 Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to the conclusion of our five-part Workforce Wednesday Briefing mini-series. I'm Dan Bersetsi, Executive Director of the Environmental and Energy Study Institute. Thanks to everyone who has joined us over the last month and to those online with us today. Of course, today does not mean the end of our coverage of workforce development issues. It is one of the central themes in our efforts to showcase climate change solutions. For one thing, all of the Workforce Wednesday Briefing materials, including archives, podcasts, presentations, and written summaries are all available at our website, www.eesi.org. And second, we'll continue to write about the need for a clean energy workforce, highlight examples of successful programs around the country, update our jobs fact sheet, and schedule even more briefings, especially next year, to share information about a just transition to a decarbonized clean energy economy. The best way, of course, to keep up with everything is to visit us online and sign up to receive our bi-weekly newsletter, Climate Change Solutions. Last week, we learned about the potential for mass timber to lower emissions and spur good sustainable jobs. And before that, we covered how leading high school programs are preparing their students for green careers, conservation cores, and the status of a just transition in western coal country. As with each of the first four Workforce Wednesday panels, I'm so pleased to introduce another outstanding group of entrepreneurs, practitioners, and leaders. It is difficult to exaggerate the importance of small businesses to U.S. prosperity. Since the Great Recession, according to the Small Business Administration, two of every three net jobs, net new jobs are created by small businesses. And yet, these same companies that we can really not afford to lose are facing unprecedented challenges since the coronavirus took hold of our country seven months ago. Another thing that is hard to overestimate is the importance of, excuse me, another thing that is hard to overestimate the importance of is the transition to a decarbonized clean energy economy. A lot of people talk about that topic, and sometimes maybe it feels a little abstract, but it is very real. And a lot of the people who actually do the work to make that transition a reality are under a lot of stress right now, and they're under a lot of stress at a time when we really need them if we aim to make any progress toward lower emissions in the next 10 years. We will hear from three panelists in a few moments about this nexus of small business importance, potential, and opportunity in the context of clean energy and climate resilience and how these innovative community sustaining companies are currently under severe pressure from the economic fallout of the ongoing pandemic. And of course we will hear about what we can do about it to position them for a post-coronavirus recovery. Now on to our briefing. First, some final logistics. After our final panelists, we will have time for questions from our online audience. If you have a question, please follow EESI on Twitter at EESI online and send in your questions that way. You can also send us an email to EESI at EESI.org. And now let me introduce our panelists. Our first panelist is Leticia Colon de Mejas. She is a nationally award-winning building scientist and climate equity speaker. She is the founder of the nationally awarded company Energy Efficiency Solutions, chair of the nonprofit Efficiency for All, policy co-chair of the National Building Performance Association, a commissioner for the state of Connecticut Commission on Women, Children, Elderly Latino and Puerto Rican Affairs, and founder and president of Green Eco Warriors. Leticia is an awarded and published children's mental leadership sustainability as well as a line of educational science-based graphic texts like comic books that feature a cast of diverse superheroes in a line with national science standards. Leticia, welcome to our briefing today. I really can't wait to hear your presentation. Hi, thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here. Just give me one moment and I'm going to share my screen, hopefully, and move forward. Great. Are you able to see the screen? Phenomenal. Excellent. OK, so energy efficiency is the most low-cost way to lower the burden on our energy grids all across the United States. In addition to lowering our demand for electricity on larger grids, it also lowers the demand for heating and cooling, closing the affordability gap for families all across the nation, and lowering carbon emissions and environmental impacts as well at the same time. It also provides a lot of jobs. And so that's really what I'd like to talk about today. So building a scale green workforce to support small businesses and improve America's buildings at the same time is what I will be focused on. So energy efficiency in America prior to the pandemic, there were more than 2.3 million Americans working in efficiency in 2018. It was the largest and fastest growing job sector in the energy industry representing over a quarter of all energy jobs with a projected growth rate of almost 8 percent for 2019. There were over 79 percent of the companies were small businesses. This is important to know because small businesses hire local people and employ and directly from their communities quite often developing and supporting local economic development. Across the country, there's virtually jobs in every single state in the United States. I like to say if you have buildings with a B, you probably have energy efficiency jobs as well. Beyond this, over 317,000 people work in energy efficiency jobs and over 1 million plus energy efficiency jobs outside of most cities as well. But again, it's very important to understand that these jobs are not just available in cities. These jobs are available anywhere that there's a building. So what's going on now? So COVID impacts on jobs. And we're seeing this with a lot of industries. But in the energy efficiency industry where we work in homes and buildings, where people live, work and play, we have experienced shutdowns all across the nation. Cumulatively, we've lost over 300,000 energy efficiency jobs. The job recoveries stalled even though some states have been opened because the concerns about the pandemic are real and often people are not ready to have folks going into their home and providing these services, which would help close the energy burdens in their homes and buildings across America. Over 40 states have double-digit employment numbers in the energy efficiency stackers right now. I myself had to lay off my entire staff for almost a five-month shutdown in my state. So here we have a link to report if people want to take a look at that later as well. I think it's important to go back and read some of these things. So what can we do? Yes, I mean, we're in the middle of a pandemic and we need to get our economy stimulated again. So energy efficiency could be part of this job stimulus package. It would be one of the number one ways to stimulate jobs all across the United States because, again, anywhere you have buildings and energy demand is a place that you can employ energy efficiency to lower that demand and close that affordability gap. The new report on energy efficiency stimulus to jump Start America's economic recovery is available. Build back better faster. If Congress appropriated $60 billion, some highlights from this report, which I found really fascinating, $60 billion for an efficiency sector would add $254 billion to the US economy and create almost 800,000 full-time jobs. In my state alone, we have 34,000 energy efficiency jobs prior to COVID. Again, that number is extremely decreased right now as our area is looking to build up and hire. One of the things we're experiencing is a lack of ability to hire skilled labor. So I will talk a little bit about that. So economic development that works. Energy efficiency solutions is the company that I have. Currently, we employ 22 people who are underemployed or unemployed when we met them. We've trained over 120 people for local workforce opportunities and we would love to train more, which is why I'll talk a little bit about policies that could support that happening on a national scale. These are long-term career paths from entry-level jobs like insulation support technicians and guys that set up lower doors to higher-level building scientists, architects, office managers. People sometimes don't realize that there are more than direct installers that work in energy efficiency and there's a great array of careers and roles that people can grow into. As we grow energy efficiency in our nation, we will grow local jobs. If your town has buildings with a B, then this isn't something for you to be excited about. What can we do? How can we make this work and how can we get this economy going? First of all, one of the areas that I see that's lacking is a lack of Department of Labor codes which acknowledge energy efficiency careers. Having codes that acknowledge those careers are important because when workforce boards are doing their planning, they really do use those codes. Additionally, that is often how funds are allocated based on workforce codes and how training programs are developed. It's important that we recognize the benefits that energy efficiency offers not just our economy but our energy grid and our society overall as well as our health and the impacts that it has to lower the damages of climate change. We can create funding sources to train the growing workforce because there is a lack of trained workforce and there's a lack of knowledge on this growing industry. All of these folks that are unemployed and need to get back to work would probably benefit from understanding the value and importance and that there's jobs available now. So what can we do? These are some legislation pieces that could be acted on right away. Hope for Homes Act 2020 is a bipartisan bill which recently passed the House. This online performance-based efficiency would offer $500 million in training in immediate support for small businesses as well as equitable access to training, including online training that would be in support during the pandemic, for example. They're grants for provider organizations to help develop the training curriculums which are very important as our industry changes to respond to the impacts of COVID. We need to update our curriculums and be prepared to go forward. This provides up to $10,000 for contracting employees to cover training costs of rehired or to retain employees. That's also important because we've had a lot of difficulty during COVID, retaining employees during shutdowns. $1,000 stipend for contractors who complete the Hope training as well. It also includes a rebate program. This is important to spur the economics beyond jobs. So in order to keep people employed, we need people to buy into products and services. And these are products and services that are not just something out there for nothing. Again, these are going to help people all across the United States save money and energy and lower their energy burdens. There's workforce grants for small businesses as well. This happens to be my favorite piece of legislation. Blue Collar to Green Collar Jobs Act would establish an energy workforce grant program to assist businesses in seeking to educate and train new hires as well as existing employees. So oftentimes we move people up from within and that's really great because it opens up new opportunities to hire from below while pushing people forward in their careers and bettering their lives. Cyber legislation is the Clean Energy Jobs Act of 2019, which is also a grant support program to support on-the-job training and efficiency and renewable energy. Again, on-the-job training is really critical for our industry because many of these things are hands-on and technical skills. There's an American Energy Innovation Act which includes a similar workforce grant program and the Green Neighborhoods Act of 2020, which is a grant for training via registered apprenticeship programs. So that's another area that we really could use work on in energy efficiency. Once we get our DOL codes aligned, we need to be working to develop pipeline such as energy efficiency apprenticeship programs. Other policy opportunities to expand energy efficiency are the Weatherization Enhancement and Local Efficiency Investment Act. This would reauthorize the DOE weatherization program which often works in line with energy efficiency programs and in-states across the America. Robust appropriations for these programs allow people to hire and keep our economy going. In addition to that, these programs do serve a lot of folks that are at risk and vulnerable populations, underrepresented and low-income populations through the state energy programs and the Building Technology Office. And so it is important to consider equity when we're talking about our future and our economy. The last thing I wanna say on that is that often time when we're working in communities that are at risk and disadvantaged and they learn about these services and there are workforce programs available, we can hire right from those local communities, train them and provide them beyond just energy savings an opportunity to provide sustainable income for their families going forward. In my specific case of my staff, we had many staff that came through jobs funnel programs who now own homes, own cars, their kids are enrolled in college and things of that nature that would not have been an opportunity without this type of long-standing career that has growth opportunities embedded in that as well. We, in my case also out of our 22 employees, 20 of us are minorities and we are a women minority-owned business which I think really does open up the conversation to show that this growing career opportunity really could enhance and engage communities of color and vulnerable populations as well. Excellent presentation, thank you so much. I love energy efficiency and for lots of different reasons, the jobs is a big one obviously and you mentioned a report on one of your slides from E2 and E for the Future. That report is epic. I think if I can make a recommendation to those in our audience right now or maybe people who are watching this later on sort of on our archive, finish this, watch all the way through to 115, it's gonna be fabulous and then go download that report and read it. Not just because it's so authoritative but it really puts the size and the scale of the opportunity in very accessible terms and then think about how we can get back to that because like you said, we're, it's rough out there right now for a lot of these energy efficiency small business companies. So you can never go past that report without making a strong plug for it. If you have questions based on what you just heard in our online audience, just as a quick reminder, there are two ways that you can ask them. One is by following us on Twitter at EESI online. You can also send us an email, EESI at EESI.org. It is now my pleasure to introduce our second panelist, Stuart Davies is the Chief Executive Officer of Ocean Renewable Power Company. Stuart's focus is on driving growth and profitability at ORPC through overseeing the commercial rollout of the company's demonstrated and proven technology in the United States and Canada and Chile. Stuart comes to ORPC with nearly two decades of experience at Sincati investors, advisors, excuse me. I write this and then can't read it, sorry. Where he served in many different roles including the Chief Investment Officer of Opportunistic Credit and Portfolio Manager. During his tenure, Stuart served as a director or an observer on boards of dozens of companies in the energy, manufacturing, food, consumer product, retail and packaging industries. Stuart, thank you so much for joining us today and bringing all of your experience and expertise to our panel. Dan, thanks for that introduction. And I wanna thank Anna Amber and Amari for and the rest of the EESI staff for inviting me here today. I'm gonna leave my video off because I'm already on, we had a storm come through last night and I'm already on plan B, but I'm hoping you can hear me okay and see the slides. So with that, just from a background standpoint, obviously during last night's debate and in conversations over the last six to 12 months, there's been a lot of discussion about the United States getting to 100% renewable energy and by 2030 or 2035. And about a month ago, I attended a conference where the CEOs, the leading CEOs from the wind, solar and hydropower industries forecasted where they thought their industries would get to even assuming some pretty aggressive numbers around battery storage. And they thought they could just get to 50% of electricity generation. So this isn't addressing transportation and industrial uses as well. And the challenge, wind and solar are great renewable technologies, but the challenge is they can't fully replace base load power. And we believe that river and tidal resources, what the Department of Energy calls Marine and Hydrokinetic or MHK can be a potential solution for that. And that's what I'm gonna talk about today and that's what ORPC provides. One of the first criticisms that I often hear about MHK is its high cost. And I think both wind and solar both suffered from that for over the 20 years ago, 10 years ago, even five years ago. And as you look at the charts on the left, you can see both of those industries as they installed more devices, their manufacturing partners were able to design engineering changes, make improvements, lower costs, installation costs, development costs all came down, which enabled them to both wind and solar to come rapidly down the cost curve to where they're at five to 10 cents a kilowatt hour and some of the lowest cost energy that is provided to the grid today. The chart on the right is where we think we can get to. We think we can get to 20 cents in three years. And that's a combination of us making engineering improvements on our design, but also getting cost reductions from putting devices in the water and then operational efficiencies from standing up a supply chain. I'm gonna play a short video. The video that you're watching is ORPC's Rivgen Power System, which is currently operating in Iggy Agig, Alaska, a remote community about 250 miles west of Anchorage. The Rivgen Power System been operating there for the past 10 months. It has survived a brutal Alaska winter, with temperatures as low as negative 40 degrees. It has also survived the breakup of about two and a half feet of lake ice, which flowed over the top of our device. And it has been providing power, reliable base load renewable energy on a daily basis to the community of Iggy Agig. One reason I love this video is there is no sound as MHK is quiet. It moves with the flow of the river. MHK, our device is also underwater. So it has no land use issues. And as you can see, it doesn't block up the river. So it has low environmental impact. Our project in Iggy Agig, we feel could be a model for the future uses of microgrid. This project is funded in part by grants to the community by the US Department of Energy. And it involves us installing two of our Rivgen devices, a smart microgrid control and an energy storage system. When fully installed by next summer, it will reduce diesel use by the community of Iggy Agig by roughly 90% and dramatically cut their CO2 emissions. Remote communities in Alaska are an important first market for us. As you can see, all of the red dots are communities that pay over 50 cents a kilowatt hour, which is five to 10 times the amount that you or I would pay on the grid. Also, Letitia talked in her comments about energy equality. These communities on average use about half of the electricity that the average American does due to the constraints put on the system from both high cost and lack of supply. As you can see, many of these communities in Alaska are located on rivers, which are the lines in blue, as well as tidal locations where there's attractive tidal resources. So we think this is a great opportunity to not only to prove our technology, but also bring renewable energy and lower cost energy to these remote communities. We also often get the question of, what is the opportunity in the lower 48? And when we start talking about various rivers, it's always hard for people from a mental standpoint, they all have this mental map of more of highways and state boundaries. Obviously, with the debate last night and the audience on this call, and an upcoming election, many of the people listening to this today probably have this mental image of the lower 48 map. What ORPCC is a river system and the river system that are highlighted in pink are the fast moving sections of U.S. rivers. As you can see, it covers a lot of this various states in the United States where there's opportunities for deployment. And we believe overall there's between river and tidal, there's the potential resource to provide power to about a hundred million people in the U.S. In addition, developing this industry, there's an opportunity to create hundreds of thousands of jobs in three areas. The first on the left is in remote communities. We have designed our systems to enable local workers, local marine and boat operators to provide services to us, both during installation and an ongoing maintenance operation. So it's permanent local jobs for these remote communities. Second, if you think about tidal and river in the lower 48, the marine industry would be involved. And so we would create jobs there. And finally, if you think about U.S. manufacturing, a lot of our component parts, as you can see in the pictures on the right, look like agriculture equipment parts. They look like truck parts. They look like things that would go into the oil and gas industry. So they can be made by U.S. companies, a lot of whom are suffering right now during COVID. In addition, they can also get a boost from the export opportunity potential here. If we just look at remote communities in Alaska, Chile and Canada, it's about a $15 billion market. It's about half a million people. They're located near robust tidal and river resources, and they pay more than 40 cents a kilowatt hour for their power. Worldwide, there's about 1.5 billion people who either about half of those have no electricity at all and about half get their electricity from diesel-powered generation. And we think the market to provide power to these communities is about 250 billion. There's obviously competition out there and the EU sees marine and hydrokinetics as a great job creating potential. And they have decided to allocate 670 million euros over the next five years to dominate the ocean energy industry. If you think about wind and solar, most of the components for windmills are made in Europe. That was a specific policy action taken by the EU to make sure they stood up the manufacturing supply chain and had those jobs in middle-class, working-class manufacturing jobs in the EU. And what they are forecasting is by 2050 that this industry will create 400,000 jobs in Europe, 53 billion in annual revenue, and provide about 10% of the electricity to the European Union. And these policies are focused on putting devices in the water. So as I mentioned earlier, so you can create supply chains and drive down manufacturing costs and come down that cost curve that we've seen with wind and solar. So what can the US do in response and what can Congress do? Well, I think there are three policies. And as an example, wind and solar received about 75 billion in subsidies over the last 10 years, which created about a half a million jobs. We at ORPC believe the MHK industry could get a boost with a fraction of that amount as long as it's focused in three areas. The first is to provide direct funding to remote communities and rural communities. Not only would this create jobs in those communities, but it would also, by enabling them to buy and test devices, it would again help us to prove out our technology. It would also help set up regulatory policies that would reduce the time and increase the speed of adoption of these projects and obviously provide lower cost power to these communities. Second, title 17 of the Energy Policy Act of 2005 needs to be amended. If you look at the loan program under that, marine and hydrokinetics perfectly fits the four criteria, but the cost, the program is designed for, it's got 25 billion left and it's designed for projects over $150 million because the minimum cost to get approval is one and a half million. This clearly doesn't work for smaller projects like we would work on in these remote communities and rural communities where there are two to 10 million in size. So we would recommend that the title 17 be amended to create a $500 million basket for projects from two to 10 million that have lower approval costs. Finally, I know there's a debate about investment tax credits and opportunity zones and whether those policies should continue. We believe they should and to make sure under those policies that MHK gets treated the same as solar and wind. We believe that once our technology proves out, many of the rural communities and remote communities that would adopt our technology early on that adoption curve fit into both the opportunity zones and if they had investment tax credits available as well would really drive equity capital to help spur these investments and accelerate the adoption in the US. With that, again, I wanna thank you for your time and I'll be available after for questions. Great, thank you, Stuart, so much for your presentation. And I mentioned our bi-weekly newsletter a little earlier, Climate Change Solutions. We actually featured a story yesterday and yesterday's issue about the hearing that you testified at the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, the hearing that you testified at last week. And so if people would like to learn a little bit more about the hearing and sort of the overall state of MHK, it's a great article, great resource and lots of great information in the testimony from Stuart but also the other witnesses that were there before E&R last week. One, another quick reminder if you have questions for any of our panelists today, the best way you can ask them a question is by sending us a question on Twitter at EESI online. You can also send us an email EESI at EESI.org. And now I get to introduce our third panelist, Jessica Cahale is a project manager at Azavia where she applies more than 13 years of experience in nonprofit and technical project management. Her recent products include Temporate, the Decision Support Climate Change Adaptation Tool that began as a small business innovation research project for the US Department of Energy and Groundwork, a labeling application designed specifically to build machine learning training data sets for geospatial imagery. Jessica, thanks so much for joining us today. I'm looking forward to your presentation. Thank you, Dan. This has been a fantastic learning experience for me and I'm very excited to see where this conversation goes. If you give me just a second, I will share my screen. And what I would say, first off, is it's not gonna take long for the audience to realize that our experience as a small business is slightly different than the other two panelists, which has been really fascinating. But hopefully by the end of this presentation, I can convince you that small business technology firms like Azavia have a role in moving us towards a greener economy. So I work for a firm called Azavia and we do a lot of investment in research and development and part of the way that we do that is by going after grants that a number of federal agencies put forward. They're called Small Business and Innovation Research Grants and we and a number of other small businesses that we can name offhand have supported their businesses over the years through these grant programs. So I'm here to talk about that a little bit. A little bit about Azavia. We're a 50-person small business and we're located in Philadelphia. We build technologically advanced solutions for geospatial data visualizations and analysis or put another way, we build intuitive web-based applications that showcase a significant amount of data usually in a number of map layers. I'm sorry to interrupt, but we can't see your slides. Oh, that's not good. Sorry to interrupt. No, absolutely. That is important. It looks like we can see them now, although you're in, we can sort of see the whole thing, not just presentation, Mark, but it looks great. Okay, sorry about that. Luckily, we didn't go up too far. So this was just a little bit about Azavia. This is the important part. So our mission is to advance the state of the art in geospatial technology and apply it for civic, social, and particularly environmental impact. And that's where I really wanna focus today. We have a number of services that we offer different clients, both in the nonprofit, for-profit and research organization arenas. So mostly we do software engineering and user experience design. More recently, we've done a lot of machine learning and artificial intelligence work. And in some cases we can actually serve as an outsourced R&D department. We have a couple areas of expertise in the environmental realms, climate change, conservation, disaster risk management. And that stems from a long-standing relationship that we've had with a number of clients around water infrastructure and watershed monitoring and storm water management. We're also a certified B corporation, which means though we're a for-profit organization, we're mission-driven and we have a set of values that we live into with everything that we do. So that enables us to have what we call project selection guidelines that takes us off the table for a number of different things that we don't think will have potential positive impact for the world. So we specifically seek out things that will leave the world a better place than it was when we found it. And that's really because our founder and CEO, Robert Cheetham, really does believe in the B Corp ethos which is using business as a force for good. We really do believe that using technology and especially now in the last 10 years with the growth of new space and remote sensing, we believe that we are well poised to make these types of technologies accessible to a larger community which can lift all boats in a sense. One of the ways that we do that is through our own investment in research and development, but also through this grant program that a number of federal agencies offer. It's called the Small Business and Innovation Research Grant Program. Some people call it Sibbers. We call it SBIR. I've heard it both ways, but it is specifically designed for U.S.-based for-profits that have fewer than 500 employees and are controlled and located in the U.S. and are really looking towards focusing on research and development concepts and building out products that can further the research agendas of the different agencies. Different agencies will publish on a rolling basis areas of interest that they're looking to fund, but overall across the program, the federal government has identified a set of research and development needs and these grants help to incentivize the development of those ideas across a large number of organizations, including small businesses and research organizations, and it also incentivizes commercialization of those products and ideas. Usually it is a three-phase process. Phase one is a concept development. You start with a research question or a theory and you spend a bit of time developing that, so that's usually about six months to a year. It depends on the agency that's giving the award and it's around $50,000 to $250,000. If you're successful at the end of that phase and you are awarded a phase two, that's really when you're building out your prototype, scaling it up and identifying specific commercial applications for the idea. That is a bit longer. It's about 24 months and it can be, again, depending on the agency, about half a million to $1.5 million. If you're lucky enough to make it past that point, you go into what is called phase three. This is not funded by the SBIR program, but it's basically the commercialization of the concept, the service, the product. And at that point, if it is wildly successful, the federal government can basically option the technology or it can say, thank you very much. This has been great. We'll keep you on our radar. Please go ahead and commercialize it on your own. Xavier has been lucky enough to win a number of these awards over the years. So since 2006, we've won 10 phase one awards, things that have ended in a phase one. So a lot of concepts being developed. Current example in the environmental sphere is we're working on how we might improve flood inundation modeling using synthetic aperture radar and adding that to optical imagery. So it's pretty theoretical, but it's pretty exciting. And we're hoping that we can improve flood modeling. We've also had a number of phase two since 2008. A current example that we're working with is thinking through how we might be able to process hyperspectral imagery, the satellites for hyperspectral imagery have not even been launched yet. And how we might be able to use that to detect oil spills and tree mortality. Those are just two potential applications that we've identified thus far. Over the years, we've been lucky enough to leverage this funding to create five different products. And I'm gonna talk to you a little bit more about the last one, Temperate. But before I do that, I just want to say thank you to all of the organizations that have provided us with some of these funds. The hyperspectral imagery work that we're working on is funded by NASA. And the flood inundation modeling that we're working on is currently funded through NOAA. So it's been a really great experience with each of these agencies. No matter which agency, the impact of the award has been the same throughout. So we've won roughly $7.5 million between the agencies over the last 15 years. And that has enabled us to support our workforce and specifically engineering positions over the last decade with those funds. And this is just an example of one small business in this realm. So if you multiply that out to all of the small businesses, specifically in the software and technology fields, that's a huge impact. In 2019 alone, the research and tools that began as SBIR projects accounted for over 40% of Xavier's revenue. And that's not to say that we didn't need to put in additional R&D investments of our own. We did. However, those concepts were so beneficial to our recurring revenue that we've continued to build upon them following the end of the phase two grants as it were. One of the things that we do as a B Corp, but also just as a technology firm that believes in community, we default to open source. So that means all of the code that we write or most of the code that we write, we put in the public domain and we allow others to use and create derivative works and put it into their own projects. So these projects have led to thousands of lines of open source codes, which has positive impacts for a number of companies and individuals within this realm. And we know this because these people are within our orbit. We talk to them on a regular basis. And this sector, specifically new space and remote sensing is growing like gangbusters specifically over the last five years. So everyone that we talk to that's working on this sort of research, either their departments are growing or they've become the head of the departments or they're getting snapped up by new startups and starting new cool concepts. So this realm is really booming. So one of the SBIR projects that we used, that we won was specifically around making publicly available climate change data usable. So the federal government, specifically the USGCRP has a whole host of climate change indicator information that's available. It's really unusable for the lay person. However, it is super complicated. Climate modeling has become super complicated over the most recent decades. The format that it's saved in called net CDF is really hard to wrangle. And if you are not a data scientist or a climatologist in a university department, you can't make heads or tail it without some sort of interpretation. So we saw that as an opportunity to really take this critical information and make it accessible to the people that actually had to make on the ground decisions about what kinds of policy changes were needed in their local communities. So we built Temperate. We call it your adaptation planning companion and we were lucky enough to win a phase one and two from the Department of Energy and then a phase one from the Department of Agriculture to expand Temperate's reach to rural, hard to reach and tribal communities. We have what we call a bias towards action. So I'm gonna show in just a second how we are contextualizing the climate change data within the types of questions that communities have to answer for themselves. You can see here, this is our website temperate.io. Anyone can go and create a free trial and I'll show you just a couple of the things that you'll see when you get there. But just before I do that background on temperate, it is a low cost and when I say low cost, I mean $1,500 a year for any community of any size. Decision support tool. And it was designed specifically for small to mid-sized communities that have limited planning resources. We're not talking about the New Yorks or the Miami's or the San Francisco's. We're talking about Blacksburg, Virginia, that kind of town. Those people may not necessarily have dedicated resources to sustainability. They have generalists more often than not that already wear 10 hats and climate change adaptation plans are kind of one more thing that they have to do. So those generalists have to create climate change adaptation plans and vulnerability assessments. And with this tool, they can do so with confidence knowing that they're using the most authoritative science but doing so in an accessible way. We believe that this addresses a workforce capacity issue that is not going to go away. We're not necessarily seeing a huge growth in sustainability officers and departments in local communities. Those communities are already budgetarily strapped. But we are seeing that these communities are coming up with innovative ways to kind of piece together budgets to get the work done. So we're trying to help them do that. And we do that in a number of ways. It's really easy to set up an account. You simply enter in an email address and pick the location that you're interested in. This particular one is for Philadelphia where Xavier's based. And anything that you see in the application after that point is specific to your location. So this is saying specifically that Philadelphia is going to get a lot hotter. It's going to have more intense rainstorms and see a lot more flooding. And that is kind of the highlight. These are the potential top hazards that people in Philadelphia might want to prioritize. But again, no one knows the community as much as the people working in the community. So we're simply trying to help people prioritize but not making any prescriptive recommendations at all. One of the things that we do is contextualize the climate change data. So in a vulnerability assessment, you'll see that people have to ask themselves questions like what's the probability of this hazard occurring? How frequent will it be? How intense will it be? And climate science can get you so far but these questions are things that the community has to answer for itself. We tried to make this simple. One of our users calls this TurboTax for climate change adaptation planning. So we put the questions front and center and then you'll see that green bar on the upper right-hand corner. That's where we put the climate data. So these are the questions that you're answering. Here's some data that is specifically related to those questions. And take a look at that, kind of browse the data and help that inform the answers to the questions. We also help to prioritize the actions that might come out of it by giving some visual cues. So based on the inputs that the user actually enters, we say, well, anything that comes out is the lower, the yellow or the orange. That's probably something that can be backburned while you deal with higher priority issues, things in the kind of darker orange and the darker red blotchers. This is all based on the answers that they've provided. We're also hoping to accelerate learning by enabling these communities to share strategies among themselves. So we have a database of over 4,000 strategies taken from across communities across the U.S. And depending on the geographic area or the specific hazard that a user is looking at, we're able to basically match them and say, here is a strategy that others, similar to you, have employed previously. Maybe you could look here. So hopefully we don't need to have people reinventing the wheel. We can kind of kickstart the adaptation process. Unfortunately, the impact of COVID means that for most of the communities we work with, which are smaller and less resourced, adaptation work has basically come to a halt. I've been unable to reach some of the people that I've worked with because they've been furloughed for a while. So this has really been put on the backburner pretty significantly. Unfortunately, there are a number of people, there's a growing sentiment that COVID really calls into sharp focus, how making investments in climate adaptation planning are actually more urgent than ever, specifically for our communities that are at the most risk. Long-term resilience is never something that somebody points to and says, this is what we should be spending our money on, especially in the light of a public health crisis. However, this is an example of how our most at-risk communities are most adversely affected. So we do believe very strongly that investment in this area is what will help us get out of this. And the way that companies like Azavia do that is by putting some of our own money behind research and development to bring these accessible tools to people and help them get the work done, but the SBIR funding really, really helps. So it's our hope that SBIR funding can either stay at its current level or ideally be increased so that companies like Azavia can continue to help communities build things like climate resilience. Those funds can help build resilience in all of our communities and we're hoping to help that happen. Thank you. That was great. Thank you so much for that presentation. That's really interesting. And the issues of climate data, adaptation data, those are critically important and near and dear to ESI's heart. So some nice overlap there between the jobs issue and sort of the kind of information that communities and policymakers and decision makers need to do right by their local resilience priority. So thanks very much for that. And Temperate has a great logo, by the way. It took me a minute to see the thermometer, but then once I did, I think it was great. It's wonderful. We call him Tempe. Tempe? That's good. I like that. He go to Arizona State. There have been jokes about that. Yes. Good. I'm picking up what you're laying down. One last reminder. If you have questions, there are two ways that you can send them to us. One is by following us on Twitter at EESI.org. The other is by sending us an email. EESI at EESI.org. And now it's the time where we'll transition to Q&A. And I've had the good fortune to introduce three excellent panelists. Now I get to introduce my co-worker, Anna McGinn. Anna is with us today. She will be leading our Q&A. And so I will turn it over to her. She is a policy associate with EESI. And I'm looking forward to the discussion. So Anna, thanks so much. Great. Thanks, Dan. And thanks to all our panelists today. Really enjoyed all of your presentations. We're just going to jump right into questions and we have a good amount of time for them today. So feel free, people in the audience, to continue sending those in as well. So we're going to jump in with our first question, which is going to be on COVID, which I'm sure is on everybody's minds as we have this discussion. So if you could speak to how COVID has impacted your business specifically. And especially in the case of Leticia and Stewart, what are the steps you're taking to protect the workers as they are either going back to work or perhaps, as Leticia said, joining the workforce for the first time? And also what kinds of state, federal or local support would make a difference in the work you're doing right now for the workforce and for growing our low carbon economy? So I think maybe we'll start with Stewart and then we can jump to Leticia. Great, so we've been certainly have been impacted by COVID, I think, in a few ways. First, the ability to get out into the, to visit remote communities to determine if they have adequate river title resources to do a project has been basically put on hold. A lot of the remote communities have put travel restrictions on us and our ability to get there. Even working with the community of Igyagic, typically we would have sent people from our Portland main office to do work on the annual maintenance. Fortunately, we have a couple of people who work for us who are based in Anchorage, Alaska. So they were able to do that work and work with the community members to get the maintenance done. So that was a big shift in how we do things. Our supply chain has been disrupted in terms of, we have a couple more devices on order and there's been shipping delays or people have been shut down and so that has caused a great deal of disruption. In terms of policies, you know, it's been interesting. A lot of state and federal policies are designed around companies that have a business that was impacted, but they're not thinking about early stage and high growth businesses in these policies. So for example, you know, a hotel had 50 million of revenues and that's dropped to 10 million of revenues. They can easily calculate the impact of that and there's no question that those hotels and the travel industry has been hugely impacted. But if you think of businesses like ours, you know, we had a plan to grow our workforce 35%. You know, we were looking for a huge increase in growth this year and still instead of going from, you know, five to 25, we're going from five to five, but that's not a loss revenue year over year. So we don't qualify for any financial aid from state or federal policies. And I think that's a, you know, we were talking earlier about, you know, two thirds of the growth in jobs is from small businesses who have a new idea and you know, it's an emerging technology or an emerging service. And those are the real engines of growth in terms of hiring. And so I think there needs to be a shift in policy both at the state and federal level to say, okay, we have these fast-growing businesses. How do we treat, how do we help them stay in business? Obviously, PPP helped us. We were able to maintain our staff, but we have not grown our staff at all this year. Thanks so much for bringing up that point. I think that's a distinction that maybe not many people have been thinking about. So that's great. Leticia, pass it over to you. So we had the difficulty in accessing PPE equipment. There was a real shortage because healthcare workers needed all the equipment. And in order to do our work, we have to have masks, gloves, full gear really, because we're going into people's homes. So that was a real problem for us. Same thing, a lot of contractors that we work with were not able to access the PPP loan for all types of reasons. People were confused. There was a lot of confusion around those loan products, whether they would be forgivable or not forgivable. And when you're a small business taking on a loan, when you have no idea what's gonna happen and your future is uncertain, is definitely overwhelming. The other thing that we have had difficulty was getting people back to work. So once they did take the restrictions and allow us to go back to work with the proper PPE equipment, we did have difficulty getting people to return to work because of lack of childcare, lack of school being opened. And so a lot of workers, their lives were in a disarray and so they were having trouble getting back to the workforce. Hiring is a whole different game right now because normally you could do a job fair or have a large opportunity to invite the community in. So right now, again, when you're talking about direct laborer's jobs, for example, those are gonna be located in the community and we're not able to kind of go out and attract people. So we're trying to create new methods. I think that some sort of funding for small businesses to help them to market themselves, to hire during the pandemic would be useful. That not having enough staff seems to be the number one problem in my industry, not being able to hire people that are trained to do the work. And so I think the pandemic has heightened that, hopefully. And then the other thing, I agree that small businesses often have difficulty when they have a new idea and they wanna get something off the ground and expand and grow. Oftentimes, because we are small businesses, people are not willing to go out on a limb right away and support that growth, but we are really economic drivers. We do hire people and grow local workforce very rapidly. It's a huge economic driver, small business. Thanks. And Jessica, I know that you commented during your presentation a bit on COVID impacts on the communities you're working with, but I'll give you an opportunity if you had anything else you want to add. Not really. The adaptation work has certainly grown to a halt. Xavier also applied for a P-Lone. We were successful, thank goodness. Hiring is a whole different game in technology in its own, but post COVID is very much different. I would just say that we have a, as a B Corp, one of the things that we use our space for is a lot of community engagement, and that is not happening right now. So a lot of the non-profits that we work with locally in Philadelphia have no place to meet, which is particularly hard for us, but we are not returning to the office anytime soon. Well, that is a really good segue into our next question, which is kind of about how your businesses interact with your local communities. So I'm wondering if you could each speak a little bit more to both the work that you do with the local community and what you're situated in, as well as the communities that you work with all over the country. And if you could speak to how small businesses position are well positioned to interact with communities and any specific examples you have of that. And maybe Jessica will jump back to you on that, and then we can go to Leticia and Stuart. Sure. So we have a couple of different communities that we're really active in. Obviously our local community in Philadelphia is one that we work with a lot. We host a lot of after hours meetings and meetups and a lot of kind of coding academies for specific interest areas. We do a lot of that. We also have a long standing relationship with the Philadelphia Water Department and the Sustainability Office in Philadelphia, which we're lucky enough to have. So we are kind of on the circuit as it were for a lot of those environmental activities, and we pride ourselves on that. We're also, the other community that I'd say that we're pretty heavily involved in is the open source community. As a technology organization, we really do believe in kind of making things open and freely accessible. We host a number of kind of technology exchanges and things like that. We also have just one of the other products that we have just hosted a data labeling conference for creating machine learning training datasets, and we had worldwide participation. And it was fantastic, yes specifically. Since everyone is stuck at home, we decided that it would be a good time to use the opportunity to engage them online, which was really great, and we got a lot of great feedback. So we're constantly looking for opportunities, and our CEO, Robert Cheatham, we joke that he knows everyone everywhere, and he's been really great at kind of making sure that everyone in the organization really tries to find opportunities to engage with the community at whatever level they're working. Leticia, we can go to you next. So Energy Efficiency Solutions, we partner with nonprofit organizations, and one of the ones we work with is Green Eagle Warriors. In this organization, what we do is we go out into at-risk vulnerable populations in communities of color and provide energy, environmental, and leadership education. So our goal really is to raise awareness in communities about the connections between energy, how it's generated, how we use it, or how we don't use it and use less of it, impacts everything from our economy and our health and the environment. And so these are concepts that have been historically missed with youth and with minority populations. And so right now, again, with COVID, it's been a little more difficult, and so we've actually moved to a lot of online engagement, online book readings, and we're posting free content everywhere, providing it to public schools as well. We actually have a big opportunity coming up here to a bunch of inner city public schools. Actually, we're providing free educational content and books to them because so many kids are at home and they don't have the learning resources that they need. And earlier in Jessica's presentation, she mentioned climate change information and how non-digestible it is. And so one of the things that we do is we take really large, complicated topics and break them down to a fourth grade reading level. That is what we are best at. And so we find that when you break something down to a fourth grade reading level, not only are you engaging the child, but you end up actually engaging the entire family because kids are really good at driving home a message. So that's really our community engagement. I always think of Smokey the Bear or even the little gecko from Geico. Once you get a cute little character and a kid gets attached to it, they're just gonna make the parents crazy until they go turn off the lights and unplug the TVs and thinking about how we use energy, especially during a pandemic when everything is online. So we have this little switch it off campaign. We're trying to defeat the phantom draw who in our comic book series is an actual literal character who listens in through your television and your cell phone and is meddling with the world through energy use, trying to steal all of the power for himself. And so the kids get to battle that by stopping that waste of energy and defeating the phantom draw while they save energy and save DaNero who is our hero character by the way. So it's a lot of fun to work with the community. I think that it's what I love the most. I know that my teams, we give out our comic books at every home we go to and it's really good to see the kids get engaged and the parents get engaged as well. So that's the way that we've kind of kept that going during the pandemic is through the tools and the online platforms. But we really miss that face to face, going to schools with our characters, putting on these live presentations and having the kids yell and scream. I can't wait for those days to come back. Thanks so much. And I think that connects really well with some of the presentations we had earlier in workforce Wednesdays on some really innovative programs going on in high schools to really reach students about these key issues. So thanks for your work on that. That's super interesting. Stuart, over to you. That's a tough act to follow. I'm not gonna lie. So we don't have any exciting superheroes in comic books, but we work with government policy makers in the States we're active in. Obviously we're headquartered in Portland, Maine. So there's a climate council and a climate policy setting in the state and we're active participants in that. There's also technology innovation groups that we're active with there, like MTI and CEI. And then we obviously, for a lot of our work we hire local firms. So if we're testing a device, we typically are gonna hire main base consultants to help us without. We'll typically test our devices at the tanks at University of Maine or University of New Hampshire or if we're going out into the ocean, we're gonna hire local mariners to hire boats and help us with our deployments and testing our devices. So, and then obviously on the remote community side, we get very actively involved. I mean, we have a weekly call with the village of Iggy Ogig as we've been going through this DOE project. And it's obviously a major change in how their community is gonna function with going from a diesel based generation where you're flying in diesel fuel and to having that right there in the river. And so working through all the issues that have arisen, we have a lot of outreach to them. And again, the weekly call helps to make sure our lines of communication are strong. Great. So our next question dives a little bit more into the skills that you're looking for in the Clean Energy and Climate Resilience workforce. So what skills do you think are necessary for people that are looking to work in energy efficiency, renewable energy or climate resilience? And what resources are out there for people who are looking to build those skills beyond traditional education systems? And I'll just make this a free-for-all whoever wants to jump in first. I mean, I think the energy efficiency industry is so broad that it's hard to define every skill that is needed for the many types of jobs that are out there. But an understanding of energy systems as they relate to buildings is an important part of energy efficiency training, the basic understanding where your energy comes from and how it's utilized in a building and how things like heat rise, for example, or the size of a building versus the size of an HVAC system, lighting things are important. And understanding health barriers is another large growing issue in the United States. Health barriers being like asbestos vermiculite mold and other issues in the buildings all across our nation that have to be addressed prior to making these deeper retrofitted upgrades. That's something that is a growing area of knowledge that's needed. Training on basic skills such as customer service. And surprisingly, this sometimes sounds silly, but something like having to use email or a tablet. Everything is so much more technical and by technical I mean computerized nowadays. So back in the day, if you wanted to work in the industry you probably just needed to know how to use an installation machine, maybe a drill and a hammer. Now you're gonna have to put all types of data sets into tablets and tools to create reports. That track information on energy demand reduction. So I think that one of the needs that we really need is to have defined places in each state where people can receive this type of workforce training so that we can really ramp up the hiring. If there was an area that people could go to through a jobs funnel or a workforce program and pick and choose which certifications they need, which like in my career for example you could be trained in less than three months, make 20 bucks an hour or more. These are really great jobs for people who need employment right away. But if we don't have the training centers or the training material in place or the funds to send people to training then it makes it hard to hire. I'd say for us it's a variety of skill sets. So I think overriding all of those is just a passion for improving people's lives through bringing renewable energy solutions. So I think everybody who works at ORPC is pretty passionate about our mission and where we're headed and the impact we can have on the communities that we are reaching out to. But it runs in terms of skill set. I mean, there's background in environmental sciences. So when you're talking to communities you can understand the issues and what they're working on. We're manufacturing devices of some skill sets around understanding supply chains and how parts are made and who can make them. There's obviously permitting and approvals that need to be done at the state, local and federal level. So skill sets in that line of work are attractive to us as well. And then obviously engineering whether it's mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, fluid dynamics, things like that. So we have a pretty wide skill set of people when we, you know, depending on the role we're looking to fill it can, the criteria can move all over the place. What we're seeing in the communities that we work with that are trying to get adaptation plans together or vulnerability assessments together is that they would much rather rely on an adaptation planner. And there are a few programs throughout the country. However, I would say that the best resource is the American Society for Adaptation Professionals. They have a host of resources and the executive director there is fantastically well-networked. And I would say that we're seeing the need increase tenfold. A lot of people just don't have the confidence to interpret some of this data. Like Matisse was saying, if you can distill a concept down to something as simple as a cartoon character which obviously is an oversimplification but you still need the confidence to know that you're conveying the right kind of information. And I think that a lot of the communities that we are working with would much rather work with someone who has both a, you know the proclivity to understand some of the climate change indicators and to work with them to figure out what the policy changes should be. So we're seeing a need for that bridge pretty much everywhere. Great, thank you all for commenting on that. So I think we have time for one last question here. So I'm gonna pick the most challenging one maybe. So we've had the privilege of having a presentation today focus on energy efficiency, another one on renewable energy source and another one on climate resilience. So I'm wondering if you could speak to kind of how these two major areas of addressing climate change come together in your business. So I'm thinking in energy efficiency maybe we're seeing more hot days in Connecticut. So how are we kind of thinking about adaptation built in with energy efficiency? And then in the case of marine renewable energy and remote communities, Alaska's facing pretty rapid erosion along the coastlines. And so kind of how does that build into your thinking as you're developing your small business work in these areas? And Jessica, of course any thoughts you have on putting together adaptation mitigation in data communication to these small communities that you serve that are trying to work with very limited personnel capacity to address these big challenges. So maybe Latice, I will start with you. Sure, so I just did a piece on NPR actually about the demands for air conditioning the growing demands worldwide for air conditioning and its impacts on climate and climate emissions. And it's for me, I've always connected those things. I actually come from a healthcare background and the reason I got into energy efficiency was I learned in 2009 about climate change and the impacts of burning coal. Believe it or not, I didn't know about this before that coming from a community that we don't talk about climate change and definitely I had no idea where my electricity came from. So when I learned about that I was terrified that I wasn't doing anything to stop this thing that was going to kill my whole community and everyone I knew. And so transitioned into this energy efficiency world and as I've watched it since 2009 changed so rapidly our environment and I see the impacts that are happening in communities that are vulnerable and at risk, sea level rise, I mean, this is a very serious problem. The health impacts of water and air pollution that relate to energy usage, they all directly relate. And then all things are connected, right? If you're a scientist, all things are connected anyways and one input equals another output. So as we draw down our demand for heating and cooling needs and we draw down our demand for electricity usage and more importantly we lower the cost for kilowatt hour as we draw down peak demand and as we build up our renewable resources what happens is it actually lowers the cost of meeting that zero carbon goal. So drawing down demand makes it easier to ramp up renewables because it makes it less costly to ramp up renewables because you're using less of them. Likewise, heating and cooling will cost less and so you're sizing a system that's more effective and you can turn it over to electrification if you deal with your thermal boundaries and so all things are truly connected. I think that this is why I think education is such an important component of all of this especially simple education for the layman and the common person who does not work in energy, renewable efficiency or sustainability because so many people are having the difficulty of making that connection and understanding that having that light on your computer on your TV on going to work, driving all these things that they're actually connected to the outputs of the world that we live in and in my opinion as a building scientist directly related to also climate emissions. So although that may sound risky if we don't worry about climate change that's okay too because either way it's still driving down the cost of our energy and still building our economy and so I say there's really no need to argue about it because using less of something that is expensive is always a good choice. So less is more when it comes to energy demand and in the case of renewables having more of a renewable resource is good because they can share it across the grid or create micro grids as we heard earlier. Hopefully that answers your question. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you, Stuart. We can go to you next and then we'll give Jessica the last word. Sure, I think there's, I think of resiliency is the real challenge for a lot of these communities and I certainly think remote communities as they look a lot of their cultures go back 5,000, 10,000 years and it's only a short window where they have become beholden to fossil fuels and so I think there's an interest in moving away from that and getting pulled back to a sustainable type of, they want the electricity that the modern world brings but without the impact and they're seeing the impact more than anyone. And then if you think about some of the coastal communities on the East Coast, there's discussions of building flood prevention systems and that's water moving in and out and I think there's opportunities there to put devices there that could generate electricity. So not only providing barriers to prevent flooding but use those as a basis to provide electricity as well. For the communities that we work with, I think both visualization, education and outreach are critical. Climate change data is incredibly hard to visualize and we've tried a number of things. Some things stick, some things don't. It depends on the community and it depends on what the future is gonna look like and feel like for them. What we've seen is the most successful way to engage a community is to make it real and tangible and talk to them about things that happened in recent memory. Do you remember Sandy? Do you remember Irene? These are the things that happened. What happened? How did we recover? What's gonna happen the next time? And Irene or Sandy comes through and we have to rebuild after that. That starts the conversation about resilience and can get through some of the barriers about the hypotheticals about climate change data. Obviously the further out you go in the projections we have projections to 2100, the lower the confidence level we have in those projections. So you don't necessarily wanna jump to the most extreme potential future. You wanna kind of ground it in, here's what you were already seeing. Let's talk about what the future might hold. Being able to distill that in a really easily and accessible way and have that conversation on equal ground is I think incredibly powerful. And I think equity plays a huge role in climate change adaptation. And unfortunately because these communities are already so budgetarily strapped they have sometimes limited resources and time to do some of that outreach but it's so critical. I think if we could figure out a way to increase the funding and opportunities for those people to engage online now I guess, since we can't have kind of large town halls and things like that. But I think that is one of the biggest barriers to really picking up steam and moving a little bit faster. Well, thanks Jessica for having the last word and you mentioned Sandy and Irene and a few other named storms. Well, I guarantee that anybody who watched us today will remember Leticia, Stuart and Jessica because you've got great presentations and shared lots of great information with our audience today and what a great way to wrap up workforce Wednesdays. So thank you very much for taking time out of your day and for joining us. And it was great to get to know you and learn a lot as well. This is where we wrap it up and I just wanna say thanks to Anna for helping me moderate today. Also like to saying Omri and Dan O'Brien and Hamilton and Joseph and the comms and the policy teams and everyone at ESI who's able to make these online briefings happen and do it in a way that makes them really interesting and accessible. So thanks for everyone's effort. This slide has a couple of links on it. One is where you can get all the resources after the fact everything will be made available online. We would also really appreciate it if you take a moment to take our survey. www.esa.org for a survey. We read all of the responses you submit. We take their responses very seriously and we're always looking for ways to improve whether it's on the technical side of things or a content side of things or format side of things. We really appreciate all the feedback you're able to provide. So thanks in advance for doing that. And we'll go ahead and end it there. Sorry for running a couple of minutes late but I think everyone will agree with me that it was well worth it because we had such amazing presenters today. So thanks everyone. I hope you have a great rest of your Wednesday and be sure to sign up online for our newsletter Climate Change Solutions. It comes out every other Tuesday. The most recent issue was yesterday and it's the best way to stay informed about all of the goings on at ESI. So until next time, not next workforce Wednesday because this is five out of five but the next time we're online which is a little ways away. I hope everyone has a great rest of your day. Hope everyone stays safe and takes care and thanks so much for joining us.