 Okay everyone thank you so much for joining us I feel like this is it's very apropos that that the net zero energy city conversation is coming on the heels of Jules conversation in particular about some of the trends that we're seeing vis-a-vis energy transformation I think our panel will embody some of the work that is happening at the local level so again this is net zero energy cities charging ahead aka Burlington and its transition to net zero energy in the thermal and transportation sectors and our ambitious goal of transitioning off of fossil fuels in those sectors so welcome everyone it's it's really a pleasure to have you my name is Jennifer Green and I am the director of sustainability and workforce vitality at BED and I'm here today with our three panelists with Darren Springer. Darren as many of you know is the general manager of Burlington Electric and formally the manager of strategy and innovation at BED it's really a pleasure to work with Darren and have Darren at the helm. Our net zero energy roadmap which you'll hear about in detail was conducted by Synapse Energy Economics with the help of Resource Systems Group and to that end we have Asa Hopkins who's here Asa is vice president of Synapse Energy Economics and also a regulatory and policy expert in energy and GHG emissions and sitting next to Asa is local personality Jonathan Slason RSG has an office here in Burlington so I'm really happy that we were able through Synapse to subcontract with a with a local firm so Jonathan has I probably the most fun and interesting title I think you're the director of future mobility planning for RSG so let me tell you a little bit about what we have on the on the docket we're going to start with an introduction Darren will kick us off framing up the conversation with some background information on BED Burlington Electric and Burlington Electric as a municipal utility and then we'll talk about some of the high level road map findings again conducted by Synapse in conjunction with RSG then I'm going to kick it over to Asa who'll talk a little bit about the findings vis-a-vis buildings in the roadmap including some of the action items that we're going to need to take the challenges and opportunities of those action items as well that are going to help us in the built environment in particular and then Jonathan will take the stage with an eye on transportation and in particular again some of the tools that were used and the findings more specifically vis-a-vis transportation and some of the action items we'll need to take to move us to net zero energy in that sector and then Darren will come back up tell us a little bit about some of the new programs and initiatives some of which were launched pre-road map and some were which were launched in conjunction with in our effort to really hit the ground running and then we'll take questions okay so thanks Darren turning it over to you okay all right hello all right hello everybody I just want to say at the outset for Burlington Electric it's been a real pleasure to be able to work with Synapse and with RSG on this roadmap exercise this has been going really for something that we were talking about in 2018 in terms of putting it together went in our fiscal 19 budget and was completed and released in September so this is a relatively new document you can read it on Burlington Electric's website burlingtonelectric.com slash nz for net zero energy so any of the things we're discussing here you can check out on the website I think folks are familiar with Burlington Electric but just in case there are some who are not we are the third largest utility electric utility in the state of Vermont we have been public power utility since 1905 have roughly 118 employees we operate the McNeil biomass plant in the interval along with with two joint owners GMP and VEPSA we are an owner of that plant McNeil is the largest energy producer in the state of Vermont now that Vermont Yankee has closed and we have been going since 2009 without a rate increase so we're coming into our 11th year now having not raised rates so that's just a little bit of background about us we have about three quarters of our customers residential about a quarter commercial but that's actually pretty much flipped on its head when you look at our electricity use it's largely commercial roughly a quarter of it is residential and somewhat unique for the state of Vermont 60 percent of our residential customers are renters we have a number of renters student population so we have some unique dynamics in terms of our service territory relative to others we serve the city of Burlington and the Burlington airport we are an energy efficiency utility everybody knows about efficiency Vermont and also Vermont gas is an energy efficiency utility Burlington Electric is an energy efficiency utility this is a picture from our energy efficiency calendar contest which I think this year we're going to rename the net zero energy calendar contest that's myself and the mayor and Mark Stevenson from Vermont Energy Contracting and Supply I think they've got a booth back there he's been a sponsor and they've been a sponsor of this contest and of course champ who's the most famous celebrity in the city of Burlington lake monsters joined with us with all of these fourth graders from public schools around the community who compete each year to have their picture about energy included in this calendar so it's a nice a nice event for us we've been working on energy efficiency as a community dating back at least the 1980s we had a bond for energy efficiency in 1990 that was an 11.3 million dollar bond major investment at the time and kicked off roughly 70 million of investment between Burlington Electric and our customers over the last several decades at this point we're saving our customers roughly 12 million annually on electric bills in terms of avoided costs so there's a significant payback associated with efficiency most notably in my mind Burlington as a community is using 6% roughly less electricity today than we were in 1989 if you look at the state of Vermont and the US over that same period there's actually an increase in electricity consumption we've seen a decrease and if the rest of the US had had a 6% reduction in electricity use as opposed to a roughly 29 increase that's equivalent to about 238 coal plants worth of electricity annually that we could be saving as a country so that energy efficiency accomplishment is quite significant and is really the foundation for our work on net zero energy we also were recognized in 2014 as a community for being the first city in the nation to source 100% of our electricity from renewable generation here you can see two different pie graphs one is lists are different resources roughly a third biomass about a third hydro both large and small hydro Vermont and out of state hydro three different wind projects that we get power from including two in Vermont the Sheffield and Georgia Mountain projects and then a growing slice of our electricity in the graph on the right coming from solar Burlington was named by Environment America just recently as the top community per capita for solar in New England and number four in the country we've seen solar was 0.3% of our generation in the 2017 version of this pie graph and in this slice here that orange slice is 1.4% just to give you a sense of the year on year significant growth of solar in the community we both buy and sell renewable energy certificates under Vermont's renewable energy standard so the pie graph on the far side there is includes those renewable energy sales and purchases we remain 100% renewable after all of those transactions are accounted for as well so after that accomplishment in 2014 the mayor of Burlington Mayor Weinberger and the Burlington Electric Department and our Electric Commission came together on a goal of becoming a net zero energy city by 2030 and the way we've defined that is to take a goal of reducing and eventually eliminating fossil fuel use not only for electricity but also for ground transportation and for heating and that's the goal that we've embraced I think it's among the most ambitious local government climate change related goals in the country Vermont has a 90% by 2050 renewable goal across those different sectors Burlington's looking at a 2030 time frame which is much quicker and looking to achieve the net zero energy goal so that's something that's exciting for us at BED exciting I think for our entire workforce we were really fortunate to be joined by our chief steward from the IBEW at our net zero energy release earlier in September this is something that I think from all facets of the company we find to be the right goal to be moving on so in terms of net zero energy we realized you know we needed some data some analysis to be able to look at what is our current energy use across these different sectors in the city and what is the pathway to get to this net zero energy goal how do we track the metrics how do we know if we're being successful and so this this this piece here looks at fossil fuel use across the building sector and the transportation sector ground transportation in Burlington the portion that stripes represents vehicles that are coming into Burlington commuters visitors non-Burlington travel and then the the darkest portion there is transportation from Burlington residents and then the other two slices are residential and commercial building fossil fuel use and we decided during the course of the roadmap that we would take primary responsibility for the transportation and fossil fuel use related to that transportation for Burlington residents as well as the fossil fuel use that's happening in residential and commercial buildings we have some tools to help with reducing fossil fuel use from the visitor and commuter population as well but we're taking a primary focus on the transportation both in and out of the city but the use by Burlington residents the reason for that in part is if there are customers we can offer a different suite of incentives than if they are a visitor to the community this is both a business as usual and then a net zero 2030 and 2040 chart here so business as usual we reach roughly a 9% reduction in fossil fuel use in the sectors targeted by 2030 we're already rolling out and have rolled out a number of programs in Burlington to reduce fossil fuel use we know there are some supportive trends particularly in electric transportation both at the state level national level even internationally we're seeing some progress with some of that so there's some emissions reduction and some fossil fuel use reduction that's baked into business as usual the two different green lines represent the 2040 and 2030 tracks for net zero energy obviously the 2030 track is the one that we're targeting if we get there quicker we reduce more emissions more fossil fuel use than if it takes a longer period of time one of the unique challenges for us however is a number of the decisions that are being made today are going to affect our ability to succeed on this time frame somebody going out and buying a conventional vehicle today that doesn't have the capability of plugging in that vehicle could be on the road in 2030 still working somebody putting in a new heating system that's a conventional heating system today that heating system is likely to be operating in 2030 so the 2040 path is a little bit more of a glide path the 2030 path although it's still ambitious the 2030 path is much more of an aggressive timeframe it envisions that you're going to have to have different types of customer equipment change out programs you know cash for clunker type programs other incentive programs that are be aimed at helping to reach that 2030 time frame I should also note that because this was an interesting finding to me in the roadmap that although incentives tend to be a lot of places where we focus policy and attention at utility level particularly regulation is really called out in the roadmap as well looking at the tools that the city has both in terms of housing in terms of land use in terms of other types of regulations ordinances and that's something that we're considering and looking at as part of the roadmap process this is the reason that we're working on this in large part you know been a lot of discussion today about climate change about the climate emergency about needing to reduce emissions and get on track to meet goals this is the emissions trajectory if we reach the net zero energy 2030 goal and this is for the heating and ground transportation sectors so this would be a precipitous drop in emissions in those sectors relative to where we are today and then this this is my last piece for right now this represents the different solutions that we're targeting in the roadmap because we remove as a primary target the non-berlington resident transportation piece buildings takes a primary focus you can see 60 of the solution really coming in the building sector from additional efficiency from additional electrification additional renewable fuels all making up some portion of the solutions in the building sector switching to electric vehicles is 20 percent of the solution I would note that economically switching to electric vehicles is one of the most beneficial steps that we can take as a community the roadmap calls that out we know today that if you charge up with burlington electrics 100 percent renewable electricity at our public charging stations it's roughly a dollar 46 a gallon equivalent if you're charging at home it's even cheaper than that and if you're charging with our off-peak rate it can be 60 cents a gallon equivalent so today current technology you can charge up with 100% renewable electricity cheaper than it is to drive with gasoline and that not only has a great benefit in terms of environmental footprint in terms of savings for drivers but it can also benefit all of our ratepayers and customers if we're adding new use to the system and doing so in an efficient way and we also found out that it's also a really great opportunity to buy local energy because if you spend a dollar at the gas station about 80 cents of that dollar is leaving the state of vermont's economy but our estimate is that if you spend a dollar charging a vehicle for example with burlington electric more than half of that dollar stays in the vermont economy and more than three quarters stays in the regional economy so a lot of times we don't think of energy or electricity in that type of way but for those folks who are looking at buying local this is an opportunity for us in burlington and really for the state to switch from sending money out of state for fossil fuels to keep money in state with electricity the last two solutions there listed district energy district heat something we're working on with our mcneal plant and some stakeholders including vermont gas uvm medical center uvm and others is a key portion of the solution it's really the single biggest step we could take as a community to reduce emissions getting waste heat from the mcneal plant and using it for thermal energy use at the hospital and potentially uvm and other buildings around the community and then five percent of the solution coming from alternative transportation which jonathan will touch on which is really the energy efficiency of the transportation sector demand management walking biking transit car pooling van pooling all the different things that help us reduce vehicle miles traveled so that when we do need to travel we're able to do so with electric buses and bikes and cars but reducing those the need for those vehicle miles traveled having last mile solutions is part of that as well so i am going to pause there and hand it over to asa for a more detailed look at the building sector i'll just start before i dive into the the technical bits here saying thank you thank you to bed for the opportunity to do this we learned a lot i'm glad that you learned a lot as well and it's great personally to be back working for people that i that i know and like in respect here in vermont so i'm glad to be back at rev and tell you a little bit about about buildings so this is the same slide that darin just showed but spread out over time so so that those four chunks are there on the right and i put little brackets by the by the buildings sector pieces of it so efficient electric buildings and district energy so i'll walk through each of those pieces but just so you see how they spread out over time district energy comes on in chunks whether the whole big portion of a system might might come on at once and the the efficient electric buildings pieces more a matter of stock turnover of heating systems that getting changed out over time so if you start in in residential buildings you know a challenge with a goal for 11 years from now uh is that most heating systems last well more than 11 years so most heating systems that are in burlington buildings today would still be there in 2030 or maybe you'll beat me off 20 year replacement time half of them would have been replaced between now and 2030 so we need to figure out how to get faster replacement and one one tool for that is that actually for for uh hydrically heated buildings for for uh buildings with boilers adding a ductile system to that doesn't require you to it can be entirely separated time wise from when you would replace your boiler so you can displace the vast majority of your fossil fuel use uh tomorrow without waiting for the time when the when the boiler comes and so that's that given the the amount of of hydronic heat in the city that's actually that's a really good thing for being able to take much faster action than waiting for systems to turn over it does mean however every time a system turns over you got to be there and saying well no actually let's replace that boiler with a ground source system or an air source system let's replace a furnace with a heat pump and and really be trying to get there in in basically every uh every opportunity to to engage with that uh that I want to I want to double down also on the first word of this we've talked a lot about heating systems and the electric part of the that efficient electric uh buildings piece but I want to double down on the efficient part of it as well uh this this this pathway in order you know you could electrify everything and ask BED to go find even more electricity uh to serve to customers but actually it makes a lot more sense to to be really efficient about that and be using that electric heat into a really high performing building shell so so we modeled roughly a tripling of the pace of of weatherization of of air sealing and insulation in the city such that half of the buildings get weatherized by 2030 you'll notice there's a so on the on the chart here the heat pump piece is is green the the black part is is various fossil fuels there's a tiny little silver of electric resistance heat but the the there's this last little bit there at the end which is more of the sort of the door-to-door campaign like you know it's starting to get that as last few units out and and and then you know squeeze that last little bit of fossil fuels out of out of the residential building stock there's a typo on the slide it should say commercial buildings in the upper left sorry about that the so in in commercial buildings it's again efficiency electrification but also district heat district energy so a similar stock turnover story to what's going on in the residential picture interestingly commercial cooking there's as much natural gas used in Burlington for commercial cooking as for water heating and so not only are you thinking about trying to swap out all the water heating systems you're also thinking about engaging with with restaurants with the cafeteria at the hospital with uvm right on on what does that the cooking picture look like for for you know induction induction cooking and other other technologies to to to get at that piece as well again weatherizing half of the square footage by 2030 and then you'll notice this big opportunity for district energy so we modeled that as all basically using a lot using all of the renewable heat options that have been on the table in the conversation with Correx in the in the district energy conversation in Burlington so that's McNeil but it's also so the first chunk basically there is capturing the waste heat from McNeil and like that would be a that would be a great thing you do that you didn't get the rest great you just have to electrify that much more the green part grows to take more of the what would have been the blue piece but if you're able to also use like a digester at the wastewater treatment plant and and and you know get heat there heat pump heat out of the sewer system etc right then there's another piece there we didn't we didn't bring in other things you know water source heat pump out of the lake or you know whatever other other ideas might it might have been out there we were working with the quantified specific pieces that are that are known there we did account you'll notice here that there are still some fossil fuel heating piece and that's more think of that as combusting methane molecules piece because actually the way you get to net zero in the end is you also go talk to Don and make sure that that's that that's RNG that's going into the pipes for those last bits that's also necessary on the district energy side where in order to meet peak heat needs you need to be able to fire up some extra boilers and you want to run those boilers on on RNG as well to make sure that that whole picture can really be net zero so all right so all this though those pathways are great you know like everybody just go off and go do that right so like the city is going to actually do stuff to change people's behavior to get dramatically different purchasing behavior dramatically different behavior about how people choose to spend the the money they might invest in their homes and in their businesses so we split this out into three time periods over the next 10 years near term mid term and long term near term is really pretty near term if you want to if you want to split 10 years into three periods you know one of the periods can be particularly long the the first period is really about priming the pump that this is where incentives where getting the the research done moving you know it takes time if you if you need state legislative change you know one of the things we mentioned is you know evolution in what does it mean to be an energy efficiency utility what does it mean to use tier three you know is there is there a sort of a net zero cognizant scaling and role for for what the regulated energy efficiency world looks like for the utility well that's going to have means going to the legislature perhaps means going to the puc those processes take time so you want to start them now so they can start to have impact in time to have impact in time to matter by 2030 there's not a lot of time for like well and then there's a one-year delay that doesn't that doesn't work there's not a lot of time to make this work so there are there are there are things around massively increasing the rate of energy efficiency pushing those electric options laying the groundwork for district heat building the groundwork as I said for regulatory action rate design and then the transit plan piece that Jonathan will talk about you know some of those pieces have to start getting laid in the near term in the in the mid term if you're really talking about replacing basically every system in buildings in in the city incentivizing 100 participation with capital intensive investments is a lot of money to flow through the utility and back right in an incentive framework and this is where we get to the regulatory levers that that Darren mentioned you know talking with the with the city zoning ordinances performance standards other things where you say go you know yeah this is obviously hypothetical but go to landlord and say if you want to be a landlord in Burlington your building has to meet at least this level and you know and it's got to be you know no fossil fuels in the building by some date you can plan for that you're in business you can make investments in your building but but know that that's coming I know that all your competing landlords for tenants are doing the same thing right so you know raising raising the bar for everyone there's going to be a certain amount of things you have to do to bring new technologies in to meet the niche edge cases so that's where supporting r&d well having Burlington be a welcoming place for someone who wants to try out a new kind of heat pump technology or some other option that that that meets a need here before 2030 where maybe that technology can scale nationwide globally in the 2030s or 2040s but you want to be able to get it deployed here because it's going to help get this get the city towards its goal and also bringing financing tools to bear you know financing is a good way to to to bring people to the table about investments they might want to make but which are doesn't necessarily involve the same sort of outlay of say rate pair money and by the end period by this the long-term you know long-term you know my kids will still be in still be in grade school the the there you're at the cash for clunkers stage you're at but you're buying out equipment and you're and you're and you're talking about getting r&d for the for the bit that that you have yet to get to so in the in the near term I basically talked through this on the other side but getting ghg and net zero targets built into the utility programs which might require working with the state deploying capital to fund additional incentives as as Darren will talk about they're already effectively doing educating folks making sure folks understand building owners tenants commercial and residential building owners about what this is going to mean benchmarking labeling rating zoning permitting getting the building code if you're building a new building in barlington in this time frame like you got to be building it as though it's going to be a good player in this in this net zero future and and obviously getting that district energy system it makes it a lot easier to think about you either have to bring some really interesting kind of technologies to someplace like the hospital to get it to be fossil fuel free or you got to plug it into McNeil and and so really trying to figure out how to if you can plug it into McNeil sooner rather than later is a really good important first step there and rate design again you're getting at sending signals but also really rewarding people like that 60 cent 60 cent a gallon that that that Darren talked about so some sense of what this looks like in terms of of the to-do list and we'll be around to help the the city if there are any implementation issues or anything always happy to come back and help so that I'll turn the baton over to Jonathan to talk a little bit about what this all looks like in transportation right the short guy comes up here and the local personality I guess so well it is a pleasure to be here and it's wonderful as a transportation planner and engineer to be here at an energy conference because it's it's a coming of age really that now we're realizing that the it was obvious on buildings and the energy generation sectors that now we got to look at the transportation sector and it's wonderful that Vermont has taken the lead with the comprehensive energy plan that Darren was was instrumental in and then now at Burlington Electric taking on transportation as a key source of energy consumption and emissions and it was really a pleasure to be participating and trying to identify some key actions and some high return on investment policies that the city can initiate to meet our goals so transportation we already saw a slide how significant transportation was relative to fossil fuels and so we're going to focus on these two markets and just discuss a little bit about the why and so the why are all these emissions and energy and so in Vermont we see that transportation consumes 44% of our energy use and 53% of our emissions statewide it's the largest component of our emissions and and it requires a new set of actions and a new set of cooperation among all different parties and so that's why we're happy to bring some of the transportation thinking to it and then the first thing is that unleash the EVs this is this is the obvious question when everybody looks at net zero energy they said all right great let's move everybody off fossil fuels there are now adequate substitutes available today if you have the cash to do so and so this is where this chart shows that we assume that there's going to be a trajectory a growth of electric vehicles on the let's see oh my red marker doesn't show up over there but the growing share of EVs is expected to occur as the number of vehicles on the marketplace increases as well as just then the cost parity goes down by 2025 we expect that it would be generally equal to buy a new internal combustion engine car with a battery electric car and we assume then by 2025 the sales percentages start going up dramatically and just to point out that by 2028 like what Darren said excuse me what Asa just said the cash for clunkers kind of mentality sits in 2028 is long term in this plan and that's when we say we got to shift out all the inefficient internal combustion engines and get you into an EV and that's the only way to reach some of these goals on the electrification side of transportation on the vehicle side excuse me and so that's that's the easy answer that's the electric vehicle side in a nutshell and then we need to talk about the other methods the other pieces that really are fundamental to how we are going to achieve these goals and that's the behavioral change and we brought to bear some tools and methodologies here to try to get an idea of what were the best policies that would be the most cost effective and have the highest return on the investment for the city of Burlington to pursue and so the way to do that is that we broke up these markets into these three different buckets and we already described non residential and residential that Darren already introduced and this is just give a a quick graphical representation we have those people who live in Burlington and they happen to have vehicles they happen to live in places that would have some options for walking biking etc and then we have the our school students who are taking buses both on the GMT and some school buses and we have people who ride the buses around the city so that's the non residential vehicles that are based in Burlington and then we have non Burlington vehicles this is just introducing our vernacular here and these are the vehicles that this is Main Street for those of you who do not live in Burlington on a typical weekday p.m. afternoon and that's what they face this is the this is the crew that heads out of town every day to introduce a little bit about who we are and what the scale of these of these solutions might look like is that we have about 36,000 and change people employed in the city of Burlington and approximately 75 percent of them live outside of the city we know that we have a big area of residential populations in south Burlington nearby in Essex and Williston and Colchester that that's our primary residential communities and they themselves have added some some workforce to them but we still have UVM UVM medical as well as some larger employers dealer dot com etc in the city of Burlington so we hold down that core of employment for the region and we realize that that's a market that we just don't have as much direct ability to affect their behavior change but we realize that policies do have trickle effects and we'll just discuss a little bit about that in a second so just a little bit of methodology and this is where as a transportation planner I can get into this all day but I wanted to introduce a little bit to you as energy professionals and people interested in this space is that how do you start building up this idea of how do you develop policies in the transportation space it's easy just to say go walk somewhere but in reality we have these fixed constraints we have policies we have this land use we have investments that we've built roads that we've been built for years and years and so it's not just as easy to make people change their behavior overnight we've built up these this approach based on understanding travel behaviors at the household level as understanding data from the school districts and GMT and then we try to understand how many people live and work excuse me how many people work in Burlington and what those typical behaviors look like at a daily trip level basis we then compared that kind of that was a bottom-up approach we kind of multiply everything up by itself how many people are here what were the modes that they took how long did they travel on average and that's our bottom-up analysis we ground truth that by using this regional travel model that's something that's available the Chittenden County regional level and that kind of said that incorporates everything at a level at a citywide level that says this is business does this this household does this at a macro scale and then we were able to kind of ground truth our bottom-up approach with the top down and say good we're in a reasonable level of confidence here we're doing things right and then that allowed us to pivot our solutions to focus this is the household solution this is the non-burlington solution thinking about these solutions is that this is just a quick chart that shows that the the density in city of Burlington matters when you're in the center core your average trips reduce in in a vehicle you you consume less vehicles on average in your when your density increases and when your land use intensifies at a more Chittenden County scale level this is uh this is a proxy it's called block size and this is a data set that rsg helped contribute to several years ago but it shows that the density the scale of the block size matters and so the darker colors are showing where your block size are smaller and that's where you have more opportunities to walk and bike and maybe scooter uh and maybe take public transit in so that when you have your locations close to you your errands your friends you have other modes and opportunities to travel and then for those of us like myself i live in heinsberg it's that giant wasteland south there i guess in in this map and so we need to look at what other options do we have to travel and that's the bus the 15 mile category so thinking about the solutions that we analyze these are some of the ideas that are our top of mind for most professionals and now it's a question of understanding what are the effects of these how relevant are these solutions for our population in Chittenden County we have mode shifting this is a nice urban setting i don't know where it's a it's a fake graphic but it shows bus lanes and it shows these bike lanes and it shows an urban city environment with 20 foot wide sidewalks that would be great to be able to shift some people into more efficient modes we have land use 90 of our future land use i don't know if emily's here from the rpc but 90 of our planned growth is is anticipated in these blue areas in the county and towns have kind of signed up to change their their local policies to support this and 10 in the rest of the white area we played with saying what if we intensified that a little bit more what would the effect be and then transportation demand management tdm is the is the acronym for those in the gig is that these are all tools that we have from car pooling car sharing we have these other investments that we can make in the city that would allow some people to make more efficient choices and then we have parking typically it's five dollars a day in the city of berlington what if we doubled that and what would affect would that have what if we doubled the amount of transit available to us in chinning county and tripled it even we said what would all these effects be and then lastly what would happen if we priced carbon we ran a model here that's that i i do want to just quickly highlight and there's hopefully a video here i don't know if it will start there it is this is an innovative tool that has just been released it's an open source software that that rsg did help develop and we've been running it now for a few regional councils around the country from from seattle to portland oregon it was developed actually for an energy model for the state of oregon and that's where the or the origins began and now we were able to use it for the city of berlington in this tool and what it did is allow us to plug in all the specific demographics and land use and all these characteristics of our transit supply and calibrated for the city of berlington actually chinning county and then we were able to say what levers would have the most effect for us and then that would inform the pathways and strategies that we would recommend in this plan so getting down to the uh to the nuts and bolts here is that where did we land the time frame that we have the 2030 meant that there really is no uh we had to pick options that all had value we couldn't prioritize what was the low value versus the high value so really it's an all hands on deck strategy and that's where we said everything has some degree of value here everything is a positive roi and some of these things have uh positive feedback loops like the public transit investment we know up front that'd be really expensive to do but if you do it from earlier in the process next year if we doubled our transit supply it would change our land use it would change our behaviors in ways that that we didn't analyze and model here and it would have profound effects on our total energy consumption so we wanted to promote efficient travel first and foremost we wanted to increase dedicated capacity for pedestrians bikes and more efficient modes of travel and then how can we dedicate specific lanes for that particular transit for those 75 percent of people that are not going to move all of a sudden to burlington how can we get them in and out of the city in a most efficient way how can we make hov lanes for instance we want to prioritize uh tdm investments and focus on providing maybe free bus service particularly income sensitive more incentivized so that we can improve transportation options for those who need it most then lastly we want regulatory and utility leadership and i kind of think of them together but we have regulatory settings that we have within the city we're already reducing mandatory car parking uh minimums for certain areas of burlington so we will reduce i don't know it's in policy i think in the city council right now they're considering how that policy might look we're also looking at expanding at ev charging requirements as part of any new residential development or commercial development and then i think as a policy we're supporting land use intensification within the city of burlington and adjacent communities and then lastly the utility leadership here is that burlington electric has stepped up and done something unique that taking on these three aspects in the tier three framework of thermal transportation and electricity and now now bd can be an advocate for supporting sustainable transportation initiatives and be partners with the other utilities within the other departments within the city so it was a pleasure to be working on this and i hope that we continue to move the needle and push the city forward so thank you so great um darin will now um hit us home so these next two slides cover our incentive programs uh largely uh through our tier three program uh that you know focus on electrification across modes we do ev rebates and incentives plug-in hybrid ev uh incentives we have ev charging incentives we have evike rebates we have electric bus incentives two new electric buses coming to the green mountain transit service territory this month with support from bed and financing partnerships with our friends at vs ecu over there as well as others um and then so these were the existing incentives prior to the roadmap and as you can see we have um in many cases an enhanced incentive for our low and moderate income customers as part of the roadmap we uh bolstered a number of our programs and offered some new programs for the first time we've really taken initiative in partnership with vermont gas to offer incentives for cold climate heat pumps and a bonus incentive if you work with burlington electric and vermont gas on weatherization uh we have heat pump hot water incentives uh we have electric forklift incentives if anybody's interested up to 6500 for an electric forklift uh steves here we have electric lawnmower incentives that are are quite successful uh we've actually had close to about 150 rebates for electric lawnmowers just in the course of the last few months over the summer um so we do believe i think in the electrify everything uh that you can ethos that was discussed um by jules uh at the uh at the lunch but the other piece i think that's really relevant here is obviously we could do all the good work we would want to do in burlington or in the state of vermont and not solve the climate change uh emergency and not make the progress uh that we need to make so the thing that's powerful to me about what we're doing here is not just the power of what we can accomplish but the fact that there's a slide that's not been shown which is if you get to the net zero energy goal the way that's been described by asa and jonathan uh and through these slides you'd be looking at a 65 percent increase in renewable electricity consumption in the city of burlington and that's even with a host of efficiency measures across all the different sectors uh if we have that increase which is very different than the trajectory we've been on and we do so in a way where we're driving at least a portion of that hopefully a good portion off peak uh so it's not causing us to have to invest excessively in new infrastructure that we're using our existing infrastructure more efficiently that has a benefit in terms of downward rate pressure for every single rate payer and customer for burlington electric so i kind of want to end on that point before we go to questions which is i think what we're doing here uh not only in burlington but in the state of vermont with all the different utilities um is going to be powerful not just from an environmental standpoint but if we are able to implement it well hopefully it'll be powerful from a customer standpoint and and something that other utilities around the country can look at and say that's something that we want to do as well so i know we have maybe a little bit of time uh for for questions i'll hand it back to you yeah thank you so um i invite well first actually i want to thank our speakers um so two modes you can either use the app of course and um share questions this way or um we welcome folks to just uh stand up and use their voices um and maybe as we wait for things to upload let's see there weren't any just are there now a number of a number of them are answered by a number of them a number of other questions have to do with what about transportation demand management uh because the questions came in before jonathan gave his presentation oh yeah but uh what a couple of questions about wood heat um and uh i don't think we actually explicitly made a really conscious decision about wood heat um so much as thinking about you know where the momentum is in burlington's existing programs and and and leveraging those pieces uh the i think you know some some fraction of the building switching to uh renewable electricity could be building switching to renewable wood heat provided air quality and all the uh requirements are met i i think you could easily take uh you similarly want to have the building shall improve you similarly you know everything else is largely unchanged from that uh but uh you know i think uh you know different different systems are going to make uh different amounts of sense for different for different folks uh for replacing a for replacing a boiler now uh you know wood heat given that that there aren't really of a good available uh heat pump to boiler hot water technologies so if you're replacing a boiler that that wood heat might be a pretty attractive option uh if you're if your boiler has 15 more years of life on it um and you can add a heat pump to to to decarbonize dramatically today right then you know then you're in a different uh a different lever there um thanks asa and i see um i just lost it on my phone do you see those questions donathan there was a question about um why the emphasis on um single occupancy vehicles and switching those over to electric as opposed to spending more of our effort on alternative modes of transit yeah i think uh quick just a comment about that is that hopeful i don't know whether i we address that or not but just some comments there's there were some i think reasonable skepticism looking at saying only five percent of our energy has been related to alternative transportation and the reality is is that with by 2030 we didn't model any effect of shifting people who currently live out in heinsberg of me moving into the city of burlington we said what is the amount of growth that we have over the next 11 12 years and said how would the change be between today and tomorrow if we pushed people in using alternative forms of transportation and so today we did model said all right what if we doubled public transit today the reality is is that our land use and our jobs are largely already fixed and the amount of riders are not going to scale linearly if we double or triple our capacity of the public transit system for instance so that's a that's an example of why the magnitude of energy savings was relatively small in some of that alternative transportation piece but i as i as i said at the podium there is that some of these things have feedback loops that we can't that we can't quite appreciate or model without without a lot more intensive intensive system and that if we were to triple transit service tomorrow i think by 2030 there would be profound changes in our land use so it doesn't it didn't say what happens if you do it in first year versus last year we only model kind of last year effects and said if you did it in 2030 what would be the overall effect so hopefully it aligns with another question and i'll just quickly take on is that what would a community do without a without a local electric utility and in the transportation space all of these investments are what we said no regrets you would have positive immediate return on any ev that you subsidize you would then have immediate positive community benefits for any public transit that you incentivize for health environmental emissions etc and then you also have these other land use and health effects that have been documented substantially at length when you increase your diversity and density of land use and so all of these things would have profound benefits well above above and beyond maybe what was you know documented there and something in this report great thank you um yeah patty you talked about so neighboring energy committees who are trying to work you know with their cities can you give us an idea of human hours that have gone into this has it come more from the top down and we're doing this or is it the residents that are pushing for this to happen how many people are on the ground every day working on this issue of these goals and how the density rolls out you know to your neighbors mm-hmm do you want to talk about that darin yeah um could all the bd folks who are in the room just raise their hand real quick so we've everybody who's raising their hand is part of uh and there are more who are not here uh essentially part of the net zero energy effort i mean we're we're really thinking of it as a an entire utility effort but there is a core of of team essentially which uh gen was the project manager for the net zero roadmap uh kind of day to day managing the relationship with our different consultants and uh coordinating all the different feedback uh from from our team and and uh we're going to have a process going forward where we're going to probably have uh 10 to 12 people at the utility from leadership and from the the front line team coordinating on a regular basis to track our progress towards these metrics and it's not just the utility it's it's very much a department by department initiative as well the mayors had intense interest in this and been strongly supportive the planning and zoning for the city the department of public works parks and rec a number of different departments are are taking on pieces of this and then just kind of from the resident standpoint we have done surveys of our customers and asked about this was prior to the roadmap but asked about general support for the net zero energy goal and roughly 95 percent of respondents are in favor of our taking this on um gen and i are going to all the different npa's in the community all the neighborhood planning assemblies we started with one meeting previously we've got another this evening so we're going around and getting i think generally supportive feedback from the community about this but i do want to give credit for at least initiating this process really uh to the mayor for having the uh the will to say we're going to take on this goal we're going to actually take it seriously we're going to invest time and resources into it we're going to work with all of our different departments not just the utility and i do think that in communities that don't have municipal utility we're fortunate to have utilities all across the state that are committed every single utility in the state of vermont's offering ev rebates for example and helping customers make these types of changes i do think cities have a power to lead by example you know with our own fleets with our own buildings with our own heating systems and uh i think that that's an option as well beyond the items jonathan mentioned that are available to communities around vermont yes please paul i'm curious jonathan if you were able to model uh eliminating parking lot and building high density affordable housing and what burlington electric might be able to do to support that type of investment so paul help me out uh in terms of the modeling you know the i'm not clear on the actual question on the transportation side can you help me out well if you build affordable housing and create places for people who currently drive until they can afford to live but they work in burlington and you create space for them to live in burlington you eliminate drivers yeah so can you model that yeah i think we can we have uh the the tool there actually has a whole it's it's a representation of the full burlington and county population so we have income sensitivity is built into this model and so that's why some of the responses to some of the initiatives are varied and we could uh all by all means play with the analysis and understand say if we were to incentivize certain populations and look at the transportation effect you know at a kind of a macro scale and then and an individual level i think it'd be almost easier to say this is the real dollars and cents that could be saved by an individual if they had the opportunity to to change where they lived yes please how does you factor in the the effect of a student population you know thinking of the student population as a portion of the renter population basically you know on the on the building's analysis side i mean that gets to the strategies piece is that's one of the reasons why the regulatory levers and other things show up pretty quick and early in this process is to as a as a way you know reasonably short period of time to get over landlord tenant type questions around the side of somebody owns the building and somebody else is paying the bills um and uh you know you can there you know there there are definitely good things that have been done on the incentive front and you know vd and vgs have done good good good work in getting landlords to sort of step up through incentive type routes but at the level of trying to get you know nearly every building to do something in a relatively short period of time we had we identified that that that bringing those regulatory levers to bear is an important thing to think about and just add on to that patty we this week actually the city council voted on a set of reforms that from our side from burlington electric jen and chris burns were working on which among them there's some affordable housing work and other types of things but there's a proposal to have broad energy efficiency standards across all rental housing implemented over the next several years so we've we've had a time of sale ordinance that's captured a portion of buildings as they go through a sale process and required upgrades but this would be a much more expansive use of regulation really a first kind of use of the regulation in the ways that were envisioned in the roadmap to really help broaden those efficiency standards and help students help renters and others we have time for one more question i can pull from the phone or please so you talked a bit about you know transit expansion and that generally means you know more bosses but as i said recently by some local media organizers in the harvard area around today's transit expansion that running buses when people aren't on them is highly uh in an effective way not efficient way so people around to look at expanding ride share services and making uh those kinds of things available or the weekend evenings between the ridership and not justifying having the buses on the road um and something that here what what drove me to this question was your uh your transition graph talked about number of vehicles on the road number of elected vehicles on the road but i think in my experience the more important metric is you know percentage of vehicle of passenger miles traveling uh is a transition metric and so the the things that are missing from that graph are ride share services and particularly automation we're talking about tesla being ready to operate in burlington for at least next year with a fully autonomous taxi service uh in the snow in bad weather everything so you know they'll stand out in the rural areas with the technology in coming years not decades right so what's missing from your transition graph is that taking advantage of that technology and i wonder if you've got any thoughts around how you might uh model that for when it hits and you prepare for that transition as well yeah there um we've been working with uh i don't even know if this is on yeah all right we've been working with uh in separate context we've been working with different oems and also the regional planning commission on modeling what would affect with with increase automation and frankly it's it's going to be increasing vmt and so but vmt the vehicle miles traveled was our metric when we analyzed everything here and we were able to understand that the average per capita vehicle is driven about 8 000 miles today in the city of burlington and with these um opportunities to offer alternatives to driving we were able to show that that average vmt could go down in the future and so some of that had to do with a suite of options and it was kind of in this bucket but it included microtransit which is kind of the the on-demand ride sharing and within the city of burlington so all of those things were part of the puzzle none of them were i analyzed analyzed with the level of of detail is that particular microtransit solution reduced the vmt by two you know five percent or something it was a bucket of saying this this particular population because of the density and diversity of land uses they had the opportunity to shift modes and so it gave that relative boundary effects so that's what we basically modeled in this study in that in the strategy section in the report if you go to the website online you can see some very explicit examples to say invest in this study this do that great thank you so i think we were we're getting the indication that we're up here i i i believe our panelists will be on hand for a few minutes following the presentation if you had any other questions and really wanted to thank darin asa and jonathan for joining us today and for your participation thank you so much