 Welcome to the briefing this afternoon on the 2013 Solar Industry Job Census. This is the afternoon when we are very excited that we're going to be able to hear the results of this important job census to find out what is what the latest information is both across the country as well as finding out some state-specific information as well about this very very important burgeoning new area that we've seen in which we've seen tremendous growth over the last decade. My name is Carol Werner. I'm the Executive Director of the Environmental and Energy Study Institute and this briefing is part of a whole series of briefings that we will be holding throughout the year in terms of looking at technology, science, and policy issues before the Congress. And so as I said we are very very thrilled to be releasing information with regard to this important report. We did just receive word that Congresswoman Anna Eshoo will not be able to join us that there were some folks that had just arrived with whom she had to meet and will not therefore be able to make it down in time to speak at the briefing this afternoon, which is a shame because she is someone who has really embraced the need for this country to move forward on a clean energy economy. She has been a voice for innovation, addressing competitiveness, and of course coming from the Silicon Valley area knows all too well how important technology development and innovation are in terms of really driving an economy forward. So let's get to it in terms of finding out what is going on with regard to jobs in the solar industry. What are we learning? Where are things? And so to start us off with the findings of this new report is Andrea Luecky who is the president and executive director of the Solar Foundation. Thank you Carol. It's a pleasure to be here today. We just released three new reports this morning and numbers for all 50 states and unfortunately our website is a little bit crashed out because of the high volume but you can check out all that information on solarstates.org. But I'm here today just to talk about solar jobs in general. We have over the last four years tracked industry growth in terms of employment. Okay, well let me just give you a few words about who we are. We are a national C3 nonprofit. We are focused on increasing understanding of solar energy through strategic research that educates the public and helps to inform and transform markets. We are headquartered in D.C. but as I said we are national and just to be clear we are not an industry funded group. So over the last four years we've put out the National Solar Job Census report. In 2010 we released our seminal baseline report which found over 93,000 solar workers across the country. Based on the success of that report we rolled out updates in 2011, 2012 and then another very comprehensive baseline effort again in 2013. We just released this last report two weeks ago and it was very widely received, very well received and it was in partnership with the BW research partnership which is a labor market research firm and the GW Solar Institute. So we through our data collection effort we made nearly 74,000 phone calls and sent almost 11,000 emails to thousands upon thousands of companies. We collected hundreds of thousands of data points from companies. We found 18,000 establishment locations. That's up from 15,000 in the year before. Our methodology is highly rigorous. It's survey based. It's modeled after the Bureau of Labor Statistics methodology and our margin of error is plus or minus 1.3% which is significantly lower than any industry studies of its kind. Our definition of a solar worker is somebody who spends at least 50% of their time working on solar activities. But what we found is that nearly 91% of people work 100% of their time in solar. So our definition of a solar worker is as you know 50%. Some may say we are over counting, right? But we find that this metric is a very reasonable proxy considering that 91% work at least 100% of their time in solar. So we're tracking employment by industry sector. We're looking at PV, concentrating solar power, solar heating and cooling. We're looking at jobs all the way up and down the supply chain in installation, manufacturing, sales and distribution, project development and other which represents jobs and research and development, people in academia, people that work for nonprofits like myself. And we asked many questions. We were on the phone with these people for you know 15, 20 minutes and we had 30, 35 questions that we asked them. Obviously how many jobs do you currently have? How many jobs do you expect to have over the next 12 months? What percentage of your revenues are attributable to solar? How much do you pay your workers? What are the average wages? What skills are required? What education background is required? What are your perceptions of policy? What are your barriers to growth? And you know tell us a little bit about your workers. What is the demographic makeup of your workforce? We did an oversample in California, Minnesota and Arizona this year. And those are the three reports that I mentioned that we just released this morning. So we did a deep dive oversampling in those three states. So what we recently found is that there are over 142,000 solar workers across the country at 18,000 locations and that these are very good jobs. These are high paying jobs, high skilled jobs and jobs that are highly sought after. In 2010, as I mentioned, there were 93,000 solar workers and now there's nearly 143,000. This represents a growth of 53% or nearly 50,000 new jobs over the course of three years. So not a lot of industries can really tout that kind of success. As you can see coal mining is still smaller than the solar industry and they grew only by 0.25%. And fossil fuel electric generation shed workers. They shed about 8,000 workers during the same time period. We created 24,000 workers. They lost 8,000 workers. So the solar industry is a strong and a quickly growing employer of American workers. So what are some of these drivers to this growth? Obviously cost reductions are probably the most prominent, most important driver. Over the last several years, we've seen huge drops in component prices and the cost of install capacity. It's gone from $6 a watt to approximately $3 a watt in just three short years. That coupled with increased awareness from consumers, increased adoption by consumers because of these price drops, that's what's fueling a lot of this growth. Then of course in some places, in some cases, you have policies that are designed to accelerate both the drop in prices and the uptick of consumer adoption. So in our deep dive, we found that California is the number one solar state. It has about a third of all the workers across the country and 40% of all installed capacity. It's long been a leader. It's been an incubator of the industry for decades. So it's really not at all a surprise that California is number one with 47,000 solar workers. In the Bay Area, there's about 20,000 solar workers. In the Southern California area, there's 10,000, and in the inland empire, which is just to the east of LA, there's about 5,000 solar workers. So California added more jobs than any other state, added 3,500 jobs, and currently has 47,000. Workers in California earn more than workers across the country. They earn 63 cents more per hour than other solar workers in other states. And they're more optimistic about future growth, too. Nationally, solar employers expect to grow by about 15.6%, but in California, they're even more bullish expecting to grow by about 22%. So it's all coming up roses in California, or at least that's what it would seem. Arizona is a little bit different. Despite having the number one solar resource in the nation, it had a tough year. It lost 1,200 jobs. There are a variety of reasons as to why. It's hard to say exactly why. We think that it's largely due to the Solana plant in Gila Bend recently being completed, but there are other factors as well. But I think it's the growth rate, the anticipated growth rate that they're expecting next year that's really the biggest signal. Employers are not bullish at all. They only anticipate growing by 5.6%. So there's a lot of uncertainty in Arizona right now in terms of their ability to grow. And it's a shame because Arizona has, as I said, the greatest solar resource in this country. Minnesota is an interesting case. A small solar market, it only has 858 jobs. It's ranked 31st. But the potential is tremendous. Minnesota is mandated, there's a solar curve out and it's mandated to create or have 450 megawatts of solar by the end of the decade by 2020. That's a 30-fold increase in installed capacity. And what we're finding is that while the industry is becoming more labor efficient, jobs are nearly directly correlated with an increase in installed capacity. And so when you see installations going up and where you see installations going up, that's where you have jobs. So our map, which is accessible at solarstates.org, hopefully you won't run into any technical problems there, it gives a baseball card profile snapshot of each state. It's pretty fun to play with if you have a couple minutes, see where your state is at. Nearly 90% of the states grew. Only five states contracted and two states remained flat. So it's a really positive story nationwide. Not only did the U.S. solar industry nationally grow by 20%, which outpaced the U.S. economy by 10-fold, but you're just seeing so much growth across all states or nearly all states. The five states that contracted are Arizona, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Oregon, and Alaska. And this heat map represents the top 10. Well, the little sun represent the top 10. And as you can see, our solar can be harnessed just about anywhere in the country. It's not constrained by geography, by solar resource, or by political lines or party lines. There are blue states and red states that have solar, most notably in terms of red states. There's Texas, Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia. These are hot solar markets. And they're not, you know, they're red states. And that's okay. I think that's very promising. So this is the list of our top 20. There were some ties, probably should have listed them a little bit different to represent the ties better. And Washington is actually tied also with Maryland. This is an old version of my slide. But as you can see, with the asterisk, there are seven states that grew by 1500 jobs or more. That's very notable, I think. But California is the big leader. It has five times more jobs than Arizona, number two. This slide shows how the states have changed in terms of rank. And among the leaders, there were a lot of, there was a lot of movement. The four, the top four states remain the same from last year to this year. So California, Arizona, New Jersey, and Massachusetts didn't shift or change. But, you know, as you can see, there's a lot of competition, there's a lot of shifting, a lot of moving, everyone's trying to position themselves as a leader. And, and it's a very dynamic time for our industry. North Carolina, in terms of growth rate of our top 10 states, had the, had the greatest or, or, or largest growth rate at 121% more than doubled. This is largely due to all the utility scale installations that are happening or started happening since late 2012. In 2013, they're expecting a 138% increase in utility scale installations. And North Carolina is going to be the third, is going to be ranked third in terms of utility scale installations in 2013. So that's a state to watch. So 20 states more than doubled their solar growth. 18 of them were in the south, in the Midwest, or in the mountain region. Wyoming had the greatest growth or the highest growth at 580%. You know, these growth rates are astronomical. You just see, you know, 400%, 300%. You know, you're thinking how is that possible? But you have to, you have to really look at the fact that these states are coming or growing from a smaller base. California, you know, by contrast, California had an 8% growth rate, and it created 3,500 jobs. Wyoming had a 580% growth rate, and created 290 jobs. So there's a huge difference. So when you look at growth rates, I think you really need to, you know, take it with a grain of salt. Really, it's about actual numbers of jobs that were created. And this just shows the breakdown of jobs by sector. On the far top left is the national picture. About half were in installation, 21% are in manufacturing. In New Jersey, three quarters are in installation. In Arizona, about 40% are in installation. There is a treasure trove of data on our website. And in our reports, so I do encourage you to take a peek. And if you have any questions, of course, I'm happy to try and answer them. Thank you. So for another perspective with regard to the solar census, we'll turn to our next speaker who is Amit Ronan. Amit is the director of the GW Solar Institute and is a professor at the George Washington University Trachtenberg School of Public Policy. And of course, he also brings many years of experience up here on the hill where he worked over on the Senate side for Senator Maria Cantwell for a number of years. And so another office who that was really, really leading with regard to looking at technology. Amit? Thanks, Carol. Thanks so much for hosting us today. As Carol mentioned, I'm Amit Ronan from GW Solar Institute at George Washington University. And pleased, I'm excited to be partnering with the Solar Foundation on the census this year. We are going to be my presentation focused on some of the policy questions and interesting findings that we come out of the census. And I'd like to start with two charts. So even though there's about a snowstorm coming outside, no one's really thinking of solar right now. Here are two charts to show you what's going on. This is the first one. And you don't even have to worry about, you know, what those numbers say specifically, but it's really about that arrow. And it's the cost of panels and the declining cost has really been a huge market driver and translates to a lot of the findings that we're seeing in the census. So specifically in the last five years, the cost of solar panels has declined 80% since 2008, which has led fundamentally to a market transformation on the affordability and of these panels. And if we had that, this one goes back to 2001. If we went back to 1976, solar costs are down 99%. So it's a very different era from when solar was tried in the 70s under notably President Carter, who is pushing solar. Some people are still in that mindset in terms of solar potential, but it's a world of difference in what's out there. And in the future, those costs are expected to decline. The Department of Energy under the Sunshot Initiative, which Jason should tell us more about, they have a goal by 2020 of making solar dollar a watt. And that is considered commercially competitive, solar is competitive in some markets now, but that will be on an equal footing with all different solar technologies. So that's chart number one. The other chart goes the other way. And we're seeing incredible growth in the solar industry. During our census time period, the snapshot that we took in 2013 capacity jumped quite a bit. We're almost at 13 gigawatts of capacity now. When we have the data, we'll be able to add one more bar there and you'll see those green boxes there are going to grow quite a bit. And that's concentrating solar power. So that's utility scale solar where typically you see that as mirrors or arrays in the deserts. And there are a bunch of very large projects coming online to almost all in the desert Southwest. And those are multi billion dollar projects hundreds of mega watts capacity. And a lot of people are very enthusiastic to see how that plays with the larger grid. And you'll see that that far to will continue. And last year was actually the first year that there was more solar installed than wind capacity in our country. Granted, it was a bad year for wind because of some underlying tax policies. But it's a remarkable growth in the in the solar industry. And of course, as a academic, we always have to have on the other hand, on the other hand, in this case is that we're, we're going from a very small base. Solar is still only half a percent roughly of the US electricity mix and demand. But it has potential to grow. So the first primary finding that we see that sort of embedded in all everything in the census is that the jobs are falling where the installation is. So that's an important trend because maybe it's self evidence. But if you think deeper into it, sometimes there's manufacturing one center of our economy. But the job, so where the jobs are, but the, the capacity and everything else is in other places. But here there's a very, very close correlation. So if you think about solar is not even being been able to outsource abroad in terms of some of these jobs here, even the jobs themselves, the installation jobs are very local jobs. So the people who are putting in the installation, they're the ones who are getting the jobs in case in point, of course, is California. As Andrea mentioned a couple times, this is a chart from last year, 43,000 jobs. Now with the new job numbers, we know that solar jobs grew by 8% in California, 3,500 new jobs. And, and we see that in the, in the other states too. So it's not also in the other states, you might have noticed it's not necessarily where the solar potential is, you know, New Jersey, Massachusetts, the top, top states, they're not the sunniest states around, but they have the policies and the underlying support for, for the installations and they're benefiting from jobs. The other hand, the other hand in this case is that California, this is, they were ranked number three, now they're ranked fifth per capita. You have to remember California, of course, is a huge market in its own right, always ranked as, you know, above a lot of European countries in terms of its size. So of course, they're going to have a lot of jobs. Vermont now has the distinction of being the number one state per capita for solar jobs. And another interesting thing, a side note on California is they have 145,000 systems installed. So a lot of rooftops, their, their next highest state is Arizona now with their rank number two. They actually only have 21,000 systems installed on their, their state, but only they have a third of the capacity of California. So a lot of numbers to show that basically, again, that if you're doing installation and rooftop installation, so small scale, you're going to, you get a lot more jobs out of that than even the utility scale power structures. Okay, so another finding we've found. So we added some more interesting policy questions this year to try and figure out, well, what's the go no go decision that consumers are making when it comes to going solar? What, where, where is this coming from? And we found that if you look basically you can aggregate the first two bars there that overwhelmingly people are going for solar, because they want to save money. And that correlates to the first two charts. Solar costs have declined dramatically. It's become affordable in a lot of cases. A lot of that has to also do with new financing options, pioneered by people like son Edison that we'll hear from in a minute that allow people to say solar leasing is one proper option. You can put solar on your roof now, no money down. And all you have to do is pay less on your electricity bill every month. So for a lot of people, that's a no brainer. Why wouldn't I go solar? That's a great deal from a lot of things. But we were surprised. And the numbers here are actually 85% in California. So you think of California as being, Oh, they're doing it because they're green. And they like, they want to worry about climate change. California, the numbers are even stronger. And some of the other benefits that you typically associate with solar, of course, they're still there. But they're not the primary driver for consumers picking it up. So that could be stuff like, Well, you see it up there, pollution reduction. Because my neighbor has one, I want to get one region, you know, the power goes out a lot. Maybe you want your backup power. That's not not a big driver. And it may it may also show a trend which we're picking up, which is that so solar was was being built in the earlier years and previous years, you get the earlier adopters who are willing to pay a premium, because they get those other environmental benefits. For example, they're very passionate about the environment. But now we're reaching a new market market segment, where people are doing it because the economics are there. And that correlates somewhat to this this interesting finding we asked, Well, how, how do you think your customers, because again, we surveyed all these thousands and thousands of solar businesses, how are your customers figuring out where information about solar. So maybe this is a part of the digital age, but that people are doing internet searches is a big part of it or word of mouth. But if you look at the numbers, I think the interesting thing there is that people are, they're the ones seeking solar information. So your traditional sources of when you're trying to sell a business, whether it's media or advertising, that's really in terms of the solar industry's perspective, a small part of it. People are enthusiastic about solar. We see that 90 plus percent of people in America when in a recent poll are enthusiastic about solar, but right now only about 1% of people have them. We asked a related question, which we don't have a chart about, but is has some has some interesting results. And we asked, Well, do you think that the that your local utility company and your friends and neighbors understand the benefits of solar? And only about half of the people responded said they thought that. And when it came to their member of Congress on two thirds of people thought that their member of Congress did not understand the benefit of solar. Alright, so that's sort of part of the more detailed findings of the census. We're gonna I was gonna quickly highlight some of the overarching trends that we see going on in this in the solar industry because it gonna have a big effect on you know what next year census gonna show in the year after that. So on the sunny side of things, what's the good news stories here? Well, we know that solar employment probably just based on the increasingly affordability that there's a lot of market to expand that the solar employment's going to keep growing. We see double digit growth rates for at least the next decade. We see the solar employers themselves, as Andrea mentioned, over 15 15% growth rate. That's their estimation of what's going to happen in 2014. And that's another 24,000 jobs. I just mentioned the 90% plus approval rating in terms of enthusiasm for solar. Then we have a lot of market priming going on that's going to underlie future growth from our government and major businesses. So this administration has been enthusiastic about solar energy and incorporating renewables. We have the Interior Department since 2009 has approved 25 utility scale facilities. We have our largest electricity user in the world, the US military. They're committed to you picking up three gigawatts of solar by 2025. That's an important market. And then last December, President Obama signed a executive order that's requiring the federal government to get 20% of its demand from renewables by 2020. And then the second part of that is business. It's not just government supported things. The top 25 corporate solar users. So these are people who have already they're a little bit ahead of the curve, perhaps seeing the benefits of solar. They're actually going going all in there increasing their capacity 50%. That's what they did in this past year. So people like Walmart, who is actually the largest solar installer in the country. They have 215 installations. IKEA has solar on 89% of their buildings. We have Coles Department Store is another enthusiastic solar provider. And the economics makes sense for them. So the stat there is over 50 million Americans live within 20 miles of a solar powered Coles Department Store. And then finally the other important trend to note here is that we're actually far behind other countries in terms of installation. The US is now the number three solar market behind Japan and China. And we only have about 13% of the world market. Other nations are making just massive investments and commitments to going solar. We got China. They're planning 40 gigawatts of solar by 2015. So just in a few years time. I remember I mentioned we only have 13 gigawatts here. They're going to put in 40 in a few years. We have places even like oil rich Saudi Arabia. They said they're going to do 16 gigawatts of solar in the next 20 years. So they're they're basically going from zero. So why does a place like Saudi Saudi Arabia they're sitting on a sea of oil sea of gas. Why would they go solar? Well first they have really good solar resources. It's hot and dry over there. But also they know that solar is going to be one of the largest growth industries in the 21st century. They need jobs for a for a big population young population that they have there. And they also know that they if they produce solar at home that's more oil and gas they can sell to other countries that aren't quite ahead there. So they'll make it. And I saw recently Sun Edisons even looking at Saudi Arabia and manufacturing there. Maybe we'll hear a little bit more about that from Bob. But that is that is opportunity not just for those countries that are making those investments but also perhaps for our American manufacturers. So that's the sunny side of things. There's also cloudy. Not everything is well and good because and these are some of the dynamics that we see that will affect what the future job potential and growth rates are here. So one of the big ones you may have heard about it from your states depending on where you are. But there's a growing battles between utilities and solar distributed solar in particular. And we're those are likely to continue. Andrea mentioned it in the context of Arizona that that might have been part of the pullback there. We have seen in for example in Arizona the Arizona public service which is the largest utility they spent nine million dollars in essentially anti solar ads and anti distributed solar ads trying to influence regulators and the public there that distributed generation didn't make sense. We saw on the other hand of course is that the solar industry was hitting back and saying why are you taking away consumer choice. We're seeing interesting dynamics in places like Georgia where Tea Party Green Tea Party they call it. So there's Tea Party people and environmentalists are getting together to promote solar for different reasons but with a common shared goal and that is having a impact on on public opinion. So that's one of the big things that we're watching closely because it's playing out increasingly it sort of correlates pretty strongly with wherever you have higher penetration rates. That's where there's pushback from some of the incumbent suppliers right now. Another key factor here that that is much of it is in Congress's Bailiwick is the public policies and incentives that we underlie a lot of the business models right now and there's a lot of uncertainty around that. So on the federal level we had the eight-year ITC the investment tax credit that's essentially 30% of any federal any project whether it's small or big is paid for by the federal government that was passed in October of 2008 so it expired. It was an eight-year policy allowed a lot of these investments to go forward both in new companies you know the pretty strong correlation between the drop in PV price this but a lot of the big concentrating solar projects that take years to build they need to get billions of dollars in capital from financial markets they're no longer able to do that because their project is going to take a couple years to build and the and the banks are saying well we don't know if Congress will extend the ITC after 2016 so that's a big one for the industry and you know what happens next here in Congress whether it's people are talking about it through tax extenders through when tax reform comes along it's probably the single most important factor in solar's future and then another thing I want to mention if you weren't following this closely that but there's a pretty major solar trade war going on and it is a bit of battle here in the US the industry is split between the manufacturers of solar panels and the people who install them there are hybrid people that do both but essentially that there was a complaint by a major manufacturer here in the US that the Chinese were dumping cheap solar panels on to our markets which we're doing that in an uncompetitive way so terrorists were put on that there were countervailing tellers but put on by China but without getting into all the the mucky details that is creating a lot of people who want to move forward on projects this is something that that creates churn and uncertainty and probably a negative drag on on growth we did ask this specific question in the in the census whether they thought basically that affordable or cheap solar panels from China were a benefit or a harm to their business and I guess no surprise but the results were largely split about 56% of project developers so the people who use those cheap solar panels when they put them on people's roofs or in larger arrays they like that in about a quarter of the surveyed companies said that the Chinese cheap Chinese panels were a bad thing for them for their industries and finally I wanted to mention that you know what since we are looking forward and trends and what's going to happen next couple years that you always have to take this in consideration what are the the competitors to solar and of course now we have a abundance of cheap natural gas it's really been a paradigm shift in the industry energy industry right now that's taking mostly the brunt out of coal is being hurt most for a cheap natural gas but that's something you look at and also congress could play a big role in that if they they start incorporating some of the externalities associated with solar's competitors namely its contribution to climate change and whether there's increased spill regulations or what have you given some of the the recent oil train spills or the coal mining related spill in West Virginia and that sort of thing that's what we we're looking at and thank you for having us and here's Carol so now we're going to turn to someone who is doing this every day and to hear a little bit about the business perspective with regard to what's going on in his industry we are very very glad to be joined by Bob Powell who is the president of Sun Edison North America well great thank you very much for that and if I could just make one slight change when you're introducing me I actually think that we're all doing it here just happens to be in different areas and and I and I know you understand that spirit totally but yes I offer perspective that is definitely on the ground in terms of building projects in the field every day and so Sun Edison as being one of the originators in the US of the solar business which started in the distributed generation part of the business is is one that I think we've seen an awful lot in the solar industry so many of the trends we see up here I think about it's very pragmatic on a daily basis I'll walk you through a little bit about Sun Edison and maybe an intersection with public policy and innovation as well it's pretty clear to me that as I have been at Sun Edison before that actually was part of energy having sold a solar company that I ran to energy and then in a utility Pacific gas and electric company which is based in San Francisco I've seen a lot of different perspectives on this but solar has been incredibly impactful on our economy I live in California now obviously very big in California but many other parts of the US here and certainly globally as well so when you see trends like the installed cost of solar when I started was it seven and eight dollars per unit per watt all the way down to two and below two dollars a watt there's something that went on there I think a lot of it was about innovation and actually think that public policy had a huge impact on that without local incentives without federal help via the ITC accelerated appreciation and other forms of help we would not have gotten to the point where we are now and that is we've put an awful lot of solar in the ground and we've gotten more and more competitive with the help of public officials from a policy perspective so it's really exciting and I hope we continue to see that partnership so just a couple of thoughts about Sun Edison and how it intersects with this we're actually a reasonably old company right about 55 years old we're a publicly listed company and so we have 6,000 employees in 25 global locations we actually have 2,000 of those employees here in the US 600 of which are only focused on solar my part of the business we do business in 6 continents we have pretty large number 1.1 gigawatts of solar interconnected worldwide it's an awful lot of solar and then we have a very large pipeline of projects over 3 gigawatt pipeline now I'll give you a few more facts about Sun Edison as we go through but I don't want it to be an advertisement but not just us but solar in general our industry is very ubiquitous we don't just play with utilities we also are very present in your local communities as well not just at the utility level but in the homes very small systems commercial industrial customers government agencies municipalities throughout this country now with our installed base we have actually installed projects in 20 of our 50 states it's a pretty broad coverage and last year from a job perspective and in the US or North America we actually did about 200 megawatts and so if you use some people estimate between 15 to 30 people per job 200 megawatts pretty simple math that tells you how many jobs in addition to the Sun Edison employees we have it's an awful lot and what's interesting and I would concur with the comments about the jobs we create in solar those are not easily outsourceable jobs we're talking about construction workers engineers a lot of people in our local communities permitting agencies landowners etc who all benefit from solar projects both big and small so there's a lot of job creation there and we're very proud about it so with the different businesses that we have here at least in terms of our philosophy I think I'm it made a comment about utilities fighting distributed generation I actually think there's a different way to engage with the communities and the utilities being one of those we actually think that we should be working together with utilities to embrace perhaps energy efficiency programs coupled with distributed generation and we're seeing a lot of great partnerships coming there so one of the things we need to think about is how do we work together in our communities and with the businesses and for me very pragmatically it's just really simple if I work with the utility I'm probably going to be much more successful on a long-term basis because utilities have been around for a long long time and they understand very well the regulatory processes and so we see our view of solar is working together with our communities and participants in the marketplace so what I have here is our set of offices and we actually in Sun Edison do upstream manufacturing some in the US some of the other parts of the globe as well so we start with the raw materials the polysilicon we don't do everything we have to outsource some components of this but ultimately it gets us back to some manufacturing in the US is across the country and as I said projects in 20 of our US states with California and Arizona certainly being the largest ones Massachusetts is huge New York I would say commensurate with what we saw before is a huge upcoming state my home state of Georgia very interestingly enough I'm very excited about many projects going on there as well so our worldwide pipeline is very US focused by far the largest proportion of our pipeline which is really projects that we have some good visibility into we may not have all the agreement signed but we think we have a good sense that we're going to have a project 44% of our pipeline is in the US and yes there are a lot of other parts the globe I am excited about the announcement we made about working with the kingdom in Saudi Arabia and a really great joint venture relationship there and I think I'm it was exactly right for the kingdom it's very much about a couple of things but one thing is clear it's about jobs as well they realize that solar can be very impactful in their community with jobs in addition to preservation the economic value of that petroleum resource they have in there and then our backlog which is more near term but let me I'll give you a sort of a ground level view of how I think about this in innovation first off without public policy and different incentives across the globe I would never have been able to assemble or build the projects that I've had that I've built in the past or these that I have here and when I have such a large pipeline like this it really forces me to get better and so as a business someone who runs a large component of a business public policy enabling me to get to the point where I can have a large business like this has really forced me and the rest of the participants in this business to get better and better again resulting in much lower cost which I think with the right support we can continue to do and continue to build a great solar industry that competes with any form of energy generation so finally from a policy perspective there are few things that are really important to us and then we would perhaps like to see as we know the ITC the 30% ITC is reducing to a 10% level in 2016 at least programmatically there are a few things that could be very helpful and very helpful to jobs in the solar marketplace one we'd like to see the commenced construction rules and via the extenders bill to deploy more solar allowed effectively what that allows us to do is take projects we start in 2016 continue to enjoy the benefits of the ITC I think we'd like to see some form of ITC or a production tax credit as an option in the future that would be excellent and would allow us to continue the growth in solar I think there's some other things as well like public private partnerships with ourselves the armed forces and the federal government in general being the largest energy user is a great area and encouraging more solar via renewable energy goals is great in fact I'm flying from cold DC here down to Arizona to do a ribbon cutting in Tucson for the Davis Month and Air Force Base solar project that we helped build so I'm very excited about that so that partnership I think can be really great with us in the industry and so certainly working on free trade and import tariffs that could be a huge deal killer for us as well and on the state side there are a lot of policies that really help us in California the California solar initiative was one of the original ones was very impactful the renewable portfolio standards that the utilities in the state of California were required to implement was very helpful and I would actually say that public policy particularly on the state level what's interesting is as I've watched solar go across the U.S. it's actually been a bit of an incubator for innovative thoughts in terms of how you encourage via public policy investment we've been a lot of different systems tried in the states California you collect from the utility customers for smaller projects and then you fund solar projects directly other markets have these renewable energy credits or wrecks that you can trade a lot of other different interesting ideas that states have had and have tried and so I actually think that part of what solar is done is help public policymakers think of different ways to encourage investment and it's really worked we've seen great markets Massachusetts has a very interesting marketplace as well on New York is up and burgeoning I think New Jersey had an interesting one that had some hiccups but was really a good way for other states to think about how to craft their public policies so in short solar is a big job creator and our partnership with public officials via the public policies has been very impactful I would like to see it continue because I think this is a great industry that means an awful lot to us and so that I think I'll in my discussion and we'll get another perspective here thank you and before we open it up for our discussion we're going to hear from Jason Jason Walsh who is senior advisor to the Department of Energy's Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy because the Department of Energy has made a lot of difference in terms of policy over the years and in terms of the investments in R&D and in terms of research development and deployment and to hear a little bit more about those goals and how that's transpired we welcome Jason thanks thank you Carol good afternoon everybody I want to thank Carol and the ESI team for inviting me to speak and it's a pleasure to be here today and to join my illustrious co-panelists I'm going to focus my remarks on as Carol suggested DOE's role with our many partners in developing this industry and in particular what we are focused on now with respect to our SunShot initiative and attempts to drive down the cost of solar deployment I do think it's worth taking a step back to note just how far solar has come in the last few decades and how that process is sort of broken through the sound barrier over the last several years a meat covered much of this in his slide so I'm just going to simply underline for emphasis but the numbers are rather startling rooftop solar panels today cost roughly one percent of they of what they did 35 years ago when DOE first started investing in solar R&D and the prices have dropped more than three quarters since 2008 since 2008 total U.S. solar PV deployment has jumped by a factor of 13 passing the 10 gigawatt milestone last year and as a meat mentioned it's we're already approaching 13 gigawatts this year so the chart is in a sense a combination of two charts that I mean showed you showing costs going down down down and deployment going up up up and it's a fairly straightforward story and a good one I do think it's important to emphasize that this kind of dramatic cost reduction did not emerge from a vacuum right Bob mentioned the importance of public policy couldn't agree with him more there are a number of other factors at play as well one of those has been the collaboration between DOE our national labs and private industry over the last three plus decades a few years back we commissioned a third-party evaluation of the impacts of ERES investments solar R&D from the inception of DOE in the mid-1970s 2008 actually right before the takeoff of solar deployment which estimated conservatively that ERES roughly three point seven billion dollar total investment over that time period yielded a net economic benefit of about fifteen billion dollars now if that if that analysis were taken into 2013 I suspect the ROI number would be significantly higher a part of this analysis was building a counterfactual of what cost and reliability curves for solar modules would have looked like in the absence of DOE support that you probably can't see these particular figures which is not all that helpful but the the analysis essentially the bottom line of it is that it estimated counterfactual estimated that ERES investments in solar R&D accelerated the industry by roughly 12 years right which is essentially the difference between an industry that has cost competitive today and an industry that would not have been cost competitive today in the absence of that support I think those kind of numbers can get a little abstracted so I think it's at times important to put a face in the name on what some of this looks like in the 1990s DOE's national renewable energy lab worked with an early partner solar cells incorporated proving a thin film cost structure that gave rise to more than a dozen startups that that were designing and manufacturing thin film PV modules one of those startups was called first solar as some of you probably know it's now a global leader in PV manufacturing based in Ohio together EERE NREL and first solar developed a unique process for manufacturing high efficiency thin film cadmium telluride cells which was a process that won a 2003 R&D 100 award and really considered in many ways a significant milestone in the development of solar technology and in driving down costs jump ahead in 2012 when first solar installed its 10 millionth PV module in the desert sunlight solar farm project in California which when it's completed in 2015 will be one of the two largest solar projects in PV projects in the world right so these are numbers but they're also the individual companies and a whole lot of workers I work for EERE but I would remiss if I didn't mention that just as we play an instrumental role in technology development as DOE we also play a crucial role in financing right and this is particularly true in the utility scale market so as you see on this slide the utility scale market had zero projects if you go to the left of that graph just a few years ago then five projects all of which were supported by DOE's loan program office with loan guarantees and now we are up to 15 projects amounting to roughly two and a half gigawatts of installed capacity in the pipeline or just being commissioned as we speak and as you can see all the most recent projects have been privately financed right and so the I think the bottom line takeaway here is that loan guarantees from DOE made those first five projects bankable and proved the financial viability of these projects to utilities and investors which is really a central role that DOE plays we reduce risk for the private sector on both the technology side and then on the financing side as well so now we're in 2014 which I think will be in some ways considered the breakout year for concentrating solar power you can see the basic stats here for three of the loan program office supported CSP projects Ivan Pa just came online and in fact the ribbon cutting is going to be later this week out in California one of the most important things about this technology as I think many of you know is that it is dispatchable base load power it can keep providing electricity peak load and even for hours after the sun goes down it's worth noting that all of the technologies that are central to CSP thermal energy storage parabolic troughs power towers dish systems have been developed with extensive R&D support from EER over a number of years let me transition to talking about our Sunshot initiative it was launched in February 2011 as a national effort to make solar power cost-competitive with conventional sources of electricity by 2020 may have many may have heard and and Amit mentioned the Sunshot target of a dollar a watt for for utility scale solar by 2020 I think some people thought that goal was wildly ambitious a few years ago when we began Sunshot but three years into a 10-year initiative the solar industry has achieved roughly 60 percent of that goal now having said that the next 40 percent it's going to be harder if you look closely at this waterfall chart you'll see that the lion's share of the progress has been in the reduction of module costs which is that is the blue bar there blue color bar if you take a look at the gold colored bar that's changed very little since 2008 and this this represents what we call balance of system costs sometimes known as soft costs which includes costs ranging from permitting and citing and labor to financing and inspection and maintenance soft costs are decreasing very slowly right for those of you who who really want to wonk out on soft costs there are two reports from our national labs Lawrence Berkeley and again NREL that really sort of pick apart the sort of the constituent parts of these different soft costs and make some very interesting comparisons across countries one of the the interesting data points you'll find in the LB analysis is that the soft costs for installing a rooftop solar panel in the US are about five times higher than they are in Germany so this is where we are today in 2010 soft costs accounted for up to 50% of the price of a solar PV system and in 2012 they were 64% of the total residential system price right so this is in some ways is increasingly we're feeling is the biggest obstacle we face in in making the sunshot goal of a dollar a watt for utility scale by 2020 and you know this obstacle takes various forms but one of the primary forms and therefore one of the inflection points for us is really a balkanized set of citing and permitting policies and interconnection standards and other rules for pvs that are different across different jurisdictions right from across different states across different counties across different municipal jurisdictions so to our mind that's really kind of a point of attack and where we're focusing a lot of our work right now through our rooftop solar challenge we at this point have funded over 20 teams across the country actually up to 30 now because we've done a second award round and these teams have focused on developing innovative ways to streamline and standardize and simplify permitting zoning metering and interconnection processing right all of which make installing rooftop solar PV easier and faster and cheaper for businesses and for homeowners that adds up based on our own metrics we estimate that these teams helped reduce permitting fees by more than 10% and eliminated one week of wait time from the process of going solar for nearly 50 million Americans in the participating locations since our rooftop solar awardee's covered a pretty broad span of governments across the country which saved businesses and homeowners from an estimated 800 years worth of red tape related roadblocks or to put a finer point on it saved the equivalent of 10 human lifetimes so it adds up I want to I want to leave you with a vision of what what solar can look like in 2030 this map probably is hard to read but bottom line we can continue to grow this industry from state to state across the nation our solar our SunShot 2030 vision estimates the potential of an installed capacity of over 300 gigawatts meeting 14% of the nation's electrical demand this is something we can get to it is achievable and it's going to require the right mix of private sector and public sector partnership and support and investment so thank you and we'll move to conversation okay now you've got lots of facts about what's been going on in the solar industry lots of interesting local information let's open it up for your questions comments and if you could just identify yourself please when you ask okay we'll start you our foundation close to the German Social Democratic Party Germany's been mentioned a few times we have had a success story in Germany with employment with a quarter of electricity coming from renewable and someone who comes from Germany the country generally loves red tape so this problem with red tape is one that even the Germans could solve so a place that's as marginalized in the US should be able to get there too on the red tape we also don't have very much sun in Germany so although we're cloudy we do bear kind of California of Europe on our point of fact my question is on the trade war question there's a lot of discussion about maybe perhaps keeping manufacturing jobs solar in the US but others in the space that ship has failed from a deployment perspective what do you see as the best possible outcome to the trade settlement negotiation and do you see a future for solar manufacturing panel manufacturing in the US well I think it's a good question so what would be the best possible outcome I think for the solar industry would be to step back and look at what happens when you create trade wars economic activity contracts and I can tell you without a doubt if you put a tax on the technology that I have to buy or produce in some cases because you heard my story I've got a lot of US jobs some of my manufacturing pasty is in Taiwan some maybe not as much in China so I can tell you if I have a tax on my my projects that put on I'm going to do less and I think what happens is locally the jobs that I talked to you about there will be less of those available now we don't know the magnitude of what might be proposed here but to me the best outcome would be to step back and let's figure out how we can work through this and not get into trade war I don't know the answer to that and there are others that are a lot smarter than I perhaps on the panel we're out here but generally trade wars don't work very well and I can tell you I will do less business will be less people I employ has to manufacturing in the US I that's a tough one I you know it's a struggle because of labor costs a variety of other things there is some production in the U.S. and I don't know what the future holds as many things have surprised us right so I live in the Bay Area in San Francisco some really interesting companies that have come up thought about very different ways of manufacturing about technology so perhaps there are because the U.S. is a very innovative country perhaps there is an angle there to more jobs as well but I don't have the total picture I'm not a lot I'll add to that very good answer I will mention on the manufacturing side I mean it's our belief that there is still quite a bit of opportunity for US based manufacturers to capture market share and what is after all a rapidly expanding market I mean just as one example the supply chain for the Salama CSP power plants is one of the power plants I showed on that slide had a supply chain that expanded across over 35 states so it's there and it's possible we've done some analysis actually of the cost factors that different manufacturers assess and calculate as they're making location decisions labor costs are a factor and this was explicitly comparison of China based manufacturing to US based manufacturing labor costs were a factor but I'm not looking to slow and actually the biggest advantage of manufacturing in China was supply chain efficiencies and production scale which suggests to us that again with the right public policy and given the fact that we have a really great innovation infrastructure in this country US based manufacturers particularly for high value added manufacturing can still capture market share and do well in this market having numbers to this conversation in 2012 US manufacturers in the solar industry shed about 8,200 solar workers in 2013 we found that manufacturing was more or less flat they added only 100 so the sector is seen as much more stable much more strong than it was last year during the heart of the debates. While they're not very optimistic about their ability to sustain in the United States there are lots and lots of opportunities for companies that can down supply chain you don't know that much about supply chain we're getting more information about supply chain but solar manufacturers anticipate increasing their workforce by about 8% next year so that's pretty good the national lab which is 15.6% manufacturers understand quickly we were the comments of the other panels but I think it's probably a case where it's good for hard and not good for the whole generally in terms of the overall chain but we're one of the solar industry to grow and they're added in a lot of focus on just the panel manufacturing component in particular but there's a lot of other parts of the value of chain we need to consider in the U.S. and the leadership some of them sort of go and have a lot of IP value people want to manufacture those in the U.S. to protect that we were a leader to maintain it the counter rail tariffs are on political commons we have some unique advantages in some of our manufacturing processes here in the U.S. so I think probably that we're going to ask the best question that we agree that we're trying to pull back and also focus on what's been a low bit of a low level initiative in the past but that's increasingly focused now to try to work with the rest of the world to reduce tariffs on environmental goods across the board because it is a public good to have as much clean energy as possible relative to what the global climate change is working in and we see a lot of trade organizations going on Patrick Haggis from Earth Day Network my question is for Mr. Walsh you said that your organization was working with a lot of teams to streamline the process of implementing solar panels across the country I was just wondering if you could give any sort of examples of what they're doing to streamline that process is either specifics on cutting the red tape or reducing the cost and then open up to the rest of the panel if you guys have any examples of what people can do at a local level to streamline the process and cut the costs for solar panels as I said a lot of it is focused on standardizing and simplifying one example would be actually the work that we're doing in the state that I mean there's a lot about Washington State it's called the Evergreen State Solar Partnership and it's working specifically with the communities of Bellevue, Edmunds, Ellensburg and Seattle so greater King County area in particular in the past every installation of pink rooftop PV in those communities required a plan review a building permit and electrical permit and an interconnection that's a lot of permits and reviews so the team we have been supporting there this partnership has been able to review these processes align them consolidate them and streamline them where they're not necessary so that's just an example of kind of on the ground what a particular community is doing but at this point we have examples across the country of 30 teams and I can direct you to a lot more information on our website you're literally starting to question just we can get someone to put us forward here in the district we need a team and I should also mention too about reason one of the things that really drove us to make the decision was a reliable working atmosphere because with more and more extreme storm and that that raises issues in terms of thinking about all sorts of other jobs we ordinarily don't think about people who are putting together the batteries with regard to the solar system and so it's huge in terms of thinking and one other thing we just mentioned my customers and not only were they really really good they were saying that frankly they're having trouble finding enough students to meet the demand for people which was a very interesting not that exciting comment actually I think that is exciting that's one area of focus that might have been lost thus far in our industry and that is actually on the construction of the projects we spend so much time on the technology the price points how it fits together and I would totally agree on the permitting and licensing all of those issues those are huge headaches that needs to get better but basic construction knowledge in our industry implementing things like lean initiatives and taking in a more thoughtful way the process of building solar wherever it is and really thinking about what is the optimal way to construct it there's a huge amount of opportunity there to get done and so some of it is the responsibility of companies like SunEdison and by the way we have a team, a global lean team that is devoted to that which is lowering the cost and I think perhaps maybe there are other local alternatives as well and I love the SUNY example there because I would bet that in the academic community programs are very targeted around this it could be very effective because we need great folks all over the country to do that and do that well our colleague from the German industry would remind me I read a lot about the abbreviations but FIT I didn't hear that mentioned I know there's been talk about it for the last few years Europeans have used that in some degree of success so panel have any thoughts on that because down to that we see a couple examples in the states but as a federal policy problem given our very diverse mix of utility companies in Germany they have four to four utilities so it's a lot easier to do and we don't see that in our electricity system is really a 50 state system but every state deciding or whatever but it has been successful in Germany although some critics may already have a very expensive way to get solar to their high penetration rates they pay a great deal of money for that some of that was their timing it might have been cheaper now but maybe not in terms of affordability Spanish also a little bit too correct and on chair excuse me on chair just north of here very large program I think one of the problems and I know you alluded to here with the feed and chair programs is they start out so grand that unfortunately from an economic perspective they can be hard to maintain and I think a German colleague could comment on this but I think in Germany that was one of the issues and certainly in Ontario as well so but practically on the federal level I don't think that's a reality here there have been some state programs and more thoughtful perhaps smaller and more ratable is workable the thing that is great is it's simple but you ought to think long term as you design these what's the sustainability of it and some citizens haven't been great in many of the countries that have had the very grand ones I would only add that I think fit is an interesting model let's not lose sight though of the fact that the primary demand driving policy mechanism at the state level is renewable portfolio standard which now exists in 29 states some of them have solar car valves some of them have been under attack so it's worth noting that in terms of an actual mechanism that is prevalent in this country that's one thing less important I would agree on the larger side and perhaps on the smaller side as well but the net metering credits for some of the smaller systems I think is incredibly important here in the states very very important and so I think that's an area of definite emphasis and focus and obviously there has been a huge emphasis on this policy in the US but again there are issues about how sustainable that is as well and in deference to our colleague from Germany I must say that I think there's also been a lot of I mean because I think the record is very very impressive of what's happened in Germany and we've had people from industry speak before and that oftentimes people talk about costs in terms of electricity or the added cost was very very great and it's my understanding that it wasn't nearly as great as what a lot of people say it was so that many times it's been kind of misrepresented so other questions Sure We say very high prices for electricity in Germany obviously high in Europe and the feed-in territory directly funded by the residential taxpayer not industry industries, every industry is largely exempt so industry doesn't pay the feed-in territory we did start funding it at a very expensive time in 2001, we still have those legacy costs because we're paying 20 years of the tariff we're still paying early on 25 cents, 28 cents per kilowatt hour now it's much lower at 6 cents but we have a big political problem right now with electricity prices this new form of government in Germany is dealing with issues for the low income residential households who really can't afford some of the higher prices Germany also has a higher tolerance for energy prices generally the American residential payer wouldn't pay 28 cents so we also have a different geopolitical situation with being a high energy importer so it's hard to compare exactly, the US is a much more natural resource rich country than Germany and as Amy mentioned earlier that in terms of when Germany started this whole thing obviously costs were at a very, very, very different level and it was I think Germany's policy had a lot to do with driving the cost down for the rest of us can I just mention one point of that beyond the conversation we had the important lesson I think for the US from the Germany experience beyond the costs and everything but we're seeing an advanced manufacturing economy with not very good resources can they can accommodate very high penetration rates of solar there's a lot of policy makers here in the US who say there's no way we can get those percentages of solar on our system it would all break down it's unreliable things like that so it's an interesting counter example that a lot of people are looking at how you guys made it work right so we're looking there for lessons learned that can hopefully help us here right other questions or comments any last words from any of our panelists anything that you wanted to raise before the mics are turned off go ahead meet him I'll say one thing which is with the policy discussion you know regardless of the policy itself a lot it goes back to certainties of the free need tariff the big strength is that it's the certainty that you're getting this fixed amount of electricity fixed amount of payment over a long time period so you're able to go ahead with financing with it if it's the RPS you want to make sure that that's around so that you can invest into that market and get the financing and it's the same now that we see in the federal policies and investment tax credit and the makers the accelerated depreciation that uncertainty is just a real drag so whatever the policy is people just want the long term ability to know what it's going to be and that is a good point on which to end because that's certainly something we've heard from business over and over and over regardless of the technology or application so I want to thank you all very very much for being here I encourage you to go to the website in terms of being able to look at the state by state map and get all that information and of course the video will be up on EESI's website and connecting to the solar foundation as well so thank you all for coming really really appreciated and be sure and tell everybody about what is happening in the solar industry thanks