AMERICAN STATISTICAL ASSOCIATION

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COMMITTEE ON ENERGY STATISTICS

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SPRING MEETING

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FRIDAY

APRIL 4, 2003

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The Committee met in Room 8E089 in the Forrestal Building, 1800
Independence Avenue, S.W., Washington,

D.C., at 8:30 a.m., Jay Breidt, Chair, presiding.

[PRESENT]{.underline}:

F. JAY BREIDT, Chair

MARK BERNSTEIN, Committee Member

JOHNNY BLAIR, Committee Member

JAE EDMONDS, Committee Member

MOSHE FEDER, Committee Member

JAMES K. HAMMITT, Committee Member

NEHA KHANNA, Committee Member

WILLIAM G. MOSS, Committee Member

NAGARAJ K. NEERCHAL, Committee Member

POLLY A. PHIPPS, Committee Member

RANDY R. SITTER, Committee Member

[ALSO PRESENT]{.underline}:

GUY CARUSO, Administrator, Energy Information

Administration

HOWARD GRUENSPECHT, Deputy Administrator,

EIA

NANCY J. KIRKENDALL, Designated Federal Official

BILL WEINIG, EIA

CALVIN KENT, Invited Guest

CRYSTAL LINKLETTER, Invited Guest

STAN FREEDMAN

RUEY-PYNG LU

BOB RUTCHIK

BOB SCHNAPP

HOWARD BRADSHER-FREDERICK, EIA

TOM BROENE, EIA

JAY CASSELBERRY, EIA

JIM JOOSTEN, EIA

TOM MURPHY, EIA

JOHN VETTER, EIA

SHAWNA WAUGH, EIA

I-N-D-E-X

Open the Meeting, Jay Breidt, Chair, ASA

Committee on Energy Statistics \...\...\...\.... 4

Break-Out Session:

Room 8E-089, Redesign of the EIA-906

Stan Freedman, Statistics and methods

Group and Bob Schnapp, Coal, Nuclear,

Electric and Alternate Fuels, EIA

ASA Participants: Dr. Bernstein, Blair

Feder, Khanna, Phipps and Sitter \...\...\..... 5

Room 5E-069, Using Data from Combined

Heat and Power Plants to Estimate Natural

Gas Industrial Prices, Ruey-Pyng Lu,

Statistics and Methods Group, EIA

ASA Participants: Breidt, Burton,

Edmonds, Hammitt, Hengartner, Moss and

Neerchal

Return to 8E-089 for Report-Out: \...\...\...\...\... 72

Summary of EIA\'s presentation and questions on

Redesign of the EIA-906, Robert Rutchik,

EIA; and Summary of Committee advice

(to be announced), ASA \...\...\...\...\...\..... 72

Summary of EIA\'s presentation and questions on

Using Data from Combined Heat and Power

Plants to Estimate Natural Gas industrial

Prices, Ruey-Pyng Lu; and Summary of

Committee advice by Dr. Hammitt, ASA \...\... 82

Summary of history and usefulness of the

ASA Committee, Calvin Kent \...\...\...\...\... 92

Feedback on draft introductory material for

new ASA Committee Members, Nancy

Kirkendall . \...\...\...\...\...\...\...\...\..... 103

Adjourn the Spring Meeting \...\...\...\...\...\...\... 127

P-R-O-C-E-E-D-I-N-G-S

8:35 A.M.

CHAIRMAN BREIDT: Good morning, let\'s get started here. The first thing
I need to do is ask any Committee Member, guest, EIA staff or member of
the public who was not present yesterday to introduce yourself at one of
the microphones.

Does anyone fall in that category? Okay, so I guess everyone has been
introduced.

There are two items being added to the agenda this morning. These will
occur after the breakout session. The first is that Cal Kent is going to
summarize a few more of the responses to his survey on the history and
usefulness of the ASA Committee. And then Nancy Kirkendall has asked for
some feedback on draft introductory material for new ASA Committee
Members. So both of those will be \--

MS. KIRKENDALL: It\'s what I handed out at the end of the meeting
yesterday.

CHAIRMAN BREIDT: So both of those agenda items will be added after the
breakout sessions and the summaries of the breakout sessions.

So right now we are just moving to the breakout sessions. The Redesign
of the EIA-906 Power Plant Report will occur in this room. And Using
Data from Combined Heat and Power Plants to Estimate Natural Gas
Industrial Prices will be in 5E-069.

So the plan is to start at 8:40 in those rooms.

(Off the record.)

MR. FREEDMAN: What we wanted to do this morning is to talk to you about
a survey \-- oh, first row back there is Bob Schnapp who is the Director
of the Electric Power Commission.

What I wanted to do this morning is talk with you about a redesign
effort that Bob\'s office and our office are working on together for the
Form

EIA-906. The form is a currently existing survey. We\'ve had some
problems and questions with the data and we\'re looking to redesign the
form, and we\'re at a stage now where we\'re just starting to do a
redesign effort. We\'ve gone out and done a number of site visits to try
to get some more information. So it\'s very timely that the Committee
will be able to comment on this.

The EIA-906 is a monthly and there\'s also an annual component to the
survey. It goes to two kinds of respondents, electric power plants and
combined heat and power facilities which are also known as cogenerators.

In general, the survey collects information on generation, fuel use, the
characteristics of the fuel that\'s used and fossil fuel stocks.

MS. PHIPPS: Stan, could you tell us what\'s generally the sample size at
all or is it just a big survey? I just want to get a scope of \--

MR. FREEDMAN: I think Bob can tell you more, being federal, can tell you
exactly the size. There\'s a cutoff for the monthly survey.

Dean, about how many respondents are in the monthly survey?

MR. FENNELL: About 1200.

MR. FREEDMAN: And what is the size cutoff?

MR. FENNELL: Fifty megawatts or greater. It does depend though on the
energy source, to be more precise. Fifty megawatts is sort of an
average. In some cases, we\'re getting all the nuclear, all the pump
storage and then we\'re getting like 40 megawatts or greater for natural
gas and coal. So it varies by \--

MR. FREEDMAN: If you want to come down to the table, by the way, Dean,
that\'s fine.

MS. PHIPPS: What\'s the split between the electric power plants and the
combined plants?

MR. FREEDMAN: The split between the electric power and combined?

MR. FENNELL: Maybe about 500 or 600 on the regulated and 1200 on the
monthly, unregulated.

MR. SCHNAPP: That\'s the total, but of the 1200.

MR. FENNELL: I don\'t know the answer.

MR. SCHNAPP: I would guess around 10.

MR. FENNELL: I would say about 500.

MR. FREEDMAN: And those really are the ones that we\'re focusing in on
today because the survey that goes to the companies that produce
electric power, that is their business line, have been able to respond
to this survey and predecessor survey and we\'re getting reliable data
that we have confidence in. It\'s the combined heat and power reporters
where there\'s some question about the accuracy of the information.

And just to give you some examples of the kinds of cogenerators and
combined heat and power, they\'re paper mills, refineries, chemical
plants, steel mills, food processors, waste treatment plants.

Again, another way to look at this, there\'s two kinds of respondents,
the electric power plants whose only product is electricity. All the
fuel that they use at their facility goes for the production of
electricity. They can report total generation and they can report fuel
use for electricity pretty easily to us.

The combined heat and power facilities are really a different kind of
animal. These facilities produce both electricity and heat and steam,
and that heat and steam is called useful thermal output.

The major problem for us is that those combined heat and power
facilities don\'t separately measure fuel use for electricity versus
fuel use for heat and steam. And the number that EIA is really
interested in is fuel used for the generation of electricity.

MR. BERNSTEIN: Why did you make that last comment?

MR. FREEDMAN: The number that EIA publishes that we use in our models
and things is the fuel used to generate electricity as opposed to fuel
used for the other industrial processes only in this particular survey.

MR. BERNSTEIN: In the end though don\'t you, I\'m sorry to interrupt you
in the middle \--

MR. FREEDMAN: No, no, please. In fact, I would encourage to interrupt
me.

MR. BERNSTEIN: Since it is a large, even though capacity-wise it\'s not
half, but it\'s a large portion of power plants, I would assume in
forecasting you would want to know in there how much of this is steam,
because I mean the problem that we\'ve heard in terms of the overall
estimation of energy use in the U.S. is we\'ve got this problem with
light and power because you\'re potentially double counting how much
energy is used in an industrial facility for steam and how much energy
is used for electricity when it\'s combined heat and power. I assume
that\'s what they\'re talking about in the other breakout session.

MR. FREEDMAN: I\'m going to ask Bob or Dean to comment on that because
they\'re more familiar with the development of the requirements.

MR. SCHNAPP: Further on in your presentation talks about how fuel is
divided that goes into the cogenerator\'s boiler, electricity and steam.
Maybe when we get to that, we can address that a little bit better. I
don\'t want to do the presentation.

MR. FREEDMAN: That\'s fine. Why don\'t we put a bookmark on that and if
it doesn\'t get answered later on \-- another issue is some of the data
we\'re collecting at the prime mover level, gross generation fuel
consumed and heat content of the fuel. And prime mover is the machine
that heats the water to create steam and at the facility level there
could be several prime movers per facility. We\'re interested in fuel
consumed for electricity production, fuel stocks, and we\'re currently
collecting useful thermal output and using that as a factor to calculate
electricity production.

When this form was first designed, the information that EIA got is that
the combined heat and power facilities could not report or could not
separate out fuel use for electricity, as I said, versus fuel use for
combined heat and power. And we were advised by some industry groups to
ask for this number of useful thermal output, and then go backwards and
calculate the fuel consumptions.

So currently, we collect fuel \-- EIA calculates fuel use for
electricity generation as the difference between total fuel consumed and
useful thermal output. Again, useful thermal output being defined as the
heat that\'s used for everything but the generation of electricity.

We collect megawatt hours generated, total fuel quantity, heat content
of the fuel and million BTUs of thermal output. That\'s a very
generalized formula that we use to do the computation.

There\'s a couple key assumptions that we\'re making on the survey which
have turned out not to be very good assumptions in some cases. There\'s
no recognition of the different type of plant configurations and
operations. One of the things we have found out doing a lot of these \--
a lot of the presurvey design visits \-- is that all plants are unique,
even if you compare steel plants or paper plants. Their configuration of
boilers and how they use the steam and whether the steam is recycled is
very, very different from respondent to respondent. And it\'s hard to
generalize one model or two or three that would characterize an
industry, let alone all of the respondents.

We were also assuming in our calculations there was about an 80 percent
boiler efficiency. We found out on our site visits up to this point that
that\'s not a good assumption to make because again, the plants can
range anywhere between 50 and 90 percent.

And what happens when you use the formula is that very small changes in
boiler efficiency result in large changes in the fuel use number. So
when we collect the information and do the calculation, we\'d see fuel
use numbers that didn\'t make sense to us.

And that\'s because we were using this generalized formula with the
generalized boiler efficiency.

The data problems were uncovered. There was a lot of discussion
yesterday at the meeting about talking to users to find out about the
data quality. The users, especially the users inside of EIA were the
ones who first brought the problem to the attention of the people
collecting the data.

We were involved in an effort. We actually phoned between 600 and 700
respondents who responded to the 2001 survey to try to correct and
verify the data and a lot of the information we got during that process
uncovered some of the problems associated with the collection of the
information. That was from speaking directly to the respondents.

One of the big issues was respondents really didn\'t understand useful
thermal output or what we meant by useful thermal output. It was not a
concept that they measure directly. There is no meter on boilers
measuring useful thermal output and it was a hard thing for them to
understand.

I\'m going to show you two schematics that we use when we do the
presurvey design visits that will help you understand the components of
electricity that EIA is interested in. We have total generation;
electricity delivered to the grid; electricity used for other productive
purposes, that is, the manufacturing process. And Mark, I think that\'s
what you were talking about.

MR. BERNSTEIN: No, actually I think it is on the next slide.

MR. FREEDMAN: And the electricity that was used for auxiliary purposes
at the plant itself to run the pumps and that kind of thing.

Okay, next slide. Total fuel use. There\'s basically two components.
Fuel use for producing electricity and fuel use for heat and steam and
the industrial processes.

So would you like to raise your question again?

MR. BERNSTEIN: I thought you were saying that you were only concerned
with the fuel used to produce electricity. That\'s what I thought I
heard you say.

MR. FREEDMAN: Okay.

MR. BERNSTEIN: What you\'re doing is this then, that\'s fine.

MR. SCHNAPP: In actuality, what we really are interested in is exactly
what he said, fuel use producing electricity. That\'s our stated goal,
but because we\'re collecting information from cogenerators, and at
least we have spoken with a lot of cogenerators.

I made a presentation before the American Combined Heat and Power
Association and they all insisted that they could not split \-- they
couldn\'t tell you of the fuel that went into the boiler, how much was
used to product electricity and how much was used to produce steam. I
mean, I\'m still a bit skeptical about \-- I mean, I know Stan is
focused on both. We need to understand that a little bit better, but
that was the premise that we were going on, that they couldn\'t split
it. So we had to come up with a way of splitting it for them. And what
Stan just described in the past few slides is kind of a generalized way
we did it because I made previous presentations here telling you about
we went back and redid all the data back to 1989.

MR. BERNSTEIN: That\'s okay. So you\'re not ignoring the total fuel
used. You\'re making some attempt to break it out.

MR. SCHNAPP: Yes.

MR. BERNSTEIN: So that when it\'s used in other purposes, even though
your primary goal is electricity side, I just want to make sure since
you were going out and talking to them anyway. I thought that\'s what I
heard Stan say.

MR. FREEDMAN: It is what you heard me say because I\'ve been focused on
what the survey was trying to get at, so you didn\'t mishear me. I said
the wrong thing. Bob corrected me.

MR. FEDER: You talked about heterogeneity and configuration and uses.

MR. FREEDMAN: Very much so.

MR. FEDER: Does it have to do with the vintage of the plant? Does it
change?

MR. FREEDMAN: I can\'t answer that with certainty. Some of it does have
to do with the vintage. But some of it also has to do with the industry
and the way the plant is configured. It\'s not quite that clear cut.
Some of the respondents aren\'t really terribly interested in measuring
the steam. Some of the respondents we talked to when we asked them about
fuel use to produce electricity, they said well, it\'s all used to
produce electricity because the first thing it does is go through a
turbine and generate electricity. And so how do they separate off the
steam that then goes into the industrial process?

Some of the more sophisticated plants have measurements along the way.
Some of them do not. A lot of it has to do with the configuration. So it
would be good if it was just the vintage, then we could look at the age
of the plant, but I\'m not an engineer, but I\'ve seen the schematics
when we\'ve gone out and visited the company and they\'re very, very
complicated.

MR. BERNSTEIN: Some of it depends on how much they need the steam and
whether the primary driver is the steam or the primary driver is the
electricity.

The steel mill uses electricity and they also use steam for pulp and
paper. A lot of times it\'s the steam and you\'re not \-- you\'re
getting electricity in the aftermath.

MR. FEDER: Looking at other industries, I know that ways of designing
things changes with times. Plants are phased out. You see more
homogeneity because the state of knowledge of science has progressed and
now we know how to do it more efficiently. That\'s why.

MR. FREEDMAN: I think that\'s certainly the case with the boiler
efficiencies of the units regardless of what they\'re doing. The newer
ones or the ones that have been retrofitted have higher efficiencies
than some of the older plants, and some of the plant managers have said
to us, look, we know we\'re very inefficient, but it\'s not cost
effective for us to retrofit and upgrade, so that\'s why there\'s that
variation.

MR. RUTCHIK: Can you talk about boiler efficiency and its relationship
to Mr. Feder\'s question about vintage of plants?

MR. FREEDMAN: This is the problem that we\'re confronted with. We know
the data that we\'re getting now is not as accurate as we would like it
to be.

I\'ve already mentioned these things. The first step was to go out and
talk to respondents about how their plants operate, look at their books,
ask them what they were actually collecting, ask them what they could
measure because Bob did a lot of work, Bob and his staff, did a lot of
work on the first version of this survey, talking to industry groups and
they were all \-- they were very clear to Bob in how we ought to go
about collecting the data. It turns out that that\'s not working as well
as Bob and his folks and we would have liked it to, so we\'re going back
and talking to the folks who actually fill out the forms and visit the
plants.

They\'re pretty comfortable with providing information on gross
generation, the total amount of electricity they produce. Most
respondents don\'t measure useful thermal output. There was one who said
that he actually did.

One of the things we found out, and I mentioned this to Polly during a
break yesterday, is that the respondents \-- most of the respondents can
do their own calculation on fuel used to produce electricity, given the
characteristics of their plant and the characteristics of the boilers,
and they have these things called heat \-- thermalcasts that come with
the boilers that give them all the properties of the boilers and the
properties of the system. It\'s a pretty complicated calculation that
engineers have to do, combining boilers together, things like that, to
come up with a number.

But during the pre-survey design visits, once they understood what we
were after, once we showed them that schematic and drew a circle around
the box, and said this was the number we\'re interested in, they felt
they could do the calculation.

Some of them said well, we can send you the data and you can do the
calculation. And like I said earlier, the boiler efficiencies are
different than EIA had been assuming.

MR. BERNSTEIN: So did they tell you they don\'t know \-- this is not
associated necessarily with the CHP plant \-- but did they tell you they
don\'t know how much steam and at what temperature they need for their
industrial process?

MR. FREEDMAN: No, they do know that.

MR. BERNSTEIN: Can you not then back that out?

MR. RUTCHIK: That is what they are telling us.

MR. FREEDMAN: That\'s what we have tried to do by asking them for useful
thermal output. The problem with backing it out is that each plant is so
unique, we would need to know the characteristics of the plant in order
to back it out.

MR. BERNSTEIN: But they could give you some of those pieces? You can
define some of those that give you an average, sort of sense of their
particular system.

MR. FREEDMAN: Those are really the two options for collecting the data
that we have on the table. Let me kind of jump ahead to the questions
from the Committee.

MS. KHANNA: Can you go back to the previous slide?

MR. FREEDMAN: I\'ll try.

MS. KHANNA: Sorry. Your point 3, I\'m confused about that, because you
earlier said that the plants don\'t separate out total fuel use between
what\'s used for electricity and what\'s used for steam.

MR. FREEDMAN: In terms of the direct measurement every month.

MS. KHANNA: But they can calculate \--

MR. FREEDMAN: They don\'t keep that record in their business records,
but they could do the calculation for us, if we ask them to.

MS. KHANNA: So what\'s the problem? Why don\'t you just ask them to do
that?

MR. FREEDMAN: That\'s one of the options we\'re considering.

Lynda, you had a question?

MS. SPENCER: I just wondered if it would be, make it more clear if you
did a schematic of what a CHP plant is. Everything else goes into one
boiler and I don\'t know if that makes it clearer.

MR. FREEDMAN: I don\'t have that schematic with me.

MS. SPENCER: I could draw it.

MR. FREEDMAN: Go ahead.

MS. SPENCER: I\'d be glad to.

MR. FREEDMAN: While Lynda is drawing, it seems that the two options on
the table are either to ask them to do the calculation for us or ask
them for additional information that would allow us to do the
calculation. And I\'m sure that there are things in between, but those
are kind of the two extremes of how we ought to proceed with the form
design and that\'s the question before the Committee. What makes most
sense in terms of your experience with collecting data? What makes most
sense from an industry point of view, from a data accuracy point of
view? Which way ought we be thinking about proceeding.

MR. BERNSTEIN: Knowing what some of these guys do, I would not \-- I
don\'t think you can rely on them to do the calculation because they\'re
all going to do it differently.

So that seems \-- that just seems to me to be something that\'s not
going to work.

MR. SITTER: That depends. I think that really depends on how variable
the plants are in terms of their characteristics.

MR. BERNSTEIN: They are very variable.

MR. SITTER: If they are wildly different, how could they possibly give
you the information that you\'ll need to back calculate yourself?

MR. BERNSTEIN: Because you can ask and you guys will correct me, if you
know how much steam they\'re consuming in the plant, at what
temperature, and if you know some characteristics of the boilers, like
some measures of their efficiency, you can do a rough calculation which
is going to be better in some sense because at least you know how you
did the calculation, rather than them telling you how much electricity
they use and you have no idea, really, how they did the calculation. In
some cases, these guys are just going to write down a number because
they don\'t want to have to bother doing the calculation.

That\'s what seems to me \-- the problem that I\'ve worked with some of
those folks on combined heat and power stuff at plants and you\'re going
to get 10 different answers in different ways they do the calculation.

But there is another, there\'s a third thing going on and that\'s the
energy bill, if there ever is one. But I would encourage somebody to
make sure they go down and take a look, go in and take a look at the tax
incentive provisions for combined heat and power and then find out if
anybody has thought about how they\'re going to monitor that. They
probably haven\'t yet. And so somebody from DOE needs to go down and say
look, if you guys are going to have this tax provisions, you\'re going
to need to tell these guys how they\'re going to actually do the
calculation to get the tax credit for combined heat and power which
would then give you an idea of some time in the future what data these
guys are going to have to come up with, if they want to get the tax
credit. And they\'re all going to want to get the tax credit. And so
before you made a decision on what to do here, somebody needs to go and
figure out what may actually occur in the energy bill.

MR. FREEDMAN: I want to go back to Randy\'s point, looking at it from
\-- I think that\'s a good suggestion, but taking Randy\'s point, one of
the issues in asking respondents for the data, enough data for us to do
the calculation is increased respondent burden and burden on the staff
to do a monthly survey and do these calculations every month. That\'s
another thing that we have to be concerned about.

MR. SITTER: Yeah, but Mark\'s point is well said. I mean the burden on
them, if they really do it right is probably just as hard the other way.
The way that they will reduce their burden is by actually not doing it
right.

It could be \--

MR. BERNSTEIN: Do you need a monthly survey?

MR. FREEDMAN: That is a good question. Do we need this number on a
monthly basis? It\'s not the question we\'re asking the Committee, but
it certainly drives \--

MS. PHIPPS: Are there components of the pieces of the \-- you know, kind
of the item that you\'re asking for that you could ask for that
wouldn\'t be too burdensome that would give you some kind of a check on
it on a monthly basis? I don\'t know how it\'s pieced out, but if you at
least had \-- if you could break it down. I mean usually if you can give
them a way to calculate it, generally, and you could ask for a couple of
pieces of that information so you\'d have a sense of how it varied over
a month and if it were reliable.

MR. BERNSTEIN: You can ask more detailed questions once a year. And then
check back or not do it on a monthly basis. You might do it on a
quarterly basis. I don\'t know.

MR. SCHNAPP: One way that we are looking at these now to make sure that
it\'s reasonable is to calculate the heat rate \--

MR. WEINIG: Bob, would you start over again, please, because I don\'t
think we\'re going to be able to pick you up from your seat. Just give
your name and resume.

MR. SCHNAPP: I\'m Bob Schnapp. What we have done is calculated heat rate
from these other estimates that we\'ve generated. So you take the fuel
consumed by electric generation and we get the amount of BTUs using the
kilowatts of electricity. And when those numbers are wildly high or low
or negative, then they kind of pop up on our screens for us to figure
out if there\'s something wrong with the data.

Now you were just recently and very diligently talking with the
respondents and looking at 2002 data. Stan and a couple of our people
went out to talk to the respondents, and there\'s one case where the
respondent knew a lot about his plant and could tell us everything that
we wanted to know and said well, yeah, your assumption of 80 percent
efficiency is not correct, it\'s really 86 percent. Well, when we had
the 80 percent assumption, their heat rate was about 2,000 which is \--
3,412 is the lowest they could possibly be without becoming a
billionaire, because you\'re now creating energy where there isn\'t any.

And so he said no, it\'s really 86 percent. Well, we got back to the
office, plugged in the 86 percent and the heat rate was about 6,000, so
that made a lot of sense.

But not everybody out there from having talked to thousands of these
folks can provide us with the heat rate or their efficiency. I mean
there are wood plants; they just have wood scraps laying around. They
just throw them in. They use them as an incinerator. So they don\'t
really know what their heat rate is. They just \-- it\'s cheaper for
them to burn it than to have it hauled away. There\'s a lot of what
sounds like tiny questions, but have large impacts when you\'re
designing a survey for a whole host of varied type plants.

So I\'m not quite sure if there\'s an easy answer here. We\'re trying to
get an easier answer. That\'s at least what we found so far.

MS. PHIPPS: So the components that Mark mentioned, steam, temperature
and boiler efficiency, there\'s no way to get estimates on those?

MR. SCHNAPP: Some of them. There could be a lot of them that have that
information. There are a lot that don\'t. We\'ve made literally
thousands of calls to facilities and some of them are right on top of it
and some of them don\'t know what you\'re talking about, despite having
to have an engineer there and it\'s very frustrating on our part, so
we\'re trying to get to the lowest common denominator for everybody.

MR. BERNSTEIN: But maybe on the other hand, you can\'t and you need to
try to get information that you can from a majority of them that have
the gaps in a lot of them and either try to fill them by hand or try to
fill them in once a year.

Again, this comes back to how much do you really need to know on a
monthly basis or how much do you need to just estimate on a monthly
basis.

MR. SCHNAPP: In general, the nonutilities account for 30 percent of
electric generation and the combined heat and power plants should
probably account for maybe a third of that. So it\'s about 10 percent, 8
to 10 percent, of total electricity generation.

MR. BERNSTEIN: They are more consistent at some level or you could
almost check their consistency by the production. You could ask them, I
don\'t know if they\'d like you to ask them how much of the product they
produced each month and you could \-- if their production goes down,
then you could assume that their plant output and steam went down as
well. You don\'t have to ask them the detailed questions.

MR. SCHNAPP: But if you have a cold month and a hot month and you\'re
using steam for other purposes than just for processing and they may be
selling some off. There\'s a whole host of things that are going on
there.

MR. BERNSTEIN: But again, why do you need to know that every month?

MR. SCHNAPP: Well, for cogenerators, we\'re just talking about.

MR. BERNSTEIN: I would say the same thing for the whole electric system.
Why do you need to know that info?

MR. SCHNAPP: Well, the electric industry is changing pretty quickly and
there is a very high demand for moving toward more real time data. And
monthly is about as a far as we can move away and still be able to
collect it.

I think your idea of not collecting it from cogenerators, maybe that\'s
something we can think about. If we have a problem, then we only have to
address it once a year rather than 12 times a year.

MR. BERNSTEIN: Or you can ask them for the very simple data, the basic
data, because the other things like efficiency, they\'re not going to
change that much month to month.

MR. SCHNAPP: They do actually.

MR. SITTER: If they do and you\'re saying that \-- you said a few
things. One that some of them can\'t tell you the efficiency, that a 6
percent difference in efficiency makes a huge difference in your
numbers. And it\'s changing month to month. I don\'t see how your month
to month data is going to be very good.

MR. SCHNAPP: I would say that small change in the efficiencies don\'t
change the numbers that much. I think they show up more for smaller
facilities. The impact is very large at smaller facilities as opposed to
larger facilities. A change of 1 percent doesn\'t change numbers by that
much.

MR. SITTER: So how wildly are the boiler efficiencies changing on a
month to month basis?

MR. SCHNAPP: We have no measure of it, but from talking with them, they
say that they \-- one plant could be 88 percent efficient one month and
maybe 60 to 70 percent another month. It depends on what they\'re doing.

MR. BERNSTEIN: And that is okay and it also depends on what fuel
they\'re shoving in there. But when you\'re essentially using this,
you\'re aggregating it up and so the question is how much from a
statistical standpoint, and the statisticians in the room have to help
me there, but you know, there are some that are going to change and some
that are not and they\'re going to change in different directions. Do
you have a big enough sample where you really don\'t have to worry on a
month to month variation basis and that you could collect the more
detailed information every six months or every three months or quarterly
or annually. And then go back and correct some of that stuff in the
interim period so that you can get some stuff out on a monthly basis
that\'s basically good and not have to burden them with a lot of extra
paperwork.

MS. PHIPPS: I wonder if the data are any better though on a quarterly or
annual, you know, basis. I mean can they do any better job of estimating
there as opposed to a monthly which \-- I mean the yearly thing might be
just as unreliable as the monthly stuff.

MR. BERNSTEIN: You could ask them for more details of things, but you
don\'t want to ask them that every month. I think that\'s part of the
problem.

You don\'t want to burden them with doing too much stuff that they
aren\'t regularly collecting. I mean the guy has to go out and read a
particular meter or dozens of meters and \--

MR. SITTER: There is a good question there. If they give you boiler
efficiency at the end of the year, what are they giving you?

I mean if they haven\'t gone out and looked at it from month to month
and they\'re just going to say well, my average boiler efficiency was
\-- I\'m not disagreeing. I\'m just saying that I don\'t quite
understand the situation. If you\'re saying from one month to the next
is going to change by 20 percent and that a six percent difference can
give you data that you can find without knowing anything, that there\'s
a problem, then I don\'t quite understand how you\'re going to be able
to get that.

MS. KHANNA: It seems to me if it\'s hard for plant managers to actually
do this, it\'s a complicated task, actually doing it month for month
might provide them an incentive to get a mechanism in place as opposed
to doing it once a year because then they might do it really ad hoc
because it\'s hard and they don\'t want to do it. Whereas, if they have
to do it every month, it\'s actually an incentive to streamline that
process because they don\'t want to waste their time.

MR. SCHNAPP: I think there are one or two plants that we visited that
set up a very complicated spread sheet \--

MR. FREEDMAN: There were actually two interesting things we found out
when we did the site visits. One of them, when we were asking them about
the concept of useful thermal output they said well, we don\'t really
know what that is or pay much attention to it, until you ask us about
it. And then they started thinking about, well, what does that really
mean and how do we measure it and that kind of thing. And then there
were a couple of plants that actually had set up a spreadsheet. They
figured out what we wanted, even though that wasn\'t quite what we were
asking for on the form. They sort of understood that what EIA really
wanted to know was fuel used to generate electricity and they had their
engineer \-- I can\'t say the name of the company, but they had their
engineers set up a spread sheet that the different plant managers, we
only talked to one plant, but apparently different plant managers use
that to do the calculation to provide EIA with the number.

MS. KHANNA: And you were satisfied with that procedure?

MR. FREEDMAN: Once we realized that\'s what we were doing, we didn\'t
realize that when they were sending the data back to us and we were
adjusting it. But then when we went out and actually talked to the
company, we found out that they were giving us a number that we really
did want and so we are not going to adjust that number. We\'re not going
to run it through our calculation any more. Today, they\'re running it
through their own set of calculations and producing a number.

MS. KHANNA: Is there any way that kind of spreadsheet can be made
available to all those plants?

MR. FREEDMAN: I am sure if we could figure out what needed to go into
that spreadsheet. Is it the \-- just let me ask something for my own
clarification. Is the committee not enamored with the idea of having the
respondents do the calculation and provide us with the data for some of
the reasons that both Mark and Randy mentioned. We don\'t know what
we\'re getting and they may give us ad hoc estimates and that kind of
thing?

MS. PHIPPS: If they could give you components of it, I\'d feel better
than just providing you with a number.

MR. SITTER: It is such a vague question. I know a little bit, just a
small amount, about some industries like this. There are three pulp
mills in my home town. I\'ve been in all three pulp mills. They\'re
absolutely wildly different. They were all built in the same time and
they\'re doing completely different things and they\'re generating a lot
of electricity, plus they\'re running their plant on it and they just
run pitch through those boilers. I am sure they know nothing.

And then I say to myself, okay, you\'re going to ask them for this
number and I\'m absolutely afraid of that. On the other hand, I\'m
asking myself well, what would I ask them for to find out that they
could tell me that would be any more accurate than doing the calculation
and again. I\'m pretty sure that you would get numbers that were just
\-- the guy that had been there 25 years would say well, you know \--

MR. FREEDMAN: That\'s the problem we\'re confronted with and concerned
about.

MR. SITTER: I know and I don\'t think there is an easy answer to that.

I think it comes down to how precise you want that breakdown, are you
willing to accept in that breakdown, because clearly the upside of
getting them to do it is because each plant and each industry is so
wildly different that if the components of the calculation are so
different for every one, then getting them to do it, you would hope
would have a better chance of giving you the correct breakdown.

On the other hand, if there are, and if you can identify sort of a small
number of components that you can back calculate from, that\'s at least
industry-specific or something, then of course you would like them not
to be doing it. You would prefer you to do it so you know what you\'re
doing.

MR. FREEDMAN: One of our surveys, voluntary greenhouse gas survey, asks
the respondents to report a calculated number but then asks them to
provide EIA with methodology that they used. And I don\'t know how
successful that is in terms of the analysts then looking at that
methodology to see if the number that they provided makes sense, but
that\'s kind of an in between \--

MR. BERNSTEIN: I think the difference here though is if you\'re saying
that people want this data on a monthly basis or more than that, that
means it\'s going to affect electric markets, the prices or something,
the overall data, not just the focus area. So you\'re dealing with a
different issue. The voluntary greenhouse gas report is not going to
affect the price of electricity. But if the monthly data is actually
being used by people who are trading electricity, then you\'ve got a
different issue on how you do this.

I suppose the other question \-- I suppose I was listening to this and
said, well, what do you really want to know? You really want to know how
much electricity, and you really want to know how much conventional
fuel. Do you really care that much if they\'re throwing their wood waste
in there and how much wood waste there is in there.

MR. SCHNAPP: Absolutely. Absolutely.

MR. BERNSTEIN: Why do you want to know that?

MR. SCHNAPP: On the renewable side, they are interested in knowing what
types of renewables and how much renewable fuel is going into them, and
it\'s probably a growing area in the Department, renewables, and to
literally cut it out, I think people would be kept on again for it.

MR. BERNSTEIN: I understand that. On the other hand there\'s no way that
pulp mills could know how much wood they\'re shipping. They may know
some. But on the other hand, for the purposes of what EIA needs to do,
you could ask that other information on less than a monthly basis
because the renewables guys don\'t need to know on a monthly basis how
much wood waste is going into it.

But for the electric markets and the conventional fuels markets, they
need to know, is what you\'re saying. So you \--

MR. SCHNAPP: But you might have a facility that uses distilled fuel oil
and wood. We only collect the conventional fuels from that facility. If
it\'s just using wood, I hear you saying maybe you could cut them off.
Maybe we could collect them every month. But what if they use wood and
two or three other fuels?

MR. BERNSTEIN: You ask them how much of the fuels \--

MR. FREEDMAN: We do ask them \--

MR. BERNSTEIN: And how much electricity they\'re putting out on a
monthly basis because that\'s what you need on a monthly basis. And then
on less than a monthly basis, you could ask them for more detailed
information about the other stuff. It depends on what you\'re using the
monthly data for.

MR. SCHNAPP: If we are going to get part of it, I think we need all of
it because we need to have, we need to know how much fuel, as Stan
started out, we need to know how much fuel is used to produce that
amount of electricity. We get lots of calls trying to correct the data.
Until it\'s out there and corrected, we continue to get lots of calls on
the heat rates of the natural gas for this month doesn\'t look right and
it doesn\'t look right because things weren\'t shared out properly. They
used 80 percent or there was a fuel error that somebody reported. We
can\'t put all of the fuel that they report in as fuel for electricity.
They\'re combined heat and power.

MR. SITTER: Can I ask a \-- you do have good numbers on total or
reasonable numbers on total fuel and total electricity. It\'s really the
breakdown that\'s the problem?

MR. FREEDMAN: Yes, that is the crux of the problem, the breakdown
between heat and steam and electricity.

MR. SITTER: Let me ask the question. What is P, percentage for
cogeneration? I mean if you had to give a number sort of roughly, what
is it?

MR. SCHNAPP: Of generation?

MR. SITTER: Percentage of generation for cogenerators?

MR. SCHNAPP: What I said before was all nonutilities account for about
30 percent of the generation.

MR. SITTER: No, I mean \--

MR. SCHNAPP: Cogenerators account for about a third of that, so it\'s
about 10 percent.

MR. SITTER: No, I understand that. But the cogenerating plants, on
average, what percentage of their fuel use is for electricity?

MR. FREEDMAN: I don\'t know the answer to that question.

Is it about 50 percent, Dean, would you say?

MR. SITTER: Is it like 1 percent, 10 percent? Is it 30 percent, 50
percent?

MS. WAUGH: We got from interviews that either they are primarily power
producers that have add-on manufacturing process or they\'re really much
more manufacturers that have a power plant that generates electricity
for the manufacturing process. So there\'s kind of a split here between
\-- which is part of the issue that they\'re not homogeneous. They\'re
very different.

MR. FREEDMAN: I would guess, Randy, in answer to your question, it\'s
probably somewhere in the neighborhood of 15 or 20 percent. Maybe as
much as 50, but it\'s not all of it, and it\'s not 1 percent.

MR. RUTCHIK: I can just talk for the four pre-survey site visits that I
went on. To answer your question, I think it ranged from like quote
minimal 10 percent to like 40 percent for one plant. So the use of
electricity varies widely at least from my small sample, from plant to
plant. That\'s just a long way of saying no fixed number.

MR. FREEDMAN: Continue on with your point though, Randy, about what we
might do?

MR. SITTER: I don\'t have a point.

(Laughter.)

I just wanted to know how the P varied. I mean, you\'re already saying
it\'s only 10 percent of the market.

MR. FREEDMAN: Right.

MR. SITTER: And then the numbers you\'re saying the Ps are around 15
percent. So if that P doesn\'t vary a huge amount, it\'s going to have a
small impact on your electricity, so what kind of accuracy are you
looking for?

I don\'t mean that it doesn\'t vary from plant to plant.

MR. FREEDMAN: I understand what you\'re saying.

MR. SITTER: What I\'m saying is that if the P you\'re getting, the P
estimate that you\'re getting for each plant has a certain variability
and a certain bias that you might be incurring.

MR. FREEDMAN: Right.

MR. SITTER: If that bias is plus or minus 5 percent, what kind of an
impact would that have on your overall generation?

MR. FREEDMAN: I don\'t know the amount of fuel used to generate
electricity.

MR. SITTER: You estimate \-- how does that translate into a variability
for your overall number monthly? And I think \-- really, you have to
get, ultimately, you have to get down to how accurate do you need that P
on a plant to plant basis, and I think that from what you\'re saying, 10
percent or so many percent, plus or minus 5 percent of that P is
probably not going to have a huge percentage impact on your predicted
fuel use for electricity.

MR. FREEDMAN: And that is right. And if your goal is that final number,
that final fuel number for all electricity generated, then there\'s not
that much of a problem. If you\'re studying cogeneration, then it
becomes a much larger problem and that, in fact, is when the data
problems begin to become uncovered when EIA focused on cogeneration
specifically and then combined heat and power.

MR. SITTER: So your call backs are really mostly about studying
cogeneration?

MR. FREEDMAN: Yes, yes. And that\'s really where the crux of the problem
is.

MR. SCHNAPP: The impact goes further than just electric generation on
the fuel collected generation because at the national level, because the
numbers that we\'re generating the natural gas flows are then backing
out the numbers they\'re collecting in industrial and at a state level,
and we haven\'t gone through all the analysis yet, but there are states
that turn out to be negative.

In other words, they collect the number, they add up all the state for
the natural gas fuel consumption that they think is by \-- for the
industrial sector. And then we tell them how much we have estimated for
these cogeneration plants and they subtract it out and sometimes it\'s
greater than the number that they have. And that indicates there\'s
either a problem with the data we\'re collecting or the data they\'re
collecting. I know that natural gas has some ways to go on looking at
their data and we\'re trying to help them with that, but those
implications \-- it shines a bad light on EIA when they come out with a
negative natural gas consumption.

So again, it\'s not just total electric generation or total fuel
consumption at the national level. It really does permeate throughout
the rest of the organization.

MR. FREEDMAN: Polly, do you have any comments? Has anybody tried to do
this kind of thing with similar industries and had any similar kinds of
collections where we\'re interested in something that the respondent
isn\'t measuring and trying to figure out a way to get at that number?

MS. PHIPPS: Not that I know of. Again, you can get pieces of it, so you
feel comfortable with the estimate, but you know \-- certainly in
surveys, people ask for estimates.

MR. FREEDMAN: Right.

MS. PHIPPS: You know, so it\'s not \--

MR. FREEDMAN: And this, in fact, would be an estimate. The question is
who\'s going to do the estimate with how much information?

MS. PHIPPS: Right.

MR. FREEDMAN: Because it\'s not something that you\'re measuring.

MR. BERNSTEIN: Do we have any engineers in the room?

What would be useful, I think, is to do an engineering calculation. If
you were doing the engineering calculation, what is the information that
you need to know to do that if you actually had those technical numbers
and then ask what they might be measuring somewhere in the plant that
could actually give you that information.

MR. FREEDMAN: In fact, Bob has engineers who are working on that problem
and Lynda, correct me if I\'m misspeaking here, but Lynda works for one
of those engineers. It\'s the impression that I have had talking to him
and he\'s come on some of these site visits with us, is that we would
need a lot of operational information from the company. We need to look
at their schematics. We need to see how the steam flowed through the
plant, how it was used, what their fuel combinations were, what their
boiler efficiencies were. They\'re telling us that it\'s not as simple
as asking for two or three numbers and plugging them into an equation.

MR. BERNSTEIN: The question is can that be done once for a plant that
gives you the baseline, that gives them the sense of baseline, and they
can then give you the information. That might change, but because some
of the parameters change.

MR. FREEDMAN: I understand what you\'re saying. So basically set up a
model for each of \-- taken to the extreme, setting up a model for each
of these CHP facilities, based on the engineering of the plant and the
fuel that they use. Then asking them for their key variables that they
put into their spreadsheet and doing the calculation. I understand what
you\'re suggesting.

MS. SPENCER: So you would be asking for the key variables each month or
are you taking just snapshot so that you would estimate that yourself
each month without their key variables?

MR. BERNSTEIN: If it is key variables that they can measure. If it\'s
not, it\'s something that \-- I realize that may be impractical because
you\'ve got

\--

MS. SPENCER: A plant\'s operation can change from month to month so
drastically. They\'re down for maintenance for two weeks in one month
and then the next month they\'re up running 90 percent of the time and
then \--

MR. BERNSTEIN: You can figure that out from the total electricity and
steam that they use. There are \-- but it seems to me you need
initially, what they need initially, if they\'re going to provide you
the data is a baseline, which what you\'re saying is you generally
don\'t have. And so there\'s no way they\'re going to be able to give
you an estimated or fill out the form to estimate it if they actually
don\'t have a baseline to begin with. And it sounds like most of them
probably don\'t have a baseline to begin with.

And until they get a baseline, they\'re not going to be able to give you
a reasonable estimate, particularly about how things change.

MS. PHIPPS: If you could do more visits, you know, just on trying to
work on this kind of issue, just a baseline for certain plants, you
know, kind of like the greenhouse gas thing you were suggesting, provide
me something and let me know how I can provide it, you know, so you
could identify the key components of that type of thing.

MR. FREEDMAN: That would allow us to calibrate the calculation for doing
this, to see if it\'s more reasonable than the way we\'re doing it now.

Again, the plants seem to understand what we wanted once we sat down
with them, as opposed to handing them a form and explained it. And it
was clear that they didn\'t keep it, they didn\'t have a baseline, that
they weren\'t interested in that number for their business operations,
but they all felt they could supply us with that number, but their
methodologies were wildly different.

MR. SITTER: I think that there are sort of two components here. All of
the things that are being suggested and that you\'re doing are probably
going to get you closer to consistent numbers. I mean, they may not all
be calculated quite the same, but at least you\'re not going to get
something different for different plants all the time.

The bottom line is, no matter what you do here, you\'re still going to
get negative numbers for some states. I\'m pretty sure.

It just seems like the idea that you can sort of take this kind of data
and back it all the way out is never going to be completely correct. I
mean think about it, how much wood went in one week or didn\'t go in
another week and \--

MR. FREEDMAN: Was the wood dry or wet, was it maple or oak, right.

MR. SITTER: You can only get so much sort of aggregate accuracy here and
if you \-- it\'s like each time you\'re backing it up, you\'re also
trying to de-aggregate it in some sense and you\'re always going to run
into these sort of consistency problems.

When you run into this, if it was all you doing it, and of course, you
would try to balance and you would go and back check and all these
things, but when somebody uses your data with their data and they come
up with a negative number, they then don\'t have the ability to go and
do that.

And so I think you\'re always going to have that consistency problem. I
think the one thing that we really should do is ask yourself about this
P per plant and the kind of accuracy you\'re going to need, what that\'s
going to translate into when you do all your \-- not the back
calculations for the plant, but how accurate that number needs to be so
that when you do your back calculations, what\'s that going to translate
variability, the transference of variability from the plant proportion,
back up to the numbers of interest, the proportions of interest and how
that variability is going to be and what\'s acceptable to you in terms
of that.

At least you have some target and that exercise can be done without
going to plants. That\'s the miracle exercise.

MR. FREEDMAN: Exactly. I think that would be useful to do, looking at
that impact at all the different levels of aggregation. At the national
level, it\'s going to be very different or the national angle level
it\'s going to be very different than the state monthly.

MR. SITTER: And then if you do go to this process of whatever technique
you decide on where you\'re having an actual formulation, with
parameters in it from the plants, you can take it down to those
parameter values and ask yourself what kind of accuracy do you need in
those parameter values to get the accuracy in the P that you\'re willing
to accept.

And there are going to be some key guys there. Some of those parameters,
they can vary quite widely and it\'s not going to have as big an impact
on the P as other things. And the suggestion is that, for example, a 5
percent change in the efficiency for the formula you were using, a 5 or
6 percent change in the efficiency of the boiler had a huge impact all
the way up the line. You need to know that.

So any formula you can take a parameter in and talk about how much that
parameter, how accurate that parameter needs to be to translate up to
the estimator of interest \--

MR. FREEDMAN: I\'m actually not sure how far up the line that went, but
I know for the individual plants, when we were looking at each
individual survey and doing the calculation to see if the numbers they
were providing us fit in the ranges of heat rates, it was tremendous.
Maybe Bob\'s folks looked at it, but I know we never looked at the
aggregate contribution that you\'re talking about.

MR. SITTER: Yes, I think there\'s that, but the issue of that
identification is identifying something along with the number that
they\'re giving you.

MR. FREEDMAN: Yes and it\'s always been our focus.

MR. SITTER: And that\'s one thing, but finding out what \-- how accurate
that number needs to be in terms of its impact for your ultimate users
is quite a different question.

MR. FREEDMAN: Yes, I understand what you\'re suggesting.

MR. SITTER: And you may find that \-- and then of course that comes down
to then what percentage of \-- or what industries are within that are
giving you numbers like that, now that you\'ve gone and talked to them
and talked to them and talked about what they\'re giving you. Clearly
some of them are probably giving you a P that\'s going to be variable
and they have a small bias, but it\'s not going to impact your numbers
at the aggregate level you want, as long as you handle it correctly.
Others, you probably have identified are giving you numbers that are
just all over the place and you don\'t know what that impact is going to
be.

MR. BERNSTEIN: The industries of the future, are they the ones asking
for the information or have you gone to them to ask them what they could
help provide you either through the associations of the industries? Many
of those associations and working with industries of the future are the
ones who are lobbying Congress to get these tax provisions in the
legislation. And perhaps there is something that they can do to help
figure out how to get some of this information out of its members,
because they\'ve been the ones trying to get this stuff through
Congress. I don\'t know what direct interaction we\'ve had with \--

MR. FREEDMAN: I know Victor has had a lot of contact with industry
folks, industry associations.

MR. SCHNAPP: When we went through our last process to generate new forms
for January 2002, we had met with probably about 80 different
organizations, but just in this particular area, we don\'t vary
extensively with the energy and power supply association which
represents nonutilities. And we asked them, can the cogenerators give
us, do they measure useful thermal output? Can they give this to us on a
monthly basis? And the answer that came back to us several times was
yes. So that\'s why the form exists the way it does.

Now I think what we\'ve learned over time is that they probably
represent the larger folks as opposed to the smaller folks, so we\'ve
already begun for our electricity 2005 project, we\'ve begun to talk
with the individual industries. So in about two or three weeks I\'m
going to be speaking to the American Forest and Paper Association.
They\'ve already been in once to see us. And they want to get it right
and we want to get it right and so we\'re working together, and I think
that would be trying to set up meetings of the same sort with
representatives from the steel industry and the paper industry, auto and
the ones that are the larger consumers of fuel and \-- those are the
ones who are having the biggest problems with. Refineries is another
one. So that\'s on our agenda to do.

MR. BERNSTEIN: And the reason they\'ve been pushing for these tax
credits and they\'ve been asked, well, okay, we\'ll give you a tax
credit, but what do we give you a credit on? And then how are we going
to measure it? And so it may be the opportunity there for you guys to
help them figure out (a) what data could be useful for the tax credit
cited and therefore what data, then they can give you for their
estimates.

MR. FREEDMAN: And I would suspect those two things would end up being
pretty closely aligned in terms of giving us that number that we want.

MS. KHANNA: I am an academic economist, so I don\'t know what the real
world out there is like anyway. Are there patterns across plant types?
For instance, the pulp and paper mills, from what you just said seems
that it\'s going to be really hard to measure this breakdown, but other
kinds of cogenerator facilities, I mean what I want to say does it make
sense to actually target certain industries for certain plant types,
first to get a better sense of how you might be able to get an estimate
of this particular breakdown. Get that first and then deal with the more
difficult points and maybe end up, learn something.

MR. SCHNAPP: That is a good idea.

MS. KHANNA: Of course, I can also say as an economist we always are used
to measuring things that people don\'t measure. Change the incentive
mechanism and people will react.

(Laughter.)

That wouldn\'t work in this case.

MR. FREEDMAN: This has really been the first time that I think with an
issue like this, where we\'re trying \-- often a lot of efforts where
the companies do keep the information, just not quite how we want it or
definitions are a little different or we\'re not getting the questions
correctly, but not where we\'re trying to measure something that they
don\'t right now care about and because they don\'t care about
recording. But there\'s interest beyond the company in that number and
it\'s been very, very difficult and it\'s sometimes a stressful problem
in trying to get the data right after it\'s come in and being on the
phone with 600 or 700 respondents trying to explain to them what we want
over the phone and understand how the plant operates and get the number.
And that one is the problem, Randy, that you talk about, somebody just
sitting down and guessing what that number is or providing us with a
number so we stop calling them back.

I mean we\'ve seen that a couple of times on the call backs. We talk to
them and say well, this is coming out the way we think it is. All right,
I\'ll go talk to my plant engineer and they\'ll come back. This is the
number. I\'m sure. And we plug it into the formula and it\'s not the
number. And we call them back again. I\'m not even going to get into the
problem of the difference between having an engineer fill out the form
and having somebody in the accounting department fill out the form.

(Laughter.)

I didn\'t want to bring that to the table because we\'re not there yet,
but that\'s another thing that comes up.

It is a difficult problem that we\'re trying to deal with and I think
\-- we\'ve heard some suggestions around the table that will identify,
publicize and identify the importance of the problem. We\'ll get that
contribution working more with the individual industries, seeing if we
can do industry-specific, generalized models or ways of collecting the
data. I know that Bob and his folks are very open to customizing this
collection as much as possible. We\'ve already made the decision that
we\'re going to separate out the part of the collection that goes to the
formally regulated utilities. That is the power of the plants that have
traditionally responded, whose only business is power and can easily
provide us with that fuel use number. Because right now the same form is
going to everybody.

Those are sort of the easy, no brainer kinds of things and making some
changes to the form where we separate out facility-specific things from
boiler-specific, you know, just kind of making the form easier to
navigate, but that doesn\'t deal with the \--

MS. PHIPPS: This is looking through the form, it\'s such a big
separation of definitions from answer, you know, points. If you could
take a look at the form redesign as you go through. It would probably be
useful.

MR. BERNSTEIN: Can you separate out the difference between the CHP
that\'s integratably associated with a particular industry production
versus CHP that\'s independent?

MR. FREEDMAN: I am not sure I understood what you just asked, but let me
try to answer it anyway, even though I didn\'t understand what you were
asking.

(Laughter.)

There were kind of two kinds of plants we visited and the way the
schedule worked out, I went to the ones that I\'m going to describe to
you now. One of the folks described them as poker machines. They were
electric power plants that do some steam so they could qualify under
PRPA to get all kinds of benefits.

That\'s a differentiation. Those folks, I didn\'t get \-- haven\'t
visited, although on Tuesday, I am going to go visit a real cogenerator.
It\'s a steel plant and Bob ended up going to the ones that did the real
cogenerators. They have more of a problem in giving us that fuel use
number for the reasons that I\'m sure you realize \-- the ones whose
primary business is to do electricity and they just threw on some steam
and some of the uses were kind of interesting, but again, I\'m not going
to divulge any specific things in the plant. Some of the things they
were using the steam for are things that were a little strange, but
it\'s going to allow them to qualify as a PRPA plant. They do have a
better handle on their fuel use and thermal output, things like that
than the paper plants that tended to be older, tended not to care about
a lot of that stuff.

MR. SITTER: It wasn\'t just that they weren\'t in the business. Some of
these mills are putting out millions of dollars worth of pulp and the
electricity they\'re generating off the site was worth, wasn\'t worth
anything at the time that they were built. I\'m sure they just \-- that
wasn\'t their reasoning.

MR. FREEDMAN: Right.

MR. SITTER: Things have just changed is all.

MR. FREEDMAN: And sometimes that turbine was on there to generate the
electricity that they used on plant and now they find they can sell it
and make more money and then buy it back. We ran into a number of plants
like that that sold because they could make more money and then buy it
back and that further complicated \-- we talk about net and gross
generation. There was considerable amount of discussion there about
what\'s net and what\'s gross and that kind of thing too, so yeah,
you\'re right.

MR. SITTER: This comes back to Mark\'s point. You create strata which
are based on the ability to get those numbers.

MR. FREEDMAN: Maybe that is a good way for us to look at it. Rather than
by industry type \-- I mean it may turn out that industry type has a
strong correlation with ability to report, but it might be a combination
of industry report and age of plant and things like that, but focusing
in on their ability to report the number.

MR. SITTER: One of the things that was pointed out was that the one
breakdown seems to be on actual percentage, that is there are plants
whose primary \-- the percentage, P, is high and there are other ones
where the P is low.

MR. FREEDMAN: Yes.

MR. SITTER: And those really distinguished plants that probably plants
whose main coal was generation of steam and had electricity on the side.
And those that \-- main electricity and they have steam on the side. And
certainly those \-- then there\'s going to be the ones that are in the
middle and they do both. But those two ways you\'d handle them, the ones
in the middle, where its \--

MS. WAUGH: There is actually another factor which is the geography,
which state they\'re in, because they know the natural gas folks,
they\'re going to profile them and especially in California or states
where they have more industry, they need to be able to identify what the
major users are and that might also be an issue of electricity to
consider is which states and which users in those states are having the
most impact on the estimates.

MR. SITTER: Ultimately, you want sort of to categorize them into ease.
The answer to your initial question was should they supply or should you
supply? The answer may be different for those different categories.

MR. FREEDMAN: I understand.

MR. SITTER: Some of them, it might be very easy for you to collect three
numbers and do your own calculations. Another one \-- and there can be
the other category, where everything is so wildly different that it\'s
almost hopeless for you to do that. Perhaps that\'s a way to do it and
then if the impact up the line is small for that, if you\'ve broken it
down where \-- see, because sometimes every time that \-- I mean in some
sense whenever we make a suggestion, you point out a counter example.

MR. FREEDMAN: And it\'s not because we\'re trying to be obstinate.

MR. SITTER: No, I understand

(Laughter.)

What it may be is that when you think in generalities, if you break it
into four categories, it\'s really only one of those categories that all
of your examples are coming from and that category can be quite off and
still not impact what you\'re interested in.

MR. FREEDMAN: I think that there will be, and maybe I\'m speaking out of
school here a little bit, but I think that\'s also going to be an
organizational bureaucratic, I\'m not sure of the right word, a cultural
shift for EIA in terms of how we collect our information, not for Bob\'s
group, but for all of EIA. If you look at our surveys, they tend to be
one size fits all and they tend to go for uniformity and how the data is
collected. And there were very good reasons for that. It\'s very costly
and time consuming to have four or five different forms that are trying
to get at the same thing.

MR. BERNSTEIN: That comes back to Randy\'s issue from yesterday which is
you have to figure out what the value \-- what\'s the cost versus the
value of that information. If that information is really important to
have, then you\'ve got to do it that way. And it also comes back to who
uses the data and how it impacts the markets again. If it has a big
impact, then you\'ve got to be careful doing it this way. If it\'s just
a bit of data that doesn\'t have as big an impact and one size fits all
is just fine.

We can\'t decide that. You guys need to figure that out.

MR. SITTER: I think your point about the tax incentives is probably your
best way to go because you\'re going to have a chance to make them, to
steer them for the tax purposes into a direction that will give you the
numbers you want accurately. I think in the long run, that\'s going to
be by far the best solution. We\'re all going to want that tax incentive
and the ones that are going to want it, really want it, are the ones
you\'re going to have the most problems with probably, the ones where
they\'ve got a significant portion of both and it\'s highly variable
because they\'re going to have the most problems giving that number and
getting that line.

MR. FREEDMAN: Just to follow on that, if we could come up with something
that would facilitate their getting the tax advantage, not in terms of
the way the business operates, but having the data that they need to get
the tax advantage, they would look at that as very helpful as opposed to
what they do now is look at it to report something that they don\'t care
about right now.

MR. BERNSTEIN: If there is still the provision, I know IRS has looked at
it. But when I was involved in these things years ago, when we were
trying to build things like bottomless tax credits, we always had to go
to the IRS and they needed to comment on how they were going to verify
the credit. And so they probably looked at them. So it would be useful
to go and see what they looked at so far.

I mean it\'s very possible all the bill says, because I haven\'t looked
at the latest versions, but it\'s possible it says well, you just have
to show us how much electricity \-- but there may be more to tell. Or
you might be able to convince IRS that it should be more detail than
that and therefore they should help you with the language in the bill so
that it will force these guys to give you a better deal. It\'s possible.

MR. RUTCHIK: In a very simple term, put in the type of meter that EIA
wants to get the data.

MR. FREEDMAN: Any other comments, suggestions?

Bob, do you have anything you want \-- Dean?

Okay, I guess \-- is class dismissed for a half hour?

We\'re done. We\'ll take a longer than normal break and Bob will get
ready the summary of what we\'re going to do.

(Off the record.)

CHAIRMAN BREIDT: I think we\'re ready to start up here. So we\'re now
ready for the report out on the breakout sessions.

CHAIRMAN BREIDT: I think we\'re ready to start up here. So we\'re now
ready for the report out on the breakout sessions.

The first report will be from Bob Rutchik of EIA on the summary of
EIA\'s presentation and questions on the redesign of the EIA-906,
followed by a summary of the committee advice by Polly Phipps.

MR. RUTCHIK: I\'m just going to give the [Reader\'s Digest]{.underline}
version of the presentation Stan made to the breakout session about the
EIA-906.

EIA-906 redesign is a joint project between the Office of Coal, Nuclear,
Electric and Alternate Fuels and the Statistics Methods Group. And we
first started out describing to the group what is EIA-906? And it\'s a
monthly and annual survey that collects generation fuel use data, fuel
characteristics data and fossil-fuel data from two different classes of
respondents, electric power plants and combined heat and power
facilities or cogenerators, as they\'re sometimes called. And
cogenerators could be paper mills, refineries, chemical plants,
facilities that produce steam, both for productive purposes and for \--
to produce electricity. And EIA has been collecting data in the EIA-906,
I guess for two or three years.

And for the data we\'ve collected from the electric power plants, there
really hasn\'t been any problem. Their only product is electricity. The
combined heat and power plants, as I mentioned, they do two things. They
produce steam for productive purposes and to produce electricity, and
EIA has been interested in collecting from all these plants, the fuel
that is used to produce the electricity. They get a handle on the fuels
used to produce electricity as a major number that EIA publishes.

But EIA was told or \-- and I\'m speaking now about the combined heat
and power plants, or the cogenerators \-- EIA was told before the
EIA-906 was implemented that we cannot directly get these numbers from
cogenerators, the numbers for fuels used to produce electricity. And
that we could use a concept called useful thermal output, which is all
the thermal energy that is used for productive purposes other than to
produce electricity, and that EIA would take this useful thermal output
and with a couple of assumptions back out a number for fuel use, used to
produce electricity. And this is what EIA\'s practice currently is, to
calculate fuel use for electricity generation as the difference between
total fuel consumed and useful thermal output.

And in this calculation using useful thermal output to back out the
numbers for fuel use to produce electricity, there were some assumptions
behind it. One is that all the combined heat and power plants, their
configurations, their set-up were all the same, you know, they have the
same types of turbines, the same types of boilers and all the productive
processes were the same. And that\'s just not true. They vary widely.

Also, related to this is that their boiler efficiency \-- and boiler
efficiency is a very important component of this useful thermal output
\-- that EIA said the boiler efficiency was 80 percent and again, we\'ve
known and found out that this number too varies widely from plant to
plant. Some are 80 and some are 90 and some are even lower. And also,
related to this that when we did our calculations to get a fuel use
number, that small changes in these boiler efficiency numbers that are
such an important part of the useful thermal output calculation, small
changes produced big numbers, big changes in fuel use numbers.

So this is where we were, using this surrogate measure \-- useful
thermal output \-- to get this number that EIA wanted: a fuel use to
produce electricity from combined heat and power plants.

Well, we found out that this maybe was not the way to go and that there
were problems with the fuel use data from CHP plants. And we found this
out in relating to a point, a part of yesterday morning\'s discussion on
data quality. Our data users told us that.

And we also made last fall, for the 9/2001 EIA-906 data, about 600 to
700 calls to respondents to ask them to correct or verify the data that
they filled out for the 2001 EIA-906. Well, one of the major things that
we found out in all these hundreds of callbacks is that useful thermal
output is a difficult concept for respondents to understand. It just
wasn\'t working.

So at this point, to try to get more accurate numbers for the EIA-906
and specifically fuel use to generate electricity for combined heat and
power plants, EIA decided to redesign in the form of

EIA-906. And this is the process that we are currently in. We\'ve done a
data needs or data concepts process, figuring out what data we want to
collect, and we\'ve also completed at this point about 8 or 9 pre-survey
design visits.

And the pre-survey design visits told us that for the EIA-906 that we
could get pretty accurate growth generation data from CHP respondents
but \-- as we found out from the phone calls, most respondents do not
measure useful thermal output. But most respondents told us they could
provide their own \-- and let me emphasize their own \-- calculation, an
indirect measure of fuel used to produce electricity in its very
simplified and probably oversimplified form, that would take their steam
flows and how many pounds of steam and with some other numbers in there,
kind of back out an estimate that they said would be pretty accurate of
their fuels used to produce electricity.

And as I mentioned before, we did verify that their boiler efficiencies
were different than what EIA had assumed.

So we had this problem here that useful thermal output was not giving us
the best data and that the respondents could provide us with a
calculation, an indirect measure of fuel used to produce electricity.
But the problem with indirect measure is that each plant would be doing
its own calculation, wouldn\'t be replicable across plants, and that had
its own set of problems.

So we had a number, several questions for the Committee, and these
questions were: should EIA ask \-- EIA, pardon me \-- ask respondents
for additional information to calculate the estimates and continue to
perform the computations for fuel use here, as we have been doing, or
should we have the respondents perform their own fuel consumption
calculations? Or are there alternative options?

And the ensuing discussion in the breakout session resulted from those
questions. And Polly Phipps will summarize the advice that the Committee
members gave to us on these questions.

MS. PHIPPS: There were a number of questions for the Committee.
Actually, looking back at them, the first question was, should EIA
continue to ask for the UTOs and perform the calculations here. And I
actually don\'t think we spent a lot of time on this. The site visits
indicated respondents didn\'t have a great grasp of that concept, so we
really jumped right into the second question, and maybe we should have
looked at the first question a little bit more too.

But the second question was, should the \-- it was kind of a
back-and-forth on the Committee on whether the respondent should do the
calculations for the fuel consumptions or whether EIA should do it
themselves. And I don\'t think there was an easy answer. There was a
level of discomfort in the Committee.

Just in some senses there was a thought that if you accept their
calculations, they may be better because everything seemed to be so
variable, the different components of how they come to the estimates,
that there might not be a way that EIA could come up with some kind of a
knowledge of what each plant \-- there wasn\'t an overall model
basically.

But the second thought was maybe there could be some identification of
some type of model or major components, parameters that \-- and EIA
should continue to work on that.

I think one of the things that the Committee felt was, there would be an
exercise that would be useful to be done, and what kind of level of
precision do you need at the plant level, and how does that affect the
precision of the overall aggregate estimate. So that could be a
calculation, an exercise that could be gone through.

Again, we talked about the cost of getting the information versus the
value of the information. And do you really need monthly information?
Could you work on annual and ask more detailed questions once a year?
Although there were still concerns that, if they aren\'t good at
estimating the monthly, can you believe that they can be basically
really good at estimating the annual figures?

I think the sense was that they \-- that EIA should continue to try to
develop some kind of model for the baseline for these plants on the fuel
consumption, working on are there certain key variables that EIA could
ask for, where they could get a sense of how the estimates are made, and
they could calculate themselves. And some of this could be done maybe
through continued site visits, looking at \-- asking people to do the
estimates and then getting a sense of how they calculated them.

And there was a sense that certain strata might be more
straight-forward, generally, based on like age of the equipment, the
industry or geography, so there might be some really straight-forward
kinds of estimations that would be understandable, and you would feel
comfortable with in some parts of the industry, and maybe some more
difficult ones like in cogenerators, those that are mainly producing
electricity. Those may be really easy, and those that are mainly doing
manufacturing, those may be easy too.

And the ones in the middle may be the most difficult, but if a large
proportion of them, you know, you could get the baseline components and
do the estimation. That would be useful. There may be some customizing
of a collection, basically, that needs to be done.

There\'s an energy bill going now, and there\'s tax provisions \--
credits for power \-- and the calculations necessary to do that might
feed into some kind of calculations that would, could be used in this
type of form.

There was a final, a kind of an overall concern that there still \--
there was a discussion of how \-- I\'m not going to discuss this very
well, but there was a discussion of natural gas and electricity and how
they\'re coming up with some negative numbers from some states, and
there was a concern that you can only get so much aggregate accuracy
with this data, and that still could potentially be a problem in the
long run.

Would any Committee members want to add anything here that I haven\'t
\--

CHAIRMAN BREIDT: Thanks, Polly. Any other questions or comments on that
session?

All right, so moving to the other breakout session which \-- Ruey-Pyng
Lu will summarize EIA\'s presentation and questions on using data from
combined heat and power plants to estimate natural gas industrial
prices, and then Jim Hammitt will summarize.

MR. LU: Good morning. This project is using the data from combined heat
and power plants to estimate natural gas industrial prices. And the
objective of this one is to develop a reasonable series of processes to
estimate of the price paid for the natural gas purchased from the third
parties. Okay?

The industrial customer buy more natural gas from marketers or suppliers
than from the local utility distribution company. So the percentage of
the unassisted sale is buying from the local utility distribution
company is coming down from 36 percent in the early \'80s, down to the
18 percent now.

So the previous work was trying to contact the Census Bureau, using
their framing of the manufacturers to help us to do the feasibility
study, surveying the end users, the natural gas customer, trying to find
out how much they pay for the natural gas in the manufacturer sector.
Are they cost too much. One million dollars for us per year.

So we are looking other alternatives, the

EIA-423 surveys. This survey is collect the data monthly from combined
heat and power plants and independent power producers. They provide us
the cost and the quality, quantity of the gas they receive. And also,
the manufacturer energy consumption survey collects the data every four
years. The most recent one is 1998.

So last fall, I asked the Committee

for advice. The Committee suggest that we survey the \-- we plotted the
data in terms of the facility level of the natural gas costs versus the
volume each facility purchased. And also trying to see any kind of
segmentations, either the electric powers or

non-electric powers which is industrial, how much the customers ordered,
either they had the combined heat power plant or non-combined heat power
plants.

Further, I conducted analyses, followed the advice and plotted the
industrial natural gas volume of the costs, average costs and the
facility size. There\'s no apparent relationship between the cost and
the volume.

So we check on the next 22, which is the electric power and others, and
also list the FERC-423, which is the regulate utility price, and put up
a table. So that would give us some idea in terms of the region, since
each region, the average cost of the natural gas.

We also suggest, request the Census Bureau to prepare the plot or the
tables which can give us some benchmarking of the estimate we have.

So the complication of the study is, EIA-423 is a brand new survey, only
started January 20, 2002, so there are some outliers and the \'80s may
not work in, so that\'s being already sent back to us, for the managers
to call back the respondents to fix the problem.

And the next six months part, data will come in within the month, so I
will have the July-to- December data. And in this case, I can either use
the 12-month data to see the relationship or, using the 6 months,
commence using the next 6 months as a cross validation.

The next step will be \-- if we cannot come up with anything \-- we will
consider surveying the marketers as a sample of, for a particular
division or region. And also, we may reconsider surveying the end user,
or conduct a simple survey for a particular division or region.

Right now, it seems, there\'s a good passing estimate for 423 that
provided stable information, sufficient information about the 80 percent
we don\'t know in the south region. But in the other three regions did
not give us any good information at all.

So the third way we may try or come to would be to do the both,
surveying the end user and also surveying the marketers, combined with
the EIA-423 estimate.

So Dr. Hammitt will summarize.

DR. HAMMITT: Thank you. I guess, as I understand it, what came out of
the discussion \-- part of the issue is that EIA has in the future
wanted to publish a series of industrial \-- price of natural gas to
industrial commercial, industrial consumers. And traditionally, this was
based on the one survey, which is the 857, which is the survey of gas
distribution companies and, as Ruey-Pyng said, even a while ago, the
coverage of that was pretty incomplete and that it was something like 35
percent of gas volumes. And with changes in the market, it\'s now down
to more like 18 percent.

So one of the things that was done was this new survey, the 423, which
is a survey of firms that produce electricity, either to sell
electricity or for their own use, combined heat and power producers.
These are, I gather, pretty large consumers of gas, because they\'re
using substantial amounts of electricity, or at least have the
capability to do so. And that survey provides monthly data on total
expenditure for natural gas and total quantity of natural gas at the
establishment levels. So you divide those and get the average price paid
at the establishment level.

So it seems at this point we have a couple sources of data on natural
gas prices into the industrial sector. One is this new 423, which covers
firms that produce their own electricity. One is the FERC 423, which
covers the regulated utilities. And one is the 57, which is the survey
of distribution companies. So that covers volumes delivered by the
distribution companies, but only reports prices for sales by the
distribution company. They call it here \-- that does not report prices
of gas where the establishment buys directly from some supplier or
marketing company that\'s not a distribution company itself.

And I think the sense of the Committee was these multiple series are
useful, and perhaps it wasn\'t so useful to work hard on finding a way
to aggregate them into one number that could be called the average price
paid by the industrial sector.

And there were a couple of reasons for that. One is it seemed that we
didn\'t have any good way to figure out an average number, so it\'s hard
to do. And two is that the average number might not be particularly
useful to very many people, whereas these separate numbers \-- the
number that represents average prices paid by people buying directly
from the distribution companies \-- is relevant to one set of consumers,
sort of smaller ones that are likely to buy directly from the
distribution company \-- and the other that comes from the 423 is
relevant to the larger consumers.

And also by putting out two series, it sort of forces people who would
want to just get the number from the EIA, to sort of recognize that\'s
maybe not what they might want to do, and there is no single number that
answers this question very well, and they shouldn\'t pretend that there
is one.

So then as Ruey-Pyng said, he did a lot of analysis of how average price
seemed to vary by volume. And the answers I read \-- he had a lot of
nice graphs, and it seems like there\'s sort of a price floor, and many,
many firms are paying about that price. And then there are a bunch of
higher prices paid, mostly by small volume consumers. Some seem to be
real outliers that may be errors or very special circumstances but, in
general, there\'s a bit more variation or a lot more variation in the
low consumption end of the scale, which probably isn\'t surprising, but
it makes it difficult to model price just as a function of volume. That
doesn\'t have a lot of explanatory power.

So the other thing that was discussed was, if EIA is to report a couple
series, what would be useful is to characterize the coverage of those
different series and survey frames, because there\'s some overlap
between the 423 and the 857. In large part, they\'re covering different
parts of the population and, with the manufacturing energy consumption
survey, that \-- plus, I guess, Census data \-- would be two ways in
which EIA can better describe which part of the overall universal
industrial and consumer is covered by each of these different surveys.

So that\'s the end of my report, and if others have something, we
welcome that.

MR. BERNSTEIN: I have one question that \-- which I hate to ask a
question and then have to leave, but \--

(Laughter.)

In the other breakout session, we were talking about Form 906, which is
asking electric and other related information of combined heat and power
plants. Are you telling me you also have another form for natural gas
that goes to the same \--

MS. KIRKENDALL: It\'s not only for natural gas. We\'re just using the
natural gas data for this project. But it requests all fuels for
generating electricity.

MR. BERNSTEIN: So these same guys are filling out two separate forms on
a monthly basis?

Is there a reason why they\'re not provided \--

MR. FREEDMAN: I think the reasons are more historical and regulatory.

MR. BERNSTEIN: Okay. But we don\'t have to get into it now. I just \--

MS. KIRKENDALL: It needs \-- but it needs to be reported.

MR. FREEDMAN: Stan Freedman, EIA. There is discussion going on now
between EIA and FERC about taking over the FERC 423, and there is
discussion about combining the EIA 906 for EIA and at some point future
FERC 423. And that\'s part of the mix. So, yes, in fact many of the
respondents told us when we did the pre-survey design visit, why don\'t
you combine the two together? And that is under very serious
consideration here at EIA. That\'s the short answer to your question.

CHAIRMAN BREIDT: Other questions or comments?

(No response.)

Okay, if not, I\'d like to turn the floor over to Calvin Kent, who has a
few more responses on the survey of the history of the ASA Committee.

MR. KENT: Thank you very much. As you recall at the last meeting, I\'ve
done a very extensive historical evaluation of how the Committee had
functioned since its inception. And I had also, as a second part of
that, had done a survey of the individuals who had served on the
Committee, as well as the individuals who had been either
administrators, deputy administrators or designated federal officials,
to try to get a feeling for the valuation, the importance that they
placed upon the Committee.

I was asked by the Committee to go back and run the survey a second time
to try to catch some people that had not been surveyed, and to also see
if we would be able to get some people who had been surveyed to actually
comply.

And we went back and did that. We ran the survey again and were able to
increase significantly the number of respondents, particularly the
number of EIA respondents, I might add. And so for those individuals for
whom we had a usable address or were able to find a usable address, who
were still alive \--

(Laughter.)

\-- we now have \-- And by the way, Lincoln Moses, the first
Administrator of EIA, is still very much alive and very much interested,
and I had some fascinating conversations with him.

I also did something which I\'m sure is not statistically appropriate. I
started calling the people that I knew who had not responded and asking
them why not and please send it in.

MS. PHIPPS: Non-response follow-up.

MR. KENT: Yes, non-response follow-up. I got about 100 percent return
off of those, I might add.

(Laughter.)

Embarrassing the daylights out of people. And so I do want to just give
you the conclusions, which I think are appropriate. We got an over 60
percent response rate from Committee members who were still \-- for whom
we had addresses and they\'re still living. And we got about a 45
percent response rate from the EIA people.

And so let me just indicate to you what those general conclusions were.
The first one was absolutely overwhelming support, both from the members
and the EIA, for the work of the Committee. The general feeling was that
the work of the Committee was extremely important and very valuable, and
this feeling was even stronger among the EIA people than it was among
the Committee people, although both were very, very positive.

Some of the other things that came out of this, which I felt were
significant enough because they were mentioned enough times in the
comment sections \-- and I understand that Bill is going to be posting
the whole report on the website if you want to read it, as well as the
responses to all the surveys.

But first of all, there was a general feeling that there needed to be
more rewards or incentives for EIA people to participate, that
participation was uneven. There was some feeling the EIA people, some of
them felt that having to come and make a formal presentation they would
say was a burden, and that they really did not get anything out of
having done that, and that there needs to be something that would be of
a more tangible nature for the individuals who did come here and make
the extra effort to have a formal presentation.

There was also some concern about whether or not there were real
problems in EIA with data and modeling that were not coming to the
Committee because EIA did not want those problems to be exposed. And so
were \-- was the Committee really being presented the issues with EIA
that were problem issues that they should be considering.

There was also a very strong feeling that some mechanism ought to be set
up so that there could be meetings \-- either telephone meetings or
otherwise \-- between the Committee members and the presenters in their
areas of expertise.

Now this had been done on a very limited basis, but particularly the EIA
people who had participated in them that felt that these follow-ups to
the sessions, where they would be able to get back to the Committee
members, was extremely useful and much, much more of that ought to be
done.

There was also a feeling of the Committee responses, that there was
still a need for more feedback from EIA on how the input of the
Committee was being used. And this was a complaint that went all the way
back for almost 25 years. And I was surprised that it was still being
said by recent members of the Committee.

And there was also a strong feeling that there needed to be more early
involvement by the Committee on the issues with EIA \-- that oftentimes,
EIA was fairly well set, they were fairly far down the road, and that
they needed to bring the issues at an earlier time, although that
particular comment was less among the more recent respondents than it
was among those who had responded from earlier periods.

There was also the continued comment that it was good to get the
information early to the Committee, and this needed to be continued. And
also there was a comment about the consistency of presentations, that
some of them were excellent, some of them were less so, and that there
needed to be more emphasis placed on making sure about the quality of
the presentations.

So far as the actual composition of the Committee was concerned, there
was a feeling that there needed to be more members of the Committee who
were actually from industry, that were both data suppliers as well as
data users. And this was the only comment of a negative nature in all
about the Committee, because on the whole both the Committee and EIA
felt that the composition of the Committee was extremely good and was an
extremely appropriate mix between economists, statisticians and those
that were in the survey area. But there was a feeling being expressed
that there needed to be at least some people who were industry-based,
who were both data suppliers as well as data users here.

Great support for the breakout sessions. That was something that was
viewed by everyone as being positive. Many of the Committee people said
that there needed to be better orientation for new members \-- and I
know that Nancy has got her sheet out \-- but they were actually
thinking that new members could even come in a half-day early or
something like that for more of an orientation, so that a couple people
said well, I was on the Committee for a year and a half before I really
understand how EIA operated. And so that\'s something that I think needs
to be looked into.

There was also a very \-- which came from both Committee members, but
really came from EIA people and with Howard here, I\'ll make this
comment: the need for continued top level support from EIA of the
Committee\'s work. I think over the years it\'s fair to say that the
enthusiasm at the top level administrative support for this Committee
has been variable, and that when there was strong support from the top
that the Committee felt much better, and EIA felt much better about the
work of the Committee, but that there was a definite need for the
Administrator and the Deputy Administrator to clearly be supportive of
the work of the Committee and to participate in the work of the
Committee, because that way they were sanctifying the work that the
Committee was doing.

But on the whole, everyone was very favorable. As I said in the report,
or at least the survey, it is clear that this Committee is performing
the function that Federal Advisory Committees are supposed to perform
under the Act that established them back in 1974.

CHAIRMAN BREIDT: Thanks. Any questions or comments for Calvin?

DR. HAMMITT: Just a comment. I never really thought too much about the
suggestion to have more industry people on the Committee. I just hadn\'t
thought about the scope in that regard, but that sounds to me like a
great idea,and I\'m not really sure \-- presumably it\'s come up before,
and I don\'t know exactly how the Committee gets selected.

MS. KIRKENDALL: In the past, we had a few people from industry. Maybe
this is going back a long way. There were some from some oil companies.
We had at least one electric power company and a coal company. Not at
the same time, but at various times.

And they were great Committee members. It\'s not necessarily easy to
find statisticians buried in industry. If we can find them, we can
invite them.

DR. HAMMITT: It is not only statisticians. It\'s not exclusively
statisticians on the Committee anyway.

MS. KIRKENDALL: No. But still, finding them is the hard part and if you
find any, if you meet somebody and you know them and you think they\'d
be interested and a good Committee member, let us know. Because, you
know, people do rotate off and we get \-- we need good nominees.

MR. WOOD: John Wood. I was actually exceptionally pleased to hear what
Cal just said about appointments and I\'m \-- actually I\'m not sure why
\-- because I hadn\'t heard any of the previous discussion, but I
wasn\'t expecting much.

I just thought that, in fact, we did get as much useful information out
of the \-- I guess three papers, one I gave, one that John Vetter gave,
and one that Crystal Linkletter gave \-- as we could. And I actually sat
in this building until about 20 after 10 last night, thinking through
what it was that had dissatisfied me, and three of the recommendations
that Cal just gave directly addressed them.

And basically, you know, involve ASA earlier \-- and I\'ll go a little
further with that, that we spend significant amounts of time identifying
the questions we want to ask and framing them in context where you can
actually get answers, and potentially getting at some of the potentially
deeper issues and what the exercises are about. For example, when we are
trying to take data recorded by the State of Texas, this preliminary and
build it into a final estimate, in many ways what you\'re modeling is
some industry group behaviors. And you need to be thinking about that as
you approach the problem.

And the \-- kind of going back up the list, the kind of informal
feedback or continuous feedback and maybe even collaboration on, let\'s
say, monthly cycles or whatever for, you know, six months\' intervening
period is one of the processes that is likely to help get everyone
focused, so they understand the questions from each other\'s
perspective, and then frame questions so that they can be appropriately
answered.

So I\'m just actually very pleased to hear those comments, and I was
actually going to offer several suggestions similar to them on the
breakout on what ASA ought to do next. And so I thought most of those
comments were representative of my own personal experience, where
actually there\'s lots of benefit you can get, and there are many ways
to improve the process, and you can kind of get more for the level of
effort put into it, and kind of a more collaborative effort, rather than
like independent things that happen every six months.

CHAIRMAN BREIDT: Thank you. Bill, did you have a comment?

MR. MOSS: Oh, this was just related to how difficult that is. There\'s a
lot of statisticians in industry, but I guess the difficulty is finding
them in industries for whom the primary concern is energy.

MS. KIRKENDALL: Right. Yes, I think the recommendation was for energy
and distribution.

MR. MOSS: Yes, energy, right.

CHAIRMAN BREIDT: Any other comments on Cal\'s presentation?

Okay. If not, I think I\'ll turn it over to Nancy Kirkendall, who is
looking for some feedback on her draft materials for Committee members.

MS. KIRKENDALL: Okay. One of the things \-- Randy already gave me some
feedback on this, so I\'ll share with you what his recommendations were
\-- at least I\'ll give you the ones that I remember. But he suggested
that we add the schematics showing the flow of the energy industries and
how our surveys fit into them. I think you have seen a couple of those
\-- at least those of you who are not new have seen a couple of those
\-- and put those into the package. Perhaps an organizational chart, so
that you could see who fits where and how we all work together \-- we
hope.

And then he said that it should go in the front of your book every time,
for everybody, not just one time, but every time, so that if you want to
look back and check something you can do that.

So those were certainly actionable suggestions that I can take back, and
we can do that for next time. He identified a few typos that we will be
happy to correct, too.

Are there other suggestions of what should be in here? You want it in
the front of the book?

MS. KHANNA: I have a very quick one. Acronyms.

(Laughter.)

That came up yesterday, too. It took me forever to figure out what CNEAF
was.

MS. KIRKENDALL: That is one you really ought to know.

(Laughter.)

MR. EDMONDS: The thing that I found \-- the biggest question that I had
when I came on board was really, what does the Committee do, what are
its functions, and what are you looking to the Committee to provide? And
the overview, as it\'s currently structured, really tells \-- helps
people who aren\'t familiar with EIA, learn about EIA.

But I think that there\'s another complementary piece that a new member
would find extremely useful, because this is not \-- it\'s its own
special thing. And it is \-- it\'s a little bit different than most of
the other committees that I serve on, and so describing it and
describing what a member does and what the group does and how it
interacts with EIA and its goals and its objectives, I think would be
extremely helpful and get people off to a faster start.

CHAIRMAN BREIDT: Not just for new members, but for potential members,
that would be a great thing to do.

MS. KIRKENDALL: Actually, that\'s true, too. Yes. For that one, we can
always take a stab at putting something together. You guys should have
input on what it says, since we \--

CHAIRMAN BREIDT: We will look at it and say we are expected to do that.

(Laughter.)

MR. EDMONDS: Well, it actually could be a good checklist, too, to see
are we doing what we think we ought to be doing.

MR. FEDER: This is on a somewhat related topic. We got some CDs in the
mail, FedEx\'d because there was an issue with some material that was
being confidential. Perhaps you could set up something with a password,
so we can still get it in a timely fashion through the web without
having to wait for a package, and then you don\'t have to wait until you
have everything in to send it. We could look at the material as it
becomes available. Because just before a trip, it\'s very hard to find
the time to browse a CD, but if we could get a quick e-mail, that
please, we would edit some material and look at it, the acronyms, then
we will be doing it, you know, over time.

MR. NEERCHAL: That\'s the suggestion I had in my mind, too. Have an
organization chart within EIA and so on. And the other suggestion, I
think, that might be useful is, that if you\'re talking about a survey,
an analysis from a survey, specifically for someone new, I would like to
see a form, see the form. And I think that really \-- I know they\'re on
the web. Just to see where the dealers are coming from. It kind of makes
things a little bit more complicated.

MS. KIRKENDALL: That would be in particular when we\'re talking about
data from a survey or something, and we should have more complete
documentation for the survey before you get it.

MR. NEERCHAL: As being discussed in detail.

MS. KIRKENDALL: As being discussed in detail, yes.

MR. NEERCHAL: Not all of them are, but \--

MS. KIRKENDALL: Right, but when we\'re talking about something, give you
better background information for it.

MS. KHANNA: I don\'t know if this is feasible, but it\'s an idea which
is following on your comment. We have an idea of what the Committee has
told us, but when you include a new member, presumably you have an idea
what that particular member is supposed to contribute too, as well. I
mean, for instance, I joined the Committee a year ago, if you could give
me some idea why did you pick an economist, as opposed to a
statistician, or what particular role does each member supposed to
eventually play, because then when you come in for the meeting, you can
focus in on one part of the problem, which might help.

This may not be possible every time, but maybe some broad \-- this is
what we\'d like economists to focus, or this is where we need the
economists\' input, and this is where we need the operations research
input.

MR. FEDER: I\'m a little scared to know what is expected of me.

(Laughter.)

MR. KENT: Just to make a couple of comments. I know that any time EIA
gets a new Administrator \-- and it may not have been as necessary with
Guy, although I suspect it probably was \-- you are given a very nice
book that gives you a lot of stuff, including the very things that you
are asking for, including a very succinct and short description of every
one of the forms, what\'s collected, who it\'s collected from, how
frequently it\'s collected, what\'s on it, and what\'s the use is, and a
copy of the form is there. So if you\'ve got that as a reference, as the
Administrator, when you walk in, then you can \-- if somebody calls you
up in Congress and says I\'m worried about form such and such, you can
sit there, and I\'m sure it\'s now probably on disk as well.

But I think that would be very useful. And I think your comment about
getting out to the Committee the information on the particular forms
that are being talked about in more detail would be helpful, as well as
the comments about them. And I think that\'s something that ought to be
taken into consideration, but I do know for the Administrator\'s use,
there is that information available, because they do give you a nice
briefing book for briefing the file. That would be very useful for the
Committee to receive parts of it.

CHAIRMAN BREIDT: Other comments? I definitely like the idea of kind of
the executive summary version that you\'re kind of putting together, but
then additional access to some of the more detailed information, but
something along the lines of what you\'re preparing would be ideal to,
as I said, to send out to potential members as we\'re trying to get that
list together.

MR. WEINIG: We had done a couple of things unique to this meeting, which
we would appreciate some feedback on also. The facilitation of yesterday
morning\'s session through lunch time was different than before, and the
fewer numbers of topics that we\'ve chosen for this meeting in general,
thus leading to a larger proportion of breakout sessions, those were
also different.

And we would be interested in reactions to those and anything else that
turns out to have been a bit unique to \-- to this meeting.

CHAIRMAN BREIDT: So, any comments on the facilitated discussion
yesterday morning?

MR. NEERCHAL: I don\'t \-- this is my first year here. But it went fine,
I think. I think it\'s really useful that there is someone there taking
notes rather than trying to, you know, everybody does. And I don\'t know
whether the summary of that will be made available to all the Committee
members. I don\'t know what the plans are on that. I think it would be
very useful, because I didn\'t take any notes at all.

And I think the breakout sessions are really good. I think the smaller
group, I think more people talk. In a bigger group, the same people talk
all the time.

(Laughter.)

I think there is a definite advantage. You reach more people. I think it
went very well. I don\'t have the past history, so this is the benchmark
for me.

Anyway, since I have the floor, as a freshman here, I should also add
that I really enjoyed it very much. It\'s my first year here. I think I
met some really great people, and I am really pleased with the level of
attention given to quality. I think the most important thing in
improving quality is really knowing or wanting to improve. It\'s sort of
like addiction, you have to admit you have a problem before you can take
care of it.

CHAIRMAN BREIDT: Any other comments about the facilitators of the
discussion?

MR. MOSS: Well, actually this is one that we talked about at breakfast
this morning, and that is, it worked well yesterday and it probably
works well, better with some topics versus others. Technical topics like
some that occurred in the breakout sessions probably don\'t lend
themselves as well to the facilitator. The facilitators were useful \--
were necessary. I think that\'s a better way to put it.

MS. KIRKENDALL: One of the things I thought happened with that, too,
especially from mine, is that he got everything going. I mean, people
kind of relaxed, broke the ice. Everybody was participating in my
session. And Howard thought that maybe the facilitation was not as
needed for the second two sessions. He thought it really helped for the
first one, and on the other two he wasn\'t quite as sure that he needed
to be there, because it was going along pretty well anyway. So \--

CHAIRMAN BREIDT: I thought it was still useful there. I\'m not sure my
note-taking was of any use, because I don\'t think anybody could read it
anyway.

MS. KIRKENDALL: Well, that was something we learned. If we\'re doing it,
we\'ll have two people, one to take notes and one to manage the
facilitation, because it\'s really hard to do both.

CHAIRMAN BREIDT: I think about 80 percent of the room can\'t read those
notes anyway, so all these people can\'t see it, and those people can\'t
see it, so it\'s like \--

MS. KHANNA: Use a projector.

CHAIRMAN BREIDT: Yes, that might be a good way to do it.

MR. EDMONDS: I guess \-- I didn\'t see a significant difference in
quality from the discussions I\'ve had \-- we had at earlier sessions,
but I thought that the quality in all the sessions was quite high, so to
my observation it would be a little bit stylistically different. But I
think that the quality of the commentary and the quality of the
conversation was similar.

CHAIRMAN BREIDT: Any comments on the longer breakout sessions? We had
fewer topics, relatively longer breakout sessions this time around.

Any reaction?

MR. MOSS: I like them. It always seemed like before we were just getting
into it and then somebody came in and drug us back upstairs. So I think
especially if we get the papers early enough, to think about them a
little bit.

MS. KIRKENDALL: Papers early is always a challenge.

CHAIRMAN BREIDT: Johnny?

MR. BLAIR: I just wanted to follow up on that, and also what Moshe was
saying about putting up materials on the web as they become available
is, I would say, I think a useful idea. But I think an important part of
that relates to the questions to the Committee. Sometimes the questions,
at least the ones that I understand are, you know, are very clear, and
you have an idea of what\'s wanted. Other times, I think I spent a fair
amount of time just trying to figure out and understand what the
question is to the Committee.

If those questions were put up as part of the materials on the web or by
e-mail or something, I don\'t know the mechanism, but I think that over
the course of time prior to the meeting, comments from the Committee
might help to sharpen those questions \-- to ask, you know, exactly what
do you mean by such and such.

And if there\'s information that Committee members think is needed in
order to address the questions, there would be a chance to comment on
that. So I think any sort of advance materials or information or
whatever, I think should give a fair amount of thought to what are the
bottom line questions that you want the Committee to address, and trying
to sharpen those and make those really clear so that when we come in,
you know, we understand what\'s wanted in a very specific way.

CHAIRMAN BREIDT: Okay. Any other comments? Is that helpful, Bill?

MR. WEINIG: Yes, very much so. Thank you.

MR. NEERCHAL: Jay, can I ask a question? I was not involved in the
discussion of any papers this time. Does the author or the person to
work with, discuss ahead of time, or what is the process on that?

CHAIRMAN BREIDT: That certainly can be the case, the discussant, once
appointed, could contact the author, and \-- But all of this is kind of
at the last minute, so there may not be a ton of time.

MR. WEINIG: We have gone this time to adding the e-mail address to the
author\'s name and the author\'s telephone number at the front end of
each of these home page entrants, so that the author would be available
to the Committee, were there to be that interest.

MR. NEERCHAL: I\'d like to comment about it, if it\'s a question of
maybe some minor disagreement in terminology and things like that can be
taken care of.

MS. KIRKENDALL: Or misunderstandings. This doesn\'t make any sense at
all, it\'s probably useful to get the \--

MR. WOOD: Yes, and in fact, you might want the paper to be in a draft
form up there for months, and so that it can evolve over three or four
months with discussants and the people doing it, so that in fact, issues
that may just be nomenclature or misunderstanding, are cleared up. So
what you really wanted to address is addressed when it goes before the
Committee.

MR. NEERCHAL: What I had in mind would be a week.

(Laughter.)

MR. WOOD: But you might want the person to change the paper, so then you
might want \--

MR. NEERCHAL: It\'s better something misspelled then being discussed
right in front of the full Committee, something very minor, perhaps.

A month would be great, but \--

MS. KIRKENDALL: Right. A week we can do, a month is harder. For some
things though, there can be more time. Now for example, Ruey-Pyng\'s
work is going to be on-going work, and we can probably get some
documentation for what he\'s doing up there a little sooner. You can be
pretty sure this will probably not be the last time you hear from
Ruey-Pyng, because there\'s just too much stuff to do.

Unless all we do is decide to do what we did talk about and, you know,
say this is the coverage of each of the pieces \-- and we\'re going to
publish these two crises and tell you what the coverage is. In which
case we can just do that with an update and documentation. Put it on the
web.

MS. WAUGH: Nancy, one of the suggestions was a half-day session the day
before for the freshmen. Do you have any idea or does the panel \--

MS. KIRKENDALL: What do the two new people feel about that? Would you
like to come in a half a day early to get an introduction to the
Committee? It wouldn\'t be an additional expense, but it\'s additional
time away from \--

MR. NEERCHAL: I am teaching on Wednesdays this semester.

MS. KIRKENDALL: So you wouldn\'t have been able to make it.

MR. NEERCHAL: No. I think it\'s a good idea. I am a local, so I might
have a different day that\'s a little bit more convenient for me.

I think \-- I\'m trying to kind of think loudly about it. I think
organization chart is the first thing \-- I would like to really see
that. And I can do the web search and I probably can get it off the web.
But if it is made available ahead of time then I, you know, kind of put
things in my mind. And, I think next year \--

MS. KIRKENDALL: This kind of stuff we can e-mail to new members, just to
make sure they\'ve got it. We can give it to you on the web site too,
but just e-mail it to the new members.

MR. NEERCHAL: Next year I won\'t need it. But I think I will do that
homework before I come here.

MS. KIRKENDALL: Right.

MR. NEERCHAL: That\'s why, depending on you have only two freshmen this
year, do you want to spend that kind of energy trying to walk them
through EIA. I\'m not sure. Or, you know, maybe a personal meeting with
the Administrator. Maybe not \-- I mean, I think it depends what is
involved.

MR. FEDER: I think even if I could get this package the night before,
this would have been some use to me, and also warning not to bring wine
into the building.

(Laughter.)

MR. NEERCHAL: I have been on other committees like this, so I think this
is very well run. I must say, I think that it is very productive. I
think there is very little downtime, and I think that \-- I think it\'s
very well run, I must say. And I think a few others might \-- not
necessarily do everything, but other agencies \--

MS. KIRKENDALL: So you\'d just like to get it sooner, rather \-- You
wouldn\'t particularly want to come in the day before. But you would
have, this time.

MR. FEDER: It really depends on the particular months, and what we are
going to be doing. But it could be virtual session. We don\'t have to be
here to read this material. I could read it in the office. Right?

I mean, you\'re teaching and I\'m busy, but if I got it the weekend
before, I would have looked at it, and certainly in Crystal\'s paper I
would have read it before coming on the plane. That would be useful.

But I don\'t want this to be taken as a criticism, because I think
things ran very smoothly and the organization was great, so it\'s not
\-- but getting the material a bit in advance could help a little bit.

MS. KHANNA: I think Crystal\'s paper was available the week before.

MS. KIRKENDALL: It was on the web. You may not have realized you needed
to go to the web to find it, because you didn\'t know anything about
this.

MR. FEDER: Right.

MS. WAUGH: One other suggestion might be to have a buddy system for the
net control, and basically they could call somebody else on the
Committee with questions they might have.

MR. FEDER: Well, Bill contacted me, and I think in a certain way he
provided some information. I asked him, for instance, about maybe I
should put my jacket back on, the dress code and things like that. So I
talked to Bill about it.

MS. KIRKENDALL: Okay. So Bill is everybody\'s buddy.

(Laughter.)

MR. NEERCHAL: I\'m trying to think out loud, what could I have done if I
had come upstairs? I cannot think about it now.

MR. LU: This is Ruey-Pyng Lu. I just want to report another thing. Last
fall we asked the Committee if we could \-- how to recruit more
applicants \-- or the proposals to our EIA as a fellowship program. And
we did do a little bit of work on the flyers and the send-outs to the
association of energy economists, so this time we got four proposals in,
and they are very good. So we have had time to decide now.

MS. KIRKENDALL: That\'s good. That\'s where you want to be, right?

MR. LU: Yes. And four of them are researchers and university faculties.
And essentially reviewed it already, so we will decide it next week.
Thank you.

CHAIRMAN BREIDT: Anything else?

MS. KHANNA: Very minor suggestion. Whenever you e-mail or something or
post something on the web, can you put it up as a PDF file as opposed to
a Word or Excel? Those are very good ways of transmitting viruses; PDF
is a lot safer. I very rarely like to download a Word or an Excel file
on to my hard drive, because I do not know what I\'m bringing along with
the file.

MR. WEINIG: Maybe we can get together after.

MR. NEERCHAL: I think this is again a freshman question. What do \-- is
there something \-- how does the agency publicize the activity of the
Committee? How is the best way to frame it? For example, during the JSM,
or is there somewhere here in the Committee\'s reports or somewhere in
the activities, or is there a little blurb that goes on the AmStat News?

The reason I\'m asking this is to encourage more fellowship
applications, for example. If you put the word out there saying that
these kind of activities are going on, and then people know. And I think
a blurb in the AmStat News saying that, you know, the Committee is, the
Committee met, and da, da, da \-- the following things were discussed.
And this might help you recruit more Committee members.

MS. KIRKENDALL: That\'s true. At least some people have a chance of
knowing about the Committee.

MR. NEERCHAL: Right. And I have not seen a blurb like that in AmStat
News so far, and reviewing JSM I don\'t see an ASA Committee meeting \--

MS. KIRKENDALL: Yes. Well, we have had meetings at the Joint Statistical
meetings, but not very often. And not recently.

CHAIRMAN BREIDT: Not in my lifetime.

MS. KIRKENDALL: In your tenure. Yes.

DR. HAMMITT: No. But there have been sponsored sessions.

MS. KIRKENDALL: We do periodically do invited paper sessions, and we had
one last year, for example, the Committee had one last year.

MR. NEERCHAL: And the corresponding position for the economics
association and the agencies, places that advertise the Committee
activity.

MS. KIRKENDALL: I think the idea of something to be written up for
AmStat News is a good idea. Maybe if Bill could draft up something and
send it to Jay, so that we can work together on it. If Bill can take a
stab at it.

CHAIRMAN BREIDT: Yes. Okay. Is there any other discussion?

MR. WEINIG: A question for the Committee, please. We have in the past
considered four formats for materials on the meeting home page, and I\'d
like to \-- because conversions and copying of our materials from a
single format, multiple formats, has not always been successful or \--
I\'m trying to find out who reads what and in what format. So, I\'d like
to have a show of hands of people who find HTM \-- well, let\'s start
with PDF. Is everybody PDF \-- PDF is okay? And there\'s no exceptions
to that, right?

MR. KENT: Well, sometimes you have difficulty, for some reason, opening
\-- like Doug Hale\'s did not open.

MR. MOSS: Yeah, I couldn\'t read Doug Hale\'s PDF \-- most of this stuff
is on the page in multiple formats, almost everything in PDF, but
Hale\'s you couldn\'t open it.

MR. KENT: I think it\'s important that you make sure that it will open
in PDF.

MR. WEINIG: We\'ll look into that and find out and test it here.

How about HTML? I\'m just trying to get capability.

WordPerfect?

(Pause.)

And Word? All but two.

Okay, that\'s helpful. If we went to PDF and HTML, would you feel that
was enough? Are there any of you who would feel that\'s not enough?

What I\'m suggesting is getting rid of the Word and the WordPerfect and
focusing on these two.

MR. SITTER: Is there any particular reason you need the HTML? I think
PDF is about the best.

MR. NEERCHAL: Word is very nonrobust. If you put some graphs there and
once I download it, it\'s somewhere else.

I never send anything out in Word, without that caveat.

MS. KIRKENDALL: Looks like a vote for PDF.

CHAIRMAN BREIDT: Okay, thank you very much.

MS. KIRKENDALL: And if you can\'t read something, let Bill know right
away, so he can do something about it.

MR. WEINIG: Now that Carol is gone, I can do what I can.

CHAIRMAN BREIDT: Okay. I\'m informed that lunch is ready when we are, so
when we do go to lunch we will discuss issues such as what to do during
the next meeting, as well as some logistical kinds of things including
the vote on when or \-- not the vote, but some information about when
the fall meeting might be held.

Before we adjourn to go to lunch, I would like to invite questions and
comments from the public.

(No response.)

Okay? So I guess we are adjourned. Thank you very much.

(Whereupon, the meeting was concluded.)