 Hey everybody! I'm Darren Springer, General Manager for Burlington Electric Department. We are here at the second annual 2023 Net Zero Energy Festival at 585 Pine Street, Burlington Electric Department headquarters. We're so excited to be here today with the community talking about all the different technologies that can help us reduce our fossil fuel use and save money and save energy. Among the different activities and vendors we have here today, we have a number of the city EVs and other electric vehicles on display. We have electric vehicle test drives and e-bike test rides. We've been raffling items from partners and at 1245 we're going to be raffling off an e-bike, courtesy of VSECU and North Star Sports. We've got our new electric bucket truck on display for people to check out. And we've got fossil fuel-free food vendors including Ben & Jerry's Pizza 44, Micromobile Kitchen, and we also have a great Kids Activity Center over here with VEEP, ECHO, Lahey Museum, and the UVM Physics Department. So we're really excited to be here today just so we can have a great event for the community, live music, beautiful weather, and really talk about steps that we can take together on the path towards Net Zero Energy 2030. Good afternoon. My name is Chris Burns. I'm the Director of Energy Services here at the Burlington Electric Department. And we're glad you can join us. This is the BED information booth. You may have seen it at other events. We do a lot with the Lake Monsters and Summervale and some other events around the city. And this is a way to invite our customers to just come in and chat with our energy efficiency specialist and learn more about all the rebates that we're offering. You can certainly learn about all of them on our website at BurlingtonElectric.com. But it just gives customers an opportunity to talk to staff and talk about almost any subject they want about their home or business. And we're offering just a wide array of incentives and technical information to help customers help us with our Net Zero Energy City goal. So there's things about electric vehicles, electric bikes, weatherization, heat pumps. And with our partners from the Credit Union, this is our prize raffle that we'll be raffling off today. It's part of our promotion to reduce transportation fuel. We were raffling off some e-lawn equipment. And again, you know a lot of this information that you see here on this table is available on our website. So please take a look and be in touch. Thank you. Hey, I'm Tim and I'm here from VGS. We're helping the city of Burlington and some of its Net Zero Energy goals through helping Burlington customers use less natural gas. We have a weatherization program, equipment rebates and are actually now offering heat pumps to all of our customers. The table today, we have a variety of different weatherization products, some of our literature and some oven mitts and potholders. Since the combination of warmth and safety are some of our key priorities as well as helping customers reduce carbon emissions. So we appreciate the city for the invitation today and will continue to serve as a valuable partner in its decarbonization goals. Hi there. My name is Phil Hammerslo. I'm part of Walk to Shop, which is a nonprofit organization part of Net Zero Vermont. And our motto is more people walking more often. We bring in a trolley, which is what we call it. Some people would have called it a granny cart. And they come from Spain, a company called Rollser, which is run by women. And we have four models. We have a kids model. We have a medium sized model. We have a large and we just got in a four wheeler, which we call our convertible because it can go on two wheels or four wheels. We started about four years ago with the idea of working with agencies such as food shelves, senior housing, people who are unhomed. And we distribute our trolleys as a result of the grants we've gotten. And right now we're working pretty much all over Vermont. We started just in Burlington. We've spread out to Chittenden County. We just distributed a whole bunch down to Bennington, Northeast Kingdom, Williston. And mostly, as I said, we work with other nonprofits. So if you'd like more information, come and find us on the net. And we're Walk to Shop, Net Zero Vermont. And thank you. Hi, I'm Rob Kidd with the Vermont chapter of the Sierra Club out here at the Burlington Electric Net Zero Energy Festival. Sierra Club is here because we're trying to encourage people to get out into electric vehicles. We have about a half a dozen, actually a dozen cars here of owners who own the electric vehicles. Because we've realized that there's a lot of misconceptions out there today about vehicle electrification. And just to give you one example, my car here has a range of 260 miles. The car over there, the Nissan, has a range of 300 miles per charge. And a lot of people think these cars are not viable in today's world, but most people will be charging at home. And if you have to get somewhere, you can get there and live your day-to-day life. So I encourage those who are interested in electric vehicles to talk to those on the street. Especially in events like this, a National Drive Electric Week, it happens to coincide with the Burlington Electric Net Zero Energy Fair. Get out there and talk to your neighbors who have these cars because they are the ones who actually have experiences and know how to counteract all the myths of them. And another myth is people think these cars do not have power. My car has so much more power, I have to watch how fast I am driving because it has such pickup and most of them do out there. So go out there and explore, talk to those who own them and reduce your carbon emissions. By just reducing, switching to a car, you use 60% of less emissions than you would have if you were driving an internal combustion engine. So go out there, explore, and with all the great incentives out there, you can find yourself some great deals on a new electric vehicle. Hi, I'm Martin. I've been driving electric for about 11 years. I had a 13 Nissan Leaf, a 16 and a 20-20 Nissan Leaf, and now I finally have the Tesla that I've been dreaming of all my life. And all I can say is I hope that more people get electrics. They're really great cars. Hello, I'm Michael. I'm from Westford, Vermont. I'm here in Burlington at the Burlington Electric car and EV show. I drive a Honda Clarity, driven it for the last five years, and it is a plug-in hybrid, so it does have a motor, and it has a battery that gets 60-plus miles on a full charge, which is great. My office is in Williston. I can drive back and forth to work on a full charge every day. And my aggregate miles per gallon right now is 200 miles per gallon. So I think it's a wonderful car. I wish Honda would make more of them even though they've stopped production. So hopefully they come up with something better. Thank you all. Okay, I'm Carl Brand and I teach physics and climate change science and occasionally rocket science at Vermont Tech. This is my Tesla Model S, which I bought and received in June 2016. I've had it since then. I have about 146,000 miles on it. I charge it at home or photovoltaic panels. I have a five and a quarter kilowatt array on my garage, and I have a 5.4 kilowatt behind my house, and at the end of my field I have 183 kilowatt array, which serves 38 families through Randolph Community Solar, and I get 6% of the output for supplying the acre of land for that big array. And the car has just been great. I've had seven Saabs before I had this car, and then GM put Saab out of business, and I was pretty bummed out by that, and just a bunch of things happened that allowed me to buy the Tesla at the time. Now this car, when I bought it, was about twice the price of the Saabs, but because I generate my own electricity, my net cost for electricity is about 3 cents a kilowatt hour, and it gets about 3 miles per kilowatt hour, so it cost me a penny a mile for fuel. And also the maintenance costs are about half per year of what they were for the Saab. So overall, I'm saving, because I drive a lot, about $7,000 or $8,000 a year. So I've saved half the cost of the car so far, and if I keep it another five or six years, I will have saved the entire cost of the car, so so far it's already cheaper than my Saab. And if I keep it a while, it'll be a free car. So the great car, I mean Saabs were great cars, and I even tested their collision protection, and I hit a moose at 80 miles an hour and just got out of the car and walked away. It's the only car in the world designed and tested for moose collisions. But in the DOT crash tests, the Teslas have had the highest crash ratings of any car ever tested. So they're really wonderful for that. So my son who's 18, he's learned to drive in a Tesla. It probably spoils him, it makes it fairly easy. I would like him to learn to drive a shift car just in case he has to drive one, but I have a tractor, I may try to get them, I haven't been successful getting them to drive that yet. But they're wonderful cars. I had no problems with the car. Some people will talk about, oh, I worry about being able to charge it. Well, probably 95% of the time that I charge it, I charge it at home. So I'm always leaving the house with a full tank of gas, so to say. And so when I charge it at charging stations, it's when I'm doing a long trip of two or more hours away from home. And on those, I've done it long enough, the car knows where all the charging stations are. It's never been a problem. So I have no reservations. People say they worry about it, there's nothing to worry about. It takes a different mindset. You have to learn some different ways of operating than you do with a gas car. But the amount of money you save makes it easily worth it. And what you're doing for the environment makes it easily worth it. Hi, my name is Richard Glige. A year ago I founded Woodfire. I'm here in Burlington, Vermont. I manufacture small backyard pizza ovens made out of recycled steel drums. They burn wood, so you get the full wood burning experience for your pizza. Except they're made out of recycled drum. They burn very little wood. Usually just a few sticks will get you a full dinner. And they're very easy to use. And they give you access to your wood-fired pizza cooking experience at a relatively low price. And with an oven that's very easy to use, that's very portable. Hi, everyone. We are Mighty. I am Brooke Isabel and this is Bill Calfee. We are the local Amazon alternative. Hey, Brooke. So, yes, you can order online just like you do with that Monster Amazon. Have all the items delivered to your doorstep. And yet all the money stays in the local community. So we support all the great businesses that are involved here. And the delivery is by electric vehicle. Like this is one of our delivery vehicles. So local fuel, local people delivering, your neighbors support our local economy. Okay. I'm it. All right. Yes. All right. You ready? I'm going to power it up. All right. My name is Elizabeth Knuckles. And I work for Echo Lake Aquarium and Science Center as their senior programs manager. And we are here today at the NetZero Energy Festival powering up our dancing airman with just the use of these muscles right here. My friend is powering the bike. That's powering the battery. And powering the dancing airman. We're having a lot of fun here today with our corporate partners, Burlington Electric at their NetZero Festival. We've brought our bike generator today. We've brought our Rigamajig free form building materials. And we've also brought an airplane launcher. The kids are making airplanes and launching them towards the cones. They're engineering, they're designing, they're planning, they're launching and they're improving their designs today. So we're happy to be here supporting Burlington Electric. And it's a great day to be outside. We're good. Hi everybody. I'm Sophia Donforth. And I'm the director of the Vermont Energy Education Program. And we are here today at the NetZero Fest showing folks how electricity works and how you can make electricity with magnets and wires. Our program goes to schools all across Vermont and into New Hampshire to show people how our energy is produced and how our energy usage impacts the climate. And if you haven't seen us in a school near you, look for us at Veep.org. We're starting to do workshops for adults as well. So if you missed it this year, we're going to try to do this again next year, but we're really excited for everyone who's joining us here today at Pine Street for the NetZero Energy Festival. Thanks so much.