"Madame Speaker of the House, may we come in?"

The plan for today was meet a core team of students from around the state at the state house cafeteria at 1pm to present our biomass plan to Gaye Symington, the Speaker of the House.

At about 11:30 I received word that because of all the snow those other schools were not coming. That left my fiery student, a senior I snagged, and myself to pitch this idea. (Deeeeeep Breathe). We were ready to go it on our own, but then there we are in the Cafeteria gathering our thoughts when 4 key students from Mt. Abe come in. WOO HOO!

The presentation to Madame Speaker of the House was very organized, very deliberate, and she sounded amenable to it. She didn't give us a lot of feedback, but did say that it was impressive but then directed us to the President Pro Tem, Peter Shumlin (which I'm not really sure what that is, I should look it up), and he connected us with Ginny Lyons who has a biomass-related bill she's working on with the Senate. So we gave a mini-pitch to her and Peter Shumlin, and she said, "can you come back Friday to testify?" "Um. Yes." yesyesyes. We would drop anything to come testify. They're voting on a draft of it tonight, and she'll fax it to us in the morning so we have an up to date version of it. Then we'll devour it, and come back on Friday for a quick 15 minute presentation with a 20 minute Q&A period. Dang 15 minutes isn't long.

Then! Some representative (I didn't catch his name) from Addison County told us to go to the House Agriculture committee which was meeting at the time, and so we interrupted their meeting getting all situated and seated, and then like 20 minutes later David Zuckerman (who presides over that committee) told us we had a few minutes to pitch our idea.

And that was a little messier. We clearly were trying to focus on the agricultural side of it, but that meant that we didn't talk about the tax until the end, which I think was a little confusing for them. But anyway, they had SO many questions for us, and ideas, and people we should contact, and altogether it was very interesting and challenging. We didn't know things like How much does a farmer make per acre of prairie grass. Yes, it's sold for like $250/ton at Home Depot, but how much of that goes to the farmer? We didn't do that calculation, and some kids started not answering their questions, but re-directed their questions to things they did know about, which we talked about after as not so good.

But anyway, we found out that there are some counties which have received grants already to install pelletizers and work on biomass and such, so we need to talk to those folks to see how they fit into this picture (Burke and Bridport).

People kept telling us "it's so much easier to start something like this if you have a pilot program. Do it small-scale first". And fair enough. So we've got to pursue that.

In addition, David Zuckerman suggested that maybe both halves don't need to come from the government - the halves being pellet stoves in people homes and a universal pelletizer for local crops. If the government bulk purchases pellet stoves for people to sell at cost (or with a low-interest loan), then perhaps there would be a private player who would build the pelletizer? It's a thought. Either way the folks said that if you do a grant proposal through the Clean Energy Development Fund it's always stronger if it's a public-private cooperative endeavor.

It took almost 4 hours and now I'm EXHAUSTED!