 having get started. Good morning or good afternoon, wherever you might be. My name is Omar Siddiqui of the Electric Power Research Institute, and on behalf of my colleague Liang Min from the Stanford Bits & Wants Initiative, I'd like to welcome you all to this week's digital grid summer webinar, and this is part of our continuing webinar series. And today's panel is on the topic of open standards data platforms. And we're delighted to have our panel here. A few things to go over by way of housekeeping and orientation before we begin. And just to let everyone know, we are currently, we do have all the attendees on mute, given the size that we expect to have for this webinar. But we do want this to be interactive, and there are multiple ways for you to do that. We highly recommend for you to ask questions and provide comments through the chat feature. And you can access this. If you look at the bottom of your web of your web panel, there's a little cloud there. That's the chat function. You can click that and send questions or comments that way. You can also use the Q&A feature that you will see on your right hand side. That's another panel and you can direct questions to individual panelists or to all panelists at large. And then we will read those questions as they, when we come to natural breakpoints. And you can also raise your virtual hand to ask a question. We are recording this session and your participation is your consent to be a part of this recording. And we will be posting after the fact the presentations along with the recordings at the Epri and Stanford appropriate websites. And there will be some more information about that. So we look forward to your active engagement and participation in this brief word about. Our hosts Epri. We are an independent not-for-profit research organization. Our research focuses on all aspects of the electric power business from generation to delivery to end use. And it's for the public benefit. And our mission is to advance electric service to keep it safe, affordable, reliable and environmentally responsible in a collaborative fashion. And on that collaborative note, we are delighted to have been partnering with Stanford's Bits and Watts Initiative. It's a major initiative at Stanford focused on innovations for the future grid. And its scope includes business innovations, policies and technologies, particularly on between the consumer and the grid. So it's a great fit and it's been a wonderful series that we've had. So the objective that we have for this whole series, including this panel certainly is to convene experts across multiple disciplines to exchange views of what a shared integrated digital grid means, what it represents. And you see there on the graphic on the right different aspects that can constitute aspects of the digital grid. And we've had panels that have been focused on various aspects of this or have been looking at these in a cross-cutting manner. And the objective is to help identify gaps towards achieving this vision of a shared integrated digital grid. And one of the principal themes that has been present throughout is to have enabling data platforms that can provide the kind of connection between particularly behind the meter customer devices and the grid. And that's certainly something of keen focus for today's panel. To understand industry requirements on the utility side, understand the perspectives of technology providers and others in the technology ecosystem to enable solutions, and then to discuss how to bridge these gaps. Ultimately, we look at this series as a means to help inform a research roadmap and a collaborative research initiative that Epri is looking to undertake with utility support. But with the advice of this broader ecosystem of people that we brought together through this series. And when we speak of a shared integrated digital grid, one of the principal identifying characteristics of this is the ability to seamlessly integrate customer resources behind the meter resources as assets that can help optimize grid flexibility without compromising the customer experience in the process. And so this is getting to this end state is really what we want to work backwards from to see what it will take and what gaps need to be addressed. With that, I'd like to turn it over to Liang Min to talk a bit more about our workshop and introduce today's panel. Thank you all much and good morning and I believe most of us do good morning or good evening for the folks in European countries and welcome to this week's webinar. Just a quick recap and work us through that what we have discussed. We have been doing that for almost seven to eight weeks as they have conducted about 10 webinars in the last eight weeks. In June and July, we focus on different player or category of the players in this field. We had the panel talk about US utility practice, European utility practice, and also the IT company like Google, Microsoft, Intel, how they think about and how they practice in this area. Then we have a university panel, we have a startup panel, we have a federal state government panel, corporate research center panel. Then in the end of last month, July, we did a polling in terms of the interesting challenges and topics audience like to say in this month. And based on the polling results, what we organized for this month is has a reasoning discussion we had two weeks ago and had a wholesale market discussion we had last week. They were going to discuss open and standardized data platform topic. And last but not least, in the end of this month, we are going to partner with great wide architecture council to discuss the transacted energy, which is also has been raised a couple of times during this webinar series. So without further ado, I'd like to introduce today's distinguished speakers. And we have Julie Goodman from LF Energy, a Linux foundation project. We have a JC Morris on energy web foundation and Michael Russell from Unreal. So Julie and JC, they are going to talk about the open source data platform efforts they have been doing on their organizations. Then, you know, any open source data platform, we need to have the source of the data. So Michael is going to discuss some of the open source data initiative had at National Lab Complex. So I will quickly introduce their background as each of them has extended background in this area. So Julie Goodman is a founder and executive director of LF Energy, which is a Linux foundation project. It provides and supports open source innovation in the energy and electricity sectors. LF Energy's goal is to accelerate energy transition and decarbonization. Having spent the early part of her career enabling some of the largest companies in the world to become internet ready, Julie has brought her digital first cross industry background to the electricity sector. With a doctor in organization systems focused on innovation and energy transition, Julie has a very unique and multidisciplinary approach to solving complex problems. She has a very ambitious goal, which I like the most. The goal is to inspire, train and enable more than 10,000 developers in the next 10 years to digitally transform electrical power systems. Our second speaker is JC Morris. JC is the co-founder and the chief commercial officer of NSWF foundation. Throughout his career in the electricity sector, JC also has one focus, which I like a lot as well. Partnering with utility, economic provider, developers and the regulatory stakeholder to help distribute energy resources become an integral and a widely accessible part for the ecosystem. Before NSWF foundation, JC was the principal in the electricity practice of Rocky Mountain Institute. During his time at Rocky Mountain, JC's work focused on the fundamental economics of DER and their ability to provide a different service to the electrical grid through regulatory changes and new business models. Last but not least, Michael. Michael Russell is a member of NREL's data group, stands for Data Analysis, Tools and Application. He is the data lead for several very important renewable data sources, which include National Solar Radiation Database, Wain Integration National Database, so-called WING, toolkit. His work is focused on creating, managing and distributing aerial state-of-art renewable resource data through different platforms, which includes collaboration with HDF, stands for Hierarchical Data Format Group, and the Amazon Web Service to make these two datasets public available. Right now, he is also working very closely and expanding his expertise to the cloud computing and AI through the partnership and new venture with Google through several machine learning projects. So with that, let's have Shuli to kick off today's conversation. Hi, everyone. There's some folks I see in the attendee list. It's really wonderful to see you all here. It's very exciting. You know, one of the things that I really want to start with, I live right now at the edge of three fires where everybody has been evacuated. In my air is Ash, and I also have a part of a series of rolling blackouts. And so, you know, I think that as we move forward through this conversation, and I'm so excited for this opportunity for Omar, Arley, Lane, Jesse, and Michael to be able to have this conversation, you know, I really also hope that we can get very present in our reality because the more that we allow our current environment to inform, you know, kind of our steering of the direction that we take and moving forward, I think what smarter we'll be. So if my internet drops, you'll note that it may have something to do with what's going on in Sonoma County right now. Okay. So LF Energy, I think all of us know that the world around us has changed with regards to energy. I'm going to move relatively quickly through a series of slides, and I will be looking at the Q&A and the chat. So if there's some question that you have or something that you want me to go into, please let me know. And, but what I want to do is be able to move through this relatively quickly so that I can build a foundation for a conversation that we have all together. So, you know, in a nutshell, the role of LF Energy is to provide a 21st century plan of action around decarbonization and open source. Open source from my perspective is really, it's an intellectual property convenience and it allows for multiple investments. I have Siri talking to me, excuse me. We have, you know, multiple stakeholders being able to invest. And as I have seen LF Energy emerge more and more, I recognize that in many ways what we're going to be doing is building the reference architectures and the open frameworks and actually creating the software for the future because I don't think it exists. Although I think the building blocks exist. So my background, you know, I do feel like I've been in the deep end of the ocean, but my background really is as an innovation person and an adoption person and a stakeholder in governance person. So this is what I would refer to as a, you know, typical technology adoption curve. And my guess is that most of you, this is familiar to you. This is the challenge for decarbonization. Our adoption rate right now, if we start right now and focus all of our energy, is it about 9% annual for the next 30 years in terms of transitioning from fossil fuel and for decarbonizing. And for every year that we postpone that the curve gets deeper and deeper. So if we wait 5 or 7 years, 10 years, you know, we're going to start having adoption curves that are like 25% a year. And of course, that's going to be agonizing and probably impossible. And, you know, the impact is not only are we going to see disruption. The planet is going to get smaller. The livable planet is going to get simply is going to get smaller. Even if we start today. So this is the vision for LF energy. This is what my members, how my members talk about it is this notion that the grid is composed of loosely coupled system. And how they are thinking about digitalization. Is that it enables engineers and markets to make high impact changes frequently and predictably with minimal toil. And I think that if you're sitting in California right now, or you're sitting in Sonoma County, from my perspective, we need to do this. Now, because when I think about what's been happening in California, particularly with the rollouts, it's not just that we have not a battery capacity or storage to. We are also, we have not really updated our regulatory frameworks with regards to markets. We are not enabling flexibility. And we are not really sharing data modeling and AI and machine learning in a way that allows us to really optimize the grid in the ways that we need to and I believe that open source is probably the only way that we can do it. So isolation and going it alone are no longer viable. We need speed scale enhanced security accelerated innovation and global talent. And I think we need collaboration. We, we have to figure out how to work together. There is only one way through this. I think COVID is an incredible object lesson as painful as it has been to America and to American exceptionalism. It really is an indication if we have a patchwork response to climate collapse, if we have a patchwork response to the energy transition. We are going, it's going to look like COVID and our response to COVID. So I really want to encourage us to figure out how to get past whatever it is that keeps us from working really closely together and seeing the opportunity. So where I sit the Linux foundation is one of the greatest organizations on the planet. It is the home of, you know, it was 250 plan projects about a year ago. I think we're now up to about 384 and and we have thousands of members from all over planet. And they're working on the shared foundations for technology. So whether it is in telecommunications or it is automotive or as cloud. Native word, this energy or the blockchain, we are working together as communities in open ecosystems to fundamentally transform the technology stack that we're working on or the industries that we're working on. It's the world's dominant open source platform. Not that I think that one needs to dominate, but I do think that there is an importance in being able to build and facilitate community, particularly when we get to energy because the blocks, the technology blocks exist. And they need to be composed and reference architectures by those people who are responsible for securing the grid and for providing energy as we transform the world and electrify everything. So, last summer, we started an initiative with high, medium and low voltage enterprise architects along with architects from the aggregation and generation space. And we came up with a functional architecture. And the reason why a functional architecture is important. And this is kind of where I'm taking my comments towards conclusion is that what we're talking about here is a taxonomy. And that taxonomy allows us to really envision and imagine the complexity of, you know, the effort that we're all engaged in. And so what they did was that they, they took kind of across high, medium and low voltage generation aggregation behind the meter. We took input from many, many, you know, maybe 70, 80 folks. This is sitting on the internet. It is creative commons. Anyone can use this taxonomy. And we certainly want you to participate in that. And then they went down another level and they put the boxes in, you know, the, you know, the core kind of functional components of these systems. And then they went even farther. They went down and they began to address, you know, the actual kind of either applications or platforms that are essential. So whether it's consent management, which is like green button or S feed in Europe, or whether it's modeling and simulation software, or whether it's asset supervision or edge node control. What we have here is a three level taxonomy around which we can begin to build reference architectures. And then we dropped in our projects and the, and the various different initiatives. We have a lot of software coming into the Linux foundation this fall, including an electric mobility project. That is being put in by the Netherlands and the Netherlands. I think of anyone here has, you know, I know Sabine is here. You know, I'm blown away by the work that they have done with regards to congestion management. Flexibility services open markets and the ability to be able to onboard electric mobility in a way that enables the grid as opposed to actually causes irreparable problems. So these are our projects. The other thing that we started doing when we, you know, we, we did kind of the next version of the taxonomy we did in once we started working from home, and we ran three, six months sprints, three, six weeks. And again, there were probably about 140 folks, mostly enterprise architects who participated. And what came out of it was the recognition that for all the projects we also needed frameworks. And it's not just a functional architecture framework and the understanding of the interconnection of these things, but also the data architecture. The infrastructure, meaning cloud and cloud native microservices and a security framework. And so we have two chairs for each of these architectures or frameworks, and these are integrated into our governance model where we have our technical advisory council, all of these projects are together. And plus the chairs for the frameworks, they are not numbers of the tax. And the reason why this is important is that I believe that in order to be able to go faster. We need to have kind of both doors in the water is the way I describe it. For each of these four frameworks, because it will make scaling better, easier, faster, more, more smart. And you'll see there the project on the left is open energy data initiative that is what Michael is going to be representing. So the NREL project is one of our projects. And so I'm really excited to hear from him in terms of updating. I'm going to close, I think I'm closing with the next two slides, but this is the very, very beginning of the LF energy energies landscape. And I think if you were to go out and Google cloud native computing foundation and their landscape where LF AI and their landscape. What you see is some folks who are a couple of years ahead of us. Who have begun to populate the software that builds out these blocks and these blocks are really organized around the taxonomy. There's a link here. This presentation will be made available. Please go to this spreadsheet and put your software. Let us know the license and please give us a link to an SVG so that we can have the right logo. But this is one of our grand projects. And it really is making sure that we actually begin to catalyze and catalog and organize the reference architectures that represent the grid of the future. These are our members. We have a host of members that are going to come in in the next few weeks, even in a downturn market. We've had actual actually considerable growth, including she and I think I saw John McDonald here and so thank you very much for, you know, all of our members for participating. This is a a grand challenge that we're all engaged them. And I see, I think if you look at the right hand bottom corner, the power of together, that really is how we're moving forward with this and, you know, this taxonomy exercise is really around. It's kind of like organizing our a software, you know, there's a lot of stuff all over the place, particularly the labs in the US, but there's a lot of stuff. Let's get it out there. Let's get it organized in one place so that we can begin seeing where we need to be investing and how to compose the grid of the future based on what we have already begun working on. This is how to get in touch with me. Our website, we have a new website coming up. And what's not on here is our wiki, and it's wiki.lfenergy.org. And that is where all of the project work is being done right now. And where we're putting considerable investment so that these reference architectures and these groups can be made as transparent as possible. Thank you very much. I truly appreciate it. And now it's quick reminder for all the audience, you can type your questions through the chat or the Q&A function down below. Then all the panelists, they're able to see your questions and all my and I were going to monitor these questions closely and we will make sure that we will have ample time in the end for the Q&A. Next, we're going to have Jason Morris from Energy Web Foundation to share his perspective. Jason, the floor is yours. Great. Thanks, Liang, and thanks both to Effery and Bits and Watts for inviting Energy Web to be here. Always great to be on a panel and speaking with folks like the groups from NREL and the Linux Foundation and LF Energy. We are on the same team to try and accelerate the energy transition here. And I'll also say, Julie's point about being grounded in the moment is very relevant. I too am sitting on coastal California. Three towns were just evacuated just up the road for me about five miles. So from again fires, I was also lucky enough to be part of those rolling blackouts that just happened. So yes, this isn't just software. We're talking about this is real world impacts on our lives. So I think it's always important to bring that home. So in terms of what I'd like to spend a few minutes talking about with the group before we hand it over to NREL and then have a discussion. I want to drill in a little bit on exactly what we're doing with Energy Web from a technology perspective and how to think about our technology stack relative to this concept of open data platforms. And by doing that, I do want to talk specifically under the covers how does the central technology work. I'm sure a lot of people on this line have heard about blockchain technology. A lot of people on this line are interested in bringing open source kind of software to market to accelerate the energy transition for me in our experience at Energy Web. I think it's really important to double click underneath some of these more conceptual discussions and really understand how some of this technology works to see what the future could potentially look like. So that's mostly what I'll be focused on. And specifically, I will leave you with two kind of very specific project based examples of what I'm talking about here. So first, what is Energy Web? So Energy Web Foundation is a global nonprofit organization, and we really launched it in one way to help grid operators in particular. So transmission system operators, distribution system operators, vertically integrated utilities to help them transform the way that they run 21st century energy markets and programs. And again, our mission is to develop and deploy what we call a decentralized digital operating system for the energy sector in support of a low carbon energy future. So that's really our mission and focus. And to just put that mission in perspective, I think it is always useful to ground everybody in what is the current status of the energy transition? Why do we need everything that I'm about to speak about and what Julie was talking about in terms of open source software to help run this new system? It's really important to get the context here. So we've talked about and use these numbers before. I actually realized just before this presentation, we should probably update these for 2020 because these numbers have gone up on the customer side. But the point here is that we, the people on this line, whether we're residential customers, commercial and industrial customers that use electricity and energy, we're going to soon be spending more on the energy system than traditional utilities, who spend somewhere between 7 and 800 billion a year on the mix of transmission distribution and generation globally. So that's an amazing transformation that all of that capital, this kind of capital shifts towards customers. And really for us at EnergyWeb, these assets, whether we're talking about stationary storage systems, electric vehicles, electric people charging stations, smart thermostats, heat pumps, large scale solar facilities, rooftop solar facilities, wind facilities, these are the assets that are going to form the basis of a broadly decarbonized energy sector. The trick is, at least from the EnergyWeb perspective, is that that kind of ecosystem where customers are the primary investors in all of these assets and those assets form the basis of the grid. Grid operators are more or less unequipped to procure services from those assets. And that's because the kind of architecture that we're naturally moving towards is a total opposite from the 20th century model for the power system, where grid operators on the left of this chart in a centralized, top-down manner registered and integrated and operated a relatively small number of really large thermal assets. But the system we're moving towards is just totally different where we have a decentralized model with thousands, tens of thousands, millions, eventually billions of small scale assets that can actually be providing the same services that large scale generators provided in the 20th century model. And this is our focus at EnergyWeb is providing a completely open source, decentralized software infrastructure to enable grid operators to actually thrive in this kind of new grid architecture and environment. So that's our focus. The way that we fulfill our mission about decarbonization and enabling this architecture is to very specifically, and this is why I was so glad to see the every upfront slides here presenting their focus. We want to enable any device owned by any customer to participate in any kind of energy market. If I had to distill what we're doing at EnergyWeb down into one sentence, that would be it. And to break down specifically what I mean there. Let's go to the bottom of this chart. As I just talked through, there are customers all across the world investing at scale in clean tech and renewable energy assets. And those assets, in a lot of cases, actually have a lot of intelligence and software layered around them and different combinations of manufacturers, aggregators, retailers, and even some sophisticated customers. They're able to actually operate those assets in really sophisticated ways at that customer and asset layer. Then at the top, we have hundreds, if not thousands of different kinds of energy markets and operational procedures that actually manage the electric grid. And we could be talking about wholesale markets. We could talking about potential distribution level markets for electricity. We could talk about energy attribute certificates that are used to show corporates their relative contribution to where they're purchasing green energy from. So there's those markets, those assets. What we try and provide at EnergyWeb is this global open source digital infrastructure layer that is really focused on establishing identity for assets and their owners, permissions. So what are those assets allowed to do? How is data allowed to be shared between those assets and relationships between those assets? And to just make this a little bit more real, I think this slide just helps make it a bit more specific. So at the top, those are logos of a number of grid operators who are in the EnergyWeb ecosystem that we're working with on a day to day basis. And we're trying to help them deploy new markets for all of these assets to participate in. So we provide that digital infrastructure layer in between. At the bottom, again, there are a number of very large, sophisticated organizations that are already manufacturing and deploying tens of thousands and soon to be millions of clean energy assets. Whether we're talking about Tesla, Sonnen, Vestis, General Electric, just as examples, those assets are already being deployed. We try and provide the digital infrastructure for those assets to be seamlessly and easily integrated into these grid operator systems. And I would be remiss if I didn't connect this architecture to what just happened in California, which as somebody who's been working on the energy transition for 10 years was unbelievably frustrating to be sitting here in one of the richest countries in the world in one of the richest states California in the US and to have these rolling blackouts happen when consider the following on my block. There are tens of electric vehicles, multiple power walls sitting in the basement of these homes, flexible commercial and industrial load across the way. And those assets collectively absolutely could have been helping the California system operator meet its shortfall in capacity, which triggered these rolling blackouts. Those assets weren't participating in the market. And that's not because there aren't current pathways to doing so in California we have things like the proxy demand response program. The DRAM the demand response auction mechanism and some other platforms, but the current ways that assets like the ones I'm rambling about here are enabled to access those markets. Simply aren't using 21st century technology with what we're doing an energy web and even with what some of the projects that truly articulated is going on at LF energy. We have the opportunity for every single DR that has some base level of intelligence in California to be digitized and registered and integrated and providing capacity to the California system operator. And as somebody who has been in this space for 10 years again, it is just unbelievably frustrating to see that we haven't gotten to the point that all of these assets that are already on the ground aren't being fully utilized to prevent the kinds of things that that just happened in terms of these rolling blackouts. I'll get off my soapbox, but just being a part of that and in this space you can't help but be a little bit frustrated. So I want to talk a little bit about what that would look like. How could we enable every DR in California to participate in all of these different energy markets, whether we're talking about wholesale, whether we're talking about local distribution level demand response programs. And our tech stack achieves that and it's called the energy web decentralized operating system. So this is an open source stack. It has a lot of different modules and components that are all open source. And we also do use blockchain technology. In this case, we use something called the energy web chain that I'll speak about in a moment. But before kind of drilling down into functionally how it works, let's just use some simple analogies that we've had experience with that I think helps people understand what's going on here. So first, the way this tech stack works is every single DR every single customer every single market participant and authority and manufacturer and even aggregator gets a digital identity. And you could think of that digital identity like a passport and that passport just has certain specific verified information about that identity. What is it how much power can it jam through what markets is it actually allowed to participate in. Which is some of the information being shown on this graphic right here. But then if we go to the next step, we take all of those identities which on this chart are on the left. So you see a battery and electric vehicle or solar system, a customer, a smart building. Those digital identities are then authenticated and authorized to participate in different markets. And this is the basis upon which every single application in our ecosystem is being built on. And this on this kind of approach this architecture for the future grid creates an immense amount of value because it enables the ERs to be integrated and digitized and operationalized with grid operators at ultra low cost with maximum interoperability. And it has the ability to protect customer data privacy, because it's using an open source decentralized architecture underneath. So those are a lot of buzzwords. Let's just get into a couple of really specific examples to show what this architecture looks like in practice. So this chart is showing the two kind of use cases that the energy web decentralized operating system typically supports on the left at a high level, think of it as flex. And then enabling the ERs to be digitized integrated and coordinated to enable the ERs to be utilized to their full potential. And what's shown on here are a couple of examples from across the world where we are bringing to market these kinds of flexibility platforms on the operating system. On the right slightly different use case. It's about using the same technology stack to support something we call origin, which is about tracing tracking and trading really granular environmental energy attribute certificates. And we've got a number of examples from the energy web ecosystem shown here, just talking a bit about what that looks like. So I just want to provide two specific examples before I pass it off to the next speaker. So first I want to talk about our friends on the other side of the Atlantic in Austria. So this is the transmission system operator in Austria called Austria power grid, one of the earliest energy web supporters and members really progressive thinker in terms of how can open source decentralized architectures transform energy. And what we supported APG in doing is just what I talked about. So giving customer owned DRs a digital identity, enabling those identities to be authenticated. And when I say authenticated literally, okay, I am a battery sitting in Jesse's basement with the following attributes, and then some other market participant. In this case, it was the DR installers themselves are certifying that yes, that battery in Jesse's basement is what it says it is and is capable of doing what it says it's capable of doing. So we actually enabled those identities to be authenticated. And then once authenticated, those identities are automatically digitized and integrated with the transmission system operators operations. In this case, this is what the wireframe kind of chart is being shown here. We digitized these assets enabled for them to participate in the, quote, hardest market for DRs to participate in, which was a two second balancing market. So it's like frequency regulation in the United States. So we built this, it was back to support something like 2 million behind the meter resources being able to participate in a transmission system level. A transmission system operator run market for frequency regulation using the energy of decentralized operating system. And we are excited to continue supporting APG as they take this project to the next phase. So hopefully that helps you give you a flavor of kind of how we're trying to bring this architecture to market. If I flip to the other example, it's called origin. I'd like to talk about briefly what we're doing with our partner PJM on the Eastern side of the US. So PJM Gats, and I'm just looking at the attendee list. There's obviously a number of energy market participants who probably have hands on experience with Gats. So it's one of the two largest renewable energy certificate issuance and tracking systems in the US. And part of Gats is something called the bulletin board, which is a relatively manual or analog. You could think of it like a spot market for voluntary certificates in that region of the US. So what we're working on with PJM is migrating the current kind of bulletin board architecture to an application that's based on the decentralized operating system, and it's fully integrated with Gats. So what this looks like is that certificates are authenticated using a similar architecture to the one I just described. Those certificates show up on a digitized bulletin board. And the way that that works is we actually use second layer tokens on a blockchain to show this certificate came from this solar facility and is up for sale. And the full history of any kind of trade or anything is then documented on a blockchain and sync with the Gats system. So this architecture that I just talked through in PJM and the previous one that I talked through at APG. Those are the kinds of projects we are our next deep end across the world, helping to bring to market with grid operators and other market participants everywhere. And very excited to see what the next couple of quarters bring in terms in terms of additional projects and announcements in both of these spaces. So I think with that I'm going to go ahead and stop and hand it over. I'm really excited for the discussion. Great, Jesse. Thank you. A great presentation. We have our third panelist next, Michael Russell from NREL, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. So, Michael, you can advance your first slide and the floor is yours. Thank you, Omar. And thank you all for attending the presentation. I'm really looking forward to the discussion as well. So yeah, my name is Michael Russell. I am a data and software engineer at the National Renewable Energy Lab. And I will be talking about the Open Energy Data Initiative, which is a DOE-funded project through the Solar Energy Technology Office, focused at trying to improve how DOE in the national labs disseminates high value public or high value open data to the public using partnerships with the cloud. And as Julie mentioned earlier, this is one of the projects that's under LF Energy and we have been very excited about our partnership with them. So what is the Open Energy Data Initiative? So this is, as I mentioned, it's a DOE-funded project aimed at improving the automating access to high value energy datasets. And I do want to emphasize that the focus of OEDI is to provide access to data across the U.S. Department of Energy's entire portfolio. This is data not only related to solar, but to all of the DOE offices and data coming out of all of the national laboratories as well as data coming out of academic institutions. So pretty much anyone that is associated with a DOE project that is producing open data, we would like to get it into OEDI. So why OEDI? I think that as hopefully a lot of you on this call know, data is getting larger and larger. So historically, how DOE and the National Labs open source data are provided to the public is that they created data repositories. So this is kind of like your Dropboxes or Google Drives or Box accounts where you just upload data and then someone can download it to their computer. This works fine for small datasets, all of our historical Excel models, but it does not work well for large datasets like our National Solar Radiation Database, which is at this point almost 100 terabytes of solar resource data. And so we've really hit the point where to truly be able to innovate and push the envelope in terms of research and analysis on open data, we need to change the paradigm. And so OEDI is focused on doing that in three ways. One, it's partnering with the cloud. So we have developed cloud relationships with right now. We have a very strong relationship with AWS, Amazon Web Services. We're also developing relationships with Microsoft Azure and Google. And the hope here is to leverage their expertise in large data and cloud computation to make access to the data a lot more seamless and also to make analysis on these large datasets a lot more effective. So the end goal here is to improve innovation, improve access and allow for a centralized data lake. So an ecosystem where we can promote access and analysis. So what does that look like? As I mentioned, we're trying to flip this data access paradigm on its head. So historically it was put data up and then download it. So provide a way for people to bring the data to themselves. We now want to bring the people to the data. So we like this analog of a lake. We have data that is entering the lake from all of these different sources. And then people are going to come and camp out on the lake and access the data where it lives. And that will allow for, in our opinion, much greater innovation. So by bringing people to the data, everyone's using the same ecosystem. They are allowed to more easily share their analysis approaches. They can bring in their own data to the lake. Hopefully they will leave their derivative products within the data lake to allow for other users to see what they've done. It really is going to, in our opinion, greatly improve how we collaborate and innovate on these large data sets. It allows you to munge multiple data sets together because they're all in the same place. You don't have to go out and try to find them, bring them together. You don't have to download them locally and then no one knows where all the resources came from and what you actually did. By putting everything in the public sphere, we're hoping that we can streamline this approach to innovation and analysis. So I'm going to give an example of how we have already seen significant gains by using this approach. So our two NRELs, two kind of premier resource data sets are the National Solar Radiation Database. This is now a 21-year data set of solar radiation data for most of the Western Hemisphere. And then we have the Wind Integration National Data Set. This is eight years of wind resource data for the contiguous United States. And historically, the only way to access this data was through these two web servers, so the NSRDB viewer and the wind prospector. These were hosted internally at NREL and due to technological issues, they could only provide access to a very, very small amount of data. So I'm talking about a handful of points, dozens of points at a time. You'd have to request a download. It would get curated on our servers and you'd get an email. Great if you are trying to look at a single site or maybe the resource for a wind farm. Not great for actual research and really not great for analysis because you have to download it locally. You don't have a continuous stream of data. As I said, we still have significant interest in the data. This is a historical look at the requests through these websites. We're looking at tens to hundreds of thousands of requests a quarter for this data. Well, what's the full scope of the data that's available? So the NSRDB, as I mentioned, is data going back to 1998. It's four kilometer spatial resolution, 30 minute temporal resolution, and it covers most of the western hemisphere. Just for this data set, it's about 36 terabytes. We have also recently added five minute two kilometer data for the United States for 2018 and 2019, and that's pushing this data set to close to 100 terabytes. The wind toolkit is even more impressive. Originally it was 2007 to 2013. We now also have data for 2014. Originally it was just the contiguous United States. Now we have all of North America at two kilometer and five minute resolution. This data is over 400 terabytes in size. As you can see, we historically were only allowing a very, very, very small fraction of the data to really be available to the public. And so by partnering with the cloud, specifically AWS, what we've been able to do is provide a platform where you can access as much data as you want. So these are two examples of me accessing data using the Open Energy Data Initiative platform. One is downloading all 20 years of data for California to compute the multi-year GHI means. This took me about an hour to download to my laptop and compute. It was about 18 gigabytes of data that I streamed directly to my laptop. Another example is one day of DNI irradiance. So this is about 52 megabytes and it took me 18 seconds to download. Both of these examples are impossible to do with the NSRDB viewer. It's just more data than we can serve up. So we are already seeing significant improvements in just the amount of data that you can access, the sort of analysis you can do. We're really allowing access to the entirety of the data set, which was funded by DOE and therefore by the public and really should be back in the public sphere. Another example is that we've been able to build real-time web apps. So this WinViz tool is a fun little example. You can go in, you can pick any day, any hub height, or actually any time step, any hub height, and it will display the data from the Win toolkit. So this is just a snapshot of Superstorm Sandy. The actual colors is the wind speed and then these little vectors are the prominent wind direction that's happening at that moment in time. So this is a fun little real-time interactive web app that we're allowed to, that we're able to build now that we have access to all of the data. So who are we enabling? This is a snapshot of who's accessing data through the Open Energy Data Initiative architecture. You can see we have hundreds of users a month across the NSRDB, the Win toolkit, and we have a new historical U.S. Wave data set, which is going back to 1978. It's a hindcasted model that has varying resolution with ocean depth at three-hour temporal resolution showing the amplitude and direction of offshore waves for California. You can also see that we are getting downloads from across the world. So we have significant interest in the United States, but we're also getting hits from Europe, Asia, South America, and Canada. So this really shows that we are greatly improving the dissemination of data within our platform. So what are we enabling? I really think that this is the future of research, of innovation by providing the data in its entirety in a format and on a platform that has built-in computational capabilities being the cloud. We really are going to be able to push the paradigm in terms of machine learning, research, and innovation within the renewable sphere. And that's really the goal of the Open Energy Data Initiative is provide a platform that will allow better access for improved innovation and analysis. So these are the current, this is kind of where we're at with OEDI. We're finishing up year two. We have one more year on our current funding, but we're hoping to get renewed through DOE. These are the data sets that are already available on AWS, the National Solidarization Database, the Wntoolkit, this historical US Wave data set. We have a DAS data set from the Geothermal Technology Office, the Utility Rate Database, which some of you might be familiar with. LBNL is checking the sun data set and then a PV rooftop database of LiDAR data, which I think when combined with CNS-RDB is really going to provide some interesting analysis for distributed solar. So this is the location, the tilt, and the azimuth of residential rooftops for several large municipalities. We're also working on adding LiDAR data for all of Puerto Rico. So when you combine that with the historical solar radiation resource data from the NSRDB, you can imagine you can really do some cool analysis on the availability and the potential for distributed solar. We're also working on adding some distribution system data from the SmartDS project. So these are synthetic distribution networks, the city's LEAP data. So this is some census data that has been combined with energy data, NREL's high throughput experimental materials database, which is already on S3, but we're going to try to integrate into OEDI. And then the other thing is because we're already in the cloud, we can link with publicly available data sets. So one example is all of NOAA's data is streamed directly to AWS. So we can now link into those data sets that are already available on AWS in the public sphere and allow for integration into the open energy data initiative. And then we also have some new data sets under consideration and are always looking for new data sets to add to our program. So if you are interested and have data that is in the public sphere or need help with data that you want to make public, please reach out and let us know. So another part of OEDI is that we're, if anyone is familiar with the open EI data catalog, this again was kind of DOE's historical way of making their data available to the public. We are completely revamping the catalog. It will now be the OEDI catalog. It is just been launched in beta and we will be integrating all of the existing data sets at the end of the fiscal year. But this is where we are going to provide access to documentation, metadata, examples, code examples, repositories. It's really going to be our gateway into OEDI and I think that it is going to be one of the most powerful tools of the open energy data initiative. It provides a platform for people to not only advertise and disseminate information about their data, but also disseminate the truly important part of research and analysis, which is the code and analysis pieces. So what analysis did they run? What were the results? What were the publications that came out of it? I think that, as Jesse mentioned, in order to really push the energy spectrum, we need to have good open source tools. And I think that the catalog is going to provide a place to connect the data and those tools. So this is our current data lake. It's on AWS. It consists of data on S3 that is being hosted through their open data registry and then a bunch of cloud optimized tools that we've developed. So HSDS is our collaboration with the HDF group. This is their cloud optimized solution for HDF5 format of data. We're also using Amazon Athena and Glue to allow for serverless database architectures. And the idea here is that by having the data, the cloud optimized tools in the same location, we can then push analysis in the cloud. We are also working on expanding our data lakes to the other cloud platforms. So we're in conversation with Google to develop a data lake there that we're hoping can leverage their Google Earth engine as well as working with Microsoft Azure to start putting data there. And the idea here is that we want to make sure that data is truly public. We do not want to require people to partner with AWS. We want to democratize the data across all the available platforms and let people use the tools that fit their project or the tools that they're most familiar with and make sure that our data is available on all of those platforms. With that, I will take any questions and look forward to the conversation. If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to me. These are also some of our resources. So data.openai.gov is our catalog. This is the documentation for the data sets that we have out in the public sphere. Examples of how to use HSDS and then the AWS Open Data Registry. If you just search for NREL, you will be able to see all of the data that we've made available to the public. Fantastic. Michael, thank you. And thanks to all of our speakers. Boy, this has been a powerhouse lineup. And we've had a lot of questions flying around in the chat and in the Q&A. Some of those not visible to all the attendees. So I apologize for that, but we'll be asking some questions here. So again, this is a great set of presentations and it sparked a lot of discussion. You know, one thing that I want to ask of sort of an initial question. This is paraphrasing one of the questions that came in earlier from one of our attendees from Phil Markham. But I'm going to rephrase this for all the panelists. And the question I'm going to paraphrase this was, will the architectures being suggested here, these open architectures, allow us to select this as the future unfolds? Or will they constrain us to aggregate that? Jesse, I want to start with you since you did answer that question in the chat or in the direct question, but allow others to kind of chime in as well, sort of philosophically. Is what we're putting here flexible enough to allow us to adapt to any future as it unfolds? Or is it somehow constraining us in the process? Jesse, can you start that one off? Definitely, that's a great question. I think from the, I'll just answer first from the inter-web perspective. So for us, we thought it was the wrong thing to bet on what is the future market design going to be? And what are future global regulations going to be about exactly what you're asking? Will, you know, the battery in my basement have an intelligent piece of software on it that is referencing some of the open source data pools that were just talked about by Michael and then determining what to do on a day ahead basis? Maybe. Or is an aggregator doing that? Or is it going straight to the transmission level distribution operator? Who knows? And remember, even in the U.S., we're dealing with 3,000 different utilities, so everybody's going to have a different flavor. So for us, totally flexible. That, this is why I think a decentralized, identity-based kind of architecture for the grid just makes so much sense because you can architect whatever kind of complex puzzle you'd like. That said, there are some things that we're constantly watching out for. There is a kind of selection that's taking place in some of the ecosystem as we're talking about software and grid digitization, and that's more of a decision about open versus closed architectures. So in an open architecture, which again, on the inter-web side, we're really big on, any device can actually stand up and say, I want to participate in the market, and then different market participants can sort of permission that device to participate. There's a closed architecture, which also might be open source, by the way, but the language I think people should start looking out for with this question that just came up is closed versus open architectures. Closed architectures, not the case, only aggregators are maybe able to participate in the market, or only OEMs are able to participate in the market. I've even seen an architecture in Europe that just came out recently where distribution utilities are completely cut out. So again, I'm only speaking for energy web, but there are some other initiatives out there that are more focused on sort of creating walled gardens and effectively making a bet on what the future market design is going to look like. Great. Julie, any thoughts on that? So I really agree with what you just said. I think the walled garden is not really an option. I mean, there may be particular use cases. I think the way I imagine it is that, yes, we're going to need open architectures, we're also going to need open source. There will be proprietary solutions at 10, 15, 20% on top of that open source, but that local conditions are going to require the capacity and the ability to configure things. So I don't see closing, I really see opening, and I think that if you look at it from a diffusion perspective and you look at kind of what happened in telecommunications, what happened with cloud native computing, what's happening with the automotive industry right now, what's happening with the internet, what you see is repeatedly, you know, software eats hardware, meaning automation and virtualization get driven into the marketplace. I think we're in the very early edges of that. And then open source eats that. And the reason why you want to do it is that you want, we need to change floors. We cannot continue to operate on the floor that we're on. We have to change floors and part of that is being able to provide maximum flexibility and that those markets are going to change. If Sonoma County, just living through a disaster or multiple disasters, you know, you can see that that is going to change the marketplace. And I think it's the future on both. Thank you. Michael, did you have anything that you wanted to add to that? Yeah, so I completely agree with with Jesse and truly, and I think the one thing I want to add is, I think that we've seen in in the current environment that there is a there's a lot of added benefit to crowd sourcing. And so I think that one of the things that we've been fighting at NREL is that there's historically been this approach of you want to keep as much information as close to the vest as possible for a competitive advantage. We are clearly seeing that even private companies are realizing that by strategically open sourcing data, they can leverage the vast experience and interest within the data science community in the public to freely get some pretty cool solutions that are very, very much outside the box. And so I'm really excited for for the open ecosystem. I think that we are seeing that there's there's significant more upside than downside of trying to keep things in the closed garden. Great. Thank you. Leanne, over to you for the next question. Terrific. Yeah. And I'm going to take this question, which is coming first from the Q&A portal, which also kind of echo back, echo what we have discussed almost like three or four weeks ago. At the federal and the state panel at federal state panel, John Luckner from Nasrda talk about New York initiative on the data platform as Chris Urban touched a little bit on the green button initiative, you know, 10 or maybe more than 10, 20 years ago, 10 years ago. And the question is, how can your efforts help regulators like both state and federal, you know, be more specific is like New York public service commissioners, which is setting up the data platform, help the regulatory stakeholder to underpin their transitioning to a transform grid and guiding how they structure and then manager their data platform. So I would start to with maybe start with Michael, then let's go to Shirley and JC. How's that? You seem like you, you had a comment. So you go for it. No, no, go ahead, Michael. Sorry. Yeah, so I mean, my first comment is that I am. I hate the reinvention of the wheel. I think that we have so much lost productivity at all levels of society research industry, because we don't communicate. We don't share resources. And so that's really one thing that we are trying to push with ODI is we are building an infrastructure that is fully open. All of our tools are open source. The platform is open source. We're leveraging open source. Infrastructures, et cetera. And we would be fully willing to help other institutions host data as well as help them stand up their own platform that is a parallel or a duplicate of ODI. And I think that that is what we need to do is instead of having everyone try to do things on their own leverage what's been done. I mean, I am a, I always say, if you have a, if you have a question or a problem, try to figure out if someone else has solved it first. So that's what we want to do is provide an example of how you can solve this open data ecosystem problem and provide it to others that are of interest. You know, I think that that's a great answer. And I would even build on it. And, you know, another level, which is I, I think the mandate of a regulator is to ensure that the social contract is managed appropriately and that open source is like the ideal platform and tool. For regulators worldwide to ensure visibility of, you know, and participation. I believe that the Lennox Foundation has done well and where I think, you know, the nuance and the details becomes is really around the governance. And how do, how do we govern these things? You know, we can create it. We throw it over the wall. We can put it in the GitHub. But is there governance that needs to be created for shared investment? And, you know, Larissa put asked me this question also offline. And, you know, my response back is I'm working with a utility in Europe that is going to put their data. And this is a substantial, I think it's like a $10 million investment that this country has made on doing a data hub. Let's get folks together. Let's begin looking at these things together. And let's get the infrastructure folks engaged. Let's get, you know, AWS and Google and IBM and GE and the folks who are going to be building the private and public clouds of the future that are going to need to leverage the data platforms in order to accelerate the onboarding of renewable energies or, you know, what we're trying to do is potentiate electrons and not lose them so quickly. And, you know, that it is a commodity and that's what we work with. The only thing I would add is maybe a macro and a micro comment at the macro level. How real time are regulators able to engage with everything we're talking about right now? I'd say not even close. Yeah, you have rate filings filings for different programs. Many different processes by which different advocacy organizations and other organizations come together to be a part of a public process, which is critical. But at the end of the day, regulators are responding to dockets and pieces of paper put in front of them that their staff are reviewing and providing recommendations to. When you overlay software on the entire energy sector, we can enable regulators to be much more real time in their involvement with everything we're talking about. Whether we're talking technical, e.g., should we allow, you know, a battery with one hour or four hour capacity to participate in the market? Or we're talking societal, e.g., wow, all of these ERs are creating a lot of value. How should that value be allocated amongst high income, low income, medium income customers? All of those questions can be answered and changes can be made exponentially faster when we have software and digital technologies overlaid on the entire energy system. So it gives regulators the ability to be so much more hands on with seeing what's actually happening on the system and making decisions to change the regulatory toggles. I'd also just one micro comment. Privacy protecting regulation is coming to the U.S. It's come to Europe, GDPR, California, great precedent set with the CPA. If you, regulators, want to effectively take that first step of really showing how customer data privacy can be protected, they have the opportunity to do that now specifically with decentralized technologies. There's an immense amount of innovation coming from the blockchain space, but also the enterprise space. Microsoft made a really interesting recent announcement about how they're using the same identity standard we use at EnergyWeb to protect customer data. So the micro comment is, regulators, you also have a big opportunity to step forward and use digital to protect customer data. I'm so glad you just brought that up. So I was having a conversation with somebody at one of the regional security centers in the U.S., the interconnection. I'm not going to name names. And this one is responsible for a team of auditors that go out basically with pen and paper to hundreds of utilities in order to be able to assess the security. It's how we are in the United States implementing CIP, our security standards. But the truth is, is that if we had a digital bill of materials and kind of a distributed ledger that actually identified what assets are, what is in an asset and software bill of materials like SPDX, which is another Linux foundation project, that if we had those things, these things could be automated and happening in real time. So this guy has 400 utilities he has to go through, but he probably only gets a third of them. I don't know what's true or what's not true, but I do see that building, it's not only just customer data. It's also, how do we manage the security of the grid? And if we do not create some kind of transparency, you know, radical transparency allows us to really know what kinds of security has been applied to different parts of the grid. We're sitting ducks. So, you know, that's a huge area of an opportunity for regulators. Great, fantastic responses to that question. I've got another question here that came in and it seems to be more so for Shuli, but others can chime in. It's more of a clarification question. You know, the taxonomy that you presented and you reference. How does that correlate with the with IEEE's smart grid interoperability reference model? So the data architecture group is working very closely with the, with SGIP. And with NIST, I've been working with Ari Gopstein and also working in Europe with IEC. And, you know, when you're doing that kind of shuttle diplomacy at slow, but I, you know, I think that what the goal is and and I've had conversations both at a national. Federal level in Canada with the energy division in Europe and with the World Bank and also with DOE that if we can begin to harmonize a taxonomy that this is going to help facilitate and accelerate innovation because we can target in our investments. So. So the answer is there's always room for more. It's got a creative license and we are looking for people to participate. You know, in the data architecture group and the functional architecture groups in order to take it to the next level. Think of it as a source project. And so along that theme, maybe to Jesse and Michael, are there other organizations and initiatives, standards or otherwise that need to be harmonized to use Shuli's term to help make this to help realize these goals. Are there other ongoing groups and is there a need for some kind of umbrella level coordination among these various groups that are working on standards in their own areas? Jesse or Michael and any thoughts on that? Michael, do you want to start? I was going to see if you want to start. That's a tough one. So I think that, yeah, so one of the things that we've been fighting for is just locally within DOE across the National Labs is to just make sure that everyone's on the same page. Again, I just see at all levels of DOE, a lot of wasted energy with the duplication of effort to create duplicate products just through a lack of communication. So one thing that our technical monitor Amar at CEDO is really pushing is trying to make OEDI an ERE level kind of initiative. So try to push for a single approach to open sourcing data. Another thing that we're really pushing for is kind of a single coordination of how we interact with our cloud partners. So currently every single National Lab has their own kind of partnership with AWS and Google and Azure and we really want to try to centralize that at the highest level to just reduce redundancy and inefficiency. I think from my perspective, we have to integrate with lots of different standards, whether we're talking about communication protocols or different messaging services. So again, we try and just be flexible so that we can integrate with as many as possible. I will say we recently Sunspec Alliance just joined the Energy Web kind of ecosystem and their focus on communication protocol and interoperability between DERs and machine to machine communication is going to be critical. And I do see a huge opportunity for a large and specifically communications protocol to be centered around as we're talking about IoT devices, signing cryptographically secure messages with grid operators. We should there might be an opportunity for us to standardize around that. I do see one area for global truly global coordination and standardization on both a data model and a method for transacting and that's with energy attribute certificates. If you look globally, whether we're talking about renewable energy certificates in the US guarantees of origin in Europe, emerging new standards for things like green biogas, a new generation of carbon offsets, any of these again broadly construed energy attribute certificate markets. It is just screaming for a global kind of standard and we think we have that with what we call our origin toolkit. We're working with market participants across the world. I mean, just to paint a picture here, what I talked about with PJM views that same software in Thailand, and we're looking at using that same software in Europe for other commodities, so not electricity. So there is a real opportunity to pull together specifically for energy attribute certificates globally, a little bit less. So maybe for some of the flexibility focused applications because clearly we have so many different rules and regulations. But when you start talking about these attributes that are fundamental to the way the energy system operates, there's a massive opportunity to set a global truly global standard. Thank you. Liang, over to you. Thank you. Let me pull back the panel discussion a little bit. Try to focus on really the customer data, be more specific like the smart appliance, the EV web driving, the power wall that Shuli's house has. And because the customer data also touches three different things, which is the security privacy. And also we are talking here, which is openness. How do we balance the privacy security and openness? You know, what type of technology can help us to achieve harmonize the goal? Let's see how we start. Let's maybe start with Shuli, go Jesse and Michael. How's that? You know, I believe that we really have to really because we're getting new evacuation notices. So I'm probably going to have to go in a minute. So I think open source and distributed ledger technology in particular is incredibly suited for being able to address security. I think there's requirements on security on multiple levels. There's knowing what's inside of a dirt. You know, in other words, the components and concerns that we have about particularly things ending up on the bulk power system that have extraneous electronics. It's being able to make transparency there. It's about being able to make transparency with regards to the software and how it treats participants. And user data. And so I think that we have enormous opportunities, but I think that if we solve these security opportunities in a patchwork way, the way, for instance, we have approached securing our health in the United States with regards to COVID. I think that we will be creating incredible friction in terms of our ability to really hit that 9% a year growth and acceleration. So I think it's something that has to be done in the open. There's a new initiative at the Linux foundation called open open source software found open source security foundation. It is building on initiatives that have been the core infrastructure initiative. We are asking all of our projects to badge. And, you know, and Jesse, I would encourage you all to adopt CII. I think the more we begin to have visible approaches to security with regards to our software and our hardware better off. We're going to be and we've got to nip this on the bud and, you know, start moving together in a coordinated way. I would, I would really thank you for your participation in case and you're not just connected and drive safe and stay healthy. Thank you. Yeah, thanks. Everyone just stay safe too. I know you're in. You're in a difficult place as well. Thank you. Thank you. I think we haven't gotten evac order yet, but I'll stay on I think for the moment. But the simplest one line answer to how to deal with data privacy from the energy web perspective is self sovereign identity anchored on a public blockchain. For us is the killer technology combination that can deal with the question you brought up specifically around customer data privacy. And what do I mean by that. President of the US Donald Trump recently has been making headlines about some things going on with the Postal Service. We will stay completely apolitical here. What did the US Postal Service respond to that with on August 13. They applied for a patent to have a blockchain based approach to identity management. Why is that interesting. That is a way in which voters in the US could be mailed a document with a QR code on it and for in bit world digital land, you have your own self sovereign digital identity, which means it's yours. It's not controlled by Apple. It's not controlled by Facebook. It is cryptographically an identity that you yourself control. You can use that identity to then digitally sign the QR code that was sent to you, meaning you can then vote with a guarantee that no one will ever know who you voted for. We can take that architecture that US Postal Service just applied for a patent to and deploy it for every single customer in the world that is using energy. And when you have that architecture at the starting point, you have immense amount of flexibility in terms of where data is being stored, how security is being dealt with. And I'm not the expert here. You don't even have to take my word for it. Go and check out everything having to do with decentralized identifiers, a standard being put forth by W3C, the folks that brought us the internet. Again, Microsoft seems to be quite bullish on this if you look at some recent announcements. So I'm not the expert on that technology, but that is absolutely the base of our approach to solve exactly the questions you're bringing up, Liang. Terrific. Michael, anything you want to add? Jeff, that's a hard answer to follow up on, but my only comment is one of the things that we have really been working with a lot of our kind of private sector partners on is the idea of anonymization through aggregation. And so I think that in terms of sharing public data, there are a lot of very robust approaches to be able to aggregate customer data to a level where you cannot disaggregate it down to find PII. And I think that going back to your question of how do we balance this privacy versus kind of being transparent approach, I think that this is a way to do it. So if we can really push companies to embrace the idea of aggregation and dissemination of those aggregate statistics, I think it's a way for them to be transparent about what sort of data they're bringing in. What sort of kind of innovation and analysis is coming out of that data while still maintaining the privacy of the sources of that data. Terrific. Oma, I will hand this back to you. Yeah, and we have just a few minutes left. I wish we had another hour. This is fantastic. So rapid fire here just on the second team of consumer. The one hand you've all stressed and you've articulated very well the importance of open standards and interoperability. Yet we see the emergence of, you know, proprietary ecosystems and, you know, walled gardens, if you will, you know, from, you know, with, you know, Amazon enabled ecosystems, Google and so on. So how do we, you know, harmonize that the reality, the market realities and the consumer space of devices that we want to link to the grid. And the overall need that you've all been talking about just sort of quick reactions to how we can kind of get these these big ecosystems that already exist to play. I don't know if surely is still on you want it if you can take that otherwise we'll go to Jesse and then Michael surely might have left. So I'm a little I'm a little I'm still here. I'm listening because it's such an amazing conversation. I am totally distracted though. So please carry on. I had to start and surely if you chime in if you if you'd like for you're still there. I think a lot of the, well, there's two things going on. Look, surely said it open source eats some of this stuff. There are current market processes being done in walled gardens that simply do not need to be part of a business model if I could be quite blunt. So there is a fundamental conflict in some cases between what some companies are doing now and what they might be doing in the future as open source comes to the energy sector. That's always tough. However, I think the bigger thing here is just education with the stack that that I kind of talked through and I think this is also true for some of the Linux foundation projects. There's an immense amount of opportunity for proprietary business models to thrive in our stack. We're not dealing with optimization in terms of what is the right economic dispatch for all these different assets in terms of what is the right trading strategy for different ERs be participating in the market. Nor are we doing anything in terms of customer engagement. What is the best way to approach a customer to buy the ER in the first place, just those two categories alone. There's an immense amount of innovation that's still needed and a lot of it's going to be proprietary from being honest. So if you were to approach, you know, some companies that are infamously walled off like the examples you gave, I think it's important to describe what's going to be open source in kind of an idealized architecture and where is there. Who's doing what is such a common misunderstanding in this open source space that the quicker you can get to razor specificity on this open source piece of software is providing this function. I think it's easier to see where there's opportunity for innovation. Michael any final work real real quick. Yeah, I would agree with Jesse and I go back to my example earlier I think that more and more companies are seeing the value add of crowd sourcing. I think that if you start to play in the in the open sector in Google is a good example with their Kaggle competitions. I mean they're bringing in the best and brightest in the machine learning world. And they're, I mean freely participating to solve cutting edge problems that I imagine Google is probably profiting off of. And I think that it's a really good example of how you can interact with the open source world and it and it just requires to kind of have a little bit of trust on both sides. But I think that there's there's a huge advantage to companies to it's a high risk high reward and I actually don't think the risk is all that high to interact with the open source world. Yeah, I I'd like to just add one thing really quickly which is that I think at the Lenox Foundation we have seen over and over and over again, hyper scaling of business models using open source. And so it's not that open source has killed businesses and you can see this in telecommunications when AT&T made a commitment to shifting the open source. You know Eric and I just know Nokia all freaked out and then all of a sudden they realized oh no this was actually better. They got to go out you know after business in a different way it's allowed telecommunications to scale dramatically by virtualizing a lot of what you see done just with hardware and manual. So I think we're in a very similar position. And you know the goal is not to cannibalize business. It's to figure out how to innovate and scale quicker. So I am very optimistic that the next foundation and the work that Energy Web is doing, you know that all of these things can be done in a model that creates new folks and creates the grid of the future. There's going to be trillions of dollars that are going to cross hands in the energy transition. And let's change floors though and figure out the boundaries of where we need shared investment. Terrific. Thank you Julie, Jesse and Michael. You know your three organizations really really kind of pushing the envelope in terms of the open source software platform. And I want to piggyback one thing from Julie's resume, which is you know let's do together and train inspire and not tens of thousands of million future engineers help us to digitally transform the energy sector and the electricity sector together. So with that I'd like to thank everybody attend this webinar and thank you very much for your participation. And next Wednesday we're going to have a conversation on transactive energy. Again, thank you Julie, Jesse and Michael for your participation. Thank you guys. Great panel. Thank you very much. And I'm really happy to see folks. Bye bye. Bye. Stay safe. Stay safe.