 Good afternoon everyone. Welcome to our briefing this afternoon. My name is Carol Werner. I'm the executive director of the Environmental and Energy Study Institute. We are so glad that you are here this afternoon for this special briefing on hydropower and taking a new look at the opportunities for this really important and first renewable energy resource in the United States. EESI, as many of you probably know, was formed back in the mid-80s by bipartisan Congressional caucus that was very concerned about finding good solid information and also common-sense solutions to energy and environmental issues coming before policymakers. Our briefing series are an attempt to really provide policymakers and and people who are concerned about policy in the direction of the country with regard to energy and environmental solutions to find a way to really get good information out about so many of the key issues affecting all of us as we really look forward to a world dealing with many, many environmental issues, many of which are related to our use of energy and the kind of energy that we're using and of course now we are increasingly looking at how we deal with a world that is facing enormous impacts from climate change and how do we best mitigate, adapt and become more resilient to that. That makes the topic of this briefing particularly important, I think, for all of us. One of the things that I think with regard to thinking about hydropower, the different kinds of water power technologies, is that there are indeed a whole variety of water technologies and that it is really important for us to all become aware of how this important resource is continuing to evolve, become ever more important in terms of looking at its contribution to the energy and the renewable energy that we can bring to our whole country, to our energy portfolio and that does not produce greenhouse emissions. One of the things that I think is not well understood because so many times we see so much attention focused on very, very important renewable resources like solar and wind. At the same time we see the probably the oldest renewable resource that we've been using in this country ever since the beginning, that it oftentimes does not get the same sort of attention and certainly does not get the same sort of policy attention here at the federal level. So I am very excited about this panel, this lineup and indeed as you can see we're going to go right down this whole line and so that we can really hear much more about the kinds of resources that are available, what the policy issues are, what this really means to this country. So I will introduce the whole panel briefly and then we will start and of course do Q&A at the end so that we can definitely address your comments, your questions because this is so important that we want you to have the opportunity to take advantage of all of these wonderful experts. So our first speaker will be Jeff Leahy who has been with NHA since June of 2002 and has been more than 17 years of Government Affairs experience with NHA and its members working on policies for hydropower deployment. He will then be followed by Suzanne Grisel who has been with Shilan Public Utility District since 2002 as a member of the hydropower licensing team that worked to secure successfully new federal licenses for the Lake Shilan and Rocky Ridge hydro projects. And she has been actively engaged in the hydro industry and is on the board of NHA as well as the Northwest Hydroelectric Association. Then we will hear from Chuck Senzaba who is a national leader in hydropower licensing. Re-licensing and then the license implementation and compliance issues all which involve a lot of federal environmental and regulatory policies that affect hydropower. We will then turn to Matt Swindle who is the CEO and founder of NLINE Energy Inc. which is a renewable energy development company focused on conduit hydroelectric projects. That company was formed in 2010 and I bet this is a technology that many of you have not heard of. Prior to NLINE Energy, Matt worked with InterNock which is a market leader in demand response energy efficiency energy supply and carbon management. And he is also serving as a colonel in the U.S. Marine Corps Reserve. Our final two speakers are Lori Pickford and Lori is a very experienced policy expert having worked on key energy and tax policy issues that affect the overall electric utility sector. And she has been involved in working on energy electricity markets, new energy technologies, hydropower, nuclear power and federal tax policy issues overall. And then our last speaker will be Paul Gaye who has been involved in government affairs for over 20 years. And he works with his clients at, and I should say that Paul is vice president of the Strategic Marketing Innovations Company. And he helps his clients with investments in research and development programs, infrastructure projects and economic development initiatives. And of course he brings a wealth of experience as having worked for Senator Byrd, Congressman Beard of Washington State, and also he was a legislative director for Representative Boucher. So, and I should just mention too that Lori Pickford is the principal, is a principal with the Ferguson Group. So you can see we have a very bountiful wealth of knowledge here. And to kick off now our discussion, I'll turn to Jeff Leahy. Great, thank you Carol and I just want to say thanks to Carol and her entire team at EESI for partnering with NHA and putting this briefing on. Before I go far, I want to start off with a poll, a little audience participation. You're going to get a lot of talking heads at you, but I thought we'd ask a question first of all of you. How many of you rate your knowledge or experience in the hydro industry as very high, you're very knowledgeable, you have a detailed, intimate knowledge of the hydropower industry? Couple, how many of you have no background or information or this is a real learning opportunity for you, educational opportunity for you on hydro and other water power technologies? Raise your hands. So I think we have sort of a newbie crowd as well as some with some intermediate experience as well. So I think that's helpful for us as we're speaking to you. Today, we really want to talk about hydro as we begin to look again at the federal level at climate policies, at clean energy policies, renewable energy policies and the role that hydro has played in the past and also the role that we believe, the important role we believe it's going to play in the future. So in this briefing, we're going to give you an overview of the current state and future of the hydropower industry. We're going to discuss the opportunities, the growth opportunities in the industry. But we're also going to talk to you and you're going to hear about some challenges that the industry is experiencing. And then finally, we'll highlight policy issues and proposals that are out there that we believe as an industry will move our industry forward. If you did not pick up a couple of handouts that are in the room, you can get them in the back. There's a white paper that is just recently been put out by NHA as well as our Hill packet. So I just gave you our presentation overview, a very quick discussion of NHA. In any way that you make electricity from water power, we represent that this industry before Congress here in DC. So that includes conventional hydropower. It includes small conduit opportunities, large pump storage projects, which is energy storage, as well as marine energy and hydroponetic technologies as well. So the variety, as Carol said, of different technologies that make up this industry and varied technologies that make up this industry, we do represent and we promote here in DC. So this slide, for those of you who can see the slides, looks at the 2018 hydropower portfolio position in the energy sector. This information comes from BlueBurg New Energy Finance as well as the Business Council for Sustainable Energy. Hydropower was approximately 7% of total electricity in 2018, and that also represented almost 40% of renewable electricity generation that year. That is the largest generator of renewable electricity was hydropower in 2018. In terms of capacity, we have about 102 gigawatts of capacity, 80 of which is conventional hydro, and then 22 gigawatts is hydropower pump storage, which we'll talk a little bit more later. But that 22 gigawatts represents 95% of energy storage in the United States today. Looking at the build-out of the hydropower industry, and I'm just going to click through these buttons, the dots represent projects over time, going from the pre-1900s all the way to 2008. And the reason why I like this slide and like to go through it is that it shows that hydro is not just a northwest or a west coast issue. I think every time that people look at this chart, they are surprised by the amount of projects that you see in the northeast, amount of projects that you see in the upper Midwest, as well as projects that you see in the southeast as well. In terms of capacity, the wind industry passed the hydropower industry in 2016. And what this slide shows, and again comes from BlueBurg and the Business Council factbook that they put out every year, we have seen tremendous amounts of growth in both wind and solar. But we have seen no growth or minimal growth in terms of hydropower and the other renewable technologies. However, while we've not seen a huge increase in capacity, as I mentioned before, in terms of generation, hydro remains the number one resource in renewable electricity generation. In 2017, we had a bounce back from the west coast drought, and so that was a pretty big bumper year for the hydro industry. One of the biggest years we've had in probably about seven years. This past year was a little bit less, but not much, sort of on par. But we do expect that in 2019, because of again the amount of wind capacity that has been put online in terms of projects, that wind will probably surpass hydro for the first time in terms of generation. For the calendar year. So this statistic that shows that wind and solar together have jumped approximately 471% since 2008 through 2017 came from the 2018 factbook. And why is it that we see that, and what does that mean for hydro? I mean that's great for those industries, and we're glad to see that the other renewable generation is coming online. But again, just sort of set up the comparison of where we stand. It is also putting some pressure on hydro. We have a very long licensing process in comparison to other technologies, renewable or otherwise. Federal tax policy has been supportive of wind and solar, where currently the hydro and marine energy tax credits are expired. In state renewable portfolio standards, almost all wind and solar generation is qualified as a resource in state renewable portfolio standards. Almost none of the hydro generation or very little of the hydro generation is counted. And then on top of that, when you look at the grid services that hydro provides, not always are those recognized and monetized and provided for in the regional energy markets and the ISOs and the RTOs. So when you stack all of those issues, I think you can sort of start to understand why that line has remained flat for hydro while, as Carol said earlier, policy support for the other renewables has mattered and it has driven that growth. But let's talk about growth potential. I'd like to point out to people that the DOE hydropower vision report came out in 2016 in the Obama administration. It showed that there was 50 gigawatts by 2050. And how does that break out? You can see that it breaks out in a bunch of different areas. And I will say the hydropower vision report did not include marine energy technologies, but I'll talk briefly about those as well as other panelists. But what it shows is that hydro is not tapped out. The biggest growth potential is in pump storage because of the need for more energy storage in the system. The DOE looked at that and said that there's a great growth opportunity there. But we also see it at existing facilities where you could build out on existing facilities and also on non-powered dams. Which speaking of which, there are about 80,000 dams in the United States, but only 3% of them have electric generating facilities. So that means 97% of dams in this country were not built for power purposes. Flood control, irrigation, water supply doesn't necessarily mean every one of those dams is going to be viable for a hydro project, but it does show that there's a universe of projects out there. Upgrades at existing facilities, about 150 projects have taken advantage of the tax credits when they were live and active. And those projects saw about a 9% increase in generation due to those projects that were able to be financed using that mechanism. Pump storage, this is a diagram that shows basically how a pump storage project works. It works very much like a conventional hydro project. During times of high demand, you release water from the upper reservoir. It goes through a turbine and creates electricity. In times of low demand, the turbines are also pumps and they pump water from the lower reservoir up to the upper reservoir where again you can store it for later use. So in a sense, it's like a water battery, as we sort of like to call it. And if you look at this slide, you can see that there's about 16 gigawatts of projects across the United States in several states from east to west for new pump storage projects. So I think it shows that those numbers that are in the DOE report from 2016 are not out there. They are attainable, they are reachable. And lastly, marine and hydrokinetic, I pulled some information off of the DOE website. This is an industry that is still very much a nascent industry, which is growing as we speak, is going through the phases of deploying new technology, refining that technology, and getting to commercialization. So we have a lot of theoretical potential and technical potential estimates that are out there, which is significant in the future. But that is going to be an industry that grows out over time. I just quickly wanted to talk about benefits. When you look at it from a climate perspective, hydro being a non-emitting resource, there are GHG benefits that come with utilizing more hydro. In addition, if you can reduce your use of fossil fuels, you can also have less socks, knocks, and particulate matter in the environment. You can also use water more efficiently and avoid the use of water for those resources that are more water-intensive than hydro is. And hydro, and Suzanne will talk more about this, has a bunch of great reliability benefits. It's not just the fact that its generation in and of itself is renewable and clean, but it also provides a lot of the grid reliability and resiliency attributes that are needed more and more so as we bring more wind and solar online. And this slide from PJM, their reliability report in 2017 shows that of the 13 reliability attributes that they look at, hydro provided all or some of 12 of those attributes. So this is the last part of my presentation. It talks about some of the challenges that the industry faces from a policy perspective. Long lead times, large upfront capital investments, and uncertainty with regards to policy, whether that be included in a policy or whether or not that includes extending existing policies like the tax policies. And so those are the things that we're trying to fix here on the Hill with our legislative program. Just very quickly, this graph here shows you the integrated licensing process at FERC, which is the process that non-federal hydropower goes through to be re-licensed. It's over two dozen steps and takes five and a half to six years if everything goes right. Unfortunately, not everything goes right all the time, and we have examples of re-licensing existing projects or developing new projects that have taken over a decade. And when you look at the re-licensing pipeline before FERC, you have over 300 projects that are coming up in the next 10 plus years. Many of these are small. Many of them are in the upper Midwest, New York, New England, and they may not be able to survive in that environment with the uncertainty and the costs surrounding the licensing and the fact that they're not seeing the revenue streams that other resources have available to them. Some additional policy concerns. I talked about the PTC and the ITC, so I won't spend a lot of time there. RPS eligibility, we've been working with the Brattle Group internally to run some numbers, and we estimate that approximately $1.5 billion annually is in lost revenue to the hydropower industry by not being treated in the same way that wind solar and other renewable resources are treated in state policies. Again, another pressure that the industry is facing, particularly for existing assets. Energy storage targets. We've been seeing more and more of these across the United States. California's adopted one. Unfortunately, when they did so, they really focused on distributed energy storage and basically wrote out of the market a pump storage, which tend to be larger projects. Again, it just goes to show that when you create a policy mechanism or a market, if you leave resources out of that market, those resources, the investment will follow the policies in the market, and that's why we're not seeing more pump storage built at the moment. This is just a graph that shows that wedge that I was talking about, that 95% of energy storage in the United States is pump storage. And then lastly, all I will say is this is the DOE vision report really talked about the fact, I'm not going to read all of these words, but they basically called for a new look at hydropower and a new look at the policies both from a regulatory and market perspective on how hydropump storage and other water power technologies are treated if we're really going to fully realize the growth potential that we see within the industry. So I'll just stop there and hand this over to Suzanne, but I will end up with some high level conclusions. We believe Hydro is an important tool in addressing the climate challenges that our country faces. And it's not only for its own clean renewable generation itself, but again for all of the flexibility and other grid services that it brings to the system. It's not tapped out. There are many pathways to new development and gigawatts of power that are available. However, there are significant policy challenges in place. And those policy challenges are certainly here at the federal level, but they're also at the state and regional level. And if we don't address those policies, those policy challenges, then we're not going to see the build out that we hope we can see and believe we can do in the industry. With that, thank you. And I look forward to your questions at the end. Thank you. My name is Suzanne Grisel. I'm with Schleying County Public Utility District in Washington State. We're sort of in the middle of Washington State. And we are a public utility district, which means we are owned by the people that we serve. We have about 48,000 customers. We have a lot of hydropower that serves a lot of utilities in the Northwest. And we basically have 2,000 megawatts of hydropower, three hydro projects that generate about 10 million megawatt hours annually. We have gone through re-licensing on two of those projects relatively recently. We re-licensed one project in 2006 and received a new license for another project in 2009. Our third project, the Rock Island Project, comes up for re-licensing in 2028. And because we know this is a long process to get a new license, we are already planning and strategizing for that re-licensing process now. We like to consider ourselves really good stewards of the river. We're in a high-profile area. We're on the Columbia River with two of our projects. We have two 50-year habitat conservation plans for salmon and steelhead passing through our project area, which is kind of presidential for the hydropower industry. It's still kind of a rare thing to do that. I think there's three HCPs in the country. And two of those are at Schleying PUD. We worked with NHA on this paper, which hopefully you have access to in your packets. This is called reinvigorated hydropower. And the reason that we were motivated to do that is we have seen sort of a dichotomy out there. On the one hand, hydropower is really almost the perfect solution for what we're seeing as a transforming electric grid. There's a lot more variable energy resources out there. We have society wanting to transition to a carbon-free. A lot of states have carbon reduction standards. And there's a lot of need for flexible capacity and ramping in all of these grid services. But at the same time, well, public policy has really focused more on more emerging and new technologies of wind and solar have gotten a lot of that attention. But hydropower is still labors under some older regulatory processes and markets that really have not been designed to encourage hydropower since it's already been there. And so what I wanted to talk about a little bit is what is the reinvestment environment for someone like Schleying PUD that is looking to re-license our project, which is about 649 megawatts. So between 2019 and 2030, the operating licenses of about 325 hydro projects will expire. That's an installed capacity of 16 gigawatts. And many of them are also facing an aging equipment question. We are already beginning to invest between $500 and $600 million on that one project just to rehabilitate the existing generating equipment. And so that's a really big investment. But we are really evaluating whether and how as an industry we're going to re-license and at what acceptable cost. We're in an environment where while the markets have really changed and the grid has really transformed, we're not seeing that markets are valuing grid services. And so while we have these grid services to offer, we're not necessarily seeing the value associated with that while at the same time, low to flat, and energy is pretty plentiful. So energy prices are going down. State renewable portfolio standards generally have limited the eligibility of hydropower because they have been designed around creating markets for new resources. And tax policy has generally not favored hydropower. Corporate purchasers, so some of the big companies that are out there looking to supply their own campuses, for example, with all renewable energy, tend to seek out new renewables and oftentimes wind and solar. And that seems to be potentially going to be changing a little bit while I'll talk about later, but that's basically been where we have been at this point. And of course, as others will talk about later, hydropower has the longest licensing process of energy generating resource. At the federal level, research budgets have been fairly underfunded compared to other energy resources. And quality and contracting issues are actually really affecting the longevity of hydropower projects and equipment. There was a time where we could expect some of this equipment to last 50 to 85 years and we're having more and more failures at 15 or 20 years. And so that really affects the economics of the project. So how does hydro stack up? So I'm definitely not here to pick on wind and solar. I'm actually trying to highlight that the public policies that have been out there have really transformed those industries. And so what we can see here is Jeff has already mentioned a little bit that wind and solar have really grown in terms of capacity and hydro actually has less capacity out there than wind. It's not necessarily the same on the amount of total generation. Hydropower is still edging out wind a little bit, but I think wind is on track to take the lead. And you can also see that wind has really grown exponentially, solar as well, and hydropower has been growing at a much slower rate as stayed fairly steady. So those policies for wind and solar have been so effective for developing those industries that they have also been effective for really transforming the grid. And so what we see now is a lot more talk about resiliency and reliability and the need for some of these grid services like flexible capacity. So what I just did with this chart here is show all the different resources out there and kind of peg them against what they could provide in terms of all of these different ancillary services to support the integration of renewables into the grid. And as you can see, hydropower really comes out on top across the board. And I've added carbon free on there as well just to kind of show you that it can provide these services, but it also blends in really well with societal goals on carbon. And just being from the Northwest, I wanted to highlight this graph. This shows that hydropower is approximately 56% of the Northwest generation in Washington state. That's actually 70%. So retirements of hydropower, especially large hydropower projects in Washington state would make a really big difference to the grid and also to our low emission portfolio in the Northwest. And especially as we want to decarbonize even further and potentially support the transition of the transportation sector into a decarbonized future of hydropower and keeping hydropower online is really important. Thanks. And just going back again to the growth compared to other resources, those graphs I showed you before, most of that growth in wind and solar occurred since 2008. And if you could look at this graph, you can see the build out of hydropower really occurred largely between the 1950s and the 1980s, even maybe a little bit through the early 1990s. And at this point, a lot of those projects are needed to major reinvestment. It's almost like in some places you're starting over. And so it's really important to have that public policy that's recognizing that keeping those resources online is important. Thank you. So society wants a reliable grid. Many states have carbon reduction goals. Hydropower owners really need clear investment signals and to make sure that we keep these resources online. And so these are some, but there are things that we can do. And so on the positive front, I think that there are a lot that can be done that keeps hydro online and contributing to the transforming grid. One of them that's really important is recognizing the market value for hydropower's attributes. And this is something that really needs to be done more at the RTO level and some of the developing market level. Also choosing technology neutral policies for carbon reduction and ensuring that tax policy treats hydropower equitably with other competing resources. This third one sounds a little bit wonkish, but this is allowing reinvestment and existing hydrotomy additionality criteria. Oftentimes in corporate purchasing policies, those going out to buy new renewables are thinking they want new offset emissions. They're not necessarily thinking about the fact that even wind and solar are going to come to that point where they're going to be repowering. And as we look more where we've got enough energy and we're looking more about how do we have that whole portfolio or at least more of that portfolio be carbon free, hydropower is really a perfect match to help deliver a full product to those corporate customers. And then of course shortening and simplifying the licensing process, this is something that Congress can definitely help with and other panelists are going to speak to. Expanding the research and development budget for hydropower, one of the things that industry really needs right now is better data aggregation so that we can look across all units and find out and better predict with sensor technology when those failures might occur so that we can take units offline, address issues rather than wait till there's a forced outage and then have a project be offline for a longer period of time. And using these technologies and sensor technologies we could actually become even a more reliable partner for the grid. And then something that industry really needs to do ourselves is improve our contracting and quality control methods to make sure that we are better talking to our contractors and making sure that we have those expectations about long lived assets are really fulfilled when we are purchasing new equipment. So a couple of hopeful recent developments, I feel like things might begin to change a little bit. We in Washington State, we recently had a clean energy transformation bill passed. It recognizes hydropower as a renewable, which has been an excellent step for us. Tax parity is still an issue. There is a sales and use tax exemption in Washington State for generating equipment for wind and solar and other renewables that is not applicable to hydropower. That's something that we still would like to work on. But in America's Water Infrastructure Act, past last Congress, we did see a change to the law that will allow us, for example, to count our $600 million investment in Rock Island towards the length of our new license term. So when we go up and get a new license in 2028, Federal Energy Regulatory Commission will consider all that investment when they determine our next license term. We also recently did a five-year power supply contract with Microsoft. So that was a really exciting step for us and I think it's going to hopefully encourage more companies to look at combining hydropower and other renewables to serve their campuses. And then we also contributed to create a new nonprofit called the Hyder Power Research Institute. It's basically going to be run out of Wenatchee, but it's going to be taking data from hydropower all across the country to try to work on some of these equipment operational issues and just try to identify potential problems before they happen. Operationally it can potentially be applied to environmental issues too in the future. So a lot of exciting things are happening. And then my last slide really is, so there's really six action items in this kind of call to action about what we can do to support hydropower. And three of these are in the dark blue are kind of in the bailiwick of Congress and that includes ensuring that hydropower is part of new energy and climate policies and providing equitable tax incentives, shortening and simplifying the licensing process and expanding the research and development budgets. To support hydropower is a digital transformation. So those are I think three areas that Congress in particular could be helpful with. Some of the others just are in other other areas. So with that I'll turn it over to Chuck. Thank you. Good afternoon everyone. My name is Chuck Sensive. I'm a partner with the law firm of Troutman Sanders here in Washington DC. Let me start out by first apologizing for my voice this afternoon with the emergence of the spring weather. Comes that adjustment week that my allergies don't like. So I hope I can last for 10 minutes here. I'd like to start out by just kind of taking a step back. The first two speakers, there's a lot of facts and a lot of information that we're throwing at you. And I'd like to just ask the question, why is all of this important? Why should we care? Yes, the hydro licensing process takes a long time as Jeff talked about. And there are some market conditions that don't favor hydropower and value it appropriately like Suzanne said. And that there are significant reinvestment costs that are needed. And the list will go on as we continue to talk today. But I think kind of a fair question to ask is why is all this important? I know that my teenagers don't think this is important because I have to remind them every day to turn the lights off and turn the television off. They don't care where those electrons came from when they turn on the light switch. But because we're kind of wonky here in Washington DC and we're here on the hill talking about this. This is an important issue to really consider and to talk about I think for a few reasons. I think the most important one, I think the one that comes to mind most often these days is climate. Hydropower is a non-emitting resource and we care about that these days. But not only that, hydropower by some of its functionality. Suzanne was talking a little bit about this. It's a very flexible resource. It actually facilitates and integrates other renewables that are variable resources. So in a very real way with hydropower and renewable energy one plus one equals three because of its inherent flexibility. I think that we need to think about hydropower as a low cost fuel source. And our friends in the Northwest know that more than anyone else as they have some of the lowest prices of electricity in the country. I think that we need to consider that it's important because hydropower right now provides, and Jeff talked a little bit about this, immense ability even now for energy storage. Energy storage is something that everyone's talking about. Hydropower has solved that since the 1920s with the first pump storage project that was built. And then something that may not be as obvious, hydropower is multiple use. These projects as they're regulated, heavily regulated under the Federal Power Act, the hydropower pays for things such as the flood control aspects of a project or irrigation or water supply, recreation that happens upstream and downstream of these projects. So I think that all of these, again, trying to take a step back as we are really in the weeds and we need to be in the weeds to try to figure out how to resolve some very challenging issues to understand that there are some benefits here, immense benefits that are worth protecting, and you have an industry here that's ready to do that and would like to solve some of these very challenging problems that we are facing as a society. So now we're going to get back into the weeds. This is called death by PowerPoint, everyone. I'm sorry about this. But as we look at ways to potentially resolve some of these challenging tasks, I think that it's important for us to first take a look back briefly at where we've been. And in 2013 and then again last year, and Jeff mentioned the America's Water Infrastructure Act of 2018, Suzanne did as well actually, there was an earlier success in trying to get what I would characterize as incremental change to some of the regulatory requirements to sustain and help hydropower. And this started with the Hydropower Regulatory Efficiency Act of 2013. It did some very important things, one of which, and I'm not going to talk about all of these on the list, but just to highlight a couple. First, it established a new type of regulatory mechanism for small conduit projects. Matt's going to talk a little bit more or a lot more about this, but these are projects that are located along water supply lines. They help to reduce pressure on water systems. Those projects up until 2013, some of them are very small, less than a megawatt. They had to get a full FERC authorization either in the form of a license or what is called an exemption, which is a misnomer. It's like a permit. In 2013, Congress made a policy judgment that said for some of these conduits, if they're less than five megawatts, no FERC authorization is required, relieving a tremendous regulatory burden for projects that can be very marginal. There are some other things that Congress did in the 2013 Act that are important to mention today. There was a focus in that Act on trying to look and investigate a way to speed up the authorization of projects located at non-power dams. Hey, let's take advantage of existing infrastructure to build electric generating sources. That's a very smart idea. And then secondly, closed-loop pump storage. Again, trying to take advantage of the storage capabilities of hydropower. Congress directed even a pilot program to see if we can get through these processes on a regulatory basis in two years and then to report back to Congress. Well, let's follow up and let's talk about what happened five years later in the America's Water Infrastructure Act of 2018. Again, incremental change, incremental improvements. There were a lot of things that Congress did in the 2018 Act that are aimed at trying to help new project development. And we don't need to go into those today, but it has to do with permits and priorities and to protect the developer as the developer is doing some of the environmental work. But more importantly, it directed FERC to take the next step with closed-loop pump storage projects at non-power dams by issuing regulations to expedite the licensing of those types of projects. As Suzanne mentioned, another very important aspect of the 2018 Act was to direct FERC to recognize that investments in new projects needed to be rewarded and incentivized by longer license terms. A very simple, very smart solution that Congress required in the 2018 Act. So what's next? What else can we do beyond these kind of incremental step-wise changes that Congress has implemented over the last five years? Well, we have ideas, and that's what my last two slides are all about. Again, I don't have time to go over all of them, but I put some additional details that you can go back and look at on your own time, which I know everyone has tons of that. But a lot of these ideas are set forth in some bills that were introduced and actually made substantial progress in the last two Congresses. And let me give you those bill numbers because I did not put them in my slides. In the 114th Congress, it was HR8, and in the Senate bill in the 114th Congress was Senate bill 1236. In the last Congress, 115th Congress, it was HR3043 and Senate bill 1460. A lot of these ideas that are presented on the slides are from those bills, some but not all. So what are some of these solutions? First and foremost, Jeff put a slide up that showed 27 steps to getting a new license from FERC. That's my job. That's what I do, help my clients get through that process that can take anywhere from seven to ten years to complete. And it's a very highly regulated process. We need to make more sense of this process. We need to make it less fractured. We need to have more schedule discipline in the process. And that's the priority that NHA and the industry have placed on trying to make sense of a process that these difficult decisions need to be made, environmental stewardship needs to be maintained, but it can be done in a better way. Let's also modify federal definitions of what constitutes renewable energy by including all forms of hydropower. Jeff and Suzanne talked about this on the state level, but there are federal procurement requirements and definitions that have excluded some types of hydropower. Getting into the weeds just a little bit, there are some ways to balance the decision making. As I mentioned a few minutes ago, hydropower are multiple use facilities. They're there not to just generate electricity, but they're there for recreation and another public benefits. There are some decisions that are made now that are very focused on certain issues such as environmental protection, aquatic resources in particular. Those decisions need to be made, but as we move to a more complex grid requirement related to all resources and hydropower can be a benefit, we think it's important that all decision makers have a balanced approach to their decision making. In 1986, Congress directed FERC to give equal consideration in its licensing decisions to developmental values and non-developmental values. FERC has to do this balancing since the 1986 act. It seems to make good political sense to require that type of balancing approach with all decision making. The courts have said that equal consideration is not equal treatment. It's not to say that we avoid environmental protection by giving equal consideration. It's just that we need to go in with our eyes open and recognize both not just the environmental cost, but also the climate cost and also some of the benefits associated with hydropower. Other ideas on the table. There's an opportunity to continue to build on the incremental work that was done in the 2013 and the 2018 acts to promote and look at and expedite the licensing of certain types of projects, new projects at non-power dams, closed-loop pump storage. There are ways that that process can be, I think, expedited even beyond what Congress required in 2018. We need to prioritize, this is for my friend Paul at the end of the table, research and development for emerging technologies, particularly MHK technologies, but also with conventional hydropower as well. We're able to capture the energy at low-head hydro more than we ever have before. So things like, I'm from the west, irrigation canals in the west, eight-foot drops, more efficient and economic ways to capture that energy and put it to use in more than just watering our fields. There are more ideas that are presented in these slides. I'm happy to answer any questions about them, but I think that I'll stop there because my time is running short. Thank you. And just to make sure that everybody knows that MHK stands for Marine Hydro-Kinetic, right? But now you know. Thank you. So my role, I'm Matt Swendoll, Chairman and CEO of NLINE Energy. We've heard about big federal problems that hydro has, how it does contribute to the grid. We've heard about relicensing. I'm the antithesis of all of that. So what I'm going to talk about today is small hydro, which is an absolutely made up arbitrary term, but a subset of that is conduit hydro. It's akin to large wind versus small wind or solar full of voltaic versus concentrating solar. We, while we're all hydro, we have divisions within our industry on basically carved out based on regulations, forced us into some of these areas. So let's go into history lesson. And for those that are here in the room, if you could bend your necks, crean over to the screen. And for those on the webinar, if you could reference the second slide. The first renaissance of, and I'm going to put this in the context of small hydro really started about 2,500 years ago. Water power with the Archimedean screw as pumps, Romans. I'm going to give you more relevant examples of the United States. Around circa 1850, we had some of the first modern hydroelectric turbines being developed. Those being James Francis in the 1870s, Lester Pelton. These turbines, as the name implies, these are the type of turbines that we use. First power station going online, some of the first in Wisconsin and Niagara Falls. And we really hit that we moved from that experimental into the big hydro. And that was the renaissance of hydro between the 1900s and 1960s. Those were big projects, massive projects, great grand vision. And our third renaissance, we had basically the perpa or what we call the qualifying facility. This was from about 1978 to 1986. And this spurred on a lot of 30 megawatt down to 1 megawatt type size range. And then we went into a dearth of development. Right now we're in our fourth renaissance. And around circa 2009, we had state level renewable portfolio standards that set arbitrary definitions. In California is a great example. They just said, we agree that all hydros are renewable, but we're just going to say 30 megawatts. Anything above that does not count as renewable. Anything below that, you're game on. And all the hydro owners that had had their hydro in for 40 years were like, what just happened? So there are subdivisions within every state, within ISO, RTOs and what the size limitations are. And I would say that we're about to transition into our fifth renaissance. What I'm seeing is what's already playing out right now in the form of projects are we have new ways to move fish upstream and downstream. We have a lot of dams that have never been available before. So what that does is that satisfies the U.S. Fish and Wildlife or the state level Fish and Wildlife biologists that we're actually doing the first thing is taking care of the biology in that stream or river. The second thing is we're seeing a lot of on the hydropower turbine fish friendly turbines. Now when I looked at my first turbines, they look like little sushi makers is what I thought. That's not the case anymore. We're actually designing the turbines to pass fish through them efficiently with no mortality, no strikeage. They're passing federal and state regulatory requirements. The third one is we're seeing new designs for dams. Essentially some of these are engineered beaver dams that allow you to pass water and pass fish but also allow you to do hydropower. That's getting a lot of attention right now. And then the last one is we're seeing an insatiable appetite on the part of corporate buyers. So think Google, Microsoft, Amazon. They want clean, not just necessarily renewable energy that's baseload. They have a lot of wind and solar in their portfolio and I'll talk about that a little bit more. Baseload means it's on pretty much all the time. So if you're buying power as a corporate buyer, it is flat lined. Whereas your solar peaks up in the day and in the summer and then you've got to fill in that with additional electricity to other parts of the year. So I'm talking small, but let me go to even to a further subset, conduit hydro. I met Chuck almost a decade ago and he says, you know what, you should go after the big hydro and hire me as your representative. And I said, well, how long does it take to put one in? And he said seven to ten years. I said, no, I think I'm going to go conduit because of the reasons of things that were pioneered. I know that might have been fabricated slightly. But unlike the big hydro, conduit hydro, as Chuck mentioned, has a carve out that if you're 40 megawatts or less and you're in a manmade piece of infrastructure, a pipeline, a canal, any type of flume, any type of water conveyance, the general consensus across those federal and state governments are that is a benign project from both a regulatory and environmental perspective. I like to use the example, there are no bald eagles living inside a pipeline. So because of that reason and the reasonable man and woman theory in 2013, we basically have no, we file with FERC and at the time within 60 days, they give us one piece of paper back saying, go build your project, you don't need to confer with us again. That was a big development and since then, in the intervening five years, we've had about 80, 90 projects of varying sizes use that process efficiently and it was updated to take the level from five to 40 megawatts. So that is a big win for us. Let me give you an example of what one of these projects looks like. The picture that you're looking at are two pump as turbines and as the name implies, these are pumps that usually would pump water. We turned the runner or the impeller around so that it can actually produce energy and what happens at this particular water treatment plant in Southern California is they have water coming in at over 335 feet of head. The way to think about that is if you look up and you imagine a waterfall cascading in Hawaii coming down 335 feet, now put that into a pipeline and that whole column pressure of water actually is too much pressure for what the pipeline needs. So what the water utilities do not just in California but all over the world is they put in these little devices that actually blow off pressure but let the water flow keep going and they do that because they don't need to put in higher pressure class of pipe which is exponentially more expensive and when you have high pressure in an enclosed pipeline what tends to happen. Boom, San Bruno gas explosion. So the water utilities are very conscious about keeping their pressure low but what they're blowing off are two things, heat and noise, steam, wasted energy. So we go and we try to find all these sites like this one at the Sandhill Water Treatment Plant where they break this 335 feet of head before they bring raw water in and treat it at their conventional water treatment plant and then distribute it. So what we did is re-routed all that high pressure before the pressure reduction valve and put it over these two turbines where the turbines take the high pressure it turns the turbine and the impeller which takes that potential energy transfers it to mechanical energy in the form of the shaft to electrical energy in the generator, free power and in California renewable. So this particular water treatment plant went live in November 2013 so they have not had an electric bill in five years. That's one of hundreds of examples and probably thousands. The conduit or inconduit interchangeable term DOE speculates there's about 2 gigawatts or 2,000 megawatts, now that's just a small subset of the 50 gigawatts we need to get to but it just gives you the idea of the potential that's out there. I wanted to touch on technologies because I like some of these. We're seeing a resurgence of a lot of new technologies that are challenged the norm. So the two top ones these are modular technologies that would go in at a non-powered dam or at a new stream reach and these are essentially the exact same turbine that are essentially rubber stamped out so you're not custom designing it. They went and looked at the market and they saw that most of the non-powered dams in the United States are 30 feet or less of head and have somewhere around 400 to 450 cubic feet per second that's a rate of flow. So they're designing their turbines to go after that in a very efficient cost effective manner. The one in the bottom left for history buffs out there that's actually an Archimedean screw. Now 2,500 years ago they used it as a hand pump to move water from one canal up into a farm. In this case they reversed it so the water impedes on the flight of the screw and that actually turns the screw but the interesting part about this is the fish also can ride between the flights and follow it right down into the water. You might have seen these in the London Olympics. They actually used this on there to push water up and down for that purpose. And the last one in the bottom right is a company out of Alameda, California called Nuttel Energy. This is a very novel turbine technology. They're going after the low head or sub 30 foot, sub 70 foot market and they're showing a lot of promise for being able to put in an environmentally friendly turbine in a very environmentally complex site. To close out I want to emphasize a point. This is a bit of an eye chart but on the bottom which you can't see on this is the years 2014, 15, 16, 17, 18 from left to right. And this is the cumulative buying of corporate America on the renewable sector through a website called the Business Renewable Center, BRC. It's a subsidiary of the Rocky Mountain Institute for those that track this. The BRC serves as a purpose to connect renewable projects with corporate buyers. And if you look at the exponential growth in 2018 alone, there was six and a half gigawatts of wind and solar procured. Can anyone tell me if Hydro is anywhere in there? It's a trick question, none. So we ask ourselves, we scratch ourselves, wait a minute, if we have an insatiable demand and we're baseload, we give all these grid attributes, why aren't the corporate buyers buying it? And I think the short answer is one, they're not educated to what it is and two, in some cases there might be a negative stigma with dammed Hydro. So we as a trade organization have to go out and talk to them and that's something that we're doing right now about the benefits of what Hydro offers in their local area going forward. And I'll end with, again, I love pretty pictures. The gentleman you see up here, just to show you the cumulative benefits of what one Hydro project power can do. This gentleman's name is Jerry Bryant. He's the former general manager of Farmers Irrigation District out in Hood River, Oregon. 60 miles east of Portland. When he was general manager of this district back in the 80s, he had a number of fish diversions off of the Hood River and he had about 35 of them and they would foul all the time. So he'd have to send his O&M staff out to go fix these. It was a nonstop job. Then in 1996 they had one of the worst floods that they had ever seen. It took out all their diversions which means to an irrigation manager where your sole job is to move water to your farmers, he could not do that. So they had to rebuild for a year. And what he came up with in his garage is a new type of fish screen that was horizontal, required no power, no moving parts. So he took care of the operations and maintenance. Then he went into a 10-year re-licensing or, excuse me, approval process with NOAA fisheries, which is one of the big federal fish regulatory agencies. He got it approved. So what he embarked on in his agency, he goes, you know what, for every one unit of water that I put into my canal, I only get a half unit out at the end. So what I want to do is I want to pipe my whole canal, I want to put in these new novel fish screens, and I want to put hydropower in there. And what that kicked off was a benefit to the irrigation districts that no one really ever fathomed. It went something like this. The new fish screen went in, the pipe got canal, you build up excess pressure, and then you put hydropower. The hydropower paid for all of that investment, but it got better. They recovered that water that was normally seeping into the ground. They put that water back into the creeks and rivers, which then allowed steelhead and other fish habitat to spawn and to reaches that have never been spawned in over 100 years. The farmers that normally had electric pumps siphoning water out of the canals now got pressurized water. So they got rid of $40,000 per pump electric bills, but then they also now have micro hydros because they have excess conduit hydropower pressure. So this became what I love to call the self-licking ice cream cone of awesomeness. This is called the Irrigation Modernization Program, or IMP. It is full force right now in Oregon. 36, I think as this year there will be 36 of the largest irrigation districts in the state will be signed up for it. Heavily funded by NRCS, the National Resources Conservation Service through USDA, as well as the state. But it's that water, energy, food, farmer, nexus that really these hydropower projects are playing a role in going forward. That's all I have for you. Look forward to your questions at the end. We've been talking about storage. We're having to change out batteries in our microphone. Hello, can you hear me? Okay, so I'm here to talk about that federal hydro licensing process that everyone keeps talking about that takes at least 10 to 12 years to get done. I think that it's important to know that hydropower and hopefully you'll take away from this briefing today is not the dinosaur of yesterday. And if we care about climate and we're concerned about climate, we have to look at hydropower differently, even big dams. And so fixing the hydro licensing process is key and that's something that Congress can do. I think it can be fixed. I think that we can do it by protecting the Endangered Species Act and the Clean Water Act. There seems to be a black and white if you touch this law, therefore you're gutting the Clean Water Act or the Endangered Species Act. It's not that black and white. I feel like it can be done if we hold the resource agencies. And what do I mean by resource agencies? I mean the agencies that have to deal with the fish and endangered species and Clean Water Act. So that's National Marine and Fisheries Service and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. But they need to be accountable to the same standards as the licensee. And so with that, I want to give you a little case study. I've been working with two irrigation districts, two irrigation districts in the Twalmy River down in the Central Valley south of California. This is one of those multi-purpose dams. This is a hydro facility. I'm an energy person and you get 203 megawatts of energy. We're up for relicensing this dam. But it also serves all these other purposes. It does flood control. It does recreation. It does irrigation. This area is low income. It's farmland. Turdlock Irrigation District and Modesto Irrigation District are both not-for-profit. They're all about their community. It's a farming community. And we have a real strong relationship with a sister agency, the city and county of San Francisco, which basically gets all their water from our facility through the Hatchatchee Dam. So it's a multi-purpose dam. It was built in 23. The new project was built in 71. It's 500 feet high. We've been trying to relicense that since 2000. 2011. So we used a process that was supposed to fix the licensing process. It was supposed to make it more efficient. We used something called the integrated licensing process because that's such a fancy term. And so we decided to use this process. And I'll explain that in a second. So that's one thing. Number two is relicensing a dam is complicated because you have lots of environmental issues. You're working with a living body. You're working with water and fish and flora and fauna. And so it's not easy. So I get that. And that should be taken. It's a high priority. But we've been at this for nine years and it shouldn't take 10 years or more to relicense a hydro facility. It's inefficient. And if you can build a natural gas power plant and two years start to finish, you can build a 100 megawatt wind farm start to finish in two years, you should not have to take 10 to 12 years to relicense an existing hydro dam that's not doing anything different. It's not getting new generation. It's not raising the dam wall. It's exactly the same. So here are my examples. Okay, integrated licensing process. So in the 2003 Congress and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission took a whack at trying to fix this process. And Congress implemented some provisions in the Energy Policy Act of 2005 and FERC implemented regulations in 2003. That's a long time ago. They implemented something called the ILP process. And generally speaking, what that process was supposed to do was like bring everybody together in the beginning of the process. We're all going to get together. We're all going to get the sciences needed. We're going to work together. And then this would be the National Marine and Fisheries Service. This would be all the NGOs. This would be all the stakeholders. And you would see where the problems were and what science you needed. And then you would go to FERC together and then FERC would decide whether that science was the right science that you needed to start doing studies on. So we did that and we conducted 30 FERC approved studies, We also had 20 consultations, so we did workshops, we implemented some modeling techniques. All of this was done through this collaborative process, so at the same time, National Marine and Fishery Service and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service were part of the process, as was the NGOs and the environmentalists. So we move forward and when FERC implemented this process, they said we are hopeful that the resource agencies will work in good faith and look at those studies and the body of science and utilize that in good faith. FERC does not have authority under the Federal Power Act over any of the resource agencies for endangered species or for Clean Water Act, so it only applies to half of the equation. So what happened? We turdlock irrigation district, Modesto irrigation district in combination with San Francisco. We came up with a $170 million plan to increase the habitat on the river. We used the body of science that was at FERC. We used the models that we created together at FERC, and we made recommendations based on what was demonstrated through the ILP process. Our sister agencies also made recommendations, but they didn't use the science that was at the FERC. They don't have to use the science that is at the FERC because there is no statutory requirement. I don't want a mandate on the resource agencies per se, but I think they need to be accountable. We all have to be working from the same type of science on a fundamental basis. The resource agencies' proposals, they didn't use what was in the record. Their mandatory conditions, which are statutorily required on us, so they can tell us that they want 270% more water. Well, to irrigators, that's enough to make their hair go in a braid. So their proposals were not consistent with each other. They didn't run any of the models to see what the impact on the fish would be, and they didn't develop recommendations, I said this, that were consistent with one another. So in closing, I think the FERC process can work to protect the Endangered Species Act and the Clean Water Act. I think it needs to be improved. And I think the way it needs to be improved is that the resource agencies have to be held accountable to what the licensees are held accountable to. And then lastly is, if you're concerned with climate, like I said in the beginning, hydro power is not the dinosaur of yesterday. It is needed for all these other benefits. We talk about balancing, that's basically when you have the wind and the solar, you want something to balance the power. We talk about reliability, hydro is the resource that can help with that. We talk about resiliency of the electric grid, hydro power helps with that. It's all the things that were in Suzanne's chart that were up top. All those ancillary services that are huge benefits that have kind of been forgotten about. And when you hear stories like this of the new technologies, combined with the old technologies and new fish passage technologies and things along those lines, we really, really can use this resource as we move forward. Great job. Hello, everyone. Paul Gay with SMI, Federal Marketing and Lobby Shop here in town. I realize as a long term staffer myself that I am the last thing between you and getting to ask your excellent questions of the rest of the panel, so I will try to go very quickly. Also I can think of no better way to celebrate my birthday today than to be here with you, to sing the praises of hydro power and particularly marine energy. Let me start by thanking Carol and EESI, I know Jeff started it, I also want to do this as well because I started on the hill in 1992 as a young staffer and I just really appreciate what EESI brings to Congress. It's real news, it's real information that policy makers can use to make real policy. So I just want to congratulate EESI and Carol, I know you've announced you're impending retirement at some point and I just want to thank you for your years of service to us here in Congress and in Washington. I represent kind of the young start-up company of hydro power and water power. If you look at the technology that's demonstrated here on the first slide, it's completely different from anything else you've seen to this point in this discussion. Marine energy is new, it's not commercialized yet, there's nowhere in the world where I can point you to, well that's not true I guess, a company in Maine, I'll talk about that in a second, but there's very few commercial devices right now. Marine energy is wave, it's tidal, it's in river current, it's basically anything non-impounded, that's how it's defined in federal statute, is non-impounded water flows. So if you just look at the four pictures here combined with the one I showed you on the first page, very different technologies. There's probably a hundred different wave technology concepts in the world right now. You see the second device is a verdant power out of New York City, that's a tidal device, three-bladed turbine, so it looks a little more familiar. Ocean current technology, a bunch of different versions of what a power generator would look like. So R&D is very important to us and I guess I should just start here, the three takeaways I want you to think about here is marine energy and Jeff had a slide on this. It's really hard to pin anyone down on what the potential resource is. You can ask our friends at DOE and it's even hard for them to answer this question because it's technical theoretical and then what can you actually go build and capture, right? But it's a huge potential resource. Water is 800 times more dense than air and so just inherently there's just a lot more power there. It also makes it more of a challenge to capture it. It takes significant federal investment to bring these technologies to market just as every other source of power generation in this country, nuclear, fossil, whatever it is, it's taken huge federal investment to get it to this point where it is and this technology is no different. And I guess third I would just say you all can make a big difference because right now we've been trying for years and I mean years to reauthorize the marine energy activities of the water power technologies office at DOE. It's a $100 million a year bill, maybe now $150. I've tried for years to get it passed in H.A. We've been working together. It's been a really substantial challenge. Also I would say on the funding side this industry in particular depends greatly on grand side of the Department of Energy, Water Power Technology's office and the U.S. Navy's energy program. No tax policy right now is involved in supporting this industry. There's no incentives. There's no market pull. It's purely a grant driven program at a DOE and so I cannot sing the praises of the DOE water power technologies office and not fits an excellent organization is a great team. They're making real strides to make a difference. Okay, next slide. I've got about 3 minutes left. So I'm basically covered this already because basically it's the funding and the reauthorization that's important. I do want to highlight a couple of things. There's a really cool test facility in Hawaii. I urge you all to go at some point. There will actually be a couple devices, full scale mega one megawatt scale devices tested at the Wave Energy Technology site. It's at the Marine Corps base in Hawaii. It's a U.S. Navy funded site. In Oregon we're working to build a new full scale 20 megawatt test facility. It's been a multi-year effort. It'll take several more years to get that facility online. The national labs have played a big role as multiple labs. The technology you see there in the third row is a Siemens built generator in Germany brought over will be on the Columbia power technology device tested at the Wave Energy test site sometime later this year, hopefully next year. The technology at the bottom, ORPC, Ocean Renewable Power Company out of Maine, just announced on Monday after about 15 years of work that they have a commercial project is the RIVGEN device. They just had a big press event with the governor and they're going to do a project in Alaska later this year to power a non-grid connected tribal village community with 50%, I think, of clean renewable power. Okay. Why is the R&D investments matter? Obviously just looking at the wind, high cost, low deployment, R&D investments that all swings. Of course, when you throw in billions of tax equity, that also helps that capacity growth. Again, one project I want to show here on the first page of my presentation, I had a quarter scale device, Wave Energy device that was tested in Galway Bay, Ireland about five years ago. Super cool project. I encourage you all to represent Suzanne Bonamici, who has been a true champion for this industry. I thank her publicly here for all of her excellent work. She just visited a vigor shipyard in Portland, Oregon on Monday. She put out a great press release. I encourage all of you to go seek it out. But that second device on the lower left there is a one megawatt scale device. This is another picture of it here I brought. You can come up and take a look at it later. It's going to be deploying Hawaii as she went and did a tour of it. I think she found it as fascinating as I did when you saw it because it's basically the size of a cruise ship that will be parked in the water. Everything that's black will be under the water. The yellow will be above. And again, that's a Siemens bill generator on that device as well that will produce about one megawatt of power. That's a DOE funded project. Also the Irish government has kicked in funding, so that's a multi-country project and also supported by the Navy. The other project I'll highlight on the lower right is also very cool. It's the first time a Wave power device has powered a sensor that got video and images of fish and whales. That's a Navy funded project. It actually replaced 10 car batteries of power a day on that device. So it's a wave powered sensor package. Very cool. You can kind of see why the Navy is very intrigued with that moving forward. Navy 30 year plan in the very lower right, the very tiny little thing says energy harvest. That's us. Chinese have figured this out. They have devices in the water powering their new islands in the South Asian Sea. And so you can see, again, they are creating power at a point where it didn't have any before. It's a global competition. We are way behind Europe and the Chinese in particular are spending a lot of money in this space. We've been catching up the last couple of years. Thank you to everyone in this room for your support. We are now the water power program at DOE is $105 million the last two years. Ten years ago it was at zero, so I consider that pretty decent growth. But when you look at and not to pick on another renewable, but let's just say solar for example had a $246 million program and they deploy about a nuclear power plant of solar energy every three months in the United States. So I have zero deployments right now at $70 million from marine energy. So I would just urge you to consider that every dollar invested in marine energy R&D moving forward, you will get so much more benefit out of any additional dollar invested in any other renewable resources. I guess the most positive way I can put that. The test facilities are really important. This is in Scotland. They've kind of created a really cool hydrogen economy based around wave energy producing hydrogen and taking their whole economy kind of off the grid. They had grid limitations on exporting the power from the test facility. These are some of the devices that have been tested at EMEC. We're trying to recreate that here in the United States. There's several interested locations and doing something similar. I would just highlight the device in the lower right. That has now put on the grid gigawatt scale of power over the last couple of years. So that's one of the leading companies in the world, Orbital is what it's called. And again, I'll just be here some what our needs are as an industry, but I would just the R&D funding I cannot and besides enough. And so with that, I will stop. Thank you. Great. Thank you all for going through those very, very rich presentations to help us understand a lot more about both the immense opportunities as well as some of the challenges and the way that we can really move forward and what Congress, what policymakers can really do to make a real, real difference. And don't forget this affects people's districts all over the country as well in terms of jobs manufacturing and all of the benefits that accrue locally, which are terribly important. So let's open it up for your questions and comments. And I think there were some cards that were circulated. Thank you. Sullivan-Gasman, I'm with Congresswoman Norton's office. And you all mentioned quite a few different types of hydro power. And I guess I was wondering if there are ever cases that you've noticed where some of these different types are maybe getting in each other's way when it comes to advocating for their interests on the Hill or is the approach in hydro that dad raises all ships? Pardon the water pun. Okay. So just wait for the mic. Thank you. I mean, today, as I said, now NHA represents all of the different sectors that you have seen. And I think we really do bring together the industry in a way that hasn't been before. So we have projects that are in rural districts that are conventional hydro. We have projects in the marine energy space that are being developed that are in democratic districts. We have newer technologies that are happening. We have traditional technologies that are out there as well. So I think the hydro power industry is more diverse than it has ever been. But I also think that it is more in line with one another in terms of how we're trying to present our messages on the Hill. That being said, it is a diverse industry and not just diverse in terms of technology, but diverse in terms of ownership styles. We have independent power producers and developers, but we also have traditional utilities. You can get into some differences of opinion on various issues with that, but we try to deal with those internally as we can and present a united front. Other questions? I am with Ocean Energy. I don't know if anyone here has heard of it. I would be interested to know if you have. It's a marine hydro turbine, hydro kinetic. We believe we have the most developed, closest to commercialization technology in the world. It's been developed with conjunction with the United States Navy. It's been tested at the Navy's facility out of Carter Rock. It's been tested in Alaska under a grant from that state. It works. But we can't find any way to get money or find a partner. We've met with engineers, for example, at General Electric five years ago. They loved it, wanted General Electric to buy it. The guys at the top said, come back when you can compete with gas turbines. We did, and we couldn't even get their attention. I mention all this because if anybody has any ideas as to how we might go and find a partner, get our information out there. When I say we've got the best technology that exists for a marine turbine, I can back it up with studies and engineering and so on. If there's anybody got any ideas, and by the way, you can look at a video that explains it at OceanaEnergy.com. Any ideas at all? Anybody like to join, partner? I got into this business, I just want to say this quickly. I got into this with founders of the company. We're also founders of the Climate Institute, and we're into this because we're very concerned about the future of the planet for our children and grandchildren. Thank you. Go ahead. I would encourage you to join National Hyderpower Association to go talk to Jeff. I would certainly be happy to talk to you. Great. Okay, a question back here, and then we'll come over here. Ian Hart, Congressman John Garmandi's office. We have a reservoir project in our district. This reservoir phase two of it is pump storage. I'm hoping the panel can speak about broadly the grid stability benefits that pump storage provides, particularly as we continue to put non-baseload wind and solar onto the grid. Obviously, California has a really aggressive state mandate for renewable energy. I would like to shake the hand of the Trout Unlimited Lobbyists who got them to not include hydro in that by the way, but in particular the grid stability aspect of pump storage is something that I know my boss is very interested in and how that can really be used to complement the investments and the projects that are going in the wind and solar space. To start off with, in California, obviously we have the famous duck curve and the tremendous ramping rates that we see throughout the day, particularly with the increase in solar in California. We have graphs from the Pacific Northwest when you look at the wind generation over the course of a month and it looks like a bunch of spaghetti thrown against the wall in terms of the amount of generation per minute, per minute, day to day. Those are not criticisms. That's just the issue of the facts of life as it is. What pump storage can provide is that almost instantaneous or very quick, fast response to when you see either inclinations or declinations in the amount of energy that is on the grid. You just open up the gates, the water starts flowing and the water starts pumping. If there's too much energy on the grid, then you can pump the water back up to the upper reservoir to take energy off of the grid very quickly. It works in both directions and again, pump storage also provides as does conventional hydro in many spaces, voltage support, frequency, inertia, all of those other sort of, for those non-engineers in the room of which I am also one, all of those grid reliability attributes that are in more demand now because we have a system where that has less base load that has been running on the system and more variable generation. Before you used to have just one variable and that was the load, it changed throughout the day. Now you have variables on both sides of the equation, the load and the generation and pump storage and hydro can be the bridge that smooths, as Lori said, smooths that all out and makes a functioning system. I don't know if anybody else wants to add to that. So specific for your congressional district, a talking point is Pacific Gas and Electric is going to retire the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant. So from a grid stability, something has to replace that. It's not wind or solar. The current analysis is that you put a lot of lithium ion batteries out there that they typically are going to last for maybe five, six hours. You need something with that 68-hour ability to put reactive power on the grid. Sites reservoir does that. One more talking point for you as you go forward and advocate for that project. Hey, thank you guys for the wonderful talk today. I'm Nick from Senator Cantwell's office. This question is directed mostly at Suzanne and Matt. Can you guys talk a little bit broadly about what the future of hydropower conservation efforts look like, like keeping fish safe, that topic and what the biggest issues are right now that you're trying to deal with? And then also how you would combat that negative stigma that does still seem to exist around hydropower, especially in the corporate sphere. Sure, so we have two habitat conservation plans for our projects on the Columbia River. And those we talk about quite frequently. We have 100% no net impact standard on the fish passing through our project area. We've had a lot of success and we have like periodic check-in opportunities with the fish agencies on that. It's kind of an adaptive management program in the way that we have policy committees and technical committees reviewing the fish survival standards, the tributary and hatchery components, and then basically like long-term, I guess to say, the best benefit of the HCPs is that we agreed to the standard. It's a really high standard, but we were given some flexibility on how we can meet it. And so I think that's really the message. We kind of call it outcome-based standards. And one thing that we have achieved was at Rocky Reach. Originally, the agencies were looking at, we'll just spill more water. Well, that particular project didn't make sense to spill the water because the fish come created on the powerhouse side. And so we volunteered to build a $107 million fish bypass system. Get the fish, this is a juvenile fish coming downriver. Get them around the dam that way. We've had a lot of success. We've also been able to reduce bill at that project. So we've had really a win-win on the energy side and the fish side and developed really good relationships with our agencies through this kind of continuous conversation we have through our committees. So we really prioritize these issues and also through our relicensing processes, which include resource agencies and tribes. We kind of have this really in-depth conversation about the future of each project and some of those processes kind of end up having, for example, like a water quality certification with some 10-year check-in periods where we continually have a conversation about what happens in different parts of the project area. So I would say that we've been really proactive and hopefully have really gained a lot of credibility with our stakeholders and that's worked well for us. And so we've generally had a pretty positive experience, but it does take a lot of money. It takes a lot of time and it takes a lot of active management. I don't know if that answers your question. Well, they told me I had to get my presentation done in 10 minutes, so I'm still in that mode, I think, so I'll try to slow down. I'll just add just a couple of quick points to that. First, a thank you to Senator Countwell for supporting and being a co-sponsor of the two Senate bills that I mentioned, dating back to when she was the ranking member of the committee. So she has demonstrated her support for the roots where she comes from in being in Washington State. The second issue I think is just more of a how do we win the hearts and minds of people who have grown up through in a circumstance in which hydro, as we've kind of mentioned a few times today, has a reputation of not being environmentally sound. I think that it is through the stories that like Matt told today of how new technologies can help us resolve not just energy issues, but environmental issues as well. I also think that there's a public relations kind of component to this and Terry Flores' group, Northwest River Partners, and the Northwest has done a very good job of trying to set the record straight when it comes to the environmental benefits that can be attained through hydropower. So it will take time, but I think that the message is starting to take shape, particularly because of our focus on climate these days. That is really a game changer when it comes to taking a fresh look at hydropower, as Laurie mentioned a few minutes ago. You had a second part to your question, and then maybe Matt can also talk to this as well about the corporate buyers and how they view hydro. I think what Chuck said hits some of that, but I also think part of it is looking at what Suzanne said about additionality and when they are looking to be deemed using renewable power and renewable portfolio standards, which were developed in the late 90s, early 2000s. There was a lot of existing hydro, but there wasn't a lot of existing anything else. And so the definitions became to exclude hydro power because we wanted to create a market mechanism in order to incentivize wind and solar and others. And as my slide shows, we have been successful in doing that. But today, 15 years later, when a corporate purchaser is trying to procure renewable power, our projects are not always included because of those old definitions in the existing renewable portfolio standards. So my takeaway from all of this is that we have to take a re-examination of those state renewable portfolio standards and the types of resources that they deem as eligible or not eligible. Matt, I don't know if you want anything to say. Thank you. So I want to go back to your two questions. The first one is what technologies are enabling us to get over these biology issues that are there? Of all the different chasms of small hydros, probably pushing the most because of the carrot that's there, it's the non-powered dams and the near stream reaches. There is a hardy consensus now that if we can bring in a biologist at the very early development of a project and have them sign off on that technology, that it's sustainable, then that's a good win for everybody because they want to see hydropower, stimulates jobs, gets recreation. And frankly, the dam's just there not doing anything. It's just taking up space and blocking up the water. So we are going into that eyes wide open. The second part of your question, what are we doing to educate? Basically, educate in what I call in-reach. It's the opposite of outreach. We want to pull corporate America. We want to pull the biologists into our projects and have them see them. And then you physically watch a light bulb go off. They say, ah, I get it. The issue is wind and solar is very visible. You see them on rooftops. You see them as you drive by them on the highways. You see them on a wind farm. A hydro is buried in a dam. Hydro is down below. It's not in the public consensus right now. They don't see it. But guess what? On almost everyone's bill here, you're already receiving hydro as a benefit as part of your electricity mix wherever you are in the country, 100%, except it's not marketed. So at NHA, what we're doing, and we're one of many, is we're embarking on a number of campaigns to change that consensus at who we think has the most important knowledge. The state level, the ISO, the RTOs, and the corporate buyers. ISO stands for Independent System Operator or Regional Transmission Operator. Those are the three areas that we think that we can show what I call smart and sustainable hydropower to meet these new realities that we see now in the environmental and regulatory spectrum. So you've got four different answers to your question. Welcome. Great. I want to thank all of our panelists. We are now out of time. And I really appreciate all of you who have stayed a little bit longer. But if you have additional questions, I think our speakers will be available for a few minutes. But thank you all very, very much for coming. And thank you. Wonderful, wonderful panel. Lots of terrific information. So please do follow up, and everything will be posted on EESI's website as well. Thanks.