 Energy issues, energy use, renewable is really going to be the major issue over the next 20-50 years for our country, for our state, for our city. Projects like the district heat plant that the Montpelier Energy Advisory Committee has helped to bring online demonstrates the sort of breadth and depth of the innovation that's really happening at the local level. So this process has been more than 10 years and coming, the idea to have some kind of a district heat plant at all. My very first meeting ever that I attended the Montpelier City Council was in January of 1995. And at that meeting they were talking about district heat and this idea of connecting the state's heat plant to the city's downtown. And I remember thinking, wow, that's ambitious, maybe even crazy. So the original heat plant was constructed in 1946 by the state. They operated the plant on coal at that point in time. When coal was going out of favor they switched to number two fuel oil. Then from number two switched to number six. Then in the 80s we went to a chip system and basically we've been on chips ever since. Our chip deliveries come at night and you're between half to five o'clock at night and seven in the morning. The operators have the truck back all the way out and the truck can offload about 20 minutes. So this way by backing the truck up they can start pushing out of the back of the truck and then pull forward and the whole 18-wheeler offloads here. And in weather like this we're going through a tractor trailer load and a half when it gets sent about 20 below. So 40 plus tons of chips in a day. So it's going processing quite a few hours. This is the first system of its type that's been built in Vermont, in New England, in the northeast. It is a modification of an existing building. As part of the tour you can see where the old wood chips came in and sort of the lower level. But everything that's sort of at the upper level is mostly new. Many, many people in Vermont have converted to wood stoves in their own house and minimized their use of oil, their furnaces as a backup. And I like to think of this project as putting downtown on a wood stove. What's your footing? The floor will be slippery. Behind us here on the other side of this concrete wall was the walking floor that we were just at. So as the chips get processed off the walking floor they come through here onto this vibratory conveyor. This piece of steel on here, this bed vibrates and actually moves the chips along the floor to an area over here. So there's roughly two inch squares cut into the vibratory conveyor. As it shakes across the right size chips will fall down into another conveyor to the storage bins. Anything that's oversized continues on to two additional conveyors. Those conveyors take it to the hog, to that hog with the chips through this system. This thing right now because it's moving all over the vibratory conveyor goes to an auger to a bucket elevator. And that brings it to yet two more auger systems that'll send it to either storage bin one or storage bin two. So now we are in the old section of the plant. The chips come in overhead and are processed and as the chips come in they go from the front of the bin and get pushed all the way to the back. And then it takes them out from down below, puts them into another vibratory conveyor and has a system of augers that gets us over to the biomass room. But it's not a constant delivery, it delivers them to a metering bin which is based on the storage area out there. It stores the chip right at the boiler and then it advances from that point as it needs to. You know like any project you have to evaluate the pros and cons. I think the benefits of this project really fall into two specific areas. One is environmental, the other is financial. The environmental benefits I think are somewhat obvious. We are going off of oil and onto wood chips. It's a renewable source. In the long run like this is probably one of the best things that we can do for the city to make sure that we are sustainable from an energy perspective. The financial benefit is that it's going to be a very steady predictable cost over the next 20 plus years for the users. They won't be subject to, you know, oil's $2 a gallon, oh, oil's $4 a gallon, oil's $6 a gallon. What we do with our oil and energy resources now is critically important to set ourselves up for that time. And so this just feels like good stewardship on our part for that future time. I would say that, you know, the state of Vermont has ambitious, you know, climate goals, it has ambitious renewable energy goals. We've set those goals because we understand, you know, that there's urgency around climate change and we also understand that there's opportunity in helping our communities get off of increasingly expensive fossil fuels. This is boiling number one. The black horses, the bottom of this boiler is nothing more than a wood stove. Everything above it is where our water tubes are. So as the chips make their way across over here, the drop in the metering bin up here, they're stored here as they're used. And we just have two just odders here pushing their way into the top of the grate. The grate is sloped, the hydraulic is driven, so as the system burns up the chip, the gas is sent down the slope. So as the grates inside are automatic and based on the chips coming in, the combustion range, they're just proved down below here that automatic is taking that back. Now if you continue over here, after you go through the process of the heat exchanger for your combustion air, you come down through here and reflect the fly ash. So the fly ash is what usually goes up the chimney or in a fireplace, whatever the little parts you see or anything else. That gets re-injected back in the system so it's fuel that's not burned yet. So we're recapturing that, dumping it back in the system. Once it comes back through here through the induction fan, it goes overhead to the ESPs, the electrostatic precipitators. So what they're doing is they're taking out down here in ash, but taking out the finer ash that would normally be going up our chimney. In past years we didn't have this, this is new to our plant. So now it's collecting finer ash that would have been normally going out of our chimney and does a good job of it. That ash is picked up and brought over to a dumpster, automatically dumped in there. Let's go in the city room. This is the heat exchanger for the city. So we've got steam coming in through a faceplate, heat exchanger, which is right here, steam on one side, water on the other side, transfer the steam energy to the water, send hot water out to the city. When the city is operating off of this, they're on these pumps. But it's a hot water system just like a house coming out of a boiler. Relatively simple, certainly a lot simpler than all the moving parts you saw in the chip plant. I'm proud of the district heat project because I think, first of all, it was an important project to do and has a lot of benefits. And it is something that will set the city up positively for the future. But second of all, it did set, I think, a tone and I think it made more things seem possible. That was a big mountain decline getting that done. And I hope that it has inspired the Net Zero effort. Net Zero Montpelier is the idea that we are hoping to renewably produce as much energy as Montpelier consumes on the whole. We're not just talking about the municipality. We're not just like the city buildings. We're talking about everything, including heat, electricity, and transportation. The solutions that the city of Montpelier is going to be embracing through Net Zero I think are going to set its citizens up for savings over the long term as well as doing what's absolutely essential for our planet. If we're going to try to get the whole city to move towards Net Zero energy, this really sets us pretty far ahead on that moving towards that goal.