 And I hope you've been enjoying the Resilient Vermont conference so far. We're excited to get started with this panel on thermal and transportation, and I'm going to turn it over to my co-moderator, Valeria, to introduce the topic. Oh, you want to introduce the panelists first? Yeah, OK, sure. Let me introduce our esteemed panel. So on my left here, Jen Waddlesbrotur works for Vermont Energy Investment Corporation. She sets the organization's strategic direction for transportation work, oversees staff of consulting professionals and leads clean transportation development across the country. To her left is Neal Lunderville, who's the president and CEO of Vermont Gas. He recently served as general manager of the Burlington Electric Department. Prior to that was co-founder and CEO of ND Advantage and was appointed by Governor Peter Shumlin in 2011 to lead recovery efforts for after Tropical Storm Irene, which is extremely relevant to today's topics. Sorry, if that's OK. Maura Collins became executive director of the Vermont Housing Finance Agency in January 2019, but has been with the agency for a total of 20 years. In the last few years, she's been working to develop financing strategies for weatherization in the thermal sector. And then at the end of the table is Professor Michael Kross, professor of engineering here at Norwich University. He teaches classes in circuits, electronics, energy systems, and engineering design. Reyes, I'm a student from Norwich University. I've studied civil engineering, and this is my first time moderating, so I'm really excited. To start with, I would like to enter the conversation by saying the relationship between, like the general relationship with Irene and missions, COVID, and our main point for this session, which is thermal and transportation. So we're looking back to look forward here. So remember that with no coastlines, Vermont might have seen an unlikely candidate to be devastated by a tropical storm. After a green step through, Vermont said about understanding the devastation and working store resilience. The COVID-19 pandemic is having significant impacts on Vermonters across the state. Everyday people confront new challenges and the future for many seems bleak and unpredictable. This taught us that we need to be resilient against not just future storms, but other types of disaster. But if we go forward in the correct direction, we believe Vermont's future is brighter than what it lies ahead. The health of our families, economy, and community is completely tied to the health of our environment. So low-carbon technologies will keep money in Vermont and create jobs while reaching the greenhouse gas reduction. Because the vast majority of Vermont's emissions come from transportation and thermal sector, it is in those sectors that the most significant improvements are needed. So we're gonna focus on those two major topics, which is transportation and thermal sector in this session. Thank you. So I'm gonna let the panelists introduce themselves now just with a few words about sort of how their work overlaps with resilience and how that intersection between resilience and emissions comes into play. So, Jennifer, you wanna start us off? Sure thing. So I'm here to really focus on the transportation sector. In the introduction, I work at VEIC. We're very focused on strategies to increase electric vehicles in the state. But there are a lot of different ways to think about transportation. And so I'm gonna sort of frame this up in the way that I think about resiliency and climate and transportation. So the first thing is obviously transportation is the number one source of greenhouse gas emissions, both in Vermont and nationally. So the sector has been a tough nut to crack. So we have a lot of work to do here. And so clearly, if we're thinking about resiliency, if we're thinking about climate, we really have to get our arms around how we're gonna reduce emissions in the transportation sector. So that's one thing that is a very direct connection. Another thing that we think a lot about is health. So if you think about air quality and the emissions that come from on-road vehicles, there's significant impacts to our health. And they're not great. So people who live near major roadways suffer disproportionately from lung disease and all sorts of health issues that come from proximity to these emissions. So that's another thing. And we could save a lot of money as a country and as a state if we were to reduce those impacts, those health impacts. And then the last thing, and I think probably everybody in this room is experiencing what it means to have volatile gas prices, right? So we're dependent on a world market for gas. We know what's happening in Ukraine and that's driving our gas prices up. There's probably a lot more going on with that. But Vermonters don't have the capacity to absorb high fuel costs. We are a rural state. People are very dependent on their cars to get to their jobs and to get to the services they need to access. So I did a quick Google search yesterday. Average price of gas per gallon in Vermont is $4.71 as of yesterday. And for diesel, which powers trucks, and if you think about our buses, our public transit, the agencies are really suffering from diesel costs that are well over $6 a gallon. So when I think about resiliency, household budgets, if you look at energy costs for household spending, transportation is the majority of energy spending in households in Vermont. And it's not very elastic. So when prices go up, people just have to eat it because they really don't have options in a state like Vermont to do something different. And so we've really got to think about this, not just from a climate perspective, but how do Vermonters adjust? And how do they address the need to change to cleaner transportation, healthier transportation, and more affordable transportation? So essentially what I'm here for my frame, I'm like, we got to do something different. So we have spent a hundred years developing our communities and developing our state to really accommodate one type of transportation, which is a car on a road, a paved road. And that's worked really well for us, but it's not working for us now and it won't into the future. It doesn't work for our families who are dependent on personal vehicles to get where they need to go. It doesn't work for our health and it certainly is not working for our climate. So we have some really tough decisions to make as a state, we've got to decide how do we got a lot of money we spend on transportation, how are we going to make the shift? How are we going to get to cleaner electric vehicles? What's the infrastructure we need to build out for that? What do we have to do in terms of providing incentives so people can afford those vehicles, particularly lower income Vermonters? And what are we going to do to build out other options? Not everybody can afford a car. Not everybody can drive. So what's out there for people who are in that position? What's our public transit system look like? What's our bike pad infrastructure look like in our communities and what is the community design that's gonna support that infrastructure? And I've been in many meetings where people are all for these goals. Like, yes, we want more bikes, we want more walking, we want more transit, but when it comes down to it and we have to make a decision about paving our roads or investing a little bit more in sidewalks or bikes or transit, we got to go with the roads. So I'm here to have a call to action. When you're in your communities, think about the choices that you're making and what kind of a future that's supporting for us in our transportation sector. You wanna pick it up from there? I would love to pick it up from there. And I'm gonna talk a little bit about thermal, the thermal sector and what we need to do in the thermal sector to be more resilient in the future. But I wanna go back a little bit and just pick up some that Sarah mentioned. I had the honor and privilege of being the first Irene recovery officer following the disaster now 12 years ago, almost 12 years ago. And I could tell you, I had the experience that a lot of our monitors had which is seeing the devastation firsthand. And it was massive and I don't recount the numbers, but there were 500 miles of state roads. There were 300 state bridges. The town highways were devastated end to end in the state, not in every place, but in nearly all the small places where the banks are steep and the rivers run deep and the rain came down and washed everything away. And it was, but the roads were the thing that were the most visible, but it took homes. It took infrastructure and it impacted lives and communities and it was definitely a turning point for me. I'd seen plenty of disaster before in one way or another, but to see it so close and to see how fragile Vermont is for things that are now occurring more frequently and with more devastation with climate change, it connected some parts of my brain that hadn't been quite connected before. And to me, for me, it was understanding that this is a very, this network is fragile and we need to make it stronger and more resilient for the future. And that cuts across all these different areas. So transportation is a key one because all the things that Jen said are absolutely right. It can't be just about the roads and bridges. Those are critical, but that's only one dimension. And it thermals the same way. And we've largely, like the internal combustion engine and the cars that go on the roads, we've largely heated our homes the same way for more than 100 years. And it is through burning carbon-based fuel sources I'm admitting that carbon. I have recurrently, my job right now, I run Vermont Gas. We have traditionally been a company that serves natural gas, fossil gas mined out of the earth, transported via pipeline to Vermont and sent to people's homes through pipes under the ground. In a lot of ways, that's a very resilient system. During tropical storm Irene, none of the pipes of Vermont Gas were impacted. It's buried six to 10 feet under the ground. It's encased in a hard either steel or a high density polyethylene pipe. So it wasn't impacted by the weather that was around. But another frame, it's also killing the planet. I mean, we'll be honest, like it's fossil gas. It emits carbon. The methane is 20 to 30 times more dangerous than the carbon dioxide emissions, the methane that may be released through the pipe. So we have to recognize from a natural gas perspective that the product that we've been serving that is safe and reliable, is resilient and be helpful to Vermonters is also long-term making us weaker as a planet and as a society. And so as a company, we've been focused on that. But we're only one small part of the state. We serve the Franklin, Jitman and Addison counties. We don't serve the rest of the state where it's largely served with oil and propane and of course wood, which is another key component of keeping Vermont warm. Taken together, this is 34% of our carbon emissions in Vermont, which is only second behind transportation. So we have to be thinking about how we can help Vermonters build and install and maintain systems that are sustainable and renewable for the long term. It could be part electrification. That's gonna be a big part of our thermal future is how we electrify the things that are now burning fossil fuels. It's finding other ways to serve the fuels, whether that's through biofuels, renewable natural gas, biomass, advanced wood heating. These are all options. And I think importantly is how we do it quickly. We don't have forever. If we had 50 years to fix this problem, yeah, you could probably figure it out in 50 years, but we don't have 50 years. We gotta get on it right away. And so I think we can, and I'm happy to come back and talk about this, learning some of the lessons of Irene and COVID, we cannot forget the lessons of these disasters. And the public memory of these disasters tends to run about a year after the disaster ends. That is not long enough. We have to, so we need to take, we need to sort of, if you say capitalize on the fact that it's on our minds right now, Irene's still on our minds. We're still feeling the impacts of Irene. We need to remember these things, remember the climate emergency that we have, and move quickly across all of these areas. So I work for the Vermont Housing Finance Agency, and maybe unlike VIC or Vermont Gas, maybe those initials don't roll off the tongue with the same awareness for this crowd. So I'll just orient you to let you know that we are a statewide affordable housing lender. So. Which of these things is not like the other? It's me, I do housing, I do finance. But that being said, as Neil said, with 34% of the thermal emissions, VHFA has a long history of really focusing on this and that has increased in the last few years. So really VHFA, we are mission driven, we're quasi-governmental, I can tell you all about us, but we run a mortgage lending program for lower income home buyers, a lot of times first time home owners, and then we also lend and give tax credits to developers of large multi-family rental properties. And so in my world, when someone says I want you to talk about housing, I immediately ask them to pick one of two paths. Are we gonna talk about homeownership or are we gonna talk about rental housing? Because they're very different worlds, even within my world. And that, for this conversation, gets even more nuanced and complex because housing is a public good. I think we all know about Maslow's hierarchy of need and how we all benefit from when we are affordably, safely, securely housed and decent housing, and that that helps us all. And that as a society, we need each other to be housed. It actually doesn't work when there are large swathes of us without homes. And we've seen an increasing number of that since the pandemic, as Vermont's homelessness count goes up. So this is a public good that is rooted, I mean, think about our educational system is rooted really in where we live, our civic governance and who we vote for and all that is rooted in where we live and where we're citizens of. And so it's a public good, but it is delivered through only private markets. Think about your realtors, your lenders with approval and your mortgage, also through all of your credit checks and all the things and or through your private landlords. And so as Jen was saying, it gets very complicated when you try to reach public policy goals like climate resilience and energy efficiency goals and all this through private markets. And so VHFA tries to bridge the two of those in some ways and sometimes we really get proud of like a new weatherization effort that we're working on. And there's other ways that we really fall short because we feel like even we don't have control over the entire system. And that is at the nut and why I think there is a commonality between transportation and thermal because that's what these two fields share is that this really is individual making choices about where they're gonna live, how they're gonna get around that impact all of us collectively. From VHFA's perspective, again, as a mission-driven lender, we're very focused on low and moderate income for monitors. That's who our mission is and our statute says who we're here to serve. And so I plan to speak probably too much about the affordability issues that come into these thermal efficiency conversations. We do have a climate crisis right now and we have a housing crisis. And those two are both happening simultaneously and we cannot forget each other as we move the ball down the field with each of these. They are symbiotic and to solve these problems, we need to take both into account simultaneously. From my perspective as an affordable housing lender, I am routinely raked over the coals for the high cost of housing, sometimes as if it were personally my fault, but other times just really as a spokesperson for affordable housing in the state, why is it so expensive? And when I talk about what it costs to build an apartment, a rental apartment, small, modest, in a multifamily building and people challenge me and say, why does it cost the same to build an apartment in a building as it does to build a single family home? Like how does that math working? And we start to talk about, well to build an affordable apartment, we don't just, we always use the phrase, pave a corn field and put it anywhere, but in Vermont we value smart growth. We wanna think about the transportation connections, we wanna think about where the jobs are, we wanna think about that resiliency so that we don't keep putting homes on the side of those river sides that we saw get flushed out with Irene, but instead cite these homes somewhere safer where they can be more resilient. We also need to think about historic preservation and building our downtowns. There's, oh, I'm looking at the term the carbon sequestration that's possible when we reuse buildings and we don't always build new, but we repurpose schools, religious institutions, dormitories, now commercial spaces that are maybe not gonna be used for offices anymore. There's a real value in doing that. There's a value in housing the most vulnerable among us and making sure that we have some units, some apartments set aside for people without homes and that we wrap social services around those folks so that they can also be resilient in their future. And then there's the pure energy, carbon, the mission, questions of is this a net zero building? Is this an all electric building? Are you using biofuels? Are you building in redundant systems that are using the newest technologies? All those things have costs. So don't let any of us houses fool you that it's just the energy stuff that costs a lot. All those things I mentioned have costs, building downtowns and housing the homeless and doing all that, but every time we add what a houser would call an extra cost to something, it's hard because it's so darn expensive to just pave a cornfield and pop up an ugly square building. So every time we add to that cost, it does become a trade off as Jen was saying. And so there are a lot of exciting new construction technologies, new ways to think about planning and zoning and siting of housing. There's a lot of lessons that we learned through Irene that continue to shape what we're doing today. And yet I have in my office, because I reference it so much, I actually went out and bought a mobile. And it's just so important to remember through all this that when you're pulling on one part of that mobile, you really are affecting all of those other pieces and they all start swirling and acting differently. And sometimes that's really beneficial and we learn and grow and we're farther forward. And sometimes we just have to take some risks and try some new things and see what happens and learn and grow from that as well. So I'm gonna stop my comments there. I think the rest will do questions. Thank you so much. All right, can we pull up my presentation? Yeah, we have it here. I'm gonna tie it all together. So one more thing I wanna add to a new apartment. An EV charger. Oh yeah. An electric vehicle charging station. So the contrast is a little iffy here at the pictures. But what I, my perspective on this is my research interest, I teach here at Norwich University, is looking at electric vehicles. We need to have more electric vehicles to make the transportation sector more resilient. And when you look at an electric vehicle, how many people think they're a zero emission? Good, nobody raised their hand. They are a zero emission at the tailpipe. But at the factory, the power plant, to produce electricity, it's not zero emission. So on the left here, there's an internal combustion engine vehicle, which is 80% thermal wasted energy, emitting a cloud of water vapor. And on the right is a coal plant in Michigan, emitting a cloud of water vapor, but other stuff being emitted as well. So I like to look at the environmental impacts of the switch to the electrification of the transportation sector. Next slide please. So as we all know, EVs, electric vehicles, whether they're battery electric, the green, or plug-in hybrids, which have smaller capacity batteries in them, have grown substantially over the past decade or so. Click again please. And the trend is continuing to be even more. So this next slide, this next graph here was pre-geopolitical issues, where there's fewer, less fuel supply around the world. So I expect the green and probably the blue and probably the green to grow even more by 2030. Next slide. So more electric vehicles. And as the panel has mentioned, electric vehicles or transportation rather accounts for about a third of the energy consumption in the state and a big chunk of the emissions. So what are we gonna do? What's gonna happen when we electrify electric vehicles? Clicky? Well in Vermont, in New England, this is from New England, we get a lot of our energy from what we consider to be somewhat clean sources, natural gas, nuclear, renewables, hydro, and other sources. So if you're charging electric vehicle in New England, we're using pretty clean sources. So the environmental impact would appear to be sort of minimized. Next click. The problem is to the west of us, the Midwest, this is the Midwest isoplaw here, the dark color is cold, which is not so clean. And which way it is? What's the prevailing wind? West to east. So a lot of the pollutants from the Midwest come across New England. So we will have to deal with electrification of vehicles, not in Vermont, not in New England, but across the United States, across the world really. So next slide please. On top of this, so electric vehicles are great. Zero emissions at the tailpipe, you can charge them with solar panels at your house with your EV charging station and solar panels. But in Vermont, we have cold weather and we have hills. So the EPA does all their testing with not so cold weather and not so hilly conditions. So this vehicle, I actually tested this vehicle back in the early 2000s. And this was a custom made electric vehicle. And for those of you that were here in the last session, this vehicle has a actually a grid size, grid type battery chemistry, it's not lithium ion, it's sodium nickel chloride, molten sodium nickel chloride. You have to keep this all warm to keep it liquefied. So it has an active heating system to keep the battery warm. Even with the active heating system, as temperatures decrease, the range on this vehicle decreased by 52%. So now you take an EV with a stated range of 250 miles, and in Vermont you get 125 miles out of it in the winter. So what does it, what does that mean? You need twice the amount of electricity to charge it. So now you have even more charging demands on the electric vehicles. So it seems like a lot of problems. I know you pollute them. They don't work as well in the winter. They don't work as well in the hills. But what is a problem is an opportunity. You know, as engineers and scientists, we always look at a problem as an opportunity. So on the left, we have the ice in New England, daily, somewhat hourly grid profile, power profile. So you get these peaks of power demand. People go home at night and turn on the stoves and the TVs and the wash machines. You get these large peaks and you get the valleys in the day when solar panels are producing electricity. Electric vehicles can help solve that problem. So vehicle to grid. So you can hook an EV up to the charger which communicates and controlled by the utility. And the electric vehicle can help offset some of those large peaks or level out the demand peaks, which helps the utilities. And it makes us more resilient because now, anybody see the F-150 Lightning commercials? The power goes out. You hook your truck up to your house and now you have a generator to run your house for some time. So with large weather events, you can have your own little small generator sitting in your driveway potentially. And the utilities have a battery storage. Utility sitting at people's houses that have electric vehicles. So I look at it from the environmental impact and the grid impact of electric vehicles. That's what I'm interested in. So thank you. All right. So there's a lot of expertise on this panel, as you can tell. We're gonna start off with a few questions from Valeria and I, and then we'll turn it over to you for your audience questions as well. We have plenty of time for that at the end. So we're gonna take things back a little bit, Neal. You talked a lot about the recovery from Tropical Storm Irene. That's sort of the impetus, you know, we're here and the 10 year anniversary of now 11 year of Irene. And we're still feeling the impacts, as you said. We're still seeing what happened in the rebuilding. Can you, and anyone who wants to from the panel talk about how the rebuilding efforts are still kind of playing into your work now? What did we do in that rebuilding that still impacts how we are moving forward in the transportation and thermal sectors today? You take the first one. Well, I can tell you just briefly on the transportation part of it, on an infrastructure level. I know this is not my area, but I have a little expertise in this area is that a lot of the building designs following Tropical Storm Irene were updated. You know, as I mentioned before, the state lost the 300 bridges were impacted. The towns lost hundreds of bridges. There were a thousand culverts that got washed out. All of this was set in motion, a change to design standards so that culverts are oversized and bridges are oversized. I say that to say that there, so that the design of transportation systems at a real physical level adjusted, which makes sense because we're gonna have more flooding events with climate change. It doesn't address the root problem. I mean, we're just dealing with the effects of climate change by changing the hydraulic structures of these infrastructure systems. So I think that to really have a discussion about what changed is it changed our thinking around the things we have to do to get these systems to be sustainable so that we in Vermont are a small part or a leading part of how we create sustainable systems that slow the effects of climate change. Because it's gotten worse, it's gonna get worse, but we can stop it from being really bad. And it will, I mean, people I think are feeling it and seeing it here in Vermont in ways that they hadn't before, our flooding events are more frequent. I mean, that is happening in Vermont. That's the statistics behind it. We certainly are feeling the temperatures increase in the summer, increase in the winter, even though we might be seeing more precipitation, which might look like more snow. It actually is coming from a warming planet, not a cooling planet in the winter. So all of these things are gonna be need more water flowing around. So I would just go to a thermal side. I coming back to what I said before, I think it really influences how we think about building systems on the thermal side to withstand disasters, but also making them more sustainable. The good news is that those two things can go together. And we can put in, just like Mike was saying, we can put in a, for a home, a battery charging system that runs from EV, a Tesla power pack on the wall, solar on the roof that can go, at a moment's notice, off grid if the power systems go out or if the fuel truck can't make it, you can run on a heat pump on your own battery powered system. That's technology, that's not in the future, that's technology we have today. After I leave here, I'm going up, we have a little place in Danville, Vermont, that's completely off grid. We run it four seasons, completely off grid, and it runs perfectly fine. It took a little work to set it up, but these systems are becoming, I mean, it's so easy, even I can figure it out. So that could tell you, I mean, it keeps us warm in the winter and cool in the summer. These things are commercially available today. And if you look back 10 years ago, some people had backup generators and a wood pile, it was in the middle of summer, so they didn't need the wood, but they could keep themselves warm for a couple of days. But now with the sort of increasing prevalence of these off grid systems that are grid tied, we're gonna see more resilience at a home level on the thermal and electric sides. Natural disasters, but other types of disaster. So the question here is, did the resilience that we have built since Tropical Storm Irene helped with the COVID, how were the impacts of COVID similar or different? I could take a crack at it, because the impacts of COVID were really interesting on the transportation side, because people stopped going to work. Or people that didn't have to go to a location, I should say, because some people had to continue to go to work. And that's where our public transit system really kicked in for people that needed to get to a job site. And the fact that it was there was critical for many people. So I don't know if people remember the beginning of the pandemic, seeing pictures of places like Los Angeles and Seattle and Beijing, suddenly you can like see, oh, hey, there's mountains there. And the skies cleared up because so many vehicles were on the road. And so those of us who are thinking about clean transportation were like, hallelujah. This is like the world that we've been hoping for, that we've got clean skies and people are working from home. So, and I think that, what I think a lot of people are thinking about in relation to that is, what's the future gonna look like in terms of where people work? Because that has a direct correlation to how people need to access their community and the pollution that we're experiencing from transportation. And so I think a lot of people are thinking, not everybody's gonna go back to work or they're not gonna go back full time. So that's one thing that, but I think it's still an open question. But what do we need in place to support that, broadband? So if people that can work at home, do they have the infrastructure to support that? So, a lot of people are thinking about the connection between broadband and transportation emissions. Because if you can't work at home, you gotta get somewhere, which means you gotta get in your car. So that's one thing that we're thinking a lot about. The other thing that I think is really interesting is that people, there was a sharing economy that was burgeoning before the pandemic. Everybody was super excited about, ride sharing, Uber, Lyft, all sorts of innovation that was coming. And sort of that shared economy was really a big mega trend actually. And the pandemic really sort of put the brakes on that. So that was, in my opinion, an unfortunate thing that's gonna take a long time for us to recover from. And you gotta think broadly about ride sharing. It's not just those cool apps, it's public transit. And how comfortable, why are other people gonna be comfortable getting back on the bus and using those services? I think the risk we have as a state is if, services like public transit are really only for those who absolutely have to use it. And not for folks that have a choice to use it. And that's when you get a disinvestment in a really important public asset. So I think there's some risk to public transit, depending on sort of how things recover from the pandemic. But, and I could probably add some more, but those are some themes that definitely sort of emerged big themes from the pandemic and transportation. Your comment about public transit being for those who may not have the means. And so the disinvestment that happens is what I was thinking about when it comes to housing because for me the common element between Irene and the pandemic was the universe, I can't say the word, universality of the impact and how it just affected a cross cut of Vermonters. And again, from my perspective, who specifically works with people who are of lower income, I constantly see the needs and the impacts and the problems that are disproportionately impacting the folks I'm working with. And so, dare I say, and I see I'm being recorded, it is a little refreshing when impacts have a broader touch to all of us because Kevin and I were speaking of this earlier, it is somewhat refreshing for all of us to say, you know what, maybe it's not because they made bad choices to not weatherize their home or not get the fuel pump or something like that, maybe it's just the reality that we can't all weatherize our home with the latest technologies and go off grid and do these things and that there are other realities that impact all of us. So from a housing perspective, 72% of us own our homes. And so when I'm out there talking about what we need to do to build housing for Vermonters coming in and having it be resilient and sited in the right places and all that, 72% of us kind of have a permanent spot and maybe we don't want that to change and have to have out our backyard look any different or things like that. And when these events come through, I think it challenges all of us to really take a step back and say, where are we as a state and how do we want to provide not only for the 640,000 of us who happen to be here today, but the future of our state. And that building toward the future was the other commonality I see with housing that was really happening a lot in the months and years after Irene was we were talking about, okay, we just got hit with this huge storm and we see the impacts of what's happening. Let's build something different. And that was very structurally based, meaning again, where you put your homes and how they're built and the construction types and all that. Now with the pandemic and I wanna bring in the racial justice reckoning and just I'm gonna keep taking the word resilient and just building it out. I'm not so much just looking at greenhouse gas emissions but I'm just saying for Vermont to be resilient, we need to think about what Vermont looks like in the future and so what that housing looks like, what the climate impacts look like, but also the humanity of who's here, who's welcome and where they're gonna be and how close will they be to their jobs and what we wanna build as a state. We wanna turn it over to the crews. I'm gonna ask one more question and then we're gonna turn it out to audience Q&A. I wanna bring it down to the community level because I know we have a lot of people who are here representing their communities and thinking about what they can be doing and now's a really interesting time to be working in a community, in a municipality because there's ARPA dollars that are coming in. If you could, I'm gonna phrase it as if you could pick your favorite thing but obviously I know there's so many things to choose when you can talk about more than one but for communities to be investing in right now with the funds that are available or with long-term municipal funding what is the thing that community should really be thinking about from your seat of where you live and maybe Michael will start with you and then come this way this time. Sure, it's kind of ties into what you mentioned about the fear of riding on a bus potentially in the future. I live in Monkton, small little town, three hills that way and we built the park and ride and I don't see a single car there anymore. We started, I forget the name of the bus but it's a small bus that takes you to the bigger bus in Hinesburg which takes you to other places. I'm not sure it comes through our park and ride anymore but what I do see driving around are Tesla's couple either in town or through town but not a single charging station. That's one of the big issues that EVs is this distributed network of charging stations so I would love to see a charging station at our park and ride potentially or maybe two of them at our park and ride either user funded or some sort of, you're doing good for the environment so you get a very reduced rate or free charging at the charging station. So I think that scattered through Vermont and then getting us through the across the country to be a good way to, that's not my wish list of things to see. I would say what I see in communities across the state are cemetery commissions. I think most towns have a cemetery commission if they have a cemetery and there have been a lot of energy commissions that have grown since Irene I think largely but over the past 10, 15 years and I think we're not yet up to a dozen housing commissions in the state. Again, maybe a little off color but so we seem to care more about the people who've gone before us who are now six feet underground than we do our current residents in the future of the state and that value judgment is a hard one to grapple with. So VHFA has put a lot of resources into trying to stand up and support housing commissions in the state. Not so we can bulldoze every cornfield and put housing everywhere but so that we can be really thoughtful about communities planned for growth and those that are not. But I, so if you went on to VHFA's website you would find this whole housing ready toolkit. You would find all sorts of data. You could do a housing needs assessment. You could see what policies in the housing world work and what don't and all this but I'm even finding a problem with what I'm preaching recently which is and I'm gonna use South Burlington as an example which actually has an affordable housing committee and they have a conservation committee and an energy committee and we're finding we're getting back to what we do which is then getting rooted in the lens we brought to the table. Like I'm the housing person so I have to represent housing and I talk about housing. God forbid I talk about equity or energy or other issues and so there is something to be said for in Vermont we do have a 35 year history of bringing housing and conservation together through an organization that was created the Vermont Housing and Conservation Board. They're similar to VHFA but very different separate organization and there is something about challenging us to that organization has a dual mission in their statute and what they have to do is they have to equally consider the housing impacts and the conservation energy agriculture working lands impacts and I think that that is fascinating and I wish that more communities could take that kind of approach and not act like we're gonna do housing here and we'll do transportation in this room and then oh energy is separate and equity is different than all that and instead recognize the intersectionality of this and that when we are funding housing we absolutely need to be held accountable to make sure that that housing is green and clean and resilient and put in the right places and all of that we cannot separate the two we can't act like I can go and put millions of dollars into a housing development somewhere and not think that that has huge energy implications and you can't go putting park and rides without thinking about the EV charging and all that it's just that intersectionality is the thing that I want to find more ways to overcome and so I am excited by new efforts Neil and I are both a part of a weatherization at scale initiative that the energy action network has really supported and we are working with VEC and efficiency Vermont, I know you're different same I always get thrown by that on really and several other partners on really trying to bring weatherization to the 90,000 more homes that need it and it was we would chuckle a bit about the pairing of I show up and I just know housing I don't know anything about energy and then efficiency Vermont and Neil and others know all this stuff about energy and it really has been such a growth opportunity for our organization and I think for a lot of us participating on it to really see the intersectionality and now we are so excited by what's next because we're working right now on making weatherization for moderate income households who don't qualify for the weatherization assistance program to have it be more affordable but now we're going oh we need to do panel upgrades so that when the EVs come to the homes or the PV solar or something that those homes are set up for success we need to look at electrifying more of our homes but we also need to look at the health safety repairs that need to be done when doing weatherization and the like and so that's what I want to see more of in the future. Just amen to the bringing folks together because more and I have worked on this weatherization together and we were all these energy folks were talking and we were like there's so much we don't know about the housing world but more brought all that and it's really it's been a wonderful partnership that we've been able to advance so far so I think that's a great idea we should do that in communities. I want to pick up on a theme you had in your last answer to your last question and tie it back to what I'd spend the ARPA money on. Magic one. So going back to your other question like what did we learn from Irene? Irene was we had a physical destruction level disproportionately impacted low income for monitors. They lived in flood plains. There was a cheap land. They had their mobile homes. They had they had small homes next to rivers. They were washed away and it was a reminder that often natural disasters or even COVID it could impact these low and moderate income communities more than they can other communities. And so when we think about the future and how we spend ARPA money I wouldn't so much say we spend it on what we spend it on where I spend it is who we spend it on is we should when so when we think about new technology often we're trying to when we think about EVs or solar panels or heat pumps or whatever it is we wanna give a little incentive to get it going because we wanna try to give the littlest incentive to get it going so we could do more of those things. But when we do that we are not really helping low and moderate income families because they don't have the money to spend to buy the EV or to put the heat pump in or do whatever that thing is that's gonna be so important. We actually have to give a big incentive to low and moderate income families. So I would take that ARPA money whether it's in our communities or at the state or nationally and I would spend it all or nearly all of it on low and moderate income Vermonters in order to get them the help they need right out of the gate to get some of these technologies in place because it's not gonna be heat pumps not gonna be of any use for them if they can't actually get it installed and neither will an EV. We have to really help them in a way that may feel a little uncomfortable for us because we don't wanna give a big incentive but it's a big incentive is exactly what we need to do. So I would use this that money to help low and moderate income almost exclusively to help them get ahead for the next in advance of the next disaster. And I need to say amen to that. Okay, thank you. Okay, I'll be brief. So I think in transportation what we're really to get to a lower carbon future it really is asking people to do something different than what they're doing now. I think we all understand how hard behavior changes but it's gets a lot easier when people are in an environment that supports that shift. So I think when it comes to transportation that's creating the community design that makes it easier to do something other than get into your car by yourself to do whatever you're doing. So that could be smart growth like you've been talking about where is housing cited and where is it in proximity to the things that people need to access. It's also looking at the roads. So for so long that's been the domain of road engineers that are, and it's murky for people, regular people to be like, how does this all work? And how are these decisions made? But we actually have policy in the state of Vermont called Complete Streets that says whenever somebody's doing work on a road you gotta consider the needs of all users and all modes of transportation. So the question is, is that happening in your community? Are people saying, okay, you're laying out that pavement where's the bike lane? How are people gonna safely cross that road? Is there a pull off for a transit if you have transit in your community? So it's when you have those safe environments for people to do something different that's when it makes it easier for people to start to do something different when they can. Now obviously we can't make, people aren't gonna bike from Pechum to Burlington, we know that. But maybe they can in their community go from their home to the grocery store, to the post office, to school. And that's a trip that is then not in a vehicle. So I do think that we have a lot of control. I think we've seated a lot of control to experts. And what we really need to do is bring a community voice and values into that conversation and say this pavement is all of ours and is it working for everybody in the community and helping us get to the future we want which is something where people don't have to get in their car every time they wanna do something in their community. So I think that's something we have to do. And I think that the people that work on our roads are open to that. It's just they've been in charge and nobody's really pushing back all that much. So I would say ask those questions in your community. And we have a lot of money coming in. So there's gonna be a lot of projects. And then I would just echo Michael. I think that probably one of the biggest investments in clean transportation that's coming is EV infrastructure. There's billions of dollars going out across the country in ARPA and in the bipartisan infrastructure act. So that is something that all communities should have some funding to support in the future. So look at, I would definitely echo what Michael said. Where do you want that in your community and how is that gonna support folks who wanna drive EVs? Thanks Jen. I have to give a brief plug coming off of what you just said. I'm also the chair of the Northfield Energy Committee speaking of working in communities. And today there's a place making demo downtown in Northfield to show what are the problems? How are our streets not complete right now and how could they be made complete? What are the simple changes that could be made? So that's an idea of how to kinda get that conversation started in your community. I can't take credit for that place making event, let me just say. But it's being put on here in Northfield. I'll say that. Especially with e-bikes. I mean they are a revelation. They are a revelation. But they need a spot. Some people need a place to go on them. Cause you'll get a lot more people using, I mean they're selling like hotcakes. And people need to be able to ride them some way. Absolutely. And actually e-bikes are a really interesting innovation in the transportation world because I think people are seeing cargo bikes so people can put their kids on them. They can put their, they can actually do a full grocery shop with a cargo bike on an e-bike. So that's really changing things. Massachusetts is a state we're working in. We're actually gonna be doing a pilot with Cape Lake Compact, which is a utility on Cape Cod, to do an e-bike incentive program that's really centered in equity. It's like for all the people that can afford a car with an incentive can afford an e-bike and they can probably do the majority of the travel they need with an e-bike. So it's a really, and one of the state entities down in Massachusetts is putting millions of dollars into e-bike pilots to test out how these new technology can meet equity needs for a variety of communities and populations. Father, for discussion, we'll open it up to questions. And of course, as many of you know, we've been the community partner with GMT on my ride by GMT, which is a microtransit pilot project now in its second year. The first year, we were focusing on the transition of transit dependent riders to the service because they'd been using it. And this year, we're really focusing on what we call choice riders. And I just wanted to adjust your narrative a little bit because the idea of ride sharing is actually becoming quite popular in Montpelier. And according to the American survey, there are 650 units or people in Montpelier who are transit dependent. And yet we are now beyond, well beyond that, and growing by over 100 people every month of people who are now starting to use the service. And our MTI grant this year is completely focused on choice riders. So this morning I got up and did a short video of Peter Watt who works at the high school. And his message was, my family can have one electric vehicle because I can take my ride to and from work. And so I make these little videos and have a QR code in the paper and we have these advertisements so people are watching these little testimonials. And it's really important for us to realize that my ride is not the only shared solution. Phoenix Mitchell in Worcester has piloted the hitching post which is an opportunity for people to share rides with people in their community with no cost without being public transportation. So I think that sharing is really going to be and I always like to quote the Institute for Transportation and Public Policies and UCC Davis which says that it's not just electrification, we love electrification, yay electrification, but it is ride sharing that it's gonna take us up to the level that we need to get to in order to really reduce our miles, our carbon footprint. And I love the image of the mobile, everything is interconnected. It's been a hundred years of the single occupancy vehicle. It's been the back to land movement which truncated the construction of housing in our town, my pillar. We would have a thousand more housing units if people hadn't gone out and done their 10 acre plot and cause the carbon problem that we now have with people traveling so many rural miles. So- I wanna make sure we don't have other questions. Do you have a question for the panel? And so I appreciate very much what you're saying. I think it is very unconnected and I think it's just tremendously important that we see that interconnection and that we really encourage new pilots in all of this work. So. Yeah, I would just say that pilot is really innovative. It took a lot to get it off the ground and so I do, it is really looking at how we can provide more on-demand service really and rather than fixed route. And so in a rural state like Vermont, that's a nugget that's really critical to providing services that are relevant to folks. So I'm glad you brought that up because it's a really exciting pilot and I'm glad to hear that people aren't using it. Yeah, that's great. Excellent. I'd like to accept that now they've got 12 usability studies to write Vermont in other small cities and we really will that next year and more to follow. So, you know, as you say, it's not the silver bullet but it's one of many other options that are out there. I think we can do it. One more question. Yes? Yeah. So one of the things that I like to think about is lock-in and barriers to change and three common types of lock-in that exist within the energy sector are technological lock-in, institutional lock-in and social lock-in. To convert those into barriers to change, what specific technological, institutional and social barriers do you all view as the biggest impediments to increasing the resilience over Vermont's eating and transportation systems? Yeah, sorry. I don't worry so much about the technological lock-in. If I'm understanding you quickly because I feel like since Irene, there has been a revolving door of new technologies in the housing sphere that we have tried out, maybe adopted, maybe left behind and we could talk about Vermont's and lots of different construction types there. It's the institutional that is what I think the biggest barrier with housing and that is that the money pays for this thing. And so when you wanna do this and that's where we get into those silos and I talk about intersectionality, housing money, like I don't want to have all my housing money go to pay for biomass, energy, whatever the thing is because I need it to be for housing and so energy should pay for that and energy's not paying for that and so it's the institutional funding streams that I find most frustrating because I can't pay for that but I know it has to be a part of what I'm doing. We have some final thoughts for the panel as well. All right, well good. I agree on, I think there are legitimate technological issues around lock-in, especially on heating replacement and systems. That's a whole separate side topic but if you solve the institutional lock-in problem, you start to solve the technological problem. I run a gas company and one of the things that we have to forget, truly forget is that all that energy comes in a pipe. It seems like a very simple thing. It doesn't all have to come in a pipe. There are other ways to serve it. It could come through, something else can flow in the pipe. It can come through the electric lines. It can come through wood heating but we have to be able to forget the thing that we've known forever. That's the lock-in that we have is like we've got this one way of doing business. So we can forget that or hold that thought aside for a second and realize there are other ways in our business to deliver warmth, which is essentially what we're all trying to do. Keep people warm. Keep them safe and warm during the winter. Give them fuel to run their business but make sure that it's sustainable and renewable. There are a lot of ways to do that. That doesn't have to be fossil fuels. Doesn't have to come in a pipe. It doesn't have to be locked into this one way of doing it. And it is hard for these institutions and our institution and other institutions to change but if we're able to set a couple ideas in motion and show that there's a path forward, others will follow. That's what we're doing in Vermont at large as a state. We're doing that and I think all of our groups are trying to do it as individual organizations as well. I think that holds great promise for the future. Behavioral lock-in and transportation which is highly dependent upon personal mobility that's enabled by a car. So we love that. You can get in your car and go anywhere if you have the money and the car and in a state like Vermont it's hard to build out other infrastructure for that. So I would say that's one of the biggest challenges we have. It's very hard to offer alternatives that can replicate that exactly. And a lot of times that's what we're hoping to achieve. I would suggest that maybe that's too high a bar and that we can get a lot of what we have if we're willing to take a little bit longer for the trip or go in a different way or plug in. And so there's different. I'm not so worried about the technology. I feel like the technology is there. It's the single occupancy vehicle that has led to a certain behavior and the entire infrastructure that's built around it. So I think that's really what we're trying to deal with in transportation. And as Neil said, buildings is about keeping people warm and comfortable and for transportation it's like people being able to access a quality of life. Get to a job, get to services, get to entertainment, engage in civic life. And that's what that's really about. So we just have to figure out a different way to offer that to everybody. Yeah, I just thought it was interesting you mentioned you can get in your car and go anywhere. Well, if you have an EV and get in your car and go 250 miles before you're recharged. Well, it's true for cars too. You got a gun. Yeah, but then you can fill a tank in five minutes versus 15 to 20. So rapid chargers will help that. But I think, I'm not sure where does affordability fall within those different categories you mentioned? It's probably impacted by all three, I guess. Institutionally, subsidies, socially, when and how we choose to use the technology that ultimately has the cost. So I think it's probably all three play roles. So I think it comes down to that cover them all affordability of whatever new technology we're talking about, electric vehicle. You look at a comparable electric vehicle unsubsidized to a gas powered and you're gonna pay 30% more, probably on average for an EV. So it's gonna boil down to that for adoption, I think is when they become more affordable, we will adopt. Thank you. Oh yeah, thank you to our panelists. We really appreciate your time here today. Thank you. Thank you.