This is the transcript for the 2022 Tribal Energy Webinar Series: Organizing for the Transition to a Cleaner and More Sustainable Energy Future webinar.

>>James Jensen: Welcome to everyone. I'm James Jensen, today's webinar host. I'm a contractor supporting the Office of Indian Energy Policy and Programs Tribal Energy Webinar Series. Today's webinar, titled "Organizing for the Transition to a Cleaner and More Sustainable Energy Future," is the fourth webinar of the 2022 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 presentation slides will be posted to the Office of Indian Energy's website shortly after today's webinar. 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. We will answer your written questions at the end of the 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. Unfortunately, Ms. Pierce, who usually presents the introduction on behalf of the Office of Indian Energy, is unable to join us today. However, we are fortunate to have Dr. Tommy Jones, the deployment specialist for DOE's Office of Indian Energy, who will be providing the opening remarks. As the deployment specialist, Dr. Jones is responsible for assisting the deployment supervisor with implementing the office's deployment programs, which include technical assistance, financial assistance, education, and capacity building. Dr. Jones is from Jones, Oklahoma and is an enrolled citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, Naknek Native Building, and a native shareholder of Bristol Bay Native Corporation of Alaska. He has extensive experience working with Alaska Native and American Indian tribes regarding governance, natural resources, and energy. Dr. Jones has conducted numerous in-depth research projects that have informed decision-makers and has published works related to energy development in Indian Country.

Dr. Jones, otherwise known as Tommy, has a Ph.D. in natural resources and American Indian studies from the University of Arizona. He holds certifications in administration and management of Native American natural resources, native nation building, and is a project management professional. In 2016 he was honored as a recipient of NCAIED's prestigious Native American 40 under 40 award. Dr. Jones has worked for the Office of Indian Energy since 2014, first as a Sandia National Laboratories intern, then as a federal contractor, and now as a federal employee. Outside of work he is a council member of the Cherokee – of the Colorado – excuse me – of the Colorado Cherokee Circle, which is a satellite community organization of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma.

Tommy, the virtual floor is yours. 

>>Tommy Jones: Thank you, James. And hello, everyone. I join James in welcoming you to today's webinar. This webinar series is sponsored by the Office of Indian Energy Policy and Programs, otherwise referred to as the Office of Indian Energy. The Office of Indian Energy's congressional charter is to promote Indian energy development, efficiency, and use, reduce or stabilize energy costs, enhance and strengthen Indian tribal energy and economic infrastructure relating to natural resource development and electrification, and bring electrical power and service to Indian land and homes.

To provide this assistance, our deployment program partners with Indian tribes and Alaska Native villages to overcome these barriers to energy development. Our deployment program is composed of a three-pronged approach consisting of financial assistance through competitive grants, technical assistance at no cost to tribes and tribal entities, and education and capacity building. This Tribal Energy Webinar Series is just one example of our education and capacity building efforts. Specifically, this webinar series is intended to provide attendees with information on tools and resources to develop and implement tribal energy plans, programs, and projects, highlight tribal energy case studies, and identify business strategies tribes can use to expand their energy options and develop sustainable local economies.

This year's webinar series, titled "Empowering Native Communities and Sustaining Future Generations," is focusing on the changing energy landscape and how tribes can position themselves participate in the energy transition to the benefit of their communities and future generations. In this fourth webinar series we are lucky to have three thought leaders from Indian Country and a representative from DOE's Energy Transition Initiative who will provide attendees with information, ideas, and resources to help position tribes to participate in the energy transition. We hope this webinar and the series as a whole is useful to you. We also welcome your feedback, so please let us know if there are ways that we can make this series better. And you can send this feedback to your main e-mail at IndianEnergy@hq.doe.gov. 

Before I turn it back to James, I want to personally thank all the presenters for giving their time in preparing for and presenting on today's webinar. Thank you all very much. And with that, the virtual floor is yours, James.

>>James Jensen: Thank you, Tommy. Before we get started with the presentations, I first want to introduce all of today's speakers. Our first presenter, Tessa Greco, works with the DOP Water Power Technologies Office and the Energy Transitions Initiative as a contractor from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory to manage activities within the Powering the Blue Economy Initiative and the Energy Transition Imitative Partnership, or ETIPP. In those roles she works on a portfolio of technical assistance and innovation-centered projects which are guided by and infused with end user perspectives and values so that resulting research, technology innovation application, and community engagement is representative of and informed by the populations they serve. 

Following Tessa, we will hear from Anthony Giacobbe. Anthony is the Director of Seneca Energy for Seneca Nation. He has over 18 years' experience in corporate strategic planning, project management, sales and marketing, and policymaking with various national corporations. Mr. Giacobbe has served as the Director of Seneca Energy at the Seneca Nation for the past eight and a half years and has experience with distributed generation projects, natural gas, and electricity supply, broadband deployment, natural gas distribution maintenance and expansion, right-of-way negotiations, rate analysis, and energy sufficiency initiatives. Anthony received his bachelor's of science degree from Clarkston – or, Clarkson University and a graduate business degree from Canisius College. 

Following Anthony, we will hear from Sara Drescher. Sara is the Forest County Potawatomi Community's in-house environmental and energy attorney working out of the tribe's Milwaukee office. Ms. Drescher's energy-related work for the tribe includes a range of issues related to the tribe's green energy initiatives including development of green energy, implementing green energy projects, and commenting on energy policy. Ms. Drescher is involved in the tribe's Class I air program and all other matters related to the tribe's environmental and energy programs.  Prior to joining the Forest County Potawatomi Community Legal Department, Ms. Drescher worked in the Milwaukee offices of two national law firms representing a variety of clients in the areas of environmental and energy law. Ms. Drescher has a B.A. and juris doctorate from Marquette University and is working to complete her Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies. 

Our last presenter is Jana Ganion. Jana is Director – excuse me, Director of Sustainability and Government Affairs for Blue Lake Rancheria. In her role for the Blue Lake Rancheria tribal government, Jana helps design strategies for decarbonized resilience, including strategic planning and climate mitigation and adaptation, emergency preparedness, and economic enterprise development. Her project developments include low-carbon microgrids and other distributed energy resources, electrified buildings and transportation, smart water grids, telecommunications, and other lifeline sectors. She is the current co-chair of the U.S. Department of Energy's Indian Country Energy and Infrastructure Working Group and serves on the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management California Intergovernmental Renewable Energy Task Force and California SB 350 Disadvantaged Communities Advisory Group for the California Public Utilities Commission and California Energy Commission. So, that's a mouthful of things Jana is doing.

Thanks to our presenters for making the time to join us today. With that, let's get started with our first presentation. Tessa, you may proceed once your slides are up. 

>>Tessa Greco: Great. Thank you so much, James, and thank you to the Office of Indian Energy for inviting me to present on this very distinguished panel. I'm really humbled to be alongside you all.

So, I am here to talk about the Energy Transitions Initiative, give a little overview of what ETI is in short and some of our programs that this audience might be interested in learning about. Next slide, please.

To go into that in a little bit more depth, I'll just provide a brief background on the Energy Transitions Initiative, go into the programs and tool offerings that we provide as part of the ETI portfolio, and then finally, provide some specific technical assistance use cases that we're currently supporting through our Energy Transitions Initiative Partnership Project , which I'll go into more depth about in a few slides. Next slide, please.

All right. So, the Energy Transitions Initiative is part of the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, and its role and mission is to support remote and island communities with the development of their resilient clean energy solutions. So, it essentially offers research, resources, and user-friendly tools to support technical assistance activities through our landmark program at the Energy Transitions Initiative Partnership Project . Some of our goals in volve supporting innovative technologies, resilience, and bolstering capacity as part of a clean energy transition. Of course, there is more information on our website. I'd be happy to provide that link following the webinar. Next slide, please.

So, first, I love this graphic because it's kind of all-encompassing for what the ETI makeup and technical assistance program design is really based on. So, I mentioned our technical assistance as kind of the landmark or largest supporting program that's part of ETI. So, the Energy Transitions Initiative Partnership program is the technical assistance effort that utilizes and leverages all of the tools listed here in the electrification and microgrids research, the Engage, FRONTIER, and SUPRA tools, and then our policy design briefs as a separate effort, in addition to the Energy Transitions Playbook that we've developed to kind of devise a stepwise process that folks can utilize, engage with, and follow for informing their own energy transition and what steps it might take to effectively execute that energy transition that you dream up within your community. Next slide, please.

So, to kind of go in a bit more depth on each one of those components, I'm going to walk through the next few slides, which describe not only ETIPP but also some supporting tools that we leverage within.

So, first, the Energy Transitions Initiative Partnership Project, which I mentioned multiple times already, is sponsored by multiple offices within the Department of Energy, ETI being one of them, and it provides direct technical assistance to remote, island, and islanded communities across the US and territories to increase their energy resilience. So, those supporting offices are listed here but we have ETI, the Office of Strategic Programs, Geothermal Technologies Office, Solar Energy Technologies Office, Water Power Technologies Office, and the Wind Energy Technologies Office. So, it's really a very collaborative program and very intentionally so because we want it to be a technology-neutral solution for communities. So, we don't want the goals and objectives that communities dream up and ask for within the ETIPP technical assistance application to be influenced in one way or another by any one technology. Really, all technologies, all renewable technologies, as well as energy efficiency measures, are on the table for influencing your energy transition. Next slide, please.

So, ETIPP is its – let's see – second year. We released the first ETIPP application in '21, in spring of '21, and announced 11 communities that we were supporting as part of that first cohort of communities that made it through the ETIPP application. And you can see them represented here as well as the different technology influences that are making up their ETIPP technical assistance program. So, ranging from Alaska to Maine to North Carolina to Hawaii we have a range of technologies and energy efficiency asks embedded within each of those programs. You can see in Sitka there's hydropower, renewable energy potential, rate and tariff analysis, as well as microgrid support and analysis. So, as I said, the real emphasis of ETIPP is to make it as technology-neutral as possible and to make it a community-driven process from start to finish. 

The types of communities that we target are remote, island, and islanded. Those definitions are listed here. So, we don't put certainly a cap on the community size that's able to apply in, but I think some of these characteristics drive us towards smaller community engagement, isolated again from those main grid interconnects and often isolated by waterways as well. Next slide, please. 

Awesome. Thank you. So, at the core of any technical assistance project we typically ask a set of questions that technical experts at the national labs which support ETIPP can attempt to and work to answer using the various tools, expertise, and resources that they have at their disposal. So, some of those questions include: How much of my community's energy consumption could be met with locally generated renewable energy? Which efficiency measures would have the greatest impact on my community's energy consumption? What is the most cost-effective path to meeting our renewable energy goals? Alternatively, how can we make our community's energy solution the most resilient system it could be, potentially with increased costs? And how can we increase access to power during extreme events and improve the energy reliability that we need so desperately in every community? 

So, in addition to answering that central set of questions, the technical assistance that ETIPP provides supports activities that ensure the answers to these questions are actionable. So, some of the ETIPP project activities can include a community assessment of need, which can involve assessing the community energy needs, exploring energy technologies that can provide resilience and other community benefits. Those can include energy efficiency measures, hydropower, microgrid development, design and development, solar technology application, wind, geothermal, storage, tidal or wave, which are more leading-edge technologies, or simply grid infrastructure needed to support electric transportation.

In addition, ETIPP TA can provide strategic planning, which may involve convening your community and key members to establish energy priorities, including those into larger energy community plans. It can also include training and capacity building, which can involve educating project stakeholders about energy transition considerations and demonstrating the use of energy analysis tools for community organizations. And finally, communication, which can involve summarizing your project goals and outcomes for broad audiences to generate more informed community input on what your energy transition can look like and what those next steps can be. 

So, that's kind of the makeup of what technical assistance can look like under ETIPP. And certainly, other technical assistance programs offered throughout DOE and beyond take a different approach, but this is what we've found we would like to focus on through ETIPP. Next slide, please.

All right. So, I'm going to get – dive into a few of the tools and documents that support ETIPP and that we leverage through ETIPP technical assistance. The first is the Energy Transitions Playbook, and it's kind of ETI's seminal document which illustrates the ETI approach to community energy transitions. This is available to everyone online. You can see there are seven phases involved in the Energy Transitions Playbook. They all have discrete goals and objectives as well as plans that you can interact with, download, and adapt to your own community's needs as appropriate. So, I am happy to paste the link to the playbook in the chat once I'm done speaking and hope that some folks will access it and use it accordingly. Next slide, please.

All right. Engage. So, Engage is another tool developed within the ETI portfolio and it's a capacity expansion model integrated with various visualization capabilities. So, it can help with planning your energy generation and transmission assets, analyzing cost, land, and infrastructure implications of any one energy decision you'd like to implement, communicating the impacts of specific pathways to your energy goals, and it can identify the most economic path to achieving energy transitions, if that is your main objective. It was originally developed with Hawaii over the past number of years and is currently in progress to adapt to other areas across the country and territories. Next slide, please.

All right. The Framework for Overcoming Natural Threats to Islanded Energy Resilience, otherwise known as FRONTIER – we always have pithy acronyms that we apply to all of our tools, so I hope you all appreciate that. This is an online investment decision support tool to help islanded and island utilities and their community stakeholders evaluate resilience options to mitigate future risks. And I think there is going to be – this is in production, so there will be a readily accessible version of this tool to the public in the next couple of months maybe even. So, when that is complete, we will certainly pass that information along. All right. Next slide.

I'll wrap up fairly quickly because I know we're running on a tight timeline, but I wanted to provide just a few examples of the types of work that we're doing within our cohort one communities within the ETIPP technical assistance program. So, I will note that we did recently close applications and make selections for the second cohort of communities. So, there are 12 new communities that will be joining the initial 11 communities named in ETIPP cohort one who will be starting their scoping exercises and then hopefully initiating their technical assistance effort in the fall or winter of this calendar year. 

So, to provide some information on the types of challenges that communities are asking for assistance with, I've just provided a couple of snapshots of the communities in cohort one, starting with Dillingham, Alaska. So, the applicant was the utility, the Nushagak Electric and Telephone Cooperative within Dillingham and Aleknagik, Alaska. So, their challenge, they were primarily satisfying their energy needs with imported fossil fuels. Their power generation for their islanded grid is a really significant expense for the community. So, they were ultimately requesting assistance with the Nuyakuk River Hydroelectric Project that could potentially provide base load power for the two communities as well as reduce their reliance on diesel.

So, in the technical assistance effort the lab team that is supporting Dillingham is executing on a rate and tariff analysis and doing some electric rate making and comparison with continued diesel generation. It's analyzing excess energy utilization impact for space heating or ice making. And it's doing some economic impact analysis on the sport and commercial fisheries industries. Next slide, please. 

All right. Ouzinkie. So, also in Alaska the city of Ouzinkie applied to the ETIPP cohort one application process. They are a remote community in the Kodiak Archipelago on Spruce Island, population of about 150 people. And the electric utility that they have is community-owned-and-operated. So, their challenge – similarly, they rely on three diesel generators and a 125-kilowatt-rated hydroelectric system that are both aging. The hydro system is being replaced and is operating at 25 percent, increasing the community's reliance on diesel, so they really needed a replacement strategy and had a desire to attain diesel off capabilities and capacity through renewable sources.

So, the TA effort that they focused on and are focusing on currently surrounds analysis of the renewable energy generation capacity of the community, not just hydro but also solar and other renewables as appropriate, as well as storage, to complement their hydro generation capacity. They're also doing an assessment of electric – excuse me – distribution grid replacement and upgrades and trying to build a roadmap for energy self-sufficiency within the community. Next slide, please.

And the final spotlight that I'm going to present to this group from ETIPP cohort one is Wainwright, Alaska. So, the housing authority, the native housing authority of Wainwright applied in – and they're an isolated coastal Arctic community in the North Slope Borough with a population of about 500 – just over 550 people, and 90 percent of the population are Iñupiat. And so, their challenge – excuse me – their challenge is that they have a diesel-fired islanded power grid, so all of their building heating and power generation fuel costs are heavily subsidized by the regional municipality, which imports their diesel by barge during summer when the Chukchi Sea is ice-free. 

Their request specifically surrounded converting a 1500-sqaure foot former federal armory building into a child care facility and building in some efficiency measures and potentially analyzing some renewables that might be put in place to offset the diesel required for heating and powering that building. 

So, the technical assistance that is also being executed upon currently is looking at the building performance to see which types of energy efficiency measures could be put into place, as well as analyzing what solar and storage capacity might be built to offset that diesel use, as well as some microgrid analysis. That's it. Okay. Thank you so much. Next slide.

And that's it. So, I hope everyone got a pretty good understanding of the Energy Transitions Initiative Program itself, as well as the programs that make up this portfolio of efforts. And if there are any follow-ups or questions, please feel free to reach out to me. I'm happy to assist as possible. Thank you. 

>>James Jensen: Thanks, Tessa. So, if you do put us in the chat the address to that Energy Transitions Playbook, that'll be a good tool for people to take a look at.

With that, we'll move on to our next presenter. [Clears throat] Excuse me. Anthony, we'll get your slides up and then you can get started.

>>Anthony Giacobbe: All right. Great. Thank you. My name is Anthony Giacobbe and I am the Director of Seneca Energy and Telecommunications at the Seneca Nation. And I'll also be talking about Seneca Solar, which is a newly formed organization within the Seneca Nation. Next slide, please.

So, Seneca Energy is a tribally chartered entity of the Seneca Nation. We provide renewable energy, natural gas, and broadband services to the members of the Seneca Nation. Seneca Energy was tribally chartered back in 2014 and I was brought on in that year. And now the organization is seven individuals. We have three in our natural gas department and essentially three in our sort of Seneca Energy/Telecommunications department. 

Seneca Solar has been established recently here in 2022. They're a division of our Seneca Holdings Organization, which delivers over $250 million in products and services annually, primarily through federal contracting, and they have the infrastructure in place to assist in executing large projects. So, Seneca Energy has been our on-territory entity, and again tribally chartered. Seneca Holdings is a state-charted entity and that's our federal contracting arm. And now, Seneca Solar is looking to get into some commercial activities off-territory as well. Next slide, please.

And one other thing as far as structure: We do have a utilities commission and that's the board that I report to, and then we also – our holdings organization has their own board of directors that they report to. So, those are sort of the internal structures that help with the decision-making. And then, obviously, our leadership that we'll talk more about in a slide or two here.

On this slide: our values and our legacy. It really fits – the renewables have really fit in well with our overall goals and the culture of Seneca Nation. So, really caring for and healing the Earth. Trying to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions was one of our key objectives. Creating training and employment opportunities for Seneca members is something that we're really proud that we've been able to do throughout these projects, and we'll talk about that a little bit more. And then, investing for the future seven generations, which is a principle that really the Seneca Nation looks to in really all the decisions that we're making, because we recognize that those future generations are going to be affected by what we do and how we act today. Next slide, please. 

So, the Seneca Nation is located in the Western New York area. There are five noncontiguous territories. You can see the two highlighted territories, Cattaraugus and Allegany, that is our residential territories. We have about 4500 Seneca members living between the territories. There is about a 45-minute drive. We have 16 councilors – so, 8 from each of those 2 residential territories. And then, every two years there is an election. Our president does switch basically. Currently they sit in Cattaraugus. We'll have an election in November and the president will sit in Allegany. So, we've been very lucky to have great leadership and strong champions that have been able to help keep our projects moving through those transitions every two years. Next slide, please.

So, the mission statement for Seneca Energy is to ensure the security, prosperity, and independence of the Seneca Nation by building a sustainable energy platform and lowering energy costs for the Nation and its residents. And we'll talk more in a few slides about our vision, but ultimately, we put an energy steering committee together – an energy steering committee, excuse me, together back in 2014 that was a number of different directors. We had councilors, leadership involved, we had some community members, and we were able to talk about all of the different things that were going to be important to the Seneca Nation and its residents. And it really helped us craft what is our mission statement and ultimately our vision, which I believe is coming up in our next slide. So, next slide please.

For our vision, what came out of that energy steering committee, we ended up doing a strategic energy plan, putting together really a five-year plan. We go back to that annually and continue to adjust it. It's really helped navigate our path forward and I think helped us accomplish what we have today. These are kind of the pillars that we look towards: sustainability, reducing costs, improving infrastructure was a huge one, economic development. Holdings and Seneca Energy were really tasked with revenue coming into the Nation beyond gaming – so, beyond tobacco, gas, what else can we do, and energy becoming one of those areas that we're really focusing on for future development. 

The environmental benefits. Utilizing natural resources. Again, workforce development was something we wanted to focus on. And then, becoming really this energy information hub or central location where all of the sort of pertinent energy information could reside. Right-of-ways. We ended up negotiating the right-of-ways working with the investor-owned utilizes with different projects throughout our territory, what different departments – instead of having decisions being made at a department level, really being able to make them at a higher level for the Nation and trying to make things a little more uniform. Next slide, please.

So, this is a slide that we've used for a while but I think it's – it's kind of simple but has been a good framework for us. The strategic vision – again, having that strategic plan, I think that's important to put pen to paper and actually put those goals and objectives down, being very specific on what you're trying to accomplish. Leadership for us, it was just huge having the champions that, again, were able to either be in office throughout the period if we had some transition through the last nine years though, and being able to have leadership really guide us and keep that – keep us kind of pointed in that right direction, knowing where we ultimately wanted to go. 

Capital investment, we've spent – definitely spent money on projects. We'll talk a little bit about the projects kind of quickly at the end of the presentation, but there's investment in not only the projects but in the team and the development of the team, whether it's just going to conferences or continuing with trainings. That's huge. I mean, without the team that I have behind me we wouldn't be able to have accomplished any of what we've done to date. So, again, having six employees working with Seneca Energy and then myself being the seventh, we are not a huge organization so everybody has to wear multiple hats and kind of jump in and kind of do whatever is necessary at the time, and I'm lucky to have a strong team very willing to do that. And then, project evaluation and selection, kind of an ongoing thing that we will talk about a little bit more. It is on another slide. I'm going to show a tool that we use for project evaluation and selection and then I can get into that shortly. Next slide.

In the strategic planning process this sort of takes you through what we went through. And it was extremely helpful, I think, to kind of break it up into these different areas. Again, identifying those stakeholders – so, community leadership, different departments. Forming the leadership team, the steering committee, and then our utilities commission. Developing the energy vision. Assessing our needs and resources – and we're kind of constantly doing that and going back and evaluating what are those needs, because those are changing times. Obviously with COVID and everything else that we've been going through over the last few years the needs have certainly changed. 

Develop specific goals. I think that's very important. You want to get pretty detailed with goals. If they're too broad, I think it becomes difficult to really manage towards them. So, really what is it you're trying to do? Are you trying to accomplish 40 percent? We shot and put about – we wanted 50 percent of our generation to be through renewable sources by a certain year, so then we can really track to that. And we're almost there: We're at about 40 percent renewable for our government buildings at this point. And – but I think just as detailed and specific as you can get there helps with that.

Again, evaluating and prioritizing projects. You only have so much time. There's only so much money most of the time, so being able to – for us, we're really looked at where can we make that biggest bang for our buck? What situations – how do we interconnect to make it most financially beneficial for the Nation? In our case, we've net metered our larger projects, which financially has been sort of the most beneficial way to do it. But just evaluating and continuing to prioritize is important.

Identifying financing options. There's a lot of good programs out there. I know other webinars will talk more about those programs, but whether it's through DOE or PIA we've received a number of funds through different organizations, even USDA for our broadband project. So, identifying different financing options is necessary. And then, finally, that strategic energy plan. And it is really a circle where you kind of keep going back to those different topics. I don't know that you're ever done with any of them. So, kind of continually going around that circle and revisiting that strategic energy plan, at least on an annual basis, if not going back to it more often. Next slide, please. 

So, this is our decision matrix. Basically, it's a little busy on this slide but you come up with criteria – so, return on investment or gross margin, capital investment. You can weight those criteria – so, at the top you kind of see where we – some were more important than others to us at that time. You create values essentially for each of those. And then you score it. And in this case, we were scoring 1 to 10, so we scored each criteria. It ultimately gave us a score and a weighted average, and this was really for example purposes, but in this case it kind of showed you that the wind turbine was – would be in this case prioritized to higher than pursuing natural gas exploration or production. I think this is really helpful and it can – it's sort of a scientific way to get to the decision points that are going to make the most sense for your Nation or tribe. Next slide, please.

So, on the next slide we'll see a project kind of workflow, but essentially there's multiple different decision points, the decision matrix being one of them. But then, we have our permitting process with our environmental department, natural resource committee, THPO, TERO, Legal, conservation, and others. Our utilities commission will have a role. The budget and finance committee typically will have a role if there's funds being expended. And then, we obviously have to go to council. And finally, we have the president sign off on whatever agreement we are executing. Next slide, please.

And this sort of takes you through that flowchart. So, from origination, going through the regulatory process, basically the decision matrix that's internal. If it passes that, then we would take it to our board at that point. After it goes through our board you can see kind of the next steps, but ultimately it's going to go to the B&F board, then it will go to council, and then hopefully approved if it's a good project. But you can see there's multiple points along the way where the project could be rejected. It could be rejected internally at my level. It could be rejected at the commission level, the utilities commission level, or then the B&F board council. So, the hope is if you get through all of those different checkpoints, at the end of the day you hopefully have a good project because you put it through that process. Next slide, please. 

So, the next few slides are projects. We're not going to talk too much about them today. I know we are tight on time and we're mainly focused on really that structure and foundation, which I think is huge. And the only point, I think, to the projects is we've been able to accomplish the projects because we did put the foundation in place first. I kind of equate it to the wind turbine that you see the picture of. Without a strong foundation the turbine is going to fall over. It's going to be dangerous and not worth much. So, you really – one of the first things we had to do was make sure that that foundation was secure so that we could construct the turbine. And I think the organization is really the same thing. You have to create the foundation. You have to get the team in place, get your goals in place and your objectives, and then you can hopefully move through implementing projects in a more efficient manner. 

And I think one of the big projects that sort of highlights that for us is actually the first one, which is the fiber broadband project, which I will talk about a little bit today, but – not necessarily an energy project but it does go hand in hand with our SCADA systems for our wind turbine. We are looking at microgrids. So, that would all come into play, potentially making those things more feasible. And you can see we've done some smaller solar. We've also done some LED installations, a natural gas well plugging and abandonment plan. And our big project was the wind turbine and our solar array. We have about four megawatts of renewable energy that's been installed. Next slide, please.

So, for our wind turbine – again, I'm not going to go into all the details here, but we've produced about 15 million kilowatt-hours so far since commissioning back in 2017 and it's been a very beneficial project. One of the key benefits is the community benefit. We do pass a $25.00 benefit every month to almost 500 residents now. And they – so, they see a cost savings on their – that comes to 20 to 33 percent of the bill in most months. And they get that discount just as being a resident and being a member of the Seneca Nation. Then, the Nation gets some savings on their invoices as well. Next slide, please.

These are just some pictures of the tower going up and the foundation that I mentioned. Next slide.

This is our rotor fly connecting the blades and the nacelle. Next slide, please.

For our solar project we have a two-megawatt solar array. We've generated about nine million kilowatt-hours with that project. And let's see… next slide, I think we actually have a picture of the array itself. So, that's in our Steamburg area in our Allegany territory. Another project that we're very proud of. It provides community benefits to the people in that area as well served through the National Grid utility. And one thing we focused on in the National Grid utility, because we do have two utilities that serve our territories, one is BPU, essentially a public utility, and they receive a hydro allocation. So, some of our residents receive a lesser cost power and we wanted to really create rate parity between both territories and try to bring all of the electric rates to a more level rate essentially, and that was one of our focuses. Next slide, please.

Just some inverter panels. Next slide.

A broadband project. This is one we're working on currently. Again, we're pretty proud of it. I think one point I want to highlight is I think the fact that we had the structure and the organization in place was why we were able to accomplish that project. That was one we didn't necessarily see coming. I ended up getting put on a broadband task force with two other individuals, one being from our Holding group and one from our grants department. We were tasked with bringing broadband to an area that had no fiber internet, the Cattaraugus territory. We've constructed and completed a 50-mile fiber network. We have over 100 people hooked up to the network now with a waiting list of about 350 people. So, we're very proud of getting that done. And again, I think that there's no way we get that done without having the team behind me and having the organization really above me to get that done. Next slide, please. 

And this is just a map of – that is our fiber network. It kind of shows you the Cattaraugus territory. And we're covering 1200 homes with that project. Next slide.

I think I just have two more. But – and I'm not going to dwell on these slides, but essentially, we think we've created a model that we think we can duplicate out there. Seneca Energy is essentially our entity that we think we can take sort of this model and duplicate it out in Native American tribes, pueblos and Nations out there to help with those energy goals. Seneca Solar is looking at more commercial projects, and then also looking at partnering with Seneca Energy to bring Native Nations, again, renewable energy and sustainability and just helping to accomplish those goals. Next slide.

And that's basically what I covered there. We'd be happy to talk to anybody on what we've done and how we've kind of got to our status here today. I think that's my last slide. Next slide.

So, thank you.

>>James Jensen: Thanks so much, Anthony.

>>Anthony Giacobbe: I appreciate it.

>>James Jensen: Sorry. Yeah, thank you so much. Wonderful job. It's an impressive list of projects and activities and development of structure, and thanks for sharing that with our audience. And we will have time for questions for Anthony at the end of the webinar, but with that let's move on to our next presenter. Sara, you can proceed as soon as we get your slides up.

>>Sara Drescher: Thank you. And thank you for having me today. I am Sara Drescher. I work for the Forest County Potawatomi Community. I'm sure several of you have heard some of this before, so I won't dwell on anything but more than happy to take questions. Next slide.

Just as background, the Potawatomi are part of a confederacy with the Ojibwa and Odawa. They are the Algonquins and called the Council of Three Fires. They are a Midwest tribe. The Potawatomi were designated the "Keeper of the Fire." Through a series of treaties they lost the majority of their lands east of the Mississippi. And the Forest County Potawatomi – next slide – are the tribal members that would not leave from the area. So, they fled to Northern Wisconsin and the majority of those pink dots there are – that's the area that the tribe initially fled to. And then, the remaining dots are the land base that they have since acquired. Next slide.

But the Potawatomi has always had a very strong connection to Mother Earth. And when they moved to the northeast part of Wisconsin they moved to an area that had been cut over by timber, and so one of their goals was to revitalize the land and be able to use it, live off it, and grow. So, they would be in isolation living in the woods and the economic conditions for the tribe at that time was very, very poor. But at that time they also started seeing that things were already changing. So, this was in the 1950s and they were already seeing that plants were growing in areas that they shouldn't be and that some things were affecting the environment. And so, science now believes that these human activities – greenhouse gases and the like – have contributed to global warming in such a way that the tribe has taken a very strong perspective and strong stance on renewables. Next slide.

So, just recently we know that the Earth's temperature has risen. Forest County Potawatomi in response to that has – they've emerged as a leader in class 1 air redesignation. They worked very hard to defeat a mine that was going to be sited near the reservation. They are working towards treatment as state of water and with addition designations. And generally, they've created their green energy program based on these kind of warning bells that have already been ringing for a while. Next slide.

So, this is the Potawatomi's environmental mission statement. I'll just give you a second to read through that, but this is the statement that drives the Potawatomi's decision making with respect to not just green energy but construction and businesses and generally everything that they do. Next slide.

And again, just a quick little overview of what global warming looks like. Next slide.

We're very sure that this has been caused anthropogenically, and so our solution is to be the anthropogenic solution to the problem. Next slide.

And if you look at climate change, what you'll realize is that there are certain mitigation measures that you can use, but ultimately there is going to be a measure of adaptation. So, our green energy program looks a lot at sustainability and how do we adapt to what we know is coming. Next slide.

So, our program really began far before the 2000s, but in the 2000s there was a flurry of activity. And so, one of the things I want to point out is that really strong leadership is essential to getting these programs running. And so, at the point in the early 2000s when the tribe was making a lot of energy-related decisions, sustainability decisions, then the council directed the attorney general's office to start doing – start tracking their carbon, do the analysis, and to know what our buildings were doing. What could we do to reduce that? And what is the feasibility for various projects? Next slide.

And then, from there the council also told the attorney general's office to start developing projects and to work through the economics of them and to find the investment opportunities that would make sense. So, we started pursuing a lot of various site assessments for on-reservation and Milwaukee renewable energy projects. Next slide.

I am not sure why I have 2008 after 2020, but – I apologize for that – but what was when we started doing the carbon reports. And that initial tracking period was really important for us. It helped us to some of the low-hanging fruit right off the bat. Next slide.

And then, ultimately, we moved into more specific decisions. So, all new cars have to be hybrids or they have – now we've also got a motion on – that is before council that is saying that not just hybrid but now we want fleet vehicles to be simply electric. We developed an energy strategic plan. We developed a climate change adaptation plan. All of these things are intended to work in conjunction [inaudible due to audio breaking down]. Next slide.

All new buildings on tribal trust and fee lands have to be designed to redesignation, and all new construction has to consider green energy technologies offset through green energy, installation costs, economic returns, and feasibility. Next slide.

And then, along with that we went one step forward, and all new construction also has to have sustainable roofing so that we can in fact incorporate solar at the initial building point. But what all of those first few motions did was put the tribe on a path to developing a larger program. And what we figured out with the initial carbon tracking was that knowing our facilities was really important. So, in order to make the next step decisions we had to know where we were. What was our baseline? And those changes we then tracked through quarterly reports. We really engaged tribal membership to bring everybody into the same realm to understand what it was that we were developing, why it was that we were doing this.

We've kept a motion, resolution, and documents book so that everything related to energy is in one place and we can go back to it and we can say "This is exactly how the progression went." But it also links to the question that we should be doing for next steps. So, those initial motions helped us to get prepared. They helped us to refine our objectives. And it also really taught us to look in a lot of different areas for solutions to the problems that we were trying to overcome.

But then, we also – as all tribes know, funding is a huge issue. You've got tribal membership that you're taking care of. You've got new buildings that you need, businesses that you're trying to develop. And so, we've looked at a lot of different areas of funding, not just through DOE or state programs but reaching out and engaging in partnerships and other opportunities. Next slide.

Ultimately, it's a very integrated process. So, we do have a due diligence policy. That has since been updated. That due diligence policy looks at each project holistically and it looks not just at "What is this unique project going to do for this building or for this tribe?" but "What is it going to do for the area? What is it going to do in terms of environmental? Do we have concerns with respect to environmental? Are there certain special species of plant or other flora, fauna that we may not be able to get back if we create this project here?" So, our due diligence policy is really a policy that addresses all components of the project and tries to look at how a project will work for the tribe as a whole and not just as an individual project.

And part of that is that we want to be sure that everything we're doing now is planning for future generations, preserving the tribe's culture, and ensuring that there are not only economic – there's not only economic stability but there is also environmental stability for the reservation and for all future generations. So, the – there has been a Tribal Environmental Policy Act that has been enacted. The tribe continues to gain more status in class 1 and treatment as a state both in air and water. It continues to add various areas of those two things. And we work hard to assess the natural resources and understanding the impacts of climate change when we're making these decisions. So, all of the different policies and programs that we've put into place are intended to be integrated, work together, and they're linked to each other within the documents themselves. 
Next slide.

So, initially we started out and we decided we had to know what our baseline was, not just of energy use but also what is our moral outlook? What is it that we as a tribe can stomach, can live with? And once we have this as an understanding, we can then use that to inform decisions related to the most important objectives. So, we used that base to create objectives, and yet we have to remain flexible. Tribal governments are fluid. We have changes in tribal councils frequently. But the – as COVID, I think, taught a lot of us, and I know we're all tired of using that, but COVID really taught some of us within this field that these projects, they can go away pretty quickly when the economics change. And when you have to shift your priorities from one thing to another, you've got to get creative and really dig back down into your base and try to develop, again, what those objectives are and try to find new ways to get through those and to that objective, maybe with less money. Next slide.

So, our project to establish that base was Project Greenfire. And out of that project came a couple of things. We established a goal of energy independence using only renewable or carbon-free resources. We adopted the environmental mission statement. We did an energy audit of every building the tribe owned and then identified the top 100 facility improvements. We used – we also at that time determined that for anything we were not producing in terms of green energy we were going to start buying RECs to offset the electric use through traditional sources and to serve as a bridge to ultimate energy independence. And energy independence for the Forest County Potawatomi Community means not only using green renewable sources but also having sustainable sources that the tribe owns and that it can depend on long term. And we have looked at a number of different variations. We have looked at geothermal. We have looked at solar. We have looked at wind. We have looked at biomass. The tribe has recently just closed its biodigester in Milwaukee but that was a very important project. 

And so, energy independence for us means using a large, different group of projects and bringing them together in the best possible way to create a position for the tribe to be economically sustainable but also to be freestanding at some point. So, we've gone through a lot of assessments for various resources and we're going to talk a little bit more later about what we do with those assessments, but ultimately the tribe has taken the perspective that nothing is off the table. Next slide.

So, we're going to go through a little bit of the history here. In 2007 the baseline energy used was only 31 – only! – only 31 million kilowatt-hours. At that time the tribe was not producing its own energy. The tribe saw significant increases in energy between 2007 and 2009, largely related to new construction, new businesses, and a number of other factors. We increased our workforce significantly, so we had more people in office space than we ever had before. But that's a pretty large jump in those couple of years. 

But even with the square footage increases to tribal buildings, largely due to energy efficiency measures, the tribe's 2016 use actually was very similar to the 2009 use. We also, though, at that point in 106 were producing nearly 800,000 kilowatt-hours of solar. But we focused so much on energy efficiency measures at those initial stages with some of the older buildings especially and redeveloping those older buildings to be more efficient that we were able to keep our energy use very similar. Next slide.

So, this is a depiction of where we've been over the years. And you'll see that in 2009 we went up a little bit. 2013, through a number of different projects we were able to come back down a little bit. 2018, we had another hotel built, we had several new office buildings, so we did start going back up. Next slide.

But through energy efficiency reductions – and even if it looks rather miniscule, these individual reductions for individual buildings really create a significant impact to the overall use. So, we were a big fan of energy efficiency measures right at the beginning of our journey and we still do that today. So, right now we're in the middle of several projects examining buildings that, again, another ten years later we're going back and saying, "Okay, what more can we do?" Next slide.

And all of this has led us to a point where we understand the importance of being accountable. So, the initial efforts gave us a starting point but what we were realizing was that some of the projects we were hearing about in Indian Country may or may not be right for us, either because of the area that we were in, the resources that we had, regulatory systems we were working through, and so we tried to start being more creative. How do we make these projects work in light of the uniqueness of our tribal situation, the resources, objectives, and interests that we have? And then, how do we plan according to those needs and not someone else's blueprint?

So, one of the things that I've really appreciated about the prior two presentations is that ETIPP obviously provides that format for working through some of those decisions, and obviously Seneca is doing exactly that when they're making these decisions. So, for each tribe the uniqueness of their circumstances has to play into that process. My blueprint won't work for everybody, but at least if we're all looking at the individual interests and situation that we find each tribe in, we can develop the resources and we can develop the projects that are right for that tribe individually. So, recognize when reassessment should be made. We have to hold ourselves accountable to say, "Okay, this project might not have worked then but it may work now." Or "We bought this new piece of property. Is this something we can use? Would this work for this type of project?"

So, we've really taken the perspective that things change. Our initial efforts are only a starting point. They are not a directive. So, our directive is to continue to go back to the things that we've previously assessed, continue to make sure that we're aware of new changes and new technologies and options. But we have to be internally accountable for making sure that we're looking at that periodically. Next slide.

Ultimately, we do not write anything off. So, there is opportunity in going through these assessments. If it's an individual project assessment, you can understand the technology, you can understand the analysis, the planning, and then you have to figure out the flexibility. Would this work for another location? Or "Five years from now, I know we're going to be working on a new building for this site because this one is outdated. Is there a way to incorporate this project then?" So, we don't write anything off. We keep going back to those things. We think through them again. And we use those informed studies to support our decision-making, grant writing, and ultimately project implementation. The projects that we wanted yesterday might not have worked yesterday but they may work tomorrow. So, feasibility studies and assessments, they only get us so far but they shouldn't be shelved. We have to go back to them, continue reconsidering options and whether or not there are new avenues. Next step – next slide.

So, with our solar project specifically we ran into a position where we had pretty much put solar on every building on the reservation. The remaining buildings were connected over the course of our last project but we also knew that our Carter Casino and Hotel was one of our largest users. So, we knew that we wanted solar there, and we knew that it was the right time with the last grant that we had, but we also had to get creative about how exactly to get that project implemented. Next slide.

And so, while we were going through our previous projects – we did a 2014, a 2017, and then the 2019 solar projects. While we were going through those previous projects, we were reminded of some of the challenges that we faced, not just with siting but also with interconnection and with staying under a certain net metering. Wisconsin's regulatory system does not encourage overproduction. We cannot net meter for the majority of our installations, so overproduction gets sold to the utility at a cost below the cost that they charge customers. So, we knew all of the information and we just had to go back and look through it again and remind ourselves of where we had been and where we want to be. So, this is a depiction of how our last few installations have progressed. Next slide.

So, given the tribe's interest in self-producing 100 percent of its green energy, there is a really long way to go. After our 2020 installations a conservative production value is 4 million kilowatt-hours – 4.5 million kilowatt-hours, and that leaves the tribe approximately 56 million kilowatt-hours of energy still to product. And this is what that looks like. Next slide.

But this to us is – it's just the next challenge. So, solar PV on the reservation may not have a lot more use. However, there are other options. And so, we continue to review those other options, whether it be wood or biomass or the creation of a tribal utility so that we can better site solar and still get it to the reservation. But knowing that this is where we are right now, yes, it gives us a long way to go, but it also encourages us to find more ways to be creative and to continue doing this work. Next slide.

So, when you're looking at what you need to consider when you're looking at opportunities and when you're looking at what you can implement by way of projects, there are a lot of different components to that puzzle. It's essential to look at rates. If you are doing this for economic benefit, you want to lower your highest cost rates as much as possible. You have to look at community planning and what is next on the agenda. Are there going to be changes to buildings, and can you then incorporate roofs that will bear the load of a solar installation? 

You have to consider regulatory barriers such as net metering and not being in a situation where you're overproducing energy for a penny a kilowatt hour, but when you are in a position to use the majority of that energy onsite so that you are both providing clean energy to your facilities and also lowering the economic burden. You have to consider your offsites. So, if you are doing wind, for example, and you need a certain amount of space around those wind turbines, what are those offsets and how does it impact the people around them? The different externalities and components of each individual projects are going to be different. And then, finally, you need to consider where is the real need? If you're thinking about a microgrid, are you thinking about the area where you're going to have a disaster relief or for frequent outages or where you can have a community center, where you're going to have people that may or may not use it in the event of that disaster? So, focus on your needs and what can you do to improve your situation and your sustainability with respect to climate change specifically in those areas that you know are frequently with outages or where you may have to respond to some sort of disaster.

Finally, you have to know what the limitations are. Just because solar works for me, it may not work for a tribe that is more heavily wooded if they don't want to cut down a large portion of trees. Or, if you are far away from your facility that needs that power, the cost of getting that power there may not be worth that investment. So, you have to really identify within each individual project what the limitations of that project are and whether or not you can overcome them both economically but also in terms of the tribe's interests. Next slide.

Funding is incredibly important. I am a big proponent of using an energy savings fund. So, as you develop these projects your buildings are no longer paying those outrageous energy bills to the incumbent utility. Can you get council to agree to set that money aside that you would have paid that utility to fund future projects? That energy savings was already in the budget a year ago, so if that doesn't need to be sent to another sector of tribal government, can you find a way to create an account wherein you can have those savings set aside for the next project or for energy efficiency measures or for whatever it might be? But that energy savings, the idea of that savings account has funded a number of projects for a number of tribes. 

Annual facility budgets should always carry EEM. If you can get the money in there and if you can swing it, energy efficiency measures, that low-hanging fruit is so important. Can you use tax credit partners? Can you use other tribal partners? So, if there's a tribe nearby that has a lot of land and you have the economic resources, is there a way that you can partner to take advantage of their land and provide them with a certain amount of green energy in lieu of an actual lease? The creativity of those arrangements and those different types of funding are where the real fun comes from in some of these projects. 

And then, grants. You can leverage multiple sources. So, you don't have to take just the DOE grant. You can also then take state funds, or there are several other smaller groups that are providing tribal funds. But look for multiple sources and not just the one big one. Next slide.

Flexibility. And I've found through the last eight, nine years with Forest County Potawatomi that flexibility is the real key. This isn't easy stuff necessarily. There's always stops and starts. But if you remain flexible and maintain that information flow with tribal council, with tribal membership – tribal membership is so important because their interests are so key to getting these projects moving. And you also have to be flexible depending on your regulatory situation. And it's rather hard to do a presentation about the regulatory situation on one of these because for each tribe it's very different. With respect to some states, you don't have a lot of flexibility. But there are ways to negotiate through that. And so, knowing what the system is that you're in may help you to find flexible ways to work with the state, to work with incumbent utilities, and to create projects that you otherwise may think are already off the board. 

And so, it's important to know when to change the rules. Can you change the rules? And are you working through with your contacts, with your lobbyists, are you working through and really powering with that idea that you are a sovereign nation to have certain rights that maybe typical customers don't? So, having that flexibility and knowing when you can push the flexibility button is essential to these projects. Next slide.

And that is all I have. 

>>James Jensen: Thank you. Thank you so much, Sara. We appreciate the presentation. Sorry, I'm just trying to read some notes. We're on to our last presentation, so Jana, we have, I don't know, 20, 36, 34 minutes left in the scheduled time, so we'll get started. And if we leave a few minutes for question-and-answer at the end, I think that'll be great. So, thanks, Sara, and on to Jana.

>>Jana Ganion: Terrific. Hello, everyone. I just want to do a quick sound check.

>>James Jensen: Great. 

>>Jana Ganion: Okay. Fabulous. So, next slide please.

I just want to say how delighted I am to join you. I am in the ancestral lands of the Wiyot people. I really want to thank James Jensen and all the organizers of this webinar. I'm particularly excited to talk about the topic today: "Organizing for the Transition to a Cleaner and More Sustainable Energy Future," or as we think about it, how we decarbonize as we move forward to a resilient, zero-emission daily lifestyle. And just sort of by way of setting place, the Blue Lake Rancheria tribe is located in far Northwestern California, about five miles inland from the Pacific Coast in a rural and isolated area that we term "behind the Redwood curtain." Blue Lake Rancheria is a very small tribe in terms of land base and population but with a large jurisdictional and governmental services footprint relative to its size, including co-manager of the Mad River, which is the source of the region's drinking water and a significant Blue Lake Rancheria cultural resource repository.  

So, when organizing for this clean energy and climate resilience transition the Blue Lake Rancheria first clarified its context. And we've heard about this in this session so far from multiple angles. Studying the full picture of the climate crisis globally, nationally, regionally, and locally has been crucial to decision-making and investment project by project and a key contributor to certain successes that the tribe has had. So, as I'm taking us through BLR's context I'm hoping it will have many resonances for you all even though the details will likely be different.

So, global warming and related issues make local issues larger, and they've combined and cascaded into multiple issues simultaneously. As just one example, as shown in this graph, oceans are warming at a dramatic rate. And of course, oceans absorb about 90 percent of the total global temperature increases as well as a lot of CO2, which makes them much warmer, more acidic, and rising. Issues on the ground already include power and telecommunications outages. They're more frequent, larger duration, and they're both planned and unplanned. And it's been essential, really, to reexamine typical vulnerabilities that the tribe has faced for the last century for sure through a climate crisis lens to better understand the mix of solutions we need from here forward, which are much, much different from decades and centuries past. So, keeping up to date with the global data, as shown in this chart here on the ocean heat increases, has been crucial to our decision-making and just – I always like to start out these conversations with that context. Next slide, please.

Blue Lake Rancheria is finding, as are others, that the climate crisis is expensive. 2020 was the highest rate of billion-dollar disasters from climate and weather issues in the US ever. And 2021 and 2022 to date are very close to this rate. In addition to, of course, the precious lives that are lost or shortened, severe damage is happening to infrastructure, including our utilities. The extreme heat and extreme cold that disrupted Texas utilities and others is a call to decarbonize as we improve resilience at the same time. And we also see complicating factors, like the prices of oil and gas are high and volatile. And for Blue Lake Rancheria and many tribes that are in remote areas, they are vulnerable to supply disruptions. So – and when those disruptions happen energy and infrastructure are severely impacted, and by extension tribal economies and social programs are impacted. And I'll talk a little bit about a case study of that in a second. So, identifying energy solutions that are clean, don't contribute to pollution in our communities, de-risk and diversify from reliance on oil and gas and other supply chain disruptions and costs is important, with of course the co-benefit being greenhouse gas reductions. Next slide, please.

So, once we have that global picture the issues, we see on the ground nearby start to make more sense and give us an organizational and investment direction. Extreme heat and wildfires and wildfire smoke are now chronic here. They're all amplified by the warming climate, extended drought, warming forest and vegetation, and warming soils. This photo is from September 11, 2020 when the entire West Coast was on fire with some of the largest wildfires ever recorded. The same situation occurred in 2021, and we are fairly certain it will be the same in 2022. 

Public safety power shutoffs in investor-owned utility territories in California are planned power outages that prevent wildfires from the electrical grid. These are now annual, projected to last two to ten days, and be necessary for the next decade at least. We're seeing heat domes over the entire Western US. In 2020 and 2021 these created rolling grid outages. And in 2022, for our region in California those rolling outages are predicted as a certainty this year. 

The Western US is experiencing a megadrought, which is a drought lasting two or more decades. This is the worst drought in more than 1200 years, and a recent set of studies quantified that human-caused climate change is responsible for kind of a specific percentage: 42 percent of the soil moisture deficit in the last 22 years that have overlapped with this drought. Over the last two summers it was 120 degrees in Los Angeles, 116 degrees in Portland, Oregon. These events of course take lives, drain resources, and impact many of our critical infrastructure systems. Part of the tribal government's investment strategy is to de-silo emergency and blue-sky operations and place monetary value on continuity of operations of its economic enterprises and social programs, place a value on the ability to combat climate change, and reduce risk to critical infrastructure. And we've placed a value, a monetary value on the ability to provide emergency services. Next slide, please.

So, we also had to get clear on the regional risks, and there's a bunch of them. Key parts of our region's energy infrastructure are set to be inundated by sea level rise within the next several decades and this includes rising groundwater tables and increased flooding from storms – all of these combined. Humboldt County, the coastline here is experiencing the fastest net sea level rise rate on the Pacific Coast due to a combination of land subsidence and warming oceans. And this causes pretty severe impacts – so, local infrastructure, including the region's anchor natural gas power plant and a local nuclear waste repository, which is just 14 miles away as the crow flies from the Blue Lake Rancheria. Next slide, please.

In addition – I won't spend a lot of time on this; it's fairly unique to us here, but it does impact the entire Pacific Coast – we have a triple junction of faults off – just offshore capable of creating a 9.0 or greater earthquake and associated tsunamis. The entire Pacific Coast may experience this at the same time, and reports are that we are about 100 years or so overdue for the big one, so we are preparing for that. And due to our rural, isolated, sort of lower population region, we may not be the first priority for response. Next slide, please.

We – this slide shows the one ten-inch natural gas pipeline that serves the region. It runs through seismically active mountainous areas and is vulnerable to rupture. If that happens, not only will direct use of natural gas be suspended but the region's anchor natural gas electrical plant will be out of service as well, which means the grid-connected areas of the region – and there are parts of tribal nations here that are not grid-connected – but the grid-connected areas will be without power until service is restored. Next slide, please.

The region is also service by one 115-kilovolt transmission line that can only import about half the region's electrical use. The rest is generated primarily by that local natural gas power plant. In 2020 PG&E, our local investor-owned utility, put in some switch gear to turn the area in green in this photo into an islandable grid segment, and this buffers us against outages, particularly those where we don't have a wildfire risk, so we can be kept energized while other areas are taken offline. We can then deliver emergency services to those areas as needed, et cetera. So, it was an enormous benefit to the region. However, if that anchor natural gas powerplant goes down, the Humboldt Island, as we call it, won't work either. So, it's good to know, obviously, where actual electrons come from so we can make decisions about where to invest in segmentation, including microgrids. Next slide, please.

So, in organizing the Blue Lake Rancheria's transition to clean energy and a sustainable future, all of these planning contexts converge into a relatively simple strategy: Transition to climate resilience infrastructure ASAP and prioritize the lifeline sectors, starting with energy but including water, transportation, communications, and food. And when these are done well the benefits begin to stack up: continuity of operations, economic supports, improvements in community health, increased employment, and others. And crucially, we analyze and implement lowest or zero-carbon solutions to avoid making global warming and the underlying cause of these disasters far worse. Next slide, please.

So, a little bit about our energy systems. The Blue Lake Rancheria has three microgrids in operation and one other in design. All of the tribe's microgrids have the same basic characteristics. They can operate grid-connected and sort of optimize for use of solar and storage and conduct – essentially energy arbitrage to lower costs. And then, they can seamlessly island from the grid and stand alone under their own power and reconnect to the grid as needed. They primarily use solar photovoltaics and battery storage, and we do have some legacy preexisting diesel generators, which are used as a last resort if the solar and storage are exhausted in islanded mode.

The microgrids are connected with advanced building energy management systems and coordinated with the microgrid controls, and they all include electric vehicle charging stations. The tribe owns and operates all of its microgrids internally. It formed a tribal utility authority for this purpose. It purchased a portion of the 12-kilovolt distribution system from Pacific Gas & Electric to be able to build the microgrids and its electrical systems with a greater amount of autonomy. They achieve a cost savings for us of about 30 percent per year on average and achieve about a 40 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. And I want to echo Sara's comments: The first 40 percent is relatively easy; the remaining 60 percent is harder. Next slide, please. 

So, this is a quick dive into the details of one of the tribe's microgrids. It's located at our fuel complex and convenience store and it was built as a replicable resilience package. To operate and maintain its microgrids, the tribe is small so it has created public and private partnerships for capacity and project deployments. A key partner is our local university, Cal Poly Humboldt and the Schatz Energy Research Center there. This research and academic partnership has served the tribe to improve education and workforce development as well as its energy systems. Students, including many tribal students from Cal Poly, often do field study at the Blue Lake Rancheria and many of their efforts have been the precursors to the deployment of our clean energy projects.

The trivet has sourced funding from the California Energy Commission's research and development fund called EPIC and the technical assistance from the CEC and the California Public Utilities Commission and also has been lucky enough to obtain some in-kind contributions from Pacific Gas & Electric national lab partners and private technology partners. So, as others have mentioned, funding and financing these projects is always a bit of a puzzle or a matrix and we've been very fortunate to have good partners in these areas.

I'll say one note. For the 109 federally recognized tribes in California and the dozens of non-federally recognized tribes, California is investing heavily in climate resilience and clean energy transitions. Tribal nations are eligible for a wide variety of funding from the state, and specifically named as eligible applicants. Of course, there are always jurisdictional items to be worked out where tribes wish to use state funds, like limited waivers of sovereign immunity, but the Blue Lake Rancheria has found that these tribal state partnerships are productive with the clear knowledge that states are unique in their approaches to climate and clean energy concerns and relationships with tribes, and of course California is its own – has its own strategy, which may not be the case in other states.

So, with that said, I guess one of the questions would be why create a separate microgrid for a fuel station? And the quick answer is these facilities are very common in tribal nations. They can supply all the lifeline sectors that we talked about earlier: energy, food, water, communications, and transportation, which now includes of course electric vehicle charging, but they can only do this if they have power. And it's important where these small sort of commercial buildings, commercial clusters are the only public-facing emergency resource in the region, as we found out in 2019. Next slide, please.

In 2019 PG&E, Pacific Gas & Electric, conducted its first public safety power shutoff. And remember, these are proactive electrical grid shutdowns to prevent wildfires, so it's sort of two evils in the eyes of the people who are attempting to do both. It lasted 30 hours in our region and in some cases several days across 30 counties and millions of people in Northern California. The tribe's microgrids islanded and provided power to its central campus, which in turn allowed it to serve over – well over probably ten percent of the region from this small cluster of facilities.

So, I'm just going to do a quick list of things because I think it's important to think about extended power outages and our ability to provide certain services. So, we were able to deliver electricity to charge communication devices. We were able to deliver electricity to charge electric vehicles. Those electric vehicles were then used to charge some home refrigerators and communication devices. We were able to supply gas, diesel, propane to fuel both vehicles and emergency generators, including at the regional IHS tribal medical clinic. We were able to deliver ice, water, and food, and the power sustained internet and cellular systems and ATMs. Businesses and emergency responders were accessing Wi-Fi from our location. And we were able to provide critical medical housing in the hotel, serving those who needed powered medical equipment, and we were credited with saving four lives in the event. And last but not least, refrigeration to keep food cold and lifesaving medicines like insulin cold, which was a clear service that was needed in the community.

So, we proved the clean energy transition benefit stack in this event and in many since. And I'll just add that heat dome events plus wildfires of the last three years, we've islanded the microgrids to ease pressure on the regional grids and helped avoid major grid disruptions in our region. And it's also important to think through how we're going to keep power to provide cooling shelters in extreme heat events, clean air shelters with air filtration for wildfire smoke and wildfire events, and other needs such as COVID testing and vaccination sites that, again, in our experience have all happened at the same time. Next slide, please.

So, I know we're getting toward the end of our presentations here, so I'm going to go a little bit faster. I just want to say that we often get the question: What does decarbonized resilience and the clean energy transition mean for jobs? Well, the short answer is we've had a 30 percent increase in employment since 2013 in these sectors. And I think it is because of all the details here and the fact that when you set a bold strategy it leads to long-term economic development through strategic partnerships and more projects, and all of that leads to more jobs. Next slide, please.

I'm just going to briefly touch on a couple of wraparound supports for our clean energy transition. As the tribe boosted its own resilience, it also built intertribal, regional, state, and national collaborations to identify and fill gaps in supports needed for regional resilience. One example is the RTIC, the Resiliency Training and Innovation Center, which has brought key trainings to this rural and tribal region so that tribes do not have to travel multiple days to access key resources. Next slide, please.

And because the training and workforce development has been effective, the tribe is building a dedicated facility to house these initiatives, the TOMA Resilience Campus. The name may change but the campus will remain the same. Overall, this facility is focused on developing solutions for clean energy and community resilience. It will have its own facility scale microgrid with solar and storage, and that will be nested in our community microgrid. So, this sounds complicated, but what it does is allow us to test the idea of phased expansions within microgrids. So, you do your best to plan up front for you sizing of your energy systems, and then immediately there's new facilities that are added. We're adding the TOMA. We're adding a medical facility. And all of those are going to go within our existing microgrids. So, how do we make sure those fit from a technical standpoint within the energy system? And this project will allow us to design and test for that question.

And I'll echo Sara's comments about tribal government's need to remain fluid. This project is currently under pressure from dramatically increased construction costs. So, the design review decisions are testing our commitments to solar and storage and net energy buildings against the need to find cost savings. We're going to make it work, but I just want to be very transparent about the fact that these decisions, to echo the other presenters, are never straightforward or easy. Next slide, please.

I won't go into detail here to be respectful of time, but these are some of our other clean energy and resilience components across the BLR Nation. Each one has its own development strategy using lowest carbon solutions and all are crucial as economy-enabling supports that together create a benefit stack across social, cultural, environmental, and economic values. So, energy efficiency, it's – we're always refreshing our strategy here. Sara's descriptions of how energy efficiency is effective mirror the results we're seeing at the Rancheria. Our electrical use is level even as square footages increase dramatically. 

Efficiency is also more and more important as time of use electrical rates increasingly support reducing costs with close management of usage over a 24-hour period and during seasonal fluctuation of rates. So, more on that in the Q&A if you have questions, but essentially, energy efficiency and conservation are a core part of our energy strategy.

And then, of course, there's building and transportation electrification projects. There's lots of details there. And we're investigating what offshore wind energy – this is floating wind energy on the Pacific Coast – will mean for increases to cleanliness and reliability here for the Blue Lake Rancheria. And offshore wind will require to scale up transmission upgrades, which provides an opportunity for the Blue Lake Rancheria and other tribal nations to use transmission upgrades to improve reliability. So, as I said, right now we can't import enough electricity to fulfill our needs here. Offshore wind may be a catalyst for improvements on that score. Next slide, please.

So, lastly, I just want to say that more climate-resilient infrastructure is needed in tribal nations. We need to drive down our carbon emissions to stop the carnage at its present level and try to make it better. The Blue Lake Rancheria has exercised the idea of early actor advantage. We pilot innovations to learn which directions to go in. This has allowed the tribe to avoid impacts it would otherwise have been subject to. And I think lastly the tribe – the final bullet here is that the tribe is exploring incorporation of climate justice principles and their many forms. 

So, I'd like to quote from a recent intergovernmental panel on climate change, a 2022 report, that incorporates the principles of climate justice. The link is in the "Further reading" slide, which is next, but I'd like to close with this quote, that the term "climate justice," while used in different ways and in different contexts by different communities generally includes three principles: distributive justice, which refers to the allocation of burdens and benefits among individuals, nations, and generations; procedural justice, which refers to who decides and participates in decision-making; and recognition justice, which entails basic respect and robust engagement with and fair consideration of diverse cultures and perspectives.

The Blue Lake Rancheria started its clean energy transition in 2011. At the Plenary for Tribal Energy Summit in 2014 the tribe forwarded the consideration of transition, a managed, just transition and diversification of energy portfolios to clean energy as an urgent strategy, and today the Blue Lake Rancheria is in a much better position, having incorporated the strategy. And in hindsight, this has also worked to strengthen distributed, procedural, and recognition justice in this climate work. So, the next slide please.

Here's resources for further reading. These are sort of my top go-to – the top two are my go-to sources for climate data. I hope this was helpful and useful. My e-mail is on the cover slide. Please don't hesitate to contact me to discuss this further. Thank you. 

>>James Jensen: Excellent. Thank you, Jana, so much. A wonderful presentation. A lot of good information there and thoughtful comments. So, thank you for that. With that, we do have a little bit of time for some Q&A and we have some questions, but if you have one out there and you want to submit it, there's probably time to get to it. So, let's go through what we have quickly here.

I think we had a question for you, Tessa. And this is "Do you have any resources for – at ETI to deal with hydrogen-related questions?" 

>>Tessa Greco: Yeah, certainly. We have a number of technical experts embedded within the national lab system as well as our DOE hydrogen offices at – or, offices that deal with hydrogen. I'd be happy to put you in touch. If that person wants to reach out and send me a quick e-mail, I can certainly put you in touch with some good resources for hydrogen-specific questions. 

>>James Jensen: Excellent. And then, a quick one here also for you, Tessa: "Where within DOE does the Energy Transition Initiative reside?" 

>>Tessa Greco: I'm sorry, can you repeat that question? 

>>James Jensen: Yeah, no question. Where within DOE does the Energy Transition Initiative reside? I think it's EERE, correct?

>>Tessa Greco: Yeah, sorry about that. Correct. It's in our Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy in the Office of Strategic Programs. 

>>James Jensen: Great. Thank you. And this is – I don't know if we have an answer here on this panel, but I think it's also part of the ETI program, but has the Hopi or Navajo engaged with the program? Or are you aware of any efforts to work with those communities?

>>Tessa Greco: Great question. I am not aware of any efforts with Hopi or Navajo tribes as of yet. But certainly, the ETIPP program itself is open to applications from any community, self-defined-and-described community across the nation. We certainly encourage that engagement.

>>James Jensen: Thank you, Tessa. All right. So, a question for our case studies now, I think. First one: "Do you do any consulting?" So, I guess these are for – these are for our technical experts – or, our kind of thought leaders here. "Is there any consulting that you provide for figuring out how to start a project?"

>>Anthony Giacobbe: Hey, James, this is Anthony. Yeah, that's something that we're definitely looking into and would be happy to do. One of the reasons we created Seneca Solar was really to try and do that and, again, duplicate some of the projects and successes that we've had in the Seneca Nation territory. So, if anybody is interested in learning more, finding out what we've done out here, we'd be happy to help.

>>Jana Ganion: This is Jana. So, I'll just chime in and say the Blue Lake Rancheria has provided friendly consultation in the form of microgrid tours and phone calls and that kind of thing and certainly would be glad to talk over situations with people. The tribe has been very generous with my time, so to the extent that what we are doing might be helpful, please reach out to me and we can have a conversation.

>>Sara Drescher: And I will also say – this is Sara – FCPC has done certain things in the past, oftentimes at the request of DOE. They will get us in touch with somebody who's looking for some advice. Our former digester, we used to have a specific consulting arm that myself and another gentleman ran and I think now it's just more informal.  

>>James Jensen: All right. Thanks, all. A question for the three of you again, the thought leaders, kind of. What do you see as barriers for financing for tribal projects? Can you just kind of list some of the challenges that you've had with finances? And no order: Anybody can jump in there.

>>Jana Ganion: This is Jana Ganion. I'll start by saying that – I'll immediately make some wide-reaching statements that in many details may not prove true, but I think what we've seen is that there's a mismatch sometimes between the infrastructure that tribal nations need to build and the approaches or the risk perceptions taken by banks and conventional lenders. We saw this a little bit in the past sort of financing sessions where, as one example, social impact investors were looking for projects at the $100 million mark or above, and many tribal projects are between zero and $20 million, $30 million, $40 million, $50 million. And so, there was a gap in sort of the size and scope of these projects as it related to finance availability. 

And then, lastly, I guess, the idea of a patient payback when it comes to energy and other critical infrastructure builds often doesn't match with investor ambitions for rate of return or timelines for investment. So, we're seeing some of that getting talked about in a real way, but I think we have a lot of work to do to educate the financial community around the low-risk investment profile of critical infrastructure in tribal nations.

>>Sara Drescher: And this is Sara. I will say that I think Jana is right on. There is a definite gap. I think it also, though, depends on scale and tolerance. There are a number of federal sources of funding and not only through DOE. I know this is a DOE webinar but there are several other programs, including no-cost, zero-interest loan programs, which I haven't looked at in quite some time and may have changed at this point, but USDA and a number of other groups that there are other sources of funding from if you're looking solely for the federal level of funding. 

When it comes to the – looking for outside investors or partnering with utilities on projects, there are a lot of opportunities. Again, you have to consider the regulatory system you're in, the scale of project, and the tolerance that you as a tribe have, because then sometimes you end up flipping the dynamic so that you're the one receiving a little less benefit in years one through five or whatever situation the tax investor is in. So, there are various components that make those a little bit challenging, but there are opportunities.

>>James Jensen: Excellent. Thanks. Thanks so much, Jana and Sara. With that, we're kind of – well, we're a little bit over on time so we're going to wrap it up, I guess. I would make one last observation, and that is our three case studies here, well, what I see is exceptional leadership in the three individuals that spoke and their kind of long-term employment at their jobs, at the tribes they work for, and I think that's essential to be able to build successful programs at the tribal workforce, kind of the duration that they've been supported by the tribe. And I'm sure it goes hand in hand with being successful in your job: If you're successful, you can have that duration. But it seems essential to kind of build that talent within the tribe to be able to do these successes. 

So, with that, thanks so much, Anthony, Sara, and Jana. Wonderful presentations – and Tessa as well. I was just talking about the case studies there. With that, let's close here. Our final slide, we show the remaining presentations of the series. Next, on August 3rd we have the "Technologies of the Energy Transition." It will be held on August 3rd at 11:00 AM Mountain Time, just like all of our webinars are. And thanks so much to all of our presenters today. And with that, this concludes the webinar. Thank you for your interest and attendance and we look forward to you joining us on future webinars. Good day. 

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