 Good evening. Good evening and welcome. My name is Meng Cheng. I'm the John A. Erison Dean of the College of Engineering at Great Purdue University. And tonight is very special and I thank you for joining us. What a contrast compared to just one week ago the temperature difference is quite remarkable. And well tonight we have this full house of attendance and I hope that we'll all appreciate tonight is special because of the nature of the event because of the keynote speaker tonight and also because of what his accomplishments symbolize for the diverse student population we have here at Purdue Engineering. Now may I start by highlighting if you haven't noticed yet that we are celebrating a birthday 150th birthday and the celebration is longer than one year. So thank goodness our birthdays don't deserve such a long celebration but yes Purdue 150th certainly certainly we have a lot to look forward to and there's Mr. Dan Hasler the birthday boy who architects the entire the entire year-long outstanding celebration. And part of that is Idea Festival. You see my great colleague Mark Langstrom and of Chris Ladish is here as well leading the University-wide Ideas Festival the intellectual heart and brain of a Purdue Cisco Centennial. And as a part of that the College of Engineering is proud to starting today present the Engineering 2169 series of four days of events. And there's Stephanie and Kelly from the College thank you. We have in each of the four days four components a graduate student ideas competition on how are we going to live and eat and work and play 150 years from today. A poster session highlighting the research by our graduate students. We love to highlight our wonderful master and PhD students in the college. And a keynote speech followed by a faculty panel. And now we're entering those two components for the very first part of Engineering 2169 on the theme of sustainability. And the keynote speaker tonight is one of our own boiler makers. And Dr. Jorge Heddeck is is a boiler maker he received his PhD in industrial engineering from Purdue in 1981 was born and raised in Puerto Rico. He went through like many of us the students at this great land-ground University. The struggles in order to make it and he did remarkably well at Puerto Rico and then as a master student at RPI and then upon realizing that Indiana is warmer came over to Purdue to pursue his PhD. And he was then back at RPI as a faculty member and associate dean in the College of Engineering before becoming a dean at two other American institutions and then returning from England to the island back to Puerto Rico as the president of the University of Puerto Rico which is the flagship University system on the island. And as we all know that there is a lot of challenges and opportunities in Puerto Rico. And in regards to renewable energy tonight we'll hear from President Heddeck the potential future what if the world runs 100% on renewable energy and what if Puerto Rico becomes an island of testbed. Now before I handed over to President Heddeck however with his permission I'm proud to review a wonderful number here and announce an exciting initiative. As you know that we have many students from many different backgrounds in this large College of Engineering the largest among the top 10 engineering schools in the United States. And as we aspire to the pinnacle of excellence at scale we value the contribution by everyone. And this year for the first time ever the Hispanic Latino students population has a five-year graduation rate that is higher than the average five-year graduation rate in the college first time ever. To those who are in the audience and to those who are watching the streaming or maybe the archival later to those who are in the student organizations we're immensely proud of all of you. And indeed yes this is being streamed live to all the alumni around the world as well tonight. I am going to tweet about it too. And tonight we also announced this major push and initiative to raise more graduate student fellowships for both Hispanic Latino students from United States different parts of it including Puerto Rico as well as for international students from Latin American countries. And we need your help to work together towards that goal. However much you could contribute the please think about the future not only 100% potentially on renewable energy but also where we have even more than 445 undergrads today and 96 graduate students today who are Hispanic Latino students and many more from Latin American countries. And imagine this future where all of them are given this opportunity at this great land-ground University to pursue their dreams just like our keynote speaker tonight has pursued his and translated that into societal goods. Please warmly welcome back our alumni president Jorge Heddeck. Thank you. Well what an audience but an audience I was expecting to have three chairs people he's sitting here in the front three people but this is amazing to have so many of you that's the best joke I have all night by the way. So I'm so glad to be back and my Alma matter after so many years and I thank you thank you Dean and so many people who have welcomed me here today and as he said I'm here only because of the generosity of the system in which I was I went as an undergraduate University of Puerto Rico is a great place of mobility social and financial mobility for the people on the island like me I was more I was I was raised by a divorced mom of three with three children I could not have gone to university had it not been to the University of Puerto Rico and when I went when I came to Purdue tuition was more than my mom made in a year so I could not have come to Purdue if it wasn't for the generosity of so many people who supported me including my advisor Tom Sparrow who may be somewhere in the audience here tonight. So Tom hey Tom so let's give him a hand and today I would I never thought I would be the president back on the island very briefly I've spent 34 years on the mainland and I looked at people going after the hurricane first Irma and then Maria and I was watching from Boston on the on the TV not knowing how my family was doing and not to thought that I had the portfolio to go back and make a difference on the island after the hurricane so we're going to talk a little bit about that in the context of renewable energy and what it is to be back on such a beautiful island and be able to contribute back to the rebuild the rebuilding of the of the island and the University so let me tell you about what tonight the things are going to be talking about tonight I'm not supposed I don't know what I'm supposed to be what am I doing there you go so tonight I'll be talking about the challenges that we're facing the humanities facing today and we're going to be asking the question can renewable energies be the solution and what is the potential for Puerto Rico the rest of the Caribbean on the world and then we're going to draw some conclusions but before we do that I'd like to tell you a little bit about the University of Puerto Rico look at that beautiful beautiful building is a signature building of the entire University we have 11 campuses all around the island we have an enrollment of more than 56,000 students university is 115 years old actually 116 years old we have 152 programs and you can read the rest so it's a very comprehensive university we have the this the flagship is in Rio Piedras in San Juan which is a very traditional liberal arts institution but we also have architecture we have law we have obviously and a credit to business school we have a medical school and then on the West Coast we have a land grant which would be the Purdue of of Indiana with all the engineering and agricultural engineering programs on the West Coast we have we are a traditional university when when I first came here remember seeing for some reason I stuck on me that Purdue always talks about teaching research and service for some reason that's a theme that I remember being at Purdue and that's the same thing that happens on my alma matter we are about teaching we have some of the best teaching programs in in the US we are about research we do research like we do at Purdue that is transforming the world where there is cancer HIV or any of the other impactful research that we do and then we do service the University has an extensive agricultural service offices all over the island and many other service that we do at the island so we are like Purdue a traditional university in that sense so enough about that actually before I finished with the university we have a couple of you know renewable energy programs at the university and here we have for example in ESI is a again is a program that encompasses teaching research and service to the island on their renewable energies and professor Luciano Castillo from mechanical engineering who had he was the one who invited me here tonight he's been working within ESI and and and their programs we have also a proposal that we're working on on the for the ERC which is an NSF engineering research center for renewable energy and of course the one of the major partners on that proposal would be is Purdue University some other universities that aspire to be like Purdue and UPR correct now you're getting my sense of humor it takes a while and then we're talking about harnessing the fundamental knowledge and expertise needed to design a resilient coastal communities of the future amazing you're paying more attention to my students do I don't know you have to tell me what am I doing right here tonight students don't pay so much attention to me so let's talk about some of the energy challenges facing humanity we have our population growth we have pollution and greenhouse gases climate change and upcoming water crisis even on the island we have some serious crisis water water crisis and the limited conventional energy sources so those are some of the challenges that we're facing in humanity today and then the inadequate infrastructure when you think about infrastructure Maria we're going to see some slides Maria took a hundred percent of the energy infrastructure electrical infrastructure on the island hundred percent and there are many other islands that storm after storm the infrastructure is totally devastated by storms but we build the same infrastructure time and time again so I don't know what's going to take for us to learn from from from the past so here's a population growth and here you see many of you have seen this before how these reflects the availability of electricity and some of what people could call modernization in the world so you could see how that is reflected on that slide and also the population growth where the population is growing so here we have some some models we have even the most conservative for the most pessimistic model which would be the one on the bottom it still has some significant population growth and then you see some of the other forecast remodels that are much more aggressive and perhaps more I would say concerning than the conservative model here we have the energy and the access to the energy so you have here the millions of people who lack adequate electricity would be in in in the Purdue gold and then the millions of people who have no electricity that would be in the red so here you have the what it shows is that three and a half billion people lack proper access to electricity all around the world that's a lot of people three and a half billion people who lack proper access to electricity whereas we have all these renewable energy available to us we still have no way of providing that energy to most of the population of the world so they hear what we see the water reserves we have that there is a hundred percent of the water they the available water in the world most of that is a saline is that how you pronounce it salina in Spanish fresh water is is just a fraction two and a half so 97.5 is salted water right two and a half percent is fresh water and less than one percent is accessible and I know some of you may think this this is alarming but it is alarming this is these are facts about the water sources in the world and that's the the volume of the earth so here what we have is some some of this in Spanish I just wanted to make sure that that you were paying attention so here we talked is about some of the some of the crisis in Cuba one of the worst droughts in history in Cuba look at the at the level of how the water is reflected there Bolivia water crisis in Bolivia California drought drought that's English by the way it is even worse than you think and then Peru back in Spanish 17 regions are in emergency in emergency in crisis so this is global this is all over so what we have here is the access to water in the world or the droughts so look at how the number of months in which water is scarce and look at how I would say most of the world is is in scarcity of water or at least a significant portion of the world is in scarcity of water so again population here what we have is Cape Town South Africa how the lack of water is reflected in that picture two-thirds of the world population can face the same problem that Cape Town is facing reflected on that picture by 2025 so here what we have is another picture of what's going on in the world the US water withdrawal by the by the sectors in 2010 so livestock self-supply domestic mining public irrigation and notice to the right how thermoelectric power combined with irrigation is taking about 80% of the world in the world what the water in the world I think that's also concern-provoking at least for me how much electricity we use I mean water we use for just power thermoelectric power percentage wise again 11 and 11.8 would be public which is one of the largest and close to 80% would be irrigation and thermoelectric power so what we have here now is is that the glacier this glacier that has 14 billion tons of ice if we once that disappears or melts it estimated that about two feet of the ocean would be lifted I mean that could really cover many many times including the city of Boston where I used to live thank God I'm about to sell my condo there because he may disappear in a couple of years well let's talk about Maria for a moment and not my wife my wife's name is Maria by the way now I tell people now you know what it is to be married to Maria for 40 years because look as they look what Maria did to the island so we had a hundred percent collapse of the infrastructure especially water I mean electricity hundred percent collapse and the university alone the total losses accounted to a hundred and forty million dollars actually FEMA estimates we estimate that FEMA is going to give us at the end of the day two and a half billion dollars in damages to the university that's the latest estimate we have and this is over a year ago and we're still we're still doing the estimates but the latest estimate we had was two and a half billion dollars in devastation one of the smallest campuses on the on the east coast which is also the one where the hurricane came in so it was the most devastation that campus alone one of the smallest is 282 million dollars in damages so the whole university system not only collapsed infrastructure wise they we came back in two months and some of you may know that some of the universities on the mainland when we had similar similar disasters it took them a year or longer to recover well the the campus of the 11 that took the longest took only two months to recover but nevertheless is still not fully recovered and we're still estimating the money we're going to get from FEMA like I said a couple of a couple of seconds ago is going to be over two and a half billion dollars and growing so here you have before the storm on the top left on the northwest you have the storm came where the red line is that's where the storm the path of the storm but it was the width wise it took in it covered the entire island the width of the storm covered literally the entire island so four months to the storm would be on the south southwest and then this is six months after the storm so it took about six months for the entire island to come back and still today you go over and I haven't a year and a half later and not all the traffic lights are working so it's taking it's taking forever to recover so then the question that that most of us came here to to look at or to address is can renewable energies be the solution well we have a governor who says that restoring the electricity grid has become his his mission in life it's not more something it's not something that he has to do anymore is his mission in life so at the university we made it our mission to restore the electricity to restore the power grid but if you think about the devastation that it cost the problems other problems did not start with the storm but they just got worse with the storm less than 10% of the food consumed on the island comes from the island less than 10% of the poultry the fish imagine in an island less than 10% of the fish comes from the island poultry you name it meat beef comes from the mainland most of it comes from the mainland or surrounding countries so the university has made it his mission to become to have Puerto Rico become self-sustained in all those and all those areas by the year 2025 but the one that brought us here is the energy the energy the energy grid so can win energy solar energy hydropower geothermal energy and other sources can become the solution so when professor Castillo invited me to create the center that I'm going to be speaking briefly in a moment he didn't know that 40 years ago professor Sparrow had funded my research on energy planning for Puerto Rico he didn't know that so 40 some years ago I was working with professor Sparrow in this problem and of course in 40 years the technology has evolved a lot and he's come a long way and in looking at this from a different angle what we have here is that the jobs generated in a hundred percent renewable world would create those those would be the percentages available to us today the natural gas 21% oil is 31% nuclear is 4.8 and so on you know in Puerto Rico 99% of the energy comes from from oil 99% so we only have a petrol energy and a little bit of less than 1% is hydro no nuclear on the island so imagine we have all these energy and this these numbers are changing very quickly so I have to update the numbers because solar energy is starting to penetrate finally after the storm so hypothetically 100% renewable world would create about 200 million jobs directly and indirectly so here what we have is a summary the impact if we had a hundred percent renewables in the world this obviously our estimates and these are done mostly a lot of this is done by Luciano Castillo's research so we would have 200 million jobs available 75% would be when those would be the assumption and these 19% would be solar 6% would be geo jobs if we had 50% solar energy and 50% wind energy production we ended up with 500 million jobs if we reduce the greenhouse gases by 45,000 metric tons and then the water savings could be 1600 trillion trillion gallons of water per year and that could be done easily that's obviously in a hypothetical world so when you think about the world and the wind speed look at that and and if you see it's difficult to I don't know I don't have the pointer here I think but you can see Puerto Rico in yellow in that yellow area over there just just to the to the southwest of the yellow area and look is a lot of wind is available on the island and all we need is four to six mile per second winds to be able to generate the energy so this is the irradiation available in the world even Indiana has some sunlight maybe you forgot maybe you forgot we get some sunlight here so then the potential for Puerto Rico and the rest of the Caribbean again on winds solar hydro and geo there's Puerto Rico and then I'm going to give you another hypothetical case you have Puerto Rico there in the in the red circle those are the winds the winds on the Caribbean come from the east differently than on the mainland that come from the west for most part if they come from the east and that's not a van Gogh painting by way those are the winds so those are the that's the distance between some some segment some islands and some of the continent to the island that's the distance in miles and kilometers so potentially you can create a grid to take advantage of all these winds and solar energy you can create a mini grid or maybe not so many not so micro grid of energy that would be renewable energy and I may have so you can imagine here that we have a grid of energy generated that could then also be projected to the mainland in this case could be Florida but not only that you can also see this as a way of creating an experiment so what the dean said is that one of the ideas that we have with the Institute is that the island could be not only could could not only benefit from this renewable energy but can become the testbed of all these technologies that then could be used obviously in the rest of the US but especially in the rest of the world so for those of us were thinking about this from a financial from an economic point of view this has not only a environmentally environmental concern or an environmental point of view but also a financial point of view because this technology could be generated in such a way that could not only save save some some money generate jobs but also save the environment so I think that whether you're looking at this from a from a financial economic point of view or an environmental point of view I think that this is a this is a solution that could really be attracting to all points of views all points of view so in conclusion nothing surprising here for many of you you know the population growth will continue to cause increased competition for national resources some people say if you want to make money by by water invest in water and many people are investing in water in water a traditional energy sources release pollutants contribute to climate change and withdraw excessive amounts of water renewables are the way to save water and reduce the impact certain as in certain aspects of the environment inadequate infrastructure is a big problem in many locations including Puerto Rico like I said we keep all this infrastructure keeps being devastated but FEMA for example requires that we build back to the way it was before rather than allowing us to build in a way that is more resilient so we need to learn how to build more resilient infrastructure no matter which way we go last but not least it can be an alternative that should be exploring Puerto Rico not only for Puerto Rico's sake but also as a test bet for the rest of the world we have a lot of favorable conditions to make the change towards renewable energy not only in the Caribbean or in the rest of the world it has some environmental and economic advantages and although it is not a panacea because it has some disadvantages as danger to the fauna aesthetic space remains vulnerable to an atmospheric phenomena but still has so many advantages that it should be they're worth exploring so with that I hope I have I have caused you I have been thought-provoking and I hope that we can have a conversation about the need for renewable energy they need for redundancy and backup so that we do not rely on just one source of energy as a panacea and I hope that we can have a conversation for the next few minutes before we start the panel so with that I'd like to finish my presentation and open the floor for any questions yes we have a question over here how are we going to store it yes and and that's one thank you for the question did everybody hear the question how are we going to store the energy and I think that's an area of research very active research on the island for example we have a lot of the private companies are creating their own micro grids for obvious reasons and then one of the major concerns that they have in creating that micro grid is storage for off off peak or when we when you're not having enough energy so the technology is available but like every every other technology in renewables it requires a lot of continued research and development thank you for the question good question yes thank you well again I do believe that I think most people would agree that there's no one simple answer to what you said and I would welcome any of the experts in in the audience to help me with this with this answer but I think that this is more of a matter of philosophy and policy than than technology when you think about how we're going to grow go from a certain infrastructure that is being built based on these fossil fuels to the infrastructure that is going to be needed for the renewables that's not a simple simple answer there's not a simple approach to this also there's some commercial concerns that I think are important investments that countries cities companies and meeting in all these technologies in all the infrastructure so I think that is a matter of planning having a policy of planning for the future and then looking at this from a holistic point of view not only on a on a city or case by case basis but globally and as we shift the use of water from from certain uses to other uses and as we shift from the fossil fuels to the renewables then it has to it is going to be a transition but it's going to take policy and the philosophical approach mostly from the government to be able to get there I mean technologically it's been proven it could be done but again I think that the question is by when and how much we're going to spend in build in building that infrastructure companies are doing this by the way and see there's there's a group of small towns in Puerto Rico who are creating their own microgrid they're going off the grid part of the redundancy creating their own microgrid and they're doing this on their own they're not waiting from central government to do it so I think that the policies could be created at the local level as is happening in many parts of the world we don't have to wait for the for the I would say national governments to build that policy and companies are doing that too as I mentioned earlier but thank you for the question and thank you for calling me an expert I mean as a president no one calls me an expert on anything yes any other questions yes back there well I I don't I think I personally don't think that the solutions would be different I think it's a matter of what's available in the different parts of the world so we didn't talk about Puerto Rico the because of the way that the that the ocean the death of the ocean is goes very how you say the slope is very sharp is great great slope steep thank you so I never knew English and I forget in the little I knew so after being on the island for five months so because the the slope is so steep you can really do the the high the the those turbines in in the ocean that we did not bring up we don't have a lot of research yet we're starting that research but anyway I think that the answer would be that the solution would be the same the question is what's available where in terms of the of the solar available winds available hydro available but the solutions I think would be would be similar or the same no matter where you are in the world okay so thank thank you for the question you had a somebody raised yes well so the question if I understood if I heard the question so you're talking the wind is coming from the east so the cities on the east would benefit from the wind coming from the east what happens to the cities from the west is that is that the question okay also if you're talking about different countries like in Europe well I think I think that that's policy that's I think operation between the countries as you implied I think that we would have to create a grid that would would be conducive to to being able to distribute the energy in a way that is available to everybody I mean as as you may know now many of the grids allow you to sell if you're an individual or a company you can sell the energy back to the grid so there's been a lot of creativity in financial models to to really encourage people individuals companies to go to renewables and to sell the excess of the renewable back to the grid and I don't think that could be that would be the exception okay so if I heard you correctly you're saying if so would there be some disadvantages because of the cost of these renewables yes yes yes so yes we we have some risk in that some of these technologies are not the undestructible obviously the if you have the wind turbines they're also exposed to the wind and there's some some risk and danger and and solar panels I mean obviously we have we people lost a lot of solar solar panels when we had the the storms in Puerto Rico and some of them have not been able to be replaced because of the expense or because there's there's no they're not available yet but I think that there's also technology now that they're creating better and better technology that is more and more less and less vulnerable to atmospheric atmospheric conditions and at the same time I still believe and that's one of the last points that I made that in most cases at least in the in the next future in the near future we may have to build some redundancy and backup systems using the traditional grid I think that companies are moving into these micro grids mostly because of they tend to be more reliable they during they they can control that better than if they're relying on a on a national grid on a larger grid so they tend to be more reliable now they're working on the storage part but if anything fails they still need the backup and vice versa so I think that we're going to at least in the near future we're gonna have to rely on some redundant systems to be to be able to make especially for companies who need that energy or for hospitals I mean you can imagine when we had Maria you may have seen this in the news we had hospitals with no power with no backup and people died or people had to be moved from the hospital so there's many reasons for this it's not only comfort but also safety yes so that you said the cost well I mean yes I think if I understood your question and if one point of view would be if you look at the return on investment on solar panels for example is about seven to eight years on the average and if you go to Puerto Rico maybe a little bit lower because we had so much sunlight but still there's a multi-year return on investment but there there's there's not only the financial aspect you you some people would really think about the environmental aspect they may take a little bit longer it may not be only money but it may be also contributing to the planet even even if it's financial you can still get the return on investment the question is by when you can also create some some incentives for some companies we had a company who would come and on a related issue they would they would take the entire campus and with no money from the university though they would convert it to LED and then they would take 50% 60% of the savings so they invest all the money we invest zero money and we keep 40% of the savings so there may be some financial opportunities for people to invest and and to to incentivize someone individuals or companies to invest in in in these renewables and I think that for the individual there also as you may know many cities and towns are providing tax incentives also for people to invest in renewable energy so there maybe again it's more about policy and philosophy than financial but even if it's financial you can still get some benefits or it could be environmentally you because you're environmentally conscious then that could be another benefit yes well I think FEMA for most part would would have you build to what it was before so I think that again I'm not an expert on FEMA I don't want to get in trouble with FEMA I don't want them to take away anyone from FEMA here by the way it's been streamed I have to be careful thank you being but for most part that you have to build to what it was so you have to be careful but we can still be I think we we can invest as a system in my case as a university system in on the renewables and again we're doing that with some private companies in some areas I gave you the example of the LED for example as an example so I think that is a multi is a is a three-prong approach government private and then we as an university investing our own money yes is the micro great hundred percent renewable and what was a well the companies that that I spoke into on the island a hundred percent is renewable solar solar they're building like I said they're working on the storage that that would be for whatever extras they they have during the day for to be used at night or cloudy days and the backup would be just a traditional grid so whenever when they run out of energy then they go to the to the you know to the island grid to go to the public utility no in our case is is oil is yeah petrol we don't have coal on the island for better or for worse don't comment I'm not a politician I play one on TV any other questions yes yes did everybody hear him no well he first praised my for my advisor Tom Sparrow as as rightly so and he said that Tom has served the university very well paraphrasing him and also that he served the state of Indiana well through some economic forecasting and before I go into the second part I like to say that perhaps serve servingly I said that we always turn out to be like a like our advisors and I say says self-servingly because obviously Tom Sparrow has been such a great professional professor human being but I like to think that I turn out to be like Tom in everything that he did so Tom if that's the case this is you I am I am a reflection of you I'm sorry if that's the case I'm a reflection of you whatever I'm not able to live up to I apologize because you were a great role model to me so let's give him another hand please then the second part of the question was should other states endorse or espouse the same approach and I would say yes I mean when I was in Virginia we had some of the most famous economists were also serving the serving the state of Virginia and the DC area with some of the forecast we had that in San Juan in Puerto Rico and so on so I think that's something that is is well needed we have great experts Tom was an economist and as an operation researcher which is a very uncommon combination and he served him and the serve the the world very well so yes by all means we need more of that and we say some people say because we're not able to forecast the future that doesn't give us an excuse not to plan it so we should plan the future regardless of our ability to forecast it perfectly I saw a hand yes sir yes I think that that's something that professor Castillo would not like to hear right Castillo but I think that's something like I said one of perhaps I take this to a fault as an engineer is that we we learned one of the principles in engineering is that everything everything everything has disadvantages right there's always advantages and disadvantages so there's disadvantages I say and I mentioned a few space most of these technologies take space they're not pretty they they can cause harm to the fauna and on and on and that could be one of them so I think that's why we need to continue to create a balance into the advantages and disadvantages of all these technologies of course professor Castillo is going to defend himself he can't help himself stand up Luciano stand up and and and I would say study mechanical engineering under Luciano Castillo that's the best way to go if you're interested in this field he's an endowed chair okay I think we have time for one last question correct any last yes over there and then two I would go over here yes back there well we have this on on plan the professor Castillo had had approached us and and we're creating a center a UPR produced University of Puerto Rico Purdue Center and it's going to go from idea creation all the way to to manufacturing and everything in between we're thinking about having as I said earlier a test bed because there you have an island the University of Puerto Rico we literally have more well I haven't done the study but I would say we may have more land than the Vatican and they will own the entire island we have come on guys you you lost a sense of humor it took an hour for you to look to lose a sense of humor so anyway we have a lot of land we have a lot of infrastructure we have a lot of talent so we can really create this microgrid as an experiment and you can imagine companies went now with the with all the tax incentives Puerto Rico is an opportunity cost 97% or so of the island there's no and this is an information I'm gonna give you give me 30 seconds for an information but this would be a great investment opportunity for some of you there's no place on earth that has the tax incentives for anyone in the US than Puerto Rico on it I mean this is literally the truth it's an opportunity cost you get 95% tax incentives for investing on the island so you can imagine all these companies coming to the island and investing and experimenting and creating they say they professor Luciano Castillo often talks about tests like reading the first truck solar truck on the island and on and on so you can imagine the possibilities are limitless and then along the way we create some experiments we create we get the data and the possibilities are infinite infinite possibility so we we have not started to create that yet but that's part of the plan and that's part of the Institute okay so thank you for the question and one last question over here okay well I was going to say a joke but this is too serious for me to say a joke I was gonna say that I have four and a half years left in my contract I hope it doesn't happen within the next four and a half years but that's not this is not a good time for a joke but anyway I think that if the hair if a hurricane hits the island right now I think it would be absolutely devastating we have not recovered completely yet like I told you not even all the traffic lights are working I mean we have you can go through the island they this we are resilient as people I mean I walk into most of our 11 campuses and you can hardly notice that we had a storm and that we're not fully back and we had not gotten much of the FEMA but money back but still we are still very very very fragile and if another storm would hit it would be absolutely devastating so I think that I mean we can only hope there's not there's not much beyond what we're already doing that we could do but I think it would be and this had not happened in 80 years I mean the probabilities are really very low that it'll happen and we're working very hard to be ready for the next storm and as you know just to finish as you know we we had spent all these energies being documented that we have spent all this energy as a country in in planning for for this devastating hurricanes but not much had been done in recovering from the storm so I think now as an island we have created a lot of recovery plans I have to have as a president of the university in every campus they have to have their own recovery plan the island the government has their own plan so we're a little bit better prepared than in the past but infrastructure wise we're not even close to be ready so thank you for the question anyway so thank you all right we are now going to break begin the second half of tonight's event the panel portion of the engineering 2169 and ideas festival my name is John Sutherland I am head of the let me put the picture up one more I'm head of environmental and ecological engineering at Purdue and I will be serving as the moderator for this evening's panel let me invite president haddock to to to rejoin us for the panel discussion along with three additional experts from Purdue University all right so joining president haddock on the panel our first panelist is professor Maureen McCann so let's hear it for Maureen McCann so we're all good proud Purdue scientists and engineers and we know that correlation does not equal causation but it is really difficult to look at the chart that is to your left on this slide and not to draw the conclusion that global wealth as the y-axis portrays and trillions of dollars is not strictly correlated with energy consumption on the x-axis if we burn fossil fuels we get richer and so how will we decouple how will we decouple our economic growth our economic sustainability from the burning of fossil fuels because if we take a leap of imagination and think about for example the future of oil in 150 years then the chart on the right is sourced from British Petroleum's statistical review of world energy so British Petroleum BP one of the largest oil companies in the world and every year it does a survey of how much coal oil and gas remains in the ground as technically recoverable resources so that's the highest bar for oil it is 2.6 trillion barrels and then they calculate based based on current consumption rates how long that oil would actually last and they make a projection out in the case of the middle bar to 2035 and in the case of the the furthest bar 2015 to 2050 so what this chart says by BP is that by mid-century half of our technically recoverable resource of oil will be consumed in 2169 in our 150 years of sleep oil doesn't have a future and let's also think about the real cost of climate change the US government released a report just before Thanksgiving and our own US government in its fourth national climate assessment and this is a quote from the report said there would be substantial net damage to the US economy in the absence of any mitigation or adaptation strategies that we might take billions of dollars more than the GDP of many states so this is the paradox this is the challenge burning fossil fuels drives our economic growth globally but by burning fossil fuels will destroy our standard of living so how is it that we are going to decouple this fossil fuel economy from global economic growth so I'd like to put it to you that there is an opportunity for a new bio-based economy and this sits on the progress made in very quiet revolution over the last decade that involves three different kinds of technology first of all very fast and cheap DNA sequencing and you may have some of you may have taken advantage of this with 23andMe or ancestry DNA then there is the ability to very precisely edit a gene within a living organism and this gives us the ability using the tricks and tools of molecular biology and genetic engineering to enable our third leg of this revolutionary platform which is synthetic biology it's the idea that we can take microbial organisms or living plant cells and we can using a knowledge base of biosynthetic pathways co-opt those pathways to make unnatural products to make products such as finocene that can be used in jet fuels or in the famous case itamisonin as a cure for malaria so that synthetic biology platform the fast and cheap DNA sequencing and our ability to use for example CRISPR technologies in gene editing is really starting to have a translational impact on the economy one sixth of revenues from the US chemical industry were from bio-based chemicals last year the size of the bio economy in terms of fuels in terms of chemicals and in terms of materials and polymers that are made from those chemicals together with pharmaceuticals biopharma food and feed products that economic that size of that economy was around three hundred and seventy billion dollars a very conservative estimate of it that's about the size of the semiconductor industry right now so why is this better than using oil to produce our fuels and chemicals the polymers and materials that we make from those chemicals the things that we love that we then make from those materials you know sunglasses and golf balls and toothpaste and and tents and my iPhone which I do not want to give up so why is this greener why is this better is because plants the basis of this economy are farmers they farm carbon dioxide from the atmosphere at 400 parts per million and they store that carbon dioxide as chemical energy in their own biomass in their own bodies and so even if you burn a biofuel you are recycling captured carbon dioxide into the atmosphere you're not adding new carbon dioxide to that 400 million 400 parts per million burden so the Department of Energy estimates that there is at least one billion tons in the US of plant biomass that could be harvested on an annual basis in a sustainable fashion if we think forward to 2169 and I think this is an achievable goal if we can triple that and have three billion tons of biomass we will displace our entire need for oil in the US in 2169 that three billion tons of biomass is our new strategic carbon reserve thank you thank you professor mccann let me now welcome professor Luciano Castillo up here to say a little bit about himself as well thank you so much everybody I think actually and we start alluding to this issue of the our dependence actually this up I really need to thank actually my friend jay gore he was the one that refer me to give each other before I joined Purdue he invited me to give a talk on his department his center in agriculture for food security and he was asking me Luciano can you talk about food security and make some connection with renewable energy and I was up in my big mouth and I say yes and right so then that means that I have to go back and digging a lot of the numbers in trying to make the connection between energy food and and the water and and in the previous talk we see that and and I agree with with you marine we need to break our addiction to oil we have to do that and the major reason is this is from our article in scientific American and here what we show was that a lot of the renewable energy actually safe water actually this is a major point and besides that you create jobs but very recently we wrote these article in axios and this is the issue and you could see these power plants and the problem with them is that you actually are using a lot of the water but you see these crack regions of drought right and this is what I was pointing before imagine all of the sudden we have this major drought around the world and then start people moving from one region to the other so now we we want our oil right because this is in the upper 80 percent we want our oil dependence and yet now we have to fight who gets the water and who owns that water and this is why renewable has the biggest potential for our food security but at the same time for our dependence for us for sustainability you could see from here actually how we're using the water we drawn per day by different sectors and you could see from this graph this is the thermal power plant these are the power plant this actually salt water and all of this is fresh water so basically you're looking about 33% of our fresh water is being used for these power plants and then this is irrigation so I will agree that 32% to use for water for food it makes sense it's good I want to eat my nice juicy steak but to use it for energy production water for energy this is the quiet crisis that I think we're facing right now and the one that we have to do everything to avoid if you start looking at the way that water for these different energy sectors use you could see nuclear energy uses the most the part that that I wanted to show you that is better okay these are the graph from scientific American and sometimes they look kind of fancy but I like my own graph and you could see here these are gallons for each megawatt hour that you need to use you could see here nuclear energy you have coal you have bio power natural gas concentrates solar and your thermal and all the way down the message here is the following all of these guys here are bunch of dragons right they're bunch of dragons why because you're using water to produce electricity and in some cases look at this in Cape Town you don't have the water in the first place but you need the water to cool the power plant so this is part of the problem these the water we draw these the water that is consumed but the important aspect and the hope for wind energy is by the time you move down you could actually see you're using negligible amount of water and when you combine solar PV and wind these two guys here offer great hope so you could see the issue of the environment there is there we don't want to go after that but it's the fact that the water preservation that renewable energy offers and I would skip this one but what I wanted to point out is this element and I apologize for this if you look in the US right now natural gas coal and nuclear these three produce 84% or of electricity at a cost of 30 trillion gallons per year okay 30 if you go to win you could see that and hydro these are very small number when you start going to small players the production of electricity is very small but they're using about 1 trillion with bio power wind being one of the water consumptions now let me show you this because this is droughts and this is something that I have learned from some of my colleagues including death that is I hope he's here but this is the drought map by county this is computer by our group by every single county in United States you could see the most severe droughts I think this was for 18 years and you could see the Southwest region look at this year okay if you look at the solar irradiation in United States you could see look at the Southwest go from Texas start going all about the border all the way you have one of the best region for solar energy in the country and yet they do not have water right and if you go look at the wind maps you could see here look at Texas again we're gonna focus here and look at the best this corridor this one of the best wind corridor in the country in the Gulf region excellent wind resources and in the West in California excellent wind now why I'm showing you this because we have some crazy ideas that I've been working with some of my colleagues that are here and this is this issue right now suppose we know all the Southwest of United States this is a great present dilemma and and what you have is what well in the Gulf you have nice water and you have nice wind what we're suggesting here and this is actually we're going to get some discussions if you create a bunch of solar panels from border to border and wind energy you could actually solve various problems including the problem of water right because now you could some same water across the border now you could do agriculture in the desert you have energy and if you want your natural gas you could still send it so this is basically what I'm done with this so I don't want to take a lot of time but something that I that you want to see is that you could create way more jobs if you go to solar and wind that even when if you went to coal or not or even nuclear you could see these numbers here these numbers of jobs are very depressing so thank you so much okay our final panelists that will be joining us this evening and while he's coming up I I will encourage you all to start thinking about your questions for the panel let's let's welcome Professor Rakesh Chagrawal we have to get your picture up here so how many I always tell the students yeah well we have to go through the back up there we go all right like it's a it's a great opportunity to be here and thanks to all of you for staying in to here all of us here so I'll just quickly give you a brief introduction of what we are the passion my passion resides okay so this is a pointer this is a one okay ah very good okay so so what we do in my group along with my graduate students we do a lot of daydreaming okay so what we talk about 2169 maybe even beyond okay if you get up one fine morning and yeah there's no fossil okay from the cup of my coffee which I make in the morning to my clothes my transport everything comes from solar photons okay so wind is a part of that but we really like to think what would you do okay how would you meet every need of yourself okay transportation fertilizers okay chemicals everything you do okay and that's where we as a team like my team the entire graduate student team we spend a lot of time daydreaming okay a great job to have by the way okay all right so so the question is for us is so if you're going to do that the always obviously let's take a scenario where we're going to do it by PV panels okay we're going to build PV so the first of the foremost question would be is do we have what is the performance of a PV panel okay and now we have enough data like there are a lot of when you land in Indianapolis Airport you see a PV farm okay there's a lot of PV models which are installed right so we can collect data all across the world the hundreds of solar farms exist okay and we can see their performance okay so when you do that what you very quickly find is that the power okay from different solar as you heard in the earlier talks it varies from place to place okay so if you are in UK okay those those pentagons okay on the bottom bottom left okay the power you get from the solar parks is only five watts per meter square okay whereas in US which are the the dots on the right most side you see it varies all the way from around five watts per meter square all the way to 11 watts per meter square okay so how big is five watts per meter square how big or how small is five watts per meter square so I just look before I came here the LED bulb which my wife Manju who's also in the audience happens to buy for home okay and it's rating is 11 watts okay it's the LED bulb okay and it gives me 65 watts of the old power so if you're looking at you're varying from 11 watts to 16 watts and these solar pumps in UK can't even light one bulb which love lights in my house and there are they're literally 50 plus bulbs in my house if not more okay so tells you this situation we are in a bad situation when we're relying on the solar energy to do that so what that means is the average energy from a solar farm is anywhere between five to 11.5 and it is seven and a half is an average so what does that mean okay so that means if you look at a country like UK or Germany what you find is the need as a nation as a nation based on their area they need something like five watts per meter square and here is my solar farm which okay like sorry the solar farm is five watts per meter square and the need as a country is 1.25 watts per meter square so if I want to so we can talk about all PV okay all day here but if you want to supply light of the whole UK with PV in 2169 25% of the country will be covered by solar form is that feasible and that would be true for Germany too okay and that's absolutely impractical right because the urban the cities the London's okay the cities like London okay and so forth okay it's only two percent of the country same thing for us it's only two percent the Manhattan's and all those things they're only two percent of the country so we keep talking what put it on the solar panel on the house roof rooftops forget it okay we have we need a lot more area okay so if you look at our own country look at the Indiana in the middle of the map okay so my guide is turned off for that you know I'm taking credit for all this okay but I've done none of these work okay I just want to clarify to everyone okay so the my guys turned who did this calculation okay what she did was she said okay if in the state of Indiana if I meet all my needs so it is 2169 as Professor Moran McKinnon said and we are meeting all our needs for PV how much energy would I need from that form and if you can see Indiana there is more than 11 watts per meter square that means I just cannot go in there okay with the urban area and the miscellaneous land area have and mind you I can't put PV on the agriculture line I can't supply even Indiana locally okay so even coming back to our own country in our own states the situation is very very challenging okay so what happens is that coupled with the lower power recovery okay there's a land constraint okay and so there is a competition between food and energy and you heard about the water it's a clear competition okay so I don't know about you you heard about Luciano like you know you'd rather have it steak first okay I'm a vegetarian but nevertheless I would rather have my food first okay so so there is a challenge okay so what do we do so there are people like for example from Hoffa in Germany which have begun to install as you see those solar panels on the farmland because we are not going to have enough rooftops we are not going to have enough miscellaneous area so what is left okay let's put the PV modules on agriculture farm what why would you do so because now you can co-produce food you can co-produce electricity looks like a very interesting and exciting thing to do because we have windmills on the on the on the farms like you drive to and just towards Chicago you see all these so why not solar panels on the farm okay but it has a negative consequences when they did that for an offer what they found out was their soybean the potato all those went down by 20% and that's not a surprise there's a lot of shadow under these things so there's not enough photo radiation on the ground to grow the food so there's a dear clear challenge if you want food you can't put these things on the on the farmland if you want electricity you need the additional land area so what are you going to do okay so this is where we are at Purdue okay so at Purdue what we have done is in a remarkable in the last two years okay the agronomist okay this is a great place to be okay we have a great engineering school we have great agricultural school we have joined our forces together and what we have done is we are looking at it in a holistic manner so people who do photovoltaics are here people who grow food and do genetic modification which Paulson McCain talked about they are here not anymore we are all in the same room we are all on the same table okay and by the way we are doing these experiments and hopefully we'll be installing these things this spring and hopefully in the summer we'll be doing these experiments at the acre farmland and once we have it all all done okay we'll find the solutions to grow food along with the along with the electricity which we need and the manage the water which he was talking about agriculture uses a lot of water is one of the big reasons for pollution we see those algal brooms which you see in the Lake Michigan and everywhere else and we will manage this is our vision okay so 2169 we will live in harmony okay we will use the solar photons to grow food use the windmills which we don't show here but we'll put some windmills here too they all coexist and you see the solar panel the rooftop on the left at the bottom left so we will have solar panels on the rooftops too okay but then nevertheless we all share the photons equally and we'll live happily thereafter okay and that that correlation which for some I can't talk about between the GDP and the energy consumption will no longer be a problem okay so what an amazing panel well we have now gotten to the portion of the evening where we're going to open things up for audience questions and answers well questions from the audience answers from the panel there are microphones down front remember you will be recorded and you are being live streamed so use good judgment maybe while we're waiting for for people to pile down here to the microphones I will start off with a few questions of my own so as you all think about the challenges with the various technologies what are the specific issues that we should be working on to make renewable energy more competitive with fossil energy sources Jorge why don't we start with you and okay hi can you hear me I think some of the primary issues I think had to have to deal with policy when I'm being very carefully in my in my choice of words we we have to be concerned about the existing investment that has been made by companies governments individuals in transforming the infrastructure to any any new infrastructure that would be needed for in this case they're renewable that they're renewable energy obviously we also have to continue to consider the cost of of some of these alternatives and ultimately in somehow contradicting what I said in many cases it cannot be about the finances it has to be about the environmental concerns about it's about saving the environment ultimately so so I think that there's you know policy is going to be absolutely critical here and unless we start putting a value on carbon and carbon emissions it's difficult to see how you do transition one of the the difficulties that the bioeconomy faces is that it's usually just slightly more costly at the moment to produce a biochemical through a living organism platform than it is to derive it from oil and so why or how do you persuade you know a company like Walmart to invest a higher price in the plastic packaging technologies that that it uses all the time right how do you get consumers to actually pay a premium for something that simply has the same functionality as the oil based product and so I think that's that's part of the creativity that's coming out in the bioeconomy now is materials with new functionalities chemicals with new functionalities polymers that can be better in some fashion than existing oil derived polymers now I'll just give you one very simple example so lignin is a component of biomass it comes in different flavors it turns out that if you add lignin to concrete the flow properties of the concrete change depending on what kind of lignin you add in so there could be a benefit in different circumstances for building different kinds of infrastructures for tailoring your lignin to a particular use so I think I think it is driving creative thought but if you're simply making a straight replacement then yeah it's difficult to get an economic advantage maybe Luciano already talked about it so Rakesh maybe you could so I think the couple of things are happening which are very exciting actually and first of all the solar cell photovoltaic costs have been coming down if you like when when I was a graduate student of the eighty five dollars a watt and today it is like seventy cents a watt okay so all it is is going down for another by a factor of two and it'll be as competitive as anything out there but the challenge is so getting the cost on that's part of the research which we are also doing like if you can print it like a newspaper on a fast and just make it as cheap as the newspapers then imagine how cheap it would be just roll it in here and wherever you want you just put it and do it but I think the biggest challenge is the storage okay and storage not for on a small scale but storage to supply a city like Indianapolis or a city like Manhattan okay so and a system which is because you can store oil in tanks okay and if you could store something of the same magnitude so for example at procent McCain said like if you could use the biology if you can use the chemicals and we can create a storage of a high energy density thing so that would be the day we do that I tell you that the world is absolutely in the renewals okay we'll be swimming in that and the second thing which I think is equally challenging in my mind is is how do you make hydrogen a fundamental molecule of nature okay from renewal okay so we know how to make electrons from pv okay the day we learn how to make hydrogen and storage we can do everything which we do with fossil there's nothing which we cannot do so in my mind actually those are the biggest challenge yeah yeah go ahead and then we're coming over to you yeah if you think about it it in Texas for example because of wind energy is very competitive to natural gas so it's not so much in some cases the cost obviously we need the policy but it's education and I think people need to be educated that it's not just this environmentally we need to be I mean I think that's important but I think the other issues that we're gonna be dealing with in the long run which is the the water but I think also having microgreets interconnected allows me to exchange energy so a lot of the issues with these stories I don't have to have such a big battery for that purpose we have a question from over here on the the right hi this is my quick I don't know hi I'm Cesar again I'm an electrical engineering student and president of the Latino Student Union so my question I was writing down my thoughts so it's a little bit scattered so please forgive me but basically there are so many people on the planet that have little to no access to electricity like Jorge mentioned and I see that renewable energy is an opportunity to empower those communities and it's also an opportunity to uplift them and provide financial economic just so many opportunities I guess my question is should energy specifically renewable be considered a luxury or a right like to access like I feel like there shouldn't be a reason why people don't have access to electricity I mean the Sun hits you so yeah so could you think of a more controversial question I'll give you a chance I'm just joking so may I maybe health care we could do health care first and then energy well I I this is a obviously a very personal thought I think is is is very dangerous to call anything a right and I think there's some economic consequences to calling many things rights that we have seen through history I would not go so much as to call it a luxury but I would certainly think that it would be something that would be a privilege the question is how do we make that privilege available to every human being on the planet and I think that regardless of what we call it is something that as we as human kind should be committed to that we give access to electricity and what that means it means access to education it means access to the internet it means access to certain standard of living but again I think that whether we call it a luxury a privilege or a right is something that we should all commit to yeah so I was well I was just gonna say that the United Nations agrees with you and that we're in the middle of the decade of sustainable energy that Banky Moon announced in 2014 and part of those sustainable development goals is production of renewable energy its access and it's also affordability because it you know it doesn't help with access if it's too expensive to buy so I think that you the United Nations is absolutely with you because it is an issue of social justice so so what I would I would add to is like as a human being when we are born we all have at least certain rights to live comfortably okay like wherever we live even the internet the water the the medicines the clothing state everything and that all is connected to energy at the end of the day when you look at all our needs it is this one common denominator that is fossil which is energy so I do believe that energy for us each as a people who live on this planet okay if we had an access to energy everything else will follow it's just a matter of fact that we have a desperate distribution of energy over the planet earth okay so solar has it certainly and the wind they certainly have a potential to democratize okay that distribution of energy across the globe okay so I truly believe I happen to be with you I truly believe that all of us who are born here and go through this journey in life okay have certain should have certain access to energy it is absolutely a you call it privilege you call it right whatever you want to call it but certainly it is a moment the most important feature of the human existence very good maybe next question please hi hi I'm Kate Kelsey first-year engineering last semester I was in the class and my professor made it clear that in order to make progress you can't separate the engineering and policy and so in order to get from where we are to where we want to be how much do you guys think that's going to take policy work and how much do you think it's going to be engineering work so both are needed okay so the classical example is Venezuela okay the country which has so much of energy resources and you can see what policy is doing to it okay and on the other hand you see a country like ours and you can see what policy is doing okay and you can look at country like China what their policies are doing so for anyone else to think what engineers like people like myself to go home and think engineering is the driver of the universe that's absolutely wrong okay like we need to learn to dance with the policy makers okay and we both play equally important role for things to happen policies can accelerate things okay they can de-accelerate things okay so having the right policies and moving in the right direction is an absolutely fundamental requirement with the energy engineering and actually it's policy that allows the access of energy right going back to the previous question so if we have the access to the energy the access to proper incentive in places so everybody could have that availability of the energy that means that the 1 billion people that don't have access to water will get the water same with the sanitation so same with other issues so it start I think it start at the root with the policy yeah you can see it actually in the contrast between the European Union and the bioeconomy because they they have taken on board the reality of climate change thought about greenhouse gas emissions and now there's 20% renewables both on the grid and into transportation fuels in the EU and that contrasts with about 8% for renewables in total within the US so there's a policy push that that helps to further enable new technologies to develop but I don't think I could add anything to that except what comes to mind is the GPS President Clinton was the one who made the decision to make the GPS available commercially before it was a military application so the technology was there the policy made it available to you and me in the world and the whole transformation that the GPS has created by one one person one president policy makers would not make new policy friendly for any technology or anything unless young people like you do engineering and science and demonstrate that this given technology is more feasible for example the the philosophy is that we can get more jobs with nuclear or coal or natural that's not true but you could use science to inform them right and that's what it's needed but we also need you we need you to put pressure on the government on the politicians to adapt friendly measures such that you could have a better future and that that is the driver right we need that thank you very question hello I'm Leon student here at Purdue University I think President Haddock and Professor Castillo you're both pointed out how many more jobs there would be if we transform one more to solar energy right especially as compared to using fossil fuels fuels right now so could you just help me understand where this large number of jobs come from and also what type of jobs that would be that's it that's an excellent question and actually like anything any news technology initially there will be a drastic investment in the infrastructure right so their solar infrastructure on on the solar system the grid the energy source so a lot of those jobs will be there the great majority I mean and you see you get any people to install the solar panel when you look at the average salary that's way higher I forgot what the number was but it was in the mid 70s right so so a lot of these jobs are going to be shifting more in the highly technical jobs but there's still jobs in the installation maintenance part but like everything and this is advantage I don't want to be unfair to natural and and coal is that those jobs are very optimized so as a result you don't require so much a bigger labor force so every every time you start something new like a new construction you're gonna need a lot of that so that's where that is coming so in solar you have way more jobs even compared to to win so I think it's 24 25 24 for one job in the other areas but it's the infrastructure very good question no I mean this is conversation Luciano use Luciano I had had had very often I don't think there's anything I can add to that and I think that the net gain is still to be determined the net gain or the net loss but I think that for most for most part I would have to agree with the research is done anyone else and I'll just say that in the biotech industry then revenues have tripled in the last decade and actually the workforce has tripled but that is an instance where you need a very scientifically skilled workforce same will be true for you know as the photovoltaics evolve like you know and and we design and make new systems so we need all kind of distribution the answer is it's not just one kind of job like people who make them people who install them people who transport them people who maintain it so there's a whole and the micro bit so I think same thing with biomass those who grow it those who harness it those again who convert it likes so there's all skills of job we should be needed that's the if you saw the issue right you get the job benefit safety water and then you don't have the the footprint in the environment as big as the other one maybe we can switch over to this side of the room is that all right I'll come is that all right I'm not picking on you here all right hi I'm Christian I'm a civil engineering student I have a good question here that thing would be a good follow-up the question is many experts in the energy industry have suggested the use of a carbon tax to incentivize the use of alternative resources as opposed to fossil fuels however seen in the widespread yellow vests protest in France the use of a carbon tax is shown to be ineffective to a certain extent do you all believe that a carbon tax is feasible here in the United States or should we seek another pathway to best incentivize the transition to renewable energy yeah this is a good one for the engineers and scientists sir I know that we mentioned a bit about policy so I was just curious that there is an engineering perspective I think that I mean this may not be answering the question directly but I think again we could we go here into whether it is the saving environment or whether it's a financial decision and I think in many of these cases you for many people it'll be about about the environment and saving the planet is about the future generations and for some people it could be about about the finances I don't think that will ever be able to to agree in this and have a consensus but there is where the policy comes into place what is the standard we're going to take as a country and are we going to make it about about the finances and in that case it can come to fruition but it may just take longer if we make it about about the finances of the of either or and I think that's as the professor said that's the difference between our approach to policy versus a European approach to policy I think one could also argue that implementing that quickly tends to be a regressive tax with in which the the people at kind of the lower economic strata pay a disproportionately greater amount so that's that this gets hard I do think these things are necessary right and I and I see when you look at I look at renewable energy the same way I see for example fast food versus the vegetarian food or very organic food it's almost some sort of similarity in the organic food it costs way more money but in the longer run one could argue it's probably healthier than the fast food so I think not only does that exist in many many areas but I do think that's necessary to sustain that technology right and to bring new projects on it and I think one of the issues here is that it's very difficult even for economists to put a value on what they call these externalities that is sort of the you know the biodiversity in the environment that the cost of a polar bear what is the value of a polar bear right and and so until we have a means of actually putting a value on what gives us our quality of life as opposed to our standard of living then then we're not going to see we're not going to see how that carbon tax or how that cap and trade will actually save us money will actually be an economic benefit to us right because we're we're just not valuing many of the things that we should be valuing sure good yes hey guys ryan benzik here abe graduate dr mccann great to see you again we had been i'd known you a few years ago but i work as a worth a led manufacturer based in florida and so i'm a huge fan of like repurposing material and energy and putting it back into the grid what kind of so two questions number one what kind of challenges you guys see with expanding like plant-based biomass type energy because there's there's a difference between like corn ethanol and sugarcane ethanol a significant amount more of energy to produce so like what sort of challenges you see scaling up with as we start to think about more plant-based alternative options and part two is professor castillo castillo kind of from your slide what would you do with five billion dollars so okay so so there are huge issues in scaling up biomass production and let me give you maybe a sense of what a billion tons is first so if you take the entire agricultural output of the us fruits vegetables grains and hay pasture it comes to about 800 million tons so a billion tons of biomass is a larger agricultural economy than our existing food and feed supply right so that's that's the first thing the second issue is of course the land water energy fertilizer needs if we actually simply grew biomass on the land that we currently have right it would compete with food and feed so one of the challenges is actually to dramatically improve the efficiency of biomass production and constrain it to the existing land area so so bear with me just for a quick thought experiment here that rakesh is familiar with because he's been talking to my husband a lot about this but if you take the maize crop the corn that goes to ethanol production it's about 40 percent of the acreage and of maize so we can do a thought experiment where we replace that maize with sorghum and farmers know how to grow sorghum they love it because it's an annual crop it can go into a rotation cycle we could triple the production of energy from that existing acreage overnight just with that displacement of an existing crop then if we said let's not use conventional sorgums let's use some of the tropical varieties that give us double the yield even out here even at Purdue acre right so now we're getting six-fold increase on that same land area and now let me try and use my tricks and tools of genetic engineering to make some further improvements in droughts resistance in salt tolerance in biomass yield genes in in convertibility of the biomass and sooner or later we're starting to think about production at a very large scale that isn't actually increasing that land use area so so you know this is a 150 year moonshot thing to do but i think it pays off for us in the long run and i i do think that we we need to be thinking about our agricultural system in in producing all of our needs food feed and fuel so the the five billion so one idea actually and we start using your mic we started working with my friend jacor and a group in united state and if you think about it right and we alluded to that in the entire southwest where he has excellent solar radiation you have a land that is his propensity is a desert and at the same time you have very good wind resources so this idea that we've been not just we've been actually collaborating with many people we're talking like 28 people right now in united state and the d i is that if you look at the resource of energy you could actually build in the border the biggest technological corridor in the world and by that we mean that if you have you have access to the energy you have access to fresh water you could actually create an opportunity corridor where people in mexico people in us could collaborate do farming you could develop new technologies in institutes right imagine having every border a major institute where people come to the border to gain opportunities to get trained to learn about the latest research in irrigation in the desert and now you could create a problem that could and a problem in the sense that you could create tensions right but rather than doing that you create a fertile playground for people in the borders to solve problems in the future and what that means is that the first place people like to come is because of the opportunities right so you could create the opportunities in the border and and using solar energy and wind you will actually have enough energy equivalent the way you have in the hydroelectric in in the north part in canada so so this is something that we've been working with a group and we're hoping that at some point we get to play with this but it's not a joke it's actually something that we're seriously working we have a team from california including caltech stand for Arizona state new mexico we have people in in texas and and this is something that was born here at Purdue discussing with colleagues how we could actually bring a solution and we did it two years ago but when we were in the tsa i won't talk too long i felt bad that that people were not getting paid and i said you know look we are sitting here we could actually come up with a solution to help the country and everybody and actually this is something that mexico will be excited because now you're taking a looking at a desert they could invest too and take also water and energy to grow their section as well so that's what i would so we're we're running out of time and we've got four thank you very much thank you uh we we've got four people left that want to ask questions so let's try to be brief you know you went already you asked one question i have one more question if that's okay well why don't we let the other young person here first and then we'll come back to you if we have time i i i'm i do i come off as a jerk doing it i'm sorry i want to give everybody a chance all right yeah so my question is to professor castillo uh so regarding your concept of having that grid running through the country from coast to coast what do you think about about the feasibility of that grid and if we come to uh countries like Puerto Rico how do you think this will pan out in terms of decentralization of energy supply so the the first part so the feasibility well our first rough numbers at least from the solar using the solar energy is actually feasible actually just using solar energy solar panels just two rows of it you could actually it is a very doable development the the challenge and this is the part where one has to be very creative how then you protect that that those cables right like anything it has to be some sort of uh a blockage for that to protect that infrastructure from the animals or anything right uh but but the at least the first rough numbers that we we did this is very very very doable uh part of the challenge is and i'm we've been working with some of my colleagues with debi worksinger is to do the the reverse osmosis the water desalination with renewable energy at a price that will be at least 30 percent lower than using any other means fossil fuel for example so so so those ideas are there jay am i missing anything here the why don't why don't we try to yes get this question here but these do a hurry hurry hurry hurry all right we could talk we could talk okay if you want okay so thanks to each one of the speakers for their talk i think each one of you made really good points but i i i am luck i am lacking one point on each one of you and it's how our cars and airplanes fueled in a 100 renewable world without putting water at risk right so i think that would be a question so how can we go to 100 renewable without putting water at risk no with cars and so there are many ways of doing it actually so if you are like when you're talking about transportation things like car we already know we can use the hydrogen fuel cells you can use electric cars and so forth so the question is jet fuels and like you know what is the replacement and and there are many solutions actually like one of the solutions could very well what person again said you could be using the some it's a very small fraction of the biomass of that billion ton which would be needed just to make jet fuel that's one possibility and there are some far out solutions you're talking about 2169 you could be using slush hydrogen just like you go to 711 you buy slurry you have a slush okay and if you make a slush hydrogen it is very dense okay it will take even less volume than currently taken by jet fuel take you to tokyo or wherever you want to go so there are many solutions out there by the way so what looks like an impossible task is really not hi uh i'm just i want to ask a question more about the biofuel kind of bio power industry uh so it sounds like it's a really promising idea but i'm also wondering because you're growing crops in order to fuel the bio power industry how is that going to affect the nitrogen cycle because in growing plants you're going to require nitrogen to produce them so how can we do that sustainably if it's going to be taking out nitrogen and using fertilizer to produce them so um and rakesh is laughing because uh here my husband had been brainstorming this idea about how you might use a fraction of biomass as your source of hydrogen for fertilizer production so you would no longer be in a food versus fuel competition if you took five percent of your biomass and turned it into the fertilizer that allows you to increase yield on that other 95 percent of the acre so i i think you have a paper in the works yeah and also there's a whole book problem for my class tomorrow so which is what i wrote just don't say too much then right rakesh for those who are taking my class we'll see you tomorrow but but you're quite right nitrogen is going to be an issue worse than nitrogen is going to be phosphorus yeah because we have a very limited supply of phosphorus and we need that last question all right so um on the road to uh becoming a hundred percent renewable around the world um we're obviously not going to get there overnight so do you believe that third world countries and first world countries currently share the same obligation to adopt renewable energies at the same time some don't have option okay i don't think it's just a question solar energy is as i said it is democratically everywhere um i just visited india two weeks ago they don't have oil they don't have natural gas okay a country of 1.2 billion people right where is the energy going to come from so i do not think it is a it is a third world versus this world or that world i think it is for everyone okay and some don't have choice they have to take renewal because for them okay like the renewal like for example pv could be cheaper than importing natural gas or oil from a remote place okay unlike us who have plenty of it we are very blessed nation by the way okay and but that's not true for everyone so actually if you connect a network of microgrid you bypass this issue of billion this big grid right so so this could be an opportunity for developing countries to go straight to more advanced technology at a lower cost with addressing a lot of the problems we already have with the big microgrid with the big grid so and this is you know it's the cell phone solution in africa where you just leapfrog the technology issue hey i want to uh just thank president haddock professor mccann professor castillo professor agarwal let's hear it all for him and thank you for a bunch of great questions and thank you for joining us to look to learn and hear about energy and a sustainable economy and planet thank you all