 Good morning, everyone. Welcome to our policy forum this morning, which is part of our annual Congressional Renewable Energy and Technology Expo. We are so glad that you are here with us this morning to kick off this wonderful, wonderful annual event. And we hope you will stay around for a lot of the events and speakers during the day because it's a wonderful opportunity to hear what's going on in the clean energy field, to meet lots of terrific people, and to have a chance to look at a lot of exhibits and meet people that you would not otherwise often have the chance to do. My name is Carol Werner. I'm the Executive Director of the Environmental and Energy Study Institute. I'm also on the Planning and Steering Committee for the Sustainable Energy Coalition, which has worked with the caucuses to pull together this event this morning. And our first speaker on this panel is a very dear friend and colleague, Scott Sklar, who is also the Chair of our Sustainable Energy Coalition Steering Committee. In addition, he is the President of the Stella Group and an adjunct professor at George Washington University. Scott? Well, thank you all and thank you for coming. I always like to do sort of a broad base of why is this stuff important and why are we here. And I want to remind you all that the extraction, conversion, and use of energy is the single largest cause of our trade debt. It is the single largest cause of air and water pollution. It is obviously the single largest contributor to missions on climate. And we have former CIA Director Jim Woolsey walking around the floor today, and he will tell you it's really one of the most strategic issues regarding our national security. So energy is a very important issue. And so I want to sort of bring you up to date of what's happened over a year since our last expo. First of all, global investment in renewables hit $270 billion, which was a 17% increase globally from 2014. Now, when I started in this field and I worked in the Senate up here in the 70s, it wasn't even $200 million. So to see it, $240 billion in one lifetime is astounding. Also, what happened is Germany, the fifth largest economy in the world over the past year, got 50% of its electricity from solar and wind. That's almost unbelievable in terms of a major industrialized nation. And in fact, in one day in May, they got over 70% of their entire electricity for the entire country of Germany from solar and wind. So that is astonishing. And in fact, when I lecture at universities around the country with my colleagues, there's been a lot of discussion and paper saying that could never happen. Ha ha, it happened. There are tasks and challenges to bring that much solar and wind. You need other baseload, and that's why we cover all the renewable energy technologies. I want to remind you that bio power, marine energy, and free flow hydro, geothermal, and even combined power are baseload power sources that are renewable. And then of course, you have the more variable ones. What also happened in the last year is that U.S. solar jobs surpassed coal jobs in the United States of America. That's historic. There are 173,000 U.S. solar jobs compared to 89,000 coal jobs. I've never thought that possible in my lifetime. So that's the other issue that you ought to be aware of. I also want to say we have a colleague who works at the state energy coalition, Ken Besong, who tracks U.S. usage of energy. And in May of this year, he has quoted a federal energy regulatory commission report that says for the month of April, 100% of all new electricity that came online in the United States. Now, this is new electricity was 100% renewable. And the year before, it was 84% renewable of new electricity coming online. So there's a real trend in what's happening in our society on bringing on these technologies. And so, and in fact, in April, the new electricity capacity in the first third of 2015, okay, so four months, was 84.1% renewable of which 61% was wind, 19% solar, 2%, 2.5% geothermal, and 1% hydro. So it's pretty astounding. I also want to talk to you a little bit, not just on solar jobs, but the entire portfolio of jobs. So I already told you, we have 173,807 solar jobs in the United States. We have over 50,500 jobs from wind. We have over 200,000 jobs from hydropower. We have 35,000 jobs from geothermal. Over 152,000 jobs from biomass. That's electricity and heat and over 292,000 jobs from fuels, biofuels. Energy efficiency in buildings, 450,000 jobs. Appliance, energy efficient equipment, 340,000 jobs. So I want you to remember that this is the driver of the new economy. Cold jobs are going down. And yes, we are creating some oil jobs from fracking and everything else, but in fact, it's not a main engine driver in terms of employment in the United States America, globally of course it is. So we are seeing a sea change in technology. I think I'd like to end by saying that when I worked up here in the 70s, I got very close to Senator John Glenn from Ohio. And you may remember he was our first astronaut. And I'm doing a bill on the floor and he voted for this solar bill in the 1970s, which remember solar was a glimmer. And I made some snide comment as a young staffer. I had hair by the way on my head back then. I couldn't believe a Senator from a coal state voted for a solar bill. And I walk away and he puts his hand on my shoulder and gently turns me around. He says, do you know why I voted for your solar bill? And I go, no, sir. And he said, when I was an astronaut in space, sitting there in an area the size of a big refrigerator, I was staring out in a lot of blackness. And I sort of realized for the first time in my life that, yeah, there's life on other planets, but they don't look anything like us. And then of course you look at Earth. And he says, I really internalized that this is our nest. This is it. This was the blue-green in space. There was no other blue-greens. And that when I came back, my whole world changed in terms of what we need to do. And that's why I voted for your little solar bill. So I'm here to actually remind you of that view, that this is our little nest. It's not going to be so great living on Mars on the moon, I'm telling you. So what we do in energy has immense impact. And I teach my classes at GW. We use more water for energy than we do to grow our food. So it has impact on land use, water, economics, national security, basically everything you're interested in. Third highest cost of education is energy. Third highest cost of health care is energy. So thank you for coming. I think what you're going to hear all day for those of you that stay are ranges of specialists from the federal agencies and the private sector and nonprofit groups that have different aspects of this. And they're all pretty important. And it is the web because you need energy for everything we do. Thank you. Thanks, Scott. And that's a wonderful segue to our next presenter who is Ray Brady, who is the manager of the National Renewable Energy Coordination Office for BLM, the Bureau of Land Management at the Department of Interior. So there's a chance to hear how they are helping our renewables. Ray? Well, thank you very much, Carol. And Scott, thank you as well. I want to thank the System of Renewable Energy at Congressional Forum. This is an important issue. And as Scott has indicated, renewable energy, sustainable energy, green energy for the future is important to our energy economy and the energy future of the United States. The Bureau of Land Management manages some 245 million acres of federal land, most of that land in the Western United States. The Department of Interior has clearly indicated that renewable energy development is a priority of the Department of Interior, not only for the onshore federal lands that the Bureau of Land Management manages, but also our offshore wind energy resources that the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management administers within the Department of Interior as well. Since 2009, the Bureau of Land Management has approved 56 renewable energy projects on our public lands that includes 33 solar, new solar energy projects on the public lands, 11 wind energy projects, and 12 geothermal energy projects. These approved projects represent a total of over 14,000 megawatts of new electrical generation capacity. Those projects, once approved, would provide, or once developed, would provide power for some 5 million homes in the United States, and support also some 24,000 jobs within the renewable energy sector. I think this is in line with what Scott was talking about, the importance to our economy in our sustainable energy, renewable energy future. These projects also bring substantial capital investment expenditures that are important to the economy of the United States. The projects that have already been built on BLM land from those approved projects represent an estimated $8.6 billion of capital investments that have contributed to our economy. The other projects that are under construction at this point in time represent another $32 billion of capital investments. Taken together, both those projects that have already been constructed and the projects that are pending construction represent a total of $40 billion of potential capital investments. That's significantly important to the economy of the United States, and especially our western United States where BLM has a significant presence. The Energy Policy Act of 2005 set a goal for BLM of 10,000 megawatts of renewable energy projects on the BLM lands by the year 2050. BLM was able to successfully meet that goal by the year 2012, so we exceeded that goal three years ahead of schedule. That was due to the priorities that we placed on siding and permitting and approving renewable energy projects on our public lands. Our next goal or target is 20,000 megawatts by the year 2020. That's a goal or target that this administration has set under the President's vision as part of the Climate Action Plan. BLM is currently on target to meet that goal. We hope to exceed that goal before the year 2020. So with that, Carol, thank you very much. Great, thank you very much, Ray. Which is very, very exciting to see that kind of movement and how important it is to make sure that there are renewables on our federal lands that are really coming forward now full force. Our final panelist on this session is Jeff Dade, who is the Assistant Director for Energy Research and Analysis with the Union of Concerned Scientists with UCS. Jeff, welcome. Thank you, Carol. And thank you, everybody, for coming to this expo today. It's exciting to be here. You know, Scott, I think, laid out very nicely where we are today in the U.S. power sector. We are in a time of unprecedented change in transition, which is really exciting from folks like my perspective. And Scott, I've been working for UCS for 16 years now. We are seeing changes today that, you know, in the past decade, nothing closer this has happened. And as a result, we're making energy choices today that are going to be with us for the next 30 to 40 years and are really going to make or break whether or not we can make a dent in solving the climate crisis. And so what I want to talk a little bit about is some of the policy aspects that we're facing today and where we need to go in the next couple of years. So one of the really exciting things that's happening in just a few short weeks is that the EPA will be finalizing the first ever national limits on power plant carbon emissions. It's known as the Clean Power Plan. I'm sure many of you are familiar with it. As currently proposed, it would curb total U.S. power sector emissions by 30 percent over 2005 levels by the year 2030. And it's a significant step forward in the fight to slow the most dangerous effects of climate change. And depending on how those states choose to comply with this new standard, the Clean Power Plan has the potential to be, and I'll just restate it, has the potential to be the most significant new driver of renewable energy development in more than a decade or longer. And just to give you some perspective on that, the U.S. Energy Information Administration just recently, just last month projected in a new analysis that the Clean Power Plan would nearly double non-hydro renewable energy resources over business as usual levels, so compared with if we didn't have the Clean Power Plan in place by 2030 to about 19 percent of our total U.S. power supply. And just last week in a joint statement with Brazil, the White House stated that the Clean Power Plan is an integral component to achieving its new commitment to tripling renewable energy deployment over today's levels to about 20 percent by 2030. So we can see the potential of the Clean Power Plan. However, it's important to contrast that with projections that EPA put out last year when it proposed the rule that found that renewable energy will actually play a much more modest role in the compliance plans under the Clean Power Plan, only getting us marginally higher than business as usual levels by 2030. So ultimately, the success of the Clean Power Plan in terms of driving new investments and renewables will largely depend on the states themselves because under the proposed rule, states are responsible for developing their compliance strategies and they have great flexibility, at least in the current proposed rule, in the technologies and resources that they have available to them to achieve those targets. So for example, states could opt to achieve their emission reductions largely by switching from coal to natural gas. And as we know, there's strong evidence out there that suggests that America's current rush to natural gas can lead to an overreliance that poses very complex and serious risks to consumers, to public health, and to the climate in the long term. So to ensure that doesn't happen, you know, I believe that Congress has an opportunity to play a constructive role in helping states prioritize renewable energy and energy efficient technologies over natural gas as the foundation for reliable and cost effective state compliance strategies under the Clean Power Plan. And I just want to highlight very quickly five policies that Congress could take up and adopt today to boost renewables as part of the Clean Power Plan strategies, compliance strategies. First and foremost, Congress could put a national price on carbon. Pricing carbon is probably the most simple and effective market oriented policy tool recommended by many economists and policymakers across the political spectrum to curb carbon emissions and level the playing field for renewable energy against fossil fuels. Number two, Congress could adopt a national renewable electricity standard like 29 states in the District of Columbia, I've already done. So Senators Udall and Markey have joined forces with a few others this year in introducing legislation that would establish a national RES that requires our nation's largest power providers to supply at least 30% of their electricity from renewables by 2030. It's a really strong plan that my organization put out an analysis on just back in May that would electricity and natural gas bills would be about 25 billion dollars less under a national RES over the time horizon over the 15 years from 2015 to 2030 than if we continued on a business as usual pathway. So there's strong economic benefits to doing that along with the jobs and other investment opportunities associated with such a plan. Third, Congress could reinstate the production tax credit for wind and other renewable energy technologies and extend the investment tax credit for solar. I don't think any federal policy has done more to spur the growth of renewable energy technologies than the PTC and ITC have over the last decade. Unfortunately, the PTC expired at the end of 2014 and has not yet been extended. It must be extended as soon as possible for as long as possible to prevent this boom bus cycle that the wind industry has suffered through over the last 15 years when the policy is routinely allowed to lapse. Similarly, the PTC, which is legislationals, the plan is to use renewable energy as a political space that the wind industry can use ML investors in both past and months as gas and other sources. What we've found is that utilizing renewable energy is a great start for the PTC and the potential for what is yet to come if policies are really kept in place and put in place. So we have a couple extra minutes before our next panel. If there are any questions, and I also just want to mention, you can sit up here behind me on the dais. It's your chance to be the big cheese. So if you want to go ahead and you can sit up here if you're going to be up for the next panel. Question right here, okay? Both release carbon. Why is natural gas given a free ride in that sense? Yeah, that's an excellent question. I wonder that sometimes myself. But from the power, from the smokestack emissions exclusively looking at that, we know that natural gas emits about half as much as a typical coal plant. So there is some carbon emissions savings to be had from switching from coal to natural gas. When you look at where we need to go in terms of solving the climate crisis, what scientists tell us we need to reduce emissions 80 to 90 percent below 2005 levels by the mid-century, natural gas is not going to take us there. And that doesn't account for the serious issue of methane leakage in the natural gas industry from production, extraction, and distribution. So that is some 34 times more potent in the near in the short term. And depending on how much methane is leaking anywhere above 3 to 4 percent of total production and natural gas is on par or worse than coal. So we need to learn more about how much methane is leaking. We need to tighten that up. The White House has instructed the EPA to develop a rule to control for methane emissions. I think that's a good start. They could be doing a lot more there, too. But yeah, natural gas is not the solution, the long term solution to a climate friendly low carbon future. And in the meantime, we know it needs to be done better. Okay, really quickly. Okay. I'm Mary Booth. I'm the director of the partnership for policy integrity and an organization that primarily works on impacts of biomass energy. And this is a question for Scott or for Jeff. Biomass is also something that emits carbon. In fact, at the stack, emissions of bioenergy plants are more than coal. And as I know you're aware, biomass is treated as if it has zero emissions under the clean power plan. And it has been treated that way in other energy legislation like the Waxman market. And your question? And my question is, do you have any comment on what the impact of not counting these emissions might be on the actual efficacy of these pieces of legislation and renewable energy programs to actually reduce emissions? Okay. Well, first, I do not agree with the data analytically. First of all, the biomass studies that say it's more is using municipal solid waste. And when you take that out, the numbers change altogether. And it doesn't count the growing of biomass, which sequesters carbon. So the issue is biomass, and I do projects with municipal solid waste plants where we're taking the biosolids out and reducing the carbon emissions by 80%. We're using biogas and dairies, which reduce from the manure turning to methane, again, reduce it by 60%. So I don't believe the data. And I think the data is made done by people who do not understand all the subparts of biomass. It's very suspect. Jeff, did you want to add any? Well, I think we have to get the science right on biomass. We do know that not all biomass feedstocks are created equal from a carbon standpoint. We do know that whole tree harvesting is not a carbon neutral or carbon friendly technology. But there are other types of biomass feedstocks that can provide carbon emission reductions. And so we need to get the science right first, and then we have to have that inform our policies. As far as the clean power plan, you know, we'll see the EPA is looking into, well, they've received comments on this issue. I expect to see some changes in the final rule compared to the proposed rule. And we know that the EPA is also looking at biomass in a separate ruling. So we'll have to see what they come out on that front. From our analysis, what we've seen is that biomass actually plays a much, much smaller role in the compliance strategies that states will choose when it comes to complying with the clean power plan. Every analysis that I've seen is that wind and solar and energy efficiency are from the renewable energy technology side are the ones that are most cost-effective and will be deployed. So not to say that we don't have to figure out the biomass carbon issue. As I said, I think we need to let the science lead on this and then have that inform our policies. Great. Thank you. And with that, I think there's much more in the way of discussion. Happy to talk to you more about that later too. And I want to thank our panelists for getting us really a good start. Thank you all. And of course, everybody has a booth in the expo room. So make sure that you visit everybody and pursue those conversations. Thank you all very, very much for being here. And we'll have our next panel come up, please. It goes by fast and slow. Welcome everyone to our second panel this morning at the expo. I hope you've already had a chance to be in the expo room. But if not, hopefully you will get around and meet all of our wonderful exhibitors and take advantage of this wonderful opportunity to learn a lot about different technologies, different companies, different initiatives that are occurring across our country. So on this panel, we are going to again be looking at policy issues. And we have several people that we're going to hear from starting with Zoe Berkley, who is the Manager for Federal Policy with the Business Council for Sustainable Energy, BCSE. Zoe? Thanks everyone for being here this morning. I'm going to give you a little information about who BCSE is and then transition to explaining our Sustainable Energy in America fact book. It's a publication we've put out for the last three years. And it is intended to be a sort of baseline for policy discussion. And I'm going to use it as sort of a baseline for not only my remarks, but hopefully this panel because we have a number of awesome other panelists that can drill down a little deeper into the different sectors that the Sustainable Energy in America fact book covers. So about BCSE, BCSE is a coalition is okay, is that better? Thank you. BCSE is a coalition of companies and trade associations from the energy efficiency, renewable energy and natural gas sectors. The council advocates for policies at the state, national and international levels. Did you shake your head? Can you still not hear me? I will put it in my mouth. State, national and international levels that increase the use of commercially available clean energy technologies, products and services, support affordable, reliable power system and reduce air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. BCSE was founded in 1992 and for the 20th year anniversary our board of directors decided they wanted to do something to commemorate the occasion and had been discussing various data gaps in their policy discussions and wanting really a tool that they can turn to to show policy makers and journalists what is really going on in the state of play of clean energy. So thus the Sustainable Energy in America fact book was born and we've put it out for three years now in partnership with Bloomberg New Energy Finance. So a little bit about the fact book. The report is quantitative and objective, intended to provide policy makers, journalists and industry professionals with up to date accurate market intelligence on the plethora of clean energy issues facing the not only our country but the world today. It focuses on renewables efficiency and natural gas and aims as I said to fill important data gaps that have been identified, particularly investment flows by sector and contribution of distributed energy. It's current through 2014 wherever possible and contains the latest information on new technology costs. The fact book in previous years was a fairly dense 100 plus page text heavy document but this edition we transitioned it to be much more graph focused and visually focused and usually this presentation is better suited to have those that I can refer to and I'm going to do my best without not having those but I encourage you even on your smart phones and tablets to check out the Sustainable Energy in America fact book and look at the different slides even as I speak. This year also has some new coverage and analyses for the first time on U.S. energy productivity, new hydro storage policies by geography, smart meter prices, of course the EPA's clean power plan and the effects that's going to potentially have and global comparisons of energy costs. So I'll give you some kind of high level key summary findings of this year's fact book. As far as long term trends go there is evidence of a transformation over the 2007 to 2014 period. U.S. carbon emissions from the energy sector have dropped 9% and total U.S. investment in clean energy over that same period totaled $386 billion and actually 52 billion of that occurred in 2014 putting the U.S. second at the number two spot in the world. Natural gas and renewables generated more than 40% of U.S. electricity in 2014 and energy productivity of the U.S. economy increased 11% over that period 2007 to 2014. 2014 was a notable year in terms of two key developments that occurred in the backdrop. The U.S. economy of course has been regaining steam and we all remember earlier on in the year oil prices collapsed. In 2014 the fact book saw some deviations from long term trends but each of those had a sort of quote-unquote silver lining. Cold generation and carbon emissions were up from 2012 levels actually but a significant portion of the coal fleet is expected to retire soon. Energy efficiency policy has been slowing but EPA's proposed clean power plan would ask for a larger role of those policies and new policies to play a bigger role. The broader U.S. ecosystem though is preparing for a sustainable energy future and we saw that with some critical new policies that were introduced in 2014 such as the proposed EPA's clean power plan and I'm sure everyone in this room knows that the final rule is expected even as early as the end of this month, some say August but I guess it's always a waiting game. There was also the U.S. China pledge that came out that was notable and actually just recently there was another bilateral agreement made between the U.S. and Brazil and of course at back at the state level the New York state's reform vision or New York rev can be seen. Gradually coal plants are being in Bloomberg actually could be a record of that. As far as investments in clean energy go, clean energy globally increased for the first time in three years and is near its 2011 peak. Among the largest drivers of these investment figures are categories of asset financing for wind and financing for small distributed capacity mainly rooftop solar. In 2014 the U.S. was the world's second largest market for new wind installations behind China and third largest first solar behind both China and Japan. So a little deeper dive on energy efficiency and then renewables for EE utility spending on EE remains the fastest growing framework driving investment in this space. This is driven primarily by state EERS targets and decoupling legislation. BNS expects that utility spending will continue to increase if more states adopt EERS targets in response to EPA's clean power plan pending the final rule. U.S. renewable energy generation from non-hydro renewables surpassed hydro power generation for the first time this year which was notable and non-hydro renewables made up about 7% of U.S. electricity in 2014 up from just 2.5% in 2007. 2014 was also notable for that. Congress made no major energy decisions in 2014 say for our last gasp approval of a tax extenders package in December and we unfortunately might see kind of a little bit more of the same of that this year but there are some kind of more recent developments that will dictate how the 2015 or 2016 fact book ends up with the comprehensive energy bill currently being worked on by both the House and Senate and the interest in clean energy tax provisions in there. So I encourage you all to come by our exhibit table at the in the main hall. We have a lot of information as well as this lovely infographic that you can see in all its giant glory in front of our table and there's just a lot of information and we encourage all of you to to use it to your best abilities and there's slideshows on our website bcse.org as well that we hope are useful. So thank you. Great so don't leave home with or don't leave here without your infographic right. Okay all right so we're next going to turn to Deborah Stein. Dr. Stein is a professor of the practice engineering and and of the practice engineering and public policy department and she is a part of the Scott Institute for energy innovation at Carnegie Mellon University where she is really dealing with a lot of market factors. So thank you. I sort of passed this around this is our one of our little cards here. So hopefully you got to copy this handout that we have and so I'm going to kind of go be going through that. So the Scott Institute for energy innovation at Carnegie Mellon is meant to bring together all the energy activities across the campus. So we do everything from you know like architecture public policy as well as of course obviously my field of engineering and I thought what I would focus on today is non-market factors and kind of explain what those are. So just to kind of give you an idea about what we have at our table here this is a guide that's on managing variable variable energy resources for renewable electricity and it shows like policies that can be put in place to reach 20 30 percent. A lot of them are very technical kinds of changes more than even policy kinds of changes. Then this is a guide which talks about different energy technologies at CMU that are on the marketplace I'll be talking about some of those during our presentation today. Carnegie Mellon is number one actually among the major universities and spinouts and last year we had in 2013 we had 36 spinouts of one kind or another and this year one of our student teams called Hylian won the student prize competition for the energy efficiency and renewable energy office. It's a basically a truck kind of thing that you know kind of saves power at one point and then releases it another power just kind of like a hybrid car and we were just selected by the department of energy and the the same energy efficient renewable energy office to host one of the regional competitions that student entrepreneurship competitions for next year. So we're really sort of into entrepreneurship. The other thing we do is tools policy making tools. So we just put on up on our website a few weeks ago a tool called the folks on the clean power plan and it's for every single state in the country it's a free tool and people can go in there and try to figure out kind of like the right mix of technologies to meet the goals that are in the clean power plan. So anybody who's out there trying to think about it for their state we would appreciate you sort of giving that a try when the rule becomes final we'll tweak it but right now it's up there based on the proposed rule for people to get comments. So it's like you got every boiler in the country and so you can sort of say like how much of solar or wind or you know coal and natural gas are we going to have to try to meet the goals in the program and then we also have several other research activities related to the clean power plan and like what percentage of coal plants you know you know could possibly use say for example carbon capture as a way to meet the goals of the clean power plan. This is also some our sort of our infographics these two are both on electric vehicles so if anybody's interested in that topic. So let me switch now to the what I want to focus on is non-market factors. So everybody knows like when you think about a market and the market for these new technologies they're sort of like two things first it doesn't work right so as an engineer that's what we sort of care about then the market folks like it doesn't have a market and that gets into cost and sort of other factors. Non-market factors which is sort of what I focus on is thinking about two things which are public policies which are kind of opportunities or challenges to that technology or societal issues where people are kind of worried about something. So for wind power maybe you're worried about like birds or bats or whatever getting killed by that wind power. If we think about those things ahead of time then we can incorporate that as engineers into our design. So it's really important that these non-market factors be considered at an early stage of the process as opposed to kind of waiting to the end and you know every energy technology whether it's renewable or fossil whatever it is has these non-market challenges and as well as opportunities. So I'm going to give some examples from a couple of technologies developed at Carnegie Mellon to give you a feel for this. So the first one I'm going to talk about is Carnegie Mellon self-driving car. I know the Google car gets all the publicity but actually most of the people at Google came from Carnegie Mellon and we were the ones who won the DARPA challenge on it and so we've been working on that technology for for quite a while and Uber actually just came in and formed a big center at it. If you look at this handout I gave you you'll see pictures of Carnegie Mellon's car. You'll see a member of Congress who drove in the car so to speak. It's something that I guess maybe he was driven by the car and then also the Uber car which is also making its way around Pittsburgh. Now if you look at the back of this handout here you're going to see a map and on this map are the states which hold it back here and you can get a copy of this at the at the table if you need it and so you'll see if you look at this map that these are the states that either have passed a legislation to let renewable self-driving cars those who have decided to know that they don't want self-driving cars on the road some that are under consideration in some states like Groningen State Pennsylvania which has not you know gotten up to really thinking about it yet. Now you might not think okay what does that have to do with energy? Well you know actually by putting in self-driving cars we can reduce our energy consumption by a couple of percent every year according to studies so although people think about it for all sorts of different ways you know these are the kinds of things that will kind of make a long-term term benefit so that those things the state legislative regulatory activity that's an example of a non-market factor barrier that will make it difficult for us to kind of get that energy efficient technology into the marketplace. The other technology I'm going to mention here is Anken Energy. Now Anken is a an energy storage system it's very environmentally friendly it's something it just got a big award actually for being the I guess in the first opportunity because certain California so literally we have sort of job creation like about a hundred or fifty or so people in the Pittsburgh area and act on plans to sort of go out to other states for this energy storage manufacturing facility. Same thing with Uber you know and sort of the autonomous car we are also seeing sort of job creation from from that as well however there are also energy policy barriers to energy storage and you'll see here this is a report from IRAC which is this interstate renewable energy council that talks about some of these things it talks about rate structures and other kinds of things that are barriers to getting that energy storage into the marketplace. So these are kind of like two example technologies the last one I want to give is Platypus. Platypus is another spin out and it is a robotic boat and what it does it's like a little boat like this big and like fleets of these go out and can measure water quality they can measure how much water you have things like that there's something called the energy water nexus which is basically you know there's a there's a big relationship between water and energy and so having that sort of technology is is very useful from an environmental standpoint again regardless of whatever your energy technology is but they're facing a challenge their challenge is that EPA's regulations even though they say oh this is cool technology because it's able to you know rather than like on a river getting like one point it can measure many many points and give a real diverse so in the picture that I have here you'll see a different color coding and it is it shows all the different points you can get in a river or a lake or a water wastewater treatment plant so the problem they're having in this case with EPA is that all the policies and rules are designed for a human to to do the water sampling and alas it's a robot and even though they use EPA certified sensors they're having a challenge figuring out how to get through the system to get certified so that and the companies on their side you know they say okay well we can't do anything unless EPA certifies this methodology so they're kind of liking this very challenging position so we've been trying to work you know through EPA's uh an uh innovation office because they should like it right because it's better data more data than in the past um but it's a challenge trying to like make it through the system and so that is an example of a barrier where we have a technology you know the person the professor who has uh like spent out and he's now running this company full-time says look you know I could hire hundreds of people to go out and put my little robots all over the country but alas I I can't do it I have this one market which is not I'm not able to reach because of this because of this challenge so those are some examples uh I'm always collecting examples of these things uh particular for the energy sector so uh you have uh my information is on the front of this handout or stop by it and tell me a story and I'd be glad to add it to my collection great thank you so much all sorts of new things that we didn't know about uh which is great to hear here uh we're going to turn next to a different uh a whole different form of technology uh that has its wonderful applications all over the country and it's uh still got enormous potential uh to explore uh and that's Dale Lauda who is the executive director of the CHP association the combined heat and power association Dale thank you very much I have a I'm a father of two children I have a 14 year old son a 10 year old daughter and they're both very interested in in what I do and uh so for Earth Day my daughter um it came to me and said you know I have this Earth Day project I want to do and I said well it's gotta be about CHP and she said Danny I'm not gonna do an Earth Day project on CHP you know all the other kids are done solar and wind and everything I said that's the whole point you got CHP who also CHP and so they won't even know what it is I said that's your chance to tell them and uh the thing that's interesting is uh of course she's a super genius uh but she she actually understands what CHP is and probably few of you in the room do and she was afraid because none of her classmates would push her to have she'll be facing no matter who we are so let me talk about what what is the uh so CHP co-chair of the great sound power and steam at the same time it's not exactly cutting edge technology it's something that mr. Edison actually came up with years ago and thought he said at the time it and it has been proven since then that is the most efficient way to use natural gas and basically it's roughly twice as efficient as a regular uh gas fired power plant because you have one you know one stack and you have two two ports coming in so uh it's it's great technology it's sort of a sleeper technology I also worked in energy industry for many years before this including for Dow Chemical which is like the third or fourth bigot CHP user in the world and you know maybe I just wasn't paying attention maybe I wasn't very good at my job I don't know what the issue was but I didn't know anything about CHP we didn't talk about people don't talk about even in the industry it's just taken for granted and that flipped on its head is one of CHP's greatest strengths there's four key strengths for CHP one is the reliability uh two would be security issues somewhat related to reliability uh three would be its efficiency and then fourth is environmental advantages so the reliability issue is that and this is an old saw we use many times but it's a great reference when Hurricane Sandy came to up the east coast if you looked at maps that showed overhead view of where the lights were on where the lights were off pretty much where the lights were on they had CHP where the lights were off they didn't have CHP and that's a pretty good example right there of the just the dependability reliability uh Sikorsky helicopter up in Connecticut they stayed on not only were they keep running and making money which of course one of the first orders of business they were able to to basically be a hospital for the community and this happened all over New York there's a great ad that ran it was sort of a this is the time I think of some of those uh the sit-ins the capitalism anti-capitalism effort and so it was saying this is what's wrong with America Merrill Lynch's lights are still up and like the the New York state uh the daycare facility was down well it really wasn't wasn't just mean Merrill Lynch and and the nice uh daycare center it was that Merrill Lynch had a CHP facility that's why they were they were up and running so uh the reliability issue which then leads to security if you have a data center and you want to keep running all the time you want to use you want to use uh CHP as as as a resource uh environmentally the reason uh it's really a change has happened over the last 10 years or so many environmental organizations uh have actually cited CHP as a solution for climate change because it does it's so efficient and it's certainly I think that one of the speakers you never concerned scientists talked about the fact that someday maybe we won't have any natural gas sure great in an ideal world there'd be no carbon emissions there'd be there'd be no fossil fuels but we're not there yet we got a long way to go before we get there and so the most of the next best thing the next most efficient thing to use and one that's particularly special because it keeps the lights on is is CHP uh World Wildlife Fund for example cited CHP in a study they did with McKinsey last year the Environmental Defense Fund uh NRDC has partnered with CHP so there's lots of lots of great work with the environmental community uh CHP provides 10% of the power in the United States now and could provide even more uh about 18 gigawatts uh there's thousands of sites in every congressional district in the United States um and we have a map actually on our website that's really cool interactive map you can look you can highlight where you are where your city is and see where the CHP so there's CHP right in the city there's CHP down near the Department of Energy there's there's CHP all around you don't necessarily even know it's here there's a huge facility in Silver Spring that's uh that's work with the United States uh I think it's the Department of Agriculture has a facility out there um and CHP as I said it can be up to 80% even higher than that in efficiency now the primary uses are with industry so if you're if you're making uh you know certain industrial products if you can if you can do two things at once it's obviously much more efficient so many businesses need to use the steam and some others just want to have the electricity and so if you can find this is an efficient source that basically has both for you and one one resource uh hospitals once again the reliability resilience it's a totally different animal than a backup power so backup power it's a diesel sitting in your basement somewhere or at the basement of the hospital well this isn't like that this runs all the time and is completely dependable it's not dependent on a fuel you know diesel fuel becoming it doesn't have the emissions of diesel fuel and also you know what if power goes out for a long period of time well you're not going to be able to work that with backup power this is a much more sophisticated uh process and it's also being used many now with lead work is going to have a panel at our conference about the lead certification actually we have a webinar about it I think next week about how CHP is an essential part of the uh the lead process you can get lots of points for using CHP um let me mention briefly about the the CHP association so we work on regulatory legislative issues we were supporters of the clean power plan in fact we think that if we double the amount of CHP we'd probably get to most of what the clean power plan is looking at so just through CHP we could probably get a lot of what it's not necessarily going to be as painful as as it needs as it has been alleged if we just use more CHP uh we also have legislative we've been working on some issues there's the energy bill in the house and the senate we certainly are involved with that we want to maintain the ability for the CHP to have a viable viable marketplace through through purple and other protections that are out there and uh we also work on non-policy issues sometimes so we have some uh users committees and the last thing I'll just mention we have at our booth number 10 number 12 we're number 12 uh we have a description about our conference it's going to be here uh actually the national press club in a few weeks and so uh we hope you can you can attend if you have any questions about CHP what it is you know don't be like my daughter don't be embarrassed uh just ask the question and and you know wave the uh wave the CHP flag rather she did wear this to school though so at least this is our little CHP logo so it was kind of a subtle way to acknowledge us so thank you thank you so thanks so much Dale and as he said there are tons of examples so in many times examples are the best way to better understand how things work if you can really hear the stories of of where these technologies are in place and so I really encourage you to to to follow up on that and now we're going to turn to another area that is again uh a very very important and emerging area and that's we will hear from Nicole Steele who is the executive director for grid alternatives mid-atlantic thank you um yeah thanks for having me here I am Nicole Steele I'm the executive director of grid alternatives mid-atlantic I'm very happy to be here to talk about policy issues and what grid alternatives does so for um those of you that don't know what grid alternatives is we're a non-profit solar installer that works exclusively with low income communities we use a job training workforce development sort of barn raising model to do the actual installations themselves so we started about 10 years ago out in california and we became the administrator of what is called the sash program in california and we were incredibly successful in california because of that state level solar rebate program for single family housing we now have seven offices across the state of california and we are uh rapidly growing outside of the state as well so about three years ago um grid and a number of partners decided to figure out how to actually work this model in other states particularly states that don't have uh state level solar rebate programs so we're looking at leveraging different types of policies and incentives to make to bring solar to low income communities that wouldn't necessarily have access otherwise and you know these individuals that we're working with are disproportionately impacted on their energy bills and so uh by bringing them solar uh we are we're making a much bigger impact on their their quality of life and the ability to continue to sort of move forward um and you know be part of the community and you know contribute to the economy um so we first opened an office about three years ago in colorado and partially because of that was the asrec program the the market there was pretty strong and as soon as we opened that office it tanked so we had to figure out you know how to how to actually continue to move in colorado and the answer really is to work um in community solar and fortunately colorado has a great and a cutting-edge community solar program and grid has been the first um was able to develop the first 100 percent um low income uh community solar array in the country uh we then opened an office uh located in new york but it covers the tri-state area of new york new jersey in connecticut and then about a year ago uh we opened the office here in washington dc which covers the mid-atlantic uh which is considered dc maryland delaware in virginia in our sort of world so um you know it's my job to figure out how to create good policy take advantage of good policy and figure out how to bring uh low income solar to the individuals in the mid-atlantic and those four areas are all very very different from one another so it's incredibly diverse in figuring out how to make solar accessible so um taking a little bit of a step back we actually provide these systems at either no cost or very very low cost to the individual we do have a couple pilots going on around the country that brings a ppa program backed by um local green banks that uh does end up giving have providing a loan product to the individual but you know we're a mission-driven organization we want to make sure that we're um making clean renewable energy accessible to everyone and by doing that we want to make sure that they receive the biggest impact so if there's a loan attached to that they're not necessarily receiving the impact that you know our organization is looking to provide however we are still opening the market into into that community where for-profit organizations can come in and play a role um so sort of like digging a little bit deeper in what I'm doing specifically so um some of the the areas that I'm able to leverage are the solar renewable energy credit market Washington DC has the best SREC market in the country um so fortunately we're able to to leverage that um and Maryland's market's not too far behind however Delaware and Virginia's markets are kind of uh so I'm not going to be able to finance my uh my systems with an SREC market in Virginia and Delaware um so what are the other items that we leverage here in the mid-atlantic um in some of the areas we're able to work with third-party financing companies to monetize the federal income tax credit now that's it provides a couple thousand dollars for the systems that we would be working in grid alternatives doesn't um qualified to receive the tax credit themselves so we actually have to find a third-party holder to sort of monetize those dollars um so from our perspective while the federal income tax credit the ITC is very helpful for market rate installations it's much more difficult to um sort of access from the low income community side because the individuals that we're working with do not they're not able to leverage that tax credit and so um and then some of the markets that I work in the third-party financers are not even interested in working so um it's figuring out all these bits and pieces of you know how do we bring solar to individuals uh I'll also mention that uh we do have partnerships with equipment manufacturers um so we're able to bring down costs that way and then there are a number of um well there is one local solar rebate program specifically to low income individuals here in Washington DC it does expire in the fall and so you know we continue to move forward and work with local governments and state governments to figure out good policy to continue to make um solar accessible to everyone um you guys might have heard the announcement that the administration made this past Tuesday they were actually at one of our installations in Baltimore in the care community near Johns Hopkins we were doing a two kilowatt system on a row house there and there were some great announcements made to make solar accessible to the broader market which is the portion of the market that we work with and so some of the big pieces that you know great alternatives is working with the administration on are expanding AmeriCorps into uh into you know a larger uh program that's a good alternative like administers so we're able to add 40 new AmeriCorps positions where we take this year of service and we teach individuals the ability to you know learn about the solar industry and have that ability to get um the skills that they would need to um enter into that community so uh you know the solar industry is growing 10 times faster than any other than the general U.S. economy and one in 78 jobs are solar industry jobs in the U.S. alone uh in 2015 alone the solar industry is going to add 36,000 jobs to the U.S. economy so it's imperative that we make sure that we're continuing to build that workforce and we're building that workforce through our AmeriCorps program and through our RISE program in conjunction with Sun Edison. RISE means realizing an inclusive solar economy um and making sure that we're making this new clean energy economy accessible to the neighborhoods and the communities that we work with um so those are a couple of the big pieces that we're working with the administration on as well as the increase of the 100 megawatt goal on federally subsidized housing to 300 megawatts by 2020 and we'll be working closely with the federal government as well as states and local governments to figure out how to continue to do that through the the mechanisms that I was talking about earlier so I'll leave it at that um and uh like I said earlier the we are we take volunteers we take job trainees we use a barn raising model so if you go to our website gridalternatives.org you can sign up as a volunteer and we can get each and every one of you on a roof you don't even have to know how to use a hammer we'll we'll teach you all of that so thank you and great and I think we all should be about getting new skills and it's great what what you guys are doing and in terms of increasing accessibility for clean energy all all over so now we will turn to our final speaker for this panel Michael Dietrich who is the owner and founder of Renew and Sustain Consulting. Thank you um and a little bit about what we do we started our eyes started a Renew and Sustain back in 2007 um in response to the downturning of the economy and trying to figure out how to create a better balance between the environment and business uh I was actually that when I first started in 2007 I went over to Africa and we started working with biogas technologies solar technologies and one of the things that there is a huge opportunity is we have a growing population people look at this as challenges I look at it as an opportunity with growing population we have to manage our resources a lot better we have rising seas we have natural disasters which are creating various opportunities for us to then create policies and then we can create programs based off those policies and implement that through various projects one of the countries that I've worked with was Algeria in developing a renewable energy policy the desert there can actually supply a large amount of renewable energy for Europe the power lines are in place it's a matter of setting up those policies to develop further programs and then building the project to make that happen the same thing they have there is 80 percent of their population is under 30 given the civil war and the unrest that they had in that country so they have a huge housing demand problem and with conventional building methods you can't build the houses with the amount of resources that they have available so redeveloping that plan with new policies sustainable policies with new innovative building technologies here's an opportunity for people to develop new policies new technologies um better more efficient use fair cement technologies sip panels provide installation we can then augment that with renewable energy and we have off-grid strategies which are really progressive capturing what little order they do have and we're using it and the thing I really get excited about is how scalable sustainability is I actually have a number one best-selling amazon book renew and sustain which talks about the nuances of sustainability how it's scalable from this national global issue all the way down to the individual and so when you scale this down you can then have policies like you do in new york city where new jersey went and moved forward with the same policies that they had prior to hurricane sandy happening new york city is redeveloping new policies and from that there's new technologies that's going the place they're redoing things you're going to see more combined heat and power probably as a result of that so policies are a great foundation for moving us forward and we're going to save life we're going to save property we're going to reduce costs and it's this great foundation the same thing that um if congress can pass the energy efficiency bill that has gone up and not been passed yet but if you look at that instead as a jobs creator because energy efficiency is then that policy is going to weigh the found work um for innovation technology and and growth in terms of business and technology whereas um sun edison is a renewable energy company that came about um using the power purchase agreement that third party system where we can put solar on buildings which we couldn't do before that policy then created a multi-million dollar industry and business and so you're looking at sustainability and those policies driving this which is is really big um and then there you have small little successes here in the district of columbia i've been working with dc public schools and the rec systems over the last couple three years um and so i developed a sustainability um playground spec that playground spec then led the foundation for advanced storm water management innovation that the architects could utilize and frances stevens uh senior playground ended up being the sixth coolest playground in the world and was rated in the top 50 um of advanced educating playgrounds so then you can also use these policies to develop and display leadership and so you can show how you're advancing people forward um you again see this here in the district with the smart roof program that's going that's being rolled out that first started with dunbar high school where i worked with and brought the team together to get the first power purchase agreement in the history of district of columbia which took a year and a half a lot of red tape it's a bureaucracy just like the the federal government and so there's a lot of obstacles but once we get these policies in place we now have 10 megawatts of solar going on the district roofs over the next year that's a huge advance forward the district is now being able to display leadership this then drives um education which is going to be key for the development of the next generation and perpetuating us and carrying us forward so dunbar high school now the greenest school in the world it's rated 91 out of 110 points on the lead score card the highest of any um newly built k through 12 school in the world right here in the district of columbia which is really successful um they have the highest improved test scores in the district so building these buildings and engaging these students and driving this innovation back in having the policies that allow for this type of development then also improved education it improves what we can deliver and it improves how we're going to be able to carry ourselves forward as a civilization um all of this then drive having this policy and having this energy efficiency is is great because we're now looking at light shelves on buildings and different light shelves technologies advancing the insulation the types of insulation so people are now developing new types of insulation rather and so you start to see economic growth you start to see innovation you start to see new businesses and technology come up there's a lot of technology development based off of energy efficiency for how to make our buildings perform better so those policies are driving the market they're creating a multi trillion dollar emerging market based out of sustainability so for the first time using our resources what we do have using the policies that we have in place making ourselves more efficient and living off of ourselves is an economic driver for us to move forward and redevelop ourselves thanks terrific thank you thank you very much and I hope that you all see too it's really interesting in terms of sort of looking at the range of of areas and issues that you all looked at how much how much opportunity there is in so many ways and that there isn't just one way one technology or whatever it is a host of technologies methods policies being applied and frankly we are in a time of very very rapid change so everything that you're all talking about is very very exciting and so thank you all very much and I think we've got we've got five minutes so if you have any questions for these great people please let us know okay then please feel free to make sure is there a question okay question right back here you do work with any renters or is it just for home owners and also have you are you involved with any legislation related to pace so very good question renters is a huge market of the low income community here in dc i think 72 of low income individuals rent their homes so we need to figure out a way to move forward and making it accessible to renters that can happen through community solar community solar legislation has been passed in dc it has been passed in maryland and so we're figuring out what those regulations should look like and make sure that there is sort of a carve out for specifically for low to moderate income participants and what does that look like to drill down a little bit further we're looking at hopefully doing a program carve out rather than a project specific carve out so that individuals like you know grid alternatives or organizations like grid alternatives and others can really sort of lead the way on how to make community solar accessible to renters and so we're at the very very beginning stages of that and it and it's also applicable in colorado like i mentioned earlier with the community solar programming out there but here in dc in the mid-atlantic we're really working to figure out how to make it you know work overall regarding pace we're not doing any work with pace right now so there has been part there's been discussions around how we could integrate pace into multifamily development and we do do multifamily development and so that would be something that the developer or the building owner would be able to take advantage of and we would help connect them to those dollars particularly where it's available okay and deborah you wanted to follow i just wanted to mention that in the nature that there's an app for that we have a new app that cmu which is right now for pittsburgh but could be used elsewhere and what it does is it allows somebody who is a potential renter to look at different properties and see what their energy consumption and bill would be and sort of like you know how that energy comes to that renter and so since energy is a big part it's something that people would like to consider so it's just if you go to our website our latest newsletter talks about that app okay great great well and obviously i hope everybody goes to see all of these booze because there are all sorts of things i personally want to follow up with with all of you on so anyway um any other questions or comments one back here all right this question is for nicole have you looked at um maybe what the cost would be if the itc became refundable would that be a huge burden on the on the debt um the cost to great alternatives or the cost to the individual to the nation if it was extended if it was if it was refundable gotcha right right yeah i mean i don't know what the overall impact would be if it was set up that way um i obviously we try to continue to use it if it is extended um and then maybe it's accessible and you know other ways outside of having to connect directly with a third party monetizer that would hold the systems for the length that they would need to hold it so it could potentially be an approach that that strategy certainly helped the solar industry before in terms of looking at refundable credits um and and as i recall i think that the numbers showed that it was actually a cheaper way for the government to really finance renewables and then was providing the tax credit directly but by doing the 403b or the refundable credit worked very effectively as i recall so any other questions please do feel free to follow up with everyone and thanks so much for being here and thank you all very much for a wonderful wonderful panel good morning folks we're going to start our next panel i hope that you've been enjoying the expo so far and we will uh be looking at the whole role of bioenergy with regard to this panel we have a number of speakers and our first our first presenter is joanne evanek of advance joanne could you just do it from the table joanne oh do from the table sorry sorry that will that will work okay make sure the microphone's on okay well as i was saying thank you very much for having us here advanced biofuels usa is a non-profit educational organization we are not a trade group so we feel we have an opportunity to really look at the big picture in a relationship to our renewable fuels issues um what i want to talk about is watch what they do um as attorney general john mitchell said in 1969 at the beginning of the nixon administration watch what we do not what we say so i'd like to apply that to that formula to the looking at the obama administration to clearly understand what is the obama administration's record on reducing climate change if you listen to president obama's speeches he says he's a climate change leader however over the past six years the actions of the obama presidency tell a different story don't they shale oil and gas fracking have boomed obama's opened up the arctic and atlantic for drilling he has imposed no new restrictions on deep water drilling so in the transportation sector what does obama reducing climate change look like obama promised a million clean electric cars on the roads by 2015 what did we get 60 000 are running so is obama really serious about providing a clear pathway to have vehicles that run on liquid fuels meet that 54.5 mile per gallon new cafe standard to the contrary it appears that he and his administration are doing all they can to prevent more efficient lower life cycle carbon footprint cars and trucks from traveling on our roads and here's how three recent negative actions by the administration that hinder getting higher mileage lower ghg cars and trucks in the marketplace first epa tier three regulations which put at a disadvantage engines optimized for reasonably priced higher octane high ethanol fuels engines like the eco boost and ecotech by ford and gm that due to high octane and cooling properties of ethanol can get better mileage and lower life cycle carbon emissions but these tier three regulations put those cars at a disadvantage to gas guzzling petroleum optimized engines remember we went from leaded to unleaded so that we could use catalytic converters in our automobiles so that we could clean the air the epa could do the same kind of thing moving us to renewables if it really wanted to instead what these actions add up to as a concerted effort by the obama administration to restrict american motor vehicle and renewable fuel innovation the results more money out of your pocket when filling up your tank that more often than is necessary with modern technology and dirtier air and higher carbon footprint and preventing the growth of us jobs in the automotive industry in the research sector and in our domestic sustainable renewable fuel industry so if this administration is truly serious about producing cars and trucks that go furthest using the least amount of life cycle carbon they should start with these four actions i'm not going to just say what the problem is i want to give you some idea of what what solutions are in epa cafe and related clean air act regulations aimed at that 54.5 mile per gallon goal set the r factor at one the epa folks know what i mean what that does is it effectively acknowledges the improved life cycle carbon footprint of renewables over petroleum-based fuels and immediately restore the flex fuel vehicle production incentives second enforce the renewable fuel standard according to the laws that were passed in 2005 and 2007 to incentivize a transition to renewable transfer transportation fuel use the obama administration's use of current market conditions is not in the rfs legislation that is obama administration is using market access and market conditions that are presided over by the oil industry as an excuse to ignore incentives that were created to wean off us off our addiction to oil as president george w bush said and someone who knows about addiction and who knows about oil third is a practical suggestion to address the imbalance in the oil industry dominated market with the price of greenhouse with the amount of the fee reflecting those greenhouse gas effects and mitigation costs that is charge a reasonable carbon user fee for non-renewable carbon for example a 4% increase of current gasoline and natural gas prices which is less than the monthly changes we see now in our gasoline prices and it could produce at least 14 billion dollars a year i have a handout that some of our assistance will have here as you're going out the door you can stop at our booth and give you more details and more numbers on this and then we'd suggest that the money collected go to renewable fuel research and infrastructure development with the fee acting as an incentive to replace non-renewables it will self-destruct as more renewables are used and in the meantime you can demand a choice and then we'll pay less in fees the more renewables you use in the coming 2016 presidential and congressional elections we need to make the benefits of renewable energy and climate change reduction an issue at every opportunity what we we need to watch what they do not what they say see what this administration has done to hinder progress towards sustainable renewable fuels and work for changes and looking ahead keep those candidates feet to the fire okay thank you joanne uh well now here from morgan pitts who is the manager for communications and external affairs with in viva thank you very much carolyn thanks to esi for hosting us today it's a pleasure to be here and discuss in viva and our business with everyone for those who aren't familiar with us in viva is the largest manufacturer of wood pellet fuels for electrical utilities in the world and today i'm going to give you a little background on the company and industry because it's still a relatively new topic for a lot of folks talk a little bit about the demand drivers basically now when we weren't and talk of wood pellets new heat quickly the marocchi mount air divide a stable for the last five them to global renewable energy i've heard of the kioto protocol which much of the rest of the world certainly europe signed on to and we opted out of but the kioto protocol at the highest level is what is driving the demand in for wood pellets these days the european union developed the renewable energy directive which required member states to develop renewable energy strategies and particularly northern europe areas where there was a lot of existing coal fired generation there was a lot of interest in something like wood pellets that enables the maintenance of that significant infrastructure as well as the maintenance of that stable power supply but rapidly improves the emissions profile when you replace coal with wood though that is so goes by far used it closer to 100 but problems strategy is that you retain your existing assets while improving the environmental profile now they're and just to talk a little bit about the european market for a second right now we're projecting and this is not we this is actually hawkins right which is a consulting firm that the demand in europe alone is going to continue to grow over the next several years perhaps reaching as much as 38 million tons per year it by 2020 one of the common questions that we get is well that sounds like a lot of wood pellets where is it all coming from you know are you going out clear cutting deforestation driving deforestation the answer to that is is absolutely not the wood pellet industry uses low-grade residuals of harvests for higher-grade materials so in other words if you're a landowner in the southeast us where 91st 4% of forest land is privately held and kept as an investment you're growing timber on that land to make telephone poles you're growing it to make saw timber things for you know building houses for making furniture that's where the majority of the the money is that's where you know that's what good timber goes to but on attractive land not all timber can be turned into lumber because it's rotten defective it doesn't fit you know local market requirements so that's a huge resource that actually especially with the decline of pulp and paper in the recession was largely going unutilized and in many cases which is left on the forest floor burned at roadside so we're able to take advantage of this this low-grade into this clean fuel and actually just as an anecdote as I said one of the questions that we hear is you know certainly from from folks who are concerned about the growth of the industry is you are you driving deforestation is just an anecdote between 2007 and 2013 in north diva has not deforested but this is the area where there is the most demand right now but there's certainly increasing interest elsewhere in the world of south korea japan increasingly interested in using this as a resource japan especially is an importer of energy pretty much whatever it uses so you know pellets are a better choice than coal since they recently shuttered nuclear plants this enables the use of low carbon electricity instead of having to turn to fossils here in the us there we are in a state of policy flux and have been for several years on this i'm sure some of you are familiar with the biogenic carbon accounting framework anyone who's worked in biofuels currently it's under review by epa the first framework was issued i believe in 2011 it's currently to the science advisory board and there are a lot of questions and there's a lot of questions that how you actually account for carbon with bioenergy the way it historically has been looked at in the way that i believe is the most accurate is that as long as you are sourcing from areas with increasing carbon stocks so you're not deforested you're not depleting carbon it should be counted as a carbon neutral fuel then you account for the life cycle emissions but there there's a lot of discussion about that and i would be happy to take questions about that in the q and a to go into a little deeper before i see any eyes glaze over so you know with that i guess i'll i'll wrap it up i look forward to having a good discussion great thanks so much morgan and you will see a great diversity in terms of different kinds of fuels and biomass and bioenergy uses from our panel participants and so we are now going to turn to blake lindsey who is the founder and chief administrative officer for meridian holdings group ink and this will give you another whole perspective like thank you pleased to be here this morning thank you for the invitation yes meridian holdings group or mhg please stop by the booth and see us next door we can talk more about our products and what we do but we are a bioplastic or biopolymetic derived fatty acids or plant based oils to produce our type of bioplastic we spent the last 10 years now in product development perfecting this technology and we think about plastics and all alternatives to uses of petroleum i don't think knows how much we consume each year in plastics there's over 600 billion pounds of plastics produced every year a recent study by the university of georgia and two other universities that was published in the science magazine talks about eight million metric tons ending up in the ending up in the ocean every year eight million tons of plastic and that's all they can measure because it floats they don't know what's not floating they predict it could be over 200 million metric tons of plastic in the ocean today again eight million metric tons go in every year that rate is only going to increase they predict over the next 20 years it's not primarily because of countries like the U.S. where we have a more infrastructure that we have and how much we had uh top that was plastic oatmeal plastic bowl for the fruit was plastic here's a little plastic window in the bag that had my sugar and fruit nuts in there spoon wrapped in plastic and a plastic spoon plastic fork that i didn't use in plastic bag plastic coated box that had her chicken nuggets in there plastic coated box that had her hash browns in there the lid for the fruit the lid for the oatmeal the little plastic that had the cranberries in there little plastic bag my coffee with a plastic cup lid i give them credit um our biopoly good for them what we do with and uh we wrap it in plastic and we throw it away right that'll never go away i'll never degrade and 100 of is made from petroleum so we believe there's a better alternative that's good for the environment it reduces the demand on petroleum the technology like all of these panelists up here today our reporting is that okay food because i eat there a lot with my them it's just an example of how we can change the way the world uses plastics we have trademarked the term agro factoring because we are using plant derived renewable feedstocks for our manufacturing process and as i said we're located in georgia and right now within a 200 mile radius of our facility there's eight million acres dedicated to agriculture and most of those farmers don't have anything to grow in the winter time in the southeastern united states canola is a winter crop so as they're harvesting their peanuts or their corn or their cotton as soon as they pull that down i have about three to four weeks after that to plant their normal crop rotation so the farming industry is very excited because we're giving them a second income on the same acreage and in our case we're also planning a non-gmo canola oil one of the visions we have is that we'll have excess oil production capacity over and above what we need for our fermentation process to make the the pha we can rent the oil to our friends at chick-fil-a because they're already using non-gmo canola oil to cook their fries in today and i say rent it because we want them to use it and then when they're done with it we want it back as used cooking oil to turn it into plastic which we could then deliver to them those cups and plates and bowls and articles that i just pulled out of the bag as a fully renewable biodegradable food contact safe plastic and price competitively and functional for all those applications so thank you appreciate your attention and look forward to talking with you more great so sure and and please note that he does pack out his own trash so that's a real real benefit and and we'll probably never think about all of this the same way again so thank you so much and that's a very good segue to our next speaker and stuckel who is the vice president of federal affairs with the national biodiesel board because actually biodiesel can be made from some of that same same waste oil that you're talking about so and well thanks very much carol good morning everyone it's wonderful to be here always appreciate this event and the ability we have to meet and talk with folks and educate them about the biodiesel industry so i'm with the national biodiesel board and we're the trade association that represents the biodiesel and renewable industries in the united states we have plants in just about every state as carol said what we do is we take waste feedstocks and make them into fuel and that fuel diversifies the diesel supply system so we can take recycled cooking oil soybean oil canola oil algae animal fats tallow a variety of feedstocks that are traditionally waste feedstocks that either go and clog up our sewer systems or don't traditionally have a home to be used anywhere such as a lot of that recycled cooking oil and actually becomes a value add product that then we make into a fuel that becomes the alternative to diesel so we're about a 1.8 billion gallon industry or so and if you think about it in terms of what the diesel pool is you've got about a 60 billion gallon diesel pool so we're still a very very small part of that although we're very very much a growing part of the industry another part of our industry that is very exciting in a growing aspect for us is called bio heat for those folks that are from the northeast you're obviously very familiar with home heating oil so what we do is we take biodiesel and mix that into the home heating oil and becomes a replacement for that traditional home heating oil which is a very dirty and has a lot of high emissions biodiesel is considered an advanced biofuel so EPA has gone through and done a life cycle analysis which essentially says that we reduce greenhouse gas emissions by at least 50 percent and depending on what feedstock you're using we can reduce greenhouse gas emissions up to 87 percent so as we talk a lot about climate change and kind of what the president and the administration has going on we are a way that the president can achieve those goals that they have stated that folks have talked about in terms of reducing our climate our greenhouse gas emissions in terms of climate change so we're here today and we're working on that pretty diligently the program that we work very closely with and we're a big part of is the renewable fuel standard and most people think of the renewable fuel standard and they think about ethanol and you'll hear a little bit from Rob about ethanol in a minute but we're a little bit different like I said we diversify the diesel supply system in the United States whereas ethanol diversifies the gasoline supply system so for us the renewable fuel standard has really been a mechanism to grow our industry in a really sustainable gradual way we've been growing our industry about 300 million gallons a year which is small but still for us a really good step in the right direction and allowing our plants to really sustain and grow across the country the renewable fuel standard as you guys have heard and probably everybody knows a lot about he's really gotten a lot of heat lately the EPA had released its proposal for the renewable volume allegations for the RFS and for the biodiesel industry we don't have a number set in statute on a yearly basis two years ago in 2012 we received a billion gallon we gradually escalated up to a billion gallons and then after 2012 we need to go into EPA and show them why we think we should be able to grow because we've reduced greenhouse gas emissions because we have jobs we're good for the economy you know there's a variety of factors we go through so we are working very closely with EPA and talking about a 300 million gallon growth or so as the out years come up and so EPA did put out the proposal it wasn't everything that we had wanted from the biodiesel and renewable diesel industry perspective but for our industry we do feel like what EPA put out was a step in the right direction in terms of increasing our numbers EPA gradually increased our numbers 100 million gallons a year clearly we think we can do more we know we can do more we have production facilities all across the country in a capacity of almost four billion gallons that's not being utilized so if our highest production was 1.8 billion gallons and we have a four billion gallon capacity we clearly have a lot more room to grow so throughout this comment period that we're entering in and in right now with EPA we're really working with them to talk to them about how we see this program growing and why it makes sense to continue to grow the biodiesel and renewable diesel sector so so we're going to be working really diligent with EPA over the next few months the comment period closes at the end of July and we'll be submitting comments to them on why the volumes should continue to grow for all of us in the renewable fuels industry our friends in the ethanol industry obviously as well as ourselves the other aspect that we work closely with legislators on and on a federal policy perspective is the biodiesel renewable diesel and renewable jet tax credit so there is a dollar a gallon blender's tax credit that usually resides within the extenders package that our industry can use to continue to grow in a sustainable way as we all know and clearly if you're here you care about renewable energy we're competing with a very highly entrenched petroleum industry that's been subsidized subsidized for a long time so it's essential is as we all sit around the table and brainstorm about how we can all kind of diversify this that we think about federal policy factors that are important in that so clearly for us and for others the renewable fuel standard in the tax credit continues to be very important in that arena so so those are our two federal policy issues that we've been focusing on I'm happy to talk more but I know we're under a time constraint so I'll turn it back over to Carol right now thanks thanks so much and and if we have time at the end we'll we'll take some Q&A which would be great so now we're going to hear about that other part on or one of the other parts with regard to the renewable fuel standard and Rob Walther is with us today and Rob is the director of federal affairs with a poet and they have a very interesting story yeah yeah thank you Carol and thank you for having us today I always love EESI panels because the folks that go before and after you you learn so much I think my key takeaway today is that the salads my wife has me on is nowhere near as delicious sounding as the Chick-fil-A meals that your family is enjoying so I will endeavor to make some changes in my life here so back in October I had the opportunity to come and present at an EESI panel about cellulosic ethanol and that was on the heels of us opening up our first commercial sale cellulosic plant 25 million gallons 90 clean fuel and if you go and look at the video of my presentation I come across as almost giddy pretty pretty excited because you know this has been a long time in coming when I was a staffer on the hill I was on the science committee you know that committee takes a look at new things things that are coming up that might not ever come to fruition and cellulosic was a technology that we had looked at well here it was I'm now part of a company that is actually bringing it into the commercial space and so it was really exciting unfortunately as and referenced earlier we are still having problems with the environmental protection agency and their proposed volumes under the RFS so I'm not quite as giddy today and I'm not quite as optimistic as I was back in September that you will see continued rolled out of cellulosic plants but I want to make two key cases to you today that I hope you'll take away the first is that like our plant other commercial-scale cellulosic facilities have arrived and 2014 was an inflection point year what the inflection point was has yet to be determined but it was an inflection point year so I'm going to try and make that case to you and in the second case I'd like to present an argument why the RFS still remains so important why it is an important part to us being able to scale up advanced biofuels in the future so let's turn to that first point that the inflection the inflection point whether or not 2014 we saw the ethanol industry move from first generation or traditional sources feedstock which is corn and was starting to make that transition into advanced feedstocks so taking liberty project liberty which is our cellulosic plant as an example we use corn stover as the feedstock called max produce from it because it has a fair amount of sugar relative to other cellulosic feedstocks but really it comes down to the logistical and infrastructure synergies that exist by bolting on a cellulosic plant to our existing corn ethanol infrastructure poet has 27 plants spread across seven states we're the largest producer of ethanol we know how to market this stuff we know how to transport this stuff we wanted to put ourselves close to our existing producers who can haul us cellulose corn stover and also take advantage of the road the rail the power lines the water mains all that infrastructure that already exists at the corn ethanol plant that's money that's upfront capital we don't need to raise when building out these plants and that's at a time that this plant which is 25 million gallons same molecule as you get from corn is that 25 million gallon plant is about 300 million dollars the same size corn ethanol plant is about 80 million dollars so almost four x difference so keep that in mind here we need to get our capital costs down so anything we can do at the front end to keep those capital costs down on that generation one through really generation six is is vitally important the other synergy that I think people often forget here is that when you bolt on a stover plant you put in that stover outcomes ethanol but then you have this leftover lignin it's basically this fibrous mass and what we do is we put that through a solid fuel boiler we create process heat and we are able to generate all the heat that that cellulosic plant needs so we don't need any fossil fuels there oh by the way we create so much process heat that we're able to pipe that plus able to pipe biogas that we create through an anaerobic digester on site over to the corn ethanol plant the corn ethanol plant no longer uses natural gas it is now fossil fuel free so the corn ethanol plant which is already cleaner than gasoline actually takes on a ghg profile similar to that of an advanced biofuel so hopefully the synergies are starting to make sense the result is that you have 90 clean fuel coming from the cellulosic facility you have advanced ghg level fuel coming from the corn ethanol facility and this is for the staffers in the room you have a cheaper product than oil corn ethanol is about $40 a barrel cellulosic ethanol is probably around 80 85 we're going to know more as we continue to market it but that could compete with $80 a barrel oil and we know that we're going to start climbing back once oil prices recover we're competitive again and that's only at the early early commercialization stages so you know we're going to get better at this there are going to be economies of scale that we introduce and we're going to realize where we over engineered this first plant however um you know I still haven't really made the case that there was an inflection point well if you look 2014 how many corn ethanol plants were being built it's a big goose egg there were four cellulosic plants under construction and that's because of the way the renewable fuel standard is created it puts a cap on corn ethanol at 15 billion gallons all the rest of the the headspace under renewable fuel standard can come from advanced or come from cellulosic and then obviously the role that biodiesel can play so take that into account here corn is capped under the renewable fuel standard so why is an investment why why is an investor so interested in the renewable fuel standard if I have such a great product that's so clean if it's so cheap if it's better for public health if it's entirely domestic why do I need the renewable fuel standard well it's because our customers are our competitors they're the oil refineries and oil refineries are vertically integrated and they produce oil and so if they buy a gallon of my product that's a gallon of their product that they produce that they can't sell so they are unwilling to take my product that shows that there's a breakdown in the marketplace and that's what the renewable fuel standard I don't I don't care if you are the most liberal liberal or the most conservative conservative whether it be a liberal political uh wonk conservative political want liberal economists conservative economists the role of government is to is to ensure that markets work freely no matter who you are and that's what the renewable fuel center does is it's trying to break the monopoly of oil okay so hopefully you come away with that so just a quick lesson in terms of investment in order for me to get investment into one of these cellulose plants I need to prove to the investor that there'll be a return on investment that they're going to give me some money and they're going to get that money back plus a little and in order to do that I need to show that there's revenue certainty in other words they'll be revenue against which I can service my debt or whatever the credit is and in order to show that revenue certainty I need to show that there's a market for this product so one's going to buy it and there's going to be revenue flowing in and in order to show a market I need often an off take agreement or a letter intent and because our competitors are the ones that would buy our product they're not willing to give us those letters of intent because they're not going to buy our product so that's where the RFS comes in it's supplementing for a breakdown in the market where I can't get a letter of intent if you're a wind turbine you go to your local utility I say you say I have electrons to sell you and the utility says how much you say here's how much and they say yes or no and if your electrons are cheaper whether it be cheaper because standalone or because you have incentives from the government they'll buy it if I had incentives from the government the oil companies still don't buy my product so hopefully that makes sense so the takeaway here and the leave behind for you is without a functioning RFS cellulosic will not roll out in this country we will have built our last plant in this country and so the next time poet is issuing a press release the question is will it be in English or will it be in Portuguese do I have to go get Rosetta Stone Portuguese and start getting ready for being the head of federal affairs in Brazil or am I going to stay here at home and that's really the point and so that's why I go back to was 2014 an inflection point that was a positive or was it negative so thank you for your time great thank you thank you Rob and I might just mention at the briefing that Rob referenced last fall there we had several cellulosic companies that were there and basically they were all saying the same thing that they were now in the market with with product had gone commercial but that without certainty in policy and of course we hear this across the board with regard to all renewables with with regard to everything both out certainty and policy that the market was going to go overseas because that is where the market conditions were much more favorable so there are a lot of interesting things going on all sorts of bio-based products that ua programs are are fostering and to talk to us a little bit about that is mark Bratzitsky who is the director of the energy division for the rural business cooperative service at USDA's office of rural development here everybody have a little background and clarification within USDA as many of you know we're a huge department with with various agencies I represent the rural business cooperative service which is part of our rural development mission area and really within rural business cooperative service our role is to provide financing programs so mainly guaranteed loans some grants for business and economic development this morning I'll focus on our energy programs which is the division that I administer in a nutshell kind of the elevator speech the programs I administer really are loans and grants that support the rest of what the panel just talked about the production of a wide variety of advanced biofuels of bio-based products including bioplastics soon and many other products some of the focus on a couple of our programs just give you some highlights as to the program itself some status and then some insights as to some other activities where you can learn more about the programs so the three programs I'll address are the rural energy for America program the advanced biofuels payment program and for short our biofinery assistance program and I'll explain that comment for short when you get to the end of this the rural energy for America program was initially authorized in the 2002 farm bill actually all these programs are farm bill supported both from an authorization sense but also from a funding sense for the most part the rural energy for America program supports of small businesses and ag producers that are interested in either implementing a renewable on the energy efficiency side it could be things like equipment you know on farm we do a lot of funding and financing of grain dryers but it could be heating lighting and other improvements that reduce consumption of energy small businesses are also eligible such as grocery stores carwashers manufacturing facilities all again for the reduction of energy consumption on the renewable energy side the program provides funding for implementing a renewable energy system such as wind solar systems we use the term biomass to be a wide variety it could be things like biodiesel ethanol facilities wood pellet facilities so a wide variety of biomass facilities the program provides grants or guaranteed loans grants up to five hundred thousand dollars for energy systems two hundred fifty thousand for energy efficiency improvements and loans up to 25 million dollars this year we had quite a bit of funding available about a hundred million dollars total mainly because the program was delayed and getting out in 2014 the last farm bill took us a little while to update the rules so we basically had two years of funding available the funding supports especially three initiatives within the program one is an energy efficiency and basically a technical assistance program so we provide grants to universities electric co-ops could be units of state or local government resource and conservation districts for example to assist small businesses and producers by doing studies energy audits for energy efficiency programs or for technical assistance in implementing their renewable energy systems that program provided two million dollars of funding this year in 25 projects in 24 states so a very diverse program in the actual loan and grant program for systems we're in the middle of the year so I can't give you a lot of details as far as where we're going to end up but we split 10% of the funds and reserve it for small projects so projects that are requesting grants of 20,000 or less and we just finished rolling out that program and funding those projects so we just it was just over 10 million dollars available and in that program we made 800 awards of which were about half and half a little bit under it was about 325 for energy efficiency projects and little almost 500 awards for renewable energy systems this year we're just starting to roll out the larger projects so we have yet 60 million dollars available but we also have about 1500 applications on hand throughout the country so as you can see it's a very active program and going forward the second program very simply is an advanced biofuels payment program on an annual basis we have 15 million dollars this is again supported by the farm bill in the program it basically makes payments to producers of advanced biofuels so on a quarterly basis of the producers that apply for the program report to us what their production was and we simply prorate the payments based on their production on a btu basis so we kind of equate all the fuels and production to btu's and they make payments to support the production of the the various industries that the payments as you might expect are getting smaller because the industry is growing which is really the nature and the purpose of that program the last I'll talk about is really our say newest in the sense of rolling out changes to the program is the biofinery renewable chemical and biobased product manufacturing assistance program used to be called the biofinery assistance program now a much longer term the 2014 farm bill added the renewable chemical and biobased product manufacturing components to the program so just on the 24th of June we released the new rules for the program earlier this week we published the invitation for applications and on the 16th we're going to hold a rollout forum so those of you that are washington based or those that were interested in additional information in the program let me know I can provide you some insights we have this is a forum that we're going to host at USDA on the 16th and have a web link also for connection for more information on that program again that program provides guaranteed loans up to 250 million dollars to assist for the development of biofuels renewable chemicals and biobased product manufacturing if you're familiar with the program in the past it's supported bio or supported advanced biofuels so a bio refinery the major component of the biofinery had to be the fuels the new program rolling out still requires production of advanced biofuels by a bio refinery but it could be a minor part it could be biofuel that they're further processing into other polymers other renewable chemicals so while we're still focusing in providing support for advanced biofuels it's also getting much more diverse into renewable chemicals and other products there's also components of the program that will assist in financing facilities they're going to take an output of a bio refinery so it could be a fuel could be renewable chemical or it could be a byproduct and manufacture that into an end user product and there we're focusing on new and innovative and new processes innovative processes and innovative products that program will have applications an open application cycle and every six months will review applications and compete applications for projects that program was initially authorized in the 2008 farm bill and we have eight projects right now in a variety of we come active stages majority of them are actively planning still going through their their planning designing getting preparing to construct projects but most of those again are producing advanced biofuels many are focusing on woody biomass for the reasons may you heard here but for the production of cellulosic ethanol some produce a drop in heating oil and we have one client that is their project is to take a municipal solid waste so basically trash and convert it into jet fuel so it's a pretty very exciting industry to be in if you want more information the program has some handouts we have a booth back in the expo feel free to stop and talk to us and we also hope that you join us on the 16th for some more information thank you great thank you so much mark and i know in terms of just the reading that i've done with regard to some of these trash to other fuels like the aviation fuel it's very very fascinating and and i must say it is always struck me too that biomass is the one renewable resource that it can be a problem if it is not utilized and so we it's it's one of those things that offers up a whole lot of exciting opportunities very different things in in terms of thinking about all of the different kinds of sustainable uses that that can be made and and i guess one one other point that i've always found very very interesting is that in terms of thinking about bio refineries the whole host of products that can come from those bio refineries it's not just one thing at all just like an oil refinery there are often many many things that will come off that out of bio refinery you can have numerous products that that emerge there as well so we have a few minutes left for your questions or comments first let's go over here first Lucy Mannheim with iron goat technology i wanted to ask morgan about the forest that you own in north carolina i heard and it's probably erroneous that they were all chipped and sent to europe i understand from your presentation that the round wood was used for this and only the residue was chipped and sent or pelletized and sent to europe so two points there the first one is that in viva does not actually own any forest land so we source from private landowners who grow timber to as a commodity essentially to sell to multiple markets and then as far as what we actually use for pellets we use pulpwood which does include round wood in areas where there's no other market for it we use tops and limbs of trees we use chips that are made in woods from low-grade materials that couldn't be strapped to a truck essentially to clear the site for replanting and then we also use sawdust from sawmills as a residual so those are the feedstocks that we do use but we do not take any timber that could be used to turn into any kind of solid wood product okay this question here first yeah this question is also for in viva um i'm wondering uh what you would what you do if epa counted emissions from bioenergy under the clean power plan um our our concern is that um epa under draft rags is not counting emissions from bioenergy under the clean power plan and the data show that bioenergy emits at the stack a lot more carbon dioxide than coal and it can take years or even decades for new growth to sequester those emissions so how how would you respond if epa did count those emissions well i mean first of all right now the topic of carbon accounting has is is fairly well discussed um as far as them counting the emissions talking about at the stack um there are usually there is some incremental increase in purely stack emissions but as i mentioned when i was speaking earlier it depends on earlier it depends on how the carbon is accounted for the kinds of studies that show that there's an increase in emissions typically rely on hypothetical future states to make a series of assumptions about what emissions could or could not be but when you actually take into account economic factors sourcing practices on the ground a recent study by duke university and nc state actually finds tremendous benefits uh from a carbon perspective so i can't speak to what epa will do i don't have a glass ball but i am very confident that what we do is a provides good outcomes okay okay um any other questions we have a couple okay here first and then go ahead um also for morgan um i'm mary booth director of the partnership for policy integrity um so your estimate just i think it would be good if you maybe clarified to the audience that your estimate of an 80% reduction in carbon emissions at the stack um from burning wood actually depends on counting all the emissions from actually combusting the wood as zero and so um as my colleague said epa is reviewing this practice what how accounting is done now and um i'm just wondering what you think uh what you think your emissions profile would look like do you agree with for instance the study that the southern environmental law center just came out with that when you do count those emissions uh the emissions are 2.5 times greater than the coal that's actually uh the wood is actually replacing and um this was published of course in the washington post which is i think probably above the fold i think probably a lot of people here saw that so maybe you can expand and elaborate a little bit more on exactly um just first of all it's a bit after off gem so i'm not counting your question that's for panelists okay back here first Howard mark set with the red horse consultant so they buy wind energy technology's office at DOE my question is directed to mark uh thank you for your presentation before bioenergy uh 2015 conference blender pumps i think we talked about you know a whole idea of the blend wall and expanding the market to e15 market and the announcement made by the secretary could you give us further details about what the rollout's going to look like for that program because it has such great promise thank you yeah i have um there's some limited ability in that it's a actually different tone agency within usc that's administering that we have a couple of our staff that are providing some technical support uh but it's uh is a a grant program that is going to be awarded to a state level so it's going to take a participation from state agencies uh to roll out the program at the state level so it's a grant application um are being received at this time at the national level from us you know from state organizations uh and then at the state level they will support the distribution of funds to help support uh finding and financing of blender pumps throughout each state or through the state that's applying um the it will require those some some um match funding and some other participations from at the local level uh live on state level okay um i want to thank our panelists for being here and talking about all of these different bioenergy uh opportunities and uh technologies and of course everybody's got booths and so please do stop by engage ask questions get answers further the discussion that's what this is all about uh and i want to thank all of you very very much for being here make sure to visit everything um and we look forward to seeing some of you at least for the next panel thank you all very very much good afternoon everyone welcome to this session of our technology panels uh at our policy form i hope you've been enjoying the expo we are so glad you're here my name is carol werner i'm part of the expo planning committee on the steering committee for the sustainable energy coalition and i'm the executive director of the environmental and energy study institute so on this panel we're going to look at a whole range of different technologies which i think you will find absolutely fascinating we've got some really really great people here uh to talk about all this so we're going to be covering everything from fuel cells to geothermal to solar uh some transportation waste to energy and wind so we're going to be looking across a very very broad swath and to kick off our discussion this afternoon is david giordano who is the director for federal and state government relations with dusan fuel cell david thank you thank you carol um there we go thank you um as carol said i'm david giordano with dusan fuel cell uh located in south windsor connecticut uh dusan is a relatively new fuel cell company that in 2014 purchased the assets of a company called clear edge power which previous to that was utc power united technologies united technologies is what's kind of the grandfather of the fuel cell industry i would say in the united states developing all of the fuel cell technology that you now see today going back even to the space program on all the Apollo missions and the space shuttle and things like that dusan is a korean company the 10th largest conglomerate in korea a 22 billion dollar company with 43 000 employees worldwide it's really a global company more employees outside of korea than in korea and really a a good fit for the fuel cell business they decided to get into this this industry because fuel cells are a great application in korea where land is constrained there's not great applications for solar and wind and other renewables and fuel cells are something that the korean government is really undertaken but dusan saying that dusan purchased the company really feeling that there was a tremendous market here in the us and fuel cells haven't been on the stationary side but we do haven't really been that commercialized until recently and we're kind of really starting to get get over the hump but as i said there dusan is also a power generation company so as i said a really good fit for fuel cells they develop wind turbines and nuclear plants and they're into heavy equipment heavy industry so just a very good foundation and we're very happy to be a lot of the folks that i work with that the company came out of the fuel cell world the previous iterations with claire edge and with utc and this is really a tremendous fix everybody's everybody's very excited we currently employ 275 people in connecticut grown from 30 back in july and the plan is to be over 300 by the end of the year all of our manufacturing r&d uh engineering uh takes place at our state of the art facility in in connecticut um as i said before we manufacture a 400 kilowatt stationary fuel cell so we're not into anything that has to do with transportation that you hear a lot about now uh our primary application is for buildings so kind of a good use of our fuel cell is for um heavy electric users like hospitals and universities and data centers um but there's a big kind of resiliency power our our resiliency factor our fuel cells run on natural gas and they run continuous duty all the time uh 24 7 as long as natural gas is is flowing into the unit as a process by which the hydrogen is stripped out and i'm not an engineer so i don't don't hold me to this i'm the governor relations guy but um hydrogen is stripped out of the natural gas and turned into electricity and turned into heat that goes back into a building uh so we can achieve electrical efficiencies of about 42 percent and with the waste heat that we reuse we can achieve up to 90 percent efficiency in our from our units we're a clean reliable source very little co2 emissions low socks and knocks emissions and such such we don't use any water we're a traditional gas natural gas fired traditional power plant requires a lot of water to run matter of fact we produce water that we then reuse in the system for various technical aspects we currently have 112 of our pure cell what we call our pure cell model 400s running operating in the world at 59 sites throughout the world most of our units in the u.s run in places like california and new york and especially in kinetic at new jersey places that still have we're still reliant on incentives uh at the federal level and at the state level and so there's basically two things that have to be um have to be in place for us to really be competitive and that is we have to have high electricity prices and we have to have some kind of incentives we're still we're trying to take a lot of the costs out of these units but um we're still quite not there so we still do rely unfortunately on incentives but someday we'll be we'll be out of that um we have a some of our customers I just get into and I don't know how much how much more detailed uh just wanted to really talk about the company and about the kind of the reliability resiliency department for rising and hot several hospitals and universities are customers of ours and we're we're an alternative we want to be part of energy solutions we don't want to tout that we're better than necessarily than any other energy solution but we want to be part of the conversation uh to come up with a uh alternative to produce better cleaner more reliable energy great no you you're absolutely fine and um uh thank you I think a key thing that does have a real value in terms of an externality is is a resilience right and being able to stand up during all sorts of of things and something I should magically have to interrupt during uh what we've seen in the northeast in the last several years between hurricane sandy and winter storm albert halford and hurricane Irene our fuel cells continued to run because the natural gas continued to flow into them when the power was out they continued to run schools and hospitals and supermarkets providing critical need to to to people used as from an emergency emergency standpoint but our systems are not designed to be kind of that backup power they're designed to be a base load power but we run independently of the grid and as soon as the grid goes down our systems switch on immediately so you never you never lose never lose power great I know the first time that I talked to somebody about that feature was years ago and it was to someone who was running a credit card company and visa transactions and they're like we can't reboot right so anyway so thank you very very much um and we're going to take another switch to a very very different area now but also a very very important provider of base load electricity and but also as a resource that can be used in many many forms and to talk to us about that is Carl Gaywell who is the executive director of the geothermal energy association and someone who has been working on clean energy issues in the forefront as a leader for many many years Carl thank you Carol and it sounds like wall street and united airlines are all learning about reliability the hard way my name is Carl Gaywell and Ronnie had some copies of what I'm going to say if anyone wants them do you have some more left you have any more left this way you can read it and I can kind of vary off of it and highlight the things I want to and get done in seven minutes as requested and then even I want to appreciate thank the sponsors for inviting me to come talking about the challenges facing geothermal energy in the state of the industry today today we're producing power in seven western states 30 countries around the world and we're developing projects in over 80 countries which in the last few years has been a tripling of the market for geothermal power worldwide the fact of the matter is even this amount of usage which is about 3,500 megawatts in the US and about almost 13 gigawatts worldwide is still just a fraction of what's possible the USGS estimated that in the western united states just the western states there's as much as 75,000 megawatts of conventional geothermal systems we're talking about hot heated rock underneath the surface of the earth that you're using to power a power plant not the heat pumps and worldwide the potential is just enormous and it's largely untapped many people think of the california we've we're about half of the renewable power in california in terms of output but even in california there's substantial resources that are identified we know where they are they're not being utilized and what we're seeing though is there's a lot of people looking at geothermal because of all the right reasons you wondered why we moved from 30 countries to 80 well many of those countries are developing countries many of which as i pointed out in a talk i gave a while ago have signed the climate treaty so they're looking at ways to develop power systems without carbon emissions unlike some other countries we know of but they're really putting their effort into it and geothermal we can if you have geothermal resources like in indonesia the philippines kenya el salvador you're seeing a real push to making major parts of their economy as for their utility system so why do they support geothermal power although anyway we can go through the linear reasons but it's mostly because of it's good quality power for a utility system clean small footprint low emissions long lifetime etc we won't give you the advertisement but one of the things that is changed is there's been more of an emphasis upon looking at what happens when you move to systems with a lot of intermittents and i'm going to skip ahead to an issue because you can get two papers at our booths one looking at the values of base load power but the other looking at what we call the firm and flexible abilities of geothermal power because in the west today what we're doing is we're putting a lot of solar and wind on the system and we're going to continue to do that because they're such good quality low price units but what happens is it becomes a premium for firm ability to be flexible so you're beginning to see hydropower look at pump storage you're looking at geothermal look at how flexible can you be can you firm the system can you provide what's called ancillary services to the power system and the paper we outlined we looked at says definitely yes in fact we can outperform natural gas plants in terms of ramping times and speeds so we see geothermal's future in the united states particularly as becoming sort of the glue that holds together a renewable future because we can provide the firming power the flexibility to make sure the system stays reliable as we put more intermittent sunsets and learn how to balance the system out to perform but really quickly the world market as I said is growing strongly the u.s. market is not enough give you a quick quick note as to why the disparity I'd say there's two reasons first there's an asymmetry right now in tax policy which means it's very unbalanced 2009 we passed a broad tax act many many of those provisions have expired they did what a two month extender on the last package well it's a real mismatch for geothermal because we have long lead times for our projects we need to have long lead termed line times on tax incentives and they need to be more equitable you needed the we've supported moving towards a technology neutral credit based upon climate emissions because you need something which can have a metric as to why you're putting the technology out there and you're giving it across the board to everyone on the same basis or same same at same basis but the same performance basis the other thing that's happened in geothermal in the united states is bureaucracy is caught up with us the internet did a study looking at how long it takes to permit projects and geothermal projects are taking three times as long to permit as a major wind or solar project the utility scale winter solar project we're taking twice as long as a natural gas project so we've got about six bills right now in the senate looking at how we can deal with some of these issues and again our problem is is there going to be an energy bill will there be changes in the law many of these changes have been worked with some of the environmental communities that they're not viewed as too extreme but they would help speed up the process because when you take six to eight years to build a project which you could build in three you're almost doubling the price just because of the delays so our hope is that we can get some of the different senators and congressmen who've introduced bills to help streamline geothermal and keep it in a balanced way to work together on a bipartisan basis to have a geothermal provision in an energy bill which we're at least still hopeful there's an opportunity for at least what we may find out in the next few weeks so for moving geothermal forward in the u.s. we need to see tax incentives to be longer term and more across the board and we need to have the bureaucratic time lead times reduced cut in half so you can build projects in three to five years not six to ten years thank you carol that was not your signal carl but anyway it worked we're totally discombobulating but anyway but but thank you so much and and I must say you know one of the things that I hope that everyone will take away from all of us our panelists and our expo today too is how of opportunity efficient for just what the used to be exactly the geothermal industry we used to consider ourselves baseload power and many of my companies were like well we're baseload power that's important well what if the utility commission needs firm and flexible power can you provide that well yes but why would anyone want it you still can't say well look at if the california public utilities commission wants to pay you a lot of money to provide flexible power to firm the system would you build the plant I mean we're in a new era and the question is what's possible and when we went back and re-engineered re-looked at geothermal plants and said could they do this the answer was yes they can play a much more complicated complementary role to intermittent resources and that's where I see I think the future is for them in the us which is which is terrific and I must say in terms of if you talk to carl or go to us both two the other thing I also wanted to quickly mention because I know you didn't really have time to get into this too but but geothermal in terms of looking at direct use in terms of heating and and and then of course geo exchange heat pumps all different forms of of geothermal energy so they're you know which is available everywhere a little along the the higher temperatures for this enormous reservoir of of power potential so now we will now turn to our third speaker on this panel and because we ran out of chairs he's going to come to the podium to speak to us and that's Dennis Lauria who is the senior vice president of project development with the greenwood energy and they do a whole variety almost kind of I would say hybrid projects in terms of the different kinds of renewables and storage projects you put together thank you so I came in last I didn't get a seat at the table but I did get the podium so I guess that's pretty good and I've got all my notes here so I'm just going to say a few words and then hopefully save time for questions and answers excuse me so greenwood energy is the clean energy investment arm for the Libra group the Libra group is a multinational family owned organization that across six countries invests in transportation energy real estate and hospitality so green energy greenwood energy excuse me is an investor developer in clean energy projects we currently own projects from in the United States basically in the mid what I'm sorry the mid-atlantic in the northeast those include chp or combined heat and power projects fuel cell projects as well as solar projects our pipeline and our charter is to invest in projects throughout the Americas so that includes the U.S. as well as Latin America we find we have a very large pipeline of opportunities right now both in solar wind and energy storage so we are more or less an IPP an independent power producer we own assets we sell power to institutions such as universities municipalities and private entities using clean energy and we're able to provide savings to those organizations in terms of our message today I think we encourage policy makers in the U.S. to do three things to help our clean energy growth in the United States number one is to provide a smoother transition to the reduction in the investment tax credit number two is to provide more support for energy storage we see energy storage as a key for the growth of renewable energy in the United States and throughout the world and number three to adopt the EPA's clean clean power program we feel that having a smoother transition in the investment tax credit will help industry plan better right now we we have a planned step change in the industry in investment tax credit at the end of 2016 we think it's important to smooth that that transition as I mentioned energy storage is a key to the increased implementation of renewable energy and but like a lot of other new technologies that have been successfully implemented in the United States both wind and now solar energy storage right now is an expensive technology it needs help to be successfully implemented and there's a number of ways that the federal government can do that and then last but not least certainly is to adopt the clean power program will help help reduce greenhouse gases the United States just I'll keep my comments brief and I look forward to questions and answers thank you okay thank you very much and and at least as you said you did get the podium right so uh we will now turn to Ellen Levine who is the president and founder of hybrid power to go to and she is right in front of the podium Ellen hello my name is Ellen Levine I'm not a public speaker so excuse me for that I want to ask y'all one question how many of you know what an electric bicycle is raise your hands how many of you can name one brand of electric bike that's not that you don't see in front of you one one person right okay quite in quite interesting isn't that we've made our cities much more bike friendly my job is to make bikes much more people friendly so that more and more people will ride bicycles the electrical bicycle laws federal laws are very clear you can throttle up to 20 miles an hour with a motor not to exceed 750 watts so this particular bike here is kind of a high-end electric bike but it sure doesn't look like your grandfather's old mobile the battery's integrated in the body what's really really propelled this industry forward is the lithium ion technology and the batteries and the strength of the batteries they're getting lighter and stronger with every with every new shipment that we get in from a manufacturer we also build bikes for handicap people recumbents with motors with controls wherever they need them so we can put a handicap person on a bicycle successfully and they can have a freedom they never had before how many of you are willing to ride a capital bike share a bike up wisconsin avenue or up connecticut avenue or up the roslin hill from roslin to clarenin anybody up for that you three well that's two more than new and new and new a brand of electric bike but it proves the point bicycles are great and they're probably the most economical way to get around to commute but there's seven nine million baby boomers and a lot of people with physical disabilities that don't want to sweat on their way to work that need a mode of transportation that really works these really work knowing do they really work but they're a whole lot of fun a really bad day at the office for me is putting a smile on somebody's face because there's nobody that gets on the seat of one of these electric bikes and doesn't come back with a big smile on their face to give you two examples of a recent and I'll wrap up pretty quickly cost three cents to charge this bike to go about 40 miles so when you want to talk about cost efficiencies they're very easy to solar because they are storage of energy their batteries you can go straight from a panel straight into the battery so they're very very very very simple to store I mean to solar charge so every single hospital in this country should have a solar trailer full of electric bikes so things should go south doctors labs they have a way to transport things we have bikes with trailers and gurneys that can that can haul people that weigh up to 400 pounds that'll get a body out of harm's way fascinating on earth except for a helicopter maybe but it won't get shot down one person can do the job of four in a disaster as far as movement of bodies so we do the DOD shows there's not a single bike on the GSA schedule we're driving Humvees around a nature preserve at Camp Pendleton and there's not a single electric bike on the GSA schedule isn't that remarkable as much green as we talk now I challenge all of you industry leaders in the sustainable energy field start walking the walk yourself by electric bikes for internally bike sharp programs for your own employees increase your efficiencies walk the walk not just in what you do to make money but any efficiencies and and what you do for your employees health and the benefit of our lifestyle and I'll end it with that thank you so much oh by the name of the company is hybrid pedals hybrid pedals dot com uh free test rides we rent a bike before you buy it and we got five star reviews all the way and it's not just because of me the product truly does sell itself it's not a push sale it's a pull sale um great thank you alan and so be sure and stop by his booth um we'll now turn to and germane who is the director of waste and recycling technology with the national waste and recycling association and thank you carol so i want to thank you for the opportunity to talk today about converting waste into a resource so i've got a few questions what if i told you that we could take the gas that's generated from decomposing waste and make energy or fuel from it what if i told you that by making that energy there would be fewer odors and what if i told you that by making that energy there would actually be fewer emissions of hazardous air pollutants and what if i told you that doing this would lower our greenhouse gas emissions sound too good to be true well it's not i'm talking about landfill gas landfill gas is formed naturally when the organic materials in our waste such as food or paper decomposes in a landfill that gas that is formed is about half methane and about half carbon dioxide the methane is the energy component of the landfill gas and it can be used for a variety of beneficial uses by capturing the landfill gas and turning it into energy we can power homes and factories and even cars sometimes the trucks that pick up the waste and recycling are themselves powered by the trash that they pick up so how does this work after trash is buried in the landfill the organic portion of the waste begins to decompose naturally anaerobically producing the gas the landfill operators apply a vacuum to through wells to collect all the gas the gas is then piped into a compression filtering station and from there it is sent to an end user where it will be converted into a valuable energy resource by capturing the landfill gas and converting it into energy greenhouse gases and hazardous air pollutants are also controlled and reduced creating a win-win combination energy generation and emissions reductions according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency as of March of this year 645 landfill United States in every state except for Wyoming and Hawaii the EPA has identified an additional 440 landfills as future candidates for this landfill methane to energy program many prominent companies have already tapped into this valuable resource for example in South Carolina a 10 mile long pipeline delivers the gas from the landfill to a BMW production facility where the gas is used to fuel its manufacturing processes not only that landfill goes landfill gas goes to Mars and to space when I say Mars of course I mean Mars snack food in 2008 Mars snack food facility in Waco Texas the place where 85 percent of the Snickers candy bars in North America are produced so very important facility started fueling its boilers with landfill gas from the Waco regional landfill the switch was projected to save hundreds of thousands of dollars in natural gas costs each year while also lowering greenhouse gas emissions closer to Washington DC NASA also uses landfill gas to fuel space exploration NASA anticipates saving more than 3.5 million dollars over the next decade while they're heating 31 buildings at its Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt Maryland using energy from landfill gas not every project is large smaller applications have included using landfill gas to heat greenhouses to grow tomatoes or used in kilns to fire bricks so what are the kinds of energy can landfill gas be used for as you can see from the previous examples it's been converted into electricity and heat or a combination of both electricity and heat but it can also be used to directly offset another fuel such as natural gas coal or fuel oil in addition it can be turned into compressed natural gas or cng and used to fuel cars and trucks as cng fueled vehicles become more common cng from biogas such as landfill gas will also become more common in the future you could be fueling your car on trash in total as of march of this year existing recovery projects produced annual amounts of energy equivalent to over 2000 megawatts of electricity and the epa estimates that this is the equivalent of producing annual energy benefits powering over 1.2 million homes and reducing emissions equivalent to sequestering carbon in over 83 million acres of forest and in addition unlike some other renewable energy sources landfill gas is generated 24 hours a day seven days a week even if the sun don't shine or the wind don't blow landfill gas keeps right on going in fact landfill gas recovery systems have an online reliability of greater than 90 percent so in summary landfill gas it's a lamp it's a reliable source of clean renewable energy that reduces air pollution and mitigates the impacts of climate change the national waste and recycling association appreciates the opportunity to share information about landfill gas as a valuable renewable energy resource and if you have any questions please feel free to contact me thanks great and thank you so much and landfill gas really is pretty amazing and we've done some briefings looking at that too and it's just amazing in terms of it becoming a real revenue stream for communities or companies as well as making sure that we take advantage of all of these things that we waste right so we're now going to turn to Seth Stolgis who is with Stein where he is the senior marketing manager Seth hi hello everyone I just wanted to briefly thank Carol and Scott Sklar for putting on this event today I've been coming for a couple years now and it seems to be getting bigger and bigger so that's that's really great to see my name is Seth Stolgis and I work it's going to be a time and state of the market for us solar manufacturers I'll tell you a little bit how our technology differs from what has been referred to as a commoditized market and I'll talk a little bit about some of the projects and the momentum that we're doing so we are a solar panel manufacturer we're 100% US owned and we produce our product here in the United States in Hattiesburg Mississippi we are 100% backed by COSLA Ventures this is the venture venture capital firm founded by Vino COSLA the co-founder of Sun Microsystems and we employ over 120 workers in the United States and here full of solar manufacturers that produce their panels on US soil and we are starting to see demand for high quality US made solar products increasing we're seeing this demand from residential commercial utility government markets and particularly from the armed forces so the armed forces actually have a mandate to use solar products that are made in the US and with their concerns over supply chain management and availability made in USA products should be used far more regularly we're also getting to see an international demand for USA made products believe it or not countries such as Africa Japan when you see a blade of a wind turbine fly off your wind turbine you start to wonder about quality and so we're seeing more and more of an interest over time as some of these products start to fail from other countries so a lot of people think all solar panels are made the same a lot of them are our technology is a little bit different traditional solar panels use silicon that's the main ingredient our panel uses what's called a SIGS thin film product so SIGS is copper indium galanide and selenium and unique to our thin film product it's cadmium free which is a toxic substance if not disposed of and used properly what's unique about the thin film process is it requires far fewer materials so that's why it's referred to as thin film the film itself is actually thinner than traditional silicon doesn't require as much product going in and it also has half as many steps in the manufacturing process so our manufacturing process is about 95 percent automated and that's what gets our product that we see so even though our product is produced in the US it's competitive in price with foreign made products stuff we see coming out of China and it's a very high quality our panels actually produce more energy per watt than traditional silicon panels and this is due to two reasons one there's absolutely no degradation with SIGS technology so traditional panels lose about one half a percent each year after 25 years that's 10 to 15 percent loss in production we've seen no degradation over time with this technology our panels also perform better and hotter climates so all technologies like cooler temperatures a nice 70 degree day is actually the best day for solar but as the temperature starts to creep up our panels will produce more energy than traditional panels which start to not produce as much in the heat so we were founded in 2006 we've been producing panels since 2011 and we're really starting to to see our market take off so we're working with utilities washington gas and georgia power just actually finance some of our products our projects we just last year sourced panels for four different one megawatt sites in georgia it's about a three million dollar project so about 12 million going in there and given that we're in the southeast the southeast solar market is actually starting to really take off it's a little bit different than other markets most markets go residential commercial utility and georgia and some of the other southeastern states because of the way policy is written we're seeing some very large solar farms put in the ground but that's good for everyone at the end of the day because we tend to make more of an impact with with being at scale there are some some policy changes going on georgia did just pass net metering over the past couple days so we expect the market to continue there and mississippi is in talks they're discussing net metering at a policy level as well and i should just mention the we're seeing more of a demand for like i said our product international markets we're installing a four megawatt system that's about a 15 million dollar project in Mauritius which is off the coast of Madagascar and we expect the international market to continue to grow so basically you know in short if you can buy high quality made in us a product for the same prices is a competitive product from another country why not and as we continue to see manufacturing jobs in the u.s move overseas we expect our facility in mississippi to double over the next year and we provide more and more jobs to americans and in turn as we export product can actually help lower the u.s trade balance internationally terrific that's a great story and it's it's wonderful to know that there's actually this kind of a manufacturing facility in the in the southeast and in mississippi we will now turn to our final speaker whom i think when all of a sudden you said something about blades on wind turbines was going oh my um and because we're now going to hear from jim riley who is the senior vice president for federal legislative affairs with a we at the american wind energy association so um and we're delighted to have you here jim thanks carol appreciate it uh i suppose i enjoy being in a theater in the round too so for for those in the back apologies that you're looking at the back of my head thanks for including us thanks for this whole forum i think this is an exciting program on the hill and it comes at an excellent time the the space around renewable energy is uh it it's high energy at the moment there's we just came from some conversations on the senate side as the senate is thinking about a tax extenders markup and energy is the topic for those of you who are in that conversation you know what i'm talking about so your timing was perfect i don't know when you picked this date but but it's a good one let me let me ask a couple of questions following up on on anz idea um what percent of electricity in the united states today comes from wind this is just an average is it one percent five percent or ten percent how many say one percent how many say five percent what about ten percent okay well the fives were right we're just shy of a five percent average in the u.s. today comes from from wind um which state in the united states generates again on average the most wind electricity is it i'm gonna give you three choices texas california and iowa who says iowa who says california who says texas it's texas texas has more wind installed than any state in the united states what well we can get into the per capita's but if you go to if you've been to um but what's fascinating to me is as i looked at go to texas and i talked to my daughter and she thinks of texas as horses oil wells and the dallas cowboys but it it leads the country in wind production what country leads the world in the amount of electricity generated from wind is it germany is it china or is it the united states who says germany china united states it's the united states we generate more electrons from wind than any other country today china has more wind turbines installed than any other country but they don't know or they're not being used as efficiently and they're not delivering the electricity that this is when i as an exciting time in the u.s this is it we're we're seeing this opportunity come into reality um speaking of my daughter she she's five and a half and she came by the office last week and she knows what i do because i come home and i say i help people build windmills she thinks that's really cool and she draws little pictures of them and she'd been in my office for about an hour sitting there really quietly drawing finally she looks up and he says dad dad where where did they build them and she thought we actually built them at 1501 m street so i i had to tell her a little bit about about iowa um iowa leads the country in terms of jobs around the wind industry right now so it is it is the manufacturing center uh seamen's and t p i composites and others have huge facilities they are building wind turbines and parts for wind turbines um the the industry today is if you go down the kind of middle corridor the wind belt of the u.s that's that's where most of the turbines are are operating um yes there's some in california yes there's some in maine but really we're centered in that section up and down from texas to iowa and so when you think about wind as we're bringing the cost down of the machines and the cost of wind has fallen 58 percent in the last five years so if you think about that uh forecast going forward we're on a trajectory that should assume it continues it will make wind that much cheaper and that much more affordable for families and businesses around the u.s but we're not there yet we need things like continued growth on transmission because where all of that wind is in texas is a long way from where people are using that electricity so uh progress on building transmission lines and that affects a number of our technologies is critical uh carl and and others mentioned the need for continued certainty on tax policy wind has benefited from the existing tax policy in the u.s and it needs it to continue for some period going forward so that we can transition to something that is a competitive market which i think down the road we don't think that the current system will be as necessary as it is today but it has to continue for now i think enough's been covered and the fact that many of you are here wind obviously has huge benefits on the um not only on the cost uh during the polar vortex two ish winters ago it's hard to remember how cold it was that day but wind saved consumers in the northeast and midwest one billion dollars in electricity costs a billion dollars in just 48 hours people say how did that happen it was the fact that wind was generating and uh utilities could move and purchase the wind contracts rather than buying what at that time was very very expensive natural gas you know we were heating our homes with natural gas because we don't heat our homes with wind uh and so the market was able to adjust and consumers saved a billion dollars which which is not an insignificant amount um wind is also generating in some states as much as on average 20 percent of the electricity in states like Iowa South Dakota and Kansas and it does that reliably people say sometimes well is wind always there well wind is always somewhere and as the technology of the grid has improved the operators are able to harness if you know if the wind isn't blowing on this side of Iowa it's probably blowing on that side of Iowa and so the the grid as dynamic as it is is able to to deliver wind as a reliable source of electricity um in some states for example Colorado there was a period last year where wind provided 60 percent of the state's electricity load for a short period of time uh so you know again we're we are we are here we're growing uh we're currently supporting 73 thousand jobs in the United States uh AWIA the trade association that I work for has 1000 members that range from General Electric which is a small manufacturing company um down to companies that provide services out at the wind farms provide the safety training to our workforce um it's it's a fascinating place to be and I appreciate the chance to be here and tell a little bit about it terrific because I'm sure there will be lots of questions for everybody because you have all been so good in terms of keeping to your time commitments and everything we've got some time for real discussion with with all of you so any questions comments okay we'll start here hi everybody can you can't hear me all right my name is John Harris III um I'm just an artist and activist um I just had a question about how you all feel about um hip energy solar energy because you know the country we're always talking about tobacco and the dissonance between tobacco and hemp products moving forward um because so much can be done energy-wise with him so I just want to know what you all thoughts were and how you feel like that could revolutionize different industries stuff like that who wants to comment or I'm not touching that with a 10-foot ball anybody okay I guess we'll just let that one be there and and we're glad you're here and thinking about all sorts of stuff right okay uh Jim did you have a comment okay oh could you just like there's a number of uses and is very profitable where it's grown in other places in Canada for example where it's legal uh one can make chunks of car bodies out of the it hemp has a very long fiber very strong fiber it's why it's been made into rope and so forth for hundreds of years and it really is an extremely useful crop it's it's and would be a benefit to American agriculture the problem it's faced all along is people confusing it with high THC marijuana but in fact it's quite possible to separate them from one another and it's quite possible to have a very useful growing and non-intoxicating growing of industrial hemp great thanks see there's always somebody in the audience or whatever that can handle almost everything and there's several states that have moved forward because certainly prior to um uh up through world war two is a very very very important industrial crop great for clothing too okay visit to the orcney islands uh north of scotland where they have a lot of wind uh but what interested us was uh the pushback uh from developing it there uh there was concern that the uh farmers the the individual owners were making profits for them being back above the consequences of having a windmill in the place i wondered what you're doing about this and if it's a problem in the development of the industry i've i've not been to the orcney island so i can't do putting there citing an industrialized wind farm is not an insignificant experience and the uh the companies that do it and do it well work with the states and uh the communities to make sure that there's acceptance of the of the farm um the in texas one of the again getting back to the stories there why is there so much wind in texas the the landowners there welcome the business the think about this a um a ranch in texas can bring a farm in bring a wind farm in put the turbines in and that is that is guaranteed cash flow to that landowner for the next 10 20 years whatever the contract is and uh as part of the deal that they might end up with better roads out to their farm um there's there's a real upside the the farm is also in in most each state does things a little bit differently but usually they are contributing to the community whether it's the the fire the fire fund or the education fund so that states really appreciate the the royalty payments that are coming in um but there are examples where wind has had a hard time um the when think about off of nantucket is a case here in the us that is a um I think it shows all of the challenges of bringing wind into a community uh where again sometimes it works and I think wind has a lot of opportunity and is still being built in places where there is huge potential and support for it um our members get calls every week from companies or from uh counties that want to bring more wind into into their area so okay thanks because I think it's one of those things that it really varies depending upon where people are in terms of the kind of of um acceptance and and how things uh progress we have a question over here yes I have a I have a question about subsidies um the individual types of renewable energy that are individually subsidized or are they collectively given sub percentage of subsidies and if they're not collectively given why not do it as a group I think it would be much more um stronger um I have a stronger voice rather than individually um lobbying or fighting for that particular type of renewable energy um okay Carl Jim you should both respond and of course of course as they said now it's really by the time this is a very very hot topic here on the hill right now that that's exactly what I meant when I said right now tax incentives are very asymmetrical but it's almost by happenstance the 2005 energy bill was really the first time that congress tried to put all the renewables into an incentive package so we all got slightly different treatment but they were all there since the right now so hopefully but more importantly there's been a lot of momentum on capitol to do exactly what you're saying which is come in with a technology neutral tax provision that's based not not on just whether you're renewable or not but on your performance in terms of greenhouse gases so if you can show that you because I think climate will be I don't know exactly what you're saying over to next but it does make it policy makers to hear from people um why this is really important and and what people want our energy mix to be about in in this country did you want to add anything Jim I think Carl speaks for the the industry quite well it you point out the fact that it is a a stovepipe system that we have today a lot of people believe it could be more efficient but getting from here to there as the senate finance committee and the houseways and means committee have tried is no easy feat so in the short term the reality is we're going to continue something akin to what we have maybe with some minor adjustments of dates but um I think you would find support for something more comprehensive okay um go ahead yep both and then you Alan yeah and I just wanted to add real quickly one of the the benefits that solar's seen um is that we got an eight-year tax credit um a lot of other industries have had to fight for one or two year tax credits and you see a lot of boom and bust markets so hopefully in the future not only is there a bill that looks at all this all the technologies but also one that looks at a long-term subsidy because it's really helped solar get where it needs to be um that if in 2016 the investment tax credit does expire um the industry should be able to stand on its own at that point okay and obviously we've seen a huge boom and bust kind of thing which just is not healthy and doesn't work well for for anybody I know the charts that I've seen from a way before look like this giant sign curve and um so I think certainty has been a huge issue for all of the industries and as Carl said where there's a long much longer period involved in terms of the building out for example of geothermal projects it makes it really really important the policies recognize all of this go ahead I have a question for hybrid bikes how much does that bicycle cost I just came I just came back from Holland and they're scary to try to uh across the street given how fast they're going but I doesn't go up mountains instead of just flat Holland and that's my first question and I have a question for the thin solar folks too you can get a very good e-bike for anywhere from $2,000 to $4,000 that particular bike right there is around $4,000 but that's a very high end bike to answer your other question what's your question about hills or is it gold yeah it completely takes away the hill anxiety of riding a bicycle a lot of people love to ride down the hill to the beach but they sure don't want to ride up the hill back from the beach and that's actually how one of the companies was founded by the retired president of Winnell Winnell company now I have just a comment to add to that it's interesting that if I'm a one percenter and I buy a Tesla for $100,000 I get a huge tax credit if I'm an average Joe and want to ride an electric bike instead of a fossil fuel vehicle okay I think that needs to change I think your average common commuter needs to be incentivized to some degree to get out of their car and get on a bike and to go low carbon no carbon no car right right right I have a question also the solar panel I was very interested that at least eight times you said in your presentation high quality high quality high quality is that your competitive advantage against foreign competitors like the Chinese I would think also your lighter so they might have a competitive advantage to ship I'm just curious what you mean by high quality is that part of your competitive advantage against foreign producers yes it is it is one of one of the benefits I think that there I mean there's a very small percentage of solar products made in the U.S. right now there are a number made in Europe but the majority of manufacturing is coming out of the Far East particularly China a little bit out of Taiwan and really the big difference most Chinese companies I don't mean to generalize are using handmade products so these are giant warehouses where men and women are literally hand soldering panels together in these higher quality environments particularly particularly like ours where greater than 95% of the process is automated it just really results in a much more standardized product across the board if you look closely at solar panels that are hand soldered together versus those that are made by machine you can see the difference and you know solar is really only taken off in the past eight years per se and what we're starting to see is that different companies panels are degrading more rapidly than others now we've only really had panels out there for four or five years so we can't say that there's going to be no degradation in our panels over 25 years but when we start to see certain products to grade five or 10% within the first couple years and we look at where they made where they were made and how they were made it tends to point that you know how you make your product is very important and when investors start to see that their annual returns are diving in the wrong direction and this goes for all technologies then it really starts to ring a bell so I have a feeling over the next five or ten years it will really start to sort itself out over which which products are higher quality and there there are some very high quality producers all over the world it's not just limited to the US but I think we'll we'll see a little bit of a shake up and a shake out over time yes I have a question two quick questions actually for the landfill gas I wondered how similar your technology was how applicable it would be to say tapping into large-scale industrial farm waste as sort of a biodegester and I wondered if the wind industry might comment on stratospheric wind tapping into the high upper atmosphere jet streams where on the scale from science fiction to actual implementation is that thank you so with landfill gas converting waste into energy it you know it's the organic fraction of the waste that we're focused on so if you can actually do additional separation and get a more uniform product so like just doing food waste like in California what they're doing is rather than having it go to a landfill they're sending it to anaerobic digesters where it's an enclosed system in a building they're doing a rapid decomposition of the food waste and then they're pulling off the methane from that and then the food then is cured waste is cured into a compost like product which then could be used as a soil amendment so that's kind of be that probably the next step down the road we're probably not there yet because it is somewhat more expensive than most people are willing to invest in but yes it's got some similarity with other biomass type conversion I had a question also on landfill gas I think you indicated that 50% of the stream of gas coming out was CO2 and 50% methane what do you do with the excess CO2 or do you just burn a very low grade gas in which case the CO2 is getting into the atmosphere yes so the straight answer is that the CO2 is going out into the atmosphere the way the EPA looks at the CO2 from landfills it's considered a biogenic source rather than anthropogenic source because it's from the degradation of a cellulosic material so as long as it's not going under an increased value so it's it's the same as if you were going to compost as long as the compost is releasing CO2 it's it's considered part of the original carbon cycle rather than coming from a fossil source and adding to the carbon cycle but if it's going out as a methane where a methane has a CO2 equivalent value of 25 times that of CO2 that's when it's considered a contributor to the greenhouse gases does that make sense we've been told that CO2 has a lot of value and I understand that there's been talks that it could even be made into food grade quality but whenever I ask anybody they're like no no not us because I don't think anybody wants to think anything in their food is coming from a landfill so if if it is used I think it is kind of on the down low question for the whole panel I'm a with a WGL energy we're we we invest in distributed generation projects technology agnostic each of your vertical markets have their respective challenges plenty of them but if you collectively could combine forces what policy issue would you tackle what would what would make making your projects easier to do in my case you know if we want to create jobs people have disadvantaged people have to be able to get to those jobs so there should be some way that a subsidy could be granted to a job applicant who accepts a job that may not be on a public transit line or that may enable him to move forward in life and to progress in life especially those coming out of coming out of the military coming out of the penal institutions these people have very very difficult times because they can't find a job that's close to their home and it's it may not be on a sort of working where it's somehow federally guaranteed for certain people would be quite beneficial to everyone I think one of the things that you've kind of heard a little bit from all of us is some of the tax extenders that we're talking about I think what that does and I think you've heard from wind and solar and geothermal about what some of that does is it allows the infrastructure and the technology to develop to a degree where the price point becomes competitive and economical and that they can then compete on an equal footing it's the development of a lot of the technologies and getting the price point down that um so that you know the average person can take advantage of small time to what is is that we can think and so you know you can't put solar on your roof pretty much in Florida um but you know you can which is a sunshine state right which is pretty paradoxical um but but you can in Massachusetts and a lot of other states so I really think we need a stronger federal program for a stronger federal incentives mandates unless we line on individual states if we're really going to make progress in adopting more clean energy in the United States again good things have been said that the keys for for wind and I think for a number of these other technologies is certainty over a over a long period of time and we don't we have not had that and that's made the cost of our technologies higher than they could have been if we'd had certainty um and uh you know looking at today's administration today's congress um I think we we're focused on the tax extenders because that's what's that's what's real um I think we could have another discussion once we get through tax extenders about what's in tax reform or other programs that government may offer but today we have to pay attention to what's what's on the table great thanks um and I just wanted to mention too that it's important to think about how each of these things again works together in terms of policies and oftentimes it's not just one policy but it may be a portfolio a blended suite of policies that may be necessary to really make things work and Carl referred to transmission I just wanted to mention that that with regard to thinking about policies how important that is and that there is that's going to come up on a later panel this afternoon so I encourage you to to listen in for that as well so I want to thank all of our panelists thank all of you for being here for this and um and enjoy the expo and thanks so much for coming well welcome back everyone uh for this panel um so in the last panel we talked about a whole variety of renewables this time we're really going to focus in on hydropower and water technologies and there's uh you're in for a treat there's lots of interesting stuff going on and I always learn so much from all of these folks so I uh am anxious for you to have a chance to hear them as well and of course they all are part of exhibits in the expo room so please please visit them we're first going to hear from the national hydropower association and we are going to hear from two people who are presenting together on this LeRoy Coleman who is the senior manager of strategic communications and at national hydro association nha and and coupled with him will be trey taylor who is the co-founder and president of verdant power international one of their members the boy you gotta push it is this on now okay I have a lot of information so I'm going to try to get through it as as fast as humanly possible let's keep us on having uh us here uh national hydropower association uh we are the united voice of the hydropower industry uh we advocate uh for improved regulatory and legislative policies to protect and foster growth for our nation's largest uh source of clean renewable emissions free electricity we represent more than 200 uh members uh both public and uh investor owned utilities independent power producers developers manufacturers and suppliers uh we also have councils that focus on small hydro pump storage marine energy uh wave and uh title technologies which trey is going to speak about as soon as uh as soon as I get done here so what is hydro power hydro power well at its core hydro power harnesses uh energy from flowing water and it converts it to electricity now many of you recognize hydro in its traditional forms from conventional from dams uh which they store water in a reservoir when the water is released uh it flows through and spins through a turbine turning a generator and produces energy there's also run of river hydroelectric facilities which meaning the river is endowed and there's also pump storage which kind of works like a battery what it does is it charges it charges like a battery during the evening when energy is low and water is pumped up and then at night sorry we love we love Canada we don't we don't want uh and at night when or it's going to be during the day when uh there's more use for energy it comes back down uh so capacity where are we at with hydro power hydro power today the U.S hydro power fleet federal and non-federal has a capacity of 79 gigawatts providing over 30 million american homes with affordable power each year it's uh actually I should also note that hydro power generates more than half of the nation's renewable energy uh flexibility as a renewable hydro power is unique uh and for its grid flexibility facilities can quickly go from zero power to maximum output making them exceptionally good at meeting rapidly changing demands for electricity so what's our potential well hydro has a lot of potential right now there are 80 000 dams across the country only three percent of those dams roughly maybe about 2400 are equipped with power generation 80 000 dams three percent have power energy generation so that means our potential is real according to the department of energy we could increase our generating capacity by 12 gigawatts through the addition of power generation on non-powered dams or roughly maybe a little over four million homes so what's keeping hydro from reaching its full potential well we have to address meaningful and much needed license licensing and regulatory improvements the current process has involved into a complex and time consuming process with duplicative processes that can increase cost to the point where a project is no longer cost competitive or able to attract investment licensing a new hydro project can take up to 10 years 10 years which is longer than a lot of different energy options such as fossil fuels and frankly no one should be satisfied with a process that stifles one of our most important renewable energies um and nha has called on congress as well as all stakeholders to come to the table to work on a solution at the same time that we are i don't think we can have a real conversation age we are hydro power is helping the nation avoid over 200 million tons of co2 annually that's the equivalent of over 42 million cars each year meeting climate change mitigation objectives including the national reduction goals proposed by the obama administration will require continued and expanded hydro power the good news is americans love hydro power we can be excited clap if you want that's great um the uh our polling is found that over 81 percent uh support existing hydro power as well as 75 75 percent uh are in favor of expanding hydro power so that's kind of a quick overview and uh treta was going to talk a little bit more about marine energy uh thanks leo so marine energy you hear it described as ocean uh wave power kinetic hydro power so let me describe marine energy but first let me tell you about our project in new york city we've been working on this project for 15 years we would have been commercialized by now had not the uh recession hit in 2008 so that set us back so where we are now we are on the verge of commercialization we're going forward in the marketplace but our market is not the united states our market is overseas uh marine energy will continue to grow overseas because that is where the political will exists it doesn't exist here in the united states we will be coming back to the united states once we lower our costs overseas and then and so doing though in the meantime we will be creating jobs here for exportation and i'll be getting getting into that in a minute um it's uh marine what's interesting about marine energy is that once we do create it and coming back we'll be creating also affiliated jobs associated to marine energy and hydro power in the water energy food nexus and also powering micro grids and smart cities and so let me explain what this is all about and the role that hydro power marine energy a subset of hydro power will play the drivers are this it's globalization it's the it revolution and it's climate change and again i'm going to go back to this issue of money because that's what's keeping all this bogged down it's america's short termism real quickly here we fancy ourselves as a country of innovators and yet as a percentage of r&d uh money for innovation our r&d is declining rapidly corporations are not putting money into r&d because of short quarterly short term profits its shareholder values that come before long term planning innovation and yet the world is moving fast beyond where the united states are but there's an opportunity for us i'm going to explain a little further as lee roy pointed out hydro power currently is one half of renewable energy and renewable energy's path uh in the next three decades is putting it on a path to be one fourth of the world's power will be coming from renewable energy that's just a fact from the energy administration administration energy information administration and hydro power again will be playing one half of that hydro power has grown from 27 percent in the last 10 years and it's continuing to grow to the points and the opportunities that lee roy pointed out kinetic hydro power as a subset of that um uh is hydro powers answer for distributed generation and it will grow seven fold in the next two years uh in the next 10 years the electric power research institute says the potential for kinetic hydro power is 23 gigawatts around the world out of a market potential of 250 gigawatts so the market is just absolutely huge where my company is going is we have projects our project pipeline is lining up in turkey in ireland in canada in the uk in china not the united states and that pipeline within the next 10 years will be 1.7 gigawatts so we already have starting to get onto contract one seven 1.7 gigawatts represents six billion dollars just for our company and that's only seven percent market share so you can see the opportunities that are out there for this industry for this subset for my company however uh and and also the reason for that is marine energy hydro power it's it's practicality reliability and predictability really acts as a uh base cornerstone if you will for contributing to distributed energy resources and the answer for the world quite frankly is distributed energy resources powering micro grids micro grids are the answer for grid resiliency and security integral to strengthening the economy that's where the world is going decentralized power micro grids distributed generation the global economy is growing too not and here's an interesting statistic to think about 90 percent of the world's consumers reside outside the united states not the united is growing but the people now it's growing to over three billion people in within the next 10 years and with a growing middle class that means more electricity use more demands for clean energy and water so you can see where the opportunities are so so let me share something else with you and it's an export i i also participate at the white house small business council and on the white house business council this is something we've learned amongst all the companies there we did a poll 70 to 80 percent of the people we employ it's for the purpose of exporting our technologies and services this is not jobs leading america it's jobs being created in america for technical services like building in incremental hydropower behind dams in turkey that aren't currently producing power that's the business and by doing that overseas it's our costs begin to come down so we can begin to imply them here in the united states right now we can't do it because the costs are too high cheap gas fracking you get the picture from a from a business point of view where we have to go so what are we exporting now something else to share with you and this comes from my background my background is this i used to work for the Edison Electric Institute which is the investor own trade association for investor own utilities i also used to work for procter and gamble british telecom and it corporation when it was the world's largest conglomerate and i'm currently serving my fifth year on the research on the department of commerce's renewable energy and energy efficiency advisory committee so what all this is about is business it's about making money it's about the economy now let me give you one more quote which comes from richard branson himself on climate change he said there's no greater time to make wealth than right now because of climate change in other words new technologies new jobs new industries things we can be doing to make money and save the planet at the same time these are not mutually exclusive so what are we exporting so here's how we compete against wind and china's wind and solar we'll be exporting virtual power plants and the idea of a virtual power plant is this you have all the renewables talking to each other they get cited you have wind solar hydrokinetic hydropower they're all talking to each other and that creates base load power energy storage is part of it fuel cells is part of it chp is part of it they're all talking to each other providing power talking to each other providing base load power to micro grids which is the basis for smart grids and smart cities using local and integrated resources is how that all comes together so how does that happen now i've been talking to the united nations and the united nations development program it's this idea it's the idea of going in and it's a service the united states can export through our own government government to government business we go in to do regional integrated resource planning and then we do ecosystem cost benefit analysis and then we do modeling and then we do something strange that this country never does we plan we create plans and we make those economic arguments for going into countries with all of the renewables going in with an answer to developing a sustainable community this very example i'm talking about is underway in the zambezi basin working with the united nations development program us trade and development agency to connect five african countries along the zambezi river basin starting with hydropower then you begin to connect and the reason you start with hydropower is because it's also part of the water energy nexus our systems could be reducing clean water while it's producing power and pumping water for our agricultural purposes and creating water holes to help protect the african elephants from poachers okay so that's what's happening normal coalescence here's the okay great so hopefully we will have time at at the end for a little q and a and because i think it could all be very engaging so we also have friends from north of the border obviously the u.s and canada have a very very special uh relationship and uh it's amazing how much clean energy power we get from canada and in terms of what that means as we look at clean power plans here in the u.s uh what that means economically so we're happy to once again welcome jacob irving who is the president of canadian hydropower association jacob thank you once again carol very much for the opportunity to come and talk about canadian hydropower to our american cousins here and to begin with um i think i i'd like to start off by um reading a a bit of a humorous piece from the internet uh please don't stop me if you've heard this one before because i think it's instructive it goes a little something like this it's a it's a transcript between a u.s naval ship and canadian authorities off the coast of newfoundland some of them already heard it so the americans are on the radio let's say please divert your course 15 degrees to the north to avoid a collision the canadians respond recommend you divert your course 15 degrees to the south to avoid a collision the americans respond this is the captain of a u.s navy ship i say again divert your course the canadians respond no i say again you divert your course the american responds this is the aircraft carrier uss abraham lincoln the second largest ship in the united states atlantic fleet we are accompanied by three destroyers three cruisers and numerous support vessels i demand that you change your course 15 degrees north that's one five degrees north or countermeasures will be undertaken to ensure the safety of this ship the canadian responds well we're a lighthouse so you know your call it's so canadian us canadians love that little story whether or not it's true is a whole other thing but um i think the point i like the point of the story is that i think is sort of as mighty as the united states is um you can always use our help and thank you and and and i also think actually another this is so replete with analogies and lessons this little fable um is that uh i often think about that lighthouse operator and you know say um they didn't communicate it properly and say there was an accident uh you can be sure that that lighthouse operator would have had a performance review with their superiors it would not do for us canadians to let you crash upon the rocks but sometimes what we forget on our side of the border is that it is our job to communicate better to you we shouldn't be sitting back passively expecting you to know things that you may not and that really is the basis of why i'm here to talk to you today as i always get the chance through carol and esi to do is i i get the chance to essentially come and remind the united states of canadian hydropower the nature of it how large we are how we can grow and how we can help both ourselves in canada but also the united states and to take a bit more of a north american approach to some of the shared climate change objectives greenhouse gas issues that we've all discussed so in canada from hydropower perspective uh we are the world's third largest generator of hydropower and that is significant when you think of who number one and number two are a number one is china with about 1.6 billion people number two is brazil with about 230 million people number three is canada with 35 million people so we clearly box above our weight class when it comes to hydropower generation we have one of the cleanest and most renewable electricity systems in the world hydropower is our number one source of generation it's over 63 percent of the electricity generated in canada compared to the united states which is about 70 thermal combination of natural gas and coal so uh we have a very large very clean renewable electricity system and we're which we from which we derive great benefit um but we look south to the united states and we see a desire to improve clean the electricity system here and the good news and the news that i want to make sure i communicate and that i bring to americans every time i get the chance is that as large as we are third largest generator in the world we could still more than double our current installed capacity and that is significant another way of looking at it is that if you look at um oecd countries around the world um and you look at who's building new storage hydropower who's building new large storage hydropower there's really only two countries and that's turkey and canada those are the two countries that that have the resource of their disposal that are building it and can build more and why this is important is because we can lend this undeveloped resource to assist the united states you know as lee roy was talking about there's there's there's huge potential here domestically with with hydro there is the potential to ring more power out of your significant fleet the the united states has the third largest installed capacity of hydropower in the in the world um more efficiency and the like you can ring a lot more power out of that and bring more on and i know that that developers here are very strongly engaged on that front but also like lee roy mentioned is there's a lot of non-powered dams there's a lot of dams in this country that don't have hydro facilities in them at all and if you can add that you can bring on significant new domestic uh resources which is very impressive us up north in canada um we have new storage hydropower that can be built and the reason why that's important the reason why that's significant is because everyone knows that as the new renewables come on wind and solar both the united states and in canada that uh they need a dispatchable backup and the great thing about hydropower is that for 130 years of history no other form of generation has succeeded in being more dispatchable than hydropower basically you can turn us on and off faster than any other form of generation and that is very important if you want to bring on new more variable resources such as wind and solar and so canada has a huge capacity in that regard already and we have the ability to build even more and then connect with the united states and help it in its desire to clean its grid and bring on more of its own clean renewable electricity and this isn't just theory we actually have a very interesting project that that's developing in practice in the middle of our continent and it's essentially it's it's an arrangement between our province of manitoba and the states of wisconsin minnesota and north dakota and i know actually bill liberos here from minnesota power um so i might i might throw questions to anybody asks about some of the real details of this but i can give you the large overview what it is is there's a desire in wisconsin and minnesota to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions from electricity generation they'd like to turn down their coal and they'd like to turn up their renewables to the west of them is north dakota which has one of the greatest wind resources in the world world class wind resource but not a huge load center to plug into minnesota and wisconsin offer that they are the load centers so they would really like to very much bring in some of that wind into minnesota and wisconsin but for that to be viable uh they need a backup and the best backup that you could ask for for wind is is hydropower to the north lies manitoba manitoba is 98 hydropower it is a hydropower developer par excellence uh with a huge history they are building a new project the kiosk project and that project will service manitoba's needs but there will also be excess that will be able to support the wind power in north dakota and so to boil it all down what it is is it's two countries three states and one province all getting together across borders to ensure that clean renewable power enables more clean renewable power and this to me is an amazing good news story of international cooperation as much as it is a story about energy development our two countries are working together to bring on each other's clean renewable resources and there's more potential in that regard from coast to coast in canada we have undeveloped hydropower potential east west north throughout the system and perhaps something to to end on as i as i try to attune you to the opportunities that canada presents that we offer um you know it's obviously our hydropower exports are obviously a really big deal to us canadians we send you more electricity than you send us that stands to reason that's the way things normally work with natural resources in canada in the united states uh you have more people than we have uh we are the second largest landmass on the planet we have a lot of resources we are a net exporter of all forms of energy and you are generally our customers so this works between our two nations quite well and yes we enjoy a favorable balance of trade and electricity we send you probably somewhere in the order of about 40 terawatt hours a year of hydropower and this is this is mutually beneficial obviously to us as the generator but for you as well this helps to space between a half a million and a million tons of carbon your way every year so we're working on this together we're building it together but as large and as important as that is to us canadians and as much as that delivers to you in terms of reliable electricity and environmental benefits it represents less than one percent of your electricity consumption overall so our canadian hydro is contributing less than one percent of us electricity consumption our humble argument is that that couldn't should grow a little bit if we went to two percent that would be a doubling for us canadians and i'm not even sure if it would necessarily be noticed that strongly in the united states but it would displace more greenhouse gases as as it always has and it will have the capacity to be able to enable more the us renewables as well so the partnership opportunities are vast this is a very good news story i like to think that we can deliver from from the north to our friends to the south and really all we have to do is keep doing what we've always been doing which is getting along coming up with with natural exchanges between our two systems helping each other out balancing each other's needs and and attacking a common goal together which i think is essentially reducing our greenhouse gas emissions and cleaning up the north american electricity system and we've been doing it for 130 years really all we need to do is keep doing it and do more of it and i'd be really excited to answer some questions in that regard following the end of the panel okay thank you jacob and hopefully hopefully if we can stay on on time we'll we'll be able to do that and so i now would like to turn to david chicot who is the director of efficiency solutions with the los angeles department of water and power i had the privilege of meeting david just a couple months ago was so impressed by everything sorry that they were doing there and of course we also know that that whole part of california well california is really struggling with regard to water and therefore its whole linkage with energy right thank you carol so i'm going to change it up a little bit we've had some great presentations about the supply side i'm going to talk a little bit about the demand side now how we can do demand side management one side note ledwp operates one of the largest pump storage plants in the world castec 1566 megawatts we operate our own aqueduct from no one's valley where we have a lot of inflow hydro and the animals point to the right of me it's all interlinked power water job creation economic development it's all interlinked inextricably interlinked and because of that i'll talk a little bit about our energy efficiency efforts as well as our water efficiency efforts because they really go hand-in-hand on both resources we have tremendous drivers for looking for new sources of power and water we consider efficiency a source we have integrated efficiency water efficiency power efficiency as a supply side resource in our integrated resource planning for both of those resources and in fact they're looking for it to accommodate about 15 percent of our energy needs by 2020 and about 20 percent of our water needs by 2020 we have tremendous drivers in in los angeles in california especially los angeles that are putting pressure on supply side resources traditional supply side resources on the power side we are we are experiencing hotter summers we've still got tremendous population growth rising affluence and plug loads that's rising affluence is a good thing to buy product and plug loads is not so much so those are challenges but the big one that's coming for all utilities in california is our our statewide policy push under ab 32 the greenhouse global warming solutions act to electrify the passenger vehicle fleet vehicle transportation electrification is a huge policy objective in the state of california not just not just light duty vehicles but also freight and and shipping doxide power as well but where it affects the utility most specifically is with the light duty passenger vehicles we have estimated that a full conversion of the of the passenger vehicle fleet in the city of los angeles will double our load we will go from retailing 24 000 gigawatt hours per year to 48 000 gigawatt hours per year that's tremendous tremendous increase in in consumption and tremendous amount of growth over a short period of time so we're very constrained on on the we've got tremendous drivers driving load and you know the ability to bring on new resources traditional supply side resources is is very challenging citing power plants we're doing renewables we're doing lots of renewables but again matching that kind of load is challenging so that's you know that leads us to really be focused on energy efficiency on the power side and on the water side we don't necessarily have the same growth drivers but here's where we're really constrained on the supply side the traditional supply side we're in the midst of a four-year exceptional drought the last four years are the the driest period of four years on record in the city of los angeles the drought we're in in in california is pretty much an unprecedented in recorded california history the snowpack which is our reservoir that falls in the sierra nevada over the over the winter and then slowly melts through the summer keeping the reservoirs full that feed the aqueducts that move the water from where it lands to where it's needed was virtually zero april one there's no snowpack just astounding so what's in the reservoirs is what's in the reservoirs now we got a lot we've we've built a tremendous amount of reservoirs in the last few years it'll tide us through but we're really hoping that the signs of the el nino that we've been seeing with the flooding and texas in the midwest is a harbinger of a wet winter for california but in the meantime you know not having that we are in full efficiency and conservation mode turf removal is a big one we are we are d landscaping los angeles if you go back 150 years if you went to los angeles it was lots of native plants let's put it like that it's a desert you know it's a temperate desert but it's a desert then we terraformed it as if we had gone to mars and created this lush this lush you know southern california lifestyle uh of turf and you know inappropriate plants high water uh high water type varieties etc lush landscapes well we're we're working to yank that out now it's a it's a it's a cultural shift it's a painful process but uh you know it's it has to be done because the you know the water supply just isn't there to maintain that so that is a huge driver for us and in the programs we run now we've made a long term commitment to these to these programs uh to these investments like i said we're making this we're making efficiency in both energy and water a supply side investment we're investing upwards of 200 100 to 200 growing to 200 million dollars a year in energy efficiency so between here in 2020 we're going to invest over a billion dollars in energy efficiency for which we we will save the the equivalent of two 2 000 megawatt power plants and you can't build a 4 000 megawatt power plant for 1.2 billion dollars but you can if you build it out of efficiency same thing on the water side we're investing upwards of of 60 million dollars a year in water conservation and i don't know how many of you are familiar with water price wholesale water prices we have seen our our wholesaler is the is the the legendary uh an infamous metropolitan water district southern california i can say that because i'm with the legendary and infamous los angeles department of water and power uh and it's on water 200 and they will continue to ride and we expect in fact we're probably not more than four or five years away from two thousand dollars an acre foot at which at which point all sorts of other measures are cost effective uh water efficiency is always cost effective even at 200 dollars an acre foot but at 1200 to two thousand dollars an acre foot you can really start doing some some amazing things uh we've been running a turf removal program that incentivizes customers at at uh to to remove turf and replace it with a california friendly landscape no bare dirt friendly landscape at three dollars and 75 cents a square foot now up until recently we had we had put some controls in recently because we were given away tremendous amount of money but up until recently before those uh it stepped down to three dollars per square foot but then there was no limit well three dollars a square foot is 140 thousand dollars an acre we're going to 140 thousand dollars an acre for turf removal that's the price of land and in the good part of the u.s i'm not in california necessarily but uh it's just it just puts it in perspective and that was cost effective the water saved uh over the you know over 10 or 20 years pays back that investment us not having to procure by that water from metropolitan or or you know build a desal plant which there's a lot of interest in from the business side but a lot of pushback from the policy side and the environmental side as well with you know whatever homeowners property owners happen to be on that part of the coast it's it's it's more cost effective to do the the conservation route one thing that i really want to stress and so this is this is what i'm going to end with but i'm not rushing out of it because it's really important i'm guessing a lot of the audience here is obviously since we're here staff representatives elected representatives of electeds etc a lot of times i find that when i get in front of an audience like this and i talk efficiency and i talk to man side management uh yeah that's that's nice but at a certain point after a certain point it kind of becomes okay so i'm going to throw a word in there that will get you back thinking and the word is jobs jobs so efficiency energy and water efficiency efforts are prime driver of job creation and we've heard all about the solar industry solar industry is a shining star of job creation in state of california 54 thousand jobs in the solar industry that's great on on the backs of billions and billions of dollars invested we have uh i've we've always sensed that that efficiency was a more cost effective job creation stimulus pathway than many others because it's more labor intensive than materials intensive uh so we studied it and produced this in concert with ucla the luskin center of public policy we analyze energy efficiency job creation from the investment we're we are making in our programs and sure enough we found that our programs generate 16 jobs for million dollars invested and jobs for million invested is pretty much the benchmark of job creation from very stimulus pathways that compares natural gas development at 5.2 jobs for million invested residential new construction you know construction starts new homes that's the big big bellwether of the economy nationwide 10.7 jobs for million smart grid deployment we're getting there 12.5 solar generation 13.7 a lot of jobs there too but even more jobs per million come from investments in in energy efficiency i know we're talking water we did this three years before this one for water found the same thing 16 17 jobs for million dollars invested same thing labor intensive less materials intensive there's a month there's there's a creation of materials that creates jobs but quite often overseas in china offshore manufacturing or in the case of the natural gas development of fracking out of state and so if you're local to the to the you know the concerns of the local electorate which we are is as the utility serving the city law less our going to put in a plug i have more of these i'm at table t 11 out there in the in the other room and we'll be given these away until they're gone and we also for our our aggressive energy and water efficiency targets out through 2020 we developed a detailed business plan that explains how we plan to achieve it market segments strategies incentives there a customer barrier buy downs etc the whole plan is here to achieve the lofty goals we've established for 2020 and energy and water efficiency i have copies of these as well so please stop by take them off my hand so i don't have to lug them out of here like i had to lug them in here this morning thank you then about policy i moved from los angeles to israel 10 years ago to get into the technology world i moved back to the united states two years ago to bring them to market i got interested in renewable energy and decided that i wanted to make game changing innovations that would save the planet and i so far i've filed around 30 patents in different areas i first like to tell you a little bit about them they're somewhat related by being influenced by a discipline called computational fluid dynamics that sounds like a mouthful i'm going to make it really easy for you imagine that there's wind blowing at one meter per second the relationship between power output and velocity power is related to the velocity cubed so that's one times one times one one light bulb if you increase that velocity to two meters per second then you get two times two times two which is eight light bulbs just by increasing the velocity by one meter per second so you take that and then on top of it let's say you apply it to water you multiply it by one thousand because of the density of water as opposed to wind so you work with this kind of enhancement of power and we make geometries that can cause the speed to be higher at the point where it hits the blades and now let's see how some of it applies so first i'm going to talk about hydrokinetic power i'd like to thank the nha for inviting me to come here and speak my company called pioneer valley renewables makes underwater turbines they can be used in rivers canals tides and ocean currents in november we did a demonstration in the connecticut river canal system in massachusetts and it demonstrated that we were making well over a hundred percent more power per water speed than the conventional three bladed regular underwater turbines that's a game changer and we're now negotiating our first contracts um and i'd appreciate by the way if everybody in the audience can think of places in their districts where we could do this kind of thing so this efficiency advantage is so high that we can afford to manufacture this in the united states and we are planning to manufacture in the united states mostly in a depressed industrial area in massachusetts but using as many other suppliers from the united states as possible and also in the local locations and the same technology can also be applied to small and medium-sized wind turbines and we hope to get into that as well technology number two we call it the wind energizer now i'm going to wave a magic wand and i'm going to show you how we can improve the power output of the very large wind turbines and wind farms by at least 30 without even touching the turbine now that may sound like magic but what we do is we use the discipline of computational fluid dynamics to make models of the wind turbine the wind in the terrain and we make structures maybe 50 meters maybe 100 meters away from the turbine to change the wind before it hits the turbine it's a very unique innovative solution and it works we've proven it on a small scale and this is something everybody should think about for their district because it's a great job creator after the high-tech work is done it's farmed out to local construction and installation firms and metal fabrication firms and this can be huge for all the wind farms all over the country and what's more because it lowers the effective speed at which a wind turbine starts to turn is that it opens is of the energy tulips for now they're beautiful that's why we call them tulips they're quiet and have low vibration but they're two major impacts on the cost of energy and those are one that they start at lower speeds than other turbines and two this is what i call more zoom in less room there's a cluster effect they're designed in such a way and this is one of the patent pending things that i have is that if you place them at the right distance next to each other one improves its neighbor by 20 percent most wind turbines you need to separate make it far away now this is a game changer because if you were to imagine where would the solar industry be if you had to put one panel on one end of a roof and another panel on the other end of the roof and nothing in between so this opens the capability to make rooftop wind farms okay next one i'll talk about final technology i'll talk about today is in pipe hydroelectric it's applying hydroelectric to piping systems every piping system around the world has areas where there are where there is excess pressure pressure that you don't need to run the system now what usually happens is the water utility either lets it leak and that's of course important for people like you or they put in a pressure breaker which wastes this pressure as heat imagine having a pressure breaker that can make you money and give you the right pressure that you need to run your system at the exit so this is a unique approach the application water utilities but even sustainable buildings if you look at a building like this it's probably being cooled right now by water circulation and there's probably a chiller in the basement that the water is flowing back into continuously that's building up energy that we can partially recover by putting in a turbine in the pipeline that's descending if anybody knows the engineer for this building please let me know afterwards okay so let me suggest some policy measures that would help number one encourage innovation now i've been busy with innovation myself everything i'm doing is in an early commercialization stage it takes money as tre pointed out the amount of money going for research and development is very low the number of good ideas that get turned away for government support is very high you just simply have to put in more money or you're not going to get the innovation and you're not going to get the new jobs now when you put in this money it's important to make rules that it should go to small companies that need it and for fundamental not just incremental technology in other words if there's a game changer now the fact is is the way most people are most people in corporations and most reviewers for the department of energy they don't like to stick their necks out there's something new so unless you write into the rules or the laws that the money is to go to fundamentally new approaches then it's not going to go there another area to revise is sba loans now if i were running a nail salon and wanted to expand my business i can get money more easily from the sba than if i have a high-tech firm that could turn into a billion dollar company so that should be revised in such a way that we can do something about it another thing is as everyone pointed out there are a lot of unused dams in the us if you were to fund hydrokinetic as an alternative to putting the old francis or other kinds of turbines in place that would open that up for hydrokinetic to do what it does hydrokinetic means you don't have to stop the water and then start it again you have the extra energy from not stopping the flow i'll make the rest fast another area's patents it sometimes seems like the patent office is trying to increase its fees they find all sorts of great ways to deny you a patent and sometimes they get very silly so that and it's not just the u.s. that does it it's other countries i've heard that china purposely does it this way as part of their overall economic strategy i don't know if that's true or not but i did hear it from somebody who heard from somebody who worked in the chinese patent office these are all things that can be worked on and make it easier for innovative companies to put their money into more important things okay so uh i'm getting messages to stop i just like to say that conclude that we can do the transition to a sustainable economy if we have the right vision will policies and funding and in this transition hydro power has the greatest density of power and we should do whatever we can to help reduce the red tape that's involved in bringing it to market thank you lots of interesting stuff there sorry that we are literally running out of time because you've all got so much great stuff to say but we because we started a little bit late and we have one speaker remaining who also has some very important messages for us today too and that's thomas orner who is the vice president with water management ink and obviously this is all about water management what we've been talking about wait how many minutes can you do no more than five how's that okay what's really important for us i first of all wanted to thank carol and ees i they've done a great job for the last 19 years i believe on the hill and it's not just this annual symposium it's every week they're educating the people up here on both the senate and the representative side they do a wonderful job you need to go to their website if you haven't and attend some of their sessions wanted to thank the senators and the congressmen that are here and a lot of their aides that are really the staff is the ones that go out of their way to give the proper information to the upper level folks to form our policy and we're becoming a lot more sustainably minded in the country uh due to time factor will constrict a lot of things but but water management we've done large-scale water efficiency programs mostly on the east coast we have an office here in alexandria one in nashville and one in dallas we kind of work off the philosophy that the bottom line of green the sustainable movement is black that's an accounting term at west coast is they figured out a way to greatly undercharge for the water by it's I believe going to happen in LA and most of california within the next year and a half is they had slack in the system they're spending a lot of money wisely they're going to be a repeat of what happened to seattle I believe 12 years ago seattle was into a crisis drought they went out and got everybody involved they saved 28 percent first year water utilities operate quite differently than electric and gas utilities the two main differences are that electric and gas the commodity is about 70 plus of what you pay on your bill in water the infrastructure cost is 70 plus of what you pay on your bill so when you have a 28 percent savings and that's my over under for what LA is going to do next year you have to double your rate within three years it's going to change to the whole dynamic he's talking about going from two dollars an acre foot to 1200 in acre foot and that's the one thing that always amazed me about the california water professionals that I knew they talked in acre feet where we on the west coast talking I mean east coast talking thousands of gallons so there's going to be a great increase in efficiency which will lead to an increase in the cost we've set up a program we call it the wolf program water optimization and low flow program we've set up our first major mechanical contractor in san diego we've been doing this 35 years and everything we've done is based on ROI return on investment and internal rate of return for our clients we have a lot higher rates three to five times what california has we do not decouple the wastewater from the water fee so it's all based on consumption we have 54 000 water authorities in the country with 54 000 different rate structures the difficulty that we'll have in the near future is how do we properly pay for the most valuable entity that mankind is pure water and disposal you don't have a civilization so in my 20 seconds left awwa waterworks association conference the general manager of dc water was to ask at a panel how many jobs we were talking about jobs are you responsible for in the district of columbia george hawkins stepped to the microphone and said every single one of them without a water authority you don't have civilization it's the cheapest three dollars less than four cents for 10 gallons of water biggest bargain in the world well we got to make it a lot more expensive and we're going to be doing that in the next few years thank you thank you thank you and sorry for feeling rushed and everything because this is just a critical critical issue because we cannot survive without water and it's so dependent upon how we use it how we consume it and it's also so important in terms of the energy that it provides and and this huge nexus is fascinating very very important so go see all these guys and thank you all very very much for being here we're now going to move to our speaker in seven minutes and put all important there's no magic bullet right so we are delighted to have our speakers talk about their particular products in the first panel really is kind of about some of the systems and technologies and then next we'll look at design and building envelope so the first speaker is Greg Merritt Greg is vice president of marketing and public affairs at Cree lighting and Greg will talk about better lighting and energy efficiency thanks Ellen so Cree if you're not aware is a headquartered in Durham North Carolina we're the largest U.S.-based developer and supplier of LEDs and LED lighting products we have about 4,000 employees in the U.S. mostly in North Carolina in Wisconsin and we develop LED chips packaged LEDs LED products at about 50 to 40 days because the new technology was purest may argue digital music is not better but for those of us that use it it is right mostly because we can share it but better is not in the better is in the eyes of the user not the supplier not really not even of the regulator therefore as we look at energy efficient policy especially related to lighting or I would argue any other technology we have to focus on the quality of the customer's experience in addition to will not adopt we see manufacturing quality of the expected pursuit of a lead to the customers which means less adoption less adoption means less savings there are some states and some organizations have already recognized this those of you that that work in California in the recent title adoption a significant focus on the quality of the lighting the quality of the dimming etc. with rex for cooperative I've been much the too many of you purpose to save energy so if you as much energy materials I'll be back in pipe and be a whoever along with the hospital head type versus Chicago with or you local part of the agenda between 10 percent number insulated pipe in a hospital 10 percent of it is missing or damaged to the point it's not functioning so that's over a mile of piping that should be insulated to save energy is not functioning and so our argument is very simple we're all we want to do is educate people about the need to perform mechanical installation work in the United States in Canada I represent 1200 contractors and roughly 24,000 to 26,000 workers in the US and Canada these folks are performing this work and we could do more if we just paid attention to the needs and if people paid attention and that's all our objective is the other big objective of mine is and I've been to the White House twice to discuss this issue has really is ours right that's the number one and now we'll turn to Shayna Longo and Shayna is with LeGrand North America LeGrand has not only done some extraordinary in how do the same thing with the variety of products so Shayna am I far away okay thanks Ellen so I'm going to give you a little bit of a summary about how LeGrand prioritizes sustainable buildings but first you probably are not really familiar we are roughly 1.2 billion we make the products that provide the pathways and services to bring you your power light data and AV within your buildings we also are one of our core competencies is in control and sensing so we have major manufacturing facilities within the US about 50% of our manufacturing is still here in the US in states such as Connecticut, North Carolina, New Jersey and California and we view our commitment to energy efficiency and sustainability as playing a really key role in allowing us to maintain competitive within the US so as Ellen mentioned I'm going to touch on a few things that we've done in-house and then talk about one of our customers who we've helped we are a better building better plant challenge member the DOE relationship has been phenomenal it's very supportive the the technical support that we've received through this program is absolutely invaluable and one thing that was really important was in our most recent energy marathon we conducted a internal competition between multiple sites and if you stop by our booth I actually have a toolkit that instructs you of how to do this in your own facilities where we the sites competed against one another to reduce their energy intensity and the winner was congratulated personally by the Department of Energy the winner ended up being a small site in El Paso Texas one of our smallest they achieved a 60 reduction in energy usage in 26.2 days and we just found that absolutely phenomenal I mean if you could do it in 26.2 days why couldn't you do it for the rest of the year overall the company was able to achieve a 15 percent reduction just in those 26.2 days and overall we've in our better building better plant challenge we've actually beat that challenge number which is a 25 percent reduction in 10 years we beat it in three and we achieved a 32 percent reduction to date and we've recommitted we've decided that with the energy marathon so that our customers really interested in such as lighting controls and plug load controls that help them manage their own energy efficiency but we also understand that it's beyond that you know there's other performance needs that they have in their building such as hospitals so one example is the recently renovated Parkland Hospital which you're probably very familiar with the name there was a 2.1 million square footage renovation that set up early on so they figured involved beyond and be part of an integrated design process within a building one thing that we found really interesting when it came to the nurses we had developed technology for their patient rooms to control their lighting and you know they have a variety of patients of writing stages of health and we had originally proposed use of iPads to control the lighting within the rooms and we tested this with some local nurses and they just found it too cumbersome they were like we can't use the iPads it's too complicated we need we're caring for this person's life and we need to just be able to walk into a room hit a switch intuitively and the light that we need is going to turn on so we actually worked with them to customly engrave a panel and I have a picture of this back of the booth if you want to stop by that showed different lighting options that the nurses could use within those rooms so long story short we know our customers are wanting we're doing it internally we're really trying to encourage the high-performance building movement first is encourage other many are resource and those programs to be you know and not only have we taken advantage of this within our own facilities as we've improved our energy efficiency but we've worked with customers who also do it on the lighting side as well so continued renewal of that credit or the deduction is really important last or thirdly when it comes to code we are advocates along with a lot of people or a lot of companies in our industry for the three-year code adoption cycle technology is always changing and we know that buildings need to keep up so the code needs to be adopted consistently throughout the states and the federal government can play a role in encouraging adoption of those codes and the last point I'll make is a little bit more of a local and state policy it's benchmarking and disclosure ordinances so there are currently 16 cities across the U.S. that have adopted some version of a commercial benchmarking and disclosure ordinance New York one is one Chicago Boston and what this is is it's really a sunshine clause it it is requiring buildings commercial buildings of a certain size to disclose their energy bills and as culturally using and we covered a lot of these things like codes and standards and and also yeah I would encourage people to go to your booth because I think you you don't make the systems you make the systems better you make the products that make the building systems work it's about and it's so energy efficiency is one if you make buildings too too energy efficient without proper ventilation we have problems with sick building syndrome we have lottings that are America is going to often house which arcs with one of the very old European and companies it's based in Switzerland we have factories in Holland Germany Switzerland Italy we also do have factories in Buffalo New York and Haverhill Massachusetts so we are manufacturing products here as well and my part of the company is heat recovery ventilation how many here know what heat recovery ventilation is a few so one of the things that is happening with energy efficient homes everybody mostly knows about the basics are you add insulation and you seal them airtight and if that's all you do you end up with a box that sealed airtight and doesn't have air changes and ventilation and this is an unintended consequence that is starting to become a real issue and one of the things we talked about is codes and standards not keeping up with technology and with the advance of making things energy efficient or energy efficient in homes and buildings and as a result of that you can have those unintended consequences of what we get with health issues we've been trying to work with spray foam manufacturers because they go in they spray foam a home air seal it up tight and some of you may have heard that the spray foam industry is under the gun because people are blaming the spray foam or the chemicals for air quality issues in a lot of cases that's not the problem the problem is you sealed the house up tight and you haven't provided ventilation so what our company does and what you've got in Passive House Katrina's going to be talking in the next round and with Passive House Institute U.S. but one of the prescriptive points in a Passive House is whole house balanced ventilation and it's a really critical element to moving forward on energy efficiency both for the heat recovery ventilation side is recovering energy of the exhaust air that you're blowing out and heating in the winter time for example the air coming in so that the air's fairly close to the same temperatures the air that's going out by the time they pass through a heat exchanger but the key is to provide that fresh air throughout the house in a known rather than what's now which is kind of a hitter fan to deeper moisture out of the but you don't know where you make up air coming from so for example a bedroom where you're getting through the problem from a fresh air in them so these are all critical issues as we go forward we uh we've been working across the whole country and in Canada as well we uh I could talk about a lot of really exciting stuff that's going on with everything from habitat for humanity homes that are employing this type of technology to high-end homes schools offices small commercial projects but it's improving the indoor air quality and health of the occupants tremendously and when we're talking about energy efficiency and building things that's kind of schools where the classroom school so the classroom is as the class up fresh air so much and benefit is energy efficiency can be a real driver to enable you to do these other things to make sure that you provide for these other benefits so so thank you so much and I think we actually are could we possibly be running questions but I do have a comment with regard to what you were saying rush hospital in Chicago did we're talking about about doing I'm sorry and and they they did basically the same thing when they were designing that new hospital they laid out that entire facility floor by floor in tennis courts and brought in the nurses and the doctors who are going to use the facility and found out exactly where they wanted all these little items that we wouldn't normally think about where do they want the calls where do they want the oxygen where do they want all these things and I was just fascinated by that that whole operation and hearing you talk about it brought all that back to me that really is outstanding yeah I think that the the way of building now is really going towards that integrated process you know that's all the stakeholders need to be involved right off the bat because that's how you're going to get the performance that you're seeking yes sir I don't have a question either I have a comment um I think it's been very uh the social those are and um we didn't want to have a car and we haven't had a car we do a lot of walking we use the public transport and um as a demographer by uh area specialization I do a lot of counting and I walk a lot of walking and I have to count the cars that have you know what proportion of the cars that I money rather than money I think humans rather than they've been from a state and that day currently uh five percent they've been from a state and that day currently uh start to improve energy use people American when nobody's home and and on and on so as we get into more automated and data driven controls that will be you know a significant impact on wasted energy I think just to do we have the we have all of the had mechanical insulation around the Chicago or the U.S. market for over a hundred years and now we have to get people to start recognizing the need to use this to save the energy and that that is that's the key to all of this is getting people to change the way we do things you are right on so in thirties it is in around you have to use it no matter what it's doing you have to do you do that thing that it can do and you have to use it to do that thing and uh we don't technology and good and good the welcome the welcome design issues save energy are important or physical quality to get started with our next panel thank you for coming this is our second panel on sustainable buildings my name is Ellen Vaughn with EESI and we we talked in our last panel about important products and systems to improve electrical performance with controls and sensors talk about lighting and and I'm delighted now to welcome our panel to talk about design issues and envelope issues and and really how it all comes together um to to make uh a sustainable building and introduced is really actually doing this and um that's that's a wonderful thing when you see um uh a a business person who has made the commitment um and it's it's a good business decision as well so I am really happy to introduce Kier Grant to grand champ uh who's president of high performance homes um I had the pleasure of uh visiting um the model grand opening and um uh it's it's amazing and it's it's wonderful to experience high performance uh and uh he's building homes that meet uh a DOE uh zero energy ready home certification so how about that went and intrigued me I'm an engineer I thought it was a possibility but anything that had been done but a possibility well but lo and behold after years of r and d I started doing it started building it the way that we do it we just take it from the basically the outside envelope the make the home like a refrigerator make it as energy efficient make it as tight as you possibly can uh no air is moving around no air escapes we make sure that the inside of the home is quality controlled for indoor air quality humidity anything that could be harmful we have an i a q system indoor air quality that will knock out down to debris it's kind of like a hospital inside we do the envelope and then we add pv al solar sink uh probably 34 more effective than air source units hence getting better every star take our insulation ninth level we use a sips panel on the exterior perimeter uh it's 10 times stronger than conventional construction we spray form our insulation we blow in a minimum of a r 49 that way everything is nice and tight we use energy efficient windows well tom's here now we actually met through the nfrc conference and prior to so it's it's important that i have the highest quality of products you know all across the board we had a high performance home as pledged that we will build every single home not just one or two every single home to a zero energy ready status there's less than one percent of these homes united states i wanted i want to do it for the world i think it's my responsibility my responsibility for the nation for the country i want to carbon neutral i want to offset everything we possibly can these houses are worth it you live in a cleaner environment everybody is happier and healthier the the comfort is unbelievable it's just about soundproof as well looks like a regular home acts like a regular home but it doesn't you don't have electric bills you have a lot of comfort we also are petitioning so that we can get the tax credits incentivized i believe there is on the floor of 45 l a new home tax credits i support that we're also talking about getting mortgages that are reduced rate for these types of homes because they are less at risk than a regular conventionally constructed home regular convention constructed homes are at a hers 100 an energy star which most people have heard of energy star it's about a hers 63 good builders are building to the 50s we actually have our model home at a hers 23 we have another one within the development that's a hers 16 this is off the charts we're not just practicing we're doing it day in day out all i want to do is change the world and keep doing it one house at a time oh all right thank you care so putting it all together energy efficiency and adding renewables and and and getting high performance thank you i'd like to now turn to paul bertram who is director of environment sustainability and government affairs with king span insulated panels paul right thanks for the invitation and thanks for coming to hear our presentations king span is a global company out of ireland and they really wonder what the heck we're doing over here in the u.s. in a couple meetings with the department of energy they said well how did you make this all happen in europe and the answer was we bloody well mandated it so we're not going to get that here so we have to figure out how we can influence this the best way we can they have a number of divisions by the way they have solar division king span energy which is out of jesset maryland here they have an insulation division headquartered out of atlanta they have an under air floor system that's headquartered out of jesset maryland maryland and that's basically for data centers and moving air but the insulated metal panel division is the largest and so echoing off of of your homes that you're building we think that the envelope is being relatively ignored in the commercial market so we're focused on the commercial market and my focus is envelope first energy efficiency so how many are familiar with basic building construction if you were going to build a wall can you imagine how many pieces and parts have to go into a wall system can you imagine how many trades might be involved in that and if you are a really great architect designer engineer and you had all the perfect details where were the latent defects going to occur they're going to occur in those trades and all those assemblies so what if you could put out a wall system that looked like that that met all the requirements so a sip that is this is the equivalent to a sip the difference between a sip and an insulated wall panel is a sip is actually a construction it actually is can assume the structural integrity of the unit so it it doesn't require framing and things like that you have to have a steel frame for insulated metal panels so that would be the only difference also i think i don't know are there joints in your sips i can't remember so we have we have joints in these also but you're eliminating a whole lot of things these are both sips and insulated metal panels are offsite manufactured under high quality higher quality and faster build speeds and they have a lot to offer so we think that at Kingspan we think that there are more focused attention to to the envelope codes are driving new construction so we feel like that's coming along yes state to state it varies and we have work to do there on driving energy efficiency of the building envelope at the state levels but where i believe that the real benefit of these plays in is in deep energy retrofits on existing buildings so i was involved in a project in boston it's called castle square and if you're interested i have a white paper see me after the presentation i'll be happy to send it out to you but it was over 500 000 square feet of a seven-story facility that was built in the 1960s it was a brick and concrete block structure that had no insulation in boston massachusetts so they decided that the tenets this was tenant owned it was public private so there's some investment development companies in it but the owners were tenant owners and they decided they needed to upgrade the building the tenants did not have to move out there was some disruption but it was a scheduled disruption new windows got put in went up to an r5 window uh they went to an r40 so they went from zero to an r40 on the exterior the envelope represented a 30 improvement depending on who you want to talk to in this project the developer involved said that they were 52 percent of over baseline and where they started the architects as they were at 68 percent so doe cheered anything over 50 percent so it was pretty significant there's a lot to be learned out of it and most importantly in this white paper we have one year of actual data to verify what the performance actually was versus what was modeled and where things needed to be done and one thing that i will tell you that came out that was significant was that commissioning wasn't done until a year after the project was built and part of this was a new boiler system and they had three solar hot water units up on the roof and they were all there and looked really great two of them actually work one of them wasn't even hooked up to the system so there was a lot to be learned and the essence of this is exactly what doe is looking for repeatable scalable models what you're doing is a repeatable scalable model and although not quite passive house principles we're pretty close to the air infiltration exfiltration rates and the insulation that you're looking for and so what's the barrier well the payback on this project depending on how you wanted to peel the onion was somewhere between 19 and 30 years payback um so this was a pretty unique project in that it was a tenant owned project they didn't really care how long it took to get the payback because their utility bill went down significantly and they got the benefit of that right away but if you're a building owner maybe it's an office building something like that you might not want 30 years on the books so i agree that we need to look for mechanisms in financing and incentives to help do this and there are a lot of them out there uh but we we need to influence that however we can legislatively and uh and the reason is because the envelope is being ignored because energy is too cheap in the u.s and uh we have to create some sort of a carrots and sticks kind of approach to this to to get where we want to go so thank you very much thank you paul that was uh very helpful and you really covered a lot of important issues i appreciate that um and one i'm going to pick up on is uh the the retrofit issue uh that's uh new construction in this country is what one percent typically of the housing of the building stock so retrofits are critical but it's also important that we do it right to begin with so care uh you know we won't have that that great need that we will uh because these will last um and and still be performing well and the other issue is performance um not just modeling when we need the good design then we need to make sure that they're actually working as as uh intended um and so uh so performance measurement and codes and standards those things are all important and that's a good thing uh to to have segway into uh tom heron's uh presentation tom is director of communications and marketing for the national fenestration rating council um so looking at those um uh products uh part of the envelope and and um how how they measure up uh is is all important so tom yeah thank you all my names tom heron uh with the national fenestration rating council and uh fenestration of course refers to windows doors and skylights and i agree um the building envelope is absolutely ignored um it's it's overlooked in so many instances but you know being here today it makes me think about how far at the same time that green building and sustainability really has come you know just 50 years ago it was a big goal among design professionals to keep the outdoors out as much as possible in fact i did a little research and back in 1961 the downtown national capital committee in washington dc decided they were going to build a new central library and so they hired a consulting firm to determine what features the building should have and they came back and said partly in their report windows serve practically no useful purpose modern lighting and air conditioning methods have removed the need for reliance on natural light and air shocking and it went on to say a more even and satisfactory level of lighting and temperature can be achieved if there are no windows imagine this and unfortunately this idea kind of took hold and it persisted for a long long time after that so maybe this has something to do with why the building envelope is being ignored today but you know we all know better we know that windows do in fact play an important role and they improve our quality of life by making residential and commercial buildings not just more energy efficient but also more comfortable and they do a lot to contribute to green building sustainability and they deliver a lot of health and human performance benefits and nfrc's role as ellen mentioned in all of this is serving as an independent third party certification organization for energy performance for fenestration in residential and commercial buildings and under our program windows are independently tested certified and then labeled so that's the consumers and the building owner's assurance that when they see the label they know that the product is going to perform up to the manufacturer's claims it's kind of a watchdog system and our ratings also help the epa determine which which windows doors and skylights are going to be eligible for the energy star program we were established back in 1989 as a kind of following the oil energy into they window manufacturers were making a lot of outlandish claims about how well their products perform and something needed to be done about that so fenestration industry leaders collaborated and created the nfrc and as i mentioned what that really does is hold manufacturers accountable and provides a layer of protection and in 1992 we were recognized as the official rating council for windows doors and skylights in the energy policy act so why is all of this important because in addition to empowering homeowners to make more informed choices nfrc's ratings programs enable code officials to verify compliance for commercial buildings and this is one area where we can realize a tremendous amount of improvement laurence berkeley laboratories in california did a study a couple of years ago and they concluded that the amount of energy being wasted through inefficient windows annually is about 50 billion dollars it's a staggering number obviously and today only about 30 percent of commercial buildings in the u.s. are using high performance windows and the way that we can make improvements here is through increased code enforcement and one of the reasons that this has been challenging and we need policymakers to look at this is that energy code enforcement a lot of times take a bat takes a backseat to health and safety issues and another reason is just a lack of understanding many people don't realize that windows are always performing you know we look at the windows right now and they're just kind of sitting there we can't really see them doing anything but there's always this tug of war going on we have the air conditioner running meanwhile the sun is beating in and there's constantly the struggle taking place during the winter this can really add up to in your utility costs because you have to blast your heat in the summer to have to take care of this performance and require litigation and students have been shown to retain information and do better on tests than their counterparts who study under artificial lights and there are a number of other studies that just to the positive top of the uh that that such an important by guarded businesses by occupy are the most energy efficient so reducing this $50 billion loss it helps bolster the economy you know that when businesses are spending less money on energy they have more money to reinvest into their businesses and additionally it would also create new jobs there are a lot of benefits here as building codes evolve new jobs for quality control assessors building commissioning professionals and energy auditors would emerge and policymakers can support these initiatives requiring fenestration energy code compliance in commercial buildings and one way to do this would be by tying compliance to eligible eligibility for funding and this is really important because a lot of people think that it's the transportation industry that uses the most energy in the U.S. but it's actually buildings and that's why we need to pay more attention to this and particularly to windows in the building envelope thank you thank you Tom yeah that's it's it's so important as we know we we like to have natural light and I have to say when I stood in front of the window at Kier's house uh upstairs if if I was in my house it would be hot and uh it cold downstairs probably um it was comfortable it was what 90 something outside it was comfortable inside it was I felt no inside to no technology and I think we have a lot of opportunities we can't we can't get all the products that we'd like in this country so I think we have a lot of opportunity to do jobs with with even higher performing products uh Katrin Klangenberg is uh co-founder and executive director of the passive house institute us and Katrin will uh talk about what you've heard some people allude to the passive house design um and I think it really I mean literally we'll wrap and tie together a lot of these a lot of these other issues and so Katrin I I'm so glad you're here thank you and I'll let you take it away thank you um maybe not and uh and you make use of the means of repeating and cooling your building really cool design and with a strategy for climate change so um instead of just only focusing on the numbers and the building efficiency uh we probably also need to start thinking about making our buildings more resilient and that's what passive building also does um so how do you know that you have actually a passive building and this is where the numbers come in uh we might not have to go too much into detail but uh it's important to know where that uh specific point uh is set that we certify to and uh my system is actually a direct response to kind of like now zooming back out big our main objective our main objective is to meet our climate and carbon reduction goals globally and that's where we started when we when we formulated the standard so how much carbon do we have to have to save globally uh then we can calculate back how much is that per person and then we can translate that into a particular performance metric that we measure buildings against why is this important to policy makers well it's starting to become maybe something like a safety issue right like I walk we're based in Chicago and uh I walk the streets of Chicago and not very many buildings um are employing these strategies they're actually two condo buildings are going up right and left from my apartment right now there's not a lick of insulation in these buildings and it's I don't know in my personal opinion it's kind of scandalous it's essentially we're still building tents out there and uh you might have seen some of the infrared photos that have been taken of very beautifully designed star architect skyscrapers they are essentially like radiators plugged into the utility grid we're heating the atmosphere and if you equate like the energy consumption of a building to the carbon emissions that are related to what they are using then it's it's it's a real shocker that is like becoming a health and safety issue we need to curb carbon emissions of buildings that they are allowed to put out into the atmosphere like um the ultimate comments if you will so with our standard setting uh and program uh we we do education how do you get there we teach folks how to design to these standards uh how to effectively integrate all these systems that we've been talking about and uh we also certify buildings make sure that the specifications that the architect puts on the drawings uh that that actually gets uh being put into place and that the building performs the way it has been modeled and um so we uh started about like 10 years ago and uh we have some really pretty exciting news to report this year has been absolutely phenomenal and I I'm not really sure what's happening there's a disturbance in the force so maybe there's finally some political will uh might have all started with the one city report uh from uh New York City's mayor de Blasio that he issued last september you might have seen that one uh New York City committed to an 80 percent carbon reduction by 2050 and uh one of the strategies that they very immediately identified was uh passive building uh standards and principles and uh they named one particular project which is one of the very first multifamily certified passive buildings in New York City it's called the Nicarabaca project by architect Chris Benedict and uh it is also an affordable project and she built it for the same cost cost parity uh now imagine that and uh since then there have been a couple other people looking at the systems of passive house and um you might have seen this recently um like an article was in the New York Times the to be tallest passive building in the world just broke ground uh Cornell is building a residence hall and another mid-rise uh is also just breaking ground developed by a for-profit developer who claims that he can build it for one percent additional cost for profit development so these are all really excellent news and what we're finding if you get into bigger buildings the installation value is really not that much more than code actually like those uh larger buildings they have an envelope of about an r 30 r 35 maybe r 40 but that that would be already a little bit smaller building uh so we can do this we absolutely can do this and i i believe very strongly that passive building will be a cornerstone to achieve our carbon neutral goals uh was talked about earlier to eliminate carbon from our uh from our way of life so uh oh yeah um before i go um we actually had some policy success uh the city council of New York City did propose legislation that would require all capital buildings to meet our certification fees plus uh and that is groundbreaking uh that is really quite something so the city to come forward saying like to meet our carbon reduction goals we will require that standard or similar or equivalent of course they cannot write just like one one group into into legislation and just yesterday the city of seattle voted uh that uh projects mid-rise uh in the city of seattle will be allowed to build uh to a higher far so they they are going to be allowed to build more square footage on the same lot than other projects would be allowed to who are not built to this energy efficiency standard so we're seeing a couple of these really good things happening and also in the affordable market had uh green communities criteria they're starting to look at passive uh to incentivize affordable developers because of course it's a win-win for everybody it's a win-win for them they pay less energy they have low maintenance footprints and the affordable rentals they pay less utility bills so um we really hope that this will take off we are currently seeing a hockey stick growth curve and um thank you ellen for all your great work and your great support thank you thank you so much gutrin what a great wrap-up yes if uh i think resiliency could have certainly been in that uh in the title and that is um that is critical tom you mentioned a little bit ago that the building sector uses most of the energy and that that's true some people don't uh think about that but building that's just a building operation is about 40 percent of our total energy use 70 percent of the electricity use employing these strategies uh really is getting that down to almost we're getting down to zero and buildings are we have the technologies the expertise the uh best practices to um to to actually create buildings that produce energy so uh these are these are becoming um more and more as we train more of the building professionals and as we certify more of the products as we have innovators who are taking a chance and getting out there and and showing that it can be done cost competitively and the beauty of it is that we address uh environmental uh problems while we also create better places to live uh and we spend about 90 percent of our time indoors think about that that's kind of stunning uh and so we really environment is and build here growing sustainable right now so I am so thankful that all of you came in to tell this story and you did it so eloquently um and thank you all so much for coming um really appreciate it and please do uh call any of us if you have questions and um and we'll have our next panel I think in just a couple minutes and we'll wrap it up so thank you oh any question do we have a minute for questions perhaps I'm not sure this ends at 345 so yeah hi uh so I've worked on one more of these these horrific stark attack buildings um and um they like a lot of glazing uh and and a lot of the time they'll cite oh well they're these new high emissivity windows or low emissivity windows or something um so it's okay now we can put we can glaze the entire building do you think the kind of guidelines and policies exist right now to ensure that the right kinds of windows are being used on the right faces of the buildings and that relatively high tech windows aren't being abused and not really being incorporated into the holistic design it's getting a lot better actually because a whole building commissioning is starting to um become more prominent you know there's a a lot of thinking that co-compliance is the most important thing and that's kind of been the prevailing attitude for a long long time that's beginning to shift toward being able to show ongoing performance and probably the most efficient buildings in the future aren't going to be the ones that initially met the code but the ones that you can keep showing over and again how well they're performing and that's the kind of thing that uh you know policymakers can make a big difference by promoting things to go in that direction so I I would I would second that it's getting better uh so in New York City I was surprised um uh they are also now requiring actually architects to pay attention to thermal bridging even though they have not made made a decision yet to put like one energy performance metric on uh on it in in terms of code but that that is already going a long ways but I would still say like no matter how good the window performs you we will have to move away from the all glass buildings it's not so for example like the the concrete slabs they they all go straight to the outside right the um if you don't have a curtain wall so that's a huge thermal bridge right there just as an example um if we pay attention to that maybe maybe we can get there so when do we test the building to know whether it's performing right or wrong after it's built so there is a new standard out called the building enclosure commissioning standard and ASTM puts that out and that is a way to do incremental testing as the building's being built to make sure that it will more reasonably deliver the intended design and output and that's also uh the basis of driving something called outcome base performance codes which you're going to see more of as time goes on thank you all was there another question over here yes sir I guess get it uh get the performance out to the public um just like we've been building these homes very successfully but nobody knows we're doing it uh Sam Raskin who's a DOE he's the chief architect for the zero energy ready program which is the adherence that we build to uh he's standing at the highest podium he's trying to get the word out we're trying to do it ourselves it's just a function of nobody knows it's there uh passive house eight years ago I didn't know what it was and now you probably ask one of five people they haven't done the fias what is it fias can you please spell that and that is the technology that we're all going towards and again this is you know it's a sustainable it's affordable it is the it's the right or the country to the future I mean this is what we should do and how we get it out just by doing it by doing it and you know glorifying it saying okay yes we do have a hear 16 that's an existence on the links of Gettysburg in Pennsylvania and it has not an electric bill and it will not nobody knows about it matter of fact these people that specific couple don't even want to tell their neighbors they're embarrassed there are lots of associations uh trade associations a a i a us gbc lots of ways that we can deliver the education um but what is the education that is the key and the missing link in all of this is building science and building physics and that that's we have to bring all of that into focus architects are not taught other than a few technical colleges they're not taught building physics or building science and we're at a level now when we start talking about system performance and outcomes we have got to get there and so that's where the education needs to be is on building science and building systems and building physics yeah and I like to second that so uh because it was absent in the marketplace and we had absolutely nothing to work with when we first started we started our own training program so we have a training program for certified passports consultants who are doing the designing like this would be the architects who show up and they get taught building science and the modeling tools we have one training program for builders um and actually in fact the builders are really excited I think a lot of builders they do things like every day the same but um at first they were like well you guys are crazy with your air tightness and then it was a real nice challenge and people really get into it and they really have fun doing it and you were saying it like you're you're excited about your job right it is an absolute challenge to build a day and day out exactly and like you were saying when do you test it how how we test our homes we do it as we go along uh pre drywall we do a a blower door we do a duct blaster which means probably very little to everybody but us up here go that's awesome I got a a ch 50 of 1.1 and she's terribly excited because she knows that we're right there um it's important to know what the house is doing as we're moving along because like you said you wait till the end all of a sudden something fails you don't know why it failed you're in a forensic mode then exactly and like you know our steps panel is very similar to yours the thermal bridging we don't have two by fours we don't have headers it's 10 times stronger without it so minimize the thermal bridging you don't have it there's less sound transfer there's no less heat and you know loss and it starts before it gets to the builder we need to re teach people how to design uh there was emphasis on the integrated design bring everybody together up front and uh don't get into forensic mode because that is expensive and you do it right from the beginning it's really not difficult absolutely and and thank you for saying that because uh one example even uh with uh with paint you might think well that could be substituted um but if you have a particular for example day lighting scheme that requires a certain reflect reflectivity um and that gets sort of substituted down the line because that specialty contractor wasn't involved um that can change the numbers that can change the whole uh uh performance so it it has to be uh has to come together in an integrated way so thank you all so much thank you for your good question I wish there was a simple answer but it really is about um uh professional training um and I think there are some institutional challenges we're going to talk about in our next panel um things like uh uh you know the the electric grid and um perhaps uh we'll talk about financing um the way we value uh you know builders should be seeing the the value that they're putting in homeowners should be uh seeing the value insurance um and uh getting a loan they should you know be get credit for not spending a lot of money on energy I mean that's that's helping um we just have systems in place that really haven't caught up with this yet so I think there's a lot of room for some policy um uh thinking and and it doesn't uh it it can be I think across the whole spectrum of education and financing a lot of things so thank you for that um thank you all so much for um your wonderful presentations and thank you for coming um to the buildings panel and I am going to now hand it over to Scott sclar for our next panel uh behind the scenes grid and transmission issues it's all connected my little thing I thank you ESI for um hosting this this briefing session the last panel today is one of the most important uh so we have all these different needs we have different kinds of electric loads at the residential infrastructure commercial industrial and institutional sector we have and those are impacted by economic activity uh environment clean air act standards uh the state of our economy regional solutions local economics all of that impacts it and now as you see through our uh caucus room exhibit we have all these generation technologies that are huge some of them are on the grid traditional ones you know of you know natural gas and uh uh and of course then the geothermal and the biomass power and landfill gas and and uh concentrated solar power and foldable tanks and wind of all sizes and um the whole marine energy tidal wave regular hydro free flow hydro so we have all these different generation sources all coming into the market and then we also have these unique energy efficiency uh technologies coming in led lighting being probably the most dramatic um reducing lighting loads by 80 percent um but energy efficiency software we know loads we can control we can deal with time of day we can deal with seasonal we can shift things around electric energy storage is really coming in most of my projects have them so now not only can you take the intermittent renewables but you can arbitrage between the low rates like in texas that are two cents a kilowatt hour at night because of wind and offset 12 cents electricity during the day that's pretty cool pays back by the way right this second so we have all of that and you know it's not shocking everybody pays attention to the generation side mostly a little bit to the efficiency and not a lot of what goes in between and these gentlemen up here have different viewpoints of an experience of what goes in between and i want to remind you electricity is one play but thermal energy of course is another play we use heat we use heat for heating we use heat for cooling we use heat for industrial processes we use heat actually to make electricity so there's a whole range of things to arbitrage and of course just like the cellular industry or just like the communications industry we have wired technology and now we have distributed technology we call that cellular and it has to seamlessly interact and by the way this is what i teach in my gw classes so i love this topic and can talk for two hours but i can't so we have some really great presenters here and a pretty major in their field and the i'm going to do it in the order in which it's printed um and so i want to start by just saying you know i am stunned i just uh did a project in where i they wanted to have the lowest most energy efficient campus corporate campus and when i looked in every part of their buildings on their energy lows virtually everything that they had worked off of dc current now it comes out as ac current but everything the computers the monitors these were they had banking equipment atm machines absolutely everything the motors some pumps everything we're really all ac to dc devices of course which we turn ac and then ramp down to dc so i'm actually really pleased we have a dc fusion here and we're going to speak from our table and you have to press that button and we have tim martinson who's the co-founder so tim thank you away am i speaking properly i guess why are you doing damn good wow um tim martinson dc fusion co-founder my partner dave geary in the back of the room first of about what we do where we've come from we're predominantly from the data center industry we started or dave started the initiative to utilize direct current higher voltage dc for data centers back around 2004 and i met him in 2005 at every conference here in washington dc and we started this incredible voyage and the idea that direct current would do a better job to power an it load that is inherently dc thought it would be very simple we talked about efficiency we talked about reliability we talked about the lower cap x cost up front maintenance costs integration to renewables it seems like a slam dunk everybody should do it not quite so easy so we are proud to say that the first data center utilizing dc in a commercial sense in the united states is up and running in princeton new jersey in a company called steel orca so as far as deployable technology today we have finally got there in the united states however we're only approximately one lights behind shine and i won't and uh almost a half that out of japan and so while we started with some very good ideas and technology and help move that forward it's being deployed globally better or faster so but my point that i wanted to make a it's available here but that we need to look at things differently we tend to think in terms of efficiency in a very microscopic way and we look at the led light and say that's that's efficient and that's very true if we look at it from the load back to the grid and start thinking in terms of how we get power to power things it changes your dynamics we talk about our technology as chip to grid what if we need dc why are we providing ac from utilities we tend to think of everything from referencing what the utility can provide us you know they will give us more if we ask them for more we will consume more our incentives are on devices becoming efficient but when are we going to start to look at true energy efficiency and a simple example and a fact that i'd like people be aware of the epa has a regulations in place that the us eia says will cause a roughly 200 coal fire plants shut down around 2020 so i'm i like the environment i'm not against any of these things but that's going to be a change and an idea what that means the entire data center industry by some methods is about 400 or excuse me 40 coal plants so the and during the polar vortex uh american electric power the ohio utility was running at full tilt during the winter 90 of the plants that are going to be shut down so there's change coming so there should be a sense of urgency that something's happening so i want to examine the power chain quickly from the utility to the chip and we have a slide that presents this i'll try to make it very simple um you put power coal in energy some sort of energy source and 40 percent of it leaves building 60 percent of it goes up into the atmosphere of course that's the carbon we all want to avoid to get it from there to these destinations seven percent is lost in transmission to get it into the building and distribute it properly safely cleanly stored over batteries in the case of a data center by the time it actually gets to the load the chip and does actual work only five percent of the energy is actually used i think we ought to take a look at how we can provide technology at the chip and skip some of those stages which to me says distributed generation becomes the strategy that we need to spend a great deal more time on distributed generation can be combined heat and power solutions natural gas with micro turbines or fuel cells or solar wind but something local to the load which means we need to go behind the meter and learn how to control and act like a utility with our own buildings and the data center being a bulk load should be fairly easy to do in a data center but it's very difficult to do across the board for our houses for 63 million homes equates to some of these numbers that i'm talking about i would think that it would be easier to do at data centers in particular and the u.s. government is the largest data center organization on the planet followed by at and t and oddly enough the it folks that make and choose equipment don't have responsibility for the electric bill well at and t as of this year does so there that's a big change so when you buy it equipment now that guy is responsible for the bill so as far as policy policy change i'm not advocating going out and creating law i'm simply saying from an awareness we need to incentivize the technology adoption that's already in our back pocket to use and i wanted to just spend one moment on residential well how do i end up in residential aside from the fact that i was an architect student back in ohio state um well villages there's 1.8 billion people that go to bed every night without electricity and how are we going to help them if we follow the model that we have here in the united states how much fuel would that really need we need to do something systemically different we have civilizations sovereign nations in this country that have that same problem we should be able to create a off the grid model to provide energy for villages and to create a solar home to create cell towers in those areas or bring technology to these sovereign nations the technology is already in our midst we're already selling it something politically has to change to focus the direction of the entities that control these decisions it's very excited about what's happening that it's happening now finally a carbon plan to reduce our our greenhouse gas emissions by 65 and one of the core products or approaches is district energy i don't know if you knew that and we are and we are working with the building community the development community to make buildings district energy compatible so this is very very exciting and the this is one approach that somehow gets lost in a lot of plans so i am really thrilled to have rob thorton here representing the association the industry sort of educate you a little bit and bring into this discussion that approach thanks god so in five minutes i'm going to make you all district energy experts whoa ready whoa so to tim's point a typical central station power plan is about 34 percent efficient so that means one third of the fuel that goes in comes out as electricity but two thirds of the fuel is dumped as waste heat it's really in the rivers oceans uh and to the sky in fact if you were to aggregate all the central power plants in the u.s it would be the equivalent of 25 quads which is almost as much as we use in transportation and it would be more than the total energy consumed in 216 countries let me rephrase that the waste heat from us power plants is greater than energy consumed in every country on the planet except for three russia china and the u.s so what does that tell you that's a big challenge and also a huge opportunity just the waste heat we have a technology it's worked since thomas edison invented it in new york city it's called district energy we take the heat and put it in a pipe and we use it to heat and cool cities in fact this building the one you're in is on district energy the capital power plant is down the hill they make steam and chilled water it's piped through an underground network the building doesn't have boilers and chillers or cooling towers it gets its thermal energy from a location uh you know down the street district energy is ubiquitous if you went to college in the united states i'm willing to bet that you lived in a dorm that was on district heating the campuses consolidate their central plant and when you aggregate the thermal loads of dozens of buildings you create economies of scale to deploy things like waste to energy combined heat and power biomass uh renewable energy so it's this thermal network that connects dozens or in some cases hundreds or thousands of buildings uh to a thermal network kopenhagen arguably the most efficient city on the planet 98 percent of the buildings don't have boilers they're connected to a district heating network that uh also recovers heat from power plants waste to energy and in fact in denmark they also are known for uh high per capita wind energy application at times the wind turbines are spinning but there's no load no electric load the price of power actually goes negative the district energy companies get paid to take the power and they put it in electric boilers and they turn it into heat and they use it to heat their communities they actually get paid to use renewable energy but the story in denmark isn't wind or solar it's that they have this thermal energy backbone this infrastructure that really connects all their buildings and creates scale um big sea change for our industry lately was superstorm sandy october 2012 8.1 million people without power from the coast to michigan the systems that stayed online were district energy chp systems at princeton university co-op city in the bronx nyu and manhattan not because they had emergency backup generators but because they had highly resilient reliable district energy assets supplying electricity power and cooling to their campus district energy micro per we've been doing micro grids for about a hundred years and and the reason is that if you're a research institution a hospital like the medical center in in houston or princeton you process tens of millions of dollars worth of research every year you can't rely on the commercial electricity grid for the level of reliability that that mission critical operation demands and so they took it in their own hands and they built combined heat and power district energy on campus and that's really where uh you know our our our success has been but sandy was a wake-up call for mayors now mayors are saying to us the idea we want what princeton has i'm competing for the next google i'm competing for the next pharma they're asking me not what's the price of my power they want to know where is it located what does it cost how green is it and how resilient is that power distributed generation is moving forward and mayors want it and the mayors are saying to the regulators look this isn't a technology problem it's not a financing problem it's a policy problem and we've got to revise these arcane rules that protect thomas edison's grid from the new innovation that we need to deliver resiliency to our economies and district energy is really sort of proven that yesterday nyserda i'll conclude in a second nyserda just released the results of the new york prize they've awarded a hundred thousand dollars to 83 communities in new york 100 000 dollars to study micro grids district energy and chp then the next tranche of that will be uh half a million dollars to deploy and the ultimate prize will be nearly five million dollars to underwrite these new systems mayors want it campuses have it uh final point we're working with usdn c 40 cities the game for climate adaptation is really at the city level and we're working closely with the united nations environment program they launched last year at the un climate summit a district energy and cities initiative it's on our website district energy dot org i urge you to read it their case studies of 45 cities and how they use district energy to cut emissions strengthen the grid and really deliver for climate adaptation um that's all i have thank you rob and uh it's interesting your point on district heating versus diesel engines i was hired by the governor of mississippi after katrina and of course they had millions of gallons of diesel fuel in the rat in the ground but of course the grid was ripped up they couldn't pump it out of the ground and of course i've been hired by hospitals after sandy we had four hospitals during operations had to move people out of operating rooms because the diesels weren't working so um uh diesel is a great technology when you had no other choices but we do have choices our next speaker is i mean the guru of a lot of this jim hecker has been in FERC has written papers has been really a uh an idea guy on how to modernize the way we do it so he's now um uh wires council and uh jim take it away thank you share some wisdom please thanks god um this has been a really wonderful day um we've heard a lot about local uh discrete solutions uh using less energy new fuels new technologies really a new vision of um of the electric future and so you might ask why is this guy want to talk about electric transmission that's kind of old-timey isn't it well my goal today is to tell you why this is going to be extremely important in the future notwithstanding the fact that we are going to have an increase in distributed generation and new technologies uh like uh at tim and rob have talked about um my wife this morning said listen dear uh if uh i were terminally ill and i had 60 minutes left to live on this earth i would want to spend those precious last few minutes listening to you talk about electric transmission and i i said really why is that she said because it would seem like an eternity so so you know where you're you're really in for it i i don't know how much i can bore you in five minutes but i'll give it a try um uh the grid was uh most of the grid uh that we enjoyed today is built 40 50 60 years ago uh a lot of its outmoded a lot of its aging um it's certainly a lot of it's still electromechanical instead of digital uh and um we are looking at a future that arguably it's going to be filled with a lot of distributed resources uh with with storage with batteries with uh a demand response uh both on the supply side and the demand side it's going to be a different environment how does transmission fit into all that uh i submit to you that transmission investments going to continue to be very important um after about a 25 year dip in investment uh we are now putting somewhere between 10 and 15 billion dollars a year into the grid and the department of energy says we need to keep doing that for another 20 years uh and a lot of that is an anticipation of a new environment at the bulk power level uh a lot of what you've heard today is a is a the distribution level uh this is going to help make um our electric future uh more um resilient uh transmission is an enabler of new technology of new power markets that are going to help keep prices down uh it is a it is a uh a way in which we enjoy a lot of optionality uh because frankly we don't know what the grid's going to look like or what the electric system or generation technologies fusion is going to look like in uh in 20 or 30 years or how it's going to be deployed how do we adapt to that without losing reliability um well a robust transmission system is one important instrument in doing that um uh today investment as I said was growing there are a lot of drivers uh the the principal one is the rise of renewable energy but we've also got to replace old facilities uh we are uh uh now planning for a more integrated inter-regional grid than has ever existed before um the uh EPA's uh clean power plan uh and share economics uh are uh going to have a profound effect on fossil energy and uh we need that's another thing we need to uh adapt to plus we need to keep the grid reliable absolutely 100% reliable particularly for for uh chip makers and industries like that so uh uh even though growth has been relatively flat it's still going to grow you know 20 to 30% over two or three decades so we need we need uh uh and I'm speaking on behalf of a group that I'm counsel to wires and I'm I could I will talk to you in the hall about it yeah it's very appropriate didn't I um the uh uh uh that we believe that that uh uh policies need to be improved reformed in order to eliminate barriers to uh growing the transmission system and to to making it more nimble uh and modernizing it overall um we find uh and uh we have studied this uh or had uh uh uh economist study this we find that uh the current planning system that uh uh happening under uh the auspices of my old agency uh is uh fairly inadequate uh people are pouring money into the grid but the question really is are we building the right transmission are we planning for the right things we do a production cost analysis when we plan for a transmission line but we don't look at the array of benefits that uh that are necessary at benefits uh uh that um without which we could be running some enormous costs and uh and risks uh and I can talk more about that but um uh we have a grid that unlike the natural gas pipeline system is regulated at several levels of government and even though this is interstate commerce and it's all an integrated network that's governed by the laws of physics those little electrons go wherever wherever we don't know where those came from but um um the the fvrc uh the fvrc uh regulates uh uh rates the states regulate siting um uh the uh the number of agencies are involved um in uh in improving any things is is a usually a at least a five-year affair and typically eight or ten years uh and that is uh that makes them expensive uh and it makes uh it makes the system a lot less nimble than it otherwise uh would be um I guess I would wrap up simply by saying that we think that given the environmental benefits the reliability benefits the economic benefits and the insurance benefits of transmission that this is a critical link to uh the clean energy future good jim I'm going to do the first question and then I want you to ponder yours and I want one minute answers on these and I teach risk in my gw classes and starting with you jim so we have this transmission system the head of homeland security uh not the head the head of security within homeland security said the grid's been hacked like crazy and will continue to be we have lots of examples of minor examples of limited terrorism on the grid California New Mexico we have lots of examples of intense weather patterns hitting and knocking out the grid sandy and Katrina we have forest fires and earthquakes knocking the grid down and we have complaints by the renewables that the grid is set up the way it is because it went with the mouth of the coal mine you know and uh but uh you know our energy is coming if elsewhere not from the coal mine potentially so from a risk point of view um what's the play here how do you make this harden new transmission of the future in one minute or less in one minute or less well you spend some money and it's uh it's really uh important that we start looking at the grid differently than just delivering power from central generation to the local loads it's much going to have to be much more dynamic obviously it's going to have to be hardened uh against cyber intrusion but uh NERC says that the grid has never been more reliable has never but that could be just because it's not been reliable so you now you just step up right exactly we there's a thought here don't want to get radical on you no we definitely need to improve our game there's no question about it and uh and that's going to require some some investment the the question that's raised by my remarks I think is is that necessary are we going to in the face of the risks that you're talking about uh uh rely almost extensively on distributed generation on microgrids on on local solutions that do not depend on the grid at all I submit that over the next 20 or 30 years the big grid is going to be just as important well that's true in communications we have this very robust sailor network and a wired network too but tim let's go to you now because you have the option to both work at lower voltages and also more regionally or closer to customers so talk about risk for a moment a minute now a moment thank you nice to have a two minute oops if you have a two minute question with a one minute answer that's right okay because you're not moderators that's why okay um so with distributed generation you have the opportunity to control your own destiny in that regard I think those that are in the business that they are a mission critical site have to take a hard look at that we're seeing risk managers actually starting to look at change to the grid and risk associated with that and I agree that the grid's going to be here forever but in a different form and so distributed generation hospitals have been doing it for years data centers need to do more of it um solar is a daytime answer so energy storage becomes a critical part of that but when I look at risk I look at the number of components and the affordability to create a risk or more risk adverse environment and direct current utilizes less components it has interfaces directly with um storage systems better a lot of work we're doing at the Emerge Alliance which is a non-profit focused on DC for occupied space data centers select vehicle charging and you've got Elon Musk out there with new energy storage solutions that can be in your home so a risk adverse home could be dealt with in direct current type of solution so I think direct directly everybody's going to have to look at risk as to a way to manage that better themselves right and lower voltages do have less component burnouts by definition absolutely so Rob your your technology in some ways is already resilient right so give us a yeah I think I mean I think the grid is great and in most of our members rely on the grid I mean they work in complement with the grid they make like Princeton University for instance they they buy about 60 percent of their power they make about 40 percent they just don't buy the expensive 60 you know the expensive power um but the master planning done by our institutions who are mission critical whether they have surgery or data centers or cancer research petri dishes that are literally invaluable they've largely determined that they want generation nearby you know they want that access proximity and industrial grade so you know our members have basically looked at this and not every institution has combined heat and power sometimes the rules are too complicated with the incumbent utility and it's just a bridge too far but by and large most of our universities medical centers they make most they make all of their heat and cooling and electricity is a byproduct they still purchase you know the they still purchase a big portion of their electricity but they look at business interruption costs risk mitigation and by and large they've come up with you know we want a gas turbine we want generation we want thermal storage and we want to we want to own it and operate it and we want to rely on it most of the most of the time not as emergency backup not as diesel generators that get started once every six months their primary operation is district energy combined heat and power absolutely and it works okay i'm going to take a few questions they got to be short you're back there is that director is that director who are you directing on the policy regulatory barriers local state and federal so that's a one minute answer to yeah one minute well uh at a uh at an iso level if you let's say you're princeton and you want and you uh you used to consume on a peak day 27 megawatts today on a peak day you consume from the grid two megawatts you now now there are 25 megawatts that are available for everywhere all the other customers on that wire on that distribution network princeton doesn't really get paid for the value they generate for the local grid they don't pay for the peak demand because they're not consuming it but they're not really getting a peck capacity payment or var support and so there are some rules that really need refinement and it hasn't always been easy for a institution that wants to co-generate to do so there is this notion that only utilities can sell power across a public right of way well it turns out in massachusetts that's not exactly true the municipality determines who can move power across a public right of way but we have this urban myth that this majino line that only utilities can do it when in fact that's not the case but utilities have historically not been receptive to destructive revenue from co-generators the c-word co-generation the white blood cells come out and they fight that infection that's historically been the approach that's changing i'm i'm amazed you're alive today rob well for that reason i'm pretty well inoculated right okay i gotta cut that off another question over there who also had a question yeah the risk of sounding naive from what i'm gathering is that it's coming down to policy that's one of the biggest challenges coming down to policy and even when we're talking about our crumbling infrastructure it always gets punted down the road and it's always short term thinking what do we have to do or what is it going to have to take in order for us to actually produce long-term policy that is going to actually reinvent our gym you pick that up please yeah that's a that's a big question in the in the case of transmission uh the the contrast between how natural gas pipelines are authorized for example by by the FERC the FERC certificates them sites them sets their rates that's not true for electric transmission FERC sets the rates and even there it's it's effects are sort of marginal and the state site there are a number of other agencies that have different kinds of authority land management agencies in the west for example i i think because electric markets operate regionally because the grid is a regional machine we should be regulating these things on at least a regional basis or an interconnection wide basis and conceivably at some point even a national basis we have a patchwork of electric regulations that require you know one state has a renewable portfolio standards the other doesn't one has citing uh under certain kinds of criteria and the other state that that same project crosses is not bound to honor those uh those criteria administer the law in the same way i could go on and on but the federal oh jim you can't go on and on you've got to end that up right now i'll take one more question you have it i'm probably showing my age but i was always taught that you split the system between transmission and distribution and the way you guys are using the word grid i is a very interesting transformation of how we used the word grid historically i think or am i wrong and i'm curious when you look at wires and you look at the other two systems how you define grid and how that works as we go forward in policy tim you can start with that one for you you define it new a we all four of us probably define it slightly differently i'll let tim start i guess in a dc micro grid we're talking about the distribution of power within a localized area so it's effectively off the quote grid okay so it's its own grid so there are micro grids nano grids and not to confuse the issue but it's the idea of going to a distributed power to uh maybe work in tandem with the grid the national grid or the local grid but in many dc applications we're doing it by its own a building in california is totally behind the grid from a policy issue i'll sneak into the last question so the challenges we have is the incentives don't take into consideration the good work we're doing for dc micro grids and buildings and communities and needs to enhance that and support that like it supports other technologies and rob you have a pipeline grid correct yeah well we have thermal distribution like in in coban hagan we have a high tension transmission network that you know jim has in denmark they have a high temperature hot water distribution network they supply hot water around 18 uh communities but you raise a good point we often confuse ourselves you know we use we use terms this whole lexicon gets convoluted and we think people get it and we're saying something and they they're hearing something else right so i think we all need to be a little more careful and artful about what descriptors we use my own view on the grid it's really the wires uh and it is distribution level or transmission level and and those are as you pointed two very different things as it is with communication where we had we have big wires we have distribution wires and we have wireless cellular wires and they're really grids too so i want to thank you all okay i'll let you sneak in if it's very short because i will cut you off correct that's quite opposite in its structure it was originally intended thank you that's it you're cut off thank you i appreciate you all coming thank you very much give a hand to the panel and you may ask them questions before they leave this room feel free i will not block the door but i will i think they will sit here for a few minutes if you're not violent thank you thank you panel your question's again