 Welcome everybody. We're going to get started right on time because we have a lot of material to cover, a lot of technical material to cover, and we really would like to open up to a dialogue and because this is a nice intimate group, I think many of you will have a chance to have your questions or comments included in the dialogue. I'm Mariana Grossman. I'm the founder of Minerva Ventures and we work on climate adaptation solutions and planning and strategy and so I'm especially excited to have a panel on this topic because when I listen to people talking about climate change and climate change plans, typically they're talking about reducing greenhouse gas emissions or mitigation and that assumes that there, I mean it needs to be done but there's sort of an underlying assumption that I hear sometimes behind people's discussions that there's a big light switch in the sky and if we suddenly could bring our greenhouse gas emissions down, then all the consequences of climate change, commanding there's plenty of seats, all the consequences of climate change would magically be handled and unfortunately geophysical systems work on a really long time scale and when you have melting glaciers and things like that, it's going to take quite a while for the climate system to adjust. So we have some wonderful experts and two of whom I met last year working with a committee or technical advisory group organized by Governor Brown's Office of Planning and Research on Climate Adaptation for the State of California. So we have Guido Franco who works for the California Energy Commission and is their resident climate expert and Lewis Blumberg from the Nature Conservancy was also on that group and Jessica Fox who is a sustainability leader for the Electric Power Research Institute through representing the bigger electric utility industry. So I'm really excited about having gathered people with so much expertise and from complementary points of view. So you're in for a treat. This chart I found on the current NASA website and this is you can see that the CO2 levels are essentially going looks like almost straight up when you look at that kind of over hundreds of thousands of years trajectory. We're really in a period of discontinuous change and if you look at that global average temperatures that kind of map that they also go almost straight up and then you can see that dotted orange line I put in there what's going to happen to that curve is it going to keep going straight up are we going to bend it over and as temperatures increase there are all kinds of consequences that ensue and those are things like heat and fire and drought or torrential rain other kinds of changes in the hydrological system and weather patterns and those those kinds of things all have an impact on our energy system and that's really what we're going to be addressing today. So what are the impacts we're seeing right now like we had the rimfire recently in Yosemite that had an impact on transmission lines there are new impacts coming what are those how do we build more resilience how do we perfect prepare for shocks and breakdowns in our energy system caused by these climate impacts and then how can the grid address things like rising temperatures and extreme weather and our panelists will talk about what some of those impacts are on our energy system and can renewables and energy efficiency increase resilience and how can we factor in impacts into that when we talk about projecting renewables portfolio and demand standards typically that's done assuming weather is usual and we know we aren't going to have weather as usual so that's what really what we're digging into is going in eyes wide open what what are we going to do to be able to have a more resilient future and how do we help protect the energy system and take advantage of innovation to to make this process successful so our panel I have introduced and I'm going to turn it over first to Gido okay where's he come up here I think I close that and then I go to okay thank you very much okay so good afternoon everybody so what I'm going to do is to talk about what the state of California is doing to prepare the energy system for a changing climate so the outline of a presentation I'm going to give you very brief historical perspective then I forgot to add a slide about the California fourth assessment but I will just mention what it is and what we're doing very briefly and then I will talk about a new group that was formed I about a year and a half ago the CPU CCC adaptation working group and then I briefly discuss what is next so with respect to research I mean the California Energy Commission has been a sponsor climate change research since the early 2000s we had a vast portfolio of research on climate change as far as I know is the only state-sponsored regional research program in the nation has been there for a long long time and the idea is to provide information that will inform climate policy in California for example our 2006 California climate assessment was an influence in the passage of AB 32 the lot that requires emission reductions in California and our most recent work has been very influential in the passage of I think three or four bills mandating adaptation in California so let's now talk about the impacts of climate change to the energy system so the energy commission has sponsored research on how climate change in this case hot temperatures will affect the electricity system and we started with a looking at how if we superimpose the climate of the end of the century to the system of today what would have been the consequences so high temperatures will decrease the efficiency of power plants or thermal power plants will decrease the efficiency of pvs it will increase the efficiency of transformers etc etc it will increase electricity demand the bottom line is that if we had the climb of the future superimposed now to what we have we need to increase the number of power plants but about 30% so that's a huge increase we also look at hydropowers so we have several studies on hydropower units using engineering methods a statistical method etc etc and the bottom line is climate change will shift the hydrology you know it's such a way that we would have less generation available from hydropower in the summer and the spring when we needed the most and more generation in the winter with a lot of a spillage with potential problems with for flooding with a natural gas system we funded a project from with professor Ratke looking at the potential vulnerability of the natural gas infrastructure that we have in the delta to sea level rise and working very closely with PG&E they found some vulnerabilities the good news is that they have time PG&E have time to take care of those vulnerabilities because that impacts the same thing in the first world by Pacific Institute in 2009 sounded alarm that sounded the alarm that we have a lot of problems with the expected increases in sea level rise in this case is showing substations but that could be flooded but we also have problems with power plants etc etc wildfires the same thing we have a study by professor Westerman from UC Merced looking how climate change will impact wildfires at the time in 2003 we had the first study nobody believed it now obviously the evidence is in front of us so and the so the what he shows that what we found is that our transmission lines are vulnerable to wildfires and that vulnerability will increase dramatically with the changing climate so so before I talk about this let me just briefly talk about the California climate assessment the next one that I will submit it to the governor and the legislature in 2018 so we have like 15 projects looking at the vulnerability of the energy system not only electricity natural gas also the petroleum system to climate change but more importantly how to adapt and but also we are abandoning just the idea of looking at the end of the century we are looking now at what will happen in the next 37 years to 2050 and that's important because the chairman ordered us to the cc chairman to to find out what we need to do now in order to protect the energy assets in the next 30 for five years the measure stop there but now going back to the talk I mean there is a working group that was formed by the CPUC and CC is co-chair by the chairman chairman Weiss Miller and the CPUC Commissioner Randolph that also includes representatives from the natural resources agency the governor's office of planning and research and the office of emergent services so they meet we meet every quarter to coordinate our respective activities with respect to climate adaptation there is going to be an hyper workshop hyper is the integrated energy policy report that will be held of August 29th this year to talk more about this so this is a good I mean it gives you an indication that energy agencies are taking climate change very seriously but more importantly that all the horrible things that you may see in the news that will be black house everywhere because of climate change okay our job is to make sure that that doesn't happen that our we will protect our energy infrastructure for the benefit of California so what is next so before we were funding research to show that we had a problem to solve now we have shown them I mean the energy utilities realized that that's the case they have submitted comments to and to the public record saying hey we're willing to work with the energy agencies to solve this problem but but now it actually we're now in the case that we need to provide information or research or so results that actionable that the electrical utilities that electricity right pairs can use to actually adapt to a changing climate and that's more difficult because in the case of the I use we need to work very closely with them and this represent problems for example our researchers will need to get data and access perhaps to confidential information from the utilities so one solution is like we have done it before the researchers could work directly with the utilities access confidential information but when they send a report to us we don't see the confidential information so the information that goes to the public in our in their research products will not contain confidential information but describe in an understandable way you know the the potential impacts and how those impacts could be alleviated the it's possible that research results could inform great cases in the future when the utilities go before the California Public Utilities Commission to ask for funding for adapted to implement adaptation measures and I mean this is also becomes very difficult when the for research because now we are not talking just about paper being published in scientific journals we're now are talking about billions of billions of dollars to adapt to a changing climate so thank you very much and my good friend max is there I love him very much thank you okay I am from the Electric Power Research Institute and just to clarify we do not represent the electric power industry we are not a power company ourselves we are a nonprofit research institute that's really independent of the electric power companies I'm going to kind of take this up a notch here in terms of perspective for a few minutes and then we can discuss further when we get to the to the Q&A session resiliency is a is a huge word and and it can be fairly nebulous kind of similar in my mind when we say sustainability sustainability is a gigantic umbrella term so when we talk about resiliency and as we work with power companies and with communities and stakeholders it's useful to kind of get our hands around this term a little bit and define it more specifically so we heard today about the cyber cyber risk potentially so resiliency could be related to infrastructure or lines and poles in the electric power system we talk a lot about these you know toothpicks that are still sticking up to run of all of our kilowatt hours through the whole system versus underground ecological resiliency obviously is extremely important and has been the focus of much of the meeting so far and Lewis Bloomberg is going to cover the ecological aspect in more detail right after me so I'm not going to cover that so much we also need to think about business resiliency so at the end of the day there probably is going to be a match up between regulation so the hammer coming down with business incentives for companies to either keep doing what they're doing or to change their decisions and kind of and change their path so these kind of things infrastructure business ecological these are all sort of different elements and perspectives on resiliency and how you handle these things are going to be really different depending on what you're talking about sort of similar to the three pillars of sustainability right environmental economic and social these kind of things they all have aspects to them that are fairly complex and honestly we'll probably have trade-offs between meeting business resiliency and social resiliency and so forth so let's talk about this a little bit more as we think about the future power system and where we're going kind of in as as we look forward we're on this cusp of this really you know monumental shift and how the electricity system is managed their environmental footprint how it's set up and there's so many aspects to it including of course customer expectations and demands what shareholders expect from companies that they invest in what are investors expecting of the power companies that they're putting their money into of course there's a huge energy water interface in nexus that is already here and will continue to become more important as we go forward so this interplay is something that uppery's been working on for quite a while thinking about this integrated energy network the integration of many different systems electricity gas water thermal and also the integration of how ecological considerations fit into this new system within this is going to be this two-way flow of electrons it's something that hasn't been there you know in the in this kind of real old school traditional industry power plants where the power plant did all this work and got it to your plug and you put in your plug you got power at the plug it's what it's what socially was expected what was demanded was power at the plug at a predictable price but now we're seeing that this two-way flow of electrons where I have solar panels on my house I generate power goes back to the grid so what's going to happen here in terms of resiliency the stability of the grid the prediction around those kilowatt hours being available when you plug your when you when you put your light in the wall and then how do we use systems to sort of back up this intermittent kilowatt hour delivery from solar for example so these are kind of things we need to sort of be thinking about when we're talking about resiliency in addition to ecological considerations here so to kind of bring this down a little bit in a in a more statistical basis lots of people do these predictions about the fuel mix of the future really you really need to be thinking and these are the types of graphs so when you look at a chart like this all of these different colors are related to different trade-offs and consequences so there is just this huge debate about gas right that we just heard boy that was an active debate right over lunch so looking at the power system of the future what is the fuel mix at the end of the day and here's just an example this is this is based on current current expectation or assumption around the price of natural gas if it's two dollars and fifty cents as a flat natural gas price the economic and predictive models would show wow by 2050 we're gonna have a lot of natural gas out there that's going to be pretty big this is from an every model called region it's it's run on a national level if you just change one element of the model the price of natural gas and you bump it up to ten dollars you can see now instead of that huge swath prior it's not a pretty small slice wind has popped up you see a little bit more solar coal is still staying pretty steady here so this is just one piece this is pure you know there's boundaries on this model they in this case you change one variable the price of natural gas right what's not considered here and not reflected in this model that does need to be considered are what about those ecological assets is your access to water stable are your impacts to habitat and biodiversity being appropriately considered and managed here so these other risk factors are not taken into account on projections of solar have we thought about for example the impacts of of solar fields on pollinator habitat pollinators we need pollinators right our food supply our social stability depends on pollination services so it's this is a complex sort of analysis that has to be done when we're thinking about resiliency of our systems as we go forward with meeting the expectation that we have power right it's a social it's a social expectation that we have power at the plug so every has a series of white papers which you're welcome to go and look at and we look at it from the from a mashup of resilient flexible and connected so these are some of the things that we consider so when you're thinking about this resiliency piece it is the equation is what's your resiliency risk it is a combination of your probability of a hazard occurring times your consequence so what's your vulnerability what's your exposure to it so this is kind of a the deeper set of research that you have to think about when you're managing risk and resiliency you know you need to know your boundaries around what's your vulnerability are you thinking about pollinators and then your hazard there is for example use of pesticides and then your resiliency risk would be considered or do you have something else sort of on your mind here so a chapter that was in a book that we published last year a very enjoyable read I might add has five stars on Amazon comm if anybody would like to go and get it one of the chapters these are case studies from electric power companies chapter 8 energy wrote a chapter on climate change resiliency and adaptation so energy faced this huge issue around Hurricane Katrina power loss for 1.1 million people destroyed homes of around 275,000 destroyed homes so what were they going to do they were on duck to figure out something to restore power to help their communities and it says the storms and their aftermath provided a clear business case for energy to forecast and mitigate climate related risks and they went forward and they identified elements of the risk what how do you peel apart those elements and put it together in sort of a plan for understanding how you're doing we also manage this energy sustainability interest group this is the largest group of any industry that is working collaboratively together to think about issues related to this big bucket of word sustainability the work in this group goes from peeling apart what are your issues here what are sustainability issues how do you know how mature you are in managing those issues do you have metrics to measure how you're doing you can benchmark against your peers and then use that information to engage stakeholders so I just kind of quick quickly took you around this wheel so in our research just that's not published yet but will be published by the end of this year the question about an issue we have 15 sustainability priority issues that have been identified out of about 450 issues that stakeholders and NGOs and CDP and GRI were all requesting disclosures on we got him down narrowed it down to what they really were asking for is 15 issues in 2012 resiliency wasn't on there climate was on there but not resiliency as a separate topic we just refresh this and now resiliency is its own topic in there so it's not just part and parcel to climate and that's kind of one of my points you could be thinking about other aspects of resiliency you need to think about so then the question comes if it's defined as its own issue how do you measure it how does a power company go about making sure they are resilient that they are being responsive to this issue what are their things they should measure what are their metrics should they have a strategy on resiliency is that enough or do they need to actually be going getting quantified numbers like energy is now doing so these are some of the questions and further from that we have a sustainability maturity model there's different domains to it water greenhouse gas affordability reliability we're looking at building out one for resiliency where companies can go and assess how mature are they related to a particular topic so these are all things that are sort of on the cusp of work that up is doing and the industry is thinking about doing and so when we go back and we start kind of thinking about this and what's the quantitative research that we're doing we know we need to be thinking about what's the audience of concern how are companies going to think and measure this for themselves what's the boundary and clarify really this definition of resiliency because it's not only just it's not always being resistant to unpredictable storm events for example or unpredictable fire events there's other aspects to this topic that are going to be important to keep on the table and make sure we're kind of when I say resilient it's the same thing that you hear and when you're thinking about it you know we're talking the same language which there's some reasonable concern that that's not necessarily happening right now so well good afternoon first I would like to thank my honor for inviting me to be part of this panel today and and for the organizers of this conference it's been really great so far so I'm the Lewis Bloomberg I'm the lead of the California climate change program for the Nature Conservancy how many of you have heard of the Nature Conservancy good okay we're doing well so on Halloween of 2015 Governor Brown declared a state of emergency in our forests because of climate change and there's documented science now to support this because of the increased temperature and the extended drought we had a huge die-off of trees and scientists today estimate there's a hundred and two million dead trees in our forests and that comp that produces of it holds about 89 million metric tons of carbon that's 19% of the standing above ground carbon in the state this is a huge problem and it's a huge threat to the the the atmosphere from the carbon loss and to the transmission of electricity and what I'm going to talk about is this nexus between nature and climate and the role with the energy sector here so at the Nature Conservancy we've been looking at at different ways to address climate change were you calling using the term natural climate solutions and I was really pleased that Jonathan Pershing this morning mentioned the role of land use and land use change in the global climate debate because it's the sector that is often overlooked it's hard to measure changes from them from the land use from the land base and so it's really important that it's be included in the conference I'm glad he mentioned it I'm glad I'm having the opportunity to talk about it here now so Mariana talked about mitigation and adaptation I'd like to offer another frame to look at at climate action through the nature through the lens of nature through using nature to address climate change and when you use nature to address climate change you can all often make progress on all three key strategies you can reduce and avoid the emissions of greenhouse gases you can restore carbon put it back on the earth where it came from and you can enhance resilience and reduce climate magnified risk and when you do that you get a whole suite of other benefits which is why nature is a very powerful tool to address climate change so I want to talk real briefly about reducing emissions and avoiding emissions and we just completed an analysis and submitted it for publication that shows that in fact we can use nature to produce at least 13% of the greenhouse gas reduction emissions that are necessary to meet California's 2030 emission reduction target this is the first time that we've been able to come up with the number the state has not done that a number for the land sector so this is really important work and I wanted to highlight that and now I'm going to move more to talk more about risk reduction and resilience so these are pictures of fourth threats that we have historically faced in California these threats are all magnified by climate change the frequency and severity of these extreme events is predicted to increase in a lot of the research that the Energy Commission has funded had shown us this and they're all they're all threats for which nature can be part of the solution set it may not be the only one surely not it may not be the one you choose every time surely not but it is a part of the toolbox so so with wildfire okay so with wildfire is there a pointer okay well there wasn't a pointer no there's no point okay so with wildfire we can do ecosystem based forest management to reduce the the intensity of wildfire with sea level rise coastal hazard storm surge here wetland restoration moving buildings back can help protect from those threats we we know with floods we saw this with Orville that our infrastructure is very much at risk a levee setbacks reconnecting flood plains those kind of activities can help deal with with floods and groundwater recharge and forest management can help with drought there's also urban heat is a big problem and we have people dying this week in California from high heat we're going to see more extreme heat events and it's right now it's happening so so there you can use urban forestry and urban greening can help mitigate the heat of the effect so these are just some of the the the threats that nature can help exact ameliorate so natural climate solutions are familiar if you drive to Sacramento on highway 80 if you've done that in this past winter you saw the yellow bypass has been in place for many years it's a flood risk reduction project to protect Sacramento from floods so we know there and we know through other analyses that natural climate solutions work they are proven they're flexible they avoid keep you from avoiding future options they're cost effective even without factoring in the dollar value of the co-benefits they can avoid the greenhouse gas emissions that you get from pouring concrete and they provide a suite of multiple benefits here habitat for the Pacific flyway for birds recreation and economic benefits from the leasing of land to farmers for rights in certain times of the year so how are we doing well you don't mention that the passage of laws in the eight years I've been working on this I've seen a really a growth in California's response efforts to develop adaptation policy and plans and when I started eight years ago on this topic resilience was not the term people didn't use that term it was all adaptation so that's happened in the last maybe six year five six years so California has done a lot with the status past several bills and can talk about those in more detail Governor Brown issued an executive order that for the first time dealt with climate adaptation and put the adaptation and the mitigation together we've worked on the on the budget to help fund the research to help the Coastal Commission develop coastal plans with climate change considerations we're working on some of the research from the fourth climate assessment that Gido mentioned as our others and then planning I left out for last the the natural resources agency is accepting comments today on its safeguarding California plan it has a section on the energy sector and I would call your attention to it and urge you to submit your comments on that as well so things are developing so what are our objectives at the nature conservancy I think they're really there I know they're very clear we want consideration of climate change to become standard business practice in government at all levels and I think the business community many are already recognizing this and they're factoring this in because they see effects their bottom line but governments have been slower to take this up so we want consideration to be standard business practice we also want to create a preference for natural climate solutions where they make sense and I'm really pleased that some of the laws and plans and policies that the state has do in fact have that preference so that's been helpful so what's the connection to the energy section energy sector around resilience in nature we talked initially about transmission the reliability of power that can be disrupted from wildfire that's come up several times here here today we've talked about increased demand from high heat well that what's going to exacerbate the heat island effect in our cities and again urban forestry and urban greening can help with that nature can help with cost containment for the energy sector in many ways one of those would be just by providing forest carbon offset credits in California's climate regulatory program for the utilities to purchase so they can achieve their emission reduction requirements at the lowest cost to them and to the rate payers a lot can be said about employer safety from fire and high heat as well as rate payer well-being this is where nature can can help the sector in that way and then finally in the in the siding of facilities especially renewable facilities so for example the nature Conservancy worked for a couple years to help with with partners to develop the desert renewable energy conservation plan the RECP this plan has been accepted by the BLM and and the state's looking at portions of it and what it does is it identifies the low conflict zones that looks at the conservation values in the California desert and say where should the transmission and renewable facilities be to minimize conflict and therefore to facilitate the permitting process so that's one way that that that natural climate solutions can kind of help with supply so there's a lot of ways here there's this this connection I think is very strong between natural climate solutions and resiliency in the energy sector and then there's one example I think we're sitting with that we saw we developed a web-based decision support tool to look at coastal inundation of Ventura County this is a place where energy has two power plants that are once through cooling plants that both need to be either retrofitted or replaced and the Oxnard Planning Department and then Oxnard City Council did some analysis with the with the tool and found that that while these are plants already in the flood zone they would be further the risk of inundation would be much greater going forward in the in a climate change future so the Oxnard City Council put a moratorium on power plants along the coast right now in Ventura County so is the energy sector resilient that was the question imposed I think that that it's hard to say as Jessica talked about it's really hard to measure that probably not yet but I would say we've already heard that it's we're on our way there's progress is being made and I think that's exciting and I think that the our natural resources have a critical role and to play in achieving that resilience for the future and ultimately the energy system is one of the systems that are they're all interconnected here that provide that a life on the planet and it's well it's connected with the ecosystem which is very much threatened by what's happening and so the challenge of climate change is the challenge for our generation and it will be the legacy that we leave to the next generations and those to come thank you take the prerogative of the moderator to ask a couple questions and and then open it up to all of you because I imagine you have things on your mind and I would like to actually start with Lewis one of the things I learned from you in the last year on the climate adaptation task force was really understanding what does natural infrastructure mean so can you give you had a kind of a range from nature itself to more constructed kinds of things could you just give a few examples of what you mean well there there has often been this sort of dialectic between built infrastructure or hard infrastructure and natural or green infrastructure and we look at it as a spectrum and starting with conservation is as the as the the most protective and the less disruptive strategy is then you get into to mix programs where you would build a levy setback you can move a levy back you use equipment to move some earth but then you replant the the floodplain with vegetation you get some carbon benefits and wildlife benefits so that's a mixed effort and action like beach replenishment would be even more aggressive using machines to move sand down the beach to compensate for sand that's been eroded and then further out is would be what's what we're looking for a new name maybe crowd sources been called managed retreat or relocation is moving facilities that they're that's the sort of the last result and then finally would be you know building new levees and new piers and rock revetments and seawalls which would be hard infrastructure and beyond at the end of this the spectrum there so it's a green to gray spectrum if you will and and Jessica can you talk a little bit more about how that every is helping facilitate dialogue and learning among the electrical utilities and kind of cross-pollination from different states and regions how does that work sure yeah and actually we just launched it pollinator initiative yesterday so the buzzword catches my ear a little bit on the cross-pollination piece so we we have a number of projects that are related to this and we have projects that are focused on the engineering kind of the grid hardening piece of it where you're talking about making sure the grid infrastructure itself is is resilient you know when storms come through or you get that a squirrel with those big teeth that come chew through your line like we saw at lunch you know are you resilient to those kinds of things and then in our environment sector we have we have a whole a whole collaborative research effort talking specifically about climate change so the focus of this meeting is you know seems to be focused on the climate change piece and impacts to ecosystems and so forth so we have a whole a whole project on that as well so we have we have a few different things but I guess for apri we we isolate them you know if it's grid infrastructure that's with those engineering guys if it's climate change and resiliency like Lewis is talking about that's actually in my sector and that's what we focus on so you know these kind of different perspectives we also look at social pieces within our sustainability program and one another thing that struck me in the last year is that California is using a variety of climate models to be able to predict what's likely to happen and or different scenarios and I think that probably most enterprises businesses school districts local governments regional governments really don't have the capacity to maybe even know what a climate model is much less use the data provided by them so what is the CEC doing to help people understand climate models and use them in their planning process well in 2000 I think 2008 with Amy Lewis Stanford I don't know and by then she was with Google so we had a partnership between the energy commission and Google to develop a web base tool that's called cut adapt where you can go type your address and has the climate projections for your specific others home or business or you can do it for your territory if you are you you and so and the reason we started this because it was because the energy commission has been contributing to the overall research portfolio developing California specific downscaling techniques that takes the outputs of the global climate models that are too coarse for California to to find out how climate will be affected in California in relatively small with high geographical resolution so we're talking about three or four miles so squares of three or four miles that does the level of resolution that we are using and at a daily time steps so so we have this wealth of data but in the scientific reports we could only publish one or two figures so with Amy's inspiration you know we decided to explore this option and it has been a huge huge success and now we are worried that it may be too successful because there are local entities that just go take the image from cut adapt and post them in their climate adaptation plans and isn't tool that is easy to use and all of that but we don't have the resources to also provide technical support I mean the idea situation would be not only to have the tool but also technical support to make sure that people are using the tool correctly so we yeah but I think it was worthwhile we are gonna be released the new version of Canada in the next few months so there will be much additional features including new climate projections for California are being used for the next California assessment by the way and this is like kind of hybridizing so four years ago we decided that the downscaling techniques that we were using were not good enough so we contracted with the Scripps institution of sonography to develop a new downscaling technique that is called local in Spanish is crazy woman but it's actually cut is local analogs and it's doing very very well the federal government so that we're doing did some testing and at the end they decided to deploy local at the national scale the beauty for us is that when we look at impacts for California not now also we can look at what will happen and outside California to for better integration and interpretation of our results and and you may not like me with asking this follow-up but if someone were really enterprising and they wanted technical help are there people at the CEC or their local universities or like who would they go to for expertise on on climate modeling well for climate modeling per se but not necessarily boy for Canada I mean all local universities in Stanford for example have professor Noah different ball yeah so every university now has expert on climate projections for California so sure they will be happy to help okay I have other questions but I want to open it up to all of you what we have this wonderful set of experts here what questions do you have about climate impacts on our energy system and how well-prepared we are to address them Jim thank you things you talk about seem right on to me what you didn't spend as much time talking about is the counterproductive laws and regulations that we have that are getting in the way I just illustrate this radio story I was listening to there was floods in the Russian River and radio the interviewer was talking to this woman whose house had been just flooded out and saying oh what's happened was so terrible she said yes terrible I just couldn't flood it out she said but what's gonna happen she said well the state pays the cost so I'm gonna rebuild just like did I did the last three times and and I said now wait a minute it's the financial incentives and insurance are really not in some sense taking into account the need for the strategic withdrawal the street for putting out people out of harm's way and one of the things that are happening now to help correct some of those difficulties I just but I I think this is like the third rail topic because it brings up managed retreat and FEMA will keep bailing people out in blood zones and people rebuild there so you didn't mention that that idea little I'd love you to dig a little deeper into when do we decide that we don't reinvest in infrastructure where it used to be well this is a big topic and it's a new topic and a couple things first of all FEMA the federal government requires that you rebuild in the same place so we did this repetitive loss analysis that showed they were paying for to replace homes in the same place over time in places that were surely going to flood again so that has been a FEMA issue we have not been able to address we did work with across the aisle with some conservative members of Congress and in a big stakeholder group to revise the federal flood insurance program for the coast right now the federal government ensures homes along the coast where they cannot get private insurance and if the rates are really low they're below market rates it's a subsidy for coastal homeowners and after several years of work both environmentalists and taxpayer low tax act activists I'm not quite sure of the term but they were conservative members we Congress passed the law to revise that program and set market rates at a certain time date certain well it turns out I think it was Ted Cochran a leader in the state Senate had a house has a house on the on the Gulf Coast and the next year they repealed the bill so I think that that that's a challenge I think with the insurance industry what we've talked about that for several years and what we hear is that the retail insurance industry operates on an annual basis the risk is too great they just won't reinsure where there is traction is on the international level with the reinsurance companies because they buy these they bundle these policies so they actually have climate risk and and there's a new group that's been meeting since the Paris cop around insurance trying to figure this out in terms of relocation I'm trying to avoid the term managed retreat I'm open for ideas but it's very very controversial it can be very expensive and it gets into issues of social equity especially in other parts of the world you know who who moves who tells who when they have to move who pays for that where do they go we have climate refugees from Louisiana whose land is gone they have moved they've had to move there are climate refugees in the Indian in the Asia an Asia Pacific that are stranded looking for a new home so this is an issue that we have not dealt with yet and that's going to become more prevalent yes please wait for the mic grab the mic yeah thank you thank you for this panel and for this event my name is Alice Hill I am currently with the Hoover Institution and just on this issue of coastal resilience managed retreat for those of you here on the Stanford campus on September 18th and 19th the Hoover Institution Stanford Woods Institute as well as the Wilson Center based in Washington DC are going to have a conference focused on this issue as it relates primarily to California also to the East Coast but since we're here in the West we'll do that so I just wanted to let everyone know if this is an issue it is highly controversial very politicized but the reality is there will be many people migrating as a result of sea level rise the announcement went out yesterday I see a hand up here and if you introduce yourself that helps us get to know each other hi I'm Ben Davenport with the city of San Leandro Ms. Fox I was interested in the model where you were showing natural gas usage increasing or not I'm curious what inflection points you guys found so what price associated and do you see any you know if there were say a carbon tax what would that need to be at so on the carbon tax piece I don't know if we've done that kind of variable within the model but I could go back and certainly check on the that variable if you add a carbon tax and you know how that's attributed to these different fuel types coal gas wind solar all of that kind of thing the other thing that's not included in here would be subsidies so if there's subsidies for renewables for example that's not something that's sort of included within this so in terms of that just and you can go online you can use this model I put on my slides of a link to the models called region you can go and kind of play with it a little bit with what you want to consider the two scenarios I gave were simply to just demonstrate the pretty big swing in projected fuel mix of the future and that was just you know pivoting one variable in that case it was the price of natural gas which does seem to be you know aside from subsidies and and clean power plan and regulations and all of that if you just look at the economics of it so if you're a company and you're sitting there making a decision on what you're going to do with your assets the price of natural gas is a huge defining you know factor in terms of kind of where you're going just on those pieces what we see of course is that examples for example like Norway divesting of all their investments in coal assets in 2015 I don't know if you remember this it was pretty big deal Norway divested of all their investments related to coal those types of things are major triggers here as well so companies that were affected by that that are based in the United States power companies you know that that was a big incentive aside from policy aside from the price here and then demands of customers and of course you know Guido mentioned Google and it's just at the top of my mind of course Google is a hundred percent renewable and other companies like that that say if we're gonna if we're gonna locate in your service territory we are requesting that you deliver us renewable power so customers themselves are really showing a lot of Jim is so disruptive at these meetings golly the leader so these kind of stakeholder and customer demands are are really influencing this so that was part of my point to you as a region is one model based on some some considerations and variables but this is you know there's a lot of other variables investor shareholder you know expectations customer expectations the piece about water resiliency we haven't hit on here at all water resiliency is a big big big deal we know we hear about water right so this relates to land change it's not just climate there on water but it's land change demographic spread and urban growth storm water issues impervious concrete those things that's a piece that reproduces is doing a lot of work on is the piece about what's resilient related to water which has an overlay of climate change of course but there's other things related to water that are actually you know maybe more influential on on a terrestrial basis than just the change in temperature once you get outside the polar ice cup melting issue yes hi my name is Pam Doman I'm at the California Energy Commission I was just wondering about the fourth assessment can you talk about some of our partners working on that yes so the California fourth assessment as I said is going to be released to the governor and the legislature in 2018 so our main partners are the the California Natural Resources Agency the energy commission is funding is funding projects on related to the energy system the resources agencies funding projects about agriculture forestry public health all of all of the other sectors we're also working very closely with the governor's office of planning of research and the steering committee for the assessment is the cat I love cats so the cat climate action team research working group that is headed headed by our chairman the chairman of the energy commission so we have like 21 state agencies that are part of that group that meets every month once a month in addition we have like I would say like 30 research groups are working on this we have like 30 research break papers that are coming out from this effort in addition some groups that already have funding for example from NSF have decided to align their studies with the California assessment to make it more comprehensive in addition for the first time we are not only going to have assessments for for California as a whole we are now moving to regional assessments so there will be one for the Los Angeles region there will be one for the Sacramento Valley another one for San Joaquin Valley and one feature of the assessment is that we want local universities to lead each one of the regional assessments so UCLA in the in the for the Los Angeles region you see San Diego the one for the San Diego etc etc so it's a big effort I hope all of you will notice the results at the end we hope to make a big splash not only in the scientific circles that we have done in the past but also you know let California's know more and what we try to do is to not only bring the bad message that everything is gonna be bad but also how it stays these days preparing and getting ready for the expected changes Mr. Sinks is your cat named mocha my name is Rod Sinks I'm a council member in the city of Cupertino and I am a founding chair of Silicon Valley Clean Energy I'd like to talk have you talk a little bit about your views of the renewable portfolio standard and whether it needs expansion what we've seen in energy markets is plummeting cost at wholesale of solar energy in California geothermal is relatively expensive wind is very problematic for folks to build their issues with birds we're told so it's easy to get solar but we know that we need baseline energy that's always on should the RPS grow to include say major hydro and if if not what else would you do would you expand Cal ISOs authority to include all of the western grid as other states would opt in would you think we should be investing in storage to hang on to all that solar until the the duck curve work we come out of the duck curve at the end of the day what are your prescriptions for California lawmakers in trying to make our energy supply more resilient and I would add that when we got our agency started we elected to to choose a label of a hundred percent carbon-free electricity for our customers so we're doing that at a percent under PG&E's costs to our customers rather than focusing on renewables so so our first message is carbon-free and it maybe is that the label we ought to be hopping on because 50% of what we're buying is is big hydro thanks yeah so your question is well about my paycheck that's the term that we use but I will give you my personal perspective don't take it as a California Energy Commission view of the state so in the research I mean I work in the research division so I'm gonna also give you my perspective on the research point of view so we are funding studies looking at how the energy system should evolve not only to reduce greenhouse gas emissions but the same time to lower or decrease the vulnerability of climate impacts and we see multiple options to make it more reliable I mean storage is I mean one good option the issue of hydro one of the issues is that in order to drastically reduce greenhouse emissions we need also to electrify everything that can be electrified so the net effect according to our models it hasn't infiltrated into the policy reports yet is that the net effect is going to actually be increasing demand of electricity in California so with that the contribution of hydro will diminish in percent in percent terms so it started in the 70s I think was like 50% of electricity in California came from hydro now it's about 15% in a normal year and that percent she's gonna go down we're also looking at urban renewables you know how to so we're gonna have a study looking at how to have urban renewables like solar and on others bio gas in inside the urban centers they put there is also a possibility to integrate that with micro grids that will help with the vulnerability of the energy system because the micro grids can isolate themselves if there are problems outside their territory and at the same time they could help with the overall energy electricity system so so the bottom line is that what I'm trying to say is that we see multiple options to increase the carbon free supply of electricity I hope I at least attempted to answer your question just just my personal view is I don't think we need to go to 100% RPS standard by law we have a 50% one now and my understanding is the RPS is initially to stimulate market activity we heard several times today about the low lower cost of renewables and so I think the markets there we've seen good job growth and all that so I but I would I would agree with you I think we should shift the metric to to greenhouse gas emissions you know what is it what is the what are the utilities putting out that's the metric that we're using today and for the future to gauge our progress so to me that's more more useful than the percent for renewables hydro is not carbon-free to be clear hydro has greenhouse gas flux associated with it so that have to be you know measured and considered in that too is that from plant growth in the water what causes the height yeah yeah yeah there's a bunch of studies on that that are out there you know yeah the vegetation within the sediment flux within the system coming behind the dam and so forth so hydro is not carbon-free oh I don't have to have one because I'm not a regulator I'm a conservation biologist by training yeah but I don't I don't know I know the hydro thing is huge though when you're looking at stability of renewables so Hawaii has a by 2045 they have to be a hundred percent renewable by 2045 it was mentioned earlier right and other states are looking you know looking to be aggressive of course California so then if you're going to be there how are you going to have a stable supply of kilowatt hours every time you plug in right so that that was one of your points that you referenced to so the storage possibility of hydro is enormous some hydro plants can come online within 15 minutes potentially I mean there's there's huge potential for hydro to potentially be a backup and companies we were just talking to him earlier this week they invested in new hydro versus battery storage other companies have invested in huge this isn't a little battery storage this is a huge amount of battery storage coming off of their solar fields so this question about how do you keep the grid and those kilowatt hours stable is an enormous challenge and it really hasn't been figured out yet companies are doing this will shoot we got to meet our RPS goal or their voluntary target for example Axalon has a voluntary carbon target in that case they're heavy heavy nuclear so is it carbon-free yeah it's carbon free so that's some of the the consideration here so you know I can point to the trade-offs that you have to think about with these different with these different issues but ultimately you know the economics it's a combination of economics and the regulatory kind of box that you're put in that'll determine you know your path forward and how you structure your business I have a question I just want to hang out I want to add to this as well I think it's important to avoid the temptation to do value engineering and to look at each type of energy as its own special thing so you could take something like geothermal and say it's providing base load maybe per kilowatt it's going to be a little bit more expensive but it provides this extra service of smoothing out availability or same with microgrids a smart microgrid might cost a little bit more to set up but it creates resilience it creates resilience to things like earthquakes which has nothing to do with climate change so I think a value engineering approach is like I used to work in the on the automotive industry it's like you take a tractor and you look at each little part and try to optimize it instead of thinking about the whole system of the piece of equipment or maybe even how it interacts with the the approach to farming that you're taking so I think the same thing with energy system we ought to be thinking about different types of energy together as a system and what is the benefit that each of those types of storage geothermal hydro solar wind all these different types of energy how they work together and think about pricing that system as a whole you know just as just as a comment on this to the so this is this is a sort of a mini story my son he's going into high school next year he did horrible in eighth grade horrible in eighth grade and I'm glad this is a video so he can watch it later so he yeah so and now it's publicly known so he you know he would come home and he's very you know into like you know my value system naturally and so he didn't turn in his home market you know when he had essays do and he'd say to his teacher he say well I'm worried about the environmental impact of the electricity in my house and the solar was already down that was dark and I didn't want to turn on my lights and computer to get my essay done so I didn't do it okay talk about you know hooking in right to value systems and hearing all this conversation at home right but this thing about what the customer expects especially the next generation it's no joke generation Z is looking for places to work and products to use that align with their value system so aside from regulations and us adults sitting here talking those next people are coming up and an enormous amount of economic dollars is transferring to generation Z within the next 20 years and they're gonna be making their own investment decisions so let's not leave the whole childhood education thing totally off the table here it's extremely extremely important as we take the long view of this transition to a more resilient future. Margarita. Hi my name is Margarita Coleman-Ars with global water farms were a startup for desalination using primarily solar power and I have a 16 year old I actually wanted to talk about climate change education because in another workshop just right before this one there was a slide that really grabbed my attention and it was one that showed the number of extreme heat days from the baseline to say 2050s 2080s and it was a very simple graphic but one that I feel that would really help those that part of our population that doesn't believe in climate change internalize it and really start to understand this I know that there's some countries maybe Denmark I can't remember that post like as part of their nightly news broadcast like how much renewables or how much in other words it's present more in people's minds and and I'm wondering what ways California or if you have any ideas on how we can get these messages out to a broader public I'd love to see for example Governor Brown issue a similar invitation to entrepreneurs since California is a leader to come here you know like the French president did so real quickly on that the the chair of the public utilities Commission Michael Picker went to Washington DC in February and stood outside of US EPA with a sign inviting the EPA scientists to come work in California I realize we're nearly out of time is that right for my time keeper okay maybe we're a little bit over so that gets to be your last comment was Jessica wrap up come back from you I think I I think I'm good yeah I think the higher penetration of renewables is a technical issue but I think it's gonna be resolved in one way or another so I will not be too I mean at least I'm not too concerned but I'm an optimistic I'm also an engineer the things that everything can be solved with technical solutions and I want to I want to thank our panel and also thank all of you for looking into the future and thinking about what are our vulnerabilities and and then really how are we going to allocate capital to address those vulnerabilities and I think there've been some all the middle vulnerability analysis being done by different departments of the state and by utilities but the investments to address those vulnerabilities have not really been made yet so there's a big business opportunity there and there's a big risk that if we don't make those investments we'll keep getting hit with emergency after emergency and that will suck away a lot of capital and energy and and create a lot of damage so I think this is a really important issue and I'm very grateful for all of you for being here to discuss it with us thank you