00:00Senator Kelly. Thank you, Madam Chair. Mayor Gago, thank you again for being here. As you know,
00:08better than probably anybody, Phoenix is a urban heat island experiencing higher temperatures in
00:16the surrounding rural areas due to the lack of vegetation and the use of asphalt and concrete
00:22that absorb a lot of the heat. An estimated 45 percent of Metro Phoenix residents live in an
00:31area where the urban heat island effect raises temperatures by about eight degrees or more,
00:37and this is why I worked to include the Healthy Streets Program, which I think you mentioned in
00:43your opening remarks, and we put that in the bipartisan infrastructure law, which would fund
00:48initiatives such as cool pavement projects that mitigate the effects of this extreme heat.
00:54So, Mayor, why is it critical for Congress to fund programs that help vulnerable cities like Phoenix
01:00become more resilient to the effects of extreme heat? Thank you for your leadership on that program.
01:08We are at a point now where we are going to have to adapt cities to hotter environments. Phoenix now
01:14talks to cities all around the country, including in the northernmost parts of our country, about heat
01:19challenges. This is a national problem, and we appreciate you coming up with a national solution.
01:26The heat can be deadly. We are losing more Americans to heat than any other type of natural disaster,
01:31but our infrastructure funding hasn't caught up with that reality yet. Even some of the coldest states
01:37in the country have had terrible heat waves with an incredible loss of life. We know the solutions.
01:44There are building material changes, design changes that can save lives. Your program will help cities,
01:52rural communities, tribes get the funding to make those changes, many of which require us to design
01:58infrastructure very differently. I had a roundtable back in Phoenix on extreme heat just last week,
02:04and the number of deaths nationwide from extreme heat exceed every other natural disaster combined.
02:12It is a real problem that, and it's also associated with the thing we're going to talk about next
02:21here. I want a little bit about energy. It's our grid. The grid goes down in Phoenix. The estimates are
02:29that somewhere up to maybe half of the residents of the city will wind up in an emergency room if it happens
02:37during a certain time of year in the summer when the heat is the highest. So I want to talk about
02:47mentioning electricity here. Data centers, chip manufacturing, and other industrial expansion
02:53transportation in Phoenix is putting pressure on our infrastructure. And as our population grows to fuel
03:00this technology boom, how does our electrical and transportation infrastructure need to respond?
03:11And since this is transportation, maybe we should focus on that.
03:14Right. Well, when you look at, so we are seeing a huge boom in data center and advanced manufacturing.
03:22Just in the Phoenix metro, the data centers have requested 32 gigawatts of new electricity. The amount of
03:32damage that, well, the impact this would have on our streets with all of these construction,
03:36these are huge construction sites. In our case, we have it in many cases right up against residential,
03:42so very high impact. And you're seeing a lot of truck traffic. Water is a different impact, but
03:51the amount of infrastructure investment is something we really need to talk about.
03:56Data centers are very vulnerable to heat, so the cooling impact in a community-
04:00And to put the 32 gigawatts into perspective, the current SRP and APS, the two utilities,
04:07provide about 16 for the entire county right now. So the requested over a number of years,
04:15I think it's five to 10 years, exceeds what is currently on the grid right now.
04:19It does. And this is a trend we're not talking about enough as a country. What does it mean
04:24if in a few short years, we're asking our utilities to completely replicate themselves?
04:29I'm so grateful for paying attention to the infrastructure side of that, because the amount
04:35of traffic in areas that have not seen traffic. We should probably talk about hazardous materials
04:42on our streets. They will be going places they haven't, and it may be time to have new conversations
04:47about that. The data centers, there's a conversation in Arizona and several other states about small modular
04:54reactors. So that would put nuclear material in areas that have not seen nuclear material before.
05:00Phoenix is the fifth largest city in the country. Our transportation department needs your support
05:05to navigate that, as do our firefighters and others who will need new types of training.
05:10If we are going to see this change, we have to look at how it impacts our street network.
05:16There might be some time where we might also be able to reduce regulation, particularly around
05:20semiconductors. There's some hazardous material regulation that we might be able to update
05:25to be able to make it a little bit easier to do business. But it really is time to look at
05:30the types of material that will be traveling on streets that have never seen it before,
05:34and how we have the appropriate regulatory system from the federal government for these issues.
05:39Thank you, Mayor. Thank you for being here.
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