 No, I'll try not to. Well, welcome everyone. Thank you so much for joining us today. I'm Dan Berset with the Environmental and Energy Study Institute, and it's my privilege to welcome everyone in the room and online to the fourth installment of Congressional Climate Camp. It's been a long but really, really tremendous briefing series. We started back in January by taking a look at the budget and appropriations process, and then in February, we talked about public attitudes, about climate change over time, non-CO2 greenhouse gas emissions, things like methane, fluorinated gases, and other pollutants. And here we are today with the Big Kahuna implementing the Inflation Reduction Act and Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. And we have a really excellent program lined up for everyone today, and actually, this is kind of a mega briefing for us. So really, really excited about it. Before we get to our panelists, I just want to say a few words about EESI for those of you who are new to our organization. This is what we do. We provide policymakers with science-based, non-partisan information about climate change topics, and we do our best to do it in a timely and relevant way. We also do a lot of writing. We do podcasting. Over time, we've developed expertise when it comes to helping utilities in rural areas access federal resources for inclusive on-bill financing programs. But really, when we're on Capitol Hill, most of the time, we're doing exactly this, which is convening the best in terms of experts and practitioners to help share information that you all need to do your job, and maybe most importantly, answer your boss's questions when he comes to you or she comes to you and asks questions about climate change topics that are before Congress. So we do the briefings. We also have a really tremendous newsletter called Climate Change Solutions. We have a lot of briefings. Climate Camp is just one of our briefing series. If you'd like to learn more about what we've got coming down the pike, the best way to do that is to visit us online at EESI.org and sign up for Climate Change Solutions. It comes out every two weeks. It's a really tremendous resource. We also do a lot of fact sheets and issue briefs. Sometimes we do big reports, and we have a social media presence. So if you haven't already followed us on Twitter and LinkedIn and Facebook and Instagram and all that, our handle is at EESI online. I mentioned our climate camps. If this is your first climate camp, that's okay, because we have you covered. You can go to our website. You can watch archived webcasts of the entire series. Presentation materials are all posted online, and at some point in the near future we'll have summary notes for the presentations as well. What comes after climate camp? There's a little thing called the Farm Bill coming down the pike. And so we'll be doing a briefing series, probably kicking off, well, actually kicking off on March 23rd, we'll be doing a briefing about organics with our friends at the Natural Resources Defense Council. And then we'll do more briefings in April, May, and June. We also have a briefing next week, next Wednesday, I think it is, with the Business Council for Sustainable Energy, about the Sustainable Energy and American Fact Book. And then we'll be back in April, April 19th, for doing a program on DOE nuclear programs, briefing on DOE nuclear programs. Something we won't talk a lot about today, but a huge amount of funding in the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act for those programs. We have a ton of materials on the front table. I hope everyone helps yourself to the slides and our other written materials. Talking about these two pieces of legislation, even independently, but together, I mean, this is 10 pounds of flour in a five-pound bag, but we have a lot of other resources that I hope you'll avail yourselves of. And if you have additional questions, we'll all be around. We're all wearing our lapel pins. So if you see one of us, please just stop us, whether it's Anna or Molly or someone else, and we'd be happy to take your questions and help you fill information gaps that you might be seeing in your work. So it is my privilege to introduce the first of our two panels and our first of our two speakers on our first panel. Dr. Henry McCoy Jr. is a seasoned professional in business, community and economic development, policy, government, finance, energy, philanthropy, and the academic world. Prior to joining the Department of Energy, Henry served on the faculty at North Carolina Central University School of Business, where he led the entrepreneurship program with additional appointments at Duke, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Harvard. He's a former banking executive entrepreneur and former assistant secretary of the North Carolina Department of Commerce. And Henry, thank you so much for joining us to kick off our IIJA IRA implementation briefing. It's great to see you. Thank you. Thank you. Appreciate this, Dan, and EESI for this opportunity to come and speak to the congressional staff. I think what we're doing over in the Department of Energy is exciting, and certainly your congressional members are a key to this. And so I want to thank you all for taking this time here today. I also want to do a quick introduction. I have our chief of staff from the Office of State and Community Program, Chris Castro in the back there in a nice sunny tie. Marjorie Fios-Harris, who is our assistant director of external affairs. And so it's wonderful to be here, and I always enjoy sharing a panel with David and Naziel. So just to kind of get into it, so the Office of State and Community Energy Program was created as a part of the infrastructure law that got passed in 2021. And it has grown only with the Inflation Reduction Act. And so what we do here at the Office of State and Community Program is really try to find a way to connect to tribes and local governments and states to really jumpstart this investment in the community aspect of what we do. I want to give a kind of go a little higher for a moment and look at what's happening in DOE. As a response to the bipartisan infrastructure law, the IJA, what happened was there was a creation of a new infrastructure pillar within the Department of Energy. So it became a question of not only this idea of let's create resources for infrastructure, but also how are you going to implement those infrastructure dollars into the communities? And so the Office came about in February 2022, again, as a response to the 2021 November legislation. 90% of the resources that focus on infrastructure come through this particular infrastructure pillar. And we are one of the newer offices in that pillar. So if you think about, go back to fourth grade health, the Maslow Harkin needs, you think about the work that we do in communities. It's thinking about how do we help communities not only survive, but how do we help them thrive? And so if you think about the infrastructure pillar, we go from everything from helping individuals who are energy burdened to lower their energy costs to doing things like looking at domestic manufacturing, as you know, many of these provisions include bi-American to think about these clean energy technology that really will jump start us and continue to have that world lead, and then really looking at it from a holistic standpoint. We try to look at community in a way that imagines, what does a decarbonized community look like? And how does that impact everybody? So the infrastructure pillar really looks across that entire gamut. So you see that the blue is us, the Office of State Community program, we go by SCIP. We have seven sister offices within infrastructure. And those seven offices that we have within infrastructure are we all working together to think about community in a very holistic standpoint. And so we at SCIP really serve as some folks call us the tip of the spear to get resources in this community and help communities plan and execute on dollars that come down. So really to that end, SCIP's mission is to be a strategic partner and really focus on place-based strategy. We really think about what does it mean to transform and place in ways that not only do that physically, but also move communities with it. So how do we help communities rise in the process of making these investments? And so to that end, we are an entity that has almost 30 programs within the Office of State Community programs. And so a key part of those 28 programs as we sit in our separate pillars is to think about how do we work together and think about the whole being greater than some of its parts. So we think about this in a very holistic way. So the dollars that the Congress has appropriated us are really leveraged and braided and brought together in a way that hopefully creates some really great emergence. So part of that is the Justice 40 initiative. As many of you probably know Justice 40, President Biden, signed executive order a few days after taking office that said that 40% of these benefits should go to historically disadvantaged communities. So we take that seriously and we build that into everything that we do. We also look at how do we deploy clean energy technology. A key part for us is thinking about this idea of looking at a community and thinking about how do we increase the absorptive capacity of that community to accept federal dollars and other dollars, information and knowledge and technology to really move those communities forward. And so that deploying clean energy really focuses on that. Simultaneously we want to catalyze the economic development. It's about jobs, it's about jobs, it's about jobs. And so a key part of this is how do we make sure that we're making, creating this connect with tissue between the investments that we make and the local economy in a real way that ties to that. But we also want to create ownership amongst communities and certainly avoiding pollution through these place-based strategies and reducing energy costs. There's so many individuals who are energy burdened. We want to make sure that we keep that at the forefront of what we do and all that we do. And so SCEP looks at that from a very holistic standpoint. How do we make these investments in these historically disadvantaged communities as well as much broader than that? We have $16 billion in our funded capacity. And so we know that we can make an incredible impact on that. So I did have this intentional foresight. You have our slides, but a key part of what I want to say about this is that we're looking at these building blocks of success. What that means is that we have $16 billion within our offices at SCEP. But across DOE, we have $100 billion in resources that are going to communities. And then if you look at across federal government as a whole, we work very closely with the alphabet soup, right? USDA, DOT, EPA, we lead an inter-agency working group. There's almost half a trillion dollars across all of federal government. How do we, those resources together that are really going to a community and stack those dollars on top of each other to move forth and really be transformation in those communities? So we try to go in this work with some level of foresight and really thoughtfulness. We want to meet communities where they are and we want to understand what they need and move forth. So I'm gonna go really quickly through some of the programs that we have within SCEP. And I know this is a busy slide, but let me go to the next one. So we have a senior slide. We have our investments around workforce. And so we have the $10 million around workforce training and creating assessment centers. We also have another $10 million as it relates to career sites. And so partly what we're doing is we're trying to make sure that as the money goes into community, that there are individuals there to actually activate this from a job standpoint. We think about this very, very seriously when we think about jobs, but also thinking about the opportunity for entrepreneurship within communities that historically have been left behind. And so these resources that we have, which equate to $10 million, $10 million, another $40 million for auto training. And then we have another $200 million that we have within the Inflation Reduction Act training. We have $260 million just for training. And we know that that's gonna be critical because you need these things to line up. We also have what is energy efficiency materials pilot program, which is really a very complicated way of talking about investing in nonprofits. You invest in the buildings of nonprofits to essentially make them more energy efficient and more resilient. We have a kind of sister component of that, which is $500 million for the schools program, which does the same thing. It looks at going into low income schools and uphitting those buildings to be energy efficient. And the idea of both of those is that if you can save resources on the energy cost, those resources can then be reinvested back into community. They can be reinvested back into young people that can connect those young people with those job opportunities. And so we're very excited about that work from that standpoint. We have $550 million in energy efficiency block grant funds. We talk about momentarily. And then we have the state energy program, which has been around for the last almost 50 years. Every state gets resources on an annual basis to really think about what do they want to do from a planning standpoint. And then the weatherization program, which has been around similarly long. And that program is to go in to low income communities and weatherize homes. And so we're very excited about the connected tissue from a community standpoint of each of these programs. Here's the big kahuna inflation reduction act, right? So when I started this role in the office of the infrastructure office started in February of 2022, I started my role in the new office of SCAP in July of 2022. So when I started at the end of July, we had $6 billion. About three weeks later, in the inflation reduction act in the past, we had $16 billion. And so you can see how quickly things turn around. But we have $10 billion in our provisions. And a lot of folks hear about these rebates, the rebates that folks get. And so it looks at doing everything from electrification of homes to make sure that the homes are ready to be electrified, but also getting rebates for appliances. And one of the things that we're focused on is making it simple for low income individuals. So these programs, they tiered, but a lot of the benefit will go to individual 80% of the AMI area median income or below, up to 150% of AMI. And we are focused on utilizing technologies and things of that nature to give rebates at point of sale. So it's not like when we were growing up where you got that box of cereal, you cut the side off and you sent the rebate in and what they received and you waited six weeks to get that $5 or whatever. It's not that kind of game. What we're gonna do is we're gonna make sure that individuals can go to the point of sale and have the rebate institutes. And that's up to 100% of the cost of the product. So that they may not have to come out of pocket for anything. So we're working with states and Navi and others to figure that out. We've had a great working relationship around that. So the Inflation Induction Act is a huge part of this. Next is TA, Technical Assistance Partnerships. A key part of the work that we do is try to make sure that our grantees really have the best information knowledge that they can to move communities forward. And again, have to meet folks where they are. If I go to California, they may say, Henry, go sit down somewhere. We got this covered, right? California's office is bigger than mine from a standpoint of this work. But I may go someplace else and they may need additional kind of help. And so we have a number of different programs that focus on technical assistance and delivery. We have working with different programs. We have almost 240 partners that we're working with on different technical assistance efforts and things of that nature. So it's really critical and crucial for us that that's how we learn. We go in and we communicate. Part of what I tell my team, and we talk about all the time, is that we should get smarter. With every dollar that we put in a community, we should get smarter about the next dollar we put in, right? And that takes learning from the communities, the listening to the communities, understanding what works and what doesn't work. So TA is a key part of that. We have a few tools that we utilize as it relates to helping communities understand kind of what their economic and environmental landscape looks like. And so one is something we call slope, which is a great interactive tool. You can go on and you put your community in and it comes up and basically shares with you kind of what is your energy burden? It shows you a bunch of different information that can help the community then make better decisions about where should we go? Where are we in our process? And so that's a tool, it's had 12,000 unique visitors, I think in just the last year alone. We have a low income energy affordability data lead to does a lot when we're trying to think about how to invest in those historically disadvantaged communities. And so we really use data to drive our work and that's important to us. I just kind of, I covered this really quick because I know time is running short, but we've over the last year, we've put out billions of dollars in each of these different programs, weatherization, the state energy program, energy efficiency conservation block grant, we put them out into the community. We want this money to get into the hands of the people in the community to move forward and to be impactful. So what I do is I probably save some of this when we sit down for Q and A, but a key part of what we do is really figure out how do we want to benefit and help communities and particularly historically disadvantaged communities. And so we have built in this notion of putting in a community benefit agreement with every grant program that we have. We want to make sure that everybody is very conscious of making these investments, how you intend to impact the communities that are the most in need. So actually what I do there, because I know you have the slide deck in front of you, I wrap up so we can hear from David and the wonderful work they're doing. But certainly when we get in Q and A, I'd love to talk more about how these dollars are really impacting the communities at the ground level. So thank you so much. Thank you, Henry, I appreciate that. Let's see, I think I'm just gonna move ahead. I think actually, David, you don't have a slide. So I may just leave up this very nice thank you slide that Henry ended with. But yes, a couple of quick reminders. Henry's presentation is extraordinary because of the amount of information that's in there. There are printed copies out front. If you want an online version or an e-version, you can visit us online and download it. So a lot of really great information and a lot of practical information from industrial staff to about how to interact with these programs. Also would like to, Henry sort of segwayed into the idea of questions. We will in fact have questions. We'll have the ability to ask questions here in the room. If we're in our online audience, and I would say we have a robust online audience right now, you can send us an email and the email address to use is askask.org, can also follow us on Twitter at ESI online and ask us a question that way. And Henry called out a few of his folks today, but he mentioned the energy efficiency materials pilot program. So just in case they're watching, I can embarrass them a little bit, but that's a program we've been working on a lot at ESI and Henry's team working on the non-profits program and the school program is just really killing it. So kudos to Sarah and everyone there working on that. So thank you very much. Our second panelist is David Terry. David is the president of the National Association of State Energy Officials, and he's worked with NASIO in a variety of capacities since 1996. David leads NASIO's policy actions and programs in support of the 56 governor designated state and territorial energy directors and their offices. NASIO communicates the state's views on virtually all national energy issues. David has participated in governor led policy meetings testified before Congress and presented at White House and International Energy Forum. David has 25 years of experience working on a range of energy issues for such organizations as the governor's wind and solar energy coalition and energy services coalition. And most importantly, he's a member of our board of directors. So we really appreciate his support in multiple ways. David, I'll invite you to the lectern and look forward to your presentation. Thanks, Dan. I'll try to see if I can close that for a little room. Good afternoon, everybody. I want to thank Dan and the ESI team. It's an amazing organization. I'm not just because I'm a board member because I see their impact every day and the information they put out. And I think about the nonpartisan approach informative approach that our founding former congressman Oddinger brought to this organization and Jared Glomar chair of the organization. He's a great leader for all of us. I wanted to just cover a couple of background things very quickly. One, for those of you don't know, as Dan alluded to, we represent the 56 state territory and District of Columbia energy directors in their offices. About 80% of those directors are governor appointed or serve at the pleasure of the governor. They cover every energy issue imaginable. They're policy oriented and forward looking, economic development, climate workforce, all the things governors care about. They're thinking about in the lens of energy. That means they cover everything from building energy codes on the one hand to transmission planning on the other, advanced nuclear technologies, opening markets, financing, the whole gamut. And our organization reflects that. The IJA and the IRA present a pretty amazing opportunity needless to say. And I want to start though with a little bit of a level set. There are two parts to this. The second part's almost more important than the first part. The first part is with the exception of the weather station assistance program, no IJA or IRA dollars have gone to the states yet. So if you're wanting what they did with the funding, they haven't done it yet because they don't have the money yet. The other part of that that's incredibly important is Congress delivered to DOE and the other agencies, but DOE in particular, a huge challenge. The number of programs doing it responsibly, planning and hats off since Henry has been with us. It doesn't even seem like it hasn't been a year yet. I think the engagement honestly between DOE and the states has increased multiple fold. It's been a huge positive. The staff there, Chris, Ana Garcia, others, the office's grid deployment office, Maria Robinson, Gene Rodriguez now at the office of electricity, Alejandro Moreno and EERE. Everybody is running flat out. If you see them, thank them. They're doing their jobs well for all of us as are the state directors. So with that, I wanted to hit on really three items. One, just a little bit of a state lens on the infrastructure and IRA benefits. Those vary a lot. People are still digging into it, but they are moving. They are planning and acting. I wanted to talk a little bit about that. The second one is not talked about as much in the media or in meetings, and that's the cross-cutting elements in different programs. There's an enabling component there that we hear from industry that's really important. We think a lot about what the private sector is doing. They're the ones that make the investment choices. We pay a lot of attention to that. And third, just some examples of what we see states either planning or acting on with just some quick examples. There's a lot more, a spoiler alert, I'm not gonna do a long list, but give you a bit of a teaser. I think the first piece is there's a foundational program and Henry mentioned this, the U.S. State Energy Program. It's an annual appropriation. It's been around for many years. The annual appropriation is very modest. 65 million last year spread across 56 states and territories. You might think, wow, that's not very much. It's not a lot of money, but it's an incredibly flexible program. It is the glue that holds together so many of the state private sector partnerships in the utility industry. Actions the governor's office leads. It's used for planning, statewide energy planning, emergency response and preparedness, building energy code, education, voluntary programs around schools, financing, a public, private infrastructure, whole range of items. And I'm gonna come back to that a couple of times, not only because we care about that program a lot and the ongoing nature of it, but it was also funded under the IJA at $500 million. A good portion of that goes out to the states. They haven't received that yet, but they will soon. And they're thinking already about how they use that. All of those programs that Henry listed have almost all of them have a state, a central state component. The SEP funds are used for planning around hydrogen hubs, workforce development, planning around EV infrastructure that comes out of the Department of Transportation. We have a partnership there I'll talk about. Whole variety of activities, that is really the glue. It's the only flexible funding that the states get from the federal government for these activities in a normal year and are the IJA. Transmission planning, all those pieces they put together, working with their private sector, local government, constituents, disadvantaged communities, that's what they accomplish. And that's just an important thing to keep in mind. Front and center and all of that is there are these sort of multi-headed challenges, which are opportunities in the context of these bills of affordability, reliability and climate and a variety of other things that are important to state and local governments, depending on the state. The second piece I went in on is that cross-cutting component. Part of that has a foundational element in the state energy program, but also think about the dollars that you probably have heard about coming out of the Environmental Protection Agency, the greenhouse gas reduction fund, some 27 billion dollars divided in different ways, additional planning funds, a lot of those are financing components, some grants, a lot of those are also funding specific climate projects that states and local governments individually, tee up that makes sense for their communities. There are big chunks for workforce development as well, both at DOL, the Department of Energy and State Dollars. The financing component really can't be overstated, but the other piece of this is something very familiar to everybody in the room, permitting and zoning and siting of energy projects of all types. And that cross-cutting planning money, some of which is in the IJA, most of which is in the form of the state energy program or existing state and local dollars are critical to realizing any of the infrastructure dollars that were passed out of Congress. Not a new topic, everybody knows it here well, it's important, but there are different pieces of that. And I think we can't overstate really the part that state governments in particular have in working with their industry. Most of these activities are in the control of state local governments in the private sector. There is a federal role, obviously, but that cross-cutting piece, none of this happens without it and really just wanna stress that. We see great actions in states like Indiana where the governor and the legislature have moved voluntary programs to get local governments renewable ready, for example, for siting, so that the community is educated about what it means and what it doesn't. We're also separately in other states beginning to work with renewable project developers so that they come into a community with a clear mind and a plan about how they're gonna engage the community up front. There are a lot of things that none of us do as well as we could in this space. There are great examples here. There are also tougher problems on federal lands, excuse me, and siting on federal lands, particularly in the West, that have to be resolved. And those are more federal issues. Department of Interior and certainly in the offshore wind and other areas. The third place I wanted to touch on briefly are some of the examples of what we're seeing. And again, these are things that people have at the state level, plans in the works, the dollars haven't started flowing yet, but they're getting ready. The hydrogen hubs which received, I mean, really so much news and not hype, but news in the sense that everybody was engaged and interested. In every region of the country, our members came together with their governors, created regional collaboratives around hydrogen and the hydrogen hubs, thought about what it meant for their businesses, for the resources they have, and many of them bid on those projects. We'll see what the outcomes are. I won't cite any particular region, except to say everybody took a little bit different approach that made sense for them. It's a huge opportunity. We had just deeply involved in no particular order, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Colorado, New York, California, New Jersey, all of the energy offices across the country, nearly all of them engaged in this topic in one way or another and working toward those hubs. There's a section of the IJA, we call it 401D for shorthand, it's grid resilience. There are formula funds that go to the states, there are competitive funds that go to utilities, both consumer and investor-owned, large and small, $2.5 billion to the states. The energy offices, about 90% of them were designated by their governors to handle these funds. They're working with their utilities and their communities to see where they can plug holes, if you will, in grid resilience issues that are at their state level. It's obviously a small drop in the bucket compared to what we need to do, but it gets people moving directionally the right way. We have Tennessee engage that, in that California, Hawaii, New York, almost every state working, putting together plans, those get submitted to the Department of Energy in about another two weeks. So we'll begin to see what those looks like. They unfold over five years. The EV infrastructure activities, this is a really amazing story. It came about in an odd way, we'll skip that, but we have the Department of Energy, the federal level, and the Department of Transportation, the state energy offices and the state transportation offices. That sounds really complicated. It's an amazing success story already. The Neve dollars, $5 billion, the states have turned in their plans. The state DOTs and energy offices completed around the six regional meetings on plan implementation. The dollars will be flowing and the integration with the industry, both the electric industry and the auto industry and the providers are going really well. It's a good story, good news. They're beginning to think about what that means for other areas of transportation electrification. The joint office at DOE, again, couldn't be going better. People are very pleased. I will say just to maybe pat the energy offices on the back, they've been working on alternative fuels issues for 30 years. They've been working on EVs since before there was a Tesla S. They've been thinking about this. So they were ready to run and I think their DOT partners have done the same thing. Transmission planning, we have a variety of working groups that our members participate in looking at different regional issues around transmission. There's obviously a lot of sighting work here but there are also some low-hanging fruit. Some seams issues between different parts of the grid particularly in the Midwest and the center part of the country between the Eastern and Western interconnect. Another low-hanging fruit piece is re-conductory. High efficiency transmission cable that carries two and three times the load at 20% less line loss. That's efficiency. You have more power making it from the plant to the actual endpoint. Cost effective already. We're not doing nearly enough of it. It's made here in the US already. It's really a no-brainer. So our folks are working on that as well. Last couple of items, carbon utilization and carbon capture. I think probably the best success story here we see along the Gulf Coast, the Petrochem complex, Louisiana, Texas, Oklahoma, they've been working this issue for a while. Billions of dollars in private investment to build on existing carbon pipelines, existing refineries, existing hydrogen infrastructure, in fact, bringing that together to take advantage of some of the fossil energy and carbon management office at DOE resources but also the tax credits. And that is the other part of this story in the IRA. We have huge tax credits that are becoming available very quickly. Treasury's working really fast with DOE and other agencies to make that happen. The private sector's stepping up. The states are savvy to what those are. They're looking at their resources, their businesses, and seeing how they can jumpstart that. This is a place where that's happening in real time and I really commend you to take a look at it. We have resources about most of these on our website. I won't do anything except tell you, just type in Google in the term, Google Nazio Hydrogen, Nazio Transmission, you'll probably get where you wanna go. The last one probably has the most attention and those are the high efficiency electrification rebates and the so-called home, whole home rebate program. Most people think of them as one program, they're actually two. It's a total of $9 billion, about $4.2 billion each. Our members manage those funds, they will all come to them. As Henry mentioned, we are working hand in glove with their staff. These are complicated programs. We have a major task force, including almost every state in the country that we work with, about 50 private sector companies ranging from retailers such as Lowe's and Home Depot, small and large, manufacturers train, manufacturer heat pumps, ream, whirlpool, a long list, I'm leading a lot of people out that contribute to this and they're thinking through, what is the consumer experience gonna be like? A lot of those dollars are reserved for low income folks. What is their experience gonna be like? How is it gonna benefit them? How do we do it fairly? It's a complicated program and I think it's worth taking a little time to get it right. There's a rush to get it out, people have a need, we wanna meet that, we also wanna do it right. So I'm gonna pause there, happy to take questions and appreciate the time, Dan. I wasn't joking about 10 pounds of flour and a five pound bag. This is an enormous set of topics. We have a microphone wrangler by the name of Tyler. Thank you, Tyler. And if you have questions, please feel free to raise your hand and we will do our best to find you. If you have questions in the online audience, oh, we have David up here actually, we'll start with you. Since you're the person who made all of this possible with the Sustainable Energy Coalition and Representative Tonko's office. So David, why don't we start with you and we'll go from there. Great, thanks. David Scott, Executive Director of the House Sustainable Energy Environment Coalition, connecting both of your points on the rebate programs. Your reference that they're set up to be point of sale, which of course will help with the take up. But since these are handled by the states and there is the income component of this, what is it starting, what are you all exploring at this point in terms of how you will do point of sale while also verifying income of this? Start out and then I let David jump into he's been heavily involved in these conversations. So there is an income verification aspect to this. So we're making sure that the individual is being qualified to get these resources. What we're looking at is, and I know the conversation I've been around, what is the best way to gather that information? I mean, there are certainly certain privacy issues of course that you have to take into consideration when you're trying to figure these things out. So we're looking at, I know a number of tools. I know some states have tools already that they're using for income verification. There's also, certainly we have partner agencies that snap and hood and public housing and things of that nature, but we're pretty sure that the folks in those areas are qualified. And I think it's really thinking about, what is the best way to leverage tools and make it easy to really verify this income, again, maintaining privacy of the individual, but also not delaying it beyond what needs to happen. David, I know you've been heavily involved with my team on this. Yeah, and it's a complicated question, but just a couple of things I think I would share. One, I think there's maybe, if you don't work in this space at the state level or maybe the national level, you might intuitively think a national program would be easier. By the time you talk to three or four states or three or four people in the business, you pretty quickly realize that from an implementation perspective, it would have been impossible. You have rural states, largely urban states. You have in every state as much money as this is, it's a fraction of the low-income population that benefits, how do you decide and choose? So the point of sale piece is important, much as Henry said, income verification will happen by this state. Retailers will not be dealing with that, providers won't be dealing with that. Coming up with an interface, which I suspect to you we will have some opt-ins for states, but states have run rebate programs like this for a long time. This is larger, I'm not diminishing that it's not complicated, but you also have the issue of the lens through which you see the 80% of area meeting income, for example, and how you apply that differs greatly from state to state. There's parts of the countries where a heat pump, a low-temperature heat pump may make a lot of sense in a household. They're parts of the country when it's not gonna make sense. So there's a differentiation of product. There's a consumer education component that goes to this. So the states will handle the income verification component. They'll look through lenses such as the state low-income programs they offer already, federal programs to try and pre-qualify people so that a customer doesn't have to go through all of those hoops before they get to their local retailer, their provider, whoever's providing that service, and that they have some kind of reasonable, probably largely electronic, but also there needs to be a paper means, not everybody is electronic, in order to capture that rebate. There is certain data and information that I think we and DOE are in pretty strong alignment that need to be collected in that process so we know how the money's being used. We saw this in ARA just as a really quick refresh. There was a rebate program in ARA for energy star equipment. The states ran that flawlessly. Every one of them, the territories across the country, operated those, no fraud, no abuse, it's run well. I think we'll see a very similar thing here. There's a lot to think through. The one thing I would caution, there is a big push politically both in certain parts of the states and at the federal government to move very quickly because there's a need and a desire to get something done. I would suggest this is a program you don't wanna make a mistake on. And I am concerned that we take the time that we and Henry and his team have been taking and use that well so the consumer has a good experience, the retailer has a good experience, the manufacturer has a good experience, and we have a good story to tell when we're done. Hi, thank you very much to both of you. Can I ask two questions? One to me. Well, since you're a panelist on the second panel, I suppose I have to- Oh, privilege. So go ahead. Sorry. Okay, to Mr. McCoy. I was wondering with all these programs, amazing programs that go through the states, how are you going to ensure kind of like an equitable flow of capital to all states, including those states that are not as motivated as others to implement these changes? Oh yeah, great question. And so yeah, this equity piece that I mentioned is a critical part of this work, right? One doesn't go without the other. And so part of what we do, of course, and your question has some layers in it, right? I mean, on one level, we have formula programs that every state is qualified for. I mean, they get the amount of money and that's what you're getting. We also know that, you know, different states may look at these resources in different ways as it relates to the decision to draw them down and things of that nature. But in terms of working with the state energy officer, I mean, everyone I've worked with has just been tremendously dedicated to the communities that they come from, right? And so I say this, we feel like that, you know, we've baked into our process, our application process, as I mentioned before, community benefits agreement. So we're making sure that everyone thinks about how the community has to benefit from these resources. And again, I feel like the states are already really motivated around that. We also hope that within this context that we want politics to be out of it in that sense, right? Where when you're talking about connecting to people, particularly people that really need a lot of the opportunity and, you know, whether it be workforce or things of that nature, that, you know, every state will decide to participate. But we have now, through justice 40 through our systems around grants, we have systems that basically capture data on that. So the states have to report, local governments have to report what they're doing around justice 40. They also, I mean, David and his team have been wonderful about saying, hey, you know, we really want to work with you all around, you know, how do we see justice 40 get implemented in the work around that. So I say that, you say that so many of our programs, I mean, at the very foundation, we start out thinking about how is this gonna, I'm going and help the communities that really most needed. And so I feel like that, you know, with that as a foundation, it's impacting everything that we do and how we design our programs, how we implement them, again, how we meet communities where they are to really understand what they need and not just sitting kind of an average tower. Thank you. I appreciate that. Second question is regarding the rebates. So I am concerned with the ability for again, small local contractors. You said this is gonna be had at the point of sale. So, you know, when you talk about the big networks, the Lowe's and the Home Depot, then that's all good. But then you have communities that work with their local installers. Are you thinking about working with the people or the organization non-profit CDFIs that finance low income communities and therefore use local installers that are underbanked or that may not be using these networks or are you thinking of other resources like that? Yeah, I have been and that's sort of the everyday business, frankly, that it was a precursor to all these programs. Most of the states were already doing that. So it's a natural fit. They need to do that for their local communities. But I wanna back up to your other question. I know every state really well, everybody's motivated. This is exciting, important work. They have constituents that need it. That's not an issue. Not to say that every industry in the country, including government, is short staff. And that's true at the federal level, state level, local level. So there is that. If there's any detection of not motivation, it's not motivation. It's just, if you haven't tried to hire anybody recently, let me tell you it's challenging. So on your point though, yeah, part of the challenge in designing the rebate program, much as the Energy Star rebate program in 2010 was designed by each individual state, they had to make that program for, Sue's One Person HVAC company and Acme Incorporated with 10,000 employees or 100,000 employees. And you can do that. It's not easy, but you can do that. It's not new. There also are utility programs, many of which are members oversee or engaged with that operate as well. Some of those are good fit. Some of those are not a good fit. This is a different animal. Weatherization Assistance Program, in some respects, that's a good fit and some respects not for these programs. So that's the part where I said it may feel like a national program is a great idea. One size fits all. Not surprisingly, being a state organization, we don't think that's a good idea. And that's not what Congress delivered, which I think is pretty wise. Thank you. Thanks very much. Thank you very much. And given the enthusiasm that you refer to, David, and I want to ask Dr. McCoy as well as Dan, really quickly, what's going to be the role of the US Congress given the landmark nature of this legislation? How does Congress fit into the implementation and down the road over the next months and years? What do you see their role during that time? Happy to start. I think at least two roles. I think there are probably many. First and foremost, oversight. Clearly, that's important. You need a check and balance on what's being done, the pace at which it's being done, all the things that are part of the congressional responsibility role and authority. I think the other piece is a lot harder. And I talked a little bit with Dan about it before the session, but the expectation setting, just by accident, nobody on purpose, some in the media, some in advocacy groups, some at the federal and state level. The message that we send about these programs, the dollars are available now and come get them. The rebate programs are exhibit A. There's been a lot of the media as though you can go and get your rebate tomorrow and it's open to everybody. That is not true. It is not open, it hasn't started and it's not available to everybody. It's intended to largely be a low income program. So I think congressional expectation setting and the differentiation, it's a lot different to build a transmission project than it is to run a rebate program than it is to help weatherize somebody's home for next winter. So I think those are the expectation setting as well. Obviously the oversight and measurement's an important one and we support that kind of transparency. I think DOE has a good record of transparency on these issues. The states, that is what they do every day. Yeah, and I will, you know, I'm thinking back on that, Amy in that part and I'll add an initial that's going to sound a little self-serving, right? A number of these provisions are one-time provisions, right? But if you think about the job ahead, particularly as it relates to investments in communities, you know, we often talk about things like, you know, the great technical challenges of the carbonization and energy and things of that nature, floating wind, hydrogen, all these kind of things. But it's also a pretty incredible technical challenge in terms of how to get these resources into communities, particularly the communities that have been kind of left behind over time. And that's not a one-time or two-year, three-year thing. I mean, that takes time. And so, you know, I hope that as a part of this process that we can not only look at the kind of resources that are going to our legacy program, but also think about, you know, some of these great palates that are being done right now, some of these things that are being invested now, you know, are there ways for those to ultimately show up in base funding and long-term funding on an annual basis? Understanding, we're going into these communities and asking them to put together plans that are real long-term plans. How do we make sure that we're funding those plans in the long-term? And hopefully we can take politics out of it and just think about the idea of getting communities to access the capital. So. No, because we have one last quick rapid-fire question from the audience. I'd like to make sure we get to you. We've got our question corner up here in the front. So, Tyler, and then we'll switch panels and people can take a donut break. Hi, my name is Aiden from the Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun. My question is, I don't know if this is the right forum, but on carbon capture utilization, storage, et cetera, I'm wondering how the IRA addresses the kind of issues of like scaling that to a large scale and making it like cost effective because I think that's one of the biggest issues these days with that kind of technology. I can take a stab at that. Not my area of expertise, my staff are better at it, but I will tell you the IRA tax credit component, the additional more than doubling of the price of carbon and the tax makes it financially feasible. And I always point to the petrokin sector along the Gulf Coast where we do have some of that infrastructure in place already and you have an end use case for it already. There are other examples that we have to build out in other parts of the country. So I think that part is there's a path to that being economic that is quicker in that part of the economy and that part of the country. And I think that's one to focus on. There's a really natural connection to the hydrogen activities as well in that particular market and would recommend that you take a look at a Pennsylvania company, Air Products. They're actively engaged in that area, most of the major oil companies, but I think probably the best example, Governor Edwards and Louisiana and his team at the energy office, they have been leading on this for some time. One of the missing components that is incredibly challenging is class six well. These are the wells where the carbon would be pumped down in storage, if you will. There's a lot of science around it. It's a safe proven technology and approach. Giving the state's primacy, which is a normal process on many environmental regulations to do that so we can move more quickly is important. That has been moving very slowly for two administrations. We hope it goes more quickly. I think the administrative region is doing a great job of moving that forward, but that's a critical component we have to move more quickly on. Private sector is investing and they are ready to go waiting on that action. Well, thank you very much and thanks for the last question. Henry and David, thank you for joining us today and sharing your thoughts about how everything is going in the world of IJA and IRA. I did six years at the Maryland Energy Administration. State energy offices are critically important in all the ways that David said and if you haven't already reached out to your state energy office or to NASIO, I definitely recommend you do that. It's a great resource to understand exactly what's happening to the benefit of your states and districts. And Henry, again, thanks to you and your amazing team at DOE that's growing. It seems by the day, which is excellent. I need all the help you can get and we're all rooting for you. So thank you so much for joining us today. I think they deserve a round of applause. So we are going to transition to panel number two. For those of you who are in the room, there are some donuts in the back. This would be a time to do that with Grace if you wish to go get one. Make sure to come back because you're not gonna wanna miss our second panel. It's quite good. Sorry we didn't get to the online questions. We'll do our best for the second panel. And as a reminder, if you'd like to go back and see any of David's presentation or Henry's presentation, everything will be available online, including their presentation materials. Henry's slides in particular are great and so I encourage you. And also, we didn't talk much about it but Henry's slides also has some suggestions about how congressional staff can stay updated. David talked about how things are happening, present tense, future tense. And so there's some great recommendations in there about how staff can keep up with what's going on. Do we need to open the laptop? All right, let's open the laptop. Great. All right, so we have three quarters of our panel. Who are missing? Oh no. Come on. What's she got? She's probably getting a donut. I don't blame her. They're dunking donuts. We're not beholden to house catering in this room so he's flurged. There she is. All right, so here we go. We'll move on to our first panelist's slides. All right, so second panel, we have four really tremendous folks who will be sharing their expertise. A lot of the issues actually that came up in the last panel will be dealt with again on this panel in even greater detail. Our first panelist is Sarah Klein. Sarah is an independent consultant specializing in transportation policy. She began her career in the US Senate where she served for eight years as counsel to the Committee on Banking Housing and Urban Affairs. On the banking committee, she had responsibility for all transit-related matters as well as various housing, finance, and insurance issues. She further developed her transit expertise as Director of Policy and Government Relations for the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority. She led policy development and research for two national nonprofit organizations, Transportation for America and Reconnecting America. And today, Sarah is joining us as a consultant to the Bipartisan Policy Center. Sarah, welcome to the briefing. I'll turn it over to you. Great, thank you very much, Dan. I'll walk over to the mic. Can everyone in the back hear me okay? That's often a challenge. Okay, terrific. And we'll make sure the slides advance. They do, great. So I'm here to talk about specifically the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, otherwise known as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. I'm gonna start with a brief overview of this enormous bill. Trans, then go to some more deep dive into some transportation programs and finally talk a little bit about the status of implementation. So as you all know, this is an enormous bill authorizing $1.2 trillion for infrastructure across a variety of sectors, transportation being the largest in terms of dollar amount, but also energy, broadband, water, variety of other things as well. This is a really unique piece of legislation and I think it's worth just pausing for a moment to note how it's so unique. First of all, Congress mushed together all of these infrastructure sectors into one bill which almost never happens. Usually Congress works in silos and does each program separately. It also mushes together authorization and appropriation which again usually is done separately but in this case decided to do some of both. And as a little point of interesting legislative history it didn't go through the usual House Senate conference process but instead was directly negotiated between a group of senators and the White House but it ultimately did pass in November, 2021 with bipartisan support. Of the funding in the infrastructure law more than half of it goes out by formula meaning that the law itself specifies who's going to get the funds and how much they're going to get and a lot of that formula funding goes directly to state agencies as we've heard a little bit about. My slides are, my numbers didn't quite work. It's 75% in the transit program. In addition to all those formula funds there are over 100 competitive grant programs in the infrastructure law. This is just an enormous number of opportunities for states, counties, cities, tribes and other entities to apply for funding directly from the federal government. We have on the bipartisan policy center website a list of all of those programs just in case you can't read the tiny little print on the screen. That's just a subset anyway because there's a whole bunch of programs. So you can take a look at that if you are interested in seeing what types of opportunities are going to be available over the next five years for folks in your districts. The White House is doing us a big favor in this regard by reporting out on the website build.gov what funding has already been announced or awarded and they have a really cool interactive map. They didn't tell me to say this. I don't even know who's putting it together but I think it's cool. Where you can zoom down even to the county level click on one of the little dots and see what grants have been awarded already in that county. So I encourage everyone to check it out because it's pretty cool. Zooming into transportation a little bit which is as I said the bulk of the funding in the IJA and also my particular area of expertise. So that's what I'm going to talk about. Most of that funding as I said does go directly to state departments of transportation in through formula programs. I've listed the major formula programs here on the slide. Look at those numbers for a second but this slide itself these seven programs are well over $200 billion. So the scale of this is really just enormous. So because this is congressional climate camp you might be wondering which ones of these are the climate programs. Well there are four of these formula programs that are specifically focused on climate friendly projects or projects to reduce emissions. The congestion mitigation and air quality improvement program has been around for decades actually has been the signature climate program of the surface transportation acts for many years but the IJA enacted three new formula programs specifically focused on carbon reduction which is for projects that reduce emissions. A protect program which I can't remember what that stands for but the program is focused on resilience and then the charging and fueling formula program which is designed to support electric vehicle charging infrastructure and other fueling infrastructure. So these four are specifically focused on climate but those two at the top which those two programs themselves actually represent just by themselves more than $200 billion. They can also be used for climate friendly projects if state departments of transportation choose to use them that way. In fact, state departments of transportation have a lot of flexibility in how they use federal highway funding. It's called highway funding. It can be used for highways. It can be used for bridges, for repair, for construction, et cetera but it can also be used for transit, bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure, traffic management programs. It can be used for charging and resilience. So there are tons of resources available actually for these types of programs. Switching to the competitive side, as I mentioned there's a bazillion of these new competitive programs. There are some with a specific climate focus low and no emission buses. More funding for charging and fueling and resilience as well as other specific programs like reduction of emissions at ports. But just like with the formula side there are lots of other programs that may not specifically call out themselves as climate programs but can be used for emission reducing projects. So they may be focused on safe streets. They may be focused on innovative technologies. All of those types of programs can also support projects to reduce emissions. So if I leave you with one bottom line here it's that the whole surface transportation program these multiple hundreds of billions of dollars can be considered to be a climate program. It's going to have an impact on our emissions in the future. We just don't know for sure today exactly what that impact is going to be because as was alluded to in the first panel a lot of the decisions have not yet been made at the state and local level as to how these funds are going to be used. So there's a complex looking graph on this slide that was put together by the Georgetown Climate Center who ran two different scenarios making some estimates about what types of projects these funds might be used for. And the bottom line here which is kind of seems kind of obvious in retrospect but they did a lot of analysis to show it is that if these funds if the states and communities getting these funds decide to invest them in projects that encourage for example more driving and we have less electric vehicle infrastructure there's going to be more emissions. If they use them for projects that transition to the electric vehicles faster encourage people to do other things like take transit, take a bike and walk then we'll have less emissions. We just don't know at this point what this package of projects ultimately is going to look like. So let's talk a little bit about the status of implementation. The formula funds have generally gone out as scheduled. It's not, I mean it's not easy but it's also not that hard to send those out the door because the law says who gets how much many of the competitive programs have also been launched not all of them but many of them they've accepted applications some of them have awarded funds some are even in their second round of applications which is great. There are still a number of initiatives in the bill that haven't been launched. There's some pilot programs, some guidance and regulation that need to be updated. These are very important things. Obviously Congress wanted them to be done they're in the law but I think the departments have prioritized getting funds out the door over updating regulations and guidance despite the fact that that is also important. I think it's fair to say that given the scope and the scale of this bill reasonable progress has been made. There are some challenges that remain again it was alluded to in the first panel that the timeframe for this bill is long. People are not gonna see the impacts tomorrow or next week for the most part. This is a long term thing. States and local governments did not have $1.2 trillion worth of projects ready to go. They are now in the process of figuring out what those projects are gonna be planning them, permitting them, applying for funds, working all that out. So the timeframe here I think people's expectations need to be a little bit reset. It's gonna take a while before we fully see the impacts. There's a couple of other challenges with regard to implementation that still remain even though we're over a year into it. Federal agencies are struggling to hire enough staff. State and local governments are struggling to hire enough staff to deal with all the programs that are available. There are economic issues that are affecting things. We're in a high inflationary environment. The purchasing power of a dollar today is not what it was in November of 2021. So how do folks handle that? There is an upcoming congressional debate over spending in fiscal year 24 and future fiscal years. We don't know if the infrastructure law programs are going to be kind of swept up in that or not, but that is also something folks should definitely be aware of. I think if these challenges can be overcome and I know that everyone is working hard to make sure that they are, this bill promises real progress in meeting our infrastructure needs and the future climate needs of the country. Thank you. Thank you, Sarah, that was great. As a reminder, we'll have a Q and A period with our second panel as well. So start jotting those down. If you're in our online audience, you can send us an email. Email address to use this ask ask at esi.org. We can follow us on Twitter at EESI online. This brings us to our second panelist, Kevin Renner. Kevin joined Resources for the Future as a visiting fellow in 2017. And before RFFs, Kevin served as Deputy Associate Administrator for the Office of Policy at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Leading up to his appointment in the Office of Policy, he worked as senior advisor on energy for the Senate Finance Committee from 2008 to 2014. He worked on energy and climate legislation as senior professional staff for Senate Energy. In that capacity, Kevin led the development of the Clean Energy Standard Act of 2012, a presidential priority that would have used market mechanisms to double the amount of electricity generated in the U.S. from low and zero carbon sources. Kevin, welcome to the lectern. I'll get your slides teed up and you can take it away. Thank you. Thanks, everybody. It's fantastic to be here. So if I stand up straight, can the people in the back hear me and the mic looks okay? Excellent, good. Wonderful. So I'm here from Resources for the Future. For those of you that don't know Resources for the Future, we've been around for 70 years in Washington, D.C. We are a nonpartisan economics analysis firm. We, I say firm, we are a nonprofit. We've been informing decisions on energy and natural resources over that time to a great extent and we would love to be engaged with all of you and the questions that your bosses have. So please come to us with any of things related to this. So I'm gonna talk a bit about the Inflation Reduction Act since we just talked about the bill or the bipartisan infrastructure law. And I'm specifically gonna focus on the power sector because that is one area where a lot of the emission reductions from the bill are expected to come from. And so just to give you a very, very thumbnail sketch of some of the key provisions of this, there are a lot of tax incentives within the IRA that are quite important. The first is that there is a very long-term extension of production tax credits for producing clean electricity, also the investment tax credits, which gives you a credit against the capital that you use to build out clean electricity projects. And these have been sort of seminal, very important provisions for a long time to transition the power sector to renewable electricity. What happened in the IRA was fundamentally important in that it moved from being a sort of on-again, off-again, short-term extension kind of approach to a very long-term pathway that the sector can build around. So as a part of that, it actually transitioned to a technology neutral, a set of incentive structures, which is based on the emissions rates of a given kind of generation technology, as opposed to being specified as called out as a technology within the statute itself. This is huge because it's gonna be a long-lasting provision and you can just judge new technologies without them having to have a lot of lobbying on the hill to get them included in that list of creditable technologies. So the structure was set up a little bit differently in that there is a base rate of $5 per megawatt hour for the PTC and 6% for the ITC. But then there is this layered bonus structure where you can get a five times bonus multiplier if you meet prevailing wage and apprenticeship requirements. Another 10% comes from projects that are located in so-called energy communities. There's another bonus if you are able to have your projects meet a set of domestic content criteria. So overall, it can actually be an incredibly substantial set of incentives for these types of projects. In addition to just things that are kind of thought more for renewables, we have a production tax credit now for existing nuclear generators, which is also tied to market conditions. As a former panelist mentions, the 45Q credit for capture and storage has been greatly enhanced. It was doubled to $85 per ton. And finally, there are a lot of provisions to make it easier to monetize these tax credits. So tax exempt entities now are eligible for direct pay as well as those that are taxable have the ability to transfer these credits to others as well, which really streamlines that process and makes it so you don't lose as much value that Congress intended to go to these project developers just in the monetization of those tax credits. So that's kind of, there are lots of other tax credits. This is very much a thumbnail sketch. There's a great CRS report that I should have linked to here if you want. ESI has resources. There are a million resources out there that give a much more comprehensive list. But these are the ones that I'm kind of thinking of as I'm showing you results from our modeling exercise to understand what these incentives are likely to do in the coming years here. So RFF, as in our analysis, we operate two different detailed power sector models. One is called Haiku, one is E4ST, which is referred to as East. Normally we do not use these for the same policies because that's a huge duplication because they both have their own sort of specialty. But the IRA was an important enough policy and it is now the baseline for kind of policies moving forward that both of these models were turned on to see how the policy would interact. Now under, I'm gonna show you sort of two different things which is probably hard to see from the back. I'm showing you kind of changes in electricity capacity. So these are actual steel in the grounds to generate megawatts. I'm also showing you changes in generation and from what the sources of those are coming from. And generation obviously is the electricity that's being generated from those projects. So under the IRA, both of these models, well, first of all, I would say that in the baseline this kind of, there's a no IRA case that's shown for both of these models. You'll see that in both of them for the no IRA case, there definitely were substantial increases in wind and solar expected. That's part of the baseline expectation. In the presence of the IRA though, with the economic incentives, the way that they are, you see that that really is amplified to a tremendous degree. So you see that both models are showing that solar and wind capacity are in particular built out well above their historical maximum. So it's a huge deployment that is being shown within these models. You also see that as another panelist I'm kind of alluded to, the CCS credits aren't expected to be very substantially able to make those projects viable. And so what you find is that many of those that are modeling these sectors right now are seeing that their models is so economically viable it wants to retrofit all of the plants or build lots of new plants moving forward with CCS. And so there's a lot of kind of modeler insights that try to say, what are the real world implications and what are the potential real world constraints that will kind of mediate some of these kind of economic incentives. I also see that the east between the two builds less kind of capacity but actually has very similar generation and this attributable to the fact that it sees a higher capacity factor. These resources getting used more often than high crude does. So with that change in kind of clean electricity capacity on the grid, what does that mean for emissions? I'm showing you carbon dioxide emissions. The dark blue line on the top is in the absence of the IRA. The lighter blue line is in the presence of the IRA. So our new baseline condition, you see that both of the models are showing certainly very substantial CO2 reductions compared to the baseline before which did not have the IRA present. You also see that even though emissions really come down within the power sector, that they do not reach President Biden's goal of getting to net zero in the power sector by 2035. And they also actually don't trigger the value which the tax credits start to automatically phase out. This is the green line I'm showing here which represents 25% below 2022 levels of emissions from the power sector. That is said in the statute that if you hit that within the power sector after 2032, the credits start to phase down. We show that in our modeling that you're still expected to be at or above that even through 2035, which means that's the runway for developers thinking about these credits is quite long compared to anything that they have ever seen before. Finally, you see that that's east between the two models sees greater emission reductions due to the CCS that it builds out, the carbon capture that it builds out. So the way that the IRA was structured as being incentive based is fundamentally different from other approaches people have thought about in terms of decarbonizing the power sector or other sectors because when the government is giving incentives, there's the opportunity for those incentives to flow through to consumers. And that's sort of standard economic theory, but it's also something that we are seeing within the economic models as well. And I'm showing you here the effects on retail electricity prices. It's kind of a strange way of looking at this, but we're thinking about the next 10 years kind of on average what a consumer would expect to see in terms of retail electricity prices just to ground you compared to what electric prices are right now in the national IRA. The orange is showing what the old baseline was without the IRA. The blue is showing you the change with the IRA. And so what you see is that the blue bars are much bigger and much more negative because they are actually reducing retail electricity rates on the order of between 5% and 7% in the national average just by the virtue of these credits and the value of these credits flowing down to consumers. Another way to think about the IRA is in terms of what it is doing to baseline air quality. As you are reducing the reliance on fossil fuels in various different parts of the country, you are reducing the emissions of sulfur dioxide, of NOx emissions, and these have really important health benefits. And so when you look at these also in the baseline, you're seeing that these reductions of these two particular pollutants are really coming down as a result of these decreased reliance on fossil fuels. And if you look at this map, you can see that the bars are greater in areas where you might expect there to have been greater reliance on fossil fuels. When people think about the benefits of the IRA, they often think about things like retail electricity rates and things of that nature. These improvements of air quality are also incredibly important and have benefits that often don't get monetized in analysis. The final point that I'll make in any of this is that the way that the IRA was paid for is ends up being fairly progressive. And so what we're doing here is, if you think about the way that a household is likely to experience the Inflation Reduction Act, it's going to see it's kind of bills change in a few different ways. One is through the reductions in electricity prices that I already alluded to before, as well as in savings, kind of on other goods and services in the economy that are also using kind of have reduced retail like this in rates. There will also be a change in generator profits. And finally, there's going to be a change in tax burden because the IRA itself was funded through a change in the corporate income tax rate. So if you want to think about what any household is going to experience, it's going to be some kind of combination of all these. And RFF runs a social welfare incidence model and has looked at this. And I'm showing you here the kind of distribution across different income quintiles. The black bar is showing you kind of the nets of all these different pieces. And so what you see when you kind of grind all these things through together, you see that the lowest quintiles actually end up coming out ahead all the way up through the kind of the fourth quintile where they're kind of just about kind of coming out even, indicating that the entire policy itself and the way that it's paid for ends up being a relatively progressive way of funding the package. So in conclusion, the IRA is really setting up a market environment that strongly favors the deployments of new clean electricity. And that our new baseline that includes the IRA is kind of suggests that there's going to be substantially greater clean electricity generation, associated reductions in air pollution and widespread kind of air quality improvements. Those tax incentives are reducing reach electricity prices, which is important because it is also then making it easier to electrify other sectors, to reduce emissions from those sectors as well. By themselves, the tax credits are not expected to decarbonize the power sector by 2035 and those tax credits are expected to be very long lived. Finally, these are economic models. A lot of the real world conditions that are faced in terms of deploying kind of these projects at the scale and pace that will be needed to achieve in the results in here are going to be incredibly important both to represent and modeling, but also to have policy makers working to address so that you can actually achieve the potential of these kinds of legislation together. Thank you very much. Thank you, Kevin, that was great. Oops. Thank you, that was great. And if you'd like to go back and revisit any of Kevin's slides, of course, they're all online at www.eside.org. Scroll through. All right, so our third panelist, we're not even close to being out of IRA and IJA programs to talk about. And so our next panelist is gonna help us understand a big one. Dewan Andrade is the executive director of the Solar and Energy Loan Fund or CELF in Florida. She leads the organization and is responsible for raising public, private and philanthropic capital, overseeing the financial operation, risk management and loan portfolio performance and developing innovative financing programs to help low and moderate income populations gain access to affordable capital for sustainable home improvements. Dewan is a Bolivia national and she developed a passion for social and environmental justice issues while growing up in eight countries spawning four continents. Welcome to the briefing today. I'll turn it over to you. Thank you. Good afternoon. Buenas tardes. Konnichiwa. So after these presentations, I'm just like, wow. I think I'm gonna try and bring all of that down to very much a ground level and try to share with you what it looks like to be working in the space and in the spaces that the IRA and all of this will be benefiting. So let's start with this infographic, which is like a very simple, you know, way to kind of show and demystify how we see the IIJA and the IRA working together. The Infrastructure Investment Jobs Act, the Big Picture Federal Funding for all the, you know, the bridges, the transportation, railways, water. I mean, there is great information about all that right now and it is huge and amazing. Then the way we see it is, you know, you need to kind of have that flow down to community. The IRA really focuses on bringing those funds down to kind of a more tangible level by the people in the community. Amazing, finally, you have 40% earmarked, intentionally set up to benefit low income and disadvantaged communities. That is historic and we should applaud that tremendously for this administration. So now those funds from the IRA are gonna flow through the state agency, sorry, federal agencies like EPA, Department of Energy, DOL, HUD. But really, in the end of the day, in order for those funds to reach communities, you're gonna need the local governments, the local jurisdictions, and then a plethora of community-based organizations including community development, financial institutions, green banks, credit unions, community-based organizations and networks, developer network, nonprofit networks. And then all of that can create these resilient, low-carbon, thriving, sustainable communities. So with that, I'm gonna briefly introduce self as an example of an implementation tool. Our mission is to rebuild and empower underserved communities by providing accessible and affordable financing to improve healthy and to create and improve homes, make them resilient and sustainable. We are the only and first green bank and CDFI hybrid model in the country. We were created in 2009 by St. Lucie County, Florida with a $3 million DOE grant from the ECBG, that's a lot of letters, from the Energy Efficiency Block Grant. Those $3 million today have raised and leveraged $40 million in capital, direct capital into the organization, and that has now leveraged over $100 million in projects. We were created to kickstart the green energy economy. So we're kind of back to where we tried to be 10 years ago, but now we're back with ammunition. So that's a good thing. So then we also operate in Florida and because there's such a need in the Southeast, we've now expanded to help other organizations across the Southeast. So I'm gonna focus a little bit on the Southeast because my question previously to one of the panelists about the equitable deployment of capital is really relevant to us in the South. It is not the same. The policy landscape is not the same in the South and the Southeast as it is in the North and Northeast. So we're kind of on our own there at the grassroots level. So we know that we need to scale the investments in these resilient energy efficient and low carbon buildings, especially housing, because the Southeast is the most vulnerable region to severe events, including hurricanes, extreme heat and sea level rise. More people in Southeast are cost burden than any other part of the country. More than a third of households have trouble paying their energy bill. The Southeast has lower average FICO scores, which means that they can't access capital either to make improvements that will benefit, not only protect their homes, but also reduce energy. And Florida by far has the highest percentage of cost burden renter households. So what did we do to address these issues? We created a loan program that would address the needs for homeowners, small to mid-sized landlords, developers, contractors, and then a specific product for solar, mostly focused on single family homes, now expanding into the broader multifamily. Like I mentioned before, our leveraging of every public dollar is 13 to one. And that is what I would like everybody here to keep in mind is that these funds ultimately have the power to leverage private capital and really bring those results and those benefits down to the community level. So how does IRA greenhouse gas reduction really help advance climate equity and inclusion? We already talked a lot about how the money flows. The IRA has about $394 billion gonna be broken down, mostly an investment in tax credits, which by the way, great idea. But when you think about low-income communities and low-income populations, they don't benefit from tax breaks. They don't have the base to begin with. Nonprofits don't benefit from tax breaks. So this is why it's incredible that there is a bucket for grants to provide technical assistance to build capacity. It's gonna be very important for us to focus on how to best use those funds. And then there is finally the direct pay. So all this time the ITC, the 30% tax credit for solar was available for again, for the people that have the money to invest. Well, the direct pay provides a path by which nonprofits can help low and moderate income populations benefit from the 30% ITC. So here we have in the ground, of course, our focus is gonna be the greenhouse gas reduction fund. I have to mouthful. 27 billion to mobilize and leverage private capital for greenhouse gas reduction emission with a focus on low-income and disadvantaged communities. The goals of course are to strengthen the capacity of the ecosystem. Hugely important to consider ecosystems, base ecosystems. It also intends to accelerate the transition to equitable net zero economies and to catalyze jobs for the future. Seven billion of these are earmarked to go through states, tribes, municipalities and eligible nonprofits, the academia. But 20 billion are eligible for nonprofit entities who are then going to deploy the capital down really to the grassroots of the ground level. Those are also gonna provide technical assistance and capacity building. This is tremendously important because in the end of the day, climate resiliency, energy efficiency and clean energy all do what? They save money. So in this time of higher inflation costs, higher costs for capital, higher costs for transportation, higher costs for rent, higher costs for mortgages, actually all of these investments are gonna help put most working class Americans in a better position to save money in their homes. The place from which every person can get set up to thrive. This is a place where well-being begins, it's the home. So we really think that these investments, this funding are gonna catalyze tremendous opportunities through the deployment of these funds in these ecosystems, which include the green banks, CDFIs, credit unions, I've already mentioned them. And I just wanna tell you that these organizations are ready to go. They're ready to scale, they're ready to deploy. We don't have to reinvent the wheel. What we have to do is do more of it. We have to replicate, we have to scale, we have to do more. So for example, green banks, there are 24 green banks right now, five nascent green banks in the South and Southeast. They've mobilized $14 billion in 2021 in green projects. Obviously that has a huge impact in gas reduction, but also saving people money and providing more accessible, resilient, strong homes. CDFIs, about 1,100 CDFIs nationwide, leveraging capacity, eight to one. By the way, the green banks leverage on average, three to one, but some of them like us, we leverage 13 to one. And then there's about 200 CDFIs in the Opportunity Finance Network that are already reporting on at least one green product that they offer to communities with a focus on low and moderate income communities. And they are preparing to deploy IRA, GHDR funds. Credit unions play a critical role in helping communities in the face of natural disasters. They also help with financial inclusion and coaching and all that. There are about 6,000 institutions nationally serving roughly 100 million consumers in the inclusive network alone, mobilizing $2.25 billion in green loan products in 2021 and other intermediaries that are ready to go. So I'm just gonna leave you with an example of really how self is kind of a model organization of how we can implement these funds and how we leverage and partner in public-private partnerships to effectively make sure that those funds reach communities. We partner with state and local governments, housing authorities, nonprofits. We customize programs and we leverage local government resources and raise blended capital. 70% of our clients are LMI and have no problem paying back the loan capital that we provide to them. In fact, we've deployed $30 million with less than 2% default rate, 70% LMI clients. So with that, I'm gonna leave you just with some examples. This is, sorry, this is an example of a solar project that we are doing in Miami-Dade with Miami-Dade County. It's a resiliency project. So again, solar for emergency response. This is a water quality. Martin County built the infrastructure, had a little bit of grants, had $200,000, needed to connect 400 households, 200 of them low and moderate income with no access to capital for $10,000 to hook up to the sewer system. We come in, we bring in $2 million, we set up their payment plans and we work with the utility and now we've deployed about $1 million in these loans and people are now having healthier and safe water in their homes. And to end, this is Pamela, one of our clients, cancer survivor, veteran, no access to funds, less than 500 credit score. Her roof was caving in after hurricane damage. She could not access funds. So what do we do? We bring in funding from US Treasury. We bring in funding from other sources, leverage it and are able to help her, protect her home and access insurance funds. Same thing with hurricane disaster recovery. We fill the gaps and we make it happen. Thank you. It is really hard not to be excited about the potential for leverage of these programs. It's very cool. It's also very hard not to be excited about all of the home energy rebate programs that are coming down the line. And to help us understand that a little bit more, we come to our fourth panelist, Jana Barisi serves as the head of the Washington DC office for Lowe's Companies, Inc. In this role, Jana leads Federal Government Affairs strategies for Lowe's. And this includes working closely with company leaders, key legislative and executive branch officials, and industry and trade associations on policy and initiatives relevant to the company's stakeholders, including customers, associates and communities. Prior to joining Lowe's, she served on the government affairs team at Walmart with increasing levels of responsibility. Most recently, as senior director of Federal Government Affairs, Jana, welcome. And just as a note, we are gonna go past our allotted time by a little bit, but that's okay. So we'll hear Jana and we'll still get to questions if you're looking at the clock and wondering why. There you go. Thank you. Thank you. We're excited to talk about rebates or what? Okay, there we go. I won't touch it again. Hi, everyone. Thank you so much for the opportunity to be here. I really appreciate it to be here to talk to you about how we at Lowe's are thinking about the rebate programs in particular, but obviously some of the tax incentives that are relevant to our customers and to the products that we sell. So just quickly about Lowe's, we are a Fortune 50 home improvement company. We have 1,700 stores around the country. We are in every state and Washington, DC. We employ about 300,000 associates around the country and we process about 17 million transactions a week. So, and again, focused in the home improvement space. I would just share too, as we think about customers and point of sale, I think this is really relevant. So if you think about our Lowe's customer, we kind of have customers and serve customers in different ways through different segments. So we have what we call the do-it-yourself customer. So that's URI going into a store and maybe buying something or buying an appliance and installing it on our own. We have a services business. So we call that sort of the do-it-for-me customer, right? So maybe customer buys something, but then we can connect them with a service provider who can install that product. In some cases, we may not sell the product, but we can connect a customer with a service provider. So think of like an HVAC, for example, we don't have those on the shelves, but we can help connect customers with relevant service providers. And then we have our pro-customer. So that is a contractor that's doing projects for consumers. So I raise that because I think those are all really important segments, customer segments that are gonna require different types of information and a different understanding of kind of how these programs specifically are relevant to them. So we've talked about this a bit. Obviously we, I think everybody's familiar with this. It's just all the relevant tax provisions and the two rebate programs. What I would say on the tax incentives is, I think our teams are just thinking about how do we inform customers about their potential availability or relevance to them? I think every customer is gonna be different, right? In terms of their interest in or sensitivity to a tax incentive, but just thinking through, how do you at least get that information to them so they're aware that these incentives are available. There may be some other services opportunity in this space, like there are some small pilots going on, for example, in terms of solar installation. So that's a place too, where the tax incentive piece becomes relevant to deploying that business. I thought this was helpful too, because we talked about this program earlier and kind of some of the income verification pieces, but it's just helpful to see the specific products that are enumerated in the statute, that are eligible for the rebates. Again, some of these we sell directly when you think about an electric stove or cooktop. Others we don't. And then as we think about kind of the marketplace and inventories, for example, there aren't a lot of heat pump dryers, post dryers on the market in the US today. And so do manufacturers look at that opportunity differently and does the assortment change based on the availability of those incentives? And then of course the Homes program, which we also talked about earlier, what I would say about that is, I think this is a program, perhaps not exclusively, but that more often is going to include more stakeholders, a contractor, a home energy auditor. And so again, thinking about, we're talking about a consumer level benefit, but when you've got these other players in the mix, kind of how are they interacting with the program and potentially passing through the benefit to the consumer? So I really just wanna focus on this piece and maybe give back a little time so we can get the Q&A, but conversation earlier, obviously about income verification and how that's gonna work. And obviously we will not be doing that as retailers, but that is relevant to how consumers interact with the program. And the question about sort of what they're going to get that deems them eligible, that we know that they're eligible, when they come into a store, interact with us online. And I think it's important to remember too, that technically under the statute, the project is also supposed to be verified. So if it's new construction or swapping out a gas stove for an electric stove or some other gas-powered appliance, and so that's gonna be relevant too in terms of what the details are around that and is it a self attestation by the consumer or something like that. And then we get to point of sale and I think that goes back to my point about the customer segments, right? So we think a point of sale as our cash registers, right? So when people are coming to check out at the front of the store or online. And so this question, for example, about a universal coupon, what exactly does that look like and are there technological requirements to upgrade the POS systems or to change them so they can interact with those? And I think that goes to some of the questions too about we recognize there's going to be state level flexibility, but is there opportunity for some common specs, particularly on something like that where it could require some technological implementations on our side? And so basically how, again, what does a customer see once they're deemed eligible? And then the other question is, for example, in some cases, let's say you're getting a water heater, you'd be working with your contractor or service provider, if you're the eligible entity, but they're buying it to then install it, how does that benefit flow through? So I think some questions on that front. And then consumer education, obviously that's been talked about a lot, but just given some of the complexities about not everyone being eligible for the rebates, again, with the Homes Program, the necessity to probably have some baseline analysis done by a home energy auditor, just how are we simply seamlessly getting information to customers about the potential availability of these benefits? Also recognizing that there's going to be some nuances given the eligibility things, and obviously from location to location, media income assessments are different, right? And so even from place to place, somebody who might be making the same amount may not be eligible in the same way. And then one other thing I would mention is, obviously there's the big focus on point of sale. We see circumstances where people are coming in and more of an emergency situation, right? My hot water heater broke. I need to replace it. Hopefully, and this I think is gonna hinge pretty heavily on how the verification process works, but certainly we would encourage consideration of limited circumstances that somebody could apply for a post-sale rebate in that type of situation if they had to buy the product in short order because something had failed in their home, but they could potentially be eligible for the rebate that there's a chance for them to come back and get that. So we have some teams that do consumer insights, and I just thought that this would be helpful a little bit to share just some of the things that we've heard in early conversations. And again, it's with our DIY customers, but also the pro customers, you can read these, but I think it's interesting just in terms of how this one in the middle, five years ago, I never had a customer ask me if I'm using sustainable products now that's something that's a lot more common. And property managers sort of using it as a potential selling point that it places is more energy efficient. On the DIY side though, some question about how much consumers are willing to replace something if it's not at the end of its life, right? Even if there are incentives. So you see this, I don't like spending money. I don't see myself replacing just because it's energy efficient, especially if it's still working. But conversely, somebody that's in the construction business, making the choice to put in the more energy efficient product because they would see that as a selling point. So one other thing I want to mention too is just around the skilled trades and contractor training piece. And now obviously there's a lot of funds in the IRA for contractor training and those programs will have to be developed by the states. We recently announced a program, $50 million over five years to get 50,000 more people into the skilled trades. And so the first tranche of grants will be for community colleges. And so that's, it'll be interesting to see kind of where and how some of these investments and programs potentially compliment each other as our program gets moving and the funds start flowing through from the IRA as well. So all that to say, and I want to introduce my colleague, Robert Curris. We've been working a lot on this and we appreciate the partnership and conversations that we've had with Department of Energy, with Nazio, with many others as we bring our perspectives to the table about how to make this functional and operational acknowledging state flexibility but where there's maybe opportunities for DOE to provide some turnkey options and where certain things sort of occurring at scale will make it easier and more efficient for us to inform both our customers and our associates about the availability of these programs and the benefits they can provide. So thank you. My turn to deal with the microphone once again. That was great. Thank you so much. And we do have time for questions. Like I said, we're going to run a little long but that's okay. And I have a couple here from the online audience but if there's anyone in the room, I am scanning for hands and maybe what I'll do while we're waiting is start with a question that came in from their online audience and I'm going to ask it because I also know who this person is and he's a good guy. And I think actually it gets to a lot of what everyone was talking about and that is outreach and communication to the people who sort of across the spectrum who will be involved in getting these projects in place, especially perhaps when it comes to the environmental justice community. So the question is what steps are planned for outreach and communication to targeted populations to ensure that the people who apply for these rebates or who are designed or who intended to benefit from these programs actually benefit? And Sarah, happy to start with you since it's been a while since we've heard but anyone please feel free to jump in with your thoughts about how we communicate these benefits to these different populations. Thank you. So focusing on the infrastructure investment and jobs act it wasn't actually a lot of rebates focus more on public infrastructure but the challenge of involving community members and development of infrastructure projects is something that's been a focus for a long time of transportation and infrastructure agencies because you do get better results when you have input and engagement from the people who are ultimately going to use the project. Transportation planners are great. They don't necessarily know the ins and outs of every intersection or every bus stop. And so getting that input is really incredibly valuable. The Department of Transportation recently released kind of a best practices guide to public engagement which has a lot of very useful strategies but I think that the challenges on the side of community organizations they don't have a lot of resources and this law is huge. There's so much information coming at them how can they parse it out? So I think for the congressional staff in the room to the extent that you are meeting with constituents or transportation agencies helping them understand the value of engaging with each other and kind of pointing them to what you think might be the most important opportunities for them to work together on is a really important role that I think you could play just kind of helping everybody parse through all the chatter that's going on about these laws and help people really focus on resources that can help them. Please feel free to jump in if anyone else would like to make a comment Kevin or Dawn. I would just say that just adding to that is there's an issue of trust in communities and that has to be addressed. And the way to address that in our experience is to work with the community organizations very hard to get to one-on-one and all that but there are established community organizations that should be used and listened to and just kind of the same comment that Sarah was saying here. The one other thing that I think is really important is the messaging. We talk about climate resilience. I mean, it's just like these big words that really means simple stuff like your roof replacement, your window replacement, making your home safer, healthier, better. How you message this has a lot to do with how people receive it. All right, I'm gonna ask another. Oh, we have a question in the back, Tyler. My question actually was in response to what Sarah had just said a minute ago. There's a local transit agency which most of us are familiar with that both just before the pandemic and subsequently is engaging in a fairly wide-ranging review of its bus operations and the community engagement was mostly very selective. There were invited persons to participate in the earlier discussions and the more recent discussions and while there were occasional pop-ups to try and reach regular people, there were few and far between and not noticed in advance one just found them by happenstance. I don't know what is in the new public engagement manual, but for the most part, agencies and the states need to do a better job on a regular basis. I would suggest them but would suggest in reaching out to the public, actually the consumers of the service, riders of transit, drivers on the roads to see what they think. And with regard to the suggestion that since most people here are congressional staff, I know in my case, my representative never talks to me but he will talk to my mayor and then if he's feeling liberal, he'll talk to my city council. congressional staff should be encouraged consider that odd person such as myself who wanders into a congressional briefing, not me but people like me, and reach out to them. I mean, the regular folk have ideas and they're not reached by the traditional transit agency process that I'm familiar with. I don't know if anyone has a response, but please focus. Well, not a response but a comment. I do think that we government generally, I don't know why I say we because I'm not government, but government generally does not do a great job of talking about the programs and the plans and the projects in a way that makes sense to people. That doesn't make people want to engage. And there are plenty of requirements for public engagement in the transportation program. There's like four different plans or five or six now with the new law that require public engagement and outreach. What many people do not have time to engage in six different planning processes. They don't know which one is the most important, which one is gonna have the biggest effect on them. So this is really an important area and I think that comment speaks to it a lot. Thank you. Right, I think we'll wrap up with a rapid fire question. We'll give everyone an opportunity to respond here, but we've talked a lot, the four of you cover a lot of these programs. There's a lot of programs out there. We've covered a lot of ground, but for our congressional staff in the audience, are there things on the horizon, big next steps in the programs and the investments and policies that you all are tracking that you would just highlight as something for people to be on the lookout for, say in the next several months with respect to the IJA and IRA implementation. And happy to start with Jana, if you'd like to go first and then we'll move down the line. Sure, glad to. I'm sure many of you know on the IRA, consumer rebate programs, DOA had an RFI that closed at the end of last week. It's a blur. And so I'm sure they're reviewing that feedback and I think an important next step is just gonna be the ongoing conversations about program design and implementation and timing of funds flows and when the states can start putting in their plans and proposals. So I think it's still a question from where we sit of when we process that first rebate, right? But those are all the next steps in the process that we're keeping an eye on and staying engaged in. Yeah, so we are paying very much attention to the greenhouse gas reduction fund and waiting for the NOFO, the final rules that come out from the EPA. They said they're gonna be two to 15 recipients of those funds that then will channel and make those funds flow through community-based organizations. One thing that has happened is that the timeline has moved, so now we have like another year that we're gonna be waiting for those funds. So I think that it's gonna be important to look out for kind of the gap filling pieces of the IRA. So some of the programs we heard today from the Department of Energy, how can communities know be alerted to programs that can help build capacity and provide technical assistance to prepare the communities for the greenhouse gas reduction funds, actually. So those two things, one last thing to pay attention to is a direct pay. There's still a lot of mystery as to how that's gonna work and we're eager to demystify it, but we're already coming up with strategies and programs that we think would work to capture that direct pay. I'm glad you mentioned that. That's a really important point, Kevin. Sure, I'll highlight just a few as well. There's certainly still guidance coming out from Treasury on some of the tax credits, so like the hydrogen tax credit is gonna have importance, the guidance coming out. Also, just the overlay with regulations that will be coming out is gonna be a really critical one and how, for example, EPA regulations think about their regulatory environment now that it is in a world in which the economic incentives are so important and so beneficial to clean electricity. That'll be a really important kind of interaction to watch as well. Thanks. Sarah, I think this gives you the last word. I guess so. So three things, although by the time all of us go through there's like 12 things you have to pay attention to. Number one, appropriations and the debt limit. These are two really important conversations that are gonna happen this summer in Congress about federal spending and they can affect taxes, they can affect spending, they can affect all of these programs that we've just talked about, so keep an eye on that and please engage and hopefully support these important programs that we've talked about today. I hope I'm allowed to say that on behalf of PPC. Second, as I mentioned, and as Duane just mentioned too, there are a lot of technical assistance programs. Bipartisan Policy Center actually has a blog post up online which highlights a number of them. There is a White House document that lists 65 different technical assistance programs across the federal government that state and local communities can access to get help with implementing these programs. Even sorting through 65 programs is a lot, so they might need technical assistance to understand the technical assistance. But you all can play a role in helping to connect your communities with these federal resources. And lastly, there needs to be kind of a feedback loop from the federal government and this is something that is sort of forward looking. We're talking right now about how much money has gone out the door. Eventually we're gonna wanna know what has been the outcome of those investments and I don't know that federal agencies right now are thinking about how they're gonna track and measure that, but it's something for you as staff to think about. What are you gonna wanna know about in 2026, 2027, whenever we start talking about this again in terms of a new law? And let's start tracking and measuring that today. That's a great note to end on. Please thank our panelists and join me with a round of applause. Thank you so much. That was really excellent. Our first two panelists are also still in the room, so thank you so much again for joining us today. I'd like to also thank our sponsor or our host I should say for today, Representative Tonko and the Sustainable Energy and Environment Coalition. It means a lot. He helped us a great deal throughout the entire series of climate camp briefings and so thanks very much to him and his great staff for helping us get this great room and bring these issues to staff. I'd also like to take my, well, not take my, I'd like to thank the folks I work with at EESI. I don't know, it's been a long day. I especially like to thank Dan O'Brien, Omri Laporte, Emma, Allison, Anna and Molly for all the hard work that went into this and all of our congressional climate camp series and all of the upcoming briefings, which we've got a bunch coming up and also other additional resources and things. So thanks very much. Thanks to Linley, Tyler and Madeline who are great spring interns for all of their contributions as well. And I would be remiss if I didn't say, thank you, Curtis, for helping us with our videography and making sure that our live cast looks and sounds great. This is the last slide of the day. This is a survey link. If folks in our in-person or online audience have a moment to take our survey and to share comments about how today went, did you have any issues with the video or the audio? Do you have any other questions or ideas for additional briefings? We read every response and so if you have two minutes we really appreciate every one's willingness to share that feedback. I'll also say one last thing about sort of internal stuff at ESI. We're actually recruiting summer interns right now and we're also recruiting for a policy associate. So visit us online at www.esi.org. If you're interested in learning more about that. Next Wednesday, March 15th, we'll be back on the Hill downstairs, I think in room 2044 with the Business Council for Sustainable Energy to talk about the Sustainable Energy in America Factbook. We'll be back on March 23rd with our friends at the Natural Resources Defense Council to talk about organics and agriculture and we'll be back in April 18th with more friends from the Department of Energy this time in the Nuclear Energy Programs Office talking about the wide range of programs underway in large part funded by the IAJA. So with that, thanks for indulging a little bit of overage today. We really appreciate it and thanks again panelists for joining us and thanks to our great audience. Thank you.