 Hi, everybody. Welcome to our briefing today. I'm Dan Berset, President of the Environmental Energy Study Institute. And we have a really great briefing lined up to talk about the Sustainable Energy in America Factbook 2023. Before we get to our speakers and our panelists, I just have a couple of things I'd like to begin with. The first is by a big shout out to Representative Paul Tonko and his staff for helping us be here today with the room. So thanks very much, Representative Tonko. Your staff is always incredible to work with to bring educational opportunities to Capitol Hill. ESI is based here in Washington. We are focused on policymaker education about climate change topics. We also have developed expertise over time, helping utilities and rural areas access federal resources to provide inclusive on-bill financing for their customers. We do lots of different stuff when it comes to policymaker education. We have briefings like this. This is actually our fifth briefing already in 2023. And we have several more lined up, actually many, many more lined up in the coming weeks. We also have a really great newsletter. It comes out every two weeks. It's called Climate Change Solutions. And if you're interested in learning more about what we do at ESI and keeping up with all of our briefings and our written materials, I really can't recommend subscribing to that enough because it is really great. We have some good stuff coming down the pike, too. For example, next week is the first of our Farm Bill briefings of the year. On March 23rd, we'll be working with the Natural Resources Defense Council on a briefing about organics. That will be really, really excellent. We also have some really great fact sheets coming on, including one about EV trucks, which should be really cool. And we also do reports and FAQs and things like that. And the best way to keep up with that is by subscribing to our newsletter. And you can do that by visiting us online at www.esion.org. And while you're there, subscribe to our other news letters and follow us on Twitter and other social media at ESI online. I am really, really looking forward to this section because this is one of the resources that I use a lot when I'm trying to remember where things stand in terms of the transition to a decarbonized clean energy economy. The Sustainable Energy Factbook is a really extraordinary resource. We have a great in-person, I didn't do that. We have a great in-person audience today, but we also have an online audience. And everyone's going to hear a lot of really great information. For people in the room, if you have a question, save it till the end and we'll have a roving microphone so you can ask your question. If you're in our online audience, you can also ask us a question. We'll do our best to incorporate that into the discussion. You can send us an email. And the email address to use is ask at esi.org, ASK. You can also follow us online on Twitter at ESI online and ask us that way. And now I get to introduce the first of our speakers today, Ethan Zindler, head of America's Bloomberg NEF. Ethan manages the company's analysts and commercial teams in New York, Washington, San Francisco, and Sao Paulo. He serves as Bloomberg NEF's primary spokesperson in North America. He's also a senior associate non-resident at the Center for Strategic and International Studies Energy and National Security Program. Ethan holds an MBA from Columbia Business School and a bachelor's degree from Georgetown. Ethan, welcome to the lectern. I'll turn it over to you. Thank you. Thanks, Dan. And thanks EESI for this opportunity. Again, it's great to be back here. And of course, thanks to Business Council for Sustainable Energy for partnering with us on this important work. And you're going to hear from Lisa Jacobson in a few minutes. So thanks to Lisa and Laura and the whole team there for supporting this project. This is the 11th year that we have done the Sustainable Energy in America fact book. Every year brings new and interesting surprises. And this year was no different in that regard. But it was the least weird year, I guess we could say, of the last three, given what we've been through with COVID. But there were some pretty unusual challenges that were less COVID-oriented and more specific to the energy sector. And those who are in the energy business can attest to that. The first major, really major, land war in Europe that we've had since World War II, continuing recovery from COVID in terms of the effect on supply chains, higher energy costs, which I'm going to talk about in a minute. And these things really had some substantial effect on the broader transition to lower carbon sources of energy across the US economy. So it was kind of less weird out in the real world for normal people, people going back to work, and things like that. In our world of energy, it was a tumultuous year. And so I've titled this hardwired into US growth because the main point of one of the main points that we try and make in the report is even despite these unusual circumstances in the energy industry, we continue to see a lot of progress in the broader energy transition towards newer, more sustainable energy technologies. And I'm going to try and show you a little bit about that right now. First, though, let's start with a little background on last year and why I said it was kind of a weird year or an unusual year in the world of energy. This is just a glance at the price of natural gas. And the reason I'm showing it is because natural gas is the most important factor in setting electricity pricing in the United States today. About 40% of our power now comes from gas. It's had an enormous role in helping to decommission a lot of coal by our generation in the US overall. And so it's something really critical to thinking about the economics of energy in the United States. And in general, the US has had relatively low natural gas prices for quite some time. The left-hand chart is basically the wholesale power, excuse me, the wholesale natural gas price. And then the right-hand side, you see different prices for residential, commercial, and industrial pricing. Overall, Americans have basically been blessed with low-priced natural gas for some time now. Last year, we saw an uptick in those gas prices pretty sharply. And a big part of the reason for this, of course, was the events in Ukraine and additional demand that was placed on the US gas system to provide more exports to Europe and elsewhere. It is important to kind of asterisk the note that natural gas prices have actually since come down. And they're about somewhere between $2 and $3 per million BTU now at Henry Hub. But for a good part of last year, they were up. And that had a lot to do with the Burmaqro scene within energy in the United States. There were other areas, though, where we saw prices go up as well that were really quite germane specifically to renewables and to electric vehicles. So first of all, steel costs for wind, which are used, typically used in wind turbines, those were up. These charts, each one of the ones that I'm going to show you here is rebased essentially to zero, so you can kind of see them on an equalized basis. If you look at some of the key inputs used in solar equipment, particularly polysilicon, the yellow line, you can see how much that jumped last year. If you look at some of the key inputs into lithium ion batteries, though some of those are almost literally off the chart here in terms of the kind of spikes that we saw last year. And then finally, just the general cost of shipping anything was up last year, but then did drop towards the end of the year as some of these bottlenecks were unclogged. But across the value chains, as we talk about wind, solar, and batteries used in electric vehicles, there was a lot of cost pressure and a kind of weird year in terms of the ups and downs that you see here. Similarly, when we look at the actual prices that consumers and others are paying for electricity, you can see that those prices rose. The Texas spike, of course, is a reflection of the very unusual year that they had a couple of years ago. You can see that that recovered after that. But nonetheless, you can see wholesale power prices rose last year, resale power prices, which tend to lag more slowly in terms of rising, but wholesale in particular, again, natural gas prices tend to drive wholesale electricity prices in the US, and you can see why those rose last year. So one of the big stories that we've told for years about this energy transition, and which I still think is generally true, is that the transition to these newer technologies usually has met lower cost energy. Last year, things got a bit off track on that, but nonetheless, we continue to see really important progress and there's some signs already here into 2023 that the 2022 story of higher costs is already starting to come to an end. One area where higher costs benefited as technology in particular was when we think about electric vehicles. So this is just a very simplified look at the cost of essentially a cost per gallon of filling your tank with electricity, that's the yellow line, versus filling it with fossil fuels. And you can see because of the higher prices that we saw for petroleum, for gasoline products, how much those prices went up. And even though there was a jump in electricity prices, even at the retail rate, is still on a per gallon basis, much less expensive to essentially fill your battery with a charge than it is to fill your tank with gasoline. And now on the right hand side, you can see the growth that we've seen in electric vehicles. So last year, about one million EVs were sold in the United States, or I should say one million cars with plugs in it were sold in the United States, that's both pure electric vehicles and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles. A real surge from the year before, where we're up at about, we were about 600,000, 650,000 the year before, you can see who the biggest sellers are, no huge surprise, Tesla is still the biggest seller, but a number of new names that are much more active in the market now in manufacturing and producing very appealing vehicles that are reaching out to more buyers. To give you a sort of sense of context, that's about 7% of all new cars that were sold in the United States last year had a plug-in it. For some context, the number was about 30% in China last year, where they sold about 5 million EVs. In Europe it was probably somewhere around 20% overall. So we are not leading in this regard, but what we at BNEF have seen is that when markets sort of hit that kind of 10% adoption rate, the growth continues pretty sharply thereafter. And so we seem to be on that trajectory now. One other thing to say just about cost before I talk about renewable build is, I've shown you a bunch of things, but the thing to keep in mind is like, when you think about the cost competitiveness of clean energy technologies versus their sort of fossil competitors, while we saw the prices go up for polysilicon and for some of the other inputs that go into solar and wind, for instance, we saw the prices also go up for buying natural gas. So as all costs rise, you can see on this chart here of levelized costs, there's still a gap between renewables and coal, which is the black line on the top, and now a bit further gap between renewables and natural gas. And we at BNEF have tried to make the point for a long time that renewable energy represents the lowest cost technology in many parts of the world, not everywhere, let's be clear, but many parts of the world today. And you can see that the gap has actually gotten a little bit wider in some cases over the last year. All right, so what does that meant in terms of actual stuff getting built onto the grid that's renewable energy? This is just a glance back to 2018, 2019. And you can see that the US market in terms of new wind and solar build was somewhere at a plateaued level of about 20 gigawatts of new capacity being built per year with a bit more solar than wind being built each year. Then we saw this big step up in 2020, up to 36 gigawatts, and since then we've been more or less in that zone of the 32 to 37 gigawatts of total build. A big part of the jump that we saw in 2021 was around solar when 24 gigawatts of capacity was built, you can see here. Last year was, frankly, even though over 20 gigawatts of solar was built, it was a challenging year for the solar industry. There were some pretty substantial tie ups in the first half of the year related to tariffs on equipment imported from overseas countries. That's an issue maybe the panel will talk about, not fully resolved, but essentially put on hold for a while. But that made it very challenging for developers to get equipment into the US that they needed in a timely fashion. And that pushed down both the total number, but also the number that we were forecasting and others were forecasting for solar build last year and a smaller overall number in terms of the amount of renewables that were built last year. To give some kind of context for these numbers, you're seeing 30 gigawatts per year. The total US power system is about 1,100 gigawatts somewhere in that neighborhood. So this is a pretty small percentage of that total overall. In terms of what it means to try and get towards a goal and the Biden administration has said that they want to entirely decarbonize the US power system by 2035. 35 gigawatts, whatever the number is, if you're in the 30 to 35 number, that is about half of what you need to be building every year if you wanna get to that kind of a target. So the market is big and it's a lot bigger than it was. It's grown really spectacularly over the last 10 years. But if you wanna actually get to decarbonization, true decarbonization, a lot more work needs to be done. And I haven't even talked about batteries because I got about five more minutes. So that's a whole other area that needs to accompany all that build of renewables. I'll just talk about money for a moment here and note that last year globally, we at Bloomberg NEF counted over $1.1 trillion of new investment that went into energy transition technologies last year, which was a spectacular figure blew away the prior record that we had counted, which you can see on the left-hand chart there. On the US side, it was about $140 billion a new capital that went into this area overall. So something like a little over 10% of the total. If you wanna contextualize that a bit though, in this I know is the interest for many policymakers, let's compare China versus the United States. So about half of that 1.1 trillion was China. That's what you're seeing on the left. And again, about 140 billion was in the United States. So again, a record year for us in the US, but we are definitely not the world leader when it comes to attracting new investment in the sector. Where we are in terms of what kind of energy we're consuming on the power sector, just to be clear, we're now at a point where about 40%, as I said earlier, of our power needs are met by natural gas, but renewables hit a new record last year at about 23%, that's this, that bit up there. And basically almost all of that growth that we've seen in renewables over the last 10 years has been from the contributions of wind and solar, plus other technologies like geothermal biomass and others, but primarily it's been wind and solar that have added the most. I'm gonna keep moving relatively quickly, just to say something that you guys all know, the Inflation Reduction Act, massive sort of earthquake of policy happening for our sector last year. The most important piece of legislation, at least in my view, ever passed to address climate change and support energy transition technologies. I'm sure the panel have more to talk about on this, but it is one of the great stories of 2023 to see how this gets implemented in all of its various forms. And of course it came on top of the passage of the infrastructure law the prior year. All right, let's finish just by talking about emissions for just a second because in some ways as we think about addressing climate change, that is kind of the bottom line. What kind of progress are we achieving at this point? And last year was an interesting year on emissions. So first of all, not too surprisingly on that left-hand side is you see total greenhouse gas emissions and you see this is just emissions from the energy sector. There's this giant divot, which I think you can all guess was COVID. And then there's this bounce back that was into 2022, which is sort of expected as well. And then last year we saw emissions rise, I think by about 1% year on year, which is this last little bit over here, which is interesting because I guess if you're looking for the best new, there's never great news about emissions continue to go back up, but we're still well, we're now below 2019 levels. And it's a pretty good chance that we'll never get back there again at this point. And the economy grew last year at it, at it, not an outstanding clip, but a decent clip overall and only 1% growth in CO2 emissions. If you look under the hood though, there's also some interesting things worth noting. So it wasn't that long ago that the power sector was the number one contributor to CO2 emissions. That's the red line there on the right-hand side. That is no longer the case, not only is power sector not no longer number two as it was, but you could argue it's essentially tied for second or third place with industrial emissions. And this certainly raises the sort of profile here of the industrial sector and the long-term need to decarbonize things like steel and cement making, where we've really basically made almost no progress whatsoever, even though we are rapidly decarbonizing the power sector. And finally, where does this leave us towards hitting overall emissions goals? The Biden administration has pledged to cut emissions by 50 to 52% by 2030. There's also the Paris target of cutting CO2 emissions 26 to 28% by 2025. And if you look at where we are on that, we were, thanks to COVID, sort of heading on to a nice trajectory, click another year or two, a couple of years forward and you can see we're no longer really on that path. And then when you, sorry, and this is the COVID drop, if you think about 2030 and the kind of emissions decline that we need to see, it's a sharper decline. And I guess the only last thing I'll say is that the power sector, you could argue, is now really doing its part to reduce its emissions as we see this move away from coal and towards natural gas and towards renewables in particular, which is zero carbon while nuclear holds steady. The transportation sector, we think we can actually start to see some progress with a million new EVs on the road as of the end of last year and sales scheduled to rise this year. But we need to see more progress in other areas if we're gonna have any chance of trying to hit this 50% cut by 2030. So a lot of really great progress achieved last year and a lot of signs that this energy transition as we tried to say is hardwired into the way the US economy now operates, but clearly some need for some further progress ahead. So with that, I wanna just welcome Lisa up and say thanks again to Lisa and to everybody for hearing me for a few minutes. Change over. Great, well, thank you, Ethan. Excellent, challenging, kind of, there's a lot in there to unpack, which I'm hoping to do right now with our panel. But before I do, I just want to take a moment and thank our partners EESI. I mean, it really is an honor to work with EESI. We work here at home on federal education and policy development. We also work internationally. I'm really pleased with our partnerships when we go and attend a far off meetings of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Just this last year, we had the opportunity to partner on our booth together. And I know for those that are here in the room and online at our booth when I sat there, who came over, people saying, we're the EESI people. You have a very strong global following and it's because of this excellent content that you put together. So we're really privileged to be able to partner with you on this event each year. The Business Council for Sustainable Energy for those that might not be familiar with us, we are an energy trade associations. We were founded in 1992 by executives in the energy efficiency, natural gas and renewable energy sectors. They came together because they knew they had readily available clean energy technologies to offer, to offer for the environment, to offer for our economy, to offer for our energy security and competitiveness. And all of those things are the same. What has changed is the fact that we now represent many other industry sectors and those sectors are working together in the marketplace. So a lot of leadership from US energy companies and right now our frame is how do we move forward with the energy transition? So resources like the Factbook really help us know where we've been, where we are now, and then looking at some of those graphs where we need to get. And then we can roll up our sleeves, work on public private partnerships, work with all of you here on Capitol Hill to adopt policy. So that's who we are. I'd like to take a moment and thank the sponsors of this project. They're listed here. We could not do this work and commission this report from Bloomberg New Energy Finance without their support. So thank you. And now I'd love to invite up our panelists. So please I'll introduce you in a moment but take a moment in my last couple of comments here to come and join up here on the panel stage. So as our panelists are coming up, I just wanted to thank again ESI and their entire staff for their excellent work all year long and helping to put this together. And I also wanted to acknowledge the BCSE staff that's here. I know online you might not be able to see them but I'd love to acknowledge Ruth McCormick who's our vice president of federal and state affairs. She's with us today as is Laura Tierney, our vice president of international programs. Lizzie Strickland who is our communications manager and Avery Bernstein who is our program associate. So thanks to all of you for all this work. Yeah. Okay. Let's applaud ESI and BCSE together. Yeah. And then just the last thing to say before I turn to the panel is we're really pleased that we're doing this event as the kickoff day to the Business Council for Sustainable Energy's 2023 Clean Energy Forum. So we have meetings all day today, this event, and then we have meetings all day tomorrow. So excellent opportunity to bring folks together and learn from this terrific resource. So on the panel, I'm gonna introduce each panel, panelists right now and then we'll go and hear from them about some of the key things that they noticed in the fact book data this year. They might highlight a factor too and just kind of generally set the stage which will be our conversation that follows. So first to my right is Amy Farrell, senior vice president of government and public affairs for Cres Forum. Next to her is Charles Bolden, senior director of congressional affairs for the Solar Energy Industries Association. Next to him is Vincent Barnes, senior vice president of policy and research for the Alliance to Save Energy. Billy Kamaya, head of federal affairs for the American Clean Power Association. Yvonne McIntyre, vice president of federal affairs for PG&E, Pacific Gas and Electric Corporation. And Jennifer Kane, the energy efficiency policy leader for train technology. So just an amazing grouping of the different sectors that BCSE represents and I'm so grateful for them sharing some thoughts with us today. So Amy, let's start with you. I'd love to hear a little bit from you about how you're seeing the year and anything in the fact book that struck your interest. Sure, thank you, Lisa. And thank you for the sponsors for including me in this panel presentation today. I'm looking at the fact book, one of the things that I wanted to focus on is sort of a stage set of where we are with respect to industrial emissions. If you look here, there was a mention now that the power sector emissions have gone down. We see a relative share of emissions from the industrial sector is higher. Now, industrial processes count for about 29% of global energy use and one-fifth of all global greenhouse gas emissions. And particular, this is concentrated in some six sectors that are energy intensive. You can see them on the screen, so I'm not gonna read them to you. One of the things you talk about what's of note in this moment and I'm thinking where we are kind of in the world, politically, what's going on the hill, et cetera. I think this is a really important thing to focus on in particular because China, for example, accounts for 50% of the global steel, cement, chemical production, and nearly 60% of all aluminum. So that's a lot of this manufacturing production going on in China. And when you think about that in terms of global consumption and the embedded emissions in those, it's important moment here because when you compare that to the United States, already the US is competitive from an emissions intensity standpoint. The average product made in China results in about three times more carbon than one in the United States. And so we've got this competitive carbon advantage and we are now very focused on policies that look at ways to increase and improve the emissions efficiency of manufactured products in the industrial sector overall. So I guess the big picture takeaway that I have on this is we've seen all the deployment, the great progress and deployment of clean energy. The clean energy sector is very much already hardwired into the US economy. And now we have a real opportunity here when it comes to deploying solutions that will address industrial emissions, things like carbon capture and hydrogen deployment. And with that will be poised to increase America's competitive advantage and reduce global emissions. I know there's a lot of focus sometimes on what US emissions are doing, but we really believe the global emissions, it's a global challenge and these global emission reduction should be focused on. So we have the opportunity here to take advantage of the emissions advantage that US produce resources and goods already have and then to increase that through the advancement and adoption of technology and things that are currently being focused on and projected as a teaser and incentivizing you to go into the fact book after you see this picture, there are a couple of slides that talk about what kind of deployment is expected with respect to hydrogen and you'll see the projections are a lot of uptake in these various sectors. There's great information there on the expected cost curve, the trajectory for the cost curve on hydrogen technology and what that means for adoption. And then similarly, there's expected almost 300% increase in carbon capture utilization in storage, which creates more opportunity in the space. So that's what I'm at my high level three minutes and then we'll talk more about that, I think later. Yeah, look forward to that. Thanks so much, Amy. Charles, welcome. Thank you, thank you, thank you for having me. And I just wanna say that you and Dan really are doing great things out here. So we really appreciate that. I will be talking about the deployment of solar imports. As you all can see from the pie chart, a vast majority of our imports, approximately $8 billion in total, the vast majority of those comes from countries covered in the oxen anti-circumvention case. And from this pie chart, you can see Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, they're all very much countries in which we have seen a lot of our solar imports come from. With respect to that, at the bar graph, you can see there was a dip very much sold in the early part of 2022. But once the president announced the two-year reprieve of the circumvention tariffs, we can also see a spike in solar imports. So with that being said, we recently released a SMI report that shows strong growth in 2023 and even stronger growth potentially in 2024. So that was really one of the highlights that I took from the fact book. And again, this fact book is something that we all should really look into a lot more and looking forward to the question that you may have for us. Thanks, Charles. Absolutely. Vincent, welcome to you too. No, thank you, Lisa. And thank you, Dan and Bloomberg as well. It's good to be here. My name is Vincent Barnes. I'm a Senior Vice President of Policy and Research and Analysis for the Alliance to Save Energy. My focus is primarily gonna be on energy efficiency. We have a couple of graphs in front of us. One is, relates specifically to energy efficiency resource standards or their standards that states adopt to motivate or accelerate energy efficiency investments within that state as a strategy to reduce energy consumption, but also to reduce carbon emissions as well. The second chart that you see identifies utility energy efficiency spending. And as was mentioned earlier by our Bloomberg rep here, you can kind of see in the 2019, 2020 area where some of that spending level actually goes down. We expect some of that spending level to go up. So how do we necessarily look at this? We certainly know that through the IIJA and through the IRA, we saw historic investments in clean energy in general and we certainly saw historical investments in energy efficiency more specifically. We saw significant investments in tax incentives, 25C, which is designed specifically to motivate consumers who own homes and who itemize and you can now own two homes and claim the credit. Also for developers to build energy star or better homes and then also tax incentives specifically for commercial, both existing and new buildings. And so those investments there were also excited about other investments. Primarily I'm gonna mention the greenhouse gas reduction fund. And that's a $27 billion investment that's been made by Congress in the future of energy investments, of clean energy investments, primarily in low income and disadvantaged communities. That's about the full total is approximately $27 billion. You have a $7 billion tranche that is specific to low income and disadvantaged communities. We think that, well, we think we're pretty sure that's gonna go towards solar community and rooftop. We also have another $8 billion that is designed specifically again for low income and disadvantaged communities. And that will go toward projects that reduce or eliminate greenhouse gas emissions and can also include solar as well. I mentioned those pieces that is the investments in energy efficiency as part of the IIJ and the IRA and investments more specifically in terms of the greenhouse gas reduction fund because ideally what happens with this is that these investments that have been granted at the federal level are combined and braided with the investments that are happening at the state level. And so it's interesting to say, so kind of if you can take a picture of these two graphs now or these two graphics now and when we come back next year and the year after and the year after, it's gonna be interesting to kind of see that growth particularly on the right in terms of utility efficiency spending. The anticipation is that utility spending will increase, not decrease because of the federal spending. That is the intention of these federal investments to supplement but not to supplant those investments. One more piece before I hand it over to Billy and that is that we certainly understand in energy efficiency that it has a role in U.S. energy and climate policy. In fact, the IEA has indicated that energy efficiency alone can help us achieve 40% of the emission reductions that are required by the Paris Agreement. That's energy efficiency alone. That's before we've begun to retrofit our supply resources. Oftentimes it is thought that if we are simply doing solar, if we are simply doing wind, then we've solved the problem. From our vantage point, we would say that the energy transition isn't simply a supply problem. It is also a demand problem. And so we have to solve consumption as we solve supply. And why that's important just as was mentioned, the cost of supply is going to increase exponentially based on the direction that policy is currently going. Policy suggests that we'll be plugging more things than in the future than we're plugging in now which means that we'll have to have a larger grid and build greater capacity. And if our capacity is primarily going to be renewables, we're going to have to build more of that as well. So these are capital investments that our utilities and others will have to make. Those capital investments are generally done over time. Utilities get paid back for those capital investments over time. The way they get paid back is through their rates. And so if we have to continue to build capacity to meet what we think is going to be an increasing demand, then the price of energy will likely increase. The technology that can help us decrease those costs is energy efficiency. It is you simply lower the demand. Now, to make a distinction, and for some this may be pedestrians and for some it may not, to make a distinction, this is not turning off your lights when you leave the room. This is not closing the refrigerator and leaving it open too long. This is not walking to school or walking to work versus driving your car. This is about technological investments that actually allow your refrigerator to run the way that it runs, but it's using less energy today than it used 20 years ago. It's about your H-back system running the way that you want it to run at the temperature that you're most comfortable while still using less energy. And so it's important as we look at the energy transition that we're looking at both supply resources and solutions, but also demand solutions as well and energy efficiency is the technology to get us there. Thank you, Vincent. Billy, welcome. Let's hear what American Clean Power has to say. Thank you and thank you for this opportunity. So the chart or the slide that I picked here, on the left, you'll see cumulative renewable capacity and on the right, you'll see generation. And as you can see over the last decade, we've pretty much seen a period of growth in the renewable sector year upon year. I do need to note though, however, that 2022 we saw slightly less growth than we did in 2021. And there are a number of reasons for that. I'd say first supply chain, which I think inflicted a lot of industries over the last few years. We saw delays connecting projects to the grid. In the first half of last year, as Charles mentioned, the commerce investigation seriously impacted solar imports and with the president's waiver that really interjected some certainty, a transition period for companies, but also some certainty in the market. And then finally, long-standing permitting obstacles. Since we're here in the halls of Congress, if you were to ask me what's one of the key barriers to rapidly deploying clean power and what can Congress do about that, I would suggest permitting reform. And I think there's a pathway to reform the permitting process and maintain our environmental laws and guarantee time tables. And there's a way to do that. So if I can put a plug in for anything, I would put a plug in for that. The outlook going forward is really good. ACP is tracking 135 gigawatts of wind, solar, and energy storage projects in late-stage development. We've seen 32 clean energy domestic manufacturing plants announced with 14,000 jobs, 66 billion in announced clean project investments, and 3 billion in electric bill savings for over 17 million Americans. Now this chart really focuses on energy sources, but I would be remiss if I didn't draw attention to energy storage because we're really seeing a boom in this technology. Last year we had a record amount of battery storage installed, four gigawatts, which increases the total battery storage capacity by 80%. In California, we saw more battery storage installed than any other technology, including solar. I'm sorry. Yvonne said I'm stealing her line, apologies. I'll stay away from California. But our outlook for storage is really, really positive. We're tracking over 16 gigawatts in advanced deployment, late-stage deployment. So, with that, I will pass it over to Yvonne and I'll stop talking about California. We love to hear about all states, so it's fine if we hear about California a little bit more. So Yvonne McIntyre with PG&E. Welcome Yvonne. Hi, thank you Lisa, and thank you both Lisa and Dan for inviting me to participate in this today. It's been a while since I've done one of these, so happy to be back. Lisa said I'm with Pacific Gas and Electric. We are the Gas and Electric Utility in Central to Northern California. I'm gonna focus today partly on storage, but the chart on the left shows that we are increasingly seeing a prevalence of a billion dollar weather related, climate related disasters and events. And it's impacting people's power. People are out of power for a long time in many instances when these events hit. And so what is that driving? It's driving people to look for solutions on how to keep their own power on. And so it is really, we're seeing an increase in residential solar, excuse me, battery installations. And it's really kind of gone off the charts in years. I mean, California obviously is no stranger to extreme weather events. We just in the last three and a half months in December, we had an earthquake in our service territory. And then in the last three months, we've had 13 atmospheric river events. I had never heard that term before until I came to PG&E, but we've had excessive torrential rain and hurricane like winds in the first three weeks of January. And then in the last few weeks, if you've been paying attention, just ridiculous amounts of snow. That snow is now melting and on top of us getting rain. So everybody's saying, hooray, we've got resolving our drought issues in California. No, it's not. It's improved our drought situation by 26%. But now we're having massive flooding, levees are breaking. Because of the drought, the soil has been very loosened. So it's bringing down a lot of trees, which are bringing down a lot of power lines. And so this is an issue that we're facing. So again, customers are taking in their own hands, installing storage systems so that they can keep their power on. And it's one thing that we're actually welcoming this increased implementation of battery storage in our service territory. And the last year, well, as of this last February, there are approximately 54,000 PG&E customers that have installed and connected behind the meter battery energy storage system in our service territory, totaling 500 megawatt to capacity. And we're also looking at this as a way that we can help the resiliency and reliability of our system by being able to tap into those systems, not just for customers themselves to restore power to their own homes, but to have power to the grid. We've come up with a couple of projects when we partnered with Tesla to create a virtual power plant. And so we offer to customers to join this program. We pay them a fee. And then when they're called upon in instances that we know we're gonna have a lack of capacity, they provide power back to the grid. Last year, we had a couple of really bad heat waves back in August and September. And so we deployed a virtual power plant for the first time in August, where nearly 2,500 of our customers delivered up to 16 and a half megawatts of power back to the grid when we needed it. And by the end of 2022, we have more than 4,300 customers that were enrolled. And this virtual power plant was activated 10 times between August and September of 2022. During that heat wave, we came very close to what we call to do rolling blackouts because there was a lack of capacity throughout the state. And there's been a lot of solar that has, excuse me, wind, yeah, battery that has come into the system that really saved us. We ended up not having to do rolling blackout, partly because of all the battery storage that came into the system. Also, there was a text that went out by the governor at like a very critical time that we were right on the edge asking people to conserve, and they did. And it really prevented us. So this is just gonna continue to increase. California is not the only state that's facing this. We're starting to see Texas. We had a big wildfire in Colorado. So it's spreading throughout the country. These are not just once in a hundred year events anymore. This is prevalent. And our systems, our utilities have to look for ways to bolster our systems, but to also work with our customers to help. Thank you, Yvonne. Yeah. Sorry about all the challenges that California and other states have faced in the last year gives us pause. Jennifer, Jennifer, great to have you. And thanks for traveling to be with us today and Jennifer is with Train Technologies. Thank you, Lisa. Can everyone hear me okay? Okay, perfect. So like Lisa said, I work for Train Technologies. We offer a broad range of energy efficient technologies that go into residential and commercial buildings in addition to transport refrigeration. And what I wanna talk about today from the Factbook is the status of building energy code adoption throughout the United States. So as you can see, there's a lot of different colors on the slide and the main takeaway from this is that it's not consistent throughout the United States what the minimum energy efficiency standards are for all buildings that are being newly constructed or have major renovations being undergone. And I appreciate a lot of the comments that have already been said because I don't need to talk about why energy efficiency is important, but Train Technologies in addition to a lot of the private sector has climate commitments in order to reduce the amount of emissions that our customers are putting out into their buildings with their energy consumption. And so there's a few different levers that can be pulled. One of them is ensuring that as new buildings are constructed, they're done so in an energy efficient way. And so there's a few model codes that exist at a national level that help states to adopt kind of standards for energy efficiency. And you can see that the darker green states have adopted maybe the more recent versions, more energy efficient versions of those codes. And some states are still using previous versions when it goes back all the way to 2009 in some cases. And so all of these standards are updated every three years. And there's a lot of states that are kind of trailblazers in the path to adopting the most recent version, but there is still a lot of support that's needed for the states that are a little bit farther behind in those energy codes. And so if there's one takeaway that I can leave with you just right now, it's that the federal agencies and federal buildings have an opportunity to kind of lead the way and support these states in their adoption and kind of show them how it can be done. And so federal buildings are a perfect example of some of the good ways to practice that most recent energy code adoption implement building performance standards which work in complementary fashion to building energy codes because they adjust existing construction as well. And so I'm not gonna take up too much more time, I'll wait till we get to the questions, but turn it over to you, Lisa. Great, well, actually, Jennifer, let's follow up on that a little bit. So we obviously passed some very significant pieces of legislation over the last several years that focus on energy efficiency. Is there anything in there that would help states and localities that want to do more on building codes or building efficiency in general? Definitely, so between the building infrastructure law and the Inflation Reduction Act, there's over a billion dollars allocated to supporting states in their adoption of more efficient energy codes. And so in particular, the building infrastructure law is dedicated to helping states improve their energy efficiency in general. And so that could be through workforce development or technical assistance. And that's over a period of five years. So there's some time to work with that. And the Inflation Reduction Act works specifically on implementing the most recent version of these codes. And so that can really help some of those trailblazers too that need additional support or are interested in adopting zero energy codes, which is obviously a really important ask as we start to look into the future and decarbonizing our buildings. And just to kind of set the stage one more time, a fun fact is that the Department of Energy estimates that 75% of the buildings that will be newly constructed or renovated by 2035, 75% of buildings will be newly constructed or renovated by 2035. And so, some of the comments that we talked about earlier, if the power grid is decarbonized by that time, and it meets the goals of the administration, we wanna make sure that the demand side is reducing their use on fossil fuels in addition to consuming the least amount of energy as possible. Great, thank you. That was really helpful. I just wanna remind folks that may be participating online. If you would like to ask a question, you can email ASK at EESI.org. And also for those here in about 10 minutes, we're gonna open it up plenty of time for questions from those participating here. So if you have questions, get ready. So, Yvonne, I wanted to go to you too. I mean, fascinating conversation that you and Billy offered on storage. But I also know in your jurisdiction, very high electric vehicle adoption. I was just wondering if you'd talk a little bit about the trends in electric vehicles that you're seeing in PG&E's service territory and how you're thinking about it as storage or just part of the energy transition. Sure, it is very exciting. We're all excited about the growth in electric vehicles in our service territory. California has set a goal, the no more combustion engine cars sold after 2035. But there's like serious levels of adoption within our service territory. We have the largest number of electric vehicles in our service territory than anywhere else in the country. There's over 425,000 EVs in our service territory. And then nearly one in four of new vehicles sold in our territory last year within an EV. And I know a lot of people kind of are concerned about, well, what did that do to the grid? Can the grid handle that? And we're wholeheartedly saying, yes, we can. The electricity industry is really taking the steps necessary to bolster our grids and be able to add that capacity and use that. But the other thing that we're looking at is how do we use those vehicles to help bolster capacity on our grid? I think everybody's heard in California, we also have the most solar installations and any other state in the country. But guess what, when the sun goes down, all of that power comes off at once. And so typically how we make up for that capacity that comes off is firing up peaker plants, natural gas fire peaker plants. And so what we're looking at is instead of relying on dirtier plants to do that, we're gonna rely on all these electric vehicles that are in our territory. And so an electric vehicle battery has the capability to power a house for three days. A Tesla Powerwall has the ability to do that for three hours, three to four hours. So you can add multiples, but there's gonna be a lot of money to do that to be able to power a house for three days. So we've entered partnerships into partnerships with Ford and GM to test bi-directional charging technologies. And so with Ford, we're taking their electric lightning pickup truck and we're looking at, how is it gonna work? How can we set up our system to be able to access that power in the times that we need it? And so just similarly to the types of things that we're doing with the residential battery installations, we're gonna offer a special rate and allow customers to opt into this program. And so when we need to call on extra power being put onto the grid, that's where we're gonna get it from. And so because we have so many EVs already in our system, it's gonna, hopefully we'll get most of our customers to buy into this program that we are not gonna have to rely on fossil fuel plants anymore. And we're not gonna have to do a lot of more building and so of new plants. And so this is gonna really help us go to that grid. The partnership with GM is actually testing the bi-directional charging technology as well. We have this really great testing lab in San Ramon, California that we test all types of equipment from high voltage equipment to, we're doing appliance like hood testing. There's big debate on gas stoves right now. So we're actually testing hood to see if you can increase the ability to take up the VOCs that are associated with gas stoves. But this is the other place that we're testing the bi-directional charging technology. And so great partnerships, a lot of utilities are really partnering with the auto industry to ensure that we're in this together when we want to make the systems work. But we also wanna see how they can benefit and not just put a burden onto the electricity grid. Thank you. Yeah, amazing what's happening. And I know just in the conversations that I've had with members and others in the industry in the past couple of years, just a lot of these concepts have been discussed for a long time, but now we're actually seeing them in the marketplace and we're seeing new partnerships come. And I'm sitting here listening to this panel, you forget really we've had a tremendous four years of activity in federal energy policymaking. And most of it's been on a bipartisan basis. Obviously the Inflation Reduction Act was more driven by the Democratic Party, but a lot of the stuff that was in there are things that have had bipartisan support for many years, including a lot of the tax incentives that were in there. And certainly I think the priorities of Republicans to broaden the menu of the types of activities that we support through the tax code was represented in the Inflation Reduction Act. But when we couldn't imagine those bills having passed in the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act or the Energy Policy Act that was passed the year before or the Chips in Science Act, our industries were saying, A, we need support and we need any more partnership from the federal government to help communities, to help the private sector, to help states and regions move forward with the energy transition. But what we really need is predictability. We need policy certainty and we need policies that are not just one or two years, but that could satisfy the project cycles of many technologies. And there are many technologies that need more than one or two years to move through the project investment and construction cycle. So those things were in large part addressed. And now Charles, you're gonna be like, she said all this, but why is she gonna come to me? But in your comments that you made just now, looking at the experience of the solar industry last year, you saw a disruption, right? And then there was an action taken in this case by the Biden administration that caused a calming, a slight reprieve from the disruption that you were experiencing. So I was just wondering if you could talk about how your industries are feeling as we approach 2023, I mean, maybe on trade, not fully resolved, but are they feeling that there's a little bit more predictability and how important is policy certainty for investment in the industries that you work in? Yeah, well, I'll say first of all, we've been putting out fires lately, but I think that when it comes to things that support domestic manufacturing, like that is something that we wanna continue to let members of Congress know and policy makers know that when we put policies out that let us get the assurance of where America will be in the next few years, domestic manufacturing and bringing jobs back to America, but also the jobs that these policies create, they will change districts, they'll change lives, they'll make a huge economic impact. So I think that that is something that a lot of our member companies are focusing on, is how do we bring back more domestic manufacturing? But we do understand that the supply chain is still with the current capacity levels that we still have to figure out how we can depend, not on China, but other countries as well and as well as bringing those jobs here to the United States. So I think policy is definitely shaping up and has been in our favor. However, we continue to face different challenges on a day-to-day basis, so. Thank you. Well, I'll come back to that because there might be some suggestions for Congress that you're thinking about in that context. Billy, I'd love to go to you. I mean, you can make a comment on the policy certainty part if you'd like, but I'd also love to hear from you. You mentioned permitting and siting, and obviously we're here at the offices of the House of Representatives and in the next few weeks, we're expecting one of maybe several energy bills that are gonna move forward. And I know for the Business Council for Sustainable Energy, that is a very high priority for us, this Congress. And I just wanna know if you wanna expound on that a little bit more, but also too, if there's anything, as you look back over the last few years on kind of the goals that you had and what kind of policy certainty we have or don't have at this moment, so. Sure, certainly the Inflation Reduction Acts gave us a decade of tax policy certainty, and we're seeing those market signals are impacting that look that I talked about today with regards to solar manufacturing and investment in clean energy products. So we're really seeing a boom in that. I think that to realize the full benefits of that, permitting reform is gonna have to be a part of that because, frankly, we need to build, we need to build plants, we need to build transmission lines, there's a lot. HR1 that will be moving through the House, I think makes, has some really important pieces in it, specifically related to reforming NEPA. I think there is more that can be had, and I think once the House passes their bill, we'll see what the Senate adds to it. We're certainly hoping there's some movement to help build transmission lines, but we are really supportive of the process and we're happy to see that the House took this up so early in this Congress. Yeah, that's great. Just to piggyback off what Billy just said, when it comes to transmission lines, I feel that the responsibility that we have to do when it comes to policies in that room would definitely have to take and consider the environmental justice impacts and the equity. We wanna make sure that we're doing it the right way. So just wanna make sure that while we think of transmission, we wanna make sure that we're doing it in a just and equitable way. No, I appreciate that. And worthy of a whole conversation in and of itself, which I'm sure EESI will lead because it's just so important to unpack what you just said, Charles. I, Amy, I wanted to see if you wanted to comment on any of the energy legislation that the Republican leadership here in the House is involved in anything that you're prioritizing, something, things that you're hoping to get accomplished. Oh, yeah, thank you. I think that, you know, we too see this as a positive and a strong first step. The, you know, the House plan, the Republicans plan, it's multifaceted, it's about investing in innovation, unlocking domestic resources, and the letting, you know, having things, you know, let us build the permanent reform piece. And so we're, you know, we were glad to see that out and that move moving forward. As I mentioned in my initial remarks, you know, we think that there's real opportunity and alignment between emission reductions, global emission reductions, and the type of modernizing or permitting that'll allow increased build out of clean energy, increased access to our critical energy resources in the U.S. and that's securing the supply chain and so forth. And so a lot of these goals align. And I would, I think it's, would encourage folks not to get put into this like false choice, you know, that there's a trade-off between, you know, between environment and in energy production and national security. I mean, it's all the legs of the school. The stool, we need the affordability, we need the emissions, the emissions component to be there. And then we also, I need this focus on energy security. So, yeah, we see this as a very positive thing and, you know, a good step and yeah, I'll leave it at that. Okay, well, we'll come back to you. We're gonna, I'm gonna take one, do one more question from up here, but then we're gonna open it up to questions. So get ready if you have one. Vincent, Jennifer talked a little bit about building codes, but beyond again, these very significant pieces of legislation that have been enacted. And I know you're working feverishly like we all are to help design the programs that are included in them. You know, are there other things that you would recommend that Congress do to support energy efficiency? Yeah, certainly Lisa don't wanna understate the value of IRA and IJ. I mean, historic in terms of energy efficiency investments. Having said that, if we're the way that we're looking at IRA and IJ and IJ investments, first bills on energy efficiency long overdue, but what they do provide is they provide a baseline or what are in Yvonne's parlance, they give us base load capacity. They may keep us humming for a while, right? In terms of what we need to do as part of the energy transition, that is energy efficiency carrying its load. But if there's an additional step that we could have taken in the IRA and certainly a step that we should be looking toward post-RA and Yvonne touched on this some as well, that would be with investments in demand flexibility and in gaps as well. What are gaps? So grid integrated efficient buildings. Okay, thank you. And so Yvonne talked about virtual power plants. What demand flexibility, we call it active efficiency at the Alliance to save energy. Some also call it digital energy efficiency. It is about the ability of technologies to communicate to make equipment and homes and buildings more efficient. And so if you use in bi-directional charging, that is curious enough at a demand flexibility type technology. It is about, think about this. We're not there yet, but the technology is gonna get us there if we make the investments. But demand flexibility is about a building's ability to shift share and shed load on a regular basis. A community's ability to shift share and shed load. A home's ability. Even inside your, not there yet, think about appliances and equipment, having that ability to shift share and shed load. Working with your utility, working with businesses, working with commercial, working with industrial. You add all of those, you add demand flexibility into all of those different pieces and you actually optimize or maximize the already placed energy efficiency investments. That's what we would like to see. We think the next big step, one of the next big steps on energy efficiency is investments in demand flexibility. A lot of that is on the utility side, but a lot of that is on the consumer side as well. I see Jennifer shaking her head. Any comments on that that you wanna add? No, I agree with everything that you said. One thing to consider is that there's a new trend to implement building performance standards. So I had alluded to it previously, but it's a way for larger commercial buildings to have targets to reduce their energy consumption over time. And so it would really stress the importance of that there's a national coalition right now. I think it has about over 30 cities and a few states and a couple of states that have already implemented this and cities. So really stressing the importance of getting those policies in place. And that might include potentially benchmarking policy prior to actually setting the targets for reduced emissions because you can't reduce the energy if you don't know how your energy is being used. And so there's a lot of different policies that are in place right now and up and coming that can work in conjunction with all of the funding that is being presented at the IRA. So a lot of times those energy efficiency improvements might also be able to qualify for a tax credit. And so there's a lot of different moving parts but would really just stress the importance of getting those policies in place. Great, thank you. Well, as promised, we'd love to open it up to some questions from people in room. Anyone have a question? And if, okay, I see one here. And if you could please introduce yourself. And we have, great, we have some from online too. Wait, well, Mike is coming to you. Thanks very much. My name is Jared Blom. I happen to serve as chair of ESI and want to tell you all how thrilled I am about this program this afternoon and many of you on the panel I know personally and thank you for making the time to come see us. I'm thrilled by the kind of progress we've made in terms of implementing a lot of the technologies which you guys are talking about in terms of production technology and efficiency technology. But data shows that between the production of the energy and the utilization of the energy there's a tremendous amount of loss. Some estimates up to two thirds. Can any of you talk to the issue of how we can we upgrade the grid and enhance the efficiency of the actual delivery? Is that something that any tech, any particular industry is looking at to try and be more efficient in how we actually transmit the electricity? Anyone, I also want to say, Ethan, you're welcome to answer any questions you'd like. I will pull up a chair for you if you want to comment. We'd love to have your input but anybody on the panel want to talk about that? Look, I would say that's an energy efficiency issue really if our energy is being produced more efficiently there are fewer energy inputs to produce that energy. That's really what we're working toward. And so while it may not fully be an energy efficiency issue, there are technologies that can make the production of energy more efficient. It can happen at the manufacturing level when you're producing the solar panels. It can happen at the oil and gas level when you're pulling the oil out of the ground. It can happen in the distribution chain when you're moving from upstream to downstream. Energy efficiency can actually be pushed into all of those stages of processing and development to actually extract, to lose or avoid the waste. That's the word I'm looking for, to avoid the waste in terms of energy production. We're not the full answer in terms of greater efficiency in how energy is produced but we are certainly part of the answer. But part of, so it's a delivery issue, right? So you have tremendous line losses in the power lines themselves from production to end use. And it's a materials issue, right? And so currently they're copper wires and they get hot so you're losing your energy that way. So there are efforts. I don't know, I know materials experts are working on it. Department of Energy is looking at it. So there are those efforts out there but it's something that this industry has tried to deal with for many, many, many moons. Nobody's cracked that nut yet, but they keep trying. So. I figured with this group, you guys would know something about it. You wanna comment? And if you need to do more work on it. Yeah, I know 3M at one point had been looking at, you know, yeah, so. Thank you. I would say like I was at a briefing earlier today where this very thing came up and there's actually in DOE's loan program office, there's one program specifically focused on investments at existing facilities to do just this type of work. And then there's obviously offices and investments looking at broader transmission technology and improvements and opportunities. So it's definitely part of the whole picture, part of the all of the above check. Well, I would like to take a question from our online audience. We have a few of this first one and I can't believe we really haven't talked about this much and I would love to invite Ethan and if he wants to say anything about it, hydrogen. We haven't really talked about it as much as I thought we might have yet, but obviously, you know, connects to all the industries at the Business Council for Sustainable Energy. I mean, the question was very general, you know, what's the outlook for hydrogen? And I know there were a tremendous amount of incentives in the last several research development and deployment legislation as well as tax credits for hydrogen, a lot of conversations kind of going back to the slide that Amy put up there, how many different sectors could benefit potentially from hydrogen, clearly industrial transportation, perhaps buildings, power. I mean, what do they call it? It's the key that unlocks everything or something like that. So is that true? You know, how are you all looking at hydrogen? Does anyone want to pop in first? Go ahead. Well, Ethan could probably talk to the overall projector. I mean, I know if you look and encourage you to look in the the the document, I think slide 57 in particular, Scott, a slide on the projected outlook and looking at the demand, but also looking at the trends in 2022 electrolyzer shipments and a few slides ahead of that. It talks about the costs, current costs and the expected drop in costs for both blue and green hydrogen production. So the outlook on that is good. Currently the industry is small, but again, expected to significantly scale and grow. We see that, as I mentioned before, as an opportunity when it comes to the industrial processes, tons of opportunity on that front, but also, I kind of jotted a note to myself too when you were talking about the storage challenges. Another thing that came up, there's the ACEs Delta Project in Utah, right? I'm looking at Rebecca, who knows everything about all this stuff here. And that, for example, from a storage, like one salt cavern in that is 150 gigawatt hours of storage. So this is real game changer type stuff, both from an energy storage standpoint, also real opportunity when it comes to field source and use when we're looking at our chemical, industrial cement, those major sectors, real opportunity there. So again, no panacea for everything, but as we look at each piece as parts of the economy and opportunities to both reduce emissions and compete globally, I think hydrogen's gonna be a big piece of that puzzle. And there was funding in the IJA for hydrogen hubs, there's tax credits in the IRA for hydrogen. Everybody's going after this money. I mean, that's what you said. I mean, the star that everybody's gonna try to crack. And so we have a project that we're collaborating on in Northern California. California as a state has gone after the hub to become one of the hubs. We made some pretty aggressive climate goals last year. Said we're a gas utility. And so we've made some commitments to substantially reduce our emissions in the gas system. And part of that is putting hydrogen in entire lines. The industrial sector is one of the hardest sectors to decarbonize. And so that's where you're looking at. They use gas, natural gas as a feedstock for a lot of their processes right now. Can you use hydrogen in its debt? So it is something that across the country, everybody is looking at and investing in. Billy, comments. Yeah, I just wanna add, I agree with the comments here. This is a growing field where our members are investing more into green hydrogen. But I wanted to draw attention to Senator Coons and Cornyn just introduced a package of four bills aimed to boost hydrogen. One specifically is called Hivia, which would create a financing, a pilot financing program for grants and loans. And if you're interested in hydrogen, I would certainly take a look there. No, that's great. I don't know, Ethan, did you have any comments you'd like to make? You can come stand here and I'll move aside. I mean, I'll just, I think those are all the right points. I definitely agree with Yvonne in particular that for hydrogen, in our view, the most likely and important application is around these industrial processes. And I showed that chart. And we have not seen real progress on reducing CO2 emissions from the industrial sector. So that's the most likely. And there's certain things about making cement or steel that you require incredible heat and it's hard to provide that without burning something and better to burn something that produces no CO2 emissions. In our view, the IRA is potentially monumental in this area and it offers up to potentially $3 per kilogram for the production of hydrogen based on our own BNF's projections. And this isn't a fact, this is a projection based on what we see of the supply of the equipment to make hydrogen. You literally could have a situation where $3 is more than the cost of actually producing hydrogen. In other words, you're literally paying people to, federal government would potentially be paying people to produce hydrogen. The challenge between now and then is that actually one thing that isn't in the IRA is anything that really drives a whole lot of demand for green hydrogen. And so I think that's one area to potentially look at. I think the hubs idea and the money that's gonna go under the infrastructure might help drive demand and that could be quite helpful. But I think there's a lot of unanswered questions. And the last thing I'll say is, the definition of what is green hydrogen is not a straightforward question. And it is one that the Treasury Department will have to address when they write rules around how this tax credit works. You know, is your hydrogen green? If the, you have a solar plant and a battery right next door to where you make the hydrogen and all it does is provide the power. Is your hydrogen green? If you buy power off the grid to run your operations and you happen to operate in a state which is 75% renewable power. These are not clear questions to answer. Do you need to match 100% of the power you use with the power that it's produced? So in other words, is every electron that you use green at the moment that you use it, these are not questions that have ever really had to be sorted out fundamentally. And so the rules, which I think are exposed to come sometime in August, but we'll see if Treasury hits that deadline. That will really define a lot about, about how the hydrogen industry can grow in the US. We have time. Oh, this gentleman here, please introduce yourself. And a mic is coming, yes. Kevin Killian, I'm a regular citizen, except I don't have representation because I'm a DC resident. With you. I have a question about the power plant. I thought they were phasing out net metering. So is it like a power purchase agreement? And because the trucks and SUVs contribute to the majority of the fatalities on the road, could you make it a smaller payment for them than for regular cars? You said something about power purchase, or you said something about a power plant. And I like the term developer better. Like anybody can be a developer if they have renewable. Okay. And also energy efficiency. You know, we can grow it all. Any comments on virtual power plants, a little bit more detail on how they worked, at least in the setting that you are in? Yeah, so we, like I said, we have one already set up with Tesla. And so we, customers sign up with us. We, and so then we request, when we find out that we have a need, a capacity shortage, then we put the call out that they, you know, put the power back onto the grid and they receive $2 for every incremental kilowatt hour of electricity that discharges during the event. They can opt out. Like if they're just like, oh, I'm afraid my power's gonna go out. I need it for here. But so that that's the one that we already have going. We just announced last month, partnership with Sunrun that it is a special program just for summer reliability. So Sunrun will enroll up to 7,500 residential homes, solar and battery systems in our service territory that will be capable of discharging 30 megawatts back to the grid during times of constraint. They will be, if you're enrolled in the program, they'll be directed to discharge every day from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. during the month of August through October. So that's that window that we really need it when the sun goes down. And then in exchange, they'll receive an upfront payment, $750 and a free smart thermostat. And they will, and we're gonna ensure that they'll retain enough energy for their own personal use while they're also providing power to the grid. So from that example, it sounds very on the ground and community level focused. This will probably be our last question. Is there anything, maybe I'll give you all a chance to say one final quick word, but is there anything that Congress can do or federal regulatory bodies need to do to help make more of that happen? Or is it really just at the state decision or local decision level? Anyone have a comment on that? So I think the policy is already providing the incentives for people to continue to install. The deployment of these technologies for us to be able to utilize them as well. So that's one thing at the federal level, that's the most important thing right now. State level, it's always a matter of, how do we structure our rates? How do we structure the programs to be able to attract our customers to be part of them? And that has to have regulatory approval. So we have to go through the CPUC. I will say we are in the state of California that is very much bought into all of this that have very aggressive emissions reductions goals. And so, we tend to find a good partnership with our regulators out there on programs like this, but it is always the challenge of, we have to figure out the right rate structure that's gonna get regulatory approval. Thank you. Anybody else have a comment on that? Yeah, go ahead. Yeah, my comment isn't direct, but I think it's worth noting that our discussion today has been primarily about fulfilling the capacity need. That is the amount of clean energy we will need, the amount of solar, the amount of wind, the amount of green or blue hydrogen. And from a policy-making perspective, particularly since we are doing this particular briefing on the Hill by way of EESI, I think from a policy-making perspective, at least from this point forward, we should be thinking energy efficiency first. That is what is the size of the problem that we have to solve. That is what is our energy demand and how can that energy demand be reduced and then build from there? If we are not first tackling this from a perspective of energy efficiency first, we may actually have to spend more to build the capacity that we need. And so if we're being purposeful and strategic in terms of what energy costs are gonna be for consumers once we get to the other side of the transition, and if we're going to be strategic in terms of how much of our land is covered with solar or how much of our land is covered with wind or how much of our oceans are covered by wind, we should first look at energy efficiency, how can we lower demand? And the technology is there to answer a good part of that question. So we're not talking about a brand new technology. We are talking about an existing technology that is consistently being improved. Very important to keep in mind, we have a few minutes, like two minutes left before we close, but any last thoughts, something burning that you didn't get to say that you wanted to say? Start down this way, slowly go down. Anybody, Amy, Charles, Vincent, Dilly? I would just, oh please, after you. You can go first then I'll go. I went too fast, okay. I thought you were just, yeah, I was going like this to see if anyone perked. All right, Charles goes first then to you, Amy, and then we'll proceed. I would just say one of the major issues that I find interesting as my time working in renewables is specifically for solar is the equity piece, the justice, the environmental justice aspect. When we talk about the health implications, there are health disparities that we've seen across the country in low income and minority communities. I feel that I have an obligation to speak up on it. And one of the things that I would like to say when it comes to renewable energy is that for far too long in these communities, we've seen health disparities, respiratory issues have been leading killers amongst minority communities for a long time. And I say all that to say that the more solar that we deploy, the more hydrogen, when the less that these communities will be impacted. Benson talked about the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund. Right now there's a bill that is being pushed in HR1 actually to repeal the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund. And I just wanna say to that point, we must bring the health implications from these communities as well as when we look at the taxpayer dollars that some of these communities are facing when it comes to hospital bills and things of that nature, to be proactive in this space is the best way to go for it. So please put equity, please put diversity in the forefront of these conversations when it comes to renewable energy. Charles, I just wanna piggyback on something that you said about health concerns inside low income and disadvantaged communities. And certainly the relation to solar. I appreciate you leaving the opening to that really is energy efficiency that saw a lot of those air quality issues inside the home, air sealing the home, ensuring that the HVAC system is working the way that it needs to. Absolutely the capacity issue and the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund fortunately provides that $7 billion investment that will get some of these solar installments into low income and disadvantaged communities. But it is essential that not everyone will choose solar, not everyone will go solar. But one of the ways to ensure that we are improving the health of individuals inside their homes, particularly in low income and disadvantaged communities is through energy efficiency investments and the data proves that out actually. It's all about the portfolio, right? And then we all have something to contribute. I know we have to close, we're pretty much over like 10, 20 seconds down here, any last comments? Can I just, I want to piggyback on that as well. I mean, when you look at electrification, transportation, building, all of that, you are transforming a lot of disadvantaged communities are next to highways. And so you're taking those vehicles off the road, replacing them with non-emitting vehicles. So you're addressing a lot of the disadvantaged community issues and again, I shouldn't be saying this because I'm a gas utility too, but you take away some of those issues as well as you electrify buildings and homes. Okay, Amy, you get the last word before Dan comes up to close this out. Okay, I will just add, we have to think about the fact that we're in a global community as well and everything out there shows there's going to be increased global demand for energy. And because of that, we have to think about the right now and where can we produce the energy in a way that we've got an emissions advantage in how it's produced and that's part of the produce more angle that we're looking at and the reason we need to keep looking at all these technologies be it in the renewable space, hydrogen space across the board is that we're looking at solving these technology and innovation challenges so we can have a space where globally there's not that trade-off between affordability, reliability and emissions taking that all into account. So that'll be my last word, thank you. Yeah, and I'll just say the last several years despite as Ethan said, very weird years for many reasons and some really challenging and difficult times here in Congress and there too has been challenging but a lot of really strong bipartisan legislation and I think I hope that that's what we'll continue with over the next several years and the Business Council for Sustainable Energy wants to be a resource, so thank you ESI. Thank you to our audience here, our audience online. I'm gonna let Dan close us out. This is kind of fun. I just float in at the beginning and then float in at the end and I get to listen to really great presentation. So I have to start by acknowledging any time we mentioned building energy codes that's top of my list of favorite briefings. So thanks very much for that. I think our panelists deserve a round of applause for their excellent presentations today. And I think our friends at the Business Council for Sustainable Energy also deserve our applause as well combined with Ethan and Bloomberg NEF for bringing the Sustainable Energy Factbook to us once again this year. So thank you so much. This is the, I don't even know how many years we've done this briefing, 11. Well, okay, I have to believe I haven't been around for three and a half. So this is a great briefing and it really is a tremendous resource. The amount of work that goes into putting these slides together in the Factbook, it's a lot of work, but it's really worth it. If anyone hasn't visited, I don't like to send people to other websites other than esi.org, but I'll make an exception. If you haven't gone to bcse.org yet and downloaded the Factbook, you really ought to because it's what, 150-ish, maybe 140-ish, maybe 80-ish of somewhere, somewhere between one and a million slides that really give you some really excellent snapshot. I haven't looked at it yet. I'll admit, I haven't done it yet, but it's a really excellent set of snapshots for the energy sector in the United States and where things are going. So thank you so much for that. I also get to say a few additional thank yous. Lisa, of course, Ruth, Laura, everyone on Team BSE always really, really tremendous to work with you whether it's here or in Egypt or soon to be United Arab Emirates. So thank you so much for helping us with this briefing today. Thank you also to everyone on Team ESI. I'd like to thank Omri, Daniel Bryan, Allison, Emma, Molly, Anna, Tyler, and of course Troy, our intrepid videographer for helping to bring this briefing to everybody today. We'll close it out. We have a reception starting shortly, which will be fun. So I hope everyone has a chance to stick around and thank you once again to Amy, Charles, Vincent, Billy, Yvonne, and Jennifer for a set of really great, excellent presentations today. Thank you, we'll close there.