 Thank you all for being here at the Expo at our 20th annual Congressional Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Expo. My name is Carol Werner. I'm the Executive Director of the Environmental and Energy Study Institute and a member of the Steering Committee of the Sustainable Energy Coalition which along with the House and Senate caucuses is sponsoring the Expo in this forum today. So we're delighted that you're all here and that you're here for this second panel of our policy forum which we've got some wonderful speakers on this panel too. And we certainly hope that you will, as we listen to hear how they also help set the stage in terms of thinking about energy and economic development and all of the benefits. What that means in this country, we hope that you will make sure that you see their exhibits talk to them further in both the foyer and in the gold room afterwards. So to lead off our panel discussion this morning is Nicole Steele who is the Executive Director for Grid Alternatives Mid-Atlantic. They're doing a lot of exciting work and Nicole will tell you all about that. We're just hoping to get through the day without any injuries up here. Good morning everyone. I hope everyone's having a great morning. I see a lot of familiar faces out there so hello again and it's nice to meet those of you who I don't know but thank you Carol for the introduction. Again my name is Nicole Steele. I'm the Executive Director of Grid Alternatives Mid-Atlantic. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Grid Alternatives we are the nation's largest non-profit solar installer. We work exclusively in low income communities and we use a job training model to do the installations themselves. Some people refer to us as the habitat for humanity of solar but we actually take it even a step further with the job training piece and so we find that that job training piece is actually a very, very important part of our model even though it was only added a few years ago. So Grid Alternatives actually started out in California a little over a decade ago and we had a traditional model of doing single family installation so we're a turnkey solar installer and I think that surprises a lot of people. We are not just a project manager, we're not a facilitator around job training. We are a full service shop and the reason we do that is not only to make sure that we're bringing solar to lower income communities but we're also giving our trainees the ability to see every step of the process and when they have that opportunity to see that step they then can enter into the industry prepared to have a full understanding of what is involved but then also have an understanding of the installation piece is not just the only path for solar jobs. And so I'll focus a little bit more on the solar job piece in a minute but the reason we exclusively work in lower income communities is because lower income communities are disproportionately impacted by their utility bills meaning they pay a larger portion of their income on their utility bills and so a big savings on that through solar or through energy efficiency would they would see a much greater impact. They would be able to stretch $20 a lot further than the normal person so it really gives power and wealth building to communities because they're able to put some of those dollars back in the pockets that who deserve it the most. So we started out in California about 10 years ago we started out with a single family model in partnership with the state of California in the SASH program. So California administers the SASH program which is I always mess up the acronym but it's single family affordable solar housing and some capacity and then there's also a MASH program which is the multifamily side of things. So we've been administering that program since the beginning and we'll continue to move forward with that and we wove in the job training piece. Now single family isn't the only way we can impact low income households. There's also multifamily, there's renters, there's individuals that don't have the ability to have solar on the roof for one reason or another. So as we expanded outside of the state of California we started to look at different solar models. So our Colorado office was the first affiliate office to open outside of the state and they focus almost exclusively on community solar and ground-mounted community solar in partnership with the Colorado Energy Office and in partnership with rural electric cooperatives across that state. Now they are starting to weave in more multifamily and some single family projects but that really gives us the ability to help impact those who don't own their own home. And then as we moved on to the east coast we opened an office in New York and so our New York tri-state office covers New York, New Jersey and Connecticut and they are almost exclusively working on multifamily projects right now and almost exclusively in the state of Connecticut in partnership with the Connecticut Green Bank. And so the Connecticut Green Bank has been able to help facilitate a much larger impact and delivery of solar to lower income communities and GRID has been a partner in that effort. Now coming down to the Mid-Atlantic to where I am based I run the DC office so we're physically located here in DC so that we can have this presence on the hill and have this federal presence but we also do work on the ground in DC, in Maryland, in Virginia, we're exploring Delaware and Pennsylvania and other states surrounding on how do we make this model work. We've been mostly working in the single family space in DC and Baltimore but we've also expanded into the multifamily space because clearly we're going to see a larger impact. I believe the stat in DC is that 72% of lower income individuals live in multifamily buildings in DC so why would we exclude that as part of our model. So you know I talk about incorporating single family and multifamily and community solar into the accessibility conversation for low income access that's incredibly important but the financing piece is also incredibly important so we work very closely with our financers, our financing partners, our banks to really create different models and different strategies and approaches to make sure that financing is accessible for those different types of projects. I want to make sure that I'm not running out of time but I do want to talk a bit about our workforce piece. So most of you probably do know that there's about 260,000 jobs in the solar industry in the United States today and that the solar industry is growing about 15 times faster than the rest of the U.S. economy. There are more jobs in the solar industry than in the coal, oil and gas industries combined and this will only continue to grow as long as we maintain good policies at all levels of government so federal government, state government and local government. Working here on the east coast when I opened this office three years ago I found it very difficult to hire qualified employees in the solar industry because it was still a growing industry and so as I started to hire people I was actually importing them in from California and that is how I was able to start the office because they didn't exist and then going back and looking at the solar foundation's job census from a couple years ago 90% of mid-Atlantic employers say it's somewhat or very difficult to hire qualified employees in the mid-Atlantic so you know that is one of the major reasons why we are focusing on workforce development in the solar industry because if we don't have the employees to install we don't have that workforce to install the solar the industry is not going to be able to continue to grow at the rate that it has grown. We also are focusing on the communities that we work in so we're doing so we have wealth building across the board that we're impacting not only through a utility bill but also through a paycheck and these are good career pathways into the solar industry. So I just want to close with one specific project that we're working on here in D.C. It's called Solar Works D.C. It's a new program that was recently announced in partnership with Great Alternatives and D.C.'s Department of Energy and the Environment and D.C.'s Department of Employment Services. It's a year long program where we've designed three cohorts across the year to train up to 75 individuals in the solar industry in all areas of the solar industry so while we will be focusing on installation they will also have exposure to our outreach and sales and design and project management and everything that goes into the installation process itself. So we're actually very excited about this program. It's one of the largest it's the largest program that Great has done in partnership with the local government and the reason that this program is rolling out is because of a new program called Solar for All that crosses all of D.C. and that's a result of the 50% RPS increase with the 5% solar carve out and that they have a goal of reaching essentially all low income individuals in the district by 2032 by reducing their utility bills in half with solar. And so again going back to what I originally said the way to get there is through workforce and if the workforce doesn't exist and you don't have the installers to do those projects and what's better than utilizing our local talent to be able to go in and take advantage and build those career pathways here in the district. So I think there's incredible opportunity around Solar for All and SolarWorks D.C. and we just want to make sure that everyone is paying attention to not only the solar access conversation but the inclusiveness, the equity piece and the diversity piece as well. So thank you. Thanks Nicole. Is that a great story or what? And so we are now going to hear from Patrick Hughes who is the senior director for government relations and strategic initiatives with NEMA the National Electrical Manufacturers Association. So there's a theme here in terms of thinking about jobs, manufacturing, economic development. So Patrick. Great. Thank you and good morning everybody. So I'm with NEMA, National Electrical Manufacturers Association as Carol mentioned. We represent the manufacturers of electrical products from the point electricity is generated through the entire transmission and distribution system to its end use and buildings. So lighting systems, motors, building controls. What I want to talk today about is that final piece, buildings. We have been doing a lot of advocacy as NEMA, encouraging building owners and facility managers to benchmark the energy performance of their buildings which typically involves using Energy Star Portfolio Manager which is run by EPA. And that program is a free tool for building owners or managers where they can input information about their facility. And what they get is a 1 to 100 rating relative to similar building types. So if they get a 50 back that means they're about average. If they get a 99 back that means you know they're in the very top 1% of performers. And we now have over two dozen cities that have passed local ordinances requiring buildings typically large commercial buildings sometimes multi-family buildings to measure their energy performance. I think all of the ordinances have them use Energy Star Portfolio Manager and publicly disclose that information. So that means they report their scores to the city. The city usually publishes a spreadsheet of those results. NEMA and a number of our partners in this benchmarking advocacy work were curious to see are these ordinances which often don't require the building owners to actually make any sort of improvement to their building. We were curious to see if these ordinances were resulting in voluntary improvements to facilities. Were the ordinances which required the measurement of energy performance actually resulting in either lower no cost operational changes to the facilities or even facility managers and building owners paying money to upgrade the energy performance of their building. So we commissioned a study which I have copies of where our booth is over in the foyer. So if you want to grab a copy after this, I'd be happy to give you one. To see, you know, what are these facility managers actually investing in? Because we've seen from other reports that the energy use intensity of buildings in cities with benchmarking policies was going down. We just didn't know why exactly it was going down. There was an MIT study that showed a 14% reduction in energy use intensity over three years in New York City and another Urban Green Council report that showed a 6% energy use intensity reduction in buildings. But they didn't look at the specific changes. So what we did was we surveyed a number of facility managers in New York City and we chose New York City because their policy has been implemented the longest. DC actually passed their ordinance first, but New York City implemented first. So we went with them. And what we found was that 77% of New York City facility managers made a low or no cost change to their building. 77%. 75% actually spent money to upgrade their facilities as a result of the benchmarking ordinance. And in the report, I have very detailed breakdowns of what specifically they did. But we asked them, you know, if you made an operational change, what exactly did you do? The most popular thing was to train building staff. So, you know, actually have a program to train your facility managers, your custodial staff to do easy low cost things, turn off the lights, you know, make sure the HVAC isn't running at night when it's not needed. The second most popular thing was to stop heating and cooling the building simultaneously. Yeah, it's funny. It seems it seems so straightforward and obvious, but a lot of people didn't realize that they were doing this in their facility and so they started to measure, you know, how the building was doing. And it's a no brainer. You don't want to have the heat on in one office and the AC on in the next and have them, you know, fighting each other. So that was a little over half of all the facility managers did those two things. Next, on the tiered list, we had 40% calibrate their building automation system. So actually, you know, take a close look at their set points, you know, how the building's programmed. If everyone leaves the building by five, is there a need to have it cooled until seven, for example? Then the next one was educating building occupants. So actually working with the tenants in the tenant spaces to help encourage them to save energy. Again, doing low or no cost things, set points using fans instead of air conditioning, you know, lighting controls and just making sure that, you know, if they have a conference room in their space that it's not lit throughout the day, if there's no conference going on that day. And then, you know, as we go down the list, some of the less popular things start to get a little bit more complex in terms of optimizing their variable air volume box flow. So this would be, you know, a pretty sophisticated energy manager going in and looking at the air flows in the building. And then also adding or optimizing chiller staging was the next most popular thing that people did in buildings. Those are all pretty inexpensive. A lot of them are free opportunities to save energy in the building. So, you know, right off the bat, because they measured their energy use, they saved some energy almost immediately. Then we asked them, did you actually make an investment in your building? Did you spend money to upgrade your building systems? And again, 75% said that they did. The most popular upgrade was to lighting systems. 46% said that they upgraded their lighting systems. 45% just slightly less said they upgraded their heating systems. And that makes sense. In New York, a lot of buildings still use fuel oil to some extent. So there were some good opportunities for heating system upgrades. 42% separate from the lighting, which was just the actual bulbs, you know, converting to LEDs for the most part. We asked about lighting controls. And so 42% added some lighting controls. So that could be occupancy and vacancy sensors, so that if no one's in a room, the lights automatically turn off or dimmers so that occupants can dim the lights to their preference or automatic dimmers that can sense daylight so that if there's sufficient daylight coming in from the window, the lights aren't on. Next, we had people installing energy management systems. 40% of people installed a sophisticated building energy management system. 40% invested in their cooling systems. And then 16% looked at plug loads and installed some sort of plug load management system so that they can actually control at the outlet level whether things are on or off. This could be handy if you have a lot of desks and you have things like a scanner or a printer that could be turned off using an automated receptacle, for example, if it can tell that the person's not at their desk. 15% invested in day lighting upgrades to the facility and 11% invested in building envelope upgrades to the facility. Our hypothesis is that those are a little more disruptive to tenants which is probably why fewer people did that, but they do offer very significant returns on energy. So, you know, we're seeing people do that in addition to the other upgrades. Running out of time, but we did also ask why people were motivated to make these changes. Some of the popular responses we got were to save money. That was number one. To help the environment was a popular response. Half the people said they wanted to help the environment. A little less than half said they wanted to follow best practices. And many people said that the results of the measurement was what really notified them to the opportunity to make these investments and what motivated them to do so. When you look at the report, in the back, we had open-ended responses and they're very entertaining. But I just want to close with a few of my favorites. We got a few that said, you know, local law 84, which is the name of the ordinance, is a waste of time or it's idiotic, which is fine. That's their opinion. They were still, you know, improving the efficiency of their facilities. But then we got a lot of positive responses. So one said New York City local law 84 has made us more aware of wasteful spending and how to make cost saving changes. And then another respondent said, I think local law 84 inspections helped my company identify key areas of improvement for creating a more energy efficient building. The cost savings are worth it in the long run, even though the initial capital outlays can cost a lot. And then my favorite one was in all caps and it said, I just like save on energy. So thank you everybody. Another wonderful story, great project and now maybe just sending those results of your survey to all these other cities and people go, geez, pretty incredible. And so we are now going to take a little bit of a shift to looking at the water energy nexus. Tom Horner, who is the vice president for water management is our next presenter. Good morning. I first of all wanted to thank Carol and the staff at ESSI for organizing this 20th annual event and to continue really to reaching out to both sides of the aisle of while educating the hill on energy and environmental issues. Wanted to thank the senators and the congressmen who are able to make it today and their staffs of outwardly it appears that the two major political parties are miles apart when it comes to this essential issues. The truth is that due to ESI and long term advocates like Scott Sklar, the energy and water efficiency movement has become truly nonpartisan at its core, not at its outward approach. What I've seen is major property owners, manufacturers, investors firmly believe that the bottom line of green is black. Since investing in efficiency and renewables is good for the bottom line, smart owners continue to implement programs. Efficiency is good for business and the environment and due to rapid advances in technology continues to become smarter every day. It takes a lot of water to produce energy. Different energy has a separate and specific water footprint. Most of the renewables use a lot less water than the conventional use. Our current projections for 2017 is that 13% of our total electric usage will be for moving water and wastewater around the country. It's a significant part of our energy use. Outwardly, as I think we all know, there appears to be a great divide on Capitol Hill. People on both sides of the political spectrum have mostly stopped talking with each other and have instead decided the best course of action is to only spout their coalitions or parties pre-approved rhetoric. This same issue has been prevalent for generations with religions around the globe. The leaders were known to speak to their face within specific communities and to treat outsiders with indifference at best. Less than a month ago, many great religious leaders around the world knew that the time was right to change that prevalent attitude. Their extraordinary appeal organized by the Elijah Interfaith Institute urged their followers to reach out and make friends with people of different face. These leaders, including the Pope, rabbis, Muslim clerics, ministers, and the Dalai Lama stated that these personal relationships would be a cure for misperceptions, prejudice, and distrust. The information was disseminated in 16 languages and the three-minute video is a must-see for everyone. Jonathan Sacks on launching the initiative said, one of the wonderful things about spending time with people completely unlike you is that you discover how much you have in common. I believe that everyone on Capitol Hill needs to watch the video and initiate friendly discussions across party lines. You are the leaders of our country and are responsible for running our commons in an effective and efficient manner. Our commons are everything we jointly own. Every government institution, land holdings, and major parts of our energy and water systems. When I was coming of age, rivers would catch on fire. Smog was widespread in urban areas and the energy intensity of the products we produced was approximately two times what it is today. Without our common investment through the federal government, the great majority of the leaps in the environmental and efficiency movement would not have happened. I remember a discussion I had with Scott Sklar about ten years ago. He sometimes doesn't realize that water is the most important issue. I stated that solar PV made absolutely no sense from an economic point of view. He kind of chuckled and said that within ten years solar and a lot of the other renewables will become mainstream. With the price of solar panels, not the racking, not the installation at the time, was approximately ten dollars a watt. The current prices are under one dollar a watt wholesale. So the biggest change we've seen with a lot of our long-term clients in the past few years, business leaders that let's say have a decidedly right-wing slant in their attitudes, and even some who believe this climate change stuff is just kind of, it's the sun, it's nothing to do with what we do. They're the ones that are embracing the green movement. When you spend significantly less to implement a program than the accounting and reliability advantages it produces, you are being smart for your stockholders. Called efficiency, environmental, the green movement, the pace of program implementation will continue to increase significantly over the next few years. My grandfather left behind many words of wisdom for his grandchildren. One of my favorites was, there is so much good in the worst of us, so much bad in the best of us, that it ill behooves any of us to speak ill of any of us. Please watch the short video on making friends that the world's religious leaders put out last month. We need to start talking and treating each other with respect if we truly want to make America great again. Thank you. There are people doing all sorts of wonderful things across the country, making important leadership contributions, which is why we are so delighted to have Mary Blanchard, who is associate director of Wisconsin Energy Institute with the University of Wisconsin at Madison here with us today, because they are doing a lot of terrific work in terms of really looking at how we transition to clean energy and what this means in terms of dealing with systems. Thanks very much Carol and thanks to you all for being here today and for the opportunity to speak to you. What I wanted to do is to give you an overview of the work that we do at the Wisconsin Energy Institute at UW Madison and then also talk about some specific research that's going on that might be of interest to you. Overall at the Wisconsin Energy Institute we're really working to develop clean, sustainable, and cost-effective energy solutions. We do this by first of all helping our researchers, doing education and outreach, and then engaging the public also to look at energy systems kinds of solutions. On the research front we have more than 160 faculty members at UW Madison who are affiliated with WEI. There are also others across the university in multiple different colleges, so the College of Engineering, the College of Ag and Life Sciences, and Letters and Science, and then also at our Environmental Institute who are engaged in policy in other areas. We are one of the top research institutions in the country. We do about 70 million dollars in just DOE funded research and many more, much more than that in energy related research that comes from other funding agencies and from private organizations as well. We're home to a number of different research centers and consortium that are focused on energy issues. We're home to the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center, a consortium that's focused on electrical machines and power electronics, an engine research center, a power systems research consortium, a material center. We're home to the nation's first solar energy lab and many more, so there's a tremendous amount of expertise. What I would like to say about the research focus is that it is very, very important that we bring together these researchers from across disciplines. Innovation really happens by bringing ideas from one area into another. For example, at the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center, we have experts in plants. We have experts in chemistry about how to take apart those plants to get at the sugars to convert to fuels into chemicals that would normally be sourced from petroleum. We have experts in the conversion of those sugars into molecules, and we have people who are focused on the sustainability of all of that. How do we make sure that we are growing crops for food, but that we are also delivering things called ecosystem services and having habitat for bees and for birds and others to make sure that the landscape stays healthy? All of them are coming together, and by having that cross-disciplinary focus, it provides the opportunity for, let's say, somebody who's in conversion who's trying to make that end molecule that's going to be useful as a chemical to make fabrics or to make plastics. With somebody from the plants perspective who is an expert on plants to say, there's something that happens in the conversion where we're getting these molecules that are a problem. Is there a way to work much earlier in the process to avoid having these molecules come up that we don't want in the end result so that they're working across those boundaries in order to provide the solutions that we need? Our researchers are across all topic areas, not just from bioenergy and bioproducts, but people focused on batteries, as I mentioned, engines, electricity distribution architectures, and on policy and regulation. There's one thing that I've realized from working in the energy space now for more than a decade is how it's not just about the technologies. It's really about policy and regulation and also about financing. It's really a three-legged stool for how these energy solutions are going to get out into the marketplace and we have to make sure that we're addressing all aspects of that. Just as a specific example of that is that I'm from Wisconsin. In Wisconsin, it's not legal to do third-party leasing for solar, something that's legal in 26 other states. That financing mechanism has really enabled an incredible proliferation of solar in places like Arizona and California, but it's not legal in my state. We need to have the regulations that allow these new technologies to come to market. It's also important to us to support the full life cycle of research, so not just basic research but also applied research. Then we bring industry in to work as collaborators in the research itself, but then we also work with industry to help move these technologies towards commercialization because we want them to get out there. They're only making a difference if they really get commercialized. We also have a number of education initiatives. For our undergraduates, we have a certificate program, which is like a minor program in energy sustainability. We have capstone projects where the students go out and work with government organizations and others to develop solutions. We just had one from this last semester where students worked with a city in Wisconsin called Waterloo on what would be a renewable energy plan for that city. That's an example of real-life application for their research. We run innovation competitions in energy and sustainability for students. We have a student energy club, and it's also really important to us to help educate students about what potential careers there are and connect them with professionals out in industry to help them prepare for their future. We have a team for the collegiate wind competition that's run by the Department of Energy as well, which I think is a really college-defining experience for students to have an application that's been given to them and to design a wind turbine that's going to get tested in a wind tunnel, develop a business plan for that, and to really think about how these solutions work, what are all the pieces that need to come together for these solutions to get on to the marketplace. We also do K-12 curriculum development, teach the teacher kinds of programs as well. As I mentioned, too, it's really important for us to look at things from a system's perspective, and that I want to just give a particular example in that where we have researchers sort of across the range of something which I think is interesting, which is the nitrogen cycle. Some of you were probably familiar with the fact that the creation of a process called the Haber-Bosch process early in the 20th century has enabled us to have seven-plus billion people in the world. The production of nitrogen for fertilizer, that's been a huge thing for the benefit of mankind, but it also has had some downsides for that as well in terms of too much nitrogen can contaminate water. We have experts who've looked at how to make sure that the seeds, when they're planted, that the plants uptake only the amount of nitrogen that they need, researchers working on how to improve the Haber-Bosch process so that it uses less energy in the production of the fertilizer, and that also those who look at in drought years, what's the impact of too much nitrogen's put down on the soil, what gets into the water tables. In Wisconsin, we have a lot of dairy farms, so there's a lot of nutrient management. In some places, we have too much nitrogen because of what's in the manure at a dairy farm, and how do you manage that through biodigesters and how do you optimize so that you're able to most efficiently move nitrogen from places where there's too much to where maybe there's not enough. We also do a number, we have research in microgrids. We have one of the pioneers in microgrids, which is a way of creating resiliency for the electric grid. Our researchers' work was in an apartment complex in Lower Manhattan when Hurricane Sandy hit, and it was the only building in Lower Manhattan that stayed up for the five days that Lower Manhattan was without power. That's a really interesting area. There's a lot of research going on on the future for what would make sense for electricity distribution architectures that the grid wasn't designed to have so much solar and wind happening at the customer endpoints. How can we maybe use microgrids to help accommodate this much greater increase in having distributed energy resources while maintaining the stability of the grid, and maybe that also might enable a marketplace that happens closer to the customer, as opposed to us just buying from the utilities directly. We also have work on a new type of electricity turbine that would be 50% more efficient than our current natural gas turbines would work for any type of energy source, so whether it's concentrated solar power or natural gas or biomass or even nuclear, it would be much more efficient at a lower capital cost and be simpler. That's really seen by the U.S. government as being a very important cross-cutting initiative. We have a number of people working on new types of batteries that would be able to enable lithium ion batteries to not be as flammable so that would reduce the risk. That would be an important thing. Combining the capabilities of ultra-capacitors for delivering power very quickly with traditional batteries that can deliver power over a longer period of time. As I mentioned before, we're home to the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center, some fundamental law. It's one of three research centers across the country. They've really built a very strong foundation for bioenergy research with 360 patent applications, a dozen startup companies, nearly 2600 peer reviewed journal papers coming out of that research. Some just quick highlights from the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center in terms of some of its results is a lot of study on, again, the landscapes. How do we have a sustainable biomass supply for bioenergy and for bioproducts, including how we could grow crops on marginal lands that could provide beneficial ecosystem services while also increasing farm incomes. Work to on lignin, which is a part of biomass, and how we could have new uses for lignin. Right now, it's used as a waste product. It's burned for process heat, for example, in a paper and pulping company, but that it's 30% of all biomass. And if we can have new uses and use lignin as a source of chemicals that would be used for plastics, for example, that would be a really big benefit in terms of reducing petroleum demand. So here at the Energy Institute, we're really proud to support the world-class researchers that are engaged in the discovery of new innovation, and to also engage our students in the public in exchanging ideas on how to address our energy challenges. Thanks very much for your time.