 Good morning everyone. I'm Sally Benson. I've been the director of the global climate and energy project for a long time For those of you who've been here coming year after year You've seen me and and I've I've seen you so Anyway, so so let's go ahead and get started. We are really excited. This is the 13th annual Global climate and energy project symposium and I think you're in for a real treat because like always we have an amazing group of speakers here and This year the focus the theme for our event will be You know advancing energy research GSEP and beyond we're going to be looking out to the next the next 15 years So I thought it would be wonderful to take this moment to talk a little bit about the history and evolution of the GSEP portfolio of research and I'd like to begin by sort of giving you the snapshot of what we did in the end So this is a pie chart that illustrates all the areas of research we have worked on and you can see It's very broad and very diverse and this was by design And and this was a portfolio that was really developed organically seeking the best ideas from Stanford faculty and Seeking the best ideas from faculty and students and and so forth from around the world So you can divide this up into a number of big categories the single largest group of investment was in the area of renewable energy research and The next largest was in the area of carbon-based energy systems basically trying to find ways to use fossil fuels more efficiently and to Decarbonize them in the later years. We started to do a lot of work in in energy storage and and fuel cells We then also in the early days did a lot of work on hydrogen and And all throughout this time period we use sort of systems analysis energy systems analysis to underpin A lot of the strategic thinking and decision-making about GCEP So so the way this this these proposals were selected was we had a list of categories that that faculty could propose to To do work with us and in addition to that we would look at our portfolio and we'd always asked the question What's missing and we identified a number of ideas what that we're missing and those were the areas we actually would solicit ideas from Faculty from Universities around the world and I thought I could just highlight some of these so so the first one of these we called these targeted calls for Proposals within the area of hydrogen and what we would do before we would issue a call for proposals We would invite the leading experts from around the world to come spend a day or two with us identifying what were the opportunities what were the challenges what were the critical areas where we're Deep and thoughtful research could make a difference. So hydrogen was the first one The next one was on advanced coal utilization And we had a number of ideas in that area We next in 2006 moved on to fuel cells and batteries and got our first proposals for new battery architectures and advanced fuel cells Next was high efficiency PV This was the really pushing the efficiency frontier solar cells that could perform with efficiencies of better than 44% So radically new ideas that would open up the third generation of photovoltaic cells After that we shine looked at biofuels and in particular identified a very challenging problem of lignin management Lignin is very recalcitrant and if we could find a better way to convert lignin to sugars or to to Allow the lignin not to interfere with the conversion to sugars that the biofuels could be unlocked in terms of greater potential We then moved on to the electric grid We hypothesized that one One solar cells and wind became inexpensive enough that the next big challenge the grand challenge would be grid integration And as you see many of these ideas I think what you'll see is that long before these became terribly popular topics GSEP had identified these as important areas of pursuit We then moved on to grid grid scale storage, which was obviously going to be key as we had inexpensive Renewable electricity and we had a better grid. We need that could then move on to think about how we're going to store all that energy But carbon capture and storage were very critical technology for deep decarbonization We didn't do any work in carbon capture. So we we went out to the to the community and got a lot of good ideas there And then in 2012 I think very interesting negative emissions This is the idea that you can Actually extract carbon dioxide from the air from the atmosphere and sequester it either in useful products or you can pump it underground or trap it in in Biomata biological matter trees trees soils and and and so forth and this was 2012 again long before Negative emissions had become sort of a part of the everyday discussion about how we were going to deal with climate change Moving on to developing countries. You know in spite of the fact that by 2013 the price of renewables had dropped dramatically They still weren't nearly inexpensive enough to deploy at a grand scale in the developing countries So could we find much more inexpensive ways to produce these critical technologies? So that's how this is developed So anyway, I thought that would be fun history for you to see all that and this this organic and slightly targeted evolution of this portfolio So so just yesterday we had our management committee meeting and we always sort of take stock of what's happened in Chisholm and and There were some numbers that kind of blew me away away So I just thought I'd give you a little bit of Chisholm by the numbers So a hundred full-scale proposals funded these were projects that were multiple year typically three years They were funded at a high enough level that typically multiple faculty members could collaborate with a team of students Which I think was really unique and and and one of the main reasons GSEP was so impactful 935 peer-reviewed publications in leading journals and counting that's an enormous enormous contribution from all of the faculty and students staff who participated in this program and Then one that I think you should all be incredibly proud of is that the field-weighted impact factor of the G-slip portfolio of Publications actually has a five times higher impact factor than the than the field average Okay, but that's good. You expect that right, you know from the amazing group of people But it's two and a half times as good as the average Stanford publication So what so I'm very proud of that so anyway, you all did a really great job and it also tests to the The the interest in in these new energy technologies So now I thought I just sort of do a little very quick walk through the the particular areas where where GSEP focused its attention and The first one I'd like to talk about is co2 capture and storage so so picture, you know You're now back in in the early days at this point. There were two CO2 storage projects in the world. There was one in Norway and then there was one in Canada But really very the fundamental science of co2 storage was largely unknown and and how we would manage underground injection to optimize these processes needed a tremendous amount of work and and and G-slip has worked on this area continually So what some of the early work we did does that some work by Lenore actually on co2 enhanced oil recovery and He and his team figured out that if we manage the reservoir differently than than you do for a typical enhanced oil recovery operation that you could actually store much more co2 per ton of per barrel of oil that you produce Next was this idea that when you put carbon dioxide in an underground aquifer that it begins to dissolve in the water and it creates very complex Convective mixing and this was a problem that was really computationally intractable and Hamdi Chalepi and Lynn and colleagues really wrote the first and most important publication on this which is still The number one publication in this area They then moved on to to understand more about something called residual gas trapping and did really the first Simulations to show that this could actually contribute very very substantially to To increasing the security of carbon dioxide storage by immobilizing the co2, so it couldn't escape from the reservoir And moving on from now the question became well, what is it exactly that leads to? residual trapping of co2 and immobilization of co2 and we began to do experiments that shoot showed that the Heterogeneity of rocks is really a key factor that controls how much of this trapping But then we wanted to be able to predict Quantitatively how this worked and so we we developed methods for mapping the subcore scale properties of a rock never been never been done before And showed that you could quantitatively predict the performance of Reservoir rocks and finally went on to do work on on showing how this heterogeneity is actually related to the degree of trapping so that's an example of the evolution of ideas and contribution of G sep in one area So I now want to move on to transportation So so again, let's put ourselves back in the time 2002 if you look at the automobile efficiency stand efficient the typical efficiency of an American car that was being driven that they hadn't actually changed in a long time and Advances and transportation especially like-duty were sort of taking very good place incrementally and And and Chris Edwards came along and said well now is the time for bold and radical Transformation and why can't we have an engine that's more than 60% efficient and he threw a number of projects really pushed just efficiency frontier and showed that it's possible to have a a soothless very very high efficiency engine and there and and their startup companies now pursuing these ideas now, but at the same time really the potential the dream of electric cars was was Beginning to to come to come to life and but you needed much much better batteries and in Yixue Developed this idea of a silica nanowire battery that could be much more much have a much higher energy density than the traditional lithium-ion batteries that were being used and And again, this is moved on and there's a company who's working on this But then the grand challenge, you know, and we had a great discussion yesterday about what do you do about really long-distance transport? You know what happens when you want to be able to go, you know 600 miles or you know more And so so Shen we found got the idea. Well, why not make roadbeds where you have embedded? Magnetic induction that actually allows you to charge your car while you drive then you don't need such a big battery in your car and And this is kind of a wild idea, but actually that technology is now developed that you can You can move over a series of chargers and your car will will be charged So we can imagine a superhighway between here in LA or here in New York that Did you get to drive along and when you get to your destination you've got just as full of battery as you had when you started But but again batteries have challenges particularly some of these more advanced advanced chemistries and the cycling of batteries degrades them and so so Yixue and colleague Jen and Bao developed a basically a self-healing Polymer that that could make the battery life extend much longer and then finally We got into into the business of light-weighting cars You know imagine a car where you have a this this plastic shell beautiful concept car But in order to make that happen in order to make that work You need coatings that that make that plastic just as safe and durable as as the as the glass and and the coatings we use today and you'll hear about that Okay, so let's move on let's move on to photovoltaics. We did a lot of work. You know really The holy grail here is to make solar electricity cheap enough So it's available to everyone everywhere at the time The panels were costing our modules were cost about three dollars a watt way way too expensive we need something more like 30 cents 30 cents a watt and and silicon was the the dominant technology that was being at the used at the time and and the complexity of Manufacturing that made it seem difficult to to really drive down that cost curve So many of different ideas in film technology is third generation ideas We're being pursued to try to drive down these costs and Mike McGee he here at Stanford Was working on organic solar cells and he got this idea that you could have basically an ordered bulk header ejection Junction solar cell that would optimize both light absorption as well as electron transport and And moving on then so if you think about Thin film solar cells the thinner you can make them the less materials you need also You have a higher chance of actually being extract the the the electrical energy from that and so mark brongers ma and colleagues at Caltech Developed some very elegant and important theories about how you could trap light in very very thin film So that you could you could make these very thin film solar cells that had very very high performance And and other materials were important So and Gena bow developed the concept of Transparent conducting electrodes made out of carbon-Newton nanotubes with with fullerine glue to make stretchable and flexible transparent electrodes and Again, there's a company here that that is actually working on these ideas And then she went a little farther and said well, but let's make an all carbon solar cell every single component every single active component would be carbon-based and and was able to demonstrate through Building one of these and then finally thinking now what's what's happening is you know the perovskite revolution is has really turned the solar PV World, you know on its head it used to take Decades to to improve the efficiency and this family of materials perovskites over a very very short time went from low Efficiencies to to to high efficiencies and the Mike McGee he again working on this develop the idea of a tandem Cell made entirely of perovskite and and is the world record holder for efficiency for those cells Okay, so so another area Renewable fuel synthesis. Okay, so so if you think back to that time period And you look at the the energy contained in the Sun or if you look at abundant wind energy The idea is you'd make electricity But but even back then we had faculty members who said yeah, but you know can't we do something else? You know heat's good electricity is good But what we really need is a fuel because we need to power our transportation We also need to store a mass of quantities of energy that it would be hard to store in a battery So why not make renewable fuels and and at the time there was a lot of work on biofuels, which is one form but but there were other ideas and and And we were able to engage Leaders like Nate Lewis who was working on artificial photosynthesis the idea that you'd essentially Make a leaf-like structure that would that capture solar energy and basically produce hydrogen and worked on this very Elegant and novel device architecture that would allow you to do that This led to to this early support to Nate Lewis led actually to the development of j-cap one of the the Department of Energy's major efforts into renewable fuels Other challenges so so it turns out silicon is actually a pretty good material for splitting splitting water That's what you want to do make hydrogen But but it's highly corroded it can be highly corroded in that environment so so So Paul McIntyre and Chris Chidsey came up with the idea that you could actually put a coating with ALD Atomic layer deposition and and they were able to show that you could make these coatings and protect the silicon and get very high high performance from those devices But but what about doing something more than that hydrogen is great But but fossil you know carbon-based fuels are better in particular You can make liquids out of carbon-based carbon-based materials and Tom harm Rio and his colleagues and students Started to work on this and they did some very interesting experiments with a novel reactor And they were able to show that that's would during co2 reduction on copper surfaces You were actually making a whole host of organic molecules that had heretofore been not even Known and and again, there's there's a startup working on this idea that you're going to hear about Matt Cannon Discovered a very interesting material a copper oxide derived catalyst that had very very high selectivity and performance for making ethanol and And did some work to be able to show that it was actually the green boundaries in this unique nano-structured catalyst that led to these very high Performance with regard to ethanol production and more recently Tom Tom Haramio has been working on on advanced materials for for oxygen evolution So again moving from hydrogen To to to carbon-based fuels based entirely on renewable energy Okay, so I'll say a little bit about biomass I mentioned that at the time corn-based ethanol was was a well well established Technology though it was really quite controversial at the time There was a big question how much benefit is there because When you're making a corn ethanol from corn the energetic inputs from fertilizer and so forth are very high And so we were looking for alternatives But one of the big questions games well What really is the the global potential for biofuels and some people so you can do the whole energy system based on that? Others said the potential is very very little and and so Chris Field and his colleagues came up with a very authoritative Database rigorous study Suggesting that the global potential for biofuels was on the something on the order of 15% of the global energy demand assuming we didn't Use the same lands that are needed for food and that we would preserve wild lands But they also made the point that the climate change itself was going to change Change the landscape and that and they were able to make some predictions about how quickly habitats would shift With changing climates, which is important has an important implications for the availability of that 15% They also went on to ask questions about as well our biofuels good for the environment and they they came up with some very interesting work to show that the albedo would actually change if you had large areas of Regents producing biofuels and you could actually have local cooling a benefit from from doing that Also very interested in in other approaches for using biology to to make fuels and Jim Swartz has done some really excellent work improving the ability of enzymatic production of hydrogen And we had a great team from around the world really working on on the lignin management problem And they were able to in a collective activity make some real breakthroughs on Being able to engineer plants that could produce much more sugar than the traditional plants and you'll hear more about that And then finally, what about the idea that you take a electrode you provide electricity? You make that an energy source for a microbial community and if you did that would they synthesize fuels for you Well, it was actually known that that worked But the exact mechanism by which the electrons would go from the electrode to the to the organism were not known And if you you know the given that that's such a critical aspect So you know you have to figure that out if you want to take this approach and and Alfred Sporman and together with his colleagues actually have now identified the mechanism that the electrons are transferred and And just briefly I mentioned that we used systems analysis throughout this to help make good decisions for for GSEP and The first one that today there is this chart is in many places It was an exegetic analysis of global energy resource We wanted to ask the question really how much energy is available from all of these different sources And this was the first way that provided an apples to apples comparison. So we really knew how big these resources were We then moved on to define concepts as energy stored on investment So it turns out that batteries take a lot of energy to make them And some types of batteries actually you only get a little bit more energy out than you put in over the lifetime of that battery That's operating and and what we learned really the key thing for research was here Is we need to make batteries that last a lot longer if we want to use them for grid-scale storage? We also answered questions like is the photovoltaic industry a net energy producer to society And we were actually able to show that there was a period of about 10 years Where we were putting so much energy into making new photovoltaic panels And they were taking so much energy to make that it wasn't a net electricity producer But but with improvements in technology We are able to show that in around 2012 or so that the photovoltaic industry became a net electricity producer We also showed this Showed that that sometimes it makes more sense to curtail renewable energy Than it does to store it because the energy it took to build that battery or fuel cell Was so much that that that we should think about That the best thing to do with renewable energy sometime may be to simply curtail And then we said well, what about fuel cells or fuel cells better or worse than batteries? Turns out that this sort of energy stored on investment for fuel cells is quite a bit better about three times better than Then for a battery, but because it's about three times less efficient round-trip efficiency Batteries and fuel cells are kind of a wash And finally did some really interesting work on on looking at Electric transportation battery electric vehicles or fuel cell vehicles and found at least for two countries Germany and and the United States that the battery electric vehicles are probably a more economical choice and Just very quickly a couple of game changers some of the ideas we got We're so radically new that we we just said we have to pursue them even though they seemed very high risk and And and one of them was something called Pete photon and enhanced their myonic emission Nick Milash and ZXN pioneered this there's now a large program in Europe pursuing this idea Developed the idea of open framework batteries using really really inexpensive materials That that could have essentially unlimited cycle life An aluminum Aluminum battery that could be charged in as little as a minute and then finally a technology You'll hear more about radiative cooling the idea that you could generate cool or coldness by capturing the energy that Is associated with radiation from the earth out into space? So I just want to wrap up. We've got a great program for you We have plenary presentations and and I'll introduce those as we come along We have a fantastic panel many of the early sponsors of our of GSEP are back here And we're going to look back 15 years. We're going to look at where we are now and look to the 15 years in the future Of course, we have our technical sessions Which are really the heart of GSEP and and you're going to hear a lot of great talks from from leaders in the field We also have a new special session called innovators to watch These are people who really didn't participate in GSEP, but who have come to join our Stanford community and And they're going to do great things and you're going to get to hear a little bit from each of them We have our technology showcase There are many spin-offs that have Have come from the the GSEP activities and and you're going to hear about some of those also some from other parts of Stanford Our students They're my favorite part. We have our distinguished student lectures They put all of the faculty all of us to shame because they do such a great job talking about their work We have our great poster session From GSEP as well as we've got something new we got posters from another program called our energy transformation collaborative to showcase that and our student social and This is the last GSEP symposium I want to let everybody know GSEP has you know made Tremendous contributions to our community and really laid the foundation for Transformational energy research here. We continue to work with all of our partners We have lots of exciting plans and development and with with our existing sponsors and and even a broader group And and the bottom line is that there's a lot of work to be done This is a 36 billion tons worth of CO2 per year's worth of work to be done between now And when our job is finished so for the students out in the audience here This is a really good problem to work on because I think you'll have a lot of job security to work on decarbonizing the global energy system And I just want to say one more thing really a thank you to somebody. Where is he? There's a Richard Sassoon. Can you stand up? It should I personally have to thank you I we have room for lots of time for lots of things at the end of this But I if anyone was going to leave I just wanted them to realize the incredibly important role you played So thank you Richard. Oh Okay, we're now going to move on and and I'm really delighted to introduce our next speaker It's someone I came to know she is someone I came to know when when I started to serve on the science policy board at the Slack National Accelerator Laboratory she had been at Cornell University and in 2014 no actually I've got this wrong she came back to Stanford in 2002 She went on to be the director of the the National Laboratory here on the Stanford campus. She did an amazing job And and and after that she became the dean of the school of engineering and she is now our new provost Which we are absolutely delighted about that. So please join me in welcoming provost persistral