 It is my greatest pleasure and honor to introduce Megan Notting, recipient of the C3E Business Award. Megan is Executive Vice President of Government and Regulatory Affairs at Sunova Energy Corporation. And I'll have to say it was a challenge to make this talk short. There are so many things that impressed us about Megan. First of all, she is an absolutely fierce advocate for distributed solar since she started in the industry, being engaged in many of the early tough challenges and wins at the state level. And us veterans remember it and are thankful for it. Secondly, some of Megan's successes have really been due because of her ability to bring different constituencies together, whether it be regulatory bodies, utilities, consumers, communities, solar companies, and to find common ground. And that's what we need even more today. Megan has also been a fierce defender of women and took the leading solar industry associations to task back in 2013, for examples of bias against women in numerous industry association conferences. They took note, they changed. She then went on to found a non-profit vice to support the careers of women of all you out there in solar. Wanting to address even broader community and diversity issues, Megan ran for the Colorado House of Representatives in 2018 while she was still working at Sunova. Her second place is a testament to her ability to overperform others. She was the only candidate who worked while running. Please join me in welcoming and congratulating Megan Nothing, winner of the business award. Thank you. Hello. Well, thank you, Jennifer, for that lovely and thoughtful introduction. It's an honor to have gotten to know someone as accomplished as you. Thank you to the C3E ambassadors and staff for the amazing work you do to support and empower women. And a huge thank you to Nisha Desai for nominating me for this award. It's a huge honor to see my name among the incredibly impressive winners, both this year and in previous years, and I'm really honored to join your ranks. I've been a huge fan of C3E and your work since the beginning. I attended the first C3E conference at MIT back in 2012 and then a number of subsequent ones after that. I love the energy and the passion that attendees bring to the work they're doing in the clean energy space. And that works incredibly important because right now, world leaders who are predominantly men are meeting in Glasgow to figure out the next steps in our commitment to combat and climate change. The stakes could not be higher. In the best case scenario, things will get much worse. The climate has already warmed one degree Celsius or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit compared to pre-industrial times. The IPCC has said that in order to keep warming to one and a half degrees Celsius by the end of the century, we need to be at net carbon, net zero carbon emissions in 30 years. And even then, we're going to see the extinction of twice as many plants and animals and the loss of 10 times as much Arctic sea ice. If every country just meets the goals they've set out prior to Glasgow, the earth will warm three degrees, and if we do nothing, the increase will be greater than four. Humans have never lived in a world so hot and projections show that large parts of this planet will become uninhabitable above three degrees Celsius warming. We know the cause of climate change. It's greenhouse gas emissions, and we know how to reverse it. We eliminate those emissions. But in order to make that happen, we need all of the passion and the energy and the brilliant minds that we can get. We need all of you to be pulling in the same direction, all of us. We in the world need you. Everyone who's watching this and your friends and family to pitch in to help us get there. If you are not working in clean energy, then why not? Because we really need your talents. There are currently about 220,000 workers in the U.S. solar industry. The National Solar Trade Association estimates that in order to meet the Biden administration's clean energy goals, we're going to need about 900,000 people by 2035. The U.N. Secretary General has said that by 2030, solar and wind capacity should quadruple and renewable energy investments should triple to maintain a net zero trajectory by mid-century. There is a lot to do, and we especially need women, because climate change is disproportionately affecting us. In the fantastic book, All We Can Save, the authors say the climate crisis is not gender-neutral. Climate change is a powerful threat multiplier. Making existing vulnerabilities and injustices worse. 80% of people displaced by climate change are women. There is growing proof of the link between climate change and gender-based violence. Tasks quarter survival, such as collecting water and wood or growing food, fall on female shoulders in many cultures. We women have the most at stake in this fight, and so we need to demand a seat at the table, a voice in discussions, and leadership in actions taken. Distributed solar policy is my passion. My goal is to ensure that we transition as quickly as possible to clean energy and that everyone has the opportunity to take advantage of distributed solar and storage to save money, have reliable access to energy, and contribute to future greenhouse gas emissions. To that end, I'm excited to announce that I'll be donating the prize money I received to Empowered by Light, an organization devoted to empowering vulnerable communities to leapfrog dirty energy and grow their economies. This specific funding will go toward building a solar and storage project in the Navajo Nation in Arizona, a place where one of my aunts worked for many years as a nurse. I pledge to devote the rest of my career to helping facilitate clean energy solutions. I hope you consider doing so as well, either professionally or in your spare time. Given the consequences which we will continue to see more of in our lifetimes, we need everyone, especially all of the brilliant people watching this to pitch in, because if we don't, the result will be dire for humanity and for the rest of the world. As they say in All We Can Save, we need every solution and every solver. To change everything, we need everyone. Thank you.