 so good evening we're going to begin in a minute or two if you're finished or when you're finished if you want to get rid of your plates and stuff that goes over there chewing so that I can talk we're going to this cut this is genuinely a conversation we have we come and probably with a variety of viewpoints and understandings of various facets of climate change and that's all right we're we're going to the flow of this evening is we're going to just sit at our tables and meet one another and talk for a minute or two with some guided questions second we're going to have some presentations from some folk who really know their stuff when it comes to burning wood and digging holes to get into the ground to see the heat that's there and so we're I'm really excited to be able to share what they have to say we will then break into tables again to see what kind of questions you had comments feedback and then come back into plenary make sense and so I invite you to continue to eat it be informal take care of yourself restrooms are right through those doors either side all right so let's begin the program is being recorded by orca orca records our select and other kinds of public meetings and so there will be a record of what would take place tonight so the the action is going to be up here when we get to watching the slides so I will we'll call your attention up there anything else what's being passed out is basically just some some conversation starters I would like you to in your tables to first of all find somebody who's willing to take some notes all right once you find somebody who can take some notes and introduce yourself and answer some of the questions that are on that sheet of paper when it gets to the last question please write those everybody's concern what you want to learn we need to know that whether we have that shared or not we're anxious to learn where everybody is okay so we're gonna take about no more than 10 to 15 minutes just to get to know one another at the table and and share those questions on that sheet of paper I'm sorry Harry but you have the note in the pen if you had a chance to have sucker Would you like to say the cook? Yay! Yay, guys! Thank you, thank you, thank you. We appreciate it. I enjoy it. She enjoys it. And she's leaving the coffee pot. Coffee and water will be out. So, have you had a chance to kind of go around your group and get some questions? Yes. Concerns? We're working on it. We're still working on it, okay. We're writing down questions. He's writing down questions. I got you. He's the question though. I have questions about cost. Okay. That's a question. That's why the networking thing about networking and building. Share the cost. Share the cost. They're not good for an isolated area. But it will be good for a friend. He looks at potential in this area. These communities are represented here. Here we go. I just found a company in New Hampshire that does it. Turn our focus. We do want to keep this three questions that you have. There looked like there were three groups. I'm wondering if somebody from each group would just like to share with the rest of us how informed do you think people are? On average it seems like this group is four out of ten. Four out of ten. Three of them. Quick. Looks like we'd average out at about five. Somewhere in the neighborhood of five. Keep pushing that button. I just need to use it. But same. We'd save five more towards the four because we realize it's not going to work. Five more towards four. Okay. Is there a question that kind of rose to the top in your group? It didn't get to that. Okay. Give us more time. We'll get to it. Is there a question that rose to the top for you? I think there was a question that people did a lot of nodding about, which is how can we motivate good policy? How can we motivate good policy? We had a whole bunch. We had a whole bunch, but the ones that rose to the top are probably the costs and how the financing works for doing projects like this. And if there are any downsides to developing geothermal. Geothermal costs and downsides. All right. Thank you for coming. And I really want to thank the Best of Energy Committee. There's an Oquichi Regional Commission. The middle school. Pierre is the principal back in Vermont. We spent the White River Valley notes. We want all of you to know about all of those organizations. Let's get into the meat. And let's first hear, we call this burning or burr. Not because we want to criticize, but we want people to be informed about the consequences versus the opportunities. It comes along with the ways that we choose to get heat in our homes. About Kim. Burning. Burning. Not burrowing. Can everyone hear me? Yep. Thank you for being here. Thank you for caring. This is awesome. I am part of the 350 Vermont Clean Heat Study Group. And that means for over two years I've been looking at studying, studying, studying as a citizen. I'm not an expert scientist, but I've read a lot of expert scientists. And I'm studying how to heat and cool our buildings to lower our greenhouse gases. But before I get into that, how many people here know someone with asthma or COPD? All right, quite a few of you. And for this topic comes from having an aunt who had asthma. She was a brilliant professor of biology and she went to an academic conference in Maine. She took a walk on the beach, experienced an asthma attack that she did not survive. Her sudden death was obviously tragic to her colleagues, her students, her friends, and of course her family. So if I get somewhat passionate, I am passionate about helping other families not experience what my family experienced. Plus we've had a super tough summer. Wildfire smoke, too much flooding, too much rain, cyanobacteria, filled beaches. It's really bringing the reality of the changes home. Now I'm told optimism can be described as that cheerful attitude of a tea kettle that can sing when it's up to its nose in hot water. And that's a bit what I feel like and maybe you feel that way, too. But I do have hope. I see lots of progress. I see lots of individuals changing to systems that lower their greenhouse gases. And I know there's lots of people working very hard on policies that help our local, state, and national governments do those policies as well. And if you remember nothing, remember that together we are stronger than anything we can do as individuals. So yes, we have delayed working on fighting climate change and greenhouse gas emissions. Surprise your friends with this fun fact. The first scientist to discover or prove in a scientific experiment that adding CO2 to the atmosphere will warn the planet was a woman. Eunice Newton Foote. She never lived to see women get the vote. Her paper was delivered in 1856, 167 years ago, and she couldn't even present it because only men could present. Hooray, that's no longer our situation. So it's been too long. But, proverb that goes, don't look back unless that's the direction you want to go in. So we all know that the best time to plant a tree is 50 years ago, right? And also we would add the best time to have done a lot of things to fight climate change was 50 years ago. But the next best time is now. We have tremendous power if we will use it because we have all the solutions we need already to heat and cool buildings and not burn anything. Air source, ground source heat pumps, geothermal networks which you're going to hear about, electric boilers, solar with battery backup. We have all the tech we need. And here's Morganics. Once you put them in, now I know it's a challenge to put them in, but once you put them in, they are cheaper because you're no longer burning a fuel you buy. The sun is providing your fuel for free. They are easier to maintain because you are no longer trying to capture a controlled explosion, much less maintenance. And with recent legislation, the Infrastructure Act and the IRA, we have tremendous opportunities to lower the cost of putting these perfect solutions in. Well, I shouldn't say perfect, nothing's perfect, but these are way better in terms of the greenhouse gas emitted. So, and if you have questions about the IRA, I do know quite a bit about where to find information on the IRA. But for schools and municipal buildings, starting in January, there is payback for nonprofits. You have to put the green system in and once it's operational, you get 30 to 70% payback. Now there's lots of things that determine whether you get the full 70%. But 30% is nothing to sneeze at either. And probably you can figure out that we support it. Anything we burn is a problem. Whether it's fossil fuels, fossil gas, renewable natural gas, biomass or wood, all of these fuels release CO2 and or methane. These are the dominant greenhouse gases. Now, I'm going to slip down. 350 Vermont is not against logging. My house is wood. My furniture is wood. There's all kinds of important products we use daily that are wood. The best insulation is cellular insulation. So, when you harvest a tree and make a product like furniture or a house, the carbon is still sequestered. What we are against is burning trees. It's instant release of the CO2 to the atmosphere. And the atmosphere doesn't care where the CO2 comes from. Whether it's oil or gas or coal or wood or renewable natural gas, the atmosphere doesn't care. It doesn't go, oh, this is a renewable CO2. No. So I'm going to have Jean help me. I have a little demonstration. If I had a globe, I would have brought it and I should have asked some of the teachers. But basic revolution for hundreds of years now, we've been adding CO2 and methane to the atmosphere. And it acts like a blanket already strong enough that you're seeing what we saw this summer and what we're seeing worldwide. Everything out of control. Every time you burn something, you add to that blanket. And as most of us know, the CO2 takes over 100 years to dissipate. Methane doesn't take as long. But the combination of methane and CO2 is particularly toxic to keeping the heat in. And methane takes 25 years and we don't have 25 years to turn this around. So we've got to stop as much as possible now. We're all, I know you're trying, you're talking to people. We're all probably still burning something somewhere and we're all trying. So we're all in this together. Worldwide, we are losing huge amounts of forest because of the climate induced droughts and the massive wildfires that impacted our air this summer but have been impacting California and Australia for quite a few years ahead of us. That combined, unfortunately, with a huge scale up in burning biomass, pellets and wood chips, worldwide we are in a massive deficit in terms of our trees. Thank you. Trees are super cool. Trees are the only thing that sequester carbon. We've got lots of great green tech to heat and cool home but there is nothing that we have invented that sequesters carbon. So here's some things to think about. One 150 year old oak tree sequesters eight tons of carbon. If you cut that and replace it with a little tree, it takes 465 10 year old oak trees to sequester the same eight tons of carbon. And we don't have 10 years. So when you burn the wood, there's no time to wait for the atmosphere to get those trees back up to speed sequestering. Just today Vermont Digger had a very excellent opinion piece and the man writing about biomass basically said something I should have known but I didn't think about it until he wrote about it. 1700s, 1800s, 1900s, what did we do to Vermont? We clear cut it. That was millions of sequester carbon. Our forests are young, 100 to 150 years old. They nowhere near come close to replacing what we clear cut in those centuries of farming. So here's where the scientists are on top of this and some of this may be surprising or shocking The scientists now consider wood worse than coal on three different important ways. One, it is the least efficient of all fuels we burn. Two, it produces the most greenhouse gases per amount of energy produced. And three, it is the most toxic to human health. The EPA has six critical pollutants. It covers as the top ones they manage. Wood produces more of these. It produces five of the six and produces more of those five than any other fuel we burn. So it's very much like cigarette smoke. No amount of these chemicals that are released are healthy. And nothing we burn is healthy, but wood is the most toxic. I have a family member who is a lung doctor and every winter that doctor's patients would show up at UVM clinic and say, Doc, why am I worse? And he would have to ask them, are you or is someone near you burning wood? People with asthma, COPD, heart problems are this sensitive to find particulate matter. If you don't have asthma, you won't know what they go through. But the clinics at UVM were overstuffed with the wildfire smoke. And a lot of people were in such distress they couldn't go to work. The ERs were overstuffed, the clinics were overstuffed with suffering people. The American Lung Association states that many rural communities in the U.S. are now covered in the winter with a haze of toxic material from the wood people are earning. They also say, this is their 2023 research on the scientific literature. At the state level, biomass and wood combustion has supplanted coal as the leading sources of death from fuel combustion in many states. Nothing we burn is healthy, but wood is the worst and I am conscious bound to tell you the truth. As reported by the scientists and the medical scientists, wood produces the most of fine particulate matter. Medical science recognizes no amount of fine particulate matter as healthy for anyone. This is why New York and Massachusetts have now passed legislation not only restricting fossil fuels, but also restricting renewable natural gas and biomass wood from heating and cooling buildings. We have the green solutions. They are cheaper and easier to maintain in the long run. And we have funding to help us put them in. For your help. For the health of those you love. For the children that I know we all care about and hope will live beyond us. For their future, let's work together to reduce our greenhouse gases. Thank you. Thank you, Kim. Before you run away, are there any questions for clarification? Just that you want to understand, you didn't understand something. Yeah. Can you say more about the health issues in Burlington? More about the health issues in Burlington. I've lost a lot of people. Do you mean, I'm not 100% sure what you're trying to... You were talking about people suffering greatly. Oh, yeah. What's the most important thing that matters when you spend on that? So when the... I don't know about the rest of you, but because of the wildfire smoke this summer, I not only bought an air purifier for my home, but I also have on my phone the AirGov app that tells you the fine particulate matter every day. And we had quite a few days earlier in the summer when it was in the red zone. When it's in the red zone, because I know too much, I wear a K95 mask if I'm going outside my house, because the K95 mask will filter the fine particulate matter. But for people with asthma, COPD, heart issues, they're very vulnerable and the fine particulate matter for a person with asthma can cause them to get dramatically worse. So that's... Hospitals are unusual places. We take most of the suffering of the world and we put them in one building. And the rest of us go around and don't know anything about it. But if you know an ER doctor, if you know a pulmonologist, a lung doctor, if you know a chest radiologist, if you know pediatrician, if you know these folks see this all the time and they care. It's very hard. Hospital. Yeah? Oh yeah. I can't give you numbers, but I know that the... And to be honest, I don't know how many were hospitalized, but I do know the ERs were overflowing. And Vermont Digger had an earlier this summer, an ER doctor wrote in about, this is a health crisis. One in five people worldwide dies because of air pollution. It is a very serious matter. The app is AirNow. It's free. It's the government app. And here's what it looks like. You pull it up today. Our air was good, but now that I have it, periodically I check it. A few days ago, we were back in the red and it wasn't even in the news. So it affects all of you cumulatively even if you don't have asthma or COPD or a heart problem. It can cause those things. You know, the five things that wood produces are fine particulate matter, and it's so teeny, it's slightly larger than a coronavirus. So nothing in your nose or throat filters it. It gets right into your lung, right into your bloodstream and accumulates in your organs and the effects are cumulative. In India, in New Delhi, where the air pollution is out of control, it's taking 12 years off everybody's life. And the children are being severely damaged, their lungs and hearts. So that's just one. Then there's sulfur oxide, nitrogen oxide, VOCs, volatile organic compounds, and carbon monoxide. None of these things are healthy. All of these things are causing heart, lung and cancer problems and or exacerbating health for those who have a chronic condition like asthma or COPD. I want to tell you something we get told in the legislature. I wish you would comment on it. The argument is made that burning wood is less destructive than fuel, oil or propane because those sources of carbon come out of the ground where the carbon was previously sequestered while trees are part of the natural carbon cycle in which even the trees, if you don't cut them down and burn them, they're going to eventually fall down and rot and that carbon's going up into the sky. Let me put that question to a later point and focus. But I will say I have papers addressing that. So I can point them out to you afterwards, Dick. I really appreciate your question. If you have questions, clarification of anything that Kim has said. If not, then let's move ahead. I do. I'm just a little curious. You mentioned that trees are only means of sequestering carbon. To your knowledge, has anyone tried to find some other means? Yes, your national federal government and any other governments have put millions of dollars into large plants that are trying to sequester carbon and to this point none of them are working. Prairies, lots of other natural landscapes do sequester tons and tons of carbon by the things that trees that we can manage to also do. Thank you. Yes. Of course wetlands and soil and prairies, anything green is sequestering carbon. Thank you. It's tough to find something sequestering more than a mature tree. And the amount, think about the difference in size of that one oak tree as massive as it is versus 465 ten-year-old trees. The amount of space needed. I don't have a question, but I have a question right now is how people are normalizing the smoke. Right? In whatever June or July when it was first here, it was like, oh my God, oh my God. I'm very sensitive to it, not my health but my eyes. I just see it. People say, oh, what a nice foliage day. And I'm like, well, yeah. And there's this haze. I feel like we're normalizing it at this point. And that to me is very scary. We may be normalizing the smoke that we are experiencing. Yes. If somebody can find the light switches and turn something, it might be easier to see. That clicker, I believe. Right on the table. I think it's on the top of that clicker. Thank you. Okay. It would be great if we could have some light because I have notes because I have very specific things I want to share and I don't want to forget. Some lights are good. Let's go with that and see how that works. If you can't see the pictures, make sure you let me know. My name is Debbie New and I grew up in Vermont. I raised my family in Vermont, not too far from here. And I have actually been in this building before but not to talk about geothermal energy, which I'm going to talk about tonight. I was here to teach a class on tap dancing. I thought if we go through this pretty quickly, we could do a little shuffle ball change, if you don't mind. That's one of my favorite things to do. Okay. So anyway, I'm really happy to be here to explain to you what I've been learning about geothermal energy for buildings and something that's called a thermal energy network. So I'm going to do a little bit of reading for my notes because I want to be able to say this clearly because this is about technology but it's also about common sense and using what we already have, which I think that people in Vermont understand very well. What are the resources right around us and how can we use those? So geothermal energy and thermal energy networks are a local, affordable, safe, healthy heating and cooling solution that we could have right here in Vermont. So I'm really interested in collecting your ideas and your questions about this, about how we can bring this solution to our communities here. So please keep track of what you need to know, what I'm not explaining well and that kind of thing. So basically, what do you need to know and what can we do together? Because Kim just told us a lot about why we should stop burning things. So let's focus on what we can do in order to accomplish that and get our heating and cooling from somewhere else. So geothermal solutions aren't new but networking geothermal is a newer idea in Vermont and other places. We can do geothermal for one building. We can also network geothermal systems to create a community scale infrastructure system like we have water systems and wastewater systems in many of our larger town centers. So these networks are not going to work everywhere in Vermont in a more rural state like ours, but what can we do? How can they play an important role in the portfolio of solutions that we need? So let's start with geothermal energy for an individual home. Now this is not geothermal like you think of the Geysers in Yellowstone National Park or what they do in Iceland or something like that. Those are deeper geothermal. We're talking about shallow geothermal, relatively shallow, like about the depth of a water well. And you might be familiar with this. So when you turn on your heat in your home, if you have geothermal, the ground source heat pump inside your home delivers warm air inside and extracts cold air like an air source heat pump does. When you need cooling, the process reverses. The heat pump delivers cold air and extracts heat returning it to the earth rather than sending it outside. So underground is where this temperature comes from that is compressed in a ground source heat pump. Water-filled pipes underground absorb the underground temperature and bring it up to your heat pump. And around here, at about the depth of a water well, the constant temperature of the earth is about 50 degrees. So that's pretty moderate and it's constant. So the ground source heat pump can easily convert that into 70 degrees if that's what you want inside your home. So this can keep you comfortable in the winter, but it also can keep you cool in the summer. That excess heat that's extracted to cool your home can be sent back underground to store. So these systems have thermal storage built in. Geothermal can also work well for a large building. And that's why I'm really excited to be in a school tonight because schools are a great place as are town halls and other municipal buildings for geothermal energy because they're reliable and they're low-maintenance systems. And also because over time, the upfront costs to install them are, you're able to recover that pretty quickly, especially as a nonprofit not having to pay taxes with the Inflation Reduction Act like Kim was talking about earlier. We can get into more of that later. So a municipal building is great because you can put in geothermal and then you can expand a network out from that into the surrounding community. So why network geothermal? Well, because it's even more efficient that way. Buildings are connected to these vertical bores or wells and they're linked by horizontal pipes. These vertical and horizontal pipes form closed loops so they don't interact with the ground, they don't interact with the water inside your house or anything like that. But they exchange temperature with the earth and share it between buildings because homes and large buildings of all different kinds have different thermal needs at different times. So excess heating and cooling isn't wasted but can be exchanged efficiently between them. So do you hear a background sound in this room? Yeah, there's a ventilation system in any building like this and that ventilation system is often ejecting heat into the atmosphere. We can capture that and send it back into the building or the nearby buildings. These loops, these networks can grow over time and become even more affordable and efficient the more people that connect to them because the more people are sharing the cost. We don't have to do everything at once. We can start with a school or a town hall and we can build a network from there. So another reason, another why about network geothermal or even just geothermal for a single building is because of all the benefits. So I'm just going to run through some of these quickly. These systems are safe and clean with mainly water in the pipes instead of fossil fuels. There's no risk of explosions or toxic leaks and no emissions. They're affordable and reliable to people who they serve because once installed customer bills can be shared. They are low and they're predictable year-round so you don't see spikes like you do with many fossil fuels. And addressing what Kim was talking about they're healthy. Nothing is burned in order to create the heating so the indoor air is safer to breathe. They're also flexible which is important in Vermont because they can fit into many locations and different kinds of landscapes without disrupting places. There's minimal footprint being mostly underground and inside buildings. They're also resilient and secure because of this. The loops are made of durable plastic pipes and they're underground or inside so they're more protected from disruption. They're also equitable because they're a community-scale solution. It's not a house-by-house choice of people who can't afford it or people who can't afford it but it's about a municipality making this available to many more people in a neighborhood or community. And they can be part of a just transition because fossil fuel workers whether they're gas workers up around Burlington where they have gas or they're oil and propane, plumber, pipe fitter type people it's pretty much the same skills to do these kinds of pipes with water instead of fossil fuels. So the transition for those workers can be pretty quickly accomplished. And one of the best things that this is local energy we're not importing fuels from outside the state and we're not sending our energy dollars away. It all stays right here. So I want to just briefly run through some examples of where there is geothermal energy and it's working in Vermont. So schools in Winooski, schools in Burlington, Champlain College, St. Mike's College, Fairbanks Museum in St. John'sbury there's a long list. We just can't see it. We don't know where it is. This is up in Burlington and it's an industrial facility so you can see it's a very large kind not like what you might have in a home or a smaller building. But this is a geothermal system in Vermont. There's also a geothermal network that's working in Toronto. It's not that different from our climate here. 300 homes are networked there and they expect to reduce their emissions by about 80% from those buildings. In Texas they do everything big in Texas, right? That's the folklore of Texas also probably the reality because this neighborhood and I don't blame you if it makes you cringe a little bit but it also looks a little bit like South Burlington in terms of the developments that are going in up there. I don't know if you've seen them recently. We have one development with 7,500 homes 2 million square feet of commercial space and three schools that are all networked on geothermal and also connected to solar for their electricity. So do you remember that big storm that wiped out the power across Texas and stranded people for weeks? This community was able to function right away because they had local energy on site. And just to the south of us in Framingham, Massachusetts there is a project going in right now they're drilling, they're installing geothermal in this neighborhood that has affordable housing schools and a fire station. There's lots of other projects to talk about basically I just want to recap when we're talking about networked geothermal we're talking about systems that use ground source heat pumps and underground pipes that connect multiple buildings heating and cooling but also hot water and as I said thermal storage which is really key to be able to ride out the differences in temperature. Now I want to talk about thermal energy networks because we don't just have to borrow there is heat in many other places around us. Thermal energy networks do everything that a network geothermal system does and they can harness waste heat from large buildings from large refrigeration systems like in a grocery store and from wastewater. These systems use thermal energy that already exists across a community that's otherwise vented or lost and that has already been generated and paid for. So one example is that the waste heat from a large grocery store refrigeration system can be reused to provide heat and hot water to about 15 to 30 homes nearby. So combining geothermal with other thermal energy resources in a network creates an even stronger solution. And we've just created a short video it's about three and a half minutes about thermal energy networks that you can watch on the website of the Vermont Community Geothermal Alliance which is the organization that I'm working with and we have information about how to find that on the back table. I wanted to show you the video where the speakers don't work but we couldn't figure that out. So I'm going to keep going. So by building network geothermal or thermal energy networks that use many kinds of heat in town centers and in new construction which is the lowest hanging fruit easiest to install it there we can do three main things use the resources we already have to reduce emissions by about 80% or more we keep energy dollars in our communities and we make customer bills predictable because heat pumps these ground source heat pumps are about three times as efficient as air source heat pumps regardless of the outside temperatures they can deliver heating and cooling from 50 degrees rather than from 0 degrees or 90 degrees so they're working with a much narrow range and they don't have to work as hard they use less electricity this reduces the demand on the electric grid and helps to shave peak loads which also cuts customer costs because it's those peaks in electricity that cost us more this strengthens our ability to use electricity where we really need it so it really compliments air source heat pumps and other kinds of clean energy solutions and I want to reinforce this by saying that thermal energy networks are a yes and solution the yes part is that many Vermonters are installing air source heat pumps in their homes and we need to keep doing that as much as we can especially in our more rural state the and part is that in town centers and in denser areas we can install thermal energy networks to help more people access and afford clean energy we can also pair our systems here with solar like I described in Texas and supply local electricity to run the system lowering emissions even more I want to talk to you about Colorado Mesa University as one more example they have similar temperature swings like we can see here in Vermont that's way out west but there are a lot of things that apply and I can tell you some specifics about the system because it's been operating for over a dozen years at Colorado Mesa University that system is heating and cooling about 16 buildings they're adding 9 more and they're planning on expanding to the surrounding town and high school facilities nearby that university has saved one and a half million dollars every year in energy costs which adds up to nearly 12 million dollars since 2008 and the college has been able to reduce tuition by 2% because of how much they've saved so that's Colorado this is Vermont what's needed to bring the solution here and make it work right here in Bethel or in Randolph or South Royalton there are three main things that we're working on one is financing because of the upfront costs we have opportunities to harness federal money to harness the tax incentives and make those work here in Vermont we're working with the Vermont bond bank with the economic development authority to figure this out but we'd love your help too because we know that once we get the upfront cost settled for a thermal energy network we all will be able to pay less or at least keep our energy prices stable also the work force issue across the clean energy transition we need workers to weatherize to install air source heat pumps we also need drillers for the geothermal components we need people to install ground source heat pumps so why not train air source heat pump and ground source heat pump installers at the same time and having a few more engineers around would be helpful too so we're working on that talking to tech centers Vermont technical college department of labor etc the other thing and the last thing I want to highlight really we have a bill in Vermont that is modeled on a bill from New York New York state passed a bill last summer and it passed their senate unanimously which is unprecedented and it was supported by labor unions utilities and environmental groups when was the last time you heard about those three groups working together but they actually did and they passed the bill through in New York and now in New York there are 40 or 50 projects online and already they're building things in New York so we took the New York bill and we made it fit Vermont in New York the utilities are required to do this the Vermont bill allows our existing utilities to do this but it also allows our municipalities to do it it allows fuel dealer businesses to expand and go into this line of work so that they don't have to just fall off the map with a clean energy transition so if we get non-profits energy co-ops, home motor associations, fuel dealers municipalities being able to install these systems they can do this using a utility model they can essentially become a utility like a water utility or an electric utility or a wastewater utility in your town which means they can access the upfront costs that they need in order to install the system and then over time set rates that help them recover that cost and in some cases maybe make a return on the investment which because it's a municipality or a co-op or whatever it is it's going to be reinvested into the community so we're working to pass that bill each 242 and I would love your ideas from legislators as well from people who live in these towns about how we can help get that bill through together there are towns in Vermont that are waiting for this to happen so they can install a thermal energy network so last thing we all know that heat is a precious resource in Vermont we spend a lot of time and energy and money in staying warm in the winter and increasingly we're going to need to stay cool in the summers so we need both heating and cooling we have a lot of the heat we need and it can be created as warm for our homes and it can be rejected as cooling for the summers so we have opportunities to harness it that's a picture of Middlebury and I like this one here because the lights of the traffic make me think about energy going through a community so imagine that those lines around delivering heat to buildings in your community so I'm going to stop there and I really welcome your questions and ideas thanks a lot thank you I'm going to switch from the agenda that I thought we would have I think we're a small enough group that we can go into just some first some clarification questions and then into a general conversation about what we've heard today so clarification Nick what is the status of the bill right now status of the bill right now thanks for asking it's being redrafted by legislative council by Ellen and we expect to get a fresh copy of the bill in two or three weeks there have been some small tweaks made to the bill since last time around and these really improve the bill for municipalities because it takes time to get it out of the PUC process and I can explain more of that later but it allows municipalities to fast-track these systems Any other questions? I was just wondering about the bill it did not I'm sorry am I not talking okay I'm here I'm just wondering about the bill that would work so for a municipality say as a non-tax paying entity a municipality qualifies to get the 30% tax credit that I think Kim was mentioning back as a check so Vermont Economic Development Association or the Vermont Bond Bank in this case they work with municipalities the Bond Bank could do a bridge loan to help provide the capital to get to that government check for 30 to 40% of the cost of the system the other things that we're exploring are grants, other low-interest loans and especially I like public-private partnerships like with a local college or a factory say in Northfield where darn tough is located they have a social environmental mission this could benefit them they could enhance their relationship with the town there are all sorts of possibilities about where the money could come from and that's one of the problems that I wake up every morning wanting to solve it is also the case that funding for utilities which this would enable is very different than funding for a non-utility and that's a significant change or difference that makes some of these systems more affordable you said DTC is involved you said Vermont Technical College I think is that Daniel Costin yeah well here's two things he said he said that there is a massive amount of money that is easily accessible and the other thing he said is that the Malpelier Fine Arts College was going to possibly put a system in the summer did that happen I have been talking to people in Malpelier about a few different project possibilities and this was all pretty flooding but I know that the entity that bought several of the Vermont College of Fine Arts Buildings is an engineering for sustainability institution and they should be interested I think I've heard that they are interested in geothermal and I'm waiting for a reply to my email about that in a conversation so that's one thing and yes Vermont Technical College Dan Costin isn't there right now but Chris Riley is working in the yeah so Chris Riley I talked with him Susan Smiley here and I've talked with him and they're having a visitor via zoom pretty soon the person who designed the Toronto system is going to talk with one of their classes so we're doing everything we can together and they're also going to be involved in a project in Heinsberg there's a department of energy grant to put a network geothermal system in an affordable housing new development in Heinsberg that's about 150 units I think it's a grant that was given to 11 different projects across the country and we got one in Vermont and it's Vermont Gas that applied for it and got that money I see this project as a difference maker I see this project as a I see this project as a difference maker because of money availability there are a lot of great ideas around on all kinds of renewable energy and light but the money isn't there this one from what Costin told me is there certainly the money is there in the inflation reduction act in the tax incentives and other programs and yes there's a lot of growing interest the department of energy's geothermal technology office is working very closely with national leaders on this and I also know that there are foundations that want to fund projects especially in energy burden communities and in places that really need it which is really encouraging because that's where I and maybe all of us want to see this kind of clean energy system go first so that people who really need it so I'm working hard with other people to find those foundations and connect them to projects in Vermont all of this is all of this is great for networks in communities where we've got buildings close together but I want to tell a story from about 50 years 30 40 years I don't know but back in the mid 80's whenever that was we knew somebody who was a farmer in Minnesota he decided to go out and dig up under his fields and he laid a pipe under his fields he then put his fields back over the top of that and he heeded his home an old Minnesota farmhouse yellow you got sure you betcha cost him a lot of money $200 a year to heat his home and that was for power to run the pumps and to run the blows it doesn't have to be tens of thousands of dollars to install for a single unit if you have space and a strong back right now not everybody has that but that's just part of the so other comments questions you know I have a couple of questions in there about the economics of this the first one is and I'll ask them both and I'll give you back the mic the first question is are these systems that are networked are they metered so that different households pay for what they use and if so how do they actually manage that and then the other question is like in my neighborhood I live up by the hospital in Randolph and a substantial number of the homes in my neighborhood already have air source heat pumps and it seems like every day there's a new one going in and so when time we get a ground source network system going we're looking at duplicating to a large extent the system and so I'm wondering how people envision including or not including homes that have already made those clean energy investments two very good questions thank you so about the metering so people pay only for what they use and so on the business model that the owners of the system select so if it's a municipality how does the municipality want to charge they can play they can have people pay a flat fee they can do a how many square feet are in your building and you pay according to that they can, I think the metering thing is a little bit trickier the people I work with are not that keen on the metering idea but it can be based on how many kilowatts used to run the system rather than on BTUs if you use those kind of technical terms BTUs measure thermal energy and kilowatts measure electricity so there are different ways to do it different business models so then the next question is about what about all the air source heat pumps people already have well one thing that's happening in the ground source heat pump industry we're figuring out ways to convert air source heat pumps into ground source heat pumps so what I need to find out and I don't know enough about is can that happen to any air source heat pump that's already been installed or is that only newer air source heat pumps that might be able to connect but people are aware that a lot of air source heat pumps are already installed and being able to convert to a ground source heat pump system so I know that some of the manufacturers are working on that and piloting those units if not already installing them I think that where there are air source heat pumps we need to go with that and do the ground source heat pumps in places where there aren't any yet so I think we need we need to do so much so fast there's plenty of room for both there you go, Gary says plenty of room for both questions, comments or Sylvie question about the bill so it's going it's a house bill and we'll start in the house energy committee on the above law yeah okay okay and that's going to be coming up right at the beginning of the session or actually how we don't know that okay so the question is about where is it going to start at the state house and when but we are meeting with members of the house energy and environment committee three of them if you know Dara Tore from Moretown she's going to lead Gabrielle Stebbins from Burlington is in support they're both on the committee and Mari Cortes from Addison County is the original co-sponsor of the bill and Senator Bray on the senate side has said that he has a version of the bill that's very similar maybe identical, we hope to see it soon we're working with Senator Anne Watson from Washington County Montpelier area on her leading in the senate so we're going to try both house and senate and then Randolph well Larry Satowitz is also on that committee and here so we okay so Jean's story about his friend in Minnesota made me think that I wanted to tell you you can put these slinky kind of pipes underground and do a geothermal system you can also put plates or loops of pipes in water and it doesn't interact with the water so it's not like an open loop system it's still a closed loop they're looking at doing this and snow making ponds in Vermont so that ski area I just went on a tour of the Killington heat plant thinking about this with a manufacturer of ground source heat pumps they put a plate in the snow making pond and take heat out and put heat back in and it apparently will make snow making more efficient because it will lower the temperature of the water so it's kind of fun hooray could you explain a little bit more how a network system can support the heating and cooling needs it's all the work that's done by the ground source heat pump and does every building have a ground source heat pump but I still don't quite understand I don't have much of a picture okay so yes every building would have at least one ground source heat pump inside it depending on the size of the building these systems have electronic controls that measure the thermal energy in each building and send the heating or cooling to where it's needed these controls can be monitored remotely and one person can be watching four to five systems at the same time that's part of the low maintenance and the low cost of these systems but they're electronically controlled in order to figure out where the heat and the cooling needs to go does that help and your question about air source heat pumps is also relevant to places like this school we're appreciative that the school has moved off of fossil fuels but that is a step toward becoming carbon-free and heat ground source heat a thermal network and here's where I really want to encourage towns and schools to somehow bridge that chasm that exists between them where near the two shall meet when we're talking about a thermal network we're talking about big buildings like schools town halls town firehouse you know a factory next door we're talking about a network that captures the heat and shares it between public, private school community and if we get together and bridge that gap between the towns and the schools to have the conversations about how we're going to heat the buildings in our town my belief is we'll get a lot further a lot faster than if we continue to act as if the others don't exist does the Framingham Mass example show us any ways of towns and businesses that sounds like a place where multiple players were joined together and were there incentives or other approaches the Framingham Mass project is being done by an investor owned utility a gas company so they are deeply engaging the community in doing this project but they didn't do it on their own obviously they worked with the municipality but it's a much different way of doing it than we would do it here yeah I also just wanted to tag on to Jean's comment and connect what Kim was saying about burning wood with what I was saying about geothermal that on October 20 at the agency of natural resources the state of Vermont is having a municipal day I think it's at the Vermont Life Building in Montpelier and one of the sessions is about encouraging municipalities and schools to put in biomass burning systems so what my mission is and maybe we could all do this together is to make sure that geothermal is equally considered and that everybody understands the benefits of a geothermal system for a school or a municipal building and biomass isn't advertised as the only thing so we can hear some of us are hearing impaired some of us are hearing impaired thank you okay well I know I can do it so I do this for a living so I hear microphone voices in small rooms all the time I understand the economies of scale that a a municipally owned utility is you know more efficient I guess per calorie than an individual how much less efficient is an individual household is this feasible for an individual and specifically what I'm thinking about is around here we are full of places that have very deep driven water wells can you just go and drop the self-contained unit down into a well yes sometimes I talk with engineers who talk about using water wells just send a pipe down and pull the heat up in a closed loop it's possible yes so that would be something to investigate there's an electric co-op in Oklahoma that is making money by individual homes putting in geothermal systems separate just for one house and they have over a thousand homes now with individual geothermal systems and they are making money because they're saving money on the electricity side on the electric grid and the ins and outs of it but it's an amazing model it works there because drilling costs less than it costs here in Vermont but it doesn't mean some of the ideas can't be applied here so I've definitely heard people in the industry say yes we should be looking at networks and how can we pair those with individual geothermal for homes that don't connect they're too far away so that's another area where creativity is needed an individual family or a town wanted to go for geothermal either individually or as a network how would they go about it so I would divide that into the individual and then the grid for municipality so for an individual it means contacting an installer who does geothermal systems and also a tax accountant because of the inflation reduction act and how to maximize those credits and I think that most people will find that it's unaffordable for an individual home which is why I'm focused on the community scale infrastructure it's unfortunate I would like geothermal in my home and it's not going to happen so that's the individual side it's not impossible but it is going into the homes of wealthier people in Vermont hang on just a second so then how would a municipality go about looking into this oh yeah a town or even just like a new development an affordable housing developer or something like that right so if they're looking just to do geothermal they would again they would contact an engineer and have the engineer do a study of the thermal loads of the building the square footage and the configuration and all of that stuff and they would figure out how many wells need to be drilled and what would the cost be and that kind of thing and then you go to the tax accountant and I'll do all of that stuff and you also talk to agencies in Vermont like the Vermont Economic Development Agency or the bond bank to get help with the financing so it really requires an engineer I would say start with an engineer municipalities may also apply for an emergency grant which is emergency resilience municipal emergency resilience plans this came up when we were exploring geothermal a long time ago before we got there and finding an engineer in this area has that changed because we couldn't find anybody so that's a good question yeah that's why I'm talking to Vermont Technical College about bringing more engineers into this world so I haven't scanned the engineering world across Vermont Susan's been helping a bit with that but we are at the beginning of figuring that out we do at the Vermont Community Geothermal Alliance we do have a toolkit that we have developed for towns people like us in small groups getting together to look around and say where is there already thermal energy to look for the grocery stores to look for the big venting equipment on top of big buildings to figure out do we have a wastewater treatment plant that has high enough flow that we could plug into it and pull heat out of it so you do need to know some specifics and we're putting as much of that as we can gather into a toolkit so that towns can take three or four steps of planning out a system and then get to the point where it's time to sit down with an engineer so we are trying to help people to do have a grassroots community driven exploration of what's possible I'm going to take one more question and then we're going to close it down and Vincent had his hand up actually I asked a question earlier and he told me to wait but no that's true okay I'm not sure why things could work out this way but conceivably could you have a community thermal network and then add geothermal to it later could someone comment on the carbon cycle regarding wood okay I'll articulate the question again we are told in defense of wood heat that unlike we're wondering if you want to answer this question if you want to put advocates of wood heat make the case that oil and coal is sequestered and so it's stuff that would not be in the atmosphere except that we burn it while wood is part the trees are part of a carbon cycle in which even if we don't burn them they will fall down and the carbon will end up in so all we're doing by burning wood is speeding up the carbon cycle not actually adding carbon that's the argument that is made it's not my opinion I'm asking for a comment so the first thing I would say is there's a lot of myths like this in the industry and all the climate scientists are working hard to try to explain why they don't work I mean oil and gas are natural plants too they've just been down there longer coal and that's all prehistoric plants that have been pressurized so I try to address that in my example of the atmosphere doesn't care what the CO2 comes from the problem is the instantaneous combustion overloading what is already overloaded and that is what is melting your glaciers your sea ice raising the oceans causing the storms to be so intense heating the oceans the ocean off of Miami got to 110 degrees this year the ocean has been absorbing massive amounts of archaea and it's now starting to show so those things are instantly impacted by the instantaneous delivery of massive amounts of wood carbon to the air and those impacts don't go away when the tree re-burns or the tree re-grows the tree to get back to the size you harvested at more like 75 to 100 years so it's have you heard the term cognitive dissonance I don't know how people sleep at night if they think they're causing climate change and so industry and people who depend for this for their income and their jobs this is cognitive dissonance I don't know how the tobacco companies people sleep at night I don't know what their cognitive dissonance is they don't have a myth about tobacco not being toxic they just denied it for years but these papers this is a letter I only have one copy so all of you legislators might want to take a photo of it or give me your emails and I'll send you the link this is a letter that was signed by over a thousand top climate scientists I didn't print out all their signatures and pages because I only have one signature here it's Peter Raven director of the Missouri Botanical Society winner U.S. National Medal of Science so he was the former president of the American Association of the Advancement of Science they all have bios like that and they're worldwide and it's a thousand scientists have signed this letter and it directly deals with that myth I've heard it two ways I've heard it you sequester the carbon you burn it it already was sequestered or I've heard the trees grow back so it's renewable first of all the trees don't go back fast enough and neither of these myths are scientifically based and neither of them deal with the instant overpowering of the amount of CO2 and methane in the atmosphere and you're not going to get the glaciers back you're not going to lower the ocean temperature we need to slow climate change down but the changes we already have we have the question was not is global warming okay I don't need to be persuaded what I was getting at was an argument that has been made to me that I suspected intuitively is just plain wrong and I was looking for some support here it's absolutely wrong from a scientific standpoint but your industry people will spout it heavily and this it's two sided this letter addresses the myth this letter also addresses the myth because this is where I got the figure of the oak tree this is addressing that it's renewable the trees grow back well they don't grow back fast enough but these two letters you can take this one there's three of you in the legislature just take your phone and take a photo and you have it or I'm happy to send it to you there you go I want to call your attention to this table back here there is a lot of literature both about 350 Vermont also about lumber and logging versus climate change some of kin stuff it's just a wealth of information that I encourage you to take a look at before you leave by the way I'm willing to stay forever but I don't know if all of you are there's other things that I want to say is well thank you for coming Julie who has one more coming there are a few things back there there's only one copy so make sure you don't take the last copy and just make sure if any of you were aware that we had what is Dave's title he's a forester with the national he was here but he had to leave and he asked me to give you this information it will be difficult to reduce total biogenic carbon release average actual acres burned per euro settlement or pre euro settlement which was 17 million average for the last 20 years is plus or minus 7 million although earlier fires pre euro settlement use not stand replacing fires many of today's fires are stand replacing in other words not stand as they just take what's on the ground stand means take the tree down earlier fires were more landscape maintenance in the fire that served the benefit and health of for the I can't read this served to benefit the health of many American landscapes I think you can understand it I don't need to explain it you all understand it the wood that we're doing now is taking standing trees centuries ago in four centuries it took non-stand trees and that makes a difference in the release of the captured carbon from the ground we could go on and on and on thank you for coming thank you for your interest we passed out a registration form at the beginning please fill that out for us so that we know who was here and if you add your email and check some boxes we'll help you get more deeply involved take a look at the table back there and have at it, thank you