 Hello everybody. We are here for group six renewables and efficiency driving growth and jobs. Now I have to warn the panel. We have a huge panel, huge, in terms of number of people and I really got to keep you somewhere around eight minutes to get through. So I really need you to hustle and I will cough about four times if you're going over before I put the hook out. All right? So with that I'm not sure we can get to questions but what I will do is ask the panelists to stand outside in the hallway so some of you can ask them questions since the panel is so big and the time is so short. We are going to go in order so I'm going to list the panelists in order so you know who they are. Alina O'Brien, Lead Building Survey Statistics Team, USEIA. I use them in my GW classes. EIA stuff all the damn time. Great group. Ruth McCormick, Director of Federal and State Affairs, Business Council, Sustainable Energy. Lynn Averson, President of Clean Energy Business Network. CEPN is the acronym. I don't want to talk about that acronym. Anyway, Nick, Nick Hall-Steel, Executive Director, Grid Alternatives of the Atlantic. Sylvia Lacerro, Senior Program Associate, Building Clean Blue-Green Alliance. Khalil Shahid, a Senior Policy Advocate, NRDC, Representing Energy Efficiency for All. And Elias Hinckley, OEP Topic Director, OurEnergyPolicy.org and K&L Gates. So there we have it starting with Eileen. Take it over. I need you also to make sure you talk right into the microphone so we pick you up. All right, sound check, sound check. That's good. All right. Good. So Shirley Knapp, let me tell you, the first person I want to acknowledge in this room other than the people who've organized this is Shirley Knapp. She's our Legislative Senior Advisor and she's the one who told us we needed to be here today. And she's the one that reminds us that we learned about energy use from the American people, the owners and tenants and commercial buildings and manufacturing establishments. But not only are the people represented in the data we collect that the legislative offices that fund us represent the people. And so we pay a lot of attention to what the information needs are of Congress and of many, many stakeholders. So I also want to acknowledge who's helping Shirley. This is Maggie Woodward. She's our Economist. She is the one at the beginning of all of our survey programs that make sure that the content is robust, that it will address the policy questions. And she's also there at the back end making sure we translate all the information we collect into something that's digestible, accessible, readable. And I also want to acknowledge other EIA staff here. Chip Berry. Chip Berry manages our residential energy consumption survey program. Has anyone used the REX data? If you haven't used it, it's on our website right now. Sylvia is our newest data user apparently. But Chip Berry has done a lot in the last 10 years to run both our largest national study of energy demand in the residential sector and our most innovative study. And some of those innovations are going to translate into our commercial building study, which Joelle Michaels is planning right now for 2018. This is a national study of energy demand in commercial buildings across the country. The residential demand is also the only national study of energy demand across the country. It is the envy of the world. I kid you not. I've talked to people in South America. I've talked to people in Beijing and Canada. Nobody does these kinds of studies on a regular basis. If you're not using the data, let us help you use the data. These efforts that Chip Berry did in the residential survey saved us a lot of money. Over the last 40 years that EIA has been in existence, we started running these surveys on an annual basis. Some of the structural stuff wasn't changing very quickly, so then we ran them on a biennial and a triennial and a quadrennial basis. But there is so much changing in the energy landscape right now that it behooves us to figure out, to bring the cost profile down of running these surveys, to be good stewards of the money that we get from Congress, that we can study this population, these populations more contemporaneously, more rapidly, and to turn that data into policy informing value as quickly as possible. And I'll talk just a little bit about that before I stop talking. The final results of the latest residential survey were released, the initial ones began a couple years ago. The final, the last results from the residential survey came out at the beginning of June and were presented at our annual energy conference. In that, you will find that what we've been studying for 40 years is tremendously more complex and detailed and requires a lot more statistical effort and modeling expertise. And so one of my jobs is to make sure that I hire the best staff. I got an intern who's here today, Maggie Matsui. I stole her from three other federal agencies and she's working on some of the newest data we have coming in on residential sub metering. So in the past, we have measured households and buildings consume energy by asking people who occupy homes and commercial buildings, characteristics of their structure, of the heating systems and the other things which they plug in. And as you know, it may know over the last 40 years, we've had tremendous gains in energy efficiency due to building codes, due to collaboration with the manufacturers and industry and the construction folks. And energy efficiency is now a competitive factor in large buildings and large cities anywhere where there's competition for occupancy. The people who support our program tell us that energy efficiency makes their buildings more attractive for tenants. They command a higher price at sale. They get better interest rates on things they need to borrow money for and the investments that they need to make in that building stock. So I was mentioning something about the REX 2015 results that came out. 40 years ago, it was sufficient to measure a couple of things that were, you know, high energy consuming devices like heating and cooling. We could tease out some refrigeration estimates from the data we collect. We always collect the consumption data directly from the suppliers who provide energy to the households and buildings. And then we were modeling statistically how that would be spent within the home. But over the last 20 years, as efficiency has improved on these major energy consuming devices, we and one of those people have been plugging in laptops. I'm running out of ideas right here, but I have a lot more things that I plug in at home than I did when I was a kid. Part of that's just affluence. I have a lot more money now. I have two laptops and an iPad and an iPhone. I shouldn't name major brands, but you can imagine that this makes, you know, we got the whales, now we're shooting for the minnows. How do we measure and target and optimize the energy that we're using every day? So the latest wrecks that came out at the end of May, early June demonstrate for the things that we feel confident we can report to you where the next targets are or what's happening within the consuming units to homes. EIA runs the only national studies of consumers. The surveys that I manage with Chip and Joelle and Maggie and others are the only direct way we touch the American public. Mostly everything else we do is on the supply side. And if anyone else who follows me today is talking about energy and isn't using some part of EIA's data system, I'll be surprised. If they're talking about efficiency and they haven't used a derivative of EIA data, I would be surprised. Our energy efficiency data or our consumption and our modeled end uses data go right into things like the Energy Star Portfolio Manager, the lead certification, appliance codes, building codes. They are the authoritative source of that kind of information. And again, we're the only country that runs them on a regular basis. We don't run them as regularly as we'd like, but we're making some investments I think that can improve upon that. We are going to, we are experimenting right now with one of the DOE labs. On the use of these new devices, you can buy one right now on Amazon. You hook it up to your electric power box and it will disaggregate how the energy is being consumed in your home. So whereas we've been modeling end uses in the past, we think we might have insight into the objective measure of these things which can fine tune our model and allow us to spend money elsewhere. For example, I know Chip Berry would like to restore the measurement of state energy estimates in 2009 when we had a little extra funding. We produced our national residential benchmarks, but we also produced data for 16 states with the improvements we've made in how we collect data and how we will collect them on the CBEX. Collecting data over the web in addition to in person will be able to save a lot of money and get you more data. Thank you. Thank you. Okay, good. I just got to use the hook. Good job. Good job. My name is Ruth McCormick and I'm with the Business Council for Sustainable Energy, which is a trade association of trade associations and businesses from a broad cross-section of the clean energy sector. We include many renewable energy technologies and associations, energy efficiency, and the natural gas sector as well. So we're a very broad cross-section. The organization has been here in Washington for 25 years, 26 now, and we work on policies to help expand the markets for these commercially available existing clean energy technologies. And in recent years we have noted how the information about what's happening in the growth and use of these technologies has been somewhat lacking and we've wanted to try to capture what our own industries were seeing. We obviously look at the EIA data, as Eileen mentioned, but there is a lot of smaller players in these markets that weren't necessarily getting captured in the reports and studies that were being done. So we began to commission a report by Bloomberg New Energy Finance, which is our market research and analysts, to tell the story about this huge transformation that was occurring here in the United States with the energy sector. And we call this report, which is now been produced for six years, the Sustainable Energy in America Factbook. And this is what the Factbook looks like, actually this collateral material for the Factbook. We use this information with policymakers at all levels of government, at the federal level, state level, even the international level, to try to give them an understanding of this huge transformation that's taking place. And it's been a very useful tool and while Eileen mentioned, we also use the EIA data, that the Bloomberg analysts will say they think this report is the most up-to-date and comprehensive report that is available, largely because they do take the data that's available through EIA and other places, and they supplement it with industry data directly from our industries, as well as from data from their own clients. So we think it's a really comprehensive, useful tool to understand what's happening in the market. And I know that as we've met, particularly with people who are not tracking very closely what's happening here at the federal level, like an international audience, they appreciate being able to see what is happening here in the United States with this transformation, because not everything is happening at the federal level. There's a lot of work that's being done at state and local levels, as well as corporations, that are choosing to use these cleaner sources of energy and helping to drive the growth. You also heard from the previous panel statistics from a number of the different trade association and industry sectors that are members of the Business Council for Sustainable Energy, such as the hydro industry, the solar industry, the wind industry, but this report compiles that together so that policymakers can see what is happening across these sectors and compare them one to another. It doesn't talk about policies, it just lists the facts. They can see what is happening with the sector and what some of the reasons why some of these sectors are growing and how. No projections, it's all a current report as to what happened up through the previous year. So I wanted to share with you a little bit about some of the statistics that you will find in this report, and you can go to our website to download the full report which has a list of about 130 different slides in a very usable, friendly format where you can capture the information and that information is available for policymakers and others to use to share this story. We also have a table out here in the expo area that I highly recommend. One of the key takeaways from this last year's fact book is a continuation of what we've seen in recent years, and that is that consumers are devoting a smaller share of their household income to energy than they ever have before, both electricity and energy writ large. In fact, for the cost of energy in total, it's about four percent of the average American household income. That, of course, leaves more money in the pockets of American consumers to spend on other things. Electricity off takers have been buying renewable energy at ever cheaper prices than they ever have before, which is helping to drive the growth of the use of these technologies and helping to drive that lowered cost for American consumers. In fact, renewable energy generation now accounts for 18 percent of US electricity generation, which is nearly on par with the nation's nuclear sector. So renewables and nuclear are producing about the same amount of energy, which is 18 percent. And because natural gas is in our membership, I know that this particular section is focused on renewables and efficiency, but I do have to touch upon natural gas because they are within our membership. That industry now accounts for another 32 percent of electricity generation and also helping to drive the lower cost of energy for American households. The thing that's been really interesting about this greater use of these clean energy technologies is that it's driving economic growth in our economy here. At the same time, it is not we're getting more productive with the energy that we use. It is not the the increase in the pickup in the economy is not driving an increase in the amount of energy that we use to keep the economy running. In fact, there's a really interesting chart in our fact book that shows how the growth line of the economy has been decoupled from the energy productivity line and energy use is actually declining. And that's been happening over a number of years and is attributed to the energy policies and technologies that are being deployed. So we're getting more bang out of our buck for the energy that we do use. And the job growth that's occurred through these industry has been these industries. It's been significant. In fact, the statistic that we use for the first time in this year's fact book regarding jobs is that approximately three million American jobs come from these clean energy sectors. So we are helping the economy grow in terms of cost for consumers, as well as the job growth that's occurring and really contributing to a positive uptick and fewer emissions, which is the result of the greater use and lower cost of these technologies. You'll hear a little bit later from the Clean Energy Business Network, which is a partner and a sister organization to the business council for sustainable energy regarding a new tool that they have called the faces behind the facts, which shows the people in some of the smaller to medium sized businesses and the innovations that they're bringing to market and the work that they're doing to also drive growth in this sector. So I will leave it at that. I look forward to any questions that you may have at the end of the remarks and thank you for the opportunity. I'm going to try to continue that trend. Well, thank you so much, Scott, and I really wanted to thank the entire team here at ESI and the House for Noble Energy and Energy Efficiency Caucus for your leadership in convening today's event. As Ruth McCormick just mentioned, my organization, the Clean Energy Business Network, is an independent small business division of the business council for sustainable energy. So the CEBN, a division of BCSE, a lot of acronyms there, but we're thrilled to have that partnership. And I want to also thank you, our team members, who are present here today. So out in the Expo Hall, we have Andy Barnes, our program manager, and here we're joined by our interns, Jordan DeGroote and Girish Balakrishnan. I saw him. There he is. So thank you so much for all of your tireless work. And I'll tell you a little bit about our organization to start. The mission of the Clean Energy Business Network is to grow the clean energy economy by focusing on the needs of those small businesses. So we work to promote policies to support the growth of the clean energy markets, promote public education and understanding of clean energy technologies, and to provide opportunities for business development for small and medium sized energy enterprises. We represent a community of more than 3,000 business leaders in all 50 US states and nearly 350 congressional districts. And a little over half of those congressional districts are currently represented by Republicans and almost half by Democrats. So we truly are a very nationwide and bipartisan organization. The topic of this panel discussion is on growth and jobs. And frankly, that is what small businesses are all about. And I'm here to tell you a little bit about how some of those national and global trends that are prior to speakers have documented, including some of the trends that Ruth mentioned from the fact book on the increasing deployment of clean energy, the decline in costs, and the job growth associated with that actually trickle down to Main Street and what kinds of impacts we're seeing at that level. And while the trends that we are seeing are incredibly promising, the take home message is there's still a lot of work to be done to ensure that we continue to demonstrate leadership in the global clean energy economy. If we want to make sure that we continue to innovate, commercialize, and deploy the next generation of clean energy technologies here in the United States, we all need to demonstrate leadership as policymakers, advocates, constituents, and business leaders. So why does it matter? Why does it matter if the U.S. is a leader in the global clean energy economy? Well, it matters to Benny Hayden. In 2010, Benny Hayden was laid off from his job and decided to turn that setback into an opportunity to learn new things and deploy his skills in new ways and also contribute to his community in the process. He founded Marketing for Green to apply his marketing skills to sustainable energy. He's working out of Atlanta and Detroit, and he's coaching teams that are competing in the DOE's Solar in Your Community Challenge, which promotes solar access in low and moderate income communities. Benny wants to grow his business and help his community in the process, and in his own words, he says he's affecting positive change environmentally and socially, helping to create a sustainable society. The U.S. energy landscape also matters to Jim Newman, the so-called Dean of Green. Jim has worked for more than four decades in energy efficiency, renewable energy, and in deep energy retrofits in the built landscape. His firm, Newman Consulting Group, is based in Farmington Hills, Michigan, but Jim has traveled the world, giving presentations on efficiency in more than 24 states, seven countries, and four continents, so he really understands what the global landscape looks like. Back home, he sees tremendous opportunities to turn even the oldest buildings into models of modern efficiency. Last year, his firm completed an energy efficiency retrofit in a more than 100-year-old building that is now a historic restaurant. And they got help in part from a local financing program called Commercial PACE, which allows the property owner to basically finance the upfront costs of the project and then pay the costs back over time on their property tax bill. The energy conservations that his firm implemented are expected to save their client $2 million in energy costs over the next two decades. So think of it. That's money that was essentially being vented through the chimneys. And now that restaurant can reinvest those cost savings back in its business and its employees. What about Biojo and Beth Redwick? In 2007, when gas prices were passing $4 a gallon, the South Carolina couple was looking for ways to save money. And they took it to the next level beyond the typical consumer. They started to actually experiment in their own garage with converting used cooking oil and grease into biodiesel. Today, Biojo and Beth are the proud owners of green energy biofuel, which has expanded beyond South Carolina to serve customers throughout the Southeast, including restaurants, schools, and several major corporate clients. They collect waste oil and grease from their customers and turn it into a drop in biodiesel blend that burns more efficiently and emits less pollutants than petroleum diesel. The couple is also giving back some of their success to their community by investing in programs for local schools. And then there's Julian Gonzalez. After a state in Habitat for Humanity exposed Julian to sustainable development, he traveled across the world from his native India to do his masters in sustainable design and construction at Stanford University. After graduation, Julian found the perfect fit for his professional interest at WSP USA, which is actually a local DC based firm that's providing engineering and professional services in energy, water, environment, buildings, and transportation. And last year, his firm had a very exciting local success serving as the technical advisor on the Maryland Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Council, working to help the state with its very ambitious goals for electric vehicle deployment. Julian says the growing demand for corporate sustainability has only solidified his conviction in a triple bottom line approach, social, environmental, and economic to tackling infrastructure challenges. So if we want to see more success stories like these leaders, we need to make a national commitment. We need to set the stage so that entrepreneurs like Benny can pivot their business skills into clean energy technologies so that innovators like Biojo and Beth can see an energy problem that needs solving and go out and solve it so that experts like Jim can help more and more clients save money. And so that young leaders like Julian will be attracted to working here in the United States, whether they were born here or they come here to participate in our top notch universities and entrepreneurial environment. These are just a few of the individuals we've profiled in our sustainable energy and America Factbooks companion project faces behind the facts. And these profiles are a way of bringing the stories of these business leaders here to Capitol Hill so that you can meet them and understand some of the decisions that you're making and how they can impact lives and communities across the nation so that you can know how programs like RPE were essential to helping Rita Hansen commercialize the technologies developed by onboard dynamics and get their compressed natural gas refueling technology to utilities and fleet owners on the West Coast. So you can know how applied federal R&D grant programs have made it possible for Gulf Coast Green Energy and Electrotherm to bring their waste heat to power solutions to reducing flaring in North Dakota and to providing reliable power supplies to Guantanamo Bay. And so you can know how technical assistance from the Department of Energy has helped combine heat and power providers like Jen Durstan at Capstone Microturbant Corporation and Gary Fector at UGI Enterprises communicate the benefits of their technology to potential customers. The small businesses like these represent the promise of growth, the promise of a better future. So here in our nation's capital, the decisions that you're making can help these business leaders deliver on that promise. Thank you. Hello, everyone. How are you doing out there? It's a little toasty. So I will speak fast, but I have a lot of important things to say. And I do want to point out that today has been successful in only having two manals. And why is that important? Because we're talking about jobs and jobs in diversity and importance and working towards making a more diverse clean energy economy and clean or just energy economy in general. So I apologize for the heat in here, Scott. I don't know why you couldn't do anything about that. But I appreciate that. Well, we're just saving energy, I guess we're being more energy efficient. So anyway, again, the topic of today is about jobs and growth. And I am the executive director of Grid Alternatives Mid-Atlantic. My name is Nicole Steele. How many of you in the audience know about Grid Alternatives? A few of you. All right, fantastic. So I won't get into the weeds about who Grid Alternatives is, but we are the nation's largest nonprofit solar installer. We work exclusively in low to moderate income communities, and we use a job training model to do those installations themselves. It's very important that we support the solar industry overall, so that there are jobs for our trainees to enter into. So we started out in California a little bit over a decade ago, and we had a traditional model of working with single family homeowners and doing installations on their home at no cost in partnership with the Public Utility Commission out in California. You know, since then we have 10 offices opened across that state. Some are satellite offices, but we've done over 10,000 installations in that time. And we've opened offices in Colorado and then the office that I run here, physically located in Washington, D.C., but we cover the mid-Atlantic so that can include Maryland, Delaware, Virginia. We're having conversations in New Jersey and Pennsylvania and West Virginia, and it's important because while energy policy is driven kind of at that state level, there are federal impacts and there are regional impacts, and so it's very, very important to be able to glue all of those things together. As we've opened our offices in other states outside of California, we've been looking at how do we make a larger impact and how do we make clean energy accessible to everyone, and not only the actual clean energy, but the economics of clean energy and moving into, you know, a career pathway and having the ability to participate in an installation themselves. Some people refer to us as the habitat for humanity of solar, and so I've heard a couple of people mention habitat before and we actually partner with habitat around the country and it's a perfect model to make sure that the communities we are working in that are disproportionately impacted by their utilities every day can also reap the benefits of solar energy. And so Ruth mentioned earlier that the average household sees about a 4% portion that's paid out towards their utility bills. Well, that's double when you're talking about low to moderate income communities. So, you know, if you're looking at 8% of your income going to your utility bills, a 50% bill reduction by providing solar at no cost is going to be a huge impact to those families and those residents in those buildings. And so I started to talk about how we've expanded the model. We're now working with affordable housing providers, we're working with job training organizations, we're working with banks and financiers to look at innovative models to make sure that solar is accessible to everyone, you know, and we're also looking at creating our own job training programs. And we are actually implementing a number of different types of job training programs that look at exploratory training, you know, so a short internship or short six-week program over the summer to more of a career pathway for a 12-week program. So again, who are we? We provide solar at no cost, we partner with affordable housing providers, we do community solar, so there's a lot of folks out there, you know, don't have a rooftop necessary to necessarily to put solar on, it's not solar ready, but we can sure make sure that solar is accessible. And so community solar is where we install solar not necessarily on the property, but in the same community and can still impact your utility bills. So we're integrating job trainees into all of those projects that we're working on, multifamily, community solar, and single family. What does that do for that individual? It gives them exposure to all different types of job training in the clean energy industry so that they're ready to, you know, sort of talk about who they are and what they do and what they know to industry. And we work closely with industry to figure out what those needs are and we incorporate that into the training that, you know, are those sort of different models of training, whether it's a six-week training, a 12-week training, a 13-month training, we have a number of different ways that you can enter into the economy. And so the other thing is, is that, you know, one of the big things that I talk about regularly is that 90% of mid-Atlantic employers find it either somewhat or very difficult to find qualified employees in the solar industry that comes from the solar job census report that comes out every year with the solar foundation. And that is why it's so important to be able to make sure that jobs are also part of the equation, part of the conversation. If we don't have people in the workforce that are qualified to implement a clean energy economy, we don't have a clean energy economy. So, and why don't we make sure that we're targeting under-resourced, underserved communities that could benefit the most of seeing a new career pathway or just a new industry that's growing and now is the time. So one of the things that I mentioned at the beginning of my remarks is that it's important to be looking at diversity. You know, manals, what is a manal? Does anybody know what a manal is? It's basically a panel that's made up of all men. Right now, right now there's only 26 percent, only 26 percent of the solar economy is made up of women. And so it's absolutely important that women are included in the conversation. We have a women's initiative to make sure that women are elevated and their voices are heard as part of this growth into the industry. But we also want to make sure the community is a color that we're working in, have that opportunity themselves. And so we work directly with community colleges and job training organizations. And I have a wonderful staff, wave staff, go visit our booth. That is, you know, not only working in the communities daily, they are the booths on the ground, but they also are representative of the community. And there's different types of job. It's not just solar installers. It's solar sales. It's solar design. It's communications. It's marketing. It's fundraising. It's what I do. You manage people. You do budgets. You do a whole bunch of different things. And so we want to make sure everyone has that opportunity to see those different career paths. So what you can you do, obviously, go visit Elijah, Andy, and Christelle at the table out in the expo. Sign up to volunteer. Like I said, we are the habitat of humanity for solar. We'd love to get you out on the roof. You don't need to know how to know to do anything, not even know how to use a broom. All you have to do is go to our volunteer orientation that we offer once a month. And we'll get you out there. You can take part in the installation itself and really give back to your community. Obviously, we donate is the last thing that I'll plug. Sponsor that trainee. Make sure that we are able to be able to provide our training services to as many people as possible. So right now we have a summer youth employment program here in the district. Right now we have nearly 20 trainees in that program. And we're looking for sponsors for every single one of them. So I would love for each and every one of you to consider to support them today. So thank you very much. And I'll take questions at the end of the panel. So thank you. And I'm glad it's not a panel. Good afternoon. I also wanted to thank ESSI and the senators, congressmen and their staff, and all the energy professionals that are here today attending this forum. I think that this is a great opportunity to bring us all together to discuss America's future and our energy policies. And if you don't know the Blue Green Alliance, what we believe is that if we solve our nation's environmental challenges, we're going to create jobs, ensure fair trade, and build a strong, clean energy economy. So what are clean energy jobs? I think most Americans would answer that it is wind and solar. But we know and we're working to help the public understand that clean energy jobs also include energy efficiency workers. And that's workers installing and manufacturing here. Energy efficiency is actually the third largest energy source in the United States. There are 2.25 million Americans working in energy efficiency. And that's, again, including manufacturing and installing energy efficiency products. We think that this is actually a conservative number since it only accounts for workers using products that are energy star rated. And we know that there are thousands of products that do not go through the energy star certification rating for a variety of reasons. But those products are in the energy efficiency sector. Those are workers making and installing these energy efficiency products. But they're just not accounted for. So by the official number, we have about 315,000 manufacturing jobs that are within energy efficiency. So that means that it's one out of every four of those jobs are in appliance manufacturing. And 67,000 new jobs were created last year in the energy efficiency sector. So while some of you may know that I wanted to draw attention that 40% of that was actually jobs in manufacturing. And it's estimated that manufacturing is actually going to increase another 10% this year. So nearly 60% of those energy efficiency jobs are in construction. Therefore one out of every six jobs are in construction. So it's promising to see that we've got a sustained job growth and energy efficiency. And what we need to do is just keep growing that number. We know that America continues to lose its middle class. But we know that manufacturing and construction jobs historically have delivered good jobs with family, sustainable wages, and benefits. Those are the types of jobs that we need more. That's why we need effective policy that increases energy efficiency requirements, drives technological innovation, and creates market demand. Over 70% of the energy efficiency jobs are in small businesses, so a little plug from what you were speaking about. And energy efficiency jobs are actually found in every state in the United States. Energy efficiency jobs are hiring our veterans. They're creating job opportunities for those with high school diplomas or less. But we want to invest in energy efficiency to work over time for us. So that means incentivizing and requiring the use of energy efficiency products that are made here in America. That's how we can revitalize our US manufacturing. So we can do it by utility incentives, government rebates, procurement policies, product rating systems, and building codes. And all of that can help to achieve this goal. So please don't be fooled when you're told that you can't find US manufacturers that can't deliver on energy efficient products. BGA, the Blue-Green Alliance, we've compiled a list of over 3,000 US manufacturers that are producing energy efficient products here in the United States. This can be found in our database. It's completely free, and it's called buildingclean.org. And we do follow the energy star product categories. So that includes appliances, HVACs, windows, doors, skylights, roofing, insulation, plumbing, sealants, and lighting. And then we've also included for the consumers a water filtration system as we've got growing concerns of our infrastructure. Energy efficiency investments can do a lot more for this country than what they're doing right now. So as we know, energy efficiency saves consumers money. They improve school and work attendance, and energy efficiency also improves occupant health. But that's a whole other discussion that we can't get into today. So clearly investments are needed, but even just as strength and procurement policies, we can increase American jobs without even increasing the investment. So if we continue to link energy efficiency retrofits with buying local procurement policies, we can vastly increase the number of manufacturing jobs. That's the base of a strong and competitive country. Some states and utilities are already working on this. But we should be doing this across our nation, and the federal government should be showing leadership in this. So we need to seize the opportunity to enact policies, make investments, and make so that we can grow American jobs, improve job quality, in energy efficiency, installation, and manufacturing. So let's work together to buy more American policies into government spending. Thank you for attending this panel. And please stop by our booth. We'd be happy to answer any questions. I'm great here. I just want to say, let me soak in. I worked very hard on this. I know. I know. I like it. Thank you. Thank you. Good afternoon. Oh, it was like, what? Do I have it? Yeah. Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you. Thank you, EESI, and everyone for organizing this and for coming out. And I promise to try to be very brief, because we were about 10 minutes into the France and Belgium game. And I really want to get to that. So my name is Khalil Shahid. I'm a senior policy advocate with the Natural Resources Defense Council. And we work on a project called Energy Efficiency for All, which is a national partnership between NRDC and the National Housing Trust as our key housing partner and elevate energy, formerly CNT Energy out of Chicago, and the Energy Foundation. And we work in 12 states directly across the U.S. to primarily increase utility finance energy efficiency programs supporting affordable multi-family housing. Utilities across this country spend in aggregate around $12 billion annually in energy efficiency programs and services. In many times, in many states they're mandated to spend a portion of their revenue. Usually around 1%, 2% is sort of the gold standard. We can get everyone to that standard, it'd be great. But utilities are required to spend around about 2% of their revenue on energy efficiency services. And despite the fact that these families in low income housing are paying their bills just like everyone else, they aren't getting the services back to them from the utility. So in a sense, they're subsidizing energy efficiency programs for middle and upper income families. And one of the main reasons why this happens, utilities will say, well, these low income homes don't meet the cost effectiveness standard that they are required to pass for their energy efficiency programs because who knew that low income families tend to have to rely on older, less efficient housing as their only option. And so it costs more to actually weatherize and retrofit those homes. And so we work with partners across these 12 states in a way that sort of mimics our national partnership with we typically have a sort of lead environmental or energy efficiency advocate. We have a lead housing advocate. We have someone on the ground who has technical expertise actually doing the retrofits. And then we bring in cobble in a bunch of other advocates. We'll have low income advocates, environmental justice advocates, health advocates. And through this network that's now about four years old, four and a half years, we created a much broader network really to reach out to those states that we don't work in, but also to bring in some of these wider issues that our partners on the ground have really brought up to us. And so we created a network called NewHab. It's a network for energy, water, health, and affordable buildings. I had no vote on that name. But it is a great group of people from across the country coming together to share information, to ask questions of each other, to build on their resources. And it really gives us an opportunity to spread this work to many other states. And as the name implies, water efficiency, water access, affordability is a key issue that many of our partners have brought up. And also health in and of itself is something that our partners have brought up. And so NewHab has really expanded our reach beyond strictly thinking about energy efficiency in buildings. And so retrofitting, housing, any housing, but particularly low income housing, because it's such a low hanging fruit, it has many, many different non-energy benefits, as we call them, including health, economic development benefits from the cost savings of retrofitting these homes for every dollar put into energy efficiency for a low income multifamily unit, $2 goes back into the local economy from the savings that that family will get from that retrofit. And then, of course, jobs, which is a topic today. And often, in our imagination, when we talk about clean jobs or green jobs, the first thing that pops up is someone installing a solar panel on someone's roof. And we really want to see more of that. But the sort of forgotten piece of that is the fact that of the 3.2 million clean energy jobs across the US today, approximately, around 2.25 million of those are actually in energy efficiency. And so energy efficiency has become kind of the stepchild of the kind of clean energy conversation, the clean jobs conversation. And what we really want to do is to really bring it more to the forefront. Because what these jobs are, as my colleague mentioned, many of them are actually very good construction jobs and very good opportunities for people, particularly from these communities, to enter into this conversation, to enter into this work, not just as recipients of a service, but actually as employers, workers, professional workers, actually delivering services to a much wider community. And in many cases, these jobs are jobs such as HVAC repair services, lighting upgrades, and, of course, manufacturing jobs, manufacturing the energy star products that go into many of these homes. And overall, energy efficiency employs more than two times more people than all of the fossil fuel jobs in this country. So it's a huge sector. It is a huge opportunity that is only expected to grow just this year alone. Overall, in aggregate, overall in aggregate, the energy efficiency sector is expected to grow or has the potential to grow by at least 11% just this year. And so part of this issue, I think, is why it's sometimes neglected in our conversations around clean energy and clean jobs is, I think, that we have this sort of unconscious bias towards the, quote, unquote, productive economy. And so we think about producing energy, but when we think about reducing consumption, when we think about reducing expenditure, that's kind of left out of our economic conversations. And so energy efficiency kind of gets put sort of in that bucket. But there is great economic value, as I mentioned, just the indirect benefits of actually reducing the direct energy costs to these families. But also when you think about it from a climate perspective, residential energy efficiency is the largest single measure reduction strategy for CO2 emissions in this country. Whether rising all of our homes can, by 2050, can reduce carbon emissions by about 550 metric tons of CO2 equivalent carbon emissions. That's the equivalent of the state of Texas, California, Virginia, New Jersey, Florida, and Illinois altogether. And there is great productive and economic value in that potential emissions reduction both to our economy, but also to preserving ourselves from the harmful effects of climate change. And so I'll stop there, as I promised, but just want to say that the low income housing sector presents a great opportunity, both for those emissions reductions, but also for jobs. We have a study coming out later this summer that's going to look at the job potential just in the affordable multi-family housing sector. And just to give you some of the numbers that we have for the city of Atlanta, if you just retrofitted all the low income affordable multi-family housing apartment units in Atlanta, you're talking about 28,000 aggregate jobs for the city of Atlanta and 45,000 for the state of Georgia. For Kansas City and St. Louis, it's 7,000 and 9,000 respectively and 18,000 for the state of Missouri. For New Orleans, which is my home, it's 5,000 in aggregate and 15,000 for the state of Louisiana. But also the other piece of that same jobs report is actually also going to look at the issue of economic inclusion within this sector because there is a great deal of both racial and gender inequality within the efficiency job market, particularly when you break it down by job category. People of color, women are much more dominated in the installation and sort of repair sectors, but they're underrepresented in the architecture and the engineering services. And so this report is actually going to give some detail as to where those jobs are, who's actually getting and what the actual disparities by both race, education, income and gender are going to be. Thank you. Thank you. Good job. Great job. It's crazy, there you go. Backup hitter, unbelievable. So I'm really impressed. When I saw the list, there were seven people on and I was seventh, so I only prepared about 45 seconds of comments figuring there was no way there'd be time left, which is, I guess, bad in some sense, but if you're like Khalil and all you gotta add here as fast as possible to find a way to TV, it's good. I am a lawyer. I lead the energy finance practice for a big international global law firm, but that is not why I'm here. I'm here in my capacity as the topic director for finance for a group called Power Energy Policy. And just out of curiosity, how many of you in the room have heard of Power Energy Policy? This will be lots of education for you. So formed not quite 10 years ago as a response to the view that within energy policy discussion circles, things tended to be divisive, maybe tribal and often uninformed or ill-informed. And so the thought was, could you put together a nonpartisan platform for people to share ideas, right? An open format for both sides, all sides to push ideas back and forth and actually think through some of these existing policies and potential policies and whether or not they could be better formed to incorporate different sides of the issue and really come to a place that would allow us to have some foundation for something and look more like a functioning national energy policy. Not say we don't have one, but we don't. So we do a couple of things. And for those of you that don't, I just wanna make sure I get this out there. For those of you that don't know and are interested, there is a table set up down in the foyer area. Charles right here and his team are there and they can take your name down and get you included in the list and attached to the group. They host events, fantastic events, free drinks, always a good thing for events. Also some really interesting panels and discussions. But the primary sort of driver for the organization is an online discussion platform. And within that, they'll put out every couple of weeks or so a new question. This is a policy-focused question, something to sort of dig in and think about and you get people from both sides. There's thousands of experts who are registered on the site. You have to be registered, so not just any Yahoo can show up and troll this thing. You actually gotta be a registered expert and we've ejected people for just showing up and trolling things. We've been out as fast as we should sometimes. But the idea is you have this online platform which allows for this good online, for a fulsome dialogue around a policy issue. And these issues run the gamut of things within the energy policy world. Some of them are hosted by members of Congress and they'll come in and they'll write the question and they may even respond to some of the feedback. But to give you a flavor, some recent ones are RPS programs effective. Should we cut fossil fuel subsidies? Different discussions around carbon taxes, policy programs for grid resilience. Is there a continued role for coal in the U.S. generation mix as we look out into the future? That was actually hosted by a Republican member. That's a surprise. No, I know. I know, it's a shocker. There's been a discussion on electric, couple of discussions on electric vehicles and how policy rolls out for those. Energy storage and how market design and energy storage should work together. And so some of these are sort of high level macro issues, sort of general, how do you feel about something. But some of these are really kind of technical, deep in the weeds discussions, right? Market design around energy storage is a fairly technical issue. And for some of these, and the one that I recall, this was probably a year or two ago, we had a really sort of deep and probably a hundred different participants in a conversation on the water energy nexus. And the output of that was really dynamic. And so we took that and turned it into a little booklet, which became a little bit of a policy book that people are interested in trying to understand the energy water nexus better. You had just this wealth of comments from people all over the political spectrum, from all different parts of the industry, with some really interesting ideas. So I've got a couple of minutes left. And what I thought I'd do is sort of frame up what will be a coming conversation and give you a sense of sort of how this works. And so, typically what's done, if somebody puts out a little bit of a position at the back end, they ask a question, right? So pull this back and make this a policy-like question. And so I'll lay out sort of my position and throw the policy question out there and people can think about whether or not they would have input on this. If you've all been in the room all day, I'm sure people talked about the role of corporate renewable buyers and the role they're playing in the industry. Over the past five years, direct corporate purchases, indirect through financial instrument, purchase of renewable energy become a really big driver for renewable development. About 11,000 megawatts of built renewables specifically are tied to corporate buyers over the past five years. Now, when this trend first started, what you had were corporate buyers who were looking for price certainty, right? We talked about dropping price for renewables and you had this nice sort of fixed price, no price volatility, lower price. That was a piece of it. You know, the sort of like notion of green or carbon targets, all of which are very independent and individually driven. I mean, there are some organizations trying to sort of provide some defined metrics on this, but it's all a little loose in terms of how those work. That's great, but these are complicated deals, right? So the idea that Walmart wants to buy power from a remote wind farm is fundamentally a complex transaction. It's hard to get done. Part of that is the way the market is designed. Now, behind this, there's a new push, right? A new direction for, or a new reasoning for some of the corporates becoming more and more engaged in this sort of, we need to go out and really think about how we're procuring power, what time of day, when that power will be produced, where that power is gonna come from geographically, and this comes from the investment side. And so first, we've seen some hedge funds that started to look at this, right? They take a really hard look at climate risk and your exposure to things like energy pricing, physical climate risk, and what that could do both from a regulatory standpoint, but also from a consumer-based standpoint, starting to try to define what the value of that was. That's followed by the analysts, right? If the hedge funds start to do it, the analysts follow along like, wait, there's probably something worth watching here. And so they start to rethink how they're putting value on corporate equities, right? The stocks that you trade on the stock market. Am I giving that the right value because have they thought about their exposure to climate risk and their energy consumption? And you'll follow that with investors. And so we now see really big, sophisticated corporate entities that are looking at this whole puzzle in a much more holistic and thoughtful way, recognizing that they need to not only sort of hit their own internal green target or carbon mandate or a renewable energy 100 target, but they need to actually think about what their operational exposure is to some of these things from a cost structure standpoint because it's gonna impact the value of the company, right? So you take all that, and all of a sudden we've got this big push for all corporations if you wanna be competitive, and I need to think about sort of how you're gonna participate in this market. So that's my lead in. And then the question is, quite simply, what if any policy reforms are needed to provide a US-based business with the ability to compete for the future of investment dollars? Are we ready? And do we have the policy tools or do we need different policy tools to be able to do that? And so then you, as our pool of experts, would weigh in on both sides. And people that have different positions. And over time we've built out a conversation which we've took us through hopefully a whole different set of directions on that argument or discussion, maybe it's not an argument. And the outcome of that is something that's valuable to anybody, they can step in and they can read that and they can learn sort of the different views and some of the background information for those views. So again, if anybody thinks this is interesting, or you wanna get invited to things with free drinks, find Charles and his table in the other room once we're done here. Free drinks, deal. Free drinks, and look at that. Even with extra time, I didn't go over my time. Good, I'm so proud of you. If any of you took one of my three interdisciplinary courses on sustainable energy at George Washington University, you would know that it's always less expensive to save energy than generate it from any source. And then if you maximize energy efficiency and energy savings, it gives you more options. In my business hat, I've done 129 zero energy buildings, not net zero energy buildings. And if you maximize energy efficiency, it gives you many more options to generate thermal energy or electricity on site and makes those options less expensive. So there is what this panel, the depth and breadth of the panel has said to you is that we need to optimize it and we need to integrate it. And I hope you take that with you. I also wanna say I have two zero energy buildings off the grid near Claren and Metro. Always happy to do tours. I do tours twice a week. With that, we have seven minutes for questions, short questions, short answers. Right there, no, you can't make a quick shout out. Thank you, questions only, down, yes, answer, sorry. Yeah, so I mentioned very, very briefly in my comments that so our summer youth employment program that's in partnership with DC's department of the environment and our solar works DC program, it's a six week program. So that's very exploratory. What is solar? What is energy efficiency? What is it like to get on a roof? Those sort of very basics of the industry. And then the 12 week course that's also part of the solar works DC program in partnership. Sticks you to the roof so you don't fall off. So we glue you to the roof. Thank goodness, thank goodness. Safety first, anything you can think of, OSHA required is more. Yeah, so anyway, that one's much more career path. And so you get OSHA 10 certified, you get CPR certified, you take a NAPSAP PV 101 40 hour course, we get you set up to take the NAPSAP, which is the industry certification for entry level by the end of the course. We do interview and resume and cover letter development. We teach people how to talk about what they know and what industry providers are looking for. And so that they can communicate what more they just went through and what type of job they're looking for. And then we have a 13 month program that just takes that a whole bunch of steps further that looks at more of like an apprenticeship style training program. Next question. Yes, sir. The next question is on the roof. In the U.S. potential job in store industry, why is that happening, is it going to happen? Well, that's a great question. We have over a million buildings with solar water heating, which sound like a lot, but the tiny countries of Cyprus, Lebanon and Israel have more than a million buildings with solar water heating does so does the city of Tokyo have more than a million buildings with solar water heating as is virtually every city in China. Solar water heating is less expensive than photovoltaics and it's really codes. China has developed, I'm sorry, China, California has developed a state code for both PV and water heating for buildings and construction as do a lot of other cities. So it's really an issue. You're right, it's sort of solar day lighting, solar water heating, geothermal heat pumps all need to be brought into this fold, absolutely. Other questions? Come on, this is a quiet group. Okay, with that, round of applause for our great panel. I am gonna ask them to stand outside for a few minutes for any of you who actually do have questions and we'll get the other panel up here.