 Some of the issues that we are going to discuss in this panel have been teed up, have come up in some of the conversations in some of our previous panels, because here we're going to be taking a look at things that are really important, oftentimes that are behind the scene but vital in terms of the delivery of energy services. So we're going to be looking, we've got people who are going to be addressing finance, dressing the grid, and also storage, all of which are very, very vital to making our whole energy system work. And as I said, various people have sort of teed up some of these issues in prior sessions. We're going to hear more now. Our first speaker will be Fran Teplitz, who is the, if I said that properly, the policy director for Green America and also the board co-chair for the American Sustainable Business Council Action Fund. Can you come up here? You can, from the table, it's fine. Just speak, and please, all of our speakers, please speak very clearly into the mic. Pull it up close so everybody can hear. Great. Thanks so very much. Good afternoon again, everyone. I'd like to thank you for attending this year's Congressional Renewable Energy Expo, focusing on the economic benefits and resiliency of energy efficiency and renewable energy. It's just an incredibly important topic. As noted, my name is Fran Teplitz. I serve as the director for social investing and policy programs at Green America here in Washington, D.C. We are a national membership-based organization over at Farragut North. We have a 30-year history of working to build the green economy, and by green, we always mean both the social and the environmental side of things. We work with consumers, investors, and businesses to find marketplace strategies to solve many of the issues confronting our nation and the world. We have a national membership-based of about 200,000 members and E-activists, as well as a national business membership of companies that we screen on their social and environmental impacts. There are about 3,000 of those small to mid-size mission-based businesses in our business network. And you can find these businesses on our website at www.greenpages.org. We also work in the areas of responsible finance, sustainable food systems, and fair labor practices. And for more than a decade now, we have focused heavily on energy and climate issues, working to advance renewable energy, oppose dirty energy, and promote energy efficiency. One of our major financing initiatives that I'm pleased to share with you today is the promotion of the Clean Energy Victory Bond. The Clean Energy Victory Bond is a proposed U.S. Treasury savings bond that would be backed by the full faith and credit of the U.S. government, and it would support renewable energy and energy efficiency programs that have had a successful proven track record. The original Victory Bond, of course, was issued during the World War II era, and at that time it enabled millions of Americans to help shift our national economy to confront the war effort. In that spirit of patriotism, Victory Bonds generated $185 billion during World War II, which is equivalent to about $2 trillion in today's dollars. We need a similar mass mobilization and mass financing initiative now to help us address today's needs for energy security, clean energy, certainly job creation, and drastically reduced greenhouse gas emissions. The Clean Energy Victory Bond would be available starting at just $25 and can mobilize Americans toward the shared goal of advancing globally competitive U.S. clean technology and ultimately a greener economy. Financing from the Clean Energy Victory Bond would support the extension of important tax credits for sectors such as solar, wind, geothermal energy, residential and commercial energy efficiency programs, electric vehicles, and other sectors. In most cases, the tax credits, such as the investment tax credit or the production tax credit, would be extended for about a decade, allowing these developing industries like wind and solar and the others to become more competitive. From coal to nuclear power to oil, no new energy source has been developed without significant government funding. As the fossil fuel-driven economy becomes increasingly unsustainable and short-sighted, the need for an alternative path forward becomes ever more urgent. Legislation to create the Clean Energy Victory Bond was introduced in the House of Representatives this spring by Congresswomen Zoe Lofgren and Doris Matsui. The legislation would enable the bond to raise $50 billion, and in turn would attract additional private and public investment. We estimate that the Clean Energy Victory Bond could generate one million good clean energy-based jobs across the United States. According to the Political Economy Research Institute based in Amherst, Massachusetts, investment in clean energy generates roughly 3.2 times more jobs overall than similar investment in fossil fuels and 3.6 times more jobs if we're looking at the unskilled workforce. We have seen repeatedly that when the production tax credit, for example, is allowed to expire or is extended, the wind industry and employment levels contract and expand in direct response. We need to ensure there is a steady stream of support which the Clean Energy Victory Bond can provide so that businesses and investors have a clear market signal. In addition to the employment benefits, the bond would also help reduce pollution from the burning of fossil fuels which in turn will lower health care costs and productivity losses associated with pollution-related illnesses. These cost savings to the government and business are significant. Businesses across the United States have endorsed the Clean Energy Victory Bond concept. Small businesses in particular understand the risks to our economy posed by climate change, including supply chain disruption, destruction of infrastructure, rising health care and energy costs, and extreme weather events from which some businesses, especially small to mid-sized companies, will never recover. Financing for clean energy is a must and we need to be creative about it, which is why groups like the American Sustainable Business Counsel Action Fund and others have endorsed this bond. The Clean Energy Victory Bond Act of 2014 now has 34 cosponsors in the House. We need more representatives to cosponsor the bill, which is HR 4426, to demonstrate growing support for democratized financing of clean energy for our clean energy future. Discussions are also underway for the introduction of a companion bill in the Senate. Thousands of Americans have already pledged to buy the Clean Energy Victory Bond once it is available, and you also can pledge to buy the bond at the website dedicated to it at www.cleanenergyvictorybonds.org and you'll also receive ongoing updates on the progress of the Clean Energy Victory Bond campaign. The Clean Energy Victory Bond should attract diverse support since it is not a tax, represents investor choice, creates U.S. jobs, and enhances competitiveness and energy security to help lay the foundation for the clean energy economy, upon which our future depends. So please help yourself to any of these handouts and visit our booth at T9 for more information. Thank you. Thank you Fran. And now we will turn to Catherine Hamilton, who is the policy director with the Energy Storage Association. Thanks, and our booth is right across from Fran, so if you're visiting her, you can visit me at the same time. It's a way you can all make a difference, so that's great. Thanks. The Energy Storage Association represents a lot of companies in the ecosystem of energy storage, utilities, developers, integrators, laboratories, anybody who cares about energy storage is part of this association. And the association does technologies that are in batteries of all chemistries, flywheels, compressed air, thermal storage, which includes ice and heat storage, and pumped hydro. Now, when you think about energy storage and a lot of people, so that just gives you a snapshot of what the technologies are. So I had to give a presentation recently to a bunch of state regulators and I was trying to think, energy storage is so awesome. How am I going to convey this to a group of regulators? So I Googled what makes everything better. And there could have been a variety of responses. The only response that I got was bacon. So what I want you to do is think of energy storage as the bacon for the grid. It just makes everything better. It really does. So I'm going to tell you why that is. First of all, energy storage technologies allow you to do things with a grid that we've never been able to do before. So the way our system is set up is that electricity is generated and it has to be used immediately upon generation or it just goes to ground unless you have a storage medium. If you have a storage medium, then you can hold it and save it and wait until you're ready to deploy it at the cost you want to deploy it and when you need it the most. So it allows you to operate the grid far more efficiently. It allows you to optimize every resource on the grid, whether it's integrating renewables or whether it's increasing the capacity factor of a natural gas plant. It allows everything to operate better. It does a variety of things that nothing else has been able to do. So it has multiple purposes. It can do frequency regulation. It can help with the ramping. It can do voltage response. It can do, you know, help lower our peak demand. One of the ways that energy storage should be thought of, again thinking of bacon all this time, is that it is a flexible capacity resource. So, for example, a natural gas plant that is nameplate rated at 50 megawatts really only has flexible capacity of about 40 megawatts. An energy storage facility, remember energy storage, say if you keep in your mind something like a battery, it can both absorb energy when it's charging and it can inject energy into the grid when it's releasing. So it actually has double the flexible capacity of a traditional generator. So, for example, an energy storage plant at 50 megawatts actually has 100 megawatts of flexible capacity. That is enormously powerful to think of that resource on the grid and think also that when you're absorbing energy or charging something, it is actually a resource to the grid because often the grid needs someone to absorb it, not just inject. So it really has double value. So what are some of the big opportunities we have coming up? One is that EIA predicts in the next 15 years we're going to need 40 gigawatts of peak generation. That is significant. Where are we going to get it? Especially in the context of the EPA greenhouse gas emission rule. So if you have a cap on your emissions, how are you going to then build emitting plants? Well, we think that storage is going to need to be a huge tool in that toolkit to be able to meet those guidelines and that provides an enormous opportunity for this industry. We also look at the droughts, the severe droughts they're having in California and the need to not use water-intensive technology. These batteries, flywheels, compressor, none of those use water at all. They have no environmental footprint. There's no emissions at all from these resources. So we see this as a great tool to allow everything to work better, cleaner, and to lower our greenhouse gas emission footprint. We also see a huge move right now to a more resilient grid Energy storage can help make that grid more resilient. So in Superstorm Sandy, the folks in New Jersey who had solar rooftop had no idea what the grid went down that they were not going to have electricity. If they had something backing it up like energy storage, they would have had electricity. So right now, New Jersey, for example, is looking at a resilience bank. They're looking at giving grants to critical folks like gas stations, fire stations to be able to back up their solar with energy storage because that will definitely make it more useful. But all of this being said, it's wonderful, and everybody, come look at our booth in the beautiful pictures, you're going to say, well, why don't we have it everywhere then if it's so awesome and everybody loves bacon? And the reason is that we do need policy. So why do you need policy? You need policy to create certainty in the market to bring investors. Investors are not going to invest in something that is considered risky, that is considered an unstable market, you need market signals. So one area that we've been focused laser like on is FERC, which is sometimes my very favorite agency because what they can do is they can tweak the market rules that will allow different, not just technologies but different characteristics and services that are provided to the grid to be compensated for those services. So right now, there is something called frequency regulation that is compensated for speed and accuracy. Energy storage facilities provide speed and accuracy like nothing else can do, so they're getting paid for it. If you don't get paid for it, then your cost is higher. So if you get paid for what you do, your costs will go down. So we're also doing, we've had several other orders go through FERC, we're working with state regulatory agencies as well to try to put policies in place that will create that certainty for investors. What are we doing with Congress? We right now have six bills that we have introduced, totally bipartisan, bicameral. Nobody has ever said to me when I walk into their office that is a really bad idea. They all say we love bacon, it's a great idea. So we have six bills, what are they? There's two of each, so we have investment tax credits. The energy storage industry has never been able to take advantage of any tax credit unless it's completely tied to a renewable energy facility and we like to think of this as more of a grid facility rather than something that is necessarily tied to renewables. So there's an investment tax credit that's been introduced three times now in the House and Senate, totally bipartisan. The lead on the House side is Chris Gibson from New York and he's very bullish on storage, so he's been a huge champion for us. We also are part of the Master of Limited Partnership Parity Act, so where Master of Limited Partnerships right now are only for oil and gas, they're trying to open them up for renewables, efficiency and storage is right in there and we think that will be a huge benefit as well. And then finally the last one that we have, two of as well that one was just introduced, HR4855, which is the R&D tax credit. The R&D tax credit right now is really only able to be taken advantage of by large companies. So we need for some of these pre-revenue startups who are doing really interesting storage technologies, new chemistries to be able to take advantage of that. So we need to make sure to, this is really more of a tax reform proposal where we say, alright, let's let these small companies form partnerships so then they can be able to move their tax liability and to be able to take advantage of the R&D tax credit. So those are the bills that are out there. We've been working them, we've been educating folks mostly on what storage is and what it does because we haven't ever had any kind of policy benefits in the past, it's all been focused on R&D and I will just say we are not a science club anymore. This stuff is being installed on the grid right now, commercial scale projects and if we can just create more market certainty, investors will come and all of you will be able to take advantage. Thanks. Great, thanks Catherine. And I must say with regard to thinking about the whole role of things like MLPs and everything too, EESI has a fact sheet with regard to that on our website so that is another place you can get additional information. And as Catherine was saying, there is a lot of bipartisan support on both sides of the hill with regard to this as we recognize more and more how important storage is to, again, making things work as a system. So we now want to turn to Diana Rivera who is the Director of Market Development and Regulatory Affairs with Clean Line Energy. Thank you. Good afternoon and thank you for the opportunity to speak with you today. What if I told you that the wind blowing in western Kansas could save you money? For residents here in D.C. and in Maryland and Virginia, or the wind blowing in the Oklahoma Panhandle could save money for Georgians? Well, I'm happy to tell you that it's not only possible but it's also already happening with a combination of innovation and infrastructure. Let me start with innovation. Thanks to state and federal policies supporting wind energy, our American wind industry has grown. More than 550 factories in 43 states across the country make components for wind turbines. And today, 70% of their content is made in the USA. With economies of scale and innovation like taller towers and longer blades, wind turbines are more efficient than ever at capturing energy from the air. In other words, capacity factors have significantly increased and the cost of wind energy has dropped by 43% in the last four years. But wind power prices vary by region and most importantly, wind speed. The windiest part of the country is the Great Plains where wind power is now being sold at record low prices. Tens of thousands of megawatts are under development in this region but they need access to larger markets. The wind industry has matured and it is ripe for expansion. But we need to unlock this resource with the infrastructure to support it and that is the challenge that Clean Line Energy Partners is working to address. It's a pretty simple idea. We have a phenomenal wind resource in the middle of the country but larger markets and stronger grids are hundreds of miles away. We need wires to connect the two. If we can bridge that gap, we can unlock billions of dollars of investment in new wind power, create thousands of jobs, generate millions of dollars in tax revenues and reduce carbon emissions by 10 million tons per year with just one of Clean Line's projects. Build the wires and the wind farms will come. Texas is proving this concept with its Cres lines now completed. Texas is blessed with an amazing wind resource and large markets and its own grid operator all within its borders. It's a little more complicated when you're talking interstate lines but this is the challenge we've been working on since 2009 and we're making good progress. Plains and Eastern Clean Line is a 720 mile line that will deliver 3,500 megawatts of new wind power to Arkansas, Tennessee and other states in the southeast that have historically lacked access to utility scale wind power. Two of Clean Line's projects, Grain Belt Express and Rock Island will deliver wind to the PJM market which includes Illinois, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland and several other states with strong renewable portfolio standards and an expected shortfall of supply. Grain Belt Express will also deliver wind energy to Missouri along the way. To span distances of 500 to 750 miles we will use direct current transmission lines. With DC lines you lose less energy along the way, you can use fewer wires and fewer structures and have a narrower right of way than you'd need for comparable alternating current lines. These efficiencies will allow us to deliver wind energy at prices competitive with any other new local generation. With AC to DC converter stations acting as toll booths will recover costs for these projects by charging customers directly rather than through broad cost allocation typically needed with AC lines. DC is a well established technology but no overhead DC lines have been built in this country since 1986. So to see the newest modern DC lines we went to China which is thousands of miles ahead of us with 12 DC lines in operation and plans for 30 by 2020. Clean Line has been developing our project since 2009 engaging with thousands of stakeholders along the way and we hope to break ground on a project beginning in 2016. We have some work to do. Grain Belt Express, the project that I've been leading for the past four years was granted public utility status in Kansas and Indiana and received approval to build 370 miles of the line in Kansas. We're currently before the Missouri Public Service Commission and expect to file in Illinois next year after working with landowners to identify a route with the least possible impact. Plains and Eastern Clean Line is a public utility in Oklahoma and seeking the same approval in Tennessee. The Arkansas Commission told us that their laws didn't envision this so we're working with the U.S. Department of Energy and Southwestern Power and existing federal utility in Arkansas and Oklahoma to build the line in those states. DOE is currently underway with the NEPA review process and we expect a draft environmental impact statement later this year. At the most local level, we are engaging one-on-one with landowners seeking easements to build, own, and operate a transmission line on their property. We take that responsibility very seriously and we work to be responsive to each of their concerns. For example, we are offering annual increasing payments that will continue for the life of the project. I want to leave you with one final thought. Wind Energy is saving money for consumers by decreasing electricity prices and reducing fuel costs. Because wind is free, wind power is not subject to the volatility in fuel prices and in fact, utilities are incorporating renewables into their portfolios to hedge against fuel price risk. Georgia's Public Utility Commission recently approved Southern Company's long-term contract for Oklahoma wind calling it an extraordinary advantage for consumers. But in deregulated markets like here in D.C., Maryland, and New Jersey, consumers are missing out on the price stability offered by renewables because competition disincentivizes long-term contracts. Adopting long-term procurement for renewable energy in deregulated markets like Massachusetts and Connecticut have done recently would open up lower cost financing to construct new projects that could save money for you and me. Thank you for the opportunity to be here today and I look forward to taking any questions. Thanks very much and I think hopefully there will be a lot of questions about that because as you said, D.C. lines are something that really haven't been built here and offer a lot of opportunities as we look at how, again, we think about systems overall in this country with regard to renewables and then making them as efficient as possible in D.C. does allow that. So now we're going to turn to Lynn Jorland who is the Chief Executive Officer with Empower Energy. Lynn? Thank you and thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to be back on Capitol Hill and supporting an old friend and solar, Scott Sklar, who many of us have heard today and heard his bearded jokes and bald jokes and other good things. I wanted to share a little bit on a path to resiliency and really an opportunity in some events and crisis and developments that have been happening over the last years and really ongoing as we speak, which is changing the landscape of energy. But first, wanted to share with you what is Empower Energy. We pride ourselves on delivering the right clean energy mix defined as solar, rooftop, ground, EV charging with a partnership with Chevrolet and GM, as well as parking canopies. We also work in combined heat and power, essentially in brief where energy savings, energy efficiency for inside the building on, say, universities, hospitals, fitness centers with large thermal load can actually get up to 45% increased savings in generation or capturing of waste heat, often with natural gas, sometimes with biogas and other forms of biomass, perhaps. We also work in and are developing two offers as we speak in LED, financed LED lighting, as well trying to really pick our horses and strategic partners in storage. I started in 1994 in solar, a company called Astropower that we built, took public and sold to GE, went to BP Solar and then to Sun Edison and founded that with a good friend, Jigger Shaw, and the whole time had two things on my mind up until 2005. It was the power purchase agreement that was going to stop being pushed aside by the CFO usually who'd say the upfront capital cost is just too much for solar. Help us out here. I was fortunate to be part of a team that put together that power purchase agreement with Goldman Sachs and others who has opened up the market radically. The other is, like I said, storage. We haven't chosen which source we're going to use, whether it's advanced lead acid as a transition product or lithium ion, but we know we are. We'd love to talk further about that and get some guidance. The Empower Energy also provides all the financing for these projects. We design, engineer, supply, construct, O&M, and finance solar CHP and energy optimization projects. Some of our clients initially and an investor is General Motors. We started with General Motors about five years ago and have a number of solar energy efficiency and CHP systems on their facilities, mostly in the U.S., one in China, and starting to go global. Cummins, universities wasn't going to have a thermal load, boarding schools would be a typical candidate, hospitals. In the end, our goal is really to try to seize the opportunity of two developments that we've all seen and I thought I'd share some statistics on how they impacted our business model and what I think is a timely opportunity for companies like ours. So the hurricane that changed energy forever in the U.S. by the name of Sandy, a couple interesting statistics is the largest hurricane ever recorded, of course, but it also was the most expensive at over $65 billion. There were more than 8.6 million utility customers that lost power across 24 states. There were eight nuclear power plants that went offline or reduced production and there were 235 energy assets that flooded, including power plants and electrical substations. Again, in that crisis is a chance for a new business model. The most noteworthy, and I think some of us saw pictures of, that it really is just intolerable and speaks to our antiquated grid was the hospital that I cannot recall the name, but in New York that was out of power for 17 days. Again, for this particular application, hospitals, CHP improves really energy savings and again can be up to 45% increase in energy efficiency. And the combined, we've experimented quite a bit over the last four or five years with the advantages of combining solar and CHP because we live and breathe really by the project model and investors that acquire our projects. Lastly, I think defining resiliency, like when I started in more retail rooftop systems with Walmart, this was for solar, Whole Foods, Ikea, Kohl's. In that era it was all about sustainability but many of us knew in about 2005, 2006 it was usually the sort of warm feeling sustainability page on the annual report and I think it's important that we would define resiliency because we're at a similar stage of a buzzword that needs to have economic meaning to people. And I'd say there's four, promoting resilient building and rebuilding, coordinating resilient regional infrastructure approaches, something we're involved with, particularly in the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast, hardening of energy infrastructure, developing microgrids, all areas that we're involved with. We're starting, we don't want to be all things to everybody at the same time or as I've been in one business you go out of business. And we've progressed from solar into CHP and now we're moving into financed LED lighting. The second key development is really coal plant compliance and this is really about what's called Matt's mercury air toxic standards. This is a mix of actions that were really about reducing coal generation and several stats to share with you was that the mats that will take effect in 2016 will eliminate 90% of mercury, acid and gas related and gas released by coal-fired power plants will also limit emissions to the level of the current 12 best controlled plants. And I could go on, I see I have a time clock on me so I'm going to move forward. Bottom line is it's been costly to existing coal facilities and making many too unprofitable to operate. So according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration these developments will take about 16% of coal producers offline in the next five years and in the end it's about what's going to fill that gap and ultimately prevent power outages and energy reliability issues. And Power Energy's integrated renewable energy offer is about on-site distributed generation not about grid tied energy although we've done some projects initially. It's an added layer of reliability between our customers that are in the commercial industrial space and the so-called mush markets and the utility, their utility. Specifically again we're about rooftop and ground mounted PV solar combined heat and power energy optimization, backup power and in time we have some applied engineering work we're doing in micro grids. All of those offers provide a really most important thing is making it simple to the customer ensuring that there are financing options of choice but not too much that we have a team experienced in and ultimately eliminating the significant costs of electric outages and generate economic clean energy. We have a group of people from different solar companies Sun Edison, BP Solar, former Astra Power, TriGen on the energy efficiency, energy management side, Lime Energy, Johnson Controls. I think they're some of the best people in the business and we're just having a lot of fun building what we think is a timely business model and look forward to answering your questions and we too have a booth and look forward to meeting each of you. Thank you. And I must say it is really important to think about how all of this really can be fun by putting this stuff together thinking about different hybrids that in terms of systems, the optimization it can just make you feel really good when you see it all come together and really work and it is very, very exciting and things just keep changing, keep evolving and that is part of all the excitement and everything as well. So let's, we have a few minutes. Let's open it up for any questions you may have. Okay, we'll start right here and there's a microphone coming your way. I was curious if there's been any kind of focus of where the market's going how it's going to get monetized if it's more on frequency regulation or load shifting and what you're seeing that going and then the other question was are you seeing, with people who are developing intermittent generation sources are they able to reduce their costs of interconnection and transmission upgrades by incorporating storage? Those are good questions and they're huge questions. So California has the biggest storage play going on right now. They have a mandate for 1.3 gigawatts of storage and they did that because they also have mandates for renewables and for greenhouse gas emissions reductions. Their nuclear power plant songs just shut down. They have a water crisis. They really need something to help them and so the target for 1.3 gigawatts of storage is going to be really important to them and that will help us play out a lot of different scenarios of storage to see really how commercially it's going to function much more holistically. Other states that we're looking at and other kind of market mechanisms, right now the only thing that we're compensated for from the system level is frequency regulation. So in order to think about what other, how else would you do it? Right now we're working really closely in a PJM process right now with the 13 states in the Atlantic that PJM controls to try to ensure that storage has a place in the capacity market. Their capacity market is called the RPM and we're trying to create a tariff for that that would then compensate energy storage for providing capacity resources and if you can do that, that's going to really, really change the game for storage to be able to do that. Otherwise on the state side a lot of this is about just getting it on the menu so when states do, if they're in a state that's doing integrated resource planning make sure that energy storage is considered in part of the planning so that when you're looking at the system energy storage is part of it. So that's really important to make sure that we're all included in that. To make sure that when you think about solar rooftop if you need something to backstop it that you at least consider energy storage. So part of this is educating the regulator community and the states to just get them to understand that it is a resource that should be part of the toolkit and if they start doing that and integrating it into the way they do rate cases and the way they do planning processes then we feel like the compensation will be there and we'll come. Did I answer all your questions? Yeah, I mean interconnection is always a little bit of an issue but we did get an order, we've had three orders on through FERC, that FERC has issued that directly impact energy storage and the last one was interconnection to make sure that there was a you know streamline process for interconnection for energy storage and we feel like that is going to help lower the cost of interconnection. Okay, any other questions? Okay, over here. Well while we're waiting for that question I'll just say that in terms of thinking about storage we put in a battery bank to go with our small solar system so that we, our grid goes down we're still operating so anyway. I'm guessing you're in PEPCOS? Yes, right. Okay, go ahead. Yeah, so I heard you talking about both the clean energy victory bonds and six different bipartisan bills for energy storage. What are the prospects for any of this legislation actually moving beyond just getting co-sponsors and being introduced again and again. Can any of these actually pass? You go first. That is a key question. So we view that the clean energy victory bond campaign in particular we recognize that this would be a multi-year effort. We believe we're meeting with both parties all parties. It has sole democratic support at the moment so obviously that would need to change but the feedback that we get from investors from the American public cuts across party lines, geography you know it's extremely diverse and we believe that our job is to continue to build the momentum needed that will ultimately shift things so that initiatives like this can move forward legislatively but it will indeed be a multi-year effort. As is true with almost everything. Yeah, so we're looking at the investment tax credit which has actually been introduced three sessions in a row and on the Senate side the champion is Senator Wyden who is of course chairman of Senate Finance and he wants to include it in the context of tax reform over the next year and a half that he does so if they do something like that in the Senate I would expect the ITC for energy storage to be discussed and talked about. I also think that MLP Parity Act has a lot of other folks behind it so it's not just the energy storage community and in fact the oil and gas community is pretty closely tied to it as well because they want to make sure they keep their own tax credit. So I see that also happening in that context I don't see it happening before either before they leave next week or in the lame duck. The one thing that could happen in the lame duck is if they do an extenders package that includes the R&D tax credit there's a potential for some tweaks in that for this pre-revenue tax proposal I also am not hitching my wagon to that star but I would say that there is a slight potential for that more so in the context of tax reform though. So stay tuned because these things are going to continue to generate a lot of discussion and of course the chances for things moving is always enhanced if there is lots of discussion and lots of people talking about it, raising it, giving these issues visibility and that's what everybody is always looking for in order to encourage movement. So I want to thank this wonderful panel and so let's give them a hand