 I want to welcome you all today to the first of our policy panels on behalf of the Environmental Energy Study Institute, EESI, that is the core sponsor of this event, with the Sustainable Energy Coalition. I am Scott Sklar, I'm Chairman of the Steering Committee of the Sustainable Energy Coalition. I have a 17-year-old company that blends all forms of renewables and efficiency globally for the last 17 years, and I teach three interdisciplinary courses on sustainable energy at the George Washington University. We have a great panel today, and I do have to apologize because the head of EESI has had a little accident, and I have to introduce a senator in about five minutes, so I'm going to let this panel go for 10 minutes autopilot. But we have four great people here, and I hope they control themselves. And by the way, we are webcast today, so don't do anything violent or untoward because you will be totally categorized on the catalog on the web forever. We have a great panel to start off, and on public policy and sustainable energy. We have Sue Gander, Director of the Environment, Energy and Transportation Division of the National Governors Association. We have Joe Heiser, Professor of the Practice, Carnegie Mellon University, Wilton Scott Institute for Energy Innovation. We have Andreas Kramer, Founder of the Ecologic Institute, Mercator Senior Fellow, Mercator Foundation, and Mary Alice Fisher, Certification Program Director, Low Impact Hydro Power Institute. So we got a wonderful gamut. Now my instructions to this panel, since we are limited in time and I would like to sneak in some questions, is that you are to speak for 10 minutes, and if you go over 10 minutes, I want the other panels to put their thumbs down or something like that. You're going to also signal them too. So when this woman starts signaling you like crazy, you just stop dead because we want to get a few questions in. So with that, Sue, you may take over. I will be back in five. Thank you, Scott. Great to be here today and excited to be on this panel. I hope you'll take a few moments after or in between some of the speeches to go by and visit the Expo down the hall. NGA has a table there where we are sharing our story maps around energy transformation. These are multi-layered visualizations of what's going on in states across the country around energy, and that includes things like solar wind, storage, transportation electrification. So please do stop by. As you heard, I'm Sue Gander. I'm with the National Governors Association. I'm part of our Center for Best Practices, and I head up our team that looks at energy environment and transportation, and our focus is on state policymaking, helping states, helping governors, their staff, other folks at the state level. Think about strategies that they can adopt to achieve their goals. In my case, around energy, around environment, around transportation. So I feel like this forum is very much at home for me. I'll just say that I know we're here on Capitol Hill, which is the home of federal policymaking, but my message is that it's the states that are leading efforts to advance and support clean energy across the country. They're doing it across a whole diverse set of resources, resource types, and for a variety of different reasons. So I'm going to share with you some of my thoughts on that. So if you're here from Congress, part of a staff, please do take a look at what states are doing, and I think you might get some good ideas of your own. If you're here from an energy company, definitely get your business case ready, because there's lots going on out there. And if you're a consultant, you really need to act quickly, because it's an absolute feeding frenzy, I can tell you, in terms of helping states think about what they're going to do. I want to note that this past year, National Governors Association has been working intently on issues around clean energy and more broadly energy transformation as part of what's known as a chair's initiative. So our chair, Governor Brian Sandoval from Nevada, has selected the topic of technology transformation, specifically in energy and transportation, as his theme for the year. And so we've been focused on helping think through what are those issues mean for governors and how can they prepare for this new technology that's already starting to be with us today. The initiative is called Ahead of the Curve Innovation Governors, and those story maps that I mentioned are part of the work that we put together to help governors and states think about what their strategies might be. And we looked at six different strategies, sort of broadly, looking at supporting technology transformation, modernizing policy processes, just catching up with the technology that is arguably way ahead where the policymaking is, preparing and educating the workforce, which we know also has a number of skills gaps that need to be addressed, updating communications and data systems, really critical, particularly when we think about the digital and connected worlds that energy and transportation are these days, meeting that communications network to help transmit that data and take advantage of the technologies. We also looked at addressing cyber threats, along with that increased digitization and connectedness. There's some increased threats in terms of cyber vulnerabilities and then educating the public, because all this technology really calls for people to do new things in new ways, and sometimes that's a little scary. So we talked about how can we help folks understand the technologies, its benefits, the tradeoffs that do come along with some of the new technologies as well. So for the past year, we've been meeting with governors, with state officials, industry, technology, thought leaders, hearing about what they have to say about the future and how governors can play a role. We kicked off the initiative last July with a visit from Elon Musk, who had some starling revelations as only he can make in terms of the future of technology being increasingly electric, solar, nuclear and automated, so that really got the governor's attention. We continue to have conversations with thought leaders like that, and really hearing about how energy sector disruption is upon us, and as we like to say, states are serving as those laboratories of innovation. So I want to share with you a little bit about what we're seeing at the state level. I'll start with noting that in this past round of state-of-the-state addresses from the governors of the first 44 that spoke, 13 of them mentioned specifically renewable energy and some of the goals and targets that they wanted to achieve. You had folks like Governor Ige from Hawaii who signed a law into effect, committing them to 100% electricity for Hawaii by 2045. Sorry, 100% renewable energy from their electricity sector by 2045. You had, in the middle of the country, Governor Sam Brownback at the time from Kansas talking about his dream of a future Kansas exporting wind electricity across America, I think speaking to the economic development goals for that state. And then one of our newest governors, Governor Northam from Virginia speaking about the Clean Energy Virginia initiative that he launched to help advance renewable energy in that state as well. So governors see these opportunities firsthand well over half the states have some kind of executive order that they've put into place to promote energy efficiency in their fleets and in their buildings through what we call lead by example actions. You have a number of states that are looking at adopting new electricity business models through what we call power sector modernization or grid modernization. States like California, Colorado, Hawaii, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New York and most recently Rhode Island have put forward ideas for how to move to more of a performance based approach to support their utilities and that's again because of the shift to distributed energy resources. You've got a lot of changes also taking place in terms of some of the renewable energy policies that were put in place years ago that states feel like they need to be updated. So a number of states have looked at their renewable portfolio standards. They may have extended them, they may have adjusted them and taken on new types of targets as part of that as well. And one interesting development that is in response to some of the pushes at the corporate level is you have a number of states 14 by our count that have adopted some kind of green tariff mechanism whereby companies can pay for through a special tariff renewable energy to more or less supply their needs on the grid. That's because of the many sustainability goals that companies have set. And then we're seeing a number of new technologies take hold. I just want to mention a few of them that we've been working with states on offshore wind. I know that's a topic that's under discussion here on the Hill as well. We have the first offshore wind site already in place on Rhode Island and now we have over 8,000 gigawatts of planned resources off the Atlantic coast. You've got the first announcement of a approval for a site in the Great Lakes by Ohio. And we just held a forum with the Danish Embassy a few weeks ago and saw tremendous interest in this. Both from states interested in the resource and how they can make use of it, but also in those involved in the supply chain and also developing their ports to take into account the new development. Storage is another huge game changer. We've seen states across the country taking action, setting targets, studying this resource more, thinking about how it can combine with other intermittent resources and how it can really help with their resiliency strategies. And then arguably the hottest topic of all I would say is electrification of transportation. So that combining of energy and transportation, we had over 43 states take action on EVs in the last year. So that's a lot of action and you might ask why? Why are the states so interested? And I just wanted to note there are a variety of benefits from economic development to wanting a diverse or more diverse resource mix to achieving lower costs for their electricity, to addressing environmental and health concerns, to responding to those corporate preferences for more renewable energy that I mentioned earlier. And then one that's becoming increasingly important to states is to try to have a more resilient electric grid, particularly in the face of increasing natural disasters and other threats to the electric grid. So I mentioned all that and I am excited to say that we've captured a lot of those stories in much greater lengths in two new roadmaps we're going to be putting out later this month. One is on energy innovation and one is on transportation innovation. If you stop by our booth, again big plug, you can drop your business card in and we'll get you on the list so you can be part of that release. So with that I'll close and I will stick around later today if you have questions if we happen to run out of time. Thank you. Good morning everyone. My name is Joe Heesher. I'm a part-time professor of the practice at the Scott Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. I also work here in Washington as a principal of the non-profit Energy Futures Initiative. What I wanted to talk to you about today is in particular focusing in on manufacturing energy efficiency and some work that we've been doing at the Scott Institute at Carnegie Mellon on this topic looking at some new policy approaches. So let me start off by just sort of setting the stage for you a little bit about U.S. manufacturing. Two major trends are underway right now if you look at the U.S. manufacturing sector. The first is just overall growth. The most recent bi-annual survey by the Institute of Supply Manufacturing of the supply managers shows that it's projecting continued growth in both employment revenues and and in particular double-digit growth in capital investment in new plant and capital equipment. The other major trend in U.S. manufacturing is the what I call the transformation of manufacturing which is what some people refer to as industry 4.0 as others refer to as the industrial Internet of Things which simply stated means the application of digitalization to manufacturing processes and plants and what that might mean for future improvements. So the question you might ask yourself so what does this mean for for energy efficiency? And essentially what we're looking from our perspective what we're seeing is that this is creating potentially a lot of new opportunities but at the same time means that we also now need to be thinking in new ways about federal policy toward manufacturing energy efficiency. Obviously the growth of new capital investment means that new equipment will be installed that will be more efficient a lot of that will have to do with the programs that have been in place over the past decades dealing with efficiency standards and voluntary programs but at the same time there's other things going on with industry 4.0 that I think are we think are very significant and so one doesn't necessarily think about industry 4.0 or digitalization as energy efficiency per se but in fact when you think about those trends there are a lot of energy efficiency improvements that are embedded throughout those innovations. So for example one of the trends in industry 4.0 is increased use of sensors and big data analytics and those things create the opportunity in manufacturing to provide for tighter tolerances greater controls more predictive maintenance all of which leads to more production and more productive use of it existing equipment without any change over in the hardware itself and that in turn means that you have greater energy productivity from an existing plant. Another good example I think is 3D printing or additive manufacturing. A 3D printer is not an energy efficient machine per se but it does provide important energy efficiency benefits. For example the application of heat is much more precise and much more carefully controlled. There's no waste material at the end of the process and by having you know final shape formation in the process you eliminate the need for follow-on machining all of those things save energy and so that kind of leads us to our thinking about how how to proceed on this and in particular we think that then energy efficiency policy needs to have a much more of a systems perspective and how it approaches rather than a component perspective and how we think about energy efficiency policy. The second area that wanted to touch on as well is looking at the what this then means for federal manufacturing assistance programs within the federal government today we have a number of federal programs that reach out to provide various forms of assistance primarily technical assistance to manufacturers big and small in the Commerce Department we have the manufacturing extension partnerships which provides a lot of business advice and assistance to manufacturers in the Department of Energy we have the industrial assessment centers which are largely university-based programs that provide more technical assistance in solving technical problems and then we've had in recent years the growth of what was referred to as the manufacturing USA institutes which are more research and development innovation institutes some of which are based at university some of which are based at non-profits some of which are connected to DOE national laboratories and these institutes provide a much more broader perspective on research and development technology transfer innovation and workforce training and then last but not least we have in both the Department of Energy and an EPA programs to encourage use of combined heat and power at manufacturing facilities and particularly in the case of DOE they have set up some broad regional centers that provide technical support to manufacturers looking to install CHP what this all means then is that when you step back and you look at the trends in the transformation of manufacturing that a lot of these programs while they provide important benefits are more categorical in nature and what we're looking at is recommendations for how they can be better integrated there have been some attempts already at looking at integration by for example having members of the manufacturing energy partnerships connected to individual manufacturing institutes but we think that there could be a lot more opportunity for integration here particularly when we want to take more of a systems level perspective and we want to look at energy efficiency not in isolation but really is an important component of the overall manufacturing process and we think that there may be opportunities and the work we're doing at the Scott Institute we're taking a very close look at it at a regional level and what can be done at a regional level to integrate these vertically this vertical programs last but not least I do want to just say one point about combined heat and power again we've been looking at it at a regional level and right now there's roughly two and a half gigawatts of combined heat and power electricity capacity that's installed in manufacturing facilities in the tri-state region of Pennsylvania Ohio and West Virginia looking at some of the DOE data there's a potential for another 8.9 gigawatts of electricity which is a huge amount of potential new generation that can be gained from combined heat and power the problem is that it's scattered at a number of facilities some big some small but the good news again is that just looking at some of the larger potential applications typically 20 megawatts or more there's probably about a hundred facilities in the tri-state region that could provide about another three gigawatts of capacity in total the challenge with combined heat and power is that you're trying to optimize both your thermal and your electricity generation where your thermal generation has to meet your manufacturing needs and your electricity generation has to be integrated with the grid and that's where I think again there's a need for more federal support both at a technical level financial level and and at a regulatory level to encourage more deployment of combined heat and power particularly working with the smaller manufacturers who do not simply have that kind of expertise that also means that there may be opportunities as well for new third-party business models to come in to play to support manufacturers in that regard so finally I just say in conclusion we're thinking about the idea of a broader definition of what constitutes manufacturing energy efficiency and what should go into a manufacturing energy efficiency policy that it not is simply the kind of the per unit energy savings but rather something that really considers manufacturing at a systems level considers things like energy benefits from product improvements energy and benefits from process improvements from productivity improvements and last but not least lesser environmental impacts including reduced greenhouse gas emissions so this is kind of a work in progress we're planning to put together a report we're still doing finishing up our research on this and we would very much welcome your ideas we have a table outside where we'll have some information including a handout that captures some of the information that I just covered so we would be very interested in talking to any and all of you further about any of these ideas thank you we have some seats open we have two here we have about two more here so feel free to walk in we have three in the middle over here so I feel sad for all you people standing up in the back and by the way can it's very hot in here do you have any contacts with Johnson controls call us down our next panelist right up there sir great thank you Scott I'm Andreas Kremmer I am the founder and director emeritus of Ecologic Institute in Berlin Germany and I'm the chairman of Ecologic Institute here in Washington DC we celebrate our 10th anniversary of the creation of the Ecologic Institute here in Washington DC and the president Max Krunig is sitting here in the front row the role we have as a nonprofit think tank the largest or second largest in Germany depending on how you calculate is to provide evidence for policy learning we evaluate policies as they work in very in the various member states of the European Union and we help the dissemination the spreading of good policies and the eradication of bad policies and we do that also across the Atlantic and elsewhere we bring a German a European perspective to the debate in Washington DC and in that context I should say at the outset that I do not take instructions from foreign governments or foreign corporations or indeed anybody else I'm my free agent and nothing I say here in these August halls today shall be interpreted as constituting an attempt to influence the legislative process in this country or the outcome of any election the disclaimer out of the way well there we are anyway what you need to understand about the European and the German context is Germany has land borders with nine countries we have electrical interconnections with all of them we have wires across the sea to two more and we're building wires and pipelines across the sea to another one so we will have interconnections with 12 our neighbors that's typical I guess it's typical for most of the states in the United States as well Hawaii may be an outlier in that respect but what it means is that any policy any public policy that is developed in Germany has an impact on the neighbors and it is good neighborly policy to tell them about it beforehand in actual fact there is a formal process for notifying anything that the government might adopt both to Brussels the European commission but also inform the neighbors what it means is that nothing that happens in Germany is done without the prior information going to all our neighbors and our neighbors don't do anything without us knowing about it beforehand I don't think that we consider enough the interconnectedness of our energy systems and the interconnectedness of our policies interconnection is not just in the market and technical it is also in the thinking and that is what we as a think tank do is we evaluate the policies we tell the stories that work we still the stories that make mistakes that contain mistakes and let me be clear about that is when you go to seminars like these everybody talks about their success stories in the hope that they will be copied elsewhere but you know when you get the policy practitioners to travel with one another to look at sites they sit in the bus after two beers in the evening the question comes and what went wrong what you can you tell me about and it's that story about what went wrong that contains so much information and has avoided so many repetitions of mistakes it is so important that we keep talking enough of that my invitation to you today is to imagine the world in 2020 2050 could be 2060 I don't care about the date it's about an imaginary endpoint of the shift towards green energy at that end point we have 100% renewable energy no more fossil energy no coal no oil no gas it's not that far away it's one and a half generations away renewable nuclear energy will be reduced to what the technology can be because it is too expensive it doesn't have a rationale in the energy system it does have a rationale in military terms but for that you don't need an industry that has the size of it today so imagine how that will go there will be a lot less trade we will not be shipping coal and oil half of the shipping tonnage miles on the world ocean today are for fossil commodities and products half of the shipping tonnage can go away in the next 32 years imagine what that means how many ships we can break up and use the metal for recycling to make wind turbines out of them great fun there there is on land and on the seafloor we have a lot we will have a lot of legacy infrastructure abandoned stuff in many cases the companies that own it today will not be around to dismantle it and to make it safe it will be a public policy issue to make sure that the oil rigs are removed that the pipelines are removed under the damage to the ground water and the soil is remediated we will have a decline in the trade but also in the contribution of industries to gross domestic product why is that because the renewable energy is completely different from the fossil energy in the fossil energy market we extract the stuff the coal the oil and the gas and we put it once through the system and we burn it and then it's gone it's once through consumptive use of the resources all the resources the lithium all the rare earths all the other metals and metalloids that we use for the equipment that we use on renewable they're durable they are extracted they're put into durable equipment we use it for 20 years for 40 years perhaps longer and at the end of that we will recycle it completely different economic rationale it's not trade once through but it is for investment purposes so there will be a lot less throughput in physical terms and a lot less throughput in economic terms as a consequence lower trade volumes lower tax revenue because there is less business to tax and that will have an effect now some people focus on the destabilization and you could say that what is happening in Venezuela today is the first petrol state going bankrupt because it can't make the money anymore it's a little bit simplistic but it's not fundamentally wrong to say it like that but you also know those of you who have studied political economy international political economy the concept of the resource curse that the extraction of fossil energy in any part of the world tends to breed autocratic repressive governments the resource curse is something that can be lifted as a consequence of the shift towards green energy with great long-term effects for freedom the shift towards green energy is good for freedom all around the world there's nothing new about that it's all positive and i could talk about it for hours but don't do that i won't but i will be available on the corridor after the event is over but when all of this is done scott there is something else that we should keep in mind there will still be the consequences of global overheating there will still be the food loss the protein loss and the consequences of the acidification of the world's ocean and we still have the consequences of sea level rise we need public policies to deal with the consequences as positive as the outlook is on the energy transformation thank you very much thank you we still have two chair spaces up here for anybody who wants to sit down and two over here so feel free to walk up front and to go along with the last speaker i do have two buildings off the grid three blocks from the clarity metro stop i give tours there all the time you are all welcome you have to let me know first i don't want to be woken up but i do give tours next speaker please and thank you everyone for your interest in today's forum and this panel specifically thank you my name is mary alice fischer i am the certification program director for the low impact hydropower institute a lot of words there we call ourselves lihi i still call myself mary alice so i want to spend a couple minutes telling you a little bit about who we are what we do and then why it relates to public policy and and some of the people on this panel have touched upon some of the things i wanted to mention as well so we're an independent nonprofit our mission is to improve the health of river systems since we focus on hydropower and we we try to do that by helping hydro projects to reduce their environmental and social impacts and the way we do that is through encouraging market incentives for hydropower projects to participate in renewable energy markets so we do this through a voluntary certification program hydro project owners come to us we evaluate their projects against a set of key resource area goals and science-based standards and these goals and standards are designed to ensure protection of eight key resource areas and that includes adequate river flows to protect aquatic habitat water quality in general upstream and downstream fish passage shoreland and watershed protection threatened and endangered species cultural and historic resource preservation and recreational opportunities so it's very comprehensive we're unique in the energy industry as a small non-profit we're actually formed by a group of environmental organizations about 20 years ago they recognize they care about rivers they recognize that hydropower exists and will continue to exist and they wanted to do something positive how can we reduce the impacts of hydropower so over the course of time they came up with this certification program and that was done through collaboration with a wide variety of stakeholders so now on our governing board we have a broad cross-section including representation from environmental NGOs from the hydro industry from renewable market experts and even from state and federal agencies so our program kind of exists at that intersection i see like interlocking chains and in my mind you have hydro owners who want to sell their power into renewable energy markets you have consumers who want to buy trusted renewable energy know that it's actually renewable you have environmental advocates that want to make sure that renewable energy and or energy in any form is is clean and then you have state and federal policy makers who want to make sure that their environmental goals are being met through their renewable portfolio standards and and other programs so what lihi did is create the first and still only standardized definition of low impact hydropower in the country and the standard definition is really important because it's sound energy policy depends on it so what we have now in some parts of the country some states and their programs call maybe small hydro projects low impact some other states may call only run of river projects low impact and those are projects that don't have impoundment storage there's some in the hydro industry that feel that projects that have been recently federally or state licensed or permitted or re-licensed should be considered low impact because they've gone through a pretty rigorous regulatory process re-licensing there's others outside the hydro industry who don't believe any hydropower can be low impact by definition and there's even some who believe that hydro power isn't even green enough to be called renewable seriously so there's a a wide variety of perspectives on this but we recognize and our program recognizes that a broad brush approach to trying to define and and affect low impact hydro power can't be done based on size alone for instance there's small hydro projects that can have really damaging impacts locally to their local ecosystems there's very large projects that that we have certified that have really minimal impacts and they're doing a fabulous job and have made huge improvements in their local river ecosystem so as i said our program is based on a set of science-based standards that are you know defensible reasonable understandable and consistent um we also recognize that every energy project whether it's renewable or not including hydro does have impacts and that's why we're called low impact hydro not no impact hydro that's just not possible but also our program through our certification program i'll describe a little bit in a minute is focused on achieving site specific improvements every hydro power project is unique because it's built uniquely into the environment to take advantage of site conditions and so we focus on positive outcomes that are site specific so our certification process is pretty rigorous you can just ask our applicants about that it includes a very in-depth written application submittal of lots of supplemental documentation that we carefully review and real demonstration by the applicant that they're meeting our standards they have to prove to us that they are truly low impact under our criteria we have multiple levels of review of those applications including sometimes by our governing board of directors so it's it's rigorous the process is also transparent unlike a lot of certification processes for a variety of things we do it in in open public so our applications when when they're accepted by us are posted on our website announced publicly we use third-party technical reviewers and their reports that are written to determine whether or not a project is recommended for certification are also publicly posted there's two formal comment periods and then we directly also solicit input from state and federal resource agencies just to make sure that the project and what the there's the applicant is saying about the project is real and is consistent with state resource management goals so as a result of that rigor and transparency low impact hydro certification has become you know kind of the gold standard it's become a trusted source of information for states and programs that want to acknowledge hydro power in their in their programs so for instance massachusetts has a renewable portfolio standard that has size limits on hydro power but also environmental thresholds and when they were last updating the program they realized that they didn't have the internal capacity budgetized but budgetary wise or technical expertise to be able to evaluate hydro power projects so lihi certification was written into that that state law covering that program we were not responsible for that but we're happy about it and in addition to massachusetts or again in pennsylvania also have programs that require lihi certification most states do not they either accept all hydro or small hydro or no hydro in addition the green e program the national voluntary renewable energy credit certification program requires lihi certification along with other restrictions as does EPA's green power partnership so these are just examples of energy policies that both recognize that hydro power is renewable and it can be a good clean source of energy but also under what the benefits that lihi brings is an understanding and a recognition that improvements are being made and so and impacts are being reduced at these projects so what you know really sets us apart is you know what like all hydro power you know lihi certified projects are green they're renewable they're carbon free hydro in general puts out about twice as much energy per installed megawatt as wind and solar because water is typically more available than wind and solar so it's important that way but also in and this afternoon is a session on renewable energy trends and prospects I believe and I know there'll be a couple representatives from the hydro industry there and I'd encourage you to attend just to learn more about a whole range of other positive attributes that hydro power house but as I say we're focused on site specific environmental and social benefits that particular hydro projects can bring and you know we like to recognize and reward our certified projects because these are owners who are responsible and responsive they commit to long-term improvements and to long-term protections of their local ecosystems and so we just feel that these hydro projects that have been certified and can demonstrate their lower impact can and should continue to be recognized in the renewable energy markets like other renewables are thank you very much thank you