 So we only lost one casual weather casualty today and we're really sorry that Judith Judson McQueenie from Customized Energy Solutions is not able to be here today, but she and Catherine sort of had a mind meld earlier and we'll try and sort of pick up the policy and market dynamic side of that two-sided coin. We've got here today with us Harish Kamath from, who's the program manager for energy storage at the Electric Prior Research Institute, one of our favorite groups who's flown all the way here today to talk a little bit about the status of the technology, all the different applications of the different technologies and the ways in which we should be thinking about progress from a technology standpoint. And then as I said, Catherine Hamilton, who is the policy director at the Energy Storage Association, I want to make sure I get that right, is going to talk a little bit about some of the policy drivers, both at a state and a federal level, and some of the, and as I said, sort of try and pick up on some of the market dynamics as well. And then we've got Praveen Kathapal from, who's a vice president for energy storage from AES here to talk about sort of the progress and challenges in terms of deployment. Each will have a presentation, will make the presentations available on the website afterwards, as well as the entire webcast session. So why don't we go ahead and we'll get started and then have a bit of a good discussion. So, Harish, you're going to go first. Good morning, everyone. Thanks very much for coming and I think I want to thank CSIS for hosting this event and Sarah and Annie and Michelle for putting it on. This is a great opportunity to talk about energy storage and never try to pass one of these up. So this is a really exciting time for us to talk about this technology as well because it's really coming together in a lot of different ways. As you'll see later on, it's not just about the technology, it's also a lot about the policy and about the implementation. So can that be better? So a lot of what we'll be talking about, we'll usually be talking about a component of that and I'm going to be talking really about the technology piece first. So let me begin by, I'm going to crane my neck around a couple of times because I can't actually see the slides from where I am, but that's better, there you go. So the key thing about storage is it's a really different component of the electric grid. The grid as it's designed today is designed to operate without any energy inventory or a very small amount of energy inventory to be precise. Essentially all the electricity that you use is generated at the moment of use. So if I turn off all the lights in this room somewhere, somebody's got to turn down a generator to account for that and if I turn them all back on again then somebody's got to turn up a generator a little bit to account for that. Energy storage can be a buffer in between that and by doing that it really alters the supply chain substantially. We have some energy storage already on the grid, but by putting in energy storage across the grid it can really be a significant game changer in improving the reliability of the grid as well as potentially reducing the potential for future cost increases, improving resiliency in the case of natural disasters, improving flexibility so that we could increase the amount of renewable generation on the grid. So when we talk about energy storage in this context, we look at it in several different places in the bulk storage which is the transmission network all the way down to storage at the edge of the grid even on the customer side of the meter. People talk about all the pieces of this. We already have some bulk storage at the transmission level and so we know a little bit about that. We know how to use it. What's really interesting and what's revolutionary, potentially revolutionary, is storage down closer to the edge of the grid. When you put storage at the distribution level or especially on the customer side of the meter, then you start to see some very interesting things happen because it decouples the effects of load from generation. And so that has some very interesting effects on the grid. Right now in our context, however, that's not clear. The reason it's not clear today the way the electricity grid operates is because, again, we've designed the grid to operate without the storage and it's worked very well that way for 100 years. So as we introduce storage, it's going to take a little bit of a change in the way that we think about things before we can actually use it effectively. And that doesn't mean just changes in the technical sense. That also means changes in the economic sense. And there are also some many policy angles to that as well. So when we look at what's on the grid today from a purely technical standpoint, the vast majority of it, as I mentioned, is pumped hydro large scale energy storage that operates on the transmission network. There are some other technologies out there that play a role, but they're relatively small. And one of the ones that I'll point to here is batteries because that's usually what people think of when they say energy storage. It's a relatively small component right now, as you see up there, compared to some of these other pieces. However, that's expanding very rapidly. And as you'll hear from my colleagues up here, one interesting thing about this is that as you see, policy is going to make an impact on this. You'll see in California they've got now essentially a mandate for energy storage and you'll see a lot of deployment for that. And the question that's been raised before is how are we going to get that much storage on the grid? How are we going to even make that much storage? And the truth is, it's really not that much when you look at everything that's already out there already. And in fact, if you look at just the number of electric vehicles that have been put on the road in the last four years, that's substantially larger than the mandate that you see. And in fact, if you look at all of the portable electronic batteries that were sold in 2014, that's actually a fairly substantial number. Just the iPhone, just in the first three days of the iPhone 6 sales, there were something like 80 gigawatts of energy storage that was put out there. All right, I think it's 80 megawatt hours. I'm sorry, I'm using the wrong metric. But it's a huge amount. So there is the capability to produce a lot of energy storage out there. So of course, what's different now from what we've seen historically? What we have had historically is very expensive energy storage. There have been some technical issues for using it on the grid. And really from what we're starting to see is new technologies that can really address the technical issues. That makes it a lot easier to implement this energy storage. We're seeing on the economic side not only better technologies and lower cost technologies as we get improvement in costs and improvement in scale from a lot of different applications. A lot of them, for example, related to consumer electronics. We're learning how to make batteries lower cost. But we're also taking advantage of some of the financial instruments that have come up in the last few years. For example, the way that solar is being leased these days. The same types of business models can apply to energy storage. And there are many other financial innovations that are making energy storage more of a possibility. And then finally, from a regulatory standpoint and policy standpoint, historically, again, energy storage has not been important and has not been seen as important because we've operated the grid very well without it. What we're starting to see now is that regulators and legislators are taking it very seriously. And that has led to some policy changes. I'm sure Catherine will tell you more about that. That's making energy storage possible. Despite all that, there are still some obstacles, some technical obstacles to the use of energy storage. The primary one is that although we have a very good grasp of how to use energy storage from a technical sense, we have a little bit of a disconnect in terms of how to use it versus what the value is. Again, the grid was designed to operate without energy storage. So if you try to use energy storage on the grid right now, it's kind of hard to find value in it. It's like the old days before cell phones. If you told people you needed a cell phone, people would say, why? We've got pay phones everywhere. So if you say, well, rather than using the pay phones, I'm going to charge you $50 a month and $200 upfront to have a cell phone. Most people would have thought 30 years ago you had been crazy. So you have to have a paradigm shift. You have to have a difference in the way you're thinking about how you actually operate your grid to really have a strong value proposition for storage. And that's beginning to happen. In addition, we're starting to see real products on the grid. That's starting to happen. And from a utility context, we have to have the entire supply chain really ready for the implementation of energy storage. So these are things that really take an industry mindset. It takes a lot of stakeholders to understand what's going on, both from the business side and from the regulatory side. And the general public as well will really benefit from knowing what the issues are in this area. So one of the issues is, of course, as I mentioned, value. We historically have thought about this value justifying the very high cost of energy storage by stacking up all of these individual values. If you think about it, that's not really how people buy products. You don't buy your smartphone by saying, well, this app is worth this much, and this app is worth this much, and this app is worth this much to me. You just buy it. And then you figure out how you can use it. Well, I mean, that's kind of what's happening now in energy storage. Historically, we've had this approach where we have to have this value to justify things. But going forward, what we're going to start to see is people buying energy storage, putting on the grid, and then figuring out how to make money with it. And I think that's, in fact, what Praveen will talk about later on. We're also developing analysis tools to make this whole process a lot easier. And that's something that's critical. This is something that we've worked with a lot of utilities on at Epri and a lot of our colleagues at Navigant and DMVGL and other places have also done a lot of work in this area. On the hardware side, we've got great technology, and a lot of people are really understanding the battery part of things. You see a lot of press about the batteries, but you don't see a lot of press about the rest of the product. So that's kind of like you're making a processor without thinking about the keyboard and the monitor and everything else you need to use it. So all of those components really need a lot of work. So we're trying to facilitate that at Epri through a group that we call the Energy Storage Integration Council is a technical forum that really tries to put all these pieces together, bring together all of the players. There are lots of people out there that are doing really good work in this area. And we just want to make sure that everybody's coordinated. So that's another way that the industry is trying to pull this all together. And then finally, we would like to see the actual hardware in the field. This is all great when it's at a PowerPoint up on the screen. But when you actually have hardware to deploy, then it becomes a lot harder. What we have had the advantage over the last few years, the Recovery Act programs and several other programs out there have really deployed a lot of energy storage. We've learned a lot of lessons through that, as well as there have been a few brave souls who've put forward their own investment in that. And Praveen will talk about his experience of energy storage in the last few years to really try to make a difference through the markets. So really, this is an exciting time for energy storage, because you're starting to see the confidence of all of these developments, technology, the regulatory area, as well as people coming in with an intent to really try to turn this area into something that makes money. It's a very exciting time. It fits in very well with all of the other things happening, like for the deployment of renewable energy and the need for increased reliability and resiliency across the grid. So we're very excited to be working in this area and to working with our colleagues in it. Thank you very much. That's a good question. Thanks very much, Harish. Teed that out perfectly for me. I'm a policy person, so policy is my hammer and everything is a nail. So I'll tell you how everything's going to be solved with policy. And then Praveen, I'll tell you what's really going on. So energy storage association is the trade association that represents all these technologies that Arash talked about. We're completely technology neutral, so we represent technologies all across the grid, whether it's from the bulk power side, distribution, substation side, or behind the meter. So there's a wide variety of technologies that are completely neutral in the way that we talk about policy. Oops, did I like, ah, there we go. This is the problem with not having eyes on the back of my head, although my kids would never believe it. So this is sort of a sampling of member companies of the Energy Storage Association. And you can see here that there are a lot of developers, like AES is one of the biggest developers, next to our energy. We also have integrators like S&C Electric and ABB. And then we have innovators, a lot of companies out there building technologies that the developers are using to deploy storage. So this just gives you a sampling of what this ecosystem looks like and it's significant. Okay, IHS has said that energy storage growth will explode and we're already starting to see that, but from 0.34 gigawatts in 2012 and 2013 to six gigawatts by 2017 and over 40 by 2022. And how's that gonna happen? All right, I'm going to credit Praveen with the slide because he kind of came up with this chart a while ago, which is what does storage technologies need from the funding perspective? They need equity and debt, they need investment. And the way you get investment is to make sure that you have a market that will drive that, that investors say, ah, there's a market in place, so I know it's safe for me to invest. So that's what we come at this, that will any kind of market mechanism or policy that we put in place, will it then create market certainty that investors will be interested in so that you can get equity and debt. Okay, this is a big opportunity. EIA projects that in the next 15 years we're gonna need 40 gigawatts of peak generation. And when you think about this as, what is peak generation against the context of the clean power plan and having to reduce greenhouse gases, you need to start thinking about how you're gonna meet that peak generation. And if you can use alternatives to fossil to do that. So some of the ways in which we outreach on policy, we're certainly very, very targeted on FERC and the system operators and trying to make sure we get the rules right on the bulk power side. We work with state regulators, we have very good relationships with lots of commissioners and do a lot with NARUK. We work with Congress. I have, even though it may seem like Congress doesn't pass bills like all the time, it's they're still really receptive to education. We've done an enormous amount of education with Hill staff and members. And we have found that everybody thinks storage is a good idea. Nobody says this is not a good thing. And so it doesn't have, it has great bipartisan support. In fact, I consider it completely apolitical. It's something everybody needs. And so we've had really good traction and we feel like moving forward, that's just going to increase. State legislators, the same thing. State legislators may need even more education, but we found that they're really, really receptive. Right now, everybody's open to new ideas and energy storage is one of those sort of technology neutral, good new ideas. And then federal and state agencies, everything from EPA to the Department of Energy and state energy offices that we work with. Okay, so some of the key policies that we've seen are on the FERC side, and I'll talk a little bit more about the market changes. We've had, we've seen three orders, 755, 784 and 792, that have been issued that have helped energy storage in some way. We've seen a lot of new market products from the system operators. We've seen states do procurement as Horesh alluded to the California mandate. Those are, you know, procurement requirements, planning, considering storage while they're planning their future energy needs. Trying to eliminate regulatory tax treatment barriers that have never been tax credits for energy storage so that's something we're looking at. We also want to make sure that there are federal tax incentives in addition to state tax incentives. And last Congress, we had six bills that had energy storage built into them that we were really proud of and we'll see how that kind of works in this next Congress. We want to make sure that we continue the pipeline of research and development. As Horesh said, they're all these new technologies. We want to make sure that we feed them into the pipeline so they get the support, the scaling so that developers will use them on their projects. And then the EPA clean power plan rule is a huge opportunity for us because energy storage really fits into every single one of the four building blocks that EPA has proposed and can provide solutions in all of those building blocks. And then thinking about new financial mechanisms, whether it's infrastructure banks, infrastructure is something that we think that Congress and the president are gonna come together on. That's a great opportunity for storage. And then the loan guarantee program still has a lot of funding in it and it is very bullish on storage. So some of the policy basics, like what do we tell people? What do we want in policy that will really help move this market? Energy storage acting as a wholesale resource which is on the bulk power side should be charged at those wholesale rates. Even if it's interconnected at distribution, which it should be allowed to interconnect at distribution and it should not then be charged distribution charges as a load, it should be considered a wholesale resource if it's providing wholesale resources. Storage acting as wires resources should be eligible for rate-based cost recovery. There was a project in Texas that was allowed to be rate-based as it was a deferral for transmission. They put a battery in instead of having to build a transmission line. So that sort of rate recovery, allowing energy storage to be considered at a wires resource, a wholesale power resource. The interesting thing is it doesn't fit into one nice neat bucket, so you have to kind of be creative on how and how you think about it and think about it differently, as Harish said. All the operating rules of storage, like how utilities actually use it and how it's functioning on the grid should allow storage to retain a state of charge that will make it as useful as possible. Some of the other policies should be considered a capacity resource. There is a new consideration on flexible capacity, which I'll talk about again in just a second, but energy storage can be considered a flexible capacity in being able to both withdraw power from the grid if you have an oversupply and also inject power back into the grid. So it actually does double the service of a regular straight-up generator plant. It should also be able to be modeled to traditional generating resources. It should be allowed to compete. Energy storage should be on the menu for RFPs for every single-peaker plant, for example, to be able to compete with any other kinds of technologies, any other kinds of resources, and let's see how that falls. And it should also be, as Harish mentioned, to be able to be compensated for all of the values that it provides to the grid so that it's not necessarily this plus this plus this, but what is the whole range of values that that particular resource can commit? Don't make it just do one thing. Like, let's figure out all the things it can do and allow it to be compensated for all of those values that it provides. And then third parties and independent power producers should be able to contract with utilities to provide energy storage, and that we're seeing that in California, and we'll see that elsewhere, but that's really important that you allow others to participate in this. The Brattle Group, and you all should look this up in November of last year, I did a report that Encore funded that found that given the significant benefits of storage, that it brings to the system at a whole, enabling the cost investments in electricity storage does require a regulatory framework that compensates for all of those different values. So in Texas, you're gonna see a lot, even though it's not an organized market under for jurisdiction, ERCOT is doing a lot on energy storage based on what their needs are. All right, so let me just give you an example of what a policy impact would be. With Order 755, we worked very hard to make sure that FERC recognized that it is important that there is compensation for services provided to the grid for frequency regulation that reward speed and accuracy. This wasn't saying energy storage should be paid to do something, it was saying if you have a fast, accurate resource, you should be paid to provide that resource no matter what it is. And Order 755 allowed that. And if you can see this chart of the energy storage revenue, you'll see that it went up significantly when Order 755 went into effect. And this shows the areas that it's been implemented so far. Another policy impact, when you look at how does policy affect investment. A couple of years ago, now the energy storage investment tax credit has been introduced in three different congresses, consecutive congresses, very bipartisan, bicameral. The Copper Development Association, and copper is basically in everything, they decided they actually had, they could benefit materially from energy storage market increase. So they did a study, all right, what would happen if you did do an investment tax credit from a federal level? And this is what they found, is that it would increase the market substantially for them and for everybody in energy storage. So this is what we show lawmakers when we say an investment tax credit provides certainty and it really does increase the market in a new technology. You all may have seen this, this is the CalISO graph, finally called the duck, it looks more like a loon these days, but anyway. What this means is that there is a significant opportunity in flexible ramping. I talked about flexible capacity, but also in ramping as well, to make sure that energy storage is integrated with other technologies that could provide flexible resources as well that you might consider variable resources, but actually can act much more like base load if you're using energy storage in concert with them. Here's another policy opportunity, capacity. So thinking about how do we write rules to allow energy storage to provide capacity services because it can do replace speakers and this is something we're seeing really occurring and it's a huge opportunity for energy storage if it's given that opportunity to participate as part of integrated resource planning, as part of the procurement in states to be able to look at what do we need that we don't have to build a traditional plant? What are all those flexible resources and energy storage should certainly be considered one of those? Frequency response is another policy opportunity. This was the part Judith was going to talk about which is that there are other opportunities and other potential services that energy storage can provide that it is not compensated for and if it had compensation and tariffs for real benefits that it can provide to the grid and that the grid needs, then the market will only increase because as I said before, investors will then see additional markets because frequency regulation on its own is not all it can do and it's not the only market we want it to be in. We want it to be in a variety of markets. So I'm gonna give you just a couple of state examples. This is a state example. California just did a roadmap. It was released on New Year's Eve. I'm sure you guys were all downloading that while you were celebrating. But basically the roadmap goals are threefold. They say, all right, we wanna increase the revenue opportunities consistent with values. As I've said, it needs to be consistent with what it's providing to the grid and we wanna be able for storage or any other resources to get those revenues. We wanna reduce the costs of interconnection and integration and even operations because we should be able to solve these issues. This isn't rocket science. This is technology, but the utilities have the ability to figure it out. They've done it for other resources and they can do it for energy storage and they're starting to see that happen. Then also streamline policies to create certainty and that will be and make sure that the rules are in place so that everybody knows what rules to play by. So that's what the California roadmap goals were. California issued a mandate or a goal of 1.3 gigawatts and asked the utilities to take a look at, how are you gonna meet this? Well, utilities are also thinking about how are we gonna meet our resource in California, it's called resource adequacy. How are we gonna meet what we need to serve our customers reliably, efficiently, cost effectively and Southern California Edison put out an RFP and came up with a variety of ways that they could meet it that included energy storage. So they came up with 260.6 megawatts of storage to meet their local capacity requirement and Praveen can address this because they were one of the beneficiaries of this California Edison RFP, which is thermal energy storage over 25 megawatts behind the meter batteries, 135 megawatts and then 100 megawatts of grid scale and all of the utilities in California are doing similar things in different ways and to different levels, but they're all saying what are all of these flexible resources that we need to meet our capacity requirements and let's make sure that energy storage is on the menu for us to be able to choose. So as I said, 1.3 gigawatts by 2022, SoCal Ed has already done, has already said there will be 260 megawatts that were awarded in November, they're looking at an additional 16 megawatts request for offer that they're gonna issue in April, Pacific Gas and Electric as well is gonna do 75 and San Diego Gas and Electric, they're not sure it's gonna be between 25 and 800 megawatts, so they kinda have to see what they're gonna get when they issue their RFO. Some other state examples and one of the ways ESA participates is we do a lot of filings at FERC, we do a lot of filings relative to the ISOs and what they're doing, we work within our COP, but we also work within states. So we're party to the New York Rev, we do a lot of filings, we've probably done half a dozen filings in New York. New York already has a decoupled regulatory construct for the utilities and they're saying we're gonna reform the energy vision, if you all haven't read about this, you should look at what they're doing because they really want their utilities to be platform providers of a whole host of services and we think energy storage is gonna be really, really important to making sure that that all works the way they want it to. And ConEd is looking in Brooklyn at a project where they use energy storage in a very integrated way. This will be a really interesting test case on a decoupled market to see what happens when you really allow the utilities to use their full creativity to say, all right, you guys are their service providers, let's see what you can come up with that are gonna keep reliability, resilience is very important in New York as well and to keep cost effectiveness, keep the consumer prices down and allow consumers some choice. In Arizona, there has been a settlement that's been negotiated to allow for energy storage and a whole host of other resources to bid on peaking capacity, that's gonna be really important rather than just using traditional for everything as they move forward, especially given the clean power plan that they're gonna need to be able to lower the greenhouse gas emissions and if they use much more all source procurements including energy storage, they'll be able to do that. In Hawaii, I don't know if you've seen what's going on there, it's like they're changing the tires while the car is moving. I mean, it is unbelievable, all the things that are happening in Hawaii and they have a huge amount of renewables that they need to integrate in a way that's seamless and that allows the lights to stay on and reduce their prices. The cost of electricity is exorbitant there and they're trying to do all of this at once and certainly energy storage is playing a key role in that. And then in Texas, as I mentioned, the Brattle Report that they're looking at storage for multiple uses, like how do you make sure that if a utility decides to build a system with energy storage, how are they able to recoup those investments? How do they build that into a rate case? And so that's going to be something that's gonna happen in the legislature of Texas first and then moves on into the, into ARCOT. So if you do all these wonderful things that I mentioned that we have to do, what do you get in the end? You get investment and market growth for storage companies and developers, certainly. You get optimization of all the resources on the grid. And I was careful not to say this is not just about renewables integration, this is about everything operating better and cleaner and more efficiently. It increases resilience to the grid. So states like New Jersey, New York are looking at this as a resilience option, just as they would any other kind of backup type system. This will lower costs to consumers in the end because you will avoid having to build bigger capacity plants, traditional generation. If you can just use what you have much more efficiently, it will definitely decrease emissions because of the efficiency and also because you're not having to build additional plants. And then the benefits will accrue to everyone. It'll accrue to the folks who are investing. It'll accrue to the utilities, to the system operators and of course, as the regulators look at this to all consumers. Okay? Sure. Thanks, Catherine. That was a great lead in. And thanks to CSIs for having us today. I'm Praveen Kathpal. I'm a vice president with AES Energy Storage. And I'm gonna be sharing with you some of our experience at AES in deploying energy storage on power systems around the world. So to start, AES is a global power company. We're headquartered very close to here in Arlington, Virginia, but we operate in 19 countries. We have 18,000 people around the world. And our core business is generating and distributing electricity across those 19 countries. And we also offer a number of innovative energy and infrastructure solutions off of that platform. This gives you a little bit of sense of the diversity of our fuel mix and of the type of businesses AES is in. In the energy storage team, we like to fondly refer to this as the AES platform as the largest collection of problems in the power industry. And so many years ago, we set off to start looking for solutions. Going back to the beginning, our first deployment, I can't believe it's been this long, was seven years ago. And it was just a couple of megawatts. It was in Indiana at our utility, Indianapolis power and light. And it was actually the first megawatt scale application of lithium-ion batteries that had ever been done. And that's kind of staggering to think about now when you look at this huge, mature global supply chain and a lot of the, we've been fortunate in the power industry to leverage a lot of the R&D and manufacturing investments of the automotive sector and of the consumer electronics sectors. But now a lot of those investments are being justified on the basis of addressing the stationary energy storage opportunity. Over the years, we've done a number of other deployments in the US and in Latin America. I'm gonna go into those in a little bit more detail. But to take a step back to get really fundamental when we're talking about batteries on the grid, there's a lot of different visuals people can have. And just to make it really clear, we're actually literally, yes, talking about batteries on the grid. And they aggregate up in kind of this architecture where we start with cells that they're sort of like the size of a C or a D battery. Some of the ones, like if you look at some of the ones that are going into electric vehicles are kind of the size of this notebook. And those are packaged together in these modules and they're put together in these deployments that ultimately look like an industrial facility, like you see with these shipping containers or in a warehouse. But when you're on the inside, it actually is a very high tech seeming environment. It has the look and feel like you're in a modern data center. So long ago, in a faraway desert, this is our first commercial problem that we solved, was AES has some generation in Chile and in the northern grid of Chile, which is covers the Atacama Desert, kind of goes out. You can see the off to the Andes. We found an opportunity to deploy with the Amion batteries in a way that created value when integrated with our generation business there. And the good thing about this is that it's led to, here's a closer up view, but it's led to a follow on work where after that deployment, which was in 2009, two years later in 2011, we built this second storage facility that's also integrated with the thermal power plants. And that plant for a number of reasons, including partly the innovation of having integrated energy storage actually won the Edison Award, given out by the Edison Electric Institute in the international category. And it was also the power magazine Plant of the Year. So it received recognition in the industry while also delivering value and being an application of an emerging technology. In the US, we've also done similar deployments. These are a little bit different of a commercial model, but technologically, the fundamentals are very much the same. This is a deployment called Laurel Mountain. It's at a very scenic ridgeline wind farm in West Virginia. That's just about three or four hours from here. I was just there last week. Very pretty in the snow, very pretty in the fall too. So let me know if you want to visit sometime. And we have a 64 megawatt battery energy storage array that's located right there next to the substation at the Laurel Mountain Wind Farm. And that's providing reliability services in the PJM markets. And PJM is the largest grid operator in the United States. And I think the second largest grid operator in the world. And again, this led to some follow on work where about a year and a half ago, we brought on another very similar deployment in Ohio. This is at the Tate Generating Station, which is a gas-fired power plant. But again, the storage fundamentals are very much like they were in the previous picture where it's providing services in the market in PJM. So looking forward, there's a number of policy priorities and Catherine can outline some of these. But depending on your country, the state, the regulatory structure, the supply mix, there are a number of objectives. You know, always chief among all of them is our reliability, cost, and sustainability. And what we found is that energy storage is sort of suited to all of those structures. It doesn't matter where you are, what the regulatory structure is, what the culture is. You know, there aren't really places more different than California and Hawaii or Hawaii and Texas. But you know, all of those in the U.S. are finding opportunities for storage. And we see the same thing happening across our global platform. As an example in the United States, there's the increasing demands to meet renewable energy targets, but there's also environmental, there's also a number of aging plants that are being retired to meet environmental standards. And storage helps kind of fill that gap where it can fairly rapidly replace retiring capacity, but it can also add to the flexibility and resiliency of the grid. Katherine talked a little bit about this opportunity as well where as a result, I think, both between demand growth and the competing policy priority, we expect tens of gigawatts of new peaking resources in the United States alone. The global opportunity is a few times that. And a lot of this is happening in the next decade. So we're right on the cusp of the planning and procurement cycles to meet a lot of these needs. So there is some urgency for storage to be included in that decision-making so that we can end up with the right long-term supply mix and the mix of resources that provides the best value long-term to customers. So as an example of this, as the opportunity scales up, our offering has evolved to it at AES, our Advansion product. It's available in a similar format to what you saw in the previous pictures, but as the opportunities become larger, we're also looking at deployments in a warehouse-type building. And I'll show you a rendering of what that might look like, but not quite yet. So I mentioned the opportunity across the world. These are just some of the places where storage is being considered Asia, Europe, Latin America, the United States. So this is a rendering of what a deployment might look like. Catherine mentioned that AES was awarded a 100-megawatt contract with Southern California Edison. That's to meet 100-megawatts of peaking capacity. The resource that we would build has actually a 200-megawatt flexible range so it can help solve some of the ramping and flexibility issues that are particular to the California system, especially as the renewable penetration increases there. And so that's what a deployment like that would look like. It's something, again, that can be done anywhere with a seven-year operating history. Storage really is an established and proven solution. And more and more, we're finding that it is built upon a mature global supply chain. There's really a lot of household names in electronics, in manufacturing, in infrastructure who are involved in supplying the necessary components for this, none of which really need to be invented right now. So it's also not dependent on any kind of technological advancement, any kind of cost breakthrough, any kind of furthering of R&D, though all those things will add to the value. So between the proven deployments and the mature supply chain, it's ready right now and can provide value anywhere. And I think the key issues that still remain to this being as widespread as we hope it to be are really around the education of stakeholders that will lead to more mainstream industry adoption, like Catherine was mentioning, including storage in procurement, whether that's a generation of transmission and distribution infrastructure or anything else. This fits in the wholesale markets and the utility and on the customer side. And so as we spend a lot of time at AES, I know Catherine spends a lot of time at ESA educating utilities, transmission system operators, governments, NGOs about this opportunity and about the value. So that's the main thing that I think needs to happen between where we are and this really becoming widespread. So I hope after hearing us today, all of you become ambassadors for energy storage and go talk to all of those groups and within your own organizations. And then also some, the other thing that we see maturing is around the value analytics. And Harish, as much as I would love if our customers just bought it and figured out the rest later, some of them are subject to very rigid procurement paradigms because they're regulated entities or their governments. And so we try to do as much as we can to make that value transparent. And each project that we've done, each deployment that we've built has really been, we've had a lot of confidence in that value proposition and we're encouraged to see the knowledge about that area increasing as well. So thank you and I believe the panel will be open to questions. Yeah, absolutely. Thanks very much guys. That was really three great presentations and one very good and surreptitious recruiting effort on your part proving that. So thank you very much for that. One of the things I like best about what you all just did was talk about the same issue from three different vantage points and each gave us a way of thinking of the challenge and opportunity is at the crux of the question. So Harish, you talked about needing a paradigm shift which was this concept of not only thinking of all the different ways you need to think about the value that storage provides but also the way that people are procuring other resources and capabilities that they've got. And Catherine, you talked about sort of the ecosystem, the community of folks that are aware of the challenge and the different things that you do to sort of educate them to think about the value proposition, right? And then proving you talked a little bit about it as being a solution, right? Just as someone who's gotta find return on dollars for what you put out in the field, looking for places where this can come into play and be sort of a solution. At the core of all of that, each of you really was trying to figure out a way that the value proposition for storage can be realized to its fullest extent. And Catherine, not to pick on you, but one of the things you said was of a concern but certainly seems to be the right thrust is nobody dislikes storage, right? But there is a problem, right? So nobody dislikes energy efficiency necessarily either except everybody else that's competing for that value proposition, right? And so there is a tension there, right? Which is we're talking about a transition within the electric power system that seeks to redistribute value, right? And also perhaps put a cost or a compensation on all of the, to borrow from the QER process, all of the illities, all of the capabilities we'd like to see in the new system that we have. But you will, being true stewards of the craft that you're in, you all sort of put things on the table, right? So Arash, I was interested in maybe if you could talk just a little bit about sort of the data analytics work that you guys are doing and sort of the energy storage integration commission that you've got together. Cause it strikes me that for a group like Epri, a lot of what you're doing on storage leads back to this concept of integrated grid, right? I mean, if the grid can't do it, storage can't do it, right? So there is that sort of, you know, how do you enable people to know about all of those things, right? And then Catherine, I was wondering if maybe you could talk a little bit about where is the toughest place from a policy perspective to try and recoup the value of what storage provides, right? What is the thing that's sort of the hardest thing to say there's a service here that we're providing either because somebody else has a kind of a lock on that service or it's a hard conversation to have or it's a hard service to convey, right? It's a hard thing for people to put value on just because in the system it's hard to put value on. And then Praveen, just from the projects that you have done so far, are you recouping in any of them or how close do you get to recouping the true value of what that storage provides, right? How much more could the storage that you've distributed be doing? And what do you think the value proposition for you as a company would be if you could actually make good on recouping all of the value that you think that it's providing? So maybe just go down the line and then we'll open it up for questions, okay? Sure. Sure, thanks, Sarah. It's a great question. So one of the things that we recognize about electricity is that it's generally considered a public good that everybody has access to and everybody would like to have reliable, low-cost, clean, safe, secure, electric power. And because it is seen as a public good, it is a heavily regulated industry. And so a lot of the things that we look at are in that context. One of the things we have to see in terms of assets, whatever they are, whether it's energy storage, certainly, but also a lot of renewable generation, a lot of new assets, which are not like the ones that we've seen historically, but even the ones that we've seen historically, require, because of the regulatory structure of the industry, require to go through the planning and operations process that utilities have that the industry has to actually deploy them. So one of the things that we have been working on at EPRI is something called the concept of the integrated grid, meaning essentially that the planning and operations processes of the utilities of the future and other stakeholders in the utility, in the electric power enterprise, have to incorporate these new technologies into their planning and operations processes. And if we think about those things, certainly from a technical standpoint, but also from an economic and regulatory standpoint, if we think about those things and do it in a planned way, then that's gonna be a lot more efficient and a lot more effective than trying to do it in an unplanned way. So we're trying to understand those issues, we're trying to create frameworks that allow us to do cost benefits analysis to understand what the cost of deployment of these new technologies are relative to the benefits in the context of the core mission of the grid, which is to again provide a clean, safe, reliable, secure electric power at a reasonable price to everybody. And that goes back to something that Praveen had mentioned there at the end. As he said, we have to be able to justify deployment. So I was a little flippant earlier, when we buy these technologies, when we buy a smartphone, we don't go through and add up all the individual applications to try to find out if it's worth it. But that actually is the process that people do when you have a new technology. If you remember 30 years ago when you had a computer, if you wanted to buy a computer, you added up, well, here's how much value I think I can get from spreadsheet software or from database software, from word processing, whatever the major applications you use are. And then you can see whether it makes sense. We have to do that in this particular era because we have to understand what the values of this technology are relative to the impact on the grid and relative to the cost of the actual technology itself, especially for technologies that are relatively expensive, like energy storage, looks at the moment. Because again, we're still trying to figure out exactly how much value it is, and we're still trying to integrate that into the planning and operations processes. So this is a really important aspect of it. And it's tough to get your mind around because again, you're trying to interface all the technology and the regulatory questions as well as the economics of all of these together, which is one of the things we're trying to do at EPRI. So again, I think I agree entirely with Catherine and Praveen that the major issue here is really information, making sure that all the stakeholders in this process are informed about the real technical capabilities, the real economic opportunities, and the regulatory issues around the deployment of energy storage, as well as these other technologies to understand what can be done going forward. So Sarah asked what are the toughest places to do for energy storage? And I would just say, Praveen said, where to solve problems? Who doesn't have problems? Everybody's got a problem. So you have to think about where the places that have moved first. The places that have moved first have really big problems on prices of electricity or they are resource constrained or they have congestion on the grid. And those are sometimes the first movers because they've got really big problems. Resilience, it's another issue, certainly in the Mid-Atlantic and of course they're still going through some issues right now up in the Northeast. So the places that have had immediate problems, those have been ones that have been able to use energy storage, come up with energy storage solutions as a solution. So some of those states that have very low rates that don't have huge populations and congestion are slower to move, that said everybody's got issues they have to deal with, whether it's making sure that they keep their consumer costs low, whether they make sure that they lower their greenhouse gas emissions, whether they have to make sure that they retain a really reliable grid as it starts aging. And you watch what's happening with solar and you think about the markets that as solar costs have dropped dramatically and solar has become much more tried and true and it's being deployed everywhere. And you look at those states that you never thought you would be able to deploy solar like Georgia, Louisiana. Those are big solar markets now. So I feel like everybody can use it. It's the issue of like, what are the problems you're trying to solve and how are you gonna use it to solve those problems and then compensate it so you can actually build something. That would be my response. Thanks. First, something that you mentioned in your commentary, Sarah, was about the value of storage is competing with others who are seeking to meet the same value. And I think Catherine's point about storage going first to constrained areas is a really good one because at some point, a place can be so constrained in terms of what you can build or how quickly it's needed or just what the needs are, what the problems are that you can't do anything else. So storage actually competes really well with impossibility or the lights going out on an economic basis and has for a long time already. But when you think about, okay, I want the flexibility of a pumped hydro reservoir and the reliability of a peaking plant and the cleanness of solar. And I wanna put it in the middle of an urban area. There's really only one thing you can do which is build storage. And I think we're working, we're moving towards a place, we're evolving towards a place where storage captures all of that value in an integrated way. But one of our refrains at AES from the beginning of the storage effort has really not to let the perfect be the enemy of the good. It was much more important for us to solve acute value propositions, pressing problems in our platform like our first commercial deployment in Chile. Each day or each month that we didn't do that was very expensive. So it was completely fine to have a single or a dual value proposition project and get it online as fast as humanly possible and then start working on the next one. Over time, I think we've worked on value optimization. And I think our U.S. deployments are a great example of that. Katherine talked about FERC a few years ago issued what's called order number 755 which recognized that resources, not just storage but any resources that are fast and accurate are creating more value by ramping up and down in their fast and accurate way than conventional resources that were slower and would overshoot. And so you could run a more efficient and more reliable system by relying on fast and accurate resources. But the injustice was that they were being paid the exact same amount. And so what FERC order number 755 corrected was a disparity between the value that was being created and the revenue stream that was going to each resource. And I think that's a good example of where we initially built the projects justified on the base value proposition of the market structure at the time prior to 2011 and then subsequently that additional value was recognized and the revenue stream increased commensurate with the level of value. I think our projects save consumers in PJM over $20 million just by providing reliability services in a more efficient way. I realize we've got some big audience and so I'd like to provide some time for questions. If you do got a question, just sort of raise your hand and then identify yourself and your affiliation and please make your question in the form of a question. If you're in the back, I think we will have a microphone for you just so the people on the webcast. Oh yeah, Fernando's got it back there. We'll be able to hear it as well. So any questions? Okay, we'll start with Bob and then we'll go right here. What is the place of, yeah, I'm Bob Hershey, I'm a consultant. What is the place of flow batteries in the storage spectrum? Well, I can try to answer that. So flow batteries are certainly a promising technology and something that we're watching closely at Epri. There are a lot of companies out there that are developing these technologies and have even started deploying them. I would say that they are somewhat less mature than some of the other technologies like lithium ion or lead acid, but they certainly have a good value proposition moving forward and I think that a lot of people ask whether there's a single technology that's going to win for energy storage. It's difficult to say whether there's going to be a single technology that overcomes everything else, but certainly what we believe is that there's a place for a lot of different technologies with a lot of different characteristics and we're watching to see how that evolves and how different technologies are deployed. Can you just press the button? Susanna Sandborn from Deloitte. Getting to the issue of renewables integration. You're seeing alarm bells in the solar industry about this is the biggest problem going forward and we need to do something about it and Catherine mentioned in Hawaii changing the tires while the car is running. So I'm just wondering, clearly storage is one of the solutions to that. Is your education effort, is it all going to happen in time in the other states to avoid changing the tires while the car is running? Is this a solution that is going to be able to happen so that we don't run into the renewables industry having to slow down their growth? I mean, just based on the education that we've been doing with state regulators, it's amazing when we go to NAIRUK and host meetings, the state commissioners that come are maybe not from states that you think have big problems and they're really interested in this. So I think people are starting to get internalized a lot more and they're watching what's happening obviously in other states. But I feel like it is something that is out there that you have a lot of projects that you can look to to learn from. And so it's not like everybody has to start in the same place that Hawaii started. So I think you have a lot of already good case studies out there, you have a lot of utilities that feel more comfortable, you have a lot of third parties developing projects. So I feel like that's coming together in a way that a regulator right now probably wouldn't say, I've never heard of energy storage. They would need to go and find out a little bit more about how it would help their state, but I think it's starting to become much more integrated into how they're thinking. Maybe I'm just an optimist. Thank you and thanks to all of our panelists for really great presentations. I have a couple of questions and I'll just throw all of them out and you can answer whichever ones you like. I'm Michelle Milton by the way. I'm with the Energy and National Security Program here at CSIS. I was hoping, you mentioned that energy storage competes against other technologies, other fuels. I was hoping you could talk a little bit about the interplay of energy storage and demand response and what's especially with what's going on with demand response right now in the market, whether that is a main competitor for energy storage, how people in the energy storage community view demand response and how perhaps people in the demand response community view energy storage. Are they complementary or competing? I was hoping that also, you know, harsh and I think somebody else mentioned behind the meter storage, but it was not something that was a focus of the presentation. Proving is that something AES storage is looking at. Is that likely to be battery technologies and is that something that is really still on the technological forefront? Are there technical issues or is it more of a scale and deployment issue? I have more questions but I'll leave it there for now. Thanks. Sure, thanks. Those are both really good questions. On the first question about the interplay between energy storage and demand response, it is somewhat dynamic. We're both there complementary and they're in competition. The complementary aspect is a lot of times storage that's being placed behind the meter is considered demand response. If you look at how a utility performs procurement, there's sort of the difference between things that are that it's essentially the degree of visibility and control they have. So grid level resources that they have visibility and control over, they can procure sort of on the same basis as generation versus behind the meter resources, even if they're aggregated. Just because there's that sort of division, there's the delineation point of the meter, whether you're modifying an industrial process or shutting off cycling and air conditioner or just using a battery behind the meter, the effect is the same net at the meter of reducing the consumption at that low end point. So that's the way they're complementary. At the same time, they're competing. If you look at the procurement that Southern California Edison performed, there were some buckets that were set aside for energy storage procurement, some that were set aside for other preferred resources like demand response or energy efficiency, and some that was sort of an open field of competition. And energy storage ended up faring pretty well where five times the required amount of storage was procured. And I think the key differentiators between storage and demand response are storage, it's a dedicated grid resource. It's not, there isn't some competing economically productive use for that energy. It's permanent, so whether that, the company closes the plant can remove the demand response opportunity. You don't have that when we commit to providing energy storage resource over a 20 year contract. And it's flexible in both directions. So you have the full flexible range where 100 megawatt peaking can actually go have a 200 megawatt flexible range. So those are sort of the competitive dynamics between the two. So your question about behind the meter, that's definitely something we're looking at as AES kind of increases how we're looking at distributed energy resources. Most of what's been done behind the meter, honestly to date has been based on specific state level or utility level incentives in California, New York, and to some degree, there are economic projects happening in Hawaii, but we're most interested in pursuing businesses that scale based on the fundamental economics and making sure that we can do that not only in an economically viable way, but in a way that's safe and reliable. But yeah, there definitely gonna be increases in how much behind the meter storage that you see coming up. Yeah, and I'll hand it off to Hirash in just a second. Certainly a lot of energy storage companies are offering demand response services. So it seems like as we're moving to a grid that has to have a lot more integration of clean resources, I have a feeling like there's gonna be a space for everything and energy storage should have a big piece of that space. On the technology piece, just as a perspective, I started working for an electric utility in the mid-80s and we were deploying thermal energy storage then, which was ice storage and there's heating storage in the Northeast certainly. So there are companies like Stephus and Ice Energy that have been doing this for a really long time, doing thermal storage. Now some of the newer offerings are things like, people like SolarCity that are deploying rooftop solar with battery backup. So there are a bunch of different ways to look at it, but certainly there's some that have been around for a long time and have been proven for a long time. Yeah, I'll just say briefly, a lot of people think of these technologies as directly competitive or all or nothing propositions. Do we wanna do demand response or do we wanna do energy storage? And that's just simply not the way that things are. Yes, we wanna do both. Both of them have their places and one's gonna be stronger in some place and another's gonna be stronger in others. And as Praveen and Catherine pointed out, in a lot of cases, they're very complimentary. So we do want to look at both of these technologies and use them where they're appropriate. This is always a genie consultant and a John faculty of Stasi University and formerly with SAFT advanced batteries for 18 years. And back to the question on batteries again. On one of the presentations, we have seen the fly wheels, I mean, almost more than double the capacities in the market as compared to the battery-based systems. Can somebody, I mean, throw the light on why do we have this kind of big difference between the two? Yeah, I can talk to that. I think that's my slide. So there's a very large, there are a few very large fly wheels in the world that are used mostly for research purposes and that's what those represent. Really, I have them on there because just to show that we do have a significant number of fly wheels out there that are deployed and most of them deliver a lot of power but not a lot of energy. So that's the representation there. There's actually a lot more energy in the batteries that are out there, even though that the power capacity is different from the energy capacity. Thanks. My name is Richard Kidd. I'm the Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Army for Energy. My question is to any of the panelists, this is both a question and perhaps an offer of collaboration. Do you have any economic or business analysis tools on the value proposition that storage offers for energy security? So the Army is the largest utility consumer in the country. We have, depending on how you count, either the first or second largest renewable energy project pipeline coming to fruition in the country. We're under a variety of congressional mandates for energy security and we're building microgrids on a number of our installations. So clearly there's a role for power storage, energy storage. The challenge is when we go to the cost benefit analysis tools and models that we are given, we cannot justify the expenditure even though we can conceptualize the value. So do you have any tools we can borrow right now or do we have opportunities for collaboration in the future because I think there's a case out there. Thanks. Let me start by saying, we certainly have some tools that may address some of the needs that you're talking about. We've actually, in my group also addresses distributed generation and microgrids. So we've been looking at the specific issues that you're talking about and you're right, it's not easy to justify economically some of these things, at least on a very simple basis. However, intuitively it seems like there should be the certain value and actually accounting for that value is a little bit difficult. So we're developing some tools, we have a tool that does some of what you're talking about and I'd love to talk to you about that offline, but also we are developing some analysis methodologies that hopefully will make that more straightforward in the future and we'd really value your input in what are the considerations that would go into that kind of a methodology. Yeah, that's definitely an area that we're seeing more and more interest in and it's something we'd love to collaborate with you. I'd be happy to talk to you afterwards a little more, generally the way we've looked at energy security or microgrid application says it's really been a combination of not just fuel use reduction, but improvement in the, I guess risk reduction is an important value metric. So risk in the fuel supply chain is one element that we try to include and then the other is the reliability improvement. They're also, it's also kind of a risk measure, fuel volatility, I'm sure that's a risk metric you've probably looked at with renewable procurement. We don't have an off the shelf tool, but we've definitely, for a number of customers, looked at sort of adding up both the cost and the risk measures to justify deployment. Yeah, I'm so glad you're here, Richard. And I've been trying for a long time to get my arms around how do you capture the value of security, what does it mean, how do you measure it, and then how do you get credit for it. One state that has moved on resilience pretty strongly is New Jersey and they developed this energy resilience bank and one of the things that we, when we submitted comments to that docket was to try to come up with a value, like what does resilience mean? What are all the different factors that go into it? So that may be one to look at to see if they've started collecting data on that, but certainly that's really important and I think it's important for the Army but also for a lot of other types of customers that need to look at what is security slash resilience, what are all the metrics around it. So thank you. Alan Kovsky with Bloomberg B&A. I was curious about trying to approach the value proposition in the context of pump storage, which has, as far as I know, been able to justify, its value for some time. And I wonder why that's a much harder task, what the differences are that make it easier to justify pump tidal storage rather than other technologies. So I'm sure Praveen's gonna, has an understanding of this too, but it's funny that you mentioned it and thank you for asking this question. It's a really important one. In actuality, so pump tidal, a lot of pump tidal was built at a time when the value proposition I think was easier to develop because we were looking at vertically integrated utilities. In fact, it's actually very difficult for us now to justify the value of a lot of pump hydro that's out there. When we do the analysis through our tools, however, when you turn around and ask the system operator about the value of that energy storage, they'll say it's gold. So there's a clear discrepancy between the real value of the energy storage and the value that's accounted for, which is something that we believe is lost somewhere in the, maybe in the economic or regulatory structure of energy storage, which is one of the things that we're investigating right now and would like to understand better. So yeah, we've often looked at a history of pump hydro and what lessons it provides to inform this new and next wave of energy storage. And what's really interesting is what, at least in the US when most of the pump hydro was built, it was in lockstep with nuclear capacity additions. And if you sort of distill that for the present day, we had a highly inflexible energy source and we were using storage to provide flexible dispatchability and to absorb over generation. And that's startlingly similar to what we're happening. As the cost of solar comes down, we're going to have a non-dispatchable source that creates an abundance of cheap energy in certain time periods. Just it's in the middle of the day instead of in the middle of the night. And so why aren't we looking as much to pump hydro now as opposed to some of these other technologies? And I think part of it is that the world is changing much faster because we're not in the vertically integrated utilities that are planning for the pump hydro with the nuclear additions of the 70s. And with the level of environmental permitting that is required to build a new pump hydro, there may be some that are still viable. There's still some under consideration, but essentially it takes eight to 10 years and tens of million dollars of development expense that's fully at risk that ultimately comes down to this binary outcome. So it's a rather risky development proposition. You know, if I was competing head to head with a pump hydro plant, you know, I would go spend six years doing something else and then start working on that to get online at the same time is another way of looking at it. So there's a higher velocity of capital, a higher productivity of working on advanced energy storage developments versus something like pump hydro. Hi, I'm Nasser Sheikh. Thank you for very informative sessions. I'm a professor at Stony Brook University's campus in Korea and my research involves the assessment of renewable energy technologies using multiple perspectives that social, technical, economic, environmental and political, I call it steep, and using decision modeling and expert judgment. And my question is, you know, I want to get a sense of your policy-making status today in national policies here in the US versus internationally. Can you sort of give me a broad strokes idea of where we're at versus other countries, let's say in Europe, in Northern Asia, Latin America, and so on? That's a great question. Oh, yeah, yeah, sorry, sorry, sorry. Hello, my name is Prabh. And I actually wanted to ask you about hydropower. You just said there's a big risk model, but if you look at it, Washington State and Oregon State have bulk of hydropower and they have the cheapest electricity rates. So they can back up what they have done. So there are more 300 dams. I mean, I understand it's a risk model, but right now they have the cheapest prices for renewable energy. That includes Washington, Oregon. So even though investment has been done, it's been better off to invest in hydropower. Why are we still investing solar power? Then statistics say that hydropower is more cheapest currently, and even though it's risky, but it's cheapest. Sure. Interestingly, the company Unicos, it's a German company that had been doing solar and storage in Germany, came to the United States and said, we think that the regulatory construct here is more highly developed, which kind of floored me because I thought, well, Germany's done it all. But in fact, we do have, because of FERC and because of the organized markets, we have a really very productive and effective way to get market rules put into place. So I think that that construct makes the United States a really good place to kind of try to develop market rules. Other than bulk power though, you really do have to look at state by state and what are different states doing and what are the different regulatory constructs they have for their utilities. Is it a fully integrated utility? Is it decoupled? And how are they looking at this? I can see us in the future having to look at something like what you're talking about or what they've done in Austin and Minnesota with like the value of solar, where you try to look at a lot of different value streams and figure out what do you need? What kinds of resources do you need to meet those? Whether it's energy storage, demand response, efficiency, solar, whatever those resources are, how do you value those in a way that really compensates everybody in the way that they should be? So it's really interesting this proposition that you come up with. I'd love to talk more about that because it would be great to be able to share that those kinds of metrics and values so we can think about it here too. Yeah, just quickly to add to the answer to that question. We're ASs in 19 countries and in all of our major geographic business units we're working on storage development right now. So we see a lot of opportunity and necessity breeds innovation and the value always wins. So it's sort of like water flowing down a cliff will find the crevices of value and go there. And that's sort of I think where storage fits in uncharted territories is there's going to be some value on one side of the meter or the other, whether it's nationalized, integrated, liberalized, whatever the market structure is. There's usually a way to get a deal done. We're very used to the market structures in the US but actually if you look around the world so many of the system operators whether you go to Spain or the Philippines have emulated the same LMP market, Ancillary Service Market structures that we see in PJM. And what we found really exciting is they learn from each other. There's an exchange both ways. And PJM particularly I like to cite as a great example of this. Their leadership, their staff really are ambassadors for these market structures worldwide. And what we like to do sometimes is when we're working in another country bring the system operator, they visit PJM we have a storage unit that's actually on PJM's campus so they can sort of understand the market structure and see the operation in person at the same time. And we hope that will facilitate and accelerate those types of, that type of structure being adopted. Coming to the other question about Hydro. Yeah, I completely agree. I've spent a lot of time in Washington, Oregon and studying the power system there. They absolutely have the lowest customer rates. But a lot of that is because you have a river system that was damned decades ago. And we see looking forward, what do you build there or what do you build anywhere? And particularly in that region when it comes to flexibility and it comes to reliability. We're seeing there's a utility in Oregon that's right now building gas-fired reciprocating engines. It's like the most expensive form of gas-fired peaking plant you can build in an area with abundant hydro. We see utility in Washington that over the course of its integrated resource plan says that they need, I think something like two or 3,000 megawatts of new gas-fired peaker plants and nothing else. And from being in the region I've sort of seen with the governor's offices, the utility commissions find it sort of disturbing that while having this abundance of hydro, this abundance of wind, when it comes to reliability and flexibility the region is really looking towards building new gas-fired peaking plants. And I think that model is going to change. Definitely for the energy, the hydro is there, cross your fingers in good water years. We're seeing right now two successive years of drought in Latin America and in California has a real impact on the hydro system operations. It further has competing uses again. There's recreation, there's fish and you can't always do, you can't always extract all of the power system value of the flexibility and the low cost of the hydro system when you have to optimize for these other uses. And I think that extends to other hydro heavy areas. I mean, we see a lot of similar issues to the Northwest in Brazil, in Panama, other places. Let's take these two questions on the side. I'm David with FCHA, kind of going off the hydrogen theme. I guess what's kind of your outlook for fuel cells and hydrogen energy in going towards grid sustainability? Hi, I'm Seth with Kennergy Solar. We have looked at a lot of projects solar coupled with battery storage. And one of the main revenue streams that we look at is the ancillary services market. And we have to make bets on whether or not those are real. And one thing we've wondered about is it going to be or could it have the possibility to be somewhat of a boom and bust market similar to what solar renewable energy credits were in New Jersey? Will a bunch of people jump in? Will it flood the market? Because people are making some big bets in the business world to try and figure out whether that will pay off. I guess I'll talk about hydrogen. So hydrogen is certainly something that we've looked at a lot over the last few decades. I think we'll look at it some more over the next few decades. There's a joke in the industry that it's always five years away. It does, we have made enormous progress in fuel cells and other hydrogen technologies. And in particular, there were vast investments that were made in the European Union in the last decade and a half or so in hydrogen and looking at how it fits into the energy infrastructure. We're still a little skeptical about where it is right now, but I think it is a long-term prospect. It certainly got very good possibilities. We are seeing some near-term prospects for it in things like power to gas, where renewable energy or other inflexible generation is used to generate hydrogen that's injected directly into the natural gas infrastructure up to a certain percentage, relatively small percentage, five percent. That's probably got some possibilities in some parts of the world, especially where natural gas is relatively inexpensive, I should say, like Europe. In the US, it's a difficult, again, you're competing against natural gas. Natural gas is relatively cheap here because of the shale gas, so it's a little bit different here, but we think that long-term, it's got some potential. And on the answer to the service's question, it's a risky business. I mean, unless you can sell them forward, it's a risky business. You're subject to variations in the market price every hour and those markets are, while they're transparent and liquid, it's hard to tell exactly how steep the supply curve is. It's highly sensitive to the amount of storage in the sense that if you add 100 megawatts of storage providing regulation in PJM, that's very different than adding a 100 megawatt gas peaker because you can use all of the storage, all of the time, for ancillary services. So, I mean, we've gone in for a couple projects, we're working on a third one right now in PJM, just taking that market, for example, because it's the biggest one in the US, but we've seen at least three or four other generators who are competitors jumping in. And so, that is likely to have an impact. And when I mentioned these other generators, they're already building something or they already have something online. So, if you're just looking at it now, good luck. But, yeah, it's, there are a lot of other ways storage can create value. That was sort of the low hanging fruit and a lot of it is sort of being picked up. Well, thank you very much for indulging us. We went a little bit over, which we try not to do, but we could probably stay here for a lot longer and talk about this. I just wanna say thank you to each of you very much for deepening and broadening our knowledge on this topic and we will consistently try and keep pace with what you're all are doing. It's a really dynamic time. I wanna say thank you to Haresh and to Catherine and to Breveen for being here, to Michelle and Annie for putting this together and for Judith and Boston. We hope the snow's going well. And please join me in thanking our panelists. And thank you, Sarah and the rest of the CSIS team for having us.