 Good morning, everyone. Welcome to the 19th annual Congressional Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Expo and Policy Forum. We are so glad to have you with us here this morning and to start off our first panel to kick off the nine panels that we will have today where we will hear from all of our exhibitors and special guests and so that we hope you will stay with us throughout the day as well as it as well as attend all of the booths in the adjoining caucus room and see all of the technologies that are on exhibit there and talk to all of the exhibitors. We hope this is a great day, a chance to really learn and have a chance to have dialogue with many many fascinating people, learn a lot and hopefully we can all gain a lot and help move our country forward for a clean energy economy. So to start off this panel which we are calling setting the stage we will first hear from Scott Sklar who is the steering committee chair for the Sustainable Energy Coalition and let me introduce myself also before Scott starts. I am Carol Werner. I'm the executive director of the Environmental and Energy Study Institute and also serve on the steering committee of the Sustainable Energy Coalition with Scott and of course it's the Sustainable Energy Coalition that is sponsoring this expo and forum today with the Senate in-house renewable and efficiency caucuses. Scott. Thank you Carol. I want to start saying that my company blends all the clean energy and energy efficiency technologies all over the world. I have projects on every continent including Antarctica and I teach two interdisciplinary courses at the Georgia Washington University on sustainable energy. So I come here every year for the last 19 years of being grayer and losing a little more hair but my job is to sort of tell you what happened since last year. So the year 2015 we have stats now at the end of 2015 obviously takes a few months to get them. UNEP United Nations Environmental Program with Blue Merge New Energy Finance said that renewable energy broke the 156 gigawatt barrier meaning 156 gigawatts or essentially 156 nuclear power plants worth of renewable energy was added to the global grid. This is the first time ever we have broken 150 gigawatts. That's huge. When I started in this field 40 years ago it was a half a gigawatt so it would be 150 gigawatts is astounding. 2015 was the first time we broke $150 billion of private sector investment globally in renewable energy. $150 billion has been put in by the private sector. If you look at countries they put in almost $800 billion. So we've had almost a trillion dollars worth of investment but it's the private sector investment I want you to really think about. 2015 was the first time that half more than half of all new power generation added on this planet was from renewable energy. In fact 253 gigawatts added of all power 130 gigawatts from renewables excluding large hydro and then after that cold capacity 42 gigawatts oil and gas 40 gigawatts and nuclear 15 gigawatts. So renewables is huge globally in what we call in electric additions to the grid. All clean energy investment. Okay I'm talking about in this case a subset of private sector investment. Venture capital public markets distributed financing and asset finance in 2015 exceeded $285 billion. So that's a subset of traditional financing. And last year this past year 2015 the first time in history and by the way I'm going to tell you something when I start in this field everybody told me you know you can never have an industrialized country totally on renewable energy. The grids just can't handle it. Now of course they were only talking about solar and wind and I want to remind you that geothermal biomass power hydro and marine and waste heat and cogeneration are 24 hour power okay as is concentrating solar power. But they're only talking about wind and solar when they talk about renewables you could never have an entire grid on renewable energy. Well on Sunday May 8 2016 all right this year in Germany the fifth largest economy in the world. All right 90% of the country's total power came from solar, wind, hydropower and biomass. How astounding is that? When I used to say that 40 years ago people would laugh at me up here and I worked in the seventh year in the 70s would laugh at me that that would ever happen. And here it is in my lifetime. So before, maybe, but the papers I've handed out to you that I teach at my GW classes if you take these studies in aggregate what they come to the conclusion is that with technology we have today and the resources we have on this planet today we can meet most or all of our global or US energy needs with a combination and I stress a combination of high value energy efficiency, energy storage and the complete portfolio for new energy. That's what you have that I handed out to you today. So I want you to think about that and the people at this table will give you more detail and vision on this but the point being is we are on a trajectory that is as important as the trajectory of communications, distributed communications by the way that's what cellular is and seamless grids, cell healing grids with cellular and the internet in energy. That's what this transformation is about. So thank you for hearing me. I'm going to have to leave because I am in the big room introducing other speakers but thank you for coming and happy if any of you after you go through this today please feel free to stop by and talk. Thank you. Thanks Scott. And who better to hear from next in terms of studying the stage for the big picture is Roland Risser who is the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Renewable Power at the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy at the US Department of Energy. Delighted to have you with us Roland. Thanks. Thanks and I'm happy to be here with you today. I'd love to talk about the EREs that acronym for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy so you'll hear me say ERE shorter about their program. You probably know that DOE is the federal agency primarily focused on the next generation of clean energy and that's why it's important that we have a strong role in this specifically for the renewable power programs and those for us are wind, water, solar and geothermal. We're continuously assessing the potential for renewable power in the United States. This includes identifying critical research, looking at development, demonstration and deployment activities to help move this technology forward. To give you an idea of the size of our program I'm going to talk about our budget request. So a budget request is very different in budget but their budget request into FY17. So our largest for the total renewable is about 550 million. Of course the largest program is solar. It's at 240 million. Wind is the second largest at 145. Geothermal is 97 and water which is a growing program is at 69 million. So while our work primarily focuses on research and development many of the challenges to deploying this renewable resource involve way beyond technology solutions. You have to have the market solution and address market barriers. So I'm going to spend some of my time talking about that. So within our programs we work to address these market barriers to deploying renewable power at a commercial scale. They include both technology and non-technology costs and includes things like reliable objective quantitative information to inform decision making. So how do we do this? Well we work with a broad set of stakeholders to quantify the resource potential and to figure out how to remove those barriers to that potential. And those include things like environmental impacts, regulatory issues, human use conflicts, and access to financing for renewable power technologies all in line with the national energy policies and our departmental goals. In solar for example we've made incredible progress over the years. You've heard from Espar about that about two-thirds the remaining cost reduction that we're addressing is not on the technology itself but it's on what we call the soft costs and these are things like permitting and interconnection to the grid. An example of how we're dealing with soft costs includes a project called the national community solar partnership which really is looking to unlock potential for solar power to those who normally would not have access to it. This is our households and businesses that are renters. They don't have adequate roof space and low and moderate income folks that don't have the capital to invest in this upfront. So we're working with stakeholders in the public and private sectors to expand things like community solar and this allows low and moderate income households in particular a pathway to get DOE expertise and national activities to implement programs and projects. This partnership is collaborative between DOE, HUD, the EPA, USDA, and then key representatives from the solar industry, NGOs, and the state and community leaders. So it's a broad brush approach. An early technology example of how we are strategically focused both on the R&D and in reducing market barriers is in the water technology program. So while we're not only focusing on R&D such as funding innovative wave energy devices, we're also investing in addressing environmental siding issues, regulatory issues, financing barriers to allow these to be commercialized. This is particularly important like wave energy or current energy where we don't have a history of putting these in place so there's you don't have a history of how to get the permits done and working with the Department of Interior and others. Another more advanced industry example in the water power office is conventional hydropower. We don't haven't talked a lot about that in the past but you have to understand this industry has been around for a hundred years and the it out currently provides about 7% of the renewable power to the U.S. This is a pretty big number. Electric electricity storage which is a critical element for renewable power which you heard from is such as pump storage is a key element to getting even more renewable power under the grid. The market barriers in this industry are well known but there are still significant challenges to reaching the increase in hydropower in the U.S. We are currently working on a hydropower vision report similar to a wind vision report we released last year that analyzes the potential for hydropower in the United States. Again this is both hydropower on the land and then hydropower on the ocean which is called green hydroponetics and this involved both technology advancements and environmental sustainability. We also have a vision report coming out on our geothermal program called GeoVision and you might have heard of our Sunset 2020 report which now we're working on our Sunset 2030 report which is where we're going with solar for 2030. So even assessing and resource potential can be risky and costly. For example in geothermal we initiated a program called the play farewell analysis in 2014. Now play fairway that's not a golf game this is a term that is brought from the oil and gas industry where they look at information that's available on what's this the surface and subsurface data that lets them know where the highest potential locations are to then go out and do your exploration in the drilling. The costs are in that drilling phase you want to make sure you have the best locations to do that and we would I'd be remiss if I didn't talk about grid modernization this is the only way for us to reach the full potential of renewable power. We recognize that the grid we have today does not have the attributes necessary to meet the demands of the 21st century and beyond including renewable a significant renewable penetration. The current business as usual trajectory for the electric industry will not result in the timely transition to a modernized grid. Innovation in the electricity sector is is inhibited by regulatory market and business model uncertainties. A lot of uncertainty is there and people don't know where to go next and how to move forward. Moreover large investments that we do today will be fully instituted for for years and then they'll be in place for decades after that so everyone's very careful about what investment they're going to make. Our nation is ready to make investment decisions that will create the grid of the future. The federal government recognizes that it is a public good issue and that the federal sector is a unique position to help transition for states industry and other state owners. Through the department's grid modernization initiative we've mapped out a multi-year plan to lead to a coordinated portfolio of activities to help the nation on a cost-effective path for a resilient secure sustainable and reliable grid that is flexible enough to provide the array of emerging services that remain affordable to consumers. These aren't new problems how our offices are trying to think differently about how to solve them. At EERE we're continuously striving to get the right balance between technology and market issues. We focus on solutions that have widespread relevance and where the industry is unlikely to invest on the zone. Thank you very much. Thanks Rowland and and I just want to encourage you all to follow up with Rowland or with other EERE staff in the other room later because there are so many golly gee whiz kinds of stories coming out of EERE in terms of technology advancements let alone this longer term work that is critical to to being done. So now we're going to turn to Dr. Deborah Stein who is the professor of the practice engineering and public policy department and she is also the associate director for policy outreach at the Carnegie Mellon Scott Institute for Energy Innovation and how she gets that on one card beats me. Deborah thank you for being here. Yeah hi and thank you very much it's great to be in DC and I just say that I used to work in Countyville I worked for congratulations service for so many years so some of you have come across a lot of reports I thought I wanted to hear and I was also the White House I was executive director of PCAS I was the president of Countyville and I was a senator from all over the world. So I've been in academia for only about four years now and so therefore you're a part that I'm not a sort of traditional academic and so I'm going to start out with this question. So one thing I have learned in my teaching days is it's best to ask a question rather than provide an answer. So you're the policymaker you're trying to really care about electric computers so what you care about and your ultimate goal is to reduce emissions from your vehicles. So the question is does it matter where your policy goes should it be just a nationwide policy or should it be a policy that maybe varies based on region. So let's say Countyville would say okay let's go for a nationwide policy electric vehicles everywhere wonderful thing. Okay a few of you how many of you think it depends on where that electric vehicle is. Okay well good we have our answer and the answer for that is as many of you probably because it depends on where your electricity comes from if you're in Pennsylvania like I in Pittsburgh then the majority of our energy comes from coal and so that means that when the electric vehicle that's in Pittsburgh it's not from the second to the best benefit compared to one that is in California for example where there's a lot more to learn. Well let's take another example if you're looking at say winter solar columns or are they better located in Pittsburgh or are they better located in the semi-sapwest. How many think Pittsburgh and how many do you think Pittsburgh okay how many do you think the southwest okay the correct answer is Pittsburgh and the reason why is because we've done a study this is a study in the proceedings of the National County Sciences and you find you'll get more air pollution benefits for the same reason by having your solar plan in Pennsylvania Ohio West Virginia which are all coal-based states that in California so I have come to the conclusion that all energy policy is local and I look at the national government for many years I was here for about 20 years and the more work for local level the more I realize that there's a lot that needs to be understood at that level to really have an ultimate long-term impact on the environment. So here's another question for you data centers you guys know about data centers do they use a lot of energy or have they been increasing over time or have they been decreasing over time or have they remained the same so how many think data centers their energy use has been increasing uh as as you know our reliance on IT has increased increasing in energy consumption no decreasing can you not you got you know like my students you got to answer the question thank you how many think it's the same okay a lot of uncertainty here the correct answer we just came out with a study that says that actually the energy use today some of you the centers has remained relatively constant in the past a few years I think I have questions right now so are you supposed to they're talking aggregate or percent area uh at aggregate yes yes exactly aggregate so these are some of the arguments now another I was actually just in Paris at some meetings that were focusing on European energy policy and the focus there was on energy storage and they were talking primarily about what kind of energy storage we're going to have to guess we'll be in on this correct answer and uh but here at Carnegie Mellon we have a kind of this called acronym it is an obvious hybrid battery based on the saltwater battery that is low cost that has gone from laboratory to manufacturing and job creation all of them about 10 years and it provides ability to buy a renewable electricity and energy storage for the grid so we can have renewable electricity but I often find that people just continue to talk about within ion batteries and don't look at the other options that are available the other thing we do at Carnegie Mellon is we run a clean technology prize competition sponsored by EVE or one of eight national regions that cover four states Ohio West Virginia and I was just at our national competition one of our student teams won the national prize and it was for a hybrid truck and rather than focusing on the cannabis you might think instead of focusing on the trailer so as the trailer goes downhill it gathers energy and it goes uphill it uses energy just gathers the body and that Pittsburgh has a lot of hills so that works out pretty well the team that I work with this year is called Gecko Robotics it won the rice competition that it's at Rice University and what it is it's the robot that climbs up the inside of Boilers that's called Boilers for example and it detects when there's faults and so right now about 40 people die every year from doing these inspections and the robot has a better detection at lower cost and then people who just come in and fix you know where those detectors are and that increases the energy efficiency of it I have to say by the way the high line that was happening much earlier that increases truck energy which is about 40 percent this increases efficiency of say coal facilities by about three percent so we have a lot of technologies that are on the market that we're really trying to push into the market place now the challenge we have is what are called non-market factors I talked a little bit about this last year when I was here so non-market factors so you know a technology can work and a technology can have a market I'll give you an example of that Thomas Carr but there can be non-market factors and non-market factors are those that are policies that I've encouraged, encouraged that technology that's in the market like part of the reason I think that at beyond that's the saltwater based battery had this success so it was because the coal technology from California requiring a storage by 2020 but we my class every year we take two or three cases on a real life examples in the region where there are what I call unintentional non-market factors that are making it more challenging for technologies to reach the market place one example of this is we have a company that is buying these trucks and they have difficulty because they produce fuel but somebody else does the trucks and so as a fuel company they can't they have no control of the truck regulations so they have to work with the partners there's a hydropower company that is trying to take existing dams that are owned by the use of our employees in other words for a falling part and wants to renovate them and make money from them everybody's in favor of including our import but nobody can seem to figure out from a congressional standpoint how to fix the legislation so that can't occur to make money so that that investment makes sense so these are the types of things that we work on at the party melon we're just trying to encourage better decision making and and through analysis answering the questions we might have from the policy that's terrific thanks Deborah really appreciate it so we will now turn to Nicole Steele who is the executive director with grid alternatives which is bringing another aspect to thinking about a diverse economy in terms of looking at equity and solar Nicole thank you thank you Carol again my name is Nicole Steele I'm the executive director of grid alternatives mid-atlantic it is our vision to make clean renewable energy accessible to everyone and so for those of you who are unfamiliar with grid alternatives we are a non-profit solar installer soup to nuts full service and we are but we work exclusively in low-income communities and we use a job training model to do the installations themselves so i spoke on a panel here this time last year and we were very very new in the dc region and i think we probably had done about 10 single family installations at that time and i'm happy to report since then we have provided over 200 kilowatts of free solar to homeowners in both dc and baltimore in the past year so we're very proud to be able to continue that service but you know we have to have good local state and federal policies to make that happen so again for those of you who are unfamiliar with the story of grid we started out in california about a decade ago in oakland by two engineers that were seeing that solar was only accessible to sort of like wealthier individuals and so there's this huge market of people that are disproportionately impacted by their utility bills but yet they don't have the access to the benefits of solar at the same time the state of california was creating the sash program and the mash program and so grid became the administrator of the sash program which is the single family solar affordable housing program it's a rebate program that we administer and because of that we became incredibly successful across the state and we have about 10 offices across the state of california that's been implementing low income solar with job trainees for about the last 10 years and we've also been able to expand into the mash program as well which is the multifamily side of things and that's a program that's fully funded through their new cap and trade program so it'll be interesting to see how the funding continues to flow through that program but we have been able to expand our offices in the state of california double and triple in size because of that funding that's being that's being directed into that program because it is so important to make sure that low income individuals do have access to clean energy and also those jobs that come along with it so about five years ago we started to open offices outside of this data california and as you know most states don't have sash and mash programs so all of our affiliate offices look very very different from one another based on policies that are on the ground so our first affiliate office in california or in colorado outside of california was opened because it had a great renewable portfolio standard and we were going to be able to leverage the srex and we were very excited about entering into that market well as soon as we did that the srex market tanked and we had to figure out a whole other approach to bringing solar to low income communities in the state of colorado fortunately colorado was one of the first states to adopt implement community solar on a larger scale and also required a low to moderate income carve out so we've become one of the larger developers in the state of colorado to provide 100 solar to the lmi community in colorado and we were we did open the first 100 lmi community solar array in the country in partnership with grand valley power which is a rural electric cooperative in the state of colorado about a year and a half ago and since then we have now developed a pipeline of 2.9 megawatts of community solar that will come online over the next two years in colorado and uh yeah so that's a huge win in colorado and that'll continue to move forward rapidly and then we opened an office in new york about a year after the colorado office and as you know new york is going to look very different from colorado and uh in california and so we have a great partnership with nice sirta we have some on bill pilot programming happening in the comet territory we're about to launch a really great uh partnership with the connecticut green bank and their multifamily program in the fall and then there's an extract market that can be leveraged in new jersey um so they're they're a strong uh a market but with lots of different types of both state and local level programming happening and then we move down to my office so we're physically located here in washington dc but we cover dc maryland delaware in virginia and we talk a little bit about the carolinas in west virginia and pennsylvania um as you know all of those areas are very different from one another but we have been able to be incredibly successful in dc because there is a solar for all program through their dc sustainable energy utility which provides a rebate for single family low-income homeowners um as you may know dc has the best extract market in the country um in um two weeks ago i think it was the the dc city council passed a 50 rps standard which is incredible and all of the alternative compliance payments that will be coming through that program will go towards low income solar so it is definitely the vision of dc city council and the mayor to make sure that solar is accessible to everyone and that is was unlocked through very specific local policies and dc is a very specific or um special circumstance because it acts like a city state um maryland's a little bit different we've been very active in the city of baltimore and maryland had a pretty good s-rec market and we were able to leverage that and we have third party um financers that we can leverage the federal income tax credit because one of the things um you know i've talking i've been talking a lot about state and local incentives but you know the itc is a huge solar incentive however the community that we serve does not have access to federal income tax credits because they don't have that same tax liability um that other individuals would have and so we as a non-profit also don't have a tax liability so we have to find partners to to leverage that so that's one of the things that we're always like you know that that's a great policy it's a great incentive but it's actually not accessible to everyone and our whole vision is to make sure that this clean energy economy this growing economy is accessible to everyone so i've talked a little bit about how we've been able to open our offices and how we function in these different areas but i haven't really talked about um the job component and why that's so important and so we have an initiative called rise which is realizing an inclusive solar economy where we target the communities that we work with and we work directly with job training organizations to get individuals on the roof that may not otherwise even know what solar is um and these are good well-paying not only jobs but careers and so we can provide that opportunity for an individual to get up on the roof and they don't even have to have ever used a hammer before we'll teach them everything about the solar installation process um and really take them through so that they can demonstrate competency and all the bits and pieces of that process and to connect them to the the growing solar industry so you might know that the solar industry is growing 12 times faster than the rest of the U.S. economy and being located here in the mid-atlantic the stat that came out of the solar foundations jobs report earlier this year was that 90 percent of uh employers in the mid-atlantic think it's either somewhat or very difficult to hire qualified employees in the mid-atlantic and so that's why it's so important to be able to connect individuals to this job and provide that opportunity for job training so I just want to close by saying you know we are a non-profit um and so we don't want to see ourselves as an industry competitor and so a lot of people think of us as you know well you're a solar contractor how does it work and it's like well we work in an area that the industry is may may not go themselves and we are continuously evolving and flexible to make sure that we're providing that value add and filling that gap within the industry and so when we recognize that there are gaps in the industry that's where we will be nimble and fall into place to make sure that we're helping create good local state and federal policies to really fill those niches and thank you thank you