 All right, welcome everyone to our community conversation with Phil Coop. Do we have the tools to abandon fossil fuels? I'm Matt Cannon. He, him on the campaign and policy associate director at the main chapter. And we very much appreciate Phil being here. We look forward to this exciting talk. Next slide please. We've, I'm sure most of us have been on zoom at this point but just a few reminders, you could remain on mute during the presentation. That'd be very helpful especially for audio quality as we're reporting. I think we have a small enough group where we might be able to speak some questions into the room if we use the raise hand function, but it also works well so just put questions in the chat or raise your hands and we'll get to you as we can. I know Phil has said he's open to questions during if need be and we'll also have plenty of time afterwards. Next slide. And we always want to acknowledge the land that we're on. We're in the homeland of the Wabanaki, the people of the dawn. Next slide. All right, so out. For the review. We're going to welcome Phil Coop here of revision energy. Phil is co founder of revision energy and grew up in Scarborough, Maine, where his parents always had Sierra Club stickers and publications lying around the house as a result of their lifelong support and membership. Today Phil is trying to pay it forward as a member himself and through revision energies, long term partnership with the main chapter of the Sierra Club. He also serves on the board of the environmental and energy technology council of Maine, known as e to tech, and on the board of the conservation law foundation, which is currently engaged in a lawsuit to hold Exxon mobile accountable for its decades of lies and investigation regarding climate damage from carbon and methane pollution. He's been a mentor and the big brother big sister program for 20 years and lives with his family, and a surfing Chihuahua just outside of Portland, Maine. Phil take it away. And thank you to everybody who's here this afternoon. I'm grateful for your time and I'll try to make the best and highest use of it. And I'm going to jump right in and start sharing my screen here. Fair warning. I've got a fair number of slides. And so I'm going to try to move briskly through this so that we can get to questions at the end. And, you know, since we're a pretty small group don't be shy to, to chime in along the way and we can have a little discussion if somebody would have a question or a point to make so. So let's begin with a brief history lesson. This is 1969. That's the Cuyahoga River in Ohio. This was the 10th time that that river had caught fire. We see the flames coming out of the water the black billowing smoke. And so this is the event that catalyzed the, the formation of the environmental protection agency in the early 70s. And so we had this visceral example of environmental degradation, urging our lawmakers to action as well as citizens. Today, our challenge is significantly different. I want to first address the scale of the problem that we're facing right we've got 8 billion people on planet Earth on our way to 10 billion by 2050. All of us needing energy for the lifestyle that we want to live and this image of Mexico City is just to remind us that we, we live in this beautiful relatively uncongested part of planet Earth but there are a lot of humans who need to get by on the planet and so we, we've got a quite, quite a scale of a problem in front of us. The other thing that's different from 1969 is the technology that's sometimes our friend but sometimes actually not so benign and so when we see images like this in the world you know hey what a bummer people can't get to Starbucks fast enough but in reality what concerns me is the fact that we have 250 million cars on the road in America, a billion cars globally, and every one of them is actually doing this. Right, so the catalytic converter technology has rendered carbon pollution mostly tasteless, colorless and odorless in large parts of our existence and so we can kind of get the fault sense that there's really nothing happening out of those exhaust pipes when in fact we just can't see what's coming out. Similarly in our neighborhoods, we have a problem so in Maine particularly it's acute, we have more than 400,000 homes heated by oil in Maine, each one burning on average about 800 gallons per year. And so that results in about 18,000 pounds of carbon pollution per oil burning household well when you walked on your neighborhood street in Maine you don't see black car balls and billowing black smoke so again, we get this fault sense of security but in reality as we go through our everyday lives in America and throughout the world right we turn the key in the ignition or we warm up the home. Most of us are sleepwalking through the reality that we lost the equivalent of hundreds of deep water horizon disasters into the atmosphere every minute of every day, but we're totally unaware of it because we can't see it and for the most part can't taste it however the science is incontrovertible right we, we know what is happening around us from these reports like we see from NASA we're showing us that the parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is way beyond where it's been for hundreds of thousands of years. And we also know that when we overlay the earth's temperature data with that co2 in the atmosphere data, we can easily see how quickly the climate's warming up. This, this is like the fourth mud season that we've just had this, you know this year in Maine and it's only the beginning of March. So to give us who have been here a long time certainly can see all around us, how quickly the climate is changing. And, you know, you get you can't fail to mention that Casco Bay and the Gulf of Maine being the fast second fastest warming body of marine water on the planet is hugely concerning. So that's a heavy dose of kind of negativity to launch us into why I'm really optimistic that we have the tools that we need to abandon fossil fuels, and that we're really starting to accelerate that transition. One of the reasons I'm really confident that we're going to pull it off is this historical example of a global existential threat to which humankind kind of responded in concert together. And, and we appear to be overcoming it what we're looking at is the ozone layer hole that started developing in the late 60s and early 70s. What scientists discovered was that harmful chlorofluorocarbons and hydrofluorocarbons from our refrigeration equipment was being released into the atmosphere and chewing away the protective layer of the ozone that protects us from harmful ultraviolet radiation. And this is when scientists started reporting on this and then health officials started warning us that we were going to get skin cancer and die, you know, basically the global governmental bodies came together and in 1980 signed the Montreal protocol to eliminate the harmful chemicals in HFCs. And what this slide is showing you that is that by 2065, we expect that ozone layer to be largely restored, because we stopped emitting those harmful content contaminants into the atmosphere. And hopefully we will have a parallel type agreement globally. One of these years with the international the IPCC agreement. Anyway, if we're going to move from fossil fuels to renewables, we need to make sure we actually have the, the, the volumetric scale of resources to do so and this is the work of Dr. Richard Perez. He's a globally renowned energy researcher and what he's showing us is the relative abundance between fossil fuels on the right hand column and renewable energy on the left hand column. The rise of the bubbles matters. So the little blue marble down at the lower left. That is global annual energy demand for everything on planet Earth, every boat car factory train house car you name it. That's roughly the volumetric scale of how much energy we need. You can see that we have plenty of fossil fuels to meet that energy demand. And then with renewables we have wind and solar. The takeaway from this slide, which I think is really important for every person to know on planet Earth is that in one hour, the sun is delivering enough energy to the surface of the earth to power all human energy demand for an entire year. And that's just one hour so we have this colossal amount of free energy and power raining down all around us, you know, especially on a sunny day like today. Just keep that in mind one hour of sun on a given day is enough for a whole year for the planet Earth. And so that just can, you know, tells us that we have to get better at harvesting the resource. What about the local resource to be harvested. A lot of folks are tempted to think that we live too far north. New England is you know too cold and and and wintry to have a good solar yield. But remember that our latitude is identical to Monaco on the French Riviera. And so the north of Spain and the south of France or a famously sunny region on planet Earth, and we're at the same exact latitude as them. You can see that I've circled Germany in the upper right to illustrate how much further north that country is. We know that with the conflict, the war and you can crane right now. The German energy picture has never been kind of more relevant than today. And, and what we're seeing is that, you know, Germany has spent the last 30 years trying to get out from underneath Putin's dominance of natural gas supplies to Western Europe. And so they've been been investing heavily in renewable energy and storage to achieve that goal. They have a long ways to go. The point of this slide is to show that a modern industrialized nation with a heavy manufacturing economy, heavy manufacturing economy is eliminating a pathway to 100% clean energy plus storage. And we can learn a lot of lessons from them. One of those lessons would be don't get rid of your nukes too quickly. But anyway, nonetheless, we can see a pathway and the take away from this. Yeah, you just put in present mode a little bigger. For the slides. Make it bigger. Yeah, it's going to present. Sorry, how's that like this. Yeah, you got thanks. All right, sorry. Anyway, the purpose of this latitude slide is, is to show how much further north Germany is to illustrate the fact that we get 33% more sunshine per year in our patch of northern New England, and they get in Germany where they're, they are showing us a pathway towards 100% clean energy. The other way that we, we established the viability of main solar resources to look at this national renewable energy laboratory map. And what it's showing us is the expected yield yield from a solar array anywhere in the United States. And so it's, it's often surprising the folks to understand that a solar project in Portland main will yield roughly the same amount of solar electricity per year as a solar array in Houston, Texas. And that's because photovoltaic panels are much more efficient at lower temperatures. So on a bright sunny, you know, 40 degree day like today, all the solar arrays in Maine are basically energized at maximum output because they have ideal conditions, whereas in Houston you'd be paying a penalty for the heat and humidity down it's also kind of fun to mention that our region is only about 10% less sunshine per year than most of Florida. And that's, you know, and this is how we can communicate to folks that you are going to get a strong economic and environmental return on a solar investment, even in a place like northern New England. The other good thing about the solar resource and the industry in general is the fact that the costs have come down pretty significantly over the last 20 years. And you can see as the cost of solar has dropped that's the black black line going down to the right. Global adoption of the technology has really skyrocketed. And that's what we're seeing all around us today. So from my front row seat here in the renewable energy industry. I want to share kind of the perspective I see in terms of us being either at a tipping point or having already crossed over the tipping point. And I'll show you a historical example here's 1900 New York City. You can see what the mode of transportation is that the fuel is going to be the hay and the water. And then you fast forward just 13 years. And we've had this radical disruption of our transportation technology, and almost an overnight fuel switching from hay to gasoline. Unfortunately, we skipped the electrics here but it does prove the point that once things get going, they can happen very quickly. And that's what I'm seeing all around us. If you're driving out of Portland, over across veterans bridge on your way to 295. You'll see this oil tank farm, which dates back to World War two and I've circled one of them. This is the oil tank that I circled. Right, so we can ignore the fact that this is kind of disgusting greenwashing because the thin film solar on top of this tank is basically toxic and not doing much clean energy output. But from a symbolic standpoint, this is this message is colossal in my opinion because you have a 150 year old oil company now bragging to the rest of the world that they're the first of solarized oil tank in the nation. I'm also seeing similar signs from the fossil fuel industry when I look over at Irving oil. From Irving oil's own website, we recognize that human activity is impacting our global climate and requires action by us all. While we provide our customers with cleaner transportation fuels we also strive to do so with the least impact to our environment, particularly by reducing our carbon footprint. Now every single one of you could be, you know, choking on that statement from an oil company. I would be too except for the fact that this past summer, I sat down with Arthur Irving, the 85 year old chairman of Irving oil and his daughter Sarah the 50 year old heir apparent to the company. And they looked me in the eye and they said, we are deeply concerned that we are going to lose our business if we don't involve our business. We heard our conversation about converting their 900 gas stations to solar arrays and electric vehicle charging stations, while also doing solar for their refineries in New Brunswick and Searsport. And since that conversation last summer, we've now installed the first solar array on an Irving down in Pembroke, Massachusetts. And so I'm starting to take the Irving family at their word that they plan to really change the business model that they've relied on for about 100 years now. That is a humongous change in everything that I've ever known about the energy industry because for the last 20 years, the fossil fuel industry has done nothing but try to drown us in the bathtub. They're hiring us to install clean energy systems on their fossil fuel petrol stations. So humongous change that I'm seeing around us. Here's another example. So Shaw Brothers Construction is a 60 year old civil construction firm, large road builder and basically large civil project type company, massive carbon pollution footprint for the last 60 years. They've circled in the upper right, their giant fleet of diesel dump trucks. And in the bottom, I've sought, I've circled the giant diesel rock crusher. I want to also note this business is owned by Johnny and Danny Shaw, two of the biggest, you know, Trump and the page supporters you might find out there they're not self identifying tree huggers. But last year, they had us install a 3.2 megawatt solar array on on one of their abandoned gravel pits. And then after we completed the project, they added to their website this environmental commitment page which talks about how the 3.2 megawatt array is generating about 4 million kilowatt hours of electricity which is running much of that giant plant that I showed you in the first image. In addition to the solar array, they invested in electric rock crushing equipment so that they could stop burning diesel for this kind of industrial process that they do a lot of every year so they they're drastically reducing fossil fuel costs and emissions. And at the same time they're looking at electric dump trucks to replace replace the diesel fleet. And in the lower left, you're seeing their first electric drive loader, which is saving about 40, 4300 gallons of diesel per year. And so this is another terrific example of huge movement towards clean energy from a sector where you really wouldn't expect it. Now I want to just show you some great examples from small relatively small technology to massive technology about how fast this energy transition is happening. Here's the world's first electric snowmobile built by some students at McGill University, now being manufactured by a company named Tiger. If you like ripping around on a dirt bike you can do that with a cake electric motorcycle. The electric tractors are already on the market, helping us think about how to decarbonize food production. And when we think about the enormous carbon footprint of industrial agriculture. I find it inspiring that even companies like John Deere are looking at how to pivot away from massive diesel equipment to help us grow the food that we need to feed the population. This slide I literally just added about a week ago, when the news came out of Scandinavia that they now have a 26 ton excavator with a 300 kilowatt hour battery pack showing us that we can decarbonize heavy construction. This is where Norway launched the world's largest electric ferry. They've launched a bunch of others before this one, but this is quite the monster it can handle something like 400 cars and about 600 passengers. Really remarkable technology that's having its batteries charged by a combination of wind hydro and solar power. The world's first hybrid electric cruise ship is already sailing on the oceans, showing us how we can move large vessels into sensitive ecological areas without causing the damage that we have historically. And now, again, from out of Scandinavia, we have the world's first 100% battery electric zero emission container ship. I'm excited about the prospect of these types of boats coming in to the port of Portland instead of those I'm skip diesel boats that are currently bringing us a lot of goods from across the pond. Electric aviation is already off the ground haha is one of the first prototypes out there. And also, it's worth noting that, you know, even the the massive kind of passenger jet industry is already on its way towards figuring out how to achieve zero emission air travel long ways to go. But we are already flying planes across the ocean with with zero emission sustainable aviation fuel. Continuing on with big human carrying devices, the pro terra, but battery electric bus goes 350 miles on one charge, the city of Portland will be sending off the first pro terra on its routes for the city this summer. Revision is really grateful to be providing the the battery charging infrastructure for this bus, as well as the one that's going to soccer soccer main and to the city of Boston. We're also working on electric school buses, you know, decarbonizing school buses is something that everybody can get excited about, particularly the kids who have to breathe the harmful fumes when they're on the bus. We only have one in Maine thus far. And we look forward to hopefully being part of the effort to to electrify all of the fleets throughout the main school systems. It's also nice to know that our massive delivery companies are getting on the bandwagon FedEx UPS and Amazon have all committed to a full electrification of their delivery fleets by 2030. I think it will, you know, from a reality standpoint it might take longer for them to get there but the commitments are very strong because it's driving innovation and electric vehicle manufacturing. The giant companies in America are stepping up and doing the right thing I think it's it's awesome that Apple is 100% renewable energy powered for all of its domestic operations. And then you have the US military, again, super relevant in this moment of war in Ukraine. At this time, I have spent my waking hours on trying to figure out how we can make an argument that will convince 100% of Americans to move towards clean energy. And I think the Pentagon is helping us in this regard. A couple years ago the Pentagon came out and publicly stated that human cause climate damage is the number one security threat that we face as a nation. When you see the tussle over fossil fuels during the Ukraine war. It's become more and more obvious to me that the logical stance is for a superpower like the US to use its underground reserves of fossil fuels as stingily as possible while we pivot to a clean energy and that way we keep those underground reserves, hopefully in the ground and unburnt but we also keep them in reserve if we need them for national defense and national security purposes. And I think this might be the most powerful argument to get companies like Exxon mobile and coke industries to start changing their tunes. So pay close attention to this, this sector I think it's, it's a really important aspect of the clean energy transition. And I'm more and more confident that this will be an angle that helps us really start making the acceleration go faster. Other massive energy consumption includes steel production and concrete production and organizations like the Rocky Mountain Institute are trying to figure out how to decarbonize these sectors. And so back in 2015 they started thinking about how to do the first steel making plant. And this is the Rocky Mountain steel mill in Pueblo, Colorado. And so in the upper image, you see the 2018 drawing of their vision of how to decarbonize it. They've been burning coal for about 60 years at that plant because coal is so abundant in Colorado. And then down in the lower image in 2021 you can see that they've built the 300 megawatt solar array to stop burning the coal, despite being in the middle of coal country. That is a monumental accomplishment and, and something for us to gain hope and inspiration from that we can actually pull this off on the global scale. Currently you have projects like this happening out in the western desert where they're building arrays at this scale this is 400 megawatts, and, and then there's a giant battery storage facility in the white building at the bottom. This, this clean energy power plants going to supply 24 seven firm power for about a million households out west. So this is illustrating how we can somehow provide clean energy to 330 a million Americans over time. So what are we going to store all this part, this power so up here you see we're using lithium ion batteries. That would be those would be stored in that white building, but we're going to even bigger battery storage to do a global transition. And I want to drive everybody's attention to pumped hydro energy storage. This is a magnificent kind of low tech way to store. This is one of the basic quantities of renewable power. And if you're not familiar, familiar with how it works you have a lower reservoir on the lower left and then the upper reservoir. And so when your wind and solar power are crank cranking out at maximum production. You use that power to pump water into the upper reservoir. And when the sun goes down at night and or the wind stops blowing, you release the water from the upper reservoir and it sluices down through generators through turbines to generate electricity. So this is a critically important and massive piece of a global clean energy transition. And so now that you know how it works. Let me show you this really mind blowing information so a recent study by the Australian National University examined the topography and hydro geology of planet Earth. And what they discovered were 616,000 locations on on earth, you can see all the little bubbles the little dots there that are high pot hypothetical pumped hydro energy storage locations. And what this is showing us is that we have 100 times more pumped hydro potential than what is needed for a 100% global transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy plus storage. I just found this out in the last couple months, and it's boosted my confidence level in the clean energy tris transition by about 100%. I think this is critically important data and should be very invigorating for those of us who want to see this clean energy transition happen. In parallel to that study. This news came out of China, which just kind of activated the world's largest pumped hydro energy facility. So the storage capacity of this place is 6.6 billion kilowatt hours. That's roughly enough power for 100,000 main homes for an entire year. So that kind of helps you under helps helps you grasp the magnitude of the pumped hydro energy storage that we can use to mitigate the intermittency of wind and solar. Other types of storage are happening right under our noses that folks might not be aware of but this is the Wyman station oil fired electricity generating power plant in Yarmouth main in the upper image. You can see it in its preferred state which is dormant. Okay, the utility that owns it next era has has arrived at the situation where every time they turn it on which you see in the lower image where it's belching all of that pollution. Every time they fire the oil boilers they lose minute they lose money every minute of the time they're burning the oil. So what they did to help keep it dormant is they installed 16 megawatt hours of battery storage in the basement of Wyman station. So now they're actually making money with that facility by using the batteries to mitigate the intermittency of wind and solar. So that kind of underscores how the renewables and the storage are intertwined to make this clean energy transition possible. So we're locally talking about what we're doing here in our own neck of the woods. This is the one mega way around one megawatt array that revision installed a few years ago at the South Portland capped landfill. So this array has achieved 12% of the city of South Portland's electricity demand the last couple years, and we're now filling up all the rest of the green space and that capped landfill such that we hope to get them to about 50% of South Portland's total the total demand over say the next year and a half to two years. But we're doing all sorts of stuff with this ground mountain solar right it can be used for municipalities we can also do it as community solar. We can also do this really kind of new innovative approach which is called agrivoltaics, where you're either grazing animals or growing food around ground mountain solar arrays. So this is a fascinating application. We've quickly discovered that they'll, there will no longer be goats allowed on the premises they, they climb up and eat all the wires from the backside of the array. But the sheep are very gentle and only focus on the grass. So we've, we switched over to sheep only grazing. So that's one way to integrate agriculture with with energy production. Another way you can do it. This is a story that came out of Colorado this year, excuse me in 2021, a farmer who had been growing crops for 100 years needed to diversify his revenue stream so he, he built a community solar array for about 300 nearby homes. And when they installed the arrays, they spread them out enough to to fit his tractor down between the rows so he can do his cultivation. And so what he discovered was yeah, solar production is awesome, but holy smokes, the vegetables grow significantly better, because the shading from the panels keeps more moisture in the soil. And so he had an amazing yield in the first year with great results indicating that this is something that could be used globally. The first studies on global integration of agriculture agriculture or food growing in solar shows that if we used 1% of currently farmed farmland globally, we were produce 100% of humanities need for energy. And so this is something I think is going to get a lot of traction going forward, hopefully here in Maine as quickly as possible and then the rest of the globe. So let's talk about revisions, kind of closer to home knitting. This was a vision that we had 10 years ago for the 100% clean energy home. This was really just a dream back then the cost of the solar electric panels was pretty much prohibitive to all but the very wealthiest consumers, the electric cars didn't have the didn't have enough range, and we're too expensive. Every storage wasn't around and heat pumps were just starting to achieve usefulness in our climate. You fast forward 10 years. And we're really excited to report that we're building this 100% clean energy home every week of every week of the year, sometimes multiple of them in a given week. So here you see the home with the solar electric panels some legacy hot water panels there and the blue ones to the left, but then the heart is the air source heat pump, the electric cars there in the driveway. And then this client has the Tesla power wall battery in the basement. And so something that we envision 10 years ago and aspire to has become kind of a regular project for us that we're terrifically excited to report. The big thing that's driving it, besides everybody's desire to stop burning so much fossil fuel and creating so much carbon pollution is the fact that you save an awful lot of money. When you migrate off of those fossil fuels and move to, you know, a clean energy home which is basically a regular home with no fossil fuel appliances, or high performance home, which is a home that's been super insulated and also uses clean energy exclusively. And so this is driving tremendous growth in the residential clean energy sector for us. We also recognize that even though the savings are awesome for, you know, for middle class middle and upper class consumers, we're deeply concerned that low to moderate income consumers might be left behind in this clean energy transition and so we're working hard to bring solar to facilities like this, which is a low income housing project where we finance the solar array on behalf of all the tenants, such that they achieve savings immediately on day one from their electric bills, without having to go into debt to get the array or or try to scrounge together their own money to put it to cover the upfront cost so that's a huge focus for revision now and going forward. Similarly, we built this project for the mobile home park in the in the back. Thus far we're hearing from the community that each, each mobile home is saving about $120 per year on their electric bills from the array in front of them, and we did this in partnership with the church. And so this kind of underscores revision energies philosophy as a certified B Corp that we want to use our company to make the world a better place and create positive change and in this reflects those efforts by us. Similarly, we are trying to make good use of dead space all across New England's landscape. This is obviously a large parking lot it happens to be Boston police headquarters down in the city. And the story about this is one of our first big solar parking canopies and you get so many layers of benefit. First of all, we know that the, the cities are hot in the summer because the asphalt absorb so much sunshine and heats up so terrifically that at night it has to spew that heat back out into the city and so these type of parking canopies really knocked down that heat absorption by the asphalt. So this is really snow plowing in the winter, gives shelter to the car drivers and also can be a power plant to charge electric cars. So we see a great future for solar parking canopies, and on a smaller parking canopy approach you can see here a community from the ground up with zero fossil fuels is the hillside living community in Newbury Port Massachusetts. You see the homes in the back that are built to be zero fossil fuel and then the solar parking canopies down here in the bottom of the screen. And speaking of solar parking canopies what about the cars that we might want to put under them. I'm thrilled to report that the early sales of electric vehicles are blowing away the early sales of cars like the Prius. And we know the Prius went on to become ubiquitous and we're going to see the same thing with electric cars in a big hurry. And in countries like in Scandinavia when you take Norway for example this really underscores the ability of a society to move quickly in September of 2021, almost 80% of all vehicle cars, a vehicle sales were were full battery electrics in Norway. And I think this is where the US is headed in the rest of the world, as fast as we can get there. And for good reason right. If you charge your electric car with solar. You can get down to zero emissions, even if you charge your electric car with grid power you're going to cut your and your carbon pollution by about half compared to burning gasoline so tremendous opportunity with vehicles we know that New England's number one culprit for carbon emissions is vehicle exhaust coming in at more than 50% of our total carbon emissions in the region so get on those electric cars people. And don't worry about where you're going to charge it 90 to 95% of your charge your electric vehicle charging happens overnight at your home. But if you need to venture further a field, the plug share app will show you where every electric vehicle charging station exists out out there in the world and we are putting them in just as fast as we possibly can and you can see the coverage is already fairly respectable. I often get asked the question what are we going to do with all of this clean energy technology at end of life. So with solar electric panels the good news is you got a 25 year warranty and a 40 year expected useful lifespan, and then a highly recyclable product when it when it's no longer working with electric vehicle batteries it's a little bit more complicated because we have rare earth metals and those batteries and other substances that aren't as easily recycled. But the beautiful thing is that we've already shown the reuse of electric vehicle batteries is is a great opportunity and so what this entrepreneur is doing his company is called B to you. That's the letter B number two, the letter you and in the white boxes above. He's filling those with with what you see with the wires coming out of them those are used Nissan leaf batteries. And he uses the solar array behind the white boxes to charge the batteries for about $25 a megawatt hour while the sun is shining. He sells the power from the batteries to the utility grid for $200 a kilowatt hour and excuse me a megawatt hour. And so what he's illustrating for us is a very successful business model. Reusing those old car batteries in a way that's helping to accelerate clean energy and keeping the stuff out of the landfill for as long as possible in the at the end of the day, you can totally recycle a battery as well. So getting close to the end here I just wanted to, you know, quickly pivot to a few aspects of revision if you if you're not familiar with us we are 100% employee owned company as well as I already mentioned the certified B Corp and part of our work is is trying to help those with the challenges in our communities. And so we're really thrilled when we did our first project at zero upfront cost for the Goodwill Hinkley School up in Fairfield. Again we finance that array so they didn't have to take any money out of pocket and achieved savings from day one, and we just couldn't be happier about what former president Glenn Cummings had to say about that effort. We did the exact same type of project for Good Shepherd Food Bank two years ago. We're really grateful for the opportunities to support their mission. They deliver 25 million meals a year to hungry manors. And so these solar panels are helping them keep perishable food from going bad and also reducing their energy costs. And so, I guess the sum total of all that is we've developed a decent reputation throughout New England and we're incredibly grateful to be consistently ranked among the top five and right now the number one solar company in New England. And to say goodbye for the to the presentation I just want to briefly introduce our new mascot Sun Squatch. That's me paddle boarding with my little chihuahua and Sun Squatch we invented to help the younger generation deal with the anxiety and stress that they're feeling about the age generation's poor stewardship of planet Earth. And, and so far Sun Squatch is doing a nice job for us so with that. That was a lot and a short amount of time, I will stop talking and let people ask questions. Wow. Yeah, thank you so much Phil. It's been inspiring and there's a lot of good questions and comments, but it is really nice to have encouraging news about what people are doing right now and what we can continue to do. So I'll, I'll read through a few and then I think others. Yeah, we'll do our best here folks. There's a question about Northern Maine I know you showed a map earlier of Maine sun resources. Does revision work in Northern Maine or are there enough, is there enough sun up there to do everything we're talking about. Yes, if you look up crown broccoli, the company. I think that's the name of their outfit they're a huge broccoli grower up in a rustic county and they have a massive solar array up there. So far as I know that arrays is doing wonderfully well for them. But we didn't install it. Yes, we do work in Northern Maine, but the project has to be of a certain scale to make it worth everybody's while to have us driving, you know that far north and doing work up there. But yeah, short answer is yes. Longer answer is depends on the scale of the project. Great. Thank you. There was. Yeah question about the Shaw Brothers I believe and yeah, I mean that was pretty incredible what they're doing how are you advertising or highlighting that. Yeah, yeah so you know to Johnny and Danny Shaw's credit they're all about promoting the project. We have, we did one kind of ribbon cutting event that was kind of poorly attended. And so our goal is to circle back and hopefully draw more attention to it, but you know I'm bragging about it as every chance I get, because it really underscores the fact that solar has merged into the kind of the mainstream and it's not just for tree huggers and and by Rose. Now we're seeing a much broader swath of society embracing the technology, recognizing that you both get an economic and environmental return and I think that that's really important for us to succeed in the long term goals. Yeah, we'll stay tuned on that. And Richard posted in the chat report on electrifying mains lobster fleet so I definitely want to take a peek at that and hope everyone else does too. I think we can send that around afterwards. Yeah I have a quick comment on that that which is, so I'm having an electric center console boat retrofitted for me right now that I'm going to use as a demonstration of the Casco Bay this summer. You know it's a classic like 19 foot center console that you would see as a pleasure boat or a striper boat, but it could be used for near shore aquaculture and near shore lobstering, clamming and taxing. And so I'm purposely having that created to kind of run around in Casco Bay to talk about how, how to decarbonize the marine environment. So it will not replace a 35 foot lobster boat, but it's going to show us a pathway, and people can hit me up if they want to go for a spin this summer. Great. I should mention I was also involved a couple years ago and solar powered electric boat that was bringing kids out to do lab research and can hold 30 people so things are moving quickly. A question on the aviation fuel, what is that sustainable aviation fuel made up. So algae is the, is the main ingredient. And I want to, I want to say that it's a Honeywell product. I have to confess, I'm not deeply knowledgeable. People who want to take a deeper dive, go for Google. Sorry. I'm a solar guy. Right. So to ask a question about land is there enough land to accommodate all the solar we need. Can you talk more about land use and the amount of solar we need. So, that's a great question. And absolutely there's plenty of land so we did some quick math, just on the state of Maine. So we would need roughly 1% of mains land mass covered in solar to achieve 100% of the energy demand for the state. So it's like a rough back of the envelope calculation that that said, however, we totally agree that we need to be disciplined and focused about where we develop solar arrays, and not just assume we should cut down trees or or gobble up agricultural land to put in these, these giant arrays. And so we're huge advocates for proper siting of solar arrays on the landscape. But if you ask that question again if you ask the internet, you can get that question answered so many different ways to reassure you that it's not just coming from some solar guy but lots of really in depth land use studies have been conducted to show that we just don't need much of planet Earth to accomplish what we want with solar panels. That's good to know. And I could throw the data up on the screen but it would compromise our time a little bit. Okay. And can I like to just follow up to that because it got me thinking, is there are there any technology or is it. Is there any vertical use of space for solar fields. I know it's a little more challenging to do but is that technology. So there's, there is research going on in in the agricultural sector about doing vertical arrays in between rows of cropland, you know crop growing and then a vertical array. So, you know, you got to do it I guess in the right place and temper your expectations for the yield based on that vertical aspect. You do better in winter than in summer, but in some places that's fine. So yeah we got a lot of good questions so we'll get to as many as we can. There was someone on the call I think you mentioned it in Portland, Phil, but was that part of Portland electrify everything program, or could you mention that, are you involved in that program. Yeah, so the city of Portland has launched what it's calling it's electrify everything program, and it's geared to accelerate clean energy adoption in the city of Portland. And energy is the preferred vendor for this program. It provides discounts, basically kind of volume discounts to both residences and commercial businesses in Portland. And so the more people who sign up the better the discount. Okay. Great. Thank you. So a question about, or maybe a couple questions about efficiency and reducing use of electricity, so that solar and other energy sources can go further. That's such an awesome question. So, so let's start with computer chip manufacturing right so humanity has been somewhat spoiled by the existence of what they call more as law. You know, in early in the days of computer chip manufacturing they discovered that every 18 months, scientists could double the amount of data they could etch on to a silicon wafer. Okay, and that Moore's law has held true for 40 years now and it has enabled us to take the size of a supercomputer, you know, needing like a full like a school classroom, and we've shrunk that technology down to a cell phone that sits in our pocket. Okay, so Moore's law has produced that with the, the silicon wafer. Unfortunately, in photovoltaic panel manufacturing, even though you're using the same silicon kind of base ingredient. There is no corollary on the efficiency gains with photovoltaic panels. And so, if you, you know from one year to the next, if there's a two to 3% efficiency increase in solar photovoltaic panels. That's considered a good year. And so, David correctly points out that we're, you know, we're kind of hovering around 20 to 25% is, is the very best stuff on the market today. The theoretical limit for efficiency from a physics standpoint is 29%. That's, that's what I have read. And so what the long. This is a long way of saying, don't hold your breath and delay and investment in the future. Don't delay and investment in renewable in solar panels, while waiting for a hyper efficient panel, because it's never going to come. There has never been buyers remorse, because of an efficiency gain, as far as I'm aware of. All right. Thank you. All right, on the solar parking canopies, what practical question what happens when this, they're covered with snow. Ideally, there's a tilt of some sort to the canopy such that the snow can eventually slide off. Ultimately, if you live in the Northeast, you're going to lose some solar production to snow at some point during the year. Much to my regret, snow cover is dropping precipitously by the year. And so every year that revisions been in business, basically the, the loss of production from snow cover has fallen by some percentage every year that goes by. But yeah, the bottom line is if you get a foot or more of snow on a solar array, it's going to be covered for a little while. All right, I'm sure someone will come up with some rake technology at some point. Yeah. Yeah. All right, there's a question about efficiency main specific but we might have to check the website on that but do you require or do they require backup heating oil to get rebates for installing heat pumps and do your electric houses have backup heat for low temperature days. The website efficiency main answer the question about how they're handling that rebate lately but but when we consult with a homeowner. We invariably encourage them to have some type of backup, but more and more homeowners are going forward without backup, because if the, if the structure is well enough insulated, you don't absolutely have to have the backup. It also depends on the comfort level of the homeowner, you know, do you feel like you could handle being chilly for a week in February if if there was a major outage and you didn't have backup electricity. So, it's, it's a kind of a case by case basis there's there's not a blanket statement to be had there. It depends a lot on the structure depends on the quality of the shell and then the comfort level of the occupant and suffering through a little cooler temps and they might prefer at times. Okay. And I might. I might just ask for clarification on this question. Are we moving forward to develop electric car storage. Becky is there is specific to that. Well, it's an excess solar energy. I mean there has been talk of using automobile, you know electric cars as a battery to that nighttime losses. Yes, absolutely. And so the fancy term for that Becky is vehicle to grid technology or v2g. And yes, people are working furiously on that. And I apparently the Ford F 150 lightning the electric truck is going to have that type of capability right out of the gate. And in other parts of the world this is already happening so yes, it'll be here sooner than later. Yep. To know the official phrase for that too. We have a land trust worker here talking about solar on their properties. Do you have any public policy ideas that can make it easier for land trust or other nonprofit or non residential land owners to have solar. I don't know if there's another part of that but we're, we're always looking to do creative collaborations that help projects move forward. And so there could be a conservation angle that resonates with a given community of constituents or stakeholders. There could be a way to dedicate some of the power to a load of moderate income community as a way to get past potential objections or obstacles, but yeah. So why don't we put my email address in the chat, and then folks who have questions like that and want to engage a little deeper can just reach right out to me. And Clifford's patiently had his hand up for a little while why don't we let him. I'm in with a question. Thanks for putting in the time here. Oh, it's Cliff Prolich. Hi, Cliff. Nice to see you. A little broader thanks for coming. Considering what's going on in the world right now and fossil fuel industries are like drooling to like. Please use our fossil fuel we can go here we can go there. What is the real true renewable energy industry? What's their relationship to being able to say to a country or to a government or a state? Don't do that. We'll get we'll get this solar farm up within two months ready to go. You know where I'm coming from. I mean you're battling a fossil fuel industry that really would like to destroy anything that you do, but they can't. In Europe, you know they're pulling their hair out. What are the answers to come right to the table right away so we don't go down that path anymore. All right, so I believe in speaking truthfully and transparently and I think Germany is the best illustration of that what you're asking about. So if they had to go back and do it over again. I don't think Germany would have gotten rid of their nuclear plants as fast as they did. And I hate to say that because I'm not a big fan of nukes, but it's put them in a terrifically difficult spot at the moment. And there aren't enough workers in the clean energy industry to build that array in the next two months. The biggest obstacle to the clean energy transition hands down right at this moment, both in the United States and globally is not enough workers to install all of the clean energy systems. And so if we can shanghai a large proportion of fossil fuel industry workers to come over and start doing the right thing and clean energy, we could change that to some extent. But we need to be cloning electricians as fast as humanly possible. If we really want to kind of keep the pace going. You know, right now revision energy is scheduling projects in mid to late summer. And it's only the beginning of March. And that's because there aren't enough people to do all the work fast enough across the industry. At the same time, you have the traditional construction industry fighting for all of these electricians. And so the industry term for the clean energy transition is called beneficial electrification. And to make it happen, you need an army of electricians. And right now, we only have a platoon. One final point. I mean the fossil fuel industry received lots of money up ahead in front of any project. Why can't we get the renewable energy industry to get enough money so that people can be paid for education and paid to be cut get right on the line. Gradually, but not fast enough. That money is starting to flow. You know, just for example on under the American Rescue Plan Act, there's a bunch of workforce training money that's flooding into various states and communities and so right now revision energy is trying to get it its hands on some of that money to scale up the revision energy training center, so that we can clone more of those electricians. Great, great. Thank you. And the last minute or two it looks like Becky, I see your questions so maybe do you just want to speak them into the room about conservation and micro grids. Well, I'm hope I'm I think micro grids are at least a valuable thing for security for local communities. How do you perceive, you know, solar transition to solar and micro grids. That's one question. How do I perceive it. I proceed. Yeah, go ahead. I perceive it as we should have gotten started 30 years ago. Now that the technology is starting to emerge. I do think that this is going to be in part of that. You know, big picture transition. We need to start identifying the sites like college campuses or, you know, the, the center of towns different places where we can execute these micro grids, they're not happening yet. And part of it is the lack of utility buy in, and part of it is lack of kind of like state or community planning to integrate these these micro grid efforts. So, yeah, that's a big area of opportunity that is currently kind of under resourced and isn't going fast enough. I have one more and then I see the last question is sews. Oh, and okay. If you have another couple minutes, we can, I have a couple more minutes. Sure. Okay. Becky, did you have another follow up. I don't, I don't think I have a follow up it's okay. Have to go ahead. Okay. Yeah. So I'm have, if you wanted to just ask it but she's asking about the grid here and how much solar can handle and how much more investment we need. Here all these things about, you know, the grid isn't up to the challenge and we need to invest money and I just be interested in your take on that. Yeah, well it's absolutely true, you know, the big choke point in rolling out the clean energy that we want to roll out here in Maine is the fact that our substations are either at capacity or or way over subscribed. And the upgrades for those substations are really expensive, you know, very capital intensive and and equipment intensive. And so now that the utilities have been dragging their heels on clean energy for 30 years, we're way way behind where we could and should have been by this point. And so I know the PUC is doing everything it can to try to solve this really difficult problem. But yeah, the grid needs significant investment and upgrades to make it to make the clean energy transition viable. Yep, that is what I thought. You affirmed what I thought. Yeah, you are correct. Yeah. Go ahead, Maggie. Maggie, yeah. You're muted Maggie. Thank you. This has been really uplifting. I mean there's a lot of work ahead but I love your optimism about getting it done, and potential at least, but what are we, are you guys, do you guys have any ideas I mean I'm looking around a lot of us have the black screen like I did until just now but I know some of the people there and we're kind of mostly in a certain demographic. And what are we doing to engage younger people and minority groups in in these wonderful. I mean I know I love you know what you're doing for maybe housing product low income housing and and that whole. You're doing it but to get the people to the table. What do we have to do I mean it's just all us old people for the most part sorry Philip and some other people that are a lot younger. Yes. Yeah, great question Maggie thank you. So you saw sun swatch at the end and sun swatch could be could seem like a kind of a light hearted lark. Sun swatch is actually serious as a heart attack in terms of we specifically wanted to find a powerful way to connect with the younger generation and so sun swatch goes to like middle schools, or to camps and literally engages with the younger generation and that's from the city of Boston up to the city of Bangor. So that's part of it we also just built what we're calling the tiny climate education center I think that's the name of it we had a tiny house built. It's got solar on the roof. It's got a heat pump it's got an electric vehicle charger. It's got a very storage and it's meant to be taken around to the schools basically and bring the kids out and, you know, welcome them into the tiny climate education house. So that's a that's a very specific thing. We go to the school mostly like the 20s and 30 year old so you got I know you guys got done yet. All right. I. So last week I presented to the kids at Casco Bay High School. I do the college tour as much and as fast as I possibly can. So Bates Bowdoin, Northeastern BC University of New England USM. I'll go any place they will have me. And so if you think this presentation is worthwhile and you can get me an at bat at a college or a high school set me up. But we also go into communities of color. 53% of our hires in 2021 were BIPOC. So, so we're trying our hardest to be inclusive and to reach across the, the age brackets and the demographic brackets, the best of our ability while still maintaining a viable business. Okay, thank you. You're welcome. I'm Maggie I'm in that age block so I'm here I know Philip is and we're, we're very engaged as Philip was saying in the chat, you've led mute movements and yeah, I know it's there so definitely help fill get out to more people though. Yeah, as well. Yeah, thank you I mean, we have a pretty good history of showing up that's our trademark so other than the last one of these. And Becky I see you and then we'll wrap up. I just wanted to say that main youth for climate justice is a group that we've done a lot of work with. And I hope that you have done a presentation with them. Yeah, if you haven't and you need a connection. We maybe Philip you'd like to to connect but I need all I need an invite. Well on you maybe on your right or Anna Segal, both of whom work with us as well, maybe one of them will invite you so. Make it happen in the bigger the crowd the better. Great. Yeah, of course. Thank you again Phil so much yeah this is really it really is encouraging. I learned a ton, even though you've already shown me at once. It's really. Yeah it's really inspiring so we'll help you get out there as much as possible thank you all for coming. And especially after the last hiccup last time as Phil mentioned thank you. Have a great rest of your day. And we'll talk to you soon we'll follow up in the in an email with any links that are relevant as well. Awesome. Thank you. Take care everyone. Take care.