 Okay, welcome everyone to this sixth panel. I hope that you are learning a lot today, and you're going to learn a lot more on this panel. We have a great group of people here, and the theme is grid, storage, and transmission. So we're going to kick it off starting with Bill White, who is the Director of Public Affairs for CTC Global. You can just talk from there. Okay. All right, everybody can hear me. Get this in the right position. Great. Hi, I'm Bill White. I'm Director of Public Affairs at CTC Global Corporation, and thanks everybody for coming and for your interest in transmission and storage and energy and clean energy. We're really excited to be here today. So I'm going to talk just for a few minutes about advanced high-performance transmission conductors. And that's a fancy word for conductors, a fancy word for wire. So for high-voltage cable, we call them high-voltage conductors, and that's wire. And I'm going to talk specifically about this product. So people in this group, I'm sure, have spent a lot of time, you know, thinking about and studying energy innovation over the last several years. We've seen tremendous innovation at the end-user level with high-efficiency products like LED lighting and lots of end-use, great end-use technologies to manage your energy. We've seen great new generation technologies and the prices fall, and we've seen a lot of innovation. It turns out there's a tremendous amount of innovation also going on in the middle, in the transmission system, in the grid. And that's what I want to talk about, in particular one product, but there are many. But this is our product and I want to talk about it. So for the last 100-plus years, the high-voltage system has used wires that have a steel core wrapped with round aluminum strands. And that type of wire is, almost all of the high-voltage wire in this country is that type of wire. This is a new product that uses a carbon fiber composite core. It uses these trapezoidal strands. I can't see it from that distance, but I encourage you to come to our table next door and take a look. And it means, what it adds up to is, for the same diameter and weight, we can conduct twice as much electricity. It's more efficient. It cuts the line losses by 25% to 40%. So that's a gross savings of 1% to 2%, generally speaking. And it is stronger and lighter than steel. It doesn't sag. And it doesn't corrode and it doesn't rust. And so we think it's a really great innovation and we need to get the most out of our grid to get more renewables online, to balance them over large regions. And we need to be as efficient as we can be with our existing system and with any new lines we build. And that's why we think that high-performance conductor products like this are the ones that we should be using going forward. And we're really happy today to tell you that in Texas, American Electric Power, just won an Edison Award from the Edison Electric Institute, their highest award just last month, it was announced. They used our product to re-conductor, that is, replace the wire on a 120-mile stretch in the lower Rio Grande Valley of a 345 caving line, which is an extra-high-voltage line, a very high-voltage line. They did it... They didn't have to replace the towers. They used the existing towers. They doubled the capacity of the line. They cut their line losses by over 30%. They eliminated their risks and reliability concerns due to line sag. And they did it all without taking the line out of service. Because they could use the same size conductor and double the capacity, they didn't have to replace the towers. So it is the largest energized re-conductor project in history. And so we're really proud to have been a part of that. And what it means for going forward is we're excited that we need to modernize our grid and we think technologies like ours are going to be a big part of that. And it's not a part people hear about all the time. We're familiar with the end-use products. We see the generation technologies and that's why I want to share this with you today. And we're happy to answer any questions you might have. And we sell this product now. We've had it for 10 years. It's sold in 40 countries around the world. We manufacture it in Irvine, California, right here in the U.S. And now we're selling it in, we sell it, like I said, 150 utilities, 40 countries, and growing all the time. So we're excited to be here and happy to answer any questions you may have. Thank you. Thanks, Bill. And that's really exciting too because when we think about the scale of transmission losses in this country, when you get savings like that, that's the equivalent of a whole bunch of power plants. So that is something we really, really need to think about. And it's another whole way that renewables and efficiency really go hand in hand and are extremely important in terms of powering this country, right? So we're now going to turn to Keith Dennis who is a senior principal for end-use solutions and standards with NRECA, the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association. And Keith knows a lot about dealing with transmission, efficiency and renewables. That's true. I'm going to talk about two things mainly today. And if you remember two things, the concept of environmentally beneficial electrification and the concept of community storage. Like Carol said, I work for the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association. We're the representation of 900 not-for-profit electric utilities around the country. So overall, co-ops cover about three-quarters of the land mass in the United States. We serve 42 million people in 47 states. So I do want to talk about these two concepts. And first is environmentally beneficial electrification. And that has to deal with what is electricity's role in a carbon constrained future and what are the implications of a cleaner and greener grid and the changes to the reputation of electricity as it becomes more renewables and produces less greenhouse gas emissions. For decades, policymakers have considered that if you could have things in your house that directly burn fossil fuel like natural gas or propane, that that might be an environmentally preferable option to using electricity from the grid because the grid had technology like coal and gas power plants. However, the industry has gone undertaken a lot of change in the last decade and that conventional wisdom really needs to start changing. So it's been about a century since we brought power to homes across the country and now it's really environmental groups and industry stakeholders who are saying that part of the greenhouse gas future is actually electrifying more things like electrifying transportation we heard about in the last section, electrifying space heating in your house and electrifying water heating instead of using propane and natural gas. And there's several reasons why big trends. The first trend is that the end-use appliances in your homes and businesses today are more efficient than ever. We have heat pump technology to heat your home and heat your water that's 200% efficient. Geothermal systems are up to 400% efficient. They take heat out of the air and the ground and turn it into heat for your house. If you think about just light bulbs you're not even going to be able to buy a CFL light bulb anymore just LED light bulbs. So you think on the side of how much electricity in these devices it's going down down down down. So if you're saying how am I going to heat my water, how am I going to heat my house you're going to have an appliance that's extremely efficient. Now on the other side of the equation besides also this putting them through wires that are incredibly efficient, you have the generation and the emissions with generation is going down down down as well. Almost all new power plants are either combined cycle gas or renewables and a lot of them are renewables. The power plants are extremely efficient and the less efficient power plants are being taken offline as all these renewables are coming in. Obviously renewables don't have any greenhouse gas emissions. There's also the need to integrate renewable resources. Traditionally speaking if you know a house wanted electricity we would build a power plant we would burn gas, we would burn coal, we would produce as much electricity as you wanted whenever you wanted it. Now we're using things like wind and the sun and that's only available when nature says it's available. And so the winds blowing, the sun's shining we have to use the electricity generated when it's available and electric appliances are the only way to do that and they also can be used in a way that takes advantage of those resources. So you can heat water for example on your water heater when the sun's shining and then not heat it when the sun's gone and it will be in your tank still warm. You can put that electricity in your vehicle at night when the wind's blowing and then drive during the day. You can time when you use these products to when the nature has it be available. And just more and more cases, the last trend is that there are more times when you have the option to switch to electricity than ever before. There are electric vehicles out there you can reduce your gasoline, your diesel. There are pumps for agriculture so you don't have to use diesel in your pumps and again there's heat pump technology for your water heating and your space heating. So all those things make environmentally beneficial electrification an important part of our future. The next thing I want to talk about is the idea of community storage and everybody talks about storage being really important to renewable energy and we have things out within our community that actually store energy like water heaters like vehicles and sometimes even like batteries in people's homes or on the grid. So throughout your community there's all sorts of resources out there and a lot of them are cost effective today and we use a lot of them today. We use water heaters for demand response already we can use and that's using them for storage and so we're talking about it in terms of community storage and folks have heard of community solar before and it's the idea that maybe you can't put a solar panel on your house or you don't want to but you can buy into a community solar project down the street in the same way you might not be able to solve the storage problem yourself but you can participate in a community storage project by using your car to charge and help bring down the peak use of the grid or to store energy when it's cheap and available like wind at night. So water heaters are a big part of that vehicles, ice storage batteries, all that stuff might be available in your house that you can participate in a community storage program. So with that I'll just say electricity is a very important part of solving the climate picture. The trends are that we need to electrify more things, get rid of things that directly combust fossil fuel in your home and we hope that you will have the opportunity to participate in community storage programs in the future. Thanks. Thanks Keith. We'll now turn to Brett Adams who is the Vice President for Business Development, Sales and Marketing with Primus Power. Brett. Thank you. I have to apologize in advance because I think this is the first time I've been required to sit. Not be allowed to hold or point or demonstrate anything or use slides so I'm really winging it here outside of my comfort zone. Do you want to stand up over here? No, no. I can do this. It's outside of my comfort zone. It's a learning experience. So basically I feel like I represent energy storage. It's amazing depending on where you're at and which sort of communities you step into, what the available knowledge is. Usually for most of us energy storage is that part of your car your cell phone, your computer that you hate that causes you pain and suffering and I'm here to say that it can be something else kind of already been addressed. Energy storage is about enabling policy goals like using more renewables, making renewables dispatchable, about being able to use the grid more efficiently to begin with. So being able to use fossil fuels and the current infrastructure and produce more electricity and use it more efficiently and grid resilience. It's about not being in the dark just because a large hurricane came by. And so needless to say, due to the number of policies that I'll kind of cover the energy storage market has really taken off where I used to have to do a long song and dance six years ago when I started getting involved in it. It's pretty well understood now and we're seeing say it was under 100 million when the company was formed in 2009. There's in 2015 it passed 500 million and we look like we're going to be over a billion dollars this year and growing 3 billion in the next four to five years. There's less than two gigawatts of stationary storage installed today that looks to be expanding over 25 gigawatts in the next 10 years. So huge expansion quite diversified. This is just not us nuts in California that are driving this. Actually we're not even the leader in per capita. This is being driven nationally and globally. Hawaii is being driven because of large penetration of solar is causing issues such as reverse flows through substations New York due to resiliency things like Katrina, Texas due to large amounts of renewables wind that's been installed in California for a number of reasons including resiliency and integration of a large amount of solar. So it's happening globally and it's we're really at the very beginning of this. It's going to be a very large market but you're really seeing the results of positive policies coming to play. The performance are improving significantly. The cost have come down probably 70% in the last two years. So something that was always previously stated as a question of cost and performance were not there is now really just about having a level playing field. So there's a large number of drivers for that and I invite people to come by and I'll happily have a conversation. I'm in the B7 a little bit on on Primus Power. We benefited in 2009. We're an RPE funded project to develop our core technology. We did DOE demonstration project. We recently did a major contributor to the components to an ESTCP microgrid. So this positive sort of policy has helped us and we've performed and brought interesting technology. Our primary benefit is that it's very long duration, five hour systems last forever that unlike conventional batteries we don't wear out due to depth of discharge. We don't do any damage to the system through the state of charge system. So there's a much more resilient battery and so you would love to have us on your PC and have our battery wear out except that it literally weighs a ton because it's mostly made out of water. So we're great for stationery storage horrible for electric vehicles for that reason. We shipped a number of systems. Our first system was last year megawatt hour system in California. Since then we've shipped a system to Washington to Microsoft. We recently was announced by Microsoft to Central Asia supporting a solar installation and other systems in California and we are fully sold out in 2016 and we have a number of projects that we're doing in 2017. So why come to DC? My main message at this point is that the performance is doing pretty well. The costs are coming down and there's some really interesting and innovative technologies that are underway. We'll see if there's any shortcomings in the current technology. So that's where we play. And so what I want first and foremost in terms of we're creating American jobs, 60% of our product is the value comes from California the other 20% from the US broadly. I'm happily employed in lots of smart people in Hayward. What we need first and foremost is a level playing field. We need the chance to be considered. Every single time there's a transmission project, every single time that there's a capacity, that there be requirement to at least consider energy storage and let us give a chance to make a bid. There's been a number of orders by FERC 755 for example that showed the benefit if we get paid for the benefit we bring we can create a market. And so the studies in mandate that FERC is now talking about where they would at least look and understand the barriers that exist for energy storage we find that very positive because I think if you actually look at the situation you will in many cases, not in every application, but you'll find many applications where energy storage is cost effective and valuable to the grid today. And so we just ask for that kind of consideration. And you know if we could have the similar sort of financial opportunities that's always been our problem that other energy projects get like MLP master limited partnerships to lower our financing costs. ITC would be nice which I know is being introduced this week at the senate. These are definitely nice to have would make it easier for us to fund projects and get the experience we need to scale up to get the cost down performance up. And again, really like Arizona now requires that every energy storage project or every purchase of new capacity, consider energy storage, other states have done similar things. So in summary, you know, energy storage is really happening. Companies like Primus Power, I think we've benefited from policy but we've delivered really to the desire of those policies. So there's a lot of fun and cool stuff happening but you don't have to wait. There are projects underway today, the market is really happening and real benefits in terms of resiliency, more efficiency which reduces greenhouse gases and the enablement of more wind and solar is happening today. And happy to talk more about that to anybody who comes by my table. Thanks very much, Brett. We'll now turn to Mike Jacobs who is a senior energy analyst with UCS, the Union of Concerned Scientists. Thank you. Thank you all for coming out. The folks at EESI also do a great job all year round with focus briefings here. So this policy forum gives each of us speakers eight minutes which my wife reminded me was the length of our first date. Is anyone here familiar with speed dating? So I'd like to see if after this conversation we might want to see each other again. In Boston 8 minute dating we were given the option to meet again for business or for romance. Obviously I'm here for the networking relationship. But about me, I work for a public interest organization. We have a vision of making our electric grid run on 100% renewable energy. To do this society needs both wires and storage. Right now the US is about 7% renewables or 13% including hydropower. I first got involved with storage while working in the private sector to add more wind farms to Hawaii's island electric grids. Yes, Hawaii land of infection and compassion. They called aloha. Though I was based in Boston in addition to all the great things about Hawaii one sees the limits of an island when working on problems there. For example the electric grid on an island is much, much smaller than the grids we have in the lower 48 states. But this can be a reminder that we ultimately have limits everywhere in everything we do. But to add more than that first wind farm on Maui on the island of Maui which at night was already sometimes 30% of the electricity used at night we needed one of two things either a transmission line a new transmission line which is how all grids make use of wind farms or energy storage. In Hawaii such a transmission line would have to be underwater going from one volcanic island to the next which is especially difficult and has not been done in such deep water. The other option which at that time was not known as practical matter was storage. People would say to us you could get a battery. Like they would say you could win the lottery. So no one in the renewable energy industry at that time was building energy storage. Of course this is starting to change now. But much like with dating we might have an idea of what would be perfect in Hawaii adequate transmission would have been perfect for what we needed at the time. But even that might not be available. So the experience in Hawaii we actually use storage to fix the transmission problem. The other interesting thing about dating I mean getting to know storage is that there's a lot of mystery. It can be hard to get to know storage. The storage characters can play many roles can seem to be something different to different people. For me I've been worried about trust and safety issues. It is difficult to know what to expect and what health and safety measures have been addressed when dealing with energy storage. So in the policy realm more testing, more standardization of performance more sort of safety clarifications and standards will help a great deal for wider adoption of energy storage. And we've been working on the senate bill literally with that kind of language. The other mystery though is much more exciting. There are so many ways that storage and transmission improve the grid and not all these benefits have a price or payment. That is there are benefits from storage that are monetized. Sometimes people have looked at storage and will ask what is it? Is it a generator? Is it part of transmission? This confused introduction for storage into a world where everybody knows who they are who they work for and how they get paid is definitely holding back the adoption of energy storage. So this is where you come in. Public policy can help recognize when there are benefits to society such as pollution coming from storage use for lower prices for consumers for fewer conflicts about citing new infrastructure. Energy storage brings some benefits that reduce expenses reduce air pollution but which do not get a payment. So these are public benefits they are a reason for public support through legislation as Brad is named to support energy storage or through tax policy to explicitly support storage. So we've got a little bit of literature basically some blogs we've written explicitly about coming through some of the obstacles for storage we've got those as handouts and I thank you. Great, thank you Mike. And so I think the moral of the story is we should all take our speed dating into the other room as well. I don't know. But that brings us back to thinking about transmission and as Mike was just saying the whole connection in terms of thinking about storage and transmission all being important as we look at building in more and more renewables and so I now am pleased to turn to Jim Hecker who is the Wires Council. He is with Hush and Blackwell and he is also the former chairman of FERC of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. Jim. We just love working with the ESI and participating this conference every year. It's interesting if you listen to some of the policymakers, senators and congressmen today talk about all the bright and shiny new technologies and techniques that this sustainable energy conference represents that none of them say transmission and that's because it's thought of as old technologies, a lot of stuff in the air, the aluminum sky as some people call it. Well I submit to you that we need more of it it needs to be better planned it needs to be infused with new technologies and it needs to be planned in a way that complements a lot of the things that we've been talking about on this panel. It's an important ingredient of our energy future and it's one that people sometimes talk about reluctantly because it has historically had a bad rap. It's old technology, it's costly and so what's happened after 1980 frankly the country disinvested in transmission until about 2005 we witnessed a decline in investment, a deterioration of the high voltage grid at a time when the electric system and the economy were just beginning to become transformed into something we have today. Competitive bulk power markets fostered by FERC new technologies digital technologies I mean most of what we've talked about in this panel today wouldn't have been on anybody's radar screen 20 years ago. We have of course more renewable energy and as capital costs come down and the cost of producing wind power and solar biomass power there's more of it and it completely transforms the nature of the whole electric system and how it operates and so you have a transmission system that was built in the 1950s and 60s that we are now asking to do things that it wasn't designed to do. That's where new investment comes in. We think it's been projected that between now and 2035 or 2040 the country is going to have to invest somewhere around $2 trillion in the electric system as a whole. That's a lot to choke down. Transmission ironically is only a minor part of that. $300 billion or so. But a lot of that has been spent over the last few years and we're now on a very positive investment curve. But in anticipation of what the economy is going to need and what renewable energy technologies are going to be available and marketable and competitive in the future all of that necessitates a way of planning and transmission of anticipating what our needs are going to be and building transmission which frankly last 50 years or so that is going to ease our transition into a clean energy economy. Why is that not inevitable? Well frankly today transmission is planned the way it's always been planned usually by for reliability purposes in very incremental pieces and built to stay under regulators radar screens because it is expensive and people think most about the cost and the fact is there are two things I want to leave with you. Number one is that as I believe I believe congressman Van Hollen said today in talking about this general context a cost is the wrong way to come at this. What we need to be thinking about is value and we need to be planning transmission for the kinds of technologies that these gentlemen see coming online. We need to be investing in the kinds of technologies that Bill talked about not because not because it's just a great thing to do to pump up rate base but because in the long run the benefits to consumers are enormous. We've done a we've asked the Brattle Group some of you may know them and we have copies of this back at the office over here to do a study as to what this kind of anticipatory proactive as opposed to reactive transmission planning can be can yield in a very carbon constrained environment which I think is what we're all talking about today. Whether it's driven by the clean power plan of EPA whether it's just the the economic degradation of traditional baseload generation whether it's driven by new technologies whatever we're looking at trying to plan for a grid that does a lot of things very differently. The savings to consumers they anticipate in a more carbon constrained environment such as the one anticipated by EPA is about 50 billion dollars a year from from investment in transmission that will be of course not anywhere near then. So that the yield to the American economy and to the American electricity consumer is enormous. So focusing on near term costs and and having a regulatory system that in the near term is very very tough to deal with is problematic. Let's look long term let's look at value let's look at ways in which a very integrated and up to date electric transmission system can complement and help the deployment of these kinds of new technologies and the clean energy economy generally. Thanks Carol. We have a couple minutes so if there are any questions for our panel okay go ahead Tim. What have been the major factors driving the reduction in cost and storage? Mainly scale. Yeah sorry, yeah mainly scale. So basically there's a large number of the components in conventional technology that when made on very large scale the graphite components, ionic membrane materials and so forth can be much much cheaper the level of automation and so on. In our particular technology you know we're already our costs are fairly low we're actually at par with conventional lithium ion even though we're at tiny scale and so if we could have some of the components the cost would drop 50-80% just because we could use more automation we could design facilities that are specialized in producing and are now very very custom and so on. Well you know I think we need to incent new technologies like the one we're talking about and Congress actually did that in 2005 and provided some incentives that have helped the resurgent and transmission investment but I can tell you what the problems are and you can infer from that what the solutions are and they're very tough solutions that are legislatively extremely difficult but the Supreme Court has said in New York versus FERC that FERC has planetary jurisdiction over electric transmission because it's interstate commerce what FERC does is set the rates and it has jurisdiction over planning under some subsequent cases but it does not approve individual transmission projects it does not cite those projects that's done by the states it does not have anything to do with rights of way or land rights it doesn't have anything like the authority over transmission lines that it does over the planning and construction of natural gas pipelines and so one can infer from that that the ultimate regulatory solution is to make a transmission regulation since it's an energy delivery system like pipelines to make that regulatory system look more like pipeline regulation that would really require a complete rethink of how the federal power act was written in 1935 and in a congress that's very hesitant to preempt of doing at the state level I don't see it happening but there are lots of things you can do to improve citing to get state regulators and federal regulators on the same on the same page in terms of the need for transmission and the need to work together because remember transmission where it used to be a local event within one state within one service territory is now a multi-state, multi-regional development project and that means you've got a whole lot of people with different laws and different criteria and different ways of looking at who pays to get involved in these things it's one reason that FERC's Order 1000 has not worked particularly well when it comes to interregional projects that's that's my short answer I can give you the longer one some other week and so we'll take if you can make it really short how open would you guys be to or like what value do you find in building an underground electricity highway where who will be transported from state Arizona to a more cloudy region like Maine for example what value do you find I'll wait into that well I think the idea of a national and interregional network is a great idea and I think in fits and starts we are moving in that direction because the economics are so overwhelmingly beneficial as you point out when the sun's shining really cheap solar in Arizona if you can move that power east and pretty far east the differential is enormous in the price you're paying very high prices on the east coast and you're generating this power for a tiny fraction of that so I think that makes sense whether the cost of undergrounding lines or whether you even need to do that with technologies like these and many other technologies that are now available even with the existing overhead system and the existing rights of way that we have you can get a lot more out of the system there are some DC lines proposed DC networks have been proposed I think that we'd like to see that and we'd like to see more of that I think it's a very cost effective way there are a number of studies that tell us that a strong network is one of the least cost ways to decarbonize our economy and one of the fastest ways the technology is all here right now we don't have to invent anything at all and so that's very compelling and I just want to add one more thing when we talk about the cost of transmission according to EIA at DOE the smallest part of your electric bill is transmission it's about 11% about two thirds of it is generation and then the rest is the distribution network so yes individual transmission projects are expensive but there is no greater value than upgrading the network think of any network the internet or broadband is anybody suggesting we have too much we're just getting way too much information it's coming too fast let's just shut that down no it is a high value we need to do it smartly and we need to find the places where the highest value is going to be there of course but I think there's a tremendous value left there and we really need it as Jim said with the future that we're headed toward with a lot less carbon in the system so I want to thank a terrific panel