 And with no further comments from me, I will introduce our first speaker, Michael Craig. Michael's presentation is titled Grid Scale Electricity Storage, A Help or Hindrance for Mitigating Climate Change. Welcome, Michael. Depending on who you ask or what paper you read, the object pictured behind me is either a key to solving climate change or a contributor to climate change. Now that's a problem because climate change is an immense challenge. It's going to require a lot of effort and resources to solve. And so we don't have the luxury of investing in a technology that ultimately primes harmful. So what is this object behind me? It's what we call a grid scale electricity storage device. Basically a giant battery. Take millions of iPhone batteries, put them in a box, and connect it to the grid. And that battery can charge using electricity from the grid and then provide it back to the grid when it needs it. Now, as you know from using your iPhone, batteries don't have emissions themselves. Those emissions come from two places. One, where we charge the battery with. And then also where we displace when we discharge that battery. So in current systems, what happens is that we charge that battery with a coal-fired power plant. And coal has a high carbon emissions rate. And so in so doing, we tend to increase system emissions when we use storage. But in a decarbonized system, which has lots of zero carbon sources like wind and solar, using storage tends to decrease emissions. And so we have these two ends pegged down. We know what storage does to emissions now. We know what it'll do in 50 or 60 or 70 years when we have a decarbonized system. What about in the middle? That's the gap that my research aims to fill in what I'm interested in. As a power system decarbonizes, how does storage affect electricity system emissions? So to answer that question, I use a pair of power system optimization models. The first, the capacity expansion model tells me how that power fleet evolves over time, what generators retire, what generators are added, given some emissions reduction target. And second, I use a unit commitment model, an operational model. So what I can do is I can take those future fleets that I just generated, put them into the second model, and estimate annual emissions with and without storage. And the difference that I get from that is basically how storage affects emissions. Now using these pairs of models, we've found a number of interesting results. First, we found that storage actually reduces emissions well before you get to a decarbonized system within the next 10 to 20 years, depending on the target that you set. And second, those emissions reductions are actually greater in that midterm in the next 10 to 20 years than in the long term. Because in 10 to 20 years, what storage does is it forces coal out of the fleet. And since coal has a high emissions rate, you get a lot of emissions savings from that. Whereas if you wait to put storage into the fleet until 50 or 60 years when all you have is gas or renewables, the emissions that you're saving is really just from displacing gas. And since gas has a lower emissions rate, you don't get as much value from that storage. And these results have important implications for policymakers. First, a number of states have policies today that promote storage with the express purpose of reducing system emissions. And our results indicate that that's not going to happen in the near term. But there's also a role for policy before you get to a decarbonized system. Those types of policies that are in place now would actually be very useful in five to 10 years. And for states that are thinking about addressing climate change or even at the federal level, policies that support storage will have a big role to play in the midterm. Thank you very much.