 Hello and welcome everyone. Thank you for joining us today for our briefing towards the energy system of tomorrow. I'm Dan Bresset, the executive director of the Environmental and Energy Study Institute. EESI was founded in 1984 on a bipartisan basis by members of Congress to provide science-based information about environmental, energy, and climate change topics to policymakers. More recently, we've also developed a program to provide technical assistance to rural utilities interested in on-bill financing programs for their customers. Our work revolves around providing informative, objective, nonpartisan coverage of climate change topics in written materials and on social media. Everything we do, briefings, fact sheets, issue briefs, articles, newsletter, and now even podcasts, is always available for free online. And as you might know, we've been working over time for the past several months to help inform climate change policy discussions that are increasing in intensity and urgency. So that is another way of saying that we have a lot of recent, timely content for you to check out online. And the best way to do that is to visit us online at www.esi.org and sign up for Climate Change Solutions, our bi-weekly newsletter, and follow us on Twitter at EESI online. Today is the start of our latest briefing series, Modernizing the U.S. Energy System, Opportunities, Challenges, and the Path Forward. Our congressional climate camp, which ran from January through May, was designed to establish a baseline climate change resource for Congress and other policymakers. And now starting today, we're ready to focus even more on pathways to meet our new commitments under the Paris Agreement to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions by at least 50% by 2030. Because so much of the present discussion in D.C. features in one way or another the word infrastructure, that will be where we spend the next few weeks. Not so much trying to define what it is or is not included in infrastructure. Instead, we'll consider some of the most impactful opportunities for big-time, fast-acting emissions reductions. First, energy system modernization is a subject of this three-part briefing series. And the second, which we'll cover on Tuesday, involves the at-scale deployment of capital made possible by a national climate bank. We have three experts joining us today to help us understand how we currently power our economy. But our main goal of the session is to help policymakers imagine how our energy system needs to evolve over the next decade or so and what it needs to look like to facilitate a transition to an equitable, decarbonized, clean energy economy. Unless we change the way we generate, move and consume energy and transition to the resources needed provided with affordability and environmental sustainability in mind, we will find ourselves 10 years from now in even bigger trouble that will be even harder to mitigate and adapt to, let alone try to reverse. So today, our experts will help us imagine what the energy system of 2030 needs to look like to deliver greenhouse gas emissions reductions in line with our new international commitments. Next Friday, we will think about modernizing America's transmission network. And on Friday, June 18th, please join us for leveraging grid-ed integration for resilience and decarbonization. If you'd like to RSVP for the whole series, visit us online at www.esi.org. One last thing before we start up the presentations and begin the discussion, please feel free to send us your thoughts by email at esi.org. It always gets me the two ads. Or follow us online, follow us on Twitter, at EESI online. We will do our best to incorporate your input into the conversation as we go. And now it is my pleasure to introduce the first of our three panelists today. Jennifer Chen is president of Regrid. She works to help clients shape electricity, transmission, and governance policies with an eye toward modernizing grid infrastructure and scaling up clean energy. Jenny has written and presented on these topics, including testifying before the US Congress and the US Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. She is a senior fellow at R Street and senior policy counsel at Coefficient. Welcome, Jenny. Thanks for joining our panel today. I'll turn it over to you. Thank you so much for the kind introduction and for inviting me to participate in today's briefing. Today's topics are important for Congress, agencies, state and local authorities, and stakeholders as they grapple with guiding the transformation of our power system. The questions I hope to touch on today include what are the overall policy needs to facilitate an efficient energy transition to cheaper and lower emissions electricity? How do transmission, markets, and grid-edge reforms fit together in a coherent framework? And what are the roles of different government actors? Next slide, please. Our electricity system is evolving. Policies and customer preferences are scaling up wind and solar and distributed energy resources, such as electric vehicles. These changes have the potential to be complementary with appropriate policies in place. Wind and solar are lower cost, fuel, and emissions-free resources, but they are also variable, independent, on weather. Electrification of transportation and buildings and other sectors can potentially help us manage how and when energy is consumed to make the most of wind and solar when it's available and even store it. Another challenge, as seen in this map, is that the cheapest wind and solar resources are far from most electricity customers and need physical infrastructure as well as a means to trade these resources. Long-distance transmission is needed to physically connect wind and solar-rich regions to customers. Despite investment costs, well-planned transmission is expected to produce significant cost savings as well as jobs. And sharing resources over a broader region helps even out variability in wind and solar and flattens out peak electricity use across different time zones. Resource sharing through organized markets can also help improve reliability at least cost and can facilitate achieving state and federal policy goals. Thus, regional market expansion and transmission expansion work well together to optimize the system. Despite the regional nature of these solutions, there is significant roles for states and local governments. And there are models for how that works well. The governing statute, the Federal Power Act, contains mechanisms and allows for cooperative governance. Next slide, please. Regional markets allow distant buyers and sellers of electricity to transact. This helps integrate wind and solar by optimizing generation efficiency over larger regions and enabling cost-effective resources to reach customers. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, or FERC, oversees independent regional grid organizations. They are known as RTOs and ISOs, regional transmission organizations, and independent system operators that operate these markets. In the map, these are shown as the New York independent system operator, the New England independent system operator, PJM, or Pennsylvania Jersey, Maryland, the mid-continent independent system operator, Southwest PowerPool, and the California independent system operator. However, electricity trade is highly fragmented, as you can see in the map, particularly in the Southeast and in the West, aside from California, where there are no regional transmission organizations. Further, utilities can voluntarily leave or join RTOs unless their membership is required by state law or as a condition to guard against potential utility abuse of its market power. The incentives utilities face, however, do not necessarily spur them to join RTOs. For utilities with business models that make more money by building more power plants, sharing resources to reduce bills may not be in their shareholders' financial interests. Potential solutions here could include Congress could direct FERC to require utilities to share resources as part of an independently operated market to help guard against utilities, against overbuilding and overcharging customers. Congress could fund DOE, the Departments of Energy, to develop and improve on open source energy trading platforms to optimize trades across borders and reduce costs for new regional transmission organization formation. Next slide, please. An efficiently built network of transmission lines can help optimize the use of electricity resources. FERC establishes the rules for the transmission planning process. However, the main challenges for building transmission are mostly along the lines of interregional transmission planning and siting. Planning is piecemeal, and there's no planning process in place for a nationwide backbone grid. As you can see in the map, the US is divided into planning regions. Setting aside the question of how well transmission is planned in each of these regions individually, there is little or no planning in between the regions. Even if we had interregional planning between pairs of regions, that geographic scope is still too small to optimize a national network of transmission. A bottom-up approach, compared, for example, the natural gas pipeline system to the highway system, will be more costly and disorganized. But that's the approach that we're taking today. Transmission upgrades and local projects have risen to cost around about $20 billion a year in recent years, but are focused on smaller projects that are easier to plan and build because they are not subject to FERC planning process requirements. Lastly, equity is a concern when determining who pays and where projects are cited. Potential solutions here include, FERC is expected to take up transmission planning reforms and could try to fix regulatory gaps for local and interregional planning processes. But it would be a bigger step to require interconnection-wide transmission planning. Congress could fund DOE to improve an open-source mapping tool that can help transparently identify citing risks earlier and identify corridors that optimize efficiency, equity, and avoid environmentally sensitive areas and cultural heritage sites. Next slide, please. Customers can offer key solutions as well. Customer devices will scale up with electrification, and the distribution system must be able to manage higher amounts of smaller distributed resources, discharging and storing electricity. Electric vehicles, buildings, pool pumps, water heaters, et cetera, on the distribution system can also help balance electricity supply and demand. This can help integrate wind and solar and maintain reliability at least cost. Note that for the California heat storm last year, it was approximately 4,000 megawatts of voluntary load reductions that came out of the woodwork after California's governor issued an emergency call and saved the state from additional outages. With a better system of demand response in place, outages could be avoided or reduced. FERC is trying to facilitate this integration of these smaller resources onto the larger grid by allowing demand response, storage, and distributed energy resources to participate in wholesale electricity markets. But as these resources sit on the distribution system, states and utilities have a role to play in tapping into the flexibility these resources offer. The transmission and distribution system coordination is important here as are accurate prices that reflect the value of electricity as well as better forecasting. Congress could fund DOE in its labs to provide technical support to states, RTOs, distribution system operators, or utilities. Next slide, please. I've covered some of these recommendations, but just to summarize here, how can Congress help? Market and transmission expansion and grid edge issues highlight the importance of federal, state, and local authorities collaborating. And there need to be forums to work out solutions. Congress could ask FERC and DOE to convene states, local authorities, and stakeholders to develop a coherent, equitable, and implementable large scale backbone transmission plan. Congress could fund and provide technical or rather Congress can fund DOE to provide technical assistance to states to study the benefits of market and transmission expansion and improve distribution systems to accommodate distributed energy resources and their proliferation. Congress could fund DOE to improve open source mapping tools to identify transmission corridors that optimize efficiency, equity, and avoid environmentally sensitive and cultural heritage sites while maximizing existing rights of ways. Congress could help reduce the cost of efficiently sharing resources by funding DOE to develop common open source energy market trading platform to optimize trades across borders. Congress could also help align incentives with public policy goals. It could direct FERC to require utilities to trade electricity and share resources as a part of an independently operated market to minimize the potential to overcharge customers. Congress could also enable DOE to investigate setting standards to encourage greater efficiency for the transmission system. Thank you very much, and I look forward to your questions. Well, thank you, Jenny. I actually have two follow-up questions. If you want to try your video again, I'm game for that. But I do have two questions. First is, could transmission planning be any more complicated? No, I'm just teasing. But my real question is, your maps are fabulous, and I really appreciate that you included those in your presentation. One of the things that helped convey to me is that we have a big country. And I was curious, what impact do the long distances involved moving from the East Coast to the West Coast, the Canadian border, the Mexican border? Do long distances contribute to the complexity of our energy system challenges? All right, that's a good question. So having a diverse set of resources in the country is helpful, and having different time zones that you can average over is also very helpful. So for example, when the peak usage of electricity is occurring in California, for example, that might not be the same in other regions. And so you'll have peaks that come on at different times. And if the system works well together, then customer's usage of the system is somewhat smoothed out. And you can also imagine that if you have wind and solar resources where wind is stronger at night, it's also stronger in the winter. And solar resources are stronger in the summer and during the daytime. These resources complement each other very well. Looking on a broader geographic scope, the wind might be blowing in certain regions and the sun could be shining in other regions. And having the system bring all of these resources together also averages out that generation. But in terms of the long distances for transmission lines, electricity is something that travels very quickly. So there could be issues that arise because of certain issues, like at certain points along the transmission lines. But oftentimes, these networks are designed to be redundant to help avoid issues that could crop up because of a failure at one point. Thank you very much for that. I appreciate your answer. And again, thank you for the maps. I love maps and presentations. Great presentation, not just to help set us up for the rest of our discussion today, but also really couldn't have asked for a better presentation to set us up for the rest of the series. All of the stuff that Jenny just talked about and we'll talk about with our next two speakers, all of this is connected and interconnected literally. And a great presentation to kick us off. One quick reminder, if you missed any of Jenny's presentation, whether the slides themselves or her comments, everything is available online, www.esi.org. Everything will be posted pretty quickly and within the next few days or so, maybe a week or so, we'll also have written summaries of the presentations that you're hearing today. So they'll be an ongoing resource. That brings us to our second speaker. I'd like to introduce Juan Torres. Juan oversees continuing efforts at the National Renewable Energy Lab in the Energy Systems Integration Facility to strengthen the security and resilience of the nation's electrical grid. He leads NREL's Global Initiative to optimize links between electricity, fuel, thermal, water, and communications networks in order to develop and demonstrate new technologies to modernize the grid. Juan, welcome to the panel today. I will turn it over to you. All right, thank you, Dan. And I'm going to switch over to my presentation here. OK, you see it OK? Looks great. Perfect. OK, all right, well, thank you. Thank you for having me here. A pleasure of providing some information to this great discussion. What I'd like to do is talk a little bit about some of the trends specifically that are influencing the evolution of the power grid. So this is historical data that is focused on the different generation sources that we're currently using on the power grid. The information, the data goes here through 2019, but the trends are pretty consistent with the trajectories that we're currently on. So you can see coal has we've been decommissioning quite a few coal plants over time. Natural gas continues to increase. They tend to be used really well because they are great for peaking. They can ramp up very quickly. Natural gas has been fairly inexpensive over time. Nuclear is fairly constant. We're really not adding more nuclear, but we are decommissioning some of the older plants. But it provides some really good base load generation. The green, which is the next level up on this chart, is renewables, which is more or less it's lumped together. And we'll talk about that here in a second as to why don't we go ahead and double click on that and expand the renewable space. Because that's the one that right now is getting a lot of attention, especially with the focus on decarbonization. So if you start at the bottom, that's hydroelectric generation. We're somewhat limited on hydro because we're not adding any more rivers to our topography and lakes and so on. Because a lot of the hydro plants and so on have been tapped about as much as we can, although we are squeezing a little bit more over time. I'll focus on where the big growth is. It's really in the green section here, which is wind and the yellow, which is solar. Those are the two particular generation sources that have gone down significantly in costs and are being utilized in many areas, not just where the sun is shining most, which tends to be in the Southwest and the wind blows most heavily in the Midwest. But across many of the states, they've included them as part of their renewable integration plans. We just completed a series of studies called electrification futures. Studies, I included here the URL for those of you that are interested in finding more data. And I believe there were six different reports. I'm highlighting here one of the really interesting things. As we're looking out to the future on the energy consumption side, on the electricity consumption side, if you look at the bottom, that's industrial use. So forecasting out to 2050, we looked at a variety of scenarios. But overall, we're becoming much more efficient in use of electricity for industrial applications. So that's not gonna be significantly higher than where we are even today. On the residential side, we also continue to become much more efficient, much more efficient buildings, lighting, appliances, and so on. And so that will get a steady growth, but that's not gonna be one of the major contributors to some of the big ramp that we see. And you'll see as we move up the screen here. In the green, this is the commercial business types of offices and so on. So they're gonna get the same kinds of efficiency gains that we're seeing in a lot of the residential applications as well. But in the different scenarios that we see is electrification to transportation. We are seeing that that will have a significant impact in the use of electricity. Consequently, that will also drive the evolution of the power grid, where we connect and where we charge vehicles, when we charge vehicles, the size of the charging and so on. So we're talking about everything from commercial fleets to and heavy duty types of vehicles to light duty vehicles that the typical average consumer might drive. And the technology needed on the power grid is gonna actually affect the overall architecture and the overall use at different times of day. So those are the kinds of things that we have to take into account. What is driving the change? So electrification to transportation is definitely at the top of the list. And here I'm showing you a little bit of eye candy as I describe this. This is actually a model that we put together as part of a study on the Eastern Interconnect was primary focused, the Eastern Renewable Grid Integration Study, which is the darker gray side, darker gray right half of this map. The lighter gray on the left side is the Western Grid or the Western Interconnect. For this particular study, we did not include Texas, we didn't have their data at the time. But I'm using this more to make a point. As we forecast into the future, the different types of generation sources, we need to understand how this potentially could affect the dynamics of the flow of energy at different times of day. You can see this is actually, you'll see a shade coming across, it just went from right to left. Because in the evening, the blue really, you get to see a lot more blue, that's wind. And right now you see the yellows coming up because the sun is shining, this is the sun rising. And we're needing to understand how does this impact the flows, what transmission needs, does this require? Even at the local levels, this is primarily we're trying to capture the larger generation plants. But we'd probably see a significant increase in local, say, solar generation. The kaleidoscopes on the right and left, the one on the right corresponds to the different areas that actually you saw earlier from Jenny, some of this noted there. And we're able to get a sense of, well, how would the energy flows change between those different areas at different times of day and so on? This is looking actually at five minute increments with some forecasted data. And on the left side, the kaleidoscope corresponds to the Western grid. And then you'll see some bar graphs up above that also provide just a different perspective of that same kind of information. You know, the reason I'm showing you this is this is a dynamic system. It also does not include, of course, just the US. Our grid, we are part of the North American grid that includes Canada and actually we did down into Mexico as well. So the strategy that we take forward has to take into account, those partners has to take into account the existing infrastructure and how we can build on that because we are taking a system that's been around over a hundred years. And I described this many times as we're taking a 57 Chevy and trying to add some say some Tesla types of features. If you took your current Chevy and say you wanted to add Bluetooth and you wanted to run on a battery and you wanted to have sensors for collision and so on. That's kind of in a sense what we're doing because we want to get, we want to take advantage of the benefits of the existing infrastructure as well. So let's talk about that infrastructure just to get us all on the same page. Historically, you know, we were very much a centralized generation architecture. We have large big power plants that I depict here on the left. And then that was, that moved electrons essentially from those points to the consumer through long transmission lines and then eventually through a substation to the consumers which could be residential or commercial or what have you. And these power plants historically, they just basically, they heated some sort of a fuel, whether it's coal or whether it's a natural gas or whatever it is converted to that into heat. And then you boil water, make steam and that drives a turbine and turns a big generator that has a giant magnet on it. So it's an electromechanical system. And it's important to note that because that creates physics we call inertia. You move a big mass and it keeps going and you want to keep it at a certain frequency and by adding and removing load by people turning on more or less, you know, consumable resources that use electricity that actually then causes the, you know, that magnet to move faster or slower. And so we want to maintain that constant frequency. It's really important. Things have changed considerably. Now we have different types of generation sources that are controlled more by mother nature. So we have to add some buffers. So wind blows at certain times better than other times and the sun shines during the day, not at night. So we're including things like energy storage or things that we're exploring. They're not just batteries, there's compressed air, there's other ways to do this, pump hydro. And on the right side, that's where you see the most change happening. And that is near the consumer, what we call the edge of the grid. So now electricity can be actually generated by the consumer, it can move from them out onto the grid, but used by other consumers be even used on what we call the high voltage bulk grid. And all these different appliances and charging of vehicles and so on are making the consumer more active part of how the grid is being operated. This is a lot of information. So I'm gonna hit this, just the highlights here. On the left, you'll see that, you know, by moving toward what we call power electronics-based generation and even the end use devices, it's changing this concept of what I called inertia. So instead of having a big magnet spinning at a centralized power plant, when you have smaller devices like solar panels with inverter boxes that connect those to the grid, and even similarly over on wind turbines and so on, just fundamentally how those devices connect to the grid is different. We are still working on how to operate a grid with a lot of these power electronics-based devices. And the graph on the right shows, we've done this on really small 100 kilowatt systems, say like in Tau Island, American Samoa, and even at 100%. At Maui, we've actually had 30% penetration of inverter-based power electronics-based devices. If we wanna get to where some of these goals project, 2050, with some of this information we have with the terawatt of wind and solar potentially on the power grid, we don't quite know how to do that. And that's why the research is really needed to help us understand how we transition to how they decarbonize grid also means a grid that uses different types of technology and devices. And the amount of inertia on the grid is much, much different. Something else to consider is the advancements in technology, artificial intelligence and concepts like autonomous energy systems put much more control within the system itself because it just cannot, it's overwhelming to have humans in the loop to operate the grid the way we did initially. And even today, it's very challenging with the amount of information that comes back to operators. So putting some intelligence close to the devices within the devices so that they understand how to maintain reliability for the larger system and have some level of awareness as to what the goals are of the system. Those are the kinds of things that are being developed and are in research now and will be deployed over the next several years. This is an example of one city has been really progressive and we just put out a big report on the work done with the city of LA where they've been trying to develop a plan to achieve basically 100% use of clean energy for all of the needs there. And I will show you just briefly, the importance of having the tools to understand how we get there. This particular tool simulation goes in to help us understand, how do all the different devices, as I mentioned, the end consumer and all these different devices being added to the grid are gonna be really important to help us understand how the grid operates. So we need tools that help us understand like in this case, vehicle loads and vehicle charging, how's that happening throughout the day? We're able to model this and get a sense so we can plan and predict better to maintain resilience and meet the load demands as the system evolves. Being able to understand the electrical loads themselves, again, they vary considerably throughout the day and the new devices, all the power electronics devices and so on, it's important to understand what's gonna be out there. I'm gonna wrap up with this slide. As we move forward, we definitely need to understand how the threats to the grid are also changing. Historically, at a local level, the biggest threats, if you ask, utilities are squirrels and trees. At a local level, those cause the most small outages, but on large scale, natural disasters, storms, hurricanes, tornadoes, wildfires, those kinds of things are becoming much more prevalent, increase in frequency and increase also in impact. Space weather is a challenge, solar flares are a challenge, electromagnetic types of disturbances. Those can have impact on large transmission lines. They actually induce currents that could potentially cause outages. Physical threats have not gone away, especially with terrorism and things of that nature that are around. Directed energy weapons like electromagnetic pulses need to be taken into account, make sure that the system of the future is resilient to all of these and of course cyber. Every day I look and I'm watching the news and things that I work on here at the laboratory. This is of utmost priority. Everything I talked about there has some sort of digital element to it. And if that is the case, it is a potential target or a potential point of disruption. So it's really important that we pay attention to the cyber element and incorporate more cyber security within the system. So with that, I will pause there, Dan. See if you have any questions for me otherwise look forward to the Q and A. That's great, really cool presentation. I think when we post your presentation, it will be static as opposed to the animation. Is the animation that you provide or the animation that you showed our audience, is that available? Is that available online? Is there a way that people can- I will let you know what's available. Many of these kinds of animations you can see at the lab website. We are a DOE national laboratory. So much of the work that we do, we wanna make available to the public. So I encourage you to go to NREL.gov. Great, thanks. And that's actually my follow-up question. I was wondering if the cool work that you're doing at NREL, how would you describe your coordination with the folks at DOE here in DC at EERE and building technologies office and solar energy technologies office? What level of coordination and collaboration do you have with those folks? It's significant level of collaboration. So I did not include in my brief bio to some of the other things that I work on. So another hat that I wear is I'm a co-chair for something called the Grid Monetization Lab Consortium. So there is an initiative within DOE that includes multiple offices, not just within EERE, but there are five offices involved with GMI. There is offshore electricity, OE, so EERE, fossil energy, nuclear energy, and CSER because of that security and resilience component. So one of my roles is to help work across those offices and with coordination and investment in various research projects. Within EERE alone though, that they have a significant amount of work in this space. And so we work with all of the offices across those three major areas of vehicle, renewable power and energy efficiency as I mentioned in my presentation. It's important as we evolve our energy infrastructure that we look at not just the generation side and even not just the grid in how we move the electrons, but the end use in the consumer side is significantly changing the overall energy infrastructure. So coordination across all these offices and investments and research and so on is extremely important. But really the most important part is that collaboration between government and industry. Because ultimately that is where the ownership and the investment and the operation of that energy infrastructure really happens. Great, thanks for that. I really appreciate that. Great presentation. Thank you so much. Great, thank you. Just as a quick reminder, we after we also introduce our third panelist and when she is finished, we will have a discussion. And so there is an opportunity for people watching online and I know there are many of you. To submit questions, you can do it two ways, one by sending us an email and the email address is EESI at ESI.org. The other way is to follow us on Twitter at EESI online. And as always we're live tweeting our event today. And so you can send us a question. Thank you very much. And we'll do our best to incorporate the questions that come in. We'll do our best to incorporate them into the discussion. Our third speaker is up next and this is Daisy Robinson. Daisy is an associate in the oil demand team at Bloomberg NEF. She's based in London and she leads Bloomberg NEF's biofuels coverage. She covers advanced biofuels markets, the policy shaping them and the role in decarbonizing the transportation sector. Before joining Bloomberg, Daisy worked as an oil trader with Bank of America Merrill Lynch. Daisy, thank you for joining us from so far away today. I will turn it over to you. I'm looking forward to your presentation. Thanks Dan and thank you for having me. So yeah, my name is Daisy Robinson and so far today we've heard quite a bit about power but I'm gonna be talking about the fuel side of things specifically biofuels and their role in the transportation sector. So first I just wanna quickly introduce Bloomberg NEF for those who don't know us. We are the primary research arm of Bloomberg where it's strategic research provider covering commodity markets and the disruptive technologies driving the energy transition within those sectors. So our coverage assesses decarbonization pathways for power, transport, industry buildings and agricultural sectors and the pathways to adapt to the energy transition. As Dan said, I myself sit within the oil demand team where I cover the role of biofuels in decarbonizing the transport sector. So looking at the composition of energy consumption in the US, transportation is not the largest sector in terms of energy consumption but it is the largest emitter as of relatively recently. Power on the other hand consumes about 40% of US energy but emissions have been rapidly falling over the past decade as we just heard from one. So transport emissions are disproportionately high considering its energy consumption and this needs to be addressed. At Bloomberg NEF, we expect that alternative drive trains particularly electric vehicles will play a substantial role in helping to lower transport emissions. We expect by 2040 they'll account for about 60% of passenger car sales in the US and about 40% of the fleet. This is based on economics as we expect battery prices to continue to fall meaning electric vehicles reach price parity with internal combustion engines in the mid 2020s. After that point, adoption really takes off but it still takes time for things like this to infiltrate the fleet. And so by 2040, 60% of cars will still be internal combustion engines which means road fuel demand while we do see it declining significantly it's still substantial. So we need other solutions working in parallel to clean up the liquid fuels portion of that demand particularly for the diesel pool as it's harder to electrify heavier commercial vehicles. Biofuels are already playing a role here in displacing fossil fuels on road. So about 10% of the gasoline pool is ethanol and around 5% of the diesel pool is bio-based but there is a limit to how much these conventional biofuels can play a role here as they face blend limits with conventional vehicles. So ethanol has been around 10% or what's known as the blend wall for about a decade. We actually expect that it will eventually break through this blend wall that 10% mark towards the 12 to 13% range as more and more automakers are giving the green light for their cars to use the higher blend which is E15 or 15% ethanol and gasoline. So we expect that will become more commonplace but we think update will be slow due to the lack of availability as currently less than 2% of US gas stations actually sell E15. So more refuelling infrastructure would be needed in order to help that take off. But in any case, not even a 15% blend of ethanol would actually be sufficient to keep that ethanol demand from falling along with gasoline. Because of declining gasoline demand we expect that the ethanol blend rate would actually have to reach about 20% by 2040 just for ethanol demand to remain flat at 2019 levels. So this will put quite a bit of pressure on the ethanol industry and the farmers that supply it. So looking at some of the clean fuels out there and how they stack up, some biofuels offer some really considerable emissions benefits and can even compare with electric. And it's worth highlighting here that these are average carbon intensity values. So in reality there's quite a big range depending on the source of that fuel. And the fuels I want to focus on today are fuels known as drop-in which means that unlike ethanol and biodiesel they have practically identical properties to fossil fuels. So they're not restricted by blend wars which means they could in theory replace fossil fuels 100%. And the big value add of drop-in biofuels is that they fit seamlessly into our existing infrastructure whether that's at the pump or in engines or in pipeline networks. And even in the case of renewable diesel there are synergies in the production side of things as well. And also in the case of renewable diesel it can be used in any diesel type fuel application. So it's highly versatile. And it can also be used to produce sustainable aviation fuel which we've been looking at quite a bit at the moment as this is one of the very few decarbonisation options available to the aviation industry at this point. So levering infrastructure that we already have in places of course avoids a huge amount of costly overhauls of existing fleets and also logistical networks. It also means these solutions can infiltrate the system a lot quicker. But it also has beneficial, it's also beneficial in terms of things like preservation of jobs to be able to keep assets running that might have otherwise closed down. But I'll talk a bit about that in a moment. But first looking at renewable natural gas this is mostly produced through biological decomposition of waste in landfills. But an increasing share is actually being produced from animal waste from farms. And the resultant fuel has super low emissions in fact it can result in negative carbon intensity as the process uses waste that would otherwise release emissions into the atmosphere if it was left to decompose. But the catch is production costs are significantly higher than conventional natural gas which is pretty cheap. So the market is largely driven by policy support and for that reason a lot of it goes into the transport sector. Most of it in fact is used in the transport sector because the reason being that's where the credits are essentially so renewable natural gas or RNG generates D3 RIN credits under the national renewable fuel standard. And it also generates low carbon fuel standard or LCFS credits in California which are rewarded based on the carbon intensity of individual fuels. So RNG is rewarded particularly highly because it has such a low carbon intensity. So looking at the chart on the right you can see that RNG already accounts for a third of natural gas vehicle fuel consumption. So there is a bit of a risk here that RNG will kind of run out of room to grow within transport which would damage project returns. In fact, if you look at the California market which is a major market thanks to the low carbon fuel standard which I just mentioned is pretty much already saturated with RNG. RNG has already displaced about 98% of the state's natural gas demand in transport. So one solution to kind of get around this is generate more demand so convert more fossil powered vehicles like those running on diesel to natural gas. So this is occurring thanks to some initiatives that subsidize the cost for truck operators to convert their fleets to natural gas. Another solution is to promote LCFS style incentives elsewhere in the US to kind of redistribute that demand. But also if we look at natural gas consumption within transport we see it plays a relatively small role compared to oil. However, there's clearly plenty of opportunity for RNG to displace natural gas elsewhere in the energy mix. But because of those high costs utilities need regulatory approval to invest in RNG supply for customers. So many states are now taking those sorts of actions to promote RNG use elsewhere in the energy mix which would give that sector more room to grow. In terms of decarbonizing transport in the absence of a major shift towards natural gas vehicles there is only a relatively limited role that RNG can play compared to liquid fuels. And that's where renewable diesel comes in. So renewable diesel is made from lipids like vegetable oils, used cooking oil from restaurants and animal fats and it's practically identical to fossil based diesel. It's a distinct product to biodiesel which is chemically different to regular diesel. So biodiesel needs to be blended in low quantities whereas renewable diesel can be used 100% in any diesel engine. This is a sector that's really heating up at the moment and expected to expand really quickly, particularly in the US as a number of projects are under construction or under development at the moment and putting all of these projects together. We see that those projects would potentially increase the market by about 10-fold in just the next five years. And if we look at the type of these projects and break it out by the type around half of these capacity additions that are planned in the next few years are refinery conversions that is converting an old oil refinery to instead produce renewable fuels. And the reason this is the case is the process to produce renewable diesel has a lot of overlap with traditional oil refining in the hydro-treating area. So there's an opportunity here for refiners to reuse or repurpose existing assets to really progress the energy transition and what is more around half of this project pipeline was actually announced last year in 2020. And the reason for that is the pandemic hit refiners extremely hard last year as travel restrictions and lockdown really hit demand for fuels. So they found refinery margins were very, very low for a prolonged period. And this led to a huge amount of refinery closures across the world. But in the US, almost a third of that capacity is being converted to bio refineries to produce renewable diesel and other products like renewable jet fuel as well. So refinery conversions of this sort have a lot of benefits from one perspective. It helps keep an asset running, extending its useful life and also preserving jobs. But it also expedites the energy transition because it allows oil and gas majors to really leverage their refineries, their logistical networks, their refuelling stations and also their technical expertise to scale up low carbon fuels. And it also helps to lower the cost as conversions are considerably cheaper and also quicker than greenfield sites. And the reason you can see the chart on the left here, the reason that refinery conversions are such a strong trend in the US compared to the other regions, it's all down to policy. So RINs and the biodiesel blenders tax credit really buoyed production margins through the pandemic while traditional refining margins slumped which created a huge divergence and an opportunity. But the big challenge for renewable diesel is whether the sector will be able to scale up enough to displace diesel and jet fuel demand. There's a particularly big focus on waste-based feedstocks as they have a better low carbon properties, but these are in pretty short supply. Producers are making strategic moves at the moment in order to guarantee themselves access. So a couple of examples, Nesta, who are the world's largest producer, recently acquired Mahoney in the US which is a company that collects used cooking oil from restaurants. And they also entered into a partnership with McDonald's in the Leatherlands to turn the cooking oil from their friars into fuel. And we expect partnerships like this to become more typical as producers look to secure this high demand feedstock. But it also kind of works both ways as it helps companies like McDonald's to kind of lower their carbon impact as well. But Nesta themselves have said they've identified 35 million tons of these waste oils globally available for the conversion to renewable fuel by 2030. So to put that into context, if all of this waste were converted into fuel and sold into the US, it would cover less than a fifth of its overall diesel demand. So there's a definite need for innovation here to keep the sector growing. And that innovation already exists. So technologies exist that can use household waste or forestry or agricultural residues and convert them into a bio crew which can be further processed into products in existing refineries just like the current system of refining fossil fuels into useful products. So these waste feedstocks are much more abundant than waste oils and can help the market to keep growing but these technologies are less developed than the technology that we already have to convert waste fats and oils. So more investment and incentives to get there is needed. Policies like the LCFS in California help because they are structured in such a way as to reward fuels based on their carbon intensity. And in doing so, they promote waste feedstocks but further initial support to get projects like this off the ground and up and running would really help boost the sector and importantly help decarbonize these hard to abate areas of transport. And with that, I'll hand back over to Dan. Thanks Daisy, that was a great presentation lots of good reminders that our energy system is not just electricity. We use liquid fuels for lots of things to in our daily lives and that will likely continue for some time. Wanted to sort of just use your presentation as an opportunity to plug two briefings that we've done over the last few months. The first is a briefing that we did back in March with actually that featured one of Daisy's colleagues at Bloomberg NEF, Melina Bartels. That was a briefing that we did on the 2021 Sustainable Energy in America Factbook with our friends at the Business Council for Sustainable Energy. So that briefing is fully archived online www.esi.org. We also did a briefing back in November on sustainable aviation fuels that Representative Julia Brownlee helped us introduce. And that briefing is also available and we went into not just SAFs but also just tech advancements in aviation super interesting topics. So thank you so much for your great presentation and we are gonna now pivot to the discussion portion. I will invite Jenny and Juan to turn your videos back on. As I have been, as I listened to your presentations I thought you all did a really, really great job describing sort of how the energy system of the future will be different than the one we have today. We'll have more renewables, we'll have less fossil fuel generation, we'll have more EVs and we'll have less fossil fuel consumption and transportation and how that actually shakes out is TBD. But thanks to Daisy's presentation with a lot of those trend lines you can kind of see where things are pointing. But I wanna dig into a couple extra, couple topics in a little bit greater depth in our Q&A to help our audience answer some questions that I think they have on their minds. So we'll, Jenny, we'll start with you and then we'll go to Juan and then we'll go to Daisy. We'll sort of stay in the order of our presentations. And this first question addresses an issue that has already been discussed to some degree. And this is the idea of what do we do with the existing energy infrastructure that we've spent decades and decades building? We can't just discard it and start over from scratch. That would actually have a huge emissions impact with all that embedded in energy. How can new energy infrastructure investments sort of use and better leverage what we already have? And building on what we've already heard how can we repurpose and what does this look like in practice? How can we repurpose and make use of our current energy system infrastructure to squeeze emissions reductions and as well as efficiency and cost efficiency out of that? Yeah, that's a great question. And thank you for asking. Certainly, given existing power plants and infrastructure we'd certainly wanna make decisions not based on sunk costs. So we do wanna make sure that we're using existing infrastructure consistent with policy goals. And that oftentimes includes emissions reductions. One thing that I like to highlight is that transmission is a fuel neutral infrastructure. And as we decommission power plants locating wind and solar to use the associated transmission infrastructure could oftentimes be helpful if it's possible. Existing infrastructure lines and rights of ways can be made to do more with advanced transmission technologies. So we can update existing infrastructure with advanced conductors, for example. Some of these technologies can extend the capacity of existing rights of ways to carry more electricity. And some of these conductors can also reduce power loss, line loss in these lines. So when we think about the power grid as one large machine currently we don't have any energy efficiency standards on that machine but we can search for ways to make that existing infrastructure more energy efficient. Another example is that PowerFlow could be better directed along transmission lines with newer technologies. I think also we can tap more into the demand side to help cost effectively enhanced flexibility and reliability of the existing system. So if we look at devices that customers are buying anyways for non grid uses such as hot water heaters, building HVACs and electric vehicles these resources are essentially batteries that can also help provide balancing services on a range of time scales. So enabling these resources to obtain revenues from the markets and improving ways that these resources or devices can communicate with the grid can encourage them to provide appropriate grid services. That's great. Juan, do you have additional thoughts about how we can leverage our existing infrastructure for emissions reductions and other gains? Yeah, absolutely. And Jenny had some great comments there that I'll build upon. There are some good things about the current infrastructure. It's a reason it's been around so long and we've used to operate it very reliably over the many decades. Most reliable grid in the world I believe. And but there's some things we can add to it in some cases there'd been studies to look at should we increase the interconnections between the major grids? That would be one thing. DC ties, some more high voltage. I will also say though that once you start going down into the local level it's not a one size fits all solution once you go down to that level. And what does that mean? It's based on policies and resources. All right, why solar and wind, variable generation some of these low carbon emitting types of generation sources extremely popular say in California, say in Hawaii. In California they have very, very limited water resources in the Southwest in general. And it turns out the legacy generation plants the large coal and even nuclear and so on are very, very water intensive. You need lots of water. In fact, I believe data I've seen don't quote me on this but I believe there's data out there. About 40% of the water used in the US is used for thermoelectric cooling of power plants. Another 40% for agriculture and then the last 20 for manufacturing and things like that. So my point in the end is you really need to look at the local resources local economics and so on to assess what makes the most sense that we can build upon from the legacy infrastructure. How can we improve on that? And then how can we add new things that maybe are more plentiful in those regions because those resources are not the same all over the country. So I encourage folks to always take a look at local economics, local resources. There's other things that come into play eventually too like even workforce needs locally. We need to develop those kinds of things to make sure we can operate and maintain the system of the future. Thanks. And Daisy, I know you already addressed some of these points in your presentation but I'm eager if you have additional thoughts and also I'd be interested to know a little bit more about the end uses in transportation in terms of switching in alternatives to fossil fuels and what's currently out there and how rapid that transition could actually take place. Yeah, I don't have a huge amount to add because this was sort of the basis of my presentation and so you really hit the nail on the head that this is a challenge that we can't just discard all of this infrastructure that has taken a long time to build up. And I think that really highlights the key kind of difference between conventional biofuels that have been around for a really long time versus these more advanced drop-in biofuels which can literally drop into the existing system that we've established over many decades. So that is kind of the crucial difference. And in terms of the kind of end uses, again, this is why kind of drop-in biofuels really solve a problem and I'm not suggesting that they can solve the entire problem on their own. I think that alternative technologies that do require new infrastructure, things like electric vehicles, things like hydrogen eventually will certainly play a role but for now we have a challenge where fleet turnover takes a long time. Whether that's cars or trucks or if you look at planes for example, they have quite a long lifespan. So if we wait for that natural turnover to occur before we replace and go towards new technologies, something like a hydrogen plane, then we'll be waiting several decades. So time is of the essence with the energy transition and that's how kind of biofuels can step in and really add value there. Thanks very much. The second issue I kind of wanted to use this as an opportunity to dig into a little bit is affordability. I think in a lot of discussions, there's an implied quality of fossil fuel generation compared to renewables in particular and the idea is that fossil fuels are sort of inherently more reliable, resilient and affordable and I think our neighbors in Texas might agree that reliability and resilience are not necessarily inherent characteristics in oil, gas and coal if you're not doing the basics in terms of preparedness but affordability I think is a different question and right now we in the United States we benefit from relatively inexpensive energy and a lot of that is made possible by our natural resources especially over the last few decades, the availability of pretty low-cost natural gas. We know however renewable energy is cost competitive and so it doesn't necessarily have to impact or have a negative impact on affordability. What can we do? Jenny again, we'll start with you and then we'll kind of go through. What can we do to ensure that the modernized and updated energy infrastructure that we will hopefully start building and expanding upon what can we do in those series of investments to make sure that energy remains affordable for everyone? So yeah, I just wanted to say that we have to overcome the collective action problem to build the transmission that we need in order to tap into these cost-effective resources and ensure that the energy transition is affordable and I think the other piece is that leveraging the demand side, leveraging technologies that customers are going to purchase anyways to make the most out of these technologies. So smart devices in your home, in your businesses and in the transportation sector, like we can really use these to balance the variability in wind and solar and maintaining reliability is something that we definitely want to ensure and continue to study. A lot of these technologies that are based off of, that are inverter-based resources. So again, wind, solar, batteries can react more quickly than conventional power plants. So if we appropriately harness them that could be a benefit for reliability. And I think lastly, just to touch on the reliability question again, a robust transmission distribution system can also help ensure reliability because we're looking at larger regions, sharing a broader pool of resources, diverse sources of electricity that could help during severe weather events that might just impact parts of the US at once. Thanks very much. And sorry about the audio feed problem. Sorry about having to interrupt like that, but hopefully you'll be able to come back in a second and we can see you again. But thanks very much for that answer. One, I'd like to hear from you about sort of what we can do to preserve affordability in our future energy system. And I think also if you have thoughts about building on what Jenny was talking about with respect to resilience and reliability as well, very interested in hearing that. Yeah, absolutely. We've become accustomed to paying pretty really low rates for say electricity and even gasoline has been pretty cheap for over the years. So, but things are changing and how do you do this within the context of things like increasing frequency of storms and other events and even the cyber threat. We don't wanna pay more than 10, 11 cents a kilowatt hour for electricity, yet we want it secure and robust against the most equipped adversaries in the world that are targeting our system through cyber means and other means and so on, right? So how do you do that? That is a big challenge. Definitely, there are some things we can do and have done. An example is say the, you know, the sunshine goal that was set by administration here, a couple of administrations ago to drop the price of solar technology. And that was done through research, advancements in research, investments in research and then getting some demonstrations and getting to the points we can get to economies of scale. So it has to be a very coordinated kind of effort. I think government can play a big role to really help with that, but that partnership with industry. Maybe the other piece of it is standards are standards. If you just get the technology out there, but you have a lot of competing technologies and it's more expensive to maintain and interconnect these kinds of things. So investments in the right kinds of standards, I think is really important. That court, you know, this is gonna be required coordinated effort, huge coordinated effort from, you know, the public and the private sector. And so I think that's really important to establish that communication, to be able to be clear on where are we going? How, you know, what are we trying to achieve here? And if you just let the market drive it, then sometimes other things like resilience or security could potentially lapse because you need to have many times, like some of the work that I do, that government perspective to understand what is the threat? What's going on there? What do we need to be aware of? So that resilience aspect is another thing, you know, when I talk about security and resilience, many times it's more like, it's like buying insurance. And so understanding that level of risk that we're really willing to attain or maintain is also important. You know, what level of reliability, what level of resilience is important? There is a difference between resilience and reliability. You know, reliability is you're trying to keep a bad thing from happening and keep that probability low. And resilience is assuming, you're gonna assume something bad's gonna happen, but how do you get that system back up and running and minimize the cost and the time? So I think having that common understanding of what are those goals across the board, common, you know, the coordination across standards, and then I think a really strategic investment in research and demonstration. Thanks. And Daisy, over to you. Very interested in hearing your thoughts about affordability and the transportation sector when it comes to liquid fuels. Yeah, so this is a bit of a challenge, I guess, with these advanced biofuels, particularly, you know, looking at solar and wind, which are kind of getting cheaper. This is not necessarily the case for liquid fuels because you're adding kind of another layer of process to actually, you know, acquire the feedstock and convert it into fuels. So there's a chance that, you know, that process will always remain expensive or more expensive than the fossil fuels that they replace. Particularly if we look at the kind of oil, organic oil-based renewable diesel, that's what I was talking about, because we're relying on a feedstock supply that is relatively finite. So, and also additionally, the technology that we use to convert it is fairly well established. So there's kind of fewer opportunities there for cost reductions over time. But that's why I think it's very important to keep investing and keep supporting those newer technologies that I mentioned at the end, which are capable of converting more abundant resources like household waste, because they're, you know, we're not at risk of depleting those resources anytime soon. These technologies are much more expensive now, but they have more potential to come down over time because, you know, they're less developed at the moment, but, you know, as they scale up and develop, yeah, they have much more potential for cost reductions going forward. But I think, you know, there are some benefits as well when we look at homegrown fuels. If we look back at history at, you know, oil prices that can be very much at the mercy of external factors or geopolitics. So, you know, it kind of feeds back to that energy independence or that sort of thing to have a bit more control over prices than maybe historically with oil prices. And that probably applies more broadly than just renewable diesel, say, just to biofuels in general, right? Things are able to grow here. Would it help if I ate more french fries to help keep the oil? I feel like we could start something there. I feel like a more french fries campaign. We could work with the potato people, perhaps. Yeah, I'd be on board with that as well. Yeah, that's a different department at Bloomberg. Great, thank you for Jenny for coming back because I'd like to kick off the last question with you. We'll set the french fry issue aside for a moment. One thing that we think a lot about at EESI is sort of how the impacts of climate policy, what the sites sorts of impacts of climate policy and investments have on communities that have over time been marginalized or been not included in decision-making. Oftentimes these are communities of color, low-income communities, frontline communities. And I think it's fair to say that fossil fuels have not had a great track record when it comes to impacting nearby communities, oil refineries, coal mines, to examples of things that are not terribly pleasant neighbors to have and so often the communities impacted had little or no say about where these facilities and where these operations have been located. As we sort of take our steps, as we make our investments to improve and modernize our energy system, do you have thoughts about what we should be doing differently to ensure that new infrastructure does not have the same negative impacts on affected communities or perhaps even could help improve and sort of mitigate some of the past negative impacts that fossil fuels have had on people? Yeah, absolutely. And it's important to give traditionally disadvantaged communities a voice as a starter. So some process changes could help here. And as an example of that, FERC is standing up its Office of Public Participation, which should hopefully help with the infrastructure citing that FERC influences such as natural gas pipelines. And I think that there are some creative solutions that could be create a win-win situation. So if we look at transmission citing, for example, citing is typically an equity issue. There are overall benefits to building a more robust transmission network, but some might object to citing these lines over their lands if they don't see any direct benefit. If we come up with a transmission planning process that is more transparent, inclusive, and looks forward to potential citing concerns by engaging stakeholders early, we have a better chance of developing creative solutions. One example is that a transmission citing solution where a Native American tribe was given equity in a transmission line and thus is able to obtain revenue from citing a line on their lands. We can also think about just transition and think about its regions that might be looking for jobs and bring those stakeholders to the table to see if they would be willing to cite infrastructure with appropriate protections, of course, to make sure that their communities are protected. Juan, eager to hear from you. Sort of how can we ensure that future energy system infrastructure investments don't create the same kinds of negative impacts that some of our past investments have had on marginalized and low income communities of color? You know, we have a lot of work going on in this space in the area of environmental justice and energy justice and so on. And the experience that we've had is it really comes down to understanding the stakeholders, the impact on the stakeholders there, taking into account those historically marginalized folks, it's because they weren't taken into account. That wasn't important. It was maybe it was more important to get something done at the lowest cost within a certain time and not thinking about the long-term ramifications. So it's really taking more of a more strategic perspective in asking those questions early on on these projects and engaging the stakeholders. So you have a better well-rounded understanding of what the not just the short-term implications are, but the long-term. And I think, Jenny's point about, can you find equity so that there is a win-win? There's some win for all the stakeholders. It's not gonna be equally distributed likely, but that everybody sees what is the benefit for their stake and their support of the project. Daisy, we'll turn over to you next. Yeah, I would definitely echo both of the sentiments of the other two panelists, but I would also just finally add kind of one final concept, I guess, when it comes to liquid fuels. And that is converting waste to liquid fuels is kind of making a useful product out of something that we have no other use for. So it's kind of a win-win in that regard. And so when we're thinking about other benefits to communities other than cleaning up the transport fuel mix, I'd say that that's another really obvious benefit is actually utilizing waste products, which would have otherwise ended up in landfill or that sort of thing. Thank you very much. We have time I think for one more question. And Jenny sort of inspired this question. And I think we'll probably have to wrap it there. But I'm very interested in sort of your thoughts. One of the things in Washington D.C. is we're having these policy discussions. One of the things that people always want to know about is what are the job implications? What are the job creation implications, workforce development implications? And Jenny just mentioned the concept of a just transition, which I think is something that's very important, something that we've covered in other sessions. And I think it's perhaps worth a little bit of discussion here. Jenny, we'll start once again with you and we'll go around the horn, but could you help for a policymaker audience understand of all of the things you've talked about today, what some of the workforce development opportunities are also possible as we're reducing emissions, as we're improving equity, as we're making all of these improvements, what do you see in terms of workforce development opportunities at the same time? I think we definitely need to look on a community by community basis, because we know that a clean energy transition does create clean energy jobs, high paying, good quality jobs, but a lot of these communities that are losing jobs might not see a one-to-one replacement in jobs. So I think that there is an important, there is an important effort to look at what kinds of jobs that could benefit some of these communities today, not too far in the future, what kind of workforce training opportunities, what kind of immediate job opportunities, and we might have to look further than just in the energy sector, but expanding horizons, looking on a community by community basis and listening to these communities, I think could help carry us further in the just transition. Juan, I'm curious what you think, and also if you have any thoughts specifically around sort of the role that research and development could play in creating new opportunities for new types of jobs related to clean energy transition. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we really are gonna need workforce that understands some of the new technologies, understands the computer interface here, a lot of folks that understand the cyber aspect. I will add a couple of things to consider here. As we're developing these new systems, we need to understand what is the new life cycle for these systems, okay? So there's everything from, when you install these things to operate and then some sort of an end of life, these systems are gonna be a little different than what we've had before. And there's gonna be jobs created throughout that life cycle. Another aspect of this is the supply chain. So where are we gonna get the components? Everything from hardware components electronics to materials and we need to consider the rare earth kinds of materials and make sure we're not reliant on these certain materials that are maybe controlled by some other country as well as the software aspect of it. So all those pieces I think are really, are super important and opportunities for us to be strategic in creating the jobs and then identifying the workforce that's gonna be needed there. So I think that's a significant opportunity that needs a little bit more thought. Thanks for that. Daisy, I think this means you get the last word on the panel. Nice. Yeah, so I would just add to finish off that, on the liquid fuel side, as I've been discussing, there's still gonna be demand for liquid fuels for the foreseeable future. And therefore, the drop in biofuel element, another benefit is that there are a lot of synergies with the existing setup and therefore that technical expertise that employees have working within refineries or that sort of thing who've built up this kind of technical knowledge over a long time. That knowledge and skill set will still be valuable and it won't become redundant. It can just be applied to this kind of new, cleaner technology. So yeah, I think that would be where I'd round off and that's kind of another benefit of drop in fuels. Well, thank you very much for that and that brings us to the end. Jenny, Juan and Daisy, thank you so much for three excellent presentations and a really great discussion. I really enjoyed talking with all of you today and I'm sure our audience did too. As a reminder, if you missed anything from any of the presentations, everything will be posted online, including the webcast, www.esa.org. So thank you so much for joining us today. It was a real pleasure to get to meet you over the last couple of weeks and talk with you today. Thank you so much. We are going to wrap up. I have a couple of things to close with. I think we're gonna put some slides up in a second. There we go. So the first is today's session, while excellent and awesome is just the start. We have two more sessions on modernizing the US energy system. And if you like today, and if you wanna learn more about a lot of the topics, we have opportunities for you to do so as early as next Friday. We will be looking at modernizing America's transmission network, transmission network next Friday, also at noon Eastern. We will then be on June 18th. We'll be looking at leveraging grid-ed integration for resilience into carbonization. So a lot of the themes and a lot of the topics we talked about today will be carried through the rest of the series. We will also have a briefing on Tuesday, I think also at noon, but all the details are available online about the potential emissions reductions from a national climate bank. And we have a really excellent lineup for speakers for this one from all over the country talking with us about that. So we will be focusing our efforts in June, like I said earlier, on sort of where we can get the most emissions reductions from various points in the infrastructure debate. So I hope you will take the opportunity to join us once again on Tuesday, and then the following two Fridays to wrap up the series. I would like to thank everyone, in addition to our panelists, I'd like to thank everyone at ESI who worked so hard behind the scenes to make this all possible. Dan O'Brien, Sidney O'Shaughnessy, Amber Todorov, Anna McGinn, Omri Laport. So I'd like to thank our four interns, Anna, Ashlyn, Irina, and Jackson for all of their help, live tweeting, notes, all of that great stuff. Thank you so much for helping us out today. We have a slide up right now. This is a link to a survey. If you have two minutes and you would be willing to share your feedback about today's session, we'd really, really appreciate it. If you had any issues with links or with our live stream page, or if you have ideas for topics or formats, we read every submission that our audience provides using the survey. We really find it valuable. We're always trying to do better to improve. So if you have a moment and you can fill out the survey, we'd really appreciate it. I will conclude there. I hope everyone has an excellent weekend and I look forward to seeing many of you back next Friday and hopefully many of you back for Tuesday to talk about the National Climate Bank. With that, thanks again. Thanks to Jenny, Juan, and Daisy. Thanks to everyone at ESI. Happy weekend and see you next week. Thanks.