 Well, colleagues, welcome here to the ANU today, and can I firstly begin by acknowledging and celebrating the first Australians on whose traditional lands we meet and whose cultures are among the oldest continuing cultures in human history? I'd like to particularly welcome today the ACT Minister, Simon Corbell, here to the ANU. Within his portfolio, Mr Corbell is responsible for energy and climate change. In that capacity, he is responsible for the establishment of policies to drive the development of Canberra as Australia's solar capital. The ACT government is also committed to large reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, and the Minister, I'm sure, will say something about that in a few moments. I would also particularly like to welcome our speaker today, Dr Dan Aversu, to the university. Dr Aversu is the director of the US National Renewable Energy Laboratory, which is the United States' primary laboratory for renewable energy and energy-efficient research and development. NREL has been continuously involved in the international forefront of renewable energy, R&D, and technology commercialization for many decades now. Dr Aversu became NREL's eighth director in 2005. Prior to NREL, he was an executive with CH2M Hill Company and Sandia National Laboratories, where he worked for more than 20 years. He began his career at the AT&T, Bell Telephone Labs, customer switching laboratory. Here at ANU, we have a 40-year history of solar energy research, education and technology transfer to industry. At present, about 100 staff and PhD students work in solar energy R&D within the university. Our national prominence in solar energy is recognized through our core membership of the Australian Solar Institute. There are many research ties between ANU solar researchers and US-based institutions. For example, ANU's sliver solar cell is being commercialized by Transform Solar in Idaho. Transform is a joint venture between the large Australian utility, Origin Energy, and the US-based semiconductor memory manufacturer, Micron. A $6 million joint research program is underway between ANU and Transform. This public lecture is timely considering the recent passing of legislation to establish a carbon price by the lower house of the Australian Parliament. There has been a rapid fall in the cost of both wind and solar energy in recent years and a rapid rise in installation rates throughout the nation. A transformation of our energy system is undoubtedly underway and a move to renewable energies is at the centre of this. Dr Avazou will undoubtedly tell us more about this shortly. Without further ado, I'd now like to introduce Minister Simon Corbell to speak to us. Well, thank you Vice-Chancellor and good afternoon ladies and gentlemen. I also would like to acknowledge the noneable people as the traditional custodians of this country. And I pay my respects to their elders and the continuing contribution they make to our community. Can I also welcome Dr Dan Avazou. Dan, welcome to camera. It's a pleasure to have you here today. And I'd like to thank the university for the opportunity to briefly speak to you today. The ACT government is proud to be supporting this lecture and also ongoing research on renewable energy through the Solar Energy Endowment Fund, which the government and university agreed to entering into about a year or so ago. Last month I was very pleased to release the government's sustainable energy policy, which is an integrated policy framework focused on managing the social, economic and environmental challenges faced by the ACT in relation to its energy use and production. At the heart of the policy is a continued commitment to maintain affordable, reliable and increasingly renewable energy supply for our city. And it's a vital part of a suite of policies and programs the government is developing to help us achieve our targets in relation to greenhouse gas emissions and to achieve carbon neutrality for our city by 2060. The policy sets out four key outcomes, renewable and affordable energy, smarter use of energy, cleaner energy and growth, economic growth in the clean economy. There's a whole range of specific measures that the policy is seeking to promote, including implementation of national energy efficiency reforms, support for measures such as electric vehicle, infrastructure rollout, adoption of renewable energy targets for our city. And importantly, I think in the context of today's discussion, the implementation of large-scale renewable energy generation for the city with 40 megawatts of solar generation capacity to be made available for uptake through a nation-leading feed-in tariff auction process. Together with our existing residential feed-in tariff scheme, this is part of the government's commitment supporting up to 210 megawatts of renewable energy generation for our city. These are exciting and challenging policy proposals and proposals that will be well informed by the types of discussion that we will hear today. The ACT is one of the fastest growing areas in Australia for renewable energy, currently focused on wind, and as a region we have a potential to build on that through the work that the government is focusing on in solar and which we already see significant leadership on through the work of the Australian National University. I hope that Dr Arbusu's discussion and presentation today will focus on how we can continue to work with our community to support the uptake of renewable energy and to demonstrate that it is a sustainable and energy-efficient choice in our day-to-day lives. I look forward to hearing Dr Arbusu's thoughts on emerging trends in global renewable energy technologies and welcoming him again to the ACT. Thank you very much. Thank you, Minister Carbelle and also President Young. Thank you for the invitation to be here. Apologize for the delay. I'm going to speak rather quickly. Hopefully leave a little bit of time for some questions at the end. Thank you for the opportunity to be here. I think this is one of those times when I think across the globe we share many challenges that need our focused attention. And this is one of those. So without further ado, let me just leap into our presentation this morning. And really I want to leave a little time for questions because I think hopefully it'll provide some insights as to certainly through a lens that we have in the United States regarding these global energy initiatives. First and foremost, I'll restart every talk with the fact that what we need is a solution for energy challenges that really deal with not just energy security, not just the environment, but also the economy. All three of these things need to be dealt with simultaneously. So it is an important piece. Recently I had the opportunity to host Secretary General of the United Nations, Bonke Moon at the laboratory. He made a couple of statements that were I think particularly profound and I couldn't say it better than he did regarding the use of alternative and particular renewable energy. So putting a priority on renewable energy, we address job creation, address climate change, women's empowerment and food security and it cuts across everything that we do and that we will face in the future. I think it's indicative of the fact that these are aspirational challenges, targets and otherwise goals that we want to get to. And it's something that I think we share as a goal. So let me just jump into this. I recently had the opportunity to be part of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC special report on renewable energy. What is the mitigation potential of renewable energy to address issues that relate to climate change? One of the, as you might recall, these IPCC reports are not new work in terms of new science. They are peer reviewed summaries of everything that's occurred in the scientific literature. So it is kind of what is the global and national consensus around energy? So first one of the graphics that I want to point out is the one about, so renewable energy makes it about 12.9% of our total energy consumption globally. Of that, 10.2 of the 12.9 is what we call traditional biomass. That's biomass that's not sustainable. All right, so that piece needs to actually be changed as well. So it's a little bit over prediction of what we actually do have, but just to date a point that I want you to take away. The second thing that we did in this report is to look at what is the potential, the technical potential of renewable energy resources across the globe. And without going into any real detail on this, I will draw your attention to the red lines up here. This red line here is the global primary energy. And specifically, this is what the globe consumes today. That's what we all use as a global community. This is the potential, based on purity literature, of what solar provides alone. So solar has even quite a bit more opportunity than what the globe consumes today. And you'll see that this is electricity over here. This is all primary energy for both global direct solar and biomass. All of this to say, there's a tremendous amount of resource. And it's not an issue of, do we have enough resource? I guess that's the bottom line. There was a whole set of analysis that we did as part of this study and took advantage of. I'll draw your attention again to this side here, which looks at 164 different sets or scenarios of what we might expect from renewable energy going into the future. These data points are all of the data points of each of the scenarios, 164 scenarios. Now you might recall when this report came out in August or so, there was a headline coming out of the EU, in particular the out of Germany. And it focused on the fact that there's one data point right here that says that 77% of the global energy, essentially usage can come from renewable energy. Well, that's true in that one scenario. They didn't point out this scenario down here, which is 5%, that's a very conservative or otherwise very negative scenario in terms of the assumptions that one makes. But you can see that there are 162 other scenarios that can be almost any number you want. So the bottom line is you tell me what you want, we can get it for you depending on a set of assumptions. And this is in fact what the scientific community will tell you. Now the color codes in here relate to what kind of carbon emissions future you wanna have. And so some of the ones that are toward the left are the ones that are less carbon in the environment and the ones that are more carbon, not surprising in terms of what we might project going forward. So all that to say is that we're just trying to kind of take a snapshot of what we are with our energy picture. Another picture that's pretty important is what is the price or the cost of energy. So these vertical slices here are what the cost of conventional energy or so-called traditional energy. These various bars are what the various renewable energy technologies can provide. And you can see some of them are already in the cost effective range or comparative range with traditional fuels and most of them or many of them are not. So again, and this is electricity up here, this is heat down here, this is fuels down here. So it is a snapshot of where we are. What this graph tells me, and you can draw your own conclusions, is that there's still some cost reductions that are necessary to be fully comparable to what we traditionally use in the various types of fossil fuels. All right, so who's doing what? Is another, where are all the technologies being deployed and this graphic here shows you kind of a world map, a geothermal, you have this set of countries, a wind, you have this set of countries led by China, solar PV, you have this set of countries led by Germany, CSP, Spain, et cetera. So it tells you a little bit about who's deploying what and it gives you again a snapshot of where the activity is globally. If you look at the finance, in other words, how much money is being spent in this industry, it's about a $268 million industry depending on what things you count. One thing is that up 211, if you take out all the mergers and acquisitions, what it'll tell you is that rough numbers we're kind of looking at investments being made and this one is by Europe, Middle East, America and Asianic and Oceanic. So you've got essentially investments being made on a per quarter basis in this arena, roughly a third, a third, a third in terms of regions of the world. So that's one cut at the finance developments I think globally. If you look at it by technology, what you see is that you have rough numbers, most of it being spent on wind and then followed by solar efficiency is this piece up here and then other things like biofuels in the middle. So there's a lot of activity. It is in fact again driven by what I think is the most cost-effective technologies in the marketplace but suffice to say it's a growing industry, it's global, it's a couple hundred billion and in fact looks like it's increasing even after the recession that has occurred. I frequently get asked, so where's the technology going and what have we actually seen? Actually, it's a pretty impressive story. If you look past, excuse me, if you look past the past decade, what you can see up here is that wind has increased from less than 10 gigawatts globally to over 200 gigawatts globally. That's a factor of 20. There's been a factor of 30 increase in solar technologies, a lot of new entries in terms of biofuels, in terms of building efficiency. Lots of technologies are already at grid parity in certain regions of the globe, not in all but in some and again it's a big finance thing. So a lot of progress. One can feel good about the fact that we've made a lot of progress. Now, I draw your attention to this particular statistic. Nineteen and a half percent of the global electricity came from renewable energy in 1990. In 2008, it was 18 and a half percent. So where I've talked about all the progress we've made and all of the technology ramp-ups on a double digit kind of Kager bases where that's losing ground and so the question is, what's going on there? Well, what's going on is in terms of the use of energy, the demand for energy, this is in the Americas, this is in Europe and this is in Asia. And what you see is where there's been improvement in terms of low carbon energy in these two regions of the world. In this region of the world, we've had kind of a major reduction in our reduction of the overall percent in terms of renewables. Forty-seven percent of all new generation in the electricity sector has come from coal. And that is, in fact, part of the challenge that we have as a globe is that we're losing ground on a global basis, primarily because of the appetite in developing nations in particular is so great for energy. And that leads us to, I think, a new set of perhaps insights regarding what we need to be doing as a global community. So in the US, we get asked the question frequently. So we recognize that we had a problem in energy, literally, in the 1960s. And yet, for almost four-plus decades, we've not really made much progress. And I have another slide where I've got quotes from each one of our presidents since 1960 talking about how important it was. And of course, our sitting president, President Obama, has made it yet a high priority in his administration as well. These are not challenges that we don't recognize. They're challenges we've recognized for decades. But it is really difficult. And the question comes back to why is it so difficult? Well, I've got a graphic here that kind of describes, in the US, I would expect that there's some similarities in other parts of the world and certainly in Australia, in the US, energy is not a classic supply-and-demand sector. In fact, we expect and we anticipate that innovation is gonna drive economic growth and drive progress. And yet, in this sector, in the energy sector, if you look at, up here in this particular graphic, if you look at the percent of sector sales that we invest in R&D, it's literally less than 1%. 0.3% of sector sales in energy that we invest in R&D. Contrast that with pharmaceuticals, a variety of other IT and semiconductor related technologies where you're in, certainly in the teens or 20% of pharmaceuticals of your sector sales that you invest in R&D. So it's a sector, and I would argue, is devoid of investment in R&D. It's innovation poor. Another thing that I'll point out is asset utilization. If you look at, in the US, again, if you look at our domestic generation of energy supply, what you will find is that we've made about $2.5 trillion of investment. At roughly any point, well, say, if you take the average load on our electricity system on an annual basis, it's roughly half of the generating capacity that we have. So roughly a trillion plus dollars is sitting idle all the time. If you look at other sectors within our economy and you say, what's the utilization factor of your asset base? It's a lot more than 47%, which is what we have in electricity in the US economy. And the reason for that is we put a high premium on reliability. We say, you know, when we plug our appliance into the wall socket, we want that to work. We want the lights to be on at the time. We don't want any disruptions, all right? And so we generate, again, more energy than we absolutely, or capacity that we absolutely have to use in order that we never have the lights go up. And that's that asset sitting on the sidelines. And that's not true of many of the other sectors. Again, this is indicative of what kinds of problems you have in the energy sector that you do not have in the other sectors. Other, likewise, we have long cycle time. This is not IT. This is not, you get a new product every eight to 10 months. This is, sometimes you make investments, these investments last a long time. A coal plant will last you 50 years. You make a decision to invest in a coal plant that's gonna take you 50 years in the US. In our nuclear fleet, we are now licensing our 30 year license and technology to 60 years, and the expectation is that we will go to 90 years. Part of that is the fact that we want these assets to continue to work for us in our economy. It's not a bad thing, it's just a recognition that if you're gonna make decisions today, they last a long time. So think about what we do. And the last thing I'll say about the sector and the uniqueness of it is the fact that it is being driven by public policy. And public policy relates to the fact that we have had objectives in our energy sector, and those objectives for about in the US for 100 years have served us well. We like the idea of low cost energy. We have very, very low cost energy in the US. At my house, my first 500 kilowatt hours of electricity, I pay five cents a kilowatt hour or four. The next, anything above that, I pay nine and a half cents a kilowatt hour. That's what I pay retail, you know? That's a lot less than that if you pay wholesale. We like our cheap energy. In Europe, they have a different set of conditions where energy's much higher. In Asia, much higher, I understand it's higher here. But in the US, we have a serious issue regarding the cost of energy. And that cost of energy is, in my opinion, artificially low. It does not take into account all of the other things that we expect out of our energy system. So what is it that we need? What we need is a transformation. And that's the part that's most difficult for perhaps all of the community to fully acknowledge. A transformation from a set of attributes which are not sustainable by everyone's definition to a set of attributes that are sustainable by everyone's estimation. Now, expectations here are important. So, you know, one first fundamental question is, is this the future we want? And if so, what are we willing to do to get there? Those are the questions that are in front of us. And I would offer, and I frequently say, you know, if you don't care, I think eventually we'll get here personally as an intellectual matter. I think we'll personally get there to this outcome. It may take centuries. Can we afford to wait centuries? And my response to that is absolutely not. There's a sense of urgency. We need to move quickly. Unless you would decide that you need to move quickly, you really don't need government intervention at all because you'll eventually get there because you have to. There's no question in my mind, you have to get to this set of outcomes. But can you wait centuries to get there? That's the real question. And the short answer to that in my estimation as a scientist and engineer is, we have a sense of urgency. We need to move more quickly. All right, so that's the question. What we do in our program is to start to look at this thing via sectors. There are sectors that relate to electricity generation and end use, and then transport fuels and end use. And ultimately, all of these things coalesce into an integrated sustainable energy system. And we'd be thinking about it holistically as an energy system, all right? So let's talk about technology for a moment. So there's technologies that are out there, and many of these technologies are already cost competitive based on what I mentioned earlier in terms of our IPCC report. This is the state of technology in the US a decade ago, and this is the state of technology today. Recognized that Texas, 10,000 megawatts, 10 gigawatts of wind energy primarily, is the state with the most amount of energy in the US, the most amount of renewable energy in the US. That's not something that most people recognize. And as you may know, even though that state is green on this map, it's kind of red, if you think about it in political terms. So that said, there's a lot of things that we can talk about in terms of progress. There is, in fact, quite a bit of renewable energy in the country, and it's moving fairly quickly. And we're very excited about it. We have a national program that focuses on a variety of goals, one of which is 80% reduction of essentially, I'm sorry, 80% of our energy technologies would come from clean sources. Now you have to define clean here a little bit differently than we normally define clean, but this is what the administration has said as part of the national goals. If you look at the definitions of clean in this particular metric, we're 40% now, and we want to get to 80% by the year 2035. All right, lots of things, I'm gonna go through all these in the interest of saving time, but lots of activity, there's R&D to be had, there's innovation to occur, and there's a lot of things that's still left to be done in terms of improving the technology, and we're about that, and there's a lot of new interest in offshore wind technology where there's a tremendous amount of resource, because most of the population of the earth lives within literally 200 or so kilometers of a coast. All right, all that to say, great opportunity for wind, great opportunity for solar, and I will add that in the solar, and I was the lead coordinating lead author for the solar chapter in the IPCC report, one of the things that we focused on was the fact that there's a lot of unaccounted for solar resource that we don't really capture in the literature. I tried to find, for instance, how much lighting occurs that you can offset energy usage through the use of solar energy, and you'd be hard-pressed to find any peer-reviewed literature on lighting technology, but essentially, it ought to be counted as part of the solar resource. We tend to spend most of our time down here, this is the elegant stuff, this is the conversion of solar to electricity directly, it helps us think about how do we fit into the present energy system, and so we spend a lot of time both in our national program and otherwise on these technologies. A lot of what I would call significant progress being made, roughly three gigawatts, 3,000 megawatts of solar energy now included in our grid in the U.S., there's roughly 30,000 plus 40,000 gigawatts on the globe. A lot of that is in Germany, in Germany, of course, as you know, doesn't have as nearly the solar resource that we have in the U.S. or that you have here in Australia. One of the big issues that we're working on is to get to the cost of these technologies so they are at grid parity. In the U.S. we have a thing called the SunShot Initiative and the SunShot Initiative is really about getting the cost of solar and certain PV in particular down to a dollar a watt, okay? That's 50 cents a watt for a module, 50 cents a watt for the balance of system, those are incredibly ambitious targets. Can they be done? What is interesting to me is as I talk to the various developers of the various technologies, there's a lot of folks who believe we can get to these goals. Maybe not as quick as we would like in the administration today but certainly there are goals that are worthy of pursuing and if you can do that, you get down to six dollars, I'm sorry, six cents a kilowatt hour, six dollars a megawatt hour, six cents a kilowatt hour of, for that life cycle cost of that technology. It's hugely important. This is the map of today's technology in terms of grid parity. Only the yellow piece here are those states are the ones that today are within 25% of grid parity meaning 25% of being competitive with the traditional fossil fuels. If we get to a dollar a watt, the map changes to this which is essentially everyone in the US to a large degree could have some contribution from a solar resource competitive with fossil fuels. Lots of technologies that we're working on, I think the verdict is still out on which one will ultimately be the technology of choice because I think there's still great promise in all of them, one of the things that we've done is continue to look at innovation with the private sector and we're working aggressively with the private sector. At our laboratory, we have over a hundred and 30 new cooperative research development agreements over 400 partnerships that are active at any one time with the private sector and we're working on a number of things. These R&D 100 awards are kind of the best 100 inventions of the year that have found their way into the marketplace and I highlight some of those and talk to the solar group here a little while ago regarding some of the technologies that are essentially attendant in there. What's interesting to me is the level of innovation in the laboratory is as robust as it has ever been and it's something that I think we can take full advantage of. There's great opportunity I think in the solar technology. I'm bullish on solar primarily because of that first map that I showed you. Solar has more resource potential than all of the other renewable energy technologies combined and it would be essentially short-sighted of us to not try to exploit that to the maximum degree possible. Now I'll get back to that here in a minute but there's some exciting things that are going on in the laboratory and we're looking at first generation, second generation, now third generation technology which is way off but one of the things that we're focused on is nanostructured materials. There's a great deal of promise in nanostructured materials and specifically we're now looking at technologies that you can begin to in very low cost ways kind of paint onto surfaces and get essentially the electricity production out of those via some very inexpensive process. Biofuels, a lot of work, certainly in the US has been focused on ethanol. We recognize that ethanol is not the fuel of tomorrow. In fact ethanol really could be quite frank about it is the way in which we help with agricultural policy in our country. It's to help corn farmers. Let's just talk about it the way it is because that's really what it is. Really what we're about is kind of next generation so it's not about kind of putting fuel in competition with food, it's really about taking your biomass resource and using it in a very judicious sort of way and that can be cellulosic research which is the stuff that we're doing in a variety of other technologies that allow you to think about technology and new sources of fuels that can be compatible with our infrastructure in a new and different way. So we've made a lot of progress on cellulosic. This is not the food part of the corn plant. This is the leftover, the corn stover so to speak. And we've made great progress in terms of getting the cost down. But again, it's not about ethanol, it's beyond ethanol. There are a variety of technologies that you can use to drop in, to use for both aviation fuel and for using also for diesel and other molecules that look like hydrocarbons. And so we've got a number of startup technologies and a whole new set of pathways for taking fuel, I'm sorry, for taking carbohydrates and turning them into hydrocarbons. And so we're talking about biomass as the fuel but ultimately getting to a liquid transportation fuel that's compatible with our infrastructure and a tremendous amount of progress being made in this arena and that's gotten a lot of resurgence over the course of the last five or so years. It would, I would be a bit of an estimating talking about transport and vehicles. There is a whole, I think, huge challenge in our transport sector. It is probably the more difficult part of our energy system to transform. Primarily as we have so many few, we have so few options. We like our liquid transportation fuels. We really don't have many other alternatives for that other than electrification. Electrification only works if you're generating your electricity from a clean source because otherwise you really have just transferred the carbon emissions from one sector to another. Anyway, lots of so-called technology options. The one thing that I can say has been one of the major developments in our country over the past couple of years is the administration's ability to get essentially a new, what we call CAFE standard but corporate average fuel efficiency standard increased from this flat plateau we've been on for the last, you know, almost a decade onto a new plateau where we're going from something, you know, north of 25 miles a gallon to up to 54 miles a gallon as a target. To get the automakers to agree that that is, in fact, a target that the fleets need to accommodate was a major change in terms of policy and in terms of business value propositions going forward. There's a number of things that have to be done. One thing that's not clear to us in the policy arena is what will the consumer demand? Because in fact, that's probably the biggest unknown in terms of making a transformation in our transport sector. What will this consumer behavior be towards some of these new technologies? One thing that I'd like to point out, and this is something that Google sponsored by McKenzie's, a consulting valuation firm, looking at what would the cost of the battery need to be in order to really begin to take off in terms of electrification of our transport system. And the co-hard facts are that it's going to be really, really difficult to do this. And where we want to go to electrification, I think one of the things that we need to spend time and energy on is battery consumption. Lithium ion batteries like the one that the Nissan Leaf uses is costing something like $700 per kilowatt hour. Even if it costs $340 kilowatt hour, $340 a kilowatt hour, the break even price for that vehicle if the cost would be $5 a gallon of gasoline equivalent. So you'd have to have $5 of gasoline equivalent even if you cut the price in half or the cost in half of a lithium ion battery today to get a leaf size battery compatible, essentially, with your value proposition. If you did that, you were able to get to penetration of these technologies going forward. And what this graphic illustrates is that it takes a long time for these technologies to find their way into the marketplace. And one of the things that we need to be cognizant of is these strategies that we're putting together in terms of national policies need to have staying power because these transformations in our energy system will take time and there's no substitute for that. The immediate reaction to some of these things simply don't happen unless you're working at it fairly aggressively over long periods of time. So that's the point to be made. I'll talk about buildings and I wanna talk about this as I kinda wrap up the talk. But more importantly than anything is there's some public policy that we can use today to help us improve our essentially energy consumption and the effectiveness of which we use energy. And it's really quite a testament to the fact that our policies are not yet fully integrated with our social and otherwise national objectives. And let me just point that out. So first of all, 40% of the energy consumption in the US comes from buildings. 70% of our electricity is used in buildings. We'll come back to that in a minute. What you can show is if you look at a building and you look at both its initial cost, say consider that to be the mortgage monthly payment, and its energy usage. So how much energy would that building consume? You can find almost in every building that we have in our country, both commercial and residential, that there is a minimum, where you can save 40% of the energy and still have a lower lifecycle cost of that building. All right, we say that again. So as a consumer, you could put in some efficiency measures into that building and lower your monthly bills, mortgage plus energy bill from 2,500 in this particular building down to like 1,800 and save 40% of your energy. What you'd have to do is you'd have to make some investments in energy efficiency and then you would reap the benefits that over the lifecycle of that building, all right? Now, you can do that in almost every building in the country and we don't do it. And the reason we don't do it is the first cost of that building is borne by the builder. The builder doesn't live in the building, the builder doesn't care whether that building's efficient or not. The tenant pays for the energy bill, for the life of the building and we've decoupled the incentive to make the efficiency investments from the reward of the lower energy prices. We've decoupled it. One party gets the benefit, one party has to make the investment, the other party gets the benefit. Well, that's a structural issue. That's not a technology issue, it's a structural issue. If you have one and the same, then you're incentivized to make those changes. I'm gonna illustrate that here in a minute. All right, so that's that. There's lots of things you can do and we're about trying to understand what are those things you can do in terms of the as-built environment. All right, so let me now come back to this thing in terms of a vision. The vision is this. You know, you essentially have a grid in our country that is very archaic. It's old, and it's further aging and deteriorating. We're not making investments in it. It's not very smart. We have big power plants and big wires connecting them. And really, that's kind of what we have. We've had it for 100 years. It's worked well, but it's no longer doing the job for us and we need to do something very, very different. All right? There's a lot that needs to be done to make this system look a lot more forgiving to renewable and distributed resources than what we've been able to do. All right? So there is the current system and the future system. The future system is one that really has this much broader vision about the end use and the generation and that they're flexible and that you are actually able to mix and match and take generation from where it's being generated and deliver to where it's needed on a much more robust kind of mechanism and a time scale that then is currently available. We've got grid integration projects going on all over the country. And one of the things, and these are some of the projects that we have over here on this side of the graphic, one of the things that we can tell you the largest PV system in the US is one that central energy has in Nevada. It's 48 megawatts. It's a big system. And we're looking at what the utility is asking us to look at. You know, we had these renewable portfolio standards. They're encouraged to put the system onto the grid. They've got it onto the grid. Now the utility is looking at and saying, you know what? There's a whole bunch of stuff in here that makes us nervous. Makes us nervous about reliability. Makes us nervous about, you know, when the clouds come over, what happens to this system? How do we accommodate this? What about our thermal units? Do we have to ramp them up and ramp them down? What about our nuclear units, et cetera, et cetera? And we're looking at these things and we're collecting data. So policy got us out, started out out front and we're moving in this arena. And now when we're starting to get some significant penetration, now you've got issues that essentially need to be addressed. And so this is a graphic of a large facility that we're monitoring. This outline right here is kind of clouds coming over. Clouds coming over the facility, over the field. And these graphics right here, this is what the DNA or the solar profile looks like as time of day goes by. If you just look at one segment of this field, you get this kind of volatility or variability. As you start integrating the larger system, you get this smaller amount of variation. It indicates to us what we've kind of already believed that if you look at this thing in a much more sophisticated way, you can begin to balance out some of these so-called intermittencies. And you can begin to smooth those, again with a much smarter grid than you have today. So it's technology that needs, it's a sophistication that we need to understand as we think about a new future for ourselves. All right, so let me just talk about the last thing, which is a new building that we've got going up at our laboratory. And this building is our research support facility. You put acronyms around everything, so it's the RSF. And this particular building is where most of our researchers will be housed. All right, so we're finishing that last segment just in the next few weeks. My office is right up in here. I'll be moving in literally in several weeks. 1,400 people, right now 800 people are already in the building, but we'll have 1,400 people, 1,400 people. All right, this building was designed so that it would not only be lead platinum, that's the leadership in energy and environmental design. It's the US Green Buildings Council. I think other countries use different things, but it was designed with the idea that it would be net zero energy. Lead platinum, but also that it would use half of the energy consumption of a normal building. Now remember that graph I showed you earlier regarding a building. If you look at commercial buildings, here's this commercial building, 18% of our energy consumption goes to commercial buildings. If you look at what are the things inside that building that actually use and consume energy, the biggest piece is loading. Then you start with heating and cooling some flood loads, ventilation, a variety of other things. That is what the profile of a typical building is. So we kind of purpose to say, you know what, let's do something very different in this building. And what we didn't decided to do was to say, all right, let's look at everything we know how to do as we construct this building going forward. So the first thing we did is we said it's orientation. So we didn't give it to the architects, sorry for any architects in the audience, we gave it to the engineers and said, you know, what would it need to look like? What does the envelope need to look like? What needs to be long and narrow and it needs to kind of follow the wind, the solar profile around the day. And so that's kind of what, and then we gave it to the architects and said, maybe make it look nice. So that was the first big change that we made. So daylight, 100% daily. This building is 100% daily, meaning that on a day when the sun is shining, you do not have to turn the lights on unless you want to. You can, but you don't have to, all right? So that was the first thing we did. And you know, inside the building, we've got things like light louvers that actually channel the light so that it doesn't have direct lighting on your station, but in fact, over across the building. Second thing we did was thermal mass, huge thermal mass, very thermal management oriented. So again, lots of thick walls that go along with the building. One of the things we did, we put a labyrinth underneath the building, a big concrete structure with these kind of passages in it that allow you to collect cool air during the evening hours of the summer months and warm air during the winter months so that you can actually begin to manage the energy usage of the building. Next thing we did is we actually put in natural ventilation. In the US government, don't ask me why you cannot open and close windows. All of their fixed and you're not allowed to open and close windows. Well, we got a special, you know, it's meant to get an act of Congress to get open and closed windows. Not too sophisticated, but we got open and closed windows in our building, which is really important. The next thing we did is we said, okay, let's put the solar scan on the building. It's like the equivalent of a tram wall, passive solar heating, except in this case it's active. It's essentially the technology we invented at the laboratory literally as a metal plate with holes in it. And essentially warm air is drawn through this via some, you know, positive pressure and you bring the air in and you put it down in the labyrinth and you can use it for the purposes that you need it. The next thing we did is we actually have a data center in this building. It turns out it's, it is the lion's share of the energy usage in the building as the data center. But you ever go and need the data center. So we put a data center in our building and it has got a very, very unique set of cooling approaches to it. And in fact it's one of the greenest data centers we've got a big award for in the country. And in fact, we probably think in the world it's got a PUE, that's a performance measure of 1.1 where the previous one in the building that we're in now is 3.0. So it uses one third of the energy of a normal data center. Does that recognize that that's an important piece of it? The next thing we put in, electrochromic and thermochromic windows. So, you know, on one side we got electrochromic and on the other side we got thermochromic, triple pane windows everywhere. We end up putting heated and cooling into a set of tubes that are ultimately the thermal management of the building. So in every floor we have like over 42 miles of this piping, essentially is the way in which we heat and cool the building. So chill water and hot water all running through the same set of tubes. Then we put on top of the building a photovoltaic and roughly 2.5 megawatts of PV on the building. We have a number of other sustainability features. These support columns, these columns are recycled natural gas pipelines that we got from the natural gas pipelines. We fill them up with concrete, they're the structural members of the building. Which means that we have pine forest thinnings. We have a thing called beetle kill in our country, primarily as a result of climate change. And now the insects are beginning to eat, you know, they're living longer because the seasons are now shorter, the winter seasons are now shorter and they don't kill the larvae anymore with the freezes. And so now we're losing a big part of our forest. We're thinning those forests and the beetle kill pine forests are now being used as aesthetic features of the building. All right, this building now is not only, so here's the photovoltaic 2.5 megawatts again with that on the parking garages that are associated with this building. We measure everything in this building. We have a display that you have and when you walk in you can see what's going on. If you're a staff member in this building, you are challenged to be energy, you know, an energy conservative. One of the things that we do, if you take the overall usage of the building, number of kilowatt hours on an annual basis and divide it by the number of people in the building, it's less than 300 watts per person, okay? Less, it's about 285 watts per person. That's all in, that's everything. The actual watts per duty station is 70 watts. Less, about like a light bulb, an incandescent light bulb. So we, you know, and you walk into this building and the first thing you recognize is it's highly energy efficient. So the first thing we did is we said, okay, you have a budget. You as an individual walking in the door, you have an energy budget. It's less than 300 watts. We don't want you to use more than your share. So all of a sudden those little space eaters that you turn on sometimes and put them underneath your desk, that's contraband in our building. So we don't let anybody have that stuff. Nobody has, you know, all, not everyone has a copy or on their desk anymore. All these kind of things are now, we look at how do you make these as energy efficient as possible? Everybody, you know, a monitor is 300 watts by itself. So we give everybody LED monitors, 24 watts piece. So you start to think about energy and everything you do, everything is measured. All right? The next thing I'll say is, and this question everybody asks is, all right, that's great. So how much extra did you pay for this? All right? What I'm telling you is, here's this building. My budget was $300 a square foot. We built the building for $259 a square foot. And if you add the photovoltaics on it, $286 a square foot. I was able to build this building at less than the budget that I had of $300 a square foot, which is what it typically cost to build a building, built a code in the Denver area. What I'm telling you is, we're incentivized here to put the energy features into this building because we're the tenants. We're the ones that are gonna live where the energy costs of this building long term. All right? We put things that were essentially off the shelf into the building. This is not revolutionary. This is technology that's here today. If you were to ask the question, and one of the things that we focus on is, if all the commercial buildings in our region were the new ones, were of the same profile as us on a hot summer afternoon at the peak point when the utility is actually asking everybody to get off of energy because they can barely keep up to the load and now they're running at max power, we're exporting energy into the grid. If you ask them, what if all your commercial clients were like us and you're exporting energy into the grid whenever you have the peak demand on your energy system? They will all tell you the same thing. It's a game changer. It'll change everything. What it will do is make us as a utility not interested in how we deliver the energy in a traditional format, but how do we take the energy that you're bringing in and bust it to somebody who else who needs energy and how do we bring it into broker things? Now we're talking about a business value proposition very different than utilities have today. Utilities have an energy proposition today. It says if I sell electricity and if I build new power plants, I get paid. That's how my shareholders actually value what I do. And those are the two things that they get. If you have this environment, it's a very different value proposition. Now they are worried about how do I get this technology? How do I get the energy on? How do I get it off? How do I broker it? It's an IT-like infrastructure. All of a sudden, it's not about big power plants, big wires, it's about distributed generation and it's all of the attendance value services when you talk about energy in a different way than the way we're having it now. And so when you talk about new green energy economy and all those kinds of things, this is the economy of the future. Not that part that says, I'm gonna try to think out how I'm gonna play into the existing infrastructure the way it is today. And I think that's really the biggest issue that we have in front of us. We can do this. There's no question that we have the opportunity. There's plenty of resource. And then we have a business value proposition that works today if we were to use it. You know, I frequently get asked the question, well so, but what about the built environment? You can't do that for old buildings. That's true, you can't. But we're not doing it on new buildings either. And the question that you really need to be thinking about is what future do I want and invent this future and I think you need to invest in innovation. It's not about the short term, it's about the long term and in fact it really is about access to capital. And so when you talk about all the policy instruments, if you can have policy instruments that give you access to capital so you can have innovation and you can transform the energy system then you're on the right track, independent of which instrument you use. And there's gonna be debate about which instrument to use. But what you can say is making the transformation is actually the path of, that is the path that's going to be the best path course in the future. If we delay it's gonna get harder and it's gonna be more expensive. If we don't delay, we'll get started, it'll be rough but at least we'll get there hopefully in a reasonable amount of time. So that's all I have for you today. Hopefully I left some time for some questions. Thank you. Yes. What is the research that has to be done and is your lab doing it? Thank you for the question. I didn't have time to cover one of the things that I think are the most important things going forward. And that's systems integration. As these utilities are beginning to recognize is that so these distributed resources operate differently than we anticipated. We really don't have the research done on that that we need to have. We've just invested, the government just invested in a new facility called the Energy Systems Integration Facility. It's a $135 million new capability to do essentially megawatt style integration of distributed resources. So that's everything from vehicles that you plug in, vehicle to grid, all the storage technologies, all the various technologies that relate to generation, solar, wind, geothermal, all those things and how they operate onto the grid. So we'll have a high performance computing center and a simulation instead of software where the utilities can come in, simulate what their grid looks like and then put these technologies that are somewhat yet new, all the power electronics, all the control technologies and the things that relate to how to integrate these things onto the grid and allow them to essentially do the experiment virtually before they actually put it on the grid. It is about risk reduction and that's the most important thing going forward. And so I think energy integration and the integration of new sources, distributed resources onto the grid is one of the most important challenges going forward and probably the biggest barrier we have to wide scale adoption of these technologies. And so I think that's the next big thing that has to happen and that's precisely what we hope to do. We get a lot of interest both internationally and from the Department of Defense and others as well. The operating cost side of things. Is there any policy moves in the US to assist when commercial and residential buildings are on the market to have some sort of insight of the likely operating cost to be able to cut the remaining upfront capital costs? Yeah, one of the things I didn't say is still very true. And that is the, you know, that you would think that the easiest thing to do in terms of the as built environment or the new building environment is to just change the codes and the standards to acknowledge the fact that you want to save energy in the building. That would be the easy way of doing the essentially the restructuring of this market. Turns out that that's the hard way because there are literally thousands, maybe tens of thousands of jurisdictions for how you develop the requirements around buildings. And we try to harmonize those in one size fits all kind of thing and you'll get, you know, you get a certain backlash that's pretty, pretty ugly. You know, there's a lot of work that still needs to be done to make the public aware of what the attendant benefits are of this some what I would consider to be a fairly minor public policy regulatory requirement to say consider energy efficiency in the context of new building construction. And I think we're making progress in that area but still a long ways to go. And, you know, some of these things there's just resistance because it's just gonna be difficult to change the status quo. But part of the awareness is getting people to recognize what future do I want and how do I get there and having them be have it be market pull rather than technology or otherwise regulatory push. Any other questions? She's a man, the renewable energy support well, between those that support cost push measures particularly R&D support and those that support man pull measures like getting Paris or U.S. or renewable portfolios and particularly in relation to solar and which do you think would be the better investment of always short-term other funds? Well, so, you know, I think one of the things that certainly we face in the U.S. is the fact that the sector, the energy sector as I described is not classical supply and demand. You know, it's not IT, it's not semiconductors. It's very unique and we have government intervention whether we like it or not we've had government intervention. And so the government I think role needs to continue, you know, I think there's a general consensus that market forces kind of are most efficient and you've got to let them work. But given the fact that this is a highly regulated environment, investment in R&D and innovation allows you to put things into pipelines and hopefully those pipelines then gets pulled into the marketplace. You need to get over the barriers of adoption of the technologies into the marketplace. Even if something is at grid parity, it's unlikely that the market is going to adopt it unless it has, you know, what we call a much more compelling value proposition that makes it much better than the incumbent technologies so that you essentially don't have to run the risk that it might not work. So there's an investment required to get over a herd. All right, there's a couple ways to do that. One is to raise the prices of the incumbent technologies. Another is essentially to put some incentives in to get over the barrier. Ultimately, it's my feeling, based on my many years of watching this arena, is that you need these technologies to be in the marketplace and you need the market to actually be the primary driver of reducing the costs. You can't wait until you have the better technology for the market to adopt it. You've got to be in the market and driving the cost down. So one of the things that I believe is a role for government is that you need to have incentive so that the government allows these technologies to be de-risk. In other words, I believe what we do at our laboratory is reduce the risk of private sector investment. And if you can get to a point where you're reducing the risk of private sector investment, I think you've got the best government policy. Some of that's going to be on the front end and some of that's going to be on the back end. But I don't think there's any substitute for doing it along the entire spectrum. Because you simply cannot just put it in the front end and hope that good things happen. It doesn't, not in this environment. You need to be participant and perhaps a diminishing role as you get closer and closer to commercialization. But there is a legitimate government role, in my opinion, based on the nature of that sector that allows there to be government involvement along the entire spectrum. That's why we have so many industry partnerships. It's about de-risking the technology. And not all of them are going to be successful. But at least we're in a position where we can move the technology more quickly. It really is about access to capital and moving the technology more quickly. And I think those are the things that hopefully will inform good public policy. I'm always... That's one of the big blocks, especially for distributed EV and people getting formal takes from the rooftops, et cetera. And I know there's large government loans going out to institutions that are producing solar cells and things like that. But as far as access to capital for people to build, maybe a community solar array, or to get an EV on their rooftop, what type of creative ideas is that around work out? Do they work out any ideas at all to get the creative ideas of how to get capital for people at lower rates? Because it's really hard to keep your hands in the money that you guys right now love, especially. Yeah, very much is. And I mean, that's precisely the point. Well, one of the things that I've tried to do well in my tenure at the laboratory, I've now almost completing my sixth year there, is to be a resource, a resource for the financial community, for the policy community, for the technology community, so that they can go to somewhere to help them make wiser decisions. Access to capital, I think, is by many measures, the one biggest issue that all would agree is an issue. There's a number of ways to get access to capital. And so one of the things that we try to do at the laboratory is we're not in a position where we are advocating any one policy mechanism over another. But we are in a position where we can talk about how this marketplace works based on our relationship with the private sector and based on our understanding of how the technology will ultimately be integrated into that marketplace. So, you know, the one thing I can tell you is that, you know, you wanna let the market work as much as the market can work. And to the degree it needs some level of support, then that's really where I think the national programs and the public policy are to participate. So, to the degree that, again, you can recognize that there is a serious need on the Delta, both in the multiple valleys of death, we call them at various places. There's ways in which you can have kind of minimal government involvement, but at least have government leadership. Part of that is in the regulatory environment. And part of that is in the US, one of the things that's being contemplated is a thing called Clean Energy Development Bank, CEDA. It is a way in which the private sector can kind of lead a national asset, a government asset. And so you don't have the government necessarily being the one manipulating and being venture capitalists, but you got a more, what I would call, venture capital-like structure that helps you get that same outcome without the direct government involvement. It's kind of an indirect government involvement. Maybe that has some legs to it, and maybe that's another way of doing it to a round of all the other attendant issues that we face in a number of other fronts. But no question that we need to have very, very wise and thoughtful government policies. One of the things that you don't want is to try things in the marketplace only to find out that you had unintended consequences. That's really damaging. It sets you back in time. So let's be looking on thoughtful as our position. Let's have strategic energy analysis in a much more sophisticated way than we've ever had them before, and at least be well-informed about some of those public policies that need to be put into play. So I think all of those things suggest, we as a laboratory, we're a resource. My intent is that we offer counsel as to, here's a model, you dial in this policy mechanism, you get this outcome. You dial it the other way you get a different outcome. That should be a transparent methodology that everyone agrees to, and then you can debate the public posture or the wisdom of the public approaches. But let's at least have, let's not fly blind. And I think that's to a large degree what we've been doing in the past. And let's be much more informed. So absolutely, we need investment in developing this infrastructure and this methodology and strategic thinking around how we use and ultimately generate energy for the future. Well thank you, I think we're very cool with the day. I'd love to have you join me, please, in thanking you and Professor Abhizu and also Professor Ian Young and Minister Simon Corbell. We're out for now, so that's fine. Thank you very much for having us.