 All right, we'll get started here. Welcome everybody, thanks for joining us. I'm Brittany Wilson, Governor Scott's Deputy Chief of Staff. Tonight's briefing is on the administration's work in the space of climate change, mitigation and energy innovation. We're gonna try to stay within the hour limit. So in order to do that, we're gonna have to keep things at a fairly high level. So not everything is gonna be discussed tonight. And there's certainly more details to come after the governor's budget address next Friday. So that being said, if anyone wants more details, wants to dive in to some of these areas a little bit deeper, we're happy to schedule some follow-up discussions. If legislators have questions during this presentation, we will pause momentarily. Feel free to ask clarifying questions, but again, anything kind of in-depth and you wanna hold off and we can schedule something later on. For members of the media or public, if there are questions for our office, please reach out to us afterwards and we can follow up. But questions tonight will be for legislators. Now I will pass it over to Secretary Moore. Thanks, Brittany. So I'm going to provide a fairly high-level overview of our climate office and some of the thermal work and start with the Global Warming Solutions Act as context for what we have here. The, as many of you were involved in the Global Warming Solutions Act, which is Act 153 of 2020 was passed in September of 2020. And it created the Vermont Climate Council and provided it with a series of tasks and directives. The Climate Council held its first meeting November 20th of 2020 and is comprised of eight members of the administration, myself, Secretary Flynn and Commissioner Tierney, among them eight members that are appointed by the Speaker of the House, including Chris Campany, who's recently retired from the Climate Council from the Wind and Regional Commission and then seven members appointed by the Senate Committee on Committee. So we are a 23-person council. The council organized itself in a way that was supported by five subcommittees that are showing up on the screen and really worked aggressively to produce the initial Climate Action Plan, which was adopted by the council in December of 2021. The plan itself is intended to cut pollution, greenhouse gas emissions to 40% below 1990 levels by 2030, and that's approximately half of 2005 levels. It's a little bit challenging to give just a single set of numbers because the baselines for some of these different years and targets are different. But if you think about it as half of 2005 levels, that's probably the most useful measure. The Climate Plan itself was developed in a coordinated fashion with the Comprehensive Energy Plan that the Department of Public Service was working on on a largely parallel timeframe, and those two documents really do speak to each other. There's a commitment to update the Climate Action Plan at least once every four years going forward, and there is an extensive implementation section contained within the plan that should help inform decision-making. Many of the recommendations of the Climate Action Plan involve incentive-based programs and will rely on legislative action in order to be put in place. And then the Climate Action Plan also speaks to the need to develop a framework for measuring and assessing progress, and I will talk about that a little bit more in a bit, but that is something the agency is actively engaged in. So the Global Warming Solutions Act gave a seven-point charge to the Climate Council for its work. Greenhouse Gases was one of those components, but it also asked us to look at opportunities to expand C-Carbon suit sequestration in our natural and working lands in an effort to achieve net zero emissions by 2050 across all sectors in Vermont. We were directed to pay particular attention to energy burdens in rural and marginalized communities, look for ways to reduce chemical usage, in particular ozone-depleting substances, and then there's a whole book of work related to adaptation and resilience and trying to make sure communities and homes and businesses are not in harm's way. In response to the work of the Climate Council and the next steps laid out in the Climate Action Plan, the FY23 budget established a climate office in ANR. This climate office is intended to help coordinate work that is really going on throughout agencies of state government. It's not limited to ANR, and I have a list up on the screen in front of you, but you will hear from two of the most active partners in the space, the Department of Public Service and Agency of Transportation tonight, but also includes Vermont Emergency Management, the Agency of Agriculture, Food and Markets, the Department of Buildings and General Services who's running a municipal resilience initiative, the Agency of Human Services, both through weatherization work performed by the Department of Children and Families, as well as the Health Department that is looking at some of the other health effects of changing climate, the Agency of Commerce, and then we also have engaged with the state climatologist, which is a position at UVM, and currently that is Dr. Lesley and Dupigne Giroud. So there's been a lot that's transpired in the just barely over a year since the climate plan was adopted and just wanna touch real quickly on sort of the highest profile of those items first. As some of you may be aware, the Agency went through the role-making process and adopted what's called the Advanced Clean Cars and Clean Truck Standards in December of this year. These are also sometimes called the California Emissions Requirements, and these put Vermont as well as other states that have joined with California on a track to have only electric vehicles for sale in the light duty truck and passenger vehicle market come 2035. So it's a very long planning horizon that we're operating under. This gives the vehicle manufacturers plenty of notice as they start to plan out their inventories for out years, but it was a significant undertaking to get that role-making package through, and it puts us on track to start receiving higher efficiency vehicles in Vermont come 2026. Like yes, the Advanced Clean Car and Clean Truck Standards only applies to new vehicle sales come 2035. That is an important point because about 75% of the cars that are registered each year in Vermont are used vehicles, and it does not affect the ability to sort of see those vehicles used to the end of their youth school life. We are also working to deploy about $250 million of ARPA funding and state one-time monies in climate action, and I think both V-Trans and Public Service will speak to that in a little bit more tonight, but these are some of the highest profile of the initiatives being funded. There's also new money that's still sort of sitting out there on the horizon. The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, IIJA, also sometimes referred to as the bipartisan infrastructure law and the Inflation Reduction Act or IRA have competitive grant opportunities that Vermont will likely be eligible for, and we have been reviewing those opportunities and prioritizing our efforts in terms of which ones we will pursue. It's also important to keep in mind the competitive opportunities under these two federal funding programs aren't limited to state agencies, and it may be that there are other entities within Vermont that will choose to apply for some of these funds. Just one other note is that there really is sort of limited information and instructions available to us right now. The Inflation Reduction Act was passed in the second half of 2022, and federal funding agencies are at this point developing guidance, and we expect that guidance to roll out, starting probably later this month or next month, and there will be a lot of it, and we will have to sort of take that in and consider again which programs make the most sense for us to pursue. We've also been working on a number of fairly significant technical analyses that are needed to fully evaluate some of the strategies in the Climate Action Plan in terms of greenhouse gas benefits, but also particularly costs, savings, and different approaches. Another piece of work, technical work that has been going on and being led by the Agency of Natural Resources is the development of a municipal climate toolkit. This was again a specific requirement of the Global Warming Solutions Act. It includes a municipal vulnerability index, but the idea is to put together tools both to help communities understand what infrastructure they may have that's at risk under a changing climate, and then identify strategies for mitigating those risks, and we are currently on track to complete that work in the summer of 2023. One of the other tenants of the Global Warming Solutions Act and the Climate Council has been a real focus on environmental justice, and improving outreach to what have traditionally been underserved and marginalized communities. And so as the administration has moved into this climate action space aggressively over the last couple of years, we really have been redefining and expanding public engagement, and looking for different ways to talk to the public about climate action. Perhaps the best example is the recent public processes we ran around with clean car and clean truck standards. In reality, those are a very technical set of rules, and we have very little control as the state of Vermont over making tweaks to them. You either adopt what California did, or you adopt what the federal government did. There is no other choice. And so it felt kind of disingenuous to go out to stakeholders and ask for their input and feedback on these rules that we really can't change. And so instead we went out to stakeholders and talked about how the rules would be deployed, and then asked for input and advice on how state government could help them make a successful transition to electric vehicles. So we heard lots of things about charging infrastructure, some things about incentives to help with the upfront purchase cost of electric vehicles, and even people who said, I'm not sure my home is wired in a way that would allow me to charge a vehicle at home. That kind of feedback and input has been really helpful to us in sort of thinking through the types of programs, including what opportunities we may pursue through some of these federal funding initiatives. And then I think the last piece, my last slide, is just that we are working on a set of tools that will help us be able to report back to all of you accurately on the progress we're making in this space. A&R has a longstanding greenhouse gas emissions inventory and forecast that we produce annually, but it's usually delayed by two to three years. We've had some data sets that have sort of fallen off and had to look for different approaches in a couple of places recently, but are continuing to improve that inventory tool. We've been working with our sister agencies and departments, notably the public service department, department of motor vehicles and the tax department to start to understand currently available information on the types and volumes of fossil fuel deliveries that are made into Vermont. We know that having a robust data set is a necessary foundation for a lot of the programs that are being envisioned, not the least of which is the conversation around a clean heat standard right now, which just seems really challenging to advance apps and having an understanding of fuel deliveries. We're also have developed an RFP that will be put out shortly to obtain consultant support and helping us build the tool that we will use for tracking progress long-term. And I think with that, I will turn it over. Oh, I will pause and see if there are questions anyone has about that fairly fast and intense overview. All right, seeing none, I'm gonna turn it over to Commissioner Tierney. Darn, Julie, thank you. I was hoping you'd help me out on the stall for time. Unlike Julie, I'm afflicted with middle-aged poor eyesight, so I'm not sure I can see everything on the screen. If I turn my back to you, it's because I'm looking at the largest screen because I can't read my slides. June Tierney, Commissioner of the Department of Public Service, and you heard Secretary Moore explain to you how closely our two agencies have been working to advance Vermont's policies on climate change. My piece here will be today to talk a little bit about energy and weatherization. There are other agencies working hard on weatherization as well, such as the Office of Economic Opportunity. There are also other entities, such as Efficiency in Vermont and other energy efficiency utilities working in this space as well. It just happens to fall to me tonight to talk a little bit about what we are conjointly doing in order to address weatherization because as many of you know, I'm sure, 30% of Vermont's emissions are ascribed to the thermal sector and that is a huge chunk we need to address. I think intuitively many of us reach for energy, renewable energy as the first stop in addressing climate change, but the fact is you've done a lot of great work in that arena now for well over a decade and that's paying off. The sectors that have not received quite as much attention because working in that space really requires money, this transportation and the thermal sector. Happily we have money now at hand and what I'm about to walk you through is a little bit of how that money is being used and going to be used in Vermont. So we start with what you have done so far. Just last year alone using considerable ARPA funding, you appropriated 67 million to a variety of programs which the department is now administering either in its own right or through efficiency of Vermont. I start by reminding you of this work for two reasons. One, because a lot of this you did without knowing what was going to come to the state under IIJA, nevermind Ira. So if those two massive tidal waves of funding hadn't come to us, this is still excellent work that you would be doing under what we in the administration have called no regrets investments, meaning we know we can do this without more data, without more knowledge. This is obvious stuff we should be doing. I'm emphasizing this point because you heard Secretary Moore talk about the need for data and the need for science in order for us to make our best policy judgments about how to address our climate challenges. And when you are also trying to address the imperative of the urge to reduce emissions, it's hard to square that sometimes with the call to be patient while we develop the requisite data and science to know how to take our best shot. One thing I know you folks really do understand very clearly is a dollar gets spent once. Hopefully if the dollar is spent well, it has a multiplier effect. But we don't have endless dollars, so we have to make them count. And that's what we're trying to do here. Very quickly, last year we had 35 million to administer through EBT efficiency of a mod in order to help moderate income folks to weatherize their homes. 20 million goes to support the problem that you just heard Secretary Moore describe. You wanna do an EV. And then you discover after you've dropped the several thousands to buy the EV that you in fact don't have the kind of electric system at home that can allow you to charge the EV. You need a panel upgrade. That can be a hefty chunk of change, sometimes 4,000 bucks. We have discovered, we're doing from utilities that it's anywhere from 25 to 50% of our homes that are in that situation. I won't do the math here on the fly because I'm not very good at math, but I think you can understand that we're talking big bucks. 20 million is good, but it's not gonna take us all the way. Happily under the IRA legislation from the federal government, more help is on the way. You also appropriated 5 million to install heat pump water heaters for low and moderate income households. A no-brainer, I can tell you right now that a move like that, changing out your old boiler to get a heat pump version can save you 30% alone on your heating bill. So those are big bucks, big savings. And finally, you put 7 million towards supporting storage installation and load management in a nutshell, that's to help people put batteries, power walls in their homes, helps them during a power outage as many of our mothers recently experienced, also helps the utilities do what we call peak shaving which is to keep our costs in the aggregate down during the time when the price for electricity is as high as can be. And if we can keep those low peaks down, it pays dividends in terms of the rates that we pay all year long. I'm switching gears now to tell you a little bit about the 45 million that you appropriated last year just to the Office of Economic Opportunity, again for home weatherization assistance. In a nutshell, about 50% of our housing stock is very old. It's leaky, it's inefficient and it needs to be retrofitted or upgraded. You have put serious bucks toward that and that is a good thing, it's still not enough. Now happily again, there's more money on the way under the IRA legislation and also I believe some funding from the IRJA but this is a good moment to say, you know what, let's make sure we're progressing at a good pace at a pace that we can handle because there are workforce issues, there are supply chain issues, there are inflationary pressures, et cetera. I'm not saying we shouldn't do anything more, quite to the contrary. I'm just saying that as you weigh policy considerations, think of yourselves as driving a vehicle that has many gear shifts you have to do and think about how you have to time your gear shifts in order for your engine to run smoothly. That's a little bit about what we're asking you to do here as you reflect on policy in the climate change arena. Here we are to talk a little bit about the Inflation Reduction Act. This comes to us in two big chunks and I see a question, yes sir. I have a question on three just a while. Let's go back because the questions are welcome. Yeah, a stove like that can be a $5,000 appliance. It can be a little higher, it can be a little lower. It's not appreciably more expensive than a wood stove, a good wood stove, it's just that it has a different technology, that's all. And increasingly there are rebates associated with those stoves and so it's a good time to be changing out an old stove for a new one. Does that answer your question? Yeah, I'll stand. Well, that is a very good question and I don't mind telling you, it's one that we've struggled with in part because of the lag in guidance from the federal government, not lack of guidance. At the state level, we have tried to define who ought to qualify for these things and we've tried to include moderate income folks in that span, only to discover as we've tried to implement these programs sometimes that the federal government doesn't agree with those definitions. So I'm not avoiding your question, I'm just alerting it to the fact that it's not always clear, at least right now, who qualifies but basically we always aim these programs at low income and we do everything we can to expand the range to moderate income. I hope that answers your question. Generally speaking, they pay a piece of it. Generally speaking, they pay the upfront cost and then they get a rebate or if they're working with a certain vendor, the vendor is able to give it to them at a certain price that has been reduced because the vendor has gotten the rebate. I'm just checking on all, so I wanna just check this over here. For sure because it's through the Office of Economic Opportunity and that's why she's the deputy chief of staff and I'm the lawyer commission. So back to the IRA and please folks, keep the questions coming. That's exactly why we're here tonight. On the IRA as we affectionately call it, you have two chunks of funding coming our way. You heard Secretary Moore a moment ago say that there are a lot of details we don't have yet from the federal government. There are also other kinds of data traps that we have to watch out for. Just last night, I got an email from my staff telling me, hey, good news. These two 29 million figures in fact are 31.5 million and I was doing a dance because hey, we'll take three million dollars more. And then this morning, I got an email from them saying, oopsie, it turns out that the guy at DOE in fact to copied and pasted text that was due for Rhode Island, not Vermont, they're getting the 31 million, you're getting your 29. So my point is that we have to adjust on the file like that. So the point of being here tonight is to tell you what we can say with reliability and to ask you to be flexible with us as we find out more and more from Uncle Sam what the actual facts are. So we have two chunks of 29 million dollars coming to us, the first one through the State Energy Office. I wish I could have done a test with all of you to see how many of you knew we had the State Energy Office before this year. But we definitely have one and it is coming alive at the Department of Public Service because it's a little like a chia seed pet. It's got no hair until you put water on it and it comes to life. That's our State Energy Office, don't tell them I said that. So anyway, it's expanding now in mission and one of the things that we've done in applying for federal funding is to try to get a resource, a person who can help us with providing capacity for the municipalities and smaller villages in like in Vermont as they try to avail themselves of opportunities under both the IJA and the IRA. So anyway, my State Energy Office is going to be administering this 29 million. This is a good example of funding that can be used to administer a program where you can get something like a $4,000 contribution from Uncle Sam to your hot water heater that you're going to install as an air pump capacity or to say whether or not you're home by having it filled with foam to insulate it. That's called retrofitting. So in a nutshell, I've just covered both programs here, measures that can be taken, gear that you can install and also rebates that you get for doing insulation activities and the like. Here again, I would underscore in their high efficiency electric homes, that isn't the place where you make the expenditure and they get reimbursed, but rather that's where you go to Home Depot and you buy a piece of gear and it's got a reduced price because there's a point of sale reduction in the price right there on the spot. Or there's paperwork that you have to file to get it. Moving on to the next one. I want to spend a little bit of time talking about the IJA from the Department of Public Service perspective. We have three million up here that we received after applying for it successfully. It is that amount was sent to Vermont as a matter of formula. And that's the money that we're using to create that position that's designed to help your folks at home in local leadership on select boards and the like, get together to apply for federal funding for stuff that they need to do in the energy space. We also have a block grant that I think our representative, Sibilia, led the charge on this last year in combination with the next block of $775,000 to make sure that this money was directed via the Buildings and General Services Agency to help municipalities with things like updating their air handling systems and insulating and the like. You've all, I'm sure, sat in town offices or gone to town meeting day and have had the experience of sitting in one of those lovely charming antique meeting houses and it can be dark cold or you know that the bill for heating it that day is very high because it hasn't been retrofitted yet. We also have a formula grant that we're anticipating but we don't know how much it is yet to help us administer programs that will reduce number and duration of utility outages. Don't need to let us spend a lot of time on that. Everyone here knows how important that is. We've been reminded only two recently. All I can tell you is the money's welcome but it will never be enough. And finally, competitive solicitations. If I see it all scattered to you tonight it's because as we speak I'm getting texts from my staff about an application that we're putting in to compete at DOE to draw down funding that will finally help us build if it's successful the New England Clean Powerlink, a project that was certificated by the Public Utility Commission I think seven or eight years ago and that to date hasn't been built. If it does get built it'll bring hydropower down from Canada into New England and it'll have a material impact on winter reliability. Another huge concern for all of us you gotta stay warm and keep the lights on the winter and with that make that more affordable than the ways that we're trying to meet that mission right now. No guarantee that we'll get it but if I look at that application then we certainly won't get it. We also have a second program with the same project, different entry point that wants to do on February one so I'm really gonna be deciding myself for a while, Brittany. But this is the kind of thing that we're chasing. I just wanna emphasize that for you for a moment because I know we pack well above our weight in terms of how we punch but in the end I have maybe 45 people in my agency. We are a small agency, we have limits and the demands all good, all well attended, all necessary that come from the legislature and the governor, they don't ever seem to stop. So you need to keep that in mind as you sort out your priorities in the legislature as to what you wanna do this session. If you're going to assign new things please make sure you assign them with resources so that we can get it done and please also understand at the end of the day there's 24 hours in a day and my staff fills a lot of those hours with work for the public good. I am nearing the end of my presentation and I know if we can hardly wait. This is the brainiest part of the presentation in that I just wanted to carry forward for your benefit that there is a lot of homework we're doing from prior sessions and we need time and opportunity to do that homework. We've heard secretary Moore talk about all the things that are being done now that the actual climate action plans were adopted. While that plan was being promulgated and adopted the department of public service was at work on these programs, all of which represent our early work on decarbonizing Vermont's energy supply. Familiar names I'm sure the Renewable Energy Standard, the Standard Offer Program, NetMeeting, that represents about a decade and a half of intellectual work that you folks have done in this state that we have now gotten a lot of experience with but that all developed in silos separate one from the other and there's a real need now to harmonize them to say, okay, now that we have all this experience with these programs, what has worked, what hasn't worked, what fits together? There was a time when very rich incentives from that metering made a world of sense where we were trying to get people to put solar panels on their houses. It's a very, very expensive way today to get renewable energy on our grid and you have to start asking yourselves, you will hear in a moment from my colleague at AOT as we electrify everything whether it's heating or cars, how are we gonna do that and afford it if electricity gets really expensive? And so you have to start looking at programs like NetMeeting and saying, hey, is that the way, is that the best way for Vermont to be provisioning renewable energy and climate in the service of climate change if it gets too expensive for people to be able to pay their electricity bills as they electrify, are we working at cross purposes? So that's the kind of question that we're asking here and we have a robust public engagement process that we've launched where we are really trying hard to reach people other than the usual suspects who want to show up to help us with this work. Let me be clear, the usual suspects who show up, they're always welcome, they always make immensely positive contributions. The only knock here is that they're always the same people. But equity, justice concerns, Justice 40, the federal legislation requires us to get beyond those folks and to get to others who traditionally had not been included in these things. And that's one of the things that the department's trying to do in this work by having a very robust engagement process. Yes, sir, I see in the back, an alternative to what I'm talking about. It's really not an alternative as much as it's looking at the rates that are paid for it and saying what makes sense now that putting solar panels on your house is kind of a normal thing to do. There are models like that. I wouldn't stand here today and tell you that's the one we should do. But the fact that those models are out there is something that should be looked at and there should be a cost-benefit analysis, which is a critique that you've heard me make very often in the legislature. We should know what these things cost. And you should know what they cost before you adopt them. So at least that's where I come from. That's how you do business. Are there other questions? Yes, sir. I think those are absolutely valid questions. The first thing I'd want to say is if you are drawing a blank and you have a concern that that's not being done, then I apologize because that's a blank that we've left in the public understanding of how we plan for electricity, how we administer these things. It begins with the ISO New England, the grid operator and manager here in the region who has a very robust planning staff and the like who do run those studies and who track how much energy do we need for this. A lot of that work is also done by what we call the Vermont System Planning Committee, which is an entity that was created by the Public Utilities Commission. All of our distribution utilities and Velco and other stakeholders participate in that process. There was a direct response to these very questions that were raised when we were struggling with upgrading the Northwest Reliability Line about 15 years ago. Every utility in the state also has what we call an integrated resource plan. Those integrated resource plans are reviewed by my department. They are also reviewed by the Public Utility Commission. The purpose of those plans is to answer those kinds of questions. There is also, of course, your local energy planning committee. There's the work done by our regional planning commissions in the state. And there are any number of stakeholder groups who are also tracking these things and who frequently do a better job of presenting the information than I do. They don't have as many hats to wear. Anyway, so I hope I've given you some comfort that these things are being tracked, but there are no easy answers and there are no clear answers. These are judgment calls that have to be made in policy, which, and this is a good note for me to close on, is why having the patience to develop data and to make policy judgments that are informed by that data is so very important. Vermont's living large right now. We've got lots of money, but we all have been around the times when we didn't have that money and still needed to get the job done. And we have no knowledge that we're going to have this kind of money in the future, so we need to get it right because we take one shot here. With that, I'm going to see the stage to my colleague from AOT. Did I get a hit? No, there we go. As some of you, I'm sure, no, I'm not the secretary of transportation. He's sitting over here, Secretary Flynn. Yeah, but we have the same haircut. We didn't get the chia seeds, I guess. So, no, I'm just the bureaucrat standing between you and dinner, so I'm going to try and be quick. Coming out of the Climate Action Plan, we have very specific targets, and these are really minimum targets to be able to hit, but 2030, 2025, 27,000 plug-in electric vehicles by 2025 and 126,000 by 2030. I've just noted transportation sector accounts for nearly 40% of the emissions here in the state, and transportation is often the second highest expense in a household budget. But we do know, the agency of transportation is, of course, reviewing all the activities that we work on to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and it's a wide range of activities, and with the carbon reduction, a strategy that we're working on will be able to kind of hone in on what is the cost-effectiveness of all of those strategies, but we do know that electrification really poses the clearest and quickest path to reducing emissions. So how are we doing fairly well? We're up to 7,500 vehicles as of the start of this state fiscal year. This map gives you a sense of where EV registrations are located. We're just over about 50% of the EV registrations are fully electric vehicles. So because of that, we rank fourth in the nation for EV adoption. Clearly, where you see more of the white, we have more work to do to conduct outreach and make sure that we're providing the infrastructure that people need to have the confidence to be able to purchase electric vehicles and know that they'll be able to get around as they need to. And so our incentive programs that we have on the state of wide level account for more than a quarter of all the registered plug-in electric vehicles in the state. So we know that this works. And when we've asked Vermonters what are the biggest barriers to EV adoption, of course, purchase price is the single largest. When you kind of look at all the other responses, many of these better in cold weather, faster charging, more charging stations, longer driving range, that all relates back to creating a public infrastructure that allows for people no matter what kind of car they are and no matter where they live in the state to be able to get around as they need to. And so I've concluded the governor's strategic priorities, growing the economy, making Vermont more affordable and protecting the vulnerable, because they relate to all of the things around EV adoption and because they help to inform the policies that we develop, the programs that we develop to help with those cost barriers and with the infrastructure that we're working on. So thanks to the legislature, last year we had six and a quarter million dollars in federal funds that was authorized for fast charging along the highway corridors. There was another $10 million that's being managed by our partner agency, agency of commerce and community development to mainly work on level two charging. So somewhat slower charging, but more appropriate charging for community attractions, for workplaces, to build upon the work that's already been done for multi-unit dwellings so that the 20, some odd percent of people who live in housing that's not a single family home, that they still have access to home charging, which is more cost effective to provide and more affordable for the people benefiting from it. Then we also have a number of different pots of federal funding that are coming online. So we had our plan approved in September of this year, the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Program that will bring in over $20 million to the state. The first iteration of this plan identifies 15 locations throughout the state so that we're building a highly redundant network that will allow Vermonters in all parts of the state to benefit from this. As well as people coming in from other places for tourism and other reasons. Then we have the Inflation Reduction Act that was referred to earlier. That does provide extra incentives for our private sector businesses, for our residents themselves to be able to install whether it's home infrastructure or a business, commercial enterprises or workplace charging, to be able to extend out the state resources that have been approved for community charging and for corridor charging. And then we have the Carbon Reduction Program which is a federal formula fund that will bring in about $6.3 million a year, some of which we'll be able to use on charging to really get into the places that aren't on the designated corridors. So we're limited with our NEBI program, the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Program to certain places along our highway network. But the Carbon Reduction Program has more flexibility. We don't need to meet minimum standards in terms of the number of chargers and the level of power. And so we can more finely tune what's needed in more rural areas and places that are off the network. And then finally, we have a number of competitive grants that haven't been announced yet that we're expecting earlier this year and we hope to be competitive in that way too. It's really geared for many rural places in the state. So we're doing fairly well right now. We're ranked first in the nation in terms of public chargers per capita and in part because we don't have a lot of capita but that's either here or there. So we are working at building out a broader network and we're looking to upgrade seven of these locations early this spring and then as we receive the final rules from FHWA, the Federal Highway Administration, then we'll be able to start rolling out some of the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure money. So beyond those investments in EV charging, as I said, the highest barrier to adopting electric vehicles is clearly the cost and that's been rising over the past several years. So $20 million was appropriated last year to be able to help with that. And I go back to the governor's priorities. This is really about targeting the support to those who need it most. So all of our incentive programs are designed in a way that provide the highest benefit to the people with lowest incomes. And I'll just, the next slide will go over the income guidelines where people qualify but $12 million for the incentive program for new plug-in electric vehicles, $3 million for the mileage smart program which is the used vehicle incentive program and that's for people, households at 80% of state median income, the Replacier Ride program which is $3 million. And then Drive Electric Vermont, our partnership that's lasted over a decade now to help with all kinds of vehicle electrification strategies, $2 million and then I mentioned the $16 and a quarter and $1 million for charging. This is just a snapshot of what has been achieved thus far over the past year. But as you can see in the last sort of bullet there, over 80% of this funding is going to households with lower incomes. So up to $4,000 is available for new vehicles, for people that qualify, it's for moderate income folks, it's $2,500 and up to $3,000 for a plug-in hybrid. And there is about just over $10 million now left in those funds, this gives you a sense of where are people getting vehicles in the state, who's receiving the money? We keep track of this. If you wanna dig into this more on the Drive Electric Vermont site, there's all kinds of information and you can play around with the different filters to see what questions you want to have answered. Mileage Smart Program is a used vehicle incentive program and that's for plug-in electric vehicles but it's also for conventional hybrids with a mileage rating just above 40 miles per gallon. And up to $5,000 is available for that program and in over $3 million available left in funding for that. The Replacier Ride Program is trying to get people to trade in their less efficient vehicles that are 10 years or older and pursue a cleaner option and that could be a vehicle that's, you're stacking this $3,000 incentive on top of a new vehicle incentive or it could be with the Mileage Smart Program. So it begins to work away at that high upfront cost and then we also have the Inflation Reduction Act which for the first time created a $4,000 tax credit starting January 1st this year and a up to $7,500 tax credit for some of the manufacturers who have timed out or met their caps under the old system. We're, like Commissioner Chanry said, we're still waiting on guidance on how that will work. We're expecting that by the beginning of March to understand a number of the specific requirements on which vehicles qualify for that. And then there's another option that was developed for those who are trading in a vehicle and maybe in more urban areas that are able to get around in other ways. So it supports bike purchases, e-bike purchases, car sharing and the like. And our partnership with Dr. Electric Vermont helps us with all kinds of things. It's really a great resource for the public to be able to go and wade through the different, the many incentive programs and understand how they can be layered on top of one another, how they interact. There's a lot of stakeholder coordination that goes on bringing utilities together with a number of the agencies that work together on EV charging for example. But this is a great place for those who are maybe not directly related in their committee work to transportation to be able to go and explore some more about what kinds of programs are out there and how they fit in with the federal funding. And lastly, they've helped with developing our National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Plan. So we've done all kinds of work around that. In the coming year, we'll continue to do that work. We'll continue more public outreach to help inform successive plans and then we'll look at things like our own agency activities, how we can do a better job or kind of build upon what we've already been doing to expand our electric fleet. And then looking at things like workforce development and diversity in EV infrastructure, installations and EV maintenance and the rest of it. And then we're also going to continue fleet support. So we're looking at how we might be able to build again on the Inflation Reduction Act and make sure that not only residents but businesses, commercial entities, nonprofits, even municipalities how they can do their part and benefit from some of the programs that are there. And so that's, yes. Sure. Yeah, it's been developing more in like California, for example, we don't have many facilities to even be able to support that. There is a slide that I could share with you if you wanna follow up that shows sort of the relative efficiencies of a fully electric vehicle that's battery powered versus a hydrogen electric vehicle versus a nice vehicle. And that gives you a kind of good perspective where we're gonna see the biggest gains. And that's why our focus here in the state is really on electrification in the way that I've laid out. Yeah, sure. Any other questions? I would just stress to end the amount of inter-agency cooperation that happens. That the charging infrastructure program, for example, that we have laid out today has all been led by agency of commerce and community development but there's also representation from the public service department and the agency of natural resources from buildings and general services. So it is something that requires a whole government approach and that's how I think Vermont is unique in some ways in the level of cooperation that we've been able to apply to this very complex problem. So, oh, sorry. Sure, so there's... Yeah, so there's lots of resources. Like I said, Driver Electric Vermont has a very good page that walks people through what are the eligible models? What are the amounts that are available on the state level, at the local utility level, which can also stack with the incentives through the Inflation Reduction Act. So there's an incentive calculator there that people can kind of plug in what their expected vehicle cost is and then see what their incentive might be. So at the end of it, you might have something that's 50% less and then there are other resources in terms of financing that might be available, lower cost financing through some of our local credit unions and other ways that you can kind of access incentives. EV charging is another added cost that contributes to the high upfront cost. Over the lifetime of the vehicle, the hope is that people save money and that's the projection, but we need to get past that first cost. So help is available as well through utilities and the state and some of the programs that the charity's department is developing to support the electrical upgrades to make these kinds of things happen. If you have constituents out there who are clueless and we're asking you about these things and you just don't know where else to go, just call the Consumer Affairs Public Information Division of the Department of Public Service. We will help you onto the path. We will be able to see whether it's a utility question as Brittany was just pointing out or if it's a drive electric question in the mic. It may not be our mission, but we're happy to help, that's why we're there. Also, Drive Electric Vermont has a phone number on its website as well that folks can call, but when in doubt, reach out, we will help. Sure, thank you. Yeah, so we have a list of participating dealerships and that's on the website as well. There are over 30 participating dealerships and so when people go to the dealership, there's actually all kinds of resources there as well and trainings that have been done for the salespeople as well to make sure that everybody's aware of the incentives and that people aren't leaving money on the table if they qualify. Any other questions? Great, thanks so much and good luck. Thank you all for coming and please let us know if we can do any follow-up.