 Good morning. Good afternoon. Good evening to all our viewers from around the world. Thank you for joining us today for Stanford global energy dialogue Let me offer some framing remarks The world uses 580 exajoules of energy today Which is likely to double by 2100 to provide a decent quality of life for 11 billion people Yet to keep a global average temperature rise below two degrees Celsius The world has to reduce carbon emissions to net zero Sometimes between sometime between 2050 and 2100 This energy transition at this gigantic scale and urgency is historically unprecedented It is the defining issue of the 21st century Looking backwards to the 20th century for a solution is not a recipe for success The world needs to experiment with new ideas create new create new infrastructure This needs a fertile environment for innovation It needs to access capital and most importantly needs the ingenuity of the people How are we going to achieve this? What is going well and where are the bottlenecks? This is the topic of today's dialogue Alicia Thanks Arun. We have the honor today of welcoming two very special guests Eric Toon is the manager of Breakthrough Energy Ventures The billion dollar investment fund of the Breakthrough Energy Coalition A group of influential investors assembled by Bill Gates to advance clean energy technologies Eric is an emeritus professor of chemistry at Duke University Where he served as vice provost and director of Duke's Innovation and Entrepreneurship Initiative Eric worked with Arun at the U.S. Department of Energy's Advanced Research Programs Agency Energy, known as ARPA-E We're also fortunate to welcome Avik Day, managing director and head of energy and resources for the Canadian Pension Plan Investment Board A global investment management organization that invests the assets of the 330 billion U.S. dollars Canadian Canada Pension Plan Prior to CPP, Avik served as president, CEO of Remvest Energy Partners and founder and CFO of Remora Energy Most importantly for a Canadian, he served as the general partner of the Arizona Coyotes Hockey Club After our conversation with Eric and Avik, we will move to questions from our students and audience But before we begin, we have a quiz and a poll for you So first the quiz In 2018, roughly how much capital was invested in the global energy sector You see the answers there, we'll give you a few minutes Excuse me, a few seconds to respond I think that's good, shall we see what, how we did on our quiz? Alright, close, 1.3 trillion was the highest ranking response, the answer is actually 1.9 trillion So according to the International Energy Agency, 1.9 trillion was invested in the energy sector and let me just break that down for you by region 668 billion of that in Asia Pacific, 428 billion in North America and 281 billion in Europe And with regard to fuel, interesting to note the biggest sum is actually 726 billion into oil and gas infrastructure 478 billion in power generation, 300 billion in electricity infrastructure 240 billion in energy efficiency and 80 billion in coal infrastructure So let's turn now to our poll To keep global average temperature rise below 2 degrees C, the world needs to achieve net zero emissions before 2100 Which will require gross negative emissions of about 30 gigatons per year And emission reductions of about 40 gigatons per year compared to a business as usual scenario What do you think are the chances of reaching net zero emissions before 2100 And let's see what you think the chances are We're optimists, I like it, turning to you Arun Great, Eric and Avik, thanks so much for joining us today So the public sector doesn't have the capacity to fund the global energy transition The private sector is going to be a major player Yet there are well documented gaps of what we call values of death In the traditional energy financing pipeline that have crushed the dreams of many would be climate solutions There was a recent article in Nature Energy from Harvard team that showed that while RPE has been very successful in creating breakthrough technologies, they face the same values of death We seem to have a systemic problem with our innovation value chain Breakthrough energy ventures is trying to address that at the early stage investment whereas Canadian pension fund is investing largely in later stages but a few in the early stages as well So my first question to you Eric is the following Before we dive into technology innovation, tell us about breakthrough energy ventures It is not your typical venture fund, how is it different and what do you think the attributes are to better serve the breakthrough energy solution and the entrepreneurs Sure, thanks very much Arun As I think everybody knows, everyone's seen the MIT report about how clean tech 1.0 lost somewhere between $25 and $50 billion And of course Einstein's definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different outcome So breakthrough was really designed to be different to try and address what are at least some of the possible shortcomings of clean tech 1.0 So remember breakthrough energy ventures, one component of breakthrough energy which was launched by Bill Gates And is supported by the breakthrough energy coalition, a group now of about 40 of the world's wealthiest and most influential individuals Breakthrough energy ventures was designed with a number of attributes that are different than a traditional venture fund But I'd highlight really just two of them, the first and I think the most obvious is the timeline I think that people felt that one of the problems with clean tech 1.0 is that the timeline of a normal venture fund, which is typically 10 years Doesn't match the timeline of development of technologies in hard tech generally and for sure in clean tech So breakthrough energy ventures has a 20 year time horizon That obviously has advantages in trying to match up time constants brings in challenges as well If you sort of get into your handy dandy IRR calculator, think about what the size of that fund is going to have to be at the end of 20 years It's a fairly daunting number You also have problems co-investing with other funds that have more traditional timelines, but that is certainly one important difference The second is the group of people that has been assembled inside breakthrough energy ventures We have a very atypical group of partners and of investors inside the fund Breakthrough is sort of built in two large groups. There's a science technology engineering side of things That's the piece I head up and then there's a company building and investing side of things that's headed up by gentlemen by the name of Carmichael Roberts The head of our investing piece Carmichael has a PhD in chemistry and organic chemistry I was actually on Carmichael's PhD committee at Duke We have 20 more than 20 advanced degrees in science and engineering inside our organization So we built a very technical organization feeling that one of the failings of clean tech 1.0 is this idea of not being able to diligence deeply technology So going after that technical expertise very deliberately was something that we did And then finally I think a piece of it that you really referenced is this idea of needing an entire ecosystem And breakthrough energy ventures and the group of people behind that are capable of doing much more than a single venture fund And so today you're seeing the catalyst program, an early stage development program that will find technologies that they're very nascent stages And help build them and get them ready for investment You'll also see a partners fund that will live at the end to breakthrough energy ventures group that will be designed to scale technologies that have been successful And have made it through the end of the pipeline so trying to build an entire ecosystem So breakthrough has been built deliberately to try and be different than the traditional venture funds that didn't do so well in clean tech 1.0 Will it be successful or not? We'll have to wait and see Just a quick follow up. What are your metrics of success? How do you define success for a breakthrough? You know, so here I might disagree with some of my board But I'm going to say that one of the most important things we have to do is make money You know, breakthrough energy ventures, we're a billion dollars now We've got a second fund that we'll start investing in First the next year there'll be somewhere between a billion and a billion and a half That, you know, obviously by some measures is a lot of money Compared to the magnitude of the challenge in front of us. It's not even a drop in the bucket And so we have to attract much much much more money to this space to scale these to build and scale these technologies And I would argue that the way that we're going to do that is by showing the world that there is a way to invest in this space and make money So, you know, we have our North Star around carbon. We have thresholds We'll only invest in technologies that we believe have the potential to mitigate at least half a gigaton per year of carbon So obviously carbon is our North Star But I think probably the most important thing we can do is to show people that there's a way to invest in this space and make money Great. Thanks. Alicia over to you Thanks and I'm going to turn to you public pensions are not necessarily thought of as the vanguard of investment shops But they're among the largest pools of capital in the world and have a critical role to play in scaling up sustainable solutions As we just discussed is not your typical venture fund. Can you tell us how CPP is not your typical pension fund And in particular, can you talk about how CPP has positioned itself to interface with the venture ecosystem And why you think that ecosystem is relevant to the real assets and infrastructure investments of your portfolio Thanks Alicia and it's an honor to address the community here and I'm excited to be part of this conversation We at CPP IB have the tremendous luxury of investing with an investment only mandate Our mandate is maximize returns without undue risk of loss But importantly over the course of the last decade that conversation of maximizing return has evolved into addressing the needs of all stakeholders So today when we think about and talk about maximizing returns, it's in the context of you cannot do that without addressing the needs of stakeholders And most importantly understanding the business imperatives around that What are the risks and returns of investing in that ecosystem So the first factor is we have an investment only mandate and we get to look at it through that lens and evaluate risks and opportunities around factors like climate change The second piece of it is we structurally have some comparative advantage relative to other single pools of capital CPP IB today is one of the five largest single pools of capital or largest pension funds And with that we get to play along the entire risk spectrum So our structural advantages are one of scale we can do large deals And flexibility we have the ability to invest through cycles flexible on structure Flexible on how that capital goes in and at what part of the balance sheet We invest across five investment departments over 25 different investment strategies for that 450 billion And within that we get to look at each and every investment or strategy through the lens of risk return So I think that affords us the luxury of being a long-term investor aligning around long-term strategies and themes And then importantly leaning in at all parts of the cycle Whether you know we're in a recession dealing with a pandemic or investing in in the in the peaks of the market Which brings us to the SF point You know for us historically we viewed venture as a as a space for the experts We weren't naive enough to think we could go put you know put out a signpost And compete with the likes of Eric and his team and leading venture investors through history But what we did recognize was a growing opportunity for us to be part of that ecosystem We are a preeminent large investor in the world. We do invest across asset classes We do have a unique vantage point where we get to see different asset classes different industry verticals how different types of investors act How different companies operate and so we chose to put that flag down recently over the last year Because we want to be part of that growing ecosystem and we recognize to be a successful long-term investor We've got to be in that ecosystem. We've got to be an active participant. We've got to leverage our knowledge in that community and bring the best of that community to us So that focus is going to be multifold. It's going to be investing in preeminent funds in the space It's going to involve us being active participants in for example our area in innovation technology and services in and around the industrial and energy complex And it's going to be bringing the best of the valley into our business around technology and data as a preeminent pension fund Yeah, so Eric let's dive into some technologies. Two weeks back we had a wonderful global energy dialogue to discuss atmospheric carbon removal And among the natural climate solutions the lowest hanging fruit was to increase food productivity to reduce deforestation and also to reduce meat consumption I know that BEV is looking into that seriously. What kind of innovations are you finding and what are the potential impacts? Our agriculture course is responsible for an enormous fraction of emissions On the deforestation side we've invested in companies that are developing alternatives to palm So microorganisms that are capable of producing a synthetic palm oil Deforestation for palm of course is a huge issue. You mentioned meat From the perspective of greenhouse gases it's not of course so much meat per se but rumen in animals And rumen in animals from the perspective of agriculture are primarily cows. There are a billion cows on earth today And I think there's a number of things that we can do there. There's a very very simple approach But something that would certainly be an impactful approach You'd probably be surprised to learn that the most productive cattle in North America are 20 times as efficient As some of the least productive cattle in the developing world in sub-Saharan Africa and places like that So increasing the productivity of the animals would be enormously beneficial Getting rid of meat of course gets rid of some significant fraction of cattle We've invested in a couple of companies there. One that is focused on developing these complex flavorants that are important in making things that are really effective meat substitutes So if we look at impossible for instance what the secret sauce in impossible is a heme containing protein Those are difficult to make. Those are multi-enzyme systems that really can't be made synthetically So we've invested in a company called Motif that makes complex flavorants for food We've also invested in a company called Nature's Find that makes a base protein that can be used as the starting point that you can add things to There's a number of companies that are doing this. One of the attractive parts of Nature's Find is first of all it's a filamentous protein So it has texture to it, right? That's been one of the hardest things to replicate in meat with these synthetic meats is texture And it also has absolutely positively no flavor which makes it a good base to add flavorants into But for those of you in the audience who are feeling good about the fact that you don't eat meat, remember that half of cattle is dairy So cattle as a group are about the same as transportation overall and half of that is dairy So thinking about ways to address dairy is important. We've invested in a company called BioMilk A couple of women who have a process where they can culture mammary epithelial cells and produce milk, real milk Not a milk substitute, not a milk alternative, real milk And so they are working first with human milk as a replacement for women who choose not to or who can't breastfeed But we feel that this is a simple enough technology and a low cost, sufficiently low cost technology that we may be able to eventually do that with bowline milk So that's pretty exciting More than half of all milk is cheese. About 60% of milk is cheese And you'll be depressed to learn that a third of cheese is mozzarella Cheese of course requires casein, a protein that comes from milk And we have invested in a company called Alpine Roads that's expressing casein Casein is a difficult protein to work with. You would think a protein you would be able to express Casein is a particularly difficult protein. It's heavily modified, post-plimerization, both like COSLAID and other modifications And it's also natively denatured, so it's a very difficult protein to handle But we have some folks who are expressing casein in soy, which is clearly scalable, clearly very low cost And also replicates many of those post-plimerization modifications that you find in animal proteins So we've been pretty active in this space to address rumen and animals in general, COS in particular on both the beef and the dairy side of things It's really fascinating to hear Eric talk about all the technology And one of the things we've started focusing on is we've got to be in all parts of the value chain So as much as the innovation is pushing us into new frontiers on this, the great part about it is it's dragging all of us into this new realm Be it old world or new world. Yesterday, my team had the opportunity to listen to a Stanford grad, actually, Olani Wilhelm Who leads the ocean's work at Conservation International, and she was making the point around shrimp ponds Shrimp ponds in Indonesia account for more GHG than every light duty vehicle in the US And to change and to morph into a lower carbon world, all we need to do is be better about addressing fallow ponds Finding an alternative power source for water pumping So each and every one of these matter and as we calibrate into this new world, there's going to be countless opportunities to put capital to work and make money So in fact, my follow-up question was to you, Avik. Okay, so let's say Eric invests in one of these shrimp ponds or artificial meat And they are widely successful at this early stage. The next stage you would need investments on the order of about $100 million or higher And so the question is, okay, so CPP can get involved in this and enable this to happen, but what would you be looking for in these businesses? Who would you partner with? Do you need the government to provide any signal or does the government not matter in this? Well, what's interesting about that is I won't comment on what governments should or shouldn't do. The reality is many of them are already doing it You know, if I looked at climate action, there's really three legs to the stool. It's policymakers, it's capital providers and it's industry The policymakers ultimately are going to set the framework that will ultimately price carbon such that it becomes an economic proposition for all of us that invest It's either a requirement to mitigate cost or an opportunity to make money. That's how we look at it The way we look at it and I think capital providers and institutional investors are putting their money where their mouth is today So, you know, three years ago, the green bond market was $100 billion and over the next 12 to 18 months we're going to cross a trillion dollar threshold of issued green bonds with a thousand plus issuers We were the first pension fund to issue one two years ago and then last year we were the first one to issue a Euro bond So I think when we're looking at a hundred million dollar plus investments, what we're looking for is is there proof of concept And do we see an opportunity to scale these into businesses that ultimately generate profits and make money for 21 million beneficiaries And how we get there is ultimately a combination of the environment in which we operate where policymakers have great influence Capital markets demanding it to provide that capital and then industry players, whether you're at the technology front or going concerned large scale enterprises driving that innovation and change Thanks Alicia over to you. Yeah, great. I think I want to stick with you and actually spanned on this question of green bonds and other listed sustainable investment products So if you could share a little bit more about that issuance and what role you see for not only green bonds but now transition bonds sustainability sustainability link bonds In scaling climate and energy solutions in particular what type of accounting and accountability and disclosure do you think is necessary to ensure that those products actually drive emissions reductions in the real economy Sure and maybe just quickly on the green bond market, which we're very excited about. As I just mentioned, there's, you know, close to 1000 issuers from 40 plus countries around the world. We've participated in issued two of them. So we've raised 2.2 billion of capital and the mandate to invest around those green bonds is from renewable energy through building efficiency projects and waste, waste and water Efficiency and treatment. So this is a clear move by capital markets to facilitate long term investments in the sector. So that's on the institutional capital side. What's happening in equity markets is equally profound Whether it was, you know, the, you know, everyone likes to talk about the Larry Fink letter that was issued a year ago, but this movement around disclosure accountability what we're seeing an impact funds there's probably at least a couple dozen impact funds in the market right now, who are clearly investing around this theme. So you're seeing it in public markets in terms of specific passive ETFs that have clear criteria around what you can invest in and what you can't, which is driving capital in that direction. You've got private equity investors now flooding the market that are thematic based around these key issues of sustainability. And then you've got debt markets. So across the capital stack, you've got each in every segment actively participating in this space. All of this is fantastic progress we've made today. And there's clearly much more to be done. But I think our perspective is you can't change what you don't measure ultimately. So the work around climate disclosure globally is absolutely paramount to this conversation. We have to have a level playing field in terms of how we report emissions, such that we can ultimately price it, and then such that we can ultimately put a value towards it on the profit and loss statement and or the balance sheet. The vision for this is in 10 years we're looking at companies, we're looking at trading multiples, we're looking at precedent transactions and understanding the cost of the climate footprint, the greenhouse gas footprint for each and every company and being able to hit that to the bottom line. All right, Eric, turning to you. We're all aware of the traditional technologies to invest in renewables electricity and heat storage carbon capture we just talked about animal protein. What do you think are still in our collective blind spots that could have a gigaton scale impact and what are we missing in typical energy dialogues. Sure, I think there's, you know, I would think about that in a couple of different buckets that are sort of at the perspective of individual technologies. You know, we have to remember that we're not necessarily talking about energy per se, we're talking about emissions. I think the hardest pieces of this whole game to decarbonize are the large scale heavy industry manufacturing kinds of things right. So it's how you do steel it's how you do cement and remembering that there's probably not going to be a green premium for those kinds of things. So figuring out how you're going to do it at scale and at cost right. And when you start talking about how am I going to replace cement something that I'm going to pay $100 a ton for right. It's very, very, very challenging. I think there's other areas of manufacturing that might be even more challenging. So we recently did a study at BV looking at the emissions profile of textiles and that turns out to be a very large one as well. But it's also fragmented into a million little pieces. So when you sort of stand back and say, what's the big lever I can pull on to have a significant impact on the emissions from textiles. It's not really clear that there is one because it's broken into a lot of different little pieces. So those those big manufacturing and heavy industry kinds of things I think are some of the very hardest ones to do. The other sort of kind of class of blind spots that I would say are the thinking further down the road and thinking through the implications of the kinds of things that we're doing. So there's very much a theme of foot now one that you know we have certainly recognized they're taking advantage of kind of electrifying everything right and this business that the that the availability of very large quantities of very low cost intermittent zero carbon electricity enables a whole bunch of things that you wouldn't ever have thought of before. You know that maybe I can make electrolytic hydrogen for less than $2 a kilogram or even less than $1.50 a kilogram right. You never would have thought of that before. So there's all of these other things afoot. Electrofuels might be the most which we worked on right at the very beginning at RPE long ago might be the best way there is to make electric electric fuel. The implication of that for the demands for power for zero carbon power are nothing short of terrifying right. If you so people know that we've invested in Boston metal which is doing electrochemical production of steel using electrons rather than carbon as the source of reducing equivalents to reduce iron. If you were to replace all of the steel production capacity in the United States with an electric field with a Boston metal approach, you would need to increase the size of the grid by on the order of a third. So you would have to increase the generating capacity of the United States by third and that's just for steel. If we go down the list and think about all of these opportunities that are afforded by this very low cost zero carbon electricity, you're talking about a massive, massive, massive increase in the generating capacity in the United States. And I think that that means you know all of a sudden we need innovations in things like wind and solar fundamentally new approaches to wind lower cost approaches to wind wind that can be cited in places where it can't be cited today is an area that we're very interested in. TAN themselves and other approaches to very high efficiency, electricity of solar generation is an area that I wouldn't have thought we when I first started in breakthrough I would never have thought we'd be interested in. But it's it's an implication of some of these other approaches that we're taking transmission right how we're going to move that electricity around from the places we can generate it to the places we can use it. So fundamentally new approaches to transmission that let us use existing right of ways or to reconduct or existing assets, things like that. So that I think is the other kind of looming blind spot right you take advantage of this interesting opportunity that's come about, but then thinking through the implications and what that's going to mean for for infrastructure development deployment in the coming years. So interesting back to you. Yeah, Eric let me follow up on that I mean your success on the commercial side depends on a lot of R&D that has been done in a pre commercial sense. And you were in the founding team of RPE and 11 years later. Things seem to have gone well for RPE, except for the systemic issues that I've talked about earlier about valleys of debt etc but RPE has done its job. But if the US were to start RPE today, sitting from your vantage point now as a early stage investor. If you were to start RPE today, what would you do differently. It's an interesting question and you know I think all of us that were there at the beginning have talked a lot and participated in panels and studies and all sorts of things and you know how can you replicate this. I think one of the things that so RPE happened at a very particular moment in time. And there was a very particular set of attributes that were almost accidental that allowed us to be as successful as we were. As you know, I think first and foremost what made RPE so successful was the people. We had just the most incredible group of people that I've ever been around and that I've ever worked with in my entire life. And we had that sort of two or two and a half year period there where we really caught lightning in a bottle and I've never been a part of something like that. You know before or since and I don't think anybody should ever lose sight of that. There was also this interesting dynamic. We obviously had Secretary Chu and we were sort of his baby and so we got his care and love and attention. But remember that the initial bolus of money for RPE came from the Recovery Act. $400 million out of a $32 billion I think allocation of money to the Department of Energy that all had to be spent in sort of 50 and months. And then $400 million out of $32 billion that meant we kind of flew under the radar. And so we were able to get a group of people to RPE that never would have come the normal time. I never would have come. I was a chemistry professor. I never worked in energy in my life. You know Dave Danielson was obviously also instrumental. Dave was two years out of his PhD. Nobody ever would have hired people like us to go be the founding except that there was this huge panic and they just had to get it done. And they left us alone to kind of do our thing, right? And I'm not sure that that would happen today and we might sort of be loved to death. So I think that people should remember that that unique set of circumstances that allowed us to do the things that we do. You know, would I do something different? I think the one thing that I would probably do different would have been to start with a bigger budget. I think that starting with a budget as small as we did, it's so hard to grow a budget in Washington. Because, you know, as much love as RPE has got from Congress and in particular the Senate and largely the Republican side of the Senate is at that Lamar Alexander and people like that. It's hard to grow a budget inside Washington. And so the fact that our budget started so small under $200 million in the first real appropriation makes it very difficult to get the levels of a billion dollars or two billion dollars, which is probably where it needs to be to really be impactful against the magnitude of the challenge that's in front of it. So that's probably the one thing that I would do differently. Terrific. Alicia over to you. Can I ask a quick question of Irish? Sure, go ahead, please. Eric, that unleashing of creativity and those constraints that that you just didn't operate in there. How do you replicate that in breakthrough now? Yeah, I have no, well, I think you can you replicate it and break through right now because the people that are running the Department of Energy totally care about RPE. So it gets left to itself, right? But it's absolutely possible to love those things to death, especially in the beginning and people who are worried about, you know, the potential downside. If you're a politician, you're way more worried about downside than upside, right? And so micromanaging the urge to micromanage becomes almost overwhelming. And again, because we were there this funny period in time where people were trying to get $32 billion out the door. We kind of we kind of flew out of the radar. I think it would be very difficult to do RPE from the start again. Don't you agree? No, I think, I mean, yes, I mean, what you said is exactly right. And I think the budget, I agree with you that starting off with a bigger budget is, you know, is important. Otherwise, it's very hard to grow. So as you stated, I think the role of Steve Chu, because if you remember before or before he became the secretary, he was part of the Gathering Strong Report, and he was the one who was pushing this. And so, you know, having his blocking and tackling for RPE and nurturing that in the sense of a Bell Labs kind of culture was very, very, very important. I don't think that should be understated. If you were to have an RPE again, we should get Steve Chu back. In the green mark, in the green mark. Alicia, over to you. Okay, I'm going to direct the last question to you before we turn to student and audience Q&A. In a 2019 report, you identified three key pillars of commercial viability for carbon management. A, integrated policy, B, effective carbon pricing and C, engaged investor community. You have C, but we don't have A and B in the US. Do you have any questions and sovereign wealth funds collectively change things in the absence of policy, or do you really need government? And what else do we need to unlock private capital for the energy transition at scale? Maybe I'll answer that question with an example of what we're doing. On the nature-based side, there's amazing progress being made in parts of the world. We can capture nature-based solutions at $7 a time. And so, you know, when looking at your question, Alicia, can you do it without policymakers? Absolutely, you can. You can create these voluntary markets where the impetus is upon investors and companies to meet these thresholds in order to continue capturing capital and continue growing their business. I only know three ways you can make money from investing. One is increase revenue, two is cut costs, and three is invest to grow. And so the climate or the critical ingredients to do that is the access to ongoing capital and the creation of those opportunities where you can get scale, you can drive profitability, and you can ultimately return capital. You know, give it back to shareholders. So in absence of that policy being in place, what we're seeing is the creation and emergence of this voluntary market that I expect to continue growing. Our hope is to see that, you know, continue to increase, you know, up to and ultimately in the high double digits over time. But, you know, we've got to look at that cost stack of capturing sequestration starts at the bottom and continue working up. And hopefully we see a growing material carbon market evolve. Okay, we'll turn now to questions from our audience. But before I do that, let me introduce Maya Gerter, who will be moderating questions from our students. Mike is a Sloan fellow at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. He received a bachelor's in engineering in 2003 from Cambridge University. And since then has been an investor, most notably as a director for nine years in black diamond capital. Mike, let's begin. Thank you, Alicia and a room for inviting me here today to participate. And thank you, Eric and attic for taking the time to speak with us during this dialogue. We had a great deal of interest from students in this dialogue and I'd like to kick off my first question with Eric, please. The innovations technologies and new ventures required to reach net zero by around 2050 will likely need to start scaling in the next decade. However, climate tech and clean energy R&D typically takes time from ideation through to product market fit through to achieving gigaton scale commercialization. What key actions that we need to take today to accelerate clean tech innovations in order to hit this urgent timeline that we face to get to net zero. And it'd be great to hear your views on both technological and non technological innovations in areas such as policy, regulation and emerging economic models. Sure. You know, policy, those kinds of things end up being the bane of deploying infrastructure at the scales that we're trying to do it at here. Enormous amounts of money have to be brought to bear and this infrastructure gets built out over over very long timelines. I tell people all the time that the biggest challenge that there is in the whole energy game is trying to wrap your head around scale, right? We do energy at scales that dwarf any other human activity. And, you know, even as someone who's been working in it for a long time now, you can sort of say the words, but internalizing what scale means is almost impossible to do. And so that kind of scale requires a couple of things. One from the policy side of things and one from the tactical side of things. From the policy side of things, what you need more than anything is continuity, right? It's very, very difficult to attract capital to a space like this if policy is going to change every four years, right? Politicians don't lead, they follow. And so if everything changes every four years, it's problematic. I would encourage administrations to the extent that they can use legislation to introduce policy rather than executive action, right? Because executive action is far too easy to undo and we saw the Obama administration, you know, basically got tired of trying to do legislation. It's too hard to work with Congress. And so they did a lot of stuff by executive action. The next administration can very easily come in and just turn it all out around. So, you know, to the extent that these things can be enshrined in law to give investors the confidence that there's going to be at least some level of continuity, I think is absolutely critical to deploying these big infrastructure things. On the technical side of things, without looking at a specific technology, what I would say is that people need to be incredibly mindful of the constraints that the kinds of scales that we're talking about impose on what you can do. And so we see technologies all the time that are incredibly clever, incredibly thoughtful, incredibly interesting and have absolutely no hope of ever being deployed at scale, right? Using rare metal catalysts and things like that that just don't scale. I mean, technology, and I think I'll pick on the Bay Area, technology, especially in the Bay Area, it turns into a fetish, right? Where people want to do stuff that's super cool. And that's fun and it's fine. But thinking about how stuff is going to get deployed and deployed at scale. What you're really looking for is kind of Russian tractor technology, right? That's the kind of stuff that can get deployed. So that's from the technology perspective broadly. That's what I would say is to be careful about developing very, very clever technologies that have no chance of being deployed at scale. That's very helpful. Thank you. Just as a follow up, you spoke about some of the challenges of scaling even VC funding in this space. What can we do to channel more VC funding into climate tech? And are there lessons that we can learn from other disruptive sweet spots that venture capital firms invested such as AI or fintech? Well, I think that the most important thing we can do, and that's why I say the most important thing that we can do at breakthrough is make money. I think it's really pretty straightforward. Investors invest to make money full stop. And what hasn't happened so far is a clear demonstration to the real heavy duty money, the money that people like Avok represent. We haven't demonstrated to that class of people that there's a way to put money to work in this space and see a return on that money. And so I think that it is, unfortunately, incredibly simple and incredibly difficult at the same time. You have to show people that you can make money. That's what's going to attract money to this space. And quite frankly, nothing else is. Great. Thank you very much. I'll go to Alicia. Great. I'm going to chime in with the first audience question. And this is directed at Avok. How do you measure ROI for energy efficiency projects, especially for infrastructure investments? Thanks. It really comes down, I'll just expand on Eric's point, which is you have to make money. So going back to my previous point around growing revenue, cutting costs or investing to expand. When we're looking at these efficiency projects, we're actually looking at the climate impacts on these businesses. We have a tax on carbon in every underwrite, and we're looking at the competitiveness of these businesses for the long term. So if we were applying a conventional lens of private equity on an investment, we may be in something for three to five years with a plan to bullet exit. Our belief is let's go build going concerned enterprises. And if you do that well, and they're sustainable businesses, then someone will pay you for that three to five years from now. And in that context, we look at all sides of that equation. So it isn't just a, you know, in a typical industrial business, you'll look at an efficiency project and say, you know, I'm going to put 10 million to work here and I'm going to get an 18 or 24 month payout on this. And then I'm going to capture a two or 3% efficiency on my operating cost structure. In this venue, you're actually looking at these businesses and saying there is going to be a burden of operating five years, 10 years, 20 years down the road that may not exist today. But when I put that into that ROI calculation, it's an imperative to go act on that now. And ultimately, it comes down to an IRR calculation or an MLIC calculation. Is this good business to do this or not? Fantastic. Just moving on to the next student question. This one's for Avik. So, as you mentioned, as institutional investors are getting more focused on climate risk, climate investment opportunities, ESG led investing in sustainable finance. We haven't seen a significant increase in capital deployed yet in sustainable finance and estimates are that we might have a funding gap of $1 trillion annually needed to be filled. Given the long term real asset infrastructure characteristics of most clean energy businesses and some of the infrastructure investments required around that that Eric just mentioned, do you think pension funds are a natural fit for capital here? Just as a follow up on that, what is the appetite for some technological risk to be taken by pension funds such as CPP IV? Lots there. So let me see if I can hit on parts of it and catch me if I miss anything on the technological front. Absolutely. And I'll start from the last point and work back on the technological front. Absolutely. I think we've identified the opportunity for us is to really invest in late stage venture. Following proof of concept where companies or enterprises need that security of capital ability to have follow along and be a long term investor through all cycles of that investment, whether it's you know late stage CD round, you know, pre scaling into pre IPO and then ultimately being a long term public shareholder. So that's where we focused our attention because it's too difficult for us and we're 1800 employees in eight different offices managing 430 billion CAD. So it's impossible for us to be everything to everyone. And we think bringing that duration to play is where we have a comparative advantage and we have something to offer all of these great innovators that are in the sector today. But in real assets overall what I feel very strongly that real assets is one of the most compelling asset classes on the planet today. We're in a low interest rate environment and the world is materially shifting. So 97% of increased energy demand over the next 30 years is coming from India, China, Africa. Half of global diesel demand is going to switch and markets over the next, you know, 25 years. And in real and then you look at where capital spend is going there's $35 trillion going to be spent around energy transition over the next 30 years across all aspects of it whether it's efficiency, building efficiency, renewables, investments, you know, smart grid technology, every aspect of it. So there will be a growing space in real assets as capital markets move away from public markets towards chasing higher return alpha generation it's going to increasingly go towards real assets, private equity, private credit. And so the opportunity to generate returns by taking risk I think is going to increase and being able to play for the long term and take some of those risks and play that cycle on these investments is going to be compelling. And I think that when you talk about pension funds, it's also important to note that pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, endowment funds, ultimately that is the source of capital for almost all of these asset classes. You know, retail investors are important, but whether you see us as an active investor being on the front line, you know, or, you know, sitting on a board of a new venture, ultimately, this is a massive source of liquidity for all of these asset classes, no matter what part of the balance sheet we play in. So I do think that's going to continue to be an important part of what we do as a pension fund. And I think you're going to see an emergence of other pension funds, whether they're US ones or other international ones, can continue to leg into taking more risk to generate the returns necessary for their beneficiaries. But it's going to take some time. Do they get all of it? I'm not sure I did. I think you did. You gave us a very good feel for it. So really, thank you for that. And I agree with you. The focus tends to be on the climate change challenge, but there's a huge amount of climate change opportunity out there as well, which is very exciting. We'll do one more question from the students before we go back to audience Q&A. And this one is for both Eric and Avik. So we've recently seen some significant strategic announcements and climate commitments being made by the likes of BP, Shell, Amazon, Google, Unilever, and dozens of others, as climate change risks, actions and targets are incorporated into their strategic plans. How is evolution in strategy by large corporations likely impact the clean tech ecosystem, particularly around innovation, commercialization and funding? Are we likely to see greater corporate venture capital activity and greater M&A as large players seek to acquire innovative technologies? Eric, would you like to go first? Sure. So I think you have to be careful about lumping all of those firms into a single bucket because I think they're different firms with different motivations that have different skill sets, different opportunities, different challenges. We know, for instance, that Amazon is now very active in this space. And I think that given the size of Amazon, given the rate at which it's growing, I think that they have the potential to be very important market actors. I think that they can support innovation and I think that they can direct markets powerfully in important directions. So people like that who are large consumers of energy, I think can be very powerful in the choices they make as companies and the way they choose to behave. So I think that that's hugely important. When you look at the oil companies, I think it's a lot more complicated and I think that group of people as well is not monolithic. What I will say about the oil companies is that they are some of the few people on earth that really do understand this issue of scale, that really do know how to do things at scale, that really do know how to be impactful at deploying technologies at these literally incomprehensible scales. And so to the extent that you can bring those people along, I think it's incredibly important. What I would say is historically not very many businesses have been able to steer their ships and make transitions to sort of fundamentally reinvent themselves, right? I don't know. I hope they can because frankly I think they have a skill set that we desperately need. I'll take the other side of that bet. Yeah. I would argue there's probably not a company in the world that has been able to do that. I'll take the other side of that bet. Yeah. I would argue there's probably not a company in the world that's better prepared to understand and innovating carbon capture and sequestration in the next And that particular piece, I agree. Yeah. And then on the other side of that, I would also say Shell has got probably the highest probability of being the world's largest power producer in 10 or 20 years. So one of the things I'm most excited about across any asset class is what energy transition is going to mean for big oil. So for a century, you've had these historic companies who have been the preeminent traders, the preeminent explorers. And frankly, to your point, Eric, the preeminent project managers of large scale CAFEX projects and really complicated places all around the world. And what was big oil is now going to be big electricity. And so what was the integrative of yesterday in exploiting, extracting, processing, transporting, upgrading and delivering as a transportation fuel around oil, I think is going to be in the business of electrons going forward. And I can't imagine companies better place to go do that than the majors with the caveat that big tech is just faster, quicker, better capitalized to go do many of the critical elements of what electrification is going to look like. So I don't know that they'll own every part of the value chain. And we thankfully have companies like Amazon breaking ground and pushing that innovation, but I'm really excited to see what the ecosystem looks like in 10 years from now. Fantastic. Thank you both for that. Arun, over to you. Sure. Let's talk hydrogen, because I think this is something that has come up many times and Eric you and I have chatted about this quite a bit on hydrogen. You mentioned about electrolysis and hydrogen at something like $2 something less than $2 a kilogram. And that mark has been set because of steam and reforming, which gets you hydrogen without carbon capture about $1 $20 a kilogram. Now $2 a kilogram is $15 a million BTU. It's going to be hard for it to compete for things where you need hydrogen as a fuel for heating, which is a big deal. So are we are we chasing the wrong target? Should it be $3 a million BTU or so for hydrogen, which is like 50 cents a kilogram? It depends clearly on what you want to do with that. If what you want to do is try and make liquid fuels, the energy content of a kilogram of hydrogen and gallon of gasoline are just about exactly the same. So if you're $2 a kilogram, just for the energy content of the fuel, and now you think about the CapEx, the OpEx, the efficiency of blah, blah, blah, it's really hard to see how you're ever going to be able to make fuels cheap enough to do things. And as you know, just turning it flat out into heat is even harder. So I think you have to be a little bit careful. Hydrogen from electrolysis, you're making hydrogen as a chemical fuel that you can either do things with or move, right? I mean, the most efficient way to get heat and especially space heat and things like that very low value heat from is to move the electricity and use the electricity to generate heat. If you're going to try and replace even higher temperature process heat, which you would like to do, then yeah, I think that hydrogen is going to have to be considerably less than a kilogram. But again, there's 33 and a third kilowatt hours of energy in a kilogram of hydrogen, right? At a cent a watt, you're at 35 cents just for the hydrogen. Never mind, you know, again, the CapEx, the OpEx, the efficiency. So I think that you would have to look at some very unusual sources of hydrogen. And you know, you and I have talked extensively about this business of trying to figure out a way to extract the reducing equivalents in the Earth's crust, right? To turn iron two and water and heat into hydrogen as a sort of effectively inexhaustible source of hydrogen that came out, came up out of the ground. But other than doing something like that, it's awfully difficult to see how you're ever going to get hydrogen that cheap. Alicia, over to you. Sure. Another question from the audience. I think we can start with this for Eric, but OpEx feel free to chime in as well. Are we overlooking projects for drilling technology breakthroughs to enable profitable access to deep hot, dry rock geothermal? Sure. That's a great question. And as you know, we really don't have drilling tools that'll work at much above 300 degrees C, and that very much limits what you can do with geothermal today. So the development of tools that could work at temperatures considerably above that, I think that's absolutely a great opportunity and something that we would be interested in. We are investors in a couple of geothermal drilling companies, and I would say advances in drilling technology as opposed to equipment per se have greatly expanded the opportunities for geothermal and for the production of electricity by geothermal. I think the development of tools that could work at high temperatures would be at least as important and perhaps more important. Thanks, Mike, your turn to ask. So just the next student question. This is for Eric and Avik again, both of you, please. So we're increasingly seeing SPACs, special purpose acquisition companies being used to raise capital with a mandate to acquire typically private companies in a given sector. There are about 10 SPACs with ESG or energy transition related mandates that have been raised in 2020 out of a total of about 70 in the market so far and counting. How do these vehicles and new capital affect the clean tech ecosystem, and how could they be used to bring new technologies to maturity? Avik, would you like to go first? Sure, I'll go first. You know, it's when you step back and look at SPACs, you know, they're special purpose acquisition vehicles. They're formed around preeminent, personally individuals who've been in the space that have access and credentials in the public market, and it's just a different method of ultimately getting into public markets. It's technology that's been around for 30 plus years, and where they work and where they're prominent is where you have market inefficiencies. So one of the most interesting dynamics at play today is where you've got increasingly focused smart beta or algorithmic trading or ETFs dominating public market exercise. There's been a lot of pain reversion to trading activity when all of it's getting filled by ETFs overall. And where you have great market volatility, you see these openings for really smart people and sophisticated investors to pile in and find those ways of bringing to public markets interesting companies and ideas that don't have a following. One fascinating over the past five years through an energy lens is, you know, five years ago, if we were talking about a public company and their institutional shareholder base, there would be sector specialist fund managers who were deep in that domain, understood the names, understood the technologies to talk about, you know, things that were technical, commercial and strategic about that industry. In many sectors, like the energy sector today, those, those specific fund managers have all left. And so what it's doing is it's creating this vacuum. So I think the facts, there's a lot of attention around them. I think they're a great vehicle for the right company that's looking to scale and capitalize on a market opportunity today. The structure is going away. As an institutional shareholder, you know, we see a place for them. But it doesn't change the fundamentals of any board or any management team, which is you've got to grow companies to make money. And when a SPAC is a viable alternative to get public, and you have a use for those proceeds to further grow your company, then great. But to hit a market because SPACs are hot in itself, I wouldn't use as a, as a capital formation strategy. I agree with that 1000%. You know, they're kind of the cool new, the shiny new object on the street at the moment. And so they're getting a lot of attention. I don't think they're, I don't think they're good. I don't think they're bad. I think that there's, there's situations where they make a lot of sense and can be very useful. I, my prediction is we'll see a couple of those spectacularly badly, and then people will be a little more circumspect about when you use them and when you don't. Great. Fantastic. Thank you so much. Anisha over to you. I want to stick with you. You mentioned that RPE really needs to get at least $2 billion to make an impact. How do you measure the impact of your capital investments? And have you found tools like Crane, which measure emissions reduction potential of early stage ventures useful? And how do you think about equity issues, especially as it relates to serving underserved communities and protecting against unequitable distribution of climate impacts when you're considering the impacts of your investments? Right. So there's an awful lot. There's an awful lot in there. So, again, breakthrough was designed to tackle the sort of biggest, terriest problems there are in the climate space. We use as our threshold half a gigaton per year. So we will invest in technologies that we believe have entitlement to at least half a gigaton per year. So the question is, what's the price for performance of the technology? What's the size of the market? What would you have to believe would get you to half a gigaton? And usually what I tell people is, if you need a spreadsheet to explain to me how you get to half a gigaton, I don't want to do that, right? Because it's sort of interesting when you ask people to do that, that inevitably their technology is going to say 0.56 gigatons. It's never exactly half. It's always 0.56. Look, there are a million tools out there for calculating the impact of various technologies and the carbon intensity of various technologies. And I think that they are all valid in a particular way. But there are so many knobs to turn. There are so many ways to adjust the numbers that accept in the very broadest of brushstrokes. I personally don't find the models terribly helpful. I mean, I think they are to some people in some circumstances, but for me, I know I want to go after steel. I know I want to go after liquid fuels. I know I want to go after cement. And I don't need a model to know that I want to go after it. So we've looked at a lot of different models. I would say that we don't make extensive use of them. The issue with protecting underserved communities. I think that it's incredibly important to remember that the underserved community that we're most concerned with here is the 80% of the planet that lives in the non-OECD world. That is the biggest underserved community that there is out there. That is the group of people who want to and have every right to an expectation of a quality of life, a standard of life, equal to that of those in the West. So for us to go to that group of people and say, yeah, I know that we achieved this incredible standard of living by burning oil and gas and coal. But you can't because now we've discovered that there's these environmental problems. I think that is the community that needs to be protected. And I think that there's an incredible onus on us to develop technologies that give that huge chunk of the world Western like standards of living without the environmental problems. And I think that that is our burden. That is our responsibility. That's what I take most seriously. And that's the underserved community that I am most focused on. Thanks, Mike. I think we've got you before Arun. Thank you, Alicia. So, I guess this next question is for you and it's a bit more Canada specific. I guess resource exports are key to the Canadian economy, but with declining imports of fossil fuels and energy decognition generally in the US. What would be your advice to Canada, the government of Canada, how to tackle this. So the Canadian energy industry for 70 years has been a bastion of innovation, efficiency and entrepreneurs. I mean, that's there's countless examples of that. Much of the technology around drilling innovation reservoir management, much of that has been incubated in Alberta. Over the course of, you know, generations in the industry as we look out today. I think there needs to be a real conversation around what optimal production in different climate oriented scenarios really looks like. And a recognition that, you know, we're unlikely to ever see 7 million barrels a day of oil supply coming out of Canada. But what we should see is three to five of the world's most efficient, clean, safe resources getting to foreign markets, because a bulk of the capital has already been spent. And on a point forward basis, if we can figure out efficiency electrification carbon capture and sequestration, then we will have a resource that can deliver net zero targets and an increasing in a world where carbon prices are increasing. That may not be consistent with everyone's perspective on Canadian energy, but where you look at natural gas as a feedstock, you know, we could talk about hydrogen, but natural gas in any scenario, whether you're at one and a half degrees, two degrees, 40 gigatons, 70 gigatons. You know, we talked about a bunch of the scenarios today. There's a role for safe, clean and viable natural gas getting to markets. There is a role for energy. And there is a role for oil supply. So the advice is, figure out in that world and those, you know, Eric talked about on the venture side, you know, what the end state looks like, you know, what are you trying to accomplish. Similarly, for Canadian energy, we've got to be able to define what, what the North Star is, you know, what the end game is. So in that scenario in 2030, chasing growth may not be the way we ultimately deliver returns. Chasing efficiency is, you know, looking at the cost side, looking at the efficiency side, optimizing revenues and optimizing those end markets that put a value to that energy. You know, clean, efficient and responsible energy. That's great. It also requires massively leaning into all parts of this equation. Can't do without capture. That's great advice probably for all nations, not just Canada. So thank you for that. If I can ask the next question of Eric, and this is around biology, biology based solutions. We are biology based solutions like bio generated hydrogen and photosynthetic fuels to have an impact on a significant scale. I mean, that's that's such a complicated and multifaceted question. I mean, I think the answer is extremely highly likely. I guess that, you know, the question becomes, what exactly does it mean? We've already talked about the potential for for biology in agriculture. You know, we've got pivot bio, for instance, in our portfolio that's developed an organism that produces reduced nitrogen of only a fertilizer. Man made for synthetic fertilizer. I think pivot out a million acres planted last year. So that's already at a relatively large scale and that that will go to a very, very, very large scale. I do think that there is a role for biomass extracting carbon from the atmosphere and also providing reducing equivalents. And so I think that there are there are there are there are real possibilities there that will will absolutely be realized. You know, I think that people have to be realistic about what biology can do and what biology can't do. What what scale means the need for other resources like water. So so so biology will absolutely be important. But like everything else, it's not a silver bullet that's going to solve it. Thank you so much. I think you're next. Sure. First of all, I just want to thank the audience. This has been a very, very active audience that lots of questions we are. I'm not sure we'll be able to get through all of them, but we're trying to group them. I just want to follow up a little bit of for Eric. You know, you mentioned early on about food that you can make, you know, you want to make milk, you want to make heme and other things and other ingredients. But as you know, very well, when you look at food, it is very, very complex. And this is not a simple thing. There are there are micronutrients that are other aspects of food. You know, there are macronutrients as well. So when you try to build food from from a bottom up way. I mean, have you thought about some of the implications of that on human health. And are we, you know, are we tinkering with things that we don't know exactly where it's going to go. So talk about the unintended consequences that you might, you know, that may haunt us later on. How do you think about that? Well, you know, the one thing I can absolutely positively guarantee you is that there will be a plethora of unintended consequences, right? There is absolutely no possible way to do things that the scales we're talking about here and not have unintended consequences. So I think that's the first thing that we have to be careful of. If what you want to do is have an absolute unambiguous answer to every conceivable question that could ever possibly be raised, we're not going to get anywhere. And so that's the one thing that I can guarantee you, but whatever the alternative is going to be, it's going to have environmental consequences. And there are going to be unintended consequences. So we sort of have to get comfortable with that and tell ourselves, you know, that the bar isn't nothing, the bar is better than the alternative, right? And we know what the alternative is. And the last time the temperature of the surface of the earth was as warm as it is today, sea level was 25 feet higher than it is today. So, you know, that's the alternative. So that's the first thing that I would say. The second thing that I would say is, you know, I think that you can be thoughtful, that you can be careful. Before we invested in naturopine, for instance, we spent a huge amount of time looking at the amino acid composition of the proteins that are produced and compared them to the amino acid compositions of proteins that would be in normal diets, right? There are some amino acids that have to come from diets that don't. And, you know, is this actually going to be an important source of human nutrition? So I think that you can be careful. You can be thoughtful about that. The micronutrients and such that you're talking about are absolutely important. But again, I think, you know, in 2020, I think that most of those issues can be appropriately addressed. And remember, too, that for the most part, we're not talking about replacing 100% of people's diets. We're talking about replacing, you know, one component of people's diet. So I think that they are issues, but I think that they can be addressed. So I'm going to ask each of you to give some closing remarks. But before I do that, I just want to ask one last question, which was one of the panelists, one of the audience questions. And this goes back to, and this is for both of you, but this goes back to Eric, something you said about the underserved communities in the world. We know that most of the population growth is going to be in Africa in the next, in this century. And the energy infrastructure has not yet been built. There's an opportunity to leapfrog into a 21st century infrastructure, for sure. But there is also challenges in that. And, you know, Bill Gates was here two years ago at the Global Energy Forum, when he correctly pointed out that if you really want to address climate, unless China and India are on board to reduce carbon emissions, it's game over. Take the Africa opportunity and the challenges. Take India and China and give us your view of what are we, you know, what, how should we think about addressing both the energy access issues and carbon emission issues in that in Africa, India and China. Give us a view on that. I'll make you want to go first. Sure, happy to you know, if you look at Africa in particular, the electrification of Africa and in particular, how we think about distributed generation, I think is going to be an incredibly fascinating and mission critical opportunity set for investors over the next investors and governments over the next 30 years. And I think in particular, what we're going to see is your transmission and distribution around conventional generation or nuclear generation, those are all expensive long term projects. What I'm excited about, you know, when I talked earlier about what integrated energy looks like. What it's going to look like is you're going to have base load power. That's going to be a combination of renewable plus conventional plus sequestration plus batteries plus energy management solutions. And I firmly believe this distributed generation model that'll be based around smaller communities, leveraging off of commercial and industrial customers, and then broadening that to smaller communities. And that build out is going to be transformational on the carbon conversation without question. It's true, without India and China, you know, we're still going to be at 55 60% coal for for, you know, total energy demand 30 years from now and that won't solve the solution will be at 7080 gigatons of GHG before we know it. So I think the impetus of coming down the cost curve on distributed generation and the economics of transferring and transitioning from coal to gas to renewables to a broader integrated energy management solution will ultimately dictate what the outcomes are. If we can't get the technology to bring the cost down, it's going to be hard to drive policymakers in a different direction, as Eric had pointed out earlier in the conversation. So we got a, we got a, we got a bet on technology and innovation. Thank you. And Eric, a short answer I know you alluded to this earlier. Again, people aren't going to pay a premium, right? People, people are going to pay, people are not going to pay a premium. And so we have to develop the other. The other thing that I would mention just in passing is that I think we have to be a lot more sophisticated about these issues than we have been. You know, South Africa, Nigeria and Mali are all part of Africa, but they're completely different in their needs and their opportunities in their, in their everything. And so we've got to be careful about that. China and India are absolutely important as well, but in very different ways, right? And then for all of these places, I would not just focus on electricity building materials. The issue in China right now is cement, right? And it's going to be in other places as well. So don't just focus on the power generation piece of it. So a quick, very short closing remarks, especially advice to the youth and people who are students. Any thoughts from you, Eric, and then Avik? I think that there are incredible opportunities in this space investing across the entire spectrum, starting from the earliest stage, you know, taking a toy model out of a lab and toward something that might be scaled all the way through to late stage deployment. And so I would absolutely encourage people who really want to have an impact and really want to make a difference to think about opportunities in this space as careers going forward. We need models for how to invest in this space. I applied, applaud Avik and what they're doing. And obviously I applaud, you know, Bill and folks who have done breakthrough. I think we probably need to try more models to figure out even more effective ways to go forward. Avik, short comments. Follow what you're passionate about. We're living history at the moment. And so precedent is not necessarily going to shape the future. And if you can build conviction around a theme or an idea, or how you want to spend your time, you know, pursue that with bigger and the opportunity will be get itself. Thank you. And Avik and Eric, thank you so much for joining us today. But before we end to the audience, you should know that there's an important upcoming discussion coming up on October 22 on an action plan for carbon capture and transportation in California based on the joint study between the Energy Futures Initiative that Ernie Moniz runs and Stanford, Stanford Center for Carbon Storage. We are putting the link up there. Please note that link and you can join us October 22. There will be more information that will be sent to you. Again, Eric and Avik, thank you so much. And thank you to all of you for joining us around the world for the global energy dialogue. We found it informative and relevant during these unprecedented times. Please join us two weeks from now for a conversation with Lucas Jopa, Chief Sustainability Officer of Microsoft, will focus on corporate sustainability. Again, please register on our website, gef.stanford.edu, and note the date and time October 28, 8 30 to 10 am California time. We will now conclude a broadcast of today's program on behalf of the entire Stanford prequel Institute of Energy. We thank you for joining us, and we'll see you next time.