 My name is Olivia Campbell Anderson and I'm Executive Director of Renewable Energy Vermont. On this gorgeous sunny day, for some of us winter might be the farthest thing from our minds. However, a lot of our monitors are thinking and getting ready and preparing for next winter already. And as we've got 4th of July coming up, we're also thinking about our independence from fossil fuels. And so we're here today to celebrate the fact that there are new sales tax incentive taking effect July 1. Other new incentives that we're going to go into detail talking about. 80% of Vermont's heating comes from oil and gas. And we are working at Renewable Energy Vermont with a collaborative of folks to stabilize and reduce heating costs with renewable solutions like advanced wood heating. Because 78 cents of every dollar spent on fossil fuels leaves our economy. Instead of sending more than 131 million dollars every year out of our state and exacerbating climate change, we could be reinvesting 70 million every year where we have nearly every dollar staying in our local economy with renewable wood heating, displacing 40 million gallons of fossil fuels. Over the next seven years, Vermont needs to install just under 40,000 new clean wood heating systems to meet our renewable energy and climate commitments. And to date we've installed fewer than 400 on the boiler side for advanced wood systems. So we've got a lot of work to do and we are thankful to share the benefits that advanced wood heating brings to Vermonters to help make their homes more comfortable, lower their heating costs, and support our local economy and our forest landscape. So which is why we are here to announce the new incentives and the sales tax exemption, which would not be possible were it not for the advocacy and work of several senators and delegates and representatives including one of whom is with us today, Senator Anthony Polina who represents Washington County, and also serves on the Senate Agricultural Committee and the Senate Finance Committee. And so Senator Polina is going to join us and talk a little bit about some of the good work that the legislature did to help Vermonters access more renewable heating this year for the next few years. Senator, thank you. Thank you, I appreciate your patience. I just realized recently how connected everything is to your lower back. There are people here today who can speak, I think, better to the actual issues around the technology and the efficiency of advanced wood heat systems. But I just want to make clear how important it is not only to homeowners and businesses, but to our local rural economy. We're not just here to encourage the use of wood boilers and advanced wood boilers and to encourage a more efficient way of heating our homes and businesses. But what we're doing here today is we're encouraging more of our vitality to our rural communities and our local rural economy. Right now what we're doing by advancing wood heat boilers is we're creating a market for what we think of as low grade lumber. This is wood that has come from Vermont Forest and normally would have been going to paper production. Those markets have recently dried up over the last couple of years. A lot of that wood was going to Maine to go into paper plants which have shut down. So now that it's a resource that essentially is going to waste and not doing anything economically for our rural communities. By advancing the use of advanced wood heat boilers, we're actually creating a market for that low grade lumber which then creates better jobs for loggers and people who work in the woods. And it allows us to strengthen our rural economy. So we're not just talking about more efficient heating systems. We're talking about something that's really good for our rural economy, our forest products industry, and for all Vermonters. So I just want to make sure that that's really clear that that's one of the reasons, not the only reason, but that's one of the reasons why it was important to myself and others on the Agriculture Committee to push forward with this in the face of some pretty bad opposition. This was not a time when people wanted to spend money. There was a lot of questions about sales tax exemption, whether it was the right thing to do, whether we could afford to do it. And we really made the argument that we couldn't afford not to do it because of the importance that it would put on our rural economy. Particularly at a time when we're trying to do everything we can to support our logging and forestry industries, this is one of the things we can do, which again would help both homeowners' businesses, but also be good for our rural economy, our forestry, our loggers, and our rural communities. So I appreciate everybody being here and I just want to make it really clear that this is an economic development initiative as well as a renewable energy heating initiative. Thank you. You know, and Susan Clark has been not only powering her electric home with solar, as you can see here, but also using wood and advanced wood heating for several years now and is going to share her experience about that. Susan, sure. Thank you. Thanks everybody for coming all the way to my house. And I, you know, I agree with everything that's been said here about energy independence, about supporting my neighbors who are loggers and foresters and helping the rural economies, helping our communities. But I guess the perspective that I would bring is as a person who actually heats with a wood boiler and I have to say I heated with regular wood, you know, kind of carrying like this into your house for about 15 years here and at another house. And it's great. It's great heating with wood. You know, everybody knows how terrific it is. It is a lot of trips out to the wood pile and there's a lot of detritus that comes in your carpet and there's that dust and there's the fact that when you stand next to your wood stove, you're warm but if you go near living room, you're cold. And you know, I mean, there are some downsides to heating with wood that I'm sure some of you are aware of. But I loved it. I loved it. But it didn't make sense for this house and when our oil furnace went out, we had to replace it with something and we did a lot of research. And this just made total sense for us. It has all the advantages of oil in that a truck comes to your house twice a year and plugs into your house and you've got fuel. And when you're cold, you turn on the thermostat. So from a selfish point of view, it's really easy to heat with wood pellets. And in addition, I feel really good about the sustainability and what it can do for using local fuels. So I really appreciate it and I feel really glad to know that there are now ways that people can do this in their homes that make it even more affordable, which I hope means that more folks do it because I think it works really well. Thanks. One thing I would mention, given what Susan said about the deliveries, is at some point, if we continue to move in this direction, we will actually see the development of wood pellet production plants in the state of Vermont, which is something that we sorely need to create that market for the low-grade lumber. So we'd like to see pellets being produced here in the state of Vermont more so that we could use more of that low-grade lumber. And we are excited to be partnering with Efficiency Vermont, who are now offering some new incentives for customers to lower their expenses and costs. And Karen Glittman from Efficiency Vermont is going to talk a little bit about some of their work. Thank you. Thank you, and it's a pleasure to be here and join in this celebration of modern wood heat. Efficiency Vermont is really excited and are thankful to our forward-looking regulators at the Public Service Department and at the Public Utility Commission, who changed the rules to enable Efficiency Vermont to provide more incentives for modern wood heat. We will be offering a $3,000 incentive for advanced wood heat furnaces and boilers. We're also going to continue to work with renewable energy Vermont and with the contractors on large commercial 5,000 square feet or larger buildings with technical assistance supporting our contractors to provide renewable wood heat there as well. So we know that advanced wood heat is good for the economy. We heard Senator Polina talk about it. It's good for the forest. It's good for all the critters that live in the forest. And it's also part of how we are going to meet our energy and climate commitments in the state. So we're excited to be part of this. We're delighted to be able to offer additional incentives and to continue providing technical assistance to homeowners and businesses who want to take advantage of this local renewable resource to heat their buildings. So thank you. Thanks, Karen. So there in Vermont there are more than a dozen, nearly two dozen contractors and different local businesses that you can connect with to get an advanced wood heating system. One of them is going to speak with us today, Andy Bhutan from Pelogy. Andy, you want to talk a little bit about your customers and how you help folks. So Andy Bhutan from Pelogy, I'm the founder and general manager of Pelogy. We started about 12 years ago in this wood pellet heating business. And we started out as a manufacturer and as technologies improved and changed and wood heating got more automated, we've become an importer of technology. We now distribute wood pellet boilers from right here in Montpelier, Vermont to about 13 states as far away as Alaska, Washington, Oregon and pretty much the entire northeast. So we're a Montpelier, Vermont-based business. We import boilers, we train technicians and we work with feedback from homeowners and from businesses to really ensure that this automated, advanced modern wood heat technology is the best that it can be and the most reliable and easy for homeowners and individuals. In a home like this, you can expect anywhere from two to three deliveries per year, not unlike oil. You turn the thermostat up and you've got good central heat throughout the house with renewable technology. To Senator Polina's point, we thank him very much for taking a leadership role in this. This is about the local economy as well. Not only are we a local business and a local distributor of the technology, but right now there are hundreds of foresters out in the woods working on a day like today harvesting this low grade timber, bringing it into places like Vermont Wood Pellet down in North Clarendon where we're producing pellets, New England Wood Pellet, Curran Pellet, all within this local woodshed. I reflect back on comments made by Mike Snyder, who is our commissioner of forests and parks here, who said that having a robust forest economy means healthy forests and you can't have one or the other. You have to have a robust forest economy in order to have a good, healthy forest and that's part of finding a market for these low grade timbers. So we're both focused on the technology end. We're focused on the ease for the homeowner and this modern wood heat is not bringing in logs and stoking a fire four or five times a day. It's truly thinking about it maybe three or four times a season and other than that it's fully automated. With that I'm happy to take any questions at all or kind of a panel here if that's appropriate. Sure. Let's maybe do a quick summary for all of the customer incentives and then we can move into questions. Starting July 1, Vermonters will pay no sales tax on a new advanced wood boiler thanks to Senator Polina and his colleagues, Senator Starr, Representative Helm, many others in the legislature that were involved in that. They can receive a $3,000 off the system from Efficiency Vermont. They can receive another $3,000 off the system from the Clean Energy Development Fund. Andy is here and can answer questions about that and for folks that are in Washington Electric Co-op's district they can get another $1,000 off. So other utilities, they may have specialized programs and I would encourage you to contact them and request that. So ultimately you're looking at a total of $7,000 to $9,000 off a new boiler. You're looking at stable fuel prices that you can rely on. Local fuels, local heating very much is similar to local eating and there's no reason now that we shouldn't all be thinking about and actually making the switch. There's no better time than today. So I also want to take a moment and recognize, as I mentioned, there are dozens of companies in the state. Look for folks who are renewable energy Vermont members, folks who are a part of Efficiency Vermont's Energy Excellence Network. And we also have here Dave Frank from Sunwood Biomass who installed the system in Susan's home. Cutting Edge Energy Systems is here and Born's Energy both providing the systems and all of your local fuel needs. And you can find the contact information for these local businesses as well as others that are not here today on our website which is REvermont.org. We have a renewable energy business listing and you can find someone near you to help you get one of these systems. So with that, any questions that folks have about the systems or about the incentives? Characterize that goal of 40,000 systems over the next, would you say, seven years? Is that a, you think you're going to meet that goal or is that like a high in the sky kind of thing? If we're only at 1% now, it seems like there's a lot of work to do. Yeah, there is a lot of work to do and what we know is sort of goals without plans and dreams are goals without plans and actions are just, you know, dreams. So that's one of the reasons why Rev pulled together a five-year action plan on what are the different steps that are needed to accomplish that commitment that the state has that we all share. And we're really thankful that the streamlining incentives where you have, you know, you'll have one form or an identical form to get the customer incentive for efficiency, Vermont and clean energy development fund, that's one check off our plan. The sales tax exemption for the next three years, another check off. And we also have other folks that are working through the state would energy team and us here on education and customer knowledge. So there is a plan towards this. It's accomplishable. The technology is here. The state, the legislature is supporting us. If our utilities, efficiency Vermont supporting Vermonters to help get them there. And so if we keep sharing the good news about what wood can do for folks and keep these incentives to overcome any barriers, we can get there. It's a lot of work to do though, but the benefits will certainly be worth it. So cost was the biggest barrier? Yeah, what we see is, you know, advanced wood heating systems are a little bit more expensive than your traditional oil or gas boiler. And that's, you know, typically because think about how long that technology has been around. This technology, advanced wood heating is extremely efficient, automated and easy. And so that's why we're not talking about your grandfather's outdoor wood boiler, grandfather's wood stove. And so it's here now, it's been here for several years, but we just need to do a little more to overcome help for Monters with that higher upfront cost. May have a little more upfront cost, which we're addressing with these incentives and cost reduction measures. But you also have lifetime savings, particularly on fuel over time of the system. Do these new incentives make the upfront costs actually cheaper than a gas boiler? Or just comparable? Where do these incentives bring it in comparison to a, quote, traditional system? I could speak that a little bit. So we've just been involved in a quote where we're looking at an old turn-of-the-century farmhouse that has some weatherization done to it. Their current oil heating system is 30 years old and they're looking at options. With after incentives, which included the sales tax exemption, we came within $500 on a $20,000 brand new heating system job. So that's really a first for us, that our systems, our advanced wood heat systems are actually now seeing some parity from a cost basis. And it's important to point out that, you know, solar was here years ago as well. And these types of incentives, they really boost a marketplace. They boost a sector. And once that sector hits a level of sustainability, meaning numbers, then we see those costs come down. And so it's not one of these situations where we anticipate incentives to last forever. It's really that. It's incentivizing a marketplace to get its feet under it, to really build momentum. And then much like the solar industry, we see those incentives fall off as the quantities of systems come up and the prices come down. But you also see the advantage of having a more stable fuel cost. Absolutely. Fuel cost savings over the last 30 years of fuel pricing indices and tracking. What we see with wood pellets are that they really track inflation as far as price increases, whereas we know the volatility in the oil and gas market is really, you know, incredibly up and down. And that's why we see a lot of affordable housing developers, you know, switching to modern wood heat as well, because they have that predictability in their heating costs and the fuel prices. I can just add that when we put in our system six years ago, we had to think about it because the upfront costs were higher than putting in an oil furnace. But we did the projections, we did the math, and realized this is going to come out even in the end, you know, when you look at the life of the system. So it actually made a lot of sense then with these incentives, it's a no brainer. It feels to me as if, wow, if we've had these incentives, okay, we didn't, but I'm glad everybody else did. And the point about the incentives and all of these market elements is really to catalyze the market. And this is about finding a way to turn this market on so that it can get that leverage so that we can see those costs come down, we can bring that parity, make sure that Vermonters actually have real choices. And that's what this is about. And also have the ability to make investments. When you talk about the goal, it's an ambitious goal. Sometimes we don't meet our goals in Vermont because we talk a good game, but we're not willing to make the investment that it takes to actually develop an industry or a product. And what this is going to do is to allow people on their own, homeowners and businesses, to actually make the investment that's necessary in this industry to allow it to grow. And I think that's really important that we're encouraging that kind of direct investment in the new technology. So I've had, I've spoken with a number of people about the concept of advanced wood heat. And the pushback that I get is, you know, well, do we have enough trees? Is there enough? Can we do it here in Vermont? And I was just wondering if there's somebody who could address that issue in a way that I can then share it with my audience. So we are fortunate to have someone out in the audience today, which I would actually welcome Emma up if she would like to brave the sunshine without her glasses. And speak that. I'd be delighted. Maybe an introduction and then tell us who you are. I'm Emma Hanson. I'm the Wood Energy Coordinator. I work for the Vermont Department of Forest Parks and Recreation. And the answer to your question is yes. So Vermont is currently harvesting a little bit less than half the net growth in our forest, meaning we could harvest twice the number of trees and still maintain the same forest footprint. Okay. And what that would equate to in Wood Energy, it would truly be enough to heat about 80% of Vermont's spaces throughout the state if we just hit those harvest goals. And create a lot of jobs. Exactly. Indeed. And keep our forests as forests. And keep the profits going to multinational corporations and the exons of the world. The profits are going to stay here with the local foresters and the wood loggers. Even if you put it like that. It's kind of a no-brainer. You know, a lot of our forest tracks and a lot of our family farms are going through switchover generational changes. And a part of keeping forests as forests, as Emma stated, is maintaining value of that land to the landowner, to the landholder, to the homeowner. And, you know, we've had some personal experiences within the family regarding, you know, large multi-hundred acre farms. And you do need to get creative with conservation, with forest management techniques. And a big piece of that is really having a market for the low-grade timber. It makes it a profitable venture to follow a forest management plan when there's a market for the low-grade timber. If there is no market, either in wood pellet or in the paper industry, which has really seen the decline in the past few years, it makes it very difficult to get in and follow a forest management plan. So it's another aspect of really keeping our forests as forests and not having them turn over to development. Any final questions? Yeah, I was wondering, one of you had mentioned using these advanced wood heating systems in affordable housing areas. I was just curious if this technology is something that's feasible in multi-family homes or, you know, apartment buildings. Yeah. So, absolutely. There are multiple examples. Actually, Vermont leads the way in multi-family, so in two areas. Vermont leads the way in multi-family housing with advanced wood heat, but also affordable housing development heated with wood heat. Thanks in part to organizations like Housing Vermont and Capstone who really have looked at the economics as well as the local marketplaces for this technology. You know, we have systems in multi-family, you know, mixed-use buildings where, you know, it's even historic buildings, downtown historic buildings. There's a new development in Manchester, Vermont with 18,000 square foot building with a, you know, a restaurant, two restaurants, retail space, four condominiums above, all metered through heat metering off a central, you know, wood pellet heating system. And that's becoming more and more, you know, realistic and more than normal as well for large contractors to come in and do systems. In fact, we did host an event down on Berry Street in Montpelier at one of the multi-unit facilities down there that's heated with the wood pellet system as well. It's not just multi-family units, but it's also larger commercial uses. One of the best examples is schools. There's a lot of schools in Vermont that are already using wood heat, and this would encourage them to do more of it. So I think that we know it can certainly be used for larger projects as well. It's important to look at it that way. All right. Well, Seuss, if there are any reporters who need to see a system for B-roll purposes, Susan has offered that they could do that. We're all not going to have the joy of going down into her basement. Tight shots only. Yes. But thank you so much, and feel free if you have any other questions to reach out to us or any of the folks in the audience, we'll have the next expertise here today. Thanks.