Sean Esterly: Good morning or good afternoon, everyone. Wherever you might be located. And welcome to the 11th and final webinar of the 2017 DOE Tribal Energy Webinar Series. This one is titled Economic Market Potential and Tribal Lands and Interactive Tools for Assessments. My name is Sean Esterly, and I’ll be today’s webinar chair. I am a project manager at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, also known as NREL. Just want to go over some of the event details for today. The webinar is being recorded and will be made available on DOE’s Office of Indian Energy Policy and Programs website along with a copy of the Power Point presentations.
And please give us about one week for those materials to be posted. Everyone will receive a post webinar e-mail with the link to the page where the slides and recording will be located, so you’ll have that information. And because we’re recording this webinar, all phones of the attendees have been muted for that purpose. We’ll answer your written questions at the end of the presentation. You should see the question pane where you’re able to do that within the go to webinar window. Please feel free to submit questions at any time by clicking on the question button and typing in your question there.
We’ll try to keep the webinar to no longer than two hours. And so let’s go ahead and get started with opening remarks from Lizana Pierce. Ms. Pierce is a senior engineering and the deployment supervisor in the Office of Indian Energy Policy and Programs. Duty stationed in Golden, Colorado. Lizana is responsible for managing technical assistance services, implementing national funding and financing programs, and administering the results in tribal energy project grants and agreements. She has more than 20 years of experience in project development and management and has been assisting tribes in developing their energy resources for the last 18 years. She holds a bachelor of science degree in mechanical engineering from Colorado State University and pursued a masters in business administration through the University of Northern Colorado.
With that, Lizana, I’d like to turn things over to you.
Lizana Pierce: Great. Thank you, Sean. And I join Sean in welcoming you to the final webinar of the 2017 series. This webinar series is sponsored by two US Department of Energy organizations. First, the Office of Indian Energy Policy and Programs and the Western Area Power Administration. And as an introduction, the Office of Indian Energy directly fosters, coordinates, and implements energy planning, education, management, and programs that assist tribes with energy development, capacity building, energy infrastructure, energy costs, and the electrification of Indian lands and homes. To provide this assistance, our deployment program works within the Department of Energy across agencies and with Indian tribes and organizations to help those tribes and Alaska native villages overcome the barriers to energy development.
Specifically, our deployment program is composed of a three-pronged approach, consisting of financial assistance, technical assistance, and education and capacity building. And this webinar series is just one example of our education and capacity building efforts. Specifically, the 2017 webinar series is part of the office’s efforts to support fiscally responsible energy business and economic development decision making and information sharing among tribes, and it’s intended to provide attendees with information on tools and resources to develop and implement tribal energy plans, programs, and projects.
As well as to highlight tribal energy case studies and identify business strategies tribes can use to expand their energy options and to develop sustainable local economies. In today’s webinar, Economic Market Potential on Tribal Lands and Interactive Tools for Assessment, attendees will learn about the technical potential of indigenous energy resources, infrastructure consideration, and tools available for energy supply assessments, including a demo of our new tool, developed by DOE’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory under sponsorship of the Office of Indian Energy.
Based on your feedback, we’re in the process of planning for the 2018 webinar series, and I’d like to thank those who did take the time to provide us that feedback. We will be providing additional information on next year’s webinar series probably in January, and send the – any additional information out through the Office of Indian Energy e-mail distribution list. So if you’re interested in next year’s series, please join our e-mail list. And with that, I want to turn the floor back over to Sean.
Sean Esterly: Great, thank you, Lizana.
Lizana Pierce: Thank you.
Sean Esterly: And so today, we have two speakers providing a joint presentation and demonstration, and I’d like to go ahead and introduce them now. First speaker we’ll be hearing from is Anelia Milbrandt who is an energy analyst at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory specializing in bio-energy research with extensive experience in the area of biomass resource assessment, geospatial analysis, and project management. Most of Amelia’s work during the past 14 years has been centered on evaluating the existing or potentially available biomass resources in the US and abroad.
These resources include solid biomass waste materials such as crop residues, forest residues in MSW as well as lipid sources such as fats, oils, and greases. She is a lead researcher and author of publications related to bio-gas resource and market assessments. Other areas of expertise include bio-geography and geospatial analysis applied in biomass resource assessments, feasibility studies, and infrastructure, market, and policy analysis. Amelia has extensive experience in managing projects and programs related to bio-energy development in the United States and abroad, and she holds a masters of science degree in geography from the University of Sophia, Bulgaria.
Joining Anelia is Donna Heimiller. Donna is a senior geospatial data scientist with 20 years of experience at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. Her areas of expertise include geospatial analysis and modeling supporting multiple renewable resource assessment technologies, regional scale site evaluation for technical and economic potential assessments, energy system modeling, electricity infrastructure analysis, and data visualization. Her work has resulted in more than 50 publications as well as publicly distributed data sets. She received a bachelor of science degree in natural resources from the University of Michigan in 1993 and a master of forestry in spatial data analysis from Colorado State University in 1998.
And so with that, I’d like to now go ahead and turn things over to our presenters.
Anelia Milbrandt: Thank you, Sean. Welcome everybody and thank you for taking the time to join us today. I’m Anelia Milbrandt and I’ll be showing the results of our analysis on behalf of our team here regarding technical ______ potential of tribal lands and building a tribal land _____. Here with me, again, is Donna Heimiller, who will be participating in the questions and answer session. But I’d like to acknowledge a few other colleagues who have been instrumental in our analysis and tool development. These are Paul Schwab, Bertral Eitran, Nick Guillory, and Sherry Star.
Just to quickly show you what you’ll be hearing from us today, we will illustrate the results of the technical economic potential of renewable energy on tribal land. We will also illustrate the results of a survey we conducted during the last year regarding current installed renewable energy capacity. And towards the end of our time, we will demonstrate the Tribal Energy Atlas. When we discuss renewable energy potential or any other technology for that matter, conventional energy as well, we generally refer to these four categories. Resource are also called the theoretical potential, which is essentially the maximum resource potential you could have in a given area.
We refer the limit to this resource potential to what we call technical potential by applying topographic or land use and other type of constraints, system performance, and so forth to arrive at technical potential or establish an upper boundary estimate of what we call also developmental potential. An economic potential is essentially a subset of technical – excuse me – resource potential where we apply some costs to considerations, such as technology, fuel costs, and so forth. And finally, we arrive to what we call market potential where we apply policy, regulatory, investor, and other market components for analysis.
Our – the results of the analysis will be showing you today are focused on technical and economic potential. But it does have some components of market potential, especially in the two that we’ll mention later on. The results of the utility-scale technical potential analysis on tribal lands located in the lower 48 states is estimated to be about 6.5 percent of the total national technical potential, and as you can see in this table here, leading technology is solar PD followed by solar CSP and wind with a relatively smaller contribution from the other technologies. I would like to mention here that we have a _____ pending publication to be published probably in January or later I hope where you’ll be getting a lot more information about the methodology being used, maps, and so forth.
So for the limited time today, I won’t be able to show everything, but I’ve tried to sort of show you the essence of these results. Moving on to show you just a sample of the maps that will be provided in the report I just mentioned. This is the geographic distribution of these resource potential by tribe. I won’t spend time on each individual map. These are here only to show and say that the darker the colors produced in this map, the higher the technical potential. And as you can see, many of the tribes in the lower 48 have actually pretty decent technical potential for these resources.
Regarding distributed-scale technical potential, we provide such estimates only for biogas. Biogas is the gaseous product of anaerobic digestion, which is a biological process of organic material that is being decomposed in the absence of oxygen. Biogas is composed predominantly of methane and carbon dioxide, CO2, and some other trace components. And actually, methane is usable portion of biogas. This is what we use to produce electricity, heat, and lately transportation fuel. Therefore, our estimates are focused on the biomethane potential. Biomethane also refers to perhaps you’ve heard the term renewable natural gas, which is the food substitute of natural gas, and it’s been getting a lot of publicity and attention lately.
So in our assessment here, we provide biomethane potential estimate for animal manure, wastewater, and landfills, and we also provide discussion in the report of biogas potential from food waste at casinos. The map on the screen shows the geographic distribution of this resource, and as you can see for the most part in the lower 48, ______ good potential and some actually exhibit really, really high potential for biomethane. Moving onto utility scale, economic ______ potential. This is a list of inputs included in our analysis, such as renewable energy cost, market electricity prices, availability, and level of energy support policies. We also apply some transmission cost information in the tribal-specific factors and parameters.
I would like to note that the economic potential estimates vary based on the input assumptions, therefore the results of this analysis are case specific, and very likely could change over time. The results of the economic potential for wind indicate about one gigawatt capacity with the potential to produce three terawatt hours of electricity. Respectively for utility scale PD, the analysis shows an economic potential of 61 gigawatts and potential of 116 terawatt hours of electricity. Regarding distributed scale, we were not able to do a full economic potential due to some data limitations.
But instead, we provide what we call levelized cost of electricity for the following technologies. Distributed wind, residential solar PV, biogas, and small-scale hydropower. Estimates are provided for the lowest LCOE that could occur in the tribal area as a guidepost for further investigation. The results of this analysis indicate that a distributed wind and PV potential exist for every tribal area, but in low resource areas, the resulting LCOE is high and may not be competitive with grid electricity prices.
This is especially true in the case of wind for areas outside of the great plains, and for villages in ______ Alaska. In the case of residential PV< this is applicable to Alaska villages whereas the lower 48 exhibit relatively low levelized cost of electricity. We do provide similar information for other technologies as well in the paper. This is just illustrated for our limited time today.
Moving on to show you the results of the survey on the currently installed renewable energy capacity. They say this is current as of the end of November, and the response rate is about 67 percent, which means we still have about 30 percent of tribes who have not responded to the survey. But we do believe that we’ve captured the main installations across tribal land.
Regarding installed capacity by renewable energy type, solar is the leading technology with almost 300 megawatts installed currently, followed by wind at 67 megawatts, and biomass at 31. Regarding installed capacity originally, tribes in the west have almost 250 megawatts capacity still, followed by tribes in the Midwest at 32 megawatts, and Alaska at 18. Before I dive into demoing the Tribal Energy Atlas, I would like to just give you a little bit of background on the tool. It is an interactive geospatial application. You don’t need to have any prior geospatial experience or expertise. It’s pretty intuitive. You just have to allow yourself a little time to get comfortable with the window and functionality and data that it offers.
It allows users to view resources, infrastructure, and other pertinent information. It also allows users to query the data, conduct simple analysis, which I will demonstrate shortly. It provides some demographic installed capacity and utility scaled renewable energy technical potential summary by tribe. We also allow users to download data sets and feedback options in case some of the data that you see is dated or you see some discrepancy with information that you have. We are more than happy to hear from you or suggestions on improving the functionality and so forth.
We are always open to feedback. Our expected release date is due at the end of January. With that, I’ll switch to the tool. So this is the initial screen of the Tribal Energy Atlas. It’s still what we call the beta version, which means it’s still in progress. It is in a pretty final stage at the moment. We just need to add several data sets with the opinion and just sort of improve the functionality for some features. But for the most part, it is what it is, and I’ll be happy to show it to you today. As you can see in the left hand side, there is a menu of options.
This tab, this particular tab, is expandable. You can click on it, and again, it goes up and down. Then you can click on any of these technologies provided, and it expands information below. In this case, you can click on utilities scale wind, which as you can see, it is shown for the lower 48. This particular button is not functioning right now for the resources until we finalize the data in the report I just mentioned, but as soon as that is available, I will load the data. It is however – we’ll demo later available for the rest of the infrastructure, environmental, and the other information.
You can also click on this question mark here. We call this button meta data or information about the data. I give you more information about this particular layer, where you can go for more information, what is the time reference, and other pertinent information. You can also click on the legend button where it shows you what each of those different colors mean. In this case, we show the utility scale within tribes and megawatt hours, and the different colors are present on the different sort of classes and rankings.
The query tool currently again is not functioning for the resource data, but it’s functioning for all the other layers. The _____ is published, this will be live and available as well. We also provide utility scale wind within ten mile radius of tribe. Only as an illustration to show the potential for outside of travel areas in case tribes are interested in purchasing those line and expanding just so they can see how much more potential they can actually tap in. Again, it’s purely illustrative. We can run this type of analysis at 20 miles and 50 miles and so forth for this particular exercise and model. We have run about ten miles.
We also provide – for distributed generation, we provide the wind capacity factor. Again, you can click on the legend and see what each of those different colors mean. As you can see, the wind capacity factor for distributed generation is very favorable across the board for most of the tribes. Moving onto solar, we provide again a similar fashion, utility scale PV within tribes with the ten mile tribes. We also provide information on the solar, the concentrated solar power potential within tribes and extended boundary.
And similar to wind, it provides capacity factor for distributed generation. Similar information again is provided for geothermal, ______ in every single one individually for sake of time. We also provide information on hydro potential, woody biomass, and then _____ biomethane. I would like to stay here just a minute or so. There’s several different layers. CAFO stands for concentrated animal feeding operations. This is a really large facility that they produce various type of – well, raising animals, cattle, pigs, and poultry and so forth. So we’ve estimated might be _____ potential at those locations. Again, within tribes and within ten miles of tribes.
We did the similar type of analysis for landfill. As you can see, if you click on within ten miles of tribes, you can pick up a lot more resources. Again, this is just sort of a prospecting type of opportunities. Wastewater treatment plants, again, they provide it for lower 48 and for Alaska villages. Similar for wastewater treatment plants, ten miles. And then we also provide information on casinos with restaurants. As you can see, many casinos have a lot of restaurants on site, and this is a great opportunity for exploring biogas potential on site. To either offset the local energy consumption or ______ back to the grid. Moving onto the infrastructure section, we do provide information and transmission lines.
As you know, this is very important for any type of project development. The closer you are to transmission lines, the better. More viable your project will be. We provide that for the lower 48. I don’t believe Alaska has very good – do you want to jump in, Donna?
Donna Heimiller: There are some lines that are –
Anelia Milbrandt: Proprietary.
Donna Heimiller: You can actually see some lines on the map right now I think for Alaska, but they’re just very few kind of connecting anchorage to Fairbank. So for the major transmission lines. Oh maybe not. I apologize. It looks like they do not show up on our – yeah. But there are a few transmission lines, and perhaps if there’s some information from tribes in Alaska, we might be able to add some additional information.
Anelia Milbrandt: Exactly. Thank you, Donna.
Donna Heimiller: Sure, sorry.
Anelia Milbrandt: No worries. Another data layer we provide is railroads. Very important, especially to biomass, which sets it aside from the other renewable energy resources. Biomass is actually transportable, and railroads provide sort of the cheaper transportation mode, much cheaper than transporting it via road. We also provide information on natural gas. As you can see, there are many different type of information here you can display, and sort of including your analysis such as import and export terminals, pipelines, and market hubs and processing plants. Storage facilities and so forth.
And this information is particularly relevant to biomethane layers of _____, biogas, because biomethane is actually a 100 percent substitute for natural gas, and which is again very attractive for certain communities. So it will be an interesting exercise to see where you can actually produce biogas and interconnect with natural gas pipelines. We provide similar information for petroleum, such as petroleum refineries, _____ terminals and so forth. Again, this type of analysis would be very helpful if you’re looking at the alternative transportation fuels. I’ll turn those off. And the infrastructure folder, you can also find information on power plants. We provide information on coal and natural gas, but we also show data on renewable energy facilities such as solar, wind, geothermal, and hydro. And again, some additional ones.
I will expand here, ______ power plants. Bear with me a second. I have to lower the bar. In the case of biomass, again, which is a little bit different than the other technologies, it’s very important when you consider any type of bio-power facility in your location. You do want to look at the competition in your area because biomass resources, there’s a competition going on there between electricity production, combined with power facilities and biofuels. So you may want to look again with this tool what is currently in the area that might be sort of targeting already using the resources that you plan to use in your project.
We have information of coal firing plants. These are plants that fire coal and biomass, landfill, municipal, solid waste, other waste biomass, and _____ plants and woody – dedicated woody biomass power plant. Bring that back up. We also provide some information on environmental type of inputs, such as water availability, and we provide data on fresh groundwater and surface water. Again, for this actually, we have the data already available for you to download. If we have _____ geographic information system application, and you’d like to import any of these data layers, you want to do your own analysis on site, you can either import it as CSV, which could also be used in Excel, a spreadsheet format. You can also import share file and K Mail, which is using Google Maps.
And geo _____.
Donna Heimiller: So that’s a web version.
Anelia Milbrandt: For Google type of application as well.
Donna Heimiller: For geospatial applications. It’s just a very specific – yeah, a web version of a geospatial file. Yeah.
Anelia Milbrandt: Thank you. Again, you can go back to legend and see what each of those layers mean. You can adjust the transparency. Later on, I will demo to you a simple analysis that you can do, but you can play with the transparency and layer multiple data sets on top of each other. And you can adjust that as well. Under the environmental data, we also have greenhouse gas emissions from stationary sources. These are, for example, power plant generators. We also include cement plants, ammonia plants, and things of that nature. We provide stationary sources of methane, carbon dioxide, and nitrous oxide. As you can see, it’s pretty dense.
So what you can do, you can go here to the right hand side and zoom to a particular location. Drag a box and the tool will actually automatically reset, so we can actually explore the data a little further. And here, you can, again query the tool. You can click on either a triangle box or whatever shape you’d like to, or just simply using the point. And the tool will be able to tell you how much ______ is produced in this case in that particular facility. Emits about 1.4 million tons of CO2 equivalent. Well this is for CO2, but if it’s methane, it’ll be CO2, and for NOS would be CO2 equivalent as well.
Additional data that is provided under the environmental folder, protected areas. These are national state parks and other local protected areas, wilderness areas and wilderness study areas. We also provide information on critical habitat, such as endangered species mammals and birds and so forth. We also provide boundaries on natural tribal lands. We also provide county boundaries, state, federal lands, and congressional districts. Again, just as a reference to later on, if you’d like to build your own _____ and you’d like to explore further.
I would like to bring your attention to the upper right corner where there’s some additional tools. Again, you can use the first button to just simply draw a box. Again, we’ll zoom into that area. You can hit the plus sign and just brings your level up or level down into the minus. With that particular zoom at the end, so mutual location, you can type in an address of city, state, zip code, and so forth, and it will automatically bring it to that particular location. If you expand the arrow here under the change base map, you can also change the background color. Right now, we set it up to light because we would like really to show this information that was just showing you, and keep it as clean as possible in the background without overbearing the image.
But you can simply click on a roadmap, and that is the standard Google Maps. You can already ______ information on the Google Maps. You can perhaps you want to explore some of the satellite imagery on top of the information, resources, and so forth. But perhaps the most pertinent one would be the train. As you know, for certain technologies like wind and solar, terrain is very important to be considered in the analysis. So this background might be very valuable.
I will bring you back to white just so then I can show you a few other things here. For example, a simple analysis, for example, I’d like to see in that particular area here what is the woody biomass potential. I would click on that. So we display. Naturally, I would like to look at what is the proximity to transmission lines. I would like to also bring the railroads that we mentioned earlier. It’s very important for biomass to be – to consider the cheapest transportation role. Now as you can see, the resource layer sort of overwhelms the other resources.
So what you can do, you can go back to the legend, and you can change the order. The arrow will bring it down, and then railroads perhaps I want to get it a little bit more prominent. And again, you can adjust the transparency of the layers to see them a little better. So here, what we see really did actual resource – we have some very important intersection here where we can bring the resource to. Again, from by land, by railroad, we have also access to transmission lines, which seems like a really promising area. I would like to again – again, this is a very simple analysis that can bring in any type of other additional information. I would like to bring you up to that corner here on the upper right side. You can print that map.
I’m not going to wait for full completion. It’s just going to take a little bit for the server to load all the information, but if you’d like to, for example, show this particular map in your presentation or like to use it at meetings and so forth, you can certainly do that. You can learn more about the tool by clicking on the About button. Home will bring you back, and I’ll use that feature in just a moment here. But before we go there, I’d like to mention also the feedback option. Again, if you’d like to send us a note, you can also click on Tutorials, which would guide you through the whole process of, again, how to use this functionality data and so forth. Now I’m going to click on the Home button which will bring me back to the initial screen that we started from.
And we – Tribal Energy Summary. So you go to the Tribal Query tool, and either type in a name – oops. A name of a tribe. You can do that, and it’s going to automatically select those that contain that word, or you can just browse through the list of available tribes that is good here. Just going to select anything random. So by selecting either way, what the tool does, it brings up a map of that particular location with all the information that you have selected in the selecting query data feature, and then it brings a numerous ______ economic and demographic data, such as population, total house in units, occupy house in units, units with electricity.
Right now, they’re set up as placeholder. We do have the data. It’s just a matter of another week or two to process. It’s just it took a lot of time to, again, make the data compatible with some of our geographic information system features. The same thing, the data that I showed you for installed capacity will also be displayed here. Again, it’s just a matter of sort of comparing and making the data compliant with our geographic database.
And then the tool also pulled utility scaled ______ range of potential in terms of capacity and generation for every tribe by technology. So this is all I have at the moment. I’ll bring back to the tool. I’ll bring back to the home screen, turn on and off some layers, and I’ll be happy to take any questions. Thank you for your attention.
Sean Esterly: Great, thank you very much, Anelia, and also Donna, for covering that and walking us through the tool. Just a reminder to our attendees, we’ll move onto the question and answer session now, so if you do have any questions for the presenters, feel free to type those in and submit them. I’ll start with the first ones we received and we’ll go through them. One of the earlier questions we had is wondering if you could explain a little bit – which I think you did during the walk through, but how this differs from other NREL tools, such as wind prospector.
Donna Heimiller: Sure. So this tool is specifically targeted towards the tribal areas, and to really displaying the results of the analysis that were done on the technical potential and the economic potential. Something like wind prospector has some similar components where we will show the results of some of the national analysis that were conducted for technical potential, but it does not have anything about the economic potential in it. And it is also broader. We haven’t specifically limited it to the tribal focus.
So this hopefully just provides a little bit more targeted information. It also provides information about all the different technologies that were considered in the analysis in one location. So we have for instance the wind prospector, we have a geothermal prospector that gets into geothermal issues more broadly. There’s also the NSRDB viewer, which works mostly for the solar information. So hopefully this kind of provides a better focused area one stop shop for tribal resources to be displayed.
Sean Esterly: Great, thank you, Donna. And for the planned paper, will that cover the role of energy efficient housing and micro-grids in the future of tribal energy resources?
Anelia Milbrandt: No, the paper is only focused on utility scale, to some extent on distributed scale electricity generation. It does not cover energy efficiency nor transportation fuel production, nor combined heat and power and other applications that again – I definitely see the interest. It’s just that particular paper, it’s out of scope for these other technologies.
Sean Esterly: Yeah, and just a reminder everyone – because we’ve had this question come in a couple times. The tool is not yet publicly available. Should be available sometime in January, and what we can do when you register, you provided us with your e-mail. So when the tool becomes available, we can send out a link to that tool to all the attendees that are here today. So we’ll be sure to do that. So moving on to the next question. They’re wondering, again, kind of related to the NREL tool, but does this tool use any data from other maps, such as EIA maps or other external tools outside of NREL?
Donna Heimiller: We’re using data from the tribal boundaries from the US Census Bureau. Some of the data sources for things that we use in our technical potential analysis will come from outside sources, like the US Geological Survey or other entities. The land cover entity –
Anelia Milbrandt: The EPA.
Donna Heimiller: EPA.
Anelia Milbrandt: _____ Gas.
Donna Heimiller: Yeah, and then some of the data that we’re suing inside of the economic potential analysis are coming from the Energy Information Administration.
Sean Esterly: Perfect. In short then, some of the maps will be the same or similar to information on other websites. We basically – you pulled data from the most reliable and accurate sources that you could locate. Perfect. And next question. On the biomass resource map, is there or could there be in the future a layer showing beetle kill, fire kill, et cetera, other areas like that?
Anelia Milbrandt: Excellent question. We do have information on the beetle kill by state. It’s therefore it’s very coarse for a mapping application. We’re happy to sort of provide this information in the tool, but it may not be sort of informative because again, it has not been brought down to a final resolution for a mapping tool. The person who asked that question, please feel free to send me a note, and I’ll be happy to share with you the report in the data if you’d like to explore it further. Thank you.
Sean Esterly: Great, thank you, Anelia. And will there be – once the tool goes live, will there be any opportunities for additional training on the use of the tools or any sort of help desk or anything like that to help users?
Anelia Milbrandt: I would direct that question to Lizana, perhaps.
Lizana Pierce: Yeah, so there’s the online instructions that’s provided as well as the documentation. However, there is the opportunity to request technical assistance, not only for this tool, but the Sams model and other models through our technical assistance program, which is an online very quick, short form that you can request that assistance.
Anelia Milbrandt: Right, again, in the feedback option, send us a note if you see some glitch or something. Or you need the very quick sort of a question, if it’s something that can be dealt with immediately, we’re always happy to make ourselves available. But if it’s something, again, more of a training and so forth, that will take some time as it will benefit the technical assistance. Perhaps it’s a better vehicle for them. But it is a quick question of the query tool or something to help us out with this, or data that you don’t see and you’d like to see available. We have lists of data that we’d like to include in the future. So again, we’re happy to receive your feedback on that.
Sean Esterly: Great, thank you both. Next question that we have, one of our attendees who is obviously familiar with our work at NREL is asking what the difference is or the information has been updated since the previous 2012 report that we issued on geospatial analysis of ______ energy technical potential on tribal lands.
Anelia Milbrandt: Very good question. Do you want that, Donna?
Donna Heimiller: Yeah, so we have updated the analysis completely. So we are using more recent renewable resource data sets for wind, solar PV and biomass, as well as hydro. The geothermal data has not been updated, and we’ve actually limited it in this case to just the identified hydrothermal, geothermal plants. The economic analysis is completely new at this point, but basically, it represents a similar philosophy to what we had done previously. I think it was in 2012 or 2013, just that we have updated the data sources and updated our understanding of what constitutes good technical potential and economic potential criteria for analyzing the data.
And also I think including Alaska. I don’t think Alaska was included last time.
Anelia Milbrandt: Exactly, I was going to add that Alaska was not in the report, and bio_____ also was not considered. So we do have a pretty extensive, again, on site data which is pretty good.
Sean Esterly: Great. And that’s all the questions we had right now. One quick follow up question. In the version that’s currently publicly available, what’s out there, is it possible to make the tribal land boundary clear or without color?
Anelia Milbrandt: I’m sorry, this version right now?
Sean Esterly: Yeah, so what’s the version currently available out on the website? It’s not the tribal version. Correct? It’s just –
Donna Heimiller: Might be in the renewable energy app.
Sean Esterly: I think that’s what they’re on.
Anelia Milbrandt: I see. So probably referring to the renewable energy. Because this version is not available. Not version – this Atlas is not available publicly, but maybe the tribal lands were ______.
Donna Heimiller: Yeah, I think there are different applications that do have tribal lands as a layer. The only thing you could really do to try to decrease the visibility of the interior color is just to increase the transparency on that layer, and that you do on the legend.
Anelia Milbrandt: Right, the legend, there’s a transparency button, you can move it up and down and see just the layers here.
Donna Heimiller: But unfortunately, you can’t change the fill symbology of that layer itself. You can turn on and off some of the individual categories, but you can’t change the coloring.
Sean Esterly: So I’m not sure which tool that attendee is currently using, but it’s not the same one – we didn’t demonstrate yet – again, that tool will be released sometime in January, and we’ll be sure to send out the link to that once that occurs. And so with that, I don’t believe that there’s any other questions that haven’t been addressed. Let me pull up the – our slide so that we can display everyone’s e-mails in case anyone has any follow up questions. Great. And so these are the contacts for today’s presenters. Please do feel free to follow up through e-mail. We’d be happy to answer any additional questions. If you have any general questions, please direct them towards myself, Sean Esterly. My e-mail is displayed there. I’ll leave these up on the screen.
Again, we’ll be sending out a link to the location of where we post the webinar recordings and slides so that if you miss part of this webinar or would like to share this information with others, you can go out there and access that. And again, when this tool becomes available, sometime in January, we will e-mail out a link to all of – to everyone that registered for today’s webinar. So you will receive that and be notified of that. And so with that, I’d like to once again just thank our presenters for the great presentations and walking everyone through this really useful tool. We’re very excited for it to be released, and again, attendees, thank you very much for your time, and we look forward to seeing you again in 2018 for the next Department of Energy, Indian Energy webinar series. And with that, we’ll conclude our webinar. Thank you.
Lizana Pierce: Thanks, Sean.
[End of Audio]