 As a self-introduction, I'm Kerri Armel. I'm a research associate at Precourt Energy Efficiency Center. And I develop energy-saving programs, various kinds, so community-based as one, but also online browser applications, games, incentive programs, and I also develop evaluation techniques and evaluate programs. So for example, because we're going to be talking about the community-based programs, and so we may have discussion about various types. And so one of a couple that we've developed in collaboration with Tom Robinson at the School of Medicine is a Girl Scout program that is currently being disseminated nationally, as well as a high school program. And in both of those, it's for the adolescents or the children as well as their parents. In both cases, we randomized controlled trials, which demonstrated energy savings. So zooming back out, there's different types of programs. Like I said, community-based, median marketing, incentive, et cetera. And each of these programs have different pros and cons. And so community-based are great for a variety of reasons that our speakers will go into some more, but to mention a few, because there's one-on-one contact, people can trust the spokesperson more. They're salient because you have this interpersonal and social aspect, there's norm effects. You can see what might be more relevant, because what solved the solution for somebody like me probably is going to map better onto my situation. Advice can be personalized, et cetera. However, there's various issues, and we're going to get more into this through the presentations and hopefully the discussion. They can be harder to scale cost effectively, because if you're paying the labor to do the programs, labor can be quite costly. And if you're not paying the labor, the fidelity or the consistency with which the program is disseminated and replicated can deteriorate. So without further ado, we'll get started. We have three fabulous women today. Cat Donnelly from Ascentive, Julian Rich from PG&E, and Sandra Slater from Cool City Challenge. And I'll give you a little bit more background on them before each of the presentations. So we'll start with Cat. Cat's the founder and CEO of Ascentive. She's managed numerous large-scale community-based behavior and cultural change energy initiatives. And she holds two master's degree and a PhD from MIT with a focus on energy efficiency, clean energy, and behavior change, and is also a licensed engineer. Thank you so much. We're glad to see a good turnout in this group. We're going to talk a lot about community-based social marketing-type programs, local programs. And we want to make this very interactive, so we've saved a lot of time for questions, so we're excited to have you here. My framing comes from over 21 cities that we've worked in, that we've done program design and implementation of these programs, community-based local programs, mostly focused on energy, but sometimes we focus on other areas as well. Residential and commercial. I'm going to focus a little bit more on commercial today, since the objective that I see is super charging the Silicon Valley and getting us to the next step with energy efficiency. And I think it's going to come from a lot of the business community to lead that and a lot of public-private partnerships. So these are probably obvious things to you. More than 30% of a typical commercial and residential building's energy use is wasted energy, a lot of opportunity from a carbon perspective, a money perspective. And then the second one may not be quite as obvious. What we know is that staff costs account for 90% of a building's business's operating costs. And that's important for a number of reasons. One, that means that the energy costs are about 1%, so oftentimes it's not even something that businesses are thinking about. And so what they are thinking about is their staff costs. So when we think about these programs and how we engage across the companies, it's very important to engage at the worker or the staff level, the employee level, because happier employees mean more profitability for companies. It means people stay longer, less turnover, those types of issues. So that's the framing. I'm going to talk a little bit about the behavior science, why are community-based, local, targeted partnerships effective in engaging individuals? The number one reason why they're effective is because we make the vast majority of our decisions based on social, culture, and emotional factors. So while we can all stand here and say, I'm very rational, I'm an engineer, I like to think of myself as rational, but the bottom line is that is not how I make decisions. So we're social creatures, we do what other people do. I mean, just quite frankly, that's what we do. We look to others to model behaviors and to see what types of behaviors that we want to take. And so this is very important. The number one reason why people do things is because we are social creatures. So always keep that in mind as you design different programs or do different programs in your communities. Trusted messenger influence. Again, this is a social, another social behavior aspect. We look to people that we trust to help us make decisions about what to do. We have some great examples. One of our programs, the Connecticut Neighbor to Neighbor Energy Challenge. In this program, we did a lot of trusted messenger influence. And one of the things we did was if we wanted people to get audits, we would start with a local politician and we would ask them to invite the media in. And after we would do that, hundreds of people would sign up. A great example from that program, and Jillian knows this one well. We've talked about it a lot, is we are in a city, a little town called Cheshire in Connecticut. And we're having trouble making traction. And we started asking around, what's going on? Why can't we make traction? And what we found out is we needed to talk to the horse commissioner. We didn't even know what a horse commissioner was. And so we got the horse commissioner involved. And this program took off. And what happened was we got earned media out of it. If you can't read the slide, it's a guy using lots of energy sitting on his couch and he's saying, I don't know, honey, what do you think? Should we sign up for this Neighbor to Neighbor Energy Challenge? They started hearing about it from trusted messengers. People need a reason. Not everybody really cares about climate change. It's something that's out in the future. It's nebulous. So we try to pull in the core values and the reasons for people to take action. Oftentimes, that reason is it's the right thing to do. Don't underestimate the power of it's the right thing to do. All right, so how do you do this? We have three main things that we like to talk about. Go where people are already going. Engage how people are already engaging. And serve up the what's in it for me factor. All very important. Get to the core value of why people want to be involved. Make sure you don't make it hard for them. You go to the local organizations that they're already involved in. And you engage how they're already engaging. I'm just going to give one example. This is Envision Charlotte. It started out as Smart Energy Now. We were hired by Duke Energy to design the marketing outreach for this program. It was the first of its kind city wide in 21 million square feet. There were 64 out of the 68 building owners that signed up for this. And lots and lots of people across the city. It was a city of the potential market with 75,000 people. The goal was 5% savings from behavior change. And 15% from operational savings. It was very much a top down and bottom up effort. So involved public private partnerships from across the city. It's really important to get the municipalities involved and other trusted messengers. And it involved top down leadership at the building and company level. Then there was the bottom up aspect of it. We trained over 1500 energy champions. And these guys were the people that went out and spread the message. You know, these are your trusted messengers. These are people that get really involved and really excited. And this is who needs to spread the message. You know, it's not us. We're not the trusted messenger in this case. We did a couple of, well several, energy efficiency action burst campaigns. And these were focused on two behaviors. Turning off lights and powering down plug loads. That's it. Just very targeted, simple focus. Ran town halls, did social media, sent blogs. Gave toolkits for running these campaigns individually. Did a lot of crowd sourcing. What are your ideas for what types of campaigns we should run? That kind of thing. And the results of this were 6.2% energy savings within 18 months across Uptown Charlotte. And if you look today, they're almost to their 20% number. And so very exciting program. And if you want to learn more about that, certainly get in touch with me. And I can tell you more about that. It's a lot to cover in seven minutes, so can't cover all of it. So how do you go forward with these types of programs? Lead from the top. Very, very important. And I do think it needs to be a public-private partnership. And it needs to be partnerships across the community. You got to find the local trusted messengers. And as I said at the beginning, the business community is very, very important. And guess what? There's profits to be had from this. So it's not something that's going to cost money in the end. The long-term, the profits are incredible. We see 21% increased productivity. Sometimes we've seen across companies, 5.5 times increased revenue, 7.5 times increased profits. Huge dollars when you get your employees really involved in these types of programs. Model these programs from the middle. So this is train. The trainers partner with the local community organization so you can get to their networks and go where people are already going and engage at the company management level so that people have permission to do these programs while they're at work. Mobilize from the bottom. You know, grassroots movements are incredibly effective and a very important part of this. We want to enable our sustainability champions and we want to motivate our individual participants to take action and to spread through word of mouth. All right, so here's my equation. You know, it's obviously very simplified. Tick out all the variables. But apply behavioral, social, and building sciences along with I believe it needs to be more than about energy efficiency. It needs to cross across sustainability, climate resiliency, and wellness. You know, how do we make our communities well and more healthy? And then combine this with healthy profits, people, and places. So what we at Ascentive try to do is redefine the way businesses optimize their triple bottom line. We want to develop these collectives of communities working together so you can think of a community as a floor of a building, a department, a whole city, a neighborhood. We're going to see examples of that in the next two speakers. And then create these culture change programs that cause, that create spillover at work and at home. And you can see a lot of success with them. So my seven minutes are up so I'll stop here and we'll get to questions later. Thank you very much. All right, so next up is Jillian Rich. She's a manager at PG&E in the San Francisco headquarters. As part of the energy efficiency organization, Jillian manages the workforce education and training team, which aims to provide California's energy workforce with the necessary skills, tools, and resources it needs to meet California's energy and climate goals. Jillian graduated from UC Berkeley School of Environmental Design. Thank you. Okay. Wonderful. Hi everyone. Hello. All right, so I'm here to talk about a local example from the Bay Area of how we implemented a lot of the ideas that Kat spoke about just now. And she was a consultant on this project and I'm excited to recap it. It lasted for 18 months. It went from May 2015 to December of last year in San Francisco in San Jose. So hyper local, but before we get into it, let's talk about why we did it. So a lot of you that have been in the energy industry for a while know that we've been doing energy efficiency for 30 years plus and we've been doing a widget-based approach. You get a check for doing a certain action. And in 2014, we looked ahead and realized that that's not going to work in the long range. One of my favorite acronyms is Bro. Has anyone heard of this? Yeah, okay, behavioral retrofit operational. I think it's one of the funnier acronyms that we work with on a day-to-day basis. But we realized that this was the future, a holistic approach to look at a building and come at energy savings from a myriad of sources. And so we wanted to come up with a way to do that. And right about that time, we had new leadership at PG&E who had been involved in Envision Charlotte and he said, why aren't we doing that here? A lot of our rebate and incentive programs for energy efficiency are peanut butter. They're the same across the whole territory. We need to have a local approach. So thus, step up and power down was born. Our mission was a big one. We wanted to have that messaging, that social messaging, that commercial and industrial buildings account for nearly half of the nation's energy use. We set out to change that. And so we came out with this, I took this slide from one of our earliest decks. I went back in history and pulled this one. And it was right when we had come out with our branding. What do you notice that's different from what you normally see from PG&E since all of you, I think, live in the area? Anyone? I can't see the logo. You can't see the PG&E logo. Yes, that's great. Yeah, it's tiny on purpose at the bottom. What else? OK, I'll give you some hints. The font, it's whimsical, you could say, fun. We don't use the PG&E bright blue. It's a dark blue. There's it's all about we wanted to have a bit of a different marketing campaign, make this fun, make this identifiable as something different because it was a partnership with the two cities, which I'll get to in a moment. But first, I want to just say there's three things that were different about Step Up and Power Down as a campaign to market our energy efficiency products. The first is kind of what Kat talked about, which we also call organizational behavior change. It was we'd historically always gone to the middle man, the facility manager, and sold our energy efficiency products saying, hey, you need new refrigeration, new mechanical, whatever it was. This was about going to the top and to the bottom. So it's going to the C-suite and leveraging the mayors networks in order to get them on board with championing sustainability and their workforce. And then it was also down to the individual employee coming up with handraisers and champions in order to give them something to do because our messaging was simple changes, big savings. So this is the community aspect. Even something as small as turning off a light, it seems like nothing to you. But our messaging was that if everyone in the two cities we picked, which I'll tell you are San Jose and San Francisco, if everyone did that in San Jose and San Francisco, it could add up to big savings. So I said, what was it? Organizational behavior change, community, and competition were kind of the three unique things we did with this campaign. The competition angle, again, we picked San Jose and San Francisco. Probably wouldn't have been smart to pit them against each other and create bad blood, right? So it was a competition amongst themselves. We created goals for each of them. And if each of them met those respective goals, then PG&E shareholders agreed to give a million dollars to each one as a reward. So it was a friendly competition, although some of them took it more seriously than the others. I will say, since we're in Silicon Valley, that San Jose did beat their energy target first. Ooh, no one? Okay. They're proud of it. So we had the mayors on board, and we came out with this program. Again, it's May 2015. Put yourself back there. You saw Banner ads, VTA, and Muni signs, and then also some targeted marketing on websites. Our messaging was, again, simple changes, big energy savings, off is the new on, because this was back when Orange the New Black was out. And then our first ask was for people to pledge to say, I will save energy. We had a goal of 1,000 businesses signing up. That means the decision maker in the business. And we met that goal. It was, we'll get into in a second. So we had experiential campaigns where people went and got a cup of coffee, learned about energy, and signed up for step up and power down. Exactly what they do after they pledge, it was a mix of training, energy audits, behavior campaigns, and facility upgrades. Around behavior, I'll mention that these were some unique new products, right? Because we were trying to combine everything we normally sell to a business. Again, rebates incentives with the behavior. And so we did come up with a way to audit behavior. So not only say what the opportunity is, but what are the social and cultural barriers within the workforce that prevent people from doing that sustainable behavior. And we came up with campaigns. And a lot of them are really fun, like energy vampire slayer, one that involves rubber chickens. I'm not kidding. And all of them are on stepupandpowerdown.com for free download if you're ever interested in doing that in your own workforce. So stepupandpowerdown.com slash resources. So we provided this suite of services. And there was a solution for every business, whether small or large. And then you saw our marketing shift. We started to showcase actual people in the community who had stepped up and powered down. Here are some examples of folks from a, everything from a data storage facility to a small smoothie bar. And then come to the end of the campaign, the marketing campaign was really about showing our energy champions and rewarding them and recognizing them for all that they had done over the 18 months. I should mention, and the left, you can see that some of you may not be able to read that because it is in another language. All of our marketing was in language. And we had actually a really cool contingency of businesses from Chinatown and San Francisco that were very engaged in this campaign. We were even showcased on the local radio, so some are in media there. And so again, these were real people telling about how they saved energy. And it was to promote people going down their energy journey that we had set out for them once they pledged. So here's how everything ended up, right? You're probably wondering, okay, you showed us what you did, was it successful? Well, here were our goals. We wanted 1,000 businesses to participate and we had over 1,200. And then in terms of energy savings, here I'll pause because it's an industry event. I wanna be clear, so the last thing we wanna do is have people sign up for a competition and then say, oh, in a year and a half after the competition ends, it will tell you how much energy you saved. Right, but that's not motivational. This is a marketing campaign. So what we did is we took what we normally would save from San Jose and San Francisco, added about a 15% adder, and then they made that our goal. So San Jose and San Francisco during this campaign period met with the energy savings targets that they would, they saved as much energy as they normally would, plus 15% plus a lot more because you can see here from the graphics that we exceeded our targets. So what portion of that savings is attributable to step up and parodown is currently left to be determined. That's the process that takes a while. And if you that are familiar with California energy savings evaluation know that it's a process. So what works and what didn't? Any of you that are interested in doing a community-based approach to sustainability, I wanted to make sure to focus on these in I think a minute, okay. So, oh. No. Okay. We'll let you go a little bit over there. Thank you. So first is, let me pick one. What worked is that we feel that we deeply engaged our customers. We used a lot of one-on-one approaches and by doing that bottom-up and top-down approach, we had people who thought that they were doing everything right and then they learned that there's a lot more that they could do and created new relationships and open doors that we never could have before. Of our 1,000 participants, we had some really big names. There was extremely popular among hotels in San Francisco, the Hyatt, Park 55, Mark Hopkins, also Big Tech like Salesforce, and Cisco, I could go on. All of our participants are on stepupinparadown.com. So what worked was that deeply engaging our customers in a new way that PG&E hadn't currently done and then also what also worked is the partnerships. We could not have done this without San Jose and San Francisco. Having their name, having their mayor recognize our participants, having their input and working alongside us on the marketing, they knew exactly what messaging to target micro-neighborhoods in their community and so that partnership was crucial. What we could have done better is, I'll just focus on a couple of these, tracking and data management was a huge one and Kat can speak to that as well. Anticipating the amount of hand-holding, we tried a big data approach especially for small, medium business customers because it's so expensive to go door to door and it completely flopped and we had to shift direction mid-campaign because small, medium business owners just don't have the time to go online and look at their energy no matter what we do is what we learned unfortunately. So we had to go back to a human approach and we'll just have to work harder on figuring out how to make that cost effective. Also building community making, we picked our largest commercial areas in our service area because we wanted to go big. Unfortunately, it was hard to build that community feel that I think you saw maybe in the Envision Charlotte a little bit better so we need to work on that angle as well. So I'm happy to talk about more of these offline. I'll be around after the session and also in the Q&A but those are just from my perspective, five or six of the things that worked and what we could have done better and if we relaunch step up and power down ever in the future, we will definitely keep in mind. Thank you. Thanks so much, Jillian. Next up is Sandra Slater. She's the California director of the Cool City Challenge. Sorry, cool blocks. Well, it's good. Okay, all right. Sandra was a consultant to the Golden Gate National Recreational Parks Conservancy and to Zeta communities. She's led her own design firms, Sandra Slater Environments and she lives in Palo Alto in a home that she designed to showcase green principles where she's had more than 4,000 design professionals visit. So, yeah, thank you. I'll leave it up to you. Can you see the keys? Okay, well, why don't I, while you do that. So, I can get started if you like it. Yeah, sorry. It's great, well thank you. Thanks to the panelists also who preceded me. The program that I'm gonna tell you about the Cool City Challenge and the Cool Block program is something that's come out of 30 years worth of research and development in behavioral sciences of what works and incorporates so much of what Kat and Julia just talked about, which is sort of the family family, the trusted social connections that you have and it's building on many, many iterations of what works and what doesn't in terms in behavioral sciences. So, a few years ago, I was looking for something that was a highly leveraged project in the carbon reduction space and while we need great technology, as we're hearing today and we need great policy, what we also need are people to change their behavior. We need to change the culture around carbon because ultimately it's us driving policy, driving technology uptake and being able to really serve as the underpinnings for major carbon reduction on the planet. So, we need behavior change at bottom line. So, here's a two minute video that comes out of we're just doing a pilot in Palo Alto. We're in partnership with the city of Palo Alto. We completed just our beta. This little two minute video gives you a little bit of experience of what the alpha was like and you'll see it's a very friendly kind of open approach. When I was growing up, you kind of relied on your neighbors. Most people want opportunities to help each other and they just don't hear about them all the time. Or don't feel comfortable asking somebody. Back when I was in Ethiopia, we really have a community-based life. We don't live very independently like we do in America. I have this motto, I live to serve. I serve my family here and using as a cool block, I can serve my neighborhood. Where we're headed with global warming is not inevitable. We can stop it. Now I know that I can do it and my block can do it and that my neighborhood can do it. I want to save the planet for future generations. You know, I have a son. He hopefully someday will have a family of his own and they will have a family of their own. And it just goes on and on. I want the human race to continue. I felt it before I had a kid, but now I feel that pressure even more to leave the earth for the children, hopefully in a better place than when you came into it. You want to take care of the kid more than just about anything in the world, so. One of the things that we've talked about in the groups is how to organize ourselves, especially bringing together and making a community that collaborates and trades, not only objects and tools, but help from one another at different times. Relying on other people that they can check on me. It's a good thing because I might need the help. The Cool Block program is nine meetings over approximately four and a half months that help people learn carbon reduction, water stewardship, disaster resiliency, livability and empowering others. It is so simple and so profound. People want to connect with people who live in the same place. The cities are where change is gonna happen and we can do it one neighborhood at a time. My dream is that we'll reinvent our cities, reinvent our quality of life, reinvent the planet and build the future that we dream of. Victory is just a matter of organization. And that's what this is. It's blocks organizing, which is the most basic way you can organize beyond your own household. It can't be stopped. There you have it. You see that it's a neighbor to neighbor program. There are five to eight households on a block that we get organized and we consider a block corner to corner both sides of the street. So they're the people that you wave to when you come out at your front door and people you can rely on in an emergency and people that you can start tool sharing. You don't wanna go several blocks away to borrow the ladder or whatever you wanna be able to have that kind of social capital right on your block. So the teams meet, as you saw, about every two weeks over four and a half months and they get to this kind of stuff that's happening in living rooms across these teams that we've had has been really astounding. They support each other. They do knowledge sharing. I have solar panels, come and look at mine or I have an EV, come and drive mine. This work, this didn't work. So that kind of building of a social capital is really, really key to the whole program. So why does it work? We're really tapping into intrinsic motivators. We don't, of feeling of safety and of connectedness and of making a difference. We don't go in and we know 90 ways not to knock on your neighbor's door and say, come and join us. We've iterated the whole program to get really the best learnings that we can. So we've developed a script that goes like this. Hi, I'm Sandra from across the street. So it's somebody you know, it's not somebody coming from somewhere else. I'd like to invite you into my home to learn about a program that's in sponsorship, partnership with the city of Palo Alto. It's important because it's got the city's imprinture on it. To get to know each other better as neighbors, conserve resources for the sake of our children and to get ready for an emergency so that we can rely on each other if there's an earthquake and also be able to start tool sharing and doing some other things on the block. So you'll notice I don't mention carbon at all. It is not about carbon. It's about other intrinsic motivators that we have. So with that we get about a 55% uptake on a block, which is if you know of anything about community organizer and that's an astounding number. And why? Because people want to get to know their neighbors. They want to make a difference. They don't know how, they don't have the tools and they really want the social connectedness and the feeling of safety of knowing your neighbors. I mean the idea that we are a tribal species and the idea that we don't know the people who live a few feet from our sleep, a few feet from our head every night is kind of an anomaly I think for the human species that we really do want to connect and know our neighbors in a more profound way other than just a block party, which is great but not sufficient to really be engaged with your neighbors. So we partner with the city and get all, we have Bruce over here from the city of Palo Alto Utilities Department and we went around to every single department. We said, how can we help you leverage programs that you're already doing that you're not getting traction with? So how many bill inserts do we read? Not very many. So that's not a very effective tool of engagement for these wonderful, I mean the city of Palo Alto has amazing programs all throughout the city to help residents engage on this issue and other issues, water stewardship, zero waste, safety and resiliency but people don't know about them. And so we're giving the city an ability to really leverage all those programs that they already have. So the proof is in the pudding, what are our results? We've had 95 households already, we've reporting. We have more households, a lot of people not interested in going on and documenting their data maybe because they don't feel that part is important what's important to them is getting the stuff done not necessarily reporting but we have 95 households over this piloting period. We had 55% participation as I said on the block which is amazing. The average carbon reduction was 14,000 pounds per household per annual. That translates to about 25% of the carbon for household and that includes everything from systems in the house and efficiency, behavior change turning off the lights, that kind of thing to air travel and we've had some wonderful iterations of things that this is the kind of stuff that happens is one woman works for the gap. She said, you know, I have to do airline travel for my work, I don't have a choice. So she went in, when she saw her carbon footprint from her air travel, she was just blown away. So she went to the gap and she said, look, don't make me fly and if I absolutely have to fly, at least buy carbon offsets for me. So that was just one little thing that's happened that can sort of ripple out onto other parts of people's lives when they start becoming aware and changing the culture around carbon. They completed an average of 24 actions per household. That's across all the things, water resiliency, emergency prep, carbon reduction. And they've had over 2,500 separate actions have been done by the population so far of these 95. So how are we gonna get it to scale? And that's always a difficult question and that's sort of the next phase of the pilot is how do we get this, we're following the work of Everett Rogers, some of you may know him because he was a Stanford professor, talked about, you know, uh-oh, his work, I'm almost done. He coined the phrase early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards on the bell curve. If you can reach 15 to 20% of a population and an idea is scalable, it will scale on its own and it'll go viral. So it's kind of the tipping point. So we're trying to reach 25% of the households in Palo Alto. What happens to the culture in Palo Alto when people are demanding goods and services, taking advantage of living a low carbon lifestyle? You know, 15 years ago, taking a bag to the grocery store was like, oh, my friends would say, oh, she's such a tree hugger. Now, if you don't take your bags to the grocery store, it's like, oh my God, nobody sees me, I haven't been in my car really, I do, but I just forgot. So that's a cultural shift. That's a change. When I'm in New York and there's no place to put a bottle or a can because there's no recycling, it feels weird. Those are the kinds of things that we're looking for, writ large, in a community. What happens in a community? So scaling it, blocks, beget blocks, we already have our teams who are saying, wow, this is so great and talking about it in their book clubs and their friends and all the rest about the program. We're in partnership with the city and we would hope that the city would really make it part of their whole smart city, cool city campaign of really engaging neighbors and saying you need to do it. We wanna get utilities involved. Of course, we are very lucky with the city of Palo Alto utility. We have technology partners we'd like to engage with and of course, corporations who can also start helping us get their employees to go to their blocks and do it in their homes. So we're looking also at affinity groups like the Boy Scouts and faith-based groups and saying look, from this group of our congregation we only need five or 10 block leaders and then go from there. So that's our scaling strategy and we're really hoping to get to the 25% of the city of Palo Alto's blocks and then see what happens with that. So that's it and my contact information and be happy to answer any questions you may have. Thanks. Excellent. Thanks so much. So I think we'll stay seated here. I'm gonna open with a question and then after we answer it, I'll open it back up. So be thinking about what questions you'd like to have. First off, I just wanted to say that these three programs, community-based programs are very hard to do and take a lot of work and they're hard to scale. They're hard to get impacts and require a lot of iterations and so on face value for folks who may not have done it, it may seem sort of obvious because you know how to talk to people but it's actually quite difficult designing these and getting them to scale. So I commend our speakers on fantastic programs and fantastic jobs. I also just wanna clarify one thing is the speakers mentioned the word behavior a lot and in the utility world, the utility specifically defined behavior as sort of habits or repeat actions but I think most of the speakers here would agree with me that they're referring to it in much broader terms and so the term behavior can refer to people changing settings, people purchasing technology and installing it properly, can refer to changing everyday habits, performing maintenance, et cetera. So it can have a much more sizable impact on energy reductions than simply changing habits would alone. So to get to my question, the term scalability came up a few times in the presentations and obviously to see large population wide savings, we both need to have deep energy savings per person but we need to get lots of people involved and in a community based program because it's people doing the communication by definition, the cost of labor is, can be relatively high and so how do we get scalability period because it's difficult to get scalability but also how do we do it cost effectively in the context of these programs? So that's what I'd like to open up to you guys. Do you know where to go first? You wanna go first? Is that on? Yeah. Okay. So scalability is difficult at the beginning. You know, these programs do follow very much a hockey stick curve. You know, at first you feel like, oh, I'm not making any progress, this isn't working and then all of a sudden like Sandra referenced, you get this tipping point and one of the main ways that we get sustainability in our programs is by going where people are already going. So going to the local organizations that they're already involved in and the neighbor to neighbor energy challenge, we had 134 local organizations that went out and promoted the program for us and it took a while to get them on board but once we had them on board, it started running on its own and every single program I've ever worked on, we've done that same thing. So working with the cities, working with the counties, working with local governments, working with the utilities, working with the local organizations is very, very important. And the other thing I would add is doing a train the trainer aspect of this. So we've seen lots of programs where it's a little bit scary but you just let the program go. You train the trainers and you say, go do this your way in the way that makes the most sense to you and so that's another way that we get scalability. I'll just riff off of something that Kat said, there was decades ago in the Pacific Northwest, there was a program run by Bonneville Power Administration and a bunch of other organizations up there and over, I believe it was a three-year period, they ended up getting something crazy like 90% of the population, the households involved in doing some energy upgrade and they did it because they had so many organizations involved at different levels, different clubs and government officials and just everybody was involved, so yeah. Yeah, so I don't want to minimize how much it does cost a lot and especially when you're trying a social innovation where you're trying to prove something it's never been done before and we're working with the city now and trying to get some funding, we have a matching grant and it's like, it's a little bit like pulling teeth because it's something brand new. What we found is what I told you on my scaling side to infinity groups going to else clubs and Girl Scouts and all the rest and just trying to get a few from each one of those and then have it go viral and the team's beginning teams, also what we did was we had the coaches like the training of the trainer, we had people who'd been through the program who then for the next group decided to be a coach so I got 25% of the people, no 30% of the people from my first group to be coaches for the second group so they're helping now I'm going to be recruiting from this next group to be helping for the, so there are ways of doing it and ours is all volunteer at the, when you're actually doing the program, getting the program started, it takes a lot, as you say, it takes a lot of administration and a lot of work and unfortunately cities and municipalities and corporations and others aren't necessarily banging it down on the door to say let's try this because it's unproven and we're hoping to have Palo Alto be a model city so that other cities can come in and learn both the stuff that works and the stuff that didn't work but you have to be willing to take a risk. I'll just add a few comments, so scalability was one of our primary concerns at PG&E, we have 240 cities in our service area and so we had a lot of questions, well why just these two as a pilot? How can we scale to the rest if this is successful? So we, right out the gate, we're thinking of scalable solutions like the high tech SMB, small, medium business outreach mechanism that I mentioned and it was a big learning lesson for us when it flopped. We realized that community-based means community-based, you need to use the community, you need to use trusted messengers, if we're gonna do this you have to do it right and so we really shifted direction and used the city as our messenger for small, medium business and completely turned it around, ended up meeting our goals and getting a lot of good feedback from our small businesses. So in terms of how to make it more scalable, yes, partnerships, that's primarily what we did, business associations, chambers of commerce, hotel associations were great at getting the word out for us and I'll stop there just because of time and I wanna go to the next question. Okay, well I'm gonna open it up to the audience so feel free to let us know. I have some more questions if nobody has some but any questions about specifics of the programs? Sometimes it's pretty, oh yeah, sorry, go ahead. Hi, James Tulea, I'm currently on the board of Carbon Free Silicon Valley and the Climate Action Advocacy Group in the area. I was at PG&E Energy Efficiency Group with Gillian for seven and a half years. So before I left, there was a lot of effort to try to get the CPC to allow more for behavioral change programs and it's hard to measure as you all know and I'm worried that for those types of programs that are funded and overseen by the CPC and others like them, how do you, are they moving toward a better understanding of how to drive this and being okay with some things that don't work? There was certain definitions in CPC rulings that were very restrictive and I don't remember the details anymore. Is that gonna keep things from moving ahead? How do we push for getting these large cultural shifts that we need to have happen? Otherwise it just maintains this two to 5% participation rate in these kinds of programs and we never really get anywhere as an overall culture. Sure, great question. So as background, our regulators, the California Public Utilities Commission, currently the only approved behavior change program for energy efficiency is our home energy reports. Maybe one of you, some of you have gotten them, they have a smiley face or sad face according to how you compare to comparable houses in your area. So it's the only program and what we do does not currently count but we do have a working group creating a new definition of behavior that would help with some of, have these programs count and get at those bro savings, right? My favorite acronym and so we're working on that and it's part of our new, our plan that's outlined in a business plan we just submitted to the California Public Utilities Commission pending review hopefully by the end of the year. So if that gets approved then we'll have more flexibility to go this way. The California Energy Commission and California Public Utilities Commission, they put out a roadmap of how we're gonna achieve our energy efficiency goals as a state and that draft report just came out for the 2018 year and beyond and it's in there. There's a whole appendix on bro so you can read it and know that we have to get there. It's just how we get there is still being worked out. Do you want me to go? I wanna say something but you can go first. Okay, so I'm gonna dodge the question just a tiny bit because I'm gonna step around it and I'm gonna say going back to what Carrie said, we believe behavior change goes across every single action that happens in the building all the way to deciding to retrofit your building, whole building retrofits. I mean every single thing you do and technology also crosses across every single thing you do. You can't believe sometimes with turning out lights it's literally a technology problem. People don't know how to use the light switches often. Seems silly but it happens and so we like to think of that continuum, the technology behavior continuum and that's really important as you think about these actions. So the way I would think about a little bit getting around this barrier that we have right now is thinking about other leaders of these programs. Like maybe it's the cities leading them, it's a non-profit organization like Envision Charlotte, it's something like that and then the utility is a partner of these programs. They don't necessarily have to be the leader because there are so many regulatory barriers for them and we're leveraging, like Sandra mentioned, we're leveraging all those great utility programs that they do have approval for and it doesn't cause that same barrier and so that's how I would think about it right now. It's a little bit dodging your question but I like to work within existing frameworks and see how we can make these things happen given all the barriers that we have. So I have a little bit of another work around your question which is it's not only for us, it's not only about carbon. I mean carbon is a big part of it and it's my bottom line and it's why we have the program but how do you put a number on social capital, building social capital? How do you put a number on resiliency and getting ready for emergencies? How do you put a number on people sharing tools and getting to know, you know, all that stuff that, and that's the hard part is getting, for instance in the city of Palo Alto is getting all the departments to stop being siloed in just my thing and looking at a more systems approach of all these things and how are they interacting and so that's my, it's like you wanna beat them over the head, you know, but we're certainly running into that and if you're looking at a regulatory entity like the PUC, they're not gonna get that, they're not gonna get the social value, the resiliency value and everything, they're not gonna put a value on that which is too bad because it is gonna make our whole culture that much more resilient to things that are gonna come down the pipe. So I have a couple points too. So there's been several independent papers estimating that the energy saving potential of behavior programs, again, covering lots of different actions that people would take, it's basically anything you do to implement energy efficiency requires some element of behavior but that it could reach a potential of population-wide, 20% energy savings from programs like that and yet the state-of-the-art program gets one and a half percent energy savings so there's a huge discrepancy there, like you said. So you raise a few good points as to obstacles in getting there and one was the measurement and evaluation and we have, we now have in California, Texas, multiple other places basically entire states where every building has smart meter data and could be used to evaluate these programs and if we track when people were exposed to things, maybe when they went online to do something, et cetera and we could pretty tightly couple the energy saving impact of these programs but it's been difficult to get the energy data and why? Well, individuals themselves are disinterested in energy data. We've tried very hard to get people to sign up and it's very difficult to get energy data directly from utilities and we tried for years and I could tell you stories about that and the PUC and CEC have tried giving some information and some access to aggregated data and stuff but it really doesn't help in the evaluation of these programs and so that's one barrier, one issue and then a second thing is that the funding to do these programs is a challenge and currently they're funded through rate payer dollars going through the PUCs and then being channeled for utilities and the utilities have basically been gatekeepers to implementing these programs. Well, the utilities in states like California are regulated utilities and they're very conservative and they wanna do programs that have already been demonstrated to be effective. They're not the startup companies that are gonna develop programs and try all different things and experiment with it and I've raised this issue to former commissioners and stuff like that but it's not been adequately solved if there's not a flow of money into organizations that can be more fast moving and implement and experiment we're not gonna see that big jump unless there's some clever work around that nobody in this space has thought about because people have been hammering on this for multiple years now and people leave the field when they figure out that they're not gonna get funded to do something innovative so that's my take on it. Could I just add one more thing? And I think I love the work you're doing and I think it's organizations like you that make a big impact and then it's also businesses and residents looking at the other co-benefits that come along with this and Sandra alluded to it but from a company perspective the co-benefits that come along with an engaged workforce are huge and even just looking at productivity 21% increase in worker productivity that pays back in a few days. So these types of programs can be cost effective if you pull in the other savings and co-benefits that come along with them so that's another way that we think about that. That's a great point that you guys made here. And I just wanna address the innovation point. It's a good one. This was our attempt to be start-up-y and we learned a lot from it. And in terms of where we're going with this the energy efficiency world is changing if you're not a part of it. It's a good time to be engaged and by sometime next year 60% of our portfolio of our money, of the rate payer money is gonna be outsourced so programs that are completely designed and implemented by not PG&E or not the other California utilities. And so we do have an opportunity to change the way we do things and get it more stranded potential for energy efficiency. And so we're embracing the change and preparing for it as we speak. It'll be a big one. Yeah. So I was a take off from that. I was curious how quick purpose like about a year or no about six months ago I was at a conference on the East Coast in New York City and it was like 500 of the top corporations at their own commit forum. So for all the communities, social responsibility officers of big corporations. And the whole theme was oh, let alone hold the circuit or economy. And I was just wondering how you all, does that even, does this framework even, does that meme or that theme even ever come up anymore? Or for them it was all new. And yet there's data that says 38% of CEOs say there's no business model for a circular economy, et cetera, et cetera. So I'm just curious, now if things are gonna be outsourced, what happened or what is happening with the circular economy in your sphere that you're speaking of, local community? I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. Your economy is saying, from along the whole supply chain, if everything is recycled and everything is taken, like little butterflies, but the whole big picture is just everything, all your resources come from a recycled source. So it's cradle to cradle kind of. Yeah, cradle to cradle. Yeah, excuse me. Yeah, okay. I mean, if you have no answer, that's the answer. Yeah, I mean, I think fundamentally, my feeling is we have to shift. I mean, corporations have to stop thinking quarterly and quarterly reports and being their driving force on whether they're successful or not. And of course, for me, it's like, do we all need an electric drill in our sheds? It gets used literally 10 minutes to 20 minutes every 10 years and we all have them. We all worked for them. We all went to the store. We bought them and they're sitting there. Do we all need them? No. I mean, I don't need the drill. I need the hole. I don't care about having the drill. So I think corporations are gonna have to start thinking in a different way around resource use and about the whole plant obsolescence and all the rest. We can't sustain the planet. If everybody wants to live the way we do in the US, it's two and a half planets worth of resources. It's not gonna happen. So or it can happen, but it's gonna be to our detriment. So I think corporations are gonna need to figure out how to do this. And I think there's shifts. I think the millennials are very different in their way they're purchasing, the way their values, what their values are. A lot of kids don't have driver's license. I mean, for my kids, 16, wow, they were out of the house with the car. They drove four blocks to Pali and I was mis-sustainability, right? It was like, drove me crazy, but now kids are not even getting their driver's license. So there is a shift and the whole, I think the economy is gonna have to shift. And frankly, I feel like our lives are gonna be better. I have an aspiration and a vision that our lives will be better if we stop gobbling up the resources so quickly and that we need the more circular economy, but I'm not in the corporation, the corporate world, but you might have more insight into that. I'm not sure I'd answer the question. I'm sorry. Well, no, it was not even something that you used up. Well, I will say that we are going to a longer term planning cycle as a state. Normally we have a plan for energy efficiency in two to, well, one to three years stints and now it's 10 years. So we are going at it from a more holistic long-term perspective. So hopefully that will help. I think we had a question in the gentleman, the white shirt. Did you have a question? You raised your hand a while ago, I thought. Regarding the community-based, have you considered partnership or looked at a company like Nextdoor? Yeah, we have talked to Nextdoor a couple of years ago. They're very transactional. It's sort of like I have this for sale or whatever. Nextdoor is fabulous. I love it. I use it all the time. But it's not really allowing the social capital to get built that what we're looking for, it's sort of on your... And Nextdoor is also like your whole neighborhood or your whole city, not specifically your block. And they are actually looking, or at the time, I have to go back and circle back to them, looking for some added value to just the transactional. They actually do want to start building community. And I saw Facebook today made... They have now a new moniker, which is building community, not just about connecting people. So I think there are, everywhere I look, of course it's a hammer seeing a nail everywhere, but I am seeing people saying community, building community. It's about the divisions of the left and the right, or the blue and the red states. We really need to start building community. We need to start bridging. And we're only gonna do that when we start relating to each other. And so that's one of the ancillary benefits that we have. Just to take one comment, there was an example from Nextdoor, to the Nextdoor there was a demonstration organized against St. Carlos airport itself. Right. So it was a lot of... Yeah, yeah. I think those kinds of groups are starting, and certainly Facebook is now doing that a lot of that. My name is Ben Mehta. I've been ex-epri-ex-PJ&E ex-energy commission, so. There you go. I've seen energy efficiency. I've managed energy efficiency for the large commercial industrial customers in Silicon Valley. What motivates people is money. If you connect energy efficiency with very direct incentives, money-wise, people will do it. I mean, large commercial customer I had, they would not touch it unless they see the money. And I think the same psychology applies to me and you, you know, at my home level. If I can see some benefits, I'll do it. But I don't think that picture is very clear. Yeah, I don't know. I take it issue with that. Yeah, so the amount of energy, if people make significant, energy's so cheap, at least in a lot of places, the amount of energy people would tend to save in their home, they're spending more money on a cup of coffee each day. So when I've, because we've explored all sorts of motivators with people, and when I've kind of pitched money, people, everybody, everybody, when you ask them, everybody says money, money would motivate me. And then you show them how much money, they're like, forget it, I'm not even gonna do it. Why should I waste my time doing it? So I'm curious if you could elaborate on some different angle, because I don't see where that's coming from. Well, all of us get $100 plus monthly bill from PJB. If I can show that I can save 5% of that bill doing something, I would do it. I mean, not everybody would do it, but people would do it. Yeah, $5 is- With the incomes in this area? It's that proverbial cup of coffee. That's one cup of coffee a month that you're saying that if you go through, do all this stuff, you're gonna save five, one worth. What we found is that information is not enough. All of us know what we're supposed to do, but it's actually doing it that is the hump. So information in itself isn't good. Financial incentives in and of themselves aren't necessarily the driver. Protest isn't necessarily the driver. There are all kinds of ways that you can affect change, but they're limited in their scope. And I think Kerry's right- Second point, Silicon Valley has just gone green. I just started buying green electricity in Cupertino. And that's an organization that can promote these kind of things. And I would ask your coaching or whatever ways to convince them that, hey, it's a good idea. This Palo Alto concept that you have developed, is it available in Cupertino? I don't know. Well, not yet, because we're still piloting it, but it will be soon, I hope. Yes, so I think. And this next door is an excellent site. I can go tomorrow and just input my thoughts of what I learned here. A lot of people will read that. And that will start. So we don't even have to wait for the next door organization to do this. I and individual people can just express their opinion and it will powerfully multiply. Yeah, well, you need to get the municipalities or whoever to pay, somebody's gotta pay for it. So yes, you can do it, but somebody has to sort of build the infrastructure to do that, so. No, no, no, use the next door infrastructure. Just I as an user, I'm going to tell tomorrow that this is what I heard. It's a good idea. And then I'm sure people are going to ask me, but how do you do it? So just use that individual power. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, thank you. I wanna go, thank you for your questions. I wanna go back a little bit to the money question because one of the things I talked about in the presentation is from an individual psychology standpoint, money's not really gonna be a motivator from an individual basis. In fact, we've seen a lot of evidence in the behavioral science world that once you bring money into it, you negate all of the intrinsic motivations that are out there. So people doing this for the right reason. And so money becomes not a sustainable way to promote these programs on an individual behavior standpoint. Now, when you're talking corporations and businesses and you're thinking about profit of these businesses and when you change cultures in these businesses and now all of a sudden they're seeing five and a half times more profits out of their businesses. Okay, that's a motivator. So, you know, the research, even I think it's coming out of EPRI actually was that for time of use pricing, if you wanted to get any impact out of the time of use pricing, you literally had to make the rates 10 times more than the other rates. So money can motivate at the individual level but only really, really, if it's very painful for you and if you frame it correctly. And there's a lot of ways to mess up that framing. But from a business standpoint, I do think money and profits is a motivator and something we should take advantage of. Thanks for bringing that up, Kat. That's an important point. Yeah, I think, you know, too, there's a famous experiment where they tried to get people to recycle and if you recycled, you get $5 off of your bill or whatever and then they did a lottery thing. They said, if you recycle and have a certain threshold, you can win $1,000. And of course it went way up because the $5 is meaningless, but $1,000. Wow, I have now a chance to win $1,000. Change, I mean, we're weird animals. We are just, you know. So we also saw this in Step Up and Power Down. We thought the million dollars that we gave to each city of our corporate money would be motivational for businesses. So one of our messages when we went in was, hey, your community could win a million dollars and that could be put toward a community benefit like a climate action plan or a playground. And it backfired. They did not, they said, well, what piece of that is mine? What portion of the million am I gonna get? And it turned the whole conversation negative. So we changed our messaging. We tested our messaging. We also surveyed participants ahead of time and they all said money was the number one thing, but you know, when we went in and used that money messaging, it didn't work. We have data on it. So they all went with the green angle, the sustainability angle and climate change worked a lot better in San Jose. I'm sorry, in San Francisco, that's funny enough. In San Jose, we did have targeted success with the dollar savings pitch when we went in cold and asked for participation. So again, it's so important to know your community and respond to it and come at this as a process and not a baked solution. Yeah, and I think one more comment on that is we as humans think we understand our motivations. If you ask people, are you doing this because your neighbors are doing it? No one will tell you, yes, that's why I'm doing it. But the fact is, we're not gonna admit that as human beings, we're like, no, I'm making rational decisions. I'm doing it for rational reasons, but we don't make our decisions that way. So I think it's really important to keep that in mind. Which is why we're not going in with carbon. We're going in with all these other things. For instance, for me, I have built this home and I live a sustainable life. I have all my, you know, throughout my life, but I was woefully unprepared for an emergency. I mean, I had water in a first aid kit and the thing that you get from KQED when you give 200 bucks. But that was it, right? And so I'm getting, because I have a team now on my block and we just went through the program, I'm now, it's something I know I should do. I knew, you know, for years, I've been thinking, oh, I really gotta do that. But there's no deadline, there's no accountability, there's no support here. With my group, there was accountability, there was support, you know, people, we shared ideas. Oh, I got a thing at Costco, it was a side of salmon and it's good till 2022, you know, smoked salmon. So I'm gonna be eating salmon or when there's an emergency. So those kinds of things are sort of, people go in for all different kinds of reasons. Curiosity to look in somebody's house. Because we have shared leadership. Every group, every team member has a meeting in their house. So they're shared, you know, all these sort of things that are brought in that are intrinsic motivators because often when you're stating to the money or other, you know, carbon, it's not necessarily a driver. I'm gonna feel free to come up and ask questions, but we're over time now and there's lunch and a lunch debate and I don't wanna keep people here. So thanks so much for participating.