- Do we have the proper workforce in Michigan right now for these jobs of the future that we've been talking about this week?

- We have the right people, but we don't have the right workforce.

So there's so much training available, so much that needs to be done.

But these are jobs, the jobs of today are jobs of the future.

So people have not been trained to maintain EV charging stations, install EV charging stations.

They're not enough energy auditors.

Our next energy is doing battery sale manufacturing.

Where are the experienced battery sale manufacturers?

There are none because the industries are so new.

So we are on the precipice of creating the right workforce with the right people here in Michigan.

- So what is it gonna take to do that?

- It's going to take a lot of good training to be scaled and elevated.

One of the most exciting things for me is that there are groups of people training, but they're training tens and twenties and a hundreds.

And we need hundreds and thousands in some cases, to be trained in order to serve the needs of the clean energy industry.

- Lisa, you testified at a house committee of two years ago about labor shortages.

- Yeah.

Two years ago.

Two years later, is the message the same?

- Pretty much.

Pretty much the same.

And so we are still working with it, working through it the best we can.

And I think, because "The Power of &," right?

It's all of us.

And so when we talk about, that's my competitive advantage.

I've heard certain people say, hiring people, being able to train up the workforce, that's my competitive advantage.

No, it's not, it's all of us.

We all have to come together and set up these types of training programs that gives everyone a pool of resources.

Because not everybody that I train necessarily wants to work for me.

But maybe they wanna work for Carla, maybe they wanna work for DTE and the folks coming from DTE, I can certainly use them.

But there's a commonality, there's a common footprint that we all need to start with.

Maybe it's the math skills and we bring the math up.

We're talking about technology.

What does technology really look like?

When we talk about it, everybody talks about software coding.

It's not just software coding.

We have technology in everything that we touch.

When I look at the automobile, I look at it like an iPhone.

It is what Steve Jobs said.

"I didn't create the phone, right.

I created the playground that everybody wants to be on."

So now we have energy coming into it, energy in a different way.

We're looking at wireless, we're looking at the charging.

The thing I'm excited about is looking forward and saying, "How can my car talk to the next car?

And having all these different elements that come together to make that happen.

- 'Cause it's going to.

- It's going to, it's upon us, right?

Everybody says it's here.

Whether I like it or not, it's here.

I just love the smell of exhausts in the morning, so I'm (indistinct).

(panel chuckles) I'm sorry.

- There's not much of that though on Mackinac Island.

- No.

- None.

It's the smell of horses in the morning.

- Yeah, now that's an interesting one.

- Not the same.

(panel chuckles) - No, it's not.

- Trevor, one of the sessions this week is, are industry and consumers prepared for the electric revolution?

- Well, it's coming.

So I think industry has to be prepared.

And I want to go back to your first questions.

- Please.

- Around workforce, right?

So what Lisa was talking about is we have to have a growth mindset.

We have to all think about how we get this workforce ready together.

'Cause it's gonna be a strategic advantage for Michigan and all of the companies in Michigan.

Our eco structure, our ecosystem will all benefit as we work on this together.

So we gotta work on workforce together and make sure that we're all benefiting from that.

And then when I think about the grid, we spend a lot of time talking about is our grid ready for electrification?

The good thing is it's not all coming at once.

And what we see is the majority of people that are charging their cars today, 82% in our service territory, do it in their own homes.

But then it goes into, well, how do you make sure that charging an electric vehicle electrification is equitable across the whole service territory.

I think that's where we need to work with partners like these two to make sure that, how do you put charging into the low income communities or the rental communities to make sure that they also have access to electric vehicles.

- Well, and this goes to this question about is it equitable, right?

Is this electric future equitable?

So what kind of work needs to be done?

You're talking about it and thinking about it.

What are those next steps?

- So at DTE, we will file what we call a Transportation Electrification Plan.

And we're doing a lot of stakeholder analysis with everybody right now, trying to figure out what's the right place for DTE to play in that.

Look, for people that want to install chargers.

If you install private chargers in somebody's home, well there's a market for that.

And there's a reason companies do that because they see profit in doing that.

There's other segments of that market installing chargers in the public areas for people to charge, low income areas, rental areas.

Right now that's not a profitable market.

So what we're trying to figure out a DTE is where should we play?

Where should we partner?

- Right.

- And what's that look like for the whole ecosystem?

So we move vehicle charging forward.