 Welcome to Sustainable Energy in America, Factbook 2019 edition. You'll hear more about how that came to be and how many years that organization has been putting this out. But I want to first welcome you and tell you what a pleasure it is for me personally, Jarrod Blum, to be here as chair of ESI and also as vice chair of the Business Council for Sustainable Energy. So it's kind of a privilege of being in a leadership role with both groups. And obviously it makes me very happy to see that working together, partnership is the way things get done in this city, so I'm very, very pleased that they're both involved. ESI, for those of you who don't know, was formed about 35 years ago by a group of, a bipartisan group of visionary members of Congress who wanted to create a forum for the discussion, dialogue of solutions, of science-based solutions for environmental and energy related issues. And I'm pleased to say that that's been ongoing for 35 years. We've maintained the non-partisan, bipartisan tradition. In the past, our board has had members of Congress from both sides of the house who spoke to each other, who sat down together. So, and we try to continue that tradition of bipartisanship even today. We've spent a great deal of time trying to put together briefings like this. You've had 30 to 35 of them a year and you can imagine over 30 years that comes to about 1,000 briefings. So, a lot of information has flown through this process and we're pleased to cosponsor this event today with the Business Council for Sustainable Energy. The Business Council was formed about 30 years ago and it's a coalition of industry groups, companies and associations whose goal was to promote international, federal and state policies and programs that recognize that there is technology available to create the new energy forum for the 21st century to deal with climate issues and to deal with the economic drivers of efficiency and renewables and natural gas. The fact book that you'll be hearing about this afternoon is unique. There won't be any other compendium that you will be able to access that has this kind of information all together in one place. And I think it's important to note that we're in the right place at the right time on this issue of climate and new energy. Just last week the ESI sponsored another briefing from Yale University did a survey in the United States and found not to anyone's surprise, but there's a great deal of increase in concern and awareness about climate change. And I think that's an important point to keep in mind. Also, there was an awful lot of increase in support over 85 to 90 percent of the people surveyed support federal policies that promote renewable energy. So there's an awful lot, there's a confluence of events coming together in addition to obviously other things that we see and experience every day in terms of news with respect to weather related issues. But it's not just the environment. We have economic drivers as well in terms of job creation. And just recently REI refitted a distribution center in Arizona. They won an award from DOE on their Better Buildings program. They had a 400,000 square foot facility which they retrofitted to reduce their energy by 20 percent. They save $170,000 a year in energy costs using many of the technologies you're going to hear about this afternoon. And again, they didn't do that just to be a do-gooder or even a climate change activist. They did it because it made economic sense. So we're all here in this room to deal with multiple issues. And I think we're going to find the policies and technologies discussed immediately following my introduction. And I'd like to introduce who's going to handle the moderating of this program, Ethan Zindler, who's the head of Bloomberg New Energy Finance. They say head of Americas and I'm going to leave it at that. I gather you have all the responsibility for your programs within North and South America. And I'll let Ethan pull the rest of the afternoon together. And then after, Ethan will have Lisa Jacobson, who's president of the business council, moderate a question and answers part of it. So Ethan. Thanks, Jared. Hi, everybody. And thanks for that very nice introduction. And as Jared mentioned, this is, you know, part of a long-term relationship that our group Bloomberg NEF has had with BCSE to produce this fact book for I think we're in our seventh edition now. Lisa can correct me if I got that wrong. And so we're very happy to welcome everybody here today. Seeing the sandwiches over there reminds me of my dad's famous expressions, which is that there's no such thing as a free lunch, which I thought would have applied here except for the fact that you are going to have to listen to me for the next 20 minutes. So, so much for free. First, before I get started, and what I'm going to do is share with you some of the fact book findings. But before I do just a little note about scope, because certainly terminology matters. So we talk a lot in the fact book about sustainable energy. And this slide, which I realize is really tough for you guys probably to see without getting too into the details on it, really mostly what we're focused on in the fact book are energy technologies like renewables, energy efficiency, in particular things, the technologies that enable energy efficiency. And then we're also looking at natural gas and carbon capture and storage technologies to some degree as well. And we look at electrified transportation as well. I know there are a lot of other definitions and we don't really look at nuclear very closely in this, but it's important for you to understand that when I refer to sustainable energy, I'm kind of talking about that first category of technologies I just mentioned. If I talk about zero carbon technologies, I'm primarily talking about renewables plus nuclear because they don't emit any CO2 at all. Again, a tough slide to read, but the fact book, which is over 130 slides this year, focuses on things like deployment, financing and the economics, and I think there's a lot in there. And of course, I want to mention that the fact book has a lot of our data with Bloomberg and EF. We collect a lot of this information, but a ton of what's in there is actually from the Energy Information Administration, which is your own tax dollars at work, or for a number of the other great groups that we've worked with who provide information about things like energy efficiency and other stuff like that. So there's a lot of actual other people's data that we're just putting together, hopefully in an easily consumable package with great guidance and expert support from BCSE. We do this every year. All right, so some key findings from 2018 that we try to cover in the fact book, and I'll try and cover here for just a couple of minutes. First, U.S. power continued to decarbonize. Overall, the power sector in the United States has seen a greater deployment of new energy technologies that are lower emission. I'll talk a little bit about that in a moment. Two, total number of people working in these sectors has been growing. Three, energy remained inexpensive by historical standards to consumers. There are a lot of different ways to sort of show that, but I'll show you one or two. Four, corporate procurement. The role of large corporates involved in clean energy continued to grow, and we really had a record last year for that. And five, we've continued to see investments in energy efficiency overall. So those are actually all trends that I would say have been pretty consistent over the last six or seven years that we've been doing this report. This is the general sort of direction of travel of the U.S. energy sector overall. But there were definitely some divergences last year. First, energy productivity stalled. And you may be saying, wait, how could we have gotten good on energy efficiency, but not on energy productivity? I'll explain what I mean by that in just a couple of minutes. Energy consumption overall went up, which finally, if you're worried about CO2 emissions, is not great news, because CO2 emissions last year from the U.S. rose rather precipitously, actually year on year from the year before. And so raising real questions about whether or not the U.S. can do its part to try to address climate change overall. All right, so first, on the U.S. power sector. Really, there's a lot of different ways of looking at the U.S. power sector, but this is one very simple one on a macro basis. We look at the amount of different power that is generated from different technologies on the U.S. And again, we all drive cars and there's lots of ways in which energy is used. This is just thinking about electrons and electricity that we generate. Last year, coal accounted for just 27% of power generation. That was the lowest level since 1979. We are way off the high point for coal, which was about 10 years ago. And you can see that coal's share, which is that black bit at the bottom, has been declining. Red, which is nuclear generation, is stayed about the same at about 19% or 20% each year. And then last year, overall gas consumption, natural gas, continued to rise and played about, accounted for about 35% of power generation. And finally, that blue chunk at the top, which is renewables, that includes large hydro, wind and solar increasingly, that's about 20% of generation. Last year was 18%, but you can see it's getting up towards 20% overall. So you can see essentially a decarbonization that's going on across the mix of power generation in the U.S. So that's all good news. One thing to look at is in absolute terms, in terms of the number of terawatt hours that were generated, the one thing I would note is that that last bar on the far right that you see there, that's a little higher than it had been, in fact, a good deal higher than it had been the year before. So the overall amount of electricity in the U.S. actually has been flat year on year. We all think, oh gosh, we've got all these new flat screen TVs and our iPads and everything, that this stuff is just going to keep going up and up and up. But actually, energy efficiency has ensured that we've been able to get all these new wonderful devices in our life, but not increase the amount of electricity we use for the most part. Last year we definitely saw that trend switch up a little bit. Just to drill in a little closer on the renewable capacity that was added, we've been seeing about 20 gigawatts of new wind and solar added each of the last three years. The yellow chunk you see there is solar again that accounted for about two thirds of the total, a little less than that, that got built last year. And it's pretty consistent with the year before on a percentage basis. The solar industry had a pretty down year actually, not, you know, still over 11 gigawatts, but down compared to the prior year in 2017 and then we saw a bit of a rebound last year. There's a lot of activity happening in both the wind and the solar market, very keenly aware of the fact that the production tax credit and the investment tax credit, which support those industries from here on Capitol Hill, are due to scale down and, in one case, expire entirely. Again, a little bit of context in terms of the total build. You can see those gray bars show how much gas was built. It was a record year for new gas installations, or I should say record for some time over the last 20 years or so. As the U.S. continues to add a good deal of additional gas capacity, we have been blessed with extremely low-priced natural gas and a great deal of availability of gas, and that is having all kinds of ramifications across the power sector. Probably most notably, it is accelerating the retirement of coal-fired power very, very quickly. Renewals are also playing that role as well. In terms of coal, again, last year was the second highest year we've recorded. This is really just EIA stats in terms of the announced retirements, the actual retirements of coal-fired power plants in U.S. history. If you think about what's going to happen next, you can see those gray bars looking ahead. There have been considerable additional announcements of coal retirements going forward. Always try to make this slide in the context of Washington, and certainly the public policy efforts from the Trump administration and others to try to support coal. The reality of it is the market is moving very quickly, gas is cheap, and it's making gas very, very difficult for coal-fired generators to continue to survive. This is a complicated chart that I probably won't get into too detailed on, but to say that we at Bloomberg NEF every six months update our outlook on the levelized costs of energy of different technologies. Just to vastly oversimplify this, this is to say, okay, if I owned a wind or a solar or another project, and I was an equity holder, I was an actual investor in that project, and I wanted to earn a 10% rate of return, so how much would I have to sell my power for? What's the range? And without getting into great detail, you can see that we walk through each of the technologies on this slide. You can see onshore wind tracking photovoltaics, which is the yellow chunk. You can work your way over to the right. You can see coal and some of the others. Long story short is we are increasingly seeing places in the U.S. where renewables are the lowest cost option in terms of power generation. And I realize those opponents of renewables will point out, well, okay, wind only generates when it's windy, and solar power only generates when it's sunny. Fair point. But this is simply looking at that cost per megawatt hour that we see generated. We also start to look more and more at the cost of renewables plus storage, which is also getting much more cost competitive as well. All right, I'm going to keep moving rather swiftly. The next point I meant is that employment continued to grow last year in these sectors. You can see the total now coming up on 3.5 million total jobs. Worth noting that that pink bit along the line along the bottom and on the far left shows energy efficiency jobs. Energy efficiency employs several million people, a couple million people, excuse me. It is fundamentally labor-intensive stuff to do retrofits and all kinds of other work that needs to go on. This is a huge part of this industry overall. The solar industry represents now about 350, 360,000 jobs. It actually dropped a little bit year to year because there was a little less activity between 17 and 18, but it's still pretty considerable. Of course, I would point out that when we compare these sectors, we hear a lot about coal jobs. Don't get me wrong, I think this country owes an enormous amount to those who got coal out of the ground for decades and decades and worked in the mines and worked in the plants. But if you look at the raw number of people employed in that industry compared to the solar industry and others, it is much smaller. And as we think about what the economic priorities are going forward, I think this chart is something that I hope policymakers will keep in mind. That's me editorializing, by the way. That's not in the fact book. That's not what we call fact. That's what we call an opinion. Just going on here, I want to mention that energy continues to remain inexpensive by historical standards. This chart simply shows the total amount of energy expenditures on the left-hand side per household. On a historical basis, this chart dates all the way back to 1960. And you can see how much, how little households are spending overall. On the right-hand side, you can see how much they're spending on natural gas. And the bottom line shows electricity. This line has been down for some years now. And overall, consumers are essentially reaping the benefits of the natural gas bounty, plus the fact that renewables have gotten much cheaper. These cost savings are being passed on to consumers for the most part. Quick point about energy from corporates. And I am struck by this as someone who lives and works in Washington, but who's most of my clients are really corporate clients. The level of enthusiasm that we see in the corporate world for renewables is high. If you look at the number of companies that have signed on things like the RE100, these are companies that have promised to have all their power come from renewables. And you look at then this, which is contracts signed by corporates in terms of supplying their own power from renewable energy. Last year, on the left-hand side, you can see it was a record year for the most number of power purchase agreements signed by corporates. About 8,500 megawatts of capacity of yellow solar and blue wind overall signed by large corporates. And then on the right-hand, you can see who some of these companies are now. Facebook, Microsoft, you see on the list. Google has traditionally been on there as well in the past. So you could say, oh, well, it's just tech companies trying to be green. But look a little closer. More closely, you'll see AT&T, Walmart, Exxon, Mobile, Apple, of course, is tech, but Kaiser Permanente, Royal Caribbean, Cruise Lines, T-Mobile. The trend towards large corporates buying clean energy is definitely moved away from just those who are trying to do the right thing green-wise. These are companies that want to walk in clean energy capacity at a fixed price at a location where they're comfortable over the long term for business reasons. Exxon, Mobile, probably the most notable, signing over 500 megawatts of contracts to help power oil and gas operations in West Texas last year. So this is a trend that's moving ahead. I will editorialize for one more second and just say that I am struck within the context of Washington that there seem to be some business groups that claim to represent all business and are not being necessarily all that supportive of clean energy. But if you look at the membership and you look at who's taking the lead in terms of clean energy adoption, it actually often is some of the largest corporations in the world. This is just another quick glance at companies that are involved in clean energy and energy efficiency as well as some of the logos. I'm going to just try to move quick just so we can get to this great panel that we've got here as well. Oh, sorry, just to back up for a sec. I did mention energy efficiency improvements continued, and we continue to see investment in this area. Sorry, this is a tough chart for folks far away, but the variety of types of financings that we're seeing into energy efficiency run the gamut from utility investments to energy service performance contracts, pace investment, utility spending, et cetera, et cetera. Sorry, I'm going to move fast through these, but the investment levels in utility from utilities and others and efficiency continues to grow overall, and that's great because one of the things that we have consistently seen in our firm as we look at different economies around the world is that the most mature economies are the ones that are best positioned to enjoy the benefits of energy efficiency. It is a total cliché to now say that energy efficiency is the low-hanging fruit of clean energy, but the reality of it is there are still many more steps that can be taken to make our economy more energy efficient, and some of those steps aren't really particularly too snazzy. It's not like buying a Tesla, it's like replacing your boiler or other things that people just have to do because things break, and the next one you buy is much more efficient than the one you had that goes for refrigerators, goes for cable boxes. Any number of different devices that operate in your house, you will find that as you replace them, the new one is much more efficient than the last one that you just got rid of. All right. So the last bit here, let me just talk a little about some of the things that are maybe the not-so-good news by any means, which is that first slew of stuff, those are the long-range trends, those are the things I've been up here and talked about, I think probably the last three or four years, they are consistent, they are defining the energy sector overall, have historically. This is the not-so-great news that we saw last year. So the first thing to note is the U.S. economy, as many of you know, actually grew at a pretty reasonable pace last year at about 2.9% GDP growth compared to some of the prior years when we were kind of limping along at more like 1%. So what happens when you grow your economy faster? There is the potential that you grow your energy demand faster, and that's what happened last year. So that top line simply shows GDP and how it grew, and you can see that a number of years it was going up at the purple line, which is the primary energy consumption was staying pretty flat. Last year, if you look at that last little tick, you can see that primary energy consumption also ticked up, even as GDP ticked up, and that's a little bit of a worrisome sign, and it says that we can't always grow and not have energy growth. The two will sometimes certainly correlate, especially perhaps when the economy grows at a more reasonable pace. And then on the right-hand side, basically if you put those two lines together and you think about how productive can the economy be, you can see energy productivity was rising every year, or most years, there's certainly that big divot around the time of the Great Recession. But if you look as it keeps going, you can see it was continuing to go up, and then again last year, energy productivity took a little bit of a dip overall. To my mind, that's a little bit of a worrying sign, but something that I think to keep an eye on into this year. Again, energy consumption overall went up last year, and I mentioned that just a moment ago, but to dig into a little deeper as to sort of who and why. The first thing is if you look at the red line, which is the power sector, we saw a little bit more of demand from the power sector. The blue line, which is the industrial sector, also ticked up, and the residential and commercial sectors ticked up as well. Interestingly enough, the yellow line, which is transportation, didn't really rise all that much last year overall. But again, we're seeing across the energy sector more demand coming along. At least last year I should note. And then finally, or almost finally, I did want to just make one quick point about what this ultimately means for greenhouse gas emissions, which I think for anybody who is paying close attention to this and is reading the IPCC report, we're all increasingly feeling very worried about the new conclusions that we may have as little as a dozen years to try to address any of this. So any tick up in CO2 emissions should be worrisome for those of us who are worried about climate change. And as you can see in the left-hand chart, you can see total gross greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. by our estimate rose by about 2.5 percent last year. There are different estimates. We'll get a final number at some point, but they clearly went up. And that was driven by GHG emissions from the energy sector, which you see just below that, which is a subset of the total greenhouse gas emissions. I would note that on the right-hand side, you see the different segments or the different contributors. This is sort of another way of looking at how emissions are calculated and who contributes the most. And the first point I guess I'd make is that that yellow line, which is the transportation sector, it basically crossed just about last year where suddenly cars and trucks became actually the single biggest source of CO2 emissions in the U.S. It had traditionally been the power sector, which is that red line, and you can see how much CO2 emissions from the power sector have been coming down as we've been adding more renewables, more gas, and improving energy efficiency overall. And then I would also note, though, that the buildings and industry sectors, you saw both tick up actually quite a bit last year. And I think that's, again, a little bit of a worrying side. I'm going to just close on two charts that I realize are challenging to read from a distance, and maybe I'll just do this one for just a second, which is one of the things that the Energy Information Administration does every year is they count what they call heating degree days and cooling degree days. I'll just look at cooling degrees for days for a second. And to just really oversimplify this, the EIA regionally in different parts of the country thinks about, okay, how many days does the temperature vary against the mean by a certain amount and create an undue amount of demand on the energy system? And last year, without getting into great details, was the highest number of cooling degree days that the EIA has tracked, basically since they started tracking them in 1990. And what that means is that last year, weather put unprecedented demands on our energy system. And if you go back and you look at the emissions that I was showing you from the building sector and the industrial sector, particularly the building sector, what it meant is that people were putting more miles on their air conditioner and on their heating but on their air conditioning throughout the year than they had in the years past. I guess for me as someone who's worried about climate, despite all the very good news and things that I showed you, this makes me nervous. It makes me concerned because it suggests to me that the effects of climate change are already here and we're feeling them and that the energy system that we have is already having to react to it and that in turn is making more emissions. And so to my mind, I don't mean to leave you on too disquieting a note, but it suggests that the challenge is real and it's here and that we have to do more and more about it. So with that, I think I'm going to hand it back to Lisa and say thank you very much for your time. Well, thank you, Ethan. That was an excellent presentation and definitely lots for us to talk about in our panel. So again, I'm Lisa Jacobson, President of the Business Council for Sustainable Energy and it's our pleasure to be partnering again with EESI and I want to thank the staff from EESI and the BCSE for the excellent work in putting this event together. So really appreciate all you do and to our online audience welcome and glad you could join us. I wanted to mention that all the information that you see outside and the slide presentation is all available online for free as well as the full fact books. So if you were to print out the fact book, this is what it would look like and it's about, let me find a good pretty page. I'm not finding the best one, but basically similar to what Ethan has showed you, it has about 120 facts and figures with commentary. The executive summary is in here too. So I encourage you to download it. Again, it's all free. So hopefully it'll be of use to you. And there's an overview section as Ethan described which goes into a lot of the big picture charts that he showed, but then there's a sections covering everything from combined heat and power to storage to transportation to all the renewable technologies. A very robust energy efficiency section. So I really encourage you to dive in and take a look at it. Before we turn to the panel, I also wanted to introduce Ruth McCormick who is our lead federal and state policy director. Here's Ruth. Hopefully some of you have already met with Ruth but I'm sure EESI or BCSE would be happy to follow up if you have any questions about some of the content that you're hearing today. So now we have an opportunity to hear from some of the industries get their reaction on the trends that Ethan described. So we've got an excellent panel here. I'm going to sit with them and introduce them in turn. And then when we're done with about 15, 20 minutes of discussion here at the panel, we're going to open it up to all of you so you can ask some questions. We really look forward to that. And I would just say it looks like everybody has a seat so we're good and there's still a little bit of food if people are hungry and you didn't get anything. We will not be offended if you get up to grab something to eat because we really appreciate your time. So let me introduce our panelists. First we have to my left, Carrie Anand, Executive Director of the Biomass Power Association. Then next to her is Emily Duncan, Director of Federal Government Affairs for National Grid. Then to her left is Charles Hernick, Director of Policy and Advocacy at CREZ Forum. And at the end is Ana Pavlova, Vice President of Government Relations for Schneider Electric. And I've asked each one of them just to take a few minutes at the start to introduce themselves, talk a little bit about how they fit into the energy industry. And some of them have a few slides that they might talk a little bit about and give a little bit more in-depth discussion on. And then I have a few questions that I'm going to ask here from the panel. So Carrie, can we start with you? And if you do want me to put up the slide that you had suggested, I will do that for you. Yeah, if you don't mind. Thank you. Thanks for the tech support, Emily. Oh, and, you know, okay. Here you go. I think I got yours. That's the one. That's the one. Hi, so thanks for having me here today. I'm excited to be part of this BCSC and EESI event to great organizations. I'm glad they were able to put this together. So first off, I'm Carrie Annan with the Biomass Power Association. And I wanted to just see a show of hands. Are people familiar with biomass power? Good. Good. I like to see that. So just want to make sure. I will review exactly who I represent. I'm actually here on behalf of Covanta Power. Covanta, they're one of our members. And they actually do waste energy. And they're one of our biomass power association members. We represent domestic power plants that use mostly forestry residues. So, you know, when you're harvesting lumber for lumber operation, you're going to split off the tops and limbs and the materials, the parts of the tree that you can't use to make into another product. That's what my members use to generate power and waste energy, as you would imagine, is garbage, going to a waste energy facility. They take out the recyclables and then use the rest to generate electricity. So just so you know what we're talking about here, all the plants we're talking about are in the U.S. So just to give you that context. We provide base load power. So that's 24-7 power generation using materials that often need to be dealt with in some way. They're going to sit on a forest floor and decompose. They might contribute to a wildfire if they're not used or cleared out of a forest. So, you know, I just wanted to give you an idea of why our industries are important in the larger kind of renewable context. And I chose this slide because I wanted to show you, you know, I think it illustrates very well how little growth our two industries have had in the last decade or so. We're in green. And the last time you can really clearly see any growth for biomass, biogas and waste energy is back in 2013. And there's a good reason for that. The reason is that policy at the time really supported biomass and waste energy growth. That was during the days of the 1603 program. So our members were able to really apply for grants and build facilities as a result. Since then, there hasn't been a lot in the way of policy to promote biomass and waste energy growth. We're currently expired under the section 45 tax credit program. So, you know, that's something I wanted to point out. You know, it takes a lot longer to build a biomass or waste energy plant than it might for some other renewables. So, you know, the point that I'm trying to make here is that policy directly affects the growth of renewable energy. And the policy over the last few years really hasn't benefited our industries and enabled us to grow like it has some other industries. I also wanted to point out to you, you know, while we're talking about policy, we're talking about policy driving growth, that we actually have a policy proposal that would help drive growth with for biomass and waste energy. So, and that is including electricity and the renewable fuel standard. Technically, it is already included in the RFS. When Congress passed RFS-2 back in 2007, electricity was an accepted pathway. Electricity using the fuels that we're talking about that our industries use. However, the EPA just hasn't basically gotten around to implementing electricity as part of the program. This is important because this is something that could keep our facilities online and doing the important things that we do, like taking on low-value wood waste and flammable, you know, low-value wood that we're clearing off the forest floor in places like California, using garbage and a lot of these facilities need to participate in the RFS and technically they're entitled to do that. So, you know, as we look at the electrification of the transportation sector, this is especially important. Using biomass or waste energy to power a vehicle, the EPA has said is something like 96% less carbon emitting than gasoline. So, you know, this is very important to keep these renewables online as more and more vehicles are charging up with the grid. So, anyway, that's what I wanted to talk about today and I'm happy to talk to anyone else about the RFS and our proposal after this. Thank you very much, Carrie. Next, we're going to hear from Emily Duncan with National Grid. Thanks, Lisa, and thanks to BCSE and EESI for having me. So, as Lisa mentioned, I'm with National Grid. We're a multinational energy company. Here in the U.S., we're a utility. So, we serve about 6 million customers, about 20 million people in three states, New York, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island. We have 16,000 employees, and last year alone, we invested about $3.3 billion in infrastructure in the U.S. And our goal, kind of what we're projecting right now is we're going to invest a further $10 billion over the next five years. What I wanted to focus on is the slide that you have up there, which is the greenhouse gas emissions. I really like this slide because I think it showcases the efforts that the power sector has put in, particularly the utility industry, in reducing our greenhouse gas emissions. At the end of 2017, or as of the year end 2017, the electric power sector CO2 emissions were 20% below what we've seen in the 2005 baseline. And each of the utilities, or many of the utilities across the country, including National Grid, have set our own goals for how to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Our goal is to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions by 80% by 2050, and that's targeted to 1990 baseline level. And in order to do that, to achieve that, we really have looked or focusing our efforts on three different areas. The first is power generation. So the part of the country we're in, we really can't own generation. We're in a deregulated market. So what we've done is we've created a subsidiary called National Grid Ventures, which looks at buying up renewable energy, energy storage, et cetera, throughout the country. And they recently completed an acquisition of Geronimo Energy, which has a portfolio and pipeline of hundreds of megawatts of wind and solar generation, mostly in the Midwest. And just to give you a sense of kind of where we need to go in that portion of our emissions. So right now in the region in which we operate, we're at 45% zero carbon electricity supply. We need to get to 67%, and that's by 2030 alone. The second area we look at is heat. Our part of the country is actually one of the few areas where we still have a lot of customers, hundreds of thousands of customers who are still using oil to heat their homes. It's rather dirty. We'd like to convert a lot of those homes to natural gas if we can. And so we need the capacity in the Northeast to do that. In order to reach this, again, this 80 by 50 goal that we have, we need to double the rate of energy efficiency retrofits and triple our rate of oil to gas heating conversions by 2050. And then finally, the third sector we're looking at is transportation. As you can see on this slide, transportation has now become the top emitting greenhouse gas emitting sector in our economy. And we see that as a real issue and a real part where we can play a great role. And so we right now have about a million EVs on the road that's across the country. In our particular part of the country, we need more than 10 million EVs on the road by 2030. And the way we can help do that is create the infrastructure so folks can charge their EVs when they're driving across New England and the Northeast. We have about, just to give you a sense, we have about 75,000 EVs on the roads today up in New York, Massachusetts and Rhode Island. And so we've been incredibly supportive of the CAFE standards. We're very supportive of the EV tax credit. We'd like to see the cap on that raised. We've been working closely with the original equipment manufacturers to make that happen. So I would say that's kind of a number one tax priority for us right now and would certainly appreciate support for that. So I think I'll leave it there and look forward to your questions. Thanks. Thank you very much. And Charles, you're next. It might take me a second to pull up some of your slides. So please go ahead, but I will get them up there for you. Sure. I was the last person to respond to the email, so that's why it's... No, that's nothing to do with it. I was just having... Thank you, Lisa, for having me here. And thanks to BCSE and EESI for putting on. What is really an informational event every year when the fact book comes out? It's a pleasure to really dig through and try to understand some of the details. And it helps inform me personally in my work. My name is Charles Hernick. I work for an organization called Citizens for Responsible Energy Solutions Forum. We're based here in Washington, D.C. And focused primarily on federal policy. We do a little bit of work in states. I'll probably cite some of those examples, too. We're an all-of-the-above clean energy organization focused on market-based approaches. We're a conservative organization. One of the major events that we put on over the course of the year is National Clean Energy Week, which is the last week in September. And I hope you will write that down. If you didn't celebrate last year, that's okay. It was only the second year that we did it. But this year will be the third, and so we're looking for additional participation and continued growth. So the two slides... And this is one of two slides that I wanted to piggyback on and get back to. This is the levelized cost of energy. So this is essentially the cost that it takes to develop energy. And if you're an investor and looking at making these decisions, what you can see is that the first four basically cheapest and kind of sure bet from a pricing standpoint projects are renewables. And that's a really big deal. Because what it means is that in terms of the menu of options for energy supply, renewables have made it. And there's a new status quo that is out there in terms of what the costs look like. Now, that doesn't mean that renewables are immune from any price changes. And indeed, over the course of the last couple of years, we've had a lot of conversations in Washington D.C. focused on tariffs, focused on tax credits, and indeed some of these tax credits for renewables are phasing down or still need to be paired up. And then also there are increasing siting challenges. There's more penetration for solar and wind, some of the lowest hanging fruit and easy places to build get chewed up. So it's not that we've made it over the hump and that we're running at full speed towards a renewable energy future. There are certainly some variables that are still to be determined, but in general, the scenario is quite good. And so from my organization's standpoint, one of the things that we want to do is help make sure that there is market certainty and that we can work to eliminate some of the unknowns and maybe that's something that we can get into a little bit more. But Lisa, if you could go to the corporate procurement slide, that'd be great too. So this is a big deal and I want to pause here for a little bit because we're a market-based organization and we looked at the supply first and this is what we look at in terms of demand. And the take-home that you should leave today is that demand for clean energy is surging and that's demonstrated by these corporate procurements. But I think if you ask yourself and if you sit in any bar or restaurant or you're riding the metro and if you were to talk to the person next to you about what is climate change and what do we need to do, in general folks understand that we need to invest more in clean energy and I think that what you're seeing is that the rubber is meeting the road right there and one of the things that Ethan mentioned is that there are some usual tech companies that are up there but you also see AT&T, Walmart and ExxonMobil at the top of the chart and that's a pretty big deal because what it also means is that these are companies that are focused on locking in a good deal for a long period of time. And so it's not just for the environmental attributes that they're doing it it is also for that cost certainty that they're able to lock in with long-term power purchase agreements for renewables. That's not to say that the marketing benefits aren't there. Anybody who watched the Super Bowl either for the football or just for the ads may have noticed that Budweiser took out an ad focusing and telling the world that their beer is brewed with 100% renewable power, wind power. That's a lot of money for an ad. And so you've got to think of who Budweiser is targeting there and trying to expand their beer market but really meet that demand that people have and are increasingly going to make in their day-to-day decisions. So that's one where if we get into a little bit of the policy one of the things that I'm particularly interested in is understanding how we can help supply meet this surging demand that is manifesting itself both at the corporate level but in the day-to-day decisions that customers are making. Thank you, Charles. Anna? Great. Thank you. So this is actually a perfect segue in addition to clean energy. What else can corporations do? And I'm going to talk about energy efficiency a little bit more in detail. So I'm with Schneider Electric. We're a global energy management company. We're also a manufacturer. We operate in every state in the U.S. We have 20 manufacturing facilities and 70% of world's buildings have some kind of a Schneider product in it. Mostly you don't see them because they're electrical and you probably don't want to stick your hands into electrical sockets or panels or anything like that. So from our perspective we're also our members of the... We've committed to procure 100% of our energy from renewables by 2030 as well. But energy efficiency, and if we can go maybe Lisa to the slide that talks about the rising energy consumption or the consumption that rose in the last year. So there is a solution around that. And well, there are many solutions around that. But in particular when we think about what Ethan was talking about earlier well energy efficiency as we know it is usually you're buying or replacing your HVAC system or your heater or you're putting more insulation in. That is traditional energy efficiency and it is very important and obviously if you live in a colder climate you may want to have better insulation. But for situations where there's a long spell of cold or a long spell of heat for example and you're trying to deal with that as a community and on a broader basis than just an individual home the one other thing that often gets forgotten is the actual active energy management of the buildings. For example if you're thinking about an average commercial building, office building 60% of that building on average every day goes unused. And yet there is still all sorts of stuff happening. The air conditioning is blowing or the heat is going, televisions are on in rooms that are not being occupied and even if you've got the lighting controls figured out you probably don't really have any of your other appliances being managed. And it's really fairly easy to do. There are energy management control systems that go into the building that can optimize the use of the energy in the building every day to make the best out of it. And that's really important. It's technologically, well it's much less expensive than an HVAC replacement and frankly it can be done in old buildings. It doesn't have to be in a new building. You can actively manage and extract the maximum performance out of an old building with old equipment. Now you should maybe want to consider buying new equipment as well but my point is this is not some, let's only look at the top 5% of the buildings in the world or something like that. And one of the ways that other countries in the world try to get that maximum efficiency is through benchmarking. In many countries in the world there is mandatory benchmarking for large commercial buildings. In the U.S. it's just a city by city situation so I think about 12 cities do that now and then some smaller cities are looking into it. And then Europe actually is saying, okay so benchmarking is great in the sense that it tells us what the energy consumption is in each individual building but what about that? So what about buildings that are using way too much energy and so they are trying to drive that optimization and maximum performance from buildings with a new directive that Europe had passed last year. In the U.S. we don't have any of these policies. It's really an ad hoc basis. Some states are looking at that. From our perspective we prefer to have a universal policy so certainly in a national level it would be nice to have those things. But they can really address that issue of higher energy consumption but when the weather is in a prolonged something spell that you're not used to whether too hot, too cold, too wet or something else. Thank you. Thank you very much. I'm going to ask one question here but then I'm going to go to all of you so just get ready with your questions and before I do I just wanted to do a couple of quick shout outs. The first one is to the sponsors for the fact book project. A few of them are up here and we couldn't do this project every year without their generous support so I want to thank them. And then I also wanted to mention a side project through a sister organization we have called Faces Behind the Facts and that's exactly what it is. It is profiles of employees in clean energy sectors throughout the country. It really gives you a sense of what everyone is doing every day, the breadth and diversity of this really strong employment base in the country. So this also you can see off the BCSE and the Clean Energy Business Network websites and again just thinking about the fact book materials you're seeing all of that again is available for free online off of our website so I encourage you to look at it. So my first question I'm going to get this back to our cover slide. Great. So my first question relates to policy. Each one of you have spoken a little bit about policy and how the federal government could play a constructive role. The House of Representatives today there's a number of very important pieces of legislation that are being developed whether it be infrastructure, budget and appropriations bills, tax policy, proposals looking to address climate change and there are more. So I just wanted to give each one of you an opportunity to speak to the things that you're looking at for this Congress and how they could be helpful to your industry and why. I'll start with you, please. Sure. So I mentioned a couple during my little talk. One of them is tax extenders. As I mentioned we're currently expired under the tax code so that our eligibility for the so-called PTC, ITC production tax credit investment tax credit expired on December 31st of 2017 so that's why doing tax extenders it's a conversation we have every year but it's very important that we get our the deadline extended through last year and hopefully this year too and then moving forward as well and then I will just mention again the RFS that's really our biggest priority and as I talked about I don't think I really got into the details here but this is something that doesn't require any additional funding from Congress it doesn't require any new legislation it really is just getting the EPA to process applications from electricity producers to participate in the RFS and according to the EIA last year there were 323 million RINs that the electricity sectors, biogas, biomass and waste to energy combined would be able to generate or they're basically being left on the table which is a lot and the value of that is quite a bit so if you're interested in learning anything more about that go to RFSpower.com that's our website for our coalition for the biogas waste energy and biomass industries to get this done and you know Carrie you mentioned in addition to biomass, biogas and waste to energy other extenders in the power arena are the energy efficiency extenders as well as extenders for hydropower and geothermal and you know others can chime in as well but it's not just the biomass industries there are many industries in the energy sector that have not had their tax provisions extended great, thanks Lisa because I was going to say in the tax space I mentioned the EV tax credit which is our number one tax priority we're also very supportive of the energy storage credit the energy efficiency credits and creating parity across the technologies in sections 45 and 48 I would say the other big priority for us is an infrastructure bill we would love to see an infrastructure bill that considers more than just roads and bridges obviously we think those are important looking at the electric grid as part of our nation's infrastructure is important to us so we would love to see something like that get across the finish line and I think as part of that infrastructure bill looking at public-private partnerships finding coordination between agencies on the electrification of transportation and expanding our clean vehicle infrastructure I think would be kind of the top priorities within there certainly appropriations are important making sure that we have R&D funding we work very closely with our national labs on a variety of projects so ensuring they have the funding they need to work with us on things that are important to the utility industry and our nation's grid and then finally I'll touch on workforce development the utility industry I think like a lot of industry sectors is starting to see a large swath of retirements the average age of a national grid employee is 44 which is not quite retirement age I wish it were but it's not but we do have about a third of our employee segment is going to be retiring of course the next few years and so bringing on people who can do just the day-to-day jobs of pipe fittings and getting on a bucket truck and fixing electric transmission lines but then also interconnecting solar we are now interconnecting more distributed generation solar systems than we are converting folks to natural gas that was the first time we did that was actually last year when those numbers kind of switched so having folks on board who can do so we've been working closely with the center for energy workforce development that's kind of the partner organization for utilities and trying to push some policies forward I know congressman rush has his bill out there blue collar green jobs bill we're looking closely at that so there's lots of things in this space that we think congress can do to kind of help drive utility industry but also frankly more importantly greenhouse gas emissions and our climate priorities yeah thanks I think this is an interesting because part of what we do need to focus on is how we can create more consistency for investors and project planners in this space and so to kick a dead horse that's a bad it's a terrible analogy but to focus on extenders if you don't know what that is you should like write it down and follow up and chat with us a little bit afterwards because essentially imagine yourself you're a coupon shopper and you're going to buy your groceries you're going to buy whatever the issue of extenders makes it so that you don't know if you're going to get your price break until sometimes a year after you've bought your groceries or done your shopping or whatever it is so it's basically the worst possible strategy that we could have for trying to incentivize a level playing field for all renewable energy types to be able to compete and so that's that's one area that my organization is is interested in I think that the other thing too is that you know within with the new congress there are lots of calls for big bold sexy ideas to deal with climate change but I would encourage to not forget that there has already been a lot of good legislation that has been written over the past couple of years just hasn't been passed both on written by democrats by republicans cosponsored by both parties and that there's really a lot of fuel out there that we could be utilizing bills that have been written and introduced on carbon capture storage and how to modernize and move to the next generation of nuclear power how to streamline regulations not sacrifice safety or environmental controls but how to streamline regulations so that we could actually see more development of nuclear and large-scale hydro in particular so there are a lot of opportunities for near-term action and I would encourage folks to also look at some of the stuff that has already been drafted and you know really close at hand yes actually there's also an energy efficiency bill that's been around for bipartisan fashion and was passed by 80 votes in the senate I think five times now it's McKinley Welch on the side and we're from Welch McKinley and so we're nice to actually see that pass one day but I actually wanted to talk about one other item and that when we were talking about electric vehicles and it just reminded me that we spent so much time thinking about the transportation center when it comes to light-duty vehicles we often collect the other really big part of emissions contributor to our economy and that is ports ports and airports but certainly ports and one of the global trends that's happening now is ports are reducing their emissions because believe it or not pretty much everything in the port runs on diesel and they're backup generators this is not something you actually would normally want to have in your regular sort of neighborhood even and that's when ports try to expand they get a lot of opposition because this is diesel emissions from backup generators and so the idea is that if you electrify a port and you bring certain automation and automation does not actually in this case mean job loss it means taking people who have to manually go up crane and then pull on ropes with the help of the diesel generator they now can actually sit in front of a computer and an automated system does that and they just monitor that process and it also actually interestingly brings incredible energy savings and emissions reduction so it's both the automation side the electrification i.e. getting rid of the diesel generators and that can be something that should be considered part of port modernization because when ships come in and they have technology that can allow them for example to plug in to a port that has the electrical system and the ship has an electrical system they're going to look for that port they don't want to go to a port that doesn't have anything or it takes 10 weeks or 10 days to unload when they can unload automatically in five and so that becomes an issue for us competitiveness it also becomes an issue for individual state competitiveness because if there's a port right next door that's got all these things then the port next to it that doesn't may lose out on business and so from that perspective we have an interesting policy challenge most federal money when appropriations gives money to ports it goes for dredging so it's the Water Appropriations Committee that handles that issue so there's not a good framework that is set up for on-shore modernization the stuff that I'm talking about and so transportation committee is interested in that idea and I think it's really not even necessarily about money it's just about saying what if we're going to give you federal dollars for whatever are you considering some of these competitive elements like electrification getting rid of diesel doing beneficial through automation and energy efficiency improvements and emissions reductions I think that's the questions you may want to ask when you're thinking about funds for ports thank you everyone that was excellent so now I'd like to see if there are any questions from our audience I see this gentleman here and if you could just introduce yourself I think because we have a web audience we're going to my name is Kirk Renaud I'm a small business owner and it seems like we ought to talk a little bit about carbon pricing here and I understand that there's a bipartisan bill out there there have been many of them that are suggesting carbon pricing and dividends and this is something that can send the right price signals that should help all of our industries move forward together and I wonder about your organizations your feelings about is that at all possible to see progress on this year sure so we certainly support carbon pricing at national grid I think we think it should apply not just to electricity but to all fuels and I think where kind of the rubber hits the road for us is trying to figure out what you do with the revenues and so we certainly think that a portion of the revenues should go to vulnerable communities that was one of the I don't know if you've seen Congressman Tonko put out his climate principles like it was last week or the week before and we read a lot of them resonated with us maybe all of them resonated with us but one of the ones we were clearly keyed into is part of our job frankly at national grid is keeping energy affordable we have a lot of customers and that's probably the biggest bill they pay every month and so making sure that we keep that affordable is important to us and so when we look at carbon pricing we are trying to figure out what's the most effective way to use the revenues but it's certainly a policy that we support and we like to see it get some legs here in the next couple of years hopefully sooner maybe from our perspective we also very much support carbon pricing we also are very interested frankly in other regulations such as financial disclosures and how those items can actually force corporations to look a little bit beyond the immediate quarter and as well as the banks and the lenders and Wall Street but certainly carbon pricing is one of the mechanisms we're very interested in we would certainly want it on a national level not on a state by state level that would be a bit of a nightmare we're very interested in how Canada is going to address their new so they used to be in case you're not following that these to have a several of their provinces had a carbon tax and now they've instituted a nationwide program and so now they've got to bring up everybody and it's a challenge but it's certainly something that we would very much be interested in a kind of a realistic and thoughtful debate on this issue in the US as well that's okay Kirk thanks for your question I think it's an important one the focus on carbon pricing and I think it's actually pretty interesting to see how much the dynamics have changed around the discussion on climate carbon pricing even in just the last few months with the talk of the Green New Deal suddenly carbon pricing went out the window and it was a focus on firm federal mandates and it's a very different approach than something that is focused on carbon pricing my organization we're not we just don't view carbon pricing as realistic in the most near term but it is realistic and actually happening in a lot of states you look at the regional greenhouse gas initiative which is a compact of northeast and mid-atlantic states they're already doing carbon pricing they've been doing it for over a decade plus California and you're looking at Virginia and New Jersey by the end of the year joining a carbon pricing a cap and trade system and that's already a third of the US economy that's covered by a cap and trade system or has some type of carbon price for the energy generation sector the other thing that's interesting is that it's not that the federal government doesn't price carbon at all either last year one of the least told stories about carbon pricing and federal action was related to carbon capture and sequestration in the 45Q tax credit which is essentially a price for injecting carbon dioxide underground and that's a big deal because that sets up how the federal government is interested in playing as their John Q. Taxpayer Uncle Sam is willing to pay to eliminate emissions in that way so what we're seeing is maybe a challenging setup of federalism where states are having positive carbon prices and the federal government has started having a negative carbon price valuing it in different ways now that doesn't make for a lot of market efficiency but what I would love to see is to figure out how we can if we do establish carbon prices establish them at the most local level possible because I'm not convinced that a single federal price is the most appropriate either because if you buy a hamburger we got our lunch for free so this is a bad example maybe but if you buy a hamburger tonight the price that you're going to pay in Washington DC and where I grew up in Minnesota and it's different than it is in Oklahoma and different than it is in Napa Valley and that's fine because what we want to see is we want to see different prices in the lowest possible price for carbon because I think if we're really serious about eliminating carbon emissions we want it to do it for the lowest possible price so we can eliminate as much as possible as quickly as possible and so I think that that's another element that is a real challenge with carbon pricing is what's the right price to drive the action that we're really looking for and there are a lot more questions than straightforward answers at this point which adds to the political hurdles that I think we do see right now and I will chime in here too for biomass we're certainly interested in seeing where the carbon pricing conversation goes we did a study two years ago where we found that comparing a biomass power plant to a similar size natural gas facility the biomass plant was something like 115% better less carbon emitting than the natural gas facility in a year so that was an encouraging result to the study for us and then as Charles mentioned the possibilities of comparing carbon capture with bioenergy that's the only feasible way that we have right now actually taking carbon out of the atmosphere so I think there's a lot of potential there and we're certainly watching the debate and interested to see where it goes I would just comment from a business council for sustainable energy perspective we have a long standing focus on the integration of emissions and energy policy we support market based mechanisms that put a price on carbon we also know that in addition to whatever market structures we put in place we still need those complementary policies they may come in the form of an energy policy or a tax policy or even our D&D so as congress is looking across all the things that it's going to be working on it can make progress on emissions reductions even if we don't pass a national structure this year and I think we need to seize any and all opportunity we have to increase investment in energy efficiency renewable energy and other clean generation options and then looking again as Ana was saying at opportunities for modernization of our economy and being able to tap into you know automatic controls that will really optimize our productivity so there's a lot we can do to help to talk to you about it but please take a look at our website because we have our climate change statement on there which goes into what we look for in terms of carbon pricing and market based mechanisms so thank you for the question there is a question yes please introduce yourself thank you Monica Gowen with the Geological Society of America Geoscience Policy Office and I'm wondering about the panel's thoughts on wheeling strategies for communities and some of the obstacles to better wheeling strategies for renewables both in terms of increasing the availability as a power resource and then also to break down some of the barriers in the public's mind about sources of energy that have to go online I might I don't know if Ethan wants to speak about this topic but if Ethan wants to we'll go ahead does anyone want to start I mean I can just take it at the highest level there's different regulatory regimes guiding the movement of renewable energy within different markets in the country and a lot of that happens either at the regional level or at the state level and there clearly are there's infrastructure barriers moving renewables from one part of the country which is a transmission issue there might be grid modernization issues and then there are regulatory structures that were put in place long long time ago that don't respond to the market today so overall when we look at those types of questions we're saying what are the market structures do they meet our needs today and into the future and in many cases they need to be updated and do they value the full stream of benefits from the panelists whether it be for reliability or for energy efficiency providing demand response or energy efficiency into the system or taking renewables where they're generated and getting them to load so we need to we didn't talk about it as much but corporate procurement requires specific provisions either at the regional or state level to allow companies to directly procure and sign these contracts so a lot more needs to be done and it is a very complex set of institutions, rules and just kind of the way things get done so we think we need to be looking in a refreshed way again at what all the different values of different resources bring and then how to create market rules that allow them to deploy so that would be anyone yeah, I think maybe the thing that I'll follow up on the slide that I reshared was the slide on corporate procurement and that matters, the flip side of that coin is that you see the surging corporate procurement, that's good because it means that these companies are able to get what they want but you also have to realize that if the writing is on the wall that what people want is more clean energy they want more renewables Facebook, AT&T, Walmart they want more power than I do as an individual and so when you see communities and corporations setting these goals for 100% renewable and kind of really achieving that next level it's very difficult because right now what we're seeing is it's only the biggest corporate players that are able to really get it their way in the markets that they're choosing to work in so there is a lot that needs to be done to modernize infrastructure and allow consumers as individuals to get what they want in an easier way and there's a that's easy for me to say like right here and it's very hard to do because all of my life I have walked into the bathroom in the morning to turn on the light switch and it comes on the lights come on it's because of 100 years of built infrastructure and we can't forget that that there's a lot of capital investment that's already taken place that has produced a reliable resilient grid that we have today and to modernize that is a tremendous undertaking I guess the other thing I'd say is I used to work for the solar industry and we looked at Texas as a real kind of hot bed market they kind of had this theory of if you build it they will come and so they built out their CREZ system which CREZ something renewable energy zone I can't remember what the C stood for and they now have an incredible amount of wind in that state and certainly the solar is not far behind I think where we're operating up in the northeast we continue to face problems and this is true I think in other parts of the country as well in building out infrastructure right and people don't care whether it's a transmission line bringing hydro or wind or solar or a natural gas pipeline they just plain don't want it and in their backyard or you know a few miles away and so trying to work with our communities to better make the case for why that transmission is needed the clean that it often is bringing into their communities continues to be an uphill battle for us and one that we believe strongly and are working towards but I think it's going to be an ongoing struggle for us and figuring that out and certainly at the federal level I think what helps is kind of something that they have been working on for many years is kind of creating a one stop shop for federal permitting and siting right so kind of getting all the agencies together and having one point of contact for companies like ours that are trying to build out this infrastructure so we're not going to have 15 agencies over and over again to try to move the ball forward so we certainly appreciate Congress and the administration working on creating that one stop shop for lack of a better term but I think your question is really valid and it's a really important one is as we build out more and more of this generation how do we get it to the places where we need it most Any other questions? Anyone on this side? Yep, gentlemen right there, thank you Thank you, Sullivan Gassman from Congresswoman Norton and my question was for Charles regarding you mentioned nuclear power as energy source that you thought had some potential or something we would want to invest in I wondered if you'd expand a little on that given what we've seen even in some of these slides showing how nuclear power is sort of stagnated and remaining around 20-19% of our production It's not even on the levelized cost of energy slide due to lack of new build for nuclear power the nuclear the way that we understand it and have viewed it in the past we need to change that mindset and I think that the future is smaller it's focused on small modular reactors that's where a lot of US policy interest is headed and in fact where some countries are strategically headed I was in Canada last year at their launching of a national strategy to identify opportunities and deployment for small modular reactors so that's basically reinventing and looking at something in a completely different way for the Canadian landscape like literally their landscape it makes a lot of sense because they have a population that is very much spread out over a huge landmass and so you need high concentrations of power in disperse areas to be able to make it work the challenge in the United States is going to be that you're competing against really cheap solar and wind to develop that next generation of small modular reactors so we're going to have to get creative to think about how we can deploy these technologies you know we're talking there's the not in my backyard problem that renewables face and then you're talking about nuclear it's like a very different conversation that you're suddenly having in your community stakeholder meeting right so I think that we need to look at how the Department of Energy utilized the Department of Defense I live in Annapolis there the Naval Academy is situated there's plenty of good security where if a nuclear energy nuclear power source were cited on a military installation well we're already used to a certain level of risk and benefit associated with that operation and so to look at how new nuclear can be tested in different places in the United States I think is an important one but to also look internationally on how we can work strategically with partners I know that we've been working closely with United Arab Emirates and a few other countries to develop that next generation of nuclear power internationally even if we can't do it here because when it comes to nuclear the other folks that we're competing with Russia in particular don't hesitate to sign new agreements to build nuclear power plants for example and that's very much to our long term strategic challenge thank you yes Ethan would like to make a comment so this way I don't know those are all good points on nuclear the other thing to keep in mind is the existing fleet that we have that about as you know 19% of all our power comes from nuclear half of all of our zero carbon powers from nuclear at the moment and those reactors many of them are aging there's about 100 of these plants around the country and to my mind that's the bigger challenge slash priority because if we have a dozen years to deal with climate change we can't afford to have any zero carbon generation coming offline particularly not at mass scale so I think to my mind that's the bigger focus we as a firm and this is not again not fact book our firm sort of view I'm certainly much I'm not terribly bullish on small modular reactors I think it's an important technology that we need to invest in I think we should be investing in all new technologies that could potentially provide zero carbon but in the short short run we are starting to see renewables plus batteries become so cost competitive that it may under price anything we've got probably five or ten years easily of SMR research and development probably required maybe more before we get to any kind of scale but again I'm not against it it's just I think we our view in our terms of our long term forecast we start to see solar plus storage and wind plus storage start to make a much sooner impact before those other technologies next Lisa just one thing I'd add on that too that I think is often lost in this conversation is just the tax base that infrastructure creates in communities I used to way back when I used to work on nuclear quite a bit when I was an attorney and if you talk to the communities that have nuclear power plants in them a lot of folks really love them they create high power high paying jobs you know six figure jobs and they are almost single handedly paying for some of the school systems in the communities in which they operate because they have such a large tax base and the same goes for utility infrastructure national grid pays a billion dollars annually in property tax we need that tax base so I think we also need to look at infrastructure as a job creator and a tax base provider and that's really important plays an important role in a lot of these communities thank you I think I'm going to wrap it up now if anyone wants we just go down the line any closing comments could be brief just anything you want to say as we wrap this up thanks again for having us and I just want to you know remind you that biomass power it's using resources that are available and we should support those and look at RFSPower.com if you want to learn more about what I was talking about with the RFS I just want to say thank you for having me I think it's a really inspiring time to be on Capitol Hill I hope you all are enjoying this time because I think we're having conversations around climate and energy like we haven't had in many years probably about a decade so it's a great time to be in this industry and so I hope you all are gleaning everything you can out of what you're doing every day so thanks for being here yeah thanks for the opportunity to be here and thanks to you all for your attention I think that what you take away is that you know there are a lot of opportunities out there for clean energy and for energy efficiency the devil is in the details so that's where the hard work of legislating and making decisions really does lie you know anyone to take my pessimism for a federal carbon price to mean that we can't be focusing on immediate actions because I think that it kind of bothers me when people are like well we need a 2021 strategy and I'm like we need to address these problems today and so that's why my organization is looking for that low hanging fruit we've proposed a policy that would establish a voluntary federal framework that would help companies and individuals track their own carbon emissions and track corporate procurements that was one of the things that I did talk about the corporate procurement part and at the same time you gotta realize that if folks are making these public statements they perceive an economic advantage to that and we want to assure that there's consumer protection associated with those statements that folks are making and so as you open up the wall street journal daily and notice that more and more people are making these claims we do want to make sure that folks are following up on those those claims and investing in renewables as they say that they are very glad to see you all here thank you and to echo what Charles was saying on the carbon piece I think same goes for infrastructure if we can't get a massive bill passed there are plenty of smaller opportunities and I hope you do if you have questions come to us and we can talk about some of the more targeted approaches that we can take thank you so much great well on behalf of the business council for sustainable energy and EESI thank you again for your time and look forward to following up and having some good conversations have a great day bye