 Hi everybody. Thanks for coming today. Friday afternoon, busy week, we were just talking like it's a flyout day. Yeah, thanks very much for being here. It's a really wonderful turnout. We have got a great set of speakers today. I'm Dan Bresset. I'm the executive director of the Environmental and Energy Study Institute. Only for the last few weeks though, so I can't take too much credit. Let me start by thanking our host today, the Clean Energy and Technology Staff Association. And my new friend Danielle Moon is here with us and she's going to come up and say a few words to welcome everybody here today. So come on up, Danielle. Hi everyone. Thank you so much for coming today. My name is Danielle Moon. I work for Congressman Joaquin Castro from San Antonio, Texas. I'm the president and founder of the Clean Energy and Technology Staff Association. As I think we were supposed to have a slide on our, oh, okay, sorry. So as shown on the slide, we are founded in the 115th Congress and is a bipartisan and bicameral staff association with over 90 members. And our mission is to promote educational opportunities and host lively conversations about clean energy technologies. So if you're not a member, I highly encourage you to join us as we have many more exciting events coming up. Next month, we're going to have a briefing on nuclear energy with MIT and a toy drive with the Nuclear Energy Institute. So if you'd like to join or learn more about us, you can come find me or use that email address. We have our officers here today over there on the corner, Lawrence and San Gina. So you can come talk to any of the three of us if you're interested. And with that, I'm going to hand it to Dan to start the conversation. Thank you. Thank you very much, Danielle. This is actually ESI's first time working on a briefing with this staff association. So hopefully we'll get off to a great start and this will be the beginning of a beautiful friendship. Today we're going to talk about the growing role of renewable energy in the U.S. energy mix. We have a wonderful panel today that will help us understand the importance and the potential for renewable energy and storage to power our daily lives and most importantly to do so in a less carbon intensive way. For those new to ESI, we were founded in 1984 on a bipartisan basis by members of Congress to help educated and informed policymakers, stakeholders, and the general public about the benefits of a low emissions economy. In 1988, ESI declared that addressing climate change is a moral imperative, a sentiment that has since guided our work. Today we are fully engaged on the climate change policy debate and committed to working with Congress to find workable solutions now and looking ahead. One way we are active on Capitol Hill is by working with our clean energy allies to organize and present briefings. We'll cover a lot of topics today, but if you want to learn more about any specific renewable energy technologies and policies that encourage investments in this space, well good luck for you because you can visit EESI.org for summaries of all of our briefings, videos of most of our briefings, fact sheets like you wouldn't believe, lots and lots and lots of information to help you do deep dives on any of the issues. And just specifically in the last year, we've had briefings on renewable biogas, beneficial electrification, hydroelectric power, as well as issues like the perception of climate change in the minds of the public, the special needs of families in rural areas. Just a few days ago, the Energy Information Administration released its short-term energy outlook. And the findings in this report confirm that not only is renewable energy a critical piece of the U.S. energy mix today, but it will continue to be so and more in the coming years. I hope we all know that hydro power is the top generator of renewable energy in the United States. According to EIA, it will count for about 7% of total U.S. energy generation. That's important because hydro power is a leading source of energy storage and helps promote energy system resilience. The overall trend in renewable energy growth is pointing upward. EIA sees non-hydro power renewable energy generation to increase 12% of total utility scale generation. And renewable energy growth is a major contributor to EIA's estimates about U.S. carbon dioxide emissions reductions, lower by 1.7% in 2019 and by about 2% in 2020. And now we'll move on to our panelists. We will leave plenty of time for questions after their presentation, so please hold them until then. And we'll do our best to get everybody a chance to ask their question. Our first speaker is Bill Parsons. He's the Chief Operating Officer of the American Council on Renewable Energy. ACOR is a national nonprofit organization that unites finance, policy, and technology to accelerate the transition to a renewable energy economy. Prior to ACOR, Bill served as Chief of Staff and Legislative Director to then Representative Chris Van Hollen and managed the House Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Caucus for 8 years. Bill was also a founding board member of the Montgomery County Green Bank. Bill, thanks so much for being with us. Thank you so much for that nice introduction. And to the whole EESI team. It's nice to be back in 2167. We never served on T&I, but we have extended stints on ways and means, OGR, and education and labor. So my job in the next 10 minutes or so is to kind of set the table on the sector at large, and then I'm really delighted to be here with my colleagues, and I'm going to step down and let them speak to their areas of expertise on the technologies that they cover. Oh, it's okay. Not a problem at all. I'm also aware that there was competition for your attention today, so thanks for the interest and for showing up. It's important. So as Dan mentioned, ACOR is the largest pan-renewable organization in town, and what that means is we're multi-technology, and we also were across the transactions. So we have manufacturers, developers, utilities, big corporate off-takers like Facebook, Amazon, and Google, and also investors, big banks who invest in infrastructure funds, private equity, and the like. So that's the lens that we bring to the renewable energy sector. First slide I'm going to show you here is total renewable energy installations. What I want to call out for you, I apologize, it appears that the legend is kind of halved out there, but you can see what it's getting at. Since we had the last full year of data we have was for 2018. 19.5 gigawatts of capacity added in 2018, and that's the second highest year ever, so still decent momentum. And it happened in a backdrop of many people in this room will appreciate pretty static electricity demand. There's not a lot of growth in electricity demand and hasn't been for about the last decade. So in the face of flat electricity demand, relatively low natural gas prices, and many in this room will also appreciate the phasing down and out under current law anyway of the existing legacy credits for wind solar and other technologies, some of which actually lost their credits in the end of 2017 when the underlying extenders bill was not renewed, which is unfinished business that we can cover before the end of the event today. Over this period renewable energy accounted for about 50% of new power generation. So you can see the kind of order of magnitude of growth that we're talking about in the sector. I mentioned our membership includes investors, so we track renewable energy investment. Again, not a record year in 2018, that was set back in 2011, but $48.5 billion is nothing to sneeze at. We have another metric that we use connected with ACOR's 1T by 2030 campaign, which is a drive to secure $1 trillion in private sector investment in renewable energy and enabling grid technologies between 2018 and 2030. When you take that $48.5 and you add in what we would characterize as enabling grid technology, my colleague Jason Burwin, a classic case of this is energy storage, you get something closer to $56.7 billion invested in 2018. Global investment. Cumulative lead is $3.2 trillion since 2004. In 2018, the U.S. portion of this figure was $289 billion. There are 176 countries with renewable energy targets, and almost all of them signed up for Paris representing about 90% of global emissions. So what accounts for renewable energy growth that we've seen in the last decade, which has been impressive, although as it has been noted, is still when you add to hydro and wind and solar and the rest of the renewable technologies, you know, we're, hello Carol Werner. We are, we're hovering just under 20%. And for the goals that probably many in this room have in terms of addressing the climate crisis, grid decarbonization is going to require far higher levels of renewable penetration. We'll get to that in a couple slides. When we look at how we account for the growth so far, for principle explanations to describe for you. The first is state RPSs and CESs and goals and so forth. You don't have to look at this in too much detail, but you know, I think for as long as I've been in this sector, the kind of received conventional wisdom has been, and especially now, you know, the federal government and federal policy is not a particularly fertile, you know, ground for progress on clean energy or climate. I think we have an opportunity to change that this year, which we're going to try to get into before the end of this session. But meanwhile, the states have taken the lead and they've been a really important factor. These renewable goals across these states for driving renewable deployment and investment. These are some of the states that have an illustrative list that have, and I should say, and this list sort of exhibits the trend, getting far more ambitious. You're seeing, you know, 100% goals. I was on a panel a couple weeks ago in Maryland. Governor Hogan let the 50% goal get signed by 2030 get signed into law and properly announced that he felt it was not ambitious enough and charged his secretary of the environment to come up with 100% goal for clean energy. He wants to expand the qualifying resources by 2050. So there is probably folks have noticed, you know, there's something in the air that people are getting serious about this. More states, also cities. Over 100 cities and 10 counties have raised their hand for 100% clean energy goals. These kind of goals and mandates absolutely do drive to man. And they can inform one of the policy recommendations I'll offer when we get into the Q&A, because I think we can take this policy until national. Second driver of renewable energy growth, and this is really significant. I mentioned part of our membership, our large corporate off takers with renewable energy goals, the corporates. Look at this year over year growth. You've got in 2017, you've got 2.8 gigawatts, 17 rather, and then 2018 over triple to 8.6. That's massive growth being driven by corporate, private sector, corporate renewable energy goals. Really significant trend in the sector. And we don't see that stopping. We see that growing. On the other side, if you want to look at that and kind of the corporate side, this is a slide that represents distributed solar demand, not just the blue graph is residential. The yellow portion of the bar is nonresidential, kind of C&I commercial industrial scale like PV on a Walmart. And you'll see it's roughly evenly distributed there in 2018, approaching a little bit under 5 gigawatts, I think. Not quite a record year in 2018, but near the top. And so that the demand for distributed solar is also a significant driver right now. Third reason, dramatic improvements, dramatic reductions in cost. So you see here over the last decade, 88% reduction in the levelized cost for solar, 69% reduction for wind. This, we're going to sort of show some of the same data on a chart that compares different generation resources. This is an unsubsidized chart. So the numbers on the bottom show a bottom end of the range, numbers on the top, top end of the range. And the thing I want to call out for you is unsubsidized. This is without reference to any credits, any other incentives. Onshore wind and solar PV are directly competitive with natural gas today in many regions of the country. Why are there differences? You get differences in the size of the installations, the technology used, the geography where they're placed, and also financing costs. So that's why you see a range here. But I would just point out that these legacy credits, the PTC for wind and other technologies, the ITC for solar have been an indisputable policy success, attracting capital investment, driving deployment, increasing volume, decreasing per unit cost to the point where we're now competitive in many parts of the country, even without the credits. Massive federal success. Thank you, Congress. Finally, just going to talk about the tax situation here. 2015, there was an agreement, both the wind PTC and the solar ITC, to phase down and eventually, in the case of the wind PTC, to phase out. We're at 2019 on this chart. So the sort of navy blue color is wind. You see it back in 2016. It was at 100%. This is a production tax credit, so it's 2.4 cents. And then there was a glide path down here so that this year is the last year where if you're qualifying, which means you commence construction, basically means if you can document that 5% of your total spend is incurred this year, you reserve the ability to receive the 40% of the original PTC over the next 10 years, provided you're actually in operation four years later. That absent a change in current law, that PTC is phasing down and out this year. The gold bar here is solar. So the thing to notice here, again, going back to 2019, is the solar still gets qualifies for 100% of the ITC and the phase down begins starting next year. And it will phase down until it gets to a third of the original credit value starting in 2022. And that, I should point out, is only available for utility and commercial scale. So it phases out for Resi. Just got my one-minute thing, so the timing is perfect. Here's sort of maybe my, I want to offer some inspiration here and to thank you again for choosing to be here relative to the other things you could have spent your time on. I was really struck by this quote amidst the other things we can concern ourselves with. It says the same way we look back today on what things our grandparents did to defend democracy. Our grandchildren are going to look back and have feelings about what we did today with respect to the climate crisis. What those feelings are will depend on what we decide to do. So I look forward to engaging with all of you about what we can decide to do. And thanks again for the invitation. Thank you, Bill. One thing that I wanted to call attention to, in some of your slides there were big spikes, circa 2011, 2010-ish. Some pretty big reductions in that same 2010-2011 timeframe. My guess is that that's attributable to the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. That was huge, and it's no coincidence that started in 2009, it ramped down in 2012, but that's a huge driver for a lot of these. And I think it's really interesting that the levels of cost reduction and the levels of investment have come back. The stimulus did what it was supposed to do for these technologies. I think that's exactly right. And maybe the follow-on piece of good news, which is not an argument for inertia or inattention, but notwithstanding what I would describe as not coherent federal policy as it relates to renewable energy deployment and investment, we do have momentum from the years of smart policy that so far is carrying us through. We are at an inflection point, as it relates to the phase down of the legacy credits, and we can talk about what that might mean and what we might do about it. But I think that's a great point about why the 2011 spike hits, and it's also useful to point out there's a two-year delay between appropriation of funds or the provision of grants and when they start showing up in the deployment numbers. But we're benefiting from past years of smart policy, and it's going to fall to all of us to engineer some smart policy for the next decade. Plus. Thank you. Our next panelist is Dr. Will Pettit. He is the Executive Director of the Geothermal Resources Council. GRC is a nonprofit professional association founded in 1972, and today it boasts 1,200 members in 44 countries. Will is an applied geophysicist expert in subsurface science and geomechanics. I love introducing scientists. It's so cool. I'm not one. I don't know anything about any of that. Before leading GRC, he managed consulting companies in Minneapolis and across the pond in the United Kingdom. Will, great to have you. Okay. Let's see if the technology works for me. Yes. Okay. Well, thank you for inviting me to be here, and I'm excited to be here, and it's a real pleasure to speak with you all. There's no doubt that geothermal energy will be a huge success in the near future, and we're on the brink of a boom in the industry. This is because the energy transition needs us, as society decarbonizes and electrifies over the next few decades. We've had an industrial revolution. We've had a technology revolution, and now we're inside an energy revolution. For that revolution, society will need a mix of renewable and clean energies, as well as a huge leap in energy efficiency and heat management, and all of the above clean energy strategy. We will need renewable and clean energies that are always on, no matter what the time and whatever the weather. This means thinking outside the box in terms of how we manage our energy supply and consumption, and we're going to need to collaborate as a renewable energy industry to get to 100%. In this presentation, I'm going to provide an introduction into where geothermal is heading and how it fits into the U.S. energy mix. Geothermal energy is the recovery of heat from the Earth that is then converted to electricity or used directly. The Earth is a huge heat source that constantly transports heat from its center to the surface by thermal convection and conduction. Geothermal technologies and industries then capture that heat for a wide range of uses. It's a renewable energy source that emits very low greenhouse gases, just like solar or wind, except the energy comes from within the planet beneath our feet. That energy can be a few meters depth to thousands of meters depth. One of its benefits, as well as one of its challenges, is that it's hidden almost completely from view beneath us. Surface installations that use geothermal energy have the smallest footprint of all the renewable energies, so it simply doesn't have the bright visibility of other energy sources such as solar or wind. But it's always there. As a renewable base load resource, geothermal supplies energy continuously. Geothermal industries can be broadly split into four types. Extraction of natural hydrothermal hot waters at temperatures usually well above 100 degrees C, and from great depths to generate electricity. Direct use of cooler water for industrial and community heating systems, usually between 40 and 100 degrees C, and then geothermal heat pumps that work at lower temperatures with shallow installations to heat or cool individual buildings or houses. They are the geothermal equivalent to rooftop solar. The fourth type is known as EGS, Enhanced Geothermal Systems, where deep reservoirs are engineered to circulate water in a rock heat exchanger. These systems do not need hot water in place, but instead rely on enhancing natural permeability through pumping fluids continuously. These guys are in a research phase but offer huge potential. So let's ask ourselves this. Where is my clean energy coming from on a still dark winter night in 2030? And what about 2050? Well, let's stop and think about what that moment in 2030. There are three things that are certain to be happening in our society. Firstly, decarbonisation. Renewable portfolio standards and greenhouse gas emission targets will increase penetration of renewable power in the electricity markets and be replacing carbon emitting generation with a carbon-free energy mix. Secondly, electrification. Our ground transportation will electrify as demand for electric vehicles increases substantially and technical innovations see electric trucks enter in the market. There will also be pressures to electrify our homes, buildings and industries by making them more energy efficient and removing carbon emitting heating and industrial systems. Thirdly and possibly most controversially, climate change. It's here and it's a scientific fact. The global climate will continue getting hotter and extreme weather events more common. This is going to drive public an opinion and accelerate decarbonisation and electrification over the following decades. All this means that electricity demands will increase, peak loads will move to later in the evening and during the winter, storage and energy efficiencies can play big roles but clearly can't meet all the future demands when solar and wind cannot. Society will also need clean and renewable energies that work through the night in any weather and are efficient during the winter months. These things are already happening. In California as an example, RPS and GHG emission targets mean that government agencies are needing to find practical solutions across a broad range of activities. California will be 60% renewable by 2030 and have reduced emissions to 40% below 1990 levels. States across this great nation will follow the same path with 29 now having adopted RPS targets. Policies for fighting climate change and lowering greenhouse gas emissions will yield procurement of geothermal energy in both heat and power on an unprecedented scale. So what does geothermal bring? Well, it can make a significant impact to building jobs and providing economic benefits in local communities across the nation. Geothermal power production creates quality jobs and contributes to local economies near the resources. For every two megawatts of geothermal development there are five quality jobs created and highest for any renewable energy. Operators pay local taxes and pay royalties for state and federal lands. Geothermal energy always also helps to fight climate change by helping with electrification and decarbonizing our economy and is a reliable source of energy that gives clean renewable power and heat that's always on. As a flexible base load, geothermal power will play a substantial role in maintaining a functioning electricity grid. It can provide the electricity grid with resiliency, reliability and stability as we transition to renewable fuels. It's a stable 24-7 energy source with capacity factors greater than 70% in practice, higher than any other power resource except nuclear. It can be ramped up and down so it's flexible to give power when it's needed and can help balance the grid when intermittent renewables come on off. Mitigating the so-called duck curve where large demand ramps are needed due to evening consumption combined with solar generation coming offline as the sun sets. Geothermal power also provides ancillary services that are so important to maintaining a resilient and stable power grid with black-start capabilities, spinning and non-spinning reserves and frequency regulation. I like to think of geothermal as a facilitator of renewables that allow us to transition to more solar and wind, meaning that the renewable power industry has a win-win opportunity to collaborate for the benefit of everybody. In the US, current power production is focused on the western states where the most accessible resources are found. California is the largest producer and has the largest geothermal field in the world. However, the earth is hot everywhere. It's just how deep we want to drill and the economics of recovery. This map indicates the temperature of the subsurface and access to hot rock. The benefit of EGS that I mentioned earlier is that we can tap into that resource almost anywhere. Research projects in EGS are being performed all over the world. In USA, there are two large projects funded by the DOE's GTO and by Bill Gates Breakthrough Energy Ventures. So in the USA, we have 3.6 gigawatts of installed geothermal power capacity. We have about 1.2 gigawatts being developed. A recent study by the Department of Energy called GeoVision shows there can be over 60 gigawatts of capacity by 2050 if we enable cost-competitive geothermal expansion. Total accessible resources from EGS can provide much more than 100 gigawatts of power according to other government studies. The DOE's GeoVision study is pivotal and far-reaching. It highlights the importance of geothermal in the energy mix. Not just in electricity generation, but also in direct use of heat for domestic and commercial applications and geothermal heat pumps in buildings. The report shows that if we can bring down regulatory timeframes and well costs and enable geothermal anywhere, then we can see amazing market growth through 2050. We can scale up existing geothermal heat pump technologies in residential and commercial buildings. We can include heat pumps in new builds and retrofit existing buildings to reach 28 million installations. We can develop district heating systems that supply heat directly to communities and industries leading to an estimated 17,500 installed systems. And the 60 gigawatts of estimated power capacity means geothermal will provide 10% of total U.S. electricity demand. This is a vast potential for economic expansion. On the Hill, 2019 has been a very busy year. We've had three congressional hearings, one in June with the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, one in September with the House Committee on Natural Resources, Subcommittee on Energy and Mineral Resources, and one yesterday with the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, Subcommittee on Energy. The previous year we had a congressional hearing was in 2007. It has also been a busy year for draft legislation that includes geothermal energy, and I've given some of those draft legislation there. The GLC's Policy Committee has followed this activity with great interest and supports all the draft legislation. The PC is an independently funded group of interested organizations advocating on behalf of the geothermal community. The Chairman of the Committee, Paul Thompson, with Ormack Technologies Inc. testified at two of the hearings this year. Our past President, Maria Richards, from Southern Methodist University testified at the hearing yesterday. We look forward to seeing the next steps on these bills and are excited about the possible outcomes. Lastly, I want to switch gears a bit and talk about lithium. Geothermal developers are looking at ways of increasing the value of geothermal plants where possible so as to make power production even more competitive. One way to achieve this is through co-production of minerals with the power. In an area like the Imperial Valley in Southern California, the minerals are transported in the geothermal brine that is extracted from the hot rocks at depth and currently pumped back into the reservoir. The demand for lithium will increase substantially over the next 10 years as society transitions to using more battery storage and transportation turns to electric vehicles. The supply of lithium is becoming a national importance as battery markets and technologies develop. Mineral security becomes critical as the U.S. currently produces hardly any lithium. Now, it so happens that Imperial Valley has a huge resource of lithium in the geothermal brines. Companies like Berkshire Hathaway Energy have been investigating how to recover that lithium and estimate that the region could produce over two-thirds of the world's demand in 2025 and at very competitive costs elsewhere. This symbiosis of geothermal power and mineral recovery is an amazing opportunity as the mineral extraction techniques will need power that can be obtained from the same renewable and clean energy source. It also has many opportunities for expanding local economies as battery and vehicle manufacturers potentially move into the same area as lithium production. So to conclude, the geothermal industry is helping build a future where geothermal power and heat can be rolled out across the nation as a critical source of renewable energy for U.S. households and businesses as we transition to a clean energy future. It's clear that society needs geothermal now so we better get to it. Thank you. Thank you, Will. Well, one of your slides mentioned district heating systems and I'm glad that you went in to the battery issue a little bit but when I think of district heating systems I think of things that sort of sit underneath or sit alongside major cities but you said there's 17,500 district heating systems. Can you just describe a little bit about what that is and where those are located? So there aren't 17,500 now The geofusion study from DOE estimates that 17,500 could be installed across the nation by 2050. But you're correct, the community heating systems effectively extract hot water from underground and then pump that through buildings can be downtown, residential buildings commercial buildings and so forth. The one great example that we have is Boise in Idaho they have a district heating system that supplies the whole downtown area so it'll be a great opportunity for the future. In commercial buildings and others they buy that just like they would buy power from the utility companies. Absolutely. Thanks for that. Our next panelist is Peter Thompson. Peter is the project coordinator at the biomass thermal energy council or BTEC. He works with BTEC's government affairs rep to mobilize membership to advance the policy goals of the biomass heating industry at the federal level and those policy goals include the sustainable use of wood and agriculture biomass or agricultural biomass for clean and efficient heat and combined heat and power to help us meet our energy needs while strengthening communities and local economies. Peter, welcome. Thank you for having me. I want to thank EESI and CETSA for giving me this opportunity to speak to everyone. So I'm just going to jump right in. I just mentioned BTEC's mission. The use of biomass. Our membership spans the entire industry. We're fuel producers, equipment manufacturers, engineers, installers, government agencies and other nonprofits, academia, and we have three main focus areas, policy and government affairs, technical and regulatory affairs and then education and outreach. So I just want to start with U.S. energy consumption in 2017. 11% of that was comprised of renewable energy, 44% of which came from biomass feedstocks. That is what I'm here to talk about today. So these are the sectors that utilize woody biomass for energy, residential, commercial, institutional and industrial biomass power plants, export products and emerging technologies. There's a few applications listed next to those. And then I just want to get into is this sustainable? So this data is from the U.S. forest service. So forest area and population growth since the 1850s. Forest area you can see towards the end of that century we're declining pretty steadily than the U.S. forest service was established to manage the nation's forest lands and the decline of forest area ended at that point and we experienced a tripling of the population since then. So our forest lands are stable at this time. And then since mid-last century our growth rate and compared to our removals from those forests, the growth rate exceeds removals. So we're not removing more carbon than we're growing which is both very encouraging but there are a variety of issues facing the forest today and I'm here to talk about those as well. So the first one would be development pressures and land uses. Forests need markets to remain forests. If you don't have a value for those resources people will just convert that land to another use whether it be agricultural land, or something else. So if you want to keep a forest you have to make sure that that resource is valued in some way for the benefits it's providing our society. The next one is forest management. So you did on the previous slide I showed that that was private and public lands. So we're having problems in the western half of the United States where most of the public land or public forests are owned by the government. So there's a lack of funding for forest management. What we're experiencing there is a lack of of dead standing trees and just for example in Colorado one in 14 trees is a dead standing tree. So it's not absorbing any more carbon it's just sitting there waiting to either spark or just continue to sit there. So it's not sequestering any more carbon. That accounts for 834 million trees in Colorado alone dead standing. So we argue that we need to remove those to mitigate and prevent the spread of these diseases like these infestations southern pine beetle in Georgia mountain pine beetle in South Dakota and bark beetles in Colorado in California they're destroying our forests so we got to remove those and if you add those well sorry and then rapidly shifting energy markets so if you have cheap fossil fuels available our fuels wood fuels are not competitive they just can't compete and then also climate change exacerbates many of these issues so then you see issues like in California last year the 2018 campfire was the deadliest fire in California's history killing 85 people some other figures here it caused $16.5 billion of damage and it destroyed 150,000 acres of forest land and the town of Paradise California so the stakes are pretty high I would put to you to make sure that we have healthy forests so how do we do that well we manage our forests we make sure that we're going in there making sure that we're removing disease or infested trees so that those diseases and infestations don't spread you can compare to an epidemic of some sort with a human disease you want to contain it you got to contain the disease before it spreads puts the healthy areas at risk so this picture here this is after a wildfire fire direction going down the hill before that fire hit they thinned out the forest before the homes and the homes were saved because they thinned out and the fire was stopped and it's tracked essentially towards the bottom of the crest of that hill so we argue once you remove those trees from the forest what are you going to do with them right now the US Forest Service practice is to just pile them up let them sit and in some cases they actually just burn them openly in these what you would call an open burner it's just emitting either way it's emitting the emissions into the air directly from the wildfire or the open burning just to get rid of the resource so we argue that the benefits of wood energy provides for low value wood for the private sector and then also in the public sector much of the budget is being spent on wildfire suppression we need to shift that and put more resources into wildfire prevention and forest health so we can also increase rural economic development job creation and we provide energy savings in recent winters in the northeast where our technology has high penetration we've seen a 50% cost savings compared to heating oil when shortages came at the end of a very cold winter a year and a half ago so key barriers for deployment for us there are three that I'm going to address here the first one is the high capital cost at low volume of production for biomass heating systems that's similar to all other renewables at low scale of production you're not going to see the benefit of scaling up production and cost savings so there has to be some sort of mechanism that helps people deploy these systems and ramp up production so we can see that cost savings compared to the already high volume production of fossil fuel heating systems the next one is the low value wood requires markets to be economically viable so in recent years especially in the northeast because of the cheap fossil fuels we're seeing closures of pellet mills and also there's a decline of coal and paper those are the two main feedstocks for these low value wood resources they typically go there and are made into other products whether it be pellets or paper so we need to make sure that those markets are available so that we can continue to manage our forest properly otherwise they'll, like I said earlier be converted for another use and also the last one this goes across all energy sectors we need to have a comprehensive carbon intensity accounting and pricing for all the energy options and until we do that all renewables I think will remain secondary role compared to fossil fuels so we need to address that okay so I wouldn't be here if I didn't have some homework for everybody so we have two pieces of pending legislation the big one, the reason why BTEC was founded was because of the H.R. 1479 S628 so this is an investment tax credit for those biomass heating systems of 30% if they reach an efficiency of 80% or higher so you're replying highly efficient low emitting systems across the country provide energy resilience to communities and you're helping people save money there the next one addresses residential side that's a grant program $75 million a year that was introduced in the Senate this past summer excuse me or a winter fuel so that was introduced it's estimated there's 6 million residential wood heaters across the country that don't even meet 1988 EPA new source performance standards the EPA enacted new ones in 2015 and there's going to be new ones again in 2020 there's going to be two compliance of NSPS so we need to help people have the resources available so that we can deploy those more expensive newer, lower emitting systems and improve air quality and health impacts and then there's existing programs but we can also improve those the renewable fuel standards since they're very successful in mixing in renewable fuels for transportation there's a group of the Biomass Power Association and American Biogas Council the EPA RFS currently and then we would also argue because thermal energy accounts for 33% of the total U.S. energy demand we would like to see thermal applications qualify for the EPA RFS the next one, next two are actually from the Farm Bill last year thanks for including those so there's the Community Wood Energy and Wood Innovations Program that has authorized funding currently the Senate has provided partial appropriation so we would like to see that move forward in any appropriation bill that goes forward and then the Bioenergy Program for Advanced Biofuels immensely successful program for fuel producers to expand their production to bring more fuels to market traditionally was dominated by the biodiesel sector but in the latest Farm Bill they limited the amount of payments I can go to a specific fuel type at 35% that should increase the participation from other industries like the pellet producing industry so we're very happy about that and we look forward to seeing that implemented and then actions to take cosponsor of the BTU Act HR 1479 S628 and the Wood Heaters and Mission Reduction Act if you're in the house and you have the capability maybe introduce a version of it there and we can get that moving forward and then work with us to direct EPA and the renewable fuel standard to include wood pellets and chips as qualifying fuels for thermal pathways but as well as for electric pathways that are coming and then again thank you for your work on the Farm Bill last year there's a lot of good stuff in there that's going to help our industry continue to be viable and provide energy solutions for people so that's the woody biomass side of things I'm also going to talk about biogas we have friends at the American Biogas Council so I wanted to also highlight that because it's very important to sustain sustainable biomass so in the United States every year 66.5 million tons of food waste are produced every year 31 billion gallons of wastewater every single day and there are manure and nutrients from 8 billion cows, chickens, turkeys and pigs across the country that deal with all that waste has to be managed somehow if we just let it sit there it's going to emit methane into the air and just decompose what you're seeing in a lot of landfills and on factory farms so that needs to be addressed the US biogas market currently there's 2,200 biogas systems in the country but there's a potential for over 14,000 so we need to unleash that potential and just help realize it use that resource so what does that mean in practical terms that would require 40 billion dollars in capital deployment for 13,500 US biogas systems provides 335,000 short term construction jobs 23,000 permanent jobs and the 23,000 permanent jobs are well paying between 50k and 100k people in rural communities and their non-college jobs that's a good thing and then just a comparison to the big technologies on the block solar and wind this is a base load technology this fuel that a biogas system produces is available 24-7 it's always there it provides base load energy for people in these communities so to receive the same capacity from solar and wind you would have to deploy 5 times the amount of systems compared to one biogas system what we're currently seeing and then there's also for both of the options woody biomass and non-forest biomass there's also non-energy benefits so there's waste management nutrient recycling I can speak to them but those are a little bit better if I have more time anyways policy solutions if you are involved in any of these issues the RFS infrastructure climate, watershed protection these are the issues that biogas should be part of the conversation there's a variety of programs that we're engaging with the RFS right now the waiver and small refinery exemptions are being abused by the current administration being given out in the wrong ways that needs to end and I'm almost done I promise and then the farm bill had a lot of helpful programs in it so we would argue that they need to be appropriated they didn't get the same mandatory funding in the previous farm bill so we'd like to see those appropriations enacted and then finally tax extenders if you're going to extend tax incentives to some renewable technologies the deployment of all the portfolio solutions that we need to address these issues so I would argue just take a holistic view of all these technologies that have benefits for our society beyond just the zero carbon and I'll just close by saying that all of these technologies are readily available at least one of them the feedstocks are readily available in every community across the country they provide economic opportunities they provide energy, resilience security and independence and they help maintain our environment and with that thank you for your attention thank you I'm glad you made that last point because I was going to ask you about a lot of these facilities are pretty close to where the feedstocks come from right like you can be pretty close to you know where you get your sludge or where you have your manure and you know within a couple yards maybe even or a couple hundred yards you might have the digesters and some of these other technologies that's true and in the case of the biomass the resource that's extracted from the forest it's used within 50 to 75 miles of where it's extracted so it doesn't travel very far it's a very circular local economy and that's very encouraging thanks our final panelist but certainly not the least panelist is Jason Burwin he is the Vice President of Policy at the Energy Storage Association before joining ESA Jason was the Associate Director for Energy Innovation at the Bipartisan Policy Center a good friend of EESI's where he directed research and advocacy on U.S. energy research and development and tax policy he also served as staff director of the American Energy Innovation Council a group of CEOs led by Bill Gates to advocate for greater U.S. federal investments in clean energy technology development Jason's earned degrees from the University of California Berkeley and Columbia University and really looking forward to what you have to say Jason come on up thanks great thank you everyone good afternoon everyone yes I am a person I am standing before you I know you've been listening to a lot of talking I will try to make this a little more energetic so that we can slide into a Q&A perhaps a little faster and not keep you all listening to the sound of my voice I am the Vice President of Policy for the U.S. Energy Storage Association we are the National Trade Association here in the United States representing all parts of the value chain of energy storage that's not just manufacturers and component suppliers those are the people who are putting together these facilities developing them putting them on the grid and then operating them utilities, independent power producers, large end users we are also a multi technology organization when you think of energy storage what comes to mind anyone anyone no fourth wall what solar lithium ion batteries hydra like pumped hydropower hydrogen rubber bands if you did them large enough and taught enough and could you have a kinetic energy storage is many technologies and we represent a large set of technologies the preponderance of our members are focused on battery storage because that is the fastest growing segment of the industry but we have folks doing a variety of battery chemistry as well as thermal storage, mechanical storage and chemical storage in the form of things like hydrogen storage is important because what you have in the power sector is a system that is designed around a single constraint supply and demand have to match every moment, every hour, every day every season, every year in order to avoid disruption and blackouts on the system that kind of a system has to run under very constrained operational choices in order to make that happen when you introduce storage you relax that constraint and in fact enable a variety and larger range of operational possibilities that flexibility is fundamentally what storage is providing to the power system and why it is so incredibly critical particularly when we are having a conversation about renewable energy on the power grid and I think everyone has noted renewable energy is based on in the case of wind and solar upon when you are in fact having that access to the sun or to the wind obviously there are other resources that do not depend on weather as much but suffice it to say that given the amount of development we have seen in the wind and solar sector storage has become an extraordinarily critical part of this conversation if we are to move to higher and higher deployments of wind and solar just for a little bit of a market snapshot the we have about just over one gigawatts of batteries now connected to the electric grid I did not create any slides for you so you have to look at my face but you know what they look like, you know what they are made of what is in here and what is in your laptops that is the same core technology as these lithium ion battery cells just scaled to a much larger array they look like shipping containers by and large they are not that sexy but somehow Elon Musk has made them extremely sexy so I will take it and so we have one gigawatts just over one gigawatt of batteries on the grid we have 22 gigawatts of pumped hydro storage on the electricity grid harder to get sort of a measure of thermal storage I have heard around 3 gigawatts of thermal storage capability on the electric system and plenty more to come the reason why does anyone know why well the reason why we are focused a lot these days on batteries and particularly the lithium ion batteries is because the costs of lithium ion batteries are dropping extremely quickly you saw bills charts of solar and wind declines storage is falling even faster than that this historically has been about cut in half on installed costs every three to four years which is dramatic does anyone know what's driving those cost declines anyone anyone anyone what tech innovation sort of but not exactly anyone else guess electric vehicles the global build out of electric vehicles which I think will show the demand for lithium ion was going to be driven globally by electric vehicles is ultimately what's driving the cost of grid battery storage down so we're really writing that kind of dramatic expansion in scale of manufacturing globally and that's what's really making this turn very quickly from something that people talked about as theoretically possible to now being installed at the hundreds of megawatts per year on the US electric system the reason why also something that I think excites a lot of folks in the utility sector independent power producers, large end users is because it provides really three core values the first is that you are able to save money when you don't have to build as much spare capacity on your power system in the form of excess power plants or excess wires because supply and demand have to match in the power system moment to moment if we have one day a year where the power demand is up here and the rest of the year it's a lot lower well we still have to build all the power plants and all the wires to serve that one day of highest peak demand and so in fact we have an enormous amount of underutilized capital assets in our power system when you have storage you have the ability to store and meet those kinds of peak demands on the system without having something that necessarily idols the rest of the year because the storage can be used continuously for a variety of purposes so you are able to actually save folks an enormous amount of money through that process the second key value here is reliability and resilience anyone who is in California right now will tell you that they are thinking about what a battery might mean for their ability to get through an outage being imposed because of wildfire shut off safety risks additionally as you go to higher and higher levels of things like renewables on the electric system the oscillating change in supply and demand over time requires an extraordinarily fast flexible response on the electric grid to remain stable storage has been providing this at increasing scale started in fact here in the mid-Atlantic region the first market globally was here in the PJM mid-Atlantic regional grid which brought on nearly 300 megawatts of batteries to stabilize the grid and more effectively than gas fired or other power plant technologies and then the final and key value I think for a lot of folks in this discussion is integrating a diverse range of resources that's more renewables making nondispatchable renewables controllable but also for that matter taking inflexible resources like nuclear and allowing them to be effectively accommodated and have the flexibility to be able to allow them to play well with the rest of the grid for that matter distributed resources as we see more build out of things like rooftop solar electric vehicles, things that are at the edge of the grid storage is helping to make sure those get integrated without disrupting the grid locally and putting more stresses on that would otherwise make those too expensive to host so when you bring storage into your system you're getting all of these benefits and an example that I think I just read literally before coming here what kind of things we're seeing now Salt River project, so this is an electric cooperative in Arizona just announced they are now going to build a 250 megawatt solar facility paired with a 1000 megawatt hour battery so that's a battery that's 250 megawatts same size as a solar plant four hours of that rated capacity from the solar so the sun shines throughout the day as it starts going down in the evening the battery is going to kick in and keep all through the evening peak the same amount of generation being supplied to Arizona residents all from the sun so that's really the incredible power when you're able to put this kind of resource on the system and what's driving again a lot of the interest we're seeing in places such as Bill had mentioned that are now saying well if we're going to go to 100% clean or 100% renewable or what have you storage has to be a part of that solution states are a lot of times driving this conversation so we've been seeing things like deployment targets, places like New York California, Massachusetts I think there's a discussion right now in Nevada to establish one there are obviously other state policies driving this but from the federal level we're also seeing enormous bicameral and bipartisan interest I think that many folks might have seen in September the senate energy and natural resources committee approved and amended and approved the better energy storage technology act senate file 1603 which would provide a $1.4 billion authorization of a massively multi-technology multi-application energy storage research development and demonstration program effectively elevating storage to one of the top priorities of the Department of Energy's applied R&D objectives something that we strongly support and again has bipartisan support the other I think most exciting thing moving forward right now is investment tax credit eligibility for energy storage senate bill 1142 house file 2096 again bipartisan in both chambers and what this bill does is basically take a quirk of administrative guidance from the IRS right now you can count storage as eligible for the ITC when it is paired with an ITC eligible generating resource so like a solar plant for example so that is why in part when you hear about storage these days a lot of it is storage plus solar because when you integrate it with the solar you get the 30% investment tax credit there is no reason though why that benefit cannot be shared widely by wind power by hydro by geothermal by in fact any number of other resources on the electric system so we think that it is important that storage be untied from just being paired with only solar for that matter folks in the solar industry are excited to see storage have its own standalone eligibility for the investment tax credit because we have thousands of solar projects that have been deployed but you can't add the battery now and get that tax credit whereas new builds can so it is all going into new build we have an enormous opportunity right now to create a wave of new jobs and economic development just by retrofitting all of the already existing solar with batteries and other storage technologies and then ultimately it is about leveling the playing field storage is one source of flexibility that we have in the electric system and we have resources as well some of those like fuel cells for example micro turbines have access to the investment tax credit so we want to see just making sure that we are not distorting the investment signals across the grid for the best solutions for grid flexibility and I might add this is all storage technologies back to what we started with that doesn't just mean lithium ion batteries it means hydrogen it means pumped hydro it means molten salt it means underground pump tide or geomechanical pumped hydro storage it means all of these new innovative technologies that the investment community is focused on because we all see how important this technology is to going to higher and higher shares of clean and renewable energy in our grid so if you have any questions of course please feel free to contact me afterwards the energy storage associations website at george.org and look forward to your questions thank you Jason that was great I'm glad we're talking about the EV issue because Edison Electric Institute which is the utility trade group they say that there's going to be like 7.5 million EVs on the road by about 2025 there's about 1 million right now but that number will almost quadruple by 2030 and each one of those is basically just a four wheeled battery and we have to park them somewhere and I have a feeling that something you're tracking very closely but it's going to really change the way we use energy in our homes and how we think about reliability and resilience I'm not going to ask you a specific follow up because I'm going to give you the first crack at our first question because you came up with it and we have a roving microphone that will soon be dispatched because Melody will have it because we're going to be because we're recorded it's important that we ask our questions into a microphone so that everybody can hear so when we get to the audience questions please just wait for the mic but I'm going to start and Jason I'm going to start with you magic wand time what could Congress do before the end of the year to make life better for the energy storage association for the energy storage industry I think the most important thing of course would be in fact enacting investment tax credit eligibility for energy storage technologies it's you know right now the house I think it was the sustainable energy environment coalition 166 house members signed a letter to leadership just a couple weeks ago stating a number of priorities at the top of that list energy storage ITC eligibility I think a lot of us are looking forward to what the House Ways and Means Committee is going to include the next week and we understand that in the Senate right now as well there's obviously an ongoing discussion about what can be included in an end of year package I don't think there's a single more impactful feasible thing that can get done this year for renewable energy than ITC eligibility for storage maybe for the industry but it will make ESA's life a lot easier too I mean don't get me wrong I personally would enjoy being able to take a like very easy 2020 yes we're going to come all the way down the line Peter you're next same question to you but for your industry I already said it but ATU Act HR 1479 as 628 and then on the biogas side of things that would be tax credits for HR 4186 and HR 3744 so tax credits are huge for renewable energy industries well I agree with Jason actually the tax legislation is obviously a key part to it the tax extenders that are out there but then also we in the geothermal world and I included it on that slide that's in your pack we have three draft bills that were put together and published this year and also something that Jason mentioned is how bipartisan some of this is and I just wanted to just go through those three bills very quickly if I can to highlight that the first one is Senators Cortes Masto and Wyden who published the Geothermal Energy Opportunities Act and then Senators Lisa Mikowski and Joe Manchin published the Advanced Geothermal Innovation Leadership Act and then Senator Jim Reich and congressman Russ Fulker published the Enhanced Geothermal Production on Federal Lands Act so and there's a real mixture of as I say bipartisan appeal in those draft acts so I think we have a really good chance of bringing those together and getting those passed and Bill you have a broader perspective on the industry what do you think happily I'm going to agree with all of my colleagues here I'm going to start the first thing I'm going to say is the tax extenders is important this year you have some of these technologies their incentives expired at the end of 2017 so they need to be renewed for sure and can all be part of the mix if we have smart policy here's I do want to pull back the lens though and I'm particularly keen on the business idea on the energy storage the freestanding energy storage ITC I want to call attention because this is my shorthand for folks who want to walk away with this there's a pile of these letters out on the table it's a multi sector letter from the entire renewable sector the climate community all the national environmental organizations you know from National Wildlife Federation are signatories to this letter and encourage people it's sort of a cheat sheet for what's going to be at play at this year end tax extenders legislation which is going to get combined with what progress can we make on clean energy and climate this year the broader view that I want to share is I remember at the beginning of the year we were thinking about this and when we were talking with the national environmental community and you know storage this is this has been going on for a while and then people will recall it sort of maybe faded for some a little bit but in the beginning of the year there's a lot of talk about the Green New Deal that was a big national goal and the urgency and so forth which is certainly something that ACOR endorses as an aspiration we think about the typical thing as a congressional staffer will also think about the legacy credits about the PTC and the ITC and pick up and amplify something Jason said when you get to penetrations 50, 60, 70, 80% or higher approach sort of Green New Deal aspiration you simply have to have massively expanded deployment of storage to make that work you just do and so what I say to my friends and congressional staffers here there may be an opportunity in the not so distant future to have a separate discussion about larger climate policy but in today's environment where agreement is going to have to be secured from the House and the Senate and on a bipartisan basis if you think of the three legs of the decarbonized stool and will forgive my friends here but because I'm for the extenders and for maximizing deployment of all these technologies but given current trends utility scale solar wind and storage really is the third leg of that stool it happens to be the one politically that's making itself available to us this year and we would be fools not to take it so to the degree your bosses my guess is 7 out of 10 of you if statistics don't lie probably did sign the letter that Jason referenced that's really important please have your bosses weigh in in support of including things like an energy storage tax credit I would throw in EVs and offshore wind as solid bicameral bipartisan candidates for enactment this year on the year-end spending bill as part of that tax extenders negotiation kind of quaint you're thinking about a year-end spending bill I was thinking about like a December 20th punt to February or March I think they're going to go to December 20th right folks less the president vetoes it depends on how shiny the Christmas tree is questions from the audience we have a roving mic right here in the back hi thank you I'm wondering what you feel the feasibility is if there is any of establishing a national RPS so I would say this year heading into the election year that's a low probability event but I let me let me address the merits on underlying your question we saw one of the slides that I you know offered was there's there's two things that I think recommend very strong and serious consideration of a national RPS the first is the massive experience that we have at the state level this is this is a known quantity we know how this works and in fact it does work and the second thing I I think I would call out is and this is not you know we're actually about to release a climate policy options paper that that compares RPS CES but another distinct advantage in addition to experience of the states with RPS is it directly drives demand for renewable power by design and when you have certainty around demand you give investors certainty to invest and if we need to scale up at a rate to meet Paris climate goals I think an RPS could be an incredibly or CES provided as properly structured could be an incredibly helpful policy tool in any comprehensive climate plan other comments from the panel yeah I absolutely agree with Bill and I think seeing the experience in California the states are already doing it independently so I think the federal government has to come along at some point and join the club the other thing as well is the greenhouse gas emission targets I think it goes hand in hand so bringing legislation that really targets both is really important I would also agree but if you look at specific RPS or inconsistencies from state to state some states treat biomass energy as a fossil fuel essentially because it emits carbon that's already existing carbon it's not fossil carbon in states like the Northeast they look very beneficial for biomass and they treat it in the way that it should be reflected so I think that a national RPS could be beneficial as long as we have comprehensive carbon accounting for each of the technologies Jason do you have anything then well so long as we're talking about three-legged stools we've talked about greenhouse gas reductions goals, we've talked about renewable portfolio standards we've also mentioned energy efficiency it's another integrating set of technologies that make all of this easier to do other questions oh we've got to well I guess we have to ask Carol Carol and then we'll go right behind Carol first of all thank you all very very much and so you've laid out a whole series of policy measures as well as documentation for the enormous contributions that can be made across the whole family of technologies so my question is I am presuming that all of you are submitting all of these ideas for both near-term and also sort of the vision to the House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis because it's critical that you all get this answer that there really is a full breadth of looking at the whole universe of what truly is possible answer from ACOR well actually you know Jason why don't we start down there since we yeah sure I mean and I think one thing that just to step back a second and explain what I think is sort of harder to get at the 10,000 foot view that I just gave you from the podium but from 50,000 feet let's go to space and I'll tell you why I think storage is going to be such a big part of what this Select Committee needs to focus on there are only three things you do with energy you convert it right from one form to another and that's what we do with wind and solar and gas turbines and geothermal and you know combustion and biome all these things are just conversion technologies we transport it we move it around that's oftentimes in wires or in pipes sometimes it's by rail car other things or we store it we have a place where that energy sits until we need it and you can get all the carbon out of your generating as much as you want and get the costs of lower cost stuff down you can build as many wires as possible to get away for example from fuels that move through pipes if you can't figure out how to store energy better than a hydrocarbon we're going to be dependent on them for the rest of time and that's what the challenge ultimately comes down to and why energy storage is such a transformative set of technologies because when we can store energy without creating more carbon emissions that is fundamentally going to unlock these non-carbon generation sources and ability to transport it around that is ultimately the challenge of the 21st century power system for decarbonization at its core and why I am so passionate about energy storage certainly but also why I think when we think about this in the context of climate and decarbonization why so much attention needs to go into the storage question Bill? You sort of answer Carol's question directly yes the submission deadlines next week we're going to be polishing them up as we speak also submitted to energy and commerce on their 100 by 50 goal we sort of said we touched on carbon pricing which we did actually this is a group I think this is an appropriate observation to make and we're going to speak more to this dynamic in our climate policy options paper I remember when I was a congressional staffer my basic shorthand for carbon pricing was make dirty more expensive forces and internalize the externality of carbon pollution and that'll that's what we need to do it's a true statement as far as it goes but I do want to since you all the kind of staff who will come to an event like this I do want to call out that not all carbon pricing regimes are created equal and when congress gets around to addressing if it chooses to pick up carbon pricing it needs to be purpose built for the goal in mind and here's what I mean by that for example in today's context if the goal of implementing carbon pricing is to accelerate deployment of renewable technologies as part of a plan to meet mid-century climate goals say seems like it's a likely motivation you need to take care not to design a carbon price whose initial level and rate of annual increase has the primary effect of incentivizing near term fuel switching from coal to natural gas if you do that and it's very possible to design a system that will do this you will see helpful reductions in the near term because natural gas is about half as emitting as coal however you will also have incentivized an entirely new generation of natural gas infrastructure whose useful life will far exceed the point after which our emissions become not helpful to achieving climate goals so this is exactly the kind of audience I want to start socializing that kind of nuance and sophistication because carbon pricing there's a decent chance this could be coming we need to be smart about it thanks will Peter do you have any other comments and are you writing RFI responses I hope I just agree with Bill in answer to your question we should definitely be adding comments in front of the select committee on climate crisis and you know I think going back to my opening statement in the presentation we need an all of the above type approach with clean energy and yes storage will play a huge role but the challenge with storage is that you have to get the energy into it faster than you take it out over the long term so you need to produce that energy in the first place how many of us have got mobile phones that are continuously on the low end of the power scale so we do need that energy generation to be there at all times to get that energy into the system but then also I think what we have to do is not focus completely on electricity this decarbonization that we're going to go through needs to be as I say an all of the above type approach where we also look at energy efficiency as you mentioned the greatest the greatest thing for people to do in terms of in terms of reducing their bills in their houses for instance and decarbonizing their houses is first of all to make their houses more energy efficient so we're going to need to be doing energy efficiency across the whole of our society and also part of that is heat management as I mentioned if we can get more effective heat management into our homes and our buildings and our businesses we need a lot more to bring down that need for the power in the first place and help decarbonize the whole of society so I also agree with Bill and yes it is necessary for biomass to provide comments on the proceeding so we will be doing that I certainly know we're providing comments because poor Ann and Amber and Ellen have been drafting them furiously for the last couple of weeks we have time for at least one more question and I promise that you would get to go next so you get your next question hi this question is probably very specifically for Mr. Parsons in your slides you showed a spike in consumer demand in 2018 and I was wondering if that's also explained by our or if that's explained by something else great thank you for the question no so I'm guessing right now but it's an educated guess 2018 would have been would be a bit of a lag for our funding to be showing up in a year over year bump in 2018 what I would the guests that I would offer is sort of the second thing that I think you mentioned which is the economic recovery so that you had that kind of undergirding supporting demand both on the C&I side which is new I mean one thing I need to say one piece of that is the C&I the new corporate demand is not a cyclical thing that we've seen before that's new the idea these big companies Facebook and Google and Amazon are coming out and saying really aggressive we need 100% carbon free by a limited time period that is a brand new driver it was over 8.5 gigawatts last year which is massive the increase in solar is a function of a relatively healthy economy and also probably some people trying a lot of times when credits expire it draws future activity into the present in order to capture the value of the credit before the phase down so that also could explain part of that spike would be an educated guest other questions? up here in the front that was you thank you quick question we talked a lot about decarbonizing the electricity grid we talk about energy generally the question is what about renewable gas as a way to decarbonize our energy sector background on this is we do have in the energy storage field an opportunity to use the gas grid which is an asset that's stranded if we move away from natural gas all together we can store renewable gas in there as an energy storage medium we can transition to use zero carbon fuels like hydrogen in the transportation sector for heavy duty, medium duty all of that can come from renewable gas from excess renewable electricity generation which we will have when we go to SB100 or like 100% renewable electricity so where do you see the role of renewable gas in energy future of America? thanks so storage is storage at the end of the day I think DOE has this moonshot goal fuels from sunlight they call it which is the idea that you might take the natural occurring photonic energy that hits the earth every day and be able to somehow take that, take carbon dioxide and be able to create a synthetic fuel without the actual net addition of carbon to the atmosphere this is very exciting stuff I mean to the extent that you can create something that is a net zero or potentially even reducing to the extent that you are able to find ways for example to capture the emissions that do come off of the synthetically produced or for lack of a better word renewable that's really powerful and I would say that in fact the most important place to have that conversation is the industrial sector particularly because as much as we talk about decarbonizing the energy system decarbonizing industrial processes is like a ten times harder process and there's not really much of a way to replace the use of things like natural gas in industrial processes so a clear-eyed view of dealing with climate challenges needs to take into account what we're going to do with that so I think that particularly when you talk about the industrial sector we have to be talking about all the options that are out there for decarbonization other comments okay well we'll go ahead and wrap there almost finished there's my fourth briefing at EESI and I've always managed to go a couple minutes over because that's because we have such great panelists so let's give everybody a final round of applause just a final reminder if you haven't already gotten into the habit of visiting EESI.org please do and hopefully you'll use that opportunity to sign up for our new newsletter Climate Change Solutions the other Tuesday and it's a great way to keep up with all the goings on at EESI next Friday it might even be in this room don't cut that next Friday we have a briefing on deep decarbonization legal pathways to deep decarbonization decarbonization hopefully you'll be able to join us for that and I don't think it's been announced yet but on December 4th there's one on west coast coastal resilience so that should be very interesting we've done we're going around the country bringing people in to talk about these resilience projects in their communities and they've been fantastic so thank you very much thanks to the EESI staff for pulling off a great briefing thanks again to our panelists and I hope everyone has a great weekend