 All right, here we go. We're gonna go ahead and get started. We're a few minutes late. I'm getting the thumbs up from Troy. That's a positive sign. Thumbs down from Troy is not a positive sign. Thank you for joining us for our briefing today. Updates from Rural America. This is the third briefing in our Briefing Series about IIJA and IRA progress report. The first one was about a year ago. Last one, and it was focused primarily on what's in the IRA and the IIJA and the status at that point of the home energy rebates at DOE. We did one in September on tax incentives and here we are talking about rural programs. And by we, I'm talking about the Environmental Energy Study Institute and I'm Dan Bersett. I'm the president of EESI and really, really thrilled to have you all with us in the room and in our online audience. I'd like to start by thanking Representative Tonko and the Sustainable Energy and Environment Coalition for helping us once again with the room today. It's a great place to hold briefings. EESI is celebrating 40 years of congressional education this year in 2024. We were founded in the early 1980s by a bipartisan group of members of Congress who knew that Congress, in particular congressional staff, needed access to science-based information from a nonpartisan source about climate energy and environmental topics. And so EESI was started and our work got underway in 1984. And today we are doing exactly what we were doing back then, although with the aids of additional technology and things. What does congressional education look like? Well, it looks like this, lots and lots and lots of briefings. We hold a briefing about once every two weeks, if you believe that. The first briefing of the year was about the Fifth National Climate Assessment, a great way to start the year by getting a level set about what actually faces us when it comes to climate change. We've also done briefings about the DOE Energy Earth Shots Initiative. That was a really good one. We have a briefing coming up next week about the Sustainable Energy and America Factbook, always a good one. We do that one every year with our friends at the Business Council for Sustainable Energy. If you missed any of these, or maybe there's a briefing coming up that you just can't get to, that's okay. You can always watch it online and everything is available in terms of webcasts and presentation materials and additional resources. If you visit our website, and that is www. EESI.org. Visiting the website is a great way to stay up to date, but if I could make a recommendation, I would sign up for our bi-weekly newsletter Climate Change Solutions. Comes out every two weeks. It's a great way to keep up with everything that we're doing at EESI. And we also have lots of great resources and tools like hearing trackers and legislation trackers. And we actually have every two weeks an IIJA and IRA tracker. So you can keep up with some of the biggest announcements coming out of the agencies on a regular basis about what they're doing with the work or what the resources that Congress has provided. We understand that for a congressional staff person, you need this information when your boss comes to you late in the day with a tough question. And if it's a question about climate change, I hope you'll come to us to help you find the answer. You can count on us to be timely, accessible, relevant, and practical, absolutely. We also have a lot of practical resources, including a series of side-by-side-by-side comparison charts. They'll be coming out as soon as the Farm Bill text starts to be released. And that will help you compare not only with what the Senate and the House are proposing with what the two chambers are proposing and how they are different from one another. We also do a lot of really great fact sheets and articles, and I have to show you this one because it's out on the table. And I got my way, my colleagues printed it in color. This is our jobs fact sheet. This just came out. Look how nice that looks. You can, with just these two pages, you can get up to speed on energy efficiency jobs, energy transmission, distribution storage jobs, renewable energy jobs, also adaptation and resilience jobs. We don't always think of that part of the climate sector, but it absolutely counts and it's one that's growing because climate impacts are here now. So, great job to Nicole, my colleague, who is in the lead of putting this together, but this is the kind of stuff that we like to do and this one is just how look how nice it is. It looks so good. Anyway, back to the briefing. We also have a podcast. That is a great thing too. We just did an issue. Actually on a rural issue, we had someone from Bonterra talking about sustainability and winemaking, or as I like to call it, study juice. And that's a great one. But today we're talking about rural programs that were enacted as part of the IIJA, or Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, and IRA, Inflation Reduction Act. And there are billions and billions and billions of dollars in the IIJA and IRA intended to support clean energy and climate resilience in rural areas. Why rural areas? Well, because rural energy burdens in rural areas are very, very high. Rural family has a rural energy burden about 40% higher than their urban counterparts. And so we have to make sure that we're paying close attention to the specific needs of rural areas. The joke is, you visit one rural area, you visited one rural area. And so these programs have to be not just set up quickly, but also set up in a way to maximize these investments. This is the biggest set of investments in many, many decades. A lot of people would say since the rural electrification acts back in the 1930s. So these are, in many cases, long overdue dollars. And thanks to the great work of agencies like USDA and DOE, they're working hard to get these dollars in place. And what our panelists will help us understand today is what we should be aware of as we're tracking these benefits and that these investments will provide what's happened so far, but also importantly, what's to come. So before we get to our panelists, I have two other things I wanted to say. One is we have a survey. If you can't make it all the way to the end of the briefing today, we'd still really appreciate that if you shared your feedback about the briefing with us. This is less than two minutes and I promise we read every response. So if you have a moment to take the survey, we really appreciate it. We also have a nice in-person audience. We have a robust online audience. If you have questions, we'll have a Q and A. For people in the room, we'll have someone with a microphone and you can ask the question that way. If you're in our online audience, you can send us an email. The email address to use is ask that's ASK at ESI.org and we'll do our best to incorporate your comments questions into the Q and A session and we'll also be on social media, Blue Sky, Threads, Instagram, all of that. Our first presenter today is Sandra Pirahit, excuse me, Sandra. Sandra is E2's director of federal advocacy. She started her career in the private sector working in the Environmental Claims Division of the Insurance Company, Travelers Inc. She transitioned to nonprofit advocacy working with nonpartisan organizations large and small from the National Parks Conservation Association to the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound. Just before joining E2, Sandra worked for 12 years at Defenders of Wildlife, most recently serving as its government relations legislative council and she is going to give you a very great presentation about all the cool work happening around this issue at E2. So, Sandra, I'll welcome you to the lectern and look forward to your presentation. Oh, that's been done. All right. Well, good afternoon, everybody and I need to start by thanking EESI for obviously inviting me to speak but also just for hosting this briefing and nonpartisan briefings in general. I think it's an important topic and it's a timely topic so glad to be a part of today's discussion. Rural America, what exactly are we talking about and why does it matter? So, I'm going to give you a few just baseline statistics. 97% of U.S. land mass is rural. That's over 40 million people, 20 million schools, businesses, homes, farms. Rural America is the people and the land that produces the food and fiber that we all rely on. As Dan mentioned, rural America is also a place of challenge. We talked about the energy burden but we also, these are places that have faced many of them decades of population decline. Rural areas account for 80% of persistent poverty counties. That's after a recent decline in rural poverty and in addition to all of that, farming is getting harder for many. Since 2013, more than half of U.S. farms have been operating in the red and since 2011, more than 100,000 farms have ceased operational together. The reality is that for farmers here in the U.S., costs are rising from fertilizer prices to insurance and layered on top of that is the rise in extreme weather. This makes it much harder to rely on the way things have always been and still make a profit. This slide shows the 19 disasters in 2022 that were over a billion dollars. So you'll see drought, wildfires, floods, tornadoes, hurricanes. That's just becoming more and more frequent. In 2023, they were even more. These events impact, they hurt farmers' bottom lines and they drive up food costs for everybody else. Today's discussion, despite that intro, is not a doom and gloom conversation. Today's discussion is not about the plight of rural America. The contrary. Today's discussion is about real federal investments that are addressing these issues, investments that are harnessing rural opportunities and improving the economic resilience of rural communities, the lives of rural America and our national food security. So my organization, E2, we're about 10,000 business leaders from across the economy, including farmers, ag tech folks, people in rural America. And we took a look at some of those federal policies, some of those major investments. I encourage you to read the full report, but I've got 10 minutes, so I'm gonna give you some highlights. We looked at three major provisions, tax incentives, rural conservation funding, and rural clean energy investment. And I'm gonna start with our tax incentives. Be careful, there are lots of numbers coming, but I will translate them. We took a snapshot of the major clean energy manufacturing project announcements at the one year mark of the Inflation Reduction Act to assess what impact they had specifically on rural America. And it turns out, it's a lot. The report details that one in four of large scale clean energy projects announced in the first year of the IRA are located in demographically rural areas. More than 50 total projects in 21 states. That's more than $20 billion in investment in rural areas. Again, that's year one. More than 67,000 new jobs, including more than 21,000 permanent jobs that will pay nearly $2 billion to workers each year. And almost 5 billion in new tax revenues in the near term and another 700 million every year in revenue as these projects go into operation. So whether you think of the short term infusion in construction, which is why there are two numbers here. There's sort of a construction phase and then there's the operations phase. So if you look at the short term infusion of construction phase or the longer run benefits of the operations phase, these are all good numbers for rural America. They are also more than good numbers. I wanna flag a couple of things and just sort of give you a little bit of a glimpse behind what these numbers are. The first thing I wanna flag, and I'm by showing you more numbers, but I'm gonna speak to you in things that aren't numbers. The first thing I wanna flag is the in-depth jobs impact on communities with an example. About a year after the IRA passed, the auto company here announced a $217 million expansion of an auto factory in rural Georgia to build EVs. The expansion will add 200 direct jobs. But while Kia designs and assembles cars, they rely on local suppliers, Hyundai for seats, auto parts and other components. And lo and behold, Hyundai is now expanding too and they will add another 100 jobs. That's hundreds of new workers who will also buy burgers in local restaurants, get movie tickets and buy gym memberships and put their kids in sports teams, all of which creates jobs and creates community. So when you look at numbers like this and your eyes glaze over and you see things like direct, indirect and induced jobs, what we're talking about is the direct job of a factory worker who's working at Kia, the indirect job of the suppliers that are supplying Kia and the induced jobs of the restaurateur and the gym membership guy, all of whom benefit from the tax incentives that we put just towards manufacturing and growing the economy. So tax incentives are bringing back manufacturing jobs but they're also spurring local jobs on Main Street in rural communities across the country. The second thing I wanna highlight is the thing that I wobbled under and read and that's taxes. Yes, I can see all of you are either shivering or you haven't done your taxes or your eyes are glazing over because it's taxes but this is tax revenue and it's really important when it comes to rural communities because many small rural towns are challenged to pay for basic services like teachers, police and firefighters. With smaller populations, they have less tax base to carry the burden of keeping up roads and schools and libraries and emergency services. When these major projects move and they instantly diversify and expand the tax base. So this here shows that during that construction phase, these rural projects you'll see about 994 million or basically a billion dollars in taxes. We'll see that for about five years. That's more than the annual tax generated by the nation's forestry industry for context. And this is just the beginning. This is just the first year of projects announced. The state and local portion can start to fund fire trucks, upgrade public facilities and over the long run when you get to the operational phase, you're talking about revenues to pay for salaries of teachers and the operating costs of those services. These numbers are big and there are lots of them but they're also meaningful and they're only just beginning. So when you hear of tax incentives and clean energy manufacturing and production tax credits and EV tax credits and domestic content and you think generic economy, but our report shows, our analysis shows that that incentive, those incentives are really having an outsized impact on rural America. The second IRA policy that I wanted to touch on is conservation funding. Let me go there. There's about $20 billion in the IRA for extremely popular and completely voluntary programs in farming communities across the country that advance farming practices, conservation farming practices like cover crops or low till crop rotations, integration of livestock, et cetera. For those of you that don't like numbers, I won't put up another instant chart. I'm gonna introduce you to Lucinda Stunkel. Lucinda is a great farmer in Palmer, Kansas. She grows oats, wheat, grain, sorghum, soybeans, alfalfa, and she has about a thousand acre farm in North Central Kansas. Lucinda was part of a conservation program known as the Soil Health Demonstration Trial and was designed to expand and study the use of regenerative ag practices. After the program, this is what Lucinda said. She says, I drive by other farms where the soil looks cheap. It looks like powdered cake mix. Mine looks like moist, dark, rich brownies. We're building healthy soil while sequestering carbon into the soil from the air. I'm gonna have to go faster. All right, but Lucinda's not just proud of the climate impact or the quality of her soil. She's really impressed with the economic bottom line implications of these practices. She gets extra income from having cows graze on her cover crops. She talks about how regenerative practices have allowed her to save on pesticides and fertilizer costs. And then she talks about resilience. In the three years she was in the program, it was all drought all the time. But Lucinda's soil increased its absorption rate of water fivefold. And that meant that when it did rain, it was more water on her farm. Her crops lasted when others wilted. These are the intangible, but also the economic implications of these kinds of investments. There's a lot of in the report. I am beyond my time. So I'm gonna wrap up with two things. There is a lot in the report. That was one example. There are data on surveys that were done across multiple for those of you that do like the numbers. There's also a lot of information about how wildly popular these are and oversubscribe they are, as well as the broad bipartisan support the public has for these programs. So I do encourage you to take a look at the entire report. The last thing I'll say is that our report also touches on all of the program, all of the funding for clean rural energy. I have to plug it, but you've got two other great speakers who are gonna touch on that. So I'll leave it there. And I'll just say this. All of these things, whether it's the couple of programs I touched on, all of the ones that folks will touch on today, they all contribute to the ecosystem, the natural ecosystem. They reduce emissions, they stop runoff, they help water quality. But what our report shows, and what I think is important to take away is that they're also building economic ecosystems. And that is particularly true in rural America. And those economic ecosystems, they all add little bits to it, are really what's gonna help the economy to thrive particularly in rural America. Thanks so much for your time. Thank you, Saundra. That was a great presentation. I really appreciate it. And great, congratulations on a really excellent report. I hope everyone takes a look at it. It's a really good one. Our second panelist today is Claire Soroski. Claire is a senior energy counselor in the office of the Undersecretary for Rural Development at the US Department of Agriculture. Before this, Claire served a special assistant to the President for Climate Change Finance. And before a time at the White House, Claire served as the West Africa Regional Manager and Climate Team Lead at the US Trade and Development Agency. In that role, she advanced rural electrification and clean energy development through solar mini grids and battery storage as well as grid scale solar, wind and hydropower projects. And today, she has her fingers in all sorts of great programs at USDA that she's about to tell us all about. So Claire, welcome to the lectern. Thank you for having me here today. Yes, I get to have the awesome job of actually implementing some of these programs. So it is a very exciting time at the US Department of Agriculture. As Dan said, we haven't seen this kind of investment in rural America since the 1930s when it comes to energy and clean energy in particular. So it's a really exciting moment in time. And one that is long overdue. Our rural communities are struggling. Secretary Vilsack talks all the time about how many farmers we've lost over the last decade, how many farmers are in the red every year. And so it really is a struggle for survival for our small and medium-sized farmers and others in rural communities. So these investments are long overdue and really exciting. We have three major programs that I'm gonna talk about today. They are all supported by the Inflation Reduction Act. So if anybody here had a hand in the Inflation Reduction Act, thank you. Rural communities, thank you. These are really, really important dollars that are being invested. So the first program I'm gonna talk about is the REAP program. Well, let's go to the next slide. Slides are not advancing, but I will be talking about the REAP program. Oh, this is not plugged in, I think. Oh, we just connected the USB one. Oh, okay. Daniel, we'll come up and we'll just move on. Okay, no problem here. I'll stand to the side while you figure that out. So the Rural Energy for America program is the first one I'm gonna talk about. Then I'm gonna talk about the USDA Powering Affordable Clean Energy program. And then I'm gonna talk about this awesome new program that we're calling New Era. That is really ushering in a new era for our rural electric cooperatives across the country. So the first program, Rural Energy for America program really gets to the heart of, oh, well, first maybe I'll talk about what we've delivered. That's always fun. I forgot I tossed these slides in there. But back to the point about investment. Over this last year in FY 2023, we were able to invest over $6.8 billion, covering over 100 loans in clean energy and other energy resiliency, smart grids, et cetera, for rural communities, mostly via rural electric cooperatives. We also put out three major funding announcements for the three programs that I'm gonna talk about. And we are moving quickly to get this money into the places where it needs to be as quickly as possible. We were able to get those funding announcements out and we've received incredible demand. So I'll talk a little bit more about that. We were able to get 3,000 REAP awards out. Again, I'll talk a little bit more about that means. And we've also been working on things like improving our environmental review processes, thinking through and creating new concepts like farmer benefit plans. This year, we are continuing to deliver. We've already gotten out 1,000 REAP awards. We just announced our first round of invitations to proceed for the new era program. We just announced our first five PACE awards. So this will mean more when I actually tell you more about these programs. So the Rural Energy for America program is direct assistance to ag producers and rural small businesses. This program, if you're an ag producer or rural small business, you can apply to this program to build your own clean energy for your own operations and or energy efficiency. This is a huge opportunity for our rural communities and for farmers. I'd like to give the example of a couple of farmers in Minnesota actually who are small scale farmers, the Goldbergs. They are now saving about $10,000 a year through a wind turbine that they put up through the REAP program. And what the IRA has allowed us to do, for them that means huge savings every year. They're now able to invest more in jobs on their farm, they are not in the red. I mean, for a small scale farmer $10,000 a year is a huge deal. So these funds from the Inflation Reduction Act have allowed us to move this from a program an existing about $50 million a year program that's had great bipartisan support for many years, but about a $50 million program which meant every year we were turning down hundreds of farmers that wanted to access this program. What the Inflation Reduction Act has allowed us to do is to provide up to 50% grant before it was 25% grant and up to $1 million before it was $500,000. So we've been able to offer more support at slightly higher levels. And as a result, we have gotten much larger demand. We have over 1,000 times the demand now for this program than we had before the Inflation Reduction Act which really goes to show that our farmers are in need and the more support we can offer, the more they're able to actually access the programs. At a 25% subsidy, most farmers still were not able to make these investments. Now that we can offer up to a 50% grant, now they can really, really get in the game. That's something that they still have to come up with 50% of that. That's not easy for everybody, but now it means that many, many more people can access this program. So it's really critical that this level of investment continues so that our farmers and rural small businesses can continue to benefit from these programs. Again, eligibility, ag producers, rural small businesses, they can use this funding to build small scale wind, solar, small scale hydro, et cetera, or do energy efficiency, which is equally important. These are just a few examples. This is an example of a rural auto repair shop that was able to reduce their energy cost by 51% through the REAP program. A grocery store that reduced their energy cost 40% through the REAP program. A laundry mat. I think a lot of people think about rural communities and they maybe only think about farmers. They don't think about all of their supporting communities and businesses in rural communities. And these are businesses that struggle as well. So this is really a game-chasing program for them. So in addition to being able to provide a higher level of subsidy and just reach many, many, many, many more people, we are also working to make it easier for people to apply for the program. And we're doing that by being able to provide technical assistance. So again, this is where Congress really took some great leadership and included technical assistance funding in this program. As a result, we're able to have technical assistance providers now in every single state. And so if you are a rural small business or ag producer, you can reach out to that technical assistance provider and they can help you actually go through the process of applying for the program. So that's huge. I'll stop talking about REAP right now, but it is one of my favorite things to talk about. So if afterwards anybody wants to ask questions or talk more about it, it is a really excellent program that is changing people's lives in rural America. And like I said, we were able to do 3,000 awards last year because of the Inflation Redaction Act and we hope to do at least that many this year. Hey, what else do we have on deck? We have the Powering Affordable Clean Energy Program. This is another great program. The Rural Utility Service, as I mentioned, has been, well, I don't know if I talked much about it actually. The Rural Utility Service was, its original formation was created in the 1930s to help create and then support rural electric cooperatives. So we've been a partner with rural communities on energy since the 1930s. This longstanding partnership has been really incredible and has allowed us as a country to be one of the first countries in the world to achieve near full 100% electrification and things like that, which is actually quite a big deal. A lot of countries still have not reached that goal. And we were able to do so early on because of our partnership with rural electric cooperatives. We've always been able to provide loans to rural electric cooperatives and those serving rural communities with energy. This program for the first time allows us to do partially forgivable loans. And again, when we're thinking about high energy burden, other high costs for our rural communities, this is game changing for our rural communities in terms of reducing their costs. So through this program, we are able to do partially forgivable loans. We put out the funding announcement last year, 20% partial forgiveness for anybody serving rural communities with clean energy, 40% forgiveness if you are serving distressed, disadvantaged or energy communities with clean energy, and 60% forgiveness if you are a tribe or serving tribes. And we got an enormous response. I think that's gonna be the reoccurring theme here. Our rural communities are hungry for these programs. For the $1 billion that we have for this program, we got over $12 billion in requests. Huge response. That also means that we're unfortunately not gonna be able to serve all of those folks, but it means that there's a lot of interest and things like tax credits and other things can come in and we actually just did a funding fair today about other federal opportunities. Through this program, we are probably gonna be able to support about 70 really great clean energy projects, everything from completely new projects. These are our first five awardees, Midwest Electric, for example, this last example. There's nobody that has a solar project in their area in Nebraska. They've been thinking about it for a while, but we're worried it was too expensive. They saw this program and they're like, this is our moment, we're gonna do this. So Midwest Electric is building their first solar. Everything from Midwest Electric to Kauai Electric. They've had a commitment to sustainability for years and getting to 100% renewables. They're gonna be able to use these funds to help get there. So really exciting. The last program I'm gonna talk about briefly is the New Era program. This is our $10 billion program for rural electric cooperatives and this can be used to help transition rural electric cooperatives across the country. We have got an incredible response here as well. For our $9.7 billion, we got over $47 billion in interest. All told, if all of those projects were implemented, it would be a $100 billion investment in rural America. Again, we are not gonna be able to do that ourselves, but we are gonna be supporting these co-ops to continue to move forward in whatever way they can. And we just announced our first round of invitations to proceed for that program. Other things, there are plenty of other things to talk about in this space. I will just scroll through these briefly so you can take a quick look. But the point is that we are seeing huge demand for these programs and it's very exciting. Rural communities want to adopt clean energy, want to benefit from clean energy and these programs are allowing them to do that. Thanks for your time. Claire, I'll give your name card back. One moment to make sure, because Claire gets a little bit of extra screen time because when you mentioned the rural energy savings program in an ESI briefing, you get a couple extra minutes of screen time. So could you just say a very short few words about the great work that Chris McClain and everyone is doing at USDA or US about less? Okay, this is an amazing program. The Rural Energy Savings Program allows us at the Rural Utility Service to lend to our rural cooperatives and those serving rural communities, so utilities as well if you're serving rural communities, we can lend to you at a 0% rate and then you can lend to your members to do energy efficiency, all of these things, on-grid, off-grid renewables, lighting, HVAC, all of these things that are really expensive for rural communities and rural households. This program allows us to lend to your utility or your rural electric co-op and then they can on-lend to you. And now that people have figured out what this program is and what it can do for them, the demand for this program has skyrocketed as well and this is one place where we really do need more funding. So I would just flag that. We really do need more funding for this because the demand is really high now. We're seeing great results all over the country. Traverse City was one of our most recent entities that took advantage of this program in Michigan. Again, just providing that kind of additional amount of funding that gets people over the edge to be able to then adopt these energy efficiency practices that create more savings for them in this like beautiful feedback cycle. So, thanks. It's a great program. It says right up there on the slide. Who might disagree? If anyone wants to learn a little bit more about RASP, our colleague Miguel Yanez-Barnuevo is with us. He works with utilities that actually access this program. So thanks, and Taniqua, sorry, I promise that will not come out of your time. Taniqua Hay is our next panelist. Taniqua leads engagement activities for the Department of Energy's Energy Improvements and Rural or Remote Areas Program, which received $1 billion from the bipartisan infrastructure law, AKA IJA, to provide financial investment, technical assistance and other resources to advance clean energy demonstrations and energy solutions that are replicable and scalable. Before this, Taniqua worked as a sustainable infrastructure advisor at the International Finance Corporation within the World Bank Group. Taniqua, welcome to our briefing today. I'll turn it over to you. And if you mention RASP, you get the same treatment. I might not be able to work that in, but... Hello everyone, and thank you for the invitation. So happy to be here speaking with you today about energy improvements in rural and remote areas program and the selections that we recently announced. And that are entering into negotiations as we speak. Like Claire, I am really, really excited about how the bipartisan infrastructure law is allowing us to invest in local rural communities. So I am from OSED, the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations, and our mission is to deliver clean energy technology demonstration projects at scale in partnership with the private sector to accelerate deployment, market adoption, and equitable transition to a decarbonized energy systems. So within the Department of Energy, OSED works to fill the gap between research and development of clean energy technologies and the full-scale commercial adoption of those. And so as you can see... Sorry. And so as you can see on this slide, the range of programs that OSED manages, we fund demonstrations across different technologies and place-based programs, like our Clean Energy Demonstrations on Minelands, our Clean Hydrogen Hubs, and what we'll talk about today is energy improvements in rural or remote communities in our error program. So the energy improvements in rural remote areas program was established under the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. Congress gave a relatively broad purpose and mission for this program, and it was to improve resilience, safety, reliability, and availability of energy and environmental protection from adverse energy generation. So as you can see here, some of our program goals to deliver measurable benefits to energy customers in rural or remote areas, to support new rural and remote energy system models, and to build clean energy knowledge, capacity, and self-reliance in rural America. So the exciting opportunity, funding opportunity that I'm gonna talk about today is this $300 million funding opportunity. And so under ERA, OSED has released two funding opportunities. The first is this one that we'll talk about that was released back in March of last year. OSED also released another $50 million grant opportunity that would fund much smaller projects, and those applications are currently under review, and we'll hear more about that in a little bit. But for the $300 million opportunity, this briefing is very timely. It's just a couple weeks ago we announced the selections. And like Claire mentioned, we received a lot of strong interest from communities. We got 365 concept papers requesting $23 billion in federal investment. And of those, we encouraged 78 to move forward for full applications, and that was worth about $1.6 billion. And from that, we received 75 full applications. So two weeks ago we were out at the Tribal Energy Summit where Secretary Granholm announced the selection of 17 of those projects. And several of them have sites, multiple sites. So these projects will span across 20 different states. Many of these projects will serve tribal nations. There will be 30 tribal nations that will benefit from Alaska to Wisconsin, California, New Mexico, that will support seven different types of energy technologies. And so you can see a map here that will show where a lot of these projects will span across the lower 48. And then this next slide will show many of our Alaska projects, which exemplifies just how the AIR program will support some of our country's most remote communities. It's been really interesting just hearing the challenges that, I mean, we hear about rolling remote, but just how remote, a lot of these projects so remote that only, you know, there's just a small window during the year where they can even receive materials to even begin working on some of these projects. So we really, really do have a diverse set of rolling remote projects. So many of our projects plan to deploy more than one technology, but as you can see on the pie chart, happy pie day, by the way, everyone. As you can see on the pie chart here, many of the different clean technologies that the rural and remote communities believe that will benefit their energy systems. They've been able to stack in heat from heat pumps to EV charging, hydropower, microgrids, biomass, solar and battery energy storage systems. Many of those will display multiple. So one of the really, really crucial parts of these programs is prioritizing the community benefits. And within OSED, as a lot of other programs, we require applicants to include a community benefits plan to help ensure broadly shared prosperity in the clean energy transition. So you can see from these four pillars, community and labor engagement, diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility, investing in American workforce, the Justice 40 Initiative. By prioritizing all of these, we can ensure the next chapter of America's energy story is marked by greater justice, equity, security and resilience and we really, really impress upon applicants the importance of this piece. It weighs as heavily as any of the technical portions of the application because we really, really, I mean, the point of all of this is to ensure that communities are receiving the benefits. So they really has to be demonstrated across the application. So there were a lot of amazing impactful projects, but in the interest of time, I'll just highlight three of them. So we have energizing role Hopi and Navajo with solar power battery based systems. And so the communities within the Navajo and Hopi Nations have some of the best solar resources in the country, but thousands of those tribal homes lack access to electricity. So connecting these homes to the electric grid can be costly and take years and years to do. A lot of these communities have had projects that were just short of having enough funding to implement. So these, I mean, just life changing, had an opportunity to spend some time with the Hopi tribe and go to some of these homes and you can, it's just incredible the impact that it will have on these communities. So we'll bring off grid, solar and battery storage to electrify much quicker and at less cost than if you were trying to bring them onto the grid. The next project that I'll highlight is Old Harbor hydroelectric project. And Old Harbor, as you can see here is a remote tribal village on Kodiak Island in Alaska. It's approximately 50 air mouths from the nearest social services in the city of Kodiak. Its community members have disproportionately higher energy bills, really, really just exponentially high to what the average energy bills are. So this tribe is gonna be able to sell hydropower generated through the project to the local utility that will help provide energy security, lower cost, and reduce the health impacts of using diesel fuel. And the last project that I'll highlight here, solar and storage microgrids for rural community health centers. So this is a really interesting model of how we can bring energy resilience to important community assets. In this case, community health centers and be able to deploy them at scale. So most individual community health centers will probably not have the capacity to take on a project like installing a microgrid even though it can be critically important to keeping the health centers running and in times of emergencies or power outages being able to keep important medicines refrigerated and empowered to essential equipment. The National Association of Community Health Centers here developed a model to bridge this gap. So by working with partners to bring knowledge and expertise, the National Association of Community Health Centers can break down the barriers by bringing financing, capacity, and know how to individual health centers to do these projects with them. So as extreme weather events have put strains on the electric grids, power outages at community health centers are continually a growing problem. This project will address that. So we'll have up to 175 sites across the Southeast. So as you can see, this is just a sampling of some of the projects that we're able to fund through ERA. You can see more details on our site, energy.gov, backslash, OCED, O-C-E-D, backslash, E-R-A. But thank you. Thank you for that. It almost sounds like you have fun in your work. That's amazing, amazing stuff. Or we're just gonna take a quick pause because the sun, although it is so unbelievably nice out today, we wanna make sure we have, there, that's a little bit better for the live cast. Thank you, Dana. Sure, sounds good. Our next panelist today is Zach Bodhain. Zach is the director of government relations for the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership. Before joining TRCP, he served as the policy director for the Western Landowners Alliance. In that role, he led WLA's government relations policy development and advocacy work, spanning a range of public and working lands conservation issues. And before that, Zach spent six years as the policy advisor for conservation and wildlife at the Western Governors Association. Zach, I'll welcome you to the lectern and turn it over to you. I'm really looking forward to your presentation. Well, hello, everyone. Thanks so much to ESI for the invitation and for hosting this briefing. And we've had a lot of energy talk today, but I'm gonna switch it up a little bit and talk about a different type of connectivity. That would be wildlife habitat connectivity. So I'm excited to share some of the work that TRCP has been doing through our IIJA and IRA implementation working group, seeing how these funds are touching down in rural America, and share some lessons learned from that. But first, I wanna provide just a quick bit of background on TRCP. I can get this to work. There we go. Folks who may not be familiar. So we're a nationwide conservation organization with field staff throughout the country and headquarters here in DC. Our mission is to guarantee all Americans quality places to hunt and fish. And we work across several different policy centers to achieve this. So we have centers for public lands, private lands, water resources, climate solutions, and marine fisheries. Also being heavily on the partnership component of our name, pulling together a policy council of 63 partner organizations, spanning hunt, fish, conservation, outdoor recreation, all of those to leverage our collective voice. Finally, we have, as I mentioned, an IRA and IIJA implementation working group where we pull in about 25 partner organizations and work with a number of federal agency partners to get these dollars on the ground. So before jumping into some of the specifics on IIJA and IRA, I wanna give just a little bit of background and start with some context on the issue of wildlife migrations, wildlife habitat connectivity. So I'll make two points pretty clear up at the top here. Daily and seasonal movement is critical to wildlife health. Just like us, wildlife need to move, they need to go find food, water, shelter, what have you. The second point I'll make very clear is that well-stewarded private agricultural lands are an essential and often overlooked part of the puzzle when it comes to wildlife conservation. I think there's kind of a tendency for conservation groups to focus on those typical fortresses of conservation that we think of, those being national parks, vast swaths of public land, national forests. Those are important and what we do on those matters, no doubt, but we need to do a better job of recognizing that fish and wildlife populations are intertwined with working, rural and agricultural landscapes. I guess to put it simply, if we care about conserving wildlife and wildlife habitat and wildlife habitat connectivity, the future of farms, ranches and rural communities matters a whole lot. So I'm gonna focus on the West primarily for the purpose of this presentation, but just know that this is really a nationwide need and nationwide issue. So you'll see, here appears a slide of Wyoming and mapped there are a number of well-studied wildlife migrations, so mule deer, pronghorn, et cetera. And you can see the phenomenon that I was talking about where predominantly big game species will spend the winters in low-lying, mostly privately owned lands. So those large circles on the map there, particularly in the southern end, those are predominantly privately owned landscapes and they're largely in agricultural production. As things turn summer, things start to green up, they move to higher elevations and the northern part of the map, there are more around Yellowstone National Park, Teton. So you can see this movement from private to public in between is very important to the life history. But so to put this in context, I'm gonna zoom in on Southwest Wyoming and this here is a map of land ownership in Southwest Wyoming where you saw some of those big arrows about moving up from the South of the state all the way up to Yellowstone. Every bit of yellow that you see on that map is managed and owned by the Bureau of Land Management or BLM. So that includes, it's the big chunks up in the North and South there, but it's also all of those little squares in the checkerboard, all that's BLM managed. Next to those in the white is all privately owned land. And the reason that exists is largely a relic of land grants to railroad companies during Western expansion in the 1800s. So this is not a Wyoming problem, it's not unique to Southwest Wyoming, this is something that exists throughout the West. And so if this looks like a mess, it's because it is. Imagine you are pronghorn mule deer trying to make your way from here around Rock Springs up North to Yellowstone. One of these patterns, you're gonna have to cross through a lot of different land ownership types and a lot of barriers. So some barriers will hit along the way, fences, a lot of them. Every white square in that checkerboard is in many cases, surrounded on all four sides by some barrier or some form of fencing. Fences can obviously get in the way of wildlife movement, they can also potentially injure and kill wildlife. And there's been some really interesting advancements recently around wildlife friendly fencing that allows wildlife to move more freely along with virtual fencing. If you kind of think about those dog collars, if you've seen those that create the perimeter around your house, same concept applies. But it's cost-intensive and very prohibitive for most producers to install and implement. Next up, a lot of roads, which I think many folks would be familiar with, roadkill and wildlife vehicle collisions and some of the hurdles there. Not only does it block wildlife movement but presents a serious public safety risk that disproportionately impacts rural communities. There's over one million wildlife vehicle collisions in the US each year, counting for thousands of deaths and injuries to motorists and $8 billion annually in damages. So it's a big issue. And again, predominantly disproportionately impacting rural communities. So this is where funds that were made available through IAJ and IRA come in. They've brought a big boost to infrastructure investments in rural communities to keep wildlife off-roadways, help wildlife cross-roadways safely, along with a whole host of other investments in things like fish passage, agricultural production and ecosystem restoration more broadly. I'm gonna start with some of the IAJ investments and I'm not gonna cover all of these, obviously, because I only have 10 minutes, but I did just wanna flag a few here and in particular flag the number of investments that are targeted toward the Department of Transportation. So this is not the entire universe of conservation or habitat connectivity or ecosystem funds made available through the bill, but you see here there's a lot going to DOT with a nexus of wildlife migrations. I think it's taken us perhaps too long in the conservation community, but we're really finally waking up to the fact that departments of transportation, state highway administrations, they really need to be at the table. Those managers of large linear infrastructure, they need to be at the table when we're making these landscape-type decisions around conservation. And they largely haven't been to this point, but these funds have enabled a lot of that. I'll zoom in a little bit, in a little bit on the DOT Wildlife Crossings Pilot Program along with some of the fish past work, but I wanna jump over to the IRA really quick. And so under IRA and Sandra pointed some of these out very well, but there's been a suite of investments around 20 billion going over to USDA, particularly targeted through the Farm Bill Conservation Title Programs. And these funds are largely geared toward climate-smart agriculture. So climate resilience and climate mitigation type work. But I will say in implementing this, USDA has done a great job to expand that list of what can be considered climate smart and fall under that bucket to be very inclusive and encompassing geographically. So I think farmers across the country are really tapping into these funds and seeing it manifest in ways that matter to them. Going back to the Wildlife Crossing Pilot Program. This program is jointly administered by Department of Transportation with Interior through the Fish and Wildlife Service. It's meant to address both public safety concerns and conservation objectives by reducing wildlife vehicle collisions and improving wildlife permeability through transportation infrastructure. Puts out competitive grants to states, tribes, in some cases other federal agencies, counties, and they were just recently able to announce the first funding round going out. It was about $110 million in that first round of funding. And I think there were some initial and probably to be expected learning curves in getting this pilot program up and running. I mentioned DOTs and conservation and fish and wildlife agencies have not historically worked together. So figuring out how to do so through this program, there were some I think expected hurdles in learning, but I think really it's safe to say now we're up and running. And I will note that despite this being run as a pilot through IAJA, the program is already oversubscribed. And so we are eagerly looking forward to the next farm bill to codify and expand this as I think a major priority for our community. I'll touch quickly on some of the fish passage funds that were made available as well. So these funds touched down in, I think across eight separate agencies in total to about $2 billion. So that's a couple of different funding pots spread throughout the bill, but what was unique and interesting about how this was done is that there was really a targeted approach on despite the agency, everyone was sort of tasked with the same outcome. So restore aquatic ecosystem, remove barriers to fish passage, and remove infrastructure that's inhibiting or improve infrastructure. So I mentioned this in total about $2 billion. The result really has been groundbreaking levels of coordination across federal agencies in an incredibly rapid deployment of these funds. The Fish and Wildlife Service, largely in the lead of this stood up an interagency task force and created the Fish Portal website, which you can see there's a huge level of granularity project by project details and where money is being spent. And you can see they've already gotten about a quarter of the money out the door. We anticipate that about half of the funding will be out the door in the next six to eight months. So it's a huge success and really showcases what interagency coordination and clear guidance from Congress can accomplish on the ground. And finally, I'm getting short on time. So I'll do you want to touch quickly on the USDA Migratory Big Game Initiative. So I mentioned that roughly 20 billion that went to USDA through IRA. That is supporting a lot of work to expand migratory big game corridor conservation on private land. And so it started out with a partnership in Wyoming and an agreement with the governor's office and Secretary Vilsack that then transitioned into a pilot program. And it has been a very innovative application of USDA's conservation title farm bill authorities. So they've put resources toward permanent conservation easements and priority migration corridors. But beyond that, I've looked to the conservation reserve program which provides producers annual rental payments for up to 15 years in exchange for improved management on their operation. And they've paired that with the environmental quality incentives program which then provides cost share and technical assistance for conservation improvements. So that can look like invasive weed treatment. It can look like wild life friendly fencing. And in the past, producers have been barred from accessing both those programs simultaneously. So you're either getting the rental payment or you're getting the cost share in TA predominantly. Which has, I think historically, there is CRP cost share, but I think what we're seeing here is that there's a targeted application of these programs toward a single objective being wildlife habitat connectivity. And we're seeing I think what creative application of farm bill authorities can really do. So we're excited to announce that USDA has expanded this to Montana and Idaho largely through support of those IRA dollars. And we're looking to, I think, expand this program nationwide eventually. So I'll wrap up now because I'm at time and would love to touch on some various opportunities potentially in the Q and A but I appreciate the time today everyone. Those wildlife crossings are incredible. Like imagine if we had started doing those, you know, a long time ago. Francis is very eager to be our fifth panelist. But before I introduce you, I did want to do two quick things. For our in-person audience and in our online audience, we have these people until 4.30 and we'll have time for Q and A. So if you have questions, we'll definitely bring a microphone around and if you're in our online audience, you can send us an email. And the email address to use is askask.org. Also, there's presentation materials out on the front table and on our website. So if you wanna go back, the livecast will be available too. So if you wanna go back and look at that cool picture of the wildlife crossing that Zack just had, you can do that for sure as well as access the presentation materials. That brings us to Francis Sawyer. Francis leads Pleiades Strategies where she advises mission-oriented organizations on strategic planning, policy research and design and program management. Francis formally served as policy advisor to investor and philanthropist Tom Steyer and as deputy director of external affairs to California governor Jerry Brown. In both roles, she focused on partnership development, storytelling and intersectional policy design and I can't wait for your presentation today, Francis. Thanks for joining us. I'll turn it over to you. Thank you so much, Dan. And big thanks to EESI and just learned so much from everyone else who spoke before me. And it really just, to me represents that we need to take a moment and think about what was covered on this panel because these topics don't always sit side-by-side with each other. We talked about bringing big industry and new manufacturing jobs. We talked about agriculture and support for small and mid-sized farmers, land conservation, fish habitat, energy programs from coast to coast and the amount of opportunity and possibility that is being made possible by the IRA and the IIJA is truly transformational for rural America. And I love that everybody on this panel is sitting here together and that we've brought these topics together because these topics sit side-by-side in the real world. When we're out in communities and out in place, we're talking about all of these at the same time. You have community organizations, workers, folks who are on the ground, who are grappling with ways to develop and grow their community life and to deliver the benefits that they wanna see as a community. And each of these programs in conversation with each other is key to us modeling and being a part of that conversation on the ground. We've heard so much about these investments in America through clean energy and conservation and the support that we see is really transforming the economy. It's improving quality of life. It's opening the doors to economic, help social possibility and opportunity. And many of these programs are also significantly providing lower costs to families in terms of energy savings and that creation of economic growth. DOE, USDA, DOT, DOI, I'm naming the acronym SUP. We have touched on each of them and so you see what a whole of government approach this has been in that unlocking of opportunity and the collaborations that this funding has made possible as it is driven to place. As we're bridging this connectivity, our lens at Pleiades has largely been through the generational opportunity that is available to rural electric cooperatives. Some of those programs that you saw Claire mention. My connection with rural cooperatives got started really early. My grandmother was from Greenville, Georgia which was about 14 miles down the road from Warm Springs which is where FDR sat when he signed the REA. And that was this transformational initial investment that was going to catch rural America up with where the cities had been for about 40 years on electrification and the model that it did so with really pulled together two fundamental things that I see replicated in the programs that we have today. The insertion of federal resources and expertise and having projects built with deep local community leadership and benefit. And so when we look at the programs that rural co-ops have available to them today just as when FDR brought in programs that brought light, brought pumped water into the home, we're having an outsized impact on connecting the opportunities of today's clean energy possibilities with rural communities that have been really locked out of clean energy from a policy perspective until this transformational legislation. This has an outsized impact on poverty in America. Rural electric cooperatives serve 92% of persistent poverty counties. And so when rural cooperatives are able to lead and have their resources to lead, they're able to really have an outsized impact on poverty reduction, pollution reduction. They have aging energy fleet and have not had doors open to clean energy because until the provision of direct pay we're unable to access clean energy tax credits from a policy perspective as nonprofit cooperative corporations. And as Dan led with, rural communities also experience some of the highest energy burden. You've got 40% of greater energy burden in rural America than your average urban resident. And that really means that these programs that can improve weatherization and efficiency, clean energy access have a outsized impact on that quality of life in the home. Claire just marvelously covered new era and pace. The thing that I really wanna emphasize here is just how popular these programs are. They are massively oversubscribed. We have 12 billion in proposals from pace. We have 43 billion in proposals from new era representing 93 billion in total project value. And these are clean energy projects that cooperatives are excited to put into action, excited to have the support to move forward. And they can really transform and unlock the clean energy economy for the cooperatives that serve rural Americans, all 42 million. These are huge indications of interest and this transformation really allows us to invest in the grid, make it more reliable to those climate field disasters that Sondra mentioned that we are seeing more and more of and take advantage of the lower cost of clean energy and be able to deliver lower cost savings and solutions to rural households. I look across these programs and from the energy programs, land conservation reap, there's a couple of pieces that when we get to where this is in the ground are really important ongoing conversations. And these are around collaboration, the capacity of all of the organizations that are coming together to implement and the deep community engagement and community benefits that have been part of the design and purpose of these bills since they moved through and that we have to need to keep realizing. To start with collaboration, there is so much collaboration needed. Like just think about like the conversation we've had here today and the collaborations and the expertise that lies within each of the agencies, that lies within the utilities that are able to access these programs, lies within the communities, both local governments, state governments, nonprofit organizations, labor, faith communities that are a part of pulling these projects together and making them a reality in the real world. And that collaboration is not easy. It is often hard and it takes time. And the collaborations that have already kicked off and that have started are, I think, great starting examples and we're going to need more of it across the board. I think about the USDA funding fairs that are coming up, helping to connect cooperatives who have submitted to those oversubscribed programs across agencies, what other opportunities might help bring their projects to life. I think about the National Renewable Energy Lab, NREL. We have such a wealth of knowledge about the energy transition from a technical assistance perspective living at the labs. NREL has just opened a technical assistant portal for cooperatives to help with their application programs. Thinking about how we can cross-pollinate, how we can collaborate, use each other's skills and work together to bring these projects to life is going to be a decades challenge. Next, I'm going to look at capacity. When we're talking about rural towns and rural utilities, there's a great capacity need. There's a lot of learning to be done around the changes to the energy ecosystem that are ongoing and opening new doors for thinking about managing supply and demand. You have capacity needs to move this transformational amount of funding and the internal capacity of the agencies that everybody has been working so diligently to get these programs out the door. Just huge applause for all of the effort that has gone into being thoughtful and moving this money into the field and then building that technical capacity into the programs themselves. Back to the REAP technical assistance grants, for example, where we're helping to connect those applicants with the resources they need to enter that door and to put their name in the hat. Last, I want to look at the community benefits plans and community engagement. Really, really core to this funding and the programs, as was mentioned, it's baked into the very law in many instances where programs like New Era have the expectation and the responsibility of project developers and utilities to pull community engagement into the plans and to build a plan that can be part of the contract itself that delivers the benefits that the community decides. And really thinking about how in that project development stage and proposal development stage, how to open conversations, be transparent and build partnerships with labor, non-profits, agricultural producers and farmers, non-profit groups, faith groups, and really think through how these projects can deliver across multiple values and multiple goals that a community has. There's a lot of folks who are really excited to help with that, who are coming from place-based organizations and excited to see those community benefits articulated and delivered as part of this funding program. So I'll wrap it up there. I think, carrying this, we've got a massive, massive indication of interest across the board here. These are investments that are meaningfully shaping and changing folks' lives, the opportunities that they have, the economic and the natural systems in which we live and making them better. We're strengthening the grid. We're strengthening our autonomy. And it's a really exciting time. Thank you. That was great, Francis. Thank you so much. We're gonna move into Q&A and we're getting some really interesting questions from our online audience. Looks like we have some questions in the audience first, so I'm not sure, oh, Megan, you have microphone duty today. So right over here in the second row, we'll get started right away. Usually it takes a little while for our audience to warm up, but not in this case. We're ready to go. That's right. Well, yeah, we'll get you the microphone. That way, our live cast audience can hear what you ask. Like check, like check. Like check. That's it. Okay, thank you. So this is for Claire. It's just a quick question. I was just wondering about it, but when you said that technical assistance would be provided in each state to give role farmers help with applying for the programs, is that just like free of cost? And also how often do people actually reach out to this in all the states? So it is free of cost to the applicants and to like the farmers who are seeking the technical assistance. And the answer is we don't know yet. This is the first time we've been able to do technical assistance. Again, thank you to Congress for including that. It's really critically important to be able to offer that. And it's our first time being able to do it. So we just awarded those in the last few months, many of them, and we'll see over the next year. And we do have one more funding round open for people who want to provide technical assistance. It's open till March 21st. And so please apply if you're interested in providing technical assistance for REAP. And yeah, I hope to be able to report back on that next year and see what difference that made. Great. Thanks. Any other forms of technical assistance anyone might want to comment on that you're aware of? Any other deadlines or things like that? Taniqua, I'm not sure if there's anything that you have there, but I just want to make sure you have an opportunity if you do. I mean, we have partners that we work with through our programs, but not a separate funding opportunity. That's just purely technical assistance. Great, thanks. Could you move your microphone just a little bit closer? Sorry, thanks. Thank you for that. Oh, we have another, we have two other questions. We'll go, well, you definitely get to go first. Go ahead, Sharon. Hi, I'm Sharon with the House Sustainable Energy Environment Coalition. Thank you so much for this great overview. I was wondering with regard to USDA's investments, I've been helping our members report back on numbers of investments in their districts, communities impacted. Is there a good list from USDA related to the Inflation Reduction Act investments that we could highlight? These are the number of projects that we funded in rural communities in our district or state. And then also another question related to DOE had a great pie chart related to the type of energy systems that they're funding. Is there a similar type of graph for USDA? Like, are we really funding solar on farms or wind generation? We'd really love to know the breakdown as well. Great. So we can provide, I'll take that second first. We can provide that kind of data for REAP. Right now it's been a long-standing program and we have kind of a dashboard online and things like that. I would say for REAP, we are primarily seeing solar projects. So that's the vast majority of the renewable energy in REAP and we've just launched a new effort that we're calling RAISE to raise up underutilized technologies and wind and geothermal and other technologies that are also really great. So that's what it looks like for REAP. For PACE, a new era, those are still really new programs. So as I mentioned, we just announced the first five PACE awardees. So that's still under development in terms of who will get awards, how many and what that distribution looks like for types of technology, et cetera. And then in terms of investments, one thing we did do is put together state-by-state fact sheets on the demand for our IIJA and IRRA programs. So those are online right now and they're state-by-state. So the demand for the programs is already online and then we're still in the process of awards for PACE and new era. So we won't have actual data on who's gotten, how many awards, et cetera, until probably by the end of the year. Sharon, we can probably help you track that down too. Yeah, that's a lot. Other comments on the panel in response to that question about breakdowns and things? All right. I saw our next question, which is here in the third row. Hi, my name is Ann Vroom. I'm in the sort of private equity side. Fascinating presentation, number of questions, but I'll just ask one, I'll just go with the term. In terms of long-term sustainability of these projects, what do you all have built in to the program framework that will return five years hence and say yes, this small hydroelectric project did work, is still working or went for clement or never happened? The same goes for micro grids. I mean, some of these are expensive technologies, not only to implement, but to sustain over what should be the longer horizon of the money invested. So next one question. Well, since that question's almost exactly what we had prepared in advance as the first question, my guess is that we all are pretty prepared. So perhaps, Sandra, we could go just down the line and then hear from Claire and Taniqua and Zach and Francis. Sure, well, I will start with the fact that the legislation itself has some inherent benefits. In terms of the durability of these programs, there's a lot of leverage. There's a lot of public funding, meeting, private funding that's recycled. So you get a loan, you pay the loan back, the loan gets put forward to pay for more projects. So the sustainability of the program is enhanced by the fact that there's this, I think Claire mentioned it, the beautiful payback cycle, that there's some longevity there. The other thing I will say is that, well, maybe I'll just leave it there because there are a lot of us. Yeah, and I'll just start by saying we're the federal government so we're gonna make you report. So we have requirements in all of our programs for reporting and some of them out to 10 years and things like that. I think the other great thing about US Department of Agriculture is that we have such long standing relationships with our rural electric cooperatives. So we are working with, I mean, we've been working with many of them for over 70 years. So it's a relationship that is sustained, it's ongoing. It's not a kind of one and done kind of relationship. And so I think we have reporting requirements for all of our programs to make sure that they're delivering. And then we also have these really great long standing relationships with our rural communities that I think will help with the sustainability of and the ultimate realization of these projects. I think my answer really similar to Claire's. There are reporting requirements, but as was mentioned before, long term viability of the projects are important consideration for OSED even in developing our programs and making selections for the project. So one of the goals of the program is to support new role or remote energy system models using climate resilient technologies, business structures that promote economic resilience. A lot of that is baked in and in addition to that, many of the energy system models, some of the project selections have unique business models that can support self-sufficiency in the long run such as community ownership models that enable tribes and community members to receive revenues and payments that they otherwise wouldn't have received. We're really looking at when we're evaluating the plan, how these projects can be operated and maintained way past the implementation. So it is a really big part of how we even evaluate the projects to begin with, but in looking at their project plan to ensure the right pieces are baked in for long term viability. Yeah, and I don't have a ton to add in terms of the reporting or project by project compliance and durability other than speaking to some of the USDA programs in particular, there are conservation compliance monitoring measures built in that are meant to work with producers and ensure that these programs are working for them, but at the same time, they're managing according to a management plan that's been federally approved. So there's some of those checks within those programs throughout the duration of them, but I guess to expand on durability a little bit, my mind goes more to political durability of these and at the risk of saying something obvious, many of these programs are authorized, funded by Congress and political wins change. And so to me, durability is much more about demonstrating broad buy-in, demonstrating success long-term to ensure that these programs continue to receive funding levels that they require and ensuring that we're as advocates on my side of the table, telling the story of how these programs are benefiting real people and benefiting fish and wildlife. I guess to that and one final thought on durability and just food for thought, I guess I'd throw out, there's, I think in some ways we need to get out of our own way sometimes and there's a real barrier and frustration that we've encountered on the permitting side. So in terms of environmental compliance, whether it's through NEPA or some of the other statues, that we are obviously their bedrock and critically important statues, but at the same time when you're doing an environmentally beneficial project like covert removal or things of that nature that are actually meant to improve environmental outcomes, there's gotta be some ways to get those programs on the ground faster and that's some of the barriers that we're hitting right now. Thanks, Francis. And yeah, to add to just one point on the energy side is that investments in the grid are generational investments when we invest in the wires and the generation that is needed. Those are designed to provide reliable electricity and that durability is baked into the very foundational role that a utility has as a bedrock institution in our economy. Great, thanks. Sandra, you'd like to say a little bit more? Yeah, I'm gonna jump in one more time. Just as a couple of thoughts that were triggered, one is also no one's expecting a hundred percent success and in fact, in some of these programs, the idea is to seed innovation and so when you see a failure of a DOE loan program project, that doesn't necessarily mean that the program is broken or that there's something fundamentally wrong because if there's no failure, then we aren't investing in America's innovation and so there are different programs that have different kind of pieces of the pie but as we talk about that ecosystem, that innovation piece is also really important and part of that is gonna have some baked in failure so I'll put that out there. The last thing, just Zach's point on political viability, I think I agree with him that that durability piece is really important. One of the aspects is obviously we need more of these briefings, right? That people know about what's actually happening. Preaching to the choir. But I think that part of the aspects of IRA and IIJA is that it's designed to bring along a lot more people than your standard policies. We're talking about several programs that affect rural economies and Francis talked about the fact that the rural economy was the last to be electrified, they were the last to get broadband. They will not be the last to get clean energy. They will not be last to become part of the clean energy economy of the future. We need to kind of uplift that so that people realize that they are benefiting. So rural economy is a win and getting it but there are other communities that are easily left behind that there are lots of programs here that are trying to access those and bring them in, bring them into the pool. Yeah, I mean it applies to the IIJA too but what we like to say about the IRA, ESI, is that this is good stuff that people will like and then want more of. And the way that the IRA was really structured around sort of incentives, that's only gonna hopefully lead to people wanting more of it because it's good stuff. I'm looking around for an, there we have a question. Megan will be right over with the mic. Thank you. But all these work into pre-canned questions, not getting to ask any of them. Hi, I had a quick question for Claire. Is there a way to find out if re-funding is allocated by state? I mean if there are states that have more re-funds as appropriated to them than other states? Yeah, I think we have a REAP dashboard online and so I think through that you can see how much funding is going to different states. And we do have states that are more active in re-funding than others like Minnesota, Iowa. Those states are really active and their members are, their constituents are really active in applying for REAP. And one reason we wanted to do REAP technical assistance was to make sure that other states, a lot of rural communities, if you see one person do something, then it's like, oh, what are you doing? Oh, that's working for you? Great, and then it kind of spreads in this great way. But if that first step isn't taken, nobody knows about the program or is doing it, then you can't start that. So our hope is that the technical assistance will really see that in other places where we're not seen as many applications. REAP makes its awards bi-annually, right? Like every six months or so and they're like published in like these big spreadsheets, right? We are actually administering with the IRA funds, we're able to do it on a quarterly basis. So every quarter, we're putting out new funds and closing the last quarter and so it's on a quarterly basis right now. So you can see all of that being updated quarterly. And we can help you find that too online if you need to. USDA does a really good job making it really easy to see where resources are going generally. And REST, for example, like Arkansas is like the biggest REST page. Great, that's awesome. But, and they do a good job helping people figure that out. All right, I'm looking for questions but I'm gonna ask this one because it's kind of interesting. It's from someone in our online audience. And I don't know how we answer this one. I suppose there's like a big picture way to answer it and then maybe like a very specific program by program way to answer it. But, how much of the IRA has currently been implemented? I think that's actually kind of an interesting question because, and I would expand it to IHA, right? Which had a year head start. But I don't know if anyone wants, Sondra, it looks like you might want to talk about it. Well, I would just say just a bit. And it's not a technical answer but part of the value and durability of the IRA is that it's meant to be a 10 year program, right? For the tax credits, for these programs. A lot of the idea was that there's funding up front but we know that partnerships take time. Programs take staff and time to stand up. And in many ways, all the success that you're hearing about is very much the tip of an iceberg in a positive way, right? So, not something you're gonna crash into but something that's really building on. And I think that there's a lot more to come both in use and in deployment. So, there's still guidelines coming out on the tax credits. There are still programs. I know the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, another program that'll be really instrumental in rural America is just coming out with first announcements. So, I think it's, at the moment, just a bit and already really positive. Thanks. And I feel like it's a lot. So, yeah, I think it is what do you consider implementation? And I like to talk about it as like a continuum for rural America. DOE with the IAJ was able to come out with some of their rural community programs earlier. USDA then came out with ours through IRA, EPA is now implementing their Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund. So, I think it's this really great kind of umbrella or arc that is allowing communities, maybe there were some that were on the ball immediately and then others heard about it and then there are others that are still are just kind of wrapping their minds around their opportunities. And so, I think that's great because that means that those who are just wrapping their mind around the opportunities still have opportunity. At USDA, we were able to do 3,000 REAP Awards last, over 3,000 REAP Awards last year, that's huge. So, we are really moving money and making sure that it's getting to rural communities as quickly as possible. We've already done 1,000 REAP Awards this year, this fiscal year. And then we were able to put out all of our Power and Affordable Clean Energy Funding and all of our new era funding and are now, as I said, announcing our first PACE Awards and hope to continue that throughout the year. And then on new era, hope to have some of our first awards in late summer. So, we're really trying to move things because of what Sandra said about energy and it takes time to implement. So, some of these projects are gonna be large and complex and we have to disperse all funds for our IRRA programs by September, 2031. And that means that for some of these really big clean energy projects or complex things, maybe there's a carbon capture and storage project, things like that, it will take a lot of time to do all of the work necessary and get all the permits and get those projects in place. And so, it's really important to us to award those funds as quickly as possible so that we are giving our stakeholders the best chance possible to complete those projects by the 2031 deadline. Great, thanks. Tinequa, Zach, Francis, please feel free to weigh into if you have any questions or any responses to how much have we done, how much is left. I think our answer would be very similar to what's already been mentioned. It does take time to start the process and a lot of the projects that I mentioned in addition to the several of their provisions within OSED, a lot of those selections have happened within this fiscal year, so I think we'll see a lot more being implemented as they get up and running, but we're on that continuum, as Claire said. Yeah, and now it's on to add beyond an observation that I think early on when the money first came out, I think there was sort of this collective sense among agency partners of like, oh wow, this is a lot, we gotta find, and at least with the agencies we worked with on Forest Service Projects, Forest Health, that it's kind of a, let's find shovel ready stuff where we can get this money out the door quickly, and now I think we've pivoted more toward a phase of, okay, let's really catch our breath, think through what's innovative, what's unique, where haven't we touched yet, and I think we're just starting to enter that phase with a lot of these programs, which is very cool to see. Right, Francis, I think this gives you the last word on the panel today because we're a little over on time, so you can take it whatever direction you would like. Oh my, this feels monumentous. Yeah, truly seconding the amount of activity and effort that has already happened to date, and Asandra said, I do believe it is very much the tip of the iceberg, and look at the output and economic opportunity that's been unlocked by just that tip of the iceberg. We'll make a call out to one specific program to go narrow before going broad again, which is through the tax credits, we haven't touched much today on the tax code, but a majority of the dollar amount within IRA is expected to go through the tax code and the clean energy credits. One really transformational policy change that was part of IRA is something called direct pay or elective pay that allows governments, local government, state governments, rural, electric cooperatives, nonprofits to access those tax credits directly for clean energy projects that they are developing. And what this really does is we've had this tremendous kind of burst of effort as the initial grant and loan programs have gotten off the ground, have taken those shovel ready projects and put them into the works. And what the tax credits leave open is that if your community didn't have the capacity to have that shovel ready project, didn't have your ducks in a row or that, you're still able to access the tax credit benefits without a cap on those programs for the decade. And that is I think a really important long tail to this that shows the durability of these investments that's pairing with private sector investment and is going to keep the door open to this real decade of deployment. Great, thank you so much. I think our tremendous panel deserves a round of applause. Thank you so much for joining us today. That was a really great set of presentations. Thanks, this is a great topic and we'll be back I think in six or so months with our next progress report briefing. Francis was just talking about the tax incentives. That was our last briefing back in September. So we had nine panelists talking about, I think 13 tax incentives and everyone kept at their time. They did a really good job. We had someone from the US Conference of Mayors specifically talking about direct pay and the benefits that they were expecting. And of course there's been guidance and stuff since September that's rolled out but that would be a good place if you wanted to just get a quick overview of what the tax incentives are geared towards and what they're expected to deliver. We also did a briefing a little bit less than a year ago with Jim Clyburn talking about opportunities in rural communities and really focused on the co-ops. So we had someone from Aiken Electric which is in South Carolina. We had the great Aliyah Nedd with National Cooperative Business Association, Clusa talking on that panel as well. So that would be another, if you wanna dig a little bit more into that and it's always fun to listen to Jim Clyburn speak. He's a great guy when it comes to these topics. I'm putting the survey back up, we're wrapping up. I would, if anyone would like to take the survey either here in person or in our online audience I'd really encourage you to do that. Thanks again to our panelists. Thanks to Representative Tonko and the great Sustainable Energy and Environment Coalition for helping us with the room once again today and for your question. I also have a great set of colleagues at ESI thanks to Dan O, Omri, Allison, Aaron, Anna, Molly, and Nicole for helping pull the briefing together. And we have lots and lots of briefings including one next Thursday about the Sustainable Energy in America fact book and more to come after that. We also have three pretty great interns this spring. Emily's not here, she's off today but Kylie and Megan are so thank you and Megan helped out, Emily helped out. She actually has a great article coming out, a book review, a book called Gasoline Gate. I read the final draft of it and you're not gonna wanna miss that. It's a great book report so I call it the book report, it's an article. But thanks to Kylie and Megan and Emily for being great interns. Yeah, I think that will just about wrap it up. We're a couple minutes over, sorry about that but hope everyone enjoys the amazing weather here in DC today and has a great rest of your Thursday and we'll see you next week for the Sustainable Energy in America fact book. Thank you, thanks.