- Thank you to everyone from the academy 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 f