 Thank you very much, Tom. It's so nice to see so many friends, and I'm thrilled to be here mostly because of the kindness of so many of you in the room. I'm here for three nights, and well, some of us are going to go grab a pint later, but I'm thrilled to be in this room now. I left the employ of Minister Ryan there in about 2009, and I had been looking for a while for a way to get into development, as Tom said. And so when I was in Ireland, I talked to Tom, and by development I mean working, doing the same work many of you do here in poor countries and non-OACD countries. And I had the opportunity to move to the United Nations in 2009 and spend some time there before moving to the bank, as Tom said. The bank is, of course, a part of the United Nations, and just to give you the quick overview on the bank, and then I'll move into this. As you know, the bank and the International Monetary Fund were founded after World War II to help rebuild Europe. And now we have about, on the order of 30,000 people working at the bank, 15,000 staff, 15,000 consultants roughly at any time. And we do on the order of $60 billion in loans, grants, and concessionary financing and risk tools. So just to give you a sense of that, and in the energy space, we do about $10 billion a year. And those big numbers are roughly split between what we call IDA countries and IBRD, the bank like all large bureaucracies loves acronyms. And the IDA is the very poor countries, and the IBRD is not as poor countries. And countries graduate, and that's the term we use from one to the other as they're. The metric is just GDP per capita, essentially. And I see some friends from ESBI here too, I see them in Washington sometimes. So I was going to give a talk roughly the same talk that I gave at Stanford University earlier in the year. And it's interesting because I gave a similar talk maybe three or four years, five years ago at Energy Ireland. Energy and the conference and two essentially blank stares, who cares, stuff which I totally understand. Because obviously everyone's issues are the ones they have to work on and deal with directly. So that's why I put up sexy terms now. Some smart professor told me, you should say things like, oh, before it said a new geopolitics of energy for all. Anyway, use terms that people will find more entertaining than just what poor people do. But now the topic has gained quite a lot of press and significance in the world. When you think of it in terms of all of the energy issues that everyone deals with in this room have to be dealt with in some way in places with much less institutional capacity and people capacity and a lot less money, of course. So all of your knowledge is imminently transferable to a lot of these situations. Because as you know, the situations are not that different. So I'm calling it geopolitics and research only because we're in a research institution and geopolitics I already told you why I'm using that term. But I'm going to go through sort of the scope of this issue. I won't, I'll try to keep this to about 20 minutes so we don't, it's late in the afternoon. And then look at some of the investment money and then some of these geopolitical concerns and research. So you all know this, but this is a knocky slide from EASA, the Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, that cool place they developed in Vienna during the Cold War to get the brilliant Russian mathematicians to come over and share their secrets. And they put up this lovely sort of graph from 1850 to 2000 showing that we used to run on biomass and et cetera, et cetera. And the change in service is along with it. Now you all inherently know this, but when we're talking to our, you know, the bank calls our client countries, which is all poor countries, 150 countries, it's interesting to see this sort of evolution of how energy was used. And then I think as all of you know and you probably see every day in these conferences, we, you know, you inevitably go to the energy conferences and they put up a triangle, right? And it's very clever triangle and World Energy Council has a trilemma and everyone talks in terms of the triangle. Well, and the triangle is, of course, environment, economics, and security. Of course, that triangle is not quite so useful anymore because there's a lot, many more concerns that people have. And so we try to think of it in terms of other things, competitiveness or resilience or affordability or links to other sectors. So this one I used to always put up and it's for Frank Combray, who is Frank's now in New York at the EDF, right? Yeah, and Frank put this up to many claps and smiles, even though it's Blake and not somebody else, but that we take for granted these services and these are the kind of things I'm talking about, of course, the things we take for granted every day, the fact that the coffee was hot, the lights are on, the frequency is the same everywhere. We can light up our crystal and we have this lovely projector and we're comfortable. And those are the things, obviously, that everybody else wants, too. And so in about 2008, the Secretary General of the United Nations of Ban Ki-moon was... This is all Chatham house, isn't it? This is a European house, as you say, right? He was struggling a little with the climate change narrative and the negotiations, if you remember, coming out of Copenhagen. I just moved there and he made my boss at that time a guy called Kanday M. Kellogg's. How do we... We said to him, why don't you consider energy as a sort of core topic, right? It's something you can transact. It has links to climate, obviously, and environment and everything else. But it's also something you can... That's sort of core to the business of the United Nations. And in fact, Ambassador Donahue, who's downstairs or in town, I guess, worked quite a lot on this over the last years. If you don't know, Ireland should be very proud of what Ambassador Donahue has done in New York in getting the sustainable development goals over the line. And so we sort of tried to get energy into the development narrative, right? Where it seems obvious to everyone in this room or the energy people that it should be. But remember, it was not part of the Millennium Development Goals. And when you used to go in 10 years ago to even a place like Irish aid, they would say, well, we don't do energy. We worry about children, women, poverty. That is essentially it. Those kind of words. And that's what I had those first conversations with Tom about. So now energy is firmly on the table. It's part of the Sustainable Development Goals. Ambassador Donahue helped that. And so we have our own goal. It's called goal number seven. Sorry about that. And it has certain targets. And the targets are for universal energy access. That means people to have access to this. Renewables and efficiency. There's sort of vague language on renewables and a little better language on efficiency. Even though it's, of course, harder to measure efficiency and easier to measure the renewables. But that's how the negotiations came out. And that was minted when in September at the General Assembly roughly. So here's what the targets look like about the Sustainable Energy for All initiative that you may have heard of. So just to give you a sense of the scale of the decision why it might be important to you is that there's... Okay, I'm sorry. The World Bank is a very American organization culturally. Or I feel it is much more than the U.N. So they use Americas to show the scale of things because that's what we're doing. But roughly a billion people don't have access to electricity. And roughly three billion are still cooking on. Dung or some solid fuel. You can take that electricity number and probably triple it to get to the number of people who don't have access to stable electricity or reliable or affordable. So you probably have roughly half the world's population that don't have it. So it's an enormous number. You can get the numbers that will resonate with the power crowd. The Sub-Saharan Africa that has 900 million people in it, the middle of Sub-Saharan Africa. So not South Africa has an installed capacity of about 35 gigawatts. Right? So what do you have here now? Eight? Yeah. So, right, it's nothing. 35 gigawatts for 900 million people. So they don't even do, you lose of load probability in eight hours or less here and in the states. And here you do the cumulative minutes lost. There you have 56 days. Those are for the people who do have the power. 56 days without power. So you can't run a business. You can't do anything. So energy is a pretty big deal, not just for the poverty sense, but for the business sense and developing. And then the other reason to care roughly about this is that the demand curve for OACD is roughly flat. The demand curve for China, you'll see, even though it's a little surprising, is moving towards being flat. And then the rest of the world, which is the 150 poor countries, including India and Brazil, South Africa, is going like this. So all the energy demand is now a developing world issue where it didn't used to be. That's the big paradigm shift. And that curve should go non-linear if we want any of this other stuff to happen. All it shows you is per capita. I'll just give you a sense of scale. Per capita, kilowatt hours per capita, and electricity demand per capita for over a year. And, okay, so here's the U.S. and here's China. No, no, no, sorry, Russia. And Europe is right around here too. Virgil, five, six, seven thousand. And here's the rest of the world. Here's China coming up. And look at Nigeria. That's just the zero. I can't even make that so you can see it. It hasn't changed either, so that's the problem. So it's low and not changing. And if you put Ethiopia or any country you can name down there, it would be on that zero axis. So we went back a couple of years ago and said, well, what if you wanted all these people and businesses and economies to have the same amount of electricity per capita that, say, South Africa has or North Africa? And it comes out that, okay, this is a very basic sort of backward engineering thing. You just take a number and backward do it. And there's the curves that you start seeing. Those are those nonlinear curves, right? They go like this and you say, okay, well, those look pretty. They look pretty doable. Here's what if we take the numbers from the past and push them out to the future, that's the red line, nothing. And that's one gigawatt a year more. And then here's the number if you do the way all of you do the demand curves in Europe. In other words, if you take GDP and you sort of put it in a little regression model and stick it forward, that's what that comes out. So all the consultants that the World Bank hires to do demand curves come out with this line. And then the lines is that if you want the populations to have sort of North Africa versus South Africa. And the numbers that come out there as a power, people in the power industry, you would say are, or everyone does say to me, you know, those are totally ridiculous. You can't build 19% supply generation a year, year on year for 20 years. It's impossible, never been done. But okay, so that just gives you the sense of the problem. So the real solution is probably somewhere in here. But you could do it. We can afford it. They can't afford it. I'm going to skip this. And here's the precedent for how this has been done in the past. This is sort of interesting, but you can see these lines over to the left are the United States and the UK going from the 1930s, say in the US, up through the New Deal. And all the institutions of the United States are getting to close to 100% in about 1950. So that's 10, 20, 30 years from 1920. And this just gives you the idea. And the really steep curves are places like China and Vietnam, though, that did it much, much faster than we did. Vietnam did it in a decade, essentially. China, too. Totally different places, different governments, different ways to do it. Because the typical reaction to this is, well, of course China can do it because they're just fantastic at infrastructure, which is true. But Vietnam also did. But other countries take a lot longer, like us. But it's just as interesting as a precedent, I think, to see how these things happen. So now we're going into countries and we're saying, you know, then if you look in this, if you pay attention to this discussion, there's usually a dichotomy with people saying, oh, you should do all distributed generation or solar, or you should do all centralized power and the two shall never meet. And all power system planning people say no. But what we're doing now is we're taking geospatial data, so all the demographic data, and then doing a least cost optimization, just a straight optimization. The same way you would do it typically with all grid, but we're using off-grid and mini-grid. So mini-grid is the green, off-grid is the red, and the grid is the blue. And if you run this function in Nigeria, it shows you, well, you would probably do about 90%, 80%, 90% grid, because there's really dense populations and they have some corridors existing. But if you look at Ethiopia, the story would be very differently. This is just a straight optimization. This graph sort of helps people get through some of that, and I think we can come back to it if you like. And then there's this idea of environmental trade-offs. If all these people, if you think about that, if those 900 million people in Sub-Saharan Africa or the, say, three billion people who have access to crappy, for lack of a better word, service, God Electricity, would you have an environmental disaster? So the IEA came out with this cute graph. This is Fatih, who you all know, and he's spoken here before. He's now the director of the IEA. Said, well, no, actually, if those people get power, it's not a big deal. Overall, demand doesn't go up that much, and greenhouse gas emissions don't go up that much. But, of course, Fatih's wrong here, and the reason he's wrong is that he assumed, essentially, what my last boss used to call poverty management, which is poor people stay at very, very low levels of demand for the foreseeable future. Almost nothing, right, those curves at the bottom. But if they actually don't and they start to have meetings like this, then that number becomes significant, and you have to look at it. So, at the bank, almost all my colleagues are... The bank is separated into essentially three, but two that you need to think about. One, which is government to government loans, that's the World Bank. And then there's something called the IFC, the International Finance Corporation, that does private sector. So anyone who is going to do a wind project in a market that's risky or needs some engineering services tends to work with the IFC, and we do, I sit in the bank side, we do government to government. They think we're rough, they have no idea what we do, and it's very strange, and what do a bunch of PhDs do, and then the bank thinks that the IFC people should get jobs at Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan, but now I just said that on the record. The investment flows, though, are how we get to the problem of the bank, because it is a bank. And just on this energy access part, you know, these numbers are wrong, but roughly 9 billion a year was going into this access part, and that's defined in a certain way, and by some calculation you say you need about 45 billion going into it. So there's the delta between 9 and 45. I then did a bunch of numbers and came up with my own estimates and said, well, anyway, they're all beautiful numbers, they're all deeply wrong, but you could probably need closer to about 150 billion a year towards this problem. And so that just gives you a sense of these beautiful numbers are important in order to mobilize resources and get politics and politicians going. So if we talk about a $150 per annum billion investment, then we have a sense of the scale of what we need to do. And I told you already that the bank is doing 10 billion, right? So we're just a tiny little piece of that, right? So I'm just moving into the geopolitics part, which is sort of an ultimate or really the last section of this. In March of last year, I had the honor to write a piece in Foreign Affairs, which was terrific for somebody like me who covets that sort of thing. And when I was doing my research for writing it, I found out that they'd never had a piece before on this topic in their 100 years. So in the 100 years of Foreign Affairs, the energy topics, if you sort of go back and look at them, they tend to, they were mostly on oil security, right? The vast bulk of them are on oil security. And so I wrote this piece, but then, and the editors did a terrific job and essentially redlined everything I wrote. But the image they decided on was this image of this Pakistani girl with a candlelight. And I said, that's not the image I want. I wanted something more modern and scale because that's what the essay was about, that this is not an issue solely for this little girl to get her one light. And in fact, in the essay, I say a quote from my last boss, which said, you know, all that giving these people one light does is show them that their floor is dirt, right? It's just poverty management. So they want dishwashers and gas stoves and all the things that we all want. So I took some other images that, you know, you could think of this issue in a different way, not just the pure poverty issue for the poor girl studying. She does need light, but she'll get like probably better if they deal with the whole society rather than worrying just about her life. And you know, there's this section of geopolitics, which is to say poor countries are starting to find oil and gas in large amounts and being able to put up renewables in large amounts and there's tensions over revenues and things that some of you deal with every day, how institutions work, how revenues work, how governance works. And then there's the sort of not quite a classist but perspective of how this is treated as a development issue when in fact, this is a woman called Juliana, wrote to, she's like a hipster coder. You know, she would fit in perfectly in Brooklyn or one of these sort of places and she has a software shop in Kenya and they have this magnificent piece of software that's really cool. You know, the kids there, I call them kids, but you know, the 20-year-olds there want the same thing that the 20-year-olds here want, which is to open up their laptop, be able to code, be able to text, be able to do everything on their screens and get into this modern society, right? But if we only focus on this as the problem, then we miss making sure that Juliana, they would tell you they'd much rather have power for their computers than at their houses, right? Just like any 20-year-old. So that's an interesting take on how you think about this, whether you think about it solely in terms of development as we used to versus the new way. And this comes down to how you do business. You know, I know Alex and others in this room deal with companies all the time and the business needs and a big company comes into Ireland and immediately goes to ESB and starts negotiating tariffs and power quality and all these kind of things. This is almost half, and I'm sure that's wrong. I bet more than half of the companies in Sub-Saharan Africa have on-site diesel generators because they simply can't operate their businesses. So they don't go and talk to the ESB equivalent over there. They just put up a generator. And at the same time, it's interesting that a lot of these countries are starting to get oil and gas and some in big amounts, right? In Tanzania, the gas is decent size. In Mozambique, of course, and Angola, of course, in Nigeria, of course, but then some more moderate things like in Ghana, which isn't even on there, where we did a $700 million loan guarantee to the Ghanaian government to crowd in $10 billion in private sector to do offshore gas. But now all of a sudden they have offshore oil and offshore gas coming on shore, which should be great for essentially getting towards being a wealthy economy. But they have to have every rule in the book written for how that money is used and where it's used and what institutions they want to build and all the rest of it. So that's where we work in the area. And then at the same time, a lot of my colleagues and other people say, well, you have all this gas. You should export it. That's the sort of economic model would be it's worth exporting, it's worth y, internally x is greater than y, you send it out. But now that the, I don't know how closely you follow this, some of you do, I know, but I hadn't looked in six months and all of a sudden the natural gas prices in Asia have fallen in half. So natural gas in Asia used to be at, last time I looked before this 12, 13, 14, 15, dollars and a million BTU and now it's at six. So that market for them is no longer there. So then we can start to think about, well, why can't they use it domestically if they have this huge gap? And this is sort of a powerful picture that shows some elements of that. This is children playing soccer at night in a field next to their school does not have lights but they're able to see because of the flares, the gas flaring. I mean you can imagine how dangerous it is let alone how ridiculous it is, right? So there's an enormous resource there and that is a straightforward planning issue, right? No more. I mean there's technical solutions for it but it's really a planning issue about getting gas infrastructure to power generators or to do fertilizers or some other industry. But this happens, I mean you can take that picture any day of the week in places like Nigeria. And so one of the things we did was look at what if you changed your perspective on what their internal demand is and you said, actually we want to get people gas for cooking and gas ranges and we want to start some fertilizer industries in sub-Saharan Africa to use the gas and what would that look like and what would the economics be? It was just a sort of thought thing but it's around. And I guess just finally all those things I've said in the last couple of minutes are all around focusing energy access or energy poverty as a security issue rather than a development issue. In some way that's semantics but it also can, I don't know if you noticed but the climate change marketing machine has taken on this link to defense and security very strongly. You've seen those reports there's a couple of think tanks in America and they get these big generals out and a lot of them, generals and admirals and big important in America anyway, military people saying climate change is a threat vector. They got some great words too. And I'm sort of trying to just push not opposing that, just try to push a lack of access to the stuff we've talked about here is likewise a security issue. There's migration, there's violence, there's violence to women, et cetera, et cetera. So there's quite a few research questions. I put those up because I was at another research institution but I'd be keen to explore those with the institute here. Some of them might be useful and that's it. Again, it's a pleasure to be here. Thank you.