 Hello, and welcome to the Burlington Mayor's show for the month of April. We're getting together at the tail end of April here, and excited to have this show. Joining me today is the General Manager of the Burlington Electric Department, Darren Springer, and we are going to focus today's show on our Net Zero Energy Plan. And we just this week released an update to how we're doing with respect to the plan. As part of the roadmap that we committed to a couple years ago, we also are getting metrics every year. We can tell on an annual basis how we're doing versus this very ambitious plan. So we're going to get into that in a moment. As always, we're happy to answer other questions as well, and hope you'll consider calling in to talk about the Net Zero Energy Plan, but also if there's anything else going on in Burlington, and anything else about local government that you're interested in talking about, give us a call. And usually, I'm not sure if we can get the number up there on the screen. I'm sure we'll get that posted in a moment, and it's been a while since I managed the switchboard here, and I guess I've forgotten the number here, but we'll get posted shortly. Darren, we presented this update at the city council a couple of days ago, and I'm going to ask you to walk through it in a moment. I think, and there's the number 862-3966. We'd love to hear from you. This is our second update in terms of metrics. We published this plan in 2019 and then had the first numbers come in a year ago, which were in some ways shockingly good in that we had seen very substantial emissions over the course of that first a little more than a year segment. We all knew that part of that was this really exceptional thing that happened in the world of the pandemic hitting in March 2020, just months after we sort of launched the plan. And there's a big question mark hanging over the last year as, you know, as this economy started to recover, would those numbers go in the opposite direction? And the answer is to some degree yes, but still overall, I think the two big take-home messages for me were that this plan, this very concerted effort to move us away from fossil fuels. And that's what the goal is. I mean, we should start there. Just make sure everyone's clear what this net zero energy city goal is. It's a commitment to do everything we can over the next decade by 2030 to become a net zero energy city, which in large part means moving with ground transportation or vehicles and with the heating of our buildings to convert away from the burning of fossil fuels for those purposes and replace it with systems that run on electricity and then continuing to power that electricity as we have since 2014 with 100% renewable energy. That's what the plan says and lays out. It's the most ambitious local climate goal in the country, we believe. And we've got to do a lot of work to get there. Really, it will require a transformation of this community to achieve it. And why don't I hand it over to you now, Darren? You can talk about what this update said and how we're doing against that very ambitious goal. Great. Well, thank you, Mayor, and thanks for inviting us to join for the show. I think the slides I'm going to present are similar to slides that we presented at the City Council on Monday evening. So I'm going to pull those up and walk folks through what exactly we are doing here with net zero. A little about Burlington Electric for folks who may not be familiar. We're a public power utility, electric utility here in the city. We manage all of the electric grid and renewable generation plants for the city of Burlington. And we have over 21,000 customers now with about three quarters of those being residential customers and the quarter being commercial. We, I think you talked about this goal, this 2030 vision that we have of making Burlington a net zero energy city by eliminating fossil fuel use across not just electricity, which we've done by being 100% renewable, but also thermal and ground transportations. And that's what makes our goal uniquely ambitious is that we're trying to do that on a timeframe that very few are taking on. And Burlington is really in the lead was recognized as having the first US net zero 2030 plan by the smart electric power alliance. So how are we doing? And this, this set of graphs demonstrates what the business is usual path looks like compared to the green line on the left, which would be the net zero path by 2030. And as folks can see, and as you alluded to, Mayor, in 2020, we had reached a point where we were on the path for net zero, having achieved significant emissions reductions, although a portion of those were likely attributed to the pandemic, to people driving fewer miles, for example. And what we saw was a mild rebound in emissions in 2021. However, it was only about a one and a half percent increase relative to 2020. And when you look at the overall picture, we're still down 12 and a half percent on emissions compared to our 2018 baseline. So Burlington is still doing better now than we were when we started this effort, significantly better. And we're doing better as well, you know, particularly in the transportation sector, which you can see here. We have a pace that's actually still, you know, not only on the roadmap pace, but better than the roadmap pace when it comes to gas and diesel use, which is on the left here, natural gas use in buildings. We've had some downward trend as well. But we are a little bit off of the pace that the roadmap would have us on for natural gas use in buildings. Can you speak there before we advance? I mean, just a little bit about, like, how do we how do we make these projections and how confident are we in their accuracy? Absolutely. So we partner with a company called Synapse Energy Economics out of Cambridge, Massachusetts. They developed the roadmap data for us and update it each year. And we use as updated data as we possibly can. So with natural gas use, we partner with Vermont Gas Systems to get updated data for the city of Burlington on how much we're using. And then with the vehicle miles traveled in the gas and diesel use, we use Chittenden County and state of Vermont travel data. We look at DMV vehicle registrations for the city of Burlington, so we understand how many vehicles are electric versus conventional. And then we're able to extrapolate how much gas and diesel use is estimated for the community. So I think quite impressive, I think, as a serious data effort and one that in and of itself, I feel like, is changed the way we kind of think about and talk about and try to work on these issues that we're getting this regular data like this. Absolutely. I think, you know, the state of Vermont, which has a significant emissions inventory for the entire state, their data goes back, I think, to 2017-2018 timeframe. So to have data that's updated for 2021 gives us a really a clearer picture of how we're doing in Burlington. And, you know, it's very helpful as it guides our efforts. You're saying that when the state is looking at their performance, they're looking at data that's five years old? Yeah. In some cases, there are several years behind where we are, which granted they have more emissions inventories to track than we do. But having this updated data that we have is really useful as we're saying, how are we doing? How can we adjust our programs and our thinking and our outreach to customers? Awesome. I'll let you get back to it. I'll just advance this slide here and it'll come back up in a moment. So I mentioned some of this key takeaways, but one of them that's important is nationally in 2021, emissions jumped back up 6.2 percent. And we saw globally as well, emissions going back up after the economy more fully reopened coming out of the pandemic. So for Burlington to only have a one and a half percent increase means we did better relative to the national and global trends and we consolidated more of the gains that we've had here in Burlington. Importantly as well, there are a number of great initiatives that have taken place over the course of the last year that are not yet impacting this data, but will as we go forward. So the Burlington Electric Net Zero Energy Revenue Bond, which voters approved back in December, that will start to impact this data going forward as we roll out projects and incentives, weatherization standards for rental properties, which you worked on with the city council. That'll be impacting data going forward as we use less energy in our rental properties and weatherize them. That'll be a significant one, won't it? Right. I mean, I think we think something like 40 percent of the rental units in the city really are not meeting the kind of modern building standards for weatherization. And maybe they went into the modern building standards, but they're not meeting these really basic weatherization standards. And as that there will be a reduction as that happens. I mean, I saw it with my own house when I weatherized my old 100 year old house. We saw the consumption drop by 25 percent. I mean, this is going to be real measurable progress when we get that done with hundreds, thousands of units over the coming years. It is. You know, 60 percent of our residential customers are renters. There are a large number of buildings that are being going through the process over the next five years to get weatherized, become more efficient, save 25, 30 percent in terms of energy use. And we'll see that rolling through the data each year. Natural gas use in rental properties should be dropping year over year as that rolls out. I know there were concerns about sort of throughput and how many units could be converted a year and whether like the market was going to be able to handle us pushing so many. Do you have any sense of how that's working in the early days here? Yeah. I think the great thing is that it's a staged approach. So we're going to start with the buildings that use the most energy. And so we're going to get the most bang for the buck right away in terms of weatherizing those buildings. And then as we go to buildings that are a little bit more efficient and on down, you end up with more buildings. So there will be maybe some challenge at the back end trying to make sure that we have enough folks in the workforce to do this work, enough incentive program participation opportunities so that rental properties can participate in the incentives. But we think we have a good plan and we're hopeful that we'll see each successive year. This will have an impact for really the next five years and then beyond. And then just another thing that we should mention is for new construction now you have to have a renewable heating system. That's an ordinance that you signed back in the summer of last year that the City Council had enacted and that will help us as well. So we want to make sure that as we're building new, we're doing it with renewables, whether that's electrification like heat pumps or geothermal, renewable fuels. And so that will help us avoid adding new infrastructure because we're going to use fossil fuels for the future. And certainly there's more we can do, I think, in that area as well. Certainly, and we talked about this, we've been talking about this plan a lot this week. The, you know, when you have new construction, of course there will be, you're growing the community at some level. And this plan, I think what we're going to, we've talked about in the future, is where I think we're really going to see as new units come online and they're held to this different standard, the per unit, essentially per capita impact should really improve, even if it might be a little bit hard in the grass we've been looking at so far to see the cumulative impacts. The overall performance of the community is definitely going to get better on that kind of per capita basis. Absolutely. If we build new construction with renewables, that'll help our per square foot or per capita, per unit, you know, emissions come down and ensure that we're investing in the types of technologies that we want to see for the future. So I'll just, I'll jump back to the slides for a moment here and we'll pull them back up on the screen. And what folks will see is we have, at Burlington Electric, incredible incentives for a variety of things. And you can go to BurlingtonElectric.com to learn more. But if you're looking at an electric vehicle, a plug-in hybrid, an electric bike, an electric lawnmower, a cold climate heat pump, even electric leaf blowers, forklifts, induction cooking, you name it, if there's something that can use renewable electricity instead of fossil fuels, we're working to incentivize it for customers. And so again, anyone who's interested can go to BurlingtonElectric.com, check out our rebates right there. There are a number of exciting things. Really is an impressive list. I mean, and it's, I really hope this is, this is maybe one of the most important parts of this whole discussion for Burlingtonians to realize is their, this plan succeeding requires Burlingtonians, Burlington property owners, vehicle owners, and businesses to take action. And I think for this plan to succeed, it's really important that people understand these pretty remarkable and generous incentives that are available for this broad range of different devices that we use. Absolutely. I think, and we'll continue to expand them as we do each year over time. But customers of BurlingtonElectric have a great opportunity to take advantage of really strong incentives. In some cases, there are state and federal incentives that can be paired with the BurlingtonElectric incentives and really make an impact. And exciting new this week, even if you are a customer who's taking advantage of our incentive program, you can go to BurlingtonElectric.com slash yard sign and we're happy to get a new net zero lawn sign installed right in your front yard so you can let your neighbors know that you took a step to helping the community reach its goal. I took mine home today. I haven't been actually, I haven't gotten it home yet. I got to get it installed. I think this is, I'm glad you guys are doing this, Darren, and that I think, again, to the last point, that this is really something that, this is not just a government plan. This is a plan that is going to require Burlingtonians to act. And I think this kind of lawn sign campaign and other things that we're doing is just going to spread awareness and really hopefully just, I think kind of become more and more a part of the way of life is that people are thinking, maybe I should electrify that. Maybe there's not, you know, I've got to replace my weed whacker. I don't know if we have another weed whacker incentive yet, but we did. There we go. I'm going to go check out the incentives that are available for that. And maybe can you, we're trying to help people with that. Can you speak a little bit to, and I know some of these are early days, but just to give a sense of people, the way we're trying to be as proactive as we can about this, how we're marketing these incentives. Absolutely. So we are trying a lot of new things for an electric utility because typically, you know, you buy your power from the electric utility. The electric utility is not going to talk to you about different products and things like that. But really, if we think about it, we're competing as a renewable fuel provider against really well-financed and trenched incumbent oil companies, for example, that are selling you your transportation fuel. And we happen to be able to provide you renewable electricity for your vehicle if you have an electric or a plug-in vehicle for the equivalent of 65 cents a gallon if you charge overnight with our off-peak rate, you know, 450 a gallon right now in some cases at the pump. That's a great opportunity. And so we want to share that with people. We've run a radio ad for the first time recently. We've had digital ads that we've used where people, if they're looking for a vehicle in Burlington, we try to make sure that they can be aware of our incentives when they're doing their searching. We partner with a number of different providers, so heat pump installers, auto dealers in the community, hardware stores. We partner with them so they can let customers know about our incentives. And really, you know, community outreach is going to be a key component of our success here. And it is early days. I think we have much, much more we can do in this area. It's exciting to think that we offer those kind of price advantages on the... I mean, you know, be saving more than $3 a gallon every time you fill up your car. I mean, this really adds up. Yeah, this is one of those great opportunities where the clean fuel is the cheaper fuel. Yeah. We don't always have that advantage to that extent. And right now, we can say very clearly that you can buy local, you can buy renewable, and you can fuel cheaper with renewable electricity than with gasoline. I think this point is worth pausing on again to just in that I... So often when I talk to folks, I think people assume that doing the right thing for the earth involves some kind of sacrifice or premium or extra cost. And, you know, it's reasonable if people think that way because, well, it's still the case in some... sometimes, but certainly in the past, there was a big spread for some of these items. But these technologies keep getting better. The more they become mass produced and the kind of magic of the industrial process takes this course, the efficiencies improve. And we've seen it happen in solar panels where they went from really just not, in many cases, a really competitive or more affordable option. You know, and we've seen it in our own... the city's finances. I always like telling this story is, you know, when we became the first city in the country to source 100% of our electricity from renewable sources, we knew it was a kind of great environmental achievement, climate achievement. What we didn't expect was that Moody's would issue a report saying, giving us a credit positive, basically improving our outlook because they realized that Burlington Electric customers would, from this point forward, from that point forward, be really fully insulated from the volatility of the fossil fuel market. Well, you know, here we are again, you know, when that's very much on people's minds. Burlingtonians who have made this switch over to electric vehicles or electric elements of their thermal systems and their buildings are just not impacted by this volatility and what's going on in Ukraine in the same way. It's a great point, Mayor. I think whether you have a new vehicle or a pre-owned vehicle, whether it's a plug-in hybrid or an electric vehicle, if you're able to use renewable electricity as a fuel for part or all of your daily commute, you're going to be driving right past that gas station. You're not going to have to worry about the price at the pump because you're going to be paying a much cheaper price with your charging at home. And that's something that we want to expand access to for as many Burlingtonians as we can. And I think the point... Not by as many potato chips either. There'll be less gas station stops for, you know, maybe a soda or potato chips. So the point with Ukraine and what's happening globally is a really important point too. We don't control the price of oil at all. And even as a country that has developed more oil resources and become a bigger producer in recent years, oil is controlled as a global commodity. And so what happens when we have the situation that we have with Russia invading Ukraine, you know, we don't want to be sending dollars necessarily to support that effort. We want to be spending our dollars locally on renewables, not sending money over to finance a war. And what we have is an opportunity to control our price a little bit better too because we're a state-regulated electric utility. Our prices don't change day to day. If we have a rate change, it's going to be a public process that the community gets to weigh in on at the city council and at the electric commission. And we have much more stable pricing. Price of oil can be cheap for a period of time and then global events can drive it incredibly high and that hurts people when they have to pay at the pump. So we have a chance to decouple ourselves from that over time here. Really is striking. I mean, and you've been great about pointing this out, Karen, that this ethic in Vermont of it's something we believe in, it's very much part of the values. We'd like to help out our neighbors. We see the many benefits that flow to our sort of local quality of life, to buying local. I don't think we think about energy that way usually, but we should start because I mean, the jobs related to fossil fuels, our jobs, thousands of miles from here, the profits tend to, in many cases, go to these regimes that are, you know, governments, whether it's Russia or Saudi Arabia or Columbia in the last couple of decades that really have any emethetical values to what the kind of society we're trying to create here in Burlington. And you can really flip that on its head and be employing the local mechanical workers who are installing these heat pumps. That's where the related jobs are. The profits are not really profits. They're flowing to BED. They're helping us keep local electricity rates lower. And it's really something I think people should, we should just keep talking about because I think it's a profound change. Absolutely. We want to add local renewable energy to the local books, local foods, local beer, everything local, local renewable energy as well for our vehicles, for our homes, for our buildings. And we have that opportunity. We're getting close on time. Let's make sure there are a few more highlights we should hit on your deck here. Absolutely. I'll pull this back up here in just a moment and continue with the slide deck. So just briefly here, we have some exciting projects going on. I know you're making efforts to electrify the city fleet and improve city-building energy use as well. We talked about some of these. We have some new initiatives too. A couple here that I'll highlight. We have charging infrastructure expanding everywhere in the city. We're going to have new public charging in the Old North End and a partnership with Car Share. So more people can drive electric through Car Share, even if they don't own a vehicle themselves. More charging at rental and multi-fleet and enjoy the shopping and restaurants that we have here in Burlington. A couple other just, you know, we've talked about some of the progress here. This is a great example with heat pumps. We've had a 15X increase in heat pump adoption since we launched our green stimulus in 2020. In addition, electric vehicles, we've had about more than doubling of electric vehicles since we launched that green stimulus program. Let's go back one slide here because I think this is a good, since we're running out of time here, this sort of shows kind of the two big messages from this. I don't think I quite got this out at the beginning of the show. The two big messages are, from my perspective, this push towards electrification as a main strategy for achieving our local climate goals is having an impact. You can see we launched these targeted incentives, did some good publicity around it, really started to get the word out there and obviously the adoption rate at that moment increased dramatically. But you look at the top of the slide and you see as dramatic as that increase has been, we are way below, we're at basically a quarter of the adoption rate that we need to get to and sustain for the next eight years if we're going to really wean ourselves off fossil fuels by the end of the decade. So this should be both, I find this both reassuring, like what we're doing here matters and it's going to have an impact and it's awesome to have the data confirming that and we got a long way to go and we got to keep acting decisively, strategically and if we're going to get anywhere near these targets and that's exactly the value of having an ambitious near-term target. We had it in one of our recent town halls where that MIT professor John Sternum made the point, so many governments go out there and they create these goals for 2050 and then people will kind of forget about it. 2050 is too far away to have any accountability with it to have any, it doesn't drive the actions that are needed now. We're in a moment where we need action now. We need to make a lot of progress as a globe by 2030 and I think this plan is making us do that. I think you're right and the ambition of the plan drives us to think every day at Burlington Electric what we can do to help our customers, to help our community. We hope this becomes truly a community, a viral effort. There's nothing like having your neighbor take a step and then being able to ask them and say, hey, how's that working out? You have an electric lawn mower. How's that working for you? I saw you installed some heat pumps and for folks who are renters in the city who may not be able to do some of those things on their own we want to make it possible for them to see these benefits as well. So the ambition of the plan drives us to think big and to hopefully create a model that can be useful not only here in Burlington but other communities who are looking to us for leadership we can demonstrate that this can be done in a way that's economically beneficial. You know, I think a lot of kind of bad thinking sometimes or sloppy thinking is justified on the idea that we can be some kind of model. I think in this case it's actually, this is, we've earned the ability to do this because Burlington has been a leader on local climate policy for 30 years now going all the way back to the 80s pushing 40 years I guess now and we've delivered. We consume much less electricity than many other communities have. It's been real results there. We became the first city in the country to source 100% of our electricity for renewables and those achievements have impacted other municipalities and the country and they've given us, I think, an incredible credibility that we should be a leader in this area and there are a lot of places watching and if we can succeed at this I think it is going to have a much greater impact on this existential issue than just about anything else we're working on. Completely agree. I think that's an excellent point to end on and I couldn't agree more. Well, we will leave it there. Thank you for joining us. I hope you have found this interesting and you've learned something from it. We will be back to do this again in a month. We'll be back in the month of May. Not sure what the focus will be then but we have a lot of exciting work underway here in the city of Burlington. I hope you'll consider joining us. Thanks for tuning in and we'll see you next month on the mayor's show. Thank you.