 We have a final session which I'm looking forward to is an absolutely delightful conversation and I want to simply introduce the person who will organize the conversation, a person who needs no introduction and therefore I will spend no time introducing him, William Perry, Bill Perry. Thank you, Jim. Every president since President Eisenhower has proclaimed that the United States energy dependence was a national security problem and we should do everything we can to eliminate that dependence and every president since President Eisenhower had presided over a decrease in that dependence. That's a historical fact, but what may be that may be about the change with the fracking revolution in particular in the last few number of years seems to be turning around so if you modify the proposal to be energy independence for North America not just the United States and if you define independence not to mean we don't buy any oil but we buy less energy than we sell then that's I think that's an attainable goal five to ten years so I have a few questions to ask my two colleagues here. The first is is that a reasonable statement of the problem namely North American energy independence as I defined it in five to ten years. If so then what is the economic value of that position how does that change our economy economics and secondly what is the security value does it really improve our security and let me start off with the security first and turn to Jeff on that one. You think we do have a security problem because of energy dependence and you think removing that dependence or decreasing that independence improves our security. Well I think we have a security problem because of our dependence on petroleum because I do think that our markets are subject to disruption and and our economy is subject to substantial disruption because of what happens in the in the oil markets of the world and I think it's it's great I think there's some substantial benefits to reducing our imports of oil and getting to a point where we are perhaps a net exporter of energy or petroleum but as long as we are dependent on petroleum and as we are today that's that security problem continues to a very substantial extent so so we haven't solved the problem the total problem we we've we partially solved our our current balance of payments with the rest of the world if we dramatically reduce our imports but we have not solved our security problems that'd be my take on it. Steve would you comment on the first of all the five to ten years being a reasonable goal secondly economic impact and third the security impact any of those. Sure first let me do a reverse order the security there are two parts of the security one is the security having to do with an interruption of supply if there's unrest in the Middle East and and something some key straight is mind this is an interruption of supply that scares a lot of countries and then there's the and that's an issue we actually get less and less oil from the Middle East but it's still an issue because oil ships very easily around the world and because of that if there's an interruption supply of other countries you you see an impact and we see impacts there and it's more on the financial side the volatility and the nervousness of of that is is another issue having North American your point about North American energy independence I think is a very real possibly not so much United States but North America Canada US Mexico it won't relieve the price volatility of oil because it is an international issue because oil ships so easily it could certainly relieve some of the supply issues of interruption of supply and so I think now the question is we are blessed with a lot of fossil fuels in North America we are blessed with a lot of land and sun and wind in North America as well and if you consider that plus all the other things for example the trading of energy across borders we're beginning to do this with Canada and hydro and actually can actually start to trade and think of trading energy using hydro storage and so these there's tremendous opportunities there where if you look at North America as a whole and not each country separately there are a great deal of opportunities that we're just beginning to scratch the surface of the bill we should think about now a major factor in this progress in the last decade has been the fracking revolution first with natural gas and now with oil as well and here my question is what could this be upset by an event like it could we have a TMI female lion type event some ecological disaster which causes a stop at least a dramatic slowdown with that thought in mind what could be done to minimize that probability is that we talked about more regulation than the regulation is it a state regulation or federal regulation how do we go about that approach Jeff will give you a crack at that first what about the regulatory issue well Secretary Chu had a commission which did a very good report I thought back to him and to the Congress and everyone talking about the whole issue of fracking and horizontal drilling and and the economic and the environmental impacts and we had a hearing and brought those folks to tell us what they concluded my recollection and Steve can can correct me on this but my recollection was that they said the problem of of spills polluting groundwater was was a problem with all boiling gas drilling but it was not a some fracking did not add to it that substantially except that fracking of course is causing us to do a lot more drilling that the real economic or the real environmental issue was the release of methane and that this was something which did require additional regulation and which I understand the EPA is looking at now as something that they are going to try to regulate more effectively than they have in the past do you have a view of the relative importance of state versus federal regulation in this area well to the extent that the federal government will step up and do it it will be more effective in my view deep well in the eastern part of the United States first a lot of the drilling the horizontal drilling fracking in the eastern part of the United States term private lands then so it it's out of the formal purview of the federal government it's it's the state regulatory agencies however I will agree with Jeff that on federal lands especially in the western part of the United States the U.S. government should step in and develop a set of standards and every increasing better standards as the technology gets better so that this resource can be extracted in the safest way possible I would say that the through my through my own Fukushima or whatever you want to use as an example if a major water table does become contaminated in a major sort of way that would have a profound impact on on how you know that a lot of states and a lot of communities will say no more and so in in the study we were doing and we were doing this and as you well know because he was the chair of the secretary of energy advisory board and there was a subcommittee that was doing this so he was asking a question he knew the answer to yes don't don't let him fool you but in any case I think what the commission the study also recommended is please adopt best practices yes you need regulatory authority but industries should also step forward and say hey don't don't don't kill the scoots and and and there are a lot of best practices that one could adopt to to mitigate a lot of the risks the fugitive emission is an issue not you know the monitoring of this all these things the the base lining before you start of water tables all very important things long before it becomes mandatory I would hope that industry would step forward and say we're going to do this because what they should not want is a ecological mishap that's significant that could really stop this okay okay so so I think one tries to get the industry to step up the plate to do this partly on their own but they still need a regulatory push without a doubt and I think the federal government is in a good position to set those standards it's the self-regulation within the nuclear industry a good analogy for that do you think uh well it's partly self-regulated and partly we have the nuclear regulatory commission and so they keep the industry honest but I think the US nuclear industry especially after three mile island recognize that this you know anything and with one mile island there were no deaths there were no there was a very insignificant amount of radiation that leaked out it turned to that it's less than one per in the 10 mile radius around it's less than 10th of a percent of background Fukushima a entirely different story okay and and you saw what a profound impact Fukushima had on many countries attitudes towards nuclear energy and so so you so the nuclear industry in the US is pretty good but they also have the nrc you Steve this morning you gave I thought a very eloquent statement about the importance of solar energy the question I want to get to is how long is it going to take to get solar energy to a significant scale you can define significant however you like a significant skill in terms of a supply of electricity in the United States and when that happens or American industry have a significant part basically play a significant role in the supply that those solar energy as you see the things trending today I'll define significant is at least 10 percent okay we're in the US we're about 10 percent all renewables of which six percent hydro and most of the others currently wind but but solar is getting into the one percent range now I would hope in the next decade it gets into the by itself gets into the 10 percent or higher range especially as the cost come down dramatically and you get rid of these figure out solution to solve costs also the energy storage will be a major part of that you know I I would love to see renewables be 50 percent of our electricity generation or by you know 20 or 30 years from today that I would love to see nuclear continuing this century I think by the middle end of this century I hope we don't need it anymore but unless we move in this direction you know we have a serious risk of some adverse climate change so now I think it needs new business models as I was discussing if you can get the utility companies and the regulators to embrace hey there's a profitable way of doing this which instead of being scared of solar it becomes their growth industry because and I've known enough about these things and talked to them where they would love to have especially on the energy storage side in building energy storage in a distributed way they would love that and so if they make that part of this business plan then I could see it taking off because instead of getting scared and beginning to fight it they they embrace it as a growth industry where it becomes at least as profitable as as you know building a new gas plant so I think when you get things like that and you get over those humps then you can really see it take off because then interests are aligned and and and so you know in the last year I was Secretary of Energy I started to try to talk to the utility companies the regulators and say this is a real opportunity of a completely different business model in the time scale when solar becomes 10 to 20 percent of electricity in that time scale what other renewable energies do you think hold the most promise well wind and solar hold the most promise with wind in certain countries around the world now I don't what I mean by wind let's say if you look at Ireland which is about 10 percent wind by generation the Iberian Peninsula is about 20 percent wind and solar I'm picking those examples because they have very small ties to the rest of the world if you're Denmark it doesn't really matter because you have you know convention access to conventional electricity for the but if you're an island or you're more isolated then it becomes can you get self-sufficiency and the the experiments are they're not experiments they really you know Ireland's 10 percent going one and going 20 25 percent Great Britain wants to go to 20 percent Iberian Peninsula wants to go even higher and so we have existence proofs that at least at that level you can manage this and where you're you're not tied into a bigger system that absorbs all the fluctuations let's go back to North America it's incredibly large area with the right transmission systems with the right trading things with all these other things even in the United States alone there's an incredible opportunity we you know we have fossil fuel energy resources we have renewable energy resources also come out of our years that we should take advantage of and if you include all of North America then it becomes very good the case of the solar 10 20 years from now who's going to be making the solar panels well I hope the United States goes back to making in big time I think a lot of it depends on a lot of things what has happened over the last several years is there have been as I said exuberance of expectation and availability of very cheap capital particularly in China where there was an overexpansion and then you coupled that with the recession and all of a sudden there's an oversupply that's going to work itself out the price is still going to go down as I said if I look I see at least 15 years of technological headroom where it's just going to march down in the electronics in the distribution transmission systems and in the panels themselves and so now the question is okay where is it going to be made the United States should be a major manufacturer if you consider where as I mentioned briefly most of the photovoltaic silicon that goes into the Chinese factories actually comes from the United States because the companies that make silicon photograde silicon in the United States have access to very inexpensive power and it's very energy intensive so we ship silicon to China in a highly automated factories in China they dope it they put on the electrodes they do all this stuff okay and then they ship it around the world consider another thing that also you know remember in the good old days and steel you would you would make the steel where there's coal because the shipping of the coal the transport of rail of coal is more expensive okay yeah I grew up in Pittsburgh I know all about that right the iron ore is easier shipped than the coal so you should okay now who are the where we buy a lot of our steel from Asia which to have neither the coal nor the steel so China is buying coal from the United States Korea you know they don't have coal and Japan they don't have coal they ship the coal they don't have the iron ore and they're able to make better cheaper steel than us what is wrong with this and what is wrong with it is the US for decades did not retool and did not reinvest okay so so for me to hear people say oh no no we can't we can't capture back you know steel manufacturing it's kind of crazy so can we and so because we have a very inexpensive energy and great natural resources surely we you know in highly automated plants you know it's not it's not the labor but it's more important because even in highly automated plants there's a whole supply chain for that plant that's usually domestically supplied so in terms of jobs it's not in the plant itself it's the supply chain and all the secondary and tertiary jobs and so we should be really looking hard at ourselves and saying why can't we we capture steel manufacturing as well as solar we should Jeff we'd like to weigh in on this this whole issue well I may be somewhat cynical after hanging around Washington so long but my view is that I agree we have the capability to regain a portion of the world market for manufacture of solar cells but unless we adopt policies to support that or to lead to that result if the Chinese have policies to do that and the Germans have policies to do that in various other countries then then they're going to wind up manufacturing the solar cells it's like they're going to wind up manufacturing the LEDs and and perhaps the batteries now we we put some as while Steve was secretary we we did a lot to try to stimulate manufacture of batteries in this country and I hope very much that that will continue but again I think we've got to follow through with those policies in order that we not wind up buying all of our batteries from overseas as well just like we may wind up buying all of our photovoltaic cells. I agree with everything you said Jeff you know there's a myth going around that China was developing solar cells to sell to Germany or the rest of Europe and the United States now they started that way but because of the continuing recession especially in Europe China is now in 2012 for 2013 for sure will be the biggest market for renewable energy in the world domestic China now why are they doing this well there's a couple of reasons they want to keep their solar matter fact all this huge investments those hundreds of billions of dollars they want to keep that alive to get out of the solar supply ride that and and they also actually are very concerned about climate change in their country and so but they they see this as a and if you have a home market which is to what Jeff was saying of a robust home market that's the best thing you can do for manufacturing but you you want to make in the United States to be used in the United States as well as the world market and so China China's willing to say okay we're going to start helping deployment of solar to write help them ride through this overproduction problem and that's you know if you have to think about that that makes a lot of sense in a lot of ways but in the long term they just see this as an opportunity not only for their domestic market for world market and they make no bones about it let me have pivot over now to from supply to demand and I commend all of you the remarkable speech that Steve gave this morning on the things that could be done in demand it could really make a great difference I want to just pick up a few of those and talk about them a little bit and because of the fracking evolution we have natural gas and bountiful supply and getting cheaper and cheaper one of the potentials for that is to use it as a fuel for vehicles in particular for trucks all of the calculations I've seen say it makes a lot of sense for trucks to be using natural gas for fuel there's sort of a chicken and egg problem though they're not going to use it until they get gas stations along the freeways and the and the uh companies are reluctant to build those gas stations and sort of say there's enough trucks so it's a standard chicken and egg problem is there a role for government in breaking that you know getting that long jam broken to get a moving the outcome will be a free market bonanza but how do you get to that outcome you know first Steve and then to Jeff what can government do to get that moving fast well let me first have what the federal government is doing there wants to do if you take a and we're talking about long-haul trucks these are the 18 wheelers the average distance the long-haul trucks drive is about 100,000 miles a year and they get about five or six miles to a gallon of diesel okay so that's a lot of money all right 100,000 miles five by five let's say uh and so there's 20,000 gallons but you multiply by five the other way so it's 100,000 dollars a year just for fuel and um if you take those the same internal combustion engine it can be retrofitted and not even and the newer ones are will be optimized better and it already makes good sense as you well know from your CF these these are all loaded questions he knows the answers to these are all leading questions you understand but but it already makes good sense and so what now with trucks to retrofit a truck they sometimes would charge or even to build you know a new truck out of the assembly like a mack truck or kennel worth the truck itself is 100,000 dollars and they're charging up to another 100,000 dollars to put in the the gas handling system and the liquefied containers now what should it cost about 30,000 all right but if you build new it it's not going to be that much more and so as you begin to do this the first thing you want to do is get enough competition out there at least in several manufacturers so the price should never be it shouldn't today it shouldn't be 100,000 and most it should be 50 and just get it down to 50 30 20,000 dollars and also you know at that price point you know you're paying for yourself in one year I mean the cost of liquefied natural gas including shipping and a few central stations in the United States still looks to be two or three times cheaper okay now Shell I don't know where their program is now they were going to invest about 300 million dollars in stations in stations around the United States and there's another consortium of companies that were going to do it more in localized areas but if you look at the map of the United States there's some major interstates and you need a station about every the range is five or six hundred miles you fueling station every hundred hundred fifty miles to get from the edge of one city to the other than another city and and so it's not like a personal vehicle where you have to have lots of so and so the uh the trucking industry heavy-duty trucking industry is 20 percent of our energy of transportation it's big and if you do this interstates in the maps that I've seen you can get half of that so that's a significant savings but it's it's the economics already look very very good and so the administration is proposing let's help you know if someone wants to spend the extra 50 or 80 thousand dollars we'll pay for a certain amount up to that and then just to nudge it forward and to keep companies like you know Shell and others to invest because that would do a lot again for energy independence you know offloading oil which is I see it mostly prices mostly going upwards gas I see as being stable for the next couple of decades well the market system is going to make this happen sooner or later the question is how do we make it sooner rather than later Jeff what's your view on that well I I think Steve's given a lot of good information there about what is happening and I think to the extent that the government can step in and partner with with the private sector to accelerate this we certainly should I I'm encouraged that you can buy a ram pickup now that is is equipped with both natural gas fueling capability as well as gasoline and that's to me a substantial step forward and I hope that there gets to be competition between various manufacturers in this country even at that level because there there are a lot of fleets of pickups that are in operation around the country that could be using natural gas that are that are stuck with gasoline right now by the way that technology has an huge advantage when you're at the delivery truck or personal vehicle level because you could have it's sort of like a plug-in hybrid you can run a natural gas if you're there but you don't have the anxiety that if you ever got stranded with a taze mire an engine you could a direct injection engine you could you know flip the computer and the computer says okay my feet is now natural gas will natural gas tank go the first 40 miles flip it my feet is now gasoline and so this this is technology that existed isn't deployed quite it's beginning to be and that becomes very exciting because natural gas this is going to be a lot less expensive in the u.s than oil and diesel and gasoline let me give you one concrete example I I was having lunch with the mayor of a small town in new mexico secoro new mexico some of you probably know secoro where new mexico tech is located and the mayor was complaining that the city is the natural gas utility and the city was trying to figure out how it could use its own natural gas to operate its own fleet of repair vehicles and and city vehicles around there and he said the cost was prohibitive of trying to get these things retrofitted and so when uh when dodge came out with their their uh truck that allowed for natural gas usage I called him up and said you know this is this is a reasonably priced vehicle that will allow you to do what you need to do and and as far as I know they're they're following through on it but but there's a lot of opportunity for for the use of natural gas in the transportation sector that we haven't exploited yet those of you who are new to this area if you've been driving around campus around Palo Alto you discover a profusion of hybrid cars priuses and others in fact you'll see a lot of priuses you'll see a few teslas the tesla uh showroom is just about about a mile or two from here and you'll see a few kind of cars i drive which is a plug-in hybrid and the question that i'm going to ask these two is what is the future and more economical automobiles is it hybrid plug-in hybrid all electric or is there fourth technology out there not yet on the market um you know really agnostic uh you know and it it but it's also it's deeper than that because it really depends on your usage if you're in a farm in the midwest or west you range is a big deal for you and and so uh an all electric is probably not going to do well okay you know you really want to go three or four hundred miles now ten years from the day you maybe go 300 miles uh in a 25 000 car you know teslas you know 75 000 or 82 000 dollars for the teslas but but we'll but uh so it really depends on what you're going to use in suburbian and cities uh you know there's a lot of things that do work uh you know once you get above 150 or certainly 200 miles uh for city suburban driving there's there's you know there is some anxiety i know some leaf owners have some anxiety at at 100 miles but uh and so they have to think a little more deeply about their trips but is there anything in the diesel fuel which is going to be a competitor uh in the diesel fuel well natural gas uh for heavier duty things um in the medium duty things one issue has to do with natural gas storage in the cost of the carbon tank uh which you know that's where r&d can do a lot of things i um again chemical fuel is is really very high energy density and despite the fact that the engines are only 35 percent or diesel maybe 40 percent efficient uh it's such high energy density that the range is issue but but i don't know because maybe 15 years from now we get the battery that you know and and everything changes uh so you just don't really know i think you just invest in all these things to see what happens invest in the research and all these things and let the private sector make investments jeff well i agree with what steve is saying i i think that at the current the current state of technology development the plug-in hybrid has a lot of attractions for people and in my part of the country where where you may wind up having to drive over 100 miles on a on a trip or during the day uh i think that all electric vehicles are getting better and better and uh and the cost is the cost of of getting that extended range is coming down and so i think uh there's there's potentially great opportunity there but at the current time i think there's more of a market for plug-in hybrids like the one-year driving i want to pivot to build although i must say i i do salivate over at teslas that has enough range for me pivoting now to buildings uh there's a huge potential to be realized and making buildings more efficient and steve touched on that this morning in his talks and the question in my mind is how do we get more energy as a misambiguous word or how to get more action by the people who build buildings particularly industrial buildings to build in these features that are say energy saving all of the mathematics i've seen that suggests that the math is in favor of doing this that the payback period is very attractive but yet it doesn't seem to be happening what can we do to get some moving here and does government in particular have an important role to play here so again steve i'll throw that question first to you and then to see well first i think the biggest one of the biggest barriers believe it or not is uh inertia and information many many architects and structural engineers actually don't know what's available at no extra cost uh and how you can save and one of the things i started when i was director of berkeley lab but pushed even harder is how do you how do you get people aware of the existing technologies and even design tools that they can plug into this this is the concept of what you want how can you put in something really simple like air ducts right angles and air ducts very very bad uh it costs a lot of energy to move around air with it has to go like that but but people when they draw the air ducts they use you know right angles well you know it when you're building a new building it doesn't cost them it doesn't cost more the very very simple things having the ventilation system not fight convection is something that is not fully understood you know hot air rises uh and and so you have profound examples even in modern buildings built in the last five years where they just say we're going to use energy and power to overcome natural convection whereas you should be using natural convection to actually assist in the circulation now we have a we just bought a home here in mellow park it's a two-story home um uh it has no air conditioning we don't need air conditioning you open up the windows and the ground floor at night and let it cool on the top floor and then you close the windows at eight or nine o'clock in the daytime and your house stays at 70 or 68 or you name it that's what's happening and so that just the sensible use of what you have is something that most building designers have forgotten about over 200 years ago and and in europe today where they don't have much air conditioning they know this stuff so just even getting that stuff into the design of the buildings is is a profound and it saves money you know just not forcing against you know hot air rises color sinks just things like this passive shading uh when the south and west facing sun in a hot day use some white shades okay and so again this is stuff that you can build in to the automated things i will go around and do this managing myself uh my wife won't do it but you know i will open the windows at nine closing during the day and do all these other things so so it has to be automated okay but but you can do those things and and so those are things that don't cost much money and then it saves on the size of your chiller it saves on the size of your hbac system it saves on everything and and but i think the ignorance and inertia is is is a lot of it what can the government do they can be the information barrier they can be the convener they can be helping invent software tools that help the architects and social engineers automatically say well this is kind of what i want conceptually and so you tell me where i should put the air ducts and how big should they be and you can tell me how to use passive shading and make suggestions jeff anything on buildings well just that this is a difficult issue for the federal government to fix uh i mean the tradition is that the state and local government determines building codes and that's always been the case and it's not i think i've i've determined in the time i was back there that it's not realistic to think we're going to have federally uh mandated building codes that have any real teeth in them so i do think the federal government's role is is as steve describes it and that is to try to show the way try to try to encourage try to provide incentives for states and and local communities to do the right thing and for builders and architects to do the right thing and when we build federal buildings hey you let that be an example we build things in military bases let that be an example we're going to turn over now to the audience to ask questions to this panel and there's people with microphones if you raise your hand somebody will bring a microphone to you and you can speak here we go john massey could you give us your name first john massey quick question i grew up just north of pittsburgh as well and used to work for the us bureau of mines pittsburgh mine research center which sort of watched over the coal guys an interesting experience so i have a question about fracking and the potential role of insurance and the reason was there were a lot of coal mines in western pennsylvania that were out of use for 20 30 years the companies were gone they would collapse they would burn all kinds of stuff to what extent is it possible to either have regulations or involve the insurance industry in making sure that people in an area don't get hurt 20 years later and therefore give shorter-term incentives to the companies to do it right engineer the the wells right and do the geology right that's an excellent question i'm not sure we have an answer in this bound to that question i'm going to turn over to c for us to see if it's yeah that's a great question because there are plenty of examples of mining companies that do this and then 20 30 years later they're belly up they no longer exist okay and you get you know acid conditions terrible runoffs all these things and and then you know ultimately either you you've got this really polluted site or else the taxpayer has to clean it up and i it we shouldn't be thinking about that just as you know after the macondo oil spill the Gulf of Mexico you know TransOcean was the company hired by BP to do this but a much smaller company could have done that which has no assets and they could have done equal damage because it was TransOcean and and there has to be protection against that now it was suggested by the oil the presidential oil spill commission that everybody who extracts oil out of the Gulf of Mexico pay into a pool an insurance pool that you know and then depending on how much you're extracting how much profit you're making you pay more you know so the big guys who are getting a lot of oil should pay more into that but it allows the smaller people to have this pool of protection i thought it was a great idea the company strongly resisted that okay so a similar thing you know in all mining operations you know in fracking the the biggest fear is actually the smaller companies who can do equal environmental damage pollute a major water table or have fugitive runaway fugitive emissions and they don't have deep pockets and they just they don't even go through chapter 11 they just go straight to chapter 7 and then who's left holding back the people and the taxpayers so insurance pools things like that to give it more longevity i don't know but but these are some ideas but amazingly industries the you know i was thinking this is a great idea for the oil industry to help help itself and yet huge resistance jeff do you want to add anything to that just that i i could also support the kind of establishment of a fund to deal with oil spills but i i really think probably the government's most effective efforts are done at the front end in trying to have effective regulation and monitoring of what's going on i mean i think instead of coming along behind and trying to trying to provide some kind of recompense for for folks that are injured by inadequate regulation i think we're better off focusing on on better regulation and better monitoring of what's happening at the beginning next question yes my name is very very china and kubitino city council the united states infrastructure ranking is number 25 in the world when the government is going to spend more money in improve the infrastructure especially the massive public transit to help reduce the co2 jeff do you want to add that well i i think it's not likely to happen soon we we of course had a substantial infusion funds into infrastructure as part of the so-called stimulus bill that that the congress passed to try to help us pull out of the recession i don't think there's much appetite in washington uh to try to do that again right now particularly given the size of our deficit and given the sentiment of many people that we we need to be shrinking government not increasing the size of government and and certainly there's very little enthusiasm for raising taxes so so what you're proposing has some good logic to it but i don't think you're likely to see uh a groundswell of support in washington for uh substantial additional public spending on infrastructure in the near future okay there's a question over here hi my name is elliott hoffman and i run a company called true market solutions and i have a quick comment and then a quick question as of a couple of hours i was walking through the the hallway here and i noticed on this beautiful bright sunny day in this beautiful building filled with glass every single light bulb was on and there are roughly i just counted about 60 bulbs in here plus the side panels and it's just our behavior is a big part of what we're doing the question is is related to a a meeting that i was out a few weeks ago in napo with people who are focused on climate energy and ab 32 all focused on california and there was a professor from stanford one of your colleagues dr chew uh mark jacobson and be curious to your thoughts on his his findings along with somebody from uc berkeley and that was that they've they're now saying that in california and new york and i'm not sure about the whole country that by 2030 we could convert all of our energy to electricity and produce 100 of our electricity with wind water and sun power and convert this by 2030 add another 10 or 20 years who cares but what what are your thoughts on that well i don't believe that let's see what steve and jim you may want to comment on that one also steve let's start with you i think that's a way over optimistic i think that for uh airplanes um i don't see liquid fuel being replaced uh in the near future so then the question is can you make uh liquid fuel renewable liquid fuel rather than um you know from fossil fuel that's something that certainly is good got a lot of department of energy attention a lot of other people's attention um so while i'm very bullish on on technology i think 20 years was was the 20 years your number uh yeah that's um i don't see that happening in 20 years um i i we are going to need some point sources of energy just for peaking and other things like that so so and for the next 2030 40 50 years at least just just for things like that so jim do you have a different view on that than steve i think in fact technically you might be able to do it if you don't care about the cost if you don't care about the economy if you don't care about the reliability of the you don't care about the reliability of the system and if for airplanes you have a very long extension card next question yes my name is richard hilt and um i'd like to i'd like to thank both dr chu and senator vigaman for for um bringing up some very interesting technical energy issues and the policy issues and not withstanding dr chu's belief that physicists are smarter than economists jim you had a lot of restraint there but these are these are very complex issues both in terms of the technology and in terms of the policy how do you how do you communicate the complexity to the average moke in the street effectively first of all i did not say that physicists were smart all i was saying is that um you might have inferred that what i what i was saying was uh that uh i would love to dearly have more data-driven stuff and and spend a lot of time getting valid data that other people can say where'd you get that data how'd you get that data this is what astrophysicists do with each other and astronomers they can't do experiments we don't go start a star and say okay now we understand how stars work but you get better and better information and then and it eliminates models it refines models it gets rid of some of the stuff the underbrush thinking and so i think jim i will both agree that that data-driven stuff and get better at getting data more reliable data and the discussion is is the data reliable how did you analyze it all this other stuff and then start from there and and that's really what i was pushing so yeah and let me comment we have data-driven physicists and you have theoretical physicists you have data-driven economists and theoretical economists and hopefully each group talks to one another at least the physicists were the physicists and the economists were the economists yeah the the the string theory guys um since they can't make predictions uh they kind of fly off in some deep space and so i'm an experimentalist as you can probably tell next question my name is chris varma i have been in the silicon valley for 35 years in microelectronics industry uh manufacturing part of the microelectronics has gone to asia so is the solar panel the question to secretary especially is it really practical to bring those back here now economically let me begin i i said can we do it not should we spend taxpayer money to do it huge difference and i would agree with jeff there's a role and they're not you know the proper role of the federal government is one thing and there is not an appetite going for at least for the next five six years of huge federal dollars going to things so so um so it it's and there was another question that had something to do with this most of this stuff has to be private sector driven it just simply has to be that way that's the way the u.s. society and markets and everything else would work and so what you should be spent what we should be spending our time doing is thinking how to tweak things to to drive private sector investments that make it a good business decision right and and to say we can do this and not and ignore the economics is saying no we really can't you know many time people have commented say we can do x and it it's only a matter of money and said well excuse me energy is about money right you know a 10 difference in energy costs mean huge things to a lot of people and and and so it's a not start to say it costs five times as much so going back to whether we should be bringing solar companies backing out states it's gotta you know first the whole market but but unfortunately solar modules ship everywhere in the world now it's like automobiles so so it's you know what are the incentives that are don't use a lot of taxpayer money to actually get american companies to reinvest in themselves i go back to steel what what should one be doing that doesn't require a lot of taxpayer dollars to get the industry to reinvest in itself and that's the cruise that's the sixty four dollar question in my life do we have another question this will be the last question by the way and i'm going to turn over to jim find a word thank you very much my name is bobby populace i have a question about um federal policy we talk about um ways that you guys can change it one of it is the divestiture of oil companies through the sunsetting of their subsidies there seems to be a lot of money that goes into idc's or or subsidies that are no longer relevant or not nearly as impactful as they could be if applied to renewables or other things in the in the non-carbon or low-carbon energy can you talk about that um and those policies and you know obama talked about repealing those didn't really get anywhere but i know he's talking about bringing that back love to hear about that jeff do you want to add that one uh well i think uh everyone's talking about doing a major reform of the tax code clearly that should be one of the things that uh should be looked at as part of that and the president of course is advocating i think in the budget the president has sent the congress for the last several years maybe since he's been president each each year he has advocated the repeal of those various tax provisions that uh that favor the uh fossil fuel industry basically so i think uh i think it's only going to happen as part of a major tax reform it's not going to happen on happen on a one-off basis and uh and of course there'll be a lot of fight about whether it happens even in that context well please join me in thanking these two amazing people