Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Senator Anne Watson (Chair)]: Thank you for being here. And yeah, looking forward to hearing about the annual report.

[Jared Duval (Executive Director, Energy Action Network)]: Thanks. You, Chair Watson, Senators of the Committee. Happy New Year. Glad to

[Jared Duval (Executive Director, Energy Action Network)]: be with you again. Thank you for the invitation.

[Jared Duval (Executive Director, Energy Action Network)]: So I know most of you, I was here last year, but just by way of introduction and for the record, my name is Jared Duvall. I serve as executive director of Energy Action Network, which is a statewide nonprofit organization that primarily does data tracking research and analysis related to energy and energy affordability, energy economics, emissions, and we recently came out just at the end of last year with our latest annual project for Vermont on energy affordability and emissions. Hopefully some of you have already seen this. If you don't have a copy yet or if you'd like an extra copy, I brought some with me, and I think all of the slides I'm going to share today, all of the visuals come from this report and I provided the slides to June. Think they'll be available eventually. My bad for not getting up to her sooner. And just also so you know that every slide I'm going to share, all of these visuals are available online for download. We have energy committees, have legislators, we have the media who often will download and use our graphics to help talk about energy issues, and we welcome you to do the same if that's helpful to you. I also want to start by saying that in addition to my role directing Energy Action Network, I was also appointed by the Senate to the Vermont Climate Council, and I just want to be clear that today I'm just testifying in my EAN role. The roles are quite different and require and allow different things of me, so EAN as an independent non partisan nonprofit organization does not engage in any lobbying, so we don't take positions on or advocate for or against any bills before the legislature, strictly information sharing data and analysis just the facts please organization. But different than that, as a member of the public council, I am required by law to make recommendations to the legislature regarding the climate action plan and the Global Rating Solutions Act. So I just want to clear that in the past I have sometimes testified in that role and not given that role today, just sharing with you the EAN report. So let's dive in. Okay, so many of you know EAN, it's statewide, it's two things, it's a network of member organizations, profits, utilities, colleges and universities, businesses, basically any organization in the state of Vermont that wants to help learn more about energy together and help the state of Vermont accomplish our energy and climate related goals. In support of that network, can use data from what broadly we have a small called backbone nonprofit organization that I lead. We have our deputy director and network manager Kara Robichek as well, and we do a couple of key things. We do the data tracking research and analysis which is best known by this annual progress report. We also produce research papers and research briefs, and then we also serve as a kind of neutral convener and facilitator of different working groups across the state on climate workforce, on expanding weatherization, on other kind of energy affordability related topics, and that includes an annual summit, it includes ongoing working groups, etc. So this is a long running annual progress report, as you can see from the images of our prior year covers, and it's a really large undertaking. We spend ten months a year on this. We're really grateful for the collaboration and review of state agencies and departments. A lot of the data that we get for this report comes from the Public Service Department, the Agency of Medical Resources, VTrans in the past and been in this report, federal agencies as well as state and local government utility data as well. So very thankful for their collaboration and contributions. Many of you will know that in past years we've primarily looked at energy use, we've looked at emissions, but this year we really wanted to lean in and focus primarily on the question of energy affordability, and we realized that no one had ever stopped before, we hadn't stopped before, to do some very basic things. Answer the question, how much in total does Vermont spend on energy each year? So we developed the first tally of Vermont's total energy study. We also realized that while there's been much data tracking and analysis that looks at specific energy costs, how much are Vermonters paying for electricity or for gasoline or for fuel oil, we hadn't tallied up the total energy cost for the state as a whole and for average households over time. So this report will have the same energy data and analysis, it'll have updated emissions data analysis, but the primary focus and most of the new data and analysis is related to questions of energy affordability and energy economics. So that first question, this is a graph that helps answer it. How much does Vermont spend, or how much money is spent in Vermont in a year on energy? The answer for the latest year for which we had full data in 2023 is over $3,000,000,000, $3,300,000,000, and most of that over $2,000,000,000 was for fossil fuels related to transportation and the thermal sector, primarily home and building heating. So you see the transportation in blue, gasoline spending in Vermont nearly $1,000,000,000 in 2023, and then in the thermal sector it's more split up, but the largest costs for Vermonters were fuel oil and propane cumulatively nearly $700,000,000 in that year. This includes businesses? Yes, this is all energy spending in the state of Vermont. And to put it into context, $2,000,000,000 a year on fossil fuel spending, it's just under 5% of state GDP, so it's very significant. I've seen other analyses that compares the total cost of energy in the city as being similar to the total amount of money spent on education. Okay, but that's a big number, break it down a little bit. This graph shows two things, in the orange is the total fossil fuel consumption, we're zooming in on fossil fuel use and costs here because those are the ones that move the most. Our electricity use and costs have been very stable over the last decade. So we zoom in on the fossil fuel to see the key changes that have been happening over the last decade. That orange line shows total consumption in terms of volume, gallons, therms, etc, added up, as measured in trillion BTUs. What you see in the bars below is the total spending on those fuels, and this highlights a really key dynamic. I want to zoom in on, you look at the years 2021 and 2022, you see something really interesting and important. The fossil fuel consumption, total fossil fuel consumption in Vermont was basically flat. Can you see that? Is my cursor showing up? Yeah, you see it from here to here, our total fossil fuel consumption was essentially unchanged in that year, but the total amount of money that was spent on that in Vermont increased by about $700,000,000 in just one year, and this was primarily as a result of price spikes. Fossil fuels are 100% imported into Vermont, they're part of a global commodity market that experiences significant price volatility, and this was around the time that Russia invaded Ukraine, we saw significant price spikes in the global oil markets, and that led to a $700,000,000 price increase in just one year for Volantaris despite flat consumption. And those are just for inflation or not? This is not, we have another version that does do that. We tend to do it over long term time periods if it's just a one year comparison, adjusting for inflation, it becomes a little less important.

[Senator Terry Williams (Vice Chair)]: Do we know how much you know, how much tax we've generated from Beaumont?

[Jared Duval (Executive Director, Energy Action Network)]: It varies by fuels and I can have some of that information later at one of the presentation, but there's different amounts of fees and taxes applied to different.

[Senator Terry Williams (Vice Chair)]: So some of that might be taxing fees too?

[Jared Duval (Executive Director, Energy Action Network)]: No, this is just the total volume. Okay, so tax is stripped out. Yes, because we multiply the volumes by the average retail price for each month for a set of funeral volumes. So we were just looking at it statewide, but those are big numbers, what do they actually mean for their constituents? What do they mean for Vermont households? And so we don't really think about energy as having one energy bill, you pay for gas at the pump, you pay your electric bill, maybe you have a fuel oil or a propane bill, but if we think about total energy costs for a Vermont household, this is what an average Vermont household's energy bill would have looked like over this six year period that we have the latest data for. And so what we did was we took an average household in terms of having two gasoline vehicles, average heating load, know, Vermonters use different heating fuels, but the plurality, the largest source of heating is fuel oil, and we looked at average electricity costs, and that price spike that we saw in the previous graph in 2021 and 2022 really shows up here as well, and what that translated to for an average Vermont household was nearly $2,500 in extra costs in just one year. So one of the reasons that we wanted to do this analysis is that affordability is such a key conversation in Vermont, whether it's at the State House or whether it's at kitchen tables, and oftentimes the affordability conversation doesn't focus on energy, but we think it's really important to look at energy because when you look at average household budgets, the second largest cost for average Vermont households is the cost of transportation, and the largest cost on average for Vermonters is the cost of housing, and a key cost of housing is the cost of heating and electricity. So if we're going to have a thorough conversation about affordability in Vermont, we think the energy affordability conversation is really important. How much are we spending on energy and how is that changing over time, and what are the key cost drivers? And we see that in recent years it has been the high costs and the price volatility related to our dependence on fossil fuels, primarily gasoline, fuel oil, and propane. So again, providers don't get one energy bill, but if they did, this is the type of increase that we and our neighbors saw in just that one year from '21 to '22, really a $2,500 increase. This is just on the fossil fuel side, this doesn't include electricity. We're not the only ones who've been looking at this question. Efficiency Vermont does a great report called the Energy Burden Report which came out last in 2023. Energy burden refers to the share of household budget that is spent on energy. Not only are our transportation, our thermal sectors responsible for the most fossil fuel use, they're also not surprisingly the two highest cost sectors, the ones that are responsible for the highest share of energy costs in households. But now there's a range here, in 2023 Efficiency Vermont found the average household about $7,000 in energy costs, again that was an increase from just four years earlier of more than a thousand dollars, but you know there's a range of expenditures which you see here in the bottom right corner. So we've been looking at total energy spending for our SSE, we've looked at household spending, we've looked at some of the price volatility which I'll share more about. Another key feature of fossil fuels is, or of energy costs in general to look at, is when we purchase a certain energy source, what does that mean for the Vermont economy and how much money recirculates here contributing to local jobs and the Vermont state economy versus how much is leaving the state? And as I said, Vermont does not produce any fossil fuels, so the fossil fuel use is 100% imported into the state, which means that there's a relatively small difference between the wholesale costs that the importers of that fuel charge and the retail cost. There's only a small amount of that cost that saving recirculates in Vermont via gas stations or from your fuel dealers and their trucks etc. So it varies by people, but on average about 76¢ of every dollar that we spend on fossil fuel leaves immediate, that first dollar spent immediately leaves the philanthropy economy and goes out of sync. It's a very different story for local energy resources like electricity and like wood. So here we see electricity, on average about $0.60 a million dollars we spend on electricity, $0.05 9 stays and recirculates in Vermont because a much larger share of our electricity price is related to local labor. It's line maintenance, it's tree trimming, it's customer service operations, and a smaller chair is for the fuel or the power itself. And here in Vermont, we do produce some of our electricity in state, and the electricity that we purchase out of state, even though it's going out of state, say in Quebec or to New York or to Maine or New York, that money is getting recirculated regionally rather than going into a multinational kind of global fossil fuel export environment. So that's a key feature as well. And then most of the focus of this report is on energy cost and affordability, but it is also important to remember that there are far different effects on pollution from these different energy sources. So this is just an example of the life cycle amount of climate pollution that's created from gasoline vehicles versus electric vehicles. So for instance in Vermont a gas vehicle produces seven times more climate pollution over its lifetime than in an electric vehicle, and that's primarily as a result of two factors. One, electric vehicles are so much more efficient because electric motors and regenerative braking, etc. Allow you to go the same amount of miles for a quarter of the energy input as a gasoline vehicle, which combustion processes are inherently inefficient, three quarters of the energy input into a gas vehicle, Senator Watson knows this well as a science teacher, about three quarters of the energy input is lost through heat and other engine losses and doesn't actually get delivered to the wheels and move the vehicle. So that's part of the reason that electric vehicles produce less pollution, they're more efficient, they use less energy. They're also using a less polluting energy resource, paying Vermont's electricity portfolio as opposed to fossil fuels.

[Senator Terry Williams (Vice Chair)]: What was the reason for

[Jared Duval (Executive Director, Energy Action Network)]: the difference between US and Vermont? The US is the average electricity portfolio, and so in The United States there's a greater share of fossil fuel use for electricity generation, whereas in Vermont we have a cleaner portfolio than the nation. And I want to note here that this is full life cycle emissions, this is not just tailpipe emissions, so this includes emissions related to battery manufacturers. So you see there are electric vehicles in the purple have higher emissions related to battery manufacturing, but those are way more than offset in terms of the fuel emissions that come over the life of a gas leak. Okay, so in summary our findings when we looked at energy prices and costs in Vermont over time for households as a state, fossil fuels have four key features: they are expensive, they are price volatile, they drain money out of Vermont, and they love heavily. Another thing we wanted to do is look at not just average household spending, but there are key differences in energy costs in terms of different household types, including by household income. So what this looks at is you see along the bottom x axis households that make under 40,000 a year on the left, going up to households that make more than $150,000 a year on the right, and you see a really important and consistent dynamic here across energy use and energy costs, which is that upper income Vermonters, I mean it's especially pronounced in transportation, but upper income Vermonters use a lot more, they travel more miles, they produce more gasoline, they spend more on transportation, they have more vehicles. The average household making over 150,000 a year has nearly two and a half vehicles, whereas folks who are the lowest income homeowners may only have one vehicle. So transportation spending significantly increases as income goes up. But the share of transportation spending, the transportation cost burden is much higher as you see in these orange bars for lower and middle income Vermonters, and so even though lower income Vermonters are on average spending a quarter of what upper income Vermonters are in transportation, that takes up twice as much of their household budget, that smaller amount. So this is a real, again if we're focused on affordability for Vermonters, transportation taking up nearly a quarter of household budgets for the lowest income providers, this is a really important thing to focus on if we want to achieve durable affordability for providers. We see a similar dynamic though not quite as stark when it comes to heating. This is data that actually combines average heating costs with average electric costs, because those two data points are combined in the American Community Survey where we get this data from, but again you see as income goes up more energy spending, but the share of household budgets that get spent on, in this case heating and electricity, is much higher for lower income households. And then we just wanted to dig even deeper, dive even deeper, which is okay for those households, what is making up those costs? And we see some more key differences by income. For upper income Vermonters, look at the green, nearly half of that transportation spending is on vehicles, and much less is on the fuel and the maintenance as you see in the orange and blue. But for lower and middle income households, a much larger share of their transportation costs are fuels and maintenance. So you see here 23 plus nine, nearly a third of transportation costs for lower income homeowners in both of these scenarios is fuel and maintenance, where it's less than a quarter for upper income folks. So if we know that if we want to address transportation affordability for lower income providers, the cost of fuel and the cost of maintaining vehicles is especially important. We also looked at differences in energy use and energy costs by household type and by income. So on the left you see owned homes, the right you see rented homes, and then broken down within each of those is the fuel type. You see some important and interesting differences here as well, but I'm cognizant that I'm running short on time so I'm going to speed through this.

[Senator Anne Watson (Chair)]: We have nothing after you.

[Jared Duval (Executive Director, Energy Action Network)]: Okay. Mean, should say of course, you will tell me, oh you want this difference, but I would welcome any clarifying questions throughout, so please don't hesitate to stop. But you know there are some interesting differences here. One of our lowest cost heating options in Vermont is the use of local wood, and that's something that folks in own homes are taking much more advantage of than in rented homes, whereas folks who rent are physically functionally dependent on some of the higher cost fuels and some of the lower cost fuels. Mean you see because of so many rental units and apartments in Chitung County, especially in gas territory, we see a higher share of renters using fossil or utility gas, natural gas, different terms are used for that, but that is one of the lowest cost heating options. Does home is it single family residence or single family residence in apartments or how is home defined in this? Yeah it is it is a family dwelling or a single person's So it could be an apartment, could be an old condo, it could be an multi family situation. Another thing we wanted to look at is you know how do different heating costs compare both on average and how much of a range,

[Unidentified Committee Member]: how much volatility do we see in

[Jared Duval (Executive Director, Energy Action Network)]: those over time? So we were just talking about the cost of different heating options in the last graph, what you see with the blue dot is the average cost of different heating systems in Vermont 2020 through 2024, the most expensive way, this is fuel only, the most expensive heating fuel over that period on average was propane, and then fuel oil, and then these lighter, I don't know what time in common, but these lighter orange flowers, peach, there we go, that's scary,

[Senator Anne Watson (Chair)]: it's

[Jared Duval (Executive Director, Energy Action Network)]: a nice image in these winter months. Peach range, it ranged from a low in one year of about 1,600 in total annual cost to a high nearly double that of 3,200 in one year. So this is just these broader ranges show the greater price volatility in these fuels as compared to these fuels which are both lower cost on average heating fuels and susceptible to less price volatility. And then of course it's not just about the cost comparison in Vermont, many people also care about the pollution that's related to those different heating sources. So not only are propane and fuel are the two most expensive heating fuel options in Vermont, are also the two most polluting, either in terms of direct emissions or in terms of life cycle emissions including upstream emissions. These charts show how these prices are moving over time, this is data from the Energy Information Administration, EIA, and you see gasoline in orange, diesel in blue. I have to refer to this as a roller coaster graph just because that's the type of volatility we see in these fuels, and then on the bottom we compare them to three different types of electricity prices. So since these are transportation fuels on the top, we look at the statewide average residential cost of electricity, and the numbers at the end are just like where does that line end, so $1.66 was the same way the average retail electric price. But many utilities including Green Mountain Power and Burlington Electric offer electric vehicle charging rates that bring that rate even lower, so you see in GMP and ED territory that just the price of fuel light is about a third for electricity as opposed to gasoline. This is similar though not quite as pronounced difference on the heating fuel side. You see the on average higher cost and greater price volatility in propane in gray, fuel oil in purple, although those have been down in recent months, and then you see the equivalent costs for the amount of delivered heat for electricity with full time heat pumps and weaning fossil gas or natural gas in full range. We've already reviewed that, this is just to say that different fuels do keep more or less money in state, the earlier slide is just an average. Do want to share with the committee not just graphs, not just media, but a quote from a book that I came across that I think really helps illustrate the dynamic that we're dealing with when it comes to energy affordability, energy costs, this probably applies to other things that we can provide. This is an excerpt from the book Men at Arms by Doctor. Terry Cratchit, and this is spoken by the character Sam Grimes. Grimes says, the reason that the rich were so rich was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots for example, you earn $38 a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost $50 but an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of okay for a season or two, and then leaked like hell when the cardboard even cost about $10 Those were the kinds of boots Vimes always bought and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was on a foggy neck by the feel of the collars. But the thing was that good boots lasted for years. A man who could afford $50 had a pair of boots that would still be keeping his feet dry in ten years time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent $100 on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.

[Senator Terry Williams (Vice Chair)]: It

[Jared Duval (Executive Director, Energy Action Network)]: is in my notes, it's not in a slide.

[Senator Anne Watson (Chair)]: That's a

[Unidentified Committee Member]: great But

[Jared Duval (Executive Director, Energy Action Network)]: I think that when we look at energy, the question of energy affordability, we realize that transportation is not than boots, housing is not different than boots, heating is not different than boots. That it's not a simple question of what is affordable, there is often a distinction between fleeting one time affordability, a piece of equipment that may cost less because it's less efficient, because it's cheaper, but then over time it's going to lead to higher costs for providers and for the city. You see that with vehicles, we see it with the question of weatherization, there's an upfront investment, but there's also a return on. Weatherization, the State Department of Health has conservatively estimated that is three to one return on investment when we weatherize homes, because what happens? We reduce fuel costs over time, we increase health and comfort in homes, And so this question of affordability is not as simple. Oftentimes in order to ensure durable long lasting affordability, it requires upfront investments, and the folks who most need that going back to this energy burden question and the cost being highest for lower and middle income Vermonters. The folks who most need to get on those lower cost more price stable energy curves that are enabled by weatherization, by electric vehicles, by becoming water heaters, where you spend less money month after month, year after year, and over the length of the equipment, folks who most need those lower costs get locked out of them if there is not assistance in terms of overcoming the upfront cost hurdle of the more efficient and higher quality equipment or investment, whether that's weatherization, whether it's EVs, the low sea pump water heaters, etc. So this is a key dynamic. We've understood this for years in Vermont when it comes to investments in traditional energy efficiency, electric energy efficiency. As a state since from 2000 to 2021 we invested nearly $1,000,000,000 in electricians. That then helps avoid increased costs related to transmission and distribution. We're below our historic peaks in electricity use because of those investments, and that has resulted in conservatively estimated over $3,000,000,000 in total savings for the longest. But now the concept of energy efficiency is not just about electric efficiency or not just about weatherization and light bulbs and appliances, it's also about some of these bigger questions related to transportation and heating. So this is something I was mentioning earlier. In an internal combustion engine vehicle, are very inefficient. Of the total energy that's put in in terms of gasoline, 16 to 25 gets delivered to the wheels and lifts the vehicle. In contrast, in an electric vehicle, 87 to 91% of the energy input moves the vehicle. We see the same dynamic when it comes to water heating. A gas or propane water heater that relies on combustion only 60 to 65% efficient, so you need much more energy input, which you see here in the orange, to achieve the same amount of annual household pot water use as you do for other types of water heaters, and there's a really important difference between the efficiencies gained with heat pump water heaters, which are using not resistive or resistance electrics in the identical cases of this electric water heater, but are using, that are transferring energy from, off from the air to the water and achieving much greater efficiencies. We also see this with types of space heat, key it's efficiency differences that allow us to use less energy with modern technology, and what that results is more

[Senator Terry Williams (Vice Chair)]: for

[Jared Duval (Executive Director, Energy Action Network)]: your dog. So when I think of how do we sometimes the most basic questions are the best questions to start with. What is energy? And I always go back to think Aristotle had it pretty right in ancient Greece said energy is the capacity to do work, and when we use energy more efficiently we can do more work for less energy, which means less cost and less pollution. We'll see that example here with electric vehicles taking you three times as far for the same dollar off of GDP rate, which about what 7% of the modders have access to. The other key thing, remember back to the breakdown of transportation costs by income group, and that for lower and middle income Vermonters, fuel and maintenance costs were disproportionately high, nearly a third of their transportation costs, which again are the second highest average household costs for rural homes. Key difference between electric vehicles and fossil vehicles: fewer moving parts, less average maintenance. So this is data that comes from AAA, they do an annual newer driving cost where they get data from consumers and from repair shops. What are the average annual and lifetime repair costs and maintenance costs of different types of vehicles? And what they found was on average, and we look at these this data for Vermont as well, about nearly $10,000 in avoided or nearly $10,000 less in fuel and maintenance costs for electric vehicles than combustion vehicles. And you see that here, is the breakdown, and this gets back to this question of upfront costs versus over time costs. Without incentives, so this is a conservative graph because it doesn't include incentives that do still exist, they don't exist at the federal level, they don't exist at the state level, but utility incentives still exist in verifiable. But without any incentives, this is an apples to apples comparison of two different vehicle models, one gas, one of the Chevy Equinox. Without incentives that Equinox does cost about $5,000 more upfront, but you see the lower lifetime fuel and maintenance costs more than makes up for that upfront cost difference resulting in estimated lifetime savings of about $5,000 Those savings are even larger when you do apply those incentives that do so insist, and that were even higher when we still had federal and state incentives that brought that upfront purchase costs either when we were used to electric vehicles.

[Senator Anne Watson (Chair)]: I don't know if you're going have an answer to this, but I mean, I've seen you give this presentation before. I've been reading this for eight years now, and the arguments are all great, but in politics, as you know, so much of what we do in this building is what is immediate. And every time we try to do long term policy solutions, they become complicated, whether it's in energy or education or taxation or whatever it is, we try. So how do we address this different? Because the lifetime costs are clearly lower, but people are looking at annual costs. They're looking at monthly costs or weekly costs. How do I get from paycheck to paycheck? So how will we translate this into a shorter term argument?

[Jared Duval (Executive Director, Energy Action Network)]: I think a key piece of information related to that is what you've already done, which is the state of Vermont, I would argue wisely, designed its electric vehicle incentives so that they only apply to vehicles below a certain price point, so you weren't incentivizing and providing support for luxury vehicles, and you provided higher incentives for lower income, middle income folks than you did operating with folks, and so this is the result of what you did from 2020 to 2024, is that most of the EV incentives helped enable lower income Vermonters to get into vehicles that Danahawi wouldn't have been able to get into lower those monthly vehicle costs at your top of the valley.

[Senator Anne Watson (Chair)]: And how many? So 5,700 people though, which is great, but even though we're small, that's still a tiny tiny portion of our population.

[Jared Duval (Executive Director, Energy Action Network)]: It did grow over time until it fell off a cliff in 2025 when the incentives were fully expired and not renewed, and so you know but I do think it's an important realization that if there's a desire to help providers lower their transportation costs, and if there's a particular desire to help lower middle income providers, if we have the highest energy cost burdens lower those costs, what we see from survey after survey is that the upfront cost of electric vehicles usually is the single biggest hurdle, and this is a you know I'm not going to specifically support one policy or another, but I will just point to the historical data that you had a policy in place that was addressing that increasingly so over time.

[Senator Anne Watson (Chair)]: And this was a combination of state and federal?

[Jared Duval (Executive Director, Energy Action Network)]: This is just the state.

[Senator Anne Watson (Chair)]: This is just the state.

[Jared Duval (Executive Director, Energy Action Network)]: Yeah, but as you correctly point out, was not just the state incentives that were at play, there was a federal incentive. Just shows what a difference one year makes, so this is looking at US CDs, how much combined in the federal utility and state incentives the upward possibility USED could be brought down. That was in 2024, the difference a year makes in terms of changes in federal and state policy and funding decisions. So sad. And not just on the electric vehicle side, there was also a program that was passed by the legislature called Switch and Save, which helps lower and moderate income Vermonters replace inefficient and costly fossil fuel water heaters with efficient and lower cost heat pump water heaters, and that helped a thousand Vermonters, more than a thousand in just one year lower those costs.

[Senator Anne Watson (Chair)]: That was in 2023, right? I mean, you got this space,

[Jared Duval (Executive Director, Energy Action Network)]: I'm sorry. Note is covered, that's April, that was from April 24 to March 2025, and I believe that those funds are nearly expired, although efficiency per model would know more about that.

[Senator Anne Watson (Chair)]: I do want to just pause with that question because I feel like that is like the million dollar question, right? Like how do we And if we had a million dollars. Probably wouldn't get interested. Probably not, but it'd be a size. You know, like it's, because it's that upfront cost, like how do we help with the upfront cost? And there are so many ideas that I, that are just pergling around that. Mean, like, who is paying, you know, is it a question of, you know, for lack of a better phrase, like taxing the rich, you know, or like is a finance question where it's going to pay for itself in the long run? So who takes the risk of, you know, eating the upfront costs to share the benefit with the ideally like lower income and middle income Vermonters over time. So is it a financing mechanism? I don't know. And I, so there is another bill that came to us about green banks, which I think has potential to be part of that solution. That one came here. It came here. I thought it was going to go to finance, but it's here. So, and we actually would have, potentially had some testimony on that today. But people couldn't, again, even the backup people, some of the backup people couldn't make it, but that is a question that I am continually thinking about. Yeah. Yeah. Yes, go ahead.

[Senator Terry Williams (Vice Chair)]: So thanks for the data, this, you know you can't lie, the data wasn't alive and for your your point it's like you know the cost of people going to work and have to have some poor families have to have vehicles because ones broke down they're not as efficient. And then we couple the property tax problems, you wonder why people leave in Vermont. Eventually, a lot of people are gonna be able to afford to live here by the same people that can afford a lot good roofs. So so we need to you know we got a mechanism in place to actually do something about it. We'd almost be financially better off going by everybody an electric vehicle get rid of all and I think they tried that it's called cash for clunkers right And then, you know, they wouldn't have an additional cost, but it I think it falls on the government come up with some kind of a plan to fix it, and I don't

[Unidentified Committee Member]: know the there. We are. Right. So so that that mechanism did that. Right now, there's still a long one solution. Right? Well, that's the

[Senator Anne Watson (Chair)]: that that's just laying up a map of where we need to target, where, like where we need to hit in terms of emissions. I think the question about money is actually a totally different question, particularly because so many of the solutions that are also renewable are also cheaper. And so that gives us, and it's not always, it's not always true, but most of the time it's true, and that gives us some leverage to, to, to play with. So anyway, I'm very interested in like how we can be helping Vermonters save money and also save pollution. That's, that feels like a win win if

[Unidentified Committee Member]: we can figure out what we are.

[Senator Anne Watson (Chair)]: Okay, we're going to hatch it. We're going to keep thinking about that.

[Jared Duval (Executive Director, Energy Action Network)]: If I may, Senator Williams, the question that you just asked was something we were kind of curious about, so we wanted to do a thought experiment. In a scenario in which all Vermonters drove EVs or half of Vermonters drove EVs, in the most recent year for which we ended in 2024, let's just do a thought experiment, what would their total fuel costs have been? What we actually have had in 2024 was 3% of our buyers drove EVs spending about $11,000,000 on electricity fuel charge, drive those. 97% of Vermonters drove gas vehicles at a cost of about $880,000,000 This is just fuel costs, it assumes electric rates what they were in 01/2023. In full analysis you would need to account for potential transmission or distribution costs increases from this level of electrification, but just in a scenario in which half of the runners had EVs, we estimated that the fuel costs would have gone down by over $200,000,000 and would have been cut nearly about in half if all the runners had electric vehicles. Now there are really important key questions about as we electrify transportation and heating, what does that mean for our electricity grid? And it presents both challenges and opportunities. I mean one of the greatest opportunities of electric vehicles is that they are batteries on wheels that have the ability to smooth peaks and lower electric costs. This is what utilities are already doing with EV charging bills, they give you a lower rate in return for the ability to pause charging at times of peak demand, which lower costs for customers and for ratepayers as a whole, and in the future there's an even greater opportunity. We're not there yet, but around bidirectional charging, not just where the utility can send a signal, don't charge at this time of peak demand so we can lower costs for everybody, but also can those batteries be used to return electricity to the grid during times of peak demand? Because as we know, the highest electricity costs come during those peaks and the more we can do to help flatten and smooth those, the more we can do to reduce costs.

[Senator Anne Watson (Chair)]: Do you happen to know if that is a, why are we doing that at all? Is a technology barrier? Is it a policy barrier?

[Jared Duval (Executive Director, Energy Action Network)]: My sense is that

[Senator Anne Watson (Chair)]: I feel like this is not necessarily your area though. I

[Jared Duval (Executive Director, Energy Action Network)]: do not claim any special expertise in this area except somebody who follows the news about it very carefully, and what I have seen is that I think that there as electric vehicles, the vehicles themselves, and as the charging stations have developed, in the early years there were not uniform standards. Some vehicles charged with Chattanooga, some charged with CCS, and you know it's the same thing with vehicle to grid technology. Different auto manufacturers are leaning in there and others are not, or it is and Chevy are doing something in that space, Toyota has not yet. And so I do think that there is this question of what is the role of government in terms of trying to set commonalities and standards, whether it's on charging equipment, whether it's on the use of vehicles, because it's not just about an individual consumer, it also has effects for society as a whole and deals with how they interface with our shared electricity grid. So I think it's a great question. I'm sorry I don't have more information now, I can try to fix them up and share it.

[Senator Terry Williams (Vice Chair)]: So somebody's gotta pay for the research and development to get these systems protected. So it's horrible among the ones. Yeah. That's why I thought hybrid.

[Senator Anne Watson (Chair)]: Yeah.

[Senator Terry Williams (Vice Chair)]: Because, you know, it's kind of the best of both worlds. I went to put solar panels up. The insiders were gone, but I still did it because I could floor it. And I and I started to see a difference in the cost, you know, what was going in my pocket. But How do we fix it's probably not gonna happen in my lifetime, although I'd like to be able to say it goes that, you know, this this committee fixes the problem with your help. I mean, that's what we're all here for. How do you do you come up with the research and development when they can affect those systems so they're affordable and effective?

[Jared Duval (Executive Director, Energy Action Network)]: I think in Vermont, I mean I can't answer the question, but what I can offer is that I think in Vermont we in some ways we benefit from the economies of scale of other states. One example on the vehicle side is that Vermont has for a long time partnered with California in terms of the advanced clean cars to rules, which has delivered a larger share of efficient and electric vehicles here than go to states that are not part of the advanced plane cars two rules. So more of that advanced and efficient and lower cost technology or technology that can lower costs over time is coming to Vermont because of these larger markets and the research and development and innovation that's happening in bigger markets. There's also a lot of great innovation in this low state that has helped them, especially on battery manufacturing side, in electric aviation, so it's not just that we're kind of a follower of these larger markets, Vermont is making its own contributions, but I think you're exactly right that it is a combination of what is happening in the private market, what's happening in Vermont, what's happening outside of Vermont, and then what is the balance of state and federal policy to either support or hold that out.

[Senator Anne Watson (Chair)]: Yes, good. Well, just a question, advanced clean cars, and I believe the governor reversed that and we're no longer in that completely, or at least a truck part of it. There was something that he backed us out of It was the enforcement. So we're still in it, it's really no, but we're not enforcing it for We have a child's unenforcement. I see. But to Senator Williams' part about research and development, I mean, there was a lot of money for research and development in the Inflation Reduction Act, which was an enormous boost to clean and green energy that the Trump administration has now completely reversed and now is literally invading other countries in order to get more oil. So, I mean, we're going in the opposite direction nationally, and that impacts our small state. I mean, we cannot, as tiny little Vermont, do all the research and development, build all of that infrastructure, and force carbon manufacturers and others to do things for the best of the environment, or you know, the best for families' pocketbooks. The national federal government has to do that and they are going exactly how it's

[Unidentified Committee Member]: to Just as short as you can slip.

[Senator Terry Williams (Vice Chair)]: Is that, you know, we need a plan first of all you know it looks all ten years where do we want to be in ten years and I don't it's got to be a private public partnership to get that plan out and then get everybody on board to do it and then find the people who want to invest in that plan financially and then Vermont can be you know we are a leader in a lot of long term energy initiatives but Vermont could be you know the leader So we don't have a plan. So how do we put together a plan and go?

[Senator Anne Watson (Chair)]: We do have a plan. You are on the, in your other hat, on the committee that reads the plan, Action It is a statewide plan that's updated every two years, every four years. And that came out of the Global Working Solutions Act. I mean, that is a plan for reducing emissions and increasing renewable energy usage in the state. There's also the comprehensive energy plan, which is every five years. And so it doesn't, weirdly it doesn't line up, but similar,

[Unidentified Committee Member]: similar objectives. So back to my original goal, so why aren't we doing legislation that makes us go forward with the global warming solution? So we have tried some of that. And well, anyway,

[Senator Anne Watson (Chair)]: we should have, let's have this conversation offline about what the policies that were in that. I'm a newbie. That's okay, no worries. I think it's fair that we, we can, I think we need to be looking for creative solutions, some of which are in that plan? I mean, even just having this conversation, I'm starting to think about the EV charging connectors that, I mean, got one for free from Greenbelt Power for getting an electric vehicle. Does that have bidirectional capacity? What could be our role in ensuring that more bidirectional chargers are deployed? Because that has a real potential benefit to ratepayers as batteries are potentially feeding back electricity from their grid, or I'm sorry, from their, from an EV battery.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Well there's yeah, anyways.

[Jared Duval (Executive Director, Energy Action Network)]: So again, which is on the question of what plans exist, just share with the community that the climate action plan was updated in July after you all adjourned and so you know I'm sure that there are members of the climate council administration that would be happy to share the top priority recommendations of that whatever point makes sense.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: And maybe we should talk to them, Yep. They should report back. Okay. Okay. Super.

[Jared Duval (Executive Director, Energy Action Network)]: Thank you, Charles. Thank you. You're much.

[Senator Anne Watson (Chair)]: You. Okay. And