these things. Likewise, you're developing some kind of community planning capacity. You want to sort of plan this sort of stuff out.You really want to sit down, and we have people here that currently help tribes plan how to better organize their community, how is the best way to do this? If we did have a _____ biomass _____, where are we going to stockpile all this stuff? You don't want to stockpile it near a school. Maybe there's a different area where you can stockpile it. Again, community planning is really critical. So you can see, really, when you develop a resource, it's the whole project that you're looking at, not just the one resource that you're developing.I think, previously, you've heard this from the previous speaker, there's a lot of reasons why you want to develop your resource. What we've run across is tribes what to enhance their sovereignty. They want to stand alone. They want to be at energy independence. That's a big deal. They could be the first ones off, last ones on whenever there's a power outage. If you try to do any kind of economic development and your electricity goes off and it's off for four hours, that kills productivity, the shop has to shut down. If you're running a casino, the casino has been shut off and you now have to run emergency power. This is really a problem. Some of our tribes look at it and say, "We're really concerned about the environment; this is what we want to go after," which is great, but really have a clear definition of why you want to do something.A lot of times, there's money to be made, or money to be saved. "How do we save money for our members? If they're paying a boatload of money for propane, how do I save them money so they'll have more money in their pocket to spend?" and have creation of jobs, revenue, energy for a new development. In some cases, we have a gas pipeline going on or near the reservation. Cant they tap into that natural gas pipeline and use that for some kind of energy for promoting a company to come onto their reservation because they have energy. So you've got to look at all the different things. So it's not just renewable energy, conventional energy; it's also energy that is coming through your reservation, and maybe that's the better way to go.So, when we look at it and we talk with our tribes, really what we're talking about is what are you trying to accomplish. There's residential-commercial, and usually that's a building, so putting solar panels on a building, using _____ biomass to heat up a tribal building type of thing. Usually, that relates to cost-savings, and then there's industrial scale, where you're generating power, probably more than what the community needs, but it's used to help run a business ‒ a casino, attracting a business onto the reservation, what have you. Again, both of those are heavy with the jobs. Utility, which we really quite honestly are not seeing that often, in which you're generating power. The whole reason for you doing that is exporting it off to someplace other than the reservation. The goal is to sell every bit of electricity off that resource because there's a power purchase agreement that makes you sell everything, and the tax credits associated with everything. Generally speaking, not a lot of jobs after the initial construction, if it's wind and solar. However, if it's biomass, hydroelectric, yeah, maybe.Oil and gas strategy. Again, we look at oil and gas. A lot of our tribes do that. We do seismic interpretation with them. Again, when you're looking at this stuff, both this and renewable, if the tribe has decided, and let's just say it's a large-scale development, the tribe can't really afford to sit down and say, "Well, wait a second. Do we want to do a joint venture with somebody, or do we want to lease it out to somebody?" If they want to do a joint venture, there are companies out there that just do joint ventures. They don't lease things out. Likewise, there are companies that simply just buy properties. They never lease, they never joint venture. We help you guys sort of sort through that whole process to find out who is the right person you want to talk to.Likewise, even within that whole thing, there are some really good companies, and, likewise, there are some really terrible companies. How do you traverse that minefield and figure out which is a good company to work with, which one isn't? We help with lease negotiations. We sort of talk about what's going on. If a tribe wants to develop it themselves, they've got to realize there's a high risk content. How much of a risk are they willing to assume when they do any of these things, because there's a risk with everything, versus maybe they're not willing to take a risk. Maybe they want to take the lowest risk possible, and that would be a leasing option.So, when we do all these things, and you talk about what's out there, and a lot of times when we sit down and talk with our tribes, we're bringing up other ideas that perhaps they had not thought of. So what are they trying to accomplish? They may come back and say, "My gosh, we want to do a huge wind farm," and they look at resource maps and it looks like a tremendous resource on there. But the problem is there's no power lines near or around them, and they can't get that resource to market, and building power lines is actually more than the project is worth. Looking at that, _____ _____ sitting, again, at a table where you're having a conversation with everybody, the leadership and all the members, what's realistic? What's not realistic? If you build a big wind farm, is it realistic for a big power line to be built to where your market is, and where is your market?If you're in, say, northern Wisconsin and your market is, say, California, can you realistically get it to that market? Are there power lines in there that you can get into that will get you to that point, or if it's not possible, that's something we can eliminate fairly quickly. Looking at the market forces, who is out there or what kind of technology is out there? What's happening with your current provider if you're trying to sell power in a local _____? Would it make sense for you to simply buy out that person rather than starting a new utility, or who is going to be your competitor? If you have a power company there that is fairly large and doesn't want you developing, what's _____? What's going to happen if you do do this and talk about this? What's going to happen?We bring up oil prices, and the reason why oil fluctuates all over the place, if you look at it, and the reason why we bring that up, that impacts fuel costs. So, if you're using fuel oil to heat your home, you can count on this price going up and down quite a bit. Likewise, if you're using propane, again, it's going to go up and down quite a bit, and it's going to cost you a lot of money. But, if you're doing natural gas right now, everybody is saying that the price of natural gas will probably stay the same for the next ten years, so maybe natural gas may be something that you might want to talk about. We talk about risk tolerance. How much risk do you want to assume on this whole thing? This is something that you want to talk about before you get into the whole thing and find out, "Oh my god, we're mortgaging the farm here to get this thing going."Is this really the risk that you want to do? Travel capacity, really identifying what you need to have happen, what kind of expertise, what kind of financial, what kind of business people do you need to have on staff or start training in order to get this project to be successful? Then, how does this align in your long-term plans? What do you want to see happening in the next 10, 20, 15 years? Is this the path we're going down? Is this the right path where the tribe actually wants to get going on the whole thing? Okay, so fortunately, we have a lot of tools to help you along in this matter.The EMD program, which Lizana pointed out, and it is out there right now, it's an annual program to help you with some of these decisions. What kind of resources you have really define ‒ often, what will happen is that it looks like you have good potential, say, for low-head hydro. Okay, great. Let's do a feasibility study to see whether or not that's actually something that is economically viable, or can we look at the dam and find out that the dam perhaps is not as stable as it should be in order for us to work on it. What exactly are we talking about? Likewise, you're looking at market studies and so forth. It's also used to help you develop what's called a bankable document, so that if it's small enough and you do want to get a loan for it, let's get a bankable document that gives you the technical information that you can take to a bank and you can get a loan for it, if that's your overall goal in itself.This is what we like looking at for tribal management, and it's been described as watching paint dry as far as excitement goes, but it's something that's really important as far as setting up the right kind of business entity. When you take a look at tribes throughout Indian country, the ones that are more successful generally have a lot more legal structure set up so business can be successful. You know, the corporate codes, how easy is it to get loans for what you're trying to do, setting up tribal business chapters under federal law, establishing a tribal utility. If you want to develop a small biomass plant where you're selling power back into the grid or whatever, you want to have a tribal utility.They only deal with utilities. A utility only buys from a utility at certain levels, so this would help out. So, if you're in the tens of megawatts, that's what you want to look at. Regulatory. What kind of laws and policies do you want to have that regulates this so that you're in control of your own destiny, that you are looking at, "How do I make sure that if emissions are really a concern, an issue to me? What are the standards I want to adhere to?" and develop those kinds of things. So that will help you with it.Here's our information, and please call us, all of us. It doesn't cost you anything to call us. We are very responsive. We'll get back to you as quick as we can on the whole thing. If you want us to come out and talk, as you can see, we travel a lot. Currently right now, half my office is out visiting people before the Fourth of July. We go all over the place. More than welcome to come up and talk with you, not just for people that are on trust reservations, but we also work with Alaskan Native corporations, where a village will call us up and ask us for an opinion or ask us for help. We're more than happy to give you as much help as we can. Too often, I can't provide dollars to you through the Energy and Mineral Program, but certainly through the TDC we can help you out through the TDC. So that's my presentation.
Randy Manion: Thank you, Stephen. Excellent. John, just give me a moment to get your deck up. Okay, John, it's all yours.
John Hendrix: Okay. Well, thank you, Randy. It's nice to be with everyone today. So, as Randy said at the beginning, I work for the Mississippi Choctaw. Just a little bit of an overview of our community to give you a sense of our situation. We've got about just under 11,000 enrolled tribal members. We have 35,000 acres of trust land in East Central Mississippi. It's not contiguous, so it's scattered out over eight separate communities. In our enrollment, you have to have 50 percent blood ______. According to our last demographic survey, 80 percent of the tribal members still speak Choctaw as their first language, so it's a very culturally intact tribal community.Just a snapshot of our economic development efforts. So the tribe actually started its first company in 1969, and they've got a pretty good economic development success story, so a variety of manufacturing companies, service businesses, organic vegetable farming, construction companies, casinos, hotels, and other resort properties. Also involved in healthcare and some other local community services. Consistently ranked in the top five employers in the state of Mississippi with about 5,000 jobs. According to our last economic impact study, it was exceeding $1 billion, so a good, positive economic development impact in our community.So, for our economic development initiatives, we focus on three primary goals. So the first would be just to earn new business revenues to help fund government services, so we run a very large tribal school system ‒ six elementary schools, two middle schools, and a high school. We have police department, fire protection, security offices, court systems. So all of that is done without any type of internal property taxes, so we primarily fund those through business revenues. We also look to create new job opportunities for tribal members, and kind of the backdrop to that or the foundation is having a good, reliable, cost-effective infrastructure to support our economic growth.Specific to this webinar is the question kind of becomes, "What role could energy play in us achieving our economic development goals?" Steve alluded to this, and many of you at the tribal level may be able to relate to this, so we're contacted weekly, if not daily, with new economic development opportunities. So this is just a list of some of the energy-specific deals that we got from a period of 2010 to 2015, and, as you can see, it's kind of across the board. So we were looking at natural gas peaker plants and renewable projects, solar and biomass, energy-efficiency initiatives, converting our vehicle fleet over to compressed natural gas, or tribally-owed utility companies.So across the board, each of these projects were coming in with a very wide range of subject matter and a wide range of investment requirements, anywhere from less than $100,000.00 to over $50 million. From my perspective as the economic developer, it just took a very long time to review these. So we has the consistent flow, but every one of them was what I call a heavy lift: it just took a lot of time and a lot of attention for me to get to a decision about which opportunities do I need to spend more time on. So each deal could take hours or weeks or months to evaluate, and, frankly, there's just not enough time to do it all. I wanted to share some of the challenges that we have internally. Some of you may be able to relate to this.First is kind of the status quo. So we do live in a very inexpensive electrical community, so we're serviced by TVA through a local co-op. A lot of the projects that I would talk to other departments about, they would just say, "Well, we really have cheap, reliable energy. Why rock the boat and try to go down this other path that we don't know is going to work?" So a lot of projects just never got started. A second thing that we faced was just organizational structure. So what I began to realize were that most of the energy projects that came to me required several different tribal departments to actually get to a decision point or to implement, so it may involve the finance department or the natural resource program, or of course our folks in economic development, or environmental department or facility maintenance ‒ if it's energy-efficiency related ‒ public works, if somebody wanted us to become our own electrical utility.We've got a dozen different enterprises, and they're all independently run with independent finances. So each of them had to be approached separately. At the time, we did not have a full-time energy manager that would have just naturally been responsible for this, so nobody really had that specific charge and nobody had the authority across the board to implement something if it proved to be good. Another factor was just the perceived risk of the energy market. I mean the prices are, in some cases, considered very commodity, very volatile. The technology, especially on the renewable side, seemed to be changing constantly, the prices kept dropping, so if you pursued something, you had to wonder if that technology was going to even be relevant in the next few years, or if the prices would drop if you just held out for another year or two. So the technology changing was perceived as a huge risk.Then, the federal priorities, so sometimes the federal programs are incentivizing certain developments, and we would always ask, "Well, what happens if that incentive goes away? What happens if we get into that business and there is no more incentive?" So we just tended to kind of shy away from some of the projects that were presented to us for the perceived risks _____. Then, just internally, we had different priorities. So some individuals wanted to pursue a really green energy development plan, some were only concerned about price of energy, especially for low-income households, and then some were more concerned just purely about reliability, especially the gaming and resort folks. It was just making sure that the power was on and flowing so that they could stay in business.So, like I said a minute ago, we had significant opportunities, from my perception. Each project that came to me was a heavy lift to get evaluated, and I just really felt like we had the need to get all of our stakeholders on the same page. So I felt like we needed to come up with a tribal strategic energy plan, I knew that would help us, but I wasn't really sure what the best approach was. So this is how our strategic plan came together back in 2015 and 2016. So, in September of 2015, I went to the National Tribal Energy Summit and was talking to some peers about the need for a more strategic plan for our energy at Choctaw. I was introduced to the National Renewable Energy Lab, Liz Doris, and she said, "Yes. In fact, we'll come to your community and help you put together a plan, if you can get it scheduled." They had done about a dozen or so other tribes that year.So, throughout the month of November, working with Liz and Sherry Stout, they helped us come up with a list of the energy data that they needed to evaluate, and then I was able to get it scheduled right after Thanksgiving. So December 1st and 2nd, we had a really intensive two-day session at Choctaw. Liz Doris and Sherry Stout came in and did a great job just as outside facilitators helping us come up with a plan that was right for our community. The next day, I had a two-page summary that I was able to distribute internally. A month later, they helped us come up with the 20-page, actual detailed strategic plan. Two weeks after that, the tribal council adopted that plan. So, in our community, four months from the time that I was aware that this was even a possibility until the time our plan got adopted.I think this slide is kind of important for an ingredient for success. So, if you are looking at doing a strategic energy plan, I think having the key stakeholders in the room is going to be very helpful to you, so you need somebody who is actually going to kind of coordinate and get everything done, gather all the data, get the meetings set, and make sure that it gets finished. So it could be economic development, it could be community development, natural resources or environment, whatever fits your community. You need a good core team that's going to kind of get involved and spend a little bit more time throughout the planning process to represent the different important key departments.We included our elected officials, so the tribal chief actually wrote the invitation letter to everyone to attend the meetings, and all of the council members were invited. So having elected officials involved was important. Then, the key stakeholders was a very wide range of folks. We had a large group, a large audience, so from housing to schools to casinos, everybody who was either representing a large energy user in our community, or anyone that would need to be involved, if we chose a development project, who would need to be at the table to get that from concept to opening. So everybody, at the end of the two days, was kind of on the same page.So just in summary, the plan that we developed, we came up with a vision statement that talks about looking at economic benefits and quality of life, kind of making a balance of those through responsible, efficient, and strategic development. So we had six areas that we focused on in different orders of priority, so energy efficiency, as someone mentioned earlier, was kind of the first step. We also realized that we had a large vehicle fleet, so the transit authority was a large consumer of fuel energy in our community, and we needed to include them in this process. We did not have any renewable energy projects to date, but we all agreed that we wanted to try one to just kind of get our feet wet and learn how that worked, and see if we could replicate that with success. Heat energy was another area where we looked at the natural gas opportunities, and operations, so trying to figure out how we actually stay on top of our energy consumption, and we decided to hire a full-time energy manager to do that.So a couple of areas I was going to talk about from a case study perspective, so the first one is really the energy efficiency, which should honestly be the first step in an energy plan, so it's an excellent place to start. But I guess my point here is it doesn't happen automatically, at least not in our community. So we realized through this process that we spend millions of dollars every year on energy, that's including electricity, natural gas, propane gas, gasoline. But the way that it works is it's very dispersed, and it's even hidden among lots of different departments, programs, enterprise budgets and vehicles. So it's just $20.00 here and $40.00 there, but it adds up to millions of dollars each year for our community. The staff that actually control the light switches and the computer and the thermostats, there was no connection to their actual energy expenses. That became obvious.The staff that were replacing light bulbs had a limited budget, so our maintenance department that was replacing burned out bulbs had no incentive to look at the long-term operating costs. Their incentive was to make as much as they could with the budget they were given as opposed to looking at the total cost of ownership. So that's just a simple example of a disconnect that became obvious to us. A similar situation was the housing. They have a limited budget to build as many houses as they can, and they don't pay the electricity of the facility, so there was very little incentive for them to be focused, or spend extra money on energy initiatives or energy efficiency up front _____ they wanted to build more houses.So we realized that a big key to this situation with us was to have a full-time energy manager that could coordinate these initiatives, keep everybody on the same page, look at updating some building codes to make them more energy-efficient, et cetera, et cetera. So we actually were able to fund this position this fiscal year, so that came directly out of our strategic energy planning exercise. I also wanted to share a few examples of actual energy development projects that we've been working on since we put this plan together. So one is related to natural gas service line extension. We've also done evaluation related to a wood pellet production mill, and a biomass combined heat and power plant.So just as a reminder, when I look at projects, I'm looking at three different areas or metrics, so the opportunity to create new business revenues, the opportunity to create more jobs for tribal members, or the opportunity to have reliable, cost-effective infrastructure. So I applied these same metrics to the energy projects that we evaluated. So Example 1 is a natural gas service line extension. So a little background on that is most of our energy for heat comes from liquid propane. So, as Steve mentioned earlier, it's very inconvenient, it's expensive, those tanks have to be manually filled, and they tend to run out on the coldest nights, so it's a challenge to service them, and it's an expensive way to get heat to your home. So we actually received two separate offers to extend natural gas service in our community in 2013, and we wanted to explore the feasibility to convert the different parts of our energy infrastructure over to this natural gas system.So the decisions that we were faced with was, one, should we convert any of our vehicle fleet over to compressed, natural gas? So we had several hundred vehicles, between police cars and ambulance, and buses for the schools. So you would have the cost of retrofitting those cars, installing fueling stations, which is very different than the typical gas fuel station, you would have to retrain your maintenance employees, so we needed to look at that ‒ should we convert our tribal homes? So it is cheaper and it's more efficient, but these homes in our community are different ages. Some are modern, some are 40 years old. It has a very rural spacing so that everybody kind of likes to have their plot of land, so there was a large distance in between homes in many cases, which is more expensive to run the pipe.The cost to convert, so between the appliances and the things inside the homes, there was a wide range of what it would cost to convert a house and install this system in each home, so we needed to get an understanding of that. Should we use natural gas to actually provide electricity and steam for our casinos and our commercial laundry? The casino looks like a good load because it's a 24-7 operation with a consistent electricity draw, but is it worth it in our situation? Another thing we wanted to review was is it worth us putting some money in up front to buy down the cost of this natural gas service installation in order to have lower expenses over the future? So, fortunately, we were able to ‒ to help us conduct this analysis ‒ receive a BIA-DEMD grant award, so that allowed us to do a really detailed, professional financial analysis on this opportunity. We, in our case, partnered with Baker-Tilly services to help us conduct the analysis, and it did cover 100 percent of our costs to analyze this, so we're very thankful for Steve and the folks at DEMD to help us make this possible.So a summary of the findings out of that analysis was that three of the four just were not feasible. So the residential, the cost to install or convert each home was just not economically feasible at this time, so that helped us make a wise decision to not go down that path. The combined heat and power at the casino, again, was not feasible. We have very low cost of power, we have very reliable power, and, when you add in the cost of capital expenditure, the cost of maintenance, it just did not make sense for us to move forward with that project _____. The same thing with the compressed natural gas vehicle fleet, so it may have changed a little bit now, we would have to go back and look at it with natural gas prices being lower, but the cost to convert our fleet, our vehicles, put in new fueling stations and retrain our maintenance crew just did not make economic sense.The one area that does make economic sense is converting our government and commercial facilities, so the results were that that will save the tribe about $1 million a year versus the propane gas that we're burning now. So Phase I of that project is the conversion of our government and commercial facilities. We are going to buy down a portion of the upfront costs in exchange for a lower long-term rate. We actually broke ground this month, so that project is officially underway, and it should take about nine months to complete the installation, and over the next spring and summer, we'll convert our facilities. So we're very excited about this project. It's a great opportunity to reduce our expenses and to strengthen our economic commercial infrastructure.So Project 2 is wood pellets, which is a renewable fuel source. So people create wood pellets to use as a fuel source for heat, to create electricity or steam. So, in our situation, we have about 25,000 acres of timberland that we manage. Our wood prices have been really low for the past several years, and we're looking for ways to increase their value. So we were approached by two separate groups that wanted us to look at developing wood pellet production mills. One was going to use our timber and regional timber to produce wood pellets to export to Europe. Their utilities have very strict renewable energy standards that they have to comply with, so at least in our region, there are lots of European utility companies that are owning, operating, or buying from pellet mills.The second group had a different angle, and they wanted us to produce wood pellets to put in small consumer-level size bags to sell to homeowners that were using wood pellets as a source of fuel to sell through home improvement stores. The investment in that was about $10 million to $15 million, which is a lot of money, so obviously the decision we were faced with is should we pursue either of these? We did need a market to do something with our wood, and we were interested in energy, so we were faced with the decision of should we move forward or not. Again, we were fortunate to get a BIA-DEMD grant that helped us look at the market for the wood pellets, to help us do a feasibility study to see if it actually is feasible for us. Again, we partnered with Baker-Tilly to be a part of our analysis, and it covered 100 percent of the cost for that study.So a summary of the findings out of that analysis was that we verified the business model, we put together the financing package, the pro forma financial statements, the written report with all of the findings, and it appeared to be feasible back in early 2015. So we developed a Phase II timeline that said, "Now we want to move forward with an RFP and see if we can find a development partner to come in and work with us on this." So, again, we were able to work with the DEMD grant program to take us to Phase II of this analysis, the wood pellet mill study, so put together to develop and issue an RFP for the wood pellet mill. About six months into that grant implementation, we determined that the market had changed and it was no longer feasible, so the market for wood pellets had been saturated, the US plants had started decreasing production, and the European utilities ‒ we were not getting any responses to our RFP. So we were six months into the project for wood pellets and biomass. Our project, we kind of realized, was no longer feasible.So, fortunately, while that was going on, a new opportunity came up. So I was at a meeting with the local forestry commission and a lot of wood processing businesses, and learned that the market for wood residuals had become saturated, so we had a new sawmill opening close to our community, we had an existing plywood mill that was doing a large expansion, and we had a new plywood and veneer operation that was opening up. So, between all of those businesses and the other sawmills, the market for their sawdust and woodchips had been saturated and no longer had an outlet for that.Fortunately for us, the crew from DEMD actually was in town doing site visits and looking at our wood pellet study, and they went to a meeting where we learned about this and started exploring that as a potential biomass energy project. So the folks at the DEMD program allowed us to redirect the remainder of our wood pellet analysis to this analysis to see if this indeed was a real opportunity. So the conclusion was that it did appear to be feasible, and so we really appreciate the flexibility with the grant program there, the ability to use existing resources that we already had to explore a new opportunity rather than just having to keep going down a road that we knew wasn't going to end up in a good project.So this is just kind of a snapshot. We have a new plywood and veneer company that's building right next door. As you can see, there's a 17-acre Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians parcel, so we have 17 acres in an industrial park, and right next door to that is the new plywood and veneer facility. So they're spending $100 million in a very large-scale, state-of-the-art plywood and veneer business, and they already have about 320 employees and it will get up to around 400, and so we began to work directly with them to say, "Could we take your wood waste and wood scraps to generate heat back for your facility for your boilers?" So we've been working on this for about a little over 12 months. We've made a lot of progress to date. The engineering has been completed, and it is a feasible project. The project budget we estimate to be around $12 million. The pro forma financial analysis has projected a positive return on investment. Job creation is about 14 full-time employees once the facility is up and going.We have outlined a letter of intent with the partner at the plywood mill, and they're very supportive of the concept. We have the project specs for the equipment already submitted to contractors last week, and the bids are due July 17th. We've been contacted by different funding sources, so we have identified several different potential ways to fund the project, and there's a very high level of interest among those sources. So, really, the next goal for us with that project is to hopefully make a mutual decision with our partners to develop this in late summer, and ideally kind of have the project signed off and completed by the end of the year and groundbreaking soon thereafter. So that's what we're hoping happens.So just to recap kind of our case study examples, at Mississippi Choctaw, how did we decide what energy projects were right, some of our keys, I guess, were number one, to recognize the need for a comprehensive plan that got all of our stakeholders on the same page. That allows us to make kind of quick decisions on which energy projects to pursue, and, just as important, which ones not to pursue, so which ones not to waste tie on. Number two is identify and respond to the need for change in our organization's structure and staff. So we had some structural barriers that prevented us from maximizing our energy opportunities, and we were able to address that through the planning process, and that became effective this fiscal year. The third one is to identify the energy opportunities that are available to you. Every tribal community is a little bit different, and we were fortunate to receive some DEMD grant funds to help us test the feasibility.So, in some cases, the feasibility proved to not be there, so I've seen lots of examples where we end up getting proposals that we never make a decision, they just kind of sit there. So this allowed us to make really good decisions, it kept us out of that no-decision mode, and then avoided some bad decisions. So really thankful for the funding and the support we got for that. Then, finally, it was just kind of making sure that we kept our economic development goals and priorities, so looking at each energy project through this filter, through job creation, business revenues or cost-effective infrastructure. Again, all tribes are a little bit different. Your priorities and metrics will be unique to your own situation, your own evaluation. It could be that you're focused on renewables or green energy. It could be you need more resilience in your community. It could be total self-reliance, where you want to be creating your own energy for your own use. So each community is different, but it may be helpful to you to think through what your priorities are and line that up with your energy project analysis.So, with that, I want to thank the Department of Energy for putting this together. Thanks to NREL and the folks there for their support for helping us with our strategic planning exercise. Of course the BIA-DEMD group for providing some really smart, flexible funding to help us make good decisions, so thankful for that. Anybody is welcome to contact me if you have any similar situations and you want to compare notes. Thank you for your time, and I'll turn it back to you, Randy.
Randy Manion: Thank you, John. Terrific presentation, and we'll go into the Q&A portion of the webinar at this time, if you can just stand by a moment while I pull up the questions that are coming in. All right, this is to the group. "Any advice on how to determine the best scale of project?" It's a two-part. "Does it make sense to start with the small project first, like residential-commercial, and then expand to utility scale?"
Stephen Manydeeds: Yeah. This is Steve Manydeeds. I can reply to that. It sort of goes back to what I think Mr. Hendrix was saying. What we're saying is that you really truly need to sit down and decide what your long-term plans are, where you want to go. In some cases, it makes perfect sense to do a small project, but, in other cases, you may not have that opportunity. I'm reminded of a tribe in the Great Plains in the Rocky Mountain region that had a dam that they retrofitted, and they jumped into a 10-megawatt project, which was not a small project, in which they retrofitted the dam. So it depends on the resources that you have and what your long-term plans are. In some cases, it's very easy to build a small one and then just do incremental build-ups from there to build it up to where you want to go. It's one of those things where it just depends on what you're trying to accomplish.
Randy Manion: Thanks, Steve. Anyone else?
Jimmy Salasovich: Yeah, this is Jimmy from NREL. Yeah, the only thing I would add is consider getting community buy-in early on so that if you are building a bigger project, you would want it to impact and benefit as many people, and have people understand why you're doing it early on so that you don't go down a path that the community in general doesn't want. So I think, yeah, all those things, looking at your resources, those kinds of things are really important .
John Hendrix: This is John. The only thing I would add on is just to consider, if you're talking to utilities, a scaled project and maybe it's a renewable project and it's totally new to your community, I don't know that I would jump right into that if you have nothing now. So making sure that you have the internal capacity to handle whatever it is you're wanting to do, so if it is trying to convert your community over to a different power source, I would kind of ease into that one and make sure you build capacity along the way.
Randy Manion: Thanks, John, Jimmy, and Stephen. Lizana, anything to add?
Lizana Pierce: No, I think they covered it. I think that's an internal tribal decision on what the end goals are and how best to proceed, and of course how to develop internal capacity to sustain the projects. I think it was pretty well covered already. Thank you.
Randy Manion: Okay. Question for you, Mr. Manydeeds. "Is there a webpage to find more information on the Energy and Mineral Development grand program?"
Stephen Manydeeds: Yes. Our webpage is DEMD ‒ I'll give the whole thing out here. Go to www.BIA.gov/DEMD, and I will modify my last slide to include that so that you can have it in the slides when they're made available.
Randy Manion: Perfect, and thanks for reminding us of that. We'll have these slides posted, as well as this recording, in a week or two. All right, let's see. A question fore you, John. "How are the natural gas, pellet mill, and combined heat and power projects identified as opportunities that should be investigated further?"
John Hendrix: Two of them were brought to me, so the wood pellet mill ‒ well, I was aware that there were wood pellet mills in our region, and it was just kind of on my radar screen. I had two different groups approach us that wanted to partner to develop wood pellet mills, so that came to me through two different development partners that approached us. The natural gas, that had been on our wish list for, gosh, over 20 years as something that we had been trying to get done. We had an outside utility company in the area who wanted to expand, and they contacted me and said, "We would like to approach your community from this different direction and serve all of your accounts." So, when kind of the local utility company found that out, they wanted to compete for that business, so we ended up with two groups competing to serve natural gas in our community.So that's how that one came to be, and then the biomass project, when we were looking for sites for our wood pellet mill, one of the sites that we considered was the 17-acre site, so when we were exploring that, doing our feasibility study for wood pellets, and actually when the DEMD staff were here doing a grant evaluation, it kind of led us to the plant. So we found that opportunity and it just kind of came together in sequence with the other project.
Randy Manion: Great. Thanks, John. Steve, one of the participants just e-mailed in and said the DEMD grants link is not working.
Stephen Manydeeds: Okay. We'll get somebody on that right away.
Lizana Pierce: But it also is posted on grants.gov, and so it's fairly straightforward. If you go to grants.gov ‒ let me find the number for you ‒ and you search the actual agreement number, which is BIA-000-0006-DEMD, and it should pop right up.
Randy Manion: Okay. Next question, "What is the best way for renewable energy companies to be aware of RFPs for projects on Indian land?"
Stephen Manydeeds: For us, if a company approaches us and asks for funding, we don't fund them. Our work is strictly with the tribes. So, if a tribe calls up and asks for funding, we'll all over that. We'll help them out. But, if a company calls up and says, "We're interested in working on a tribe," we're going to direct them to the tribe and get a tribal resolution.
Randy Manion: Okay. Lizana, were you going to say anything?
Lizana Pierce: Yeah. I mean any business arrangements need to be made directly with the tribe itself.
Randy Manion: Okay, great. "Are there any tools for tracking the energy baseline?"
Lizana Pierce: Oh, there are tons of ENERGY STAR management tools out there. They have a whole series of webinars. In fact, I think some of those are on our website, those events. So yeah, there's no end of available tools. Jimmy, have you got anything to add?
Jimmy Salasovich: Yeah, besides that, I mean sometimes I'll get a building's data and put it into Excel, so just tracing the utility, and then, like you mentioned the EPA's portfolio managers is one we typically get data from.
Randy Manion: Okay, great. "Any suggestions on educating your tribe and leaders prior to strategic planning for development of an REP?"
Lizana Pierce: You know, there are a number of different events. The Office of Indian Energy has our annual program review, where all of the various funded projects, of which there is usually 30, 40, or 50 that are highlighted, is a good opportunity to network with other tribes that are doing energy projects. There is a wealth of information on the website, these webinars, different things. But, typically, everybody is really, really busy, and so it's not uncommon, when you come to a strategic energy planning session, that some of that discussion and visioning and learning occurs real-time.
Randy Manion: Okay. Anyone else on that?
Stephen Manydeeds: Yeah, we've had real good luck in interacting with Lizana's group when we've had a couple questions about planning. They've come up _____ _____ up in Alaska was the last recipient where we asked them to come up and help with the tribe on the educational side of it. We've also provided informal training on it, but I think by far and away NREL is perhaps the best avenue to go with.
Lizana Pierce: Yeah, and in fact, the strategic energy planning session that John mentioned was through the Office of Indian Energy sponsored that, as well, so part of the strategic planning session is workshop-type information-education, as well.
Randy Manion: Okay, next question, and John, this is for you. "What exactly then was the final biomass project for the Choctaw initiative? It wasn't clear whether you would be building the CHP facility to power the mill or using their byproduct to fuel your facility, or marketing your own biomass to the mill's CHP facility."
John Hendrix: Right. We're not pursuing the wood pellets. We are pursuing a partnership on our land to use their wood residuals through our CHP system to generate steam and some electricity for them. So we're not using our biomass, we're using their biomass, which is just next door to us, so that's where we are now. But, with that said, we are selling them trees, so I guess indirectly, I don't know how you want to calculate that in, but we're one of their suppliers but not their only supplier.
Randy Manion: Okay, great. Thank you. This is an interesting question. "Can you help with water wheeling projects?" I'm not exactly sure what's meant by that. Bernie, if you want to add more detail, I was thinking maybe one of the panel could figure it out, but I think we may need more information. It's selling water, water sales.
Lizana Pierce: Yeah. Typically, that wouldn't necessarily be in our wheelhouse, the DOE, but I'm not sure I understand the full magnitude of the question, either.
Randy Manion: Well, water is a commodity, so selling it to other city, county, things like that.
Lizana Pierce: Typically, that's not something that we have helped with at all. Steve, what about you all?
Stephen Manydeeds: Yeah. Once you get into selling water, you get into water rights issues, and really we're not set up to sit down and address water rights issues, how much water you can sell, first right of refusal, and all that. There is an office within the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the water resources, that probably may be able to help, although I'm not sure if they can or not. If it's not related to energy and minerals, that's sort of outside our expertise.
Randy Manion: Just a few more questions here. There's, again, a question regarding the slides. Yes, the slides and recording will be posted on the Office of Indian Energy Policy and Programs website, so do an Internet search for Office of Indian Energy Policy and Programs. It comes right up, and you'll see the link on the page where the slides and recording are posted. I don't believe we've gotten the recording up yet for last month, but the slides are up for last month's webinar.
Lizana Pierce: Right, and Randy, anybody that registered will receive an e-mail and that link will be in it, correct?
Randy Manion: That's correct. Thanks, Lizana. Those both attended and did not attend will receive a follow-up e-mail with that link. Just bear with me. _____ if there's any more questions here. I think that is it, folks, so Lizana, Jimmy, Steve, and John, you guys did an outstanding job. Thank you again for those really informative presentations, and I want to pull our upcoming webinars here. The next one is going to be July 26, "Effective Tribal Project Partnerships," and you can see the others. With that, Stephen and Lizana, any final announcements you want to make to the group before we sign off?
Lizana Pierce: No, just thank you for joining us, and, if you have feedback, please let us know. Look there, magic. We ended on time, huh?[Laughter]Even with our ‒
Randy Manion: Stephen, any ‒
Lizana Pierce: Go ahead.
Randy Manion: Exactly. Stephen, any final ‒
Stephen Manydeeds: Yeah, we'll fix that link and make sure that the EMDP announcements on our link is going to be active. Within a week, the Tribal Energy Development Capacity grants will be available, also. If you have any questions, please feel free to call me and we'll get you to the right people. If I don't know the answer, I'll find somebody that does.
Randy Manion: Excellent. Thanks, everyone. Talk to you next month. Bye-bye.
Lizana Pierce: Thank you. Bye-bye. Thanks, Randy.
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