 And welcome to the Smart Grid Seminal. Our speaker today is Dr. Lara Piafone from Acura Innovation. She's going to talk about some interesting demand response and new charging experiments to reduce greenhouse pollution. Just as a reminder, we have another seminar next week, same time. Professor Drew from New Kiosk will talk about machine learning and the process of operation. And remember this, we're not going to meet here. We're meeting through Room 368. This room is now available next Thursday. And there is a special seminar on the following Tuesday. There's a typo. It should be Tuesday, November 16, Tuesday. And it will be 10 o'clock. Now, I know some of you may have time conflicts, so if you can make it, we strongly recommend you try to attend. And you'll be in Room 300, not this room, 300. Dr. Piafone is very passionate about technologies that reduce carbon emissions and contribute to a cleaner environment, and actually innovations to design and run programs that focus on emissions reduction technologies. Prior to actuation, she worked on energy technology innovation at Pixar, where she led the corporate strategy and technical team, advising the company on energy technology trends, investing in energy storage technologies, and running the company's partnership R&D program. Before that, she directed the Office of Energy and Supply Security in the US DOE Office of Policy and Systems Analysis to serve as AAAS, Compressional Science and Engineering Fellow for the Center for Energy and Natural Resources Committee, focusing on nuclear power and energy finance and electricity storage. She received her 15 engineering systems of MIT. She also holds field master degrees in nuclear engineering and technology policy, also from MIT. Without further delay, I'll let the speakers come to the side. So now you can start sharing. Wonderful. Thanks so much, Shinwon, for that wonderful introduction. I'm really excited to be here with all of you today and to talk about systems experiments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in time to save the planet. So this is possibly going to be one of the less technical talks you'll be seeing. Really what I'm going to be laying out today is kind of a framework for how I'm doing some thinking and a very specific kind of problem solving. And so what you'll see is that I've got a couple of efforts that I'll describe in detail here around demand response and one on EV charging that are very specifically addressed at solving some climate challenges. But there's also kind of a meta theme here, which is talking about systems innovation and systems experimentation, which is sort of a version of R&D. It's really kind of a new type of innovation, I think, in some ways that exists in certain kinds of organizations throughout our ecosystems. But I think not sufficiently. And so you'll see that, among other things, I also have a plea in here to join me in kind of the systems innovation revolution to join me in kind of thinking about what your work is, both at Stanford and potentially beyond that in some of these kinds of ways. So I'm really excited to make this interactive. Please do feel free to interrupt if you have questions. If you have ideas, I really want to make sure that we're moving back and forth on this. And also really want to invite you all to make this interactive even beyond this talk. I think you'll see that my passion is really about having impact and on doing things that will make a difference. And so if you see things in here that excite you, if you have ideas that the sparks, if you see gaps in the climate tech innovation space that you think need addressing, I really want to hear from you. Similarly, if you dramatically disagree with something that I put out here or you see a source that I'm using that doesn't hold up to standards, I really want to hear about that, too, because I want to make sure that I'm moving in directions that are actually meaningful. So without further ado, let's jump in. And let's talk about the scale of the climate challenge and what I mean by systems innovation as a way to approach solving elements of it. I'll start here. And I don't think I really need to dwell on the elements of this slide. I think a lot of folks are aware of the climate challenge and what it poses to all of us here on Earth. I think typically when we talk about the climate challenge, there are two big pieces. We talk about the scale of the problem. And then we also talk about timing. When it comes to scale, what you see here is some data from Climate Action Tracker that very clearly shows us that going into the current discussions, the COP and Glasgow right now, we're really not on track to reduce global warming to a level that's actually going to make sense for the world. Our current policies don't get us anywhere near there. There is a huge gap, a lot of activity, that needs to occur to get to even the pledges and targets that were set out. This is as of about April this year. And then still a gap to get from those pledges and targets down to 2 degrees C and 1.5 degrees C pathways. I'm really excited. Folks may have seen that there's some Twitter in the news today around the fact that some of the commitments that are being made right now at the COP might actually get us somewhere between 1.5 and 1.9 degrees C if you count things like the methane emissions targets. But obviously, there is a lot of question about really how we get there, what it's actually going to take, whether again globally we can even meet our targets, let alone exceed them to the extent that we're actually going to seriously be on those kinds of lines. In my experience in the climate tech innovation world and the climate space world generally, the discussion around time has not been as prominent as it's starting to be now. It's a really good thing because what you see here is that the time element is something that really gets us at this very sharp bend in these curves. What we do over the next 10 years with respect to emitting greenhouse gas emissions matters so much more than what we do later this century. It's really important that we get moving at a speed that really makes a difference. And that's not something that our climate tech innovation ecosystem, in my view, is well set up to do. And one way that you can think about that is when you think about renewables, which are some of the best news story we have when it comes to greenhouse gas emissions reductions. There are a lot of folks out there who kind of say, great, renewables box checked. We know how to do this. We're doing it. The fact of the matter is that right now they're just mitigating about 5% of global emissions. And that's after decades of work and innovation and deployment. So we really need to do a lot more a lot faster in order to get where we need to go. OK, so from that framing, let's talk about the climate tech innovation ecosystem a bit. And again, I think there are some elements of this that are likely to be very familiar to all of you. I think typically when we think about technology innovation, we think about it in a very linear manner. We think about it kind of from this left to right that you start off in the laboratory, you demonstrate some technology, you pilot it, you get it to a point where it's really de-risk from a technical perspective. And then if you believe what most policymakers in DC often I find tend to believe, then what happens there is you take that technology, you throw it over the fence to the commercial sector, and then the commercial sector scales it up and deploys it very rapidly. I think all of us are probably clear that that's not really how it works and that there are in fact, valleys of death or gaps along this pipeline all throughout. And it's really challenging to get a technology from the beginning all the way to the end. Again, we have a good new story here in the climate tech space. The good new story is that there are new institutions and new kinds of innovation that are being brought to bear currently mostly on sort of the early stages of the pipeline. So to give some examples, we have RPE now. We didn't a decade ago when I was getting into the climate tech space. We have hard tech incubators, like for example, the engine at MIT. We've got more patient venture capital that's really willing to take the time to work on hard technologies and understand that the returns are not likely to be as great and a lot more VC in general that's coming into the climate tech space. So again, some really good news about what's happening to help shepherd technologies across some of these valleys of death. We need more of that and we need it to work faster. What's interesting though, is that despite all of this activity, despite a lot of the excitement around climate technologies, particularly in the recent couple of years, we're not seeing points on the board. We're not seeing that curve really come down in the way that it needs to with respect to greenhouse gas emissions. And the reason for that is because when it comes to actually pulling down that curve, it's all about scale. It's all about deployment. It's all about the things that happen at the right-hand side of this particular kind of depiction of the innovation pipeline. And what I've noticed is that there are a lot fewer institutions and organizations that are out there specifically trying to solve problems at that end of the pipeline. There's some really good reasons for that. One is that it's really expensive. In general, when you're talking about massive scale-up when you're talking about big demonstration projects, it costs a lot of money to work in that space. Another big reason is that you just don't control of all of the variables. This isn't to minimize what it takes to do technology de-risking. There's a lot that has to go right, a lot of really important factors that need to come together in order for that to work. But then when you start thinking about, can I affect policy? Maybe you can, but you don't necessarily directly control market aspects. Maybe you can help design markets in ways that actually makes sense with a certain kind of institution, but you're not necessarily gonna control how communities perceive exactly what it is that you're doing. So there's just a lot of interlocking factors, a lot of things that need to collectively go right in order for things to work in that space. So here at Actuate, that's what we're doing. We're basically focusing all of our energy and effort on that, on what is it going to take to really get to deployment at scale? And we're trying to think about whether there are ways we can bring a new kind of innovation to this space to make things work faster and better and to get us to deployment much more quickly. So I'll kind of motivate that with an example and kind of make it a little bit more concrete what I mean and I'll use solar as kind of the reason, the baseline to kind of talk about how this works. So when you think about solar power, again, really good news story that we've got here. We invented the first solar panel in the United States in 1954 at Bell Labs. It took another 30 years to get that solar panel efficient enough that we felt like we could commercialize it. And so here we are another 40 years later and right now solar is producing a little over 2% of the electricity in the United States. So again, this is our good news story, but it took 70 years and that's a really big problem. We think about all of the technologies we're gonna need to bring to bear in the climate space. Now, when you think about that commercialization phase for solar, one of the good news stories there is that there was a lot of innovation, a lot of things needed to happen and they did happen in order to take solar where it is today. So we kind of have that mapped out here and this is very oversimplified, obviously, but you can think about a couple of different dimensions on which things have to go right and innovation needs to occur in order to get to deployment. So for solar, individuals and communities were extraordinarily important. Obviously markets were instrumental in getting solar together. So new business models around things like leasing of solar on rooftops were really huge and getting a lot of solar out there. Policy was extraordinarily instrumental on the global stage to really get solar where it is today as was finance and how we pay for these things and obviously the technologies need to be there too. So when you think about the kind of innovation that happened across all of those different domains, I think what you can usually think about is that there were organizations that were willing to take some risk. They were willing to innovate a little bit and took at least an incremental step or in some cases a pretty big step to try something different. And so this is a system that works. If different organizations, if different countries, if a whole bunch of collective actors try some different things, eventually we'll figure out what works well and those things will stick and eventually they will scale and the things that don't work will fall off the table. But it just takes too long. And again, this is one part of one emission sector. So there's a lot more that we need to do to make this happen. And that's what we're trying to figure out at Actuate. Can we shortcut this somehow? Can we maybe run some specific experiments that really signal to key communities what works and what doesn't and kind of do that much more quickly and much more efficiently than waiting for the entire sort of system to figure itself out. All right, so when we think about specifically, what are we gonna go and do about this? How are we gonna actually make this actionable within Actuate? This tiny nonprofit, which I should probably say is in very early stages. And so you'll see that we're kind of at the beginning of some of our thinking and not at the end here. So first of all, we start with this right to left thinking. I'm really thinking with the end in mind. And so we start off by thinking about what is it going to mean if we really start drawing our emissions down in the way that we really need to? Again, this won't be a surprise to anybody. There's not a single technology or a single silver bullet answer to this. Instead, there's a set of very disparate sectors that we need to decarbonize. And we also have to think about the carbon sink side of the equation. So the way that I'm working within Actuate is to say, okay, let's start with the end in mind. What would it mean to really, really reduce greenhouse gases in each one of these sectors? The next question I ask is, what are the barriers to achieving those big levers, those things that are really going to make a difference? And then the next question is, what can we do about it? Is there some kind of solution that breaks those barriers? And specifically, is there something that we could do with our nonprofit vantage that would actually enable us to bring these solutions into existence much more quickly? So I mentioned, we're at very early stages. This is to say, I've been at this for about six months and as a nonprofit, we're still in the process of raising a planning grant. But we've got an initial collection of what I would call extraordinarily raw ideas. And that's what you see here. We very affectionately actually call this our acupuncture slide because this is where we start thinking about interventions within these systems. So really again, collections of very raw ideas, I'm not sure yet whether these are really gonna be sufficiently meaningful, everything on this list. And I'm not sure yet that even if they are, there's something we think we can go to to really unlock them. But these five things that are here in bold are elements of the system that I've been thinking about a little bit more critically and trying to figure out, is there something we can do to really super charge a greenhouse gas reduction solution? And I'll talk today about demand response as a way of supporting renewables and about ubiquitous charging for electric vehicles. So maybe I'll pause here and see if there are any quick clarification questions of any sort. I don't know if you've got any, it looks like we have a Q&A. Okay, great. Okay, so what do we do? So I kind of have already alluded to this sort of program design process, this thinking process that I go through, but here's roughly what it looks like as we think about what is the thing that we're gonna go do to try to unlock greenhouse gas emissions. The first question we ask is what is a greenhouse gas reduction pathway that has a really, really big impact? This is a really similar question to the kinds of questions that every other organization is asking if they're in the climate tech space. So you'll see that venture capitalists are asking these questions of the things that they want to invest in. Obviously within the research and development enterprise, a lot of folks asking this question. But the next one starts to get, in my view, a little bit under-asked. It's something that I think a few people are thinking about, but really thinking about what are the barriers to implementation at scale? What would it mean to really have this particular lever in existence at wide scale and why is that not happening already? And then the next question is what sort of system solution is there? What can we do to break those barriers? And then finally, there's the very actuate specific question, which is what can we go out and do to bring those system solutions into existence or to otherwise break those barriers? I've presented this as kind of a sequential set of questions and as you can see, there's a way in which they are, but the truth is that I go about answering all of them in parallel and sort of iterating among them. Right now, because we're a tiny, fledgling nonprofit, there's a lot of internal work, a lot of research, calculations and estimates, a lot of talking to experts in the external world. In the near future, we've luckily been raising some money so we're gonna start to do more formal analysis, which means actually contracting work with folks in the research community. And this would be to do some technology de-risking, it would be to do some small scale demonstrations or potentially some analytic work that supports the answers to some of these questions we're asking. So what I'll be showing you today with respect to demand response in electric vehicles is really some of the early stages of me grappling with some of these questions. I'm certainly not final on any of them, but definitely solicit your feedback on where we're going. Okay, so let's start to make this more concrete. What are we gonna go do here? So here's how I'm thinking about demand response. Again, we're in a smart grid seminar. So as you can imagine, this is a slide that was not necessarily developed for all of you because I think this will be pretty obvious to many of the folks who are tuned in here today. But just to reemphasize, wind turbines and solar PV systems, really inexpensive, great news. The problem is that managing grid systems with a lot of variable renewables is not. So we have a number of ways of addressing that. In California, we're using a whole lot of natural gas which works really well but obviously comes with the big downside that it's got CO2 emissions. We can imagine building lots of renewables, just doing an overbuild and building lots of transmission to make this a better part of the solution. But that's going to be expensive. Electricity storage is 100% going to be part of this picture. There's no question about that. I think still some questions about when it's going to get inexpensive enough and how we're going to configure it in ways that really work for the system. And there's some potentially really exciting and interesting ideas out there, for example, with thermal energy storage and this idea that you could toggle between heat and electricity production but some big systems questions on how to make all of that work effectively. Demand response is kind of an interesting dark horse here in my view. I think part of what is happening here is that while this has the potential to be really inexpensive and also is carbon free, there's a lot of uncertainty about how available demand response really is. How much is there out there and what would it really take to tap into it? So that's a question that we're seeking to potentially answer within Actuate by going and driving at a program that would figure out how much demand response is there and then actually demonstrate this is what it would take to actually go and get a lot of it on the system in a way that would meaningfully support new renewables adoption. Okay, so then the first question, given this sort of picture for demand response is what kind of impact could it have? And really there are two questions there that I've already alluded to. The first question is how much demand response is there? How much can we really ever expect or hope to tap into? And then the second really important question is if we were to push demand response really far and kind of get it to its logical edge, would that actually meaningfully support renewables adoption? So as you can imagine right now, the phase that I meant is looking at a lot of literature and there's certainly a lot out there, particularly with respect to California and all of it sort of almost answers some of these questions, but generally includes a lot of assumptions on limitations to demand response and some of what I wanna know is, could we push those barriers? Could we actually, how far could we get with demand response if we really wanted to push it? So I think there's likely to be some analytical work that I'll be commissioning in the near future to kind of support some really direct answers to those questions. But right now what I have is a set of intuition and again, this probably won't be surprising, but just to make sure that everyone's anchored on what we're dealing with, this problem around electricity generation and getting renewables on the system, again, I see over and over that there are a lot of folks who think this is a problem that's been solved. They really think we're there with respect to renewables. A lot of times you will hear the words, it's just about policy or it's just anything and we always are really skeptical here within Actuate anytime we hear the word just because it's usually not that. And again, to kind of give a sense for the scale of the issue that we're up against here, electricity generation is still about a third of carbon emissions in the US. This really needs to come down because it's considered technically to be the easiest sector to decarbonize. The Biden administration has set a goal to be 100% carbon free by 2035. This is a long way off however, of what the EIA is predicting. And again, this is the energy information administration that is part of the Biden administration. And they say that we're likely to be about 53% carbon free by 2050. So there is a lot of work to be done to close that gap. And my personal belief is that solving the flexibility problem and making sure that we have a grid that's clearly going to be stable, ideally for not much more money is a really important way to make sure that we can supercharge renewables as a piece of this rapidly decarbonizing future for electricity. Okay, so that's the impact thing. Oh, I want to pause here and say that, one of the funny things about demand response is that there are a lot of different ways to characterize its value and its potential impact. But this is just to kind of drive this point home a little more around the intuition that part of what we're seeing as we deploy more and more renewables in California is we get more and more curtailment. And so this is something that we're definitely keeping an eye on and that we know that renewables developers are also keeping an eye on. So figuring out a way to actually use the power that we already have, in addition to making sure that this doesn't become an impediment to building new resources is one of the reasons that I'm motivated to look into this particular problem. Okay, so now let's sit and talk about the barriers. What would it take to get really deep demand response? So now I'm kind of assuming that demand response is going to be highly impactful. Right now, most of the demand response around the country comes from commercial and industrial customers. And what you typically see is that in most regions, you have about five to 10% of your peak load that's available to access as demand reduction. And usually what that means is that there are commercial and industrial customers that are paid to maybe one day reduce their load. They're paid to kind of maintain some availability. And then usually around one to three times per year the grid operators will call them up and actually this sometimes still happens with physical phone calls where they ask people to please reduce their load for a certain period of time on a certain day. What I'm told is that they are always grumpy when asked to do so. They really like getting paid for that sort of capacity and availability, but they're really annoyed when they actually have to reduce their load. But nonetheless, this is something that we've got out there and something that we could potentially grow. In addition, residential demand response has the potential to be really valuable. But as you can imagine, it's been far less tapped into so far. And that's for a simple reason, which is that any individual residential customer doesn't provide you a lot of responsive load. But obviously if you sign up, lots of customers it does. And so that's kind of what leads us into thinking about some of the barriers here specifically for high levels of residential demand response. So what I've done is made this little spider diagram and for things that are kind of close to the middle that means they're blocked and there's a problem. And we need to work on addressing these barriers and things that are farther to the outside mean that they're less of a concern at this point. So what you see here is a pretty obvious thing which is the biggest block order residential demand response is individuals. It's getting people actually signed up for these programs and then getting them to use them. And so I'll tell a little story about that. Folks may be familiar with OmeConnect. They're a demand response provider that exists here in California. And I am currently an OmeConnect customer, I guess participant, I'm not really sure how they characterize me. But as you all can imagine, I got excited to sign up for this. I figured I should try it out, especially as I started digging deeply into demand response. And I'm someone who's very interested in energy, who's fairly knowledgeable about electricity and electricity markets. And it still took me, I would say several hours to actually get everything to the place that I was set up to be able to do this. It required signing up on an app that required linking my utility account which is actually relatively easy to do in California but very hard to do in many other jurisdictions. It required them sending me a whole bunch of smart plugs. We had to pull our refrigerators out in order to set them up. Anyone who has ever set up a smart plug knows that it takes about 25 minutes longer than it should. So there are a lot of real transaction costs to getting people signed up for this. And again, for folks who are really excited about energy and electricity, that's not that big a deal. But in the utility industry where I was previously, the statistic we often cited is that the average customer thinks about their electricity bill for three minutes per year. So you're now asking them to do way beyond that to really invest some time and effort in actually becoming part of one of these programs for some small incentives potentially at the end. But this is a big issue is how do you actually get people over these humps? The markets are a huge challenge as well. I think there are a lot of nation markets that support demand response. California has one of the most sophisticated. There's some good news here which is that folks I'm sure are familiar with FERC Order 2222. This among some other things that are happening at the federal level is really spurring all of the jurisdictions, all of the grid operators across the country to make markets available for demand response. So some really interesting things happening there but a lot of disagreement on how to actually structure these markets in a way that allows demand response to participate that recognizes it for its value but also recognizes some of the realities of the current grid and how things are working now. And I think one of the things that we're likely to see is that there will be a lot of different market constructs in different regions of the country and that's going to make it a lot harder for companies to scale quickly. So some big questions about the right way to structure markets for demand response. Policies are obviously extremely important and how they support certain kinds of resources versus others on the system. Finance, now this is one that I put towards the edge of the diagram here. And this is not to say great box checked, finance done, we don't need to worry about paying for this. It is true that if we think about demand response technologies as they exist now, they're not very expensive to deploy. So paying for it may be less of an issue but it's important to recognize that there are a lot of low income families out there that really don't have the time resources. And in many cases probably not the financial resources even to take on a smaller extra burden. And I wanna pause here and talk about that for a second. This is the first time in the entire presentation that I've brought up equity but that's not to say that it's not very central to everything we think about it absolutely is. And I think what you'll see is that it's central to every program that we're considering. One of the things that has bothered me for a long time about the technology innovation ecosystem is that it's really not set up with equity in mind. There were some really good and obvious reasons for that. I wouldn't say good reasons. There were some obvious reasons for that which is to say that technology when you think about technology adoption a pretty standard playbook is that you invent a technology in a laboratory, you spin it out into a startup company and then you're working on gaining traction for that technology in order to be able to scale it. And so a lot of times what folks will do is they will target early adopters with their very first product. Early adopters is a code word for people who are wealthy people who have a lot of extra time on their hands to be able to switch to something new and people who are able to absorb risk. Now, if you look at, for example, a company like Tesla what you see is that this actually works particularly from the business minded perspective that you start with a very high end product and then eventually you figure out how to evolve that for the mass market and include others. There are a couple of big problems with this though. One is that obviously you're leaving a huge group of people out. But the other is that this isn't actually a strategy that matches the urgency of climate change. So for example, when you think about a demand response technology there are a lot of technologies out there that are designed with these early adopters in mind. It may be that with some slight tweaks these can be made available to a much bigger size of the population, but it also might be that you need a completely different solution that is structured and looks very different in order to actually address a bigger market. And so part of what we are going to do at Actuate is to be very clear about that. And to say we are going to do product design when we do product design in a way that addresses everyone holistically and really understands that there are gonna be some differences in customers and that there are ways in which we have to include them differently. And we need to include different kinds of organizations and people in the process of doing that design and doing that technology invention work. And that's something that we're explicitly hoping to provide funding for and to include as a key component to all of our programs. And we're doing this not just because it's the right thing to do, but because as you can see in the case of demand response and many other technologies we need, we have to do this in order to be able to get there for the climate. Okay, so then there's the last piece of this the fifth dimension, which is our technologies. And here I think some really interesting possibilities. The first is that we say we're not too worried about this and we have the technologies we need for residential demand response. And again, including things like smart plugs, home assistance, there's a lot of stuff that helps us connect the things that need to be connected. But what's interesting is you could imagine technology solutions that tend to obviate some of these other barriers. So specifically I'm thinking about this sort of holy grail kind of device that ideally you would clip on to the outside of someone's house, say near their smart meter, something that could do automatic low disaggregation and control and or be controlled by some other outside device and that basically would allow a different kind of environment where you're drastically reducing the transaction costs and the time that's required to actually get people signed onto these kinds of programs. So I think some really interesting possibilities there. Okay, so that's mapping all the barriers. Now what do we do about all these barriers? What are some of the solutions? The answer to that is I don't know yet, but I'm starting to work on solution spaces and I've got these three buckets in which I hope maybe to find some ideas. Two of these we'll see map very directly onto the barriers that I mapped earlier. So the first is thinking about users, the customers and trying to figure out is there some sort of radically different process we could identify or design to actually get people involved in participating in these programs to make this go way faster. And again, something that can be usable across a range of different companies but to move this whole class of technologies forward. The third one actually relates very directly to the market issue and involves potentially could we do something like go out and try some systems experiments where we're going to maybe test a certain kind of market construct and then do that compare it to a bunch of other similar sort of or different market constructs in different places, do some rigorous evaluation across all of these and be able to identify faster what works and what doesn't in terms of the kind of transaction structures we need and the kinds of market incentives that really make a difference for demand response. This is kind of one of those places where, the idea would be to help with the pilot ITIS as I call it that or others call it too that really kind of afflicts the demand response space. I think part of what we've seen over the last decade or so is that there have been a lot of demand response programs in a lot of different territories, some big, some small, some pilot like in nature all with some differences and all extraordinarily hard to compare in any kind of apples to apples sense. So getting a handle on what's been done and then trying to do something that really clearly does some comparisons among options I think might actually help move this space on much more quickly. The second one here might be of most interest to bits and watts. And so this is a piece of the puzzle that I think actually relates to a lot of the barriers that doesn't map onto a specific one. What's been interesting to me is that as I've talked to more and more demand response providers grid operators in utilities in this space, I'm hearing over and over that one thing that's missing is a very simple and open source nationalized platform that would allow for demand response providers, utilities and system operators to actually communicate effectively with one another just about what's happening on the system and what kinds of trans and to be able to make the kind of market transactions they need to make. It turns out that it's not infrequent that you will have a demand response event on a particular day and the next day, demand response providers will say that they've provided a certain amount of demand response to the system. Meanwhile, grid operators disagree about what that is actually what has been provided as to utilities. And there are a lot of problems here. I think one of the biggest ones obviously is in defining what is the counterfactual. So you see that there's less electricity used than what you might have expected but how do you decide what it is that you truly expected on that particular day? But apparently it's also a challenge just again, being able to communicate, being able to share data. And I think the other interesting thing is that there are some big questions about whether someone who built such a platform can actually make money on it. You know, everybody has said to me it's not really the job of anyone player within the system. It's kind of falling through the cracks and it's something we need but something that doesn't exist. So this is something that we could potentially go out and support the building of it. As you can imagine, there's obviously a lot of technical detail but there's a huge amount of work that needs to be done on the stakeholder side to make something that's effective in this space. And probably you're gonna have to at least to some degree solve some of the questions existing in the third solution bucket here, specifically around what are your expectations for market transactions and what those look like. Okay, so I'll pop one more thing on this. So then the last question what is actually gonna actually go and do about all of this? That's the next thing that I'm gonna be digging into with respect to demand response is getting a sense for what would a program actually go and look like that might attack or achieve some kind of goal within one of those three solution buckets or maybe more than one solution bucket. And so usually the way we think about programs this is where if anyone's familiar with DARPA this starts to look like the DARPA process. You might have a track that involves some prototype design, something else that involves a lot of demonstration and or evaluation. There's always a key component to every program that DARPA does and to every program that we actually put out there that involves adoption support. So this means including from the very beginning that folks who are going to invest and or the regulators who are going to actually implement these market structures to make sure that they're on board ideally helping to design some of the solutions but at least having a front row seat into what we're trying to demonstrate. And the other thing that you can see here again is that when it comes to the folks that we are going to actually work with the idea is that actuate itself will be a small nonprofit and very lean that involves kind of a program manager and then that person is going to go out and contract with teams to go achieve specific goals and very carefully manage them and that absolutely will include universities and national labs but it will also include companies. It may include startups. It definitely will include community organizations. It's really whoever it takes to accomplish a specific goal. So that's kind of the next step with demand response. Okay. So next I'll jump into EV charging but any questions about demand response before I do that? Hold it for one second. Oh yeah, go ahead. Yeah, go ahead. So just having a question on your previous slide or two slides ago when you were showing the three solutions. I just got a question about the demand response market at the current moment. So is it basically the ISO would be paying the demand response providers a fixed amount every month just for them to be available to curtail when needed? So basically, yeah. So the answer is that there are various ways that you as a demand response provider can make money. One of the ways that it works in California is that there are sort of two, so there's a market called the DRAM, the demand response auction mechanism. I think it's auction mechanism. And so there are a couple of elements. One is that the system operator does indeed give you a capacity payment. So they say, okay, like, and this is under the resource adequacy market in California, they basically say, all right, if you've got capacity that you have available to provide to the grid we will pay you to maintain that capacity. And that's obviously available to generators of any sort. So that's one way that demand response operators make money. And then secondarily, you can also make money in the energy market. So now this is where the system operator says, okay, here's the expected load tomorrow. I'm going to now take bids on serving that load and demand response is allowed to bid in and to provide a demand response service in that market. And then if the demand response is called, they're actually paid for that demand response service that they provide in the same way that a generator would be paid for the electricity that they serve. There are a lot of huge complications on how you actually calculate the degree to which demand response providers get paid and what sort of value they're providing to the system. And some big problems frankly with how it works with California, which I can dig into, but there are some ways in which demand response providers lose money. Now there are other ways in which they can interact with the system as well. So if you have a utility that includes a load serving entity, so that means someone who's putting wires out on their businesses, they can contract directly with demand response providers in the same way that they might sign a PPA contract with a generator in order to provide a certain amount of service. And so that's another way that demand response providers can make money. What you're seeing in California is that some of the community choice aggregators are basically serving a function like that and they're at least one or two that are starting to procure demand response as a piece of their portfolio. So does that answer your question? And just a quick thought, because it seems like there's two systems here. One is the centralized system, whereby the ISO is determining how much to kind of change at all. And on the other hand, we have the site market mechanism whereby they let the market decide the price. So I was just wondering, are they moving towards a certain kind of model? Or are they going to be using that thing or both? That is a trillion dollar question, maybe not trillion, but at least billions and billions of dollar question. But no, that's a really good one. Basically, I mean, as you can imagine, what's happening right now is that historically everything has been based on a centralized system. And what you've seen is that the system operators largely look at things that are happening on the grid edge. So anything that's behind the meter that means distributed solar, it means distributed batteries, it means EV charging in many cases. They basically look at all of that as changes in the load that they see. In other words, they're still looking at the system as I've got centralized generation and I've got load. And anything that someone's contributing on the load side is just like a reduction, right? So that if you're generating solar, that's not counted as generation, that's counted as load reduction. So I think what we're seeing is kind of a slow evolution toward realizing that that's completely inadequate because it masks a lot of what's actually happening on the grid edge side. And in that context right now, there are a lot of very active debates about what this should look like. And so there are people out there, for example, who argue that we need to have distribution system operators and that you've got basically one operator for the bulk system, for big, huge power plants and for getting those electrons basically onto the transmission grid. And then separately, you would have smaller scale distribution system operators that might even run a completely separate market that involves letting these demand side resources participate. And then there is a lot of ideas that are kind of in between that, right? Where you can imagine demand response aggregators that are kind of taking a lot of what's happening on the grid edge side, rolling that up so that it becomes meaningful within some of these bigger markets. That's the way a lot of folks are trending right now. But I think there are some really big questions about what is the level of market operation that is going to occur? Where on the system are market transactions going to occur? And what ultimately is this going to mean for the telemetry that's required, for the choices that customers are unable to make and frankly for the entire business structure of the industry itself? So this is a huge set of problems. And it's interesting because as I'm digging in on sort of demand response as a piece of this, there's definitely a lot of huge system issues that interact with this. And it's really hard to kind of grapple with all of them simultaneously. But I think frankly, it's something that we kind of need to do. So really interesting questions about how this will evolve in the future is the short answer. Meze, thank you. Great. All right, any other questions on this? And we'll talk about EVs for a bit. Oh, actually before I move on from this, one other point that I want to make, which is that there's even a not discussion I just had, there's actually a really interesting and important equity angle that everyone should be aware of, which is that there's a lot of discussion about, for example, creating markets that would allow for transactive energy, so that I as a homeowner could put solar on my roof and then offer that for sale to my neighbors or maybe even to some broader market. And there's some interesting ways in which that could obviously be very valuable. You could think about more directly providing price signals to spur people to do things that are going to enhance resilience and help decarbonize the system. But there's one huge issue, which is that we have a lot of existing infrastructure, both in our distribution infrastructure in particular that has had varying levels of investment depending on where you might live. So part of what we're seeing is that there are certain places where you've got feeders that have tons of remaining hosting capacity. You could put lots of EVs on your block and nothing will happen. And then there are also cases where if you're the seventh EV or in some cases, maybe even the first EV, you're literally going to be blowing transformers and destroying infrastructure by plugging that in because of the varying levels of investment and capacity that exists across the system. So one of the things that's really sort of interesting about this particular debate around how these structures evolve is that we'd like to use market mechanisms where we can, but there are some infrastructure realities that make that very difficult. And furthermore, when you think about your electricity bill, a lot of what you're paying for is directly related to electricity and service provision, but there are also some social programs that are baked into that because electricity access is such a fundamentally important thing for human existence. So as we're thinking about these market structures, that's another thing that's really important to account for is the fact that folks are not created equal in terms of their physical access to the grid infrastructure and also that there are ways in which we need to make sure that we're maintaining the social contract to actually provide electricity to everyone. Okay, so there are no other questions. We can move into EVs. All right, electric vehicles as a way to decarbonize transportation. So this is a fun one because I think the impact question for this is not very hard. When you think about decarbonizing transportation, electric vehicles for passenger cars as it turns out are roughly a three gigaton problem. Again, some good news here, which is that we have already started bending the curve and we're seeing that in terms of, you know, the actual CO2 emissions coming down in passenger transportation in the last couple of years. But as with everything, there is some bad news in the climate. If you look at the International Energy Agency, what they have said is that if we are going to achieve net zero emissions by 2050, we need to stop selling internal combustion engine vehicles globally by 2035. Now think about that for a second when you compare that to the fact that today, globally electric vehicles make up about 4% of global sales. That is completely insane to imagine that we are actually going to get to 100% of sales being electric by 2035. But this is my question is what would it take to actually hit those EV sales targets? What could we do to rapidly expand the adoption of EVs? So we need to get people to buy more cars. Now there are several barriers to people actually adopting electric vehicles. And so part of what's out there in the literature is that the first issue is sticker price. Good news about the sticker price is that it's starting to come down and there are some fairly straightforward ways that policy incentives can help impact that. The second big issue is range anxiety around batteries. But again, some good news, their battery performance is really improving and also what's nice is that the car companies that are out there have a lot of incentive to actually improve battery performance pretty substantially. So that's also in a fairly good trajectory. A third issue that people cite in their decision whether or not to buy electric vehicles is a question around whether they will have access to charging when and where they need it. And this is a huge ugly structural systems problem that is really, really challenging to solve. So again, to kind of motivate where we are and kind of what are some of the barriers here. This is where we are right now in California and we actually have banned the sales of internal combustion engine vehicles by 2035 in line with IEA recommendations. And as a result of California Energy Commission has started working on what it would really take from a charging perspective to enable that future. In 2020, we had about 70,000 chargers in California. The CEC predicts that by 2030, we need 700,000 shared private and public chargers in order to support this. And so you can see these green bars here or their recommendations for where we need to see these chargers by 2030. And then the additional 1.2 million chargers we need to actually comply with this particular goal. So again, a really tall order, a lot of charging infrastructure that needs to get built very quickly. So this is the issue that I've started digging into on EVs. Can we do something to try to improve this picture to make it much more easy to build charging infrastructure in a way that supports folks? As I have dug into it, I realized that there are a lot of problems with building charging infrastructure. So now again, getting into this barrier mapping phase, it turns out that the business model for charging infrastructure doesn't actually work very well. Typically what you see is that you've got say, a grocery store owner who decides they wanna put a level two charger in their parking lot. Usually that starts by them, thinking about going out and procuring a charger and then usually the company that supplies a charger will advise them, hey, there's a rebate that's available from your utility or from some other kind of incentive program. So you get that rebate in place, you go through a long drawn out process of permitting and make ready, you finally install the charger. And what many folks find very quickly thereafter is that that charger is dramatically underutilized and that when you're selling electricity to the people who are utilizing those chargers, it's going to take you longer than the lifetime of the charger in order to recoup your costs even with the rebate. So this is a pretty serious issue that folks are really just not making money on these charging installations. And as you can imagine, there was a huge chicken or egg issue around, do you build those in order to support EV charging infrastructure and do you wait until the EVs come? And then it makes more sense from a business model perspective to build a charger. But that's a big issue. The make ready piece of this is another big issue. It's expensive, it takes a really long time, permitting can be a very big challenge. But there are two other issues when it comes to building charging infrastructure that are often overlooked. The first one, and there's a lot going on in this graph, it turns out that somewhere around 50% of vehicles in the United States do not have access to a dedicated parking space. Now this is really, I should say shocking and striking to me, I was trying to say both at the same time. This is a lot of times when you talk to people even who are very familiar with the EV space, they make the assumption that most charging is going to happen at home. That doesn't work for about half of Americans. And so what you see here is some work that was done to actually evaluate some of the surveys that are out there and figure out what it's going to take for at home charging. And part of what you see is that even at relatively low levels of EV sales penetration, you actually need to make a lot of changes. So for example, when you get to 22%, you need new outlets. It turns out a huge number of vehicles, even if they have dedicated parking are a long way away from an outlet. At some point, you're gonna start to need multiple electric vehicles per household. Eventually you need to solve this problem for renters. And once you hit this sort of 50% level, we might need to completely rethink how parking works. So this is a gigantic challenge that's really facing electric vehicles. The second issue is one that has actually been very well highlighted by some research coming out of Stanford with your own Sally Benson, among others. But one of the things that she has pointed out is that, hey, it turns out our grid has a lot of renewable electricity available during the day. During the nighttime, power is likely to be both very expensive and less clean. So again, this assumption that we're going to do almost all of our charging at home is a really pretty bad idea in a lot of solar dominated regions like California. There certainly are other places in the world where this is not the case and where you've got a lot of wind at night, where this will be less of an issue, but there are a lot of solar dominated regions globally that will need to grapple with this, that ideally you're going to try to find a way to get people to charge during the day. Okay, so what does all of this mean then about kind of the solution spaces that we go after? What this has really kind of pointed me to is how do you kind of focus on that daytime charging and on the kind of charging and the level of access to charging that's going to be needed to really support high levels of adoption, including for people who don't have vehicles. So one potential way to think about this is to really ramp up DC fast charging. The challenges there are a battery degradation and the fact that it still takes a really long time. You're talking about sitting around for upwards of 30 minutes to get a full charge, not to mention that it's expensive to build these fast charging stations. There's an interesting alternative here, which is battery swapping. And there's a company called Ample that is a startup company here in California that's trying to make this work. A lot of folks have sort of dismissed battery swapping in particular because the view is that a system where we do a lot of battery swapping would be too expensive because as you can imagine, you're taking the most expensive part of the EV which is the battery and then building a whole lot of extra batteries in order to be able to support this. But what's interesting is that part of Ample's vision is that you can actually write size batteries for the job. So most people who are only driving a couple of miles to work every day, maybe all they need is a 30 mile range battery in our car most of the time. And then if you have a battery swapping regime, what you could do is swap out that battery with another one that has the same form factor but 300 miles of range if you need to go do a longer trip. But still questions about cost there, big questions about whether car companies would actually be willing to provide for some of the standardization that's required to make this doable. And also a question about whether we're too far down the road but it's a really interesting idea. The way that Ample's technology works is they have basically a robotic system to do this battery swapping in cars and it takes about five minutes. So it feels pretty much the same as it does going to a gas station now where you drive in your car, the batteries are changed out by a robot and you drive off five minutes later. We're definitely gonna need more level to charging. And so part of what I've been thinking about is, okay, like workplace charging might be a great way to go after this. And maybe part of the idea here is to make sure that every single parking space and a parking lot at work has access to a charger. It turns out that running wires is actually really expensive. As I was digging into like, what is it gonna take to get a lot of public charging access? It turns out that some of the most expensive pieces of doing this are literally just getting the wires where they need to go and upgrading electrical panels. So another plea here for anybody who's interested in doing some research, I feel like there has to be an easier way. Wireless charging maybe is the answer but there has to be a way that we could actually get to a point where it's much less expensive to actually do the make ready that's required to make level two charging work. Obviously interconnection and permitting needs to get dramatically improved. Rethinking the business model for these kinds of charging stations where maybe there's some amount that other entities are willing to pay like utilities, if they could have some control over the charging that happens at these stations and we need a solution for maintenance. And then obviously I think home charging is going to be a piece of the solution, which definitely implies that we're going to need some batteries on the system. So some more things that we can think about there. My guess is that in reality, we don't get to pick one of these things and solve that problem and then say we're good to go with EVs, we're likely to need all of them. But this is how I'm starting to narrow down into some solution spaces that we might go and track for actually. Okay, so I'm going to go ahead and conclude here. And this is where, again, I'm getting on my soap box and just saying I really hope that all of you will join me in working and thinking through systems innovation problems in this particular way. I think one of the things that I've noticed over and over again within academia and the laboratory R&D ecosystem here in the US is that I think we do a little bit too little of this thinking. I think a lot of times we get excited about the kinds of problems that we can solve because we have a particular data set available or because there's a particular technology that we already know a lot about. And I'm really hoping that we can start a revolution where we do a lot more upfront thinking around what are the biggest problems? What are the things that are 80% of the issue instead of 20% and how do we really focus more of our R&D capacity and effort collectively on those things? So certainly for all of you out there, your particular piece, your mechanisms, the things you're able to do will look different than mine and different from things at other entities. But ask yourselves these questions and when you're given the opportunity to focus, focus on the things that make a big difference and really actually accelerating us to where we need to go. Because quite honestly, the climate depends on it. So I will pause there and really look forward to all of your questions and we'll put this up so that folks can follow up with me and so you have my email. Yeah, it's so strange to hear a pause after our talk. I think this might be the first time I've done it to an actual room. Yeah, a few questions in the Q&A. Should I just read these and start talking or how best I should read them? Yeah, please. Let's give the priority to the folks in the room. How's that? Yeah, so this is kind of like a meta question, but you talked a lot about like the big picture thinking of like how do we do this in time to save the planet and then focused on like two solutions like demand response that would be charging. And I just don't see how like the implementation of just those two things will like save us in time and like, I don't know, if you could clarify like how that fits into the scheme of what you're thinking about, that would be helpful. No, absolutely, that's a really great question. And so I didn't really go into the details around like what we're trying to do as an organization, but what it is, what I'm aiming for is basically to develop a portfolio of ideally eight to 10 different programs. So EV charging could be one, demand response could be another, and ideally again, you know, another huge group of things that we would go after. And the intent is that each one of those would be, you know, big bites at the apple. And so we have kind of, you know, when we talk about impact and that we need to be able to do something about greenhouse gases at scale, we are thinking about roughly a one gigaton threshold, which is pretty much what everybody uses, you know, of the 40 gigaton problems. So if I think that, you know, the end game of a particular solution I'm pursuing is significantly less than a gigaton, I probably won't go after that. I'm gonna try to have within my portfolio a bunch of sort of one gigaton opportunities. To be clear, what we are doing is going to be very high risk and high reward. And so the intent is not necessarily that each one of those things will work out spectacularly. The hope is that at least a few of them will. But we're, you know, so what we're limited to being able to do as a nonprofit is, you know, one thing, but part of it, again, what we're really doing here is both trying to impact climate change ourselves and trying to demonstrate that there is this kind of systems innovation that this kind of focus on sort of the deployment and scale up challenges is something that's needed in a much bigger sense. And so we're constantly in conversation with DOE. We're constantly in conversation with folks at the federal level. We're in conversation actually with some state, you know, funding agencies that are thinking about energy and environment issues as well. So we're really trying to influence other big sources of funding and, you know, R&D work that could potentially take up the mantle of this kind of systems innovation with the idea of being that collectively, if we were, you know, if there were more organizations doing this and more money going toward it, we could actually start really making a difference in moving that greenhouse gas emissions graph downward. Okay, fantastic. Thank you. Yeah. They call this the theory of change in philanthropy, which is a lot more specific of a question. I think you mentioned at one point that if you're trying to tell grid operators what to do, they get grumpy. Did I understand that correctly? It was when grid operators tell industrial customers to reduce their electricity load, aka to slow down their manufacturing processes and things like that, the industrial customers get grumpy. Oh, I see. Okay. Well, that still works for my question. I've heard quite a few comments from quite a few different people to that effect of like people just getting like grumpy as you describe it and not wanting to make changes or like adjust for whatever load it. Could you demystify that a little bit? Like, what does that mean in practice? It just, from the grumpy description, it feels like that shouldn't be a problem. You mean we shouldn't be worried about people being grumpy. Well, like people should just get over it in the midst of all the annoying people. Like, that's what it sounds like, so I want to know what actually happens in practice. Yeah, I know. I mean, I think, well, first of all, I think we all agree with you. Everybody should not be as grumpy about all of this, but no, I mean, I think the reason I bring that up and the reason to kind of pay some attention to it is that there are two pieces to all of this. In order for demand response to actually be valuable on the system, you need to get people to sign up for it to say that they're willing to provide that capacity and to be on call to do it, but then you also actually have to get them to participate. And so, the same thing is true of industrial customers as residential customers, that if you, you might get them to sign up, but then if you're saying, you need to make this huge sacrifice, like it's a 95 degree day and you need to completely turn off your HVAC system. At some point, what you're going to see is a lot of defection and people who are either opting out in the moment or who are opting out permanently if they do that several different times. I didn't, by the way, tell the part of my story where my OM Connect app did not properly connect to one of our smart plugs in my refrigerator was off for eight hours. So there are all kinds of fun things like that that happen in the course of these programs that might be a reason that people sign up and then the resource becomes less valuable. So I think a big piece of what has to happen for demand response to work is to understand people's psychology and to find the right balance between maintaining comfort and making sure that you're not inconveniencing people but still finding that margin that you can make those reductions without getting them to the point that they're willing to that they're bailing on the whole system. And one thing that's interesting is that you can't imagine that this is a terrible analogy because obviously you wanna frame it a more positive light but you could kind of boil the frog to some degree. And once people start actually participating if it's not too uncomfortable and they don't really mind it, maybe once in a while you can actually reduce their HVAC you said more substantially and still allow them to opt out. But as you get people more familiar with demand response and more comfortable with it and same thing for companies you could get to a point where you're actually able to do more of it. But there's an interesting trade-off. I mean, you do have to watch for the cost of all of this particularly when it comes to say an industrial customer that there is actually a real disbenefit if they're really reducing their manufacturing lines and things like that for an extended period of time that's real money that they're losing out on. So figuring out, how do you appropriately compensate customers in the system and how much demand response can you get for what costs and at what point are you cutting too deep? And then it's like the cost of compensating folks actually exceeds the value of the demand response that you're getting. Those are the kinds of things that we need to do a much better job of assessing in order to make this successful. And I think there are some big questions about like when you start hitting those lines where things are more expensive to go deeper than it is valuable to do the demand response. At that level do we actually have enough demand response on the system that this matters or is it something that we need to go pursue other solutions? Is anyone working on it? That seems like very hard problems to objectively target. Is anyone specifically working on that conflict? That's a really good question. I think I'm sure there are. I don't actually know yet because I haven't dug deep yet into the social science literature around all of this but I think that's definitely one of our next steps internally is to understand, who's actually looking ideally directly at sort of customer response to demand response programs. Certainly there's some data that various companies out there have and I'm sure folks know about O-Power which has done a lot of work on kind of electricity, customer psychology and different ways that can impact their behavior. So there's definitely a body of literature out there and some active work on it. How deeply it's specifically going targeted at defining what are these bright lines or soft lines that we need to be wary of crossing when it comes to customer adoption. I'm not sure yet. Okay, that makes sense. Thank you. There's one question. Yeah, I had a kind of a macro renewables question. I'm starting to see the common slide of renewables only about four or five percent and then it's been historic over the years. So I mean, that's just the sober reality and just I guess more of a curiosity question. Is there an upper bound to renewables? Is it just we need like, if you just build a ton of solar panels and when, I mean, or is it just an upper bound that renewables will never meet that hundred percent, you know, great requirement. Yeah, that is a great question. And for folks who may not be aware of Stanford, in fact, and some of the faculty that have been at the center of a very, very intense debate on this that has been really raging in the academic world around is a hundred percent renewables possible. So I think the answer is, if you want to build a system with a hundred percent renewables, you absolutely can. It's a question of costs and there are some questions about grid stability once you start getting to those really high levels of penetration. There are also by the way questions around, do you count hydro as part of that or not? Because obviously that's a very different kind of renewable resource that kind of really helps stabilize things if you have a lot of it available. So I think, you know, the general thought is if you're really going to do a lot of renewables, then you, if you're really going to rely exclusively on renewables, you have to really over build the system. You have to build a lot more capacity than you need. You have to build a lot of transmission so that if the wind isn't blowing or the sun isn't shining in one region, you can cart that to other places. You're definitely going to need a lot of storage. You're going to have to think about seasonal storage, which is extraordinarily difficult because there are big seasonal patterns to obviously to solar insulation and to wind. And frankly, not really great ideas out there on how to deal with it. Hydrogen could be one example. So the short answer is it's totally possible. It's going to take a lot of land and a lot of expense. So there are not many people that I know of within the space who are truly pushing for that. But you can definitely get to pretty high renewable penetrations in California. I think it's something about 30% of our electricity that comes from renewables and counting. So I think, you know, we'll definitely see a lot more and there's a lot more room on the system, but that room is starting to get a lot more constrained once you get upwards of like 60% renewables penetration for sure. You really need to do a lot more to shore up the grid. So is there a confident strategy out there for getting to the 100% carbon free? I mean, like, I mean, is it still really, we were really trying to find the technology to get to that place or it's a financial limitation? I don't know, just it's definitely a common problem of our time right now. It's just, I don't know, I'm just kind of curious if we're getting to a strategy soon. Yeah, no, I mean, it's a great question. I think like, you know, so there's, I can try to follow up on this. If you want to send me an email, there's some work that came out of a group from Princeton and MIT recently that looked at some scenarios for getting to zero. And they really looked extensively at all of the different issues, including land use and other things that kind of prevent expansion. And so I think like, you know, the top line conclusion that I see most often is that the technologies are available in the sense that we don't think we need to radically invent something new. The question is, you know, what is the right combination among things like nuclear renewables, potentially, you know, still fossil, but with some amount of sequestration and capture, in addition to, you know, how long do you allow that kind of last 10% to be made up by gas because gas is extremely flexible. So those are the kinds of things that I think we're grappling with right now. And I think it really is, you know, we need policy absolutely to support, you know, the rapid build out of these things, whether that's through some kind of clean energy stammer, ideally it helps level the playing field among natural, really among natural gas and other kinds of renewable resources, at least if you're looking at the US. But again, I think there is this technical challenge on the grid flexibility side of things if you want to do this with a whole lot of renewables in particular. And so that's something that we have to figure out and where there is probably some technology development and invention that's required, particularly to bring the cost of storage and other kinds of technologies that we might want to use. Thank you. We have about seven or eight questions from those who are not participants. Why not we let Laura pick one? Yeah, I'll maybe take a couple. My gosh. Let me suggest one. You have a very good question from Lane Smith. Go down a little bit. Go down. I like a manual. Oh, Lane Smith. Okay. The one right above it. Oh, yeah. This is also a good one. So those two. Let me expand this a little bit, Laura. And many of these questions, are there specific numbers, how much annual GHG emissions demand response will help cut down? I'll expand this a little bit. You know, the analysis you have done in terms of the key technologies, including demand response EV and others on the industrial sector and the building sectors, right? Are these some qualitative analysis or do we have any number to support each technology to help how much GHG reduction ideally? Yeah, that's a great question. So I think the short answer, well, it depends a little bit. So I'll start by saying, you know, demand response specifically on the annual greenhouse gas emissions reduction. I have not yet seen really good numbers to translate that. What I can tell you is that some of what the studies, again, particularly in California do is they talk about the degree to which demand response can reduce curtailment of renewables. And so you can make an assumption then that if that curtailment means you're replacing like sort of standard grid mix power in California with a lot of natural gas on it. And instead you're replacing that with fully renewable power or you make some kind of assumption to that effect. Then I think you can get a sense for what the greenhouse gas emissions is. And that's definitely something that I'm going to be working toward. You know, it's a big question because I think there's certainly the question around like what is the greenhouse gas emissions impact of one particular technology? And then there's also the question of like how do we think about the greenhouse gas impact of the programs that we run within Actuate? And we're going to have to have at least like, you know, a rough answer to both of those questions. I will say that it's been a little bit easier for me to get answers to some of those questions in other cases. So like for example, if you do actually get to the point that you're completely, you know, that you have all electric vehicles on the road, you know that that's three gigatons of carbon emissions. But one of the things that I need to work out is, you know, what is the relationship between building, for example, a single charging station and the amount of electric vehicle adoption that that charging station supports. And as you can imagine, it depends on a huge range of factors, including where exactly you are, what the level of penetration is already, et cetera. To give one example though, you know, one of the things that I didn't talk about that was on the slide was actually mass timber. And timber is a replacement for structural steel and cement in buildings. And that's a case where we've done some calculations internally. We've noted that it turns out that structural timber has a really great replacement for steel and cement in mid-rise buildings in particular. And so if you look at the mid-rise building stock that we're projected to need in the United States over the next 10 years, what you see is that somewhere on the order of half a gigaton per year is possible. Actually, sorry, that's not just in the US context, that's globally. So that's something that, you know, may or may not rise to our kind of gigaton threshold depending on some other assumptions that we might make. But those are some of the things that we're definitely trying to get a handle on. We have probably a night of four, five minutes. Okay. Yeah, maybe you can try to answer this question from maybe Steve. Utility tariffs. Maybe. Electrification and demand. Oh, I see what you mean. Okay, so yeah, I think, so when I talk about sort of market structures for shaping demand response, I'm definitely including utility tariff structures as part of that. I think the question around, you know, what are customers actually charged for electricity usage among utilities, or, you know, in terms of like on their utility bill, and then are there separate demand response providers that provide separate kinds of payments and incentives and that sort of thing? So you definitely can't imagine a world where there's, you know, kind of like almost separate systems for electricity provision and then demand response program participation. What's interesting is that I've definitely talked to people who believe that we actually need to move to a system where there's no such thing as a demand response aggregator. And it's sort of an interesting perspective, but basically their argument is that that's kind of essentially a middleman that's sort of, you know, basically making money within the system here. And that's going to sufficiently increase costs for demand response that you kind of have to pay for this extra middleman infrastructure that you don't really need. And that instead what should happen is the utilities should just contract directly with our customers and or should, you know, use utility tariffs and other kinds of incentive programs within the utility structure as it exists. And utilities should basically be the only purveyors of demand response. And it's an interesting argument. Obviously the more you can take costs out of the demand response system, the more demand response you can actually procure. And that's something that's going to be really important and really valuable. Having come from a utility context, I'm pretty clear that utilities themselves, you know, in as much as the goal is sort of to make things easy and sleek for customers and to integrate with some of the existing things they have in their home, that's not really a utilities forte. Given that, you know, we struggled really even just to build basic apps that were available on people's smartphones. I can't imagine that we would do a good job of making that customer experience go extremely well. So I do think that at a minimum, you probably need companies that are willing to provide those kinds of solutions for what is your customer integration and interaction look like. But whether they are themselves entities that exist as kind of a market player within the system, I think is an open question. Or at least could be an open question, although there was a lot of momentum already around the existence of the company. Sir, Laura, can I just have a quick clarification? Because you mentioned that the mind response is used to decrease curtailment. But to my understanding, the mind response is more for shifting your load. Let's say when we have too much demand and we shift that away. So I'm just wondering, how does the mind response actually reduce curtailment? Because that means that we're actually increasing the demand, right? But it just seems like we don't have that. Right. So what's interesting, I think actually Lawrence Berkeley National Lab put out a study on demand response and they've got a really sort of interesting taxonomy for how they talk about different kinds of demand response. So the first is shed where it's like you reduce load and then you basically for all rights and purposes assume that load is never coming back. And that's kind of how we think of demand response currently particularly with CNI customers that like if they reduce their manufacturing line for a little while, then they're going to put it right back up when the demand response event is over. And that's just kind of how things work. That particular load never comes back. Then there's shift where again, is more what you're talking about with a lot of residential customers, particularly if say you were going to pre-cool a house and then have them reduce their load during a particular period of time. And then there's shape, which is where instead of doing that kind of shifting process in real time, you kind of make permanent changes to the load profile of various users and reshape their load. So that maybe every single day they're using more power in the middle of the day than they otherwise would in order to shift to times when solar is available. In terms of like how that specifically addresses curtailment, both the shift and the shape kinds of resources are intended to do that. So like a very basic issue that we have in California is a lot of times a lot of curtailment of wind and solar happens in the middle of the day because there's just way more power than the grid actually requires at that particular time. So the more you're shifting load to happen in the middle of the day, the more that that energy is actually getting used. And then theoretically if you've shifted it that means you're also then not using it night when wind and solar becomes less available or it should say when solar becomes less available. Does that help? That was really helpful, yeah. Thank you. Yeah. Great. Okay. Any final? So I guess we don't have time to answer all the questions, but I'll email you all these questions. Some of them may be very helpful for your future research. Sure, yes, that would be great. And certainly again, if folks are interested in reaching out to me at any point, I would love to discuss any and all ideas, gaps, white spaces that you're seeing where there's something that needs to happen and to get unstuck within the system that you think a small nonprofit could help unstick. We're always on time, so thanks so much. Okay. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you.