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hi everyone welcome to our webinar today the topic of today's webinar is renewable thermal and RPS examples from New Hampshire Oregon and Vermont our host for today our Samak dominant MacDonald and valve story Sam is the communications coordinator involve project director here at Clean Energy Group you you also have some excellent guest speakers with us on the line before I pass it over to them there's wanted to go over some quick housekeeping notes and the agenda when I start with housekeeping an introduction and overview and then give it over to our speakers for some state examples and end with a Q&A all of our attendees today are in listen-only mode you have a couple of options to join the audio portion of the webinar you can call in via telephone or you can connect via your computer's mic and speakers if you'd like to minimize the webinar console so you can view the webinar slides full screen click on the little orange arrow that you see circle here you can also use that orange arrow to expand the webinar console following our webinar presentation we are saving about 15 minutes for Q&A with the audience we ask that you please submit your questions by typing them into the questions box on your webinar console and hitting sense we're gonna get to as many questions as we can we have a lot of people registered today which means that we'll probably get to a lot but not all of the questions to make sure that we get to your questions please type them in when you think of them don't wait till the very end finally this webinar is being recorded we will post a recording of this webinar on our website Clean Energy Group dot org slash webinars and we will also send you a follow-up email within 48 hours with a link you can see them you and now I'd like to pass it over to our host for today's webinar Fallon Sam as I said earlier and they'll be introducing our webinar topic and today's guest speakers right Thank You Mari so as Marie mentioned this webinar is being presented by the clean energy States Alliance which is a partner organization of clean energy group the clean energy States Alliance also known as sisa is a national nonprofit coalition of public agencies and organizations working together to advance clean energy you can see the logos of our member organizations on the screen here so today's webinar is being presented by the RPS collaborative this is one of theses projects the RPS collaborative serves as a forum for the exchange of experiences and lessons learned regarding the implementation of state renewable portfolio standards the RPS collaborative is supported by the Energy Foundation and the US Department of Energy and it's facilitated by sisa and our members include state RPS administrators federal agency representatives and other people like yourself who are interested in RPS issues so if you'd like to learn more about the RPS collaborative and learn more about our resources I encourage you to visit our website CC dot org backslash projects backslash renewable portfolio standards there's a lot of great resources there including a link to sign up for our monthly newsletter all kinds of publications and announcements about events and webinars so today we are talking about renewable thermal and renewable portfolio standards and sisa has recently published two reports related to this topic these reports which are available on our website are titled renewable thermal and state renewable portfolio standards and we also have case studies of RPS best practices one of those case studies is on thermal inclusion specifically it's on the example of New Hampshire we do have guest speakers with us from New Hampshire today and we also have the author of this case study with us style story so now we'll be talking about that case study in just a moment but first the case study about renewable thermal and state RPS is is an interesting report I encourage you to check it out one of the things that we talked about in that report is 14 states that do have our PF included in do have renewable thermal included in the RPS we give an overview of these 14 states and what their programs include and we talked a little bit broadly about renewable thermal and RPS is the 14 programs that include renewable thermal very very widely in terms of which technologies are eligible how the output is measured and monitored how recs values are determined and how the technologies are classified in the RPS so there's a lot of variations and very interesting programs we have three of those states with us today to discuss their programs and you can you'll be learning a lot today but I also encourage you to check out that paper which is available on our website another thing included in the paper is a broad overview of why to include renewable thermal in an RPM so the reason we updated this paper and the first place is because it was originally published in 2015 we republished it this year because more states have been adding renewable thermal to their RPS and there are a lot of good reasons why they have been doing that adding clean energy technologies to an RPS is a powerful way to promote their development and market growth so including renewable thermal is a great way to support those technologies using certain renewable sources like biomass to produce heat is more efficient than using them to produce electricity another reason and finally renewable thermal heating and cooling achieves a main policy goal of an RPS to help people transition away from fossil fuels to cleaner renewable and local technologies so lots of good reasons one of the challenges that states are having in incorporating renewable thermal into their RPS is is that our p SS were designed to track and measure electricity generation not heat or cooling not thermal so that's some of the challenges that states are facing so read more about this in the report again it's on our website so the second report said I mentioned that sisa produced it was written by this case study was written by alf story it goes into depth on New Hampshire's RPS I'm going to pass it over to Val too to talk about that hey thanks Sam and you will be hearing more about New Hampshire's thermal RPS directly from Karen and Deandra at the sustainable energy division at the New Hampshire PUC but I wanted to tell you a little bit about from the analysis that we had done for this case study we were specifically looking for examples of an innovative program in the RPS and New Hampshire's thermal program stood out to us since it was the first RPS program in the nation to include renewable Heat eligibility so we decided to do a deeper dive into that and as Sam mentioned including these new renewable heating and cooling technologies in the RPS is a way to spur their market growth but the other thing that it does is it sparks job creation and economic impact either in the state or in the region so one of the things we looked at in the case study on New Hampshire's thermal inclusion was the economic impact of New Hampshire's thermal rec incentive from the development specifically of woody biomass thermal projects the case study of the whole of data New Hampshire's thermal RPS program and we looked at the program's legislative history we wrote a program summary we reported on the results of the program we assess its strengths and its limitations and we included lessons learned and recommendations for New Hampshire and other states considering including or updating thermal provisions in their RPS and as I mentioned New Hampshire will be talking more specifically about their program in a second but I wanted to take a minute to point out some of the economic impact findings that our analysis yielded and in fact this analysis was done by innovative natural resource solutions we hire them to do the the economic analysis on 21 woody biomass thermal projects that have qualified for thermal recs and as you can see on the screen we found that the 21 projects in 2017 to display an estimated 1 million five hundred thousand gallons of number-two heating oil generated over 43,000 thermal reps and those in turn generated nearly a million in gross revenue for the xxi system owners who reduce their heating costs by an estimated 1 million three hundred thousand by switching to wood fuels and then using an economic impact multiplier of about two point one and that was applied to the some of the heating to the heat cost saving the wood fuel sales and the t-rex revenue in all found an estimated near over eight million in beneficial economic impacts to the regional economy system great analysis and data there and there moving on to the next presentation with Karen and Deandra they'll talk about the program and other program results yep next slide please these are this is the list of all of today's speaker and I'll introduce everyone before their presentation so first up we have Deandra Puccio and Karin Crampton from the sustainable energy division of New Hampshire's Public Utilities Commission and just a reminder to go ahead and type in any questions you have and if possible type in the speaker you would like your question addressed to since we have multiple speakers today the end it diandra and Karen thanks for being here you great think so and this is Deandra and Karen and I are going to share this so I'm going to talk a little bit about some of our metering requirements first so our thermal energy was included in the New Hampshire RPS through legislation that was enacted in 2012 and that created a carve out within our class one source requirement so that's our new renewable sources so it created a carve out within within that source class and require the Commission to come up with rules about how we were going to measure thermal energy verify production and report that energy to me pool gif all right the slides were a little bit delayed so useful thermal energy defined in our legislation is renewable energy that's coming from a class one source so these are their new renewable sources that can be metered and is delivered in New Hampshire to an end user in the form of heat basically for any thermal process that otherwise would require the use of electricity or another type of fuel waiting for the lines so some of the eligible technologies and our class one sources include geothermal solar thermal methane gas and a variety of eligible biomass types of biomass and biofuels all of these sources in order to be eligible for thermal production for thermal recs have to have begun operation or been installed after January 1st of 2013 we have a number of requirements around rec eligibility for thermal sources so emissions requirements usually developed with in conjunction with our new high New Hampshire Department of Environmental Services and so for particulate matter anything under 3 mm BTU is required to certify that they're going to conduct best management practices and this is something that was developed with NH des so that's about 880 kW and below anything above that they then start to have monitoring requirements which they work with the yes on regularly for NOx emissions it's similar however the size a demarcation for monitoring is is much larger so anything under a hundred and then BTU per hour those are best management practices that's about 29 megawatts so that's those are you know really large systems and then once you're above that size you have monitoring that you have to do through des to be eligible for our programs and one note is that our electric eligibility is actually a little bit more stringent than these thermal requirements so we have a number of metering requirements as well they're different for large and small facilities and they also also are different based on the type of technology that's being metered the demarcation for large and small this was recently changed I think Karen's going to talk a little bit about that but we increased it from 200,000 mm BTU up to 1 million Btu an hour as for large systems and there are pretty detailed methodology requirements for the metering that are laid out and our rules we're not going to go into that detail here but for all of the systems the boundaries for the thermal measurement you have to be measuring the thermal output before the heats going out through the distribution system we have a number of requirements around the accuracy ratings so for error in liquid systems your metering you're using flowing temperature sensors and those either have to meet an accuracy that's the European standard 14:34 - one so you can either meet that or you can meet a 5% or better accuracy rating for all of your temperature and flow sensors and that compliance has to be confirmed and signed off on by a professional engineer licensed in the state we also allow for both air and steam and liquid systems you can apply for an alternative metering method those also have to be five percent accuracy or better and they have to be attested to by a professional engineer as well and we review those on a case-by-case basis for steam systems you can either have a meter accuracy of 3 percent or better 5 percent or better or potentially an alternative method that doesn't match up with our detailed methods that are listed in our rules as long as they're better than 5 percent and then for small systems we do allow parametric monitoring so for systems below 1 mm BTU there are a number of different calculations depending on the technology that you can use to to calculate your your production so in order to get certified as I've been mentioning a professional engineer has to attest to the metering and that the metering arrangement meets all of our rules and methods and meets our accuracy requirements an independent monitor has to complete initial inspection of the system typically the independent monitor is also a professional engineer so those are very often the same folks and then that independent monitor once your system is certified verifies the production does the calculation reports that production to me Poole G is on at least a quarterly basis and for some facilities if you're over you know those emissions requirements that were in the past slides you may have some quarterly verification and reporting that you do through des and that comes to us as well so the calculation that the monitors do to determine the production levels they're reporting to me Poole so they follow these you know detailed requirements on metering methodology to get their thermal output measurement and then there's a number of discounts that may or may not be applied so there's a meter accuracy discount F V accuracy of the meter doesn't meet the European Standard they have to you know do it a discount and then for large systems there's an assumed losses discount so that's just assuming that you have some kind of parasitic load or storage losses and those are dictated through our rules they're laid out and our different by technology so the independent monitor will will you know add those deductions and do the calculation and then they do have to know you mentioned that a lot of our PS are set up for electricity so they do have to convert the mmvt you and report in megawatt hours which is not has not seemed to be too difficult so Karen's going to talk a little bit about you know there were us meeting our requirements and some of the impacts that we've been seeing in the state so far great thank you so this is Karen some standard just took you through the different technologies and how these technologies become certified I'm going to go back and take a look now at the policy perspective of this and how thermal fits into New Hampshire's RPS so the table that you're seeing on the screen right now the center column that's highlighted in blue shows our thermal carve out as the and I mentioned that this is a carve out from our total class one acquirement and it actually started at 0% way back in 2008 when the RPS was created when the thermal legislation passed they started off at I believe with 0.4% and now we are expecting a growth of 0.2% annually in this carve out and the other thing I'd like to mention is one of the things that the PUC and the legislation has given us authority to do is for good cause and after public notice and hearing the PUC does have the authority to either accele ate or delay that point 2 percent annual increase so for example if we're seeing that we just don't have enough facilities coming online to meet the increase we can delay the increase and we're doing that primarily to arm keep a handle on the cost of the RPF so to not have our ratepayers and current costs that they don't need to to bear so how do these AC peas work and how to Rex work as you know RPS compliance can be met in one of two ways either through the purchase of a renewable energy certificate often referred to as a rec or through the payment of an alternative compliance payment or at ACPA so in new hampshire our acp rate for thermal is a little over $25 this year it increases annually by half of the consumer price index and to put that in perspective the ACP rate is roughly one-half of the class 1 ACP rate and again that was done number one because it was thought that it was appropriate to have the incentive for thermal to be less than class one it was thought that the full ACP wasn't necessary and also to help keep down the cost of the RPS as in other RPS is the rec price and what the rec is trading on is is a market-based rinsable so it's the price is really dependent on supply and demand so the string that we have up now shows you the certified facilities in New Hampshire and we're showing you back starting in 2014 which is the first year that we certified facilities the top graph is showing the quantity or the number of different facilities that are certified in New Hampshire the bottom chart is showing that those same facilities but showing you the total capacity for all of those facilities so as you can see we we are seeing an increase it was slow to start off but you can see between 2016 and 2017 that we really did see significant growth of about 50% and that's for obviously a variety of reasons most of our certified facilities are wood biomass facilities however we do have nine geothermal facilities and our very first liquid biofuel facility was certified in 2018 so from our expert compliance perspective again this is looking at the RPS compliance on an annual basis and showing you what percent of the overall requirement was met with Rex which are a purple versus a CPS which are shown in green and as you can see we've pretty much stuck in the 20 percentile range for compliance with Rex and again that's for reasons that it is taking this market a little bit of time to mature and get up to speed and it's also because if you look on the bottom I'm showing you the the requirement so the obligation has increased so even though 2016 to 2017 we were at 24 versus 29% the obligation almost doubled so even though the the ratio between recs and ACP might not look like we're making progress we are actually making progress when you compare it against the overall requirement so how do we incentivize these projects and get more online in New Hampshire our alternative compliance payments go into a renewable energy fund and those renewable energy funds funds or monies then are used to support and incentivize new project development here in New Hampshire so we do that for the biomass industry in a couple of ways number one we have pellet rebate programs both residential and commercial and we also have a competitive grant solicitation every year that we're required to do by statute and we do allow biomass technologies that are not eligible for rebates to participate in that RFP the screen that's being shown right now this shows you our rebate programs as you can see we've we've awarded over 400 rebates at this point spurring investment of over 10 million dollars our commercial and industrial grant program again this is used for all technologies that we don't offer rebates for but if you look at the shaded purple part of that pie chart you'll see that we've incentivized 19 different thermal based projects I'm sorry actually 20 thermal based projects um and that's from everything from landfill gas whoops that's actually electricity I'm sorry is 19 but we do have solar thermal and geothermal in there and there's some pictures so the benefits of the RPS I won't go into a lot of detail because we are getting close to our 15 minute allocation that went over a number of these in her her forward so we'll just say that yes we are recognizing the the things that val has stated keeping fuel diversity fuel dollars in new hampshire and spurring economic growth some recent and upcoming changes that we've seen last year we did introduce methane gas as an eligible fuel source for thermal purposes into the RPS and what we see coming up is number one possibly some changes to our rebate programs also we're looking at through legislate through legislation expanding methods by which energy can be measured and monitored and reported what I mean by that is right now we are measuring the fuel output it may be helpful and easier to be measuring fuel input we're also looking at possibly changing the monitoring requirements or I'm sorry changing the requirements of that class once the methane gas facilities are part of the program we're thinking it's going to be easier for them to generate recs and we might see a surplus of recs because of those facilities coming online and the final thing that we'll be looking at are some additional 2500 rule changes to make the registration and certification processes easier and with that our final screen shows you the website where you can certainly get a lot more information about our program and contact information for Deandra thank you great thanks to you both just a reminder to type in any questions if you've got them and now moving on to our second presentation in thermal energy in Oregon our Oregon's RFPs we have Rebecca O'Neill from the Oregon Department of Energy welcome Rebecca hello actually my name is Rebecca Smith Rebecca O'Neil is at PNNL and I covered her resume I am a senior energy policy analyst at the Oregon Department of Energy and I spearheaded the rulemaking that we did on thermal energy here back in 2016 adding it to the RPS let's see if I can get this slide to advance the first slide it should and should advance it there we go there we go okay so uh before we dive into the specifics I'll just give you some really light background on organs or PS every state is different and the enabling statute for adding thermal to the RPS and then I'll go through some of the major issues that we dealt with throughout the rulemaking process and then a quick view of what the program looks like today you so in Oregon or RPS is the compliance end of it is administered either by the PUC for our investor owned utilities or for our many consumer and utilities by their respective boards auto however we handle eligibility we do have some statutory authority there with respect to the types of feedstocks that are eligible and then we also certify facilities eligible to generate electricity for the RPS so in fifth 2016 we had a huge energy bill passed 1547 and so in addition to adding thermal recs to the RPS it increased our RPS targets it eliminated coal by wire there was a lot going on in it so perhaps it's no surprise that the section on adding thermal to the RPS was very brief essentially all it told us was that one and this is unique to our program that that thermal energy had to result from the generation of electricity using biomass second that thermal energy had to be used for a secondary purpose and then it said that as part of this system established for allowing for rec generation that we must allow recs for this generation of thermal energy and then I gave us a very common conversion factor of megawatt hour to BTUs so that was great however there was a lot of areas where we did not have clear statutory direction one of these for example was that even though this statute made reference to some of the sections of the RPS it was never explicit in the statute that this will be part of the RPS that these these wrecks will count as RPS compliance instruments we only have so much statutory authority to handle that in the rulemaking but our interpretation was that that was implicit and we sought to make it as explicit as possible but so that raised questions of these you know are these t-rex really recs do the same rules apply to t-rex this was not a fait accompli when we started this rulemaking also it did reference our RPS directly so it wasn't clear we had to limit the biomass to RPS eligible biomass sources you know if there was some sort of threshold for how much electricity had to be generated versus the thermal energy generated and then it was utterly silent on any sort of methodology for measurement reporting and verification so no surprise those were some of the biggest questions that we tackled during the rulemaking process and we did that throughout the summer and fall of 2016 so it was a fast process we were under quite a lot of pressure from our stakeholders to get moving in digging into the definition of secondary purpose we found it important to really be clear on what was qualifying thermal energy and what was station service and we have this question especially in relation to on-site processing of fuel for example we had you know potential for seeing a lot of tore faction of biomass here and so there was the the question of well can we can we use thermal energy to horrify this biomass that were then going to feed into our boiler to create electricity creates or will energy to Torah fie more biomass and so we determined that anything that was in direct support of the electricity generation was station service and not qualifying thermal energy we did make a distinction for digesters however our interpretation was that using thermal energy to heat a digester was in service to the anaerobic digestion and not to the generation of electricity a byproduct of the digestion process would be natural gas that could be combusted to generate electricity but the digestion of a waste stream was seen as the primary activity and would happen in absence of the generation of electricity so that was probably one of the biggest discussions that we had then certainly we looked at fuel displacement we looked at what New Hampshire and other states were doing and then how we wanted to set up a metering requirements estimation is an anthem ax to Regis and to most people here out west we see it as a issue Rek integrity so looking up at how to setup our metering requirements mmm so the program as it stands today we as much as we could make it explicit in our rules we really tied it to the RPS as much as possible since that wasn't as explicit as I would have liked in the original statute and we waited through this whole process it took us about six months to do our rules which will probably sound ridiculous to some of the states who have had a number of years to work through this process but the program that we ended up with as I said is very RPS focus so we made it clear that eligible biomass RPS eligible biomass feedstocks would be only those eligible for the generation of that electricity that would then result in the thermal energy as with the RPS multi-fuel facilities can qualify but only for the portion attributable to eligible biomass fire electricity generation for RPS biomass is included woody biomass it also includes manure animal waste however it does not include geothermal or solar thermal so those are not included in our thermal program here which is certainly different than a lot of other states it's primarily on the woody biomass and digester side we didn't go into every kind of qualifying thermal energy we've got some pretty similar language here to what New Hampshire has we did keep a fuel displacement with with fuel and or with or electricity and then we got pretty specific with our station service most mostly in relationship to that on-site fuel processing question one of the biggest changes to this versus our other RPS certification was that we asked for a thermal energy management plan and we asked for it to be quite substantive so it includes all of the information on the thermal energy generating equipment as well as the electricity generating equipment secondary purposes we look at all of the data measurement collection and storage system calibration and then the accuracy therein we use similar standards to New Hampshire and then the calculation methodology we've left as something that we finalize with the applicant throughout the certification process and so we certainly allow them to suggest a methodology and then we look through that in terms of discount factors any other questions that we feel only want to answer so with respect to mmv all facilities have to meter the thermal energy going to the secondary purposes so no big surprise there we wanted to have a threshold for small and large facilities and allow some of these faults small facilities to have some relief on the administrative costs because our thermal program is tied to electricity generation there's no residential dimension to this so we've already got a smaller pool of eligible facilities and then our small and large there's a little bit less of a spread between there you know and so we're also expecting fewer facilities you know we look at New Hampshire with you know 100 million BTUs per hour and we're just not seeing facilities we're not going to see a lot of facilities with that so we chose as one p rec per hour which is essentially you know 3 million BTUs per hour is that threshold for small and large and so these small facilities one they can self-report under Regis and then two they can use as constants certain parameters in their calculations that represent de minimis values and that have variance that is no more than plus or minus 2% under the full range of expected operating conditions these have to be updated annually and we worked with Regis to come up with something that was not estimation but that would provide some some metering relief for some of these small facilities without sacrificing data integrity yah state your data readings every hour everybody does it much more often and then the large facilities cannot self-report they have to use a non balancing thermal qualified reporting entity and often that will just be a professional engineer so going through this whole process we certainly learned a lot I have to thank the other states that that have trod some of this path ahead of us New Hampshire Massachusetts also spoke to folks in North Carolina I reached out to them early and often really wanted to learn as much about their programs and some of the hurdles that they overcame and I really tried to stay in touch with them as well because I wanted to harass them throughout the process and steal as much from them as possible that said our program was you know very different all of these programs are really different so that the best practice is that you can adapt are there limits so we also had to get creative so for example kind of where to set that threshold for small and large in a way that was going to make sense for Oregon the coming up with the allowance for use of constants for certain parameters that was a novel approach that we chose to use that our engineers developed and certainly we made some mistakes throughout this process we did the rules in six months the biggest error that we had to fix I think was just the timing we just everything took longer than we thought it would it took longer for Regis to get their functionality up and running for facilities to be able to get in there and start the certification process it took us much longer to actually certify a facility a lot of back-and-forth with engineers site visits we really underestimated that but we were able to to move forward and fix those so thus far our program where we're at now is that we have received four applications thus far for certification like I said it's a much smaller pool of potential applicants than other states one of which has been certified as of Tober of this year the first one was a wastewater treatment plant with a digester and the other you know we're interest getting interest as well from pulp and paper operations and digester so those look to be the biggest types of facilities were expecting to work with we have just kind of had the first tranche of those -rex generated so in terms of where the market is and their value that is still up in the air but because we've made it clear that these are fungible with electricity based recs and for our PS compliance we fully expect them to assume that value in the marketplace but with all things we see we will see as we move forward and we're certainly working with continual improvement and of course looking to our other states and trying to see how we can learn from them as well so thank you eh Thank You Rebecca all right we are moving back to the east coast next we are going to hear from Andy perch licks and the Clean Energy Development Fund at the Vermont Public Service Commission and Newell Department thank you and we will learn about how Thermal is included in the new clean energy standard thanks Andy right well thank you so I'll try to go quickly so we can have time for questions here's my complicated outline of what the talk is going to go over case you get lost you can refer to that and so the thing things to remember about Vermont's program is we have a portfolios or a renewable energy standard not a portfolio which is actually an important distinction in Vermont for the governor that passed this and the legislature at the time because we already have a pretty clean electric mix and folks didn't want to we had an RPS but it was a voluntary RPS and people wanted to do something different than other states and so we included all renewable and all energy because we we were doing well on electricity but not and transportation and heating and cooling so that's what the RPS our renewable energy standard is meant to address and people are familiar with renewable energy portfolios standards to have classes but we had tears as part of our effort to convey so we are like other RPS ha's our standard does have three tiers but they cover different things Tier one is like other class ones it's it's the it's the big box of the renewable energy generation Vermont already had a 55% electricity to clean renewable energy electricity in 2017 when this standard came into effect it was passed in 2015 but had a couple years for the utilities to get to give prepared it increases 4% a year so the the distributed utilities have to get the 75% by 2032 and all renewable energy is included and that includes large hydro we used to not include large hydro which is basically the hydro we import from Quebec as not renewable but as part of this process we did include it as renewable the only technology that I could think of that some states do consider renewable that we do not is waste energy our second tier is the distributed generation tier and that's a carve out of tier one and it's starting in 2017 it's one percent increasing to 10 percent of electric sales and this is just for our larger utility our one IOU utility as well as a couple of the others the smaller muni and co-ops that we have that have under six thousand customers got a more time to start that you don't have to comply with this till 2019 so next year is their first compliance year and so this was designed like other RPS s to drive the more local distributed generation on the Vermont grid and so we think that's going to be 25 30 megawatts a year net metering counts for this tier and these tier two compliance can be bought and sold within the state amongst the different distributed utilities so our third tier is the where we would have something like thermal Rex which we don't have thermal recs we have this Tier three compliance mechanism which we call the energy transformation tier and that starts at two percent of electric sales up and goes up to twelve percent but it's not a carve-out it's just separate although tier 2 recs can you have extra can carry over into tier 3 and the way did this is we did it as the displacement of fossil fuels instead of just the generation of thermal energy although that's how we categorize it we change it into how much fossil fuel are the system savings and this was to encourage utilities to to reach out and try to help us with the other sectors we don't regulate like other states do not regulate the home heating fuels and we don't regulate transportation fuels and this is a way to let our regulated utilities kind of help us slowly make that transition to renewable fuels in those sectors I realized I didn't have any graphs of pictures which is that with some violation of PowerPoint so I included this graph in here that just shows you the ramp up of three tiers that we have and so that third one the energy transformation is is basically our thermal component but since it just type to fossil fuel savings it's not just thermal it is largely actually electric vehicles and heat pumps but they're measured on BTU savings that and converted to megawatt hour savings so some other components that we have that are similar to other RPS is we have an alternative compliance payment but we said it pretty high so that $60 increases at this 1.3 percent we haven't had we only have had the first year 2017 everybody met at the reges the obligations without having to pay the compliance payment but if they do ever get to a point well it will come to the clean energy developments on to be used for incentives and annete so instead of doing the thermal metering that other states that have thermal energy and there are PSS have done we decided to go this other route and use a technical advisory group which folks might be familiar with states do use these for efficiency measures if you have energy efficiency programs that you regulate and evaluate and since we had already set that up for our efficiency programs we just basically created the same same kind of structure to create this conversion for for the tier 3 compliance it's like if you're going to have how much fossil fuel you save what's that what's the value of that and megawatt hour basis in once the technical advisory group once the tag approves that then utilities just go forward and do those and claim the savings based on the number of units that they like converted like number of heat pumps they install number of electric vehicles they got their customers to buy a number of pellet boilers that they're got the customers installed so we don't try to actually measure the BTU of all those pellet boilers we just say you did X number of pellet boilers that's worth Y megawatt hours because they already went through all that in the tag process there's both prescriptions prescriptive and custom measures in this tier 3 the prescriptive measures go through that tag process and get a megawatt hour value assigned to them and then but utilities can also do custom projects where they just might have a customer that comes to them we've had a few of these where there's just it's only going to be one or two that they ever get to a couple examples are we had a few lumber mills that had diesel generators at them because they electric service wasn't adequate for the size of their motors and so they were running diesel generators the utility up upgraded the service and so since there was fossil fuel savings by not running that generator anymore that qualified as a custom measure and they got the equivalent megawatt hour savings of that fossil fuel saved they've also have done that with some maple syrup sugars evaporators that had had to run on on gadreel had to run diesel generators during the sugaring season they ran on electric line out to them and then they got those savings and they can come to us beforehand for the and get approval on the custom measures on on what's the megawatt hour savings are going to be or they can just do them and then go to the PC during the compliance filings and make the argument of why it should be included I already said this you know they generate thermal savings and then get converted into megawatt hour savings and we do a subtract if it's something like an electric car yes they're saving fossil fuels but they're using electricity and that electricity might is not going to be a hundred percent Elektra Newell for for most of our utilities although we do have a couple utilities in Vermont that are a hundred percent renewable so they don't get a reduction but the other ones we do some some at there where we we take away what they're non renewable electricity component is and here's my contact information if anybody wants to reach out with questions that I can send you all sorts of other examples or documents or reports on this Thank You Val alright great thank you Andy and thanks for everyone for typing in some great questions we've got a whole suite of them and about 10 minutes left so let's start Andy why don't we start with you and you're calculating BTU 2 megawatt hours savings you calculate in any loss factors for the conversion of fossil fuel cell electricity or fuel cell electricity yeah we do have a heat rate and that's it's actually in the statute that we have to use a I think we use that whatever the EIA establishes as the nationwide heat rate conversion and there's some question about whether that's the best one to use for Vermont but yeah that is that is in there great and what are the megawatt hour credits for typical residential heat pump yeah so like why I'm just looking at a report here for one of the utilities click 30 37 megawatt hours for the installation of a cool climbing heat pump that's the lifetime savings week for lifetime savings for heat pump is 7 years 10 years so they get they get the lifetime savings in the year that they install these technologies is it longer for ground source heat pump and a different I don't know if it is I don't know if it would be a different way to probably would be because they're more likely going to be a hundred percent of the heating load where he pumps some time most often or not but we don't have a lot of ground source heat pumps and there's that in and I don't know of any programs to support them so none the utilities are using ground source heat pumps to meet their obligations they're doing a cold climate heat pumps electric vehicles are the prime ones but some some biomass you know pellet conversions as well but not a lot okay and like this might be the last one for you and so you mentioned how energy savings are calculated what about weatherization does that work into your energy transformation to you at all yeah they can do weatherization and they can they just have to show the fossil fuel savings so if they have they have a program that's on top of our other weatherization programs that we have in the state and they can show that customers are doing these measures with their incentives they can claim those fossil fuel savings and those are there are prescriptive measures for for megawatt hour savings for those measures okay thank you alright moving over to Oregon couple of questions come in if you could revisit and clarify a little bit about digester so just let me start here so just heating a digester qualify for a t-rex why or why not yes so we are interpretation was that yes a digester using that heat to keep the digester warm would qualify for thermal Rex the distinction that we saw was that the primary activity of the digester was not generation of electricity the pride the primary activity was digestion of a waste stream that if it weren't digested would have to be disposed of in some other fashion and with cost and only though it would be eligible only if you could show that if not for that thermal energy that you would be using either fuel or electricity to heat the digester okay and then as a follow-up is does that are cogent systems the only type of thermal use that can get that are eligible for key risks that is correct and that was all based on the statute that bill that passed it it pretty much said only cogent and only cogent that was biomass fired and so that's why our program doesn't include you know any other or pious eligible electricity feedstocks honest alright are there any local content requirements as the biomass have to come from Oregon so we stuck with the RPS requirements and so within the RPS there are requirements with respect to you know if it's forest or rangeland woody debris in terms of how it was harvested and where it came from not only is there no requirement that it comes from Oregon but eligibility for generating tier X is not limited to Oregon I should have probably mentioned that earlier we saw thermal recs as inherently unbundled because they're not associated with any delivery of energy to the grid and thus we went with what the RPS geographic requirements were for location for unbundled recs and that is within the boundary of whack and so that so we have ones facility that has applied that is in Washington State and we may have some California applicants as well all right thank you for that clarification as you expect your program to grow do you expect wastewater treatment plants and their associated digesters to participate in the t reckt program and how how would they do that we absolutely do and our first certified facility is a wastewater treatment plant it's in the city of Gresham here in Oregon and so they you know again if they meet all of the requirements with respect to that digester if they are you know the Gresham also used some of the waste heat in terms of district heating within the facility and so heat going to the digester was not the only secondary purpose qualifying secondary purpose that they had but so if it is going to the digester you know one of the big hurdles is you have to show that there's either fuel or electricity displacement that your process needed that to happen and that you would expend fuel or electricity to do so otherwise so we certainly hope that more our wastewater treatment plants will apply and we've gotten some nibbles of interest from some agricultural digesters so some animal manure digesters terrific thanks we only have a couple of minutes left so let me get some questions over to New Hampshire a local content question for you where you sure doesn't have a local content requirement for four woods or pellets and chips but what where does the would come from do you know yeah we don't have a requirement so it's not something that we review here I mean just anecdotally we do have a pretty big forestry industry in New Hampshire and in the Northeast in general but we don't have any process for reviewing or work around where the fuel comes from there are a couple of manufacturers though that I can add we've um we gave a grant one year to a manufacturer who produces precision dry chips and they're actually using biomass to dry the chips so we know that those a lot of our dry chips are cortical manufactured in New Hampshire and then delivered to facilities in New Hampshire great thank you I know we've reached the hour so we're just going to stay on for a few more minutes so feel free to stay on the line anyone who can so you have just added methane gas for thermal applications to the the RPS what motivated that inclusion that was through legislation methane gas has always been part of the RPS when used for generating electricity the thermo the additions to use it for thermal purposes was just done through legislation I believe it was one of our utilities that brought that forward and discussed it with the legislature legislatures thank you earlier you mentioned some of the grant and incentive programs you have and how 4w use that to fund pellet manufacturing or wood chip drying in the state is anything being done to increase the number of geothermal systems in the state nothing specifically a number of years ago the utilities were offering a rebate to geothermal for geothermal it is always open as part of our grant solicitation so people can certainly apply we've just only had one one entity that applies and was awarded a grant so there's nothing specific but they are always able to submit proposals to us thank you and as you update the RPS is New Hampshire considering the inclusion of air source heat pumps as an eligible technology that was actually brought up during our RPS 2018 review so I believe one of our recommendations out of that review was to at least always consider the inclusion of new technologies but that would be in order to include that we would require legislation so one of our recommenda ions I believe was to you know study whether or not new technologies should be included in the thermal class thank you and last question actually is for you Sam in as you did research for your paper did you talk with states that considered adding a thermal component to their RPS but didn't so in other words have a broader group of states considered adding or are they in the process of adding a thermal component to the RPS that's definitely I know a couple states are are thinking about this issue and have been for a while and have been trying to push it through so yes there are several states working on this and there were some requests for this webinar topic for that reason because people are interested in finding out how other states have been able to push it through and examples of successful programs so it's definitely an area of interest for more states than the 14 that that currently have programs great thank you thank you to all our participants and all the panelists thanks for staying beyond the hour I hope this conversation has been useful thank you for the terrific presentations to all our panelists should you have any questions feel free to reach out to us and of course you can download both papers references on this webinar at the link on your screen thank you everyone have a good day