 All right. Welcome everyone to our Fix the Grid event with Dr. Richard Silkman. I'm Matt Cannon. I'm the Sierra Club's Campaign and Policy Associate Director here in Maine at the Maine chapter. And we're really happy to have you all here for what is our last event before the summer. So we're really excited to have Dr. Richard Silkman here to give us his insights and a blueprint for a zero carbon economy. He has an extensive bio, but just quickly he's a PhD economist and co-managing partner of Competitive Energy Services, former director of the State Planning Office and a nationally recognized expert in the regulation of public utilities and development of competitive energy markets. There is much more to his biography and I'll put it in the chat and feel free to fill in as many gaps as you think, but we're really happy to have you, Dr. Silkman, and take it away. Thank you very much, Matt, and thanks for having me a little before Memorial Day, so have someone to look forward to. What I want to talk about today is a book that I put together about a year and a half ago now, which looked to see whether or not Maine on its own could achieve a zero carbon economy. And if so, how it might go about doing that, and what it might cost us in terms of what we have to pay for energy and related services. So if any of you are interested in this, let Matt in the book, let that know and at the end there's a link to the digital version. But for those of us who like to have something in our hand when we read, I'm happy to send you a hard copy if you'll pass on your address to me. What I said about doing was trying to decide whether or trying to figure out how we could get to a zero carbon economy, and whether we could do it without jeopardizing the health and vitality of our current economy. And it doesn't do us any good to get to zero carbon if it's going to cost us so much money as to be unaffordable because then nobody will do it. And so as I said about trying to model energy use in Maine and model this transition. What I realized is that it is possible to do this. It's going to take a lot of work. It's going to take a lot of transitioning. It's going to take a lot of redefinition of what the economy is. But over the next 30 years, what I've demonstrated in the book is that we can get to a zero carbon economy in Maine. And most importantly, if we are careful, if we do it smart, we can do it spending no more on energy over this 30 year period every year, then we spend on energy today. Now, the way to do this is through five processes, and those are highlighted here in yellow. The first, and most of you who have looked at this area are going to find these very familiar. The first is beneficial electrification. We have to electrify transportation, heating, and all of our processes in the industries and commercial sectors of the economy. But it doesn't do us any good to electrify unless the electricity is generated without carbon. And so the second thing we have to do is decarbonize generation. And as you'll see, what I've done is build out renewable generation in Maine, primarily focused on PV solar onshore and offshore wind and using our existing hydro resources. And also relying on batteries to match load and generation. And again, that will become clearer as I go on. But in order to do this, we do need battery systems. And we need large scale battery storage systems and these aren't Tesla wall batteries. And these are industrial sized batteries in order to handle Maine's economy. The fourth thing we need, and something we don't have now, but we're working on it, is we need to convert our electric grid from a one way distributor of electricity to a network where power flows all across the grid in both directions. And we don't ever do that simultaneously, but it can do that in a way so that distributed resources can be used to provide energy to us when they're not delivering services to the customers. And we can use load as a substitute in some instances for generation. We have this grid that is a network. Think of it as instead of thinking of the grid as your water system where the water flows in one direction only to the final tap, which is how our current electric grid operates. We need to think about the electric grid much more like the internet where communication takes place in a networked environment. And finally, what I'll show you is that this transition and our ability to be successful here requires unprecedented amounts of capital investment for us to make this transition. And because of that one of the key components to being able to make this transition on an economic basis is to have access to cheap capital. Let's talk about that near the end of the presentation. So I start with mains energy use. Most of this would be familiar to those of you who have studied energy. This is where we get our energy now. What is not included in this are hydro and biomass on the assumption that we will maintain our hydro and we will maintain our biomass resources at current levels for the next 30 years. So this is really all of the stuff we have to either displace or convert in the electricity is one thing we have to convert. There's a lot of energy, but means a big state, and there are a lot of people and there's a lot of production that occurs, but all of this has to be substituted out into electricity. And we can do that by doing the following. And to give you some perspective, RNS. It's a technical term but what it really means is current electric load. I'll show you all the details of what these things mean, but the relative numbers are important. Whatever this unit is, we use 12,000 of them today for electricity and they. If we convert all of our heating to electricity, we will get rid of a lot of fuel oil kerosene and natural gas, but we are going to use 7,000 more units of electricity. That's 65% of what we're currently using today. All of this heating that we're going to use is going to be heat pumps of one form or another, and they're going to give us access to air conditioning. And so we will increase our air conditioning loads, but not by a lot on our process side and this is all of our industrial processes. If we convert it all to electricity, this is how much electricity we're going to use almost the same amount of electricity that we use today. And then lastly on our EV charging, passenger vehicles, buses and trucks, total about two thirds of what we use today. So if you think about conversion, this is the amount of electricity we use today. This is the amount of electricity three and a half times the amount of electricity. We will use when we fully convert everything that we're doing today. Now, in my modeling, I'm looking at this over 30 year period. And what I have assumed is that efficiency. There are a number of different activities that all of those will occur over these 30 years. But what they will do is offset growth and electricity use. We're all using more and more electricity, more computers, you know, more televisions, more refrigeration, more everything in society. More people, more housing units. All of these things would increase electricity consumption would narrowly. But what I'm assuming is that that's all offset by energy efficiency. So if we want to do this, what we're going to have to do is increase our total electricity consumption by about three times. And our peak load is going to increase by about five times, largely because of heating. And graphically, what this new load looks like over the course of the year, and this is from January. This is from January here to December, every hour. The blue down here is our current load. This is what we currently use in May. And orange is the amount of electricity we will use for heating. And not surprisingly, that's heavily concentrated in the late fall winter, and then the winter into spring. Not much in the summer. The green is air conditioning, very little, all of it concentrated in the summer. And the reason why you'll see some here and not here is that I modeled a particular year by our and it was 20, it was 2017. And these were the hot days during 2017. In 2025, they'll be different days, but they'll be hot days and cool days. Today is the process load, and this occurs all over the course of the year. It's relatively flat, sappy biw Pratt Whitney they use electricity on a relatively flat basis, or energy. And then lastly, what we'll have is charging load and charging again will be generally flat over the course of the year. We'll have to drive a little bit more in the summertime that we do other times of the year, but electric cars get better mileage in the summer than they do in the winter so those balance off. And we'll charge, you know, whenever we charge our cars, turns out that most studies seem to suggest we'll charge most of our cars at home overnight. The same is true with school buses. Same as true with postal service trucks and FedEx trucks. So most of our charging will occur overnight. But this is what our load looks like after we do beneficial electrification. All the generation that we have in Maine, you know the Westbrook plant, all the wind turbines, all the hydro stations, the VZ plant, you know, Cousins Island, all of those electric generating plants are currently providing us this below. What we need to do is build out renewable energy that will cover this entire graph. And that was a very significant undertaking. And it's not going to be done, you know, with rooftop solar, I mean it has to be done with large scale, industrial size generating facilities. And again, we'll get to that in a moment. Now what I've assumed is that this doesn't happen overnight. So over this 30 year period from 2020 to 2050, what I've assumed is that here's where we are now with respect to all of this electrification that we're going to undertake. In each sector, we're going to get to 100%. So I have forced that in the modeling. Now, whether we ever get there or not, is anybody's guess, but I forced us to get to 100% electrification by 2050. What I've done it is to say, for instance, for passenger vehicles, this is the red line. So by 2040, you know, roughly 60% of all the cars on the road will be electric. There'll be 100% by 2050. You know, I look at school buses, you look at trucks, you look at heating. You know, we're going to be installing heat pumps and ground source heat pumps into all of our houses and commercial establishments. That's not going to happen quite as rapidly as the transition to electric vehicles. But it's going to happen. And it's going to happen along this curve. So far, to efficiency mains credit, we're actually ahead of the pace that I have assumed. I'm doing a really good job putting in heat pumps around the state. And so we're actually running a little bit ahead of this pace. But again, I was a little bit conservative in terms of how fast it would occur. The hardest thing to transition is the industrial processes. You know, when you're when you're looking at big factories. You've got big boilers and you've got big steam systems converting that to electricity is not easy. In some instances, there's no technology available for doing that today. So what I've done is I back and loaded that. It's convenient. I just don't know how it's going to happen. I know how the electric vehicles are going to shape up we know what those things look like and I know what heat pumps look like. And what this technology is going to look like. So I've said, let's push it off into the future. Let's let it happen then. But ultimately, all of this doing all of this by 2050 is going to get us this electric long shape. And that's what we have to meet. How do we meet it using renewable generation. I mean it's easy to meet using nuclear and gas plants and oil plants. But how do we do it with renewables with the bars and this chart show you is the monthly electricity consumption, January through December. In that graph that you saw before, instead of looking at hourly now I said what about monthly let's look at it monthly. And as you remember from the graph we use more electricity in the wintertime than we use in the summertime from that graph. But this is what it looks like monthly. This is the monthly load shape that we have to meet. On a percentage basis. So 10% of our energies in January 10% in March, you know, 7% in May, as little as 6% in September and so on. The yellow line here shows you the amount of generation from a solar project that occurs each month. Not surprisingly, there's very little solar in the winter months. Most of our solar is generated in the summer months when the sun's out days or longer. That solar shape doesn't do a very good job matching our load shape. You take that yellow line and convert it into these bars. What we would have to do is buy a lot of batteries to take all of this surplus. Oh, I'm sorry. To take all of this surplus and have it available to meet this load here and this load here. This is a piece of the answer, but it can't be all the answer. The blue line shows you what happens to our existing hydro. Our existing hydro peaks in the spring runoff. No and all of our major rivers. It's lowest in the late summer and early fall after our summer, no rain season, and then it goes up again in the fall when we get more rain, typically. It's okay. It's a little better than solar in these winter periods. But again, hydro is not going to do it either for us. But when we look at wind, both onshore and offshore wind, what we see is almost the mirror image of solar. Most of the wind generation occurs in the wintertime. Very little of it occurs in the summer. So unlike some parts of the world, California being one of them. We've got a nice convergence harmony between our generating sources and main using offshore and onshore wind to meet our winter seasons and using solar to meet our summer. Using combinations of wind and solar, and we'll get to the numbers in a moment, we can come close to meeting this monthly load. Now, hour by hour, it'll never match. I mean, it's going to match on a rare occasion, but you can't count on it. So hour by hour, we are going to need batteries. And so what I've done is I've said, I know what load I have to meet. So I'm going to put in a lot of solar, and I'm going to put in a lot of wind and we'll get to how much in a moment. And I'm going to use batteries to match the differential. So whenever I have a little bit too much generation, I'm going to put it into batteries and I'm going to take it out whenever I have a little bit too much load. Now, this next chart is of some interest, but it's not a particularly important chart, but if you were to power our loads entirely with solar, what would happen is you would run an enormous deficit. You'd have to have a huge amount of batteries. And then once we hit March 21st and the days started getting longer, we would now start accumulating, paying off that deficit. And then we put a lot into storage and we'd be able to ultimately come back to zero. But all of this would have to be batteries. If I use my solar onshore and offshore wind and I over build each a little bit. This is what I need any deviation from zero is storage, and it's much much less storage and storage is expensive. So, this is possible. Now what's interesting about this is California has a very different regime. They've got enormous amounts of sunlight. Fortunately, they have it better year round and we have it here. But all of their wind occurs in the summertime. And so what happens in California is they have huge winter deficits against load, because their wind doesn't have that acyclic characteristic to it. You remember the Santa Ana winds, all the far, you know, the fires that they have, they're all summertime fires. When I say summer, it's April to October, because the winds comes off the desert. Here, we've got this prevailing westerly. That's enormous helpful helpfulness to us Northwest winds in the wintertime that really do do us a lot of good. So, what I've said is, let's build out a system over the next 30 years. And let's let that system be about 7500 megawatts of salt. With that in perspective, we've got about maybe 100 megawatts built today in May. All of this net metering projects that we're doing are going to get us maybe 1000 megawatts. Even times that much in order to meet our load obligations. Let's do 2500 megawatts of wind. Right now we've got almost 1000 megawatts of wind. But there's no other good places to put wind anymore, because people don't want to put it on our ridgetops, which is where all our wind is in southern Maine. So the only place we can really put this is up in a rustic in the potato and broccoli fields. The wind conditions aren't as good as they are on there on our, you know, our ridgetops, like on the top of sugar loaf or on the top of Catat and, or on the top of other other good mountains. But it's still good enough to be able to be financially viable. But the key to our future, and being able to meet our load obligations is 5000 megawatts of offshore wind. And we can do 10 times this amount of solar without any problem at all in Maine. To put this in perspective this amount of solar will take about 40,000 acres of land. Maine has 17 million acres of land, not counting all of our lakes and rivers. This is just land area. So we need to do this, and we would need about 40,000 acres. Now, 17 million acres is a lot of land but obviously some of it's developed, about a million acres is developed. So that's 16 million. About half of the land is on the north side of mountains, not the south side. Right, we don't want to put solar on the north side, or in the valleys on the north side. So that drops us down to 8 million acres. But 40,000 acres on 8 million is a trivial amount of land. So the solar is not a problem. The onshore wind, we can put this up in a roostick and it can work. But it's the offshore wind that's critical. If we don't do this, we don't have a prayer, given current technologies to get to zero carbon by 2050. Now the way I've done it in the modeling is I have assumed that we're going to front end solar. Solar is cheaper. We can do it earlier on in the process. So we're going to put a fair amount of solar in while we wait for the offshore wind to fall in price. Because it falls in price as a result of our experiments, you know, our pilot projects that we're doing here, but also in Europe, and ultimately Japan, Korea, and the West Coast, the cost curve is going to start falling. And that's when we're going to really ramp up our offshore wind 2040 to the end of to 2050. So most of these 5000 megawatts are going to go in. I'm going to skip this chart, because it just tells you what I've assumed about the capital costs associated with each of the technologies I'm happy to go over later, but it's a little bit in the weeds. The only thing that really matters and I'm going to come back to this point is I have assumed that we can finance all of this capital investment with 3% money. But for those of you who have heard me talk about our main generation authority, or heard me talk about pine tree power, you can begin to see why those are so important as low cost sources of capital. But again, I'll come back to this issue in a bit. So now what I want to do is now we've seen a little bit about what the load has to look like. And we've seen a little bit about what the generation has to look like. Now what happens to cost. And here is what we have spent over the last 20 15 years or so from 2000 to 2016, I haven't updated the data, but 2017 and 2018 this would be relatively flat in real terms, so adjusted for inflation. And roughly 5 billion to 6 billion to 7 billion dollars 5 to 7 billion dollars a year on energy in Maine, all forms of energy. Our GDP in Maine our gross domestic product or gross state product in Maine is about $60 billion. So 10 cents out of every dollar of our income goes to pay for energy. We have to do this transition and keep within that 10% range. This is affordable. But if we try to do this transition, and all of a sudden, we have to spend 20% of our income on energy. It just won't happen. We won't be able to afford it. We have to spend that amount of discretionary income in Maine to be able to accommodate that kind of an increase in what we have to spend on energy. So looking at the transition that I just described to you, these bars here are every year, the amount of money we will spend on energy as we do this transition. Today within the range. This is the low end of the range over the last 20 years. This is the high end of the range. And this is the average of about 6 billion dollars. We can do this. But we have to do it smart. One of the things that's happening over this period, these bars here are the same as the green ones. The same I've just color coded them differently, but it's the same bars. What happened during this period is that we are going to move away from fossil fuel. So our fossil fuel costs are the gray portion of each of these bars. They're going to fall down to zero. And what we're going to do is just place it with increased investments in our grid or electric grid remember the grid has to get much bigger to handle all this new electricity. We're going to increase the amount of grid that we have and we have to spend money on that. We are going to reduce the amount of electricity that we use, but that we're buying from fossil fuels today down to zero. And we're going to displace that with all of this generation that I just described to you, financed at 3% money. And then ultimately, to match generation and load, what we're going to have to do is put in storage. And this is what those storage costs look like. So you can see I mean the story of the transition is one in which our energy spend goes from fuel. So pay as you go pay as you use pay as you generate electricity to capital expenses buying transmission lines and polls buying solar projects buying wind projects buying battery storage. We transition from fuel to capital operating cost to fix costs. Now the amount of this investment is substantial. What I've laid out to you. Every year. This is how much money. We will spend. We will be spending based on that on the modeling. Over this period, we will spend and this is the cumulative amount. Or I say spend but it's really investing because we're investing in the grid and investing in generation, but we're going to have to put this capital to work. We're going to spend almost $60 billion. We will be ballpark $2 billion a year. Not so much initially, but as we get into the offshore wind and the battery storage, a lot later on. And we can, but having spent all this money, the carrying costs the amount that we have to pay off every year in interest and debt service and principle on all of this spending. Which shows up in these bars here. So we're going to, you know, we're going to spend $60 billion and we're going to pay about $6 billion a year in interest and principle costs, and a little bit of operating and maintenance costs. And that $6 billion is roughly what we're spending today for all of our energy that we're consuming. The gasoline that goes in our cars, the heating oil that goes into our houses, the natural gas that goes into our factories, all of that $6 billion we're just placing. Now the consequence of this is that ultimately, we move from a lot of carbon emissions to zero. The path that I've just laid out is not, it's not an overnight path. I mean, it takes a lot of investment. You can see, you know, we're spending a billion dollars a year here. And you're investing, you know, in these technologies, it's a billion dollars. I mean, this is more money by far than we ever spend in our schools or in our public housing or any things that we engage in. There's a lot of money and this doesn't count all the heat pump money that each of individuals are going to spend or the electric vehicles, each of us are going to buy. This is only for the grid and the energy. We're going to be putting a lot of money into that. And it's going to take some time to have an effect. But ultimately, it will, and there'll be accumulating effect. And so while we may not see much in the way of emission reductions early on, once we exceed certain threshold levels, it'll start happening very, very rapidly. And we can get to zero. Easy path. I mean, if somebody were to ask me today, are we going to get there? I mean, you got to be pessimistic. I mean, it's, it's tough to get this kind of a conversion of an economy to occur. We're working at it means moving things along. We're trying to get more people with electric cars. We're trying to get more heat pumps out into the system. We're trying to build more solar. We're wrestling with offshore wind. You know, we're fighting people all along the way, whether it's lobstermen or oil dealers or, you know, whatever it is, and we're fighting people all along the way to do this transition. It's a hard transition to accomplish. And what makes it especially hard when you think about all the other transitions we've gone through. You know, think of the automobile. And all of the investments that went into our roads and our cars. We got at the end of that period, each of us individually we got an automobile, and we got to get rid of the horse. And so it was a tremendous benefit to us individually. When we went to electricity, you know, from coal and kerosene and whale oil lamps and whatever else we burned. We all benefited enormously by that transition personally and it was good for our houses it was good for each of us. This transition is different. I've gone solar on my rooftop I generate pretty much all my electricity now through net metering. I put heat pumps in. You know I generate virtually all of my heat instead of using propane with heat pumps. But at the end of the day, I'm getting the same amount of heat that I used to get from the propane. It's no better it's no different for me inside it feels just the same. I'm getting the same amount of electricity they used to use off the grid. I'm getting it now from my solar panels, but it's the same electricity the lights aren't different. The stove doesn't work differently. The computer doesn't work differently. It's all the same. There's a big difference between this transition and all of our past transitions is in our past transitions. They provided direct immediate benefits to the individuals and the companies and society. This transition provides a long term social benefit in the form of carbon reductions and a solution to global warming and global catastrophe. Getting that kind of collective action, you know is really hard. And that's what makes this transition so difficult. We're doing something here at the end that gave us something different than what we already have would be an easier transition. What we what we're going to get is we're going to get clean air. We're going to get better climate, but that's not something that we can spend and consume immediately. You know that's your Tesla works just like every other car. You don't see that immediate benefit. It's defer gratification. So with that, Matt, I'll conclude. You have you can have Joan has a copy of this Matt has a copy they can send it around to you. If you go to this website you can download electronically. The copy of the book. If you email me at this address or email Matt, I'll be happy to email you put a hard copy in the mail to you. So with that, I'll stop sharing the screen and be happy to answer or talk about any questions that you guys will leave the screen up in case you have questions about any of the individual graphs, but I'm happy to answer any questions or to hear your own thoughts about the presentation. Thank you very much. Yeah, that was that was really helpful and you have some questions in the chat and feel free to pick some out as well rich but I guess just starting. And I did just put that link to the actual book in the chat. To be able to find my chat, Matt, so you may have to do this. No, no problem. Yeah, Becky asked about modeling for increased temperatures in the in the future. You might have higher cooling loads. Yeah, in the future, did you know I didn't that's way way too I mean it's way too complicated introducing dynamism into this model is I mean it can be done and it wasn't the ultimate purpose of this I mean if I wanted to, you know get this published by the American Academy of National Academy of Sciences I would have done that kind of work, but I really didn't want to get into it in that much detail, but Becky you are right there are feedback effects in here. And unfortunately, for most of the feedback effects were on the wrong end of it. Some of some of the feedback effects are actually beneficial, for example, as we switch to winter peaking electricity use that actually is a benefit because our grid can carry more power when it's colder outside, because it doesn't heat up as much and resistance is lower. So for things like air conditioning, and, you know, in summertime activities. It's a problem and the feedback effect is the wrong direction. Great. Thank you. And I did get a couple individual questions and there's one in the chat about rooftop solar and kind of distributed energy I know earlier. But that would be a real challenge. Can you talk more about maybe why rooftop solar couldn't work or why more smaller projects would not work. They can work. I mean my rooftop solar is as good as you know I got a field of 100 acres of solar. I can provide the same electricity. And to some extent it's actually a little better because it's closer to load. So it's marginally better not a lot better but marginally better than the big size solar. The problem is that my rooftop solar. I'm going to measure this now in kilowatts, as opposed to megawatts. So we would need 7,500,000 kilowatts. My system is eight. And the average rooftop is eight, nine, 10. Now we can do a lot of rooftops, and we'll get a dent in this we might actually get a third of this potentially is being rooftop solar. But we're not going to get to the full 7,500 megawatts using rooftop solar. Another thing too is that rooftop solar works really well for warehouses where the rooftop relative to the electric use in the building is large. Rooftop solar works miserably for large scale commercial office buildings. So if you're in Portland, take a look at the roof of any of one city center and compare the available roof that you have up there to the amount of electricity consumed in that building. And it doesn't work well. So what that means is for our major cities, you've got to import all of this electricity from places where you can generate it economically. And those places are places like Hyrum and Parsons field and play Oxford places where there's land. And so you've got to bring that all into the city. You know, when you drive down 95 through New England, which you see, you see a little less of it today but in Hartford and Bridgeport and Stamford and Providence used to see these big coal oil plants sitting right in the middle of the harbor. And the reason for that was because they were next to low. And so you economized on transmission by putting your generation next to load that works real well for high dense fuels like oil and coal and even natural gas. It doesn't work well for low dense fuels like solar. One of the issues with this transition that we have to think about is how we are going to move all of this generation back up the second here, I'm sorry, wrong way. All of this generation from these facilities into our load centers. It's pretty easy in in Maine, Portland, small, and it's pretty rural once you get a little bit out. But can you imagine New York City. And I just think of it even if you put solar on all of the rooftops in New York City you'd meet maybe 1% of their total load. And you've got to bring all that power from places offshore, as well as solar into New York. And it becomes a real challenge. Thank you for that. Yeah, I appreciate that. I'm going to mix. Just because they're related there's a couple questions on cost. One seems to be more on social costs from David and a few others. I think it gets at what, what happens if we, or what are the costs if we don't, don't decarbonize the grid, and relatedly, how, how can we actually show people to have a personal benefit to doing this. Well, I mean the cost if we don't decarbonize. First off, if Maine doesn't do anything, there is no change, right? I mean we are so trivial in the broad atmosphere, but you have to do it. You know we're all in this together you've got to pull your weight. And you know this is, if the left guard on one play at the Patriots doesn't block, well maybe it's a quick release and there's no harm done. But you know you can't, you can't get, you can't win Super Bowls doing that. Everybody's got to pull their weight. But in the cost for not doing it, I think you know the, the, the UN Paris Accords I mean all of that demonstrate that there's enormous costs of doing it. Now, those costs, people don't quite understand them and they aren't internalizing them very well. I mean what really are the costs to somebody who lives at 1000 feet above sea level, you know, in Skowhegan, you know, maybe there's no direct cost other than, you know, may rain a little bit more on when it rains it may rain heavier. But it's maybe a little warmer in the winter than maybe a few more ticks, right, but, but I can tell you, I live at Pine Point, my house sits at 16 feet above sea level. I've been low tide, not high tide 16 feet above low tide. And I can tell you that if we don't do something the cost to me is going to be my house probably within 40 years. And commercial street, you know, I mean all of these places. I think people at some level understand those costs, bringing them and making them real is really hard. You guys Sierra Club organizations like yourself and you're the ones that really have to do this. I'm going to bring it home to people to make them understand that these are costs. And the reality is, is they aren't costs that probably won't be significant costs for many of us. I mean I'm 70. And I'm going to die before there's any catastrophic climate change problems, but my kids and my grandchildren aren't and so you got to pay attention to them. And I thought just as an example the most reason you probably have seen this but you know, so the equivalent of the Supreme Court decision in Germany throughout their carbon plan because they had to to back and loaded. And they, they were imposing to high 8% of the cost of conversion on people that were going to be around in 2035 2040 and 2045 and not enough on people who are around today. I mean, I thought that was incredibly foresightful. And you know those are the things that the younger generation are going to have to keep hitting home and hitting home hard. And you know you guys, despite the evidence on the screen that we're looking at you guys Sierra Club tens of a lot of young members, and so you got to get them out and get immobilized. But we're not going to do a good job pricing the social consequences of not doing this action and we tried. I'm an economist, you know I carbon taxes runs in my blood. I mean I would like nothing more than to have carbon taxes. It would solve a lot of the problems that we're running into with the design of policy. But it's just not going to happen we got to figure out a way to do it without that. And we're working our way through it and we're getting better at it. But ultimately this is, if we can solve this question we have solved proverbial $64,000 or a million dollar a billion dollar trillion dollar question that we have to face. But we're certainly trying to mobilize as many people as possible to move on this and I will try to find or maybe you have it that article about Germany in the email follow up to folks. So there's another question about costs and then a lot of people have questions about battery storage so we'll definitely touch on that but Dan asked what do annual costs look like after the 30 year period of capital is completed how much will it cost to maintain this generation and transmission infrastructure after the transitional investment is completed. That's a good question and you know because of the way in which I presented the analysis and written the book I focused only up to 2050. In the modeling that I did I carried it forward and additional 10 years, just to make sure that I wasn't doing something wrong. And when I mean by wrong I don't mean wrong mathematically. I mean wrong logically, and that we were going to see this number continue to rise and rise and rise and rise and rise. And that wouldn't solve anybody's problem. What actually happens is that by 2050, we hit a sort of steady state where the earlier investments are now fully depreciated and they're getting replaced by the next generation of solar the next generation of wind and so on. And what happens is this curve actually flattens out at around 6 billion in real terms. I just I mentioned this in the book I don't describe it in the graphs, but we don't run into, we don't have a problem going forward we reach a steady state around 2050. But it's an excellent question very perceptive and in that you know, there's no good way to cover every piece of material in a short period of time, but it is something that I worried about and you'll see it in the book where I do talk about that issue. There are several battery storage questions so I think I'll do my best just to pick a few out and we can maybe talk about it in general but I guess I guess Phil's question is probably the most critical is, can we really build that many batteries economically. This is the first question. And yeah, what are the other technologies out there I mean this. I know you assumed that the technology would be developed but how do you see battery storage technology right now. I mean we're doing really well on batteries. There are, there are issues associated with you know certain minerals that have to go into the batteries. And some of them you know periodically go into short supply, some of them not. There are of course issues associated with the environmental mining of things and human rights issues and social equity issues and all of those kinds of things. But from a technological perspective will work through that. You know where we are in the, when you think about batteries, you know not the lead acid ones that we've got but the newer technology batteries that we're working with. These are infant batteries in their life cycle stages. We are really early on in this process. There are ways in which we can store batteries using different materials different techno or store electricity rather using different materials, more efficiently and at lower costs over time. And one in my modeling is I have focused only on the lithium ion batteries that we're using today for, you know, the Tesla put down in Australia that we have up at cmp's facility in cousins island those kinds of batteries. Right now that storage is costing us about $500 a kilowatt hour this was actually in 2019. The numbers are now down closer to 350 a kilowatt hour. By 2050 in real terms, and I'm assuming in the modeling that they're going to cost $41. Now that cost curve is consistent with anything that you look at in the literature whether it's NREL or Bloomberg's modeling. This is the cost curve that they see lithium ion falling along. What is not included are the next level of technologies, for instance solid state lithium or air lithium. Now, there are problems with those that we haven't been able to overcome air lithium is far far more dense and far cheaper. The problem is it's explosive it ignites. Well, maybe we'll figure out a way to solve that problem. And then there are other kinds of technologies that are in the wings. We'll figure out how to do that. If you would have some of you weren't around in 1990 or at least not around enough to even be answered be able to answer the question. But if you were to ask somebody in 1990 what it would cost to put solar on somebody's rooftop. I told you it would cost you about one year's worth of your income. Now, that's only 30 years ago. Today, you know, it's a very small amount of money by comparison to put solar. Over the years we have reduced the amount of costs for these technologies so much that they are now getting close to being free on a dollars or cents per kilowatt hour basis for the generation itself. The prices now in Texas, California on a 30 year levelized basis, just for the generation at about two and a half cents a kilowatt hour. We see those same prices for some of our customers in India at just over one cent a kilowatt hour. We're seeing them now beginning to approach a penny a kilowatt hour in Saudi Arabia and other places where the sun is extremely beneficial for solar. And so battery storage is going to move down that same curve. I can't tell you how it's going to do it. I can't tell you when it's going to do it, but it's going to happen. Smart people are working on this stuff today relative to the number of people that worked on it a generation ago. Yeah, and we'll, we'll try to provide maybe another resource or two of, because there's a lot of questions about potential technologies. Maybe there's a way to just add one or two of those to the email afterwards, but specifically just real quick on the Isla hoe project. Are you familiar with the capacitors out there and do you do you think those are potential. They are for certain kinds of of storage arrangements. The capacitors are very good at instantaneously delivering electricity and large amounts of it. They are less effective as a storage technology from multi day periods. But that doesn't mean you know you can't use them in the grid. You can. And you know the Isla hoe project describes one way in which they can be used as a way of balancing loads. And, you know, capacitors, we have a lot of capacitors on the grid now see MP has deployed quite a few of them to balance loads, almost instantaneously. There's, you know, there are stations that they have around the state and all utilities do this, I always doing it in the context of they're trying to create a micro grid and balancing loads that are tied to small changes. They're small changes, but relative to the system they're quite large and capacitors are very good at that kind of balancing. All right, thank you. All right, I know I think we're gonna have to have you back for a part two in the fall but I know we're coming up on the end here so maybe the last question. Now is from, I think Phillips question is a good one to end on, can other states do this is net zero sufficient, or will we need to reach net negative in a regional national context. Well, on the latter net zero probably won't do it, because Zimbabwe is never going to get to zero right so you know somebody's going to have to offset something about what other people are doing. And I think from, you know, from a policy perspective, it's hard enough to get to zero, let alone negative and so, you know, if we overshoot a bit was the benefit. Right so, and I didn't worry too much about that question although the IPCC stuffs does suggest that if we really want to stop temperature climbing to why we're going to start taking carbon out of the year. I didn't address that issue. The, the other question was the first part of it mad I just lost it. I think it was just, can other states. Yes, thank you. Yes, they can and some states have an easier time doing it and some states will have a harder time doing it. You saw in the in the modeling that offshore wind was essential for main in order to meet this, and it will be for most of the East Coast states. And the reason is is because we have no onshore wind. Now there's no offshore in Iowa, but we don't need offshore wind in Iowa because we have plenty of onshore wind. Iowa has just like we have a nice balance between solar and wind Iowa for example has a very nice balance between solar, and it's onshore wind. So, and in fact there are many days today, when Iowa is actually generating with 100% wind power, all of the energy that it's using in the state. Texas, similarly, has a much easier time doing it. And there are places where it's going to be a little trickier. And, you know, I'm not sure we're going to be able to get there quite so easily. California is one of them that went to load is going to be tough to meet, but they've got a lot of good hydro out there that they can operate differently right now a lot of their hydro is run to meet summer loads because that's when they're but as we put in more wind and more solar, some of that hydro can be shifted to meet winter loads. And so there may be some opportunities in places like California to move things around. I think in the US the more most difficult areas I believe are going to be places like South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama places where there's not a lot of good wind regime. And there's a lot of sun, but there may not be enough to cover the winter loads. Well thank you. On that on that one more thing on that go for what we're seeing as well and this is maybe another technology that you may want to talk about this in another session. I don't know if you've heard of somebody but in Europe, they've got some of the same problems we have here, right with wind, they got a lot of windy around a lot of load in the wintertime, not a lot of sun in the winter in the wintertime and with it looking at doing is converting a lot of that summertime wind that they've got into hydrogen and using the hydrogen as a fuel to heat homes, rather than electricity. There's a wild card in this. I didn't deal with it, because I focused on batteries as the storage medium, but hydrogen has some potential as well. And you know we're seeing a lot of interest being played, especially in northern Europe around hydrogen. So that's ideas I did want to mention that is another option. Okay. Thank you for that and yeah we'll try to combine or compile some of the resources we talked about in a follow up email. I'm going to stop sharing. Thank you all very much for coming.