 All right, well, welcome everyone to our briefing today about the 2024 Sustainable Energy in America Factbook. I'm Dan Bresset. I'm the president of the Environmental and Energy Study Institute. I'd like to start by offering some special thanks first to the House and Senate Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Caucuses that is chaired by, on the Senate side, Senators Reid and Crapo and co-chaired by Senators Van Hollen and Collins and on the House side, chaired by Representative Cleaver. I'd also like to thank the Conservative Climate Caucus chaired by Mr. Curtis and his vice chairs and also the Sustainable Energy and Environment Coalition chaired by Representative Tonko for working with us to bring this event to you today, helping us get the word out and many, many thanks for your willingness to participate. This briefing would also not be possible without the partnership of the Business Council for Sustainable Energy and in particular, Lisa Jacobson. So thanks, Lisa, to you and your team for and the amazing people at Bloomberg NEF who once again put together a really, really great resource. We are celebrating 40 years of policymaker education here on Capitol Hill at EESI. We were founded by a bipartisan group of members of Congress. And since 1984, we've worked to provide science-based information about environmental, energy, and climate change topics to policymakers and the public. What does policymaker education look like? Well, it looks a lot like this. We do lots and lots of briefings. We're doing about a briefing every two weeks, and we cover lots of different topics. Our first briefing of the year was about the Fifth National Climate Assessment. We did a briefing that featured under Deputy Secretary of Energy David Kirk, Turk, excuse me, about the Energy Earth Shots Initiative. We had a briefing about innovations in weather forecasting. We did one about the budget and appropriations process. We've got one coming up on climate adaptation and national security, one coming up on river restoration, ocean carbon dioxide removal. We cover a lot of ground because climate change covers a lot of ground. And I encourage everyone, if you haven't already, to sign up for our bi-weekly newsletter, Climate Change Solutions. That is really the best way to keep up with everything that we're up to at EESI. We try really, really hard to ensure that our congressional education resources are timely, relevant, accessible, and practical. We put a lot of thought to making sure that they're science-based and ready when congressional staff need them. In fact, before they need them. It's much better to have this information before your boss comes to you on a Thursday afternoon, a couple hours before they leave town with a difficult climate change question. I hope that you'll consider EESI a resource so that when you Google something like, say, ocean carbon dioxide removal, you'll also add EESI to the end of that and be taken to our resources because they're really, really good. Every year, for the last several years, we've tried to organize a briefing to highlight the Factbook because it is a tremendously valuable resource. It is organized about as well as you could possibly organize something like this and it is just totally chocked full of data about US energy sector trends, data points that will help you make sense of how the US energy system is evolving but also hopefully inspire policy options that could encourage it to evolve further, faster, and more equitably towards decarbonized clean energy that we will desperately need to power the 21st century economy. That just about concludes it for me. My colleague just put up a survey link on our screen. If you have a moment and would like to participate in our survey, we really appreciate that. If you have any feedback, if you have any ideas, if you're in our online audience, and I know there's many in our online audience today, if you're having any issues, technology issues, please let us know. We read every response and it matters a lot to us when people take those two minutes to fill out that survey. After, Lisa bleeds the panel through their presentations, there will be a time for questions. We'll have a roving mic that my colleague Emily will be moving around. If you're in our online audience, the way you can ask a question is by following us on social media at EESI online. You can also send us an email and the email address to use is ask that's ASK at EESI.org. It will also be live streaming and doing real time coverage on Blue Sky, our Instagram story, threads and X. So now I get to introduce my good buddy, Lisa Jacobson. Lisa Jacobson is the president of the Business Council for Sustainable Energy, a 65 member trade association representing the energy efficiency, natural gas and renewable energy industries. Lisa has over 20 years of experience advising federal and state policymakers on energy tax, air quality and climate change issues. She's a member of the US Trade Representatives Trade and Environment Policy Advisory Committee, the Energy Efficiency Global Alliance Steering Committee and the Gas Technology Institute's Public Interest Advisory Committee. Lisa, welcome to the lectern. I'm really looking forward to learning all about the 2024 Sustainable Energy in America Factbook. Well, good, oh, wrong way. All right. Well, good afternoon, everybody and hello to our online audience. It's wonderful to be with all of you. Again, my name is Lisa. I'm the president of the Business Council for Sustainable Energy and it's really our pleasure to share with you some of the findings of the 2024 Sustainable Energy in America Factbook. For those that might not be familiar with the BCSE, we are a 30 year strong industry coalition based here in Washington, DC, focused on policy enactment that will help deploy clean energy and energy efficiency technologies, products and services. We put together the Factbook each year with our members and a number of specific sponsors of the project and I'm not gonna go through all their names, some of them you may hear from today as part of the panel but this is a broad based industry and stakeholder effort to bring this information to you. The council, as I said, is very focused on policy, education and advocacy and for us a cornerstone of that is knowing what is going on, knowing what the facts are. What does a certain industry look like? Where is it headed? Where are they having stumbling blocks and how can policy work together to overcome those barriers? So a lot of what you'll find in the Factbook is pertinent economic, technology deployment and environment information. We're looking at the outputs of this deployment. How are we doing from an air quality or climate change perspective? How are we better providing affordable energy resources to businesses and families throughout the United States? All of that you can find in the Sustainable Energy in America Factbook. The Factbook itself, you can find for free on the BCSE's website along with a number of really important communications tools. We have a video you may want to watch. We have shareables on there. We have links to quickly get to information on certain sectors or other data sets you're interested in looking at more closely. And this is actually the 12th edition of the Factbook. So if you want, you can go back further and see how are we doing five years ago? What was that storyline like? Taking a step back when we looked at 2023 which is the most recent year of data, we saw a number of really important trends. We saw some challenges. We saw some very significant macroeconomic challenges for example. We saw high interest rates. Those are impacting households but they were also impacting businesses. We saw supply chain challenges. Things that were core to enabling us to build and deploy energy infrastructure were hampered. They couldn't get the inputs they needed or the equipment they needed to deploy. And there were other challenges that we faced as we continued to rebound from our COVID business conditions. But despite all of those challenges, our headline for the 2024 Factbook was the clean energy economy is thriving. And it's thriving because it's boosted by a strong policy set of frameworks. Those are largely policies that are here in Washington but also policies that are done at the state and local level. So my hope for today is that we can have a conversation about both what does the energy transition look like? What are we moving forward with? Where are we needing to spend more time and effort? But also unpack that. What is the public private partnership model? How have the policies that have been enacted here in DC but also in all of your districts shaped where we're seeing job creation, where we're seeing investment in the energy sector? And think about what can we do next? We've certainly done a tremendous amount in the last five years, going back to the Energy Policy Act, to the tax policies that were in the Inflation Reduction Act, to the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, to the Chips in Science Act. I mean we had this tremendous amount of legislative success and that legislative success was done primarily on a bipartisan basis. Obviously the Inflation Reduction Act wasn't, but a lot of the policies that have made investment in the energy sector possible in the last several years are due to tax policies that have had bipartisan support for going back almost 30 years. So it's really important to think about both where we've had success and why and what we can do going forward to keep that success moving forward because ultimately it's helping communities and it's enabling us to have more modern and affordable energy services in the United States which is critical. So my last point before I turn to Tara is this is really important for the United States but it's also important for us globally because as we're stronger at home we can be more competitive abroad and we have such competitive advantage when it comes to the way we produce and consume and deliver energy in the United States we're highly efficient and we're highly clean but we also have the leadership on many energy technologies that are in high demand throughout the world. So as we grow our domestic energy economy there are benefits for us both here and abroad and we have opportunity to even do more and to really make that competitive advantage that the US has even stronger. So it's my pleasure right now to introduce Tara Nairayan. She is the head analyst with Bloomberg NEF and she focuses on long term decarbonization issues. She and her team were critical to putting this year's fact book together. It's really was a pleasure to work with Tara and also others on the Bloomberg NEF staff. So she's gonna share kind of a big picture look at what we saw in the 2024 fact book. So Tara it's my pleasure to welcome you. Thank you for joining us and thank you for traveling from Boston down here for this event. Yep. Hi, thanks so much Lisa and for the welcome from EESI. My name is Tara Nairayan as Lisa said and I'm really here to present some of the big overview or the big stories that we found when putting together the fact book this year. And we've been working with PCSE for about a decade or more now and we do this project every year and it's something that, yeah, it allows us also to put some of our data and our analysis out there. A lot of it sits within the broader Bloomberg ecosystem. There's as a different research provider. And so we're really happy to like make this information as widely available as possible. And so looking at 2023, so looking back at 2023, there's 60 plus pages of data. So definitely look at it but do take away the two main stories that we saw in the data which are first that it is a year in which the records across the board kept rising. But at the same time, when we think about the bigger picture of where we are in terms of decarbonization, where we are in terms of climate change, what we also see is that actually we're in a situation where the records need to keep rising going forward. And I wanna start off by telling you first about what we saw finally in the data in terms of disruptions. So COVID still a couple of years, not so far back in the radio mirror as we wish it to be, but it's far back enough that the data finally started turning around and letting us know that some of these disruptions are sort of firmly behind us now. The first thing that we saw when looking at prices or the different commodities that underpin clean energy, so wind and solar and batteries, the cost of transportation and shipping, over the course of 2020 and over the last two years, the biggest thing that we had seen was the sort of like general jump in prices and trends. So every one of these charts sort of index to zero, sorry, index to one from January 2020, you can see that there's this sort of surge in prices and it was really over the course of 2023 that all of these lines started taking back down. There's not universal interest rates are still rising, but the underlying commodities for clean energy are starting to ease. Conventional energy commodities are also starting to ease, so the price of natural gas, and here we're just tracking the benchmark hub for natural gas at Henry Hub, following a bit of a spike from the sort of geopolitical tensions in Europe, the Russia-Ukraine war, natural gas prices had risen, which had a sort of knock-on effect for wholesale power prices, so the price of electricity that we buy, and so for homes and businesses, both the gas as well as the power that people were looking at buying over the course of 21 and 22 was pretty high, and in 23, that trend also started taking back down, prices started to ease, and as natural gas came back down, power sort of riding on the back of that also, prices began to cool. And it was also when emissions finally started to take back down. So for the last two years, 2021 and 2022, there's been this rebound for the pandemic when emissions from the overall US economy, all of the end-use sectors put together, were increasing year on year. Essentially, it was a rebound, right? Like all economic activity was suppressed during the pandemic and so on, but it was really only in 2023 that we saw this 1.8% decline year on year, such that the total emissions number coming out of the US sort of resumed that downward trajectory that it's been seeing for a while. Most of the emissions are still coming out of the big three sectors, so power transport industry. I'm gonna talk a little bit about that because that's where a lot more of the attention is gonna have to be focused on. But in every sector apart from transport, emissions actually fell year on year, so this is a good thing. Some of these disruptions are behind us. And at the same time, we also saw sort of at the end of 2022, the IRA passed and that was a pretty big thing. It spurred so much excitement, it spurred so much enthusiasm, a lot of announcements for investments, plans to develop and actually deploy new clean power capacity, new low carbon technology, factories manufacturing. And over the course of one year, what we've really seen is a lot of this excitement and activity start to materialize. One way of looking at this is looking at how much money has been spent. So this is our annual effort to track how much is invested, how much low carbon or clean investments are going into different segments of the economy in different countries. So sort of the chart on the right, you can see like globally, there was more than one and a half billion trillion dollars, one and a half trillion dollars invested by the whole world, so across all countries. And on the left, you can see that in the US, we really invested like a ton of money. This is a record setting amount of investment going into every aspect of the clean energy transitions. That's renewables, power grids, low carbon transports, that's primarily EVs. So that's over 300 billion dollars that went into the US energy transition last year. There's two messages here. So like I said, on one hand, we've seen that there are records that we are setting. On the other hand, it's very useful to remember that in the context of the global picture, every country with the exception of Japan actually ended up setting records as well. And so when we think of the overall push towards energy transition and decarbonization, we will need to continue setting records every year because that is the direction in which investment needs to go. Every country is doing it and to remain competitive, the US will need to do that as well. But all of this investment ultimately boils down to the fact that there is one number that we're kind of focused on and that number is emissions. The aim is to bring the emissions down and to really ensure that a lot of the investments are actually being usefully directed to actually decarbonizing. And so when we look at that, as I mentioned earlier, there are three big sectors where a lot of these emissions come from. So that's power, transport and industry. And we're kind of going to look at all of them to see how we are doing or how we did in 2024 on each one of these. Power used to be the biggest source of emissions in the US compared to 2005 levels. We were about 40% lower than what we were emitting from the power sector. And so it's really like the most rapidly decarbonizing sector of the overall economy. And this is something to really celebrate. There's been a lot more renewable capacity deployed, so wind and solar, which are the fastest growing sectors. But if you add up the amount of electricity that we're generating from everything, so hydro, wind, solar, biomass, geothermal, we are really setting records every single year for how much power we are producing from clean electricity. And when we look at the mix of electricity across the board, we have even more reasons to feel motivated and to feel good about ourselves because essentially that dark band at the bottom, the amount of electricity that we're generating from coal every single year is steadily rising. So that's another record. So in 2024, 2023, we saw 16% of US electricity supply coming from coal, and that's the lowest it has ever been. As the most emitting technology, the faster we can bring that number down, the better. Now there's one thing that I did want to flag, which is that when we think in, so when people in the sort of energy space look at data across the board, we listen to the conversations. One of the things that people keep saying is that overall the amount of installed coal in the US is steadily declining, and that's pushing down emissions from the power sector. And this is true. So much so that this might be something that we take for granted that like coal in the US is steadily becoming uneconomical, and the amount of installed coal capacity is steadily declining. What is very useful to think about is that sometimes our view of what the future might hold is not necessarily, could sometimes be more optimistic than what we currently see. So here's where coal capacity has been for the last few years in the US. But in 2018, if you asked all the power plant owners across the country how much capacity do you plan to keep online by 2030, this is that line, or this is how much they would have said they're going to keep operating across the country. If you ask that same question in 2019, economic conditions had changed, more plants were being planned to be taken offline such that by 2030 even less capacity was going to be operating. And that same number in 2020 and 2021 and 2022 essentially went lower and lower every year. And so this is where we are at the end of 2023. By 2030 there's going to be only about 150 gigawatts of operational coal in the US. And if history is any indication that number is likely to tick down lower, which means good things for power emissions. But before we sort of pat ourselves on the back and get a little too carried away with this, it's really useful to look ahead and think of where the next challenges are or where the next big things to focus on are going to come from. And that's primarily natural gas because essentially the fuel that is displacing a lot of the coal in the power system is essentially natural gas. It's the steady growth and not necessarily from renewables that is more economic than it is to run coal. And if you really stop and look at what we're doing in terms of natural gas, the US is steadily increasing. It's overall production as well as consumption of this fuel. So there's the sectors of the economy that always use natural gas, so for building heating and cooling, for industrial uses, but demand from power. So essentially to burn as fuel, to displace coal, has steadily been rising. And so have the amount of exports that we are sending to other countries. Essentially, when we look at the growth of natural gas, there are very few natural predators, I want to say, for natural gas. It's really rising pretty steadily. And so when we think about emissions, this is the aspect of things where there has really not been enough thought put into it and where we would need to have to turn our attention to in the future beyond just renewables. Gonna go really quickly through the last two sectors, transport as well as industry. Last year, transport or electrified transport, which really does a lot towards cutting out the emissions coming out of road transport, like through internal combustion vehicles, a set a new record. We saw a 50% rise year on year in the number of electric vehicles sold. A big chunk of that was because of falling prices. So Tesla cut costs, a lot more customers responded to tax credits that were available. And we saw a lot more automakers expand their market share and sell a lot more cars, which is good for consumers. It gives them more options and essentially highlights that the market is relatively healthy. From an emissions point of view, one of the things that despite the fact that transport emissions have gone up year on year, it's useful to look at what trends also stood out from the sort of regular ice vehicle side of things. Gasoline prices have been higher since they were over the sort of pre-pandemic period as a lot of refineries in the US have shut down. And so that higher price essentially led to fewer people driving. So it cut down on some of the discretionary driving. And they've also been some structural changes. So if you look at the chart on the left, compared to the amount of gasoline demand for like motor fuels or road fuels that we've saw pre-pandemic, in the last couple of years, we've actually seen a lot less fuel consumption. Some of the structural reasons are that more people are working from home. There's less reason to drive. And so if you're ever in a conversation where you want to push back against RTO or returning to office, just think about the environment. That's a real thing. And the last thing or the most stubborn sector to decarbonize is industry. So we've seen a lot of gains in power in terms of steadily decarbonizing. And we've seen this traction come through in road transport, which sort of affects all transport. But industry is really the hardest one, the most difficult to decarbonize. And this is where the passing of the IRA in the last couple of years has really had a bit of an impact because it's essentially given a kickstart to sectors that are really nascent and otherwise would not necessarily have been able to see this level of investment or enthusiasm. It would have essentially taken these technologies in particular hydrogen and CCS years to become a lot more competitive. So we've seen the shipment of electrolyzers go up in 2023. These are like actual electrolyzers that have been shipped to be installed and to produce hydrogen through electrolysis, which is fairly green. And we've also seen a lot more announcements come through for CCS, not just in the sectors that traditionally carbon capture was installed. So natural gas fuel processing, but really every sector of the economy across the board, including power, ammonia production, as well as chemical production, we're starting to see more sectoristic interest in carbon capture when they were not necessarily doing so before. And this is where essentially a lot more of these announcements would need to scale up very rapidly and be converted to actual investments for which more clarity and certainty around the policy is something to keep an eye out for over the next couple of years. The last thing I wanted to talk about, which is not something that's related to emissions, but is such a big portion of the IRA that was passed, is this big boost and push towards supply chains or domestic supply chains and supporting manufacturing. I said it was the year of excitement announcements, that's absolutely true. This overall is a map, I don't expect you to read all of it, but in states sort of across the board, there have been projects, factories and investments announced in an effort to take advantage of tax credits that are encouraging and supporting supply chains based in the US. And this is fairly bipartisan. States is not like a red or blue state thing. When we break that down, according to which sectors are announcing the most, so you can see the big chunk of announcements is really coming from solar as well as batteries and batteries are a sector that are still fairly new and there's a lot of scope for the US essentially to establish some competitiveness and get ahead in terms of the global race for maintaining a lead in the battery space. A lot of these battery of factories are being paired with EV manufacturing facilities, so those two industries sort of going hand in hand. And that's all I had. I realize it's a number of things to throw at you all at once, but I do want to leave you with the fact that at least looking back at the 2023 data, we've done a lot and there's hopefully a lot more still to come. And with that, I will turn it over to Lisa who will introduce the panel coming next. Thank you. Thank you very much Tara. That was, yes, amazing year of records and as you said, let's hope we continue with that times two or three. So I'd love to invite our panel to come up please. Join me up here. And for our audience as they're getting settled, what we're going to do, we'll spend about 20 minutes talking up here as a panel. We'll hear from each panelist a little bit more about their role in the energy sector and how they were reviewing and reflecting on the data from the last year. But then we're gonna open it up to all of you and hope we can have a good conversation. So first what I'm gonna do is introduce each one of our panelists and then Helen, you'll kick us off. So first to my left is Helen Walter Teranani. She is with train technologies. To her left is Allie McGigan with National Grid. Next to her is Billy Calmaia with the American Clean Power Association. And then next to her is Charles Bolden with the Solar Energy Industries Association. And then finally at the end of the line there is Heather Reems with Cres Forum. Again, I've asked each one of them to talk a little bit about their background and some of the reflections they have on the 2024 fact book data. So Helen, you're gonna kick us off and I have a slide prepared for you. Just let me know when you want me to pull it up. So Helen Walter Teranani from train technologies. For those of you who don't know, train technologies is the largest provider of heating and cooling in the world. Very committed to decarbonization even down to our leadership's pay as in part due to reductions in emissions from our customers use for products which is about 94% of our total overall carbon footprint. So that's a very heavy focus area for us. You can go to the slide. Thanks Lisa. So I've been asked to talk a little bit about building codes. For those of you who don't know, there are over a thousand building code jurisdictions in the United States. So it's no easy task to get building codes updated. When we think about energy codes, there's kind of two categories there. There's residential and commercial building codes. ASHRAE organizes the commercial ones and then the residentials are done through ICC a lot. The International Code Council. There has been an uptick of adoption of energy related building codes which of course will lead to reduced energy consumption both commercially and in the residential forefront. But there is a really long way to go. That's a very pretty map. It's got a lot of colors on it, but there's a lot of white and a lot of jurisdictions are well behind in their uptake of the most modern energy efficiency codes. If we think about Texas for example, there are some jurisdictions in Texas that are using the latest commercial building codes. ASHRAE 90.1, the 2019 or 2022 edition, but the state overarching only requires about a from the 2009 version. And these can be quite significant from a cost perspective, that energy use from a cost perspective for building owners and families. There are three jurisdictions, California, Oregon and Washington State that have started to adopt performance-based building codes. And what that means is that it's based on the total energy consumption of the building rather than looking at specific individual pieces of equipment. And that's important when we think about improving the overall use of energy in a building. If you think about insulation and the amount of energy that's needed in a building and how you can reduce that, that can drive some of that really great advantage for building owners. I guess the last thing that I would say is that energy consumption is really important in the overarching scheme of the movement away from toward more climate-friendly solutions on the energy front, because the less energy we can all consume, the less work that we need to do long-term around grid upgrades, et cetera. So there's a lot of work to do here that the rest of the panel is gonna talk about that's very important and I'm a little adjacent to that. But we feed into that and we think it's really important to kind of support our colleagues. Yeah, thank you. Thank you very much, Helen. One of the slides that we didn't put up yet, but I invite our audience to look at is our overall country's energy productivity over time. And we can go back to the early 1990s, that's how far back we go in the fact book, to look at energy productivity, which is how much energy do we need to grow our economy? I mean, it's staggering. Our energy productivity since 1990 is about like 80%. And we're very pleased to see that while we had a one-year break in a very long-term trend in the COVID rebound period, that in 2023 we saw that long-term trend continue and a lot of it is due, I believe 60% or so is estimated to be due to things like policy and building codes in particular. So policies played a big role in investment and energy efficiency has played a big role in helping keep our energy productivity strong. And that was a takeaway from the fact book that everyone should take a look at. Next, Ali, great to hear from you and please tell us a little bit about National Grid and your role there and what you were looking at in the fact book this year. Sure, thanks everyone. My name is Ali McGuigan. I work for National Grid in the Washington D.C. office on the federal affairs team. For those who may not know, National Grid is one of the largest investor-owned utilities in the world. So in the United States, we serve customers in Massachusetts and New York connecting about 20 million people to the power that they need. So we have a net zero ambition by 2050 to decarbonize our gas and electric networks. And when we think about the kinds of investments that we need to make there, we're thinking about how do we deliver an energy future for our customers and communities that is clean, reliable and affordable. And that truly underpins kind of everything we do day in, day out. And specifically when thinking about our gas system, we are increasingly thinking about a concept called integrated energy planning among our business. So we recognize in Massachusetts and New York specifically because of the ambitious goals our states have that electrification is going to play a massive role in decarbonizing the network. But then when you look at our gas customers, where it makes sense for reliability or affordability concerns, we're also exploring solutions to decarbonize our gas networks through either blending of RNG and hydrogen in the system, networked geothermal pilots and energy efficiency on source heat pumps, things like that. So Lisa, you could go to the next slide. Oh, you're already there. So I wanted to kind of expand on a couple of the items within this chart you're seeing on your right hand side for US energy transition investment just to give you a flavor of some of the types of investments companies like National Grid are making here in the US. So in New York specifically, actually yesterday, we announced what's called our upstate upgrade, which is a $4 billion investment for 70 projects, primarily transmission projects that will generate thousands of jobs as well as increased grid capacity to ensure we can connect renewable energy projects to the grid and enhance resilience to ensure reliable service during extreme weather. As most folks know, the Northeast is a peaking system in the winter. We have harsh winters, so we need to make sure that our system operates effectively for our customers during those months especially. And then in Massachusetts, we have what's called our electric sector modernizations plan, our ESMP called Future Grid. So we've recently announced a $2 billion investment in Massachusetts that will upgrade our electricity distribution grid as well as promote electrification and the connection of distributed energy resources. And what's really exciting about this is our ESMP in Massachusetts will expand system capacity by about three gigawatts by 2035 and enable more than 31.3 million metric tons of GHG emission reduction. So we're really excited about some of those opportunities for our customers and communities. And if folks have questions, I'm happy to give more examples. I have a long list of them. So thank you for your time today. Thank you, Allie. And yeah, I mean, amazing. All of those announcements recently and in so many different areas. Thanks for sharing that. Billie, great to have you here today. Love to hear your perspectives, please. Thanks, Lisa. So my name is Billie Kamiam with American Clean Power. For those that aren't familiar with this association, we represent solar on and offshore wind, transmission, battery storage and green hydrogen. And that's anyone from the developers to the utilities to the manufacturers. And so today I wanted to talk a little bit about manufacturing, as you can see on the slide. It's showcasing, really we're in a boom for manufacturing right now at a time when our country has been losing manufacturing jobs. The clean energy industry is creating them. Just in our association, we've checked 128 new or expanded manufacturing facilities announced in the last year and a half. And we can really credit a lot of that to the 45X. Advanced Manufacturing Tax Credit. About half of those announcements are in the solar supply chain. So as we're looking to onshore supply chains and decouple from China, we think it's having a really impactful result. Today we have just seven gigawatts of annual domestic solar module production capacity. Once these announced facilities come online, this will surge to 117 gigawatts. That's a 16-fold increase. We have announced over 43,000 new manufacturing jobs and $39 billion in investment. And if I can add a bit of an anecdote here, last fall I went out to Colorado to tour a blade manufacturing facility as for wind turbines. And we were walking the floor talking to the folks working the line. And they were hiring kids right out of high school with no education, no further training, training them on the spot. And so we think this is really having a great impact in terms of creating those blue-collar jobs, but good-paying blue-collar jobs across the country. So we think it's a really good story to tell. And as you can see, it's really spread geographically across the country. Thanks, Billy. Yeah, amazing to see it in a map, right? And appreciate the work that American Clean Power and we're gonna hear from the Solar Energy Industries Association in a moment. But both of your organizations are doing to kind of make it real, see where it's going and unpack what these numbers are, right? So Charles, would love to hear from you next. Welcome. Thanks for sharing your thoughts with us. Thank you, thank you. Good afternoon, my name is Charles Bolden, Senior Director of Congressional Affairs for the Solar Energy Industries Association, otherwise known as SEA. We are the largest trade association that focuses on solar and storage. We represent manufacturers who represent, sorry, I'm blanking right now. We represent over 1,300 member companies from large-scale utility projects to small-mahmed-pop rooftop solar projects. So with that being said, I'm happy to discuss what we found from the Factbook. 2023 was a record year for the solar industry with nearly 35 gigawatts installed. Residential, commercial, and utility market segments all set records for the year, and community solar market segment very narrowly missed that record. Of note, over 13 gigawatts of solar were installed in Q4 alone. In 2019, there was only 13 gigawatts installed for the entire year. So as you all can see, the deployment is very much so happening. Solar represented more than half of all new electric capacity connected to the grid in 2023. The first time in 80 years, a renewable energy source eclipsed 50%. Last was hydrogen in the 1940s. After a turbulent 2022, in which supply chains were disrupted by a couple legislative and regulatory trade actions, causing significant project delays, cancellations, modules, supply stabilized earlier in 2023, allowing many delayed projects to move forward. While the bulk of the growth came from the utility skills segment, both residential and commercial markets set records as well. Both markets were boosted by demand pool in California where a change in net metering laws last spring had customers scrambling to get projects under contract ahead of the change to the less beneficial net billing rules. Much of that pipeline created ahead of this rule, change was still being built out in the state in 2023. On the manufacturing side, deployment as Billy alluded to, we tracked eight gigawatts and that is now double to 16 gigawatts over the course of that year. So the IRA really shaped our industry and it is really booming right now for us. Looking forward, we expect another record year in 2024 as utility scale pipelines for the year continue to be strong. Residential market will be down a bit due to some California issues, but IRA adders will boost the growth elsewhere. So thank you for that. Thanks Charles. So you mentioned kind of the interconnection between federal policy and state policy that has driven the deployment of solar in the last year or more. So I hope we can talk more about that. Love to. A few moments. Heather, great to have you. Great to be here. Obviously you're not representing a company or a particular industry sector. Please tell us a little bit about Cres Forum and share some of your reflections on the Sears Factbook. And also I'm just gonna put in a plug for the two of us. We released a op-ed in The Hill just after the Factbook was released this year. So I'm sure you're gonna mention some of those themes, but it was a really great opportunity to get the word out and really talk about the competitive advantages that the US has with these movements. Yeah, there's some great themes from the Factbook that were great to tout this year. I was kind of thinking next year in 2024, we're looking at the data. It seems like we're gonna be record breaking again and having some really exciting news. So I think this is a trend, right? Of just positivity. So you're gonna get nothing but positivity from me here. Today, I'm Heather Reims. I'm the president of Citizens for Responsible Energy Solutions and our nonprofit Educational Arm Cres Forum. We're based here in Washington, DC. We're a rightist center organization. We engage lawmakers who support climate change, legislation and advanced clean energy deployment more quickly. We believe that when you have both sides of the aisle working together, we'll have bipartisan legislation and what that means more durability, more certainty, more deployment. Although it's rise, it's a good thing. So again, very positive, positive, positive. We are a longtime sponsor of the Factbook. We're proud of that. And one of the reasons why we sponsor is it's practical data that is so needed in discourse here in Washington and around the country just in measure year over year about our progress which we're doing here today. Our focus at Crest is on cutting costs, energy costs, not energy choices, exporting American innovation and not our jobs and reducing emissions and not reducing our economy. And what we're seeing here with a very robust, all the above approach is efficient use of our resources here in the United States while emissions go down. I think I've got a couple of slides here that will reflect that. As you'll see here in the slides, you can see coal uses going down as Tara mentioned and that's good news because it's one of the higher pollutants that we have and we're seeing increases though of natural gas which does need to be addressed in terms of its emissions but also expansion of other energies like nuclear and renewable energy. We also know that storage is coming online and being able to be more efficient. So again, I think the good news continues. All the while, I think we can go to the next slide, Lisa, is that we are decreasing our emissions. This is great news and I think it's important to kind of celebrate this because we talk about the struggle and we know how hard it is on Capitol Hill where we are now about trying to get these policies past and what's going on but take a moment and take the stock that we are reducing emissions. We are producing energy more cleanly and we have the most robust emission standards and environmental standards in the world. That's the type of thing we do want to export, not our jobs, we want those great standards to be exported and then the greenhouse gas is also dropping, it says 1.8% reduction. And that's great to see especially on the heels of we know we have record temperatures over the last year. In fact, the cherry blossoms are blooming two weeks earlier than normal this year and some are attributing that to a rising temperatures and climate but we see it all around us. So knowing that we are reducing emissions is great news but there's more that needs to be done. I'll finally say that some people kind of think about there's public energy and democratic energy sometimes and we kind of see this as American homegrown energy and America produces emissions generally go down. So we have a lot to offer the world in terms of our minerals, our resources and our technology and I think the fact book is just a great source that kind of highlights that and I look forward to building on those policies in the future with you, Lisa, thank you. Thank you and thanks to all of you. So I'd like to explore two question areas over the next few minutes. The first is okay, so we had this in many cases record breaking year for the industries or sectors that you're involved in but as we noted, if we want to achieve longer term decarbonization or kind of our other energy policy goals of modernization and efficiency we need to move faster and we need to invest more. So just would love to hear from each one of you a little bit about how you're seeing the challenges and opportunities as you look out over the next few years. And I mean, maybe I will just go in order because start with you, Helen. I'd love to hear from train technologies perspective what you see the challenges and opportunities. I think it's, we are very focused on innovation as a company and we continue to invent new solutions with lower carbon footprints and extend the temperature range to very low temperatures like pharmaceutical processing up to industrial processing, high temperatures, moving those decarbonized inventions forward. But one of the things that's exciting is that basically all the technology that we need to achieve 2030 goals, those are commercial today. It's really a question of uptake and I think one of the challenges that we see is how do we encourage not only uptake of these technologies, but also the most efficient technologies. So not just move to a technology, but make sure that it's really energy efficient so that we reduce the things that you all have to do because you have a lot of work to do in front of you without that additional burden. So that's the big thing that I think about Lisa. Thanks Helen, Allie. Yeah, thank you. What first comes to mind for me is when utilities think about investing in a lot of these major projects our planning timelines run on a much larger cycle than what is really required of us to do everything we need to do to get the grid ready and decarbonize it in time. For example, in New York and Massachusetts we have 2030 climate goals and we are going to deliver that future, but we as utility need the help of governments and regulators to bring everyone to the table in order to allow for us to make those investments ahead of demand. And demand that clean energy demand is happening today. It's happening as we speak, as you've seen kind of as evidenced on all of these slides. And the second piece of that is in order to get us to the capacity we need. We need to develop more transmission and more inter-regional transmission. And with that, as I'm sure all of you know we have siting and permitting challenges. And so anything that can be done to help us kind of expedite that process and allow us to build ahead of demand is going to beneficial for all of us. Thank you, Billy. So you're gonna hear the same, let me echo what Ali said. Permitting reform is really probably front of mind for most of our members. It takes 10 years to build a transmission line on average. When you think about inter-regional transmission it's even harder. And so I think that's what's really holding back a lot of the clean energy deployment right now. If I can add on to that, we have a series of clean energy tax incentives that are really creating a boom right now. But we've also seen a lot of political votes taken in this Congress that would repeal parts or all of the incentives. And what I keep hearing from my member companies is that they have investors all around the world and they don't understand political votes and having a business certainty and knowing what the rules are going forward because a lot of these projects take 10 plus years to build out and not understanding what the forecast is gonna be like in a year or two years. That lack of business certainty is really impacting our members now. Thank you. Charles. Yes, I would say, just to echo what Ali and Billy said, business certainty as well as transmission, permitting and citing, those are some of the major issues that we've been focused on at SEA. And another thing too is a little bit out of the realm is just educating low income and minority communities about the effects and the capabilities of renewable energy and especially solar and bringing them more access and confidence in what they should be looking into and educating those consumers. So I'm gonna be on the permitting reform train too here. We've got to get it done. We've got record investment and we've got government red tape holding us back. So I, but to be a little bit more original too, everyone wants it, but you know what I mean? Everyone wants clean, affordable, reliable energy in some way just in the eye of the beholder. People don't want pollution. They don't want red tape. They want us to build. They don't want, voters don't want us to be relying on other countries. They want to build it here. And I think there's challenges and opportunities that we see as themes that are like both sides go in nod their head, yes, but I would say the devil's in the details. It's hard getting to those pathways to actually pass that legislation to move forward. So while it's a tremendous opportunity, if we can't agree on like, let's cut bureaucratic red tape, then what else can we be doing right now? What's more important right now than cutting bureaucratic red tape to get things built and letting America build and produce and doing what it does great. So I'm not optimistic on this Congress necessarily, maybe on lame duck, but if we don't get it done and it was in the next year, shame on us. Well, three of you mentioned, or maybe four mentioned permitting and citing and obviously there are many bills. There've been lots of hearings. There's, you know, this has been maybe a decade or more conversation, but certainly in the last, this Congress and the Congress before a lot of attention, what are the kinds of things without mentioning maybe specific bills, but just what are the kinds of building blocks that you think are needed? Obviously some policies were passed in the fiscal responsibility act early in this Congress and that was important. But just be curious if you wanted to expound like what are the kinds of things at the federal level that might be needed? And I don't know who wants to go first, but open it up. I can jump in just on the thinking about needing for mining, for instance. Needing critical minerals, rare earth minerals for a lot of the cool technologies that we have here in this country. And are we going to be reliant on other countries for mining and processing, or are we going to look here in the United States and do some of it here? And then the term French shoring has been thrown around a lot these days when we're working with our allies, which is a terrific idea. That's why we have allies in doing that. And we've got it, it seems like there's a piece of a strategic plan missing in the clean energy economy when we're not talking, addressing, mining these minerals, a circular economy, certainly recycling is very important. And that's also being invested in, but it's still young, expensive. So we've got to get real about what we need and clear the way to be able to get to a cleaner economy future. Otherwise, it doesn't seem like we're serious and getting there. And I think that creates partisanship in a way, nipping, that is really not very helpful. And when you're trying to really get serious legislation passed. So that's one example from my purview. Thank you. Any other thoughts? Thanks. And when we talk about permitting reform, I think it's really important to note that, I don't think our goals are to undermine any existing environmental reviews, our, you know, better off environmental laws. I think what we're trying to get at really is, can we speed up the process, have some timelines? I think the fiscal responsibility act really did put down a down payment on permitting reform, but there are other things that we can do. For example, judicial review, that's an important process, but can we put a timeline on it to make sure that it happens expeditiously? Right now, DOE can identify transmission lines that are in the national interest and FERC has a backstop siting authority capability, but that process is bifurcated. Can we have reviews happen at the same time so that we can speed up the process? Not undermine the reviews, but have them happen at the same time. Yeah, that was excellent. I don't know if anyone other comments. Yes, go ahead. I mean, I think just to echo what other folks on the panel are saying, I mean, I think everybody is in favor of early, deep engagement with stakeholders so that those later steps, that people aren't surprised and reacting to permit discussions. And I think that exactly what the other panelist said, it's just, I think everybody wants to see this move forward in an orderly way without missing steps and making sure that everybody gets engaged. Thanks, Helen. Any other comments on that? Well, let me give an opportunity for panelists that haven't spoken. When you're looking out at the policy landscape, either we're spending a lot of time at the business council for sustainable energy and also many of your associations and companies on implementing the policies that we've just enacted over the last several years. And it's critical that we are doing that well and that we're getting the results that we hoped Congress would enable us to achieve. And that does involve a lot of detail and technical work and public-private partnership. But so whether it be in terms of the policies that we've enacted and what needs to be done to implement them or looking ahead to the next Congress, what are you hopeful that Congress can do to support at the federal level the energy transition? Yeah, so I guess I'll turn to the bipartisan infrastructure law. We are one of many companies, particularly in the energy sector, who is competing for dollars. And one thing that we're finding, particularly when engaging in our states and communities, is more education needs to be done. And your offices are really critical in kind of being that bridge between Washington and what's going on on the ground in our states. And a lot of this is being done through partnership. So we are maybe a lead applicant in some instances versus a sub-applicant in others. Sometimes the state entity has to be the one that applies for the program to receive a grant. But what we're seeing is that a lot of the times communities aren't aware of the resources that are out there. And even if they are, they don't have the technical capability to have someone take the time to apply for a grant. So we've actually taken on a lot of work at the community level to try and educate our own customers and communities. But I think more can definitely be done with DOE and Congress. I would just add, at CLE we've been hyper-focused on educating kind of minority communities on the benefits of solar. And what that looks like is we've been putting together some fireside chats on Capitol Hill with members of the Tri-Caucas to discuss the ways that the health impacts that the industries around have caused and the respiratory issues and things of that nature. So promoting more community solar is one thing, but also making it more affordable and educating those consumers and educating those people in the areas in which they're mostly impacted by greenhouse gas emissions. The second thing too is just one thing that I'm excited for is that transmission and permitting, it seems like we all want something to get done, every industry wants to get something done. So we're open to coming together with other individuals and industries to promote more clean resources. So I think that's one of the major things that I would say. Thank you, Charles Heather. Yeah, I was also going to add, at least you're aware of the work that Cress has done and the conservative climate, working with the conservative climate caucus and the conservative climate foundation and bringing legislators, policy makers, members of Congress and staff to COP and expanding on the international discussion. It's global climate change, right? Not just U.S. climate change. And how can U.S. policy making help reduce global emissions? So I know we have big problems to solve here in the United States, but what kind of policies can we be passing with an eye towards lowering global emissions? And we're getting there. Republicans are, record numbers went to COP this last year, participating in panels. And as you heard me earlier saying, we have both sides of the aisle working together, you're more likely to see some bipartisanship. I'm hoping that also translates to something on a global scale recognizing that the United States is serious about lowering its emissions. We all agree about how we're going to get there, but we are serious about lowering emissions and we also want to help the world decarbonize in a way that's doable. And having those discussions today, tomorrow, next year and following years, I think makes me very hopeful as an advocate but also as a parent. No, thank you for that. And as many of the viewers and those in the room will know, EESI has also been a participant as has the Business Council for Sustainable Energy in the international climate change process under the Framework Convention on Climate Change. And sometimes we use the word COP, Conference of the Parties, which denotes the current regime where we're having these annual meetings. And it was wonderful to see so many members of Congress there in the past conference, which was in December in Dubai, UAE. So if anyone, I was gonna open it up in a minute to questions from the floor. Feel free to ask more questions about the connection between the international work that our organizations do and what you're all doing here in Congress. So just the last question, maybe we'll do this as kind of a speed round. The headline, as I said in the beginning of the fact book this year was, the clean energy transition is thriving, supported by strong policies. So it just wanted to get your riff on that. If you think of either one policy or one action that was taken that contributed to the deployment we've seen last year and the years prior, please let me know. So do you believe in that? Like, what's your feeling on that headline? Helen, you can go first. I would be remiss if I don't talk about all the funding that's going out there for new equipment and upgrades for families and for building owners to reduce their energy consumption and also to transition to cleaner uses for heating. So it's a lot of money and it's also not a lot of money and I think there's some really clever constructs out there to recycle the money if you will and kind of reuse it and go through loan programs. And I'm excited to see all that roll out and I think it kind of takes the first step forward in a very big way toward this end with a lot of support. And I think we've been many years without this kind of policy, Lisa. And so we've seen the very slow motion forward in that way and this is really quite a dynamic leap into the space. And like I said, my biggest concern is that we do this in a way that there's the least amount of energy use for families, least cost that way, as well as in a way that is sticky and durable and quick. And so not too tall of an order for the states to take up, I don't think. Thank you. No, I mean, it's amazing amount of resources that are being driven to businesses and consumers through the bipartisan infrastructure law and the Inflation Reduction Act. So thanks for highlighting that, Allie. Yeah, piggybacking off of that. I mean, Bill and Ira were both once in a generation funding and achievements. And so I think from our perspective, it showed the world that the US truly is serious about emissions reductions and making those investments happen in our communities. And that's really exciting. And we're really eager to be a part of delivering that future. But to the points that Billy and Charles made earlier, we need that certainty moving forward. So those tax credits, all the great progress that was made, businesses like us, we rely on those policies to make those decisions in order that we can do this long-term. Thank you. Yeah, I mean, the full suite of energy tax incentives, I think are really helping our country grow our domestic energy production across the board. But one thing I wanna mention is, while this was a huge investment from the government, it's also leveraging a ton of private dollars. I mean, our members are tracking $455 billion of investment coming from the private sector. And so this is really all of us working together to increase the American energy, so. Very important point, thank you. Yeah, just echoing a lot of what's been said is the tax credits are super important to our industry. I think that, looking forward, we wanna see more in the investments on the transmission side. And obviously in the IRA, I personally, taking off my seahat was excited about the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, funding levels for low-income and minority communities. But just maintaining the IRA as it is, and there is no perfect bill, we definitely understand that. And so wanting to make sure that we can continue to strengthen bills as they come out. But obviously focusing on minority communities, low-income communities, I think that if we wanna get this clean energy transition on track, I think everyone has to be brought to the table. I was gonna say the investment, you mentioned public-private partnerships, but this investment, I think the fact book has, but my number is here, this is like $303.3 billion in investment in 2023 with the data set that we're talking about. It's incredible amounts of money. And it's just clear signals to the market that it's time to invest safely. And that certainty is there. I think also looking at the increasing and manufacturing that we're seeing. And then, oh, by the way, we're reducing emissions. I mean, these are win-wins here. And I know as an organization that engages Republicans, we have a lot of work to do to educate about the blue demand, red supply, or going into red states that's happening. But it's getting more than blue demand and red supply. It's really becoming an American issue of creating homegrown energy, manufacturing, all of that, and all boats can rise. And there were criticisms about the IRA that this was not inflation reduction act. It wasn't really gonna reduce or do anything for the economy. And I think those are been, if anyone's saying that now, they may look like fools because we're seeing just tremendous growth in progress. Thank you. Thank you all. I'd love to invite Tara to come back up because we have at least one question from our online audience. But before I go to that, let me see if there are any questions in the room. Well, if you're thinking about one, let me start with the question that we got from our online audience. It was about battery storage and some of the trends in battery storage. So I think I'll first turn this to Tara and see if anybody has any questions or any additional comments they would want to make. Can you just talk about some of the trends in battery storage? I mean, you mentioned the pairing with solar. Is that short term or is that moving to long term? Where does that sit? The question that was asked was just about the policies that could speed more deployment of long-term energy storage, but I thought maybe it's an opportunity to talk a little bit more about it generally as well. Yeah, fair enough. So there's actually been the battery storage sector, industry, I don't have to keep holding it down. It was awkward, but yeah. Okay, technical difficulties. But it's been growing pretty rapidly and there's been records sort of set every year. So for the last four years, the sector has beat its own records. And I think in 2023, that number was about seven and a half gigawatts across utility scale as well as distributed sort of residential, commercial batteries that are shifting energy around. The challenge of course is moving this to more long-term storage that because most of the batteries today are about four hours storage duration or maybe just a little bit less. It's really hard with today's costs for that to happen in a vacuum, which means policy support is really critical for pushing through the adoption of long-term, long duration battery storage. One of the places where this is happening most rapidly is in California where the entire ecosystem of like the CEC and the CPUC and the IRP development process is essentially centralized such that the state pushes for the different types of firm capacity that they want to see various utilities go out and buy. And one of the things that they have definitely pushed for is more long duration battery storage up to sort of eight hours being procured by various utilities over the next five to 10 years. And without that actively being pushed through by a regulator or supported by a state, it immediately raises these questions about, hey, this is really expensive. Is it fair to do this? Are there cheaper cost options? And that kind of brings us back to the fact that in many parts of the country, gas-cold thermal facilities are the cheaper cost of firm capacity to the grid. It's really only in places where there's a lot of renewables that allows for some of that battery economics to make sense. So a lot more needs to be done before batteries really sort of fulfill their full potential to shift clean energy around. Right, and does anyone else have a comment on policies that support battery deployment? I mean, I would just note for the individual who asked the question that in the Inflation Reduction Act, we had the first time standalone energy storage investment tax credit. And so that's a really important set of policy tools that might help address more robustly some of the economic challenges in the short term. I did have another question from the online audience, but let me first see if there's anybody in the room with the question. Yes. Oh, go ahead. We're gonna go to you next. Thank you for your patience. I was just gonna add that, you know, and this is a little bit, again, adjacent, but that's where apparently where I live on this panel. So I mean, as we think about, again, I wanna support you all and have you build out less grid. So as we think about demand shifting, you know, and trying to shift to more renewable energy, you know, if you think about a peak load in the daytime and you wanna shift, you know, some of that demand to nighttime, you know, thermal energy storage and other types of storage are, you know, and it's not the longterm exciting stuff that you were just talking about there, but you know, that shorter term is gonna be important to kind of stabilize that demand and reduce the peak. So I just didn't wanna not mention that. Just to ask you to linger a little longer, because not everybody is familiar with thermal energy storage. So can you just explain a little bit, and I know a little bit about what trained technologies focuses, maybe just give an example of how in a building it could be used. Sure, I didn't mean to get into like a company thing, but so one of the most exciting parts of my life was going to my company and seeing a big tank in front of the building there, and it's actually a big ice cube. And so we make ice during the day and then we, sorry, we make ice at night and then we use that for cooling during the day. So there are other technologies like that that can kind of help to smooth the demand. So I'm not trying to get into an advertisement, but I just, it's just as a nerd, it's a fascinating piece of technology. Right, I mean, so there's lots of different ways that we can manage these peak demand periods, and obviously there's a lot of grid work and Ali, you were talking about that too, but things like building technologies could offer storage options in ways people may not think. So thanks for sharing that. Any other comments on storage? Go ahead. I was gonna say, I'm gonna nerd out with you a little bit here. I was just at a conference where they were talking about some of the emerging technologies that show a lot of promise. And as we saw in the fact book, we have the industrial emissions sector, the industrial sector is kind of cocked about, it's hard to decarbonize. And a lot of companies were featured at a recent conference I was at and talking about new ideas where they are using thermal batteries, but they're co-citing them with, where wind and solar are in particular, but particularly in the middle of the country where the wind blows a whole lot, they're storing the energy there, deploying it during the evening, hours when the sun is in shining, and really getting really reliable, very inexpensive energy, but also highly concentrated to be able to power, to make cement and steel and big things. And I think that is, to me, I've kind of listened to it and went, I think sense, why didn't I think of that? But also how exciting to think about how entrepreneurs in the market are thinking about co-citing, co-generation and other pieces and using the best technologies I think is something that we all wanna see. Good ROI for it for taxpayer dollars too. Definitely, and that at the end of the day really encapsulates to me what I see when I look at these policies altogether over the last several years, it's that market signal to invest and innovate. And even though we may have some of these technologies on the shelf now or maybe they've been used as pilots, now we have this big momentum push over the next decade to figure out how to expand that, scale it up and come up with new ideas that again may not have been ripe previously. So all these policies have contributed to this really dynamic environment that we're in right now. So I'm gonna go to the gentleman with the question here and there might have been a couple others. There's two, so thank you. And if you don't mind, please introduce yourself. So I'm Jordan. There's a microphone right next to you. Oh, in my face. Yes, hello, Jordan Zambrana, Representative Paul Tonko's office. Yes, so my question is kind of that interesting data that Tara presented kind of on the energy breakdown and to use your knowledge of natural gas kind of having no natural predators there. So as it continues to kind of grow and it's taking share from coal and that is a great thing, is there data showing that maybe perhaps once coal is petered out to a certain level that it will start to take share from renewable energies and question going like what policies could be in place to kind of prevent that or what needs to happen to make sure that natural gas doesn't grow at the expense of renewables? Yeah, great question. So when we look at like some of the longer term, the future scenarios, thinking about as costs today are likely to evolve, what becomes the least cost mix of technologies that can meet growing electricity demand, what we kind of end up seeing is that pattern that we are in today kind of carries out. So a lot of the coal gets replaced by gas and but once you get to a certain point, it's very hard to incorporate beyond a certain threshold renewables into the share of generation. And so we kind of reach a limit to how much renewables you can have. By 2050, I think our last calculation was at about two thirds of the electricity supply, which means that about a third of the power systems needs for base load, flexible ramping to sort of discharge around the renewables as well as to backfill for the days in which, you know, you just have like lower wind and sort of resource available. Batteries can get you so far, but it actually does end up being cheaper to use peaking gas. And so at that point, either we would need the batteries to be very long duration or very cheap in order to essentially shift the cost curves that we see today, because it doesn't really show that gas is likely to be completely displaced by batteries. We need the batteries to become a lot cheaper. And the second is, if we were to get to the point where we simply cannot push that gas out of the system, you need to offset the emissions and find a way to build not just CCS like carbon capture plants, but also the supporting infrastructure, the pipelines, the storage, all of those things so that we can continue to use the fuel, but not emit. Yeah. I mean, that was an excellent question and we can have a whole, we should have a whole session just on that topic. Just a few thoughts and I'll let others on the panel chime in. Energy efficiency, again, bringing it back to reducing the needs that we have on the supply side. There's so much more we can do with energy efficiency. Your boss in particular has really been the leader on thinking about policies on energy efficiency. But again, as we're talking about the supply equation and changing the mix, decarbonizing, we also need to be always thinking about what we can do more on energy efficiency. So that's one thing. And then we talked about it a little bit in some of the slides that Tara pointed out. But if you look at those nascent sectors that really had this kickstart, it was in decarbonization technologies and a lot of those technologies relate to, or have the potential to decarbonize natural gas for all uses in our economy. And there's some really good new data in the fact book, also on things like renewable natural gas as well as hydrogen and CCS. So take a look at that because here we go again with what's needed by customers plus supportive policies, we've really seen a strong jumpstart in those investments. So those are just a few of my thoughts, but let me see if anybody else has any comments on that question. I could just add that from our perspective on the distribution side, part of our clean energy vision is thinking about how we can decarbonize the molecules going through gas pipelines. So we have the system there when needed, but you have R and G and hydrogen blended with natural gas to kind of reduce emissions in the short term while we're working to electrify the system at large. Maybe I could add to that and just gonna be nerdy again. And Ali, I don't know what you'll say about this, but one of the things that New York is looking at where I live is looking at what could we use pipelines to what used to be called waste heat. So if you think about a data center, there's all this heat, could we use that heat to heat homes or schools or hospitals and those sorts of things again, Lisa, reduce that demand that you're talking about. And with a third of the energy still needing to be from natural gas, we're gonna have to think about those ways as well as shifting demand. Like how can we shift demand to other times of the day? So just some more thoughts there. Last thought about that. I mean, we also have a set of policies at the federal level that are regulatory, right? So we just saw in recent weeks the EPA moving forward on the Biden administration's continued power plant regulation discussion, right? So there's a lot going on in addition to what Congress might do in terms of research, development and deployment support or specific policies. We also have at the national level a whole regulatory regime, which is looking at reducing air pollution and also addressing greenhouse gas emissions. So in the power sector, where we're now at like 40% below 2005 levels because we've done more energy efficiency, we've dramatically increased renewable energy deployment, we've switched from coal to natural gas. I mean, that whole portfolio has gotten us where we are now, but we know we wanna get much further down the line. And so we're gonna need all of the policy tools that we have. But in addition to the things that we discussed, we definitely wanna think about the regulatory tools that we have. This gentleman had a question. Thanks, and we'll bring a mic to you. John Wentworth, pedestrians.org. I was curious about hydrogen, anything in the near future coming along with hydrogen, particularly in terms of storing energy for time shifting and as a substitute for methane. Yeah, I think right now, most of our, at least what we think is that the best uses for hydrogen or where most of the demand is likely to come from are sectors that are already set up to use hydrogen, but would just turn to using it from a cleaner source. So rather than from natural gas, by sort of the reduction of natural gas, you'd moved using it through electrolysis, so produced through renewables. The opportunity to use hydrogen either in power or in ammonia or in as methanol as a fuel for shipping, those are still slightly far away. In power, it doesn't necessarily make sense. You could possibly blend in certain amounts of hydrogen with gas-fired power plants, but running pure hydrogen doesn't really make all that much sense to produce electricity from, and even the blending has certain limits. So to get, I guess, the industry of the ground, it's the sectors that are already set up to use it would need to begin, and then the rest would have to pick up. I think there's one other question that we sometimes get asked about hydrogen as a way to decarbonize steel. I think the US steel sector in particular is not really set up to do that. A lot of it is electrified and doesn't necessarily need to sort of do this like fuel-switching thing to then turn to hydrogen. It's fairly clean already, that's another, yeah. Yeah, I'll just say that our members, some of our members are really excited about the prospects for hydrogen, and beyond steel, I think they're looking really at decarbonizing the transportation sector. There is a energy tax credit for hydrogen, and the administration is currently going through the process, the rulemaking process to provide that guidance. So we're waiting for that to come out, and once that's finalized, I think people will start getting even more excited. Well, I would just also say, you're probably aware that they're in the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, the bipartisan infrastructure law. There are hydrogen hubs, and currently there's seven of them throughout the country, and they are coming together with more detail on different hydrogen economies. They're all different. They're different kinds of arrangements, supply, demand, different applications using different fuel sources, all in different geographic jurisdictions around the country. So that's an amazing place to get a snapshot of what people are thinking about hydrogen, and with the public-private partnership model that came from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, plus the tax credits, and other supportive policies on the ground, I mean, it's gonna be really exciting time for hydrogen. So I personally look forward to seeing over the next few years what our data shows on hydrogen, all the applications, and what the benefits it's providing to communities and for jobs. So this has been fabulous. We really appreciate everybody's interest and time and attention, both here in the room and from the online audience. I wanna thank EESI, its entire team, for allowing the Business Council for Sustainable Energy to participate and partner in this briefing today. We watch you, we're watching every two weeks, the different briefings that you put out. We really enjoy our partnership at the COP and in other forums. So Dan, thank you so much for your leadership and thank everybody on BCSE's team and EESI's team for their work in putting the briefing together. Great, thank you, Lisa. Thank you. And I keep a pretty close eye on the RSVP list for our briefing, so Lisa. Yeah, there's some accountability there. Well, thank you, that was a really great session, Lisa, and thanks to Tara and Helen and Allie and Billy and Charles and Heather for that. We actually got another question from our online audience, but it was, and I don't wanna let it go by because it's relevant to some things that were discussed today, but it might not have been, I'm not sure how many people were tracking it who were sitting on the panel today, but Helen had some great slides about building energy codes and you referenced the International Code Council as one of the governing bodies, I guess you would say. Well, the codes are updated every three years and so I worked on the 2021 International Energy Conservation Code when I was the executive director of the Energy Efficient Codes Coalition and vice president of policy at the Alliance to Save Energy and the 2024 IECC was just approved and there was a set of appeals and there was an appeals board and they overturned, and they decided that none of the appeals needed to go forward and yesterday, last night actually, International Code Council, Board of Directors vetoed it. They overturned it. An opportunity to improve building energy efficiency in every state and every jurisdiction that adopts the IECC and poof, it went away. Lots and lots and lots of hard work and I mentioned that because it's a major bummer. I know exactly how much work goes into developing those codes. I know how many people put time and effort into that and I think it's an example of the kinds of opportunities that are there before us and go a lot of hard work, right? Went into the Inflation Reduction Act. Be really nice to be able to take full advantage of it. A lot of hard work went into the 2024 IECC and it would have been really nice to have been able to take advantage of that and every building we build today that's inefficient is a building we have to retrofit and retrofits are more expensive. They're more invasive and in the meantime, that building is gonna generate and contribute to more emissions. So, ugh, it's such a bummer. Anyway, I don't wanna end on a bummer note even though that is a major bummer news and if you come to ESI Briefings, if people mention building energy codes, they get a brownie point. Sometimes they get more time to present because I love building energy codes. But instead of that, I'm gonna end on a series of thank yous. So sincere thanks to Lisa and our panel for being really, really excellent discussants today and bringing lots of cool and interesting issues to the forum. Bloomberg, NEF, an amazing job and Tara, I really appreciated and learned a lot from your presentation today. So, special thanks to you all. Big thanks to Senator Schumer for helping us get the room today. Very, very nice of him and his team for that. Big thanks to the House and Senate Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Caucus and their leadership. Senators Reid, Crapo, Van Hollen and Collins and on the House side, Representative Cleaver. Big thanks to the Conservative Climate Caucus, Representative Curtis and his vice chairs and all of the staff that work with those members as well and also the Sustainable Energy and Environment Coalition Representative Tonko for all of his leadership. The caucuses are doing really, really important work to help people on and off the hill understand what we talked about today. And I wanted to make a couple of plugs related to those caucuses. One is the Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Caucus that works with us to sponsor every year the Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Expo and Policy Forum that'll happen towards the end of July. So, another good reason to sign up for Climate Change Solutions, our bi-weekly newsletter so you don't miss that. It's a day long. If you like this, multiply it by four. It's a series of panels. It's exhibition space. It's a reception. It's fun. And so we're really, really eager to work with leadership of the Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Caucuses on that. As another example I wanted to plug a sustainable energy and environment coalition has produced an Inflation and Reduction Act website resource to help inform consumers as well as other organizations about how they can take advantage of the IRA tax credits in particular. CEC's also helping congressional offices to host the IRA page on their own website to help that information get to their constituents. And so for staff in the room, if you are not currently working with the three caucuses that helped bring us this session today, if we can help you meet the right people for sure, these are great, great congressional organizations and they do a tremendous service to the institution. And they're generally, I think universally a delight to work with. And so I definitely encourage you to get in touch with them. Lisa mentioned that I have a great team because I have a great team. So thanks to Dan Oh, to Omri, Allison, Aaron, Anna, Molly, and Nicole for all the hard work bringing the session today. Also big thanks to our spring interns, Emily, Kylie, and Megan. They're great. And videographer Troy, we couldn't do it without you. So thanks once again. We'll be back on the Hill on April 2 for the National Security Climate Adaptation Nexus. That's a good one. We'll be back on April 16th for demystifying ocean carbon dioxide removal. And then that's gonna be done in partnership with the World Resources Institute. Stay tuned, there's lots more to come. Again, climate change solutions is a great way to stay up to date with everything and everything, including this livecast. If anyone wants to go back and revisit the presentations or review presentation materials or eventually read summary notes, you can do that by visiting us online at www.esi.org. At some point, there is another survey slide. Oh, I clicked one too many times. It's okay. If we're willing to take the survey, we'd really appreciate that and we can help you get that link after the fact. So thanks everybody. Hope you have a great rest of your Thursday. I guess today's like the first full day of spring. Anyway, time is flying, but thanks for joining us today. Thanks again, Lisa and everyone at BCSC and thanks to the panelists and have a great afternoon. Thanks.