 All right, how are you guys doing? Warmed up? Very good. So what I'm going to talk about is to give you an impression of my impression of where the energy world is today. What are the big trends that are happening that are really rocking this industry? And what are the big opportunities out there that one should seize in order to make a big difference in this energy world? I'm going to talk about the science and engineering of scalable solutions because if something eventually does not happen at scale, it doesn't matter. So whatever we do in our lab, at least, is with the hope that with the idea that it can actually connect to some level of scale and not just remain in the laboratory. So that's what I'm going to talk about. But also talk about the global energy systems. Now when we're talking about scale, it's all about people. And it's important to note where the people are. This is the population density of the world. And you can see in our little corner over there, you know, it's a pretty high-dense population, but look at the rest of the world. It's important to understand where the people are and where people are going to be in the future. But on top of that, here's what we have. This is overlaid on top, the lighting. And what you see immediately is that you can see the United States is nice and bright. We certainly need to keep it bright and make it brighter in a sustainable way. But you also see, and somehow these lights are shining right on top of it, there are many parts of the world that people actually have not turned on the lights except for these lights out here. And the big question, the challenges that we have moving forward are three grand challenges. Oh, great. You guys now go to sleep now. The three big grand challenges, how can we decarbonize cost-effectively and continue the economic growth for all? Second is how can we provide access to affordable modern energy to every human being in this world? And finally, how do we make our energy system resilient, adaptable, secure against various threats, whether it's climate threats or cyber threats, et cetera? Those are the big grand challenges which will keep not only our generation busy but your generation as well. Hopefully you guys can really address them. Now, this is moving forward, but where have we come from? I call these the global exponentials. Over the last 250 years, the birth of the Industrial Revolution and the late 1700s, you find that the global per capita GDP has gone up exponentially. This is amazing. If you call GDP per capita as prosperity, it has gone up exponentially. I don't think the fathers of this nation would have ever expected our lives to be in this form with electricity, with microphones, with cars and automobiles playing. They have no idea it would be like this. And so that's, of course, enabled largely by the use of energy. Very well correlated, without energy would not have the GDP growth. And it's been mostly about fossil energy. Of course, as a result of that, you have CO2 emissions. You just heard about that. I'm not going to deliberate more on that. This is obviously not what is required. And what you find is the population today, it's about 7.7 billion. It's estimated by the end of the century, it's going to be 10 billion people around the world. But you can see the error bar is also 10 billion. It really depends on the fertility of women in Africa. That's where the major population growth is going to be. So this is the world we are entering in right now. And the question is, can we continue economic growth without the CO2 emissions and can we decouple them in some way? And so that's the big question, the first question that I talked about. How do we do that? Before we go further, it's important to note some of the trends that are going on in the world. And these are unmistakable trends. I was involved in a report within campus on the School of Engineering, which is called SOE Future. This is the strategic plan for the School of Engineering. And I co-led that with the current dean of engineering, Jennifer Wittem. And you're going to hear from her Wednesday morning. And we actually looked at one of the global trends. And you'll see a few of them, especially those related to energy. Urbanization, major trend. So the growth in population that we are seeing now will mostly be living in the cities. The rural population around the world is going to be flat. And people are moving to the cities. And obviously when you go to the cities is for better livelihood, which means more energy, more modern energy. So the energy demand, many parts of the world are going to go up. This is striking because the big red circles are mega cities, which have 10 million people or more. The pink dots are the 5 to 10 million. The green dots are 1 to 5. And the yellow ones are less than a million. And what we find is that these mega cities are not only growing, mega and large cities, they're growing at 5 to 8 to 10%, 5 to 8% per year. This is, I can assure you, this is not planned growth. This is unplanned growth that's going on. And the question is what kind of infrastructure can we provide? People talk about smart infrastructure. The question is what the heck is that? Smart for what? And can you make an unplanned infrastructure to be really smart to the point that you don't have congestion in the roads? You actually have access to electricity, clean water and sewage, all of that together. This is a major, major issue that is coming up in the world. Other issues in the energy world in the United States, we have found in a way that at least we had never expected. This, the idea of extracting unconventional oil and gas from shale with horizontal drilling and fracturing. And we find that the United States is, of course, abundant with this. China has the biggest reserves of shale gas, except that they don't have the infrastructure to extract it. But the price of shale gas, price of gas has gone down significantly in the United States. And you see this large difference in prices between Japan and the United States. And when there's that larger difference in price, guess what happens? People want to make money. You buy low, sell high. And that's what's going on and I'll show you a bit of that right now. The other part, which is a dramatic change. The first one is a dramatic change in itself. This is another dramatic change. The price of electricity or the cost of electricity generation from wind and solar is coming down to the point that it is the cheapest way to produce electricity. So wind today is approaching $20 a megawatt hour. I just got back from China and they're now talking about $20 a megawatt hour without any subsidies when the wind is strong. You know, eight, nine meters per second. It's a wind speed. And two cents a kilowatt hour, $20 a megawatt hour without any subsidies. This is unbeatable. This is the first time in history that carbon free electricity, A is the cheapest way to produce electricity and it can be scalable. We are entering a new era and solar is coming down as well. And you can see we're crossing the bands of US natural gas and China coal for electricity generation and US coal and nuclear. Unfortunately, nuclear costs are not coming down. It's not quite economic to use nuclear today, but wind and solar are the most economic way. And it becomes an economic imperative. You want a cheap electricity? Let's put wind and solar. Not because of climate issues. It's just cheaper. And by the way, it addresses the climate issues long term as well. So this is another major trend that is happening. The cost of batteries, for example, it's coming down at a pace that we never expected. And you find this is now, this is dollars per kilowatt hour on the y-axis. And this is years on the x-axis. Today, if you really, this is at $190 a kilowatt hour Tesla. I just got back from China. I just learned that today they are now making $150 a kilowatt hour, which is battery pack, the whole system, $150 a kilowatt hour. Once it reaches 100, which is the next five years, electric cars becomes competitive within cost and range as gasoline based cars. And it becomes mass marketed. And this is a major transformation of the transportation industry. And so this is happening as you've heard. India doesn't want to sell any gasoline cars after 2030. That's a big deal. China is now announcing similar things I just heard this morning. And Volvo wants to go all electric. Okay, so again, it will take some time because it takes about 20 years more for the fleet to change. So by 2040, 2045, you will see deep penetration of electric vehicles. The question is, do we have the charging infrastructure? What are the other services you can add on to it? Not often appreciated LED lighting. The cost has come down to the point. Heitz law is like the Moors law. It's come down to the point that it's cost-competitive with compact fluorescent lighting, and it's much more energy efficient, and it's going further down. And this is driven not because of lighting. LED technology has been driven by television. Okay, that's how the technology, and it rode on that thing, and then the cost has come down. So it's important to know where things are going. These are already happened. Guess where some of the opportunities are? Cooling technology. Not often appreciated. These are some of the biggest loads that are in homes and buildings, et cetera, is air-conditioning refrigeration. It turns out that the hydrofluorocarbons that are the refrigerants that are used in refrigeration, air-conditioners today, their global warming potential is about 3,000 times that of CO2. And depending on the economic growth in developing economies and the uptake of air-conditioners, refrigerators, the leak from that, it turns out we'll have, HFCs will have about anywhere from 25 to 40% of the global warming potential compared to CO2. That's a big deal. So following the Paris Agreement, there was something called the Kigali Agreement. The Kigali Agreement was about phasing out HFCs and introducing other refrigerants for cooling technology. Because this is one of some of the largest loads that are in homes and buildings, et cetera. Why is this important? Because the technology is being phased out, and guess where the demand is going to be? This is the ranking of cities in terms of the annual, per year, cooling degree days. The amount of cooling multiplied by the number of days. And you can see this is the rank of cities. The first OECD city is Miami, and that's number 14. And guess where the economies are growing at 6% to 7% a year is all in the stock cities. And they all want to do air-condition. So massive demand, and this is another very interesting trend, it turns out by 2040 or 2050 or so, the amount of primary energy consumed for cooling is going to be comparable to that of heating. This is the transition from the economies in the OECD to non-OECD countries. That's what's going on out here. And so we have massive demand coming up, and we have the technology, current technology being phased out. And so that's the transition that we're seeing. So we deal with that in our group, and so we have various projects on cooling. If anyone's interested, happy to chat about it. The other trends that are not often thought about in energy, but are transforming the energy sector, digitization, we are seeing a 50-fold growth in the amount of data between 2010 and 2020. 50-fold, which is unprecedented. The amount of investments are going on, the cost per bit of computing is going down dramatically. And so this is another transformation. It's being integrated into the energy business that no one had ever thought of, essentially to introduce automation, reduce cost, increase efficiency. Another big trend that's going on. So if you look at this world of energy and look at all these drivers that are happening, here's what we are seeing. The global energy system is at really a tipping point for a major transformation, and I call this the 3D effect. The first D is decarbonization. The industry is not thinking of, there's no debate about climate change or global warming. The debate is over. The industry is looking for solutions, and they want to decarbonize, including the oil and gas industry. We deal with quite a bit of oil and gas industry. They are the most motivated to figure out how to pivot from the current business to the new business line, which is decarbonized. They want to be an energy company, not an oil and gas company. This is a big, big driver. The second D is digitization. This is entering the oil and gas industry, entering the transportation, as we now know, the uberization of things and the autonomous driving. This is entering in ways that we see that in the transportation. We don't see that in the electricity industry. We don't see that not because it's not happening. It's just not in the news media. It's happening in the oil and gas as much as in the autonomous driving. So this is going on, the digitization. And the last one, the driver is this diversification. Because in the first of all, the transportation is getting diversified. Electricity used to be centralized generation. It's getting diversified to distributor generation. So this is going on as we speak. And no one had expected all three to come together in ways that are happening. And as I said, it's $10 trillion per year. That whole industry, the largest industry in the world, is at a tipping point for a major transformation. And we're seeing multiple of these happening. So that's why I felt, and I said that, I wish I was a grad student right now, because the world is in front of you. And the largest industry really does not have a strategy moving forward. They're looking for innovation. And so when I talk about innovation, what does that really mean? Innovation just doesn't mean only science and engineering. It is the complexity of science and engineering interplaying with business models, interplaying with markets and economy, with the regulatory innovations and regulation, finance, and at the end of the day, people acceptance. And it's about the future. So it's all about you. And I showed this chart to people at Shell, at Shell, right at Shell, the second largest public company oil and gas. And guess what they focused on? He said, I really like that. Because they know this, but they are not always in touch with this generation of people and the next generation of people. So they really want to work with us to actually understand where the future generations want to see this world go. So believe me, you guys are in power. So given all of that, I'll give you a few examples of how I think about how do we decarbonize cost effectively. Number one, switching from fuel from coal to natural gas with global access to cheap natural gas. This is happening as we speak. Just to give you another example from Shell, they just built a ship called Prelude. This ship is so big that it displaces three times the amount of water that an aircraft carrier displaces. And this is LNG transport. And they want to make it LNG. And if you don't have an LNG terminal on ground, don't worry. They have an LNG terminal in the ship itself. This is floating LNG terminals. And they build this to basically make sure that they can take this opportunity of access to cheap natural gas around the world. And this is what they're trying to enable. So this is the first thing is switching from coal to natural gas. Second is to decarbonize the grid by integrating renewables. If you can reduce the cost to nuclear, fantastic. But that's not happening in many parts of the world, most parts of the world. So getting the renewables integrated, integration is key. It's not just the cost to reduction because that's already happening. Decarbonization of the transportation itself, either via electrification or by low carbon fuels. And electrification is great for small vehicles, whether it's automobiles, personal automobiles or scooters and things like that. But for long haul trucking or for planes, you need liquid fuels. And at least that's what, unless you have a super-duper battery, which frankly I haven't seen yet. Decarbonize and electrify industrial heating. This is the hardest thing to decarbonize, industrial heating, which is needed for steel, concrete, petrochemicals, food. They use a lot of energy. And finally, of course, energy efficiency and conservation. So what I'm going to talk about in my group, what we look at are two things. One is the grid and the other is low carbon fuels. And so because the battery-based transportation is already happening, the industry is really moving forward. But we have no idea how to make low carbon fuels. And the grid, as you will see, is difficult to decarbonize because of various issues. So let me talk about the grid first. So this is what the grid has been for the last 120 years. I call it the Tesla Edison paradigm. The architecture of the grid has been the same for the last 120 years. That is, the paradigm is that you've got big centralized generation, long-distance high-voltage transmission, medium-voltage distribution, and then low-voltage use in our homes, right? 50 hertz or 60 hertz. But the architecture has been the same. The generation are continuous generation. These are big turbines, turbo machinery. The generation, there's one-way power flow to all billions of loads. And the generation always tracks the load. What does that mean? It means that when you turn on the light somewhere, some generator realizes that the load has been turned on and they ramp up the generation. Now, how did they know that load has been turned on? It turns out that when you turn on the load, you reduce the frequency and the frequency goes down. This is communication in the time of Tesla and Edison. And then they note the frequency and they ramp it up to bring it back to 50 hertz. That's how it worked out. This thing is fundamentally changing. When you try to integrate a lot of renewables, you get, you know, this is the California duck curve. Chinese exported peaking duck. This is the California duck. So when you integrate a lot of renewables like solar, for example, in the middle of the day you've got over generation. Then the sun goes down. And so this is the net load. That means you take all the load away that is met by solar and then what else is remaining has to be met by other generation sources. In the middle of the day, you have the load reducing, then the sun goes down and you have a massive ramp. This is unprecedented. So you find this is the shape of the duck and the duck is getting fatter. And in California, we have exceeded what we had predicted. In fact, we are at the 2020 level in 2016, both in over generation and in the ramps. Big problem. Connected to the grid is the fact that on the other end of the grid, the edge of the grid, you've got devices, electric vehicles which are connected to the cloud. All of these things will be connected to the computing network. You've got thermostats that can be controlled remotely. These are big loads, air conditioning. And you've got generation which is local that is connected to the cloud as well that can be controlled. The advantage of connecting to the computing infrastructure is that you can collect the data, you can do data analytics, you can remote control, and you can aggregate things remotely and sell those services. So this is what is going on in the grid. This used to be what the grid was. You have a generation. You have long distance travel to transmission. That is controlled. Pricing is controlled by market, wholesale market. And the market is regulated by the federal government because it crosses state boundaries in the United States. So there's a lot of, besides technical, a lot of other issues. And when it comes to this local region, many places in the world and the United States, these are regulated utilities where the pricing is determined by a utility commission, not by a market. And then their jurisdiction ends at the meter of your home and behind the meter is where you live. And so this has been the construct. And now what we're trying to do is to integrate more than 50% of renewables in California. That's one of the many parts of the world. And that's volatility, all the duck curves and all that. And at the other end of the grid, you have volatility in both ends going on. And this is what's going on. The architecture has completely changed, but because you can aggregate in the cloud, you can sell the services to the utilities in the wholesale market. So the whole grid is being rewired as we speak. That's what's going on. And so as you can see, this is not just a technical issue that are market issues, the pricing, the regulatory issues, et cetera. Which is why we created this initiative called Bits and Watts. We launched it last year. And this is in close collaboration with various industries from around the world. And this is to really help provide holistic solutions, technical connected with markets connected with regulatory reform, connected with policy altogether. And so this is, we just started this. There's a tremendous amount of interest and lots of students involved. Just to give you one example, a digital example. This is the, you know, so PG&E is the local utility and they get data from various homes, okay? All the meters, how much electricity you use. And people are expected that everyone assume that it behaves like this. That you get up in the morning, the load goes up, then you go home, go to work, the load comes down, you come back in the evening, load goes up. It's like the Golden Gate Bridge, right? So they gave the data to our colleague, Ram Rajan Kapal, in civil engineering. And he said, okay, let's do some simple machine learning to understand, is that the pattern? And why not just look at the data? What they found was that 200 different patterns, only 14% follows that. And there are various other patterns. You look at this thing right out here. You know, the thing that dips in the day, right? Then it goes up at night. We call it the graduate student pattern. The sleeping during the day, awake at night, right? So this is, and no one had any idea that this was going on. And so this is a simple data analysis to find out. There's another program that's going on. This is Vader, we got some cool names. By the way, that tool is now sitting in PG&E and other utilities and is open source. People can use it for free. That's what we do as part of Bits of Watts. This is Vader, another one. I won't go into the details. This is a really cool one. He's a couple of grad students in one year. Z-Cheng Wang, he just completed one year out here. And he got together with a senior student and basically looked at Google Maps, okay? And Google Maps are available free. Then they developed an algorithm called Deep Solar where they used deep learning to find the location, to identify solar panels from satellite images, okay? And they trained it with existing data. And they gave, you know, if it detects a solar panel, they give a thumbs up. If it detects a solar panel with no solar panel, they give a thumbs down. And it learned over time, okay? And then now they can essentially put a map and they find the GPS location and size of all solar panels. And so this is the heat map of all the solar panels in the Bay Area. We are somewhere in the peninsula out here. That little bright spot out there, that's San Francisco. A lot of people in San Francisco have solar panels, but it's cloudy, but they feel good about it, okay? The rest of the place, this is the solar irradiation map. But now we have the GPS location of all these solar panels. This is Los Angeles area. It's the highest concentration of solar panels. We have now the GPS location and size of all solar panels in the United States. Okay? In less than a year, these guys did it. Now we can correlate with family income, with voting patterns now to see why do people buy solar panels? Is it the price? Is it economics? Is it feel good or is it not? So this is what is going on. This is an amazing tool. We are now getting into a difference. So this is images, okay? And image recognition. And so it started with cats and dogs. That's what a lot of people did initially. And you can now recognize cats and dogs. You can recognize human emotions. You can now recognize satellite pictures. But these don't have to satisfy the laws of physics. This is what we're entering, what do I call the holy grail of machine learning or deep learning. This is a jet engine. And the way we analyze jet engine and predict the behavior is we do this. We have an input to a set of conservation equations. Some of you may have been exposed to this called the Navier-Stokes equation, continuity equation. Essentially mass conservation, momentum and energy. Okay? And you get an output. But if you want to simulate a gas turbine for one second of a real physical phenomenon, one second, it takes you maybe a month of computing time to do that. So you cannot do that in real time. What we are now trying to do is the following. Do you really have to go learn about all the physics and details or could you somehow replace the physical model with a transfer function that you can train with existing data, simulations of the past, experimental data and train it. But this avatar of a gas turbine engine, which is a deep learning algorithm, it has to satisfy the laws of physics. It cannot violate that. And this idea of constrained by physics and a learning algorithm isn't new. And so we are just starting. And the goal is, this is the Holy Grail, can you make the computation time less than the physical time? Because if you can do that, you can do real-time decision-making. So I'm actually looking for some graduate students, either mechanical, electrical, computer science. We have a collaboration with another faculty member, with actually a couple of faculty members in this. Let me just quickly wrap up on something. I was involved in writing a report for the former Secretary of Energy on CO2 management. He has a question, what are the R&D opportunities for gigaton scale net reduction in atmospheric CO2, either by CO2 utilization or negative emissions? I won't go into the detail, but the important thing to note, what's the research to do to get to the gigaton scale? It's not research for the sake of research, it's research that is translatable to the gigaton scale. One of the approaches was to make hydrogen. Because if you want to do anything with CO2, you make a hydrocarbon or a fuel, you need hydrogen. And hydrogen has to come from water. And if you want fuels at $3 a gallon, you need hydrogen at $2 a kilogram. And to produce hydrogen at $2 a kilogram, you need energy sources, carbon-free energy at less than $30 a megawatt hour. And as I mentioned before, we are entering the period, the first time in history that carbon-free energy is less than $30 a megawatt hour. It's at $20 a megawatt hour. So this is, the timing is great. You could follow the electrochemical path to split water to hydrogen, or you can follow a thermochemical, photochemical. There's various pathways of getting there, but you're trying to produce hydrogen from water. There's a lot of work going on in electrochemical out here. Tom Haramio and others are looking at electrochemical. Matteo Carnello in chemical engineering is looking at photoelectrochemical and electrochemical techniques. We are looking at the thermochemical approach. Why? Because thermochemical, because if you were to scale it to the 100 to 1000 megatons of hydrogen per year, you will need plants, many plants of this size. It's not going to be in a beaker. It's going to be like this. And if you are to get to this scale, and by the way, the whole chemical industry is thermochemical, so we said that why don't we start from what the system would look like and what the industry knows and work backwards to see what science you need. So the idea that we had was, can you make thermochemical water-splitting reactions that you break it by heat? And so the idea is the following, and I'll go through a bit of the science. It's really like a redox heat engine. You take a metal oxide like a ceramic and you heat it. This is the high temperature part and you get rid of oxygen. Now this thing, material, the ceramic has vacancies of oxygen or basically it needs oxygen from something. Then you expose it to water and it grabs the oxygen from water and produces hydrogen. Okay? Seems simple. Right? Well, the problem is that the materials that work state-of-the-art, cerium oxides and iron oxides and all, they need temperatures of 1500 degrees Celsius and that's just, it's very difficult to scale it then. The industry can do 1100 degrees Celsius at the most. And so we took on the challenges. Can you go below 1100 degrees Celsius? And the challenge comes up as the following. And I won't go into the details. This is thermodynamics of delta H and delta S, but there's a thermodynamic sweet spot and there was no material that fell in the thermodynamic sweet spot and it has to do with real material science and going into the understanding of various chemical bonding and phase transitions, etc. And we were able to find this material in the interest of time. These are, we call them polycata and oxides, magnesium, iron, cobalt, nickel, oxides, etc. that go through a phase transition as you go up in temperature, go down in temperature and that phase transition is utilized to split water. Can it split water? Absolutely. This is the hydrogen yield on the y-axis. This is where cerium oxide, these are the state-of-the-art materials at 1100. This is our material at 1100. And this is at 1000 degrees. So we have reached what we call, what is often considered the holy grail. Can you get down to 1000 degrees and split water? And we just submitted this paper a few weeks ago. And again, I won't go into the detail. So this is a very active area of research. So what else are we doing? Where are we going with this? There are some other holy grail reactions. And people thought these are impossible. The holy grail reaction of the first is the water splitting. We're now building react, we're thinking of building reactors looking at the kinetics. The second holy grail reaction is, can you turn CO2, with the hydrogen that you produce from water splitting, can you turn CO2 into... Because if you do, methanol is liquid transportation fuel. You can transport it anyway. It's cheaper than LNG. These are what are called reducing reactions. And the material that we have, we think we can get there. These are holy grail oxidizing reactions, turning methane into methanol directly. The way it is done today is you take methane, and you make carbon monoxide and hydrogen, and then combine carbon monoxide and hydrogen, and then form methanol. It's a very convoluted process. No one can do it directly today. People have spent careers trying to solve this problem. That's why it's called the holy grail problem. No one has been able to do it. So we're going to give it a shot. Because we have a new mechanism of inducing these reactions. The second holy grail problem in oxidizing reaction is you take two methane molecules and make a C-C bond to make ethane. And ethane is the precursor for ethylene. Ethylene is the biggest chemical that is sold in the market. It's got massive market scale. And no one can make ethylene directly from methane. And so this is what is some of the other reactions that we're looking at right now. And we're looking for some top graduate students in any of the engineering fields to go after these. Because people thought even the water splitting was impossible at 1000 degrees. We just showed it. Let me end my talk by some famous predictions or infamous predictions of the past depending on the point of view. A lot of people say that, oh, this is impossible, but it doesn't violate any laws of physics. And so here's quotes by Lord Kelvin who felt radio has no future. X-rays will prove to be a hoax. Heavy and air flying machines are impossible. Lord Kelvin was very opinionated. He was dead wrong. But he was convincing enough that he convinced Wilbur Wright, who in 1901 claimed that man will not fly for 50 years. Fortunately, he had a brother, Orville Wright. And within four years they showed that you can. You have an existence proof. Birds are flying. They're heavier than air. So they were able to do that, of course. And so I think the best way to sort of depict the future is the famous quote by Arthur C. Clarke, any sufficiently advanced technology cannot be distinguished from magic. And it's for all of you guys to do some magic here at Stanford, which is why our lab is called a magic lab. It's for you to do some magic. So as I said, we are hiring. So if you're interested, come and talk to me or send me an email. We're happy to chat. Let me stop you. Open it up for you and I. Yes? So a few questions. First, you talked briefly about integrating the mobile into the grid. What do you think will be the best sort of technology that's in the current categories and aren't necessarily having to deal with grid storage? And also, I was interested in hearing some of your thoughts about what sort of technologies will be that decarbonizing technology? Decarbonizing the cooling technology. Well, for the grid thing, it depends on how much penetration of renewables you have. California is already running at 25% renewables. And we don't need any storage. It's a matter of logistics, a matter of coordinating the other sources. Fortunately, we have natural gas. So when the sun goes down, you can ramp up the natural gas turbine just like jet engine ramping, right? So we could do that, but it has carbon emissions. So as you go to more higher and higher penetration, today at 25%, if you go to 40% or 50%, the problem changes. And then you no longer have. So how do we integrate higher penetration renewables? There are various options. One is long distance transmission. So when the sun sets in Utah, the sun is still here. And can we take that excess electricity and transmit it to Utah or Kansas, wherever they need it? That means you need high voltage, long distance transmission, high voltage, mega volt, hopefully. So that's one way. The second one is to modulate the load. So if you have factory manufacturing going on, could you modulate the load to follow the generation? And that's another. Then, of course, is storage. But there are various forms of storage for the grid. If you can retrofit a hydroelectric dam to have a pumped storage, retrofitting, you already have the transmission lines because hydroelectric dam, it's the cheapest way to store electricity. There are other ways. In a Stanford campus, as you're going to see today, it's run. We draw electricity from the grid. It's got a heat pump, and it's got three water tanks. Two for cold water, one for hot water. So when the price of electricity is low, we grab that, we cool and heat, and we run the heating and cooling system all of campus by thermal storage. Much cheaper, 10 times cheaper than chemical batteries, electrochemical batteries. So when you get to electrochemical battery storage, which is expensive, then you ask the question, how can I minimize my use of that battery because it's cost? And so these are then depends on the options of what else other resources you have. So it's not a simple question to answer. It depends on the situation, but what I just explained are the various options we have to optimize them. Yeah? You talked about penetration of electric vehicles in the coming years. You talked about penetration of electric vehicles and how various countries and companies had pledged to integrate electric vehicles over gasoline, but it's remained a challenge for shipping and diesels particularly. So do you see any potential alternatives in that area that did overcome that challenge? Shipping or diesel? Well, shipping decided like trucking and diesel vehicles instead of gasoline. I think you really have to think about alternative liquid transportation fuels or liquefied transportation fuels because if you really want to go long distance, long distance, long haul trucking, boy the batteries have to be much better than what they are today. Now there's no question, there's research going on and trying to make lithium sulfur batteries or lithium air batteries. That's aluminum based batteries, etc. But I think having the option of liquid transportation fuel that is low carbon is very important. So that's the alternative. Now people are thinking of hydrogen. Hydrogen of course, distribution infrastructure is the most important thing and storing the hydrogen. The best way to store hydrogen? Hydrocarbons. But if the carbon comes from a, if you can use the carbon, recycle the carbon, that would be the best. The other form by the way is ammonia. If you can turn hydrogen into ammonia, there's lots of nitrogen. That's a very hard reaction. That's what is called the Haber-Bosch process. But if there are alternatives to that to make ammonia, ammonia can be liquefied very easily. But liquid transportation fuel is very important. That option should be there on the table. Yes? So we talked about using the different MOX chemicals to spread the water molecule. So my question is, is there any carbon footprint involved in getting those molecules in the first place and is there any carbon footprint involved in conducting the rest of the reaction? Well most of the carbon footprint will be there in the energy to split water. The cost of energy dominates everything else. It's a lot of energy that you need to split a water molecule. And so that energy has to be provided by a carbon-free source, a low carbon source. Otherwise you're back on the treadmill. And the question now is can you take renewable electricity and turn that into heating? Absolutely. You can get all kinds of furnaces, induction, those that are well-known. Yeah. Yeah. So we talked about energy conservation in a very large scale. But this is also true that we are moving towards miniaturized technology and we are trying to make all tech smaller and smaller. So is there any way that energy research can play a major role in the micro-analysis scale for various technologies there are today? Yeah, so I didn't talk enough about nano and micro, etc. First of all, nano and micro is really important to get a different function that you would not get in macro. So nano stuff is all embedded in this. You really have to understand things of the atomic anatomy to scale to get a new property of a material that you would not get in macro. But at the end of the day if you want to get to scale at the megaton or gigaton scale you got to be able to take the macro and nano and stuff and be able to scale it. To retain the nano scale properties and the functions that you get the nano scale but get tons of it. That's the difference that it's not just getting a paper out from a nano. The question really is that is it viable long term? Yeah. Do you think electric vehicles will outpace renewable energy such that will end up with vehicles powered by coal or bad carbon sources? Yeah, good question. That's a worry, frankly. You make policies where you don't decarbonize or you adoption of electric vehicles goes faster than the decarbonization of the grid. We don't know, frankly how the policies are being sorted out. There's a lot of danger to that and especially we're seeing in China a lot of the electricity from coal and if you decarbonize if you go to electric vehicles you may get more emissions that way but frankly things in China are driven not it's certainly driven by CO2 it's also majorly driven by local pollution and if you can reduce a pollution that would help. The decarbonization of the grid, frankly is probably the easiest way the easiest thing to do it's not that easy frankly but it's easier of all the other options and that's why I think people are going for EVs because eventually that's what's going to be. There will be a lot of EVs present not to say there won't be any gasoline there will be gasoline cars as well but EVs will certainly be there. Okay, very good.