 Welcome, everyone, to our second panel this morning at the Expo. I hope you've already had a chance to be in the Expo room, but if not, hopefully you will get around and meet all of our wonderful exhibitors and take advantage of this wonderful opportunity to learn a lot about different technologies, different companies, different initiatives that are occurring across our country. So on this panel, we are going to, again, be looking at policy issues, and we have several people that we're going to hear from, starting with Zoe Berkley, who is the Manager for Federal Policy with the Business Council for Sustainable Energy, BCSE. Zoe? Thanks, everyone, for being here this morning. I'm going to give you a little information about who BCSE is, and then a transition to explaining our Sustainable Energy in America Factbook. It's a publication we put out for the last three years, and it is intended to be a sort of baseline for policy discussion, and I'm going to use it as sort of a baseline for not only my remarks, but hopefully this panel, because we have a number of awesome other panelists that can drill down a little deeper into the different sectors that the Sustainable Energy in America Factbook covers. So about BCSE, BCSE is a coalition of companies and trade associations from the energy efficiency, renewable energy, and natural gas sectors. The Council advocates for policies at the state, national, and international levels. Did you take your head? Can you still not hear me? I will put it in my mouth. State, national, and international levels that increase the use of commercially available clean energy technologies, products, and services, support affordable, reliable power system, and reduce air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. BCSE was founded in 1992, and for the 20th year anniversary, our Board of Directors decided they wanted to do something to commemorate the occasion and had been discussing various data gaps in their policy discussions and wanting really a tool that they can turn to to show policy makers and journalists what is really going on in the state of play of clean energy. So thus, the Sustainable Energy in America Factbook was born, and we've put it out for three years now in partnership with Bloomberg New Energy Finance. So a little bit about the Factbook. The report is quantitative and objective, intended to provide policy makers, journalists, and industry professionals with up-to-date, accurate market intelligence on the plethora of clean energy issues facing not only our country but the world today. It focuses on renewables, efficiency, and natural gas and aims, as I said, to fill important data gaps that have been identified, particularly investment flows by sector and contribution of distributed energy. Its current through 2014, wherever possible, and contains the latest information on new technology costs. The Factbook in previous years was a fairly dense 100-plus-page, text-heavy document, but this edition, we transitioned it to be much more graph-focused and visually focused. And usually, this presentation is better suited to have those that I can refer to and I'm going to do my best without not having those. But I encourage you, even on your smart phones and tablets, to check out the Sustainable Energy in America Factbook and look at the different slides, even as I speak. This year also has some new coverage and analyses for the first time on U.S. energy productivity, new hydro-storage policies by geography, smart meter prices, of course, the EPA's clean power plan and the effects that's going to potentially have and global comparisons of energy costs. So I'll give you some kind of high-level key summary findings of this year's Factbook. As far as long-term trends go, there is evidence of a transformation over the 2007 to 2014 period. U.S. carbon emissions from the energy sector have dropped 9 percent and total U.S. investment in clean energy over that same period totaled $386 billion and actually 52 billion of that occurred in 2014, putting the U.S. second at the number two spot in the world. Natural gas and renewables generated more than 40 percent of U.S. electricity in 2014 and energy productivity of the U.S. economy increased 11 percent over that period 2007 to 2014. 2014 was a notable year in terms of two key developments that occurred in the backdrop. The U.S. economy, of course, has been regaining steam and we all remember earlier on in the year oil prices collapsed. In 2014, the Factbook saw some deviations from long-term trends but each of those had a sort of quote-unquote silver lining. Cold generation and carbon emissions were up from 2012 levels actually but a significant portion of the coal fleet is expected to retire soon. Energy efficiency policy has been slowing but EPA's proposed clean power plan would ask for a larger role of those policies and new policies to play a bigger role. The broader U.S. ecosystem, though, is preparing for a sustainable energy future and we saw that with some critical new policies that were introduced in 2014 such as the proposed EPA's clean power plan and I'm sure everyone in this room knows that the final rule is expected even as early as the end of this month, some say August but I guess it's always a waiting game. There was also the U.S. China pledge that came out that was notable and actually just recently there was another bilateral agreement made between the U.S. and Brazil and of course back at the state level the New York states were forming the energy vision or New York Rev came out in 2014. There was also more capital that flowed to financial vehicles aimed at sustainable energy development such as yield, COS and green bonds. I'm going to take a quicker, deeper look in the U.S. electricity generation by fuel type. Longer-term and larger structural trends were seen as the U.S. power sector is gradually decarbonizing. As I said coal plants are being retired and Bloomberg actually expects that 2015 could be a record year for retirements. Approximately 23 gigawatts are expected to come offline and natural gas and renewables are gaining ground. As far as investments in clean energy go, clean energy globally increased for the first time in three years and is near its 2011 peak. Among the largest drivers of these investment figures are categories of asset financing for wind and financing for small distributed capacity, mainly rooftop solar. In 2014 the U.S. was the world's second largest market for new wind installations behind China and third largest for solar behind both China and Japan. So a little deeper dive on energy efficiency and then renewables for EE, utility spending on EE remains the fastest growing framework driving investment in this space. This is driven primarily by state EERS targets and decoupling legislation. BNF expects that utility spending will continue to increase if more states adopt EERS targets in response to EPA's clean power plan pending the final rule. U.S. renewable energy generation from non-hydro renewables surpassed hydropower generation for the first time this year which was notable and non-hydro renewables made up about 7% of U.S. electricity in 2014 up from just 2.5% in 2007. 2014 was also notable for that Congress made no major energy decisions in 2014 say for our last gasp approval of a tax extenders package in December and we unfortunately might see kind of a little bit more of the same of that this year but there are some kind of more recent developments that will dictate how the 2015 or 2016 Factbook ends up with the comprehensive energy bill currently being worked on by both the House and Senate and the interest in clean energy tax provisions in there so I encourage you all to come by our exhibit table at the in the main hall we have a lot of information as well as this lovely infographic that you can see in all its giant glory in front of our table and there's just a lot of information and we encourage all of you to to use it to your best abilities and there's slideshows on our website bcse.org as well that we hope are useful so thank you great so don't leave home with or don't leave here without your infographic right okay all right so we are next going to turn to Deborah Stein Dr. Stein is a professor of the practice engineering and and of the practice engineering and public policy department and she is part of this Scott Institute for energy innovation at Carnegie Mellon University where she is really dealing with a lot of non-market factors and emerging energy technologies Deborah welcome thanks so thank you very much for being here so the I've sort of passed this around this is our one of our little cards here so hopefully you got a copy of this handout that we have and so I'm going to kind of go be going through that so the Scott Institute for energy innovation Carnegie Mellon is meant to bring together all the energy activities across the campus so we do everything from you know like architecture public policy as well as of course obviously my field of engineering and I thought what I would focus on today is non-market factors and kind of explain what those are so just to kind of give you an idea about what we have at our table here this is a guide that's on managing variable variable energy resources for renewable electricity and it shows like policies that can be put in place to reach 20 30 percent a lot of them are very technical kinds of changes more than even policy kinds of changes then this is a guide which talks about different energy technologies at CMU that are on the marketplace I'll be talking about some of those during our presentation today Carnegie Mellon is number one actually among the major universities and spinouts and last year we had in 2013 we had 36 spinouts of one kind or another and this year one of our student teams Calhillian won the student prize competition for the energy efficiency and renewable energy office it's a basically a truck kind of thing that you know kind of saves power at one point and then releases another power just kind of like a hybrid car and we were just selected by the Department of Energy and the the same energy efficient renewable energy office to host one of the regional competitions that student entrepreneurship competitions for next year so we're really sort of into entrepreneurship the other thing we do is tools policymaking tools so we just put on up on our website a few weeks ago a tool called the focus on the clean power plan and it's for every single state in the country it's a free tool and people can go in there and try to figure out kind of like the right mix of technologies to meet the goals that are in the clean power plan so anybody who's out there trying to think about it for their state we would appreciate you sort of giving that a try when the rule becomes final will tweak it but right now it's up there based on the proposed rule for people to get comments so it's like you got every boiler in the country and so you can sort of say like how much of solar or wind or you know coal and natural gas are we going to have to try to meet the goals in the program and then we also have several other research activities related to the clean power plan and like what percentage of coal plants you know you know could possibly use say for example carbon capture as a way to meet the goals of the clean power plan this is also some are sort of our infographics these two are both electric vehicles so if anybody's interested in that topic so let me switch now to the what I want to focus on is non-market factors so of everybody knows like when you think about a market and the market for these new technologies they're sort of like two things first it doesn't work right so as an engineering that's what we sort of care about then the market folks like it doesn't have a market and that gets into cost and sort of other factors non-market factors which is sort of what I focus on is thinking about two things which are public policies which are opportunities or challenges to that technology or societal issues where people are kind of worried about something so for wind power maybe you're worried about like birds or bats or whatever getting killed by those that wind power if we think about those things ahead of time then we can incorporate that as engineers into our design so it's really important that these non-market factors be considered at an early stage of the process as opposed to kind of waiting to the end and you know every tech energy technology whether it's renewable or fossil whatever it is has these non-market challenges and as well as opportunities so I'm going to give some examples from a couple of technologies developed at Carnegie Mellon to give you a feel for this so the first I'm going to talk about is Carnegie Mellon self-driving car I know the Google car gets all the publicity but actually most the people at Google came from Carnegie Mellon and we were the ones who like won the DARPA the first DARPA challenge on it and so we've been working on that technology for for quite a while and Uber actually just came in and formed a big center at it and you know if you look at this a hand out I gave you you'll see pictures of Carnegie Mellon's car you'll see a member of Congress who drove in the car so to speak as to something that I guess maybe he was driven by the car and then also the Uber car which is also making its way around Pittsburgh now if you look at the back of this hand out here you're going to see a map and on this map are the states which hold it back here and you can get a copy of this at the at the table if you need it and so you'll see if you look at this map that these are the states that either have passed a legislation to let renewable self-driving cars those who have decided to know that they don't want self-driving cars on the road some that are under consideration in some states like on State of Pennsylvania which has not you know gotten up to really thinking about it yet now you might not think okay what does that have to do with energy well you know actually by putting in self-driving cars we can reduce our energy consumption by a couple of percent every year according to studies so although people think about it for all sorts of different ways you know these are the kinds of things that will kind of make a long-term term benefit so that those things the state legislative regulatory activity that's an example of a non-market factor barrier that will make it difficult for us to kind of get that energy efficient technology into the marketplace the other technology when I mentioned here is Auckland energy now Auckland is a an energy storage system it's very environmentally friendly it's something it just got a big award actually for being the I think the first energy storage system to get an environmentally friendly battery for the system and so it's an example of sort of two things which is sort of it's a non-market opportunity in a sense that part of the reason that Aquion has been able to go from a Carnegie Mellon laboratory to job creation in a very short period of time is because of that sort of policy pool and that's because certain states like California and Hawaii for example have said okay we're going to we're going to put in energy storage mandates we're going to be putting into policies that will encourage those energy energy technology to get to marketplace so literally within less than 10 years five years or so we have sort of job creation of like about a hundred or 50 or so people in the Pittsburgh area and act on plans to sort of go out to other states for this energy storage manufacturing facility same thing with Uber you know and and sort of the autonomous car we are also seeing sort of job creation from from that as well however there are also energy policy barriers to energy storage and you'll see here this is a report from Iraq which is this interstate renewable energy council that talks about some of these things it talks about rate structures and other kinds of things that are barriers to getting that energy storage into the marketplace so these are kind of like two examples technologies the last one I want to give is platypus platypus is another spent out and it is a robotic boat and what it does it's like a little boat like this big and like fleets of these go out and can measure water quality they can measure how much water you have things like that there's something called the energy water nexus which is basically you know there's a there's a big relationship between water and energy and so having that sort of technology is very useful from an environmental standpoint again regardless of whatever your energy technology is but they're facing a challenge their challenge is that EPA's regulations even though they say oh this is cool technology because it's able to you know rather than like on a river getting like one point it can measure many many points and give a real diverse so in the picture that I have here you'll see a different color coding and it is it shows all the different points you can get in a river or a lake or a water wastewater treatment pad so the problem they're having in this case with EPA is that all the policies and rules are designed for a human to to do the water sampling and alas it's a robot and even though they use EPA certified sensors they're having a challenge to figure out how to get through the system to get certified so that and the companies on their side you know they say okay well we can't do anything unless EPA certifies this methodology so they're kind of like in this very challenging position so we've been trying to work you know through EPA's and innovation office because they should like it right because it's better data more data than in the past but it's a challenge trying to like make it through the system and so that is an example of a barrier where we have a technology you know the person the professor who has like spent out and he's now running this company full time says look you know I could hire hundreds of people to go out and put my little robots all over the country but alas I can't do it I have this one market which is not I'm not able to reach because of this because this challenge so those are some examples I'm always collecting examples of these things for the energy sector so you have my information is on the front of this handout or stop by it and tell me a story and I'd be glad to add it to my collection great thank you so much all sorts of new things that we didn't know about which is great to hear we're going to turn next to a different a whole different form of technology that has its wonderful applications all over the country and it's still got enormous potential to explore and that's Dale Lauda who is the executive director of the CHP Association the combined heat and power association deal thank you very much I have a father of two children I have a 14 year old son a 10 year old daughter and they're both very interested in what I do and so for Earth Day my daughter came to me and said you know I have this Earth Day project what to do and I said well it's gonna be about CHP and she said Danny I'm not gonna do an Earth Day project on CHP all the other kids are doing solar and wind and everything I said that's the whole point you got CHP who also CHP and she they won't even know what it is I said that's your chance to tell them and the thing it's interesting is of course she's a super genius but she she actually understands what CHP is and probably few of you in the room do and she was afraid because none of her classmates would place little embarrassed to have to be a shield for her father but it sort of symbolizes some of the frustrations we face in the CHP industry which is that no matter how many people we talk to there's still many many people that don't know what we are who we are so let me just tell you a little about what what is CHP and what do we do so CHP is combined heat and power which also is called cogeneration for a variety of reasons we don't use that term anymore in the United States but for but it's basically the same thing and CHP or combined heat and power is just what it sounds like it's it's a machine that makes both power and steam at the same time it's not exactly cutting-edge technology it's something that Mr. Edison actually came up with years ago and thought he said at the time it and it has been proven since then that is the most efficient way to use natural gas and basically it's roughly twice as efficient as a regular gas-fired power plant because you have one you know one stack you have two two porcs coming in so it's it's great technology it's sort of a sleeper technology I also worked in energy industry for many years before this including for Dow Chemical which is like the third or fourth big in CHP user in the world and you know maybe I just wasn't paying attention maybe I wasn't very good at my job I don't know what the issue was but I didn't know anything about CHP we didn't talk about people don't talk about even in the industry it's just taken for granted and that stuck on its head is one of CHP's greatest strengths there's four key strengths for CHP one is the reliability two would be security issues somewhat related reliability three would be its efficiency and then fourth is environmental advantages so the reliability issue is that and this is an old saw we use many times but it's a great reference when Hurricane Sandy came to up the East Coast if you looked at maps that showed an overhead view of where the lights were on or lights were off pretty much where the lights were on they had CHP where the lights were off they didn't have CHP and that's a pretty good example right there that just the dependability reliability Sikorsky helicopter up in Connecticut they stayed on not only were they keep running and making money which of course one of the first orders of business they were able to to basically a hospital for the community and this happened all over New York there's a great ad that ran it was sort of a this is the time I think of some of those the sit-ins the capitalism anti-capitalism effort as it was saying this is what's wrong with America Merrill Lynch's lights are still up and like the New York State the daycare facility was down well it really wasn't wasn't just mean Merrill Lynch and and the nice daycare center it was that Merrill Lynch had a CHP facility that's why they were they were up and running so the reliability issue which then leads to security if you have a data center and you want to keep running all the time you want to use you want to use CHP as a resource environmentally the reason it's really a change has happened over the last 10 years or so many environmental organizations have actually cited CHP as a solution for climate change because it does it's so efficient and it certainly I think that one of the speakers you never concerned scientists talked about the fact that someday maybe we won't have any natural gas sure great in an ideal world there be no carbon emissions there'd be there'd be no fossil fuels but we're not there yet we got a long way to go before we get there and so the most of the next best thing the next most efficient thing to use and one that's particularly special because it keeps the lights on is CHP. World Wildlife Fund for example cited CHP in a study they did with McKinsey last year and the Environmental Defense Fund NRDC has partnered with CHP so there's lots of lots of great work with the environmental community CHP provides 10% of the power in the United States now and could provide even more about 18 gigawatts there's thousands of sites in every congressional district in the United States and we have a map actually on our website that's really cool interactive map you can look at you can highlight where you are where your city is and see where the CHP so there's CHP right in the city there's CHP down near the Department of Energy there's there's CHP all around you don't necessarily even know it's here there's a huge facility in Silver Spring that's that's work with the United States I think it's the Department of Agriculture has a facility out there and CHP as I said it can be up to 80% even higher than that in efficiency now the primary uses are with industry so if you're if you're making you know some certain industrial products if you can if you can do two things at once it's obviously much more efficient so many businesses need to use the steam and some others just want to have the electricity and so if you can find this is an efficient source that basically has both for you and one one resource hospitals once again result reliability resilience it's a totally different animal than a backup power so backup power is a diesel sitting in your basement somewhere or at the basement of the hospital well this isn't like that this runs all the time and is completely dependable it's not dependent on a fuel you know diesel fuel becoming it doesn't have the emissions of diesel fuel and also you know what if power goes out for a long period of time well you're not going to be able to work that with backup power this is a much more sophisticated process and it's also being used many now with lead workers are going to have a panel at our conference about the lead certification actually we have a webinar about it I think next week about how CHP is an essential part of the the lead process you can get lots of points for using CHP let me mention briefly about the the CHP association so we work on regulatory legislative issues we were supporters of the clean power plan in fact we think that if we double the amount of CHP we'd probably get to most of what the clean power plan is looking at so just through CHP we could probably get a lot of what it's not necessarily going to be as painful as it needs as it has been alleged if we just use more CHP we also have legislative we've been working on some issues there's the energy bill in the house and the senate we certainly are involved with that we want to maintain the ability for the CHP to have a viable viable marketplace through through purple and other protections that are out there and we also work on non-policy issues sometimes so we have some users committees and the last thing I'll just mention we have at our booth number 10 number 12 we're number 12 we have a description about our conference it's going to be here actually the national press club in a few weeks and so we hope you can you can attend if you have any questions about CHP what it is you know don't be like my daughter don't be embarrassed just ask the question and you know wave the wave the CHP flag rather she did wear this to school though so at least it's our little CHP logo so it's kind of a subtle way to acknowledge us thank you thanks so thanks so much Dale and as he said there are tons of examples so in many times examples are the best way to better understand how things work if you can really hear the stories of of where these technologies are in place and so I really encourage you to to follow up on that and now we're going to turn to another area that is again a very very important and emerging area and that's we will hear from Nicole Steele who is the executive director for grid alternatives mid-atlantic thank you yeah thanks for having me here I am Nicole Steele I'm the executive director of grid alternatives mid-atlantic I'm very happy to be here to talk about policy issues and what grid alternatives does so for those of you that don't know what grid alternatives is we're a non-profit solar installer that works exclusively with low-income communities we use a job training workforce development sort of barn raising model to do the actual installations themselves so we started about 10 years ago out in California and we became the administrator of what is called the SASH program in California and we were incredibly successful in California because of that state level solar rebate program for single family housing we now have seven offices across the state of California and we are rapidly growing outside of the state as well so about three years ago grid and a number of partners decided to figure out how to actually work this model in other states particularly states that don't have state-level solar rebate programs so we're looking at leveraging different types of policies and incentives to make to bring solar to low-income communities that wouldn't necessarily have access otherwise and you know these individuals that we're working with are disproportionately impacted on their energy bills and so by bringing them solar we are we're making a much bigger impact on their their quality of life and the ability to continue to sort of move forward and you know be part of the community and you know contribute to the economy so we first opened an office about three years ago in Colorado and partially because of that was the SREC program the market there was pretty strong and as soon as we opened that office it tanked so we had to figure out you know how to how to actually continue to move in Colorado and the answer really is to work in community solar and fortunately Colorado has a great and a cutting-edge community solar program and grid has been the first was able to develop the first 100 percent low-income community solar ray in the country we then opened an office located in New York but it covers the tri-state area of New York New Jersey and Connecticut and then about a year ago we opened the office here in Washington DC which covers the mid-atlantic which is considered DC Maryland Delaware and Virginia in our sort of world so you know it's my job to figure out how to create good policy take advantage of good policy and figure out how to bring low-income solar to the individuals in the mid-atlantic and those four areas are all very very different from one another so it's incredibly diverse and figuring out how to make solar accessible so taking a little bit of a step back we actually provide these systems at either no cost or very very low cost to the individual we do have a couple pilots going on around the country that brings a PPA program backed by local green banks that does end up giving providing a loan product to the individual but you know we're a mission-driven organization we want to make sure that we're making clean renewable energy accessible to everyone and by doing that we want to make sure that they receive the biggest impact so if there's a loan attached to that they're not necessarily receiving the impact that you know our organization is looking to provide however we are still opening the market into into that community where for-profit organizations can come in and play a role so sort of like digging a little bit deeper in what i'm doing specifically so some of the the areas that i'm able to leverage are the solar renewable energy credit market Washington DC has the best SREC market in the country so fortunately we're able to to leverage that and Maryland's markets not too far behind however Delaware and Virginia's markets are kind of so i'm not going to be able to finance my my systems with an SREC market in Virginia and Delaware so what are the other items that we leverage here in the mid-atlantic in some of the areas we're able to work with third-party financing companies to monetize the federal income tax credit now that's it provides a couple thousand dollars for the systems that we would be working in grid alternatives doesn't qualify to receive the tax credit themselves so we actually have to find a third party holder to sort of monetize those dollars so from our perspective while the federal income tax credit the ITC is very helpful for market rate installations it's much more difficult to sort of access from the low-income community side because the individuals that we're working with do not they're not able to leverage that tax credit and so and then some of the markets that i work in the third-party financers are not even interested in working so it's figuring out all these bits and pieces of you know how do we bring solar to individuals i'll also mention that we do have partnerships with equipment manufacturers so we're able to bring down costs that way and then there are a number of well there is one local solar rebate program specifically to low-income individuals here in washington dc it does expire in the fall and so you know we continue to move forward and work with local governments and state governments to figure out good policy to continue to make solar accessible to everyone you guys might have heard the announcement that the administration made this past tuesday they were actually at one of our installations in baltimore and the care community near john's hopkins we were doing a two kilowatt system on a row house there and there were some great announcements made to make solar accessible to the broader market which is the portion of the market that we work with and so some of the big pieces that you know great alternatives is working with the administration on our expanding americor into uh into you know a larger program that great alternative like ministers so we're able to add 40 new americor positions where we take this year of service and we teach individuals the ability to you know learn about the solar industry and have that ability to get the skills that they would need to enter into that community so you know the solar industry is growing 10 times faster than any other than the general u.s economy and one in 78 jobs are solar industry jobs in the u.s alone in 2015 alone the solar industry is going to add 36 000 jobs to the u.s economy so it's imperative that we make sure that we're continuing to build that workforce and we're building that workforce through our americor program and through our rise program in conjunction with sun Edison rise means realizing an inclusive solar economy and making sure that we're making this new clean energy economy accessible to the neighborhoods and the communities that we work with so those are a couple of the big pieces that we're working with the administration on as well as the increase of the 100 megawatt goal on federally subsidized housing to 300 megawatts by 2020 and we'll be working closely with the federal government as well as states and local governments to figure out how to continue to do that through the the mechanisms that i was talking about earlier so i'll leave it at that um and uh like i said earlier the we are we take volunteers we take job trainees we use a barn raising model so if you go to our website gridalternatives.org you can sign up as a volunteer and we can get each and every one of you on a roof you don't even have to know how to use a hammer we'll we'll teach you all of that so thank you and great and i think we all should be about getting new skills and it's great what you guys are doing and in terms of increasing accessibility for clean energy all all over so now we will turn to our final speaker for this panel michael detrick who is the owner and founder of renew and sustain consulting thank you um and a little bit about what we do we started our eyes started a um renew and sustain back in 2007 um in response to the downturning of the economy and trying to figure out how to create a better balance between the environment and business uh i was actually that when i first started in 2007 i went over to africa and we started working with biogas technologies solar technologies and one of the things that there is a huge opportunity is we have a growing population people look at this as challenges i look at it as an opportunity with growing population we have to manage our resources a lot better we have rising seas we have natural disasters which are creating various opportunities for us to then create policies and then we can create programs based off those policies and implement that through various projects um one of the countries that i've worked with was algeria and developing a renewable energy policy the desert there can actually supply a large amount of renewable energy for europe the power lines are in place it's a matter of setting up those policies to develop further programs and then building the project to make that happen the same thing they have there is um 80 their population is under 30 given the civil war and the unrest that they had in that country so they have a huge housing demand problem and with conventional building methods you can't build the houses with the amount of resources they have available so redeveloping that plan with new policies sustainable policies with new innovative building technologies here's an opportunity for people to develop new policies new technologies um better more efficient use fair cement technologies sip panels provide installation we can then augment that with renewable energy and we have off-grid strategies which are really progressive capturing what little water they do have and we're using it and the thing i really um get excited about is how scalable sustainability is um i actually have a number one best-selling amazon book renew and sustain which talks about the nuances of sustainability how it's scalable from this national global issue all the way down to the individual and so when you scale this down you can then have policies like you do in new york city where new jersey went and moved forward with the same policies that they had prior to hurricane sandy happening new york city is redeveloping new policies and from that there's new technologies that's going the place they're redoing things you're going to see more combined heat and power probably as a result of that so policies are a great foundation for moving us forward and we're going to save life we're going to save property we're going to reduce costs and it's this great foundation the same thing that um if congress can pass the energy efficiency bill that has gone up and not been passed yet but if you look at that instead as a jobs creator because energy efficiency is then that policy is going to lay the found work um for innovation technology and and growth in terms of business and technology whereas son edison is a renewable energy company that came about um using the power purchase agreement that third party system where we can put solar on buildings which we couldn't do before that policy then created a multimillion dollar industry and business and so you're looking at sustainability and those policies driving us which is is really big um and then there you have small little successes here in the district of columbia i've been working with dc public schools and the rec systems over the last couple three years um and so i developed a sustainability um playgrounds back that playgrounds back then led the foundation for advanced stormwater management innovation that the architects could utilize and frances stevens senior playground ended up being the six coolest playground in the world and was rated in the top 50 um of advanced educating playgrounds so then you can also use these policies to develop and display leadership and so you can show how you're advancing people forward um you again see this here in the district with the smart roof program that's going that's being rolled out that first started with dunbar high school where i worked and brought the team together to get the first power purchase agreement in the history of district of columbia which took a year and a half a lot of red tape it's a bureaucracy just like the the federal government and so there's a lot of obstacles but once we get these policies in place we now have 10 megawatts of solar going on the district roofs over the next year that's a huge advance forward the district is now being able to display leadership this then drives um education which is going to be key for the development of the next generation and perpetuating us and carrying us forward so dunbar high school now the greenest school in the world it's rated 91 out of 110 points on the lead score card the highest of any um newly built k through 12 school in the world right here in the district of columbia which is really successful um they have the highest improved test scores in the district so building these buildings and engaging these students and driving this innovation back in having the policies that allow for this type of development then also improved education it improves what we can deliver and it improves how we're going to be able to carry ourselves forward as a civilization um and all of this then drive having this policy and having this energy efficiency is is great because we're now looking at light shelves on buildings and different light shelves technologies advancing the insulation the types of insulation so people are now developing new types of insulation rather and so you start to see economic growth you start to see innovation you start to see new businesses and technology come up there's a lot of technology development based off of energy efficiency for how to make our buildings perform better so those policies are driving the market they're creating a multi trillion dollar emerging market based out of sustainability so for the first time using our resources what we do have using the policies that we have in place making ourselves more efficient and living off of ourselves is an economic driver for us to move forward and redevelop ourselves thanks terrific thank you thank you very much and i hope that you all see too it's really interesting in terms of sort of looking at the range of of areas and issues that you all looked at how much how much opportunity there is in so many ways and that there isn't just one way one technology or whatever it is a host of technologies methods policies being applied and frankly we are in a time a very very rapid change so everything that you're all talking about is very very exciting and so thank you all very much and i think we've got we've got five minutes so if you have any questions for these great people please let us know okay um then please feel free to make sure is there a question okay question right back here you do work with any renters or is it just for home owners and also have you are you involved with any legislation related to pace so very good question um renters is a huge market of the low income community here in dc i think 72 percent of low income individuals rent their homes so we need to figure out a way to move forward and making it accessible to renters that can happen through community solar community solar legislation has been passed in dc it has been passed in maryland and so we're figuring out what those regulations should look like and make sure that there is sort of a carve out for specifically for low to moderate income participants and what does that look like to drill down a little bit further we're looking at hopefully doing a program carve out rather than a project specific carve out so that individuals like you know grid alternatives or organizations like grid alternatives and others can really sort of lead the way on how to make community solar accessible to renters and so we're at the very very beginning stages of that and it and it's also applicable in colorado like i mentioned earlier with the community solar programming out there but here in dc in the mid atlantic we're really working to figure out how to make it you know work overall regarding pace we're not doing any work with pace right now so there is been part there's been discussions around how we could integrate pace into multifamily development and we do do multifamily development and so that would be something that the developer or the building owner would be able to take advantage of and we would help connect them to those dollars particularly where it's available okay and deborah you wanted to mention that in the nature that there's an app for that we have a new app that cmu which is right now for pittsburgh but could be used elsewhere and what it does is it allows somebody who is a potential renter to look at different properties and see what their energy consumption and bill would be and sort of like how that energy comes to that renter and so since energy is a big part it's something that people would like to consider so it's just if you go to our website our latest newsletter talks about that app okay great great well and obviously i hope everybody goes to see all of these booths because there are all sorts of things i personally want to follow up with with all of you on so anyway any other questions or comments one back here this question is for nicole have you looked at um maybe what the cost would be if the itc became refundable would that be a huge burden on the on the debt um the cost to great alternatives or the cost to the individual to the nation if it was extended if it was if it was refundable gotcha right right yeah i mean i don't know what the overall impact would be if it was set up that way i obviously we try to continue to use it if it is extended um and then maybe it's accessible and you know other ways outside of having to connect directly with a third party monetizer that would hold the systems for the length that they would need to hold it so it could potentially be an approach that that strategy certainly helped the solar industry before in terms of looking at refundable credits um and and as i recall i think that the numbers showed that it was actually a cheaper way for the government to really finance um renewables and then was providing the tax credit directly but by doing the 403b or the refundable credit worked very effectively as i recall so any other questions please do feel free to follow up with everyone and thanks so much for being here and thank you all very much for a wonderful wonderful panel