 Stanford University. Thanks for joining us again. My name is, just a reminder, my name is Kevin Lin. I'm the Director of Grid Modernization for the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy. This is a panel, we're having a lunch and round table discussion with U.S., Mexico, Canada, and looking for energy collaboration opportunities. But you may also notice that Dr. Steven Chu is up here too. He will be speaking after the session. So we're lucky to have him here. So before we get started, I was just going to say a few words about earnest and the importance of developing this U.S., Canada, Mexico collaboration. This has been sort of one of the key things that we wanted to do as part of the earnest program. I think there's really a lot of opportunities, as I said earlier, this is sort of a bottoms up approach where we're really trying to work with states and communities to help them meet their clean energy goals. And we believe strongly that there's a lot of collaboration and interest and collaboration of how we do that together in North America. And so this was sort of foundational to the way we put the application together. So I'm really thankful to have two of my comrades here, partners in crime again. We have Eugene So, who is the Deputy Director for the U.S. and America's and the Bilateral Affairs Division, Natural Resources Canada. And we also have Federico Lopez de Alba, who is the Acting Manager Environmental Protection and Electricity Commission of Mexico. So I'd really like to thank our panelists for being here. I am going to follow Holmes Hummel's very nice introduction and the way she sort of set this up. I'm going to let them introduce themselves a little bit better than I can myself and let them kind of ask this sort of this very first question. You know, I think we've talked a lot about the energy transition over the first, you know, for the United States at least, both yesterday and today. And we've had, you know, many of the administration goals, clean electricity system by 2035, clean power system or energy system by 2050. Many of those administration goals. But similarly, we have, you know, energy transition goals for Canada and Mexico. And I wanted to sort of hear from our panelists more about their energy transition. What are they facing? What are they looking forward to for their energy transition as they move forward? So maybe Eugene, I will start with you. Thank you very much, Kevin. And I'm very pleased to be here on behalf of Natural Resources Canada. Just by way as a little bit of a background about what we do at Natural Resources Canada and our Canada, if you like to call it. We're the federal government agency in Canada responsible, as you might guess, for kind of natural resources issues within the government. Kind of as analogous to perhaps the U.S. system. We're kind of like a combination of the U.S. Department of Energy, the U.S. Department of Interior, and a little bit of the U.S. Department of Agriculture as well. Because, you know, my department's mandate covers everything including energy, mining, innovation with regards to clean technology, as well as forestry, wildfire fighting and so forth. So my team is responsible, generally speaking, for the bilateral engagement that we have on a government-to-government basis. So my team covers the U.S. and America specifically. So I'm really glad to be able to come here and speak to this audience here at Stanford and representing some views from the government of Canada. A quick kind of 101 about what our kind of emissions reduction plan is. Actually, we are very well aligned with both the state of California as well as the federal U.S. government. Similarly, we also have goals to have a net zero grid by 2035 and with a target of 2050 for overall net zero economy. So naturally, you know, using the word economy, it really will be for Canada and like many other countries, it will be an economy-wide shift. And of course, you know, natural resources and energy all sectors within that group will have to play a very, very big part. What I would like to say, the way that we have kind of, the government kind of has framed its approach to emissions reduction, I would say kind of in three large kind of categories. One, of course, is kind of like the regulatory and the policy signal, right? So it's about, you know, we have, for example, a tax, a price on carbon that's going to ramp up until, at least ramp up until 2030. You know, we have our high levels of emissions reductions plans under the, you know, the Paris commitments. And then, of course, we're sending some high level of policy signals about what we want to be doing in terms of planning for the future energy transition. The second aspect of that is kind of the innovation side, right? So, you know, here in the U.S. you have the, you know, Inflation Reduction Act. On our end, through many subsequent federal budgets, we've announced many different initiatives and the list really, really does go on and on of various programs that will both support, you know, clean technology development, deployment as well as investment. And then the final aspect that I would like to touch upon, and I think this has been a recurring theme that I've been hearing both, especially today, but also during yesterday's conference sessions as well, is about kind of community engagement, community and stakeholder engagement. I think that, and many of you here seem to agree, is that there is no energy transition without buying from communities that will be directly affected by the energy transition. So as we were talking about, it is, of course, you know, the underrepresented communities who have not benefited, who have not historically benefited from economic development or have, in fact, been harmed from, you know, natural resources development or energy transition. And of course, it's also, you know, your regular old rate payer, right? Like, when they see their rates go up because, you know, government says we need to be investing in renewables or investing in new technologies. All they see is a cost, right? So making sure that we're able to have these, you know, blunt and transparent and honest conversations with people to ensure that there is sufficient buy-in for these energy transition plans. I think one thing that did stick out to me from, I believe, yesterday, someone said that, you know, fighting emissions is, it's either win altogether or we lose altogether. So hence, it's very important to have that, to have that broader engagement with the community. And of course, I'm very glad also to be speaking with, you know, our U.S. and our Mexican counterparts as well, you know, to achieve these goals together. Thank you. Federico, similar question for you. Maybe you can... Okay. I'll start with some historical facts. CFE used to be a state-owned monopoly until the reform of the... about 10 years ago, in 2013. After that, we are still owned totally by the state, but we are just a major participant of the market. Now we basically produce 54% of the total electricity in Mexico, but the electricity sector has been opened. That's one important fact. The other important fact in Mexico is that we cannot do anything without a law. So we, after the reform, we were forced to pass a law on the energy transition. So now we have to deal with the law of energy transition, but also we passed a law in 2012 on climate change. And the decision was made in 2018 to go together with climate change commitments, energy transition altogether. So in our NDC, when we presented that to parents, we made commitments. We have to have 35% clean energy supplied to the system by 2024, meaning this year. 45% by 2030 and 50, 50 by 2050. The other special component is that we also have to transform the law ruling the energy system. And we passed a law where it says that local communities have to be involved in the planning of the system. So now there are, especially indigenous people in the Southwest are very, very involved in the planning of the system. And that means that we used to say before the reform of the law that the federal government wasn't trying to do anything he wanted, not taking into account the local needs and the local participation. After the law, now we are forced to involve local communities in the planning and in the implementation of the projects. So by law, now we have at least to have 25% participation of local men power into the development of the projects, which has changed the vision of the planning of the system. And also by law, we are forced to a 15-year planning system. So anything that has to be done this year, for instance, was planned about 10 years ago before the law. So with the reform after 2014, everything was planned for 15 years ahead. And we have a general planning instrument, which is called PRODESEN, the National Program on the Development of the Energy System, and a planning system inside CVE. For the first time ever, we integrated a planning commission inside, and we also were forced to implement a think tank inside their own commission. So we are dealing with innovation in energy with this think tank group. We are dealing with small hydros, small modular reactors, green hydrogen, ocean forces, and the increasing wind and solar. As a matter of fact, as a result of that, we are actually building a 1000 megawatt solar PV into the Sonora Desert. With that, we will have clean energy into the border. Into the border area, we used to have Mexicali with the geopower, and we were selling energy to California. Now we will be able to sell energy to California with this new solar photovoltaic system. So CVE is very involved, as a matter of fact as a major participant, into the support of the Mexican government for the NDC. So we know that we have to have at least 35% of clean energy this year. Thank you. So thank you for that. That's a good background for all of us. So I guess the second broad question, and you've already touched on it some already, but I know for us, again, many of us were trying to really think about communities and states and how do we build the energy system from the bottom up. I think one of the things, speaking from the US perspective, and having been at DOE since 2007, we've really fundamentally changed the way we think about this community development piece. And people like Shalonda Baker, who's really established Energy Justice, is sort of a key piece of what we do across the department. We develop community benefits plans, we think about diversity, equity, and inclusion, and we think about jobs, we think about Justice 40, and almost every solicitation that we do, we've developed a state and community energy program where we're really working to work on the demonstration side to really look at how we work with communities more directly, whereas in the office that I work in that's more focused on R&D, we also still are working closely with communities. So I think this whole community engagement for us, we've really doubled down, and not even to mention our grid development office. There's a whole host of different solicitations and funds that are going directly to communities to help them rebuild either their grid structure or to do a variety of different things. So I think there's a lot of exciting things going on the community side. So similarly, as you've already touched, and maybe I'll go to Eugene first, tell us a little bit about how you think about communities as you build out the energy system, how you are thinking, building things from the bottom up. Absolutely, and let me pull a little bit from what you just said about your experience at DOE, and what I've also seen at Natural Resources as well. When we're talking about the build-out, as I said earlier, when we're talking about the build-out and what the future energy needs are and the energy transition, a lot of it will have to be community driven. I think one of the particular challenges that Canada has is that we have a lot of rural, remote, and primarily indigenous communities that traditionally up until now, a lot of their powered generation, it's not connected to any big utility grid, and a lot of their generation just comes from diesel generators located in their communities. Of course, we have funding programs in place to be supporting these groups transition off of this dirty diesel generation. The way we're trying to work with the communities to deliver these funding programs, I would say, is kind of anything but conventional. I think earlier someone mentioned that one of the representatives on that, I believe the first panel, was saying that not all of these kinds of communities have the capacity or the resources to go through these traditional RFP processes. I mean, I work in government, I know how long it can take to get things done in the bureaucracy, of course, but really trying to move away from that kind of model and really being focused on building the capacity to understand how the government processes work. But of course, on the flip side as well, offering more flexibility from government to assist these communities in receiving such funding and developing these projects on their own terms. So what does this actually mean? So for us, it's about being more open-ended about what these calls for proposals are. It's about helping build the capacity within these communities, not just us kind of stepping in and offering services, but what are the kind of investments that we can be helping communities directly to build their own understanding about what their needs would be specifically in their communities. It's about having a relationship. So when these communities are coming to us seeking assistance or seeking access to funding, we're not going to be like, no, this is not the right kind of program, or we're not the right folks you need to talk to, hey, go call these other guys, right? Really kind of having that kind of open, like no wrong-door principle in assisting these communities, like if we can't help you, then who else within the government of Canada can, because recognizing, again, these energy transition goals go beyond just, of course, my department National Resources Canada, but across the kind of broad spectrum of what the government of Canada, and frankly, the world is trying to do with regards to emissions reduction. So there's a lot of lovely projects where we've seen some really good, true partnerships between the government of Canada and local groups and helping them build out their renewable energy capability. I mean, there's a whole list online, I think one flagship program that we like to refer to is one of those acronyms, right? It's the Clean Energy for Remote and Rural Communities, C-E-R-R-C. And there's a lot of lovely programs that you can look up. I mean, one that perhaps I would highlight is there's a project up in Fort Shipaway in where we assisted, again, a community that primarily had relied on off-grid diesel generation. We assisted them in building out a solar farm and a really excellent part about the solar farm project is that not only are we kind of eliminating or reducing the need for diesel generation, I think they at that time were like 600,000 liters of diesel per year, replacing that entirely. And the solar farm project is being co-owned by the indigenous groups that border this community area and it's a company called Three Nations Energy. So really kind of seeking out and helping to build these kinds of true partnerships so that not only are we offering funding, helping reduce emissions, supporting energy transition, which is all good, but also ensuring that the economic benefits from these kinds of projects are flowing back to the communities themselves. If I could jump in really quick before we moved forward. I just want to second, you triggered me on one thing. I mean, one of the things that we typically have a challenge at the Department of Energy, too, is when we put out solicitations like this one, sometimes it can take nine months to a year to turn around and it's just part of the process that we have. One of the things that we try to develop is part of one of our programs called Clean Energy to Communities, I mentioned it earlier, is we developed a few other different kinds of programs, one called Expert Match. So we basically tried to have a one-page application which was turned around in one month where the technical assistance is provided in those next two months. So it's a three-month whole process. We also do cohorts. There's another way we try to pull people together where the whole program is complete in six months. So we're really trying to think about new ways that is in addition to sort of our usual way of doing business with communities because as you say, a lot of the folks that you're trying to help don't necessarily have all the tools available to apply to these somewhat cumbersome processes that we have at part of the federal government. Anyway, Federico, I'll turn it over to you. Yes. One of the things we have also changed with this transition law is that we know that we have closely to 2 million people without electricity in Mexico. Most of them are in the very isolated communities and until they reform, all actions were federal. One thing that has been implemented after the reform is that each state is creating its own energy authority. So with that mechanism, they are close to the community, so they don't have to pass through the whole procedure of the federal authorization. Now what the federal government does is give the money to the state so they can use local resources to implement their local, we call them small projects. Normally, those are communities of less than 10,000 inhabitants and very, very small ones is per se with 1,000 or so inhabitants. And the other thing we have experimented is that at least for Mexico, we don't have to rely on one single source of energy. We implemented basically solar photovoltaic but combined with biomass. One of the big problems we're still having in Mexico is that roughly those 2 million people live on good. So their primary source of energy is still good. So we are helping them to transform their very, what we call primitive, and sorry for using that word, way of producing energy going to electrification and teach them how to use electricity in a very efficient way. So now they are, for instance, producing local biogas. And then with that they have a backup generator during the non-solar period and so on. So that part of the law has been very successful up to now. That's wonderful. That's great. So here's the million dollar question for all of us and we didn't really practice this beforehand but part of this is, you know, so what are some of the things that we can do together? And to me, like, there's a couple of things that I guess we have talked a little bit about. So one of them I mentioned I think was the, back in 2018 we did something called the North American Renewable Integration Study which was a partnership between the United States, Mexico, and Canada to really think about what a transmissions build out would look like to how we could basically use the transmission to be able to better use the renewables that are all across the country, all three countries so we could better utilize that across North America. But also there's, you know, the other part of this and we're already kind of doing this as part of earnest is understanding what are the lessons learned from a community-based system. So we have a number of pilots that are in Canada, we have a number of pilots that are going to be in Mexico and there's going to be a number of pilots in the U.S., obviously. And we're trying to think about how can we use the lessons learned from all of those. But those are some of the things that I think about, at least, is how we might work together. But maybe Federico, I'll go to you first. What are some of the ways you think we can be working together? Well, one point that is very important is we have a lot of experience of exchange of electricity with California. There are at least five interconnections and that's the basic part of how the transmission of electricity can be done. And that is because the peak periods are different in the southern part of California and the northern part of Mexico. Our first energy consumption through the day is through air conditioning, while in California the biggest chunk is at night. So that has been working for at least 25 years. So we pretend with this new solar program in Sonora and Chihuahua to extend the transmission lines from the desert through the border, at least to Colorado and Arizona. Because we plan to install overall five gigawatts solar into the Sonora desert. And one amazing thing is that when we discuss with the Tojonos, which is a binational tribe, or a binational nation, as a matter of fact, and they are very collaborative. They say, okay, instead of putting walls in between the countries, just why don't we put transmission lines? So that is a point that is resulting very interesting for us to dedicate part of the production to supply to the southern states of the United States and hopefully through the United States to Canada. And maybe I can build off of that one. And thanks for bringing that up, Federico. I mean, Canada and the US, at least, speaking from the northern perspective, we already have a very closely integrated electricity transmission system. I think we're 37 intertized and counting. I think there's more slated to be developed as well as especially on the eastern seaboard. I think one of the advantages that Canada has with our natural resources is that 80% of our power generation is already non-emitting. So especially when we're thinking about these intertized, we've mentioned resiliency, energy security, risk mitigation from extreme weather events, right? Having these intertized in place is so important to ensure that when there are certain regions, either in Canada or when we're working with the US, when there are regions that aren't able to produce, or this is the common criticism, right, of distributed energy resources, when the sun doesn't shine or when the wind doesn't blow, right? We're able to kind of balance those loads out from somewhere that's further away, where the weather is different or where they are still able to actually generate energy that can be then sent towards areas that are in need. And of course, we've talked about kind of ability to kind of balance load demands during kind of different parts of the day between different various jurisdictions. So I think that remains a very, very important part of how we can approach the continental energy security, or sorry, energy system from an energy security perspective and from a resilient climate resilience perspective. And if I can put a couple of plugs in, right? Like Canada is doubling down on emissions-free energy, right? Like, you know, three of our largest provinces, you know, Quebec has announced its intent to build out more hydropower capabilities. Ontario, where I'm from, Ontario is building out new nuclear reactors, they're refurbishing existing ones, and they're also going all in on the development of, you know, next-generation small modular reactors and all the West Coast as well. They also have a very strong kind of hydropower base, but they're also working on developing new renewables, renewables resources. And if I may add as well, many of these renewable projects, they're looking again to work very closely and directly with indigenous counterparts. So I can't stress the importance of a continental approach enough with respect to the energy system, because, you know, as the saying goes, really stronger together is the most important part. Yeah, I agree, and I had told Eugene, I had never been to Niagara Falls until, like, maybe December of this past year in the winter time, which I encourage you to go because there's very few people there, it's quite cold, but it's still worth seeing, it's awe-inspiring to see all the electricity that's being generated there in the Falls themselves. So it really gives you a sense of, like, all the, as you say, all the clean energy that's coming from hydropower right there at the border. I'm going to open it up for questions. I think we've got plenty of time for questions. I've sort of already thought of some things that we could be questioning ourselves about what we could be doing in the future, but this is really for the audience, and I'm curious if anybody has any questions here. Claudia Canizares, University of Waterloo, Canada. Thanks for your presentations. I was particularly curious about the way things are organized in terms of, in Mexico versus what Canada is, which is different from the states. In our case, provinces have the control of the electrical systems. What the federal government does is play, you know, provide kerosene sticks, taxes versus funding, right? And that moves the system in such a way. In Mexico, my understanding is everything is directly controlled by the federal government, that the states don't have a lot of role into these decisions about the, particularly the electrical systems. Would you comment on that, please? Thanks. Yes. As I said, we used to be a state own monopoly until 2014. After the reform, we are one participant of the market. One thing that we have to take into consideration is that worldwide, 55% of the total electricity produced in the world is produced by state-owned companies. So in this administration, that number was just like a magic number, but we will change administration in September and the programming will be necessarily different. The law will be the same, but the law allows the participation of private companies. As I said, now we produce roughly 54%, but we might be producing less. We don't know. We have to wait until the election and see which party will win the election and by law, they have to produce a national plan. One very important chapter of that national plan is energy. So we have to wait to define how much participation of the federal will be. However, in the law, it's established that if you want to participate with an installation below 0.5 megawatts, you don't even have the need for a permit. You just go to the Ministry of Energy and then get a subscription and you can produce your own electricity. That has also to be changed. There is a lot of discussion in moving from 0.5 megawatts to 2 megawatts, which makes more sense because 2 megawatts is, let's say, a small generation unit. The other point is that in the law, it's a contemplation of distributed generation. For instance, the state of Northern California and the state of Sonora have plans for what they call photovoltaic houses, meaning solar roofs. Their plan is to install 25,000 roofs by 2030. My guess is that no matter who wins the election, at least that program will continue for the next period of six years. My name is Mani Venkatesubramanjan. I'm from Washington State University in Pullman. We are located in the Pacific Northwest. In our conversations with our... Like Canada, we are a heavy hydro-producing region. In our conversations with some of our local industry members, a topic that has come up recently is about the Columbia River Treaty and the negotiations which are ongoing. I just want to put you on the spot. See if you can offer some insight on the sensitivities and what's really going on in the discussions. Thank you. What I can say is that I know that we're working with all parties involved, both in the US, Canada, and I gather that our local community groups are involved in negotiations. I don't think I can share the details on that, but what I can say is that I think we're all very committed to working together in finding a solution that actually works for all management of our joint watersheds of that region. Thank you. This is a question for Steve. You oversaw the Department of Energy during a time of tremendous innovation and during the Recovery Act. That helped start RPE, et cetera, tremendous innovation. How do you see the work that you led during that time period enabling the work that's happening today with IRA, with VIL, all the investments? We thought back then Recovery Act was a once-in-a-lifetime type of funding, but a decade later, we happen to see that again. How do you see the connection between the two? Well, thank you. This is Min Lee, who was a crucial part of the SunShot Solar Team when I was there. I would say that a lot of what we did, people may or may not know in the Recovery Act, we had $38 billion to invest in the U.S., of which a lot of it went into energy infrastructure and helping this transition. One story, we distributed PMUs. These are things that monitor the electricity voltage and cycle three times a second to help coordinate the grid. So we gave them out and unlike Mexico, probably even unlike Canada, the United States doesn't have a central energy system at all. We have a Western Connect and Eastern Connect in Texas, but within those things, within the Western and Eastern Connect, there are bazillion little companies. These companies didn't want to share that data. So there has been some progress made. There are some technologies, especially in coordinating transmission distribution that were huge opportunities that aren't fully realized. And so I would say now in the Recovery Act, the inflation IRA bill, there's a lot that is going to be investing in transmission distribution, which is great. Permitting remains a problem. When I was Secretary, there was 11 years before you got a line from the time of application. I wanted to reduce it to four or three and hit stiff resistance even within the federal agencies. For example, within Interior, the Fish and Wildlife game didn't want to accelerate permitting because they didn't want transmission lines where they hunted and fished. So there are, and I want to take this as an opportunity to tell you some of the other things, the political aspects of what's going on. For example, Washington State has a lot of good hydro power. We were trying to get the transmission grease the wheels so you can transmit electricity, cheap hydro power to California, and the first step would be get an energy rebalancing program so you can clear the books of energy and stiff resistance from Washington and Oregon because they did not want cheap energy leaving Washington and Oregon to go to California. Similar sort of thing I saw in Canada. Canada has, in the eastern part, tremendous water resources that could really help New England which has very expensive electricity, some of the highest in the country, and yet there was stiff resistance because the people invested in gas generation saw that there would be stranded assets. And so what did they do? They resisted it, but they resisted in a very effective way. They convinced people in New England they don't want transmission lines. And so you see these things at work. Mexico, just this morning I looked up in graphs of how much electricity, what's the breakdown of electricity generation in Mexico, and over two thirds is fossil fuel today. And if you think about it, given the rich solar and the fact that you have California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, and the ability to start transporting green energy across borders to give you both energy security and all this other thing, it's not happening because there are too many well-healed potential losers and so the fossil fuel industry. And so that has dampened this. And so these are some of the things that are part of the reality of what we face. The opportunity of lowering the energy costs is really dramatic. And yet they don't want it, but there are enough well-placed people in U.S., Canada, and Mexico that you have this resistance. And so I think the answer is that I think the public has to get engaged to say you're keeping our electricity rates high because of this, meaning stranded asset problems and other problems. And so there has to be... One has to figure out how you can solve these problems. Well, I like Ben's leading question because I worked with Ben in Sunshot and we all worked for you back in the day. I do think... I mean, I think it's a leading question, thinking that I think a lot of what we did back then has formed a foundation for what's going on now. I think there's no question about that. I mean, my opinion, humble opinion, but I think given the time, maybe we should go ahead and transition and hear from Secretary Chu and turn it over to you. Well, I said a lot of what I was planning to say, but let me go and make a broader setting to this. Certainly there's a lot of opportunities of cooperation in Canada, the U.S., and Mexico. There, setting... We started what's called the Clean Energy Ministerial when I was Secretary. I remember David Sandelow, who is Assistant Secretary, comes to my office and he says, I want to start Clean Energy Ministerial. And I said, what is this about? I don't want a cop junior because I don't want a bunch of people talking about negotiating this and that and the other thing because in my experience, I was watching cop. Nothing was happening. Still seems to be true. That there were no real action items. So I said, I'm not going to support this, but I'll tell you what, let's sit down and figure out how it could be different. And how it could be different was to say, it's not going to be any form of diplomatic treaties or anything, forget about that. Are there things working in your country that could be exportable to other countries? And we started with something very modest. Let's talk about energy efficiency. And it was in this first energy minister, which is 20 nations, it's now 25. We started talking about energy efficiency, energy efficiency standards, and I remember two things. Three things. One thing is South Africa was one of the countries and the representatives of South Africa were shocked and said, what? Energy efficiency? You can save lots of money? And said yes. And now that you can stop the subsidy of diesel generation in Canada. I'm suspect it was subsidy. And just, oh by the way, you don't even have to set up a standard by yourself. You can just follow leading countries and follow two years behind. Things like that. LEDs and fans. 20% of electricity in India is due to, residential use is due to ceiling fans, of which the ceiling fans were only 50% energy efficient, the motors. Could be 90%. More than, okay, just like, and then better fan blade designs. And so they were throwing money away and electricity heavily subsidized in India. So why don't you go to ensuring that there's minimum standards? So we started that and this morning I looked at it and it's still the same. Cheap wins. Now there is not, the fans are very sad. LEDs did take hold in India, but you go down the list of these things, of common sense things that are technologically available 10 and 20 years ago, and yet they're still not being implemented and the question is why. And so very discouraging. The other thing is we were trying to encourage China to stop exporting stuff that could no longer sell in their country that were very energy inefficient appliances or LEDs that were only, instead of lasting 25,000 hours, they would last 500 or less. And I said this is poisoning the market because people will try the LEDs less, you know, you're going to last, you can will them to your children and grandchildren that would last a long and they were lasting less than the 100 watt light bulbs, incandescent light bulbs. And to try convince China to stop dumping stuff on developing countries, that was a partial success, I would say, only partial. But there's lots of things at play where, you know, the scientists, I look back and say, well, it was a start, but we need a little bit more oomph and more social pressure to actually make it happen because there are too many people who just see this is a money making proposition, it's only about money. Energy is about money. At the beginning and the end. But when you see that we're throwing away money, there's, I see, huge opportunity. And so a little feedback from you people on how you see this and how we can get all that wonderful hydro from Canada and transmission lines. And the earlier conversation was in local communities, the big players, it's really these gigawatt things. And another final thing in sunshine, one of the successes of the sunshine is we started it with federal dollars that underwrite government loans for large solar wind, large solar. And it expires in about four years and the investments in solar after that were picked up by the private sector where it's three or four times more investment because they saw that it is profitable. But before the first thing it was deemed too risky and it wasn't. So that's another thing that perhaps Canada and Mexico, if you show that you can make money if well managed and let the private sector move in, that would be a huge big deal. And so that's another thing that that part did work. And it's really a success story in the sunshine thing. How do you start something? Because in the end in the United States our energy is generated by private companies. And they want to know whether they're going to make money and whether they're going to make a profit by doing something which they want to do but we're afraid to do it. So any comments? Maybe on the New England side. If I believe you're referring to the New England Clean Energy Connect project I think just very recently, just a couple of months ago it finally got approved. Now I don't think the way that in which it happened it got snarled up in courts and like you said there's various interest groups that play. I don't think that should be a best practice perhaps for getting these big transmission lines across. But I think again kind of speaks a little bit to when there is a good value proposition here that's being put forward by project proponents like you said, cheap hydropower helps drive down emissions. It seems like a win-win, right? There were various players in that region that got ahead of the conversation brought in some confounding or conflicting interests or conflicting arguments where they were able to speak with the community first and then that kind of got ahead of the benefits that actually this project would have generated. So I think it serves as a little bit of a lesson when we're building out these major projects again like making sure it's as much as a communication strategy as opposed to just touting simple benefits, right? Really being engaged with communities who will be benefiting from these changes. Before you respond I just want to make a quick comment. The transmission line problem is we have tremendous wind and solar but a lot of times you want to send the electricity to populated areas and the lines will cross low population areas and then the people in these low populations what's in it for me? And I think there is something that can be done just as for farmers in the Midwest and the United States now farmers love wind because they can have wind turbine in three on their property and they get tens of thousands of dollars if not more income from the rent per year from wind then they get from farming. A similar thing can be done for transmission lines so that you can buy it because otherwise it is a what's in it for me sort of thing that could actually work and in Mexico I see another large looming thing Pemex is a very large oil gas company that controls the energy in Mexico which defines a lot of what many governments in Mexico have to consider and so your comments about that? Well you are right Pemex is a huge company however the participation into the economy is very sensitively decreasing we let's say 10 years ago we were a typical oil exporter now we are roughly importing more than we are exporting so I wonder what sort of decisions have to be made by the next administration concerning Pemex which is not the case of CVE the electricity company the electricity was basically generation was open in the 90s but they were forced to sell all the electricity to the monopoly now with the reform of the law we started a very nice program in two things efficiency the free market of solar and wind and at that time the cost of electricity decreased basically 25% but still another thing that has to be done in Mexico is that CVE has roughly 50 million contracts out of which 42 million contracts have subsidies so from my point of view what we have to do is transform the participation of clean energies against the subsidies for instance solar roofs are paid through the subsidy but once you own your own system you don't have to receive money from the subsidy from the economy for the government so we have to implement mechanisms in which we have to transform the way of thinking from the pure economy system I just want to thank our panelists for a very interesting discussion and I think we're probably going to move on to the next panel but please give a round of applause to our panelists here