 So, I'd like to welcome everyone in the room and online to the Accelerating Energy Decarbonization press conference at the very first Sustainable Development Impact Summit. Today, sitting beside me, I have Laila Tretikov, CEO of TerraWatts Initiative, Wilfred Loriano Dorego, partner at KPMG, and Harold Hischhofer, Senior Advisor at TCX Investment. So today, we're talking about accelerating clean and affordable energy. And we are having this press conference during UNGA week. So, we have all these leaders. What are the ways that we can take actionable outcomes and move this SDG forward? Well, thank you. Thank you, Alan, for your question. Thank you, everyone, for being here. I think if we look at the big picture, we're at a fundamentally different place in the history of humanity. For the first time since we became humans, we have the opportunity to really look forward, because even though we don't have enough data, we have enough to understand what is going to happen. And not only that, we even capable not only of predicting what's going to happen, but also changing the trajectory of our own development. But that said, we're also at the same time at a critical point, because the next 20 years, what actions are we going to take in the next 20 years are going to change the Earth for the next 100,000 years. So the level of accountability on us is enormous. And one wonderful thing that has happened is that countries, actually, well, most countries, have come together around the Paris Agreement and around the Sustainable Goals. And we have quite robust set of objectives as it comes to climate. The problem with is that right now, even though we have the objectives, we don't have the tools to actually implement those objectives. And what we do see now is that we're already behind. Even if we just look at the objective for the Paris Agreement that said one of the objectives was 2.5 terawatt of clean energy, solar energy. By 2025, we're not even at 5% of that. We're accelerating, but we need to move much, much faster. Why? Because it's our problem. It's my problem. It's your problem. Everybody in this room, our children, it's a problem that's bigger than any one country, bigger than any one continent. It's the size of the Earth. It's an Earth-sized problem. So we need to have Earth-sized solutions for this problem, which means we need to bring all of the stakeholders and we need to design solutions that are really massively scalable. As we heard in the previous session, scalable enough to really create liquidity around $3 trillion. So this is what terawatt is all about and that's why if you have this page, you'll see what are some of the organizations that come together around terawatt to deploy these solutions. So it's large organizations that are enterprises, large businesses. There are 16 countries that are now behind terawatt and so the policymakers and their NGOs and civil society members. So that's really critical for us to all come together and look at the problem as a whole. As we move forward, you have to understand and you have to remember that at the end of the day, it's an economic transition. We are transitioning from the world that is geared up over the last 100 years for carbon-based economy. And in the next 20 years, we need to fully decorbonize. How do we do that? Typically when we look at economic transitions, I grew up in the Soviet Russia in the 80s. And what happened in Soviet Russia? The economy collapsed when the country tried to transition. We see this in the 2008 crisis. We see this during big wars. It's always the same. Well, Earth is too big to fail. If we look at what is already happening with the hurricanes, Harvey, Irma happening right here in the United States. We have droughts in Africa. We have floods in Asia. Earth is too big to fail. We cannot afford this kind of failure. So we need to act now. So there are three constituents and three major legs to developing the tools that we're developing. One is the policy tools. And we're lucky enough to have some of our partners here with us. And they can talk a little bit about how do we address the issue of policy, changing policy in many, many countries around the world that fundamentally act independently? How do we standardize the market? And ultimately how do we unlock the financial markets around creating a solution and around mobilizing trillions of dollars going forward? So those are our big questions. And what I want to do is I want to invite my co-panelist here to speak a little bit more about how the policy, how can we understand the policy, how can we address the policies globally? Thank you Layla. I guess in order to figure out the importance of policy, just imagine a country where there is no policy, there is no legal standards meaning that there is no rules to guide investors and there is no effective dispute resolution mechanism. Imagine another country where you do have policy and legal standards but they are not effective meaning that if, for instance, you have on paper that you can complete permitting processes in about six months, actually in reality it would take more than six years to complete. And thirdly imagine a country where you do have effective policies and legal standards but they are not stable. For example, if you have an investor who enters into a solo market and at a given feeding tariff which makes all his calculations around this feeding tariff and this has been subsequently questioned by the state. So in all these three examples what you see actually is uncertainty. And if we want to make energy affordable we need to attract private sector and we only attract private sector if we are able to make the whole thing transparent because long-term investors, they reflect uncertainty into risk premium and it makes the cost of capital more expensive so this is in opposite of what we are trying to achieve. So that's why it is important, policy is important. So basically I would say Laila, if I respond directly to your question, if we want to accelerate the rate at which we convert to renewable we need policy and legal standards that first which are credible because investors need to know that there is no artificial support to the market and this policy and standard need to be stable. So basically if we do have that, that could be a good move to accelerate the move to transition because this will contribute to make clean energy affordable. Because this will not be achieved if we don't have a strong mobilization of private sector and private sector all together. Wilfrid, can you tell us a little bit about how you yourself as a partner of KPMG, as a board member in France are engaged with Starawatt. What solutions are you building there? Let me start first with why KPMG is involved. As you said that before, today more than ever the climate change issue is an issue for everyone. It's an issue for you, it's an issue for me and I think it's an issue for all of us here individually. It's also an issue for government, sorry for organization. KPMG is an organization which employ approximately 200,000 people around the world. So it is important that we are committed to participate to the solution to make our planet great again. So that's why KPMG is part of Starawatt's initiative. Now in concrete terms, how do we contribute to the program? We, KPMG again, is an accounting, auditing and advisory service firm. So we operate over 150 countries and we have international network and very strong presence in the energy sector. So our core competencies really is quantification and make the link between what is regulation and quantification. When you know what is the impact of regulation, it is easier to manage and to see what's regulator needs to do in order to bring cost down. So basically what we're doing is to contribute to build a tool which purpose is to make the correlation between regulation and the impact of uncertainty to cost of capital and then to the cost of energy. This tool, in order to build that, we really, what we've done is simple. We took all the solar technical parameters and we add to that a kind of 21 regulatory criteria. That's what we work with, considered critical and because if they change it can have a strong impact on the way investors perceive the risk of each country and ultimately the impact on the cost of capital. Why cost of capital? Because it's the key component of the cost of energy. Yeah, what I find particularly fascinating with the work that we've done so far is that we can now look at a country and basically look at it as if it were a credit rating except it's a policy rating. And we can look at what the impact on the cost of electricity will look like so that when investors come in, then they know what kind of outcomes they're going to see. And the more we can optimize that, the more projects these countries are going to build. And with that I think it would be really interesting to talk about what kind of bottlenecks are there when we talk about financial markets. Why isn't there more investment going into renewables? Why isn't there a trillion dollars yet? Maybe Harold, can you walk us through it? Well, we heard in the previous panel, right, creating markets and if we want to mobilize the trillions, let's start out with billions, but if we eventually want to go, we do really need to create the market. So let's perhaps, and I fully agree that one of the bottlenecks, just to answer to your question before, the bottleneck is certainly that affordability still is not there. And if you look in some African countries, financing costs make up more than three quarters of the costs of solar energy. And that's not good enough because it shows also clearly that even if we make further progress in reducing technology costs of equipment, the problem is the financing costs. So we need to create these markets. We need to bring in financing. Let me perhaps answer here in two phases. The first one is sort of a strategic consideration, what we should think of, look at an historic example. And secondly, I will tell you exactly what we want to do to be practical to achieve that in the coming years, right, actionable. As we are in New York, I looked a little bit, I brushed up my history, and I looked how the U.S. Treasury bond and bill market was created, which is now the deepest bond market in the world, and it's really fantastic. And one of the most famous sons of this city, Alexander Hamilton, was really important, and there are two lessons. So first, there were clear rules established. This is a little bit what you said, I'm afraid. A clear rule was established to make sure that the credit quality was there, the credit of the U.S. was established. And secondly, you know, this sucked in new liquidity, and it also was what Alexander Hamilton said cemented the union, this large debt. So what can we learn from that for the solar market, the global solar market which we want to create? We need to work on the credit quality and establish rules, and this is what Wilfredo said before. We need to have standardization in the regulatory part for solar PV. We need to have standardization in contracts. But then, you know, and the beautiful thing on solar PV is that technically a solar plant in Mongolia looks very similar to a solar plant in Argentina. So and then we have the standardized contracts, so beautiful. But in weight, we have still very different macroeconomic regimes, macroeconomic risks, and this is where the third standardization initiative which we are working on is coming in. So what we want to do is homogenize financial risks and offer de-risking instruments for the investors so that they can invest in solar assets. Right now we have tens of trillions of institutional assets invested in negative to zero-yielding investments, very safe investments. And that is a result because institutional investors have very strict investment guidelines and they are very conservative about risk taking. And they need to deploy very large funds in a go, so they need deep markets. What we need to offer to them is a homogenized asset class which is de-risk to their liking so that they can deploy these funds. And when you have these investors to buy in, you will achieve a snowballing effect. How are we going to do that? So we will ask TWI, TCX, which I'm representing. We are specialized fund which provides FX currency hedges, the World Bank Group, ATI, Agence Fastidair of Mont. A number of large financial institutions have been asked to prepare for the COP in Bonn, a feasibility study, on a global de-risking facility for solar PV. We are making good progress. I cannot tell you all the details. This has to wait for Bonn, obviously. But some principles and this will work roughly. What are the principles of this mechanism which we hope we can introduce in Bonn? First of all, we don't want to reinvent the wheel. There are many de-risking tools already available. For example, Miga from the World Bank is offering Convertibility Insurance. TCX has FX foreign exchange risk management tools in all currencies in the world with a few exceptions. But these instruments are not easily accessible for solar investors. So what we are proposing is a platform which gives easy access to all these various providers of risk management tools. Secondly, we want to make this sustainable. If you want to mobilize billions and then eventually trillions, you need to have institutions which are financially sustainable. That means you need to price the risks to reflect the costs. It's a very important principle. In some countries, this will work very well, where the risks are relatively moderate. In other countries, where the risks are very high, we need to then probably think of alternative solutions as well. And last but not least, it will rely, as any marketplace, on the interest of many people to come in. To willing to dedicate their time, dedicate their capital because they have a profit expectation. And this conference, while I'm here, is very much driven that we inform other people on a global basis that we are doing that and hope that this may interest them to work with us. And we are certainly very open to reach out and work. And in one month from now, I hope we can disclose the details. And thank you very much for allowing me to talk here. Yeah, I think we're very grateful to have STCX and the World Bank on board with the initiative. But as we build the momentum and as we start building and deploying those tools, the most important part is for everybody to start coming together. So we start with 16 countries, but we ultimately need to get everybody involved who is part of the Paris Agreement. For the benefit and the important part for the corporate interest is that we are watching an opportunity in front of us. It's a huge opportunity for innovation. And we are at the very front of it. So that's really important as well for our partners. And this initiative needs to expand to hundreds and hundreds of companies. And now is an opportunity to get engaged at the foundational level with TerraWatt. And then ultimately the world global thinkers. Our advisors are some of the most famous economists in the world. And we continue to look for the great minds to join us. I think we should add just one thing and it's a huge profit opportunity. I think this will not work without the opportunity that firms will make profit and that will happen. And I think that is very an important fuel for to achieve the billions and trillions eventually. Maybe if I can add one more thing is the affordability of solar is already there. Because we have best in class countries who has always been achieving great things in terms of making solar affordable. Now I think what we are raising here is how do we make it affordable for a large number of countries? And the two, I mean there are two legs what we are proposing here is a natural de-risking mechanism via reform, regulatory reform. And then in addition to that a financial de-risking mechanism by combining the two, the intention is to make a large number of countries using solar because it is affordable. On that note I'd like to open the floor for any questions that anyone might have. Hi my name is Jerome Tagger and I work with Impact Alpha about sustainable finance. A few things first. So it sounds like the initiative has already been in the works for a while now or maybe a year and a half or so is that right? So I'd love to also better understand where you are at this point. And you mentioned this is a time for people to get involved at a foundational level. So who and to do what? What are the ongoing initiatives besides the one you talked about on de-risking and specifically on finance? What are the plans beyond this? Are you building a marketplace? I think I heard about marketplace. Are you building investment vehicles and so on and so forth. So before we answer the question I'd like to take one more question from the floor and then we'll go on to the answers. Hi I'm Dan Ferber, I'm with Springer Nature Science Publisher. My question is to what extent is there need for more technological development of solar PV to expand these markets? That's basically it. That's a great question. So I'll take the last one first. On the technology side we're in very, very good space. So from the cost of photovoltaic has fallen by a factor of 20 in the last 10 years, the cost of batteries by a factor of four. So we are in fantastic space and it will continue to improve but we actually don't need for it to improve. Even if it stayed right as it is and we saw availability of finance which we heard here accounts for sometimes two thirds of the investment. We would be in really, really good shape in terms of affordability and scalability of solar. We will continue to need additional storage capacities and the most value is actually going to come from the intelligence that will sit on top of the grid. And those are the services, the energy services that we're going to continue to see expanding and probably exploding. And that is sharing of energy, collaborative network, networking, intelligent transport and robotics that are going to plug into the grid. So that's where we're going to see an explosion of innovation that's already happening but it's going to continue to happen. If I can just add to that, in addition to the fact that the manufacturing costs will continue to decrease, there is also a scale element which affects the cost of solar. Meaning that more we build large scale projects, more it is affordable because we already discussed that as well. In addition to the third element which is the financing costs we're talking about here. To give a specific example about the scale effects, we're seeing that already in East Africa with distributed energy that people need to build up distribution mechanisms, warehouses and so on. And these are investments and they may feel more comfortable if they see that there is more sales coming in the future. So there will be fantastic impact on the supply chain if we increase the volume. So that's very important. And to the question about terawatt as an organization. So a little bit about history. It started originally during the Paris Agreement as the industry response, even back then the industry players wanted to participate, wanted to take part in what was happening. And now we're seeing more and more industry players step in and basically say, especially in the United States we see this a lot because of what's happening politically with respect to the Paris Agreement as the United States trying to withdraw. Corporate leaders are stepping in and saying we will own the problem as well, which is fantastic. The issue is that as an individual company the problem is bigger than any individual company. And companies usually come at this problem from the perspective of their, we've heard this from the previous session, from the arm of their sustainability arm. And the reality of the matter is it's an economic question. It's a question of innovation for companies. It's a question of how they're going to transform to service their customers in the next 10 to 20 years. So it's very valuable actually for companies to come together to start creating these tools. When Daniel Stiff initially started, the companies looked at it more from the perspective of how do we better understand the market, how do we better support this. Now it's about how do we transform ourselves as we transform the market because the market is going to transform whether we want it or not. How it's going to transform and how it's going to affect businesses and how businesses are going to affect it, that is something that we can shape and that is something we can change. And that's why we're hoping that everybody, all of the companies, start to engage now because that's the right point in time. Everybody is already stepping up. Everybody is already starting to commit both good intent and financials towards that. We need to join hands right now. It's very, very important. Otherwise we're little islands and there's no networking effect. The second question that you asked is what are the next things? So over the years, Terrow had started to transform into effectively an incubator for ideas that are scalable and can really horizontally affect the entire planet. So the first two big initiatives and two big ideas that will probably transform into their own organizations is the piece around financing which Harold talked to us about it. And the next one is the other one is about around policy. So think of it as kind of a standard enforced thought process around policy making. And what's going to happen next is as we see this market evolve, again, this is little islands. Everybody is a little bit on their own island. They're struggling to find their market. We need to bring the players together. So the next generation of this, the next piece, is the digital platform that helps everybody get connected. And the first piece of it is the financial piece where all the players can combine so you can create the value chain. So as a customer I can come in and I can say, okay, I want to create a project. And what are all of the different components that I need to make that project happen? Today it can take six years for a project like that to come to fruition. We need that time to cut off into the best of being six months or less. And maybe if I can just add to the terawatts, as Laila said, currently there are three initiatives. One is to propose a kind of standard contract where available. And there is a tax source to work on that. It has been working for a year. The second thing which is important is the evaluation tool which allows policy makers to see the impact of regulation into the goal to make solar affordable and to decide themselves which reform they want to make because they see the quantification of the impact of the reform. Okay, and this is ongoing. There is a tax source to work on that. We, KPMG, terawatts, of course, and three high street lawyers such as Herber Smith, Norton Rose, and Trilegal was joined force working on that to make it happen. And that's why we designed this criteria I mentioned earlier. We're running a pool of two or five thousand people professional to confirm that the initial view the tax source have on this criteria and the weighted grading is still relevant. So we're waiting for that. When we get the result for that, these two will be presented to the COP 23 in November. And then when it is presented, we can start interaction with government and policy makers so they can actually use this tool. And this will be also available to financial investors because they can use that to assess the country raised in each country they decide to go to. And in the financial tool, right, what the contributions which we are looking for are, let's distinguish between the various stakeholder groups. One stakeholder are state actors, and there you have donor governments and you have recipient governments. And they will be asked to contribute different things. For recipient governments will work very much with the standardization initiatives to accept a certain regulatory framework to harmonize their regulations to do potentially other reforms and donor countries may have also their views what they want to achieve, what priorities, political priorities they have. Then we have another stakeholder groups which are institutional investors. We need to, in order to be successful, we need to hear very clearly what they need in order to then, because they at the end need to be satisfied with the services and invest and be willing to invest. We are working also with institutional investors for example as the climate bond initiative where we are trying to see work with this group to see what can help to package the assets then aggregate assets in the future. So I'm going to just pause here because I can see the level of passion from our panelists and in the room. So I will invite you all to follow up and to watch this space. And I would like to thank all of you, my panelists for joining us for sharing this incredible passion you have for accelerating energy decarbonization and everyone online. Thank you for joining us. I'm closing the press conference. Thank you.