 Well, let me start by introducing myself. My name is Arun Majumdar. I'm the co-director of the Precourt Institute for Energy, along with Sally Benson, who you're going to meet soon. And I want to take this opportunity to thank Secretary Schultz, Perry, Rice, and Chu to formally host this forum on our behalf. And I also want to take this opportunity to thank Jay, Jay Precourt, for being the visionary to bring us all together. And I want to thank all of you for joining us. We have been waiting for a long time to have you here, and especially the ones who have traveled internationally. I know you're going to have some jet lag during the day. Our job is to keep you awake. And I promise you a great program. Let me start by posing some questions that you may have in your mind. And those questions perhaps are, why are we here together? Why now? What do we want to achieve at this forum? And most importantly, what kind of future do we want to create together? Let me also start by saying, I wish I was entering college as a freshman today. I think that's the only way I would be 40 pounds lighter and looking like that. Because the next 30 to 40 years will be the most exciting period in the field of energy. And to appreciate the future, let me start by talking briefly about the past. Around 250 years ago, when the Revolutionary War was being fought by the founding fathers of this nation, there was a peaceful revolution taking hold in our society. We now call that peaceful revolution the Industrial Revolution. The Industrial Revolution transformed the world. It introduced a level of prosperity and quality of life that could not have been imagined 250 years ago. We now live in electrically lit and air-conditioned homes. We sit in our living rooms and watch Usain Bolt run in the Olympics. Our life expectancy has gone up by a factor of two over the last 250 years. We have so much better health care, and we have high-speed travel. And not to forget, we have the world's information on our fingertips. And this has all been enabled by sourcing distribution and use of energy. If you take the energy away, all of this falls apart. So talking about high-speed travel, and many of you have taken that to come here, just to remind everyone, this is how we used to travel in the past, 250 years ago. Maybe one, maybe five, at the most 10 horses. Today, we can put 100 horses in the engine of a car and drive to the grocery store. Or we can put 100,000 horses in a jet engine and fly you around the world in 24 hours that would have taken months in the past. The energy sector should be congratulated for this enormous success. The Industrial Revolution was all about going from horsepower to horsepower. And the energy sector has shaped the 19th and the 20th centuries. It is so embedded in our lives today that access to affordable energy is a matter of national security. Now, despite the success, we all stand at the threshold of a major energy transformation at a colossal scale, an industry that is roughly $10 trillion a year. And this transformation will shape the economy, the environment, and the international security and geopolitics of the 21st century. Every nation, region, business, industry ought to pay close attention to this because it will affect everyone. That is why we're here today. So what is changing? A few game changes. Game changer number one. Innovations in horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing of shale formations have led to an unconventional oil and gas revolution. 30 years ago, this was an outlandish idea. 30 years of persistence, R&D, and implementation, and it is now a game changer. And there is still plenty of room to improve. It has made North America self-reliant and has changed the global landscape of oil and gas. The low cost of natural gas and abundance has reduced the cost of electricity, and it is reviving the US chemical industry. The global impact of this is so profound and complex that we don't understand the full extent of it today, which is why at Stanford, we launched the natural gas initiative to research all issues related to unconventional oil and gas, including its environmental impact. Game changer number two, lithium-ion batteries. R&D over the last 10 years into materials to store more energy has reduced the cost by a factor of five to six that could not have been predicted 10 years ago. Within the next five to seven years, the cost of a battery pack will likely reach $100 a kilowatt hour. Why is that important? Because at that cost, electric vehicles will achieve cost and range parity with gasoline cars without subsidies. And you give it another 15 to 20 years and we're likely to see deep penetration of EVs around the world, and with no tailpipe emissions, EVs will reduce air pollution, which is a major problem in many cities around the world. Now, after 100 years of gasoline-based automobiles, this is a tectonic shift. You add to this mobility services and autonomous driving to this mix, and you're looking at a colossal paradigm shift. And there's still plenty of room to innovate. So here at Stanford, we are in the process of launching the StorageX initiative to accelerate laboratory discoveries into industrial-scale solutions. Now, to power the EVs, we need the electricity grid. But here's the challenge. The electricity sector and the auto sector never had to interact in the past. Now they have to. Today, it's only about in a five million EVs where there are one billion automobiles around the world. But here in California, we have about 5% penetration, and at 5% penetration, EV charging may be manageable, but when the penetration is more than 50%, we could have a real challenge on our hands. So the bottom line is this is a game changer, not in one sector per cost, but across multiple sectors. Game changer number three, lithium-ion batteries, that was game changer number two, number three, modern renewables. Carbon-free electricity generation from wind and solar are becoming the cheapest of all sources in the levelized cost. They're not 24-7, but even then, they're the cheapest source of generation. It is therefore not surprising that they have received globally about 70% of the new investments in the power sector. It is still a small fraction of the electricity market, but it is growing rapidly. And it is also bringing down the price of electricity, and it's undercutting the traditional sources, such as coal, nuclear, and sometimes even natural gas. Can these traditional sources innovate fast enough to compete in the market, or will they become stranded assets, jeopardizing trillions of dollars of past investments? What will that do to the financial sector? Well, these are the questions that we're facing today. There are no easy answers, but these challenges are gonna get more acute in the future. Bottom line, this is a tectonic shift in the electricity market. Talking about the grid, which is where all of this is connected, we are still living in the architecture and the paradigm of the Tesla Edison grid. It was never designed to integrate solar and wind and fluctuating renewables. So to manage these fluctuations, we need some kind of stored energy, either in the form of gas or hydroelectric or batteries. And the question is, how do we minimize the cost of these balancing assets? So this is on one side of the grid, this is the volatility on one side, and you add to this the volatility of EV charging on the other side and suddenly realize that the grid faces a double whammy in uncertainty. So how do we manage and coordinate all these distributed assets that are volatile so that the grid is stable, it's affordable, 24-7, and reliable? The future of the grid is not just energy. The future of the grid is also synergy. And the digital world, we are surrounded by 50 years of innovation in the digital revolution right around here that Tesla and Edison never had. And the digital world can provide the synergy to reduce the cost, increase reliability, and be the conductor of the orchestra of millions of distributed assets for energy. And to enable this transformation, Stanford has launched the Bits and Watts initiative, Bits for the digital and Watts of course for the energy to catalyze innovations including how to plan and operate a scalable EV charging infrastructure. So if you step back for a moment from all of this, you realize that we are at the intersection of multiple game-changing innovations. We are witnessing not one, not two, but three different, and sorry, I forgot to mention the fourth one, LED lighting, which has lit up the world where electricity has not reached in the past. And what is remarkable is that all four are happening simultaneously and at unprecedented speed. And if you think this is fast and a lot, we need to move even faster and farther. Why? Because the reality is, since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, the fuel mix is such that the Industrial Revolution was largely based on fossil fuels. The scale is so enormous that despite the gains made by carbon-free sources, fossil fuels contribute roughly 80% of the total primary energy. Our lives depend on fossil fuels and any disruption to the supply will be disruption to our lives. We can't just drop it in a minute. But science has made it abundantly clear that greenhouse gas emissions, due to the use of fossil fuels, is causing global warming. How much warming? One may ask. Well, since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, the global average temperature rise is slightly more than one degree Celsius. But the averages can be misleading because the warming is not evenly distributed. So here's some data. The Arctic is warming much faster than the other parts of the world. The air temperature rise about three to four degrees Celsius on an average and the sea ice has gone down by 20%. A new ocean has been created within a lifetime. And this is not just sea ice. We have lost almost 4 trillion tons of land ice in Greenland and 2 trillion more in Antarctica. This is affecting both the poles. But one may say these are the poles, who lives there? Well, here is now the temperature distribution during summertime averaged around the world. Some summers are hotter, some are cooler. And the distribution is moving only in one direction. And the tails of the distribution are reaching four to five times the standard deviation much more often than in the past. And the tails of the distribution, not the average, but the tails of the distribution have a disproportionate effect on our lives, on our feedstock, on our agriculture, on our livestock, et cetera. And if you think that this is only the Arctic and this is only the averages, think again. Because over the last couple of years, we have seen some all-time highs, temperature. This is coming to a neighborhood near you. So since you are at a university, here's a pop quiz. And this is, there won't be any grading, don't worry. There's no pressure, no all-nighters. But I'm gonna put up some numbers and I want you to think about it as to what they mean. The first one I've already given you the clue is one. This is one degree Celsius. Roughly the temperature rises at the beginning of the industrial deletion. This is the average and we know with that as the average, the tails of the distributions are pretty bad. The second number is two. And that is two degrees Celsius. We kind of had agreed upon this that if you have one degree temperature rise, the distribution, the tail is pretty bad. With two degrees it can be really bad. And the tail may be wagging the dog then. The next number is 800. This is not 800 degrees Celsius, don't worry. This is not Venus. If the temperature, if you want to keep the temperature rise, average temperature rise below two degrees, we have 800 gigatons of CO2 that we can emit. This is the headroom that we have. The next number is 40. And that is roughly the rate of emissions per year, 40 gigatons of CO2 per year. And the final number is obvious, is 20. That if we keep the emissions constant from now onwards and we only emit 800 gigatons to keep our temperatures below two degrees, we have 20 years left. Now, whether we believe in the details of the science of climate change and all, I hope we can all agree that at the very least, we face some serious risk of disruption to human lives. And we have the next 20 years to address this problem. In the words of Reverend Martin Luther King, we need to innovate with the fierce urgency of now to address this risk. And when we have risk, normally in our lives, we take an insurance policy. So what is our insurance policy for the future? The first part of the insurance policy is research, R&D, to create new options, to reduce the cost, and to take a systems view to find where the gaps are and optimize it. So we have heard about the game changes of unconventional gas in batteries and renewables. These are all necessary, but they're not sufficient. What else do we need? We need a few more game changes. And these are, if you have renewables in the grid, how about multi-day grid scale storage at one-tenth the cost of lithium-ion batteries? We don't know how to do that today. How about small modular nuclear plants at half the construction cost of what we have today? When the economies and the emerging economies are growing and it's hot, people want air conditioning. The demand is going up, but the refrigerants that we use have a global warming potential 2,000 times that of CO2. And it's going to be phased out. So we need to innovate to figure out how to do air conditioning with zero global warming potential. We obviously want zero net energy buildings, but how about zero net energy buildings at zero net cost? Because that's the way it will scale. And scaling and energy is everything. We need to decarbonize industrial heat. We need to reimagine how to make steel, concrete and petrochemical process to decarbonize it. And finally, our food and agriculture sector has a large footprint of CO2. We need to decarbonize that as well. And if you think that is enough, we need more. We need to have a global carbon management at the gigaton scale, which is capturing carbon, putting it in the ground, harnessing the photosynthetic process to absorb the CO2 from the atmosphere and put it deep in the ground so that it doesn't go back again. And then using the carbon-free energy that we have, the cheap carbon-free energy to convert CO2 into chemicals and fuels and so that we close the cycle. And we need to do this cost effectively and at gigaton scale. Folks, we have a gigaton scale problem and we need gigaton scale solutions. Megatons is not gonna do it. And those industries that are at the gigaton scale today, such as oil and gas, have a historic opportunity to provide the stewardship. Research is necessary but not sufficient. The other part of the insurance policy is policy. To enable solutions to scale because scaling is absolutely critical but with predictable long-term signals. We need innovations in designing markets for electricity, for oil, for gas and for carbon. And here at Stanford, we have the Schultz-Stevensson Energy Task Force that has proposed an innovative policy, a revenue-neutral carbon tax. It puts a price on carbon but gives the money back to the people as a carbon dividend so that it is not a fiscal drag on the economy. We need innovations in financial policy to bring trillions of dollars of long-term low-cost capital to the energy sector. Here at Stanford, we just launched the Sustainable Finance Initiative to enable this to happen. And sometimes there are some market failures. Such as an energy efficiency. And we need some sensible regulations like appliance standards, building performance, measured performance standards, as well as fuel efficiency standards to reduce the cost and reduce the emissions. Now, if you step back for a moment and think about where we are, we talked about the three or four game changes that are already going on and all the game changes that we need. And we soon realized that the fundamentals of the energy sector are changing. And at this moment, I'm reminded of a legendary CEO who is to teach at the GSB, the business school out here, a local CEO who recently passed away and that is Andy Grove. And Andy wrote a book called Only the Paranoid Survived because he went through one of these transformations. And in that book, he coined the term a strategic inflection point. And he said, this is the point in the life of a business or an industry when the fundamentals are about to change. The change can mean an opportunity to rise to new heights, but it may just as likely signal the beginning of the end. So I believe in the energy sector, we are reaching the strategic inflection point. Whether you take the unconventional oil and gas revolution or the electrification or transportation or renewables or the two degree Celsius, you take one, two, three or all four of them combined and you realize that the fundamentals are changing. Now, you cannot shut down the traditional approaches because it will disrupt people's life. You cannot do that. And yet somehow we need to pivot to a new path that is, and we have to do that simultaneously. Now, going backwards in time to look for data may not be the recipe for success because if you were to create an EV charging infrastructure, there was nothing in the past. So what do we do? How does one move forward? I talked about research and I talked about policy, both are important. What else is needed? This is the time to experiment. Experiment with new ideas, with new solutions, with new markets, leveraging new technologies and look for first adopters. This is the time to take some calculated risks and when you do that sometimes we fail but to fail quickly and learn from the failures and to engage with each other so that we don't repeat each other's mistakes. This is the time where competitors, past competitors can become your partners and new competitors can arise from the left field. One needs to be flexible and agile and engage to look for these patterns changing. This is the time for startups with a vision and execution but also for scale-up. Start-up is not enough. We need the scale-up and we need that community to engage and most importantly we need talent and capital. What I'm describing to you is the process of innovation and this is the ethos and DNA of Silicon Valley. That is why we're here and Stanford is the genesis of Silicon Valley and continues to be one of the catalysts for this region. And at this forum we have an innovation showcase that's gonna start at lunchtime, go on to the reception just to give you some illustrative examples of what's going on of this ecosystem. And one may ask how did this happen at Stanford and why does it continue? What's the culture like? And I'm reminded of the immortal words of Mrs. Jane Stanford who in a 19 or two speech reminded the purpose of Stanford and she said the public at large and not alone the comparatively few students who can attend this university are the chief and ultimate beneficiaries of this foundation. And she went on to say that while the instruction offered must be such as will qualify the students for personal success and direct usefulness in life they should understand that it is offered in the hope and trust that they will become thereby of greatest service to the public. And it is with this sense of purpose that we have gathered here today and this sense of purpose is not just for Stanford. It is for all of us and especially for the next generation. So at this forum we have students not just from Stanford but also we've invited students from some of our peer institutions. They're here and in the future we wanna expand this to students from all over the world. It is after all their future that we'll be discussing and they ought to have a say in it. They will be the leaders of the future. Now they can compete in the athletic field but when it comes to serving the public we're all in it together. And that public by the way is all of humanity. These are the 10 billion people in the 21st century because everyone needs energy to live a comfortable and prosperous life. It's at the very root of our modern life. And we need to make it sustainable and it can only be sustainable if we have, if we ensure three securities. First is economic security that is it needs to be affordable, reliable and ensuring economic growth and prosperity. It has to ensure international security and ensure environmental security such as a clean environment. Now if you ignore one of these it will not be sustainable in the long term. All three have to be met. Now if we could achieve this vision that would be transformational for all of humanity. It would be nothing short of a new industrial revolution. The last one took 250 years and we have 20 to 40 years to do this one. So we need to overcome some barriers and accelerate things. Now when we talk about technologies like solar and batteries the world is relatively flat. Whether you buy the solar panels out here or in China or in India the world is relatively flat. But when we talk about implementation on the ground which requires finance, markets, governance and policies the world is far from flat. It is pretty heterogeneous. That is why we are here today. To learn from each other what the challenges are what has worked, why, where and how and what has not worked. We need to engage so that we don't repeat each other's mistakes and learn what has worked. The innovation ecosystem thrives on diversity of ideas or people and cross-fertilization of those ideas. At Stanford we are trying to form that community within the process for the sustainable energy future. That is why we are here today. We need to spark the creativity, the collaboration and the learning and the leadership to achieve this. I have talked about a few initiatives that we have started at Stanford but there's more, much more. And tomorrow morning my colleague Sally Benson is gonna talk about a few things more. So stay tuned. But the main work starts after the forum. And I urge you to stay involved and engaged with us. I hope I've answered some of the questions that I posed for you right in the beginning. We have a terrific lineup of speakers and panels and I'm sure the dialogue will be very engaging and stimulating so please enjoy the forum. Thank you.