 Good morning, everyone. We're going to start our next session and I am delighted to introduce our next speaker who is Craig O'Connor with the Office of Renewable Energy and Environmental Export with the US Import Export Bank. This is a really important piece of how the US government assists businesses, American businesses in terms of really building their markets and and really deploying technology around the world. Thank you very much and thank you for the opportunity to be here with you today. I'm going to talk very rapidly about Exxon Banks. I'll give you a quick overview of our programs and more importantly and interestingly for you some of the deals that we've financed. See my colleagues from the Department of Energy in the back. So and I'll try to allow time for a couple questions. So actually it's the Export Import Bank of the United States and we were started in 1934. We're located on Vermont Avenue and basically set up in 1934 during the height of the Great Depression to provide financing with financing with scarce. It was challenging. Obviously there's many markets that lack the financing necessary to rebuild and buy US made goods and services. So originally we're set up to provide some import financing, but we dispensed with that early in our years but never bothered to change our name. So we only finance the export of US made goods and services. Untership dust doesn't matter. I'll tell you about Gamesa builds US turbines, wind turbines in Pennsylvania. We finance the export of those. So Exxon Banks had an interesting history. We financed the Pan American Highway, the Burma Road during World War II, some of the first steel mills, the rebuilding of Western Europe. So our basic mission again is to finance the export of US made goods and services. We do look for a reasonable assurance of repayment and so I like to tell people we're not in business to make money, but we're not in business to lose money either. We're a congressional charter organization so every four or five years or so we get a new charter from the US Congress. The reason I'm in my current job, I've been at the bank over 20 years, started life as a loan officer there. I was talked into being the bank's environmental liaison officer back in 94 as a part-time job and now it's a full-time job for me and five other people as of 2009. And so the sense to increase our support for environmentally beneficial exports was actually written into our congressional charter. And so increasing our support for renewable energy is a congressional mandate but it's also a top priority for the administration. So how do we do that? Well, first we provide direct loans and that's very critical, particularly in times of financial turbulence. And so for renewable energy, Exxon Bank is able to offer repayment terms of up to 18 years. That's a long time. And as my esteemed speaker, Scott Scalar and Carl Gaywell mentioned, with renewable energy you're buying your fuel up front. And I tell the international customers, you know what, you've got a 20 to 25 year fuel price hedge. I was at a meeting on Vietnam wind developers, a lot of government officials on Monday at the US Trade and Development Agency, another agency you should get to know. And I always do that, ask for a show of hands. How many people think the price of oil and gas will be lower in 10 years? Nobody? No bulls? Well, you heard from our friends in solar. So it's obviously the price of solar and wind are going to go down. But notwithstanding that, if you've got your energy costs locked in for the next 20 to 25 years, that's a heck of a fuel price hedge. Particularly if you're a Caribbean island like Barbados and you're importing diesel and your costs are 42 cents a kilowatt hour. Solar is already a grid parity. Solar is already a grid parity in a lot of areas in India. So I'll talk a little bit more about that. Direct loans up to 18 years. Our current interest rates based on 1% over comparable maturity treasuries is about 2.96%. No, you can't get a mortgage. I can't get one either, so don't feel bad. But why is that relevant? Well, if you're talking about a market like Brazil, Brazil is an investment grade rated market. So CalPERS could buy Brazil bonds if they wanted to. But the interest rates in Brazil are very high. The average rates that banks charge to customers is probably 25%. And the longest loan you can get is probably three years, and that's only through a development bank. And so interest rates are very high throughout the world. Terms are very short. We supported a project in Canada where the banks were only going out eight and a half years. Can you imagine trying to pay a home mortgage off in eight and a half years? No way. So this is not so much different. So if you've got an 18-year term, it enables the per unit costs of renewable energy to be much lower. Now we also provide loan guarantees, and that's 100% full faith and credit guarantee of loans that commercial banks would make to credit worthy buyers and credit worthy projects to buy U.S. made goods and services. That's another reason that we exist is because basically banks are limited in their ability to make cross-border loans. Every time a bank makes a loan, it has to hold back a little bit of reserve requirements. Part of the financial crisis is that those that were doing CDOs didn't hold back that capital. But that's another discussion we can have. So banks have to hold back capital, okay? Well, they've gone through a lot of capital in the recent experience. And so if they can make a loan, have it 100% guaranteed by Exxon Bank, we find a reasonable assurance of repayment. It's a win-win. So we're crowding in private capital, private financing to support renewable energy. We also have working capital guarantee. So if you're a company like TAS, Turban Air Systems, a company that Carl Gaywell knows very well. It's an emerging geothermal company. You're in Houston. You go to your bank and you said, listen, great news. I've just got $50 million water from overseas, but I need working capital to build my systems. And a bank looks at them kind of funny. And what? Your source of repayments overseas. And again, their ability to take a long-term cross-border risk. And so Exxon Bank provides a 90% guarantee to a bank like a Bank of America or Silicon Valley Bank to make that loan to the exporter to support their build-up to producer goods for services. Just in case you're wondering, over the past five years, since 2008, we've returned $1.6 billion to the U.S. Treasury. And that's because our loss ratio is very, very low. Some might argue too low, particularly those of us in business development, but that's Craig's opinion and not for attribution to the bank. But no, we have a great loan officer core. And so they do a great job at structuring these loans, and so we do get repaid. We've really assumed our historic role when financial markets were under some difficulty. We stepped in, and so when I joined the bank, it's probably $8-9 billion a year, and financing is probably a big year. Well, last year, for the third straight year, we broke a record $35 billion, and that supported $50 billion in exports. Now, this is with the same number of people, so our productivity is really high. People are working a lot longer and sweating as well, but that's another story. But we're achieving our mandate, but hopefully that financial markets will come back to normal. I mean, the old days, you know, Germany was a big borrower of Exxon Bankers. They needed it. Well, Germany's economy outgrew Exxon Bank. They developed their own savings, and then we focused on other markets. So we're kind of, one of the kind of the sub-lines of Exxon Bankers were a lender of last resort in many areas. I like to be the lender of first resort for solar because I want to grow this portfolio in case you're wondering. We started the office in 2008, and our growth has really mirrored the growth of the industry. So we had $30 million the first year we started. That's not much. Next year we had $100 million. Next year after that we had $330 million. Next year, the last two years, our total has been $1.6 billion. So we're demand-driven, right? So what I try to do is increase the probability goods and services will be demanded by saying, well, this is a great financing package if you buy U.S.-made components. So I'm proud to say that we're probably the number one, number one or number two lender for solar in India. And so that's supporting over $480 million for the projects. We're probably... The Indian government has a national solar mission, so they've committed to get 20,000 megawatts by the year 2022. And so in this first, they've hit the first gigawatt, the first 1,000 megawatts. We've financed probably over 30% of that. And again, because of the challenge of short bank-term tie-interest rates, we financed the first commercial concentrated solar project, CSP project for Arriva. Now, Arriva is, yes, their French company, but they bought a linear Fresnel company in Mountain View, California. So that export and the goods and services that go into that export were used in a project in India that's the first CSP. We financed recently a rooftop project in Mexico, a $780,000 loan guarantee that we provided to UPS Capital to a business in Mexico for 10 years to buy modules made by Cineva in North Cross, Georgia. So we don't have a minimum project size either. And so we can either... Echo Heat Pumps is another one of our customers at very, very small loans. Some of the other interesting deals I've mentioned can be made a couple of times. So we financed a project in Honduras, 18 years because it's renewable energy, we also support local costs, site preparation, grid connection, up to 30% of the U.S. contract amount. That project, Serra de Hula, provides 6% of all Honduras' power and does so at a rate that's half the cost of existing costs of generation. Why? Because they're importing bunker fuel. They're importing diesel for generation. Now they've got a 25-year fuel price edge. That project is the largest wind project in Central America. We've got a few more as a follow-on. So really the entire bank is created to supporting renewable energy. We have my unit that's really business development. We try to structure the deal so they look like they're bankable. Then we have a project finance group that they're really experts in their field and they're really committed. So they've done some of the first independent power projects around the world. Independent power projects means a government agency doesn't own it. So it's privately generated, privately financed, privately owned. Maybe a government utility like CFE in Mexico agrees to buy the power. But again, it's crowding in. A lot of investment that can be used to support infrastructure development. So this whole idea, you know, it's a policy form. So the whole idea is, you know, in 2004 you probably had one U.S. wind manufacturer. And that was GE Wind, right? Because of the PTC, now you have probably well over nine wind turbine manufacturers. These are high-wage, high-skilled jobs. And guess what? You've got this production base in the U.S. Now these guys are ready for export. So the first time I ever met Kameza, I said, well, you guys are a U.S. company now. They kind of looked at me funny. No, we're Spain. As far as I'm concerned, you're a U.S. company. And think about the customers in the Americas that want to buy U.S. made goods and services. Nobody can touch Exxon Bank and the financing. So we can be very important to you. So following project, one of the first wind projects in Uruguay. Uruguay's government provided special incentives for wind. So we're there. Obviously we're looking for GE. Again, we're demand-driven. Look for credit worthy source of repayment. Some of the other projects you may be interested in. We financed a rooftop project in Barbados. So our engineer wanted to go inspect the project. We said, no, you don't need to. This technology works. Nice try. So that was an individual that did that. It was Williams Industries. And he put solar panels on a recycling facility. Why? Because it saved him money. All right? I mean, he wasn't necessarily green. The green was, hey, it's going to save me a lot of money. And I've got a fuel price edge. So that was another deal that we did. In the geothermal side, this is interesting that Carl made the point about geothermal technology and how increasingly it's becoming modular and you can use geothermal with lower heat. So we financed a $1.6 million small, $150 kilowatt project in Turkey. So it was three modular Pratt and Whitney units. And that was a loan guarantee to one of the banks that made that possible. So I think I'll stop there. I think I have a few minutes left, right? So one or two questions. Yes, sir. It's Morocco, isn't it? A bold phenomenon. Absolutely. 20 years ago, King Muhammad was doing that two tables and making Morocco the same. They believed that 200 gigawatts of renewable energy in Morocco were having, we've had substantial problems getting maximum pay attention to this project. Cool. Cool. Please do, because nobody's talking to you about it. So trust me, I'll get my teeth into it and won't let go of it. Yeah. I think, well, one issue is local content in Brazil. A lot of countries have local content restrictions. And so Brazil is one of those. So we finance wind blades. We didn't finance the turbines because Brazilians are saying that for projects they support, 60% has to be made in Brazil. So that's probably one issue. The other issue is the government's pretty, they jealously guard the electricity sector. So it's hard for new companies to get involved in there. But let me tell you, since you brought it to Brazil, one of the speakers you're going to hear about in your upcoming sessions is Steve Wilburn. And they, the company Firm Green, and they had a project to capture the methane gas from one of the world's largest landfills in Rio de Janeiro, the Novo Grimacha landfill. In fact, there was a documentary film that was made about it. And so they were selling, they were cleaning the gas, they were selling the gas to Petrobras, which is a state oil and gas company, for use in their facility. And so we provided a 12-year direct loan, and that project was our project of the year, this past year. So that's a project we're very proud of. Firm Green's a small company. They had the proprietary technology. This is good use of outsourcing. They used the outsource manufacturing of the systems to various, you know, metal shops all throughout the U.S. Midwest. And obviously they're hoping to replicate that. Okay, one more question. Yeah, great question. I mean, for the bank as a whole, it's in the thousands. For renewable energy, it's probably, it's probably firms that we know, probably less than 100. But I mean, you look at the solar manufacturers in the U.S. and you could probably count them on one or two hands. When one or two hands. So, again, we hope that more companies will get engaged. And look, companies are born global. It's not like all of a sudden, you know, you develop this market and you're just going to sell the United States. You've got to think immediately about global resources. Department of Commerce has a system to help you find a distributor. They'll do a customized market search for you. You know, they'll help you with your issue about market access. We've got the financing both for the international customer as well as the U.S. company to get ramped up. So there's no, and I tell you, we have the venture capitalists and we're locked in with some of those. Basically the pitch is send us your new companies and this is how we can help them export. They're born global. And the VCs will ask right away. It's like, okay, what's your plan for going global? And there's, there's no, we've got great technology in the United States. A lot of it's automated. A great place to manufacture. I don't have to tell you that. If the policies are right and you, and you get an industry like we have with solar, like we have with wind, that's an industry that can go global and be successful. And the financing is a key part of that. We hope to keep growing with the industry. So thanks a lot and look forward to hearing from you. Great. Super. Thank you. Thank you. Dr. Danielson is going to be speaking now in the caucus room, but I want to just say a special thank you to Craig. I think that it was great that you were here today because I think that we are really on the cusp and that this is a very, very exciting time. We are looking at renewables exploding across the world in terms of thinking about market. The opportunities are endless. The new technology and companies are so fascinating with many, many terrific stories. And so we really look to follow up with you, Craig, because we think this is such an important piece of everything that's going on. So thank you very, very much for being here.