 Hello and welcome, everyone, to our briefing today, Energy Efficiency Means Business. I'm Dan Versette, Executive Director of the Environmental and Energy Study Institute. The Environmental and Energy Study Institute was founded in 1984 on a bipartisan basis by members of Congress to provide science-based information to policymakers about environmental energy and climate change topics. More recently, we've developed a program to provide technical assistance to rural utilities interested in on-bill financing programs for their customers. EESI provides informative, objective, nonpartisan coverage of climate change topics in briefings, written materials, and on social media. All of our educational resources, including briefing recordings, fact sheets, issue briefs, articles, newsletters, and podcasts are always available for free online at www.esi.org. The best way to stay informed of our work is to sign up for our bi-weekly newsletter, and you can do that also by visiting us online at www.esi.org. Our briefing today is the second in a series about existing federal programs that deliver multiple climate benefits. On February 8th, we took a look at the Rural Energy Savings Program at the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Next up, we'll be briefings about climate adaptation programs across the federal government and efforts to build a national framework for large landscape conservation. We're very eager for the next generation of climate policies and investments, but we should also make sure to be knowledgeable about what is already working. And so if you get to sign up for this entire series, which we'll run through next month, visit us online at www.esi.org forward slash briefings and RSVP right away. What do we mean when we say that energy efficiency means business? Well, let me count the ways. First, and maybe most importantly, energy efficiency means business when it comes to its potential to deliver greenhouse gas emission reductions. Our friends at the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy found in the halfway there report that scaling up energy efficiency across key economic sectors could cut U.S. energy use in greenhouse gas emissions by 50% by 2050. Second, energy efficiency means business because it creates more jobs than any other clean energy sector. In our latest Climate Jobs fact sheet, we counted a total of 4.1 million climate jobs in the United States in 2020 and more than half of that total were energy efficiency jobs. And these are stable jobs in manufacturing, construction, and installation in every state that contribute to local economies and provide opportunities for job training in workforce development. These are jobs that are not easily outsourced with strong prospects for future growth. And third, energy efficiency literally means business, actual business, because of its near limitless potential for leveraging savings into additional investments and contributing to public-private partnerships. Federal agencies, states, and local governments have been enjoying the multiple benefits of cost-effective, cash flow-generating investments in energy efficiency for decades. And as the opportunity provided by energy efficiency has evolved, innovators in the public and private sectors have yet to run out of ideas about how to do more by using less if I can paraphrase our friends at the Alliance to Save Energy. I could go on, but I'll stop there and leave it to our panelists to take it from where I left off. And today we have a special guest. Representative Marcy Captor serves the 9th District of Ohio in the U.S. House of Representatives. She is a native of Toledo and took her first oath of office in January 1983. That makes Representative Captor the longest-serving woman in the history of the House. And of special relevance today, Representative Captor is a senior appropriator and chair of the Energy and Water Subcommittee, which provides funding for the programs we're about to discuss. Welcome, Representative Captor, to our briefing today. Thank you to the Environmental and Energy Study Institute for hosting this important congressional briefing at a time when America and the world is working to build a brighter, greener future for us all. We are at an exciting moment filled with endless possibilities. Energy is foundational to every aspect of our daily lives. The challenge and opportunity we have before us is how to produce and deliver it effectively, cleanly, affordably, and safely in this 21st century. As chair of the Energy and Water Appropriations Subcommittee, my role is to help steer America's energy, innovations, and possibilities to support our communities and the economy while protecting our environmental treasures and sustaining life on Earth. We carry out this vital mission across the federal government, but one of the most important is through the Department of Energy led by Secretary Jennifer Granholm, who lives and breathes this work every day. In this most recent year, our Energy and Water Subcommittee passed a $53 billion dollar bill to meet our nation's needs, investing in everything from improvements to our nation's power grid and the deployment of renewable technologies to the important work of energy efficiency programming being led at the Department of Energy. These programs and more will be discussed by our panelists shortly. Last year, thanks to the leadership of President Joe Biden, we also passed the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act because when you invest in renewable energy and green infrastructure, you invest in living wage jobs for hardworking Americans. This historic legislation and the resources it delivers will unlock our capacity to tackle the most pressing environmental and energy issues of our time. Combined, our Energy and Water Subcommittee and the Jobs and Infrastructure Bill will provide tens of billions of dollars all across our nation to create the energy future we need. It will put people to work in the energy jobs of the future and lower costs on families, seniors and businesses. Let me thank the panelists speaking here today as well as the Environmental and Energy Study Institute for organizing this conversation. Remember what America makes, builds and grows. Makes, builds and grows America. Together, we will deliver the energy solutions that power America forward. Thank you. Well, and thank you, Representative Capter, for joining our briefing today. It's very generous of you to share your time with us. It has been a long time privilege to work with you, Representative Capter, and your dynamite staff over the years to provide our policymaker audience with briefings about how energy efficiency does, in fact, mean business no matter how you look at it. Let me remind everyone that we will have some time for questions today and we will do our best to incorporate questions from our audience. If you have a question, you can send it to us two different ways. First, you can follow us on Twitter at EESI online. You can also send us an email. The email address to use is askASK at EESI.org. And that brings us to our first speaker of the day. Michael first is the Assistant Director at the Washington State Department of Commerce's Energy Division, which includes energy policy initiatives, emergency management and the weatherization program. Michael joined the weatherization network in 2009, drawn by the convergence of social justice and environmental sustainability. After working for five years with the New Mexico Energy Smart Program, he transitioned to Washington's Weatherization Program in 2014 and has been actively involved in the Weatherization Network's Weatherization Advisory Committee. Welcome, Michael. I love your background today for the Zoom call. I'm really looking forward to your presentation. Well, thanks so much, Dan, and thanks to EESI. And it's wonderful to share the stage with Chair Capter and the members of this panel. And I'm just going to test and make sure that I've been able to navigate Zoom efficiently. And you can see my screen. It looks great. Awesome. Well, thanks again. As I said, I'm Michael Furze. I'm an Assistant Director of the Department of Commerce. He, him, pronouns and took over the State Energy Office in addition to Washington State's Weatherization Program in 2016. This agency that I work for does a lot. We cover homelessness and housing programs, government infrastructure, international trade, and energy policy and programs. So it's a lot of fun folks doing important work that I get to work with and I get to bring energy efficiency into each of their portfolios as well as I can. What I'm going to share with you here is the challenge and the future that Chair Capter spoke about on the left hand side of this graphic of the emissions that are re-inventoryed in 2018 for the state of Washington alongside the targets that we set in 2020. And what we need to do is go from where we are today to the emissions reduction through the emissions reductions to get to our targets of the future. In order to hit those targets, everyone has to do their part. Every sector of the economy has got to do everything they can to reduce our emissions. And the good news is that we can do that. The state produced in its 2021 state energy strategy, a path to get to net zero by 2050. And the way we're getting there is through 100% clean electricity, clean, connected, energy efficient buildings, flexible, low carbon transportation, clean energy innovation that will bring about low carbon industry in our state. And it's very easy to say those things. It's a different thing entirely to move forward. And it's not something that Washington state can do on its own. And so the approach that we're taking is to work with communities as we move towards this 2050 transition and make sure that who benefits and who pays in this move to 2050 and cleaning up our energy economy distributes those benefits differently than we've been able to do previously. And we could not do this in Washington state without our partners in the federal government. State's on this really bold path to bring down emissions. We're partnering with communities, utilities, other stakeholders, and we've taken some important steps. I am in the middle of a presentation, and I'll be right back. Do you want to come sit with me? I'm sorry that I cannot. Go ahead and sit right there. I'll be with you in one sec. Washington state is on a bold path to reduce emissions. We passed legislation in 2019, 2020, 2021, around our electric grid, around buildings, around appliances, and we've got more to do. The seeds of all of that important work have come about from this partnership with the Department of Energy and the state energy program. The great thing about the state energy program is that it allows states to do the things that they need to do in order to move their energy economy forward. It gives each state, including Washington, the opportunity to pursue energy savings, to improve resilience and the sustainability of our communities, reduce air pollution to create jobs, and to help achieve climate energy and resilience goals. And we can do this while supporting workers through the transition. So the benchmark of this, for me, as you heard in the introduction, is the low-income weatherization program. This is where I started my career in New Mexico, and I'm really excited to see what we've been able to do in Washington state. We've been weatherizing homes for 40 years, and there's been particular attention paid since the 1980s to energy efficiency investments in Washington state, and we've weatherized enough homes in the 40 years that we've gotten all the low-hanging fruit. And so what we have done is focus our work on home rehabilitation so that we get homes that we've had to defer weatherization on before and get them ready for energy efficiency work and investments through the weatherization program. We've also focused on innovation in two areas. The first of those areas is thinking really deeply about improving the health of folks living in homes that we weatherized. And so our program now is chiefly a weatherization plus health program. And that allows us to do investments that will reduce asthma triggers and prevent slips, trips, and falls. The other side of the innovation coin is a partnership with the Washington State University Energy Extension Office with the C program, which actually spun out of the Recovery Act. The Aura Investment Dollars allow us to go into, well, that's where the program started. We continue to fund that program and partner with them through state funding and SEP work. And they will do things that really are above and out of the range of the low-income weatherization program. So folks that are maybe above income level, maybe weatherizing neighborhoods or mobile home communities, trying to bring specific community solutions to bear on a length of state and what our communities need. Part of our state energy strategy is expanding and continuing to expand the weatherization work that we do. Key issues for us are continuing to build on these healthcare investments and building on partnerships that we have with tribal governments in order to create jobs in those communities and also to do more weatherization work where it is needed in those highly vulnerable households. Some of the benefits of the weatherization program really are about reducing energy burden and improving the health outcomes for these households that we weatherize. It's really a strong component of our energy efficiency strategy for the state overall. And one of the key aspects of this is feeding the construction pipeline. There's the housing market here, like every other state at the moment is going gangbusters. And so we have an opportunity to train folks in energy efficient building practices that they can take with them as they pursue other careers in the building trades. Washington State is one where during the Recovery Act, everyone experienced in the weatherization program, Davis Bacon, we have a state prevailing wage law that has persisted since 2009 in the program that really makes these jobs, again, career pathways paying $20 to $25 an hour where folks can help support families. The other side of the partnership coin is the state energy strategy. And bear with me for just one second, please. Thank you for your patience. I wanna say one more thing about the weatherization program before I go to SAP. In addition to the four areas of funding that we've got, an area of innovation that we've been focusing on is Douglas heat pumps. There's some alignment with policy work that we're doing to electrify the building sector. And one of the challenges that we have heard from businesses in the state here is needing to get familiar with installing Douglas heat pump technology. And so through SAP funding, weatherization funding, we've been able to collaborate in the County of Yakima to deliver a Douglas heat program with the Yakama Nation Housing Authority. And that's some work that we're proud of. So shifting to SAP, this is a pretty, it's an amazing investment, as I said before. It provides states with lots of flexibility about how to go about their climate and energy work. And for us, these investments which are less than a million dollars a year have really translated into exciting energy and climate policy that matters for the people in the state of Washington. And it matters back to that slide earlier for us to be able to hit our emissions goals. So I think of SAP as the seed funding that allows ideas to grow and take root in the policy sphere, lead to legislation and additional state funding to pursue bold ideas. For us, that again has manifested itself in 2019 with the new clean buildings law. This is looking at buildings that are under over 50,000 square feet. They've got to hit an EUI target and energy use intensity target. We've got some state funding that will help them get there but it will create jobs and reduce energy use in the building sector, which is about a little bit more than a quarter of our emissions profile. It has helped us quite a bit over the course of the last couple of years and certainly the last few weeks as concerns over cybersecurity have been raised and thinking about planning and operations for energy emergency management. We help the state family reduce its emissions and toxics and its operations. And like the federal government, we are collaborating with the state's Department of Transportation to plan for electrification of our transportation sector and reduce emissions. And then we've spun out some interesting programs through our Clean Energy Fund. And that last one is an idea that took route through SEP funding in 2006 and has grown over time to become a 40 to $60 million investment. That's a partnership between communities, utilities to push grid innovation forward. So this again is a combination between the investment from the federal government and SEP, policy ideas from our state energy strategy and then leveraging state investments to move grid modernization forward. There are three projects here that I'll briefly touch on. Horns Rapid is a focused energy training program. The Opalco Battery Storage is a remote island community that pairs a microgrid with a solar power that has deferred the upgrade, quite an expensive upgrade of an underground C cable. And then the Miller Community Center is a partnership with the Utility Seattle City Light that will help keep lights on, cell phones powered and medicine cold in the event of sustained outage. Well, as I said, we're partnering, trying to mirror the feds and their collaboration between DOE and DOT, looking to electrify the way that we move people and material through the state. And we've just released a round of grants that will help move innovation forward. This is not simply charging, this is working with utilities to manage a number of different use cases. So what happens when you plug in a bus and fleet vehicles on a distribution feeder at the same time, how do you manage that work? And so we're excited to see what we can learn there and how we can push our innovation forward. So as I close, I just wanna say thank you for the partnership. The seed planted by the federal government and the flexible funding that is SEP has enabled Washington to take this bold action. We have a lot more to do. And I look forward to coming back to talk with you all about what we've been able to achieve over the next three to five years because of this partnership. Thank you. Thank you, Michael, for getting us off to a great start and no worries, but next time we might insist that the interrupter gets a little bit of screen time. At least sounded pretty cute. Once he gets on the camera, Dan, it might be hard to get him off, but I'll let him know that there's a desire there. Thank you, Steve. All right, well, then we'll be careful about to encourage that, but thank you very much for getting us off to a great start. Michael, you mentioned Opelco, Orca's power and light cooperative. We actually had a speaker from Opelco at our February 8th briefing, Travis Neal. So if anyone would like to learn more about that battery storage program and the on-bill financing that made it all possible, we do a lot of work with them. We're big fans of that project. And so I encourage everyone who wants to learn more to visit our website to watch that presentation from Travis back on February 8th. So thank you very much. Great presentation. That brings us to our second panelist. Christopher DeHess is Vice President of Global Public Affairs for Eaton, a global power management company that serves customers in more than 175 countries. Chris works cross-functionally with Eaton businesses to develop the company's strategic position on global regulatory legislative and governmental issues. Chris advises Eaton stakeholders on complex global policy issues, including aerospace, defense, energy, trade, taxation, government programs and procurement. Chris, welcome to our briefing today. I will turn it over to you. Thanks, Dan, appreciate it. Just bring up my presentation here. Okay, there we go. All right, so Dan, thank you so much for the opportunity to participate in the panel today. I think this is my fourth year, so I must be doing something right or maybe too complimentary, who knows? But again, it's really a great opportunity to share one company's perspective related to how important the Department of Energy and their various programs and labs are to our company, not only our company, but our industry. And since we were last together, it's been such a really significant sea change and focus towards these issues in general. And the energy transition is in full motion and Eaton is all about that. And as a country, the Department of Energy is at the center of our competitiveness as the globe shifts to a low carbon economy. So cannot stress enough the importance of the work of the people that are hopefully somewhere out there watching us on YouTube and other venues. And I also would like to praise Chairwoman Marcy Captor, who's just a great champion for energy policy in the United States. And I have had a pleasure of working with her and her staff for many years. And we are here in Ohio where she is a leader in our state and it's just been a great collaborative relationship in the past and then looking forward to more in the future. So Eaton Corporation is not a household name in many cases, but we obviously are supplying a lot of the power management solutions in the energy management market. We manage power intelligently, safely, securely and efficiently. And we really are bullish on our future as the megatrends around the globe are pointed to decarbonization and the better management and the resilient management of facilities and mission critical operations. So we really think that there's a lot of opportunity here and we have invested through acquisition and through investments in R&D on this trend. So it's very likely that if you're in the capital building or one of the house office buildings or you hope to go back there, our equipment is in the basement helping run that facility, right? So we're the power distribution and management systems for electrical power equipment. We're in buildings, we're in data centers, we're in schools, we're all over the place. And for us, that's half of our business. The other part of our business is vehicles both in the passenger car segment and the heavy duty segment. We've been doing technologies in that area for over a hundred years from the beginning as an axle company and as a transmission and engine management solutions and now taking the mechanical power that we've managed for over a hundred years and migrating it to electrification platforms. And because we have this competency and electrification we feel like we're really well suited for that challenge. Our other business is aerospace and we provide fuel management systems on the aircraft and that as well as going electric. So for the sake of time, I'm gonna skip through this one. We have a concept that we've been calling everything as a grid. And it's approach of advancing technologies and digital intelligence and optimizing the energy that our customers use. So it's adding value through efficiency and cost reduction. It's helping them contribute to decarbonization and reducing their emissions to meet their own sustainability goals which everybody has now turned their ships towards. And it allows them to collect the data of this power management system and apply it in many, many different ways so that it can anticipate problems in a system. It can correct problems in a system and it can actually monetize that data. So it's actually so more valuable in terms of a product for our customers. And if you think about the different ways that we use energy, we're really focused on the data like data centers. Those are the sort of the factories of information. And we have really grown a business in making sure that those facilities stay up and running because as we know through the pandemic, they have to run because our economies depend on it. But not only are we looking at the fact of running those more efficiently and making sure that those mission critical applications stay on, we're looking at opportunities to take stored power within the storage capabilities of our systems and putting them back onto the grid to contribute to the energy demands of the grid and reducing emissions of the overall grid. It could be more local. It could be more managed from a local management system like a microgrid and really looking at that trend both in Europe and the United States. We look at the vehicle. Obviously there's a transition in the passenger vehicle from the mechanical and internal combustion engine to electric drive. We've seen hybrids and now we're going to plug in hybrid and then we're going all electric. There's a lot more components for electrification in a company like Eaton and that kind of vehicle than in the previous technology. So we're investing our way into that and we're bringing a systems approach to it with more efficient inversion and conversion on the vehicle which makes those batteries go even farther. So we're trying to contribute to the reduction in range of anxiety and doing it in a really cost-effective manner with that 50 years of experience and inversion of electrical power. And on aircraft certainly there's opportunities for us to take mechanical systems and electrify them and then have diagnostics to forecast issues and have parts at the ready that we can make there at their destination with advanced manufacturing technologies. I should also mention too that our heavy duty truck segment which has been traditionally a significant player in drivetrain and drivetrain management is now electrifying and we have expertise in understanding how to manage power in 11,000 different duty cycles in that heavy duty segment. So it's not one size fits all there and the Department of Energy and their programs at the vehicle technology office are critical for companies like Eaton to really explore opportunities to bring electrification to the fore there and it's not only battery electric but it's also the future of fuel cells in the class eight segment. We really feel there's a very big opportunity for fuel cell technologies in class eight. Otherwise, those trucks are gonna be carrying batteries around rather than goods and services that we need. So in any event, we're really bullish on that trend as well. So this approach of the traditional generation and obviously there's a shift from some of the coal and perhaps some of the natural gas into more renewable sources of energy. What it's gonna take is investments in transmission. So the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act has a significant investment to jumpstart the deployment of those technologies that we need to have distributed energy resources all over the country. We have a great grid, it's just old, right? We've made this investment, we've got to upgrade it so that we can really realize the potential that renewable integration into the grid and then localized generation can bring to the fore. And if we're gonna have electric vehicles, be part of the electrification system, you've got to upgrade both the high voltage distribution system and the median voltage and the local distribution systems in that environment for the building that you're working in or in your home. And we are all over that environment and our approach is to integrate that as a system and to really look at a holistic approach that drives adoption of these technologies. So this is sort of a schematic of how that works in a building setting. This is sort of Eaton's bread and butter and now we're taking it to that next step. You're integrating not just a localized generation through solar or perhaps wind or another applications. We're managing and storing that power and we're electrifying fleets, allowing them to use the resources that are generated there on site. We're storing them for when you need them. And this is a story we all know about but we're sort of uniquely positioned because we have connection to all of those systems. And for us, it's an exciting time as we migrate to that. So how does that integrate into what the Department of Energy does and the important work that they do in their different offices and ERE? And how important is it that Congress maintain and grow the funding in these areas not only for research and development but to demonstrate the technologies and to really look at how we are manufacturing things so that we can get into integrated circuits and all kinds of different technologies that bring these technologies to the market. So if you look at this schematic here, we are again, of course, all over this ecosystem but each of the offices and we're engaged with all of these offices have a responsibility to help drive adoption of technologies in the different areas that we need to really see the energy transition become reality. So you've got the grid modernization lab consortium where we're doing grid scale storage and you're looking at solar energy technology office and behind the meter solar and distributed energy storage there and technology commercialization fund where cyber and energy storage and fleet charging have to come together because cyber is not something that is an advantage it's going to be inherent in everything that we do and you can't go a day without seeing headlines about the importance of cyber security and the vehicle technology office which we have a long standing relationship with and the importance of really driving efficiency and the adoption of system-wide approaches to deployment of electrification all kinds of different vehicles and especially again in that heavy duty segment where there's so many different vehicles that do so many different jobs and how do we tailor make solutions for those systems that make sense? So for us it's really important investments that are being made there and it really is shifting to electrification specifically and really kind of phasing out those internal combustion engine programs and then of course the advanced manufacturing office the focus of making sure that the United States is making the appropriate investments so that we have supply chain resiliency supply chain is an issue for everybody doesn't matter if you're trying to get a cup of coffee or if you need a transformer for the grid there's challenges now but the investments that are being made today are gonna help us work through that and then eventually we're gonna be world-class and we're gonna have sort of a renaissance in manufacturing in this country that's starting from a very efficient and a very technologically advanced standpoint. So as we're engaging with these different partners both in the commercial area through our customers and then with the national laboratories we are crisscrossing this country working on all kinds of technologies and development and deployments and working with partners in about 20 different states. I'll tell you a little story about each of these different programs not all of these, but it give you a good example of how we're doing that. So the one partnership that has been extremely valuable for us is our partnership with Denver. We have 20 engineers embedded in NREL's offices in Colorado. And what this does instead of getting on a Zoom call we can put a mask on and go down the hall and talk to world-class engineers. We have access to software and demonstration and the technologies that we need to leverage the critical computing power that they bring to bear so that we can do things more efficiently and get them into the demonstration, into market quicker. So for us, this partnership has been world-class and it just bears fruit all the time for us. Advanced fuel cell, we talked about the opportunities in electrification and hydrogen is an electrification technology it's just taking power from hydrogen sources and converting it to power into the drivetrain for electricity. And for us, it's making these systems more cost effective trying to find ways to take technologies that we've used for decades in driving airflow management systems that are very, very high pressure and allowing for very high density of power generation in this hydrogen air system fuel cell that we're developing. This is a program that we won last year in partnership with Ballard and NREL and extremely excited about the opportunities in this space. We talk about the heavy-duty truck space and all electric vehicles would be the greatest end goal if we could get there but we're just starting to migrate into these areas. And while we've had electric vehicles in the passenger side for over a decade at some scale on the heavy-duty side we're just beginning to realize the possibilities. Eden had a hybrid system that we developed in the mid 2000s and we brought it out to the market in the 2009, 2010 timeframe. And we were enjoying a lot of great sales and interest the systems work, but they were just too expensive. The cost of battery technologies were just way too expensive. The work that the DOE did to invest in battery technologies now brings us to a time where battery technology is a lot less expensive. And you can really start thinking about integrating these systems into this heavy-duty space at a cost-effective manner that paid themselves back for a truck fleet within two to three years which is the timeframe that they need to make those investments. On top of that, we can electrify components and drive train systems to bring electric power to the duty cycle when it needs it on demand. And then we can cruise in with the internal combustion engine and in a very efficient low emissions area. So we can drive emissions from those vehicles down to 0.02 or 0.03 measurements there for the missions. The ones that they're talking about probably getting new regulations for. So it's low emissions, low CO2 output and tailor-made for these different duty cycles. We're also taking this technology off-road and so that it can impact agriculture equipment and construction equipment because that is a segment that really hasn't had a lot of investment but there's a lot of opportunity to reduce emissions and drive cost reductions into those segments and then have them really drive electrification into the agricultural sort of scheme of things here. And then these are just different components that we're working with, high impact charging programs for school buses. And with the injection of funding in the infrastructure package for school buses to electrify, we're really, really excited about the opportunities for school districts to reduce emissions and to drive efficiencies. And they have lots of fleets and those fleets have to work, right? So we're a part of that solution set that makes sure that when you turn the key that the vehicle works and that the charging is there and that everything is seamless so that those kids can get the school and the school districts can operate efficiently. The same thing can go for a transit fleet as well. And there's a lot of technologies there that have been in the market. We're into making the components in those systems a lot more efficient to make the battery systems last longer in the duty cycle. Okay, that wraps up my portion of it. I look forward to the questions and the dialogue later. Thank you, Chris. Definitely doing something right and it starts with your slide. They were great, lots of information there. It's a great reminder or great time for me to make a reminder with our audience that if you'd like to go back and visit Chris's presentation of course, everything will be posted online at www.ESI.org. That includes an archive of the webcast today as well as presentation materials for all of our panelists. I'd like to do that no problem at all. And over the next week or two we'll also be posting summary notes and things like that. Like Chris said, we have made this briefing a bit of a tradition. Chris is a repeat panelist but our next panelist is new this year and it is really, really nice to welcome him to the Energy Efficiency Means Business Family. Vincent Barnes, the Senior Vice President of Policy and Research for the Alliance to Save Energy and he's the organization's primary policy lead. Vincent's responsible for working to ensure the Alliance to Save Energy is the leading voice on energy efficiency policy in Washington DC. He's a respected government affairs professional with over 20 years of policy and executive leadership experience. Vincent's got a track record engaging members of Congress participating in regulatory rulemaking, legislative development and stakeholder engagement and as a proud Alliance alumni or alumnus, Vincent it is really, really nice to welcome you to the panel today. I'll turn it over to you. Thank you, Dan and greatly appreciate it. Allow me to take a brief moment and bring up today's presentation. There we go. So good afternoon again and it's a pleasure certainly to be on today's panel. As Dan said, I am Vincent Barnes and I have the privilege of serving as the Alliance to Save Energy Senior Vice President of Policy Research and Analysis. I've been asked to provide an overview of two offices within the Department of Energy's Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy known as EERE. The primary focus for today in this presentation will be the Buildings Technology Office known as BTO and the Advanced Manufacturing Office AMO. I will provide a review and background of each office generally high level followed by a discussion on how BTO and AMO are funded through appropriations. I will then end with a brief discussion of BTO and AMO and selected provisions of the Infrastructure Investments Jobs Act and Budget Reconciliation formerly known as Build Back Better. Let's see, did we advance slides? We did not. There we go. I'll commence with the Buildings Technology Office. The primary function of BTO is to improve energy performance in U.S. buildings of which there are some 129 million. The general purpose of the office is constant although it's safe to say that levels of activity if you will and focus can differ depending on White House administrations and political majorities to be quite candid. This is evidenced in the current administration where there is significant focus on decarbonization and equity. BTO leads in programming, research, technology development and evaluation that forwards the administration's priorities in the built environment. This occurs through improving energy efficiency in new and existing homes and commercial buildings including through research, development, demonstration and deployment of advanced technologies to positively impact building performance, utilizing advanced building technologies, advanced building envelope technologies, advanced building construction technologies, appliance and equipment standards and lastly energy codes. The purpose of this focus is really quite simple and reflects the challenge and opportunity in the built environment as the U.S. attempts to mitigate the effects of climate change. The challenge, of course, is the amount of carbon emissions and energy use associated with residential and commercial buildings. That's the challenge. The opportunity is deployment of energy efficiency technologies that reduce energy use and load resulting in an inevitable decrease in carbon emissions. The technologies developed and deployed through BTO play a large role in emissions reductions as the grid transforms. And once that transformation is complete, developed built environment energy efficiency technologies will certainly play a more than substantive role in reducing load on the grid, increasing energy reliability and achieving energy affordability and productivity. Through research, development, demonstration and deployment and in partnership with the private sector, state and local governments, national laboratories and universities, BTO works to improve the efficiency of buildings and the equipment components and systems within them including the electric grid integration and advanced energy storage. The program supports research and development activities and provides tools, guidelines, training and access to technical and financial resources. In the residential built environment which accounts for about 20% of US-related greenhouse gas emissions. This includes a focus on technologies, policies and partnerships to improve the energy efficiency and performance of new and existing homes including single family, multi-family and manufactured. In the commercial buildings context which accounts for approximately 16% for all US carbon emissions. This includes research and development via public private partnerships that reduce energy waste, improve energy efficiency and the eventual goal if you will of zero emissions from commercial buildings by 2050. That said, two additional areas of focus for BTO include appliance and equipment standards and energy codes. Among BTOs mandates is the development of minimum energy efficiency standards and appliances and building equipment. These standards drive emissions reductions in energy efficiency in the built environment. Normal appliances such as refrigerators, laundry machines, dishwashers, they're actually responsible for nearly 13% of home energy use. Current appliance standards save consumers approximately $320 annually on energy bills. As a result of appliance efficiency standards we've seen significant performance, significant performance improvements if you will since 1990. And just as examples, washers now use 75% less energy than they use in 1990. Dishwashers use 53% less energy. AC 50% less energy and so on. As we think about energy codes while the DOE does not develop building energy codes in the same way in which it develops equipment and appliance standards. DOE works closely with ASHRAE and the International Code Council as commercial and residential building codes are developed by these two entities and provides feedback and provides comment as model codes are developed and eventually adopted at the state or local level. Moving on to appropriations. The building technology office is subject to annual appropriations which supports the work of the office including the research, development, demonstration and deployment of performance energy efficiency technologies in the built environment. Generally speaking, the office has experienced a measured increase over the last decade as we anticipate the need for a significant increase in the forward years as the US attempts to identify additionally mission reduction strategies in addition to the solutions required to reduce energy use to achieve a decrease in energy intensity and load on a decarbonized grid. Finally, I'll cover a few highlights in the Infrastructure Investment Jobs Act that include BTO or where there are intersections if you will with BTO objectives. This includes 225 million to support energy code development and implementation, three billion for smart grid investments including smart buildings technologies, 40 million for workforce training connected to built environment energy management and 10 million for colleges and universities to facilitate energy efficiency design in the built environment including research and development. As we consider what would happen in budget reconciliation, I will mention two highlights. The first of which is additional funds to further energy code adoption. As passed by the House, budget reconciliation will provide an additional 300 million to further building code adoption. This includes 100 million to adopt the most recently published codes for residential and commercial buildings and certainly 200 million dollars to adopt the zero energy provisions within the relevant codes or stretch codes. One additional highlight that intersects with BTO is relevant energy and implementation in addition to the use of BTO is relevant energy efficiency tax incentives. This necessarily includes the 25C credit for homeowners, the 45L credit for home builders and the 179D deduction for commercial building owners. Budget reconciliation would extend all of these incentives and increases the value of each beyond what is in current law. That said, it's important to note that 25C and 45L expired at the end of last year, however we anticipate extension and expansion of these credits should budget reconciliation come together and certainly extension and possible expansion of the credits if it does not but needs to move through some other legislative vehicle. It's also important to note here that while DOE and BTO are not specifically engaged in development of those standards, they certainly weigh in on how the various energy efficiency tax provisions are applied and of course the standards that may also apply to them as well. I will now pivot if you will to a discussion on the Advanced Manufacturing Office or AMO. The Advanced Manufacturing Office formerly known as the Industrial Technologies Program, AMO engages with industry to support research, development and deployment of industrial energy efficiency and environmental performance in the industrial and manufacturing environment with a focus on commercialization of emerging technologies, increasing productivity through R&D, development of various software tools and other resources. As a general rule, R&D investments are high impact, use project diversity to spread risk, target nationally important innovation that critical decision points and contribute to quantifiable energy savings. The R&D portfolio covers multiple areas, including about limited to electric machines, think advancements in power electronics and motors. CHP are combined heat and power, high performance computing, innovation through lab and vetted entrepreneurship programs, next generation manufacturing, emerging research exploration, innovative process and materials technologies, small business innovation research and next generation materials. Similar to BTO, AMO is also subject to annual appropriations, but comparatively speaking, AMO has experienced a higher percentage of increase over time. This is arguably the result of the climate imperative in addition to the recognition of untapped efficiencies in the industrial and manufacturing space, which reportedly accounts for about 30% of USGHD emissions. As we highlight the intersections with the infrastructure investments job back, I'll just mention a single but significant highlight. In the infrastructure legislation, Congress authorized 550 million for industrial research and assessment centers based in institutions for higher learning. Importantly, these funds are for optimizing energy efficiency and environmental performance within industrial and manufacturing facilities. That said, funds are also made available for grants to small and medium size manufacturers for upgrades recommended by an industrial assessment center or by combined heat and power technical assistance center. With that said, I should add if you've been watching the news feed over the last few weeks, you certainly have noticed that there is a reorganization currently occurring within DOE, including in the EERE space. I won't go much into that, but we anticipate some movement in terms of responsibilities being traded off and being picked up from other entities within DOE and being shared within other entities within EERE. But I believe Jennifer who will follow me will go into greater detail on some of those changes. And with that, I'll stop there and thank you, Dan, and thank you EESI for the opportunity to provide this brief review of BTO and also AMO. Thank you, Vincent, for joining us today. And if you'd like to go back in our audience, if you'd like to go back and review Vincent's slides, there's lots there, everything will be available online. Also, Vincent gave us a lot to digest. If anyone in the audience has questions, there are two ways you can ask your questions. One is you can send us an email and that email address is askask at esi.org or you can also follow us on Twitter at ESI online and we'll do our best to incorporate questions from the audience in our discussion. But before we get to our discussion, we will be joined by our fourth panelist. Jennifer Schaefer is the president of Cascade Associates, a governmental affairs consulting firm located here in Washington, DC. Jennifer is appearing today as executive director of the Federal Performance Contracting Coalition, which is focused on accelerating the pace, easing the approval process and increasing the number of performance contracts with the federal government. Jennifer has more than 25 years of public policy experience and energy and environmental issues and she began her Washington tenure at the office of Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska and later served as a consultant to DOE. Jennifer, welcome to our briefing today. I will turn it over to you. You're muted, Jennifer. Sorry about that. I'm trying to figure out how to share my screen. I was so successful earlier. There we go. Let's go here. And I think we got something going on now. Okay, I won't go into that, but I am Jennifer Schaefer of the Federal Performance Contracts Coalition. I represent energy service companies that do work with the federal government. These are those companies. They're big companies, but what they all have in common is they do work with the federal government on performance contracting and they're all approved to be on a master contract to do basically energy upgrades for the federal government and for individual facilities within the federal government. I will say just a couple of words because it's a little more, it's a little complicated. These all do performance contracting, particularly energy savings performance contracting. And in such a contract, these companies, a company like this would go in, be invited into a federal facility because they're having some kind of facility issue or energy related issue. They develop a project that's comprehensive and uses energy and water savings to pay for the project. So they will do the investment grade audit, they provide the financing or attract the financing. They enter into the contract, they get the subcontractors, they build the project and then they're in a long-term contract to get paid back through guaranteed energy savings. They also provide operations and maintenance and those types of things. So it's a real good deal for the federal government that get infrastructure without upfront money. So here I am at an appropriations discussion. Why am I talking about things that need no money? We'll get to that. Performance contracts are getting bigger, they're getting more complex. And so that is one of the things we'll talk about a little bit today. Right now they're being driven in part by general needs of the federal government, which are many and we'll get into a little bit of that. But also by the executive order that came out in December, it's the president's federal sustainability executive order. And it has some very big bold goals like a hundred percent carbon reduction, a hundred percent carbon free electricity, a hundred percent net zero carbon buildings, big bold goals. And so we are, performance contracting is a tool to reach those goals and other important needs of the federal government. The executive order goals that performance contracting really addresses is it allows the federal sector to reduce carbon emissions, demand reductions, you heard it before from speakers, demand reductions, reduced carbon, getting more efficient, quickest, cheapest, easiest way to reduce our carbon emissions. And by the way, to move towards a hundred percent carbon free electricity, the less you need to generate, the quicker we're going to be able to and more cost effectively will be able to generate all electricity from carbon free sources. We also facilitate electrification efforts, which is another big goal of this administration in that we do smart buildings, grid integrated buildings, grid flexible buildings, putting in electric technologies. And we performance contracts advanced environmental justice goals. This one seems a little weird, but we did an analysis of the performance contracts done with the federal government in 2020. And cause we just picked a year that was fairly recent. And over 40% of those projects were done in hub zones and more than 40% of those projects used minority and disadvantaged contractors for about 40% of the work. But performance contracts don't just help out this administration's executive order and big bold goals. We're addressing things like crumbling infrastructure. The federal government has $170 billion worth, billion with a B, worth of infrastructure investments and backlog maintenance that they have not been able to get to and cannot afford to address. Additionally, we're doing a lot of resiliency, whether that's climate resiliency, resiliency against a foe, which is where Department of Defense is thinking, resiliency against blackouts that are weather related, whatever it might be, resiliency is super important. So is cybersecurity. The other things that performance contracts do is they allow the input operations of maintenance. So that's really important right now as the government doesn't have a lot of people to do maintenance themselves, much less really complicated maintenance on really complicated systems. And performance contracts guarantee results. This is super important. We measure and verify the results every year during the performance period of a performance contract. And if we don't reach the guaranteed level of savings, then we pay. So everything that's under the performance contract is guaranteed to do what we have guaranteed that it will do. So why appropriations? Performance contracts are getting bigger. We're trying to address a lot of interest. It's not just either old fashioned, let's do the lighting and the air conditioning. It's comprehensive. People want deep energy retrofits. They all want resiliency. They want renewables on site. They wanna be cyber secure and they want to have fence to fence projects that aren't individual energy conservation members. They want to go big and get everything done in a way that frankly makes most sense if you can do it all together. Not everything pays back with energy savings, right? Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't. But the first thing reason we're here to talk about appropriations is we're gonna talk about the FEMP program, which is the program at the Department of Energy is in EERE, but maybe not after the reorganization. It's moved to S3. We think that might be an elevation of the importance, but maybe it's not. However, that's something we can get into and the questions if people have questions, that has been moved out of energy efficiency and renewable energy to the implementation office. But anyway, the FEMP program, we're asking for $60 million. We're doing that because this program helps every single agency and every single site within the federal government meet their goals. Whether those are energy goals, water goals, climate goals, goals to get more resilient needs to be cyber secure. They do education and training and they help with projects individually. They have project facilitators. They do technology evaluations. They do everything, not just for performance contracting, but all efforts to meet executive order goals and other goals. They're tracking those, they're facilitating those, they're advising on those. So it's a little program with a big impact. So we're asking for $60 million for FEMP. It was funded in 22 at 60 million in the House and Senate recommendations. We do know there's probably gonna be some nicks and cuts in that as they finalize things here, as you finalize things here. And then within that, we wanted $20 million for this affect grant program. And that program has been in effect since Congress actually started it. So thank you in 2019 to put a little bit of money into performance contracts so that they can go big. Example, you might have a performance contract with lots of energy savings. You almost got enough with the utility rates in that particular spot in the country that you could also get your microgrid, but oh, whoops, maybe the battery backup system that doesn't quite make it. So you've got a little bit of money in need for that and everything else fits under the efficiency bundle. Great, that's the kind of thing the affect grant program does. And we're really enthusiastic about that program. The House and Senate recommended 20 million in this FY22. Again, we've probably see a little cut to that. 21 and 20 was at 11 million. I'll tell you from the 20 budget, $11 million of affect grants leveraged $443 million of private sector investment in federal government. So a little can go a really long way with this kind of leveraging. I did want to mention there was money in the IJA for the affect grant program. At least we think it's for the affect grant program. It's under the same authority. So probably gonna be something like that. It's $250 million over five years. That may beg the question, why should there be appropriations for it on an annual basis? And I think the answer would be $170 billion of backlog maintenance and net zero carbon buildings. We have a lot of work, we have a lot of capacity and we should get moving on and it will significantly reduce our costs of the federal government going forward as well as our emissions. Couple other things that performance contracting does is it's a big job creator. If you think about the fact that direct funding like design build, a building infrastructure for the federal government, if the federal government spent $5 billion to just go out there and do design build, they would create almost 50,000 jobs. Well, hey, that sounds pretty good. But if instead they use that to leverage performance contract, even only at 10 to one, they get a half of a million jobs. So the same way it leverages big activity and big money and it also leverages big job creation. And again, I just wanted to mention, CO2 savings can be pretty robust, not just through performance contracting, but efficiency alone. Efficiency alone can meet 50% through performance contracting with some of these leveraged dollars. We can reduce emissions in the federal government by 50% by 2032 from the president's baseline level. And that's before we even start thinking about how do we reduce, or how do we become all electric or all renewable or all non-carbon grid? You can really do a lot with demand side. And I think it was someone early on in the presentation. I think it was Dan mentioned the ACEE-EE study halfway there. I really commend you to take a look at that. Efficiency can do a lot for a little and really help out. So that was all I had. I'm gonna stop there so we can get to the questions. I promise Dan I'd be able to leave us some room for questions. Thank you. Looking forward to it. That was great. Great, Jennifer. Thank you very much. And lots of free publicity today for ACEE-EE is happening right there. But it really is that good. And if you haven't read it yet, I really encourage you to do it. I will invite all of our panelists to turn their videos back on because we will now move into Q&A. There's still an opportunity to ask questions and I see a couple of them coming in. You can follow us online at ESI online, that's Twitter, Instagram, et cetera. You can also send us a question, ASK.ESI.org. Jennifer, actually you sort of in a way predicted the first question, we will go back to the top of the order because it's been a little while since we've heard from Michael and the others. But I'd like to revisit the findings of that ACEE-EE report. The potential for energy efficiency to deliver about half of the greenhouse gas emissions reductions necessary to meet our climate goals. I'm curious, Michael, we'll start with you again. I'm curious sort of what you see in front of you next three to five-ish years as the most significant opportunities for energy efficiency. And if there are ways that you could also perhaps talk about where the infrastructure bill might fit in to that or where that bill might encourage those savings to come from. Or also, as Jennifer mentioned and Vincent mentioned, DOE has plans to implement the infrastructure bill and that will change a little bit about how the agency's organized. So are there any other, within your answer, are there any opportunities that may come from that? But Michael, we'll turn it to you first and then we'll go through the order. Yeah, thanks Dan and thanks panelists for the exciting conversation that you've teed up. For those of you that watched my segment, Good News, my son found his iron name costume. So all is good in the world. I look forward to wearing it later. When I think about the work that Washington will be doing, we're fortunate to have kind of the policy landscape mapped out for us. That's by virtue of this 2021 state energy strategy that I talked about earlier. And we have been bringing new legislative ideas from that suite of policies through legislative sessions last year and this year, focused on reach codes, focused on expanding the 2019 clean buildings law to capture smaller buildings and have them do energy assessments, sub-metering and then energy efficiency upgrades. There's work to do to target electrification, specific communities, specific technologies. And we'll see. I know that not all those bills will pass this session so we will continue to move the conversation forward from there. Then there's kind of the bread and butter of our work. We know that there are 100,000 homes that need to be weatherized, many more that need to be upgraded in order to be weatherized and folks need customized and unique treatments for their individual homes. So what I can see is the opportunity for pretty large workforce expansion. And focusing our efforts in communities that have environmental health disparities lighting up with the Justice 40 principles and figuring out how we can bring black, indigenous, people of color and businesses into these opportunities and those conversations are going on right now. And folks are asking, when will the money be available? What credentials do I need? How do I start the training? So there's kind of that piece around policy discussion. There's that piece around the things that we know, play a role in our clean, affordable, and just energy future efficiency and then associated work. And then there's the kind of the leading edge piece of this. How do we set up kind of the technology that Chris laid out in his awesome slide from the grid storage initiative, the next generation of connected buildings? How do we get folks trained up to use that? How do we test those technologies on our grid and in our buildings, maybe break them, figure out how to do it better the next time? There's a role for states and probably national labs to play a part in that R&D. We're fortunate to have the Pacific Northwest National Lab who's helping that initiative. But they also have focused their, some of their time over the past year to bring the technology out of the lab and into communities. We have a smart city in Spokane, a medium-sized city with great basketball school. And they have an interconnected city that's a partnership with the utility, the lab and community members trying to get a sense of how we can build IT into the work here. What's gonna matter is how quickly funding becomes available. And so the hope from us and from other states is that the infrastructure funds for SEP and for weatherization can get released all at once so we can plan as I think we need to spend that money in timely and thoughtful way to take advantage of the opportunities ahead of us. And in addition to that funding, it's also helpful to get and increase the formula or the annual appropriations to go along with that so we can pair kind of the regular work that we're doing with these significant investments. And I guess the last piece that, well, I'll leave it there and let other panelists jump in with their thoughts. Thanks, Dan. Thanks, Michael. Chris, let's turn to you. So I would go back to the American Rescue Plan as well. There's a tremendous amount of money still making its way through the states. They're investing in clean water facilities and wastewater facilities. All upgrades for those facilities, if they're putting in new switch gear, power distribution equipment, it's gonna be 30, 40% efficient than what they have there now. It's 20 years old. It's just mathematics and physics. And it's for us, it's just a wonderful opportunity to do something that is cost-agnostic but just gonna just drive a lot of efficiency. If you look at the infrastructure package, the facility modernization, again, same concept. EV deployment will require power distribution equipment upgrades, transformers. So as long as we can get them, because supply chain issues are prevalent throughout the system, we're working through them. But all of that is an opportunity to upgrade equipment. As I mentioned, water, the reshoring of supply chains for resiliency and redundancy, for companies and government and everybody else, it's happening. And when they're doing this, they're doing it with the most modern equipment and they're gonna have it so that it's the most efficient. So there's a lot there. And the drive for sustainability in private organizations is significant as well. You have people making aggressive targets for 10 years from now and they gotta start yesterday. So all of that is coming in the next three to five years. We love it here, Dean. Vincent, love to hear what you have to say about opportunities next three to five years and where infrastructure and DOEs plan to implement the infrastructure bill might fit in. No, sure, I appreciate the question, Dan. A couple of things. Harkening back to the energy efficiency can reduce carbon emissions by 50% by 2050 as we think about what that means and where those reductions would actually occur. We're actually talking about the five or so sectors in the economy that are responsible for greenhouse gas emissions. And so we're talking transportation. I have a 2019 figure in front of me that's a transportation is 29% of GHG. We're talking about electricity generation at 25%, 2019 numbers, industry at 23%, 2019 numbers, commercial and residential, 13%, agriculture, 10%. That study is really talking about extracting energy efficiency and driving down energy intensity, if you will, in those sectors. And so as we think about offices like BTO, AMO, BTO, those offices are responsible really for kind of driving energy efficiency in those areas, in industry, in transportation and also in commercial and residential in the built environment. Having said that, as we think about what the focus would be, where are the challenges, where are the opportunities in energy efficiency? Right now, we have the luxury of looking at energy efficiency as a major workhorse in the carbon reduction strategy. Having said that in the future, once the grid decarbonizes or once the grid is at low to zero, energy efficiency will play an even more significant role in domestic energy and also in domestic climate policy. And that role is in decreasing load on the grid. As we think about what it is that we're trying to do in energy transformation, we are releasing our dispatchable fuel resources, our natural gas potentially. And for a more heavy reliance, if you will, on variable fuel resources like solar and wind. Mind you, at the same time, we have a concurrent policy running to electrify, which means that we will be plugging more things in. And so literally as we're reducing our reliance on dispatchable fuel resources, increasing our reliance on variable fuel resources, we are actually demanding more from the grid by plugging more things in. The question becomes, how do we do that and keep electricity and energy reliable? The answer to that question is going to be, and is energy efficiency? Energy efficiency is that thing that's going to effectively lower demand on the grid, thus reducing the need to build excess capacity, quite frankly. And to that, energy efficiency will also be the tool, particularly as we think about its role in modulating or mitigating demand on the grid. It will also be the tool that drives equity and energy, quite frankly. And it will also be the tool that will ensure that energy is affordable. Very well said. I think you got some snaps from Michael. Always a good sign. Jennifer, I'll give you the last word on the question. Where do you see the opportunities in the performance contracting space in the next few years? So I totally agree with Vincent and I think he's spot on. I would really emphasize that in the next three to five years, energy efficiency has the ability to get us to a greener grid quicker, cheaper. It's something we don't think about much, right? We don't hear people talking about, oh, clean energy, that's energy efficiency. No, no, no, no. They go right to solar and wind. That's great, we're all for that. My guys install that stuff day after day after day. We love it. But efficiency is the little engine that could. And I think we have to start thinking it in terms of what it allows us to do with the grid. We can't put all those electric vehicles on the grid if we don't seriously reduce demand. Otherwise, it's just not there for us. So that's kind of where I'm coming from. And then I'd like to add that comes through technology and innovation in the energy efficiency space. Much like the US has invested in solar and wind in anticipation of the need to address the issues of climate change, we will have to make an even more significant investment in energy efficiency to ensure that we're balancing load and capacity. And to rep my Eskos again, and we need to start moving right now because we have a lot we can do in the next five years. Think about it. If we got $70 million in the IJA annually, it's 50 plus 20 that we're asking for appropriations. This is not ridiculous amounts of money. We can bang out over the next five years, 10, 15% of that backlog maintenance, which is significant, $10, $15 million, or yeah, $1 million worth, no, more than that, $1 million worth of work. All these B's and T's and I can't keep track. Jennifer, I'm gonna rip with you for a minute on energy efficiency if I can, Dan. And that is just to add, when you think about it, since 1990, washers use 75% less energy. I mean, you have to ask yourself, the washing machine essentially does the same function, but wow, it uses 75% less energy. That's innovation, that's research, that's development. Those are investments made by the government to actually get us there. And we can do that with other types of equipment and appliances as well, and we'll need to, quite frankly. Yeah, absolutely. The refrigerator is the one, right? Refrigerators compared to mid-70s refrigerators, they're bigger, they use less energy, they dispense water, they make ice, they do all of this stuff, and it's all been spurred by innovation in response to the efficiency standards. So it's a great message. I would like to double back to something that's come up a little bit, but it's workforce development. And I think for those of us who know energy efficiency, we know that there's almost no way to minimize its importance as a source of job creation, but I feel like we haven't given it it to do. And so Michael, I'm happy to start once again with you, but we can also make this more of a lightning round. Love to hear from the panelists about sort of where we are in terms of the state of play and workforce development. For instance, weatherization I sort of think of as a workforce development program in disguise in a lot of ways, but I'd love to hear sort of where we are with workforce development, where we are with sort of the next generation of energy efficiency workers. And Chris, it looks like you may wanna go first, but then I'd love to hear everyone else's perspective. Sure, I mean, this is a challenge. I mean, it's a challenge to find talent and it's extremely competitive in the private segment and especially in our arena here in the power management segment. It's gonna be critically important that we train the current talent that we have that has been focused on mechanical engineering, for example, for decades, extremely bright and talented people as they transition to electrical. We need to find ways to get them sort of that extra training and I mean, they'll pick it up real easily there, but we need those folks to remain in the industry and remain with thousands of these folks and we need I think help and special programs to focus on that initiative, number one. And then I think number two, in terms of when we're looking to deploy the technologies, there's gonna be a whole lot of new opportunities to do projects that are different. And again, getting people out of the research areas or out of the universities that not only have an engineering background but can do construction as well, it's gonna be vitally important. So I don't know if I can pinpoint a program that's really doing it well, but we've been having a lot of conversations about some of the proposals and build back better and how we need to make sure that they're driving this electrification theme through the research and through the workforce development opportunities. It's not just manufacturing, it's actually engineering as well. But I'll just say that build back better has a bunch of that stuff in it, but there's also $70 million worth of work in the IIJA in different buckets for workforce development and they have different focuses but they all are about developing the clean energy workforce. Much of it is focused on efficiency. There's a number of things around buildings. There's industrial program related stuff. So I know that we're trying to address it, but yes, our members find that workforce is a problem at the moment. That and supply chain are two of the things that are an issue. I would add, Dan, just in terms of the role of energy efficiency in the clean energy workforce, energy efficiency is the largest employment provider in the clean energy space, first of all. And but having said that, we have more work to do in terms of diversity and inclusion, not just in energy efficiency, but throughout the energy workforce space, quite frankly. And there are a lot of provisions, as Jennifer mentioned, both in infrastructure and budget reconciliation that try to move the needle in terms of training and opportunity in the energy work space, if you will. Having said that, I'd like to put one plug in for the Blue Collar to Green Collar Jobs Development Act that was originally sponsored by Chairman Rush in the House. Legislation likes that. And there are provisions within budget reconciliation and also provisions within infrastructure that have pieces of it. But a whole approach similar to what Blue Collar to Green Collar attempts to do, I think is going to be necessary to significantly move the needle here. So two points, in Washington, the energy efficiency job sector is about 65,000. Folks, it's been growing steadily from 2016 to the end of the before times. And we would expect there to be increased growth through the investments that are being made at the federal level and at the state level. I would like to lift up my public servants because in addition to the money, in order to get it out to the folks that are going to be working on this, we're gonna need folks to be able to understand the complexities of the federal awards to set up the procurement processes and the contract in order to get the money out the door and to be innovative in doing that. It's not the most intuitive thing. So hopefully both sectors will be able to accommodate what is coming their way. Well, Michael, I think as it turned out, you just had the last word on our briefing today. We always, I always know that 90 minutes is not enough. And yet we continue to make our briefings 90 minutes. But this was a really, really excellent discussion. And thank you, Michael. Thank you, Chris. Thank you, Vincent. Thank you, Jennifer, for joining us today. If anyone would like to go back and revisit any of the presentations, review any of the materials, you can do everything by visiting us online at www.esi.org. And you can also revisit the Rural Energy Savings Program Briefing we did back on February 8th. If you wanted to learn more about WPALCO, for instance, which is one of the initiatives in Washington State that Michael mentioned. We have other briefings coming up and you can RSVP by everything online. Just in summary, I think, you know, today was a really great overview about the opportunities of energy efficiency. Michael, I really liked what you said about sort of the nexus of regular appropriations and infrastructure. You know, both are really necessary. It's not either or it's both. And we have to keep up the work underway, but also IJA is important because it provides a boost that's really necessary to make up some much needed gains. And, you know, Jennifer, in the context of affect, you said a little goes a long way. And well, in the case of energy efficiency, a lot goes a really, really long way. And as Vincent named the sectors, transportation, buildings, utility sectors, there's a lot of work to do across the entire economy to make sure that we tackle emissions and energy efficiency helps us do that by enabling systems thinking and electrification and renewable energy deployment. So in many ways it is the little engine that could and it's the little engine that does, but it's also the little engine that could do a lot more. I would like to take a few moments to say thanks. In addition to our fabulous panelists, I'd like to thank Representative Marcy Kaptur for joining us with her video remarks today. Thanks to her great staff for making that possible. And thanks for her steadfast support for these programs and just, you know, generally being a really great champion for these programs in the context of regular appropriations. And as she mentioned in her remarks, she's a big fan obviously of what's in the infrastructure bill as well. I'd like to say thanks to a very special person who's not with us on the panel today, but Erin Lane is a wonderful colleague and she helped pull the panel together. And I would just like to make sure that she gets a special shout out for being generally awesome and a great person to work with. Also have a lot of great colleagues at EESI that I'd like to say thanks to, Dan O'Brien, Omri Laporte, as well as Emma, Allison, Anna, Amber, Savannah. Everybody does a ton of work to make these briefings possible. I really just show up 20 minutes early and read from a script. It's really all the hard work on their part that makes these briefings possible. So thank you very much to them. And we have two wonderful spring interns, Emily and Grace. So thank you for all of their work today as well. Dan O'Brien who's behind the scenes, he just put a slide up. This is a survey link. It means a lot to us if anyone can have two minutes or can share two minutes of their day to take the survey. We read every response. I know we didn't get to every question today. We'll do our best to follow up with you. But if you have a few moments to take our survey, do you had any technical issues, audio issues, video issues? Do you had any issues with the website? If you have ideas or suggestions for our programming, we really take it very seriously and we appreciate the time that you put into that. Also the link here for all of the resources that are available on the slide as well. I think that about does it. I really thank everyone for joining us today. And I wish everyone in our audience. And thanks again to our panelists. I wish everyone a great rest of your Thursday and we'll see you in the coming weeks for the next installments of agencies in action. Thanks so much.