 Well thank you everybody for coming here today and sorry I'm a little bit behind schedule but that's all right. We're going to hopefully move through some good information for you. I like to keep it interactive rather than just talk at you so please don't be shy to raise your hand and call out if you have any questions as I go along. I'd just like to mention really quickly that in 2015 Revision Energy became a certified B Corp and the B stands for Benefit Corporation. The way I distill that down is that I say that we are running the business to create maximum positive impact in the communities where we live and work rather than the traditional business model of maximizing shareholder returns. And in fall of 2017 we became a 100% employee-owned company because we really believe in sharing the success of the business with the people who are making it happen. And the photo is that's the Crossroads House in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. It's a facility that provides shelter for anywhere from 30 to 50 families on any given night year round and they're doing just tremendous frontline work on some of society's most difficult problems. I was really proud of my team that went out and did all the fundraising by themselves to purchase the equipment that's on their roof, the solar hot water and solar electricity and then they went and installed it on their own time. And I think that kind of really expresses what it means to be running a B Corp and an employee-owned company. So, yeah, so what I'm here today to talk about is the tremendous challenge that we're facing. After 200 years of the Industrial Revolution we have this fossil fuel infrastructure that's just deeply embedded into every aspect of society and our daily lives. And what I'm finding in the 15 years of running this renewable energy business is that 200 years of Industrial Revolution powered by fossil fuels has created trillions of dollars of wealth associated with that fossil fuel industry. And a lot of that wealth is being deployed today to try to stop our renewable energy industry in its tracks, which makes it extraordinarily difficult to forge ahead and that's what we're doing nonetheless because I think that the reasons to do so are just so incredibly and abundantly clear. So today we're at 7 billion people on planet Earth, all of us burning fossil fuels for the energy that we need. What concerns me is I raised three kids in Maine. I'm born and raised here, a lifelong manor. We're on our way to 9 billion people globally and our energy demand is expected to increase by 30% over that population increase. And so how are we going to figure out how to get 30% more energy while driving down the colossal fossil fuel consumption that we are undertaking today? And despite the staggering numbers associated with how much fossil fuel we use and how many people there are, I'm actually optimistic and hopeful and that'll be the longer tail of this conversation. So I think one of the biggest challenges outside of the trillions of dollars of fossil fuel wealth that's arrayed against us is the fact that we have this invisible enemy that we're trying to confront. Most Americans look at an image like this and the biggest problem they see is that cars may not be getting where they want to as fast as they'd like. But in reality, the way I think about it, if we go one slide ahead, every single car in that previous slide is actually doing this, but catalytic converter technology has rendered the carbon emissions from burning the fossil fuel basically tasteless, odorless and colorless for the most part. So when we start up 200 million cars in America, if you go back to the other side for a second, most people are just utterly oblivious to the fact that they're creating this giant plume of carbon pollution coming off the tailpipe. And same for when we walk through the streets, if we can go two ahead now, when we're walking down the street, we don't see giant tar, black smoke and tar balls coming out of our homes. But in Maine, we have 400,000 homes that are heated with oil, each one burning an average of 800 gallons per year, which equates to about 18,000 pounds of carbon pollution entering the atmosphere. And of course that atmosphere is closed, so it really doesn't have any place to go other than to turn our oceans acidic where it's absorbed and ideally the trees are consuming as much of it as they can while we continue to cut down the trees. So when you add all of that up and we go one slide ahead, every day in America as we start up our cars or our boilers fire or whatever fossil fuel consumption we might be undertaking, we're lofting the equivalent of hundreds of deep water horizon disasters into the atmosphere, we're just completely unaware that that's the case. And I think that's a really massive challenge for us as we think, how do we get people to have more urgency around this idea, like even my individual actions in the aggregate add up to a really terrible impact. And the fact that we don't have giant orange fireballs and black billowing smoke is part of our challenge. We go another slide, I think a lot of people in this room know what's happening as seven billion people burn fossil fuels 24 seven year round. We've now kind of saturated earth's atmosphere with a level of carbon dioxide parts per million matter in the atmosphere that's been not seen for 800,000 years. It's really quite extraordinary, we're in totally uncharted territory for this level of carbon dioxide in human history, if we go one more head, I think good sound science is telling us what happens when we push the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the earth's temperature is going up in lockstep with that saturation of the atmosphere with those greenhouse gases. So that's some pretty heavy material. I'm going to try to pivot a little bit now to why I think there's cause for optimism. Does anybody know what we're looking at? So there's the ozone hole. And I remember back in the late 70s, early 80s, and I was a young kid, a younger person but well enough aware about this big hysteria around this ozone hole that scientists were telling humankind, hey if we don't solve this problem everybody's going to get skin cancer. Everybody's corneas and retinas are going to be fried by the unimpeded ultraviolet light hitting the earth from the sun and the ozone layer is what protects us. And the global community got together and said holy smokes that sounds terrible, we don't want that. And in pretty short order the world came together and created the Montreal Protocol which was signed globally in 1980 and we all agreed we're going to stop using these chlorofluorocarbons, the CFCs that were eating away the ozone in the atmosphere. We're going to stop using those chemicals to allow the ozone hole to repair itself. And for most of the last close to 40 years that ozone hole has been closing up. There was a recent news story about the fact that there are now some kind of phantom sources of CFCs that are being detected. So that problem may not be quite as solved as I hoped it was. But the trend is in the right direction and it proves a really important point which is when we all agree on the science we can all agree on what the solution is and we can get together globally and create that solution. This forecast out to 2065 of the ozone hole basically having been totally repaired through the Montreal Protocol. We hope that comes true. Just to liven things up rather to be heavy material, yes, Peter. The CIGALI Amendment bans HFCs in air conditioners worldwide and the United States has not actually signed onto that protocol yet given the current administration but they've not opposed it. And the reason is because the United States has the substitute gases for HFCs and it's a trillion dollar business to swap out all the CFCs with HFCs, all the HFCs with non-HFCs in the worldwide air conditioners. So and that's an important point because people are worried that if we pass some national climate policy that the Trump administration may veto it. But the fact is if it can be sold as a business proposition, as it grow the economy, maintain our international competitiveness deal, then the Trump administration might well sign it and the Trump administration has signed some climate beneficial. I do this talk quite often at schools as well and sometimes I'll bring people like my paddle board surfing Chihuahua with me just to get the kids a little bit of oh my god, you know, we're going to live for another couple of years and this is actually an Instagram post because these homes in the background are covered in solar and that's on the spur wake mark but he's a character and the board's all torn up because he likes to surf the waves and he gloms right on it. It's really hysterical. What's that? He likes it. He likes to surf. He loves it. He loves it. He loves it. That's not terror. That's just like, this is fun. That's how you stay on. Anyway, so let's keep going. Let's talk about the alternatives that are out there and what is available to us in terms of the energy sources for humankind and on the right you've got your finite options in natural gas, oil, uranium and coal and on the other side on the left-hand ledger are renewables and we're talking about terawatt hours per hour. We're talking about the energy sources for humankind. On the other side on the left-hand ledger are renewables and we're talking about terawatt hours per year, staggering amounts of energy. To put it in context, this bubble here is global consumption in 2009 and that's the forecast for 2050. So you can see we've got a lot of energy available to us and there's actually one giant yellow bucket that I think presents as a pretty outstanding option for us. Happens to be the mom of every other bucket here on the slide. For me the big thing is that in one hour the sun is delivering enough energy to the surface of the earth to power every human energy demand for an entire year. Every factory, every car, every truck, boat, plane, you name it, that actually falls onto the surface of the earth and so if we get efficient at harvesting that level of energy we can stop using the fossil fuels and I think that's important to understand that the available energy is there. We have to get better at capturing it and storing it. And so let's dial in a little bit more locally. It tends to surprise a few people to know that our latitude is identical to Marseille, France, on the French Mediterranean and although we don't have that year-round Mediterranean climate, the point is that we're at a very sunny latitude, you know Spain is a sunny area, the French every area. We have the Gulf Stream which brings colder weather patterns to us but overall at this latitude it's a strong solar resource. Another way to think about it is Germany, much further north of us, has achieved amazing renewable energy penetration over the last 30 years of their energy transition. They call it the energy weaned and they're petrified so Germany knows that Russia controls all this and most of the fossil fuel resources in Western Europe and so they're deathly afraid that Putin is going to choke them off so they want to get energy independent for that reason and they also freaked out about 7 billion people burning fossil fuels in a closed atmosphere. So if we look at, you know, what Germany has accomplished, you know this article was from May 2016 and what they're talking about here is a day, a weekend day where the sun is shining brightly, the wind is blowing strong, you know it's energizing the 26,000 wind turbines that they have in the couple million solar arrays but I think it's proving the point that a modern industrialized economy can achieve this energy transition over time and they've made heavy investments to accomplish this. They're now at 30% kind of annual renewable energy as part of their energy mix. America is at less than five. Anyway, so they have a heavy manufacturing economy as well, you know, largest exporter on the planet, more dollar value than China's annual exports. And going back to the local solar resource, I just like to surprise people to say that if you put a solar array in our neck of the woods, you're going to get the same annual output as you would if you put that solar array in Houston, Texas and that's because a solar panel really loves a cool, dry climate relative to a hot and humid climate. On an annual basis, our solar resource is just 10% less than most of Florida. So it's pretty good up here, even though January and February really stinks. It's actually pretty good, yes. Yes, it's kind of hazy down in Houston and choked with volatile organics, I'm sure, yeah, and hot. Solar panels are at maximum efficiency in April-May-ish because the temperature is low. And there's another piece that's coming up about that. Let's go to the next one. And so thinking about that cost aspect that you brought up, you know, the price of solar technology has really plunged. This number is still dropping, even in the face of a tariff slapped on by the Trump administration. I should say it's more plateaued temporarily, but the drop in the cost of solar technology has caused this amazing spike in adoption around the globe and in America. Is it just the cost of the system? That's right, not the full installation. And so the soft costs have become more expensive than the hardware itself. And this is what has really been crucial to maintaining revision and energy's forward progress in the face of kind of unremitting hurricane force winds out of Augusta. This has been kind of much of our saving grace right here. And so what happens when we kind of reach this nexus where the technology drops to a price point where it's universally affordable? Let's go to the next one here. I think there's a good technology and kind of energy example from early in the late 19th, early 20th century. So there's 1890 New York City. You can see how we're moving around and what kind of energy we're using. And I think that horse is having some grains down here, maybe a drink of water. But let's fast forward 10 years and go ahead. Yeah. And we just see this amazing transformation of technology adoption, energy consumption. I think that that is a way for, say, kids who are trying to get their arms around this idea of an energy transition to see a historical example of the fact that humankind can actually pivot rather quickly. And we've all seen it with our cell phone technology and computers. The Cray computer used to require this entire room. And now I have nearly as much computing horsepower in my pocket, which brings up a point about the technology. The Moore's law is what has enabled that Cray supercomputer to shrink down to this. Moore's law says that every 18 months, the amount of data that we can etch onto a silicon wafer chip has doubled every 18 months. And so for 40 years, it's shrunk the technology while keeping its incredible power the same. Unfortunately, solar panels, which are also made of silicon, don't have that same corollary. So if we get a 1% efficiency increase in a year in solar technology, that's pretty good. And that's kind of a long way of saying that for the most part, we don't suffer buyer's remorse when we invest in a solar panel that's going to last about 40 years. So let's talk about the energy transition that is underway now. If we go to the next slide, this just came out in March. I was really inspired to see that Ontario is blowing up a coal-fired power plant to make way for a gigantic solar power plant. Hopefully there's not a whole bunch of tar sands in that equation. But it's still a very hopeful sign nonetheless. And there are many more that I'd like to share with you. Let's think about Scandinavia, one of the most sophisticated ferry systems in the world. This is incredible. They're going to basically convert that entire ferry fleet to battery electric, thereby eliminating the point source pollution that comes out of their stacks, but also giving them the chance to power the entire fleet with solar and wind power and actually store all of that energy and be able to use it maybe when the sun isn't shining or the wind isn't blowing. Are they going to collect on the boats? No. There's not enough surface area on the boat to get a meaningful amount. I mean, you could trickle charge some batteries for light sources and stuff, but you're not going to be able to move the ship. Now, the batteries are too big. That's the world's first all-electric commercial fishing boat, which was launched out of Norway, the country that happens to have the highest per capita electric vehicle adoption on the planet. That's the first solar-powered motorboat that has traversed the seven seas. I like to weave in the aspect that we're really going to get our butts kicked in this renewable energy space if we don't start paying attention to what's happening in the world. We're trying to reduce energy efficiency for our vehicles while China is saying that we're going to pivot to eliminating the internal combustion engine. If we're not paying attention and getting involved politically, it's really at our own peril. This is a really exciting technology right here. This bus was actually in Portland a couple months ago. This bus goes 350 miles on one charge. We're now proving that we can do battery electric at scale. It's really phenomenal. I hope that we get one in the near future. And I think what I'm trying to do here is reinforce the point that, thankfully, there are some adults that still have their hands on the steering wheel in America. While Trump says that we're pulling out, companies are just driving forward. This is a Walmart somewhere in the west. I think it's in Boulder. Keep going. So UPS is showing tremendous leadership. Their long-term plan is to convert their entire fleet to battery electric. Going back, he went to. Apple is now using a mixture of on-site renewables and then purchasing off-site renewables to go 100% renewable energy powered, which can make you feel a little bit. This is in Cupertino, I believe. Yeah, that's their brand new, what do they call the thing? The spaceship. This gets some crazy. Yeah, that's the office space. It's this giant ring. Yeah, it's pretty neat. And in air travel, this is the first solar powered plane. It's got solar panels in the wings and batteries and electric motors. That circumnavigated the globe. It was announced about three or four months ago that the world's first electric jet should be here in 10 years. So I think this gives us that sense that we're attacking this at the residential scale all the way up to really heavy energy consumption. The point I wanted to make about this energy transition relative to why would we keep it in the ground if we have all that we need and then some. And I look at the US Department of Defense. So this is the largest acquirer of renewable energy in the United States. Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines, they are installing solar on everything and everywhere they possibly can. And there's a couple of reasons. First of all, they see fossil fuel supplies as the weakest link in the battle theater. Your fossil fuel supply chain is the thing that's most easily taken out. There's this group called Deploy US, which is a bunch of retired four star generals who have been in Iraq and they've watched their gasoline tanker heading out to go resupply the troops and they've seen a missile take one out and be like, oh, we've got a lot of vulnerability here. And they're coming back to the US and going around and talking about this fact that it's just not a long term success strategy domestically or abroad in the battle theater. And they also, the Department of Defense sees climate change as the biggest security threat on the planet right now. So one area that's really interesting to me is how do we come up with a singular argument that gets 100% of America thinking we ought to be making this energy transition and doing it faster and more aggressively than we are today. And my hypothesis is that with seven billion people on your way to nine billion and the fact that fossil fuels are utterly finite, we're doing crazy stuff to get them today. And it's now perfectly legitimate to argue that fossil fuels in the ground have become a nation's most valuable strategic national defense asset. Maybe even more valuable than nukes because you can't power most of your navy without fossil fuels. You can't fly all your jets without fossil fuels. And so if we are kind of in this scenario where you're either gonna run out of them or you're gonna burn so many that the planet becomes uninhabitable, doesn't it argue that the nation with the greatest reserves under its soil is by default the strongest nation on the face of the planet? And if that's true, they wouldn't argue that you use every drop that you have as a stingily and as efficiently as possible to build the renewable energy infrastructure that can power you today while you hold your powder for a day if you really need it. And maybe you get that 30 to 40% of Americans who could care less about a renewable energy transition. Maybe you get them actually joining the party. So I'm throwing that out there. I'm talking to Angus King about this as a potential angle with the administration that we're facing today. And because it's really hard to get climate deniers to feel the same level of urgency that I think most of us feel in this room. And what keeps them so incredibly strong in that arena is the fact that the Koch brothers and others are just filling their coffers with these trillions of dollars of fossil fuel wealth that's been generated and super concentrated in a few very powerful hands. Let's go to the next one. So just quickly pivoting to what we see at the tip of the spirit revision. So this is a Lowe's home improvement employee who lives in Durham, New Hampshire. He has fulfilled his lifelong dream to basically abandon fossil fuels. He uses about 25 gallons of propane per year as backup but his house is basically powered by solar. The heart is showing where the heat pump ductwork is. So the solar panels are able to power his heat pumps. It's obviously charging his electric car down on the driveway. He's got some old school solar hot water up there. And the point of the slide is to just say, this isn't just for the zillionaires anymore. It's become much more mainstream. And this person has basically traded his utility and fuel bills for a monthly payment on his loan from the bank. And it's basically a wash. So he's cash flow neutral. And in the bargain, he's abandoned fossil fuels. And once he pays off his loan in 10 or 12 years, he's now making money in the form of avoided utility costs for the next 30 years. Because now we don't have to solder copper pipes from the roof down through a couple floors into the basement and get that all right and tear open walls. But this has become really common. We call it the 100% solar powered household. We'll go one slide further. And then when you have the battery in the basement, now you've got that ability to span the four or five days that you might be without sunshine in a given storm. It is hard to do this in a main winter. Let's just be honest. We all know what it's like. A lot of these homes will have a wood stove as they're back up to the backup. But it's really showing us that we can go from 800 gallons of oil consumption per year to 25 to 50 gallons of lighter fuel. We have a lot of old housing stock that needs a lot of love. It does a great job of keeping the heat out in the winter, in the summertime, those super insulated homes. Some quick examples. This is a net positive office building. It's obviously a small one. This is up in Falmouth next to Tidesmart Global. They export the extra electricity down to EV charging stations in the driveway. This is the first kind of carbon neutral school in the area. This is the Friend School in Cumberland, super insulated envelope heated and cooled with heat pumps. And the solar array is designed to meet that annual load. Grandiotes Granola, local great company. They took an old abandoned elementary school in Hiram, totally reinstallated it and added electric ovens at much higher expense. But then they did the math and we built a solar array to power those ovens and the heat pumps and the electric vehicle charging station they use. So they're now pretty much carbon neutral or 100% renewable energy powered. This is an exciting project that we've been working on for the last five years down in Kensington, New Hampshire. There's a man named Alan Lewis who is trying to create a 400 acre campus that can be a demonstration model for 100% renewable energy at the community scale. He's got year round food production going here, some businesses on the property, there's EV charging. We're doing another kind of, we're doubling the size of the renewable energy this year with the hope of getting there by 2025. But really interesting project that everybody can visit. It's, if you go to the farm at Eastman's Corner, that's kind of one of the anchor businesses down there and that's this place, great little spot. It's only 10 minutes off the highway. Let's go to the next one. There's another great example. I think the name is Down East Woodworking and they're North, I think they're North of Freeport. But they had this humongous demand charge that was hitting them because they would turn on their really powerful saws once or twice a day and the utility would hit them with thousands of dollars in electricity costs. We went up there and we put in a pika battery system exactly sized to meet that demand charge and it's gonna get like a four year payback. Solar plus a battery, so that's exciting. Yeah. He's excited about that. Oh, they love it. They are best buddies. I like throwing this up. This is Revision Energy's shop on Presumskut Street in Portland just to say that we're really trying to guzzle the Kool-Aid that we're offering to everybody else. We have solar electricity, old school solar hot water there. We're charging our electric cars. We're running a veggie biodiesel in our install trucks this time of year. We can get away with 100% in the summertime and a lesser fraction in the winter when the stuff doesn't burn so well. And it leads us into a little bit just to glance it. You got another slide there. Oh, we're stuck. Is that just one? So I've been driving electric cars now for almost seven years and I'm really excited by what I see. So this to me is pretty inspiring. This is the cumulative sales of plug-in vehicle sales in the US and I think it's great to note that the early trajectory here is better than what we saw with the Prius 25 years ago. And now that the Prius is ubiquitous, we can assume that electric cars are gonna actually outpace that growth. And if you're thinking about charging stations, so first of all, if you don't have an electric car, let me just say that the performance is just out of this world. There's so much better than a gas powered car. The internal combustion engine has about 2000 moving parts. The electric car has about 18 moving parts. So you have much fewer opportunities for trouble. There's no maintenance over here with the electric car. You don't do oil changes, spark plugs, timing belts, none of that, you basically rotate the tires and that is it. It's wonderful. As far as charging stations go, 90 plus percent of all your charging just happens at home overnight. You really don't need to worry too much about a charging station unless you're going on a long trip. The average American drives less than 40 miles per day and now with the say a Chevy Bolt on the market that goes 240 miles, you really just don't have to worry for a second about range anxiety. You do if you're trying to go to New York City, but this app called Plug Share will take you to any charging station you want at a restaurant or a place where it would be enjoyable to hang out for an hour and recharge. The main term pike just got a whole bunch of Tesla charging stations down here in Kennebunk and we have millions of dollars of incentives coming into the state from the VW settlement money. So this map will be coming much, much more densified with charging stations in short order. So yeah, the cars are super intelligent. So you can have it on your phone, your computer and the cars are basically pre-programmed to tell you where the charging stations are. So range anxiety is not a thing. There's a company in Massachusetts that's building the equivalent of a gas can and they're 10 mile chunks of battery with a charged hookup. And so in 1920 something, there were 120,000 harness manufacturers in the United States and by 1930 something, there were 10. And so we've gone through these really rapid changes in our manufacturing sectors many times over in history. And it's pain, right? We couldn't rip fossil fuel out of our economy right now and avoid a utter financial collapse. I mean as much as I want it to happen tomorrow, the world couldn't withstand that. So I'm very sensitive to that reality. I think it's something that humanity has to figure out. You can't throw every person today in the fossil fuel business out of work because the whole train would come to a halt. So we have to figure that out. How about if we took some of the trillions of historical fossil fuel wealth and deployed that to have a plan transition? I must be. I must for some reason I think it's wrong, right? For Charles Koch to be a multi-billionaire, what has he done for humankind? Did he cure cancer? Did he fix heart disease? No, no, he took a public resource and became so wealthy, it's heavily subsidized and became so enormously wealthy that nobody can touch him. Isn't that lovely? Yeah. So first of all, it's really hard. You know, we don't have a five year horizon that we can look out over and say, yeah, we should buy trucks and hire people and invest in tools and infrastructure. Feels like there's a cliff every six months, whether it's the PUC blowing up net metering or LaPage having another veto. So it's incredibly difficult. Thankfully, rational, right-minded people are taking action like yourself and they're keeping the renewable energy train rolling in the face of that type of opposition. And we are, we're steady, we're solid and there are maybe more of you than you thought because we're doing it throughout Maine. We go to Bangor, we're at the coast, we're inland, we're in Buxton, we're in Scarborough. But there are pockets, you know, Portland's got a good concentration of solar aficionados and Brunswick is a hotbed. Freeport's pretty good. There has been a rebound, an anti-Trump rebound in this space. People are saying, you know what, I finally have to do this now because it's one of the ways I can vote with my checkbook. Yeah. They will be someday. They're incredibly cost-burden today with Maine's policy. You know, in Massachusetts, you can build enormous solar farms and get economies of scale that result in a good deal for the end user. In Maine, you have this artificial nine-member limit on a community solar farm which makes it really hard to do it cost-effectively. But that should come. Like this should all get unleashed when we have some new leadership in Augusta. Yeah. So right now it's 100% a political solution. Make no mistake. What we do in November is going to be the next most important way to jumpstart Maine's solar industry. Outside of this type of gathering and you going out and telling as many people as you can that this is actually a good investment today. It's really, we need state leadership. We've had eight years of government telling us this is a waste of our time and our money. Whereas in Massachusetts, they've grown this tremendous renewable energy economy with about 400 solar companies and about 20,000 workers. I would say it's even worse than in terms of waste of our time. They're telling us the guy with solar through who they're stealing from you. Exactly. And that's being spoon-fed from the Koch brothers to people like LePage who disseminated out to us. And so that's why this political battle is so important this year in these midterms. Yeah. Yeah, and I'm spending all my time at fundraisers for political candidates. I'm going, I'm talking to both Democrats and Republicans, you know, Sean Moody, if he were to get elected, he's the guy who financed the solar array at Maine Audubon. So he has a pretty solid level of credibility thus far. When he hired LePage people, I started to wonder, you know, how much I can trust him. But so far, he has said, I think he has said that he thinks renewable energy should be a big part of Maine's economy. Yeah, we can just quickly just see what's left here. So that's a car that's gone 600 miles on one charge. I think I'm almost at the end. And that's a prototype that'll be, yeah, that's it. That was the end. Yeah, I was asked to, yes. Yeah. Mobilizing and advancing.