Tribes Leading the Way to a More Sustainable Energy Future Text Version

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>>James Jenson: 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 "Tribes Leading the Way to a More Sustainable Energy Future," is the final 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 this webinar. There is a possibility that they're already posted, but I haven't confirmed that at this time. 

Everyone will receive a post-webinar email with a 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 each presentation. This is a little different than how we've done it previously in the past, for those of you that come here often. So please make sure you're submitting questions as presenters go today, and we should have time to address those questions immediately following each 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 in your question. 

We are also interested in gathering webinar topic ideas for the 2023 Tribal Energy Webinar Series. If you have any ideas for potential topics that you would like us to consider, please submit those also via the question button located in the control panel. You can submit those at any time today during the webinar. 

Let's get started with opening remarks from Lizana Pierce. Ms. Pierce is the senior engineer and deployment supervisor for the Office of Indian Energy Policy and Programs, and duty stationed at Golden, Colorado. She is responsible for the execution of the deployment program, which is national in scope. Specifically, the deployment program includes financial assistance, technical assistance, and education and outreach. She also implements national funding opportunities, and administers some of the resultant tribal energy project grants and agreements. She has nearly 30 years of experience in project development and management, and has been assisting tribes in developing energy resources for over 20 years. Ms. Pierce holds a bachelor's of science degree in mechanical engineering from Colorado State University. Lizana, the virtual floor is now yours.

>>Lizana Pierce: 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, and bring electric power and service to Indian lands and homes. 

To provide this assistance, our deployment program partners with Indian tribes and Alaska native villages to overcome the barriers to energy development. Our deployment program is comprised of a three-prong 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, the webinar series is intended to provide attendees with information on tools and resources to develop and implement energy plans, programs, and projects, to highlight tribal energy case studies, which you'll hear some today, and identify business strategies tribes can use to expand their energy options and develop sustainable local economies. 

This year's webinar series, entitled, "Empowering Native Communities and Sustaining Future Generations," has been the focus – focused on changing energy landscapes and how tribes can position themselves to participate in the energy transition to benefit their communities and future generations. 

In this final webinar of the series, we want to share some tribal energy success stories. We are currently in a time of unprecedented opportunity for tribal energy projects, and this opportunity is the result of the confluence of substantial federal support and ever-increasing urgency to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and improve resilience of our energy systems. 

We hope that these case studies will both inspire ideas of what you can do in your tribal community, and also motivate you by demonstrating that the inevitable changes of all tribal energy projects can be overcome. 

We hope this webinar and the webinar series as a whole is useful to you, but we also welcome your feedback, so please let us know if there are ways we can make the series better. You can send that feedback to our main email box at IndianEnergy@HQ.DOE.gov. 

And before I turn the floor back to James, I did want to personally thank the presenters for giving up their time and preparing for and presenting on today's webinar. So thank you, AlexAnna, John, and Scott. And with that, the virtual floor is yours, James. 

>>James Jenson: Thanks, Lizana. Before we get started, I first wanted to introduce all of today's speakers. Our first presenter will be Lizana Pierce, who we just introduced, and who just spoke. And then following Lizana, we will have AlexAnna Salmon. AlexAnna is the president of the Igiugig Village Council. She was raised in the Village of Igiugig, and is Yupik and Aleut. She has a dual bachelor's degree in Native American studies and anthropology from Dartmouth College, and a master's in rural development from the University of Alaska Fairbanks. 

Following AlexAnna, we will hear from John Flores. John is the director of the San Pasqual Environmental Department, and manager of the San Pasqual Domestic Water Department. He has worked for the San Pasqual Band of Mission Indians since 2011. He has worked in Indian Country for over 15 years on tribal environmental, water, and wastewater issues. He holds a bachelor's degree in political science and US history from University of California Berkeley. He also received his GIS certification from Mesa Junior College in San Diego. 

Our final presentation today will come from Scott Clow. Scott is the environmental programs director for the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe. He has worked for the tribe since 2006, and has been working on renewable energy issues and opportunities for much of that time. Scott has a BA in chemistry with a minor in environmental studies. 

Thanks to each of our presenters for making the time to join us today. With that, let's get started with our first presentation. Lizana, we'll be pulling up your slides, and then you can get started. Thank you.

>>Lizana Pierce: Thank you, James. As a precursor to the presentations you'll hear today, I wanted to give the attendees an overview of the Office of Indian Energy Program, and some additional examples of tribal energy projects _____, and the tangible impacts collectively these projects have had in Indian Country and Alaska. Next slide, please. 

So James previously introduced me, so we'll go on, although I would like to say that I've really had the pleasures and privilege of working with Indian tribes and tribal entities for nearly 25 years, and I still learn something nearly every day. Thank you. Next slide, please. 

So as an introduction, as advocated for and by tribes, and incorporated into the Energy Policy Act of 2005, the Office of Indian Energy was stood up in 2011 as one of about a dozen assistant secretarial level offices within the Department of Energy. Specifically, the office is charged by Congress to promote Indian energy development, efficiency, and use, reduce or stabilize energy costs, enhance and strengthen Indian tribal energy and economic infrastructure, and bring electric power and service to Indian lands. 

To aid us in accomplishing our mission, the office receives insight on issues affecting energy and infrastructure development on tribal lands, and guidance from tribal leaders through Indian Country Energy and Infrastructure Working Group, or ICEIWG. 

And I won't go through each of the pictures on the right, but these are additional examples of successful tribal energy projects that were co-funded by the Office of Indian Energy, and you'll see more throughout the presentation. Next slide, please. 

So the office is currently comprised of 14 federal staff duty stationed in Washington, DC, and Golden, Colorado, and in Anchorage, Alaska. And we also have some limited contractors _____ headquarters, and a contractor team in Golden, Colorado, though primarily supporting the financial assistance grants and agreements across the nation. 

The office also receives support from DOE's Office of Energy Efficiency, Renewable Energy, in our Golden field office, the DOE national laboratories, primarily the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, NREL, and Sandia National Laboratory, and other local technical assistance providers. 

Specifically, the department program consists of seven federal staff located in Colorado and Alaska, and eight support service contractors, primarily in Colorado, although we have a few – one in Miami, one in Canada. Next slide, please. 

So I just wanted to sort of introduce you to the deployment team and the federal team members. Myself, Tweedie Doe, Mike Stevenson, Josh Gregory, and Dan Smith. Also shown is Dr. Tommy Janes. He's my deputy. He's primarily involved in funding opportunities of special projects, and not necessarily specifically in the grants. And now shown here is Allen Ferbitsky, who's also duty stationed with Dan Smith in Anchorage, Alaska, and his primary response – focus is technical assistance to Alaska villages. Next slide, please. 

And one this slide are members of the deployment contractor team, and they include Jen Luna, Jami Alley, Kris Venema, James Jenson, who you heard introduce today, Jessica Bekker, Mike Vehar, Nathan, and Brandon. Next slide, please. 

So a little more on the deployment program. I think as we said in the introduction, to achieve our mission and address barriers, the Office of Indian Energy offers and the deployment team executes financial assistance through competitive grants, technical assistance offered at no charge to Indian tribes and tribal entities, and education and capacity building. 

These three prongs are intended to assist Indian tribes and tribal entities overcome the unique regulatory, technical, and economic challenges to developing their vast energy resources _____ how they choose. Next slide, please. 

So today, we're going to focus on the financial assistance aspects of the deployment program and the results of those investments. Between 2010 and 2021, DOE's Office of Indian Energy has invested over $114 million in more than 200 tribal energy projects across the contiguous 48 states and Alaska. These projects, with cost share, are valued at nearly $200 million. 

Through these grants, the Office of Indian Energy continues its efforts of partnership with native communities to maximize the deployment of clean energy solutions for the benefit of _____ communities and Alaska natives. And by the way, this shown here on the map is an interactive map from our website. You can zoom in, zoom out, get summaries and presentations or final reports of the projects there as they're completed. We also have a sortable table as well, if that's the preference. So if you're interested in any of these projects, you can see that on our website. Next slide, please. 

So the Department of Energy projects on the previous slide have had some really tangible impacts, I believe, in American Indian and Alaska native communities across the nation. Of the $114 million invested by the office, 75 percent, or $85 million, has been invested in hardware installation projects or deployment projects. These projects have – are valued, with cost share, at $160 million, and they've had, in my opinion, some real tangible impacts to over 100 American Indian and Alaska Native communities. 

These positive impacts have included more than 43 megawatts of new generation installed, more than 10 megawatt hours of battery storage, collectively, over $13.7 million saved by these communities every year, and for the life of the system, we estimate nearly $300 million saved for those communities. That results in about a $3.50 savings for every $1.00 DOE has invested. And the projects collectively have affected over 8,600 tribal buildings in Indian Country. 

Just some more examples on the right, pictures of the projects that were co-funded. Starting clockwise in the top right, we have Huslia Tribal Council. They've installed a community-scale biomass project to heat their community buildings. And below that, Soboba Band in California installed a one megawatt solar system. In the bottom right, Rosebud Sioux in South Dakota installed a solar panel for lower income homes. And then on the bottom left, we have Fort Mojave Band and Aha Macav Power Services, who installed a 2.3 megawatt solar system. And in the upper left, Alaska Village Electric Corp, in partnership with Alaska Native Corporation, installed 900 kilowatts turbine to power the communities of Bethel and Oscarville. And you can see the presentations for many of these projects from our annual program review on our website. Next slide, please. 

As I just said, we recently held our annual program review. It is a forum for tribes to meet and learn from each other, and to share success and challenges, an opportunity for networking and learning, and we heard from I think over 40 tribes tell their stories and their projects. And you'll hear from three of those today. 

As we know that many in Indian Country are exploring energy options, this event is also open to other tribes in Indian Country as a whole. Next slide, please. 

And although the best case is for the project participants to speak for themselves and tell their stories, I think there are many more out there, and I just wanted to give you a few examples. 

So these are examples of tribes in Colorado, Arizona, Nebraska, and Alaska who have deployed clean energy technology in their communities. Starting in the top right and going clockwise, we have Ute Mountain Ute Tribe installed one megawatt solar. You'll hear more about that today. 

In the lower right, we have San Xavier Band installed solar on their education building in 2021. And in the lower left of the slide is a photo of the RivGen system installed by Igiugig Village and their partners, along with storage, energy storage for a microgrid system, and you'll hear from that a little bit later in the webinar today as well. And in the upper left, the Winnebago Tribe in Nebraska solar system installation is shown. Next slide, please. 

And again, I love pictures, and I think they tell the story better than I, but some more examples of tribe in Arizona, Montana, and Alaska. Again, starting in the top right and going clockwise, we have the Fort Mojave Band, who installed a 2.3 megawatt – I think I already had a picture of that. Sorry about that. In the lower right, the Blackfeet Community College recently installed a 53.2 kilowatt solar system on their campus buildings in Montana. And then to the right, we have pictures of the installation by Nuvista _____ Electric Cooperative _____ Kwethluk, who installed 670 kilowatt hour battery storage. 

And these are just a few examples of the projects that we've had the pleasure to co-fund and be a very small part of over the years. And all the presentations of the 40 plus projects that were presented in the program _____ are on our website as well. Next slide, please. 

I also wanted to let folks know, if they haven't heard already, that the Office of Indian Energy announced on November 1st two funding opportunities collectively valued at $35 million in DOE funding for clean energy technology deployment on tribal lands, and the other to power unelectrified tribal buildings. Applications under these funding opportunities are due February 9th, 2023 and February 23rd, 2023, respectively. And you can find more information on the funding opportunity announcements on the IE Exchange website at IE-Exchange.energy.gov. We also recently had a couple of webinars for each of these funding opportunity announcements, and those are available on the Office of Indian Energy website. Next slide, please. 

So this is a screenshot of our website, and included on that main page is our contact information, so please reach out if you have questions, need assistance. We can try to help you – direct you to resources throughout our office, across the department, and other agencies. You can also subscribe to our email newsletters, receive information directly on funding opportunity announcements, upcoming events, or stories about tribal energy projects. And we also invite you to join us on Facebook and Twitter. Next slide, please. 

So again, thank you for your time and attention. Again, you can reach us on our main help desk phone number and email for more information, and on Twitter and Facebook at DOEIndianEnergy. Next slide, please. 

And in closing, again, more examples, but I did just want to say that the Office of Indian Energy's goal is really to assist tribes in achieving their energy vision. Next slide, please. 

And again, thank you for your interest and your attention. And now, we'll hear directly from those making some of these projects reality within their communities. Thank you. 

>>James Jenson: Thanks so much, Lizana. We do have a couple of questions that came in, so we'll get to those now, and then we'll move on with AlexAnna's presentation immediately after that. 

So just a couple of questions, Lizana. The first one is can you elaborate at all on the Office of Indian Energy's relationship with other DOE programs? For instance, they've called OCED, the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations, and their EIRRA program, and EIRRA stands for Energy Improvements in Rural or Remote Areas. Do we have any direct coordination or interaction with those programs? 

>>Lizana Pierce: Yes. So as we said, we're a pretty small office, a very small office in comparison to some of these others in DOE. But yes, we do try to coordinate across the department, and especially with programs that are – have opportunities for tribes. We've provided some guidance, and we're here as a resource to those offices. We have provided some – supported some application reviews, and providing guidance and answering questions to many of those offices. 

But we also have our own mission, as well, so we try to balance those, if you will. 

>>James Jenson: Thanks, Lizana. Another kind of broad question for you, and you may not be able to answer specifically, but what are investments like looking with all the Build funding, and I know a lot of that funding is not coming through our office, but specifically – I mean, that does come through our office, do we work mostly with competitive grants, or non-competitive grants? And if they are competitive, how do we ensure that the tribes are empowered to apply for these grants? 

>>Lizana Pierce: Okay, so to clarify, the Office of Indian Energy did not get any direct funding through _____ infrastructure bill or IRA. However, like I said, we are working with various offices, trying to assist them, to ensure that not only tribes, but other underserved communities, have access to these opportunities. There is the Office of Economic Diversity, which helps the various offices and tries to ensure that the benefits of those funds are actually going to communities that have been underserved in the past. Did I answer the question, James? Or did I miss it? 

>>James Jenson: I was a little distracted answering a different question, but I think so. I think the question – did you address anything about competitive versus non-competitive grants? 

>>Lizana Pierce: Yeah. So – 

>>James Jenson: And how we are able – 

>>Lizana Pierce: Yeah. As I said, we didn't receive any funding. Each office is directed by law, by statute. A lot of those statutes are very prescriptive on how that money gets executed, and to whom, and for what. So I can't really speak generally about that. There are prizes that are being offered. There's technical assistance that's being offered. There's direct funding through formula grants and competitive grants. 

The couple that come to mind specifically for tribes in formula grants are the EECBG Energy Efficiency Conservation and Renewable Energy Formula Grant. I think they just released their formula, and I believe applications are due in March 2023. 

The other one is the Grid 40101D, and that also has a formula grant process, and very prescriptive from Congress on who's eligible and what it's for. So those are the two at least formula grants that I would recommend you take a look at. 

There are links to that information through the Office of Indian Energy's current funding opportunity website, as well as other opportunities we see throughout DOE, and throughout other agencies that we try to capture. 

>>James Jenson: Thanks, Lizana. And then specifically they asked if our funding opportunities are competitive, and yes, they all are competitive. 

>>Lizana Pierce: Yes.

>>James Jenson: And we do have a TA program that is not competitive per se. If you qualify, then you qualify for it. 

>>Lizana Pierce: Yes. It's by request, and at no charge. We can offer assistance within our funds and within our capabilities. But typically, the Office of Indian Energy funding opportunities are competitive. 

>>James Jenson: Excellent. Thanks, Lizana. That's all we have at this time. Lizana will still be on the webinar, so if anybody has further questions, you know, throughout the webinar, then submit those questions and I'll ask them to Lizana during subsequent Q&As. 

All right. So with that, thank you, Lizana, and we'll move on to our next presenter, AlexAnna. We've introduced you, and we'll bring your slides up, and then you can jump right into it. 

>>AlexAnna Salmon: [Foreign language spoken] while James pulls my slides up. There we go. It's an honor to be here today to present on our hydrokinetic journey. Next slide, please. Next slide, James. 

So this is our project location. I belong to the Village of Igiugig, like James mentioned. It's Yupik, Aleut, Athabascan homelands located in Southwest Alaska in a region commonly known as Bristol Bay. Next slide, please. Next slide, please, James. 

So Igiugig is one of the smallest nations in the United States, and I wanted to provide this example, this case study, as a way that our nations are really leading the way to a more sustainable future, and that we have the tools and wherewithal to make this happen. 

For example, this is our governance structure. We're a federally recognized tribe. We are Alaska Native, where we do have land-owning native corporations, which is different from the lower 48 and Indian Country. However, when we have our governance system that holds the people and values first, and working together for these renewable energy systems, we really have a unique situation where we have an ability for stable governance. This value system holds our relationship to our lands and waters as central and paramount. We have vision and long-term vision to think in spans of thousands of years, and by working together, we have land and site control. And so that's the purpose of this graphic, is just to show how we've been able to tie that together for a successful project. Next slide, please. 

And this type of governance, nation to nation, we have this ability to also work holistically with our energy infrastructure. Well, to work holistically – sorry. Here's a slide showing our project need. Igiugig Village has extremely high energy costs, like most of our northern communities. We're connected to a centralized electrical power grid, and the power plant is comprised of three diesel generators, each with 65 kilowatt generators, which produce 325 megawatts per year, using a total of just under 25,000 gallons of diesel fuel. 

So this picture in the right hand corner shows – I really appreciate it. We fly our fuel in in several thousand gallon increments on a very small runway, and this is a picture of the fuel plane actually coming in for a landing, right over the river generator as its sitting on shore. 

So our tribes are able to set long-term visions. Igiugig's energy vision is to improve energy self-sufficiency using local renewable resources and village workforce to minimize environmental impact and maintain cultural identity. Next slide, please. 

So the goal for Igiugig – 

>>James Jenson: I'm sorry, the – 

>>AlexAnna Salmon: Oh, sorry. What's that? 

>>James Jenson: No, sorry for interrupting. I just want to let you know that the lag is quite long on your end. It's populating on our end much faster. So you may want to – if you have a hard copy or something, you can present off that. 

>>AlexAnna Salmon: I will adjust – yeah. I will adjust. Sorry, James. Thank you for letting me know. 

So the goal for Igiugig is to reduce our fuel – diesel fuel usage for electricity by 50 percent by 2030, while lowering energy costs and increasing system resiliency. Our focus areas are also holistic energy infrastructure, energy efficiency and conservation, our renewable energy, climate adaptation, capacity development. So I'm speaking today specifically on our renewable energy, and specifically our river hydro project. 

So the project objective is to acquire and install a smart microgrid and energy storage system capable of managing high-penetration renewable energy sources that will provide power to all Igiugig homes and facilities for sustainable energy supply and resilient operations.

So our year-round population here in Igiugig is about 70 people, and you can go to the next slide. So here are just some maps of the regional detail, and then the local detail, which is the – is harnessing power from the Kvichak River. And this shows specifically the sites of the RivGen deployment, and I want to recognize that our people have been living here for 8,000 plus years, or what we call time immemorial. And what I appreciate the most about this project is we have relied on our deep indigenous knowledge systems of place and our home to lead us into taking a technology that was an emerging technology, and bringing it through to proving. Next slide, please. 

And here's a close-up of the configuration of the RivGen in the water, and it connects to the shore through a buried line, and right to our buried line grid system, right on the road. And you can go two slides forward. I'm going to be talking about the phase one of our project. 

So we were a test site, and we began in 2007 towards this journey, and then became a hydrokinetic testing site. And we used a variety of funds, State of Alaska renewable energy funds, State of Alaska emerging tech funds, and then through this proving process, we selected one company to partner with, which is the Ocean Renewable Power Company, and here's a picture of our village and their leadership on the shores of Lake Iliamna, where the RivGen is deployed. 

We selected it because of its simple design and maintenance, the hire of local contractors and local workforce development, the opportunity to own this device tribally, and the long-term viability and also scalability of this device. Remember, we're only – a village that can run off of one or two 65 kilowatt generators. Next slide, please. 

So in phase one, a lot of the project funding came from the US Department of Energy Water Power Technology Office, and Ocean Renewable Power Company matched 50 percent for its patented marine renewable energy technology. And we perfected its deployment over several test seasons, and here's a picture of Igiugig owned equipment, Igiugig owned vessels also deployed this device, using our own local workforce. Next slide. 

It's a picture of the project in its entirety. Where the RivGen gets launched in Lake Iliamna, which is Alaska's largest lake – it's just sixth, or just after the Great Lakes. So we assemble it up in the lake, and it is floated down the Kvichak River to the project site you saw previously. And you can see in relation to the village, we're all fairly close. And it plugs right into the grid. 

And that other picture is the device actually on the bottom of the river. So the other reason this was selected was because of our fish population. Our Kvichak River supplies one of the last largest sockeye salmon runs in the world, and we have a very large smolt outmigration in the spring, and then the return of spawning sockeye salmon in the summer. And we didn't want a hydro device that would interfere with that, because fish come first where we live. Next slide, please. 

So phase one highlights that I just wanted to go over. Through this process, we were the – we became the first tribal entity to hold a Federal Energy Regulatory Commission hydrokinetic pilot license, which we're under for the next ten years, to about 2029. And we've so far recorded millions of sockeye salmon transiting past the device with no observed injuries or mortalities. 

We've had extreme weather conditions over the periods we've been testing the RivGen device. One of them was extreme cold weather, which created two frazil ice events, and I'll show further pictures of that. In the extremest situation, the device was actually floated to the surface, and was able to shed the ice and sink back to the bottom without disturbing anything, or damaging the device. 

And then we have the spring ice break-up, which in one season, over two feet of lake ice flowed safely over the device. So we've been observing for years. Next slide, please. 

We are still working on the smolt outmigration monitoring, and we have regular – or annual adaptive management team meetings, and our next one is coming up here in December, where we bring all the regulatory agencies together, and review our monitoring plan. And these are some of our partners that are listed. And we're trying to capture and prove that the smolt outmigration are also unharmed in this technology. 

And the RivGen float – I should explain it. It floats down to its site. The pontoons fill with water, and then it sinks to the riverbed. And it's in the power channel of the Kvichak River, so the inmigrating sockeye salmon avoid the device completely, because they're trying to take the path of least resistance to the spawning grounds. And the smolt typically stay in the upper meter of the river, so they also avoid the device. And this is an example where we used our deep indigenous knowledge to select the device that we thought would coexist here. 

The next two slides, please, James. I'm going to just jump right into phase two. So this is where we received our project funding by the US Department of Energy Office of Indian Energy. So under this award, we partnered with Ocean Renewable Power Company and Schneider Electric and the Alaska Energy Authority, and we also underwent extensive comprehensive energy planning with the National Renewable Energy Lab. And I'm really proud of our energy vision and goals that were adopted. The focus areas and strategies that have been outlined into direct actions, which we adopted last February, and are already underway, moving pretty aggressively with the goal that we set to reduce our diesel for electricity by 50 percent. And so we will report on that each year to see where we are in that goal. 

We also are very fortunate to have good partners even through our consulting to help look at all these various moving parts of a energy project, from ownership, maintenance, permitting, etcetera. So next slide, please. 

This slide talks about the smart – or how the system is set up as a smart microgrid, where we deliver baseload renewable energy from our Kvichak River. We are permitted to deploy up to two devices of the RivGen, which provides predictable baseload power, and it feeds into our diesel generator, which will serve as a backup, once we're fully transitioned. And then we have an energy storage system, which was purchased through this partnership, and smart controls. So it'll tell you diesel's on, diesel's off, battery will kick on, depending on how much power is able to be produced by the RivGen. 

So next two slides. We are – I'm going to cover the work completed to date and some of the lessons learned. 

So during the phase one, we installed RivGen 2.0 power system, including the device, cabling, anchor, shore station with electronics, and the interconnect to Igiugig Electric Company. The 2.0 device was then removed and replaced with the upgraded 2.1 model. You can see them both there in the Kvichak River. Off to the side is a converted fishing boat that pushes a flexi-float barge, which is used for the assembly and deployment of these devices. And we're really proud that our local workforce, being commercial fishermen, engineers, equipment operators, are able to deploy this device. Next slide. 

And this photograph, which I love, is a picture of what I call Bessie. It's Battery Energy Storage System, Indian Energy, to remind me which program has paid for what. It was installed in the fall of 2021. Commissioning began in the spring of 2022, and it's still underway. It will have the ability to be grid forming or following. It's rated for 253 kilowatt hours, with 125 kilowatt inverter. So featured here is the Schneider Electric purchased energy storage system and the inverter. And next slide. 

So other work completed to date is the generator control upgrades. We have SCADA access, remove view. This was installed in summer 2022. And we're going to just move through these next slides, because this is a very technical presentation that our technical technician and John Salmon actually report on. So you're going to have to excuse me here. Next slide. 

These are more views of the generator technologies. Actually, James, can you go all the way to slide 24, lessons learned? 

This has been an impressive work completed to date, but at the moment, the RivGen is not providing power to the system. We've had some issues that I will be speaking to. Also, our battery energy storage system is still undergoing commissioning, so this – a lot of what has been accomplished is – well, permitting was a huge milestone, and then actually purchasing, shipping, installing all of the systems, and now getting all of the systems to talk to itself, talk to each other, is still underway. And we – because of our cold winters here, we tend to save that work for the spring and summer, and our short construction season, because of we can't afford to be without electricity and heat during our cold winter months. 

So lessons learned. Phase two of the project is still happening, like I said. Weather, seasonality, everything, COVID, equipment and supply availability, that all impacts project timelines. And communication is really key. So what we're doing here in Igiugig is not just hydropower. It's actually – we have a smart energy system that we're hoping can integrate multiple renewable technologies, including wind power and solar power, and we want all the technologies to be able to speak to each other. And so we have regular microgrid meetings between all the engineers working across the array of projects to help with our transition. We don't want to be single energy resource dependent out here. And then – next slide. 

These are just photos. I'm with Lizana here, where I feel like the photos speak more than I can ever tell you. Here are some of our extreme whether events, where the river has frozen over. You know, we had an ideal river for hydrokinetic power, because we have crystal clear water, usually. We are usually free of debris. The mouth of the river never freezes. 

What we're seeing with extreme climate change is everything, and sometimes everything within one year. Extreme winter temperatures, freeze and thaw, and out – flowing out of our ice, or breakup of the ice several times, rather than just in the spring, like it used to be. We've seen the highest water levels, the lowest water levels, extreme storms before anything has been able to freeze, which have eroded banks, and debris flowing down the river. 

So in the time – I've lived here my entire life, and we had relatively stable, what I call kind of normal winters, for the first 20 years, and the last 15 of my life have been super erratic. And in the years that we've been on this hydrokinetic journey, we have seen the most extreme of them all. 

So the next slide shows a picture of the frazil ice, and this is another example of our localized knowledge of environment. This story – on the right is the RivGen floating. I stepped out of my house, and I looked north, and I saw what I thought were the Northern Lights, and I couldn't understand why they were so low on the horizon, and they weren't moving like the Northern – they weren't dancing like the Northern Lights do. 

And then I almost had a heart attack, because I thought, it's the RivGen, and something is not right. The lights shouldn't be towards the surface. And sure enough, it collected the frazil ice, and it floated. And we got on the phone immediately. We have regular – unless there's an emergency, we have weekly meetings every week that I've attended for years. But we – they called in, and one of our village elders said, what's the matter? And we told him, and he said, oh, don't worry about it. The lake is about to freeze over, and it will warm the water, it will shed the ice. You don't have to do anything. 

Sure enough, exactly what happened. So next slide, please. I've heard some of the most amazing uses of our deep indigenous knowledge with this deployment project. 

Our future activities are really to reinstall the second RivGen device and the second shore station, so we will have both of the RivGens in the river, which should supply the village power, allow us to go diesel off. 

We also – our rural Alaskan communities use heat recovery off of our diesels, which is a huge energy saver as far as providing free waste heat to our facilities. And so this has to be replaced as well in order to reduce cost. 

We have our power purchase agreement and service agreement still outstanding. We have to complete upgrades to our shore station, and complete the commissioning of the – of Bessie, as well as continued salmon smolt monitoring until we can retire that risk. 

The last slide, and I'm out of time, is just a _____ slide to thank you, and thank you for listening and bearing with me. Lizana mentioned about this unprecedented opportunity, and I believe it, and I've seen, and I want to commend the Indian Energy staff and contractors and their entire team to being so dedicated to Indian Country and Alaska, with deployment of these projects that will feed our resilient communities. So _____. 

>>James Jenson: Thanks so much, AlexAnna. Excellent presentation. We have a couple of questions, and we'll get to those, and then – and then we'll lose you for the rest of the webinar. I know you've got some travel to do. So thank you for the time today. 

First question here. I mean, this is – this project I think you said started in 2007, so incredibly long in the scheme of things. To what do you attribute the perseverance to be able to bring this project through well over a decade of timeline and development? Is there any lessons learned you can draw from that? 

>>AlexAnna Salmon: Yes. So the slide where I showed the village organization, where we hold our people and values central, and our relationship to our land and water, so just being aware of our carbon footprint really motivated our community. It also – we have – I mentioned our comprehensive energy plan, which is outstanding, and I'm happy to share it with – well, I think you've seen it, but I'm happy to share that as a template. That really grew out of visioning – community-wide visioning which happened in 2001, and it set the trajectory of all of our projects, and alternative renewable energy was identified as the top three priorities. 

So that consensus building and that visioning amongst the village to select, okay, we're only going to build affordable five-star Energy Plus houses. We're going to do what we can for energy efficiency and conservation. We're going to look at all renewable energy options. We have the climate adaptation work, and we have to grow local capacity to do all of this. 

So the stable – the stable governance, the partnership with our land-owning corporation, and then that extensive long-term visioning, has really held this – held this project together. And I think managing expectations – I remember stepping into administration here, and the community said, we have $750,000.00. You know, it was almost $1 million. They thought – that was such an immense amount of resources. They thought, we'll be transitioned overnight. 

We found out that that would cover permitting for the river, and that's it. And so we had to pivot. Okay, next best option. Create a testbed, and let other companies come out here and help us share the cost. So we were very creative about it. But the end goal has always been the same. Thank you for that question.

>>James Jenson: Thanks much, AlexAnna. One last question here, and you probably can't answer it directly, but is there an estimated all-in cost for the system? And, I mean, I don't know how you draw the boundaries around the system, but, you know, whatever info you can provide. 

>>AlexAnna Salmon: There is no – there is no total number. In fact, the amount of time and energy and dedication that our Igiugig Village Council has dedicated, there is no price tag to that, either. 

We had multi-million dollar awards, between the Water Power Technology Office and Office of Indian Energy. Most of those awards were met by 50 percent, and – with 50 percent match. And the environmental work and the monitoring has taken up 30 percent of our budget overall, so that's really critical to me, is to retire the risk of our fisheries resource, but also to put our federally recognized tribe in a position of power, where we're not being dictated when to turn off and on, because we are not going to harm our fisheries. You know, we're in this because of – our indigenous peoples have contributed the last to the climate crisis, yet we're bearing all the costs. 

And so with the rising cost of fuel, our – you know, our – the cost-benefit analysis just continued to look better and better and better for this – for this project. So I don't have a number, but I can tell you, you know, multi-millions. 

>>James Jenson: Yeah. And this is certainly not a typical project, right? I mean, it started from an emerging technology, and had to permit it uniquely for the environment, and hopefully future projects, similar projects, would be less difficult _____. 

>>AlexAnna Salmon: Yes. Yes. Another thing is really – yes, James, and everything is really costly out here. And I feel like where do you draw bounds on it? When they do cost-benefit analysis for the transition – or from the cost of diesel to renewable energy, they're not actually factoring in the cost of a bulk fuel farm. And the climate crises we have experienced, our entire fuel farm almost went into the river during a storm. And this is common for Alaskan northern communities. That cost $1 million to fix. And our power house upgrade was $1 million. So every time you turn around, it's just very expensive to do work out here. 

But what I feel like is if we can prove and make something work in our challenging environment here, it can happen anywhere in the world. 

>>James Jenson: Excellent. Thanks so much, AlexAnna. We don't have any further questions, and we appreciate your time today, and we'll let you get about your day. But thanks again for your time and sharing the story with our audience. 

>>AlexAnna Salmon: _____. 

>>James Jenson: With that, let's move on to our next presenter, John Flores. Welcome, and we've got your slides up. You may proceed. 

>>John Flores: Hi, everyone. Thank you for having me today. My name is John Flores. I am the environmental director for the San Pasqual Band of Indians. We've been fortunate enough to get a few tribal DOE projects funded in the past. I'll be speaking today about our microgrid project for our tribal government center. Next slide, please. 

So this is the project team. Nothing is ever accomplished alone or in a silo. So we have several different people as part of our team. These were the ones most directly on the team, doing the day to day of this project. So from the San Pasqual Band of Indians, myself, our public works director, David Martinez, Desiree Morales, our utilities manager. We had our owner rep, which was Joshua Simmons from Prosper Sustainability, Michael Burr from the Microgrid Institute, and Dustin Jolly, who was kind of our third party check on all of the – all of the engineering and installation. 

And then our design build contractors were Green Realities, Ralph Ciarlanti, and Gridscape Solution, Vipul Gore, who did the actual batteries. And our third party code compliance that came out and did inspections was EsGil Corporation. Next slide, please. 

So this is a little bit of information about San Pasqual. Our reservation was established in 1910. We're about 3,100 acres, 150 enrolled tribal members, and over 1,600 lineal descendants. Our reservation population is about 2,100, 450 homes. And over the last decade, we've been getting into a lot more obviously individual residential solar, and now we're getting into larger scale solar and battery projects. Next slide, please. 

So some of our needs. Maintain electricity during power outages, reduce electrical cost, and also, you know, 100 percent renewable to reduce our emissions. We are located down in San Diego County, and so we are under an investor-owned utility, _____ Gas and Electric. We have one of the highest costs for electricity in probably the continental US, other than maybe Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico. We some of the highest costs here on the continental 48 here for energy. So we saw this as a way to save some money. We spend about $70,000.00 to $80,000.00 a year on electricity for our government center. Next slide, please. 

Power supply threats. So climate change is impacting all of us throughout the nation in different ways, but nonetheless, it's an impact here in San Diego and Southern California. We have severe weather. That of course has only been made worse with climate change. High winds. San Diego, we've experienced large wildfires throughout San Diego County and Southern California. We do have an occasional earthquake. We have localized physical damage to our grid. Distracted driver runs into a pole, and the grid goes down. Drunk driver hits a pole, the grid goes down. 

And then SDG&E has been doing a lot of planned outages for system upgrades, and on our government center, we didn't have any backup generators, so when the grid goes down, all of our buildings went down, unless you had to run out and go, you know, rent a generator. 

So some of the impacts on that was obviously inability to use our facilities when the power went out, lost productivity and revenue, equipment damage, and, you know, potential human impacts as far as our fire station not being able to respond in a timely manner because the power goes out to our power station or our police station. So if someone were trying to call in if there was something going on and they needed emergency personnel, obviously, there could be disruption getting our emergency personnel out to those people on the reservation. Next slide, please. 

So as I mentioned, wildfires. The green is the San Pasqual Reservation. You can see we're a non-contiguous reservation. We've had two very large wildfire that have burned throughout our area in San Diego County. The first in the orange was the Paradise/Cedar Fire, which burned a little over 90 percent of the reservation, and we lost about 100 homes to that wildfire, so a devastating wildfire to the San Pasqual Band of Indians, and that was in '03. 

Then in '07, we had the Poomacha/Witch Fire, and you can see where they kind of overlay – the Poomacha/Witch Fire burned up to some parts of the reservation. Fortunately, they were uninhabited areas. However, that doesn't mean the reservation wasn't impacted, because whenever there's a wildfire nearby like this, that means the reservation is more than likely going to be evacuated, and power will be cut to the reservation due to obviously wildfires. 

So as you can see, we're a little green island in a sea of wildfire out here. And with climate change, of course, wildfire have only gotten worse and more intense. And we know it's not a matter of when – if, but when we have another large wildfire out here. Next slide, please. 

So some of our – like I said earlier, reduced costs and emission on our specific project. So when we drilled down and looked at the numbers for building a microgrid for our government center, we're looking at energy cost savings of $1.1 million over 25 years, and that's probably on the conservative end, because energy, a lot like gas, only tends to go up. Over the last three years since we started this project, SDG&E has raised their rates twice over the last three years. So we're hoping to displace over 272,000 kilowatt hours. That's in the first year. And then our GHG or greenhouse gases footprint reduction is 193 metric tons over one year. 

So you can extrapolate those last two out over the life of the system of 25 years. So we get into some big numbers going forward. And like I said, the $1.1 million is probably on the lower end, with the way energy rates continue to increase here in San Diego County. Next slide, please. 

So what's a resilient microgrid? By definition, a true microgrid is a group of interconnected loads and distributed energy resources within a clearly defined electrical boundary. But what we did, we had seven meters throughout our government center that connected various buildings that made up our government complex. And we went into each one of those buildings and tied them all into a microgrid, and eliminated those seven sub-meters now. They're gone. And we created one master, like a campus meter, to flow all the energy through. 

And so we serve multiple facilities and we no longer need a backup standby generator, such as a diesel generator. When we were talking about this project and getting funding, as I mentioned earlier, we don't have backup generators on standby, diesel gen sets. And the tribe was looking at purchasing diesel generators for each one of the buildings, and my department, the environmental department, we really pushed back on tribal leadership on that, to educate them on what a microgrid was, and why that would be more beneficial to the government. 

One of my phrases to the tribal leadership was, you know, diesel generators are 20th century technology that you're trying to use to solve a 21st century problem. So why not use modern technology, 21st century solution of a microgrid, to solve a 21st century problem of climate change? 

And so we talked about it. You know, a thing about a diesel gen set is when they're not being in use, they're just a large paperweight that just sits there and has to be maintained, whereas with a microgrid, it's used every day, even when the grid is up, because we will use those batteries. They turn on every day, and supply energy to the building, because they have to discharge – we discharge them down to about 20 percent, from about 100 percent charge all the way down to 20, and we keep that 20 percent in reserve in case we have a large outage in the evening time and we need that extra 20 percent to make it to the morning, when the sun comes up. 

But yeah, so we really wanted the microgrid, because we wanted something that would be in use every day. When people come in in the morning and they turn on their computers and lights and coffee pots, you know, we get peak shaving off of the batteries. So it's in use every day, whereas a diesel gen system is only when you need it. Next slide, please. 

So our project goals were – I keep talking about this, but this was really the three main benefiting factors of the project goals, was resiliency, maintain electrical power during outages. SDG&E, when we have high wind events, they will turn off our power. They're called PSPSs. It's a public safety power shutoff, is what that acronym stands for. It's pretty common throughout California now. All of the three major IOUs, investor owned utilities, do that now. San Diego Gas and Electric was one of the first utilities to do that, and then the rest started doing it after they experienced wildfires in their areas. 

You know, economics, to reduce electrical costs. Like I said, $80,000.00 a year on electricity. If we're saving $70,000.00, you know, we're spending $10,000.00 a year on electricity, that's $70,000.00 we can use somewhere else in the government for government services to provide to the people of San Pasqual. 

And the environmental benefits of it, of helping reduce our carbon footprint, reduce our emissions here, doing our part to combat climate change as much as possible. 

So someone in leadership, in tribal government, someone's going to like one of these pillars. They have different factors that they may be – think are more beneficial than others, but these touch on the big three pillars of this project. Next slide, please. 

So as I said, this helped for our government center. So our government center is made up of our tribal administration building, which is an emergency Red Cross evaluation center, our housing and police department, so our first response police, public safety, and security monitoring. We have a server in there with various cameras throughout the reservation for safety. And if the power goes out there, all of our camera network goes out for the police. 

Our fire department obviously is very important to keep up and running 24/7. Police and fire always have to go 24/7, 365. Our education building, which is also the emergency public shelter that we can use in case of emergency. And then our preschool, which is also an emergency public shelter. 

So if we needed to evacuate people out of their homes into a shelter, or if people were say unfortunately to lose their homes during a wildfire, we can turn our tribal admin and tribal hall into an evacuation center, and give people temporary housing until we can get FEMA in to get them back on their feet. ?

We have full kitchens in our tribal hall, our education building, and preschool, so we can cook and provide food for people in case of emergency as well. And if power goes out during the summertime for residents, they can come to these areas for cooling centers to stay cool, or if they have medical devices that need power, to be plugged in, they can come to these areas to be plugged in for that as well. Next slide, please. 

So what were our components? So we got a previous grant from the DOE to do some solar on residential and our education building. So we had 24 kW of solar that was already on our education building, and then we built an additional 157 kW at a carport farm where our employees park. 

We're putting in a propane generator for redundancy. That's coming in actually later this month. It should be here next Friday, and then we're going to get a crane and drop it in and connect it> That's the last phase of the project. 

Our BESS, our battery energy storage, is 240 kW. And really, the microgrid controls, that's the whole brains of the operation. That kind of handles the monitoring of the battery, the PV, and the grid, and it seamlessly controls where we get power from, and the power distribution to the building, and if power goes off, it will turn on the battery. 

And there is some latency, so the latency is basically defined as how long it takes from the grid going down to the microgrid creating its own island grid to bring power back up. And you can get it almost seamless. A lot of financial institutions, like banks that do transactions, or say a casino, if your tribe is into gaming, you obviously can't really have power ever going down. So they're going to want that to be almost seamless. 

But because we're a government center, we didn't need it to be that seamless, and we could have some latency. And we're about 30 to 40 seconds from power going down to the microgrid turning on and islanding and forming its own grid. 

Some of our important areas have backup batteries, like our servers. We purchased some backup batteries, so that the servers for police, fire, and the government center don't experience any outage. So when the grid goes down, their backup batteries turn on, provide power to those. And then some of our – like our CFO, our tribal chairman, they have backup batteries on their – UPSs on their computers for them. And so that's one way we mitigate that latency issue. It's just – it's really a cost-benefit analysis, because the more – it's more expensive for the shorter latency time. 

Energy management controls. Those are another great thing, that when – if the grid goes down and we go into island mode, HVAC obviously takes a ton of energy to keep buildings cool. And so the controls will immediately take over the HVAC systems, and start setting the climate controls up. So if it's set at say summertime, July, it's 100 degrees outside, and the thermostats are set to 72 degree or whatever they may be, the management controls will start bumping those up to say 76 degrees, and that's all seamless. 

And lastly, you know, we're in California. California is really taking the initiative to try to phase out combustion gas cars, and moving towards electric vehicles. And we didn't want to be left behind in that, so as part of this project, we installed six EV charging stations for employees to use that are all tied to the microgrid, and they're free for employees or tribal members, or if anyone wants to drive down here and visit us in an electric vehicle, you can go ahead and plug into that and charge at no cost. Next slide, please. 

So what did it take to get this done? Well, one, we had to upgrade our utility service. Going into the government center, we only had single-phase. So we worked with San Diego Gas and Electric to upgrade that to three-phase. As I had mentioned before, we removed the existing utility meters for each one of those buildings, and installed just one master meter. 

And then we ran new underground cabling to tie all the buildings together. For the most part, they're underground. In some areas, we had to go along the building. It was only in one or two areas that we couldn't do them underground, because of existing utilities there, and concrete, and it would have just increased the cost of the project. But for the most part, we ran all new cable underground to each one of these buildings to connect them to the PV and the microgrid. Next slide, please. 

So what did this cost us? So we had several different funding sources. Of course, it all started with Lizana's team at Office of – DOE's Office of Energy. We applied for a grant for $703,000.00. Then we – because California had – it's called a Self-Generation Incentive Program here in California. The company that we worked with for the batteries, they put forth the money, $600,000.00 out of their pocket, to recover this rebate. So we got an additional $600,000.00 from the State of California through the Self-Generation Incentive Program rebate. 

And then applied to Grid Alternatives for $150,000.00 solar accelerator grant. And then our tribal match for the tribe – San Pasqual's part of a consortium of five tribes that comprises the Indian Water Authority, where we sell some of our water, excess water rights, to the City of Escondido _____ here in San Diego County. And we can apply for economic type projects through our Indian Water Authority. And the tribe applied for $703,000.00 from Indian Water Authority. 

So you can see about $1.4 million in DOE and Indian Water Authority, $600,000.00 in the SGIP program, so now that's up to $2 million. So all told, we were a little over $2.1 million for this project. Next slide, please. 

So lessons learned. We got awarded this project in 2018, put it out to bid in the summer of 2019, and then selected our winning bidder there about in the fall of 2019. And so of course there was no COVID when we started this project. And then we start in late 2019, going into 2020, and then COVID hits in February/March of 2020. 

And of course, we experienced what many people experienced during COVID. You know, process delays, supply chain issues. So worked for – we all started working from home. Our contractor of course was on site working, doing everything they could to mitigate impacts to their workforce. But of course, our contractor and their employees – some of their employees would test positive with COVID and have to go and quarantine. So that slow down things quite a bit. 

Interconnection process. Working with the utility, it takes a long time – it takes a lot longer than it should to get interconnection. So we worked with SDG&E for the interconnection to turn on the microgrid, and there were a lot of delays in that. One, because SDG&E was also working remotely, don't have so many employees, their employees were getting sick, so their inspectors, you know, would be – it would delay them coming out to do inspection out here. They also experienced at SDG&E staff turnover during that time, people retiring. We probably went through about three or four different planners with SDG&E on this project, and it seems like every time a new planner came on board, we had to get them up to speed and reeducate them on everything. 

Technical issues. You know, there was functional testing, shakedown testing, finding the glitches in the system. One of the stories I like to tell is we turned on the microgrid for testing, everything was working great. I get a phone call around noon on a Tuesday saying we have no power, _____ the building's _____, what's going on? The microgrid's working fine. Well, our admin building has an elevator, and we forgot – my office is not in the main admin building, and so we don't really use that elevator much. It's just for ADA compliance, so we'll use it every once in a while if we have a lot of packages. 

Someone used the elevator that afternoon. Elevators take – it's a large load on the system. The minute the elevator turned on, the breakers on the microgrid were set a little low, so the breakers did what they were supposed to do, protected everything. They turned off the whole system. So that was an easy fix, but something we didn't quite think of. 

So, you know, little things like that during testing, we found, and reset the breakers, and what not. But it took a while to get everything tested and inspected by SDG&E. 

And we finally got interconnection back in August of this year. So we've been fully interconnected with SDG&E, where we can export any extra energy to their grid. Next slide, please. 

So this is a map showing the project area. This is our government center. And so if you just follow the line there, you can see where the solar in the upper left hand corner is a parking lot with solar – elevated solar for parking. That was the new solar that was installed as part of this project. 

And then we went to meter number one, which is behind the government admin building. Meter number two, that's our tribal hall. And then you swing over to meter number three. That is actually our police and housing department. Then you can see right next to that is where the batteries went. So the batteries are right next to the police department. And we did that on purpose. We wanted our batteries to be in a place where someone would see it 24/7. 

So originally, actually, when we were scoping this project, we were going to put our batteries – number four is our fire department. And so you can see where it says San Pasqual Reservation Fire Academy. That's behind the fire department. They've since moved, and they were supposed to move before the project started, and we were going to put the batteries behind the fire department. 

But because they were running behind on moving, partly because of COVID, and the project had to go forward, we moved the batteries from behind the fire department to next to the police department. So that's where the batteries are. And then you can see we're adding – it's going to be a propane gen set. That's going to be connected to the storage tank. And that's just for redundancy on the system. 

The three-phase is right – the master meter is zero. That's the new master meter we dropped with SDG&E, three-phase. Come down to four, that's our fire department. Six, this is our – six is – five and six are our education department, and then seven is our preschool. 

And so everything you see in here, the yellow, we ran new underground cable. And then the orange is where we did building – on top of the building, so ran it where we needed it to go. Next slide, please. 

So where are we at today? So project status and accomplishments. Contracted design build contractor. That's completed. We completed our three-phase application to SDG&E, completed full engineering design, construction activities complete, minus the propane generator, and final connection of the propane generator. That should be this month. 

And the government center was tied into the microgrid last December 31st. So it's almost been one year that the microgrid's been running on the government center. However, we didn't have interconnection to SDG&E until August. So we had to really curtail our solar, which we could do, but we set the controller that we couldn't export any excess energy to the grid. So now, though, that we have full interconnection as of August, now we're exporting any excess energy. Next slide, please. 

So pending milestones. The backup generator should be here next Friday. Complete test on fully integrated microgrid. That would be the backup generator, because we've completed all of the other tests, except for the backup generator. And then lastly, continue to monitor the microgrid going forward. We have a really nice – I wish I could show it to everybody here – a nice user interface online portal that we can log into and monitor the battery discharge, the solar, how much our solar is producing, how much we're taking from the grid, and if we're islanded, how long we're islanded off, the state of charge of the battery. It'll even show like our greenhouse gas calculation, how much GHG we've saved. 

And you can drill down from yearly, monthly, weekly, daily, hourly, to see your data on your microgrid. If you come out to San Pasqual, everyone's always invited to come out here and take a look at what we've done, and I can walk you through those – the user interface, if you'd like. Next slide, please. 

So this is just kind of our on-grid function versus off-grid function. So when we're on the grid, so the way to think of it is the grid is actually kind of – when it's on, that's kind of our backup power. So when we're on grid, we're offsetting utility power by using our solar and battery. So our solar turns on. Immediately, we store excess solar production into the batteries until the batteries are full, and then it goes to the building, and then anything that's extra after going to the buildings and the battery goes to the grid. 

So when we're off-grid, functions are automatic islanding and reconnection to grid. So when the controllers sense the grid has gone down, it'll automatically island itself. No one has to go out there and flip the switch or press any buttons. It's all automated. And the minute the grid comes back on, it'll reconnect back to the grid. And so like the autonomous operation of solar, storage, and HVAC controls, and seamless synchronization to the generator. 

So the LP gen set is kind of a backup to a backup. If it's a very long outage – say right now it is – you know, it's December 7th. We've had some rain in San Diego this last week, and it's been very cloudy, so – and the days are shorter. So if we had an extended power outage where we're not getting as much solar, and it's – we're talking five or more days, and the batteries drain to a certain percentage, say 15 or 10 percent, then the LP generator will kick on, and it will not charge the – it won't provide power to the whole building. It just provides power directly to the battery. 

So the generator turns on and provides power to the battery, and then the battery discharges to the building. But that's only in case of a large power outage and emergency when we don't have ideal sunny days here in San Diego. Next slide, please. 

So these are the solar canopies we've installed. It's 156 kW peak output. We can charge our batteries – so if our batteries were completely drained to zero, and it's a nice, sunny day, we can fully charge our batteries to 100 percent within 3 hours, about. And the equivalent of this is basically imagine if you had about 37.5 homes completely off-grid on solar. So that's how much solar we put up on our carport, so enough for about 37 homes. Next slide, please. 

And we put lighting underneath it. So you can see that's the lighting underneath the canopy, which is great, because out here, right now, we're getting dark, you know, about 4:15 it's starting to get dark. And most employees work anywhere from until 6:00 PM. So if you were an employee in the past and you parked here, there was no real lighting there, so it'd be very dark on a winter day, winter evening. So now it's a little bit safer for our employees to go out. You can see one of our charging stations there underneath the canopy that we installed. Next slide, please. 

So this is a close-up of our – we installed six BTCPower EV chargers, one at the admin building, one at education, and one at our tribal hall. Charging is free for people to plug in their EVs. We have about eight people with various electric vehicles or EV hybrids. And that's why I said, if you build it, they will come. When we first started this project, I asked permission to do 12 of these. Tribal leadership said, no one even has an electric vehicle. We're not going to say 12 spots. 

You know, so there was a negotiation, a little back and forth, and we settled on six. And since we put these in, of course, high gas prices have certainly helped. People were deciding to change a gas car for an electric vehicle in California, because we experience high gas prices there. We – if you build it, they will come. And now we have about eight people with EVs that plug into these six charging stations. So they kind of have to jockey for these stations. 

And you can see they're really cool. Blue means they're ready to charge. This one, the error code, that error code, they have to be connected to the Wi-Fi, so this one wasn't connecting, so it was an easy fix. We just, you know, put in – you have to put in the Wi-Fi capabilities on each side, particularly when we were first putting them on. And they work really well now. Next slide, please. 

SDG&E had to drop a three-phase transformer. So this is their transformer dropped. It was installed on October 29th of last year. Next slide. 

And these are our battery storage systems. They were by GridScape. They're onsite, remote controls. They're LFP batteries, lithium ferro-phosphate, 240 kW. The nice thing about these batteries, it's about the size of a small connect box. So if you're familiar with the large shipping containers that these big ships use to move materials around the world, and then they have those half ones, this is about the size of a mini-shipping container, a little bit smaller than that, to give you a reference of about how big these are. 

And if the government center were ever to expand or we needed more power, you can just simply drop another box in here. So these are very scalable. We would just come in, put another storage box in with more batteries, and then connect it to the microgrid and those buildings. So we can definitely scale for any future needs. Next slide. 

And I guess if there's any questions, that's – you can go to the next slide. There'll be in the box, I guess. You can ask. I just want to say thank you to Lizana and the DOE team and my team here at San Pasqual. It was a very ambitious project. It took a little longer than we thought because of COVID. But we persevered, and we got it done now, and the tribe is very happy with the microgrid. 

And we're in San Diego County, so if anyone wants to come and visit us, if it's cold and you're looking for an excuse to get out here during the wintertime, come on out, and I'll show you our microgrid and our user controls, and we'd love to have you here. 

>>James Jenson: Thanks so much, John. Appreciate the presentation. Very interesting project. We do have quite a number of questions for you, and so we'll get started on those. And I was distracted some of the time, so I apologize if you already addressed some of these questions in your presentation. 

How did you select a propane generator over a diesel generator? What was the thought process there, and benefits of that? 

>>John Flores: Yeah, so the thought process on the diesel generator was – a propane generator, we could put a 500 gallon propane tank that basically is going to be set aside in a standalone propane tank just for the propane generator, so we know we'll always have propane on hand for the generator when needed. We didn't want to have a bunch of diesel laying around for various reasons, on diesel, one of them also being that a lot of the gas stations out here where we're at in Valley Center, they don't have backup generators for their gas stations. So if we had a diesel gen set and we were running low on diesel and it's a long outage, we probably wouldn't be able to get more diesel from a local gas station, if they didn't have their pumps working, whereas with propane, they could get out here a lot easier to service us with a propane tank than they probably could diesel. 

And then there was the idea of having diesel just sitting around in a tank, and people afraid of someone stealing diesel out of a tank. People don't really steal propane out of a tank, but people can steal diesel gas if it's lying around. So yeah, so we decided to go with the propane gen set over the diesel gen set. 

Also, O&M. I mean, operation and maintenance of a diesel generator is a little bit more than a propane generator, as well, is what we were told. 

>>James Jenson: Excellent. Thank you. So that kind of leads to the next question here. What sort of O&M does this system require, and are you having to hire any additional staff to help manage the microgrid? Or is that falling to you? Or is it contracted out? Or – 

[Crosstalk]

>>John Flores: Yeah, so there's not much in the way of O&M, because PV, there's really no real moving parts, and even with the batteries, once installed, there's not much in the way of moving parts. We do have a five-year O&M contract with GridScape, who put in the batteries, to service them for the next five or so years, I believe, if there's any service required. 

It's been up and running for a year now, and we haven't had any issues where we needed O&M or some sort of maintenance. There's some daily – a lot of it is actually software related, to be honest with you. So over the last year, there's been some system upgrades to our microgrid, but it's all through software updates. 

So if you have a smartphone, like an iPhone, you know how they – Apple will send out an iOS update, and you just install it onto your phone? That's been the majority of our experience thus far, is GridScape will let us know that they're doing a software package upgrade, and it's seamless. We don't need to turn off anything for those software updates. It's not like the microgrid goes down. They just download it. 

But as far as physical maintenance, it's relatively – there's not a lot to the physical maintenance thus far that we've experienced, and we don't believe it's going to be a lot of physical maintenance on these things going forward. 

>>James Jenson: Thank you. When you consolidated the meters, I assume you took ownership of the lines between the various meters, the electric lines. Is there any challenges with taking that one? Is there, you know, liabilities or things that the tribe has had to deal with when taking that responsibility from the utility? 

>>John Flores: Well, no, because everything after the meter is customer – the way San Diego Gas and Electric always did it was even with the old meters, SDG&E would come with a drop off of their main distribution line, off of a transformer, to a customer-owned pole, and then from there, we ran stuff underground. So SDG&E allows for 100 feet at no cost to the customer of line. 

So typically, what we would do on our government buildings is there would be a customer-owned pole 100 feet off, and then everything trenched under from that pole to the building was already our responsibility anyway. So no, there's really not any more – we haven't really taken on any more responsibility than we already had previously with the underground trenching to the different buildings. 

So in the past, when we had seven of those meters, there were literally seven customer-owned poles dropped going into the government center, and from there, we had to trench to the building. So instead, now we did a bunch of trenching connecting each one of the buildings, and then stubbed out to our three-phase connection point. So it wasn't really like we were taking on more responsibilities for O&M and management of those lines that we put in for our buildings. 

>>James Jenson: Excellent. Thanks for that clarification. I have a question here about solar. So you have the canopy, the solar canopy, and residential solar. Do you have land for ground-mounted solar, and is that something that the tribe might pursue in the future? 

>>John Flores: So I assume they're talking about like a large solar farm array, like a megawatt or something like that, for a ground mount. Yes, we do. The tribe has about 45 acres set aside. It's a parcel of land the tribe had identified for utility development, and that utility development means we have some funding that we're going to be building a wastewater treatment plant, a community wastewater treatment plant, for all of our homes on the reservation. So we'll be putting a microgrid on that wastewater treatment plant. 

We're going to be doing a new transfer station for solid waste that'll also be connected to that, to that microgrid for the utilities. And then the remaining space is going to be used for community solar, and that's one of our projects that we have currently funded by the DOE right now, and the latest funding is to do – it's – we're phasing it over three phases to one megawatt. But our first phase is about 270 kW of solar that's either going to be ground-mounted, or – right now we have it planned to be a carport over our ballfield, our park, our community park, and parking is right next to that. 

So yeah, so long story short is we are looking at doing that very thing, and we have land set aside for that. 

>>James Jenson: Excellent. Thank you. And just a couple more here. Thanks for your indulging us with these. If the grid islands and you have EV charging going on, does that automatically shut down? I know you talked about other sorts of demand side management. Is EV charging part of that as well? 

>>John Flores: Yeah. Unfortunately, EV charging is not part of that. So if we had people plugged in, we would probably have to just ask them to unplug their vehicles. We only have six charging stations, so it's not a lot. And we usually have anywhere from three to five of them in use every day. But yeah, we would have to actually ask those employees, or just go and unplug those cars from the microgrid, to conserve power during a long outage. 

And we have had some outages, some – ones that aren't a big deal are the ones that are planned outages. SDG&E will contact us and say, we're planning on bringing the grid down on this day for this many hours. And those are no problem. Right? You know, those are easy. 

The unplanned outages, typically, we – those are the more difficult ones. But obviously, even then, we kind of have an idea of what they could be and how long the duration might be. So we have high winds in San Diego County during the fall. They're called Santa Ana winds. And that's typically when we know SDG&E might shut the grid down. Or, of course, if there's a fire going on, we know SDG&E might shut the grid down. 

If the grid unexpectedly goes down, and it's not high winds or any fire threat, so we basically know someone hit something, a car hit a pole, or something on the – their lines, and so those will probably be shorter outages. SDG&E has a tribal liaison now, which we pushed for for years, and I recommend all tribes with whatever utility you work with out there, really advocate for a trial liaison. And we have her number on speed dial, so the minute the grid goes down, we're in communication with her. What's going on? How long is the grid going to be out? 

Because even though we're islanded, a lot of our residents don't have battery backup on their home, so that means they're without power, which means we need to know how long they might be without power, because we might have to roll into a Red Cross evac center, right? Or get things ready at our tribal hall to accept people in until they can get power. 

>>James Jenson: Thanks, John. I really appreciate all your information. Excellent presentation and really cool project. 

With that, we'll move on to our final presentation. Thanks for your time, and you're welcome to leave or stay on, as you wish, John. 

With that, let's bring up Scott's presentation, and Scott, thanks for joining us. And I know you've been on vacation, or are on vacation, so we appreciate your time _____ slides up so you can proceed. 

>>Scott Clow: All right. Can everyone hear me okay? 

>>James Jenson: You sound great. 

>>Scott Clow: Okay. Great. Well, thank you. Sorry I'm running a little late today. Kind of juggling a lot. But I wanted to share some of what we've been doing with the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe over the last several years. 

Thank you for having me. I'm the environmental programs director for the Ute Mountain Tribe. My name is Scott Clow. I've been chairing our renewable energy team for the tribe for the last decade. And I'd like to say that it's been a long time coming that we've had some projects come to fruition, and we're really gaining momentum in the renewable energy sector in a variety of ways. And so thank you for having me. 

So I want to go over three community scale projects, and then talk about some larger projects we have. 

So James, do I have direct control over this? 

>>James Jenson: No, you have to ask for us to advance. 

>>Scott Clow: Okay. So go ahead and go forward. 

So a little bit about the tribe, really briefly. On the right, those are the San Juan Mountains in Southwest Colorado. The Ute tribes, the seven bands of the Utes once roamed all around Colorado, Northern New Mexico, and Utah, and the namesake of Utah. 

As far as land base, over half a million acres of land. The Weenuche Band is the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe that split off from the Southern Utes in the late 1800s. Economic development-wise, we have a 7,000 acre farm, irrigated agriculture, hotel, casino, resorts, a construction company. We have a tribal park. And we – the tribe's bread and butter for many years was oil and gas, and that's changed a lot in the last 15 years. Go ahead. 

A little bit about the demographics. Originally hunter/gatherers, now not so much, although that's steeped in tradition. A lot of hunting still. About 2,100 tribal members, 55 year life expectancy. So very young median age. A lot of young people in the tribe. High poverty rate compared to the rate in Colorado. Very low per capita income. So we're all in this together and helping the tribe. Go ahead. 

On the right are some of the tribal council. The gentleman second from the left is Chairman Hart, recently reelected. Most of these guys are still on the tribal council. We just had a big election, and I'm happy that we had some carry forward with these folks. They've been very supportive in cost shares with Department of Energy, and looking at the future for the tribe's economy with renewable energy. 

On the left is a map of the tribal trust lands outlined in red. You can see the majority in Colorado, a little in Northern New Mexico, which is very advantageous geography for commercial renewable development, and I'll get into that a little later. And the lands in Utah on the left, with the White Mesa Community. That's one of the projects I'll describe, encircled in yellow there. Thank you. Go forward, please. 

Planning and plans. I really want to talk about the importance of planning. Going back more than ten years, we had an energy efficiency and renewable energy grant from Department of Energy, and we used that for some energy efficiency planning, and also to put a little solar system on the tribal office complex. 

We then got a grant from Department of Energy for a community solar feasibility study, and the cover of the report that was the deliverable on that is on the right. Basically, that looked at what it would take to build a community scale solar project, and the best place in town in Towaoc, Colorado, for that, in and around Towaoc. 

So that was a real driver, and I can say that Department of Energy, if you're thinking about applying for a grant, it's really advantageous to actually have had them help with some feasibility study going into that. They really like stepping stones involving their funding mechanisms and planning for these, so you're not going in cold. 

On the left also is the cover of our climate action plan adopted by the tribal council in 2020. It's a guiding document on how the tribe is taking actions to address climate change, and it's really a cornerstone of the tribe's economy, and a transition from fossil fuel as part of that economy into renewable energy, and a lot of things that climate is impacting and what we might be doing about them. 

I will say that the tribe is not entirely abandoning fossil fuels in its economy, but that's really declined, and we've got some really good projects to bring revenue to the tribe with clean energy. Next slide, please. 

So one project that is complete now is we took that feasibility study and we got a grant with Department of Energy to build and bring online a one megawatt community solar project. And so it took more than two years to plan and design, negotiate things, and construct the project. We put it online in March of 2020, literally days before the world shut down. 

Some of the details, one of the things that our project manager and I, when we met monthly or weekly, sort of on the – with eyes on the finish line of this project, we – our constant delay and setback was, you know, this transformer, to step down the power from our system onto the local power grid. It took over six months to design, order, and build and deliver that transformer. It was the last piece of the puzzle. 

So if you're in a project like that, beware, that's the timeline, maybe even longer now, in the COVID economy era. But our partner and EPC on that was Grid Alternatives, with a mission to bring solar power to low income people. 

We were limited by some policy to one megawatt. We have a curtailment system that limits it, so we don't hit a megawatt and get penalized by the company that our electric cooperative buys power from. That's Empire Electric Association, and they are very cooperative. 

The pictures here, in the upper right, some geotechnical analyses on the site before anything was built to make sure it would hold the system okay. Lower left, the groundbreaking ceremony. Ironically, a snowstorm, muddy mess, with the gold shovels. And then on the lower right, at the flank of the Ute Mountain, that's our – that's our solar array, over 3,800 panels, and 1 megawatt when it's all running good and the sun is shining. Thank you. Next slide. 

Workforce development has been a key component of these projects, our community projects. On the one megawatt, we budgeted for two interns. We turned that into four interns for a shorter period of time. And we had 21 people apply for these jobs. We got some money out of our higher education program and our temporary worker program. We wound up with 11 people employed on the project. Six of them stuck through the whole way. We had to lay them off for a little bit, which caused some problems. 

But we've got two more community projects with workforce development involved there. And I want to mention, in the lower right, that's Starmie Wall. I'll talk more a little bit about him. So next slide, please. 

This was a community volunteer day, something that Grid Alternatives does on all their projects. So these are some tribal members who just came out to help build some racking for a day. It was great to get people out, and hands on. And so Helen Munoz in the upper left, Becky Hammond in the lower right, and then a group of folks in the picture on the right. Great teamwork. Next slide, please. 

So our one megawatt community solar, we have been saving over $80,000.00 a year in electricity savings in the first two years it's been online. I will say that we've had an inverter that's been problematic, and so we can do better than that. It really should be more in the $90,000.00 to $100,000.00. But we're addressing that. 

We have local residents in Towaoc, Colorado signed up for bill credits monthly on their electric bills, 150 to 200 residential bills credited each month. I say each month. We've missed a couple of months because of the process there. But it was about 150 the first year, about 200 people signed up now. 

And then we also credit public works and other government electric bills. So we're going to reopen that opportunity here in December and into the beginning of January for more people to sign up. 

The spreadsheet in the upper right are some of the residential customers that have signed up. The lower are public works related government electric bills. So we're targeting public works, because those are community systems. And so public lights, public water systems, public wastewater systems. 

And I mentioned Starmie Wall. He works for public works. So part of what we're doing by crediting the public works department electric bills and offsetting them is to also help support Starmie, because he was an intern on the project, understands the solar systems, and he is our operations and maintenance guy. So we're helping public works pay for Starmie, and Starmie is taking care of this system. 

The little clip of spreadsheet in the middle of those two is an example of each month, we work with the electric cooperative. So there was a check for February of 2021 that was $10,000.00. We told them, okay, use $8,900.00 of it for residential. Use the rest for government. There's an administrative fee. So that month, they credited over $10,000.00 on electric for the town. Next slide, please. 

Our EPC, Grid Alternatives, and their electrical engineers, Circuitous Electrical Systems, they delivered all the technical manuals, warranty information, in hard copy and electronically. The gentleman in the front there with the fluorescent vest is our former public works director. There's a Grid Alternatives guy to his left, on a little walk-through tour with some of our tribal interns. We completed the curtailment test on the system in May of 2020. It went to 100 percent capacity. And there's a SCADA system that we can monitor online remotely, as well as doing in person, on site inspections. Next slide, please. 

Another community project we're working on is in White Mesa, Utah. That's that satellite community in Utah I showed on the map there. This is – the goal is to offset the government facility electric bills in that town. So we're working on that one. We've had a few setbacks I'll mention. But we're aiming for essentially over 200,000 kilowatt hours offset on that to the tune of saving about $20,000.00 a year. That diagram on the right is a design for one of the arrays on that system. Next slide, please. 

Again, some of the facilities we're trying to offset on that map. It's a really small town. Originally, it was planned to be seven meters. We're down to about five now, 144 kilowatt DC. Grid Alternatives as a partner, also. We have a different electric company, Rocky Mountain Power, on that one. And the next slide, we'll get into that a little more, too. Next slide, please. 

Oh, yeah. The cost share reduction. So last year, Department of Energy reduce our cost share from 50 percent to 20 percent. Thank you very much, DOE. That lowered the tribe's payback period significantly, and thank you, American taxpayers. Next slide, please. 

So we did some designs on the system in early 2022. We looked at consolidating systems, which is allowable under the local electric company's policies. So we're planning on building two systems and allocating that savings back to five meters, is now our plan. Next slide, please. 

And bam. We put on the brakes, because the electric company said we had to do a system impact study in order to connect it, and make sure it was all safe. So there were substation backflow concerns. We're poised to – the tribal council has approved in November us proceeding. We're going to put $5,000.00 down. It could cost about $10,000.00 for the system impact study. But we have to do it to move forward, to get this system connected with them. 

So this project is on hold for now. Thank you, Department of Energy, for offering us some flexibility in the project timeline. So more to come on this one in future presentations. Next slide, please. 

In White Mesa, Utah, one of the issues is environmental justice. We have a uranium mill up the road. It's the last uranium mill in America. And this – these are some pictures of it, and some of our concerns about the facility. 

But the reason I call this slide truly cleaner energy is that there's no free lunch. Anything you build, whether it's photovoltaics with lithium ion batteries, or vanadium flow cells, they all have an environmental impact. Unfortunately, uranium has poisoned many people around the Four Corners. I know we're probably running out of time. If you could bear with me for a few more minutes, I'll try to be fast. Next slide, please. 

So we pivoted to Towaoc. We have another community project that's focused on saving our housing authority on their electric bill. Again, we had a cost share reduction on that. Thank you, DOE. The plan for this was to have 20 rental homes and an apartment building offset. Once we designed the system, it actually turned out we did 23 rental homes and the apartment building, so potential savings, about $24,000.00 a year for our housing authority. Next slide. 

These are some of the systems. Again, we did – we had 11 trainees or interns paid in this project, tribal members, trained to help build these things. Grid Alternatives hired them, which made our billing process and paying the interns a little easier. And our higher education program, again, is going to give us some wiggle room on affording that. 

This is on the corner of Chief House and North Star Lane in Towaoc. Next slide, please. A couple more of the home scale projects. Again, these are all rental homes, so electric is incorporated into their rent. So our housing authority is saving money on these homes through the solar panels. Next slide. 

Down on the south end of town, we have what's called the supportive housing unit. It's 11 apartment building – this is about a 60 kW design. It's a ground mount, because the roof has too many penetrations to do a roof mount. On this one, we used anchor screws instead of piles driven into the earth. So you can see the equipment on the right has got an auger on there, so they'll just drive the screws into the ground with that pivoting hydraulic skid steer there. Next slide. 

Here, you can see a little fence construction on the project. Next slide. Here's the array being built, about 50 percent done, with the racking. It's all done now, and last – actually, this Tuesday, the electrician was wiring in the final interconnection prior to the electric company bringing it online. Next slide. 

So this is one of those homes. The November power generation you can see. We had a little more produced then used, and to date – actually, the numbers on the left were October numbers. The generation on the right is November. So those aren't exactly accurate. But anyways, we've definitely offset the consumption on the home, and all of these projects are designed that way. So next slide, please. 

Bigger picture, on the left, you see a picture of a coal fired power plant. That's the San Juan generating station in Waterflow, New Mexico. It's just south of the Ute Mountain reservation. On September 30th, 2022, a few months ago, that last smokestack stopped blowing. It is officially closed down, and we are at the forefront of the effort to fill that void with clean, renewable energy, solar power and energy storage systems. 

For the tribe, we are trying as part of that climate action plan to transition from fossil fuels to clean energy as part of the tribe's economy. So last year, we got our first solar payment before anything was built. It was an option to lease agreement, brought in $100,000.00. We just got two more of those done with the tribal council, another $300,000.00. We've brought in $400,000.00 to the tribe on commercial solar without building a single panel yet. So that is a great path to the future. We are hoping our first utility scale commercial solar will come online at this time next year. 

And we're also working on a 600 megawatt closed loop pump storage project to use water on a big battery, and we've also got a small hydroelectric project and some other commercial in the hopper. These folks in this photograph are some staff, but most importantly, these are the future of the Ute Mountain Ute tribe, the youth, and that's why we're doing this. Next slide, please. 

Thank you very much. Happy to entertain any questions that people have. 

>>James Jenson: Thanks so much, Scott. Really appreciate your time and your presentation. It's a wonderful success story. 

We do have just a couple of questions, and then we're running out of time, so we're going to have to wrap it up after that. But do you have any recommendations for how to deal with interconnection concerns? Did you reach out early in the process, and is there anything state and federal governments can do to help move interconnection along? 

>>Scott Clow: Yeah. On the community scale with interconnection, it is challenging. Every electric utility company and each small local electric company has their policies and procedures, what they allow and what they don't allow. As I alluded to with our one megawatt project, I call it a one megawatt project. It's actually 999,999 kilowatts that can be allowed. If we hit one megawatt, we get penalized. 

And so we have a curtailment system on it to keep it from getting to one megawatt and getting penalized. That's really complicated. There are a lot of constraints. 

But as far as recommendations, I would say if you're building a project, designing a project, make sure that you are fully aware of those constraints before you make investments in things that cannot be built. 

On the utility scale, I would make sure that you – if you – it's a tribally driven project, that you're fully aware of what the process for the interconnection queue is on that. And if you're working with commercial partners, as we are, that they are fully aware of that process. I can tell you that we have – our partners have invested heavily in getting in that interconnection queue, and it's an ongoing process, and very competitive. 

So as soon as you can get a project in the queue, the better. Land control is key. So if there is any waffling as far as giving a company exclusive control for that land, obviously, if it's a tribally driven project, that's ideal, because you have land control. But it's very complicated. 

Reach out to Department of Energy as well as the BIA's Division of – Department of Energy and Mineral Development. They can both provide technical support on that. 

>>James Jenson: Excellent. Thanks, Scott. And one last quick question. How much of your time does it take to develop these solar projects? 

>>Scott Clow: Boy, that's a tough one. As I mentioned earlier, we've had a renewable energy team for more than ten years, and we – to be honest, we spun our wheels entertaining a lot of companies that came to us over the years. I would say the first half of that, we really just wanted to vet these companies, and we had a lot of stops and starts. And I highly recommend getting feasibility studies done. We've had a few of those, both on the community and the commercial scale. So those are really valuable. 

As far as my time, it has increased substantially as we've gotten actual projects funded. I have to write quarterly reports, so that takes some time. Our finance office has to do financial reports, so that takes time. You know, so like any grant, you have to put in the time to administer that grant properly. 

We have monthly renewable energy committee meetings, in addition to negotiation meetings with companies. So yeah, you want to make sure that you can commit the time to negotiation, especially. These – you don't want to lock in your tribe to a 20, 30 year deal without terms that are favorable to the tribe. So please plan the staff to be dedicated to that. And it takes a lot of time for your attorneys as well. If you don't have in-house attorneys, you're probably going to have to hire external attorneys, because as much as us worker bees who aren't attorneys love to try to push things forward, we've got to have our attorneys review things before the officials make decisions on them. 

So yeah, I would say several hours a month, minimum, to really get into doing some major projects. 

>>James Jenson: Excellent. Thanks, Scott. Thanks for your time. We're going to have to close out questions at this time. So as stated earlier, this was the last webinar of the 2022 series, and we're moving on to the 2023 series, and we're starting planning for that. We do want to thank today's presenters for all their time, and our attendees for joining us today. 

We are interested in receiving feedback on the webinar series in general, and on any topics of interest in the 2023 series. So reach out to us with feedback or recommendations. Once we have finalized the dates and topics for the 2023 series, we will share that info on our website, listserv, and social media. So please keep an eye out for that info. 

With that, we will conclude the 2022 series and today's webinar. Thanks, everyone, for your time and interest and attendance, and we look forward to you joining us on future webinars. Good day. 

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