Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to the 2021 Congressional Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Expo and Policy Forum. I'm Dan Bresset, the Executive Director of the Environmental and Energy Studies. You're not actually going to be hearing much from me today, which is a good thing, because we have such a jam-packed schedule. So let me take this moment to direct everyone to our website for lots more information. Please visit www.esi.org forward slash expo for more information about the expo itself, the two congressional caucuses we'll be hearing from, as well as to sign up for our bi-weekly newsletter climate change solutions. Of course, we're coming to you virtually today, and hopefully we will be in person the next time we have a congressional clean energy expo. I'm very pleased to let everyone know that we'll be hearing remarks from all five of our caucus co-chairs over the course of the afternoon. We will also be hearing from Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary Alejandro Moreno with the Department of Energy's Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy. We are also going to be hearing from experts and leaders on two panels. The first that will start at about 2.10 p.m. national security and climate change, and then we'll be hearing from a group of experts and leaders a little bit later in the afternoon on Clean Energy Sector Workforce Development. But like I said, you're not going to be hearing much from me, so I'm going to do my best to turn it over to our speakers and to keep things running on time. Let me take a quick moment to share a special thanks to our co-chairs, Senators Reid Crapo, Collins, and Van Hollen. And let me also take a moment to share special thanks with Representative Ron Kine of Wisconsin. We'll hear from him in just a moment. This is actually his first time addressing the Expo because he only recently became chair of the House Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Caucus, but he's a great leader when it comes to these issues and we're really, really happy to have him on board with the caucus. So let me do that. I'll introduce Representative Ron Kine, who represents the Third District of Wisconsin and the U.S. House of Representatives. So let's go to that conversation now. Well, Representative Ron Kine from Wisconsin, Third District, thank you for joining us today and welcome to the leadership of the House Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Caucus. Great. Great. Thanks, Dan. Glad to be with you. Absolutely. Sir, I'd like to ask you a couple of questions and I'd like to start with maybe one of the basic ones. Why did you decide to chair the House Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Caucus and what makes you enthusiastic about renewable energy and energy efficiency? Well, first of all, thanks for the invite to kick things off with you and that and thanks to everyone who's participating. I can't think of a more important issue facing Congress this year, the nation to global, really, because of the existential threat that global climate change is facing. So for me, it was a no brain joining the Renewable Energy and Energy Efficient Caucus as co-chair to build bipartisan support to such an overriding issue, looking at the Renewable Energy Caucus general principles I'm in complete agreement with that climate change is an existential threat. There are solutions that are achievable, a healthy environment and a healthy economy go hand in hand and U.S. leadership is crucial for all this. So I was happy that one of the first steps that President Biden did on the first day in office was getting us back into the Paris Agreement. We have to have a seat at the table. We have to be offering U.S. leadership and the technological know-how that we bring to the table to help the rest of the world achieve the goals that we all share as inhabitants of this small planet. And I'm seeing a lot of the progress being made back home in my large rural western Wisconsin district, something we can talk about in a little more detail. Great, thanks. Members of Congress are also energy consumers and I'm curious if you have personal experience with renewable energy and energy efficiency and if so how has that influenced your thinking about sustainability and climate? You know I do have some personal experience because a few years ago a cabinet my wife and I built on our small family farm got struck by lightning and it went down. We relied on propane gas for our energy needs at the time but when we rebuilt thank goodness for insurance we went with geothermal energy for heating and cooling purposes and it has worked marvelously and I've always scratched my head why we're not tapping geothermal more frequently especially in climate challenged environments like we have in the upper Midwest where the sun may not shine all the time or the wind might not be blowing all the time but that constant ambient temperature just five feet below the surface can provide cooling and heating a year round. So we couldn't be happier from that but I also see firsthand in my own congressional district. I've got a small rural community called Kaston that has become the renewable energy capital of the world. They've done geothermal with their businesses on Main Street. They partnered with the largest organic co-op in the nation, Organic Valley, along with one of the bigger healthcare providers to develop wind turbines and they partnered with XL Energy to establish a huge solar farm and this is just a small rural community doing all this which shows that it can be done if it can be done in Kaston, Wisconsin it can be done anywhere in the world. Well sir over the years ESI has highlighted farms and farming communities especially those that have put sustainable land use solutions in place and adopted clean energy technologies like the ones you just described. Based on the experience of Wisconsin in your district sort of where do you see opportunities for renewable energy and energy efficiency in the agricultural sector? You know I have I think more rural electric co-ops than any other congressional district in the world and I give them a lot of credit even though Wisconsin has been pretty coal dependent throughout our history they're really making an effort to diversify the energy sources moving to more renewable sustainable greener energy projects and they're working with local communities with the local farmers in particular that they service to diversify those energy sources to increase energy efficiency. Again a major goal of the caucus is how do we make operations homes farms more energy efficient just with the technology that already exists in the know-how that already exists. So again it's an example of how a state Wisconsin that's been very coal dependent mainly from Wyoming where we had to spend a lot of money to bring in our energy is starting to diversify and do it on our own in a more sustainable fashion and creating good paying jobs at the same time and that gets back to one of the principles of the caucus that a healthy environment, a healthy economy go hand in hand and we're witnessing that firsthand throughout western Wisconsin right now. For sure and one of our panels a little bit later today we'll look at sort of look across the clean energy sector and identify workforce development opportunities. Right. Climate change is on the minds of many Americans and I'm curious what concerns people in the third district of Wisconsin about climate change and what are some of the additional climate solutions that are making a positive difference in the lives of your constituents and helping them also improve the resilience of their communities. You know there's virtually no place in the country of the world that's not impacted by climate change. For us in the upper Midwest it's some perennial flooding that is happening all too frequently with the coolies and the bluffs, the valleys that I represent it's not hard to funnel sudden downpours of water affecting many communities. So I've been dealing with flood mitigation efforts because of climate change and the projections for it to continue until we can get a grip on all this. So I've become good friends with FEMA throughout the years as you can imagine. But there are a lot of win-wins involved with this too. I've recently reintroduced the bipartisan bill to make it easier to establish bio-methane digestives for farms. This is from animal waste, manure management which otherwise might flow off the property into our drinking supply. It can be corralled then in order to produce energy. And we've got again, Organic Valley, Gundersen health provider investing in these type of projects. I've been one of the leading voices for a strong conservation title to Farm Bill. Again something that's very important for rural communities throughout America including energy efficient means and farmers want to do this. And the next Farm Bill we could tee up for major carbon sequestration on farms and in rural areas to create real benefits and incentives for them to do more in sequestering any carbon emission that would normally take place based on past farming practices. A lot of research, a lot of science going into all of this. So that's one reason. Again I'm delighted to be a part of this caucus because of the exciting change that's happening, the tremendous potential that exists right in front of us, and the ability to do this in a bipartisan way because I think people now are beginning to realize that this is not a partisan issue, it shouldn't be, and that there are some practical solutions that can strengthen and grow the economy with good paying jobs. So many families spend a significant share of their monthly income paying their utility bills and energy burdens are often highest in rural communities as well as in communities of color and in tribal communities. How could U.S. energy policy do a better job addressing equitable access to affordable clean energy in rural areas and ease the weight of those energy burdens? Well I think one of the places we can start and the investments that we've made and it's part of our Green Act actually coming out of the Ways and Means community a more sustainable energy equation along with enhanced efficiency measures. How do we help people consume less energy what they need through energy efficiency? The deployment of technology that can help reduce that consumption and footprint that people rely on. That as we know working with businesses makes bottom line sense for their profit margins and the same is true for families that when you go in you work on a farm or in a home to make it more energy efficient you could have a $500 monthly bill dropped to 100 bucks a month. What a huge cost savings that will be to families across America and that's part of our Green Act that we're trying to report out a committee and move forward to get this year. So there are ways of doing this and doing it very well but I also was co-author of the Opportunity Zone legislation and that's trying to get really staged capital in the more depressed economic regions of the country and I envisioned in doing the teaming up with Tim Scott and Cory Booker in the Senate, Pat T. Berry in the House was being able to utilize renewable energy resources and opportunity zones with that early stage investment and we're seeing that now in Wisconsin with XL Energy deploying solar farms and OZ zones that have been designated and a lot of these are in rural areas all of them by definition have to be in economically depressed areas and it's usually those families that are most impacted by rising energy costs. So again it's I think a creative innovative way of developing projects in the hard to reach economically depressed regions of the country through the Opportunity Zones and we're only limited by our imagination of where we can take these OZs especially when it comes to energy development sustainable renewable energy sources so I'm excited to be continuing to track that and develop that and make it a convenient option for more communities. You've mentioned jobs and workforce development and that's a big theme of the expo today and in fact renewable energy and energy efficiency jobs have been on a pretty strong upward trend over the last several years although we have to acknowledge the awful total the pandemic has had. What are your priorities to strengthen clean energy workforce development in rural areas in a post-pandemic recovery period? You know I'm getting a lot of feedback from renewable energy companies now that have huge demand and wait list because of the lack of workers. I was just on campus at one of my technical colleges, Chippewa Valley Technical College about a week ago and took a tour of their Renewable Energy Workforce Development Center that they're actually creating there to help produce the jobs for these renewable energy projects and we need to support that we need to support access to these training programs support the technical and vocational education programs that are standing up right now in areas like mine and throughout the country in order to meet that workforce demand that we know exists because of consumer demand and people asking for more wind and solar and geothermal and energy efficient projects in their own backyard. So I'm again hopeful that there'll be strong public private partnerships in this area that we are responsive to the private sector and where the demand is coming from and where the workforce development needs and of course my tech school back home in Wisconsin is showing us the way. You've been very generous with your time which we really appreciate but I have one more question that I'd like to ask and over your time in Congress politics and policies around many issues have changed dramatically. How is your understanding of climate change and I'm thinking of the impacts as well as the potential solutions evolved since you've been serving in Congress and what in your opinion is different about the way policymakers and the public talk about climate change today compared to maybe when you first arrived in Congress. Well Dan I've been around a little bit and at first talking about climate change trying to do anything on this front was incredibly frustrating because of how partisan and polarized the discussion was. I mean I was around for the Clinton Gord administration of course Al Gord leading the way on the time in the Senate the time when he was VP and getting the word out but I was present at the creation so to speak about seeing the necessity and the urgency of starting to act now before it becomes irreversible and yet through the years by communicating by getting to know my colleagues especially across the aisle the formation of the climate solutions caucus where you needed one R or one D to join hands to join that bipartisan caucus the conversations opened up and I think more people realize the urgency of the moment and more people back home now too. I mean every day is a new case study of the effects of climate change from the wildfires out west to the heat domes above Portland in Seattle to the perennial flooding in the upper Midwest to rising ocean and buildings starting to collapse in South Florida. I mean all these are predictable scientific events that really requires us now to put politics aside and be more concerned about our children's future than about the political moment and that's what I'm hoping this caucus will bring with your guys of South weighing in reaching out to the various offices. I've begun conversations with many of my Republican colleagues to really strengthen this caucus and the potential that we have to make significant progress and so we can look back on history and to say we rose to the occasion before it was too late. Thanks for that and of course here at ESI we'll do whatever we can to help and that's our entire reason for being around and thank you so much for joining us today. I know it's a busy time in and around the House of Representatives and we really appreciate your time and welcome to leadership of the House Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Caucus. I really really look forward to working with you and your staff who I'll just take a moment to thank them for all they've done to bring today's event to fruition and thanks to them. I'm proud to join and provide the leadership we can. Olivia on my staff has been doing a terrific job too of getting the word out and working with all of you so we'll look forward to making progress in the days to come. Thank you. I wasn't going to name-check Olivia but I'm glad you did. She's great. I hope she doesn't mind. Well it's too late now. Thanks. Great to see you. Take care. Thanks. Bye-bye. Great. Thanks. Thanks to Representative Kine for joining the House Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Caucus. Thanks for his leadership and thanks for the chance to chat. I really enjoyed our conversation and hearing about his priorities for energy efficiency and renewable energy. As you can see we're moving pretty quickly and I am primarily here just to keep things moving. I joked this morning that we have 10 pounds of flour but only a five-pound bag so we're going to keep things going pretty quickly and to help us do that we are next going to hear from Alejandro Moreno. Alejandro is Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary at the Office of Energy Efficiency Renewable Energy at the Department of Energy. He focuses on renewable energy and of course ERE has lots and lots going on and almost all of it is relevant to what we're going to be talking about over the course of the afternoon. National security, cyber security, energy affordability, workforce development. Please join me now in welcoming Alejandro Moreno to the 2021 Expo. Thanks so much for joining us today Alejandro. It's great to see you. Thanks for being part of the 2021 Clean Energy Expo. Thanks for having me. I've got lots of questions for you. I know that DOE has lots of work underway in ERE in particular. I'd like to start with a topic that one of our panels a little bit later today will address and that is resilience in the context of national security and I know DOE plays a big role in assuring the resilience and reliability of our energy system. At ERE how do you work with colleagues across the department to integrate energy efficiency and renewable energy resources in a way that maximizes grid resilience and reliability? This is a critical question and of course in ERE our focus is on a lot of the emerging clean renewable technologies and the Biden administration has a clear goal of decarbonizing the power sector by 2035 and we know this will involve a substantially different resource mix than we have today including substantially more renewables like wind and solar but at the same time and hopefully this goes without saying the primary job of the electricity system is to make sure power is available when and where it's needed affordably and reliably and any power system structure generation makes it doesn't do this doesn't work full stop. And so a lot of the discussion that you're hearing that we have in ERE and that we work closely with our colleagues in our office of electricity for example when we talk about integrating renewables into the power system what we're talking about is ensuring the power system is reliable and resilient as more renewables come on whether we're talking about integrating renewables with storage or increasing the flexibility from generation from clean energy generation like hydro and nuclear or we're talking about having more flexibility or control overload. And I think we have a real opportunity to do that not just to maintain the status quo maintain current levels of reliability and resilience as the grid evolves but really to leverage some of the emerging capabilities and technologies we see to end up with a power system that really increases resilience and reliability. And particularly in the face of new threats that we see whether manmade cybersecurity threats or climate change related threats, new weather events, the wildfires, heat waves that certainly are on everybody's mind right now. Yes a couple examples here I think for example greater distributed generation and storage can certainly limit the spread of power outages and help get parts of the grid back online more quickly. Greater observation and control of the power flow can help predict and avoid outages altogether. Better modeling of sub hourly flexibility on the grid can help make sure we're citing and operating power infrastructure in a way that specifically reduces vulnerabilities. And to your question which you know always the the million dollar question for a bureaucrat how are we looking at working with other parts of the department this is an essential one because all of the attributes we're talking about when we talk about reliability and resilience these are system level properties and characteristics. And so they require a deep coordination both across DOE and across the technologies themselves that can comprise the grid. You don't get reliability from one particular technology working in isolation you get it from the way multiple different elements of the system come together at the way they're operated the way they're planned the way they're maintained. And so to do that requires increasing coordination always in particular across the 11 different technology offices in EERE whether on the load side on the generation side on the transportation side with our office of electricity which runs all of the actual power system research a lot of the power electronics research the controls research the microgrids research and of course with our colleagues in our fossil office in our nuclear office whose whose generation technologies continue to be to be critical elements of the process. Thanks I'd like to dig into this a little bit more and move us down to sort of the community level and at the community level and especially in areas that are on the front lines of climate change resilience and reliability are major concerns and especially at this time of year and what's the potential at the community level for decentralized and distributed energy of resources to keep the lights on and help communities recover from severe weather. This is this is also critical and really goes straight to the heart of what I was saying a minute ago about the the opportunities not only to maintain resilience in the power system but potentially to increase it using advances in technologies and controls the that are really becoming more cost effective and more prevalent on the system. You know we're we're developing new methods and tools to simultaneously integrate multiple technologies so that we have at least the opportunity in places to evolve from a purely or predominantly centralized command and control structure to a more decentralized system this is increasingly feasible and it's increasingly affordable and at the same time I think as you pointed out people in communities are increasingly looking for ways to have greater control over their power supply whether it's municipal utilities that are looking for more independence from regional providers particularly as as you see more and more coincidence of peaks in demand across many different dependent power systems or individuals who are looking for for more independence for their own individual supplier or communities and technologies that can help some of them are obvious I think rooftop solar of course and and community level solar as solar costs come down this becomes more viable particularly also as we increase the ability of the distribution system to accept and to be optimized for bi-directional flows this becomes easier um maybe some some approaches are less obvious we have a really interesting demonstration project with Idaho fall power Idaho falls power excuse me recently looking at combining multiple smaller run-of-river hydropower projects with battery systems to increase the capacity value and of the local Idaho falls falls power fleet and reduce their dependence on on their regional provider as well and they were really happy with the results that that we came um that we got out of that um and some elements really involve potentially fundamentally rethinking certain elements of of power system design and configuration storage is a really interesting example I think you know we we think a lot about how to value stack storage and how to incorporate it into the existing whether policy um sort of architecture or physical architecture of the grid but it's also interesting to think about how you might use storage if you were designing a new system for scratch from scratch if you really had affordable um electricity storage of four hours or more and and how you might build in a system where storage is a critical buffer it really does become as integral to to the power system as transmission or distribution infrastructure and allow you to more effectively plan say for average loads rather than for for people so these are all some of the things different ways that that we could see communities and smaller units of load or or aggregated units of load having a little bit more control over over their own generation and and ultimately over the services that that energy provides to them that's cool and it feels like we're getting closer and closer I don't it'll be it'll be nice when we're sort of we reach that sort of level of full integration um I'd like to take it down to next level sort of to the household level and you know many families spend a significant share of their monthly income on utility bills um in some cases 10% or more where the national average is closer to 3% and energy burdens are often highest in rural communities communities of color and in tribal communities what are some of the things eere is doing uh that uh with the goal of improving energy affordability for these families well um uh in one way all of the work that we do has to be targeted at a portfolio right in the same way that a power system that isn't reliable and resilient doesn't work no matter its generation or its emissions profile the same way one that doesn't provide electricity affordably doesn't work for the same business that said and and maybe a little bit more more usefully to your point um while eere has uh some some very clear decarbonization goals including reaching a fully decarbonized power sector by 2035 that's the president's goal just as important are the goals related to ensuring that the clean energy transition benefits all Americans you've heard the president and the administration talk a lot about the importance and the opportunity for creating jobs um in the clean energy transition um at the same time also addressing environmental justice past inequities um and ensuring that the energy services and energy infrastructure benefits communities where it's located and where the services are provided um and we know to your point right now that energy burdens fall hardest on low we have extensive database evidence that both from um our own low income energy affordability data tool or lead tool as well as analysis and on us census data um showing that how rural communities and and also communities of color disproportionately affected by high energy burdens um rural communities specifically have had a higher median energy burden than urban households um and it's worth noting that those disparities increase substantially from minority communities um and individuals households rather elderly um and also those who rent um and so it's a critical part of our mission in DOE and ERE to reduce those disparities um as well as reducing energy burden overall um DOE has a new office of energy justice that helps lead this effort um and the president's new justice 40 initiative promises to deliver 40 percent of the overall benefits of climate change investments to disadvantaged communities and that's something that we are taking very seriously is a key part of how we are determining where we spend our money where we request money for um to congress for for the work that we will continue to do in the upcoming fiscal years um and these investments are really targeted on ensuring that the communities that have suffered the consequences of high energy burden the consequences of of poverty um really are the first development and ERE has has a number of programs that have historically included a focus on uh low income communities and and otherwise disadvantaged communities including programs like our weatherizations uh assist weatherization assistance program it's the nation's largest whole house energy efficiency retrofit program um and it focuses on disadvantaged american families on a national scale providing energy efficiency retrofits to about 35 000 low income families in in every county and and i think every every state uh every year um another program within the weatherization or broader weatherization office is our state energy program which strategically engages state leadership um in deploying clean energy technologies and increasingly can be leveraged to to create programs that focus specifically on disadvantaged communities um within our renewable energy programs as well we're increasingly focused on programs that specifically look at some of the barriers to access for low income communities for example rooftop solar is very difficult to deploy if you don't own your own home and so how do we look at financing models and structural models physical structural models that allow for example communities to invest in their own solar at a slightly more aggregated level where the financing structure is something that allows low income communities and low income individuals and households to participate um while seeing the same benefits and ensuring that the individuals in the household you put the same benefit that they might from cell phone rooftop solar on on a on an owned house for example um let's dig into the the jobs issue a little bit since you you mentioned it and weatherization is the energy program i i tend to think of this as jobs programs as much as anything um job growth in the energy efficiency and renewable energy sectors has been on a strong upward trend over the last several years and of course that was pretty severely interrupted by the pandemic but there's a recovery taking place what are eere's priorities to strengthen clean energy workforce development um i i think as i said before we have an opportunity as we transition to a clean energy power system and a clean energy economy to create thousands and thousands of new good well-paying jobs and stable clean energy careers that have potential for growth potential potentially to join a union um this will be essential to the success of of the green energy transition and is a huge opportunity for the american economy overall um eere does have a i think a critical role to play here as we are the the technology experts um traditionally we've done a fair amount of workforce training work but i think we all recognize that if we are going to be successful in not only in ensuring that skilled workers are are available but the jobs are available in there that it takes more than just training training is a critical element but we need to take as as do we and um and as the clean energy sector a a more holistic approach um i think starting from education and really ensuring um robust stem programs related stem programs ensuring diversity and inclusion within those programs to make sure we are drawing from all of the talent that america has to offer drawing connections between those programs the educational programs and the industries and the sectors that are creating jobs themselves um and there's a role there i think for for the do we and for the federal government in partnership with both private sector institutions and universities themselves to ensure that we're developing really thorough and robust networks between a wide range of universities and the increasing number of companies in the clean energy sector um of course the training and ensuring continued skills development both from a stem perspective and from a vocational training perspective is important but also creating certifications that allow for a level of technical standards and labor standards in the jobs themselves so that we as jobs develop there's there's a set there's an element of both quality assurance but also predictability and stability in those jobs that the customer and the recipient of the work and the technology know what they're getting but the workers know exactly what they're getting as well and can train for that and then lastly and potentially most importantly it's making sure that that the parts of the industry that create those jobs create those jobs here in the us and you can have all the workers in the world but if you don't have the jobs um in the us then then you're not going to see that same benefit to the local american communities that you need and that's a big part you know of what we're looking at for example if if we look at some of the estimates of the amount of wind turbines or solar panels um in solar capacity that needs to come online every year between now and 2035 to increase uh i'm sorry to um to meet the president's climate goals that could entail a a doubling or tripling of of of say wind um capacity wind manufacturing every year how do we ensure that that stays in the us or or the the majority of that or the the components that are most productively developed in the us are developed here and that we're not losing job opportunities um where it doesn't make sense to to other countries or um otherwise losing opportunity really to create that um that those opportunities for the workforce here i mentioned at the outset that one of our panels later today will deal with national security and resilience and climate we also have a panel coming up later that will deal with workforce development job economic development job creation in the renewable energy and energy efficiency sector so um thanks very much for that answer i'm looking forward to what our industry representatives have to say about it too um you have a lot of experience and expertise in renewable energy um i come from a background that's defined more by energy efficiency um how should these two good things work better together and specifically how does eere think about energy efficiency and renewable energy um in the building sector um so again this this again great question and it really goes back to the principle of integrated systems that i talked about at the beginning i think in the first question um you know my focus has really been focused on on decarbonizing degree and i recognize that as as important as renewable energy generation technologies are we're not going to get there without the load side either um and part of this is in the efficiency itself traditional efficiency measures um particularly reducing peak demand which is of course a driver for the scale of the generation infrastructure you need um at the same time advances in in smart appliances and building technologies all also offer the opportunity to provide a lot of flexibility back to the grid so there's a real opportunity space there for adjusting aggregate demand on the fly in response to changes in in generation output so instead of this traditional sort of paradigm of of just constantly adjusting generation to meet fairly sort of standard load patterns or load patterns that are that are taken as a given being able to adjust both sides of the equation dynamically offers you a lot more control in ensuring reliability and resilience and affordability at lower overall costs with lower overall infrastructure requirements and we have a lot of work in in eerie focus on that our grid interactive buildings program in our building technology office for example that's a primary focus but it works really closely with with the renewable energy technologies as well right particularly with behind the meter technologies rooftop solar behind the meter storage is an integral component to the load side flexibility as well and so at some point the that rigid distinction between the buildings on the open and appliances and the grid becomes pretty gray and you need to work closely across the suite of technologies again understanding how they integrate at different points in the grid chain whether behind the meter at the substation level at the bulk level but you know whether it's buildings or transportation I think maybe even the biggest element of integration is really looking at the projected electrification of loads that are currently served by fuel or by thermal energy as we know many automakers are looking to have most if not all of their new models be ease by 2035 or so and decarbonizing heavy industry is going to require a mix of both electrification and zero carbon fuels and this will have a major effect on the demands that are coming from the power system we know that it's it I think it's the problem statement is fairly well acknowledged but understanding the nuances of the implications of different sequencing scales pace of electrification of different sub sectors is something we're just starting to really wrestle with you know just to give an example understanding the true flexibility of different types of demand for example what percentage of people are going to be willing to have their cars charged at three in the morning instead of six o'clock when they come home and plug them in or how much flexibility will ups delivery trucks have to charge it during the day and deliver at night these are actually given the scale that we're talking about here in aggregate these are really important questions they may have significant implications on the generation side and build out and they also take a type of technical knowledge that's that's relatively new for the power sector it's a lot of consumer behavior for example psychology these are going to be important factors in understanding the whole integration of the power system with load and beginning to move from you know sort of siloed IRP resource planning generation planning transition transmission planning into more holistic integrated energy planning a number of utilities are starting to do this it's it's certainly a way I think we an approach we're very supportive of but it requires a level of coordination and a level of understanding and knowledge across multiple disciplines within the power sector within the energy sector that that is is relatively new and going to be more and more important as we look forward well Alejandro you've been super generous with your time but I do have one more question for you it's something we haven't covered yet but I'm interested in hearing what ERE is doing and I'm going to refer back to one of our congressional climate camp briefings and we sort of specifically looked at the emissions profile of the industrial sector and why it's so important to decarbonize the processes we use to make stuff what is ERE doing to help industrial producers and manufacturers reduce their carbon footprints this is another another great question and another great example of a sector that really cuts across many different technologies and many different offices within the ERE of course within ERE we have our advanced manufacturing office which has a large focus on industrial decarbonization it actually started life as as the industrial technologies program but we have a lot of work within our fuel cells program looking at hydrogen for example in our bio energies program looking at new combustion turbines that can be optimized for renewable energy fuels and of course also within our nuclear and within our fossil energy and and carbon management program a lot of the work is is looking either at individual technologies or integrated energy systems that have a real potential value for industrial decarbonization some of that I will say there there's we are looking at at hybrid systems that can both support industrial decarbonization and the grade at the same time and offer more flexibility back to the grid but really looking at industry and heavy industry itself I mean we are looking and we need to look at the efficiency of the processes themselves we need to look at opportunities for electrification increased electrification of multiple different currently thermal power processes we need to look at hydrogen and other thermal sources of thermal sources hydrogen for processes that are not well suited for electrification we know there are a lot and so we're looking at a at a sort of a sector by sector looking at chemicals looking at steel looking at cement for example and really recognizing that they each one is different each one has their own needs each one has their own cost drivers and so working with you're within the re are our manufacturing office taking the lead in working directly with with the industrial stakeholders themselves but being able to bring the full range of technologies that we have again from a generation side from the storage side and from efficiency side to bear we are continuing to develop strategic plans specifically for industrial decarbonization it's one of the five key priorities you see out coming out of the eere probably should have talked about those at the beginning but but the first is decarbonizing the power sector reaching a fully decarbonized power sector by 2035 the second is focused on decarbonizing the transportation sector the third on buildings the fourth on on industry industrial decarbonization and the fifth on agriculture and what's really important about all of those if you know eere well they don't perfectly align to our offices or even to our sectors and again it's a recognition that all of this work is cross-cutting and it requires integration of multiple different technologies focused on specific end uses because that's ultimately where our stakeholders reside where the benefits will accrue and the people that we need to be working with and listening to to make sure that the technologies and the solutions we provide work for them and if they don't work for them then they don't work here well you just said something along the lines of for people who are familiar with eere it's impossible for anyone who just listened to the last few minutes not learn so much about eere so much great work going on over there the Department of Energy and you've been again extremely generous with your time to join us today for the expo thank you so much I only wish we could be together in person so hopefully next year we'll be able to have an in-person expo but on behalf of everyone thank you so much for joining us today and telling us all about your great work at eere I really appreciate it well thanks for having me it was a pleasure and wish you the best for the rest of the show great thanks so much okay great well special thanks to Alejandro for making so much time available for us today it was a great conversation and definitely enjoyed speaking with him there's so much going on at DOE and eere we are now at the point in our program where we will have our first panel of the day what does climate change mean for national security I will introduce the panel as we go and we'll have a little bit of time for discussion but to help us welcome the panelists I would like to introduce caucus deputy co-chair senator Susan Collins the senior senator for main she is a key appropriator she also serves on the special committee on aging committee on health education labor and pensions and the select committee on intelligence so let's welcome senator Susan Collins thank you Daniel it is a pleasure to welcome our distinguished panel I thank my colleagues and the renewable energy and energy efficiency caucus for your commitment to bipartisan action on the challenge of climate change there's no question that climate change presents a serious threat to the security and prosperity of our world here at home the effects of climate change could damage our economy harm public health and overwhelm disaster response in addition climate change poses a direct threat to our national defense in 2019 the pentagon reported that two-thirds of military installation surveyed were already facing risks related to climate change such as flooding drought and wildfires we must take action on two fronts first it is essential that we build greater resilience into our critical infrastructure such as our power grid and water supplies second we must continue to make investments in the clean renewable energy sources that help to reduce greenhouse gas emissions the energy act of 2020 that became long late last year demonstrates the progress we can make when we work together from increasing energy efficiency to supporting renewable energy production and storage this comprehensive package keeps our nation at the forefront of clean energy development clean energy is vital to our future our economy and our environment thank you for the important work you do to help our nation stay positioned as a global leader on combating climate change thanks senator collins for helping us introduce our panel today what does national security or excuse me what does climate change mean for national security we have assembled a really amazing collection of leaders and experts and practitioners to help us get to the bottom of this question to the extent that we can this afternoon and i'm going to open the panel by introducing our first speaker we will be hearing from joe bryan senior advisor for climate and who works with the office of the secretary of defense at the defense department joe welcome to our panel today thanks so much dan it's uh it's a it's a great opportunity to be here thanks for the the opportunity to join and and to be with some uh some old friends and some new faces i see with my uh my fellow panelists so as dad mentioned my my name is joe bryan and i'm the senior climate advisor to the secretary of defense and um you know some have asked why the secretary of defense actually needs a climate advisor what does climate have to do with national security and my answer to that is the same one as secretary austin's and that is that there is little about what the department does to defend the american people that is not affected by climate change just look around the world the arctic is warming at a rate twice as fast as the rest of the planet heating up competition for heating up competition for resources and influence uh extended drought in honduras sell salvador and guatemala contributes to migration north to our southern border longer hurricane and typhoon seasons impact operations in fact typhoon wootip in february 2019 forced us to pause exercises with our australian and japanese partners you know in april secretary austin hosted a panel as part of president biden's climate leaders summit and the iraqi minister of defense said at that panel quote put simply iraq is very hot and it's getting hotter he called climate change quote an existential threat to iraq's national security and talked about how isis understands that vulnerability and has targeted water resources including the mosul dam as a way to undermine the government the challenges to security and stability posed by climate change are real and they're significant they are mission generators demanding attention and resources and the same phenomenon that drives mission demand also challenges our capacity to respond we sortie ships in the face of hurricanes we evacuate installation in the face of what installations in the face of wild fires just look what's happening out west right now there have been evacuations of bale air force base and camp petalton marine corps base in just the last month we have black flag days when it's too hot to train it was over 130 degrees in death valley a couple weeks ago and the heat wave in the pacific northwest actually shut down a puget sound naval shipyard that's that's puget sound hurricane michael wiped out tindall air force base in 2018 causing five billion dollars in damage legion had more than three billion dollars in damage from the same storm flooding in the missouri river in march of 2019 caused more than 400 million dollars of damage and off at air force base in this spring i was with deputy secretary hicks at naval air station pennsycola which suffered about 450 million dollars in damages from hurricane sally and that was just last fall the base when we visited had 27 football fields of temporary blue roofing covering their facilities climate change is going to cost us in resources and readiness the reality is that it already is we need to make sure that we're prepared for the impacts of climate always with a focus on the mission but secretary austin has said many times our mission objectives are actually quite well aligned with our climate goals there is not a repeat there is not a competition between what's good for the climate and what's good for the mission look our military bases house critical missions that need to stay up and running even if the grid goes down when we have a threat environment from weather and cyber just think about the pioneer pipeline attack few from a few weeks ago that put the grid at risk and what do you do to improve mission resilience well number one you get really energy efficient and number two you bring energy storage and distributed generation inside the base fence line preferably things like solar that minimize logistics requirements and you put controls in place that make sure resources are directed at the right assets you don't want to keep the lights in the gym on when the mission suffering from lack of power look i was out at marine core air station miramar in california just a few weeks ago that base has a micro grid capable of power and critical missions even should they lose grid power to get there they leverage a range of assets from landfill gas to solar and last summer miramar actually took six megawatts of power off the grid to help the local utility deal with exceptionally high demand during a heat wave and preserve the grid for everyone we need more of that capability and that's why president biden's budget request proposed significant increases for programs like the energy resilience and conservation improvement fund to strengthen base resilience now it's important to recognize the two thirds to three quarters of our energy is actually used on things like ships and airplanes not our bases and reducing energy man is not only good for the climate it is critical for military operations the joint war fighting concept includes four concepts command and control fires information advantage and contested logistics we know that we're not going to get a free pass to push fuel into theater so we can't be aggressive enough and reducing operational energy demand after all you can't sink efficiency the president's budget proposed new investments in key operational energy programs from hybrid electric tactical vehicles to engine improvements on navy ships to reducing air plan drag to improve fuel efficiency these investments are a priority because again they are great for the mission and also happen to be quite good for the climate finally the president has made domestic lithium ion battery production a priority and that effort is tied closely to electric vehicle deployment you may have seen the executive order calls for electrification of the federal fleet now you might ask what does that have to do with national security and while it may not be immediately intuitive the commercial EV industry is actually critical to do d capability the scale and pace of the shift to electric transportation is massive and fast Volvo is committed to be all electric by 2030 gm by 2035 forward in europe by 2030 and Volkswagen will have 70 new electric models and 50 percent of the u.s and chinese markets targeted for electric by 2030 lithium ion batteries are at the heart of the transformation to evs and estimates are that to date around 750 billion dollars has been committed for investment in the lithium ion battery supply chain but right now china dominates that supply chain and that's a problem because military capability depends on batteries the navy alone has two to three thousand systems that rely on lithium ion batteries and future capability from unmanned systems to directed energy weapons all rely on lithium ion it is the commercial sector however that will drive supply chain investment the od is a big customer but can't move that market on its own we need the commercial ev industry to drive supply chain investment back to the united states again ev deployment good for the climate but also necessary for the mission i'll end with this thought the world is changing and the climate and clean energy challenge and opportunity raise issues that we need to engage and the choices we make matter to the climate but they're also crucial to the military success thank you and i look forward to the conversation thanks so much joe for getting the panel off on a great start our next panelist we will be hearing from is lisa jackson lisa is president of the business council for sustainable energy welcome to the panel lisa thank you dan it's a pleasure to be with you once again and congratulations on an amazing program of this year and i'm very pleased to be part of this panel today where we're focused on national security and resilience you know and following the previous comments you know just like the military the private sector which i represent is deeply impacted by disruptions to supply chains and we are involved for a number of reasons so i think the national security frame which you don't often hear from the business community as the lead is a really important topic to discuss you know just thinking about the business council for sustainable energies experience that the organization was founded nearly 30 years ago on the cusp of the rio earth summit and through those discussions the businesses that i represent realize we not only have you know technologies and expertise to share but we also have a national imperative to participate because while we can work here at home and abroad to reduce emissions and to improve our resilience we have a larger challenge in front of us which is you know the safety and security of populations throughout the world so there's a moral impedetive to make sure that we have a secure safe and thriving world for citizens and families and communities to help help and and contribute so from a business perspective national security is a very important topic so when we look at it we think about our goods and services and our supply chains as i already mentioned and we look at it from the lens of community and individual safety and prosperity i also want to talk a little bit about resilience and here too we look at it both here at home and what we can offer abroad the impacts of climate change are severe and unfortunately increasing you know this is one of the areas that the business council for sustainable energy tracks in a report it releases each year called the sustainable energy in america factbook just a few years ago we started a new section on resilience and resilient investment and how the clean energy technologies and services that business council for sustainable energy members offer are expanding and unfortunately that section you know continues to get larger and larger as the the frequency and severity of the episodes are happening in our country and in others and the expenditures that we have to make to rebuild um and and hopefully to a larger extent invest up front before we're having these disasters increases so resilience national security and us competitiveness i think are all interwoven and certainly top of mind for the companies and industries that the business council represents one of the aspects that we try to offer in this conversation is obviously the need to prioritize investment to support our national security as it relates to climate change and to invest in more resilient infrastructure but to do so with the private sector in mind and really trying to use any public activity or public investment as a vehicle to leverage private sector activity i know we're going to talk about this a little bit more when we hear from tim unruh uh the executive director of naysco but i wanted to point it out because i think that's one of the top messages that the business council for sustainable energy is trying to put forward to policymakers you know our challenges um are ones that are so significant that we can't do it alone there really needs to be public private partnership so with that again i'll conclude by saying that national security is vital to us companies we need to have stable markets here at home and many of our industries operate in the global marketplace so when we're thinking about the geopolitical aspects of climate change and the need for stable markets abroad it has a direct impact on jobs and investment here in the united states too so the business community looks to help find ways with its technology and expertise to enhance our national security and to contribute to conversations that will enable us to leverage the private sector in these areas so that we can achieve our goals more affordably and faster thanks dan well thanks to you lisa for joining us today and uh you sort of took away um my ability to introduce our next panelists but i'll let it go this one time um he'll get two introductions today um but if anyone's going to get two introductions it might as well be tim unruh executive director of the national association of energy services companies tim thanks for joining us again this year at the 2021 expo tim i'm i'm sorry we're having a little hard time understanding you um do you think maybe it sounds like your microphone may not be connected how about now can you hear me now it's a little bit better now but i'll say a little bit okay it's still pretty touch and go no dancing we're getting a little bit of interference it sounds like now we have some typing um could you try again tim it sounds like you're very far away um is any better yet yes okay great sorry about that it does not count against your time right it worked fine in our preview i've changed so it's great to be here today and thanks lisa for the call out from bcsc and i it's nice to get to work with so many people that i've worked with prior and to be on this panel with them and uh it's uh looks like a great turnout for you today dan so wonderful congratulations um as mentioned by lisa before i want to expand on the topic of of a public private partnership called energy safety performance contracts or espc's this type of contract has been around for about 40 years now and enabling legislation is in place for the federal government and every state government in the us and about seven billion dollars of work is done under this type of agreement with the private sector every year and since infrastructure is the hot topic in washington this week i want to explain how espc's are a unique tool that that we use in renewing and modernizing our public facilities a tool that's enjoyed prod bipartisan support across the country for the last 30 years in my recent history i ran the federal energy management program in the u.s department of energy one of our roles was to manage energy stage performance contracts during my tenure we saw two significant achievements using these contracts that greatly benefited the american taxpayer the first achievement was the president's performance contracting challenge in that challenge each federal agency accepted a goal to implement espc's over a five-year period through active agency leadership some of those leaders are here on this call today and consistent engagement through white house council environmental quality we were able to implement four billion dollars actually over four billion dollars in federal facility improvements and let's be clear that is four billion dollars of private sector investment into federal facilities in the second achievement a new program was started called affect and as you can guess we love those acronyms and this is another one it stands for assisting federal facilities with energy conservation technologies or that's where we get affect congress established this program to allow federal agencies to compete for grants by proposing plans to leverage the grants into agency-wide energy stage performance contract programs rather than one-off espc projects we started small with about three million dollars of grants the first year because we didn't know if agencies would really like the idea and we were delighted that agencies submitted proposals and that the winning proposals leveraged the three million of grants to about 75 million dollars of programs a 25 times multiplier of federal funds from with private investment how do we get these astounding results it's really pretty simple actually unlike other public private partnerships which allow an increased fees or taxes to repay the private investors espc is repurposed money that a public facility is already spending on wasted energy and the maintenance of obsolete equipment to a stream of guaranteed savings to repay the investors and these are very safe investments with extremely low default rates most of which are held by long-term institutional investors but neither the public nor the private halves of this partnership are resting on our achievement of over 60 billion dollars of performance projects to date we're all working continuously to improve espc on the public side the department of energy develops and refines a set of standard contract processes and documents now in its third generation and posted on the doe website as well as developing and maintaining a database of more than 7000 espc projects that documents the success of espc's and state energy offices develop program regulations and processes to help state facilities local governments k through 12 schools universities and water wastewater facilities to better utilize these these contracts the private sector has also made improvements with neisco collaborating with doe and state efforts to improve performance contracts and establish an accreditation program that enables customers to identify high quality escos there's even an organization that provides a coordination between the private sector and state energy offices called the energy services coalition as you can see we've developed this industry significantly now how does this relate to resiliency as we face the task of rebuilding our public facilities infrastructure we're learning that we must expand the use of performance contracts because there is not going to be enough government funding to get the job done we've learned for example that energy efficiency improvements are interrelated with many necessary resilience improvements an example is that new windows and doors not only have to minimize air leakage but they also have to be wind resistant hurricane resistant and they might even need to be blast resistant in another case when a facility wants to install a system for peak energy use reduction they may also decide that they want to install a microgrid to improve the facility's ability to survive a power outage or to make sure the facility can be used for emergency shelter we also see that many pandemic related building improvements are also tied to energy efficiency like ventilation and uvc lighting sanitation these resilience plus efficiency measures share one thing in common the efficiency portion provides sufficient savings to pay for itself but the resiliency add-on does not this puts building owners into a quandary and they recognize if they do the efforts together they have significant opportunity to reduce overall costs but if they have to do them separately they know that the resilient measures may never be done for this reason the national association of energy service companies is asking congress to take advantage of the financial leverage offered by espc's we believe that a resilient down payment can be leveraged with espc's to get more done with less we believe that for every dollar invested by congress we would expect at least four dollars to be invested by the private sector let's be clear our our four times leverage estimate is a modest expectation as this proposal is modeled after federal affect program while its initial offering saw a 25 times achievement the program consistently performs at at least 10 times leveraging every year we believe that as federal state and local governments across the country recognize the need for resilient improvements in their building infrastructure they're going to find that leveraging their investment with energy states performance contracts will lower their building's emissions while making them better ready to weather whatever type of spoilers i look forward to hearing what others have to say on this topic today dan awesome tim thank you so much and apologies for the um the the technical issue at the start but i can assure you i heard everything that you said after that it was great i'm sure it's my fault anyway well i will it's over with now we'll leave it there thanks so much tim um our next speaker uh is um an old and dear friend to esi john conger director of the senate excuse me director of the center for climate and security john welcome to the expo today really looking forward to your presentation john you may be muted on your end okay well can you hear me now all right good um so thanks for inviting me thanks for including me in this presentation it's very exciting uh to have this panel today on what we consider to be a very important topic the the intersection between national security and climate change which is obviously the the meat and potatoes of our center um i think if if i could have one thing that the audience would take away from today's session from all the panelists it's that climate change is a national security issue it affects how do d operates and plans and impacts infrastructure it affects human security and safety and it affects global stability by its nature it means that what you've always done isn't good enough and that your planning assumptions have to change the uh the incomparable joe brian uh went through all of these details uh you know earlier on in his presentation so i'm not going to repeat all of the different ways that climate change is going to impact national security but i do want to leave you with a second takeaway if you have two takeaways in addition to climate change is a national security issue i want you to take away that more than in almost any other aspect of climate policy climate security has been an increasingly and to some people surprisingly bipartisan and pragmatic space at the at the center for climate and security we've been working to promote this consensus for many years we have an advisory board of retired admirals and generals who've all recognized this underlying premise and that underlying premise your first takeaway but back in 2017 i think we saw really the potential of this because congress and a bipartisan vote declared climate change was a direct threat to national security now let's remember what the situation was in 2017 we had a republican house or republican senate president trump and all of them came together to make this declaration um you know but there was a house floor vote where 46 republicans joined all the democrats to affirm uh this provision and it was captain conference in the defense authorization bill signed by the president and you know when when that you know generally when the bill is pending before the president they come out with the statements of administration policy and that statement of administration policy didn't the climate provisions so i think it's important to recognize that this was something that had broad agreement at the very least within the defense space and then the following year the house and senate arm services committee continued to include pragmatic measures into defense legislation resilience measures artic strategy you know when you have a whole new ocean to patrol that changes the strategic calculation and with the arctic ice melting that's what that's what you've got um the kinds of provisions that basically recognize the dod has a stake in climate change and we don't want to impose a blind spot on them that would make them more vulnerable in in december of 2018 senator inhoff who has a reputation as a climate skeptic commented to the media that while climate wasn't his priority he was not going to try and block measures from appearing in the national defense authorization act if they were going to help the military well he was about to become the chairman of the senate arm services committee so you sort of get a sense of the the acceptance of this issue the washington post saw this pattern and published a piece noting that if you wanted president trump to sign climate legislation all you had to do was put it in a defense bill dod has put out policy on how to incorporate climate change into infrastructure programs published studies on the vulnerability of dod bases that there was a science study that that was uh 2018 where they assessed the vulnerability of base in the pacific noting that um there was going to be because of sea level rise the you know this was a radar facility in quadruple that by the 2030s it might not be able to operate because the island wouldn't be able to support human habitation and those kinds of studies are really important because it wasn't that the base was going to be underwater it was that the uh the aquifer was going to be polluted with salt water the sea level rise hits other things before you're walking walking in water across the the installation and so you had to be able to have that fresh water so the point is is that dod has been doing these things for a long time under republicans and democrats you can reach back to the bush administration and find highlighting this issue find studies highlighting this issue uh you can back down back to the bush administration again to repeated worldwide threat assessments by the intelligence community that state that climate change is a national security issue um in 2020 the secretary of the army issued a climate change directive and uh they had also they finally finished their army climate assessment tool which was the predecessor to the dekat the defense climate assessment tool that joe mentioned the over those years i think one of the reasons that such bipartisan consensus has emerged was because of the billions of dollars of impacts the extreme weather events have had when congress has to start writing checks everything becomes real and it's no longer an issue of debate but when you have to write five billion dollar check for 10 the air force base or 3.6 billion per camp lejeune or joe also mentioned the the often air force base damage from the flooding of the missouri river i think pragmatism emerges when the impacts are clear and so you had republicans and democrats coming together in congress and you had republicans and democrats across administrations buying into this issue so what's different well i'll tell you what's different it makes a significant difference when senior leadership prioritizes a topic or portfolio and and that is certainly what the current administration has done without question the threat imposed by climate change has been prioritized by this administration but without question it is clear that it is one of secretary austin's top priorities and and i think that that has sent a shockwave and momentum through the department and that came from the president so it's shockwaves through the rest of the administration as well i think it's important to recognize that what interests your boss fascinates you and that has taken hold at dod and across the enterprise but it's really at the heart of the effort it's about pragmatism it's about taking it out of politics setting aside from politics recognizing the risks and trying to take commensurate action you know congress is continuing to work this issue and i expect to see more provisions in the defense authorization bills more provisions in the appropriations bills you hear during uh you know during an appropriations committee hearing house appropriations committee hearing earlier this year um you heard bipartisan support and interest in the issue it was it was a republican in that hearing who mentioned that president biden needed a bigger emphasis uh on climate and his defense strategy so i'll wrap up um we definitely turned a corner and in the past few years congress has stopped arguing about scientific consensus and facts and having non-scientists arguing with non-scientists about scientific issues and working on how to respond there are lots of reasons for that but one of them is the bridge building that occurred through the national security sector and and the fact that it has helped us step aside from the political debates and turn to pragmatism uh and and be able to move the ball forward to figure out how we protect uh our military and our national security from the impacts of climate change thank you and i look forward to your questions thanks john that was a great presentation and a great um summary of sort of how to look at this i love the um i love the emphasis on pragmatism i think that really um especially with with what we're seeing in the headlines um you know i think that really hits home so thank you so much for your presentation um next up we will hear from beth gibbons beth is executive director of the american society of adaptation professionals or asap beth welcome to the panel thanks so much dan and i really can't imagine having a better t-up from what john just said because at asap we really talk about our work being pragmatic optimism we try to remain optimists in the face of immense climate challenges and looking at what needs to be done and i would say that you know john's remarks and also the washington post article that came out this weekend that said we have enough studies we need to set targets but we need to do adaptation today is really where asap comes in um our organization is a network of professionals across north america who come from multiple sectors from academia nonprofits from the government and philanthropy to identify how do we actually do cross disciplinary cross sectoral work to address the impacts of climate change and when we talk about that when we bring people together from all of these different sectors what's defining that work is that we're talking about integrating future climate conditions into our day-to-day work and it's so critical i mean the reasons that we've already heard climate risk is posed to our health our security our economy our infrastructure in 2020 there were 22 billion dollar or greater disasters already in 2021 we've seen eight billion dollar disasters and so we say why does climate adaptation matter because just as we've already heard that when those bills start to get come due and they are coming due we need to come up with mechanisms to prevent them and that is really where climate adaptation actions come in climate adaptation introduces new thinking it's asking for you to think about things in ways that are iterative collaborative interdisciplinary and in all of this work we're really asking for climate adaptation solutions to be people-centric and future-oriented we need to break our paradigm that we are going to plan for the weather or the system of yesterday we need to start looking forward and we have to start being strategic and so when we think about that we think about who are some of the best strategists we have among our minds and we turn to do d and we've seen the department of defense in so many ways already leading in this area we see collaborations that have taken place from san diego to colorado into the hampton roads region and it makes sense because the same study that john was alluding to earlier that 2018 study of the pacific base included 3500 bases in half of those bases identified that they were considering climate as one of their top risks in some cases it was flood in some cases it was saltwater intrusion in some cases it was wildfire but we know that the bases are thinking about it already and so when we want to imagine what could this look like as a solution we have some really great places to turn so i'm going to tell a short story of a place-based case where whole government coordination came to play a role in changing what is happening today and what's going to happen into the future and i'm sure many people on the skull already know this story is from the hampton roads area and so when you imagine hampton roads there on the tip of virginia you can see 1.7 million people you see one of the world's most impressive natural deep water ports and you have the most military installations of any place in the usa so a place that has sensitivity opportunity and multiple reasons that we're going to need to be protecting this place back in 2014 they launched the hampton roads resilience integrated pilot project which you'll never need to know the name of if you want to call it shorthand it's the ipp and this effort brought together players from really i'm going to repeat this again a whole of government approach and i'm going to repeat that because we're hearing the current administration talk about a whole of government approach but i think that their whole of government is thinking about the federal family and at the hampton roads all of government whole of government approach it was the local government a regional body the state government and then they brought in federal partners it was do d it was army core it was fema all coming together to really think about what were the resources they had the questions they needed answered in the ways that they could be collaborating to secure their assets through that research they found that they were facing a three to seven foot sea level rise a minimum of a three meter storm surge which was going to be inundating i don't want to say catastrophic because that may be too far but it was an impact which would require action on behalf of the base on behalf of the city and on behalf of the state itself as it was thinking about its own trunk lines and from their action was able to be taken they've worked on shoreline restoration that has included living shoreline restoration which is now an enabled restoration initiative that army core allows in a standard approach to addressing shoreline risk they worked on dune rehabilitation rehabilitation they worked on hardening waterways as well it's not always just green infrastructure you have to bring gray in there they brought in floodgates and flood walls and they worked on improved communication tools tools that were useful for the residents and for the base and so when you think about these takeaways we know that climate change is going to impact across the board we see our cities often as the front lines where impacts are taking place they are the homes to where our bases are located and together these partnerships can be really powerful to bring home not just a lot of conversation about what are the risks and was it going to cost and how will we measure it but they're putting work in the ground and they're actually changing the landscape for what does resilience look like in communities today and so I really recommend this approach when we think about climate change adaptation everyone is going to adapt that is going to happen humans are adaptive people we're adaptive creatures out there on the earth but if we're going to adapt in ways that really preserve our life our liberty our way of wanting to live and to be with one another it's going to require thoughtfulness about what we do today and what we do into the future and coming together through collaborations helps us to really open up those conversations and ensure we have access to the technology and the resources that we all need to get the work done so thanks Dan for letting me be here to share a little bit about what ASAP is doing and join the panel for how adaptation is part of our solutions absolutely Beth I'm thanking you I'll send it right back at you and double it thank you so much for that excellent presentation we will now hear from Zalika Strong Zalika is the vice president of government affairs at the national hydropower association Zalika take it away thanks Dan and thanks everybody else for this really great insightful information and clearly climate change is so important to all of us we're seeing so much synergy right now congressionally as we're looking for true national solutions and I'm excited to kind of dovetail our conversation today with the role of hydropower that has been part of the climate change conversation for decades you know when we think about renewable generation how important it is to integrate it in the mix not only for a solution for a clean generation but with hydropower really have the opportunity to have to enhance grid resiliency and reliability with integrating a lot of hydro into the grid as well as also working together across other renewable resources like solar wind power to to not only provide the clean energy solutions that we need but also to provide the solutions to variability and intermittency issues so I think with hydropower we have been like I said we've been part of the conversation for a long time up until last year we were about nine percent of all renewable generation all generation in the country came from hydropower went down to seven percent with wind kind of accelerating their investments in in renewable energy so still a very significant portion of what is clean and generated in this country in the last year kind of moving forward we have started to really look from an industrial perspective on how we can better provide a strong role for hydropower as well as pump storage to accelerate its positioning in the clean energy mix and so together with a broad group of folks we have moved forward to in what we consider the uncommon dialogue back last in last October in 2020 the groups or after about a year and a half conversation and and negotiations came together to work for towards climate change solutions as well as river conservation as and enhancing at the same time enhancing hydropower and pump storage benefits for to advance clean energy this group is a group of industry folks and conservation folks that have in the past probably not sat at the table and this this historic and monumental opportunity has brought them forward to provide some of these solutions and in this in this dialogue we've really started to look at what are the some of the key pillars and infrastructure that are needed to be that we need investments in to address some climate address the climate change issues while also accelerating the rehabilitation retrofit removal of the nations more than 90,000 dams folks don't realize we've got about 90,000 dance in this country and 2,500 currently generate electricity so clearly you know the the makeup of the hydro industry is you know of these dams they facilitate a number of different roles from irrigation to to also providing generation issues so generation solutions so going back to what this uncommon dialogue has come together work towards is you know the four key pillars have been providing how do we improve dam safety how do we leverage the federal tax code to incest incentivize some of these investments in hydropower to and within that framework of this ITC is improving dam safety providing the needed investments for environmental improvements grid flexibility and availability it needs as well as incentivization for removing dams at the consent of the dam owner that no longer provide a resource to the community another key pillar that's really important for the hydropower industry a lot of folks don't realize the hydropower industry is a really interesting mix of private you know dams that are with independent IOUs independent operating utilities as well as with you know another half of our fleet is with the federal government and a significant portion of our fleet is through public power customers and so you know this dynamic and this very kind of resourceful industry over the decades has also needs not only investment in the private sector but another important investment is ensuring that our federal fleet does have all of the necessary you know O&M costs as well as investments that it needs to continue to include renewable energy power generation as well as enhancing environmental performance again improving a lot of these technologies that are needed to leverage the industry and then the third part you know the fourth part which I think is a true showing of how important hydropower the role of hydropower and clean energy solutions is is really looking at from an infrastructure perspective is how do we look at the nation's dams and provide you know remove some of these dams that are high hazard that are proved to be you know basically not providing the energy that the energy resource they need and also you know have issues in which they you know there's a there's a desire to move them and so we've worked together with these conservation folks to ensure that you know there's a stakeholder engagement with this process and that the dam the removal of those dams is an effort that is that falls under the consent of the dam owner so these four pillars have created a lot of synergy on the hill we're looking at you know some congressional support to assure that we can really take the hydropower hydropower to elevate it as a as a true clean and renewable energy source and and to elevate its role and to kind of continue providing the investments that the industry needs to to generate electricity I think the other part you know that I wanted to touch upon you know I think that one of the key the industry has done a tremendous job in ensuring that you know it's not you know having the right type of kind of renewable energy not only enhances grid resiliency and reliability but the industry itself has done is actively incorporating climate resilience strategies to mitigate vulnerabilities that to generation pollution so they're looking at you know the industry is invested in optimization of efficiency river management forecasting research on climate science so that we're able to power homes as well as be able to assess you know what the needs are in the community deal with you know water like solar like wind as a you know as a natural resource you're going to have a lot of transition and so we've done the industry has done a lot to ensure that factor such as precipitation and timing of you know snow melt all of those those regional fluctuations from year to year remain stable and that we're able to provide the energy resource that is needed and so I think from you know between the historic investments from the hydropower industry as well as this new kind of this new effort through this uncommon dialogue to relook at the hydropower industry and address some of the river and conservation needs and ensuring that we're part of the climate solution truly truly truly shows the industry's perspective and investment in addressing some of these climate change needs thanks everyone for you know allowing me to kind of give a perspective on the hydropower industry and excited to you know hear what some of the questions are from everyone so thanks well thanks to you Zalika and thanks to all of our panelists um Joe Lisa John Beth and Zalika you may notice that we are without one unfortunately we lost him he had another commitment that we so we lost him but let me just for our audience if Tim were here he would continue talking about the benefits of performance contracting and the benefits of leverage and things like that and there's one group that I just kind of very quickly wanted to call attention to is the federal performance contracting coalition we actually featured them at a briefing back in March titled energy efficiency means business Jennifer Schaefer was one of our panelists so if you would like to learn more information about the issues that Tim covered that's an additional EI resource the ESI resource that addresses that topic but now we have a better part of 20 minutes or so for Q&A and we've got some questions lined up and I think the first question I would like to dig into a little bit is we we heard a lot about what the Department of Defense is doing and sort of you know whether it's the case study that best shared with us or it's the sort of the evolution of the last few years of how you know DOD has been sort of you know doing more and more on the resilience in the adaptation side I'd like to sort of look at it from the perspective of what other federal agencies might be able to learn from the Department of Defense and Joe I think we'll start with you but I'll frame it a little bit different for you are there things that the Department of Defense has learned from other agencies and then as we go through the rest of the panel I'd love to hear about what the Department of Defense could do and sort of export to other entities around the federal government or even state and local government yeah thanks Dan so one I think we all agree the scale and scope of the challenge here before us requires a whole government approach and I have to agree with Beth that this isn't just limited to the to the federal government's approach it also touches on state and local and the fact is that bases are in communities right so we can't do what we need to do without support and collaboration with our state and local partners on the federal level I think it's important to think about the department's role and the importance of relying on the interagency relationship so when we think about our allies and partner strategy how are we going to talk about climate globally what is our approach going to be with respect to our global commitments to supporting resilience at countries that may be challenged how are we going to communicate that climate is a priority for us we we have to partner with folks like the state department USAID so the the things that we can work with them on and that we can learn from them and engaging our international partners and allies really important are some of the challenges internally I mean the drought that impacts the Department of Defense also and and the and the also affects the rest of the rest of the country right affects farmers and and it affects communities and so working with USDA and Department of Interior and what a what's the right approach for us at a federal level what is the right what are some of the right solutions how do we support not just the defense mission but everything else we have to accomplish and then to Tim's point and to the one you just raised is that how the how do we collaborate with DOE to do things that are effective at addressing the challenge and the ESPC the third party finance energy projects is a great example right we leverage FEMPS contract across the department to make sure that we are going to get the kind of resilience improvements at our facilities that we need John can speak to this probably even better than I and that is that and some of the folks on the on the panel can as well and that is that the Department of Defense is frequently challenged to get enough funding to make improvements to our facilities that we need in the face of the climate challenge and frankly other challenges like a cyber threat to the grid and we need to leverage the capabilities that exist in places like the Department of Energy and the expertise and and frankly the financing that exists in the private sector to make the kind of improvements we need so this is a not just a whole of government approach that we need to fix this problem but it's a it's a whole of country approach federal state local and private sector so I think there's tremendous amount we can learn from from each other across across both federal agencies and across the public and private sectors thanks Joe Lisa let's go to you next what are some things that you see the Department of Defense doing that other agencies should should learn from and implement to the extent that they can well I mean I think the rigorous planning and assessments that they do and the discipline with which they implement what they set out to accomplish is something that other agencies will will look to as best in class and then seek to adopt but I think what underpins it is you know just as we heard the congressional history brief history over the last decade or more about the recognition of the national security risks that climate change imposes on our country and our economy when the Department of Defense makes something a priority publicly the rest of the government but I would argue the rest of the economy responds and I recall you know 10 15 years ago when really climate risk assessment and then crime climate risk management both from an emissions reduction point of view as well as an adaptation and resilience point of view took on a whole new level of importance across the Department of Defense the private sector took note and then you know we're talking mostly about adaptation and resilience today as it relates to national security but I would argue the investments and the economics underpinning the investments that the Department of Defense made and clean energy deployment were groundbreaking and the private sector took note of it because given what we just described with yes you know we support our military very strongly but but we still don't have enough resource to do all the things that we'd like to accomplish and things like you know third party financing can kick in and help but still the scale is so significant so people would ask well could we really afford to make those clean energy investments even though we know that they are helping to address the emissions associated with climate change there were still questions but when the Department of Defense and its agencies put the data forward showed that a they could do it that this was reliable and this was affordable energy and that and and characterizing to the public what the benefits they were getting you know that was an eye opener and I think that was you know again the start of the private sector taking another look at what they could do with clean energy both for their climate and sustainability objectives but also from their energy reliability and energy resilience perspectives thanks Lisa John let's send it over to you what are some things that you think the Department of Defense does well the other agencies should adopt so I think it's important to recognize that DOD doesn't have a monopoly on wisdom but they just had a head start that they got to start on this issue earlier and were given a certain degree of freedom to do what they wanted to do over the last several years when other federal agencies were sort of steered away from climate change and as a as a focus area and so they do have a head start and they have done a lot of things I think I would boil it down to a couple main topics one is mainstreaming climate change has been integrated into other functions in the Department of Defense in an important way it's not set off in a silo it's not some other some assistant secretary off in the North 40 who you know isn't necessarily that nobody's going to listen to or anything like that it is integrated into a lot of other people's jobs and Joe is working this issue right up in the secretary's office and let me tell you everybody works for the secretary and so therefore they have to pay attention to the issue so I think that's one mainstreaming the issue is so very important and not sort of setting it off into a separate silo I think the other piece that I just highlighted at this point is is guidance and setting the rules in place DOD also has had a head start on this putting it is hard to manage an organization with two or three million people it's hard to manage any federal agency and and you just can't assume that somebody at a field office or at the base level knows what an assistant secretary or under secretary said yesterday you have to write it all down you can't assume anybody has a twitter account or reads tweets from the commander-in-chief you have to write it all down and formal cumbersome bureaucratic documents but it's the way you manage large organizations and so DOD has put out a lot of that guidance over the last 10 years and integrated climate change into those documents once again it's a it's a it's a it's a it's a characteristic of mainstreaming of making this part of everybody's job and it's not the main part of everybody's job but it's a part of everybody's job and so you have to sort of think through you know how it's going to affect you and I'll give you one example from another federal agency I remember sitting in a sort of whole government meeting about climate change in the White House back during the Obama administration I was the DOD rep but I remember as I was talking about how we were changing the the building codes for our construction and saying okay every dollar I get on construction from now on is going to be climate climate resilient construction because I'm just changing how I spend the money I'm not asking for new money well the DOT guy the department of transportation raised his hand and said yeah we spend billions and billions of dollars on infrastructure and it's not that we need new billions for climate resilience it's that we change the way we're spending the money we're already getting and that that is making all every new project climate resilient and I think that is the crux of this this is the federal government as we all know spends a lot of money and when you change how you spend the money you're already getting that has a huge climate impact so that that would be my thought that's great and bonus points for mentioning building codes that's a surefire way to get on the moderators good side and ESI panel um Beth let's turn it over to you what are you seeing some things all some things that you're seeing that other agencies could also do following John is great I love all those things I think that the building code pieces spot on DOD has a head start knowing how to integrate future climate conditions into its risk portfolio and that is information that every agency should have been thinking about and now is being required to think about um I think that there's a opportunity for a lot of data sharing we see some climate adaptation efforts collapse under the weight of having different sources of data that people are trying to reconcile and it really exacerbates the distrust around the whole topic still climate which unfortunately still does exist in a lot of places when you get local it it's serious DOD has an authority I mean having DOD out front and now having the private sector coming along to doing a lot more physical risk assessment I think the SEC coming along adopting some of the TCFD language expectations around integrating physical climate risk into disclosure is just continuing to shave down this kind of I would I call like the mountain of uncertainty that is going to get low enough that we no longer have to get our like gym shoes on to jump over it we can just step over it in a regular meeting um and so I think that DOD does that just coming and having done this work and then the last thing I would say is being willing to tell the story which I don't think is probably a strong suit for DOD in general but the IPP work in Hampton roads wasn't easy it collapsed at one point they had to reform one of their working groups um but they worked through that and being willing to tell the story that um whole of government collaboration especially when that whole of government means from you know the community to the Fed is hard um I just think that people like to hear where challenges are so that we don't think it's going to always be you know we're going to get together and then the work is going to be smooth sailing it won't be and there's some really good reports out there that tell the story of where these collaborations got sticky and how they worked through it so I hope those are stories that are going to get shared thanks Zaleika let's give you the last word on some things that other agencies could could do better following DOD's um oh you may be I think you may be muted on your ends like I'm sorry to interrupt oh no thank you for letting me know I had it on you I'm on Massachusetts Avenue so it gets loud out here so um I think a lot of what everyone said I would holistically agree with I think what we need to consider even just looking at the panel and just the number of touch points that are um working towards uh you know climate change solutions I think a lot of interagency coordination data is key um that's something our industry is working really closely with like the Bureau of Reclamation and Army Corps and those folks so that there's an understanding um from a needs assessment um and a decentralized effort to get that type of information to be able to share it um I think one of you know in my past experiences some some key things that I think have been really successful is that interagency conversation the government is one of the you know biggest procurers of energy equipment whether it's from buildings to machinery to etc and I think that um there's a lot of an opportunity to be able to to share some of those lessons learned there's a lot of touch points in which communities are impacted by some of these rules and regulations there's a lot of industries that have been bolstered by it like ours um so I think that that coordination and that um availability of report and I think you know on last point I wanted to lead off is there are a lot of different players now in the energy game you know back in 2003 when I went to FERC it was this small agency at that time but if you look at the number of folks that are now invested in working in this field and understanding um you know and trying to find climate change solutions having accessibility to that information where it's relatable across different platforms so from the technical to the more the policymaker the you know you know sorry this is my GR hat on but to that Hill staffer that's working on energy for the first time and they couldn't tell you the scope of the different things so I think having you know using that data to build those different types of platforms is really important and um you know I'm going to give kudos to Lisa and BCSE and the work that they do um the sustainable energy fact book has been something that I've you know a lot of folks use to get an understanding of some of those intricacies in that technical data but also be able to elevate it to a position where you're talking to a broad audience as well so I you know so I think working across all of that and these agencies kind of working together um to build to build that report will be great thanks Alika um we have about five or so minutes left and um Joe I'm going to start with you for this next question I know it's something that's a major priority of the of the administration and that is you know doing what we're trying to do with when it comes to climate while keeping environmental justice and equity in mind um but I'd like to give the opportunity for everyone to also you know offer comments if you have additional thoughts but Joe why don't we start with you how can we ensure um that the work that's being done around sort of the nexus of climate and national security is um it's real those benefits are realized on an equitable basis yeah thanks for that it is a priority for this administration and rightly um I think one of the things we have to recognize is that the impacts of climate fall will fall do fall disproportionately on people who can less uh who can least uh cope with some of the aftermath of climate events and changes that we see in our environment so uh the folks who lack air conditioning suffer the most when there's a heat wave the folks that lack um live in flood planes suffer the most when there's uh when there's when there's a sea level rise right the folks that can't afford to rebuild or don't have insurance and nowhere to go those are the folks who are challenged and that's true in the united states it's also true globally and that it's the kind of things displace people uh that um that suffer the brunt of climate and then also compose a challenge for national security reasons so you can't disconnect what we what we need to do uh for climate reasons uh for national security reasons from what we need to do to do the right thing globally and and I just wanted to make a quick point on something Beth said about the Hampton roads area is a great example of why you need to work with communities um the defense installation that you know uh the Norfolk Naval base is uh is uh is a is a big important base for the united states uh it so happens that most of the roads that lead there are underpasses um and those are the underpasses those are the roads that get they get flooded and if we can't get our people to work or if people can't get to work when you talk about equity um then none of us can do our jobs and that's not good for the department of defense it's not good for the community it's not good for those folks who live and work there so we can't disconnect what we need to do for national security reasons from what we need to do uh to do what's right by by our people and by people globally um across the panel um other thoughts about how we can ensure that these benefits are realized on an equitable basis um we can go in the order maybe we'll go with Lisa but um if anyone has any additional thoughts please feel free to speak up sure I'll be brief I'll just um call out the justice 40 interim guidance that was released a week and a half ago by OMB the office of management and budget our national security I mean national climate advisor Gina McCarthy and the chair of our council on environmental quality chair Mallory um that sets out really what I see number one is a holistic uh planning process for government agencies and on a very quick timeline so um without getting into a lot of the details you know one of the elements is a broad stakeholder engagement process kind of rigorous assessment by agency and by program and and by doing that with a lens of equity and underserved and under invested communities specifically they're going to uncover data that they wouldn't have gotten before and I think that kind of bottom up and top down together planning process will be very informative and hopefully will help people at the end of the day and communities thanks John I think you raised your hand yeah so so I I just want to make the point that equity and climate justice are in our self-interest okay since in two or three different ways one the most fragile nations and most likely to be destabilized nations around the world are also the ones that are probably the ones most deserving are most focused from a climate justice perspective so if we make investments there to keep them stable and to give them resilience it's going to have uh impacts for our national security positive impact down the line and I guess on a local level a lot of the communities are around D&D bases or lower income and so by investing in defense communities you are uh contributing to uh you know environmental justice but you're also protecting that base because those bases rely on their local communities for power water wastewater employees housing so and so forth and so if the base if the base is resilient but the community is not the base is still true and so you still you really it's a it's a all in the interest of the Department of Defense to uh to incorporate these things into the climate into the justice strategy all right and I just um we want we have to wrap it there because um we have senators Reid and Crapo coming up uh in just a few moments but um let me just thank everyone uh Joe Lisa Tim um who had to leave us about three o'clock or so John, Beth, and Zeleica thank you so much for sharing your knowledge and your expertise and your experience with our audience today it was a really really engaging panel and I learned a lot and um I really appreciate the time that all of you took today to join us and um to join our audience so thank you so much um really really appreciate it hope everyone has a great rest of your Monday yeah thanks everybody thanks Dan thanks everyone thank you Dan thanks all right thank you um so we so I um mentioned that we have uh the next or the next agenda on our program is just about to start um and um I'm very excited about this we are going to be joined um in just a moment um by our two senate co-chairs senator Jack Reid and senator Mike Crapo and I'll introduce them in just a moment but um before I do that um I just wanted to uh make a quick note to um remind everyone that if you liked what you just heard if you want to learn more about or any number of the topics um we cover a lot of stuff at ESI and the best way to keep up to date with everything is to sign up for our newsletter so if you have a moment you can visit www.esi.org um and you can sign up for our newsletter um you can also learn more about climate adaptation more about environmental justice um pretty much anything that has to come uh pretty much anything that comes across a congressional staff person's desk we can learn all about it um so it's now my privilege to introduce um our two senate co-chairs uh senator jack Reid uh and senator Mike Crapo um all great leaders when it comes to these issues and they um you know while ESI sort of executes the expo it's it's really uh an event that's sponsored by the house and senate renewable energy and energy efficiency caucuses uh senator Reid is the senator senior senator from rylan is a distinguished veteran and he also is the chairman of the armed services committee and senator Mike Crapo represents Idaho in the united states senate he is a ranking member of the senate finance committee um and he as you will hear uh i predict uh a great champion of our national lab so with that um let's turn over to a conversation with senator jack Reid and senator Mike Crapo thank you well senator Reid senator Crapo thank you so much for joining us today uh the 2021 congressional clean energy expo and policy forum it's great to see both of you thanks for joining us thank you good to be with you great thank you um senator Reid i think maybe we'll start with you the conversation um why did you decide to chair the senate renewable energy and energy efficiency caucus and what is it about uh renewable energy and energy efficiency that makes you so enthusiastic about that well it's it's the key to our economy it's the key to our environment it's the key to the future of our country really uh when you look at the recent climate effects that have been ravaging the country uh you know that uh investing in renewable energy energy efficiency is one of the major solutions uh if we can use less energy and we can derive that energy from renewable sources we won't have the climate effects we also can become an economic leader throughout the world in terms of the technology uh and all these things together will make our quality of life much better that reason and also the ability to share with uh Mike Crapo with the convincing things well let me jump in on that first of all i completely agree with everything that jack said i really enjoy working with him we are a republican and a democrat who work very well together and this is just one of those examples let me give a little bit even more a specific response with regard to my reasons and i'm going to kind of tie this to idaho being a little parochial um many people don't realize this but idaho is a leader of clean energy development and the home to lead one of the well i think the leading nuclear energy lab in the united states the idaho national laboratory and roughly 80 of idaho's electricity comes from clean energy sources 60 percent of that is from hydropower and 20 percent of that is from renewables um and if i'll probably mention nuclear a couple more times during this discussion because nuclear is a very big thing to me um at the idaho national laboratory we're looking at a couple of really exciting promising new advanced nuclear projects like okos um aurora micro reactor and new scales modular a small modular reactor and we're working to get these reactors to deployment so it's really a great opportunity for me both from an idaho perspective perspective as well as the broader economic and global perspective that jack referenced thank you um senators as i'm sure you know many families spend a significant share of their monthly income paying their utility bills some in some cases 10 percent or more and that compares to a national average of about three percent and energy burdens are often highest in rural communities communities of color and in tribal communities how could us energy policy better address equitable access to affordable clean energy senator read well one of the major programs that i've supported and i uh has been a weatherization assistance program this provides low income families with the resources to go in and insulate their homes uh to change their heating systems so essentially they become much more efficient the course of energy goes down and that's absolutely critical and also the environmental aspects are significant because you cut down on pollution basically when you modernize these systems and the other program that we have is the liehe program the low income heating assistance program which actually helps pay for the bills and some of these people as you described very very difficult position uh i think frankly uh you know in a more robust effort in terms of infrastructure of affordable housing uh when we do that we have to make sure we build these affordable houses to be energy efficient we've seen some examples in Rhode Island where they've been actually three-dimensional houses small homes but extremely efficient in terms of energy use and if we keep doing that then we're gonna we're gonna help these people who really need help and i'll just add that in addition to the weatherization assistance that jack referenced and the housing improvements that jack referenced and the other items both of us worked together last congress uh to pass the energy act of 2020 last december and that act not only reauthorized programs like the weatherization assistance program that jack referenced but also things like the advanced research projects agency our butt relating to energy and programs to facilitate the transfer of technologies to the private sector i think we may come back to this but doing that is one of the ways we can reduce costs and we need to do it very effectively and the last thing i'll mention is that clean energy r&d for technologies like storage and carbon capture and advanced nuclear as i mentioned are the kinds of things that as we move from the research and development to the deployment of these technologies will simply reduce the cost to those who face not only the pressure from the costs but also the need for access to these new technologies thanks for that um the one of our panels today deals specifically with workforce development and jobs and renewable energy and energy efficiency jobs have been on a strong upward trend over the past several years apart of course from uh pandemic caused losses what are your priorities senator reid and then senator crepo to strengthen clean energy workforce development in rhodaland and across the country well in rhodaland we had 16 000 people and we're a small state about a main population overall engaged in this type of effort uh the pandemic cut back obviously because of the slowdown and activity but one of the things we have to do is make training available uh for the skills that are necessary for uh renewable construction maintenance as you know we have the first offshore wind farm in the country off of block island red island and uh there we're trying to develop the the workforce to not only build additional wind projects but also to service them on a continuous basis so those are some things that we we have to do and I'm very pleased that in the last COVID-19 bill we passed last fall last fall we uh committed about 35 billion dollars for uh wind solar and other clean power sources so demand will will will drive off employment because they will need these skilled workers and senator i'm sorry go ahead i was going to say the clean energy workforce in Idaho is growing in a surprising rate yes it is and uh you know again jack has nailed it uh we've got to ensure that our energy sector continues to be a robust job provider and we've got to continue to invest in our workers so that they have the skills as jack said to succeed in these highly technical jobs just to give an Idaho example here even before the pandemic the demand for qualified educated workforce of skilled technicians was increasing rapidly and to use the Idaho national laboratory and nuclear again as an example about 40 to 50 percent of the nuclear workforce across america is eligible to retire in the next five years in both the private and public sector and that will create an even greater demand and a necessity for increasingly skilled workers and uh i've introduced in that context a job a bill with senator duckworth of illinois in the last congress which we hope to reintroduce here soon called the doe jobs access act which does exactly what jack was talking about in the nuclear arena it establishes a five-year grant program run by the department of energy in consultation with the department of labor to facilitate the creation of apprenticeship and pre-apprenticeship programs to help fill critical nuclear jobs and grantee organizations would be required to cover at least 25 percent of the cost of these programs and each grant could not exceed five hundred thousand dollars here and in this program then we're going to also be serving veterans and young people and individuals who have barriers to employment who would receive priority in this grant awarding progress a process so all of these things to train our workforce uh are necessary because if we succeed in expanding the investment and capital allocation to these new technologies we've got to have trained workers to participate in deployment totally agree i i won't be doing it right we'll need the the workforce to actually get this stuff done of course right our chances to halt climate change and avoid its worst impacts will be improved uh if we harness the power of the public and the private sector um and i think here at esi we think that there's a role for federal leadership to initiate and encourage public private partnerships and i'm curious in your opinions uh what are some opportunities for government and businesses to work together and uh specifically how could the federal government also help state and local governments forge new private sector partnerships let me defer to mike because i don't want to be the first god always he's co equals all right i'll step in first this time jack you know as as the ranking member of the senate finance committee i completely understand the role of the federal government and private investment plays in deploying these new energy technologies um i've because of that there's a couple of bills i'd like to reference that i'm working on that i think are kind of exciting uh one involves clean energy tax incentives uh like i'm proposing with my bill called the energy sector innovation credit act which senator whitehouse and i have introduced and this legislation provides up to a 40 percent investment tax credit or a 60 percent production tax credit across clean energy generation carbon capture and storage and these tax credits are technology neutral they're focused on clean energy though they specifically include clean hydrogen ptc and ultimately these technology or these tax credits will basically phase out as the market penetration of these technologies become more mature so it's it's an effort to provide a support and an incentive from the federal government to the engagement of the private sector across these sectors and one other area just another quick example of fostering private sector and private public partnerships is this isn't my bill but it's the financing our energy future act that i'm a cosponsor of that expands the definition of what energy sources qualify under a master limited partnership business structure now that sounds kind of complicated and getting in the weeds but a master limited partnership is a partnership that is taxed uh like a partnership rather than but it's but its uh interest its ownership interests are traded like a corporation meaning that it's only taxed once at the shareholder level and that gives it a significant access to larger and more liquid sources of capital but it's limited right now to only be used for fossil fuel products timber and other minerals and this legislation would again on a technology neutral basis expand the definition to clean energy projects so they can get this improved financing as well getting capital applied to these technologies is one of the most important things we can do and it's the private sector and that includes state and local governments it's those sectors that can most you know take advantage of these opportunities to get the capital allocation where it should be well i can't have done a superb job i would emphasize the fact that tax credits are very effective and efficient way to do this it's used in many aspects of our economy low income housing is one example in addition i think uh engaging with private industry and universities and other research centers in research for the department of defense stopper uh and trying to translate the experience we have uh in the department of defense and many other agencies into the commercial sector is going to be another source i think of cooperation and collaboration which we essentially thank you um based on your respective experiences uh in Rhode Island and in Idaho um what renewable energy or energy efficiency technologies and you've already mentioned between the two of you a number of technologies that are very exciting what are the technologies that you think hold the most promise to reduce greenhouse gas emissions lower utility bills create jobs or better yet accomplish all three goals senator read well uh first let me commend the local Rhode Island office and energy resources they've done a superb job in fact we are consistently ranked in the top five energy efficient states in the country uh and i'm very very proud of the wind energy offshore that we've put in place it was uh the first time it broke the the mole it set off expansion and other areas close by and uh Martha's vineyard around there uh and that's one major contributing area uh we've also looked at uh trying to be more efficient with our resources i've been always been supportive of uh increased mileage for our automobiles and now we're moving into the electric phase of automobiles and i hope that in the context of our infrastructure plans and proposals we can create sort of a national system of charging stations but Rhode Island i expect to be in the forefront of that so these are a few examples of what we want to do well thank you and then in addition to the wind and solar and electrical for the vehicles that the jack has mentioned let me be a little bit parochial again as i said i probably would be uh and reference in Idaho uh nuclear is a big deal and i'll come back to nuclear here i really think that nuclear energy is one of the most significant new advances that we need to make not only because the United States has let itself get a little bit behind the curve in terms of other nations and their engagement but because this is such a good source of high quality energy that's one of the reasons i introduced a bill called the American Nuclear Infrastructure Act with a number of my colleagues both Republican and Democrat this bill would increase the efficiency and predictability of permitting processes for advanced nuclear and i might add that that can be said about every one of these technologies we've got to have a more efficient and predictable permitting process further we need to develop advanced nuclear fuels those are becoming more difficult to get and we can enable the preparation for advanced reactor demos at DOE sites like the Idaho National Laboratory this enables us to increase collaboration with our U.S. allies and to strengthen our current aging nuclear fleet and as i referenced increase our energy security by reducing reliance on China and Russia for nuclear fuel so like i said i'm i i am really a big advocate for nuclear as one of the big solutions that we have that can be a very powerful clean energy across the board thank you um senator reed senator capo both of you have been wonderfully generous with your time i have one last question for you and this one um challenges us to look ahead and sort of define what the leading edge of clean energy might look like and we've talked a lot about many technologies as i've said and we already have many of the energy efficiency and renewable energy technologies we need to cut emissions and ensure we have the sustainable affordable energy that we need to continue to prosper um senator capo you've mentioned Idaho National lab senator reed you mentioned work going on universities there's a lot of very exciting research and development happening when you look at the leading edge of clean energy clean energy research and development where do you see um opportunities that are especially promising well i just one area that i'll mention it's the university of Rhode Island has just received an EPSCOR grant from the Department of Energy another example of collaboration and they are examining the the possibility feasibility of floating wind towers offshore so you could move them out far away from the coast to the objections of some of the people who live there but also do it in a way that you could get much more mobile much more agile you could move them around and that's one of the things that break the mobile technologies that our university is looking at and we have to keep it up and and the answer to this question in my opinion is that we've got to deal with some not only the broader things that we've talked about the tax credits and incentives and other approaches that we've talked about today but we have to identify specific supply chains and other issues in areas that are critical for example semiconductors uh recently the united states senate passed a major piece of legislation that ended up getting nicknamed the china bill because it had many different pieces of the of the necessary steps that we need to take to become more competitive with china overall but one of that one of those pieces was the chips act that had put about 50 or 52 billion dollars into helping us get sto