 Rhaid wnawn i'm fwy a gweithio yw'r wych yn hynod i gweithio hefyd a'r farson sydd am chamhau hwn. I thank you for your co-operation. Fuddwch chi'n gwahanol, i'w wneud am wirio gallu gyda'r ystyried, ond rydych chi'n gwaith fynd i'n ni'n meddwl i'n fwy ag independentadau. Rhaid i'n meddwl i'n meddwl i'w pat Nocton. Pat Nocton,wydgrif Weiniddi yn gy yardsdio ni'n pobl mewn mynd i fally aptax R voiced calling Teether that I want to thank in advance suitedГaeth her the ESB for now companies of information, policies that support this and the series of talks. Thank you. I want to eat as little intoinaltor IE 60 mins w al angenu ni. ond bysiau i chi byddio waith esb i gael chi'r ffordd o'r 5th cerddau cyd-wyr. Felly mae'r cyd-wyr ymlaen yn yma, cyd-wyr yn cyd-wyr yn cyd-wyr. Felly wedi fynd yn cyd-wyr i'r IIEA yn rhan o bryd yma, o'r cyd-wyr cyd-wyr ar y brod, oherwydd o'r cyd-wyr cyd-wyr, oherwydd o'r cyd-wyr. The topic of the current series, of which this is number five, is the electric lifestyle which focuses largely on the potential to enlarge the role of electricity in the new energy future that we're all working to deliver. We have had over the series very many distinguished and accomplished speakers and today's speaker, Dr Ernst Monet's, must rank at the very top, one of the most influential and accomplished speakers on the topic, a nuclear physicist who has worked for many years in MIT, who was the 13th US Energy Secretary from 2013 to 2017, and who currently is the president and the CEO of the Energy Futures Initiative, so he's uniquely qualified to, I suppose, give a really valuable perspective on the energy industry and where it's going. At ESB we share the vision of the Energy Futures Initiative for an energy future that is cleaner, safer, more affordable and secure, and we believe also in the potential to significantly expand the role of electricity in that energy future. At our September session here, Christian Ruby from Eurelectric shared some research looking at the Paris 2050 targets, and I suppose that research supported the view that if we are to meet those targets that the electricity share of energy consumption across all of the various sectors will have to increase from some 20% to something like kind of 60% of overall energy consumption. So at ESB we are preparing our business for that energy transformation. We're looking at a future large-scale low-carbon electricity generation. We're looking at transmitting that low-carbon electricity across networks that are much smarter to customers who are very, very different to current customers, customers who are much more engaged and active in terms of their kind of energy generation. We're looking at a future relationship and indeed customers who will no longer be entirely consumers but will be, in many cases, producing electricity on the smallest scale themselves. So it's a very, very different future. Our focus really is on investment in low-carbon generation. A very significant investment for preparing our networks for an all-electric future where electric vehicles and heat pumps will be very much the norm rather than the exception. And we also have a tremendous focus on innovation internally and externally. Internally we have initiatives like our incubation centre, down and dog patch labs, where we are looking at all of the new ideas that are coming to us really from our customers. And also externally we're working with about a dozen international utilities on the free electrons programme where we're looking at accelerating new start-ups in the energy industry and last year alone we had 500 programmes competing for support in that programmes of which we're supporting about 15. So we believe in ESB that the low-carbon future is essential and achievable. We have redefined the very purpose of our company to playing a leading role particularly in this society in bringing that to being. And we know that there is an immense challenge in bringing this message and this understanding out into the public in terms of the importance of addressing the carbon challenge, the urgency of doing so. The real kind of challenges in doing that but more importantly the ultimate societal benefits around success. And we're really welcome being here today to hear Dr Amona is in person, give his insight on these challenges. I also welcome the fact that during his three days in Dublin he is engaging with all of the main kind of media television interviews and making his own contribution to raising awareness of the challenges and the potential ahead in this society. So I'll say no more and back to the chair. Thank you very much. And once again thank you to the ESB. As Pat has said Ernest Moniz was the 13th US Secretary of Energy serving in President Obama's Cabinet. He's had an absolutely, or is having I should say, well be careful not to speak about people in the past hence. At least in their presence. He's having an absolutely stellar career as a physicist, as an academic. He's crossed the threshold over and back from academic life into politics and public policy and back out and back in I think a number of occasions in the course of his extraordinary career. As Pat has said he was Secretary of State for Energy for a number of years, very, very instrumental in the negotiations that led to the Paris Agreement. And also it's worth saying because unfortunately it remains current was one of the negotiators along with his colleague John Kerry of the historic Iran nuclear agreement. Which was also one of the headline achievements I think I can say of the Obama administration. So there's a lot we could say about you Ernest, but I think what we'd rather do is to hear from you. So please take the stage and then we'll have an opportunity to ask some questions afterwards. Ernest Moniz. Well thank you Pat and Alex and actually both of you mentioned my service to Secretary of Energy until 2017. I do want to emphasize that was until noon on January 20th of 2017 and I think apparently you all know what that means. And also the IAEA it's been a pleasure to be here and we were just discussing maybe there will be some opportunity for collaboration going forward since we are some kind of sister think tanks in this community space. So today again I'll talk about global energy challenges and actually to tell you the truth I think I'm going to repeat a lot of what Pat I think said today. But what I would say is certainly the overarching energy challenge is I want to add the word deep decarbonisation of the energy system in the advanced economies which would incorporate United States and Ireland a little bit different in scale. But advanced economies in an unprecedented short transition period. So we really are talking about and I know Ireland has adopted the goal, the objective of something like 80% decarbonisation by mid-century. So again it's not just decarbonisation but it is deep decarbonisation over a few decades. And the reason why of course it was highlighted recently again but in a very public and effective way I thought by the last IPCC report just a few weeks ago basically that I think really brought out the differential impacts of even just one and a half versus two degrees, two degrees centigrade. And I have to say I have to admit that even the two degrees centigrade is not going to be a walk in the park, put it mildly and frankly we are not on a trajectory to get there. But I think the IPCC report kind of tells you we got to fight for every tenth of a degree because it all makes a huge difference. I just say that in my own home city Boston, Massachusetts, recently the mayor came out with a long term plan in terms of adaptation. Boston as many of you know, since you probably all have relatives there, we are a pretty Irish city that we are on the water. And so I think the plan that the mayor put out is just the right kind of thing. How do you reshape the waterfront in ways that provide barriers to flooding etc while providing even more public access to the sea etc. Terrific and there's a commitment of spending at minimum of 10% of the entire capital budget every year for decades acknowledging that that's probably an order of magnitude less than one needs to actually resolve the issue. So the scale of the adaptation challenge I think is becoming also more and more recognized as we of course keep our eyes on mitigation. In fact one other example I'll give from the United States in terms of the scale I visited a few years ago when I was still in the government. One utility in Florida called Florida Power and Light, you may know them. They by no means serve the entirety of Florida. This is one utility, one footprint. They have already spent $4 billion on hardening of assets against the impacts of enhanced storms and that does not protect them against the monster storms that we have seen recently. So there's so many of these examples where the costs of not mitigating are going to be just so overwhelming and it's not clear the great social benefit of having gone from a wood pole to a cement pole. But these are the kinds of things we're going to have to be doing a lot of. So going back to Paris, I'll just emphasize that the Paris goals which we are struggling to keep up with are a very important step. But again to remind they are in no way commensurate with the deep decarbonisation goals that have to follow and that's really the context in which I'd like to talk. Now there's some good news in my view and the best news and I will say this from an American perspective is that despite a number of activities, my presidents, President Trump's announcement about withdrawing from Paris for example last year, we can talk about the results of the elections on Tuesday in the United States, but the good news is a lot of noise in the system. We are not going back from a low carbon future and what I would emphasize is that when the president made his announcement on June 1 of last year, it was just days before the majority of governors of states who have been in the lead reaffirmed their commitments or even strengthened commitments, mayors of large cities including large cities in so-called red states, the two largest cities in Texas for example, made their commitments. And most important of all about 1700 business people came forward and said we're staying in the course because I think frankly anybody who has to worry about real capital allocations and the like with not two year but 20 year time horizons recognises it is a very bad exercise in corporate risk management to invest say in a high carbon future. So I think that the ground truth is that we are and we will continue to be moving to low carbon but of course we can't be polyannish in terms of the unresolved scale and scope and timing and those are all central to judging success because the climate clock keeps ticking whether or not we are taking the steps we need to or not. But again I think we should not lose sight of the fact that we are making progress towards low carbon, low carbon future. I might also say that last year on a personal level I was one of the attendees of a small group of roughly 40% global oil and gas CEOs, 40% major financial market players, a few other random people. I was one of those in that category meeting at the Vatican and I think very encouraging about the confluence of the climate and the social justice agenda. Now we have to translate that obviously into action but again I'm reasonably optimistic there. But now the question is what are the tools and I think the simple summary to me of those tools is a synergistic innovation in the technology, policy and business model spaces. They are obviously connected. For example business models will be much easier to develop aligned with a low carbon future if we have the right policy signals and the right technologies available. But really I want to posit that innovation across the board is going to be central. I'll spend particularly a focus on what I consider to be the core activity of technology innovation. That includes what you might call platform technologies like IT and artificial intelligence, robotics, drones, telecom, we have a telecom regulator to be here, 5G, large scale computation. All of these technologies that are not viewed as energy technologies per se, a major part of our success will come if in the energy business we are thinking about the innovations that integrate these fully into the energy sector and we are only scratching the surface on that today. And then of course there are the specific energy supply distribution and end use technologies and here there's no doubt that we have made substantial progress as noted for example in the cost reduction of photovoltaics and wind and LEDs, efficient lighting and batteries and the like. But what I want to discuss and I posit that those innovations are critical. We've got to keep pushing on them. We've got to deploy them more broadly but they still aren't enough and we are going to need brand new breakthroughs, new technologies if we don't come back and discuss that more if we are to meet the deep decarbonisation goals. At Paris, before going more specifically, at Paris, COP 21, everyone remembers what was by definition the last act of Paris, namely the Paris Agreement. Less well remembered, but I think I'm prejudiced admittedly, but I think very important was what happened on the first day of Paris. That was the day when the national leaders were there, the French were very clever in having the national leaders there, the first day and not the last day like Copenhagen and where they could screw around with the negotiations. But on the first day, on the first day, 20 national leaders of 20 countries got up on stage and announced what was called mission innovation, that's with a capital M and a capital I. And that initiative was that those countries which collectively represented roughly 80% of global government-sponsored clean energy R&D committed to doubling those investments over a five-year ramp-up period. Now we all know it's just like the Paris CO2 goals, you kind of get maybe halfway to the goal that's set. But the point is really it was an acknowledgement for the first time in the COP series really that technology innovation is absolutely core to meeting climate goals. And there's a lot of, I can describe later on a lot of progress there, but I think that's really the message, the recognition that, and it's controversial. Frankly, some environmental groups criticized this focus on the need for technology innovation using the argument that we already have all we need, all we have to do is have the will to implement it. And I, and apparently those national leaders fundamentally disagree with that statement, which is what we will spend a little time discussing. Now, you may notice that when I said we've had these very significant cost reductions in things like PVs, photovoltaics and wind, including now I would say offshore wind progress in cost reduction. LEDs dramatic, I mean more than a 90% cost reduction in less than a decade. Batteries cost kind of cut in half, another factor of two needed over the next decade, etc. A lot of, I mean those basically are focused on the electricity system. Batteries obviously also have mobility but storage in electricity. And clearly decarbonizing electricity, and we heard some of that earlier from Pat, is an absolutely necessary condition to get to where we want to go. We have to pretty much fully decarbonize electricity. We also need to have significant success on the demand reduction side. Energy efficiency, conservation and the like. Again necessary but not sufficient. And as Pat also said, once we have the pathway towards very low carbon electricity, then we have to electrify as much as we can in other sectors. He gave examples. I'm in the middle of buying an air heat pump actually, and of course electric automobiles and the like. However, and I'm not going to argue about the 60%, but we need more electrification. But we have to remember that is not the full solution. Frankly, it's not, in my view, close to the full solution to the challenge. Because there are many other sectors that are much harder to decarbonize. Much of the transportation sector is not going to be electrified. Obviously, air travel is the obvious extreme example there in my view. Unless you want to fly in the solar impulse plane over the ocean, like lying down on your back alone for a few weeks. It's remarkable by the way, but not recommended. With buildings, we can see line of sight for electrification. But we do run into the enormous turnover time of the existing building structures, which is a big challenge. Industry is, in my view, not going to be fully electrified. The uses of high temperature heat, for example, is just not going to work. As you all know, in this country, more than in my country, agriculture isn't exactly a simple sector to decarbonize. So when all is said and done, what I'd say is the, you know, we need very low carbon electricity. We need very low carbon fuels and we need very low carbon heat. And we are much more advanced on the first of those three than we are on the last two. Now, let me talk a little bit, I'll come back to that a little bit, but let me talk first about kind of this transition. Because I will also, and this may be a little bit controversial, but I think we cannot forget the role of natural gas as a transition bridge, whatever words you want to use there. In the United States, we have reduced national carbon emissions in the last decade by 12, maybe 13%. Over half of that is the substitution of gas for coal. And our coal use has gone from 50% to below 30% replaced by gas and renewables. And so there's a lot of controversy over fracking. And of course it was the combination of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing that led to the incredible gas revolution that certainly in the States we have, of course Ireland, major gas dependence as well. And the enormous increase in production of gas also influencing our export potential with LNG. And again, that's going to, when I was secretary and approved the export licenses for LNG, a major part of it was the likelihood that a lot of that LNG was going to be displacing coal in other countries and certainly that's the case in China. So in fact, sorry, a little bit random here, but the revolution there also in the LNG markets is because there also have been business model evolutions. So for example, the fact that we now have LNG contracts that do not have destination restrictions that are not based upon indexing to oil prices is dramatically changing and growing that market, especially in Asia, especially in China, and especially in reducing coal use there as well. So I think this is an example of something we also have to think about. It's fine to think about where we have to be at the end, but we also have to think about how to get from here to there. And this is important. You might be interested because I know these fracking discussions are always exciting in different countries. An exchange that you can find on the internet in October of 2016, shortly before the presidential election in the United States, an exchange between President Obama and Leonardo DiCaprio, and the president acknowledged in making the following statement that this was an audience that was not going to be terribly receptive to his statement, but he said, look, I understand the issues with fracking and we have to minimize the environmental footprint, keep working on getting that down. But he also then said, let's get real. We're talking about reducing CO2 emissions. We're talking about creating enormous numbers of jobs. To give you an idea, the low natural gas and natural gas liquids prices have led to something like $200 billion of capital investment in new manufacturing capacity in the Gulf Coast alone. And so what he is saying is, look, we all know where we want to be. We all know we want to be there today. But the reality is we've got to think about getting from here to there, and that includes the social issues in addition to the technical issues. It certainly was the pragmatic approach that we took and that he took and no one's going to call him uncommitted to the climate agenda. So these are difficult discussions and they are going to stay difficult for the next years, but it certainly is the reference frame that we think we need. Actually, another side that I'll make when I leave time for questions is that we did this at lunch a little bit, but let me repeat a little bit about the elections two days ago. And just to say that in terms of this agenda, climate agenda, the fact that the House of Representatives changed party leadership is not going to magically have a great climate policy discussion and law passed, et cetera, et cetera. But I want to leave you with a more positive note. Number one, there has already been established in the Congress a bipartisan consensus on supporting the innovation agenda. Roughly speaking, just don't call it climate in the public debate. But very, very good support really coming and I don't think that's going to be effective number one. Number two, when you look at the state results, what you probably in climate, what you probably read about most is the defeat, the rather handy defeat of the Washington state initiative on having a carbon tax put in place. And it's true, and that was the case, the word tax remains toxic, but look beyond that. In five states, the new governor elect or a state ballot initiative all have very, very strong increased climate commitments, renewable portfolio standards, clean energy standards, et cetera. And so the reality is, again, states have been where the leadership has come in the United States. The footprint of the state commitments to very, very strong carbon reduction grew with the elections on Tuesday. So that's, I think, a little bit out of the, not in the news so much, but is something that should not be ignored. So, again, going back to the hard to decarbonise sectors, as I said, we need to go to low carbon electricity, fuel, heat, if we are going to have a chance at meeting the economy-wide deep decarbonisation. This calls for maintaining a very, very broad portfolio of clean energy R&D. For example, just as one example, hydrogen could be one of the ways of addressing many of these issues across the board. Not just fuel cell for vehicles, but heat and the like. Here I want to go back to this idea of transition because if electricity plus hydrogen is kind of a backbone of a very low carbon economy in the future, once again, natural gas can be an important part of the transition because today the uses of hydrogen are growing dramatically and by far the cheapest way of making hydrogen today is steam reforming of natural gas. So as one vision potentially, one can see this being a way of developing the market uses of hydrogen. Then one can add to that carbon capture and sequestration and then you have carbon free hydrogen if you can manage the sequestration. Then you can imagine innovation, and there's lots of opportunities for innovation, dramatically reducing electrolysis, carbon free electricity driven electrolysis of water to hydrogen and oxygen. So that's one example of a vision that is clearly technologically possible. It's going to be a question again of working at it much harder than we are and getting the cost down to where these are important substitutions. Now having said that, with my physicists back of the envelope calculation, I would argue it still isn't enough. We will still not get to deep decarbonisation when one includes the social realities. Will we really be able to deploy low energy density technologies like solar and wind as much as we would need? That's a separate question from storage. It just takes a lot of space to do that. Or will we be able to build, especially if in the United States this is quite relevant, will we be able to build a real continent scale transmission system, move the wind to the load centres? I can tell you from direct experience that this is not easy, etc. So again, we need the technologies to provide the optionality to overcome the various challenges that one faces in different countries, in different regions of my country, in different geographies and the like. So I think this is, we still need more options and what that means to me is we are going to need very large scale carbon management, direct carbon management in addition to these supply and end use and distribution technologies. What this amounts to is some form of carbon capture, utilization and or sequestration. Keep the carbon out of the atmosphere or literally take it out of the atmosphere in what's called direct air capture. The carbon capture can be, as I've implied, it can be from concentrated sources and by the way we have spent far too much attention in the transition sense in carbon capture from coal plants. That could be important in the future, but it's expensive. It's much cheaper to capture the carbon from industrial plants. Today that is done in the United States and is even with no carbon price is not very far out of the money because it's much cheaper to capture CO2 from a variety of industrial plants. So it's concentrated sources, but it's also dilute sources, sometimes known as air, where it's way more expensive today. I'll come back to that. But we've got to either, we've got to keep carbon dioxide out of the air or take it out of the air. Utilization. Today's utilization method is very limited, enhanced oil recovery. Most people don't realize that today in the United States 300,000 barrels of oil per day are produced by CO2 injection into reservoirs. 60 million tons a year of CO2 are used. That could be amplified by maybe an order of magnitude, but it will be very geographically limited in a global sense. So we really need to go to another form of utilization, which is to be able to make very large scale commodities like fuels, maybe building materials out of CO2. We know it could be done in the laboratory. We are not even close to having that as a scalable, affordable technology. An example of where we need a lot of innovation and some scientific breakthroughs. Then you come to sequestration. Well, you can put it all underground, so geological sequestration. But there's also the option of biological sequestration. For example, engineering biomass to have much deeper root systems, things of this type. All of this requires big breakthroughs. That's why I say, going back to what I said earlier, it's great that we're working on these technologies that we see in front of us. And we need to do that, but it's not enough. We've got to solve some of these other challenges to get there. Now, I mentioned that something like direct air capture is now gets to be quite pricey. There's various estimates. Let me just say $500 a ton for the capture, which sounds like sticker shock. Why would you ever do that? Well, if you run, and you may have done it here, the Institute, I'm not sure we have done it. If you run economic models that try to accomplish, give you a scale, try to accomplish this deep decarbonisation through the mechanism of a direct carbon price, you will get numbers in the $500 to $1,000 range per ton. Now, obviously the idea is to not to have to get there. But what I'm telling you is don't dismiss direct air capture yet. Clearly you want to work that price down just like everything else through innovation. But I'm telling you, that's kind of the world that may be there. But of course, even if you have to pay a large price on the margin in a deeply decarbonised world, you're not doing it for very much carbon. So the total cost can still be manageable. So I don't know the answer. All I'm saying is, I think nobody knows the answer. But if we're going to have deep decarbonisation, we better have a lot of scientific and technical breakthroughs and as broad a set of tools as we can think of. Finally, let me just end with some comments on this idea of synergistic technology, business model and policy innovation and the whole idea of carbon pricing. On the first, let me go back again and use the development of unconventional natural gas as an example in the United States. This was a 25 year process. It started with government support for some basic work in characterising reservoirs that could produce unconventional natural gas. It moved on to a public-private partnership in the sense of a regulator, a FERC for the experts, a FERC allowed fee, a FERC allowed surcharge on interstate gas commerce to support a demonstration program of producing from these kinds of reservoirs that have been characterised by the federal R&D investment. And at the same time, Congress putting in place a time limited tax credit for producing the gas. So all those things, I mean that to me is a beautifully designed program including the time limit on the tax incentive, not open ended, which then led to opening up this field. That's the kind of thinking that I think we need to do to really stimulate major, major moves as we had in the natural gas production. But clearly tax incentives or carbon prices are important and I will end by just talking about one particular initiative in the United States which importantly in the context of our earlier discussion is put forward by very distinguished republicans who served in high positions in the United States government. George Schultz, the former secretary of everything including state, Jim Baker and other former secretary of state, Hank Paulson, former secretary of the treasury and others. What they have done is say, okay, we need a system that obeys four principles. One, it must have a price on carbon that is sufficient to move the needle. They propose something to start in the $45 to $50 per ton range. I think a number that's been discussed here in Ireland recently, a similar number. Secondly, it must be socially progressive and for that what they propose is take all the funds and by the way $50 times let's say 5 billion tons is a fair amount of change. What they say, what George says is whatever you do, don't let the government get its fingers on it. I'd say that to all my government friends here. Divide it up into an equal dividend for everybody and send them a check and that is progressive. The lower 70% of the income distribution would come out ahead. Third, reduce all other technology incentives and eliminate at least some part of the regulatory basis. Obviously kind of for business. And fourth and the one for which frankly there is not a good solution is something that has a border adjustment on carbon until there's a uniform system across countries to avoid especially leakage of industry from higher carbon price to lower carbon price. So that's the kind, again it's not perfect and as I said the border adjustment is something that still needs a lot of thinking as to how you would do it. But I think that's the kind of thinking we need in terms of it can't just be focused on carbon price, it's got to have all those other elements come together. And I think it's coming together and certainly in the United States when this is coming from a set of distinguished Republicans it gives me hope that we can have not in the next couple of years frankly but in the succeeding decade I think we will find the United States actually moving to something like this kind of a system that will then be a tremendous spur to the technology innovation as well. So that's kind of my picture of where we are and what we need to do and it's been a great pleasure the last couple of days learning also what's going on here in Ireland and I'm happy to certainly take some questions.