 And I'm going to start by talking about the inspiration behind our company and then how that has led us into a really exciting field of bringing sustainability to remote or what we call islanded communities, whether you're in the middle of Alaska and surrounded by vast expanses of land or whether you're in an island surrounded by vast expanses of water, you're essentially island and you're cut off from the rest of the world, there's no infrastructure. So it's a situation that most people don't appreciate how many people in the world are actually living in these types of situations. So the, is it earth or is it ocean, 70% about and growing because of global warming of the world is covered in water, oceans, rivers, lakes and this water if you notice is almost constantly in motion, whether it's tidal currents or river currents, it's always moving and for those of you who have ever been to a beach and been knocked over by a wave or in a canoe trying to paddle upstream, you get an idea of the power that is in this water. In fact, water currents are 832 times more powerful than wind because of the greater mass. So one way to look at the world is it's this vast resource of energy that's waiting to be tapped. At the same time, if you look at where people live, which is where people use electricity, it's almost always very close to water, an ocean, a river, a lake and that's for a good reason because water provides great transportation, it provides water for irrigation, it really is obviously a life sustaining situation. So by necessity, people have founded town, cities, villages near water. So the amazing thing is if you look at it, most of the people and most of the electricity, roughly two thirds of the electricity that's used in the world is used very close to this amazing reservoir of energy and it has not yet been tapped, it's still there just waiting to be tapped. So somehow, if you could figure out how to take that energy in all of that moving water and use it to generate electricity, you would essentially be delivering it right to the door of the users who live right near the water and it would revolutionize how electricity is generated and transmitted around the world because we wouldn't necessarily need big transmission lines going around, it would all be done on a local or regional basis. So that in essence was the idea, the inspiration behind founding Ocean Renewable Power Company 14 years ago. A group of us got together and thought having spent our careers in electricity business and honestly growing up in Illinois, I knew nothing about water, about oceans. If somehow you could pull this together, it would be dramatic. It wouldn't be a transitional technology, it would be a transformational technology. So that's how we got started in this. And then as it turns out, the more we got into this, the very best of these energy resources, these water resources, which it's really defined by the velocity of the water, the more velocity, the more speed of the water, the more energy there is in it, that stands to reason. The very best of these resources just happened to be located in areas that are for the most part remote or near remote. They've been in decline or never actually had a peak economically. They are areas that have been basically forgotten, it's the greatest underserved market in the world is that people that live in these communities, but they're sitting on these amazing energy resources in terms of either tidal or river currents. So as we really got into looking at how are we going to do this and where are we going to do this, it became pretty clear that the very best place to start is going to be in these areas like Eastport, Maine or Iggy Aga, Alaska, which is a remote community, 280 miles southwest of Anchorage, literally in the middle of nowhere. But on one of the most amazing rivers that you'll ever see, in fact, it's the best salmon fishing in America or in places like Couchwalk, which is in a region of Quebec known as Nunavik, Nicole knows where that is. It's the very northernmost part of Canada, of Quebec. It's bordered by the Angaba Bay on the east and Hudson Bay on the west and it's an area that's absolutely huge and they have several remote communities, Couchwalk being the biggest of them and they have this amazing river, the Couchwalk River, that is a tidal river. So it's not tidal or it's not river, it's both. It's a river, but the tides come and go through the river and it's got tremendous velocity. But these are areas that typically during the wintertime, particularly unemployment rates, can reach 50%. Per capita income is a fraction of where it is, what it is anywhere else. As an example, in Eastport, Maine, if you look at per capita income there, it's less than half of what it is here in Cumberland County and it's only a four-hour drive. So these are areas that are facing severe issues in terms of sustainability. They exist only because there have been government subsidies and those subsidies increasingly are going away and so there are communities like this around the globe that are really seriously trying to figure out how they're going to exist in the future. And energy is a key part of that. So what are these communities like? First of all, they're mostly indigenous people. The area I just referred to in Northern Canada, Nunavik, is part of the Inuit homeland. In Iggyaga, Alaska, there's actually four native tribes that inhabit that community. As I mentioned, they're facing severe sustainability issues. There's no local or regional fuel sources. If you ever went to Kujak, the first thing you notice when you get off the plane, there's no trees. So there's not even wood to burn. They burn diesel fuel for heat. There's no power grids. There's no pipelines. There's really no infrastructure. There'll be fishing boats, a front-end loader, a few things like that, but there's really no infrastructure. And conventional power stations like a big gas-fired plant or, God forbid, a coal plant, they're just too big. They're too expensive. These don't work. It would be too expensive to bring the fuel there. So they're on diesel. They're fueled by diesel. And diesel is expensive. It almost doesn't matter what it costs at the refinery. Getting it from the refinery to these communities is very expensive. And in some times, in the wintertime, in Igearga, Alaska, for instance, they have to fly in the diesel fuel. So you can imagine how expensive that is. And it's also environmentally risky. These being indigenous communities, they have a high regard, a high respect for the environment. They do a lot of subsistence fishing and hunting. And every year, there are fuel spills. Two years ago, there were three major diesel fuel spills in Nunavik, northern Quebec. And this is devastating for these people. So it's not just the emissions and the noise from diesel. It's all the risk involved with transporting, handling, and storing fuel. So if there is a solution, it has to be based on locally available resources, which means renewable energy. And any power systems have to be easy to deploy, maintain, retrieve. You just aren't going to have the ability to bring in cranes or large pieces of equipment. It would be prohibitively expensive. So for a lot of these northern communities, solar and wind really don't work. You can imagine in these areas in the northern latitudes in the wintertime, solar is not a very good option, maybe for an hour or so a day. But even then, it's pretty marginal. And wind is very problematic as well because wind turbines accumulate ice. They lose their efficiencies. A lot of times they break down. And in the middle of winter in northern Quebec, I guarantee you, you're not going to get somebody to go up there and fix it. They're going to wait till the summer. So the systems have to work and they have to be deployable and retrievable easily. And so that's kind of the underpinnings of what our solutions are, which I'll get into in a minute. And again, because these are communities that, a lot of them were originally communities that some of them go back thousands of years, but they're based on hunting and fishing, they're near water. And so when you get into these northern latitudes, you have tremendous tidal and river resources and it's right at their doorstep. So let's look at the worldwide view of this. There are two billion people in the world that live in islanded or remote communities. Think about it, two billion people that are isolated from the rest of the world. Seven hundred million of them rely exclusively on diesel generation. So that's roughly twice, a little more than twice the population of the United States that relies on very expensive, essentially environmentally dangerous source of electricity. And you can see kind of generally where they're located in most of the advanced societies around there, they tend to be in the north, in Africa, there's a lot of people there that have no electricity, South America as well. But it's a huge underserved market. And if you look at the polar view, I have a great map in my office, actually I have a round conference table and I have a map that I got from a group in Canada looking at the world, straight down looking at the north pole and it's really interesting. It takes them a few minutes to figure out what they're looking at. But you wouldn't believe the number of communities that exist, not just north of the Arctic Circle, but even a couple hundred miles south of there near polar communities that fit this category of being remote isolated and no access to reasonably priced electricity. Typically in these communities the price of electricity is five to 15 times what you pay. So imagine if your electricity bill you got and it was six or eight times what you're paying now, it would be quite a shock. But it goes beyond that as well. If you want to buy groceries in these communities, in Kuzhwak when I was there a couple of years ago I went into the grocery store. A little bitty head of iceberg lettuce was eight dollars. So they're facing sustainability issues. Is that ringing? The ring that you got there? What? What? The latitude of the ring that you marketed. That's actually what's defined as the Arctic. So it's the boundary there. Yeah I don't know what the parallel is. It's probably 65 or 70 something like that. But there's obviously because these are remote communities there's a lot of complicating factors. One of the great things is you meet some real characters. People with names like Jaco or Tarak or Tunu which are shown here by the way. These are people from Igayage. So it's tough because the logistics are very tough. But because the resources right there, once you can get these things installed and get them running and get the local people trained then it becomes a very sustainable situation. But no two communities are the same. Part of the reason they're such an underserved market honestly is because every one is pretty unique. So you can't batch them all together and call them a particular label that these communities are this because they're all pretty unique. So they all have to be approached a little differently. You have to build the relationships. There's obviously over the years have been a lot of people that have tried to sell them snake oil and it didn't work. So there's a little bit of that going on. But you have to do it one community at a time and that takes work. And remote logistics are tough. If you're out there on a river and you drop a bolt in the water, you've got to get on an airplane and fly two or three hours to get another one. And so logistics are key. And it's expensive if you don't plan accordingly. So the implementation can be costly if it's not well planned. And there's a lot of existing and governmental community relationships that are in place. I mentioned that these communities have been subsidized so if you offer them a solution that will reduce the overall cost, that may not actually translate to the actual people. Because it may be the government that's paying the subsidy. And so you have to figure out all the politics of working not just with the local community but with the regional or even federal government to be able to capture the full value of your proposition. So you have to talk to a lot of very different people from government to indigenous organizations to local community leaders. And of course these people have no money. They pay a lot of money every year for energy but they don't have any money to buy anything. So part of the solution has to be being able to package this in a way that they can afford and that reduces their annual payments that they would otherwise make for energy. So that's where ORPC comes in. This, by the way, is our river unit on the Kuizhek River in Agia Aguilasta. Our mission is to improve people's lives and their environment through sustainable energy solutions. And we do that not just from a technology standpoint of generating electricity but being able to bring technology to make their local, what are called micro grids, to make them smart so that they can incorporate not just our systems but if they do do some amount of wind or solar, be able to make all of those generating resources play nice together with the goal of shutting down the diesel unit because if you don't shut down the diesel unit you're not saving them any money. So that's the trick. So it's a combination of generation technology with smart grid technology packaged with a financing plan that allows that they don't have to put out a lot of money up front that over time you can get your return on investment. And it takes an amazing team to do these things. One of the things that I'm most proud of at this company, I was one of the founders, is the people that we've attracted are literally amazing. They're incredibly talented, they're smart, they're dedicated. We now have 30 people on the ORPC team. We're in three countries on two continents. We have Holyomes and Ciderays in Canada, in Ireland, Dublin, Ireland and Montreal. We have extended team that really stretches throughout North America and beyond. I mean, we have research partnerships with people like Penn State, Applied Research Lab, University of Washington in the state of Washington. The University of Maine has been a partner of ours for years. They do all of our marine monitoring. So monitoring for potential environmental impacts. Now in Canada with LaValle University and in Ireland with University College Cork, University of Belfast. What's neat is what's common with all the people we work with is they're excited about what we're trying to do. So we realized 14 years ago that this was going to be a very long putt. Maybe a thousand foot putt, I don't know. And we're down to maybe a 20 foot putt now. But it's the kind of environment where the only way you can actually get through it is you have to be a closely knit team that has all the capabilities that are needed, but above that they're inspired by what we're doing. And when we go into the office every day, we're doing stuff that's never been done before. And there's no manuals. You can't go to the internet and download the manual for this stuff. We're making it up as we're going and we're documenting and we're creating manuals. And that excites people. And technology is great, but people are way more powerful. Speaking about people, this is the crew. These are people from Iggy Aga Galasta that deployed the Ribgen system there. So these are people. We have two. This is Ryan Tyler, our senior mechanical engineer and Monty Worthington, who's our project director in Alaska. The rest of them are all locals that we have trained how to do this. So our value proposition and this shot, I love that the kids were fascinated by it. By the way, one other characteristic of these remote communities that was a shocker to me is the birth rate. The birth rate in Kuzhwak up in Nunavik is almost three times the birth rate of the United States. It's about 3%. So these communities and another amazing thing is that 70% of the people that live in this area in Nunavik, 70% of them are 30 years old or younger. We could use some of that in Maine. So not only are they facing sustainability issues today, but what are these people going to do? And they don't want to leave. This is God's country to them. And if you ever visit one of these communities, you won't want to live there, but you can understand their love of the land and their heritage. So being able to create economic development is key. So that really gets to what our value proposition is. So what we provide them is locally produced and locally controlled electricity, renewable electricity, from local resources. Nothing's brought in. It's already there. And they control it, which in many cases, the history of these communities is they did not have any control over their energy. It was provided by somebody else, and they were at their mercy. So this is a different paradigm for them. We provide a significant reduction to their environmental risk. And that's not just in terms of the noise from diesel or the emissions from diesel, but as I mentioned, reducing the risk of fuel spills. And it creates local, sustainable economic development. Because what we do is we train the people how to operate and maintain these systems themselves. So they have to, it puts people to work, and they're working locally. We buy locally to the maximum extent possible. So it does create economic development. And it's not thousands of jobs in a community like this, but we found in Eastport, Maine, when we did our title project there in 2012 and 2013, creating 10 or 15 jobs in Eastport, that's like creating 1,000 jobs in Boston. So it's a big impact. And another great thing that we found out, it turns out that our power systems have no known impact on the environment. We have monitored all of our installations extensively. It's been done by third parties, whether it's the University of Maine or the University of Washington or independent consultants. We have hours and hours of video and reams and reams of data. And through all of this, there's not been one known fish mortality. So, and by the way, these projects are all monitored by all of the agencies, federal and state agencies. So US Fish and Wildlife, NOAA, National Marines Fisheries, Army Corps of Engineers, you name it, they're all involved as well as in Maine, the Department of Environmental Protection, in Alaska, it's Alaska Fish and Game. We have to put reports together and they have to sign off on them. And they have signed off that there are no known adverse impacts. So that's been very encouraging. I can't say that they'll never, ever be a fish injury, who knows, but the one thing we do know is that this is environmentally not a risky proposition. Our project, Niki Agaeng, I'm gonna show you a video of it in a minute. While we were, we deployed during the peak of the salmon run, almost 2 million salmon went by our device and not one injury. So let me tell you about the technology a little bit. All of our systems are kind of the core technology is what we call our turbine generator unit. We, belovedly call it our TGU. So we developed this TGU, it's patented. And the neat thing about it is you can make it bigger to use in tidal situations, you can make it smaller to use in rivers because there's just not the space in a river. But it is truly unique that you can see the turbines, they kind of look like paddle wheels that have been twisted. And in fact, if you looked at one of those foils on the turbines, it looks just like an airplane wing. And that's because it operates on the same principle. The moving water impacts the foil, gives it lift, it rotates, turns the generator, generates electricity, and then it comes to shore through a power cable. So the interesting thing is you look at this, there's only one moving part. It happens to be a big moving part, it's all the turbines, the shaft, and the generator moving, but there's no gears. So there's only one moving part, so that means lower maintenance costs. The other interesting thing is you look at this, it's kind of very wide and not very tall. So immediately you can see where you can get this in some fairly shallow water. So versus other competitors that are in our industry, we're able to utilize sites that are shallower than pretty much anybody else in the industry. And it also, these turbines, believe it or not, it doesn't matter whether the water is going into it or we're coming back through it, they always rotate in the same direction. And it sounds counterintuitive, but they always rotate in the same direction. So it's ideal for tidal, because all you have to do is put it in the water, and it doesn't matter whether it's the eb tide or the flood tide, it always rotates in the same direction. There's no mechanical reposition you need it. So we've developed two applications. One for tidal, we call TyGen, it's a registered trademark name. You can see it on the left, this is the latest version of it. It's essentially a TGU that has a buoyancy component on the top of it and is held in place with a tension mooring line. And depending on the water flow, one of those devices can generate up to 600 kilowatts. On the right is the latest version of our RivGen power system for rivers, much smaller system, 35 to 50 kilowatts, but it's about less than a quarter of the size of the other one. And all of these can be deployed as single devices or you can put several in an array and then connect them all under water and bring the power to shore. In all of our systems, there's nothing visible. There's no visual impacts, there's no view shed issues. So when we were in the water in Eastport in 2012 and 2013, people would call and say, hey, I want to come and see your project. And I said, well, that's great, but you're just going to be looking out on a bay, you're not going to see anything. So that's a great feature of our technology is there are no visual impacts. And we're utilizing land under water that really isn't being utilized. So there's not an impact on land use as well. The technology is great, but you also have to be able to execute. And I'm proud to say we've done 11 very complex first-of-a-kind marine testing and demonstration projects on tidal and river sites in Maine and Alaska. We have gone through all the highly complex regulatory processes. In fact, we've turned that into a competitive advantage in our collaborative approach with the agencies. We deal with the fishermen. Now, there's a group of individuals, rugged individuals, they're wonderful, the fishermen are. And we've gotten through it. In fact, we were cited by the Maine Ocean Energy Task Force as the model for energy development on the coast. And a lot of you don't know this, but Maine made history in 2012. Our project that we did in Eastport it was the first ocean energy project of any type that includes offshore wind, wave, thermal, what's called OTAC, any type of electricity generated from the ocean. This was the first one anywhere in the Americas to deliver power to a utility grid. So we sold the power to the New England ISO. And that was a historic event in 2012. And then our Iggy Agig project, we completed it in 2015. That was a demonstration project. This is the remote community in Alaska. When we were online, we were providing about a third of their energy needs. Again, it was a collaboration with the Iggy Agig Village Council and the Alaska Energy Authority. So that was a situation where you bring both government and community together for the greater good of the community. And next summer, we will be putting our first commercial unit in Iggy Agig. So with that, I hope I can, I wanna show you a video. This was a great video done by the CBS affiliate in Anchorage on this project. Susie Kistus, she's still here. No, we provided them the video, but they did this great. It looks like an infomercial, but we had nothing to do with it. The power of ideas. Can they rescue rural Alaska from some of the highest energy costs in the nation? Well, Alaska is rich in renewable energy resources, but there are also lots of challenges to tackle. America is full of dreamers. We push new frontiers by choice. That's what makes us Americans. Well, the president enjoyed the hospitality of Alaskans. He also acknowledged rural Alaska's energy challenges. So we're gonna deploy more new clean energy projects on native lands. And that's gonna reduce dependence on fossil fuels, promote new jobs, and new growth in your communities. The motto of Alaska is North to the Future. At the International Glacier Conference, the Secretary of State gave a shout out to the Bristol Bay Village of Iggy Agig for its innovation. Iggy Agig just wrapped up a demonstration project which uses river currents to generate power. These are the kinds of creative solutions that will enable Arctic communities to endure and to thrive in the future without having to rely on dirtier and ultimately destructive sources of power. The project is a collaboration between Iggy Agig and the Ocean Renewable Power Company. They've dubbed it RIVGEN. The fast currents of the Quee Jack River are ideally suited for power generation and its clear waters also made it easier to monitor the fish, which is hard to do elsewhere. But the data collected so far shows that there seems to be no impact. Company believes this project also has applications for tidal power. There's some significant tidal opportunities. The one we're looking at very closely is the community of False Pass and the Aleutians. And they have a wonderful resource there. So will the president's visit lead to more energy projects to help ease rural Alaska's hunger for affordable energy? I know that I've been in conversations with key staff members from the White House in the last few days. I think his trip here to Alaska really has brought a lot of high-powered attention to what the needs of the state are. Rural Alaskans pay some of the highest cost per kilowatt hour in the nation. The average cost for communities on the higher end of the spectrum is about 70 cents, four times what Anchorage pays at 16 cents per kilowatt hour. We believe that affordable energy is the underpinning of every sustainable community and every sustainable enterprise. And you can't do it with 48 and 58 cent power. In Iggy Agig, the cost per kilowatt hour is close to a dollar because the community is dependent on expensive diesel fuel to run its power plant. But there are hopes that tapping the river's energy will help change this. When RIVGEN is online, it provides about a third of the community's power needs. Rhonda McBride, KTVA 11 News. Anyway, so thank you for going through this with me. And I would love to answer any questions you may have. Yes, ma'am. Talk more about Eastport, what happened since in 2012, I think you said? Yeah, we were most active there during 2012 and 2013 in Copt Cook Bay. We continue to use Copt Cook Bay as a kind of a test center. So we have done other smaller projects there, not generating power to the grid, but other projects. We are planning a project now in probably the second quarter of 2020. We'll be going back with essentially a redesign of our original design. Both our project in Eastport and in Iggy Agig were great. They worked. It absolutely proved that our systems work, but they had a couple of problems. They were too expensive. And we had some nagging little issues that you would expect with a first of a kind project, things like bolted connections coming undone, things like that. So we have spent the last three and a half years going through a complete optimization of our design. And I'm happy to say we have reduced the cost by more than 50% and we've increased the performance by about 50%. So that new design, the first production unit of that new design, we plan to install in Eastport in 2020. And then the hope is that soon after that, we can eventually build up to a five megawatt project in not in Cobb's Cook Bay, but on the other side of Eastport in Western Passage, which as you may know is right on the border with New Brunswick. Yes, sir? Restrictions around the area around those units, lots of new fishermen, do they have to stay away here? The, no, they don't have to stay away. They obviously can't drop anchors there. They can't do dragging there. But traversing back and forth over this, there's no restriction. So basically the Coast Guard is obviously involved in all of what we do. There's a, if you look at a map of Cossack Cook Bay, you'll see our site plotted on the Coast Guard maps. And it's basically called an exclusion zone so that you can go over it, but you can't drop any anchors or you can't do any dragging there. And as you may know, Cobb's Cook Bay is one of the premier scallop resources on the East Coast, really, their scallops are amazing. We worked very closely with the fishermen and we found there were areas in the bay that were highly prized and we are deal with the fishermen and we would not go there. But there were other areas of the bay that they didn't really care about that much and so that's what we looked at. And in fact, the site that we used was a site that was identified to us by the fishermen as an area that they don't care that much about. It happened to have the best current in all of Cobb's Cook Bay, so it worked out very well. I'm wondering, is that thing heard in here in the colors that, you know, I understand that the electricity was underground to a power plant, but you could be some pain in the back when you heard the word, sort of. Yeah, we, when we did the project originally, we, this goes back quite a ways. The state of Maine established what was called the Ocean Energy Task Force. Back in 2010, essentially, during the Baldacci administration, they wanted to investigate the potential opportunities for ocean energy and they identified Tidal as one of those opportunities, so there were incentives put in place. They offered basically a five megawatt contract people could bid to build a Tidal project that would reach capacity of five megawatts and we won that. So we have a long-term power purchase agreement. The price is not yet at the point that we can put our system in and make money, so obviously we can't get investors to invest in a project that doesn't make money, so that's part of the whole thing we're going through now with this, we call version 2.0 of our design, is to reduce costs to the point where we can then, in fact, build that project and get a return on investment for investors. By the way, during that project, one of the great stories of that project is our supply chain extended to 14 of Maine's 16 counties, meaning we had suppliers or service providers or contractors in 14 of the 16 counties. We've invested, at this point, probably close to $40 million in the state we've created during the peak of that project, we created more than 100 jobs, so all of that was looked at originally as part of the allure of doing title energy, and it turned out to be true. Yes, Sarah, in the back? You, yeah. No, no, Sarah. I was just wondering, why did you try out for-profit company, but can you still get foundation grants? It seems like the population you're trying to serve, that there ought to be some pretty big foundations out there that would want to support something especially during the peak of that project. Yeah, it's interesting. Foundations donate money to non-profits, typically, okay? And we originally, we started our company as a for-profit. We haven't turned a profit yet, but someday. But Tesla hasn't turned a profit either, they've been around longer than us, so. So foundations are very kind of narrow in their scope of what they'll donate money to, and we just don't really fit that, which is a shame, because you think that they would be interested in doing that. That's the bad news. The good news is that there are groups out there that they're what they call impact investors that are looking to invest in something new that they're gonna get a return on their investment, but they're gonna get more than that. They're gonna do some good for the world. They're gonna do something to combat climate change. They're gonna help indigenous communities. So there are a lot of these investors around. They're typically what they call family offices, which are families that have accumulated wealth over the years, and they create up an investment arm. And so they fill that gap between philanthropy, which would be the foundations, and venture capitalists, or what we call vulture capitalists, they fill a niche. And in fact, our company has been sustained primarily by two family offices that they're amazing people. I mean, they put a lot of money into the company. They're still our biggest fans, even though we haven't returned any of their investment yet. They still believe in our mission. So those are the kind of investors that we deal with. And just to give you rough numbers, we've raised about $90 million to date. About roughly 50 of that has been private investment, primarily family offices. The other has been government, various government grants. And we've gotten money from the European Union, from Canada, US Department of Energy, where we've gotten more money from US DOE than any other company in our business, almost 26 million. So DOE has been good to us. And we're kind of the poster child for how do you take public money that's put in through DOE, and then raise the private capital to match that. That's the secret in an industry that we exist, because we're still considered too risky for a typical investor. Yes, ma'am? So assuming that these remote places have inexpensive power, what kind of industries could they do for how they create jobs? Yeah, well, that's a great question. I'll explain the long-term vision for these remote communities. I mean, the sad thing is that they sit on, some of them sit on amazing resources. I can tell you this community, Kuzhwak, which, by the way, is a town of almost 3,000 people. And so it's not a village. It's a fully functioning community. They sit on an amazing resource. But right now, they use diesel to generate electricity. They also use diesel to heat. And in fact, it's about 50-50. So they use as much diesel to heat as they do to generate electricity. But if you have affordable, renewable energy, you displace the diesel that's used for electricity, you eliminate that, but then you can convert the heat to high-efficiency electric heating, and you'll completely eliminate the need for diesel. What will happen is new industries that can then spring up, as an example, they can do greenhouses. All it takes is energy. I mean, energy is that essential part of life that you can't exist without. And if you have an abundant supply of it, you can do a lot of things. You could use renewable energy as an example to create hydrogen, and these places could be using hydrogen-powered vehicles. So they would be zero emission vehicles. By the way, right when I was in Kuzhwak, a gallon of gas was about eight or nine dollars. So there's a vision of this that if you have a big enough renewable resource, these could become zero emission communities. So they could thrive through their own agriculture and other means. Yes, ma'am. We're not big enough for them to worry about yet. They're not really worried about us. There is a concern, as an example, in Nunavik. We're working with the largest Inuit company. It's a company that was established under the St. James Bay Settlement Act back in the 70s. So they represent all the Inuits. There's another cooperative that's a similar company that provides all the diesel fuel. So they stand to lose. But amazingly, they have decided that rather than fight it, they want to join it. So they've now created a new joint venture with this other Inuit company to be part of what we're doing. So for us, it's tremendous because these people have been, they know all the logistics of these communities. They know how to deliver things and how to do things in these communities. So it really brings a lot to the table. And that's why working with the communities is so essential. There are so many untapped resources that you wouldn't think about that are there. Their knowledge of the water and all the logistics involved. So that's our plan, is to bring these people into it. But Big Oil isn't gonna worry about us because they really don't care about remote communities. They're looking at the lower 48 states, as they say in Alaska. They're looking at the big ticket items and we're not even approaching that yet. Yes, ma'am. I just wanna know, is there something you would do right now? There is, part of the original project is still there and we use it for research purposes. But there is nothing, no generating equipment in the water today. We hope to have that in second quarter of 2020. It's turning to the final one, he said. And when that goes in, will that be generating to the grid? That will be generating to the grid, initially in Cops Cook Bay and then we're gonna move it over to Western Passage and that's when we hope to build out that project after that. So it'll be the mid-2020s. The big thing, of course, is being able to secure the investment. That's the toughest part. John, you had a question earlier. The project is going, how much power would it give for it to be in the future? Yeah. The five megawatt project that we hope to do in Eastport would almost supply all the electricity for Washington County, 28,000 people. There are a couple of components that are highly proprietary, very specialized components like the generator. It's called a permanent magnet generator. It's not like a normal generator you would think about. So it's a very highly specialized field and that is being supplied by a supplier actually in Norway. Not Norway main, but the country Norway. The turbines we actually had, our initial supplier was in Rhode Island but we're now out for bids and we're considering suppliers from Ireland, Canada and the US. The rest of the system is mostly fabricated steel and other machine components and we buy them locally. So if we do a project in Maine, it's done in Maine. We try to maximize the amount of content in our project that's done locally. That's again, part of our value proposition. So what we do in Canada will be done in Canada. What we do in the US will be done here. Alaska, we have a supply chain actually established in Alaska for that project. So that's how we do it. Sir. How long you had the video there that submarine looking at least one type of piece of land? Is that part of the unit that goes down? Yeah, yeah, it's... For maintenance and why not? Yeah, it's an interesting design because it looks like a TGU sitting on a pontoon boat, basically. The pontoons are ballast tanks. So it's actually deploys itself. The way we do it is we put the anchor in first and the nice thing about rivers, typically this river anyway, it only flows one direction. You put the anchor in, you assemble the device on the shore, you pull it out with a fishing boat, hook it up to the anchor. So it's sitting on top of the water. It rides very nicely on the water. In fact, it makes a great maintenance platform. We've done that. And then when you want to deploy it, we actually have tubes that go to the pontoons, the ballast tanks, and then we flood one side. And you notice that one point in the video, it was sitting like this. The one side touches down and then we put water in the other tank and it sets down and then it's fully deployed. It takes about a half hour from beginning to end to actually deploy it or to retrieve it. Any more questions? Joni, questions? The one time I thought, now this will take any other energy to make up. It's just the flow of the water. So, I mean, so many things to get energy to make electricity, you have to use other energy. Yeah, now it's just the flow of the water and there are no liquids, so there's no chance of any spills of anything. The bearings we use are what are called lubricated, water lubricated bearings, there's no grease. Yeah, so it's environmentally pretty benign. Can you add to the original unit that's designed in place? All of a sudden, you've got building growth going on on land. Can you tie up all of these into it? Yeah, yeah, we typically, the plan is, for instance, the project in Eastport, the five megawatt project, will probably be 12 to 14 of our units. And then we have an umbilical cord from each of those that comes to an underwater, we call a consolidation pod, where we basically plug into an underwater box and then there's a single, from there a single line that comes ashore. And the cables are actually bundled cables. It's a combination of the power cable, the transmission cable, with the data cable. There's a lot of data and control systems involved in this, it's amazing, you look at this, it's kind of like a car today, when you open up the hood, in the old days, you opened up the hood of the car and you saw the motor, right? Now you open up the car and you see all the electronics and you wonder if there's actually a motor in there somewhere. Well, this is actually a lot like that. The electronics involved with this is absolutely amazing. It's, in fact, still advancing. So, the data cables are very important as well. So we bundle them together into one cable and bring it to shore, but you can put any number of units in the water. Yes ma'am? My friend is from Nova Scotia, so I'm used to going around and facing the seas, tie up the forest. Some of them are really, really powerful. Can you overwhelm us? Yeah, yeah, we're actually very familiar with Nova Scotia. What part of Nova Scotia are you from? Well, my family's from Canada, which is at the very tip of the bay, but the actor curves around, next to the last town, 14. Yeah, okay, because in the Southwest, Nova Scotia, there's, in Digby, in that area, there's some tremendous tidal currents. The Bay of Fundy is world-renowned for its title. They say they have the largest title differential in the world, and actually that's not true. The Northern part of Nunavik has a higher differential. But nobody really lives there, there's a village there, but so they didn't get their PR done right. But no, you're right, there are the tidal currents in what's called the upper minus basin, they can reach 14 knots, which is ridiculous. And there are people in our industry that are targeting their systems for that, but you can imagine the stresses on a system. We took a different approach. First of all, there's only a handful of sites like minus basin around the world. So we took a different approach, and we optimized our design around a much lower flow velocity, which means lower cost because you don't have to have the same structural support, et cetera. So instead of 12 to 14 knots, we're targeting four to six knots. That opens up most of the world, honestly. There are hundreds and hundreds of sites around the world that meet that criteria. So that was a little different approach that we took. Ultimately, we will be in the Bay of Fundy, but we won't be in the upper minus basin. We'll be in places like Digby in Southwest because the currents there are much more in tune with our design.