 So good afternoon I'm super excited to kick off the the afternoon panel discussion on What the future landscape of investing looks like in this space in this ecosystem? It's been my pleasure to have Moderated or have been part of this panel for a number of years My name is Pedro Mocrian. I split my time between Stanford Between GE ventures and also another advisory firm that I have that focuses on early-stage Investing and advisory work around the innovation in infrastructure cities and energy My background prior to that was I actually had me former grad student here of Jim Sweeney's which is why I got roped into doing this And and was one of the first graduate students at the pre-court Institute for Energy Efficiency Back in the day, so it's been a lot of fun seeing a lot of different things Between then and now I've actually spent six years on the venture capital side of the firm called Mayfield And have advised a number of different multinational companies in the space, so it's my pleasure to introduce the panel Because that's basically gonna be the most you're gonna hear from me The panel here is has been picked because of the representation of the different stages of investment in the energy space and sort of Representing different views of disruption that's happening And and how those disruptions come to market I'll let the panelists introduce themselves and then Greg is gonna give us a quick presentation And then the format today is gonna be much more of a conversation And and if you would like to take part in that please feel free You know make it controversial interesting poke holes at stuff make fun of us Try to direct it at me, and then I'll take the the blame for anything before the panelists themselves So I'll I'll turn to Devjit to provide the background. Sure. Thanks bedroom So I'm Devjit Mukherjee. I'm director at next 47 next 47 is Siemens's brand new Consolidated venture group which I can talk more about as we get into the discussion By way of background. I'm an engineer by training stated mechanical engineering and Did my master's in PhD here at Stanford? So it's nice to be back on campus after grad school I started consulting for for some VC firms and Including a startup that was started by one of the professors on my on my reading committee for my dissertation So I got into kind of the startup and VC world pretty early did some VC consulting work Doesn't aerospace engineer full-time for a couple years And then made the move full-time to venture capital back in 2005 I went to row ventures where I invested pretty much across across all all spaces. It was a generalist fund But towards the end of my tenure there got involved in energy. It really was Was my area of focus. I felt passionate about it and there was a lot happening back then I'm sure we're gonna talk about some of the differences between then and now and after that Went to clean tech group briefly where I headed up the West Coast research practice And after that I felt like I really wanted a view of what the corporates were doing because I felt like they had long-term staying power in the space and that's when I joined Siemens In one of its venture groups now that's become next 47 And I'm sure we'll talk more about it as we go along great a but Yokel I spent 13 years in Venture at a traditional venture firm called Rockport Capital I was about eight hundred and fifty million dollars under management focused exclusively on clean tech and with Rockport Actually moved out from Boston about ten years ago opened up the Sand Hill office Moved it up San Francisco a couple years ago and as of about six months ago Actually spun off with one other partner to found a new early-stage fund called congruent ventures We're focused on pre seed seed and early series a investments We write 500k to million and a half dollar checks with a interesting follow-on structure to follow on those successful companies We invest broadly across sustainability. So we take that Term as fairly liberal anything touching energy resources transportation We can look at Hardware software will do incremental changes that we think have real financial returns. We'll do very high-risk High-reward investments that that are long shots, but could be world-changing. So We're taking a pretty broad view of the space This is not because we're special but because the sector has been challenged I think we're one of the first new early-stage funds to have been formed in the last couple years focused on the space Greg Katz. I've I've also had the pleasure of being at Stanford for two years did my MBA here Worked in the Clint administration back when they believed in science Was the director of financing for efficiency and renewables worked at good energies Which I think is the first large firm investing just in clean energy. So managing director there and I'm going to talk a bit today about a new fund which is Has a federal low-cost debt as part of it. So it's sort of a new model of financing I'm Dave Rogers. I got added to this panel late. So I'm not in your brochure. I'm kind of a rare bird in Silicon Valley as I'm not interested particularly in technology or Early-stage I'm here because I bring diversity in the thought of having been historically one who's worked on building or developing or financing or buying or selling actual projects or companies with Substantial Assets in in the ground or on the sea working away. I was for 30 years a lawyer With a large law firm Latham and Watkins. I ran the project finance group there for many years At least within the group I ran it was we I don't know We had many high hundreds of billions of dollars worth of projects that we did and Cross a lot of sectors and lost, you know around a lot of places in the world. So The thing that I'll bring to the panel is a perspective that It's not all about technology. It's also about scale up. We got to figure out how once the technology is developed How it's going to get Scaled up in a large way. I see one of my friends and former students here I also teach a clean energy project development finance for the last three years at the GSB and the law school mostly GSB and then we also have engineering PhDs in the class and so we focus in that class on try to how do we get Projects built using new technologies and what point does something become eligible for Vast amounts of low-cost capital because at the end of the day That's where it all has to be if we're going to really move the needle. Thank you so Greg if you'd like to So what while Greg is Stepping up to to to get his presentation one of the themes that that I thought would be interesting to cover right now is There's a unique point in time that we're at which is 2017 never mind what's going on in certain sort of the In in Washington, but if you just think about it from a time perspective Going back exactly 10 years ago was 2007 and 2007 was the height of the hubris of what was going on in the clean tech space In terms of all the investments that were being made across a whole slew of different technologies that for whatever reason may or may not have worked out and Then you advanced five years from there and you have 2012 and 2012 is interesting because it actually is an Indication of the other extreme end of the pendulum swing where a lot of the traditional specifically vertically focused funds Starting to actually shut down So it was the the bottom point of investment in the energy Infrastructure space at large and now in 2017 as Abe was pointing out is sort of the the dawn of a new set of breeds Of investment opportunities where Abe hopefully will talk about some of the your thesis in a second And what Greg was speaking of in terms of these hybrid approaches So it's been a really interesting decade as it comes to investment And so that's going to be the theme that we'd like to talk about today But before we do that Greg floors yours. Great. Thank you very much. So This is a cover of a book I wrote on costs and benefits of greening Buildings and cities. I'm gonna talk a little bit about that because I think that's going to be the biggest driver I'll just say there's that's on Amazon There are only a hundred and seventeen shopping days till Christmas This was a ad that Exxon which is called humble back then ran in 1962 Which they boast that every day humble supplies enough energy to melt seven million tons of glacier That's ignoring the CO2's impact So that you know the the the the the sharp drop in venture capital and investing in clean energy is really Created a need for more financing. These are some of the firms have been involved in financing The way to think about these firms today in part are some of these are very Hardware and capital intensive so an ever power atrina solar some of them are very software oriented in capital light So my energy or a tendril and that matters because in it in a period where you have well a little capital going into clean Energy and your growth stage company on the bottom left-hand side. You've raised a couple million You've got a couple million dollar projects in the ground if I'm a software company. I can raise VC money It's not capital intensive But if I'm building wind or solar or ground source heat pumps raising project finance to do to build these projects with VC is Just much too expensive and banks will only provide debt financing if you get to 40 or 50 million dollars in scale So this is huge clean energy financing gaps So many of the firms that we talked to that are have innovative approaches for scaling clean energy Can't get the capital to grow and they're not viable for VC funding So one of the new Approaches to this is a firm that we're just we just launched were approved as a small business investment company Those have been around for 50 years. They leveraged low-cost debt. It was critical capital for growth of 10 of thousands of companies including Apple and Intel and the way it works is we as a We provide debt into a clean energy development company which they then in turn used to do project finance With a PPA structure and we have an ownership stake in that We can do up to 20 or 25 million and we think at the end of that cycle They'll be large enough to qualify for bank debt. We think this is a critical gap in the market We think it's a kind of a new take on an old structure to provide financing that is essentially leveraged debt So I'm going to talk about cities because cities are extraordinarily important to our transition to low-carbon This is the same place 21 years later. You can see this sort of rate of Asian construction There's only one building that's similar in both of those two-thirds of co2 is in cities So cities is really what matters in our transition And it what's important is that outcomes matter at a city level rather than politics So it's about budgets and and issues that are considered externalities for businesses So health employment and tourism matter to cities Cities can drive large changes in carbon. They have that great Specification power and because they're there for a long term. They've got relatively good credit rating all of these provide leverage opportunities The impacts of climate change on energy and building design has already manifest an increased need for air conditioning a reduced need for heating When you think about benefits here's a here's cool roofs So a lighter color roof the cost of that is 76 cents per square foot the benefit to the building owners a buck 34 The the size of the benefits mostly related to health including reduced heat mortality is about five dollars a square foot So what's exciting about cities is that the financial benefits which a private sector Company would think about as an externality a city would not think about as an externality It's a city's responsibility to think about citizens health and many of them of commitments on co2 And they worry about heat mortality and so cities are really powerful Opportunity set for driving technology and funding again additional cost for doing For for doing a green so a lead office building. Is it around four bucks a square foot the green dark green and blue bar The direct benefits to the building when you start stacking up the additional benefits Which are crew at a campus level or a city level it dominates and when you take a step back and say when you add up Those externalities relative to the cost on a net present value basis over 20 years the return is a 10x That's a very compelling return proposition if you think externalities are actually Internalities and there are a lot of additional benefits We're not able to quantify it's written up in this book because of work like this cities across the country said okay This gives us quantification on what we knew that it's smart to do green buildings We're going to require that all public buildings be green going forward But we're now looking at what are called smart surfaces a lot of clean clean tech technologies from cool roof green roof solar PV Water and other things and what we're finding is that when you map this against a city in terms of benefits The net present value is very large So those the cost at the top first cost on M cost, but you get energy benefits storm water health Potable water benefits which aggregates this slide is actually cut off But it shows about a two billion dollar net present value for Washington DC to take all of their surfaces and make them one of these Technologies cool roofs PV green roofs permeable But that doesn't get at other benefits so DC where I live and by the way I have a proud to say we have Electric car which for four years has been running off PV on my roof We're going to roughly triple a number of 95 degree days And that's just not because of it's not only because the hot air coming out of politicians It's from climate change and that means that the city functionally becomes unlivable for one or two months in the summer So what we did is we said what where can we where can we figure out the quantification of impact here? It's on tourism so five percent avoided loss in tourism for DC Which is reasonable from reducing your excess heat in the summer Adds about three billion dollars in net present value for Philadelphia the numbers about five So what we found is for DC net present value of adopting these strategies city-wise is about five billion and Philadelphia it's about eight billion dollars Cities are also in a very powerful position to drive innovation and carbon sequestration So cap carbon capture and sequestration very expensive involves separation piping putting the stuff in the ground which then leaks a Plant a company south of here called blue planets one of a suite of new companies It's developed way to to sequester carbon. They do it in aggregate That's a poor at the San Francisco Airport where many of you flew into their their pouring cement that's used aggregate made with co2 I think it's the first carbon sequestering commercial products sold in this country And then people have talked about PPAs before but I think this is so extraordinary that you're seeing long-term purchase power agreements Coming in at four three four or five cents a kilowatt hour So about one third of the cost of electricity in a place like California So cities are just beginning to get into the business of doing direct long-term contracts to buy power And to go to zero net carbon. I'll just mention one last thing which is working with the former president of Stanford Don Kennedy about five years ago. We launched an initiative called CO2 DE which is about correcting a market mispricing So if I do an energy efficiency investment the value of the CO2 that results Doesn't go to us it defaults to the utility So this initiative to say look if you're gonna have a market in carbon make the pricing signals work by having the allocation of the CO2 go to the people who do the investment So it's an indication of when we think about financing getting the incentives right become extraordinarily important. That's it. Thank you Thank you Greg a Lot of interesting themes actually just just from there alone And I want to just kind of jump back to the the macro theme is just viewing the past ten years Most of you folks have have been in this space for beyond ten years, right? But if you just just say ten years ago, what did the space look like? What did it look like five years ago? And what is it looking like today in terms of like they're the really interesting opportunities? I know you're kind of talking about how that shifted Perhaps you can start Yeah, sure I'm happy to so I mean it's interesting going back to 2007 so at the time. I was at Row ventures doing pure play financial VC investing and Things were very very very different. That was really the I'd say the peak of the hype cycle in terms of energy It was also the beginning of I think a lot of Curiosity and enthusiasm about the space and you also have to consider Kind of what the what the pricing look like So if you looked at the price of a barrel of oil or you looked at the price of natural gas The prices were about four times higher than they are today So things were coming off the shelf that we hadn't seen before Technologies that had been developed in the 50s and 60s were being dusted off and promoted So it was at the time. We were seeing a lot more startups and entrepreneurs coming up in what I would call the the hard tech area so we were seeing lots of things like fuel cells and batteries and biofuels solar cells and solar technologies new types of engines it was really a Diverse time in terms of all the different offerings we saw and Fundamentally a lot of these technologies had become cost competitive with the pricing of the day So it was a super interesting time Everyone was getting into it the VCs were talking about how the energy markets were much much larger than anything in consumer internet And so forth. So it was definitely an exciting time But it didn't last for too long. So if you fast-forward to 2012 a Lot of VCs by that time had had started the retreat or had fully exited the space. They'd realized that financial returns Were not easy to come by the public markets Weren't weren't terribly Welcoming it was difficult to get private exits hard technology hard science Naturally takes longer. It's very capital intensive and it didn't really fit. I'd say the conventional VC model very well So by 2012 a lot of the enthusiasm had died This was also after the stimulus funding of 2009 which actually helped I think along with the VC money had helped Bring a lot of new technologies to market So that that period kind of died in 2008 and 9 in 2011 at Siemens I 2011 12 time frame I was still seeing actually some companies in the space. I think it was kind of the tail end So there were Relative to now at least more pure play energy companies at the time. I Think between 2012 and now a lot has changed So it really has I think the landscape of startups has really shifted Today, we we don't really see nearly as many pure play energy companies energy efficiency and those types of things are a lot less attractive In terms of building businesses around those themes specifically in a dedicated way today We're seeing much more around around data, right? So it's it's this is the the era of AI and industrial IOT So now we see Technologies like that coming into the energy markets and potentially disrupting so it's about making better use of data about collecting Information from sensors that are distributed and there are thousands and thousands of them and these impact everything from power generation To the way that we operate smart grids There's also been a shift. I think in just in terms of what I would call consumerization There's a lot more power at the end points So we're moving kind of from a centralized to a thoroughly decentralized model where consumers have a lot more control and power And so that's really changed fundamentally the types of companies that we're seeing so I'd say the technologies are not pure play energy anymore from what we're seeing. It's things like AI and IOT and blockchain We're seeing a lot of service enabled models things like drones I think the data aspect really makes service models much more viable now that you basically have pervasive sensing You can charge in a different way And so the new business model innovation aspect is pretty exciting, but I'm not sure that we're going to go back to the era that we were in in 2007 for better or for worse I can't say that and hopefully we had a chance to talk about some other trends I want to give the other panelists an opportunity to talk but hopefully we can talk a little bit a little bit too about What's happened in the broader markets? How VCs have changed how corporate VCs are changing the landscape What we're seeing with our own customers because there have been some shifts there as well Yeah, I can take a spin at this from a kind of financial markets perspective So ultimately, you know venture funds and most fund structures are funded by institutional dollars, whether it's the Stanford Endowment or the University of California Endowment or pension funds and family offices So I joined you know Rockport in 2004 early 2004 and we were the ugly stepchild of venture People in venture, you know a couple people dabbled in energy climber done a couple deals in it Nobody wanted to touch this stuff and then and we had just we had we were investing out of a first fund at that point We went out to market in 2005 to raise a second fund. It was really the first institutional fund Which ended up being about 260 million dollars We we barked up a lot of trees and people thought we were crazy It was a there were a couple, you know traditional funds out there that had focused on energy Materials but not many groups had gone out and kind of talked about you know We never we never called a clean tack until we submitted a while later, but a bunch of Distributed physical assets out there that we were investing in and it wasn't until the blackout of 2005 When the eastern grid went down I think it was a transformer in Ohio if I remember right That any institutional capital paid the sector any attention and we went from kind of scrapping to try to raise a fund To all of a sudden being oversubscribed in like three months And and the reason I bring this up is it's really about institutional capital's mentality around this space and that is informed You know first it's informed by hype and then later it's informed by returns So the hype went way up we closed this fund a bunch of other Solid funds kind of expanded their mandates a little bit and closed funds as well And that's when I got kicked out of Boston to move out to Sand Hill Road when all of these Sand Hill Road firms started doing deals In the energy sector and we wanted to syndicate because we didn't really know that much about venture We just knew a lot about energy. It's an energy operating room Historically and so there was it was complete go-go days You know deals pre-revenue were getting funded at billion-dollar plus valuations. Hello Silicon Valley. That was unusual for energy that has now become norm out here for traditional venture deals and then 2008 struck and financial markets cratered and a lot of a lot of Money yet venture funds were having the answer to their LP saying why aren't you investing in this new sector? LP said we want some exposure. We think you're great venture funds Go put some dollars out and so they'd find the best, you know deals possible and you'd allocate dollars from a generalist Into the sector. Well, a lot of those deals were not good deals and you know, we were in some of those as well So I can't point purely to the generalists on that and then the tide went out and everything blew up the good deals Often kind of scrapped along the deals that had high burn and you know a lot of fundamentals had changed from energy prices to solar panel prices Just went completely bottoms up in a very short period of time and the institutional memory is 10 to 12 years from when you commit as a as an asset manager on the back end and Until that stuff until those negative returns work their way out of the system Funds like mine have a tough time convincing a traditional asset allocator to allocate anything new even if the all the trends that We just touched on which I completely agree with are kind of in your face And so that's that's the cycle for me. It's it's it was kind of 2005 to 2008 when everything blew up 2008-2012 was a slow-motion train wreck as people ran out of money and couldn't find new financing Baby thrown out with the bathwater And then 2012 to now is all right. There's a whole bunch of really interesting activity digital starting to hit physical You know, we're doing early-stage investments of the five kind of top deals in the pipeline three of them They don't even mention machine learning and AI three of them are based effectively on machine learning and AI and like that's not even the pitch I think the stuff is completely over-hyped, but it's also real And so you're seeing all of these kind of digital approaches actually starting to play into the physical world And that's just kind of a whole new ballgame and fits in a lot of ways very well with traditional venture and I'll stop there Yeah, I mean I you know eight years ago I'd say energy efficiency people wanted to do it, but those are tough deals I I guess I have two points one is I think energy efficiency finally finally is going to have its day Partly because of the cost of meter and communications is dropped partly because they're starting to solve problems other than energy vision It's energy vision is the world's most boring problem, right? And you don't in its optional, but what's great about the new services that we're seeing is that they solve other problems security Comfort that kind of thing. I also think pace is going to really accelerate pace commercials around 400 million last year should be 10 billion within three four years So you have new forms of fun coming into both residential and commercial financing for efficiency that's going to really accelerate new technology adoption and scaling and then my second point is sort of the PPA model, which is really what the solar industry was built on is being applied in new areas It's pretty exciting energy efficiency ground-source heat pumps water. That's a great structure to scale clean energy technology Broadly beyond solar including in areas that are utility areas like water and energy efficiency, and that's an exciting area Yeah, I think all of these approaches are going to be valuable and they're going to be Incremental ways to get to the problem We have to keep in mind the problem. We're talking about is measured in tens of trillions of dollars Well, it's the IEA estimates is what in the 40s of trillions and the estimate that was in the Panel this morning the first panel was around 15 trillion Measuring not quite apples to apples, but we're talking about a problem to decarbonize the world enough To meet goals that is measured in many tens of trillions of dollars of investment And the only way that investment can be made is to be made with low-cost capital and so what we as a society need to do is to figure out how we're going to implement solutions at a vast scale and part of the problem that we have as a society is we need to get more Consensus around how we're going to let that occur because even when we have Machinery that's quite proven technologies that are quite proven whether it's a well proven wind turbine or a pumped Hydro water turbine that will either be a generator or be a pump That's old old old technology decades old fully proven Often that's not the technology that's the issue It's could be that it's just hard to get a permit. It's hard to get a Pricing model reflected into the new worlds of how energy storage is going to be priced whether it's a state law Issue or it's a federal law. Is it power is it transmission? It's all kinds of issues to sort out So that the challenges we have here are not just about technology It's about taking a piece of machinery that may be perfectly proven You get a warranty on you can get bank financing on and so on But you didn't have to figure out how does it get implemented into a project at scale project? I used to work on some years ago is a Pump storage facility that needs to be built being built at a old Kaiser steel iron mine The site looks like Mad Max. I mean you could have filmed Mad Max there And it's 1.3 gigawatts for like six hours right enormous in California It would facilitate an enormous buildout of renewables Instantly dispatchably the way when we're when we have curtailments of renewables going on at quite significantly in a high hydro year where we've got a lot of inability to take the midday solar and so We've got a lot of environmental groups fighting that. I mean if we as a society Can't figure out what we want to get behind whether it's the solar projects or whether it's wind projects or Pump storage facilities on a Mad Max location. We're not talking about a pristine river that needs to be damned Then we're going to have a lot of trouble achieving our goals Notwithstanding whatever great funding can come out of Silicon Valley into into innovators because the innovators can innovate all they want and succeed but at the end of the day we've got to get the Innovations implemented and financed and to get those implemented in finance We need to be a lot more effective effective as a society in figuring out how to block Non-technology and non-financing obstacles to those projects getting built at scale So I totally agree with that But you know one of the other big things that's happening is that a lot not enough but a lot of generation and control is going into Private enterprise so there's massive permitting problems. You know as an investor I won't as a venture investor with a limited time frame I won't touch any technology that has to go into those kinds of projects partially for the bankability reason partially because of the Sighting permitting and other issues that that go into that but what you can find is these distributed generation behind-the-meter storage efficiency kinds of products that actually Kind of avoid all of that and then the question is you know who's coordinating and all we had a discussion about that before About price signals and you know How do you actually balance the grid when all the decisions are being made in a very distributed fashion? but the fact of the matter is is you know private people and enterprises can buy and build whatever they want behind-the-meter as long as they're allowed to Interconnect and that that is kind of the fundamental flaw is is all of that central planning is starting to go out the door in some ways because As things scale behind-the-meter, it's gonna take a while I don't think there's any credible scenario That solves our climate problems behind-the-meter behind-the-meter is great and it makes a contribution But I don't I've never seen anyone put forth a credible story that solves our climate problems globally With solely with behind-the-meter primarily with behind-the-meter related technology You should find all those and I applaud you for doing it. I'm just saying that to meet our goals. We have huge Needs to put lots of infrastructure into place worldwide and We need to find ways to get that done. Alright, so I actually couldn't agree more I think the challenge is is unless we go towards that, you know, Chinese centralized government point of view We certainly don't want the Trump administration making those decisions on our behalf. So how do we actually, you know, implement that as my big question I don't think I'm not talking just about the US. I'm talking about globally It's a global problem, right? And you know, we can all agree about Trump or whatever we can leave Trump out of the room Can't do that This is it's not about Trump. It's about a need to Figure out and by the way, you know my view is at least we also need to do a better job in California, right? In California, I agree with Greg Foley about pricing signals. Let's talk about pricing signals in California California we've got Carbon pricing Well, great Anyone who took Econ 101 even if they dropped out after the third week Knows something about marginal pricing And if you want to buy something you should have it all turned out at the same marginal price Well, what do we have in California? Well, and the most recent by the way failed auction with settled at the minimum price We had carbon priced in the cap and trade program at $8 a metric ton And the low carbon fuel standard we priced carbon $75 to $125 a metric ton if you look at the E3 report a very Definitive report the implied cost of per metric ton avoided of of CO2 for the RPS is somewhere between $400 and $800 depending on whether you have a high rooftop solar or or low rooftop solar penetration If you look at the SGIP the small generator incentive program the implied price for avoided ton of CO2 is in the thousands So we're spending a lot of money in California with the wrong pricing signals If our goal is to mitigate carbon if our goal is to benefit particular things that we want at the The planet central planning of California to decide what is best then fine We might want that kind of policies where we're particularizing how we're pricing carbon But if the goal is to you know reduce carbon emissions We have a three order of magnitude difference in our carbon pricing within the state for the same atmosphere so We can get into policy questions. So I am I'm proud. I'm proud of the fact that we we managed to make it 33 minutes without saying the word Trump So that's potentially a good good outcome so far So yeah, so so 2017 No one can really forecast what's gonna go on in the future, right? So for me to ask you what you think is gonna happen 2022 is kind of crazy But the thing that I'd like to get your takes on from from your different vantage points is what gets you excited about today I mean you're you haven't given up on the industry the ecosystem and you and you still seem like you're pretty Admin about some things that are actually happening. What what gets you excited every day? What gets you excited in the morning? What are you looking for? What are the trends? I'll begin with you again, okay? Well next 47 we're looking at energy, but we're looking at a lot of a lot of other areas as well But Siemens just for background is is a very big company based in Germany with close to 100 billion in revenue And a lot of that is energy related revenue. So we are in power and gas we're in other forms of generation. We're we're in power delivery the entire Electricity transmission and distribution infrastructure. We're in mobility. Which is transportation So many of our businesses are either driven by or heavily impacted by by energy decisions I think one of the things that has changed in the last few years not going back to kind of the earlier question Which is continuing to keep me very enthused about this space in general Is that we're seeing some changes first of all and and you know, we're really in the business of of startup innovations So how can we work with with startups to keep Siemens competitive and to help them as well? And I think there's probably more opportunities now for kind of this big corporate strategic and startup Partnership to bring, you know one plus one equals three type value than ever before and there's some reasons for that First is that we're seeing our own customers being more amenable to start up innovations and externally externally generated innovation so in the past it used to be very difficult for startups even with better technologies to be able to Approach conservative customer bases like like utilities for example without the validation of a big partner like Siemens Today, I think that's changing although Siemens can still very much help in that equation So what we try to do is work with some of the best startups Use their speed and agility and technology advantages combine it with our tremendous kind of domain expertise and customer relationships and And long-standing kind of the stability of the ship so to speak to approach markets in new ways And I think next 47 this new group that we just started that we're very excited about which is just getting off the ground is Kind of an example of how corporates are changing number one in the space. So corporates themselves are being more kind of accepting of startup innovations and an external externally generated technologies So we put in a billion dollar fund So we're gonna be investing a lot of capital in the next in the next few years And we're taking the long view. This isn't just for the next two to five years. This is a long view about how we Create new value across all of our businesses and you know to your point about disruption a company like Siemens And this is actually why it came to Siemens in the first place having a global footprint being big being around for 170 years I actually believe that some of these big corporates are uniquely suited to address energy challenges that are global in nature and not localized or small so I Think the fact that that customers are changing. They're slowly warming towards innovations and and and kind of moving more at the speed of The ecosystems we see around us for example and the fact that corporates like Siemens are also Have changed and it's not just Siemens But other groups of as well that it really upped I think the game in terms of corporate venture capital and bringing in flexible models for not just investing in companies But also partnering with them ultimately To bring value to fuel startup success But also our success and addressing technology challenges and energy challenges of the future I think those two things are are our trends that I've seen in the past five to ten years That have me very excited specifically about this job Sure, you're still in the game. Yeah, now I try not to speak too much here But you know that there's there's a lot of different data points in here And you know the thing that gets me up in general is Thinking that you can make real venture and financial returns at the early stage investing in in this broad space that at least You know congruence defining a sustainability There are so many the macro trends are kind of very clear Then you kind of get into the middle layer that Greg just articulated very well urbanization trends food Transportation, how do you actually deal with this massive urbanization? Challenge that's going on where we're venture investments actually end up making money is kind of at the micro It's like we have a we have a product. We have a team. How do they make money? How do they make margin? How do they scale without breaking the bank and taking too much capital to actually grow their business? What's exciting to me in the sustainability space is that you know, we touched on this a little bit before but Everything out there in the physical world is starting to get instrumented from a sensing perspective And there are going to be control points that are being layered in to most things that are sold from kind of from here on forward You combine that with low-cost distributed generation whether it's solar and other things declining costs on energy storage It's a long much longer discussion gets a lot of news cycles these days It's kind of mostly out of the money today, but in five or ten years. That's just not going to be the case And you start to get really excited not just about the technologies But the business models and the changing business models to deploy these technologies into the ecosystem Some of them are aligned on financing and so on the board of the largest pace originator and administrator in the country There's a lot of innovation here that kind of combines Technology business models and financing actually that you can deploy Real stuff into the world and get paid for it. That's really exciting And what's most exciting is seeing all the next generation entrepreneurs actually walking through the doors with really interesting companies That's that's the exciting piece Yeah, I totally agree that last coming. I mean ten years ago. You had a very small pool of management with actual experience and clean energy Not humble enough now. You have a large pool of experience capital I mean a large pool of managers who are humbled because they've seen a lot of failures I think that really matters ultimately success and businesses comes down to management You know half of more than half of all new power in both Europe and North America in the last three or four years has come from renewables So it's no longer a marginal technology and the cost curves are really steep And they're better than we expected and so there's an inevitability About renewables becoming the global norm for both baseline and and marginal power and that the transition So I drive this electric car 125 miles a gallon. I haven't bought gasoline in probably three years and it's great, right? I mean, I had to I barred my wife's car the other day. It's terrible mistake. I'd get gas And then finally I think climate change and or carbon is really becoming a defining brand issue very rapidly Especially for for the next generation and that means that it matters Who you so that and then this brand piece of it is gonna have an impact on who you can hire And who you can retain and it's true for corporations It's true for cities which are accelerating down this curve towards self-defining around carbon mitigation Which is a whole set of secondary benefits health employment variety of other things and certainly corporations I mean the leading corporations many started out of the Silicon Area are defining themselves about going carbon neutral within five years. Those are the trendsetters So I think is a lot of reasons to be optimistic. I Agree with that fully and I think a couple interesting data points to just tie on I on the management side One of the things I get most excited about is I can't believe the quality of the students that I teach here They're just so talented and they are so energetic and Capable and that's all they're about is trying to figure out how they can become part of some team and learn Something so we do have a crop and it's not just a Stanford. I do some stuff out of MIT as well And same kind of thing there We have a Generational shift in focus in terms of what what kind of talent we're going to see rising and what they'll be willing to work on Or what they won't be and that's also affecting the the gray hairs if you saw the article in the Wall Street Journal on total Bringing its management team out to Silicon Valley and trying to make the CEO trying to make sure his senior management team could smell the coffee of where things are going in the world and The awareness that The bigger oil firms are starting to have because they plan things in decadal timeframes They're not they may have to report quarterly earnings, but they don't think in quarterly Timeframes they think in decadal timeframes when you're going to go make an investment in pre-salt Brazil or you know Arctic Circle oil and gas Primes are thinking to start thinking in very long-term cycles And I think it's starting to set in that this is not going to be a carbon driven hydrocarbon driven world Starting within their managerial, you know remit of the timeframes. They need to be thinking about and that is a big Change and that is a big change to now. They need to start thinking about okay. Well, what else and how do we adjust and how much of the Resource resources do they have are they in fact going to be able to you know return and get it get a return I'm a recover and we get a return on and that's flowing through investors. It's flowing through Governmental thinking and so on so I do think that it may be even the the Outlier positions of Trump are even accelerating some of that in terms of people on the pushback so the the fact is we've got a a much More Identifiable set of mindsets that are changing and I think that's the most important thing So as we begin to wrap up the panel I welcome any questions But that's professor Rogers as you're speaking about your students One of the things that I learned about teaching at Stanford is you can give a three-hour lecture and the students will remember two bullets so One of the things that I'll just take sort of my my my privilege as moderator just to kind of say Three of the things that I've seen personally over the past ten years that have changed since my time as a as an active VC The first is a shift in in purchase power So before everybody used to focus on the fact that utilities were the biggest customer of anything related to energy And we've seen over the past ten years that that shift in purchasing power is actually Changing and and fundamentally driving new innovations down towards where the consumer is actually Having it much more strength in buying these things the next is a shift in monetization So one of the things that again if you think about traditional energy, it's in systems But one of the things that that we're starting to see more and more of is actually a shift towards business models So despite the fact that we see you know potentially solar city or Tesla Or uber and Lyft is sort of being these one-off technology companies They're actually the fundamental drivers of business model changes and and they're trying to focus on the third thing Which is a shift in value Ten years ago every technology investment was a shift towards driving down the cost right to becoming the lower cost lowest cost best Solar technology lowest cost best wind power generating technology lowest cost, you know car, whatever you want to call it and Now the focus right now is as we saw in Greg's presentation Four cents in Texas two and a half cents a kilowatt hour wind contracts Cost is no longer the issue now the focus is now on on value And this is actually where I 100% agree with you in terms of Siemens having a really opportunity to work with companies that Abe is Investing in is this ability to actually drive value for customers as being the the biggest shift So those are just my three points Given the fact that there's no questions. I'll go with one more question. Oh, please So so while you come on up on there, please to the microphone I'm going to part with one controversial thought from each of you So please I want you to think about one controversial thing where everybody's going to go Before you leave I'll pass because I think I already gave my controversial comment about California mispricing carbon, so I'll let others go with theirs So one thing I don't think was mentioned it happened between 2007-2012 was the failure of national climate legislation right the Waxman Markey bill It failed when the Democrats control the White House the Senate and the House and So I want to pick up on something Dave said Or implied at least I live and work in Berkeley. So this is all magic to me, but And my interest is in clean energy for the for dealing with climate change It requires enormous is going to require enormous amount of investment right enormous amount of investment but investment is not the same as venture capital and What I even back in you know around to Prior to 2007 it was obvious a lot of people were going to lose a lot of money So some of the stuff that was being claimed, but now if I'm understanding correctly There are there are true sort of venture capital possibilities. They have a lot to do with control, right information Machine learning by whatever name that stuff is great, but you're right. It's not going to save the world So what I'm sort of interested in is are there when I think of say world-saving thing is like large Large-scale storage true breakthroughs that might happen But a lot of those seem to be still in kind of national lab stage right the fundamental science is not there yet So I'm asking away. I wonder if I'm understanding this correctly is that there are there are definitely VC Possibilities in the clean energy space But they are pretty micro and they're targeted and they're not they're really this is a really separate thing now from the kind of large-scale investment that is needed to Move toward a clean energy system particularly given the lack of Pricing signals from the government anytime soon. Thanks So is the question in terms of You're not looking Yeah, I'm not not quite sure I got that the whole question, but that's all right. Let me try to let me try to hit the the point which is Yeah, I generally agree that way for example what I'm doing You know, I'm We'll be deploying something around 80 million dollars, you know into the sector that is not going to solve climate problems It's got it has to scale in general In general when you're talking about technology solutions, there is not that need to scale to address these problems There's really divide of like hey Do we need new technology to address this or can we scale at lower cost of capital of the existing technology to address this in the former category There is not really solution right now the closest this would be kind of you know generally bucketed in the policy and government world We all know that in the US at least that doesn't really exist the only Real group out there that is focused on those kinds of challenges and they're not they're not quite investing yet is the breakthrough energy Coalition of breakthrough energy ventures, which is Bill Gates's coalition, which has I mean it's real money But it's still not the trillions you need. It's a billion. Okay, that's something And you know, they may have the capability to take something out of early-stage lab and over ten years Actually get it out into the market that doesn't fit the traditional venture model And we very much hope that they're successful But you know, I'm actually despite the fact that I invest in early-stage technologies I'm a big believer that to actually address the systemic problems worldwide It's much more about deploying. It's much more about clearing the roadblocks and from a policy Perspective to actually get existing technology out into the market and again, unfortunately, that's at least in the US That's kind of a policy exercise And that's unaddressed Hi my I'm proud of my question was about sort of return on on capital in in Energy investments as opposed to consumer internet or whatever right so so I've been talking to to VCs in in sort of in your world and the sort of general sense I get is that most well a large fraction of Ventures in energy are capital intensive and then therefore Consumer internet VCs don't like them and because because they're looking for capital efficient Ventures, so then the question is well, why are you guys doing? Why aren't you doing consumer internet, too? And and so so Is there something sort of fundamentally changing about the the the fact that things are data-driven and so so The the ventures are capital capital efficient or or is it just a lower returns business? I'm talking too much somebody else. I'll just take a shot I mean the reason Siemens is not in consumer internet is because it's not in our business, so we're gonna we're gonna be strategic One one thing just to just to note is that what we're seeing in energy is is and I mentioned this briefly is We're seeing less pure play energy companies So keep in mind that there are many companies out there that are horizontal in nature that can still have a huge impact on energy markets So those are very much in our in our interest In our interest landscape as well So we're seeing a lot more of that. You don't have to be labeled as an energy company anymore to have impact in the energy space In my controversial statement of the day just to jump into the question that addresses this is that you can make money in Early-stage investing and for this room in sustainability and energy in general for this room I'm sure that's not controversial. It's a very controversial discussion for Traditional asset allocators as I mentioned before people do not think that you can make money and so you know fundamentally I believe you can you have to be contrarian to make money in financial markets Otherwise you're too late and so the idea would be to invest early Against the trend and the problem is it's not gonna be it's gonna be five or ten years before if anybody knows whether I'm a total idiot or smart And that's kind of a it's a it's a measurement problem from that perspective Hi, I'm very new so my question is regarding what Greg told me about a clean energy financing gap after Greg told like, you know, there's a financing gap for smaller medium projects Why is that because if we have a proper business if you have a good business model names? You have a good revenue model and you Are we able to show that you're able to generate a good revenue and have profits? Why is it so difficult to get funding for those projects? Yeah, and so I differentiate between Software predominantly software companies where they may need two three four million dollars before they get to profitability and and and a company that's a fruit developer of You know a capital-intensive Renewable energy or energy efficiency project And so problem is they don't have a balance sheet So the valuation they get from a VC firm is not enough to use for project financing And they're not large enough and don't have a track record large enough to get debt From a bank say which needs to be 30 40 50 million dollars So they're sort of stuck in that place and they end up being service providers So they'll go and they'll take their 8 to 12 percent cut for developing a solar project someone else will buy it But that's not what they want to be they don't want to be a service provider They want to be an owner and so what's interesting about this model of having low-cost debt Going in with warrants into a company And having them use that money to do project financing and then those projects secured by PPA and available to the Lender as recourse That's a model that solves this generic problem, which is against specific to capital-intensive Clean energy development companies not to capital light software-oriented companies, and I think it's a big gap Yeah, I get it because in generally if you see in energy or renewables like for example in power power industry Generally if people start tending if they need funding they start from a low-capacity unit and slowly slowly They would develop it so in that case, so that was thinking in that case How would that look getting funding if it's a small unit and it's a small fire You know, that's a to the investment is very small. Will that be a small bigger issue for getting funding and all? You know one of the things I think that we talked about earlier this sort of 2005 through 2007 experience of clean tech investing is that people Underestimated how hard it is to make sales close sales, you know build channel Relationships and so you're at this the time it took to build the revenue to support the company growth and Management and sales those two things never met And so a lot of companies had very exciting technology large perspective list of clients took a much longer to close much longer to scale from pilot to to a large large Scale contract and that I think was probably a large An explanation a very large portion of failures for companies that from a paper perspective look viable at a good management team Good thesis good plan to go to market. It was a rational investment decision from a buyer's perspective But buyers aren't rational they're risk-averse and unless you're solving a problem that has to be solved They're not going to invest if it's optional and energy efficiency would fall into that class of optional. Thank you Greg while you have the mic something controversial Yeah, really controversial. Um, can I see a show of hands of the number of people who are carbon neutral in their life today? So people it's so one person is of people at Stanford aren't doing it. What you know WTF Right, so I've been yacking about this and working in it for 25 30 years It took me until three or four years ago to get solar and a electric car The cost for us of going carbon neutral as individuals is a couple hundred dollars a year It's a fraction of 1% So if we're gonna get serious about climate change, we got a we got a walk the walk guys and not just talk to talk That's my controversial statement With a word called a river's capital net power I've been listening with great interest about the discussion today And and and it really is dealing with a problem that we tried to solve when we face this we had This is my partner Miles Palmer here We went to MIT many years ago more than you know farther Years ago that I would care to admit but We got together and we had these big technologies We had these big ideas and we thought how do you execute these big ideas? We came out and did the Sandhill Road thing and and people Even to this day claim that they offered us a lot of money just to say that they didn't turn us down, but What we understood that we we had to do is it wasn't the VC solution We were beyond both the capital intensity as well as the time horizon of VC Well, then we look at the corporate solution Well, the problem with a corporate solution is is at the VC level of corporates We were too big for the VC level of corporates We needed, you know, hundred fifty million dollars for the first plant That's bigger than a VC a corporate is going to ever willing to bet Then you sort of think well, it must be that there are people inside of corporations who are inventing this stuff But then you run smack into the into the face of Clay Christiansen's innovators dilemma All the reasons that corporations intrinsically don't do these large over-the-horizon innovations inside the corporation So we sort of box ourselves into the solution was we had to develop our technology to the point Where we could get into the C-suite of the corporations So we got into the C-suite of Exelon. We got in the C-suite of Toshiba. We got into the C-suite of Chicago Bridge and Iron and Across all of those we raised several hundred million dollars And we're building a pilot plant down in Houston right now They will show that the world can meet every climate target it has without having to pay more for electricity and But it took a totally different approach. We had to basically we turned ourselves and it was capital We're in many Bell Labs because we got a bunch of technology geeks and engineers who like to invent stuff and My background on Wall Street with Miles's background of building defense systems Basically allowed us to develop it to a certain level where we could get into the C-suite of companies And so that's another that's another approach to this that's totally off the map of what generally people think of Thank you. That's great. Well, thank you very much for Patience and participation on a bright afternoon if you give me a chance to thank our panel again