 We'll proceed pretty much like the previous panel. We will take questions for Ana, which I'm sure there are many, after we go through the panel. So I would like to encourage all of us, the panelists and everybody else, to steer the debate or the discussion to what HIAS can do to this actionable item, sort of things that relate to HIAS. So of course, Ana just pointed out to some very interesting thing right now, but the nickel, which I didn't know. So I'll start by introducing briefly the panelists. I'll do it alphabetically. Mikhail Karamanic is a professor in BU, Boston University. He got his PhD from Harvard. And he works on the system engineering, power markets, and micro grids. Things are relevant. Effie Vufulla-Giorgio is a distinguished professor. Effie? Raise your hand. Effie is a professor in UC Irvine, a beautiful place. She used to be before the University of Minnesota and her area of expertise is stochastic modeling of precipitation, rain basically. Alexandros Michos is a full professor at Aachen University in Germany. He's director of the laboratory for process system engineering. And he got his PhD at MIT. He specialized in optimization of energy systems. And Thanos Danotanes is my colleague at the PFA. He works on atmospheric processes. Also here in Greece, by the way, in Patra, if I understand correctly. He's a PhD from Caltech, another place where I was for many years. He had his PhD in chemical engineering there. And he got his diploma from the Metzhovio, like pretty much everybody else here. So before he was a Georgia Tech for a number of years. OK, so now we'll start with the questions. So these are pre-arranged questions. So the first question will ask us to Michalis. And the question relates to grids, the change in the electrification of the energy sector, both in terms of mobility or other sectors, and the production that's not longer central creates a need for smart grids. And can you address this particularly as it relates to Greece? Thank you. Wonderful talk we just heard. And I'd like to bring the discussion at the somewhat higher level and look at the overall sector of electricity, which is becoming a supremely important sector in energy. And it's going to play also a key role in promoting societal objectives of sustainability, which have three pillars, energy, environment, and economic sustainability. How come? So electricity is growing to become a ubiquitous sector in promoting these three sustainability pillars, not only because everything is becoming electric, renewable generation, transportation is being electrified, space conditioning is relying more and more on electricity. And therefore, it's going to play an important role. There are huge challenges, though, that are possible to delay the decarbonization objectives and the sustainability objectives. And those have to do with supply and demand volatility that if left on their own without coordination, they may really decrease the utilization of the infrastructure and the investment because we will have to invest much more than we need and be able to address few hours in time and a few locations in order to be able to have energy supply. So to increase the efficiency and therefore the economic sustainability, which is a major potential blocking area, we will have to take certain actions in coming at the higher level, the grid, an active grid, and an active coordination is needed. The electricity grid is the largest man-made thing that we have to present. There are millions of participants on the generation side, on the consumption side. So being able to coordinate those is important. And one of the important ways of going forward in this direction is to be able to recognize that we have degrees of freedom and therefore coordinate, for example, the use of batteries that we heard such wonderful things about, taking advantage of the fact that most cars, for example, excluding those that are parts of fleets, are parked and therefore plugged in and ready to charge maybe 20 to 22 hours out of the 24 hours and are on the road for a couple of, for two to four hours at the most. So when you charge is very important and that can affect congestion on the network, that can affect issues and problems at the local networks, distribution networks, and the overall networks. Same thing with space conditioning, heating and cooling. You can pre-cool, you can pre-heat, and therefore be able to even out this supply and demand volatility, match these things up. And of course, that leaves the long-term issue, what people in Germany call the winter doll drums, where you need seasonal storage. And that's, of course, possible with storing hydrogen and other things. So how do we go forward in addressing these issues, perhaps, is something that we can discuss during the Q&A, during the question and answer period. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. The next question or issue is Professor Fufula. So, Effie, the topic is climate change and these fires and all that, which, of course, it's also in California where you are now and then here in Greece. So can you please tell us something about that? Thank you. And first of all, thank you for giving me this opportunity after having taken advantage of the excellent and free educational system in Greece. Having graduated my diploma in civil engineering from Echovio, I have been in the US for 42 years. So I'm ready to give back. And I hope that the highest is a mechanism to do that. So back to our discussion, I would like to make three points. The one is obvious, the other two are not. Point number one is that climate change is real. It is one of the biggest challenges of the 21st century and we all feel it. It affects all of us in multiple ways. Now, this is not an audience that I have to convince you that climate change is real. So I'll go to my second point. The second point is adaptation, management, and planning to deal with climate extremes from floods to droughts to fires is critical. Yet we're not prepared and we don't know yet how to do it. We have to bring together the scientists, policy makers, decision makers, government in the same room to develop a policy and a strategy which is not reactive. It is proactive. It is principled and yet nibble to deal with what is coming that we don't know yet the details. Now, making an analogy with California. Now, you have experienced the fires here in Greece and probably you know that California in 2020 was the record high year in fires. 4.3 million acres were burned. Now, let me put into perspective. This is five islands of Evia. Completely five islands of Evia were burned in 2020. Move forward to 2021. 2.4 million acres were burned. This is another three islands of Evia and counting. And yet California, which is of course the most proactive state, environmentally friendly, does not know how to deal with that yet. Two weeks ago, it was in a meeting, the government started the Climate and Welfare Institute and I can talk more about that, but the problem is not easy to solve. Everything from utilities, the power lines that created ignitions to forest management with the challenges of prescribed fires, uncontrolled fires and so forth. We can get into this question. Point number three, workforce development. We have excellent minds. The young generation really, I have two kids, they care about the environment. They are prepared to address the problem they inherited from us and we have to help them do so. Now, we lose many great minds to Google and Facebook. Nothing wrong with that. I see the young people being attracted there no matter what their background is. We have to invest and create the opportunities for the next generation that will be experts in climate science, engineering solutions for energy and environment. And this is a challenge that I would like all of us to address. And I hope that the last two challenges which are not easy, adaptation, management and planning and the workforce development to address these problems is something that highest can develop and I'm fully committed personally to say that. I can help in any way. Thank you. Thank you, every. Next, I'll give the floor to Alexander Smysos. And the topic that he addresses is something that came up already, which is energy storage. In other words, in the changing supply or also demand side of electricity, how do we address this problem with storage? Alexander? Thank you. So we talked already about renewable energy. I hope everyone in the audience is in favor of renewable energy. Last week I was in Nicaragua, I found out that not everyone in Greece is in favor and they talked about the industrial renewable energy. I had to Google it. I had no idea what Van or Vip or something like that is. Sorry? Yeah. So what are the key renewable energies? Just in case you're wondering it's wind and solar. We have both in Greece and that's good news, but we all know that they fluctuate in time. Professor Karamanis already talked about this. Temporal energy storage is needed in the range of seconds, in the range of hours, but also in the seasonal range. That's one aspect. The second aspect is that both within Europe and worldwide we have big discrepancies in the exergy usage or energy intensity of societies. So if we look at the map of how much exergy we're using per square meter, this is very different for Germany and very different for Greece. Similarly, and not matching this difference, the availability of renewable energy, again in watts per meter square, is very different across Europe. It's very different across the world. If we look at these two things and if we want society to stay more or less as we have it right now, we more or less automatically get the need for energy transport as we have been doing for decades. The idea is that we have, however, renewable energy transport. Some people want to do that with electricity. I will talk about a different option. If we want to talk about or if we want to address temporal energy storage and spatial energy transport, one way to go are so-called power to X. Power to X stands for we take electricity and we make something out of it. This is a term coined in Germany but by now it's used also elsewhere in the world. If we define it broadly, it encompasses demand side management, meaning that we modulate our demand it encompasses producing chemicals, producing other products that we use somewhere else and it encompasses energy storage in the sense of electricity producing something and this something reproducing electricity. If you think about products, it offers also an alternative to what Professor Fanopoulou talked about, namely instead of having electrical vehicles, we can run with combustion vehicles or fuel cell vehicles or whatever technology vehicles we can think of that use a synthetic fuel. Hydrogen, we all have heard about the hydrogen economy 20 years ago, we hear about it today as well and hydrogen offers both energy storage and energy transport in principle. It has the advantage that it, electrolyzers and fuel cells can be operated flexibly. However, if you look at the energy density, in particular the volumetric energy density of hydrogen, it does not match the requirements that we need to transport it or store it. And therefore, this power to X comes into play where we take electricity, go to hydrogen and then use the hydrogen to produce something else. There are many ideas out there. There are many technologies being developed and just to provoke you, I will tell you that there are ideas out there that can have a higher round trip efficiency from electricity to the product and back. Then you can do with hydrogen. So I can go from electricity to hydrogen to something else and then back to hydrogen, back to electricity with a better efficiency than just from electricity to hydrogen to back. Many challenges remain for research. Many challenges remain for development. And I personally see an opportunity in Europe to have competitive program compared to the US or China. And in that, I see also an opportunity for collaboration between Greece and other countries. Thank you. Thank you, Aleksander. Our last panelist is Thanos Neres from EPFL and his expertise is in atmospheric pollution. And today he'll, I think he'll address this about wildfires. Thanos? Yes, thank you. I also would like to thank you for the invitation to speak and the honor to participate in this forum. I also am someone that has spent 20 years outside of Greece in terms of my education and career after that. And over the last five years, I've been able to have a group in forth in Patras as well. So to establish a basically a research program and exchange program with my group at EPFL. So one of the things that we work on a lot is smoke. And so I'm going to follow up on all the comments that are mentioned before. You know, fires are one of the faces of climate change for Greece, for sure. And the Southern and the Mediterranean in general. We all are aware about its strong and adverse and negative impacts. But there are also other sources of fire as well that we're pretty much very comfortable with doing all the time. For example, we like to burn wood in fireplaces. We like there's agricultural waste burning that's prevalent throughout the year in Greece. And so what happens is that there's almost always air pollution, lots of smoke around. And we don't even know about it. So on top of the smoke that we generate through our usage of wood in homes and in the field, we also have the wildfire impact. And it's of course, anticipated that the wildfire impact is going to increase over time. And so we always have to ask ourselves what is the impact of the smoke that's pretty much all over the place? There's permanent haze. And when you're close to the fire, you can smell it. You can smell the smoke in the particles. But after about a day, it's still there. But we don't know it anymore. We can't detect it even chemically. It's very hard. But this particular matter contains carcinogens. And it also is one of the most toxic of all types of particles we can generate. Because when you breathe it, you get exposed to lots of oxidative stress. And that leads to things like heart attacks, strokes, all kinds of nasty things that can happen to us. And so we're at this place, this beautiful place in Europe where all the smoke is very quickly transformed and becomes more toxic over time. Well, we have no idea really what it's doing to us. Both in terms of quantitatively understanding its impact on health and ecosystems. And also there's not much awareness about it. Again, because a lot of smoke that we generate, we're kind of accustomed to it. So I think this is a call for understanding really what smoke is doing to us in terms of our health, but also the ecosystems and also climate. Because this smoke reflects sunlight, it also affects precipitation. And the carcinogens and the other toxins also end up in the water that we drink. So we really should be able to understand the impacts of smoke wherever it comes from. And I think HIAS has a tremendous opportunity to have an impact there. Because apart from the research that could be fostered through a research program or some kind of studies, it can also help interface with the policymakers so that we can actually establish best practices and also talk to the relevant stakeholders, help understand what the impact of smoke is and prevent things like agricultural waste burning, that yokelada, right? We have it everywhere. You can even smell the olive burning in many places. Well, that has terrible impacts on people's health and ecosystems, and this is something that we should try our best to avoid. So I would love to talk with you and contribute more in that regard. And hopefully HIAS can help. Thank you. Thank you, Dana. Thank you very much. Both our keynote speaker and our panelists, a lot of very inspiring comments and ideas. I'd like to ask the audience for question now and as already Dimitri pointed out, please keep in mind that questions that lead the discussions, steer the discussion toward actionable items are most helpful to both HIAS and the general environment where we are. So, Dimitri. So in that spirit, if the prime minister of Greece was present, we have ministers here, what would be the one thing that each of you would recommend regarding energy policy of Greece to prioritize? And I would like to hopefully to hear from every one of the panelists. Please. If I had to choose one, I would try to lobby for interconnecting the islands using the potential for renewable energy from the islands and in designing the grid to be able to handle this additional sort of energy, not only in the way that we consume it in the mainland and on the islands, but also how we can control the grid so that it can operate, it can be formed, it can exist in the presence of predominantly renewable generation. Thank you. The other panelists, please. Maybe I'll follow up because it's direct. So I agree in principle. Now I'm not sure how the connection should be. So is the connection electric or is the connection through chemical products? And I'm not, I do not have the answer, but I think the ministers and the prime ministers should engage experts to find out what the best solution is. Okay, please. So energy is not my expertise, but I was looking on the opportunity of this in some charts from the global, I think it was WMO. And I was surprised to see that Greece, since 2007, the carbon dioxide emissions, only carbon dioxide emissions, according to their statistics, were going down 29% per year. Since 2007, having a projection that we will reach net zero by 2041, which would be the, I had it, 19th soonest country in the world to reach the net zero. So carbon dioxide is not the only emission. And the 2007 was probably because of the economic crisis. So I just wanted to put this on the table because the graphs, if you go around, they saw this CO2 impressive decline in Greece since 2007, but for the wrong reasons. We had an economic. Yeah, any more ideas, suggestions, please. I think I said clearly when it comes to electrification of transportation, my, you know, obviously, I guess the first two things to do is the basis. I think we all experience, we all use buses and they are very polluting because they have very old after treatment system and diesel technologies. So I think that will improve a lot our cities. But I think the second one is not exactly what I said because that my second suggestion takes long term and it would be kind of more researchy. But I think we should make sure our younger people are using mass transit, electric buses, you know, buses, bikes, walk, and they realize how important that is for their health, for our cities health, and just overall efficiency. Like education and outreach. So they understand younger people can change the world from going on forward. And I would love to be able to participate in a workshop or summer school and a boot camp, whatever, just on that with young people that they realize the energy crisis and the climate crisis. Thank you. Please go ahead. Also I'm not a person that's an expert in energy but I know what's going on in other countries. So right now in Switzerland, they're trying to switch to renewables and focus on a wind and solar. And what is coming up is that in mountainous countries and Greece is one of them, there are many regions that have extremely high wind fields and that offers opportunity for a lot of electricity production using wind that you would normally not have in other locations. So that could be perhaps one way to sort of focus on the wind part. And also there's the idea of pumped storage where you basically have water and you have many mountain regions that could be used potentially as a reservoir. And so that could be used for, you know, longer term storage of energy that you can convert at demand with hydroelectric power generation. Thank you. Yeah, Michalis, please. Very briefly, you're absolutely right. The mountains but also the islands have a lot of wind potential. So the interconnection, electricity versus what? Making hydrogen and moving hydrogen. I mean, I don't know. I would opt for electricity at this point. And many of the islands have already been interconnected, the Cyclades, for example. Thank you. I have a question over there. Which one? Yes. 25 years ago, and that's a question for Anna and for you. 25 years ago, we had hydrogen powered cars, buses and heavy vehicles, maybe you were not there at the time, in the Detroit area. And what killed that idea, which was working pretty well, it was the resistance of the oil industry and to provide a distribution network. So here's the question. Is, as we usually say in technology, this an opportunity for leapfrog for Greece to go beyond electrical cars and electrical buses in particular and move to a hydrogen economy? I happen to know there are already successful companies, not in here but in other places where they have produced low-cost hydrogen cell batteries and other things. Second question, that's for Effie. This alienation is a very important technology which can be developed in Greece and it can solve a lot of the water problems especially in the islands. Is that another opportunity? Okay, and the last one, which is a little bit controversial but I have to answer it, to ask it, is there's a lot of discussion at least in the US about bringing back micro nuclear plants that they already have been approved by the regulatory commission and they have the advantage that they produce distributed energy and they're much safer. And there are actually countries in Europe considering it. Is that another opportunity? Okay, so there were some specific questions, specific panelists. So, hydrogen, so actually, it's like my lab is like a third, a third, a third combustion, a third in hydrogen, a third in batteries. And so I am sort of, how to say, really embedded in all, I don't have preferences. But if you're asking me what can be done quickly and effectively as the cost is dramatically dropping, I think we should be thinking about short term batteries, longer term for energy storage. And we know that pumped hydro and other things do affect the nature and do affect the geography and the people that live near these areas and they have a large social resistance, let's say. So actually what my colleague mentioned which is power to X or hydrogen through hydrogen means is useful. So I consider hydrogen more important for the spatial and large temporal mismatch we have and for large energy storage. But when it comes to most vehicles in the US, I think batteries should be. We had a working technology 20 years ago in Detroit, working. And so, I'm sorry, but I mean, I think the cost-effectiveness issue. It's not as long range as you implied. Okay, well, let me pass on to the other panelists who were asked specific questions. Would you like to answer? Yeah. My answer would be, I do not know the answer. I think the answer has to be found out. I do not know if a study has been done. I certainly do not have the answer. That's a very simple answer. I'd like to say a few things. Hydrogen. Let me give a chance to go back to desalination and nuclear power. Yes, yes. So desalination, I happen to be very close like 20 kilometers away from a big desalination plant that was in the making and it has not been approved because of resistance by the public. I don't know it's gonna happen. They're doing very active campaign because of course we're close to the ocean. That's a source of clean water, but it has not met the public approval. Going back to the nuclear energy, which is feasible and it's politics more than engineering that prevent us from us. I happened to be for the last eight years in the Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board appointed by Obama when I was president as a presidential appointment. And I have seen firsthand the resistance of the US public just because the decisions are made from the top and the public is not involved in a consultive way, the same as it has been done in Sweden. In Sweden, for example, there were local communities that were competing with each other. We are to put the nuclear power plants. Okay, why? Because they take them in tours, in the underground disposal facilities, they give them all the confidence they have, they can get on the safety of the engineering plants and so forth. So it is desalination and nuclear energy are controversial and I don't see in the next 20 years to invest there. Just because the public is not ready and we don't do a good job bring the public in alignment with the engineering technology that can provide the safety. Okay, thank you. Michaline, would you like to comment? So very quickly, I think you're right about hydrogen is going to play a role as far as the economic sustainability is concerned. I think it will have to come later. Some evidence to the contrary is a shell study at this point, which is taking place in the Boston area that is looking for building the infrastructure for having gas stations distributed hydrogen. You know, some of the big issues are with the nastiness of hydrogen that goes in and breaks up metal tanks, perhaps ceramic tanks are going to do a much better job. And we cannot burn more than 10, 20% of hydrogen in combustion turbines and so on. But it's going to be a solution. Thank you. Thank you. I'd like to pass on to another question back there. Thank you very much for this nice discussion and information. Now, Greece indeed has very high eolic potential, but there's a problem. The local, many people find the wind turbines very ugly. They don't like them in their neighborhoods and especially in the tops of mountains that are very close to touristic areas. And since Evia was mentioned, if you go to Southern Evia, you'll see that all the mountain tops are filled with wind turbines that I personally don't find them bad, but nevertheless, if you ask the local people, don't like them very much. And then they ask the question, what's in for me when they come and put all these things up here? So the question is, what type of payback should be given to the local communities in order to be convinced in order to get, you know, to accept this wind turbines? Prepinar, Parcona, Dapodotika, Opheli. And what is the percentage, let's say, of the money that is generated in electricity form that should go back to the local communities in order for them to be happy and then not to say that take them from here and put them instead of Evia to Amorgos or to Crete or whatever else because it's not my problem, okay? This, I think it's a serious issue and I would like to know also how this is addressed in the United States if you know. Thank you, so please. We have a energy institute at University of Michigan that works on this, you know, social acceptance of various forms of renewable energy and associated with installations. My understanding is that some of this reluctance for solar or, you know, wind, again, it has not been done correctly. And if the locals realize, like you say, some of the benefits when it comes to work and jobs and employment, they are actually positive. A lot of farmers in Michigan, in the Michigan we have this, you know, Tham area and it's very windy and a lot of local communities were not, were blocking a lot of projects. But we found out that it were not the locals, they were actually the people that they had these nice homes and they just wanted for the one month that they go to their nice home, the view. So I think it's very complex and we really need to understand what the locals are saying and what the others are saying. Yeah, yeah, Carly. Mary, please. I had the opportunity to serve at the Regulatory Authority for Energy in Greece in 2004, 2008. And so this issue in black and white, it's a very important issue. Local communities should be obviously participating in the benefits. Also there should be a just distribution of the licenses that are provided for building wind farms. And there was a very successful effort to have a public consultation and to have a just study that would distribute the licenses for wind farms across the islands. Because in the absence of something like this, you have situations in which CERIFOS, for example, came up to arms at some point because there was a big consortium of wind developers that was planning to put hundreds of generators, of big wind generators in CERIFOS. So solving this issue, having public consultations and dealing with the distribution of the benefits, those who used to protest to the establishment of wind farms were developers, essentially. So there was a real estate competition. And I remember receiving phone calls saying, oh, in Mykonos there's et cetera, et cetera, and the developers are up in arms. So that's a big issue that has to be addressed with a lot of public consultation in some reasonable planning. Thank you, Michalis. Yes, there's a few questions that have been waiting. Please. Yes, me? Yeah, you. Yes. Professor Dropoulos, I just spoke before. So I think the case for renewables from wind and water and solar for Greece is quite compelling. And of course, there are issues and the issue of social acceptance is very important. And there's clearly, we have to do a better job communicating to the public. What's in it for me about the health benefits of reducing cancer rates and overall health for you and climate. There are a lot of work that has to be done, but the issue that I would like to ask the panel is a big challenge, of course, for renewables is intermittency. And in order to integrate it in the grid, in order to be able to connect the islands, the mountains and everything, the issue of grid-scale storage is very important. Professor Nnes talked about alluding to the great work that's happening in Switzerland with pump storage, pump hydro, which is really a huge, a very important form for grid-scale storage. But I'm curious if the rest of the panel has any ideas and thoughts about what is the state of the art of grid-scale storage? Can we, how far away from creating batteries to storage that can power a city, let's say, for a month or so on? Maybe we can start with Anna. Yeah, I think the issue is for storage for a large city. We would need much more than just batteries. On the other hand, the grid itself can be more decentralized and incentivizing solar, small storage, installations with neighborhoods and some batteries. It's feasible and it's doable, I think in communities, small communities, rural communities. For the metro area, it's a problem. We need larger amount of energy. I would not advocate for electric vehicles that they're just parked. And if they are parked, we use them as batteries. Okay, maybe that is the right way, but I frankly think we should not have vehicles in cities. We should just have public transit. Please go ahead. So I mentioned power to access three options. One is demand-side management. One is electricity to something to electricity and one is electricity to something. And if we take demand-side management, it is a technology that is out there. So, for instance, our industrial party, Linde, they have the technology to run their air separation units with a variable load. Now, they will not shut down completely. They will go down or they will shut down completely. This is already out there and needs to be used. If we think of electricity to something to electricity, we're further away. If you think of electricity to a product, units, demonstration units are being built. I am not aware of industrial scale units that are being built. Thank you. Yeah, please. The fluctuation is a big issue, the volatility. However, some of it you can capture with short-term storage, in which loads with degrees of freedom, such as electric vehicles, and I never would support that electric vehicles provide to the grid because that kills their life. However, if their degrees of freedom are when to charge, so when they have lots of orders. So you can capture some of the short-term fluctuation. Then there are longer-term, sort of weekly, monthly, and so on and so forth. And there, of course, pumped hydro would be an issue. And also, the very good suggestion of reading cities from cars is very important. And one has to look at transportation, electricity networks, and smart cities in one breath, and that's part of the same problem. Thank you. Yeah, so there are two comments here. First, I mean, to convince the public opinion, I mean, it's good to say that the windmills are not very appealing to some people I understand that, but also energy independence is critical. And now we're extremely being affected by the war and the increasing energy costs. Imagine if we had an independent grid system. We wouldn't care, basically, about the increasing energy costs elsewhere. We would be self-sufficient. So I think that's a very powerful argument. That's a matter of communication and policy. The second thing is that pumped storage or variable output, the intermittency, there's some applications that are perfectly fine. So for example, if you want to invest in desalination, okay, there will be periods where you're more efficient in producing water and periods where you'll be producing less. I mean, intermittency is perfectly fine for that application and desalination needs huge amounts of energy. So I think we can, again, it's a matter of policy, identifying the things you want to address and maybe use renewable sources with its issues but with a compatible problems. Thank you. Okay, so there's one question waiting there, please. Yes, hello. Thank you very much for the opportunity and congratulations to the organizers once again. I'm Thanos Stubos from the National Research Center of the Democracy and I would like to mention that in my experience at least, I work on renewables and hydrogen and so on. In my experience at least, it's a major issue. Everybody that talked about something here in this section on energy environment mentioned the public opinion. It is the major issue in a country like Greece, probably also in the United States as I heard, it's a major issue. Several projects cannot be realized or vice versa because of a lack of public awareness, of public support and so on. And we must pay a lot of attention. I would like now to connect it to the previous section, to the previous session, sorry, education. For me, it's not a problem of bad communication or explaining whatever, it's a problem of education in a thema pedias. In other words, it's a matter of education. And there I come back to what Yanis Yorchos mentioned in his talk before and I want to connect it with an action that can be actually taken by HIEs in that direction. I think that it is very important for Greece, for example, maybe for many other places in the world, to create a new generation of, through the students, through the education system, engineering mainly, but not on engineering, a new education of people that do understand these problems, these challenges, these ground challenges in which, of course, energy and environment and climate change is a very important part of those, they understand it and how, and here is where HIEs can contribute. Yanis Yorchos mentioned a course, an introductory course, which I believe should be everywhere, all over universities, maybe even in high schools, an introductory course on ground challenges. And the students would be exposed, not on engineering students, but mainly engineering students, would be exposed right from the beginning, because they don't realize, they don't understand what the problems are and how can they be solved and there is all this misinformation that ends up with all these reactions and different opinions and so on and the fake news and then the social media and all these kind of things. So I believe that a course, which is called Introduction to Ground Challenges, first starting with a world scale ground challenges and then focusing maybe on Greece particularly and what should be done in that direction for Greece, this is something that has to be organized across all universities, even high schools and HIEs has a lot to do in that, I believe. Thank you. Thank you very much. You're welcome. Yes, please. So if you Google climate change in Greece, the most widely cited paper is the paper that has the title, what Greek secondary students believe about climate change. That was written in 2011 and it's highly cited because exactly it points out through data, extensive data, that the students that were exposed to a course on climate, they understood much better the challenge as opposed to the others that were not. So yes, absolutely, I agree. High school, not only university. I'm gonna give everyone last question. Yeah, the word to Professor Jortus because he had his hand up, but before that I'm gonna use my prerogative as coordinator of this panel to interject a comment. And I did teach such a course at Harvard many years ago and it was a wild success and it's being continued by others. I completely agree with your comment. It's very important. But one thing that I think the public does not perceive is that Greece has a huge coastline, if or rather when the ice of the Antarctic and Greenland melts, the average level of the sea will rise 60 meters. Greece will disappear, 60 meters. Yeah, roughly 60 meters, 180 feet. So the public does not appreciate that. And it is going in that direction and the rate at which sea level rise is accelerating. So these are the kinds of ideas that we have to communicate. Sorry I interjected this. So please, Professor Jortus. Just a point, that is not a question. And I know many of you probably know about it, but in addition to technical readiness levels that exist, you know, from fundamental to applied as we various funding agencies award various grants, there's something called societal readiness levels. I'm not sure if you're aware of that. The same level of ranking from one to nine in which people can actually figure out whether a specific project is societally ready to be accepted by society. So I think a lot of the things that we discussed here touch upon that. And I'm not sure how policy makers or economists or others understand the impact of this. I think this is where engineering science and policy and communication have to come together and make sure that we address this problem at some point. Okay, thank you. Thank you for the comment. So we have one last item to do, which is to give each of the panelists and maybe also ask coordinators one minute each to make a suggestion for something that highest can do in the areas of energy and the environment. So Anna. Okay, I will not conclude. I will just add something that it just occurred to me. I wanted to say that it's also very important and I'm very passionate and I think some others here about more gender equality and more participation of the energy and STEM education to women and minorities that we have and accept and embrace a lot of them. I actually chose Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering back when I was young and uncle said, oh, that's good. You're good in math and that's a good department because maybe you'll meet some rich man, rich husband. So, hey, yeah. Did you? Good. I didn't. I became rich myself. Micheli? If I were to push for something, it would be for studies that are quite advanced worldwide in the United States and in Europe that have to do with being able to control and form the electricity grid when you have limited amounts of controllable generation and number one and number two to be able to use information technology and to form platforms that can coordinate the millions of users of the grid in a more substantial sort of way of demand response that puts the demand and the supply and the generation on an equal basis and allows them to see the marginal cost of society and therefore gives them an incentive to coordinate efficiently. Thank you. Ethy? I want to echo the comment on diversity. I grew up in Levadia. We were three sisters and our father at the time did not give us options. It says you choose either medical school or engineering and we all became medical doctors and engineers. So the problem is not the students that go to the university is what they do after that and we have to provide the opportunities. Now back to actionable items. The low hanging fruit is if a student is interested for PhD or postdoc, my lab is always open and I can offer assistance. I have a National Science Foundation grant which is called I-FireNet. It stands for International Network on Networks on Fires. The summer school is happening in two weeks. Unfortunately too soon, but if someone in the audience, young person wanted to attend the graduate school, I will be very happy to cover all the expenses to fly to California and do it. If not this year, next year. And of course anything else that I can do, in fact the high, not so low hanging fruit would be to connect the high level decision policy makers in California regarding fires with those in Greece because they tried to figure out the way. The meeting that they had two weeks ago had everybody from the firefighter chief for California to the Native American people, to community advocates, to the chief, the president of the public water utilities commission for California and so forth and the scientists and they tried to figure out how to do best, the prescribed fires which you cannot avoid, the power lines which we know Pacific Gas and Electric Company is responsible for and they spent 25 billion dollars in the last two years to hide their power lines and so forth. It's not an easy problem and connecting California and Greece on that issue I think will be very important and I will be happy to follow up. Thank you. Alexander? I will echo the appeal for people to mobilize and come not only to the U.S. but also to Europe. Dear colleagues like Andres Budovis and Donizko Kossis helped me get the students. But I find that it's very, very difficult to get good Greek students and I think HIAS can help in maybe not exchange but maybe one way stream of students that will then hopefully come back to Greece that would be the one aspect and the other aspect which again much making is to try to get projects either research or development happen in Greece with partners from Europe or the U.S. or other countries. Thank you. So with regard to what I have to say I just want to point out that seven million people die every year because of air pollution exposure. They die prematurely. That's more than what COVID has done to us and of those about 400,000 of premature deaths are in Europe. A large degree of that is from smoke. It's not cars, cars are very clean. It's not all the traditional sources of pollution that we have custom to think about. And Greece has a very high exposure to smoke. So I think we have to become very much aware of this health hazard and what it does to ecosystems as well. And so I think HIAS can foster a very nice study to actually point that out. And in terms of research what we can do to improve we can do seasonal forecasts so we can see which areas are perhaps more prone to fire hazards in the next year so we can help establish policies and plans to mitigate some of that wildfire hazard and then inform the public that we have to stop burning wood. I think that's very important. So we'd be more than happy to interact with everybody both in terms of research as well as help this policy. Okay, so thank you. So very to wrap up, I'll say my own two cents. I think the interesting thing about energy and environment it's very, very multidimensional and people are trying wide variety of different things, different solutions which are being tested throughout the world and we have access to 150 scientists and engineers in top universities throughout Europe and the US. And what HIAS might be able to do is prioritize these things in terms of their relevance to Greece specifically. So I hope we can do that and now time to eat.