 edition of the Digital Grid Summer Webinar Series. My name is Omar Siddiqui with EPRI. I'm joined by my co-host, Liang Min of the Stanford Bits and Watts Initiative. And we're delighted to have you here for many of you. This is probably not the first of these webinar series. And so we appreciate that you being with us again. For those of you for whom this is your first time, we want to welcome you. We'll get some brief remarks just to give you some orientation about what the objectives are and what we plan to do for the series as a whole. And then for this particular webinar, and we're delighted to have such a great group of speakers here on today's panel, which is a federal and state agencies, a government agencies panel. And we're really excited about the speakers we have lined up and the discussion to follow. So without further ado, just a few housekeeping items before we get started. Everyone is on auto-mute. We're expecting a lot of participants and people are signing on now as we speak. Because of this, the best way to submit your questions is through the chat feature or the Q&A feature. If you look on your bottom of your screen, you will see a little floating cloud icon. If you click on that, that'll open up the chat window and you can submit questions that way. Liang and I will be monitoring the questions that come in and we'll be asking questions after the presenters are concluded. You can also choose yourself as a person to kind of raise your hand virtually and we can open up the audio line at that time. Recommend the chat feature is the most efficient way for questions though. And we are recording this session and so your participation is your consent to this recording. So thank you. And we will be posting the presentations as well as the recordings to the EPRI site and Stanford site, there'll be a link there and we'll point out where you can access the information that'll be posted from this webcast as well as from our preceding sessions. So thank you. Just a brief word, EPRI and Stanford we're pleased to be co-hosting this activity. EPRI we're an independent not-for-profit research organization focused on R&D through for all aspects of the electric utility business from generation to delivery to the end use of electricity and we have a public benefit mission. So our research is intended to benefit the public and ultimately we want to help advance through our R&D keeping electricity service efficient, reliable, affordable and environmentally responsible through collaborative research. With regard to Stanford, the Bits and Watts Initiative which Liang heads, it's a major Stanford initiative focused on the future of the grid and digital innovations for the grid for the next, for the future. And they focus on business innovation, policies around customer control and end user technologies. So really this webinar series here is really central to both EPRI and Stanford's missions to advance research in a collaborative fashion and to get in all of industry perspective including government in this case today. So our objectives for convening this webinar series is really to convene experts from multiple disciplines to exchange views and perspectives on what a shared integrated digital grid means. You see on the right some elements that are part of this vision. People have different perspectives and we want to understand what that is around the central theme of integrating customer resources to serve as agents to assist in grid flexibility. Part of what we want to do is identify some critical gaps towards achieving this vision. One of the themes that we've had recurring through the series is the need for enabling data platforms that allow information from customer devices upstream to the utilities to enable seamless transition of information and actionable information. We want to understand from the utility point of view what their requirements are and to understand what technologies can be brought to bear to address these gaps. And we've had in previous seminars and we'll continue to have leading technology companies as well as innovative startups talk about some of their approaches to help bridge these technological and data gaps and also to get a 360 degree view the perspective of government agencies will have today, leaders in government sponsored R&D, regulatory perspectives and so on. Ultimately what we want to do through this process is inform an industry research roadmap towards this digital grid vision and to enable a collaborative research initiative that is a large part of what FREED does and this webinar series is helping us in shaping and defining what this collaborative initiative will look like and there'll be more information on that as we define that. And again, the view in integrated grid can mean different things to different people especially in digital integrated grid but the theme that we have been using here is the idea of integration of customer resources to act as agents to serve and assist and optimize grid flexibility. So that is one of our key themes and we've had a variety of perspectives on what this means in actuality and how it can be achieved and what some of the gaps are. Without I'm gonna turn it over to Liang to give a bit more background and talk about and introduce our speakers. So Liang, over to you. Both attendees and welcome to this webinar series. So a quick recap of what we have done in June and in June, on June 9, 10 and 11, we have three sections, virtual sections and get together with US utilities, European utilities and information technology providers and talk about what they are doing, what the challenges they have seen when they work with their customers, when they work with their utility partners in terms of how the customer DE is integrating into the electrical grid and what type of data platform they are using or they think about to using and what is the technology challenges they are facing. So if you missed the June webinar, there's a recording available at both APRI and the Stanford website. So started from this month, from July 1st, we already conducted two panels. The first panel in July is about entrepreneurship and startup company. We get together three companies and talk about how they work with their customers and the startup company is relatively very flexible and working with their customers. And also last week, we had a university panel, we get together with two university researchers, discuss the existing research they have been doing funded by either NSF or different funding agencies. And today, we are very happy and glad to have three federal and state funding agencies here because we believe that this innovation ecosystem, the federal and the state agencies are very important part in this ecosystem. And what we will have in next several weeks, we will have next week, we will have a corporate research panel. And as we all understand that APRI is one of the utility funding agencies, we have a state federal, but corporate research is also very important piece in this ecosystem. Then start from August, we will kind of reformat the virtual discussion a little bit instead of focus on different category of a stakeholder we are going to focus on the technological, technical topics. So the first topic we are going to discuss is how the customer DR can provide the value of resilience based on the pulling results we get from last week. Okay, now it's show time. So today we are very glad again to have Chris Irvin from the Department of Energy Office of Electricity. We have John Lopter from NASA and Eric Stokes from California Energy Commission. And I want to give like 30 seconds because each of them has a very extensive background and the technical background in this field. I just want to give a 30 seconds for each of them to quickly kind of introduce their role on their agencies and what they have been doing. So Chris Irvin has more than 25 years in different area in the clean energy sector, including high tech field from HVAC system to semiconductor manufacturing, communication network and smart grid. And at the DOE Office of Electricity has managed over $1.7 billion grid modernization project. Back to 2009, when I had the American Recovery Actor, Chris is the one of the program manager who helped and worked with a lot of utility to deploy the spark beaters. And at OE Office of Electricity at DOE, Chris leads the spark grid standards and capability effort, including the green button, a consumer data access initiative and the Office Electricity's dynamic control communication program. And we heard several times in last several panels regarding the transactive energy. So Chris is also leading the transactive energy portfolio at the Office of Electricity. Our second panelist is John Lochner at Nasrda. John is relatively new to Nasrda, joined the Institute of Manning as the Vice President for Innovation. And he carried extensive career in innovation, investment and the strategic consulting to Nasrda. And he founded Headland Advisors, which provide a strategic advice in the topic of sustainability focus opportunities. He was an investor and also advisors to the business in water energy and the sustainable resource management perspective. He was the leadership team on the NRDC, Natural Resource Defense Council, and also as an advisory position at Lucas Energy. His experience in renewable energy, including as a consultant to the Department of Energy and also board member and executive committee member for Solar Energy Finance Association. And also he was investment banker in the global energy group at Credit Suisse. Our third panelist is from California Energy Commission, Eric Stokes. Eric heads up the branch at the California Energy Commission, which is called Energy Deployment and the Market Facilitation. And his office, his team, and folks on the development and also management of a new strategic initiative to accelerate the deployment and adoption of a clean energy technology solution. And one very famous program at his office, if you're in California, a lot of entrepreneurs that get access to that program is called the CalSeed program. And recently, and CEC and his office established another network platform, which is called Empower Innovation. It is the first professional network platform specifically for the clean sector entrepreneurs. Now, in addition, his office is responsible for several initiatives which help to overcome technology loss in barriers that prevent a broad adoption of clean energy technology. Now, particularly folks on the low income communities. And also a couple examples of the initiative is one of the very famous one is Design Build Computation, which provides incentive to multi-discipline team, including like architecture engineer and consulting firm to develop innovation of the design. So the format we're going to do is we'll start with federal, go to the state and from east coast to the west coast. So I will hand this over to Chris as our first panelist to share his perspective regarding customer DEI integration and the data platform issue. Chris. Thank you, Liang. And thank you, Omar, for giving me the opportunity to talk a little bit today about the digital grid and how DOE is trying to work in that space. I wanted to first present you with a nightmare scenario to try and focus our conversation a little bit. And it's something that we used to do a long time ago and we wish we could do some days today. And that is coming into a restaurant. But in this scenario, unfortunately, when you sit down, the waiter comes to you and they list every ingredient that they possess in the kitchen, every spice, every meat, every vegetable that they have purchased over the recent time. In addition, the waiter goes on to detail all of the cooking utensils and the implements and the appliances that they have out back. And then the waiter asked the customer to tell them about their life. And so she tells him about her own life, her origins, her family's back stories and how they're feeling today. And so basically an enormous amount of information has been exchanged and yet nothing particularly actionable has been done. Restaurants have solved this problem through the use of a menu. It is a focused statement of their capabilities in a way that they think is most actionable to the customer. The customer in turn looks at the menu and they process an obscene amount of information about how they're feeling, how their father felt about curry and things like that. And all they do is they point at the menu and say what they want. So this is the interaction that we are seeking in the digital grid. It is not to maximize the exchange of data. It is to have an efficient interaction that produces actionable results at the end. So the language that we're looking to use in this that we've been working on is what we call grid services. It is not a perfect language. However, it is the language that we attempt to use to convey a minimum number of offerings to the customer as well as solicitations of things that they might be able to provide. And then the customer is welcome to interpret those grid services and determine whether the contents of their home or their business are capable and willing to provide those services. Again, the thing that's important about grid services is it allows you to respect boundaries in the system and then you minimize the exchange of information in order to deliver an agreement and in order to exchange those services in the most efficient manner possible. So that's kind of where I wanna focus my discussion a little bit on this. The other thing that I wanted to mention is that grid services are about physics, time and confidence. And if I were to expand it a little bit, we have physics, time, location, confidence and value. And I would propose to you that the most difficult area of research where the least progress has been made is in the domain of confidence. And to a certain extent, it is the cause of our situation that we find in research and domains where we try to collect as much information as possible from the customer and from the customer's assets, streaming data back from inverters and things like that. It is because we don't trust the customer to interact with us. And so we want to use their data for them in some kind of a paternalistic way. And I think that that is a defect in the way that we're pursuing this DER future to a certain extent. However, we are trying still to get a hold on even the physics determinants is what is the minimum number of grid services that we could discuss with a customer that accurately express the needs of the utility at the time. And in the environment that we have in some of our research projects, the customer should probably ask for the switch status of all the switches on the network and the reclosers and the transformer temperature. And the customer says, well, I'll determine what you need based on all the information that you've given to me. So we've got this unhealthy dialogue where the information needs to be compressed and acted on where it exists. And I think that's extremely important for ownership recognition. It's important for the sovereignty of the individual actors on our system that will always be separate from each other. And it's important for privacy. And while I'm still on the soapbox of collecting too much data is that confidentiality is not privacy. I've had proposals come in to us where they say, well, we're going to collect all the customer's data but you wouldn't believe how well we're going to protect it. I mean, it's going to be very well protected. That is not privacy, that is confidentiality. So moving on to the confidence interval is that if the customer's DERs could make concrete guarantees of service to a utility and they could do it in advance of when the utility needs those services, then we have a very healthy environment. We have a vibrant environment where the utility knows that they can rely on these services, these grid services, products and things like that. In turn, however, there is an obligation for the utility to concisely and accurately represent its needs to the customer. If they're incapable of representing their locational temporal needs to the customer, then we have an impairment in the dialogue between these things. And of course, when it comes to negotiating a price is if you can't define the product then you're not willing to settle on a price. And so that's kind of the dimensions that I'm looking for is if we can increase the confidence of this exchange, we can increase the accuracy of value and the performance of the grid services that we get back. So I wanted to pivot a little bit off of that and talk about where are the Department of Energy's R&D programs exploring customer DER integration. Most recently we've conducted the electric grid of things FOA, the EGOT FOA and awarded four projects. One of them is actually two, of course, Stanford. However, we also have Purdue University, Portland State University and MIT. And all of them are looking at the internet of things at the grid edge. And it deals with the same set of issues as how can we interact across ownership boundaries in the absence of trust from time to time as you're never going to be able to provide cyber security to the customer because the customer has sovereignty over their domain. However, they have things that you want and we want to figure out the most efficient way to gain access to that flexibility. So the IOT at the grid edge is an active exploration in those projects. I've got two minutes left, I am keeping time for myself here. We have also just launched the energy storage grand challenge. And yes, there are a lot of bulk power discussions and capabilities within energy storage. However, energy storage has great potential down into the distribution system and of course at the customer locations themselves and have great ability to influence the stability and controllability of the grid. So I would ask you to look to the energy storage grand challenge. Also coming up is the Connected Communities Funding Opportunity Announcement which we're doing under the leadership of the Building Technologies Office but also in partnership with solar vehicles and of course my office of electricity. But we are looking to exactly look at this grid edge and the customer resources in new and more scalable ways. So if you Google Connected Communities and the Department of Energy, hopefully within the next couple of months we will see a funding opportunity announcement come out that explores that. The other two elements that I'd mentioned just quickly in taking a look at how are we exploring customer DER integration? We're looking at it structurally through the discipline of grid architecture which is led by multiple national labs but most notably Pacific Northwest National Laboratories looking at observability of the grid and how can we interact with all this high-scale DER interaction. And finally, I would mention the Grid Modernization Lab Consortium is a vibrant area of research where we have multiple national labs collaborating together and it is funded by multiple program offices back at DOE. So it truly is a multi-disciplinary effort and has had tremendous benefits and research results coming out of it both in the theoretical modeling and simulation as well as projects such as networked microgrids in Alaska and things like that. So with that, I will conclude my opening statements. Thank you very much. Thank you Chris, really appreciate it. So just a quick reminder, for attendees you can submit your questions through the chat function at the bottom of the screen and you can type in here. So we will try to finish each of the panelists so we have 10 minutes to share their perspective on this topic. Then we will go through the Q&A session. So now I will hand this over to our second panelist John Larkin from NACERDA. Thanks very much, Yang, and thank you Omar as well. And thanks for everybody for tuning in and also a thank you to Chris for without coordinating team up some of the things I'll be talking about. So appreciate it. Just a brief overview of where New York is because I think it's important to how we are approaching how we think about where the grid needs to go and on what timeline. So here you can see the New York State Clean Energy Goals. These are set out in legislation that passed roughly about a year ago, the New York Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act which became effective January 1 of this year and the Act commits New York State to the targets you see here, some of which are resource specific and thus give the state and grid operators some sense of the roadmap to come but the implications of the longer dated in particular goals, decarbonization in particular assume substantial electrification of the building stock and transport sectors and that will obviously lead to quite a bit more complexity in grid operations. Here, just a brief overview of NYSERDA innovation. So we are an $800 million fund that invests across climate technologies. On the left, you see the four types of innovation kind of as put out by a Harvard Business Review and as kind of generally discussed. Given our climate goals, given the speed at which we need to meet these goals, we are aiming at disruptive and breakthrough innovations although we work in all four quadrants here in our roughly 600 ongoing projects but more broadly, we're not just investing in specific R&D projects and startups. We are investing in systemic changes to enable innovation across entire sectors or across the entire state. Again, going back to the scale at which we need to change and the speed at which we need to do it, we simply can't just focus on individual R&D investments. We need to unlock the private sector and other stakeholders including the higher education. So for example, alongside investing in specific grid technologies, which we do continue to do, we additionally work on supporting regulatory policies to enable accelerated adoption of all technologies onto the grid. And we're thinking about similar interventions for higher education and for climate finance where we believe there are opportunities to drive forward climate risk pricing models to systemically decrease financing costs for technologies that have lower climate related risks, whether transitional or natural catastrophe related. So related to the topic of this webinar series, I wanted to go into two different initiatives happening in the state, one ongoing and one potential that we're currently exploring. The first here is the ongoing initiative in the New York State Department of Public Service integrated energy data resource, which began as a multi-state industry driven group tasked with understanding how supplying utility and grid data to a broader set of stakeholders could support the animation of new markets, technologies and other innovations to support the state's goals for the grid and the transformation of the built environment more broadly. The vision here is to provide a single centralized, standardized data platform that provides data needs for existing and potential grid market participants so that they can be empowered to develop new business models, determine lowest cost solutions for grid upgrades and provide customer benefits and customer value proposition. As an initial set of market objectives, the group chose number one to focus on being able to initiate DER solutions based on self-identified grid needs. So that's for the DER developer. Number two to be able to initiate DER solutions based on a customer interest signal. Number three to better respond to utility initiated grid modernization opportunities. Each of these market objectives align with the REV objectives identified by the PSE in the state. The group has then built some use cases, excuse me, around the high level market objectives. The first use case is identifying locations where DERs can provide grid value via services to the grid. The second is to screen and identify potential customers in a scalable and cost effective way. The third is to accurately calculate and optimize business cases to maximize customer and grid value. NYSERDA has just issued an RFI on behalf of the Department of Public Service for this work. And we would of course welcome everyone's feedback here. Obviously a very relevant issue for everybody attending this. The RFI is 4501 for anyone who wants to quickly Google it. And we would expect to move forward on what we believe would be a multi-year implementation of this program, assuming we get the right feedback and the right sign off from the Department of Public Service in relatively short order. This is just a brief synopsis of to date how we got to where we are with this integrative data initiative. Moving forward, onto the second topic I wanted to mention on the webinar. So this is a basic graphic that at a very high level shows where does New York believe its grid needs to be based on its macro climate policy. So we would have electrified, as I mentioned, substantial portions of transportation and buildings. We would have connected those to the grid. And we also believe a quarter of magnitude, a greater number of small scale renewables and storage assets and other assets will be connected to the grid in ways that there is no way to centrally plan for. So from a grid management perspective, we're really switching dynamics here. We're inevitably moving from a world on the left here, a highly centralized grid to a decentralized and then at some point to a perhaps fully distributed grid where an increasing amount of grid activity could be bilateral and may blur the lines between on and off grid. This poses, of course, a big challenge for how utilities and regulators currently operate the system and in some ways requires the grid to become digital to enable the operations implied by the shift in system architecture. The requirement arises from frankly the sheer number and complication of all of the activities that would be going on to the grid and the need for near real-time orchestration of all of those activities to keep the grid balanced. Given the shift we've asked ourselves and we've had some consultants come in and give us some thoughts including Eric Dressel-Huiz and Craig Boyce, the former of which was a smart grid tech entrepreneur with Silver Spring Networks, originally one of the founders and Craig Boyce who's been a consultant on innovation and technology for decades. And they've helped us think through, how do we get the innovation we need onto the grid to reach the goals that we know we have for 2040 and 2050 in particular? And this slide walks through some of our assumptions on this point. And our assumptions are that most of the tech that we need to get to particularly the 2030 goal already exists. It's either commercial or near commercial. However, even mature technologies with proven value propositions are not fully deployed. In many instances, what large grid tech OEMs and startups laugh is a market or price signal that would drive scale deployment. And often what utilities may not have is clear direction from regulators as to how to choose technologies to implement given no clear functionality requirements. As with any market, clarity around size and market potential and policy drives action. So we in New York have the opportunity to catalyze the private sector to create and deploy all these great innovations that we know we need for the future of our grid. We just need to provide the market clarity to get there. One of the paths forward we've been discussing and this is very much in real time is for the regulator alongside utilities and tech OEMs and other stakeholders to set future functionality requirements for instance, building to grid interactions and dates by which these functionalities must be in place. California has of course done similar work with solar inverter standards. For instance, through California interconnection rule 21. We believe by setting future functionality requirements we can spur utilities and corporates to act. Corporate can develop their technologies to meet the required functionalities knowing that if they do a good job there is a market waiting for them, a scalable market and utilities can assess these different technology options available to meet the requirements that they know they will be held to. With new functionalities come the opportunity of course for new business models and pricing signals in different types of interactions. So alongside functionality requirements that date certain in the future we were proposing to develop a regulator sanction sandbox or bounded area in which regulators utilities and businesses could then innovate policy and pricing signals around these new required functionalities. So for example, a company might propose a business model that would reduce congestion on the grid using tech that meets certain new functionality requirements and we could trial it alongside the regulator and utilities to determine what the value was to the grid and what the value was to customers. Given the pace of technological change the pace of change of the grid in New York given that with a little bit more than 15 years from now we are planning to have nine plus gigawatts of offshore wind, we currently have none and many, many more gigawatts of land-based large and decentralized renewables and storage. We just made the largest procurement announcement for national or for US renewables yesterday for the state and we believe a sandbox can help us get the state and the industry to innovate at a greater speed towards the interactive grid that we believe we do in fact need to reach our policy goals. And so with that I will turn it back over to the moderator. Thank you all very much. Thank you John, appreciate it. And now we're going to move from east post to west coast. I will hand this to Eric of California Energy Commission. Great, thanks Liang, thanks Omar for inviting me today to come talk. As Liang mentioned earlier, my name is Eric Stokes I'm with the California Energy Commission specifically the Research and Development Division and the Research and Development Division is responsible for minister of the state funded energy R&D in California. On average we typically award about 150 million to 200 million dollars in youth funding each year. Our kind of flagship R&D program is a program called the Electric Program Investment Charge and this is our program for the electricity sector. This program is unique in that we actually co-administer this program with the three investor owned utilities in California. As far as the CDC's administration of the program this is about 130 million dollars in youth funding each year and we've kind of organized our investments in Epic around kind of these six investment themes. Kind of this concept of digital grid really touches upon all six of these investment themes. On building decarbonization we're very focused right now on how do we unlock a lot more load flexibility out of these buildings to better respond to kind of what's happening on the grid especially as we're seeing a lot of solar PV come online. On grid decarbonization decentralization a lot of our early Epic investments were focused on how do we better integrate how do we better integrate PV and wind into the transmission system, the types of tools needed at the ISO and at the utility level to do that. As we're kind of going forward we're starting to really focus on kind of this concept of virtual power plants. We're seeing a lot of customer side solar PV and storage deployed in the state and how do we better aggregate and optimize those assets to respond more like a traditional power plant. And then on the transportation electrification side we have a pretty good sized portfolio around vehicle grid integration. A lot of our research in the past has informed various communication and equipment standards as well as developing some of these new powerful algorithms. Our original focus was on my duty but we're starting to see a push towards electrifying the medium heavy duty space as we look to meet some of our energy and climate change policy goals. And so we have a couple of focused efforts coming out on that front. Going back really quick to on the building decarbonization we have a funding opportunity that's coming out to establish a low flexibility hub. So that should be coming out in the next couple of months. As Lee mentioned one of our efforts in my office has been really focused around clean energy startup companies over the past few years. We've stepped up a series of programs to really try to stage gate new companies through kind of the energy innovation pipeline. Our first touch point with a lot of these companies is our CalSEE program which is kind of our small grant program. We just recently accepted or selected the first startup companies for our CalTestbed program which essentially gives startup companies access to testing and laboratory facilities at the University of California campuses or LBNL they're selected for the program. In addition we have two other programs are really trying to stage gate these companies through and we have the funding opportunities for these programs coming up pretty soon. One is bridge which is really helping startup companies make that transition from prototype into the pilot demonstration stage. And then kind of our last touch point is our ramp program which is for companies that have a demonstration and they're looking to scale up their manufacturing to kind of the pilot production level. And ramps are typically our last touch point with most startup companies. And then along the way we have kind of a statewide network of incubator and accelerator programs including the cyclotron road program at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab that help kind of guide these companies kind of along the pathway. As we started to introduce a lot of these new technology solutions we've also become very focused on some of the lock-in barriers and how do we start to engage some of these downstream actors that are going to be responsible for deployment of these kind of new emerging technology solutions. One example is we like to give is solid state lighting. The first generation of solid state lighting was designed to basically look like an incandescent light bulb to overcome some of these lock-in barriers but we're starting to see some real advancements in solid state lighting that really deviate from that kind of traditional form factor. But this is going to take some interventions with some of these downstream actors like architects are thinking, how do you spec, how do you design around some of these new emerging technology solutions. There's several tools that we use to try to overcome some of these lock-in barriers. One of those is informing codes and standards. Like John mentioned earlier, we did a lot of research to try to inform some of the rule 21 smart and burger standards. But one of the tools that we've used is design build competitions. We launched our first design build competition back in 2016 and the focus of this first one was for teams to design an advanced energy community. We had 13 teams that were selected for the design phase and then we downscaled those to four teams that were selected for the buildout phase of that and these included projects in Richmond, Oakland, Lancaster and then Bastic Avocado Heights which is a neighborhood in Los Angeles County. I'll talk a little bit about each of these kind of four buildout projects. So the first one is Lancaster. This is a partnership between the community choice aggregator and the city of Lancaster as well as their technology partners. And essentially for this project, they're gonna be building two new all-electric residential communities that will be microgrids. On top of that, they're gonna be retrofitting three schools to be microgrids as well as installing a storage program, a lot of the commercial industrial customers within kind of the city of Lancaster. And kind of the big innovation is that all of these assets are gonna be connected to the olivine Derms management system that will kind of optimize and manage all these various assets including integrating with the market. And then our next project is taking kind of a little bit of a different focus where Lancaster is focused on new development. The Oakland EcoBlock is focused on retrofitting an existing block in the city of Oakland to essentially be a DC microgrid among 20 or so homes within that neighborhood. Part of what they're looking to do is have a DC backbone for the community and have community storage. And so they recently selected their site, their neighborhood site and are gonna be starting installation in the next couple of months followed by what's gonna be some extensive M&V testing to try to really understand some of the challenges and how we can scale this type of concept going forward. The other two projects are just kicking off. As I mentioned earlier, one of these projects is in Los Angeles County, a neighborhood called Bassett Avocado Heights and the other is in Richmond. They're both doing similar efforts, essentially what they're trying to do is transactive energy platforms. They're gonna be installing solar and storage as well as electric heat pumps in the homes of in the case of Bassett Avocado Heights, 50 residential homes on top of that. They're establishing a central microgrid for emergency response at a local church and they're gonna be trying to manage all these assets through a blockchain type transactive platform. Richmond, a few years ago, the city of Richmond developed a social impact bond to basically acquire parts of the city that had become pretty blighted and they're gonna be renovating and rebuilding those homes to be zero net carbon and as part of our project those homes will be grid connected to the olivine derm system. And with both of these, there's gonna be apps for residential customers and including a marketplace where they can buy grid edge connected technologies and various services through the app and be able to manage their energy use through a more simple user interface. As we're kind of getting these projects off the ground, we're also thinking about our upcoming design build competition. This one will focus on building decarbonization which we're looking at. It's one of our key strategy towards meeting our 2050 greenhouse gas reduction goals. For building decarbonization, we think we have a pathway for low rise residential but as you start to look to some of these other building segments, it becomes more challenging on how we're gonna get to zero emission. On top of that, we're dealing with some other impacts which is climate change and how it's starting our built environment as well as some of the affordable housing concerns in the state and so all these issues are gonna come together in our next design build competition which is focused on kind of your mixed use mid-rise building sector. And this we'll be looking to release this in the next couple of months. And with my last couple of slides, I just wanna put in a couple of plugs. We are hosting a virtual symposium on September 2nd and 3rd around building decarbonization. As part of that, there's gonna be a big focus around low flexibility in buildings. For those that are interested in applying to be a Lightning Talk presenter at the event, we have a link below and the top link is to registration for the event. And as Lane mentioned, several months ago, we created a professional networking platform called Empower Innovation. Most of, especially in the state of California, most of our funding is kind of scattered across various websites as well as events and Empower Innovation kind of creates a more central place for all of those funding opportunities, events, tools and resources and it curates those based on people's specific interests and expertise. I'll turn it back to Omar and Lee. Great. Eric, thank you and Chris, John, great presentations and we're gonna get some good discussion going on here. We have one question already in the Q&A. We will get to that and others, if you have questions, you can either submit it through the chat feature or Q&A. Just to get things started, question for all of you, maybe we can start with Chris and go in order. You know, how would you characterize the, in general, taking a step back the role of government sponsored R&D in this space of advancing, you know, a shared integrated digital grid? If you can, let me talk a little bit about how you establish your priorities and in general, how you see the role of government sponsored research working with industry, academia and other stakeholders. So maybe Chris, starting with you and then going across. All right, I just wanna make sure audio is still good. All right, so in general, of course, you know, the Department of Energy is part of the federal government and we take our cues from the administration and so there's been a lot of emphasis on resilience and on ensuring that defense critical infrastructure is counted as a relevant stakeholder in the world and in our nation's infrastructure. But our paths to supporting those agendas are still extremely diverse and represents sort of the full breadth of the Department of Energy. And so we have efficiency plays, we have bulk grid hardening initiatives, we have an enormous simulation and modeling effort on the North American energy resilience model. But the way that we pursue it is to look at the smallest parts of the grid as well is what can DER contribute to improving the state of the grid and its reliability and resilience and what potential dynamics does it present that are more of a challenge. But in general, the role of government is to stay out of the way of business and the normal course of events and that generally takes the form of moving down the TRL levels to where the risk is higher and the reward is more uncertain. So in general, we tend to attempt to swing for the fences and fill in where there's no particular profit motive. I think probably that's the easiest way. And then we do realize that we have tremendous resources as a benefit of the taxpayers of America. And so we try to use our money to seed innovation in areas that are out ahead of the curve. So obviously the internet of things is flourishing and extremely dynamic. And so we're faced with the difficult task of what stake can we put in the ground ahead of the field that solves problems that lead us in the right direction. And so really that's where we sort of try to focus on these boundary issues, these ownership issues, these security issues that shouldn't be solved through traditional means and should be solved through innovation. And I think I'll leave that to my colleagues on the panel to talk about the rest of it. Okay, John. Sure, thanks. Yeah, I would agree with what Chris said to some extent for NYSERDA. We are looking to be catalytic. We are not looking to overlap with what the private sector would do. We are looking to take on risks where the private sector has decided it will not take on those risks. We are looking to see innovation where we believe those innovations will bring substantial future societal benefits versus benefits to any individual company or industry. And I will call out one that is both in our decarbonization legislation but also perhaps even more relevant given the pandemic. And that's affordability. There is a huge affordability issue in this country and that's not going to get better after the pandemic. And so thinking about how we create the most affordable grid and the most affordable decarbonized future is very important to us. Another area that NYSERDA Innovation Dollars are focused are around solutions for the regular utility industry as well in particular. We support the development of results for the regulator to be able to make decisions and we support the utilities in their R&D initiatives because in New York state they do not have unlimited R&D budgets and of course are not necessarily renumerated for taking R&D risk. In terms of how we focus I would say the new legislation the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act goals are a key driver of how we think about where to focus our innovation dollars and then beneath those goals the state has various constantly shifting assessments of what the technology needs might be to reach those goals and we are thinking ourselves about what do we think the largest changes will have to be in the different sectors of the economy to get to those goals where there are no existing incentives for the incumbents to really make those investments today and looking to play in those spaces. This is Eric I agree with everything John and Chris said. So for us you know our R&D investments are really driven by the state's energy policies and on the electricity sector specifically it's a bill called Senate Bill 100 that put California on a path to essentially get this electricity sector to carbon neutral by 2045. For our R&D I mean it's we've operated on a couple of fronts and one is how do we get there in the most effective and efficient way and then it's looking at the types of technology advancements we'll need to get there and basically making those types of investments. I think one of the values we've seen from our R&D programs is the ability to bring stakeholders together that might not engage with one another. I think the other piece of that is you know we're still very much in experimentation and to be able to share the lessons learned especially from all our various pilot demonstrations and our projects across you know one set of stakeholders to the other so that they're building on some of the things that have been learned and things that shouldn't be tried again. It's been really valuable as I think John mentioned you know there's limited R&D dollars and the more you can disseminate those findings and results and avoid some of the mistakes the quicker we'll get to some of these goals. Thank you. Lin? Terrific. So you know another question I have is kind of follow on what Eric mentioned so we're going to reverse order from Eric to John to Chris. So it's about you mentioned a lot of investment your office has is still on the pilot stage. So the question is how can we scale the digital transformation on customer integration? How we can go beyond the pilot? So really commercialize them be adopted by the utility or the retail provider or municipal utility or investment utility then what do you see the barriers or another push we need go beyond the pilot? Yeah I think a couple of things. One is you know one of the things we've tried to do in our design build competition is to replicate how these projects would get built and you know if they're happening in a more real setting and really try to engage not just the energy stakeholders but how do you engage kind of this broader set of stakeholders into these projects? One of the challenges and some of the examples we've seen especially from our EcoBlock project is how do you there's a lot of benefits to some of these projects but it doesn't always translate into a business model in the case of the the Oakland EcoBlock project I showed in my presentation. The location they selected has a lot of value to the utility both for their electricity service as well as their gas business but how do you translate that benefit into a business model that allows you to scale that concept more broadly? The other barriers like I said they're typically not technological they can be social, they can be regulatory. One of the challenges especially with this project is they're pursuing a community financing district model to be able to finance parts of the project and maintain maintenance and operation to those customer site assets after the CEC funding is basically over but to create some interesting social dynamics you basically need some trust in the community and among the various residents that live there. One of the first projects that was selected for this there was some tension between parts of the neighborhood block and it ultimately led to that project even with the CEC funding that was gonna basically pay for most of the capital costs the community at the end decided that this just wasn't something they wanted to pursue because of these kind of long-standing tensions and it ultimately led to us trying to identify another site selection for this concept. John, you also have an Invencent Bank experience before and can you share a little bit more about when we push scope beyond the pilot what other any sectors we need to engage or players we need to engage to help commercialize some of these technologies? Sure and I would go back to some of my comments and my presentation which is I think the regulator holds the keys here. Utilities make extremely rational decisions based on how they are regulated and based on what their shareholders are looking for and their obligation to their players. If the regulator provides utilities functionality requirements that they are mandated to meet in the future and utilities are given the opportunity to try out with some degree of freedom around the risks they take and failing they will move towards the future state that we all want them to go towards. Somebody described to me pilots as industrial tourism and I've talked with a major utility recently where I asked them what the goals were of a pilot that they were spending millions of dollars on and their answer was we don't have any specific goals we want to see what happens. I well okay then I think that tells you where that pilot's going. I think pilots need to be part of a process and I think there's a very different process in many utilities around how they would look at bringing in new transformer technology or a new CRM system and how they think about developing a transactive grid and I think that squarely falls on the regulator providing them very different incentives and a very different structure in terms of getting to those two end states. So I would say it's scalable and it's about redesigning the regulatory process. Perfect, Chris anything you want to add Pia? Well one thing I'll add is in the difference between what you're selling and what you get is I think John actually wins the award that is his bio photo actually is the most faithful representation of him as a person and I'm definitely in very last place on that. However when it comes to your question Liang is I think that there are sins that are committed during the pilot stage that we allow to be committed that hamper forward progress. In many pilots is engineers can touch every device and they take advantage of that capability and they go and they touch every device or they personally install them and they troubleshoot them and things like that. And so getting the work done is a barrier to scalability because they don't think about the plan for no touch installation or they don't give it sufficient attention. They're so obsessed over getting connectivity over these 400 devices that they can't imagine how you do it over a million devices. And so there are technological sins that are committed in the pilot stage that are sometimes unrecoverable. There are also getting back on my soapbox there are sins of data collection where in the conduction of research we collect a tremendous amount of data and that is necessary for the project and things like that. However, there's no way in the real world that you could or should collect all of that information and very few researchers give time and attention to the fact of how will these technologies live in the real world with real people. And so I have that in a project I've got going on right now is that they're collecting terabytes and terabytes of data on houses because they've got this unique permission arrangement and things like that. But they have not presented me with a clear plan of how they can go to an environment where you only get 5% of that data. And so we've got a scalability issue that's immediately available visible within the technology. And that also brings us to issues of privacy and customer sovereignty is that the researchers sometimes presume too much control is ceded to the utility or to the aggregator than a customer would be comfortable with in the tens of thousands. You will always get a customer who's willing to see complete control to the utility because they get a couple of new GE appliances and it's only for a few months kind of arrangement. So violations of ownership boundaries are a good way of looking at pilot projects and getting an indication of whether they are going to succeed in the real world. So I'd sort of stick in those grounds and acknowledging the regulatory and some of the other barriers that continue to exist. Right. Terrific. So I'll hand it to Olma. Yeah. And again, I want to invite the folks on the line please submit your questions via the chat or the Q&A feature. We will get to the questions here momentarily. I wanted to ask another question for everyone. And this is related to the issue of sort of equity, social equity in R&D. We're all aware of the digital divide that exists that we speak about integrating customer resources, understanding that some of these resources when we speak of PV, electric vehicles, other times the customer technologies may not be economically accessible for some segments of the population. So just was wanting to get some perspectives on how you balance your portfolio and objectives with this sort of in the context of social equity and other, you can all mention community-based projects, things that can help to bridge that divide. So maybe we could start with John on this one and then go to Chris and then Eric on some of these issues. How has that dealt with in New York? Maybe John's starting with you. Sure, I think first and foremost when we think about using our resources and they're vast compared to other states but they are still de minimis compared to the size of the challenges, we have to be looking for scalable markets and scalable solutions, which kind of by definition means a lot of what we are funding will end up being a benefit to almost all rate payers and all citizens of New York state. So that's kind of an overarching perspective on innovation for us. Having said that, when we look in our home turf, so to speak, we can see that there are certain issues or there are certain communities that are gonna have bigger issues with climate change more quickly and where we need to be, we have a perhaps a more obligation and also a legal obligation now with, and to really focus on supporting those communities in what we call a just transition. And so for instance, and this goes back to the pandemic again, cooling is a big issue. There are many public cooling centers in less well off parts of New York City. There is no opportunity however, for proper social distancing in those cooling centers. And so we are dealing with a large percent of people who now have no place to cool themselves this summer while we're reaching new heights in terms of temperatures. And so when we think about some of the innovation priorities that we need to have in the state, we look at that and we say, well, we know we have to cool buildings in a cost effective, energy effective, climate effective way anyway, but here's an opportunity to focus a program now on a particular part of our population that certainly needs something. And so can we design a program that gets us to our long-term goals while solving the near-term urgent solution as well. So that's another way we're thinking about deploying some of our capital. And lastly, I would say I actually also run transportation for NYSERDA, not just R&D, but also other aspects of the work. And there we are very focused on air pollution as one of our goals for mitigation. And so when we think about where to fund solutions, we think about taking diesel trucks off the market and particularly in disadvantaged communities where in particular in New York, many of those trucks are parked in disadvantaged communities even if they run in other areas most of the day. We also think about mobility and access to work. And again, that kind of dovetails with electrification when we think about shared e-bikes, shared e-scooters, improved access to public transport and all of those solutions, of course, drive down vehicle miles traveled, drive town, other costs and energy use more broadly when we look at our models. Thanks, Chris, your thoughts on the social equity as it relates to R&D in this space? I'm gonna see the bulk of my time to Eric because he probably can address this a little bit better. In general, the way we pursue our research is that we go to lengths to ensure that all proposers from all walks of life are capable of proposing offerings. And so that goes from a disadvantaged rural utility with its resulting customer base as being a viable player in our research portfolio calls and things like that. However, we don't have any specific mechanisms for assuring or measuring social equity in the execution of our research agenda. Yeah, so this is Eric. So with our, especially with our EPIC program, we actually have statutory direction that prescribes a minimum amount of funding that needs to go to projects that are in a, what they call account buyer screen disadvantage community or a low income community. So we've kind of implemented those requirements through the solicitation process in our solicitations having specific carve-outs for projects located in one of those locations that meet one of those two criteria or by awarding bonus points to applicants. If they do a demonstration project in one of those locations, what we found over the years is that communities become a little bit of an afterthought. You'll get a technology developer, you'll get a systems integrator that they basically have the project designed and it's just finding a location. What we've heard from a lot of these communities is they wanna be involved and they wanna be engaged earlier in the design and make sure that the project and the technology meet their priorities. So one of the things we've been setting up is really to try to better engage with these communities and provide kind of more of a forum for them to be involved, not more of an afterthought in the project, but more at the beginning of the project. From the state perspective, we can't really do that type of matchmaking, but we can set up the forums and some of the platforms that can enable communities to basically describe what their priorities are for their community and to try to engage with technology developers or other solution providers that would wanna partner with them on a proposal to us under one of our funding opportunities. So one of the things... Okay, Chris. Sir Eric, I was just gonna say, one of the best things that I did see in this domain was in a project that we did down in New Orleans and that the city government made their first foray into looking at smart grid projects by engaging with low income community organizers. So they actually provided contracts to these community groups that are already in the low income community and they worked backwards where they actually used them as their agents in the community, explored energy issues, and then those people became the source of some of the challenges and problems, but then they also became the agents that Entergy interacted with the low income community through. So it was almost a recruiting of channels, a channel strategy to gain access and the trust of the low income community and not to have it be papered over by, I've got a technology work and I drop it. Yeah, sorry. Yeah, and that's a great point. And not always been a lot of cases sometimes, community-based organizations, which as you mentioned, Chris, are kind of those organizations that are acting on behalf of the community. A lot of times we'll engage with them and sometimes almost require a CBO to be part of the project just so that they have a stake and they're able to have some say into what that project does. Their thing, on our solicitations, we've developed some criteria that to really, to make sure that it's not lip service that we're getting, we basically, when people submit a proposal, we really wanna know to what extent they've engaged with the community and to be able to describe that and what the benefits are gonna be to that community. Liang, over to you. Terrific. Now we're going to start to answer some questions through the Q&A. And the first question, I think, is to John Nasrada. Basically, how do you foresee the Sandbox Evaluation Criteria Initiative improving the planning design implementation of demonstration to maximize the outcome and to generate better lessons learned? Sure, and I would say it's probably a little bit too early for me to get into just too much detail there. But I think the idea is that we're looking for a situation where utilities, the regulator, and other stakeholders can rapidly test and pivot, whether it's business models, pricing signals, technologies, functionalities. And so setting that up with the right folks and the right process, again, is something we haven't done yet, but that would be the goal is to buy design and have it be something like a pace accelerator, something like do that if you think about coding, that by design it would be structured in a way to get us that speed that we need. Thank you. Omar, if you please allow me to ask another question. And so if you recall in the last several panel discussion, we talked about transactive energy. And be more specific, last week, Terry Oliver, the former city of BPA, and asked about this question as well. So I would like to hear Chris and also Eric to touch a little bit on the blockchain project you have. Can you elaborate, first is what is the definition of transactive energy? That's the first question. Second is can you elaborate a little more about ongoing research in this field? Chris, first, and Eric. Thank you. All right, all right. I was gonna let Eric go first, but that's okay. So I mean, so transactive energy is, we try not to make it too complex, but of course the GridRide Architecture Council has a lovely definition that we rely on from day to day. However, it means that you are compensated for the benefits that you provide to the utility and the utility is compensated in turn for the benefits that it conveys on to you. Really what we're talking about when we look at transactive energy related in juxtaposition to demand response is that the resolution of the service needs is dramatically better. It's not at a regional level where you say, we'll just turn off some thermostats and things like that. It is extremely targeted to the explicit control and load needs of the utility. In addition is that the flexibility in the customer's homes and businesses that is sourced is extremely diverse and very precise as well. And so really it's just a platform for allowing a requirement for a service and the provision of a service to occur in advance of when it is required and at very precise quantities. That's sort of my quick definition of transactive energy. And then I think I'd like to bounce over to Eric for what he's doing and then I can finish off. Yeah, so at least it's kind of we see transactive energy. It's this concept of a prosumer where people aren't just getting electricity. They're actually engaging with the electricity system on a much more dynamic level than kind of the previous. If you're a customer, you get electricity and you pay for it where this is much more dynamic. If you're point laying about the blockchain, I'm not sure yet. I quite understand blockchain. And so I'd be curious if anybody can explain it to me. But one of the things they're gonna be doing as part of this Bassett Avocado project and with most of our projects that are these transactive energy, they're simulated markets to a degree because we don't have those market structures yet for people to take advantage. For a while, there was a pilot program called the DRAM program, which was allowing for these types of kind of prosumer transactive platforms. But for the most part, like with this blockchain project, it's gonna be a simulated transactive energy platform. One of the things this blockchain will allow is for trading of carbon credits among the various prosumers in the network. And it still, like I said, it remains to be seen how this is actually gonna work. It's still very much a pilot demonstration project just in a very real world setting with real world households and especially low income households, most of which are Hispanic speaking. So it's gonna be interesting to see how the community-based organization and the technology developers and the partners engage with the residents in this neighborhood about a concept that's challenging for me sometimes to get my head around and how do you convey this to the residents in some of these communities? So I'll just sort of take it back up. First of all is the mantra that I'm sure everybody repeats in the mirror every morning is that blockchain is not transactive and transactive is not blockchain. Is that blockchain is a tool, it's a wonderful tool, everybody loves it. But it does not represent the total of a transactive system. Really the people who have gone the farthest with retail level transactive platforms is a company called TNO in the Netherlands and it is where they have actually implemented residential level transactive platforms where they are using value as an incentive to provide not just a load management but a control resource to the grid operator. And so that's as real as it gets and we have not gotten to that stage. We have built a transactive energy simulation platform which is of course a merger of power system simulation communications as well as wholesale and retail markets. So we're trying to provide an open simulation platform where you can look at a blockchain technology, you can look at another market technology and compare them which is of course the most challenging part of it. And of course we're exploring transactive energy in the EGOT FOA in a couple of different locations but MIT is probably pushing that envelope a little bit further. Thank you, Chris. And Eric, Olma? Yeah, so question, we have about 10 minutes left and reminder to folks to please submit your questions. I guess we have a shy group and not as many questions coming in but that's okay, I've got a question here. And it's related to coordination of state sponsored R&D and federal government sponsored R&D. So John, Eric, you both manage very large diverse R&D portfolios for very large states. Is there a role that you see or how do you see coordination with Chris and his colleagues at DOE and others at the federal level in coordinating roadmaps or other issues? So maybe John starting with you and then Eric on that and then Chris, likewise, the flip side of that is is there a role that state R&D can have in coordinating and providing input to you and vice versa? So maybe John starting with you. Sure, we love federal R&D. They have more money than we do. I'll go back to a comment I mentioned around driving technology adoption on the grid and technology commercialization. The bigger the market, the more companies stand up, look and pay attention and start spending money in that direction. And so when we can be in concert with what federal dollars are doing, that technology segment or sector has I think greater chance of actually making it to scalable deployment. In practice, quite a bit, if different parts of DOE, ARPA-E have funding opportunities, we do I think two things. One is we will co-fund. And so we and different parts of the federal government I think have cost share requirements on a regular basis and so we will provide that cost share in certain cases. And something else we do is ARPA-E tends to focus on earlier stage TRL, CRL than NYSERDA and we will hopefully pick up the baton in certain cases from work that they have done and move it through the next different couple of levels of TRL towards again, saleable commercialization. The last thing I would say is just from a market signaling perspective again, I think it's important, although very difficult for the state, I will speak for NYSERDA to coordinate with other states and with the federal government on specific initiatives and roll out a coordinated marketing platform around focus areas where that's possible. I think it's tremendously valuable. Okay, this is Erica. So similar to what John mentioned, we provide cost share for California applicants that are applying for federal funding opportunities as well as we have an MOU with ARPA-E and so we found ourselves to be a good handoff for some of the technologies that they've funded. Kind of one of the areas of coordination, I think there's kind of more of the staff to staff coordination and kind of the sharing of best practices and how we structure some of these programs. A little bit of the lessons learned from some of the investments we've made. Also at the Energy Commission, we're responsible every two years for submitting to the legislature and the governor, what's called the Integrated Energy Policy Report, which provides kind of essentially its policy recommendations to the legislature, to the governor. A lot of these issues with the digital grid are gonna require some policy and regulatory changes. I think bringing in experts from other state agencies, from the Department of Energy and to some of the workshops, public workshops that we do to kind of bring those perspectives in is really valuable. So for my part is that there's no way that we can coordinate these institutional processes and things like that. And state sovereignty is very important. And so they deserve to pursue their own mission and agenda and things like that. I think one constructive thing we might consider is we are all working on the energy sector and we're all going to confront some of the same scaling issues. And so there might be some benefit in ensuring that regardless of what you ask your proposers to do, that you have some common requirements such as a cybersecurity plan submitted 90 days after award, subject to acceptance by your organization. A privacy plan, same definition. And finally, very essential for scaling is an interoperability plan. Interoperability is not security and it is not privacy, but it is a dog whistle to people saying do not use your proprietary interfaces, your proprietary standards because it will meet with a poor end in the scalability question overall. So I think that there may be some institutional processes we might be able to take a look at and use that as our uniformity as opposed to our mission goals. Great. We have a couple of questions that have come in and a little bit of time left. So probably have to go more rapid fire here. Liang, do you want to address one more question? Let me see. I think this is a group that really warmed up very slow. Anyway, but there's several questions coming. So I'd like to pick one question here, kind of let everybody, the panelists, to close your thoughts. So when we talk about custom DEA, for sure that we are going to see new commerce, like a third party aggregator, we already see that. And maybe we'll have more retail providers which don't own any lines of transmission or distribution and maybe completely different player in the future to who own a lot of custom DEA, not all who aggregate a lot of custom DEA that interacts with utility. And then how do you hold these providers to ensure the service? Because keep in mind, utility still has a responsibility to keep the light on. And we do a utility do really well in the past and we have the trust they are going to keep doing that. And how do you see that this provider can ensure the service of the quality to both the great and also the customers? So, and I see Joe Walegorski in there. It's good to see his name again. And basically is that no utility should pay for a service where the dimensions of the service are in doubt. You should not pay top dollar for something that you can't rely on. And so that's been essential to me is that if a customer is willing to be a resource, then they also need to commit to the performance penalties that come with non-performance of those things. And customers have tremendous capabilities but they need to be held to the same level of account that eventually the utility will be held to. One of the instruments that we've been trying to figure out over time is the concept of smart contracts in the blockchain space. And really it's one of the only things that interest me deeply in the blockchain space is a smart contract is a contract in software where not only does the customer sign up to quantity and the negotiated price, but there are the details of that is if you do not perform in time, if you do not perform in quantity, then there is a penalty associated with that because you have impaired my control surfaces. And so it's really that confidence interval that I talked about at the beginning is if the utility can precisely state its requirements and put that into the service requirements contract, then the customer can choose to sign up to those or not sign up to those. And that's what makes a market effective is the delivery of the service and the provision of it with guarantees. And Eric? Yeah, I would, Chris, I think you said it all. I think of it no differently than any other marketplace. If I use Uber all the time and every time it comes when it says it's gonna come and the car is clean and everything, then I continue being a customer and they continue making money. If one of the other side breaks down, then the contract doesn't work anymore. And so it's about making sure those contracts are quite clear. And frankly, I think in the future, a lot of it will likely be automated to the point where it will be very easy. But for the time being, clarity is extremely important. And on top of that, just like that Uber example is that five-star Uber drivers are more sought out. And so there is a way of rating the credibility of DER providers over time. And the less reliable you are as a DER provider, the lower price you can command in the market as far as I'm concerned. Yeah. Yeah, this is Eric. And I think one of the questions I think we'll find out at least with some of our projects that we don't know is what are customers willing to accept? They might sign a smart contract, but are they really willing to abide by some of the requirements of that contract? Yeah, and to me, just like a long-term cell phone plan or some other plan, there's a prepayment penalty or a cancellation penalty, and the market continues. Yep. Terrific. I will hand this over to you to wrap up the session. Yeah, this is fantastic. I always say I wish we had more time. I really do, because especially since we're getting great questions at the end, but I just want to thank each of you, Chris, John, Eric, for a great session. And I just want to read out one of the final really comments here, because I think that this echoes, I think, our sentiments as moderators and everyone else. It's all three of you. We want to thank all the agencies you represent for conducting your activities in very transparent and accessible ways, maximizing digital capabilities to inform and reach out broadly, to get input and increased participation by and from all stakeholders. So with that, thank you all for a great session. Chris Irwin, John Lochner, Eric Stokes, on behalf of Liang and myself, want to thank all of you who participated in this webinar. A reminder that the presentation and the recordings, the recording will be put on the EPRI website. You can access it from the Stanford Bits and Watts website as well. So with that, thank you all for your participation and to our great panelists. Have a great rest of the day. Thank you. Thanks so much. Thank you very much. Bye. Thank you. Hey.