 Good afternoon. Welcome to today's briefing on advanced wood building products that are bringing fresh innovation to the building sector and questions, which we will explore today. It's also Forest Products Week, so this is a great time for this briefing. I'm Ellen Vaughn with the Environmental and Energy Study Institute, and we're an independent bipartisan 501c3 non-profit. I would also like to acknowledge my colleague Jesse Stolark. We have had a great time collaborating on this briefing and are so delighted to have this distinguished panel here today, and look forward to discussing the many wonderful qualities of mass timber building products and their applications. So I will introduce them momentarily, but first I'd like to thank Senator Angus King for his leadership on forestry issues and his staff for their help with this briefing today. The senator wanted to be here in person, but he sent the next best thing, and so I will let him speak for himself, and one note, there is a speaker he refers to who was not able to be here today, but we'll tell you about that in a minute. We have a wonderful substitute. Okay. Mass Timber, a big deal for Maine. That's why I'm excited to be with you, if only electronically. I apologize for not being with you. But sort of unexpectedly, we had the recess for the rest of October, so I'm up in Maine. But I just want you to know how enthusiastic I am about this idea, and the idea of new uses for forest products generally. It won't surprise you to know that Maine is the most forested state in the country, and that Jim Rish and I of Idaho and I are the co-chairs of the Working Forest Caucus. And we're always looking for ways to promote uses of the Working Forest and particularly new products. Our paper in pulp industry in Maine has seen a comeback just in the last year or so. We had a terrible stretch where we lost a number of mills four or five years ago. Now we're having some new investment in a lot of our mills, but we also have to always be looking for new products, and Mass Timber, particularly CLT, is one of them. I've been working with friends in Washington on the Timber Innovation Act and all the other pieces of legislation to help move this forward within the Department of Agriculture and other parts of the federal government. But it's also going to take a lot of private investment. And Casey Momquist is there, I believe, and we're looking forward, Casey, to welcoming you to Maine for a CLT project. And you know, and can tell your colleagues there, the resources that we have, great people, people that have been working in the forest products industry for generations, unlimited forest resources, and great potential for new uses of those resources. And that's what we're so enthusiastic about in Maine. So I'm glad to have a chance to be with you today and look forward to the results of the conference. Just keep in touch, I'm with you all the way, CLT, Mass Timber, Forest Resources, State of Maine. They all fit together. All right. Thank you, Senator. So I did want to note that we will have our panel presentations, and then we'll save about 30 minutes, hopefully, for Q&A, so please save your questions, and then we'll have those at the end. So the first speaker I would like to introduce is Melissa Jenkins. And I would like to thank Melissa for all her great input on this briefing. Melissa is a natural resources specialist at the U.S. Forest Service here in D.C. And she leads the Mass Timber portfolio for the Wood Innovations team and manages the Forest Service Wood Innovation grants. Melissa, we are delighted to have you here today. Thank you. Hi there. My name is Melissa Jenkins, and I work with the U.S. Forest Service. And today I'm going to give you a very brief overview about what Mass Timber is, why the Forest Service is engaged in this, what the status of the market is in the U.S. today, and then what the Forest Service is doing to help support this market. So what's Mass Timber? Thank you. So what's Mass Timber? Here's an example of a block of cross-laminated timber. But Mass Timber is an umbrella term for a group of building materials that's made of lumber. There are several different type of technologies under this term. An example is glue-laminated timber, nail-laminated timber, and what I'll be focusing on today is cross-laminated timber. I've got a photo behind me. A cross-laminated timber is made generally from two-by-sixes or two-by-eightes, and it's laid down in one layer with all the pieces next to each other. On top of that, adhesive is laid down, and then a second layer is applied perpendicular to that first layer, and that process continues. So adhesive is applied, and a perpendicular layer is laid down on top of that previous layer. These are grouped in three, five, seven odd numbers of layers, and they're pressed together to form large structural panels. So you can see a panel right behind me, and that's of a building in Portland. And these panels are very, very strong, and they can be used to build very tall. You don't need another type of building material to support that building. So in addition to the strength that we see with Mass Timber panels, these panels are extremely light. So there's a lot of advantages to building with a lightweight building material. This opens the door to building in some locations where heavier building materials would not work. Also, Mass Timber panels can be connected very quickly, so there are some advantages to constructing with Mass Timber for the reduced construction time. So why does the Forest Service support this? Well, the United States has been really fantastic at fighting fire for the past 100 years. And because of this, we have a situation of overstocked forests. Now, if a wildfire blows through, these fires burn hotter, they burn faster, and they take a lot more effort to put out. So what the Forest Service is trying to do is build markets for wood products. And if we can build markets for these wood products, landowners will be more likely to sustainably manage or sustainably thin their land and create a less hazardous situation, create a safer situation. If landowners can get value for their material, then they're more likely to keep forests as forests rather than sell it for some other type of development. So the Forest Service is engaged in supporting the Mass Timber market in order to make communities safer through this reduced wildfire risk. We're in it to support rural development and support rural economics. We have a great opportunity for jobs here. And we're also in it to support a more sustainable building material. These Mass Timber panels are less energy intensive to manufacture than traditional materials. But they also, buildings made of Mass Timber, store a lot of carbon. So we have a long-term carbon storage benefit here. So what's the market look like in the US today? Well, let me start with where this cross-lemonated timber started. And it was developed about 25 years ago in Austria and Germany. And in Europe today, there's a thriving Mass Timber market. We have manufacturers of all sizes, from small mom and pop shops to the large mega facilities. We also have architects, engineers, developers actively building with this material. In the US, we've only been at it since about 2015. But in that short period of time, we have seen great development. So the first two manufacturing facilities I'd like to talk about are the first two that were on the scene. And they are SmartLam out of Montana and DR Johnson out of Riddle, Oregon. And these two make architectural grade cross-lemonated timber. So you can use this material in a building. SmartLam is working on a second facility in Montana. And they recently announced a third facility in Maine. In addition, Euclid is a small boutique shop out of Utah, making interlocking CLT. Now this material doesn't use any adhesive. We have Sterling lumber out of just on the south side of Chicago. And they are the US the largest manufacturer of CLT. But they make industrial grade CLT. So you can use this for temporary roads or matting for energy development. Sterling has also mentioned, as announced, that they're opening a second facility in Texas. Now we have an exciting new mass timber product coming online. And that's MassPlywood. And Freris Lumber is manufacturing this out of Oregon. We also have Katerra and Voggin timbers that are, will be opening a manufacturing facility in Washington state. And International Beam is en route to open a facility in Alabama. And then we have Lignaterra, also opening a facility in Maine. And finally, the most recent announcement is Texas CLT that will be opening a facility in Arkansas. So we have manufacturing coming online and buildings are going up. And here are just a snapshot of a few buildings. And if you get the opportunity to go tour through one of these mass timber buildings, please take it. They are really beautiful. The pictures really don't do them justice. So here I've highlighted three buildings, two in Portland, Oregon. One of these is Carbon 12. That's an eight-story condominium building. And Albina Yard, which is a four-story office building, both made of CLT. And the third building here is T3 in Minneapolis. And this is a seven-story, nail-laminated timber building. So another technology under this mass timber umbrella. And an interesting story with T3, the largest occupant is Amazon. And they mentioned that they're willing to pay a slightly higher price point per square foot because of the benefits to their employees. So they're seeing payback in employee retention. So here's just a very brief or quick map. And it's very difficult to see. But I think that there's handouts around. And you can see this online. But this map shows where buildings in the US that are in mass timber buildings that are in design or mass timber buildings that are currently being constructed or are already built. So you can see it's not just in one location in the US. This is starting to pepper the entire country. And Congress understands the benefits of mass timber. We see mass timber language in both versions, the House version, and the Senate version of the 2018 Farm Bill. So we just a big thank you to folks that are working on this. And finally, what's the Forest Service doing to support this market? Well, we have a lot of different activities. And I'll just go through some of the highlights. The part of the agency that I work in gets our work done through partnerships. So we partner with folks at every level of government at local, state, federal, tribal governments. We also partner with associations, businesses, universities. You name it, we likely have a relationship with a certain level of partner. And one of these excellent partners is Woodworks. Woodworks is a nonprofit that educates architects, engineers, and developers about building with wood. Not only do they have educational opportunities, but they provide free project assistance. So if you're curious what your building would look like in wood, if you have it designed in traditional materials, they can help you out. And our effort of funding Woodworks is to address this multi-generational gap we're seeing in wood technology education. Students that are coming out of universities with degrees in architecture or engineering degrees or that go on to be developers, they don't have experience either building with wood, designing with wood. So Woodworks is helping address that gap. We are seeing a few institutions that are making cross-disciplinary programs at their, in wood design, or integrating some wood technologies. Clemson University, UMass, Oregon State University and University of Oregon have these types of collaborative programs. So we're really happy to see them and we hope to see more in the future. Another way that we help support this market is through our Wood Innovations grants. These grants support market development for wood products and wood energy. And they've been around since 2015 and we've funded some really exciting math timber projects through these grants. We have our next round, our 2019 round of wood innovation grants that should be announced in the next day or so. So keep your eyes peeled on that and I'm the project manager on that. So I'm happy to answer any questions. Our, the next round of activities are the CLT testing and these are really, really exciting. So we funded the first in the world blast test of CLT and the results were astounding. I was in the room looking at the blast testing and the results were amazing. Because the material performed so well the Department of Defense is starting to use CLT in their construction. In some instances in locations where they weren't able to construct with traditional materials and Jeff will be able to address that in a few minutes. We also facilitated the world's largest fire test of CLT and this fire test was initiated because the International Code Council has a committee looking at including tallwood buildings in the 2021 International Building Code. This committee that was looking to create these recommendations needed additional data on fire performance of CLT. So we helped facilitate this test and the committee used the results from this test in their recommendations and I believe Susan and Jeff will touch on this a bit later. And the last thing I'd like to mention is the communication efforts and educational efforts that we've done. And so to highlight two of them we funded an exhibit at the National Building Museum all about mass timber. We highlighted the two winners of the Tallwood Building Prize Competition. We highlighted the UMass Design Building CLT, the first institutional CLT building and we highlighted Andrew Waugh's Stodd House. Some people call it Murray Grove. It's the first tallwood building in the world in London. And at this exhibit, 80,000 people visited and learned about mass timber and we did many tours through and the photo here is of my colleague and I giving Senator King and his staff Morgan Cashwell a tour and I just wanted to thank Morgan and Senator King's office for helping facilitate this briefing. Not only did 80,000 people go through the exhibit and learn about mass timber but we had two large panels of CLT in the Great Hall, which is the big area within the National Building Museum which is in Washington DC. And 500,000 people were exposed to CLT just from walking through that area. We also funded a film all about mass timber in Oregon and Chuck Lavell was our on-screen host and he for folks, Chuck Lavell is the keyboardist for the Rolling Stones and the Almond Brothers and he had a great on-screen presence walking us through D.R. Johnson talking to Lever Architecture and highlighting mass timber in Oregon. That film was released on public television in a few states and it's available for free online. If you Google America's Forest with Chuck Lavell it's the pilot episode so feel free to check that out. So that's just a very high level overview of what the Forest Service has been up to to help support this market. We are thrilled at where things are going and we're here to help continue supporting the mass timber market. And I'll stop there, thank you. Thank you so much Melissa. Very wonderful overview and I know you'll have questions but please hold them till the end so there's a lot more to come. I mentioned and as you saw Senator King made reference to Casey Malmquist with SmartLam who was not able to be here today had a last minute conflict. But fortunately, Craig Rawlings has stepped in graciously and accepted our last minute assignment. So thank you so much Craig. We're delighted that you could be here. Craig Rawlings is president and CEO of Forest Business Network and has more than 30 years experience in the forest products industry. He's a national expert and leader in underutilized timber and woody biomass. And I'll let you come to the podium. Thank you Craig. Thank you Ellen. Thank you everybody for being here today and it was really short notice so bear with me I didn't have much time to prepare but I'm looking forward to it. So when Casey called me the other evening he asked me if I'd include some of the slides he'd prepared and so I'll go through those. He had like 28 or 30 of them but I didn't know if I could get up to speed that fast to understand them all. So I picked a few just to kind of give you an idea of what they're doing smart lamb in Montana and their planned efforts in Maine. So as you can see on the slide there I think it's what's really interesting is that most of these companies that are manufacturing mass timber today all just came onto the scene here a few years ago and most of them are located in really small towns that were timber communities for a long time and that had kind of gone away. So if you take a look at that aerial view that's the whole town of Columbia Falls, Montana and the plant being down there in the corner and their expanded plant across town are really big facilities and great employers for that area up there. He had a couple of project examples I won't get into too many because I know that Jeff will have some in there as well. This just kind of give you an idea of what Melissa described about these great big massive panels that are not only really structurally sound but they're beautiful as well. Here's a project that smart lamb did with the hardwood folks in the Midwest and made this pavilion that's been on display and I don't know how many visitors have been through there but from what I understand quite a few and it's something worth Googling just to see the photography and all the results on that and what I get questioned a lot about is what species can be used in mass timber products like cross laminated timber and it really doesn't matter it's just kind of a matter of what's available in the area where there's enough business to be generated. So on some of the things besides buildings there's building components that smart lamb and the other manufacturers are making this slide here happens to show an elevator shaft and then this summer it was a release of McDonald's opened their flagship restaurant in Chicago and so that's getting a lot of attention and a lot of press right now. I think why they asked me to be here today is a part of our company's business is we put on educational conferences for the forest products industry and in 2016 we made a move we could see where this mass timber was coming into the marketplace and what I wanted to show here with this slide is the trajectory of the growth of our conference since 2016, you can see it on the bar chart right there 2016 we had 500 attendees come to the conference 2017, 800, 1200 this year and we really expect that probably we'll hit the 2000 mark this year but I think this slide really kind of shows the overall trajectory of the industry where it's going right now. One of our first keynote speakers in 2016 was Valerie Johnson, the president and CEO of DR Johnson Innovations they built one of the first CLT plants in the country and she said, you know, year and a half ago we could have got everybody interested in the country into a phone booth that was interested in mass timber and here we are today, there's 600 people in the room so things must be changing fast so anyway, that's why I put that slide up there and then I put this next slide up just the same thing that Melissa was talking about here are the active mass timber manufacturers in North America right now and they're all in production international beams down there in Alabama they just came online but by first quarter of 2016 I think they're anticipating being in full production by then so it's pretty exciting to take a look at this map of all these logos and these companies and just about, like I mentioned a minute ago every one of these is a really small rural community in North America. The next slide here just again kind of reflects on what Melissa said that there's two plants under construction right now Katera in Spokane, Washington and Bog and Timbers in Calville, Washington and then got a couple of the ones Melissa mentioned as well I just went ahead and decided to show these slides since she just had all the logos up there just to give you some reference on the map where they're at but Sterling and SmartLam and Lignis CLT all have recent announcements of the plants they plan to build in the different parts of the country so to me what's really exciting when you look at this map in 2010 there wouldn't have been one logo up there this industry is growing really fast and there's a lot of excitement I think that's kind of the end of my presentation except as I thought about coming here the couple of things I wanted to mention is that I've been in the industry I think right about 40 years must have been an old bio I sent to Ellen but it said 30 plus years but this is probably the most exciting thing I've seen in my whole career and I've been involved in a lot of product development for the wood products industry my family has as well and it's really exciting to me is that the last 18 years I spent a lot of my time on working on forest health issues you know we all know we got some problems out there within unless I talked about the wildfires but for land managers they need products in order to be able to do their job and get their job done out there so what's exciting to me about Mass Timber is it doesn't take a big tree to make a really big strong structural piece of wood that goes into these buildings so taking small diameter underutilized timber be able to laminate them together, glue them together and make panels the only restriction on sizes with the weight limit or size limit going on a truck so with that I guess I think the only other thing I wanted to mention is since there's a lot of people that are involved in the policy arena in the room and on being streamed online is is that it takes money on this whole forest restoration forest health thing I know that's important to a lot of you people in the room and it is in the state I'm at in Montana but I think some of the things I've seen that Melissa mentioned is her shop in particular in some other parts of the forest service, the lab I think if they had twice the budget they had that they're working with right now they could probably get up to probably 10 times or more work done and they're really good at what they're doing they've been kind of the conduit for all of us that are pushing Mass Timber forward around the country and they were an early sponsor of the Mass Timber conference so as you're thinking through the farm bill different things thinking about where you might have to put some money to get return on your investment particularly on that forest health side think about the forest service and a couple of the other unsung heroes or the industry that are propelling it as well or the US endowment for forestry and communities and there's a lot more but and then of course the softwood lumber board that's the check off program they're putting a lot of money and all that money leveraged together is again been a big contributor to what I've seen the success of this new industry so that's about all I have to say I really appreciate you guys having me come in here today and I'll be open for any questions when we get done thank you. Craig thank you so much appreciate that perspective and appreciate you being here and you both alluded I think to how beautiful these buildings are we saw some pictures we are very fortunate today to have an architect who's designing some of the most beautiful structures out there Susan Jones is an architect founder and principal of Atelier Jones I think it would sound better if Amory said it in French but she's in Seattle and one of the things I think is wonderful is the sustainability issues that Susan is looking at reclamation just you just have a great sense of how to use these materials how to use waste materials and then how to put all these things together in a beautiful way so Susan is also representing the American Institute of Architects on the International Code Council's Tallwood building committee which Melissa had mentioned and has a book Mass Timber Design and Research published in 2018 so Susan thank you so much for being here thank you Ellen thank you everybody for having this panel and taking this issue as seriously as everybody on this esteemed panel here has over the last few years I'm gonna advance my slide here I am from Seattle and I'm also a third generation Pacific Northwestern and it's relevant for a lot of reasons but mostly because I grew up in the woods or very near the woods and so when we talk about using wood especially this much of it it becomes a very personal issue and it becomes a really an issue of understanding where those materials are from and so I always start with this slide where I want to remind our audience and ourselves that these come from forests and they are renewable resources but they do need to be treated in sustainable and healthy manners because as an architect really the reason I am interested in this is because it potentially poses a lower carbon alternative to my industries building industries materials so if you compose it to concrete versus steel the obviously wood as a renewable industry is a lower carbon material it's also interesting because as you realize these forests need to be thin we've talked about forest fires here and there are different climates here but some of the unmanaged forests in the Pacific Northwest for instance have grown up a very large number of small diameter trees that on the east side where it's a little drier can turn very quickly into forest fires and we've all been hearing about that over the last decade or so as the rate of forest fires have increased and there is a need for sustainable thinning and so one of that questions comes is how what do you do with that small diameter timber when you've got in this picture five or so small hemlock trees or fir trees or ponderosa pine or lodgepole pine growing very close to one another they need to have something done with them and something that's productive and useful for them and I'm excited about it because cross-laminated timber in particular can utilize those small diameter timber members this picture on the left here is a very close up picture of one of the sections of the cross-laminated timber panel that's in my house and that center curve if you take a look very quickly that's a piece of the blue beetle killed timber and it's a small tree you can tell by the diameter of that element and it's blue cast which is the blue beetle kill and it's put together cross-laminated into this sandwich of material here and it creates the binder, the strength for that and it poses a great use for that underutilized timber while on the outside you have the strength and so what it makes is this incredibly strong really large panels eight feet by 40 feet long and they're really light and they're really big and they're really strong and the excitement is how to use them because it's an entirely different thing I mean we talk about the wood in our education process well we did do some light wood frame kind of education but we never had an alternative material to deal with to make high rises out of or to mid-rise buildings or to pose against concrete and steel and it's an exciting idea then to begin to think about this but these small diameter pieces of timber then are woven together finger jointed, glue laminated together it's a beautiful tracery that ends up on the insides of these walls and that's the picture on the left it's kind of like a stitching that goes on but they're made together because this is just a little idea about how a picture of how these pieces are pressed together Melissa talked about the three, five, seven layers nine layers going together they're at cross-laminated so that they are stronger as a whole and they're very big as I mentioned these are my students from the University of Washington visiting DR Johnson's plant in Southern Oregon and then the other thing that's very exciting as an architect is that they get to be prefabricated and the issue for that is that we have a lot more control over the relationship of our design to the relationship of the production of these panels and that's a very exciting thing as an architect we kind of get to move in between that architect and contractor relationship and help really influence and ensure that the quality of our design ideas are met within the shop and it's an exciting thing to begin to bring these rural jobs also these relatively high tech lots of education behind some of these positions and this is my friend Thor DeVoe from StructureLam who was working with our house as the software is developed then to run all of the very, very large hundegra machines which cut the panels for the project and a little example of what that means this was a little tiny CAD drawing that I did for a panel in my house Thor put the CAD works together after my little hour and a half CAD drawing the big panels going through the hundegra machine on the right there out it comes to the shop to the construction site lands up on our site and ends up, lo and behold, as a panel in my daughter's bedroom and that all happens fairly quickly not quite as quickly as I mentioned it here but it's really fast but the reason as I mentioned that we're really interested as a profession is because we believe it can lower our carbon footprint of especially of our mid-rise to high-rise buildings and whether that's a number that's, say, 15 to 20% which often industry standards would say the studies are very complex to do and very difficult to do or as my students at the University of Washington kind of looked at, we found that maybe it was even 40% more carbon savings than for a mid-rise building that was made out of concrete or steel as you can see in this but again, this is just student work really the whole vision of this idea for cross-laminated timber is to be able to grow our cities out of a handful of seeds that can be planted in the forest and plus 50 years you have a renewable city so I'm gonna just talk about two little projects that we finished recently, a CLT house this is my house in Seattle it's a 1500 square foot house we finished it in 2015 my family and I have been living there for the last three years and we really love it, we love waking up in the early morning and feeling the feel of the wood underneath our feet and feeling the watching the light glancing across the beautiful wood walls and vaults in the house it's just some of the quick images of the interior of the house we've exposed it all in the inside covered it up on the outside it does need insulation and waterproofing but it does have its own R value which contributes to the insulation factor another project that we finished in 2016 was a freestanding wall of cross-laminated timber for a church in Bellevue, Washington and it's incredible, beautiful 40 foot high wall, 17 panels all slightly slightly altered by the prefabricated CNC machine process 17 against the natural light falling down we were also lucky enough to be the recipient of a grant from the Washington State Legislature which we were able to do two school editions in Eastern Washington, Washington State for elementary school kids about eight different classrooms and we did these very fast they were all modular also we could begin to replicate that design as we go forward I just wanted to show a couple of other projects that are also from our region in the Northwest Melissa mentioned Carbon 12 an eight-story residential condominium building first tech credit union an office building outside of Portland, Oregon 155,000 square feet was just finished a couple of months ago and then I finally want to get to this piece about the code element because of our early work with cross-laminated timber we were asked to sit on the ICC code committee which is a long word for a very administratively dense I should say policy committee that was designing code new codes for mid-rise to high-rise buildings anywhere between eight to 18 stories it was a very balanced committee it contained yes wood experts and architects and engineers but also concrete experts and steel industry experts as well as a whole host of fire representatives fire marshals from around the country who were concerned about the life safety issues we did perform that testing thanks to a lot of the funding that Melissa mentioned Lynn Lease actually built the project structures for us they were tested at the Bureau of Alcohol Fire Tobacco and Firearms outside of DC here and they were intense they were five tests over the summer of 2017 we burnt up five structures and then we paired them and built them again and most of them didn't burn down in fact there was just a little bit of charring on the top layer usually about an inch and a half after four hours of burning that very, very, very high heat was damaged from those smart lamp panels and what that led us to as a committee was to determine that yes indeed it was safe to build tall wood buildings and the importance of this is again as I mentioned the carbon quality of it but we introduced three new building code types for A, for B and for C which gets kind of geeky from the code area but they basically take the existing building codes which you can build up to nine story up to seven stories and go from up to nine for four C, up to 12 for four B and up to 18 for four A and all of them have different levels of protection on them and so my office and I and my students we did a little bit of work on what the amount of protection would be required and how that would look like and these are just some examples from four C which is the eight story building and almost completely exposed except for the elevator core and the stairway exits there and you can see all of the wood exposed on the right and for four A, the amount of gypsum wall board that would be necessary to protect the existing timber the mass timber from any life safety events that might work. These codes are really in them we're very excited about them because we're right in the middle of passing them we went through and I trust they will be passed but we went through a big committee action this was a photo Jeff and I were giving testimony last April in Columbus, Ohio and there's testimony that's going on tomorrow at 2.30 and Jeff's gonna be there I'm gonna try to be there to actually do the floor vote from the code code committee hearings and then once the online voting is accounted towards the end of October, early November if we pass by 50% they will become the new life safety codes for tall wood buildings as of the IBC 2021 codes which is very exciting to sense that progress but I just wanted to end by just realizing the breadth of this material it's not just a new material it's not just a new product that's emerged on it it's a really a different way of systemically thinking about the connections between our forests and our rural communities as has been mentioned our job markets in those rural communities and the health of those forests that went all the way to the beauty of our city and health of our cities and our buildings in our most dense urban areas and I'm excited and thrilled to have been part of this group moving forward so thank you very much Thank you so much Susan I'm glad you weave together those issues of sustainability and aesthetics all these things are important the safety issues and how we can get all these performance goals working together speaking of aesthetics this is a beautiful room thank you again Morgan and so I think we can probably have a lot of questions for you as well I am delighted now to introduce Jeff Morrow Jeff is construction manager for Lend Lease specializing in the construction of mass timber hotels for for DOD the privatization of army lodging program and this is a unique program I think Jeff can tell you more about that Jeff also pioneered new approaches for energy and resource conservation in Lend Lease's groundbreaking zero energy homes project certainly something that we're interested in as well so Jeff thank you for being here thank you good afternoon thank you for your time to come here on a beautiful afternoon here in DC so I'm going to be speaking you've had on the Sistine panel you've had someone talking from the Forest Service you've had you know from the supply side and then from the architecture side and I'm going to put on my construction management hat and the development hat I'm with Lend Lease we have 13,000 employees across the globe in four continents and we are a leading property and infrastructure group globally in the United States this is a map of where our operations are here in the United States we primarily function as a construction manager but we're now getting into the development as well but we have offices in New York, Boston here in Washington DC, Chicago, LA and San Francisco and then I am based out of Nashville, Tennessee which is a home of where we specialize in P3 partnerships and especially with the US military for the privatized Army lodging program which we call PAL program for short and we also are partnering with them on the military housing privatization initiative but our office is also the center of excellence for the mass timber movement here in the United States for Lend Lease we have the expertise that we provide to the other regional markets as they pursue those projects so globally with what we've done with CLT around the world five years ago Lend Lease got on the map with the development of Forte it was a 10-story residential building in Melbourne, Australia it was a hundred acre redevelopment that we were doing there and at the time it was the world's tallest modern timber building Andrew Wall had done a nine-story in London then the year later we did a 10-story in Australia and there's a picture of the interior and then that same development we did a three-story library community center called Library at the Dock in Melbourne and that had a lot of exposed glue laminated columns and beams and CLT floors for a beautiful look and then two years ago we did construction at the International House in Sydney, Australia it was in the central business district it was a big parcel on the waterfront that we were developing if you look on the picture on the left there's a lot of tall concrete high-rises behind it those are about 60-story buildings that we were doing in Sydney those were part of our development but we also had a little postage-sized lot right by the road where it was going to be over the underground parking garage and we decided let's put in a lighter weight for a seven-story CLT office building there and that's been a success that's been fully leased out and on the other side of that little pedestrian bridge if you look closely on the other side there's another identical mirror-sized lot that we're going to put in another building just like in another seven stories starting later this year and the picture on the right shows the interior of how it looks with the exposed timber structure as well as the exposed ductwork and utilities currently we're in the process of wrapping up 25 King in Brisbane, Australia it is a 10-story commercial office building it's the largest and tallest commercial office building made out of mass timber in the globe and there's a picture rendering of what it would look like when it's finished as well for both of those are renderings here's a picture from a few you know last year when we were building the construction with the superstructure and then there it is once the superstructure is completed with the the glass and glazing and then here's a picture of what the interior was looking like just a few months ago beautiful exposed timber structure with large beams and columns as well as CLT floors in this case we'll cover up the CLT floors we'll build up the floor assembly but the underside will be exposed so you'll have a beautiful looking wood ceiling we're also begun breaking ground in London on the timber yard a multi-phase development there and then one of our bigger iconic projects of note is the Google headquarters an 11-story building near King's Cross Station in London that's going to be a combination of CLT and with concrete as well as part of the structure it's a unique building over 870,000 square foot building that we're quite proud of so in the Americas we think okay this is what we've done globally what do we do here in the United States so here's a map again showing the offices of where our business units are around the country and then the next slide shows a picture of where we either have completed CLT projects or we're about to begin or that's in our committed portfolio for the U.S. Army and you can see we've our first project was redstone arsenal that we completed several years ago last fall we completed last spring we completed the superstructure up at Fort Drum, New York and it is slated for our ribbon cutting next month and I would never recommend building a building in upstate New York in the dead of winter but we had to start that we started going vertical on Halloween a nice trick or treat for us and we had to endure the whole winter in upstate New York through 120 inches of snow and 18 to 20 inches worth of rain during the few months that we were on that job site and so we were able to prove with mass timber that we could build it anywhere in any climate conditions in the worst of conditions and we could build up to minus 20 degrees but we had to shut down with the when the winds would whip off of Lake Ontario and when we had high winds the CLT panels would become a bit of a kite when they were hanging off of a crane and so we would have to stop the crane operations because you wouldn't think an 8,000 pound panel would actually fly but they do so anyway this is where our locations are and the first project we did was at redstone arsenal in Alabama near Huntsville and that's a very non-descript looking hotel four-story 92 key room hotel it's a candlewood suites hotel with an extended stay model it's got a little kitchen head in there and for our soldiers that they're staying on the military installations oftentimes the department of defense moves their soldiers around for training they won't move them but they'll sign them for temporary training to sign them so that they could last anywhere from two weeks to six months and then those hotels under this privatization agreement we have it the kids they have kitchens for an extended stay so that the soldiers can start to cook some other own food there and this is a slides showing the breakdown of where those locations are in terms of the sizes and the extent the room counts we keep gradually getting bigger we start with four stories at redstone four stories at Fort Drum we're going to do five story at Joint Base of Lewis McCord we actually mobilized there yesterday to start putting up panels there vertically we'll be going vertically there in the next week or so we're currently doing our site prep for that for the slab foundations and then later in February we'll be going down to Fort Jackson South Carolina where we'll be again constructing two five-story buildings out of mass timber and then in 2020 we will begin construction on two six-story buildings out of mass timber at Fort Bragg, North Carolina so we start to look and see where CLT can go and could CLT work for every project not necessarily but where do we think that it could go and every project has different criteria and requirements as to what you need the materials to do and what the expectations and the performance of the building are and so this Venn diagram kind of illustrates where you start to have a few of these factors you might want to consider using CLT and every project has a different story in fact every project that we're doing for the Department of Defense has a different rationale and reason as to why we're using CLT what is the primary reason it could be because of the poor soils and foundations which is what our Australians were experiencing it could also be the high labor costs which we were experiencing in multiple markets in the United States but also the blast performance that we're getting out of CLT and that is unlocking the potential for us to develop some previously undesirable sites because we had physical setbacks that we had to do so speaking of blast protection two years ago we partnered with Woodworks who had been partnered with the US Forest Service to help do some research and development of what the blast performance of CLT could do so we built these three little structures simulating three different manufacturers of CLT from North America and then we subjected them to a battery of blast tests at Tyndall Air Force Base the Air Forces Engineering Group there the Air Force there at Tyndall likes to blow things up and they were more than willing and able partner to do that for us so it was subjected to different levels of explosives to see how it would perform and so that and then was also done in conjunction with the US Army Corps of Engineers Protective Design Center of Excellence so that data would then go to them to help be utilized for future buildings knowing how the performance of that would go at the time we knew how steel would work we knew how wood stud framing would work we would you know we knew how concrete work but the CLT was a bit different of a challenge for material with that and in Europe they didn't have to worry about that but in the United States for our work for the Army client we do have to worry about blast performance and the buildings to resist progressive collapse and especially since you know this our buildings have to be able to withstand a bomb blast be it a chemical you know chemical truck bomb fertilizer in the parking lot or a briefcase brought into the building can the building withstand the blast so that people can survive and evacuate the structure and we found that the CLT works out exceptionally well and we're able to reduce some of our setbacks where we had previous site constraints issue before where your parking lot would have to be so far away from a building now we can start to bring that in so again with our undesirable lots we can make those a little bit more attractive and feasible to work out for us so when we started looking at the benefits of CLT we compared what we were doing with CLT versus our other pipeline with our other hotels that we were doing for the US Army of similar size and shape that we were building out of metal studs and we started to find out that the buildings were able to go quicker with fewer people and actually our buildings were actually getting a little bit larger but we built our hotel our first prototype with the CLT was 14% larger but we built it with a 37% faster with a 44% reduction in man hours and that's when we were on something and we thought that was really good with that but it is a disruptor in the industry here's a picture of the redstone showing how the panel is going down an 8 foot by 50 foot panel 8,000 pounds going to sit down with the railings in place you can see the walls are CLT and then we also built last year with the woodworks we did this fire test structure that has been alluded to several times so we can say we built more CLT buildings than anyone else in the United States most of them aren't standing anymore because they were either blown up or set on fire but we can say that we've done most of them we've done more than anyone else actually the building material here was actually after all the tests was disassembled and it was sent to Yale School of Architecture where they were trying to repurpose the material for some micro housing projects so there's a fire test where it shows a fire in the kitchen spreading to the living area to the sleeping area and then see how did the fires perform and we found that the CLT worked very well in these fire tests they were the most extensively tested fire tests in the most heavily censored fire tests in the history of the ATF research lab over 300 sensors were in this building to see how the wood the heat would transfer from one side of the wood through the other side of the wood and did wood act as a good thermal insulator in the event of a fire and it did work exceptionally well and the test results were then commissioned you know they were posted on the AWC's tall wood site the test reports were then bundled up for the ad hoc committee that Susan had mentioned before and this is a proposed framework for the new building codes that go in for the hearings will be tomorrow begin tomorrow in Richmond to help change the hopefully the 2021 building codes to allow a more prescriptive pathway for taller buildings and with that I'm done thanks so much Jeff so I think we got a great overview of the material what it is and how it's being applied from different perspectives of the building industry and some of the different qualities and performance values I know just hearing you all made me think of these devastating hurricanes and storms of course the wildfires and about resilience so I certainly have a lot of questions but I'm going to open it up for your questions so I will yeah I wanted to to mention the codes but I'll save that but anyone lots of let's start in the front yes sir probably going to go probably going to go to Jeff about it has to do with the fire retardancy aspect based upon your testing and also on your testing Ms. Jones comparable to in a say mixed use building where you have commercial and first floor and residential above typically you will have a construct construction of concrete of some sort and steel on the first floor we see that traditionally in DC of course then we'll see wood structure in the top so would that be still recommended because I assume that there's some right fire safety aspect of that approach and then also structurally how would the CLT compare to a rebar reinforced traditional concrete structure in an earthquake test or in a hurricane test which obviously can happen and thirdly what about in the CLT what are the actual chemicals that you're using in that that bonds the wood is that a big part of the fire retardancy that's more than one question let me see if I can answer these and Susan feel free to chime in as needed as well so the first part of it had to do with the the podium construction as you typically see here in a lot of markets around the United States the first story is concrete and then they typically go with wood that's because you've typically required to have a three hour fire separation so that if you have a fire in the restaurant that it doesn't affect the residents above you could you replace that with concrete with with a CLT the answer would be yes whether or not that's the most practical and feasible option would have to be done on a case by case basis but you would have to provide a level of fire performance and encapsulation to get that three hour separation so that would be have to that could be done either way oftentimes with the concrete you're going to be using your concrete for your foundations for especially if you're doing underground parking garage and then working your way up so you could easily do the podium and then stop there and then go with the timber that's what we did at Forte and we've done on some other projects as well so it could be either way let's see the other the structural strength performances of the CLT what we found is in certain applications the CLT can have the same strength and performance of concrete but for a fourth of the weight and that's where there's some benefits for that especially if you're building in areas with poor building soils that was our primary motivating factor in when we did Forte the soils had the soils were contaminated and they had poor bearing capacity and we were spending a lot of time and money engineering foundations to support a heavy concrete structure and our engineer said wouldn't it just be nice if we built ourselves a lighter building so if we could build a building with a fourth of the dead weight that would normally be there as opposed to concrete that's where we thought we had something to that was our primary motivating factor there so how does it perform with seismic there has been some seismic testing with the CLT it can perform well I think one of the key things will be as we move forward as we start looking at resiliency right now with the building codes is that we design you know our buildings are required to survive an event so that the occupants inside can safely get out we are not required under our buildings to survive and keep the building in use afterwards and that regard that's regardless of what building material you are using and so when you are trying to specify the design of the building what you're willing to pay for with the design and the engineering and construction of that building is are you building the built-in life resiliency for that building so that after you have a major magnitude of earthquake or major weather event can the building stay occupational afterwards in Christchurch, New Zealand when they had the bigger earthquake a few years ago no one died during the earthquake but the building is all state standing but 70% of the buildings had to be torn down because they were beyond repair and so a point moving forward that we in the building industry and the development industry have to ask ourselves is you know eventually when do we want to you know build that in and when do we want to pay for those costs that come with that but in terms of the performance of CLT versus the concrete versus the other traditional materials it holds up well and the testing that we've had thus far verifies that and then I believe a third question had to do with the adhesives how are the adhesives the wood is a very sustainable product the adhesives are coming from I believe one to two primary manufacturers and they are safe inert materials that you know don't give off the gases that they're used a lot and they came they started in Europe and they're making their way over here and they now have also with improved fire performance as well so that to eliminate those concerns that's a really important question Todd especially with new products entering the building market and what's really important to remember is that these products have been used in Europe for the last 30 years and they're also using the same adhesives that are glue lamb beams and our glue lamb columns have been using for the last 100 years and so this is a familiar adhesive that we all as an industry and as inhabitants of these buildings know and understand and I can speak from experiencing that awful off gas the new car smell kind of thing that you sometimes get in new offices or new buildings all I could smell when I built my house was that beautiful smell of light pine in there it's a really inert as Jeff mentioned beautiful product those are good questions thank you yes sir Susan you mentioned you built your home out of CLT do you see an application for future application for the broader residential market in housing or would this be something that remains limited for you know higher end homes I can't wait to do a broader application for the residential market one of the things that's really exciting as I mentioned is the modular aspect of it whether it's a flat pack where the panels are delivered to the site but they're the same panels that you made the last house out of etc or an actual volumetric prefabricated modular unit there is huge potential for those two ways to do for housing and you know I think we're really excited to see what Katera might be doing with this method there is some manufacturers in Europe that are exploring this and in our own little shop we've got three projects small little projects in conceptual level to explore this on an urban infill tight market where it might just go into a small site or maybe it's a small residential project for a client that we're looking at right now who is really she's really very interested in replicating building her own house and then having that replicated for broader markets so I would love to talk to you further about that if it's your interest thank you I think back there thank you Russell Edgar from the University of Maine I have a question for Susan so we do a lot of research on cross-liminated timber including the static testing for the blast testing that was done with woodworks and in your neck of the woods it seems timber is accepted on a whole other level and the culture sees the tie-in between the forest and these products what kind of advice could you give for the eastern seaboard to increase demand that's a great question we had an amazing experience both in Oregon and in Washington state thanks to some valuable wood innovation grants that helped build a community coalition between that was headed up by a non-profit in Washington state called Fortera and they were great at assembling a broad coalition of community partners from sure timber folks but also architects engineers community folks who are very interested in sustainability which I know Maine is also a leader in and really helping to promote the understanding of it because it is so systemic it's also a little complex and you hear different pieces of it and frankly the industry is great has been super supportive about it but you also want to appeal to people's better natures and really as a sustainable renewable product that brings together all of these values from rural communities to healthier cities it's an amazing story but to get that story across it's both public relations and it's also hard science and it's being very careful with your environmental partners to work together towards that highly sustainable method that was very effective in Washington state and we have been really lucky to be a partner in that area and to help lead that area and I think that soft science piece is a really important aspect of it I don't person I hope I don't offend too many people in this room but I'll probably about half of you I don't personally think the forest industry has been particularly good at expressing and communicating their very important new role in our fight against climate change forests are some of our best weapons that we have in the next 5 to 10 years about how to combat for climate change and while they know that I don't know that the general populace knows that as much and so this virtuous circle of building, planting, building, planting is an amazing circle that really needs I believe to get out more to the general public because there is the quick answer is like oh god we can't cut down a tree but it's which trees are you cutting down and how are you cutting them down and that is a very nuanced public message that the more we can communicate that as industry experts and coalition members I think the excitement is really going to build and we've seen that now in Washington state our commissioner for public lands Hilary Franz has been in Washington state is just advocating a new bill to our Washington state legislature to do exactly that to have those firefighters who are really busy in the summer but not so busy in December actually be on staff if should this bill pass this fall or winter to stay and start planting trees all winter long fitting some of them out and planting new ones and that's a very exciting thing that I'm optimistic will pass in Washington state and could be a great model for a lot of different forest based states in the country thank you yep I'm Bob Hershey I'm a consultant in these various tests that you've been running how has the data been spread has it been all one spot or spreads depending on the construction and the materials could I ask a clarifying question what what do you mean how is the data been spread how do you mean communicated no I mean or tested the spread of the data and the testing oh yeah all come out the same value or there's some plus 10 and some minus 10 and some plus 15 um I'm not sure if anybody can on this panel can completely answer the science of that Mr. Hershey but I will say as somebody mentioned I think it was Jeff there were 300 different data points in those those four five tests that were placed they were placed inside the walls so in between the gypsum wall board and the timber in multiple different places and I think some cases inside the timber the mass timber themselves and all of that was published in a very voluminous which is why I don't have all the designs behind me but a very voluminous test protocol of about 50 to 100 pages which is available online as part of the ICC the international code councils tall wood building ad hoc committee reports because it was a very important piece of data it's all publicly available and you'll probably understand it better than I did to add to that I would say you know the tests are I think for the most part I can't answer to all the specifics but they're they're falling in line with what we expected there's been a lot of tests done on this material in Europe and a lot in Canada but they use metric and you know a lot of times here in the United States it's like well what are the test results say for the test conducted here under our parameters because they have we have to set different building codes and they you know we in Canada US and Canada are very similar but the Europeans are different with what they require and so even though they would have they would look at it one way here in North America we would look at something differently and if you extrapolate a lot of that data fell in line with what we expected it to be there's no major outliers in terms of oh you know here's an oopsie or something like that it seems everything seems to corroborate itself but the issue was it's just creating enough volume of work from the from the North American side especially the United States side is to you know what are those benchmarks and metrics that we needed to meet I'm going to add on to that um we it's sitting on that code committee for two and a half years probably the first year of those extensive meetings conference calls was based on the fire marshals and fire community about one-third of the committee designing those tests so we architects contractors really had very little to do with it they said we want real life American style fires I was like well isn't fire fire you know we would ask it was like well no I mean what if there's there's no ventilation you know you gotta have a door that's open to the con to the corridor so you have wind coming maybe there's a maybe there's a window open so that the fire as we all know blows it burns more intensively and more heatedly when there's ventilation and draft conditions and when there's a corridor to contain that that ventilation and then have it push through the apartment dwelling so they understood that as real active firefighters much better than many of us did and they demanded that those conditions be built into those tests which we all complied with and Jeff and his company built those just the way the fire marshals wanted it built okay we got a question back there hi I'm Victoria Turnio I'm with the Department of Energy and I'm a little curious what is the next frontier what sort of research needs to be done in order to make this an even better building material or what's the next product out there that's incorporating what is a building material we can both do it oh yeah well I would say I'm not sure where the next frontier is just yet I mean there's lots of ideas I think it's more of a matter of just getting increased penetration and use of the material as it currently is and then let's start let's start expanding it more I would highly recommend that we do you know the the crawl walk run phase and keep working on the basis of skills and share those skills and disseminate throughout the workplace and keep doing the next level of innovation that's how I would recommend it there's the Europeans are experiencing experimenting with a lot of different things but I would say let's get all familiar with how the materials work and let's go from there it was the longest time we were building with steel and concrete for for 80 years before we decided hey let's use it an exposed material and then you know making and seeing what all concrete and steel could do and so the a lot of the things with mass timber is that there is a push to see how far we can push it and then but we also know that we can safely do it up to 18 stories pretty easily we've that's been proven with the Brock Commons project and the other some other projects around the world as well so I would I would recommend you know for the next step let's let's get really good at this one and then we'll take it to the next one but and and decide where do we need it to go just one comment on this and this isn't differ from what Jeff just said about that you know wait until we get our experience with the products are going entrepreneurs won't don't wait and a perfect example is for years lumber and lion Oregon everybody else was focusing on nail laminated timber cross laminated timber they went to Europe and came back and they make what they call mass plywood panels to compete with CLT basically so I think the entrepreneurs as this is coming along they're they're there's a lot of people thinking it out and a lot of research going on and hopefully that's a good thing for the overall marketplace by having that type of competition if I could just want a little bit more you're from the Department of Energy one of the things that's really exciting these days is the emerging technical merits of building science and so a lot of it is not about the new shiny new product that's coming out there which I guess it sounds like we're talking about a new shiny product but it's kind of an old product with the wood but really it's how to use those products better and so one of the things that has been used in central Europe a lot and emerged out of that area is passive house techniques and we tried we used a fair amount of that on our house with extra exterior insulation very solid wall construction really high r values r39 r47 roofs etc that really then create that extra insulative value and so when you combine that with the r value of five that a three three fly panel has you get some very solid walls and without trying very hard we have an almost passive house and they're really effective for northern climates particularly a little harder in more warmer humid climates but fantastic which passive house is well known in the U.S. but the more help we can get to spread the value of that the better as advocates of energy efficiency and renewable energy I love that answer thank you so much that contribution and and your question thank you very much and how these these qualities contribute to the the durability and efficiency and so many other things and it's a great segue to Terry's question from passive house Institute I'm Terry Hill with the passive house Institute one of the products that I've seen in Europe is wood based insulation is it coming to North America I wish I'd known about it earlier when I did the house we did mineral wool on our on our house but right as soon as I got the mineral wool to the site I had a visit from the wood based insulation folks the exciting thing about that is it's a it's a lower carbon insulation versus the mineral wool so that also contributes to the lower carbon profile construction I believe at this time it's still a little more expensive than rock wool but I may be wrong about that but I would be very encouraging of using that material again to to really round out that lower carbon profile just to add in a little bit on that not our upcoming conference in March on mass timber a company called Stichl at Austria is going to be there and they make the wood fiber insulation other questions yes sir any type of in the specific Northwest particularly you've seen any supply chain grow up around the CLT manufacturers coming at us from an economic development perspective I mean I think I think everything that you saw on those maps was pretty exciting you saw a manufacturer in Southern Oregon two manufacturers proposed in in Eastern Washington another one in Montana and that's just in I mean when I built my house we didn't have any manufacturers west of the Mississippi except for smart structure lamb up in British Columbia so now I can actually get a bid from hopefully like two or three people instead of just having one company come along but there's also a large number of folks that are working on it from the AENC the architecture engineering and contracting communities and they're continuing to to grow and flourish and to provide almost a brand new service in many ways and I wouldn't be surprised if there were some of those offshoots both both from more permeable water barriers and more permeable insulation materials the wood based et cetera as another one more integration with more building products that are more compatible with this material as a as a growth of this industry this is Melissa and also we've just been at this for about three years so we have a huge opportunity this is just the early the earlier adopters that are getting into the game just give it you know five more years and we are going to see I think an explosion especially in the Pacific Northwest where we have the supply a huge amount of supply great question thank you others anyone again this Todd if there's any incentives right now for East Coast architects to consider some of the vendors or manufacturers that you're talking about and maybe the government might have an interest in it who else do you think might might be interested in incentivizing can you repeat that again I apologize sure it's okay is there an incentive for since Susan you're you're West Coast mostly but and it's good that you're out here I saw you at Catholic University and I was the first time I'd seen some of your work and it's obviously extraordinary work that you've done so when you have architects here based here that want to use CLT but is there an incentive from the government or otherwise private industry whether etc to use it right now so we have our wood innovations grants which are a great opportunity for folks that are looking to get into little bit more in depth for mass timber so say that you're an architect that's looking to start some drawings but you don't have that you need a little bit of extra funding so you can help convince that client that CLT or mass timber is the way to go that would be a totally appropriate ask for this grant program if you are a developer that's looking to get into mass timber and have a certain idea or a little chunk of funding that you need to get over that hurdle that's what we're here for so these grants they're about 250,000 dollars we will likely be awarding about 8 million dollars that's what we've been doing the past several years and they are for for just that to help support this new market so if you have any ideas or questions and want to talk more in depth I'd be very very happy to chat with you and for anybody else who has ideas about potential applications one other thing along that line is that Woodworks if you've probably heard of them they actually provide free technical assistance for architects and they've got offices all over the country I didn't mention it earlier and I really should have is that our company Forest Business Network owns the mass international mass timber conference but Woodworks and FBN our company co-produced so I was interrupting Melissa from hearing your question because I was asking about the Timber Innovation Act and I wondered if anyone was curious about that and if you could speak more to that or or Morgan that was in the Farm Bill well the the Timber Innovation Act is a is a great piece of legislation that is highlighting work in technology transfer education research and development all about mass timber so the fact that this legislation gives us kind of the the go ahead to go forth and prosper in this sector is fantastic we've been working in the sector because it's we see the benefits for jobs we see the benefits for the land we see the benefits for communities but we have been deciding to do this because of those benefits not because somebody is telling us to do it so having some you know having Congress behind us really helps thank you sounds like you definitely have one senator at least who's really behind you okay so it's getting to be that time last chance for questions I did want to mention also before we close that EESI and E for the future will present a briefing this Thursday on the growing number of jobs in energy efficiency so it's Thursday 3 p.m. in Rayburn house office building and notices are outside and I just wanted to thank you all for being here and for watching online and many thanks again to our fabulous panel thank you all so much