 Good morning, good morning. I live for the day when I am introduced as the financier of Tesla, but maybe one day that'll happen. Thank you, thank you John, appreciate it. I want to say actually just a quick word about John before I begin. Years and years ago, a friend of mine here in DC, an elected official who's now long since retired, said to me, you know, you can get an enormous amount of things done in Washington if you don't need to have your name attached to them. John is a hero of the clean energy movement. I mean, he is the, he directs the Energy Future Coalition, I see Boyd and Gray somewhere in the audience who's a founding member of that, which I'm privileged to attend and enjoy. Senior counsel of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, his bio is in your briefing materials, but John has as much as anybody been responsible over the last couple of decades for the progress that we've made in clean energy. And in fact, the theme of my conversation this morning is that we've actually made a fair amount of progress, much of it due to people like John and the incredible work they've done. So join me in giving John a round of applause if you would. I also want to thank CSIS for hosting this event and it's a fabulous new facility. CSIS has been in the business of providing insight and intelligence into complicated and disruptive in the Washington sense of the word, disruptive issues for over 50 years. I decided to look up what was happening in 1962 when CSIS was founded. So here's what was going on in 1962. The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, and Bob Dylan released their debut albums. Johnny Carson began hosting The Tonight Show, the first Walmart and the first Kmart opened. John Glenn became the first astronaut to orbit the earth. It was the first time that the term the personal computer was ever used and of course we were entering into the Cuban Missile Crisis. So CSIS has had a long, long run. Let me tell you what else was happening in 1962 and in the early years of the 60s. There were flash floods in Barcelona and parts of Germany that killed hundreds of people. There was heavy smog over London for weeks that summer. Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, which really launched the environmental movement in this country. And Congress funded the first study to examine the effects of automotive exhaust on human health. Which leads to my sort of fundamental theme and that is we've come a long way. But in some ways, we haven't made much progress at all and in some ways there's an enormously long road ahead. Disruptive technologies not only require breakthroughs, they require the right conditions of time and place and desire. Natural gas is not new. The Chinese were using natural gas in 200 BC to separate salt from brine. The Dutch were actively obviously using windmills for commercial purposes in the 1500s. And even in this country, ethanol blends replaced whale oil in fuel lamps in the 1830s. So my first point today, because I'm not gonna talk about specific technologies, I'm gonna leave that to the incredible experts that you all have lined up for the rest of the day and look forward to hearing about their insights. But the first point I wanna make as we think about a framework for thinking about this is that as we talk about innovation, let's make sure we focus on what will work in our time and our place. Because breakthrough technologies that have no markets in a timeframe that matters for business will eventually largely remain breakthrough technologies. Today also marks the 42nd Earth Day, pretty auspicious day to hold this conference. Earth Day is now celebrated in 192 countries. And over a billion people around the world today will do something that in some way encourages them to participate in an Earth Day activity. In this country, Gaylord Nelson, Senator, former Senator from Wisconsin, is largely credited for establishing Earth Day in 1970. But people forget actually why that happened. Because in 1969, there was a massive oil spill off the coast of California near Santa Barbara. It is actually to this day, the third largest oil spill in the history of the country after the Deepwater Horizon spill and the Exxon Valdez. 100,000 barrels of oil spilled into the channel and millions of marine creatures and birds and the like died. So once again, this served notion that we've come an unbelievably long way, 42 Earth Days years later, but still struggling with and battling the same issues. Which leads then forward to my second point. It's not only that there's much left to do and not an enormous amount of time to do it in. It means that the decisions that we make, the quality of the decisions that we make are critical. Sea Rise of some level, and I don't wanna debate it, and I'm probably speaking to a comrade in arms group, but Sea Rise is inevitable. And it's going to show, I think, I say this a little euphemistically, that Atlantis was not a myth. Because in some period of time, we're gonna lose some of the Florida Keys. Now you may not care about the Marshall Islands or the Seychelles or Tuvalu or something, but one third of all Americans live within 10 miles of a coastline. So these are huge issues with enormous ramifications and the quality of the decisions we make now will have dramatic impacts. But I'm actually not a gloom and doomer. I'm actually an eternal optimist on this because I think not only have we come a long way, I think we've already won. I actually think that the argument in Washington today is not about whether or not clean and renewable energy but simply about the speed of implementation. And the question is, is it gonna take five years or 50 years? And truthfully, if the outcomes weren't so important, wouldn't matter much. Because even 50 years in an energy cycle and even in a political cycle, not that long. The challenges, the problem is, the outcomes are so binary that whether it's five years or 50 years matters an enormous amount. Why do I say we've already won? You all know as well as I do about the economics and the costs of the price of solar modules. Wind turbines in the last, how dramatically they've fallen over the last five to 10 years. I'm not gonna give you a bunch of data on that. And I'm gonna talk about how much more the solar can drop because we haven't really started balance of systems costing yet. And one thing this country is incredibly good at is taking costs out of production. By the way, it's interesting as a sidebar, just as a brain, as a thought exercise. It must be true that these lines cross at some point because if the cost of inputs is free and the cost of extractive technologies is not free, then at some point those lines cross. And that gets back to the question, is that five years or 50 years to which the answer isn't relevant except that it's deeply relevant? Here's another by the way, unrelated to where I just was, but what is the resale value of a car with an internal combustion engine if the initial purchase price of a zero emissions vehicle and an EV and a car with an IC engine are essentially the same? Zero. I mean, yes, there'll be people who always want vintage cars and muscle cars and collector's items and the thing. But if the total cost of ownership is here, right, repair, gas, et cetera, et cetera, then at some point the inflection, the purchase inflection of the EV market has to dramatically ramp up. And this problem is a function of the fact that we tend to look at the world as a snapshot rather than as a movie. You gotta look at the movie here, the introduction of EVs as an example is on a long, steady ramp. So I started by saying, I think we've already won. Here's an example. Businesses everywhere now focus on energy as a business cost and a marketing tool. And these practices are embedded. McDonald's packaging is completely biodegradable. In fact, 40% of all McDonald's total waste is now recycled. Google has taken their carbon footprint down to almost zero. Unilever, which is Ben and Jerry's dove soap, Hellman's mayonnaise and the like, has completely altered its business model and has lined up its brand against a focus on sustainability. Sprint, and by the way, Apple yesterday, Sprint and Apple now have huge electronics recycling program, buyback programs. Walmart announced a plan this year to produce or procure 600% more renewable energy than it used in 2010 and to reduce energy efficiency of its buildings by 20%. These businesses don't do this only because it seems like a good cause. They do it because it has an economic rationale to it. And in that vein, I would say to you that that's how you'll know we've really won. When we get to what I call sort of phase three. Phase one of the clean energy movement in a sense was to be a little glib. Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, Crunchy Granola, Birkenstock, save the world and appropriate to its time and place. Phase two, moral outrage, which is sort of where we have been for the last few years, also appropriate to its time and place. But we will win when we get to what I think of as phase three, which is the creation of climate change millionaires. And in a talk I gave recently, somebody asked me what I thought the most important technology of the, the most important thing that had happened in clean energy in the last year was, I think, expecting to hear some of the things that we'll be talking about later today. But this thing in my mind, the single most important thing that happened in clean energy in the last 12 months was that somebody bought Nest for $3 billion. And that whooshing sound you hear, that's not the sound of a wind turbine in the middle of Wind Alley someplace. That's the sound of a million 25-year-old heads going, what was that? And how do I get a piece of it? And that's how we win. Another anecdote along those lines, I gave a talk some months ago up at Harvard Business School. There are now 185 kids, students at Harvard Business School, enrolled in the Energy and Environment Club. Now, I'm sure there's 585 involved in the investment banking club. That's not my point. My point is that five years ago, there wasn't an energy and environment club at Harvard Business School. And today, 185 students are at least considering exploring this area professionally. That's a big deal. In the same vein, the next way where I think you can see that we are winning is that while there was a complete paucity, a drought of capital for this space over the last couple of years, for some good and obvious reasons, partly due to macro and exogenous events, partly due to micro events, and partly due to Washington. In point of fact right now, there's plenty of capital available for investment in this space. I'm personally involved with Andor aware of four different $1 billion funds being raised by private equity funds around the country to invest in the clean energy space. Some on the debt side, some on the tax equity side, some on the crossover side, some on the distress side. But the moral of the story is there is a lot of capital out there. There are also many new entrants. I don't want to go into tax equity as a structure and a concept, which will bore you all the tears, but suffice it to say that tax equity has principally been provided over the last 20 years by banks and insurance companies. There are now new entrants into the tax equity space, and those are the large corporates because effectively tax equity provides a credit against profits generated elsewhere in your business, and lots of corporate treasurers have come to understand the attractiveness of tax equity as a vehicle, and therefore by extension are playing a larger role and putting more money to work in the space. To continue this, to continue the success, the glide path that we're on, there are a couple of things we need to do. The first, again, is not a technology choice. We need to de-dramatize this stuff. People get paralyzed when they fear things. They don't act. Let me give you a simple example before talking about something maybe more nuanced. We shouldn't be calling these things green bonds. If you can price them, if they have cash flows, if they can be raided, if they can be sold in the public markets, they're just bonds. They're not green bonds, they're just bonds, and a whole new audience of people will be receptive to a discussion about bond investments who are not open to a discussion about green bond investments. Fear is polarizing, and we should not expect that communities and states and their elected representatives who come from areas whose businesses and business models and lifestyles are being threatened will go gently into that good night. We've done an unbelievably poor job as a community, as an industry, in hearing what those people have to say, and in talking to them in ways that they can, in turn, hear what we have to say. They fear jobs disappearing and the way of life disappearing. We're talking about climate change. We need to be talking about retraining. We need to be talking about job opportunities. We need to be talking about better health outcomes. We have those programs in place. We have the Good Jobs, Green Jobs program, the Trade Adjustment Assistant program, and the like, but we're still stuck in phase two, and we need to get to phase three. Partly, we have to do this because the fundamental challenge here is not technological, it's not financial, it's behavioral. The sharing economy is a critical step forward. I don't know how many of you have used Airbnb, which is gonna now be worth a gazillion dollars, or Zipcar, or Uber, or fill-in-the-blank, but we are rapidly moving down the path towards a shared economy, which has huge implications for energy because the lowest hanging fruit, which is my third point, is behavioral change. Doesn't cost anything. It just takes a really long time. The corollary to behavioral change, and the reason it's so important is, as a rule, you cannot finance your way to growth. You have to have structural demand. Over an extended period, incentives and subsidies don't work well, not for the reasons Washington thinks or argues about, not for picking winners and losers and not for whatever else people are talking about down here, it doesn't work well because it doesn't mirror current human behavior. It intends to shape behavior, which is incredibly important, but which takes a really long time, but the problem is that government programs don't last for a timeframe, a time period, required to actually change human behavior in a meaningful and sustainable fashion. Another reason that's important, in the sense that you can't finance your way to growth, is that financial innovation itself is one of the technologies I hope you'll focus on, if not necessarily today, at some point soon. Financial innovation is what actually permits extant technologies to be low-hanging fruit, to be implemented. One of the things that's curious to me, and I mean this in a positive light, is that innovation is a word that Washington is fascinated with. I think that's true for a couple of reasons. First is, no one really understands what it means. Second is, it doesn't cost very much relative to certain other kinds of programs, and the third is, you can innovate in every congressional district in the United States. So you can put little grants everywhere you need to put them. In the real world, and if you think about your own experience, I have to believe you'll agree with this, innovation is not linear. It's not man or woman, light bulb over the head, bench lab, and 20 years later, straight line, fabulous huge industry. Innovation is circular, there's a virtuous circle of innovation. Innovation begets commercialization, and commercialization begets further innovation. Most innovation is incrementalist in nature, because by definition, it's problem solving. It solves some problem that already exists. Many years ago, I taught the second year MBA class in entrepreneurship at Georgetown, the business school at Georgetown, and just as a thought exercise early on, you'd say, okay, you pick up a fork or a pen or a pair of sunglasses and you'd say, think of, you've got five minutes, think of three ways to improve that. Instantly, your mind is working, instantly, right? Well, a fourth prong, various kinds of UV filters, et cetera. Invent a fork, not so easy, right? Invent a new way of eating is way harder than improving a fork, and so one of the things I hope we will also focus on in innovation is how we innovate to get current technologies more successfully into the marketplace, and I think the answer to that, by and large, is financial innovation, and here's one of the reasons financial innovation is so important. What are three of the most important characteristics of clean power generation? They're capital-intensive, they're illiquid, and if they don't have bounded returns, they have at least knowable returns. Guess what? I spent 10 years of my life as a VC. Those three things are anathema to venture capitalists. We hate capital-intensive businesses. We hate illiquidity, and God knows we don't want bounded returns. So, in effect, we gotta come up with another way of thinking about financing innovation in the clean power generation space. Now, we've done that. We've got new views on solar finance, PACE, the PACE program, debt funds, the bonds, the green bonds, even net metering, and now the value of solar tariff pricing, which is beginning to replace the feed-in tariff pricing and the like, but we've got to keep innovating around that as well. Who does that innovation, that financial innovation? Well, the markets do, the private capital markets do, but they obviously rely on the government for something, and I think it raises, maybe it's my last point, this question of, can business do it all, do all of this, or does government in fact have a role? Not to be overly simplistic, but there are really two fundamental reasons to invest in anything, right? To make money or to serve a public good. Sometimes they're in alignment, and sometimes they're not. Indeed, one of the reasons government programs exist to invest in certain areas is because our elected officials and decision makers think that's important, but the outcomes are outside a timeframe relevant to the private sector and the capital markets, who have concluded that that particular technology cannot make money in a reasonable timeframe. And guess what? That's been the case in energy for decades. You know, the story of George Mitchell and fracking has become hegeographic at this point. You know, a child of immigrants, Greek immigrants, who invented and persevered under unbelievable odds to invent fracking. And it is a fabulous story, except that it's not true, which is not to disparage or to mean Mr. Mitchell's accomplishments. He stuck with it, he had a huge insight, he built an important business, and he contributed meaningfully to it, but it was a public-private partnership. Fracking and research on fracking dates back decades before George Mitchell got involved with it. The federal government was working on these technologies long, long before he got involved. He was able to benefit from basic science the government had done, applied R&D, tax policy support, a series of public-private shale drilling demonstration projects in the 1970s. The Gas Research Institute provided him assistance, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And so it speaks to the notion, and maybe this is the third or fourth, whatever my point is, of ways to think about technology and innovation, which is, how do we bring the public sector and the private sector, which have similar but not identical goals and objectives, to bear? And I'd summarize it this way, as you think about the technologies you hear about today, and how to think about their role and our role in bringing them forward. Do they solve real problems? Do they solve problems in a timeframe that matters? Do they use resources appropriately, the least resources and the right resources from the right sector? Do they provide good to the greatest number? Do they create no unintended consequences? Do they optimize available capital? Do they make money in some timeframe that's meaningful? And can they get done? And that's why today, as we talk about innovation, let's talk about innovation in the context of innovation and deployment. Because the loan program, of which I was a member, focused on commercial scale and utility scale deployment. It's not better or worse than RPE, which is fantastic. It's different. They are places on a continuum, but it's a continuum. We have to keep our eye on deployment or innovation can't get there. So I hope as we talk today and we talk about these disruptive technologies, this will perhaps be helpful as a framework for thinking about it. Thank you.