 Good afternoon and welcome to the 2020 Congressional Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Expo. I'm Dan Berset, the Executive Director of the Environmental and Energy Study Institute. We are about to start our fourth panel of the day, Efficient Buildings and Energy Grid Resources. ESI was founded in 1984 to provide nonpartisan information on environment, energy, and climate issues to policymakers and the public. We do our work in different ways, including by holding briefings. Those are archived online, writing fact sheets, writing articles. I encourage everyone to visit us online at www.esi.org and sign up for our bi-weekly newsletter, Climate Change Solutions. Talking about EESI, you can't really talk about EESI without the great people. At the end of the last panel, I ran through a list of people who are helping us out today. But I left three names off the list. So before I get any deeper into this, I just need to make sure that I thank Anna and Amber on our policy team and Miguel, who works with us on our on-bill financing work. Everyone, they're helping us with articles and notes and monitoring things and keeping an eye on things. And they'll be working on us to get all of the summaries and things like that online after today. So just wanted to make sure to acknowledge their efforts today and to thank them for that. We are very pleased to feature welcome messages from the members of Congress who lead the House and send it renewable energy and energy efficiency caucuses. We would not be here today without their support. To introduce this panel, it is my privilege to introduce U.S. Senator Jack Reid from the great state of Rhode Island. I want to thank Senator Crapo, Congressman Loesbach, and the whole team at the Environmental Energy Study Institute for their efforts organizing this event. Thank you to the panelists for joining and lending their expertise. I'm particularly pleased that Becca Treach from the Round Office of Energy Resources is on the panel to share a Rhode Island perspective. Energy efficiency provides real results, both for the wallets and for the environment. That's why funding for programs like the Weatherization Assistance Program and the State Energy Program is critical. Our challenge is not only reducing energy use in homes and other buildings, but also finding ways to allow those buildings to provide clean, renewable power back to the grid. I hope today's conversation will inform and inspire discussions in that area as we try to chart a path toward a clean energy future. Thank you for joining us today. I hope you enjoy the panel and keep up the great work. Thank you. Great. Thanks to Senator Reid and his truly great staff for everything they've done to help make today possible. Now we turn to the topic of efficient buildings as energy grid resources. I am not going to play favorites and say that any of our six panels today is my favorite, at least not while I'm being recorded and live streamed. But I will admit at the outset, I am a buildings guy. I like controls, I like standards, and I love codes. I think the building sector is underappreciated for its ability to contribute emissions reductions on a near immediate basis, a building retrofit. One day it's inefficient and leaky, the next day it's energy efficient, comfortable, and productive. And increasingly, efficient buildings have the ability to communicate and respond to conditions on the energy grid. I find it fascinating. And in case you're not with me, no worries. We just happen to have four of the best talkers about buildings and the business to teach you all about the opportunity. Even though we're online, we will still be able to take your questions. There are two ways you can send us questions. One is by following EESI on Twitter at EESI online. The second is you can send us an email, EESI at EESI.org. When we conclude our presentations and we turn to Q&A, we will draw from your submissions as we continue the conversation. You've already heard the name of one of our panelists, but there are three others. And in order, we will be nearing from David Nemzo of the Building Technology's Office of the U.S. Department of Energy, Becca Treach of the Rhode Island Office of Energy Resources, Justin Koucher of the Poly Isosiranya Insulation Manufacturers Association, and Keith Thennis with the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association. For full bios of our panelists, you can visit EESI or www.eesi.org. David, you are our first panelist today. I'll turn it over to you to get us started. And thanks so much for joining us. Well, thanks a lot, Dan. Thanks for organizing this and getting it kicked off by Senator Reid. As Senator Reid said, and you reaffirmed, buildings play an essential role in our clean energy future. Now, first, let's just start with the numbers for how important buildings are. So buildings are the largest energy consuming sector in this country. Buildings consume 39% of U.S. energy. That's more than transportation, more than industry. And then when we get to electricity, the share grows that much more. Just under three quarters of U.S. electricity is consumed in buildings. And at peak times, as it is right now in much of the East Coast with the heat, buildings are turning away with air conditioning, and they set the peak in most of the country, which means we're building the power grid to meet that hot, sweaty day when commercial and residential buildings are going. So the impact is enormous. When it comes to emissions, buildings are over a third of U.S. emissions. 35%. And at the end of the day, the bill to heat and cool and power and light, our buildings is over $400 billion. And as you know, Dan, as we all, this panel knows, much of that is wasted. It's money out the door, literally, in the case of buildings. So the problem is significant. The challenge is there. The question is, is there an opportunity? And I think very much that there is. So buildings have been connected to the grid for a while now. Frankly, since 1882, when Thomas Edison set up the Pearl Street station in Lower Manhattan and connected 400 light bulbs. Well, since then, it's grown rather considerably to, as I said, to three quarters of the power grid, $400 billion worth of energy. And so the question is, how do we harness buildings to be not just passive consumers of power, but dynamic, active determinants of how power is used? And there are a lot of ways to do that. And I know EESI is working on many of those, whether it's renewables or energy efficiency or demand response. The one key area for that we call at DOE, grid interactive efficient buildings. We'll call it GAB to save some time here. But GAB, grid interactive efficient buildings or buildings to grid are ways to turn buildings into dynamic resources. And there are a lot of ways to do that. And it's not just a matter of being more energy efficient. That's at the heart of it. But it's not just a matter of demand response where during times of stress we turn things off, but it's doing it on a, if we can, a 24-7 basis to control heating and cooling and air conditioning so that we can save power when it's most valuable. And then if there are times when it's most abundant, if solar is performing well at high noon in Phoenix, well, then those are times when we can, we can charge things up and then save it for when we need it. So that broadly speaking is the role of buildings. And there's a lot of technological opportunities. There's also a lot of business opportunities. And we have to help people think through ways to use their buildings, whether it's their homes or their offices or anything else. Thanks, David, for kicking us off. And a plug for our first panel of the day, Assistant Secretary Daniel Simmons, who runs the Office of Energy Efficiency Renewable Energy. He kicked off our expo today and talked about workforce. And obviously there's a huge amount of workforce and workers who help implement energy efficiency, renewable energy, storage and other technologies in buildings. So thanks, David, for you joining us today. And also thanks once again to Daniel. We are going to turn it to Becca. Becca, welcome to the expo. And congratulations on your shout out from Senator Reed. Wonderful. Thanks for having me. And I'm honored to join this amazing panel to talk about the Creative Interactive at Efficient Buildings or GEBS. As Dan mentioned, I'm from the Rhode Island Office of Energy Resources where we primarily focus on leading Rhode Island to a clean, affordable and reliable energy future. And I'm really here today to share some of the ways that my office and other states are trying to support GEBS as a critical component of that decarbonized future. First, I wanted to talk about how Rhode Island has strategized about the ideal pathway that buildings would be taking to ultimately decarbonize and to save building owners money. In an ideal world, and I will say that this is ideal and most buildings will not follow this path, but in an ideal world, we would start with having better data, right? We would have better access to information about how a building is performing. From there, we would ideally pursue all cost-effective energy efficiency. Then we would decarbonize all of our thermal loads. So that's cooking and heating. And of course, any kind of transportation that might be plugged into the building. And from there, we would really focus on renewables, right? How do we then cover the electricity that the building is currently consuming? And I do wanna build on what David mentioned throughout every single one of those four steps I just walked through. Demand response is absolutely critical to making sure that the buildings are then interacting as effectively as possible with the grid and maximizing societal benefits. So what is Rhode Island currently doing to support sort of that ideal step process for buildings, right? And improving their outcomes for society. Regarding energy data, we are working very closely with our utility to try to push forward connections with energy management softwares like portfolio manager, which of course is something that is provided through the EPA. We also are working very closely with them to try to roll out advanced meter technologies, which of course is something that states need to be supportive of if we want that better, more granular information. Likewise, we're also trying to support building labeling policies where if you go to buy or sell or lease a building, you would be disclosing information about what the expected costs would be for the utilities over the course of the year. And again, all of this is really focused on getting information into building owners and occupants so that they can make better decisions and start prioritizing improvements for their buildings. Then of course, under energy efficiency, we are lucky enough within Rhode Island to be one of the nation leading states within energy efficiency. I think we've been third for the past several years right behind California and Massachusetts. So we're very proud of punching above our weight. But in terms of energy efficiency, it's extremely important that these programs are of course supported and well-funded, but also that they're focusing on delivering energy efficiency throughout a building's lifetime. So not necessarily a one touch program where somebody got an energy audit and improved something at one point during the building's life, but that there's an ongoing relationship so that when the HVAC system fails or there's money for a new renovation or upgrade, that energy efficiency is at the forefront whenever that happens. In terms of demand response programs, we also here in Rhode Island ensure that demand response is offered at the same time that the energy efficiency programs are offered. We make sure that they are coordinated as much as possible. Because again, when I listed that ideal pathway for a building, we wanna make sure that demand responses is something that's being considered every step of the way. And then lastly for renewables, we're trying to offer a variety of programs. Ultimately, we view diversity as the key to ensuring access for everybody. And so that means we do have a tariff program as well as net metering and community solar as well. Because we know that it is difficult to of course reach all of the different buildings and all of the different occupants. In terms of challenges with these programs, I do wanna mention there, there are some serious ones. First, as I just mentioned, having access by everyone is important, right? Equity and participation and access to the programs is extremely important. And one of the largest barriers we've encountered is really around renters versus building owners, right? There is a disconnect there and more work needs to be done. In addition to that, there's a challenge about integrating all of these programs. Right now, as I just said, I listed all of them as sort of separate programs delivered by different entities and they all have different goals and objectives. But in an ideal world, there's handoffs between all of these programs and they're shared information being conveyed at the same time. So we're continuing to work on that. But that said, recognizing that all of these programs are happening simultaneously, we realized that very few buildings are going to go through the ideal four step process that I outlined in the beginning, right? Very few of them are gonna follow that nice linear trajectory. And so what we're doing is we're also trying to pursue policies that ultimately will support decarbonization and energy savings and cost savings no matter what pathway a building ends up taking. And so I do wanna talk just briefly about those large scale policies. So the first one that I wanna mention is really greening the electricity that is coming in two buildings. Just in January of this year, we had an executive order asking my office along with some other agencies to come up with a plan to make sure that 100% of our electricity is renewable by 2030. So of course, we're trying to do a study to understand the best way to achieve that. It is a large quick goal. But we think it's important that this connect directly with building management and ultimately building upgrades and retrofits because the more that we can produce renewable energy directly where it's being used, the better for everybody and the better the benefit for the grid as well. In addition, we've recently talked about renewable thermal and so I do wanna just mention one more thing about renewable thermal as a policy priority. Ultimately, if renewable thermal can be prioritized, there's a lot of opportunity within buildings in terms of heating and cooling to either electrify or pursue other decarbonized fuels. And it's absolutely critical that we provide that as part of the component of retrofits. So thanks for that. Thanks Becca. Thanks for joining us today. It's great to see you and thanks for sharing your experiences from the number three energy efficient state in the country. Our next panelist will be Justin. Justin, it's great to see you. Welcome to the expo and take it away. Thanks, Dan. And thanks to ESI for inviting myself and Pima to be a part of the first virtual event here. The ESI is hosted. Just a little bit of background as Dan said in introductions I'm with the Polyiso Sanerit Insulation Manufacturers Association. Pretty self-explanatory, but we're the North American Trade Association for Manufacturers of Polyiso Insulation in the United States. Our members operate 30 manufacturing plants and the products that we produce go into commercial roofs as well as other applications in the building envelope for commercial, residential and industrial buildings. And Dan has invited me to speak today on the importance of the building envelope when we're talking about energy efficient buildings and how they integrate into other aspects of our clean and renewable energy system. So just to take a step back to make sure that we are all on the same page with respect to what is the building envelope. It is a term of art. From a technical perspective, it means the building components that enclose conditioned space. So those spaces in your home or office building that you heat or cool, or building components that separate a conditioned space from an unconditioned space. So think if you are in a typical residential home, your ceiling is actually part of the building envelope and most commonly because that's where the insulation is separating at this time of year your interior space from a hot attic. But practically speaking, you can think of a building envelope as what makes a building a building. It's the roof, it's the walls, it's the windows, it's the doors, it's the foundation, it's a floor. And without those components, you don't have a building. And from an energy perspective, you can gain an appreciation for just how important the building envelope is to protecting and saving all of the energy that goes into heating or cooling the space that we spend a tremendous amount of time in and more so lately. Now, just as a building can't be a building without a building envelope, a high performance building can't be a high performance building without a high performance building envelope. I know these technologies and products don't get the attention that thermostats and other elements of the building do and everything's important. But I think it is really important to remember that without a high performance building envelope, we're not really talking about a high performance building. We're probably talking about a fancy building that waste energy in a lot of cool and interesting ways. And so opportunities like today to drive an emphasis to the building envelope are so important because it's important but it doesn't get the attention. It's really one of those silent heroes when we're talking about building energy efficiency. So to focus on a couple of things that make the building envelope unique from other technologies, I'm sure if you've been in a home depot, a lot of people are doing home improvement projects these days, you've not come across an aisle that's labeled building envelope here. It's not something that you go shop for, whether you're a residential homeowner or a commercial builder, you don't just buy a building envelope. It is a system comprised of a number of different products. So for instance, a roof is comprised of a number of different products that are combined to work together to provide a system function. And when we're looking at the building envelope, one of the challenges is you have all these individual systems, whether it be a roof system, a wall system, a window system that all need to be integrated in order to achieve the desired performance. So the building envelope performance is really going to be judged by its material selection, its design, and importantly, and something that's not discussed enough is its installation. So I understand earlier today in a number of the other panels, there was discussions around workforce and training. Buildings and building energy efficiency is a huge opportunity for workforce development and continued development of the workforce that's already engaged in the industry, because as we look towards meeting these new and more stringent goals, we have the technology. It's really a question of whether we have the capacity to come up with the designs and then come up with installations that meet those designs. One of the other important things that separate the building envelope from other elements of an energy efficient building is you get one, maybe two or three shots at this during a building's life. A building envelope is not something that you can cost effectively upgrade five years into the construction or occupancy of a building. There are opportunities throughout a building's lifecycle that provide an opportunity to enhance the energy efficiency improvement. Maybe you're replacing the windows in a residential building. Maybe you're replacing the roof on a commercial building. There are opportunities throughout a normal building's lifecycle to take advantage of these opportunities, but they are few and far between. And so it's great to be part of a policy discussion today because policy really has an important role to play in helping overcome what's often a very narrow focus view on the short term. People don't like to invest their money in items that it's gonna take five, 10, 15 years to recoup. So policy has a very important role to play in helping us overcome that short-term focus and maximize long-term energy efficiency opportunities. And I'll conclude by tying it back to the broader panel here today, which is when you're thinking of buildings as a energy grid resource, the building envelope, I like to think of as an enabling technology. If you can build the building envelope correctly and maximize its potential, it really opens doors for all of the other technology to be that much more effective, whether it be renewables in terms of meeting the demands of the building itself and then providing clean energy back to the grid or a whole host of other technologies. It is really, the building envelope really is one of those core enabling technologies that make other things possible and more cost-effective. So Dan, back to you. I look forward to the question and answer and thanks again for including me today. Absolutely, Justin. It's great to have you and thanks so much for making time for us today. Keith, welcome to the expo. It's great to see you too and really looking forward to what you have to tell our online audience. Thank you and thank you for having me. I work with the National Rural Electric Co-operative Association and just a little bit of background. We're the national service organization for 900 not-for-profit utilities that provide energy to 42 million people across 48 states. So we have a big footprint and I think we have a unique perspective on this topic due to our history, both electrifying the country and working on these issues and our demographics. And I'll talk about that a bit. We own and maintain 42% of the nation's electric distribution system and 2.6 million miles of power lines. So if you think about that, that would be enough power lines to go around the world 100 times. And right off the bat, I want to bring a perspective of residential consumers in existing homes because it's easy to think about this as an issue for big buildings and people in big cities or in brand new homes. But many Americans do not have new homes with new gadgets. They don't live in big buildings and don't live in cities. So, but they are important. And increasingly in this economic environment, we might not have as much opportunity to build new homes and spend a lot of money on new devices. So it's really gonna be important to think about how to reach folks in these existing homes using technology. And cooperatives, electric cooperatives, we serve rural areas and we know about this opportunity because our folks tend to be pretty spread out. And since our inception when we brought the lights out to folks in rural America, we've really been doing certain things that are really related to this topic. Groups of individuals have got together to modify their energy use to help to save money, to save on their wholesale power costs. Because the cost of energy is not the same all the time. And if you can get together and you can say not use energy during a peak time, you can save a lot of money. And cooperatives have really banded together to do this. In the past it's been done through things like water heater demand response programs making sure that you're not heating your water when energy is really expensive. Beat the peak programs, sending out messages saying, this is the peak time. You can save, we'll all save on our power bills if we don't use energy right now. Thermostat programs, giving out thermostats to folks and having them program them so that they're not on at times that they don't need to be. Weatherization programs and more. And you can think about why this is important for our demographic, because if you're out in the middle of a rural area and you're bringing that power all the way there and everybody's got their air conditionings on, you really have an opportunity to make sure you're not stressing out the grid. And there's a lot of benefits to managing that. And now that we're getting more technology and more renewable energy and more times when this is important, we can learn a lot of lessons from what we've done in the past. But you really do need technology. And I would say one of the first things, and just came to my mind when folks were speaking, is that we do really need broadband and internet access to do this, some of this technology. That's something that can be brought to an existing home that can bring signals to and from the system and that can enable things like programmable thermostat. So that is sort of another one of those enabling technologies that we really need to think about. We also have to make sure that the technology is available to folks and that folks wanna use it. Those are two prerequisites. It's not that you can have, you need the technology, you can't do it without technology, but people wanna be able to use it. People have choice and so it needs to be relevant to their life. It needs to provide value. It might be through cost savings on energy bills. It might be increases in comfort, making sure that folks are comfortable or it might be some other quality of life. Maybe making sure that the lights are on when they get home and off when they leave or security functions, other things that really benefit from having a connected home. One solution is that folks nowadays, a lot of people, amazing amount of people have these smart speakers in their homes, Alexa or Google. And there's something that people use anyway to listen to music. These are things that you could use to say, hey, put me on an environmental mode so that I can match my use to when the grid's renewable or put me on a cost savings mode so that I can maybe not run my dishwasher or my laundry when prices are expensive or put me on a comfort mode where I don't care about that. People need options that keep them comfortable. These are automated solutions that take it out of the kind of place where no offense to anyone on the panel, but policy dorks and energy dorks think about this stuff. The things that people actually might do. I want to save money today. I want to be good for the environment. I want to be comfortable. I have a party. I don't want to be worried that my automation is going to give me cold water during this party. Can you make sure, Alexa, today I want to be comfort. Tomorrow, put me back on energy savings, but I'll spend a few dollars today. These are things that we have to think about. And so it's important that it's available to average folks, and it's not what I call Star Wars technology. When you think about this stuff, you could think, let's build a whole new neighborhood that's all doing all this stuff, but we really have to have something that the average folks could use. And that goes to the equity point brought up earlier. Co-ops serve a disproportionate number of low-income folks. Nine in 10 of our cooperatives' households are below the national income, and four in five have below their state average. So we're used to serving a population that doesn't have a lot of money. And honestly, that's why we've done this in the past, and that's why there's opportunity here. A major goal of these programs has to be reliable and affordable power, and I would add clean to that too. If this is not to bring value to folks, to make sure their electricity is affordable, you're not gonna be helping people. There are some folks who just wanna have technology to, that's their quality of life. They like that, they like to have the gadgets. But for most people, the reason to do this is because there's more situations where the grid needs something like this to save money and bring people lower rates. This might require expertise in market segmentation, understanding the difference between someone who wants to do this for cost and someone who wants to do this to be green and someone who wants to do this for comfort, and really targeting those folks with different solutions. It's not a one-size-fits-all, and even though we might all think it's a good idea, it might be a good idea for different people for different reasons, and it might not be a good idea for some folks. So that's gonna be really important. I do think one of the next steps is developing pilots and figuring out what works for big segments. We can learn a lot from pilots. The last thing I wanna just notice, the role of electricity itself in this. One of the challenges that we'll face in the future is more renewable electricity. And it used to be that when you wanted more electricity to power a house, you would just say, hey, let's turn the power plant on. Let's burn some more gas or coal or whatnot, and it will serve the need. Now we have wind and solar, and that comes on when nature wants it to come on. And we need to figure out a way to use electricity when it's available and to not use it when it's not available because it will become expensive. And so the idea of electrifying more homes and more businesses in order to take advantage of that and to meet these challenges is a term I refer to as beneficial electrification. And as more folks choose electricity to heat their homes or to drive cars, we're gonna have more of these challenges and more of these opportunities. So I think it's really a really interesting time for the electric sector, and a lot of this technology really can bring a lot of value to a lot of stakeholders, whether it's folks, again, trying to save money, it is folks trying to help the environment, if it's folks trying to manage the grid, or if it's people who like cool products like electric cars, this connected technology is something that really is gonna bring value to all those groups. So it's really exciting. And I really thank that. Thank you for putting this on and inviting me. Absolutely, Keith, that's great. And yeah, I mean, one of the reasons why buildings are so interesting is because it's kind of where all those things come together. It's kind of the nexus for a lot of these things. Just a quick reminder, for those of you in our online audience, we are taking questions. There are two ways you can send us questions. The first is by following us on Twitter at EESI online and sending them that way. And also send us an email EESI at EESI.org to kick off our questions. And maybe what we'll do is we'll go back and we'll start with David and then we can have a maybe a quasi-free for all. Everyone can chime in and have an opportunity to share their perspectives. But David, we'll start with you. And when we were preparing for this panel, Justin sent around some information to make sure that we all had it. And it was from the United States Energy Information Administration. And according to EIA's most recent monthly energy review, the US consumed 6.5 quadrillion BTUs of energy in April 2020, the lowest monthly energy consumption since September 1989. And there's probably a pretty obvious reason for that. And that is because our lives have changed because of the coronavirus outbreak. For many of us, our homes have transformed into offices. Our offices have been mostly empty. I think this is the third time I've been in the office in September 12th. How is building energy consumption changed as a result of this? And what is the role? What does this decline mean? And what is the role for building energy efficiency as we try to make our occupied spaces healthier going forward? So Dan, you raised a lot of good points there. So first, as you said, building energy consumption is down. It's also shifted as you implied from the commercial sector to residential. Unfortunately, in a lot of cases, and the building I work in, which is not the government-owned, it's a leased facility, I went in there the other day and it was 70 degrees in there and it was empty as can be. So unfortunately, a lot of commercial buildings, and we get that, there's a lot of anecdotes just like that, the consumption isn't dropping proportional to the emptiness. And that shows, and I think it kicks back to what we've been talking about when Becca said about information and controls, there's not enough of it. Having said that, I think it's too early to decide how permanent some of these changes are. We spent a lot of our time in the last few months talking about the new normals. I don't think we know yet what the new normal will be, how much telecommuting we'll have, how buildings will change. So for right now, I think the right way to go is to make some short-term changes, but I wouldn't count on, I think it's premature to make any long-term changes in buildings just based on the coronavirus, not based on all the other things we talked about, climate change and cost and comfort and productivity point in time. And certainly anybody who's paying their own cooling bill like most of us are at home now, I hope by now has made some changes in terms of fixing some obvious leaks and other changes and being more careful with air conditioning. But the long-term reasons push in the same direction. All the things we've been talking about, whether it's saving money, improving the global environment, improving indoor environment can all be bettered by energy efficiency and by smart grid interactive controls. And so the reasons you do it are there. But let me also, if I can just also key back to something that was implicit in our conversation, Dan, different than what you just asked, we need to keep in mind that the value to us as individuals or society is not always reflected in price. Only about 2% of American residences and small business have C electric rates that are time sensitive. And I think everybody who's in your audience knows that electricity, the cost generated varies enormously in the course of the day, in the course of the week, and certainly seasonally. But the way rates are set up in this country, it doesn't typically reflect to retail rates at the end of the day. And that's okay, that's how it works. So the value of peak, of saving energy at peak is great in New England, for example, where we've run the numbers with Lawrence Berkeley Lab running the numbers. The cost to generate power at peak is probably the value, I'm sorry, the total cost, including environmental cost for liability degradation is probably about four times, or even six times what it is at times of low demand. But the price to the retail end users is probably the same. So I just wanna say that there are a lot of things we can do back to what Keith's derision for all of us, our policy geekness here. There are good policy interventions that help us send those, not price signals, but other ways we can help make informed decisions for end users. Great, thanks. Becca, Justin, Keith, interested to hear from you on this too. Yeah, I mean, I'd love to jump in just to build on a couple of things. So first I definitely agree with David that at this point we're not quite sure how long this is going to last in terms of long-term impacts of building usage. That said, I do think that this points to one more reason why we do need to be integrating controls into our systems right now, because again, the future is uncertain. And so the more data we have and the more control we have over the systems, the more we can modulate them appropriately depending on what that situation is in the future, irrespective of whether we can appropriately forecast that position. So definitely encourage more controls or ever we can. Also want to encourage us to take advantage of the fact that some office buildings and other commercial spaces at this point are not being used to full capacity. As was mentioned in the panel, sometimes it's really hard to upgrade specific systems within a building such as the envelope, right? But if a building is unoccupied right now, now is the time to try to upgrade those difficult systems wherever you can. And then lastly, I just wanted to cover the overlap between sort of ventilation, COVID and energy efficiency. Right now nationwide, we're really recommending to everybody that we need to be increasing the indoor air intake, right? We need to be doing that for health and safety reasons. But we can do that in an energy efficient manner, right? We can do it by just simply opening windows, but we also, if we have a good HVAC system and some kind of heat recovery ventilation system, we can do this in an energy efficient manner which won't ruin our pocketbooks at the same time. So we need to find those synergies and we need to take advantage of them. Dan, I'll just echo Becca's last comment there. I think when we look at some of the energy efficiency topics to ring the bell again on the envelope, the emphasis is gonna be looking for those savings in other places where you may have to spend more energy now running your ventilation and HVAC system to meet new standards. I know we're kind of quickly running to catch up on what those appropriate standards are, but making a building energy efficient is not gonna just be by replacing it with the latest equipment anymore. You're gonna have to figure out ways where you can make up, where you're gonna have to use more energy now to meet the demands and health and safety protocol to protect those building occupants. I'll just add a couple of points. You know, the shift that was mentioned, I think David mentioned it too, we did see an increase in electric consumption at homes and obviously a big decrease in commercial industrial. If there's a few things that that kind of brings up, people are at home more. And I think if you remember, I have actually four kids at home. And so if you think about what we're doing with teaching kids from school, you know that it kind of highlights what technology is in your house and some of those divides. And again, that kind of idea of having broadband in the house comes to mind. But also folks are looking around and thinking about comfort and they're thinking about technology. One of the other things that comes out of this is, how are people gonna pay their bills? The benefits are gonna have been, there's been a lot of stimulus out there. Folks who are at home, their bills are going up. There was some moratoriums on shut offs. There could be a big crunch out there on folks trying to pay their bills. And I don't know about you, but when I go to work, I don't pay at the electric bill there. If I'm at home all day long and I'm turning my air condition around, my heating system, I'm paying that. And we still don't really know what that's gonna do to the shifts and peaks. What's gonna happen if everybody's home in the winter and heating their home during the, you know, there's all sorts of things that we don't know about. And for utility perspective, if you have a lot of commercial customers that are shut down and all these different peaks and everything else, it could be, you know, a complicated situation. So having these types of things as a tool, another tool in addition to changing your generation source, in addition to just reducing consumption, but changing the time around, is something that is just a handy tool to have in the toolbox to make sure that we are generally operating the whole system of the job. Great, thanks. Keith, you kind of joked earlier that, you know, there are policy wonks on this panel and people who like to kind of nerd out about buildings, but for, you know, one of the most policy wonky things that always seems to get talked about, it's always a topic of competition in DC, is the need to modernize our infrastructure. And I'm using air quotes there. I think a lot of people would agree that the electric grid should be considered part of our national infrastructure. But my question to the panel is, should building improvements be considered part of that discussion? Are there building improvements that we could make that contribute to infrastructure broadly defined? And are there any of those investments, are any of them, should we be prioritizing some of them over others? Well, who wants to take that off, Bob? Yeah. Of course. I'll go first. Of course, yes. I'll answer the panel. Yes, yes, yes, yes. And I'll say for myself with that DAE building's perspective that it's yes on several levels. One is yes, because if we do the things that this panel has been talking about and Dan, that ESI works on full time to use energy more intelligently, more efficiently, then that will improve the grid infrastructure and will make the grid infrastructure less costly and more reliable. Two, buildings in their own right are infrastructure and they can be more reliable, more resilient at the same time we're making these changes. And three, related to infrastructure of course is workforce and employment and making efficiency improvements is very job intensive. It creates jobs. It saves people money which in turn creates more jobs. So to me, it's an easy yes. It should be considered in that context and can be. Dan, on David's last point there, I think the workforce doesn't get talked about enough in terms of opportunities. When you look at the, the fact is we've built most of the buildings that we're gonna have for the next 50 years. As much attention as the new home on the block gets or the fancy new apartment building, our office building, most of the buildings that are gonna be here in 50 years have already been built. And so tackling the existing building stock is so important. And one aspect I think is in that workforce development and deployment, there's a huge opportunity for public buildings to be renovated, not only saving public taxpayers dollars on operation costs, but also proving out and deploying the technologies and skills that we need that can then turn around and benefit the private sector because you've got a workforce that's trained and educated on these latest technologies. So there's certain, I think there's a human element in a number of different ways. And especially now, such an important time to be talking about how to get people back on their feet. When you talk about just what an opportunity buildings are not just from the traditional sense, but also from that workforce development sense. Thanks. Yeah, I want to second what has been said at this point. Yes, I definitely think that buildings are a critical piece of our national infrastructure, although we tend to think of them as something that really affects individuals. In aggregate, it is affecting all of our society and creating some substantial societal impacts. And that's on everything from, as was mentioned, workforce to how much we're spending for our electricity grid, but also how much we're spending locally what's available in our wallets versus how much we're spending on our utility bills and our overall health and our overall safety. Those are things that are significantly influenced by the buildings that we live and occupy and work in and we spend a significant amount of time in those buildings. And so if we can improve them, we should be because ultimately it's impacting all of us. Keith, do you agree? I think it's also important to remember. Yeah, I think it's important to also kind of note that a building is a piece of a system. And so the investment to make this work is not only at the component level of the system. We've thought that way quite a long time with energy efficiency because that's where the device works. But when you're talking about something that involves connectivity and everything like that, you're talking about broader system-wide investments. So it's also important to kind of understand that if the expectation is for a building to operate that are those investments are gonna be spread across the whole system. So it really takes a little bit of understanding to know that this is my infrastructure for a building, it's building and it's system-wide. Great, thanks. We actually just got a question online. And so I think maybe I'll turn to that one next. This has to do with what would be necessary in terms of regulatory changes to encourage time of use or time of day electricity rates. A number of you excited, the sort of the disconnect between the cost of energy and the price of energy and how one changes over the course of the day and the other doesn't. Any thoughts on the panel about sort of what... David, this one specifically focused or targeted at you but I'm interested in what everybody else has to say too. Are there things that we could be doing to kind of encourage or promote education around the use of electricity rates? What are the different factors that you might wanna consider when you're thinking about whether or not that's... Who's gonna be impacted in by how much? So look, this is the jurisdiction, primarily of state regulatory commissions as well as utilities such as the ones Keith represents that may be regulated by their owners by a municipal government. It's not a federal issue per se, but more importantly, so I say that because I just wanna sort of caveat it and I like my job and I wanna keep it and we don't have a view on time of use rates but here's what I wanna say though and I wanna get back to what I said before. I would submit even though I personally would like to see more time-sensitive rates, I don't think it's necessary. I don't think it's as necessary as others do. Certainly price sends a signal but we know there are many examples where people make decisions that where price does not, they're not particularly price sensitive for whatever reason. They don't know what the price is, whether they're indifferent to it or they're in a rental situation where they're facing split incentives. So I think there are a lot of policy interventions that can be done that can reflect the value of energy use at different times of day and different times of the year but that doesn't have anything to do with the retail rates. For example, when you look at the incentive program, a lot of states have renewable portfolio standards or energy efficiency resource standards. They typically don't, they're indifferent to what time that energy is generated or what time that energy is saved. So one could tweak with that and change those regimes without affecting price. So I just wanna say there are a lot of ways we can embody the value of different times without getting into the more charged issue of the retail prices. Great, thanks. Other perspective? But if somebody here is braver than me, go ahead and call, start fooling with rates. So yeah, I just wanted to indicate that, yeah, I mean, time of use is clearly one option to encourage us to be better about aligning generation and demand, right? And sort of spreading out costs in an appropriate way. That said, there are other opportunities, right? Demand response programs themselves are sort of providing incentives to encourage people. It's an incentive rather than a stick, right? So there are other ways of achieving it, but that said, if that is sort of the policy priority and somebody wants to move in the direction of time of use rates, I think there are a couple of specific barriers. One, you need the infrastructure in place so you need advanced meters, right? And a lot of states and utilities don't have those right now. So first major barrier is having the data. And then in addition to that, you have to be able to provide people with access to the technology that will allow them to actively manage their energy use in the appropriate timeframe, right? A lot of people right now don't have Wi-Fi service stats. They don't have battery storage. They don't know that charging their EV at one time versus another is more beneficial to them. And if they are not sure when their EV is charging because they just plugged it in and it's charging all the time, right? They're not even, they're not positioned well to then react to the time of use rates. So it's not only having the data, but also allowing people access to the technology that makes it easy for them to then optimize the costs. I'll add one thing. It's a little bit easy to oversimplify rates and to jump to that as a solution. We're talking about technology here. And I've been working on, for example, demand response water eaters for eight years and talk about we've been out on energy. But the first thing that they would jump out sometimes when I talk to kind of policy folks is, what about time of use so that you just, you know, you change the time that you turn to this? What are we talking about rates for? We're talking about technology. We need this technology to work. Once the technology works, there's so many ways to do things. And think about this, you know, it's something like 50% of Americans don't have enough money to afford a $400 or $500 emergency. If I could give them a water heater for cheaper when they have a $1,000 event, you know, what water heater goes out is gonna cost them $500, whatever it is, $600, $1,000 to fix, say I'm gonna give you this water heater and you don't have to pay that amount of money, but you're gonna be on a system where we'll just manage it. You always have hot water, but we'll change the time. And on the back end, there's some system where the cooperative or whatever is figuring out how to cut their costs by managing that. That's not a time of use rate, but I'll tell you, that person that didn't have to spend that $1,000 and can be buy food or shoes or whatever it is that they wanna buy is gonna be happy. And so when you get a technology discussion, it's very easy to jump to that. And all utilities are not treated the same, not equal. There's some that have wind in the middle of the night and that's cheap and expensive in the day and some that are an extra-nuclear power plants that price the same all the time. And so just jump to that policy, I think, is a little bit easy to do, but it's way more complicated than that. And I think it's really important to get the technology right and to allow different pricing and different rates to kind of work themselves out in a separate world. Okay, thanks. We are just about a time, but Justin, I wanted to actually give you the last word if you have sort of a final thought on that question or the envelope or energy efficiency before we conclude, love to hear from you again. You know, I'll just add maybe to complement the perspectives with a commercial perspective. I sort of agree that there's other policy tools that will help commercial building owners better value or realize the benefit of energy efficiency improvements over time. We talk about financing mechanisms that just allow a pace, that just allow you to realize and pass along investments that will be realized and enjoyed by people that may own the building for far longer than you will. And to me, those are probably solving more barriers to the commercial side than is realizing the cost of energy at the same time that you're using it. And commercial businesses don't have the flexibility that we do to just decide, I'm gonna sit in a 78 degree room rather than a 72 degree room during the day. So I think there's some other policy tools there that really help overcome some of the initial barriers and lead to more energy savings and sort of simplifying it down to just the rate issue. Great. Thanks for that, Justin. I appreciate that a lot. We'll go ahead with one second later. Yeah, can I give this request and assignment to EESI? And that is, as you continue to work with members of Congress, please make sure they know the inexorable link between renewables and variable renewables and demand side. That's always been the case. But as we go forward, as we said, with more variable renewables, demand side and energy efficiency has to be part of the integration to come up with the right and least cost answer. Yes, of course. I thought you were gonna do something hard to do. I thought I was gonna have to like write a report or like learn how to do like a complicated red recipe. Yeah, just persuade 538 members of Congress, Mr. Percent. But that's what EESI does, right? We bring facts to Capitol Hill policy makers. That's easy, we can do that. And on that note, thanks for the plug, David. Thanks to you, thanks to Becca, to Justin, to Keith. I feel a lot better now that I have a building's fixed for the day. It's been great for you to join us today. This was a great panel and I only wish we had more time. This is the end of the fourth panel. We will kick off in three minutes for sustainable transportation, but two things. One, if you are on this link, you will have to refresh or close and reopen your browser to livecast the sustainable transportation panel that's about to start at 230. That's one thing. Second thing, if you have two minutes, those of you in our audience, we would love if you would take our survey. We really appreciate everyone's feedback and comments and we do our best to incorporate what you tell us into how we educate policy makers, how we educate the public and how we go about our business. So we would really appreciate that if you have some time. Thanks again to the panel. And I hope many of our audience will be back in two minutes for sustainable transportation and then after that, new frontiers and clean energy R&D. And with that, we'll go ahead and close. Thanks so much.