 May I have your attention, please? We are going to begin our program, so those of you who are enjoying the delicious lunch, grab your plates, find a seat, there are quite a few up here in the front, and begin to keep your ears open to join the conversation. So I would like to welcome everyone to CSIS today for the latest meeting in the Chevron Forum on Development. The forum is part of CSIS's broader project on U.S. leadership in development, and I am actually wearing two hats today, one as a hat on the CSIS Board of Trustees, and the second is a hat that I sit on the Leadership Council of the Initiative for Global Development who helped sponsor today's event. So I am delighted to see both CSIS and IGD working together. The Initiative for Global Development is a global alliance of business leaders united by a common vision of reducing global poverty through increased investment and economic development in frontier markets. IGD's Frontier 100 network consists of CEOs from Africa, South Asia, the U.S. and Europe who build relationships and share knowledge to catalyze economic growth in sectors like energy that have a high potential to reduce poverty. Joe Brandt, Paul Hanrahan, Rob Mossbacker are all members of Frontier 100 Network and Contour Global and AES are great examples of companies that have managed to be successful and to help communities in which they operate. We are grateful to IGD and Frontier 100 for inspiring today's event and bringing us today's panelists. Today's discussion on investment in Africa's power sector is particularly important. For those of us who have been working and living in Africa, you know that one of the most significant problems is the lack of infrastructure. We are fortunate to have a distinguished panel, so let me introduce them quickly. Paul Hanrahan, who is just putting up his hand right now, is the outgoing president and CEO of AES Corporation. AES is a Fortune 200 power company with operations in 28 countries around the world, including in Africa, and I know he has a personal interest and passion for Africa. So welcome Paul. Joseph Brandt is the president and CEO of Contour Global, which he founded in 2005 to invest in, develop and operate power generation facilities in underserved and overlooked foreign markets. So thank you for being with us, Joe. And Rob Mosbacher Jr., who is a longtime friend, thank you for raising your hand, Rob, is the former president and CEO of the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, or OPIC, a position that he served in from 2005 to 2010. He was one of the best presidents for OPIC that I have seen in the past 20 years, and I sat on the board. So it is delightful to see you here, Rob. And Rob is also the chairman of Mosbacher Energy Company. And lastly, raising his hand, is David Pumphrey. Thank you, David. Deputy Director and Senior Fellow at CSIS Energy and National Security Program, who will moderate this top-notch panel. David will also speak up, because David is a really deep, knowledgeable, interesting speaker and thinker. It is important for all of us to be thinking about these models for best development practices by corporations with governments and with communities around the world. So let me now turn over this podium to Richard Downey, Deputy Director of CSIS Africa Program, who will provide some introductory remarks on the state of Africa's power sector and investment therein. So once again, thank you all for joining us, and let us begin. Thank you. Thank you, Henrietta, for the introductions. Welcome, everyone, to CSIS. When I think about the factors which hold back economic developments in Africa, and we think about this a lot on our program, the whole state of the domestic power sector comes very near the top of the list. It's an unfortunate reality that much of the African continent still lacks access to power and electricity. If we look at sub-Saharan Africa, the World Bank suggests that less than 10% of rural households have access to electricity, and the overall access rate is below 25%. The entire generation capacity of the 49 countries of sub-Saharan Africa is approximately 70 gigawatts, which means nothing to me, but is on a similar level to that of Spain, Spain alone. Now, this weakness acts as an immeasurable drag on economic growth. Blackouts or unreliable power supplies force businesses to scale back or halt production, as well as deterring, of course, outside investment. Now, at the same time, domestic energy demand is rising due to Africa's expanding population, and also the growing number of middle-class consumers. Unfortunately, power rationing has become an all-too-frequent phenomenon across the continent, and the likes recently of Kenya, Uganda, and Burundi to name a few. And it's been linked to social unrest also in recent months in Senegal. What's doubly frustrating is that this deficit of domestic energy provision often occurs in countries which have abundant energy resources. Now, it's an often quoted example, but Nigeria, the largest producer of oil in sub-Saharan Africa, is also the largest importer of electricity generators in the world, about 2 million units per year. Simply, citizens and businesses cannot rely on the state to provide them with a reliable power supply. Now, for all the petroleum it produces, Nigeria's refining capacity doesn't come even close to meeting domestic demand. And at the same time, look only at the gas flaring that goes on in Nigeria. Here we have a precious resource that is literally being burned off at great cost to the environment when it could be put to good purpose. Now, Nigeria's challenges are replicated across the African continent, where investment in the power sector is held back by a raft of factors, including regulatory and legal structures, infrastructure gaps, and access to financing. On infrastructure alone, an African Development Bank study last year estimated that the total cost of bridging the continent's infrastructure gap over the next 10 years will be about $93 billion a year, and about 40% of that is in the power sector. We have a new nation of South Sudan in Africa, embarking upon life as an independent nation. Large investments are taking place there in infrastructure, but most of them currently are on things like road construction and agriculture, not on energy infrastructure. As of last year, foreign donors were supporting just one electricity generation project, for example. So in sum, there's a huge untapped demand waiting to be met. And of course, the private sector has a huge role to play. But at the moment, according to the IFC, only 5% of Sub-Saharan Africa's power production capacity is generated by the private sector. So there's this big need, and that's why we're really glad to have these industry leaders here today to share their experiences of how they're going about it, and hopefully to encourage others to follow suit as well. And indeed, there are some encouraging initiatives to discuss. One area, for example, where there's been exponential growth has been the renewable energy sector, where we've seen big investments in solar power, in wind installations, hydropower and biomass energy. So I'm going to conclude on this note of recognizing the challenges but also pointing towards some of the opportunities. With that, I'll turn to my colleague, David, to get the panel underway. So thanks very much. Henrietta, for those introductions. It is really a great pleasure to be moderating this panel, principally because I don't think it's going to require much work from me. I think these are knowledgeable people, and I think will offer great insights. So I will get to them in just a second. But first, the interest of our Energy and National Security Program I think is something I wanted to highlight. As we're looking at future energy markets and the shape of energy markets, as well as the future for greenhouse gas emissions, developing countries are key. We've seen this with China and India, that they are dominating the growth. If you look at any projection that's out there, you're seeing that developing countries are where the growth in energy consumption will be. The space for Africa to develop is huge. And Richard's given some of the numbers about the lack of energy services in Africa and the need to develop those services. And the pathway that Africa chooses has very important implications for global energy security as well as greenhouse gas emissions. So I think it is really critical from both sides of this picture looking at the development side, and Richard has laid this out, that energy is critical for development purposes. Without it, you can't provide the electricity you need for education, for healthcare. Without reliable electricity services, you can't really have a strong industrial base. So it is critical to be moving these forward. And how that develops, I think, will be affecting all of us, not just from a point of view of development, but also what we face in terms of energy and greenhouse gas changes. My rather long career at DOE, I worked for some time on African energy issues. About 20 years ago, I was working with South Africa on questions as they had moved from apartheid into a majority rule, and how do they face bringing electricity services. And that really taught me how daunting this task is and how it is not just governments who will pay for it. It's going to have to be money mobilized worldwide, principally through the private sector. And that's why I think this panel is really the panel that needs to tell us what will they need to be able to bring the kind of investment dollars and the technology that will help Africa address their concerns. So with that, just a little bit of introduction, let's get started. I think first, what we're going to do is very informal. So we didn't set this up with PowerPoint presentations. And any of you, and I see some of my colleagues from the energy world who come to our events, know that's unusual for us because we like mind-numbing PowerPoints to start the presentation first. That seems to be part of the energy world. But this time, we're going to have it much more as a conversation. And hopefully, I can get the panelists talking amongst themselves. Well, I'll start it out with Paul asking you a question to get started from your perspective. You're heading up a very large and well-established international power company and you've had experiences all over the world and you've got some operations in Africa, but relatively small ones. And I guess the question will be, what do you see as the challenges for your company and any private company that's thinking about moving into this marketplace and what kind of changes do you think might be necessary to make it more attractive for private capital to come into that marketplace? Well, thanks, David. And thanks for having me here today. A quick answer to your question is we need a track record of successes in Africa. Just to set the context, AES is a global power company and we have two businesses in Africa. One in Nigeria, which is a barge-mounted generation plant. And we made it barge-mounted because we were so confident of the track record of getting paid that we put these gas turbines on barges so we could remove them, just in case we didn't get paid. Unfortunately, the harbor is silted up. There's no way this thing's ever going to leave. The second investment is much more significant and relevant, I think, and that's the investment in Cameroon. Cameroonian government working with the FFC privatized their entire electric sector in one step. They did this in 2000. We bought a controlling interest in it and have been there since. It's interesting. We took over the business and you could not have picked the worst time to take it over. The country, it's 93% hydro in Cameroon, so it really depends on rainfall. We took it over after an extended drought and the government, when they handed over thought, it would be easier for them to drain the reservoirs and to burn oil, which they did. So we took over, we had empty reservoirs. We had no rainfall and we had a bunch of people who were looking at the newly privatized electric system and saying, how come the lights are out? So it was not a great way to get started. Since then, though, it's actually started to go well. What we had to do first, and I think in any system, you've got to follow the money chain. You've got to start with the customers distribution company, distribution company paying the generator. So a lot of fixing in all ends of that. We had to put new systems in place. We had to improve collections. We had to eliminate some of the leakage that might be associated with fraud. We also had to add thermal generation because you can't have a system that's entirely reliant on rainfall. So we started out with under 800 megawatts. We're over 1,000 megawatts today and we're building a plant now that would take it to 1,200 megawatts. That's about 60% increase in generation capacity, but a lot more is needed. We've invested about $800 million into this business since we've been there. It's been a, I think it's one of the few positive success stories about privatization in Africa. One of the best things that we're doing now is we're expanding the grid to people don't have access to electricity. This grid supplies about half a million customers. We are adding about 60,000 customers a year to the grid. And we're also, so by 2021, we will have increased from about half a million customers to 1.5 million customers. So that's a big achievement. I think the biggest issue with all the African, Sub-Saharan African electricity, privatizations, IPPs, whatever you want to call it, it all comes down to the, basically, can you trust it if you sign up to a deal that looks like it's going to work? Will the governments, in fact, ensure that they work? I think that's a role where the US government multilateral associations, development banks, can play a key role in making sure that it's not that difficult to set up a system that works and that's credit-worthy that makes sense. It's making sure that you implement according to those rules. And we found in Cameroon, and there's always going to be a temptation to when things get difficult, when there's high inflation, to cut back on the tariffs. But I think the Cameroonian government realizes establishing that track record is going to be what's required to attract more capital into the sector. And I think other countries are going to have to do the same thing. Joe, Contour Global is a relatively newcomer. You're a smaller player in this field. But you've decided that Africa is a place that you want to play and has opportunities for you. So can you describe a little bit about your activities and how you evaluate investments in Africa, say, versus other parts of the world? Sure. Thanks, David. We're a privately held company, and so we started in late 2005, our first full year was 2006, and focused on development in emerging markets with a particular emphasis on sub-Saharan Africa in the power sector. Our investor base, which has grown over the last five years, is composed of primarily large institutional investors in the United States and in Europe. And so they are pension funds, insurance companies, endowments from large U.S. universities. And being a private company, we were able to have one-on-one conversations with our investors about what we thought would be interesting in the world to invest in and to get them comfortable with the idea of owning long-term contracted cash flows coming from assets in Africa. And there was a real benefit to that because the first reaction you typically get when you want to talk to an investor about owning cash flows coming from Africa is no. And the second answer is after no is let's talk about some other part of the world. And yet these are the same investors that hold long-term contracted cash flows and look for them all over the United States and Western Europe because most of these institutions have long-term liabilities. And if you own a long-term liability, you would really like to match it with a long-term asset. And if you can match that long-term liability with a long-term asset that actually adjusts with inflation, which is the norm in our market, when we develop power plants anywhere in the world, you typically are getting a fixed payment stream from either a government or a private-sector participant like a utility and those index with inflation. So you have an inflation adjustment every year just like a pension company or an insurance company has an inflation adjustment every year when it comes to keeping their pensioners or their insurance whole. And so these very investors that are in Europe and in the United States investing in things like parking lots, public-private partnerships in the UK with hospitals and schools and prisons, power plants, airports, all for the same reason because infrastructure is seen as a separate asset class, they're the right source of capital for Africa's power development and infrastructure development generally. And over and above that, these investors are the largest source of private capital in the world. I mean, this is where, when people say where's capital formed, it's generally formed in things like insurance companies, pension funds in Europe and endowments. And so moving that capital into Africa is critical to fill the equity funding gap. The problem in Africa, as people who do power development will tell you, is not raising the debt capital. The debt capital is there. It's coming from places like the World Bank Group, from many of the development banks in Europe who are focused on providing long-term subsidized capital through debt financing vehicles for infrastructure. It's the equity funding gap that you need because for these large projects, power projects are very capital intensive and just like when you buy your home, some of it has to be equity. Recently in the United States, you don't have to have any equity, but traditionally some of it has to be equity. And so you have to come up with that equity and the sources of that equity are either the state, bad source for a lot of reasons, or private companies or publicly traded companies that are active in the infrastructure space in a place like Africa. There aren't many. Or it's these big sources of capital. And so tapping that capital and bringing it to Africa is the key to filling the equity funding gap. We were able to do that for projects there. We have a 100 megawatt project in Togo that we developed and brought into operation in 2010. It took about four years to develop a tough project. The country had 50 megawatts of electricity for all 5 million people. We put in a 100 megawatt project. In the scheme of things, 100 megawatts is not a lot. It would power probably the electricity needs of one of the four quadrants of Washington, D.C. But for a place that only had half that much, it was a big project. Getting that done required getting infrastructure investors that are comfortable with that type of project in the developed world to take a chance in the developing world. And how did they get there? They got there because we were able to put products on that are probably more important than debt for our investors, which are political risk insurance products that were also offered by people like OPEC and MIGA, the World Bank Group, and other multilateral providers. And those political risk insurance products are what we needed to put onto the project to get the infrastructure investor to take a chance with the project in Africa. Because then we could tell them, look, if something goes wrong here, the infrastructure investor and most of your private investors out there, they're not used to investing in Africa. So when you say Africa, political instability, insurrection, violence, civil war, protect me against those things. And then once you can do that and then protect them against non-payment through these political risk insurance products, you can start to take the baby steps to move the capital from where it resides to where it needs to go to electrify the continent. And so we've used that, I think, pretty effectively in the places we are. We have five projects in Nigeria with the Coca-Cola, one of Coca-Cola's largest bottlers, where we develop effectively what they need inside their fence. And then we have a large project that's under construction now in Rwanda. But we've been able to do that because in a private context, we can have one-on-one conversations with our investors and get them comfortable with something that initially they don't want to touch. Actually, following up on Joe's comments, you're a publicly held company. And I was just wondering, how does that change your sort of the pressures on you in raising money and financing that may be different than Joe's being privately held? That's a great question. It's particularly up, because Joe used to work with AES and went off to the private sector to do this. I think it's probably easier to raise private capital to go do this. As a large global company, I think we're able to do some things in Africa in moderation. I think we're probably constrained because we can do a little bit, when you've got an investor base in the public markets in the US that is probably more quarterly to annually focused, you can't do too much. It's going to have a three to five-year-type horizon. So it is a little bit more of a challenge. I do think though, I really do think we're at a turning point in Africa because Latin America went through some very similar things that we're talking about now, maybe 10 years ago. I remember we started doing business in China. We had many of the same concerns. There are now projects out there, projects like what Joe and Kantor are doing, things that AES are doing that are turning out to be successful. And I think what you're going to see is countries are going to see this as a way to move the needle in their electric system that won't cause them to have to go put their capital into developing the electric sector. The benefits are enormous. I think you're going to see a segregation of countries. Those that decide they're going to do things in terms of how to do it, people know how to do it now. It's will they have the discipline to go do it. And I think the countries that are going to take the steps to put the right policies in place, which again, they're not that complicated to figure out, but then have the discipline to enforce those policies, to implement according to those policies. They're going to start to attract a lot of capital. And I think you've got folks like Kantor out there leading the way, but what I've seen in our industry and other infrastructure industries is Joe said once you turn that capital on to a region, it starts to come in force. So I think you're going to see the countries that set these things up properly and develop a track record are going to get a lot of the capital coming in. And it may take another couple of years, another five years, but pretty quickly you're going to see that happen. And it's happened everywhere else. We've been in the world. We've been able to consider in place any institutions and how well they can take things forward. And again, develop the trust factor that's needed for the capital that Joe relies on for the capital I rely on to say those are good investments. Rob, let's turn to you for a second. You've got an unusual perspective here. You've run energy companies done investments worldwide in multiple areas of energy, but also headed up OPIC, as Joe mentioned, the important insurance agency. So I'd like to get your perspectives on what Paul and Joe have been saying, and perhaps if you have any comments on how the federal establishment in the U.S. could perhaps begin to provide better support for their efforts. Well, thank you, David. One thing that's very clear is that the international financial institutions are absolutely critical to financing power projects in Africa. I mean, commercial banks even before the difficulties of the last few years were skittish about this without some guarantee backing them up. And today, the major institutions like the African Development Bank, OPIC, IFC, and others are essential. These projects just can't get done without that financing. And then on top of the financing comes political risk insurance, which is extraordinarily helpful, because you buy it from OPIC or you buy it from MIGA or you buy it even on the private market. It's important because in governments and countries in which there's been state ownership of the power sector as there has been of many other economic sectors, the idea of inviting private capital in and actually yielding control of the asset and the process to the private sector is a challenging one for many governments. And you have, we want your money, we want you to invest, we want you to build the plant and yes, we'll commit to this power purchase agreement but then from that moment on they're going to cut you a thousand times and you may bleed to death. They never expropriate the project necessarily but they can make your life miserable. So an OPIC type institution not only can sell you political risk insurance that protects you against expropriation including regulatory kind of expropriation if you will. It could also protect you where you can't get your money out of the country. So that's another risk and then political violence. So that's a kind of complimentary aspect of the financing that I think will make a lot more power investment possible than would be the case. The last part and perhaps as important as the other two is the advocacy. When a government starts to backtrack the investments they've made whether it's on a power purchase agreement or a concession agreement to enable you to come in and actually invest and operate a plant. A company can go in and pound the table and make the best case they can for why the contract ought to be recognized and honored but quite honestly the sovereign government intervention from the United States government or from some multilateral institution that already has deep, deep ties to that country is very powerful. So I see this being an essential part of driving more investment into the power sector and infrastructure in general in Africa. There's enormous opportunity as Joe and Paul have said and it does sort of have a cascading effect when a few good projects get done then more project and more investment comes and again as Joe said the big missing piece is not debt it's not the because there's a lot of public institution debt out there the missing piece is private equity and that's going to come with a little more kind of courage and examples of success. One other point I want to make I think that we need to be those of us that are around development agencies or even bilateral development agencies we need to be smarter about how we use finite public sector resources to enable more power development to take place. In other words there are parts of a continuum Paul talked about his experience in Cameroon where they are sort of an integrated operation but then there are people like Joe who's building generation and there's a question of transmission and distribution some of these things are not economic under the best of circumstances if we could use public sector dollars or donor dollars to pay for some of this that then enables private capital investment to go into the for profit part which is the generation side that's the smarter way to spend money last point in that in terms of dollars feasibility studies that could be done by or paid for by TDA or multilateral development organizations that look at kind of identifying the feasibility of power development that maybe is not just country specific but regional so that you have a bigger market than the kind of small markets we're talking about would also be a very useful expenditure of public sector resources. Thanks. Putting a little bit of my energy hat on there's been and Richard mentioned this earlier a considerable discussion about Africa's opportunity to leapfrog in terms of technologies and as we're looking at climate change we're seeing that pressure is being put on public institutions multilateral development banks institutions in the US to tilt the support towards clean energy sources to reduce the amount of fossil energy that's being used but at the same time fossil energy resources are quite abundant in Africa and I was wondering about your perspective in terms of how does that shape the way in which if you're having to make this strong connection with these types of institutions how does that shape your decisions or what's your perspective on that? Joe do you want to start? I realize I need to it's a really interesting issue given that you're right when you say that there's pressure on the public institutions particularly lending institutions like the World Bank to encourage renewable generation on the continent the issue of course is that the continent has and I always take South Africa out of the calculation about 15% of the population Sub-Saharan Africa with electricity and so what they really need is a generation of any kind fast the other problem is that renewable generation is more expensive and so if your public lending institution is saying don't do coal do solar or do wind or do any other type of renewable energy they have to also say here's how we're going to plug the tariff gap that's going to be created for the poorest people on the planet Togo $650 per capita GDP so they're going to have a tough time paying for thermal generation much less renewable at two or three times higher and what I don't hear when the development agencies say don't bring a thermal project and particularly don't bring me a coal project is how we're supposed to go about persuading governments that need to be persuaded when we say we have an idea for you how we're going to give them renewable energy at the price they would be getting from thermal energy that renewable tariff gap needs to be plugged if people are really serious about developing renewable energy in the continent in the generally high cost of renewable power and so it's a real challenge we've tried to take advantage recently of the collapse in photovoltaic panel prices to bring to governments solar projects that would have been unattainable for them to afford even one year ago and figure out a way to kind of plug the gap through some creative financing measures but having a project done here and there it's not really a policy matter the question is if you really want renewables then you need a policy and that policy needs funding that's going to bridge the gap otherwise all you're doing is postponing even further the time when you're going to get electricity into the continent in the US as Paul knows in Europe there was a time with renewables where everyone said within five years we're going to reach grid parity in prices down to the point that it's effectively the cost of a thermal project I remember two or three years ago when we started to see a lot of push in sub-saharan Africa to go renewable the lending institutions would tell us we have grid parity in Africa but we have grid parity for the wrong reasons the reason you have grid parity in Africa is because generation is so expensive that it actually is the same price as expensive renewables so I think it's a tough policy decision to cut off funding for thermal in a place that really needs capacity if I could comment on that I agree with everything Joe said we see this where there's a huge need for thermal generation that's what's going to grow these economies you need renewables also the institutions that have put constraints on that and more and more are following the thinking you can get them to fund renewables but the thermal plants which are going to be key to providing affordable electricity many of the multilaterals that have put policies in place are going to be non-players they are going to become increasingly irrelevant because there are Asian players who will step in and fill that gap and in places where that's a situation we've just gone to Asian countries and said hey we've got an opportunity for you they're getting the business and the equipment so I think there are ways to get there on this renewable piece though there's an interesting dilemma and that is the hydro hydro power plants which depending who you talk to will say is that renewable or is it not and the general rule of thumb is somewhere around 5200 megawatts a hydro plant becomes magically non-renewable it's now something else the opportunity is to look at only 93% of the hydro power resources have not been exploited yet so it's a huge opportunity to go create carbon-free electricity but I think this is not just multilateral institutions but it's also commercial banks whenever you start developing a hydro resource of any size there's a lot of political fallback a lot of NGOs jump in and say you shouldn't do it because you're going to be damming up rivers and that creates a tough issue for banks that want to get into this but there's a huge opportunity I think to provide low cost power from hydro power resources in Africa in places like the United States we've used up all of our resources it's done so it doesn't really matter for us places like Africa it does so I think there's going to need to be I think some leadership coming from many of the institutions to say look this is the right answer you can do it responsibly we're going to make it happen for the right reasons in Africa it's a real opportunity but also I think a real dilemma for many multilateral institutions I'd like to add that I think in our enthusiasm to try and steer away from carbon fuels or thermal plants we've created these dilemmas that are very very difficult to confront one is the question of dislocation on a hydro plant when it gets to be of a sufficient size so that you're impacting the population and that's something that lots of institutions run away from and then on other forms of renewable as Joe said sadly the price point is just so high that you have to just decide you're going to subsidize it or somebody's going to subsidize it for some indefinite period of time there are a couple of things that can be done but I don't I don't see this as a long term solution you can use donor funds again to write down the capital cost of some of these projects so that when you're ultimately trying to recover capital in a return you start at a much lower figure because you know what was a maybe a 100 million plant is now 50 million because somebody paid for 50 million that doesn't expect to be reimbursed but those are those aren't, I think that only works in a few places and it's very expensive so it's a challenge I do want to mention that I learned the other day that OPIC has a new insurance product which I think could be of interesting value and that is you can buy insurance if a government commits to a feed-in tariff on a renewable project at a certain level and then subsequently reduces that tariff so that you're out of the kind of capacity to recover your investment well I know I'm just they're committing or they're selling you insurance to help bridge that delta and I think they're looking primarily at India as I understand that's I guess one agency's another topic that was of considerable discussion during my time at DOE and I suspect is still an issue of interest is the role of regional integration of power grids that can play in accelerating the access to energy and there's considerable work in looking at South Africa some in Western Africa as areas from your perspective as investors and especially from the generation point of view do you see this as something that is critical importance a little bit of importance as you move forward and trying to build these larger markets Paul do you want to start on that one? Yeah, as an investor I'd say it's not top of mind for us because it's a longer term this really does require governments to work together on a bilateral basis to come up with ways to do this and it's very difficult this isn't just an issue for Africa it's an issue around the world Central America I think I look back about 15 years ago we talked about the integration of the electric grids in Central America and it was interesting that in our recent strategy meeting the topic again was the benefits of regional integration whenever it comes it takes a long time to get this done but it's absolutely it's important particularly important a place like Africa you can share the hydrology risk between countries there's people finding gas offshore the trick with an electric system is to try and keep it as highly utilized as you can run the power plants as much as you can run the grid as much as you can up to full capacity as opposed to having peaks and valleys integration allows you to do that but it does require governments to work together which is difficult in most places I think it's even more difficult in a place like Africa where there are shortages but that's where I think the developed countries the US can get in there and people have done this successfully and getting the countries together paying for the studies that's an important part of it the planning that goes along with it there then needs to be some capital associated with it and if you can get the funding for that it's going to make it easier for governments to figure out how to make it work there's a lot of models out there as to where it can work and how it can work effectively but it's going to take it's going to be more of an issue I think for governmental agencies to make that happen from an investor standpoint we're ready to go once it happens but it's going to take a long time I would add that the developed countries around the world are not necessarily a model for integration of grid so we have our own problems Joe I found interesting that one of the projects that we're working as an investor is the Coca-Cola project in Nigeria so you're basically working at the industrial level to provide power sort of smaller scale I assume that means that they are somewhat independent of the grid than in Nigeria is this a model that is unique for their situations or is this one that may emerge throughout Africa where industrial customers basically find a way to finance themselves which means it's going to represent for the grid that becomes necessary for sort of the smaller users it's an interesting topic we have a relationship with one of Coca-Cola's largest bottlers in Europe and Africa called the Coca-Cola Hellenic Bottling Company and in Europe we've developed now between Europe and Africa about 17 individual facilities there are many power plants with a twist they're extremely environmentally friendly because we're capturing the waste heat off the engine to provide the thermal energy which includes paradoxically chilled water that they need in their processes and then we capture most about 95% of the CO2 that otherwise would be admitted out the stack that CO2 is impurified and used in the carbonation of the beverage so we've done that with them in Europe it was generally a sustainability driven program although the cost of liquid CO2 is so high that it actually is one of those sustainability projects that make sense economically in Eastern Europe it was typically grid reliability and security of supply so that we were able to provide them these bottling facilities run 24-7 the largest one that we serve in Italy is producing over a trillion bottles a year so these are massive users of energy in Africa it is a response to not having a grid to draw anything from and what's interesting and I've learned kind of watching and getting to know Coca-Cola is that for the consumer product companies the largest markets for them in terms of future growth are the markets with the least infrastructure and so they've all had to get into the power business and none of them want to be in the power business I mean Coke wants to be in the branding business and the business of providing carbonated and beverages and juices etc and so we went into Nigeria with them so that they wouldn't have to continue to install their own engines and they figured that it would be our capital it would be done more efficiently and it would be developed in a way that would be more innovative than them just going out and contracting for engines and things it's also however a comment about the environment in Nigeria because I wouldn't be in Nigeria providing grid-based power I mean we made a decision as a company that despite what is a theoretical attractiveness of Nigeria it's just not ready for us at least or we're not ready for them and the risks are just way too high in terms of the commercial behaviors and then the risks of practices etc and so we said we'll go into Nigeria with Coke because we literally will be an island inside their fence selling to them and not selling to the grid and not having to get involved with the government for permits or anything this would all be a relationship with the private party Coca-Cola and so I think unfortunately it's also a comment on the environment that we are only inside their fence there David if I could this is the fact of life and large parts of the developing world I mean if you're a business entity and you're part of an electricity system that's fairly unreliable well fairly unreliable then you just can't afford to have power go down and interrupt shifts in the middle of things and a lot of that self-generation is run on diesel which is expensive and which does make renewable energy much more affordable relatively speaking and there are countries that have renewable energy resources that are in abundance and that the fuel therefore is almost like water it's virtually free to the power project Liberia being a great example of a country that had all these fallow rubber trees that are now being turned into wood chips and are going to be used to generate power in Liberia and I think it's going to be somewhere in the 20 to 25 cents about an hour compared to diesel that's a big bargain but compared to a longer term integrated utility system it's expensive if I could comment on it Joe brings up and Ron brings up a good point self-generation it's a great way to solve an industrial customer's need the problem with it though is you typically then if it becomes too widespread the grid can't support itself you lose the credit worthy customers and the grid becomes increasingly reliant on people who can't pay or don't pay or you have theft and we've seen this happen in other countries where you get to a certain point where the grid starts to fall apart it just can't work so it really is important for countries to bring those customers back over time it can be economically beneficial but it really is a tough situation where you start to lose the best customers and we've seen it happen elsewhere where the grid then becomes unsustainable as a coordinated mechanism and then you get away from it's not even regional integration you're talking about it's can you even get within the country integration so it really is important to get the right policies in place and Nigeria I think with their upcoming privatization I think may actually turn the corner I think that's something we'll all see but if they do and they can actually get that turned around it's helpful other companies will be able to say we're going to go to the grid because it's cheaper but they're going to need to do that well I think given the time it would be probably appropriate moment to open this up for discussion with the audience so if the panelists are willing to take sort of questions at random here we'll do that do we have microphones yes okay so a couple rules of the road if you can identify yourself I guess wait for a microphone and then identify yourself and then if you can if it's a commentary perhaps if you want just a response to the comment but if it's a question make sure it's clear what the question will be and I see a hand right here in the middle thank you Mr. Chairman I'm Ed Barber from Good Works International Andrew Young's consulting firm and before that many years in the state and treasury departments for any and all of you that may tie together a lot of the themes we've heard already about renewables versus thermal political risk insurance regional integration and others and that is Zimbabwe I was at a panel discussion yesterday with a visiting group of about 30 Zimbabwean businessmen looking for investment and one of the areas where they have needs as do all their neighbors is power power in this context I think well in the first place we're getting to the stage where we may start to think about the post-Mugabe era and that obviously is one major requirement and the power sector is different from many others because of its long planning horizon at the same time they now have an indigenization law that is problematic I don't know to what extent regional a regional effort might be a way to attack that but I would appreciate your comments on whether Zimbabwe is now a ready site for investment in this area and what sorts of steps might be needed to help grease the skids well I mean I think the short answer is no as you said with the Mugabe in place and one fascinating thing I'm not only part of the Frontier 100 I have the privilege of chairing the Initiatives for Global Development Board and we had a meeting in New York a couple of days ago in which we had our African business counterparts in town and a couple of people from Zimbabwe and actually since the dollarization of the economy there's a remarkable amount of economic activity going on notwithstanding the government but a power project is one that's so deeply ingrained in permitting and governmental engagement that I don't think anything can even be considered until Mugabe's gone but one other dynamic in that area there are other countries that are that were importing power from South Africa Botswana being one of them and my understanding I've looked at it recently but as South Africa has become short on power it's been forced or pretty quickly so I think importing power or being part of a regional system when domestic politics intervene can render those agreements pretty useless I'd agree the only thing I'd say is there is a need there we're part of the same group the Frontier 100 and a huge need for power the time is not now but we will sit in a panel like this and talk about countries where we won't go and three to four years later everybody's running there it really is going to come down to having the right government in place and the right policies and if that happens you can start to attract the investment good afternoon ladies and gentlemen my name is Rosemary Seguero I'm the president of Seguero's international group based here in Washington DC and I'm initially from Kenya what I wanted to ask thank you for your wonderful presentation how do you look at the renewable solar energy in the African especially the rural areas where the solar is needed using schools women there are no trees now in the rural areas where we can use the solar energy or the electricity how do you look at the future of solar energy and also in countries like Libya which is now Libya and South Sudan how do you look at it and how can you go about it thank you this has a solar subsidiary that just does solar projects to date it's been attracted more to Europe and North America because that's where the policies are the most attractive started doing some things in India and we've been looking at a project in South Africa South Africa by the way has a band of solar insulation that may be the greatest in the world so the opportunity is there to do solar but I think as Joe pointed out it's still expensive even with the reduction in panel prices it's expensive it's also only providing electricity when the sun shines so you lose the solar capacity at night what we're spending a lot of time looking into is energy storage which when coupled with solar could be the answer the problem is it's very expensive we're doing a lot of rural electrification projects in places like El Salvador we're doing a lot in Cameroon and we're typically finding that it's more economic to provide just build the grid to get to these locations but in many cases where it's really isolated a combination of wind and solar and batteries may be the cheapest way to go and we think that's the next wave of opportunity is to not have to build all the transmission line but rather put the money into a solar facility it blows more at night, solar more during the day put a battery in the mix you've actually got something that works for a small community so we think that's the wave of the future and there's been a fair amount of research done and then some proposals on these sort of modular units that can be taken into communities they were looking particularly at rural parts of Afghanistan and sort of villages that had no electricity or limited electricity whether or not you could do school tops in other words on the roofs of schools or on roof tops and how much power might it generate for how long but I think all I've seen that has real utility is on a very small scale basis and then you often have to if you want to have something around the clock you need to back it up with wind engine one interesting point about solar in that part of Africa in East Africa there's a belt that runs through Kenya, Rwanda Burundi, Congo where the irradiation levels are actually on par or better than Spain and Italy we have a number of solar projects that we've developed and operate in Italy and in southern Italy you have the best irradiation in Europe but this belt in that part of East Africa is actually higher and so if you think about it from the standpoint of comparative resources and comparative advantage it's the right place for these governments to look for developing projects and working with the multilaterals to incentivize development of projects I was in Burundi in August coupled with a trip to our project that's underway in Rwanda and when you think about the central East African countries very good irradiation but extraordinarily far from ports and so the cost for the diesel fire generation as Rob was pointing out in Burundi even for a good industrial customer like Heineken they're paying about 52 to 55 US cents per kilowatt hour for their own generation production and most of that's fuel shipped in from Mombasa which is about 1600 kilometers away and so with panel prices coming down the way they have and you pick this up in the US when you read about the cylinder of bankruptcy irrespective of whether the loan was a good idea or not they really got crushed by what happened in the global panel market for competitive products panel prices have come down to the point where a year and a half ago the ground mounted solar in a place like Burundi would probably be a 30 25 to 30 cent project you can probably do it now for high teens low 20s depending upon your expected and required rate of return there's something there that people should look at that might make sense and might not require too much funding to fill the gap one thing if I just comment on the role electrification one of the things we found whenever you do this you're going to it's going to be more expensive you've got to find some way to subsidize through the governments whatever what was really interesting to us is the high payment or high collections rate people that get electricity in these remote areas really want to pay their electricity bills because they really really need the electricity and that's something we weren't expecting but at its lower rates they pay but they all pay the collection rates are higher than anywhere else we have in our grids and the place where we do this Paul and you're working Cameron are you doing mini grids as well in terms of when you move to renewables and you describe the wind and solar are they basically setting up smaller grids or are you hoping to eventually build them back to the main grid yeah smaller grids that we have set up have been typically diesel fire just because that's been the lowest cost way to do it to date but it's not efficient and from an environmental standpoint not the best so what we're moving towards is looking at ways to do this taking a the modular approach like Rob mentioned where you have we're not there yet thank you my name is my name is Lindsay Ross and with CSIS and I was wondering if the panelists might be able to comment on bilateral investment treaties the bit with Rwanda was passed in the senate last week and I was wondering if that might change investor confidence in Africa and might maybe boost investment we'll end that about the first bilateral investment treaty we've done in Africa in about ten years or something we're so woefully behind on that that's one of the sort of infrastructure or wiring details that I think government could focus more on and I think it would help because it would provide investors a little more comfort about the recourse they have in the event that their investments go bad for political reasons as opposed to commercial issues it's one of the first questions that we will ask when looking at a country is is there bilateral investment treaty we can rely on so it's a big plus for us if there is one I'll just work way across the room then I'm McSnow, Washington editor for oil and gas journal what is the potential for natural gas to economically generate power in Africa particularly as LNG exports fuel pressure from gas bearing shales the answer is enormous the problem as you probably know is that and I think the sponsor of this event that Chevron has one of the more innovative integration cross border integration projects that's ever been developed in Africa which is a West Africa gas pipeline that runs out of the delta region in Nigeria into Togo Benin and Ghana where our power plan is on the West African gas pipeline in Togo the problem is you can stand in Ghana and see all the way to the delta through the West African gas pipeline because it doesn't have any gas in it and so the potential is enormous between the Jubilee field offshore and Ghana the delta gas the flare gas which is what the West African gas pipeline was designed around fields and you know offshore places like Namibia fields offshore in Tanzania where the blocks have been developed I mean natural gas should be a source of energy for indigenous power generation on the continent it has not been because the incentive has been to liquefy and ship and I think shale gas and the reality of what will drive the US gas market in particular over the coming two decades is going to change a lot the economics of the LNG and I think should be an unintended benefit of the development of shale resources in the United States which will be a lot of this gas to stay home in Africa and start providing fuel for power Joe I want to thank you for turning this into a real energy event mentioning both slender and shale gas so we can't have any energy events without those coming up just down here in front Charles Newstead from the State Department first a comment and that is I believe you're quite correct that a small and modular is the way to go because a big power plant whatever kind it is isn't going to be of any use to you or except in very special places because you don't have the transmission line capacity and a transmission line is very, very expensive and also subject to sabotage by various malcontenders but I really wanted to address my comment to and a question to small and modular who somebody mentioned here I think that really is the way to go in any kind of power plant and being a nuclear person I'm sorry to tell you that I think that that's one of the solutions that Africa doesn't have but it could be offered that if we wanted to and these actually nuclear plants usually are 1000 megawatts electric but they can be built with smaller units and thought is being given to that and that is something I think would be quite important for Africa we have done some agreement for cooperation with certain selected African countries that you probably know and will probably do more as time goes on and one country of particular interest is Saudi Arabia who certainly have the money to invest even though they have the oil and don't really need the power they don't want to burn that valuable oil they want to use it to get the money from the hydrocarbons in it and from the various medical values now in order to get a nuclear infrastructure into Africa you have to have a regulatory framework because it's insane to just introduce nuclear into a country that has never had nuclear and doesn't know how to deal with it so you have to develop a safety culture that's one thing and then you have to have a category of people who are educated some outside the country some inside the country to operate the plant effectively now this is all in the post Fukushima perspective when we expect a nuclear renaissance there are a lot of people we don't expect the nuclear renaissance now because I say well that was terrible look what happened so many thousands of people but I want to point out to that those thousands of people were killed by the earthquake and by the tsunami not by the relatively few people who were hurt by the radiation from the reactor so we know how to build safe reactors we can do that and I preach this to everybody in the agency for international development but they don't want to hear it because AID doesn't like nuclear but I know Mr. Pumphrey used to be in DOA for many years so he understands the importance of nuclear that it could play and I think the president also has emphasized that it's important to him and now proliferation is very important so if we take all those objectives into account I think we could supply power to Africa and I know this is getting long winded so I'll cut it off very shortly one other way of doing it which is easy to do is floating nuclear power plants they just pulled up to any country that has a port facility and that floating power plant is really under the control of the country that built it and it can be completely safe and reliable and furthermore if they don't pay their power bill you just disconnect the electricity lines and pull it out and if there's any non-proliferation problem you can do the same thing the United States once had proposals to do that we never carried them out but we once had proposals to consider that and the Russians are proposing that I can just comment I actually used to work on a floating nuclear power plant it was called a submarine and I believe nuclear power could be a big part of the mix I think it's going to be very very difficult to do it in sub-Saharan Africa it's tough to even do gas plants I think in the near term in Africa because there's so much being found it's simple nuclear I think is going to play a role it's clearly going to play a role in South Africa but I think countries are still trying to sort out what the post Fukushima world looks like and I'd say there's more pessimism than optimism from what I've seen thank you for the opportunity to address the panel I'm Dr. George Alula I'm glad because I have an engineering degree in nuclear chemistry and their PhD in petrochemistry I come from Congo and on the other side I would say that I'm speaking like an African political leader I run for president of Congo in 2006 I miss this one maybe next one so the Congo as you all know that we are rich of so many natural resource just the starting point is if you invest in Congo how you will get your money back we have 23 trillion of gold reserve known and unexplored so that's the starting point the second point is that why you need to go to invest in Congo mostly in the energy area we have one of the most powerful hydroelectric the barrage hydroelectric of Inga that is providing power to Zimbabwe in many countries around the Congo but as you say here we have one main problem the transportation Congo is also on the top 5 producer of copper in the world so it's easy to industrialize the copper production to provide the cable to transport the electricity all over the African continent that's a very huge business opportunity and also all those components we see the light here we don't have those industry and those industry does not require multi-billion to invest in so this is also the opportunity for the US business to go in Africa not only on some area like all production but also to build those and to take advantage of this market what is the market size the market size is 800 million people tomorrow 1.5 billion so investing in African infrastructure may be a chance to occupy the ground before the China China take all for the next 25 or 15 year to come so my question would be how do you see one point we come here in the Congolese diaspora with one idea we say since we lost 6 million people in this genocide that is not saying we need 140 billion state bond secured by the US and the G8 country G8 a G20 country for which 50% will come from the US this is 17 billion a year for the private sector you all know about that I am an inventor I am paying respect to Apple founder Steve Jobs who passed yesterday but those billionaires of this time are able to put together 17 billion to invest in this country to build the economy of a country which still have all the African continent economy and create the sustainable peace of the continent I thank you so much for being patient with me and this is just my question thank you for my contribution thank you I'll tell you what, Joe and I will team up and go talk to you after this meeting and see what we can do sounds interesting the potential is enormous I'd love to figure out some way to do something there we should talk afterwards seriously I'd love to do it Ben Springer with David Gardner in Associates I had a question following up on the lady in front's question regarding sort of distributed solar power I'm just curious as to what the knowledge sharing is like in your field in terms of both regulatory technical and creative investment mechanisms for particularly the renewable energy but also Mr. Brandt was talking about CHP projects a lot of the issues that you seem to face in Africa in developing countries are not exclusive only to the developing world we're dealing with some of those in the US as well as far as creative financing and I'm just curious having sort of a unique set of problems in the developing world but also in a lot of ways sort of a clean slate what lessons do you draw from developed countries and what lessons do you share with developed countries? I think that if you look at institutional knowledge and learning across technology and regulation the multilateral development agencies are actually a good facilitator of that when you spend time in and around people like the World Bank the regional development agencies African Development Bank there's a lot of excellent policy work going on that integrates experiences on the ground from companies like AES, like ourselves that is available to anybody who wants to get involved in these sectors most of this dies on the shelf but the information is there it's digitized it's equally accessible there is in the regulatory community a very high degree of capability across the continent what you will find places that are not familiar with how to regulate the private sector because they've never had a private sector is you actually will have one or two representatives in the Ministry of Energy or in the public utility that have spent a lot of time on various sponsored exchanges to other countries and to other international regulatory organizations that sponsor training and you actually have quite a bit of knowledge about the different choices and tradeoffs in the regulatory space for electricity the issue is the capability set in most of these countries is not deep and one of the challenges that you face trying to develop a power project appropriately in Sub-Saharan Africa is you really are monopolizing the time and the resources of a few of the more capable people in these ministries for a very long period of time you're taking them out of the day to day and the day to day is intensely operational because most of these ministries are also operating what electricity assets exist in the country and it's intensely political because they're having to work through election cycles at the same time and you're literally taking a team out of their day to day and requiring them to focus on your project sometimes for three years and so there's a great deal of capability in the region it's not very deep I might just add on a little bit to Joe's comments since the time I spent at DOE quite a bit of it in the international field was around the whole question of capacity building and much of a lot of AIDs work is spent in sponsoring these types of missions I do worry that it's incredibly important because you start building a set of competent people and I think my experience has always been that investing companies coming in as investors want to know that they've got experienced and capable people on the other side of the table going forward there's often been put forward that companies would like to have inexperienced people on the other side but that just leads to future problems I worry that these programs because they're not become very exposed in times that we're having and facing now in terms of budget tightness and budgetary cuts so I think it's something that I would say from the point of view of the panel that needs to be watched is do we sustain that type of support work that enables an environment to be created for private investment to come in so I had one question back here good afternoon everyone I am Amira Woods from Liberia here in Washington at the Institute for Policy Studies thanks to CSIS for convening this forum I guess my comments are probably on the opposite of my brother whom I respect and appreciate but completely disagree with in terms of opening up the red carpet to the energy sector in Africa clearly what we have are tremendous challenges from the Africa side when you think about the great imbalance particularly in the power and influence of multinationals in the energy sector the imbalance is extraordinary and the pressure of these particularly its oil and gas to be able to control decision making here on the US end in terms of campaign finance but also on the Africa end in terms of making sure that the deal is stacked in their favor often creates disasters on the ground and whether its places like Nigeria where and others have been active since 1956 with disastrous results for the environment as well as for the communities on the land on which the oil lies or places like Chad where I have been in the southern part of the country where its relatively new discoveries the last whatever 6 to 10 years and also with very damaging environmental costs and costs to people's lives and not the result in terms of the benefit to communities the benefit to development which is a theme of this session and also the benefit to the countries and then of course I'm from Liberia so that's probably newest on the list which Chevron just opening up this year and you know offshore disaster very deep offshore potential there off the shores of Liberia so you know I guess from where I sit the challenges are tremendous the costs are incredibly high and the only real opportunities are really for increasing regulation and increasing the power of people in those communities to speak up to take control of their own destiny and so I guess the questions to the panel are first on this question of greater transparency even if we take the Liberia which is the most recent example issues of now this global witness report just released last week of illicit deals being made in the energy sector already on the table to what extent can the panel which is encouraging investment in Africa's energy sector really address those underlying challenges of the resources not benefiting the people, the lack of transparency the lack of opportunities for governments to actually regulate the sector and the lack of opportunity for people to actually benefit from the resources on the land on which they live take a shot at that yeah well the history of resource development in Africa would give plenty of people pause about whether or not it's in fact a benefit or a curse so the history is a sad one for many companies and many countries however I think that's not the way it has to be in the future and so I think certain initiatives that have been undertaken starting perhaps with the G8 or G20 initiative is a step in the right direction for those of you not familiar with that that's basically an effort to require both developers or producers of resources to disclose all taxes, revenues etc or royalties they're paying to the government and then for governments to account for what they do with those and Nigeria is actually a member but obviously putting the infrastructure in place is essential while I was at OPIC we adopted a policy which was we would not finance or ensure the development of any extractive industry resource without the company we were financing disclosing regardless regardless of whether or not the government was doing its part in terms of accounting for it on the theory that if you're announcing what you're paying to the government that it becomes a matter of public record then you leave it up to civil society and others in hopefully some sense of political accountability to put pressure on the government to account for what they did with it now I think activities like that are the best chance we have and I think Liberia has joined EITI there are other countries that are joining but that's the direction I think you have to go and then greater transparency in terms of just general governance and I would say at this point this is what concerns me about Chinese investment on the continent it's great to bring this capital in for a continent that's starved for capital however it often does not come in in a highly transparent way which enables people outside of government and sometimes outside of a couple of people in government to know exactly what the deal was and in fact it ends up perpetuating some of the worst of governance so I think EITI as well as the multilateral development institutions that can insist upon rules on bidding and rules on competition offers an opportunity to significantly improve what's happened in the past and last I would say you know American companies we live by the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act you violate that and it's up to the Justice Department to prosecute that when they have through evidence of it you know people go to jail under that act and that's a level of accountability for U.S. companies that I think you don't have in many other countries just to make one quick comment countries are becoming more discerning also in terms of companies they deal with we just that was just in Vietnam about three weeks ago and we started construction of power plant near Ha Long Bay which is one of the UNESCO World Heritage sites and the Prime Minister said to me we picked you because we knew you were going to develop this project responsibly and it's important to us because this is a part of Vietnam that's got to be pristine for years to come so I think governments over time are going to become more discerning about companies they deal with and I think that's going to add to that covering for both ends one comment related to you know our role as power companies in the extractive industry matrix we tend to be what we do, what AES does in a place like Africa we tend to be aligned with the local communities because our fixed assets are bolted to the ground and our revenues come from the country we're not producing an exportable commodity in most cases and so we're typically aligned with those in the community that are trying to encourage multinational corporations in the extractive industries to both develop the extractive resource so the oil, the gas, the coal but to keep some of it home what we need to be successful and to electrify a lot of these parts of the world is for a lot of these commodities to have some portion reserved for domestic use what you've seen when you go back to you know the history in the 50s, 60s and 70s is you have a lot of concessions that are given away with conditions attached to the concessions for the extraction of oil and gas for example in places like Nigeria but none of those conditions included reserving some of that potentially power productive fuel for domestic use and so I think that Paul and I in our businesses find ourselves much more aligned with the needs and the interests of the local community when it comes to how resources that are not yet tapped but available will be developed in the future well unfortunately I think our time has run out in terms of questions I know there's a few but eager so maybe you can get with the panelists at the end I think this has been a tremendous discussion and many different dimensions of the development process and the energy process that will have to be taken into account I don't know if the panelists have any last sort of points they would want to make to make sure that the group remembers what your message was okay in that case join me in thanking our panelists for a great job and thank you thank you to the audience