 Good morning from the sunny San Francisco Bay Area. My name is Will Chu. I'm delighted to welcome you to today's Bits and Watts seminar on the challenges of departmentizing the grid. Let me first introduce myself a little bit. I am a faculty in the department of material science and engineering at Stanford and also a senior fellow in the pre-court Institute for Energy where Bits and Watts resides in. I am a new to this seminar series. Leo Ming at Bits and Watts has asked me to host today's session because of my involvement in the storage research at Stanford. And I would like to first introduce today's discussion topic, give you a little bit introduction on the storage activities and then introduce our panelists and speakers today who will address this very important topic. So those who have been attending the seminar series is familiar with the set of slides but let me just repeat it to get everybody on the same page. Why is electricity a target here? Well, the idea is really very simple but execution is extremely challenging is to reduce the greenhouse emission through electrifying energy demand and also to decarbonize the electricity sector. So if you take a look at the right this is very much a essential challenge and there are emissions which is very hard to decarbonize and the seminar series focuses on electricity as the target. We have already heard from a number of speakers on various aspect of decarbonizing the grid. We have explored for example grid interconnection beyond the regional level. We have talked about policies to facilitate decarbonization of supply to the grid. And then today we're gonna talk about storage and how this could be crucial for increasing the penetration of renewables in the grid. And then the next seminar will be on coordinating on the demand side in order to increase the flexibility of the system. Let me tell you a little bit about storage X. So storage X is the sister initiative to bits and wants where the focus is on various aspects of deploying next generation storage solutions for both transportation, grid and applications beyond. This is a really thriving ecosystem involving a large number of industry participants and also about 150 faculty, students, postdocs and staff at Stanford. I like to show this picture because it highlights the range of activities we're covering. We're dealing with materials, we're dealing with devices, we're dealing with systems. We're not only dealing with things that happened on the long time scale and the large scale, we're also dealing at the atomic scale. So storage X is an activity where we attempt to coalesce all of our expertise ranging from the technology side to the system side to the economic side and to the policy side. Let me just quickly review our key research agenda as storage X. First and foremost, we will like to develop disruptive energy storage technology to satisfy different requirements. And all options are on the table. For battery technology, we need to sustain the cost learning curve in order to continue the penetration, especially to application such as for grid level storage. We are continuing to identify pathways to achieve energy density, power density, safety and long lasting battery at the same time. We are thinking deeply about the challenges of scaling up. How do we manufacture terawatt hours of energy storage to meet all of the ever-increasing demand? On the same token, we're also thinking about circular economy. How do we develop methods to reuse, recycle and regenerate batteries and also to understand the cradle to grave environmental impact? And this goes beyond batteries as well as new technologies come into play. And then finally, we realize that the pace of R&D for energy storage has been good, but it needs to be faster. And we're also looking at leveraging informatics and artificial intelligence to really accelerate the pace of research and development. So hopefully this set of goals gives you a sense of what storage access is about. There's a lot of complementarity to bits and watts and its activities. And I'm delighted to be hosting today's session to explore these topics more deeply. So for today's workshop, for today's seminar, we're gonna be focusing on storage integration in the grid, including but not limited to batteries. We're gonna have three speakers present their perspectives and then we're gonna have a panel discussion at the end of the two hour time. So with that introduction, I'm delighted to now introduce our distinguished panelists here. We are joined by folks working on different aspect of energy storage and the grid. We have Stephen Hendrickson from the Department of Energy. We have Mike Gravely at the California Energy Commission and we have Nick Irvin, who is a director at the Southern Company. I will introduce them more deeply as they come to the stage. So with that, let me ask Stephen to come to the stage so we can get started. Excellent, thank you. Thank you, Stephen. So let me begin just by giving a little deeper introduction. So Stephen is currently the program manager at the Office of Technology Transitions at the Department of Energy. He is playing a very important role in the DOE Energy Storage Grand Challenge. He's the co-track lead for Technology Transition. For those of you unfamiliar, this is a national exercise to think about the future of energy storage as it's connected to many fields of importance to the nation. Prior to joining DOE, he was at the National Renewables Energy Laboratory where he performed a lot of original work on technical analysis and system analysis on all aspects of energy, including storage. And today, we are starting with Stephen who will give us the national level overview of the activities ongoing at DOE. And Stephen, we're delighted to have you join us. Please go ahead. Thank you very much, William. And thank you for having me. I'm delighted to be here. And I really think the way you laid out what your group is trying to pursue is definitely in line with what we're seeing at the Department of Energy. And I think as you'll see that described within the Energy Storage Grand Challenge, I will say I think one area that's particularly of interest to me is that we're a federal agency, but so much of this work happens at the regional local level, at the universities, et cetera. So being able to engage with local communities to see kind of how energy storage has a role to play in a regional context is definitely a high priority for us as a team. So with that, as William said, I'm a program manager in Office of Technology Transitions at the Department of Energy, a little background on OTT, if we call it. We are a cross-cutting office within the department. So the Department of Energy does about $18 billion worth of research and development every year. And we work, OTT works to accelerate the commercialization of technology across the entire research and development portfolio. So from that perspective, there's really sort of five types of activities that we pursue. The first is we have a suite of programs that complement the research and development activities, such as the Tech Commercialization Fund and Regional Innovation Hub. So the Tech Commercialization Fund is a set aside within the R&D budget, specifically focused on encouraging researchers to partner with companies that are looking to commercialize technology. So that's again, trying to accelerate that commercial adoption. Regional Innovation Hubs are an important topic where we're working with clusters of intellectual property, researchers, companies, universities, et cetera, to support an ecosystem at a regional level to accelerate technology adoption. The second area that we focus on are developing cross-cutting tools, including market supply chain analysis. So that's actually the portion of office that I lead, where we're trying to understand specifically what are the current companies involved in this specific industry vertical, where sort of the entry points for DOE technologies and how can we build those relationships to develop partnerships and doing analysis to inform both internal DOE strategy and external engagement. The third is we have a few different tools to increase access to DOE resources. So when you're doing $18 billion worth of research and development, we have a number of subject matter experts that sit across the Department 17 National Laboratories across the United States. We have a host of user facilities where external groups can come in and use the unique capabilities of the DOE labs to test and validate their technology. And we have a plethora of intellectual property that's been the result of the research that is available for licensing. So we have a service actually called the Lab Partnering Service, available at labpartnering.org. That really serves as a sort of a front door to all those capabilities. So any of you can just go to labpartnering.org and start digging around and see what's in there, who's working on what, what are ways you might want to partner with us. And given these are really public resources, we're trying to really make it as easy as possible for people to engage with the department. The fourth item is really working on a tech transfer pipeline. So the Energy iCore is a service where it gives lab researchers the opportunity to develop their entrepreneurial skills. So as they're working on their research, they can identify potential opportunities for market adoption or commercialization of their technology. And then finally, we work to really shape a culture of commercialization and entrepreneurship across the DOE complex to encourage where appropriate people that have the skills and the sort of awareness of where the technology they're working on may have some societal impact, whether it's reducing emissions, supporting economic competitiveness, national security. There's a number of ways that that may make sense. And so we work across those offices and I'm happy to serve as a resource to connect folks like this community with the people back across DOE and its national labs. So from that perspective of OTT, we are an active participant in the Energy Storage Grand Challenge. And so the Energy Storage Grand Challenge is a DOE-wide initiative to support U.S. leadership in energy storage innovation, manufacturing and utilization. So I think what's, you know, the DOE is a large bureaucracy, but we've really brought together a number of different resources, a range of research and development programs, the Loan Program Office, such as financing, OTT, the Office of Science, anyone who's doing anything related to energy storage working together in a coordinated way to support accelerated commercialization of new technologies. And so the goal that has been laid out is to really develop a domestic manufacturing supply chain for new energy storage technologies that can meet marketplace demands within the next nine years. So it's very aggressive, but we realize it's an aggressive marketplace and the needs for energy storage are significant enough that it warrants having an aggressive goal. So we frame this, one way we frame this is in terms of innovate here, make here, deploy everywhere. And I think this is just to help kind of tease out the different dimensions of energy storage, research, development, demonstration and deployment. And so innovate here is that the sort of bread and butter research and development work that the department conducts and funds, the make here is I think just really calling out the role of manufacturing both in the interest of job creation and domestic supply chains, but also that there's an important interplay as I'm sure many of you know between the innovation piece and the manufacturing piece that a lot of manufacturing innovations are key to reducing costs and accelerating market adoption of technologies. And then deploy here is just a recognition that these technologies are relevant in a global marketplace, they can solve problems around the world, they can improve human welfare around the world and that companies in this space are competing in global markets. So any technology that are developed need to be aware of what is the global market landscape that they're trying to succeed in. So to kind of put in context what the grand challenge is trying to pursue from the executive order issued by President Biden on January 27th is to achieve or facilitate a carbon pollution-free electricity sector no later than 2035. I think this just puts it in context as far as if you're gonna meet that goal by 2035, what that means or implies is that you need to have energy storage projects ready to go for final investment decision by roughly 2032 to give them enough time to get all the pieces together to be ready to operate by 2035. Working back from that, you really need to be able to complete the design and secure the manufacturing commitments probably a couple of years prior to that. So maybe let's say 2030. At the same time, the market structures and the policy mechanisms to enable and support energy storage also need to be in place by then. And so here we are in 2021 and you realize we're really only talking about nine years between where we are and where we need to be with these technologies ready to go into market. And so again, this just reinforces the need to, I actually appreciate the point William made about using AI and advanced tools to accelerate commercial adoption and technology validation because we are in such an aggressive timeline. So the grand challenge includes three categories of technologies. And this is just emblematic of the sort of holistic and integrated nature of the grand challenge where any work the department is doing where there are technologies that can perform energy storage services are included in scope. And really what determines the outcome and the success is really where they can find a solution of problem to solve in the marketplace and see market adoption. So that includes bi-directional electric storage, chemical and thermal storage and flexible generation and controllable loads that includes multiple R&D programs across DOE and we're really trying to integrate where the R&D pieces may be unique depending on the specific technological constraints the market challenges and the use cases as I'll get into in a minute are in sometimes cross cutting and there may be multiple technologies that can meet a certain market objective. And it's up to them to compete on a basis of cost and performance to see who can succeed in the marketplace. So the energy storage grand challenge is made up of five pillars. There's a technology development piece which is sort of the, I'd say the bread and butter research and development of the department. There's a specific track focused on manufacturing and supply chain that includes our advanced manufacturing office but a number of different offices that are looking very closely at what is the role of manufacturing and manufacturing innovations in supporting energy source cost reductions and commercialization. There's the technology transition track that I lead that we're focused on increasing access to DOE resources as I mentioned. We conducted an energy storage market report last year and conducting industry market analysis to inform strategy. We work with industry and our interagency partners folks like the export import bank, the department of commerce, the development finance corporation. There's other entities at the federal level that are looking to support energy storage consistent with their mission and we're finding a lot of natural alignment between supporting that early stage research and development on new technologies with the sort of broader economic goals for the administration and for the federal agencies. And really to focus on identifying and pursuing real world projects to demonstrate technology to, you know, to de-risk it, to reduce the cost of financing and accelerate adoption and to provide data that can be used to validate technology that can further drive the R&D pipeline and bring costs down further. There's a policy and evaluation track that focuses on providing the tool that regulators, policymakers, investors may need to understand how a technology is gonna perform and the role that changes in policy may play in project economics and system dynamics, et cetera. And there's a specific focus on workforce development and recognizing that we need to make sure we have the workforce of the future to meet the growing needs of this industry. So I think one thing that for the department at least that kind of sets this effort apart from some other approaches is really focusing on the use cases. What are the problems that energy storage technologies can solve? And working back from there to figure out, well, where can we find the technologies or if the technologies improve in their performance and then their cost reductions could start to address market challenges. So we have two high level focal cost targets for a long duration stationary application of five cents per kilowatt hour levelized cost of storage and for electric vehicles and $80 per kilowatt hour manufactured pack costs for 300 mile range electric vehicle. But we also have, and you can see this in the reports I'll mention in a little bit that there are other metrics and goals that are also included as sort of technology targets. But where I think it gets interesting is that we've identified these six illustrative use cases facilitating and evolving grid, serving remote communities, electrified mobility and as others as you see where we're saying this is an opportunity for energy storage from the industry perspective, from the market perspective what is it going to take for energy storage technologies to start to see market adoption? And then that helps inform the R&D strategy from there. And then we have these high level goals of decarbonization, equity and reliability that we're always kind of keeping in mind that we're in pursuit of. So from there you can connect both the use cases with the research and development. So as you can see there's a number of different technologies that the department is currently investing in. And so what we're trying to do is map the technologies where they're at today where they're headed with these market opportunities and you start to get sort of like a short list of where you think a technology might make the most sense and then you can get more specific kind of down at the programmatic level of well, where's the technology today? Where's the cost trajectory likely to head? I know this is William also alluded to this about well, we need the cost to keep going down because as the cost of lithium ion batteries goes down that may unlock additional markets where at a certain price point and performance it may make sense for a certain light duty vehicle segment or for a grid application it may require other performance and cost characteristics and just trying to track that and really always keeping in mind what is the market commercialization goal that you're trying to pursue and then work back from there. So another way to kind of look at that or think about that from sort of federal strategy perspective is that on the left side here you see the technology focused innovations. That's something that we've been doing at the federal level, funding universities, funding our national labs, et cetera, for decades that we're funding foundational research in all these different technology areas. And I think what we're adding to that through the grand challenge is thinking through what are the complementary pieces that need to be included to really get this technology in the marketplace thinking about the systematic effects and how it's going to operate in a system context. What is the manufacturing base currently look like? How may they change over time? How does that inform commercialization strategy? What is investment trends today? Where are they headed? What are the drivers for where we're seeing investments go? You could see one strategy where you're just going to kind of build on current investment trends or you might say, hey, there's actually a lot of potential in this other area that's not getting sufficient investment. We want to deliberately pursue an alternate technology to kind of have more of a diversified portfolio of technologies and then looking at value revenue, market design, understanding what is the value of these technologies once they do enter the marketplace? And then also as was alluded to earlier thinking more and more about end of life system recycling or pack recycling, et cetera, the relationship between one, you could use this technology in this use case and it may degrade so that it's no longer viable there but then you could use that technology in another use case and it could have sort of a secondary life there and that might increase the overall revenue that that product can generate over its lifetime. So a couple additional reports that I want to highlight. So basically just Google energy storage grand challenge that will take you to the DOE website where you'll find three reports. The first is a roadmap that was released late last year that really spells out a lot of what I just described in terms of the technologies included, the current characteristics where they're headed, the relationship between the tech development piece and the manufacturing piece, the strategies for policy evaluation for tech transition and for workforce. And in addition to the roadmap, we released two other reports. This is the energy storage cost and performance assessment where they provided an integrated framework to try to do an apples apples comparison of how these different technologies perform currently and where they're headed. And again, this is from a federal perspective where you're doing all this research and development across all these programs, trying to get that all into one shared framework takes a lot of work, but there's a lot of value in being able to kind of look across the landscape to see, well, these are where the markets are today and these are where the technologies are. This is where we're seeing some adoption. This is where we might see additional adoption in the years to come based on current trends. So that's a great resource that you can find on the website as well. And then finally, our track, the technology transitions track led the development of an energy storage market report. And so this is complimentary to that cost and performance piece, which is really looking at technology first, where things headed and we're coming at it from, well, what does the domestic and international market look like today for these different technologies? Where is it headed? Where is the current manufacturing base today? Where might that change over time? And how can that sort of state of play and projection inform our strategy for where we wanna make investments, how we wanna think through these commercialization opportunities? And so similarly, getting all of that information into one framework takes a lot of effort, but over time we wanna kind of iterate on that so that you can increasingly connect the cost and performance piece with the market piece so that you can see, oh, wow, this technology cost is coming down. Yes, we're also seeing market adoption and pick up in this area or in this region, the cost is so high that we're seeing that connection. And so we continue to build out that capability. And I would just say one final thing before I end my remarks is that we, especially the track, as an office, as a grand challenge, we are very much focused on external engagement, building partnerships, supporting what's happening at the local and regional level. So I'm more than happy to connect people back with other parts of DOE, or if you have suggestions for ways that we can be supportive of what you're trying to do in your, from your vantage point, we are very open to that discussion. And I may not have the answer, but I'm more than happy to try to find the right person for you to speak to. So please don't hesitate to reach out. And again, I just really appreciate everyone's time and for having me, we're really excited about what we're working on and it's really validating to see all that you're doing consistent with that at the regional level. So thank you very much. Steven, thank you very much for the overview and for kicking us off on the discussion. We have a number of questions from our audience. We only have time to answer a few of them. So my apologies, we can get to yours. So one of the question being posed is how is DOE coming up with these quantitative goals? So, Steven, you mentioned cost targets, you mentioned performance targets. And before you answer the question, let me just share my personal perspective. When I was a graduate student and I heard about crazy goals on batteries and solar and I thought about this, it's not possible, but yet here we are. So could you, Steven, give us some thought about what type of analysis went into coming up with these goals? Yeah, that's a great question. I think, you know, we were continually focused on engagement with external experts and the national labs to figure out what, I think there is, you know, there's so much uncertainty, right, about where things are headed, that you wanna find a balance of having an ambitious goal that does drive, you know, new behavior and pushes people. But also at the same time, isn't sure, isn't so, you know, you wanna be too far out that it kind of distracts from the discussion, but it's also not so sort of conservative that, you know, we overshoot some of these goals. I think a lot of what we're trying to do first is to just have a shared framework so people can talk about what an appropriate metric even is. And then to put those out there, and I would say even the discussion, like these kind of questions, I know we get a lot of them about, well, why did you choose that number or this number? Even that ongoing engagement itself, I think is a useful exercise. And I personally, I think the importance of that goal is to have put a marker out there that people can go after. And if we need to revise it, we've already actually been talking internally about, maybe there would be some process that within a year or two, you would already update it and say, actually, we wanna go here. But I think part of, and I appreciate the way you framed the issue up top, acknowledging that where we need to get to is pretty aggressive, so keep pushing in that direction. And we can change that number as we go, but let's acknowledge that where we are today is not sufficient, that we are gonna need continued cost reductions. But I would just add, if there are further discussions, people like to have on the specific metric stuff, I'm happy to bring in some of the folks I'm sure we'd love to engage on that front too. Thank you, Stephen. Just my personal two cents, I think it's wonderful and it's very much the role of the government here to be aspirational. And I would not be surprised if we revised the goal because they're not aggressive enough. So I'm very much looking forward to that as well. So there's a few more questions. On the aspect of metrics, many of the technology being discussed today by the Grand Challenge has very different time scale. For example, batteries are here, but say long duration storage, electrochemical technology is much further out. Thermal storage has its own set of timeline as well. So how do you morph all of these together into a set of Grand Challenges that sort of has a master timeline? How do you put different technologies on the timeline? So I think a lot of that really comes under the use cases. And I think what we're really thinking about is what are the problems that we're seeing out in the public marketplace in society that need to be addressed? And then once you have identified, hey, we've got islanded communities that could benefit from having energy storage, doing an assessment of where are they today and what is the incumbent technology as a diesel generator? Well, what does the cost need to get to to be competitive with that? And then the first is just sort of a baseline assessment of like, well, we think it may be competitive at this point in the future. If there's a rationale for why it needs to be sooner than that, then you need to say, well, how might it increase research and development kind of get there? So I think that basically it's supposed to become decentralized. And I think that's where it is sort of like from an organizational perspective, we rolled us up to high level framing, but a lot of that expertise on the specific technology metrics for those technologies is embedded in our different research and development programs. And so there's a lot of interplay and iteration between the subject matter expert for that technology or for that particular use case back up to say, well, what does that mean? Or where there may be improvements in one area that then have knock-on effects that could help in enabling another use case. But I think it's pretty common in technology development. Steven, it's all very interconnected. On this note, let me also ask a related question. So you mentioned about workforce development, which is a very essential component, especially when you talk about deployment and manufacturing in the United States. There's a lot of similarities in terms of these requirements for energy storage to say in electrification of vehicles. How are those workforce development connected? And how are they organized within DOE right now? So I think there, yes, there's a great point. I think that there is an awareness of that. I think some of the programs tend to, they may be focused on workforce and then they have core skill sets that may have multiple domains or job categories where they could be relevant. So I think that a lot of that is organized, some of that is centralized where the job work is applying to multiple fields within the energy sector and then there may be sub areas where there are specialties. But I think it is, from the Grand Challenge perspective, it's just highlighting the need for that and for increased support for that. But I will say, I think in the new administration particular, there's a strong recognition of, I think that also ties into equity to make sure that all communities are represented in the opportunities that these new technologies and these new markets present. So I think it's definitely something that's emphasized and I think that only see increased focus in the weeks to come. Steven, absolutely agreed. Let me ask one final question. This is gonna be a provocative one. You talked about 100% decarbonization, being an aspirational goal. How did DOE arrive at this goal? So Jeremy Platt asks, why not 80% because the final 20% is extremely challenging, say dealing with sea freight, aviation and the sector is extremely challenging to decarbonize. So maybe this ties back to the first question is, why 100% is this the optimal or this is an aspirational goal? Can you just- So I would say from my perspective and I would suggest from the Grand Challenge perspective, we take a certain amount of those as sort of inputs external to the Grand Challenge and say, the White House lays out a marker for what they wanna see accomplished or leadership. And then at our level, we take that as an input and say, well, they say they wanna get to hear how do we align our strategy to accomplish that objective? And so it is a matter of consensus building and connecting kind of high level goals with what does that actually mean in terms of technology costs and performance and market adoption and all these pieces bring that together. But I think a lot of the actual goal setting is sort of at a higher pay grade than I am. Well, I think this will be a very interesting discussion for our panel discussion later on as well. So Steven, I'd like to thank you very much again for kicking us off. So let us move on here. So if I can ask Mike to join the stage, please. So coming from the national level, now we're going to zoom in to a more regional level. And I'm always having spent 30 some years in California, always find the California perspective to be extremely illuminating. And let me just say, I think California is a trendsetter. So we are very happy to be joined here by Mike Grapele from the CEC. Mike is really the ideal person here to talk about energy storage in the California context. He has been responsible for research activities to increase the penetration of renewables including storage and has a very large portfolio of CEC funded research here. And he's also has held positions at the federal level as well. So he can appreciate all levels of views here. And as I already alluded to before, I think California is really a leader here in terms of deployment of storage research activities. So Mike, we're very excited to hear about the California perspective, all yours. Well, good morning and thank you. And Steven, I'd be very interested later to press the talk. I'll see we have a lot in common and we have some really interest in the storage challenge in addition to what we're doing in California. So for those that are not familiar, I work at the California Commission. We're about 700 people. I work in the R&D division and we're about 100 people in the R&D division. Next chart please. And so our R&D division is funded through many sources. The biggest one by far is the electric program investment charge. We get $130 to $140 million a year for research and development. We just last year, we have been in the program. This is our 10th year and last year the Public Intelligence Commission who funds us gave us a 10 year extension. So we have a 10 year horizon, roughly $1.5 billion to spend on research and development. Energy storage is a big part of our program. The other thing that's important to understand about our research is we focus in three general areas. So applied research, which is basically the first prototype that you had built in the laboratory in the field, technology demonstration, where you're now moving towards circulation. You're putting it in a real customer application and the ultimate goal is to move into a commercial product. And then we have a market facilitation office that works on things like permits and barriers and things that may happen external to technology to help it. Our goal and our charter at the commission is in the R&D division is to bring technologies through this system and bring California solutions in the future that we don't have today. And you'll see throughout this presentation where we have some very creative energy storage solutions on the books. And if they're successful, they will be market changers for California's future. So just a big snapshot to start off with. And again, for energy storage, California does have a bill called SB 100, which requires us by 2045 to have a zero carbon-carbon free future for electricity. I know the question earlier was 100% goal for DOE in California, it's for electricity. It's not for every sector. And so we are moving towards that goal and you'll see why. As part of that, the public utilities commission has an integrated resource plan where they're saying, we're going to need roughly 10,000 megawatts of energy storage and the SB 100 just released their plan this month for how we get to where we need to go. And in that plan, they're saying we need 20,000 to 40,000 megawatts of storage by 2045 before I leave you to start at the importance of the second one, the PUC resource plan is that's how they direct the utilities. So if they discern this is what we need, they will tell the utilities to go out and buy it. And that 10,000 megawatts is instantly funded. Next chart. So this just shows you a perspective on solar and storage and the fact that we currently have about 2,500 megawatts of storage that's been approved that'll be installed by the 2023. It's also important to note of that storage, 90 to 95% of it is one technology lithium ion. The other systems are systems that are already installed. There is only one non lithium ion system of which I'll talk about later that's doing a 10 megawatt four hour system. Everything else is basically lithium ion. Next chart. And also in our SB 100 goal, they look at different scenarios and that's why I mentioned the range which depends on what they're looking for and the different models. So they have done extensive modeling and they'll be doing another one in four years. And so we are developing research to help them. But clearly they see the need for energy storage and they see the fact that we need quite a bit of it and a very fast ramp up. Next chart. So now be more specific to our office in here. So we have a long history with energy storage with long history of working with DOE. In fact, the first association we did years ago was in partnership with DOE. This just shows you a collage of technologies, everything from flywheels to flow batteries to thermal storage, pumped hydro to lithium ion. And we have worked the residential level, the commercial industrial level and the utility level. Most of our work is on the customer side of the meter but we have, as you can see, done projects here. For example, the flywheel system up to right. We did a test here in California and tested that system. One of those trailers on our electric grid with the ISO. The ISO certified that storage to be able to compete in the market. The frequency regulation market. And they went back east and built two 20 megawatt systems of flywheels, 200 flywheels in each system and they've been operating for 10 years. So lithium ion is by far the most dominant technology in the stationary market. And it will continue to be for the next five to 10 years and probably forever. It has a very good performance. As we know, it does do well. It has many applications outside of stationary and it might be the biggest one is electric vehicles but everybody who has a cell phone, a laptop, it has a car in the garage or basically using lithium ion technology. We have the gigabyte factory here that Tesla has in the California. And also we have also show many megawatts. We talked about the 2400 megawatts, about half of that has been installed. The other half will be installed the next two years. And then obviously California has a new initiative, California lithium valley. California is expected to be one of the big suppliers of lithium in the future. And we have Tesla and in California, electric vehicles is our number one export in the state of California. So obviously every one of those includes lithium ion batteries today. So the other chart here shows cost. And in that case, we're talking about, when you look at the cost of storage and I'm sure we'll have questions later on about that, you look at the cell cost, the battery pack cost, the equipment cost, the soft cost, like installation and permitting and things and then the lifecycle cost. Again, highlighting a DOE program, RPE program is one that does innovative research. And they did a program a few years ago to look at new innovative technologies that can do long duration storage with an open goal to getting down to something in a range of $20 a kilowatt hour. Several of those contractors who won RPE awards actually have also won demonstration awards with us in California. So we are complimenting each other. We are taking the work that RPE has done to the next level to bring those technologies to market. And so we will continue to do that next chart. Today's discussion for me at least is on long duration energy storage. That's a very interesting topic when you get down to it, DOE a couple of weeks ago had a two day conference on long duration storage saying what is long duration storage? And I would say in industry, there's probably a pretty recognized definition in the sense that if you're talking four to six hours or less, certainly four hours in many cases, six. That's short-term. When you start talking eight to 10, 20, 100 days and seasonal, then that's long duration storage. And we actually have projects doing all of those. So we are actually researching the whole spectrum. For California, it's important to understand what we need. You can see this picture when you have wind and solar as your primary source and you get the valley covered with fog and there's no wind and there's no solar, then you have a challenge that you have to do. And these things can last for days. And so long duration storage is a critical part of California's future. So I want to mention, and a big deal, I've been at this commission for 19 years. I've been involved in storage for 30 years. Last year was the biggest year in the history of the commission, the history of R&D division for industry storage. We awarded over $100 million in one year, about $60 million of commission funds and $40 million of research funding cost share from the applicants. And we looked at the full spectrum of lithium-ion, non-lithium-ion technologies, in that we fielded 11 grant projects. Eight of those are doing, and these are demonstration projects that are doing 10 hours or more and they will be doing that in the next one to two years. They'll be at commissioning your system. And two of those grants are actually gonna be able to do 20 hours or more duration. So we have begun to look into this definition of long duration storage from a practical sense of what technologies can provide it. We also awarded applied research, which is the earlier stage. We awarded three grants that are doing 20 to 100 hours of storage and they also will be demonstrating that as part of it. And I'll talk about them a little later. And then we've also began to look at green hydrogen. So right now in California, we have a bill called SB 1369 that defines hydrogen as energy storage. And that allows us to do this work with our electricity funds versus natural gas. And we have both. We also awarded two grants to look at longer duration storage from a study perspective, one to E3 and one to the UC California at Modesto. And I'm sorry, Merced. And so these studies will be looking at what is the grid need and how much storage do we need? And there's 20 hours of storage at one location better than four hours at five different locations. And then how much storage do we need? And then how does that storage work? And if I have a hundred hours of storage, how will it operate? If I have seasonal storage, how will it operate? So this is an analysis to look at that. They will be looking at different scenarios and they'll be looking at the future of the energy grid from a perspective of how does long duration storage compare to other options that are available to California. And so I wanna go through just a couple of technologies to show you. And I think Endor actually came out of Stanford work. So again, this is what I think they also have an RPE grant. But this is a demonstration where they'll be doing 10 kilowatts for a hundred hours. This is a thermal storage of basically large concrete blocks. They are looking at other materials. They use very non-toxic materials, very inexpensive materials and materials that can handle long duration. So we're talking about a hundred hours of storage and with an ultimate goal of reaching $10 a kilowatt or less. So what I wanna point out in this technology is we have several companies reaching for this goal and this was an RPE goal. What it turns out to mean in practicality if you look at what we're paying today and the last year or two for energy storage if I buy a four-hour system today at 10 megawatts and in the future I'll buy a four-hour system at $10 a kilowatt hour, you can get four days of storage in the future, four days for what you pay today for four hours. And that's the innovative breakthroughs we're talking about at long duration storage. Next chart. The other big player in this long duration storage a hundred hours plus is form energy. You may have heard of them. They're the founder of Tesla, co-founder of Tesla founded this company. There are several billionaires that are on his board of directors. Bill Gates has an investor in this company. So we have a demonstration project with UC Irvine. They'll be doing a 10 kilowatt system for a hundred hours and demonstrating it on the facility at UC Irvine. They have also signed an agreement back east to build a one megawatt system for 150 hours and deliver that by 2024. So they are definitely approaching themselves into the commercial market and they're interested, they are interested specifically in replacing that's a gas power plants with energy storage. Next chart. So we mentioned before a pump tide row so there's a classical pump tide row and here's the project we have where they're doing aquifers. I mean that wells that are abandoned wells in California and there's some 10,000 abandoned wells there. So they will be these are associated with the water and it is a classical pump tide row where the water goes down and water comes up. The difference of course is when the water is in a reservoir it sits there. So this is one of the projects where we'll begin to look at seasonal storage. And the reason is when you have storage sitting still most of these systems require you to recharge it. You have to have some energy maybe 1% typically it's five or more percent. You're charging that battery to keep it fully charged. And this type of system, it can sit there and you don't need any energy to keep it. So if you can use an hour later, a day later, a week later, or three months later. And so that's something for us the definition of seasonal storage and how that would work is very important to us. So this is a technology that's not only giving us long duration, they're gonna provide 20 hours to 25 hours of storage at five different wells and integrate them all together into one system. And it also gives us the ability to start to look and analyze this concept of seasonal storage. Next chart. And also as we mentioned before we've awarded into hydrogen. Hydrogen is a big question for us right now in the future of hydrogen. Obviously hydrogen storage is like pumped hydro where you can put it somewhere and store it and put it in the ground and store it and you don't need energy to keep it there. And if we're looking at long duration and very high storage, hydrogen is clearly one of the technology we want to do. We awarded three different grants in this area. And this one here is looking at taking the wind. This is for green hydrogen. They're required to use green hydrogen and not gray hydrogen. So they're generating from the wind system they're generating hydrogen. They're putting it on storage and they're running it through a fuel cell to create electricity. So we're doing electricity in, electricity out in our demonstrations. And we have one project that's actually looking if you look at hydrogen, one of the challenges storing hydrogen, you have to store it in either very low temperature or very high pressure. We have one of our projects is looking in the metal concept when you store the hydrogen in the material and you can store hydrogen at a very compressed site at room temperature and at normal level, if that technology works out that it could be a game changer from making hydrogen a storage technology. Next chart. So just again, EOS is one of us. This is a Zeke hybrid system. They are one of our, they had three grants with us in the past. They actually went public at the end of last year. So they're one of our success stories being involved with them through the whole road. And then they also just received an award to provide us a 10 hour storage in the Disabanked Community Hospital where they will be supporting the hospital during PSPS events and during other events in California. And so this is a, I believe in the area of form fit and function of Zeke battery. I mean, lithium ion and Zeke and the Zeke combination batteries are probably the ones that are gonna be rising to the star to be able to compete on a one by one basis with lithium ion. Next chart. And then here's just a picture of flow batteries. The other technology that's rising very rapidly and I think the secretary of energy just recently made a comment that flow batteries are commercial. So we also agree with that. We have three different flow battery companies that we're doing demonstration with and those are providing 10 to 12 hours of storage. Flywheel companies, we have two projects. This is one of them. We have three different flywheel companies that are providing typically in the past flywheels for high speed, short duration. These flywheels provide four to eight hours of protection. They're very, very good performers for a good reliability, very good longterm life cycle costs. And we have two projects for this second company is providing 10 to 12 hours of energy storage using flywheel technology. So these are real world demonstrations that we'll be doing in that area. Next chart. So the last comment for wrap up my presentation is what's next for us. I mentioned we spent $100 million last year. So next year, one of the big challenges we learned with the California wildfires in the California public safety power shutoff events is that if you have enough storage and protection to carry you for the first 24 hours then you very well will be able to ride through that PSPS events. So we'll be doing a demonstration in a disadvantage. We mentioned about underserved communities. So we call it under-resourced communities which is a disadvantaged community, low income or Native American tribe. We will be doing these demonstrations in that community and we'll be looking to provide 24 to 36 hours of duration. That's a combination of storage and renewables. The size isn't sure but it's probably gonna be something in a range of 500 kilowatts to a megawatt. So it's a various extension of project. And we'll probably, we'll hopefully we'll pick one of the projects that I just talked to you to make that next step and be able to demonstrate a longer duration storage. Next chart. So I'm prepared to answer any questions now or later in the day, however, that works out the best. All right, Mike. Thank you very much for this wonderful talk. So we have again, many questions. Let me try to organize the questions a little bit. First, let me just ask something that's been on my mind for five years. I had a chance to moderate a similar discussion five years ago when the state first came out with this energy storage mandate. And I feel I didn't get a straight answer that time. So I asked the question again, how did the mandate come about to have a power versus energy as the specification for the mandate? Well, I was involved in all of that. Commissioner Peterman, as you know, was the commissioner in charge of that. And I think commissioner Peterman is probably should be known as the founder of energy storage and we know it today. That single ruling and that single action changed it. We would not have a 300 megawatt lithium ion batteries sitting in a moss land today if it wasn't for her and that decision that they made. It was a very closed door discussion, but they realized they had to make a market decision and you're correct. They put the power as opposed to energy. And they were, the staff did this and they used a lot. We briefed them on all of our research. I know commissioner Peterman, she was at our commission for two years. And then she went to the PUC and when they were doing this, they relied a lot on the research that we had done to ask them questions. It was clearly a projection in the future. As a matter of fact, for the first three or four years when she made that decision, the other commissioners, including our commissioners, felt like they were gonna have to back off on that and not do it. And now it turns out that she came out with 1% of what we need in the future or maybe 5%. So they looked at everything and they decided that they were gonna be a market a big enough to make a market transition. And they actually went through the process and developed the use cases. So they told the utility, you must buy this at storage. You must put it in transmission, distribution and customer side of the meter. You will buy this amount for this year, this year, this year. So they did a lot of work and they were very creative and they laid out the plan. And then they said, go do it, we'll pay for it. That is the key of all this is fact that the money came with the direction. And so I will mention here, I did mention before we talked before over a third of the states in the US, California and Hawaii are their leaders. Over one third of the states in the US have a mandate by 2040 to 2050 to convert their energy system to zero carbon. So that is becoming a national goal, not just a California or Hawaii goal. And so, but a lot of those goals that they're missing are like, we wanna do this but there's no money to do it yet. We'll figure out how to do it later. Fortunately for California, when they make a mandate or a decision, they cover it. So in the case that you're looking for, they tried to figure out how they operated. They didn't know the technology, the lithium ion systems that were 50 megawatts that they did in the early age did not exist anywhere in the world. And so they came up with a risk that they had what they were called exit points. So they were clearly decision where they could go back and reverse the decision. They never had to do that. And now what we see, we would not be able to even make the projections we're making today if it wasn't for that mandate that came out in, I think, 2012. You wanna help me to answer your question? Yeah, Mike, I think it's really amazing to see how much that mandate undershot is really remarkable to see. That's how fast we're moving. Maybe let me ask a specific follow up to this. You know, as I recall that the mandate was, what was exact number was a one gigawatt? It was 1.325, that was a mandate, 1.325. And in 2016, the legislature came back and said, you know, this is a great decision. We like what you're doing, add 500 megawatts more to it. So it became 1.825, so roughly two gigawatts. So that was the mandate. That's where the 2.4 came in that we have today. If it wasn't for the mandate, we would not have 2.4. And what happens with the 2.4, I'm sorry, 2,400 is all that is funded, all that's been awarded, it just hasn't been installed yet. We would not be where we are today without that mandate. There's no question about it. Absolutely, Mike. So, you know, you left in the mandate, the duration of storage was left open, right? Because you specified in power, but not energy. Do you think the incentive for the rest of the participants in the ecosystem would have been different if you specify say four gigawatt hour rather than one gigawatt? Do you think that would have made a difference in the trajectory? I think it would have been hard to implement and just so you know this and the rest of the audience knows this, there was, there is in fact a reason for the four hour mandate. And so what happens is they said, you can buy these systems, but you have to rate based them and they have to be part of your system to meet resource adequacy. So if we're a 50 megawatt system to sit there and participate in the ISO market, they must have a minimum of four hours of storage. And so they get paid for four hours. If they have three and a half hours, they don't get paid. If they have five hours, they don't get paid for the extra hour. They get paid for four hours. One of the reasons technologies like flow batteries and other ones could not compete if their system is designed for six hours and they're only buying four hours, then they're providing an extra two hours at no extra cost or no extra value. So the four hour mandate that drove us to where we are today with lithium ion was the mandate for the kilowatts and the mandate that they rate based it and they would get their money back. And so that's how they met their resource adequacy was to use energy storage. And it had to have four hours or more duration to meet now the ISO doesn't have a long duration market right now. It's only four hours and they're working on it, but they don't have a value for six hours, eight hours, 10 hours, 12 hours, 20 hours. They only have four. Thank you, Mike. So a specific question is the 20,000 megawatt mentioned, was that 20,000 megawatt or a megawatt hour for the CC goal? Everything is measured in megawatts, not hours right now. I don't know. I've not seen a megawatt hour goal ever other than the 100 hour, 20 hour, but it's not again, it's a duration goal, not a megawatt hour goal. So to my knowledge, with the exception of comparing prices, and you're right, megawatt hours or when you talk long duration storage, it's better to measure megawatt hours than it is to measure megawatt. So how do you compare a megawatt for 20 hours to a megawatt to 100 hours? Well, you compare it based on megawatt hours. In those cases, they're comparing prices to everybody's delivering the same thing. Megawatt for four hours, that's the other thing I mentioned for new technologies, it's a challenge we had with the mandate, because I went to commissioner, Peter, I'm in about halfway through the program and said, you realize what you're doing, you're buying one technology, you're not giving anybody else a chance. You say, can you actually let some of the other technology participate? And she said, okay, help me, bring me somebody who can participate. Well, the challenge is when you're buying two gigawatts, you don't buy it at 100 kilowatts at a time. You have to buy the smallest module with 10 megawatts by four hours. That's what EOS is selling to the PUC, something to the PG&E. I called 30 companies that I knew of that were active in the bit market and I asked them, when can you build a 10 megawatt 40 hour system? Two thirds of them said, it ain't even on our books, we haven't even thought about it. And the other one, the couple of them said, oh, give me the money, we'll build it tomorrow. Well, yeah, I know what that means. So nobody could do it. And today, the challenge is the same. Most of those storage systems in that 2400 is PPA, power purchase agreements, which means you have to have a banker willing to do a 20 year agreement with you and trust your system will be there on year 20. Lithium ion can get, every bank in the world will back them up. If you have a flow battery, or if you have even zinc, I mean, even a zinc battery, a flow battery, a flywheel, nobody will back that company for 20 years. And we're working really hard to get that investment community. And the reason we're doing all these demonstrations that I just showed you is because we want to give those technologies a chance to perform so that investment market will start. If they're not going to compete in that 20,000 megawatts, if they can't get financial backing, it'll all be lithium ion. Anyway, that's it. Thank you, Mike. And let me just say that this is a very difficult decision because you're trying to be technology agnostic here, but yet you have to specify something. So I think this, you know, Letmark decision here has a lot of implication to where we are today. So maybe we can come back to this panel discussion, but a very important one, absolutely. Let me just ask maybe one more question in the interest of time. So we've talked a lot about, you know, this goal being set in terms of power. How about energy efficiency? What is the state of the art right now? The technologies you mentioned all have very different levels of energy efficiency. Lithium ion, for example, is extremely high in round trip efficiency, but flow battery is considerably less. So give us your quick perspective on this, Mike, in terms of where the technology stand and how important it is going forward. So I think you have to look at how you're going to apply it. So you're correct. If you're doing short duration and if I'm on zinc battery and I want to compete with lithium ion in a four hour market, then I got to have an 85% efficiency, 80 to 90% efficiency, you know, and I've got some other shorts to show you and in fact, zinc lithium ion is not quite as efficient as they advertise, but typically the average is 85 to 95%, 85 to 90%. If you're going to go to a flow battery and now you're saying, okay, I'm giving you 10 hours of storage, but I'm going to have an 80% efficiency. Well, you say, well, I get the value of 10 hours and I get a little less efficient, that's okay. If you're looking at 100 hours of storage, we're talking 50% efficiency, which is similar to a power plant. So you are correct. I mean, you're not going to get the same efficiency with every technology. And if efficiency is the most important thing to you. So when it comes down to is you have to develop the metrics that are most important. And one of the things we do is we have a black box and we don't care what's in there. We see what's going to come out of the black box. What's around your proficiency? How many cycles a day? What's the safety factor? Lithium ion has thermal storage issues and we're coming out with new safety requirements that require you to separate those cells. And now we're having land use issues, space issues where people used to think I could put 10 megawatts in this square footage. I can't no more cause the safety code says you got to put these things further apart. Now you need twice the space you thought you needed or you're not going to be able to install it because it's not safe anymore. But that's going to prevent, you know, what happened in Arizona when the system burned down because of thermal runaway. We've had dozens of applications overseas. And that was because they were packing these batteries in so tight that they didn't have opportunity to cool. And when thermal runaway happened, the whole system went down. So that's just kind of the factors you have to think about. Yeah, this is a very tough problem specifying the metrics. So maybe let's come back to this in the panel discussion. Mike, thank you so much again for sharing your thoughts. If I can ask Nick to join the stage, please. So to finish the presentation today, and this will be followed by the panel discussion, we have Nick Irvin from the Southern company. And Nick is working very extensively on the technology development aspect. And we'll be sharing his thoughts on the technology road mapping. So just very briefly, he's a chemical engineer by training. And he's responsible for the R and D of many types of energy technologies, including nuclear, alternative fuels, fuel cells, batteries, technologies and other energy storage. So he has a very rich experience from the electricity grid side. Well, I appreciate the opportunity to be here. We are, I've got a slide deck here that is a little bit of background on Southern company. And it's a little different here. I'm gonna spend a little less time talking about exactly what we're doing. I think to sort of the first order, we're very aligned with I think the presentations we've seen here before in terms of the technology space. What I'm gonna try to do here is really learn, see if I can set the stage for us to learn from the smart folks on the line and try to just frame a few of the questions. It sort of builds a bridge from the last bit of the Q and A there on what are the right questions we need to be asking as we move forward into this low carbon future. I think energy storage is an enormous opportunity and enormous need, but I think we also have to recognize that anytime you're doing science, the most important thing you can do is ask the right question. You can do great science, asking the wrong question and get some really bad answers. So that's really, I guess the way I wanted to leave the panel talk and to hopefully jump into the broader Q and A. So a little bit of background on Southern Company. We're a, we used to be an electricity company. I started in the company as an engineer on a super regional southeastern electricity company, but over the past 20 years, we've expanded and now have operation really in all 50 states. And we've become an energy company along the way we've bought and acquired some regional gas distribution companies. We've expanded a portfolio and renewable energy all across the country, including in California with our wholesale company. And we're also working and are deploying, the nation's leading deployer of micro grid solutions through our power security area. When we were electricity only, we were roughly the size of Australia's electricity system. But you can see now that we've added gas. We are a 9 million customer strong company that is, we believe, leading the way for the future of energy. So not just your grandma's electricity company, but really what I think sort of the future of energy. We are a company also that's very forward leaning in terms of our carbon commitments. From a net zero perspective, we have established a goal for a 2050 net zero outcome. And we've got a roadmap to deliver it there. I think the roadmap is predicated on lots of technology work, lots of policy work and lots of support for infrastructure and deployment work. At the end of the day, we are unique in the job folks like myself who work in our R&D program and we remain committed fundamentally to developing innovative solutions to solve this problem. We believe that R&D is a cornerstone of the solution. And I think uniquely we're putting our money where our mouth is. We have extremely strong commitments to the Electric Power Research Institute to the Gas Technology Institute through our work with our gas subsidiary. And are a very strong and long-term partner, cooperative partner with the Department of Energy on, but the development and deployment of solutions to our energy challenges. So very comprehensive plan for getting to net zero. I mentioned our R&D. We are around 52 years of R&D. R&D was born at Southern Company in this idea of really at the dawn of the environmental movement with the passing of the 70 Clean Air Act. And we were really focused on early stages developing the science behind understanding our environmental footprint. So we did a lot of atmospheric modeling and that grew into emissions control and emissions management from the carbon coal and natural gas fire footprints. Over time that has evolved where we now have transmission distribution, customer service, and really a full portfolio of R&D that spans the entire operation of the energy system. We are a, I mentioned earlier, we're a founding member of every. We are through that partnership invested in something that's called a new initiative called a low carbon resources initiative, which is really a view towards deep decarbonization. At the end of the day, what we're trying to do is start with the customer and how do we serve the customer most holistically? I think a very important point there is that as we decarbonize the energy sector, from my perspective, it seems clear that we're consolidating the energy economy around electricity and let's just say something that looks like hydrogen, hydrogen or its derivative, some molecule. And so when you look at that serving, taking the opportunity to serve the customer in a more vertical way, not just their stationary energy needs, not just their electricity needs, but their thermal heating, their transportation, any of their feedstock chemistry seems to me to be built on a future of electricity or electricity like generating technologies, solar wind, other renewables, nuclear, CCUS as applicable across the fleet. These type of technologies are things that we are very adept in and stand well positioned to serve those customers with. That's going to mean a pretty big transformation of the delivery system. We are heavily invested in transmission distribution and what it means to accommodate those new resources and serve those loads in a different way. And then obviously this question of what is the right energy mix and how do you do that affordably and reliably to serve those needs? Sort of the big three questions that we have. As it relates to energy storage, I really want to transition now, like I said, to sort of setting the stage for a few questions. And I would say they're energy storage related. That's the toe in the door, but I think there may be even broader questions that sort of fundamentally reflect the nature of the opportunity in front of us. And I say opportunity because I truly believe it is an opportunity. I don't want to minimize the challenge, but it is a great opportunity for us to deliver sort of an abundant future for the customers we serve. So I got a bonus points at the end if you can name all these quotes that I'll offer from the same individual. So if you can name the individual at the end, bonus points to you. This idea that in science, you have to be very careful not to believe yourself too strongly, right? The first principle is you must not fool yourself. You're the easiest person to fool. So we've had a lot of conversation up until now about the idea. We're saying energy storage, but I think mostly we've been talking about electricity storage, and that's not a criticism. I think that's naturally where we are. But I like to come at this question from another direction. I think we get caught up in the idea of least cost planning models that are very linear in nature in terms of our thinking. And I'm much more of a boundary condition. Kind of a guy. And we, so we have this system now, right? That is depicted here. These are the living word diagrams that everybody knows and loves. But this system really depicts something that we seldom talk about. So the question about long term, what is long term? Well, I've included some charts, some data here on the right. I had one of my folks go do some research last year. And try to do our best estimate. I think these are probably to first order, you know, order of magnitude estimates, estimate as of 2018. What was the storage capability in the energy economy? And so I think, I think it's important to just settle on that for a moment, right? We talk a lot about four hours, we talk a lot about 10 hours, maybe 24 hours, but to be clear, the energy economy right now has invested in on the order of months of energy storage capability. But I asked my question, myself the question, why? Right? The model says, why would you ever need that? Well, there's some reason because it's not free. It's pretty close to free because it's mostly hydrocarbon stored in tanks or on the ground that power plants. But certainly it's not completely free. And so there's some aspect of this that is sort of out of sight out of mind, economic resiliency. I know for me, I hold my breath every time the hurricane goes through the city of Houston because of the nature of that, how that disrupts sort of the markets and everything else as it relates to the energy economy. And so, you know, let's level set here, right? If electricity is going to be the backbone of the future energy system, and a major part of that backbone is going to be through renewable systems that may be predictable, but not controllable, right? Then, and then we think about electricity storage. California is doing great work, but we're still five, six orders of magnitude below the total energy stored in the economic system today. And so now, then you say, maybe that's a so what, maybe how much do we need? I don't know that we need this much. I'll agree with that. I also certainly know that from an economics perspective, the conversations that we have with our major industrial sectors is all about predictable, reliable and resilient energy. These, especially as we think about the transformation of the industry, we're going to be not only investing billions and trillions of dollars in the economics of energy production, but also likely in the economics of energy use new manufacturing systems and teams and folks who invest multi-year, maybe multi-decade assets are going to need some confidence, some bankability here. And so this question of how much is enough I think is really important. And I think we should, we should really dive deep in sort of the boundary condition that we have today. The next question or maybe the next statement here is for a successful technology reality must take precedent over public relation for nature cannot be fooled. Said in the way that we think about it in R&D at Southern Company is you should follow the physics and the physics will take you to the key leverage point for the right answer. You can't out, you can't create economies of scale on bad physics and expect them to win. And so this is a chart that everyone here I know already knows, but I like to look at this chart through sort of a different lens, right? So Southern Company was built on, it was founded on the idea that some giants in our early industry had to control the rivers of Alabama to create energy density and energy supply for supporting sort of manufacturing in the south. And controlling the rivers of Alabama is depicted here in that bottom left corner, right? Dams, water, mechanical energy at 100 meters of height. That was a great way to get started. But what we have seen evolve over time is that the vast majority of the energy storage here has transitioned to the far right corner, right? Far upper right corner, the liquid fuels, the liquid hydrocarbons and the solid hydrocarbons, right? Colson's up there as well. So if you think about the previous chart, there's just an enormous amount of storage there. And while these other things exist in this, in our environment, the others just totally swamp them. And so this poses to me this question of, you know, how do we, how do we really dive deep into the physics or to the questions that Mike was talking about at the end? And will those physics drive backward compatibility? One of the things I think we have to be very mindful of is the idea of longevity of the assets we build. And so being very careful early as we invest in resources to make sure that they are durable as opposed to maybe a second wave of infrastructure coming along and overwhelming them and sort of doing their job for them as well as other jobs. So for instance, can a 10-hour storage system do everything that a four-hour storage system can? And if it can, well, then that four-hour storage system is quickly going to be overwhelmed. I don't know the answer to that. I think there's a lot of challenges like we talked about between efficiency and whatnot, but that's a really important question, I think. Everything I think is not depicted here, and I didn't highlight on the previous chart, but just the, you know, if I plotted nuclear fuel as an example on this chart, right? It's three orders of magnitude to the right and up. And so the idea that having energy supply systems that can double as storage systems I think is a really, really important concept we have to think about as we go forward. And then the last thing I'll say is this, smart enough to know that I'm dumb. There's a couple of reasons why this is a very dumb thing right here. This actually is the picture of my Blue Ray storage cabinet underneath my TV. I'm dumb for showing it because my wife will kill me, but I'm also dumb because what's depicted here is about 30 years of my current Disney Plus subscription in Blue Ray, right? And then what's predicted, what's the sad part is is about three or four years ago I threw away another probably 30 years in DVDs. And maybe 10 years ago I threw away that many years worth or more in VHS. And so I know we don't have the right answer yet. All of that box is taken away by that little black thing down there on the bottom laying next to my turned over router, the Apple TV, right? And so as we think about these adjacent industries that have already gone through this transition, I think there are things to learn from how this has happened and maybe what the customer actually wants may be extremely important thing to learn. So as an example, right? This is a hassle. I sort of hate this cabinet. It's a mess. It's always there. It's something that I have to manage. And I would, I will not rebuild this cabinet in my next home, right? Because I have this beautiful thing of Apple TV and Disney Plus and everything in the cloud sitting there at my, at my disposal. I can suddenly put my data storage on. No, nevermind. I was reading some articles from Gartner. 2016. There was this emerging trend that perhaps the cloud cloud storage would be important because of individual use of the cloud, but there was still this focus on on premise storage for institutional storage. And then the 2021 trends from Gartner is that the rate of growth of off premise cloud based storage or for institutions, corporations is growing faster than on prem and both will be reaching their limits within five years. So in just five years, we've transitioned from this idea of needing to have storage at our fingertips in our control to suddenly going completely cloud and, and relying on just in time supply. All right, with very limited local personal storage. I think, I think these trends and this idea that the customer, these, these commons, right? The commons of the future data, energy, these types of things. I'm not so sure how much the customer wants to manage that. So we should probably watch that and think about designing our energy system to support those futures. So I'm on, I'm on last leave you last with maybe a set of questions again. And really, I believe this thing at the top, I hope I can learn from the future discussion and any of you all who would like to engage us, we desperately want to learn from smart people and help have smart people connect us with the right answers. And so I would rather have questions that can't be answered than questions that can't be questioned, or than answers that can't be questioned. So these are a few that I thought I would leave everyone with. So this big idea of, I want to grow the electricity grid by 100, 150% to support the entire energy system of tomorrow from that entire Sankey diagram. And I need to do that in a very cost-effective way and very aggressively on a timeline. I think storage has to be an important piece, but just like storage of energy that I carry around on my body, I sort of want to keep it minimum to support my needs, right? Storage is an overhead on the infrastructure. It serves a purpose, but we should really be, I think we should really be careful about not overbuilding it. We should serve what we should build we need to serve what we should build. So overbuilding it puts a cost component on the back of the consumer that has to be addressed. Again, this idea for compatibility, you know, it's going to take me a long time to pay back all those blue rays in that chest in there. And that's a big challenge. And then this adjacent industry analogy. Again, data has gone through this similar transformation where we've gone from main frames to all in your laptop and desktop in your house all the way back now to we're headed back to Exascale Cloud Environment, you know, Exascale Data server systems where we're just in time data delivery to our end-use devices. That transition, I think tells us if nothing else a lot about the customer's desires, these type of systems. I'm going to stop sharing and I'll hand it back. I'm taking the questions here. Appreciate the opportunity to speak with you all. Nick, thank you very much. You know, I appreciate your pragmatic approach when it comes to energy storage and asking the hard questions. I think these are excellent points for kicking off the panel discussion as well. But let's just take a couple of questions here. You know, Southern, I think, brings the perspective of being an integrated energy company. So, you know, electricity is one of many energy carriers used here. Where do you see the opportunity of balancing between the various energy sources? I know we're talking about the grid today, but what is the strategy here when it comes to balancing the energy carriers? So, I think we have a pretty straightforward view that there's going to be a role of molecules in the energy system up tomorrow. I think I would say molecules and atoms, they need to be really investing and looking hard at our nuclear systems. The role of molecules, and I think the role that we can play in developing, I'm just going to use the word hydrogen, but let's agree that it could be any derivative of hydrogen, but a molecule that doesn't have a carbon footprint at point of use on the edge of the grid to expand our ability to import more and more low carbon resources. So the idea being any way that I can use to turn electricity into those molecules and draw more generation, expand the use of electricity to as many users as possible in these hard to electrify sectors, I think is our priority. And there you then begin to say, what is back compatible from that in terms of resiliency, in terms of, you know, all the different grid services that we need to support and stack those values for that customer. But the target I think is really this idea of high carbon footprint, high cost energy. I mean, we're really talking about these, right? So if I can use something like hydrogen to push electricity into those markets, then that allows me to grow the hydrogen infrastructure and then sort of make the bank shot off of that infrastructure back into all of these additional needs that we have. What it really points to, I think fundamentally is a need to integrate the systems approach from the beginning and not just take an electricity only approach. I think we will take an electricity system will lead, but I think the electricity providers really need to take an integrated systems approach as we chart these waters. Absolutely agree, Nick. Maybe let me ask a specific question and then we'll zoom out a bit as well before the panel discussion. So you mentioned hydrogen. What is your perspective on hydrogen as a mean for energy storage? You talked about edge of the grid, right? I think it's a really hard problem. Hydrogen for energy storage. And I think it boils down to that first chart, right? Hydrogen for energy storage. I think uniquely solves a lot of the challenges of energy storage by combining the ability to do long duration and energy storage. I think it boils down to that first chart, right? Hydrogen for energy storage. Hydrogen for energy storage is a long duration and sort of peaking power. But it's incumbent technology you have to compete with is a pile of things in a hole in the ground that I got for free. Hydrocarbons, right? That incumbent cost point makes it a very, very difficult thing to compete against. storage, I'm interested, for example, in how you optimize long-term storage with hydrogen around things like, I want a base load electrolyzer because it's likely maybe the most expensive part of the component or component of the system, and I want really cheap energy production or electricity production on the backside of that so-called, maybe it's a flow battery. We can think about it as a flow battery, right? So does that create a departure in what we've seen over the last two decades of larger and larger-frame gas turbines, as an example, that get really high efficiency because of high combustion temperatures, or do we see something that goes back to something that's more modest, like a frame five that's really focused on burning hydrogen or ammonia potentially at a smaller scale because the electrolyzer scaling would drive the energy storage product? These are the kinds of, sort of, as you peel the onion, you get down to these next levels. That feels like it might be a departure for you, from my perspective, right, as we move hydrogen as a storage medium on the back of electricity, and maybe even hydrogen as a vector for industrial decarbonization, like ammonia production. Haber-Bosch right now drives us to larger and larger systems on the back of natural gas steam methane reforming, but if I want to make green ammonia, then suddenly the key scaling component become the electrolyzer, and I miniaturize Haber-Bosch and make it more distributed. These are questions I don't think we know the answer to. We haven't really gotten there on the technology front yet, and I think that's where we've got to really do some hard study about where is the puck headed, not where we are today. It's really easy today to invest in lithium ions. It's sort of a no-brainer, but we've got to make sure we're not creating a lot of infrastructure and difficult to transition away from or grow out of components in the system. Thank you, Nick. Hindsight is always 20, 20, 10 years ago. We will not be saying the same thing about lithium-ion batteries. I think it's just very interesting, and this I think would be a good segue to learning from a Jensen field, which we can tackle in the next few minutes. Nick, I just want to really resonate with you here that there is no silver bullet when it comes to energy storage. I think this is also something that Mike and Stephen emphasize as well, and the solution roadmap is far from certain at this point, and there won't be one, but there will be many solutions coming together. I think the hydrogen example you mentioned is a very good one. Summing out, I thought you could maybe entertain us and tell us who the quotes are from. Richard Feynman? Surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman? Richard Feynman? As a lifer at Caltech, I receive all of my degrees from Caltech, and I can certainly appreciate that. So I recognize two other quotes as being from him. So I don't know how many of you got it right in the audience, but you should give yourself a pat on the back. Richard Feynman is really a visionary who was ahead of his time on many things, but gotten things right decades before they happened. So on that note, Nick, let me thank you for your slides, and let me ask Mike and Stephen to come back to the stage, and we have about 25 minutes left. I know time is a bit short, but hopefully we can have an engaging discussion. Thank you, Mike. Thank you, Stephen. And again, just let me thank all three of you for very insightful and overviewing presentations coming from very different perspectives, and I can see the differences between your views as well. So let me come back to, I think, a defining theme for today's presentations, which is what is the right amount of storage? I think we keep talking about this, and there are a number of questions in the Q&A as well. I understand the aspirational goal, but being an engineer myself, I like to talk about numbers. So there's been a lot of analysis done on the level of decarbonization and the amount of storage that is required. So maybe I can throw this question back to our panelists here. What is the right approach here in thinking about the right amount of storage? What should be considered? I'm not asking for a number, but what should our three of us have to be? Stephen, do you want to take it off? Well, I'll start with that one because there are a couple of questions about buildings and everything. So I think it is not a single question of what is the right answer for storage. The real question is, what is the right answer to get what we need at the end of the day? And that is, what's the storage role compared to demand response, compared to electric vehicles, compared to decarbonization of the building industry, and what can you do with those systems? So I think storage is a flexible solution. I don't think we're going to end up saying that's the primary solution to get our goal. I think it is an area where I don't think anybody knows the answer. I mean, obviously there are storage companies out there who would say, buy my product and I'll solve the world. I hear that all the time in presentations. But at the same time, when you look at the building, decarbonization, you look at energy efficiency, you look at thermal storage within commercial buildings and in residential buildings, you look at combination of just solar storage in the garage in the house, home versus in the grid. It's hard to make that answer now. I don't think we know enough. I think if we go along, I think in California, we're fortunate that we are beginning to look at it now, 25 years, 20 years in the future, to kind of make those comparisons. I think some of those goals like Commissioner Peterman's goal that she set back in 2012 was very innovative and made a big difference. I think there will be something. I think you see those numbers of 20,000 and 40,000 megawatts of storage. It is kind of a massive number. And I think as we go through the next five to 10 years of analyzing that and seeing what it's going to cost to do that and whether alternatives, I think that number can change. Clearly, right now, the big emphasis is on long duration stories because we don't understand it. I don't think we could get a room of 20 people and have five of them agree what a long duration storage is. And so from that perspective, obviously, I spent a lot of time on it. But I think it has to be an integrated solution. I think it has to look at the difference. But I do think the fact that we're going to a zero carbon future, which is primarily wind and solar, and wind and solar by definition are not a 24-hour-a-day grid generation source. We have to find ways to make that 24-hour-a-day generation work. That's what I'm just saying. Thank you, Mike. I can add it if you'd like. I think so, two important points that I heard from Nick and Mike in particular was your Nick's emphasis on how much uncertainty there is about how things are going to play out. And I thought, Mike, made a really important point, too, about how the consequences of how different incentives and pole mechanisms are designed may inadvertently choose certain technologies over others. And so I would say, from the DOE perspective, I think we recognize that uncertainty. And so we're really focused on trying to develop a strategy that remains robust in a wide range of scenarios. So it is almost like a portfolio approach to say, let's have as many irons in the fire as possible from an R&D perspective, and recognizing that there'd be different uses, different time horizons, et cetera. But let's push on all of those. Recognizing it may take decades for some of these technologies to really reach maturity or to market fruition. And that's also where we all, and I think maybe this part of DOE activity sometimes doesn't receive as much attention. But we've developed a number of different tools to help policymakers and regulators analyze how the system might evolve based on the introduction of new technologies. So giving the regulators at the state level, for instance, at the regional level, tools so they can understand how adding this technology will affect you both on the economic side as well as the system operation side. And really to just try, I think my perspective at least is that we're trying to enable as many sort of data-driven decisions as possible. And we don't really often make those decisions inside the DOE, but we're helping to inform and enable those decisions to be made elsewhere. And so I think Energy Search is a great example of that where it's going to be a lot of decisions made by regulators, policymakers, investors, entrepreneurs all across the sort of ecosystem. And we're just trying to support that in sort of a systematic way as possible. So just to add a little bit more to that, we're not talking enough about the customer, I don't think, in this conversation. I think about all of these potential solutions. This is a real struggle I have. We have lots of options in the fire, demand side management, all these sorts of things. And as an energy company, what I want is the customer, I think what I want as an outcome, is the customer to view me as always on. I never want my customer to ask the question when they put the light switch on, is it going to be there? In the future world, I never want to have to have my customer ask the question, should I charge my car or run my AC? Or maybe even more important, Southern Company is a winter peaking utility right now in the Deep South because of heat pumps. Do I keep my house at 68 or charge my car to go to work in the meantime? That's a bad deal for us, right? So from my perspective, how much energy storage do I want? Well, I want enough so that my customer is in a position that I can supply them all the energy they want. And I'll make more and I don't care, right? So I want to get to the point where the marginal cost of energy and the marginal carbon footprint of energy is zero. All I'm worried about is, do I have enough wire hanging on their house to deliver it? Because that puts them in a position to not have to make hard decisions about energy use because energy use is fundamental to their quality of life. If Texas taught us anything, we should know that energy use is fundamental to the quality of life of people that we serve. And I don't want to put myself in a position or my customer position where they have to make a trade on something as fundamental as that to them. And so just like we went from nights and weekends free to unlimited data plans, I don't ever want my customer to be waiting on the clock to click over to decide whether or not they start to drive, right? Just don't think about them. And so I think the answer to how much we need is, whatever we say, we're going to need more. And I think that takes us back to the physics, right? I'll say this more explicitly, right? At the beginning of a fuel cycle, a nuclear reactor has 12,000 hours, excuse me, say a gigawatt and 12 gigawatt hours, excuse me, yeah, 12,000 gigawatt hours, 12 terawatt hours of energy in its core. That gives you a lot of confidence and the ability. I think we've got to have rational conversation about how do we drive, how do we follow the physics to large scale, dispatchable, stacked value, energy supply, and storage in the infrastructure, as an example. That's where hydrogen, nuclear, I think, play an enormously important role in this future, this abundant future that serves industrial, commercial, but very importantly, me, my kids, the transportation, their heating, their cooling, all the things they need. We've got to stay focused on the customer. Well said, Nick, really appreciate that perspective. Maybe this is a good segue to the next discussion topic. In order to scale energy storage, the financing will be a crucial part of it. All three of you highlighted the bankability aspect of it. I wanted to get a sense from you. What is the big unknown here, or the unknowns, in terms of bankability? That makes it difficult for energy storage. What do the banks want to know that they don't know today that make their decision less favorable, say, for the technology development? If we have a magic ball to look into, what information do we need to acquire? And this could come from a technology aspect or the non-technology aspect. What do we need to learn moving forward to make it more easily financeable for these energy storage projects? And before you share your thoughts, let me just give one point of comparison. For lithium ion batteries, the bankability is not in the project. It's often actually in the factory building the lithium ion battery. So it's shifted quite a bit in terms of project funding versus factory funding. And this has a lot to do with where the scaling happens. For the lithium ion battery, the scaling happens in the factory, not from deploying individual batteries. So fundamentally it's very different from typical say large-scale projects that you see in the utility side. So with that thought, let me ask Mike, Stephen and Nick for you to share your thoughts on, what is really necessary moving forward to improve the financing of storage projects? Well, I'll start because I've spent a lot of time on this and continue to aggressively work this. I've talked to investors, I continue to talk to them and ask them. A lot of the work we're doing is trying to convince investors to invest in alternative technologies. So I think the first one is when you look at lithium ion and I'm an investor in the stationary market, you say, well, the electric vehicle market is growing like crazy and lithium ion appears to be the key technology that gives us some range we need to make it different compared to nickel metal hydride, which you're never gonna get there. When you look at the market for laptops and cell phones and toys and everything else that lithium ion has, but there's just another conceptual brain market that means it. When you look at stationary industry storage, a lot of companies will say flywheel companies and we'll say, you know, flow battery companies and even some of the advanced technology companies is a real question about longevity. I mean, I have to say I've been into commission 19 years and I've probably gone through a dozen bankruptcies. I'm going through one right now with the company that we have five agreements with that is no longer a valid company. And three years ago, we thought they were one of the rising stars that was gonna be a very successful company. It didn't work out. So I think the issue that the investors have is two things. One, what's the probability of that company being around for the length of this power purchase agreement? And second, what is the alternative to meet my commitment in my power purchase agreement to continue to support this system for 20 years if that company is not around? Well, obviously with lithium ions, you have many choices. You have many manufacturers, many suppliers, hundreds of suppliers of technology. However, when you go to flow batteries and when you go to advanced batteries and flywheels, you don't have that infrastructure and that backup system. So I think part of the challenge is making it a financially sound decision. That's just pure financially sound decision with the added resource. And we talked before, no one knows the future of energy storage and not that it could change, but five years from now, something could happen that could change the outlook and make a big difference and we're okay, we have enough, we don't need it anymore. So I just think it's the uncertainty and I think it's the concept of working with emerging companies that just don't have the history of performance. Even the bigger companies like GE and Westinghouse and other people that sell batteries, even they, I mean, they sell finance, but I would say they would still be challenged to find a third party financial or they would finance them even though they have the resources and the bank ability themselves to finance it. So if we get to the point where more customers buy the system upfront, then that risk goes away, but then the customer seems at a risk. So it is a challenge that I don't know is going to go away. I can just add to that. I think Mike covered it very well. I think it also helps to think in terms of types of risk. So to sort of tease out the different sources of risk from the technology side and the company viability, the policy risk, if there's an incentive and there may be uncertainty about that incentive, for instance, or the market and how the market may change over time. So if you're trying to build an asset that you expect to be around for 20 years and we have a lot of uncertainty about what the market's going to look like over that time horizon. So just identifying those and then coming up with targeted solutions for how you can address each of those, I think is that you have to become sort of more detailed in which risk you're trying to identify and ways to address those. Yeah, I would say I do think, I'm sorry, I do think that the DOE in the history, the DOE loan program, I may have lost a single here. Let me see what happens. You're good, Mike. Okay, because it says that. Yeah, so I would just say programs like the DOE Loan Guarantee Program could where it was during the R days, it wasn't accessible. I think we were too early in the technology. I think we're much more mature now. I think that loan guarantee program could create a market for financing that doesn't exist. And I think it's part of the Obama administration and I mean, the Biden administration and the amount of infrastructure they're interested in. I think if we come up with a program like that where the financial market has some secondary backup, I think we'll find a lot more support. So that's an area where DOE could play a monumental role in getting non-lethium money on technologies and opportunity to compete in the future. I just think it's going to take something like that to kick us out, to get enough history with some technologies to where the financial market is comfortable making it without some kind of incentive or some kind of a secondary guarantee. Yeah, Mike, you took the word right out of my mouth. I wanted to pitch Stephen here as a great role to play in this. I mentioned earlier, Southern Company has been involved with DOE programs for 50 years and we consider ourselves as prime contractor. So we do a lot of work directly for the DOE and doing just what we've described is how do we de-risk these technologies and make them more bankable. I think from our perspective, our focus is that we should be on the front end investing, buying down those risks through public-private cost-shared partnerships. And we really need to see DOE increase the level of investment over the next few years if we're going to make this transition happen. There's some great work out there done by Dr. Moniz and his team at Breakthrough and all the different think tanks who pointed towards the need to increase investment in clean energy two, three, four times if we're going to achieve these goals. Again, this idea of not just loan guarantees on the back end of the market but I think more fundamentally investing in the de-risking on the front end and getting more shots on goal as we in those emerging and transformational technologies is going to be critically important. Thank you, Nick. Let me maybe follow up with this more specific question. You use the word mature, de-risking, history as being what we need to achieve. What does it mean to all of you on a technology level? What is the risk here that really needs to be mitigated? Say someone comes to you with a new technology, right? So Mike, you said you hear this proposals all the time in the CEC. And what is that big question mark in your head when you say this technology risks? What is that risk coming from? So I would, again, from history of doing this at the commission alone for, and I've been working, I spent years in a small company myself that tried to go public and was bought into your storage company. I think the challenge that I see when it comes to answering that question is I would say at least nine out of 10 of the companies that we award a grant to, whether it's applied research or TND, and realistically, we order a grant and they go out and demonstrate something very successful. When they leave that system, nine out of 10 of them have a different product at the end of that test than the beginning. So the question becomes, when will they get to the point where that product is mature enough to be a stable product? And it's a good thing that they're improving but there's also risk associated. I mean, I'll tell you another story, I had, we did a project with DOE years ago with a company that had built a 500 megawatt battery system. It was a flow battery and demonstrated in Australia. Built it, demonstrated, worked well. We awarded them a contract to give us four of those systems. The first thing they did was totally redesigned the system. I went to their plant and they showed me everything. I said, Jesus Christ, you guys had a working system, what did you do? None of them worked. They went from a working system to four systems that didn't work. We only built two. The other two never got built and we ended up basically, not a single system operated. So they tried to improve it. They ran into sub vendor problems and leaks and all kinds of stuff. So the question is, yes, you always want to improve and you always want to be cheaper, better, faster. But there's a question in energy storage in particular because of the time it takes. This is not technology that you can evolve in six weeks or eight weeks. This is a two or three year evolution for most generations. So that adds to the question. When I'm an investor, I've learned certain questions to ask for any technology. When I have a flywheel company, I know three or four questions to ask to them in five minutes and I can tell you right then where they are in the commercialization process. I think banks are the same way when it comes to storage and that is how mature is your product and why, where are you in your manufacturing process and those type of things. You've got to get to a certain point where they feel comfortable that your product is going to be stable, your product is going to perform and you're not going to change something that all of a sudden takes something that worked last year that doesn't work in the future. And I don't have an answer to it. I'll just say when I talk to people I like to find out where they are in their, you know, the different versions that they intend to commercialize in. And I can say all of our successful companies that I would call successful today, their product that they give us today is not what they gave us five years ago. Mike, I really resonate with the points you just made. And I think one of the key challenge on the technology side is the design, build and test cycle. The time is very long for energy storage. It's often many years. So sometimes the risk is not apparent until much later in the process. And this is something maybe not shared, say in the microlatronics industry. And Steven and Nick, do you have other thoughts on this topic before we move on to close out the panel discussion? Well, I just, I agree with those sentiments. And I would say if you're building out a performer for a project that shows revenues for 20 years and in the later years of that there's not even an example of a project that's been around that long and investors gonna see a lot of risk there. And so that's gonna drive up the cost of capital to fund that project. And so I think that's a pretty clear challenge. And then so we're trying to come up with some mechanisms to address it. And I think Mike made an interesting point about how after the projects a certain way along you have some learned stuff that you wish you'd do on the front end and your competitors may learn from that as well. So there's a lot of dynamics there. Yeah, I agree with the general points that were made. Maybe to summarize, even as I like to think about it is it possible? Is it practical? Is it predictable? Three real simple questions. I think the last bit here that makes this that much more challenging is, I think the market dynamic that creates the value proposition is going to change drastically as we do more of what we're trying to address. So in some sort of, I mean by that, right? We have a challenge and we need storage in order to create, in order to widen the funnel associated with peak times and duct curves and all these kinds of things. But over time we're flattening the cost curve as we deploy more and more renewables. And so the idea of arbitrage value proposition all these things is going to be eroded over time. And so we're gonna be relying on something that looks like resiliency or whatnot that we currently don't have evaluation for and for the most part in the country. So that value of proposition in the market is going to change as we change the technology as the market matures. And that's another question. Great point. And I would suggest that is a different type of risk from the technology risk we're just talking about. Those are kind of playing off each other but each is a different set of risks. Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah, I just wanted before we break I wanted to answer one question that was in the chat or the Q and A's because I just want to bring up we are getting ready to award two grants to do that. First question on hydrogen and the natural gas system and hydrogen transportation. So we in fact, we have a natural gas program. I've been talking about our electricity program. So in that program, we are so we are definitely looking at because hydrogen fits in both marks. So we are definitely looking at how much can you inject into the current natural gas system and still operated, you know, hydrogen is probably the ideal renewable natural gas if it works. But also the question of can you use the natural gas system goes in California. We are obviously looking at what's the future for natural gas under our new goals. And so that is the question that we are looking at and we are awarded give or two grants to look specifically at the challenges of how much hydrogen can you inject in the natural gas system and still meet all the requirements so that the thermostat, I mean, so that the pilot light in your hot water heater doesn't go out and things like that. But also that natural gas system, can it be converted to be a 100% hydrogen in the future? If that's our plan, if we generate a lot of hydrogen from offshore wind. So anyway, but I just wanted to point to the individual who asked the question that we are doing research, we are getting ready to award two grants that will specifically be looking at hydrogen injection to the natural gas system. Thank you, Mike. This has been great. We have just two or so minutes left. So I thought I would just ask each of you to say something about the following topic. Nick, you make the point of learning from a Jensen field and of course it makes sense to learn also from past examples. So I'm curious how you think about the path taken by solar. It's about 15 years ahead of storage. What have we learned? What mistakes were made? What were the success stories? And what can we do differently when it comes to storage? Maybe just a lesson in a minute comment from our panelists would be wonderful. Nick, do you wanna start? Sure. I think if one thing we've learned, I think we learned a lot of things. I think one of the things we've learned though that we can't understate is that we can probably go faster than we think we can. So, you know, again, I'm with you all 15 years ago. I didn't, I had no idea that we would be able to do what we've done in solar. I think we've done that. There's a lot of reasons why we've done that. That would be the subject of another panel. The stage was set, I think, well. But fundamentally, I think our country has forgotten somewhat what is possible when we create focus. Maybe this is my parting shot. I'm reminded, two years ago, I went to the local NASA aeronautics museum here in Huntsville, Alabama, and I got to see the Saturn V rocket and the statement was made from paper to flight in seven years with 1960s technology, 50s technology, right? We can, if solar reminds us of anything, it's that we can move a lot faster than we thought we could. I'll just say two quick things. I think one thing we've learned from the solar industry, there was a time, and obviously, the number, honestly, the cost is 1% it was when we started with solar today, and it continues to go down, but there was a time when the cost of solar shifted from the technology to the installation and workforce management and all those types of issues that are what we call soft cost. I think storage is entering that market now so that if we will get to the point where the cost is more driven by what it takes to install, maintain it and manage it, as opposed to build it. And the second thing is I think we can expect a realistic continue reduction in pricing and a reduction in the cost of storage and more technologies that provide more value, but there isn't enough, if we have 100 technologies, all the 100 are not gonna be a commercial company. There's only so many spots at the table, like I guess I would say, and there's a lot more players trying to get there. So we'll see what happens at the end, but I think at the end of the day, we do have a very ripe opportunity, but we are gonna find that the additional other costs besides pure technology are gonna become a dominant factor as we go into the future. And I would just add, so I think there are some useful lessons as an analog in terms of how the technology cost reductions may enable new use cases, company dynamics, how the ecosystem may evolve at the same time. I think that energy storage is really a capability that a lot of technologies have. So it's more complicated on the technology side. There's a ton of different options and there's a lot of ways it can provide services to different markets. So at a high level, just the fact that storage has a transportation play and a grid play right there, it's a little more complicated than solar was. So I think that that presents more opportunities. I think it's gonna change the system even more potentially, but also as just a lot of uncertainty as well. All right. Well, thank you all for sharing these wonderful perspectives. I thought this was a very engaging conversation and thank you for answering my provocative questions directly, I really appreciate it. Stephen, Mike and Nick, thank you very much for taking your morning and early afternoon to do this with us. I learned a lot and on behalf of Stanford Energy and of course our audience, thank you once more for doing this. I hope this is just the beginning of a series of conversations. And I think we come back 10 years later, things are gonna be exactly 10x further than we are today. And our projection, we weigh off, I think that will be a very desirable outcome. Our next seminar series, to talk about demand side flexibility. And thank you once more for joining us today. Thank you and have a great afternoon. Bye-bye.