 Welcome everyone to this session in which we're going to be talking about hydropower and water technologies. And this is another really, really fascinating area. I'm always surprised at how much new information that there is and how much there is to learn and the enormous amount of power and energy that is provided through water technologies and also the huge still untapped resource that we have available. And when you think about what this means in terms of the overall supply chain and jobs, it's really quite phenomenal. So I'm really, really happy that we've got a great panel for you to hear from this afternoon. And we're going to start with Matt Nacella who is the manager for strategic communications with NHA, the National Hydropower Association. Thank you very much Carol. Good afternoon everyone. How are we all doing today? I know it's right after lunch and I just finish eating so we all get that little lull right after so I'll try not to bore you too much. As Carol said, my name is Matt Nacella. I am the communications manager for the National Hydropower Association. We are the trade association that represents about 200 companies that represent the diverse North American hydropower industry and that includes all forms of water power, conventional hydropower, small, large, pump storage, inconduit and even new marine and hydroponetic technologies. So hydropower is actually our oldest renewable in the United States. It's been around for well over a century. And as many of you know, it's history in the West and with federal entities like the Tennessee Valley Authority. It powered our war effort in World War II and helped really get us through the depression with its job creations. And that's something that it can do today as well. So as I said, today hydropower makes up a majority of the United States renewables. It's the largest renewable electricity source in America and it provides about 30 million American homes with clean, reliable electricity every day. So the fleet is interesting in that it's different from a lot of other renewable energy technologies out there in that its ownership, the makeup of its ownership is half federal, federally owned, so that's Tennessee Valley Authority, Bureau of Reclamation and the Army Corps of Engineers. And the other half is what's referred to as non-fedrally owned. So that can be investor in utilities and even small public powers owners. And of that, you know, we all think, what's the first thing we think of when we think of hydropower? Anyone? Clean and renewable. That's the correct answer. But most people think Hoover Dam and that's actually not what the fleet really looks like. Of the products that are regulated by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, 70% are 30 megawatts or lower. So they are generally smaller. And this is a perfect segue. Thank you for that, Jacob. The benefits of hydropower, it is. It's clean and renewable, but it's also very reliable. So it's a reliable source of electricity that provides, like I said, 30 million American homes with electricity. These facilities are capable of going quickly from zero to maximum output, making them well suited to meet changing electricity demands throughout the day. Pump storage, which is a type of hydropower where you can actually send the water back up to the upper reservoir and store it for later by pulling electricity off the grid as an additional reliability to electricity grid. It's affordable. Low-cost energy resources as well. Projects have long life spans. They have low operations and maintenance costs and zero fuel costs. You know, our water runs through these turbines and comes out the other end. And most estimates put hydropower at about two to five cents per kilowatt hour. Like we said, it's clean and renewable. About the equivalent to 40 million passenger cars worth of emissions is avoided every year with hydropower. And beyond the benefits that we see to the electricity grid and our clean air, it also has a huge impact on American families from an economic standpoint. About 300,000 U.S. workers are employed either directly or indirectly through the hydropower industry. And that's supported by supply chain. If you look at the map that I have back here, I know it's a little far away, but those red dots are about 2,500 supply chain companies from coast to coast that feed these projects and that's providing bolts, nuts, turbines, anything that they need to make those projects go. Now, I've talked a lot about what we already have for hydropower. It's about 100,000 megawatts of capacity. 20,000 of that is pump storage. But there's also a tremendous potential for hydropower to grow in the United States. We have our off-sided Navigant Consulting Report found about 60,000 megawatts of untapped potential in various types of technologies throughout the United States. And that has the ability to create 1.7 million cumulative new jobs. Now, where is all of this potential coming from? The number that shocks people a lot is of the 80,000 dams in the United States, only 3% are generating electricity. And the Department of Energy did a study back in 2012 that looked at the potential at the existing non-powered infrastructure. So they identified about 54,000 dams in the United States with capacity of 1 megawatt or greater. And that totals about 12,000 megawatts. That's roughly the equivalent of 12 new plants. And two-thirds of that potential is just at the top 100 sites. So if we just built at the top 100 non-powered dams, we could increase hydropower generation by 8%. Then the DOA actually, this April, expanded on that report and looked at new greenfield development. And they found about 65,000 megawatts of potential. Now, this study is off-sided as being a call to build new dams, and that's not necessarily the case. What it really is meant to do is to show what the universal potential is out there. And it shows us not only where the potential is, but what are the characteristics of these sites? What are the environmental impacts that would have if they were built? Are there endangered species in the area? So that really helps inform developers as they look at the best sites to sustainably develop hydropower further than the United States. There was also a study that found an additional 1.6 million megawatt hours per year at the Bureau of Accommodation's non-powered infrastructure. So all these things together show that hydropower is not typed out and that there's a lot we could be doing to add reliable, clean, affordable electricity to our grid. And this is definitely something that even though a lot of people aren't aware of, developers are. And we look over at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which licenses these projects. And developers have about 52,000 megawatts of permits or pending licenses at some stage of the regulatory process. Now, are all 52,000 of those going to be built? Probably not. And there are several reasons for that, and we think that Congress can address a lot of those issues. The first is the regulatory barriers. Hydro-powered project developers face long development lead times. The regulatory process is quite long, taking up to and beyond five years. And it involves dozens of federal and state agencies. But we've seen some progress on this. Last year, Congress did something that it hasn't done in a while, and that's pass an energy bill. And it was small and targeted, but it was. There were two of them that were passed basically unanimously out of both houses of Congress and signed by the President in August that looked at finding regulatory efficiencies for low-impact hydropower development, including building on non-powered NAMS, trying to get that from a five-year process to a two-year process. And NHA is currently working with the environmental community and other, our membership and members of Congress to see if we can't find additional regulatory efficiencies that we can add to the process. Beyond that, the hydropower projects are very intensive from a capital standpoint up front. So a lot of the cost is when you're building these projects and we need to find a way to leverage private investment in that, and the way we do that is through incentive policies like the PTC. Like the other renewables have probably been saying all day, the PTC is extremely important for many of our companies, and we would like to see that extended by the end of the year. And then finally, for hydropowers research and development, many of the new technologies, smaller technologies in marine and hydrokinetics, the DOE water power program plays a tremendous role in funding those activities. We've seen unstable funding levels at the Department of Energy through the Congressional Appropriations process, but we started to see a, and not to use a pun here, but a sea change in the priorities. This year we were happy to see the President actually ask for an increase in the Department of Energy's water power budget. And though we don't know what the Senate numbers are, the House actually on the floor a few weeks ago, when they were voting on the Energy and Water Bill, voted to increase the funding for that program by $9 million. So we had an amendment tacked on to that. Beyond all that, the research is there that this is a supportive technology by the American public, so Congress should be acting. We found that through a poll done by Princeton Survey Research Associates, American support expanding hydropower by 80%, 70% support the aforementioned policies needed to support that growth. And I see that I am at the end of my time, so I will close and pass on to the next speaker. Thank you. Great. Thanks, Matt. Lots more if we have any time. We'll try and take some questions at the end. We're now going to turn to looking at a case study of great international cooperation. And I think this is just a wonderful example in what you're going to hear about. So our tag team on this is Jacob Irving, who is the President of Canadian Hydropower Association. And he will be joined by Bill Liebrow, who is the Director of Federal Affairs with Minnesota Power. Jacob. Thanks. Thanks very much, Carol. And thanks, Matt, too, for opening things up. Matt and I, I think we're from, I often call our association sort of sister associations, the National Hydropower Association in the United States and then the Canadian Hydropower Association up north. Similarly, we represent the developers and the operators of hydro from coast to coast to coast in Canada. And we share a lot of the same heritage and history and the same type of resource generally. But in Canada, our ability to grow is quite large. We are currently the third largest generator of hydropower in the world, and we have the ability to more than double our current installed capacity. And I like to think that that's a good news story, both for Canada and for the United States. It's a huge, untapped potential of clean renewable electricity. And further good news, I think, of course, is that our two countries are already very strongly linked. In fact, our grids on a continental basis are generally more north-south than they are east-west. So Canada and the United States, our electricity grids have been connected from the beginning, and it's actually happened quite organically over time. I think it was as simple as that we were building electricity generation on our side of the border for ourselves and the U.S. was doing it on their side of the border. And we looked across the border and said, you know, if we stream lines across each other, we can actually increase each other's reliability and efficiency, and so we did, and it made sense. And ever since, we've been sending electricity back and forth to each other. Now, of course, Canada is a net exporter of electricity to the United States. But that pretty much follows the general story in all natural resources between our two countries. Generally, down in this country, there's 10 times as many people as there are in Canada. There's about 350 million people here. There's about 35 million in Canada. Our population is about the size of California's population, stretched across the second largest land mass on the planet. So we don't have a lot of people by comparison in the United States, but we do have a lot of natural resources and we have a lot of energy potential. And we do currently enjoy a successful relationship in that regard. We send about 30 to 40 terawatt hours of hydropower to the United States every year. And each one of those terawatt hours helps avoid about 500,000 megatons of carbon. So we, in Canada, we satisfy our own needs with electricity and we have one of the cleanest, most renewable electricity systems in the world. Since, again, 60% of our electricity comes from that. But then we also send it to the United States. And the United States, by comparison, your generation profile in this country, it's about 70% non-renewable fossil fuel. So if you look north to Canada, we like to think that we have a friendly solution for you that we can help you with. And you backstop it against the fact that Canadian hydropower represents less than 1% of U.S. electricity consumption. We like to think that there is a reasonable room to grow there. As I often say, you know, I'm not here to say that Canada should provide 15% or 10% or even 5% of U.S. electricity supply. But by the same token, we think that 1% is a little bit low. And we could probably do a little bit better. And in fact, if we were to dream a lofty dream, a lofty goal of doubling our exports, that would represent 2% of U.S. electricity. And remembering that each of those electrons is clean and renewable, we think is to both of our advantages. And of course, our countries enjoy a long and storied trade relationship, a peaceful trade relationship. We are each other's two largest trading partners. And in terms of economic benefit, we derive and offer the same sort of benefit that Matt was talking about. We have Canadians working on U.S. hydropower projects. We have Americans working on Canadian hydropower projects. Our two associations share many of the same members who are all interested in the common goal, which is essentially bringing on more hydropower generally. Because I think together, we do generally share the belief that hydropower is the best way to make electricity. Definitely within Canada, I'm never shy or afraid to mention at any forum that in Canada at least, hydropower is the best way to make electricity. Can we do better? We can always do better. Are we perfect? Nope, no one's perfect. But we are the best. And we are big, and we can grow, and we can share. And I think that's probably the biggest message that I'd like to leave everybody with today is that we're big, we can grow, and that's good. And in fact, if you of course want to get some more information on it and get a few more facts and arguments, we've got some information outside, so make sure you pick up a copy of Five Reasons Americans Should Care about Canadian hydropower. Us Canadians are always told that when we talk to our American cousins we try and be concise and direct. So we hope we've achieved that with this. But also, I think it is really incumbent upon us in Canada to remind ourselves of our great strength in hydro and our ability to grow, and also remind our American cousins that our existing relationship could and should be expanded for mutual benefit to both of us. I've joked before with Matt sometimes, is that we do share some things in common. I think some communications issues are similar. One of them is fighting this notion that hydropower is somehow tapped out. Because it's been around for 130 years, it's well-developed, it's well-understood. People I think can be forgiven for thinking that, oh well, we must not have anymore. And of course, nothing could be further from the truth. And I often joke, it's sort of like trying to communicate or advertise oatmeal. You know, it's been around forever. It's plentiful, it's good for you. And now try and get everybody excited about it. That's our job in both the NHA and the CHA, is to try and essentially remind ourselves of the solution that we have underfoot that we can enable through proper policy and greater awareness. But something else just to think about as well, since I'm a Canadian in the U.S. capital, is every so often it's interesting to take a step back and think about U.S. from a North American perspective. Sorry, the hydropower from the North American perspective. And adding our two countries together. We're already connected together. But if you look at stats and rankings, it's kind of interesting. Canada has the fourth largest installed capacity and the third largest generation. And the U.S., it's flipped. The United States has the third largest installed capacity. The U.S. has more installed capacity than we do. But the U.S. has the fourth largest amount of generation. So we're kind of interesting. We kind of fit together. And if you actually took us together and you added us together, we become a strong number two ranking in the world. We are the second largest in terms of installed capacity and the second largest in terms of generation. Who is number one? China's number one. China has the largest installed capacity and the largest generation. But when you add Canada and the U.S. together, we are nipping at their heels. We are very close. And I would argue that the undeveloped potential that both our countries have put together that we could catch China and we could exceed China in terms of both installed capacity and generation. And I think that's an interesting goal to shoot for. And I think it's an interesting proxy for development on greenhouse gas. Because if we and both our countries can pull together and make it happen, then the sky is the limit, I think for us in terms of improving our environment and our economy. That gives an overview of Canada. And as Carol mentioned, we're going to talk, we're going to zoom in a little bit more. I've given a real general sense of things. But I ended in talking about partnership between our two countries. I think Canada and Minnesota Power is actually going to be able to provide an example of where Canada and the U.S. have directly partnered together to enable renewables on both sides of our borders. And I think it would be very instructive in telling us all about how we can work together going forward and hit our mutual goals of improving our economies and improving our environment as well. That's the fact that we are bordering the Canadians with apple hydropower to our west, we've got an apple wind power. What I want to talk to you today a little bit about is kind of what we're doing and how to pack tools and technologies together. On the chairs back there are some handouts that I provided. Nothing too high-tech, but it gives you a little bit of a snapshot of what's been innovating about Minnesota Power. First of all, we're a very small and investor-owned utility headquartered in the lives of Minnesota. We serve some of the largest industrial customers in the world, and we have a high-globability of electricity, both cost, and we've got to make sure that the flights are on at 4757. So, to take a talk about the integrated grid and the fact that in fact North America you're all electricity teachers wouldn't be here on a nice avenue listening to this room. But the North American grid is in fact an integrated grid. If you look at it from a North South perspective, we run with the same 60 seconds per second for voltage and current. If you look at the integration, we're running under the same north American type of reliability corporation standards. We're running in some of the same integrated system operators. So it is an integrated grid where you need to look at it that bad. What Minnesota Power is looking at is a build-out of wind power in North Dakota, and hopefully that wind power will be an existing direct current of the DC line that comes in through the entire center of North Dakota at the time. And what we're going to do is marry that with the hydropower from Canada, because one of the things that hydropower can provide is really good, it's called low quality capabilities. Hydropower can move up and down directly so does wind power or any other instrument moves around. We can integrate that into the grid. And it's really important for you all to just keep in mind that what's happening when you see the lights on here, every time you put the lights with John or off, there's a generator somewhere where they're producing electrons or not producing electrons. In real time that just needs light. So as we generate more or less electricity from the intermittent resource when we integrate that into the grid or into our system, we have to be moving some other generation around to make sure that the lights stay on. If we don't, bad things happen. So what we're going to do is look at a long-term contract which we've signed with National Hydro. We have 250 megawatts which is just a big amount of energy. It's going to be a contract where we actually built in what's called a wind storage provision. And kind of the Holy Grail for electricity is storage because if we can't store it, it doesn't need any grid or utility scale at least enough. We're kind of doing both that and that just by using water, and the power of the water stored in a dam or in a flowing stream. So what we're going to do is we've got a lot of wind out of our encoder. We don't have high loads. We don't need all that electricity. We don't necessarily have to take the water out of the canada. They can actually not send us the electrons meaning they're not spilling water from our behalf, meaning that the water is actually being stored. And if you think of storage, again it's not for dams. It's for dams along several river systems in Canada and liquid thick which is really a pretty darn big battery. Some of the diagrams I have see that we have Canada has a battery whereas my friends don't know it's a battery. That's what we're going to use that meeting system for. So it's a perfect example of kind of being in the right spot for us being in the intersection of water and wind. And I think our engineers being covered are going to figure out that this is going to work for us. It obviously is not going to work for Kansas or some other places where you just don't have that kind of access. And in fact, in Minnesota we only have 10,000 lakes. We just don't have 10,000 feet of elevation. So we have plenty of water. We just don't have a lot of elevation change to capture that power in moving water. There's still some availability there but nothing compared to what our friends have to know. So being big and powerful to take this, we're going to look at being able to partner use that, use it well provide our customers who need cost-effective electricity and reliable electricity with cost-effective and reliable electricity. That's our story. We're just going to do it. If you have questions, we appreciate all of you coming out today. Have a nice afternoon. And I have the right to look at the comments so I apologize to my fellow panelists and let's hear what they say. But the power will take the decision to report back. So thank you for your time. Thanks, Will. Now we're running a little bit short of time but we can do it. I'm going to turn to Thomas Horner who is the vice president for water management. Good afternoon. We're a water efficiency company and you might be wondering what is really happening? You can put over 60 pounds. So it's good at producing electricity but we pump 450 billion pounds of water around the country every day through our water and sewer system. So it goes through the system and then the sewer systems have to pump it up and up to get it to the point. 13% of our electricity is used to pump water and wastewater around the country. We've done programs that because of the water savings have saved more energy than the energy of the program. So in a few minutes I have I think I want to touch briefly on this which is we're getting to the point of one water where there used to be three separate columns, the water column, the wastewater column and the storm water column. In the next 10 to 20 years those systems will be integrated and then bringing that a little further kind of just talking about our definition of the column. This is resources, the infrastructure the lights, the dams, the rivers that as citizens we own together. We have a duty to enhance and be shared that sense and you use them wisely so that our kids can actually enjoy them also. So the water industry like other parts of the column water and sewer around the country are kind of flip-flop. What we have is the license that has the most water considering an incredible water deficit like California and out west it's one-third to one-quarter of the cost for what it is here in the East. So places that have plenty of supply through 65 have been charged the most because they haven't had a lot of large programs through costs of water involved in the situation and there's water efficiency that would be solved down west. So at conferences in the past few years we've asked the financial experts we've asked the water experts and so on the water guys to move what's our industry evolving and it's interesting it seems to be across the case with a lot of industries where everybody argues about what's going to happen and there are a lot of different things but if you look out 20 years to 25 years most of the experts are getting greener and so on the water side there's water, wastewater and storm water what you're going to see is that first of all technology is coming into the boat media systems are improving we're getting our first kind of rush of robotics doing pipeline repairs unaccounted for water or unbuilt water that's what the water authorities use to say we've made X amount of water and we've built for Y amount of water that difference used to be 30% on the counter board basically we're in a country at the 18 to 20% I mean it's outrageous that one bit of that huge amount of energy we're using because the product is leaking before it actually gets to the consumer so there are a lot of things we're seeing that the utilities are getting a little smarter and what we see is conservation programs will remain the lowest cost of new supply so the conundrum we have in this country is that one third of the country is in an incredible water deficit might not be every year but long term third of the country doesn't have enough water so they need to invest very wisely in conservation and efficiency programs that are significantly the lowest cost of new supply the difficulty is the two thirds of the country is not fighting the water and so you go into a community and you've got 20% of the fellow makers we just want to be more efficient well now the rates have to go up a lot more than 20% because the main difference between water, wastewater and the storm water community and the cost of the infrastructure is 80% of your cost and utilities typically 80% of your cost the prior year is in the conundrum so we're going to see a lot more reviews, recycling and what we will probably start to see in the next four to five years this is not earlier in the real water deficit areas is people used to call them toilets and tap we don't want any of that wastewater in our drinking water and so basically we all filled it many times but that we're going to see a lot of the wastewater treatment our water supply is big enough 40 cents for every thousand down or more correctly 40 cents for every 8,000 pounds of water that we move around in the country people ask why is the water cost so much in these areas well, people say come on God gives you delicious spring well you can come down to any of the plants and don't give you a bottom down bucket you can carry on but if you actually want that product transported to your facility it takes a lot of energy and so I think the only to close up people that use the commons for private gaming not directly referring to the private people because they've screwed up the water around the country in specific locations I was a voice scout we were told that if you use the commons you have to leave it in better shape than when you went in and I think we're going to see that next leave in the corporate responsibility thank you and sorry we're going to have to do kind of an expedited presentation here Jason but anyway we are now going to hear about this a very important other area of water technology from Jason Bush who is board member of the ocean renewable energy coalition and the executive director of the Oregon wave energy trust I anticipate that I'm running out of time so I'll make my comments short and I'll have to stick around afterwards my name is Jason Bush executive director of the Oregon wave energy trust in Oregon the land of hydro you might think I'm here to talk about conventional hydro in fact I'm here in my capacity as an MHK marine hydro kinetic advocate I'm a board member of the ocean renewable energy coalition we are a national trade group that promotes the development of energy from the ocean from waves tides, currents even salinity gradients and temperature gradients these are pre-commercial technologies we're still probably three to five years from seeing the first technologies go in the water and put electricity on the grid permanently so in many ways we're certainly different than some of the folks you've already heard from today focused on things like solar and wind and certainly conventional hydro we're very interested in this particular type of generation because of the tremendous potential that is out there not just in the United States but around the world we certainly want to be one of the first countries in the world that helped develop these technologies and bring them to market and we certainly want to put clean reliable electricity on the grid in the United States but ultimately it's an effort to provide these technologies for countries around the world as we double our energy usage as a people on this planet over the next 50 years MHK should be MHK should be one of those sources the industry is only a few years old, about 10 or 15 years old Scotland has made a major investment in this over the last few years they're really the home of MHK energy but here in the United States I think we're a fast follower it's a good place to be we have not invested nearly as much money as they have in UK and other countries around the world but we have a number of companies that are tracking toward commercial deployments already there are I think there's a device actually going in the water this week in Massachusetts and we are tracking four projects on the west coast currently there are projects tracking in Alaska, Hawaii California, Oregon and Washington we are particularly focused on markets like Alaska and Hawaii where the cost of energy is very high they're importing diesel fuel, burning it in generators and their cost of electricity in many places exceeds 30 cents a kilowatt hour as much as 60 cents a kilowatt hour in some of the more remote areas in Alaska certainly marine hydroponetic energy cannot compete today with some of the established forms of renewable energy but we can certainly rate 60 cents a kilowatt hour and for communities around the country in Alaska and Hawaii in particular we think we're a viable option the the primary focus of our industry right now is getting projects in the water growing familiarity with the technology for many folks of course they don't know anything about marine hydroponetic energy you say we do wave energy we don't know what that means or even tidal occurrence these technologies all exist around the world there are devices in the water still in development phases primarily there are only a handful of commercial projects anywhere in the world one of the models that we're trying to replicate here in the United States is something called the European Marine Energy Center EMEC which is in Scotland testing facility there are 14 births there they're full or contracted for an entire industry is built up around that testing facility and we are trying to do the same thing here in the United States we're looking at potential facilities in places like Oregon and Hawaii and out here on the east coast as well again I know we're running short on time so I'll keep it very short we expect the water power budget at the Department of Energy has been for the last few years has grown I think it started in 2008 and new again for the first time it funds both conventional and marine hydroponetic and we work closely with NHA and others to try to grow that budget it's the primary source of funding for the research and development for this early stage technology so I'll stop there and I'm happy to stick around and I'll have to answer your questions thank you Thanks Jason really appreciate it so I hope that since we are right on time that if you've got questions please you know feel free to follow up with our speakers probably out on the hall or at their booths which would be great because they all got so much information that I think is so important as we think about the kinds of changes that are underway and that can make such a difference from moving to a clean energy economy in this country so thank you our wonderful panel thank you for squeezing that presentation Jason and I want to thank you all for coming thank you