 Okay. Good morning. Hi. My name is Sarah Ladislaw. I'm the Director of the Energy and National Security Program here at CSIS. Thank you all very much for being here. And happy August to everybody. We're really, really pleased to have everyone here today for what is actually the third in a new series that we've started here at the CSIS Energy Program called the Frontier Energy Series. For those of you who are regulars here, you know that we spend a lot of time thinking about energy markets, energy policy. But one of the things that we've always sort of quietly prided ourselves on or tried to be conscious of doing more of was looking at issues of technology evolution, technology adoption, and sort of the innovation cycle. And we think it's really important because in terms of our public education mandate, it's really important to sort of understand what is it that is the ecosystem that makes sort of different technologies, different technology applications succeed or fail? And how do we as people who think about policy and markets think about that process? And so we're really, really pleased with the first session we had was on drilling technology. I know, totally thrilling, but it actually was very interesting. We recently also had the International Energy Agency in to talk about their energy technology perspectives, which is all about the innovation process. And today, we're especially pleased to have the session on solar energy, which we've called adoption and marketability, to really look at what's happening in the field of solar. How far have we come? How far do we have to go? And what are both of the innovations that are happening on the technology side of that equation, but also in terms of markets and financing and a whole other range of things that we think are making solar an area of that warrants increased attention. I'm really pleased today to have Ethan Zindler here, who is not only the head of policy analysis at Bloomberg New Energy Finance, but a senior associate with the CSIS energy program. What does that mean? These are smart people that we borrow from time to time to help us gauge where we're heading and how we're dealing with an issue. And I can think of no better person to have here today to sort of frame the discussion that we're about to have on solar than Ethan. So I thank you very much for taking time out of your day to do that. And Ethan has helped us put together a really wonderful group of panelists who are going to help us dive a little bit deeper into some of the various aspects of that sort of energy technology ecosystem that I was talking about before. We've got Elaine Ulrich, who's the acting team lead for the Sun Shot balance of systems soft cost. I think that might be one of the longest titles in the world at the U.S. Department of Energy, but it's good work, so good title. And next to her, we've got Yuri Horowitz, who's the CEO of Soul Systems. And we'll talk a little bit more about what they're going to talk about when we get to that section. And then we also have Nova Daly, who's a senior public policy advisor at Wiley Rine LLP. But he's here representing Solar World. And so we've got, like we said, three people who represent various aspects of the sort of challenge and process that we're here to talk about today. So Ethan is going to go ahead and give a bit of an overview presentation, and then we'll move into comments from the panel about how their world intersects with some of the things that he he'll tee up for us. And then we'll have a bit of a discussion. So thank you very much. Again, it's an on the record discussion. And when we get to the Q&A, please wait for microphones so that we can make sure that people who are listening online are able to hear it. So without further ado, Ethan. Well, first, thanks so much, Sarah. I'm really, I'm honored to be part of this organization and take part in this discussion here today. And thanks, everyone, for making it despite the supposed road closures and insanity that was supposed to ensue, thanks to the African Leader Summit here. I'm going to do a couple of things. I'm going to talk kind of broadly about where the solar market is today, and then where we see it going. And then talk about a few potential either obstacles or opportunities, which I'm hoping sort of segue nicely into a conversation that we can have with with each of our panelists. And thank thanks to all of them for joining us as well today. So first, let me start with sort of the biggest big picture context here. One of the main things that our firm Bloomberg New Energy Finance does is track investment in clean energy. So just to start us off, a little context, which is, you know, we've tracked over a trillion and a half dollars in new capital that's been invested in clean energy. And to be clear, my definition here is a fairly narrow one of renewables, not even large hydro, not nuclear, not natural gas, but strictly a kind of narrow sense of new renewables, and biofuels and what we would call energy smart technologies. So the good news is you've seen this incredible rise up to about $320 billion at one time of annual investment. The last two years total investment has actually been declining. Although this year we think that we're going to see things come back a bit and probably go up a bit, but about a quarter trillion dollar per year in new capital invested in the industry last year. Overall, let's see if this works. Or does this work? That works. So solar with don't don't don't strain your eyes trying to read each sub segment of this. But my point here is a pretty simple one, which is that as we turn the clock back, so our firm was founded in 2004 in London. And if you turn the clock all the way back then, for many of the quarters that we were tracking investment wind in the early days was attracting more money than the other technologies. And then you see biofuels also had its day. But if you look at the last several years, those yellow chunks without again digging into the details here, those yellow chunks, chunks represent investment in photovoltaics for the most part, but also large scale solar thermal. And you can see how solar increasingly represents a larger overall share of total investment in clean energy. Now in terms of where solar is going on, where photovoltaics are getting installed. This is just a quick glance. And I'm going to kind of keep peeking over this way where there's a screen, but this is just a quick glance at where the major markets have been. And first of all, of course, on an overall volume basis, you can see that we went from about six and a half gigawatts of capacity total installed worldwide in 2008 all the way up to 40 by 2013. So five times growth in about five years, which pretty pretty amazing rate of growth. But then as a sub segment of this important just to kind of look at where the markets have been how they've been changing the dark green bars at the bottom. That's Western Europe. And so you can see that 2008 through 2011 and even 2012, the majority or close to the majority of the installations were taking place in countries like Spain and Germany and elsewhere. And but that has dropped very dramatically. In the last couple years, as it as an adjustment has gone on, particularly in Western Europe around feed in tariff programs, which support solar and a number of cases, those have been scaled back or eliminated altogether. And the real growth markets interestingly enough have been Japan, in part, which you can see is the the orange chunk in part in the sort of post Fukushima age is a lot of nuclear capacity, all nuclear capacity was taken offline. They've gone through a major program to install more PV and China, fascinatingly enough, China had the biggest year we'd ever recorded for new capacity installations last year. There are a lot of potential reasons for this which we can get into. But China for a long time had been the largest producer, photovoltaic equipment. It's also now the largest demand market for photovoltaics as well. This is just a more optimistic forecast for us. I mean, frankly, this is one of the most impossible things to try to forecast. This market grows very, very quickly. We tend to be pretty aggressive. And yet every time we think we're being aggressive, we undershoot the mark. So we always try to do both a pessimistic or I'd say, you know, pessimistic and optimistic perspective. But we expect continued strong growth globally. And one of the things that we're strong growth globally. And one last note on the sort of regional issue, that last top chunk is what we call rest of world. And that includes obviously a lot of things. But a lot of it is the developing world. And what we're starting to see are a lot more opportunities for PV or photovoltaics in countries which don't have very large grids, but for whom solar can make sense on an economic basis to just go straight to PV without building out massive hub and spoke kinds of grids. So this is just a quick glance at the US market. You know, this is our view on about this year, we think we'll see about 4.6 to 5.6 gigawatts of capacity added. We've broken it out by segment by utility, commercial and residential. And I think probably the most noteworthy as we look out on our forecast is in 2017, we expect basically the utility market to be to, well, potentially collapse because of the expiration of the US investment tax credit, which is so critical to the development of those projects. Looking longer term actually, which is not on here, we do think the market will continue on its way. And this is one of my main points, which I'll get to, but because we think solar is becoming economic without subsidies, and we're really heading in that direction in many cases we've arrived there. But that's sort of where we're going. Now, not on the economics, not all markets are created equal when it comes to the costs of photovoltaics these days. There are major differences between the cost of installing solar system on your roof in California and doing it in Germany. And that's sort of what we tracked here over time. The different lines show that all in CapEx, the cost of installation for residential system in different markets. Sort of as a baseline, that bottom line is the cost of a Chinese made multi-crystalline module. But then as you work your way up, you can see different countries. And Germany really has been the world leader at a cost of a bit over $2 a watt. But then you can see above that some of the other markets, including, I said, California, which is probably more about close to four to $5 per installed watt. So there are big differences in terms of markets. And I think one of the things we're hoping, Elaine will talk a little bit, is sort of why that is. If everyone's buying modules at, yes, there's variations in module prices, but the system costs at the end of the day are very different. Why is that? All right, now to the question of the economics of it and the cost competitiveness, and bear with me for just a moment on this chart. What this is, is a look at the levelized cost of electricity. That is the cost of generating power from your system, assuming that you want to earn a reasonable rate of return on it, and how cost competitive solar can be in different markets. So along the bottom to top axis, you can see the cost of power. And then the left to right axis is sort of a proxy for the level of sun. Let me back up and just say that there's really two things that go into making a determination of whether or not you should put a solar system or two main things, let's say. One is how expensive is the power that you're getting out of the socket? And so how much do you save by offsetting that? And then two, how sunny is it where you live? So how much juice can you actually produce? So as you might imagine, if you live in a market where it's very expensive to buy electricity and it's very sunny, well, that's a place right now, I could probably tell you with some degree of certainty, economically it makes sense for you to put a PV system on your roof if you can get it financed. On the other hand, there are a lot of gray areas, places where electricity is very expensive, but it's not very sunny, places where it's very sunny, but electricity prices are very low. So this is just sort of a look at where we are now. The 2014 line tracks what we call our levelized cost of electricity for PV right now. And the markets that are essentially above that, by our view, again, is sort of a theoretical construct, but I think it's important, it can make sense right now for the consumer to put a PV system on their roof, given the cost savings that they can enjoy based on, again, the electricity prices that they may be paying in our offsetting and the level of sun where they live. And as the price of solar comes down, which is that 2020 curve line, more markets are going to become, you know, viable economically. And again, this is an analysis, just actually for the first time, this is an analysis that is not including subsidies. This is stripping out subsidies and saying what's competitive, what's not. Another way to look at pricing is to look at the actual contracts that are being signed for photovoltaics. We track the power purchase agreements that get signed for large projects. We're now not talking about residential, we're talking about utility scale here, and you can see that the cost, the PPA prices come down all the way to a $50 per megawatt hour PPA that was signed in Texas. One thing to note here, of course, is that if you are the developer who owns that project and you sign that PPA, you are going to benefit from the 30% investment tax credit. So that allows you to sign a bit lower PPA and still earn your rate of return. So this is not what we would call an unsubsidized analysis. This includes the thought and the consideration of subsidies. Now, turning the lens, sort of looking forward, and our view is that there's a lot of great opportunity for this market and that prices are going to continue to decline and this is going to continue to play a much larger role in the overall energy ecosystem. So, you know, 2010, about $4.64 was the global average that we were tracking for residential capex. That's the cost per watt of solar. We've seen that drop down 2013, 2014 to 275, 262. This is a global number. Obviously it's more expensive in California, as I mentioned before, but, you know, we think prices are going to continue to get reduced as costs get squeezed out in part by the technology, but also a big part from the non-technology costs, which I know Elaine can talk a bit about as well. And in terms of our long-range view, look, we've got our long-term perspective. Many people do 2030s a long time away. So I put that out there as the caveat, but we're very bullish that we'll continue to see strong PV growth. But it's worth noting that if you look at a market, if you look at a global energy market in terms of demand for overall electricity, let's say that more or less doubles from 2012 to 2030, you can have PV take up a very large share of the annual new capacity installations, which is the middle chart. And you'll still end up with only, I say only, but you know, with 18% PV by the time we get to 2030. So while we may be very bullish on the growth of PV, our firm in terms of our long-term outlook and modeling, we're also realistic that there's going to be, it's certainly not going to completely displace fossil generation anytime soon, that there's a big world out there. And as long as the economy keeps growing globally and that we keep having more demand for energy, that there's going to be room for a lot of different technologies to grow, we do think PV will be the strongest one to grow given what we're seeing on the cost side and some of the implications in developing countries. But that still leaves plenty of room for other technologies. Okay, so and I'll finish up in just a moment, but what are some of the things, so that's a very nice happy picture of falling costs, cost competitiveness, economic competitiveness, long-term opportunity. What are some of the things that are potentially, let's say, short-term obstacles to further growth? So a couple I'll cover here. One, you know, in some cases some strong opposition to PV that's coming from various incumbent players, in particular some utilities. Two, if we don't hit our goals or if we don't, you know, bring our costs down as quickly as could happen. And three, the potential impact of trade disputes. So I'll take those sort of one at a time here. So first, if you take your mind back for just a second to that chart that I showed earlier and said, and just hold on looking this for one sec, we thought about for a second, again what was it that made residential photovoltaics cost competitive? A big part of it is the cost of the electricity that comes into your house. The how do you, you know, the socket electricity that you get? Now in Europe, in a number of cases, the total cost of electricity that a consumer buys has been very much impacted by taxes and fees. In particular, if you look Germany here, it's about a 50-50 split on what the consumer is paying between the two of those things. So if you raise electricity prices, obviously you make PV more cost competitive. Now this is not, frankly this is a message that has not gone unnoticed by a number of U.S. utilities who are concerned about potentially essentially losing market share to PV. And so in a number of markets around the country, and I think maybe Yuri can talk a little bit about this from the from the installer perspective, a number of conversations have begun to take place about the implications of the rise of solar and should there be some kind of fee that's imposed on solar homeowners to take into account the cost of having 24-7 power even though a PV system only provides it when the sun is essentially shining. This is an ongoing discussion in a number. It's taking a lot of different forms around the issue of net metering, about fees and other kinds of things, but it's an issue that's starting to take place and we'll see how a lot of it plays out. The second thing is around technology. I showed that nice sort of projection out that we've got for costs coming down, but part of that is contingent on the fact that we're going to continue to see technology improvements and that we're going to continue to see the cost of the equipment continue to come down. That is to some degree reliant on investment from venture capital and private equity which is what this is a quick look at. Unfortunately it's a little bit of a flattened chart, but my main point is that if you look back to 2007, particularly 2008 in the great sort of heyday of venture capital investment in photovoltaics there was a tremendous amount of interest in all kinds of new technologies that would potentially change the world. I have to say the only interesting sort of fallout of all of that is that actually one of the sort of least sexy least sort of exciting technologies is the one that seems to be prevailing which is basically making photovoltaics out of silicon and just doing it at bigger and bigger scale and driving that cost down, but there was a lot of investment in different types of technologies. The level of that investment though in new technologies is definitely declined as we go into the last couple of years and in fact even though we've seen a kind of nice uptick of investment in venture capital investment a good deal of that now is starting to go into those companies like URIs who are installers and are getting out there and doing the systems who don't necessarily represent a sort of technology play. Now let me clear it that's okay because if you go back to a few slides I showed you before we're at about maybe four fifty or five dollars a watt to do solar in california well if the module the actual module costs you know well under a dollar a watt that's only a fifth of that total cost so that leaves let's say maybe three or four dollars of costs from all kinds of other things applying for the permits getting the guys up on the roof to put the things up there all that stuff there's a lot of the financing of course there's a lot of room for reducing that cost as well and so we hope that we'll see more of that I know Elaine will talk a little bit more about that in a moment and then finally there's the issue of trade and maybe before I even talk about this just to put this in a little bit of context look you know our firm's been around for 10 years and in the past five years in particular the amount of sort of trade conversations that have gone on has grown I don't know but you can't track it sort of in any kind of quantitative way unfortunately but there are many countries around the world that have various forms of trade policies in some cases they represent tariffs in other cases and in a number of cases they represent so-called domestic content rules where they simply require that the that the photo will take equipment that gets installed in that country get manufactured in that country or some percentage of it so countries as diverse as South Africa or Turkey or Brazil have all had various types of domestic content rules and others as well so this is an ongoing issue and I think one thing to sort of keep in mind on the and I'm certainly aware that's a controversial issue is that you know if you go back to those charts that I showed earlier we think we're sort of in the second or third inning of solar and there's a lot more growth to come and so you could make the argument that from the long-term perspective there needs to be lots of manufacturing hubs around the world and it's not crazy for individual countries to try and create their own hubs where they're going to be serving those markets again whether it's Brazil or Turkey or the US or wherever but on the other side one of the arguments that we've of course heard is that if you drive up the price of solar through these kinds of tariffs you potentially can reduce the rate at which you're going to have adoption and deployment so I put that out there I know that this is an issue that's of enormous interest to a lot of folks so in terms of and and I think Nova certainly can talk more when we get to him in a bit about sort of the specifics on the US-China trade relationship and I won't walk through each individual sort of aspect of this other than to say that there's been a couple rounds now or several rounds now of tariffs that have been imposed by the US on Chinese-made equipment prompted largely by a case brought by SolarWorld which is a manufacturer which is headquartered in Germany but has manufacturing operations in the United States and in the short run the immediate tariffs in 2012 essentially put a certain kind of tariff in one channel of distribution into the United States but created the opportunity for Chinese module makers to source their cells from Taiwan and get the cells put them into the modules in China and then send them to the US and avoid tariffs the latest round of tariffs seeks to address that again I won't get into too many details on it other than to say that there's a lot of different paths sort of into the United States for different types of manufacturers and frankly we read the decision that came down the other day and it's complicated to think about these different kinds of paths but the bottom line is our view without maybe going through all of this is that we anticipate that Chinese manufacturers are going to continue to try to export to the US and more likely they'll choose the path now of a direct integrated supply chain out of China and potentially incur what would be roughly a 31 percent in many case tariff when they arrive here now the big question is what does that mean for the overall impact of the US market a couple things to keep in mind if you go all the way back to that chart that I showed the US market represents roughly a bit under 10 percent of the global market in the US so we're an important market but we're not the most important market we're not the biggest market so there's a lot of capacity out there that can come into this country through different routes so one thing to note from the manufacturers perspective the second thing is as I mentioned earlier if you're looking at a total cost of four to five dollars a watt and you're talking about a module cost of under a dollar you know by our estimate if you add let's say 18 cents onto that that's obviously going to make the cost higher but it's on a percentage basis against four to five dollars a watt is not that high an overall impact so that's sort of our short-term take on it but like I said I hope we as we have a conversation around trade I think the real question is about the question of sort of short-term issues around building manufacturing hubs in different parts of the world and what the value is for that and then the longer term view as well so I think that's just about it and just say thanks very much to Sarah and hand it back to her great thanks very much Ethan so there's a lot a lot in the introduction what we should do now is maybe spend a little bit of time digging down deeper into various aspects of what Ethan talked about I'd like to start with Elaine if we can again acting team lead for the SunShot balance the system soft cost program at the U.S. Department of Energy Elaine's going to talk a little bit about what you do at the Department of Energy to think about solar issues more broadly and then particularly what your specific challenges or opportunity I suppose is in the work that you're doing so thanks Elaine for being here thanks for having me here and thanks Ethan for all that awesome information so you know I'm here again I'm with the U.S. Department of Energy SunShot Initiative and for those of you who are not familiar with SunShot it's a program that was it was a presidential initiative that was started under then secretary of energy to basically to help drive the cost of solar energy into a realm where it was cost competitive with conventional energy sources and so the cost target there was six cents a kilowatt hour basically for a utility scale solar and so we're about three years now into this this decade long challenge that was going from 2010 to 2020 and you know in that we had cost targets for the hardware for the soft costs for grid integration and on the hardware side of things we've been doing really really well as as Ethan was mentioning the cost of the hardware have dropped very very rapidly over recent years and so you know now what we have in front of us is is a challenge to to continue to to drive those markets here in in the United States for grid tight electricity and so within the SunShot Initiative we have five sub program teams we work on both photovoltaic technologies as well as concentrating solar power so those are what I would refer to as PV or CSP technologies we also have a systems integration program that works on all of the power electronics the systems components grid operations and then we have a manufacturing innovations group and then the balance of system soft cost area and that's basically everything else and so as as Ethan was mentioning that encompasses everything from your permitting your financing training and workforce development as that gets to the the installation costs and so you know we we cover all of that we also help to work with a number of of leaders folks who are working on policy and regulatory aspects provide them with high quality analysis and things like this and and so you know we're really kind of a soup to nuts shop when it comes to looking at doing both the technology development as well as the integration and looking at the aspects and how we can support those who are looking to deploy these various technologies but you know it when I really look at where we're at and and you know some of the recent analyses that we've had done you know what we're seeing is well over half of the cost of a solar installation is not tied up in the hardware and so you know I know that there's a lot of news in in recent you know recent months in the in the past year about things like smart inverters about storage about you know all these various things that can potentially you know have big impacts and change the way that this technology is deployed but the bottom line is that for any of these things to work you have to have a well functioning market that values whatever they're bringing to the table and so you know there's your straight kilowatt hours the electricity that's coming out of a solar system or you know another renewable energy source but there is also other aspects to managing the grid and I think Ethan was was you know talking a little bit about this you know making sure that you have that that power surety you know what we call volt and var support and things like this power conditioning and you know increasingly there is technology that can do those kinds of things but valuing those services in the marketplace is going to be an increasingly important aspect of what happens there and so you know I'm very I'm I'm very excited about you know all the technology developments that are that are going on but I also think that there's a lot of work that we need to do on supporting well functioning markets and putting in place the kinds of mechanisms that that can value all those various kinds of services that are happening in the grid and again utilities argue that those are important things to do and the question is who will be the various players that do those things so I think another part of that in a lot of the work that we've been doing recently in balance of system soft costs has been around the recognition that again since soft costs are not inherently hardware related essentially what those have to do with our you know people needing information and so the great news about that is that we live in a digital age we live in an information age and so when you look at algorithms computing capacity these are all things that we can get very much better at really really quickly and so that that means that there's a lot of great potential to drive those costs down really really quickly by you know relying on investment in some of the areas where the US has been very very strong in in the in the past in investing you know in venture capital and things like this and you know just as a sort of an anecdote about this I was I was talking to one of our national lab analysts last week and he was indicating that you know he'd been talking to some folks in the west who are working on the energy and balance market there and so California has an independent system operator the California ISO that manages the electricity grid for California and they have a little bit of a little bit of sort of creep into some areas outside of California where they're where their energy market operates but they now are starting to be involved in and and put together a this energy and balance market that will allow them to interact with other markets in the west and so as that work has been going on since last year basically Pacific Corps has started to use the various algorithms and do more of that real time you know five minute pricing to to practice what it will be like when they integrate into that energy and balance market and even though Pacific Corps is not yet working with California is not yet integrated into that larger balancing region they're already seeing savings just by using the improved algorithms the improved software that California has so they're already seeing that they are having more efficient dispatch just from using better quality software and so that to me again is really exciting and I think that that's a really critical piece so again I think in general some of the the exciting things that we're doing in SunShot are you know really having an increased focus on some of the work that we're doing on systems integration on building up infrastructure data assets on supporting software development and things like that and then along with all of that there's there's actually also a social science piece and so we have a really exciting new program that we launched just last year that is called Solar Energy Evolution and Diffusion Studies and that is a program that is supporting bringing together big data scientists social scientists and on-the-ground practitioners who are using tools like randomized control trials to improve deployment programs and so by pulling those three pieces together we can really quickly iterate and figure out what works in the marketplace in a much better fashion and so that that for me is also I think a pretty exciting development from the kinds of things that we've been doing and I think it's a it's a great a great place for us to be working on on doing development that you wouldn't necessarily see happening in an organic way otherwise so you know between that and then I think the other area where you know I put a lot of my focuses on just increasing access to solar through new business models things like shared and community solar focusing on improving access to financing and things like this I think that that also has made a huge difference in that there's you know the opportunity to have very rapid you know changes in how we're we're reducing the cost there I think that that will make a big difference but one point that I wanted to make Ethan is that you know as you were going through you were quickly sort of switching between using the term cost and price and so I think that's that's one really critical thing to note about the U.S. market is that the price of a solar installation is not necessarily closely pinned to the cost and so there are certain markets that where I would say you know costs are are relatively similar or in some cases you know the cost may actually be higher in some markets but the prices may be lower and again that has a lot to do with what the prevailing market will bear and you know consumer education to be frank so you know we're we're hoping that you know we can provide more transparency in the marketplace as well for American consumers so that way they can go in there in an educated manner and and when I'm talking about consumers I'm not just talking about you know individuals who are trying to do residential programs but again those leaders folks who are working with utilities, commissions and policy makers to understand you know what the economics really can look like for them so yeah thank you Elaine and I'll have a follow-up question for you when we sort of circle back so now I think Yuri we'll skip over you for a minute and go to Nova if that's okay Nova Daily actually an international investment and trade specialists but here representing the views of somebody that you work with closely solar world to Ethan has sort of talked about tell us a little bit about the company about sort of the the perspective on sort of the challenges and opportunities that come with the the sort of changing solar market from the solar world world perspective sure thank you so much Sarah and thank you CSIS and Ethan for having us here well first a disclaimer my comments don't represent solar world nor the do they represent my law from Wiley-Rye and they are my own so they should be attributed to me that said a little bit about solar world so it's obviously as has been talked about here it's a German company that decided to come to the United States and it has invested about 650 million dollars of its own money to make and produce solar here in the United States why because at the time it made perfect economic sense polysilicon is widely supplied and made here in the United States labor is a very small part of manufacturing and the equipment is going to be market market prices so it made sense given the expanded U.S. economy and expanded market for solar in the United States to come here build it here and continue to expand what it faced was a very difficult problem starting about in 2008 China through its five-year plans decided that solar power was one of the industries that it needed to ramp up on so its first five-year plan 2006 and then its subsequent five-year plan it made the expansion of solar a priority for its market and it did very well to do that expanding its exports into the United States within a period of 2008 to 2011 or 12 by about 1,700 percent so the effect was about 20 U.S. businesses shutting their doors in the United States and many innovative industries losing the ground to be able to innovate here in America solar world was like the other industries very much on the brink on the brink of losing out not only here but in Europe as China expanded its exports it's a good thing to expand exports and develop technologies but when you do it at such a rate if it's not controlled it creates bubbles and we know what bubbles do to economies especially when they're driven by subsidies from estates production subsidies they eventually burst and that's what happened in the solar market so solar world had very little recourse but to take the actions that were legal and available to it and one of those actions was to file trade cases with the U.S. Department of Commerce now I have to make clear that these trade cases I mean it's U.S. law it's international law when China ceded to the WTO in 2001 one of the obligations it took on was Article 6 of the GATT General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and that it would understood and it understood that the rules are that dumping and providing subsidies certain subsidies export subsidies into a market that causes injury can allow those foreign producers to file cases and grievance upon them the important part of understanding the tariffs is not they're just not willy-nilly tariffs that the Department of Commerce decided to put up it goes through a very rigorous process of looking at the cost practices of the foreign producers it goes on site opens a books and accounts it talks to the foreign governments to find out the subsidies being provided but that's half the equation to determine what level of dumping or subsidy happened or occurred the other part of it is you can do all that dumping and subsidization as much as you want but it has to actually injure the U.S. market to be considered WTO illegal and that's what has been found nine times on the Chinese producers so the net effect is that tariffs have been put in place as Ethan has sort of demonstrated but if you look at sort of shipments from China you know they do go down after the initial filing of the first case in 2011 but then they eventually picked up because within the scope of the first case there was a hole that allowed Chinese producers to essentially take their wafers that were produced in-house from polysilicon produced in country and then take it to Taiwan to have it further manufactured into a cell and then bring it back to China to produce a wafer that was suddenly out of the scope that wasn't addressing the injury that was still occurring to solar worlds and the supporting coalition behind it that includes 250 employers and over 25,000 employees so they determined that a subsequent case needed to be filed to address this loophole in the first case so the preliminary findings have come out recently on the dumping side and the subsidy side and additional duties have been put in place but the end goal for solar world and the members of the coalition has always been to have a U.S. market that is fair and equitable and based on competition that is not WTO illegal that's the end goal because I think all companies agree that given that level playing field you are in a position to compete fairly with the best innovations and the best cost pricing as you can some interesting studies I came upon in terms of representing solar world or just you know the renewable energy lab at the department of energy came out with a study and found that it actually costs less to produce and ship solar in the United States that is because of what I said earlier on the polysilicon equipment so U.S. producers ought to have a comparative advantage to make this product ought to have a comparative advantage and given that I think there's some justification at least from the legal side for filing cases in order to build that level playing field and on the economic side do these trade actions do they inevitably produce a situation where you have the things you want to have for the department of energy innovation happening in the United States and the globe and the expansion of renewable energies like solar and wind well I think they do I think they create a level playing field whereby other producers can come in and it's been very interesting one of the supporters of our trade case Helios recently was bought out by a Chinese producer that's now going to manufacture in the United States solar city has gone and decided to do manufacturing in New York so I think in the end what you always want to create is a market without distortions and a market that allows for a competition and innovation to drive progress one of the more fascinating stories I came across and sort of my research in working on this case in the cases with Solar World and Coalition was a story of what happened in the 1980s Ronald Reagan essentially did a 301 which is a trade action against Japan in regards to semiconductors that were being shipped into the United States while Japan had barriers and didn't allow semiconductors to go into its market it was pretty controversial at the time but he's able to negotiate an agreement whereby Japan sort of slowed its shipments it gave a new playing field for U.S. producers to have sort of a breather from the onslaught of dumping that was occurring three years later a company that was near the brink and teetering discovered a new technology called the Pentium Chip you know the company it's Intel and that company has driven some of the great innovations in semiconductors and driven down prices so the end goal I think in trade and in industry is to make sure you don't have distortions temporary distortions that level and take away from the marketplace players that could have otherwise brought great innovations and great new capabilities to expand solar and renewable energy which I think is a good thing so that said thank you so thanks very much we'll move on to Yuri Horowitz who is here representing the he's the chief executive officer of Sol Systems to talk about the the sort of installer and financing perspective and sort of good segue because speaking of innovation a lot of what has happened in the market is sort of innovating on how you actually get these products you know out to people out to different markets there's a lot of innovation going on in that side as well so Yuri thanks for being here today sure and just a footnote we are not an installer we're a financier so hopefully you guys will still welcome my comments but first maybe a personal story I'm not a policy expert I'm pretty informed on the industry I've been a CEO of Sol Systems since 2008 I started the company and I've been in solar and wind really since I can remember I started it through a college in law school and then did renewable energy law and then started the company as I said in 2008 I think what I've seen in my journey is an industry that's exciting it's exploding and I think it's got real promise for the future and I want to touch upon why I think that is through maybe some some stories and also through just a couple bullets the first is solar fundamentally changed in the early 2000s with a innovation called third party finances it's really the core of most companies now that install solar solar projects throughout the united states sonnettis and sun power solar city if these names ring a bell to you because you study solar you're involved in it at all all of them are really a function of the third party financing revolution and I think that was the first change in solar that really started what is currently a multi-billion dollar market and will soon be a trillion dollar market in the the global context so I'd say that was the biggest change early on in solar that's really driven a lot of the companies to grow as they are I remember when we started our company were based here in DC were about 30 people we started my dining room working from my dining room table last year we were the 91st fastest growing company in the United States and we've grown tremendously from two people to what we are now but when we first started there were a bunch of other kind of smaller companies out there as well a company called astrum solar which is located here in Maryland which was recently purchased for 54 million dollars from direct energy that's a that's a narrative that I think demonstrates how the industry's grown since we began and in part in large part astrum is a function of that third party innovation what that means is that oftentimes customers cannot afford the upfront cost of solar that was very true throughout the 2000s solar projects solar systems are still fairly expensive as Ethan pointed out earlier especially for homeowners what the third party financing mechanism and innovation did was enable homeowners and businesses often to secure solar for no upfront cost and then pay what is often the lease payment or a power purchase payment on a monthly basis for the power that the energy the power of the solar system produces so I think that was the first of an innovation that really changed where we are today the second for better for worse is exactly what Nova was just talking about which is the entrance of the Chinese as well as Philippine markets as well as Taiwanese markets and others basically bringing down module costs significantly so another story I remember sitting in our middle room in my apartment when we first started the business and hearing about this company called Canadian solar that was selling solar modules for $2 a watt this was about 2009 that was groundbreaking at the time most solar modules cost $2.50 sometimes more certainly Sunpower was more than that Canadian solar was a Chinese company they had decided to use the name Canadian solar for many obvious reasons but they were shipping modules and for $2 a watt those modules now are $0.65, $0.75 and those are from competitors that are as good if not better than Canadian solar as a span of about five years between 2008 and 2013 when modules went down that quickly some of it was because of dumping a lot of it was because of scale and new markets and that's the third point which is people often say you know is solar a function of U.S. market gluttony basically from the government and RPS schedules renewable portfolio standard schedules the federal ITC yeah sure solar has been built on the back of federal subsidies just like any other energy source but to think today that solar is a function of the federal investment tax credit or state RPS schedules is a fallacy it's a big one solar in the United States if we're lucky we'll do six gigawatts of solar which in and of itself is huge I'll use another story in 2008 when we started there was about 300 megawatts of solar getting built every year in the United States in 2013 there were three gigawatts being built and this year we think there will be about six gigawatts being built that's six thousand megawatts or six million kilowatts of projects there's a solar system that goes on the ground every four minutes in the U.S. it's an explosive industry and that scale is beyond the United States the U.S. is going to do about six gigs as I said China and Japan will be doing between 10 and 15 gigs in the 14 14 year as Ethan I think showed you earlier on the chart so solar is beyond the U.S. and that's the that's the third point beyond the first which is third party financing the second which is technology cost the third is market expansion if you have scale in the U.S. that's a good thing if you have scale globally that's a huge thing and I think that's where we are with solar the fourth and I think this is really a 2014 innovation is the increase in public market participation in solar one of the slides earlier demonstrated or illustrated the reduction in VC funding for solar well part of that huge reduction in VC funding is because VCs are primarily in the United States and in 2008 and 2009 they were primarily investing in solar modules and in 2009 and 2010 the Chinese decided to destroy the U.S. solar module market and they they did so pretty effectively whether that's you know good for the industry or not is a discussion I'm not going to entertain but what ended up happening was VCs didn't really know how to invest in other types of companies VCs invest in widgets they don't invest in financial companies like our own that connect Fortune 500 companies with the solar market they invest in companies that innovate modules or racking or inverters and frankly this wasn't the country where that stuff was getting built affordably so I wouldn't argue that the decrease in VC funding for solar isn't a huge downside to the solar market overall I would just say it's a change and where the different parts and components of solar are being built financing still takes place in the United States the biggest investors still happen to be U.S. companies companies like MetLife U.S. Bank JP Morgan Morgan Stanley all are very active in solar we know because we we work with many of them nationwide insurance companies a client of ours and so I think where the change is in 2014 is in things called the yield codes for any of you guys that follow solar or securitization and that's fundamentally what's changing the nature of solar now and it's changing because where is the cost of capital in other words the cost to access to finance solar the cost of financing capital was eight to nine percent in 20 2009 it's sometimes in the order of four to five percent now with lower cost of capital you can build more competitive systems that are third party finance which means more people can have solar which means the further explosion of the solar market which is why we're very bullish on the market and we think that the market will continue to expand in 2013 and 2014 and importantly will continue to survive after the step down in the United States to see the investment tax credit from 2016 to 2017 from 30 percent to 10 percent as Ethan mentioned earlier on the slide there there will be a decrease I think we think in the overall volume of systems being built in the United States but solar's gone too far we've come too far to be stopped at this point I think if anything that demonstrates that it's the increased investment by utilities in solar utilities like constellation utilities like Exxalon, Duke, PG&E utilities like Southern company that no one thought would be interested utilities like Dominion and so we think the future solar's bright we I wanted to point out one of the things that Elaine said earlier which is when we compare ourselves to Germany costs versus the actual purchase price of solar projects those graphs can be a little bit misleading solar is being built in the United States on the residential side for about three dollars a watt right now if not less it's being purchased for three dollars a watt so it's being built for less and so I think in the U.S. companies are still innovating and I think we on the our clients oftentimes on the other side of our business are the installers we've seen huge huge leaps and proficiency and expertise from them and so the future's bright that's what I would say about solar well so we're going to open it up for discussion in a minute but I thought maybe I'd take a couple of the points that Yuri stopped on and sort of pose them to the panel more broadly you know typically when we when we encounter any particular technology issue whether it's something like solar that is traditionally not had a huge market share but has always been something there's lots of potential lots of potential for scalability under you know sort of the certain right conditions or something else other technology applications that we've dealt with in this forum one of the key questions is are we talking about a situation where support for that technology the support we've seen whether it's subsidy whether it's R&D whatever sort of support the technology has received to be able to scale up and to be able to reach that potential whether we're talking about something where those support structures are changing right they could come from different places so for example you may not need as much direct subsidy in terms of the production side you may not need as much direct subsidy in terms of the the sort of installation or financing side and or are we talking about something where we are envisioning a step change in the actual applicability of solar right where we can look at a future where there's a great deal more solar like so are we changing our expectations right so there's two sort of things going on when we think about sort of solar as a as a as a sort of technology in terms of its applications one is is the nature of how we're growing these markets and then two is our expectation for what the art of the possible is how do you think about both of those things right I mean in terms of sort of the evolution of this technology well you know I I have to say it's it's been interesting to watch how markets have changed over time here in the United States and you know basically what I've seen and again some of the big differences between what we've seen and you know foreign markets like Germany and and here even the variation from one state to another is that I think you're right that there are certain policies and regulatory regimes that have been more conducive to to the market but you know some of the evidence that we've seen is that what really matters in terms of the success of a solar market is just the duration of the policy that's in place and so to a certain extent you have to determine what your goals are what what it is that you want to achieve and then you have to make a commitment to actually reaching those and you know for the most part companies will come into that space they'll learn to operate within it and and they will innovate so that they're successful I think this technology again it's the the pricing the costs right now for the technology itself are sufficiently advanced and the technology is out of place where it it's fully deployable it's not you know something that we have to do a lot of research into that you know with with a little bit of certainty and commitment there's absolutely no reason why you can't have great markets all across the U.S. and in in other nations just that we have a lot I mean I guess the long story short we have a lot of different solar markets in the United States but I think Elaine sort of alluded to and a lot of different regimes and Yuri I could talk about this as well and you know longevity you know classic yes matters a great deal and our our general view as I've sort of shown is that we think that this stuff is becoming more and more cost competitive so obviously on the flip side subsidies become less and less competitive less less important but by no means have we sort of completely turned the corner where everywhere solar is cost competitive without without the support you know some kind of subsidy in some kind of way from what I understand from your question I think you're asking whether or not you know there's two questions one what are the changes in terms of policy and two are there you know specific sort of deep technological changes that will take place I think both will take place I think the federal incentives for for solar will start to ratchet down over time as you guys know but I also think that with scale comes enormous amounts of investment and that's what we're seeing right now I mean solar city I mentioned them earlier so I understand these are six billion dollar capex companies now or not capex market cap companies market cap companies that's a huge amount of money they have resources to build their their their businesses out and I think they will and I think a lot of that will come with the purchase of like ZEP solar which is a module racking company that solar city recently purchased you know investments in those types of technologies Ethan maybe just on your your sort of overall outlook you basically you know said you guys are pretty bullish on what's possible in terms of added solar capacity probably said about 2% about 18% by 2030 so so within the solar community I think that there's a lot of thinking about how to get to those kinds of growth rates that kind of level how do people outside the solar industry look at the potential bullish nature of of solar the incorporation of solar we've got another project series going on here called electricity and transition which is just about what the heck is going on in the electricity sector in the United States across a variety of fronts how does and it doesn't have to be US dependent right but like how is that potential for solar to reach those kinds of levels changing the way that people are thinking about the electricity or the energy market systems that they're being incorporated into so it's it's a good question I mean look it's a cliche but this is this is truly disruptive technology right this is we have a we've built a electricity system that is hub and spoke that's been around for quite a while now and is centrally controlled and with exceptions relatively manageable and that they're just the sheer nature of distributed power whether that's PV or maybe it's micro wind or other things is that creates challenges that's a change and then throw in the fact that that there's the sort of unpredictability about when you're going to get necessarily that that juice out of those distributed systems and that creates further uncertainty so the look the the answer is that and I think your program is great and I think a lot of people are trying to think about this question of where the utility now fits in everything and there's a lot of smart thinking and reconsideration going on and then there's some people who are saying well I know where the utility fits it's exactly where it's always fit and this stuff is kind of a fad and it's going to come and go and so you know I think there's a lot of people involved in the kind of constructive conversation about what happens next and then there's some people who frankly just hope that things aren't going to change and or or or or feel strongly that things aren't going going to change our view is that they will because the technology costs keep coming down and particularly in a global context like I said when you're talking about new markets where you're not talking about PV really competing against the cost of electricity that's coming into someone's house you're talking about PV being the first power that comes to somebody's house or hut or whatever it is versus nothing and that's a competition that increasingly photovoltaics it's going to win because of the cost declines so there's a lot of different reactions I think this is part of a a much larger kind of conversation that's going on around rethinking how electricity is delivered consumed and you know generated and obviously the EPA rules in the U.S. are going to have an impact on that but there's a it's a very interesting time and it's not just because of renewables obviously the the rise of natural gas and the implications of that are fundamentally shifting all of these things and this is one of the wild cards that's involved in that conversation yeah to that point on the technology side I mean you know when I talk to folks in our systems integration program for example they they basically talk about you know the complexity that Ethan is referring to which is you know what happens when you go from having you know these very centralized nodes where decisions are made to having not just one or two orders of magnitude but you know several orders of magnitude more decision nodes that are you know involved in the system and um you know what's interesting about that question is the the kinds of decisions that need to be made in the policy and regulatory sphere about you know who gets to play and um you know who gets what kinds of benefits from the role that they're playing there and so you know I think that when you have the opportunity to have you know a few orders of magnitude more players involved in this you have a lot more stakeholders that you're taking into account and I think that's that's one of those things that you know the public is very interested in in getting involved in that way and I think that that what that does in what we've seen in so many other industries is that it tends to benefit consumers because you are creating the potential for much more innovation by increasing the number of of people who can get involved and be innovators and be part of that system and so that you know I don't want to draw too too many or too close of of an analogy to other areas but you know you know we certainly have seen in general that when you have more competition in the market when you create those additional opportunities for innovation consumers in that benefiting well I'm not a huge expert in the innovation side of the solar but it but I have you know truly applauded some of the things that solar world has done in terms of investing in R&D moving up its panels to you know 280 watt and and further so I guess you know broadly having seen sort of the trade world I think you know moving the innovations forward especially R&D however you can create that platform especially with the work you're doing I think it's extremely important especially for you know if you want to see this industry grow so we have about 15 minutes left I'd like to open up to sort of question and answer please wait for a mic if you don't have one right in front of you or use the mic that you do have in front of you state your name and affiliation and to the extent you can put your question in the form of a question we always appreciate it okay so we'll start right here thank you very much thank you very much my name is Sayed and I'm from San Francisco Bay Area I have a very small energy company in the system integrators one of the biggest problem we had we have now is of course financing and we could have done a lot better I know all of your company SolarCity of course I've done great job in California the success is only for mega projects because they get the money somehow but common people in California SolarCity is doing a good job but it's not enough and somehow we should have this opportunity for other smaller companies to install small systems and plus like solar farming my project that some people have in farmer areas of two acre lands or five acre lands and they want to have their own solar farm and sell it to the utility companies they're not very successful in that because financing and also we have explored market and overseas market there's a great potential for American made products and because financing from through XEM is available for here so how some of you can help a small company like us we do have very good connection in overseas for a very good project in private sectors so I would like to know how I could utilize expertise and experience to promote our business thank you very much and maybe not company specific situation-specific advice for people in that so one one program that we are supporting at the U.S. Department of Energy right now is a project that's called the solar access to public capital working group and so that working group was originally led by some folks at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory but it's a big consortium of I think over 300 organizations now that include folks in the finance space developers you know some of the big rating agencies you know a lot of a lot of players in this space and basically what they have done is they've they've taken a look at you know what it takes to really understand what a solar investment looks like to really start to characterize what the risk for that looks like and to develop standardized templates for things like contracts you know for PPAs for leases and to to start to expand the baseline information you know about what you know what solar deployment characteristics look like so that way we can start to have you know better better products out there again both in the forms of you know whether third-party finance systems loans insurance project products operations and maintenance type products and things like this and again they have worked together to try to aggregate a lot of information and best practices so that the finance community can better understand what you know a solar product really looks like because I think to a certain extent you know they can kind of look at it and say well you know we don't know how risky this is so we're just going to charge a high interest rate and that can be you know very difficult or they can say well we're not really interested in this it's too complicated and so you know this is really an area where I think we've tried to play an important role in increasing that market transparency and help a number of players understand you know what's going on with this technology what it really looks like in the field and feel more comfortable with getting involved in that from a financial perspective and hopefully you know that will benefit you know businesses across the U.S. by having greater access to to that capital first just a point of clarification my company's solar systems not not solar city we're for an innovative industry we're not very innovative with our names there's a lot of solar and solar going on full disclosure so my advice is just as a fellow entrepreneur I would say one when we began we focused on a very specific part of the market that was called there were these things called solar renewable energy credits that we built the whole business around so to the extent you want to work across markets work on something that's very specific that you can build expertise in very quickly my second point is maybe you don't want to work across markets maybe you want to work hyper local and I think that's a really good strategy right now because origination of solar assets is the king in solar the solar industry right now with all the source of cheap capital there's a huge search for good projects so you can leverage leverage your local connections in your relationships I'd highly recommend it I think that's where to go whether it's your friend that owns a store nearby or someone that you know or whatever my third piece is that if you don't want to stay in the United States and you want to go abroad I think your best bet is probably to utilize the overseas private investment corporation OPIC they've done tremendous work in the solar industry working with U.S. investors that are investing abroad is a bridge between one country and another I think you have a good advantage there the import export bank is the other one that you would use if you were utilizing equipment in the United States but my guess is that you don't want to rely on equipment in the United States at this point unless you have some sort of competitive advantage okay we're going to run short on time so what I'm going to do is I'm going to take three questions okay so please try and keep them brief so we can get them all in we've got two over on the wall over here and then you sir in the blue shirt okay thanks Julia Piper with climate wire part of E&E news wondering if you can address what's going to happen with disposing of these panels the materials in them I understand they have long lifetimes but what's going to happen there and addressing climate change low carbon energy is there potentially another environmental issue being created I as mentioned before China will be a biggest market for solar and my question will be we talk a lot about the trade issue between U.S. and China but is there any room for American company to do business in Chinese solar market and there are an opportunity for cooperation especially in distributed solar generation in China because we said a 14 gigawatt goes for this year but in the 60 of it will come from distributed solar generation but as reported none of the distributed solar generation installed in the first call that this year so yeah what's your opinion thank you thank you I'm Amit Ronan from George Washington University as we mentioned solar is booming but my sense is that's largely out of the what could be characterized as the early adopter market so they're people who are have the means to typically more affluent households that are able to afford solar up front now or they're single homeowners so wondering what the panelists think about the strategies and policies that are necessary if we're going to get to 18 percent penetration rates by 2030 there's been estimates that say roughly one in 10 Americans are able to put solar panels on their own homes because they have a roof that's suitable they have the money they're not renters they're not low-income people they don't live in multifamily units so interested in hearing your thoughts on that thank you and maybe what we'll do is we want to start with Ethan and you can address the component pieces of a couple of those that you want to and then we'll kind of go down the line just trying to make sure sure yeah I'm trying to make sure I got all of them down okay well maybe the first one I'll address first because frankly it's the thing I know at least about and don't have a good answer on but it's a very good question given the the kind of volumes that we're projecting we do we do generally assume a 20-25 year life cycle for these systems but you're right once those systems start to need to be retired there's there's a real question on what happens next and I don't know the answer at this point the China questions are really interesting one and just to give a little background more background on China as I mentioned earlier really has been for several years the largest manufacturer of Votovoltaics but then last year was the largest demand market for Votovoltaics and but the vast majority of the new projects that got built over there were large-scale projects and as was noted there's very ambitious goals now over there to do distributed solar and frankly that's that's more challenging because it requires individual systems being put on individual roofs or in backyards or wherever it is it involves a lot of individual transactions that have to take place and it's a very good point about perhaps there is an opportunity to share knowledge I know the DOE has been involved in a US-China cooperation program for some years now and frankly I don't know if those are one of the things that they've been talking about probably should but I think that's definitely an area of potential cooperation and then last to me I think I got your question which is about opportunities for solar for for lower income residents it's a good question I would say that we're crossing over to a period where if you're in the right market it can like I said showed on our chart from a you can reach grid you could be a so-called grid or socket parity right now but that still means you need 15 or 20 grand to get the system up on your roof and and part of what you know Yuri's doing and what others Solar City and others are doing are trying to make financing more available and I think some of that's starting to happen I mean I always find fascinating when I go out to California which is that there is a living and breathing solar market out there and you turn on the radio and there are ads and those are not aimed you know at just high-end consumers obviously everybody listens to the radio there are billboards it's a market that's trying to get to that but I will say that you know at least in the past when we've looked at the demographics of who the adopters are it's typically been more Palo Alto than it has I guess East Palo Alto I don't know my geography that great out there but it's been it's been more skewed more towards the higher end but that's definitely starting to shift to some degree Sure so on the disclosure materials I should say that you know we have tremendous amount of resources that we put into our national laboratories and they're doing a lot of work on testing what's you know testing what's being fielded we have a qualification plus program that we put together and in general when you look at most solar panels that are being sold today they're you know they're made of glass silicon silver these are these are things that I don't think we have to worry too much about and I just look at the car industry it's one of the largest recycling industries out there so you know I think that at some point when these things start to reach their end of life that will certainly see some some industry popping up around all of that and I also know that there are a number of manufacturers who have take back programs basically where they will bring back modules whether it's a faulty one you know or one that's already reached its end of life and that they are looking at incorporating those costs to a certain extent and so I'd say that that's that's something that you know we're we're thinking about we're addressing and that you know we'll continue to be addressing you know over the coming years on on number two on the distributed energy in China we do have some some programs where we're working with cities in in China that I'm aware of energy efficiency and renewable energy international office has has a specific grant where they're doing some work on that but yeah I agree we we certainly have taken a look at some of the soft costs and in fact I think one of my analysts was there just in this past month taking a look at how deployment is happening in China and really trying to understand that so yeah I'm just gonna say I agree I guess and then on on a means point I feel like he's throwing me a softball question here because he knows how fond I am of community and shared solar projects and also that you know right now I'm doing some work in conjunction with HUD Housing and Urban Development to help meet the president's climate action plan goal of getting 100 megawatts of solar deployed on federally assisted housing and so those are all things that yeah I think are really interesting areas of opportunity Denver Housing Authority I think recently did like 660 units of low-income housing you know was a couple megawatts or something and I think they did it in less than two years which is really exciting from from my standpoint and so yeah in the business innovation space I definitely feel like increasing access is really important there there are people who are trying to figure it out we see people in the finance space who are interested in it and frankly those are folks who are used to doing complex deals and are willing to take on some risk and so I feel like all the conversations I've had with folks in the low-income space have been really really positive if anything they there are people who really want to get things done and they will figure out how to do it so yeah it's been great pollution and solar panels first I agree with Elaine I think is the industry matures recycling programs will grow we've heard of a couple already and many of our investors actually have a disposal fee at the end of the project's life in anticipation of actually taking those panels and doing something with them so people are thinking about these things I think people will do something about them can US businesses work in China I think was your question as I understood the answer is yes Sunpower one of the largest US businesses in solar right now I think it's a five billion dollar market cap is actively working in a JV in China as we speak I'm sure we'll see others move into that space as well it's an industry that's going to explode it's exploding now and then finally the strategy is for getting to 18 percent I think the bottom line is that the lower income folks in the United States that want solar either can't afford it or don't have the credit to get financed right or don't own their home and what Elaine was pointing out is that solar is becoming effectively a commodity that you can sell in markets through virtual net metering local legislation or even if you wanted to you can sell it through regional transmission organizations like PJM on the grid you just can't sell at the same price so you can do that now and I think the ability to turn solar energy into a commodity that people can actively buy trade etc is one of the innovations we haven't seen yet but will emerge in the next five years and we're sitting parts of it certainly in DC for example there's legislation that will enable people homeowners to buy solar from projects that are outside of their home and so I think that's a big innovation it's an important one great not a whole lot to add to austere comments of the my fellow panelists here but you know obviously the issue of disposal and recycling is one that standards will be built around as time goes on that's just an important thing that the U.S. government does through its own ITACS and other groups in terms of opportunities for U.S. companies to operate in China I truly hope that does expand I know there was a enormous project that first solar was trying to do in Mongolia one of the biggest ever in Mongolia region that was under China it had fell through I'm not sure why but I certainly hope non-tariff barriers don't become a factor inhibiting U.S. companies from being able to operate there in terms of expanding solar to more rooftops you know I'm not the great technical expert that these folks are but again it's always innovation and I truly believe that one of the biggest factors of innovation is innovation that happens on the shop floor so manufacturing ties in innovation and brings long-term benefits that you never even know we're going to happen like the intel story so thanks no I don't think I have too much to add the only I did want to speak one I don't know if we're closing I wanted to add just want to add a little bit of one counterpoint on the trade issue because I think it is so important and it is so complex at least in my view and and there are a lot of nuances to it and I mean one of the things I did want to just say is that I mean we've tracked the solar industry globally for 10 years and what happened over the last five years frankly I think it was more complex than any one market sort of proactively planning to flood another what happened was the market became vastly over capacity and so what we had was a lot of different players and a lot of countries sort of desperate to sell everything that they had that they were producing into any market now I'm not a lawyer so I don't know if that what that represents in terms of the question of dumping or countervailing but I do think that's important to note is that it was a that we really went through a very tough period for for solar equipment manufacturers and this is not uncommon with new industries where you see kind of boom bus cycles where the industry kind of gets ahead of itself and build more capacity than it's needed we're starting to come back towards equilibrium now we're starting to see manufacturers who frankly won't you know won't produce unless they can make a margin on a global market and so I think I just wanted to add that one sort piece of clarification on that point I think the other thing is to keep in mind as on sort of the economic implications for the U.S. in the short run in the long and I think are really really interesting I think there's you know there are a lot of folks in this country who are now involved very actively in installing and I think a lot of them if you were to ask them just want to get their hands on the cheapest equipment that they can because they think that will give them the greatest opportunity to install the most and I think there's an argument being made from the environmental perspective that that's what's best for the planet is to try and get as much zero carbon energy out there as we can but now I I think on the flip side as I mentioned earlier I think in the long run we're going towards a much larger global market and the question is do we want to create systems whereby we create little fiefdoms where every country has an opportunity and maybe some protections to build their own manufacturing capacity so that they can be part of that literally larger pie that I showed a bit earlier so I just wanted to add that my only two cents on it because it is such an interesting topic and it is a complex one and there's many different ways to kind of look at this well listen one of the things that hopefully keeps people coming back because that we allow you to leave on time I just wanted to say aside from all of these wonderful sort of market and technical insights and policy relevant insights I was telling these guys before the session you know some things happening when all of the sudden people are walking into your offices with a sort of an iPad case that is powered by solar or on my camping trip coming up with my family I have numerous sort of solar power generation applications when I go to REI to buy all of our gear right and it's not it's not a tremendously powerful intellectual insight but it does do something about sort of the socialization of solar and the and the sort of the reachability of it and into various aspects of your daily life so that's my my sort of non-technical contribution to the conversation I just wanted to thank all of you very much for spending your morning with us and telling us about what you're doing and helping us understand what's actually happening out there on sort of the frontier of solar I think we all know a lot more about it now than when we started and hopefully we'll we'll keep looking for ways to explore going forward so thank you very much for joining us if you need any help in Denmark let us know