James Jensen:             Welcome to everyone. I am James Jensen, today's webinar chair. I am a contractor supporting the Office of Indian Energy Policy and Programs Tribal Energy Webinar Series. Today's webinar, titled "Jobs and Economic Development," from Tribal Energy Projects, is the third webinar of the 2019 DOE Tribal Energy webinar series. 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, in about one week. Copies of today's PowerPoint presentations will be posted to the Web immediately following today's webinar. A link has been sent out to the audience on where you can find those, after the webinar concludes. Also, everyone will receive a post-webinar e-mail with the link and page where the slides and recording will be located. So you have plenty of opportunities to find those slides.

Because we are recording this webinar, all phones have been muted. We will answer your written questions, at the end of the first and final presentation. 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.

Let's get started with some opening remarks from Lizana Pierce. Miss 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, and education and outreach activities on behalf of the office, implementing national funding opportunities and administrating the resultant Tribal Energy Project grants and agreements. She has 25 years of experience in project development and management, and has been assisting tribes in developing their energy resources for nearly 20 years. She holds a bachelor's of science degree in mechanical engineering from Colorado State University, and pursued a master's of business administration through the University of Northern Colorado.

Lizana, the virtual floor is yours.

Lizana Pierce:            Thanks much, James. And hello, everyone. I join James in welcoming you to the third webinar of the 2019 series. This webinar series is sponsored by the Office of Indian Energy Policy and Programs, otherwise referred to as the Office of Indian Energy for short.

So, 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 costs, 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. Specifically, to help Indian tribes and Alaska Native villages overcome the barriers to energy development. Our deployment program is composed of a three-prong approach, consisting of financial assistance, technical assistance, and education and capacity-building. In fact, this tribal energy webinar series is just one example of our education and capacity-building efforts.

It is also 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 tribal energy plans, programs, and projects, to highlight tribal energy case studies, and to identify business strategies tribes can use to expand their energy options, and to develop sustainable local economies. As many tribes are interested in energy development as a way to improve their economic conditions, and with that in mind, we want today's webinar to provide tribes with information and tools that can be used to help estimate the economic benefits of such energy project development. The primary economic benefits of the projects are typically revenue _____ _____ job creation and development of marketable job skills. Today, we will mostly focus on the employment-related benefits.

And for those interested in the revenue and cost aspects, I point you to NREL, the National Renewable Energy Laboratories, System Advisor Model, or SAM as we call it. It is a user-friendly and freely available model for projects utilizing major renewable energy technologies, and can help you estimate the cost benefits of such projects.

So, this website is also video tutorials explaining how to model various types of projects. We do hope this webinar and the webinar series is useful to you, and we also welcome your feedback. So, please let us know if there are ways we can make the series better. I'd also like to thank the speakers in advance. So _____ _____ the JEDI Model, I wanna thank Gail for that information, in advance. And also, Clyde and Tim Willink and Jesse will be speaking on not only Grid Alternatives' efforts but also the Spokane Children of the Sun Solar Initiative, which is inspiring.

And just as a side note: happy birthday, Tim.

And with that, I'm gonna turn it back over to James.

James Jensen:             Thank you, Lizana.

On today's agenda, we have three presentations. I will introduce each of the presenters, now.

For our first presentation, we will hear from Gail Mosey. Gail has worked at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory as a project lead and senior energy analyst, for 14 years. Gail holds a master's degree in economics from Colorado School of Mines, and a bachelor's degree in finance from University of Colorado. Gail is NREL's transnational Arctic lead, and works on strategic aspects related to the Arctic energy solutions in remote communities, to improve resiliency and energy security, and the energy, water, food nexus. Gail works with tribes and villages throughout the US on strategic planning, including energy efficiency and renewable energy solutions, to meet tribal energy requirements and improve resiliency.

Following Gail, we will hear from Tim Willink. Tim has served as the director of Grid Alternatives Tribal Program for four years. Tim joined Grid from Namaste Solar, where he worked for six years as a field supervisor for commercial solar installations, and is NABCEP-certified PV installation professional. While at Namaste, Tim oversaw four megawatts of solar PV installations through commercial and residential installs. Tim earned his bachelor's of arts in economics from Cornell University. Upon graduation, he worked as a lobbyist for the Navajo Nation Washington office, representing the tribe in economic development and education.

In addition to working with Grid's regional offices in California, who do extensive solar PV work with tribes on solar PV installation and workforce development, Tim has established Grid's presence with tribes in South Dakota and the Great Plains, in the southwest on the Navajo Nation, and in Washington State with the Spokane Tribe of Indians. These tribal nations continue to face economic struggles related to energy development and clean energy access. And Tim and the Tribal team work with tribes toward their goals of energy sovereignty, job creation, and environmental benefit. Tim has also worked to provide training and employment opportunities, through Grid's solar core program, to 12 solar core fellows from tribal nations throughout the United States.

Our final presenter will be Clyde Abrahamson, development manager at the Spokane Indian Housing Authority, where he supervises individuals for the Spokane Indian Housing Authority _____ projects, weatherization department, and the upstart tree band construction. Over time, Clyde's duties at the Housing Authority have evolved, having previously held roles as project manager and grants administrator. Prior to working with the Spokane Indian Housing Authority, Clyde worked as a supervisory engineering technician for the BIA Spokane Agency Roads Department, and an engineering technician with the Indian Health Service in Spokane.

We also planned to have Ray Wiseman of Yakama Power present. Unfortunately, he is unable to join us today. But for those that are interested in the economic and tribal employment impact that Yakama Power has had, where Ray is the general manager, I have included a link to a recording of a previous webinar where Ray covered these topics. Shortly, I will send this link out to the audience via the chat function, and you can watch this recording at your convenience, after today's webinar. And we apologize for that late-moment change.

With that, let's get started with our first presentation. Gail, [audio cuts out] proceed, once your slides are up. Thank you.

Gail Mosey:                Hi, my name is Gail Mosey. Thank you so much for having me. I love this topic, the economic development impact from energy projects, and also, the tangential benefits that can be received from developing energy projects. So, I'll talk a little bit about that, and then also, I have some discussion about the jobs and economic development impact model.

I was very involved in that model at its inception, and, you know, kind of got the ball rolling on the creation of a lot of these, and so, I'm really familiar with JEDI. We transferred it over to another project manager with JEDI; his name is David Kaiser. So, I can definitely give you some information on JEDI; if anybody has some specific questions, I will try to answer them. And then also, if I can't answer them, if it's just about some of the very specifics or the mechanics of the model, I can definitely loop David into that discussion.

So, you know, we get asked, you know, why complete a renewable energy project, and in many cases, an energy project. I know we're not just talking about renewables here; we're also talking about some fossil fuels, as well. But we kind of look at it in three traunches, is the economics, the social, and then the environmental considerations of developing an energy project. So, as you can imagine with economics, there's things like job creation, there's a cost savings, and, you know, maybe becoming a little bit more independent economically, that that may be appealing. And then also, the social aspect of things with the energy independence, is the independence is a little bit of a theme in these.

Also, quality of life, and then some of this energy reliability and sustainability. And then, with environment, of course, these things that always come to mind with air quality, avoiding emissions, and then some of the leadership, you know, demonstrating some of the leadership. And this slide is a lot around renewable energy, some of the items that are mentioned, but you can, you know, really, by installing any type of energy project, demonstrate leadership in your community.

So, this is just to give you an idea of project scale. I am in the industry and I've been in it for a long time, even before NREL, and I do think that there's a lot of different ways that people describe project size. And so, I just presented three here: facility, community, and commercial. I think the main thing to think about, when you're looking at project scale or when you're having these discussions, is to get a little bit specific with folks about what they really mean when somebody says, "Oh, facility size or community size." It's useful, you know, to have these terms that we kind of have a general idea about, but definitely worth delving a little further into what each person means when they say, you know, when they refer to one project size or another.

But I think it's useful, especially if you're not super familiar with energy projects, to think about it in the sense of, really, it kind of boils down to size, and then the intended use. So, facility scale is really about offsetting a facility's energy use. And you're looking – we're talking, you know, about panels on the rooftop, maybe on a carport, at a particular site that probably is going to go almost exclusively to power and operations on that site. And then, if we're looking at community scale, this might just mean more than one building; you could be looking at a campus-type application. And it's really, for community-scale projects, it's about not only offsetting your energy costs or your energy use, you know, by installing a different system, but it's also about reducing the flow of money off tribal land.

So, if you're producing your own power, you don't have to pay for power to come from the outside. And then, commercial really is, you know, just in this vernacular, more about making money. So, you're thinking about installing a project, so that you can generate revenue. So, you know, those are kind of three ways to think of it, and people have different words to assign to the different scale, that's fine. But, you know, conceptually, if you think about it in terms of the system size, and then what its intended use are, that really helps you get a handle on the way to refer to it.

So, the things that we think about for, you know, things to do with these revenues, so, we're talking about, you know, for instance, the community-scale, for instance, may be generating revenue. But then there's also the aspect of saving money. So, you know, if you think about your own self personally, like, your finances, you can either go out and earn money, and then you have additional money to invest, or you can save money. And by saving money, you know, by not going out to dinner maybe that night, you've got some money that you might be able to leverage elsewhere. And so, that's really what we're thinking about with some of these returns is that you can do things like reinvest into the community; that might mean parks and facilities.

There may be some social programs that you wanna develop, so, for instance, maybe you want to improve some medical programs, maybe some outreach to elderly, there might be some programs for children that you wanna develop a little bit more. So you could use your funds for that. By injecting money into the economy, that allows for some fiscal stimulus, and then also, some job creation and energy programs. So, I'll go out and conduct energy planning workshops, and we talk a lot about, you know, what does your energy future look like, and how would you like to achieve it. And in many cases, that means developing an energy program.

So, as far as job creation goes, here's just a few pictures of some of the job creation examples. And the reason I wanted to mention this is because I think – I was talking to James, a little bit, before the – you know, in preparation for this webinar. And people think a lot about, for job training or, like, for developing economic – or, excuse me, developing energy projects and the economic impact, they think a lot about this project, specifically. And in some cases, the job creation or economic impact from those is greater than others. There's, you know, a lot of things that we'll talk about later on, that kind of determine what the economic impact will be.

But there's also another way to look at it, in terms of developing your workforce. So, educating people about how to install PV panels: maybe you've got some sort of a manufacturing facility that produces PV panels, or maybe blades for turbines. I know that's a pretty lofty example; that would be quite a manufacturing facility, but I think you get the idea. There's a lot of components and aspects to these energy systems, that people have to get from somewhere. So, regionally, if you're well-placed, you may be able to, you know, develop your own manufacturing facility. And if that's too much of a capital cost, well, then, the easier thing to do is to train some workforce.

And this might mean that they're having to, you know, travel a little bit to the different projects, but they could have some sort of a regional territory. You know, if that's not something that they wanna hit the road and start in selling PV panels, they could, you know, work regionally, that type of thing, and be able to come home in-between projects. So, the other picture in the upper-left is a SAM training; Lizana mentioned the System Advisor Model, also known as SAM. And that's an aspect of it where, not only could you train people to actually install the renewable energy and conduct operations and maintenance on it, but you could also train them to evaluate the project. And that's using things like models and tools like SAM, and then also like JEDI.

So, they could contribute to the decision-making process of whether or not to install these projects. And JEDI, as I'll explain later on, covers a lot of different technology, so if someone were to get good at JEDI, they could, you know, really leverage those expertise and skills.

So, there's a few levels or ways that we think about the impacts from developing energy projects. I would call project development and onsite labor impact as direct impact; that's just an economic term meaning that, basically, these are the impacts that you're gonna appreciate from the construction and the operation of this project. So, sample job types are, you know, for instance, truck driving, crane operation, literally earth-moving, someone to pour the foundation, the cement. You've got, also, the management aspect of it, you know, every project needs a project manager, and then they need related support staff, they may need administrative support. And then, siting, so you've got, you know, the personnel they're serving, figuring out how everything is exactly laid out

So, these are impacts from people actually working on the project. And then, the next is supply chain impacts, or indirect is the other way that you can look at these. And these are from things like equipment manufacturing and sales of the materials and the components. And then also, any taxes that you might appreciate from the property, from using the property for the project. And then, your financing, your banking and your accounting. So, these are things that factor in to making a project successful, but they're maybe, you know, once removed from the impact.

And then, induced impacts are just that almost third tier of impacts. So it's things like money spent on other things because you're developing this energy project in an area. So, for instance, somebody might have gotten a job from this project, and they now need childcare for their little one while they're going to work. It could be grocery stores where they're doing their shopping. It's either people that received a job and they're making more money and they're maybe spending more on grocers.

Or it's people that have come in to work on the project, and they're going to the grocery store. You know, maybe going out a little more often to the restaurant, because you've got a little extra money, that type of thing. So, those are considered induced impacts.

So, now, those will all relate to the jobs and economic development model that I'll discuss here. So, that's why I covered that, not only just to have an understanding of economic impact, but also as it relates to JEDI. So, what I'll talk about, with JEDI, is just give you a little bit of information about JEDI, some of the methodology and the limitations, and then interpretation. And then I've got an example of a JEDI model run, toward the end, that I can run through with everybody.

So, JEDI models, they're an Excel-based. So, if anybody uses Excel, for anything, this platform is going to look familiar to you. Which I think is great, because sometimes you open these models and the platform isn't familiar, and there's a little bit of a learning process to even, you know, get to where you feel comfortable using the software that it's on. But this one is Excel, and not everybody uses Excel but a lot of people do, so I think it'll be familiar to people. It is freely available; you can download it, I'll show you the download screen, so that it looks familiar to you. And it allows you to estimate gross employment and economic impacts that result from an investment in a new power generation or fuel production project.

JEDI has default values, so, basically what that means is that every input has a default value in it. And that's based on what we've learned from developers and industry experts, based on existing projects. So, the good thing is, when you go to use JEDI, it has the values in it already. You don't have to come to it armed with all this data that you have to input, which can be daunting, you know, it can be a lot, you know, pretty overwhelming, when you're looking at a project. The other end of that, though, is that if you want to input your own input, like, if you've got data and information on a particular project, maybe you're a little further along in the evaluation of it and you've received some input from a developer about how much something might cost, you can put that value in there, if you would like to.

So, this is what the download screen looks like. There's the link at the bottom of the slide that says nrel.gov/analysis/jedi, or you can do what I do and just google "nrel jedi." And then this, a link will pop up, and you click on the link, and you've got this screen in front of you that says "Downloading the JEDI Models." And essentially, what you do is you click on whichever technology that you want to download, and then it gives you the choices, underneath that technology, of the specific JEDI models that are available.

So, the technologies that are available in JEDI are listed as followed: for wind, we've got distributed, land-based, and offshore; a lot of biofuel technologies; solar is concentrated in solar power; and then, MHK for hydro; geothermal. We've also got a JEDI for transmission line, if you have to install a transmission line. Because if anybody's looked at a project, you know that can be expensive. And then, natural gas, combined cycle, coal, pulverized coal, and then petroleum refining.

So, as far as why impact modeling, you know, you may ask why even run a model like JEDI. But other than just kind of the obvious figuring out the economic impact, something that's nice about JEDI is that you can evaluate different scenarios. So, you can kind of tweak the costs that you use as inputs to JEDI; you might wanna change the system size, maybe if you're looking at wind, the number of turbines. You may wanna change the year that you're constructing it, or change things like the share of local, you know, how much of the equipment and stuff that you're getting locally. And I'll talk a little bit more about that local share, which I think is a really great feature of JEDI.

But the other reason is that it just really assists in decision-making. So, it's something that you can present the results, you can, you know, come with model results to community meetings, and have something, you know, just that you're quantitative able to report, numbers and metrics. As opposed to just kind of having the qualitative reason that you wanna _____ develop this system. So, we'll use _____ the JEDI model, and we know that it's based on who downloads it, and some of the reports that come out. Government – a lot of government use of JEDI, PUCs, and the state or governor's energy office, federal agencies and the National Labs use it. International analysis and developers in other industries use JEDI. Academics use it, as well, consultants when they're trying to kind of figure out where they might wanna try to install a project, economic development groups, and also consumer advocates to maybe make the case for one project over another.

And then, just to clarify input-output models, it's just really a name for a type of model that, there's lots of different types of modeling out there. Input-Output is a relatively straightforward kind of modeling, and the reason that's nice is because it's very understandable. It's something that, in terms of the software platform that it requires, it's, you know, easily attainable and achievable. And basically what it does is it gives a snapshot of the relationship between sectors of an economy. So, it's really looking at a single point in time, that's kind of what this means is, it's not forecasting or projecting. It's telling you, like, at this point in time, what will the impacts be during construction, and then what will the impacts be annually, during operation and maintenance.

It also looks at expenditures in an economy, so it's really cost-driven, it's got multiplier in it. It's really looking at input and then to provide output. So the inputs are goods and services from other industries, payments for labor, capital, taxes, and imports. And then the outputs you'll see are, you know, the goods and services, the impacts on goods and services to other industries, households, and then governments and exports. And so, it captures the impacts of multipliers within a region, so, I think that there is some detail about the Implan multipliers that JEDI uses.

And it's a lot of detail about Implan, and I'd be happy to talk with anybody about it a little bit more, if they were interested. But JEDI decided to use the Implan multipliers because they're just widely accepted, and basically, all this means, with the multiplier, is, you know, what impact does one dollar spent in the economy, what impact does it have? Like, how can you multiply that effect? So, by spending one dollar, you're going to get more than one dollar of an impact, because of these three levels of impacts that I talked about. So you've got direct, indirect, and induced, and so, that's really all we mean by the multiplier.

JEDI presents its results as jobs, the fulltime equivalent, also as earnings, for income from work. That includes wages, salaries, and then benefits if they're made available. And then, gross output, so, the measure of the total economic activity, which is basically revenue plus expenditures on input. The JEDI phases are presented in two phases, one is for construction and one is for operating. Construction is the equivalent of one year, regardless of how long a project takes to build. And then operating, the results are presented as annual and ongoing, and I'll show you the result slide, and we'll talk about this a little bit more.

The important thing to know, for the construction, is that it is the equivalent of one year. So, if you're installing a smaller system and it's only gonna take six months, you need to divide those results in half. If it's only gonna take two months, then that's, you know, 2/12 of the results. So, that's definitely something to keep in mind as you're going through this process. Strengths and weaknesses – JEDI is widely accepted; it's used quite a lot. I was doing a little bit of homework before this webinar, and I was kind of searching for economic impact results, and a lot of the papers use JEDI, which I thought was nice to see.

So, they use JEDI for the modeling of the impacts, it's utilized by private companies, just a lot of different agencies, and we talked a little bit about that in an earlier slide. You can use available data from many different sources, like, the default data is available, but you can also give it some very detailed sector-specific information. The weaknesses in JEDI are that it is gross impact, so it's not net. So, for instance, if you were doing some sort of a systemwide modeling where you would know that if you installed four, that might offset some power production using coal, then it doesn't tell you what the impact is to the coalmining industry. And so, that's just something that, again, it's a matter of, that's just a much more complex model.

And it's something that really probably all the JEDI models wouldn't be available and attainable, if we had to do such complex modeling. So, that's a weakness of it, and that's just something to bear in mind as you're presenting your results, really, 'cause somebody might raise that point. It does assume infinite supply of input, so there is no limitation on the number of turbines that you might be able to order, or the number of circuits that you could order; it assumes they're available. And then also, fixed prices, it assumes fixed prices. The nice thing about the pricing is that, if you did wanna run scenarios, you can.

So, you can say, "Well, gosh, what if the price of this goes up, you know, three times? Is my project even still gonna be economic?" so you can run that scenario in JEDI. And then it does not evaluate the feasibility or profitability of a project. So by that, what we mean is that JEDI is just meant to be one step in the process. You definitely wanna look at the technical feasibility of a project, before you embark on it. And then also, the profitability, you know, you need your balance sheet for this project, before you can go to the bank and get funding for it.

So, as far as the variability and the economic development impact, sometimes we get questions from people that say, "Gosh, there was just a wide variety of the impacts that I found out from my JEDI runs." And usually, that boils down to the size of the projects. So, because it's input-output, and it uses multipliers, and it's linear _____ _____ _____ aside from the multipliers, the size of the project, the bigger the project, and the more the project costs, the greater of an economic impact you're gonna get. That's the nature of the model. So, I think that the main thing to keep in mind with that is that, you just have to know that, you know, you really want true results from this.

And so, you really do wanna model a system size that makes sense for the area that you're thinking about installing. And so, that's just a matter of the user having reasonable inputs and expectations. The other thing that can make a difference is the local share and the local purchase coefficient. If you've got supplies that are available or manufacturing facilities that are available locally, and you can source what you need locally, you're gonna experience a much better economic impact from these projects. Than if you have to go outside the state or outside your town to get the components.

So, here's a JEDI example, and I would like to [laughs] provide the caveat on this that, for the example, I really just wanted to show you how to run through a JEDI run. I didn't necessarily want to discuss the results of it; I'll talk about'em a little bit in terms of how to interpret them. But I used a fairly generic example, just because I really just wanted some screenshots of what it looks like, so that you would feel comfortable going through this on your own. I think that's – that's a big thing for me is just a comfort level of running through the model, that helps me just get started on it. So, this is what you'll get when you first download, and all you need is to provide your e-mail address to download the JEDI model.

But this is what you'll see as your first screen, and it just provides a few – a little bit of information about getting started. Then you click on this start button, so, start economic impact analysis. And my public service announcement of the day, because this can drive everybody crazy, is that there's a security warning across the top, that macros have been disabled. This is just something with Excel and Windows, it's just something that they – it's a default setting. You need to click on "enable content," because JEDI won't run unless the macros can run. So, just click on "enable content," and then you'll get to where you have the project scenarios.

So, I'm gonna show you three screenshots of this first screen that you're gonna see. So, the first one is kind of your high-level information, like, where is the project gonna be located, what project sector is it. I just chose commercial for this run. The other choices for distributed wind are residential and industrial. And I chose the year of construction is 2020, I said it would take 6 months, we're gonna install 4 turbines. And so, you can see where, any time the cell is white, that is where you can have your own input. If the cell is greyed-out, that's either a calculation or it's something that doesn't change.

So, and then, if you'll notice, throughout this process, on the lower-right, there's a "restore default value." So it gives you the option, if you've tinkered with the model too much – I think we all do this, you know, we get a little carried away with our input, and then we think, "Oh, gosh, I just wish I could go back to the start" – instead of having to download it again, you can just click on the "restore default values" button. So, this is just a continuation of that same screen. I just would like to give you an example of this in terms of, all the white on this screen basically implies all of the inputs that you have control over. So, you can input any of these costs that you want – in the grey are calculations – and then you can also indicate what's purchased locally and what's manufactured locally.

So, if you know that you have a facility that can provide the components _____ your project, then you can indicate, "Oh, we can get 100 percent from local." If you think, "Well, I know this place supplies this, but they don't supply that," then maybe you indicate 50 percent of the purchase locally or manufactured locally. So, continuing down that same screen is the operating and maintenance cost. So the other one was kind of the preliminary costs, and then these are to run the project. So, your operations and maintenance, and again, you can input as much as you want.

You'll see that, you know, purchased locally _____ default is 100 percent. We know probably we're gonna be able to find our labor, here; this happens to be a run for Colorado. If you're more remote, and you think, "Gosh, we're probably gonna have to hire someone to do this particular aspect of it," then you can change your local percentage. And then, these are just your financial parameters. So, again, I just wanna, you know, alleviate anybody's concerns about running the model.

I didn't change any of these, so, all of this that's in white is already provided. It's up to me whether or not I decide to change these values. And again, you can always restore your default values if you, you know, tinkered with things and you decide you wanna go back to the default values. And then, in the bottom-left, here is another "go to summary" impact button that you can push; there's also one at the top, too. But here are our results, and this is the screen that you'll see when you do go to summary impact.

You'll see this at the top, which is basically your high-level project summary. So, these are the things that you've input, the location, the year of construction, and then, these are just the high-level inputs that you might wanna just kind of report and just be aware of, you know, refresh your memory of what those higher costs were. If you need to get back into the details of the assumptions that you made, then you can also print out the results or you can go look back at the other screen. And then, what everybody's been waiting for are the economic impacts. So we've got, as I mentioned earlier, it's during construction period and then also during operating years, and it's presented by jobs, earnings, output, and value-added.

And so, if you'll notice these little red triangles on each, if you just hover over them – I can't, because this is just a screenshot, but if we were live, if you hover over them – it provides a nice description and explanation of each of these entries. So, I actually rely on them a lot, I say, "Gosh, what do they mean by, you know, this," and I'll just hover over that, and it'll explain or give a definition, or, you know, what the information is telling you. So I would encourage you to check those out. But the jobs are fulltime equivalent, 40-hour week, 52 weeks a year; the earnings are income from work, wage and salary, and then benefits.

Output is the measure of activity or the value of production, and then value-added is the difference between the total gross output and the cost of the input. So, value-added is what additional value do you get out of this project. And so, this is where I want to point out again, for the during construction period, this is for a year, and of course, I run this model and I think, "Wow, that looked high." And then I have to remind myself, "Well, I actually assumed six months," so I have to divide these results in half, before I, you know, present the results. During operating years, it's annual results.

And so, you'll notice that, you know, for instance, to run a distributed wind turbine, four of them, your job impact is not gonna be huge. These things, you know, they need some operations and maintenance, but, you know, in terms of actual employment over the course of the years, you may not realize as much of an impact from that particular project. But the thing to keep in mind is the other things that we talked about in terms of, you know, maybe you've trained some people to be the operations and maintenance person. That person, with that training, you've probably given him a career for the rest of his life. If you've got someone who's, you know, trained on installations, you know, she may be able to create a business where she goes around with a crew, and does some of this installation. So, that's something, also, that we like to talk and think about in terms of economic impact from these projects.

And with that, I'm done; I feel like I talked a long time. So, I hope everybody enjoyed my presentation, and that you got some good information out of it. And I really encourage people to download the JEDI model and try to run it. It's really user-friendly, and there is a good support site, so if you have any trouble with it, you can e-mail the link and ask them, you know, how to do something that you couldn't figure out how to do. And then, you're also welcome to be in contact with me, as well.

James Jensen:             Thank you, Gail – excellent and interesting presentation. I know you have to run, but do you have time for a few questions?

Gail Mosey:                Yeah, that's fine. I just have to be at another meeting in about ten minutes.

James Jensen:             Okay, all right, well, let's get through'em, as many as we can, and then we'll move on to the next presentation. So, I think you just addressed this finally at the end in the result slide, but you can summarize it. Your example of sample job types that are all temporary jobs, do you have any information that you can share about the percentage of temporary jobs versus fulltime permanent jobs using, in this case _____ using the solar project that you have been discussing, but maybe talk about it more broadly?

Gail Mosey:                Yeah, so, I think that for the temporary jobs, it is probably referring to the construction period jobs, and those are only during the construction period. But the long-term jobs are more along the lines of somebody who services the panels; it's kind of the operation and maintenance of the jobs. So, somebody who comes out and does the regular maintenance on the panels, that's definitely during operating years, those kind of jobs are more long-term and permanent.

James Jensen:             Great, thanks. Why only concentrate in solar power for solar technologies? Are you going to be adding PV or [crosstalk]?

Gail Mosey:                _____ good question, and, actually, JEDI had a PV version, and what happened is that the costs for PV were changing so much and so quickly that JEDI couldn't keep up. And so, you know, we wanna be able to stand by our model, and as the costs were decreasing, it just continually needed to be updated. And there wasn't the funding available to continually update the JEDI PV model, and also, the costs were changing so much that it was kind of continual updating and researching those new costs. That being said, I think to some extent things have stabilized a little bit; I know costs are still declining. And I would love to see JEDI PV back again, so, anybody who wants to follow that link and send an e-mail saying, "Hey, we'd love to see JEDI PV again," that would be wonderful.

Because that's really the most responsive that, you know, that's the best thing in terms of a call to action is when users are asking for something. So, yeah, I used to present on JEDI PV, used it a lot myself, all the time, and then it just kind of became something where it was very difficult to keep up with in terms of the integrity of the model. And, you know, that's, of course, really important.

James Jensen:             Thanks, Gail, understood. If _____ already has Implan software – and I'm not sure what that is, but maybe you are – Implan software and data, is there a way to use the JEDI model within the Implan system?

Gail Mosey:                Yeah, so, JEDI uses Implan. The multipliers are imbedded in the model. So, as long as you define your area, you should be using those – through JEDI, it will use those Implan multipliers. It just so happens that because, as you know if you have Implan multipliers, you've paid for them, and they're proprietary to the extent that, you know, you have to have a license agreement, that type of thing. So, their present in the model, but we've basically locked that sheet so that you can't access it, simply because it's an agreement between NREL and Implan. But the Implan multipliers are what the JEDI model is based on, so, I would encourage you to use JEDI knowing that it's using the Implan multipliers.

James Jensen:             Great, thank you. Another question: Have you had any tribes utilize the data provided by JEDI, to help secure grant funding or for job training or additional construction funds? And I guess that's maybe a Lizana question –

Gail Mosey:                Right, I mean, I can say, off the top of my head, I don't know specifically. I would love to hear of some examples, if anybody on the webinar has an example, you know, would love to hear about it, so I can add that, you know, to kind of the list of people who use JEDI, that would be wonderful. But someone else might know [inaudible phrase].

Lizana Pierce:            Say – I'm sorry, repeat the question?

James Jensen:             _____ _____ _____ _____ have you had any tribes utilize the data provided by JEDI, to secure grant funding or for job training or additional construction plans?

Lizana Pierce:            Not necessarily additional construction funds. We have had applications, over the years, that have utilized, predominantly, a lot of the Sams modeling. I believe there are a few cases that have used JEDI, as well, and a number of other models – there's no end to models, out there.

James Jensen:             Great, thanks, Lizana. A couple more for you, Gail. What is the cost range or the range of cost for doing a JEDI analysis?

Gail Mosey:                So, if I'm understanding the question, I'm gonna answer it to mean that somebody's wondering how much it would cost them to conduct the JEDI analysis?

James Jensen:             That's how I understand it.

Gail Mosey:                Okay. I mean, you could go on to JEDI and run a JEDI analysis in five minutes, you know, if you just input your state, your year of construction, just kind of have an idea of the technology that you wanna do. You could also probably spend a week deciding on all the inputs, like, if you had various specific inputs and you wanted to change all those cells to your specific scenario, you could really get in-depth with JEDI. But I would say that a lot of it really is just somebody sitting down downloading it, it just takes, you know, a minute or two, and then just doing a run with JEDI really doesn't take very much time. It's, you know, you push the "go to economic impact" after you input those high-level assumptions, and you've got results. So, the costs can be very low, but then you also have to remember that, you know, obviously, the more you're able to input your own costs and assumptions, do your own financing rates, your own how much is purchased locally, then, you know, the better the input, the better the output, or the more specific the output to you. So, I guess it's a bit of a range.

James Jensen:             Understood. A couple quick questions, here. Is there an input for TERO [inaudible phrase]?

Gail Mosey:                Input for – ?

James Jensen:             Tribal Employment Rights Office, yeah.

Gail Mosey:                It's a good question – I'm not sure. I could look into that, though, and get back to the asker, or get back to you guys – I don't know how you present the responses. But, yeah, I can look into that.

James Jensen:             Yeah, I can put you in contact with the asker [crosstalk].

Gail Mosey:                Okay.

James Jensen:             Can we use JEDI on small home projects such as micro wind?

Gail Mosey:                There is a residential, on the example that I ran, there is a residential option for a turbine. So, yes, you can.

James Jensen:             Okay. _____ real quick, 'cause you're almost out of time: Have you considered using nuclear energy, or adding nuclear energy, to the JEDI model, with the advent of [crosstalk]?

Gail Mosey:                I mean, I think that would be great, yeah, I think that would be a great JEDI to add. And again, it's just a matter of, you know, maybe the nuclear program deciding that there is value to it, and putting, you know, developing a JEDI nuclear. And I think again, it goes back to the JEDI PV, if people put, you know, raise their hand, say they'd like to see it, that often helps have one developed.

James Jensen:             Okay, all right, well, thank you for your time, Gail, and we appreciate it, and I'll get you in touch with that asker on TERO. And with that, we'll move on to our next presentation. Thank you, Gail.

Gail Mosey:                Thank you so much, everybody. Bye-bye.

James Jensen:             [Crosstalk] our next presenter we have Tim Willink. And, Tim, thanks for hustling back from the airport, and as soon as your slides come up, you're welcome to get started.

Tim Willink:               Great, can everybody hear me _____?

James Jensen:             Yes.

Tim Willink:               Great. Yeah, I'm just gonna talk a little bit about Grid Alternatives, our tribal program, some of our impacts and our work and our approach. And also, you know, some of the short-term – you know, some of the employment opportunities and career path opportunities, and some of the economic impact. So, here's the kind of work that we've been doing with Grid Alternatives. We're the largest nonprofit solar installer in the country; we started out in California. And our first tribal project was in January 2010 with our North Coast office, which is just north of the Bay Area. Since then, we've been pretty active; we've got 650 tribal installations, and 660 families served.

When I first started, about four years ago, I think we were in the one-megawatt range. Since then, we've installed about three megawatts, mainly single-family residences, but we are currently working with tribes on their energy goals, and that incorporates tribal community buildings. Our projects are big _____ larger more diverse, to suit the tribe's energy goals. You know, the biggest part of Grid is that we are a hands-on training organization, and so, we get people up on our classroom on the roof, and that's what we call it, is to train people who perhaps couldn't have access or don't have access to the solar industry in the technology. So, we've had over 600 tribal participants who self-identify as American Indian and Alaska Native.

And again, we have a Troops to Solar program, where we sometimes have builds that are just veterans. And, you know, shout-out to our veterans out there – we've had a number of veterans on our team. I have an SIS, right now, who's a veteran in the navy, and he's leading a lot of our installs – his name is Wyatt Atkinson. We also encourage women to get into the construction industry and not that – just to encourage them to pursue this, if that's what they wanna follow. And again, this is the hard statistic to follow-up on with us, keeping in touch with folks after they leave Grid, either with the SolarCorps or with other internship opportunities or other job opportunities. But we've had 45 folks self-report that their Grid experience has helped them get a job.

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And again, where we work, again, we started out in California; we have worked with over 40, in total, tribal partners, 32 in California and 11 across the United States. My team is the tribal HQ team; we are based in Denver, but we are very remote. It's kind of centrally-located, in my opinion, down in the areas where we work, regionally. But again, my job is to work with our regional offices in California, where, again, there are state incentive programs, and tribes are in our service territory. And so, our San Diego office works with several indigenous nations in their area, Inland Empire in Riverside, California, and also, our North Coast Bay Area and now in Colorado, we work with the Ute Tribe. But the majority of my job is to work with tribes that are outside of – where we don't have a regional office.

So, next slide, please?

So, where we work in our – outside of our regional office is in the Great Plains, in South Dakota, and also in North Dakota, and then also in the southwest, Navajo, and Arizona, and also some of the pueblos. And then, currently right now is we're in the great northwest with the Spokane Tribe, doing a big project which I'll talk about later. But here are some of our regional office highlights; again, in California, you'll see the diversity of projects. And again, these are a lot of photos from our installs, where a lot of these folks are either volunteers, tribal volunteers from the community, or else trainees from the various tribal governments or other community organizations. But Chemehuevi, again, 80 residential units since 2013, and again, the Carport Microgrid Installation, and 20 tribal members receiving training.     

Bishop Paiute – and again, just before I forget, I wanna give a huge shout-out to DOE, because we partner with them on a lot of these projects, and they support us throughout a lot of these projects, and we'll probably discuss that a little bit later. But Bishop Paiute, we have a Solar Futures program where we have three internships; that's another grant for First Steps, for youth employment. These young folks came from Bishop Paiute, and were granted or awarded an internship. And then, they – I think one of'em was eventually chosen to move to Riverside to stay on for a whole year to work, and that person's doing really, really well, completing their internship, again, doing up to 50 installs, really gaining a lot of experience on the roof and on the ground; again, we have 38 more homes coming up. San Pasqual, again, you know, a number of different homes and tribal buildings, and again, awarded for a microgrid project [audio cuts out] coming up.

The Ute Mountain Utes – I think we're near completion, or getting close to completion, on a megawatt ground mount down in _____, down in the southwest part of the state. They're working with our Colorado office, so, a lot of impact, there, as well.

Next slide, please?

Right now, our project, we're in the midst of this, this is the Spokane Nation in Wellpinit. It's 9 tribal buildings, 23 residential units, so 32 projects total; it's about 650 kilowatts. Part of the workforce development is we have hired folks from the TERO office; we also have folks from the Housing Authority, they do – and you'll hear from Cedric, later on in this presentation. And we also have some interns from us, including our Grid staff, so we've hired a number of different folks. This is the type of tribal buildings; this is their Force account building, which is mainly used for construction.

Where we first got started, on the left, in the big picture, and on the bottom-right is the job completed. So, it's a great straightforward project. _____ _____ _____ _____ projects done, I know we're gonna do some more photos, sometime later when we get the job completed. But it's really kind of a good feeling, when we drive into these areas where these projects are, and it's just a fair amount of solar going up – it looks great. And then up on the top-right is one of our elder units that we completed.

Next slide?

We also work with the Rosebud Sioux Tribe in South Dakota; we've done a number of different projects. These are residential units on the top picture; I think it was ten homes we completed; I think that was, like, around 2015. We are working closely with them on their strategic energy goals, including starting their own tribal utility and incorporating renewables. Again, we partner with a lot of the tribal governments and infrastructure that's in place, and every tribe is different. A lot of times with the Housing Authority, because, you know, the residential units, you know, there's a lot of – tribes wanna go with renewables for their residential units.

We work with our TERO office, complying with TERO and also hiring locally. And then, we work with job training organizations to bring out the interns. After the project in Spokane, we're looking to do another project, a 200-kilowatt DC ground mount in 13 residential units. Some of the other projects we've done, on the bottom-left, is a women's build on a residence, and that's a ground mount we've done. And then on the right, these are students from Sinte Gleska College, and a Housing Authority employee. These are the folks who have participated on our installs, and got a chance to get their hands going on the installs and how to install solar.

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Again, we work _____ the Eastern Agency of Navajo Nation, where, again, we're just scaling up. We've got a number of different projects up there, upcoming. We've introduced grid-type solar, and the long-term economic environmental benefits from those projects of net metering. We've got, actually, pretty adequate net metering policies, so we're looking to scale up, and these communities are really seeing the economic savings. Again, you know, there's a lot of fossil fuel production, and so, tribes are really looking to diversify and incorporate renewables into their energy portfolio.

They're just trying to find a way to do that, and we are providing those examples, in my opinion. And a lot of people pay, you know, their electric bills and utility bills, and that just goes off the reservation, and that dollar never returns. This way, through these projects, I think we're seeing, you know, $10,000.00 to $15,000.00 a year in savings, in these communities, and at least it stays in people's pockets a little longer. So, we've had two successful Solar Spring Break projects with local colleges, Navajo Technical University, again, where they teach solar and they have a solar curriculum, so they had some students out there. They _____ _____ _____ the hands-on portion, 'cause there's not a lot of solar, out there.

There is gonna be more and more, so it's, again, gaining experience and putting these kinds of builds on their resume. We also have Fort Lewis College, we have a number, and this is the photos from Fort Lewis College. The majority of'em are Navajo engineers, the majority of the women, and we actually have an intern who's joining us on the Spokane reservation, her name is Gwen Sosi, and that's facilitated through Fort Lewis College. And she's up on the roof with us, learning how to do everything, learning about the electrical side, and hopefully takes that experience back to school with her. We also work with the local high schools, again, we've had some Solar Futures builds out there. And again, some of these students just get real excited, and again, introducing that career path on that, so.

Next slide?

And why do tribes do this? Again, as I mentioned, you know, a lot of folks mention energy sovereignty or gaining more control over their resources, and having more say in developing their economies. And energy is a huge sector, as everybody knows, in Indian country; again, currently, money goes off the reservation. Because the median income is not the highest in Indian country, so there could be disproportionate energy burden, meaning a lot of folks pay more, as a percentage of their income, for electricity than other people maybe in other urban areas or in other parts of the country. And again, some of the financing models [background noise interferes with audio] federal tax credit don't work straight – aren't as straightforward as we would like, so _____ _____ get creative on those.

And again, you know, we're always looking for an opportunity to train folks on the reservation. We see a lot – we have a lot – just in Spokane in particular, we have a number of young folks who are just starting out, and looking for a career path, and being introduced to solar, and seeing potentially what a great opportunity it is. And again, in some of these states, like we'll talk about later, Washington State and New Mexico, these states are really trying to move forward with more and more solar and renewables, through incentives. So, this is kind of the economic impact, and why tribes are looking more and more into these projects.

Next slide?

So, the future, again, developing more and more strategic energy plans, seeing that solar and renewables are attainable, again, working with various agencies and levels of government on policy changes. We're seeing a lot of movement in New Mexico and Washington, obviously in California and other states are moving forward. You know, potentially, with renewable portfolio standards, it's a really aggressive portfolio standard, which is great if you're looking at renewables. And then, our question is, like, our tribe's represented; how can we take advantage, how can we be more ready when these policies get enacted. So, engaging state policies, looking at potential tribal carveouts with policies, and better interconnection net metering agreements, so that we can benefit fully from when these renewables projects are constructed.

And again, distributed generation equals local control, local jobs; it's also distributed jobs, as well. And again, you know, with the tribes, it's, you know, the long-term environmental and economic benefits, which are, I think, in my opinion, way more [foreground noise interferes with audio] in line with our cultural beliefs and our approach. And then, hopefully building the local capacity and the expertise in-house. I think Gail was mentioning, you know, hiring folks locally. Well, we have a gentleman on this project, he's a tribal member, and he's one of the only, if not the only, electrician from here.

We've made it a point to hire him, and he's been great. But also, the workers themselves, it's temporary employment for now, but this has been a long-term project. And again, I think people are – we have some folks, a couple of folks, regionally, and again, they're just, you know, that's a job that's, you know, and career experience, so.

Next slide, please?

And again, more specifically, working with Grid, you know, we have in-class and – really, the magic is on-the-job training, on the roof. These are a couple young guys from Stone Child College in Chippewa-Cree, installing solar on a duplex up there. I call it transferrable skills, as well, you know, the work that we do, put on their resume, and a lot of it's transferrable like construction skills, such as setting up a ladder, participating in safety talk. You know, you see we're all geared up in hardhats and harnesses, we meet or exceed OSHA standards and, really, best practices in the construction industry. We get a lot of feedback from some folks, it's, like, "Hey, you know, you guys, you prepared me pretty well for the safety aspect of construction."

So, we also teach about energy efficiency and energy reduction. Again, this is giving a shout-out to the Spokane Tribe, they have their own energy efficiency program, so a lot of these houses are already very efficient in not using – you know, using electricity well, and so the solar's just gonna add and save them even more. Again, a lot of stuff is, like, how solar works, you know, with net metering, and also even some microgrid education and off-grid, but mainly on the Grid type working, you know, the different – central inverters, string inverters, or microinverters, the differences, AC to DC. And also, educating about net metering in their billing charges, and the savings. And obviously, the hands-on installation is a big component of what we do.

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Workforce development, again, we take anybody who is willing to work, we provide all the tools. We also have Installation Basics Training certificates for people who are longer-term. It's basically a checklist, and getting signed-off by team leaders, that they can – they have these skills and they're able to do these skills, such as basic wiring, installing layout, and setting up the ladders, and a lot of safety stuff. If we wanna go further, we have the team leader program; we also, you know, comply with community service hours. And again, as I mentioned, Troops to Solar. I'll talk a little bit, later, about our SolarCorps program, which is very unique; a lot of these folks started out at SolarCorps on my team.

We also have a high school program, our Solar Futures, which is just absolutely wonderful seeing some of these students really get a kick out of solar and participating. Our rule, though, is you have to be 18 to be on the roof, 16 to be on the ground. But on Navajo, most of – we have a lot of ground mounts, so we have a lot of participants on those programs. And again, as I mentioned, Solar Spring Break is our college program; we're mainly targeting tribal colleges. It's great to have folks visiting and installing and helping out from off the reservation, but I also believe that we gain a lot just, you know, participating with our local colleges and local folks.

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This is the way we partner with a lot of organizations, you know, indigenous nations, a lot through the tribal housing authorities, tribal colleges as well, some tribal utilities. We just, you know, are working with them either on the volunteer side _____ the developing project side. You know, again, through their tribal government, you know, maybe it's the natural resources division, it just depends on what infrastructure the tribe has for their government, and who's implementing some of their strategic visions and goals. And again, working with the Office of Indian Energy at the Department of Energy. The top photo is a photo of Wyatt on our build in Spokane, where he's teaching about the different components, the racking, the rail, and some of our S4 standoffs. Again, you see everybody in vests, everybody's in PPE, hardhats, and such. And again –

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Here's our SolarCorps program, and again, here's – the gentleman right in the middle is Wyatt Atkinson. We've had 11 different alumni come, and again, it's a job for a year beyond, but Wyatt started out on the Spokane project, at the very beginning, as a volunteer. I talked to him about doing a SolarCorps year; he applied to our office in North Coast area. And now, he's in the previous photo where he's leading everything and really being a leader on the project itself, just running it from his portions of the project and job sites A to Z, just really grown through this experience. You know, and again, the requirements for that is moving to Denver; we also have some other positions open with our other offices.

It is, you know, a difficult move, a challenging move, but I would just highly encourage you, if folks know people there. We are definitely intertribal, and especially on my team, which makes it even more fun. And again, just a plug for us is, we have three positions available in Denver, and another position up in the North Coast area. So again, if you know folks who are gonna be thinking about a career path or are able to move to the city, to move to Denver, there is a lot of travel involved. But again, it's a whole – after their year, they will be coming close to leading the roof and the ground, and really knowledgeable in solar. And also, they get an educational stipend after their year. So, we can send out another notice and a link, sometime this week, on that, as well.

That's really it for my presentation, so I'd be happy to take any questions now or later.

James Jensen:             Thank you, Tim – appreciate the insight, there, and all the examples of tribal employment opportunities that come from solar projects. We aren't gonna take questions for you, just yet; we're gonna keep'em till after the final presentation, so, let's just move forward with that.

Clyde, feel free to jump right in. [Audio cuts out]

Clyde Abrahamson:    All right, good morning, and good afternoon to some of you. My name is Clyde Abrahamson, with the Spokane Indian Housing Authority. Both of those presentations, previously, were excellent. Tim Willink [foreground noise interferes with audio] a great training program, and really emphasize [foreground noise interferes with audio] appreciate that. And I'm hoping that my construction crew could follow their safety program, because it's very well put together. Also, Gail, she's a Jedi knight who's gone into warp speed, so, I look forward to using their program. So, we have a tough act to follow.

But we're with the Spokane Indian Housing Authority, and Children of the Sun, the Spokane Tribe, is – the word "Spokane" means that children [foreground noise interferes with audio]. So, we were actually slated for solar before our time, so it's great to have a solar program started, thanks to NREL and thanks to the Department of energy and Grid Alternatives, and all the others who gave us this great opportunity to put these savings up on low-income families, for the Spokane Indian reservation. This photo here is one of the first congress of American Indians in near downtown Spokane, so it's a historic photo from 1925. And I see a few lightbulbs in there, but there's actually, behind that bridge, Monroe Street Bridge, is the Washington Water Power Company. It was the building for the dam, just east of the Spokane Falls. The falls are still there, they didn't destroy that, but there is a dam in that area.

Next slide, please.

Here, this tribe used to fish along the river, and they had these salmon scaffolds. And this is probably taken in the '30s, but there are some earlier photos. And this is up in Kettle Falls, north of Spokane, about 70 miles north of Spokane, where they would fish.

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And one of the things that moved us into solar is the Cayuse Mountain fire in 2016. It came through the reservation at a very high speed. In fact, if you can see in that photo where that smoke is at, that smoke is actually off the reservation, and the fire had jumped the river where it's about a quarter-of-a-mile wide; the wind was at such a high speed. And it came on to the Spokane Indian Reservation, and destroyed about 14 homes and I think approximately 18,000 acres of forest land. So, after this fire, we were really interested in solar and alternative energy, to not only help our reservation but this part of the world.

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Here, you know, one of the fires of – we've all seen forest fires, but this is a photo of some of the trees being crowned off. I think a lot of our pine trees could be, like, 120 to 140 feet high. These flames were probably shooting somewhere up into, you know, close to 300 feet in the air. This is taken from one of the firefighters that was trying to slow this fire down, at the time.

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And so, COSSI, we termed this after the Children of the Sun's Solar Initiative, and this was the project that we had planned. And you noticed, highlighted there in the red letters, it's an energy plan to address issues caused by environmental change, and that threaten social and economic and environmental wellbeing of the tribe. And one of the things that this project has done, as we're talking about, is to help ones to get an education in the solar industry, and to be employed. So, we've tried to figure out how we can do this locally with this project, so we designed into this project to employ six to eight people as part of this project.

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And so, some of our – the rest of our vision is to also help reduce the tribal energy costs, and become focused on self-reliance and self-sufficiency, and the energy sovereignty with the Spokane tribe. So as we move forward with this self-sufficiency, individuals need to be trained, as presented in the two previous presentations by Gail and by Tim.

So, next slide, please?

So, this is part of our plan of action, so, we, with our partners at the Department of Energy, and our tax credit investor, and with the help of Wells Fargo Foundation, Grid Alternatives with their job training program, we are able to install solar on several homes. I know that the number here is different than what Tim had mentioned; we say 29 homes and 9 essential tribal buildings. And my slide here is a little bit behind Tim's, and I think we have 23 tribal homes and 6 buildings. But again, the tribe wants to move to energy sovereignty; we rely on hydroelectric electricity. We wanna continue to provide affordable clean energy in this area, and again, there highlighted in red is jobs.

And so, with me, I have an individual that's been working with us for about five years, with our weatherization program, as an installer. And he's being on loan to Grid Alternatives, but also to get training on not only the installation of solar but also the maintenance of the products that are being put on these buildings. So, we thought it was a good program to marry with the weatherization program and solar, because they're both in reducing the, or, geared towards reducing the energy burden on low-income families.

So, next slide, please?

So, this is, as you can see, is a helioscope of one of our tribal buildings that is gonna receive solar. Because of Washington State legislation, we can only install a total of 100 kilowatts on a single building. And this building, it shows it's gonna be covered, or at least 80 percent covered, with solar panels. But after we found out that we can only install 100 kilowatts of solar on a single building, there's only half of the solar panels that are gonna be installed. And this particular building is in progress, at this time. They have the railing up, and I think by next week they'll be installing the panels.

Next slide, please.

So, this is the Spokane Indian Housing Office, and you could see some of the panels that are installed on this particular roof, these guys are doing an excellent job with installing it and making the building still look uniform. If you can see, on the upper-righthand corner, the crew is there installing some of the components for the railing in this photo. So, this was probably taken a month ago, and this job is completed at this particular time.

Next slide, please?

So, this building is in progress; Tim showed this on one of his slides. And so, you could see the individuals working, installing the railing, but also installing some of the modules on the particular building. And Jesse's probably on the roof there somewhere, and also Tim Willink. So, this is our Force account building, and it is now a completed building. The solar panels are now generating electricity for this particular building, so it's in use at this time.

Next slide?

So, here it is in its finished state. As you probably noticed, we have taken these photos from an aerial view. We have a drone that we've been able to take these pictures from, but we kind of slowed down on taking those photos, because I ran the thing into a tree, and it was my fault and I crashed the thing. So, we're getting it repaired – we'll see more aerial photos of these projects, in the near future.

Next slide?

So, this is the Spokane Indian Housing Authority campus, and some of these buildings already had the solar panels on some of the elder or senior units. In the background, you could see the copper roof of the Spokane Indian Housing Authority office, and that's not real copper, that's just a copper color. But the panels aren't on at this particular time, but in the foreground in the picture, you can see the Grid Alternatives crew is just starting to install solar on these senior units. So, there's six units here, and at this time, they are all completely covered with solar panels.

Next slide, please?

And this building is the tribal longhouse; it's also, it's just east of the Spokane Indian Housing Authority and senior complex campus. And so, the crew is laying out here; you could see the chalk lines. And this particular roof is – it's not metal, it's comp roofing. So, we have about five different types of roofs that the crew is installing; on the previous photos, you could see some standing seam metal, and you have comp roof. And the challenging roofs will be the delta roofs, we have a couple of those, but we also have some commercial standing seam roofing, also.

Next slide?

So, you know, we're the community impact, here, so we're hoping to get training for Housing Authority staff and the Spokane Tribe of Indians staff, which are two separate entities. And so, we're hoping to train, again, six to eight tribal members as part of this project. But we want to create an opportunity to, up to four tribal members, for continuous jobs, now and on into the future, with our COSSI project.

Next slide, please?

And so, here we have, as many of you have probably seen this, about the job creation. So you can see, there in yellow, if you invest $1 million, the following industries could get up to this many jobs, and up to 14. As brought out by Gail, you know, other individuals who are working in the area, they may be developing all of the components or making some of the components, the panels or the modules, for this project. And we're hoping to fill in at least 50 percent of that, here on the Spokane Indian Reservation, with this particular project.

So, next slide, please?

So, here are some of the crew. Right there in the middle is Mr. Stephen Soodle, and he's actually our weatherization manager. And he's doing a great job with our weatherization, but he's also lending his staff, Jesse and Cedric, to work on this project, to get trained, so that we could use these individuals, in the future, for maintenance, as need be.

Next slide, please?

So we wanna talk a little bit about our partners, the Spokane Tribe of Indians. If it wasn't for the Spokane Tribe, we wouldn't be a housing entity. So, here, the Spokane Tribe is letting the Housing Authority apply for this grant, and to have this Children of the Sun Solar Initiative Project. As you see in this picture, a very interesting picture is taken in the winter; it's underneath the Monroe Street Bridge, and it's the salmon chief. And it's a statue, life-size statue, that was developed by a local artist, Smoker Marchand. And so, it's a very beautiful site, and then the river is in the background, and it's actually in the wintertime.

Next slide, please?

So, you know, here is our major funders, Department of Energy, who has helped us with this project, and helped us to, actually, walked us through the application, to a degree, and helped us to move forward. Also, we have SunVest, who is our investor, or tax-credited investor, and they also are helping us to get through this program.

Next slide?

And we have Wells Fargo, who's helped us with – I think they contributed $497,000.00, almost a half-a-million, into this project. And so, we get a shout-out to them for moving this project along. And obviously, Grid Alternatives and their Tribal Solar Accelerator Fund, helping us to also move through this project, not only with the Accelerator Fund but also with job training. So, certainly, that's what we're talking about here on this webinar, and we had several individuals trained by Grid, some of which have moved on because of the experience they received, and moved on and improved their lives and their resume, to work at other jobs and other facilities.

Next slide?

So, the Spokane Indian Housing Authority, you know, we applied for this grant in 2016, with the help of all of our partners that I previously had mentioned. We have a staff of 37 employees, that works for the Housing Authority. We have a Force account crew, construction crew, and we have a weatherization crew. And also, we have – are starting a construction company named Three Bands Construction. Three Bands is taken from – there were three different bands that belonged to the Spokane Tribe; there was the upper Spokanes, the middle Spokanes, and the lower Spokanes.

The upper Spokanes are the Kalispel Tribe, the middle Spokane is the Spokane tribe here in Wellpinit, and the lower Spokanes is the _____ Tribe in northern Idaho. So, we have a large group of tribal members from different tribes, not only from the three tribes but we have some from the _____ Tribe. And we had some individuals _____ _____ and from the Blackfeet Tribes, that worked for us.

So, that's basically us in a nutshell, here at the Spokane Indian Housing Authority. This project, Children of the Sun Solar Initiative, certainly has gotten a lot of publicity, I don't know why. Maybe our director, Tim Horan – he actually put a big shout-out there for the Housing Authority, and has talked about it. He's actually in New Mexico at a solar conference, speaking about this project. And so, it's getting a lot of attention in Indian country.

So, next slide?

So, that's it, so, I wanna thank everyone for letting us speak. But I also _____ _____ _____ I wanted to introduce Jesse Ramos, who's worked five years with the Housing Authority, as a weatherization installer. And so, I'll let Jesse speak, at this time.

Jesse Ramos:              Hello, everybody. I'm just gonna talk a little bit about my experience with Grid staff. And then, yeah, a little bit about where I work now with the weatherization outfit, here at the Spokane Indian Housing Authority.

But my experience with the Grid staff is just great; it's always been awesome. They've got such a great structure to their program that it just incites interest unlike any other job I've ever had or been part of. And, you know, every morning is a safety meeting, which is great, 'cause some of the stuff we deal with is pretty dangerous. You know, a couple of slides, there, those roads are, like, 25-30 feet high. And running a forklift, there's forklifts running around the jobsite, on tough jobsites, too, where there's kids running around.

And they got me certified on a forklift, which is awesome. I'd never even been on heavy equipment, before, so I was really grateful for that. And, yeah, just developed great relationships with these guys; they're awesome people to work for, really knowledgeable in this field. But, yeah, my time with the weatherization has been – where am I going, here –

Clyde Abrahamson:    Yeah, you've worked five years with the weatherization program, and then – and how does that work with the solar program?

Jesse Ramos:              Just energy conservation and – well, it helps the health and the quality of the homes that we're working on, and a lot of client education involved with that, and, yeah, just – yeah, I don't know.

Clyde Abrahamson:    Yeah, hey, Jesse, you recently got a certificate – what was that certificate for?

Jesse Ramos:              Oh, yeah, yeah, building analyst. It was a, yeah, hard-fought battle _____ the test of it, but I got it, and I'm grateful for that.

Clyde Abrahamson:    So, it's always a learning thing, you know, working with the weatherization program. And what are a few of the things that you've learned while working with the grant on the roofs, a few additional things?

Jesse Ramos:              Oh, jeez – every day, I'm learning something new – yeah, all kinds of stuff.

Clyde Abrahamson:    What was one of the hardest roofs to work on, in your opinion?

Jesse Ramos:              So far, I would say the longhouse, longhouse are pretty tough. I mean, it wasn't steep at all, but it was just very difficult 'cause of the – I mean, even _____ _____ it was tough to get the rail set correctly, so it was a lot of going back and keeping everything square.

Clyde Abrahamson:    And making a lot of adjustment [crosstalk].

Jesse Ramos:              Yeah, yeah, definitely.

Clyde Abrahamson:    Well, thank you, Jesse, and I think that's all that we have here with the Spokane Indian Housing Authority.

James Jensen:             Great, great. Thanks, Clyde and Jesse. _____ _____ hear from Jesse _____ _____ _____ benefactors of, you know, job skills and development through these projects, so that was cool to hear.

So, with that, let's jump into questions, in the time we have remaining. We do have several that have come in, and I'll read'em out to the panelists, here. Tim, feel free to jump back in – I'm gonna unmute you now, when the question is appropriate for you. So let's get started, here. Hold on, let me bring'em up.

So, kind of a general question, here, for maybe Tim or Clyde: What policies do you see as a hindrance to tribal solar development? And what tribal carveout policy changes do you see to be necessary in moving forward? Any thoughts there.

Tim Willink:               I can take that one, probably to an extent. I think that, particularly in Washington State, Clyde mentioned the cap on the 100-kilowatt DC, the system sizes. You know, we'd like to have that, you know, expanded, but we've had to adjust the project a fair amount. And again, it's just kind of limiting a little bit; we could've gone a little bit bigger on the tribal admin building or other projects, potentially. And so, and also, I think that's on the net metering side.

You know, again, on the other side, on the line side, you know, for developing bigger projects, you know, obviously there's the cost factor, you know, for – maybe more incentives for selling electricity and developing projects, and selling back to the utility. You know, again, I think the _____ on the federal side is the tax credits, you know, tribes aren't eligible for that, so we've had to get creative, and that's really the gist of this project. But it did create another layer, you know, took a long time, but we're able to do it through our third-party investor. I would also say that I think in the future we're just looking at Washington State initiatives coming up. And, you know, the tribal carveout, I think, again, you know, to get these projects going and to take advantage of those tax credits and other incentives, in our experience, if we don't have that language in for a tribal carveout, then –

I think the Washington State incentives are already _____, you know, they're very successful, and other entities are poised and ready _____ _____ experience are able just to swoop in and, you know, get these credits. And then, you know, a lot of times the tribe will take a little bit longer, and by the time we are able to take advantage of those different incentive programs, then those incentives are gone. And so, again, in our opinion, if we have specific tribal carveouts, then it makes the various government agencies who are implementing these projects, to make – it ensures that we have a stake at the table [audio cuts out] so to speak.

James Jensen:             Thanks, Tim.

Clyde Abrahamson:    Could I add to that, a little bit, James?

James Jensen:             [Audio cuts out]

Clyde Abrahamson:    Okay. I would encourage any tribe that hasn't applied for the Department of Energy grant to apply for it, and to get a team ready, you know, a grant writer and attorney. Godfrey _____ was a very knowledgeable attorney on helping us to apply for this. And once you get there and have a plan of what you want to do with your project, what homes, what buildings, move it forward. But also, during this process, you have to work with your utility company, and finding that individual with the utility companies that are in your area, try to work with them, and they will let you know what you have to work through on all of these projects. And it takes time and it takes diligence, and you just have to keep wading through the muddy parts, and try to get through the project the best you can. And it does take a little bit of time and a lot of effort, but having good legal on your side, it goes a long ways.

Tim Willink:               I will also say that there are state incentives that are being proposed, you know, that were pushing for language to make sure, like, you know, say, there's a virtual net metering law that's passed for a state. That tribes are eligible entities to develop those projects, and housing authorities are eligible entities. I think it's just critical to get that language in there, so that we are, you know, told that, "Hey, you're a local tribe or government – you can't do that." So, I think that's another issue.

James Jensen:             To kind of follow-up, I guess, on the last question: Does the state of Washington have the jurisdiction to impose the 100-kilowatt limitation, or is it imposed by the utility?

Tim Willink:               I'm not too sure about that one. You know, I have a feeling it is the state of Washington, but not too sure. [Crosstalk]

Clyde Abrahamson:    I believe it is [glitch interferes with audio].

James Jensen:             Okay, thank you. A related question: Can you just talk about the interactions with the utility, and how, on your projects, you get through the interconnection process? Or a little bit just more about utility interaction through these projects?

Tim Willink:               Sure – Clyde, I can take that, as well, if you want, at least the initial part. It's ironic that we actually have the utility out on a build, today, on one of our projects, as we speak. They're volunteering – I think that points to the fact that they view it as a partnership with the tribe and with our organization. But I think it just started out with, you know, reaching out to them. They have a tribal liaison, and essentially – and again, this is just a vista. We have other _____ we work with throughout the country; it's not always like this.

But they came out and – and it's just reaching out and having a conversation of, "Here's what we'd like to do. Here's, you know, what we're proposing. What are the parameters around it? What do we have to do?" You know, one of their guys who is in charge of interconnection, his name's Tyler, he was helping me load up rail, yesterday, and we were talking about it, and he's always been available and willing to do stuff. You know, very educational about the process, what we have to do, what we have to comply with, and it's really not that big of a deal.

I think – I don't know if, you know, there's been anything negative, besides, like, you know, we would like to see expanded, I believe – I don't wanna over-speak, Clyde, but – again, on the 100 kilowatts and other things for more expanded solar. But that's been our experience, I believe – I don't know if you wanna add anything, Clyde.

Clyde Abrahamson:    Yeah, I just have a little bit to add to that, that when we had our initial meeting with the Avista employees, I believe there was five or six employees that came to our site, and to discuss the project. And, you know, they just, like Tim said, laid out the parameters of what they would like to see, and a lot of involves the safety of the _____ connection. And after that, it was just keeping the lines of communication open, you know, responding to e-mails and individuals that you had to keep in touch with to keep the project moving. So, keeping the communications open is a big key on making your project move forward and making it successful.

James Jensen:             Great. Another question, here, as we're getting close to wrapping up time, here. It's specific for Jesse, but Clyde, I'm sure you can answer, as well: What forms of weatherization have you found to be most effective?

Jesse Ramos:              Air sealing and insulating, and air quality is always kind of a good thing, so, like, running an exhaust fan. But, yeah, air sealing and insulating.

Clyde Abrahamson:    If I could add just a little bit to that? A lot of people think, like, windows – windows, you know, they're nice, but they – any window you have, you're still gonna have the same amount of loss. But you also want to, as you're tightening up the home to ventilate enough, _____ you can make the home so airtight, especially if you have combustible appliances such as a woodstove or a gas furnace, that you could, you know, cause health problems within the home if it's too tight. So you gotta have a balance, there, on the home.

Tim Willink:               I'll just add a little bit to Jesse's experience. I don't wanna speak for him, but I feel like he's being a bit modest. Again, he is, you know, kind of like a dual threat, right now, with huge, you know, upside as far as, you know, to get that weatherization certificate and to be so versed in it. You know, yesterday, I was crawling in an attic with him, and he was running electrical flex, you know, pulling the tape measure on the roof, being harnessed in, just knowing how to install this stuff, you know, standoffs. And we kind of put him on the spot, I think, but again, to have – that's, you know, a huge example of local capacity for the tribe. You know, Jesse's a big member of the community there, he's gonna stay there, and it's gonna just be a resource for the tribe, in my opinion, on not only weatherization but on the solar side, as well, as we go into _____ but also the install. He knows all the components and, you know, is just a great worker, so, just wanted to add more _____ to that.

Clyde Abrahamson:    Thanks, Tim.

Jesse Ramos:              Thank you [crosstalk].

James Jensen:             Great. Yeah, yeah, thank you, and Clyde and Tim for that answer. We're basically – well, we are out of time, now, so, with that, I guess I'd like to wrap up the questions. There are still a few questions we have, that I'll just forward on to the presenters, and they'll get back to you as their time allows.

We are very interested in your feedback and suggestions on how to strengthen the value of this webinar series, and this webinar in particular, so please do send us your feedback.

On the final slide, here, is the remaining webinars for the 2019 series. The next webinar is energy considerations when designing and constructing new tribal buildings. It'll be held on the 31st of July, at 11:00 AM Mountain Daylight Time.

One more thank you to all of our presenters, today – excellent presentations, and we appreciate your time putting these together and being here, today.

And to our audience, we look forward to you joining us for future webinars.

This concludes the webinar for today. Good day.

Tim Willink:               Thank you so much.

James Jensen:             Thanks, everyone.

Clyde Abrahamson:    All right, thanks, everybody. Bye.

[End of Audio]