 Thank you, ESI, for hosting this briefing session. The last panel is one of the most important. So we have all these different needs. We have different kinds of electric loads at the residential, infrastructure, commercial, industrial, and institutional sector. And those are impacted by economic activity, clean air act standards, the state of our economy, regional solutions, local economics, all of that impacts it. And now, as you see through our caucus room exhibit, we have all these generation technologies that are huge, some of them are on the grid. Traditional ones of natural gas, and of course, then the geothermal and biomass power, and landfill gas, and concentrated solar power, and foldable tacks, and wind of all sizes. And the whole marine energy, tidal wave, regular hydro, free flow hydro. So we have all these different generation sources, all coming into the market. And then we also have these unique energy efficiency technologies coming in. LED lighting being probably the most dramatic, reducing lighting loads by 80%, but energy efficiency software, we know loads, we can control, we can deal with time of day, we can deal with seasonal, we can shift things around. Electric energy storage is really coming in, most of my projects have them. So now, not only can you take the intermittent renewables, but you can arbitrage between the low rates, like in Texas, that are 2 cents a kilowatt hour at night because of wind, and offset 12 cents electricity during the day. That's pretty cool. Pays back, by the way, right this second. So we have all of that. And it's not shocking. Everybody pays attention to the generation side mostly, a little bit to the efficiency, and not a lot of what goes in between. And these gentlemen up here have different viewpoints of an experience of what goes in between. And I want to remind you, electricity is one play, but thermal energy, of course, is another play. We use heat. We use heat for heating. We use heat for cooling. We use heat for industrial processes. We use heat actually to make electricity. So there's a whole range of things to arbitrage. And of course, just like the cellular industry, just like the communications industry, we have wired technology and now we have distributed technology. We call that cellular. And it has to seamlessly interact. And by the way, this is what I teach in my GW classes. So I love this topic and can talk for two hours, but I can't. So we have some really great presenters here and a pretty major in their field. And I'm going to do it in the order in which it's printed. And so I want to start by just saying, you know, I am stunned. I just did a project in where they wanted to have the lowest, most energy efficient campus, corporate campus. And when I looked in every part of their buildings on their energy loads, virtually everything they had worked off of DC current. Now, it comes out as AC current, but everything, the computers, the monitors, they had banking equipment, ATM machines, absolutely everything. The motors, sump pumps, everything. We're really all DC devices, of course, which we turn AC and then ramp down to DC. So I'm actually really pleased we have a DC fusion here. And we're going to speak from our table. And you have to press that button. And we have Tim Martinson, who's the co-founder. So Tim, take it away. Am I speaking properly? I guess so. Why are you doing damn good? Wow. Tim Martinson, DC fusion, co-founder of my partner Dave Geary in the back of the room. First of all, what we do, where we've come from, we're predominantly from the data center industry. We started, or Dave started, the initiative to utilize direct current, higher voltage DC for data centers back around 2004. And I met him in 2005 at every conference here in Washington, DC. And we started this incredible voyage. And the idea that direct current would do a better job to power an IT load that is inherently DC thought it would be very simple. We talked about efficiency. We talked about reliability. We talked about the lower CAPEX cost, upfront maintenance costs, integration to renewables. It seems like a slam dunk. Everybody should do it. Not quite so easy. So we are proud to say that the first data center utilizing DC in a commercial sense in the United States is up and running in Princeton, New Jersey in a company called Steel Orca. So as far as deployable technology today, we have finally got there in the United States. However, we're only approximately 1,000 sites behind China and almost half that out of Japan. And so while we started with some very good ideas and technology and help move that forward, it's being deployed globally better or faster. So at my point that I wanted to make, A, it's available here, but that we need to look at things differently. We tend to think in terms of efficiency in a very microscopic way. And we look at, say, LED light and say, that's efficient. And that's very true. If we look at it from the load back to the grid and start thinking in terms of how we get power to power things, it changes your dynamics. We talk about our technology as chip to grid. If we need DC, why are we providing AC from utilities? We tend to think of everything from referencing what the utility can provide us. They will give us more if we ask them for more. We will consume more. Our incentives are on devices becoming efficient. But when are we going to start to look at true energy efficiency? And a simple example and a fact that I'd like people to be aware of, the EPA has a regulations in place that the US EIA says will cause roughly 200 coal-fired plants shut down around 2020. So I like the environment. I'm not against any of these things. But that's going to be a change. And an idea of what that means, the entire data center industry by some methods is about 400 or, excuse me, 40 coal plants. And during the polar vortex, American Electric Power, Ohio Utility, was running at full tilt during the winter. 90 of the plants that are going to be shut down. So there's change coming. So there should be a sense of urgency that something's happening. So I want to examine the power chain quickly from the utility to the chip. And we have a slide that presents this. I'll try to make it very simple. You put our coal in energy, some sort of energy source. And 40% of it leaves the building. 60% of it goes up into the atmosphere. Of course, that's the carbon we all want to avoid. To get it from there to these destinations, 7% is lost in transmission. To get it into the building and distribute it properly, safely, cleanly, stored over batteries, in the case of a data center, by the time it actually gets to the load, the chip, and does actual work, only 5% of the energy is actually used. I think we ought to take a look at how we can provide technology at the chip and skip some of those stages, which to me says distributed generation becomes the strategy that we need to spend a great deal more time on. Distributed generation can be combined heat and power solutions, natural gas with micro turbines or fuel cells or solar or wind. It's something local to the load, which means we need to go behind the meter and learn how to control and act like a utility within our own buildings. And the data center being a bulk load should be fairly easy to do in a data center, but it's very difficult to do across the board for houses. For 63 million homes equates to some of these numbers that I'm talking about, I would think that it would be easier to do at data centers in particular. And the US government is the largest data center organization on the planet, followed by AT&T. And oddly enough, the IT folks that make and choose equipment don't have responsibility for the electric bill. Well, AT&T as of this year does. So that's a big change. So when you buy IT equipment, now that guy is responsible for the bill. So as far as policy, policy change, I'm not advocating going out and creating law. I'm simply saying from an awareness, we need to incentivize the technology adoption that's already in our back pocket to use. And I wanted to just spend one moment on residential. Well, how did I end up in residential, aside from the fact that I was an architect student back in Ohio State? Well, villages, there's 1.8 billion people that go to bed every night without electricity. And how are we going to help them? If we follow the model that we have here in the United States, how much fuel would that really need? We need to do something systemically different. We have civilizations, sovereign nations in this country that have that same problem. We should be able to create a off-the-grid model to provide energy for villages and to create a solar home, to create cell towers in those areas or bring technology to these sovereign nations. The technology is already in our midst, we're already selling it. Something politically has to change to focus the direction of the entities that control these decisions. Very excited about what's happening that is happening now finally. Oh, gosh. A carbon plan to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions by 65%. And one of the core products or approaches is district energy. I don't know if you knew that. And we are working with the building community, the development community, to make buildings district energy compatible. So this is very, very exciting. And this is one approach that somehow gets lost in a lot of plans. So I am really thrilled to have Rob Thornton here, representing the association, the industry, sort of educate you a little bit and bring into this discussion that approach. Thanks, Scott. So in five minutes, I'm gonna make you all district energy experts. Whoa. Ready? Whoa. So to Tim's point, the typical central station power plant is about 34% efficient. So that means one third of the fuel that goes in comes out as electricity. The two thirds of the fuel is dumped as waste heat. It's really in the rivers, oceans, and to the sky. In fact, if you were to aggregate all the central power plants in the US, it would be the equivalent of 25 quads, which is almost as much as we use in transportation. And it would be more than the total energy consumed in 216 countries. Let me rephrase that. The waste heat from US power plants is greater than the energy consumed in every country on the planet, except for three, Russia, China, and the US. So what does that tell you? That's a big challenge and also a huge opportunity. Just the waste heat. We have a technology. It's worked since Thomas Edison invented it in New York City. It's called district energy. We take the heat and put it in a pipe and we use it to heat and cool cities. In fact, this building, the one you're in, is on district energy. The capital power plant is down the hill. They make steam and chilled water. It's piped through an underground network. The building doesn't have boilers and chillers or cooling towers. It gets its thermal energy from a location down the street. District energy is ubiquitous. If you went to college in the United States, I'm willing to bet that you lived in a dorm that was on district heating. The campuses consolidate their central plant and when you aggregate the thermal loads of dozens of buildings, you create economies of scale to deploy things like waste to energy, combined heat and power, biomass, renewable energy. So it's this thermal network that connects dozens or in some cases hundreds or thousands of buildings to a thermal network. Copenhagen, arguably the most efficient city on the planet, 98% of the buildings don't have boilers. They're connected to a district heating network that also recovers heat from power plants, waste to energy. And in fact, in Denmark, they also are known for a high per capita wind energy application. At times, the wind turbines are spinning, but there's no load, no electric load. The price of power actually goes negative. The district energy companies get paid to take the power and they put it in electric boilers and they turn it into heat and they use it to heat their communities. They actually get paid to use renewable energy. But the story in Denmark isn't wind or solar. It's that they have this thermal energy backbone, this infrastructure that really connects all their buildings and creates scale. Big sea change for our industry lately was Superstorm Sandy. October 2012, 8.1 million people without power from the coast to Michigan. The systems that stayed online were district energy CHP systems at Princeton University, Co-op City in the Bronx, NYU in Manhattan. Not because they had emergency backup generators, but because they had highly resilient, reliable district energy assets supplying electricity, power and cooling to their campus. District energy microgrids is a new term we're hearing so much about. We've been doing microgrids for about 100 years. And the reason is that if you're a research institution, a hospital like the Medical Center in Houston or Princeton, you process tens of millions of dollars worth of research every year. You can't rely on the commercial electricity grid for the level of reliability that that mission critical operation demands. And so they took it in their own hands and they built combined heat and power district energy on campus. And that's really where our success has been. But Sandy was a wake-up call for mayors. Now mayors are saying to us, the IDEA, we want what Princeton has. I'm competing for the next Google. I'm competing for the next pharma. They're asking me, not what's the price of my power. They want to know, where is it located? What does it cost? How green is it? And how resilient is that power? Distributed generation is moving forward and mayors want it. And the mayors are saying to the regulators, look, this isn't a technology problem. It's not a financing problem. It's a policy problem. And we've got to revise these arcane rules that protect Thomas Edison's grid from the new innovation that we need to deliver resiliency to our economies. And district energy has really sort of proven that. Yesterday, NYSERDA, I'll conclude in a second, NYSERDA just released the results of the New York Prize. They've awarded $100,000 to 83 communities in New York. $100,000 to study microgrids, district energy, and CHP. Then the next tranche of that will be half a million dollars to deploy. And the ultimate prize will be nearly $5 million to underwrite these new systems. Mayors want it. Campuses have it. Final point, we're working with USDN, C40 cities. The game for climate adaptation is really at the city level. And we're working closely with the United Nations Environment Program. They launched last year at the UN Climate Summit, District Energy and Cities Initiative. It's on our website, districtenergy.org. I urge you to read it. There are case studies of 45 cities and how they use district energy to cut emissions, strengthen the grid, and really deliver for climate adaptation. That's all I have. Thank you, Rob. And it's an interesting your point on district heating versus diesel engines. I was hired by the governor of Mississippi after Katrina. And of course, they had millions of gallons of diesel fuel in the ground. But of course, the grid was ripped up. They couldn't pump it out of the ground. And of course, I've been hired by hospitals. After Sandy, we had four hospitals during operations had to move people out of operating rooms because the diesels weren't working. So diesel was a great technology when you had no other choices. But we do have choices. Our next speaker is, I mean, the guru of a lot of this. Jim Hecker has been in FERC, has written papers, has been really an idea guy on how to modernize the way we do it. So he's now Wires Council. And Jim, take it away. Thanks, Scott. Share some wisdom, please. Thanks, Scott. This has been a really wonderful day we've heard a lot about local discrete solutions using less energy, new fuels, new technologies, really a new vision of the electric future. And so you might ask why is this guy wanna talk about electric transmission? That's kind of old timey, isn't it? Well, my goal today is to tell you why this is going to be extremely important in the future, notwithstanding the fact that we are going to have an increase in distributed generation and new technologies like Tim and Rob have talked about. My wife this morning said, listen, dear, if I were terminally ill and I had 60 minutes left to live on this earth, I'd wanna spend those precious last few minutes listening to you talk about electric transmission. And I said, really, why is that? She said because it would seem like an eternity. So, you know, where you're really in for it. I don't know how much I can bore you in five minutes, but I'll give it a try. The grid was, most of the grid that we enjoy today is built 40, 50, 60 years ago. A lot of it's outmoded, a lot of it's aging. It's certainly a lot of it's still electromechanical instead of digital. And we are looking at a future that arguably it's gonna be filled with a lot of distributed resources with storage, with batteries, with a demand response, both on the supply side and the demand side, it's gonna be a different environment. How does transmission fit into all that? I submit to you that transmission investment's going to continue to be very important. After about a 25 year dip in investment, we are now putting somewhere between 10 and $15 billion a year into the grid. And the Department of Energy says we need to keep doing that for another 20 years. And a lot of that is in anticipation of a new environment at the bulk power level. A lot of what you've heard today is the distribution level. This is going to help make our electric future more resilient. Transmission is an enabler of new technology, of new power markets that are going to help keep prices down. It is a way in which we enjoy a lot of optionality because frankly, we don't know what the grid's gonna look like or what the electric system or generation technologies fusion is gonna look like in 20 or 30 years, how it's gonna be deployed. How do we adapt to that without losing reliability? Well, a robust transmission system is one important instrument in doing that. Today, investment, as I said, was growing. There are a lot of drivers. The principal one is the rise of renewable energy, but we've also got to replace old facilities. We are now planning for a more integrated, inter-regional grid than has ever existed before. The EPA's clean power plan and share economics are gonna have a profound effect on fossil energy. And we need, that's another thing we need to adapt to. Plus we need to keep the grid reliable, absolutely 100% reliable, particularly for chip makers and industries like that. So even though growth has been relatively flat, it's still going to grow 20 to 30% over two or three decades. So we need, and I'm speaking on behalf of a group that I'm counsel to Wires, and I'll talk to you in the hall about it. Yeah, it's very appropriate, isn't it? We believe that policies need to be improved, reformed in order to eliminate barriers to growing the transmission system and to making it more nimble and modernizing it overall. We find, and we have studied this or had economists study this, we find that the current planning system that's happening under the auspices of my old agency is fairly inadequate. People are pouring money into the grid, but the question really is, are we building the right transmission? Are we planning for the right things? We do a production cost analysis when we plan for a transmission line, but we don't look at the array of benefits that are necessary at benefits that without which we could be running some enormous costs and risks. And I can talk more about that, but we have a grid that, unlike the natural gas pipeline system, is regulated at several levels of government. And even though this is interstate commerce and it's all an integrated network that's governed by the laws of physics, those little electrons go wherever, wherever we don't know where those came from, but the FERC regulates rates, the states regulate siting. The number of agencies are involved in approving any even garden variety transmission project are as extensive. So building one of these things is a, is a usually at least a five year affair and typically eight or 10 years. And that makes them expensive, and it makes the system a lot less nimble than it otherwise would be. I guess I would wrap up simply by saying that we think that given the environmental benefits, the reliability benefits, the economic benefits and the insurance benefits of transmission, that this is a critical link to the clean energy future. Good, Jim. I'm gonna do the first question and then I want you to ponder yours. I want one minute answers on these. And I teach risk in my GW classes and starting with you, Jim. So we have this transmission system, the head of Homeland Security, not the head, the head of security within Homeland Security said, the grid's been hacked like crazy and will continue to be. We have lots of examples of, minor examples of limited terrorism on the grid, California, New Mexico. We have lots of examples of intense weather patterns hitting and knocking out the grid, Sandy and Katrina. We have forest fires and earthquakes knocking the grid down. And we have complaints by the renewables that the grid is set up the way it is because it went with the mouth of the coal mine. But our energy's coming if elsewhere, not from the coal mine potentially. So from a risk point of view, what's the play here? How do you make this harden new transmission of the future? In one minute or less? In one minute or less, well, you spend some money. And it's really important that we start looking at the grid differently than just delivering power from central generation to the local loads. It's gonna have to be much more dynamic. Obviously, it's gonna have to be hardened against cyber intrusion. But NERC says that the grid has never been more reliable. Has never been more reliable. But that could be just because it's not been reliable. So now you're just a step up, right? Exactly. There's a thought here. Don't wanna get radical on you. No, we definitely need to improve our game. There's no question about it. And that's gonna require some investment. The question that's raised by my remarks, I think, is that necessary? Are we going to, in the face of the risks that you're talking about, rely almost extensively on distributed generation, on microgrids, on local solutions that do not depend on the grid at all? I submit that over the next 20 or 30 years, the big grid is gonna be just as important as those solutions. Well, that's true in communications. We have this very robust cellular network and a wired network, too. But Tim, let's go to you now because you have the option to both work at lower voltages and also, more regionally, closer to the customer. So talk about risk for a moment. A minute now, a moment. Thank you. I have a two-minute question with a one-minute answer. That's right. Okay. Because you're not moderated, that's why. Okay. So with distributed generation, you have the opportunity to control your own destiny in that regard. I think those that are in the business that they are a mission critical site have to take a hard look at that. We're seeing risk managers actually starting to look at change to the grid and risk associated with that. And I agree that the grid's gonna be here forever, but in a different form. And so distributed generation hospitals have been doing it for years. Data centers need to do more of it. Solar is a daytime answer, so energy storage becomes a critical part of that. But when I look at risk, I look at the number of components and the affordability to create a more risk-adverse environment and direct current utilizes less components. It has interfaces directly with storage systems better. A lot of work we're doing at the Emerge Alliance, which is a nonprofit focused on DC for occupied space, data centers, electric vehicle charging. And you've got Elon Musk out there with new energy storage solutions that can be in your home. So a risk-adverse home could be dealt with in direct current type of solution. So I think directly everybody's gonna have to look at risk as to a way to manage that better themselves. Right, and lower voltages do have less component burnouts by definition. Absolutely. So Rob, your technology in some ways is already resilient, right? So give us a little flavor. I mean, I think the grid is great, and most of our members rely on the grid. I mean, they work in complement with the grid. They make, like Princeton University, for instance, they buy about 60% of their power. They make about 40%. They just don't buy the expensive power. But the master planning done by our institutions who are mission critical, whether they have surgery or data centers or cancer research, Petri dishes that are literally invaluable, they've largely determined that they want generation nearby. They want that access, proximity, and industrial grade. So our members have basically looked at this and not every institution has combined eat and power. Sometimes the rules are too complicated with the incumbent utility and it's just a bridge too far. But by and large, most of our universities, medical centers, they make all of their heat and cooling and electricity is a byproduct. They still purchase a big portion of their electricity, but they look at business interruption costs, risk mitigation, and by and large, they've come up with, we want a gas turbine, we want generation, we want thermal storage, and we want to own it and operate it, and we want to rely on it most of the time, not as emergency backup, not as diesel generators to get started once every six months. Their primary operation is district energy, combined heat and power. And it works. Okay, I'm gonna take a few questions. They gotta be short. You're back there. Is that director, is that director? Who are you directing there? On the policy regulatory barriers, local, state, and federal. So that's a one minute answer too. Yeah, one minute. Well, at an ISO level, let's say you're Princeton, and you used to consume on a peak day 27 megawatts. Today on a peak day, you consume from the grid, two megawatts. You now, now there are 25 megawatts that are available for all the other customers on that wire, on that distribution network. Princeton doesn't really get paid for the value they generate for the local grid. They don't pay for the peak demand because they're not consuming it, but they're not really getting a capacity payment or VAR support. And so there are some rules that really need refinement. And it hasn't always been easy for a institution that wants to co-generate to do so. There is this notion that only utilities can sell power across a public right of way. Well, it turns out in Massachusetts, that's not exactly true. The municipality determines who can move power across a public right of way. But we have this urban myth, this Maginot line, that only utilities can do it, when in fact, that's not the case. But utilities have historically not been receptive to destructive revenue from co-generators. The C word, co-generation, the white blood cells come out and they fight that infection. That's historically been the approach. That's changing. I'm amazed you're alive today, Rob, just for that reason. I'm pretty well inoculated. Okay, I gotta cut that off you. Another question over there? Who else had a question, yeah? The risk of sounding naive from what I'm gathering is that it's coming down to policy. That's one of the biggest challenges, coming down to policy. And even when we're talking about our crumbling infrastructure, it always gets punted down the road and it's always short-term thinking, what do we have to do or what is it gonna have to take in order for us to actually produce long-term policy that is gonna actually reinvent our... Jim, you pick that up, please. Yeah, that's a big question. In the case of transmission, the contrast between how natural gas pipelines are authorized, for example, by the FERC, the FERC certificates them, sites them, sets their rates, that's not true for electric transmission. FERC sets the rates and even there, its effects are sort of marginal and the state site, there are a number of other agencies that have different kinds of authority. Land management agencies in the West, for example. I think because electric markets operate regionally, because the grid is a regional machine, we should be regulating these things on at least a regional basis or an interconnection-wide basis. And conceivably, at some point, even a national basis, we have a patchwork of electric regulations that require, you know, one state has a renewable portfolio standards, the other doesn't. One has siting under certain kinds of criteria and the other state that that same project crosses is not bound to honor those criteria or administer the law in the same way. I could go on and on, but the federalism- Oh, Jim, you can't go on and on. You've gotta end that up right now. I'll take one more question. You have it. I'm probably showing my age, but I was always taught that you split the system between transmission and distribution and the way you guys are using the word grid is a very interesting transformation of how we used the word grid historically, I think, or am I wrong? And I'm curious when you look at wires and you look at the other two systems, how you define grid and how that works as we go forward in policy. Tim, you can start with that one for you. You define it, we may all four of us probably define it slightly differently. I'll let Tim start. I guess in a DC microgrid, we're talking about the distribution of power within a localized area. So it's effectively off the quote grid. Okay, so it's its own grid. So there are microgrids, nanogrids, and not to confuse the issue, but it's the idea of going to a distributed power to maybe work in tandem with the grid, the national grid or the local grid, but in many DC applications, we're doing it by its own. A building in California is totally behind the grid from a policy issue. I'll sneak into the last question. So the challenges we have is the incentives don't take into consideration the good work we're doing for DC microgrids and buildings and communities and needs to enhance that and support that like it supports other technologies. And Rob, you have a pipeline grid, correct? Yeah, well, we have thermal distribution. Like in Copenhagen we have a high tension transmission network that Jim has. In Denmark they have a high temperature hot water distribution network. They supply hot water around 18 communities. But you raise a good point. We often confuse ourselves. We use terms of this whole lexicon gets convoluted and we think people get it and we're saying something and they're hearing something else, right? So I think we all need to be a little more careful and artful about what descriptors we use. My own view on the grid, it's really the wires and it is distribution level or transmission level. And those are, as you pointed, two very different things. As it is with communication where we have big wires, we have distribution wires and we have wireless cellular wires and they're really grids too. So I want to thank you all. OK, I'll let you sneak in. If it's very short because I will cut you off. The grid that we live in, the grid, is really something that's quite opposite in structure. It was originally intended. Thank you. That's it. You're cut off. Thank you. I appreciate you all coming. Thank you very much. Give a hand to the panel and you may ask them questions before they leave this room. Feel free.