 Okay, welcome everyone. This is a thank you for joining us we, we still have significant numbers of people coming in but I think we're ready to get started and I'll turn over to Jen green go ahead Jen. So as the mayor mentioned my name is Jen green and I'm the director of sustainability charge was supporting Burlington's transition to net zero energy in the thermal and ground transportation sectors. I'm so glad that everyone is here with us tonight. I want to thank you so much for joining us for what I know will be a rewarding and rich experience for all of us. Before we get started, I want to welcome all of you as participants in tonight's discussion. I especially want to welcome Burlington School District students and teachers who I know many of whom are many of you are with us here tonight we appreciate your engagement and hearing from you on this important topic. I also want to welcome and thank the can and v can members from around the state. For those of you who don't know v can is the Vermont Energy and Climate Action Network, a network of over 100 vt volunteer town energy committees from around the state. The can is co sponsoring tonight's event so thank you Joey we appreciate that and appreciate hearing from you soon. Let's turn it over to Mayor Weinberger and Dr Saul Griffith. I want to run through tonight's agenda so we're on the same page. In a moment I'll turn the floor over to Mayor Weinberger will speak briefly about Burlington's electrification efforts and why inviting Saul can and will inspire us to strive for net zero. To the mayor speaks Dr Griffith will share his thoughts on why electrification is so critical to address the climate crisis, and why his most recent book electrified and optimist playbook for our clean energy future, and work at rewiring America is so particularly relevant from from a BED and Burlington City context after Saul has spoken for 20 minutes or so we'll launch into questions, including it opening up to participant questions. Our evening together will conclude at 615. So let me just tell you briefly about the mayor before we turn it over to Saul. As most of you know, Mayor Merrill Weinberger has been serving for 10 years and during that time has been a strong leader in climate action issues. Most recently in 2019 Mayor Merrill Weinberger set a strategic and very ambitious goal for the city to become a net zero energy city by 2030. Mayor Merrill Weinberger is a member of the mayor's climate coalition and founding member of rewiring America's mayors and municipal leaders for electrification coalition. So Mayor Weinberger I'm really happy to turn it over to you. Thank you Jen thank you for getting us off and all that you have done to lead Burlington sustainability work. I'm so glad that so many of you have been able to join us tonight from around Burlington around the state of Vermont and I think we even have quite a few. Oh, sorry about that, quite a few out of town guests, joining us on the zoom tonight. That was a ceremonial skateboard that just fell down in the background there. For all of the out of town guests. I just want to share a little bit about Burlington's context, the context for tonight's conversation. Burlington has really worked hard at the municipal level to be an environmental leader since the late 1980s. And that is when the city began some very ambitious weatherization efforts led by the Burlington Electric Department our city owned utility, and we actually consume today as a community less electricity than we did in 1989. If the rest of America had followed that trajectory there would be something like 200 less coal plants in this country than there are today. In 2014, after a decade of focus work Burlington became the first city to source 100% of our electricity from renewable energy sources, and I was fortunate to be mayor, when we got over that milestone was there for the last push. And it had a big impact on the way we think about the future and led to us setting a new goal in 2016, which we is clearly our most ambitious goal yet one of the most ambitious in the country and that is to become a net zero energy city by 2030 which essentially means that we will stop using fossil fuels to power our vehicles and our buildings and that we will do that through electrifying everything essentially, and we're off to a great start with this goal we're trying to be very data focused with this we are measuring every year our progress towards this goal. The first one of our measurements came about a year ago, and remarkably found that we were on track towards this, this target with having seen very significant reductions in our fossil fuel emissions in 2019 and 2020. We're expecting another update of those metrics fairly fairly soon. We also took a big step as a community just last fall when the voters of Burlington 70% of the voters of Burlington voted. Yes, on a $20 million net zero revenue bond, which is going to fuel our efforts to upgrade our grid and continue to make investments that will drive the community towards that net zero goal. However, we have a long way to go with this, and this is a community wide goal it's one that we're only going to reach if basically every household in Burlington and every business understands the climate importance and the financial advantages of electrification. And if everyone here in Burlington is taking action to electrify their vehicles and their buildings. The point of tonight's event, as well as an additional town hall that we're going to have next week and some other events later on in the spring and summer is to raise the profile of this issue to communicate how Burlington efforts to fit into the larger international and international effort to address the climate emergency and to make sure the community is fully aware of all of the ways in which the city and the Burlington Electric Department can help you make the electrification transition. And that is why you know I'm so excited to have Dr saw Griffith here tonight he is one of the world's leading electrification experts. I haven't known him for a while because I've been following his various podcasts and national appearances and I had a good fortune to meet Saul in DC. Last fall when I joined became a founding member of rewiring America's mayors and municipal leaders for electrification coalition. Saul is one of the co founders of rewiring America. He's also a remarkable engineer and inventor. He was a founder and chief scientist at other lab and independent R&D lab, and he helps government agencies and Fortune 500 companies understand energy infrastructure and deep decarbonization. He's the author of the books electrify and the big switch. And, you know, something that is a great, great acknowledgement a great achievement he was recognized in 2007 as a MacArthur genius grant award winner. I'm so grateful that you're joining us here tonight I know it's not your first time kind of visiting Vermont, but I know many people have not had a chance to hear your thinking yet and let me turn it over to you. Thank you very much to the mayor. Thank you for having me also understand your sponsors the event. Really honestly, thank you, Mario for the leadership you have shown. So, as I'm going to talk about, I'm going to try to. Well, I'll give a caveat to everyone. COVID a few days ago. So, I'm a little slower than normal. I've had to crib from a couple of different presentations so hopefully I can weave it into a good story. If I fog up a little bit. Hopefully you understand to tie COVID to climate. Thank God I was fortunate enough to get covered after we had vaccines developed. So it's now treatable and relatively mild. And I actually think a lot about electrification now is the vaccine we need for climate change we know it works. We know it's the way to get to zero emissions. And if we all keep to a vaccination schedule, we have hope and that's why Mario's commitment to net zero emissions by 2030 is actually commensurate with the climate science which is very rare so I appreciate you for that and congratulations to Burlington for being the first US city to get 100% renewable generation commitments. That's great. So, with that here I'm going to try to weave a new narrative that I think is really important about the climate transition, which puts communities cities, neighborhood suburbs front and center in this critical global transition. We're going through. So, with that I'm going to share the screen. Hopefully someone can provide feedback that the screen share works okay. Okay should be seeing a big yellow rewiring America. Good. Fantastic. Thank you. I just wanted confirmation for I launched in on monologue. All right, so I found an organization called rewiring America with a colleague called Alex laski. And its goal is to really help communities and help countries decarbonize on schedule for one and a half to two degree limiting warming to one and a half or two degrees. And we're doing that in a number of four forums, including hosting an electrification caucus in the US Senate, mayors for electrification roundtables and working as closely as we can with communities. So, quickly, I think it's really important. Now that we have to talk turkey on climate to put actual real communities in the climate perspective. So, some of you will have seen this chart. This is from the SR 15 IPCC report. This is the emissions reduction schedule we need to be on for trying to stay at a one and a half degree world. Fast and early emission reductions are vital because it's a cumulative problem. So if we delay by 10 years, we'd have to go down this grain pathway and actually use far more negative emissions and it's probably not even possible. So this these 2030 targets are now critical. And I'm starting to try and think about this how do we now show you this is really what we need to do in communities to get the first and the easiest reductions. Close to two thirds of our emissions around the world happen in households and small businesses with the things that we do every day. The hardest emissions that we still don't necessarily have technical solutions of the industrial ones steel and cement and other things so they are the ones that are going to happen later on this chart. But that emphasizes the need for the things that we know how to do. Meaning households small businesses and communities we need to do first and we need to do fast. This emphasizes it even more there is your schedule. And then this actually talks about real machines we've got to electrify our heating systems that's our water heaters and our space heaters go electrify our kitchens to get ourselves off gas and we have to electrify our vehicles. These are the natural ages so water heaters last about 10 years kitchen equipment 12 around 12 space heaters around 15 cars around 20 years. That really means not that you have to go out tomorrow and buy an electric vehicle but you need to be planning now that when the gasoline car that you bought a few years ago retires you need to replace it with electric. Next time you replace your water heater you need to be ready to replace it with a heat pump etc etc etc we need to be on a perfect 100% replacement schedule to hit these targets now. So what is the case for electrifying everything and really I think the case is the case for economic renewal and about redefining infrastructure about the things in our homes in our communities and I think it's really a great story about community economic renewal. It's not news to any of your carbon crisis really an energy crisis around in the US 87% of our emissions from from energy, and that's from burning the coal and the gas and the oil on the left so that's what we need to focus on. 42% of our emissions emanate from the decisions you make around your kitchen table in your house what fuel goes in your cars what heats your house, where does your electricity come from fortunately in Burlington it's all renewable now. And how are your, how are your fuels make this expands to 65% if you include small businesses because in small businesses they're making the same sorts of decision what fuels their cars. What fuels do they use for cooking and heating, and where does the electricity come from. So, our homes are our infrastructure, and we need to electrify the end users this is a typical American home today. Running on gasoline, all of their vehicles and all their toys running a huge number of things on natural gas from our heating systems to our hot tubs to our ovens and stoves and water heaters. Well, maybe not for you but for most Americans still getting their electricity from coal and gas. To achieve zero emissions true zero requires electrifying the demand side machines, and that's a simple statement that they won't be enough biofuels to power all our vehicles. It's not really an electrification strategy anyway. Our only path that we actually know works to get to zero emissions is electrification demand side machines, means the machines in your life, and then we have to supply them with clean electricity. That looks like this, that means we'll need a vehicle charger in every home or every building, electric vehicles on the streets, electric hot water, electric furnaces, electric cooking, solar on the roof, and batteries to back it up. That's a critical component of the clean electricity supply that includes solar wind hydroelectricity and probably in North America some nuclear power as well. The amazing thing about this electrification it will more than half the energy use for real people without you shrinking your home without you shrinking your cars, while also improving your health improving your quality of life and lowering your energy bills why is that. Because electric machinery is just fundamentally a better technology. If you drive an electric F 150 instead of a gasoline powered F 150 it'll use less than one third of the energy of the petrol car so we used to have a strategy in the US based on efficiency which was an idea born of the 70s energy crisis and efficiency makes things a little bit better but you can't efficiency your way to zero emissions, we need to do electrification. Same is true for your water heater if you go from a natural gas water heater you could make it slightly more efficient. However, if you go to a heat pump hot water heater, it'll use about one third the energy of your gas water heaters. Same is true for space heating a half or two thirds of the energy that you're currently using natural gas is eliminated when we go to heat pumps. Same again for cooking. In fact, electric cooking is about half the energy of gas cooking all of those add up. The other thing of course that makes a huge difference is close to 60% of the energy that is that goes into these power plants on the left that's coal that's natural gas is lost as waste heat. When we generate it with wind and solar we don't have all of that energy waste, all of that really adds up, which is why the American household will more than half the amount of energy it uses. As you can see on that picture is a picture of supply versus demand suppliers where we get it from demand is where we use the energy. We did this modeling for the Senate. You can clean the grid without electrifying the end users it gets you about halfway to your emissions reductions. We need to also electrify all the end use machines if we really want to get to zero. And so this is a statement that we can't just talk about the big things getting rid of the coal power stations we have to talk about all the little things. We know this because we looked at all the details this is an incredible map that I'm going to quiz the audience on later about every energy flow through every system in the US economy. Just joking. I think that has given me a machine level view of the US energy economy, which I think is the best way to translate the story of climate to what we have to do in our own communities our own homes. On the supply side. It's a small number of giant machines that last about 50 years. These are the coal plants, the natural gas pipelines. The oil refineries, etc. There's about a million of those machines in the US economy on the demand side it's a huge number of small machines that last around 25 years your cars, your water heaters, your kitchen appliances. It's about a billion machines on the small side. Traditionally climate policy lived over on the supply side with large corporations and large machines and their lobby groups. I think the revolution we're about to be writing is that the demand side is where Americans live and the decisions that determine the quality of their lives the cost of living and the majority of their missions. Emissions live over on the demand side and finally we can enable people with a story of how they can contribute to climate solutions in a way that also benefits their household. Households are also a logical place to create on the conversation because the household they're actually connects to the transportation sector through your vehicles to the commercial sector through how you source a lot of the things coming to your household and to the industrial sector that supplies the fuels that come into your household. Here's the challenge for America there's 98 million space eaters that are running on gas still we need to replace those in the next few decades the still 117 million water heaters that are either running on natural gas or low efficiency electric they need to be upgraded heat pumps. We have 220 million household vehicles that need to be upgraded to electric vehicles in the next 20 years. 95 million gas stoves ranges ovens grills and cook tops that need to be upgraded to electric in the next, you know, as soon as possible. 20 million gas drives are still out there that needs to be upgraded. And to enable all of that we're going to need other new household infrastructure. That's going to include at least 50 million, if not 100 million rooftop solar installations, at least 30 million household batteries, new breaker boxes or switchboards, and a vehicle charger for every home, at least to help charge all of those cars. That's another 400 million enabling machines. Just to put that in perspective that's a billion machines that's a half a million homes that need to be cleanly electrified every month for the next 25 years, or roughly we need to upgrade one of these pieces of machinery every second for the next 25 years and that's how we hit our climate targets. That might sound intimidating but remember we're going to be replacing all of these machines anyway. And also remember that doing the installation and those upgrades is going to be probably the largest driver of jobs in the US economy that we've seen since World War two. So that should be reason enough to learn to do it the climate reasons and schedule but here's a story about the economics. This is the average household spending in the US about $61,000 a year after they've paid their taxes. Around $2,000 a year is on gasoline although that's probably going to go up to 25 or 100 or $3,000 a year this year with what's happening in your cane. Around $500 on heating fuels which is more than the average household spends on dentistry and around $1,500 and electricity which is more than the average household spends on education. And over here on the left it shows you that the worst hit are the lowest income houses so for the highest income 10% of houses, it's only about 3% of their expenditure. If you get down to the lowest income 50% of houses it's close to 10% or more of the annual expenditures so they really stand to benefit if we can do this transition like right. I'm talking to you today from Australia and I have lived a lot of my life in California and I do work on climate and energy really now in Europe in the US and in Australia. And I think you can now firmly say that the future already exists it's just not one in play not all in one place. So this graph tries to tell us, tell you what is the possibility if we align policy regulations and technology correctly. So from Australia where I sit Australia has achieved what they call the rooftop solar miracle where solar on the rooftop installs in Australia at $1 per watt. After financing that leads to a cost of electricity at that household of five to six cents per kilowatt hour that's probably a third of what you pay from your grids in the US. That's something that literally is just a regulatory difference between Australia and the US so with regulatory wins in the US you could be having that price. That enables delivered heat through heat pumps where Japan, Korea lead the world in heat pumps. We could take the Australian rooftop solar experience the Japanese Korean heat pump experience combine those also the rapidly falling cost of batteries which we project could be installed as low at $100 a kilowatt hour by about 2025-2026. Combine with that the clean grid that's happening in the US and Europe where solar and wind are now three to four cents a kilowatt hour. And really what California in the US is is leading the world on which is electric vehicles. And by 2025 it's broadly thought that they will have the same price upfront at those at the showroom floor as gasoline vehicles. If you make that sort of best of Australia best of California best of Japan and European policies all exist in one place, which is possible. We would be realizing in every American household savings of on average $2,500 per year on all of their energy bills, and we could look up here and we could find Vermont you actually stand to save the most. That's because you drive a little more and your heat a little more. And in fact it would be about three and a half thousand dollars per year per household every year in savings in Vermont by 2030. If we get onto this electrify everything program, and particularly if we align policy finance regulation technology in smart ways. I'd really like to emphasize that we can't leave any household behind. It should be obviously true to anyone in the audience that you don't half solve climate change if only the richest 50% of households can afford it we're in trouble. The problem ultimately is going to be a credit access problem. I'm convinced that the economics of these will work out but will people be able to borrow the money for the upfront capital cost will people be able to afford the electric vehicles will people be able to afford the heat pumps and the solar cells. And that's going to be a question of, you know, innovations in the sector so can we do rate based financing for some of these upgrades can cities step in to help. And we need every idea that we can get to make sure that every time any person is replacing their hot water heater the cheapest easiest to install solution is a heat pump every time a family needs to get a new car because the old one retires. How do we make sure and help that family can afford and get into an electric vehicle and there's sufficient charging in their neighborhood to make it possible. This is a slide from the small town where I'm living in Australia. And I think this is what is really exciting me now on a personal level about thinking about community benefits of electrification. So, this is actually the average household in my town they spend $4,872 a year on fuels right now. For the month I suspect, or Burlington when you spend $3,393 on gasoline in my community it creates maybe half a job at the local petrol station or gasoline station. And the rest of the money just leaves the community immediately creating no real employment. $300 a year goes to natural gas which leaves our again leaves our town immediately $1,000 and electricity which leaves our town and immediately. However, there is about the early signs of success are coming about 25% of households now have solar on their roof. Some of the money for that capital leaves town obviously some of it leaves for finance but actually that creates $20 in labor jobs per year per household and around $2 in energy savings. That's today. But if we use those numbers I just showed you for what happens where the technology trends are going. This is the amazing story for the household. So will be zero zero of the money will be spent on oil zero and natural gas zero on this call we will still be purchasing clean electricity from out of state and out of town. But we will be investing in these electrification machines, the CAPEX and the finance but will now be per household $336 in labor per year, saving $4,000 a year on the energy cost that might be about $3,000 a year on energy costs in Vermont. And think about that for our community that means every house will now be spending close to $5,600 a year in the community imagine you know we like buying local beer is as someone in Vermont was quoted recently why shouldn't we be buying local energy and in doing so. Not only local energy on the supply side but sort of the on all the components of the system and think about that community spent so that's good for the household and that $5,000 in community spending is good for the community. Let me tell you the story of my community where about 1000 households. So, those savings, what that will mean is every year for those 1000 households three and a half million dollars a year will not won't be leaving community to buy oil and gas, it'll be three and a half million dollars a year that will create in our 1000 household community about 12 jobs for contractors doing the installation maintenance, and about 50 induced jobs in the community, because those community savings will be spent buying local beer local books local produce. That's an even more incredible story when you think about Burlington as a town for example 20,000 households. There's likely 40 to $50 million a year in savings that will be creating hundreds of local Burlington jobs. And I really think about have been thinking about this concretely in terms of my community but I think you probably can immediately see the benefit for for Burlington and in fact cities everywhere in America and around the world. If you have $50 million a year of spending in Burlington Vermont you you you literally can't buy football fields and new school classrooms and library books fast enough at that rate of saving it really this project really could be the project that America has needed to do local community economic renewal for decades and I think I actually this is where I have optimism for the US and for the world, because we're going to start to realize that addressing this climate problem is a spectacular way to address real quality of life issues and improve our local communities. Thank you for your slide and I have no idea how long I've spoken for but hopefully there'll be plenty of time for questions. This is how I'm hoping that we start to think about our communities and our homes within our communities this is what you'd like to keep as our, our tracking schedule. I've made these for my community I'm hoping someone from Burlington Vermont, perhaps Murrow will contact me and we'll draw these schedules for Burlington. But how do we get in my community from 30% rooftop solar to 100 in the next 20 years how do we get to 100% electric vehicles in the next 20 years how do we get to 100% electrified kitchens. How do we get out of breaker box or switchboard electric heating electric hot water community renewables to also provide some of that cheaper electricity and home batteries. I think this is the type of template we need for not only for Austin me where I live not only for Burlington where you all are but for every community in America and every community around the world and this is how we're going to hit our climate targets. Thank you for that. That was, that was awesome to see, and thank you for persevering through this, even though you're, you're recovering from from coven the. We've got a lot of comments and engagement in the chat already and one question that I've seen and that I've heard you speak about in the past and I think it adds very significantly to the. incredibly optimistic view of the future that you just laid out there are often potentially optimistic view and one that stands and really stark contrast to a lot of the, a lot of the discussion about the climate emergency which is so often kind of framed in the in the disasters and the perils that we face you start to paint you're painting an economically advantageous future. I know you believe that there are other ways the future will be more awesome and better if we move towards electrification as well and from health benefits to other improvements could you speak to that a little bit as well. We know in America that, in fact the American Medical Association if you're if you report to a doctor with your child with symptoms of asthma. The first question they will ask you is, do you cook with natural gas and use natural gas to hit your home. We know that the chief cause of respiratory illness in children and adults is the burning of fossil fuels we know the communities that are downwind from coal and gas powered stations have our cancer clusters so the health benefits here which are hard to quantify and dollars but easy to quantify and morality and emotionally are going to be enormous. For America and really we we should be doing this for that reason it's interesting. I've been living with electric vehicles in my life for a few years now and you know in my childhood, I strangely enjoyed the smell of gasoline. But it's interesting, once you don't have it in your life very much because I never haven't visited a petrol station gasoline dispenser in a year or a few years. But when I smell a car that's burning on because I'm stuck in a parking lot or something with a gasoline car is like oh wow really that is a toxic horrible thing that we're doing to our lungs every day. And it's interesting it's like when you you know I think we're all going to have this awakening when as we make this transition like oh wow. This is good and everything's quieter because we're not you know there isn't constantly an engine running somewhere. But you know I think there's, there's going to be huge ancillary benefits from, you know, the literal quietening of our communities and we'll be out of here birds again to improving quality of our health in in nearly every way. The. Thank you for that certainly been my experience as well as electric car driver now for many years even even on less consequential levels it's just more fun to drive electric cars than than alternative. Yeah I see maybe where your question was going now. I'm going to be really honest to you. I actually think the whole of the US the whole world needs to have a little bit of a mayor culper like, you know, I'm guilty to and I will now share with you that I am indeed guilty to I own a 1963 Land Rover that runs on with a Brazilian diesel tractor engine. I own a 1951 Lincoln continental and 1959 doing buggy. And I, I really, I don't love what cars have done to the world but I love the machine. I'm currently electrifying all of those. I just did a 5000 mile road trip in an electric vehicle. Doing silent donuts. I think, you know, I think the way we win the culture war is just like, you know, I'm going to tow my electric jet ski with my electric truck to the to the lake and I'm going to do donuts in the car park I'm going to silently do donuts much faster than you on your horrible to stroke that makes your child smoke as they're being, you know, cough as they're being towed behind the boat, breathing in the barely burn petrol. Like, honestly, these things are going to be faster, higher performance, you know, cooking with an induction cooktop it took me a number of years to get one into my life. And I both had psychological barriers to it, but like once you put it in, it cooks faster it cooks cleaner. Everything is, is better about it like we really have a lot of things. A lot of things to win here and we should, we should just fight back with the culture war with like, you know what you like your diesel track. Try dragging drag racing me in my F 150 electric. I have some hope that that that is starting to happen I mean it was awesome to see on the Super Bowl this year. So many electric vehicle advertisements and, and, you know, including those for the Ford lightning. I know that a bunch of our DPW street workers are looking forward to the electrification of our truck fleet in the city that we that we that we've started on. Another really good example of how it's, it's playing out differently in every country. I think Europeans are now like, oh, it's about our electric heating systems. Americans are going to be bought into this future on the back of their electric trucks. And Australians have bought in on the back of this unbelievably cheap rooftop solar where now in many communities, half of the households are enjoying electricity that's one third of the cost that they were paying previously like, you know, it's going to be a different journey We just got to make this all happen in one place. We, you know, we're just on those price comparisons where we're now you know since, since the war in Ukraine began we're now looking at over $4 a gallon gasoline pricing here in Vermont. Yeah. I've been asking our team to put up a sign that looks like a gas sign on extra electric department showing that the if you come to a Burlington Electric Department charging station you can refuel your car for the equivalent of about $1.60 a gallon. And if you are a residential customer you sign up for our off peak. You know overnight recharging. We're down and under 70 cents a gallon and we're trying to advertise that comparison on the radio right now as well. You know it's huge we did those numbers for the US in 2020. I did numbers for Australia in 2021. I just re-rend the numbers in Australia and the savings to the household by 2030 went up from $5,000 a year to $7,000 and that's all due to the increase in the price of gasoline. Probably means those numbers I just quoted you for Vermont of three or three and a half thousand dollars is probably four and a half or $5,000 a year now. I like to express it in pennies per mile. If you're driving your electric truck powered by rooftop solar in Australia, it's about two to three cents a mile. That's compared to your at $4 a gallon you're paying 25 plus cents per mile to drive your truck. So that saves that that's that's it there by the cost of a shower is you know an eight minute shower is about 60 cents running on gas. If you're running that with a high efficiency heat pump with some blend of local solar and greed renewables, it's going to be less than 30 cents for that same hot shower right. It's going to be these everyday activities and everyday savings that hook us and then that again emphasizes how do we make sure that we bring the whole community along to enjoy that. And all those numbers of course I see I think right are before you even properly price fossil fuels before we have in place some kind of appropriate carbon pricing for the pollution. You know one thing we're working on right now and you know I hope we have some state legislators on the line with us tonight is we've asked voters here in Burlington have voted for the authority for us to be able to regulate locally. Our, the, our buildings in terms of thermal regulations and and putting in place, starting with new construction I think eventually perhaps you know I do think eventually we have to put it in place for everyone when they're looking at replacing our leaders and whatnot like you were saying we we want the ability since the state won't do it and the federal government won't do it yet. We want the ability to essentially put a carbon tax on fuel consumed within Burlington the voters supported that and we have. We've had it through one, one house of the legislature so far we're hoping the Vermont Senate signs off on it in the coming days and then the governor approves it. You know, I think these numbers get even more consequential when inevitably taken too long but when we get to properly pricing carbon. What that really makes me want to emphasize is that we need cities to be the cruciples of these innovations we need lots of experiments if we're very honest. Practically no individual householders figured out how to do this let alone a whole city. We could lose this fight in a death by 1000 paper cut sense and what do I mean by that. There's been 100 years where the fossil fuel companies have we designed our building codes to support fossil fuel infrastructure we've designed our rate structures we've designed our. rules of our utility and distribution grids we've designed federal subsidies to support fossil fuels. We need to eliminate all of those things, and you know the reason Australia pays a dollar or what compared to $3 what in the US for solar is not because our salaries are lower, our wages are lower. It's because we eliminated red tape and some people call it green tape then I get confused whether it's red or green tape but. Um, you know we still have building codes in the US that are based on the fact that you but if you burn natural gas in your house you need a fireman to be out of climb on the roof with an axe and punch a hole which means that they put a set back on the side of the roof that you're not allowed to put the solar cells on which limits how much you can put on your roof we have arcane laws like that that need to be undone, we need our building codes to be updated. And we really need to think about this regulatory work in a whole system whole sense, because if we optimize at all, we're going to realize those savings. If we, you know, continue with dysfunctional conflicts between the national electrical code and the local building code on how you install a heat pump, we could lose the benefits here. It's tough detailed work but we're trying to do it here. I want to just point out one more thing get your thoughts on one more thing before we turn it over to questions from others the Jordan for my team is going to put up a graph now looks a little bit like the graphs you're showing there at the end although I would love to. You know we got a big punch bunch of the BED team here that I'd love to follow up with you after and do more of the analysis. We are, this is a graph if it if it renders momentarily here hopefully that shows what happened when in the middle in the early months of the pandemic. We put in place what we call the green stimulus incentive, which was a major new incentive from the electric department, which is and I have seen a question in the chat here it is we are lucky here in Burlington that the city controls the utility that the city owns utility that makes it possible for us to lead in this area thinks a big part of the story why Burlington has been leading for leading for 30 plus years. The, we announced in, I believe it was May of the of 2020 new incentives for heat pumps and a whole number of other new incentives but the heat pump adoption change was was the most dramatic you can see how the adoption rate has changed since the introduction those incentives and you know we still have a long way to go that's you know 500 households out of something like 20,000 addresses year households and businesses in the city but it's a start. And I think that that's extraordinary. I just did some quick math. That means it's going to take you close to 60 years to eliminate gas locally, but it's a fantastic start and you've, you know what you're really like that uptick in that curve is incredible. And, you know, let's just uptick it a tiny bit more and we're on target. But here's the thing what I don't get is like these incentives are not handouts these aren't government subsidies these are. These are discounted prices essentially from our electric utility that is trying to sell more electricity and trying to secure more customers and we have seen it's not just city owned utilities that have done this in Vermont we have a very conservative and provocative privately owned utility green mount power that has been making similar changes and really pushing for the industry to change but I get the sense this is unusual in America and unusual is not what most utilities are doing I don't really understand why the profit incentive for American utilities hasn't kicked in and people they aren't trying to grab a bigger market share of the energy dollar and you know fight with the oil companies for for market share. I don't understand either if you build a basic model of what happens to a household when you electrify or what happens to a community is you're going to need about 250 to 300% of the electricity you use today. If I was a utility executive and like oh that you mean my business is going to grow by 250 300% that's incredible they should go after that there is still however a lot of conflict in the US, because many utilities are split fuel utilities where they're like oh but if I do that I lose my highly profitable natural gas business the but you know this is now starting that 300% growth is starting to look more profitable than natural gas. So I think they will come around. Honestly going back to how do we make this benefit the consumer the most I think we even need to revisit the in the very early days of the electricity system in the US and around the world. The electricity grid was owned by cities. Cities were motivated to make good decisions for their customers in the middle of the 20th century. They mostly rolled up and got regulated as the state regulated entities. And I actually think we lost a lot in in that and now when you buy electricity in Vermont you're sending it you're sending you're buying electricity in Burlington you're sending it out of your town to the utility upstate or utilities out of state. I actually think this is the argument for doing as much as possible of that low growth of that 250 300% how much of that can we do in community renewables projects whether that's community solar, you know, let's have an argument of whether the solar should go on the school, the church, the town hall or over the car parks, community wind community hydro electricity. The more renewables you put in your community that will be the cheapest of all of the renewables because you eliminate the transmission and a lot of the distribution costs. I actually think we should not only do I not know the answer of why they are not fighting for it. I'd like to say we should also probably have a little bit of an uprising and try to change the rules of the grid that we wrote in the 20th century that favored giant centralized infrastructure and rethink it for what's really coming down the line here. Awesome 250 300% I think our BED engineers have to start recalculating I think we're planning on like a 60% increase in the in the coming years but we better we better read based on this talk. I want to get other people into the conversation here as well. Jen Johanna, why don't you take it from here. Well, thanks that was very, that was really inspiring and I think your book is aptly named you start with the word optimism in the title and I think there's another plug. I think it's important for us to be optimistic and I you know I'm thinking especially mayor about the students that are listening in tonight there is this sense of ego anxiety that I'm hearing about among young people. I think it's important that we collectively look positively toward the future, not only some of the policies that you've implemented in Burlington, the technology, the incentives and the rebates the BED is offering I think can offer a sense of, and of hope and optimism. I do. Can I can I make a little admission, please. I think the other thing you don't get to choose the title, you get to write all the words in the middle and MIT press came back with, we'd like to call it an optimist play playbook and I said I'm not, you know I'm not sure that I am an optimist. Because I can see like everyone I'm looking at some of the questions in the q amp a yeah there's a lot of reasons to believe we could screw this up. I'm trying to own the word optimism given that the MIT press have given it to me, and I actually, I've developed a curious sort of Churchillian optimism. Right I've done after the failure at Dunkirk Churchill had just been beaten the Britain had just been beaten back by Hitler in France and that was the origin of churches. And I've fought them on the beaches speech, which is actually very serious about a very grim topic not unlike climate change. But the optimism is like, it doesn't really matter that it seems futile and impossible the only possible way to win is to fight them on the beaches to fight them on the streets, and we have to have the optimism that we can fight the whole way here. Any sort of defeatism or non optimism is in some respects, rolling over and not joining the fight, we just have to win this with with that Churchillian optimism. Yeah, and thanks for that we're with you in Burlington with that and this effort to embrace the optimism, despite the hard fight. There's really no other path forward. So I will I do just want to note there's a lot there's a lot going on in the chat as you can see. I do want, Johanna Miller, who's here again. Joey is the coordinator of the can be can as a co-sponsor so I do want Johanna to have a chance to ask some questions not only of her members, but what she's coming through in the Q amp a. So Johanna let me turn it over to you to ask some questions. Thank you again and thank you Dr Griffith and Mayor this is great. And we're going to fight in communities saw too because we have this amazing leadership that's happening in Burlington and there's, you know, half the towns in the state of Vermont have these grassroots town energy committees that are working with their municipalities and working with their community members to you know really push this transition and we got a lot of questions beforehand. We got a lot of questions in the chat and in the Q amp a, and I am going to try to get to as many of them as possible some are for you singularly saw Saul and some of them are from or for directly the mayor and some are for both. But I also want to ask, ask some and I also want to make sure that Saul, especially if you have a or mayor if you have questions that you want to make sure are answered I want to get to those as well. So moving first with some of the questions that we got earlier. One thing that people noted. Dr Griffith you haven't raised the rewiring America's pushed to electrify for peace and clearly that is a big thing on top of people's minds with the, what's happening in Ukraine. So the geopolitical energy crisis can you just speak to that a little bit and just put that on people's radar so we know what that is briefly. For peace is the, you know, the majority of gas in Western Europe in fact Western Europe really has known natural gas so it heats itself and powers its industry with Russian natural gas. And so electrification for peace is to recognize that the same story board that I just told you that works for America is really the recipe for particularly Western Europe to get off. Russian oil and gas as fast as possible. But you know we should we could extend that to all countries of the world who are sending a lot of money to not terribly good Petro States. All the time. I think there's not a huge amount more to be said than people can read in the public media so but I maybe will give you one little piece of insight which was fascinating to me. Interesting comparison so in the 1970s when we had our first energy crisis. There was the first calls for energy independence and that was because 15% of us energy was being imported as oil from overseas. And that was a huge concern. America is going close to achieving energy independence now in one sense of supplying all the oil and gas and electricity it needs but we don't count all of the energy that Americans use because we also purchase a huge number of things and there's energy embodied in all of those products. And in fact close to 15% of the energy that Americans use today isn't accounted for under the energy information administration. It's energy imported in we run a trade deficit if you like in energy and energy imported in foreign goods. And in fact, close to 3% of the energy used by Americans is Russian natural gas making and you know I don't mean to offend you but Audi's and Mercedes and Legos and IKEA furniture in Western Europe that is then purchased and bought in America. So that's to show you just how deeply intertwined these international trades and energy flows are and how they really relate to the geopolitics we're seeing in the world today. And it really emphasizes the need to very quickly electrify so that we're not, you know, paying the enemy to fight us in wars. Couldn't agree more and I think that's very true in Vermont where we import 100% of the fossil fuels that we use. So there are several questions related to the affordability and really helping lower income earners sort of electrify more and one specific question was kind of electrification strategy might be appropriate for those who live in mobile parks with old wiring and 50 amp main breakers for each home. So there are several threads to the questions related to again how do we make this more affordable for people. And how do we help lower income earners sort of make the investments that they need to electrify more things in their homes. I think this is not only a huge topic, but probably the most important topic. If we are already seeing it all of the fight back from the fossil fuel companies is on cost of living, and they're trying to drive a cultural wedge between those who can currently afford to decarbonize and those who can. So unless we quickly make this affordable and achievable from everyone we're going to lose a lot of time in the fighting over the cost. Curiously mobile homes use slightly more energy per square foot than on mobile homes but they are significantly smaller and in a per occupant sensor actually much more energy efficient than current single family homes stand alone and in fact, you know electrifying and decarbonizing your mobile homes is somewhat easier and a lot lower cost because it's a smaller space to heat, and a whole other facts, number of facts like that. With that into that I think it's close to 8% of 6 or 8% of households now in the US living in mobile homes. We have to do that. It's really becomes a credit issue. Right so let's talk speak to some of the elephants in the room. If you can have you know 10 or 20% of households can afford to buy one of those imported outies or Mercedes that I just talked about. You can afford to buy an Audi or Mercedes. You've made a very poor economic choice because you instead bought an electric Hyundai or an electric Chevy bolt. The amount of money you have left over would pay for the solar the battery the heat pumps everything else. So you're, you know the top 10 or 20% of households can already afford to do this and are just making poor consumer choices horrible choices for the planet. They're not making to do it. And of the economic spectrum, probably can afford their, you know, 60 70% of Americans are living instead, you know, own the mortgages on their largely standalone single family homes. And on the refinancing of those properties or when they move, and they get into a new property and they do renovations, they can finance the costs of all of these upgrades. So the 50 60 70% at the top end can afford to do this but we, we really don't. We're not extending the credit far enough down the line we don't really have solutions to make sure that renters are seeing the benefits it passed through to them. And we don't have answers. I won't purport to having all of the answers we have teams at rewiring America thinking about this every day. One of the people Sam Calis, who works for rewiring America is a renter and he's just done the most extraordinary retrofit of his own life, including sitting an induction cooktop over the top of the gas in his house and doing a whole bunch of other things that have helped him go zero to the commission as a renter and see some of the benefits so we're starting to see that it's possible. This is to say we need a lot more thinking on this and we need a lot, a lot more answers and honestly, this won't happen without regulatory work getting done this won't happen without financial innovation and probably won't happen without public private partnerships between cities and states and financing institutions. And to go back to one of the slides I show, you know, we have to make the right choice for every house the cheapest choice the easiest to get a contract to install every time their hot water heater fails, or their, you know, their gas furnace We know in the US today, you know, if you're most hot water heaters fail, and 40% of the households that they fail on are under financial duress at that moment. And so they're motivated to buy the cheapest easiest thing they can get tomorrow because it's probably the middle of winter your partners probably pregnant or your partner is sick, and you have to make a shrewd economic choice at that moment. If you call five contractors, probably all of them are going to say no doing a heat pump installation is too hard because I haven't done one yet. And so, you know, at the very we've got to really think from those purchasing moments back and like okay how do we make sure the next time someone in one of those mobile homes their water heater breaks that we have done the workforce training. We've got financing at point of purchase in place so that when they walk in to get that thing replaced or when they call the contractor the contract is like okay, I've got the latest heat pump model. I've talked to Murrow and he's providing city based financing under XYZ scheme here's where the rebates are. It'll be installed in in six hours time and your shower tomorrow will be hot right we need to get to that place. I don't have all the answers but I know where the goalposts are very much appreciate that Mayor you've been doing a huge equity component to do you want to speak to any of the, any of the pieces that Burlington is leading on here. I would I mean we certainly don't have it all figured out either we're having those kind of discussions about how, how do we make sure, you know, for all households that we are ready for those moments when people are making those investments I will say a couple of significant things that are starting to move the needle that we're hopeful about we are offering more generous incentives for low and moderate income customers and we've gone from almost known none of those incentives flowing to low and moderate income households to about 15%. Now, getting to those households, we are after you know those decades of weatherization efforts, we persistently did not, we're not reaching about 40% of the rental units in Burlington, where the renters paid for the utilities and where the property owners had less of an incentive to take advantage of all these sort of carrots that were out there to, to meet the upgrade air sealing and insulation. We have now moved to requiring all rental properties to put in that your basic cost saving air insulation and air sealing, you know interventions. The interesting change that has evolved is in part out in this effort to try to meet a broader range of households is that we are now offering incentives for Burlingtonians that by used electric vehicles, not just new vehicles and and that's not including the group of households that we're we're serving but we got a lot of work to do I, I think that you know the way you talked about their cells exactly right we are, we need to be meeting people in the we can't be missing those moments. If we're going to get to these goals over the next 10 years. We, we are trying to advertise online digital advertising for. We're googling around for electric vehicles or heating systems. We're trying to advertise in a way that will that you know will pop up on their screen the electric option. Clearly more regulatory action is going to be needed as well and that's, you know why it's so important that the legislature give us the authority to make these changes at the local level. Here here and two questions related to that both of you have spoken to the regulatory and sort of policy frameworks that are going to be necessary to the degree you want to pinpoint anything more clearly about what exactly we might need to do, especially because so many of the folks on this call, you know students local energy committee leaders leaders in the you know their professional worlds. We want to partner with you, Mayor we want communities to partner with the state of Vermont. What can we be doing, those of us who want to support you and want to rewire America and a strategic equitable way. Dr Griffith what what would advice would you give those of us out there in the world to set the stage to make this happen in Vermont. Pick one. There's so many things to do pick one thing and do it very well. And I just saw an old dear old friend of mine. Well she's not very old but she's a dear friend of mine. Lisa Cunningham is in the chat, and she has been working very hard on changing the rules over building codes for retrofits to make sure that anytime somebody is, you know, asking for a permit to do a building project where that is a significant retrofit that it doesn't retrofit with yet more gas. So she's made that her issue and is having quite a lot of success in Massachusetts and beyond. We need similar efforts to make sure that there's sufficient electric vehicle charging infrastructure we're going to need 10 to 20 community vehicle charging stations for every 1000 households it's going to make an enormous difference of whether they are at the school parking lot at the church. At the public sporting fields or whether they're on a corporate campus so we need people to be lobbying that they are appropriately placed in the communities. Why do we need so many songs prize we need that many given that like 90% of the recharging happens at people's houses. We, here's, here's a bit of a problem. We looked at a lot of the data and the tragedy today is that we've got about 5000 vehicles we've been tracking for about five years, and people treat their electric cars like their cell phones. So they drive them home they park them on the bed stand with the cell phone and they plug them into charge. And unfortunately that means we're charging our electric vehicles at the times of day that are not necessarily correlating to when the wind is blowing and the sun is shining and the hydroelectricity is pumping. So we need to change some of that behavior and that can be changed if you put the vehicle charging at least some proportion of it, where people spend their hours during the day. And that's in the community and workplaces in shopping centers at schools, etc. So we need it's this is really a yes and issue we need this as well. Just to give you one more example of, you know, I love someone or maybe a few people on this call to take up this issue. The way we structured the utility monopoly in the 20th century motivates the utility to take the full charge that they currently charge for distributing electricity which is just so you know, two three or four times as high as the cost of generating that electricity is the cost that they managed the local distribution network with. If they apply that to all of the new 250 or 300% of the transactions. That significantly increases the cost and hampers the economics. The reality is that the local distribution grid can in fact handle this 250 or 300% you have 100 most American homes have 100 amp. Load center in 100 amps 110 volts is 11 or 12 kilowatts, even if you have two electric vehicles in your house and electrify everything else that house only will need about three to four kilowatts of constant power so there's enough room providing you can move and manage the loads around on all of the local wires. So we need someone to proactively make sure that the rules and this means you know it doesn't sound like exciting work but this you know you want to know where the frontline of this battle is the frontline is showing up to your utility regulatory committee hearings every month and kicking up a stink. Five or six well motivated citizens to show up to represent at every one of those hearings to say well we have a cartoon model of what the future has to look like to fix climate change and we don't want you to ruin it or hamper it with these rules that you're going to try and right to favor the existing system and represent for the community and represent for the household. I could go on and on and on that we need, we need a soldier in every one of these fights. So I'm the lucky winner, it gets play timekeeper and it's such a shame that we don't have more time so I think we're going to have to take you had a comment in the chat you've been invited to come back or come to Lake Champlain to kiteski so we hope that you'll do that. Thank you George Warner. I know he asked that question. At the beginning I hope of a long through conversation and may are so happy that you are directly involved with rewire as a founding member of the municipal and mayors coalition. So we know that this is one of many conversations that we'll get to have with Sol and rewiring America more generally. I do want to thank Johanna for for helping out with the questions and again sorry we didn't have enough time but we're nearing the end of our time together I know morrow you wanted to say a few parting words and thanks all personally. Thank you Jen thank you for again for your leadership and you all the work that went into making tonight possible. Sol very very grateful that you've joined us this was everything I hope the conversation would be and I do hope we can can stay in touch and there's the way that Burlington can continue to help with the movement that you're building. I, you know, my last thing I just wanted to say is, I didn't get to answer Johanna's question what's the one intervention. The one thing that I would hope people would advocate for and to me it always is clearly the want the single thing that is a policy choice that could happen. Before the end of the session this year, well, but it could happen before legislators adjourn to Montpelier it could happen tomorrow in Congress is we could put in place some kind of revenue neutral carbon pricing some some kind of way right now we are having those battles on the beaches in the towns, and we have to fight with one hand tied behind our back there's just it all of the interventions this all just listed would happen faster would have more energy enforced behind them. If we're properly pricing the cost of pollution we've done this for other pollution here in America it works. It is, it is, it is what is going to drive what is finally I think going to really make a difference in accelerating our fight and it's a good segue though to the final thing I have to say tonight which is, I hope people will consider coming back and joining us for the next net zero energy town hall next Wednesday. We're going to be at the same time. 5pm I believe the logistics are very similar, correctly if I'm wrong Jen in terms of how people you can register and, and sign up for a link. We are going to be joined next week by MIT professor, who has pioneered something called the seems like a mouthful of a name but it's called the end roads interactive simulator. But it is I've seen in action it is a pretty remarkable tool for showing what the impacts of various innovations interventions are in getting to those goals that saw featured early in the presentation. You know, that show we have to do so much work over the next next 10 years and how early interventions really matter. We'll have a chance to do this together with audience participation, putting in the various different interventions, the one that to my I will plug it as the biggest impact in part because it drives electrification. And significantly is the introduction of some kind of revenue neutral carbon price so I don't know if it's possible to drop any information into the chat as we depart here but I hope people will consider coming back for the next town meeting next next next Wednesday, April 6 at 5pm. Anything else about that Jen that I failed to mention that. That's great they can register on your Facebook page. So do you have any last words. One last word one last current. Thank you. Mayor of Vermont or Burlington for your leadership it's really. It is astounding. We need more leaders like that people of Burlington you are lucky on the fossil on pricing some carbon in any way. I'm going to set the bar even lower that would be great but we just stopped subsidizing fossil fuels, and this was painfully bought into focus yesterday Australia released its federal budget which included $11.6 billion in subsidies for fossil fuels. Most of that will immediately leave the country to pay for foreign oil. Curiously we did the calculations on what it would take to electrify the 10 million Australian households by 2030 to do so would cost you $12 billion and would lead to savings by 2030 of $40 billion a year. So by continuing to subsidize fossil fuels and be unfortunately because of the fight in your crane. There's a lot of people who now want to subsidize fossil fuels for a few more years which sort of seems like a good idea, but it just isn't. We should be focusing all of that money on electrification decarbonizing households which is the technology that's ready to deploy today. And, you know, we can do it we just have to think clearly and we have to demand for those clear thoughts to be heard and implemented as policy. Thank you. No, it's totally totally with you there. Thank you. Thank you everyone for joining tonight it's been awesome I know we didn't get to all the questions in the chat or even close, but thank you everyone for participating so actively. And look forward to continuing this conversation with you all next week if you can join us then. Have a good night everyone.