 a little bit behind schedule, but that's what happens when members like Mr. Jim Clyburn and Mr. Scott Peter stuff by to share their their thoughts with us. So that was an awesome treat and it's always great to see them. But that brings us to our next panel, which is a really important topic. In fact, this topic is probably a cross-cutting topic. I think all of the panels today will be talking about it. Before I get started and introduce our first panelist, I want to just recognize all of the folks on our live cast. Hopefully the live cast experience is positive. Hopefully the video sounds good or no, the video looks good. And since we fixed up the mics, hopefully the audio sounds good as well. So thanks to everyone who's able to join us on the live cast today. For folks in the audience, if you have to take off for a little while and you want to come back, that's great. But if you have to, all of this is being live cast at our website, which is www.esi.org. If you want to go back and watch any of this again, if you want to revisit any of the program today, everything that we live cast is archived as well. It takes a day or so to get everything posted, but you'll be able to do that. And then a couple of weeks from now, we'll have summary notes. And we actually do summary notes for all of our briefings. So, for example, a couple of weeks ago, we wrapped up our Farm Bill series with our conservation briefing. We'll have notes posted on that shortly. All of our other Farm Bill briefings have notes posted as well. So it's a great shortcut. But without any further ado, I'm going to introduce our first panelist, and then I'll have a seat. And that is Garrett Nielsen. Garrett is the Deputy Director of the Solar Energy Technologies Office at the U.S. Department of Energy. Garrett, welcome to the panel and training the workforce for the 21st century clean energy economy. Alright, thank you for having me here. I'm sorry. So I'm here to represent the DOE and just kind of talk broadly and set the stage about what's going on in the world of workforce and how we're approaching it. So when you think of the DOE, you think about large research and development programs. And it's through those programs that we provide a tremendous amount of funding and experience for the STEM workforce of the future. So we have graduate students, postgraduate students, just filling our universities and national labs, kind of setting up that next generation of technical knowledge that we need to drive the nation's R&D capacity forward. That's not all we do. And to get the great innovations that the Department of Energy comes up with, through the marketplace, we also need to be sure that there is the next layers of workforce to be able to do that. This includes the people are installing products in the field, the people are manufacturing these products in our manufacturing facilities, and a number of other different related workforce positions that might touch on energy directly or indirectly in numerous different ways. And so we intend to push this forward by not only creating more and updating our education and training materials, but also making sure that we're reaching more people. Now we're pushing under this administration towards doing more around registered apprenticeships and apprenticeship readiness programs, working with community colleges and trade schools to increase access to our program. And doing all of this with a special eye on folks who are displaced energy workers to make sure they can be part of the energy future. In the solar office where I'm from, and I'll kind of keep referring back to solar, but it's kind of a similar to many other places, workforce is a big thing. So the other people installing solar modules on your roofs and in the fields, they're also the people manufacturing not only the modules themselves, but many other components and facilities. We hope to see around the US being catalyzed by the Inflation Reduction Act. But there are broader people in the workforce that we need to be aware of too, power systems engineers, folks who operate our electric and make sure that everything can interconnect and work well together as an imperative place. We also provide workforce training for areas that you might not necessarily think about as energy jobs. So let's say for first responders, building code officials and the likes for people who actually have an impact on the deployment of solar or deployment of energy but large, but it isn't their day to day life. And so we need to make sure that everybody who has given the game is aware of what energy technologies are and how their roles might relate to them so we can drive deployment faster. So as industry scales, there's obviously innovation that's needed in terms of how we deliver programming and the programming itself. But what we see a real need for innovation is how we reach the diversity of people in the US, we're ultimately going to take these positions. We want an energy industry that looks more like the United States at large. And so we're working hard to work with community based organizations and other groups with long reaches into communities to be able to bring more people into the fold and not only connect them to training itself, but as imperative, we also connect them to the jobs as well. Training is simply not enough. We want to connect people to jobs, then ultimately train connect them to more training so they can have energy careers wherever that may evolve to. So at least a number of programs over the years, particularly recently, that focus on this, and I'm happy to go in those a little bit more on our question and answer session, but just kind of give some scale to the challenge at hand. There's a little over 300,000 people working in the solar industry today. By some of our calculations, we need 500,000 to about 1.5 million people by 2035 to reach the electricity decarbonization goals of this administration. So it's a big leap. So to illustrate kind of the whole picture of the energy space, there's the US, sorry, the deal we just released the 2023 US Energy and Employment Report. So this covers kind of a retrospect of all energy related positions looking at the 50 states in Washington DC. Last year, we've added 300,000 energy jobs across the United States. It's about a 3.8% growth rate compared to 3.1% growth rate for the broader economy. We're seeing a large influx of women into the space, which is great, but while it's commendable, women are still very underrepresented in terms of energy jobs. We're seeing a large non-white energy workforce. We are also seeing that people are having difficulty hiring. So this is not only indicative of how fast things are growing, but also the fact that we need to connect more people to jobs. And we were very focused on doing that. The last thing I'll say very briefly in terms of how we're integrating this into all of our work, we're not only thinking about the training itself, but we're including what we're called community benefits plans and all applications for funding through the Infrastructure Bill or the Inflation Reduction Act. These community benefits plans are proposals that are part of the technical proposals that include commitments about what kind of workforce, what kind of pay, what kind of training you're going to bring people in this. These are about 15 to 20% of the scoring for these projects, and I particularly looked at very closely when it looks at the large demonstration programs coming out of things like the Infrastructure Bill. So, you know, the president has said this isn't, you know, necessarily a climate plan. It's a jobs plan. I firmly believe that it is true and we are working very hard to make that a reality and look forward to working with folks in Congress, your staffs, and anybody else who's interested to make this a reality. Thank you, Garrett. Next, we will hear from Jason Walsh. Jason is the executive director of the Blue Green Alliance. Welcome, Jason. Thank you, Dan. I'm happy to be here. As Dan said, I'm the executive director of the Blue Green Alliance. We are a national partnership of labor unions and environmental organizations. BGA was formed on the principle that we should not have to choose between good jobs and a clean environment, that we can and must have both. And we did a bunch of work in the previous Congress to translate that principle into specific policy provisions, both in the Inflation Reduction Act and in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. And we are now focused on the implementation of these laws in ensuring the investments they authorize result in high quality jobs in a scale more inclusive workforce and in concrete benefits for the workers and communities that need them the most. On the very important topic of this panel, I want to flag two big challenges that I'm hoping we can talk about. And that I think we have to address. And Garrett spoke to one of them. The first, though, is the quality of clean energy jobs. There are a number of ways to measure job quality. A key indicator we look at is average wages in clean energy sectors compared to average wages in fossil fuel sectors. So the most recent BLS data we have is from 2022. There's a bit of a lag. And that data continues to show a gap in wages between these two sectors. So for example, if you calculate average wages across occupations in fossil fuel electric power generation, they're roughly $96,000 annually. Whereas for solar electric power generation, average annual wages are about 65,000. And for wind electric power generation, they're about 64,000. That's just one metric of job quality, of course, but it's an important one. And it tells us we've got some work to do in clean energy sectors. And this is not just an equity issue to be clear. I'm raising it on this panel because it is a workforce recruitment and a job retention issue as well. The second challenge is the potential mismatch between the demand for skilled workers and the supply of skilled workers. And Garrett spoke to this a little bit. Businesses will need to recruit hundreds of thousands and retain and train hundreds of thousands of workers over the next decade as we make this clean energy transition. And yet we are in the midst of low unemployment rates, effectively zero in some parts of the country and in some sectors. Furthermore, much of the investment from both Bill and Ira, and I would add the third uncle, Chip, will flow into sectors like manufacturing, construction, utilities, where labor markets are incredibly tight, where labor shortages already exist, and where the current workforce is aging. Currently one in four manufacturing workers and one in five construction workers are age 55 or older. I am 55. I know that is old and I'm not in a job that's physically punishing. And in addition to being older, the incumbent workforces in these sectors are also disproportionately white and male. So bottom line, we won't be able to make and build and repower and retrofit our way to a clean energy economy or create a workforce in these sectors that looks more like America and achieves our equity goals, unless we bring to bear intentional workforce strategies and the public investments to support them. So there are a number of programmatic and policy levers that exist to do this. Many of them are actually incentivized in the community benefit plans that DOE attaches to their funding applications which I really want to compliment DOE on. They include developing and funding sector-focused high-road training partnerships, strengthening and expanding registered apprenticeship programs, and embedding apprenticeship utilization requirements in public investments, as has done in clean energy tax credits of the IRA, requiring wage floors, otherwise known as prevailing wage, and on proving on that with fair wage and living wage standards, supporting and scaling up apprenticeship readiness programs that prepare folks for entry into registered apprenticeship programs that focus on bringing underrepresented groups into these occupations, ensuring fair hiring and equitable access to these jobs, enforcing the legal rights of workers to form unions, and collectively bargain with their employers for better wages, benefits, and working conditions. And last, but not least, if Congress wants to do something they can strengthen our anemic labor laws and pass the PRO Act. We need to do not just one or two of these things, we need to do all of them, and we need to do them at scale, which is a very heavy lift. In fact, I'd argue that passing legislation was the easy part, as gobsmacking as that might sound for those of you who live through the hellish 18 months of passing those two pieces of legislation. If we're going to use the funding and the tools they provide to build a clean energy economy that's truly a high-road clean energy economy, one that's worker-centered, that results in high-quality union jobs in a more equitable economy, and that meets the skilled workforce needs of businesses, that will depend on the decisions that we make, both in the public sector and the private sector, and the work that we do collectively over the next several years. So thank you for convening this conversation. Dan, looking forward to hearing from my colleagues. Well thanks for being part of it, Jason. Next, Lynn Abramson. Lynn is the president of the Clean Energy Business Network. Lynn, great to see you. Take it away. Thank you, Dan, and thank you for having me today. So as Dan said, my name is Lynn Abramson and I'm president of the Clean Energy Business Network, and we are a nationwide nonprofit organization that serves as the small business voice for the clean energy economy. We work with a little over then 7,000 small business and community leaders across the nation, all 50 states, a number of territories, almost every congressional district, and a very broad range of clean energy technologies and services. And the breadth in terms of the geography and the technological scope of our network really illustrates the breadth of the clean energy economy as a whole and is just the tip of the iceberg of what exists in this nation. So we help to support these small business and community leaders through policy engagement, so basically demystifying government programs and making them accessible to small businesses and communities that don't have highly paid lobbyists in Washington and aren't as tapped into some of the developments that are occurring here. Also through market and technology education, so exchanging information within the industry about some of the opportunities and trends and needs in the industry. And then finally business development assistance and what that primarily looks like is not so much in the form of an incubator where we're directly hand holding and working one to one with particular businesses throughout their whole business life cycle, but rather aggregating really useful resources, information services that are useful to businesses and communities as a whole. We do have a booth out there that we're sharing with our parent organization, the Business Council for Sustainable Energy. A couple of my colleagues, Awa and Ali, have been out there today and we're distributing some materials, but I want to just talk about some of the resources that we have available. And these are absolutely freely available. So, you know, we encourage congressional staff to share these with your constituents if you're a business leader to take advantage of these. But for example, we have a funding database, which you can sign up for and provides an aggregation of grants, you know, workforce programs, loan programs, other types of investments in clean energy. And it's searchable by technology stage, a whole variety of parameters. There are a number of increasing number of programs in there that are community oriented or workforce oriented. And you can sign up for email subscriptions on the frequency of your choosing. We also produce a number of blogs, events and other types of resources to share information about what kinds of programs are out there. And I would say that for our business, some of our organizations, some of the top priorities this year for small businesses are to, as I mentioned, demystify the government programs and then to really kind of shine a spotlight on what the investments coming from the federal government are accomplishing in communities. So we see increasing adoption of some of those programs. From a workforce perspective, I'm going to speak mostly from what small businesses and communities need based on what we've seen. And I would say first, it is to create and foster the market opportunities. And so programs such as the investments coming out of the Inflation Reduction Act, which is pumping $370 billion in grants, loans, you know, greenhouse gas reduction fund, which is that sort of, you know, Green Bank type of program, other types of financing mechanisms. And that's just, you know, leveraging further private sector investment. Those create really important market signals down the road for small businesses, ranging from early stage innovators all the way through mature technology and service providers. So the market signals have never been stronger than they do than they are right now. We also have to increase the accessibility of those programs. So I mentioned a lot of the companies and the communities we work with. They don't have lobbyists in DC. Not all of them are tapped into major trade associations, navigating the government lingo, what kinds of programs exist, you know, taking the time to apply for those that's very challenging. So there are a number of programs, you know, Garrett mentioned a handful of these, and I want to get into these further in the Q&A. But there are a number of programs that we find very valuable for increasing the accessibility of government resources. And then finally, we want to remove barriers to access, which kind of goes sort of flip side, but hand in hand with increasing accessibility. And so I'll talk further in the Q&A about some mechanisms for that. One thing I do want to mention since we are here on Capitol Hill is there is currently an important barrier that's facing a number of small businesses, which is the expiration of immediate expensing under section 170 for the R&D deduction in the tax code. Very technical, but essentially what it means is that for 60 years, businesses were able to immediately expense their R&D expenditures up front. Now they're being forced to amortize them. And so we've heard examples of companies that received a $2 million grant and may have to pay suddenly a $700,000 tax bill that they wouldn't otherwise have been facing. And these are for early stage startups. So there is legislation bipartisan by camera legislation in the House and Senate to address this issue. And so we really encourage those of you working here to, you know, encourage your bosses to co sponsor. And so we can talk further about that later. But, you know, really we appreciate the opportunity to speak to all of you today and look forward to continuing the conversation with my colleagues. Thanks, Lynn. And rounding out the panel is Charles Bolden. Charles is the senior director of Congressional Affairs at the Solar Energy Industries Association. Charles, it's always great to see you. You as well. Thank you. I cannot cannot imagine being in a better place with a better view. So I'm sorry, audience, if I'm looking past you, it's the view. Again, thank you all so much for having for having me today. I want to thank ESI and the Senate Renewable Energy and Energy and Energy Efficiency Caucus for bringing us all together today to discuss some of the greatest advancements and issues surrounding clean energy. Again, my name is Charles Bolden. I currently serve as the senior director of Congressional Affairs for SIA. We are we represent over a thousand member companies from battery storage to roof to small mom and pop rooftop solar, as well as large utility scale projects across the country. Considering the growth of the solar sector that we've seen over the past year alone, it comes as no surprise that we can expect a demand for hundreds of thousands of new solar and storage jobs. Not only is it pertinent that we increase access to solar job opportunities and trainings, but we must also focus on diversifying the solar workforce by targeting low income and minority communities through outreach, internships, fellowships, apprenticeships and partnerships with HBCUs. Just to go along with the workforce demographics, I would like to point out some statistics. Right now, the current solar workforce is 31 percent female, 69 percent male, 22 percent Hispanic or Latino, 1 percent American Indian or Alaska Native, 9 percent Asian, 9 percent Black or African American and 1 percent native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander, with 73 percent of the workforce being white. So just wanted to highlight some demographics for you all. Changes to the solar investment tax credit, ITC and the production tax credit, PTC, which require employers to hire qualified apprenticeships to unlock the full value of the tax credits, demonstrate ways in which we can hold companies accountable for fair workforce and development practices. This is so important given the work and everything that we've done in progress to do all of our part. I would like to say it will take all of us in this room to reach our diversity goals, to reach our workforce goals. As a means of contributing to this progress, SEA has launched the SEA Online Learning Center, which is an online platform that provides comprehensive educational programming for companies, clean energy professionals and people looking to join the solar and storage industry. Our solar 101 program will serve as a critical tool to ensure the industry manages its growing workforce development needs by providing education resources directly to individual workers. The United States will be unable to decarbonize this energy sector unless we're able to create a diverse well-trained workforce that can support the clean energy deployment needed to avoid the drastic effects of climate change. Therefore, we must act strategically and swiftly as we work towards developing a more robust, equitable and solar workforce. Thank you. Thank you, Charles. I'm going to actually stand up. I can see Miracle, but I can't see you from there. Again, we're going to move. It's all taped down. But anyway, let's get into the moderated discussion a little bit, and we will absolutely take questions from the audience. I'm not sure who our Mike Wrangler is. Oh, it's you. Great. I know. So we'll do our best to get to everybody who has questions. But I'd like to kick off the discussion, sort of building on something that Garrett talked about, and that is that there's a lot of diversity within what we would call the clean energy jobs, right? You mentioned building code officials as someone, as a type of job that is actually very important to the clean energy sector, but maybe isn't first of mind, right? I think the image that comes to mind are people putting solar panels on roofs or standing atop big windmills or maybe doing a BlurRDoor test. But I'd like to go into that a little bit deeper. What are some of the some additional examples of jobs that are really, really critical to a clean and to a healthy and vibrant and growing clean energy workforce that maybe we're not already thinking about. And Garrett, we can start with you and we can go down through the line if folks have comments. Sure, I'm happy to address that. And so yeah, when we do think about, you know, clean energy workforce jobs, many of us think large fields of people installing solar modules, building windmills, whatever it might be, that has traditionally been the jobs themselves. But I mean, I think through the Inflation Reduction Act, we're going to see manufacturing jobs. There are also things that we're all a bit more familiar with. That's going to be all the components, not just say solar modules, but there's racking and tracking and all those other things. Then there's also the jobs that feed the tools that go into those manufacturing facilities. And the solar energy industry in particular, a large number of the tools made to make modules are made in Asia as well. So we need to repatriate that as part of the Inflation Reduction Act. So there's a lot of ancillary manufacturing jobs that feed in to actually having a manufacturing line in your community, whether it be for glass, for solar cells, for wind turbines, whatever it might be. Then when you actually think about the deployment, that's where you start to get into positions where someone might have a thing about one or two percent of their job actually being energy-related, but they might have an outsized impact on deployment. So one that I think about here are, say, fire marshals and first responders. So remember a few years back, I believe when there was a lithium-ion battery fire in New York City in a building. And the fire marshals basically said, well, we're just not going to install batteries in New York City anymore, full stop. And that is the ability to just paralyze the deployment of a product. So we're working very hard to make sure those folks understand and know how to deal with, say, a fire if it were to happen with a given asset or any kind of other emergency response. Code officials as well have a very outsized impact on the deployment of. So we need to make sure that they are well-versed and understand exactly how these products are being deployed. This goes all the way to architects. This goes to just construction companies we're working on, any number of the myriad buildings or objects that renewable energies might be on. This can either go all the way through to, say, real estate professionals. And you need to understand how to actually price self-generating assets into the cost of the building. And so it's a whole litany of different people that have a little bit of skin in the game. And this is not only due to the diversity of how and where these technologies are being deployed, but also to how intimate they are going to be deployed in our environment on our home routes. My roof has solar on it. So I need to, I mean, I should know a little bit more about sort of the average person. But I definitely didn't know a little bit more now that it's on my roof. And so there's just a number of jobs that kind of cascade outward that need to be part of this clean energy economy. And this adds up to just millions and millions of positions that are evolving and starting now. But also we're going to need to grow into the future as we look at kind of building an electric grid that's three times the size as representative of all the representative earlier was mentioning. So there's a lot to come. And I think when we think, oh, installation jobs and manufacturing jobs are what renewable energy jobs are, we're doing a little bit of disservice into thinking about the whole pantheon of what needs to be developed. Two jobs a little bit because while there are certainly some new skills and new occupations that come with this transition to clean energy, for the most part, we're looking at existing skills and existing occupations that are deployed to new economic activity and new technologies, right? So the electrician who installs a utility scale solar farm is usually the same worker with roughly the same skill set as the electrician who helps install the natural gas combined cycle plant, right? The CNC machine operator who makes parts for a wind turbine, you know, is the same worker, the same operator who makes parts for oil and gas equipment, right? There are exceptions to that. You mentioned one of them. Dan, solar installer, and that's an important occupation, but there's also a downside, right? To having a narrowly tailored set of skills in terms of worker compensation and worker mobility, right? So if you look at the BLS data, which I referenced earlier, average annual salary for a solar installer is about $49,000 a year, whereas an electrician in the solar electric power generation sector makes roughly $75,000 a year, and electrician in the fossil fuel electric generation power sector makes roughly $95,000 a year. So at the end of the day, from a public sector standpoint, we do have to make some choices about where we invest our strategies in. I want to make the argument, most of these are existing occupations and let's invest limited resources in getting workers the broadest possible skill set so that they can actually have mobility and bargaining power in the marketplace while working, while also meeting employer needs. Lynn, your membership is very, very diverse. All sorts of different companies. What are some examples of the diversity in the clean energy workforce that you see? Yeah, well, I think that Garrett and Jason covered it pretty well, but the only things I would add would that be perhaps to Jason's point that these are existing skills, but new industries and new opportunities to employ those skills. In addition to the engineering, the installers, the project developers, sort of the science and kind of hard skills that are needed, every kind of business has a whole ancillary range of job functions within it that is supported by the clean energy economy. So don't forget about the many opportunities that are being created in finance, communications and marketing, in policy for, you know, many companies that are impacted by the local, state or federal regime will have people that need to kind of track and respond to that. Human resources, I mean, it's any kind of job that you would see in a business, you will also see in the clean energy industry. And I mentioned this because a lot of times when we project the number of workers in an industry and we do these kind of census like the U.S. energy and employment report, you know, we will count some of these people, but there's often an underestimate of just how many people are associated with the clean energy economy. And I would also say to young people that are interested in working in the industry, let's say you graduated with a communications degree and not an engineering degree, but you want to make a difference and you want to be part of the, you know, climate solutions and clean energy economy, there is a need for your skill set in this workforce. So there is a place for everyone. And Charles, solar industry, the image that comes to everybody's mind is a solar installer. But what are some examples of other types of jobs around the industry? Absolutely, like Lynn mentioned, you know, a lot of the big industries have similar jobs. So I would also say the solar industry are particularly engineering and policy. I mean, you can be a solar installer or you can be a lobbyist like myself, you know? Or you can be a sales and marketing, you can be in construction, project development, manufacturing, logistics. I think it's all, you know, we can transfer some of our skill sets into whatever energy industry you'd like. One thing I would like to mention, when we talk about diversifying the industry, I also want to say that as an HBCU grad that it is very much so, I will be doing myself a disservice if I did not advocate for a lot of our industries to go out and reach out to these HBCUs to work with them to meet some of these students halfway because that is, you know, as I mentioned in my open statement, 9% of the industry in the solar particularly is African-American. And as an HBCU graduate, we have all the skill sets and tool sets that you need to be successful in any industry. So I just want to highlight that as well. And if I remember correctly, it's Tuskegee, right? The Tuskegee University. There you go. I'll give you a plug. Charles, maybe we'll start, oh, go ahead, Garrett, please. I just want to hear a quick follow-up comment on what Jason was saying in that, you know, it's important to think about jobs and careers, right? We all got our initial job, but then it's an evolution of skills and experiences that have ultimately turned into our careers. And so we need to make sure that folks, someone gets a job as a solar installer, that there are ways for them to say, look, I'm actually pretty good at dealing with electricity. Maybe I should go out and become an electrician. That might evolve them to have a career in HVAC and that might rumoring them back from the building sectors and so forth. And so I think it's incredibly important, particularly for all the renewables industry and the DOE to be setting up ways and career maps so people understand how careers can evolve. And so we're not simply saying that we're creating a job, but we're creating a job that gives people a pathway to a broader career. And so I think that's an important point that we need to be thinking about as we map out the renewable energy space. Yeah, I think that's a great point. Charles, maybe we'll start with you and we'll move back through the list. You mentioned in your opening comments that CS membership includes smaller organizations, large organizations. There are thousands of companies involved in this sector, including a lot of small businesses. What are some ways that SIA sort of either approaches the small businesses differently? How do you approach small business or small solar businesses differently than you might? What are the types of opportunities that you're working toward to span for them? I think the biggest thing is just to educate and everyone as equal as possible. Understanding that memberships are different, but however, I think that the access of education goes a lot longer when you don't have the typical resources as a larger company as they will have lobbyists in the area or if they want to advocate. But I think the biggest thing is that we just try to educate as many members as possible on different issues, especially ways that they can find incentives to grow their business and create those high-paying jobs for a lot of the people who wouldn't have the opportunity. And aside from that, I think just the public and private partnerships, I think it's something that we also advocate for. And again, the biggest thing is just educating some of our smaller companies. Lynn, couldn't ask this question to Charles without asking it to you as well. Yeah, well, I mentioned earlier that I think some of the market signals impacts uniformly the larger and the smaller businesses, but that smaller businesses, and I would say also under-resourced communities, struggle with the access. And so I think I mentioned that I wanted to talk just briefly about a number of government programs that can assist with this. And I think where we need the public sector to step up to help support those private sector opportunities is where we see those gaps, right? And so the gaps in the funding, and then I'm really glad that Charles also brought up sort of the gaps in accessing workforce. Small businesses, their ability to go and participate in job training, apprenticeships programs, or even to know what exists. And there's a lot of times it's the information gap that is so significant. So there are a number of programs that I think are important. One is, so we're very involved in something at the Department of Energy, which we worked with Garrett and some of his team on, which is the American Made Challenges competitions. These are cash prizes that are given to companies and communities with very low barrier to access compared to a typical federal grant to help accelerate the clean energy transition in communities. And there are a number of types of opportunities that are specifically geared at trying to build clean energy capacity in under-resourced communities and to increase the equity and diversity in the industry. So a few things we've worked on include the Community Clean Energy Coalition Prize, which helps community coalitions develop a strategy to address a local clean energy opportunity or inequity. And then there's a prize that's actually gonna be released this week called the Make It Prize, which is building manufacturing capacity in communities. So there's gonna be a track that invests in community planning and then a track in manufacturing facilities themselves. There's the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, which has released several new programs, the Solar for All National Clean Energy Investment Fund, Clean Communities Investment Accelerator. We've got flyers on all of this that you can learn about it. I would say in addition to these kinds of grant and prize types of opportunities and making these investments, we also need to have greater programs to encourage subcontracting between small businesses and the larger prime recipients that get these big energy innovation hubs and things of that nature. So more matchmaking that requires public sector involvement to make that happen. And then finally, I would say longer-term grants and contracts to capacity-building institutions or sort of entrepreneur support organizations in regions. So that includes community colleges, HBCUs, MSIs, incubators, accelerators, state and local governments. So the more we see that sort of attempt to bridge the gap, both in terms of the funding as well as the workforce connections, the better that will be for small businesses, but our economy as a whole. And Jason, do you have any thoughts about sort of how we involve companies of different sizes in the clean energy sector? Yeah, I mean, I'm gonna mostly underline what Lynn has already said, but most normal people, most business owners do not know anything about these programs or what's in them. That is particularly challenging now given the raft of new programs that were authorized under the legislation of the previous Congress. And it's our job, and we're doing a lot of this at BGA, just to translate all of this information into accessible, clear language. So we put out user guides to both the bill and the IRA. We put out smaller, more targeted user guides. So for example, we just released a user guide yesterday on something that is a total game changer, which is the fact that clean energy tax credits are now non-profits, governments, schools are now eligible for these. Most people don't know that. And so we're putting out resources to actually connect the dots. The main point here is that, even when I read Treasury guidance, I wanna stick a nice pick in my ear. I mean, it is so obscure. So being able to actually explain that to people in a way that doesn't force them to do that to themselves and be masochistic is really an important job. You should make them audiobooks, right? That seems like a good idea. Garrett, your name was taken in vain by Lynn. I'd love to learn a little bit more about your thoughts in that program in particular. Sure, sure. So yeah, we think the American-made challenges are a great way to be driving more funding towards smaller businesses. Again, these are prize programs, cash prizes, small beard entry to potentially get into a program. And then the cash prizes bill, depending on the progress you make towards your given goals. And one thing that I think is a little less visible but is critical to these kinds of programs, we've developed something that a number of these programs use called the American-made network, where we set up a network of entities. These can be individual experts all the way through technology incubators that any competitor in these programs can go to and say, look, I need someone as an expert in how to deposit a certain layer of material on another material. I need someone as an expert in figuring out how I raise money. I need someone as an expert in putting together pro formulas because I want to go out and get something financed. And so it's a network of folks who are all incentivized to work with these participants because it really does take community. And if you're just an individual startup, there's enough that you have on your plate just around making a business work or technology work. And so we've really done to try to make lower the barrier to accessing as diverse a group of skills that help bring you further along through these programs, prize programs, and ultimately into our normal funding opportunities and ultimately into the market space. One other area that I think that the government can really help is by bringing, kind of rising ties things where we can bring like companies together to provide potentially a greater service. So a good example of this in the solar industry, there's a group called the Amicus Cooperative. So this is a bunch of small installers that came together to harness all their buying power to drive down costs so that they could deploy solar. They've created an O&M cooperative through some funding from the Department of Energy so that they can provide operations and maintenance across America. So if you're a diverse owner of solar assets, you can get the same level of service in all different parts of the country without contracting with 20 different companies. You contract with one entity who then is an umbrella organization for many small businesses who can then provide this. And this group now is we just wanted to help develop curriculum around operations and maintenance for solar systems, which is gonna be absolutely critical as we think about deploying, tens of thousands of millions of these assets in the field in the future. So there's two rules is one, creating that ecosystem in which small businesses can thrive and grow. We're also trying to figure out where are their synergies between some small businesses and bring them together such that they can provide in their scale together, benefits or products that normally have been left to large entities or otherwise. So there's a lot of really unique ways that we can play in these growing spaces. And again, these are solar examples because that's my world, but this can be applicable to any number of other technology areas. So if there are any questions in the audience, we have a few minutes. Oh, we do have a question over by the column on the other side, thanks. Thank you very much. Thank you all for your time. This was awesome. My name is Daniel Duran. I am in coming from the DOE, State and Community Energy Program, specifically dealing with workforce development. So we work with Garrett's team quite often. This question is actually for Charles. I began my career in the clean energy space, digging MV runs throughout Wyoming. Like that's where I cut my teeth and move my way up to DC and got here without a degree. I'm probably one of the only guys in here without a degree, but made my way up to that. I'm gonna bring up actually site, Jason, what you mentioned, wage gaps in between oil and gas industry compared to what we see in the renewable industry space. I work in oil and gas at the time as well. Saw that you had really low quality jobs where people were treated in any humane way, but they were paid well. So they were okay with doing that, right? They were okay with polluting their communities. They were okay with taking the brunt of that industry because of the fact that they were able to provide for their families. We don't see that in the renewable energy space. Like we see this huge gap. What are some challenges within the industry that are creating that gap? And how can we here in DC and in the federal space help bridge that gap or give the industry the tools in order to bridge that gap? So we can create these high quality, high paying jobs. Yeah, that's a great question. And what you basically, you stated that you're probably one of the only people in here without a degree, but I'd argue with you that that's your story. You know what I'm saying? That that's the biggest thing that you have to take from this. But to answer your question, I think you have to look at the oil and gas industry as something that has been around for decades. If not some would argue that America was built on a lot of oil and gas money. So it's going to take some time for the renewable energy sector to get there. And I think that we have to just continue to lean on the incentives that are in place. And I think that that's something that we will see in the future is that some of these wage gaps will definitely change. And respectfully, I think that the renewable energy industry will surpass the oil and gas at some point. It's not going to happen overnight, but it will happen. We have about another minute, maybe minute and a half. Lynn, Jason or Garrett, do you have anything you'd like to add in response to the question? I mean, look, I think my colleagues are absolutely correct. This is going to create jobs across a whole bunch of different occupations. But I do think to this degree issue, we need to recognize that most of the jobs that will be created will be for folks who will not need a four-year college degree for blue collar workers. And that's a very big deal, right? Because blue collar workers, the working class in this country have been on the hurting end of economic transitions for decades. And now we're making a transition. If we do it right, they're going to be building and making all of this stuff right that we rely on to make this shift. We need to make sure that the jobs are good and family supporting, but it's a huge opportunity to finally reverse direction on what have been some really brutal labor market trends over many decades for the working class in this country. And yes, these are policy choices, right? Like, it can either go well or not. It's up to us in terms of how we decide. I think we're at time. So I think I can see the clock. We started a little late, but we have a panel to transition to. Garrett, Jason, Lynn, and Charles, thank you for being excellent panelists for us today and helping us understand the opportunities in the clean energy workforce. I think they deserve a round of applause. Thank you.