 I'd like to invite Eder Rock and Cameron Briggs to the stage. Eder was the Director of Climate Resilience at PG&E and she is now the Chief of Staff to Executive Vice President of Engineering, Planning and Strategy, also with PG&E. And Cameron Briggs is General Manager of Future Energy at Origin Energy. Without PG&E and Origin Energy we're founding members of the Beats and Watts Initiative and it is a pleasure to have them here today with us to provide some key perspectives associated with the vision from the members for the work moving forward. So the way we'll be operating is that Eder will show some slides. We'll have first a short intervention from Eder followed by an intervention from Cameron and then we'll open for discussion and questions from the audience as well as potentially some questions from me as we go along. Thank you so much. Whatever you prefer, do you want to come here? Oh, you can see the slides there. I can see the slides? Yeah. Okay. Great. Thank you. And it's a real pleasure to be here today. And I was thinking about your remarks and the remarks that Arun made and something you said sort of stuck out with me and that was from your time working on the IPCC just seeing the progress of climate mitigation and maybe the lack of progress that you're feeling a little pessimistic. And I've been working in the utility space and climate resilience for the last few years and it's hard not to sometimes feel numb to the news. But I will say earlier this week there was just such a shocking piece of news coming from India about the heat wave and the ignition of a number of the landfills and the images of that. You know, I see a lot of images of climate change and what's happening but this was just beyond shocking. And to me, it just re-informed the importance of what we're all doing here today. And it's why PG&E is so proud to be a founding member of Bitton Watson to be here today because we have to show that in California we can solve these challenges and to really show the rest of the world that we can do this. We can decarbonize the grid. We can have an equitable and resilient and clean grid and we can really pave that way for the rest of the world. So things like that are horrible to see but I think they just really reinstill that sense of purpose. So I'm going to dig into what we are doing today at PG&E to really build that climate resilient energy system. I don't have a clicker so should I just... Thank you. Green arrow. Okay. Thank you. So for those of you who aren't from California, PG&E is the largest combined electric and gas utility. We provide energy to nearly 16 million Californians. For the purpose of this presentation I think one of the things we'll focus on is just the sheer size of our service area. It's 70,000 square miles. And so we have a lot of diverse climates a lot of diverse climate impacts and a very diverse population that we are serving. A really important statistic that is not on this slide referencing our runes and marks earlier is that 25% of the population within PG&E service area can be classified as disadvantaged or vulnerable when you think about pollution burden or state medium income. And so that's something that I will talk a little bit more in this presentation but a really important factor when we're thinking about the statistics that make up the service area in PG&E. So as I mentioned earlier, climate-driven hazards are projected to worsen given what's happening with the pace or the lack of the pace of climate mitigation and this is going to have and is already having profound impacts on our environment. And when we think about what that means for us here in California there are a number of really severe climate-driven hazards that we're going to see we will see more an increase in the severity and frequency of heat waves. We all know as a coastal state sea level rise will be an issue. We also have a lot of rivers and the Sacramento Delta is an area of real importance for us when we think about flooding and some of the inland areas. We're very familiar here in California and Australia about wildfire and subsidence given what's happening with the lack of water availability and use of groundwater supplies in the Central Valley we're going to see some real impacts to our infrastructure there. So when we think about this the investor-owned utilities and the California Public Utilities Commission started working together in 2018 to think about how should we collaboratively be thinking about responding and preparing for climate-driven hazards. And the CPSC directed the IOUs including PG&E to undertake a climate vulnerability assessment that includes an assessment of all of our assets, operations and services. And I'll dig into a little bit of the methodology of what we're doing with our vulnerability assessment and some of the findings looking forward. We're taking a pretty typical standard approach to this. We're looking at what the best available climate data that we have from luckily here in California from CalAdapt can tell us about future exposure to climate-driven risks. We're assessing the sensitivity of our assets, operations and service to these risks. Looking at things like design standards, the age of our infrastructure, the condition of our assets. And also looking at adaptive capacity which is essentially looking at how easy is it or not to change. It's pretty easy to replace a distribution transformer. It's really hard to move an entire substation. So we have to take things like that into account. Using these measures we can come up with a general measure of IOU vulnerability. But thinking about what Arun said earlier about the importance of communities and their perspective, because this infrastructure is for them. The CPC has also directed us and this is something we really welcome. We are engaging with all disadvantaged and vulnerable communities in the service territory. We want to understand how they feel about climate change that's happening in their areas and what they're trying to mean about that intersection of our energy infrastructure, other critical infrastructure, climate change and their historic experiences with this. And using this together we can come up with a number of proposed adaptation projects that will be submitted under general rate case filings in future years. So I'll go through two examples of the types of things that we're finding. Looking first at temperature and looking at sort of those 1 in 10 or even more unlikely extreme weather events that we need to prepare for in the future. Using the example of electric substations here in the Bay Area we've been able to pinpoint and using our existing design standards which substations are those that we should be most worried about in 2030, in 2050 and in 2080. And this map to the right shows that we have substations that are going to be exposed to temperatures outside the range that they were designed to safely and reliably operate in. So using the forward-looking data that we have from CalAdapt and then also layering information like load growth forecasts changes that we expect to see in terms of EV load growth and expected increase in air conditioning installs, we can start to identify and upgrade our assets and parts of our grid that are most vulnerable to climate change and prioritize them for investments. Another example that's just a few miles away from here is what's going to be happening in the San Francisco Bay Area related to sea level rise. The picture right here that you can see is the Dunbarton Bridge. I just drove over it last night to get here today. You can see Facebook's campus is a sort of on the upper left part of the map. In the middle of this map is one of our large transmission level substation that serves about 300,000 people in the Menlo Park Palo Alto including us here today. Looking at the projections for sea level rise and thinking about the vulnerability and sensitivity for our assets, we're able to start seeing if we had 100-year storm today, where would we have flooding? You can see that by the red dots which includes this substation that you can see in this picture. Looking out further into the future, we can see the yellow dots are substations that we'll probably want to upgrade further into the future, given expectations for the pace of sea level rise, but we know we have a serious issue in the south bay. Using this information, we can start to do some pretty cool stuff that makes me feel a little less pessimistic and a lot more optimistic about what we can do collaboratively in the future. Last year, PG&E partnered with the city of Menlo Park, the San Francisco Joint Powers Authority and a number of other stakeholders to submit one of the first applications to FEMA's new building resilient infrastructure and communities grant program. We're excited to learn mid-last year that we made it through the round and we're expecting to receive the maximum federal share, which is $50 million in funding. Once this is funded, what we're planning to do is build a nature-based solution, so an eco-tone levee that mimics the natural shoreline that will go around our Ravenswood substation that you saw on that last page, and then we'll also go around Metta's campus and protect a number of the communities in the Belle Haven area of Menlo Park, which is a disadvantaged community. I think what's really exciting about this project and what it portends for us in the bay and throughout California and beyond is just the importance of that public-private partnership. PG&E stepped up and is giving $10 million to this project. Metta is also giving about $8 million and the rest of it is being covered by the federal share. And we can do a lot more together when we collaborate like this and do innovative ways. We could have just said, well, PG&E will just build a concrete seawall around our substation. That wasn't good enough for us. We knew that there was more that we needed to do for the community, so we're really excited about this project and what this means not only for increased resilience and reliability, but also things like restoring the natural wetlands, which will have a climate mitigation impact as well. So I'm really proud of this project. I hope we're going to do more of these in the future, and this is just one cornerstone of the many things that we're doing to make a more climate resilient energy system. Thank you. Thank you so much Heather. And we'll move on to Cameron. Thank you. Can you hear me okay? I work for a large Australian energy company. I'm based here in Palo Alto and I lead the future energy activities for origin based here. I've been with Bits and Watts as everyone was saying before, sort of for five years I think since the very beginning and I can't tell you from a personal perspective and a professional perspective how much the energy system and world has changed in that time. To give you a little bit of a flavour of that I think last year when the full impact of the renewable transformation in Australia came to life we have three big energy companies and I think in the period of five weeks two of the CEOs got fired, ours didn't in terms of the reaction from the markets to what's going on and probably another data point to give you a sense of the urgency of what's happened is just before COVID and unfortunately the message has been a little bit lost. We had terrifying we call them bushfires but wildfires in Australia and in that time one billion animals died in the space of six weeks and that was absolutely catastrophic and that changed the mindset of people. I mean for some people it had been a bit of a distance or a bit of a problem that was kind of a bit unrelated to them and I think since that time the level of public expectation what shareholders expect, what our directors expect has completely changed completely changed so what we've been doing as a company in that time I think probably within the last year have really upended what we're doing and how we're doing it often times companies do initiatives where they I call it the Mars bar you do something and see what happens you do a bit more, you do a bit more we've had to make decisions where there is no coming back we're burning the boats, we're going for it, we're doing stuff and that's transcended every aspect of what we do across our business so from a generation point of view we're massively moving into renewable generation, we've created entirely new businesses where we used to just sell electricity to our large commercial customers they're not interested in buying electricity anymore they want low carbon solutions, they want to change what they do they want to change the way they operate they don't have the experience, they don't have the expertise to do that and with our retail customers again they're wanting to learn things, they want to know what their energy is where it's coming from, how it's being used they want to educate themselves and they want to become part of the solution but I think the really interesting part is when you've got all these different elements of the energy system how do you bring it together how do you bring it together in a way that makes sure you get the maximum efficiency the maximum reliability of what's going to happen and probably the thing that perhaps best explains it to me is 100 years ago when I was a post-doc and I was living in Sweden and the year I was living there and what makes all the aerospace and makes all the military fighter jets came out with a new plane it was a sub plane and what was different about it was that the technical term in aerospace design is called relaxed stability and what that actually means is that you specifically design a plane that is unstable it cannot be flown by people if the plane loses avionics you have to eject that with a parachute but the purpose of that was is if you design something that's inherently unstable for the nerds among us perturbation leads to unstable equilibria and the point of that is that you get the maximum maneuverability the maximum flexibility and the best capability to fly that plane if you actually create an unstable system and if I reflect about what that means from an energy system point of view and you're thinking about how AI is going to change what we do there's a lot of complexity there's a lot of math, there's a lot of expectation but the biggest single test that probably models what we're trying to do as a company and I think the challenge that lies ahead of us is that two months ago we announced we were shutting the largest coal plant in Australia so it's 3 gigawatts almost 3 gigawatts and we're bringing that forward that was 2032 when we're bringing it forward to 2025 which is the minimum notice period you have to give in order to shut a big power station down so the test the ultimate test is in 3 years time when we flick the switch and turn the power station off can we hit the big red button on the trading desk and that big red button is going to instead of controlling one power station with off and on button it's going to control somewhere between 2 and 3 million connected energy assets and have the same net impact to be able to give you that reliability that performance, that tradeability and so over the last 5 years we've gone through a massive transformation inside our company in terms of firstly not the AI, not the ML doing boring stuff just getting data to be reliable, just getting there to be a sense of truth just getting something that we can work with that's the first point and then now building out so every single connected asset we have whether it's large power stations whether it's individual customers whether it's systems EV charges is connected up in a way that has to be controlled by a centralized AI system that's making decisions that's linked into our trading infrastructure so we don't have day ahead markets we don't have capacity markets we are an energy only market and the electricity price in Australia could be a completely deregulated market I believe is the most traded commodity in the world so energy prices fluctuate from minus a thousand dollars a megawatt hour to fifteen thousand dollars a megawatt hour within twenty minutes and it's a completely dynamic market and it changes in real time and a lot of people blow up very quickly if you're not hedged adequately so for us as a trading company the fact that you've got this highly volatile, highly dynamic highly unstable system is something we actually want because that's where we thrive but at the end of the day the only way you're going to be able to solve the energy problem is to have run the energy infrastructure so we're a good way to doing that now I think we've got 200,000 connected devices we've got hundreds and hundreds of megawatts and our goal is to scale up in a time frame that when we switch off the largest power station it's just going to be replicated by distributed assets so for us that gives you a bit of a sense of the challenge and if you think about that transformation it sounds simple, the big red button you hit but underpinning that is a whole bunch of different activities in one time, there's your customers you have to come up with a proposition that says to them if I'm going to give you a battery or a solar system, I'm not going to install it and see it later I want to work with you, I want to understand I want to connect to that asset and give you an exciting proposition that helps you understand what that asset does what its carbon footprint is, how it works and commercially, what are we going to give you if you give us some control over your endpoint asset, what do you get so there's a whole education piece in there there's a whole data infrastructure piece there there's a whole trading piece and it's pulling all those different elements to actually make a coherent highly disaggregated, highly decentralized energy system work in a way that's going to give you the same performance because people will not forgive you if they turn on the lights and nothing happens and even as a good example, one of the biggest things we're doing at the moment is connecting up people's hot water systems because in the old days oh, energy is cheap at night you charge your hot water system up electricity from midnight to 6am or something like that, that's not what you want to do now you want to be soaking up all the excess solar that's happening during the day when you have negative prices so we're doing lots of things like that where we're connecting up hundreds of thousands of hot water systems and there's all these issues that you have to get through when you get to the practicalities of that so first and foremost which we learned earlier in the process, people aren't very happy if they have cold jowls so we've got to get that bit right which is actually by regulation if you don't have hot water systems running for a certain period of time you get Legionnaires disease so there's all these technical commercial, legal constraints you have to understand about all these different assets that you connect up and convert that into something that as an ensemble or as a collection actually starts to look like a large energy power station I'll leave it there but that's kind of the challenge of what we're trying to do the scale and why we think that AI is not just a nice feature, it's going to be critical and central to what you actually have to do Thank you so much Cameron and I'll launch us on a question to both of you on something that you just mentioned Cameron the role of the highly distributed energy generation in particular thinking about the costumer proposition of solar with storage that would be managed separately can you just discuss a little bit or where do you see that going in terms of the composition both for PG&E and in the case of Australia overall of those sorts of systems versus centralized electricity generation moving forward in particular when we think about coupling with storage where the costs are declining but still that combined system is quite expensive to start with so would you care to comment on that? Do you want to go first? Sure So it's very exciting and I think there's really wonderful applications both today in terms of resilience we're thinking about our customers that might get shut off during the public safety power shut off event or we have new technologies installed this summer on our lines where we're going to have an increase in customers and interruptions to their service we need to think about how to provide them service and looking at things like solar and backup battery storage might be a really really good way to start addressing some of those resilience issues in the short term in the longer term when we look at the projections for EV growth in California this is a huge opportunity for us because we view this not as something that we just have to manage we see this as another asset this is another source of generation for our grid and so if we can really improve our vehicle to grid technology and think about the technology that we need to do all of this distributed energy resource management I think there's a huge opportunity for us that will rethink the way that the grid is run and shaped Yeah look I agree I think it's an enormous opportunity I think one of the things that we've tried to do over the last period of time is not have a bunch of old executives telling millennials what they want to do that hasn't proven particularly successful in predicting or engaging with people and so if you kind of talk to a lot of younger people they tend to have different perspectives and different motivations sometimes it's just energy independence I can't stand the energy company I want to switch it off some people are really interested in low carbon solutions some are convenience in Australia I think by per population has the highest PV penetration in the world I think it's like 40-45% of households have solar and so for us the issue of batteries is not so much resilience or reliability I mean I think we've over invested in our grid and it doesn't really break very much what it is is more getting the most out of your solar and it's probably arbitraging between the amount of money you get feeding it back into the grid versus what you do and so for us I think that's becoming pretty economic pretty soon and so for us it's really a matter of trying to listen to the customer embrace what they do and provide enough attractive solutions that makes it exciting and engaging I mean I think when you optimize an energy system there's many levels one is the household level what's happening am I using my solar effectively there's a community level which is what's going on in the broader area and then there's what's going on at a kind of you know entire system level and I think the optimization of that is going to require a different solution for customers different levels for communities it's more efficient to have a battery that's sitting in the network than it is necessarily have every person at home doing that but we just have to be a bit flexible sure thank you so I'll launch one more before opening for questions from everyone but thinking about all the issues that you presented in the context of environmental justice now so 25% of PG&E customers are considered in a group that probably has access to the care rate program which indeed already offers lower rates compared to other segments and more will need to be done as we continue to invest in new infrastructure and adoption of EVs all the implications for that for the rate structure in the future and Cameron you mentioned that the reliance on the energy only system with an enormous volatility that is passed along in terms of potential rate structures for the induced customers so that would be like is it and how that is being addressed so in that context what sort of projects are you pursuing to identify who are those customers both under that will be both under pressure on their utility bills given relative to their income as well as located in places where adaptation and resiliency projects are crucial it's a lot to impact there yeah so we're very aware in California we have a massive energy transition underway and when you look at the state's 2045 carbon neutrality goals we have a lot of work to do on not just the greening of the grid but also the future of the gas system and all these decisions that we make are going to have impacts on rates and so as we think about this transition we have to think about going to decarbonizing in an equitable way because if we have a whole segment of the customer base that goes off grid or decarbonizes you're left with fewer and fewer customers that are paying for the transition costs so it's something that we're actively thinking about in terms of the future of can we green our gas energy supply can we do some new some innovative work looking at how we can decarbonizing pilot decarbonizing part of our grid and removing the gas system and zone electrification that has to go hand in hand with the resilience measures because when you think about it's 25% of the population so it's actually bigger than just the number of customers if you think about the medium household size our disadvantage and vulnerable communities are predominantly in the central valley and some of the urban areas of the bay we already know that these communities are already exposed to the high pollution burden that you've seen anytime you drive down the five in the central valley also heat waves other climate induced vector born illnesses and it's not even just our customers it's our workers it's the agricultural workers all the folks that are going to be outside working in these kind of conditions we have to think about having that reliable resilient source of energy because when we don't have energy and there's no air conditioning that's not just an inconvenience anymore it's a safety issue so as we think about these things about zone electrification and greening the gas supply and reducing pollution burden in these communities it has to go hand in hand how we're thinking about the reliance and the energy system and making sure that we're making those investments so that the ACs can stay on and people can get what they need during these extreme weather events thank you the big change that people have noticed is that as you get more renewable energy into the wholesale market prices come down they don't go up and for most people there's kind of an overall benefit and in fact energy prices are creeping up a bit now in Australia and that's more a consequence of the gas prices as opposed to as opposed to renewables I think just to point about volatile prices we shield our customers from that that's our job as the retailer to do that the energy sector probably faced a bit of a question at the start or as COVID was taking off about what do we do and how do we respond because that had a pretty enormous effect on our customers and I think we took a decision early thankfully our CEO said we're not going to we're going to stick by people this is not going to go on forever and people rightfully will remember how you behave in situations like that and so we took the decision we're not going to turn people off who can't pay because they recognize that the energy industry was probably one of the fortunate ones during COVID because people still need to buy electricity and when you saw the decimation of what happened to people in the services industry and all of that we felt that we were fairly fortunate to be in that position and that people I think will remember good actors in time not just for selfish reasons but that's the way you should behave so I think we try very much to do that and we have vulnerable customers who we have payment programs people who are disadvantaged aren't necessarily I mean energy is a basic service that people are sort of entitled to so I think we try very hard to do I think on mass though that's one of the reasons why if you do bring renewable energy in getting things like AI systems right because that actually drives the cost down the more efficient you can use existing assets the better you can harness those things the lower the prices will be because you don't over build to compensate for the intermittency of renewable generation as well thank you let's open up for questions someone can provide the mic hi Paul Bresla with EDF one of the I guess Cameron what you were talking about in terms of 2-3 million devices is pretty awesome it sounds like quite a challenge and one of the topics that I've dug into a lot over the last few years is has the rubric of transactive energy which could mean everything and nothing at the same time but I know we've chatted before about different systems and different vendors in that space and one of the things that makes me think of is where does the AI lie for that type of system you know is it at the home energy management system is trying to game the system is it at the substation level is the market level how is that put together such that's fair and equitable as that transition happens and it's making it so it's more there's more value for everybody involved I don't know if you guys have any thoughts and also Heather I've chatted with people at PG&E about the same thing and it's a challenge as more and more DERs happen in our community as well I'm trying unpack the question a little bit so where does it sit in terms of value or where does it sit in terms of processing yeah well I think as a starting point the processing is probably done at the at the bigger level the wholesale level I mean that's what we're doing we're replacing wholesale assets with this distributed system but then the processing then probably there's some done essentially some done at the edge because you have to have some intelligence to know what's going on there so things behave in the right way I mean I think the market's going to determine where the value sits I mean it's you can be very theoretical about it but at the end of the day you have to stand in front of a customer and say hey we would like to use your asset are you comfortable with that and there's an education process there's a partnership building process that's going to work one and if you say to someone I'd like to for example you have a large battery in your house we want to pay to use it ten times a year and this is how much we'll pay you and this is the inconvenience and customers as they should will weigh up and say hey am I prepared to suffer this inconvenience for that price and they are or they aren't and that will determine that element and I think it'll probably there's going to be pockets where it's going to be a bit probably inefficient but over time it's going to be quite equitable because competition will just eat away at people who don't do it in a fair manner Jack can you ask the people that are managing the voice level to step it up your conversational tone between like you're just sitting at a small table talking to one another it's not coming across to some people here in the audience because it's so soft and they could if they would turn up the mic a bit it would be much better because some of us including me are losing a lot because of the low conversational tone we can use the handheld if you'd like next level we'll speak up as well Amy, her hold, ExxonMobil we had a Stanford hosted a workshop feels like a few weeks back but it feels like years ago because it's been so busy but just recently on decarbonization and electrification of industry and some of the things we talked about was the renewable penetration goes up and a lot of talk about how to handle residential demand, transportation demand if heavy industry comes in and to really do a lot of electrification that demand profile is going to be very different than the residential and transportation demand. Have you thought about what that mix might look like and how you might prepare for that? I'm happy to take that I'll project so let me know if you can hear me I think we look at the future of the California energy supply with our incumbent electric grid and gas systems I think there's a number of strategies that we're looking at to think about how we're going to meet California's carbon goals and continue that clean, equitable and resilient grid and the first is we see of course transportation as the huge opportunity for us here in California with a huge projection in EVs particularly starting in 2035 and we want to be the the fueler of choice of clean electricity for those cars we look at everything else that's not easily decarbonized by the grid so industry, maritime rail then the question is how can we think about our gas system in a different way so how can we increase the amount of renewable natural gas when investments do we need to make what do we need to do for our existing pipeline infrastructure to make that a viable thing we're looking at hydrogen as a fuel source for industry and I know there was a long topic of this earlier in the week so it's really decarbonize everything we possibly can and green or offer alternatives to existing more carbon intensive fuels where we can I think it's a good answer we're all in a race against time and bits and watts is a transformative venue in which to harness the strength of stanford's accumulated capacity and your immense scale for deployment what do you need as bits and watts members to expand the number of participants in order to scale the impact of this endeavor participants from the perspective of stanford ecosystem or participants in terms of the number of members who joined bits and watts well both for example the smart electric power alliance has say 700 utilities even a fraction of whom could join the front runners in bits and watts with the leadership of the founding members expanding that circle which also expands the problem space in which stanford solutionaries can collaborate so because this is the one panel where the member perspectives are featured I was interested in soliciting your leadership vision on how this initiative expands in order to achieve faster larger impact oh you want me to go first go ahead I've got a bit to say so I think and I've said this to Leong stanford has a unique position in that it is essentially in a world where you've got all these different elements which have to be coordinated to bring together something that's going to happen every single person brings or company or organization brings its own vested perspective I mean in Australia we have there's more electric vehicles in Palo Alto than there are in Australia just because of the way the government hasn't supported it and that's going to change and the number of actors that have to come together to make that work you've got OEMs, you've got network companies, you've got the government you've got retailers, you've got customers everybody's looking at each other going oh you build it and we'll be part of it right it's a coordination problem stanford in itself has the advantage of being independent it's academic and it's independent and I think it needs to take that independence out for a spin and be more controversial be more prepared to take positions to help the industry to make decisions because at the moment every single person out there is doing it from their own vested perspective I can tell you what should happen but everyone's going well of course you're going to say that you're an energy company so one issue is I think it can be prepared to take more aggressive, more independent, more controversial positions in terms of leadership and the second one I think is that if you look at the Venn diagram between what industry wants and what academic institutions can provide it's not everything but there's certain topics where I think they excel I've said this before one is where you have interdisciplinary one is where you have very difficult problems and one where they're not time sensitive because if I go to stanford say I need a problem for this and I'll say good I'm going to put two postdocs and come back in through it I'll just come up with an answer it might be sub-scale it might be not nearly as good but I need an answer tomorrow for certain things so they're not the type of problems but I think if you pick like EV 50 was a good example where here's a problem in two or three years time it's going to be really important to understand the impact of that it's going to rely on having engineering it's going to have data it's going to have policy it's all these different things that can come together and I think stanford has a unique position to bring those elements together to tackle problems and to present them in a way which is digestible, usable and controversial end of soap box that's a tough act to follow I'll just say from perspective here and from PG&E and I'd say any private sector company we need things that are actionable and are usable they're still looking at climate science we've been engaging a lot with all the researchers that are looking at the next California climate assessment because we want to make sure that the data that they're producing is actually stuff we can use when we're thinking about how to look at our assets and our operations and services so random white papers aren't very helpful actually when we can partner together and think about this is the problem we're trying to solve what is the expertise you can bring and what are the problems that we have and work together then it's something that's really value that's what we need we have capital allocation decisions all the time where do you spend money that's going to make the most impact for society for your stakeholders, for your customers, for everybody and getting some sense of where to put that how much and when and having Stanford take positions in that I think would be really useful that I hope that makes sense but that's the type of decisions you have to make absolutely that you just make a decision anyway because you have to get a company but I think integrating into that decision making process would be immensely valuable as Heather said on actionable things and I'll just add this money these are our customers dollars we want to make sure they're both spent and we that one more question I think it's the last one Hello, hi, this is Farnaz I work with Amazon Web Services and my question is more for Cameron so I've read the article about origin shutting down some of the power plants one large one by 2025 and replacing it with a 700 megawatt battery could you speak more about the challenges that origin is facing right now as they retire a lot of these cold plants because a large portion of the power in Australian AMO is still coming from cold so if you could speak a little bit more about the challenges that origin is facing and then how can technology help with the dispatch or the operation of this large grid scale transmission level batteries Sure, I did speak about that in the discussion what we're doing when we shut the power station down and press a button that button is going to be the coordination of large scale batteries more renewable energy and the coordination of millions of distributed energy assets and so yes, we use AWS but we're putting together a large coordinated energy data infrastructure that's capable of independently becoming a market participant making its own decisions about what assets you use how you use them, when you use them so that you effectively emulate what would have been provided by a large centralized power station by a highly decentralized highly decarbonized energy infrastructure so that's the challenge is how do you do that and we're well on the way to doing that but that's really the problem at hand So we have time for one more question and I see that Mark with Hi Mark from Stanford Cameron, I love that you're pushing us it's awesome, right one of the things that we talked about earlier was the accelerator and the idea that Stanford is providing this innovation which is going to be needed for AI you brought up advanced jet fighters at the beginning of your talk when I think of electric utilities I do not think of advanced jet fighters so is there a way and I'm putting a bit back on this on the spot here Stanford is known for innovation utilities need innovation how do we work together to help you embrace that innovation I think at the end of the day our goals are the same right, we want to collectively work to create this clean equitable resilient grid for California and set that example for the rest of the world and to use that innovation we have a whole host of problems right, we're looking at the climate presentation I gave we need better predictive intelligence of which transformers are going to fail under what conditions looking at a whole host of different data points from the condition of the asset to the ambient temperature to the load changes to the customer preferences to how they're using electricity these are models that we have not developed and we need your help to develop them because if we don't develop then in 20 years it's not going to be that grid that we want we need the help, the intellectual firepower of here to think about how do we develop that model what data do we need, what does it look like and I see that as a ripe opportunity for innovation that we can use can operate in adaptable right, so when you talk about the grid and pushing the red button one of the things that really needs to happen is AI at the plant level if you improve combustion efficiency or in your case for transmission in terms of if you can spot what's going on with substations that are going to fail you can make a massive difference in terms of sustainability so that's something to think about how to put AI down at the plant level because right now your operators to plant, no clue so in response to your question I mean, well since in the mood I can give you a Chilean inspirational speech about why you should do it and why it's amazing and why it's all that but the simple truth is what drives people is general fear it's when your industry is changing when you're losing your customers that's what drives fundamental and staggering changes in behavior, I mean we operate a deregulated market we have 25% levels of churn with our retail customers if we don't innovate we lose customers if you operate in a regulated utility you annoy a customer your JD power score goes down there's a lot of elements of structural which is the motivation for doing it I think in terms of the accelerator, again coming back to the point, actionable real deliverable focused outcomes that are solving real problems that benefit from the intellectual horsepower but are tempered by the realities of what's actually happening I think really really striving to make sure that it doesn't become a think tank, it doesn't become a kind of lifestyle project it's really targeted on doing stuff it brings the horsepower, it brings the capital from Stanford to take projects and ideas to a certain point where they're ready to engage with capital markets where they're ready to engage with outside companies because remember most energy companies don't have R&D departments they don't have teams of people who can reach down and understand complex ideas in their formative stages it has to be something they're very good at deploying they're not very good at developing they have to have the commitment to take those ideas to a level to where they're able to be digested and used by industry if you don't do that it just gets stranded so that's what I would say to do if you really are going to do an accelerator that's actually going to make an impact you have to have the courage to take it to a level where it's actually going to be able to be used by the industry so we could keep going with this very interesting panel but we'll conclude with this final message from our two speakers which is that we do need to continue to work on tangible real world problems that actually enable these decisions and with that I don't want to take time away from a long awaited coffee break for everyone so thank you so much and we'll resume in 15 minutes very good