 Good afternoon and welcome to the 2020 Congressional Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Expo. I'm Dan Bersett, the Executive Director of the Environmental Energy Study Institute. And we are just about to start our sixth and final panel of the day, New Frontiers in Clean Energy Research and Development. ESI was founded in 1984 to provide nonpartisan information on environmental energy and climate issues to policymakers on Capitol Hill and the public. We do this in different ways, including by holding briefings, which are archived online and writing a lot, fact sheets, web articles, infographics, all sorts of things. I encourage everyone to visit us online at www.esa.org and sign up for our weekly, our bi-weekly newsletter, Climate Change Solutions. Over the course of the day, each of the members of Congress who lead the House and Senate Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Caucuses have helped welcome our panelists and introduce our panel topics. We would not be here today without their support, and I just want to make sure to take a moment to recognize their hard work and the hard work of their staffs to bring us all together. And to help introduce this panel, it is my privilege to introduce United States Senator Mike Crapo from the great state of Idaho. Hi, this is U.S. Senator Mike Crapo, Co-Chair of the Senate Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Caucus. Welcome to our next panel on New Frontiers and Clean Energy Research and Development R&D for the 2020 Clean Energy Expo and Policy Forum. I extend a special thank you to our panelists who have presented so far, and to the Environmental and Energy Study Institute for putting together a terrific event. These conversations are so important to the mission of advancing our clean energy and sustainability goals together. For our next panel, we have distinguished speakers from the Business Council for Sustainable Energy, California Fuel Cell Partnership, National Hydropower Association, and from my own home state, the Idaho National Lab. There have been a number of exciting technological developments in clean energy R&D from industry, academic institutions, and our national labs. If we're to achieve new frontiers in clean energy development, it will take cutting edge research and industry collaboration to do it. Dr. Bragg Sitten has helped to lead INL's charge on researching nuclear renewable energy hybrid systems which integrate nuclear technologies with variable energy sources like wind, solar, and others to provide reliable clean power. Our work continues to be an important piece in the overall discussion on the future of clean energy systems, and I thank her and the rest of our panelists for being here today. I look forward to hearing more from our panelists on their thoughts on the new frontiers in clean energy R&D. It will take all of us working together to make significant steps toward a cleaner future, so thank you for taking part in this discussion today. Great. Thanks to Senator Crapo for welcoming us today, and thanks to his fantastic staff for everything that they've done to help make today possible. Not that he would remember this, but when I worked at Senate EPW, Senator Crapo once walked into a meeting of water subcommittee staff with a little presence, these little Idaho wood products coasters, and they're really nice coasters. I still have it, I still use it all the time, and I just, I always think about what a nice guy he is, and he didn't stay too long in the meeting. We were talking about probably something a little bit boring, but it was really nice of him to stop by, and I just thank you for indulging that anecdote. I always think of him like that. Now at the end of our expo, we will look ahead to define the future of clean energy research and development. When a lot of people talk about climate solutions, the idea that technology advancements will come along to help us meet our goals is often mentioned. One big reason is that scientists, researchers, and private sector innovators have done a remarkable job rising to the challenge at hand. How can you be truly pessimistic about climate change when you reflect on the past 100 years of innovation, when so many really smart people are on the case? And it's fitting that this is our final panel of the day, because it lets us tie things together. We will need a trained and stable workforce to implement and maintain new technology applications. Our grid will become more responsive and able to reliably and resiliently adapt as emissions come down. It will all have to be done so everyone has the opportunity to contribute, but also good ideas come from anyone, and that can only happen if they have an education and supportive community behind them. Buildings will become increasingly central elements of our national infrastructure. How we travel great distances is still to be determined given our reliance on liquid fuels for air transport, and we need policies and resources in place to move solutions along the full spectrum of research, development, demonstration, deployment, and commercialization. One last thing before I introduce our panelists. Let me tell you about how you can submit questions. There are two ways. First, you can follow EESI on Twitter at EESI online and send in your questions that way. You can also send us an email at or to esi at esi.org. When we hear from our final panelists, we'll turn to Q&A and we'll draw your, we'll draw our questions from your submissions. Our four panelists are someone you just heard about. Shannon Briggs-Sittin with the Idaho National Lab. Senator Crapo gave her a nice shout out. We also have Lisa Jacobson of the Business Council for Sustainable Energy. Bill Ellrich of the California Field Cell Partnership. And Dennis Kaker with the National Hydro Power Association. For full biographies of our panelists, you can visit EESI or visit us online, www.esi.org. Shannon, we're going to start with you. Welcome to the expo. Thanks for getting us started and look forward to hearing your presentation. Good afternoon and thank you for that kind introduction, Dan. And for the invitation to join this distinguished panel today. As you heard very briefly, I lead the integrated energy systems work at Idaho National Laboratory and I serve as the INL lead for a tri-laboratory consortium that goes across the applied energy labs, including INL for nuclear, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory for renewables, and the National Energy Technology Laboratory for Fossil Energy. In the integrated systems programs, we consider energy systems that can coordinate the use of multiple clean energy technologies, nuclear renewables, and fossil with carbon capture and utilization in order to support multiple energy needs while maximizing the use of energy generated. When we consider how to design a future energy system, we need to first start with some fundamental questions. First of all, we need to consider what goals we're trying to achieve and come to agreement on those goals. I think that a majority would support the development of systems that are non-emitting, affordable, reliable, resilient, and sustainable. Second, we need to consider what resources we have available to us and how the energy generated will be used. We must often consider electricity demand and much of the work that we do to reduce emissions focuses on reducing emissions from the electricity sector. However, there are also significant energy demands and emissions associated with industrial and transportation sectors. Industrial processes often rely mostly on heat rather than electricity to accomplish what they need to do. Other needs may revolve around water purification or the production of non-electric products such as chemicals, fertilizers, metals, and synthetic fuels, just to name a few. Hydrogen is also a product of significant interest as an energy carrier that can support many downstream applications across all of these energy use sectors. Some of these energy users require constant energy supply, while others have a variable or even flexible demand that we can leverage to better utilize all these resources collectively. Only after these questions have been answered and can we really begin to assess how these various energy resources can be leveraged in order to meet these needs in a manner that is both technically and economically achievable. INL is the nation's nuclear laboratory, so I'll focus in on the role of nuclear energy systems a bit more as we assess the current and potential future roles of each of these technologies. Nuclear energy currently makes up just under 20% of the electricity generated in the US, but this 20% equates to 55% of the non-emitting electricity in our nation. At a fleet-wide capacity factor of 93%, you can see that nuclear energy provides the backbone of non-emitting electricity at all hours of the day and across all seasonal conditions, with the advent of more renewable technologies paired with cost reductions for these technologies. And this is really a challenging condition for the continued role of nuclear energy in several markets around the world. A variety of low or zero carbon technologies have certainly been shown to help us provide for a growing energy demand. And these can be employed in various combinations in order to meet that demand with lower emissions. But several recent studies that have been conducted by the International Energy Agency academics such as MIT and non-profit organizations indicate that without contribution from nuclear energy, the cost of achieving these dramatic emissions reduction goals increases significantly. The least cost portfolios in each of these studies always include an important share for nuclear energy, and the magnitude of that share significantly grows as the cost of nuclear energy drops. So let's talk a little bit more about nuclear technology. Most of you are likely at least somewhat familiar with current nuclear power plant systems. In the US, these are large-scale, light-water reactors producing on the order of a gigawatt of electricity for each plant. These systems typically operate as base load supply. But in several markets, they're increasingly being called on to operate flexibly to meet either seasonal demand changes or to accommodate variations in net electricity demand. That demand that remains after variable renewable generation is taken into account. This is often termed as operational flexibility, and it's proven to be technically feasible and safe to operate reactors in this mode. But it doesn't provide the most economic solution, nor does it effectively utilize the capital invested in these nuclear plants. So what are other options are available to us? Nuclear energy systems can also support what we refer to as deployment flexibility and product flexibility. Deployment flexibility simply describes the fact that commercial nuclear energy is rapidly becoming available in a variety of designs and sizes, such that it truly can be right sized to the energy needs of a specific community or application. Smaller systems reduce the scale of energy generation, but they also dramatically reduce the footprint of that energy system so that it can meet the needs of smaller municipalities and industrial sites. Small modular reactors ranging from about 60 to 300 megawatts are expected to be deployed in the mid to late 2020s. And micro reactors that reduce that scale even further to hundreds of kilowatts to a few megawatts are expected to be demonstrated even earlier via separate efforts by DOD, DOE, as well as private industry. And these systems even allow for factory fabrication and assembly, reducing the upstream supply chain challenges that have plagued some of the larger-scale light-water reactors. So this brings me now to the topic of product flexibility, which is really the heart of integrated energy systems. Integrated systems consider both coordinated as well as tightly coupled use of multiple clean energy technologies at an appropriate scale in order to meet energy demands across a variety of applications. These systems could be deployed in an energy park configuration where these generators are co-located with energy users to maximize efficiency and to minimize waste heat rejection and heat losses, such that when significant electricity is available from the coupled renewable energy sources, the nuclear-generated heat and electricity can then be used to support the coupled energy use applications. Efficiencies can be further enhanced by operating these systems at higher temperatures. And as many as 50 different companies are pursuing advanced reactor designs that operate at these high temperatures, making them even more suitable for industrial heat applications, such as hydrogen production or chemical production. Again, we expect the first of these systems to be demonstrated as soon as 2025. So with that said, I'd really like to draw the conversation to real steel in the ground examples. These systems I've described are not futuristic systems. These integrated systems can be built today, and they are being built. DOE is currently supporting two industry demonstrations via cost share products in the US to produce hydrogen via a facility that is co-located on site at an operating nuclear plant. These demos will put hardware into operation within the next 12 to 24 months to produce hydrogen at an excellent-owned plant, as well as at the Energy Harbor Davis-Bessie plant. These projects will lead the way for follow-on demonstrations at nuclear plants that are operated by Excel in Minnesota and APS in Arizona. These projects will also lead the way toward greenfield installation of these integrated co-located energy systems that incorporate advanced reactor technologies. The nuclear industry and the nuclear laboratory are not working alone in these endeavors. Our partnerships with the national laboratories for renewable and fossil energy have been key to the definition of leading project concepts for future energy systems that leverage these resources for hydrogen generation, for carbon conversion, CO2 utilization, and for thermal energy utilization. Our partnerships then extend to industry, both on the side of the upstream generators, such as the nuclear utilities I mentioned and the advanced reactor developers, as well as on the side of downstream energy users, such as chemical plants, who need reliable supply of heat and electricity and are increasingly demanding that that supply come from non-emitting sources. So let me end by saying that the national laboratories in partnership with industry are really leading the way in design, development, and demonstration of these innovative energy systems that will provide what's of society values, clean, reliable, resilient, affordable, and sustainable energy systems. Thank you so much for your time today. Thanks, Shannon. That was really interesting. And all of those qualities you listed were ones that ESI thinks pretty highly of. So we consider all of those attributes very important. Thank you for that. Our next panelist is Lisa Jacobson. Lisa, welcome to the expo. It's great to see you. Oh, it's great to be here, Dan. And really, what an excellent program. The BCSE is very proud to be part of the expo this year as we have for many years in the past. The Business Council for Sustainable Energy is a trade association based in Washington, D.C., focused on deployment through policy, support for commercially available clean energy technologies. Our primary sector focuses our energy efficiency, natural gas, and renewable energy. We also focus on energy storage, sustainable transportation. And there are a number of new areas that are particularly exciting from an RD&D perspective, like was mentioned just a moment ago in terms of hydrogen. So the Business Council, when we look at innovation and the value of research, development, and deployment, we can point to many public-private partnerships that with federal government support have led to dramatic changes in the way we use energy. BCSE, as I mentioned, our organization represents largely readily available technologies. So you may think of technologies in the energy efficiency space or renewable energy space or natural gas. But all of these areas are increasingly being integrated in the energy systems in the United States and around the world. And so there's a lot of opportunity to meet all those value propositions that were just described, affordable, clean, reliable, modern integrated energy systems. So even in technology areas that you might think are well understood, there's a real need for continued investment so we can enhance efficiency and productivity of those technologies. And again, not just on their own, but being integrated with other energy and infrastructure systems. So when we think about innovation, I think it's really important to look at all three, research, development, and deployment. So the Council focuses largely in two areas when we think about research, development, and deployment efforts. We look at the public-private partnership opportunities and engagement with the business community and we look at opportunities for deployment. We support wholeheartedly and can clearly see that to meet the challenges of climate change or increase our resilience and just again to continue to have modern and efficient energy systems, we need technologies that we don't have commercially available today. And our members are very much a part of trying to identify those technologies and make them work for consumers. But there are technologies that have maybe made it down the technology development pipeline but are still struggling to become commercially viable. And that's where demonstrations and deployment initiatives supported by our government really can help. So they fill gaps that the private sector wouldn't be able to accomplish on their own. When I think about the work that we do with Congress and the executive branch here in Washington, D.C. and I'm very proud to say that we often collaborate with EESI in these areas, there are often two things that you can somewhat rely on in the area of energy policy. And they are the annual appropriations process. So the federal budget that gets adopted each year and tax policy. And they have been real dominant forces in transforming our energy marketplace over the last decade. So appropriations and support for research development and deployment are kind of reliable and essential foundations for clean energy deployment. We have an opportunity this Congress to pass really important research development and deployment and innovative policy through enacting the American Energy Innovation Act, which was put forward and refined by the Senate Energy Committee. The leads on it are Senator Lisa Murkowski, the chair and ranking member, Joe Manchin. It has very broad bipartisan support. And the House of Representatives has also enacted or working to enact many of the bills that are in the American Energy and Innovation Act. It covers a multitude of technology areas. And I'm certainly hopeful that that is something that can be enacted this Congress, understanding the time is nearly to the end in terms of what we might accomplish. But we are pushing hard on that. I also would just want to say, again, business community engagement in the development and refinement of research, development and deployment policies is critical. And the BCSE spends a good amount of time working with its members to talk to the Department of Energy, to talk to other government agencies, implementing our D&D efforts, and speaking with Congress about what they're seeing as new opportunities. One of the ways we try to capture that information for Congress is in a report that we released each year called the Sustainable Energy in America Backbook. We commissioned this report and it is independently authored by Bloomberg New Energy Finance. It provides a state of play on the U.S. energy marketplace. And when you look at when we started it nearly 10 years ago and what was the main components of the Backbook and what it is today, you can see the benefit of targeted and longstanding support for research, development and deployment. You can see technologies that were just beginning to take root and to expand and you can track federal investment in those areas and then see the output in affordable deployment of those technologies. So we think it's really important not only to talk about these benefits but to try to demonstrate the benefits with facts and the Backbook helps us do that. So I look forward to the conversation. Dan, thank you for inviting the Business Council for Sustainable Energy to be part of this important panel. And I look forward to answering any questions. Thanks. That's great. Thanks, Lisa. Yeah, anyone in our online audience who isn't currently downloading and using the Sustainable Energy in America Factbook is missing out. It's a tremendous document. And it's as close as you get it to a one-stop shop, I think, in terms of all the information you need to know about the state of clean energy sector. So congratulations on another great version of that which came out a couple of months ago. Next up, we will be hearing from Bill. Welcome to the Expo. Looking forward to your presentation. Thank you. Pleasure to be here, Dan, and really pleased to be a part of this panel and the event overall today. My name is Bill Elrich. I lead the California Fuel Cell Partnership, which is a public-private partnership. We've been around for 20 years, state, local, federal government agencies, automakers, energy providers, technology companies, national labs, all with the single common goal of getting this technology into a fully sustainable market opportunity. And these are transportation focus, cars, trucks, and buses. We might be the last zero-emission vehicle or alternative fuel vehicle market to come to the market, but we think we're going to be one of the most versatile and durable over time. We're really excited here in California. We launched just a few years ago the retail market, and we've already become the largest and the first and largest retail vehicle market on the planet. And we're seeing others follow suit in that. And just as some of the earlier panel or earlier sessions talked about the battery market 10 years ago started with just a few vehicles, that's where we're at. We're at the very beginning steps in looking forward. And to that point, we published just last year, actually a year and a half ago now, our tipping point document. What we recognized after the successful launch is the need to scale this up into a sustainable market as quick as possible to enable both the economic and environmental benefits of the technology to come to fruition. And so this document looks at a 2030 vision where we would establish 1,000 hydrogen stations within California that could support the first million vehicles. And this is an exciting tipping point because at that point the market is backed away from public subsidies and it's really market driven. It's demand driven, costs are competitive with everything else on the market. And we needed to have that vision as well as the strategies to get there to help everyone as a guiding light to get there. And again, we focus on transportation here. We're working in California but starting to expand out of the state now. And when we look out of the state, recognizing it's an exciting time to be in this market. There's global recognition and momentum around the world in hydrogen. Countries worldwide have unveiled hydrogen programs as part of their environmental programs at 18 national hydrogen programs the last I counted. And in the last few months, many of these have started to pivot to be also about the economic opportunity behind hydrogen. Because again, there can be a business case for a zero emission technology which allows us to get out of that subsidy side. And so it's really exciting time to be in there as transportation but all the other applications that hydrogen has is that we're already mentioned by some of the other panelists. So I just wanted to give that quick brief introduction and then give us more time for conversation. So thanks again for letting me be a part of this. It's very exciting. Thanks, Bill. Well, it's our pleasure to have you. Thanks for being part of our panel. We will now go to Dennis. Dennis, welcome to the expo and we'll turn it over to you to take it away. Great. Thanks, Dan. And shout out to the ESI tech support staff. This is the most professional, well done platform I've been on. So thank you. My name is Dennis. I'm with the National Hydro Power Association and no surprise I'm here to talk about research and development in the hydropower industry. So there's really no better place to start than expressing our support for the Department of Energy, Water Power Technologies Office and the National Labs. These are essential resources to the industry, their expertise and resources to address innovation and issues in the industry is essential and we wouldn't be where we are today without them. So really what I'm gonna talk about for the rest of my time is just recapping some of the work that the DOE's done for the past two decades. And I'd like to focus on three areas in particular. And that is non-powered dams, pump storage hydropower and marine energy. So the first one, non-powered dams, they are exactly what they sound like. They are dams that do not produce electricity and there are 80,000 of them in the United States. And in contrast, there's only 2,500 dams that produce electricity. So as we move towards a cleaner energy future in tandem with environmental conservation, these 80,000 dams are increasingly becoming part of the conversation as either potentially resources to help us achieve our clean energy goals by adding power generation to them or potentially as part of environmental conservation solution, if they're old and outdated and can't be rehabilitated, they may be candidates for removal. And what's interesting about kind of the non-powered dam potential in the United States is that it actually aligns in a lot of states right now that are heavily dependent on fossil fuels. Most non-powered dams are located in the Mississippi River Basin. So it states like Kentucky, Missouri, Arkansas that have really high power potential on non-powered dams. And their conversion is a proven technology, American municipal power within the last decade produced over 100 megawatts of power by adding generation to a handful of non-powered dams on the Ohio River. And the newest projects, the Red Rock facility in Iowa is cutting the red tape in August. So this is an exciting area and really has been kicked off by a lot of research done by the Department of Energy. The next is pump storage hydropower. And the best way to describe what pump storage is for those who don't know is it's essentially a big water battery. And it's two reservoirs, one located lower than the other. So one downhill, one uphill. And depending on what the electric grid needs at the moment, it's either pumping water uphill for storage or it's generating water by releasing it downhill. So these were mostly built in the 60s, 70s and 80s and kind of provided flexibility to nuclear facilities. And as we add more wind and solar generation to the electric grid, these facilities are increasingly being used to smooth out the generation from those resources as well. So development in this space has been relatively stagnant for 30 years. There's only been one new projects and it was a smaller one in San Diego, but there are three projects shovel ready, one in Montana, one in Oregon and one in California that are combined 2,000 megawatts of storage. They're only barrier to their becoming, getting constructed as finance at this point. There are also several other facilities that have received preliminary permits. Those are in either Virginia or Washington or Idaho. And what's attractive about these facilities is that they're very long life. And so every pump storage that's been built is still operating some well over 50 years and they're extremely capital intensive. So their construction creates potentially hundreds of jobs. And so they're located mostly in mountainous regions that can be rural and remote. So again, an attractive quality is their job creation potential. And then lastly, just wanna touch on marine energy and this is converting waves, tides into energy. There aren't any really commercially deployable facilities yet although there is a demonstration projects about to take place in Hawaii. But again, it's very much in the research and development phase, a lot of which is done in Oregon but other states such as Alaska, Hawaii, North Carolina, Florida are hotbeds for this research and there actually was a demonstration project in Maine. So the one fun fact I'll leave with you about tide energy is that the further from the equator you go the more extreme the tides get. So just in conclusion, if you take anything away from this presentation, it's please understand the essential work done by the Water Power Technologies Office and the industry's thanks and gratitude for everybody who worked there and those in Congress who support them every year. So thank you and look forward to your questions. Great, thanks Dennis, that was really interesting and also wanna recognize your boss and Malcolm Wolf who is a great friend, great friend of mine but also a great friend of ESI's and he and Lisa in particular really helped us early on as we were scoping out not just the online version of the expo this year but the expo and policy forum and exhibition and other stuff that we were planning to do if we had been able to be in person. So he's not able to join us today but it's always great to have NHA with us and thanks to NHA and Malcolm and you for all your support. We will now turn to questions. Just as a reminder, there are two ways to ask us questions. One is you can follow us on Twitter at ESI online and send us questions that way. You can also send us an email. The email address is EESI at EESI.org. We are gonna kick off with a question and I'm gonna take the opportunity to call back to an earlier panel, our mid-day panel focused on how environmental justice can contribute to an advanced climate solutions and my questions are my sort of multi-part question is how can we ensure that clean energy research and development activities and the subsequent transition to lower emitting sources of energy will not perpetuate pre-existing sets of winners and losers or put additional burdens on frontline or disadvantaged communities? And do you have thoughts about how research and development can be carried out in a way that could actually decrease existing burdens? Happy to throw it out to the group. We've kind of started in the past going with first panel as third but in a lot of ways it's more fun if we just let people speak up if they have a response and we'll move through Q and A that way. So the floor is open. Dan, I'd like to take a first crack at that. I think that when we go back to evaluating the goals of our energy systems as opposed to pre-determining solutions to what those might look like, I think it opens the opportunities to address the potential solutions for communities of all sizes and economic classes. When we start thinking about some of the potential applications of the microgrids that might be based on a number of clean energy systems that I was describing, we can begin to think about how those can be utilized through revitalized remote regions, revitalized industry in some of those remote regions. If we start thinking about regions that currently rely heavily on coal mining, coal applications, electricity production from coal, we see that moving to the wayside, regions like Appalachia. But if we rethink that and we think about how that carbon resource can in fact be used as a feedstock to produce higher value commodities, higher value consumer products, we can bring a very different potential to those communities and begin to equalize the playing field while also revitalizing some of our domestic resources. Great, thanks. Are there comments from around the panel? Yeah, this is Lisa. I can hop in. I mean, just building off what was just said, I think that we could start as well in the work that we do with Congress about both asking those questions and encouraging through the oversight committees more hearings and conversation about the topic because in some ways it's embedded in the value proposition of a particular research development and deployment initiative, but it's not explicit. And I think we should make it more transparent and I think we would find Congress very interested in working with us. So it would bring new voices to the table and it would also, I think, improve our outcomes. I'm sure we'll talk a little bit about workforce but I think when I think about research development and deployment, as I said before, I think about partnerships and we are businesses, so I think about the business side, but who are we partnering with? In many cases, we are partnering with national labs or universities or community colleges or other organizations at the local level. And therefore we have a tremendous opportunity to think about these initiatives through an education lens and an ultimate workforce lens. So again, I think we as a group of stakeholders working with policymakers should make it more explicit as we're thinking about new areas for research development and deployment and come up with some concrete metrics in that area. So, and I think we need to think about it from a pipeline and education perspective because another way of getting at the local benefits is engaging local communities and our future clean energy workforce. Thanks, Bill. Yeah, and I think she just touched upon some of the things I was thinking. Here in California, we talk and think about this quite a bit and what's been exciting is to see some of our, as our first stations go in the ground, the workforce is exciting that this really is providing what I'd call a just transition for the entire fossil fuel dominated fueling market and not just the energy market itself but the people who work in the some 150,000 service stations around the country as we're replacing conventional fuel pipe fuel pumps with hydrogen stations, they're keeping their jobs and whether they own the station as a local mom and pop or whether they're working in it that way. And so it's a rather seamless transition. And to the point of R&D to that, everything we can do around, I mean, it's a ripe opportunity for R&D overall but from the production, the distribution to the dispensing side of it, storage is really an exciting thing. And so I, and then I would tie it, another theme I'm gonna probably hit up on a lot is in the renewable energy transition, electricity and hydrogen as energy carriers and anything that looks at R&D to tie them together, H2 at scale program within the DOE really touches across that. This is the way we can achieve this in a way that we're achieving both our environmental and economic objectives at one time. And maybe the last thing I would say is really training programs. It was just mentioned, when we see the community colleges and others, it's just starting to at least on our side be a little more integrated and thought through where I think in the other transportation networks like Battery Vehicle Market, they've started to look at this as well. So a lot of opportunity in there. Thanks. Dennis, do you have something, please? Yeah, what comes to mind when I think of environmental justice in the hydropower context is dam safety. It's kind of every couple of years you see in the news either a potential dam failure or a dam failure and water doesn't discriminate, it flows downhill, doesn't matter who's there. And a lot of times for powered dams, the only source of revenue is power sales. And as we know, the price of power is so low that there's just not a whole lot of money out there for dam safety and improvements. And especially if it's a non-powered dam, there could be no revenue at all. So when I think of environmental justice in that hydropower context, it's how can we ensure that these resources as they're essential to a climate solution, how we can make sure that they're safe for the community's downstream. Great, thanks, literally downstream. Thanks so much for that. I really appreciate that. This is sort of touching on something that Shannon, you mentioned. You know, one of the things that went into the thinking of how to organize this panel was we wanted to look at technologies that had really tremendous potential to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but that's really only part of the story. And I'm wondering sort of from your perspective and sort of the technologies that you're working on, what are some of the other co-benefits of your technologies or what would be the other co-benefits if your technologies were deployed at scale that maybe are other than emissions reductions that maybe our online audience isn't currently aware of? Yeah, so thank you for that question. I think about this as, you know, of course one of the motivators was reducing emissions, but it's also increasing reliability and resilience, bringing energy sources to regions that don't traditionally have a wide variety of resources available. You think about the Northern climates, you think about Alaska that rely on periodic shipments of diesel to ensure that they have heating in the winter. So when we think about some of these integrated energy systems that draw on diverse resources and resources that have really tremendous capacity factors overall and when put together are really phenomenal, then we can think about bringing that resilience to those communities and reliability to those communities. And another aspect of this is really revitalizing US manufacturing industries. I mentioned that a moment ago, one example I like to use is when we look at hydrogen, we've talked a little bit about hydrogen as a great energy carrier. And we heard about how it's used in fuel cells. Well, hydrogen can also be a part of the process in steel manufacturing. And by using this direct production of iron process, we can utilize domestic or resources to make that steel that we use in industry. And by using this particular process, we can actually reduce emissions by as much as 90% relative to standard processes. So let's bring more of these industries back on shore to the US. And at the same time, utilize green hydrogen, green approaches to do so in a way that looks nothing like it did previously when we were doing a lot of steel manufacturing in the US. Thanks. Other thoughts from around the panel about co-benefits? Well, I'll pick up on the panel that we just, or two panels ago, I could also talk about transportation, but maybe I'll let Bill or others talk about that. I'll talk about buildings and energy efficiency as an example, I mean, cost and comfort, especially given what we've experienced in the residential sector. Many more people being at home these past several months. We were kind of at the tail end of winter when a lot of the shelter in place ordinances came in, but it was quite cold in some parts of the country at that time. And right now we are in the summer and it is quite hot in many parts of the country. So you really get a sense of what your building's envelope is like when you're home a lot, when you're at school or when you're at the office or you're out and about, it breaks up. But when you're here, basically 24 seven, you understand the value of a tight building envelope that performs as you expect and that you can rely on that isn't breaking the bank. So energy efficiency as well as other efforts to increase the affordability of energy and the performance of energy in all different settings, whether you're in a home or a multifamily building or a large scale apartment or at your small business or a commercial space, we need to have that kind of reliable, efficient energy to live and to be comfortable. So I think cost and comfort are really important co-benefits. Thanks. Yeah, and I would echo the comments on versatility and resilience needed. And it's pretty exciting to see the decarbonization transition look at the two energy carriers more and more and how they work together. And as was noted, hydrogen's exciting in the ability to reach hard to decarbonize markets the patient probably won't be able to do. I think a little twist to how you asked, one of the co-benefits around hydrogen and especially in the transportation market that we see is besides that environmental benefit there's a market driven economic opportunity. There's a business case around the entire hydrogen supply chain and therefore there's an exit ramp from the subsidies for public and government subsidies and we're seeing that global momentum grow and in the recent years but even months that the cost competitiveness which was always the quote unquote fuel of the future is now 10 or even five years away for renewable hydrogen and just reading the other day about a new Woods and McKinsey report where just late last year they had talked about just over three gigawatts of renewable hydrogen electrolyzer pipelines in the project and that by early 2020 that had almost tripled to over eight gigawatts. And so that's just driving that economics faster and we're seeing around the country as I noted more and more global plans around hydrogen especially around the economic stimulus we all need. So I think that benefit and opportunity for environmental objectives and economic growth at the same time is pretty exciting. Thanks. Let's do this next question and Dennis maybe we'll kick off with you. You can take the first swing at it. I wanna sort of loop back Lisa touched on workforce, another panel topic that we dealt with actually our first panel. In Shannon we actually had Daniel Simmons, the assistant secretary of energy efficiency and renewable energy help us kick off that panel today. What could advances in research and development in your areas mean for the clean energy workforce of the future? How will we train the workers in the new technologies, the new applications? My guess is that workforce development in R&D actually should go hand in hand. Maybe they're already going hand in hand. I'd love to learn a little bit more about that and Dennis we can start with you and then we can go around. Sure. I think as far as workforce development I would just reiterate that a lot of the potential hydropower growth comes in regions that are already heavily used fossil fuels. And so as a way to kind of job preservation development of those facilities is a good option in the natural rural areas as well. They can be in kind of up in the mountains to and so there are capital intensive projects that require hundreds of people. So I think research and development into hydropower and how it can be developed responsibly comes brings a lot of jobs and employment benefits as well. Thanks. I'll go ahead and jump in. Go ahead. Go ahead. Those awkward pauses when we don't know who's going to speak next. Just from a nuclear perspective I'll say that nuclear energy systems and particularly those where we're starting to bring in industry and all these different applications that equates to high value, high paying jobs across a variety of skill sets. And so I think that changes how we look at these things when we bring these different types of systems together into a single entity. And another really exciting thing that we're starting to look at when we have these smaller scale systems the micro reactors and the small modular reactors is there's investigation in repurposing, reutilizing existing coal sites as those existing plants are decommissioned can we bring in a nuclear system and an integrated application to utilize that same site to repurpose that land and actually even retrain the existing workforce there to operate these systems to produce power and to produce other products. So shifting that workforce that may be looking at a future that may not look great right now into a really exciting future that brings in clean energy systems to the mix. Yeah, and for us on the hydrogen transportation side it's really ripe with opportunity and I would say in two real high level aspects we've had hydrogen in use in industrial applications for decades successfully but this really is the first retail application where the average person is going to essentially be in contact with it and all the jobs that it takes the economic might it takes to bring it to the fueling position. So that's everything from more renewable hydrogen production distribution and dispensing as I mentioned but then also that larger scale on the holistic energy system how do hydrogen and electricity play together? Those are new things we're really just starting to figure out and so there's a ton of opportunity in R&D and it's a place where the US has been really strong and so to continue that leadership and leverage that leadership and in this time where we need all the economic opportunities we can and compound that with an environmental opportunity on top of it this is where R&D and storage or in grid resiliency just it's ripe with opportunity up and down and I probably will say it too many times but it's never enough that H2it scale program is always very exciting and it's mind-boggling how deep the breadth and depth that it really does have. Lisa, whether it's on this or another topic I'm going to give you the last word on the panel. For this question or a different one? Well, you can talk about whatever you want I'm going to get you can talk about well I'll just say a couple words on this I mean for those that heard the earlier panel you might have heard that for a number of clean energy industries when we started the year we were basically at 3.4 million US jobs and the entire energy sector I think has about six million jobs. So the growth areas have largely been in energy efficiency, renewable energy, emerging technology areas and energy efficiency I think probably had about over two million jobs across the US at the start of the year. With COVID we've seen some dramatic job losses but nonetheless, whether it be recovery or just a continued expansion of US energy jobs the federal government has a strong role to play as a validator and an actual investor in the workforce for the next generations and energy is just one area just as the US government is a validator for data for food safety or the work that it does in many areas it sends a signal to the American public about what is important and what's coming down the pike and so I think focusing and pairing research development and deployment with workforce efforts all the way from basic early education all the way through to putting people in practical jobs through demonstration projects are things that we should be doing and universities and others will pay attention so I think there is a link and I think it's really important that we focus on it now. Thanks so much, that's a great concluding thought for the panel. Thank you, Shannon, Lisa, Bill and Dennis for helping us round out the Clean Energy Expo the 23rd, we are now at the end of the last panel of the day and I don't think we could have ended it on a better note so thank you to all of you for joining us today and for your support and as we have attempted to pull this off. Let me also just take a moment to thank everyone who, non-panelists who helped make today possible including our House and Senate Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Caucus co-hosts Senator Collins, Senator Van Hollen, Senator Reed, Representative Lobsack and Senator Crapo and all their great staff we couldn't be here without their support so we really, really appreciate that. Once again, all of our panelists and let me take one last opportunity to recognize everyone across team ESI, Omri, Dan O'Brien, Ellen, Sydney, Susan, Tim, Anna, Miguel. We also have Troy who is the tech wizard who makes all of this happen and makes it look so nice and so seamless and then Becky Blood, for those of you who don't know Becky, Becky has been working with ESI for the last few years pulling off the expo and certainly in my transition into ESI this would have been a zillion times harder to pull off without Becky and her support so thanks to her, she's not with us today, she is not in DC right now but couldn't have done it without her and let me also just take a moment to once again recognize we have five summer interns, we put all of our interns online for the summer and they have been very, very helpful today with social media, with note-taking, just general helpfulness and so just wanted to make sure to recognize the hard work of Abby, Bridget, Grace, Maeve and Maya, thank you to them. I hope everyone in our online audience learned a lot. You can visit esi.org for materials, biographies, webcast, eventually summaries of what you heard today on the panels and hopefully if you missed anything and you wanna go back, maybe you didn't see the workforce panel and you wanna go back, well, we'll be able to help you with that, just visit us online and hopefully when you're there you'll also sign up for climate change solutions or bi-weekly newsletter. One last thing before we close it out, we are always trying to do our best to improve and to bring interesting and relevant briefings to our audience as well as our other written materials. If you have just two minutes and are able to help us complete our survey, that would be very helpful to us. We read your responses, we take your feedback to heart. It's very, very helpful to us. So thanks in advance for doing that. With that, we are done. We're gonna wrap it up. Thanks to everyone. I hope everyone has a safe, cool and fun rest of your summer. And until next year, the 2021 Expo, we'll go ahead and end it there. So thanks so much.