 Let's see, forum. My name is Carol Werner, and I am serving on the steering committee once again for this Expo, Congressional Technology Expo and Policy Forum. And I'm also the executive director of the Environmental and Energy Study Institute, a longtime member and one of the founders of the Sustainable Energy Coalition. And we are very pleased to be presenting this whole Expo and Policy Forum in conjunction with the House and Senate Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Caucuses, as well as a number of other congressional caucuses that are listed on the program. And hopefully, you will be going through all of the exhibits at the Expo, as well as listening and learning from so many of our speakers during this forum. So I want to get this underway. And in our first panel this morning, we're going to be taking an overview of policy issues. Our leadoff will be Scott Sklar, who is the president of the Stella Group. He is also an adjunct professor at George Washington University and the chair of the Sustainable Energy Coalition, Scott. Hey, thank you very much, and thank you all for coming today, and thank you ESI for sponsoring this. I always like to start off this because my company, I blend all these clean energy technologies together all over the world for industrial, commercial, and the US military. And I like to sort of give you the trend analysis for all these technologies. So as of the end of 2013, Bloomberg Energy came out with their study that shows that $254 billion of private sector investment in renewables occurred. And that is dwarfed by over a trillion dollars of government investments across the globe in renewable energy and energy efficiency. In addition, at the end of 2013, the Energy Information Administration said for all new power in the United States for 2013, domestic renewable energy accounted for 37.16%. So over a third of our new electricity coming online was the blend of renewable energy technologies. And actually, 2012 was higher. It was over 50%. So we're finally starting to see a turnaround similar to what happened when cellular technology started overtaking in new communications, the wired technology of which it competed with. Employment impacts are also pretty high around the country. And we have a whole table in front of the caucus room of different energy and employment studies, economic studies at the state or regional level of the United States. I brought one such study out here on the front table that was all of the United States. But basically, for $1 million spent on energy efficiency, you're creating 2 and 1 half to 8.9 jobs. For renewables, it's 1 and 1 half to 7.5 jobs. These are huge, very high ratio in job creation. And unlike the traditional industries, which are the jobs are concentrated at the resource, the coal mine, the natural gas site, these jobs are spread mostly at the user site where you're installing it. If it's in residential buildings or commercial buildings or along the grid. So they're much more geographically dispersed. Now, I also teach two interdisciplinary courses on sustainable energy at George Washington University. And I also have outside the 29 studies that I ask my students to read. I'm not asking you, or will I test you on those 29 studies? But I do want to provide some impacts. When I come here, I talk about the Google study that showed the United States could meet all its energy needs for about $4 trillion worth of private sector investment. And we would read 5.8 trillion back in savings. So there's the NREL, National Energy Laboratory Combined Lab study, which shows that the blend of renewables and high value energy efficiency we have today can meet most of our energy needs. But I want to talk to you about the four newest ones that came on from last year. One was developed by an energy analysis paper developed by the Energy Information Administration, which shows that the methane potential from landfill, animal manure, wastewater, industrial processes, and other organic waste could meet about 56% of our natural gas consumption. We have a lot of methane that's going in the atmosphere. And as you know, methane is a far more potent, though shorter term, greenhouse gas than carbon. The Nicholas Institute from Duke University also looked at decentralized biogas, and they put out a study in March. And they said that this gas could meet about 15% of our natural gas use, 5% in the short term. There is also a hydropower study that was done by Department of Energy Assessment that we could bring on 12 gigawatts from existing non-powered dams with new ultra-low impact designs. And 12 gigawatts is sort of 12 nuclear power plants worth of power. Of course, it's 24-hour power. And then Columbia University's study group, their research arm just finished a study in July of this year that said organic waste. So this is, and again, this is not incineration. This is using waste for gasification, separating it out. So you're only using the stuff that biodegrades to methane. Could meet 12% of US electricity needs. So a lot on the other technologies. And again, that's the marine and water and biomass. And of course, there's geothermal. That tend to be overlooked since everybody's talking about solar and wind. Finally, I spent a lot of time just at a White House meeting this week on resiliency. Meaning, how do you maintain or sustain the US electric grid from terrorism, from earthquakes, geologic events, storms, and many of us who were involved in this, starting in the 1970s, before climate change ever showed on the screen, have been looking at this whole resiliency issue. And the only way to achieve real resiliency is just what we've done in the telephone sector. We have a distributed communications arm. It's called Cellular. And that's what you're going to need as well. For cybersecurity, you're going to need distribution and redundancy, because your grid is going to be attacked and has been attacked more than 7,000 times according to a report right up here in Congress. So there is a real essential for those of you that are interested in the national security side and on just the resiliency of critical functions to look at these objectives in terms of how you look at your state, how you look at your political issues regarding security. Finally, I want to point out to you, and I point out to my students, that blended technology solutions are really the best way to do that, putting all your eggs in any one technology. And that is including renewables, a renewable, is not the way to go. The way to go is to optimize, to have elegant blending of technologies. And that gives you greater choice. It allows the market to have better options. It allows the consumer to have lower cost power over time. And definitely where we have seen states that allow the entire portfolio of energy, efficiency, and renewables, you have less swings in rates, less surprises. And that's really critical for our economy. Because the less you spend on energy, guess what? That means you have more to spend on other things. And so that's really our goal here from a policy perspective. So with that, thank you. That's sort of the opening trends. And next year, these industries, efficiency and renewables, should grow another 11%. And I think should top half a trillion dollars in private sector investment when you blend efficiency and renewables together. Thank you. Great. Thanks, Scott. And it is very exciting to see all of these things come together and how strong and diverse they can make our whole system when, as Scott says, we really blend and optimize. And to hear a little bit more along that theme, we think about what is underway with the Business Council for Sustainable Energy. We're going to hear from Zoe Berkley, who is the manager for federal policy for BCSE, the Business Council for Sustainable Energy. Zoe? Thank you so much for all of you being here today. Like Carol said, I am Zoe Berkley, manager of federal policy for the Business Council for Sustainable Energy. I know some of you in the audience have. It's a slide deck that the first half in my brief remarks, it doesn't really matter. But towards the end, I have a couple graphs that I'll reference, so it might be useful to check it out. There are some outside on the table if you missed it. So first of all, I'm going to talk about what the Business Council for Sustainable Energy does, and then switch gears to talk about the Sustainable Energy in America factbook that we do every year with Bloomberg Energy Finance. So about the BCSE. BCSE is a coalition of companies and trade associations from the renewable energy, energy efficiency, and natural gas sectors. The council advocates for policies at the state, national, and international levels. A little bit more about what we do at each of these levels. At the state level, we actively engage annually with the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners, or NAIRUK, just earlier this month. We were in Dallas, Texas at their summer meeting, where we hosted one of our clean energy industry breakfast, which is basically a forum for our clean energy industry executives, our membership, as well as public utility commissioners to engage and network and talk about the issues from a variety of perspectives. And then we usually bring in a guest speaker. We were lucky enough to have Janet McCabe with the EPA speak at this breakfast this year. Additionally, federal policy, we're always on the hill meeting with a variety of offices. Some hot topics lately have been tax extenders, appropriations, and then often it's a specific piece of legislation, like Sheen Portman, for example. At the international level, we engage with the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and go to their Conference of the Parties meetings annually. This year, we'll be in Lima, Peru, which will hopefully be a meeting gearing up for the next year's meeting in Paris in 2015, where hopefully a new climate agreement to replace Kyoto will come out of it. So we are a portion of their private sector business observation members there. And finally, on the international level, the Climate Technology Center and Network just recently accepted BCSE as a member of their network. So we'll be working with them to consult on bringing clean energy technologies to other parts of the world. So broadly, BCSE advocates for policies that promote clean, efficient, and sustainable energy products, technologies, and services. We have a broad membership, about 51 members at the moment. In the slide deck, there's a page that shows all of our member logos. And actually, that membership is split up fairly evenly into thirds, renewables, efficiency, and natural gas. So now switching gears a bit and going to talk about the Sustainable Energy in America factbook that we've done the last two years in partnership with Bloomberg New Energy Finance and actually the first fact that Scott brought up with the over $254 billion being invested in clean energy technologies actually came from this report. And what the factbook aims to do is to provide up-to-date, accurate market intelligence about the broad range of industries, energy efficiency, renewable energy, and natural gas that are contributing to the country's move towards cleaner energy production and more efficient energy usage. So then there's a little bit of a snap shot. Slip of the tongue. Snap shot on what the factbook does and some high level facts that came from it and some that I just picked out to share with you today are that renewable energy generation including large hydro grew from eight to 13% of US mix over the 2007 to 2013 period. The cost of solar PV has come down 80% since 2008 and I also read that it's down 99% since 1973. So we've made huge strides as well as distributed generation is emerging more and more as a really transformative phenomenon in the energy sector. And total energy use has fallen 5% while GDP has grown 6% over that same period 2007 to 2013 and there's more on that coming. So the first graph on slide 10, if you're checking it out, that last fact I just said about energy use falling 5% while GDP has grown 6%. This is a really big kind of deviation from what we've seen in the past where it's usually as GDP goes up, so does energy consumption. But there's been a lot of advances in energy efficiency in the transportation power generation and building sectors and so due to that we're actually seeing energy consumption come down even as GDP is growing. The next graph on slide 11 shows US electricity generation by fuel type showing that mix and how it's changing year by year. Renewable generation like I said has grown from 8.3 to 12.9 over the 2007 to 2013 period. And a really significant point is that since 1997 94% of all new power capacity built in the US has come in the form of renewable energy facilities or natural gas. And then there's a slide on US investment in clean energy and like Scott has touched on and like I mentioned as well that figure over 250 billion over the last five years invested in clean energy from the private sector is really staggering. And actually Bloomberg found that in their global index of companies active in the renewables and low carbon energy technologies gained 53.9% which largely overshadowed the gains seen in S&P 500 companies and the Dow Jones industrial average. So this last graph on page on slide 13 shows US greenhouse gas emissions from the energy sector and economy wide. So the first line shows just carbon dioxide coming from the energy sector alone which you can see is a huge portion of it. Then the top kind of squiggly line shows total greenhouse gas emissions as well as the trajectory of what Obama's goal was of reducing emissions by 17% below 2005 levels by 2020. And we were actually already halfway to meeting that at 9.8% decrease since that was set. And as I'm sure many of you know with the proposed clean power plan out now that is set to as it is proposed to bring emissions down 30% below 2005 levels by 2030. So we'll see again that's a proposed rule. So we'll see what the finalized one looks like. And so the next slide just shows the Sustainable Energy in America Factbook website. There's quick links there to download the full Factbook or jump to energy sector specific sections or get even more specific if you wanna know more about fuel cells or offshore wind. Then let's see. And then so wrapping up one last plug. Business Council for Sustainable Energy is on social media. Follow us on Twitter like us on Facebook. We're constantly posting updates and useful tidbits. So thank you. Great Zoe, thank you. And if you want just make sure we have the slide deck we'll post it with the video for today and everything because there was a lot of very good information there just as with all of the studies that Scott is talking about. So now we're going to turn to Lena Moffitt who is the manager for federal policy, climate and energy for the National Wildlife Federation. For another perspective and with regard to policy and looking at their priorities. Lena? We already have a wild and awful heritage for two generations. So given that we work extensively to combat climate change in the region and climate change is a critical threat that we welcome today. So I wanted to speak to about two key things. First, really just offer the National Wildlife Federation as a resource and potentially partner with your organization. We're extensively promoting the land and the efficiency and making sure that such projects are wildlife friendly and site-appropriate that you can have. So we imagine that that's what we made your companies work on and those work with you on that. We also have our offshore wind expert in the audience and we wanted to share a couple of our recent reports as we win one piece that we work on is hoping to help develop this untapped resource that we can be done on a level of friendly way as we'd love to share that with you. After we're going to hamper Q it, this is in the audience, so please ask her questions after what she thought they were doing for us. Second, I'd like to say again a little bit of the Clean Power Plant, which Zoe mentioned. We think this is a key opportunity really to unleash renewable energy and energy efficiency at an unprecedented level in our country, depending on how we plan life and life. So we kicked it off that way. It really isn't over with the finish line yet and you all have an incredibly important role to play to ensure that there is finance and stringent and robust manner and then implemented as well in that way to make sure that it really does incentivize renewable energy and energy efficiency. And then finally I'll just touch on the production tax credit and the investment tax credit, which you all probably know even more closely than I do. So just going back to the Clean Power Plant, I'm sure you're all familiar with this, but we believe that it's a very exciting time in energy technology in the United States because the Environmental Protection Agency just this year, earlier this summer on June 7th, announced first ever limits on carbon pollution from our power sector, which really has the potential to incentivize zero renewable carbon versus energy and energy efficiency. And that's because of the way the Environmental Protection Agency wrote this standard. So other this section of the Clean Air Act, the EPA was charged with establishing the best system of emission reduction for our power sector. And they decided that that best system of emission reduction has a pretty broad net. So they put this in the four buckets. The first is achieving what we refer to is inside a sense line of reduction and pollution at the power plant. So heat rate reduction at current cold and at the power plant. The second is a redispatch to natural gas, which I'm sure you all are very familiar with. The third is increasing the lines on the learns, which we think is very exciting, and that this was one of the key areas we're not a lot of collaboration has been advocating over the past decade. So question environmental protection agencies include this in the standard that they're going to set. And then the final is an increase in the lines on demand side and energy efficiency, which is very exciting. So in the Clean Power Plant, we're really at a key point in time, as if you all are probably aware, the comment period currently goes up and the standard has been released. And they just held public hearings across the country. It's still going on this week. I'm sure many of you were down there. We all were, I think, testifying, if you were testifying, we were both testifying earlier this week at the EPA in support of the Clean Power Plant. And I think there's a real opportunity for your businesses and their staff and members of Congress even to offer written technical comments before the comment period closes on October 16th. And I think there are a couple of key areas that if you are a renewable energy company or energy efficiency company, you want to really be sure to highlight when EPA set that standard and used those four building blocks to establish targets for each state. And they did that by looking at what's the potential for each of those four building blocks to reduce pollution in those four states, in those four blocks it was for each state. We believe that some of the assumptions that they included about potential for renewable energy and energy efficiency in many of the states were set for 2012. And that resulted in many of the state targets, they set 49 state targets, for multiple exclusives that they don't have anymore, not for gas-powered power plants, too low. And we believe that that will leave a lot of emissions production on the table. So one of the key opportunities is to make comments that, you know, you guys on the ice here, demonstrate to EPA there are more resources, there's more potential for renewable energy and energy efficiency than they assume in the set of those standards. We hope they'll listen to advocates at the National Wildlife Federation and the industry efforts like yourselves. And when we see the final standard, it will be even tighter, which will incentivize even more renewable energy and energy efficiency. So that's the first of the opportunities weighing into the EPA before October 16th. Then there's the question point. They are set to finalize the standard by June of 2015, next year. And after that happens, the ball's really in the state's core. So we believe there's a key opportunity for you all to work with your state air regulators to make sure that they're implementing the standard in a robust way. The great thing about the standard is that it's really done off a lot of flexibility to states. So there's a lot of opportunities to advocate with your state regulators to determine how they're going to implement the standard. The National Wildlife Federation wants to make sure that the state's ability to get the hannot took the last two building blocks by truly calling on renewable energy resources and energy efficient resources in their state. They don't have to. So we would love to see you work with your state air regulators to really say, we have this opportunity in our state to use these resources. Let's make sure their actions meet. One thing I forgot to mention in the comment period, EPA didn't include in consideration a couple of very key renewable energy resources that we believe should be included. One is offshore wind, because the EPA was being pretty cautious in how they set the standard. They've only looked at existing technology in the United States. Now, offshore wind is very much of the existing technology in Europe that's got a lot of offshore wind. We don't have it here, yes, at least this year in the United States. So they can include that with consideration. That's a key thing we think should be included because we know we are going to develop our offshore wind resources. The other is distributed solar power. We believe that's a clear opportunity that should be considered as well and we hope that they do in the final standard. So I think I'm getting a two-minute mark here. It's all we want to have production tax credit. Very key opportunity in the next two months to educate with commerce. So the different item is, maybe we have some friends with that who's in the audience. You guys know this. These credits are critical to the continued growth of our onshore and offshore renewable energy industry. We're allowed to expire last year, I'm sure you all know this. We're very much hoping that they will be reinstated in the lean-down session. So it seems like it's going to be the most likely time just to have that after the election. But it did no way, it's an undial. Commerce absolutely needs to hear from you and your companies if these credits are critical and must be extended. The fossil fuel industry has helped me enjoy a century of about four billion dollars a year of federal incentives. The production tax credit is less than that and it's critical for those non-union issues. We really hope that we do it in that package at the end of the year but they need to hear from you to ensure that. So how do you work with all of you on any of these opportunities and let's answer questions about it? Great, thanks so much, Shalina, for covering some really, really key issues and good to hear about everything that you're doing on offshore wind coupled with that. And so now for our last person on this particular panel is Tom Carlson who is with Advanced Energy Economy a very interesting group, relatively new but doing a lot of terrific things at the state level and Tom is the Government Affairs and Policy Associate. With Advanced Energy Economy and the AWS National Association of Businesses making energy views clean, secure, and affordable. We actually work with the disaster sustainable and have a number of issues. One of the things that AWS also does is we need a state coalition consisting of 15 partner organizations active in 23 states across the country and together the network represents more than 1,000 companies and organizations across the United States. We represent companies working across the advanced energy spectrum. Energy efficiency, demand response, natural gas, electricity generation, solar wind, hydropower, nuclear, smart grid, and energy storage. I know today is about a day that I hear from folks talking about all the other segments. And you heard Zoe and Scott talk about all the investments our corporate. Where we looked at, trying to get a look at the dreadnance of the advanced energy company. How much gravity were these companies generating? And what we found is last year in 2013 Advanced Energy reached over $1.1 trillion and estimated global revenue was 1.1 trillion. That was a 7% increase from the U.S. market we made up 15% of the global market came in at about $168 billion. And that was up from the U.S. market being 11% of the global market in 2011. So we're capturing more of a global advanced energy market which is a great thing. And to put that in context, advanced energy globally is bigger than the pharmaceutical manufacturing worldwide. It's about the United States people with a hairline industry. So it's a significant industry and it's growing. Just want to talk about three things briefly. One, the historic role of the federal government in energy. Number two, the role of states in driving energy innovation and how does it continue under EPA's department, clean power plant, reducing carbon emissions in the power sector. And then number three, lessons that we can take from the states to apply to federal wealth. Just starting out, historically, the federal government has played a pivotal role in promoting energy innovation. And this in turn has driven economic progress. Going back to 1926, Congress created percentage depletion allowance for oil and gas exploration in the Western U.S. And this is still part of our tax code today. In the 50s, the federal government was critical to commercializing nuclear. And now recently, the Department of Energy researched the shale gas dating back to the 70s to help the boom we're seeing in the industry today. So federal policies continue to be critical. But we've seen states recently really take the lead as energy pioneers. One of the first renewable portfolio standards was created in Texas in 1999 when George W. Bush was still governor. And today, 29 states have RPS law. Together, these states have a combined population of over 200 million people. And that would make them the fifth largest country in the world. 25 states have energy efficiency resource standard. And this makes up 60% of electricity sales in this country. According to ACEEE, each of these states maintains its current target out of 2020. And the total annual savings would be equivalent to 6% of our projected 2020 sales nationwide. That would be the combined electricity consumption of Ohio, Minnesota, and Rhode Island. So we're clearly states are driving the way here. And again, the D.K. is a clean power plant. We've seen it talk quite a bit about it. This is an opportunity for states to use policies like these to reduce emissions. And also, to modernize our electric area, a lot of what Scott was talking about. We're not only going to reduce emissions, the same kind of technologies can make our grid more resilient and more secure. So, E.K. gave a lot of flexibility to states in developing their emissions reduction plan. We believe actually, as the draft rule is set, these targets are easy to achieve. And we were testifying yesterday for the E.K.s and we were very supportive of the carbon standards. And we actually think they can be strengthened based on our actual resource potential for both energy efficiency and renewable energy. And natural gas and nuclear is both, they're both going to play a big role here as well. So states have a lot of experience already, as we mentioned. In addition to RFES and BRS laws, you've also had trade programs in some parts of the country, in California and the regional gas initiative in the Northeast and mid-Atlantic states. That's another option states can look to. So despite all this great activity at the states, we still need Congress to act if we want to maximize our benefits from advanced energy. The close of 2013, Lena also mentioned a number of advanced energy tax credits inspired in addition to production tax credit. There's credits for advanced transportation and energy efficiency, a smarter grid. And with these, with support of these technologies, we've seen a lot of deployments in advanced energy. And as Zoe mentioned, we've seen with this deployment, prices come down. Wind has fallen by 40% of price last four years, solar by 60% in the last eight. We've had highly cost-effective energy savings. We've also seen advanced biofuels begin to commercialize. On the flip side, with the production tax credit being there, not being there, being uncertain, we've seen the wind market go a little bit up and down for a quarter of a pound that the wind industry in the U.S. went from $13 billion in 2011, $25 billion in 2012, and then down to $2 billion in 2013. And that's all about the uncertainty around the production tax credit. Well, it's expired again, so we'll see what we do moving forward. But one thing that the government could learn from the states is the importance of stability and continuity in energy policy. If we want to really continue capturing more of the global market, we need stability. We need to extend the tax credits at a federal level. So where is that right now? The finance committee with biosupport and support passed the expire act, but it looks like we're gonna have to wait until the act of the November elections and see if the extenders take enough. Now, that's the key, and that's the cloud driver. We need to extend the current tax policy and tax credits we have on the books now that expired in 2013. Looking forward, finance chairman Ron White and others in Congress have talked about the first long-term tax reform. Eight of the way we work with our business members focusing Congress, congressional staff, using people in this room, to develop some principles around this. This is the last thing I'm gonna mention here. So the key thing now is for Congress to really extend the tax credits. Longer term next year, beyond, we're gonna be talking about this reform. We'd like to look at four things. Number one, the target. Let's talk about the goals that we want for our energy system, whether it's greater cleanliness, resiliency, or security, and let's create a tax policy for the energy flow that works towards that. And if we're gonna have to tie face-offs, let's tie face-offs to market-based objectives for our energy system, as opposed to arbitrary counter-deadlines, which is what we have now. The key thing is providing stability and certainty for businesses and investors, and a fourth thing we'd like to see is to be technology neutral. So finally, states are, you know, honestly gonna continue to drive energy innovation, but the federal government also continues to have a key role as it has historically experienced an advanced energy economy. So with that, definitely look forward to talking more with all of you big. Please stop by AWU throughout there and if you'd love to discuss more. Great, thanks so much, Tom. We've got a couple minutes for questions. If anyone has a question or comment, or if there's anything else one of our speakers would like to say? Okay, and, okay, question right here. Go ahead. So if any of you are doing any work, oh, can people hear me now? Okay. I'm curious if any of your companies or institutions are doing any work with energy potential and recovery from wastewater. I know that a lot of times when we talk about renewable energy, we're talking about renewable energy that actually is damaging to the environment in other ways and there's a lot of advancements in technology and potential from wastewater and wastewater is something that is harmful to both humans and the environment. So I'm just curious if there's been work on that. I work with a lot of local governments on wastewater, both in the technology to clean it and then of course the technology, the energy technology to run that, those kinds of advanced water technologies. What's very interesting and I teach this in my courses too is about 18% of the grid east of the Mississippi is used to move water and sewage around and clean it. About 33% west of the Mississippi. The energy sector by the way is the largest user of water in the country. It dwarfs agriculture. Both together use 89% of the water, leaving 11% for everything else. There is not, our water use is not sustainable so we can't waste it. So this fracking stuff which uses water and then keeps it dirty is not acceptable. So there's a big issue here on both cleaning water, using water, moving water and sewage around. Lastly, our municipal water systems and also our water cleaning systems result in a lot of biosolids meaning you're scraping stuff out of it that's actually biodegradable and it turns into methane. What we do around the country is we flare the gas. So we're burning it rather than use, rather than scrubbing it and cleaning it for biogas, for energy use. So there's lots of elegances in here of not just wondering how we use water and what energy we use on it but again optimizing the whole process. Great, thank you and I think now I would encourage you to follow up with individual speakers, go meet them at their booths, take a look at that and obviously we also hope that you will take advantage of our next sessions in this policy forum and we will start our next session in just a couple minutes. Thank you all and thank you. Wonderful, wonderful panel. Thank you for starting us off so well.