 Hello and good afternoon. Welcome to our briefing living with climate change the polar vortex. I'm Dan Berset 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 about environmental energy and climate change topics to policy makers. More recently, we've also developed a program that provides technical assistance to utilities and rural areas interested in on bill financing programs for their customers. ESI provides informative objective nonpartisan coverage of climate change topics and 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. If you would like to make sure you always receive our latest educational resources, just take a moment to subscribe to our bi-weekly newsletter climate change solutions. Our discussion of the polar vortex marks the start of our latest briefing series living with climate change between now and the fourth of July, we will hold a total four briefings in the series. And in addition to the polar vortex, we will also cover sea level rise, wildfires and extreme heat. I hope everyone will RSVP for the entire series. And if you RSVP but well you know how things are something comes up and you miss a briefing. No worries because you can always watch the webcast later at www.esi.org. And if you RSVP that means you will be insured that you will receive summary notes and links to briefing materials after the briefing happens. I grew up in Vermont, and old timers like to say that if you'd not like the weather in New England, all you had to do was wait a minute and it would change. There's some truth in that. And sometimes there are some pretty wild temperature swings over short periods of time. I remember wearing snow pants to school as late as my birthday in April and as early as Halloween. But the extreme weather and climate impacts that we are that are the subjects of this briefing series are very different from a few unseasonally cold days or an early snowstorm. Our panelists today and over the course of the entire briefing series will help us understand how changes in our atmosphere caused by the release of greenhouse gases from human activity are increasing the frequency and severity of natural phenomena like the polar vortex. Climate change is causing changes in the temperatures of the Arctic and mid latitude locales that will expose southern US states for example, to the polar vortex and sub freezing temperatures more than before. It also means that some coastal areas will disappear or wash away from rising oceans and storms at a faster rate than before. It means extended droughts and drier landscapes that are more susceptible to uncontrollable and dangerous wildfires than before. And it means that more of us will suffer from health problems brought on and exacerbated by temperatures topping 100 degrees and before. It means we will have to adapt and learn to live with climate change. As we proceed through the series we will cover climate solutions that can help us improve the resilience of our communities to the extreme weather events and climate impacts as part of our adaptation to this new normal. This will be an important element in each briefing, especially as it relates to the equitable deployment of these climate solutions. While climate changes with us and will be and we will be experiencing climate impacts for many many years because of the greenhouse gases already in our atmosphere. There are things that we can do now to mitigate emissions to avoid even worse outcomes in the future. And some of those technologies like green hydrogen direct air capture offshore wind energy and electric vehicle charging infrastructure build out will be covered in our companion briefing series scaling up innovation to drive down emissions that will start later this month. First up, we will cover green hydrogen, you'll be able to RSVP to this series soon so keep an eye on our website at www.esa.org, or subscribe to a briefing notices at www.esa.org forward slash sign up. Let me remind everyone that we will have some time for questions after our panel. 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, you can send us an email at ask at esi.org that's ASK at esi.org, or you can follow us on Twitter at ESI online and send it to us that way. It is my privilege now to introduce our first panelist of the day, Dr Jennifer Francis is a senior scientist and the acting deputy director at the Woodwell Climate Research Center in Falmouth, Massachusetts. Previously, she was a professor in the Department of Marine and Coastal Sciences at Rutgers University, where she studied the Arctic climate system, and how rapid Arctic change is affecting areas beyond the Arctic, particularly extreme weather in the northern hemisphere. Jennifer, welcome to our briefing today, I'll turn it over to you. Thank you very much Dan and thank you very much ESI for inviting me to be here today. It's a real honor to be talking to you today about the polar vortex which is one of the topics that I study as a part of my research. I'm going to jump right in, sharing my screen. And my goal today is to give you a little better idea of what the polar vortex actually is this term really came into our dinner table conversations. Only about six years ago or so when we had a very extreme cold event in the United States. The term isn't used properly a lot and so today I hope you will come away with a much better understanding of what the polar vortex actually is, why it matters and also how we think it's going to be changing in the future. To get us started, I want to go back to last February 2021, when I'm sure you'll all recall the extreme cold event that struck the middle of North America. We saw temperatures in Dallas, Texas, that at the time were colder than some areas in Alaska and some areas in Greenland. This was a very severe cold event in that not only was it extremely cold, but it lasted a very long time it covered a large area, and it extended very far south, all the way down to the border with Texas. So why was this particular event so severe. Well, all cold events are generated basically in the same way. This blue track here says storm track is alternately called the jet stream. When the jet stream takes a big dip southward like it did during this cold event. We know that the cold air from the Arctic is going to be able to plunge very far south because the jet stream which is a very strong river of wind high up where the jets generally fly is the boundary between the Arctic air to the north and the much warmer air to the south. So when it takes one of these big dips, the Arctic air can plunge very far south, but you also see on here, these pink arrows and the words polar vortex so this is another factor that was very important for this particular cold spell so what I want to do now is explain the difference between the jet stream and the polar vortex and why they're both important to our winter extremes in fact all of the weather we experienced around the northern hemisphere. So what is the polar vortex. Well, here we are looking down on a schematic over the Atlantic Ocean you can see the United States off to the left, and this light blue circle going around the northern hemisphere is representing the jet stream. The jet stream is there all the time, and it's about five to nine miles above the surface. The north of that this darker blue swirl here is the polar vortex it's much higher up in the atmosphere. It tends to be much farther north. It's also a swirling area of westerly winds that in cases, some very, very cold air, the polar vortex is only there in the unlike the jet stream which is there all year round and most of the time, the polar vortex sits up there over the North Pole, and it doesn't bother anybody it really doesn't have much impact on our weather down here. But every once in a while, the polar vortex will become what we call disrupted. It can be stretched from its normal circular shape into more of a bean shape, or it can even split into two or three parts. And this is exactly what happened in February 2021. One of these disruptions occurred it was a very strong disruption, and it caused one of these smaller circulations to drop down over North America. It caused the jet stream to take one of these really big southward dips, and it brought this extra cold air with it from the North Pole and from very high up in the atmosphere. It made the cold extreme, even worse than it would have been otherwise it made it last longer, and it made it penetrate very far south. So the the actual polar vortex, as I said, is generally very circular this animation is showing you an example from 2018 of how the polar vortex can become disrupted so these very bright pink and orange colors here are showing where the very strong veins of the polar vortex are, and you can see how we go through this animation, it goes from being relatively circular to split into these two circulation so this is what we think of as a disruption of the polar vortex that always ends up causing all kinds of wacky weather around the northern hemisphere. And take a step back now and think about what's happening to our global climate system I'm sure you've all seen maps of global warming. This one's a little different. These colors on this map here are showing you different areas around the globe, how their temperature has changed relative to the globe as a whole. The areas that are blue here are telling us that they're warming slower than the globe as a whole, and the orange areas are where it's warming faster than the globe as a whole so generally you see the oceans are warming slower. The land is warming faster, and the Arctic is warming the fastest of all somewhere between three and four times faster than the globe as a whole. That's important. Well, I want you to try to imagine a layer of atmosphere that extends from wherever you are up to the Arctic, and we know that warmer air takes up more room than colder air, warmer expands. And so this layer of air is going to be taller or thicker where it's warmer, as compared to the Arctic where it's very cold that layer is going to be closer to the ground. And on top of this layer and looking towards the north, it would be like you were looking down a hill and in fact you would be so air sitting up there on top of this layer wants to flow down this hill, just like water wants to flow down the side of a mountain, and this creates a wind from the south to the north, but because the earth is spinning that wind gets turned to the right. This is what creates what we call the jet stream that river of wind that encircles the northern hemisphere, about five to nine miles above our head. Now think back to what I just showed you and the fact that the Arctic is warming so much faster than anywhere else. This layer over the Arctic is getting thicker, faster than it is anywhere else, and it's making that hill in the atmosphere less steep. And so the force driving that wind on top of the hill is weakened. And this causes the west to east winds of the jet stream also to weaken. And we know that when the jet stream gets weak, it's more easily deflected from its west to east path by things like mountain ranges here showing the Rocky Mountains, but also by temperature differences across oceans. So we tend to see a wavier jet stream when the jet stream is weak. So why do we care about these waves in the jet stream well as I showed you in the example for that cold spell that happened in January of 2021. These waves actually create all the weather that we experienced so not only does the jet stream shown in purple here on the schematic separate the cold to the north from the warmer air to the south, but also the dynamics in these waves create what we see on a TV weather map that are shown as high pressure areas and low pressure areas. So this part of the jet stream wave, where the winds are coming from the northwest, we tend to see high pressure blue skies, dry conditions. And if that those dry conditions exist for a long time, as they have over the last several years we've had a predominant wave configuration like this over North America, it can lead to drought, it can lead to heat waves, and it can lead to more wildfire. So that's exactly what we've been seeing lately. But this part of the wave where the winds are coming from the southwest are where you tend to see low pressure on the surface we tend to see stormy patterns and rain and snow depending on the season. So these waves in the jet stream have everything to do with our weather. And on top of that when they're a large when it gets into one of these very wavy patterns like this these waves tend to move very slowly from west to east. And that makes the weather that they create last a long time. This is what we think the warming in the Arctic is doing. It's making these waves be in these large configurations more often which is leading to more persistent weather conditions and leading to more extreme weather, like the colds felt we saw in February 2021 over the North American area. So what's the connection to climate change then. Well, here we are looking down on the North Pole again, and we're looking at how temperatures have changed near the surface. Over the last several decades and what we notice is there are certain areas that have warmed faster than other areas. This particular region here, just north and east of Norway and Scandinavia. It has been warming one of the, it's one of the areas that's been warming the fastest. It so happens that it's located right under the polar vortex, and by creating all of this warming in the lower atmosphere. It's changing the shape of the hill in the atmosphere that I was just describing. And when we bump up that that hill in the atmosphere or bump up that layer of atmosphere, it can interfere with the with the stratospheric polar vortex and if it goes on for long enough and it's strong enough, it can make that circular polar vortex actually go into one of these disruptions that I just described. And we know that this warming in the Arctic is happening because of climate change because of the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. And this is a very hot research topic I will say, but we think that this warming in this particular region is leading to more disruptions of the stratospheric polar vortex, which we can expect to cause more unusual winter around the northern hemisphere. So with that, I want to thank you very much. I'm going to leave you with this animation of the jet stream now. You can see that these yellow and red colors here are where the winds are the strongest. I want you to notice what a chaotic mess the atmosphere is, and I hope it gives you an appreciation for how difficult it might be to try to study these waves in the jet stream and try to understand how they might be changing over time. Thank you. Thank you, Jennifer. That was great. And that's kind of hypnotic watching the jet stream. It's really, really cool. Thank you so much for that presentation. As a reminder to our audience, we'll be making presentation materials available online after the briefing today. So if you'd like to go back and check out any of Jennifer's cool slides or any of the cool slides you're about to see from our other presenters, you'll be able to do that. The second panelist today is Dr. Morali Bagu. He is laboratory program manager for grid integration at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. In this role, he manages the Department of Energy's Office of Electricity and Grid Modernization, excuse me, Department of Energy Office of Electricity and Grid Modernization Initiative programs at NREL. He works and leads NREL Advanced Distribution Management Systems and Puerto Rico Grid Recovery and Resilience Efforts. Dr. Bagu has been a senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers since 2014 and presently he's their chair of the distribution system operation and planning subcommittee. He's also an associate editor for the IEEE Transactions on Sustainable Energy. Morali, it is really great to see you today. I'm looking forward to your presentation as well. Turn it over to you. Thank you very much and thanks for giving me this opportunity to really talk about my work here at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. I'll be touching on the evolving role of extreme weather events in the US power system with variable, very high variable generation. I think Jennifer really gave a very good talk on polar vortex and how the wind really changes patterns as it comes down south. I'll probably piggyback from that and see what that means in terms of the US power system. Let me start with a slide here which actually shows last eight years of data correlating the events or the loss of load with changing temperatures. The red graph as you see there is actually the temperature change, whereas the black one is the frequency of loss of generation or events on the system. As you can see, when there's a dip in the red graph, which is the temperature, the events actually go very high. What this really means in different type of generation, I'll talk in my next slide here, is some of the natural gas have a lot more issues when it comes to lower temperatures. The first top left two graphs will actually show that compared to the steam turbines or the coal plants and I think nuclear probably has a reverse correlation where it has issues when the temperatures are high. Long story short, I think most of the peak generation or what we call the peakers in power system are really maintained by natural gas and they really get significantly affected when you see lower temperatures happening in the system. This graph here actually shows what happens when there's a polar vortex or jet streams coming down. The jet streams really come with very high wind as coal pushes down like the front range of the Rocky Mountains where we are from. But the reality is how widespread these winds really will last depends upon the different type of coal waves. I'll actually pick two different coal waves, the 2011 which you're actually seeing it. In this the wind pretty much dies after like the day or the second day after the coal steam comes down. But I'll also show you some of the other coal streams back in 2008. I think I'll do a comparison between these two things on how the power system actually will affect based on these things. So it is an interesting graph. What it is actually showing is the different colors represents the different resource mix. You know blue is wind, the yellow there is PV and then the red is storage and all the other things as you can see I think the purple there is gas actually. What is interesting here is, let me actually switch to the next slide, is the initial cold front as you can see in both 2011 and 2008 cold fronts, the wind and solar generation actually accounted for 80% of the generation when the cold front came in. Again, just before going to the graphs here, these are actually projections of 2024 2036 and 2050, which are actually looking at a 17% 50% and 65% penetration, pretty reasonable in terms of projections, at least cost what we are looking superimposing the 2011 and 2008 cold wave on top of them. As I was mentioning, there is a lot of contributions from wind when the cold front really comes in. But as you see, the days after it, you know, if you really look at the third, fourth, fifth days here in January, you can actually see that in the milder cold wave, which is the 2008, the contribution of wind actually falls down to 10%, whereas the bigger cold wave it is actually 50%. The reason why I'm pointing this out is the issue of operations is really, I mean, it becomes a real issue for the milder cold waves compared to the bigger cold waves because you still have a lot of wind resources available there. What can we do in this kind of situations? I'll actually show you the sharing of power between different regions. I know these are like a lot of graphs. I'll try to point out some of the areas here. But what we are looking at here is the different curves here is actually showing the power coming in into the MISO region or the Midwest region from PJM, SPP and other areas. What I'll point out is actually right after the cold wave in the 2011 cold wave case, you can actually see that there is a lot of amount of power coming in from PJM and MISO regions. And that's very important. I think transmission enables uses of geographical diversity, both from wind and solar resources. And what it is implying is as we go into the future, we need to make sure there's a lot more transmission flexibility so that these just streams, which might be more local, can be actually compensated from power coming in across multiple regions. Whereas in the milder wave, I think transmission also enables geographical diversity, but it's not pretty evident as you can see in the 2011 case here. One thing I will actually point out, you do is a non cold wave report. I think North American energy resilience model is a Department of Energy flagship project, which is looking at extreme events and trying to see what measures we can take. And I think this is pointing out different issues or outages that will happen at generators and also identifying regions with abnormal forecasted loads and also ice impacts. We're actually providing a regular report to DOE on this. Certainly, I think this going to different PMS or public, I would say power authorities to really make sure they can take actions based on that. One other thing I would say, what it takes to really understand these kind of things and make sure we do really good, we compensate for these things is actually what we call correlated modeling. I think we need to understand different scenarios with the capacity growth and adoption of different technologies and also how the load grows and really look at production models, reliability modeling, and also siting models so that we can make sure we compensate for the issues in the planning stage so that we account for this polar vertex and other extreme events, even in the planning stages, not only worrying about them in the operational stages. I think that is very important at this point to consider them in our planning stages because traditionally planning has been more about, hey, how can we really compensate the system for the operational needs. But some of these extreme events were never considered, but that's the important thing that we need to really look at. I will also mention few key takeaways. As I mentioned, I think correlated modeling is key. A traditionally power system has been modeled on what is the load need, what is the generation we have, and how much resources we need to worry about. But we need to really correlate that with different extreme events and what will be the extreme need during those events and how can we compensate for them. So that's an important takeaway. And I think national labs are marching towards that in both national transmission plan and North American agendas modeling studies that they're doing, which are spanning across the continental US. Certainly incorporating this at the planning stage and future investment based on some of the extreme event is a key. I think both, you know, the Texas event last year and some of the earlier cold day events, what we realized is we do have very good operational forecasts, but we don't have good resource adequacy. It means we didn't really plan our resources well to meet those operational forecasts. I think that's a key. Again, resource adequacy in a general terminology means that, hey, what resources I have and what are the needs that I need to meet. But in reality, we also need to consider what resources will be affected by these extreme goals and what resources I have to meet the loads. I think we need to really make sure both of those equations match and see what resources adequacy we have to meet those things. Transmission flexibility, as I mentioned, this would be a plea. I mean, we have a really well integrated system. There is loosely coupling between the western to connect condition and to connect and some parts of Texas. But I think we need to increase the flexibility in the system so that the areas can be compensated when there are issues on the one side of the system. The other side can compensate for sending the power out to using our long lines. I think increasing the transmission flexibility will be a key driver for the future to really be resilient for these kind of events. Last but not the least, I think long duration storage. I think the simulations that I showed you didn't really consider a lot of storage. But natural gas, as you can see, is picking up a lot of load. But I think the storage, when we get the cost parity can can overtake some of the natural gas options there and certainly provide some of the peaking capacity as needed. And I insist on long duration storage because I think four hours or six hours will not really cater that need. We are looking at multi-day or day-long storage for this kind of needs that we're looking here. With that, there are some references that I put it down there and also a lot of reading material for you to look at. And I'll be open for questions later in the discussion here. Thank you. Thank you for that great presentation and I'm hopeful that we'll be able to revisit some of those takeaways in our Q&A because they're really interesting. And that's a reminder that for folks watching us online, if you have questions, you can send us an email ask at EESI.org, that's ASK at EESI.org. You can also follow us on Twitter at EESI online and send us a question that way. And we'll do our best to incorporate questions from the audience in our discussion. Our third panelist today is Megan Levy. She has spent nearly two decades working with building energy efficiency, both with the low income weatherization program and with the Wisconsin State Energy Office, which is now known as the Wisconsin Office of Energy Innovation. Megan is currently the Energy Emergency Assurance Coordinator for the state, and also she oversees the Energy Independent Communities Program, which counts more than 147 communities as members. Megan, welcome to our briefing today. I look forward to learning about what's happening up in Wisconsin and how you're dealing with all of this. Alright, thanks so much, Dan. And thanks to you and EESI for inviting me. I think this is a really important subject and we've just had a couple of fantastic briefs from Jennifer and Morali that really speak to why we don't want to call it global warming. We know overall the world is warming but the climate is changing and that's why we're seeing so many extreme events on the cover slide here. You'll see in 2018 Highway 2, which is a very key corridor in Wisconsin, was broken, causing the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa to be effectively an island. And then there's a paper from 1978 when we had about three quarters of an inch of ice on all infrastructure across the state. So not so long ago, we certainly had some long-term power outages to deal with. On the next slide, I just want to introduce myself because I'm a little different from our colleagues. I am with the State Energy Office. There are 56 energy offices, one in all 50 states and six territories. We were created by the Energy Policy and Conservation Act of 1975. And we have very broad mandate to save energy, to understand how we use energy. And then key to my job is to submit an energy emergency plan that we can utilize in the case of an energy supply disruption. My office sits at the Public Service Commission of Wisconsin. And there's some statute there that gives you sort of our full range of duties, but I won't bore you by reading all of that. So on the next slide, we'll talk about what we've done to build resilience, our efforts, because we have so many threats. A state that used to have more cows than people were constantly worried about more greenhouse gases than just carbon dioxide. We have no noticed hurricanes, otherwise known as durachos. Tornadoes a little easier to predict, but not that easy, just like a polar vortex. However, in the last two decades, it's been the warmest on record. So to get our local governments and our state government to think about polar vortices is important and sometimes difficult. So our approach is really effective collaboration. It's the only way we can facilitate that change that we need to foster. On the next slide, I'll just talk about Wisconsin's $14 billion problem. We consume six times more energy than we produce. And we have a lot of thermal needs. The rather small graph in the middle shows you Wisconsin energy consumption by NU sector. Industrial is a huge part of that. And then you can see one of our biggest threats other than ice storms, but part of that is these rainfall events. We've got huge, huge flooding possibilities in our state. And that really makes us think about where we cite infrastructure and what that looks like in terms of being resilient. So I want to talk about here on the next slide, the programs that we've put together over the last decade that I've worked for the office, starting with the energy independent communities program, because as a resilient strategist for the Office of Energy Innovation, I'll just say that energy efficiency is your first step to resilience. We have to understand the load we have to be able to reduce that load. In fact, for the past 20 years, Wisconsin has had the foresight and the, I think just the willingness on both sides of the aisle to have a statewide energy efficiency program known as focus on energy. And the energy independent community communities program really builds on that, but I just want to give a shout out to all the ratepayers in Wisconsin, who have been paying into the statewide program that's had fantastic, fantastic results over the years, and has paid off over time, incredibly for our state. So the energy independent communities program come came from a former governor who encouraged folks to pledge and to, and to really write this pledge down to pass it with a body, whether it's a common council, or school district or water district to pass this resolution, we will produce 25% of our power and transportation needs from renewable resources by 2025. And there's a real emphasis on the local production. We talked a lot about biofuels. We talked about RNG, that methane from those cows while the fart backpacks are not exactly commercially ready digesters are and we have quite a few of them across the state. In the ensuing years after 2009 and 2010 we continue to fund the energy independent communities after the stimulus dollars were gone. And now many of them have updated goals 100% carbon free electricity to match the governor's goal of 100% carbon free electricity by 2050 which was stated in his 2018 executive order 38. I'll just point out that 3.41 million people in Wisconsin are part of the energy independent communities program. So that really spans across your political lines. It just makes sense to produce your energy locally. And I think we understand in a rural state that makes you more resilient. So where did we go from there, we heard from communities. I don't understand which projects to do first. I'm not sure if I'm saving money. We created a technical assistance program to make sure those energy efficiency and renewable energy projects were, were going smoothly were successful. Because my expertise is really an energy security planning response. And we're a home rural state, we started doing petroleum shortage contingency planning at the state level, quickly realized that if all 72 counties and 11 federally recognized we did not have robust energy emergency plans and fuel plans that our state would not be resilient to a long term power outage or some natural disaster. So we created the statewide assistance for energy resilience and reliability program were for the last three and a half years we've just been holding regional workshops, preparing templates for folks, and really trying to from my perspective, marry up what your local emergency manager is doing with your local sustainability committee. We're all on the same page. Your emergency managers working on a hazard mitigation plan, your sustainability folks or your, you know, folks who are your department of public work folks are thinking about how to save money and how to keep things working. So this is all the same thing. Let's keep our communities resilient. I'm going to talk about our focus on energy agricultural propane incentive program in just a second. So I want to talk about here on the next slide about what happened in 2014. It really got me thinking about how we could make ourselves more locally resilient. One hack of a polar vortex happened in 2014. And it coincided with some events that made it quote unquote the perfect storm for us in the upper Midwest we had a bumper corn crop. It came in late. It was very wet, which meant we had to use a lot of propane and we had low propane inventories across the upper Midwest already and across our wholesale areas and Conway and Montbelview, because of increased exports that's when we first started churning out natural gas for export. And then there was reversal the key pipeline that brought propane to Minnesota. It was turned into because of financial reasons, it was sending distillates to Canada. And on top of that, we got a polar vortex. So here on the next slide, I'll just show you sort of the global view of what and Jennifer had some fantastic I love those animations of what this looks like. So in the deepest cold temperatures in mid January of 2014, the price for LP hit $5 a gallon at the wholesale hub for comparison. At the time it's it's a dollar or less or previous to 2014 in Wisconsin that was a, it was a problem because it was so expensive in Kansas and then 40% of the rest of our propane comes from Canada. Well trains airbrakes don't work so well in the polar vortex so we had all rail shipment stop about 260,000 residents use propane for home heating. We had our low income energy assistance agencies to identify that about 26,000 of those folks were vulnerable to this we had many small mom and pop propane companies go out of business. And the state was forced to be incredibly creative to work with utilities who had propane stockpiled in the state to borrow that to make sure that folks did not have issues heating their homes that we didn't we did set up warming shelters during 2014. And we had daily calls and it was it was a major major emergency in the state and we were lucky that more people did not die from the cold. We only had about five recorded deaths and some of those were from carbon monoxide poisoning because when folks don't have power don't have heat, they sometimes bring the grill inside and that's that's a public messaging issue we need to work on. We also had and I'll show you on the next slide a polar vortex in 2019, which we've seen some illustrations of what was different. Well, my so saw this coming they had declared an emergency there was some natural gas curtailment with the interruptible customers. But in Wisconsin we have infrastructure designed for bitter cold temperatures our wind turbines are insulated. We have heat trace pipes, our natural gas plants are insulated. And we even have crushers to break up piles of coal that was actually a huge problem we had during the 2014 polar vortex and I like to bring it up with people say oh renewables don't work in the cold. But actually in 2014, we had a serious emergency because coal piles were frozen. But in 2019, our Department of Health Services still tracked 11 deaths directly related to temperatures. We had record lows that included 20 below temperatures with a negative 55 degree wind chill. So in our warming world we can't forget that it will get very very cold. And that typically affects the most vulnerable among us on the next slide I'll just say that not only is energy security a diversity of sources, but it's energy justice is such a critical component those folks who've expired during the extreme cold are typically not as well as those who could just pay their bills and order up a space heater. So the office has been involved with the NAACP's climate justice, just energy policies and practices toolkit it's a great resource I encourage everyone to connect with the NAACP on that and also the national labs are really coming forward and doing some interesting stuff. I was able to chair the selection committee for Pacific Northwest National Labs energy storage for social equity initiative, which we would really like to mimic in Wisconsin potentially with some of the infrastructure dollars that are coming our way. And to that end, we have tried to bake into our program so I kind of laid the background programs we've done a lot of energy efficiency, asking communities where they're at helping them out with technical assistance. On the next slide I'll show you where that evolved to critical infrastructure micro grids and community resilience centers were proposed in 2020, the Public Service Commission agreed that this program should be investigated. And they allowed us to do feasibility studies in the program design memorandum it's linked in your slides. We researched New York programs Connecticut New Jersey Rhode Island Maryland Miss Massachusetts a lot of those programs. We're direct responses to Hurricane Sandy. What we learned from the Hurricane Sandy after action report was just how vulnerable our infrastructure is just how vulnerable our grid is how lots and lots of solar that was installed in New Jersey and New York simply wasn't going to work because it was 100% grid tide. Therefore, and without having a lot of the policy in place. We wanted to understand the feasibility of building clean energy micro grids for critical infrastructure. On the next slide I'll just talk about some of the strategic objectives, because again we wanted to bake clean energy and equity into this program. Sure you can build a micro grid by linking diesel generators, but that doesn't help me impact climate change that this puts more particulates in the air. So we wanted to define energy security we wanted to talk about this is this is about reliability and resilience for that critical infrastructure and the equity piece it's for everybody and we really wanted folks, because as a state agency we don't want to be super prescriptive. We wanted to test the market we say you tell us how this is going to improve equity in your community. We want to bring clean energy to those folks who've never had the benefit before. We got some, some really really great responses to the solicitation. On the next slide you'll see a little map and there's an interactive map on our website which I can put a link in the chat. We ended up funding 15 projects, including a hospital, an airport, police emergency operations center, a business park which includes another police emergency operations center. We've got a mobile micro grid solution that can pull up three facilities and add Wi-Fi and 3G, a water treatment facility, a wastewater treatment facility, and one of my favorite projects, again the Bad River tribe of Lake Superior Chippewa, they were cut off they were an island in 2018 and that's not the first time that's happened to them. They're way up at the top of Ashland County. They've already built three micro grids so their study was to link those micro grids because their local electric cooperatives distribution network's pretty full and they wanted to understand how to manage their own energy future. On the next slide I'll just dig into another one of my favorites the town of La Point, located on Madeline Island part of the island's National Lakeshore Monument. I just wanted to give you the lay of the land, it's way up there. On the next slide I'll get a little more specific on the island itself. You can see that key to the project is the existing distributed energy generation and propane generators that are already on the island. La Point has been an energy independent community since the very very beginning and is slowly with a small population but a really active energy team has slowly been adding 20kw here, 35kw there and now they're interested in linking those loads because they are vulnerable to outages just like so many of us. As we close up here I'll just give you on the next slide a little look at what does our technical assistance look like and why is that important, why would I recommend that other state energy offices start with a technical analysis because the largest energy users in every community might be easy for you to benchmark. So we sitting at the public service commission they collect energy use information for every water utility that they regulate which is all of them in the state. We've got water losses we've got energy use it helps us understand should we have that long term power outage, how we can pull these things up and it also helps us work with those communities to do their own local planning, so that they can say well you know maybe our water utility should be net zero. We do this also on the wastewater side through a partnership with our Department of Natural Resources. On the next slide I'll just talk about the natural renewable natural gas opportunity I had the picture of the cow with a fart backpack which I try to get into every presentation, but since 2015 we've been doing surveys. We understand that there is not just one way to solve this thing in Wisconsin we want to use what we have available also waste to energy is just makes sense and it's one of my favorite things. We're also using other programs on the next slide I'll show you our energy innovation grant program. This was an old American Recovery and Reinvestment Act program it was actually a revolving loan fund for manufacturers. We repurposed it into a grant program included municipalities and tribal entities as well as nonprofits and manufacturers can all apply in the in the 2020 round. We have 7 million awarded 32 projects were funded. Lots of really interesting projects, and close to my heart the comprehensive energy planning that will make sure those projects the future are successful, but a lot of emphasis on resilience and equity, because that is what we asked for in our solicitation. So, that is the conclusion of my presentation will have some 2021 results in the next few weeks, but happy to take questions at the end of the hour. Thank you. Thanks so much, and great slides and I think fart backpack might be a really good band name. If anyone out there is looking for a band name. But people in our audience may have just watched Megan's presentation that wow Wisconsin is doing so much great work. Well that's because Wisconsin has a great energy office, and so do many other states and if people in our audience want to learn more, especially folks on Capitol Hill. I want to learn about really there's no better resource to learn about what's happening energy wise in your state in your state energy office, the National Association of State Energy officials. It's a close partner of ESIs to encourage everyone to go check them out and check their energy We have an alumni of the Maryland Energy Administration and we had lots of similar programs and it's amazing the amount of work that people like Megan are doing in state capitals and other cities around the country so never miss an opportunity to plug state energy services. Our fourth panelist is Michael Gartman. Michael is the manager of the carbon free buildings department at RMI. Michael Sports RMI is residential energy plus and building electrification initiatives, and is currently focused on providing both project developers and policymakers with the information and resources they need to drive a market shift toward a more efficient affordable and equitable housing stock. Michael utilizes a background in cost estimating and project management comes from a diverse array of experience in the construction industry. Michael welcome to the briefing, and I will turn it over to you. Thanks Dan and thank you so much for having me, and I want to second your shout out to Megan and the work that so many others are doing on the ground. It's really really important stuff. I actually, Dan can you just give me a time check really quickly how are we doing on time. Great. Okay, I am going to format my screen are you seeing that. It looks great. Great so our previous presenters have talked about extreme cold events and really just how we ensure the grid stays online, which is important right it's it's best not to lose power. But what happens when we have a worst case scenario and the grid does go down. I'm going to be walking through some analysis that are my completed recently attempting to answer that question. The short of it is your house gets cold, but but let's walk through this in just a little bit more detail. The main thing is most appliances stop working. And I'm going to add the detail that it's most electric and gas appliances I work a lot on building electrification and we hear hear this concern a lot. It's important to point out that many gas appliances rely on electrical inputs to to work appropriately. The other thing that can happen. This isn't directly related to extreme cold that often when you have an extreme cold event. There's snow and ice and your roads become inaccessible. I mentioned this because I've also heard when you talk about passive resilience and extreme cold events people talk about generators and well you know just fill up your gas generator or whatever you have. You can't necessarily go out and get gasoline to fill up that generator if you don't already have that on hand. So it's not necessarily something that you can lean on. And depending on how prepared your community is for these extreme cold events, you might not even be able to get gas at all. We heard stories about that in Winter Storm Urie and in Texas where gas stations weren't prepared for an extreme cold event in Texas and didn't have generators to stay on. So nobody could even get gasoline to escape the cold. And so you're in your house, you don't really have anywhere to go and your temperatures start dropping. And really your best way to stay warm at that point is bundling up in blankets and jogging in place. It's tough. And it's serious. Prolonged cold exposure can be pretty deadly. These headlines, I think the one on the right that the Europe one is from 2012 but all these other headlines are just from the last three years. So deaths from just cold weather events happen all the time. When people aren't dying from them, there are other intermediate health impacts like hypothermia, frostbite and chill blends among other things. And just one important thing to call out, there is a pretty significant equity implication here as well. Your most vulnerable populations when it comes to extreme cold are going to be while there are several populations, but a couple to call out are low income residents and renters. These constituents are frequently living in our worst performing housing stock that is often pretty poorly insulated and drafty already. Landlords don't have as much of an incentive to improve that housing stock. Low income residents don't have the capital available to make those improvements themselves. So they're at risk. Their homes are going to get coldest and they don't have the resources to face that challenge as well as many other communities do. So I'm realizing my shared screen is varying a little bit. I'm going to move it over. The table on the right side of this graphic really quickly is just trying to frame this up a little bit. But one of the issues with understanding and quantifying the risk of cold weather exposure is the fact that it really depends on a lot of factors including your age, your gender, how adjusted you are to cold weather already. But these are just some rules of thumb that we use for the study that I'm about to go through. It's a poorly understood field that needs more research. Before I go into the results of this study and really what we did, let's talk terminology a little bit. A building envelope, I'm going to say that a few times, it's really just the shell that separates the indoors from the outdoors. So things like walls, your roof, your foundation slab and or basement and windows and doors. And I call those out. Those are typically your weakest points in the envelope. You really need to make sure that those are both insulated and air sealed appropriately. So as Megan referenced in her presentation, we've actually done a lot of work to define metrics for the resilience of the grid and distributed grid assets like islandable solar PV systems, battery storage, micro grids and the like. Again, these measures are really valuable and ideal to have. And I'll make a plug here that I'm really happy that Congress recently extended the residential solar tax credit and made it refundable as part of the proposed reconciliation package. I'm all about supporting those distributed energy resources. But that discussion leaves out the envelope considerations entirely, which doesn't make a lot of sense when you consider the fact that most homes, or at least many homes will not have solar or battery systems for a long time. But every single home has an envelope. So let's look at the impact here of those envelopes and envelope performance on just being able to survive a cold weather event. Without spending too much time on the details here, this is a modeling exercise that RMI went through or we took a real weather event from Duluth, Minnesota in 2017, where for a full week the temperature never went above five degrees Fahrenheit. I think we averaged about negative seven degrees over this entire week. And what we did is we took a typical single family home. I'm talking two stories about 2200 square feet, a representative single family home and modeled that home in this cold weather event with different levels of envelope performance. And those really just approximate different classes of the housing stock that are all over the US today. So I'm talking about a 1950s era home, 1980s era home, a home built to the 2009 IECC, which is the code standard that many states are currently using for new residential construction. The DOE zero energy ready home, this is where we start to get into super efficient levels of performance. This is a DOE program and standard that can be built to you right now. And finally passive house. And I'm talking about the passive house Institute US. We pulled that model from a Minnesota based case study. And what you see here that the first part of this graph is the day before the power goes out essentially so you can see the interior temperature chugging along at about 68 degrees Fahrenheit as the outdoor temperature drops from about 15 degrees precipitously down below zero. And then at our zero, the power goes off. You can see that these homes act very, very differently once the power goes off at 12 hours your 1950 era home is already approaching freezing indoors, while the others are at least above 50 degrees Fahrenheit. By 24 hours the 1980s home has also dropped into that severe cold stress territory at 48 hours even the 2009 IECC home is in unsafe extreme cold stress territory. In the 1935 you see that each of these homes is starting to reach something like an equilibrium between the outdoor cold and the heat being generated indoors, mostly by the occupants own body heat. You can see that in the 1950s home that equilibrium is near zero degrees Fahrenheit, whereas the passive house home is still hovering around that 40 degree threshold that seven whole days later. So really just conveying the results here a little bit more concretely between our most and least efficient building models we saw a 90% decrease in the number of severe hours that occupants were exposed to over the seven day cold snap. If this if the grid were to only stay down for say two or three days, you can look at the bottom half of this chart and see that there is a similarly profound impact when you increase the level of envelope performance in the home. And when you look at the fact that in most states a typical cold weather power outage is going to range somewhere in the eight to 20 hour range. That's, you know, a really rough rule of thumb, they can go much longer than that. But that, that say 20 hour power outage is a relatively frequent thing that happens in cold weather states and you can really see the impact of at least moving from your 1950s era home to 1980s or ideally kind of current new construction standards. And this benefit isn't quantified at all. I want to contextualize this with a graphic from the National Association for State Community Services programs. It has been so wonderful to see how many recent studies there are quantifying the health and safety impacts of good building design and things like avoiding on site combustion. It is really, really important work. It is arguably an even bigger impact than the energy cost savings and carbon savings that you can see from that work. But we're still really missing a big one when it comes to this passive survivability concepts. We need that input to optimize decision making and it really could be the biggest benefit of all when you look at the, the impact that we can have on on human life and health and safety impacts. So let's talk about what we could do with this concept. It really is just a nascent concept that RMI is exploring at this point. What we'd need to do to really utilize it to its fullest potential is one, get a better understanding of this correlation between sustained cold exposure at in some ways moderate temperatures in that 40 to 60 degree range. Understand what the health impacts are and try to quantify those and put a dollar amount to them. We also need to define the correlation between various building characteristics and hours of safety for a range of different scenarios. And we need to work with existing data flows, right? We need to understand what building characteristics city and state governments can actually work with to understand which communities are most vulnerable and which have the most and least hours of safety in an extreme event. You can imagine that if we're able to do this in craft guidelines for adoption and utilization, you could do things like direct the flow of funding for housing interventions to the most vulnerable homes. You could decide, sorry, guide disaster response efforts and you could guide other preventative health interventions like ensuring that senior living facilities where you have vulnerable residents are really well insulated. It'll take some time to build that out, right? But in the meantime, Congress can do a lot to support home resilience right now. And I'm just going to highlight a couple of things. One is just continue to scale up funding for home retrofits and weatherization programs, acknowledging that this is an unquantified benefit that needs to go into our decision making and that we don't have the data to really work with right now. The other thing to call out is that as we do that as envelopes Titan indoor air quality issues become much more of a concern and Megan actually referenced that when she talked about carbon monoxide poisoning in cold weather events, right? We need to consider electrification anytime that we're working with weatherization because as you weatherize a home and seal it up. Indoor air quality issues stemming from things like direct combustion and your gas stove can really become more of a problem. So thinking about electrification in coordination with weatherization programs is important. And this is also reason I mean these are existing building interventions. There's also reason to support more stringent new building codes. I know that Congress has recently done some work there. So not focusing on that. But that's what we can do. That's how we can work with this information and that's why building envelopes are really, really important to think about. For more information, I'm putting the link to our study in this last slide here and feel free to reach out to me if you have any other questions. Thanks. As a great presentation, Michael. Thank you so much. And yeah, just a great presentation any building envelope and building energy codes, big fans of those at ESI tremendously important for resilience and mitigation. Didn't talk much about energy savings but those that 2009 IECC house or even better 2021 IECC house is a lot more affordable to live in as well. Let's invite our panelists to turn their video on, and we will proceed into questions and answer territory. We will be keeping an eye on our Twitter feed and our email account ask at ESI.org if anyone has any questions that is by no means too late to submit them and I hope you do. However, I will be watching that while my colleague, Anna McGinn, leaves us in Q&A Anna is our policy manager here at ESI and a big part of how all these briefings come together. And so Anna, let me turn it over to you to kick off our Q&A. Great. Thanks, Dan. Thanks everyone for really excellent presentations. This has been a fun and insightful briefing so far. So we're just going to jump right in. So our first question today is that extreme cold sometimes seems to draw less attention than other climate impacts, especially when we aren't in the moment experiencing an extreme cold event. What do you see as the challenges for people, institutions and governments to be more aware of and thinking about this threat kind of on an ongoing basis? And second part of that question, if there are some policies that you think should be first and foremost in our thinking that would help to protect people from this impact. So I think we will start with Jennifer and then run through in the order that you all presented. Right. Thank you, Anna. Thank you everybody for some really great information. Yeah, so, you know, global warming, people naturally think of heat. So they think of heat waves. They think of even drought, perhaps those are very directly connected to climate change. They're very easy to see how because the earth is warming, we're going to have heat waves that are just that much warmer and the atmosphere as it warms will want to suck more moisture out of the soil, which leads to droughts and ultimately to wildfires. We also know that a warming atmosphere can hold more water vapor in it. So evaporation from the oceans and from the land increases in a warmer world. And so we are seeing more water vapor in the atmosphere. And this has a bunch of different impacts. One of them is we are seeing heavier precipitation events happening more often. I think Megan mentioned that in Wisconsin, they are seeing some of those heavier precipitation events. In fact, all across the United States, and particularly in the Northeast, that frequency of extreme events extreme precipitation events is increasing the fastest. So those are the very direct connections to climate change. This idea that also we may see longer lasting cold spells is less intuitive and it's a little harder to explain to people as I hope I got across in my presentation, it's a, you know, it's a connection to the jet stream and and changes in that jet stream. So, you know, it's just not as graspable by the public to understand but what we know for sure is that we are still going to see these extreme events. As I said, we are also going to see fewer cold way cold temperatures, records broken, we're already seeing this fewer cold records broken, many more high temperature records broken. So, even though we expect to see these cold spells happen more often in the future, perhaps be more persistent over all the temperatures in the wintertime are going up but we can still still get these very, very cold events. So, you know, it's just a little harder to, it's a little longer story to explain to people why that is, and I will leave the others on this panel, this distinguished panel to talk about the policies because that's their expertise. Great. Thank you so much Maroli we'll jump to you next. Sure, I will probably take a system perspective of what it means for the power system here. You know, events like wildfires or hurricanes, they directly impact the transmission distribution infrastructure. You see broken lines or broken poles that will disrupt a lot of power, but when it comes to extreme cold events, it actually impacts directly the generation, less pressure in gas turbine or gas lines, or even icing on wind turbines even though it's not the predominant, but certainly you see a lot of those more on the generation side. The problem with that is, you know, you end up getting a big chunk of generation going offline which will impact the system directly, which people don't see that pretty straightforward because, you know, when it rains or when the line is broken, you can pretty much see that compared to a generation system going down, that is not anticipated. So the impact of extreme cold is, you know, similar to the other events are even more than the other events, which people should be pretty much aware of. And really, I think I kind of stressed on some of the key takeaways in my presentation, having more transmission flexibility and planning more resource adequacy during these extreme events will certainly help really get through this kind of events and that's some of the important policy implications that I can certainly think of. Thank you. And I think you made that point really, really well in your presentation. Unfortunately, if you're doing your job well, people don't know. People are going to be prepared. And so I think from the policymaker side of things, Michael and I are more concerned with, look, it's important to insulate whether it's hot or cold. You know, and I'll just put that out there. My personal story my furnace went bad and my 35 year old train furnace went bad on January 2 2022, when it was negative 10. But I had retrofit my house with spray foam insulation years ago because I'm a nut, and we had the opportunity. To Michael's presentation, it held 50 degrees in this place holds humidity like you wouldn't believe. So, every day when I when I go out and have talks I can just talk to people hey listen a little bit of insulation goes a long way I know it's not sexy I know it's not solar panels I know it's not a hydrogen fuel cell or batteries but what it is is it's real resilience, particularly when you think about rural areas. And the other thing I would say is that you never let a good crisis go wasted. So every time we have something like winter storm year winter storm Yuri which we've talked about a lot in Texas having all these outages. We continue to talk about that we continue to to sort of talk about what it is in our system and why we still need to make these investments to more always point I mean I think he really illustrated that well. And the different, maybe attitude of regulators in the north, when thinking about investments and reliability and resilience versus those in Texas even though they'd had this in 2011, and it came back in 2010 these are not. It's not 500 year events anymore just like the flooding in Wisconsin is no longer 500 year event. So, I really appreciate Jennifer Morale for the science part of it. Our job is to make it as simple as possible and really emphasize those impacts that's why I love to partner, you know, with our local emergency managers and our statewide emergency management because they get it they clean up the pieces. And they're very, very interested in mitigating these hazards before they come so. One thing I forgot to mention my presentation is this new pot of money from the federal emergency management agency called building resilient infrastructure and communities it's their new pre hazard disaster mitigation program. And it's so important that we get our climate action resilience plans married up with our hazard mitigation plans because it's the same thing. We need to be able to enact these innovative responses, whether it's extreme cold or extreme heat in Wisconsin we know we're going to get both. And we know that each one can be just as deadly. So I'll turn it over to Michael. Thanks Megan and I know I think I attempted to answer this question in the presentation so I'll be brief. I think you're always going to struggle with anything around building envelope measures because they're hidden, and you never notice them. They're just not like solar panels right and nobody thinks that putting wall insulation in is a sexy thing to do to your home. And we don't have any of the data necessary to really quantify what the impact is again so so one thing is just doing that work to come up with a better quantification of the impacts and potential impacts here. The other one frankly is to take advantage of these extreme weather events when they happen. I'm certainly not pro extreme cold weather events. But I do work in Texas and there has been a lot more interest in Texas around weatherization measures ever since winter storm Yuri. So I think it's really important to be nimble and be able to recognize when your housing stock got taken around the block and when when you need to really invest in improving your homes on below performance and build seasonal communications campaigns around that. Because you never feel the problem more acutely than when you're freezing in your own home. Thanks Michael. Thank you everyone and I'm going to kind of dovetail right off of that point with the next question here on lessons that maybe specific lessons that haven't been brought up yet. That can be learned from states. That experience routinely severe cold weather so perhaps Wisconsin falls into that category of lessons that can be learned from those states for states that experience cold less often. In terms of our infrastructure our homes and other sort of community resilience resources so Megan why don't we start with you as kind of the direct state representative here and then we can go to. Jennifer and we'll wrap up with Morali. Sure thank you yeah I think one of the things that right after winter storm Yuri we had a few ice storms in the southeast and a colleague was saying man it's so cold salt doesn't work I said well you guys just use sand right that's what we do. So there was one of those interesting things also just that individual resilience part. In preparing for this talk I was talking to some colleagues from our department of health services and they have really great outreach about what to do what to keep in your car. How to stay warm in your home should you lose power and we do these campaigns. Every year we do them in the spring because of tornado season and I grew up in rural Wisconsin so we lost power a lot. We did a lot of undergrounding and wires during the 2009 2010 stimulus but it was just a guarantee you were going to lose power like 10 times over the summer and when your water comes from a well. That's a problem you need to have water you need to so you need to understand what resources are associated with energy and then protect yourself. So I think in a state that's about 80% rural. We really try to get out there we try to get in schools, we try to have public information campaigns on ahead of summer and ahead of winter, because these are the times when people die. And no matter how many times you have these events though, there are folks who aren't prepared there are folks who bring the Hibachi Grill inside. And, and it's, and it's incredibly tragic so just having more partnerships at the state and local level between folks like health services you might think our officer of the commission of insurance is really really interested in climate change and policies that can help us minimize those expenses it costs all of society when we have these big disasters. Yeah, definitely sand not salt if it's below a certain temperature is my one specific piece of advice. Michael did you have anything you want to add. Yeah, I do I'm going to be a little bit of a politician and redirect the question towards what I want to talk about. I think I'm just going to say that states can learn a lot from some of the states and cities that have really advanced comprehensive weatherization programs, which is true of a lot of cold weather states I think Massachusetts and Maine for example are leading the way there. But California's low income weatherization program is really impressive. The city level we like to call out the Philadelphia and energy authority all the time. They do work to braid and stack together I think 17 different funding sources to bolster their weatherization programs they have weatherization programs that address health and safety measures that address things like building electrification and other d carp components. And again we really need to be thinking about these things all at the same time if you're going to intervene in someone's home, we should be doing as much as possible. So that's what I'd say learn from the states and cities that have really advanced comprehensive weatherization programs. I feel like you're getting some thumbs up from other panelists. Jennifer over to you. Yeah, I think I mean I agree with everything that others have said and I would just expand it beyond cold events and say that, you know, any kind of extreme event whether it's heat or fire or wind or a hurricane or a king tide, it doesn't matter what it is that is going to expose the system and expose the vulnerabilities, but it makes way more sense to get ahead of this situation not wait for an extreme event to do that but to actively go out and figure out what your vulnerabilities are in your community, and try to make them resilient, and I think a lot of states, a lot of businesses are now realizing that climate change is presenting some significant risks to their infrastructure to their assets to their people to their communities and they're realizing that it costs a lot less if you do some of these preparations in advance rather than wait for an extreme event to come along. I will actually look at a different angle here I mean, there are states in the north, who gets this cold on a very regular basis the reason I say that is, you know, if I look at wind installed capacity I know Texas is on the top but the next five to six states are all up north, you know, Iowa, Wisconsin, Oklahoma, a few of them are up north, and they do opt for things like de-icing packages when they go to wind turbines or other solar technologies, and I know it doesn't, I mean it's probably not cost feasible when it comes to south, but there are technologies up there which can really make sure your wind turbines work as normal during these events. I think there are some technologies that probably have to come down to south too, just because of how often these events are happening, and it'll be a new norm, I mean probably look at the, consider the extreme events when you really, when you really install some new technologies in there and make sure you can get through these resilience events and that's a primary important thing when we look at system of systems perspective there. And the other thing which I probably told in the earlier question too is, look at these issues as a whole system issue, it's, you know, we should only, we should not only think about, you know, Texas is having the event, we should probably think about how can all other states really help for that event, and how can we plan resources enough when there's even coming down so that we are all prepared to attack those things. If I could just add on because the total cost of winter storm Yuri is estimated like $300 billion right now so this gets back to what we're talking about these valuation method methodologies for what real resilience to the system is because you said you know might not make economic sense in the south. So I challenge that and I and you know that's what's fun about being at the public service commission is to be able to say, when we look at our over dependent say in the north on natural gas, and the tertiary effects of winter storm Yuri on, you know, our folks in the south are paying 200% more because of what happened down south so at what point do we, as you say look at this as a larger system issue, and really put a value on just isolation at de icing those, those things that we have to do up north. And maybe we should think about should do in the south. Yep. By great. Over to Dan result for our next question. Um, yes, and very interesting and one thing that I was kind of reminded, as I was listening to the responses and the last question. There's a lot of really, there's a lot of really important coordination going on, you know, Megan you and your colleagues. Thanks to Nazio and other groups have, you know, lots of opportunities to communicate are one of our earlier breathing series, federal agencies and action talked about some great stuff happening at DOE. The Department of Energy is a really important convening body. They provide a lot of really valuable resources whetherization assistance program state energy program so if anyone in our audience wants to find out more I think all of our panelists have shared their contact information but also get in touch with us and we can help orient you to maybe some of the other stuff that's happening whether it's across the government or out in states as well. Speaking of past ESI briefing series about a year ago we were doing congressional climate camp and one of them was about adaptation mitigation double whammy things we can do that advanced climate adaptation but also advanced climate mitigation and that's where I'd like to go with this question and that is and maybe Jennifer maybe we'll start back with you and go through the lineup again. If that's alright. Yes. How do we align efforts to address impacts of extreme cold with other efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions what are some of the things we can do to mitigate what we've talked about today but also mitigate emissions that will contribute to worse climate outcomes down the road. Thank you. And I think just to clarify for everyone in case they're not clear on what mitigation versus adaptation really means because those words get tossed around a lot. I mean most of what we've been talking about today is the adaptation is like dealing with the impacts of these extreme events and figuring out how to adapt because we know they are going to continue we know they're going to get worse and the future really is in our hands as to how much worse they get. And that's where the mitigation part comes in is how well are we going to be able to reduce our emissions of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere because ultimately that's what's at foot here increasing sea level rise increasing extreme events extreme heat waves all. So, I just wanted to make sure that people understood that you know the mitigation that we're talking about now is really the underlying disease of the situation whereas the adaptation is addressing the symptoms of that disease. And I think you know me can hit on one of my favorite mitigation approaches and that is conservation because if you don't use a unit of energy, you're saving not only that unit but there's a whole bunch of energy that goes into creating that unit and getting it to you in your electric socket or the gas in your car or whatever it is and so if you can use less energy in your home in your business in your community. That has a really huge impact and it also saves you money by the way so that is really my, my favorite approach, but I would also really emphasize that this opportunity to look at how to make our. Our infrastructure our communities more resilient is an opportunity to move us more towards renewable energy resources because, you know, ultimately the fossil fuel burning that we do is the biggest source of the emissions that we're trying to remove. And by subsidizing the fossil fuel industry, still to the tune of $600 billion a year with our tax dollars that money could instead be used towards building more renewable sources, making the grid more more suitable for this new energy future. And any number of things helping people who are suffering the impacts of climate change and yet had the least to do with the problem in the first place. So, I would also like to suggest that everyone stop calling natural gas natural gas that makes it sound very innocuous natural gas is methane, methane and propane are both fossil fuels. And so I would strongly advocate for not trying to go more in those directions because, as we seek resilience, because we are just adding fossil fuel infrastructure, which I think is something that we need to really focus on not doing any more. Thanks, Morali. I think Jennifer pretty much told my words there, me coming in from national energy laboratory. I should certainly say that I think when we look at future scenarios, and a lot of resource needs or I would say operational resource needs which is interday between the days kind of resource needs I think we are looking at opportunities where renewables can contribute at a bigger level. And I certainly think that is the key. We have to look on sustainable resources like wind solar and even storage for that matter to see how they can help grid stability or the future grid needs as we look at and and I would reiterate that that's that's the way going forward, which will directly address the greenhouse gas emissions issue that we are we are focusing on. Certainly the grid was if I look back 50 years the grid was operating in a different way. I think we are in a big transition to getting into that higher penetrations or higher levels of renewables. And we need to think through what it means of grid, grid operations will look like in the future which might be completely different than what it was in the past. Yeah, I agree. I think you know the grid was the marvel of the 20th century so what's next I think they think we need to think about things completely differently starting with not calling it natural gas. It's natural it's a dead dinosaur I mean, and you know liquid petroleum gas. That's not. That's not the answer either. However, we do have the ability to capture, you know, renewable methane, and you can also make renewable propane from your, your biofuel or your biogas stream. So there's interesting ways to, again, use waste energy which I'm a big fan of so I'll say that perhaps we'll still combust some things, but if we're turning waste into something more useful. I think that that is, in my opinion that's that's a little more secure is a little more resilient, because we need a diversity of energy sources behind the behind the meter but I just I agree with everything Jennifer Morales said, particularly about that, you know that electron that you don't use has so much power in it. And so that's really where we started and to Michael's point about. I love hearing the story about these weatherization folks who can stack how many different sources that's fantastic we're lucky enough that we have our rate payer funded energy efficiency program. We actually take a portion of those rate payer dollars, and it allows us to weather eyes where we would only weather as about 1000 homes with federal dollars, we do about 5000 homes a year because we add our state dollars in. Could we do it better, could we do more you bet. And that's sort of what we're looking at leveraging some of this infrastructure act money for just to say, can we start because you can't go back to someone's home for 20 years. And Michael made the point when you go in someone's home you better make an impact. And I really think that that that is what is a big concern to me is that health and safety issues, building stock that can't take the weatherization. We have a lot of that. And then figuring out how we can take that burden off of people, but it all begins to me everything all emergency start at the local level so all solutions start there too. And that's why smart communities plan first, and we've seen it over and over again we've got a whole local government climate coalition that's that's really invested in planning and benchmarking their greenhouse gases, and then reducing them. So I'll turn it over to Michael because I could talk about this all day. You and me both Megan. Yeah, I'll just say again weatherization weatherization weatherization I think that really hits on the the nexus of protecting our constituents and addressing carbon emissions. And Dan I laughed when you noted that I didn't even mention energy cost savings because you're right in my mind passive resilience is maybe the fourth or fifth most important reason to invest in weatherization. It's extremely important and I'm so happy to talk about it today but there are so many other benefits right there's direct cost savings, especially for our most vulnerable residents you can address the most acutely felt energy burdens and make sure nobody gets you know one of those surprise $800 monthly energy bills in the winter that can just cripple an entire family. It's an opportunity to address other health and safety interventions like lead mold asbestos. There's a synergy with electrification which is this really urgent building intervention that needs some help to get off the ground and start scaling. You build local jobs right most of that money is just local labor. There are so many benefits and I'm so happy that that we have just increased funding for weatherization measures by over $5 billion in the infrastructure investment and jobs act but just to contextualize a little bit that $5 billion is expected to hit roughly $5 million households, which is a ton of households that's so exciting that's great but we have 39 million us households that are eligible for do we deliver weatherization services. So we need what 80 times that amount to hit all of them. We need a lot more and there are so many reasons to increase that amount of funding. I'm not going to suggest that we pass the IJ increase a times this year but the more we can do the better. When we have a panel this great all convened together we have to squeeze every last question out of you so I'm going to send it back to Anna she has a final lightning round question she wants to ask you. So our last question for the briefing today, and some of you have mentioned policy ideas already so feel free to repeat your favorite one or jump in with a new one but there is one action that the federal government could do or support at this moment in time on the issue of extreme cold. What would you want prioritized so let's start with Jennifer and we'll just run through the order again and give Michael last word. Well this isn't exactly directed at cold but I would advocate for stopping subsidies to the fossil fuel industry of all sorts because that money that can then go towards all of the adaptation techniques that we've talked about here weatherization grid development new more renewables and that gets that more than just cold extremes but all extremes. Marely you're on mute. Sorry. Yeah, I'll repeat what I said before. Certainly more interested, I mean, more investment in planning, proper planning correlated planning, and also investment in transmission resources and transmission flexibility. I think that is a paramount thing that will probably address many of the solutions for the extreme events that we're looking for. Yeah, I mean, again, stop the subsidies and fossil fuels and integrated resource planning across the whole country. So important into the down to the local level and then also really fostering the ability to build micro grids the ability to build the grid of the future and to do things differently to bring back pumped hydro storage to add all kinds of, you know, renewable energy renewable natural gas in Wisconsin. I'm sorry renewable methane did it again. See habits. But in Wisconsin if we just had a cow power program like Maine. We could deal with a lot of our, we would be making a lot more electricity from this methane which a lot of it is just it's either escaping, or it's going into process heat so more emphasis on local generation and energy independence. Go Michael. More times I can say it the better invest more in weatherization programs, make them eligible for more measures make it easier to stack and break funding, reduce the administrative hurdles so that cities and states can actually access that funding and use it. I have a lot more to say our team has a lot more to say about the nuances of that if anyone's interested. Great, thank you all. Hand it over to Dan to wrap us up for today. Thank you so much. Such a great session. And I just, I kind of wish we could go on, because I think we all have so much more we could say about all of these topics but Jennifer Morali Megan and Michael thank you so much for being fantastic panelists and helping our audience understand the polar vortex. What it means what it does, how communities are and can respond and adapt and we covered a lot of ground today, and that's entirely thanks to you and your amazing presentations so thank you so much. Anna thank you for leading us through a great Q amp a very interesting and really kind of again, we're at 130 we have to stop but I wish to keep going. Let me just say a couple quick things as we wind down. First is our briefings. Today was a great briefing. We have lots of other great briefings our briefings are in full swing. Recently we've had sessions on large landscape conservation. Justice 40 was on Friday, and we're releasing educational resources on a wide range of climate topics, sustainable aviation fuel school but school bus fleet electrification, sustainable farming in Puerto Rico wildlife crossings. Yesterday's issue climate change solutions had one on wildlife crossing so interesting benchmarking strategies for energy efficiency projects. You can visit us online at www.esa.org to RSVP for our briefings sign up for our biweekly newsletter climate change solutions and read all of our great articles. I'm Anna O'Brien who's behind the scenes just put a slide up with a survey link. If you have a moment to take our survey we read every response and we do our best to incorporate suggestions. You had an audio problem if you had a video problem if you have ideas for future topics. Please let us know how we did today. We really really appreciate that. I just mentioned Dan O but he is one member of a really great team here at ESI that make these briefings possible. So in addition to big thanks to him. Thanks also to Omri, Emma, Allison, Anna, and Savannah for all of their hard work. Also thanks to our former colleague Amber Todorov who was a big part of putting this briefing series together and while she's moved on from ESI. We're definitely thinking a lot about Amber during the session. So thanks to her. Thanks also to Emily and Grace who are our spring interns and who are both really, really excellent. We will go ahead and wrap it so if you're going two minutes over but thanks to everyone for joining us today. Thanks again to our panelists and thanks to Anna for leading us in Q&A, and we will see you back soon. The next briefing I think on our schedule is Green Hydrogen. Really interesting topic so visit us online and make sure you sign up for that. We will go ahead and wrap it up. Hope everyone has a great rest of your Wednesday. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks everyone. Thank you.