Let's start with a little bit of an overview of Nureka and how you're advocating for your members on the broadband front.

We are a national association for over 900 rural electric cooperatives around the country, and about 200 of those cooperatives are also involved in providing retail broadband service.

You know, In other areas, maybe there were other providers already, and so the electric co-opter didn't feel the need to get involved.

But in some of these rural areas, just like electricity 90 years ago, where the co-operative provided electricity because no one else did, the same thing is happening now in the broadband space.

So you've got about 200 co-ops in 43 states that are offering broadband today to about 2 million homes and businesses.

So it's a significant footprint.

And you asked how we advocate, and These are often sparsely populated areas.

And we've seen with the change in administration, there's been some updates that have caused some confusion, but how does Norica see the bead funding? platform playing out? What are your members' concerns as they look at that platform?

I think just in general, why don't we start, and you could share some insight with us on just how we see that grid, the increase in power demand during the summer months, because I know there are a lot of impacts there across rural America.

Yeah, it's really interesting.

You know, you have two times of year where you have peak electric use and in the winter when it's real cold and in the summer when it's really hot.

That's about as technical as I get, Jesse.

But, you know, when it's real hot, the air conditioning loads go up big time.

And that creates stress on the system.

But heat also creates stress on the system.

Well, let's talk a bit about this in terms of what we need to be paying attention to with our rural electric cooperatives and mitigating wildfire risk.

NRECA CEO Jim Matheson said rural communities would never have grown without resources from the federal government.

Well, you know, 90 years ago, rural America, most everyone did not have electricity, and this was during the Roosevelt administration.

During the Depression, he recognized the need to bring electricity to rural America because you can't have economic opportunity without it.

So they passed this bill, the Rural Electrification Act, where the Department of Agriculture would offer low-cost loans to help build out infrastructure to bring electricity to rural America.

And what's really interesting is e- they first offered it to for-profit utilities, and they said, "We're not gonna do it anyway.

Even with these low-cost ro- loans from the government, it's not in our interest to do it." So people in rural America, they each put in $5, which back then was a lot of money, to form their own cooperative owned by the members that all put the money in, and they formed their own cooperatives, and they went to the federal government and said, "We wanna build it out ourselves." We ha- and, and the, and the Roosevelt administration said, "Okay, we're gonna do this", and they've been providing loans to electric cooperatives to build out infrastructure, starting then to electrify rural America.

It's one of the great successes, in my opinion, in the history of the federal government in terms of investing in, in rural America.

Is there help from the government that really allows you to restore the system to where it needs to be?