- Thank you to everyone for inviting me here today
and making this great event possible.
It's been a lot of fun so far.
Yesterday, I spoke about resiliency
because I'm also the energy assurance coordinator
for the Wisconsin Office of Energy Innovation.
And for those of you don't know it's the state
federally-designated energy office for this state.
So in 1970s as a response to the oil crisis
the Feds thought we should have energy offices
who are monitoring petroleum supplies
and helping us think about other ways
to get off of foreign oil
and pathways to energy independence.
So we've taken that and we've run with it
with the help of our good friends
from the U.S. Department of Energy and their funding.
So today I'm gonna be very brief
because we've got two excellent speakers
who are, one, Ned Noel from city of Eau Claire.
He's going to talk to you about their newly-minted goals
and I think we've heard a little bit about that.
And then Manus McDevitt, he's going to talk to us
about Madison's impressive goals.
I'll go over our Energy Independent Communities Program
that the Energy Office has been sponsoring since 2008.
Why these goals matters
and a little bit about how we can help.
So first of all, energy independent communities,
it was a program that have started in 2008
under the Doyle Administration. It was a huge push.
He had cabinet secretaries having competitions
across the state to recruit communities.
We had about 147 communities
including cities, towns, villages, school districts.
And the state at that time encouraged a 25 by 25 goal,
replaced 25% of your current energy use with renewables.
Do the energy efficiency but get to the renewables.
After 2010, that push from the top was not as prescriptive.
So that's when I joined the Energy Office
and I was lucky to work
with my colleague Sherrie Gruder at UW-Extension
where we got to do meetings all over the state from 2011.
We planned them in 2011, 2012 through 2015.
We got out in every corner of the state
and we talked to communities and we said,
"What do you think about this energy independent community program?
"What goals do you want to set?"
And we heard from communities that they love it
and they want to set even more aggressive goals
and so we set about trying to find ways to help them.
So why do goals matters?
Goals matter because great projects happened
when there's comprehensive planning and thoughtful goal setting.
So since 2013, the Energy Office
which is funded with about $800,000 of federal money every year,
we've put out more than three million dollars in grants
to communities for planning and implementation.
And we're gonna keep putting money out there
because that's what we need
to get the right groups of people together,
to make the solar gardens happen,
to make the energy efficiency happen,
to make the transportation energy efficiency happen.
So we also like to leverage
our state's incredible rate payer
funded energy efficiency program Focus on Energy.
15 years old, its robust, it's fabulous.
If you don't know your Focus on Energy representative,
you should, it's your money.
1.2% of all retail sales
are paid into the Focus on Energy pot of money
and then they're met out through great programs.
This is just our 2017 Focus on Energy,
renewable energy competitive incentive program results.
But you can see there are investments being made
in these areas and I applaud you all for going out there
and getting this money, bring it back to your communities
and using a sustainable way.
Other resources we have.
The Energy Office created the Municipal Energy Efficiency
and Technical Assistance Program.
Because we found from these meetings we had around the state
the big barrier is money.
But another barrier is technical assistance,
to make sure that the projects are good.
We provide an independent third-party analysis.
Typically it's getting that energy use baseline right.
Getting that weather correction done properly.
Understand your utility usage,
triple down on the energy efficiency
and then you're ready for renewables.
Then you're ready for that 100% sustainability.
So contact me, contact the energy office,
we can help you out with free services.
But there's something a little more exciting
I have to talk about today.
In 2009, the Energy Office was awarded 55 million dollars
through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.
We took about 25 million of that right off the bat
and we gave some grants to some large manufacturers to keep them in the state.
The rest of it was turned into a revolving,
clean energy manufacturing loan fund.
We didn't have a lot of uptake in that loan fund
in the last three or four years.
And so after our move to the Public Service Commission,
it was decided by the commissioners just two weeks ago
that this loan fund should be turned to grants.
The Department of Energy agreed that it could be grants
and that we could open up the eligibility
from just manufacturers to include municipal entities.
I think this is exciting.
So we'll have five million dollars on the street
in the next couple of weeks.
The order is coming from the PSC
but the commissioners have voted and it is public record
that five million we've put out there.
Manufacturers of all size will also be eligible
to apply under two broad categories:
planning and implementation.
For implementation, building energy efficiency projects,
renewable energy, the commissioners specifically called out
energy storage and resiliency.
Transportation and transportation infrastructure
will also be eligible
as those are categories that we typically can't work through
the Focus on Energy program
because focus is about electric and gas utilities.
So the RFP is coming out soon.
I don't have all the details but please watch for it.
These slides will be available to you.
Since we are at the Public Service Commission
we have all the great electronic resources that the PSC uses
like the earth system.
You can subscribe to the docket,
you can see when there are updates.
It's really fabulous and it's very modern,
so I encourage you to get these links
and follow this process. Because when that RFP comes out
it will have all the information the grading rubric
and it's a great way to get interesting projects done,
microgrids, resilient communities. Let's think big.
We'll have five years, five million dollars a year
if everything goes well.
So without further ado then
I'd like to turn it over to the real stars of this show.
We'll start with Ned Noel.
He's an associate planner for the City of Eau Claire.
Practice urban planning for over 13 years
within the Twin Cities and Eau Claire markets.
And in his role he also helps the city coordinate efforts
on sustainability and healthy community design.
Please welcome Ned.
(audience applauding)
- Maybe you can cue me up. But pleasure to be with you all
and just thank you for the academy to decide
to come to Eau Claire to host this wonderful event
that we can convene and talk about these issues
that matter to us locally, statewide
and nationally and globally.
I was asked to share about Eau Claire's experience,
kind of our journey and it continues to be a journey.
To maybe enlighten some of you, whether you're elected
officials or staffers with your own local communities
or just policy people in general.
So...
My role with the city, I'm a city planner,
so I look at the systems that build a city
and make sure that they're functioning well and growing.
I've been with the city now about 11 years
and so I've seen where we've come from
in terms of these initiatives with energy
and climate change goals.
It's nice when you have been around for a while
to be able to see that progress
and also inform newly-elected officials to it
from a staff point of view of that
where we've been and where we're going.
So from that point of view
it's helpful as a staff person to have that continuity
to be able to talk about the past
and then also help people to understand
where we may be going.
So just from the local point of view,
Eau Claire where we're at,
just with this helpful resource here,
the maps that show that the temperature changes.
This is a local issue across the whole state,
various places, it's gonna be a little bit more temperature change.
But for us, over the 50 years or so from 1960s
about three degrees of warming.
And then what's predicted by 2050
which as you heard from our council president,
this 2050 is really our goal date,
we're expected to warm another three degrees.
So six degrees of warming does impact
the systems that we have, whether they're natural or built environment.
And so, I think this is, let's just be real here.
This isn't really a political issue, this is a factual issue
when it comes down to what is causing that warming.
Just a graph here from the EPA talking about
looking at the different four scenes of the warming.
And you can see the acceleration over the last 50 years or so
about why our local areas are warming.
This shows that those,
primarily the burning of fossil fuels
are increasing the heat trapping
of our solar radiation to warm our planet,
whether it's our oceans, our land or our atmosphere.
This is a matter that's really important
for our elected officials.
Again, as a city planner
I look at these systems that we have built,
whether the bridges or roads, our homes.
With the warming and the freezing in the fall,
I mean just basic things that
a lot of the local government electives
deal with the pothole issues that we have
especially around this time of the year.
And so we've had a lot of that
and that's when you've got the freeze-thaw cycle,
that's always something of a nuisance.
We've seen devastating hurricanes that there's--
When there's more energy, because of heat into the atmosphere
that's gonna power these extreme storms.
Whether they're rain events or hurricanes
and that these affect livelihoods
and washouts with higher rain events.
And just from a point of view
of having to redo some of our infrastructure,
whether it's the bridges around vulnerable areas
with coastal flooding, these are major expenses.
Whether it's planning in the beginning for it
or dealing with it after a horrible natural event
like a hurricane.
So these are reasons why the City of Eau Claire is motivated
to do something about this issue.
And back in June,
they asked staff in our sustainability committee
to come up with a response
after the president decided to withdraw
from the Paris agreement.
Our local officials felt like,
well that is something that they can't stand for
and they directed staff and our sustainability committee
to look into this issue about how the City of Eau Claire
could actually align with the Paris Agreement.
And if you know about the Paris Agreement,
it's really for nations not for local governments.
And so we kind of struggled with trying to understand
how a local footprint could actually align with
a national-type strategy, and it is possible.
Basically, we looked at our own carbon footprint
and came up with strategies.
And this is an example here of our president had mentioned
that really the municipalities carbon footprint
is about two and a half percent of the whole total emissions
and the university is included in the gray silo there too.
And so our elected officials realize that
we have a role to play as a leader
and also as an organizational point of view.
But the bigger issue is our community
and how are we going to actually advance
these things when it comes to the community.
And so I think one of the things
is to translate this to kind of dumb down
the emissions was to help them to understand.
This is a helpful calculator on EPA's website to look at.
What does this translate?
All of these metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalents,
what does this really look like and so for Eau Claire at least,
it would be about of a quarter of a power plant,
a coal power plant.
That helped them to realize,
"Wow, that's a chunk of coal emissions."
It could be looking at from that point of view.
Or from renewables, what would that look like
to power the whole city on renewables?
A very large wind farm in this case.
And then also how to actually get at carbon neutral
and plant that many acres of forest
to be able to carbon sink all of those emissions.
And so this kind of helped to put it in perspective
that it is a big-- Eau Claire even though we're a small city,
there are a lot of emissions that are still occurring.
One of the things that we felt--
and this is I think an important strategy
if you're looking to get into this work--
is to gauge the citizen response in your community.
As the chancellor had mentioned,
we partnered with the university.
I always hire somebody from the university here
as my sustainability intern.
And in this case,
she was able to do her capstone research project
on a sustainability development survey.
We gauged the community about what they think
and feel about this issue.
Is it important to them to help inform the local officials?
And so it just wasn't their own agendas, it was,
what are the people think?
We can see in these graphs that
75% more strongly agreed or agreed about what we should do
not only in the city level but the community level
when it comes to capturing and reducing the carbon dioxide.
Also, we ran this by our utility partner,
in this case Xcel Energy to really look at kind of
where this comes down oftentimes is that,
are you willing to pay a little bit more
to be able to make those changes?
And by a larger community also supported,
I mean this is kind of extreme with the $200,
that's phenomenal, whoever that's, those people were but.
Roughly around $16 or so that they would be willing
to pay more on their monthly bill.
To translate that, if they would choose to have wind source
as a option for them on their utility bills,
it really wouldn't be a whole lot
over the whole course of a year, maybe $200.
And so that helped the public to realize that
these major changes not necessarily cost big dollars.
This was a question that was actually
brought to us by Xcel is,
why not also engage about willingness to pay,
and so I think it was a very good insight.
Also we asked the people, our utility providers
are providing very renewable energy already
and carbon free energy
and they continue to do more of that.
But what does the community think,
should we be more aggressive?
And in this case again about 75% of the folks felt like,
"Yeah, we should do some more."
And so...
We're proud to say that we're offering that
really through Xcel Energy's program
with the community solar is that,
the community can take part of
if they want more renewable energy today
at the community solar garden across from Xcel's headquarters
over at this landfill that the city owns.
And so those options are already available
for homeowners, for business owners
and many have taken part in that.
So to boil all this down for our policymakers,
our sustainability committee and staff,
we looked at these goals.
If our goal is 2050 to reach 100% renewable energy
and carbon neutrality by then,
how can we look at that in the interim steps?
We bold it down to these decade drops.
If you look at the top 4% annually,
that's what we're thinking about
what technology advances in price,
declines on some of these technologies
would be able to do more.
And so each decade we get more aggressive
but in the more near term we're looking at smaller steps,
1% annually to get to the 5% drop by 2020.
What we're using here is a baseline of 2015.
And the reason why we chose 2015 is that
that's the first year that we were able to
get energy data for the whole community.
And it's been mentioned that, in our case,
Xcel Energy has these community energy reports and so we can--
It's de-identified information from utility bills.
But we can understand all of the natural gas
and electricity uses within the city.
And so based off of that reliable data,
this was the first time we were able to
look at the carbon footprint,
the energy footprint of our whole community
and so that's why we chose to do 2015.
Now we're moving into this fall,
we're trying to plan and gear up and try to due diligence
to a process that would serve our community well
related to a Climate and Energy Action Plan.
And so we kind of call this
"The retirement plan for fossil fuels."
How do we get there?
Incremental investments over time.
I think our council really understood that.
We have to be realistic about this transition
that there's different diverse fuel types
that serve affordable energy,
reliable energy, there's clean energy,
but it's not going to happen overnight.
And so we have to look at a planning process
that does justice to the current realities
but moves the needle forward.
And so this process is going to look at that,
working with our utilities and also groups that
more marginal audiences whether it's low income.
And so looking at, first of all, energy efficiency is,
conservation is number one that you need to focus on
before you even look at energy renewables.
And so making sure that we're doing due diligence for that
not only for the city but also the community.
Just insulation alone can save you big money
when it comes to the bills,
whether it's your home or your business.
And then incrementally investing more in the renewables
and then electrifying more vehicles
and growing these carbon sinks
whether it's our urban tree canopy or tree preservation
when it comes to developments.
So the keys to success that I have found
just as a person who's been around 10 years or so
with this whole process is that
the policies that were in place in the past
with our comprehensive plan, our sustainability chapter,
really set the foundation
to be able to advance to these levels.
And then also with the office of energy independence,
or the innovation, excuse me.
That 25% goal by 2025
really set us on this whole trajectory in the first place
to first measure what we use,
to have a goal in the first place
and then now to be able to actually take that goal further
where we have met the electricity portion of the 25%.
So that was really key and then
really all of these partners,
we can't do this alone whether it's just the city.
We really need to work with the community.
And again we gauge the community's voice
and we know that they support.
The utilities leadership, both of our utilities,
are fantastic in terms of their commitment
in renewable energy and energy efficiency
and so being with a strong partnership with them.
The elected leadership setting those goals as policy.
And then executive leadership, we've had three city managers since I've been around
and all three have been very supportive,
encouraging staff to do their part,
to help inform elected officials to make the decisions.
And then finally,
the staff that they're engaged and knowledgeable.
Providing that objective information
so that the policymakers can make their decisions.
And so is this all possible?
I think-- It's going to be definitely a journey.
It's intimidating in some ways
but also in many ways we can do this
and I think the answers are just around the corner
when you think about--
They add, trying to figure out, smart guy in the garage,
coming up with zero emissions vehicle.
And here the kids are with a bicycle
and dad doesn't even realize it.
So the answers are there
and I look forward to working with our community together
to figure out this plan but also collectively too,
whether it's in our region
with our communities or just statewide too.
So I appreciate the opportunity to be here,
to be with you and to really focus on these issues
that matter to our local communities.
So, thank you.
(audience applauding)
- Thank You, Ned.
That was great We're gonna move on.
I should have mentioned, both of these presenters
are from Energy Independent Communities.
Ned said the Office of Energy Independence,
we've changed the name a couple times.
And by, "we" I mean the governor.
So, you just have to roll it,
we were the, on your notepads we're the State Energy Office.
Prior to that we were the Office of Energy Independence.
Now were the Office of Energy Innovation.
So, without further ado, I'll bring up Manus McDevitt,
he's a founding principle of Sustainable Engineering Group LLC,
where he has over 25 years of experience in building design,
energy engineering and commissioning.
Manus and his firm are currently working with the City of Madison
in the development of an action plan
to achieve the city's goal of 100% renewable energy
and net zero carbon emissions.
- So that was very impressive. Thanks, Ned.
It was very interesting presentation on the City of Eau Claire.
There's gonna be a lot of parallels for what we're doing
with the City of Madison.
So a little bit of history.
So last March, 2017,
the City of Madison unanimously,
the council passed a resolution for Madison
to be a net zero carbon emissions city
and also a 100% renewable energy.
So it was a very short discussion
and everybody was totally behind it
and so that was very exciting.
One of the things that came out of it was
they also allocated resources to hire a consultant
to figure out how to achieve that goal
of net zero carbon emissions.
And our firm, Sustainable Engineering Group
along with our partner Navigant. And Josh is here.
I'll see you at the back.
We were hired to be that consultant,
to develop that action plan.
So, we're about two-thirds of the way through it
and I want to give you a little overview of where we're at
and some of the interesting exciting things
that we have uncovered.
I guess the more nuts and bolts approach or overview.
It just was in 2017 of March
where they kind of suddenly decide
"Oh, we want to be sustainable
"and get really into renewable energy."
There's a long history in Madison.
And especially with the Sustainable Madison Committee,
a very active committee,
and a past chair, Sherrie is here today
and she has a big reason why Madison
is where they're at today.
So definitely have to acknowledge
Sherrie's effort there.
The first thing that we were challenged to do by the city
was assemble stakeholder.
There's a lot of interested people.
Madison is a very, I guess, progressive city
and there's a lot of people that have a lot to say
about different things.
And so we tried as much as possible
to gather all their opinions.
We reached out to as many groups that we could think of.
Nature Conservancy, Clean Wisconsin.
Several other ones I can't remember right now
but the Public Service Commission. The utilities.
We really have formed a really strong bond with our utilities.
Madison Gas and Electric and Alliant Energy.
And of course Sustainable Madison Committee
remains a very strong part of our effort.
And of course members of the public,
general members of the public.
So what we did is we set up a series
of three public meetings.
The first one was held back in September of last year.
We had a lot more people attend than we thought.
There's a standing-room-only,
almost a hundred people attended.
It collected a lot of comments.
It went on for a lot longer than we thought but that was good.
And we also had a guest speaker, Bob Lindmeier.
He's our Chief Meteorologist with Channel 27.
He came in and give us a talk
and was very passionate about sustainability
and that we really need to take action now
because he's seeing it.
In his world, he's seeing the effects of climate change
are incredibly stark and we got to do something.
That was a really good help there.
And of course the media was super interested.
We got a feature on the local television,
the Wisconsin State Journal, our local paper,
and the City Channel and The Badger Herald as well.
We also have a website and it's an active website.
Feel free to go and look at the website.
But there's all the material that we've gathered
and that we've processed today is on that website.
Also when we have our public meetings,
you can see it up at the top right, submit public comment.
So that's where we allow the public
to submit their thoughts and feedback
and we get some really interesting ideas
from the public.
So the first thing that we did
once we started to get into the nuts and bolts.
So we gathered all the public input.
So now we're looking at, "Well, let's do a baseline of where we're at.
"How much carbon do we use?"
And then what sort of baseline will be use moving forward
in order to to see the effects of any changes that we make.
Well, we're very, very lucky
that there's a group called ICLEI.
Has anybody heard of ICLEI?
Yup, got a lot of nods.
So ICLEI is a wonderful organization
and I'm gonna mess this up.
But it's the International Council of Local
Environmental Initiatives or something like that.
But they were set up in 1990
and they currently have 84 countries,
it was an international organization.
And they do a wonderful job
of creating that baseline for carbon.
'Cause not all carbon is the same,
not all carbon is equal.
So they do a really nice job
to help local governments, like us,
track carbon and then measure the progress into the future.
So we form three groups of emissions.
Of course the city buildings,
on the left the vehicle fleets and others,
the miscellaneous group.
So here's a quick breakdown.
And what's really interesting is,
you see that our biggest portion,
our biggest amount of carbon are from buildings.
And then the next is the fleet that's--
I guess I should back up.
This is for the city operations. That's right here.
And I'll mention another little point.
Part of our scope is to deal with looking at
how to be net zero carbon for city operations
and for the greater community.
And I apologize, I missed that a little bit.
So the first phase was to look at the city operations.
So looking at the city operations
we discovered majority of emissions are from the buildings
and then the next is from the the buses and from the fleet
that's operated by City of Madison.
What about type of emissions?
Well, electricity is by far our biggest producer of carbon.
Two-thirds of our electricity
is generated from coal-fired power plants.
So that's really a carbon emissions breakdown
and we used ICLEI's database.
This graph basically summarizes the magnitude
of where we need to go and the amount of effort
that we need to put in to get into net zero carbon.
And you can see... sure we can get, we can get some
out of building energy efficiency.
Yeah, we can get some out of transportation.
But we really need to work hard on renewable energy,
that's where it's going to be the biggest amount of effort.
And I'll talk a little bit about some of the ideas
that we're exploring now and that we're pursuing.
But you can sort of see
renewable energy is going to be the biggest factor
in reaching that zero carbon.
So let's look at renewable energy.
So what are we doing? What ideas are we exploring?
Well, they fall into three categories.
And there's a lot more detail to this.
This is just an overview.
And if there's any specific questions,
I'll be happy to answer afterwards.
But just as an overview,
we split the renewable energy side
to behind the meter solar.
That's where on buildings,
the electron of energy that's produced at the building
stays at the building,
it doesn't go through the meter and back to the grid.
It just stays at the building.
And then off-site solar or wind,
that's where somewhere else, like the community solar garden
or working with the power purchase agreement
with a third party firm
to build a solar farm or a wind farm or something like that
and basically the city pays for that.
Or similar to what Ned was saying about
the City of Eau Claire in the large community garden project
and then renewable energy credits.
And I'm gonna skip along here, just got five minutes.
And then building energy efficiency strategies.
The first one, Sherrie and and I worked on together
is a benchmarking.
What an interesting effort. We were so close...
...but we got the part of lobbyists I guess.
They were very strong against benchmarking
but we're very close,
but you got to measure building performance.
And then retro-commissioning.
This is repeating what Ned says.
So this on the building energy efficiency
and then transportation.
That's a lot simpler. Electrification of our fleet.
Electric vehicles, hybrid vehicles
and alternative transportation strategies.
This is sort of a summary of some of the end products
that we're looking at right now.
But we've been challenged by the city
to come up with an aggressive, a moderate and an incremental strategy
towards achieving net zero carbon.
And this is all still a work in progress,
but we're sort of looking somewhere towards these goals here
100% renewable by 2025 is aggressive
and down to incremental 80% renewable by 2030.
So we've got a lot of ideas, they're all coming together,
we're talking to a lot of people.
And our focus is on at actionable steps.
Not pie in the sky ideas but things we can do
from day one here.
So this is my final graph but this is
sort of gives you an idea of the order of magnitude
of what we're looking at.
So here's where we're at today, 2017.
So this is a carbon against time.
So here's how much carbon emissions this city is using.
Then if we don't do anything,
we do have an increase in carbon usage
because the city is expanding.
And if we don't do anything, yes, we will use more carbon.
But here's the things that we can do
to offset that carbon usage.
And this sort of shows the magnitude
of each of those actionable items.
From retrofits, retro-commissioning,
off-site renewables, behind the meter solar
and phase one and phase two, utility renewables.
That's where the utility
we work together and developing like a wind farm
or a solar farm or something like that in the area.
And then you can see what the biggest one is,
Renewable Energy Credits, RECs they call them.
There are some cities in the U.S. already
who have declared himself as net zero carbon
and what they have done is
they really haven't done any of this.
They went straight to RECs and just paid for the RECs
and to say, "We're net zero carbon."
But that's not what the City of Madison has told us to do,
they said, "We absolutely want to look at RECs
"as one of the last things."
We want to explore every other option before we go to RECs.
But we realize that RECs will have to be
part of the solution.
So, I think that's it.
Okay, thank you.
(audience applauding)
- And we have time for just a few questions.
I see Kelly's...
Flag her down if you have one written
and she'll bring them up.
So the first question.
"Is it possible to build a combination solar wind farm?"
And I would say, yes, but...
Engineer in the room?
- Technically, yes. It's definitely possible.
But we don't have too many areas in Wisconsin
where wind power is actually feasible.
We have a little slew towards Iowa County,
west of Madison towards Iowa.
But what makes the most sense is solar.
And you know what's really interesting
is that Germany produces about 80%
of their electricity from solar
and they are further north than us.
So there's no real excuse.
We should be producing more solar.
- People look askance at that the greatest offshore
or greatest wind potentials that we have in Wisconsin
which was, is offshore in either Superior or Michigan.
A lot of shipping lanes
and frankly there's some petroleum
running through those lakes, which we need to
watch out for as well.
So we have another question.
This person says, "Great efforts for me to suppose but,
"what percent of total carbon emission
"do cities contribute?
"And then how do we address other sources
"manufacturing our automobile emission?"
So I think this person is saying:
Okay, if you're just looking at one city,
then what about rural areas and what about manufacturing?
I think we've spoken about fleets in general,
but then there's the larger transportation sector
which we shouldn't forget.
Maria Redman, the director of my office said yesterday,
38% of all energy is expended in the transportation sector,
so it's really something to think about.
So in Eau Claire how are you addressing manufacturing
and do you know the percent of the city versus the rest?
- We have not looked at Eau Claire County,
for example, the rural area.
But I think in the rural parts,
that's where like national legislation
can take care of fuel economy standards
and things like that.
So in the absence of some of that are rollbacks
on some of those standards, it's a little bit harder.
I think counties or towns would have to step up
and deal with that themselves in a more localized level
to look at those. And then for manufacturing...
I know with Xcel Energy
they have really ramped up a new program
for medium, small, medium businesses
to try to help them to take advantages
of Focus on Energy grants
where that niche of those type manufacturer or businesses
weren't really having the capabilities
to get those types of rebates.
So they've retooled some of their efforts
to make sure that they're helping those type businesses.
And that directly benefits a community like Eau Claire.
- That's great.
And I think we heard from Dane County yesterday
in our resiliency seminar which is all sort of
about resiliency and sustainability.
That their climate action plan
is really working to bridge that urban-rural divide,
because it's all part of the same piece of the pie.
And I think that we'll be watching
what Dane County is doing
and looking at how that affects the rest of state.
But Ned said at partnerships, partner, partner.
We can't do it alone.
And big hats off to Xcel for being
the only utility in the state
who really provides these comprehensive reports.
It's so important, we have to know what we're using.
We have to be able to measure it, since we weren't able to pass that
mandatory benchmarking ordinance in Madison
but we're still getting folks to voluntarily benchmark
and we'll continue to push that.
Where we can, we'll just try to explain why it makes so much sense.
All right, we'll let you get to the break.
Thank you so much. And thanks to our speakers.
(audience applauding)