Steps toward a unified electricity market in the western US

Unlike other parts of the country, the 11 western US states have
not joined together in a regional transmission organization (RTO)
to more efficiently and cost-effectively administer their
respective electrical transmission systems. In this episode,
Michael Wara, director of the Climate and Energy Policy Program
at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, discusses
the current status of a potential western RTO and the political
factors affecting the conversation.


(PDF
transcript)


(Active
transcript)


Text transcript:


David Roberts


In about half the country, power utilities have turned over
administration of their electrical transmission systems to
regional transmission organizations (RTOs), or what amounts to
the same thing, independent system operators (ISOs). RTOs and
ISOs oversee wholesale electricity markets and do regional
transmission planning, which increases system efficiency and
reduces costs for ratepayers.


The power utilities in the 11 western US states are not joined
together in an RTO. California has its own ISO, but it only
covers that one state. In the rest of the region, utilities are
islands — they each maintain their own reserves and do their own
transmission planning within their own territories. It leads to
enormous duplicated efforts and inefficiencies.


For years, there has been discussion of creating a western RTO,
to bring the western states together to share resources and
coordinate transmission planning. Analysts have found that an RTO
could save the region’s ratepayers billions of dollars a year.


Recently the discussion has begun to heat up again. A
regionalization bill in California was tabled this year but
promises to return next session. Governor Gavin Newsom expressed
his support for the idea. Nonetheless, numerous sticky technical
and political issues remain to be hashed out.


To explore the promise and risks of a western RTO, I contacted
Michael Wara, director of the Climate and Energy Policy Program
at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment. We discussed
the political forces pushing for and against an RTO, the way the
west's electrical system has changed since the last time this
discussion came up, and incremental steps that can be taken in
the direction of greater regional cooperation.


All right then, with no further ado, Michael Wara, welcome to
Volts. Thank you so much for coming.


Michael Wara


Thanks for having me.


David Roberts


So we're here to discuss something that is somewhat complex and
rests on a set of concepts that might not be — that everybody
might not come in understanding. But because I want to talk about
the specifics and I don't just want this to be a 101 kind of
thing, I'm going to assume Volts listeners have some basic
background. So I think the main thing to know is the US
electricity system is sort of divided in two. On the one hand,
you have the traditional old school, vertically integrated
utilities which own the generation and the transmission and the
customer interaction, the whole deal.


And then the other half is what's called "deregulated" or
"liberalized" or whatever the term is. Basically have created
markets, wholesale energy markets, where generators compete and
sell into the markets. And then distribution utilities which
interact with customers buy power from those markets and sell it
to customers. And those areas with energy markets are overseen by
organizations called Regional Transmission Operators or sometimes
Independent System Operators. RTOs and ISOs, as everyone in our
world is so familiar with saying over and over again I'll just
use RTO, I think from now on as a shortcut for those. So in these
liberalized areas RTOs sort of manage regional transmission
planning.


And the idea is if a bunch of different utilities can sort of
share backup and share reserves and share generally they're going
to lower costs for ratepayers. And so there are RTOs in the
Midwest, there's one in the Northeast, et cetera. Listeners might
be familiar with PJM and MISO. These are all regional
transmission operators in various parts of the country. So as it
happens, the western states, the eleven western states of the
United States are almost all old school vertically integrated
utilities which means they operate as islands. There's not a lot
of sharing. So California has its own RTO or ISO, in this case
California ISO or CAISO, but it only does planning for
California.


So what we are here to discuss is the long standing discussion
about whether the western states should form an RTO of their own,
join together into a regional organization so that they can do
more of this sharing. That is the question before us. And there
are all sorts of ins and outs and details about this but that is
the basic background. So maybe the place to start is just at a
very general level, sort of abstract level. You could explain
what are the advantages of joining an RTO versus just operating
as an island? What is the pot of gold at the end of this rainbow?


Michael Wara


I'd want to start by saying that there are advantages and
disadvantages, right? And it's important to be straight about
that. I think the key thing for listeners to remember and
understand is that the primary mission of an RTO or an ISO is to
operate. It's to operate the electricity system in a particular
geographic footprint. And in general it is the case that it is
more cost effective to operate across a larger footprint. And so
a discussion around increasing the size of the California ISO or
CAISO is about increasing the operational efficiency of the
overall system. What I'd say also is that it's important to think
both about the average conditions or kind of the expected
conditions and then periods of extreme stress on the system.


I guess my view is that the discussions around regionalization or
growing the California ISO further outside of its California
footprint have really become more important because of the
challenges of the reliability that we've had in California and
elsewhere. But especially in California over the last several
years due to drought, the unavailability of hydro as a result,
and the growth of intermittent renewables.


David Roberts


The duck curve.


Michael Wara


The duck curve.


David Roberts


The dreaded duck curve. Yeah. So the idea here is just if you
have more states or a wider area involved, you just have a larger
pool to draw. And so if you're having a sort of like choke point
or grid congestion here or a shortage of power here, there's
maybe power over there that you can import just the larger
geographic area you're covering, the larger sort of base of power
and the larger variety of power sources you're drawing from. And
that generally leads to resilience.


Michael Wara


Yeah, I think an intuitive way for people to think about this is
kind of national borders and trade, right? If you ship goods
across an international border, they have to go through customs,
and there are barriers to that. And we have rules about how those
barriers are supposed to be under the WTO and other agreements we
have with other countries. But it's just harder to ship things
internationally than it is to ship something from California to
Nevada, because we're all within a free trade zone. And what
these ISOs or RTOs really create when they're done well is a free
trade zone where electricity can be traded at very low cost.


And what that means is that the optimal power plants turn on
within a system footprint to meet the electricity demand that
exists within that footprint. So that lowers costs because it
means that you're not buying something expensive within your
little market because it would cost money to get something
cheaper that's just across the border.


David Roberts


Right. So it's just easier to share. And it's also worth saying,
all these islanded utilities, the vertically integrated
utilities, they're required by law to have a certain amount of
backup available, basically resource backup in case of problems.
And if you operate in an island, you have to have enough backup
for your own island, which is and then the next island over also
has to have enough backup for its island, et cetera, et cetera,
et cetera. So you end up duplicating efforts over and over and
over again. You have sort of like duplicated backups. And what
this wider area allows you to do is sort of have a pool of
backup, right?


So not everybody has to have —


Michael Wara


That's right.


David Roberts


enough to cover, and that also reduces costs. So these are the, I
think, the sort of abstract benefits. Like a larger footprint
means more sharing, better planning, lower costs. So back in
2016, 2017, there was a bill that came up in California, because
at least one pathway to this, the first step would be right now,
California's ISO is more or less controlled by California. The
governor appoints the members and the California Senate approves
them. So it's a very California-centric operation. So if you were
going to expand that to incorporate other states, obviously you
would have to restructure CAISO, so that it's not
California-centric, because, like, other states are not going to
join if California completely controls who's on it and how it
works.


So there was a bill back in 2016, 2017 to restructure CAISO this
way, and that sort of prompted a whole round of this discussion
back then. So what I thought I would do is sort of throw out at
you some of the sort of worries and objections that were voiced
back then and then maybe you could tell us, are those worries?
Were they valid then and are they valid now? Have things changed,
sort of catch us up on sort of stakeholder worries and issues. So
I think probably the strongest opposition to the whole notion of
regionalization, especially back then, came from unions because
California's climate laws have a lot of domestic content
requirements, so they require that the power be generated in
California, which means a lot of jobs in California, a lot of
union jobs in California.


And I think the unions worried if we expand the footprint to
include multiple states, California will be able to find cheaper
power elsewhere and we'll just import it and that will mean fewer
jobs here in California. So maybe you could say, was that a valid
worry in 2017 and has anything changed now to address that worry?


Michael Wara


So that, I think, is a primary worry about this proposal, and it
does reflect the desire of the unions in California that have
really benefited from the renewable portfolio standard here to
make sure that those benefits don't evaporate. And I think it
also in less maybe self-interested sense, the cooperation and
support of labor unions in California has been critical to the
political economy of getting hard bills through the legislature
and signed by the governor that have been really important in
terms of driving the climate policy situation forward in
California. So we don't want to damage that. And the situation in
2017 was that you could build solar in California.


If you do that, you have to pay prevailing wage and have an
apprenticeship program, which basically means you're hiring
unions to do the work. And that is not the case in many
neighboring states. And so that was the situation circa 2017, I
think there was a legitimate concern about that issue. There was
some attempt to kind of massage the legal questions using clever
language, which at the time made many of us, I think many of us
were skeptical that that language would survive review if
challenged. It's notable that the language in the California RPS,
which you correctly point out, David, is I don't know if I'd call
it protectionist, but it's certainly designed with particular
outcomes in mind about where generation gets built, has never
been challenged.


So fast forward to today and the situation is different in a few
respects that I think are worth talking about. The first respect,
and this was actually true in 2017, but people didn't focus on it
so much, is that we need to be real about who's going to want to
join a sort of common electricity market with California. And
probably it's not going to be states like Wyoming which are
committed to subsidizing their coal-fired power plants as long as
possible and in whatever way is legally tolerated by various
courts and they also happen to have a really nice wind resource
which if it were interconnected to California's grid would be
extremely valuable. Rather than try to link up with Wyoming in a
market sense what the CAISO is doing is actually building its own
transmission line that it will control out to Wyoming to connect
with Wyoming Wind.


Right? So it's sort of decided that there's not a future where
that happens. And I think many of the benefits that were
envisioned for kind of out-of-state generation resources circa
16, 17 really depended on this vision where the entire west is in
a single RTO. I personally think that's highly unrealistic. It's
unrealistic today for two reasons. The first one is what I just
mentioned that very conservative states do not want to share
power with a very blue state like California. So I think it's
unlikely those states are going to want to join whatever the
economic benefits.


It's a tribal issue. The second issue though is that there's a
competing RTO under development in the west now that will be kind
of the eastern side of the western interconnect and will involve
a lot of these other states. SPP, which is an existing RTO based
in Little Rock, is in the pretty advanced stages of getting ready
to file with FERC to create an RTO across western states. So
that's one set of issues. The big talk back in 16, 17 was "We'll
get Wyoming Wind in the CAISO and that's going to really be great
for various reasons" which it's still true it would be great to
have more of that resource in the electricity mix in California.


The other thing though that's changed is federal law: The
Inflation Reduction Act passed. The Inflation Reduction Act says
that if you want to get the full PTC, the production Tax credit
then you need to pay prevailing wage and have an apprenticeship
program. Period. Full stop. Starting on January 1 of next year.
So any projects that would be a part of the California ISO and
hope to receive federal tax credits which are material to the
economics of these projects is going to have to pay wages and
have unionized labor apprenticeship programs that are very
similar to California's. Now the prevailing wage in Nevada or
Arizona may be somewhat lower than in Kern County where a lot of
the solar gets built in California or in the western part of the
Central Valley and in the Westlands Water District.


But at least a significant chunk of the kind of economic
advantage to building out of state is eliminated by the changes
to the Inflation Reduction Act the pro-union measures that the
Biden administration has put in place. So I'd say we're actually
doing some economic analysis right now to try to understand this
with current data but none of the assessments that have been done
of the ISO RTO concept and sort of regionalization really take
account of this change and it's incredibly important. The unions
are still opposed. And that may be the reason why we don't do
this.


They are very nervous. From the perspective of a California
union, it might not matter whether nonunionized labor or a Nevada
union construct.


David Roberts


I was going to say it's not necessarily quiet their worries to
say "Oh, these jobs that will be taken from you will be given to
a union somewhere else."


Michael Wara


This is just anecdotal. But what I've heard is that there aren't
actually unionized construction workers in a lot of these
neighboring states to California because they're right-to-work
states. And so some of what's happening is that in order to
qualify for the Inflation Reduction Act tax credit structure,
workers from California are being moved to Nevada or other states
to construct these facilities. Kind of like man camp style.
Because they need to make sure, right, they want to make sure
that they check all the boxes to get the full tax credit.


David Roberts


Right.


Michael Wara


And that's a part of it. And so it's a somewhat fluid situation.
I personally can't believe that that sort of approach will be
sustained in the long run. But the general picture is that — I
guess the other thing I'd say is that and maybe this is a third
point I should have said there are three because it was better
three. Is that California is running up against the challenges of
really achieving the SB 100 objectives. We are sketching out
construction rates, starting to procure, attempt to procure
renewables at a rate that is really unprecedented in California.
And we're going to need to build everything.


And this is kind of a key message that I bring to this
conversation. We need to make sure that we're building all the
rooftop we possibly can. We need to make sure that we're building
all of the in-state generation that we possibly can. And we are
going to need to procure a lot of out-of-state generation.


David Roberts


Yes. And even then, those goals are going to be very difficult to
hit. This was, I thought, the strongest point you made. I was
reading what you've written about this. It's just that
California, its goals are so ambitious that this is not a
scarcity situation. This is not an either-or situation. It has to
go flat out to get all the power it can from everywhere it can.
And even then, it might not be able to get enough.


Michael Wara


I really think that's the right way to view the situation in
California right now. And we are working in our group on policies
that will reduce barriers to in-state construction, reduce the
barriers around interconnection, which are really the big delay
right now.


David Roberts


Oh, yeah, I want to pause and emphasize this point too, before
you move past it, because I thought it was another great point
you made in your writing, which is that the real — if you're
worried that there's not enough in-state construction happening.
The prospect of imports from other states is the least of your
worries. Like that's not what's holding up construction of new
power in California. It's all these things that Volts listeners
are very familiar with permitting, NIMBYism, et cetera.


Michael Wara


That's right. And I think the challenges there in California are
quite acute. They also interact with just how much else the other
jobs that our utilities have that are kind of even more pressing
than achieving the SB 100 goals like not having wildfires ignited
by their equipment. And many of the engineers and line workers
that are needed to do the kind of renewables build-out in
California are busy with that work as well. And so we have
resource constraints in California that are real. We need to work
on those, we need to train more line workers, we need to train.


All of this needs to scale. But there are things we should be
doing in California and we've been working on them. Many others
are working on these issues as well. The PUC at the ISO, at the
Energy Commission as well, of course, is to remove the barriers
that exist to building things in California at the same time as
we facilitate greater use of imported power that's actually clean
and not just the old way. California has long imported large
amounts of electric power. We built our coal-fired power plants
in other western states and on the res and we have shut those
down, mostly.


A lot of it has been replaced by natural gas-fired power that we
import and some renewables that we're importing as well.


David Roberts


Let me pause and emphasize that point too because another of the
objections back in 2017 or whatever were from environmentalists
who say "Here in California we've got laws mandating clean power.
But once you open it up, you're going to get a bunch of these
coal plants in other states, generate cheap power and sell it
into the RTO. And we're going to end up in California getting
coal power in our mix when we don't want it."


Michael Wara


Is that is just much less of a concern than it was in 2016 for a
whole bunch of reasons. But the fundamental and most important
one is that coal is a five cent product in a three cent market
and it is just the economic loser pretty much no matter how you
slice it. And the states that are trying to prop it up frankly
can't afford to do that.


David Roberts


Yeah. And the last thing they want is market competition. Right.
I mean the more you expose it to market competition, the less
well coal will do.


Michael Wara


That's absolutely right. And so exposing coal, especially to
markets that have a lot of renewables in them, so there's a big
daily cycle in prices is really challenging for that type of
resource. So I guess I look forward and I'll say I think about
this also this proposal in terms of what the situation will be
like, not right now, but in about five years, because it's going
to take several years to get — eve if this law or a law like it
were to pass this session, or frankly, it's not going to pass
this session, it passed next session, then there would have to be
preparation of a proposal that the ISO would share with the state
government and then would submit to FERC, and FERC would review
that proposal and approve it.


And only after that approval would the ISO be able to implement
it. And I think we're looking at the late two thousand and
twentys at best. So really you need to ask how much coal is left
in the western United States circa 2028? And I think the answer
is not very much. And even if it's there, it's not running. So
then the question is, what about the other resources? And
certainly there's a lot of natural gas in the west, and we might
import some of it if — we would import some of that power if we
were more strongly tied to other western states.


But California has its own issues with burning lots of natural
gas to generate electric power. We generate enormous amounts of
electric power using natural gas. And many of the gas plants we
utilize are older, they have significant environmental impacts,
they're located in EJ communities. And we are on the record of
saying "We want to shut them down." So all of us in the west that
have renewables goals and clean energy goals are going to be
working on this question. But it's not like we're better, we're
cleaner than other western states. And I guess the other point
that you alluded to, David, that I want to come back to is the
situation has changed fundamentally with respect to other states
renewables goals as well.


In 2016, 17, we were out way ahead with SB 100, proud of that
fact, and looking at most states in the west that had either very
timid RPSs from California's perspective or no policy at all.
Today, six of the states in the west have 100% clean energy
goals, just like California. And there are several additional
utilities that have taken on those goals and haven't just taken
them on, but are proposing integrated resources plans that are
consistent with them. So near term action to achieve those goals.
And they're doing it because of the favorable economics of doing
it right, that a mix of wind and solar combined with some
batteries and natural gas is the cost-effective portfolio to have
these days.


Now, it may get harder, we'll see, right? It could be that all of
us get to 80% clean and things get really hard, and then some of
these folks that are saying they want to do that now change their
minds, but that's in 10 to 15 years. We've have a lot to do in
the meantime, and a lot of potential partners in achieving those
goals that we didn't have five, six years ago.


David Roberts


Yeah. And not only are a bunch of states now targeting 100% clean
energy, but it's worth noting that Colorado and Nevada
specifically passed laws saying we support the RTO idea, we like
the idea of a wider area here. So there's some momentum out in
those other states.


Michael Wara


Absolutely. I think there are a set of partners, some of which
have become public and some of which are less public, that are
sort of looking to see what happens. Right. There's this proposal
from SPP. There's a lot of discussion in California. My sense is
that the partners want to see, like, if there were to be a
California option, the economics of it are highly favorable to
others because California is just such a big chunk of the
population in the west, 40 million out of 100 million people. So
there's a lot of potential buyers of electricity in California,
and having access to that market for other players in the west
could create a lot of benefits for them and also benefits for
California because California would be able to purchase
lower-cost power.


I think where the other parties start to get worried is when we,
and I say we, I'm a Californian, start to want to impose our
values on others.


David Roberts


Great segue because the third and sort of final objection I was
going to raise to that law when it came up then was just the
general worry that with a California-only ISO, California is very
tightly in control of it and can ensure that the values of the
ISO reflect Californians' values, the sustainability goals, et
cetera, et cetera. The worry is if you dilute that, California
will to some degree lose control over the running of the common
ISO, or at least it will just be one voice among many. And I
think some people in California, some lawmakers, some
environmentalists, are worried that you're going to end up with
an RTO that doesn't reflect what California wants. And at that
point, California will be just up the creek.


There's nothing you can really do once you, once you have
committed to the RTO.


Michael Wara


Yeah, so I guess I think this is a valid concern. If the
governance structure of the ISO is not designed with some care.


David Roberts


Bracket that because we're going to return to precisely that
question.


Michael Wara


Okay, so let me just speak at a high level then. Certainly there
are a bunch of states, one of whom I mentioned, Wyoming, that
have really different priorities for their energy systems than
California. California also is so kind of tribal in its blueness
and its pro-climate policies, that can be a real turn off to more
intermountain conservative states. Even with utilities that are a
little bit out of step with their state. And I would note that
Idaho Power has a 100% clean energy goal, but the state of Idaho
does not, right?


David Roberts


To say the least.


Michael Wara


And so Idaho Power needs to be careful and I think they're
interested in participating in the regional sort of markets that
the California ISO — We haven't talked about this —


David Roberts


But that's our next topic. So you're setting it up perfectly.


Michael Wara


So California has spent, since the last effort at full-blown
regionalization creating a regional RTO, California has spent a
lot of time developing kind of what I term like halfway houses to
an RTO.


David Roberts


Right.


Michael Wara


This thing called the energy imbalance market and then the
enhanced day-ahead market proposal.


David Roberts


Let's talk about those. Right now, CAISO is operating what's
called the Western Energy Imbalance Market, which involves
multiple western states. And then it is developing what's called
a day-ahead market, which will have a bunch of those same
participants. Maybe you could just tell us, what does the energy
imbalance market do? What would the day-ahead market do that the
energy imbalance market doesn't do? And what would a full-fledged
RTO do that the day-ahead market doesn't do? What are these
halfway houses like? How big of a step is the energy imbalance
market and what's the next step?


Michael Wara


Sure. So the energy imbalance market has been something that's
generated a fair amount of benefit for all the states that
participate. And basically what it says is you optimize in your
footprint. And that optimization typically happens mostly a day
ahead. Right. So power plants are on, they're not on, whatever
based on a forecast a day ahead. But those forecasts are never
perfect. And so there's always some kind of leftovers that —
maybe there's too much in one place or not enough in another. And
what the EIM does is allow trading in that real-time or almost
real-time space where the day-ahead forecast was wrong and
somebody has a little extra, somebody has not enough, and they
can exchange and create benefit from that exchange.


And the real benefit is not having to turn on a power plant or
call on a resource that would be expensive but can turn on
quickly.


David Roberts


So it's an incremental bit of sharing there.


Michael Wara


Yeah, it's like the tip of the iceberg of benefits from lowering
barriers to trade. And then there's this giant iceberg
underneath, which is the day ahead.


David Roberts


And the day ahead is not yet running.


Michael Wara


No.


David Roberts


It is in development.


Michael Wara


Yes. And the day-ahead is where you, say if you're a grid
operator, look at the weather forecast and make an estimate of
what electric demand is going to be, and then you decide which
power plants you're going to utilize to cost-effectively meet
that demand. So coordination across and I should say, even if
there isn't a market right, like in these vertically integrated
states, the utility is making that decision every day. So what
the day-ahead market, The EDAM, as people call it around here,
the Enhanced Day-Ahead Market Proposal will allow, is states if
they want to, and if their utility commissions will allow them
to, which is an important caveat, allow some utilities to kind of
opt into participating in a single optimization across the
footprint. Now, the challenge here, though, is it gets
complicated to know what will really happen. And the reason is
that many parties that say they're interested in the EDAM in this
day-ahead market proposal say they are interested in it as a
halfway step to an RTO and they are much less interested in
participating in it if there is not an RTO proposal.


David Roberts


If it's a terminal EDAM.


Michael Wara


If it's the end, yeah. And the reason for that is,
understandably, utilities don't want to — what an ISO RTO kind of
construct is turning over your system to somebody else to
operate. And if that somebody is in Folsom, California and you
have no say over how the rules are written, no seat at the table
in terms of designing future transmission expansion proposals,
that strikes many people as unfair, let me just put it that way
in simple terms. And certainly the players that do have a seat at
that table are going to seek to maximize their benefits from
whatever gets decided.


And that's going to mean that the utilities in California,
PG&E, Edison, and San Diego Gas and Electric principally get
the most benefit.


David Roberts


Right. So EDAM is run out of CAISO, basically. And so the worry
from other utilities is California utilities are going to get
they're going to be at the head of the line here. They're going
to get sort of favorable treatment.


Michael Wara


And California has bent over backward to create a governance
mechanism for the EIM, the tip of the iceberg market that is
really multistate and fair and is functioning well. And I think
in many ways, many of the concerns that were raised in 16, 17
about what the governance would look like once California shared
some power can be actually pretty well answered by just looking
at how EIM governance functions today and has been functioning
for several years. And it's a very successful model. It's widely
perceived as fair.


David Roberts


And the participants are happy, the utilities —


Michael Wara


Everybody's happy.


David Roberts


Yeah.


Michael Wara


Everybody loves it. That's why the EDAM project has moved
forward, because the people that participate in the EIM, both
California and non-California entities, have said, "Let's go
further." But as this project has neared completion and it is
getting close to that, two things are happening. One is this
competition from SPP, which I think will thin out participation
in the EIM, which is spread out quite far across the western grid
and it will also limit participation in this new program, the
enhanced day-ahead market. So the real story here is that to some
degree, if California wants to have sort of day-ahead
integration, it needs to maintain momentum toward power sharing.


David Roberts


And so what would the RTO do beyond the day-ahead market?


Michael Wara


Well, the other thing that it would do is actually plan
transmission.


David Roberts


Yes.


Michael Wara


Right.


David Roberts


Yes. Praise be.


Michael Wara


Yeah, right? Yes. And so today, in the footprint that a western
RTO centered on California might contain, there's internal
transmission planning each utility or within the California ISO,
the ISO plans transmission build-out and then there are seams.
And the seams are where different markets meet each other.
They're kind of the border. And there are real limitations on
planning across the border, planning transmission lines that
cross these state lines and cross market barriers and just
planning what people are today starting to call transfer
capacity, which is the ability to move power for California,
especially out of the Pacific Northwest and into California.


And I just add to that another challenge that we've all
confronted in the west in the last few years also is the effects
that large wildfires can have on these transmission lines.
Because there may be like four lines that connect California to
the Pacific Northwest, but they're all in one right of way. And
so if there's a big wildfire that's putting a lot of smoke into
that right of way, it can shut down the whole thing.


David Roberts


Right.


Michael Wara


And so there's kind of an additional need for greater redundancy
which will create resilience to wildfire.


David Roberts


Speaking of that, I'm going to throw one more twist here at
listeners who are now juggling whatever a half dozen acronyms
we've thrown at them so far. But there's also something called
the Western Resource Adequacy program.


Michael Wara


Yeah, WRAP.


David Roberts


WRAP. Tell us what that is and how it fits in with that silent w.


Michael Wara


Well, so one thing to say, another big objection, way back when,
was the fear of imposing a capacity market. As you mentioned
earlier, David, resource adequacy is an important goal that all
utilities or system operators plan for. They need to have enough
power available on those hot, in California, it's the hot summer
afternoon into evening to make sure that we don't have to do
rolling blackouts like what happened in Texas.


David Roberts


Right. You need enough resources to meet the maximum conceivable
demand.


Michael Wara


Yes.


David Roberts


Which, as we say, if you're doing it over and over again in each
one of these utility islands, just leads to huge amounts of
capacity that is idle almost all the time.


Michael Wara


That's right. It's incredibly wasteful. So there's a developing
program for utilities in the west to try to plan some of that
resource adequacy together and sort of share resources more than
they have in the past. How and whether this interacts with the
burgeoning proposals both from CAISO and from the SPP group to
have RTOs I think really depends on the rules in the markets.
California has made it very clear that there's never going to be
a capacity market in California and that the states that join any
RTO created under — by governance change at the California ISO
will maintain control over their RA.


It doesn't mean that the amount of resources might change. Right.
So it might be that you need a little bit less because you're in
this larger footprint utility, and the ISO say "Well, we can get
by with this much instead of this much plus a gigawatt or
something" because we're operating the whole system as one. But
what those resources actually are will be determined by the
participants and ultimately then by the state commissions that
regulate the participants in an ISO or an RTO. That's like kind
of a non-negotiable item for California.


David Roberts


Is there a particular reason that it's so uptight about this
particular point?


Michael Wara


Well, I think it relates back to our earlier point about kind of
California wanting to have some real say over the power plants
that it's using to meet load. Also, I think it has to do with the
observations from the outside of experiences with capacity
markets within PJM, especially where there's been litigation over
the desire of states to build new capacity in their own state as
opposed to having it be controlled by an auction mechanism. I
think anybody who's participated in some of these auction
mechanisms as a market participant will tell you that they're
problematic, very hard to design well. Often in retrospect,
designed poorly, and then the market operator is left trying to
fix things after the auction, after money's changed hands, kind
of change the rules retroactively, and so no one's super happy
with them.


It may be the least worst thing, but from California's
perspective, they don't want anything to do with it. It's a
non-starter, and that'll be written into the legislation. Any
viable legislation that would allow for power sharing would say,
power sharing fine, but there will be no capacity market. And if
there ever were, California would withdraw.


David Roberts


Got it. We've got the energy imbalance market as a little step
forward. Then they've got the day-ahead market, which is going to
be a really substantial step forward. Beyond that, I mean, I
think it's worth pausing just to say that sort of analyses of
these things show benefits of the day-ahead market that just
dwarf the benefits of the energy imbalance market.


Michael Wara


Yeah, but let me just back up to these studies. Yes, they do.
However, the studies that have been done to date typically assume
full participation. So they ignore — they're like engineers
sitting down to say "What would be the coolest electricity market
we can imagine in the west?" Rather than people who are connected
to the political process, which is very important in all of this,
saying "Who are the most likely partners?" Or I would frame it
somewhat differently who are the most valuable partners that
California could have in an RTO, and what do we need to do to get
those people?


And who cares if all the western states join? It really doesn't
matter. What matters is and I'll just call out one particular
partner, like, what are the things that we can do to induce the
participation of Bonneville Power Authority? If you want to think
about really successful heavily reliant on renewables systems.
Think about like northern Europe and Norway. That is a system
that we should aspire to be like where Norwegian hydro balances
German and other European wind. Right? And today a lot of that
happens. Right. We trade power every day in large quantities with
Bonneville. But if we could induce participation of Bonneville
and a number of the northwestern utilities in a California ISO
that would do an enormous amount to simplify having more
renewables on the system.


David Roberts


Right. So there's the day-ahead market that's being hashed out
there's, the resource adequacy program going alongside here and
these are all sort of envisioned, I think by a lot of people at
least, as steps towards an RTO. So let's pause for a minute and
just think about if you're sitting down with a blank sheet of
paper today and designing a western RTO what are the sort of main
design issues that you want to make sure — because there's not
like a set blueprint, right? There's not like a blueprint. You
take off the shelf and say here's our RTO.


These are all sort of designed in somewhat bespoke ways and would
need to be designed in somewhat bespoke ways to fit the values of
the participants. So what in your mind are sort of the top issues
that anyone designing an RTO for the western states ought to keep
in mind? I know that stakeholder input is a huge one, so maybe we
could start there.


Michael Wara


Yeah, well, as I look at it, I think we need to design a system
that takes account of the real circumstances in the west and that
isn't just a cookie-cutter approach. The EIM did an important
first step toward that, but the reality is it doesn't go quite
far enough. So I would say we should look at what's happened
there, look at the successes and failures in the EIM, mostly
successes. Honestly, I can't really think of real negatives and
start there. But we'd also need to say there's not going to be a
capacity market. We're going to give states sovereignty over
their resource adequacy as long as they show that it meets the
requirements for the system.


And then we need to work out some kind of a body of state
regulators that has voting rights that reflect the complexity of
the west, where we have a few states with very large urban
populations that are going to be, particularly in the early years
of a California ISO, the vast majority of load and so be paying
most of the transmission access charge. But we also need to make
sure that states that have relatively small populations have a
real voice, not some sort of nominal participation where they
don't really have any power, so that they feel less concerned
that California might just go on some spending spree and run up
their transmission charges because Californians can afford it,
and other states are much more price sensitive to the cost of
electricity. So to me, this sounds a lot like the problem that
the Founders solved with the Senate and the House. It's also a
problem that's regularly tackled in international agreements.


And the basic model is you say you need two majorities to move
forward, you need a majority of states and you need a majority of
load to make a recommendation and that's going to ensure that all
the recommendations that come forward are really consensus-based
and it gives everybody power to shape what happens. Another key
kind of governance characteristic, that I think will be
ultimately important is to make sure that the states that do
participate in this market and in the body of state regulators
that will be created have what's called Section 205 filing
authority, at least for the really important issues that come up
within an ISO and an RTO. And that basically just means that if
the board of the RTO were to take some action that the body of
state regulators really objected to, just basically the board
kind of goes AWOL and starts taking their own independent actions
without really consulting and considering what the states want.
That the states can go to FERC with a relatively low burden of
proof to get before FERC and have their issues considered on the
merits.


David Roberts


Oh, interesting. Just pause here and say back in 2016, 2017.
Another one of the worries about an RTO is that at the time the
Trump administration was in power, it was sort of bullying RTOs
to allow more coal and just to be dirtier in general. And some of
the RTOs were sort of seen as kind of bullying the states
involved, disrespecting states, sort of clean energy goals,
basically not giving states their independent due. So that was
another of the worries about this is just when you give power to
an RTO, you are giving up some power and I guess you just want
some guarantees that you're not going to get that the RTO is not
going to go bad and start steamrolling you over stuff.


Michael Wara


Yeah. So this is an important reason why not having a capacity
market is a good idea, right? That's an insurance policy. So what
the Trump FERC was doing was really interfering in a material way
in the issues around what kind of power plants exist in
particular states within these RTOs. And if you just take that
off the table by saying that that's not going to be a question
that the RTO is really concerned with, then you can go a long way
toward avoiding that problem. But we don't have any guarantees
that a future administration will not wreak havoc with western
electricity policy.


That is possible. And that's why it's important that everybody
vote who cares about the clean energy transition. Try to make
sure that never happens. But there are lots of ways beyond FERC.
I mean, you want to interfere, you could simply eliminate the tax
credit provisions in the IRA if you had a cooperative Congress.


David Roberts


Yeah.


Michael Wara


So it's a problem that is just present in a country that is
evenly divided politically on this issue, as the United States
is. And given that FERC has jurisdiction over all the high
voltage transmission, right, so it's not just these federally
regulated electricity markets where there's a greater FERC role,
for sure. But also FERC oversees all of the high voltage
transmission in the United States because it's in interstate
commerce. Even those vertically integrated utilities that kind of
do things on their own. They still have to go to FERC and get
approval for things. And if FERC wanted to, they could do things
to make life difficult.


David Roberts


Notoriously in transmission planning, one of the difficulties is
cost allocation. Who pays for what? Who gets the benefits of a
transmission line and who pays for it? Do RTOs help with that?
Would an RTO help smooth that issue?


Michael Wara


It can remove some challenges, but it doesn't remove them all.
And this is also getting to why having a good participation model
for the body of state regulators, which would be kind of a
subsidiary body to the board of directors but would provide a lot
of input to the board, is important. Some RTOs have been very
successful at building transmission to enable build out of
renewables. Probably MISO is one that stands out.


David Roberts


I did a pod on that.


Michael Wara


Yes, you did. And it was a good pod.


David Roberts


Listeners want to go Google that.


Michael Wara


Other RTOs have been less successful. See PJM's long-standing
cost allocation disputes. So I think it just really depends on
the context and on creating a mechanism where there's mutual
interest in seeing these new transmission lines get built. As I
said at the beginning, I think we need to build them. And the ISO
in California is building new transmission lines out to even
distant other western states. We also need to build a lot of
intrastate transmission. Right. And I think if that's the way to
get things done, I'm sort of a person who's like "What can we get
done?"


What's going to push us further down the track toward where we
need to be and also create a political and economic situation
where there's strong support for continued transition? And I do
think that those problems are solvable as long as you don't try
to pit people against each other.


David Roberts


Right. Well, you sort of raised another issue which I wanted to
ask about, which is there's a couple of really big utilities in
the region whose disposition on this question will be very
important. So I think like PacifiCorp and Xcel, for instance, and
there's this idea, I think, like, if you listen to Southern
Company, say a utility in the southeast, they are busy fighting
off these efforts, fighting off efforts in the south to create a
more unified market, to take steps towards an RTO, et cetera, et
cetera. Even though all the same considerations apply. An RTO
would be great for the southeast, for all the obvious reasons,
but I think utilities like Southern Company view an RTO as kind
of a direct threat to the vertically integrated utility model.


What do you think? PacifiCorp and Xcel, where are they on this?
And do you think that the vertically integrated utility model is
under threat? Once you start this process, once you start going
down this road toward more sharing and pooling of resources.


Michael Wara


What I'd say is, it is potentially under threat in some ways, but
the question again is, what are the costs and benefits? And does
your vertically integrated utility also have an independent
subsidiary that builds merchant renewable generation? Right. And
PacifiCorp is one vertically integrated utility within a basket
of utilities and other companies that are owned by Berkshire
Hathaway Energy. And I think BHE is able to take a higher level
perspective on what's valuable for all of its assets and what the
potential market opportunities might be. But I also think the
situation is somewhat different because the west is so different
than the southeast, where in the west market access to California
is super valuable for some of these utilities.


And so I think PacifiCorp looks at the situation and says "Yeah,
well, there might be some more merchant generation that gets
built in our footprint, but you know what? We could build it, A).
And B) then we can sell all the energy to California and meet
this, be a part of this really big market that we have trouble
getting access to."


David Roberts


So you think most of the big utilities in the west, generally
speaking, are on board with the general movement in this
direction?


Michael Wara


I think so. I think that the other thing is that it's challenging
for a state as big as California with all the generation
portfolio that we have to manage the transition to a solar heavy
grid. But if you're smaller, that problem gets even more
challenging. And so a lot of these utilities are also Portland
General Electric or Seattle. Power and Light, I think is —


David Roberts


City Light


Michael Wara


or City Light. Thank you. Yeah. Are looking at what they
understand to be their future, right? And saying, "Wow, there's
even additional benefit today to being integrated into a larger
system."


David Roberts


Yeah. If you're just building fossil fuel plants to satisfy your
own load in your own footprint, it's all very simple. But once
you start moving to variable renewables, the value, the need for
these larger footprints and more sharing just rises and rises and
rises.


Michael Wara


I think that's right. And also the ability to do things that are
— to have pretty sophisticated demand response programs, to have
the ability to integrate distributed resources and then bid them
into the market becomes more valuable. Those are still kind of
nascent technologies. But utilities are looking at this problem
five years — like I said, they're not thinking about now, they're
thinking about five years from now.


David Roberts


Yeah, those things are going to get overwhelming for a single
utility to manage, I feel like pretty quick. I've always felt
that about distributed resources particularly. It's like —


Michael Wara


Absolutely.


David Roberts


one thing when you have a dozen participants in your wholesale
energy market, but what about when you have 1000 or 10,000 or
100,000 with DERs? Things get complicated quick.


Michael Wara


And particularly managing electric vehicle charging in a way that
is grid supportive rather than grid destructive. I think it's
going to be really important. There's a whole bunch of things
that are coming at utilities relatively quickly and there's value
in having scale. And a lot of the really innovative policies,
like the innovative policies for integrating storage into
wholesale electricity markets, those have come out of California.


David Roberts


Right.


Michael Wara


And ultimately become national FERC orders. But the early
experiments happened here and I think there's a greater
consensus, at least within the electric power industry, that that
is the direction we are heading.


And so then that makes participation in an RTO more valuable and
particularly in one like California's.


David Roberts


So let's return to something I've previewed a couple of times
here, which is a little chaos agent in this mix, which is this
other RTO, the Southwest Power Pool. SPP is at the, how did you
put it, the eastern end of the western states. It has started to
do a couple of things. One is it launched something called the
Western Energy Imbalance Service, which sounds similar to and is
similar to CAISO's Western Energy Imbalance Market. It's sort of
a competitor to the EIM and it's sort of out there trying to lure
states and utilities into that service rather than the EIM.


And then it's also got designs on expanding its own footprint. So
basically what you have now that I think is new in the equation
is this other RTO out there talking to western states saying
"Hey, never mind California, come join our thing, come join our
Energy Imbalance Market and then eventually come join our RTO."
So a couple of questions about this. Like why? Why does SPP all
of a sudden have these sort of imperial ambitions? Why does it
want to expand? Why is it doing it now? And then do you think
that has a chance of succeeding?


You can really see, you could imagine the western states, the
western region kind of being split between two RTOs. So what's
your take on all that?


Michael Wara


So the first thing to say about the two RTO thing is like "okay,
fine," there's lots of RTOs in the US.


David Roberts


Right.


Michael Wara


And the west is a big place. And while certain system planners
have long kind of imagined that sort of the apple in their eye,
like this one market —


David Roberts


Yes!


Michael Wara


spanning across the entire interconnect, I don't think the sky
falls if there are two. And it may actually be better for some of
the parties to be I think there are real tensions that would come
up in the body of state regulators, potentially, with having
states that really just — it's not even that they don't care
about climate. They view climate as a tribal issue, and they're
on the other side, and California is on one side, and it's going
to be hard to divorce some of those questions.


So I'm sort of like, actually, this could be a positive. It might
mean that some resources aren't available to California that
otherwise would be very economic to have, and that's too bad.


David Roberts


But at least everybody involved in the California ISO would be on
the same page, right. Moving in the same direction.


Michael Wara


Or at least sort of roughly. I don't think we can go too far
there, but I think that there's flavors of that. So why is SPP
doing this? I do think part of it is kind of a desire to expand,
just sort of like empire building. But there's also the fact that
they're meeting a need. Right? There is a need for greater
interstate coordination. The EIM was a market test of that need.
It proved that this is really something people want. And the EDAM
is another step in that direction to meet that need. And SPP is
recognizing that there is a void created by the sort of
idiosyncratic governance structure of the California ISO, which
is a legacy of the California electricity crisis, remember?


David Roberts


Right.


Michael Wara


None of the other ISOs work have governance that's like this. The
reason California has it and the reason FERC tolerates it is what
happened in California. And that also when you go to the
legislature in California, not so much the legislators because of
term limits, but the staff remember.


David Roberts


PTSD.


Michael Wara


Absolutely. I don't know if it's active anymore, but surprisingly
recently, last few years, there's been active litigation still
over who pays the costs of that debacle. And so the California
governance structure is unique because of that. It creates
challenges to regionalization that would otherwise not be there
if there were an independent board, which is what all the other
RTOs have.


And as a result, SPP sees an opportunity and they're stepping
into it. And so the question really is, does California see
wisdom in also stepping into that space?


David Roberts


Kind of puts a clock on things, right? It was either nothing or a
western RTO before, but now it's like, you need to move, or your
competitor is going to suck up all your —


Michael Wara


Yeah, we'll lose some opportunities. Although I think you see
that some utilities do switch RTOs. That does happen. Little
Rock, Arkansas, where SPP is headquartered, is not a part of SPP.


David Roberts


Hilarious.


Michael Wara


Because the utilities switched out because it didn't like the
deal it was getting.


David Roberts


So it's not permanent. Like these things are fluid even after the
—


Michael Wara


They can be there are significant costs, and I think especially,
and this is important to emphasize, there would be very high cost
for California to withdraw. Might be easier for another state
that's a smaller part of it to switch out of California as RTO.
But once you get rid of your control room, you're kind of
committed, or you have to move to another person's, another
entity that has a control room.


David Roberts


And I also hear worries about basically like, if SPP hoovers up
all the states that California will be isolated in, this growing
reliability problem that you alluded to earlier, this sort of
serial crises, this growing duck curve, et cetera, et cetera.
It's going to be that much harder to solve those problems if
California remains isolated. Just if CAISO as an island amidst a
larger SPP, do you give any credence to those worries?


Michael Wara


Yeah, I mean, I think California as an island is not a situation
that we want to be in. I'm a little bit skeptical that that's
going to happen in the near term. And if it were to start to
happen, I think that California, that would increase pressure on
California to respond by creating a pathway toward shared
governance. I guess that the other thing I would just sort of say
about all of this is that people in California tend to be really
afraid of this shared governance idea of sharing power. But I
think we need to be confident about what we've accomplished, how
that has changed where other utilities think the future lies, and
in our ability to persuade other states and other utilities to
come with us on this journey.


And I think we can.


David Roberts


On the politics of it, I forgot to ask this earlier, but I just
throw it in now. There was a bill this session to restructure
CAISO along these lines to take the first big step toward an RTO,
and it ended up not advancing. And then, like the week after it
died, Governor Newsom came out and endorsed it, which I think was
puzzling to me as an outsider. What's going on there? Like, is
Newsom on the side of the angels here? Are there internal
political dynamics that are worth kind of calling out?


Michael Wara


Well, I think what happened with that bill was that it was
essentially a reintroduction of the thing that did not pass in
2017 rather than an attempt to update it to the new
circumstances. And so that was not perceived favorably. However,
the issue is one that Newsom's team views as important. Remember,
these are the people that have had to deal with the serial
emergencies that have occurred on the California grid. The buck
stops with Newsom. He understands that if there are rolling
blackouts, à la Texas, he's politically accountable for that. And
there's a sad history of what happens to governors in California
that no one wants to go anywhere near.


And so I think Newsom's team has long been supportive of this,
but maybe not ready to step out and publicly say that. And the
point at which this bill was going to fail was the point at which
Newsom decided that this is something that he had to get involved
in. And so without supporting the bill, what he is supportive of,
and this is I think, where many of us are, is the process is
developing a workable proposal that can pass, that addresses some
of the legitimate concerns and that keeps us moving. And so it's
my understanding that at the staff level within the
administration and also at the agencies, at the CEC and the PUC,
there's high level attention being paid to this issue that's
going to hopefully produce something that can pass.


David Roberts


Right. So you think the politics are good, there's momentum going
—


Michael Wara


Well.


David Roberts


the big stakeholders are on board, more or less.


Michael Wara


Let me be clear. I think the politics are still challenging.
Anything that unions are opposed to in California —


David Roberts


Right.


Michael Wara


has challenging politics.


David Roberts


And is there any prospect of bringing them on board, of
persuading them? Like I'm sure the arguments have been made to
them a million times. Are they immovable on this?


Michael Wara


IBEW is the shop union, is the union for the California ISO. All
the California ISO employees are in IBEW 1245. But I think the
bigger issue is the building trades and how the people that do
all of the work that is not electrical when you build a big
utility scale solar farm. And there the question is going to, I
think, ultimately going to turn — and this is also actually where
having the governor involved is really useful and important. The
question is going to ultimately turn on what else do the building
trades need?


David Roberts


Right.


Michael Wara


And is there a trade where the governor's team feels like giving
something along some other dimension is worth it —


David Roberts


I see.


Michael Wara


to get this value?


David Roberts


Interesting.


Michael Wara


Because it's never just one dimensional, it's never just one
thing that any organization as complex and powerful as the
building trades needs.


David Roberts


I say. I've always found this comes up again and again, the sort
of opposition of the building trades to clean energy bills in a
bunch of different states. Somewhat mysterious to me because it
just seems to me like of all the worries you might have about a
clean energy transition, a shortage of building work should be at
the bottom of your list. You're just going to build a crapload of
stuff everywhere, everybody, all the time. It seems like an odd
worry. Like, if anything, the building trades are going to be
overwhelmed with the amount of work.


Michael Wara


Well, trades are generally supportive, like trades supported SB
100 trades are generally supportive of a lot of the clean energy
legislation in California. They're worried about moving stuff out
of state. And I guess the thing that I point to, and I think the
issue that I feel California legislators and other stakeholders
should be most focused on is the reliability question for the
following reason: I'm old enough to remember the aftermath of the
electricity crisis in California, where the basic political
response was to roll back all the things that had led to that
series of rolling blackouts. And what I worry about is a
sustained heat wave in the context of a drought in California
where we have significant rolling blackouts.


And the political response to that is rollback of SB 100 goals.
And I think that is not something we should rule out of hand.


David Roberts


Wow, that's dystopian.


Michael Wara


I don't think it's dystopian. I mean, electric reliability is
incredibly important, particularly in a heat wave. People will
die. Like, there are real near term concerns with that kind of a
reliability crisis like what happened in Texas in February of
last year or two years ago. It's totally unacceptable.


David Roberts


Well, yeah, and you look at the response of the Texas legislature
and it does not augur well for —


Michael Wara


Without weighing in on their inadequate response, I would hope
that California would have a more substantive and adequate
response to a crisis like that were it to occur. I actually have
confidence that we would, but I do think that it would raise real
questions about particularly that last 20% of the SB 100 goal.
And I don't want to see those. I want to see us succeed. And I
want to see us do the things where we execute on that goal,
ideally ahead of schedule. And so reducing risks is an important
part of that. That's the reason why I think building trades
should support this, because it's going to allow us to build more
stuff.


Like it avoids a situation where we have an emergency stop or at
least an emergency pause.


David Roberts


Right, that's a good point. Final question here is and it gets to
the schedule as you just brought up, whatever happens in this
process of taking steps towards an RTO, it's going to take a
while, as you said, late 2020, as earliest, probably more like
2030. There's a dire, immediate need for more transmission and
better transmission planning in the western region. And I think
everyone can agree that it would be really bad if all of that
waited until 2030 to get started and if California didn't start
regional transmission planning until 2030 when an RTO was in
place.


So are there ways to get more regional transmission planning
going parallel to this RTO effort?


Michael Wara


There are, and you see some of it in the current transmission
planning process at the California ISO. So one alternative option
is to begin to build transmission lines that are owned and
operated by the California ISO, but which exist in other
footprints. And that's something that has started to happen. It's
happening with respect to connecting Wyoming Wind or a big slug
of Wyoming Wind to California. I think we may want to think about
that for sources of clean, firm power as they develop in the
western interconnect. There are a lot of interesting geothermal
proposals in Nevada and in Utah.


And without weighing into the nuclear conversation, there's some
news. A lot of the small modular reactors are going to get built
in Utah first. And so how we leverage our existing transmission
to these states, as the coal units that were the original
rationale for it shut down, and whether we construct new
transmission on the California dime where California recognizes
paying for these lines, no one else's to interconnect new sources
of especially valuable supply to California demand. I think it's
something we need to look at in the near term. The good news is
that the California ISO over the last couple of years has really
pivoted from being pretty reluctant to build new lines to being
maybe making some parties uncomfortable with the ambition of what
they are proposing.


And I think that's healthy. I think we need to be very ambitious
in the near term because these lines take so many years to build
and we need to be looking at where the puck is going to be, not
where it is and thinking about systematic build out of the system
to incorporate much larger renewable shares. And the ISO is
moving aggressively in that direction. I think there's still room
for them to move, but they are off the base and running, so
that's good.


David Roberts


Thank you so much for coming on and walking through this all.
It's super fascinating. There's just so much going on in the
electricity system. Everywhere you look. This is a really
interesting little subdrama chapter here, so thanks for walking
through it. Michael Wara of Stanford. Thanks for coming on,
Volts.


Michael Wara


Pleasure. Thanks for having me, David. Great to talk to you.


David Roberts


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