 Let's go ahead and get started this afternoon for our session and welcome to this part of our renewable energy and energy efficiency technology expo and policy forum. And we will be holding sessions for the rest of the afternoon until a little after four o'clock. You'll have the chance to hear from a number of speakers and providing a really good overview of what is happening in their technologies and obviously this is all very complementary to what you are seeing in the caucus room and through all of the exhibit. So we're just glad that you're here and I'm sure that there will be people, more and more people coming as we go through this session. But in this particular session, we're going to be taking a look at fuel cells, geothermal, solar, and energy from waste. And any of these folks could talk for hours with regard to their technologies, the opportunities, what's underway, the kinds of projects that have been deployed in the U.S. and around the world. So they only have a very short period of time so we want to get our panel underway and we will first hear from Carl Gaywell, who is the executive director of the Geothermal Energy Association, a geothermal terribly important resource that is very abundant in the U.S. And I think oftentimes is ignored, or it certainly doesn't get nearly the attention that it should, very, very important with regard to base load and all sorts of other applications. Carl? Thank you, Carol. We could talk for hours but you know the old question is would we say anything? I'll try to keep this short and sweet, give you a glimpse of what's going on with geothermal today and what some of the issues we face are and we'll go from there. First of all, the geothermal market in the U.S. is still growing, I mean despite lackluster economic growth up to, I guess up to the recent quarter, there hasn't been a lot of demand growth, but we put on a short of 100 megawatts last year which with a 3,000 megawatt base is reasonably good growth in the U.S. But there's still a large resource that's untapped. They estimate there's 10,000 sites, 10,000 megawatts where the sites identified, the USGS estimates up to an additional 73,000 of undiscovered resource still to go and that's just conventional type of resource. Then you get to advanced resources and EGS and you've got a large resource base that's really worth the front end of which is, I think one of the things people don't understand about geothermal energy, they don't understand it's still really a young technology like others are. We're still learning how to use it, we're still barely entering the resource base and both surface technology and subsurface technology has a lot of advances, a lot of ways to go. But what hurts us even moving down that road is inconsistent policies. I think we could all talk about the federal tax code. I mean, it just even amongst the renewables that picks and chooses winners, I don't think that's its intent but that's what it's doing right now. We need some stability and some continuity there so that people get fair treatment and long-term treatment. I know the biomass books have the same problem that often doesn't really work the way it's structured for them at all even though it's intended to. So federal policy, it's always people want to talk about taxes. I'll add to that though a new one, yesterday's hearing, the Department of Energy released for Chairman Lamborn a little study that shows how long it takes you to get a project approved. What this shows is that the NEPA requirements for a geothermal plant are about three times greater or more than it is for a solar plant or an oil and gas project. So we're looking at a project where according to Department of Energy, five to seven years worth of NEPA analysis. I mean that simply makes projects uneconomic. So one of the things we face is sort of cycling bureaucracy more than half of our projects are in federal public land. And unless the issue of process is addressed and no one wants to cut out proper environmental review, but I spoke with one senior official from the Senate the other day who said to me, you know, well, there's got to be some administrative ways to deal with this. And if there aren't, you're going to see very few projects built because the time frames just don't work. So federal level, it's taxes. And then because we're a public land resource, public land is a big problem that we face there. And then at the state level, you end up with inconsistent policies as well as states figure out how to move forward with integration of large amounts of renewables. They will see large amounts of renewables. We're going to put a lot more solar and wind online. And the one thing you don't really realize back here is how much is available and being bid in the West in these systems. We can go a long way with renewables. The question is finding the right integration and how to have a market mechanism that puts together transportation, integration for whole systems costs, which gives you strong renewable performance at the least total cost to the consumer. And that's still something the states are struggling with to do properly. But until they do, until they understand how to value geothermal, because geothermal is not just a base load resource, geothermal plants can be engineered to ramp up and down. So they can meet firming needs as well. But you've got to have policies which price that properly for people who want to build power plants to meet those needs. And we don't have those in place yet. So both at the federal level and the state level, we have inconsistent policies or gaps in policies which create real problems. But the global, the U.S. almost in spite of the governments, we still continue to build new power plants. I think some of our companies deserve sort of medals for getting them done these some days. But globally, the market's even stronger. Globally, we're seeing 80 countries moving forward with about 800 projects right now. And U.S. companies, because of their expertise, are very busy around the world. I find that my board members are often very difficult to contact because they often are outside the United States these days. But that's good news. At least they're doing business. And I think that's a good thing to do in the market worldwide because most of the systems worldwide are conventional power systems. They're hydrothermal systems which we have, it's probably the strongest expertise in the world in terms of developing. And you can see what happens where technology fits in. If you go by our booth, you can ask for a copy of Geo-101. There's a little chart which we don't have power points, but I can show you how the growth in the market has occurred. One of the things which you'll notice is we've developed flash plants, we've developed the dry steam plants, the geysers, I'm sorry, the flash plants, and then binary plants. Today, binary power plants are more than 90% of the projects we are installing in the United States. And by binary, they can give you a quick demonstration, but it's a dual fluid plant that uses the heat in the geothermal fluid to turn a working fluid. But neither the geothermal fluid nor the working fluid are ever exposed to the environment. They're never released. There's no emissions. They're very low profile plants. Those plants are not being built around the world, so we're still at the front end of what we can do with that technology. And then, lately, we've seen not just new technologies moving forward, but we've seen pretty new commitments by the Department of Energy. DOE has just announced a new initiative for subsurface technology development called the FORGE, or the Frontier Observatory for Research in Geothermal Energy that wants to establish so that we can understand how to work the subsurface effectively to produce, according to DOE, as much as 100 gigawatts of geothermal energy in the United States. So the one thing about geothermal if I had to ask people to walk away with is understand that there's a lot of new things happening and will continue to happen, both at the surface in terms of technology of plants using lower temperature fluids, seeing smaller power plants being used for essentially distributed generation, looking at projects that are coupling with oil and gas wells to produce power from the hot water that comes up from thousands of oil and gas wells. So you're seeing a lot of surface technology developments and you're seeing subsurface technology developments and one of the things we'll be doing next week will be in Reno at our annual Geothermal Summit, the treaty focuses on the western state aspects, but there will also be giving out awards, awards for environmental stewardship which we'll be giving to the Salton Sea Restoration Initiative which looks at developing the geothermal resources in the Salton Sea as it faces a water crisis to create environmental benefits to the whole region. This is an interesting plan, one which has supportive groups like Defenders of Wildlife and the Sierra Club as well. But we're also giving technology leadership awards to several companies who have developed new drilling techniques, new hybrid power plants, and new lower temperature power plants and all just in the last year. So despite the fact that it's sort of a slack market, technology moves forward, the companies are moving forward, we could move it to go forward a lot faster if we would have consistent, long-term dual-balls instead of the dribs and drabs we get, and if we could cut the bureaucracy to what's really needed and not what seems to get dished out. These are major factors that compete geothermal, they're all things that can be addressed. The resource is huge, we're just still learning how to use it. The technology we're developing to help us use it more in many more wider areas and I think the U.S. maintains world leadership today, but I don't know whether that will last for long. The world market is growing much faster I mean Germany, Switzerland, I mean Switzerland spoke at our conference in March and they said if there's one country that has no geothermal resources it's us, but we're trying to develop them. Because they're trying to develop the technology that can be used almost anywhere, the type of technology DOE is looking at in the long run here and we're seeing a lot of advancements around the world out of commitment to it, if the U.S. continues its commitments and expands them so that we get policies that support industry and support technology development, geothermal can be a major player in the markets in the future. Thank you. And as Carl said, that there's a lot of information available at the geothermal booth, really, really want to encourage you to stop by there to learn more as well as the booths of our other speakers. So we're now going to turn to Bud DeFlavis, who is the director of government affairs with the fuel cell and hydrogen energy association to get an update in terms of overall status. This is another growing industry in terms of both looking at how it's evolving and also its past deployment. Thanks, Carol. The fuel cell hydrogen energy association is a trade association made up of, we're obviously interested in fuel cells and hydrogen and the technologies are being developed and deployed for, I'm going to speak broadly here, for stationary applications as well as automotive applications. Our members are some household names, some companies and organizations you may have heard of and it ranges a very diverse group, it ranges from General Motors, Honda, Toyota, the automakers, some stationary developers including, Bloom Energy, Fuel Cell Energy, LG, also some industrial gas companies, Air Products, Lindy, these are all folks who have some kind of interest in developing and deploying these technologies. So I wanted to give a little bit of an update on where things stand and I'll first discuss the vehicle market. Some people may remember back in 2003 President Bush kind of set us on this course of developing hydrogen fuel cells for vehicles. Fuel cell vehicles first of all are electric vehicles and they are slightly different than a battery electric vehicle but they use hydrogen on board the vehicle to essentially generate electricity. The goal then was to, again this is 2003 was to develop technology where a child born today, this is kind of paraphrasing from his speech, a child born today can drive one of these zero polluting vehicles by the time he or she is ready to drive. We're a little bit ahead of the curve actually and that's I think doing part to the Department of Energy program as well as the persistence and the investments that the private sector has made so government working in collaboration with private industry. The first vehicles actually have gone on sale. They've been tested extensively in places like California a few other areas where there's been a commitment to hydrogen infrastructure but last month Hyundai actually started leasing vehicles Toyota has made an announcement as far as when they're going to be introducing vehicles here in the United States Honda is very close is not very far behind so we're seeing and then other companies as well are equally invested and probably have somewhat slightly different but equally aggressive timelines. Fuel cell vehicles are interesting because as I mentioned they are battery vehicles but there are some inherent advantages with the the ranges are generally a lot better than say a traditional battery electric vehicle the recharging time if you want to call that really the fill time is along the line of a conventional vehicle three to five minutes so you have a lot of the consumer some of the things we're used to driving the advantages of vehicles that we're used to having today that are inherent in these vehicles now infrastructure is going to be an issue but there are a few areas that I can touch upon briefly in that California has really spent a lot of time, money and effort to try and figure out where to put hydrogen infrastructure where to put it smartly how the investments how to engage the private sector as far as financing some of these new stations and that's going quite well the California fuel cell partnership did a lot of that early work about 5-10 years ago we're seeing a nationwide program called H2USA which is kind of taking that next step and going beyond California obviously the automakers want to sell cars outside of California so there's the next step H2USA there's also an 8 state MOU which kind of looks at there's been 8 states that have kind of joined in this memorandum of understanding how to put I think it's about 3 million vehicles on the road by a certain time I think 2020 and fuel cells are obviously included in that mix I mentioned that fuel cells are also being developed for stationary markets for power generation it's a straight power generation combined heat and power we have a number of companies that have done quite well and are growing and one company fuel cell energy which is actually providing a bit of an export market for the stationary market Bloom Energy some of you may have heard of them they're out of California actually have a really neat story they're manufacturing primarily in California but they opened a second facility in Delaware actually an old Chrysler plant which is kind of a nice story a lot of their products are at Fortune 500 companies using their technology the power generation technology primarily for data centers or for operations Apple has a large fuel cell facility at their data center in North Carolina and other Fortune 500 companies there's also material handling equipment fuel cells are being kind of swapped out for battery for cliffs as well in some industrial facilities Walmart just recently purchased a lot of fuel cells for material handling equipment some other notable things LG which is a Korean company has a kind of a large research and development and which will be ramped up to a manufacturing facility in Ohio very soon and General Electric is kind of getting back into the stationary fuel cell market very interesting things there and I'm happy to expand later if time permits legislatively I think I want to kind of echo some of the getting away from this technology steady kind of focused funding for research and development projects or deployment projects advanced deployment projects is probably a very good thing we've seen a lot of private dollars go into this but a steady kind of continued commitment from the government is very important tax credits particularly this year there's two sets of tax credits and again I'll speak in generalities here but the investment tax credit for some of these stationary fuel cell units is particularly important those are expiring at the end of 2016 I did mention fuel cell vehicles are kind of coming online this year unfortunately those credits that we enjoy for the fuel cell vehicles are not matched up with the basically the fuel cell vehicle credits and the hydrogen credits are expiring this year just as the fuel cell vehicles are coming in the market so we're stuck in a situation where should these expire there'll be plenty of tax credits for plug-in battery electric vehicles but a fuel cell electric vehicles may be left behind and that would be a real kind of that would be a situation where we kind of this is because of deadlines and unproper oversight that we are incenting one electric vehicle platform over another and that obviously would be problematic and with that I'll I think I'm pretty close to my time great thanks Carol thanks so much so now we're going to turn to commercial and utility scale solar projects and to learn a little bit more about that we're going to hear from Dave Bramley for Federal Markets with the M&W Group good afternoon thanks for coming and thanks for hosting us here it's a great event every year so I let me just give you a little background so I work with the M&W Group and their Gerlicker Solar America Group which is a a wholly owned subsidiary M&W builds high-tech construction facilities and manufacturing facilities for companies like Intel applied materials so very involved manufacturing facilities they also build manufacturing facilities for the solar industry have built like two and a half gigawatts of solar manufacturing capacity our company works downstream actually building solar power plants that we put in the ground so we're an EPC company meaning engineering procurement, construction we work with developers and finance companies that develop these projects finance them and then we come in and build them and then do the long-term operations and maintenance so we do the fun part of it for the most part I've been in the industry 14 years and could talk for hours and hours about what's gone on the industry like a lot of young industries like the semiconductor industry has gone like this up and down boom and bust mostly related to subsidy programs in different countries that you've probably heard about including incentives and subsidies in the US at the moment the solar industry is finally on its feet and is on a just starting on a what we think is a sustained ramp going forward as a result of more than 80% drop in the install cost of solar over the last five years so that's allowed us to be at at retail cost so a lot of the states where you have high cost of energy like New York in New England and people are paying 14, 15 cents a kilowatt hour at their house solar with very little subsidies is at the same price we're approaching next year where will be no subsidies we require in higher cost utility markets for residential solar when you look at the wholesale cost of solar in various parts of the country we're getting close to grid parity in the next three to four years DOE just published just a fabulous chart that shows the declining price of solar compared to where utility cost is right now and where it's expected to go so they originally had put out this chart about 15 years ago that showed grid parity happening in 2020 to 25 and here we are in 2014-15 at grid parity so it's pretty exciting right now in the US there's approximately 150,000 jobs directly related to the solar industry I think there's roughly 6,500 companies across the US pretty broadly distributed across the US actually when you look at a map of it last year the industry installed about 5.5 gigawatts of solar in the US alone this year will easily do 8 gigawatts of solar and the majority of that is in distributed generation not in large scale base load, these giant solar farms you see out that are hundreds of megawatts that part of the marketplace where you have what we call utility scale and those size of systems will be less and less and you'll see more and more 5, 10 megawatts systems 1 megawatt, hundreds of kilowatts so distributed generation what's interesting about distributed generation right now we're at a place where the solar industry is still less than 1% of the overall energy mix in this country and yet we have the utilities fighting back tooth and nail trying to reduce our access to the grid now because they can see that when you take the new model of solar and deploy it with battery storage fuel cell backup storage a lot of the people that are here with different types of storage technologies all of a sudden you have a very compelling story not only do peak shaving but to actually have a product that can release energy at any time even at night so my company right now we're building our first two large battery storage systems one in New Jersey and one in California it makes it's game changing right now the price of batteries that come down and the engineering around it has gone up so at this point we're seeing now the utilities are looking at their models that they've done for ever centralized distribution making money off transmission and distribution and they're seeing all of these electron sales are not making and seeing the solar industry using the grid as a way to make inroads and this leads me to my point about what's really needed from Capitol Hill is guidance on what is coming down the pike and that is distributed generation and how to change ours what is otherwise a centralized distribution system of energy into regional local where many many regional distributed inputs from solar geothermal wind etc can go into the grid and be managed appropriately without having grid stability problems they're already doing that in Germany they're figuring that out the technology exists and we merely need the political and the economic will right now in New York State has just passed legislation their way out ahead of the curve already making the utilities in New York State start to look at how to set up their grids to accept all these inputs have regional local micro grids that have a lot of inputs that then feed into a wider area by far that's the biggest I think the biggest challenge for our industry and for the renewables industry is how to have this kind of grid that is accepting distributed inputs the other pieces for solar is the need for financial innovation where legislated capabilities that people have for in other industries to be able to use REITs or to be able to use things like master limited partnerships that the fossil fuel industry gets to use which helps reduce the cost of money and investment in these projects these are the things that need to be supported here on Capitol Hill as a way to make renewables play in a much more level playing field I think the biggest issue beyond the things I just mentioned is just the issue around general subsidies embedded subsidies already amortized subsidies that other forms mostly fossil fuel energies is the benefit of right now we've dropped our price almost 100% I mean crazy price drops and we've done that with a tenth of the subsidies that the other industries that we compete with get so I think I'll stop right there and leave it at that great thank you so much and if we have any time left at the end we'll try and take a few questions then so we are not going to turn to Latoya Glenn who is the Renewable Energy Business Manager with Waste Management she and our next speaker following speaker are going to talk about another whole area that involves all of the waste that we have that have a huge amount of energy embedded in them that it is a shame if we don't make use of it Latoya? Hi once again I am a Renewable Energy Manager with Waste Management Waste Management is North America's leading environmental solutions provider we serve well over 21 million customers a week not only are we in North America we are also in Canada as well so we do business there we are determined to work with our customers educate our customers on what we do how we do it and how it best serve the environment we partner with customers such as the University of New Hampshire for GM communities local organizations you name it we are willing to do business we have the natural gas there to assist with that many people across the country do not realize that waste management is actually a leading provider for renewable energy we develop we operate we own our own landfill gas to energy facilities we have 137 facilities throughout the U.S it is beneficial projects that we utilize at certain landfill sites that we have a way that we produce this electricity via renewable energy service I guess you would normally call it is that we take our waste so once we collect our waste and transport it to our land fields throughout the U.S that waste is anaerobically decomposes it's a natural methane gas it's a natural gas we take that natural gas component and we use piping wells via or the lining of our land fields and we transport it to our generating facilities so when I mentioned 137 landfill gas generating facilities that we have we build that actual facility at particular sites once we have the methane gas we harness the energy value from that landfill gas and we sell it on site we utilize it on site we also sell it to our customers to the grid as well we assist customers with their sustainability goals you may have universities you may have an organization that's greening up and they need to be educated they want to utilize our commodity that's a natural product to assist them with their sustainable goals not only is this process a natural thing it also helps with reducing emissions and it also we serve as an energy supplier for our country it's a natural gas product it's an easy mechanism to use it's there so why not use it in the best way for the environment not only do we sell electricity from this methane gas in which we generate throughout facilities this methane gas can also be converted as a natural gas product such as you could say compressed natural gas we utilize it as liquefied natural gas to green our trucks as well out of 32,000 collection trucks that we utilize out of 32,000 collection trucks 10% which is 3200 landfill gas trucks that you see driving around to collect the waste we utilize that as fuel not only do we utilize it as fuel for our use we actually have about 60 fueling stations that we're putting out through the US public and for our own operating use as fuel with the entire process that we have the customer base that we have the focus, the education that we're able to provide to our customers and the commodity that's there we honestly would love for congress to pass a comprehensive energy policy as well as embracing the natural gas since we've been a leader in natural gas since about 1990 waste management has been around quite some time now we're a leading provider of what we offer electricity, fuel and we're looking forward to new technologies we're looking forward to partnering with companies that are able to bring about the technology to utilize this landfill gas that's there for the best for the environment as well as North America and international business to come thank you great, thanks Latoya and we'll now turn to David Biderman who is the Vice President for Advocacy with the National Waste and Recycling Association thank you, good afternoon everybody so I'm with the National Waste and Recycling Association, quick show of hands before today how many of you had heard of us raise your hands very few, I'm not surprised to see that and the reason for that is because we changed our name last year so we used to be something called the Environmental Industry Associations but nobody knew what that meant and EIA is an acronym that the folks in the Energy used for something else so that was confusing so we're the National Waste and Recycling Association but the reason we made that name change relates to why we're here today the waste industry as she mentioned is changing we're not all about just picking up garbage and putting it somewhere we're about extracting as much value as we can from it we're about as recycling as much as we can from it and we're about educating our customers how to generate less of it the energy value from waste is extraordinary and that's something that we're very focused on at our association so we're a national trade organization we have more than 800 members that operate in all 50 states so every member of congress has a member of our association in their district and we work closely with congress and several of the federal agencies particularly EPA to inform them and educate them about policy that they either should or shouldn't be making so I'm going to take a brief amount of time to talk some trash here and hopefully educate some of you about what our industry does waste management of course is our largest member and they have a great story to tell but the story is even broader than that so every person in the united states generates about four pounds of garbage every day you generate it in your house, you generate it in your office if you take everybody in the united states that's 250 million tons of garbage a year it's a lot of trash so where does it go? it goes to landfills about a third of it gets recycled the good news is that per capita the amount of waste generated in the united states is actually declining it's been declining for the past 12-13 years and the reasons for that are changes in consumption patterns the economic decline following the Great Recession just think about how many newspapers you don't read that you used to read the most recent news on the internet the amount of paper generated in the united states has declined very significantly the other thing to keep in mind about the waste industry is that we're a very reliable low cost service the amount that people pay to have their garbage picked up on a monthly basis compared to what you pay for your cell phone for your internet compared to cable television it's much smaller and the service is incredible usually somebody brings a truck to your house to take away what you want to get rid of you can't get a FedEx box picked up one time hope nobody from FedEx is in the room but you can't do that one time for the cost that monthly garbage service is so I mentioned that the waste and recyclables go to a variety of different places the majority of waste in the united states is still disposed of at landfills the good news is that we don't have a shortage of capacity the industry is providing sufficient capacity throughout the united states but we have peaked in terms of how much waste is going to landfills that happened 20 plus years ago back in 1990 and that's because we're seeing increased recycling we're seeing increased in waste diversion and as I'll mention in a moment we're seeing a renewed interest in food waste recycling and capturing the organic portion of the waste stream and recycling for a moment according to EPA in 2012 we recycled 65 million tons of paper cans and bottles and composted another 21 million tons of yard waste this is an essential part of what we do recycling allows us as Americans to conserve vital natural resources reduce pollution and conserve energy it's really important it's a growing portion of our business model it's a growing portion of the waste stream it's over a third of the waste now generated in the United States and that number is just increasing so in addition to recycling the traditional paper glass and bottles there's also growing interest in food waste and composting composting is a process that turns organic material into nutrient fuel nutrient rich soil that can be used by industries and to supplement farmland there's about 3,000 yard waste composting facilities now in the United States but what we're seeing as companies that are innovating is creating something called anaerobic digestion these are food waste only facilities that are starting to pop up particularly in the northeastern United States as states pass laws mandating that food waste be diverted this is a very exciting thing that's happening as we continue to generate energy from a larger portion of the waste stream our industry is helping to lead the way in making that happen now when you think about renewable energy I'm sure you think about wind and you think about solar and you think about hydro not a lot of people think about the waste industry but the waste industry is as significant if not larger than those important portions of the renewable fuel area in the United States so currently according to EPA there are 636 landfills in the United States that generate landfill gas where that gas is then used either on site or piped to an industrial user or into the grid that is something on the order of 2,000 megawatts annually generated per year and there's another 450 candidates that the EPA has identified that could also participate in these programs just by point of comparison there's less than operating landfills in the United States so to have more than 600 landfills participating in generating renewable fuel to decrease our dependence on foreign oil I think is a very significant success story because of the increased use of landfill gas landfill emissions have decreased by 30% since 1990 as a result of these landfill gas projects that's a very significant contributor to reducing the impact of the industry on climate change because methane as I think many of you know has adverse effects on the environment and is it adverse climate change landfill gas projects generate renewable fuel they offset the use of non-renewable resources they help produce jobs in the community and landfill gas is used by companies like Honeywell, SE Johnson BMW, Dell NASA is using it and just last week one of our member companies in upstate New York, Progressive Waste announced that they had expanded their existing landfill gas project and they're going to start shipping some of the gas from New York to California because they've sold it to companies in California that want to take advantage of the fact that it's a renewable fuel and they're also as a byproduct of that going to be providing free energy to the local school districts that's the landfill gas portion of the industry there's also what are known as energy from waste facilities there's 84 of these in the United States they generate several thousand megawatts of energy also and so between the landfill gas projects and these energy from waste projects we're a significant contributor to renewable fuel in the United States but that's not the only place we're innovating in the energy space garbage trucks there's 130,000 garbage trucks more than half of the garbage trucks sold in the United States last year placed into service use natural gas we're an industry leader in the trucking sector for natural gas and we're citing facilities when I say we I don't mean our association but our members and just here locally Clean Energy is opening the first commercially available facility in Northern Virginia is opening near Dulles Airport on August 13th just an example to help promote the important use of this resource so what do we need as several of the people who spoke here on this panel and people on previous panels said earlier we need business certainty when it comes to policy when it comes to tax policy many of the tax preferences that favor renewable fuels generally expired in December it is our hope that in the lame duck session after the election tax preferences are renewed either as part of comprehensive tax reform or as part of what's known as the extenders it's really essential for business reasons for the investors in these projects to know what the economics are going to be for them and having tax certainty is a critical component of those economics I'm sure I've used up almost all of my time so I want to thank you thank you for inviting us here today we have a booth here if people want to learn more about what we do please feel free to stop by we're right next to the ice cream there you go it doesn't get better than that and because you are all so efficient we do have a few minutes for your questions or comments so if you have any just wait till the microphone gets to you okay and we've got a question right here at Emory I have a question to the representative from the M&W group you talked about major advances in the formation of solar and batteries in terms of cost reduction and I'd like to get some ideas to the magnitude of what you're talking about sure so traditional lead acid batteries pricing for the kind that they use for a solar system which needs to be something called deep cycle have already had about a 20% reduction in the last five years it's still got a long way to go but it's allowing in certain places in certain ISOs like the PJM which has a number of issues with distributed inputs and general stability of the grid they like to have batteries that they can come into sitting at different points of the grid and have immediate immediate happiness let's put it that way in stabilizing the grid if they're having a frequency problem you know that typically that's been the utility people in the audience that's been accomplished by having spinning reserves of either a combined cycle plant or something that's stand by all the time that's still, even though it's on reserve and it's spinning it still takes about 10 to 15 minutes to come up, batteries are instantaneous so the utilities are starting to have their heads spun around or not as much the utilities but the ISOs who have grid reliability responsibility and are looking at batteries more and more especially in places like the PJM that has these issues ERCOT down in Texas also the lithium-ion battery world is another place that is for for various types of grid, so let me back up for a sec so there's all these chemistries, everybody and when you talk to battery people they're like I have the best chemistry we have the best, you know but what it really comes down to is chemistry is dependent on what you're trying to do stability, is it demand response, is it all these different things so hopefully that answers that help okay, other, okay question here in the front first and then we'll get you in the back my question is for Mr. Deflavus Deflavus, okay so I was just wondering if the technology for recycling these fuel cells and kind of you know if they have whatever their lifespan is if that technology has also been developing alongside improving fuel cell technology or kind of what the market is for just make sure your microphones are on as far as the automotive I can't speak to that but I know I was recently at the fuel cell energy plant in Connecticut and their large, their fuel cells for power generation combined heat and power those last about five years and essentially what they do is after their useful life they kind of ship them back to they have a few contractors and what have you and they essentially take out all the all the things that can't go into the melter and keep all the things that can and essentially they just they just recycle I think it's like 99% of components that are involved in that and then they just swap it out with a new one so I think they're as far as so waste stream issues in general the automotive side I can't speak to but I know that engineers have looked at that but on the stationary side they're doing it now so as far as the actual power plants are concerned they're very all the components the materials and what have you are very recyclable there's not a lot of there are as far as I know no nasty things that end up in the in your landfills so that's really good news okay there's a question a couple questions in the back hi two things for Dave from M&W you had mentioned a California storage project I was curious whether that is part of the 1.3 gigawatt California storage mandate and you know what is your experience of that process and in addition if anybody is familiar with the progress at which electric arc plasma gasification of waste seems to be approaching a commercial reality so the project actually that we're building is not part of the California program it's being added on to a 120 megawatt utility scale that's being built right now and the local utility wanted two megawatts for smoothing of that power coming out of there the SGIP program that you're talking about it's a small generation that's limited in size and I think one of the things they're going to find I think it's capped at like 70 kilowatts right something like that and it's a problem with having a very hard time finding investors wanting to put all of that time and money into something so small as far as you know they could put that time and money into something with a much bigger returns but that program will happen because it's companies like solar city are aggregating together you know hundreds of homes with potentially that'll have batteries and with that aggregation then it becomes a much better financial investment and regarding your question about plasma arc for seven eight years now several companies have been announcing that they were about to start citing and operating the first big plasma arc facility in the United States in particular somewhere in Florida it hasn't happened yet it's difficult to scale that technology it's not necessarily economically competitive with other sources of disposal I still think it's at the laboratory stage but it's one of the areas that people in the industry are looking at okay hi this is another question for Dave from M&W I'm from the solar electric power association and M&W is actually one of our members so it's nice to meet you you mentioned that you're looking for some kind of federal action to clarify what the distributed generation landscape is going to look like and I was wondering if you could elaborate more on what kind of action that might be great thanks right now what we are experiencing is you know this from your group for sure where a lot of the utilities are pushing back and asking basically for people that have solar systems whether it's residential in some states or large commercial and are accessing and are connected to the grid that they pay a fee for using that grid and that makes sense I think that this is an evolving story of is it $50 a month or is it pennies and the understanding of what those costs are I think are yet to be well understood and I think that is part of what the legislation needs to be is how do you take a national grid that's overseen by a number of regional groups and you've got FERC up and NERC up here up on the central level and how do you make that into a market that can accept all these distributed inputs that there's a utility model that the utilities can exist on transitioning from we're just selling electrons to now we're actually managing these distributed resources and getting compensated for in other ways other than just selling electrons so I think that really the near term guidance is around how do we transition from where we are now to a fully functioning infrastructure nationally that can handle all these inputs, micro grids, etc and the near term issue is on grid access for solar if that makes sense we'll take one last question I think over here Thanks about regarding the fuel cell vehicles aside from the infrastructure problem and the hydrogen refueling stations what in terms of the outlook specific components of the value chain do you see becoming needed for further cost reductions in terms of the hydrogen side or the fuel cell stacks? Well for the automotive market I think some of the industrial gas folks and people who are working on stations they've already seen significant cost reductions so I think you're going to we've kind of fallen in this classic chicken and egg problem no one's going to commit a lot of money to stations or station infrastructure and still the vehicles start coming but you're starting to see because of certain state incentives and frankly some early there's some companies who are investing quite a bit of money in some of these technologies I think you're going to start seeing a ramp up and especially in states where there are either ZEV mandates or there's a commitment to to have zero emission vehicles as far as the vehicle side and actually and then obviously where you get the hydrogen obviously depends somewhat regional but you know these countries are very fortunate to have quite a bit of natural gas that's coming online there's also some renewable sources that the economics for those are kind of improving to the point where you can get either natural gas for hydrogen or use some of these renewable methane sources for hydrogen all those costs appear to be coming down as far as the vehicles are concerned you know the word we're getting from our major auto manufacturers are you know they've hit their durability they've hit their manufacturing targets as far as and once they start ramping up those production numbers will be comparable to to what vehicles were used to driving now and you know when you look at the efficiency of a fuel cell and compare to what the price of you know the average price of hydrogen will be you're looking at as good if not better price for gasoline right now so and again so it just really depends on on ramping up production of what we have now so again I think you know the companies are looking at this understanding that if they don't hit or beat the prices that we're paying for our transportation assets right now you know we're kind of dead in the water but they're very confident that they're meeting those and so there's a lot of different factors but the progress has been really remarkable thank you all and I want to thank our panel and just encourage you to also try and check out these booths and everything there weren't any questions with regard to geothermal but don't forget how important that is also in terms of complimenting this whole host of renewable energy technologies thanks a whole lot bye bye