 Thank you and thanks to everybody who allowed us to be here and welcomed us here particularly to myself and my partner we're super delighted to be here so thank you you know many of our stories if we go back far enough are about migration and it's about when you arrive in a new land making sure that you stay as a welcome guest and that you are a steward of that land and my story of migration started about a hundred and fifty years ago some folks in Norway decided to leave there they packed up their family boat put in some salted herring some potatoes and got their eleven sons on his crew and they left for a new land and that new land was Artero New Zealand and fortunately they never made it it's not that they died at sea if they had I wouldn't be here it's just that they they stopped in South Africa I guess they got tired of the salted herring and and they settled there I was born there about a hundred years later and then I got on a boat when I was growing up and I sailed to the Americas and then and then settled in the United States so for me coming here to New Zealand now is really the completion of a family journey I'm a hundred and fifty years late and I see I've only got four minutes left so let me try to get on to the point of the discussion growing up in in South Africa it was very clear that that system was completely unfair but it also seemed to most people intractable but one person in particular showed us that it could be changed and so when Nelson Mandela came along and basically just said we're going to do things differently you know everyone fell in line and what was fascinating about that and it's been fascinating about so many of these changes from inequality to equality whether it's gender equality marriage equality they the people who benefit are not just the formerly disadvantaged but it's everyone in that society that benefits and so at some point we will we'll get that and so it is with with with clean energy and so the idea that we're working on is how can we get more equitable access to clean energy for folks and the reason that's important is demand for energy is going to continue to rise we you know we see that in terms of my ancestors thought that salted herring was a pretty neat technology but most of us like refrigeration we like lights we like the internet some of us even when we camp we like electric blankets and and as we as we progress and try to make as a more sustainable lifestyle we're going to go to electric vehicles we're going to go to you know electronic currencies and all of those things are going to take electrical energy that's actually probably a good thing because we know how to make sustainable electrical energy it's one of the easiest ones to make the sustainable and particularly what we're seeing in some countries is distributed electrical energy where it's privately owned small scale and still connected to the grid and what's interesting about that is when we connected and have the right controls technology we can actually have it so that we can make the grid a lot more reliable and resilient and that's important because we're going to need more people to adopt it if we're going to get the scale in order to mitigate climate change and then if we're going to mitigate the impacts of climate change we're going to need a more resilient grid so as we see more storms more droughts more wildfires more floods and we have to deal with these things it's going to be most excellent if we have the ability for communities to be able to disconnect from the grid from time to time when they need to maintain their own power provide services to others who are in trouble and then reconnect to the grid when we when we come back on so what does that mean for New Zealand well a lot of the incentive structures that are happening outside the you know in other countries have been actually quite successful at bringing on solar and other types of renewables the challenge has been that those incentives are often structured so that the people with the biggest houses with the biggest electrical bills and therefore probably the more affluent in the society are the ones that are getting the cheaper reliable solar and the people who can't have access to that are actually subsidizing that in the beginning there's nothing wrong with that you sort of get to five percent penetration you get solar going you demonstrated but it's not a sustainable way to get to real scale so the opportunity for New Zealand here is to come up with a new model a model where more people can get access to renewable energy and then to show how that works so that the rest of the world will look at New Zealand and say okay if they can do it we can also do that and that's how we can get global scale so the benefits would be that not only would New Zealand have a cleaner grid and a more resilient grid but that the rest of the world would then be able to adopt more more renewables so just like you know New Zealand wouldn't be able to solve climate change on its own my partner and I can't solve this problem on our own either so we'd like to invite you this afternoon to our circle right after lunch to discuss how we can get equitable access to renewable energy and we'd love to hear your contribution and and your comments thank you very much