 Well, so thanks Chris for that introduction. He took seriously my threat that I have just as much material on him as he has on me, so so he didn't tell you the really good stories about about and I'll probably refrain from that too, but in any case it really it's great to be back here. It's there's nothing like a couple of years in Washington to make you realize what a special place this is and how nice it is to be able to live and work here and so So in the next few minutes, I'd just like to talk about sort of three things. I want to look back a bit at where we were I mean Sally did a very nice job of this and purses did as well, but I'll try to give you my Perspective on what's transpired in the 15 years since we we started GSEP and Look a bit at the world around us as well And the second thing is to consider where we stand in this global Transition that's ahead of us to make the world's energy systems much cleaner and to have much lower Greenhouse gas emissions and there's some some good news there And then the third is to imagine where the path might Take us in the future and what the roles of the the many G sub-supported universities and research teams might look like as well so so Chris Chris is right he we We competed for the project that ended ended up in at Princeton the carbon mitigation initiative and we didn't get it And so then we backed up and we said well, okay, what? Which what are we trying to do here? So? We we started a conversation actually the very first conversation was was slumber J But then we very quickly moved to to ExxonMobil as well and It was pretty clear that there was this recognition amongst all of us in one way or another that the the supply of affordable clean energy is really an essential foundation of modern societies and that that we That that universities should have a responsibility to be working on these and to to be trying to be to think about the bigger systems as well as Making progress on all the individual pieces it takes to transform all of that so there was a series of meetings and details discussions that really started in the fall of 2001 and then There was a lot of conversation here and it and actually it was It was very useful part of all of this. We're ready to announce the the formation of GSEP in the fall of 2002 And the goal was really just to bring together Talented research groups here at Stanford and at many other institutions around the world To work on this challenge of supplying the energy the world needs but with much lower greenhouse gas emissions Now I I can say with absolute authority that the conversations with the companies were hugely helpful and not just for the financial support that support of course was You know certainly got plenty of attention here on the campus and around the world I had a thousand emails the day after the the announcement was made my favorite of those was the guy who said 200 million dollars Tiny against the the size of the the challenge Invest your money with us and we'll return it ten times over and you'll be fine We didn't do that So in but in any case the what we were trying to do here was to think much more carefully about how to talent Harness the talents of university researchers to work on a pretty big challenge And to make that effort be more than the sum of the parts Now for for all those conversations at that time and in the years that followed the the original sponsor companies ExxonMobil, GE, Slumberger, and Toyota and then those that joined later DuPont and Bank of America They have my personal heartfelt thanks and And And I know the thanks of Stanford and all the institutions that were that became part of GCEP with their support So when with the agreement in place we went to work here to try to figure out how to attack the challenge I Remember saying at one point that I thought the toughest initial challenge was to get an account number out of the Stanford accounting system But we did eventually accomplish that And we settled on a process that that Sally described with workshops the talented members of the research community around the world To define areas where we thought we could make a difference with the scale of the investment that we could make And we issued calls for proposals in a variety of areas and but always kept a little aside for the proposal that Didn't fit in any of the areas, but was so interesting that we just had to To to do it. We did try to avoid violating the second law But but otherwise we were we were open to the idea that that we could make Make some bets that would be interesting and impossible to find in the standard risk averse federal review system So we built a peer review process to identify proposals based on high quality science or engineering science That had a pathway for impact on greenhouse gas emissions if the worst search was successful and that we're step out in some sense The idea was to encourage projects that might involve high technical risk Could but had could have big impact if successful And you've you'll hear about lots of so I gave a lovely review I'm about I want to steal those slides by the way Sally. So I warning you now the the There's just there's just been so much that's been accomplished We there are annual reports for all of this from the project hundreds of published papers and More presentations that can be counted at least by me and lots of patents. So But I think the real product of all of this has been the talented people who have flowed through these programs The leverage that comes from the students the postdocs the faculty members And both here and at the other institutions They multiply the impact of the support from GCEP many many many times over And I know it also that this turned out to be quite an education for me in the energy R&D landscape And that actually came in handy when I went to Washington If I was qualified for that job at all which I have some doubts It was GCEP's fault This was this was quite the the the useful Education for me and and I have to say a totally reliable joke at DOE was to say that 25 years of trying to lead an academic Institution where no faculty member ever did anything because some dean or Institute director Told them to was good practice for working in the federal government So Now I need to take just a moment and say a word or two about the people here at Stanford who worked so hard to make this possible Chris Edwards you know He was Signed on at the very beginning as he pointed out He most of the good ideas about how we figured out how to do stuff were his so Thanks for all that he he and I traveled the world one of our sponsor reps Bob Wimmer suffered through What must have been an hour-long conversation in a taxi in Kyoto about how we were going to manage the peer review system? I'm sure he thought we would we academics would never actually get to a decision But we did eventually get there Nancy Sandoval and Maxine limb joined us soon after we got going And they're still here contributing today Richard Sassoon of course joined us We we told him at the time that we were hiring him to do all the work that Chris and I were supposed to do but didn't want to And that that turned out to be right didn't it Richard? Yes, so turned out there was enough for all of us to do And we put together a small team came to be known as the a team the analysis team that To help us think about this whole question of where the research opportunities are and where you know Where should we try to engage? I mean it's pretty clear that you can't do everything and Then and Steve Jobs once said well deciding what not to do was is every bit as important as what you do do so So that included folks like Wes Herman and Emily hung and hallow both are then AJ Simon and Jenny Milne Jenny is still with us. The others are are doing interesting things in all kinds of places And then Lee Wood joined us from the administrative side to set up a new unit in the university That may not seem like a startup, but in fact it is and it took a lot of care and feeding in the early days And then of course the team continued to involve as we formed the pre-court Institute and tried to broaden our scope across the university as a whole and And so that team deserves my thanks for making it look like I accomplished something that was really done by all of us together So now some of us have moved on to other challenges including me But then adding Sally Benson and Arun Majumdar to the GCEP pre-court group illustrates nicely the important principle that Organizations do fine as long as the old folks are replaced by smarter new ones And so thank you to for for joining us as well And then finally of course nothing would have happened without the the enthusiastic support of the and Responsive the Stanford students and faculty. So where do we stand now? Well, I'll start by saying that really what Persistrell said GCEP transformed this university from an inch an energy standpoint We had lots going on it was widely scattered across the university Some of us knew each other Chris and I obviously didn't know each other I remember a conversation where the I was standing there with a group of these guys It's the same meeting and they were all like two feet taller than I am and and I kind of walked up and said That could I join the the conversation and Chris said well, it's a very high-level conversation Which established that he had enough of a sense of humor to be able to survive the the startup in the university But what G said did was to provide a vehicle for bringing people together in in interesting ways And we you know, we never said in any calls for proposals This needs to be interdisciplinary We didn't say that but what we did say was we wanted stuff that was step out and the way that groups Figured out how to get to the step out requirement here, which was going beyond what had been done in that research group for the last Decade or so all that's very important, but we wanted to try to occupy a different niche They often banded together with other Research groups to work on some problem that neither group thought they could pull off on their own and and that created a whole bunch of links and it did so Whether or not G set funded the project Because the teams had such a good time Figuring out how to propose this that if they got funded great if they didn't they were they were disappointed But we provided lots of feedback on the proposals and then they went back and either sometimes came back to us Sometimes got them funded somewhere else And so what this did was to provide a whole lot of cross-linking across the University In a way that really has been hugely productive and way beyond the the amount of support that jeeps have provided Directly so so that challenge putting that that challenge in front of a bunch of really talented creative people was exactly the right thing to do And then eventually of course we decided That it made sense to give this an organizational home and the pre-court Institute for Energy was the the result the way that Stanford has dealt with this question of How do you work on hard things that cut across the whole University has been to form? Interdisciplinary Institute, so we did the same thing in the area of the environment We have people all across the campus and reorganizing the whole University to bring them together seemed like that was hard So instead we've we've used the interdisciplinary Institutes as a way to bring people together so at that point of course I had this the challenge and Opportunity of a second organizational startup on campus Obviously, I don't learn lessons rapidly But that's a lot of work But it has been great fun to watch the pre-court Institute develop and I You know Jeff Kossoff was mentioned he and I spent our whole careers at Stanford ignoring institutional boundaries And this was another another case of it because so we we pull some parts of the the Energy research effort into the pre-court Institute and other parts kind of stayed where they were but we created a An executive committee that had all the people that led those programs On the executive committee whether or not they they were a formally a part of the Institute and then made that the group the Group that worked together and so again that kind of helped bring us all together And we have a lot going on here others Persis mentioned it Sally did as well So I won't go through my list of all the cool things that are going on But it really has been exciting to watch And I think it has tremendous Potential for the future and I would say that there's been lots of similar kinds of development at other institutions I've lost track of how many talks I gave at other universities about about the kinds of things that we were trying to do and and Certainly the funding that GSEP provided helped make that point at other universities as well I don't think GSEP deserves all the credit for that obviously, but I do think we had some influence And so I think we've made some significant progress on one of the goals of GSEP Which is to harness the talents of good university research teams to work in a focused way on the energy and climate challenge And we have made a lot of progress in the last decade here if you think about it the if you just look at the cost of Some of the renewables Wind powers down by about 40 percent over the last eight years Utilities scale solar down by 64 percent LED lights now are 94 percent cheaper than they were less expensive than they were Years ago that I think that says something about How to get to scale when the unit cost is small versus if you buy a lot of Light bulbs you don't buy a lot of nuclear power plants. So it's a different different scale of things But it does say something about the question of getting to scale in the market And in in a transition from coal to natural gas power generation this last year coal Was down to 30 percent from 50 percent eight years ago and and natural gas was 34 percent so So there's there's really been a big change in all of this and it's it's fun to see how that That will develop going forward So and if you think about for example appliances and vehicles And more and better efficiency When we also have a better Feeling for why that benefits all of us. So I think the transformation is is now well underway Things are measurably cleaner already, but we still have quite a lot to do So now the international situation has also evolved rapidly since GSEP was established in 2003 Chris Edwards and I traveled the world Meeting with university groups to encourage Proposals to GSEP We went to lots of institutions in Europe and Asia and we were welcomed everywhere absolutely But it was clear that opinions varied quite a bit as to the urgency of the work that we were Suggesting on reducing greenhouse gas emissions and in China for example Researchers were much more concerned about questions of air quality improvements than they were about CO2 emissions In fact, the truth was they didn't really want to talk about CO2 emissions I think it's astonishing that in here 14 years later China at least at the highest levels in the Chinese government has taken on a leadership role and I think their announcement of willingness to Come to Paris with a nationally determined contribution along with the US Help make all of that possible, which is that's not to discount the challenges that still remain there But the fact that the Paris agreement Was agreed to by 195 nations is I think a significant step forward think back to Copenhagen and where that didn't go This was a way to get forward and even Granting the varying degrees of ambition amongst the countries I think it's a significant step and I think it will continue to be an important vehicle Even if the US follows through on its announced intention to withdraw So what about the future? Well, it's good to pause once in a while and say great, you know, we actually made some progress But I'm here to say that there's a lot more to do What is it was it Sally that said the 36 billion tons more to do? Well, yeah, there's a there's a pretty big challenge I think we'll look back on this time as one of a real acceleration in the in the kind of progress that we Need to make but it's accelerating from a pretty small base. So we we need to go much further The developing world, of course, is less far along and seeing its activities as Profoundly linked to life in society. So there are some challenges there And gosh, there's the politics. I have no intention of trying to to describe all of that or Or resolve it, but I will say that We're in the midst of one of those disagreements now about how much and how fast to work on energy environment problems And you know, there's been for those of us who work on it. There's been some disturbing news of late deep budget Reductions for the science and energy Part of the US federal support is part of that But I'm reminded of a lesson that I learned pretty quickly in Washington and that was that the the president's budget is not necessarily what gets appropriated The Congress thinks they're in charge of the budget and guess what they are So so I think you know, there's something to be said for all of us being willing to talk about what's important And why the work needs to be done? And if that conversation involves members of Congress fair enough So what are we trying to accomplish anyway? It seems to me that the overall goal for the US energy system Is something that's efficient diversified clean secure and resilient economically competitive and environmentally responsible and we can do a huge amount with with Current technologies that are available, but that are making their way to scale But I think we also need to take advantage of the creativity of folks that are here for more innovation and Indeed economies that that are are good at the energy innovation because it's woven through The basis of modern societies those societies will be better able to compete in the economics of the world And so I think that's a responsibility that all of us have some role to play in Energy is supplied and used as a commodity So costs and markets and competition do matter and indeed if we're going to get to scale They we have to do it on the basis of cost you can subsidies can work for a while, but you really do have to to get to to scale if you're going to and the the International Energy Agency says there's something like a 60 trillion dollar international energy market to be captured between now and 2040 and And at least 15 billion 15 trillion of that will be clean energy kinds of things So I think the US should be in a position to lead the way in that market and that we have the talent and capacity to do it If we can support the work appropriately. So, what do we do? Well, first of all We remember that we're in this for the long haul We really do have to take the long view here, but we also need to retain a sense of urgency Changing human systems and economies to interact in a more benign way with the environment does not happen overnight Although we've seen pretty good progress at a surprising rate recently and putting off the changes We need to make to protect health and security will make the transition harder and more expensive Second we just need to recognize that there's just this wonderfully huge opportunity space for innovation You know Sally talked about a bunch of the areas energy storage chemistries a Modern grid I probably spent more time trying to persuade Congress to invest more in in the grid Than any other topic I worked on and there were lots of different ones in Washington You know, we need to be able to accommodate the intermittent Renewables distributed generation be resilient to weather insults and forest fires and and cyber attacks We've been reminded of that in Puerto Rico and California here And we need more efficient water purification and better sensors for methane emission reduction We need to reduce the cost of carbon capture and storage and we need to focus on wide-ranging energy efficiency and absolutely everything we do We've left ourselves a lot of room to do better on energy efficiency in this country So we need to put together the the fundamental science of catalysis and nanostructure materials to make devices that range From batteries to fuel cells to chemical reactors better And we need to develop the next generation of advanced scientific computing that will support all the other disciplines and To tackle the many challenges of complex systems of systems that support modern societies But the good news is that there's a huge well of human Creativity to be tapped to work on these challenges. I just know that's true from watching the students Who come to us here at Stanford? Investing across a portfolio of technologies of systems of markets of time scales for application and funding sources and Also of research players is an essential element of progress at the kind of rate we need to demonstrate So fostering a seamless interaction of fundamental and applied energy research is fully consistent with the way GSEP has operated and we need to take that as a model of how to go forward We should continue to build on that strength here and elsewhere And the kind of work that has been done with GSEP support is every bit as important now as it was when we started And we need to stick with that effort going forward And third we should remember that innovation isn't a single event of invention At least most of the time it isn't Instead, it's a it's a fabric of ideas devices technology regulation markets consumer preferences and behavior, that's the hard part and scale of deployment Progress on hard problems as faster when we bring talented people together with very different skills and perspectives together to attack the challenges in new ways and Asking hard questions of very inventive people is an essential component of that So I'll stop here, but I'll say at the end that there's an urgent need to work on global problems of energy in the environment at a truly vigorous pace We humans can be incredibly inventive when we make up our minds to work on a challenge And I think we'll look back as I said as on this time is one that reflects a real acceleration in the pace of deployment of cleaner human systems So let's pause and say thank you to the companies that supported G-SIP take a minute to appreciate what has been accomplished so far by so many talented Students and faculty as well as the companies in their own efforts and then charge ahead We can do this. So let's get to work. This is like class, you know, you just need the first student to Ask a question and then the dams broke it Why why not continue the project? I mean that provides a vehicle which has Structure and and energy behind it. Yeah, well, we are we are continuing. We were just changing the format a bit So it's this is this absolutely is going to continue The sponsor group will change and the format will change some but but but we're certainly continuing And we're continuing to build and support the pre-court Institute. So we're not stepping back in any way Some years ago, I think about halfway through G-CEP's career the state California did a study about what we need to get to the kind of 80% less CO2 and As I recall the results they got about 60% they could see the technologies and the economics getting about a 60% cut But that last half going from 40% to 20% was going to require new things Has G-CEP's analysis or others you did at DOE Confirmed that or and are the technologies that you're targeting Fitting into doing that last half of the reduction. So the answer to both of those questions is yes that that right toward the end of the time I was in Washington, we took a look at The what would happen if we just met all the GC the current DOE goals for technology cost reductions mostly and and technical improvements and And that that made quite a significant Contribution, but if we really wanted to go further we had to do more we could we could see a pathway for pretty deep Carbon reductions associated with electric power generation, but it was quite a bit harder for transportation and For industry and then in both of those settings. We really needed Some more advances, I mean you could see lots of areas to work on but we certainly needed to do more I think that's still true in in California and it it both illustrates the the opportunity and the challenge for People that do the kind of work that's done here and at the other institutions. She said has supported What can you say about the most pressing issues in energy and climate in the developing countries and opportunities? Well, I think the first challenge is access That it's we really need to be thinking about how to provide Access to to what all of us take completely for granted this electricity and and all the and Air conditioning and all the refrigeration the the modern energy services that that we all take for granted The second challenge is that the and maybe it's an opportunity as well that particularly if you look in Africa for example And when we have we have a grid here. That's resilient. Well except for Puerto Rico and it We can get things going again in many places in Africa. There is no grid so so that's a place where Distributed generation micro grids use of even some power India's another version of this Can really improve lives in a in a big way at at modest cost for now even as the systems are built going forward and there are plenty of of sort of Political and regulatory and rule of law challenges to be addressed at the same time there So I don't discount the the magnitude of those challenges But I think we have a responsibility as a world to try to work on them and to and to make some progress This is the traveling salesman problem. So which which which is passive I'm hi I have a question for you about the kind of global politics of energy You were talking about how China you felt was able to take the lead in a different way than the United States currently is I worked in the auto industry and it's interesting how China was able to unilaterally Provide fuel economy requirements for their vehicles concerned with air pollution. Do you Wanted to ask a kind of question about which is there a style of governance that may be more effective for improving? climate policy Where didn't we prohibit the hard questions? these well You know, I think actually I mean if you look across the spectrum of Europe in the United States and then the I don't know the chaotic democracies like India and the US Or China, you know, I think they're their existence proves for making progress in all of them and They're you know in some ways it's easier to work on some problems in one setting than then and others I don't think there's there's any Obvious advantage of one or another and I don't want to pay to pick a rosy a picture of China because I mean China is busy investing in all kinds of Renewable technologies, but they're also in the one belt one road out there flogging Culp-fired power plants around the world and building more than a few of those themselves. So so It's you know like like here. It's not it's not simple And the human systems that we used to organize societies All have to wrestle in one way or another with the same kinds of problems China I think I said that that I came away from that trip that Chris and I meant did in 2003 thinking that the only real hope for for engaging China at that point was air quality Concerns and I think that's a big part of the motivation. That's that's moving them now and for very good reason I mean in some ways their cities now or like ours Pittsburgh and Houston where I grew up and LA were like in the mid-1960s that the air was really terrible so I Would point back to that time as one where where we had a dispute in this country over air and water quality that Really echoed many of the same kinds of Conversations we're having now about the climate challenge And what happened then was of course that California said well heck with you feds We're choking to death. We have to do something and some more states went along and to Over-simplify a big complicated process eventually industry was in Washington saying look 50 sets of rules not okay Give us give us some rules some certainty that all of us comply and we'll do it And so the Clean Air Act passed and and here we are, you know 47 years later We haven't solved every air quality problem, but gee it's a lot better than it was So I think the the message is that you start you work on the things that That makes sense economically at the time and you stick with it over time and and we can make progress It's hard to do overnight. These are big systems But I think you can deal with that in almost any of the the government systems if you have the right political will to do good morning, I Wanted to point out that the city of New York has a an aggressive goal of reducing their Greenhouse gas emissions by 80% by the year 2050 a large part of which will be accomplished by the deep energy retrofit of over 90% of built Existing stock in the city of New York and I was wondering what you can tell me about the university's efforts and understanding how we most cost effectively and Yeah cost effectively learn how to Retrofit our existing building stock to reduce that use of energy. Yeah This is actually a problem that we've had some experience with here at Stanford And I'm certainly aware of the of the New York effort. It's a hugely big Challenge given the the age of the building stock there, but Stanford we have a Stock of buildings some of which were built a long time ago as well And we've just in the last few years revamped our energy system here on campus completely So we it's based on the idea that all year round we we take Thermal energy out of buildings with cooling and at the same time put thermal energy back in in Heating somewhere else and that if you use heat pumps to take the the thermal energy out of the Chilled water stream and push it back into the the hot stream You don't buy a whole heck of a lot of fuel for a long time now You have to have electricity to do this But if you also work on which we've we've done on purchasing cleaning electricity and installing our own Renewables component there then we the the the CO2 reduction from this just this campus is really quite remarkable At the sides it's close to 70% from our peak And it's well below the 1990 levels for the university. So so it just says that there's a there's a big target there Some of the lots of energy efficiency things have negative amortized costs That is they pay them pay for themselves But others the kind of deep retrofit that New York is talking about it's going to cost actual money. So We do have a team here working on energy efficiency and and buildings. So I Grant you that it's a big area with with lots of potential to go forward Okay, hi, I'm Warren Lenny. I'm with the drawdown project Paul Hawkins group and also the healthy climate initiative I just returned from the forest fires in Sonoma County helped a lot of friends family evacuate I think it's clear that just reducing emissions getting down Even by 36, you know mega ton gigatons We have to actually start drawing down some of the CO2 in the atmosphere reduce these hurricanes and potential forest fires DC that this would be the new emphasis of GCEP to Actually do a lot more Drawdown technologies, which I know we're all working on right now, but that could be I think the real push that we could provide Yeah, so some of the technologies that we're talking about and thinking about particularly on the biological side Offered the opportunity to do some drawdown I'm I remain unconvinced that That capture of CO2 directly out of the air makes any sense with mechanisms other than plants just because the the thermodynamic cost of working with that low concentration is And and and those devices don't ever self-assemble the way plants do So so I think the biological pathway for direct air capture is is one possibility But but there there are many many many other options and they're certainly included in the technology ranges of technologies that we consider And GCEP really works on the technology side, but the pre-court Institute works across the the full spectrum So there there's plenty there to do and the drawdown project I think is I'm just been contemplating how to use that in my my my sophomore seminar with the That deals with the technology in the greenhouse. So thanks for all the work that was done there. That's very helpful