Sign Maryland RFP Now

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hi everyone welcome to our webinar today the topic for today's webinar is recent RPS studies Maine and Maryland this webinar is being presented by the clean energy States Alliance also known as sisa and we have with us our host for today's webinar at warren leon warren is the executive director of the clean energy States Alliance and we have a number of excellent guest speakers with us on the line today before I pass it over to them I would like to go over a few quick housekeeping notes all of our attendees for this webinar are in listen-only mode you have a couple of options to join the audio portion of the webinar you can call in using a telephone or you can connect using your computer making speakers if you'd like to minimize the webinar console so that you can view the presentation full screen you can click on the orange arrow that you see circled there that arrow will also expand the control panel so that you can use some of the functionality there and one of the things on the control panel to direct your attention to is the questions box we encourage you to type in your questions as you think of them throughout the webinar and hit Send we will be answering questions following our presentations and we would like to get to your question to make sure that we do type it in when you think of it don't wait until the very end we do have a lot of people registered for today's webinar that should mean a lot of questions make sure that we get to your question by taking it in as soon as you think of it and a final note this webinar is being recorded we will send you an email with a copy of the webinar recording in a PDF of the slides probably sometime this afternoon and we'll also be posting all of those webinar materials on our website at CC org backslash webinars and that is a good URL to know because that is also where we post information about upcoming webinars and it's where you can find archives of all of our previous webinars so with the housekeeping out of the way I would like to pass it over now to Warren Leone as I said Warren is the executive director of the clean energy States Alliance and he is going to get us started hey thank you very much Samantha clean-energy States alliance let me tell you a little bit about it before we go into the content of today's webinar we're a national membership organization composed of public agencies mostly state agencies in about 20 States and you could see our members here on the screen we do a lot of information sharing we do group projects among our members we do activities and events like this webinar for broader audiences as well and one recent initiative that we launched was the 100% clean energy collaborative which is collaborative specifically of those states that have embraced 100% clean energy goals we'll be working with them to figure out how they could better plan for achieving their goals and we'll be doing a lot of outreach to broader audiences around that topic and if we can go to the next slide you today's webinar input links into the 100% clean energy collaborative but it also links into the work that C's has done for many years related to renewable portfolio standards renewable portfolio standards have been probably the single most important state policy advancing clean energy in the electricity sector and it's very important to evaluate how that policy has been going and what its potential is in the future and as states move towards thinking about 100% clean energy is also undoubtedly the case that RPS policies will remain an important part of trying to reach for that 100 percent goal well today we're going to be focusing on studies that have assessed the RPS in two different states a study that was done by Exeter Associates of the RPS in Maryland and a study about the Maine RPS that was done by sustainable energy advantage and synapse energy economics we're going to start with Maryland I'm going to introduce our speakers for that will then hear that presentation after that I'll introduce the speakers for the main presentation and after that will be country your questions so the two people who'll be talking to us about Maryland the first one is Rebecca Whitis who's a senior analyst and senior analyst at Exeter associates who work there include economic modeling database development socio-economic analysis related to the siting of power plants and transmission lines and energy policy analysis she was the primary author of a report on and it his story's issued in late 2018 for the state of Maryland and prior to joining Exeter she worked for Voice of America and business for Social Responsibility and she's going to be joined on this presentation by Matt Hoyt who's a senior analyst at Exeter associates where he specializes in utility sector policy and regulation for state and federal clients his past work has included evaluating demand-side management and demand response opportunities at US Army facilities and co-authoring a report on the status and future prospects for nuclear power in Maryland prior to joining Exeter in 2016 Matt worked at AE energy and target point consulting so let me turn it over to Matt and Rebecca okay thanks a lot obviously I'm Rebecca and I'm up first I also wanted to quickly give credit to our coworker Kevin Porter who was actually the leader of our project and is on the line as well nextslide okay just to give you guys a sense of where we're headed we wanted to give you some background on Maryland's RPS just to know it's kind of quirky features and the history of our study and then the bulk of our time will be spent going over some of the key findings that we came up with we're gonna try to focus on the methodologies that we used that we think worked well or we're at least interesting and maybe worth replicating and tweaking elsewhere and we're also going to be trying to stress findings that probably have relevance beyond Maryland's border and then we'll leave with some parting thoughts okay so just to let you know Maryland's RPS is constantly being adjusted by the legislature this timeline shows the types of changes that are made typically there have been ratcheting up of the percentage requirements tweaking how widely or how broad the region where resources can be located will be and then throwing additional technologies into the mix and often as you can see legislatures make all these changes at once okay so where are we at right now with the Maryland RPS we are aiming to have 50% of our retail energy sales come from renewable energy by 2030 we have a very ambitious solar carve out I believe that percentage-wise this is actually the highest carve out goal in the country we've also got a little bit of tier two remaining in the mix and like almost all the East Coast states we're looking at putting in offshore wind one thing that is sort of a theme of our presentation in our report is that the Maryland RPS is truly a compromise between many many competing priorities we have the wind and solar companies hydro and biomass utilities environmental activists consumer advocates and as a result there are some inherent tensions in the legislation between encouraging new resources and maintaining existing ones lowering costs and promoting in-state development and none of these are really unique to Maryland which is why we think our report has a lot to say for other states as well okay so just to let you know this was commissioned by the Maryland General Assembly they wanted a very comprehensive report that would look at a whole slew of questions in terms of the effectiveness of the RPS both historically and a little bit prospectively so the resulting report is also quite comprehensive if you check it out you'll see it's got several hundred pages and the overarching theme throughout is these trade-offs and how policy design affects the performance of our RPS we really wanted to help people move beyond the generalizations so they could see where trade-offs are at work and decide which outcomes are most important and under what circumstances and we'll show examples of this as we go over our key findings and time wise you can see that the power plant research program which is an arm of Maryland's DNR Department of Natural Resources put out an RFP in 2017 Exeter was approved as the company that would be providing the legwork on the report in 2018 and the final report was turned in in December 2019 okay so we thought that one of the most fundamental things that people needed to understand in order to think about the impacts of the RPS are what resources are actually being tapped to fulfill our RPS as you can see on the left you have some usual suspects and then you have some unusual suspects so wind is the number one resource at the moment but black liquor which is a byproduct of paper mill production was number two in 2017 and remains important in Maryland although not in the rest of PJM and what that really means is in terms of emissions you've got a lot of Maryland RPS compliance coming from resources with emissions profiles then on the right you can see how Maryland stacks up literally with some of its neighbors that also have RPS policies because we have an expansive Tier one requirement where many resources are eligible we have a more diverse resource mix than almost everyone except for Pennsylvania all the way on the right the states in the middle used to have in many cases a more diverse mix but have been moving towards restricting what's allowed for Tier one compliance and that as a result has shifted them towards greater and greater reliance on wind in particular one of the big surprises for us was when we looked at the Vintage of facilities that were providing RPS recs and as you can see from the slide over half of the recs that have been used for RPS fulfillment we're actually in action before the RPS was ever created so to the extent that policy makers really want to be driving new renewable energy development that's something to think about and you can see that this really occurs in tier 1 and tier 2 but not the solar carve-outs so again you're trying to make it very easy for policy makers to see what's happening in every tier and this is something that happens throughout our report on the right you can see a breakdown of in state versus out-of-state this is probably one of the number-one topics of discussion among policy makers there is such a strong desire to see the RPS as a driver of in-state economic development and so we have a lot of discussion in the report about the pros and cons the expenses of wind racks here versus wind racks elsewhere in PJM same for solar and right now you can see that despite everyone's desire or many people's desire the economics are driving most compliance to be from out of state and now I will pass over the microphone to Matt hi everybody this is Matt Hoyt so perhaps is of no surprise to most of our listeners one of the major areas of interest to legislators in Maryland were the rate impacts of the Maryland RPS so our approach to studying this question was to adopt the same methodology used by LBNL and n rail that's the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and National Renewable Energy Lab and that was to take renewable energy costs and the rate impacts as a function of renewable and renewable energy credits plus alternative compliance payments divided by estimated total retail costs so that's what you're seeing in the graph on the left and as you can see from the graph the compliance cost peaked at about 1.8 percent in 2016 before falling and they remained low into 2018 at about 1.1 percent though it's not shown on the graph one thing of note is that since Maryland has increased its RPS going into the next decade up to 50 percent overall rec costs have rised pretty sharply so we'll be I guess we'd encourage you to stay tuned to see what rec price will be going forward it's also something we consider in the next slide and then on addition on the right we provide a comparison of Maryland to other states and PJM I guess one thing to note and it's highlighted throughout a report is that we focused on differentiating cost between tier to highlight the trade-offs between in-state carve-outs and out-of-state so as you can tell on the graph on the left the solar carve-out contributed as much as 30 percent of overall rate impact and this is consistent with the graph on the right which compares Maryland other states the states that tend to have higher rate impacts usually have higher carve outs or more restrictive eligibility requirements so it's another example of the complex dynamics of the rec market so as I mention Oracle rate impacts we used the same methodology to look at future rate impacts this graph in particular just shows estimated compliance cost for residential customers under both the 25% and 50% RPS these impacts peak and 2030 at approximately seven point six percent of retail bills so it's a pretty substantial increase it from the slide I just showed you a major driver of this increase is the cost of offshore wind so as Rebecca mentioned earlier and is shown on the slide Maryland is adding as many as 1,200 megawatts of additional offshore wind over the next decade so despite declines in the cost of offshore wind within our estimates it's still just a major portion of the Maryland RPS and these resources tend to be more expensive than alternatives there's a couple of simplifying assumptions baked into these estimates of future rate impacts for example we used rec futures for the initial year prices and then adjusted for inflation from there on we also assumed that the solar carve out is met at the cost of the alternative compliance payment rate and some of these future years to account for these simplifying assumptions we also did an alternative approach that's included in the report that uses some different pricing scenarios so we'd encourage you to look at that to see some alternative estimates of prices with regards to emissions we looked at average emissions per kilowatt hour on a PJM wide basis excuse me this is because it's important to consider as Rebecca said earlier as many as 80% of renewable energy credits come from out of state resources so the impact on global immittance like co2 was really a PJM wide phenomena and what our study showed is that Maryland's RPS specifically contribute to as much as a 0.8 percent drop in PJM wide co2 emissions and if you think about this this is roughly proportional and 2017 to the size of the Maryland RPS which had a tier-one of about 13% as well as its overall composition within PJM so Maryland made up about 8% of PJM wide sales and I guess similar to the future rate impacts estimates we did make some assumptions and this we assumed that all recs would have gone to resources that may not have operated in the absence of these recs which matches the premise of Rex which is to provide a subsidy another important note though is as Rebecca stated earlier the Maryland RPS does include some emitting type resources like municipal solid waste landfill gas and black liquor and as a consequence the Maryland RPS did not contribute to reductions in p/j and white so2 and NOx emissions in fact in some cases we saw higher emissions as a result and this is due to the concurrent trend of declining coal resources in PJM bringing down the Sox and NOx emissions within PJM wide whereas Maryland continues to support resources with an emission profile for job impacts we historically relied for the historic portion we relied on existing estimates from several sources and I guess I'll step back and note for some context at this point Maryland in Maryland energy related jobs make up a smaller share of the economy than nationwide according to the deal we in 2016 about 1.1 percent of employment of Maryland was in traditional energy jobs like power generation fuels or transmission distribution etc and this is compared to a national average a 2.4 percent and in a related caveat is that many of the energy jobs in Maryland are related to energy efficiency specifically but even with that context we saw that Maryland ranked third among the states the PGM states that we evaluated in terms of renewable energy jobs as a share of total energy employment most jobs are predominantly in construction they were largely concentrated nd solar which as you'll see in this graph there's some countervailing trends there there's some recent declines in solar jobs in particular which ties to an over compliance with the solar carve out which occurred in many states in PJM as a result of that solar over compliance we saw a decline and solar renewable energy credit costs which reduced the available subsidy and led to decreases and new construction activity this is very rapidly changing with the increase in Maryland's RPS to gauge future impacts we used an input-output model known as and plan and for these scenarios we look strictly at the 50% RPS and then focused on solar and offshore wind which are both in state carve-outs and the two areas that are expected to grow the most over the next decade and in total we estimated approximately 40,000 new full-time equivalent jobs and 7.6 billion in state sales revenue from 2019 to 2030 in addition to looking at through employee a net job estimates we also did a little you of future manufacturing and assembly opportunities associated with offshore wind it's a very hot topic right now and our study highlights I think interestingly and importantly there's a wide variety of manufacturing opportunities not just some of the headline-grabbing opportunities through ports one area that evaluate and report that's of growing interest to a lot of states right now is the impact of the RPS and other energy related policies on environmental justice communities so the Maryland RPS law required us to study this topic one challenge for this is that neither Maryland nor the federal government has an official definition of an each a community so for the purposes of our assessment we developed our own definition and created our own high level screening analysis using the Environmental Protection Agency's ej screen tool what we found was that there is a disproportionate allocation of benefits from the RPS compared to the proportion of the population and census tracts that we identified as EJ communities for our study we did a scoring rubric to assess this and we evaluated based on jobs job impacts and mission impacts and land-use impacts it's worth noting that there's a number of other alternative approaches you could use to doing this type of assessments so we were looking forward to seeing how other states refine and build upon this approach to evaluate this question as it becomes more prominent and finally in terms of parting thoughts I'll just reiterate what Rebecca said earlier the Maryland RPS is often expected to be a lot of different things to a lot of different people so that includes being a driver of renewable energy development a tool for combating climate change in improving local air quality a source of jobs and economic development an impetus and sustainer of in-state businesses and what we really hope to convey in our report is that there's trade-offs involved among many of these objectives so as noted above we did see that the Maryland RPS sparked new wind and solar capacity it also led to some modest increases in jobs but at the same time it's unusual and allowing resources like municipal solid waste and black liquor so though it's met its goals today that reasonably low cost it's also not necessarily met environmental justice aims so far going forward given these trade-offs we think it's important for policy makers to understand that there are potential ways they can prioritize the design to meet certain objectives and hopefully our report conveys there's different opportunities and finally in terms of additional resources in the report it is a detailed report it covers as a recommend to cover 17 different general and specific requirements so I would encourage folks to take a look at the full report and or at least the executive summary to give a sense of what else is in there this includes primers are non RPS policies as well as descriptions of the strengths and weaknesses of potential changes to the Maryland RPS Hey great thank you very much Rebecca and Matt before we go on to the second presentation let me point out to folks that after this webinar you'll get an email from us with links to the recording of the webinar and the slides and we'll also include in that links to where you can get the report but in case somebody is listening to this after the fact matter Rebecca can you tell people where they could find the report if they were just searching out of the blue sure you can go to the power plant research program website within Maryland DNR and they will have a report live on their website hey Greg thanks very much Rebecca well let's go to this second report which is about Maine and unlike the Maryland report which primarily look backwards the Maine we put primarily look forward unlike the Maryland report which was required by state government and produced for state government the main report was initiated by nonprofit groups and they contracted with sustainable energy advantage and synapse energy economics to produce the report and we're lucky to have with us today two people who worked on the report and let me tell you about them the first person you'll be hearing from is Jason divot who's a senior director at sustainable energy advantage and he has over 20 years of experience in renewable energy policy development and market analysis at SVA he conducts research and analysis and supportive decision-making for a wide range of public and private sector entities he's wet or contributed to RPS market analyses throughout New England New York and the PJM region and he's co-lead the essays New England renewable energy market outlook and he is going to be joined by Patrick Knight of synapse energy economics who performs consulting conducts research and assists in writing testimony in reports much of his work at synapse focuses on analysis and modeling of the New England electric system in light of new and existing laws and regulations his recent work has included developing free open-source tools for assisting policymakers analysis of the national energy system those tools include EPA's Evert model and synapses Eevee ready tool well let me turn it over to Jason and Patrick good afternoon this is Jason Gifford Thank You Warren and to see you set for the opportunity to speak with everyone today we appreciate it there you go for those not familiar SCA and synapse have collaborated on numerous occasions to conduct analysis like the one we're talking about today throughout the Northeast and gives us an opportunity to take a deep dive into renewable energy policy and deployment and their associated market impacts and outcomes through an iterative modeling between our two firms the purpose of this analysis was to evaluate the potential impacts of a readable portfolio standard expansion on renewable energy deployment and jobs emissions and rate payers so Maine's RPS began actually back in 2000 with a focus on existing resources particularly biomass and hydroelectric generators a component for new facilities was added to the main RPS in 2008 and then this study evaluated the potential expansion of demand for new resources in particular another 40 percent by 2030 the analysis was comparative in nature so that is it focuses on the difference in modeling outputs for two scenarios one a reference case in which means RPS policy was held constant and a second dat percent by 2030 scenario reflecting the proposed policy expansion so this type of analysis really must be conducted in a regional context attractive as it might be to try to focus on demand in Maine and facilities in Maine it's really not possible or appropriate each of the New England states has its own RPS and they're imperfectly overlapping eligibility criteria creates a complex set of interactions as wrecks disperse if you will across New England to fulfill RPS demands so acknowledging the regional market dynamics is central to understanding state specific outcomes so with this regional context in mind our study found that the increase in Maine RPS demand would be met by a combination of new supply largely in response to the procurement activities that are also covered in Maine's legislation and regional surpluses expected as a result of procurement activity in other states already enabled through prior legislation and as part of or to supplement renewable portfolio standard programs and other markets so the analysis in Maine estimates that approximately 1,200 megawatts of solar and wind with a roughly 700 that expected to occur in Maine based on our supply curve analysis so while the study focuses on the Maine RPS it's also important to keep in mind that Maine will benefit from facilities that are built in Maine but to serve the other state policies as well so further this slide which is the final one for me explains that prior policy activities and the other New England states have created an expectation of surplus over the next several years so in other words long-term procurement in New England is in the aggregate greater than incremental supply or is expected to be greater than incremental supply in the right hand chart you can see that Maine's legislation had both supply and demand side components and that for the period after 2026 additional supply is expected to be needed to match the increasing class 1-a targets between now and 2030 but then in the left hand chart we show that supply from other regional policies they've expected to significantly outpaced demand in those states leaving plenty of supply to fulfill Maine's RPS increase after 2026 without the need for additional development so just to rephrase the RPS policies and and equilibrium in those markets depends on both supply side policy and demand side policy and our PSS were born as a demand side policy but long term procurements in recent years have come in into favor including those of significant scale for offshore wind and so what we have looking forward is a bit of a defined surplus for the region as a whole we're in the prescribed long term supply contracting opportunities outpace renewable energy demand increases in some states more than others but here we show an aggregate that there's expected to be significantly more supply than than demand in the latter half of the 2020s which an important role for fulfilling Maine's RPS demand increases without requiring corresponding supply builds for every megawatt hour of additional demand so at this point I'd like to pass control to Patrick to talk about the studies job emissions and other findings thanks Jason so before I get into the findings I just want to spend a couple of minutes talking about the modeling tools that we use for this project and to describe how they capture the dynamics like that renewable supply and demand interaction that Jason was just talking about so at the core of our work there are two primary models that we use Remo and encompass Remo is a proprietary model developed by SCA and it works by giving it a set of parameters about project electricity demand renewable policies like RPS technology costs and energy prices and it takes these together and provides a forecast of expected project builds by resource type in location at the same time and also provides expected rec prices for each of the relevant policy categories under consideration so for this project we were mainly focused on the main class one tier but station showed a couple of slides ago the RPS policies throughout New England are heavily intertwined so it's really necessary to model all of them next we take the Renewable build data from the Remo model and feed it into the encompass model over here at synapse encompasses a production cost and capacity expansion model of the electric sector and it works by taking together operational data for each and every power plant in New England and combining that with data on transmission constraints imports and experts with adjacent balancing authorities fuel price projections expected to manage for electricity and many other inputs together to develop hour by hour outlets of generation prices and emissions for every state so this is really important encompass isn't just a spreadsheet model it's a more sophisticated model that really allows us to take into account dynamic changes that are projected over the next ten years and to provide quite rigorous projection of what a future under an enhanced RPS might look like so those are the two primary models but three other models that we use for this project that I think are worth talking about are our Cobra our rate and bill and back model and implants all I'll talk about those briefly Cobra is a model developed by US EPA it's a health impact screening model and its purpose is to translate changes in criteria pollutant emissions at specific power plants into public health impacts so just like the folks at Exeter we're talking earlier today about the reductions that Maryland's RPS might might cause for Sox and NOx using copra we can take a look at what happens if Maine's RPS Policy say reduces emissions of NOx and Sox at the particular power plant in Massachusetts or Connecticut or somewhere in Maine and see how that mission gets transported across the New England states and elsewhere and discern the impacts on things like hospitalization asthma incidences or premature death we also use a Philips bill and rate impact model which is a spreadsheet model that tastes together data on energy and capacity prices and rent prices from encompassing remo to develop impacts on rating bills and all give a summary of those in just just a minute the third model is the same model that the Exeter folks used in their study which is the implant model a plan is an input-output model and at least as we reuse in this study its importantly a net jobs analysis where we're not only looking at the impact of the RPS in terms of creating jobs say from no new solar construction but we're also making sure we look at the other half the ledger in terms of what if generation from gas plants is decreased and what are the impacts of jobs there just like in the Maryland study we we looked here at direct indirect and in nice jobs before I jump into the the the outputs I do want to mention that the focus of this particular project was was main but because of the intertwined nature of the New England energy market we produce outputs for virtually all of the states in New England and this is the same sort of framework that we as leverage for states and provinces throughout US and Canada as we're doing this kind of an analysis this forward-looking analysis all over North America so to dive into the results I think first I'll focus on on the benefits so the results of our implant analysis showed that the increasing the increase of Maine's RPS to eight percent by 2030 its class 1 RBS to 50 percent by 2030 results it in about a 100 to 170 jobs added to Maine each year over the study period and this includes direct indirect and induced jobs there are also other jobs created outside of Maine but but that's not included in this particular total from an issue from an emissions standpoint we see that the increase in the RPS is likely to reduce Maine's in-state emissions by 10 percent by 2030 or about half a million metric tons region-wide and if you take it's sort of a different perspective at this and you were in a credit Maine with the region wide electric sector co2 emissions so not just the emissions that are reduced in its own state borders but also in the rest of New England we estimate that Maine's emissions would fall like 55% of eliten to reference case so co2 emissions aren't the only things that are affected by an increase in the RPS just as in the Maryland study we also looked at the impacts on NOx and Sox emissions and projected that millions of pounds of NOx and Sox would be reduced as a result of an increase in Maine's yes and using the Kobra model we were able to translate this into health benefits estimating that they're roughly half a million dollars in public health benefits that can accrue each year relative to a reference case now turning over to the cost side of the ledger we anticipated that the net cost to Maine others new policy is roughly 21 million dollars per year and that includes both increased costs for essentially a sense of payment of about 43 million dollars but roughly half of this 43 million dollars is offset by decreased energy and capacity market costs including impacts to price suppression caused by zero marginal cost renewables when you translate this into customer impacts were projecting that main customers in the central Maine power utility jurisdiction would have increased bills of about one percent or about one dollar per month and again this takes into account rec prices faster prices energy prices and price suppression for small CNI customers we're projecting about a similar percentage level of impact about one percent and importantly I want to mention that many of these cost shift over time just as Jason was saying that as the interplay of supply and demand from renewable procurement since other New England state RPS has shift over time we're seeing smaller impacts in the earlier periods and larger impacts in the later periods so I'm out of time so just to wrap up I want to mention briefly here that shortly after our study was was done last spring Maine passed legislation to expand both its RPS to 50% class 1 RPS by 2030 it also modified its long term contracting programs for large-scale and distributed generation right now if you're curious about the the state of play in Maine policymakers are also currently exploring means renewable future through 2050 with focus on the impacts of electrification say from EVs or heat pumps and also potentially considering the impacts of even greater renewable expansion so I think that about does it for us I think Lauren or any things over to you for questions Henry thanks very much Pat and Jason that was very helpful and there are a number of questions I'll be asking and I'll go back and forth between the two studies but let me start with a couple of questions for the Maryland folks one is just a definitional question somebody asked what's tier one versus tier two what does that mean and what's the nature of the carve out in Maryland and yeah this is Rebecca so tier 1 is the largest tier it's pretty much everything the RPS encompasses tier 2 is a small and diminishing to soon sunset here that really just represents large hydro which has been in the mix from the beginning I think it may have expired briefly it or it was set to expire and then was rescued legislation legislatively the carve-outs are all part of the tier 1 requirement so there is a solar carve out and an offshore wind carve out the solar is percentage-wise and the offshore wind is megawatt based that doing no that's great and another question for you folks what caused the decline in rec prices in 2017 I'll take that question based on our analysis of the supply and demand conditions of Rex the biggest contributor was an oversupply of Rex throughout the PJM wide area relative to demand from states with NP JM so like the second present presenters were noting rec prices are set on a regional basis and they're considering supply and demand conditions throughout all of PJM so what we observed is declines in costs particularly for solar as the amount of resources developed in Maryland in the recipe JM far outpaced the amount of demand from states like Maryland in terms of RPS requirement good thank you let's go to a couple questions remain and one simple one is somebody is not getting the follow-up email from us and they want to find your study where would they find it sure this is Pat I think the the easiest way to get to it is to just google synapse SE a Maine RPS study I believe it's hosted on both of our websites and you should be able to find it fairly easy that way and a couple people were confused by all the percentages and we talked about thirty percent fifty percent eighty percent a hundred percent why did you focus on the percentages you did and how does that relate to what is now the target in Maine yes fair enough this is Jason I'll start and then invite Patrick dadoes as appropriate Maine has as with we heard our Maryland presenters described many RPS programs have multiple tiers or classes they signify the same thing they're just called different things in different states and they represent different policy objectives as they relate to existing renewables or new renewables so Maine's first RPS was 30 percent and that was focused on its existing fleet then came a class 1 requirement which was 10% initially and the the initial RPS became known as class 2 and that was the original 30% and then so that gets you to 40 and then the incremental 40% that was the focus of this study and the subsequent legislation is we refer to it shorthand as as class 1 but it was actually class 1a because the eligibility was just slightly different but it's oriented toward new renewables again so if you just take them in aggregate it becomes 50% new where the definition of that in Maine is anything built after September 1st 2005 and another 30% for existing resources which would be before September 1st 2005 which brings you to a total of 80 percent thank you let's go back to Maryland for a second we'll be defect to Maine in a few minutes in the case of Maryland when you were determining weight impacts did you consider the possibility that there would be lower fuel and capital costs since increase renewables will allow Maryland reduce reliance on fossil fuels this is Matt it is something we considered but for the purposes of our baseline estimates we predominantly relied on existing sources of estimates for retail cost and then adjusted them for inflation so it's a very simplified approach in our alternative scenarios we do project further declines and other cost components and we have discussion of contributors to total retail costs so if you're looking at as a percent of total costs its discussed in the report I don't know if they're I don't think they're explicit scenarios where we modelled that as a percentage basis but it's a great question it's one we were aware of as we developed our assessment well let me ask another question that relates to that in a different way you had included in your analysis the increased costs associated with developing offshore wind and paying for the incremental cost of the recs for water wind but was there any way to consider the potential that developing all that offshore wind would make the course of other competing energy less expensive because they'd be playing in a more competitive market I guess there's two notes I'll make along those lines we didn't mention this in the presentation for but for this portion of the study we also used previous modeling we had done for the long-term electricity report in Maryland to provide some additional context for our assessments and the important note I wanted to make is that Maryland is still a relatively small part of PGM so the benefits and impacts in terms of overall decreasing cost within PJM are relatively small so we we did account for this through the LCR we made note of it in the report but we didn't find substantial decreases and overall system costs because of the energy added as a result of the Maryland RPS okay thank you and let me ask you actually just one more question a couple people asked this and this goes to your slides where you were showing the comparative course of the Maryland RPS versus other off the essence and PJM and a couple people want to know a little bit more about where do those other costs appear what was the report that you were getting that data from sure we developed those estimates using the same methodology as we did for the Maryland estimates and that's the methodology borrowed from Lawrence Berkeley National Lab National Renewable Energy Lab comprised of rec cost plus AC PS / estimated total retail cost to get the actual rec cost and ACP cost we did the legwork to look through the compliance reports for each of these states where available or we look at other sources of information and that would publicly available reporting what rec cost may see these were and for the total retail costs we used an adapted version of estimates from EEI ok great let's go back to Maine for a second and let me I'm gonna read this question I don't and this person writes I don't know how much gas main bure barons but if it's a factor did you look at methane emission reductions and if so did you include upstream emissions Fiji at the well site that's a great question for this project we only focused on direct electric sector emissions so we're talking about emissions that from our co2 co2 emissions specifically from fossil fuel combustion at the power plants so there are gas plants inmate there is gas transportation of gas via pipeline to Maine but we did look at leakage or upstream methane leaks or anything like that we just focused on the direct emissions from the thermoelectric center okay and I knew no the Maryland study as we heard they considered some of the health care course and to what extent did you consider health care costs and what you said you you had some information in there about the impacts of emissions but could you say a little bit more about health care and the Maine RPS increases that you were modeling yeah of course so like I said the way that we modeled it for this project was to use u.s. EPA's Cobra bottle and what Cobra does looks at differences in emissions and criteria pollutant emissions of NOx and so2 and other pollutants between two different scenarios within one particular year so we had a reference case and we had a eighty percent by 2030 case and between each of those cases in each of the years we observed some decrease in NOx and so2 emissions caused by greater renewables from from the main RPS using Cobra we can we can tell the we can tell the model where the emission decreases happened so if there is a power plant in say Massachusetts or New Hampshire or Maine that reduces their output as a result of Maine's increased renewable requirement cobra tracks how those emission decreases what if otherwise been transported across state borders and models how they fall on people who live in these states and essentially it has a set of underlying factors developed from the literature that say for a particular set of demographics based on each you know County's census data we would expect a change in NOx of emissions of X to translate into you know why reductions in asthma incidences or premature death and each one of these values in Cobra has a incidence value so the like number of asthma attacks and also a monetized value so again using literature from Public Health translating those asthma attacks in to monetize dollar amount so that's how we're able to get to the $500,000 per year impact or benefit really from the Maine RPS great thank you very much and let's go back to Maryland for a second I have a slightly complicated question here that someone wrote in and they asked can you reconcile the impact of Maryland's RPS on co2 emissions and air quality and the fact that a meaningful portion of the recs used for compliance come from facilities that predate the RPS has there been an analysis on air quality greenhouse gas impact of the RPS when looking specifically at newer facilities that might have been built because of of--they essex incentives as opposed to just everything that's being used to provide recs for the RPS this is Matt within our assessment we did not separate by resource type besides just tear when evaluating this question it's a great question and it's one we wanted to highlight in the report given that such a high proportion of resources did come from renewable energy generation sources and available before the RPS was implemented so I guess I'll just note that this is a trade-off we highlight and discuss throughout the report the emissions analysis we did does not break it out into that way and I do think it's a great question though and it gets at some of those trade-offs we were pointing out between supporting in-state renewable resources like developing additional solar and state vs. sustaining existing resources and protecting those jobs from things like municipal solid waste and black liquor okay and speaking of the black liquor somebody wrote in to ask does black liquor remain in the RPS long term or is that phased out at some point well it basically comes oh this is Rebecca it comes up for review in the legislature almost every year I think there was even legislation again this year to try to remove it right now it's still in the mix okay and when I want to see if at time for one more question but I think what I'm going to do is we only have a few minutes left I wanted to give each team like one or two minutes to say anything else you want to say you know what you especially think people should look at your report to see or any worsens learn for folks who might do future RPS studies I don't know who wants to go first maybe let's start with Marilyn Bennie you know famous last words advice for others who might want to do obvious valuation study sure this is Matt I think we've already emphasized a number of times that there's a lot of complex trade-offs involved in RPS another note I'll note for people who are developing RPS studies in the future is that we had a wide variety of topics to address in this report as you can tell from the long list of sections that we didn't even cover so I would encourage folks to take a look at that we used a variety of different methodologies a number of different data sources to develop our analysis and included a variety of caveats that I think would be of interest to our audience so I would encourage folks to take a look at the report and just keep in mind that there are trade-offs when you're evaluating certain aspects of an RPS policy sometimes important to consider the fact that there could be downsides and other areas that may have also be interest to your stakeholders all right and Jason or Patrick you won't have any famous last words and advice for others who might want to do a study that's a forward-looking study about the potential to increase RPS targets sure this is Jason I can I can start with two interrelated things one is there's quite a body of experience now in the northeast and mid-atlantic with the implementation of renewable portfolio standards so there's there's quite a lot to learn for states that are looking to evolve or expand their programs but in order to get the most out of that I would say that the most important thing for policy makers or others looking to produce such a study is to think about what you're trying to accomplish and and the the more specific you can make the question that you're asking the the more likely it is that you'll be able to pull together actionable information because at the end of the day the each state does have slightly different objectives and even those objectives have evolved over time thank you and you want to add anything yeah I mean I I think I would just echo what's what's already been said here you know this this main study was in the first time that Jase and I had looked at RPS impacts of RPS expansion in New England we did a Massachusetts study a couple of years ago and in a Connecticut study shortly after that and one of one of the things that we kept running into was the dynamic that Matt had articulated where there's a lot of a lot of interesting impacts that come out of changing at RPS and sometimes you end up with impacts that are sort of countervailing each other in terms of what you're thinking about jobs or costs or emissions or in-state impacts versus out-of-state impacts and I think one of the things that I've certainly learned from from doing all of these studies is how important it is to try to be as comprehensive as possible you know like jason said to to keep your question articulate and and constrain it if possible but you know you you want to make sure that you're stepping back far enough and taking taking a whole view into account when you're talking about all the costs and benefits that might result from an RPS okay thanks very much and I want to thank Rebecca Matt Jason and Patrick all of you for excellent presentations and I'd encourage everybody on the line to go look at these studies they're very interesting and these brief presentations are only able to touch the surface I also want to point out that we're going to hav some additional webinars coming up including two related to the 100% clean energy collaborative and overview of 100% clean energy states and the 100% clean energy collaborative on May 11th and a webinar on May 15th on decarbonizing electricity thanks all of you for joining today thanks to our speakers and I hope to see you again on future clean energy states alliance webinars by now