Ted, I want to start with you and just ask, what was this Battery Working Group process? How long did it take? What kickstarted it? And what role did you play in the process?

Yeah, so the Battery Working Group, or the Maryland Energy Storage Program Working Group, was initiated at the end of... 2023, actually, because in April of 2023, the Maryland legislature passed a bill setting an energy storage target for the state of three gigawatts of energy storage in 10 years.

And so that when that bill was passed and signed by the governor, it went to the Maryland Public Service Commission to implement to say, OK, how are we going to achieve that goal, that three gigawatt goal in these next 10 years? And there are also interim goals like in the in the years in between from now and then, there were interim numbers below that 3 gigawatts.

And so it was the job of the commission to say, OK, what are we going to do? What rules, regulations, and programs, and tariffs are we going to create such that we're going to achieve those deployment goals for energy storage in the state on those time frames? And so they created a working group that is Commission created, but not necessarily part of the formal process.

And it was the idea was this group would be all the stakeholders in Maryland who are interested in energy storage and want to see the state achieve the goals.

And we would work together on designing those programs and tariffs and utility regulations to do that, to achieve that.

And then we would report back to the PSC on all our recommendations on how to do this.

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