 Good morning, everyone, and welcome to our briefing this morning, Funding the Future, The Impact of Federal Clean Energy Investments. I'm Dan Brasette. I'm the president of the Environmental Energy Study Institute. EESI is celebrating 40 years of advancing climate solutions through congressional education. We were founded in 1984 on a bipartisan basis by a group of members of Congress to provide science-based information about environmental energy and climate change topics to policymakers and the public. What does that look like? For congressional education, well, it looks a lot like this. We do a lot of briefing. Sometimes they're in person. In fact, often they're in person. Sometimes they're virtual when it makes a lot of sense for them to be in virtual. But we do our best to pull together the best experts, leaders, practitioners together to talk about environment, energy, and clean energy topics. We cover a lot of ground. Today, we're gonna be talking about our good friends at the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy. We featured them in previous briefings this year, but we also cover other topics. We did a briefing a few weeks ago about the sustainable energy in America Factbook with the Business Council for Sustainable Energy in Bloomberg NEF. We also did a briefing not that long ago on the IRA and the IJ, or the Inflation Reduction Act and the Infrastructure Investment Jobs Act. We did a progress report about the investments that are flowing through the U.S. Department of Agriculture and DOE into rural areas. Next week, we'll be back with a cool briefing about ocean carbon dioxide removal, and then after that, dam safety, after that, natural climate solutions, and even more. That's a lot to keep track of, and we don't have all morning, so I'm just gonna encourage everyone to sign up for our bi-weekly newsletter, Climate Change Solutions. It's really the best way to keep up with everything. And if any of those topics sounded good, you can always visit us online. All of our resources are free and fully available to the public, and our website is www.esi.org. We try really hard to make sure that our resources are timely, relevant, accessible, and practical. One reason why we're doing this briefing today is because it's in the wake of the President's budget request, and we're gonna be talking about the work that DOE is able to do to pull the private sector and the public sector together to advance climate solutions. It's much better to have this information before your boss asks you about it, and we try to time our briefings so that when things are sort of in the mix in Congress, it's appropriation season. It's a good time to be learning about all the great work that DOE is doing. And today, we're gonna be taking a very close look at the Department of Energy's latest research and innovations in energy efficiency, renewable energy, and sustainable transportation. And those things are carried out in part by the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy. In particular, our panelists this morning will explain how public-private partnerships are at the heart of EERE programs and detail all the ways that federal investments and advanced technologies drive decarbonization while building a clean energy workforce, advancing environmental justice, keeping energy affordable, and laying the groundwork for the new innovations and policies that will reduce emissions while improving the energy productivity of our economy. I'm gonna pop up a quick survey here. If anyone would be willing to take a few moments of their day to fill out our survey, we'd really appreciate that. We'll also have a link at the end of the webinar or the briefing today as well. There it is, thank you, Troy. Before I turn it over to our first speaker of the day, I just wanna mention that we're gonna have time for Q&A. We're in an online audience and we're streaming via YouTube. If you have a question in our online audience, if you have a question, you have a couple of different options. One, you can send it to us by email and the email address to use is ask, that's ask.ask.esi.org. You can also follow us on social media at EESI online. We'll be doing real-time coverage on Blue Sky, our Instagram story, threads, and X. You can always hit us up there as well. That brings us to our first speaker of the day, Jeff Maroutian is the principal deputy assistant secretary in the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy at the Department of Energy. Jeff previously served as senior advisor to energy secretary Jennifer Granholm and as special assistant to President Biden. Jeff was also a member of the Biden-Harris Presidential Transition Team and before joining the administration, Jeff was the director of the District of Columbia's Department of Transportation where he led the adoption of sustainable transportation technologies and oversaw more than $4 billion of critical infrastructure and utility projects. Jeff, welcome to the briefing this morning. I'm really looking forward to your presentation. Thanks so much. And I'm really looking forward to hearing from these exciting panelists about the great work that they're doing. And let me just say how much we really appreciate EESI leading these types of forums but also just the incredible work that you all do each and every day. We certainly have come to rely on it and know that many of our stakeholders do as well. So I wanna talk just very briefly because like I said, I'm really actually quite eager to hear from our panelists about the exciting things that they've been able to do with federal resources and how we can collectively help drive our climate goals because that work is just so important and so critical. So I'll talk just a little bit about our priorities currently going forward in the Department of Energy and EERE under the leadership of our secretary, Jennifer Granholm. As we all work together to achieve President Biden's climate objectives reaching that net zero economy by 2050. We know that there are a lot of really important steps that we need to take. And for us, high among those is implementing the suite of laws that have fundamentally changed the game for our ability to address some of the hardest to abate sectors. And so we're focused on our buildings and industry sectors, the renewable energy broadly, helping to enable new technologies that will help us get to a fully decarbonized economy. And then of course, as you mentioned, sustainable transportation and all the things that we know we need to do in order to address that hard to decarbonize and hard to abate sector. All of this also is in service of making our clean energy more efficient, more affordable, accessible to every American across the country and strengthening our national security by reducing our dependence on foreign energy sources. And so the innovations that we are able to spur at EERE with funding from the bipartisan infrastructure law, the Inflation Reduction Act and with our base appropriations have been able to fund some of the great companies that we're gonna hear from today among many others. So for those who may not be familiar with EERE, think of us as an energy technology innovation engine. We are the federal government's largest investor in applied clean energy, our D&D and the driving force behind the nation's clean energy advancements from that perspective. We support work that has helped bring a number of new technologies to life and also has helped support furthering technologies like solar and wind and helping to make them more efficient and some of the lowest cost sources of clean energy. We of course partner with many of our network of 17 national labs who are leading much of that research and development across the board. And so we're really proud of the work that we're able to accomplish in partnership with them. So a couple of just very quick priorities that I'll talk about, the grid, decarbonizing the grid, getting to a 100% clean electricity by 2035 is a priority for us and we are taking steps across the EERE and across the Department of Energy to help reach that milestone. We're also, as I mentioned, prioritizing sectors like the agriculture sector, buildings and industry. We just released a comprehensive building decarbonization strategy and that pairs well with the comprehensive transportation to carbonization strategy that we released last year. Each of those priorities is aligned with one of the research pillars that we lead. So our sustainable transportation and fuels pillar, for example, covers everything from electric vehicles to biofuels to hydrogen. And they also partner with the Department of Transportation to oversee the joint office of energy and transportation to deliver on President Biden's commitment of 500,000 publicly available charging stations by 2030. Our renewable energy office oversees a wide range of clean energy generation like solar, geothermal, which we're excited to hear about today, water, wind power and all the technologies that we know we need to enable and integrate those things onto the grid and into our system. And so those are some of, I mentioned our buildings and industry pillar, which is focused on everything from advanced materials and manufacturing to building materials and building envelopes. So we've got a lot of work happening across the board in each of those areas. And as I mentioned, there are two things that are key for us. One is the president's leadership and Secretary Granholm's leadership as we implement these historic laws. And another key thing for us are partnerships, partnerships with companies, with academic institutions, with organizations like EESI to help us further our reach. We also partner very closely with state and local governments, with tribes to ensure that our resources are hitting every single community across the country. And as I think many of you know, equity and the work that we're doing around energy justice are priorities for our office at EERE along with the entirety of the Department of Energy. And so we're keenly focused on making sure that everything we do has the reach of really hitting every American community. That is reflected in the work that we lead in our energy earth shots. It's reflected in the work that we are doing as we put out funding opportunities for a lot of the technology areas that you'll hear about today. So I could talk for hours about the work that we do and about how exciting it is to be a part of it, but I'm super excited to hear from these panelists. So I'm gonna turn it back over to you, Daniel. Thanks, Jeff. That was a great overview. And thanks for saying nice things about ESI. I'll reciprocate. You have a tremendous team over at EERE. They are a great group of folks to work with. And we've also, in addition to having you here today, want to give a couple of shout outs to Alejandro and Carolyn and Sonita and Mandy who've been part of ESI Congressional Education just in the last year or so. So really amazing group of folks you have over there and really always pleased to have a chance to work with you all. So, Jeff, happy you're gonna be able to stick around with us for the rest of the panel. We are gonna introduce our other panelists. I'm gonna introduce them all at once. And then I'm gonna ask them a question to kick off their conversation and allow them to say a little bit more about how they're working with EERE. So our first of three panelists today will be Tom Michaels. Tom is the Director of Government Affairs for United Airlines. He covers both federal and state government affairs and leads all advocacy related to climate and sustainability issues. Before that, Tom worked at Blue Water Strategies, a DC-based government affairs and business consultancy focused on energy and environmental issues and served as Executive Director of the One Foundation, a coalition of natural gas companies focused on reducing methane emissions. Then we will hear from Alexandra Bailey-Smith. Alex is the lead, strategy lead for Fervo, a next generation geothermal company. Alex leads a team focused on strategic initiatives, corporate strategy and diversification opportunities for geothermal heat and power. Before joining Fervo, Alex worked in upstream oil and gas operations, mega capital projects and technology venture roles domestically and internationally for Chevron. And then last but certainly not least, Kiran Mansharaju is the Vice President of Research at Southwire Company, North America's foremost wire and cable company. Kiran leads the Innovation Hub based at Georgia Tech. He also oversees collaborations with academia, national laboratories and startups. He's focused on introducing sustainable projects or products through public and private partnerships, underscores his and Southwire's commitment to advancing products and processes that reduce carbon emissions. And in this partnerships, Kiran and his team are leading the growth of the wire and cable industry by developing functionalized materials and technology. So that's a lot. Good time to remind everybody that the webcast as well as presentation materials and biographical information will be available on our website at www.esi.org. And Troy who's behind the scenes today is also gonna be reminding everyone of names and affiliations as we go through the panel. So I hope everyone keep track of this great discussion. So that leads me to the sort of kickoff question. Tom, we'll start with you and then we'll hear from Alex and Kiran. How has funding from the, from ERE, especially investments in research and development helped United Airlines achieve something that otherwise you might not have been able to achieve on your own? So thanks for the question, Daniel. And thanks so much for having me here. A big fan of EESI. When I was on Capitol Hill, I sat through many, many an EESI briefing and learned a lot about the work that I continue to do every day here. So really appreciate you having me on. With respect to your question, I may be in a slightly different position than some of the other panelists here. United Airlines is not a grantee or a direct funding, a fundee of the Department of Energy. However, we consider ourselves a very active and engaged partner with ERE. Most notably through the work that the department has led on the SAF Grand Challenge. SAF for the uninitiated is Sustainable Aviation Fuel. And it's critically important to United Airlines. Here's why United is a big company we're in a hard to abate sector. Just to give you some context, we used about 4 billion gallons of jet fuel last year and the year before and the year before. And that jet fuel, the combustion of that jet fuel accounts for 98% of our emissions. So even though we have about 100,000 people in facilities all across the country and vehicles on the ground all across the country, all of that adds up to only 2% of our emissions portfolio. All the rest is about the fuel that we burn in our aircraft. And so how do we get that down? Electric aircraft are potentially a viable solution for short haul, maybe 200 miles or less flights. But beyond that, there really isn't any immediate alternative to jet fuel. You need something that is chemically indistinguishable from jet fuel, but on a life cycle basis has lower emissions and that's what sustainable aviation fuel is. Instead of using oil to make your jet fuel, you use a different kind of feedstock that has a lower carbon footprint. Today we use an awful lot of used cooking oil as well as waste fats and greases from chicken processing and beef processing. And we expect to use some energy crops in the future. And we also expect to hopefully use captured gases and renewable power to create these in the future. So what's the role of the Department of Energy in this? One, they've put out a roadmap here with the SAF Grand Challenge. They set a challenge to the industry which we have accepted to try and get roughly 10% of our total fuel use to be sustainable aviation fuel by 2030. That's a lot, it's three billion gallons. To give you some context, United was the largest consumer of sustainable aviation fuel in the world last year and we use seven million gallons, that's with an M. And so we just need to get that up a little bit to say about a billion over the next slightly less than a decade. So it is a huge challenge well outside of our comfort zone and what EERE does is they're helping us to create an ecosystem of commercially viable SAF producers out there. It's a nascent industry still quite a bit in its infancy. There's a lot of different ways to make sustainable aviation fuel a SAF. And none of them are what you would call fully tested and proven from an investment standpoint. Wall Street and others still remain in kind of wait and see mode. And so United Airlines is stepping in. We have our own corporate venture fund that goes out and identifies promising technologies and we invest directly in those companies. But EERE has stepped forward with a number of different grant programs that have provided critical capital to many of our fueling partners. Alder Bioenergy is one of them. They're gonna be using a really interesting technology developed by the way at one of DOE's national labs. And it's a fast paralysis process that will use intense heat under pressure in an oxygen-free environment to take biofeed stocks, in this case wood chips and chemically convert them into high-grade, low-carbon jet fuel. DOE has also funded a company that we're not a partner with but we are definitely rooting to succeed. That's Lanza Jet. They just opened their project in Sobaton, Georgia. Really promising technology that will take ethanol, low-carbon ethanol and using a bio process convert that ethanol into a more energy-dense jet fuel. And so those are just a couple of examples. United has active commercial interest in this space, but we know that we're not gonna be able to move this market on our own. We really are reliant on these kinds of public-private partnerships with the department and some of the other federal agencies to help put in place one of the policies that are necessary to get these immersion technologies off the ground to provide some of that critical funding and no small part to provide the R&D as well. The technical know-how, the incubation of these technologies at the national labs and in other quarters and they've been great partners for us and there's no way that we would be as far as we are with that department and we hope to see that focus and investment continue to grow when I'm seeing every signal of that. So I think I'll pause there and let some of the others chime in. That's great, Tom. Thank you so much for that presentation. We have one of our most popular written resources is a sustainable aviation fuel and sustainable aviation issue brief that our colleague, a fellow, Jeff Overton wrote. So that would be, anyone wants to do a deeper dive. We have some really great stuff on that but yeah, it's impressive to see what United is able to do. That brings us to you, Alex. Really, really looking forward to hearing what you have to say. Welcome to the briefing this morning. Great, thanks, Dan. Hi, everyone. I would like to start off by thanking EESI for including Fervo in the conversation today. Like Dan said, my name is Alex Smith and I am the strategy lead at Fervo. We are a next generation geothermal power developer leveraging proven oil and gas technologies to produce 24-7 clean firm power. Just to level set everyone, I want to start with a quick overview of geothermal and what we do. And then I'll move on to focusing on how instrumental the EERE has been in our development story. So at a high level, geothermal uses heat from the earth to produce steam to run a turbine. For geothermal to work, need three things. You need fluid, you need permeability or a way for that fluid to flow. And then you need hot rock. Folks often picture the geysers and the geysers in Iceland. This is the oldest and most traditional form of geothermal where all three of these things are found very close to the surface. This powers their entire economy, practically zero emissions and very, very jealous. However, this combination is limited to a very small geographic area. Most countries do not have access to this. Over time, developers have been able to address this need for fluid by taking water at the surface and pumping it subsurface. That means that you still need to search for that natural permeability and hot rock. So unfortunately, this is still only found in a limited number of geographies. The other downside of operating in this manner is those natural fractures are very hard to model and they're very hard to control. So we have seen multiple examples in the geothermal industry of geothermal operators pumping water subsurface, expecting it to flow one way back to surface where it would produce power. But unfortunately, it dissipates to the reservoir. This ultimately destroys the performance of these projects which translates into poor economics which ultimately has made a challenging reputation for the industry. This is a primary reason geothermal makes up such a small fraction of power production today even though it's a clean, firm and really highly needed source of power. Furvo is addressing these challenges by producing our own fractures. We're basically avoiding those natural ones. Our technology deploys proven fracking techniques from the shale revolution to create our own controlled flow path subsurface and this connects our injection wells to our production wells. This makes it so that we are only looking for hot rock and opens us up to a wide number of geographies. This also drastically reduces that performance risk associated with traditional geothermal. With existing drilling technologies that are available today, this unlocks reserves of over 300 gigawatts in the United States alone. So this size of prize is huge. Furvo has proven out the technology in our commercial scale pilot in Nevada. This is a 3.5 megawatt project co-developed with Google and now we are developing our first 400 megawatt commercial scale project in Southwest Utah. I'm excited to be here today to share more about the massive impact that the EERE has had on Furvo's development and the geothermal industry as a whole. And I'm also looking forward to sparking some dialogue on how we can continue to collaborate to maximize the pace of the energy transition and adjust an equitable way. So now I'll actually answer the question. The EERE and specifically within it, the Geothermal Technologies Office has been instrumental in helping Furvo get to where it is today. To prove out our technology in the field, we have to spend millions of dollars of CAPEX or capital upfront to confirm a resource to understand if a project is viable. We can't just go out and look. So early stage funding by the federal government and a time where a project is not financeable is really, really important for our industry. This is where the federal government can play a pivotal role to getting clean technologies off the ground. But another important lever beyond direct funding is the indirect funding that we have seen for Utah Forge. So Utah Forge is a program that was put in place to push EGS, enhanced geothermal systems forward. They have stimulated growth in geothermal in three ways. First, they've been leaders in the technology exchange. They are operating in Southwest Utah, testing out different drilling techniques, different materials, you name it. And then they publish this information publicly. Furvo used the learnings from Utah Forge and applied them directly in our pilot project, Project Red. And then this allowed, this served as a proof point for follow on capital. Second, as I mentioned, exploration is a riskier part of our business. Utah Forge characterizes the resource out in Southwest Utah so well that it made Furvo comfortable enough to pick up a really large acreage position. And effectively, this allows to de-skip a very risky exploration drilling stage. And then finally, once we decided that we wanted to build Project Cape in Southwest Utah, Forge was hugely helpful in teaching us how to build local engagement across the state. That seeded our approach, which we have since made our own and developed in our own way. But Forge helped us learn how to engage with the community the right way the first time. So as you can see, Furvo's had a longstanding relationship with the ERE and I'm really excited to be here today to talk about it. Thanks, Alex. Really interesting how ERE was able to help you with that community engagement piece. Like you might not expect that from an innovation and R&D and driver of all these cool technologies, but ERE's ability to help orient them to the community is really interesting. So really glad you brought that up. Thank you for that. I'm going to, since we were just talking with you, Alex, I'm also going to plug a briefing we did a couple months ago now with David Turk, who's the deputy energy secretary on energy earth shots. Carolyn Snyder with ERE was part of that briefing and geothermal was definitely something that came up. So if you wanted anyone who'd like to take a closer look at the earth shots, the eight of those, that would be a really great briefing for you to check out. And we're covering lots of really interesting ground, lots of cool technologies and cool innovations. People have any questions for our panelists? You can ask us those questions one of two ways. You can follow us on social media at EESI online. You can also send us an email and the email address to use is askask at EESI.org. Carolyn, that brings us to you. Really eager to hear your presentation. Welcome to the briefing and I'll turn it over to you. Oh, thank you, Dan. And I really appreciate your inviting Southwire and myself specifically to this team. Really excited about the partnerships that we have been working with the ERE from Southwire and also the different labs that they facilitate. I'm going to keep my remarks a little cryptic for two reasons. One is I'm going to be sensitive to everybody's time. Two is I don't want to get myself into too much trouble. So based on that, let's talk a little bit about I'll start off with what is Southwire. Southwire is the largest privately held company. We are the largest cable manufacturer in North America, probably the second or the third in the world. Depends on time of the day. And within that, we if you look at our business, we have 80% of our businesses wire and cable. We generate, we make every kind of cable from your power generation plants to your receptacles in your home. And as we look at outside of the immediate transmission and distribution part of the cable business, we also are looking into mega trends, which is where, you know, some of the work that he is doing partnering with us is just been tremendously helpful. And in that sense, we're talking about mass transit, electric vehicles, we're talking about convergence of data and power. We're talking about Grids of the Future. Now within, you know, there is a sustainability, sustainability is not just a buzzword for us at Southwire anymore. Our CEOs are bored. Our CEOs and SVPs and everybody else involved has a plan for sustainability. And the goal for us is in the next four to five years, we're going to be all our operations that want to be net zero on our carbon emissions from different plants. Now I'm pretty good at delegating upwards. So when I talk about strategy with the ERI, with governmental funding, national labs and all that, I kick it up a little bit to all our CEOs and our senior staff, and in which we have a cadence that we set up and how to work with some of the great funding opportunities, some of the great research opportunities that come out of these national labs. And the way we have been interacting so far is it's not been purely transactional. We love what they do. We love the funding that comes. But we're also interested in, you know, we some of the implications for us are societal. And when you talk about advanced materials, for example, the work that's coming out of the national labs, especially on the conceptual level of the fundamental level of physics, it's really mind numbing. So, you know, we, I can go on and on and talk about the different kinds of materials innovations, how we work with national labs. I'll mention tool. One is something that we have already incorporated based upon the funding through the governmental agencies, such as the ERE. And one of the things that we have done is working with the researchers out of Oak Ridge National Labs. Actually, we've developed what is called grain refining. You know, if you look at South Park today, we make about a billion pounds of copper a year. And we make about half a billion or more pounds of aluminum a year. And these are really, really energy intensive. And if you look, and we divide that up into three areas, one is the scope one emissions can we reduce those. And that's really aspirational at this point of time. And then the other one is the scope two and three. So one of the fundings that we had with the Oak Ridge labs through the governmental agency was developing, can we eliminate some of these harmful chemicals that come into manufacturing of aluminum, for example. And we are proud to say today we have eliminated 80% of what is called titanium borides out of our aluminum manufacturing that has resulted. I mean, when you look at the numbers, I mean, it doesn't seem to be staggering. I mean, 2000 metric tons metric tons of carbon out of the atmosphere is not huge. But we now that falls into a whole sustainability ideas. So that that kind of develops the framework of where we are going. So we really appreciate the work that's been done at the foundational level, especially from the work that is being done. So we started the fundamental level of where the Oak Ridge labs and the guys, the brilliant scientists that they do, based upon the work that they're doing, based upon the money that they're getting from EERE. We are then able to take some of these concepts and translate them into useful products that we can build into our cables. Now the second part, as I said, is more aspirational. If you look at the way we manufacture aluminum and copper today, you take solid like cathode or anode, you melt it and then you re-solidify it and turn it into wiring cables that goes into your products. Now, there is a way and this brilliant guys from these labs came back and said, if we can convert something from solid to solid without the melting step in between, now that would be energy savings. So we made some, you know, we had some federal grants from it. We partnered with these laboratories. And now, at this point of time, we are happy to say that we are planning on scaling up this opportunity. So again, this is really aspirational. We love the part. And, you know, we look forward to continuing to engage with EERE and other governmental agencies and national labs. Back to you, Dan. Thanks. That was a great presentation. Jeff, before we move on, lots of really interesting things from Tom and Alex and Karen. Do you have any commentary or response to what you just heard before we move through the rest of the questions? Nothing specific other than, you know, some of the things that we're just discussed are things that we are excited about too. And I think that the levels of partnership and our ability to collaborate is important and really enabled by a lot of folks who have been leading this in these areas for a long time. So really exciting stuff. Awesome. All right. So Alex, I'm going to, I'm keeping an eye on our online questions. If anyone has them, there's still plenty of time. We still have 26-ish minutes or so. But I'd like to start this next question maybe with you, Alex, and then we can hear from Kieran and Mike. And that is about workforce. So geothermal wells don't dig themselves. These structures don't build themselves, right? And so the workers that actually do this work for a decarbonized clean energy economy are absolutely essential, more than essential. How has ERE helped workers in the geothermal sector be part of the energy transition? And what are some opportunities maybe where even closer partnerships could help prepare the geothermal sector workforce for the rest of the 21st century? Thank you for the question. This is one of my favorite topics. So geothermal is good for the climate. Geothermal is good for domestic energy security. But maybe most important or at least most personally, it is really, really good for jobs. We know that the ERE wants oil and gas workers to be part of next generation geothermal. We see this through programs like Geode and we appreciate the motivation behind these programs. From the furvo perspective, though geothermal is a place where oil and gas workers can seamlessly transition with very minimal additional training, furvo is a really, really good example of this. Over 50% of our office staff and field labor come directly from the oil and gas industry, myself included. And so we believe that the best way to build up this geothermal workforce and use, leverage those, the skill set from the oil and gas industry is to build more geothermal. We see it every day as furvo gets bigger. We have more jobs to offer and we hire more oil and gas workers. So we would just encourage the ERE to put more money in the core operations of the industry because it inherently is supporting workers through the energy transition. Aaron, let's hear from you next about sort of workforce and your industry and what maybe some opportunities to do even more. Sure. Now, Jeff kind of kicked it off talking about the renewables part of it and that is a tremendous part of where our strategy is now concentrating on. If you look at our industry today, it's very energy intensive. I mean, the way we transmit power and electricity is these huge transmission lines that go millions of miles. That's an exaggeration, thousands of miles. And then as you distribute this electricity and power, the new renewables that are coming in are more important. For example, wind, solar, now hydrogen is an aspect that's really important for us. So you're talking distributed energy, the way energy transition is going to happen is it's going to go away, hopefully, in the future where you're transmitting power across thousands of miles to where you're talking about individual grids, grids being manufactured at the local level. And so these concepts of fundamental resources, research into studies in and I specifically mentioned hydrogen, we are working with the labs and understanding where they are on wind and solar, but I'll talk about hydrogen for a little bit. Now, if you talk about hydrogen, companies such as Southwire make wiring cables really, really well. We know our stuff. We know how to commercialize it. We know how to make a safe product. We know how to engineer value into our products. However, when you talk about hydrogen, you have to step back. We have to step back a little bit because we don't understand it as well. So if you look at our product lines today, our goal or our process is safety, quality and productivity in that order. So if you talk about hydrogen, we don't know much about it. And that is where company, our labs and the support that comes from the governmental agencies is coming in. And so the new workforce that is going to come in, we have our guys who know how to make wiring cable, as I said, using the existing fossil fuels, using natural gas and all the stuff that we use today. But the new innovations that are going to come in is going to create a new generation of need for new people. And this is where these partnerships are going to go because the work that is being done at the foundational level at these labs, for example, and we are able to communicate and even academic institutions for that matter. And one of the things that we have interacted with with these governmental agencies or with these national labs is some of these researchers, brilliant researchers are now starting startup companies from the work that they're able to do. And now we have been able to communicate, work with these startup companies to scale up. And as we scale up, we are also able to get the staff that we're going to need, the workers that we're going to need who understand hydrogen, for example, who understand the safety issues, the quality issues, the productivity issues. So I think this public-private partnerships is going to be huge because we are very good at what we do today. But to take us to the next level, I think we really need the input from these fundings and these partnerships. Back to you. That's a really great point. Tom, SAF industry, curious about sort of where things are and maybe where some opportunities are for even more workforce development to strengthen that. So I might just add one that it's not just sustainable aviation fuel. While that is sort of our biggest focus, we are looking to decarbonize our entire operation. United is an industry leader, for example, in electrification of our ground service equipment. We call them GSEs for short. But that refers to all those funny little vehicles that you see driving around the airport tarmac, whether they're pulling the baggage carts or pulling planes. They call these tugs. And those vehicles, along with all the jet engines that are going, are all emitting a lot of not just carbon, but also other particulate matter into the air and air quality in and around airports is always a significant concern. And one of the big things that we can do to alleviate that is to electrify those vehicles. And so as we're doing that, we have been, first of all, we need the electrification infrastructure. We need the charging infrastructure there to make them work. And then we need all our maintenance technicians to be capable in how to operate them, how to work on them, how to fix them. And so that's a big part of our transition. So we started just over a year ago a new apprenticeship that's called our calibrate apprenticeship and it's for our maintenance technicians. So there are sort of three tracks on it. One of them is for our aviation maintenance technician. These are our aircraft mechanics. Takes a long time to become an aircraft mechanic and typically involves at least two years of schooling and about 50 to 70,000 intuition. We needed to train a lot more of these people and relatively quickly. And we needed to break down barriers for the many talented folks to come in. And so one way of doing that was to start our own in-house apprenticeship. It's a three-year apprenticeship. We did it in conjunction with the Department of Labor, the Federal Aviation Administration, and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. And so we're setting off down that work and it's not just for those technicians that work on the aircraft, but also those who work on our facilities and on our GSEs, our ground service equipment. And so when the Department of Energy used funding provided by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to fund what they call industrial assessment centers, these are partner entities, community colleges, labor unions, and other technical schools that we partner with, that's been a big help. It's again, one, expanding the pool of high skill, but generally not college path labor out there. These are folks that we are actively and aggressively recruiting. These are high-skill jobs. They're well-paid. You can support a family on them. But the training is critical, right? And so the more of these institutions that can get fully funded, the better. And DOE is an important funding partner. They're also, of course, an important knowledge partner in transmitting what kind of skills are going to be needed, what kind of infrastructure obviously is going to be needed, and how to integrate that with all of our existing infrastructure in a relatively seamless way. So there are customers don't notice anything, but hopefully a little bit cleaner air the next time they're at the airport. Great. Thanks. All those little carts moving pretzels, and some little bags of peanuts, and suitcases. They're all important. Yes, they're all very important. I'm going to move on to our next question, and Jeff, I'll include you in this one as well. But we'll start with Kieran this time, and then we'll hear from Tom and Alex, and then Jeff, I'd be interested to hear your comments as well. This one's a little bit more forward-looking. I'm curious how sustained investment has sustained investments in ERE by Congress, but sustained investments by ERE in all of this great work, helping companies like yours advance climate solutions. What is the outlook for maybe the next two to five years? What are the things that are just starting today that if we had this briefing again in a couple of years, you would be able to tout as successes that specifically stem from the investments that ERE is making? Give you a little background here first. If you look at the way the demand on energy is going to increase as more and more appliances, everything is connected. It becomes imperative that we take care of the present. That means we have a grid infrastructure that exists today. That is some of the overlines that you see are maybe 100 years old. As you look at transmission today, and I'm going to concentrate on the transmission part of it, you see we are transmitting power over huge distances. The line losses as you transmit power is directly proportional to the amount of distance you travel. Even as ERE and companies like ourselves look at renewables and other areas that we can integrate where we can look at microgrids and we can look at distributed energy in a different angle, as we sit here today, the reality is that we are transmitting power over long distances. There are line losses in other areas that we need to take care of. Based on a couple of things, so the investments that ERE is making are great. Again, on the fundamental level, companies such as ourselves, we can take care of immediate, when we talk about product development, you're taking a look at one, two years, right? When you look at the work that is coming out of the labs or academia, they are looking at solutions to transmit more power on the existing lines. That's one way to do it. I mean, you can get new right of ways. I mean, that gets into this whole compliance and regulatory issue that, you know, not really good at talking about that, but let's talk about the existing power lines. If you have the existing power lines, if you can do advanced materials, and that's where we are working with labs and academia and we have certain projects that we have in place, so if you take a look at it about two to five years, the goal is to develop a technology. It could be a coding. It could be new material synthesis. It could be any of all of them out where we'll put new materials on the lines, which will carry more power without changing, without having new right of ways and all that. So that is where the public-private partnership is really critical. And probably this may not be the forum to talk about this. However, in the next two to five years, we expect to have a couple of lines with this new, it could be coatings, as I said, it could be new material synthesis, again, facilitated by this partnership with the labs and academia, again, facilitated through the offices of EERA. That's very cool. My opinion looks great. I mean, we are excited in two to five years. We, you know, we want to continue to improve the grid as it exists today, even as we look forward to the new technologies on renewables and everything else that's coming on picture. Back to you, Dan. Great. Thank you so much. Tom, a couple of years, what are the investments, you know, that are being made today? What could they be resulting in in that, you know, medium term, near medium term time horizon? That's a tough one for me, because our investments tend to have a pretty long lead time. A lot of SAF project developers will say that their project is going to be ready in two years. And our experience is that it's a little bit longer, typically, but thankfully, first of all, some of these DEWI investments and our investments were made quite a while ago and our yielding fruit, our friends at Fulcrum Bioenergy who are able to convert municipal solid waste into low carbon fuel. They had a plant that's had some startups and slowdowns, but we expect them to be recommence production very soon. So it's a process. There's no silver bullet that's going to change the world in the next two to five years. Sustained levels of funding for key government partners, I think, are important over time. But there's no question that the investments that have come out of the Inflation Reduction Act, the bipartisan infrastructure law, that are behind some of these initiatives are going to yield significant fruit if nothing else were finally attracting real private sector investment into these categories because they see that the department is stepping in and de-risking them in a lot of ways. So absolutely essential and my hopes are very high. My expectations are somewhat more modest. But I think that we will start seeing our sustainable aviation fuel output roughly double each year as it did last year from the year prior and hopefully triple within the next two to three years because it really needs to if we're going to be able to meet these goals and challenges that we've set ourselves. Great. Thanks. And Alex, curious to hear how you think from Furvo's perspective what the next couple years might look like thanks to these investments. Sure. I'll maybe start by painting a little bit of a picture. Furvo is still early in our development. Our costs are still high. This 400 megawatt project is going to be, it's going to cost in the billions for CapEx. We're a new company in an industry that's kind of, I don't know, confusing reputation. And so we are overall taking on greater burden of early stage capital deployment. So the way we handle that is we raise VC money at a company equity level. Super expensive way to do it, but we are doing it and we've shown a really strong track record of being able to do it. We also have positive momentum in the project finance community. But at the end of the day, we don't actually have that project finance yet, right? And everything that I just described is all talking about one project. In reality, we have gigawatts of resource that are available right now. And then we simultaneously have gigawatts of demand that is available right now. They're banging down our door. So the market and the tech are there. We're just slowed by access to capital. And specifically geothermal and Furvo, we're dancing in this we're too new, we're not new enough area because we kind of blur the lines between R&D and deployment and again, kind of a confusing reputation for the industry and all this, many reasons for it. But I see this as the sweet spot for government support of game changing technology. So basically what I would like to see for the future is I want to just emphasize the need for flexible investment from the EERE to support both R&D, but also deployment to really ignite this industry and bring on clean firm as fast as possible. To me, it's a speed game. Jeff, if you have any comments or responses or feedback about how you see things playing out based on your ability to, or any EERE's ability to make these investments and then sustain them over the next couple of years. Yeah, well, I'll just pick up on a couple of the threads that each of the panelists just shared. And we think about when we look at the global clean energy market, we see over the next decade, by the end of this decade, we see it valued at an estimated $23 trillion. And so much of the investment that's been made already since Bill and IRA have become law is working. We're seeing those investments made by private industry to meet the moment and to meet those public investments. And I have the great fortune, I'm currently on the road right now looking at some clean energy projects. I have the fortune of traveling along with my colleagues across the country to see where this work is creating jobs with the opening of so many hundreds of new manufacturing facilities. Tom mentioned Landsatjet. Our team had the opportunity to go to their opening in Georgia just a couple of months ago to see the investments that are being made and how much economic development they're bringing to the community. And so that for us is just really exciting and that work is only gonna continue to grow as we make more and more of those investments. And I think Ferbo is a great example of how we're seeing this in real time. We're seeing how the importance and the urgency of doing everything that we can to bring the cost down of these technologies so that we can help commercialize and scale them so that they can reach more people. And that's the exciting part of doing this work across so many different sectors of the economy. So really great to hear all this feedback and hear the great work that's being done with federal resources and with federal support broadly. All right. Well, we have just enough time for a lightning round. So Tom, maybe we'll start with you and then we'll hear from Alex and Kiran and then we'll give Jeff the last word today. This is like 30-ish seconds, 40-ish seconds, but our congressional audience there are congressional staff watching this briefing today. What's one takeaway you would like them to leave this briefing with about ERE, about how ERE and companies like yours work together and achieve more by working together? Goal setting, knowledge partners, and obviously funding. With respect to funding, I'll just say, you know, Alexandra alluded to this. There's virtually no project finance out there for the kinds of emerging energy technologies that a lot of us are behind. There's a good amount of venture funding out there where DOE really can play a big role as in this sort of middle tranche of demonstration pilot plants funding. And so we view that role that they're doing as absolutely critical and obviously all the knowledge and technology development at the labs and elsewhere is just absolutely essential to maintaining U.S. competitiveness. Alex, lightning round over to you. I would say the ERE plays a really important role bridging national labs and industry and navigating that life cycle between R&D and deployment. And I think it works the best when the ERE involves industry and there's like this back and forth dynamic. And so I would just encourage folks listening on this call to think about the ERE beyond the lab or academic setting, but in an even more broad like a broader sense, right? The magic happens when the ERE is able to meet the industry where it's at between that R&D and deployment. That's a good point. Karen, lightning round over to you. Sure. Companies such as ours, we have a small R and a big D. So when you look at, so if you take a look at the work that is being done out of labs or academia, you're talking basic research. We are very good on the development cycles, scaling up, working with partnerships, commercializing. We understand those things really well, not so comfortable on the basic research. However, if the physics is developed at the conceptual level really, really well, which is they have been doing, and we develop these partnerships in a more sustained strategic way, not just, you know, scatter shot this thing, but and that is on us. And that's what we are trying to do and any help we can get from ERE and other governmental agencies would be great. Thanks. And Jeff, we'll give you the last word today. Great. Well, thanks so much. Huge thanks to EESI for hosting this and for all the work that you do. These panelists are really exciting. And I think this conversation can go on for a while. And I just want to say, and I'll sort of double click on what Alex said, that our ability to be successful is really contingent on our ability to continue to partner. And that means partnering with folks in the government, on the Hill, with our colleagues and other agencies, helping to further President Biden's full of government strategy, which we've really seen be successful in a number of ways. And then partnering with folks out in communities across the country. And so really just encourage those who are watching this, if you haven't had any interaction with our office or with the department broadly, please don't hesitate to reach out. Our team at ERE is looking for that collaboration. We're eager to be a part of the work that you're doing. And I think I can speak for my colleagues across DOE that we really want to be able to support the full spectrum of work, everything from that basic science, that basic R&D, all the way to full scale, large deployments, and in some cases enabling the capacity for companies to get loans from the department. So really exciting stuff. Appreciate the opportunity to be with all of you and hope to do more of these. Great. Well, thank you so much. And Tom and Alex and Kiran, thank you for joining us today and being tremendous panelists and sharing your ideas and insights and perspectives on sort of the developing clean energy sector that your companies represent. So thank you for being great panelists. Jeff, thanks for joining us. And it was a real delight to have you and feature you on the briefing today. Also, huge thanks to everyone at ERE who helped make today's briefing possible and your participation possible. So thanks. It's always a delight to work with your team on that. So thank you very much. And I'm definitely speaking for all of ESI when I say all of this for sure. This has been a great panel to put together. I'd also like to say thanks to my colleagues, Dan O'Brien, Omri, Allison, Aaron, Anna, Molly, and Nicole for all of their work pulling the briefing together today. Couldn't do it without them for sure. We also have three great interns who are helping us out this spring semester, Emily, Kylie, and Megan. So thanks for helping us and spending your spring semester with us. And Troy, you haven't been on camera today but we couldn't do it without you. So thank you as well for being with us today. Troy just popped up a survey. This is a link if you would have a few moments to take our survey. We read every response we receive if there's any issues you had with the live cast, the video, the audio. If you have ideas for future panels, anything like that, please. We really encourage and really appreciate when people take the time to complete our survey. We will wrap up in just a moment, but before I do that, I just want to plug our briefing next April 16th on demystifying ocean carbon dioxide removal and that will be presented with our friends at World Resources Institute or WRI. We have a new room and a new time. So if you've RSVP'd previously, be sure to check out the new time and date, or no, excuse me, new time and room. If you haven't RSVP'd yet, what are you waiting for? It's already 10.31 on a Friday morning, a couple of days before the briefing. RSVP before it's too late. It's going to be a really, really great session and it's never too late. Our briefings live in perpetuity on the website. You won't miss anything, but we'd love to have you there in person. May 1st, along with our friends at American Rivers, we will be presenting dams in every district, challenges, opportunities, and what's ahead and save the date for our Clean Energy Expo. Our Congressional Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Expo will be July 30th, and that's something that we work on with the House and Senate Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Caucuses. So I mentioned Mandy's name earlier. Mandy was one of our panelists last. Mandy Mahoney at Building Technologies Office of DOE, so, or ERE. So it's a great way to pull everybody together across the clean energy sector and climate to talk about solutions. And one last plug for climate change solutions. It comes out every two Tuesdays. It's a great way to keep up with everything we've got going on. So with that, I hope everyone has a great rest of your day. TGIF, have a great weekend, and we'll see you back on the 16th with demystifying ocean carbon dioxide removal in person and online that one. Thanks, everybody. Thank you. Thank you.