 My name is Heather Richmond. I'm part of the planning committee here for the Energy Summit and I'm also a founding team member of the Energy Accelerator, which is a DOE and Navy-based or Navy-funded initiative based in Honolulu, Hawaii that launched in 2013. The Energy Accelerator brings mainland startups to the islands to tackle challenges in energy, ag, water, and securitization of critical infrastructure in the form of demonstration projects that are implemented with non-dilutive Navy funding. To date we funded 42 portfolio companies to the tune of about $15 million who have in turn raised about $250 million in private capital, and we are poised to raise about that much again this year. I bring this up one to get you guys to quiet down and to shamelessly promote the Energy Accelerator, but most importantly I bring it up because we credit our success to three key factors, to awesome entrepreneurs, a very engaged utility, and exceptional corporate partners. I have the pleasure of presenting two of the three today, first GE. In 2015, GE became a corporate partner of the Energy Accelerator. I want to take this opportunity to personally thank Sue, Seagull, and Marianne Wu for their commitment and the entire GE Ventures team. They have truly jumped in with both feet and that may or may not have anything to do with the fact that our global advisory board committee meetings are held in Hawaii. GE has stepped in as a project partner and an innovation advisor and most importantly an investor for that and much much more, so we thank you. Second STEM. STEM is a demonstration stage portfolio company of the Accelerator that has come out to Hawaii deploying one megawatts of energy storage across 20 buildings in Honolulu, providing Hawaiian Electric with a distributed energy storage asset and allowing participating companies to lower their electricity bills. This is STEM's first demonstration deployment that demonstrated a system-wide benefits of their storage technology. It is supporting the transformation of Hawaii's grid from one being dependent on fossil fuels to one that incorporates large amounts of solar and wind. John Carrington will be here in a bit, and we want to thank STEM for their vision and execution in Hawaii. So in a moment, I'd like to invite Sue Seagull from GE Ventures to the stage. She's going to tell us a story about a little company called GE who continues to innovate in and disrupt the energy space. In order to do so, GE invests in and works with startups across the board. Following Sue's opening remarks, we'll invite John and Mary Ann to the stage to dig into this model a little bit. Old working with new, big working with small, they just may be on to something. So that further ado, Sue. All right, so thank you so much for the opportunity to actually come present and it is really a pleasure for me to address this important sort of gathering because of how important this industry is to GE. I think most of you might know GE really cares about energy. Just to give you a sense, and this is a tidbit that I learned when I joined GE just four years ago, about one-third of the world's power comes off of systems that are actually enabled by GE. That's a lot, right? And so you might imagine we care as to what's happening with regards to the disruption and the innovation in this industry. So I'm excited to give you a little bit of a view of some of the things that we do at GE, not only in the energy world, but that applies to other places, but really focus on the energy world right now. And then I'm going to invite both John and also Mary Ann to come on up, sit down, and actually have a conversation around some of the activities and some of the things that STEM is doing in the distributed energy and storage space. So take a look. Don't blink too fast. Look at the brands. Y'all know them. Where are they today? Right? Every single industry that we know is undergoing huge change, every single one. It's because of the convergence of everything that we experience here in the Valley, and we happen to be way ahead of that, if you'd like, but when you think about it as it applies to the world of energy, it's just now really starting to catch up. When you look at every single one of these industries, and you couldn't put all of them up there, they're all undergoing disruption because of the digitization and because of the ability to converge so many different things, and it's mobile, analytics, it's cloud. It's everything you can imagine to create new business models, and it's not just about new technologies. So when you think of that and you say, what else is happening in terms of major trends across the ecosystem, you all know this. So work with me on this. Think about the examples as we go along. What's happening in the world are everything is going from centralized to distributed, right? Apply it to energy. You guys even had a round table just now in terms of distributed energy. Utilities to solar, wind, storage. When you look at CAPEX to OPEX, things have happened in the consumer space, which are now happening in the industrial space. So it's per drink, per scan, per ride, per whatever. We're not paying on an asset-based model anymore. We really are paying on a utility use model, right? On a per kilowatt hour model. And when you're looking at emerging countries in particular, boy, are they moving to a really forward-thinking way of doing this with regards to microgrids and the utility with regards to the mobility and cell phones, and then the ability to be able to charge per use on a certain amount of time. And then it's static and dumb to connect it and smart. And again, you've seen this over and over and over again. So if you look at some of the models, the classic models are you sell it once, and then you have some sort of warranty item, and then, or you have a financing model associated to it. And now the kind of models that exist are much different than that. You've experienced it in your consumer lives, and you see it all the time. And these are some of the brands that you can see down here. And so you know exactly what I'm talking about. And then you start to see it being reflected in the energy world, both in consumer and now into enterprise. And I think that's really important. When you look at Solar City, which really revolutionized the solar industry with their new models, you look at Nest and what they're doing with regards to connectivity and with regards to adaptive learning. In addition to Tesla, now who would have thought that Tesla would be where it is today with regards to the way it was going about the production of cars. And yet it totally revolutionized the car industry and look what they're starting to do with regards to the energy world. So when you start to think about that, it is a very different place. In addition to that, when you think about this world and this ecosystem that's emerging, it's again one that's all around ecosystems. It's all around being able to build up platforms, networks, and then orchestration. And part of this is that you're starting to create the folks that are the prosumers, right? Those that produce and those that consume. And in the energy space that is so today, that is exactly what's going to be happening over time. Assuming the right policies are in place, the right regulations are in place, you can just imagine that the energy space is so right for the taking here. And certainly in emerging markets, not as much here in the U.S. today, in the emerging markets, this is really truly a time of opportunity. When you look at ventures for a second, and I want to just give you a sense of GE Ventures so that you understand how we sort of fit into the equation with GE. Our whole remit is really about doing forward thinking, forward sensing, and partnerships with the non-traditional players, particularly the startups. Finding the small, as Heather put it, and really figuring out how to partner up with it, because we think through those types of activities, we can find new solutions that in fact GE has not been utilizing to date. And we're certainly doing that, for example, you're going to hear this from John Carrington from STEM in terms of what he's doing, sort of the non-traditional partnerships that have been occurring there. Again, what I would say here is think about the ecosystem and the way we try to access it, and one of the things to please remember about us that I would ask you to keep in mind is that we are not just about equity investing. We do invest, and I'll give you a quick rundown because I know I'll get the question from a number of you, we do invest in both early stage and later stage companies. We do it in software, in energy, in healthcare, in advanced manufacturing, and I could keep going. So any industry that GE is in, we're investing in just to give you a sense. But it's not just about equity, it's about the partnerships that come out of it. In addition to that, we also have a business which is all around new business creation. So we've actually started companies, and we've started them from scratch. In the last 18 months, we've started three healthcare companies, spun them out, working with a syndicate of VCs. And we have two that are right now owned by the employees and of GE, and we're looking to potentially get those spun out, too. We also did this with a company that I'm going to talk about in a second called Current. And some of you must have heard about that in the energy space. And I'll give you a little bit of a view of what we're doing there. We also do licensing, so we run, I run GE licensing in terms of what is happening in that particular world and utilizing licensing as an activity that is not just about royalty, but it's about value creation and building up the ecosystems that need to occur around either know-how, IP, or talent. And then last but not the least is health imagination. I won't speak about that today, but it's solving the problems, big problems of health around the world. Catalyst, I will mention. This is a very new activity for us. We're trying to find the scientist entrepreneur who is actually looking for that next breakthrough and would like to figure out how to accelerate that to the marketplace. This is not necessarily about creating a new company. It could be. It could be about licensing. It could be about a number of different tool sets that I've just mentioned, but it truly is about finding and helping that entrepreneur actually get the breakthrough to the marketplace. So with that, what have we done in new business creation as an example? And this is a way to drive organic growth for a very, very big company that has a tremendous amount of assets in the energy space, but yet they've been sort of locked up because they've been, if you'd like, captured by one specific business model. What we did with current, and this was with GE Ventures, is we came up with a business model that said, well, hold on a second. What if we were actually platform agnostic? It didn't have to be a GE brand because we know that the customer that we're going to go after, the CNI customer, commercial industrial customers, actually want to either reduce or produce because they'd like to make money, ultimately, and shift. So reduce, produce, and shift the usage of energy. And if we could do that, how do we enable that? And so we've created a business model here that brings all of this together with a financing platform that goes with it. We sell it in an OPEX model over a long time period, and we can bring whichever assets to bear associated to it. Do remember one thing. Who was our founder? Thomas Edison. So what did we do? Light bulbs. And so as you probably know, the lighting industry is going through a huge transformation that goes from light bulbs that were before the incandescent light bulbs to LED. Now, when you think about that model, okay, you used to sell how many light bulbs a year because the turn-on inventory was pretty quick. How long do LED light bulbs last? They'll sit on a shelf for a long time if you try to sell that same model. So we had to change the business model around LED sales. And we've been able to do that. Now, as I mentioned in the beginning, the big trends with regards to connectivity, connectivity, if you have a sensor that is connected and every single light bulb that you sell, all of a sudden it's intelligent. It's informed. And we built a cloud called Predicts, our platform, which in fact we're able to utilize in terms of being able to help our CNI customers get better analytics around their facilities, et cetera. And we can talk a little bit more about that when Mary Ann Wu, who's been very involved in that, is up here. So it gives you a little bit of a sense what GE Ventures does. We not only do equity investing, we also try to create new business models with the assets that we have or the startups that we potentially are partnering with to create new ways to not only grow GE but also to help grow the ecosystems that are at hand because healthy and vibrant ecosystems are very important to our growth too. So with that, I'm going to conclude. You guys know this. I saw the tables. I saw the various topics that were being talked about. You see how much activity is going on in the energy space. It's an incredibly exciting space. We believe it's huge opportunities. And you're seeing these kind of shifts that going into renewables, shifting in the fuel mix with regards to the rise of natural gas and some of the other types of renewables, the real-time connectivity that I talked about already with regards to intelligence, which allows for asset optimization and the sharing of those technologies, the new business models, as I mentioned, with regards to current. And then think about the growth in our population and what we have today with about one-fifth of the people have no access in the world and then we have two billion of them that still have unreliable access and it's not going to stop growing. You know, it's just a wonderful time and so we are really spending a tremendous amount of time in the energy space, really trying to figure out what the opportunities might be, doing it with startups and we hope with universities and we hope that you guys will really consider GE as a partner. So with that, I'm going to ask John Carrington, our CEO of STEM, to come on up here and also Marianne Wu, who leads GE and I'm going to start a conversation. So please come on up. Ladies first. All right, while they're coming and while they're going to sit down, I'll start with the introduction since I know we will be pressed for time and let me just say that John Carrington is both CEO and director of STEM, right? It is a predictive analytics company that utilizes innovative solutions, changing the way energy is distributed and consumed and John has a very distinguished track record. He's been involved for over the last 25 years with proven leadership in technology, energy and industrial companies. He worked at GE, so just FYI, but he was also involved with First Solar and Mia Soleil. Now, Jack, back when he had time, and this is something that you probably won't Google on John, but I want to share it with you, is he once played with all four major winners of the PG, of golf, all right? So really, the Masters, the US Open, the PGA and British Open over one weekend in Scottsdale, okay? How'd you do? Pretty good. I didn't win. All right, all right. No hole in one there, all right. Let me just introduce Marianne Wu for a second. She's senior managing director at GE Ventures, so I had the privilege of working with her, but I also had the privilege of working with her at more David Alventures where she and I were partners. She is an experienced venture investor, a startup executive and a management consultant. She spent her career focused on bringing new technologies to market, still doing that, thank goodness. And prior to joining GE, she was also a VP of marketing at Oni Systems. She was a consultant at McKinsey & Company. And she started her career as a development engineer. She's an alum of Stanford with PhD and EE, is that right? Here. And so one thing I can tell you about Marianne that, again, you will not find out there as public information is she's actually written the death ride. Do you guys know what the death ride is? You know what the death ride is? You guys have done it too? That's crazy, man. It's 129 miles. You climb 15,000 feet. And this is on a bicycle or cycling, whatever. And you cross five mountain ranges. So had I known this about her, I might not have hired her before. Because this is like ultra competitive to say the least. All right. So let's turn to the conversation for a little bit. And I guess I would ask the following. And John, give us a little bit of a start on STEM and how you're seeing this landscape emerge because it's really happening pretty fast. Absolutely. Thank you very much. And I appreciate the opportunity to spend time with everybody. You know, the company was founded in 2009. We're in Millbray here locally. I took over as CEO in 2013 and we had about 45 employees, and I guess we're about 125. So the business is growing quickly. We're basically a SaaS company that uses predictive analytics in conjunction with innovative storage. And we take these systems and put them into commercial industrial buildings. The reason we are focused on commercial industrial and not residential is really the math associated. But furthermore, the CNI business is about $188 billion annual spend from an energy standpoint. One-third of the grid is devoted to CNI. When you take it to a global view, it's about 1.8 trillion square feet and 2.88 trillion dollars spent. So it's a substantial market and it's one in which we go in and the value prop is effectively a finance system in the building to save on demand charges first and foremost and then we can participate in grid services as they're available. So we'll either contract with the utility or with the CNI customer and we've been successful on both fronts and we can certainly talk more about that. From an investor base, GE, as Sue mentioned, we have good coverage in Europe with RWE, Total, and Ibadrola, Constellation here in the U.S. and then Mitsui and we just announced Peter Thiel's group, Mithril has come in as a venture partner as well as Angelina Group. So good, well-rounded, interesting board meetings because you have a variety of different perspectives but all very helpful to the company. Yeah, thanks, John. And Marianne, when you think about this, very different model, different customer base that folks are now trying to get into in terms of breakthrough, what did GE Ventures see and think about in terms of making the investment? So we saw, I think, exactly what you teed up in your charts, right, that this evolution of the energy market from very centralized and kind of one way distributed out to the endpoints to this much more dynamic situation that we're evolving to today with generation at the endpoints, with load management that you would need to deal with and this evolution that you would really have the dynamic interplay of the edge and the core and that mixing of the energy back and forth. I think the other thing that we really were excited with, with STEM, was that they had a very clear, so although there's this macro trend, a startup has to have a market opportunity that they're going after in a very strong customer proposition and STEM had a direct customer proposition to the CNI customers, that they had high electricity charges, that they were dealing with demand charges and that the storage could help manage that cost down so you can go to a customer and say, I can reduce your energy spend. At the same time, they had this double benefit that when that load was aggregated for utilities, then they had that distributed acid base that could go back against the utility. So they weren't waiting on that future. They were waiting on, they were serving a market need that existed today and they could scale around the future trend. You know, the other things that are obviously really important when we look at a company is the strength of the technology base and they had really great foundational technology. They had good investors that we were comfortable working with and that we knew well. And then John was not quite on board yet, but we were already in discussion about John and really felt comfortable about that management team and felt great confidence in that management team. So all of those things came together. And then John came on board. Yeah, well, that was part of that. We were helping make that happen. Despite that, we continued to invest. That's right. Got that. So just give me a little bit of a sense though, John. I mean, as a startup, you have to overcome so much in this emerging transformation in the energy market, particularly in this customer base. Are there things that you would say to the audience in terms of, here are the things I worry about the most overall and how I go about doing it? I think that it continues to be disruptive in the sense that we are potentially taking demand charges from utilities, right? So I get that question a lot. And I think we don't view it that way. And here's why. We are at an aggregated base. We provide a capacity to the utility and from a grid operator standpoint, we can provide grid stability. So we sit on that side helping them. At a customer level, we actually do help them save money on the demand charge component, as mentioned earlier. But the fact is the utility can take this aggregated capacity and view it not as a base load quite, but it does help that peak aspect. So it's more assured supply in the market. We can put these in a variety of buildings in highly constrained areas. So I would say the biggest risk would be to someone say they're the enemy and we're going to go after them and change the policy around that. I would say demand charges are going up, double digit all over the country. They're looking at doing it at a residential level now. I don't think it's highly likely. I think the other one to think about is, is it a glacial pace? I mean, will we have more California-like initiatives around storage? Because the fact is it's still expensive and you do need some sort of regulatory support to make it work in all markets. But a lot of states around the country, and the globe quite frankly, are looking at putting just those type of... And where do you see some of these states? Sort of, where do you see them bubbling up? Yeah, I'd say Massachusetts, Connecticut, or a couple. We see some activity in Arizona. What's nice is, in our model, we don't necessarily need a regulatory environment if we can do something directly with utility. So we're doing some of those around the country today that we haven't announced. We've won another large one in California that we haven't announced. So it's exciting in the sense that if you do that play, you don't need the regulatory aspect, because effectively you're building a gas peak or plant for them in all these buildings in that service territory. Now, you did announce one already some time ago. And that was very exciting to say the least because it really did do some validation and proof points, right? So talk a little bit about that. So that's a Southern Cal Edison RFO that took place. We actually bid that in January of 14. We won 85 megawatts. It's a four-hour call. It's a very large program starting this year. It's over four-year build-up. The next four years we'll do the build-out. It's a 10-year program. And effectively, it was an all-source RFO. And what's exciting about that is they looked at wind, solar, energy efficiency, and the commission in California demanded that they pick 50 megawatts, and they took 265 of which we won 85. So it's a real statement, I think, for the industry. And again, a lot of it was driven by some of the situation with San O'Farray, as well as Commissioner Peter minutes of things that she pinned. But a really exciting program. We're seeing more and more of that activity around the country as they look at that as the model. So that's where policy was a friend. I'll come back, for both of you, to say where is policy not necessarily a friend? And you mentioned a little bit of it in your comments. But, Marianne, you see it across so many different portfolio companies. What would you comment there? So I think policy is clearly really important in energy. These are regulated markets. I think policy is often really important in bringing new technologies to market and providing that support. I think where it's not a friend right now or where it's not a friend and where it comes up as not as a friend is where it's in tension and there's uncertainty. And that's where the, when you're bringing new technologies to market when startups are launching, you want certainty against what the environment will be in that market environment and where you have that volatility about whether tax credits will be extended, what wires charges may or may not look like, what all of these different pieces may or may not be, then it's hard for entities to move forward without understanding how their business might be impacted by some change in regulation. Thanks. John, any thoughts? I think you're right on. I think the right policy instills confidence which instills more financing and that's critical in this industry. I think where it can be a foe is maybe where it lasts too long and the perception becomes it's too rich and I'm not going to take a stance on NIM, but whenever there's a discussion about a NIM reduction, we see companies sue utilities, pull employees out of a state. That senses to me that maybe it's pretty rich if they're that angry about it, but I won't get into a whole NIM debate today. Okay, I'm going to switch topics and talk a little bit about connectedness. So, you know, we at GE are experiencing a whole sort of transformation to become much more digital. And if you guys haven't seen the commercials, the Owen commercials, so many people here have seen the Owen commercials on TV. Do you know what I'm talking about? Not many TV watchers here. Oh my goodness gracious. So this is, okay, we got one person in the background over there. So there's this dude that is a coder, right? And he gets this job at GE and he walks in to a whole group of folks that look at him because, you know, it's the valley, right? And the valley, you work at different places than GE to actually code. And they're like, what are you talking about? You mean, you're going to work on a train? You're going to work, I mean, and it's really about building applications and doing coding around this. And GE is becoming a digital industrial company. It's really an important effort for us because we fundamentally believe there's a lot of value to be unlocked in that particular case. If you haven't seen the commercials, turn on the TV once and at least check it out, really. Or check it out on YouTube or something. But the question I'm going to ask around this is, you know, when you think about storage, battery systems, hardware, how do you think about the value of the system versus the value of the asset and the interconnectedness between them? So I think there's value in both. I think there's more value in the system play, excuse me, in the aggregation of the system. So in a singular standpoint, you could think of it at one home depot. They're going to save on, you know, the opportunity to save on demand charges. But when you take that whole home depot network and enterprise, which is exactly how Chiefs Standardly Officers are speaking to us about this today, they want to aggregate those resources. They want to be a better grid citizen. They want to participate in the grid. They want to actually have a revenue stream from their energy buy. Much more demand on controlling and empowering themselves around that. So I think it's more powerful as a system than it is singular, but there's value in both, fortunately. The singular, let's just talk about that for a second. You know, is there a role for sort of an asset independent of intelligence and how it can still play in this energy infrastructure world? There's certainly a role for an asset that doesn't have... I think you're trying to decouple the two. You know, I think increasingly we'll see that assets are intelligent or are part of an intelligent system. But I think there's certainly a role for the asset itself, because you can see a value chain of different vendors that come together in the same way that we have, say, a phone that is in the end a highly connected asset. There are components in that phone that are just an asset that provide the capability that makes this magical device effective for you. So I think we'll certainly see the same thing in the energy industry, that there are pieces that are transformers. There are pieces that, you know, do a job, they will function as part and they will increasingly be part of a connected system. But there is value in the asset itself. At the innovation level, at the startup level, we talked about this a little bit on the panel earlier. It's true there's a lot of shift towards digital and, you know, at some level it's low hanging fruit because the industrial economy and the energy market has not been highly impacted by that. So there's the opportunity now to drive a lot of products of the industry to drive this kind of network capability with software and that's exciting. At the same time at Stanford, I know there's a lot of work going on on fundamental technology innovation, materials innovation, to get real efficiencies gains, you know, in solar to drive down the battery costs. We are also going to need those technology innovations and those things are important as part of the mix. They will, I think, increasingly get mixed together with digital technologies. So when you think about sort of the future and, I mean, we kind of are living in what we believe to be the future, but there is so much more to come. What do you think is going to be the biggest breakthrough over the next give it five and ten years? You know, I'm encouraged by a few things, one of which I already mentioned around the customer driving more empowerment and really pushing utilities and commissions at the chief sustainability officer level to drive regulatory environment, to drive more empowerment and participation in the grid. That's good for storage because DR is a great component and a great vehicle for that and storage is a great avenue. I think the other one is the fact that while we're looking at new technologies every day, the fact is when you looked at solar and what happened and the oversupply when the Chinese really went all in and effectively decided it was a core to their country, you look at then over to the battery side today, you have incredibly substantial companies in LG and Samsung and Korea that effectively are all in and I was with GE in Asia for four years, spent a lot of time with both companies there's very few companies that hate each other more until they look to Japan and enter Toshiba, Panasonic so there's this battle between them and these are huge organizations that are all in on batteries and they went all in when oil was at $100 and EVs were going to rule the world and I can tell you there's a lot of open capacity today because of where oil is Tesla driver doesn't care about miles per gallon maybe but a lot of others do and we saw some statistics today earlier this morning 440,000 vehicles total and 50% of them are here in California so there's a lot of capacity out there in my business because we're seeing price declines 70-80% in the two years that I've been in this role and they continue so cost curves are very steep and well ahead of the schedule that you see from Mackenzie and others and so I think that opens up more markets and drives a lot more through so I'm encouraged by the customer pool and the raw material cost and the cost of financing is really coming down dramatically yeah Mary Ann yeah so I would say the same thing the customers I think are really important in a way that they haven't been before and so I think the customer demand and interest is there and if you go back a little bit to the current story right that was sort of customers wanting to take control around generation around load reduction around efficiency and then ultimately the shift and what we're kind of seeing you know we talk about digital we talk about sensors in data what we're really seeing when you talk about that in customer context is you're starting to put in a network of sensors that can help you manage your energy infrastructure it doesn't need to stop there right so when you think about customer benefit I urge everybody in the energy markets to think about okay now I'm selling to customers customers care about energy but they care about a basket of goods too and so if I put in that sensor and data network what else can I provide to them and what value added services can I sell to them so you know as residential consumers Xfinity you know whoever your provider is they sell you the triple play right and I think the same thing is going to go on as we talk to consumer and industrial customers I can sell you energy reduction I can sell you a set of services around managing your building better I can sell you a set of services around trading your energy back into the network and I can send you a set of services around you know managing making your customers happier and so that's the opportunity we have as we move into digital so that's one right focus on customers and using digital broader than just energy to drive the energy agenda home or as part of driving the agenda home I think the second one is around electrification and it may not quite be as fast as everybody sometimes thinks but we are seeing very much this trend towards natural gas towards electrification towards renewables and things that have been historically always mechanic heat and propulsion that have always been other sources starting to move over to electricity and I think that's a very interesting trend that will have a lot of impact so we have just a few minutes left and instead of trying to fill the time just ourselves I'm going to open it up to the audience to see if there's any questions that the audience would like to ask Marianne or John notice how I said Marianne or John or suit it's only about 98 degrees outside so you don't want to hurry and leave quite correct one over here so the question now repeated so that everybody can hear is that I briefly mentioned a little bit about at the beginning GE looking at emerging markets and not just GE but a number of different companies looking at emerging markets and because they don't have the legacy systems that exist here in the US or in some of the other developed countries they can leapfrog the entrepreneurs there can leapfrog and really start to utilize the resources or some of the capabilities in those markets that are there for the consumer everybody has a cell phone in these markets so how do you use that with the kind of things that have happened for example in Kenya with the MPSA which is all financially driven as you know and was able to open up a whole bunch of local economies because of that how do you utilize that in the emerging markets to actually drive the adoption of electricity and it is a play that GE is thinking about trying to think about with regards to microgrid, grids and renewable energy solar as an example or other types of activities to figure out how do we make something happen there that right now is still in play if you'd like and you sort of have to do it locally we've been exploring what are those models because the electrification of everything is sort of a goal that GE would like to engender and these are one of the plays and it might mean that you have a different entrepreneurial set like the social entrepreneurs than you have here in the US and you have to figure out how in fact to have local VCs and they're not really VCs they're impact investors and utilizing that with some care is actually pretty important so we're in the process of trying to figure all of that out but it is an emerging marketplace and we're seeing some of that activity right now. And I'll just quickly add two points to that so I think certainly in the rural areas we're seeing these microgrids where it's renewables attached to the LED, attached to the TV and the mobile charger and the mobile payments and pay as you go there is also central generation going into those markets and that's certainly part of it so we're interested in both of those and those markets do have the ability to leapfrog both around the business model but they're putting in more efficient pieces as well and then the last thing is we think about rural development again it doesn't have to just be the energy piece of the equation and if you look at the development of those rural areas health care, water treatment very important issues so as GE thinks of those markets we think about how to put those together as well. Big infrastructure please, yes. A question for John and or Mary Ann when you think of energy storage they're almost always naturally want to think about backup power and the ability perhaps to tie solar and energy storage together for a solar emergency microgrid type of functionality but when you hear STEM and Tesla and Solar City and everybody else talking about energy storage they're almost always talking about grid services demand charge arbitrage etc and never hear them talk about backup power emergency backup power from the energy storage can you talk a little bit about that and is that one of the layers that has been evaluated as a potential play for putting some value on energy storage in the U.S. markets? I'm going to take it initially. We've looked at backup power it is one of the potential value enablers in the value stack I would say that the value of lithium ion batteries amongst those 13 items on the Rocky Mountain Institute wheel if you will backup power with lithium today isn't that compelling of an option from a cost standpoint now I think it could get there we get a lot of that on the east coast particularly so as the cost curve continues to come in I think we'll see more of that but there's other more valuable components that lithium ion provide that's why I think you see more grid services angles anything else? No I think that's right Any other questions? There's one over here Earlier we talked about how storage could be a big part of our solution going forward in terms of renewables does California have the infrastructure right now to support as much storage as we would ultimately need and if not what do we need to do to improve that infrastructure I think I think it does I think one of the tipping points that you might see in this industry in the near term is this Aliso situation in LA and by the way this is I've been in a lot of cities recently since this has happened and there are a lot of other cities that have pretty material gas leaks that are going on there's rumors of a one gigawatt problem with this gas if there's 18 gas peaker plants that are impacted in the summer 14 days of potential brownouts etc their view is a gig we did some analysis the market team at STEM actually said you could actually do a gig of storage in a 40 foot container on a single level by the way on five football fields so there's room there's capacity I think you could do it the grid could handle that interconnection it wouldn't happen overnight and again from our perspective every building becomes an opportunity for us to put that storage in but watch Aliso I think that's going to be pretty compelling the policy issues that will come out of that will be quite interesting in terms of infrastructure investments did you have a question here you go my question was are you seeing an expansion in the market in the frequency response and balancing services the ISO just kicked that out and is instead buying it balancing authorities but do you see that as another potential battery solution in the future I think that there so I definitely think that the whole piece that does need to evolve and think this is what you were sort of touching on your question as well is that we have point solutions that are going in today so you have Aliso which has a very significant problem where you have a transmission congestion in LA and so these are causing the market opportunity narrowly I think that there are a number of pieces that will come in in terms of greater frequencies response services where storage can play a piece of that but I think storage I think when we talk about storage it's sometimes misleading because it's like oh we're going to put in this battery and it's going to solve the whole thing and really when you talk about STEM John you really talk about storage and you talk about the software solution that comes with it right and so they're very closely coupled I think it's not the storage or the frequency service and the software management that comes with that comes together so the frequency services can be enabled by storage or other grid response I think that's right PGM is obviously a functioning market in that frequency response side and we'll see how it evolves here but we are not playing in PGM today we think that this is a better market and some other ones that we're targeting right now but we're looking at that as well Okay lightning round we'll get a minute and a half what is the biggest energy threat and therefore opportunity on the horizon as you see it right now this has changed status quo what would change status quo I think carbon pricing would change status quo in a pretty big way I certainly said that yesterday didn't I everyone was pushing for that I think that's a huge one and again I just think more activity around utilities getting experience around all source RFOs that have storage as a part of the solution is a big enabler and it's coming I mean like I said we did the SCE deal we have four times the SCE volume in shortlist or in contract process today so it's happening and I think that's encouraging to see more utilities taking this approach Alright so with that we are actually out of time and we want to thank you for your attention and so please help me thank the panel for actually participating