 Good morning everyone welcome to our briefing this morning that EESI is very very proud to be Cosponsoring with NIMA the National Electrical Manufacturers Association My name is Carol Werner and I'm the executive director of EESI the environmental and energy study Institute And of course the topic today before us is innovative technologies to strengthen the grid Last week we held a briefing looking at resilience building resilience building a greater Reliability into the grid so this is a very good follow-up to that briefing And if you're interested you can look at that online if you were not able to participate in that one last week the whole idea that EESI and NIMA really want to Help us all better understand our what really is at stake how this is such an important issue For us all to understand for policymakers to be aware of for us to be working with Policymakers and the public to better understand what the stakes are. What are the key issues? Why do we care what needs to be involved and indeed all of the solutions that are indeed available? So to start us on our journey this morning to kick off our briefing We are so delighted to have with us a congressman Jerry McNerney from California and a couple things that I just want to say about him first are that he brings to the Congress some very very Important attributes me. Yes. He is a very very good person. He's smart He's personable all of those good things, but he also has a PhD in math He is an engineer. He has owned and well He has operated a wind company So he has been very very much on the ground very very aware in terms of the whole role of technology of Systems of systems thinking how to think about practical solutions What this country needs to really be economically competitive and to really provide good services a strong Economy and a strong environment. So we are delighted to have congressman with Nerny kick off our briefing this morning Congressman Good morning It's really a pleasure to be here because of what this meeting represents as a step forward in in a very important technology a Technology that I was deeply involved in in my career before coming to Congress I did spend a few years developing a smart meter for residential use and Understanding how that would go to use and how that would be a part of the development of our Electrical grid was I am very instructive to me The the electric grid in this country has some very big challenges in terms of meeting the demand in terms of cybersecurity in terms of physical security and in terms of providing energy in an efficient way and Smart grid Technology can meet and help us meet those needs and not only that but it can help create lots of jobs And I've seen that happen as well. So whether you're in wind energy and you want to Integrate into a system with an intermittent power supply or if you're a baseload like Luke Lear Or if you're a customer that wants to make sure that your data is secure The people aren't tapping in and getting your private information to getting your social security numbers and so on Then then what we're going to be talking about here today is very important It's great to see people that are on top of this that are Going to be supporting it and they're actually doing the development. So I welcome you here this morning And I want to see what happens and I'm looking forward to your meeting next week as well So there's a lot of exciting things you guys are on the very tip of the spear so to speak We've got some great panelists that know From their experiences in their part of the world How they can benefit and how you can play in this world. So is there anything else? I'd love to see the environmental aspect of the Environment and Energy Study Institute. We need to reduce pollution. We need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions smart grid technology is going to be a part of that and Providing reliable Energy to this country. It's a national security issue. It's an economic issue And it's something that we need to take seriously if we want America to continue It's role as the greatest country in the world. And so thank you for coming and thank you for participating Thank you for inviting me to say a few words Hopefully inspire people just a little bit more to get what they're going to get done today That's a big that's a big question Energy policy is it's a very Controversial it's very partisan right now there's a lot of folks that are worried about the the trend toward a reduction of coal and the increase in natural gas also As I mentioned this earlier this morning nuclear power is going to have to play a role So I would just say be involved with your representatives. I mean get to know who I'll represent you back home I'll visit them once in a while, you know a lot of what happens in Washington depends on relationships a policy is important But if you know somebody and and they know you and you have something you want them to look at in terms of policy It's much harder for them to say no when they know you personally than when they don't know you I just want to say that much and and so keep involved get to know your representatives Understand the policy issues. I know it's work, but it pays off and our relationships are kind of fun. Anyway Yes, sir Well, yeah, I can there's there's a couple areas first of all There was a physical attack and a substation in California earlier this year or maybe might have been late last year But and and just by luck it it didn't end up taking down the whole Bay Area Electric grid. So I think physical security is very important. We need to understand Where are our what substations what power stations are vulnerable and how to protect them at minimum cost? Effectively, I think that's probably the the most immediate thing. We also know cyber security is a very potential is a very big potential Vulnerability that we might have as well. So those two things Of course depending on where you are in the country if you're in New England You're vulnerable to natural gas supplies And if you're out west, you know how you have the water issues Another issue of very big vulnerability is is natural disasters, which we've seen What happened in in Fukushima? Not only affected Japan, but it affected the whole world in terms of Germany deciding to To discontinue using nuclear power. So there's a number of big threats out there that we need to address and and That's something that's incumbent upon this group to to set your foot into that that frigid water and try and figure out where National polishers should go and give us the the results so that we have some guidance Yes, sir in the back Well, no, I think that's a great question You know the federal FERC Their their role would be to give guidance, but I think the important thing is that we need to have standards that That states and utility companies can agree to And until we have a good set of standards, that's gonna be very hard for the FERC to to enforce any kind of meaningful Reform on a national basis. So I would encourage the the utility companies to to move forward in developing those standards That would be I think the most important thing we could do Nationally before FERC can actually start taking steps. Yes, Peter Well, the answer to that is There is gonna be some potential vulnerability. I don't know how I'm not I'm not Well informed on the details of those installations to answer your question, but Certainly when you introduce online Access from customers, there's gonna be some amount of vulnerability And we need to have the best possible standards and the best possible Equipment out there to make sure that that vulnerabilities aren't exposed and and Exploited Okay, well, you know, we're just Establishing the the bipartisan Smart grid caucus in the house and you might ask your representatives to look into joining that caucus and It'll help us move the ball forward and and keep people informed and I mean, there's some fear out there that a smart grid is gonna lead to a The Breach of personal security Like it's might be related to NSA or something and that's not the case. We need to make sure that people are informed About what the advantages of smart grid technology are so that We can continue to move forward in this very important area And and I'm sure what Congresswoman Nardi just said with regard to the setting up of a caucus on smart grid fits right in with With something that could be very useful for our next speaker who is Karen Waylon Who is the deputy director for state and local cooperation at the? Department of energy and in the office of energy policy and systems analysis and that office and where Karen is she is Buried up to her eyeballs. I think with regard to working on the Qer the quadrennial energy review and While this is a multi-year process They are in the process of doing an immense amount of outreach Talking listening to people across the country coming from every sector of the economy all sorts of interests and concerns and Again to really focus with regard to Concerns about the transmission distribution How we do this in an efficient safe Smart secure way as well as looking at improvements in overall efficiency and really building for a more Resilient and reliable grid and the integration of all of the different kinds of technologies Including an immense amount of renewable energy resources that are becoming available across the country so dr. Wayland has a Long background. She's worked on the hill in Nancy Pelosi's office when a Representative Pelosi was was speaker Dr. Wayland was a senior advisor to her She has done a lot of work on comprehensive energy legislation she has worked with private and Business and nonprofit clients in terms of providing strategic consulting and She also had been the legislative director at the Natural Resources Defense Council and Has directed earth and marine sciences at at earth watch so she brings a wealth of experience and Exposure on both the house and the Senate side as well as working with a whole variety of constituencies and people in both the nonprofit and the Private sector the business sector so Karen. We're delighted to have you with us this morning Thank you, and thank you Carol ESI over my many years in Washington working on energy policy has really been a one of the just Amazing organizations to bring current issues right to the hill and to the public with a whole variety You always set up these great Discussions that really touch on the most current issues of the day So you provide a great public service. Thank you And and we have been very fortunate to work with Nima on the Qer and hopefully much more in-depth over the coming months because again Your members are doing the things that we're actually sort of touching on it Do we but you're actually on the ground implementing and installing and deploying innovative technology so again We look forward to building on that relationship in the coming months as as carsman McNerney noted We all are aware that affordable clean and secure energy and energy services are really essential for the US economy for continuing productivity and competitiveness enhancing our quality of life and protecting our environment and Recognizing that the federal government does have a role in ensuring those energy services the president issued a presidential memorandum Back in January of this year directing his administration to conduct the first-ever quadrennial energy review This is a you know, there are many agencies that do these quadrennial reviews most notably the Defense Department This is a slightly different exercise in that it's an interagency process because there are so many agencies that That have an equity in the energy business or in the energy and in regulating developing supporting energy around the country so it's an interagency process and These quadrennial reviews are set up to provide a policy horizon a four-year policy horizon with a set of recommendations for executive actions possible changes in statute research and development Agendas and a sort of budget and market incentive recommendations When we when we began this process and the president direct us to look at all energy infrastructure We realized that that is a monumental task Both because the energy system in this country is so vast But also because it was the first ever interagency review process So we kind of redefined the term quadrennial We are going to be looking at pieces of the energy system over the next few years And the first piece that we're looking at is transmission storage and distribution That's not just wires and pipes that includes things like rails barges and truck transport because so much energy project The product is moving that way So we'll look at transmission storage and distribution this year and then in the coming years We'll look at sort of upstream downstream end-use demand response And possibly even looking on the third year at supply chains So it that is not to say that in this first year We won't be looking at sort of upstream downstream issues because clearly transmission storage and distribution is the network that connects all of our energy systems but the recommendations that come out in January of 2015 will be focused primarily on that transmission storage and distribution network Why did we choose transmission storage and distribution for the first installment? the The reality is that these are fairly inflexible systems that require vast sums of investment on the order of trillions of dollars and that there is a certain level of uncertainty given the major changes in the energy landscape over the last five years in this country from the new shale gas reserves coming online necessitating pipeline reversals to To the changing role of consumers distributed generation Huge advances in energy efficiency and basically flat demand So these in the last five years this entry energy landscape has changed But our energy transmission storage and distribution systems are not set in stone But they are much more long-lived and and require some sort of long Investment horizon planning and we decided that that was one reason why we should start with transmission storage and distribution And you know those at the same time We've begun working on the with our office of science on a quadranial technology review, which will be of interest to you as well The Department of Energy did the first ever quadranial technology review four years ago And we'll be updating that alongside the quadranial energy review so that we have both a kind of technology based set of recommendations and this larger policy landscapes set of recommendations We are in the process of finalizing our baseline analysis So looking at the business as usual case for our electricity natural gas and liquid fuels pipeline pipeline systems We are deep into a whole suite of analyses Including developing metrics for resilience Including looking at given the nature of the regional nature of energy in this country We're looking at a series of regional fuel resiliency studies We're working with our labs on further analyses and with the goal again of having a draft done in time to help Influence the the next budget cycle. So the final Product hopefully will be out in January of next year, but some preliminary work will start coming out Probably an early fall in order to achieve the goals of the quadranial energy review We really need a robust engagement with external stakeholders And in fact the president's memorandum directs us it has a couple of paragraphs that describe the kinds of Really deep engagement. We need to have with stakeholders everything from tribes state and local governments large and small businesses academics our national labs NGOs labor organizations and other interested parties, so we have begun Are what we call our formal stakeholder engagement process, which is a series of meetings around the country focused on Specific issues within the transmission storage and distribution system and also so for example transmission of petroleum products But also cross-cutting issues like infrastructure siting and state local and tribal issues. We've had three meetings so far We had one that kicked off here in the capital visitor center On vulnerabilities of the energy infrastructure system. We held one in New England It was actually a two-part meeting on infrastructure constraints in New England and Providence and Hartford and then we just held one recently on Petroleum transmission storage and distribution in New Orleans. We've got one tomorrow in San Francisco on the energy water nexus We'll have one on July 11th in Portland And we'll have two meetings on electricity one in the east and one in the west and the first one will hold Will be on the west in Portland If you would like more information on those meetings you can go to our website at energy gov slash qer And we have for all the meetings our goal is to make sure that that the public is aware and can be It can find out any kind of information about who is talking to us about the quadrennial energy review we want these these interactions with stakeholders to be transparent and we have posted the Transcripts of the meetings if we video them or livestream them. They'll be links to the meetings There are statements from the panelists and and a variety of other information that you can find about all the meetings So stay tuned because we're gonna have a very busy summer with lots of other meetings We are beginning to look at some of the things that we're hearing from stakeholders and and and what we're hearing is both Reinforcing some of the things we already knew but also bringing to light some new issues You won't be surprised that some of the things we're hearing American utilities provide high quality reliable services deploying the latest technologies and updating their facilities Utilities are telling us that they find great value in the public private partnership between the federal government and the industry and This is something that congressman McNerney touched on What we're hearing is that that working through NERC and then with FERC To develop standards for the industry the industry has found that very useful We're hearing that redundancy is essential to maintaining the reliability in the face of increasing threats of cyber physical and Extreme weather and also what we're looking at in terms of an additional threat or opportunity a challenge to the system is a growing interdependency of of our electricity and Pipeline systems But the question becomes the cost of both hardening and redundancy can be significant Again the we're hearing that this public private partnership between industry and government is critical for addressing cyber and physical threats Where the US government has the resources to identify threats and provide assistance in defense of energy systems but of course the the private sector also has a Role to play in hardening their systems and and in sharing their own information with the federal government then there's a question about balancing information and data sharing with privacy concerns and and liability and we're hearing from from both Industry and NGOs that this is an issue so that points us to some places where we might look at what the role of the federal government is in Resolving some of the statutory and regulatory uncertainties about data We're hearing that we a lot about grids grid integration, which is not news to anybody here distributed generation We recently heard that even combined heat and power Presents some issues and in terms of integration and we're hearing about the increased use of micro grids and the and the challenges and Opportunities of micro grids in fact on the way here I was reading an article about a new Navigant study that just came out Look projecting that the investments in micro grids in this country will go from four billion dollars By to twenty twenty twenty billion dollars So how you bring those systems online how you maintain reliability How you decide who pays for the cost of both that resilience that increased Resilience but also, you know the system that it's connected to we're going to be big issues in the in the coming Years that we will attempt to tackle through the QER as well In New England we heard from a region that's starting to come together around solutions for natural gas and electricity Constraints, but we also heard some concerns about balancing the region's long-term greenhouse gas Goals with increased use of natural gas and we're also hearing about the the And this is something that we had planned on looking at very closely is is the role of energy efficiency and renewables In in avoided infrastructure we're The sort of kinds of stakeholder feedback we've heard so far kind of fall into three buckets how to operate the system Safely fairly and efficiently efficiently who will be responsible for reliability safety and security and those those fall into the Enforcement new investment standards, etc. And how to allocate costs of resilience measures I'm sure that over the next few months as we conduct more of these meetings and we begin to sort through the Material that we're getting in our our inbox will have lots more questions to that we're hearing Finally we heard a fair amount about electricity during the New Orleans meeting on petroleum transmission storage and distribution We had one port official note that electricity infrastructure is the weakness in the port system We had a pipeline executive noting that in his view the biggest exposure to reliable operation of his company's pipelines as electricity We heard from panelists who noted the need to encourage investment in the hardening of electricity infrastructure by Smaller entities and the need to work sort of county by county or in Louisiana parish by parish to guarantee access after emergencies to help get power restored to Processing and pipeline systems You'll probably be interested in a number of the upcoming meetings. Those are again. I mentioned a few they're all listed on our QER website We've got an infrastructure sightings Meeting planned in Wyoming a gas electricity interdependence meeting in Denver I mentioned the state local tribal issues that'll be in New Mexico And rural electricity issues in Iowa, so stay tuned and and I hope that this is the beginning of a Deep conversation about innovation and how the federal government can help incentivize and and grow That great work. Thank you And we will undoubtedly want to come back to you later in the year the beginning of the year to Hear more about what is really coming out of this process and what are the views and and getting them into this whole Discussion up here even further So thanks for setting that stage and now to sort of look at some of the Opportunities and some of the things that we are seeing Become available in and in terms of addressing some of these questions They're coming available in the private sector want to turn first to Ken Geisler who is the vice president for strategy and some the smart grid division in Siemens He is coming today from Minneapolis Where he is located and he brings over 30 years of management and technical experience in defining designing Developing and also implementing large integrated solutions in the energy industry He had been the chief architect of smart grid with Siemens energy and automation He has served in executive roles in other large international engineering companies So he brings a wealth of experience and is going to really provide kind of an Overview of both what Siemens is doing but kind of looking at the big picture with regard to the challenges and the Opportunities that we see moving forward Ken Thank you, and thank you ESI and Nima for the opportunity speak to all of you today. We do appreciate it We're we'll start out today a little bit with just kind of getting our bearings first Siemens is is a very large International engineering company as you probably all know about a hundred billion in sales and in the United States a little under 25 Billions so very big a lot of employees here and worldwide and honestly in a great degree Focused on all the issues that have been discussed this morning including Some of the references to the previous meetings were advanced building technologies and efficiencies that you gain out at health care systems And others that actually all apply to this this whole picture I am with the smart grid division personally and and we work within kind of the energy community, right? So we have large generation we have Implementation of control centers automation products Protection equipment everything that is necessary actually to drive forward in this market And that's one thing we'll talk about today a little bit in that many of the technologies we need to actually modify modernize and Evolve the grid are already in place out there. They're they're willing and able to be applied in these in these conditions So let's talk a little bit about Where we are where we came from and how we got here and and kind of what where we are now The electrical community the in energy environments that are out there really grew up out of a few things Originally it was driven by the industrialization of of the communities and What you saw is a lot of heavy industrialized areas that would spring up around city centers and With that in first half of the last century we always saw also saw the energization of the family farm So you had these very highly industrialized downtown areas and long skinny lines that went out into the farming community and the mountains to actually Meet the utilities obligation to serve the environment in the last Part of the last century we've seen movement toward this suburbanization picture Whereas people didn't want to live close to where the all the generation of the Energy was being produced. They also did not want to Have their life kind of tied to their jobs So they've spread out and so we ended up with kind of this energized donut or Energized donut hole at any one part of the day where people would drive out to live and the peak goes up and People would actually you know move downtown and work downtown in order to To serve their jobs. So ultimately it became a picture of the infrastructure Popping up the sports community better live work and play environments Now what we're seeing is what we're calling re-urbanization and re-urbanization is kind of a repurposing of the cities and the city centers And what that does is provides more population living in the cities We're seeing the infrastructure necessary to be used but now we have an older infrastructure We're seeing things that in fact are Unusual to the kind of designs that we have as well like the capability to utilize technology to offset your your Energy bill I can put solar on my rooftop I may have an alternate source of power that I can actually pull together and utilize I can have an electric car or perhaps I have other technologies that I can apply to make my life different and actually reduce my energy bill But that has a kind of reverse effect on the utility as well. So what's really happening with the utilities? the utilities themselves Have a large centralized energy grid it goes from the generation on the left of this figure to the transmission Which is a highly interconnected system of high voltage wires and lines to the distribution system, which tends to be quite radio So the reliability issues In this kind of a system typically are more focused on the transmission to distribution system and mainly in the distribution system because you have long radio lines that are being served What's happening is that there's technologies that provide Consumers with options and we're seeing lots more Distributed generation go into that distributed generation was described before but one of those aspects is solar power on your rooftop in Certain sit in certain States, you know the the proliferation of solar power due to the state incentives has actually, you know Overrun the capability utility to support that that kind of ingestion of renewables Within the distribution system the protection system changes the safety of the workers and the people are put in in doubt and The designs need to change so when we look at that kind of a perspective It's a change in the distribution design as well as in the Decentralization of generation generation when we look at it from that perspective as well This is probably the biggest change in you know Since the beginning of the the energization of the United States It's biggest change in the electrical industry in the last hundred years And so when we look at that and we say how do we apply that those designs have to change But there's billions of dollars of equipment in the ground out there And so these systems have to evolve from what they are To where they're going to be in a more decentralized view of the world So rather a large centralized generation and one-way distribution of power It will go to more of a patchwork quilt of I've heard the word micro districts or micro grids here We're calling them energy districts in some senses because micro grids could actually Suffice for themselves and live without connection to the utility at least for some period of time But there's a variety of technologies going into a generational change This isn't going to happen over two to five years You know this is a 10 15 20 year change and you might say where's the money coming from? Well, the money is going to come from the utility shifting their budgets to different designs They've got 30 year designs that have worked very good in the environment that they've had up to now But that's changing and it's changing very rapidly So as more consumers offset their load less are there to subsidize the the rate case if you will and We have actually to see what happens to our business models out of this to support it as well So the utility business models will likely change and need to change in some environment as well So what are the utilities worried about so when I look at a utility and we did a Survey or at least we were involved in a survey with utility dive and They ranked a number of of items To what keeps the utility folks up at night and how do they keep the lights on? I'm not going to go through every one of these you guys can look at the slides But if I boil it down I can boil it down into four things and I heard some of the words Mentioned earlier today reliability, which is what the utilities are there to provide now Reliability of electric power for the long term you know always on Efficiency is the next one say how do I do that effectively and efficiently enough where I can take my existing budgets And I can pair that off into new technologies and new designs that I know have to happen to actually You know continue to move toward this resiliency picture that we're talking about sustainability is the ingestion if you will of Renewable resource the integration renewable resources so that I'm not actually you know as dependent as I was on other Types of technologies that may not be as clean and How do I tie in batteries? How do I and tie in electric cars? How do I tie in all these other potential sources and sinks of power? To actually make this reliability index get to where we need to have it be and then finally there's resilience and The resilience is really how do I sustain a? Problem how well do I go through a big event? How well do I consume? The problem without affecting You know a large number of my customers or at least how do I minimize that? And again this concept of decentralization a generation really actually supports that one of the problems has been that in the sustainability layer the utility is not really controlling The decentralized generation it's going in to offset The energy needs of the the users and so without controlling that it's very hard to dispatch and Guarantee reliability and so there's issues If Then we look at those issues There's a number of technologies that can support it the technologies actually that are there and this is a kind of an eye Chart so forgive me, but if I look at reliability efficiency sustainability and resistance and resilience I Can actually take a picture and give you some examples where it's going in right now with different technologies The technologies are approached in the second column for from the right distribution management systems for control centers substation automation feeder automation Voltage management so more automation and more sensing equipment in the distribution network gets us more control and gets us more Liability it also improves the efficiencies that the utilities are looking for Sustainability is integration of more and more renewable resources and Finally the resilience aspects become in how do we actually utilize the generation that's out and in the distribution world decentralized in a more effective way Just to give you a few examples like there are utilities that have applied this so in those reliability and efficiency layers Generally the utilities can fit that within their existing budgets and existing business models But they're dealing with a 30-year equipment depreciation model And that 30-year equipment depreciation model doesn't necessarily account for Consumers putting in rooftop solar Consumers doing other things to reduce their their bills Okay, in fact, they're they're removing themselves from that aspect of the the rate case In one case you have automation feeder automation and we'll talk about some of that today One of our speakers will talk about automation in the distribution network today in NEC in Virginia the feeder automation supply that actually minimizes the the cause of a problem around the customers that are affected by it and actually automates the reconnection of the customers that can be Reconnected and maximizes the the reliability for it Hawaiian Electric in in Oahu has put in automation systems in their substations that actually Managed those field devices that I just talked about in the field to actually do quite broadly Ranging switching operations to improve reliability and efficiencies They also Provide more information back to the control center so I can find the problem quicker and I can fix faster So my efficiencies go up on core electric has implemented a control center at the distribution level that actually incorporates all these types of equipment The visibility visualizes it to the operator and helps the efficiencies for the utility to address them All those projects efficiency and reliability are generally within the budgets of most electric utilities When you get to the sustainability and resilience and monster changes in design Now we have to find different ways to fund this in different ways to manage it And I can give you several examples of greater sustainability Parker Ranch in Hawaii Pantex is a federal military base in in Texas where they've Driven in much wind and solar and other forms of energy and storage actually to improve their their situations Co-op City in New York actually was was the one place or one of the few places in New York City that Stood up throughout the entire hurricane Sandy event because they had generation. It was CHP Combined heat and power. It was also a microgrid. It operated as microgrid. So it stood up the entire time So only Italy is another example where scenes actually has put in a Microgrid for the the university And it has many of the characteristics that we talked about distributed generation storage and the ability to sustain itself over a period of time So there's things that we need to think about in this generational change and as we look at it from a Congressional standpoint we have to be able to reduce in some way the utilities Kind of implications of its business model if you will right it one way to do that would be to reduce the utility equipment Appreciation schedule from the 30-year picture to a smaller number perhaps five years This would incent in fact it the use of more automation technologies and investment in the grid We need to encourage the state regulators to adopt performance race bait based rate making And that will help in fact to also Get to these resilience issues and other issues that we've talked about We want to incent them to put in automation We want to incent them to put in greater monitoring so I can actually fix problems or even avoid them and Finally we want to ensure that we have the control in the analytics to ensure safety the cyber security issues and other things that we talked about We want to protect the critical infrastructure This is one of the important ideas of the microgrid as we move into something like a hurricane sandy where you know the communities were actually Impacted by this we start talking about sustainability and resilience now you've drawn in other Aspects of the community you've brought in the federal government the state government So what's critical infrastructure and how do we ensure that it's going to stay up and running and that's with local generation and Coordinated efforts with the utility so kind of we're all in the same boat It's not just the utility now you get above the reliability and efficiency levels start talking about sustainability and resilience and we must actually have that covered by the entire contingent and Finally there are ways of actually going after that you know certain states have actually Installed programs to actually begin to address these issues as well as if you look at congressman David Payne's bill HR 2962 it calls for a more preparation response mitigate and recover from disastrous attacks or cyber attacks so any way that the the system can be attacked and the Reliability that the solutions be Approached that is in fact how we're we're trying to address these issues and all these kinds of things add into it So with that I will Thanks very much Ken you touched on a whole variety of issues that I think would be great to be able to delve Into and I think it'll be really useful to look at a lot of the examples that you Already provided about kind of all of the different aspects that Where Siemens is developing and has developed technologies and kind of putting together a whole variety of What I would call kind of hybrid systems in terms of many applications being combined to address reliability sustainability resilience etc So to drill down a little bit further, we're going to have our next speaker Talk about what Their company will help how they are beginning to address this and it's and it's another example Of what they are doing and we're going to hear from a Neil Dauban who is a senior electrical engineer with Commonwealth Edison or as we all know calm Ed Coming to us today from Illinois and a Neil is a senior engineer in distribution standards in engineering Organization and he's currently is serving as the technical subject matter expert supporting equipment design and Standards back to thinking about performance again failure analysis and we clearly want to avoid those failures and construction and maintenance activities for Distribution and automation related equipment So a Neil we welcome you. Thank you Carol. Good morning everyone My name is a Neil Dauban as Carol mentioned I work for Commonwealth Edison in Chicago. I Was asked to at least to give you a very high-level overview of our energy infrastructure Modernization Act and also the smart grid that we have programmed at the Commonwealth Edison briefly we are We are excellent utility company We are the largest integrated energy provider in the United States. We serve about a 6.6 million customers We have bgne that's in Baltimore. It serves about 1.2 million customers Pico is 1.6 million customers on the other hand Commonwealth Edison has 3.8 million customers Out of those 1.1 is just city of Chicago Over service territory is 11,300 square miles and Over peak load was back in July 20 2011 was 23,753 megawatt. It was a hot summer. It was hot So we talk about smart grid There are many definitions out there. So what is smart grid? Smart grid basically in the simplest term is electrical grid that uses information and communication and they work together To improve the efficiency reliability and sustainability of the system It's much more efficient than the convention method that we have The way that we deliver the services. So if something happens right now So you have to call it takes hours to get your power restored But with this we can do that in seconds or in a minute in some cases. You will see that in a later slide So what is smart grid? How is it all done? Smart grid is basically a series of smart devices that put together. We have automated switches Microprocessor relays Distribution automations smart substations that we have the AMI meters So basically those are the meters that we're going to talk about it How it's going to help us to the key components of smart grid What this will do is smart grid will empower customers with information and ability to control energy and consumption and the cost So back in 2011 when Comet decided to embark on this to enhance the system Illinois General Assembly enacted the energy infrastructure Moderization Act called also known as EMA. I know most of you guys from the federal site, but there was a belt to talk through Legislation and I hope your state will also at least adopt some portion of it The main goal with this legislation was to address the four things the regulatory reform There was a key component because that we talked about the funding that we have to have the funding Reliability performance matrix, so we'll talk about that in the first Russian modernization and smart grid investment The prior model that we have it was 100 years old Was developed by the Comet founder Sam and so The model was good, but it was very unpredictable and adequate In some years that we got the return as high as 82% and some years we got as a lowest 17% So when we had the 82% we did have the appetite to invest money into it which we did we started Upgrading of a 34 KV system. Well with the years that we have 17% I don't think that any company will invest if you the rate of return is only 17% So one of the one of the distinctive features of this the new EMA was It was a performance based this performance based formula rate has been used by FERC the federal regulatory Commission for many years the best thing about this The best thing about this is a predictable and repeatable So basically if you do the performance and you show them that you have met all the mattresses You will get at least a reasonable rate of return. So this I think is the one of the best solution out there So I talked about that the performance formulas that what it is So basically if you take a look at it it starts in April and if everything goes well I mean it's not like you submit the bill and do you get the money you have to meet all the performance at the mattresses and by that It takes about a year if you take a look at this I'm not going to go through the whole slide, but it takes about a year if everything goes well The new rate goes in effect in January 1st Just to show you some of the progress that we had done is only been two years We have seen that we have avoided the interruptions about a half a million customers in 2012 2013 And also the frequency the time that basically how many times you have an odd is has reduced by 15% The Katie I think that's one thing that you guys must be worried about Because it takes time to restore your power and that's had reduced by 27% The other thing that we talked about earlier as created about 2800 full-time jobs in 2013 alone and We also have pumped in about 1.5 billion dollars in supply chain and into the Illinois economy So how we investing over money? Basically, we have a two-parts one is 1.3 billion dollars in its infrastructure upgrades That's what we have underground cables So that's the heart of it and then we have 69 KV transmission cables Wood poles storm hardening and also we're building a training centers as well for a workforce because we go into the smart grids The other side we have 1.3 million dollars into smart grid upgrades That was come since their distribution automation Eric will talk about little more how we Accomplishing all that and also we have a data communication and the AMI meters that we talked earlier And then you will get to see how it's going to help us off So what is distribution automation in the simplest way it says is automatically? Identifies isolate and restore power right now if you have a power outage you have to call the company They will send someone out there the first responder by the time is said and done it takes hours But with this we can do in some cases into cycle cycles seconds or in some cases in minutes The way we doing it reason we are upgrading your system with the 20 and 2600 devices. We're trying to install 2600 devices What we trying to have a 500 to 750? Customer-based segment because right now some of the feeders are so long that you have 2,000 or 2,500 customers so if you have a problem in one of the section So all 2,500 customers are out so with this the additional 2,600 devices that we're going to install Basically it's going to help us to base segment to 500 to 750 We also try to enhance our communication system We talked about that show you a little more as I said earlier that we back and when we have some money We start upgrading over 34 kb. Now we have to have a new software. So we try to upgrade that as well Everyone's concern is cyber security. I just wanted to emphasize that cyber security every device or every hardware Software that we do is built-in security and also we do not share any data We respect the customer privacy So if someone wants to have to share the information with someone it has to go to a lot of hoops to get that done We do not share any information Also that any of the transactions are done is a very similar to the ATM that you guys do and I think it's very square The last lastly the key component of this is smart meters We talked about that. We're trying to replace over 4 million meters Presently we have done about 300,000 and the goal is by 2018. I know it's at a 20 21 But now we're trying to accelerate to 2018 to replace all 4 million customers The meters that you see on the top is a static meter. It's a standalone There's no communication built into it if you have an outage. We don't know you have to call us But with the smart meters, we'll know that you have an outage. We'll be able to ping you We'll say okay, you know, we'll try to send someone out there to fix it Plus what plus it this was also give us a system reliability and over customer satisfaction as well I know I talked a lot about it But I just wanted to leave you with a video that it was summarized everything that I just talked about I hope it will help but there we do have websites if you guys want to go visit it Comet and ICC it gives you a lot more information and hopefully this video will visualize it once we get done with this I think there's everyone will benefit it. Thank you very much Complete with digital devices and automated controls that will help us monitor the flow of power on electric lines And automatically reroute power to minimize the number and duration of outages This demonstration shows how Comet's smart grid when complete can dramatically improve our ability to quickly restore your power during a lightning storm in 2010 Comet deployed more than 120,000 smart meters a key component of our smart grid in Oak Park and Maywood on July 28th 2011 two waves of severe lightning storms moved through this area from 4 to 6 a.m carrying over 5700 lightning strikes represented by the yellow marks As power was disrupted smart meters provided the exact location of outages indicated in red Before many customers called them in This is particularly important because many of these customers may have been asleep and unaware that their homes had lost electricity The smart grids automated controls are alerted to the problems on the system and Automatically reroute power to help restore 70,000 outages, which are indicated in green After the storm passes Comet can use smart grid data to know which homes are still without power Enabling Comet crews to coordinate a more effective response Since data from the grid can also alert Comet when power has been restored Comet crews stay on the job until all outages are resolved Rapid response, that's the power of smart meters and Comet's smart grid Great. Thanks. So thanks so much, Neil And I think it's also really useful to Show a kind of the representation of that With it with that short video. I remember a few years ago Living here in the district and also having been subjected to several multi-day power outages and Being flabbergasted to learn that the utility didn't know that everything had to be called in Thinking how can this be, you know at this in this day and age And so I think it's so important in terms of as we all get better information And learn how things work and what really is available and how we can all see Performance improve across the board, which also can mean obviously it's it's important for all of us But when you look at so many businesses where if anything is down for any period of time at all that the Economic loss is is huge. So now we're going to take another look at a Technology sort of we're going into for yet another deeper dive here and for this we're going to hear from Eric Keller Who is with G and W electric out of Bowlingbrook, Illinois and where he is an automation engineer In distribution automation at G and W electric Eric is responsible for power system Automation Specification also for its design its factory acceptance testing and also for its site commissioning He had been employed for seven years prior to going to G and W to add at ZIB USA also at An Illinois company where he again provided a lot of technical support and project commissioning and training for utility employees So all of these things are very very important in terms of really helping in terms of the design and the Execution the implementation and I think it's really important to understand how important the adequate training is for everybody so Eric is going to talk to us about one of these technologies and again, I went to help help all of us remember that this is like an Example of a multitude of technologies that are all involved in terms of addressing these issues of resilience reliability efficiency sustainability Thank You Carol as you as you mentioned I'm going to get into a bit more of the details on one of the Components of the smart grid automatic reclosers how they work and how they improve the availability of electric power on our distribution systems First thing to notice while I have the introduction slide These are devices that are out on the electric power lines that are 30 to 40 feet up in the air. They're outside They're subjected to all of the elements from storms there can be problems also from from wildlife and also from human accidents Cars can hit telephone poles etc And I as we before I get into it. I'll define some of the technical terms I'll get into any of those problems can be defined as a fault And a fault is essentially like a short circuit that you have in your house I'll also talk about loads which can be hospitals neighborhoods factories etc as We look at this you'll see that there are wires going into and out of each of these There's typically three and those are those are called conductors or the power line itself typically made of metal and Those actually supply the pathway for the power so I'll talk just as briefly about who G&W is and some of the things we make for the smart grid besides reclosers look at the Basics of the recloser just briefly and then look at some of the applications These will be the real-life applications both of standalone reclosers that are being used now as well as reclosers and systems with or without communication So G&W is a Chicago based company. We started with two Comet engineers back in 1905 We've always been a Chicago company. We now recently moved into bigger and larger headquarters in Bolingbrook, Illinois We we also have Besides the reclosers We also have switches that are for underground power lines as well as terminations and high-powered fuses for delivering power Besides our headquarters in Illinois. We also have international manufacturing in Brazil, Mexico, Canada and China And I work in the automation department Which helped to develop the the newer feeder automation the distribution automation For commas reclosers This is one of the pictures from the the automation pilot that we had We have we have reclosers installed in all 50 states of the u.s More than 30,000 installed worldwide 85% of which are in the u.s. And we're all manufactured in our Chicago based facilities some of our larger Customers include excellent utilities including com ed bg&e and pico as well as Alabama power aep which is American electric power National grid and progress energy Moving on to the the recloser itself. This is a brief anatomy of of the recloser One of the things to notice there are as we saw in the first picture There are this is the entrance of the power it goes into this connection or bushing and then through this Interrupter which is a a open and closed point and then out through the other bushing To another conductor that would be facilitating the Routing of power as we're looking at at weather power is available and how much is flowing through the recloser We have what we call current transformers that tell us the the amount of power that is flowing through There's too much power flowing through it's typically due to a problem on the system and we will then open up Some of the newer innovations in reclosers coming up these days We now have voltage sensors integrated not only on one side is in the past But now also integrated on both sides of this recloser Which tells you if it if it happens to be open it allows you to know whether there's Voltage or presence of power on one side versus the other The other newer innovation is rather than having one three phase or three Module device that would be acting together opening and closing all three phases at once Now we have independent modules and what that allows us to do is is we may have power lines that that come out of the recloser and feed Different neighborhoods for instance they may feed three different neighborhoods if we have independent acting Recloser modules we can actually isolate a problem in one area and leave the other two areas untouched We have a bit of a video to let you know what the recloser looks like as it operates You'll see the the middle phase will operate the middle pole will operate and then There's a bit of noise that goes with it too So as we dive into some of the technical examples You can keep in mind and have a tangible idea of what these look like when they operate the first example that will show Here we are. This is this is where reclosers have been widely used for the last many years And this is as a standalone operation in this case We have a we have a source which is the the power all of the the transmission and distribution leading up to this point and it is isolated from The the load or the power user at the end by this recloser So if there is an issue say a tree falls on one of the lines Or there's some kind of wildlife on the line There will first be a fault the recloser will detect this and open to isolate the problem and then as a name as its name implies it will reclose to attempt to feed power again and if the Problem still exists it opens once again And in this case if the if the fault goes away or it's cleared by either in the wild case Wildlife case burns off or a tree. Let's go If it blows away then then now the fault is cleared and when we finally close again Now we can successfully feed power again to the users and this is important because in the past Either we would have a fuse that would have to burn and open and then you'd have to as Anil said the customer would have to call that problem in You send out a truck and they replace the fuse The other option is that you would actually isolate further upstream at the substation And that would actually subject more customers to this problem So the recloser allows you to isolate problems to a smaller area. This is Reclosers acting as a system. This particular example is from ComEd's loop scheme Logic for automation that we assisted them with and Now what we have is additional reclosers to help segment the power distribution grid So again, we have a fault that's in this particular location between the first recloser and what we call the sectionalizer That recloser will open up again as it did before It'll close to attempt to feed power again opens again closes again it finally opens and does what it what's called locking out and when it locks out this is when it stops trying to reclose It's actually going to stay open and something further needs to be done to repair that line or isolate it in This case with automation now. We have the next device down the line, which is called the sectionalizer It senses that loss of power and opens after 45 seconds to isolate this faulted section and That allows the tie 15 seconds later to close because it sees an alternate source from the other side But a deadline still that the neighborhood or sources or that the load there is still dead It can close to refeed that power from the alternate source And this can all be done within approximately one minute rather than in the past It may have been done by by utility crews in an in hours This can now be done in timescale of one minute The final example of some of the projects that that are existing is another automation example But using communication now And what we'll see in this case will see if one of the sources is lost in this case source one We will sense that from the recloser that's on source one and then we'll be able to Close at that tie to feed the load that was previously connected to The first source it's preferred source or normal source It'll be fed from an alternate source and this can be done much more quickly And I'll show this is animated in real time We'll see the recloser will open after five seconds of loss of power and then the tie will close another two seconds later Source one is lost recloser counts to five seconds and then opens And now the tie is counting two more seconds and it closes and now we're we've able we've been able to reroute power From an alternate source in order to feed both of our loads automatically And using communication while it takes a little bit more technology to achieve this Automation and rerouting of power can be done in in fewer than 10 seconds rather than in the timescale of one minute I'd like to thank you again for the opportunity to speak a bit about reclosers as One part of the smart grid And I must say it's always really interesting to see how this stuff works and how all of these things can be put together to Really improve things and until we were working with Nima in terms of organizing this briefing I didn't know about Reclosers and how this whole role that they played how it worked and and it and as he made clear This is when we talk about a smart grid and what does it mean? It means a whole lot of things It's a whole raft of different kinds of technologies work and needing to work together And many many different kinds of applications So let's open it up for your questions or comments And if you could just identify yourself, please if you have a question Okay, we'll start back here and then we'll come up to you Very good question and and One of the reasons that during the Qer we're doing so much work Outside the DOE building is that as you know so much of the assets in our energy system are held in private hands And so and not only are they held in private hands. They are largely Regulated and developed at either the regional level when it comes to sort of electricity in the RTOs or at the state level by the PUCs so we're really trying to figure out what exactly the federal levers are and how those federal Authorities overlap with the regional and state authorities. So one of the things we've done is look at this kind of regulatory baseline What are the roles of the different entities and and what is that environment that the that private industry that private assets? have to consider when they're deciding how to make investments, so it is a You know peeling apart the layers of the onion is something that we're in the process of Doing and and we're asking the question to stakeholders. Where are the bottlenecks? Where are the places where we can try as a federal government to smooth out these sort of different layers different environments across the states Even within the federal government conflicting agendas priorities Processes to try to address Exactly what you're getting at it, which is we have emerging vulnerabilities that Clearly our system needs to adapt to and how can the federal government best respond to that? So I don't have specific answers for you right now because I don't want to predetermine the kinds of recommendations that we're gonna make but But you're you are focused in on a huge issue that that we're grappling with I think we're all concerned and I think that's why the president directed us to to undertake this this exercise but but I will say that There there's a lot of work going on in this area both in the federal government and the private industry I mean that this is not this is not an area that is not that is unexplored and It leads me to note that we will likely have a classified section of the Qer dealing specifically with cyber and physical threats that Okay, I will come here first Peter You know those are all things that we're looking at I should you know when we were looking at the range of Vulnerabilities and then the kinds of scenarios that will be modeling will be looking at things like some call them black swans Some are now calling them black sky events like electromagnetic pulses and huge storms or a terrorist threat So we will be looking at those One of the teams that we have working on the Qer is is very much focused on markets and incentives So that's one area that they are going to be looking at is and as I mentioned It is the big question that both the federal government states and the private industry are grappling with which is what is and you've heard it You've heard it from other panelists and from congressman McNerney What what kind of rate structure do we need to actually address these new issues of hardening and building and resilience? so I don't want to get ahead of the Qer in terms of Saying whether there's a better model out there But as you know, there are a lot of people working on that both from from the industry and from the federal government sector There was a question over here. Okay back here Thank you Nicole Cedaraman from the DC office of the People's Council and have a question for mr. Dahlin from com ed two questions actually The first is what type of consumer education plan Does com ed have for educating ratepayers about am I and when how's that working for you all and then Secondly, what's happening generally in Illinois around? Incorporating time-bearing rates or dynamic pricing to get the most out of AMI Mine I have exact answer for those two questions With this am I we have a very PI program that we have been educating our customers In order for a student stalled that we do go into we hold the hearings and we do educate our customers in that sense Regarding the other question that you had I have to get back to you. I do not have an exact answer for that Okay, Terry Hill with the passive house Institute We now have capabilities of building and retrofitting existing buildings to be very energy efficient That can drastically change the load on the utility grid and Given the tremendous amount of investment that is about to Be required to rehab the grid and make it more resilient Is anybody taking a clean slate approach to the design of the grid? Taking into into account these new ways to be very efficient On the building side, thanks Yes, I think there's you don't see a a pervasive At least from my experience, you don't see a pervasive thought of it. I mean in to your point some of the the biggest Demand response resources that you can get are some of the big buildings down here in the inner city And that is an excellent resource to go after for a utility and and the the building Designs and the building systems out there are quite effective to to go after that kind of a capability The integration with the utility in a program is perhaps the hard part of that. It's not so much the technology It's what's the program that's going to incent The membership in in a you know the enrollment in a program that will actually go after getting that those those capabilities so That's one thing that you can go after that is what I would call low hanging fruit The technology is there the integration and communications is can quite simply be done. We did a a job with a con Edison in New York and they were actually wanting to go after some of the buildings in Manhattan to be able to reduce their loads to address operating issues and And and when we looked at it, there's about just from Siemens standpoint Siemens has a building management systems in about 70 buildings that are above a megawatt in downtown in Manhattan If you think that a building management system can get you a rule of thumb about five to ten percent energy efficiencies if I dial it down You know five to five to ten percent on 70 megawatts in downtown Manhattan is three and a half to seven megawatts That's a lot of megawatts to go after so those kinds of things once they actually started evaluating them Even without a lot of sensing devices in the network They could see where they did have Substation metering what was being affected by it and so they could very well see how to dial it down But this is just an example, right? These are the buildings and you're absolutely right on the building efficiencies because you get 30 to 40 percent efficiency on a building that You're renovating right now you're building From from scratch you don't have that but if you're renovating building 30 40 percent One of the other things you can think about doing though is tying in the other parts of the city infrastructure that are big energy Uses for example like the water systems water pumping and water treatment Are the single largest Usage demand in any city I think bar none any city And yet they are typically not coordinated with the electric utility so their usage is easily shifted It's a it's a big battery storage capability if you know what I mean You can easily shift pumping loads to off hours. You can avoid peak times You can address operating problems through it, but there's very little integration between multi utilities in most cities It's a really really good point Karen do you want to add to that? Yeah, I will say that that's actually one of the scenarios that we'll be looking at it which is the effect on of high and low efficiency on the transmission distribution and storage networks and then also what what would happen in terms of a breakthrough technology and storage to the the kind of grid architecture May I add something that you know to that point like we talked about the efficiencies of storage You know a lot of storage is pretty good right now You know everyone always talks to me about utility scale storage, and I said well, what exactly is that the megawatt or above? I can take a 500 megawatt battery system And I can integrate it with my rail systems that are out there my rail substations and when I have a frequency problem or a voltage issue I can Move on to my battery supply and I can support that substation for you know 10 or 15 minutes That's more than adequate for the kind of battery storage as author It's just that you don't like the building management systems that you were pointing out You don't see that because it's not common practice yet, but there are utilities doing it right now Great, okay here first Hi, my name is Ryan Saunders. I work from an intern for senator shots in Hawaii And I guess I have a couple questions directed at mr. Geisler and Mr. Dawan so Hawaii is one of the states where? solar power has been maxed out in Hawaii is trying to build its renewable energy portfolio and Storage of energy has actually been looked at for Especially for wind turbines and wind farms What can you tell me about what has? been happening in regards to Systems that manage Loads that fluctuate and also for storage facilities because we had we've had accidents in the past and wanted to know if that record had been Improved or if anything's been updated since then Yeah, the the accident you're referring to I think are the fires that were with it associated with the battery technologies And that particular vendor is out of business right now. So yes, there's been an improvement in That's one way to accomplish it But yeah, I mean that this is a great example. I work a lot with Hawaii electric my electric We're also actually just completed it. You may have noticed Parker Ranch on the one slide Parker Ranch is the the biggest cattle ranch in In the Wine Islands, and it's on Big Island and they're Trying to cope with their rate issues and how they approach their rate issues So I don't know what you all pay in Washington DC what your kilowatt hour rate is mine in in Minneapolis is anywhere from 8 to 10 cents about you know, I mean on a good day and In the Hawaiian Islands the rates are anywhere between 35 to 50 cents A kilowatt hour so take your if I take my bill and I multiply by four or five a month That's what the Hawaiian Islands are paying Right so that kind of an interesting perspective to put on it when you start looking at it that way if you look at some of the examples of efficiencies and resilience that I had up with Hawaiian Electric for example they They put in a Automation system not unlike the the ones that are being described with the the reclosers, but these were actually to automate the entire east side of the island and This was in the event of the loss of a few lines that would in fact cause a four to six hour power outage for a significant part of Honolulu, Waikiki and the east end of the island and Generally when those events have occurred it had been anywhere from two to six hours that the outage times would last because it's in the Mountains and you've got guys driving trucks and hiking through the mountains and helicopters flying over looking for where the problem is So what we did is in a DOE funded program by the way DOE funded program and tying it all together So in a DOE funded program We we designed and helped them build out an automation scheme that Reconnected all that interest or all those customers through the 46 KV infrastructure So the 138 KV lines two of them large ones that feed that end of the island if you lose both lines 46 hour outage the automation in this Example reduced the outage time from to about four to six minutes depending on the The the issue that was arisen and to the point of some of our other speakers as well You know we talk about being able to switch in minutes now Versus having a guy go out in the field and search for the problem and isolating the smallest part We we are actually better than that we can we can switch in milliseconds Seconds and milliseconds. There's no question the technology is there But it's a it's a cost increment that goes up if you go to the other islands by the way like big island where it's more like 45 to 50 cents a kilowatt hour There are other things you can do the the wind regime on big island is the best in the world literally You know, there's probably 500 megawatts of wind on big island Too bad. There's not a lot of population there, but But you know building out along those lines you can get very creative because there's also a lot of elevation on big island and Because of that you can build and they've already built hydro storage And so you can have pump storage there that actually works, right? It's not unlike the you know I'm gonna pump seawater and put it in and try to use it because it the economics don't work But you have some elevation like on big island yet some very very good possibilities Which we talked to your governor and your PUC folks about so Yeah, so there is a lot of potential obviously yeah, and What does the situation look like to you in managing because we don't have very much of a grid obviously from island island We are pretty isolated In terms of reliability and being able to switch back and forth between sources that aren't Steady is that what improvements have been made recently? Yeah, that the the common about the pump hydro What you need is a affirming capability for the generation And so the pump hydro at least on big island could begin to get you that but I think the other problem there is not so much necessarily the That aspect of it. I It is a aspect of it, but one of the problems there is you have aging generation, right? So if we take any Utility any utility right and we say okay I am now an integrated generation transmission and distribution utility and In any utility where that's the case in any state where that's the case then the largest part of the rate basis the generation by far and away So given that when you you look at it you say well What are the possibilities? One is to separate generation from transmission and make it competitive on an island that doesn't that's not so easy Right because there's not a lot that are going to come in and do it So you're probably still going to end up with a regulated base Which says you really have to look at how do I incent the utilities to invest right? And so that's all within the business model a 30-year depreciation model doesn't work very good Five-year ten-year better right other forms of incentives to do it I mean why is there so much solar in in Hawaii because the Sun's out a lot no because there's giant state Incentives that allow the people who had the money to put the solar in To actually put it in right you know where you know where the second largest influx of Solar power is you guys have Idea New Jersey Why because state incentives put it out there great stuff, but the utility then it goes wow my rate basis decreasing and You know there it's it's all interconnected problems, and that's why I was saying before it's it's we're all in it together you start getting into the levels of sustainability and resilience and it's it's the utility it's the City it's the state and federal government and beyond that it's the community somebody was talking about engaging the community Here's a great topic to engage the community and the islands are seeing it first because they're living with monster rates So you have two things on on the end of the scale on the economics is one driver, right? And so you see that in the islands all the time it's a huge driver But the flip side is resilience and where do you see that the East Coast? Why because Hurricane Sandy came through and we saw places like co-op city stand up through the whole thing this decentralization idea incorporates generation so if for example utilities could own distribution assets that were generation and Claim them as a distribution asset In the rate base well, that's one way of meeting that problem, right? But there are other ways of meeting that problem. So, you know, it it depends you can Depends on where you are and what you're doing and arguably there are different met arguably there's different methods of doing it But the Hawaiian islands are in it now most islands are in it now Puerto Rico You know, you get the same issues going on there great Any other questions or comments? Okay. Go ahead Don't go be with inside EPA clean energy report in terms of Capitol Hill I know the perception is you might be choosing between stasis and gridlock, but that said Anyone who wants to opine on this? What do you see is the short to medium-term opportunity to? Push these issues on Capitol Hill and what is the congressional role in absence of a big energy bill before the elections? Yeah, I don't know there. Does anybody want to send anything? Otherwise, we'll turn to Neema and I'll ask Jim creepy to make a comment. Okay Oh Jim do you want to come up here? The Congress has moved energy efficiency forward Through the Shaheen Portman bill here in the Senate It's got stuck on the on the Senate floor to this point in time But it seems like energy efficiency is one of those areas where there's broad bipartisan support for it It's just a matter of overcoming the political barriers to passing a bill There have not been a whole lot of energy bills going through the Congress in recent years and so Members of Congress on both sides are seeking energy if the energy efficiency bill is a vehicle for Other amendments that they would like to to see considered by the Congress So it's created some political Difficulties for the bill, but none of it has to do with the content of the bill itself energy efficiency is broadly supported And energy efficiency applies to the grid as much as it applies to buildings and homes And I would just add that the house has been moving to some small energy efficiency bills as discreet as discreet items and One of the things that I think is important is that they are continue to be even though Large bills are not have not moved out of the Congress with regard to energy at the same time There are continuing bills that are being Introduced and I think the more discussion there is and as the congressman McNerney said it's very very important that policymakers are aware of of these connections of of what the Problems have you know are and have been and that there are a wealth of technologies and Systems through which to address them that can actually improve the overall reliability resilience and therefore the the overall economics That we need in terms of running the the The country so I think it's sort of incumbent upon us Just as we were hearing this morning in terms of looking at all of the different things that really are available How they can work together? I'm getting to know hearing from people who have a lot of expertise in the development and the Implementation of them and how things can work together and need to work together And that there are a host of things that are currently available But just aren't deployed nearly as much as what they could be Which could greatly improve our whole system if they did and the Qer is also another huge mechanism through which This is trying to be addressed Anything that anybody wants to add to that Well, then we all have lots of work to do and But I but I think you know too it sounds like that again policy is Important is something that we're hearing that is making a difference because in terms of helping people at the Whether it's at the state level the local level or at the federal level come together to understand what really is available how it can address problems and What therefore we all need to do working together to move things forward So I want to thank this wonderful panel and thank you all very very much for coming the briefing will be The video will be up on EESI's website. So please take a look and then also as you heard about You know things that happened during Sandy where co-op city stood up I would call your attention to last week's briefing that we did looking again at reliability and resilience and security issues But also last year in May of 2013 We did two briefings that are available on our website that looked at situations where Companies and like Princeton University for example stood up during Hurricane Sandy Take a look so that you can see why and it comes right back to the issues that we were all talking about today so thank you very very much for being here and Look forward to seeing you again You