 Good afternoon. Welcome, everybody. I'm Jared Blum. I'm chair of the board of the Environmental Energy Study Institute, and for those of you who are used to seeing the wonderful Carol Warner, who's our executive director at these functions, she had to be out of town and asked me to substitute. A poor substitute, but I'll do the best I can. For those of you who haven't been to an EESI briefing before, I want to take a minute to just share with you who we are. And this slide does a pretty good job of it. Founded by a group of visionary members of the House, bipartisan members of the House in 1984, EESI has been around for 35 years, serving as a forum for constructive discussion to solve problems revolving around the energy and environmental space. And we've been fortunate to be able to partner with wonderful organizations over the years. And today, we're going to be partnering with another one of them, the Business Counsel for Sustainable Energy, and talking about a very important publication that I think it's the sixth year that they've come out with, their annual 2018 Energy Factbook. What we'd like to do at this point, I'm going to turn the microphone over to the president of the Business Counsel for Sustainable Energy and let her move on down the road in terms of who's going to be speaking, and let her explain to you a little bit more about how that process is going to work. But again, we are pleased to have you here. We welcome your input. Certainly, there's going to be some questions about how you enjoyed this at the end of the program. Please respond to our survey. Let us know what we're doing right, what we're doing wrong. And we will continue to do this, whether it's with NASIO or the American Society of Civil Engineers or any other organizations that come with constructive ideas and policy solutions. So again, thanks for joining us. And Lisa, I would turn it over to you. Well, good afternoon, everybody. So good to have you all here. The Business Counsel for Sustainable Energy is very pleased to be partnering in this event with EESI. And we're also pleased to have the support of the House and Senate Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency caucuses for this event. I think as long as we've been doing the Factbook, we've been doing this event here on the House side and to share some really exciting news about the changes in the U.S. energy system impacting both the power sector and transportation. The Sustainable Energy and America Factbook is a compilation of very critical facts about the U.S. energy system, looking at market trends, policy implementation, economics, hopefully giving all of you for your work in Congress a full picture of the U.S. energy landscape. Today's program will feature an overview presentation by Ethan Zindler, who's head of America's for Bloomberg New Energy Finance. And then we're going to have an industry panel to share some of their reflections on the data and also share a highlight fact for you that they thought was most relevant. And we really want this to be an opportunity for you to get this information and ask questions so we'll make sure we have time at the end for discussion. Before we move to Ethan, I just wanted to share with you a short video that captures some of the big takeaways from this year's Factbook. Today, our energy system is experiencing rapid and historic changes. These changes impact how we produce, deliver, and consume energy. Over the last several years, renewable energy has seen significant growth. Consumption of American natural gas has expanded. And the economy as a whole is more efficient than ever. With all these changes, Americans are enjoying low energy bills and spending the smallest percentage of their income on electricity than any other time on record. The 2018 Sustainable Energy in America Factbook tells this story of change and the growing contributions of sustainable energy technologies, energy efficiency, natural gas, and renewable energy. In 2017, natural gas was the number one producer of US electricity, providing 32% of the power supply for the country. Renewable generation, including hydropower, soared 14% in 2017 over 2016 levels. The expansion brought renewables to 18% of total US generation, double their contribution a decade ago. This means that we can meet the demands of a growing country reliably and affordably with a diverse portfolio of clean energy resources. Natural gas and renewable energy now provide half of the power used across America. Within the last decade, we have seen a 17% jump in American energy productivity, meaning the US economy is using 17% less energy to power its growth. The average retail price of electricity has dropped over 5% since its recent peak in 2008. In 2017, average retail prices dropped in Texas and states that are part of the PJM Regional Power Group, including Ohio, New Jersey, Maryland, Michigan, Indiana, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. Low energy prices for energy-heavy businesses make the US one of the most competitive places to invest, compared to countries like India, China, Germany, and Mexico. Total greenhouse gas emissions in the US plunged to a 25-year low. And this is all happening while American jobs in sustainable sectors are growing. Today, energy efficiency, natural gas, and renewable energy industries support over 3 million US jobs. In 2017, the United States surpassed a number of new milestones, marking yet another landmark here in the changes to our energy system. Learn more by reading the 2018 Sustainable Energy in America Factbook. All of the information that you're going to hear about today can be found on the BCSE website. There's a standalone factbook website. And just call out some things we have available here. There's a set of the infographics. We also have a copy of our top line message brochure. So feel free to take any of this. But it's all available for free online. And we also have a version of the slide deck that you're going to see, as well as the full factbook. And if you were printed out, this is what it would look like, about 130 of the best and most important facts related to US energy. So again, please go to the website and you can search around for the information that's most relevant to you. So with that, I'm going to bring up Ethan Zindler. And he's going to provide an overview of the 2018 factbook findings. Hi, everybody. So first, as I get all the equipment all set up here, just a quick note. So first of all, who am I? I'm Ethan Zindler with Bloomberg New Energy Finance. What's Bloomberg New Energy Finance? Bloomberg New Energy Finance is a division of Bloomberg that provides research on the energy markets. We actually were founded as a standalone company called New Energy Finance about 13 years ago in London, and we were bought by Bloomberg. And so I've been working for Bloomberg ever since. But basically, we provide in-depth market research, primarily on renewables, but also on gas and other technologies as well. And I'm based here in Washington, and I head our team in the Americas. Let's see if this now works. Hold on a second. So as Lisa mentioned, first of all, that this is the sixth time we've done this factbook. And of course, I want to say thanks to Lisa and to the Business Council, Jared, and others who've been part of it for now a number of years for supporting this. The ambitions of the project are, in some sense, pretty modest. We just are simply trying to get out a relevant set of facts about where we stand in the US energy sector today and sort of level-set things. And I know that that doesn't sound so exciting, but actually, I'll try and make the case that the actual progress that we've seen in the US energy sector over the last decade has been, in fact, really very compelling and interesting. I think the video did a nice job of sort of walking you through some of the high-level findings. I'll do the same in a little bit more detail. So here are some of the supporters of the Business Council, which Lisa would tell you about. You can see it's a good variety of companies and non-governmental organizations that support the organization. Here's a slide on EESI. OK, and so about the fact book. Really quick, why do we do this? As I said, it's mainly to provide facts. It's to augment existing what we consider to be very reputable sources of information are already out there. It focuses on renewables, energy efficiency, and gas. It fills what we think are important data gaps that others are not producing. It has data through the end of 2017 whenever we can. It has data that we at Bloomberg collect ourselves, but it also uses a lot of data from other sources, such EIA and others that are out there. It has what we consider to be the latest information on technology costs. Those are often produced by us at Bloomberg. And it has been, as I mentioned, underwritten by BCSE. This year, a few additions. We've now, frankly, done this briefing, I think, four or five years in a row with one of the additions for this year is that we've got a few more data points on jobs that have been produced actually by the government and others. We've also extended, obviously, all the data that we've had in the past and the format we've tried to make a little more user-friendly. In terms of what's covered, always worth just mentioning what we include in the technologies. Does this work? Nope. As was mentioned, it's efficiency renewables and natural gas are the main big three that we cover in this area. We don't focus as much on nuclear, wave or tidal technologies or lighting or industrial efficiency. Frankly, it's not a knock on them. I certainly regard those as zero carbon energy technologies. It's just that the sustainable energy sort of coalition has us focused in this particular area. All right. So what am I going to talk about? Basically, four main points, I guess, that I'd like to make about the US energy sector today. And I'll have a heavy focus today on the power sector within energy. But just to be clear, one, we would contend that economic growth in the United States is no longer reliant on expanding energy consumption. I'll talk a little bit more about that in just a second. Two, we think that sustainable energy is really very much a mainstream established part of US power. Three, that the power sector transformation is not ratcheting up consumer costs. I think that's always an important point to make, particularly in the Beltway, where there's been a lot of discussions about complying with clean power plans and other types of policies as well. And fourth, although federal policy for clean energy has what we'd say faltered, or certainly been less consistent over the last 12 months, there are others who are taking the lead at the state level to support the industries. All right, so first, on the first point. Long story short, we are now growing our economy without growing energy consumption. This is just a chart looking back at GDP indexed all the way back to 1990 levels, starting at essentially one. And you can see that as GDP has nearly doubled for the United States, energy consumption has only gone up a little. And in fact, the last 10 years, we've seen our GDP grow by about 15%, and our energy consumption has actually gone down by about 2%. I know the panel is going to want to talk a little bit more about why this is, but at the most macro level, we are growing. Now, you might notice this substantial divot here, the financial crisis and the recession that followed. And one of the results, of course, of the financial crisis was that we lost a substantial amount of manufacturing in the United States. But since then, the economy has grown at a reasonable pace some years, obviously a pretty lame pace other years. But it's grown, and energy consumption has not been rising in tandem with it. And in fact, manufacturing, at least in the last five years, has not been leaving the United States. So it's not that our economy is becoming less energy intensive. It's becoming just more efficient. As I try to drill down on that just a little bit, the segments of energy as we use it in the United States, the top line is power. And in particular, over the last decade, our use of power has gone down by about 7%. The total demand for electrons across the United States has dropped by about 7%. That's a pretty substantial decline, given that basically utilities have traditionally been viewed as steady growth year on year on year. But actually demand for their product has been going down by a little bit. In terms of energy use in the transportation sector, it's actually creeped up a little bit by about 2% over that period of time. We saw real improvement in efficiency of automobiles up until about a couple of years ago. But it's basically plateaued and come down just a little bit. Meanwhile, Americans have actually been driving a little bit more in the last year or so. So that's driven that up. And then on the residential level, we've seen the actual use of energy go down by an amazing 16% in the last decade. And this is a reflection of better building stock, new housing stock, which is more efficient, but also just, frankly, how inefficient some of our housing stock was before and our use of energy was. We're replacing things like light bulbs, refrigerators, other things like that with much more efficient devices that are really driving down household energy consumption. The second point, of course, I want to make is that sustainable energy is an established part of the US power sector. And I've said this many times before, but I'll say it again, probably said to this audience last year, which is there's nothing really alternative about renewable energy at this point. It is very much in the mainstream. And you can call it other things like clean energy, sustainable energy, whatever you want to call it. But it's not alternative when you're talking about the kinds of volumes that we're now seeing within the US power sector. So over the last decade or so, you can see that the top blue chunk here in this chart is renewable power. And this is total generation. Actual electrons essentially being consumed across the US in each given year. And this is our data, an estimate through 2017. And you can see that basically the blue which is renewables essentially has almost doubled to about 18% last year. That includes large hydro projects, which frankly last year had a particularly good year of generation compared to the prior couple of years. But also we saw a lot of new renewables come online in the form of wind and solar. Gas, an amazing amount of new gas, about 50% growth in gas generation in the United States. And between those two segments, renewables and gas, you're now at about 50% of generation. If you throw in another 20% for nuclear, which is the red, which has basically stayed more or less flat, that gets you up to about 70% of power generation last year. And then the last 30% is coal. And coal has gone from about half of our power to a bit under a third of our power in just a decade, which is an enormous shift. There are a lot of reasons about, we can talk about this. Certainly you hear a lot about regulations, but one of the cases that I would make is that it's pretty simple. Gas has been cheap, renewables have been getting cheaper. And a lot of the coal plants that we have in the United States are ancient. A lot of them are 30 to 40 years old, and they don't operate efficiently so that they can't compete. And along those lines, and we hear a lot from the Trump administration about wanting to revitalize coal and where we go on coal, this is just a look at the announcements of coal plants that are due to retire. In other words, plants that have told the DOE and the EIA that they're gonna come offline. And you can see that the high water mark for retirements of coal plants was when we retired about 15,000 megawatts back in 2015. But based on the promises that have been made or at least the disclosures that have been made, this will be potentially the second biggest year for coal retirements ever in 2018. There's about a dozen gigawatts of coal that has said they're gonna come offline this year. And so as you think about this picture and where it goes next, and again I'm now veering off the facts and into a little bit of conjecture here, but if you think about where this picture goes next, if you take another 12,000 megawatts of coal offline against a total power generation of about 1100 gigawatts, you're gonna continue to see emissions come down. In fact, one of the questions that we've gotten recently is where will emissions end the year? Can they eventually hit the goals of the Clean Power Plan? We'll have to see on that. In terms of renewables, we've seen last year was just about the second strongest year we've ever seen for build of wind and solar in the United States with about 18 and a half gigawatts built. The high water mark was 2016. We saw a reduction in wind and a bit of a reduction in solar build last year for a variety of reasons, partially because there's often some uneven build in the US based on when the various tax credits are due to expire and other issues around that, as well as state level supports. But again, what do we consider a strong year for renewable build? And if you look at cumulative capacity for renewables, we're at about 240 gigawatts, including large hydro. Again, there's about 1100 total gigawatts in the United States of capacity. So if you're 240, about 20% of the total now on a capacity basis is represented by renewables. All right, the second thing that I wanna try to talk about is just about costs. And again, I like to sort of harp on this a little bit, particularly in Washington when we talk about this stuff because it always amazes me that there continues to be this sort of dichotomy setup which says, okay, we can either have clean energy, we can either have cheap energy or we can have clean energy. The two can't, we can't have both. And that's just nonsense to be honest with you. We've seen over the last 10 years how you can do both at the same time. We certainly can walk and chew gum at the same time on this stuff. So this is just a look at how much consumers are actually spending in this chart on electricity and natural gas. This is a share of consumers spend. What percentage of their total household income they're spending on one of these two things which has been counted by the Bureau of Economic Analysis. I think the data set dates back to the 1960s. We couldn't find any data earlier than that. So this is the lowest basically ever recorded for this about 1.3% of household income on electricity and about 0.4% on natural gas. And when you look at total energy expenditures which includes of course gasoline which is an important part of things, you see that you're probably at about 4% of total spend. Again, just about record territory. A little ticked up just a little bit last year but still incredibly, incredibly low in terms of what American consumers are spending on energy. Why is that? And first of course is gas which is cheap and not on this chart gas is in the two to $3 per million cubic feet range and has been there for a while. It's ticked up a little bit. It's gone down well below that as well but it's been by historical standards very low for the last four or five years and that's made a huge difference in all this. But the other thing is that the price of renewables has been coming down and it's becoming cost competitive without the benefit of subsidies. So this is just a quick look at the how our purchase agreements. Those are the long-term contracts that wind power and solar power developers sign. When you build a wind or solar project, you typically sign a contract at the beginning to sell most if not all the power to one customer or some series of customers on a basically on a 20-year period. These are called power purchase agreements. And the range of those prices you can see for different regions, Ercottus, Texas, Southwest, California, you can see each of these and you can see that the ranges for wind and solar are in some cases as cheap as under 20 bucks. In some cases as high as about $90. Now this stuff, also I'm gonna trip if I keep doing that, but the kind of pink area that you see in the middle here, those are actual power prices, the low and high range of existing power prices for wholesale power in the various markets. So you can see that the contracts being signed for renewables are basically in the ballpark in a number of parts of the country of existing power prices. I would also note, you'll say, okay, well, why are some of the ones higher? Who's buying power for higher price than the wholesale price? Why does that happen? The answer is because there are a number of state level incentives like renewable portfolio standards that grant renewable energy credits that make the economics pencil out for projects in those regions. The other thing that's coming along very, very quickly and is worth mentioning is our batteries. And there's a lot of, anybody's been reading the trades over the last two days, the Sierra week, which is well underway down in Houston and brings together about 4,000, mostly folks in the oil industry, but a lot of folks also in the power sector, there's been a lot of talk about batteries at that conference and usually that's a conference that's just about dominated by oil and gas. And for good reason, because battery prices are coming down very quickly. We've tracked them down about 65% in the last five years from about $600 per kilowatt hour to about $200 per kilowatt hour. And we saw them drop by another $64 per kilowatt hour in 2017. The implications for this are really major, but I'll start with a couple. The first is electric vehicles. For most folks, electric vehicles are not economically viable at the moment. If you look at the sticker price of an EV versus an internal combustion engine car, you might say, okay, I'm gonna buy the internal combustion engine car, it's just cheaper on a sticker price, sticker price basis. But we're not far off where EVs are basically gonna beat that car on a sticker price basis. We're gonna get there, we think within the next three or four years potentially. Battery prices will probably have to drop by another 50%, but if you look at the trajectory down, and we think they'll keep going down, you'll start to get there. The second really important thing, of course, about batteries is the role that they can play within the power sector. And really in two sub-segments. One, you can put them on the grid and they can provide power at key moments when let's say you lose power from other sources, or if it's in the peak hour of demand at three o'clock in LA, or you name it, when you need to try and essentially smooth out meeting supply and demand. There's a real role for them there. And we're starting to see more of these developed in various places around the world. And then finally, you can put them in the so-called behind the meter space. That is, if you're a consumer that has a photovoltaic system on your roof and you have a real inclination to either get off the grid or get closer to getting off the grid, you can use the system to store the power when the sun's shining most at three or four in the afternoon and use it into the evening. I would argue that right now, for most consumers that doesn't make sense, but we'll start to get there pretty soon. Just a quick look at electric vehicles. A very interesting and exciting area. There's still only 1% of new car sales, but they jumped a lot last year by about a quarter. All told, there's about three quarters of a million EVs on the road. I'm not talking about Priuses. I'm talking about pure electric vehicles. I would be remiss if I didn't talk for just a second about gas, particularly slightly in the geopolitical sense. As I mentioned, gas prices have been very reasonable for the last several years. And what that is doing, combined with the fact that we're now getting more capacity to actually export that gas from liquid natural gas terminals, is that the US itself has become a net natural gas exporter. We saw a month or two in 2016 where this was the case, but now over the course of all of 2017, the US is a net gas exporter to other parts of the world. And that means, obviously, tankers that leave places like Co-Point, up in Maryland and others, but it also means gas going across pipelines into Mexico. And I always like to highlight that because we are in the midst of a NAFTA negotiation. And the amount of gas that we are now selling into Mexico is pretty substantial. And I'm not always sure that that's top of mind when people think about cross-border trade with Mexico, but the volumes have been rising. It's a little hard to see from this chart, but it is actually the second chunk of blue that you see there. All right, I'm gonna finish up by just talking for a moment about policy. And then I know our panelists are gonna have a bunch of things to talk about on policy as well. Look, for these technologies, I think the Trump administration and this current Congress has certainly provided an interesting, to say the least, 14 months so far. We'll talk more about each one of those sort of policies and which ones have been the most impactful to date. But there's a lot of other stuff going on in the US. And I would argue that the gap between Washington and a state like California and even arguably New York has been getting wider and wider over the last year, just as the federal government seems to be at least halting some of the things they were trying to do to be supportive for some of these technologies. You see a lot more activity going on at the state level. Actually, that somehow got slightly out of order. My apologies, I did wanna say one thing about emissions, though, before I finish up, which is that on the emissions picture, all of this obviously has very positive implications. This is total emissions by sector. And you can see the power sector emissions on the left-hand side are the ones that have dropped the most sharply. The transportation sector emissions, not surprisingly since, as I said, use of transportation energy has not been going down, have ticked up just a little bit. But you can see the other sectors have been also either more or less low and holding. And what that's meant for total emissions, you can see the energy sector emissions here are really down. And then total gross emissions here also down. I'm gonna make sure we just have the right chart here yet. Next, which is that if you look at power sector emissions now, there are 28% below 2005 levels. The goal of the clean power plan that was promulgated under the Obama administration is essentially on hold at the moment and pulled back was for 32% below 2005 levels by 2030. So if we're at 28% now, and we need to get to 32%, we're not that far off. And in fact, a reporter was asking colleagues and I the other day, do we think that we can get to 32% in 2018? Probably not this year, but quite possibly in 2019 and almost certainly by 2020, we'll get there. And for all the talk about how the clean power plan was going to potentially bankrupt America and drive businesses out and all this other stuff, I mean, the US economy is potentially gonna get to these goals without breaking a sweat. And I think it's worth noting, frankly, not to make any comments about sort of the political commentary, but more to the point that a lot of what goes on in the energy industry is driven by private sector activity, technologies and costs. And that has a certain momentum that frankly has nothing to do with Washington and is allowing a lot of this progress to be achieved. I'm getting the one minute science, I'm gonna finish up. Now, the one other thing to note is about emissions and the Paris climate goal. The Paris climate agreement had the US when it was a signatory stating that it was gonna try and hit a 26% reduction by 2025, below 2005 levels. We're about halfway there at this point. And this isn't in the fact book, this is just more my opinion. We won't get there unless there's something done about transportation sector emissions. You can take a look at the power sector emissions, everything's pointing in the right direction. Frankly, we think things will keep going in that direction. But the transportation sector is so critical to the overall question of whether the US hits this goal that there's gonna need to be more progress made in that. Last thing I'll just say is that, we've seen kind of a groundswell in response to the Trump administration's statement on Paris with a lot of municipal and states basically setting CO2 goals that they intend to hit. Collectively, frankly, whether this will all add up to enough is an open question, but there's been sort of increasing local action in response, including of course, by the guy who owns my company, Mike Bloomberg, who's been very outspoken on these issues. I think I'm gonna stop, because Lisa's giving me the, you wanna finish? Okay, these are a couple, these are a little bit out of order. But anyway, I would say is that, one other thing that I would notice in terms of sort of, within the umbrella of we are still in, is that we've seen more and more action at the corporate level. So in fact, there was, I think if you guys read the Axios daily newsletter, take a look at it this morning, there's kind of a run down again from Sierra Week. All these corporates saying, look, Washington may not be pressuring us as much on CO2 emissions or clean energy, but we're still gonna go in that direction anyway. Because A, it makes economic sense, and B, frankly, the next administration may come back on us on this stuff anyway, so we wanna just keep going in the direction that we've set. But big part of that has been, companies literally directly buying renewables for their own use. So companies like Apple buying solar and wind to run a server farm, Google, same thing. Anheuser-Busch, we were actually, Lisa and I were just in Oklahoma the other day. Anheuser-Busch has signed a contract to buy wind power to run bottling facilities. You have a lot of corporations that are signing what are called bilateral contracts to buy juice directly. Now look, why are they doing this? Sure, in some cases they love to be able to say, we're making clean beer or clean, whatever you wanna talk about. But another part of it is that as corporate customers, look, a lot of people buy electricity they pay for their electricity not that much differently than you and I do, which is we get a bill and we pay it, we get a bill and we pay it, we don't lock in what we buy. But if you're a bottler or you run a server farm, you like the idea of being able to buy some chunk of your energy at a certain fixed price and knowing what that price will be for the next 20 years. And that's one of the advantages with renewables because there is no marginal cost to running a wind or solar plant. In other words, you don't have to pay for the wind, you don't have to pay for the sun. You can fix a price, you can lock it, you can set it and forget it basically for some portion of your energy consumption. That's very appealing to corporate customers. These are some of the other players that have made commitments in this area, a lot of different corporations, it definitely started out kind of as the tech, progressive tech community, but you see a lot of other types of companies making commitments on renewables these days. And then finally, we'll talk about all of these and when we get to the panel, from a policy perspective, there were a lot of interesting events that happened. I mentioned the US announcement that it plans to pull out of Paris, there was the DOE action around FERC, we'll talk about that. There was the trade case around solar equipment and then there was the tax reform issue or the tax cut bill, I would call it. And then, but we've also continued to see this kind of success in the form of economic growth no longer being contingent on energy consumption, sustainable energy being part of the mainstream and the fact that consumers aren't paying more. And then finally, that we're seeing more and more state and local policy support. So on that, I would certainly welcome up my fellow panelists to join me. I know that they've got a few slides from the Factbook that they're gonna wanna show as well. No, I just, I have unplugged it. Okay, so I, let me, I've got it. I am having knocked over the sign to make a mess here. Let me just, let me quickly introduce our fellow panelists. So immediately to my right is Liz Tate, who's the director of Global Corporate Sustainability with Johnson Controls. I'll let her introduce herself in just a moment, but Johnson Controls is a major player in energy efficiency technologies globally. To her right is Aaron Severn, who's the senior director for federal legislative affairs at the American Wind Energy Association. I'm sure a number of you know of we have, but one of the greater representatives of the wind sector. To his right, Emily O'Connell, who's the senior policy manager for the American Gas Association, represents an important segment of the gas industry, which she'll talk about in just a moment. And to her right, Allison Haldes, the director of federal government affairs at Semper Energy, which is a really interesting player in all of this because they own a utility, they're involved in gas, they're involved in power generation. They do all kinds of different interesting things. They're international as well. And then finally, Paul Assous, the vice president of government affairs of Covanta, a very important player in the waste of energy sector, and we'll talk a little bit about that and some of the stuff that's in the fact book. So I won't dwell long when I hand it over to Liz to talk a little bit about some of the stuff that she thought was interesting in the fact book. And I think if you just, if you want to sit and click, that might work. Here you go. If you have done any study of the history of economics. And some of the, one of the primary ways we've done this is through energy efficiency. About 40% of that is represented by shifting away from manufacturing and energy intensive industries, but about 60% of that is because our economy and the way we use energy in the United States has gotten better. And I think that's an important place I want to start with energy efficiency is that we see efficiency as an enabling, not even just a technology, but a suite of technologies and behaviors and practices that enable the use of all of this clean energy, right? The more efficient your building is, the more efficient your home is, the larger share of the energy that it consumes can be borne by renewable fuels or lower carbon fuels like natural gas. So we really see this as sort of underpinning this change. And the other thing I wanted to talk about or just highlight for you guys is this graph because what you'll see is a dramatic uptick here in investment in energy efficiency right around the 05, 07 timeframe. This may predate some of you in this room, but does anyone know what happened in DC in 05 and 07? Well, we passed EPCA, which is like the last big energy bill. And that started massive improvements in appliances and in building efficiency and in all sorts of different ways that we use energy across the economy. So what this shows is really the effect that policy can have on markets. And I think one of the reasons a lot of us sit in these rooms and the reason we're here in this city is because that interaction of market creation and policy is what fascinates us. And all of you right now, we're in the middle of appropriations and we're all thinking about what the right role of government is and what we're gonna spend money on as a government. And I know you all have bosses to report to you who wanna do evidence-based policy making. I encourage you to look at not just these slides, but a number of slides in the fact book and this relates to all of these fuels, which is really show that when we have effective policy, it drives investments at lower costs. It improves our economy. It creates three million jobs. And this is really important stuff. And it's a story that I think it's overshadowed in some of the partisan talks about industry and where our economy is going. But we have kind of a quiet success story here, both with efficiency, but with all of these fuels. And we're kind of chugging along, employing people, making our economy strong. And I just hope that doesn't get lost, particularly as we've seen a deviation from this administration in support. But you guys, Congress, you're our bulwark against that. And you guys have stood up for us year after year and I just hope that that continues. Great, thanks, Liz. And actually, we'll come back to you a little bit because I think efficiency is an interesting one and some of the policies that I know that you guys care most about are not always the ones that make the headlines up here on the Hill, but ones that we should talk about. Aaron, tell us a little bit about wind and what you take away from that. Sure, and good afternoon, everybody, on this windy afternoon. So I think, for those of you who don't know, we are the National Trade Association of the wind industry. So we represent all the companies of all the development process as well as the manufacturing supply chain. So my favorite slide has already been, there we go, Ethan's already kind of talked about this one, but I think it reflects the fact that I think the single biggest story about wind energy over the last 10 years is the dramatic decrease in the cost of wind. So you can see, again, here, the actual price paid by wind energy purchasers reflected in the blue bars compared to the average power price range. I guess it's more of a gray color on this chart. But overall, wind has dropped about two thirds in costs over the last nine years. And we've especially seen that in the windiest part of the country. So that would be ERCOT, which is in Texas, and then MISO, which is the Mid-Continent Independent System Operator. So basically what we like to call the wind belt from Texas all the way up to the Dakotas, Minnesota, and Iowa. So we're seeing prices like $15 per megawatt hour, and that compares to about $47 per megawatt hour in 2011. So there's been a huge drop there. And then another trend that Ethan also mentioned is the commissioning of wind projects by corporate purchasers. We've seen 6.3 gigawatts just in the last three years. And just for comparison's sake, we had 7.3 gigawatts total installed for wind just last year. And again, as he mentioned, it's part branding, but really it's about saving money ultimately. And then I guess just to kind of wrap things up, accumulatively, we've installed about 91 gigawatts of wind energy. We now account for about 6.3% of total U.S. electricity generation. And we're on track to get that up to 10% by 2020. So I'll go ahead and stop there and welcome your questions. I would like to come, sorry about that. We'll come back to you, but one question is to think about is why? What technological advancements are other things that have allowed these costs to come down over the last five years? Emily, talk to us a little bit about gas. Try that again. I'm Emily O'Connell. I'm here on behalf of the American Gas Association. We represent about 200 local utility companies across the country. We're delivering energy to about 70 million customers. So we're actually the natural gas utilities. So I like to say that we're the people that you're writing your natural gas bill to. We're not necessarily the upstream producers. We're not the midstream pipeline companies, but we're the very end of the line, the people, the natural gas utility that you're most likely interfacing with if you have natural gas service. That's okay. Thank you. Okay. Yep, that's right. So let's start out to us this year. What really stood out to us is the fact that natural gas is about so much more than just electricity generation. And what do I mean by that? Well, take for example, about a fifth of the energy that we use in this country is going to direct use natural gas appliances. So that's things like cooking your food, heating your water, heating your home, drying your clothes. It's all of those appliances that you hopefully have in your home. And the slide behind me is showing that every year on year, we're seeing growth in our customer base. But growth for us is about this. It's about adding more customers. It's about adding more infrastructure. It's about expanding all of our service territories so that we can supply fuel to more Americans across the country. Growth for us is not necessarily about selling more fuel. So this is again, the efficiency story that Liz talked about and that Ethan touched on. The purple line up here shows fuel consumption. You can see that it's been relatively steady over the past couple of decades, even starting to decline a little bit. And that's okay with us because for us it's not about selling more fuel. But the chart like this kind of begs the question of why is this happening if we're increasing our customer base so much? It's chart doesn't really do it justice, but from 95 up until now, it's actually been about a 25% increase in customers, which is substantial. But to follow on what Liz said, the reason this is happening is because we've seen such dramatic improvements in the efficiency of natural gas and use technology. The lifespan of some of these appliances can last decades. So when you have homeowners switching out, their furnace, their boiler, their older appliances that were maybe 60, 70% efficient, well they're swapping them in most of the time with high efficiency natural gas appliances. So some of those can reach up to 97% efficient. And I think right now 50% of the new appliances that are going in are considered high efficiency appliances. So that's anything over 90% efficient. So I'll leave it at that, but this is a slide that we're really proud of. Thank you again for being here and look forward to the discussion. Thanks Emily. So I wanna come back. My question for you that we'll come back on is those efficiency improvements, how much does that have to do with policy and how much does that have to do with just the market seeking better options? Was there a policy driver that got us there? And are there more needed? I guess we'll get to that too. Allison, if you could talk a little bit about Semper. Sure, I could spend a lot of time talking about Semper as Ethan mentioned, we really have our hands in a lot of the pieces of the energy world. We're a Fortune 500 energy services company. We are members of the American Gas Association. We're members of the American Wind Energy Association, not to mention the Solar Association and the Edison Electric Institute. Because of our business, which we've got a utilities business that includes San Diego Gas and Electric. I should mention we're headquartered in San Diego. Southern California Gas Company, which is our gas company. That's headquartered in Los Angeles. We have utilities in Chile and Peru. That's the international business that Ethan mentioned. In addition, I should also mention, I need to start remembering to do this, we actually just acquired Encore, which is a transmission services company in Texas that just actually became final today. Now I have to get used to talking to talking about it. So yeah, let's not forget that as part of our utilities business. And then in addition, we also have an infrastructure business that includes our LNG and midstream business, which is what I'm gonna focus on talking about today. We do have Semper Renewables, Wind and Solar all over the country. And we have Semper Mexico as well, where we have all kinds of infrastructure, generating pipeline, you name it, and we've got that going in Mexico as well. So that probably took all my time just talking about our business. But I did wanna mention one slide, which Ethan also mentioned, which just has to do with LNG exports. And the fact that the US last year for the first time was a net exporter of natural gas every month for 2017. And even though the fact book isn't prospective, but meant to be a look back on the past year, I'm gonna kind of mention both. I mean, the reason for the exports increase last year is that Sabine Pass, which is a Shanier LNG export terminal, went into service in February of 2016. They are also expanding that. This is probably gonna increase. Like I said, fact book isn't prospective, but I'm going to be. Because I see this is increasing over the next several years. There's so many projects in the queue, including around five that have already received their DOE and FERC approvals and are under construction, including a joint venture that Semper has in Cameron, Louisiana. We've got three trains that are under construction right now. They're expected to go into a commercial operation in 2019. We have three more trains there, for which we have DOE and FERC orders, but they're not yet under construction. There are another three projects, not Semper projects per se, that are permitted but are not yet under construction. And then there are about eight projects where they have submitted applications to DOE and FERC, but have not yet gotten their permits, including a Semper project in Port Arthur, Texas, where we've got our non-FTA order pending and a FERC application filed, where we're awaiting the issuance of the environmental impact statement. And then lastly, we also have a proposed facility that we're working on in Mexico that is now a receipt terminal that we're talking about making an export terminal. Thanks, that's a lot. But it's interesting though, because of what's struck by Semper, is that you're involved in so many aspects of all this delivery of electrons now, the encore delivery of gas, power generation, then the last mile with utility in San Diego. Question I'm gonna give you, which is a tough one to come back on though, is how important is it to your business to be able to export, given that the picture I've shown shows demand for electricity is flat and prices have been going basically down? How critical do you need for your businesses that you be able to have overseas opportunities given that picture? Paula, if you could talk a little bit about Coventa. So I would love to echo Allison's comments about all of our domestic growth in the United States, except we don't have any. So that made that a short conversation. But Liz, if you wanna, a couple slides here. It's a different story in Europe and Asia than it is in the United States and that kind of gets back to one of the things that Ethan talked about at the beginning, which is public policy and its impact. And so when you look at a slide that Ethan showed earlier that talked about, the number would be a little off, wind and solar had 18% growth in 2017 and 0.4% of other had growth, or there was 4% of growth for the other. We weren't even in that 0.4. Because we just have not really had an equal application of policy and even when we have had some of that equal application of policy, it hasn't really taken into consideration that one size doesn't fit all when it comes to renewables. And so when you look at some of the baselids like waste energy and biomass, we've not seen the growth here. By contrast, this slide shows the 2017 numbers, but even if you go back a little bit to 2015 and then Liz, if you wanna flip to the next slide, this slide that was just up shows no growth in the United States. If you look at 15 here and 17 here and you look at those red numbers, which is China, waste energy counts for 400 over 400 megawatts electricity in China in 15 and 180 in the UK. That is driven by climate policy for the most part for every ton of trash that we process and turn into baselid electricity. We have a negative ton of greenhouse gas emissions. And then that number is a 209% increase in China. And when you look at the numbers between 2009 and today, those numbers are just significantly larger and the growth potential, China is calling for another 180 plants by 2030. So the difference is public policy counts. And so when you look at this municipal infrastructure, half of the waste energy plants in the United States are owned by local governments. So when you look at this municipal infrastructure, not only what is existing, but also what communities would like to do to meet their local job in a sustainable manner and to attract companies like General Motors who want to have zero landfill alternatives as well as renewable electricity, we aren't really putting the right policies in place to encourage that where other countries are. And so we would like to see a change in these slides the next time we have one of these fact books come out because we're really missing an opportunity and we missed the opportunity in that with the tax code that just went through, we're hoping that that changes for the baselids going forward. But that point four, it would be nice to be bigger for all of the people in the others, including us. And I'll leave that and you can ask me anything you want later, Ethan. So I hear right now. All right, Paul. So I've got my one quick follow up for each of you. But actually, why don't we come back, we'll start with you and work back. So what was the miss in the tax bill for you guys? So there's section 45, there's section 48. So the baselids in 45 did not get extended and were not part of the last tax bill that went through, the budget bill that went through last month, I guess, or February. It remains to be seen yet whether that lost opportunity will be made up in the next bill that should be coming out this month still. So- Just to level set with everyone, what was the actual, was it a tax credit at section 45? Yeah, section 45 investment tax credit. And what was it and when did it expire? For the baselids, it expired in, I think it expired in 16. And then the last bill made it retroactive in 17. But when you look at, typically the baseload technologies are a longer build, longer lead time. So you can't take advantage of the tax credit that is essentially retroactive because if you could, you really wouldn't need it, which is not the point of the public policy. And just, I'm sorry, I'll just make sure everyone gets a baseload technology. So those are the ones that can generate basically or not contingent on when the sun shines or when it blows. Right, waste energy biomass. We're part of an ad hoc coalition with geothermal and with biogas and with the hydro. So that tax credit for that group, that section 45 production tax credit, not get extended. So these have been called the orphans because they did not see the tax credit. Well, we're kind of the orphans are kind of not the orphans. They actually, there was an orphan group and we're kind of the orphan-orphan group. You're the... Or the abandoned orphan group. You're the sons of orphans. So anyway, okay, sorry, just I'm not clarifying it out. Alison, back to you in my question, which is as a large integrated company with all these different aspects in the energy industry and the picture that we've been showing, which is level demand, in fact, slightly declining demand and declining prices. What's the importance to you guys of exports? Yeah, exports are really important, especially in the realm of natural gas. And these aren't the same thing, but I'm going to equate them just to say that we operate in California, I mean in Texas as well, and we have renewables everywhere, but in terms of our local distribution gas business, it's in California and anyone familiar with California, California policy, we're constantly moving towards more a bigger renewable portfolio standard and integrating more renewables, which we very much believe in as a company. As I said, we have renewables. We were actually, San Diego Gas and Electric was actually the first utility in California to get to 43% renewables, so we procure 43% of our electricity through renewables, which is the highest in California. So we believe in all that, but we are operating a gas company in California and it's very difficult, so we want to find other ways to use natural gas. Exports is one of them. Renewable natural gas is another. So being able to export is important and it's becoming an increasingly large part of our business. Great. Emily, you like cheap gas. And as do many of us, but you were saying though, you were talking a little bit about how you guys are more interested in customers than volume in terms of gas. And also that that's been driven by greater, more efficient natural gas appliances that use gas more efficiently. And I guess the question I have is, has that been a market driven phenomenon or has that been a policy driven phenomenon first? And then second, going forward, do you think it's a market driven phenomenon or a policy driven phenomenon? So I'll answer the second question first. That depends on what we see happening up here. I think there's potential. Liz mentioned EPCA. We are watching that closely. We have a lot of suggestions on how that policy could be improved. We think it's time. That was written the first iteration back in I believe 1975 is when it started. So we are in a completely different situation in terms of our energy security back then. And it was written to improve our energy efficiencies, makes more sustainable nation. We have an abundance of energy now. Doesn't mean we should stop improving our efficiencies, but it's time to start revisiting some of those policies. They're antiquated. And we think there's a lot of improvements that could be made. When you're looking at some technologies, particularly with respect to natural gas technologies that are 97% efficient, there's not a whole lot more efficiencies that you can squeeze out of that technology. And you have to start to ask yourself at what point does it become counterproductive to continue to try and squeeze out those last couple of percentages of efficiency and is government best served focusing on trying to squeeze that out or should we redirect our focus elsewhere where there's more efficiencies to be gained? So to your first question, it would be disingenuous of me to say that policy had nothing to do with the efficiencies that we've seen across the spectrum for end use technologies. But I think customers are asking for this. We're seeing states and counties seeking to become more efficient. So I think that it's across the board. Efficiency is top of mind. And as we become a more sustainable economy, that will continue to be a focus for us. Thanks. And I had a technology question for Aaron too, which we talked about higher capacity wind farms. Actually Lisa and I on Monday had a trip to one out in Oklahoma. We saw these incredible devices spinning quite quickly on Oklahoma wind. Which is now the number two state in the country. Yeah, eight and a half thousand megawatts in Oklahoma law and wind, it's quite a lot. Anyway, what's allowed is technological advancements to occur. I mean, what specifically are we seeing that's making wind generate more power? Yeah, so I mean, I think it's pretty basic. So the towers are getting taller and the blades are getting longer. So that allows more of the wind resource to be captured. So we've actually seen capacity factors go up to the 40 to even 50% range compared to about 30% in the early 2000s. We've also seen more of a build out of the supply chain as well as more transmission development to lower costs. And so that's really a function of more policy certainty. So I would say that the 29 states that have renewable portfolio standards has been an important driver of that as well as the production tax credit for wind energy. That's been around since 1992 but it was periodically expired. But it was really from about 2013 to now where there's been a little bit more stability and now that credit is actually phasing out but it more or less did its job. Now we have 500 manufacturing facilities, we have employment in every single state and costs are coming down. Thanks, Aaron. And indeed, if you haven't actually had a chance to visit one of these projects, it's worth doing because you don't really get the impact. And unfortunately, if you live on the East Coast, we're not surrounded by this stuff the way folks are out in the heartland or in California where you do see this stuff on a kind of routine basis. Liz, you're kind of off the hook because I didn't jot down a question but feel free to chime in on any of these if you would before we move on. Well, you sort of said talk about specific policy and I think efficiency is just sort of an interesting place to work because the primary challenge that we have in efficiency is the upfront cost, right? You will save money over the long term. If you build an efficient building, your bills will be lower every year. It's the gift that keeps on giving. Also energy we don't use is by definition the most affordable and cleanest. But to get over that first cost hurdle, we need policy and I think this conceptually efficiency becomes challenging because it's not just one thing. It's not a solar panel. It's not a wind turbine. It's a whole bunch of different things. So, but policies like, so for example, federal performance contracting, right? Which drive federal investment and create a financing vehicle with which to shift the upfront cost onto the private sector where we partner with the public sector over time to improve public buildings. Things like state EERS programs which require utilities to reinvest a portion of their profits back into energy efficiency, right? Those can help ameliorate some of those first cost challenges for homeowners or for industry or commercial consumers. So those kinds of policies are critically important in our industry. Things that kind of get us over that first cost hurdle. Things like building codes which sort of realign the incentives or just create a better floor. The other interesting thing about efficiency is, you know, what we're constantly trying to do is raise that floor with the knowledge that the ceiling is incredibly high, right? What we can do in efficiency is mind blowing. I encourage you guys to look up the Sacramento King Stadium which we were a partner on just to brag a little bit. It is the most efficient sports arena in the world and it is amazing what we were able to do. And so we have great examples of just really high tech, you know, basketball stadiums with doors that open to the outside. But we also have very basic, affordable technologies that are here now like really efficient air conditioners and chillers and insulation and building controls and thermostats that can make sort of existing buildings better and more affordable for us average folks. So that's kind of where the policy sweet spot is I think on our side is things like the 179 detox credit, things like, you know, as I said, federal investment, public-private partnerships and ways to just get over that first cost hurdle. Thanks, mind blowing efficiency, that's great. Let's take questions since I realize that I'm asking so many. Right there? First of all, thanks for this and get cheered up again. But let me ask you this and several of you talked about the role of public policy and the federal government within that. My question is whether based on all the success that you've documented, whether you would call for any change in direction in federal policy as of 2018 or just more of the same. And I'm not asking, it's not a softball to give me those list of policies again, I'm not asking whether it should or shouldn't be a federal role, but should it be more of the same? Should it go more towards early stage? More towards deployment? More towards this? More towards that, any thoughts? I would say absolutely. You know, I think Emily raised a great point that the Appliance Standards Program is a real policy success story. I think there's a slide in here. I think it's 107 if you want to look it up where it shows that efficiency in chillers has improved 40% over the last 20 years, right? What we've been able to do with policy to drive equipment forward is incredible. We're also hitting that point where you're sort of hitting that return on investment, right? The improvement curve is flattening out. That doesn't mean we can't get more efficiency, but we have argued, if you want to look at the Alliance to Save Energy blog, we have a blog post on this recently on what a systems approach can do. And if you start looking at buildings as a system and how you actually can get increases in efficiency, but it's just not on a component by component basis. So that's not a criticism of the way that the policy has worked. It's a recognition that that's been successful and it's been so successful that maybe we need to move to a next gen. If I could take a crack at that as well. One of the things that's unique for us is that half of our facilities are owned by local governments. So when you talk about a tax policy, it doesn't help them. And we think that particularly when it comes to energy policy, it just hasn't kept pace with where the world has gone, particularly when you talk about local government's role. They're trying to attract businesses. They're trying to meet their constituents demands for sustainable everything. And yet the tools between the state and the local governments or the state and federal government really aren't letting them do what they want to do. For instance, Miami-Dade, Florida owns a waste energy facility. Miami-Dade County also owns Miami-Dade International Airport. They cannot use their own power that they generated their plant to run their airport because of antiquated rules. Now some of those are federal. Some of those are state. And then how do you kind of marry up that bonk in the state over the head to say kind of get with it guys. You can't just stay in your old system the way you've been forever. You've got to start looking at it differently. So for us, we really think we should be thinking about different things. Micro grids, local governments own these plants can't run their own micro grid right now, which seems to me to be crazy. And so we think there needs to be more policy, but what I said before with the tax credit, what works clearly terrific for wind and solar has not worked for everybody. It doesn't mean that we don't need policy. We just need policy that actually is a little bit more focused on the needs of in our case, local governments and helping them spend their local government dollars the way they think is a smarter and more sustainable way. And there's just too many roadblocks to that right now. I'm just gonna chime in really quickly because California is such a unique place elsewhere too, but just as an example, something like the, you know, we're in California and we are so far beyond where it was going that it really wasn't that impactful for us. Federal policy matters in certainly in other areas like in LNG, obviously we're interested in faster permitting and things like that comes up as part of the discussion of infrastructure legislation, but with something like, again, something like the Clean Power Plan we're really more impacted by what we're doing in the state than we are than what's going on in the federal level. You know, I was just gonna add to that. I think there's a lot of common themes. Like, you know, there's a good opportunity if infrastructure legislation could move forward to do things like the streamline permitting that I think most people up here would agree would be a good thing. So I mean, you know, it's hard to see that moving forward too much this year, but I do think that there are opportunities if when you start to get away from kind of like the tailored, you know, tax credits, you know, broader themes like infrastructure or other tax structures that could benefit a broad range of industries. Thanks guys. Jared. Thank you. First of all, thanks for your presentation. I think it was extremely useful for those of us who are engaged in this space to see the kind of progress that's being made in renewables. And for ESI, I mentioned early on, we partner with a number of different organizations, but one in particular, NASIO, we started last year this time to make a commitment on briefings that focused on resilience. And to what extent does the growth in renewables usage help us confront last year's $306 billion worth of damage in this country? You know, it was the second largest in the history of the country in terms of damages due to weather. Can you speak to how renewable growth contributes to the resilience that we're trying to gain community wide and society wide? Sure, so, you know, we, there are examples of how, you know, wind perform extremely well, whether it be the polar vortex that caused, you know, some systems to freeze up or, you know, in more, there are more recent extreme weather events. But I think, you know, the other interesting thing that we've seen is that Southwest Power Pool leaders have said that they could actually get up to 50% wind on their system without any kind of reliability issues. So I think that speaks to the fact that there's an evolution in the way that grid operators think about renewables. And, you know, it's not really about, you know, having a secure fuel source like the DOE NOPA proposed earlier this year. It's really about, you know, in our view, building out transmission and having larger balancing areas. So if there's a resource that goes down, there's others that can kind of fill in as needed. And so it's a matter of finding complimentary energy sources to balance each other. And so, you know, that's the way that we typically try to think about this and to what we'd be interested in seeing more of. And I think the local governments are exactly looking for that. So after Superstorm Sandy, which knocked a bunch of power generators offline in New Jersey, a lot of our facilities stayed up and running in island mode. So Camden County, New Jersey, which is not a very well-to-do community, they have a facility and they're doing a pilot project right now with the state to do a microgrid because part of what happened there was the utility went offline that knocked their wastewater treatment facility offline which created a CSO into the Delaware River. So now insult to injury, not only all the other impacts of trying to get back on their feet from the damage of the storm, they don't have a CSO that they have got to clean up. So we're actually gonna be hardwired to their wastewater treatment facility and they're using other renewable projects around the community as well to make their local government resilient so that the next time something like happens, they stay powered up and they don't have that domino effect of what happens when you lose power as a local government. So I think that there is a role for, in addition to that, you kind of have a handy debris cleanup at the end of the whole, at the end of the day. Unfortunately, that big part of some of those types of programs are, the weather events are, you have a big mess to clean up before you can even get to restoring power. You would agree though, it seemed to me that renewables role which used to be viewed as climate mitigation, so to speak, to reduce carbon emissions has to now become recalibrated towards adaptation and disaster mitigation, would you not? Follow on to Paula. I'm sorry, did I understand you correctly that there are some legal impediments to local governments owning their own microgrids? Could you expand upon that please? Sure, I'm sorry about that. And there's other impediments that we've run into around the country. If you look at, we've got plants all over the place that we have a facility across the street from ESPN's headquarters in Connecticut. And we can't sell them power. So some of those are more state laws and utility policy. But I would hope that the federal government would see a role to say some of these policies at the state level really need to be brought into a more modern era. And I think that probably, I assume there's others that have that same type of challenge with some of the state policies, but yeah, not a single facility hurts into it. And we have 40, half of which are owned by local governments in this country, so. Last question, I forgot one more from the floor. They were in the back. Hi, my question is about the link between this new energy that is coming on stream and facilitating the shift in agriculture to urban agriculture, vertical farming. Where do you see the opportunities to combine the work that your companies and associations are doing to incubate the next generation of farmers and farming technologies? Thank you. We have a number of pilot projects that we are doing with local dairy farmers to work on things like renewable natural gas that I mentioned earlier, so taking biogas and processing it and then being able to use it just like regular natural gas, for lack of a better way to say it, and put it right back in the pipeline. So we have a number of those types of pilot programs that we're doing with local farmers in California. Anybody else? Okay, so I know we're basically done, but I'm gonna ask everybody a lightning round. One policy for 2018 that keeps you up at night either because it presents a great opportunity or a great threat to you over the next 12 months. You guys are all Washington focused folks. What's the number one thing that you're each, and I know you have a diversity of industries here. What are the various things you're watching? Maybe, Paul, you've got your light on first. Purpa. Purpa. Public Utility, they remind me of the acronym. Public Utility Regulatory Power Act. And in Congress or through FERC? Either. Either, okay. Anyway, I'm gonna get it. This is a little bit more of a local California thing, but I've been spending an exorbitant amount of time on it, which has to do with wildfire policy. California has been devastated in the last several years from wildfires and it is going to bankrupt the utilities in California. Our insurance doesn't cover the billions of dollars. We're not able to cover it ourselves. And there's a, sorry, this is a too long an answer. But there is a law in California or an interpretation of the Constitution called Inverse Condemnation that holds the utilities strictly liable, regardless of whether we had anything to do with the fire for all the damages of the facilities. And it's a huge problem that we're trying to solve on the state level and actually on the federal level. On the federal level, I'd say, we're keeping close eye on EPCA reform. State level, we're watching things, anything to do with city or states going zero carbon. That poses a problem. But then on a later note, we're seeing more and more talk of renewable natural gas and getting that on the pipeline system. So, that's exciting. I think what keeps me up is, and it's mostly at the state level, but all the attempts to restrict the siting of wind projects, so we're seeing a number of attacks related to the proximity of wind turbines near military facilities. Despite the fact that there's already a very well-established process in place to regulate that, so any wind project has to go through DOD and make sure that the project's not gonna interfere with base operations. But we're seeing attacks, proposals such as basically drawing an exclusion zone around military facilities saying you can't develop a wind project within X number of miles, which is really just a ridiculous way of it's a blunt instrument and when there's already a process that's working. So, that I think at both the federal and state levels is a huge problem. We've seen opportunity. There's legislation that's been introduced in both the House and Senate called the Public Buildings Renewal Act that would expand the bonding authority under TIFIA, which is currently only available for transportation projects to building projects. We think this would unlock an incredible amount of projects that cannot move forward right now by creating another avenue for blending public and private money together to build or renovate buildings in the public sector. So if you want more information on that, ask me afterwards. Well, thanks for those quick answers. I am struck by the fact that first of all, everyone gave different ones. And second of all, that I think maybe, maybe, and I'm not sure, because I don't know that policy well enough that Liz mentioned, but I think all the rest of them would have a basically zero cost to the federal government. We're talking about rules and regulations and different things and maybe yours would too. 48 million over 10 years. 48 million, okay. We'll round that to zero. Basically a rounding error. Round that to zero as well. So the point is that there's a lot of things, especially given the amount that the government has been spending and also cutting in terms of taxes. There's a lot of things that I think these industries are interested in that don't cost anything. So please join me in thanking this terrific panel and all their thoughts.