 My name is Carol Werner. I'm the Executive Director of the Environmental and Energy Study Institute and I'm on the Steering Committee for the Sustainable Energy Coalition, which is sponsoring this event along with the House and Senate, Renewable and Efficiency Caucuses. So we're glad you're here. Hope that you've been making the rounds of the exhibits. Make sure that you go to the ones over in the Gold Room, 2168, as well as the four year. There are so many good people here who know so much. It's a wonderful opportunity to really learn a lot from people who have a wealth of experience, who generally have amazing senses of humor and are really, really good people to know. Anyway, so welcome to this panel where we're really going to be taking a look at grid storage and transmission, which are all very, very important issues. We hear lots of discussions on Capitol Hill with regard to the need for grid modernization, how we deal with all of the challenges because everything is changing so fast in our whole power sector. And what that also means in terms of the changes that are also happening in the transport sector that are related to the grid and to transmission and to storage. So we're going to start off this panel with Salika Strong, who is the Director of Sustainable Energy for the Copper Development Association. And she is going to tell you about that and how this all relates to energy storage. And it's a really important piece of all of the things that go into making grid, transmission, storage, everything that we need it to be in order to have a robust power grid and energy economy. Thank you. Well, thank you for having me. I have kind of a loud voice, so hopefully won't need too much of the mic. I am, thank you Carol. Salika Strong, the Director of Sustainable Energy for the Copper Development Association. Just a little bit of background on who we are. The CDA is part of the International Copper Alliance of 28 Global Associations, so we are pretty much all over the world. We represent the entire supply chain of the copper industry from the mining facilities and members as well as to all those folks that fabricate and make copper products on the manufacturing side. The area that I oversee and that I manage is what we consider our sustainable energy program. And really what these markets mean for us. We've divided them into emerging markets with significant opportunities for copper and grid storage being one of them. And so a lot of people, and I'll go back to when I first interviewed with the organization about seven years ago, it was, why does copper care? Aren't you guys in everything? And it's really important to kind of help educate why we do, but first I'd like to kind of start off the presentation with giving everyone a landscape. And I'm kind of doing this across the board, landscape of what is grid storage, what are some of the policies on the federal and state side that we're seeing some synergy. And at the end of it go into why the copper industry cares, especially given our current climate with looking at energy from the lens of many different industry groups like ours that benefit from the investments. So what is grid storage and why is it important? So the way that we view grid storage, and let me know if you guys can't hear me, I'll speak closer to the microphone, is that we did an assessment a few years ago in conjunction with the Energy Storage Association and KEMA. And we kind of took a look at the market and broke it up into three areas that we feel are those investments. One is community energy storage, so anything from a few houses or small communities that are supported by energy storage devices, large scale battery energy storage, which really is looking at large installations, large things. Some of these folks will be talking about some of the great issues, as well as bulk grid storage. And why are these, why is energy storage important? And it's really a game changing factor in the energy industry that has the ability to the balance power to the supply and demand simultaneously within milliseconds. And it really helps to make the networks much more resilient, efficient and cleaner than ever before. When I started at FERC in 2003, like two weeks after I started, there was this huge blackout, which you guys probably all know, some of you remember. And there was some, you know, there was a lot of discussion as to what happened, whether it was birds and branches and things like that. And one of the factors was the fact that some of the generation devices which were considered ancillary services didn't ramp up, they didn't provide the power that they needed as quickly as they needed. And so with battery storage, we really help, this answers that question. It's that battery storage is immediate. From a very, like, very elementary perspective, think of your battery that you stick in whatever device that you need. You have an instantaneous electrical energy, and that's what really some of these grid storage devices do. They provide an instantaneous power, especially in the cases of high demand. And how big is this market? It's pretty big. Energy storage systems currently make up about 2% of US generation capacity. And there are about 71 megawatts of energy storage were deployed in the beginning of this year. And that is a huge growth potential, 276% growth over Q1 of 2016. So that just shows you the investments in the market. And some of the predictions and some of the information that I've been receiving is that by 2022 grid storage is expected to be worth about $3.2 billion. And that is a tenfold increase from 2016. So lots of cumulative investments in energy storage. And where are some of these energy storage systems in the US? I mean, they are pretty much, they're being deployed all over. We have seen them in many states, and I'll talk a little bit about some of those states that are leading the efforts when I talk about federal and state policy initiatives that support their growth. But they're pretty much across many states. We are seeing a lot of these investments. And they really go, when you think of energy storage systems, and I won't get too technical, hopefully, is that we look at it from four different categories. There's electrical, there's mechanical, there's thermal, and there's chemical. So if you look at electrical, it's everything from magnetic energy storage, pumped hydraulic electric power represents mechanical storage systems. I'm just giving a few examples. We'll go into, if you want to know more, we'll talk about it afterward. And batteries are really the most common type of chemical storage as with ice is really common among thermal storage. So again, you know, energy storage is extremely useful on the grid scale. It's needed on the industrial or grid scale for three big reasons. The first is I talked a little bit about the balance load, and that's kind of, you know, talking a little bit about the 2003 blackout. The second is really it bridges power to ensure that there's no break in service during the seconds to minutes that are required to switch from one power generation source to another. And the third is really to look at it from the perspective of power quality and management. And I think that from, you know, any of us that have worked in the electric industry, that is extremely important. And that reliability factor really interplays. And many people, you know, in the past, a lot of the conversation with energy storage correlated with renewable energy. And so right now, you know, but I kind of want to shed some light on that. While it does support renewable energy, it's not really, it's a fuel neutral. It's a technology that supports the grid no matter how the electricity is generated. Although it works very closely and is very supportive within renewable energy markets because it helps during those times of intermittencies. So, you know, going forward a little bit, you know, is energy storage clean? Absolutely. There's no direct emissions. There are no pipelines. It really has a very small footprint. It recycles electricity and it really helps to cut the emissions as it takes more of the load off of traditional generation. So now to the second part. Some of the policies, you know, we've, there's been ebbs and flows with policies as far as technologies, whether it's some of the stuff here on the hill that's going on or some of the initiatives over at FERC or at some of the state commissions. So I just wanted to highlight a few different policy initiatives that really help give you perspective. First starting with, I saw a job and employment number. So just to give you another perspective, I know I talked about dollars and investments and megawatts, but in through the U.S. Energy and Employment Report, the energy storage market supported a total of 90, over 91,000 jobs in Q1 of 2016. I have to update those numbers for 2017, but that's a pretty significant investment. And that doesn't really consider other industry groups. And this is some, this is kind of the reason why I like coming and talking at these things. There are many other industry groups that benefit from the investment in these markets, like us, like the copper industry. You think of all the wiring cable manufacturers. You think of all the mining facilities. There's a ton of investments. So the provision that I wanted to kind of highlight to everyone is in the Current Energy and Natural Resources Act. There is a provision that really helps support in Title II on grid storage program supporting DOE funding for that, which we really support as well and hope that you guys, for those of you on the Hill, take a look at that initiative. And then secondly, some of the states that are really leading these efforts. California, Hawaii, New York, New Jersey, Maryland, Massachusetts. And what's really interesting, if you take, if you hear these states are, these are states that are highly condensed, large populated states and or expensive like Hawaii is for instance. And it really helps, some of these technologies really help, you know, shave off some of those costs. They can't stick wind facilities everywhere. They can't stick big, huge solar facilities because they don't have a lot of the land. But what they can do is use technology as a form of energy efficiency to help not only the utility run and perform much more efficient, but also for consumer usage as well. And why do we care? So to end off with why copper cares. I talked about job growth. Our industry is extremely focused on the electrical markets just to give everyone a high level perspective. 60% of all copper, and this includes plumbing, tubing, architectural, 60% of all copper products is sold in the electrical markets. So that's wire, that's cable, there's flat copper pieces that help conduct electricity. And we are very, you know, very invested in that. And so I'm getting a little cue to finish up, but just wanted to leave everyone off with that. And thank you for having me and I'll take any questions afterward. I hope you got a little bit of a taste for the market for me. Thanks. And be sure to go to, so like his boot. So don't forget that. So in picking up from that, so we're going to talk about conductors. And we're going to turn to Bill White, who is with the CTC Global Corporation where he is the director of business development for the Northeastern US. Thank you, Carol. Thanks everybody for coming. Do we have a lot of congressional staffers and interns in the room? Great. And people just seeking refuge from the heat. Okay, so that's about 90% by my count. So thanks for coming. Thanks for talking about something really exciting, which is transmission conductors. But I'll start by saying that I've worked on the climate change issue for many, many years for over 25 years. And now I've been in the electricity business for a while. And I'm convinced that one of the most important things we can do to get to a low carbon future is to build a very strong and efficient network. Just like we have one for information, the internet, we're all familiar with that. If you're really old like I am, you can remember a time when there was something called a local area network, which was not nearly as interesting as the internet. I can assure you, or as beneficial to our economy. So I think we need, you know, big pipes that are efficient and work well, small pipes that work well, and we need to really access all the resources like storage, like clean energy. We're going to need it all. We're going to need it all to work together at the highest level and at the smallest level all the way down to your rooftop. So that's my purpose. So the part of the system that hasn't got quite as much attention is the high voltage system, because we don't really think about it unless we're driving by a big power line. And we say, oh, that's really unfortunate. And so I get that. But not only do we need to make that network better and more efficient, but there happens to be a large number of technologies that can do just that that are on the market right now. And I'm going to talk about one of them, but there are information technologies, there are power flow controls, there are dynamic line rating. There are a lot of different technologies that are making our grid more efficient right now. But I'm going to talk about the wire itself. So for the last 100 years or so, we've been using this, and I have props, so I'm prepared. I don't know if you could see it, but you're going to have to come visit me down the hall if you want to learn more about it. Some of you already have, I can see. And this is about 100 years old, this technology, literally the same stuff that Thomas Edison used. It's steel in the middle, and that's the structural part of it that holds it up. And then wrapped around that, the lighter colored, the shiny stuff is aluminum, and that carries the electricity. And it's called Aluminum Conductor Steel Reinforced ACSR. More than 95% of the high voltage wire that's in the air right now is this, this technology. So our company, CTC Global Corporation, we're in Irvine, California, for all the California people here in Orange County. What we did was we took out the steel, and like lots of parts of the economy, we replaced the steel with carbon fiber. In this case, it's a carbon fiber glass composite. And so we've seen it in aerospace. We see it more and more in the automotive industry. We see it in many, many industries where carbon fiber composites are replacing steel and aluminum. And this carbon fiber composite is lighter and stronger than steel, and it has the added benefit. One of the problems with this technology is that when you put a lot of power on it, it heats up, and when it heats up, it sags. And so if you've ever seen a fully loaded transmission line on a really hot day when everybody's got their air conditioners cranked up, you'll notice that it's sagging really far, and that means it's fully loaded. And that limits the amount of power that you can transmit safely on that line, because you can't let it hit the ground. That's awful. That's really bad. Or the trees that are underneath it or something like that. You can't let that happen. And the other thing that happens is the repeated stressing of it mechanically over time that becomes brittle, and it doesn't bounce back, and it has to be replaced because it's no longer safe. So what our product is thermally stable, it doesn't sag. It sags a little bit as the aluminum relaxes and then it stops. We can put twice as much, we can put 30% more aluminum for the same diameter and weight, and that allows us to carry twice as much power. So what's happening now in the grid, one of the big things that's happening, we're not, our power demand isn't growing as quickly as it once was. It's growing a lot more slowly, but it's growing. But the big change that's stressing the grid more than that is the flows on the grid are changing because our generation resources are changing. You're probably aware that we've closed a lot of coal generating facilities. We've added a lot of natural gas and wind and solar, and that means the grid, these constraints are popping up in places where they didn't exist before. So utilities are having to find ways to open up those constraints. We also have a lot of things that are just old and they need to be replaced. So those factors mean that if you're going to add capacity and replace this and you need a line that can carry more power than the one you have up there now, what you have to do is take down all the towers, put a bigger, heavier version of this on it, and build bigger towers, which everyone loves, bigger towers, right? Cut down a bunch of trees, more people can see it, that's awesome. And then you put a bigger, heavier wire up there. Or you could take our product, same diameter and weight, use the existing towers and just swap out the wire, saving more than three quarters of the project cost and putting a more efficient, higher capacity product than getting your product in. So we believe this is a technology that can help us to one of many make our grid meet the challenges that we're facing now. Changing power flows, slow load growth, and making the grid more robust and reliable all around. This is stronger, it can withstand storms better, we had one in Oklahoma, I can show you a picture of it, an F5 tornado picked up a storage container, threw it into the power line, stripped off about 15 feet of the aluminum, but our cord didn't break. A steel line would have snapped and would have taken the towers down. Ours was back up and running in a few hours. So these are the kinds of things that we think these technologies can do as we modernize not just the part of the grid that we see at our house, our efficient appliances and our solar panels and our electric cars, but the part of the grid that we don't see all the time but that's still really important, which is the high voltage system that kind of makes it all possible. So thanks, I'm down the hall. If you have any questions and you want to learn more about what we're doing, we're selling it in 42 countries around the world and it's going great and happy to answer any questions. Thanks. Great, thank you. So you heard it here. More efficient, can back out power plants, more resilient, et cetera. Okay, so now we're going to look at another set of systems of technologies and to hear about that we're going to turn to Rob Thornton who is the president and CEO of the International District Energy Association IDEA and Rob can tell you about really how important this whole thing is with regard to critical energy infrastructure and thinking about resilience. Thanks Carol. I think we're going to need a bigger boat. There's a seat down in front if anyone wants to, we're not passing a collection plate, it's really, it's all good. Is there a seat over here? Yeah, if you'd like. There you go. So good afternoon everyone, my name is Rob Thornton. I'm the president and CEO of the International District Energy Association. Pleasure to be here with you. We just had our 108th annual conference last week in Scottsdale, Arizona. It was 122 degrees. Talk about sagging. I was sagging. It's a dry heat they say. So district energy is really a central plant where we produce steam or hot water, chilled water and pipe it through an underground network to heat and cool buildings in a city, a campus, healthcare. In fact, this building is on a district heating and cooling network. The chilled water that's providing the air conditioning is about four blocks away at the capital power plant and that began operating in 1908. Today it's getting a facelift. They're adding gas-fired generation so there'll be a combined heat and power plant to make electricity heat and cooling. Actually doubling their efficiency, reducing emissions and improving resiliency. So that's really underway right now. So why district energy? So when you aggregate the heating and cooling loads, in a city at least half of the energy consumed is for heating and air conditioning buildings. Most of our policy is about electricity, but our primary energy use is for heating and cooling. So what district energy does is aggregates the heating and cooling loads of dozens or hundreds or even thousands of buildings and then creates a scale where you can deploy technologies that wouldn't make sense on a building-by-building basis like geothermal, which you can do on a building basis or biomass or waste to energy or in the case of Toronto where you take cold water out of the lake and use it to air-condition the city. So when you have this aggregated economies of scale it really creates unique opportunities. Now district energy is actually quite ubiquitous in the U.S. There's over 800 systems. Most colleges and universities have a district energy system so instead of every building having boilers and chillers and cooling towers, they centralize it and that gives both efficiency, operation, capital, etc. So I mentioned the capital power plant. It serves this building. The capital, Supreme Court, Library of Congress. You can imagine these are mission critical buildings and so that's another advantage of district energy. It is highly reliable. So you can have district energy without combined heat and power. Combined heat and power is when you burn one fuel. Usually in the U.S. it's natural gas. It's really just like the jet engine on a plane. The gas goes in, it spins, a turbine generator makes electricity and then the heat that comes out of the back is recovered and that's used to make more power or heat and that heat is used to drive pumps or heat a city or a campus. And so what ends up happening is the district energy combined heat and power plant operates at efficiencies of 70, 80, even 90% of the fuel is converted to useful energy. Whereas a traditional central station power plant, a large coal-fired remote plant generally operates in the mid-30s. So two-thirds of the fuel that goes into a big power plant is dumped as heat. The heat is wasted in oceans, rivers, and lakes. What we do is we put that waste heat to use. And there's many configurations of combined heat and power. I don't have time to go into that. The other thing we do is we use thermal storage. Other speaker mentioned that. And what we do with thermal storage is we'll convert electricity or heat into tomorrow's use. So for instance in Copenhagen where 99% of the buildings are on district heating. You heard that right. 99% of the buildings in Copenhagen do not have a boiler. And in Denmark when the wind is producing electrons at night and the load is down, God bless you, they have electric boilers. They convert that negative price electricity into tomorrow's heat and then they use it the next day. They actually get paid to make heat with free electricity, thermal storage. And now the next trend that's really emerging are micro grids. So a micro grid is really a control setting where you have a source of power generation and then the ability to disconnect from the grid during an outage or a brownout. And you can control your local load. And that is really largely for resiliency purposes. So a lot of the micro grids operating in the U.S. aren't college campuses. Princeton has really become famous for their performance during Superstorm Sandy. Princeton maintained operations, provided a resource for first responders. And at Princeton as well they have a variety of sources. They have a 5.4 megawatt solar farm right on campus that they integrate. They have gas fired turbines. They have thermal storage. They kind of have really just about everything. But what's interesting about Princeton is that 150 buildings, about 14 million square feet on this small camp, small city really, on a hot day like this they would have a peak demand on the grid of 27 megawatts. Pretty sizable load. But now since they've integrated all of this technology and advanced control system and their micro grid, when it's 90 degrees outside and 80% relative humidity, their demand on the grid is two megawatts. Two. So you say, well good for Princeton, go Tigers. Actually the story is now there's 25 megawatts available in that community, in that economy, in those wires that Princeton isn't drawing and it really strengthens the grid on a region. And one of the things we're hearing from others in the community is, well gas, CHP, is that locking in greenhouse gas emissions? Is that really the right thing to do? Is that a bridge in the wrong direction? Well let me just tell you what Princeton tried. I'm not from Princeton but you think I was. I'm from Tufts actually and we just implemented our new CHP as well. But are you from Tufts as well? Okay. Any jumbos in the crowd? All right. We'll do the secret handshake in a minute. So at Princeton what they did is they tested biodiesel on their gas turbines. And this is really literally a jet engine, a GE jet engine. And they ran biodiesel in it and it ran smoother, more efficient and cooler. So in fact it liked a low carbon clean fuel. Now the price of biodiesel compared to the current price of natural gas, they're not in line. But if Princeton chose, they could convert their entire campus by opening a valve. 150 buildings would really switch to a low carbon fuel. Much easier than trying to convert 150 buildings, 150 boilers. So we're not locking in greenhouse gas emissions. We're really, by creating this aggregated load, are really creating opportunity. And Princeton made shoes to do that for environmental reasons, etc. So I want to conclude with sort of this movement towards micro grids. We don't have a technology problem. We don't have an engineering problem. We don't even have a financing problem. We have a regulatory challenge. But right now, you know, electric utilities are motivated to invest in rate-based. The only way they grow their earnings is by adding wires. And so that's their incentive. And what we're seeing, a couple of years ago, the utilities perceived micro grids as a threat and really destructive to earnings. But that's changed. Utility leaders are now looking at micro grids as a business opportunity, as an area to invest. And so we run the IDA as well as the Micro Grid Resources Coalition. We're interested in utilities owning and operating these, in addition to Princeton's and Biogen's and pharma companies. There's room for everybody. But really the challenge is getting, frankly, the rules right. So the utilities have a way to participate and they can earn. And we can make investment and not compete. And we can all buy more copper and really pretty cool wires. And, you know, so I think we are seeing, though, mayors want what Princeton has. Mayors want a cleaner, more resilient, more reliable grid. They want to be able to say to their prospective new tenants who are now asking not just, what's the price of power in your economy? Where's it produced? How clean is it? Who owns it? And how close is it to my facility? It's not just about price of power anymore. It's about all these other characteristics. And that's where Micro Grids, District Energy, CHP, really, I think, set the stage for a clean energy future. So thanks so much for your attention. Happy to take questions when the time is right. Thanks so much, Rob. And I think, as you can hear and see, we need all of these things because they are actually all very complementary to each other. And so to round out this panel, we're going to hear from Gerald Dever, who is the manager for regional transmission policy with Excel Energy. And Excel is a member of Wires. And we have been very privileged to do a lot of work with Wires over the years in terms of really looking at all the major issues that come up with regard to transmission policy. And we're also really glad to have Wires General Counsel here in the audience who also is a former chairman of FERC. So he knows a little bit about all this policy. So anyway. Take your way. Thank you. Thank you very much for giving us the time to speak. And by the way, I was in legal at the New York ISO during the 03 outage. And I can tell you that there is no color and even the 64 color Crayola box that would match the ash in the face of your vice president of transmission planning when he runs into the lobby screaming that we've lost 30,000 megawatts of load. So it was a very interesting time. It was. Thanks again. I'm also served as Wires Treasurer. Wires is, as you know, our industry loves painful acronyms. Ours may be an award winner. It's the working group for investment in reliable and efficient electric systems. Our website is wiresgroup.com. If you'd like to go there, I think you'd find a wealth of information, all of our past research papers, all of our past presentations at some of our own seminars. I think you'd find it very useful if you want to learn more about transmission. Wires was formed in 2006 by Jim Hecker, again, former FERC chair on the president Clinton and a few other astute individuals in our industry who foresaw the growing need and importance of a good transmission grid in this country. The members of Wires are focused on arguing for a robust 21st century North American transmission grid. We want a grid that continues to support our growing electrified economy that continues to provide cause benefits for in-use consumers and continues to support the growing technological advancements that we're all enjoying. The footprint of our membership spans the entire continent of the U.S. in parts of Canada. Our membership is broad. We have traditional investor-owned utilities, many public-owned utilities, independent competitive transmission developers, renewable energy developers. We have vendors, contractors, and other services providers from throughout our industry. We have, as members, four of our six United States regional transmission organizations. So our membership is broad, but we all share the same interest in transmission. Our activities, you've probably heard a lot of, we stage regularly here with the ESI an afternoon Wires University seminar where we describe the basics of transmission, current issues, and some of the challenges we face. They're always very well attended, usually the room is filled, just like now. We regularly, every year, we try to publish one or two significant white papers or research studies on the transmission issues we see important in that year. These, again, are on our website. What is a transmission grid? Well, a current buzzword in our industry is distributed energy resources. If you go back to the time when Thomas Edison and Nikolai Tesla were arguing over direct versus alternating current, every electric system in this country was distributed. They were very remote from each other. Once it was discovered that large amounts of electricity were better moved at high voltages, neighboring utilities began to interconnect to eventually the nationwide grid that we have today. The early benefits that they foresaw were the need to have avenues for emergency power if their own generator failed, if there was a cheaper generator next door that could benefit their customers, they wanted to have access to that, and those benefits continue to grow and they're the main benefits of the grid we have today and they continue to be in the future. Today's extra high voltage grid, those circuits of 300,000 volts and above really began to grow after World War II. The regionalization and the formation of power poles really started to gain force during World War II as the need for electricity grew for vital defense industries and this growth continues on today. The grid is really three parts. There's an eastern interconnection, a western interconnection with similar interconnections, but some between those two, and then the state of Texas, as you might imagine, is its own interconnection and is largely not attached to the rest of us. No disrespect intended. They actually lead the country and wind energy down there. The benefits of the grid again have been the ability to make cheaper generation available over a wider footprint. For example, the southwest power pool covers a cheaper source of generation in the eastern edge of it that can be moved at times of the day to customers in the western edge of it. Their transmission grid allows that. This is one of the very important benefits of a robust grid. Reliability is another important benefit. Again, as I mentioned before, the need for emergency generation unfortunately comes up for all of us from time to time. Every utility must maintain a certain percentage of generating reserves and this is a reliability rule that's enforced around the country. If you can get several utilities together and share in a joint reserve generator, it takes advantage of an economy of scale for your end-use consumers. The grid is also a very significant economic multiplier. Transmission providers in this country are investing between $12 and $16 billion a year in transmission projects each and every year. Excel Energy, for example, we've been deploying a billion dollars in transmission capital ourselves since 2012. We're continuing that to 2018 and beyond. This construction creates, as you might imagine, thousands of construction jobs, even more jobs down the manufacturing pipeline for facilities and parts for that construction. The grid is enabling, as you've heard, the explosion in the use of renewable energy in our country still supports untold thousands of traditional manufacturing jobs. You know, you sometimes hear, we hear at wires, well, we're all going to drive electric cars and have microgrids. Why do we need a transmission grid? Well, we think more than ever in the future, you're going to need a robust and strong transmission grid. Again, the advancements we're hearing about today, distributed energy, rooftop solar, microgrids. In our view, all of these have been made possible by a robust transmission grid through the addition of wind and solar energy. The economy continues to become more electrified. You know, in some states they have a heavy IT sector in their economy because our economy defends so much more and more on web and internet services. These large data service centers are large consumers of electric energy. In some states that are with a IT heavy sector service center, data service centers are consuming in excess of 15% of the electricity used in those states. So these industries you might imagine require steady and very reliable supplies of electric energy. Excel energy, I'm proud to say is an example in itself of the benefits of a strong grid. Excel energy is really four operating companies starting up in Wisconsin Minneapolis, Minnesota, excuse me, down through Colorado, down to Texas and New Mexico. We have been voted by the American Wind Energy Association for the last 12 years, the number one wind utility energy provider in the country. We operate about 20,000 miles of transmission lines in 10 states. We're in two RTOs and three Western entities. We're in the process of adding still another 3,400 megawatts of wind energy between down and the year 2020. We're finding while originally a company made a courageous commitment I think in the mid 2000s to begin to transition to renewable energy, the original purpose was largely environmental mitigation. Our leadership anticipated that the future costs of mitigating environmental damage might be even greater than what it cost back in the mid 2000s to be proactive in adding wind. We're finding now with the steadily decreasing cost of wind energy that we're going full speed ahead. We're not waiting around for the government for regulations and we're not alone. Every state cities are following the same path. We're going full speed ahead to add more wind and solar to our system and as a result recently we delivered over an average hour 64% of our energy in Colorado is from wind. We've had intra-hour periods in Colorado where up to 72% over 15 minute period of our delivered energy came from wind. We've also significantly reduced our carbon output. From 2005 to today, XL Energy system-wide has reduced its carbon emissions by 31%. We're on track to reduce those by 43% by 2021 and we are sure that we're on track by 2030 to have cut our carbon emissions system-wide by 60%. We're very proud of this and again we're not alone. Other utilities are doing this kind of objective. To do all this required us to make investment in our transmission system as I said. We've made investments in our control room operators to allow them to develop the complex procedures they've needed to operate our remaining fossil generation in a more flexible manner. This is really the big challenge when you're talking about intermittent energy. If you feel like it's a California system, California independent system operator for example struggles every afternoon with a duct curve. Many of you have probably heard of it. Google it and take a look at it. It does look like a duck. The challenge for them is every afternoon as all the rooftop solar they have in the state begin, the output begins to diminish, their need to bring back up, their traditional generators becomes just paramount. The problem is most of these traditional generators cannot be turned from idle to full throttle in minutes. They sometimes take hours to ramp up. This is one of the things that a flexible generating system can provide you to respond to. Thanks very much. Another very, very powerful, no pun intended, very powerful story. I encourage you all to follow up with these folks and if you haven't been to their booths, please go see them and if you've got questions follow up with them as we get ready for our next panel. So thank you all very, very much for being here. Great job everybody. Really, really appreciate it and you're all really important.