 Hello and welcome everyone to our briefing today investments in clean energy and transportation innovations in the federal and private sectors. I'm Dan Bressette with the Environmental and Energy Study Institute. The Environmental and Energy Study Institute was founded in 1984 on a bipartisan basis by members of Congress to provide policymaker educational resources to Congress and their staff. That was a long time ago and we are still at it today. We produce all sorts of great information. I'll talk a little bit more about that in a minute. And we've also developed some expertise helping utilities and rural areas provide on bill financing for their customers and customers and members and access federal resources to help them do that. ESI resources come in all shapes and sizes. We have briefings like this today. We also have a great biweekly newsletter that we call climate change solutions. I encourage everyone to check that out and subscribe. 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It's much better to have this information before you need it, and especially before your boss asks a tough question about a climate change topic. And you can help. You can count on ESI to always help with that. And so I encourage everyone to do that. The Department of Energy is a pretty busy place these days, and one of the main centers of activity is the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, and we'll call that EERE today. Our briefing today will take a look at programs and initiatives at EERE, including those advancing vehicle technologies that leverage clean energy to others that support grid-interactive efficient buildings. EERE also works very closely with the national laboratories and many, many public-private sector partners to deploy clean energy to decarbonize our economy, reduce energy bills for households and businesses, promote environmental justice, and create lots and lots of good jobs. Before we turn to our panelists, I have one last, actually two last pieces of logistics to describe. The first is questions. We'll hear from four truly tremendous presenters starting very shortly. We'll also have time for questions and answers. Now, I have a couple of questions all ready to go, but we really encourage everyone in our online audience today to submit questions, and you can do that two ways. The first is by following us on social media, and you can follow us online at EESI online, and you can also send us an email, and the email address to use is ask at EESI.org, that's ASK at EESI.org. Send us your questions and we'll do our best to incorporate them into the discussion that we have. Finally, before we turn to our panelists, everything you see today will be stored or will be posted online, www.esei.org. That includes the webcast if you want to go back and revisit any of our presentations, you're welcome to do that. All of the presentation materials are also posted online. In fact, they're posted now if you want to download them to have at your disposal while we listen to our great presenters. And that goes for all of our briefings, including those congressional climate camp briefings, including the upcoming Farm Bill briefings, and all the briefings we've done really over the past decade plus. If you have a question about a climate change topic, we probably have a briefing about it, and that briefing is available online for you to check out. So without any further ado, it is my pleasure to introduce our first panelists today. And I think the best way to start this introduction is by saying thank you to him and his wonderful team at EERE for working with us to put this briefing together. It's always a privilege to welcome Alejandro Moreno, who directs the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energies applied research development and demonstration activities for the geothermal, solar energy, wind and water power technologies offices. Alejandro oversees EERE's energy system integration efforts. Previously, he was the director of the Water Power Technologies Office. In that role he managed efforts to develop and commercialize innovative technologies and market solutions for clean domestic power generation from hydropower and marine energy resources all across the US. Between his students at DOE, he served in the energy groups of the World Bank and International Finance Corporation where he designed and led regulatory reform programs to spur investment in clean energy and rural electrification. Alejandro, it is always great to see you, and I always learn so much from your presentations. I'll turn it over to you, and I'm really looking forward to this. Thank you, Dan, and thank you to everybody for being here. I will say there is an update to my bio since the last time I was on one of your webinars and now I'm the acting assistant secretary for all of EERE, so I'll talk more than just about the renewables here today but also all of our work in energy efficiency and sustainable transportation as well. So, to get started, for those who aren't as familiar with EERE, we are in many ways effectively the clean energy innovation hub and center within the federal government. And the work that we do, if we can go straight to the next slide, the work that we do cuts across to five major economic sectors of transportation, power, industry, built environment, buildings and industry and agriculture. The work that we've done over the past few decades is in large part responsible for a lot of the visible advances in the energy system that everybody that we all see around us today from large wind turbines and large solar panels to the incredible proliferation of light on the roads in the last few years. And a lot of innovations that we will see over the next few years, sustainable aviation fuels, for example, renewable derived in large part from biomass, the widespread use of hydrogen and industrial processes and likely in the power sector as well. And if we think about the clean energy transition that's in front of us, recognizing we've made a lot of progress but we still really do have a long way to go. And that's what a lot of us are going to talk about today. I'm going to give an overview of EERE as much as can be done in 10 minutes or so and many of the other speakers will hit on some of the projects and type of research that we're doing in considerably more depth. I'm guessing that the request that we have in front of us the budget that we have in the budget that we asked for is really critical to drive continued development, continued cost reductions performance, enhancements in technologies and ultimately the scale of the technologies in front of us that we know we need to reduce emissions, but also to continue to lower energy costs for consumers to increase the reliability and resilience of the energy system. As I said, you see the five sectors, the big energy and industrial sectors in front of us on the left in this slide, just as important, even though we and EERE we have 10 individual technology offices. Many, many of the issues that we work on are common to all of us. And you see some of those on the right here in this slide. Ensuring that new technologies in the clean energy transition provides well paid jobs here domestically, developing a well trained workforce to take on those jobs, making sure that we really think through how the impacts of new infrastructure projects and energy affect people, affect communities do so equitably, and working hand in glove with state partners and with local partners to ensure that the technologies we develop have the ability to meet and are deployed in a way to meet concrete local needs. And on these issues, I'll say personally we are really most powerful when we're working together, both within EERE, across DOE and the federal government, and working with other partners and a big part of what we do in EERE is continue to develop new partnerships and work with new organizations and fund new organizations to bring different technologies and different perspectives to the work that we do. So I'll go through a few examples again of the work across all three of our functional pillars. We go to the next slide, we'll start with renewable energy and you see our renewable energy program. It has four technologies and an integrated program that you see at the bottom there, solar, wind, water, power, and geothermal are the four fundamental technologies. And then we do work on specifically how to integrate more renewables into the power sector. We work closely with our partners in our office and work for that. Some of the work that's really critical here for example, the US right now has the chance to establish leadership in offshore wind specifically in floating offshore wind. So the offshore wind that's critical for deep water, it's all of the west coast and a big part of the Gulf of Maine, so the US really has probably the biggest floating offshore wind resource close to load in the world. But it requires bigger turbines than have ever been developed before in manufactured in very new ways, and it requires floating platforms which we've never done to be designed specifically with the turbines themselves. We know we can save 30% or more of materials and costs if we co-design the resources for the turbines that way. This takes a considerable amount of work. It has not been done to date. If we do this, the US can be the global leader in floating offshore wind, which is going to be one of the biggest new opportunities in the clean energy space. So there is another example where PV technology photovoltaics are fairly well developed, the costs have come down significantly over the last decade. But while there's the cheapest source of power on the grid in some places, we need them to continue to drive down those costs so that they can be the cheapest or one of the cheapest sources everywhere, regardless of how strong the resource this is. So this is more work to increase both the efficiency of the cells themselves, as well as the durability, the longevity of the systems. This is another opportunity for the US to develop as we think of cost and efficiency to develop leadership in new manufacturing technologies as well and techniques. The most PV right now is developed in China or by Chinese owned companies. We do think there are significant opportunities to bring back major amounts of PV manufacturing, in part through some of the incentives that you see, for example, in the inflation reduction act, but also through new techniques and new technologies for photovoltaic cells. Going to the next slide, we'll talk about transportation for a moment. We have three major programs, one focused on vehicles, one focused on bioenergy, and one focused on hydrogen and fuel cells. The work here, again, much of the work that we're doing in the vehicle's office, for example, is to continue to improve battery technologies to make the batteries in our EVs last longer, charge faster, be smaller, you can do more with your cars. Also have a lot of work through both in partnership with the Department of Transportation and others to develop networks of electric vehicle charging, particularly in underserved communities. And also for medium and heavy duty vehicles, we do have proposals for developing heavy duty charging corridors, which will be critical for the electrification of heavy duty vehicles. Other area mentioned this at the beginning, but sustainable aviation fuels. We have commitments from most major airlines to if the tech as the technologies come on board and are ready to switch over fueling. There are fuel needs from fossil fuel derived fuels, fueling system to renewable biomass powered sustainable aviation fuels. And this is probably one of the, if not the hardest part of the transportation sector to decarbonize into transition, but we see through the analysis we have, we have enough biomass in the US to be able to transition the entire aviation fleet and really strong commitments from end users to do that as the technologies become commercial. Next, next slide. Talking about our buildings and industrial program again three major programs there. One is focused on materials and manufacturing technologies that's cut across all of the clean energy space. The other program is focused specifically on new technologies for industry, really focused on the decarbonization of industry, and one for technology focused more on on buildings, energy efficiency as well as as grid enhanced building at the beginning. Big, big focus in buildings, recognizing both traditionally area has done a lot of work in making the building and more efficient, more cost effective. That is still critical. The more efficient our building envelope are more efficient all of our end users are the less new generation infrastructure we need to build. And I'm making that demand more flexible, more responsive is a critical tool in integrating more renewables onto the power system. And for industry in, in many ways this is the hardest sector to decarbonize it often requires heat that it heat levels that are much greater than than what we can achieve just through electrification. And so recognizing what what are the elements of industrial processes that we can electrify. And for those that we can't. How do we use and adapt clean fuels or clean processes for generating the levels of heat we need. And alternatively what are some of the ways to create to mimic the same processes without requiring the same degree of heat so that we can continue to electrify more and more of industrial processes as well. And, next slide, related to what I was talking about the beginning recognizing that more and more the energy sector is getting more integrated. It used to be the transportation and vehicles. I'm sorry transportation and the power sector didn't have a lot to do with each other and now as more more transportation becomes electrified. And that's not plan one without the other you can't think about what a charging network looks like without thinking about the demand that that requires on the electric system that then has to feed back into generation just one of many examples. And more and more we are thinking about how we transition to not only focus on individual technologies but focus on system level solutions. And that includes programs like our connected communities program, which focuses on using demand flexibility so it's what I was talking about a minute ago, how do we integrate some of the responsiveness in building electricity demand and use that effectively to integrate clean energy to communities focuses on bringing together local governments and other stakeholders, communities and utilities to not only have a goal for their clean energy sector but to really understand entirely throughout their energy sector through the grid through their buildings and industry and through their transportation networks exactly what steps they need to take. This is building on a study we did in LA the LA 100 a few years ago that I think Meyer will talk about next. Our energy transitions initiative, for example focuses on remote and island communities, which often are going to face some of the highest levels, percentages of renewable energy on the power system first, because their systems are smaller. How do we work with them to make sure that those systems are meeting local needs and that we're learning from integration of really high level of renewables across the board for renewables but also for the transportation sector and back in the load. And clean cities which which is run out of our vehicles program which provides technical assistance to a wide range of cities on needs increasingly they cut across both the transportation sector and the grid. And other sources of demand and so as the power sector becomes more integrated we need to follow suit, we can't just take individual technologies and not think about how they will be used but we have to recognize the context in which they'll be used and support these utilities and other stakeholders to use them as effectively as possible as a whole system. So, last slide, just what that means for us, you see our, we are budget request for for apply 24 this is in the President's request that was announced months ago. If the research and the validation that our office supports is necessary to get technologies to the stage where they're not only individually commercially available but adoptable at the scale that we need to see in order to meet clean energy transition. Some of that is cost. Some of that is increased performance. A lot of that is also addressing market barriers and getting people to understand communities, utilities others who need these technologies and who have critical services that depend on them to understand how they work together and how they provide both cleaner, more affordable energy sector at large but also how they need immediate local needs that individual communities and the utilities and the end users that rely on them need every day. So with that I'll turn it back over to you Dan look forward to the question and answer session with it. Thank you so much Alejandro and really great slides nice charts very easy to read. If anyone would like to go back and revisit Alejandro's presentation the livecast will be posted shortly after today's briefing. We also already have his presentation materials online as well so you can download the slides and that goes for all of our panelists today and really all of our panelists who use slides which is most of them. We do these briefings. Also, Alejandro touched on a lot of great issues a lot of great topics to the extent that there are questions in our online audience will have a Q&A session after our fourth presenter. If you have a question for us you can follow us online, follow us on social media at ESI online can also send us an email and the email address to use is ask at AS that's ASK at ESI.org. Our second panelist today is Meyer Seligman. Meyer leads the National Renewable Energy Labs government relations office and is responsible for ensuring that stakeholders are informed about NREL's research to help advance the labs mission. Prior to joining NREL, Meyer served in numerous capacities during her 15 year career in the United States Congress, including seven years as a professional staff member for the US committee, US Senate Committee on Appropriations, Energy and Water Development It should say seven years as a easy to work with and always super responsive and interesting professional staff member for Senate Energy and Water. Meyer I'll turn it over to you welcome to the briefing today. Thank you Dan it was a pleasure working with you guys at ESI in my past life and I'm just happy that we can continue this relationship going forward. Now that I'm at NREL but thanks so much and thanks to everyone for being here today. Next slide. Just to get started and kind of follow on some of Alejandra's comments. As an overview the National Renewable Energy Laboratory NREL is one of the 17 Department of Energy National Labs NREL is the applied research laboratory stewarded by the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy. There are four labs that are stewarded by the Office of Science. There's one lab stewarded by the Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management, one by nuclear energy one by environmental management and three by NNSA. We are the primary lab for renewable energy and energy efficiency research and development where the only FFRDC dedicated to the research development commercialization and deployment of renewable energy and energy efficiency technologies and as part of our mission. We work with private partners to transfer technology developments in these spaces to the marketplace. We're a government owned contractor operated facilities and we're funded and overseen by EERE. We have three campuses that operate as living laboratories. Our two main sites are in Colorado, our main campus at the South Table Mountain, and our Flatirons campus which hosts our National Wind Technology Center. And we also have a site, our northernmost campus in Fairbanks, Alaska, the Cold Climate Housing Research Center. Next slide. Our world-class research expertise in the four main energy sector areas that Alejandro was referencing a few minutes ago supports the work that is mentioned across all the EERE programs. It boosts economic growth and it drives the bigger engine of U.S. innovation. Renewable power, solar, wind, water, and geothermal energy technology, sustainable transportation, bioenergy, vehicle, hydrogen, energy efficiency buildings, advanced manufacturing, and energy management programs. Energy systems integration because this is incredibly important across all programs. It applies the high performance computing and data and visualization capabilities to grid modernization. NREL hosts EERE's flagship high performance supercomputing asset at our ESAF user facility. But we partner with industry, academia, other DOE programs and other federal agencies in all of these spaces. We've got about a thousand active partners across all these areas. And by partnering with universities and research institutions, we leverage our scientific state-of-the-art facilities to solve these complex multidisciplinary challenges in these areas. I'm going to provide a couple of examples of how we're partnering for impact with industry, government, and academia. But next slide. Alejandro's comments on how we support EERE programs, we are NREL researchers are on the front line of design, analysis, research, validation, resource and site characterization of water power and wind energy research. And I'm going to highlight some of the hot topic research areas that Alejandro mentioned a few minutes ago, but we are advancing working to advance U.S. offshore wind with technological innovations like floating platforms and scaling solutions for larger turbine designs and advanced turbine controls and lightweight drivetrains and supporting grid resiliency through these systems by enabling reliability services like frequency control, voltage regulation, and other things like ramping. We're fostering a sustainable and circular economy by developing advanced wind turbine and component materials and manufacturing methods to improve recycling and recovery. But we're validating multiple wind technologies at scale to achieve an integrated system that can meet all of the complex energy challenges of the future. So our background in atmospheric science and modeling and validation grid integration, economic analysis and data analytics, advanced materials and workforce development and stakeholder engagement supports DOE's core capabilities that really do support industry needs. Next slide. The holistic approach to aviation decarbonization sustainable aviation was was just mentioned by Alejandro a minute ago. But as the aviation industry transitions to decarbonization energy challenges only grow in complexity across fuels aging infrastructure and what a future infrastructure looks like aircraft and system interdependencies so the need for focused coordinated holistic approaches to public and private aviation related organizations is incredibly important. Our role in sustainable transportation is to develop the modeling and tools analysis and testing capabilities that you won't find an industry to really help the aviation stakeholders understand and assess and develop pathways and meet their goals and goals for aviation decarbonization. We are, we are also our strategic focus about large energy challenges in aviation decarbonization, decarbonization across the fuels, infrastructure and aircraft compliments all aspects of industry research and current and future needs but we do work across agencies with DOE with fAA with NASA with hub airports, state departments of transportation and energy offices and industry, the SAF producers, aircraft OEMs, airlines, engine OEMs on sustainable aviation. And airports and partnerships with airports to support the industry's infrastructure necessary to decarbonize flight and transportation hubs linking passengers and cargo to urban rural communities. You know, are incredibly large energy users so how do you update aging infrastructure for future infrastructure and plan for the next 15 to 20 years. So, next slide. Alejandro mentioned the LA 100 study which was released about two years ago, NREL provided rigorous integrated engineering economic analysis to Los Angeles Department of Water and Power through the LA 100 renewable energy study LA 100. The results there showed that meeting LA's goal of reliable 100% renewable electricity by 2045 is achievable and will entail rapid development of wind, solar and storage technologies this decade. So at the direction of the Los Angeles City Council, LA embarked on a plan to modernize its electricity system infrastructure aiming for this 100% renewable energy supply, along with aggressive electrification targets for vehicles and buildings. And so we partnered with them for this study. We are now partnering with them on an equity strategies project which ensures a clean energy transition for the city that improves energy justice. But we use community input to set priorities for energy justice and analyze clean energy transition pathways to maximize outcomes all over the city. Next slide. C to C the clean energy to communities work that Alejandro also mentioned this was inspired by LA 100 and essentially our researchers have reduced the fidelity and made this analysis like LA 100 more available to people in communities. This analysis is funded by by DOE and it's managed by NREL it's supported by other national labs PNNL are gone Lawrence Berkeley and Oak Ridge National Lab. But this analysis informs these stakeholders where to go and what to explore based on their goals and our research platforms provide the validation and de-risking to the stakeholders to really help deploy the solutions identified by the analysis. It really does. It helps communities meet their own targets and they might be net zero they might be clean energy emissions reductions or other targets but we help communities meet where they are going and support their goal setting so our research platforms can see how these communities to see how a virtual model of their community interacts with actual and emulated clean energy infrastructure and devices like wind turbines controllers electric charging stations, helping read de-risk those future developments. Next slide. Talking a little bit about our our partnering for impact NREL does have more than 1000 active partnerships with industry academia and government. From a STEM education university partnerships, we support EERE and the Solar Decathlon which is happening in about a week. The collegiate wind competition which is taking place next month. And as well as visiting faculty programs through the Office of Science and other programs across the Department of Energy but but our our idea that partnerships create jobs strengthen the clean energy workforce. DOE NREL and industry are just integrated partners that that we we help them meet their goals. We're all moving forward for the next 15, 20 years and so folks like Fortescue and Eaton Wells Fargo and international partners like the Lithuanian Energy Agency. So how are we moving towards carbon free electricity system and grid integration and hydrogen production and technologies and future state of the art facilities. Next slide. Thank you very much. And I will turn it back over to Dan. Thank you so much, Meyer. You're one of your early slides that had the the map. Of course NREL as one of those next Thursday we will have a briefing that will feature Alejandro's counterpart in the Office of Nuclear Energy, and we'll be talking with them about the programs underway, including those funded by the bipartisan infrastructure law and inflation reduction act. And also we'll have a representative from Idaho National Lab. So two weeks and two national labs. I think there's really no way we could cover too much of what the national labs have going on it's so cool. So thank you so much for joining us today. Another panelist is Steve Zanka. Steve is a commercial aviation professional with 37 years abroad in strategic airline aviation and sustainable aviation fuel experience. Over his career, Steve has been a strong industry advocate who has developed pragmatic solutions to the challenges of aviation growth, and such engagement led him to accept his current role as executive director of the commercial aviation alternative fuels initiative or CAFE in 2012, and that happened in 2012. CAFE is an industry partnership fostering the development and commercialization of sustainable aviation fuels and engages in public to private partnership activities designed to convene the group of participants needed to build an entirely new industrial sector. Steve, it's great to see you. I like your background and all of those cool models behind you. I'm looking forward to your presentation. Okay Dan, thanks. So, in my lot of 12 minutes I'm going to try to do three things for you today. One is, we've been working on this for a long time but we find that our communications outward are limited and so some people have no idea what SAP is or the fact that we're using a sustainable aviation fuel today. And in fact we've been using it continuously since 2016 so I'm going to give you some education and familiarization. Secondly, I want to talk about the fact that this is an industry pool led effort. This is not being jammed down our throat this is a strategy that we initiated in 2006 that we feel is sort of on the cusp. And thirdly, that the need for engagement from multiple federal agencies is high, including DOE ERE and the veto office. And what we hope to see over the next several years through execution of the SAF grand challenge that I'll talk with you about a bit about is that we move SAF production from where it is today to the same level of maturity that we see from solar now, pretty much being able to compete on their own. That's where we want to be. Next page. So, Daniel mentioned this, CAFI is a public private partnership. We were founded by the industry working in collaboration with our regulator FAA back in 2006. We feel like we've done a good job with respect to other environmental issues and aviation, including continuing continuous improvements and noise generation, continuous reductions and emissions. And we knew in 2006 that we had this greenhouse gas challenge in front of us. And based on work that was done clear back into the 80s, we knew that we had the ability to produce sustainable fuels. And that presented the most likely viable technology approach to mitigate our greenhouse gas production, and that's the path that we've been working on. So CAFI's goal is to develop sustainable aviation fuels. These are non petroleum drop in jet fuels with equivalent safety and performance comparable cost and providing the environmental improvement and securing the energy supply for aviation. And then doing that in conjunction with a bunch of additional public-private partnership activity that we execute with FAA and DOT, USDA, Department of Defense, energy, commerce, state, etc. Next page. So this is the commitment that aviation has made most recently. This is what we referred to as a wedge chart or a sand chart looking at our emissions going forward and where we're at today. Today, coming out of COVID, we are improving nicely. We'll probably get back to more or less a standard growth trend here in the next couple of years. But we are a gigaton production entity. And the challenge for the aviation enterprise is that we have a growth rate that exceeds our ability to improve fundamental efficiency. And so we have an emissions growth rate as a result of that. The aviation industry has committed now to net zero carbon growth from 2020 onward. And we are actually under a regime now where that's required for international emissions. And we subsequently have committed to a net zero CO2 carbon emissions in 2050. It's not exactly clear because 27 years is a long time to determine what a technology development profile looks like. But we believe that we can achieve emissions reductions from a, you know, a standard aviation paradigm of growth and emissions improvements through the use of technology, operations, improvement in operations and infrastructure, the development and use of sustainable aviation fuels and market based measures next slide. So I want to impress upon you several aspects that you hear kicked around when people talk about aviation. So as good engineers, technically driven institution, we say, okay, where does the primary problem come from. In our industry, it comes from medium to long range aircraft in the medium to large size category shown in the oval in the midst of this page build next up next. There's a lot of discussion around the incorporation of some very shiny ball kinds of targets for the aviation space hybridization electrification fuel switching to hydrogen and some other kinds of solutions. Well, what I'm here to tell you or that we are communicating more broadly is that those technologies do not work across the entire space of what we know as aviation. They likely will work very well and some very modestly sized vehicles, urban air mobility vehicles, unmanned aerial vehicles, it's some GA applications, etc. But for the propensity of the missions that come from CO2 next build. Those technologies don't work across large aircraft as an example for battery powered or electrification that technology is off of of the needed level of energy per unit volume or energy per unit mass by factors of 50. What we're talking about is the need for several decades worth of continued improvement in some of those technologies before they really buy their way onto an airplane and become the primary driver for non greenhouse gas aviation. So here in the interim where we feel like we don't have the ability to simply rest and wait for additional technologies to come along. We're all in focused on this concept of sustainable aviation fuels that deliver at least 50% reduction in that greenhouse gases. And several of them that are being produced today are in the 80% reduction level, and we have pathways towards achieving more than 100% reduction going forward next slide. So, before I talk to you more about what staff is, there's further indication of this being driven by the aviation enterprise and through our interaction over the last decade and a half with governments, how we have coalesced into an overall strategy. So aviation made that net zero carbon commitment by 2050 in 2021. In that same timeframe, the US government announced the staff grand challenge with targets of 3 billion gallons of production by 2030. And my apologies on the slide there 35 billion gallons by 2050 35 billion gallons fundamentally represents a full replacement of petroleum based jet fuel for the aviation sector in the US in that timeframe. Business aviation has made those same commitments. We have offtake agreements for between five and 15 years from airlines for at least the first seven facilities before any concrete is put in the ground. It's a fundamental unique thing that the aviation enterprise is offering to potential producers to have that level of offtake commitment. We have Corsia, which is a framework established by our international regulator on what this means for flights between countries, etc. We have a lot of policy mechanisms that are starting to come into play. The aviation understands how some of the other technologies that spin around this space like power to liquids, biomass energy carbon capture and sequestration direct air capture and sequestration sort of fit into the rubric of the things that aviation is interested in. And then we have the original equipment manufacturers, DoD and others continuing to help us with fundamental research and development and looking at different acquisition options. Next slide. There is a chart of the commitments that airlines have made all of the US airlines who belong to A4A have committed to net zero carbon by 2050. Several of them if you look through the detail on this slide have made more aggressive commitments already to net zero carbon by 2040 to certain levels of usage by 2030, etc. I have this slide in there that you can come back and look at this detail if you're interested. Next slide. All right, so what is SAF? SAF is still an aviation fuel and commercial aviation in the US or around the world uses jet fuel or aviation turbine fuel. So we're talking about being able to continue to make an aviation turbine fuel. Why is that important? Because it allows us to have a drop in approach with no changes required to infrastructure equipment, right? I don't have to rebuild every airport in the world to bring in a new type of fuel. I don't have to replace every airplane in the world, a 20 some thousand large commercial aircraft. I can do, I can get my carbon reduction by using a drop in fuel that has a lower greenhouse gas impact. We also want to do this sustainably. So taking social economic and environmental progress into account while we're still focused on achieving that greenhouse gas reduction. Well, how do we do that? So instead of reaching into the ground and pulling hydrocarbon molecules out of the ground in the form of petroleum and then refining those to fuel products, we're reaching in into our own biosphere and picking up molecules, hydrocarbon molecules from things that nature hands us or using recycled components from the things that we do as a natural course. Unabashedly, we believe we think this was validated when we initiated the work in 2006. It continues to be validated. This approach is the lowest societal impact way to decarbonize civil aviation. Next slide. So we're making a lot of nice progress. We have seven different ways to do that. We have another six in process and other 15 that are further up in the pipeline. We utilize a lot of different processes to actually convert different kinds of feedstocks, lipids, sugars, lignocellulose, hydrogen and carbon sources, etc. And we're continuing to expand on all those concepts as well as working with existing refineries to figure out how to help them convert their production of jet fuel. Next slide. Again, this is just in there for your reference. These are the seven pathways that I mentioned on the previous page. You can come back if you're interested in finding out more detail about those next. This is where we're looking. This is a glass half half. It's not too optimistic in a view. It's not too pessimistic of you. If these companies shown in the top of the page don't stumble, we should expect to see about 1.6 billion gallons in 2028. As every day goes on to get a bit more and more confidence that we're going to be able to achieve that 2030 goal of 3 billion gallons in the 2030 timeframe. And there's a lot of folks who are not on this chart who haven't got to the point of making a commercial announcement or making an offtake agreement. There's a number of companies out there that are native of them I as I have outlined in the blue box. Several of these companies launch a jet Givo fulcrum have talked about being able to produce a billion gallons themselves next. And as I indicated the production of these feedstocks can come from a lot of sources like municipal solid waste, forestry residues, ag waste, waste food production, industrial off gases oil and cellulosic crops. And the next object out in the future, perhaps is the production of these fuels from hydrogen and CO2 itself, but those kinds of solutions require ubiquitous renewable power and availability of relatively clean water. And those are some key challenges next. So, what do we focused on them so we've made some progress we have several entities who are in the process of developing commercialization. And there's still things we need to work on staff is able to be produced and used today because it has policy support, we know that the public support for policy support will likely win. So we want to continue to focus on bringing down the physical cost of those fuels. And we can do that through some of the things on these page page on this page. I'm here to reinforce the fact that the work of EER E Bido and other deal deal e offices is key to allowing us to continue to tackle cost and revenues associated with the production of components that come out of such refineries. Next page. The grand challenge we talked about it has a roadmap that's been developed that has six primary work streams that are highlighted here. Bido is currently focused on the conversion and technology and process develop components of that grand challenge and we're working with a broader basis continuously, as well as working with the other agencies that are there so just reinforces the value of public private partnerships and working with the development activities of the federal government next slide. So, as a summary, you can see some things on here I didn't mention before some various details if you want to come back and reference those feel free to do that. I'm going to the bottom of the page, the work of DOE via EER E and their bioenergy technology office, the Office of Science, the loan program office, the bioenergy research centers the national labs and others are all key to creating and enabling the foundation of success in the space and delivering on this market pool that aviation has for the development and usage of staff. Thank you Steve that was a great presentation and your slides were excellent tons of great information I encourage everyone to go online to ESI.org and download those and take a closer look. While you're there, we also have a really great issue brief about sustainable aviation fuel, my colleague Jeff Overton, who's a retired pilot, who knows a thing or two about moving airplanes around wrote this tremendous issue brief it's one of our most popular resources and so when you're online, really too bad if you didn't also check that out. Our fourth panelist today is Abby Campbell Singer. Abby is senior director and head of climate and infrastructure policies for Siemens USA. Abby leads federal policy development strategy and advocacy efforts on climate and infrastructure topics, including electrified transportation networks, modernizing grid infrastructure for renewable integration grid edge technologies and energy efficiency to make building smarter, safer and healthier prior to joining Siemens she served as senior advisor for energy and climate for the British Embassy in Washington. And that's where she managed a team of policy advisors across the US. And before that, she served as a professional staff member for the US Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources Abby. It's always great to see you really looking forward to your presentation and hearing about all the cool stuff that you guys have going on at Siemens, take it away. So, I want to first thank ESI for having me here today and other panelists. I'm hoping to round out a bit of what has been shared really focusing on the business and investment side in terms of what we're doing and what we're seeing and the different points between the programs that have been discussed today. Next slide. So Siemens, we are a large company, we have been in the US over 160 years, we are represented also two states in Puerto Rico. As you see here some fun Siemens facts on the side really just goes to illustrate I think a few different points. One, the US is our largest market. We are working on a range of different technologies in different stages of development, working on deploying those technologies across the US. We have a team of about 46,000 colleagues that are working every day to see the advancement of these technologies, and also to work with communities and partners like do we in the national labs to figure out solutions and we continue to advance. With that being said, we also have this ecosystem approach is what I'll focus on today. And that's a reflection of, we have a lot of entities that are directly within Siemens are manufacturing footprint or technologies office, the teams that are working on service and maintenance, our colleagues within the facilities, but we also support a large group of suppliers. And so this ecosystem approaches one that when we talk about these press releases that come forward and all the projects and successes that we've seen that we're beginning to work on in the US. It's a lot of work and a lot of individuals that are a part of that that are really in that sort of large ecosystem approach that Siemens takes in the US. So let me drill down a little bit further in terms of what Siemens does and how we can't into e are we into the next slide. So Siemens are manufacturing technology innovation company and the team that I lead for Siemens smart infrastructure. That team is about 12,000 employees across the US 100 locations. We have over 30,000 customers that are ranging from cities, states, hospitals, schools, utilities and everything in between that are all focusing respectively on their resiliency goals, on their climate goals, and just quite frankly on their energy usage and day to day needs. And so we've a range of different things that you can see on the side of the screen that really take into account our portfolio of technologies, it brings from building products to electrical products, electrification automation, e mobility, ACDC, how we like to phrase and say it, you know, from plug to grid grid software and then regional services and solutions and so the easiest way to frame all these different things that Siemens does is we're from the different buildings. And we're looking at this evolution of technologies really in between and the role of buildings and how we can manage those new technologies moving forward. One of the things that we're really proud of and that DOE has been critical is we've saved about $3.6 billion in energy costs for customers in the US since 2000. It ranges from various different work streams, including performance contract work so where we partnered whether it be with FEMP or states or cities to come in and really figure out how they can best be using their building assets and their energy in a smarter way and reducing not just their emissions but their energy costs as well. And then you see at the bottom of the slide here, that total number that we talked about in the beginning of Siemens facilities about 17 of those, including Siemens facilities that we will be unveiling soon in the Dallas, Texas area, e-mobility to bring our Buy America compliant EV chargers will be opening very, very soon. So next slide. What about an ecosystem approach and I know that Meyer gave a deep dive in terms of what their national labs do. Siemens we've been in the US 160 years. We are a company that again calls upon multiple different partners. A very strong part of our foundation in the US is an ecosystem that is focused on R&D as a company that is involved in multiple different areas of research, focusing on refining and developing and then ultimately seeking to deploy technologies. It's critical that we have such a strong ecosystem, not just for us here in the US, but Siemens is a company we compete with our peers here domestically but we also compete with our colleagues globally. As we've seen, particularly within clean energy across the globe, there's been various, various policies that have moved very quickly that has solidified significant funding for research and development in countries across the globe. And so we're very excited for the bipartisan infrastructure on the inflation reduction act to really see this historic opportunity here in the US to really amplify and to maximize what's been happening for many years across this ecosystem. Of course with the national labs as well to really spark and move us further in terms of the deployment of these technologies. And so I'll just touch on a couple of points here. We work really consistently with several different labs including Oak Ridge on various different projects including how we are going to make our 2030 goals become climate neutral. We also work with NREL as we're seeing the emergence of battery technologies as well as with Oregon and so this ecosystem approach particularly for a company that's developing and deploying these assets is critical to ensure that we have that partnership collaboration and really opportunities for best practices lessons learned as we're moving this technology forward. Next slide. So, if you think back to a few minutes ago where I said what does Siemens do, and what are the markets that we need for in the US. You can layer this basically to what the Department of Energy is doing and what the area is doing. It's incredibly important for these offices to have consistent funding and for us to see these policy modernizations and uplifts that we've seen over the last two years with my personal infrastructure along the inflation reduction act because we're really at this critical time. We've seen as I mentioned previously countries globally investing tremendous amount of resources and time in emerging markets, such as electrification batteries grid technologies, the evolution of buildings and what that role is going to look like in terms of making them autonomous, making them robotic and really defining what that grid edge is going to look like for a building. And so, for us, it's important that we have this partnership and consistency with programs like this. So the US has a leadership opportunity to really advance to spur that deployment here domestically so that we're not just deploying projects and deploying assets but we as a company have the opportunity to invest. And we've seen over the last two years, Siemens alone is invested over 200 million across our electrical products business, our charging business, and our electrification automation business really to meet the moment and the opportunity and the market growth that we're already starting to see from these two pieces of policy. So on the screen here just to dive a little bit further. We've already partnered with DOE and Erie in several different ways. First remembers as the better buildings but our climate challenge that again is an opportunity for companies like ourselves that are tackling a very large building portfolio footprint. We have about 10,000 vehicles were seeking to electrify by 2030. We're also looking to move our manufacturing facilities to try to tackle some of those challenges that other speakers has talked about today. And so this collaboration opportunity allows us to work with our peers to work as a labs, and then also an opportunity quite frankly for us to showcase our employees and our colleagues in the facilities as they're advancing our facility in Grand Prairie Texas is working right now to reduce its emissions by 90% through conversion of its paint lines. And it's a really strong piece of work that shows what manufacturers can do and so not only are we excited to share those lessons learned but we're also excited to work with DOE to really amplify those colleagues and to recognize the work that they do. I spoke a little bit about our investment including our newest facility which will be Dallas Texas area, which will be manufacturing or EV charging stations that work has really been critical based on what the sustainable transportation team has been doing at DOE in the joint office to give that consistency and direction to really amplify what was put forward from the bipartisan infrastructure law. And then, additionally, when we talk about renewables, we're seeing movement and interest and a real inflection point with customers and partners and communities across the US to bring on renewable technology. And while that technology is solid will continue to develop in advance, but there's also areas that we need to continue to collaborate on including workforce development so the solar energy technology offices doing a tremendous amount of work there including working with partners like Siemens and others to try to figure out best practices and opportunities to make workforce development more accessible, equitable and open. And then finally I just want to touch on manufacturing. Siemens at the heart of what we do is to advance technologies to develop the design and deploy them into manufacture them. And so us as a manufacturer we understand the challenges and it takes the consistency of markets that is needed, the ability to have a strong ecosystem such as the area in the national labs. It's also incredibly important for us to partner with other manufacturers to understand challenges and opportunities and how we can address market needs to make sure that the US is as competitive as possible. It's also important for large manufacturers like ourselves to really work and support our colleagues who are more on the smaller midsize part of the operation. And this is again when we look at these massive opportunities to invest and deploy 21st century infrastructure over these next 510 years. It's going to take again that ecosystem approach to deploy and to have the partnerships and access and supply chain quite frankly to do so. And so the advanced manufacturing technologies office has been critical within that. And one thing to note while we're building on manufacturing is we're really excited about these new entrants of US manufacturers whether it be within electrification grid technologies or within batteries. There's a huge opportunity right now and the Department of Energy and ERE is really doing a tremendous amount of work to ensure that it's done as quickly as possible as consistently as possible and most importantly as durably as possible so that as we look across these new markets, 1020 years from now the US has a strong leadership role within them. So I'm excited to answer questions and look forward to further discussion. Thanks Dan. Thank you, Abby. That was a great presentation and I'm looking forward to the Q&A as well. As a reminder, while our Abby's co-panelists turned their cameras back on, as a reminder to people in our audience, there's still an opportunity to ask questions you can follow us on social media at ESI online. You can also send us an email, an email address to use as ask at ESI.org. And I see a couple of them coming in, which is great. We'll do our best to get to those. To begin our discussion, I'd like to come back to an issue that all four of you talked about in different ways and that is sort of workforce. And I was just, I was just looking up, I was paying attention to Abby's presentation but I was also looking up our most recent climate jobs fact sheet. And it turns out that climate jobs, including renewable energy, energy efficiency, transportation, sustainable transportation. We're talking about millions and millions of people already employed in those jobs, which is great. And many of those sectors are making a full recovery sort of post pandemic. But I'd like to go into a little bit more detail. And Alejandro, I think perhaps we'll start with you and then we can go through the order. And I'm curious, how do these partnerships that develop renewable energy, energy efficiency and sustainable transportation sort of directly translate to strengthening those workforces and are there things underway that are specifically sort of designed to strengthen the workforce in addition to all of the great R&D and deployment activities at ERE? Thanks, Dan. And I think this is a critical question. We all know that the clean energy transition has the potential to unleash hundreds of thousands of new good jobs. And that said, in order for those jobs to materialize, we need well trained workforce that can effectively operate the energy system of the future. And one of the, to me, one of the most rewarding elements of being in the federal government is that we have resources that can help support that at every stage along the process. We have undergraduate education in STEM through internships through vocational training and also working with ultimately many of the different organizations that will be hiring for this workforce to ensure that an encouragement and job jobs are stable or well paid need to provide good careers with opportunities for advancement. Obviously, we can't do this alone. The partnerships that we have, whether it's with labs or ultimately with universities or with those companies that are doing the hiring are absolutely critical. The number of jobs that DOE itself hires for is relatively small. And some of those programs, some of them are really well known programs like the Solar Decathlon that work directly with students, undergraduate students to build solar-driven buildings, EcoCar Challenge, which pits teams of undergraduates against each other to build electric vehicles and other new vehicle technologies. And these teams often, it's not just the prize and the recognition they get, but they often serve as the recruiting hub within their university for companies in the field. So GM will go to universities that are active in EcoCar Challenge and work directly and talk directly to the students who spend probably more time in the lab than in class. But it's a great training for the workforce. Another program probably worth highlighting that we do in partnership with municipal utilities and regulators and others is a fellowship program or Clean Energy Innovators Fellows. It started in the solar sector and now is expanded out, but where we actively place fellows for two years in state regulators, in small utilities, other organizations that really need technical expertise to work on specific projects over a period of a couple of years that they identify in partnership with the host organization. And ultimately many of these fellows end up having careers either in their host organization or in similar roles in other entities. And so I could go on, there are many programs here, but those are two really good examples that are at different points in that process, in that career development process. Myer, I'd love to hear from you and then we'll go to Steven to Abby. Yeah, I mean just following on Alejandra's comments and I think he highlighted a lot of them, you know, there's between EERE and all of the other applied and fundamental research program within the Department of Energy there's so much in the way of STEM education and partnerships. I will again put another plug in the solar decathlon is in about a week that Alejandra just referenced the collegiate win competition is next month there's also a kid win competition in partnership with the collegiate win competition. There's a ton of STEM outreach workforce development and analysis activities that that really do highlight future collaboration and bringing people up to speed on what the Department of Energy does what the labs do and how you can potentially recruit from from those grades and giving opportunities, you know, to students to challenge their creativity and passion and skills on these technologies is a really exciting space. There's the gym fellowship graduate education minority fellowship that NREL host there's a renew reaching a new energy sciences workforce fellowship that sponsored by the Office of Science. So collegiate competitions, these fellowships visiting faculty programs, and then partnerships with universities and academia are incredibly important. So, and something that is just part of the National Lab and DOE system. Go ahead Steve interested in your perspective on the workforce issue. It's, it's really neat to actually see the jobs come into play in this market. And we've seen it in the ethanol space than the biodiesel space now the renewable diesel space and soon the SAF space and so it's real it's very tangible we're talking about 35 billion gallons of fuel production, or 35,000 million and I put it in million terms because the sort of the metrics that our industry have is that for every million gallons of production. There's between one and three direct jobs, depending on the technology and the feedstock that's used right so we're talking about a tremendous amount of physical jobs. There's typically on top of the direct another two to three x that number in indirect jobs and then induced jobs beyond that so the ethanol and biodiesel renewable diesel industry have done a good job at highlighting the the the workforce that they have this technology is going to replicate those. A second aspect of that is the majority of this fuel production is going to need to occur where the feedstocks are it's too expensive to move feedstocks around the country. It's not as simple as what we do with petroleum today. And so if you look at that list that I talked about the different feedstocks types. Well guess what a lot of those are going to be in rural and challenged areas we got a lot of work going on up and down Appalachia as a as a result of people being interested in in being able to use woody residues as an example. A lot of the new companies that are planning for production are actually looking at the certification that comes from the economy zones investment zones and those are clearly targeted at areas that are challenged from an economic perspective so there are several things going on in our industry that point to our ability to make a difference with respect to rural development and and in rural parts of the country. And then, you know, one other aspect that we have found is people often refer to will there be enough jobs and what we have found is an individual cases where these companies start to look for people, or in the projects that lead up to that commercialization those projects have workforce development activities associated with them with technical colleges local colleges, high school programs, lots of communication efforts, etc. All of the projects that USDA executes that we collaborate with them on USDA NIFA AFRI. For those of you who love the acronyms their SAS program sustainable agricultural systems and coordinated agricultural projects. We have major points of emphasis on this issue of workforce development so it is occurring. We've, I think we've got the great foundation out there that other renewable fuels have demonstrated for us and I expect this to be a tremendous job holder. When we look back 2027 years from now. And your slides you described Siemens as workforce it's already robust, but no doubt you're doing things beyond just hiring to help strengthen the workforce I'm curious what you have to share with. Yeah, I think it's a great question, we would say it's probably our number one topic or number one issue right now. We also concurrently think it's probably our number one opportunity so we currently have about 2000 positions open across the US. These are ranging from individuals that are working on engineering, I know that we just spoke a little bit about university pipelines and technical ecosystems, we have a range of those really working on what we could be doing as part to help supply and support curriculum and training. We also partner a lot with our colleagues within the national labs in terms of training and development programs. We work with our partners in the IBW as we're working to move in our facilities and expand those as an example to train. But I think when we look across this right now. We also know there's a lot that we do and has been looking at opportunities to continue to provide training internally opportunities for movement and advancement in different fields. As individuals are excited or interested in other opportunities. We also know though that there's a lot that we need to do particularly as these markets are moving forward and we're seeing additional deployment of renewables and batteries and electrification to ensure that it's more equitably distributed and that these opportunities particularly the service opportunities and the facilities are being located in a distributed way. And so I think do we's been a good partner in that particularly trying to understand skills match supply chains development deployment. I think this will be an issue that we're continuing to need a large ecosystem to work through. We also work pretty consistently with our peers as an example. A lot of the electrical manufacturing colleagues are in North Carolina we've very strong manufacturing community there and so we also working currently to see what we can do. And a lot of us believe very strongly in non proprietary training programs and registered apprenticeship so there's work that needs to be done to also ensure that it's not just training for Siemens, but it's training for these technologies and putting the individual in the best position to empower themselves as well. That's great. Thank you so much for that. And we're getting a bunch of questions I'll turn to them in a moment but I want to make sure that we sort of come back in Alejandro I think it makes sense to start with you again on this one since you're here on behalf of the Department of Energy. We know, because people from DO we tell us and we believe it and we see sort of evidence of it that sort of the alignment with the Justice for the Initiative is driving an enormous amount of work coming out of the agency these days which is great we had Henry McCoy who's the Director of the Office of State and Community Energy programs in a briefing a few weeks ago and he talked very eloquently about this as well. As far as the programs under your control, or management Alejandro at ERE. What are you doing to ensure that these investments are being deployed equitably and from our private sector partners, I'm curious sort of how that's being received. And what are you doing on the on your side of the on the table to ensure that and to leverage that investment and make sure that it goes even further but Alejandro let's start with you and then we can go back here from Meyer and Steven Abbey again. Sure. Thanks and it's a critical question and for those that don't know the Justice for the Initiative it's it's a commitment by the administration to make sure that 40% of the benefits of our investment climate. Change technologies are pretty disadvantaged communities and that's, you know, to me it's it's part of a bigger critically important philosophy that make making sure that the energy transition and the technologies that we promote work on the ground for people and meet the needs that they have this we know that that the technologies we we support are clean, that they help address climate change, dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions and which is critical. But on top of it, they have tremendous opportunities just to make people's everything and to do that in a fair way and then some of the the maybe more intuitive ways are inherent in the technologies themselves we know that renewables. Can and in many places already are the cheapest option for electricity on the grid. NREL and Meyer maybe you'll talk to this helps provide an analysis that they showed that if you're when when all of the build out of renewables that that we forecast from the inflation reduction act. are realized that the cost this could result in a reduction in the cost of bulk power, or in the cost of the bulk power system by 50 to $100 billion. That's direct money out of your electricity bill. The proliferation of EVs holds the potential to completely eliminate gas purchases, which is a big issue for many, many people. And a lot of the energy efficiency work directly can reduce energy burden, and we know that energy burden gas purchases hit disproportionately to disadvantaged communities and to people who have less disposable income distance. So a lot of work that we do on top of all that is specifically and explicitly focused on ensuring equitable access and equitable benefits to clean energy technologies. One really, I think important example is our national community solar program focused on ensuring that rooftop solar, the benefits the technologies and the benefits of that don't just accrue to people who own their own homes, but can be just as accessible to people who rent and who rent in multi units that can be very difficult to different different business model. We have a long program working with project developers and now more and more working with lenders to to ensure that the risk profile is really well understood, and that we provide a lot of standardized documents that minimize that and work directly with providers to lenders who understand that you understand that market and are prepared to lend to it and many are. So there are a number of programs that are again focused on specifically on equity, and then making sure the third real pillar to that is, is making sure that the work that we do the funding opportunities that we have the partnerships that we have with the lab that we ensure that we have provisions in there that make sure that the selection partners that the partners we work with the awardees we work with that we are representing all Americans as much as we can in all of the work that we do. Yeah, and following on Alejandra's comments I mean I think energy equity is is and has been central to enrolls work for decades. You know, from both across the country. Yes, we are in Colorado and Alaska, but we have a presence in 48 states right and we are working with communities all across the United States, and internationally and partnering for communities to figure out what exactly their goals are and how to make them, how to make those goals realized through analysis. And so, you know, integrating all of diversity and equity throughout our work throughout the innovation process across all technologies, developing to those technologies and tools to make that community driven energy transition possible so we have a range of tools that really do support that communities and tribal governments and companies and you know every every single person across all sectors can reach out towards and utilize these tools with accurate detailed data and insights that leads to more better informed decision making. And all of these NREL tools that are sponsored by eere and do e those are free they're publicly accessible, and they're complimented by user guides. But, but I think that, you know, this engagement it yields these co developed equitable solutions and and having worked with communities and organizations around the world. Energy systems really truly are defined by the people that live and work in them so how do you engage with those communities incorporate feedback throughout the process and respond to their needs as conditions and priorities change over time. But we, but we have a range of analysis that has supported different community needs and engagement and our website and I'm always happy to follow up with anyone who does have additional questions regarding these resources if you can't find them on the NREL website feel free to reach out to me. Thanks. And Steve and Abby, from your perspectives on sort of the private side of the public private partnership. How are you taking what what eere and NREL are putting forward and really putting it into practice and taking it to that next step. Well, obviously we're working in collaboration with them on the primary approaches that they're using. There's a couple of aspects that are unique maybe to the aviation enterprise, one of which is, you know, our continued focus on making these four fuels affordable is so that aviation remains accessible to everyone in the US. And, you know, you can look more broadly beyond the US at how island nations and remote areas that that have challenges associated with standard standards of living etc. You know, making aviation more affordable more green, where all of those communities is is really what we're after. There's a couple other aspects to that that we haven't touched on. We're after we're pursuing the production of SAF to address our greenhouse gases but guess what there's some other really nice things that come along for the ride. Like when we burn these fuels they actually burn significantly cleaner than petroleum based jet fuels so by having a wholesale adoption of SAF at a given airport, we're going to significantly clean up the air quality in that airport area which is often the people impacted in those communities are poor communities. So air quality aspects. There's also some things associated with feedstock production that go towards improvements or reductions in other kinds of pollutants pesticides herbicides the improvement in water quality. And other crop scenarios etc so there's a lot of things that come with the overall concept of sustainable aviation fuel that clearly are targeted at improving equity. I think it may be this in terms of the lenses of benefits and investments. We know inherent with the technologies that we make whether it be our buildings work are going to make a building safer healthier the air cleaner, reduce costs whether it be a school or a hospital or a city that the work environment the learning environment is safer and more open for that collaborative work or learning with electric vehicles it's not just you know reducing the emissions which is massive when we look at the heavy duty, but we're basically putting battery assets and garages right now the opportunity for those to serve and be called upon in times where resiliency challenges are being felt and so the technologies have these opportunities to continue to benefit the communities inherently at their level. They're going to continue to expand and get better and smarter and faster. I think the area that ourselves and others within the business community continue to work on is the role investments right in terms of new tremendous opportunities with the inflation reduction act and communities now having access to these energy credits for direct pay, but there's additional work that needs to be done so that when the systems come in it's not just that one technological approach but there's this larger view that takes into account well when investments are being done for the community college or for training or quite frankly companies like ourselves and also have a financial services business or an investment business, where we need to also take, which we are doing a larger lens to say well what are these individuals that don't necessarily have access to capital or communities or businesses. And so how can we be ensuring that it's not just one system that's deployed and approaching the benefits and clearly come from that says larger durable impact for the community and access to participate in these new markets and technologies. Thank you for that. So I've got a couple great questions here from our online audience and I think let's treat these as like grab bag so I won't call on anybody in particular well with one exception I will Steve just FYI one of these is sort of directed at you but I think it's something that everyone can answer. And so if you have something please feel free to unmute yourself and speak up in this first one. Steve, the question is sort of what might be in play for sustainable aviation fuel in the context of the firm bill. And let's broaden that out for our other panelists to if there are specific opportunities that you would like to highlight in rural areas that may or may not be connected to the firm bill will use this opportunity to to get at those but Steve let's start with you and and we'll go from there. So, yeah, do we have a half hour. Obviously, if you are, if you intend to produce feedstocks from bio sources, you have to have the bio development that goes along with it and so, whether it's new purpose grown kinds of crops, new winter cover oil seeds, leveraging some previous programs that USDA has that have fallen by the wayside over the last few years like the biomass crop assistance program. Across multiple. I like to use the pun there's multiple silos the agencies within USDA or silos and right and trying to figure out how to work across all of those to effectively build out agricultural supply chains is key. That includes some other things too like maybe some dedicated resources within USDA whose responsibility is to make sure that Saf grand challenge items are actually be being worked into those additional silos. There's multiple opportunities out there we got we're working with multiple entities who are putting together program lists for the kinds of things that could and should be advocated in the farm bill. I'm in a unique position of working for a federal agency and so I have to be careful with respect to advocating for specific programs. But hopefully my comments reflect that the multitude of opportunities that are out there to continue to get assistance from the farm bill and standing up an entirely new agricultural industrial complex also. And I'll just jump in really quickly and say the rural energy programs are critical. Again, we saw updates about within the policies that have been passed over the last couple years. USDA is doing a tremendous amount of work, particularly on transmission and generation to work with rural utilities as they're working to bring on new assets, new technologies to decarbonize also to do it in a way understanding their community and cost benefit insurance was part of that. I'll say within that note, we're really excited about these rural energy programs to look across unique co-ops, public powers, whether it's been micro grids or beneficial electrification. There's really a lot of innovative work that's done there against community approach can work with one colleague and one state in the lessons are learned from there are really spread across the overall community so critical program or definitely supportive overall energy will be. I'm sure talking to colleagues are listening to this briefing right now over the coming months on that program. Myer or Alejandro any sort of role things that you'd like to highlight. Yeah, I mean I think Alejandro and I both talked a little bit about the clean energy to communities program that is funded by the Department of Energy. And there's also resilience and remote communities, whether that's the energy transition initiative, or any of the road maps for resilience strategic energy planning on site technical analysis tools and resource and modeling and visualization activities that go on a DOE. Cool. And that's kind of a segue to this other question and again I'm going to take some liberty with it and broaden it a little bit but this one of our audience members asked about sort of the rapid development of artificial intelligence. And I just want to give anyone an opportunity to comment on that or maybe just advanced computing in general. As we're trying to solve, you know, enormous climate change topics how we're, you know, deploying this really cutting edge technology to do that Alejandro you unmuted so I'll turn it over to you. It's, it's funny, I was just having a discussion earlier today about how AI can potentially be helpful in optimizing the aggregation of many different behind the meter resources so group top solar plus a lot of the flexibility on demand that I was talking about before. And optimizing the dispatch of that is, you know, for example as part of the virtual power plant. One of many uses I think we're, we're constantly being surprised at where AI pops up. And some of the ways in which it may be able to help us, but computing in general and and the resource we have is absolutely essential is, you know, there's a reason every lab has or many labs I should say have a big high performance computers. Even things like replicating performance and testing data. I know there's a program not in my office but in our office of electricity, where we, we are looking at the ability to effectively take one or two years of performance data in this case for storage without a storage and extrapolate that out to 30 years and save 28 years worth of testing. It's critically important in an environment where the past is no longer a as reliable a predictor of the future as it used to be whether it's the technologies we have, or some of the threats and variability for facing so lots of examples of use of AI and and HPC as well. I mentioned a little while ago, but NREL does post ERE supercomputer on on site in Colorado and I mean there's, it's a constant. Whether it's, you know, AI and clean energy and focus on solar adoption between homeowners or renters and who's more likely to have solar energy. But there's there's studies and analysis that that has been done around all of these different different areas and that is central to AI and machine learning and supercomputing assets are central to any analysis that's being done because you are taking so much data and trying to break it down into a more understandable data set, translating into interpretation that that is can use usable in the real world so that's just part of part of the work research and development that we do. Yeah, and I'll just add there's a lot of areas. I've been involved in some some spaces in this role that I would have never imagined in my earlier career but the the omics associated with varietal development is a phenomenal field and we have the ability to make significant changes on food feed energy and chemical kinds of crop plants. Another thing I've been shocked by is the complexity of the root biome, right this, this community of organisms that live in the root zone of plants it's extremely complicated extremely fascinating, and it begs for, you know, big data AI kinds of evaluations of what's actually going on and what can we do to promote that environment what what what should we avoid those kinds of things. And then there's a whole bunch of work going on around autonomous crop monitoring, and the sensing systems that you can use for multiple purposes, a to just determine the health of your crops you can basically evaluate whether you know one of 10 different kinds of minerals is missing from a crop area you can do selective application of those minerals and and other treatments to the crop so that you're not wasting it in areas that don't need it and so there's some really big data management, what I view as being AI kinds of solutions that are probably out there that will change all of our lives, and there are clearly quite a few of them going on in this space also. That is very cool. I'm a little worried they're going to come up with like a moderator bot, and I'm not going to like that. I don't think that bodes well for me but until then, I guess we'll cover AI in our congressional education resources. We're at the end of our time today. And I know there's so much more that we could discuss but Alejandro and Meyer, Steve and Abby, thank you so much for joining us today and being tremendous panelists. Alejandro, I know you know this but you've got a tremendous team at ERE and we worked with many of them to pull today's briefing together so many many thanks to everyone over at ERE for all the great work you do but also all the assistance in bringing this to our audience so thank you very much for that as well. Also like to say just take a moment to thank my ESI colleagues who are really responsible for pulling all of this off and once we get the moderator bot, they'll really be the only ones pulling any of this off. Great thanks to Daniel Bryan, Omri, Allison, Anna, and Molly as well as our four interns, Linley, Isabella, Tyler, and Madeleine. Thanks for all the hard work. I'd also like to say thanks to Emma Johnson. Emma left us last week, which we're all very bummed about but she's going on to really really tremendous opportunities and so we're all very proud of her and we wish her the best and she contributed to this briefing as well even though she is no longer with us. But we wish her the best of course. My colleague, Dan O, just put up a slide with our upcoming briefings. We have a ton of briefings coming up. In fact, I think if you go to our webpage, I think there are six maybe posted, which is a lot even for us. So once we get through next week's really good briefing on nuclear energy with the assistant secretary over there, we're going to get right into Farm Bill, and we have a lot of great stuff on the Farm Bill coming up and here's just an overview of that. And we'll also have additional resources rolling out over time as well. So if anyone in our online audience hasn't already RSVP'd for any of these briefings I hope you will, because they're going to be really really good. So please sign up even if you can't be with us during the live cast or even if you can't join us in person. If you RSVP that means you get all the follow up materials that means you get the presentation materials, even means you get summary notes. They take a couple weeks but they're well worth it they're really great resources so I encourage everyone to sign up for everything, even if maybe it doesn't fit with your schedule you can always come back and watch the live cast later. I'd like to mention I mentioned Emma's departure which this bums us out, but that means we're actually hiring for a new communications associate so visit esi.org if you'd like to learn more about that. And I think the next slide is our last slide and this is a survey before I release everyone and sort of for going a few minutes over. This is a link to a survey. If people in our online audience would like to take a few moments or would be willing to take a few moments to share feedback. Did you have any issues was the audio good was the video good. We read every response and we take it all to heart and we really appreciate it when people in our audience, take a few moments to let us know how we did today. So if you have a moment to do that we'd really really appreciate it, and we will be back next week. Next Thursday. This will be an in person briefing which will be really really fun as well for the state of play. State of play for nuclear energy in the United States, and will be joined by Senator prepo from Idaho, he'll be joining us via pre recorded remarks, and we also have assistant secretary for nuclear energy Catherine Huff will be joining us as well so hope everyone will join us for that. And until then, have a great rest of your week and if you're in Washington, enjoy the fabulous weather really doesn't get any better than today like 82 degrees and no humidity. I haven't seen a cloud all day. So I hope everyone gets a chance to get outside and enjoy it before it's over so thanks everybody we'll see you next week. And thanks to you Dan. Thanks.