 Good afternoon everyone. Welcome to our briefing this afternoon. My name is Carol Werner. I'm the executive director of the Environmental and Energy Study Institute and we are delighted to be hosting this briefing this afternoon in conjunction with the German Embassy. I think we have a little feedback here. And I wanted to let you know that EESI is an independent nonprofit organization that was formed over 30 years ago by partisan Congressional caucus for the purpose of providing policy makers with solid credible information in a timely way with regard to energy and environmental issues to really develop reservoirs of networks of organizations and interests across all sectors in the quest for finding common sense policy options and solutions to energy and environmental problems. And of course ever since the beginning EESI's board of directors and our staff has recognized that energy environment and economy are very very closely intertwined and that we do better if we look at all three of those areas together in a holistic way. So today is a great opportunity to take a look at what the state of Germany's energy transition is. Germany has been leading the way in terms of their energy vendor over the past 20 years in terms of really looking at the whole role of renewables and efficiency in their national energy policy how this can all be integrated in terms of their electric power grid. And I must say those of us here in the United States have a great opportunity to really take advantage of what we have learned from all of the work that Germany has done in that when you look at the whole role of the amount of solar resources for example that's in Germany as compared to what you find throughout the United States it's really quite remarkable that Germany has led the way with regard to thinking about the development and deployment of solar energy technologies across their country as well as really pioneering so much work in terms of again wind both on land and certainly offshore and we as a result have been able to take advantage of all that investment and all of that learning and which has really helped drive down the cost trajectory and also the learning curve has really advanced us with regard to the learning curve so we owe Germany a great debt with regard to all of that kind of leadership that we have been able to learn from and and hopefully we can continue that kind of transatlantic cooperation and learning from each other in so many different ways. So our first speaker today to really talk about what is happening with regard to Germany's energy transition is Mr. Thorsten Herden who was appointed the director general as of June 2014 for heating and and efficiency in Germany's federal ministry for economic affairs and energy and of course I think it's very interesting that Germany linked economic and energy in the ministry because that really goes to show again how critically important energy is to running our various countries economies. Mr. Herden has been very involved has a long history in terms of working in organizations and professional associations with regard to engineering and engine systems as well as research associations where he has led many efforts with regard to that and was the managing director as well of the German Engineering Federation's energy forum which was responsible for developing their positions on energy policy. In addition he has served on the board of the European Association of Internal Combustion Engine Manufacturers he's on the board and the supervisory board of the European Wind Energy Association and is vice president of the offshore wind energy foundation. So I am delighted to turn the podium over to Mr. Herden. Yeah Carol thank you very much and thank you very much for this big interest in Germany thank you very much for coming and allow me to give you sort of a brief overview of what we have done and what we want to do in the future. We are living as you all know in critical times right now and my visit to the US this time which I started on Tuesday and I end with this event here is to try to seek some sort of a call it de-escalation route in order to get the transatlantic dialogue better. We all know that G7 is coming up right now and the signals are not as good as from other G7 summits and we hope we can still send out a signal to the world that it needs to have a collaboration and I will represent my minister at the G20 Energy Ministerial meeting next week in Bariloche in Argentina and also there we'll see whether or not the G20 is able to send clear signals in terms of what energy means to not only the environment but as Carol said to the economy and that is the reason why I actually joined the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Energy that our government put that together and that for me was a very important point to go from business into government which is not the normal way in Germany. So what I'm not doing today is lecturing you to say what you should have to do because that is certainly not necessary. I think that's also something which should we not do. We should not tell the others what they have to do because everybody has to live in its own environment, in its own circumstances, you have different starting points, you may have different targets but what I can tell you and what I will tell you is what we have done and what lessons we've learned and in that respect I'm particular looking also at the mistakes we made that is sometimes looked at very curiously why is he talking about mistakes but I think that is something where we can learn from each other in order not to duplicate or triple or quadruple or whatever the mistakes by saying that of course I would also hit me on my own shoulder to say what have we done good but I think it's also important to know about the mistakes. So for us the energy transition as Carol said is the combination of renewable energy and energy efficiency that are for us two twins which have to love each other and which have to go together in order to get the economy decarbonized. At least that is what the worldwide community has not only expressed but has underlined and signed the Paris Agreement that we only allow ourselves to emit a certain budget of CO2 emissions into the atmosphere and that means that we have to act rapidly fast and with clear targets. And for us that is different to other countries and that is fair enough that every country can define its own energy mix but for us it's energy efficiency and it is renewables for us it is not nuclear and for us it's not CCS in terms of coal fire power plants which then will subtract the CCS and put it down to earth it will be CC US I think we will not live without that because there are some processes where it's hardly impossible to reduce CO2 emissions but that are the two factors for us. To give you a first short overview on our energy mix so that you have a clue of on what we are talking about we have an overall energy demand in Germany at about 2,500 terawatt hours so forget about the the terawatt hours but remember the 2,500 half of that half of that around 1,250 is for heat so half of all our energies for heat for heating houses and for high temperature heat in industry half of that only 600 out of this 2,500 is electricity so it's only a small portion it is not a very small one but it's not the biggest portion and then another 700 is for transport so half of it heat and almost the same for transport and for electricity. Bearing that in mind it's quite clear what we have to address and we started with our energy transition by addressing electricity because it's the easiest way to address it and electricity can only also help to decarbonize other sectors like the heating sector and like the transport sector so therefore we felt that it's a good idea to address electricity first and what we did there was very was very powerful in terms of we went into a non at not at all mature technology in terms of PV in terms of wind energy in terms of bioenergy in terms of geothermal energy and said we pay whatever is necessary in order to make the projects bankable and in order to make the projects fly and that was 50 cents per kilowatt hour at the starting point for a feed-in tariff for photovoltaics 50 euro cents per kilowatt hour a huge amount of money a huge amount of money and we found at the end of the day that we have two winners in Germany the one is wind be it onshore be it offshore and the other one is photovoltaics the rest didn't decrease their cost that dramatically as the other two did and we then changed some two years ago this feed-in tariff into an auctioning model and we saw the prices coming down even more dramatically and the latest prices are for PV remember we had the starting point with 50 and the latest prices were about four cents per kilowatt hour in the very sunny region of the world in Germany and with wind we are also at about four cents per kilowatt hour onshore and we had the first auction on offshore wind which was zero zero in that case that they said I don't need any subsidy at all I'm taking just the market price what the market mechanism says and for that I can build the offshore wind farm all I need is the permission to build an offshore wind farm and grid connection so the message simply is why I'm saying that is that the prices as Carol said have come down dramatically dramatically we have that money of course in our backpack so other countries around the world are profiting from that what we did but that is fine as we are profiting by the way from the shale revolution right now in the US that the prices of gas are going down dramatically in in Europe so that's also some sort of helping each other but the message I can always convey to everybody if you now go into renewables you are going in renewables on a very very competitive base they are cheap they are not expensive and therefore the german energy transition will never appear for others because the high amount of money we paid at the beginning is not necessary for you to pay if you enter into the game right now so that is some first remarks on that what does that continue here I go very good so for each and every government it's extremely important that you set yourself targets according to those targets agree on measures do a monitoring of those measures whether you reach the targets and if you don't reach the targets you have to think about new measures or change the measures that's the reason why we have given ourselves targets in the various ranges and you see climate target you see renewable target and you see energy efficiency target I don't want to go into the various details of the targets because we have put targets underneath but the important thing is that we give ourselves a climate target renewables and an energy efficiency target and if you see that we would like to decrease the energy demand by 50 percent till the year 2050 that means that we will not the industrialized Germany but we will grow whilst we reduce our energy demand I will come back to that later and you see how necessary it is that you are going that way of giving you targets defining measures and then react accordingly for instance what we will not achieve the world knows that quite well is our climate target for 2020 so what we've done right now we just passed through our cabinet just last week the decision that the commission will bring will present us a proposal by end of this year how to phase out coal how to phase out coal because we absolutely know that with our coal fire power plants for us it would be impossible to meet the climate targets on the other hand you cannot simply shut them off there's a security of supply issue and there is an issue of course of people which are working in the coal business and you cannot just tell them due to climate reason I'm so sorry you don't have anything to work anymore try to do something different so you have to do a structural change there and that we've now initiated because we saw that our measures didn't succeed in terms of climate protection what you see here is the renewables in the electricity sector because now I'm going a little bit on this 600 terawatt hours out of the 2500 in terms of electricity and what you can see is we came from almost nothing in the very early stages of our energy transition and we are now at 37% so nowadays we 37% of our electricity production is done by renewables the vast majority is done by wind and photovoltaics to give you a number we have a demand which ranges between 40 gigawatts up to 85 gigawatts depending on daytime and weekend and so on 40 to 85 and we have a renewable capacity in terms of wind and PV installed in Germany over 100 gigawatts so that means our installed capacity is even higher than the biggest demand we have in Germany therefore we have the high percentages in our system and I can tell you what the grid is extremely stable we have grid disruption a year at about 12 minutes so 12 minutes a year is effectively nothing so we could cope with the question can we adopt the high share of renewables the volatile ones in our grid and we achieve that and we would like to talk with you of course how did we achieve that what did we do right what did we do wrong and how can that perhaps be done in the states that is a very interesting figure and with everybody I'm talking around the world on transparency I tell them try to get your data on electricity production real time we didn't have that for a long time and all the various lobby groups told us a lot of interesting stories and we then said we need to have in real time the electricity produced in every second from every source that we know what's going on and if you see that graph you can see various things in there first of all you see the fluctuating demand we have and our demand curve is the red one so the red curve is the electricity demand in Germany and then you can see the production from the very top from the very bottom you see biomass you see hydro you see offshore wind you see onshore wind and the yellow one then is PV photovoltaics and you see in Germany the peak of photovoltaics fits perfectly with our demand peak that is different in the US so therefore it's also different if you are thinking about measures how to deal with it but for us it fits perfectly so then we have to adopt our measures to this fit and then you can see like at the first of no no at the 21st of May at the very beginning you can see that the red line the demand touches the yellow one that means at that point of time we had 100% renewables supply for our demand so we had really complete demand supply by renewables but you can also see another issue and that is the the upper curve the upper curve the the the so what brown one that's the price so that is the electricity price at our stock exchange and what you can see is that at that point of time when the renewables were 100% the price went down and it was negative so we had a negative price and what we say is fine there is nothing bad in negative prices because that's very clearly tells the other generators how to behave because you see that all the time when there is above the red line the power generation line that we that we export electricity and if it's below that we import electricity and at that point of time of course there was much a lot of electricity to be exported and all of a sudden there was not enough demand from other countries around Germany in Europe and then the price was negative that forced the generators specifically the coal generators to change their behavior so not to produce electricity but instead of that shut them down or reducing them or whatever is possible and what you also can see in this graph is that what we need for this fluctuating renewable energy in the in the electricity mix is not baseload baseload is poison for our energy transition in Germany what you need is flexibility because sun is shining and then you have PV production wind is blowing and then you have wind production so it's not according to demand it's according to weather conditions which means they are there in any case and then you need to have flexibility to fill the gap and the flexibility can be a different one it could be peakers gas speakers or whatever it is very fast power generators it could be storage it could be demand side management or it could be neighbors and that is something I've also discussed with my colleagues from the department of state or department of energy that I said if you integrate yourself in the various states in the U.S. you can see that you can help each other we for instance are just building a power line from Germany into Norway because they have a lot of water we have a lot of wind in the north so we can make use of each other that's the cheapest flexibility you can think of we don't need to build for that storage facilities which are much more expensive so all you have to do now is to create a market an electricity market where prices tell the truth so that they say there is too much electricity in the game I will become negative and where prices also tell the flexibilities that they are needed at that point of time and then the cheapest flexibility will fill the gap so that is a learning curve in Germany of course as I said at the beginning it's different in the various countries around the world and also in the U.S. but this principle of if you increase volatile renewable energy you need to have flexibility and no base load that is valid for each and every country in the world so that is something we established last year and we heavily use in order to not be told by lobby groups that offshore wind power is the best one or coal generators are the most flexible ones or whatever we can see what happens and then we can tell them how they should behave or the market tells them how they should behave the last slide before I stop is empty okay it's not empty now it's full and that comes back to my first first issue on energy efficiency and you can see the following that we completely decoupled completely decoupled economic growth and energy demand and I think that is something where we have to pay high attention in each and every country that of course the best kilowatt hour is that kilowatt hour which you don't need because then you don't need to build power plants in order to produce it but that means also that you have to install measures in order to get the energy efficiency in place what I have learned in the last few days is that still in the U.S. there is a high demand for energy efficient products because in the states in the various U.S. states everybody feels that it's not only worthwhile but it's good for your pocket if you save energy and I think with the digitalization we are going not only we're going in which is already there and which will continue to grow we have millions of business models where you can put demand and supply together in order to save energy and the one is delivering the other one energy be it electricity be it heat or whatever it is and therefore we have to pay high attention on the energy efficiency in order to achieve our goals and I would say to order to be in order to be competitive because that economy which does not need that energy as other economies is more competitive I think that is clear for everybody so therefore again our energy transition consists of renewables and energy efficiency of two twins which love each other and will bring us into the future thank you very much for listening we're going to try this again and I want to say okay I just want to say thank you very very much for for taking us through that walk with regard to your progress and the issues that you have dealt with over these last number of years and once again I think that it's very useful for us to understand how these things really are integrated as you talked about the twins and how important it is that we can really optimize so much in the way of systems as a result of doing that and I must also say that I've been struck over the years and and even you know in the last few months as I talked to more and more people in the efficiency services area efficiency products area how much more efficiency we still have to gain because we are not nearly as efficient in across sectors as what we have the potential to do so all of that I think spells wonderful opportunities for for businesses for for all of us so I want to turn to our next speaker now who is Lisa Jacobson and I am very glad to say that Lisa and I have been colleagues and friends for many years she is the president of the business council for sustainable energy where she manages where she's been managing the day-to-day operation of the business council for a number of years and in that capacity she has also been involved in advising states local governments working hand in glove with with various companies and industries since the business council is is a council involving renewables and efficiency companies as well as natural gas she has been involved in testifying before congress on behalf of the business council and is part of the member of the department of states energy efficiency committee so she's obviously been involved working on climate negotiations for many years as well so we are happy to welcome Lisa thank you very much carol and it's a pleasure to be here today and I want to thank ESI and of course the German embassy for hosting the event and it is just so wonderful to have such a good crowd today for this discussion because I don't think it could be more timely either on the energy front or the geopolitical front so I very much look forward to your questions so I was going to first tell you a little bit about the business council for sustainable energy the business council is a trade association we are based here in Washington DC but we do do work at the state and regional level as well and we focused since the early 1990s on promoting policies that expand deployment and reduce the cost for a range of sustainable energy technologies and services and our primary core sectors of focus are energy efficiency natural gas and renewable energy one of the first things that the organization did when it was founded in 1992 was attend the Rio Earth Summit not sure how let's see a show of hands anyone know what the Rio Earth Summit is that's a good number it was a really seminal moment in terms of multilateral cooperation on global environmental issues and it had been building since the 1970s and culminated with the creation of four global environmental treaties one of them addresses climate change one of them addresses biodiversity and the other desertification and the other one some might know dealing with a range of additional greenhouse gas emissions the Montreal protocol so those four treaties really seminal and the one that my organization was particularly involved in was the framework convention on climate change and I mention it because the German government has been extremely active and a true leader through that process and most recently I had the pleasure of being in Germany in December for one of the ministerial sessions of that negotiation so I just wanted to thank you for hosting that conference and for all the work over many years that the German government does to promote climate mitigation and activity and adaptation activities across the world but my comments today are you know compliment very nicely what we just heard which is a little bit more about the US story so we can think about some of the data that I will share with you and then in the discussion maybe you'll have some questions that that might drill down to some of the differences and in some places where we're kind of similarly pointed in the right direction so this information that I'm sharing with you is from an annual report that the council produces called the sustainable energy in America fact book there's some materials right where you entered if you want to grab them on the way out but all this information is available for free online off of the business council for sustainable energies webpage and if you were to print out the fact book this is what it would look like it's about 150 of the most important facts that we think policymakers industry and the media should know about US energy markets so it covers electricity but it also covers transportation it focuses on technology deployment and technology economics so I encourage you to take a look at it and if you were to just open up any page in the print out you would you would see these charts and figures and what I like about this is that not only does it give you the data but it also includes some commentary to put it in perspective so I hope that you will take a look at the fact book and I'm going to give you a few slides from it right now I also wanted to say that the fact book you know something that the council commissions but it's an independently authored publication by Bloomberg new energy finance so the the first facts that I'd like to share with you complements the the final slide that we just saw about energy consumption and economic growth and as you'll see here in this slide we're showing over the last decade that our economic growth increased over 15 percent and our primary energy consumption was reduced by one percent and then we see this hockey stick type figure here showing the decoupling between economic growth and energy consumption this really runs counter to many decades of thinking about how economies grow so this is a major point and so we're not just seeing it in the united states we're seeing it in Germany and we're seeing it in many other countries another point about this is why are we seeing this and the business council and Bloomberg new energy finance have looked into it and clearly as we all know we can see it in our on our lives there is a greater attention to energy efficiency we have more innovation and new opportunities to reduce our energy use cost effectively but we've assessed this and point to a resource from the American council for an energy efficient economy to say that approximately 60 percent of this is attributed to energy efficiency policies some of them here in washington and some in at the state and local level so that's a real important piece for you to remember your work matters the impact of policy matters in terms of getting results like this the next slide i wanted to show you is just a breakout of the u.s. energy mix and pretty much all the data in the fact book you know we strive to be as up to date as possible goes through the end of 2017 so what you're seeing here is the power sector electricity generation mix and when you go from the top to the bottom the blue area is renewable energy and that includes hydropower the next area is natural gas which is gray and then the red represents nuclear power and the bottom area the darker area represents coal there's a little bit of oil in there right above the coal but it's very hard to see we don't use very much oil to generate electricity in the united states anymore there are few really staggering things when i look at this number one the rate of change we are seeing a very dramatic shift in terms of coal for power generation in the u.s. electricity sector if you were to go back 10 years coal production was reduced by 38 percent in terms of the generation mix and then if you go way up at the top in the blue area you see renewable energy and that started out at about 9 percent and we ended at about 18 percent at the end of 2017 that is a 90 percent increase in renewable energy generation so this is a set of industries that hadn't really changed much in a hundred years and we are seeing sweeping changes here not only in terms of the benefits and increase in energy efficiency but also in terms of the technologies that we are using to electrify the country i would also want to note the gray area significant change in terms of the use of natural gas for power generation nearly a 50 percent increase so again big changes and they have implications and we'll talk about those in a moment on renewables because that is a major focus of today's discussion 18 percent of the generation mix that is almost on par with our nuclear fleet so this is a main street main main focus of our energy sector mainstream i couldn't say that word for some reason it's mainstream within the energy sector and i'm going to break it out for you in a moment and you can see what's underpinning that number so here i have two charts for you i'm going to bring both of them up on the on the left hand side is renewable energy build and so it's showing each year what's getting built and how much and i think big takeaway here is wind and solar represented in the yellow and the blue blue being wind yellow being solar you know dramatic and steady state increases over time and then if you look at the total cumulative capacity in the renewable energy sector you see the impact of other technologies in particular hydropower which is a major generator nearly 50 percent is generated from hydropower and you can see cumulatively the impact of these different renewable technologies and and there you'll see more of biomass waste to energy you know and and geothermal other contributors that are really important to the u.s renewable energy sector so i'm going to just go one forward and then i'll come back to that slide so there was a lot of discussion on technology cost and that's a prime concern here in the u.s marketplace as well this chart is a little hard to understand at first glance but let me walk you through it this is basically showing what power purchase agreement prices are for wind and solar throughout the country and it's broken out by a number of different regions of the country so all the way here on the left hand side is texas ercott going across the country we have the southwest region california southeast pjm which is the mid-atlantic region myso which is midwest primarily and new york doesn't capture new england on this chart but this is a pretty good view of what's going on in the country based on real projects and real power purchase agreements if you look in the pink area across it that's the range of wholesale power prices in those different regions so the important thing to see is is the yellow and blue either above or below or on top of that line if it if it touches that line that means that they were comparable and competitive within the price range if it's below it it means it costs less than the average wholesale power price in the region so i think the key takeaway here this is worth further study depending on you know where you know where you're representing in terms of the country but it's showing that there are so many parts of the country where these are economic and also there are places in the country in particular very windy places where wind energy is very cost competitive and below the average wholesale power price so i want to come back to this slide now so that's all fine and good it's good to know what the power purchase price is but what a consumer's experience and we're i just said we're going through significant period of change in the electricity sector we are making big investments in terms of renewables in terms of energy and electricity infrastructure in terms of energy efficiency but what a consumers experience so the council and bnf have been looking at kind of wholesale budgets and what proportion of an annual house sorry household budget um the the council has been looking at what a typical household might spend on energy and electricity and natural gas and how has that changed over time and what we found is that we are nearly at record lows for both electricity energy and clearly for natural gas in terms of the proportion of money that a household might spend on those costs so we for electricity at the end of 2017 we were in fact at a record low since the record started in 1959 consumers in households had not spent less as a proportion of their household budget on energy than any time on record so really an amazing set of data there i want to wrap up with just a snapshot on emissions you know we are making this transition because of a range of reasons we're doing it for air quality climate economic resilience reliability i mean we could go down the list there are so many benefits of making this change and i wanted to highlight a key area here in terms of the change our emissions have really gone down dramatically in the power sector 27 year low at the end of 2017 but what you may want to notice here is that while the power sector emissions are going down our transportation emissions are going up so this is very important that we address the transportation sector and while we're doing all of this the companies and consumers are getting more involved in the way we use energy and they're making their own decisions so i think when i look at the trend lines for emissions coming down across the economy and in particular in the transportation and power sectors this gives me tremendous hope so this is showing corporate procurement of clean energy and in this case mostly renewable energy over the last several years and you just see a dramatic uptick in this type of investment from the corporate sector and it's not just technology companies if you get a chance to look at this slide you'll see anheuser bush you will see general mills you'll see target so it's really expanding beyond just the big name tech companies that people hear so much about but i wouldn't want you to think it's just about renewable energy there's a lot going on with energy efficiency as well and we're going to hear from semen soon i'm sure they will talk about it so this is just a few of the the leading players involved in both renewables and energy efficiency leader leadership at the corporate level this is what to watch these are going to continue to expand those trend lines in terms of our energy productivity and our emissions reductions thank you very much thanks so much lisa and we will now turn to hear from semen's and we are delighted that todd thorough is here with us today todd is the director in the distributed energy system in the distributed energy systems center of competence at semen's where he works with customers to develop distributed energy solutions he brings more than 20 years of experience in terms of looking at energy markets and working with end-use clients as well as utilities to figure out their strategic energy objectives and he is able to especially do that because of having an extensive engineering technical background and semen's obviously plays a very important role in north america technology deployment and so we are very glad to have todd with us thank you excuse me first of all i'm very pleased to be here obviously as part of being being a part of a large semen company we have the opportunity to collaborate closely with colleagues in germany learn from uh you know successes they've had in that market share the values um technologically and from a market perspective there that i think we benefit from here in the u.s. certainly in semen's um what i wanted to talk about today is a trend that i think is very complementary to what we've we've been talking about thus far to you know lisa and torson talked about largely decarbonization of the electric system i want to talk about decentralization of the system which i think again very you'll see is is very complementary to uh did i go backwards okay very complementary uh to the decarbonization um this is what the grid has looked like historically right large central station power plants some renewable some fossil moving electricity to high voltage transmission lines through a distribution system and directly to consumers right it's unidirectional electrons flowed from the point of production to the point of consumption and this is again historically largely what the grid has looked like in many places looks this way today but we're going through a period of transformation the energy system is becoming much more complex um there's much more uh generation that's happening at or near the point of consumption um whether and the simplest example is rooftop photovoltaic uh but addition to that now we have storage solutions we have small wind solutions gas fired combined heat and power solutions so we're starting to see again a more complex utility grid largely driven by these grid edge technologies not just power production but also demand side management programs energy efficiency programs storage on the grid which are creating challenges for the utilities both from a technological perspective now we have bi-directional flow in many places of electrons from the consumer back onto the distribution grid causing utilities to have to invest in if you've heard of grid modernization they've had to invest in smart meters uh feeder automation and and greater and more complex software systems to manage their their grid system utilities have also gone through and are going through business transformations understanding how to participate in this more decentralized energy market uh in in many cases they're seeing their kilowatt hour of sales declining or remaining flat so how do they continue to make recover for their capital investments and provide the services and solutions that their their end users need from a consumer perspective there are more options that offer greater access to sustainable solutions renewable energy i'm in greater control over their supply from a system perspective this transformation to decentralization uh has a number of positive impacts to the system increased reliability reduced energy costs improved resiliency reduced carbon footprint and and enhanced control now i work most closely and most frequently with the end users so i'm going to talk for a minute about the consumer perspective versus say the utility perspective and we're talking consumers that we work with hospitals airports campuses universities these types of folks and there are really three strong drivers for for these types of end users to evaluate implement distributed energy solutions the first economics is there a cost savings opportunity here for them and those cost savings are driven by some of the things we've already heard about the continued decline in the technology costs solar pv decline storage battery decline cost decline so we're seeing a continued decline in these costs they're making these technologies much more competitive gas prices the ongoing and expected uh low gas prices here in the u.s create a spark spread the difference between the the price of electricity in the market and the price to generate electricity from gas to be attractive and are having more customers looking at doing small combined heat and power and other small gas fire generation uh projects um additionally there's incentives are a big player in that as well we have the federal investment tax uh incentive 30 percent on solar 10 percent on on chp that's a big one and the states as well for example in california where you have the the s-gip or the self-generation incentive program these are strong drivers of of distributed energy projects for commercial and industrial customers the second key driver economics being the first the second is a greater focus on resiliency we've all experienced in the last few years um would you know a seeming increase in the frequency of weather events whether it's super storm sandy um hurricane harvey wildfires in sonoma county etc this is causing consumers to look at the resiliency of their supply their exposure to outages from the grid and looking at solutions like micro grids um that can provide a greater uh resilient and more resilient supply of electricity for their production for their um operation that and the third key driver is sustainability um you know in the desire as as lisa showed a lot of corporations making commitments to utilize renewable energy to reduce their carbon footprint and that is a key driver for uh the the the uh decentralized energy uh transformation as well again the most basic most um prolific example is rooftop solar but there are others as well that support that so broadly speaking um you know these these trends the shift in the fuel mix in addition to what i talked about from a consumer perspective from a macro perspective the shift in the fuel mix the more competitiveness of the technology costs um the favorable regulation and the general trend of decarbonization have uh you know culminated in in a perspective that we're going to see more of the generation mix being developed as distributed or decentralized projects smaller projects they represented about 50 percent of all the generation built in 2010 and you can see from the graph here that the expectation is that that percentage will increase over 60 by 2020 and then continuing on by 2030 so we are seeing a transformation in the uh the grid mix the production mix to a more decentralized uh focus what is semen's doing a couple of things i wanted to share with you about what semen's is doing in the face of these these market trends um we've made some important acquisitions uh rolls roice and dress a rand were important acquisitions that expand our portfolio of products and services uh in the sort of small generation space uh we've uh done a joint venture with gemesa to be one of the top wind manufacturers in the world and most recently we formed a joint venture with aes named fluence to be what is now the global leader in battery storage we have over 68 projects in 16 countries around the world um and see a tremendous growth in the battery storage market so these four things represent almost 20 billion dollars of investment by semen's in this space and have expanded our portfolio of product services and solutions to arrange from small power to wind to micro grids and automation there to complement this you know we've also developed a range of creative and innovative financial and commercial solutions uh semen's financial services has a 25 billion dollar global portfolio and a plus rating and a real value driver we can bring to our customers where the capital cost of doing a distributed energy project um may be a hurdle for them so we've got um approximately eight billion of investment in energy projects in the us and as i mentioned we've created a broad portfolio of of solutions from lease offerings to loans to um design build third party design build own operate maintain uh type structures so a range of structures to help foster the implementation of these solutions with our customers um and and so with that i i'll stop there and say thank you thanks so much tide and as you were just commenting about semen's rating it made me think uh also about an announcement that moody's made uh certainly more than a year ago with regard to sustainability becoming a part of how they are rating uh companies and communities in terms of bond ratings so that all of this during is is becoming much more of an issue as lisa talked about uh corporations that are in as todd talked about the investments that have been made by by semen's and as we also heard uh from from torres and as far as looking at the policies and investments that germany has made it's really quite incredible uh in terms of thinking about the immense amount of change that has occurred during this last decade or so and that we are living in a very exciting time of much much change and in the in the whole energy sector and i think that it can be very very exciting what's really important is that um we sort of needed to happen very quickly because we are also facing enormous environmental challenges so let's open it up for a much broader discussion to hear what your comments or questions may be of this terrific panel of experts anybody want to ask okay we'll start back here well first of all thank you very much for the great presentation uh my name is uh john osha i mean i work for a small consulting company that deals with uh greenhouse gas reductions can you speak up a little bit sure having difficulty hearing you and i had a question for mr harden was did germany ever uh evaluate or experience implementation of a carbon tax as a measure to reduce i guess to control greenhouse gas emissions yeah first first of all um we have the european emission trading uh system the ets which we are right now renovating um a lot because we started up with a system where we gave a lot of credits specifically to the industry which is in worldwide competition and that led to the fact that the budget was met yes but the price was too low as to have incentives in order to continue a low carbon way for many many reasons so that is on the way of renovating and that is also part of that clean energy package for europeans the debate on that so for that we want to go on the european way because we feel that if each and every country in europe goes its own way they don't fit to each other and then it doesn't create an energy union what we actually need in europe that's for the for the ets the emission trading system and then we have the non ets sector that is mainly buildings transport parts of the industry and agriculture and there we are facing the same problem as lisa showed that the us is bad in getting the transport on track and we are even bad in getting the transport on track so all our emissions in the transport sector are are increasing they're not decreasing and there are a lot of debates right now in germany from all of the lobby groups to think about a carbon price wouldn't call a tax for a carbon measure in order to address it and in our collision treaty we don't have any task like that i have to say so we don't have the task to to do so and the time will show i would call it that way what the lobby groups will tell us i give you one example we have a we have a mismatch of pricing for electricity and gas and that creates a big problem in energy savings specifically in the heat sector so we can select from 20 30 40 different suppliers by internet so i can now change my gas supplier via internet i do it in once one minute really i can change my electricity supplier in the internet but the range of of prices is for gas four cents around four cents euro cents per kilowatt hour and for electricity 30 cents per kilowatt hour so there is no way that anybody should think that he will change a gas boiler for instance by a heat pump which is driven by electricity with this price difference and i think on the long run on the long run we have to be very clear that if we have given and that's what we did ourselves that emission budget in paris to meet the two degrees increase that the demand for fossils will be reduced it must be reduced as a otherwise it wouldn't work so if this will be reduced the clear logic is that the price will continue to go down because there is a lot of fossils there and the shell revolution i think shows quite clearly how much there is and then we have to ask ourselves at one point of time and that must be a fast point of time either we get a price on on cu2 or we have to acknowledge that we cannot prevent economies from using the cheap sources so that is a debate going on in germany right now we as a government currently have no plans as we have to fulfill our collision treaty but let's see what the time will bring thank you okay question right over here oh hi so my name is roge lackey on a i work for a grid resilience company called a thing of power so quick question on where you see electricity prices going given the advent of extreme weather events so if we look at you know some of the coastal areas in our country that basically have to harden the grid i'm going to assume that rate payers are going to have to pay for that which means a higher cost per kilowatt hour and then also related you guys had a slide on electricity consumption sort of depleting with the advent also of electric vehicles and certainly the push from you know all players the automobile industry and utilities do you still assume that that's going to stay consistent just consumption going down thanks two really interesting questions i mean i don't have a definitive answer in the council this is not a forecast i mean what we produce with bnf right now is you know just a factual try to be as up to date as possible type of resource it's not forecasting out electricity or energy prices bnf and other analysts you know do provide that but i can't speak to that but you know i can share what i've seen with some of our utility members over the past several years you know coming off of sandy and then you know what is being done after the storms last last summer there is a process by which the utility i'm talking now just about the utility so not the entire economy um but when there are costs associated with um restoring power restoring services thinking about how to plan for them in the future and what types of resources or investments need to be made a lot of that is done at the state level through you know in concert either if they're a public utility with their local government or if they're investor own utility with their public utility commission and they go through an annual or sometimes every two or three years a process by which they decide you know really what they will invest in and that's where a lot of this question comes up and of course there is a huge emphasis on affordability and making sure that you know the costs are if there are going to be new costs that they're socialized appropriately within that jurisdiction but you know it has not been an easy process i look back at what pseg tried to pursue right after sandy which was a very large grid modernization um proposal that they sent to their utility commission and initially it largely was said you know sorry we need to read this is way too much investment we're worried about impacts on consumers and we need to rethink this a little bit so they proved a little bit of it and then bulk of it wasn't done and you know what we've also seen is we're getting more economic data from the storms or these or wildfires or any number of um disasters is that pre mitigation has a huge payoff in the long run so here's a situation where we had tremendous disruption in um new jersey and in other states in the mid-atlantic and northeast region and appropriate plans were put forward um but the initial reaction maybe not to the specific proposals was oh my this might add costs even though maybe some of those investments would have saved dollars in a future storm so i think we have a challenge uh working with the regular regulatory community in trying to find a better way to quantify the benefits of pre mitigation investments or investments in electric power infrastructure and it's not fully resolved so it's an ongoing issue it is of prime importance to the public utility commissioners and others making those decisions your second question was about uh you know what we might expect in terms of electricity uh demand going forward yes those slides don't contemplate significant electric vehicle or other um aspects of electrification if it happens at a much larger scale than we have right now so i mean i think it's possible that that could change you know we were looking at energy total energy not electricity versus gdp so we're looking at total energy so that might net it out a little bit but yeah we may see some shifts in terms of where the energy sector grows or declines based on a deep electrification initiative yeah for for the two points um first what we see is there will be not the electricity price that changes dramatically because as taught explained we are not only undergoing a energy transition and a revolution from one fuel to the other we're also going undergoing a revolution from decentralized from centralized to absolutely decentralized with digitalization on top of that so what we see right now is that there is a variety of business models we have the first one then you have that in the us too where there are intelligent companies putting together let's say 20 or 30 or whatever households combine them with whatsoever decentralized generation or storage facility and then they have their price that's interesting enough that's interesting enough and i think we will see different prices and in germany for instance as i said we have a range of electricity prices which is between three cents per kilowatt hour that stock exchange and 30 cents per kilowatt hour with this which is for the private person to pay because we pay the backpack for getting the renewables priced down at the very beginning and of course we pay a lot for for for grid enlargement yeah but that will change completely dramatically and we'll see a lot of different pricing issues around that would be very clear the other the other aspect is on that on that second point was yeah exactly i think that we will see a shift in any case that we will have a higher percentage of electric electricity in the overall energy demand what i don't see is an all-electric world because there are certain applications be it aircraft be it shipping business or high temperature process heating which it's where it's hard to imagine how to do this with electricity and perhaps there are cheaper options but there will be an in-between product which may be electricity which will increase so what we've just done recently is we we allowed an offshore wind farm to be built in our north sea which is not grid connected so what they are doing is they are just producing hydrogen offshore bring it down to shore because they have their customers so then you can argue is that electricity you know at the end it's hydrogen but in between there was electricity so therefore the world is getting more and more electric yes great thank you we have a question over here and then we'll come over here yeah considering recent innovations and its ability to be used as like a base load power source how do you all of you see geothermal playing into the energy mix in the future i can answer that very quick yes there is a high potential worldwide no there's no big potential in germany different energy transitions in different countries did you want to add anything lisa um maybe just that you know it's really again going back to the point about policy i mean there first of all geothermal is you know a really valued resource in our renewable portfolio and where you know we can capture that resource we should be doing it you know and my point really just related to kind of some federal policy dynamics so how can the federal government play a role if we wanted to pursue more geothermal we could you know invest in research development and deployment and we could ensure that other policies that we have treat geothermal as well as other renewable technologies in a level playing field in one area where that hasn't really happened for geothermal has been on tax policy and so making sure that when we're looking at our tax measures that we are treating energy resources not just to say a level playing field is a little too simplistic because these industries have very different business models so i would more say creating measures and in this case this is an incentive make sure that they match the business models and the needs for investors in that sector so what might work for wind might be very different for geothermal and in fact it is and i would just add that geothermal has as you were alluding some benefits that are not necessarily priced out the same way as as some of the other resources in that that's very important to keep in mind as well as the fact that geothermal is both important from an electricity point of view on a larger scale as well as thinking about the whole role of geosourced heat pumps Todd do you want to add to that well i was just going to say i think as you said in your question that you know what makes geothermal somewhat unique is that it's one of the few controllable renewable technologies you know unlike wind and solar so there's a lot of value there in that i think um you know my experience of geothermal one of the greatest cost risks associated with that is you know the reservoir analysis and and the quote-unquote dry whole risk of you know what do we have for a thermal reservoir so if that risk can be overcome you know the technology cost is can be competitive for geothermal um and there are certainly areas in this country as well as certainly globally where geothermal is a really rich rich resource okay over over here then back here well okay we'll start over here and then we'll work our way back down okay i'm pointing to that on the end sorry about that Gustav Teile from the Heinrich Bell Foundation a German political foundation um so what we heard from Mr. Turlois that's correct um is that like the energy greatest being decentralized and the feed-in system in Germany in the first part of the energy vendor greatly contributed to that do you see a threat Mr. Herdan that um the shift to the auction system reverses this development to some degree no i don't see any problem with that because um you see with a feed-in tariff that was necessary if you start by zero uh you need to create a bankable product and if you try by by zero to auction something that doesn't work at all that would have been extremely costly so but that then was the time when we had more than 20 percent and even more of renewable share and then we said there is really no need that the government sets the price without knowing what the price would be uh if the if you would let the market decide but the government should set the quantity you will need to install every year which then also goes in line with the grid expansion that's the very difference um and then the market would set the price and the market reacted to that and we saw a lot of projects which are small ones coming in but we didn't do the auction of course for the very decentralized area so let's say rooftops they are still in the fixed feed-in tariff because an auction for i don't know what the 10 kv rooftop solar panel is a little bit of a nonsense so i think that will then be overcome because the the cost of energy is going that dramatically down that it's uh i would say in a furious time not necessary to have an auction or any feed-in tariff at all the only thing you have to guarantee the only thing you have to guarantee is that you have undiscriminate undiscriminated access to the grid and perhaps that could be an auction model later on that we just auction the undiscriminated access to the grid yeah that's that's the point okay if you could all put your hands up again the gentleman in the blue suit back there and then we'll work our way down hi my name is morgan i'm from congressman ron kind's office i have a question that's kind of similar to the one in regards to geothermal about hydropower i have to know that it's traditionally been a large part of like the renewable energy push for the past 50 years or so especially in america but i have read a lot of research more recently that's pointing towards it maybe not being a great solution in terms of it being sustainable with how it impacts watersheds and water resources in consuming water to be used and stored for that energy potential so i was wondering what your opinions were on the future of hydropower in renewable energy generation well i would i would just point you to one of our board members the national hydropower association and they have tremendous resources i'm sorry i can't see the gentleman who was speaking okay um about hydropower in general and all the issues you raise and i think they're really important because um communities need to feel comfortable with the energy resources they're demanding it they want to have more control over the energy resources that they they benefit from you know from the business council's perspective i'd also like to highlight the tremendous opportunity that hydropower provides i mean again right now it's pretty much half of our renewable energy fleet is a country and it offers i like that word controllable um renewable resource and you know so it's a really big part of our system but what i find really interesting about hydropower there was a department of energy report called hydrovision that's come out in the last couple of years where it talks about what basically improvements efficiency gains incremental investment in the current hydropower fleet can deliver in terms of new renewable energy resources it's a tremendous amount so i think we have to look you know holistically as we're making decisions on energy investments but i would encourage you to check out the hydrovision report because it's very extensive and i think it will answer some of the questions you might have but it also shows you you know the significant value that hydropower provides today and what it can in the future carol i don't know if you have any other comments to make the only other things that i would raise uh it's important to recognize that i think it's only about three percent of all the dams in the us actually have hydro generators on them uh and that as lisa said as we look at all of the new turbines that have become available the efficiency of those is just being gigantically improved the you know there are issues with regard to thinking about as we are looking at more and more in terms of climate events what happens as far as snow packs the adequacy of that what that means for water supply and release so that those are issues that are becoming of greater concern but there's also a whole range of additional technologies in the water area that frankly are really really um fascinating that are available in terms of looking at marine uh hydrokinetic um uh run of stream that do not require new large impoundments and in fact there are other places as we as we look at the changes and the opportunities that can be brought it's really amazing the innovation that folks are finding for example in terms of thinking about um water systems in terms of all of our water pipe infrastructures many of them are gravity fed and so as you look at that you can pick up power if you put in little turbines in a lot of these water pipes you can pick up a lot of electricity that way uh small amounts but you know it all counts up and it's pretty fascinating and it's also locally generated uh did you want to add anything time i was just going to add that um you know as torsten mentioned is talk the the need the greater need for flexibility associated with the renewables now i know uh you know so as you mentioned not all hydro projects are the same for example um you know you have pumped storage projects and i know folks who are working on pumped storage projects which are essentially a closed loop of you know you pump water up at night when the demand on the system is low and then that's available during the day when uh you know you may have some renewable variation or some other needs of the system that that is that's available so it creates that flexibility that storage and essentially it's it's a closed system so there as you mentioned there's a number of technologies there are water related that can be valuable to the system uh terrific okay we have a series okay right over here thank you i'm Yuan Chen from congressman bill fosters office and i have two questions regarding to great interconnections the first is with the share of renewables keep increasing if we have larger scale of great interconnections well the demand of energy storage increase or decrease and the second is what is your comments on a larger scale of great interconnections for example is it possible to have a global interconnection great interconnections thank you um first of all um i don't know whether the demand of storage will increase what i know is as Todd said the demand of flexibility will increase will increase dramatically and if storage whatsoever because it's a storage is not doesn't equals to storage so many different storage devices from that one up to a pumped hydro um and that's somewhat different but if storage uh whatever sort uh proves to be the cheapest flexibility and the market is going to choose that storage then of course storage will also increase so that's the question we have to raise always coming down to flexibility that's what we need and storage is one sort of that and the other other other aspect i would say uh why not um i cannot say yes because i don't have a crystal ball in my hand but i would say why not if it is possible and it is to dig out gas in Siberia and to bring it down five six seven thousand kilometers into europe competitive prices obviously why should it not be possible to dig out electricity in china to bring it down to europe why should it not be possible to dig out the sun in the Atacama desert and bring it down to to europe in hydrogen format so all i'm saying is i don't i think there will be a lot of innovations in the next decades to come and what we should make use of is follow this innovation line and trying to be in the driver's seats if it comes to our economies finding out the innovation and making money with that and helping the world hello heather spence i'm a triple s fellow in the department of energies water power technologies office and i'm interested to hear more about your perspectives on marine energy such as tidal or wave um what you envision its role to be potentially in in germany or more broadly perhaps to start with with germany we have a lot of um r and d going on in all sorts of called it water connected energy technologies so far they have for germany only for germany not have been proven to be successful in terms of of terms of prices i don't know how that will continue but as it was said before the the water as such whether it's tidal whether it's wave whether it's pumped hydro whether it's rivers or whatever i think has a huge potential worldwide to to grow a huge potential to grow giving you one example we have just recently built not we as a government but one of our companies in germany recently recently built a hydro storage tower don't know what it is 80 meters or so for a decentralized purpose and that worked out improved to be successful uh on the on the pricing issue so that's fine um i think worldwide there is a lot of potential but again it's not the glass bowl in our hands so far for germany the two winners were wind and pv that we have to i don't to see okay question right down here but you know you can always figure out how to do turbines attached to those offshore wind farms and cable that in right uh hi my name is michael i'm from congress and will max office and my question is if the united states want to pursue a similar policy to germany where we wouldn't get more and more of our energy from renewable resources where would be the best place economically to begin doing that would be investing in more offshore wind farms or more solar farms or hydroelectric dams or geothermal plants things such as that i think i'm going to go to my colleagues comments i know from many of the industries that i represent we're looking for a marketplace that provides value on different technology on different services or benefits to energy production and use and we're not quite there yet and we have a lot of change so we have a lot of new technologies that weren't available when a lot of the rules of the road were were set for how we would generate and distribute energy resources so i think we wouldn't focus as much on any particular technology per se but we would try to set a long term vision through the pricing structures through market based structures to help achieve the ultimate goals that we seek and so one of the areas that's a big focus i mean obviously there are um environmental benefits there are economic benefits in one area that we're working a lot on right now as we talked about was like resilience and reliability benefits and how do in this case electricity markets quantify those and then help make investments to ensure that that's what's delivered if that's the goal and and part of it is it's very local these are local decisions in many cases in our current regulatory structure there is also a role for the federal government in certain markets in the country but it's largely done at the state level so it's a very complicated but exciting time but again we try to look at fuel neutral policies we set a long term goal and then really let the marketplace make the decision so we can have what we believe would be the most cost effective outcome but i have to say that it's not a perfect system so we're not starting from scratch we are starting with a system where decisions and preferences are already built in so that's a little challenging but nonetheless i see increasingly um those that are making these decisions see a vision very much described on what this panel has been discussing and trying their best to get to that outcome so it may be a little messy here and there not perfect along the way but i'm seeing more of a consensus in terms of the vision and what's possible and then they will adapt the rules to try to get to those objectives okay and i would just add that we have seen in many places many states about 30 states have had renewable portfolio standards because they've had a really broad range of renewable resources that made sense to develop and so that you have states like my home state of Iowa for example you have texas that have enormous amounts of wind that they put on the grid because it economically has made so much sense and that they have really driven down the price of electricity and furthermore they're more and more dollar staying local because of where it's being generated so that's just one one little example cod yeah i mean i i agree with what lisa said i mean you have to sort of let the market determine what makes sense and in historically what we've seen is it's largely driven by the resource availability right you have a big swath of the middle of the country that is is wind dominated because you have that resource in that wind alley in the west you have solar in the northwest you have hydro in the northeast biomass so you know a lot of it is a function of the resource availability and the economics of that resource i think what we have to do is continue to price in the value of resiliency as lisa said you know what is the value of having that rooftop solar or that that decentralized energy project to the grid but also the capital cost avoidance to a transmission or a distribution system upgrade and how does that get priced in so you know it's it's it's those issues and how they affect the economic competitiveness of the different technologies and there's been a lot of discussion about flexibility and i think as as lisa has raised too the whole issue of resilience is becoming increasingly important across the country uh as we've seen more and more in the way of extreme weather events and so we have been very glad to see on both sides of the hill um uh concern expressed about this resilience and the need to address it through for example um uh looking at amendments to the f a a the the federal aviation authorization bill in terms of looking at at disaster mitigation as as a way to really look at some of these issues certainly in the built infrastructure area we had a couple other questions okay okay let's go here first and then we'll go over here and that'll be about it i'm daniella cheslow and with npr can you we can't hear you can you hear me now yes great i'm daniella cheslow and with npr and i was wondering i saw a lot of private german investors um we're showing up in portorico to offer ideas for renewable energy and i was wondering if there's any german government support for uh exporting your technology to different places in america yeah there is there is a lot actually um we we do it in in three or four ways let me say four ways uh first of all what we're doing is uh that with all our international energy partnerships and we're doing a lot with california for instance and of course the states as such um we are trying to explain what we have experienced over our energy transition period of time and what i said before mistakes done and lessons learned and then we take our industry with us so that they can make contact directly and see whether our business models which are good for them and if if if others see that they are experienced that they can solve for instance the problems with the grid and integrate higher shares of renewables then you have the business contact and something hopefully will happen uh the second point is what we're doing we have a so-called export initiative where we take small and medium-sized companies to various countries around the world they define the technology they find the country and we go with them together because for the small and medium-sized companies it's a problem to find the partners around the world the third point we have is that within the international formats be it g7 g20 or the international energy agency the international renewable energy agency that we do that also the business type of thing together with it and and the fourth is that's with our ministry for international cooperation we have a lot of money associated to specific projects but what we not so that are the four ways what we are not doing is taking taxpayers money from germany in order to build whatsoever renewable power plants in other countries in the world because then you never know where to start and where to end and the german taxpayer hopefully most probably will not be that happy about it okay thank you and we'll take one last question right over here i think i'll do better with oh we're on npr now we can really the question is whether we're going to move to a and particularly in germany i'm interested to a no carbon economy or a low carbon economy and how do you see the future of natural gas in this country frankly it's increasingly controversial because of some of the local impacts environmental and and the rest so how about natural gas and where we're gonna head on that on that curve i think it was also to me uh at the end of the day we have to be in a no carbon economy or we can forget about our paris goals and we see an increase in temperature around the globe and the ultimate search for another planet so i think that is quite quite obvious and quite clear but there is a way to go there and for us natural gas is a is a bridge technology but that is a long bridge and a wide bridge and and a good bridge and we don't know how long it takes us but it's certainly not for a few years only to come i would say it's for decades and gas i'm not now talking about natural gas i'm talking about gas gas has the possibility to also be renewable at some point of time it is of course not natural gas where where where coal cannot be renewable coal is coal full stop and it carries the co2 around but we see that for instance in germany we need to have the fuel switch from coal to gas which dramatically would reduce co2 emissions in germany and that's valid for many many other countries in the world look into china and and and that's what you've done with the share revolution actually as lisa showed quite clearly in the power sector in the us and there are many many possibilities for for natural gas and therefore we see that our natural gas demand in all over europe but also specifically in germany will increase for the power sector in any case for the industry sector also and the question is do we get the efficiency the energy efficiency faster so that the consumption of gas in germany for heating purposes will decrease but all over in the next decade we see an increase in natural gas and then we have to think about what natural or what gas infrastructure do we need and now i'm talking about gas which can also be adapted then to renewable gas infrastructure and and it's nothing which is only a vision you know if we say we build an offshore wind farm which produces hydrogen that is renewable hydrogen that's also gas and that will be used for high temperature in industry applications i can tell you one one thing about future and vision because nobody knows what the future will bring but when i worked in industry for a long long time i i met a good friend then of mine his name was franz takke he was the guy who founded takke wind technique with which became nron and then g e so that is the founder of g wind at least and there were the two in germany anacorn with alos wopman franz takke with takke and it must have been some 20 years ago and he told me torsten what do you think about we have well receive all the problems of wind turbines on land why should we not put them in the sea said what yeah think about having wind turbines in the sea there is a much more constant wind speed and and and i looked at him and said what type of drugs you have taken by the way so it was absolutely out of any idea that we would build offshore wind farms so therefore i would say there is a bridge of natural gas and i personally think that we will see a lot of renewable gas in the in the future perhaps not in the near future but in the future i just wanted to mention quickly another issue that has been raised with regard to natural gas though as we look at increasing amounts being used for example here in the us for for power generation except do we also need to be really looking at the capture of co2 its utilization and potential sequestration from that because of the gargantuan quantities that we're looking at well i i think that the cc us specifically an industry is some sort of a must i also think that this combination with enhanced oil recovery is a business model for us in germany the ccs in order to continue coal fire power ponds to generate electricity is a no go because we feel that's that's a dead end in some point there we have other options to follow but for industry i think we will see cc us no doubt so unfortunately we are now past the hour and i want to thank all of you for coming and i hope that you all learned a lot and i want to thank our wonderful panel for a terrific discussion thank you very much