* Gov. JB Pritzker dropped this nugget into his Peoria Q and A today…

[The] day after tomorrow, I’m leaving for Tokyo to talk to Japanese companies about coming to the state of Illinois.

More in a bit.

…Adding… Here’s the list of those headed to Japan…

Governor JB Pritzker
• Senate President Don Harmon
• House Speaker Emanuel “Chris” Welch
• Senate President Pro Tempore Bill Cunningham
• House Majority Leader Robyn Gabel
• Anne Caprara, Chief of Staff of the Governor’s Office
• Grace Hou, Deputy Governor
• Andy Manar, Deputy Governor
• Martin Torres, Deputy Governor
• Sean Rapelyea, Senior Advisor for External Affairs, Governor’s Office
• Claire Lindberg, First Assistant Deputy Governor, Governor’s Office
• Connor Josellis, Director of the Executive Office of the Governor
• Tina Yan, Deputy Chief of Staff, Digital Media, Governor’s Office
• Clare O’Neill, Senior Director of Advance, Governor’s Office
• Morgan Evans, Senior Advancer, Governor’s Office
• Kristin Richards, Director of the Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity
• Cas Peters, Chief Business Attraction Officer of the Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity
• Christy George, President and CEO of Intersect Illinois
• John Atkinson, Board Chair and Managing Director of Intersect Illinois, Chairman of Marsh Chicago
• Paulina San Millan, Senior Vice President of Business Development at Intersect Illinois
• Preeti Chalsani, Chief Quantum Officer of Intersect Illinois
• David Awschalom, Director of the Chicago Quantum Exchange
• Curt Bailey, President of Related Midwest
• Rashid Bashir, Dean of UIUC Grainger College of Engineering
• William Cox, Senior Vice President of AISIN
• Wendell Dallas, President and CEO of Nicor Gas
• Kara Demirjian Huss, Senior Vice President of TCCI
• Mark Denzler, President and CEO of Illinois Manufacturers’ Association
• Kaitlin Fahey, CEO and Founding Partner of Magnify Strategies
• Michael Fassnacht, Chief Growth Officer and President of Clayco Chicagoland
• Chris Gladwin, Chair at P33 and CEO of Ocient
• Michael Jacobson, President and CEO of Illinois Hotel and Lodging Association
• Harley Johnson, Director of the Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park
• Regina Jones, Sr. Vice President, General Counsel, and Secretary of ADM
• Robert Karr, Partner at Barnes & Thornburg LLP
• Dan Lynch, Vice President of Government Affairs atUnited Airlines
• Nadya Mason, Dean of Pritzker School of Engineering and Interim Vice President for Partnerships atUniversity of Chicago
• Bill Mastoris, President of Peoples Gas and North Shore Gas
• Christian Mitchell, Vice President for Civic Engagement at University of Chicago
• Takashi O’Haru, President of White Cube LLC
• Meredith O’Connor, International Director of JLL
• Eric Perreault, Vice President for Research atNorthwestern University
• Dwayne Pickett, Vice President of Clean Hydrogen Market Development at Constellation
• Barton Pitts, Vice President of Business Development at Nexamp Solar
• Gil Quiniones, President and CEO of ComEd
• Meera Raja, SVP of Deep Tech at P33
• Jim Reynolds, Chairman and CEO of Loop Capital
• Josh Richman, Chief Revenue Officer of PsiQuantum
• Smita N. Shah, CEO of SPAAN Tech Inc
• Lenny Singh, Chairman and President of Ameren Illinois

…Adding… More from the Q and A…

Maybe some of you have noticed that we’ve made a lot of progress over the last couple of years attracting companies to the state of Illinois, new businesses. I’ve talked a lot about clean energy businesses and electric vehicle business, but there’s a whole lot more. … (W)e’ve had a lot of conversations with companies, some of them in the state of Illinois, expanding and wanting to come to Peoria. Some of them from other parts of the country, even other parts of the world, who want to come to Peoria, and some in Peoria who want to expand and don’t know whether they should do it in Peoria or maybe somewhere else. So, you know, our job is to put as many businesses and create as many jobs as we can in Peoria. And so I feel really good about the prospects for our state. […]

I had people tell me when we started this effort a few years ago to start to really promote the state to businesses that they had not heard from the state of Illinois or the governor of the state of Illinois since Jim Thompson was governor. That’s 40 years. So I mean, that’s in a way, that’s embarrassing to admit about our state, but it also says we must be doing something right, because everybody’s recognizing it now, and they want to talk to us, and they want to come here. So I feel good about the prospects for us bringing businesses to the city of Peoria and to the surrounding community, the county and the region here.

…Adding… He really went hard on this topic…

So the first thing is, you’ve got to let everybody know you’re here, and what it is you have to offer, right?

And I’ll tell you what the number one thing we have. We’ve got a lot of things to offer. We could talk about a lot of things, and I do, but the number one thing we have is we have the workforce and the workforce training and the education. And it’s impressive when you put us up against other states. And we have some of the best talent in the nation for everything from manufacturing to service industry, scientists, engineers, I mean, we really have it all here. And we just haven’t told everybody about all of it, and when I talk about it, because, and I feel like it’s a campaign, you know, when I talk about it and promote the state of Illinois, people are surprised when we have the third largest community college system in the entire nation. Very few people know about that, right? We have 48 community colleges, and we’ve been. Funding them for the last few years, finally, and and we also have some of the best universities in the entire world, in Illinois and in the public ones. Anyway, we’ve been funding for the last few years, and so now what you’re seeing is an increase in enrollment. You know, new freshmen classes are bigger than they’ve been in a decade or more, and community colleges now can offer tuition-free opportunities for people to get a certificate or a degree to get the kind of, you know, training that they need. So that’s number one thing that I say, [applause] yeah, thank you.

And then we have lots of other things. I’ll just point out that we have the third most reliable energy grid in the entire country. Now, maybe that sounds uninteresting to you, but for a lot of businesses, right, making sure that they have a continuous source of electricity that doesn’t go out. You remember a couple years ago when Texas, I mean, the lights went out for a couple of weeks. Okay? Because their grid is no good. Ours is the third most reliable. Oh, by the way, the other two most reliable ahead of us are small states where it’s pretty easy to do. We’re the largest. I mean, we are in the top 10 most populous states. We’re the ones that have the most reliable electric grid.

And then clean energy. Which companies, you’d be surprised, they show up at our door. It’s like the first, second or third question they ask: ‘Have you got the electricity? But we want clean energy. We want to know that we’re getting it from clean sources.’ And because of the the Climate and Equitable Jobs Act that we passed a couple years ago here in Illinois, we’ve doubled the amount of renewable energy that we’re providing just since 2021 when this went into effect. And I don’t want to promise too much, but I think over the next year, you’re going to see numbers that show that we will have tripled it over the next 12 months. So I meant since we started, not from today. We’re not going to triple it from today, but, more clean energy, solar, wind, and then we’ve got really terrific, you know, we’re the largest state for nuclear, and the reason that’s so important is it’s base load. Very important. More than 50% of our electricity in the state of Illinois comes from nuclear and so we’re able to build. On top of that for states that are running out of electricity. It’s going to take us, it’ll be a long time since we were ’til we run out, though we need to keep building out our distribution and our production.